China's Army might be training the country's next crop of cyberhackers. An investigation by Mandiant, a U.S.-based computer security firm, found that many of the attacks on American corporations and government agencies are coming from a clandestine People’s Liberation Army base on the outskirts of Shanghai. The report found that many members of China's most sophisticated hacking groups are working from around that area, and it's likely that they are run by army officers or contract workers.

NYT:

The building off Datong Road, surrounded by restaurants, massage parlors and a wine importer, is the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398. A growing body of digital forensic evidence — confirmed by American intelligence officials who say they have tapped into the activity of the army unit for years — leaves little doubt that an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around the white tower.

An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one comparatively small area.

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the founder and chief executive of Mandiant, in an interview last week, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”

Other security firms that have tracked “Comment Crew” say they also believe the group is state-sponsored, and a recent classified National Intelligence, issued as a consensus document for all 16 of the United States intelligence agencies, makes a strong case that many of these hacking groups are either run by army officers or are contractors working for commands like Unit 61398, according to officials with knowledge of its classified content.

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Army National Guardsmen serving in Kabul, Afghanistan in a war that many have forgotten, took the time this week to hold a flag raising ceremony to honor the children and staff who lost their lives at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Once again, the number of suicides among soldiers outnumbered combat-related deaths for the year.

Stars and Stripes:

Through November this year, potentially 303 active-duty, Reserve and National Guard soldiers took their own lives. In Afghanistan 212 soldiers were killed as of Dec. 7. The trajectory for soldier suicides keeps getting worse.
...
The numbers have increased despite a range of training and awareness programs instituted by the service in the last few years.

More measures may be on the way:

- A bipartisan group of 36 lawmakers is pushing for new rules allowing military commanders and mental health specialists to ask unstable troops whether they own any personal firearms; lawmakers from both the House and the Senate are working on a final compromise version of the legislation.

- Gun rights advocates have opposed the idea, saying it could lead to commanders intimidating some individuals into giving up personal weapons.

"Gun rights advocates," (NRA) see a problem with "unstable" soldiers surrendering their weapons? I'd really like to see a poll conducted among the soldiers themselves to see how they feel about such a measure being enacted in the hopes of reducing suicide in their ranks.

(This video was shot and edited by Steve Hebert for ProPublica and produced by Steve Hebert for ProPublica and Krista Kjellman Schmidt, ProPublica)

By Peter Sleeth, Special to ProPublica and Hal Bernton, The Seattle Times

WELLSVILLE, Kan. -- The day after Jim Butler learned his son had died in Iraq in 2003, a U.S. Army casualty officer showed up at the family's small ranch to explain what happened.

Your son was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in the city of As Samawah, the officer said. But he had no other details to offer, nothing about how the fighting came about or what Sgt. Jacob Butler was doing when he was killed. For the grieving father, it wasn't enough. The question of how Jake died gripped him in the days after, in part because he'd made an unusual promise before his son left: If you are killed, I will go and stand where you fell.

So Butler made a simple request to the Army for Jake's casualty report. Rules require one when soldiers are killed in a war zone. Unit commanders are supposed to create and maintain them, along with numerous other field records.

"They said, 'We'll have to see,'" Butler recalled, "because one should have been made."

Nine years later, Butler is still waiting for a report he may never get. As an investigation by ProPublica and The Seattle Times revealed, the Army has lost or failed to keep that document and many other field records from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 1st Armored Division Jacob Butler's unit is among those lacking many of its records. Documents and interviews show that dozens of units are in similar shape, and that U.S. Central Command in Iraq also lost records related to joint-service operations in the theater.

History is cheated when front-line records are lost. And without them, veterans can face delays securing benefits for combat-related disabilities.

But missing records can have another after effect, creating uncertainty and confusion as survivors struggle with the heartbreak of loss.

Family members of soldiers who die in war are entitled to casualty reports if they request them. That fact did not help Jim Butler. He pressed the Army repeatedly in the months after Jake's death for his casualty report, but got a series of conflicting and perplexing responses instead.

"I felt hurt because I felt they should be truthful," Butler said of the Army. "Is that too much to ask?

"If it turned out Jake was killed by friendly fire, it would hurt, but I could handle it," he said. "If he died by suicide, it would hurt, but I could handle it."

The truth turned out to be far different, but Butler had to dig out the story himself. And he never saw the most complete official account of Jake's death until a reporter provided it.

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Via:

Transcript:

From the Debtor's Jungle:

We are the Invisible Army of Defaulters. We are your neighbors. We are your family, your friends. We are millions. We are everywhere. We are going to bring the system to its knees. We can, because we wield the one power that all the armies of the world can never defeat: The power of refusal. This power has destroyed the mightest empires. The same fate awaits the current system of mafia capitalism in America, an economic system driven by Wall Street CEOs who produce nothing, contribute nothing, who have bought our government and reduced it into a criminal enterprise whose main purpose is to support loan-sharking, gambling, extortion, and the slow reduction of American citizens into debt peons. Every dollar we take from a subprime mortgage speculator, every dollar we save from a collection agency is a tiny piece of our own lives and freedom that we can give back to our communities. To be able to take care of our children, our friends, our families is a value that no accountant can ever measure, that no government, loan administrator, or hedge fund manager can ever have the right to take away from us. We are an army of lovers who cannot be defeated. We are laying the groundwork for another world. Strike debt.

Resist. Insist. Stand together. Build. Never give up. #S17.

The suicide rate is skyrocketing among American troops as numbers have reached nearly one per day in 2012, according to new Pentagon data revealed in a report on Thursday. Over the first 155 days of 2012 154 active-duty troops have committed suicide, far outdistancing the number of those killed in action in Afghanistan. The research shows a growing burden for troops in wartime demands in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. The military is also struggling with increase in the number of sexual assaults, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and other misbehavior, the report stated. The number is up 18 percent from last year, and 16 percent from 2009, the highest year total of suicides in the military on record. In both 2008 and 2009, suicide deaths outnumbered combat deaths.

Kim Ruocco, widow of Marine Maj. John Ruocco, a helicopter pilot who hanged himself in 2005 between Iraq deployments, said he was unable to bring himself to go for help.

“He was so afraid of how people would view him once he went for help,” she said in an interview at her home in suburban Boston. “He thought that people would think he was weak, that people would think he was just trying to get out of redeploying or trying to get out of service, or that he just couldn’t hack it - when, in reality, he was sick. He had suffered injury in combat and he had also suffered from depression and let it go untreated for years. And because of that, he’s dead today.”

Not that we needed to hear yet another reason to bring troops home from Afghanistan now, but new statistics on heroin use and soldier deaths involving heroin reported by the Army are indeed more reasons to /war now:

* Eight U.S. soldiers died of overdoses involving heroin, morphine or other opiates in 2010-11. The totals for the two years are double the number that the DoD reported as drug-related deaths in Afghanistan for the last decade. [Emphasis mine.]

* 56 soldiers, including the eight, were investigated for using, possessing or selling the drugs. However, broader drug use statistics released by the Army earlier this year reporting nearly 70,000 drug offenses by roughly 36,000 soldiers between 2006-11. The number increased from about 9,400 in 2010 to about 11,200 in 2011.

* The Taliban are believed to be stockpiling opium to finance their activities, U.N. reported. Afghanistan's poppy fields now provide up to 90 percent of the world’s opium.

In one overdose case, a member of the Kentucky National Guard was found dead of “acute heroin toxicity” at his Afghanistan base after a soldier, also in the Kentucky Guard, bought heroin from a civilian contractor and used it with him. [Emphasis mine.]The report found that he also had morphine and codeine in his system.

I suppose the heroin-dealing civilian contractor had immunity from prosecution for that, too.

Others more often involved soldiers who were found dead and were later determined to have taken a mix of prescription and other opiate drugs.

The nonlethal cases range from a soldier failing a random drug test to more organized abuse.

In one case, seven members of the 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, were found to have smoked hashish and/or ingested heroin numerous times, including some bought from members of the Afghan army and police. The investigation found that one other brigade soldier acted as a lookout while others used the drugs.

Army officials also say that "CID has quarterly drug statistics that show that drug use by troops in Afghanistan is not greater than that of troops in installations back in the United States and there is less of a variance in drugs used by troops in Afghanistan."

I'd like to see those statistics, because I hope that the Army is not putting stats for pot smoking by troops in the same category as heroin use. That would be ridiculous. But, we are talking about the military, so...