A safe and happy holiday to all. Don't over imbibe and drive and while you're resting up from the fireworks tomorrow, you might want to keep the celebration going by contacting your Senate sneaks and asking them to honor the occassion, and our Founding Fathers, by upholding the Constitution and protecting the Fourth Amendment.
Dan makes it easy to send them a message and you could pass along some of his suggestions if you find yourself at a loss for words.
As my favorite pundit in the world, Yogi Berra, once said, "It ain't over till it's over" and the activists are in overdrive this week in organizing the opposition to the impending sellout of the rule of the law in the Senate on FISA. As usual, FDL is leading the charge and today's post consolidates the current actions. They're busier than the shoemaker's elves over there and have invented a new call tool from Blue America that makes it easier than ever to make those phone calls and more importantly to track the results on the feedback. They also conjured up a much needed tool to track public appearances of our Congresslizards while they're at home in our districts and offer some practical actions we can take to focus attention on pending issues.
Meanwhile, at the GOS, McJoan has additional actions that have the potential to greatly impact the debate. My favorite comes from my old pal Ben.
One option for fulfilling your duty as a private citizen is Ben Masel's Operation Read the Bill. Print a copy of the bill, find your Senators while they are home during this recess--the 4th of July recess, no less--and ask them if they've done their duty of reading the bill. Ask them if they know that they're about to redefine the term "WMD" to possibly include many weapons that the U.S. military uses. Ask them if they know they are about to cede even more of their power--the power of protecting us, their constituents, from unlawful surveillance--to the executive.
Finally, in case you missed it, Russ Feingold issued a terrific statement on the FISA mess earlier in the week.
The outpouring of support from you and across the country, in letters and e-mails and phone calls and the blogs has been absolutely fantastic. It really made a difference, as we mounted a challenge this week that almost nobody thought could work. We did stop this thing for now -- it is delayed until after the July 4th weekend.
I teased some of my colleagues...I said, we can celebrate the constitution on July 4th, and when we come back maybe you'll decide not to tear it up....I'm deeply grateful for your support.
As they said at FDL. this is what a real patriot sounds like. One can only hope it goes from his mouth to Obama's ears. It would be really nice to see this kind of bold leadership from our presumptive candidate. In the interim, you know what to do. We may still lose, but we could still win and in any event, it's best to go down fighting.
Update: Dan at Pruning Shears checks into comments to remind us that you can also become a citizen co-sponsor of the Dodd-Feingold Amendment to strip retroactive immunity from pending FISA legislation. I signed onto that a while ago, but if you haven't, it only takes a minute to do so.
This is a somewhat comforting turn of events. I've been following this case for a while and if memory serves, this group was targeted by the Bush regime's homeland surveillance team for allegedly funneling money to terrorists. In the course of the discovery process, as it wound it's way through the lower courts, the government inadvertently sent a document proving they had been illegally spying on the charity. When the mistake was discovered, federal agents stormed the charity and their lawyer's offices to retreive the document and any evidence of its existence, going as far as seizing computers. The White House has been trying to kill the case in court ever since but the federal district judge is not buying the government's arguments.
The judge, Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge for the Northern District of California, made his findings in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by an Oregon charity. The group says it has evidence of an illegal wiretap used against it by the National Security Agency under the secret surveillance program established by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The Justice Department has tried for more than two years to kill the lawsuit, saying any surveillance of the charity or other entities was a “state secret” and citing the president’s constitutional power as commander in chief to order wiretaps without a warrant from a court under the agency’s program.
But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims in his 56-page ruling. He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.
This is especially heartening because the same judge will be presiding over the about 40 civil cases against the telecoms that have been brought by various parties. Of course, if the fiasco of the so-called FISA compromise passes in the Senate, the judge's frame of mind won't mean squat since it will effectively force him to dismiss those cases but still, it's good to know there's at least one sane jurist left in the higher courts who is willing to put the rule of law above political fealty. There may be hope for us yet.
Update: Glenn has the legalese and a much fuller explanation of what's at stake in this vote.
Chris Briem at NullSpace is getting into the weeds of the new Hockey Arena's financing and notes that there could be a couple of very large problems on the horizon. The arena has the potential of straitjacketing the City of Pittsburgh AND Allegheny County due to the bond statement's seniority arrangements AND the weak condition of the Don Barden and PITG finances.
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette has been reporting that the final financing for the casino is still not coming together:
"A combination of anxiety and curiosity has built in recent weeks
surrounding Don Barden's efforts to secure $780 million in financing
for the Majestic Star casino, and it could come to a head at the
construction site Monday. The
team of more than 20 companies erecting the North Shore casino has not
been paid on time for work done in either April or May, according
to the primary contractor. They agreed on one extension already at a
June 16 meeting with Mr. Barden. They meet with him again on Monday,
and will decide collectively what action to take if he cannot provide
payment of about $10 million that is owed, said Dan Keating III,
chairman of Philadelphia-based Keating Building Corp., the primary
contractor."
Barden and PITG have had trouble getting financing as they have swapped principal backers and have found raising capital in the crunched credit markets much tougher than they anticipatead a few years ago. This could have some massive regional financial impacts if the casino is either not built at all, OR if it is significantly delayed or downsized. So let's get into the weeds with Chris by reading the bond statement and working through some of the implications. The bond statement is here SEA_arenabond_2007.pdf and we'll start with Chris's analysis:
The core financing in the form of $7.5 annually is indeed slated to
come from him, but he isn't really involved in building it. So who does
bear the risk of the arena project.
One answer is the Sports and Exhibition Authority (SEA) because THEY ALREADY BORROWED THE MONEY. That raises lots of questions. If the Barden money stream does not start flowing in as expected, what happens? ....
the revenue backing the project are not limited to the revenues
specifically tied to the arena, to include the Barden payments, rent or
other sources.. but all the SEA revenue. At least that is my reading.
So before these bonds could default to bond insurers it seems the
holders have claims against most SEA revenue.
WARNING --- SOME SERIOUSLY NERDY FINANCIAL WONKERY AND SPECULATION AHEAD --- Read at your own risk to your mental health....
The Sports and Exhibition Authority currently is paying off the bonds for most of the major destination projects in the city center right now. These include the two new stadiums, Heinz Field and PNC Park, and the Convention Center. The Convention Center is a money losing proposition at this time that is consistently blowing a hole in the current Sports and Exhibition Authority budget. It already drew upon the Regional Asset District's general fund of the 1% county sales tax to cover its 2007 operating deficit. The SEA is drawing upon a wide variety of general revenues to pay its pre-existing bond obligations.
So you can see there are significant revenue streams for the SEA from the county sales tax, hotel tax and dedicated parking taxes. Those revenues are already assigned to pre-existing debt obligations, but I am a bit worried when I read the bond security summary from page 6 of the statement:
The Bonds are payable from, and are secured solely by, certain payments and other revenues to be received by the Authority including: (a) Special Revenues; (b) Swap Receipts; (c) Commonwealth Lease Payments under the Commonwealth Lease (each as hereinafter defined); and (d) other moneys pledged to or held by the Trustee under the Indenture for such purposes.
THE BONDS ARE LIMITED OBLIGATIONS OF THE AUTHORITY PAYABLE SOLELY FROM THE TRUST ESTATE PLEDGED UNDER THE INDENTURE. THE BONDS ARE NOT OBLIGATIONS OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA OTHER THAN THE COMMONWEALTH’S OBLIGATION TO MAKE ANY ANNUAL LEASE PAYMENTS TO THE AUTHORITY UNDER THE COMMONWEALTH LEASE.... THE FULL FAITH AND CREDIT OF THE COMMONWEALTH IS NOT PLEDGED FOR THE PAYMENT OF THE BONDS. NEITHER THE CREDIT NOR THE TAXING POWER OF THE CITY OF PITTSBURGH, THE COUNTY OF ALLEGHENY, OR ANY POLITICAL SUBDIVISION THEREOF IS PLEDGED FOR THE PAYMENT OF THE BONDS......
What are the special revenues? From page 27 of the entire statement and page 17 of the counted pages:
“Special Revenues” include certain rental payments expected to be received by the Authority pursuant to the Arena Lease (its sublease of the Arena to the Arena Operator), payments it expects to receive from the entity which receives a license to operate a slot machine casino in the City (the "Casino Operator"), and payments it expects to receive from the Economic Development and Tourism Fund (“Economic Development & Tourism Fund”), a fund established pursuant to Act 71 of 2004 of the Commonwealth (4 Pa. C.S.A. §1407) ("Act 71").
In English, the special revenues are the arena lease payments, and two streams of casino revenue. The arena lease payments are paid by the arena operator and collected from the users and tenants of the arena, including he Penguins. The two slot streams are a $7,500,000 annual payment pledged by Don Barden and PITG, the slot license holder, and another $7,500,000 from the state of Pennsylvania. The state money is from a bond issue backed by casino revenue.
And here is the genesis of a potential financial implosion. The arena's financing is dependent upon the casino being built and rapidly generating revenues. The arena is already being built in anticipation of the casino running on time and on budget. The vast majority of the SEA's ability to repay is tied to the casino. however the casino looks like it will not be completed on time due to financing problems and more importantly, it will be completed when disposable incomes are shrinking. Ooahhhh Shit....
Despite the bond statement limited the SEA's responsibility to only the dedicated special revenues, interest rate swaps, lease payments and insurance payments, this bond structure could turn itself into an implicit moral bond structure.
The county and the city have authorized the SEA to perform some local government functions, including agreements to place golden handcuffs on the city amusement tax, and have allowed the SEA to borrow off the books. If this debt is placed on the books, neither entity can handle the additional debt load strain. Furthermore, the SEA has current claims on varying amounts of local revenue, including payments from RAD that are dedicated to rehabbing the current Mellon Arena and are due to terminate in the near future. Local entities are counting on additional RAD funding becoming available. IF the SEA or the city/county decide that the implied cost to their credit ratings are too high to use insurance, that RAD revenue will be eaten up and could also displace other currently funded projects.
This right now is a low probability event but as the troubles with PITG continue, combined with a slowing economy, the probability of an implosion increases.
I think I saw this list a while back but it bears repeating. Stolen from Angry Bear who has the source link.
Federal Contracts for Paper Shredding Services FY 2000-2008
Yr. Total $ 2000 $452,807 2001 $456,235 2002 $752,799 2003 $1,018,191 2004 $2,329,466 2005 $2,980,375 2006 $3,068,877 2007 $3,463,610 2008 2Q * $1,148,718 *Note: FY 2008 only includes data up to first and part of second quarter.
Taken in context with the ongoing refusal of so many agencies in this administration to turn over their email archives it's not difficult to conclude that no one connected to this administration is particularly worried about being prosecuted for their crimes because they're blithely destroying the evidence in blatant disregard of the law. [via]
Dan reminds us in a longer post that should be read in full that the FISA vote is now set for July 8th and we need to taking advantage of the space to keep pounding at our Congresslizards to do the right thing.
The Senate is of particular concern because the FISA vote is set for July 8th. Tell your reps and Democratic leaders to strip telecom amnesty from it. Emails are fine, phone calls are better, faxes better still because they take up space in Congressional offices, and money is best of all because, well, it’s money. FaxZero allows you to send two free faxes per day, and Senator Obama’s fax number is (202) 228-4260. Feel free to send requests for a belated birthday present to America.
It would have been more helpful if we could have seen this happen two years ago, if not seven, but really, it's never too late to demand accountability and considering that it will probably take years to purge all the incompetent crony appointments made by Bush, Wexler's new bill is bound to come in handy down the line.
The bill, known as the Government Accountability Office Improvement Act of 2008, insists the GAO have access to pertinent documents it is entitled to for conducting investigations. It also reasserts the right of the GAO to challenge any refusal of documents in court, responding to a district court decision that favored the office of Vice President Cheney in withholding energy policy planning documents from the GAO.
In a statement, Rep. Waxman said "GAO needs unfettered access to federal agencies to help Congress identify waste, fraud, and abuse in federal programs. This bill says that federal agencies and the White House can't withhold records that GAO is entitled to review."
It occurs to me that if we were able to uncover the full extent of corruption within the Bush regime, it would probably tie up the courts for decades. That's unlikely to happen but still, it would certainly be satisfying to see even a handful of the worst perps brought to justice in the end.
Do you know how easy it is to find out what David Addington looks like? This easy.
Which makes the outrage coming from the likes of Red State, Hot Air and Powerline at William Delahunt's admittedly dumb words just as much Faux News at it always is.
Addington set out to be a complete jackass showing the "grace of gollum" in his contempt for Congress. Some Congresscritters seemed more interested in showing their contempt for Addington in return - or in grandstanding rather than asking searching questions about non-hypothetical events. All in all not a great day for America, but let's not lose sight of the simple fact that, sans Addington, Yoo and their bosses, America wouldn't have an officially sanctioned policy of torture and the commission of other war crimes. There's a clear villain in the Addington/Delahunt tale and it isn't the congressman from Massachusetts.
This looks like an interesting project. HuffPo, noting that McCain's pretty much got nothing to offer but fear, has started a new page called FearWatch08.
But things are always less scary when the lights are on -- so throughout the campaign HuffPost will be conducting a FearWatch, keeping our eyes peeled for the lowest, most base attempts to scare voters into voting their fears, and collecting them on a FearWatch08 page.
And we'd like your help. So be on the lookout for examples of fear-mongering in speeches, in press releases, in local TV spots, and in direct mail come-ons -- and send any you come across to fearwatch08@huffingtonpost.com so we can add them to our collection.
Sounds like it could be a good resource if it takes off and if nothing else, it would be good to have a catch page for the little items that might not get blogged, or even noticed, otherwise.
Considering all the political costs involved, I was willing to give Obama something of a pass on not leading the fight against the FISA capitulation but now he's gone too far in promoting the false narrative to excuse this destruction of the rule of law.
"The bill has changed. So I don't think the security threats have changed, I think the security threats are similar. My view on FISA has always been that the issue of the phone companies per se is not one that overrides the security interests of the American people."
What a steaming crock. This bill has not changed for the better and he specifically promised to support a filibuster. It's beyond insulting that he seeks to justify his walk back on that promise by spewing the same fear mongering talking points the White House has used to justify every constitutional breach of the last seven years. Since I'm late to the party and John Cole and I have been pretty much in sync on this all week, I'll just quote his post.
Before, when he accepted the compromise but promised to fight for removing immunity, it was one thing. This is a total collapse and a rapid abandonment of principle. From a voting perspective, nothing really changes. McCain is for it, Hillary would have been, now Obama is. Obama is still the better of the three on a wider range of issues.
As to whether I like it, no. I could understand the politics of supporting the filibuster and voting for the bill, but I don’t understand or accept getting out in front of this piece of shit and giving us more of the same “You can’t handle the truth.” It is a craven capitulation, and failure to support the filibuster tomorrow really is deciding the politics of fear trump “change.” We all know there are threats- the question is one of constitutionality and the executive Presidency. We are against it.
This was a test, and Obama is failing. It is of little solace that McCain refuse to show up and Clinton would have, too.
Obama doesn't understand that the 4th Amendment is national security, and he's prepared to throw it out for some illusory Republican-defined "toughness" because he hasn't got the guts to actually be tough in defense of our country. When it comes to pushing Overton's Window back into some less distorted position, Obama is not your guy. (Yes, you still should vote for the Democratic nominee, but you should put all of your other efforts into doing things like getting people into Congress who will try to keep him in line - and doing things to make them want to keep him from these continuous forays into right-wing territory. You were always going to have to do that, no matter who the nominee was.)
And NTodd puts it into historical context and reminds us that total destruction of the rule of law that served us well for almost two and half centuries is just as devastating when it happens incrementally.
This nation survived an invasion of a superpower in the early 19th century when the country was young and rather defenseless. It survived a civil war that killed more Americans than every other war we've fought. It survived the War to End All Wars. It survived the most destructive conflict this planet has ever seen. It survived the Cold War and all its attendant small wars. And now, when faced with box cutters, we decide that our civil liberties are a burden, that the Constitution is a scrap of paper, that our ideals are quaint?
As Cernig noted earlier, FDL has a list of the 15 Senators who voted against cloture and explains the procedural machinations that will make it possible for the remaining turncoats to appear to vote no on the bill when in fact they already endorsed it with this vote. It appears our only hope is for Reid to keep it off the floor and that may be worth pursuing, though unlikely to succeed. Also, for those who want talking points in order to convey the importance of this issue, for whatever it's worth at this point, Avedon has a good post explaining FISA in simple terms.
Ultimately, we've been had by the Democrats again and we're left in a bad place for November. There is no other viable choice but to vote for Obama no matter how badly he disappoints us. The alternatives are simply too horrible to contemplate. It appears he doesn't care and will be pursuing the 50 plus one percent option in trying to woo over the pee-stained pants crowd to gain the White House. That may work for him, but he pursues it at his peril. The young people and progressives who enthusiastically supported him are not so easily fooled and he will lose more of that enthusiasm every time he sells us out to pander to the so-called center. I know he's lost mine. I'll still vote for him but I'm not going to put the energy into promoting him that I would have, had he only shown some real courage here.
However, we can and should make a point of turning our energies to the down ticket races. We need to oust every one of those 80 imbeciles who find political expedience more important than the health of our republic. The only way we're going to get a change we can believe in, is to change who's running the show. If we manage to unseat enough of them, the rest will take us more seriously in the next fight.
After the abysmal capitulation in the House, it's looking bleak for a victory on FISA but it appears all the noise we've been making will at least stall it for a little longer. Digby reports:
Senator Reid just informed his colleagues on the Senate floor that, because of all the other bills in the queue (like the housing bill, and the Iraq supplemental), FISA may not get a vote until after the July 4 holiday recess.
It may be that it will even be delayed beyond that into August with all the other pressing matters on the calendar. Read the rest of Digby's post to get a list of the ways our privacy is threatened by our complicit Congresslizards.
Meanwhile, my posting has been off on account of a perfect storm of medical problems, so let me recap a couple of related developments I didn't get to in the last couple of days. Glenn has an excellent post about the ongoing deceit coming out of the House in attempting to paint the "compromise" as some kind of victory for oversight. As always, read the whole thing, but here's a couple of key grafs.
Just as Nancy Pelosi ran to Time to justify her support for the FISA bill, Steny Hoyer yesterday spouted his justifications to The Politico and said this:
In an interview with Politico on Monday, Hoyer called the FISA legislation a "significant victory" for the Democratic Party -- one that neutralized an issue Republicans might have been able to use against Democrats in November while still, in his view, protecting the civil liberties of American citizens.
In other words, Democrats achieved a "significant victory" because -- by giving Republicans everything they demanded -- Republicans are no longer able to criticize Democrats on this issue. What a shrewd strategy: "if we comply with all their demands, then they can't criticize us for anything." That's the Democratic Party's plan for winning, according to Hoyer.
Digby again on Steny Hoyer and the Politico's fluffer of a piece they did the other day.
What a guy. Clearly, those who demand that the party should hew closer to the positions that put it in power should be happy to have such a "masterful" leader who will sell out their most cherished principles in order to make a deal with people who would like to turn the US into a police state.
Do read the whole Politico article, which doesn't bother to spend even one paragraph describing why people were opposed to the bill. For that matter it doesn't bother to tell us why the other side was so adamant that it get passed either. The fact that it wasn't some typical congressional agenda item which might naturally be "horse traded" but rather a matter of fundamental constitutional principle isn't worth mentioning. Even the fact that the whole thing stinks to high heaven of financial corruption gets no mention.
Speaking of that financial corruption here's some numbers on telecom contributions to the Congresslizards that rolled over. They average close to $10,000 each in political payola from telecom lobbyists, with Steny Hoyer coming in at $29,000 and Rahm Emanuel clocking $28,000 prior to the sellout.
For some odd reason, the EU seems to think that the people who make chemicals and intend to introduce them into the marketplace should have to prove they are safe first!
The new laws in the European Union require companies to demonstrate that a chemical is safe before it enters commerce -- the opposite of policies in the United States, where regulators must prove that a chemical is harmful before it can be restricted or removed from the market.
Just pause and think about that for a bit. In the US, companies can produce and market whatever chemical cocktail they can come up with, and it is the responsibility of the government to prove whether or not it's harmful before it can be restricted or removed. (And let's not forget the Bush administration's attempt to ensure that companies whose products it's tame regulatory bodies have "approved" can no longer be sued if those products do damage.) Do you feel safer? If you're going to, you'll have the EU to thank.
Adamantly opposed by the U.S. chemical industry and the Bush administration, the E.U. laws will be phased in over the next decade. It is difficult to know exactly how the changes will affect products sold in the United States. But American manufacturers are already searching for safer alternatives to chemicals used to make thousands of consumer goods, from bike helmets to shower curtains.
The European Union's tough stance on chemical regulation is the latest area in which the Europeans are reshaping business practices with demands that American companies either comply or lose access to a market of 27 countries and nearly 500 million people.
From its crackdown on antitrust practices in the computer industry to its rigorous protection of consumer privacy, the European Union has adopted a regulatory philosophy that emphasizes the consumer. Its approach to managing chemical risks, which started with a trickle of individual bans and has swelled into a wave, is part of a European focus on caution when it comes to health and the environment.
I'd call the European approach conservative, under the original meaning of the word, and it is the kind of thinking I appreciate. Dumping all kinds of chemicals into the environment and ourselves is a damn good way to wind up in serious trouble, which, given recent history, we probably already are.
In more than 30 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has required additional studies for about 200 chemicals, a fraction of the 80,000 chemicals that are part of the U.S. market. The government has had little or no information about the health hazards or risks of most of those chemicals.
The EPA has banned only five chemicals since 1976. The hurdles are so high for the agency that it has been unable to ban asbestos, which is widely acknowledged as a likely carcinogen and is barred in more than 30 countries. Instead, the EPA relies on industry to voluntarily cease production of suspect chemicals.
"If you ask people whether they think the drain cleaner they use in their homes has been tested for safety, they think, 'Of course, the government would have never allowed a product on the market without knowing it's safe,' " said Richard Denison, senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. "When you tell them that's not the case, they can't believe it."
One of the harshest criticisms of globalization is that companies look to relocate to places where regulatory requirements are lax and easily worked around. One of the benefits of a multipolar globe with an interconnected populace is that they can force their governments to act when they'd prefer to turn a blind eye. Thanks to the EU deciding not to go with the lowest common denominator, it appears that this is one of those cases where we get to reap the benefits.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) introduced a measure last month that would overhaul U.S. chemical regulation along the lines of the new European approach. It would require the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to use biomonitoring studies to identify industrial chemicals present in umbilical cord blood and decide whether those chemicals should be restricted or banned. A study by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found an average of 200 industrial chemicals in the cord blood of newborns.
Said Denison: "We still have quite a ways to go in convincing the U.S. Congress this is a problem that needs fixing." But new policies in Europe and in Canada push the United States closer to change, he said. "They show it's feasible, it's being done elsewhere, and we're behind."
File this one under poetic justice of a sort. I'm sure most of you remember the interest this purchase generated at the time.
Back in late 2006, it was widely reported in the Latin American media that President Bush, or perhaps his old man, had bought a 100,000-acre farm in a remote area of Paraguay. What struck people at the time was the choice of country. Paraguay, of course, has gained a certain Club Med status among the world's villains and criminal elements as the place to go when the law's on your tail. The country, ruled for six decades by the dictatorial and fascist Colorado Party of Gen. Alfredo Stroesser, an almost cartoon caricature of a Latin American dictator, has no extradition treaty with any nation.
That's why it has long harbored aging Nazis, bank robbers, and a string of ousted or retired Latin American dictators and their assistants over the years.
One might have thought this was a wise buy for a family with a son whose war crimes, when fully revealed, are likely to rival the worst dictators in the world's history. Unfortunately, no one could have predicted this would happen.
Last month, a former Roman Catholic Bishop with leftist, populist tendencies, Fernando Lugo, surprised almost everyone in Paraguay, and no doubt President Bush, by winning the national presidential election, ousting the Colorado Party for the first time in 61 years. There is talk that among other things, Lugo is thinking of returning Paraguay to the community of nations, by signing some of those extradition agreements.
So much for that hidey hole. I have to admit that I'm taking an untoward delight in the idea that they spent all that money to escape justice for naught. I have to believe that someday Bush will be called to account for his lies, by someone. I hope I live to see it.
Character is what you do when no one is watching, or what you do when there are multiple potential paths. It is the moments of urgency, of confusion, of chaos and crisis when rational decisions are not able to be formed or full decision processes and loops run that character becomes critical as that informs the option space and choice space of individuals and groups. It is at that point where the default assumptions become nakedly clear.
After 9/11, we as a country despite the best efforts of some, revealed an ugly character as we panicked and forgot about the differentiating factors that we like to believe makes the US as a whole exceptional. We tortured, we profiled, we hired out mercenaries, and we launched a war of choice of neo-colonial conquest. We failed ourselves in order to give a slight salve of liberty. Our political and press process failed miserably in tolerating and encouraging these behaviors. The oh so serious pundits and politicians who one would usually suspect of knowing better caved in and said that we had to torture, we had to invade, we had to suspend the Constitution as this was an unimaginable and deadly threat, while forgetting about the Soviet's 20,000 nuclear weapons. Some of this was from fear, and some of this was from cold political calculus that fear inspired lashing out was what the median voter wanted. We failed.
Now that times have cooled down, this hysteria is receding. The politicians who should have known better has been defeated for the Democratic nomination while someone who did what they could is being nominated and favored to win the White House. The courts have been fighting a valiant action to protect their prerogatives by defending the Constitution against hysteria. And today's decision to grant Habeas Corpus by overturning portions of the fear inspired MCA has several great lines that assert what we should be and what we need to be (stealing these excerpts from TalkLeft:)
Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom’s first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint.....
Their access to the writ is a necessity to determine the lawfulness of their status, even if, in the end, they do not obtain the relief they seek. ...
The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, a part of that law....
These are assertions of first principals of American exceptionalism. We should be strong enough and tough enough to believe in our principals even when those principals look to be difficult and expensive to follow. And by following those principals we advance our meta-narrative that we respect people, we respect the law, and that we play fairly. And by advancing this narrative through real and expensive signaling actions, we would have undermined the central Bin-Laden narrative of a clash of civilizations where the Muslim world is defended by a band of strategically aggressive but scrappy fighters against a ruthless, imperialistic hypocritical United States. It is this battle of narratives that we need to win in order to make us more secure. Our principals are strong when we act upon them in times of crisis and danger, and we need to remember that.
Schwartz is currently head of the US military's transportation command, it's single command for global air, land and sea transportation. He was due to retire from that post in January.
He is an alumnus of the National War College, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a 1994 Fellow of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Seminar XXI. He has served as Commander of the Special Operations Command-Pacific, as well as Alaskan Command, Alaskan North American Aerospace Defense Command Region, and the 11th Air Force. Prior to assuming his current position, General Schwartz was Director, the Joint Staff, Washington, D.C.
Transportation and special forces - Gates is obviously still working at preparing the military from the top down for the wars it is fighting right now. If that needed underlining, have a look at the aircraft Gen Schwartz has flown - C-130E/H, MC-130E/H/P, HC-130, AC-130H/U, YMC-130, MH-53 and MH-60. Not a fighter or bomber among them.
Not a big surprise for anyone that's paid attention, but the Senate Select Intelligence Committee has released a long awaited report concluding President Bush and Vice President Cheney made public statements that they knew at the time weren't supported by available intelligence.
It's important to note this report is not about the obviously incorrect intelligence the U.S. generated regarding Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. This report concludes the President and Vice President engaged in an effort to mislead the American public.
“Before taking the country to war, this administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” said committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D- W. Va. It's long been known that the administration's claims in the runup to the Iraq war, from Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al Qaida to whether Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program, were incorrect. But the Senate report is the first official examination of whether the president and vice president knew that their claims were incorrect at the time they made them.
“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate," Rockefeller said in a statement. (Link)
"Deliberately painting a picture...that you know is not accurate". Gee, that's one way to put it. I can think of another.
While I remain completely unimpressed by McLellan's mea culpa, I'm liking that our malingering media are being forced to account for their own failures to inform the public of the deceits leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Not that they're taking the scrutiny particularly seriously. The major culprits are laughing it off and adding insult to injury.
Politico reporter Mike Allen, formerly of The Washington Post and Time, appeared yesterday on the show of right-wing radio host Mike Gallagher. The two of them guffawed together at how absurd are Scott McCellan's claims that the media was "deferential" to the Bush administration and then Allen said this:
ALLEN: And indeed, Scott does adopt the vocabulary, rhetoric of the left wing haters. Can you believe it in here he says the White House press corps was too deferential to the administration?
This was exactly the narrative they were plying back then that allowed this disaster to occur. Anyone who dared question the White House lies was a left wing hater and besides it's not their job to question authority. They were of the mind that they deserved their bloated salaries for mere stenography. And it wasn't just in the runup to the invasion that they failed us. They continued their fluffing right through the 04 elections. One had to go to the foreign press to find a functioning media. Take for instance, the attack on Richard Clarke, who blew the whistle on Bush's long pre-planned invasion of Iraq.
The swiftness and ferocity of the Bush White House's attack on Richard Clarke tells you two things: his story may be largely true, and the Bush administration is terrified that the American people will believe it. [...]
The White House did not let a single news cycle go by before questioning that the alleged encounter between the president and Clarke had ever taken place, assigning dark motives to a man who has served four presidents, three of them Republicans.
And the self-serving US media stars, along with their pet neo-cons, jumped right in with their long knives to stab Clarke in the back. Small wonder so few thereafter showed any similiar courage, although the knowledge of the deceptions was widespread.
"The conversation absolutely took place. I was there, but you can't name me," the witness said. "I was one of several people present. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that the president had Iraq on his mind, first and foremost." This former national security council official was too terrified to go on the record - he knows how vengeful this administration can be.
Former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill paid the price for truthtelling with his account of "how the Bush White House set its sights on Iraq from day one." Rumsfeld threatened him and when he failed to kowtow, he "instantly became the target of an investigation by his former department, which claimed that he had revealed state secrets."
Yet the facts were obvious and irrefutable. "The fact that the Pentagon pulled the fighting force most equipped for hunting down Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan in March 2002 in order to pre- position it for Iraq cannot be denied." After spending five months establishing rapport on the ground in Afghanistan, the elite unit was given two days notice to turn over their mission to those most ill-equipped to carry it out. But this was probably the most egregious failure.
Along with the redeployment of human assets came a reallocation of sophisticated hardware. The US air force has only two specially-equipped RC135 U spy planes. They had successfully vectored in on al-Qaida leadership radio transmissions and cellphone calls, but they would no longer circle over the mountains of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.
We had AQ in our sights. We could have taken out bin Laden, actually won the so-called on terror right there, but Bush had other priorites, long in the planning. Back then, few expected our media to become so complicit in the lie, but they not only allowed the Bush administration to proclaim "it was the only qualified protector of national security," they actively persecuted the truthtellers on the administration's behalf. The Guardian said then that, "Sooner or later - and certainly before November - that truth will out." But it didn't out, it was buried in reams of White House press releases dutifully transcribed by a craven press corps too enamored of their own place on the guest lists of the powerful to do their duty to their profession or the American people.
Yesterday, Scott McClellan ran into Richard Clarke and apologized for denouncing Clarke's book at the time. That's not enough by a mile. He should set up on a street corner and apologize to every family who lost a loved one in this occupation, to every soldier who came home broken and to every Iraqi who lost everything to the lies he perpetrated in service to his former masters.
But really, that's even not enough. Almost the entire corporate media not only failed to tell the truth, they actively worked to destroy anyone brave to do so on the public record. There's no apology, no penance great enough to undo the damage and destruction caused by the negligence of McLellan and all those of his ilk in the punditry who enthusiastically 'created the reality' the White House demanded. In a sane world they would have long ago been relieved of their microphones and banished from civil society.
Pretty much everyone should be well aware that Iraq War spending hasn’t exactly been a model of accounting discipline. Still, it’s nice to be reminded of the sheer scale of the incompetence.
A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.
The audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit was released Thursday in tandem with a Congressional hearing on the payments.
This is apparently in addition to the nearly nine billion in cash the US flew in on pallets earlier during the conflict. And I love the examples they give at the end of the article.
Examples of the paperwork for some of those payments, displayed at the hearing, depict a system that became accustomed to making huge payments on the fly, with little oversight or attention to detail. In one instance, a United States Treasury check for $5,674,075.00 was written to pay a company called Al Kasid Specialized Vehicles Trading Company in Baghdad for items that a voucher does not even describe.
In another case, $6,268,320.07 went to the contractor Combat Support Associates with even less explanation. And a scrawl on another piece of paper says only that $8 million had been paid out as “Funds for the Benefit of the Iraqi People.”
But perhaps the masterpiece of elliptic paperwork is the document identified at the top as a “Public Voucher for Purchases and Services Other Than Personal.” It indicates that $320.8 million went for “Iraqi Salary Payment,” with no explanation of what the Iraqis were paid to do.
Whatever it was, the document suggests, each of those Iraqis was handsomely compensated. Under the “quantity” column is the number 1,000, presumably indicating the number of people who were to be paid — to the tune of $320,800 apiece — if the paperwork is to be trusted.
I can’t know for sure, of course, but I’m willing to bet that a fair number of those examples were passed around the office for people’s amusement at the sheer ridiculous incompetence they show with taxpayers’ money.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that fraud was prevalent, but it does mean that any fraud that did take place will be almost impossible to track down and prove.
It also means that the Pentagon will be reluctant to prosecute any fraud it does track down, since such a serious lack of oversight makes the Pentagon itself at least partially culpable for any such actions. After all, under such circumstances, even a relatively honest person would be likely to take advantage of the system.
Controls, the saying goes, are there to keep honest people honest. Without them, nearly everyone strays, and the fact that oversight and spending controls have been allowed to lapse in just about every government function is one of the most pervasive legacies the Bush administration is going to leave the American people.
A new internal audit of $8 billion in Pentagon contracts for Iraq has revealed that 98% of those contracts didn't have a complete paper trail - nearly every transaction failed to comply with federal laws or regulations aimed at preventing fraud, in some cases lacking even basic invoices explaining how the money was spent.
Petraeus himself admits to insufficient oversight in the handling of a couple of hundred tons of weaponry worth up to $800 million on the black market while he was responsible for the US military's program to arm Iraqi security forces. Some of those weapons ended up in Turkey, in the hands of terrorists and criminals.
Given Abramoff, "Duke" Cunningham, "Dusty" Foggo and a ream of other unsavoury and corrupt military/industrial and political insiders at the highest levels of Republican power, why is no-one asking how high complicity in all this goes?
(Washington, DC)-Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) issued a subpoena to former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove for testimony about the politicization of the Department of Justice (DOJ), including former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman's case. Yesterday, Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, sent a letter to the Committee expressing that Rove would not agree to testify voluntarily, per the Committee's previous requests.
"It is unfortunate that Mr. Rove has failed to cooperate with our requests," Conyers said.
"Although he does not seem the least bit hesitant to discuss these very issues weekly on cable television and in the print news media, Mr. Rove and his attorney have apparently concluded that a public hearing room would not be appropriate. Unfortunately, I have no choice today but to compel his testimony on these very important matters."
And, since this enquiry is about events in Alabama, there can be no invocation of that magical "executive privilige" without implying that Bush was also involved in any goings on.
Bush's memorandum, signed on the eve of his daughter Jenna's wedding, introduced "Controlled Unclassified Information" as a new government category that will replace "Sensitive but Unclassified."
Such information -- though it does not merit the well-known national security classifications "confidential," "secret" or "top secret" -- is nonetheless "pertinent" to U.S. "national interests" or to "important interests of entities outside the federal government," the memo says.
The information could be, for example, the steps taken to protect power plants from terrorists, or which pipelines are most vulnerable to attack.
Left undefined are which laws or policies generated the requirement for protecting such information, and which interests are pertinent. But Bush's memo does refer to the "global nature of the threats facing the United States" and to the need to ensure that the "entire network of defenders be able to share information more rapidly" while protecting "sensitive information, information privacy, and other legal rights of Americans."
The president declared that the purpose of the new classification is "to standardize practices and thereby improve the sharing of information, not to classify or declassify new or additional information." But some critics described it as continuing an expansion of secrecy in government and a potential bureaucratic nightmare.
Michael Clark, a contributing editor to the blog Daily Kos, who first wrote about the Bush memorandum, said the White House "seems to have used the crafting of new rules as an opportunity to expand the range of government secrecy." Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, described it as a "not even half-baked" exercise in policymaking.
The new term ('controlled') indicates the intended outcome (i.e. secrecy), whereas the old term ('sensitive') had provided a justification for keeping 'Unclassified' material secret. That suggests immediately that the Bush administration wants the CUI classification to justify itself - to cut off by definition any appeal for publication of a document.
He continues to note that the memo allows policies which "require protection from unauthorized disclosure", as well as information, to be designated as "Controlled" and that while the new classification should only apply to "pertinent" information or polices, no definition of "pertinent" is made.
Nice work, Michael. And very nice to see a blogger get credit from the mainstream.
Whoa baby. This is the best rumor I've heard for a long time.
Just off the House floor today, the Crypt overheard House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers tell two other people: “We’re closing in on Rove. Someone’s got to kick his ass.”
Asked a few minutes later for a more official explanation, Conyers told us that Rove has a week to appear before his committee. If he doesn’t, said Conyers, “We’ll do what any self-respecting committee would do. We’d hold him in contempt. Either that or go and have him arrested.”
Conyers said the committee wants Rove to testify about his role in the imprisonment of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, among other things.
“We want him for so many things, it’s hard to keep track,” Conyers said.
Glenn Greenwald has been doing great work this last week or so on the story the mainstream media wish would go away - their bending over and saying "Please, Sir, may I have another?" for water-carrying military analysts primed to pump out Pentagon propaganda.
Today, he cites an email from veteran journalist Joe Galloway which pours scorn on the Pentagon's claim that they included critics of the administration's policies - former Pentagon hack Larry Di Rita had specifically mentioned Galloway as one of those critics invoilved and Galloway says that's just laughable.
He also notes that White House denials of knowledge about the Pentagon's law-breaking program are flat lies.
Ohio Democrats are sending a real and differentiating signal that should reflect strongly on them when compared to Ohio Republicans. Ohio Democrats recognize a massive ethics/impropriety situation and are doing something about it by drawing up articles of impeachment against the Democratic state Attorney General:
House Democrats filed articles of impeachment this morning against Attorney General Marc Dann,
charging him with nine counts relating to a sexual harassment scandal that has led to widespread
calls for him to resign.
The articles, sponsored by 42 of 45 House Democrats, contend that Dann warrants impeachment for
"misconduct in office rising to the level of malfeasance, neglect, nonfeasance, gross neglect of
duty, improper exercise of authority and gross immorality."
A pattern is emerging at the state level. State Democrats are looking at impropriety, corruption and scandals and not trying to defend it. We saw this with Eliot Spitzer, we saw it in North Carolina and we are seeing this in Ohio. As I wrote in regards to North Carolina these actions are strong contrasting actions, good politics and good policy:
This is good government, good sense and good politics as almost
everyone involved can point out a concrete action that they took
against self-dealing. It also serves as a deterrent to anyone who is
interested in self-dealing. Good job North Carolina, and I wish
Congress would take similiar actions against multiple members (from
each party) as that would help restore some public trust in the
institution.
Keep this up and credibility on good governance will increase and voter cynicism will decrease thus blurring strategies will be less effective.
I wonder why I had to turn to Murdoch's British press oulet for this story?
Thousands of South Africans who suffered under apartheid won the right yesterday to sue a number of companies, including BP, Citigroup and Ford, for allegedly helping to perpetrate human rights abuses.
The US Supreme Court ruled that three class actions can use the American legal system to sue approximately 50 international corporations who they believe “knowingly aided and abetted the South African military and security forces”. Some legal experts have estimated that the companies could be sued for as much as $400 billion.
The corporations that could be facing a court challenge in the United States also include ExxonMobil, UBS, Deutsche Bank, General Motors, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America and General Electric.
After all, this is a potentially huge story. If the plaintiffs can prove that, for example, a motor company knew that lorries that it sold in South Africa would be used as armoured vehicles to destroy townships or a technology company sold computer equipment and software that would be used to operate a racial identification system and thus knowingly helped the old South African commit atrocities, then those companies would be on the hook for hundreds of billions in damages for at a time when the nation is heading into a recession. Nevermind the possibility that one or more companies might defend their actions by saying "but the Reagan government told us it would be OK".
If you had shares in one of those companies - and you might well do as part of your retirement planning - wouldn't you want to know about this? Wouldn't you expect FOX business, the WSJ and other US media outlets to be covering it?
Speaking to The Times, Michael Hausfeld, the lead counsel for the Khulumani group, which is based in Washington, said: “We want a legal acknowledgement of accountability, that these international corporations knowingly helped the regime violate human rights.
“A ruling in our favour would have two possible impacts. It would force the companies to pay compensation to those who were injured as a consequence of the abuses they suffered. It would also trigger a change in corporate governance.”
...The American and foreign corporations have appealed to the Supreme Court. The Bush Administration and business groups have supported their appeal.
Because heaven forbid a Republican administration ever increased corporate governance so as to prevent violations of human rights.
The editors of National Review think they have the answers - North Korea was using Syria as a proxy location for its own nuclear weapons program. Fuel would have come from NK and gone back there for reprocessing. So the Syrians wouldn't have gotten a weapon from it after all? What was in it for them, then?
Moon of Alabama, however, has some grave doubts about the briefing itself. Another Powell-esque episode of "Slam-Dunk Pictures Presents?"
Cheryl Rofer, a nuclear and non-proliferation expert with years of experience in the field, has been analysing the photos and CGI from the briefing to Congress.
And lastly, over at The Arms Control Wonk, James Acton is wondering "why now?" For a probable answer to that, I'll refer him to the NRO article above and it's last line: "It’s time to admit the deal was a mistake and start rebuilding the consensus to sanction Kim Jong Il for his dangerous lies." It's what the Cheney/Bolton camp have been after all along and this was the right time to strike.
In late 2006, Congress revised the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act to make it far easier for a president to declare martial law. Those changes were repealed at the end of this January as part of Public Law 110-181 (HR 4986), the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (signed into law by President Bush on January 28, 2008).
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), who championed the opposition to the original law, was also the hero of the repeal. It helped that all the nation’s governors opposed the 2006 law.
Boise State Professor Charlotte Twight, the author of the excellent Dependent on DC, alerted me to the change last night. I checked on Nexis and the only news coverage I found regarding the repeal was a 322-word Gannett News wire story from February 1 that focused on how the repeal made governors happy.
Very good news indeed - a little bit of rollback of the Bush notion of executive power which obviously he had no choice but to accept given widespread State objections to the original legislation. But wtf Dems? This was definitely worth crying from the rooftops back in January - especially given the agreement of all those Republican governors. So why didn't you? Even if the mainstream media didn't want to know, we bloggers would have.
By now you've heard about the 416 children, many young girls who it is alleged were abused by their far older "spiritual husbands", who have been removed by the State from the Texas compound of the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
What you may not have heard about is that the US government gave a company owned by FLDS honchos a nearly $1 million loan from the federal government and $1.2 million in military contracts - despite a 2005 lawsuit alleging that cult members worked for the company on cult orders for little or no pay.
The ability of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or FLDS, to operate and grow is largely dependent on huge contributions from its members and revenue from the businesses they control, according to a former accountant for the church, and government officials in Utah and Arizona, where the sect is primarily based.
One of those businesses, NewEra Manufacturing in Las Vegas, has been awarded more than $1.2 million in federal government contracts, with most of the money coming in recent years from the Defense Department for wheel and brake components for military aircraft.
A large portion of the awards were preferential no-bid or "sole source" contracts because of the company's classification as a small business, according to online databases that track federal government appropriations.
NewEra, previously known as Western Precision Inc. and located in Hildale, Utah, also received a $900,000 loan in 2005 from the federal Small Business Administration, the data show.
The president and chief executive of the company is John. C. Wayman, identified as an FLDS leader and a close associate to Warren Jeffs, the sect's "prophet," who was convicted last year as an accomplice to rape for arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old cousin.
...
U.S. Rep. Kay Granger, the Fort Worth Republican who sits on the House Appropriations Committee that deals with issues of defense, military and homeland security, said she is surprised that the federal government is doing business with a group accused of mistreating women and children.
"It makes me very uneasy," Granger said. "It needs to be investigated without a doubt."
To begin with, she added, federal authorities should look into NewEra's financial records.
John Nielsen, who worked for the company when it was Western Precision in Hildale, said in a 2005 affidavit that he and other FLDS members were made to work for little or no wages, even as the company was bringing in lucrative government contracts and other work.
At the same time, $50,000 to $100,000 in company profits were going each month to FLDS "and/or" Jeffs, Nielsen said in the affidavit, filed as part of a civil lawsuit.
He said he and other sect members thought their working for free or for extremely low wages would bring them redemption. Instead, Nielsen said in the affidavit, he was found to be "wanting" by the sect's leadership, ordered off the property and separated from his five young children and his wife. She was "reassigned" to another man, becoming the fourth of his six wives.
"It broke my heart," Nielsen said in the affidavit. He declined to comment when reached by phone Friday.
Like Kay Granger, I'd like to know how this happened. Did no-one at the DoD connect the dots between several highly public scandals over child brides with the contracts being handed out to this company? Do they not talk to their colleagues at the FBI or Justice at all about possible lawbreaking when allocating contracts? Did they just not care? Or is it possible that this is just the tip of another DoD procurement corruption scandal?
What does this tell us? Perhaps that even a marginal failed-state on the verge of civil war can teach America a thing or two about democracy. Then again, for Iraqis such political issues are alive and vital - a literal matter of life and death.
Or maybe, from the Bush administration's point of view, it shows that Iraq needs more of a tame media to distract the populace. Where would Bush be right now without the twin circuses of American Idol and Presidential Idol?
The New York Times has caught up with the news that Iraq has handed a multi-million dollar arms deal to Serbia, a nation that burns US embassies down, with US approval. I mentioned this on the 9th, when reports from Europe said this was Serbia's biggest arms purchase ever.
The deal was struck in September without competitive bidding and it sidestepped anticorruption safeguards, including the approval of senior uniformed Iraqi Army officers and an Iraqi contract approval committee. Instead, it was negotiated by a delegation of 22 high-ranking Iraqi officials, without the knowledge of American commanders or many senior Iraqi leaders.
The deal drew enough criticism that Iraqi officials later limited the purchase to $236 million. And much of that equipment, American commanders said, turned out to be either shoddy or inappropriate for the military’s mission.
...The deal was also supported by Iraq’s Office of the Commander in Chief, a shadowy group of Shiite advisers to Mr. Maliki that American officials accused last year of leading a purge of Sunni Iraqi Army commanders who had cracked down on Shiite militia leaders.
The same group, which rejected suggestions that it bring in Western advisers, has marginalized senior uniformed officers charged with procurement decisions and kept American officials in the dark about Iraqi financing of arms deals, according to high-ranking American officials familiar with its workings.
“It struck me as bizarre,” said a Western official with knowledge of the security ministries, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be seen as criticizing people he was advising. “You can only explain it in two ways: a desire to avoid oversight and a desire to offer opportunities for graft and corruption.”
A high-ranking Iraqi government official who spoke on condition of anonymity, for fear of reprisals against him and others in his office, said, “We have no confidence in the Iraqi contracting process.”
“I heard about it out of the blue, that the minister of defense took a delegation to Serbia and came back and said that he had signed deals with the Serbian prime minister,” the official said. “Why Serbia? Why not Ukraine? Why not Russia? We just don’t know.”
However, the Serbian firm involved has made a counter-statement denying that the deal was struck without senior Iraqi or US officials' knowledge and pointing up one obvious falsehood in those U.S. officials statements to the NYT - there have been no shipments on the deal yet, so nothing could have been inspected and found to be "either shoddy or inappropriate ".
"All the Iraqi officials were informed of the contracts signed with us," said Stevan Nikcevic, head of the company Jugoimport-SDPR, quoted by the Tanjug agency.
His statement followed a report by the New York Times Saturday that Iraq and Serbia had signed the $833 million deal behind the U.S.'s back to shield Iraqi officials from anti-corruption rules that would apply to a U.S. contract.
Nikcevic rejected the newspaper's report that the September deal had also been signed without the knowledge of senior Iraqi leaders.
"These contracts were confirmed several times, according to our information, by the Iraqi authorities," Nikcevic said.
The deal was largely negotiated by Iraq's Defense Minister Abdul Qadir and Planning Minister Ali Glahil Baban, and covered the sale of helicopters, planes, armored personnel carriers, firearms and other equipment, the newspaper said.
The Jugoimport-SDPR chief said the gear hadn't yet been delivered.
"Reports of dissatisfaction with the quality (of the arms) are not true, because we have not yet exported any equipment," he added, responding to criticism by U.S. military officials cited in the newspaper.
"Personally I think that someone is unhappy that he wasn't included in this job and cannot quietly accept that the Serbian arms industry is good-quality, competent and competitive."
That's as clear an allegation that Iraqi arms procurement is being seen by the Bush administration as an extended corporate welfare scheme for US arms manufacturers as you are going to get. Which isn't to say that there no problem with corruption inside the Iraqi government - there is and it's massive. Even the guy who was appointed by the Iraqi government to be their corruption watchdog has been scared into exile by attacks on his home and family.
But is does leave a couple of questions hanging. As a matter of diplomatic policy, why did the U.S. sign off on even a portion of a deal with Serbia given recent events in the former Yugoslavia? And just how much of the administration's pushback now that the deal's become public is just sour grapes from those inside the administration with closer ties to US arms companies than perhaps they should have?
The UK's High Court has ruled that Tony Blair's government acted unlawfully in ending a probe of bribery allegations over a multi-billion arms deal with the Sudis - and named Bush's pal Prince Bandar as having attempted to pervert the course of justice.
For the British government, a dressing down from the judiciary can hardly come much rougher. The High Court in London, in a damning rebuke of ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair's administration, ruled Thursday that the government's own Serious Fraud Office (SFO) broke the law in 2006 when it scrapped a corruption probe into arms deals between BAE Systems, Britain's biggest defense firm, and Saudi Arabia.
The judgment, handed down by Lord Justice Moses and Justice Sullivan, censured Robert Wardle, director of the SFO, for allowing threats made by Saudi officials to scupper the probe into allegations of bribery. The Blair government called a halt to that investigation in December 2006, a decision it insisted was made purely in the interest of national security. The court was scathingly unconvinced. "No one, whether within this country or outside, is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice," the judges ruled. "It is the failure of Government and [Wardle] to bear that essential principle in mind that justifies the intervention of this court."
The SFO's probe, begun in July 2004, focused on the alleged payment of bribes by BAE in connection with its $60 billion "Al-Yamamah" arms deal agreed with Saudi Arabia in the mid-'80s. According to the High Court judgment, BAE sought in late 2005 to persuade Lord Goldsmith, then Britain's Attorney General, to call a halt to the inquiry, claiming it would sour relations between the U.K. and Saudi Arabia, and endanger future lucrative arms deals.
When both the Attorney General and the SFO's Wardle resisted BAE's request for lenience, the Saudis turned
By Libby