The Pentagon’s Private Army

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This seems like it should be bigger news. Congress has recently granted the Pentagon $200 million to aid foreign militaries, a sum which the executive branch can now spend without oversight from either the State Department or the legislature. That means the military can spend money training and equipping foreign armies without following constraints that require that the aid recipients meet certain standards, “including respect for human rights and protection of legitimate civilian authorities.” And military leaders will now be able to set a small but potentially important aspect of foreign policy without input from the State Department.

Perhaps there’s a case to be made that the old oversight rules were too byzantine, and, as administration officials argued to the Post, the old way of doing things was hindering U.S. attempts to provide security assistance in “crisis situations.” But the opportunities for abuse here are pretty self-evident. Among other things, the Pentagon wants to use the funds for “fighting terror and bolstering stability” in Africa. But we know that the United States has fostered a “close intelligence relationship” with, for instance, the regime in Sudan that’s currently responsible for genocide in Darfur, all in the interest of fighting terror. Is further assistance on the way? Is this really the sort of thing that demands less, rather than more, oversight?

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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