WTF??

Halliburton’s missing nuclear waste found alongside Texas highway

Halliburton planned it all!

The oil well explosion in the Gulf of Mexico could be a well-timed and profitable accident for Halliburton, the global oil company with the famous connection to former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. Just eight days before the uber-Valdez accident, Houston-based Halliburton acquired Boots & Coots Services, also based in Houston, in a $240 million cash and stock deal.

Boots & Coots, which uses the graphic of a burning oil well to represent the ampersand in its name, specializes in "pressure control and well intervention services." In other words, when an oil well explodes, Boots & Coots can step in and help remedy the problem. In a release, Jerry Winchester, Boots & Coots president and CEO, says "Combining the resources of both companies creates the premier intervention company across the globe.”

While Halliburton's timing of the acquisition could be chalked up to luck, some members of Congress are asking questions. Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), have asked Halliburton provide all documents relating to "the possibility or risk of an explosion or blowout" at the rig in the Gulf, according to a report in the LA Times.

They just couldn't have foreseen it would get so big and out of control..... Kinda like the Iraq war....

It's only money

Halliburton rakes in the dough:

Economists are forecasting a recession, U.S. company profits in almost all sectors are taking a hit, and many American families cannot say they are better off than they were eight years ago. But one giant oil services company is weathering the economic storm quite well. Reuters reports Halliburton “said on Monday that first-quarter profit rose 6 percent as customers in markets including the Middle East and Asia spent more on oil and gas exploration and production”:

In North America, Halliburton’s revenue rose 11 percent to $1.86 billion while operating income was nearly flat at $491 million.

Halliburton said revenue outside North America soared 24 percent to $2.16 billion, while operating income rose 21 percent to $422 million.

Tengrain of Mock, Paper, Scissors shows us an insolvency graph:



and details Georgie's Grand Adventure with our economy.

Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post:

Energy and food prices are soaring. The housing market continues to collapse. Government revenue is falling, and taxes are rising. Airlines are jacking up fares and fees while reducing service. Banks are pulling credit lines. Auto companies are cutting production once again. Even investment bankers are losing their jobs.

The tendency is to see these as separate developments, each with its own causes and dynamic. Fundamentally, however, they are all part of the same story -- the story of the global economy purging itself of large and unsustainable imbalances that for a time allowed many Americans to think they were richer than they really were.

A fascinating photo album of business offices that have gone bankrupt, life interrupted, shot by photographer Phillip Toledano:

A peek into future corporations

If we hold no one accountable for their actions:

Former Halliburton/KBR employees have described an atmosphere of “rampant sexual harassment.” Poe has also confirmed that his office has heard from multiple other women who were victims of sexual assault while working for KBR in Iraq.

But... no one will pursue Jamie Leigh Jones' rape case:

The Bush administration has been anything but cooperative. Both the State and Justice departments refused to give Poe “answers on the status” of the investigation. The DoJ “refused to send a representative” to a Congressional hearing last month, and the State, Defense and Justice departments all missed Nelson’s deadline for answering questions.

Now, the Inspector General of the Department of Defense has written to Nelson and other lawmakers, saying that his agency will not investigate the allegations:

In letters to lawmakers, DoD Inspector General Claude Kicklighter said that because the Justice Department still considers the investigation into Jones’ case open, there is no need for him to look into the matter.

“[T]he U.S. Justice Department has issued a statement that they are investigating the allegations,” wrote Kicklighter’s office to Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who had requested he look into the matter. “No further investigation by this agency into the allegations made by [Jones] is warranted.”

Creating all that new 'reality' really went to their heads:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

The 'new empire' has been run by barbarians who have little regard for human suffering.

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.

It's all about who DOESN'T get the oil

Greg Palast: (my bold)

In all the chest-beating about how the war did badly, no one seems to remember how the war did very, very well — for Big Oil.

The war has kept Iraq’s oil production to 2.1 million barrels a day from pre-war, pre-embargo production of over 4 million barrels. In the oil game, that’s a lot to lose. In fact, the loss of Iraq’s 2 million barrels a day is equal to the entire planet’s reserve production capacity.

In other words, the war has caused a hell of a supply squeeze — and Big Oil just loves it. Oil today is $57 a barrel versus the $18 a barrel price under Bill “Love-Not-War” Clinton.

Since the launch of Operation Iraqi Liberation, Halliburton stock has tripled to $64 a share — not, as some believe, because of those Iraq reconstruction contracts — peanuts for Halliburton. Cheney’s former company’s main business is “oil services.” And, as one oilman complained to me, Cheney’s former company has captured a big hunk of the rise in oil prices by jacking up the charges for Halliburton drilling and piping equipment.

But before we shed tears for Big Oil’s having to hand Halliburton its slice, let me note that the value of the reserves of the five biggest oil companies more than doubled during the war to $2.36 trillion.

And that was the plan: putting a new floor under the price of oil. I have that in writing. In 2005, after a two-year battle with the State and Defense Departments, they released to my team at BBC Newsnight the “Options for a Sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry.” Now, you might think our government shouldn’t be writing a plan for another nation’s oil. Well, our government didn’t write it, despite the State Department seal on the cover. In fact, we discovered that the 323-page plan was drafted in Houston by oil industry executives and consultants.

The suspicion is that Bush went to war to get Iraq’s oil. That’s not true. The document, and secret recordings of those in on the scheme, made it clear that the Administration wanted to make certain America did not get the oil. In other words, keep the lid on Iraq’s oil production — and thereby keep the price of oil high.

Cheney must be so proud

Halliburton settles in:

MANAMA (Reuters) - Halliburton Co. , the U.S. oilfield service giant, said on Sunday its chief executive plans to open a corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates in an effort to expand business in the Eastern Hemisphere.

"My office will be in Dubai, and I will run our entire worldwide operations from that office," Halliburton chief executive David Lesar said at an energy conference in Bahrain. "Dubai is a great business center."

Update: Waxman wants to know why:

Time’s Karen Tumulty comments on Halliburton’s plan to move its headquarters from Houston to Dubai: “Is this about tax breaks? Getting beyond the reach of congressional subpoenas? And what about all that sensitive information that Halliburton has had access to? At a minimum, reincorporating in Dubai would mean that Halliburton will be paying less taxes to the U.S. Treasury, even as it collects billions from government contracts.” She also reports, “Henry Waxman is already planning to hold a hearing on this, an aide tells me.”

OMG! I thought I was so far afield I was joking

When I asked what had happened to the illegals picked up in the DHS raids.

Lo and Behold! Talk Left blog:

What holds 400 illegal immigrants from 30 countries, 170 of them children? The T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center, for which the Corrections Corporation of America receives $2.8 million per month.

A jail by any other name is still a jail. A detention camp is still a detention camp. That the prisoners wear scrubs instead of orange jumpsuits or pink underwear doesn't change a thing.

The Government invited the media today. Surprise, for the first time there was pizza on the menu. How humane. They brought in plastic potted plants to warm up the place. The Government says its more like a community college than a jail.

What a farce. Can the "students" leave? Of course not. It's a jail.

More...

Outside the blocky buildings with thin slit windows, protesters from a local group called Texans United for Families held up signs saying, “Don’t Jail Children for Profit.”

“If they can put an ankle bracelet on Martha Stewart so she doesn’t run off to Jamaica,” said a protester, Jose Ortan, a computer technician, “they can find ways to do it for immigrant families.”

Devil's Tower at Daily Kos provides his thoughts and notes that the reporters weren't allowed to interview the detainees during the tour.

Update 2/26: Peterr at Firedoglake reports:

Last December, Pach highlighted the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on various Swift meat processing plants, sweeping up all manner of workers. Some were legal, others were not, but "working while brown" seemed to be the common denominator. One of the most problematic issues, to me, was the handling of children and families. Little thought seemed to have been given to how to deal with the children in school whose parents were swept up. Churches and other groups stepped up, but the lack of concern on the part of ICE for the children affected by this was appalling.

This past Thursday, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) and the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, two well-known and non-partisan NGOs, released a report entitled Locking Up Family Values (large pdf - 2 MB). It details the conditions at two model "family detention facilites" run by ICE, and the story is appalling.

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children felt it vital to examine the implications of this expanding penal approach to family detention in order to inform the development of policy and practice that serves the best interests of children and families. To that end we visited both the T. Don Hutto Residential Center and the Berks Family Shelter Care Facility and talked with detained families as well as former detainees. What we found was disturbing:

• Hutto is a former criminal facility that still looks and feels like a prison, complete with razor wire and prison cells.
• Some families with young children have been detained in these facilities for up to two years.
• The majority of children detained in these facilities appeared to be under the age of 12.
• At night, children as young as six were separated from their parents.
• Separation and threats of separation were used as disciplinary tools.
• People in detention displayed widespread and obvious psychological trauma. Every woman we spoke with in a private setting cried.
• At Hutto pregnant women received inadequate prenatal care.
• Children detained at Hutto received one hour of schooling per day.
• Families in Hutto received no more than twenty minutes to go through the cafeteria line and feed their children and themselves. Children were frequently sick from the food and losing weight.
• Families in Hutto received extremely limited indoor and outdoor recreation time and children did not have any soft toys.

And that's just from the summary.

But it made such a nice neat pile!

If we could call all crimes and stuff terrorism. Then send all the bad guys to the really cool camps Halliburton's Kellogg Brown and Root is building all over the US....

Sinfonian at Blast Off! explains:

Here's a shocker: the federal government has been identifying all manner of cases as terrorism-related since 2001, but many of those had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.
[snip]
It's really quite consistent with this maladministration's totalitarian attitude, the old "my way or the highway" mentality. You get arrested on terror charges (trumped up though they may be) and you have no constitutional rights -- rot in Gitmo without counsel for all anyone cares. If martial law has to be declared, and the military has to take over civilian law enforcement, so be it. And if they can't scare you by throwing strawman terrorist arguments into every issue, well, they'll just make shit up. Oh, sorry, I mean "diminish or inflate" the statistics.

Just wondering.... You know those illegal alien sweeps that caused such a ruckus late last year?

Do we know where the illegal aliens have gone?

Update: Via C&L, Texas Kaos talks about the PBS report on the government spying on its own citizens:

The key findings in PBS's report:

- The government is intercepting most emails sent domestically.
- AT&T is collecting most emails and sharing them with the government, specifically the NSA (this is backed up by Klein's documents).
- The NSA spy room at AT&T's San Francisco facility is only accessible to the NSA and AT&T employees cleared by the NSA
- The NSA's interest seems to be in MAE WEST, *the* major hub of American and international internet traffic on the West Coast
- The device installed in San Francisco is capable of intercepting 10 GIGBYTES of data per second. In layman's terms, that means it could go through all the information in all the books in the Library of Congress in 15 minutes.

AT&T declined to be interviewed for this PBS report.

[snip]

Also included in the PBS report was the revelation (earlier reported in Salon) that more AT&T whistleblowers have come forward. They've provided evidence that AT&T's St. Louis facility also had a secret NSA room installed after 9-11. This room is only accessible to the NSA (or employees cleared by NSA, much like the SanFran room) and employs biometric security. Bottom line is that AT&T is looking more and more complicit in the degradation of our civil liberties post 9-11.

[snip]

You can watch the entire NOW program online - I'd strongly advise doing so. I'd embed it, but GooTube is going down the drain and I refuse to use their "service" anymore. So, click this link and go watch the program. You'll be glad you did.

Waxman digs Blackwater out of the shadows

To answer some questions about what they were doing in Iraq with the taxpayer's money...

As Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) gears up for the second day of his House Hearings on Waste, Fraud and Abuse of Taxpayer Dollars, the focus will shift to North Carolina-based Blackwater International.

The secretive security firm made headlines in Iraq when, in March 2004, four Blackwater employees were ambushed and gruesomely killed. Six more were killed in April 2005 when their Mi-8 helicopter was shot down.

Blackwater's ill-fated presence in Iraq has been especially curious because, for many of their missions, no one could find the U.S. contract that actually authorized them to working there.

Until now. Yesterday, the Army finally disclosed who had sub-contracted Blackwater's operations -- and it's none other than our good friends Halliburton (via AP)

Pair this article up with this post, and it really gets interesting.

Update: More updates.

More Updatiness: 2/8: Blackwater email shows lack of equipment. Article shows how indifferent the Republicans were to the widows of the killed contractors and how they defended the Blackwater company.