This little nugget caught my attention during my daily Yahoo News perusal:

Virginia Sen. John W. Warner (R) said that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and a senior aide improperly manipulated the national base realignment plan announced earlier this year to compel the movement of more than 20,000 defense jobs away from the Washington area.

Two years before the Pentagon revealed its base closing plan May 13, in a stream of memos and internal records, top department officials were saying that “thinning of headquarters in the National Capital Region remains a[n] objective,” according to Warner.

Raymond F. DuBois, Rumsfeld’s principal aide for personnel and organizational planning, guided planners in an April 1, 2004, meeting: “The Secretary of Defense wants to reduce footprint and headcount in the [region] . . . — Moving activities from the [region] is good but moving activities beyond the 100-mile radius of the Pentagon is better,” according to minutes of his remarks cited by Warner.

WaPo via Yahoo (emphasis mine)

Can someone shed some light on this for me?  Why would they be spreading out their resources from the nation’s capital?

More below the fold…

Warner, chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Defense Department acted improperly by singling out one area of the country for cutbacks. He added that he did not know the reasoning behind the 100-mile limit.

He said Rumsfeld’s team used the base realignment process to achieve other goals, specifically, unrelated real estate management goals. Congress intended the base-closing procedures to focus on one issue: efficiency — or, in Pentagon jargon, “military value.”

“In simple terms, the military value model was rigged,” Warner said, citing a final report in which Pentagon planners adopted criteria that prejudged all leased space as less desirable than owned buildings and the concentration of activities near Washington “as a negative.”

Real Estate Goals?  Now I’m really confused.  These warmongers have absolutely no respect for human life, contrary to their spin.  The soldiers and defense workers are mere pawns in their game and I have to wonder what Rummy’s objective is, because it’s already in motion:

In a blow to the nation’s capital, the base closing commission voted Thursday to shut down the Army’s historic Walter Reed hospital and move about 20,000 defense workers miles away from their offices near the Pentagon.

AP Via Yahoo

The AP article gives more details on the base-closure hearing, I recommend checking it out to see the areas that will be hit with even more job losses thanks to Bush’s regime.  They really are destroying our country from the inside-out, aren’t they?

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