"The Emperor Is Naked" - Hagel Fired As SecDef

 

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has been fired.His tenure was less than two years.

His departure comes after a long period of disagreement with President Obama over what Hagel saw as disastrous budget and manpower cuts by the White House that affected American military capabilities, disagreements of the president's strategies in Afghanistan and in both the nature and the methods used to fight Islamic State.

Basically, he was fired for telling the Emperor that he was naked. And as a convenient scapegoat for the Administration's failures.

According to one of my sources, what clinched it was his disagreement with the president about the need for ground forces in Iraq to fight Islamic State. His statement about 'not wanting to put boots on the ground where they are needed' contradicted the president directly and made him a target for Obama's consigliere Valerie Jarrett, who reportedly went ballistic, pushed hard for Hagel's firing, saying that 'these people in the Pentagon needs to remember who they work for.'

Hagel's parting shot was an interview he did with PBS's Charlie Rose last week in an interview Rose conducted at the Pentagon:

Rose asked Hagel to elaborate on comments that he made in a speech at the Reagan Library last weekend. In that speech, Hagel said that America’s military capability, while still the best in the world, is being threatened.

Hagel re-iterated that to Rose, but also left viewers to wonder about the direction that President Obama is taking the military.

“I am worried about it, I am concerned about it, Chairman Dempsey is, the chiefs are, every leader of this institution,” Hagel said, including Pentagon leadership but leaving both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden’s names out of his list of officials who are worried about the U.S. military’s declining capability. Hagel said that the Congress and the American people need to know what while the U.S. military remains the strongest, best trained and most motivated in the world, its lead is being threatened because of policies being implemented now.

Hagel went on to note that a good leader prepares their institution for future success, saying that “the main responsibility of any leader is to prepare your institution for the future. If you don’t do that, you’ve failed. I don’t care how good you are, how smart you are, any part of your job. If you don’t prepare your institution, you’ve failed.”

In the past couple of years, Hagel has warned that defense budget cuts implemented under President Obama were hurting readiness and capability. The “how smart you are” line may be a veiled shot at President Obama, who basks in a media image that he is a cerebral, professorial president.

Another mark against Hagel was that he reportedly underwent something of a change of views regarding Israel during his tenure as Secretary of Defense, especially during the Gaza War that did not jibe with the president. He came to see Israel as a more important ally than he had previously indicated, and facilitated arms shipments to Israel during the last Gaza War.

Once President Obama realized that the Pentagon was okaying arms shipments in a way that that would have been normal under any other administration but that he objected to, he stopped shipments of armaments like Hellfire missiles to Israel that the Israelis had already paid for in the middle of the Gaza War and held them up for 'State Department review.' This had never been done previously to Israel in a war situation. The Israelis did not receive the shipments until after the war was over, and Hagel reportedly caught a great deal of flak over it.

Chuck Hagel will continue to serve as Secretary of Defense until a new one is nominated and confirmed.

I did not support Chuck Hagel when he was nominated as SecDef, especially after his sub par confirmation hearing. However, sometimes people rise above their limitations when put in a position of responsibility, just as they sometimes fail to do so. Chuck Hagel had the ability to see that something was horribly wrong with the way President Obama was handling matters of defense and national security, and the courage to say so to the president.

There are some presidents who have had the ability to absorb contradictory views and use them to make their determinations, even modify their perceptions. Unfortunately, the president Chuck Hagel served is not one of them. Instead, he's one whom no one can tell anything to that contradicts his own, set in stone ideas. He perceives anyone who deviates from that in any way as disloyal, and for that sin, Chuck Hagel had to go.

Res ipsa loquiter.

Obama Administration To Shrink Military Back To Pre WWII Levels

Pravda-on-the-Hudson has leaked Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's proposals to downsize our military to pre WWII levels.

The Army is going to be cut to between 440,000 and 450,000, as opposed to a post-9/11 peak of 570,000. A lot of the troops we're getting rid of include battle hardened and experienced officers, NCO's and enlisted men whom served in AfPak and Iraq...not to mention experienced and successful commanders like General Stan McCrystal and the Marine Corps' General Mattis, who have already been forced into early retirement for political reasons.

Our entire fleet of Air Force A-10 attack aircraft, one of the best anti-tank planes in the world are going to be eliminated while more money is going to be spent on what the Times calls 'the controversial F-35 warplane'. It's controversial, all right.

The Navy will be limited to adding two destroyers and two attack submarines every year, but will have to give up 11 heavy and light cruisers, which will go into what's called 'reduced operating status'. That simply isn't enough to maintain America's naval superiority on the world's oceans.

The Navy managed to save all 11 of its aircraft carriers for now, but some of them are approaching mid life and we're not going to be building any new ones. The USS George Washington is going to be overhauled and will get a nuclear refueling, but there's no guarantee for any of the others, especially if the defense budget continues to shrink under the Obama Administration as it likely will.

In an effort to discourage retention and new enlistment, pay and benefits are being cut markedly. Pay for officers is to be frozen, while enlisted men will get a single 1% pay raise before their pay is frozen as well. At the same time, a lot of the perks and subsidies that make military life affordable at the current rate of pay are being eliminated or severely cut back. Tax-free housing allowances for military personnel are going to be sharply reduced, and so is the $1.4 billion direct subsidy provided to military commissaries, so groceries and other goods at the PX are going to be a lot more expensive.

Health insurance deductibles and some co-pays will increase for some military retirees and for family members of active duty servicemen, and new enlistees will see even higher rates for these items. This is on top of the screwing our active military already took on their retirement benefits and COLAS.

Aside from the F-35, the areas where the defense budget isn't shrinking? Cyberwarfare, special ops and drones, of course.

What's going on here is pretty easy to figure out, and I said it back when Hagel was first confirmed as SecDef - the idea is to sharply reduce our military capabilities, eliminate our military's ability to fight a two front war, and to use the 'savings' for the president domestic agenda. Instead of jobs for engineers machinists, scientists, assemblers that actually create growth, and instead of providing training in various fields for our military, we'll just hand out more food stamps and welfare checks. Instead of national defense, more green energy scams and more trillion dollar stimulus programs,
Brilliant!

And of course, most of Pravda-on-the Hudson's reader thoroughly approve:

From Binghampton,NY

The size of the army is not the problem; the size of the Pentagon budget is. Replacing soldiers with gold-plated weapons systems is not the answer; demilitarizing the US economy is. The country needs a multi-year plan to cut defense spending in half without sending the economy into a tailspin. Each year 10% of the Pentagon's budget should be transferred to a new agency charged with rebuilding the country's infrastructure. In five years when half of today's trillion dollar military spending has been moved to civilian use, that new agency be phased out by cutting its budget 10% per year. In a decade, the US would finally have a peace-time economy for the first time since 1941.

From St. Louis:

It's high time that Americans have a conversation about our national values. Are we a country constantly at war, using the military as our #1 jobs program? Or are we a nation of peace, where we invest our resources and young people in more productive ways?

Given the long-term effects of war on our citizens, and the cost of caring for disabled veterans like my own father, it just seems obvious that we should scale back the military to pay for things like infrastructure, cleaner energy, job training and education. Let's hope Congress agrees.

And from San Francisco

Not only do we currently spend roughly the same annually on our military than the rest of the world combined, we currently spend ~4x more than the second place spender, China. Even if we scale back adventurous aircraft projects (that can likely easily be replaced by simple unmanned drones), other countries have a long way to go before catching up with us. The parallels drawn in the comments to WWI are unwarranted; we are not going to quickly be overtaken by any other country's military. Were another nation state to begin to turn into a threat we could also still adapt and increase spending. This is a fantastic decision to help balance our budget, and certainly wiser than cutting all known domestic aid programs...

As others have mentioned, the days of nation-against-nation combat are over. Outmoded cold-war-sized armies do no good against terrorists in bunkers. The time is right for intelligent trimming of the military.


Every one of these comments could be datelined 1938 and would fit in quite well.

This is quite a gamble to take, given what's going on with Iran, the PLA's increasing strength and a resurgent Russia,but that is after all what America voted for. Hey,what could go wrong?

SecDef Hagel And JCS Gen. Dempsey Implementing Plans To Put Women In The Front Lines

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey are in the process of implementing plans that will put women service members on the front lines in combat.

Under details of the plans obtained by The Associated Press, women could start training as Army Rangers by mid-2015 and as Navy SEALs a year later.

The military services have mapped out a schedule that also will include reviewing and possibly changing the physical and mental standards that men and women will have to meet in order to quality for certain infantry, armor, commando and other front-line positions across the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel reviewed the plans and has ordered the services to move ahead.

The move follows revelations of a startling number of sexual assaults in the armed forces. Earlier this year, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said the sexual assaults might be linked to the longstanding ban on women serving in combat because the disparity between the roles of men and women creates separate classes of personnel - male "warriors" versus the rest of the force.{...}

The military services are also working to determine the cost of opening certain jobs to women, particularly aboard a variety of Navy ships, including certain submarines, frigates, mine warfare and other smaller warships. Dozens of ships do not have adequate berthing or facilities for women to meet privacy needs, and would require design and construction changes.

The Obama Administration is already tossing thousands of battle hardened and experienced warriors out of the service to 'cut costs'. Apparently a number of them are going to be replaced with women without experience on the front lines of combat in the name of political correctness.

As for Dempsey's comments on sexual assaults in the military, how ridiculous they are can be determined by the stats on homosexual rape in the military, which is a significant part of the increase.

 

More military men than women are sexually abused in the ranks each year, a Pentagon survey shows, highlighting the underreporting of male-on-male assaults.

When the Defense Department released the results of its anonymous sexual abuse survey this month and concluded that 26,000 service members were victims in fiscal 2012, which ended Sept. 30, an automatic assumption was that most were women. But roughly 14,000 of the victims were male and 12,000 female, according to a scientific survey sample produced by the Pentagon.

“It appears that the DOD has serious problems with male-on-male sexual assaults that men are not reporting and the Pentagon doesn’t want to talk about,” Elaine Donnelly, who heads the Center for Military Readiness, said. She noted that only 2 percent of assailants are women.

Now that gays can openly serve in the military, I wouldn't be surprised to see those stats increase, no matter how the Pentagon tries to hide it.

They will undoubtedly increase for women as well as the New Politically Correct Military rushes to put women on the front lines of combat. Aside from the additional risks women will face if they're taken prisoner, (particularly by adherents of Islam...'what thy right hand possesses'), the very nature of combat conditions themselves and the close quarters they involve will lead to increased sexual assaults, pregnancies on the front lines and decreased unit cohesion as various troops couple, decouple and rearrange.

Not only that, but it will lead to increased casualties because of the lowering of standards and because most men are genetically programmed to take risks to rescue women in peril...especially if there's a sexual or romantic connection between them.

Welcome to the Left's deconstruction of the US military.

Obama Openly Shows Destroying The US-Israel Alliance Is At the Top Of His Agenda

 

Now that President Obama has been re-elected and has 'more flexibility' as he famously told Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, he no longer faces re-election and can happily pursue the more pernicious parts of his agenda. As anyone who's observed the last four years knows, President Obama has a major problem with America's alliance with Israel and wants to create lots of 'daylight' between the two countries.

His latest two cabinet appointments complete a series of moves that show exactly where the most anti-Israel president in history is headed.

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's views ought to be self evident, and new Secretary of State John Kerry appears to be wholly compatible with the anti-Israel slant of President Obama's second term appointments.

The White House has announced that the president is promoting UN Ambassador Susan Rice to the position of National Security adviser. Rice was nominated by the president for Secretary of State in spite of having few qualifications to the office aside from being an Obama loyalist, but was rejected by the US Senate because of her outright lies to Congress and the American people on Benghazi.

The position of NSA does not require Senate conformation. It also makes it more difficult to subpoena and question her about items like Benghazi.

Anyone with any doubts about Rice's feelings on Israel should examine her tirade at the UN when forced by political considerations to veto an incredibly biased resolution against the Jewish State.

Replacing Rice at the UN is none other than Obama's foreign policy adviser Samantha Power.

Samantha Power is noted for having the president's ear and for her own unique solution for the Israeli-Arab conflict - an invasion by US troops to force the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem back to the indefensible pre '67 lines followed by an occupation to 'protect' Palestine along with massive US financial investment in Mahmoud Abbas' apartheid, terrorism supporting reichlet.

Picture it - US troops rousting Jews out of their homes at gunpoint to create yet another judenrein area in the Middle East 'for peace'.

I'm sure part of the plan includes setting up some camps in Judea and Samaria...you know, just to concentrate those Jews so they can be dealt with properly.

Just to connect the dots, SecDef Chuck Hagel is also in favor of this kind of final solution...and Secretary of State John Kerry is already talking up a $4 billion jizya for 'Palestine, as well as going public that he personally could care less about Israel's history of massive Arab terrorism directed at its civilians every time they given up land 'for peace'.

The idea here is to make Israel unsustainable and eventually put 'Palestine' in its place.

Should the Israelis allow themselves to be forced into this, Israel would be faced with the grim task of resettling half a million refugees. It would be surrounded by Islamist regimes as well as the reichlet of 'Palestine' . They could launch rocket attacks and even land based assaults on Israel's civilians while US troops on Israel's borders would be there to prevent the Israelis from retaliating. Not only that, but the U.S. peacekeeping force itself would be sitting ducks for Arab terrorist attacks.

The security fence that has largely made an end to suicide bombings would no longer be a factor since it would be largely in the territory and control of 'Palestine'. Under these conditions, there would likely be massive emigration from Israel provided other countries even agreed to allow them in.

Of course, an even more likely scenario is that Israel would simply not acquiesce to the final solution President Obama and his friends envision for it. The country has a well trained and well armed military as well as being an undeclared nuclear power.While President Obama might order US troops into action against Israel, a far more likely scenario would be a severing of ties between the U.S. and Israel and enthusiastic American backing for a whole range of harsh UN sanctions and resolutions along with massive military aid to Israel's enemies in the region.

In that case, Israel would probably improve its already cordial relations with China and America would have lost one of its most valuable allies while supporting regimes that embrace neither our values or our best interests.

Dismantling the US-Israel alliance has been President Obama's goal from the start, no matter what he said to credulous U.S. Jews in order to get elected.

Now that he no longer has to pretend anymore, he's clearly signalling that he plans to proceed with this agenda by appointing a number of willing helpers to his national security team.

More Chuck Hagel: He Accuses India of Terrorist Attacks On Pakistan!

This is just too precious.

Apparently, Hagel doesn't just  have a problem with Israel, Jews and Armenians...he hates India too!

From the Free Beacon via  Simply Jews:

I think I like the presidential candidate for the post of US secretary of defense more and more. A man who is able to use metaphor so fluently... but judge for yourself:

The Embassy of India chided secretary of defense nominee Chuck Hagel late Monday for suggesting in a previously unreleased 2011 speech that India has “for many years” sponsored terrorist activities against Pakistan in Afghanistan.

“India has over the years financed problems for Pakistan” in Afghanistan, Hagel said during a 2011 address on Afghanistan at Oklahoma’s Cameron University, according to video of the speech obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

India experts also criticized Hagel’s remarks earlier Monday as “paranoid” and “over-the-top.”

“It’s both over-the-top and a sharp departure from a U.S. position that has seen democratic India as a stabilizing influence in Afghanistan and Asia more broadly,” Sadanand Dhume, former India bureau chief at the Far Eastern Economic Review and current resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Free Beacon.

“It’s also exactly the sort of statement that would have frayed ties with New Delhi, which has been watching the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan with concern,” Dhume said, referring to the administration’s plan to remove most military forces from the war-torn country in the coming months.

Apparently this ignoramus the president wants as SecDef never heard about Mumbai, New Delhi, or any of the dozens of terrorist attacks Pakistan-back ed terrorists like Lashkar e taiba have launched directly at India.

Forget what our clueless President wants - is the U.S. Senate prepared to confirm a pro-Islamist moron as Secretary of defense who has already taken a stand against two of the only major allies we have with a significant military?

Simply Jews illustrates that with an amusing and very much to th epoint story about th eMiddle East, b ut you'll have to click on the link to read it.

Farrakhan Endorses Chuck Hagel

The account of the Nation Of Islam's Louis Farrakhan's speech on Saviour's Day has a lot of juicy stuff in it, especially about making a concerted push to recruit and black gangbangers as 'natural soldiers ' for the Nation.

The Hagel endorsement come in the final paragraph:

Farrakhan said the country needs a Defense secretary like Hagel, who will follow his own conscience.

It's also interesting that Farrakhan, an open anti-semite, was allowed to use the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion, a stadium at a publicly funded university for his speech.

Hagel: Enforce 'Palestine' On The Pre '67 Lines By Sending U.S. Troops Into A $160B Death Trap

The real reason President Obama wants Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense so bad is not just because he's a Republican who can be a convenient figleaf for the president's planned hollowing out of our military.

It's because he profoundly agrees with President Obama's views on Israel and with top level Obama advisers like the president's NSC assistant Samantha Power. The way to 'solve' what they see as the Israel problem is to invade with U.S. troops, forcibly evict any Jews living outside the pre '67 lines including Jerusalem and leave American 'peacekeepers' in place to enforce it.

That is exactly what Chuck Hagel, long time Israel hater and former Carter NSC adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcraft, Arab lobbyist Carla Hills and a slew of the usual suspects proposed to President Obama in a 2009 report entitled "“A Last Chance for a Two-State Israel-Palestine Agreement”.

The report calls for an imposed settlement and of course, links the Israel problem with al-Qaeda, even though the Arabs waged genocidal jihad on Israel before al-Qaeda was even in existence.Here are a few lovely ideas contained in this document. First it mentions that America's pro-Israel community might be a tad upset, but that an American president ought to be able to perform the massive con job needed to convince most Americans why this is so vital, and why vast amounts of taxpayer dollars need to be spent:

"A new U.S. effort to reach an Israeli-Palestinian agreement may anger certain domestic constituencies. We do not, however, believe it is beyond the capability of any American President to explain to the American people why this long-running dispute must at long last be ended and why it will take much diplomatic heavy lifting and public expenditure to make it work."


Yes, this calls for yet another episode of nation building at the American taxpayer's expense.

The report calls for a non-militarized Palestinians state, enforced by an estimated 60,000 U.S. troops under UN mandate, plus, believe it or not, Egyptians and Jordanians ( who will of course be paid for by the American taxpayer as well. The document envisions this as being in place for - wait for it - 15 years. It also calls for U.S. recognition and support of Hamas ( "shift the U.S. objective from ousting Hamas to modifying its behavior, offer it inducements that will enable its more moderate elements to prevail, and cease discouraging third parties from engaging with Hamas in ways that might help clarify the movement’s views and test its behavior.")

As if Hamas hadn't already made its views totally clear as well as its behavior! Hagel and company want to Israelis to lay down and accept a terrorist group with clearly genocidal intentions as a 'peace partner', backed up financial aid to Hamas and by U.S. force of arms. And that demilitarized Palestinian state? The Arabs were quick to disavow that almost as soon as Israeli PM Netanyahu proposed it.

The report goes on to link the creation of Israel with 'considerable and ongoing Palestinian suffering' as though Arab violence and support for a jihad against Israel with the murder of every Jew in Palestine had nothing to do with that. Needless to say, there's no mention of the enforced ethnic cleansing of almost a million Jews for the Arab world and their suffering. it also links U.S. problems with Iran to the 'Israel problem', as though all the Ayatollahs need to become peaceful and give up their nuclear program is Israeli capitulation and the creation of 'Palestine'. There's also a slam at "militant settlers and their political supporters", with no mention of Israeli attempts to swap land for peace in Gaza or via Oslo.

But wait..there's more. The report urges that Israel be muscled into ceding the strategic Golan Height back to Syria..in exchange for a Syrian promise "to participate in no anti-Israeli alliances of any kind" and to make an attempt to "use its influence" to get the likes of Hezbollah to agree to peace with Israel.The Syrians might agree - why not? But you can guarantee that once they have the land back, the promises will be quickly forgotten.

I'm sure President Obama absolutely drooled as he read this. That's likely one reason why Chuck Hagel was made co-chairman of the president's Intelligence Advisory Board.

There was an interesting NATO analysis and feasibility study of this proposal made by Florence Gaub, an analyst NATO Defense College. She mentions the following points:

"..there are over 19 cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. In total, 4.2 million inhabitants in the area live in cities of this kind, with more than half a million living in refugee camps. This itself implies two things: first, arms caches are difficult to locate without local knowledge, and arms smuggle is facilitated greatly. Disarmament measures would be even more difficult to enforce than they already are under friendlier circumstances."

In other words, like UNSC 1701, disarmament would simply not occur..especially if aome of the peacekeeping force were Arab or Turks.

"Independently from the local security forces, the NATO force in Palestine (hence the minimalist version) would, if it follows the example of the successful cases of Bosnia and Kosovo, need forces ranging from 43,700 to 76,000 men, including the police forces. Of these, between 16,100 and 28,000 would patrol Gaza, and between 27,600 and 48,000 the West Bank. Page 10

Current theatres of operations would have to be reduced in size before a suitable size NATO mission in Palestine would be available without introducing longer deployments – something many Allies would like to avoid."

"Stabilisation missions are largely infantry missions. This is topped in our case by the fact that in worst case scenario, the tasks would entail urban warfare and counterinsurgency, which are also infantry heavy tasks."

In other words, (a) most of our NATO allies would be even less anxious to assume the cost of maintaining combat troops in the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria as they were in Afghanistan,especially for the 15 years anticipated, so most of them would be Americans or paid for by the U.S. (b) since disarmament is unlikely, these troops (as well as Israeli civilians) would be sitting ducks for terrorism attacks by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah's al-Aksa brigade and others.

Needless to say, since the American taxpayers are likely to tire fairly quickly of seeing American troops come home in body bags while defending 'Palestine' th emission would quickly collapse...except the Arabs would have the land, Israel would be left with a lot of dead civilians and indefensible borders and the security guarantees given them would be absolutely worthless...just as they were in Gaza and Lebanon.And the cost, essentially money borrowed from China to enforce 'Palestine' would be staggering.Remember, it currently costs around $100,000 per year to deploya an American soldier.

"Aside from the costs for the mission itself, additional costs can be expected, due to the training of the Palestinian police, building infrastructure and providing equipment. Some estimates calculate between $9.61 billion and $16.72 billion per year, not calculating reconstruction efforts, which in the case of the recommended 5 years would result in a total number between $48.05 billion and $83.6 billion."

"NATO’s mission in Palestine would have slim chances of success, and a high probability of failure. One should not be blinded by perceptions of a historical opportunity and embark on an endeavor that could cost NATO credibility, prestige, money and lives simply because it seems to be a politically symbolic chance in a lifetime to establish NATO as a global security provider.

"The territory involved presents aspects that would cause any campaign planner nightmares – densely populated, urban areas with highly intermingled conflicting populations, a volatile political ambiance where the tides can turn any second, and a very experienced opponent if it ever comes to counterinsurgency. Thus, this mission would need thorough preparation, careful planning, sufficient staffing and funding, a significant amount of political will, and would leave a very narrow margin for success. At the current stage, and with its other operations ongoing, it seems irresponsible to hasten NATO into a mission that has all the ingredients to turn into a quagmire that equals the Alliance’s involvement in Afghanistan."

There's another little detail that needs to be explored. Suppose Israel decides not to cooperate in her own national suicide? What if they don't accede to dividing Jerusalem again ans creating 500,000 Jewish refugees?

Ah, that's the fun part. Israel isn't Serbia. They're a nuclear power with a well trained and well armed military. So either implementing this diktat either involves NATO,led by America, attacking Israel, perhaps in coordination with Arab armies (an unlikely scenario, but not impossible with this president) or a total severing of the U.S.-Israel alliance.

This is why President Barack Obama wants Chuck Hagel in so badly.

Any Senator whom votes to confirm Chuck Hagel when this comes to a vote needs to realize that this is exactly what they're voting for. Deploying 60,000 U.S. troops into a death trap, spending $160,000 billion we don;t have on 'Palestine' and severing the American-Israeli alliance.

As Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe said earlier this week, anyone voting to confirm the likes of Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary is going to be held accountable. They can't say later they weren't aware, that they didn't know.