Blog sprinkles

The Chinese just have to do everything better:

The jam on the main north-south motorway into Beijing has been blamed on a set of roadworks that is intended to alleviate congestion caused by thousands of trucks bring coal and perishable goods into the city.

At its farthest extent trucks joining the back of queue in Inner Mongolia were taking several days to reach their destination, crawling along at about 2mp/d – or miles per day, the measure of speed on the clogged section.

Fantastic ancient art work:

Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.

Just looking for a scapegoat to beat to death and hang in the village square:

This is teabaggery crowd in America today.

Oh happy news!! New microbe discovered eating oil spill in Gulf!!.... Wait a minute.... If you read down to the last paragraph, who is funding these marvelous scientists who have discovered this microbe? (my bold):

Scientists also had been concerned that oil-eating activity by microbes would consume large amounts of oxygen in the water, creating a "dead zone" dangerous to other life. But the new study found that oxygen saturation outside the oil plume was 67 percent, while within the plume it was 59 percent.

The research was supported by an existing grant with the Energy Biosciences Institute, a partnership led by the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois that is funded by a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP. Other support came from the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Oklahoma Research Foundation.

Ah. Prostituted scientists. So why on earth should I believe you guys, then? And ignore the crude dumped in the local landfills.... and ignore the guy who was telling the truth months ago:

What Steiner said to me during that first interview was blunt, depressing -- and struck me as having the ring of truth. Little did I know how true.

"Government and industry will habitually understate the volume of the spill and the impact, and they will overstate the effectiveness of the cleanup and their response," he told me at the time. "There's no such thing as an effective response. There's never been an effective response -- ever -- where more than 10 or 20 percent of the oil is ever recovered from the water.

"Most of the oil that goes into the water in a major spill stays there," he said. "And once the oil is in the water, the damage is done."

Steiner was also one of the first scientists to warn that much if not most of BP's oil was remaining underwater, forming giant and potentially deadly toxic plumes.

Credo Action: We need to cut military spending, not Social Security:

Sign our petition to the members of the deficit commission telling them to make recommendations that significantly lower military spending, allow the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% to expire, and modify health care reform to include a robust public option to lower costs.

Putting Glenn Beck into perspective using MLK.

Omg.... Sean Connery is 80.

Marcellina of The Practice Room has a link showing how far it is from Ground Zero to the 'mosque'.

You do that. I'm sure you'll learn something: Conservatives Across The U.S. Plan Parties To Read The Constitution Out Loud

Obviously because it's fun! Sloth and Gluttony Hard to Shake Even For the Healthy

If we were listening to Ray Bradbury we'd be packing our bags right now!

New solar system looks much like home

The newly discovered solar system may contain the largest number of planets ever found orbiting another star.

Although... if you look at the space junk we've left in our wake just around Earth, I'm sure the other star systems hope we won't figure out how to space travel....

Anyway... we're all gonna diiiiiieeeeeee! Or lose all our invested money which comes down to the same thing....

Underpant bombers and crotch terrorists

Can only be defeated by the boring work of intelligence and police work, not by gazillion dollar jets and hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

Robert Scheer:

Preventing terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland has nothing to do with occupying vast tracts of land or winning the hearts and minds of backward villagers whom we falsely depict as surrogates of an evil empire, as we did in Vietnam and are now doing in Afghanistan. What is needed is smart police work to catch these highly mobile fanatics, and that begins with actually reading and then acting on the readily available intelligence data. It requires detectives with brains and not generals with firepower.

The ballooning of the defense budget after 9/11 has proved a great boondoggle for the military-industrial complex, which suddenly found an excuse to build weapons and deploy conventional forces against a superpower enemy that no longer exists. But our stealth fighters and bombers designed to defeat Soviet defenses that were never built are a poor match against a terrorist’s stealth underwear.

It's kinda like going through rehab in Hollywood

Don't think they are really trying hard to fix the problem:

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Nine graduates of an influential Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists, including some who had been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, have been arrested for rejoining terrorist groups since the program started in 2004, Saudi officials said Monday.

Saudi Arabia has been furnishing jihadists and al-Qaeda members around the world for more than a decade. Why would they stop now, doesn't it get their disaffected and restless youth out of the country?

Besides, being locked up and tortured in Gitmo makes a person become a terrorist whether he was one before or not. Even thinking about the injustices done in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo have made many sign up for revenge.

So Gitmo is a factory for producing terrorism, right?

Pentagon officials have said that 61 of the more than 525 Guantánamo detainees who have been released have returned to terrorism. That claim has generated some skepticism, and the Pentagon is expected to declassify portions of a report on the subject in the coming days.

Ah... the famous 61:

On the January 25 edition of NBC's Meet the Press, host David Gregory allowed House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) to repeat the falsehood that, in Boehner's words, "we've already found" that 61 detainees released from the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay are now "back on the battlefield." In fact, the figure, which comes from the Pentagon, includes 43 former prisoners who are suspected of, but have not been confirmed as, having "return[ed] to the fight." Moreover, even the Pentagon's claim that it has confirmed that 18 former Guantánamo detainees have returned to the battlefield has been questioned by experts.

[snip]

Further, the Pentagon's definition of "returning to the fight" has been challenged by some analysts. As CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen noted on the January 23 edition of Anderson Cooper 360: "[R]eturning to the fight, in Pentagon terms, could be engaging in anti-American propaganda, something that's not entirely surprising if you have been locked up in a prison camp for several years without charge." Bergen further stated: "[W]hen you really boil it down, the actual number of people whose names we know are about eight out of the 520 that have been released [from Guantánamo], so a little above 1 percent, that we can actually say with certainty have engaged in anti-American terrorism or insurgence activities since they have been released. ... If the Pentagon releases more information about specific people, I think it would be possible to -- to potentially agree with them. But, right now, that information isn't out there."

Additionally, Seton Hall University School of Law professor Mark Denbeaux -- who has written several reports about Guantánamo detainees, including some challenging the Pentagon's definition of "battlefield" capture and published detainee recidivism rates -- has disputed the Pentagon's figures, asserting: "[The Defense Department's most recent] attempt to enumerate the number of detainees who have returned to the battlefield is false by the Department of Defense's own data and prior reports." He added that in "each of its forty-three attempts to provide the numbers of the recidivist detainees, the Department of Defense has given different sets of numbers that are contradictory and internally inconsistent with the Department's own data."

Update... Now it's only 2:

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – Two Saudis formerly jailed at the US prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have joined Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch, and authorities here worry that two other ex-Guantánamo inmates may have strayed back to militancy because they have recently disappeared from their homes.

Wasn't this why the National Guard was created?

To avoid conflict with the Posse Comitatus Act?:

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.

There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement.

But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

[snip]

Domestic emergency deployment may be "just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority," or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU's National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of "a creeping militarization" of homeland security.

"There's a notion that whenever there's an important problem, that the thing to do is to call in the boys in green," Healy said, "and that's at odds with our long-standing tradition of being wary of the use of standing armies to keep the peace."

The National Guard:

Established under Title 10 and Title 32 of the U.S. Code, state National Guard serves as part of the first-line defense for the United States.[3] The state National Guard is divided up into units stationed in each of the 50 states and U.S. territories and operates under their respective state governor or territorial government [4]. The National Guard may be called up for active duty by the state governors or territorial commanding generals to help respond to domestic emergencies and disasters, such as those caused by hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes.[4]

With the consent of state governors, members or units of state National Guard may be appointed to be federally recognized armed force members in active or inactive service [5][6][7]. If so recognized, they become part of the National Guard of the United States [1]. The National Guard of the United States units or members may be called up for federal active duty in times of Congressionally sanctioned war or national emergency [4]. State National Guard may also be called up for federal service, with the consent of state governors, to repel invasion, suppress rebellion, or execute federal laws if the United States or any its states or territories are invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation, or if there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the federal government, or if the President is unable with the regular armed forces to execute the laws of the United States [8]. Because both state National Guard and the National Guard of the United States relatively go hand-in-hand, they are both usually referred to as just National Guard.

Maybe I've answered my own question: (my bold)

The Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act substantially limit the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement.

The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385) passed on June 16, 1878 after the end of Reconstruction. The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services (the Army, Air Force, and State National Guard forces when such are called into federal service) from exercising nominally state law enforcement, police, or peace officer powers that maintain "law and order" on non-federal property (states and their counties and municipal divisions) in the former Confederate states.

The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. The Coast Guard is exempt from the Act.

Any militarization of our country is a dangerous thing and needs to be controlled carefully.

Why we should always keep an eye on our government

And those we hire to protect us. They think our own citizens are the terrorists:

Undercover Maryland State Police officers repeatedly spied on peace activists and anti-death penalty groups in recent years and entered the names of some in a law-enforcement database of people thought to be terrorists or drug traffickers, newly released documents show.

The files, made public Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, depict a pattern of infiltration of the activists' organizations in 2005 and 2006. The activists contend that the authorities were trying to determine whether they posed a security threat to the United States. But none of the 43 pages of summaries and computer logs - some with agents' names and whole paragraphs blacked out - mention criminal or even potentially criminal acts, the legal standard for initiating such surveillance.

State police officials said they did not curtail the protesters' freedoms.

The spying, detailed in logs of at least 288 hours of surveillance over a 14-month period, recalls similar infiltration by FBI agents of civil rights and anti-war groups decades ago, particularly under the administration of President Richard M. Nixon.

[snip]

In February 2006, the national ACLU and its affiliates filed multiple federal Freedom of Information requests seeking records of Pentagon surveillance of anti-war groups around the country. Using information from a secret Pentagon database, NBC News reported that a unit of the Department of Defense had been accumulating intelligence about domestic organizations and their protest activities as part of a mission to track "potential terrorist threats."

"It serves no security purpose to infiltrate peaceful groups," said Michael German, a former FBI agent who specialized in counter-terrorism and who joined the ACLU two years ago as policy counsel in its Washington legislative office. "It completely misuses law enforcement resources."

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, German said, the government has "actively encouraged" local police agencies to become intelligence gatherers and to compile information that does not necessarily have a connection to criminal activity.

Take a look at the army we have, Mr. Rumsfeld

And the war you wanted.

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - The Defense Department's repair bill for dilapidated and destroyed equipment, weapons and vehicle is expected to exceed $100 billion this year. But if it settles the behemoth bill, the military may place in peril its plans to increase the size of the nation's armed forces.

Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the House panel that oversees defense spending, blamed the rush to upgrade the military's equipment and facilities to the failure of Pentagon to plan for a long and costly Iraq war. The Defense Department wants to bolster the size of the military with 92,000 new soldiers and Marines.

To pay the $100 billion plus military repair bill, Pentagon has no choice except to cut on its personnel budget, Murtha said.

The Bush administration's war of choice. Their quagmire. Their blunder. Bush's legacy.

When you put a moron in charge...

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is undermining the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to determine health dangers of toxic chemicals by letting nonscientists have a bigger — often secret — role, congressional investigators say in a report obtained by The Associated Press.

The administration's decision to give the Defense Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of delay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program's credibility, the Government Accountability Office concluded.

At issue is the EPA's screening of chemicals used in everything from household products to rocket fuel to determine if they pose serious risk of cancer or other illnesses.

A new review process begun by the White House in 2004 is adding more speed bumps for EPA scientists, the GAO said in its report, which will be the subject of a Senate Environment Committee hearing Tuesday. A formal policy effectively doubling the number of steps was adopted two weeks ago.

Update: via Blue Girl of Blue Girl, Red State:

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.

The government seeks to reverse a lower court ruling that allowed Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef to conduct more comprehensive testing to satisfy demand from overseas customers in Japan and elsewhere.

Less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows are currently tested for the disease under Agriculture Department guidelines. The agency argues that more widespread testing does not guarantee food safety and could result in a false positive that scares consumers.

"They want to create false assurances," Justice Department attorney Eric Flesig-Greene told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

But Creekstone attorney Russell Frye contended the Agriculture Department's regulations covering the treatment of domestic animals contain no prohibition against an individual company testing for mad cow disease, since the test is conducted only after a cow is slaughtered. He said the agency has no authority to prevent companies from using the test to reassure customers.

"This is the government telling the consumers, `You're not entitled to this information,'" Frye said.

It should be evident that the Bush administration really really really is not compassionately conservative... unless that really means drawing the blinds of their house while poor people writhe about on the ground dying from cancer from toxic chemicals or from Alzheimer's from mad cows....

What outsourcing can get you....

No quality control = death.

Inside the Air Force reported in late March on a problem vexing the U.S. military -- fake parts showing up in depots and finding their way into Air Force and Navy aircraft.

An unknown number of counterfeit aircraft parts are being fastened into U.S. military weapon systems after infiltrating supply depots, posing new safety risks and potentially driving up maintenance bills by hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to Pentagon officials.

This practice is an unintended consequence of two converging trends: globalization and Defense Department acquisition policies instituted in the 1990s that encourage use of commercial-off-the-shelf technology, according to Robert Ernst, head of aging aircraft studies for the Navy.

Nice. You don't go to war with the military you have, you sabotage it at every turn with defense contractors who sell cheap copies and overcharge. In for a penny, in for as much loot as you can carry away.

No wonder they want this war to be eternal.

I am coming at you, and you will explode in a few minutes...

From irritation and fury at the Defense Department. They were the ones deciding to send out this video to broadcast how dangerous Iran was, the Navy was apparently not really upset.

Via Phoenix Woman at Mercury Rising:

The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in charge of media operations, Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the navy itself.

Then the navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that US warships would “explode” in “a few seconds”. Although it was ostensibly a navy production, Inter Press Service (IPS) has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defense Department.

The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three US warships occurred very early on Saturday January 6, Washington time. No information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.

These actions take place regularly in the Persian Gulf. The Navy knew about the Filipino Monkey and his constant threats. So... this little boat skirmish exposes the desires of the Bush administration, to start a war with Iran just before Bush leaves office:

In the June 2007 issue of Commentary, neoconservative icon Norman Podhoretz laid out “The Case for Bombing Iran,” in which he argued that “the only prudent–indeed, the only responsible–course” is to “strike” Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible.” Though the recent NIE has slowed down hawkish belligerence towards Iran a bit, Podhoretz is still arguing that President Bush should take “military action” against Iran “soon.”

In a new article for Commentary, titled “Stopping Iran: Why the Case for Military Action Still Stands,” he argues that Bush should commence with a “bombing campaign”:

Iran can still be stopped from getting the bomb and even more millions of lives can be saved–but only provided that we summon up the courage to see what is staring us in the face and then act on what we see.

Podhoretz isn’t alone in his desire to keep pushing for an attack on Iran. Ever since Podhoretz’s recent article was released online, right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt has been promoting it, encouraging his audience to “read the whole thing. Twice.” Hewitt has also been asking his guests, including New York Times columnist William Kristol, if they agree with Podhoretz’s assessment. Scarily, they do.

We can't get these creeps out of office soon enough.

Bush's Legacy: Letting Cheney and Rumsfeld loose upon the world

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department over the planned war in Iraq writes for Asia Online about Cheney and Rumsfeld and why they attacked Iraq: (my bold)

According to some commentators, when it came to the American ascendancy abroad, the real powers behind (or in) the White House were Cheney and Rumsfeld, who had been collaborators ever since the distant Ford administration. Some argue that they - and their neo-con poodle and second-in-command at the Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz, as well assorted neo-cons once linked to the Likud party in Israel and the Christian right in the US - were the true framers of a Bush empire.

To be sure, Rumsfeld was an early member of the Project for the New American Century and no doubt had ideas - or perhaps simply fantasies masquerading as ideas - about a more aggressive use of American military strength throughout the world. Cheney's former position as chief executive officer of Halliburton and his connections with large corporations certainly made him the prime imperial candidate for considering global energy flows and eyeing Iraq as one vast oil field just waiting to be seized, one more country with must-have natural resources for the American imperium.

Even if the duo were eager indeed to expand US influence and resources overseas, as veterans of countless Washington partisan and personal battles, what really got their aged blood flowing was the sleazy, vindictive inside-the-Beltway world of Washington, DC. Rumsfeld's utter inability to focus on post-invasion planning in Iraq was in itself strong evidence that what happened there ("events" which he so often simply made up) was of secondary concern. Iraq - or success in that country - was indeed important but mainly to the extent that it heightened his profile as a monster player in Washington.

For both Cheney and Rumsfeld, it was the imperial capital, not the empire itself that really mattered. There, "war" would mean the loosing of a commander-in-chief presidency unchecked by Congress, courts, anything - which meant power in the only world that mattered to them. War in the provinces was their ticket to renewed prominence within DC's self-absorbed biosphere, a kind of lost space station far removed from Mother Earth, and a place where they had longstanding, unfinished accounts - both personal and political - to settle.

"Foreign policy," in other words, was an excuse for war in a far-off country that 63% of American youth between the ages of 18 and 24 could not, according to a National Geographic survey, find on a map of the Middle East. That, in turn, would make both the vice president and secretary of defense (for a while) little Caesars in the only place that mattered, Washington, DC.

If Saddam and assorted terrorists were enemies, they weren't the ones who really mattered. In the realest war of all, the one on the banks of the Potomac, Cheney and Rumsfeld were, above all, targeting those symbols of American internationalism that they had grown to despise in their previous Washington stays - the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency - perhaps because those organizations, at their best, aspired to see how the world looked at the United States, and not just how the United States could dismiss the world.

Just as Bush "kicked ass" in Iraq, so Cheney and Rumsfeld used Iraq to "kick ass" among the striped-pants weenies at Foggy Bottom and the eggheads in the intelligence community. (Consider Cheney's treatment of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who questioned the validity of the administration's claim about Saddam's search for uranium yellowcake in Niger in the late 1990s.)

In toppling Iraq, the "imperial" aim of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, their foreign policy "experts" and their acolytes was to raise the flag of their own power high above Washington, DC, while discrediting and humiliating those in the foreign-policy profession interested in the outside world for itself, those willing to consider how it related to actual US national interests, not fantasy ones, and who therefore dared to question the goals and intentions of the dynamic duo.

To see how Washington-centered this cast of characters actually was, just recall the secretary of defense's self-glorifying press conferences in his post-invasion heyday, when he played the strutting comedian. In that period, Rumsfeld, venerated by, among others, aging neo-con Midge Decter in a swooning biography, was the king of the heap and visibly loving every second of it.

Front-page headlines in the imperial capital were what counted, never the reality of Iraq - any more than it did when Bush strutted that aircraft-carrier deck in his military get-up for his "mission accomplished" moment, launching (against a picturesque backdrop of sailors and war) Campaign 2004 at home. Poor Iraq. It was the butt of the imperial joke, as was - for a while - the rest of the outside world.

Political theorist Benjamin Barber caught the Bush foreign-policy moment perfectly. The US, he wrote, made "foreign policy to indulge a host of domestic concerns and self-celebratory varieties of hide-bound insularity. The United States remains a hegemonic global superpower sporting the narrow outlook of mini-states like Monaco and Lichtenstein."

In the end, the Bush administration is likely to be remembered not for a failed imperialism, but a failed parochialism, an inability to perceive a world beyond the Washington of Cheney and Rumsfeld, beyond Bush's national security "homeland". That may be the president's ultimate legacy.

Blackwater is deliberately unaccountable

Jeremy Scahill lists the reasons:

Federal agents investigating the Sept. 16 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians by operatives of the Blackwater security company have concluded that 14 were victims of unjustified and unprovoked shootings. Some died in a hail of bullets as they fled. The investigators also have rejected assertions by Blackwater that its forces were defending themselves, saying there is no evidence to support that claim.

This initial glimpse into the evidence uncovered by the FBI bolsters the Iraqi government's claim (made within hours of the shootings in Baghdad's Nisoor Square) that the killings were criminal, as well as the findings of a U.S. military investigation that called all 17 of the killings unjustified. But that raises a crucial and complicated question: Who will prosecute the killers?

The answer may be no one. That certainly seemed to be the view of veteran diplomat Patrick Kennedy, who recently reviewed the State Department's use of private security. Kennedy and his team came back from Baghdad concluding that they were "unaware of any basis for holding non-Department of Defense contractors accountable under U.S. law."

Although the FBI conclusions appear damning, each of the three potential avenues for prosecuting Blackwater have fatal flaws:

U.S. civilian law: The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 provides for prosecution in federal court of U.S. contractors for crimes committed overseas. The problem is that this law only applies to contractors working for or directly accompanying the U.S. military. Blackwater works for the State Department in Iraq as "diplomatic security," which is separate from military operations. Legislation has been introduced that would expand the act to apply to all contractors, but not retroactively. The Justice Department might argue that the Blackwater guards were indeed accompanying the military, but courts could well throw out such a case.

U.S. military law: In late 2006, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) inserted an amendment in the Defense Authorization Act that places all U.S. contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the court-martial system. But this has not been tested, and the Department of Defense has shown no desire to use this option against any security contractors -- let alone ones who aren't working for the military. Facing a military prosecution, Blackwater could even get support from civil libertarians, who would see it as a creep toward applying military law to civilians.

Iraqi law: The Iraqi government wants to prosecute the Blackwater shooters in its courts, but that isn't going to happen. The day before L. Paul Bremer III ended his tenure as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in June 2004, he issued Order 17. It grants all contractors sweeping immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts. There is a provision that allows the U.S. to lift immunity in individual cases, but Washington would never hand over a U.S. citizen to an Iraqi court.

"These legal loopholes amount, in practice, to a license to kill with impunity," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing Blackwater for wrongful death and war crimes in federal court over the shootings. "There is no genuine deterrence to acting unlawfully."

Even if the Justice Department moves forward, the investigation was contaminated from the start. The State Department's initial report on the shooting was drafted by a Blackwater contractor on U.S. government stationery. Two weeks passed before the FBI was dispatched to investigate; for two weeks, the only people looking into this crime were from a non-law-enforcment agency, the State Department, which had potential culpability of its own.

Then there is this fact: The State Department inspector general, Howard Krongard, who previously has been accused of impeding investigations into Blackwater, has direct family ties to the company. His brother, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, former CIA executive director, this year joined Blackwater's advisory board as a paid consultant. While at the CIA, Krongard played a role in Blackwater's first soldier-for-hire contract in Afghanistan in 2002.

Deliberately setting up mercenaries above the law. And Blackwater wants to operate inside the United States.

Not only do we need new laws, we need a new government. Fire everybody who was hired in after January 2001 for starters. The whole place is contaminated.

More Blackwater news

This sounds like a recipe for something very ugly. The Times is reporting that "the Iraqi interior minister said Wednesday that he would authorize raids by his security forces on Western security firms to ensure that they were complying with tightened licensing requirements on guns and other weaponry, setting up the possibility of violent confrontations between the Iraqis and heavily armed Western guards."

And: (update: fixed quote)

BERN, Switzerland (AP) - A Swiss national who worked in Iraq for the U.S. security firm Blackwater is being investigated to see whether he broke a law barring Swiss citizens from working for foreign military services, an official said Tuesday.
The United Nations has called the use of private security guards by companies like Blackwater Worldwide, which was involved in the killing of 17 civilians in Baghdad two months ago, a growing new form of mercenary activity, which is discouraged in international rules on the conduct of war. Blackwater Worldwide recently changed its name from Blackwater USA.
The United States rejects the notion that government-contracted security guards, of whatever nationality, are mercenaries.

And:

One of the world's most notorious mercenaries may soon be overseeing all of the State Department's security convoys in Iraq.

The New York Times is reporting today that the Department of Defense is taking control of the State Department's convoys of security contractors, like Blackwater. The Pentagon already coordinates its outsourced security details through a single, Defense Department entity, the Reconstruction Operations Centers, which tracks movement of security convoys to make sure they and the military don't trip over one another. Most likely this existing mechanism will be expanded to monitor Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp convoys for the Department of State.

But here's the interesting twist: The Reconstruction Operations Centers are themselves outsourced, through a recently renewed $475 million contract to the British firm Aegis. And Aegis is run by the infamous old-school gun-for-hire, Tim Spicer.

An historical file?

Or just fucking hysterical? Via Ripley at Zen Cabin, the Chicago Tribune:

WASHINGTON—Two intelligence assessments from January 2003 predicted that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq could lead to internal violence and provide a boost to Islamic extremists and terrorists in the region, according to congressional sources and former intelligence officials familiar with the prewar studies.

The assessment on post-Hussein Iraq included judgments that while Iraq was unlikely to split apart, there was a significant chance that domestic groups would fight each other and that ex-regime military elements could merge with terrorist groups to battle any new government.

The second NIC assessment discussed “political Islam being boosted and the war being exploited by terrorists and extremists elsewhere in the region,” one former senior analyst said. It also suggested that fear of U.S. military dominance and occupation of a Middle East country—one sacred to Islam—would attract foreign Islamic fighters to the area.

The former senior [intelligence] official said that after the NIC papers were distributed to senior government officials, he was told by one CIA briefer that a senior Defense Department official had said they were “too negative” and that the papers “did not see the possibilities” the removal of Hussein would present.

They knew. They lied. People died. Impeach, convict, jail.

Just which civil war are we in the middle of?

Sunni and Shia? Or Pentagon and State Department?

WASHINGTON, May 14 The U.S. Defense and State departments are in a "bureaucratic knife fight" over the best way to revive Iraq ' s economy, a published report said Monday. Pentagon officials said they believe reopening state-run businesses could reduce violence by employing tens of thousands of Iraqis. But State Department officials argue this is antithetical to free-market reforms, The Washington Post reported.

"There has been a surprising degree of venom and hostility" between the departments, a senior U.S. government official involved in Iraq policy told the newspaper. The dispute has become so pitched that Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Paul Brinkley has stopped working with the U.S. Embassy in Iraq and set up his office elsewhere in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone.

"We tend to not deal with them very often," Brinkley said of embassy officials. "We have our own mission, and we do our own thing." Brinkley also told the Post he expected several factories to reopen this summer.

By year's end, he said he envisions Wal-Mart stores selling made-in-Baghdad leather jackets and other U.S. retailers stocking Iraqi loafers, hand-stitched carpets and pinstripe suits, the newspaper said.

Blackwater apologist?

I don't usually do this, but to my post about Blackwater Doug posted this response. My remarks are in bold.

Doug said...

You might be interested in the industry perspective on the hearings:

"Best Supported, Best Supplied Military Operation in History" It doesn't say anything about how intelligently the support and supplies are being used, does it? Nor whether the soldiers on the ground are seeing any of this equipment. Or even whether the plan itself was feasible.

House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Defense

Key points from the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA)

10 May 2007

While IPOA appreciates the interest that Congress is showing on the issue of contractors providing services in Iraq, we regret that we were not offered the opportunity to testify today to provide balance and an industry perspective on these critical issues. There is much that can be improved in government contracting, and IPOA has been at the fore with ideas and suggestions to improve private sector support for international peace and stability operations. While corrections and improvements are important, we should not lose sight of the fact that the innovative and cost effective use of contractors has ensured that the U.S. military operation in Iraq is the best supported and supplied in military history. Cost effective? The huge drain on the US treasury is cost effective?

Contractors are not new actors in stability operations and areas of conflict. For example, the United States had 80,000 contractors in Vietnam at one point, and that is despite the fact that the Cold War era military did far more of its own logistics and support. Furthermore, because we are going to be working with contractors in the future as well, the question is not whether we should use contractors, but how we can use them better. Ok, how about being accountable? Where are the receipts? Where is the proof that what we paid for is what we are getting? Where are the sensible cost-cutting measures?

A few key points:

1. It is due to the private sector that our operations in Iraq are the best supported and supplied in history. Our military is better able to focus on their core missions and leave the ancillary tasks to professional contractors. Um, no. Contractors get killed in Fallujah where they weren't supposed to be, and the US Military is used for revenge and retaliation. The US Military hates the contractors or else signs up with them for the huge salary.

2. The reason we contract services to the private sector instead of utilizing the military is because it significantly reduces the burden and strain on our soldiers in the field. The private sector offers enormous surge capacity, a reservoir of professional capabilities, and huge cost savings. Like refusing the soldiers the best bullet-proof vests because they can only use the more inferior contractor's equipment? Like e-coli in their drinking water because the contractor isn't cleaning the water supply? Like driving empty trucks about because that covers what is on the contract not what is sensible? These points are what I remember right off the top of my head. The list of complaints is incredibly long.

3. Civilian contractors doing the military support, reconstruction, and security in Iraq are overwhelmingly Iraqis, the people who should be leading such efforts in Iraq. Americans make up only 17 % of Department of Defense contractors, something critics prefer to overlook. Really? Are these good Iraqis all packed into the Green Zone? Are they trustworthy? Who is vetting these people? Who speaks their language? How dangerous is it for Iraqis to be found out working for the US? How long do these Iraqis stay on contractual work? Is there sabotage? What kind of oversight is there? Why are Iraqis complaining about unemployment?

4. Good oversight and accountability are good for good companies. While oversight has improved since 2003, overwhelmed contract officers have had a detrimental effect on the private sector's ability to fulfill their contracts. In terms of accountability, companies can and are frequently held accountable through standard contractual methods. For individuals, there are a number of laws on the books, including the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA), which can be used to try contractors in Federal courts. As a trade association, we believe these laws could be more energetically enforced by the Department of Justice. Overwhelmed? Businesses who have signed on to do work for the Iraq war are folding up and quitting. They are walking away from the jobs we counted on them to do. Do they pay the US back? The contractors aren't forced to do the work, the soldiers are.Who then does the work for our military WHO CANNOT leave? Our soldiers are overwhelmed and they are dying.

5. The U.S. military is designed to be the most capable organization in the world, it is not designed or expected to be particularly cost effective. Outsourcing needs to the private sector brings huge economies of scale and efficiencies that save billions of dollars while reducing burdens and enhancing services to the soldiers in the field. I'm sorry, I don't think so. Pigs in a trough is the vision I have. Prove that contracting has been more efficient. What I've read, it is completely the opposite.

6. Critics of civilian contractors need to articulate alternatives. Not just for U.S. operations, but for UN and Africa Union peace operations, which rely on contractors for critical services as well. Articulate alternatives????? How about not going to war with Iraq in the goddammed first place? How about throwing all these contractors and military and money into Afghanistan and FIXING the joint in the FIRST place? And don't tell me we had to go to war with Iraq. It was going to happen the minute Bush was selected as president. I bet with my friends we'd be at war with Iraq within two years. It was obvious.

The way a good president would have dealt with 9/11 would have been to address the world, telling all that we would give every resource, every effort to finding Osama Bin Laden and every al-Qaeda cell on the planet. And then do that. The world community was with us.

A good president would have asked his country to sacrifice, to unite, to help in this effort; not to tell them to go shopping. A good president would have brought all sympathetic nations into the discussions, told his country exactly what must be done and why. A good president would probably not have even bombed Afghanistan, but if it seemed clear, he then would have followed through with his promises to the Afghanis. We would have stayed and made that country stable and possibly even democratic. We would have stayed and negated the economic need for growing poppies which sends the poison of heroin throughout the world. We would have proved ourselves trustworthy. Other nations would have noticed.

Articulate alternatives? Isn't that like saying: Forget how we got into this quagmire, tell us how to get out! Or worse yet: Quagmire? Great! We're going to make a shitload of money, baby!!

War for profit is dangerous. The best articulate alternative is to have no war. If a war is needed, justify it without lies. We would support without question such a war and welcome a draft if the cause was just, our lives were in peril, our country truly in danger. We cannot run a war as a business because where people are making money off of the most horrific of human endeavors, making money off of agony and death, we have lost our humanity.

We are better than this.

Supporting the troops

By misusing the National Guard thereby leaving us unable to deal with inevitable disasters at home:

Nearly 90 percent of Army National Guard units in the United States are rated "not ready" -- largely as a result of shortfalls in billions of dollars' worth of equipment -- jeopardizing their capability to respond to crises at home and abroad, according to a congressional commission that released a preliminary report yesterday on the state of U.S. military reserve forces.

The report found that heavy deployments of the National Guard and reserves since 2001 for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for other anti-terrorism missions have deepened shortages, forced the cobbling together of units and hurt recruiting.

[snip]

"The Department of Defense is not adequately equipping the National Guard for its domestic missions," the commission's report found. It faulted the Pentagon for a lack of budgeting for "civil support" in domestic emergencies, criticizing the "flawed assumption" that as long as the military is prepared to fight a major war, it is ready to respond to a disaster or emergency at home.

From Virginia and the District of Columbia to Indiana and New Mexico, National Guard units lack thousands of trucks, Humvees, generators, radios, night-vision goggles and other gear that would be critical for responding to a major disaster, terrorist attack or other domestic emergency, according to state Guard officials.

Well thought out, Bush! Just like everything else you've put your hand to!

So they are either driven insane like Padilla and now useless

Or never were dangerous, right?

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - The U.S. Department of Defense has released five detainees from its terror detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Two of the alleged terrorists will return to Afghanistan, while three will be sent to Tajikistan. According to the Pentagon, "With today's transfer, more detainees have been released [390] or transferred than remain [385] in Guantanamo."

However, the detention facility remains a key point of contention for legal scholars and human rights activists who say the holding of the prisoners is a violation of both international law and the U.S. constitution.

However, the Department of Defense says, "This transfer is a demonstration of the fact that the United States does not desire to hold detainees for any longer than necessary. It also underscores that the United States has put in place processes to assess each individual and make a determination about whether they may be released or transferred during the course of ongoing hostilities - an unprecedented step in the history of warfare."

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In a nutshell

The Bush administration:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- About $10 billion has been squandered by the U.S. government on Iraq reconstruction aid because of contractor overcharges and unsupported expenses, and federal investigators warned Thursday that significantly more taxpayer money is at risk.

The three top auditors overseeing work in Iraq told a House committee their review of $57 billion in Iraq contracts found that Defense and State department officials condoned or allowed repeated work delays, bloated expenses and payments for shoddy work or work never done.

So. When do we get the money back?

Don't accept that tip from Mr. Bond!

The coins are bugged!



"The Defense Department is warning its American contractor employees about a new espionage threat seemingly straight from Hollywood: It discovered Canadian coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside.

In a U.S. government report, it said the mysterious coins were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada."