Of course, it could be that there is no love lost between the Blackwater guards and soldiers, considering stories like this one claiming that guards had some soldiers on the ground at gunpoint.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Blackwater
It seems that it's not only the Iraqi witnesses who say the Blackwater guards were not provoked into firing upon civilians. U.S. soldiers investigate and can turn up no evidence that Iraqis were doing anything but trying to get out of the way. The report calls it a "criminal event."
If the Terr'ists Don't Scare You, Maybe Aliens Will
Somehow I missed this from December of 2005 - an interview by Tucker Carlson with ex-Canadian Defense Minister Paul Hellyer.
Ron Paul
I must say that Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is sounding to me like the most sensible person in the whole lot of candidates from both parties. Not that he'll ever get on the ballot. In fact, that very characteristic would probably preclude him from getting on. You can listen to this evening's News Hour interview with Paul here (mp3), or hunt for it on the News Hour web page - I don't know how long they'll have it there. Couldn't locate a transcript.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
The Nobel Prize
Doris Lessing is unimpressed with her new Nobel Prize. When reporters came to her home and told her she’d won, she said she “couldn’t care less,” and that the prize "doesn't mean anything artistically."
Asked repeatedly if she was excited about the award, she held court from her doorstep and noted she had been in the running for the Nobel for decades."I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise," Lessing said. "I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."
[...]
"I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot, OK?" Lessing said, making her way through the crowd. "It's a royal flush."
[...]
Although she is widely celebrated for "The Golden Notebook" and other works, she has received little attention in recent years and has been criticized as strident and eccentric.
But feted. And $1.5 million richer."
"I'm already thinking about all the people who are going to send me begging letters — I can see them lining up now," she said.
Well, I’m sure she’s right about that.
Lessing brightened when a reporter asked whether the Nobel would generate interest in her work."I'm very pleased if I get some new readers," she said. "Yes, that's very nice, I hadn't thought of that.”
Not one to look on the bright side, and all.
Her next book will be about her parents and the effects of war."
The second part of what she said would be a "passionately anti-war" book would chronicle the full effect of the conflict on her parents' lives."I don't know how it will do. I just sent it to my agent, who said the last 200 pages are unbearably painful," she said. "Good! Let it be unbearably painful so people know what wars can really be like."
Indeed.
And if your local PBS station has been running Ken Burns’ “The War” and you haven’t been watching, do. And read this Newsweek article about it as well. I think you’ll find it interesting.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
Not Even a Practical Question
If the war in Iraq is so noble, why aren't you and your sister serving our country there?Jenna Bush: I understand that point, but there are many ways to serve our country, and I think my skills are better suited for teaching and representing the U.S. in Latin America through unicef. I respect the men and women of our country who are over there fighting. It is an unbelievably selfless thing to do. But if people really thought about it, they would know it's not even a practical question.
I’ve really thought about it. Somebody please tell me why it’s not even a practical question. Is it because it would be such a huge loss to UNICEF? Latin America? The teaching profession?
Or is it not the question that's impractical, but the asking of it? After all, she's not going to be giving a satisfactory answer.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
P.S. A commenter on that post gave Jenna-dissers a lashing, claiming they were too stupid to see that having her in Iraq would bring danger to anyone around her. That was the excuse the royal family used, too. I don't want to hear it. It's a damned poor excuse. Roosevelt didn't use it.
House Bill to Make War Profiteering Illegal
The House overwhelmingly passed a measure Tuesday that would prohibit “war profiteering” by contractors.
Oh, really? What’s the catch
[C]ontractors can only be convicted if they are proven to have had an intent to defraud.
Well, that’s a fairly worthless piece of legislation, then, isn’t it?
Three bold reps actually voted against it.
Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, whose district includes many defense companies, said the legislation took “political potshots at contractors.” Moreover, he said, it might have “unintended consequences,” including criminalizing mere overpricing.
”Mere” overpricing. Like the company that was charging $99 per bag of laundry for the soldiers who were prohibited from doing their own? (If you haven’t seen “Iraq for Sale”, check it out.)
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
The Missing Billions
Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! try their best to "follow the money."You can read Vanity Fair's Billions Over Baghdad here.
Just weeks after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration began airlifting planeloads of cash to Baghdad for use by U.S. occupation officials. $12 billion in US currency was shipped in just over a year. But where did the money go? To date, at least $9 billion cannot be accounted for.Last month, Democracy Now! interviewed the investigative journalist team of Donald Barlett and James Steele. They published a shocking expose in Vanity Fair tracking how the money went from the Federal Reserve to Iraq.
So Amy Goodman asked Alan Greenspan if he was aware of the missing money at the time and if so, did he investigate. And he answered.
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, let me say that what we were involved in was essentially endeavoring to create a viable currency for the central bank of Iraq. And what we did do was -- I think very successfully -- create what is a viable financial system, even under the circumstances that currently exist. [...]The issue which you are referring to had nothing to do with the Federal Reserve in any of our relationships with the central bank.AMY GOODMAN: Well, they are talking about, in one day, for example, the East Rutherford operation center of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 100 Orchard Street in East Rutherford, a tractor-trailer truck pulling up, and though accustomed to receiving and shipping large quantities of cash, the vault had never before processed a single order of this magnitude: $2.4 billion in $100 bills. But ultimately, again, $9 billion of $12 billion gone missing in Iraq.
ALAN GREENSPAN: I am not familiar with any such evidence. And it was certainly not brought to my attention. I, frankly, find it very unlikely that those orders of magnitude were involved in any of the numbers that we were dealing with. [...] There’s been, I’ve seen, several reports fairly recently in which that sort of mistake was being made. But what I can tell you is that no such numbers of any order of magnitude of the type you are discussing came to the attention of the Federal Reserve.
Journalist Naomi Klein finds that claim highly dubious.
I would just add that it’s quite surprising, actually, that Mr. Greenspan is unaware of this scandal around Iraq's missing billions, because Paul Bremer had to testify before Congress and was asked directly about those missing billions. It’s been the subject of very high-level investigations. There is a huge paper trail around it. So this is hardly a secret [...]
And, Don Barlett and Jim Steele, two of the nation's top investigative journalists for Vanity Fair, agree.
DONALD BARLETT: One of the problems is that Mr. Greenspan speaks in a language that is unknown to most of us. He's done this for years in a kind of economic doublespeak which goes unchallenged. But in this particular case, Mr. Greenspan is flat wrong. Jim had obtained a lot of this information, which came from Mr. Greenspan's Federal Reserve Bank .[...]
JAMES STEELE: One of the most significant things that's part of this whole process, the fact that they don't know where this came from, where these numbers came from, all of these came, numbers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is a -- if not a branch, it's certainly part of the Federal Reserve system, which Chairman Greenspan headed for so long. And the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provided these to various US government agencies, various congressional committees. There are literally thousands of pages of documents that led to the statistics that we used in our article [...] So the Federal Reserve system certainly was intimately involved in processing this cash from the very beginning.
Once it got to Iraq, which is the point we made in our story, that's where everything vanished, where there was absolutely no oversight, where there was no follow-up, where -- and the idea that this went into creating a viable system over there is almost comical, because when you look at some of the records in Iraq, you see that much of this money went to the Ministry of Finance, which in turn turned this over to various Iraqi banks. But exactly where it went from there, nobody to this day knows.
To the tune of about 9 billion dollars out of 12. Comical? Ludicrous! Outrageous!
Oh well. It’s only money.
So, did Alan Greenspan really not know? Is the Brooklyn Bridge still for sale?
But wait. That’s not all.
DONALD BARLETT: [B]ack through the 1990s, there was a mutual fund, so to speak, in the Bahamas called Evergreen Security, which was selling its certificates around the world, especially in the US. [...] Evergreen Security had been run for the most part by Patrick Thomson, a resident of the Bahamas, for a long time. And it was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, and in the end more than $200 million disappeared. Well, it was to Mr. Thomson that this very mysterious Thomas Howell in La Jolla, California, turned to create a company for him called NorthStar. And a few years later, lo and behold, NorthStar is retained by the Pentagon to make sure the money in Iraq, the $12 billion, and billions more, does not go missing, which, of course, it did go missing.JAMES STEELE: When we looked into the background of NorthStar, come to find out this is not your normal accounting or auditing operation. It operates out of a private house in a suburb of San Diego. All attempts to interview the individual, Thomas Howell, who apparently heads NorthStar, failed. He would talk to us a couple times, but said that his hands were tied. The Pentagon would have to give him approval to talk, and they did not.
[...]
But what does it say to us about the way, in part, we run this war over there, that the Pentagon and the Coalition Provisional Authority turned to a company, whose ostensible -- one of its functions running out of that address is home remodeling, to supervise what's going to happen to billions of dollars being airlifted from this country to Iraq? It may be almost a metaphor for the way we run that whole operation over there.
Let me guess, Patrick Thomson and Thomas Howell have “connections” to the Bush Administration?
JUAN GONZALEZ: And were you ever able to trace the way or the connection between these individuals at NorthStar and the contracting agencies in the government that gave them this contract?DONALD BARLETT: No. The only thing is that it is crystal clear, and Paul Bremer insisted, that this was a Pentagon arrangement and that he had no say over this whatsoever and that NorthStar was basically a creature of the Pentagon, in terms of supposedly tracking this money. And again, you're talking about a company set up by a person involved in a $200 million stock scam. It just raises all kinds of questions, you know, as to why the Pentagon would utilize such a resource.
Doesn’t it just?
AMY GOODMAN: So you have an accounting firm created by a mysterious La Jolla man by an equally mysterious Bahaman resident who specializes in setting up offshore entities used to launder money, concealing assets, avoiding taxes, a man who presided over a securities firm from which $200 million was disappeared. [...] How has the press followed up on this expose?DONALD BARLETT: This is interesting. I mean, NorthStar, the company's identity was hanging out there. It's been hanging out there for a long time. But basically no one has looked at it. And it goes beyond the news media. It also goes to the heart of congressional investigating committees, of government -- nobody's interested. And that really raises red flags in our mind as to why you wouldn't be curious about a company assigned the task of making sure billions don't disappear, and they disappear.
As the law might ask, what could a reasonable person conclude?
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
Baghdad's Showcase Embassy
Documents obtained by the Oversight Committee depict widespread defects in fire detection systems, fire service mains, fire sprinklers, fire-proof construction materials, and electrical wiring throughout the [Baghdad] Embassy complex. Other documents implicate the Managing Partner of First Kuwaiti, the prime contractor, in an illegal kickback scheme to obtain subcontracts under the Army’s multi-billion logistical support contract.
The massive U.S. embassy building under construction in Baghdad appears to be sinking faster than the Titanic. But at least the Titanic had a maiden voyage; that may not be the case for the over-budget, shoddily built, behind schedule embassy located deep in Baghdad's Green Zone. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack now says he doesn't have a clue when the mother ship of U.S. diplomacy in Iraq will be ready for actual occupancy
It’s only a half-billion-dollar enterprise. I say dump it and start over.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
Another Bite Out of Palestine
The Israeli army has ordered the seizure of Palestinian land surrounding four West Bank villages apparently in order to hugely expand settlements around Jerusalem, it emerged yesterday.
It’s a little hard to say we’re fighting to protect Israel and at the same time to spread peace and freedom in the Middle East when Israel keeps sucking up Palestine. But we manage.
The land seized forms a corridor from East Jerusalem to Jericho and is intended to be used for a road that would be for Palestinians only. Analysts said the road would run on one side of the Israeli security barrier, while the existing Jerusalem-Jericho road would be reserved for Israelis.A spokeswoman for the Israeli army said it was necessary to build a road to link Bethlehem and the Judea region with Jericho and the Jordan valley area in order to "improve the quality of life" for Palestinians.
That’s rich. It doesn’t do much to improve the quality of life for the Palestinians whose land has just been confiscated. But of course, the road can’t be built on land that already belongs to Israel.
Adam Keller of the Israeli peace group, Gush Shalom, said the confiscation of land belonging to the villages of Abu Dis, Arab al-Sawahra, Nebi Musa and Talhin Alhamar would "rob many villagers of their sole livelihood" but would also "facilitate the big annexation plan known as E-1, which is aimed at linking the settlement of Ma'aleh Adummim with Jerusalem and cutting the West Bank in two."[...]
Jeff Halper, an Israeli geographer who specialises in Israel's development of the West Bank, said it appeared that there was a rush to carry out as much work as possible before the US-sponsored meeting between Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, in Annapolis, Maryland, in November.
"They want to push everything as far as possible before the November meeting because that will be seen as the starting point for everything," he said. "Anything done before that meeting will be set in stone. In general this has to be seen as part of a timeline in which Israel wants to get all its development of the West Bank finished before Bush leaves office."
Just in case.
But really, I don’t think they need to worry. Nobody after Bush is going to change our policy with regards to Israel.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
Go Home You Stupid Garden Gnomes
Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want any more “Buddhas” on her lawn.
"I had, for five months, [anti-war] people sitting outside my home, going into my garden in San Francisco, angering neighbors, hanging their clothes from trees, building all kinds of things -- Buddhas? I don't know what they were -- couches, sofas, chairs, permanent living facilities on my front sidewalk."[...]
"We have to make responsible decisions in the Congress that are not driven by the dissatisfaction of anybody who wants the war to end tomorrow," Pelosi told the gathering at the Sofitel, arranged by the Christian Science Monitor. Though crediting activists for their "passion," Pelosi called it "a waste of time" for them to target Democrats. "They are advocates," she said. "We are leaders."
I guess that puts us in our place, eh?
Pelosi admitted no mistakes and claimed no regrets as she reflected on her first session in the speaker's chair. "I'm very proud of the work of this Congress," she declared. Evidently so: She repeated how "proud" she was nine times. Passing the recommendations of the 9/11 commission made her "very proud," while energy legislation made her "very, very proud," and new ethics rules made her "especially proud.""What do you see as your greatest mistake?" asked one reporter.
Pelosi smiled. "Why don't you tell me?" she proposed. She smiled again, then laughed. " 'Cause I think we're doing just great."
Okay, everybody. Back to Nancy’s house. She obviously isn’t getting it.
Rudy 'The Slime' Giuliani
I think we've seen this tactic before: Take a quote of a quote and attribute it to the speaker. Rudy has apparently been saying that Hillary spoke out against the free market system, implying she's communistic, when in fact, the quote he attributes to her was taken from an interview she gave in 1996 in which she was quoting someone else's complaint about the free market system. And apparently, nobody's calling him on it.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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