capt. Bringdown Isles

[matthew]

Change Of Heart Once In The Pan

[matthew]

Goddamned no good welfare bums are sucking American dry!

Seriously, the amount of anti-poor lobbying that is carried out must be astonishing for so many to ignore what is taking the bulk of their taxes: military contractors. The site above does not seem to take into account the seven percent increase granted for the wars "The Iraq-Afghanistan request is on top of Bush's plan for a $439 billion Pentagon budget for the coming fiscal year, a 7 percent increase from the current year.")...the U.S. is currently spending 49% of its tax dollars on the military, and 2008 does not look any prettier.

Military contractors who joined forces with energy and engineering contractors along with former White House officials to form the hegemonic Project For The New American Century to lobby for an easy war* against a barely standing Saddam Hussein. Once the PNAC took over the government in 2000 with their puppet GWB at the pulpit podium it was a done deal. Iraq would have been invaded with or without 9/11.

(repost, I am sure)

_8:46 A.M. American Airlines Flight 11 impacts WTC 1 (North Tower)
_9:03 A.M. United Airlines Flight 175 impacts WTC 2 (South Tower)
_9:37 A.M. American Airlines Flight 77 impacts the Pentagon
_9:59 A.M. WTC 2 collapses
10:03 A.M. United Airlines Flight 93 impacts ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania
10:28 A.M. WTC 1 collapses
_2:40 P.M. Plans to attack Iraq already in motion...

Just over four hours after the attack's take their terrible toll of human life, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gives orders to Defense Department staff member (Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence) Steven A. Cambone, orders to pass on to General Richard B. Myers (Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff); orders that he scribbles down in note form.

As the day unfolded after the planes struck 9-11, it was pretty clear who is (which groups) responsible. August 6, 2001 they had been warned by the CIA, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike In US", the same building had been targeted before by the same factions in February 26, 1993, they had struck embassies and the USS Cole in the port of Aden...but what was Cambone takes notes of?

"2:40
Resume Statement:

Best info fast
judge whether good enough
Hit S.H@ same time -
Not only UBL

Tasks Jim Haynes to talk w/ PW
for additional support v/v Usis &
connection w/ UBL

- Hard to get a good case

- Need to move swiftly -

Near term target needs -
- so massive - sweep it all up
- Things related & not

->
Need to do so
to get anything
useful"

Of course, UBL = Usama bin Laden and S.H. = Saddam Hussein

"Best information fast, judge whether good enough to strike Saddam Hussein at same time, not only Usama bin Laden"

Rumsfeld is, of course, a founding member of the PNAC who believed that the removal of Hussein was paramount to enacting their plan for Pax Americana , which would cement the global hegemony that the U.S. had enjoyed since the end of WWII, and more importantly, since the fall of the U.S.S.R.

Yet we are supposed to believe that the U.S. fell into the Invasion of Iraq...it had no choice, they REALLY believed the intelligence that suggested that Saddam Hussein might allow for Weapons Of Mass Destruction (PNAC buzzword) to fall into the hands of likeminded terrorists?


*the Hussein part was the "easy" part. These idiots did not even take into consideration the potential fallout once he was gone. But most of these guys already cashed their cheques.

[attachment deleted by admin... had to make some room, kids]

[matthew]

DEFENSE SPENDING
Defense spending soars to highest levels since World War II
By James Rosen
McClatchy Newspapers
Tuesday, March 20, 2007

WASHINGTON - As the Iraq war enters a fifth year, the conflict that President Bush's aides once said would all but pay for itself with oil revenues is fueling the highest level of defense spending since World War II.

Even with past spending adjusted upward for inflation, the $630 billion provided for the military this year exceeds the highest annual amounts during the Reagan-era defense buildup, the Vietnam War and the Korean War.

When lawmakers approve a nearly $100 billion emergency spending bill in the next few weeks, Congress will have appropriated $607 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with about 75 percent going to Iraq, according to a new Congressional Research Service study obtained by McClatchy Newspapers.

Less than three months after assuming control of Congress, Democrats are moving away from their election campaign pledges to restrict or eliminate funding for Iraq.

"Nobody wants to be labeled anti-military for the crime of cutting the budget," said Winslow Wheeler, an analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington. "It makes supporting whatever the military services request a political necessity amongst both Democrats and Republicans."

Bush appealed to lawmakers Monday to pass the war supplemental measure without adding troop withdrawal dates.

"They have a responsibility to get this bill to my desk without strings and without delay," Bush said.

Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, responded: "This week's House debate on the supplemental appropriations bill offers an opportunity to change the current course in Iraq by demanding accountability and beginning a phased redeployment of U.S. troops, which is a step that serves the interests of both the United States and Iraq."

No one disagrees that a lot of money is being sucked up in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the relentless violence grinds up tanks, planes and other aging equipment.

Beyond the immediate war costs - accelerated by the 30,000-troop increase Bush has dispatched to Iraq - defense analysts inside and outside the government cite several factors that they say are driving military spending:

-Pentagon funding declined in the 1990s, under the first President Bush and President Clinton, as Americans enjoyed what would prove to be a short-lived "peace dividend" after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

-Aging weapons systems fell into disrepair and weren't replaced at what would have been bargain-basement prices by today's standards.

-Military health care and pension costs are soaring as the recruits and officers who formed the volunteer armed forces after the Vietnam War retire and begin to age.

-Pentagon planners are replacing several generations of major weapons systems simultaneously in the Army, Navy and Air Force; the new high-tech tanks, ships and planes are as much as 10 times more expensive, on a per unit basis.

-Congress is likely to approve Bush's request for an increase of 92,000 soldiers and Marines in the country's active-duty forces, the largest growth spurt since the Cold War ended.

About 300,000 American troops are deployed outside U.S. borders - roughly half in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the other half in 76 other countries.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, told the Senate defense appropriations subcommittee last week that winning the war on terror will require still greater resources.

"The country's not mobilized," Schoomaker said. "Less than one-half of 1 percent of the people are participating in this. And I absolutely believe that we've got to get people out of the spectator stands and onto the field. ... I believe that this is a very long, serious fight that's going to continue to get more and more dangerous."

Already, the United States is spending almost as much on its military as the rest of the world spends on combined armed forces.

Some analysts wonder whether the torrent of money is being channeled in the right directions.

"Since we are outspending the rest of the world on big-ticket weapons systems, we really don't need to worry about an enemy who fights us with those sorts of weapons," said Loren Thompson, head of the Lexington Institute outside Washington.

"The place where we seem poorly equipped is in unconventional conflicts," he said. "Maybe instead of spending billions of dollars on high-tech networks to fight wars like Iraq, we might spend a more modest amount of money on teaching our soldiers just to speak the (Arabic) language."

James Carafano, a defense analyst at the Heritage Institute in Washington, said military spending isn't nearly as high when compared to the overall size of the U.S. economy.

Current defense appropriations equal about 4 percent of the gross domestic product, Carafano said. That figure is up from the 3 percent level under Clinton, he added, but still a good bit lower than the 7 { percent share reached during the Cold War.

"When you have a bigger house, you buy more insurance," Carafano said. "When the nation is worth a lot more, we have to spend more to protect it."

History, Thompson said, will determine whether Americans are getting a fair return on their investment in defense.

"We have not had any follow-up attacks to 9/11; that's a pretty powerful success story," he said. "On the other hand, the world's best-equipped military is being fought to a standstill by a handful of zealots in Iraq. That's a powerful story of disappointment and frustration."

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/16935815.htm

[matthew]

 Published on Saturday, March 24, 2007 by Associated Press
Documents Show Gonzales Approved Firings
by Lara Jakes Jordan

WASHINGTON — Last week, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he was not involved in any discussions about the impending dismissals of U.S. attorneys.

On Friday night, however, the Justice Department revealed Gonzales’ participation in a Nov. 27 meeting where such plans were discussed.

The firings of eight prosecutors has since led to a political firestorm and calls for his ouster.

At that meeting, the attorney general and at least five top Justice Department officials discussed a five-step plan for carrying out the firings of the prosecutors, Gonzales’ aides said late Friday.

There, Gonzales signed off on the plan, which was drafted by his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson. Sampson resigned last week.

Another Justice aide closely involved in the dismissals, White House liaison Monica Goodling, has also taken a leave of absence, two officials said.

The five-step plan approved by Gonzales involved notifying Republican home-state senators of the impending dismissals, preparing for potential political upheaval, naming replacements and submitting them to the Senate for confirmation.

Six of the eight prosecutors who were ultimately ordered to resign are named in the plan.

The department released more than 280 documents Friday night, including e-mails, calendar pages and memos to try to satisfy Congress’ demands for details on how the firings were handled - and whether they were politically motivated. There are no other meetings on the calendar pages released between that Nov. 27 and Dec. 7, when the attorneys were fired, to indicate Gonzales participated in other discussions on the matter, Justice spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said.

Scolinos said it was not immediately clear whether Gonzales gave his final approval to begin the firings at that meeting. Scolinos also said Gonzales was not involved in the process of selecting which prosecutors would be asked to resign.

On March 13, in explaining the firings, Gonzales told reporters he was aware that some of the dismissals were being discussed but was not involved in them.

“I knew my chief of staff was involved in the process of determining who were the weak performers - where were the districts around the country where we could do better for the people in that district, and that’s what I knew,” Gonzales said last week. “But that is in essence what I knew about the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on. That’s basically what I knew as the attorney general.”

Later, he added: “I accept responsibility for everything that happens here within this department. But when you have 110,000 people working in the department, obviously there are going to be decisions that I’m not aware of in real time. Many decisions are delegated.”

The documents were released Friday night, a few hours after Sampson agreed to testify at a Senate inquiry next week into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys last year.

Asked to explain the difference between Gonzales’ comments and his schedule, Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the attorney general had relied on Sampson to draw up the plans on the firings.

“The attorney general has made clear that he charged Mr. Sampson with directing a plan to replace U.S. attorneys where for one reason or another the department believed that we could do better,” Roehrkasse said. “He was not, however, involved at the levels of selecting the particular U.S. attorneys who would be replaced.”

Gonzales this week directed the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate the circumstances of the firings, officials said. The department’s inspector general also will participate in that investigation.

Nonetheless Democrats pounced late Friday.

“Clearly the attorney general was not telling the whole truth, but what is he trying to hide?” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

“If the facts bear out that Attorney General Gonzales knew much more about the plan than he has previously admitted, then he can no longer serve as attorney general,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who is heading the Senate’s investigation into the firings.

Added House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers:

“This puts the attorney general front and center in these matters, contrary to information that had previously been provided to the public and Congress.”

Presidential spokesman Trey Bohn referred questions to the Justice Department, saying White House officials had not seen the documents.

The developments were not what Republicans, skittish about new revelations, had hoped.

Earlier Friday, a staunch White House ally, Sen. John Cornyn, summoned White House counsel Fred Fielding to Capitol Hill and told him he wanted “no surprises.”

“I told him, ‘Everything you can release, please release. We need to know what the facts are,’” Cornyn said.

Sampson will appear Thursday at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, his attorney said. “We trust that his decision to do so will satisfy the need of the Congress to obtain information from him concerning the requested resignations of the United States attorneys,” Sampson attorney Brad Berenson wrote in a letter to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee that oversees the Justice Department.

New e-mails released Friday indicate that some of Gonzales’ most trusted advisers were kept out of the loop in the firings. Scolinos apparently learned about the plans to dismiss attorneys on Nov. 17, 2006 - nearly two years after Sampson and the White House first began talking about replacing prosecutors.

Democrats question whether the eight were selected because they were not seen as, in Sampson’s words, “loyal Bushies.”

Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman contributed to this report.

© 2007 The Associated Press.

[matthew]

McCain Takes It On The Nose

[matthew]

Breaking the Army
Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 11 (IPS) - President George W. Bush's ongoing "surge" of some 35,000 troops to add to the 140,000 already deployed in Iraq is highlighting growing concern, particularly among the military brass, that the U.S. army is overstretched and fast becoming "broken".

An increasing number of senior retired officers, some of whom had previously expressed optimism that the active-duty force of some 500,000 soldiers could handle U.S. commitments in the "global war on terror", now say the current situation today reminds them of 1980, when the service's top officer, Gen. Edward Meyer, publicly declared that the country had a "hollow Army".

"The active army is about broken," former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who also served as chairman of the Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush 15 years ago, told Time magazine this week, while another highly decorated retired general who just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan described the situation in even more dire terms.

"The truth is, the U.S. Army is in serious trouble and any recovery will be years in the making and, as a result, the country is in a position of strategic peril," ret. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, former head of the U.S. Southern Command, told the National Journal, elaborating on a much-cited memo he had written for his colleagues at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

"My bottom line is that the Army is unraveling, and if we don't expend significant national energy to reverse that trend, sometime in the next two years we will break the Army just like we did during Vietnam," he added.

In an indication of the growing concern, both Time and the more elite-oriented Journal ran cover stories this week. They both concluded that the Army was rapidly approaching or had already reached "the breaking point".

"Pressed by the demands of two wars, plus mandates to expand, reorganise, and modernise, the Army is nearing its breaking point," according to the Journal, which also ran a companion article on how much the service has been forced to lower its mental, physical and moral standards to meet recruitment targets.

Some 15 percent of Army recruits last year were granted "waivers" from the Army's minimum standards -- about half of those were "moral waivers"; that is, they were permitted to enter the service despite prior criminal records. Only 82 percent of recruits had a high school diploma or its equivalent, below the Army's benchmark of 90 percent and the lowest rate since 1981, according to the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

From just over 1.6 million soldiers at the height of the Vietnam War, the Army's active-duty force fell to a half million troops by the mid-1990s, following the end of the Cold War. Counting reserve and National Guard forces, the Army's total strength stands at about one million soldiers, of whom less than 400,000 are trained for combat.

While that was considered adequate for conventional conflicts with clear military and political objectives like the first Gulf War, in which the U.S. used overwhelming force to quickly prevail, it has proven far less suitable for the kind of prolonged occupation and unconventional war in which Washington now finds itself engaged in Iraq.

While some in the military brass, like then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, warned the Bush administration even before the 2003 Iraq war that several hundred thousand troops would be required to stabilise the country, Bush's defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was determined to show that a "transformed" military -- one that used advanced technology to make up for numbers -- was the wave of the future, repeatedly rejecting appeals by his commanders, Congress and some of his neo-conservative allies to expand the army's size.

It was not until Rumsfeld was ousted after last November's elections, nearly four years into the U.S. occupation, that Bush finally agreed. In January, his new defence secretary, Robert Gates, called for an increase in army ranks to nearly 550,000 and in the Marines, from 175,000 to 202,000.

These increases, however, will be phased in over five years, offering little relief to stresses in the existing force, according to defence experts.

In addition to lowered standards for recruitment, the biggest concerns at the moment have to do with readiness and training. As more troops are rotated into Iraq for the "surge", the amount of time devoted to training has been substantially reduced.

"Given the new policy of having (U.S.) troops (interact more) among the Iraqis," Lawrence Korb, the Pentagon's top personnel officer under President Ronald Reagan, told Time, "they should be giving our young soldiers more training, not less."

Adding to the readiness problem are shortages of equipment, such as tanks and Humvees, on U.S. bases where training takes place. Instead, as units are rotated out of Iraq, they leave their equipment behind for their replacements to use.

"On the equipment side of the equation, the Army is pretty much broken," Tom McNaugher, an expert at the RAND Corporation, told the Journal.

Just as the Army has been forced to relax its recruitment standards, it has also been forced to shorten intervals between deployments. While the Army's recommended standard is a two-year interval between deployments that can last up to one year, the average current interval is substantially less; in some cases, as little as seven months.

Those stresses are particularly difficult to manage for mid-level officers, most of whom have families back at home and have already served as many as three and even four tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.

While retention rates for these ranks remain strong, according to the Pentagon, some experts believe its statistics, which lag by several months, do not reflect what is actually taking place.

"Today, anecdotal evidence of collapse is all around," according to ret. Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, a former Rumsfeld adviser and a regular commentator on CNN, who previously was optimistic about the war and its impact on the Army.

"The Army's collapse after Vietnam was presaged by a desertion of mid-grade officers (captains) and non-commissioned officers… Most left because they and their families were tired and didn't want to serve in units unprepared for war."

"If we lose our sergeants and captains, the Army breaks again. It's just that simple. That's why these soldiers are the canaries in the readiness coal mine," he told the Washington Times last week. "And... if you look closely, you will see that these canaries are fleeing their cages in frightening numbers."

Indeed, the Army is currently short about 3,000 mid-career officers, a number that will be impossible to make up as the army expands over the next five years -- a situation that Scales called "pretty much irreversible".

According to a report in the Boston Globe Wednesday, graduates from the military's officer training academy at West Point are choosing to leave active duty at the highest rate in more than three decades -- "a sign to many specialists," the Globe said, "that repeated tours in Iraq are prematurely driving out some of the Army’s top young officers."

Of the 903 officers commissioned on graduating from West Point in 2001, 54 percent had left the service by January of this year.

Meyer, the general who pronounced the army "hollow" in 1980, agrees that the army appears headed down the same path as after Vietnam.

"I absolutely see similar challenges confronting the Army today as we faced then in terms of stresses being placed on the force," he told Journal. "I think the Army is stressed at this point more than in all the time I've watched it since at least the end of the Cold War." (END/2007)

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37304

[Tripp]

Rove and Co. Broke Federal Law With Email Scam

Our friends at CREW are back in the news. They've put out a report saying "the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over FIVE MILLION emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005." The White House was apparently given a plan to recover those emails, but has chosen to do nothing. I'm going to go ahead and guess that the plan to uncover those emails will never be undertaken unless done so with the power of a federal subpoena, because those emails were meant to be lost.

But guess what? Turns out, this is all illegal! Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post asked a White House spokesman to read aloud the White House's policy on email retention, and this is what he said:

    "Federal law requires the preservation of electronic communications sent or received by White House staff... The official EOP e-mail system is designed to automatically comply with records management requirements."

Federal law? Holy cow! Deleting your emails is a federal offense, and the official email system is designed so emails will never be "accidentally" deleted. These guys are totally on the hook, right? Wait, there's more?

    "Personnel working on behalf of the EOP [Executive Office of the President] are expected to only use government-provided e-mail services for all official communication."

So using email addresses belonging to the RNC and laptops and Blackberries on loan from the same is a violation of policy?

Bring in Patrick Fitzgerald now! Everyone is going to prison!

[bebopbalogna]

Everyone is going to prison!

yeah right.  it's somewhat comforting to know that the crooks have been exposed (again),  but very troubling to know that nothing will ever be done about it.  setting an unprecedented precedent of unlimited immunity for future fuckers.

[matthew]

I don't know where they are going but some of them are coming from....

[matthew]

U.S. officials exclude bombs in touting drop in Iraq violence
By Nancy A. Youssef
McClatchy Newspapers


WASHINGTON - U.S. officials who say there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian violence in Iraq since President Bush began sending more American troops into Baghdad aren't counting one of the main killers of Iraqi civilians.

Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn't include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

President Bush explained why in a television interview on Tuesday. "If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory," he told TV interviewer Charlie Rose.

Others, however, say that not counting bombing victims skews the evidence of how well the Baghdad security plan is protecting the civilian population - one of the surge's main goals.

"Since the administration keeps saying that failure is not an option, they are redefining success in a way that suits them," said James Denselow, an Iraq specialist at London-based Chatham House, a foreign policy think tank.

Bush administration officials have pointed to a dramatic decline in one category of deaths - the bodies dumped daily in Baghdad streets, which officials call sectarian murders - as evidence that the security plan is working. Bush said this week that that number had declined by 50 percent, a number confirmed by statistics compiled by McClatchy Newspapers.

But the number of people killed in explosive attacks is rising, the same statistics show - up from 323 in March, the first full month of the security plan, to 365 through April 24.

Overall, statistics indicate that the number of violent deaths has declined significantly since December, when 1,391 people died in Baghdad, either executed and found dead on the street or killed by bomb blasts. That number was 796 in March and 691 through April 24.

Nearly all of that decline, however, can be attributed to a drop in executions, most of which were blamed on Shiite Muslim militias aligned with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Much of the decline occurred before the security plan began on Feb. 15, and since then radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has ordered his Mahdi Army militia to stand down.

According to the statistics, which McClatchy reporters in Baghdad compile daily from Iraqi police reports, 1,030 bodies were found in December. In January, that number declined 32 percent, to 699. It declined to 596 February and again to 473 in March.

Deaths from car bombings and improvised explosive devices, however, increased from 361 in December to a peak of 520 in February before dropping to 323 in March.

In that same period, the number of bombings has increased, as well. In December, there were 65 explosive attacks. That number was unchanged in January, but it rose to 72 in February, 74 in March and 81 through April 24.

U.S. officials blame the bombings largely on al-Qaida, which they say is hoping to provoke sectarian conflict by targeting Shiite neighborhoods with massive explosions.

Ryan Crocker, who became the U.S. ambassador in Iraq this month, said the bombings are a reaction to the surge of additional U.S. troops into Baghdad.

"The terrorists like al-Qaida would make their own surge," Crocker said this week.

U.S. officials have said that they don't expect the security plan to stop bombings.

"I don't think you're ever going to get rid of all the car bombs," Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said this week. "Iraq is going to have to learn as did, say, Northern Ireland, to live with some degree of sensational attacks."

But some think that approach could backfire, with Iraqis eventually blaming the Americans for failing to stop bombings.

"To win, the insurgents just have to prove they are not losing," said Denselow, of London's Chatham House.

Experts who have studied car bombings say it's no surprise that U.S. officials would want to exclude their victims from any measure of success.

Car bombs are almost impossible to detect and stop, particularly in a traffic-jammed city such as Baghdad. U.S. officials in Baghdad concede that while they've found scores of car bomb factories in Iraq, they've made only a small dent in the manufacturing of these weapons.

Mike Davis, who recently wrote a history of car bombs, said that once car bombs are introduced into a conflict, they're all but impossible to eradicate. A few people with rudimentary skills can assemble one with massive effect.

"They really don't have to be very sophisticated; they just have to be very big," Davis said.

Davis said checkpoints are useful in detecting car bombs "until they blow up the checkpoint," and erecting walls is not practically feasible in communities. When U.S. officials proposed building walls around Baghdad's most troubled neighborhoods to fend off car bomb attacks, residents balked, saying the walls would further divide the city along sectarian lines.

Bombers also have shown that they can adapt quickly. When the U.S. military blocked off markets to vehicular traffic, bombers wearing explosive vests were able to walk into the areas.

Finding a defense against car bombs has fallen to the Joint IED Defeat Organization, a Pentagon task force created in 2003 to find ways to protect U.S. troops from roadside bombs, which remain the No. 1 killer of Americans in Iraq.

But car bombs aren't the primary killer of American service members, said Christine Devries, the task force's spokeswoman. Roadside bombs are.

---

ABOUT IRAQI CIVILIAN CASUALTIES

There are no authoritative statistics on Iraqi civilian casualties. The Iraq Study Group in its report last year found that the Pentagon routinely underreports violence. Other groups have criticized the Iraqi government's statistics as unreliable - a moot point since the government recently stopped releasing comprehensive totals. On Wednesday, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq chastised the Iraqi government for withholding statistics on sectarian violence.

One study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health and Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad, estimated that 78,000 Iraqis were killed by car bombings between March 2003 and June 2006.

Iraq Body Count, which keeps statistics based on news reports, finds that there have been just over 1,050 car bombs that have killed more than one person since August 2003, when a car bomb detonated in front of what was the United Nations headquarters, killing 17.

McClatchy gathers its statistics daily from police contacts, and while they're not comprehensive, they're collected the same way every day.

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/editorial/17134251.htm

[matthew]

I was virtually apolitical growing up (I had no opinions of Canadian leaders or Reagan, H.W. Bush or Clinton - other than I was cynical of the all) but by late high school I was already aware that <a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/dUg7Jnn7AAk" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/dUg7Jnn7AAk</a>

....

Firefighters Union

[matthew]

Who Will Stop the U.S. Shadow Army in Iraq?
Don't Look to the Congressional Democrats
By Jeremy Scahill

    The Democratic leadership in Congress is once again gearing up for a great sell-out on the Iraq war. While the wrangling over the $124 billion Iraq supplemental spending bill is being headlined in the media as a "show down" or "war" with the White House, it is hardly that. In plain terms, despite the impassioned sentiments of the anti-war electorate that brought the Democrats to power last November, the Congressional leadership has made clear its intention to keep funding the Iraq occupation, even though Sen. Harry Reid has declared that "this war is lost."

    For months, the Democrats' "withdrawal" plan has come under fire from opponents of the occupation who say it doesn't stop the war, doesn't defund it, and insures that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq beyond President Bush's second term. Such concerns were reinforced by Sen. Barack Obama's recent declaration that the Democrats will not cut off funding for the war, regardless of the President's policies. "Nobody," he said, "wants to play chicken with our troops."

    As the New York Times reported, "Lawmakers said they expect that Congress and Mr. Bush would eventually agree on a spending measure without the specific timetable" for (partial) withdrawal, which the White House has said would "guarantee defeat." In other words, the appearance of a fierce debate this week, Presidential veto and all, has largely been a show with a predictable outcome.

The Shadow War in Iraq

    While all of this is troubling, there is another disturbing fact which speaks volumes about the Democrats' lack of insight into the nature of this unpopular war -- and most Americans will know next to nothing about it. Even if the President didn't veto their legislation, the Democrats' plan does almost nothing to address the second largest force in Iraq -- and it's not the British military. It's the estimated 126,000 private military "contractors" who will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war.

    The 145,000 active duty U.S. forces are nearly matched by occupation personnel that currently come from companies like Blackwater USA and the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close personal and political ties with the Bush administration. Until Congress reins in these massive corporate forces and the whopping federal funding that goes into their coffers, partially withdrawing U.S. troops may only set the stage for the increased use of private military companies (and their rent-a-guns) which stand to profit from any kind of privatized future "surge" in Iraq.

    From the beginning, these contractors have been a major hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely central to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq. While many of them perform logistical support activities for American troops, including the sort of laundry, fuel and mail delivery, and food-preparation work that once was performed by soldiers, tens of thousands of them are directly engaged in military and combat activities. According to the Government Accountability Office, there are now some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq. These not-quite G.I. Joes, working for Blackwater and other major U.S. firms, can clear in a month what some active-duty soldiers make in a year. "We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of Defense," said House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. "How in the hell do you justify that?"

    House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman estimates that $4 billion in taxpayer money has so far been spent in Iraq on these armed "security" companies like Blackwater -- with tens of billions more going to other war companies like KBR and Fluor for "logistical" support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the House Intelligence Committee believes that up to forty cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors.

    With such massive government payouts, there is little incentive for these companies to minimize their footprint in the region and every incentive to look for more opportunities to profit -- especially if, sooner or later, the "official" U.S. presence shrinks, giving the public a sense of withdrawal, of a winding down of the war. Even if George W. Bush were to sign the legislation the Democrats have passed, their plan "allows the President the leeway to escalate the use of military security contractors directly on the battlefield," Erik Leaver of the Institute for Policy Studies points out. It would "allow the President to continue the war using a mercenary army."

    The crucial role of contractors in continuing the occupation was driven home in January when David Petraeus, the general running the President's "surge" plan in Baghdad, cited private forces as essential to winning the war. In his confirmation hearings in the Senate, he claimed that they fill a gap attributable to insufficient troop levels available to an overstretched military. Along with Bush's official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of contract security forces," Petraeus told the Senators, "give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission." Indeed, Gen. Petraeus admitted that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq not by the U.S. military, but "secured by contract security."

    Such widespread use of contractors, especially in mission-critical operations, should have raised red flags among lawmakers. After a trip to Iraq last month, Retired Gen. Barry McCaffery observed bluntly, "We are overly dependant on civilian contractors. In extreme danger--they will not fight." It is, however, the political rather than military uses of these forces that should be cause for the greatest concern.

    Contractors have provided the White House with political cover, allowing for a back-door near doubling of U.S. forces in Iraq through the private sector, while masking the full extent of the human costs of the occupation. Although contractor deaths are not effectively tallied, at least 770 contractors have been killed in Iraq and at least another 7,700 injured. These numbers are not included in any official (or media) toll of the war. More significantly, there is absolutely no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law -- military or civilian -- being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent Congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts – and, no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts. Before Paul Bremer, Bush's viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in 2004 he issued an edict, known as Order 17. It immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq which, today, is like the wild West, full of roaming Iraqi death squads and scores of unaccountable, heavily-armed mercenaries, ex-military men from around the world, working for the occupation. For the community of contractors in Iraq, immunity and impunity are welded together.

    Despite the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq and several well-documented incidents involving alleged contractor abuses, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to the possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison. While dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed -- 64 on murder-related charges -- not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.

    As one armed contractor recently informed the Washington Post, "We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night." According to another, U.S. contractors in Iraq had their own motto: "What happens here today, stays here today."

[matthew]

Funding the Mercenary War

    "These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies," argues Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S. contractors from Iraq. "They charge whatever they want with impunity. There's no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their activities are."

    Until now, this situation has largely been the doing of a Republican-controlled Congress and White House. No longer.

    While some Congressional Democrats have publicly expressed grave concerns about the widespread use of these private forces and a handful have called for their withdrawal, the party leadership has done almost nothing to stop, or even curb, the use of mercenary corporations in Iraq. As it stands, the Bush administration and the industry have little to fear from Congress on this score, despite the unseating of the Republican majority.

    On two central fronts, accountability and funding, the Democrats' approach has been severely flawed, playing into the agendas of both the White House and the war contractors. Some Democrats, for instance, are pushing accountability legislation that would actually require more U.S. personnel to deploy to Iraq as part of an FBI Baghdad "Theater Investigative Unit" that would supposedly monitor and investigate contractor conduct. The idea is: FBI investigators would run around Iraq, gather evidence, and interview witnesses, leading to indictments and prosecutions in U.S. civilian courts.

    This is a plan almost certain to backfire, if ever instituted. It raises a slew of questions: Who would protect the investigators? How would Iraqi victims be interviewed? How would evidence be gathered amid the chaos and dangers of Iraq? Given that the federal government and the military seem unable -- or unwilling -- even to count how many contractors are actually in the country, how could their activities possibly be monitored? In light of the recent Bush administration scandal over the eight fired US attorneys, serious questions remain about the integrity of the Justice Department. How could we have any faith that real crimes in Iraq, committed by the employees of immensely well-connected crony corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton, would be investigated adequately?

    Apart from the fact that it would be impossible to effectively monitor 126,000 or more private contractors under the best of conditions in the world's most dangerous war zone, this legislation would give the industry a tremendous PR victory. Once it was passed as the law of the land, the companies could finally claim that a legally accountable structure governed their operations. Yet they would be well aware that such legislation would be nearly impossible to enforce.

    Not surprisingly, then, the mercenary trade group with the Orwellian name of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has pushed for just this Democratic-sponsored approach rather than the military court martial system favored by conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. The IPOA called the expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act -- essentially the Democrats' oversight plan -- "the most cogent approach to ensuring greater contractor accountability in the battle space." That endorsement alone should be reason enough to pause and reconsider.

    Then there is the issue of continued funding for the privatized shadow forces in Iraq. As originally passed in the House, the Democrats' Iraq plan would have cut only about 15% or $815 million of the supplemental spending earmarked for day-to-day military operations "to reflect savings attributable to efficiencies and management improvements in the funding of contracts in the military departments."

    As it stood, this was a stunningly insufficient plan, given ongoing events in Iraq. But even that mild provision was dropped by the Democrats in late April. Their excuse was the need to hold more hearings on the contractor issue. Instead, they moved to withhold -- not cut -- 15% of total day-to-day operational funding, but only until Secretary of Defense Robert Gates submits a report on the use of contractors and the scope of their deployment. Once the report is submitted, the 15% would be unlocked. In essence, this means that, under the Democrats plan, the mercenary forces will simply be able to continue business-as-usual/profits-as-usual in Iraq.

    However obfuscated by discussions of accountability, fiscal responsibility, and oversight, the gorilla of a question in the Congressional war room is: Should the administration be allowed to use mercenary forces, whose livelihoods depend on war and conflict, to help fight its battles in Iraq?

    Rep. Murtha says, "We're trying to bring accountability to an unaccountable war." But it's not accountability that the war needs; it needs an end.

    By sanctioning the administration's continuing use of mercenary corporations -- instead of cutting off all funding to them -- the Democrats leave the door open for a future escalation of the shadow war in Iraq. This, in turn, could pave the way for an array of secretive, politically well-connected firms that have profited tremendously under the current administration to elevate their status and increase their government paychecks.

Blackwater's War

    Consider the case of Blackwater USA.

    A decade ago, the company barely existed; and yet, its "diplomatic security" contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone, total more than $750 million. Today, Blackwater has become nothing short of the Bush administration's well-paid Praetorian Guard. It protects the U.S. ambassador and other senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting Congressional delegations; it trains Afghan security forces and was deployed in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region, setting up a "command and control" center just miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect FEMA operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 a day from the American taxpayer, billing $950 a day per Blackwater contractor.

    Since September 11, 2001, the company has invested its lucrative government pay-outs in building an impressive private army. At present, it has forces deployed in nine countries and boasts a database of 21,000 additional troops at the ready, a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gun-ships, and the world's largest private military facility -- a 7,000 acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. It recently opened a new facility in Illinois ("Blackwater North") and is fighting local opposition to a third planned domestic facility near San Diego ("Blackwater West") by the Mexican border. It is also manufacturing an armored vehicle (nicknamed the "Grizzly") and surveillance blimps.

    The man behind this empire is Erik Prince, a secretive, conservative Christian, ex-Navy SEAL multimillionaire who bankrolls the President and his allies with major campaign contributions. Among Blackwater's senior executives are Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA; Robert Richer, former Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA; Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General; and an impressive array of other retired military and intelligence officials. Company executives recently announced the creation of a new private intelligence company, "Total Intelligence," to be headed by Black and Richer.

    For years, Blackwater's operations have been shrouded in secrecy. Emboldened by the culture of impunity enjoyed by the private sector in the Bush administration's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater's founder has talked of creating a "contractor brigade" to support US military operations and fancies his forces the "FedEx" of the "national security apparatus."

    As the country debates an Iraq withdrawal, Congress owes it to the public to take down the curtain of secrecy surrounding these shadow forces that undergird the U.S. public deployment in Iraq. The President likes to say that defunding the war would undercut the troops. Here's the truth of the matter: Continued funding of the Iraq war ensures tremendous profits for politically-connected war contractors. If Congress is serious about ending the occupation, it needs to rein in the unaccountable companies that make it possible and only stand to profit from its escalation.

    Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

Copyright 2007 Jeremy Scahill

click here

[Tripp]

why do you have to disperse an immigration rally??

[matthew]

Ex-surgeon general accuses Bush officials of censorship
Says they chose agenda over facts
Dr. Richard H. Carmona said officials muzzled him.    Dr. Richard H. Carmona said officials muzzled him.
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Los Angeles Times  |  July 11, 2007

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's first surgeon general alleged yesterday that administration officials prevented him from providing the public with accurate scientific and medical information on such issues as stem cell research and teen pregnancy.

"The reality is that the 'nation's doctor' has been marginalized and relegated to a position with no independent budget and with supervisors who are political appointees with partisan agendas," Dr. Richard H. Carmona told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological, or political agenda is ignored, marginalized, or simply buried.

"The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds," said Carmona, who served from 2002 to 2006. "The job of surgeon general is to be the doctor of the nation, not the doctor of a political party."

Carmona testified alongside former surgeons general C. Everett Koop and David Satcher, who served in the Reagan and Clinton administrations, respectively. They also told the committee that they faced political interference, particularly on morally charged issues such as sexuality and drug use.

But Carmona said some fellow surgeons general told him the interference rose to new levels during his tenure.

"The surgeon general has to be independent if the surgeon general is going to have any credibility," said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and the committee chairman. The panel is considering changes that would insulate the surgeon general from political crosscurrents.

Administration officials had no immediate comment on Carmona's denunciation, but the Health and Human Services Department was expected to issue a statement. The House hearing occurred two days before a Senate panel is to meet to consider the nomination of Kentucky cardiologist Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr. to succeed Carmona. Holsinger already has drawn political fire from leading Democrats and gay and lesbian organizations. As a lay member of the United Methodist Church, Holsinger has strongly opposed the liberalization of church policies toward gays.

Surgeons general are viewed as public-health advocates who serve, in essence, as the nation's family doctor. Previous surgeons general have played pivotal roles in debates about smoking, drunken driving, mental health, and disparities in medical treatment between whites and minorities.

Carmona said that he expected that would be his role when he came to Washington, but that his attitude was politically naïve.

When the issue of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research came up early in Bush's first term, Carmona said, he felt he could play an educational role for administration officials and the public by openly discussing the latest scientific research.

Stem cells can be grown into any type of cell in the body, and some scientists see the promise of a cure for Parkinson's and other diseases in them. But producing embryonic stem cells has involved the destruction of human embryos, raising moral issues that some, including many religious conservatives, find profoundly disturbing. In 2001, Bush limited federal funding for stem cell research and has since blocked attempts by Congress to lift the restriction.

Carmona said he was told to stand down from playing any educational role because a decision had already been made. He also said administration appointees who reviewed the text of his speeches deleted from them references to stem cell research.

Likewise, on the issue of preventing teen pregnancy, Carmona said he was not allowed to deviate from the administration's position that abstinence was the best approach. In fact, he said, he believes a variety of approaches are needed, including contraception for sexually active teens. The administration did not want to hear the science, but wanted to preach, Carmona said.

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.