Yellow Cake All Over Again

Lambert points to the Pravda's taking of the bait and offering of the same to the other fish, hook, line, and sinker.

But they're not simply gullible over there at Pravda.

They're quite a bit more in fact.

At least one of their Directors is a member of the Carlyle Group, and as such stands to make more than a little money if the D.o'D.'s budget is inflated even more by an expanded war.

This shill also headed the FCC during the Clinton administration.

Funny how much of the main$tream media started to wear brown shirts about that time, isn't it?

Regarding the IEDs: funny how everyone forgets the weapons caches Rumsfeld let the locals walk away with about the time he was consolidating his hold on the oil wells.



What lurks behind the Times Select fire wall on this topic? Jeebie tagged it before it got locked up. By William J. Broad and David E. Sanger:

The videotape , taken by `KSTP-TV`, an ABC affiliate in `Minneapolis-St`. Paul, shows troops breaking into a bunker and opening boxes and examining barrels. Many of the containers are marked "explosive." One box is marked "Al Qaqaa State Establishment," apparently a shipping label from a manufacturer.

The ABC crew said the video was taken on April 18. The timing is critical to the debate in the presidential campaign. By the Pentagon's own account, units of the 101st Airborne Division were near Al Qaqaa for what Mr. DiRita said was "two to three weeks," starting April 10.

Then they headed north to Baghdad, and the site was apparently left unguarded. By the time special weapons teams returned to Al Qaqaa in May, the explosives were apparently gone.

In disputing claims by Mr. Kerry that the Americans had lost the explosives, a senior administration official said Thursday, "We don't know all the facts and no one should be jumping to conclusions." Al Qaqaa, the official said, "was not controlled for three weeks after the I.A.E.A. left," and added "there are a lot of dots we have to connect."

The Pentagon also notes that it has destroyed 400,000 tons of munitions from thousands of sites across Iraq, and that the explosives at Al Qaqaa account for "`one-tenth` of 1 percent" of that amount.

The Minneapolis television crew was with an Army unit that was camped near Al Qaqaa, members of the crew said. The reporter and cameraman said that although they were not told specifically that they were being taken to Al Qaqaa by the military, their videotape matches pictures of the site taken by United Nations weapons inspectors, according to weapons experts.

"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al Qaqaa," said David A. Kay, a former American official who led the recent hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the vast site. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an I.A.E.A. seal."

One weapons expert said the videotape and some of the agency's photographs of the HMX stockpiles "were such good matches it looked like they were taken by the same camera on the same day."

Independent experts said several other factors - the geography; the number of bunkers; the seals on some of the bunker doors; the boxes, crates and barrels similar to those seen by weapon inspectors - confirm that the videotape was taken at Al Qaqaa.

"There's not another place that you would mistake it for," said Dean Staley, the KSTP reporter, who now works in Seattle.

The accidental news encounter began last year after the invasion, Mr. Staley recalled in an interview. Their Army unit arrived in the region on Friday, April 11, and made camp. The Fifth Battalion of the 101st Airborne's 159th Aviation Brigade flew helicopter missions from the camp in the Iraqi desert, moving troops and supplies to the front.

A week later, on Friday, April 18, two journalists recalled, they joined two soldiers who were driving in a Humvee to investigate the nearby bunkers. Among other things, wandering inside the cavernous buildings offered the prospect of relief from the desert sun.

"It was just by chance that we were able to go," said Joe Caffrey, the team's photographer. "They wanted to go out and we asked to tag along."

Mr. Caffrey provided The New York Times with the latitude and longitude of the camp, which places it between 1.5 and 3 miles southeast of Al Qaqaa bunkers. A commercial satellite photograph of the region shows that the camp was close to the storage site. Mr. Caffrey said the soldiers used bolt cutters to cut through chains with locks on them, as well as seals. He said the seals appeared to be lead disks attached to very thin wires that were wrapped around the doors of the bunker entrances, forming a barrier easily cut in two.

They visited a half dozen bunkers, he said. The gloomy interiors revealed long rows of boxes, crates and barrels, what independent experts said were three kinds of HMX containers shipped to Iraq from France, China and Yugoslavia.

The team opened storage containers, some of which contained white powder that independent experts said was consistent with HMX.

"The soldiers were pretty much in awe of what they were seeing," Mr. Caffrey recalled. "They were saying their E.O.D. - Explosive Ordinance Division, people who blow this kind of stuff up - would have a field day."

The journalists filmed roughly 25 minutes of video. Mr. Caffrey added that the team left the bunker doors open. "It would have been easy for anybody to get in," he said.

Mr. Staley recalled that during the drive back to camp, they saw a red Toyota pickup truck with some Iraqis in it. "Our impression was they were looters," he said. "This was a no man's land. It was a huge facility, and we worried that they were bad guys who might come up on us."

The two journalists filed a short story, which ran soon thereafter in `Minneapolis-St`. Paul.

In the interview, Mr. Caffrey said he had carefully rechecked the date on the cassette for his camera, adding that he was sure it was April 18, 2003.

Yesterday Mohamed `al-Sharaa`, director of the national monitoring directorate at the Iraq Ministry of Science and Technology, explained for the first time why Iraqi officials had specified in their letter to the United Nations agency that the explosives had been looted after April 9, 2003. "We have some witnesses," Mr. Sharaa said outside his office at the ministry. "They say that the materials," he added, were "in this site after April 9."

The witnesses were people working at Al Qaqaa, Mr. Sharaa said. Still, he said, the evidence is not yet definitive, and "we don't say it's impossible" that the material was somehow taken out of Al Qaqaa before the American forces came through the area. The first American forces arrived at Al Qaqaa on April 3.

Rashad M. Omar, the minister of science and technology, said that as far as he was concerned, the exact timing of the disappearance remained unknown. "How, where, when is it taken, all these questions, we don't have answers," Dr. Omar said.

He said a committee headed by himself was about to undertake an investigation of the disappearance, in parallel with American efforts to clear up the mystery. Dr. Omar said that he was extremely confident that the investigations would determine the facts of the case.

"The quantity was so huge," Dr. Omar said. "Somebody must know what happened to the material. I am sure the facts will not be hidden for a long time."

Jeebie also tags a CNN transcript from October 28, 2004 of Aaron Brown's run down on the rip-off.



You can find out more about Al Qaqaa, what it was, and why it and other sites like it would have supplied all the C4 and other conventional explosives an insurrection would ever need here and here and here and here and here.



Al Qaqaa had over 380 tons of explosives. The locals made off with it completely.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), forwarded an Oct. 10 letter [.pdf] to the UN Security Council from Iraqi officials notifying the IAEA that tons of Iraq's most powerful explosives "were lost after 9 April 2003, through the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security" at al-Qaqaa.

That's enough to blow up every road in Iraq, one American personnel carrier at a time.

And of course, despite being videotaped, Bu$hCo claims that never happened. Who ya gonna believe, Dear Leader or yer lyin' eyes?

“There were adjustments made depending on the audience”

...The debate before the Senate Armed Services Committee was touched off by a report by the Pentagon inspector general’s office, which investigated the Pentagon’s intelligence-gathering and found it seriously flawed, especially in its search for links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.



Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the committee, called the report “a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities” carried out by Douglas J. Feith, who was under secretary of defense for policy just before the invasion of Iraq early in 2003.

“Well, unfortunately, the damage has already been done,” Mr. Levin said. “Senior administration officials used the twisted intelligence produced by the Feith office in making the case for the Iraq war...”

The long-awaited report by Thomas F. Gimble, the Pentagon’s acting inspector general, concluded that, while the Feith team did not violate any laws or knowingly mislead Congress, it developed dubious intelligence that was inconsistent with the findings of the wider intelligence community.

Mr. Gimble told the committee today that, while the Pentagon’s in-house intelligence-gathering was not illegal or unauthorized, “the actions, in our opinion, were inappropriate, given that all the products did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intel community, and in some cases were shown as intel products.”

When Mr. Inhofe pressed Mr. Gimble on whether he agreed with Mr. Levin’s characterization of his report, Mr. Gimble said he viewed the document as “a flat, fact-based report of the events that occurred. I don’t have an opinion as to whether it’s devastating or not devastating.”

On Thursday, as details of Mr. Gimble’s report were beginning to come out, Mr. Feith issued a statement saying his office’s activities had been authorized by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Deputy Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and that his office properly shared its findings.

The report could add fuel to the growing debate in Congress over the administration’s conduct of the war, and whether and how lawmakers should declare their opposition to it.

Mr. Levin said he wanted his committee to hear from Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. Both Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby received a Pentagon briefing in September of 2002 on supposed Al Qaeda-Iraq links that Mr. Gimble’s report said did not fully reflect intelligence agency views.

Some of the administration’s most severe critics have long accused the White House of implying a link between the Al Qaeda terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the regime of Saddam Hussein -- a notion largely discredited by the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.

Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia, embraced Senator Levin’s remarks and said the intelligence operation in Mr. Feith’s office had helped to create “a misunderstanding that persists to this day and affects the debates that are going on now...”

...Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, drew from Mr. Gimble a statement that Mr. Feith had not been entirely consistent in his intelligence briefings, in ways Mr. Gimble said he could not go into for security reasons.

“He changed the briefing for his audience?” Mr. Reed asked

“There were adjustments made depending on the audience,” Mr. Gimble replied.

“Well, why would he do that?” the senator asked. “Why would he make changes based on the audience?”

“I don’t think I’m in a position to make a comment on why he would do what he did,” Mr. Gimble said.

Of course, the Rethuglicans and Lieberman simply respond, "Does Not!".

The same kind of people that look at the Grand Canyon and think it was done by Noah's Flood believe them, too.

More on the report from Truthout's Jason Leopold:

A long-awaited report on the veracity of pre-war Iraq intelligence has found that a secretive policy shop exaggerated the Iraqi threat, providing the White House with cherry-picked information about links between Iraq and al Qaeda. The shop, operating out of the Pentagon, was set up by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Its goal was to lay the groundwork for a pre-emptive military strike against Iraq.

The report would appear to confirm British intelligence assertions that surfaced in a document widely referred to as the Downing Street Memo that the facts against the threat posed by Iraq were being fixed around the Bush administration's policy leading up to the invasion of Iraq...

The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General produced the report, which focuses largely on the work of former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Feith's Office of Special Plans sent the Bush administration bogus intelligence on Iraq's weapons program and ties to terrorist organizations that supported the administration's policy.

An executive summary of the report was released late Thursday by Senator Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Levin has spent the past two years battling the former Senate Republican leadership to conclude its so-called Phase II investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence.

Last month, in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he was told by Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kans.), who was formerly in charge of the second phase of the Senate's investigation, that Vice President Dick Cheney applied "constant" pressure on Roberts to drag out the probe on pre-war intelligence. A spokeswoman for Cheney denied the allegation...

The inspector general's unclassified executive summary of the report, as characterized by Levin, states:

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy developed, produced and disseminated to senior decision-makers alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaeda relationship. These assessments included some conclusions inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community,

The inspector general also stated that the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy "was inappropriately performing intelligence activities of developing, producing, and disseminating that should be performed by the intelligence community."

The inspector general concluded that these "inappropriate" activities were authorized by Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense, or Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of defense.

Senior administration officials, including Vice President Cheney, made numerous public statements that reflected the views of the Feith alternative analysis, which were inconsistent with the analysis and judgments of the intelligence community. Indeed, Vice President Cheney said the principal Feith office assessment was the "best source of information" on the alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Rockefeller said the conclusions of the report are damning. Moreover, he said, his committee was kept in the dark about the Office of Special Plans and the fact that it was engaged in intelligence-gathering activities.

"The IG has concluded that this office was engaged in intelligence activities," Rockefeller said. "The Senate intelligence committee was never informed of these activities. Whether these actions were authorized or not, it appears that they were not in compliance with the law. In the coming days, I will carefully review all aspects of the report and will consult with [Senate intelligence committee] Vice Chairman [Kit] Bond to determine whether any additional action by the Senate intelligence committee is warranted."

The White House and the Pentagon have been dogged by questions about Feith and OSP's activities dating back to the beginning of the Iraq War. It was during that time that a number of CIA analysts spoke privately with Democratic lawmakers and complained that Feith's unit had been cherry-picking intelligence information that provided worst-case scenarios about Iraq's weapons programs. Levin and Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), called for an immediate investigation...

In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, Rumsfeld became increasingly frustrated that the CIA could not find any evidence of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program - evidence that would have helped the White House to build a solid case for war in Iraq. Rumsfeld helped set up the Office of Special Plans in 2001 and tapped Feith to head the office.

The OSP, according to published reports, was to gather intelligence information on the Iraqi threat that the CIA and FBI could not uncover, and present it to the White House to build a case for war in Iraq. The committee relied heavily on information provided by Iraqi defector Ahmed Chalabi, who has provided the White House with reams of disputed intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. Chalabi heads the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who have pushed for regime change in Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans routinely provided President Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, who headed the National Security Council at the time, with questionable intelligence information on the Iraqi threat. Much of that information was included in various speeches by Bush and Cheney, and some was never vetted for accuracy by career CIA analysts.

In an article in the New York Times in October 2002, the paper reported that Rumsfeld had ordered the OSP to "to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists" that might have been overlooked by the CIA.

Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said in an interview with the New Yorker in May 2003 that the Office of Special Plans "started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the president. It's not intelligence. It's political propaganda."

Lang said the CIA and the OSP often clashed on the accuracy of intelligence information provided to the White House by Paul Wolfowitz.

By the fall of 2002, the White House had virtually dismissed all of the intelligence on Iraq provided by the CIA, in favor of the more critical information provided to the Bush administration by the Office of Special Plans. The CIA had failed to find any evidence of Iraq's weapons programs.

In a rare Pentagon briefing four years ago, Douglas Feith said the Office of Special Plans was not an "intelligence project," but rather a group of eighteen people who looked at intelligence information from a different point of view. Feith now teaches a seminar on Iraq War planning at Georgetown University.

Scooter does Sargeant Schultz and the Plausible Deniability Drumbeat Goes On

And a mind is a terrible thing to lose.

Speaking of losing one's mind, it's curious to note that old Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski putting Rice on the hotseat for along with James Baker and Company. Thus the old guard gets its digs in for being left out of the party.

Jeff Wells takes a moment to take a dig at the usual business of the Washington cabal known as the U. S. Senate:

...Last week, while excoriating Bush's Iraq policy before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he warned
of "a plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran." He sees the scenario unfolding with

"Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a 'defensive' [his own quotation marks] US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan."

On leaving the hearing, Brzezinski was pointedly asked by reporter Barry Grey whether he was "suggesting that the source of a possible provocation might be the US government itself." He responded that he had "no idea. As I said, these things can never be predicted. It can be spontaneous." Grey followed up, "Are you suggesting there is a possibility it could originate within the US government itself?" To which Brzezinski replied, "I’m saying the whole situation can get out of hand and all sorts of calculations can produce a circumstance that would be very difficult to trace."

This is the same Brzezinski, of course, who rhetorically asked, of his early sponsorship of Islamic radicals as US proxies, "What was more important in the world view of history? The possible creation of an armed, radical Islamic movement, or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few fired-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" (And note, Brzezinski's policy of instigation was launched in Afghanistan against it's pro-Soviet government in order to goad the USSR into its bloody quagmire.) His book The Grand Chessboard (published, I realize with a slight frisson of synchronicity, the same year as Corso's), was cited early in the days following 9/11 as America's road-map of geopolitical ambition in the 21st Century. He knows better than most the reach of the hidden hand. Now, he's dropping broad hints that the US may manufacture a provocation in Iraq, blame it upon Iran and catastrophically broaden the war. So what do we do when they begin to sound like us?

On the one hand we should always be cautious about blithely accepting the word of deep-power embeds, but I also think it helps our understanding along if we admit that their world is neither static nor monolithic. It may appear from a distance that they're all in it together - and at our distance the differences between factions of the global elite may be too nuanced and rarefied to hold much meaning for us - but I believe there's a dynamism among conspirators that often seems lost on their theorists, some of whom like to project a virtual hive-mind upon the powerful. Rather than an undifferentiated block of them, I imagine an inter-penetrating Venn diagram of rival interests, means and analyses, and while Brzezinski is certainly in the thick of it that doesn't mean his opposition to the White House's adventurism is a sham intended only for public consumption. Though his reasons are certainly not the same as mine. (Brzezinski, interested in the efficient projection of American power, can foresee its ruin by the Cheney/Bush model, but he seems to regard it as the accident of bad policy rather than an intentional controlled collapse...)

An "accident of bad policy" is the logical reason behind it all, and on one level, the simplest explanation that Occam's Razor produces. Mr. Brzezinski can't be faulted for taking that tack to the wind. But blaming simple bad policy decisions is something of a non sequitur when quite a few of the policy makers are making quite a bit of money off of it. It's not so bad at all for Bu$h's ba$e.

Chaos is the plan. There's no accident involved with making big money. That's the razor that slices the problem to the bone.

What Do We Care What They Think?

The New York Pravda's Kate Phillips is clutching her pearls because some TheoCon weiner doesn't like the attitude of Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon or Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister.

Seems like they occasionally get pissed at the injustice and hypocrisy all around 'em and cuss.

Well damn. I guess that counts me and Dick Cheney both out of the power loop. Can't have language that scares the Preachers. Fuck, no.

Looks like they're still clutching their pearls, now. Pam Spaulding makes some good points, and so does Glenn Greenwald. I guess hateful talk is alright when it's coming from the Righteous. Or self-righteous, anyway.

I like Chicago Dyke's take on this:

...We here on the Tubes often refer to the members of the media as the Gang of 500, and don’t think they aren’t aware of the correctness of that label. Cushy, work for three hours a day “jobs” aren’t the only thing at stake. As Joke Line recently bragged, established mediawhores get to write campaign speeches, tell candidates what issues they should focus upon, make or break bills and careers. The short way to describe what they cling to so desperately: Power. Amanda and the blogosphere are trying to take that power away from them, one passionately argued, logically constructed, compassionate blog post at a time.

Candidates are often puppets to so many forces, it’s hard to know the real human being behind the public face. Edwards is currently trapped between the Scylla of his own populist image, and the Charybdis of those who determine if anyone in the population gets to see and hear that image. In a way, I don’t envy him. But in another way, I hope he can have his own Come to Jesus moment here. It’s not just about showing spine, or even doing what’s right and standing up for those who support and work for you.
The right choice for him is also common fucking sense.

For how much longer do you want to pay people who advance in power and career by bashing you? How much longer do you want to cower to unelected, cliquish Heathers who care nothing for the real people you say you want to represent and lead? This is one of those moments when doing what’s right is more than just scoring bonus points with your Savior. It’s about taking the first, bold step in destroying the structures that have held representative democracy hostage for far too long...

Well said indeed, lady.

I'll repeat my comment, here:

About a third of Americans support Bush. Now, the media more or less admits it. Perhaps this is all that has ever supported Bush, even during two Presidential elections.

They can not be pleased, no matter what a Democrat does. Unless that Democrat is a Lieberman DINOcrat, in which case they’ll pat him or her on the head until a Rethuglican can take his or her seat.

Only about a third of Americans cared about what a President and a consenting intern did in the ’90s.

Only about a third of Americans would be offended by Amanda or any of us using whatever language we want.

You would figure, after the bullshit of 2004, Edwards would know better.

At some point, our leaders would do well to forget the pearl-clutching mainstreamers, who represent nothing really other than their own sanctimonious interests.

Our leaders should lead. Or follow us. Or get out of the way.

Cd also cites this excellent post, which I will reproduce here, mostly because I like it, and I admire a guy who can write about this without cussing:

...While we all wait to see how the Edwards campaign will respond, it is worth remembering these three crucial points:

1. Attacks of this sort are not about cuss words (or military service or smoking or any other crap), but about right-wing thugs trying to control elections through fear.
2. When it happens, get your principal on TV right away to defend the electoral system from the thugs.
3. While on TV, be loyal as heck to those being attacked and everyone else associated with them.

Donahue, like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truuth before him, do not really care about the language of bloggers or the military records of veterans. What they care about is controlling the electoral system by appealing to our fears. They attack good people to intimidate and silence the debate--to keep us from standing up.

We will not allow it anymore.

The 2000 and 2004 Presidential election cycle was defiled by Republican thugs who ran roughshod over the system with impunity. This time, Americans will speak back.

For the Edwards campaign--and for Democratic campaigns attacked in this way--the time to speak back and defend our system from these thugs is now.

Damned right.

Arming Both Ends Against the Middle

Always remember: Chaos is the plan.

BANGALORE, India, Feb. 6 — Encouraged by the passage late last year of the first agreement on nuclear cooperation between India and the United States, American military contractors and technology companies have descended on Bangalore, the country’s technology hub, this week in the hope of winning some of the biggest military contracts.

On the eve of India’s air show, which is held every two years, 52 American companies ranging from the largest contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and General Electric to smaller companies are showcasing their products and lobbying government officials.

The five-day air show opens Wednesday in the suburbs of Bangalore, just as India and the United States are gradually relaxing policies governing military collaboration between the countries.

“There is no opportunity or market outside of India that is bigger than India for both commercial aircraft and defense products,” said Mark Kronenberg, vice president of integrated defense systems for the Asia-Pacific region at Boeing.

Boeing said it projected a market of $15 billion for its own products in India over the next 10 to 15 years. Mr. Kronenberg said this estimate was “conservative.”

Boeing and its competitors are angling for potential orders that include 126 fighter aircraft by the Indian Air Force for an estimated $11 billion, heavy-lift helicopters, carrier jet trainers and antiship missiles.

One of the hotly contested contracts will be for a multirole combat aircraft that executives for the visiting companies say will entail the “fiercest competition in the last 15 years.” Boeing will go head-to-head with a rival American contractor, Lockheed Martin, along with French, Swedish and Russian competitors.

As part of its marketing effort, Boeing has brought in two multirole combat F/A-18 Super Hornet aircraft, a Chinook helicopter and the C-17 transport aircraft to show potential buyers.

Lockheed Martin, based in Bethesda, Md., brought one of its F-16 multirole combat aircraft and is also showing its P-3C surveillance aircraft and its strike missiles to the Indian military.

“We are tickled pink to be here,” said Dennis D. Cavin, the vice president for international air and missile defense strategic initiatives at Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed Martin will have the opportunity to showcase its F-16 combat jet on a flight later this week. The pilot will be one of India’s best known businessmen, Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, an industrial conglomerate, who is also a trained pilot. Mr. Tata has frequently appeared in the news lately after his steel company, Tata Steel, moved ahead last week with its acquisition of the Corus Group, a much larger British-Dutch steel maker. “We look forward to putting him in the pilot’s seat,” said Robert H. Trice, senior vice president for business development at Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed said it was in the running to sell six C-130J Hercules transport planes to the Indian military, with the possibility of another six by the end of the year.

The American contingent at the Bangalore air show this year is its largest ever and “illustrates the dramatic ramp-up in their commitment to the Indian market,” said Ron Somers , president of the Washington-based United States-India Business Council of the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Over the years, India’s cool relations with the United States had resulted in a conspicuous absence of American military products in its armed forces. India’s previous alignment with the former Soviet Union created a military weaponry dominated by Russian MIG jets, as well as French and British products.

Other military contractors from Europe and South America have also appeared in significant numbers at the air show and are vying for contracts...

This has been coming awhile.

Finally India gets a piece of the action Pakistan's had for awhile. Or is it the other way around? The Lords of War eat Indian resources that could have gone to preserve Indian lives. Untold billions of dollars worth will be squandered so the Big Boys of India can have their big toys. Just like their partners in Pakistan. And the rest of the Middle East, including, you will note, Iran. And of course, Amerikastan.

Speaking of untold billions, does anyone have any idea about that missing trillion dollars the Pentagon couldn't account for? The first time Rumsfeld acknowledged it- everythingchanged the next day.

But there's no doubt about their accountability: the Patriot Phillip Perry is on the job.

Pierre Tristam notes:

President Bush's 2008 budget includes a $625 billion request for the military, up from $295 billion the year Bush was elected -- a 112 percent increase. Its about $100 billion more than all other military budgets in the world, combined. Plenty of attention is being paid the exhausted military fighting Bush's various wars. There's no denying it. It's overstretched and undermanned. It makes you think the Pentagon needs more money, not less.

But little attention is paid the flip-side of that story -- the squandering of money on defense contractors' swindles, whether it's the superfluous $66 billion F-22 fighter jet program -- one of three jet fighters in development -- or the $9 billion-a-year missile shield, which, one test aside, hasn't gotten much past its middle school science project concept since Ronald Reagan fancied it a quarter century and $160 billion ago.

The military is strapped by its own doing. Lawmakers are complicit. Job-producing military contracts are seeded throughout the land's congressional districts like above-board bribes.

But lawmakers couldn't get away with it if the military weren't the subject of a misplaced, ill-informed and dangerous public infatuation that's been changing American society for the worse since the early 1980s -- the period when Reagan built up the military into the creepy colossus it's been since. As Andrew Bacevich, author of "The New American Militarism," wrote, "The ensuing affair had and continues to have a heedless, Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued in utter disregard of any consequences that might ensue. Few in power have openly considered whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles."

Misuse of the military abroad and its escalating burdens on taxpayers are well documented. The consequences of the infatuation on civilian society are documented less well, because the effects are more subtle than convoys of tanks down Main Street. The consequences are more diffuse, more pernicious. There is, for example, the increasing role the military is playing in domestic life, secretly and not-so secretly, crumbling almost a century and a half old prohibition against military meddling in civilian business.

Five years ago the Pentagon established a "Northern Command" over the United States, the first time such a command was based on the mainland, ostensibly to coordinate responses to terrorist attacks. The Pentagon is actively engaged in domestic intelligence gathering, something that would have been thought outright illegal a generation ago. In December, the president signed a law that gave him the authority to declare martial law virtually at will.

Militarization is happening in more direct ways. Last week, the Associated Press circulated a story about the Pentagon selling surplus hardware to police agencies. The story projected a happy, fortunate circumstance. The tone was approving. The suggestion rewarding.

A picture featured a young police officer called Shane Grammer holding up a massive M-16 rifle with at least two scopes and a muffler-size barrel, a Chevrolet Blazer behind him, also military surplus, cluttered up with soldiers' helmets, camouflage and gear. The officer was a member of the Litchfield, Pa., Police Department. Litchfield is a minuscule township of 500 families. Who does Officer Grammer intend to use his M-16 against?

The difference between police agencies and military units is becoming difficult to distinguish. They love their helicopters, they love their night raids, their SWAT teams, their chases, their drawn guns.

We often hear about how "attitude" is in itself a trigger of violence among gang members. What we don't often hear about, but endure, because the media are too busy writing cute features about military surplus property in the hands of local police agencies, is the same attitude from police -- the very same approach: Look at an officer the wrong way and you might be in jail before the rooster crows once. All of that military hardware brings with it an attitude all its own, a sense of power and presumption that has to be exercised. At this rate, a police state would be a blessing. What we're heading toward is a military state, perpetually at war abroad, but also perpetually mobilized at home down to the tiniest mom-and-pop police agency. Uniforms are the new cult, force the presumed solution to order's challengers. The law can wait.

When a society is no longer exclusively and vigilantly civil, its claim to be a civilized society, let alone a civilizing one, is in peril. Other countries have been discovering that about the United States. We're discovering it at home, too, every time a police shield is flashed with the presumptive power of an M-16 burst.

Some of us discovered that quite awhile back.

Emerald Country

Krugman, via Tennessee Guerilla Women:

One of the best of the many recent books about the Iraq debacle is Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” The book tells a tale of hopes squandered in the name of politicization and privatization: key jobs in Baghdad’s Green Zone were assigned on the basis of loyalty rather than know-how, while key functions were outsourced to private contractors.

Two recent reports in The New York Times serve as a reminder that the Bush administration has brought the same corruption of governance to the home front. Call it the Green-Zoning of America.

In the first article, The Times reported that a new executive order requires that each agency contain a “regulatory policy office run by a political appointee,” a change that “strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts.” Yesterday, The Times turned to the rapid growth of federal contracting, fed “by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.”

These are two different pieces of the same story: under the guise of promoting a conservative agenda, the Bush administration has created a supersized version of the 19th-century spoils system.

The blueprint for Bush-era governance was laid out in a January 2001 manifesto from the Heritage Foundation, titled “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel.” The manifesto’s message, in brief, was that the professional civil service should be regarded as the enemy of the new administration’s conservative agenda. And there’s no question that Heritage’s thinking reflected that of many people on the Bush team.

What is this "Bu$h team" of which this man speaks?

How should the civil service be defeated? First and foremost, Heritage demanded that politics take precedence over know-how: the new administration “must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Second, Heritage called for a big increase in outsourcing — “contracting out as a management strategy.” This would supposedly reduce costs, but it would also have the desirable effect of reducing the total number of civil servants.

The Bush administration energetically put these recommendations into effect. Political loyalists were installed throughout the government, regardless of qualifications. And the administration outsourced many government functions previously considered too sensitive to privatize: yesterday’s Times article begins with the case of CACI International, a private contractor hired, in spite of the obvious conflict of interest, to process cases of incompetence and fraud by private contractors. A few years earlier, CACI provided interrogators at Abu Ghraib.

The ostensible reason for politicizing and privatizing was to promote the conservative ideal of smaller, more efficient government. But the small-government rhetoric was never sincere: from Day 1, the administration set out to create a vast new patronage machine.

Those political appointees chosen for their loyalty, not their expertise, aren’t very good at doing their proper jobs — as all the world learned after Hurricane Katrina struck. But they have been very good at rewarding campaign contributors, from energy companies that benefit from lax regulation of pollution to pharmaceutical companies that got a Medicare program systematically designed to protect their profits.

And the executive order described by The Times will make it even easier for political appointees to overrule the professionals, tailoring government regulations to suit the interests of companies that support the G.O.P. — or to give lucrative contracts to people with the right connections.

Meanwhile, never mind the idea that outsourcing of government functions should be used to promote competition and save money. The Times reports that “fewer than half of all ‘contract actions’ — new contracts and payments against existing contracts — are now subject to full and open competition,” down from 79 percent in 2001. And many contractors are paid far more than it would cost to do the job with government employees: those CACI workers processing claims against other contractors cost the government $104 an hour.

What’s truly amazing is how far back we’ve slid in such a short time. The modern civil service system dates back more than a century; in just six years the Bush administration has managed to undo many of that system’s achievements. And the administration still has two years to go.

But you see, it's all a game to the Great Wizard of Oz , the Man behind the curtain, David Addington.

Who Woulda Knowed?

Except, you know, everybody who was against the War at the time. Atrios points back to Fred Clark at the Slacktivist:

Friday, February 07, 2003

POWELL'S EVIDENCE LOOKING SHAKY.

No smoking gun, lots of smoke and mirrors.

1. The aluminum tubes. The IAEA keeps pointing out that these tubes are not suitable for enriching uranium for a weapons program, as Powell and Bush assert. The U.S. response has been that with lots and lots of money and American high-tech science, the tubes could be altered for this purpose. This is evidently true, but it's also the opposite of Bush's original assertion that the tubes were part of an Iraqi effort to create a cheap-and-dirty weapon. The whole aluminum tubes business smells like the now familiar Bush pattern of deceit.

2. "The fine paper that United Kingdom distributed." Complete and utter hogwash. This casts suspicion on everything else Powell said before the Security Council -- including "and" and "the."

3. Powell asserted an Iraqi connection to al-Qaida. The cornerstone of this assertion is a terrorist camp in northern Iraq. (Northern Iraq, of course, is not under Saddam Hussein's control so it seems rather beside the point -- but let that pass.) The U.S. says it has months of satellite photography monitoring this hive of al-Qaida activity. This raises an obvious question: why is that camp still there?

Right now America is already at war. Remember the "war on terrorism"? (It's easy for civilians to forget about this war since the president only mentions it when it's politically expedient to do so.) The great difficulty in the war on terrorism is finding the enemy. Well, here they are. What are we waiting for?

Lawmakers raised this very question with Colin Powell yesterday and the answers -- the non-answers -- are deeply troubling. Here's the Los Angeles Times' report by Greg Miller:

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spent a significant part of his presentation to the United Nations this week describing a terrorist camp in northern Iraq where Al Qaeda affiliates are said to be training to carry out attacks with explosives and poisons.

But neither Powell nor other administration officials answered the question: What is the United States doing about it?

Lawmakers who have attended classified briefings on the camp say that they have been stymied for months in their efforts to get an explanation for why the United States has not launched a military strike on the compound near the village of Khurmal. Powell cited its ongoing operation as one of the key reasons for suspecting ties between Baghdad and the Al Qaeda terror network.

The lawmakers put new pressure on the Bush administration to explain its decision to leave the facility, which it has known about for months, unharmed.

"Why have we not taken it out?" Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) asked Powell during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Thursday. "Why have we let it sit there if it's such a dangerous plant producing these toxins?"

Powell declined to answer, saying he could not discuss the matter in open session.

"I can assure you that it is a place that has been very much in our minds. And we have been tracing individuals who have gone in there and come out of there," Powell said.

Absent an explanation from the White House, some officials suggested that the administration has refrained from striking the compound in part to preserve a key piece of its case against Iraq.

"This is it, this is their compelling evidence for use of force," said one intelligence official, who asked not to be identified. "If you take it out, you can't use it as justification for war."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the intelligence committee, said she and other members have been frustrated in their attempts to get an explanation from administration officials in closed-door briefings.

"We've been asking this question and have not been given an answer," Feinstein said. Officials have replied that "they'll have to get back to us."

A White House spokesman said Thursday he had no comment on the matter.

The administration's handling of the issue has emerged as one of the more curious recent elements of the war on terrorism. Failing to intervene appears to be at odds with President Bush's stated policy of preempting terrorist threats, and the facility is in an area where the United States already has a considerable presence.

U.S. intelligence agents are said to be operating among the Kurdish population nearby, and U.S. and British warplanes patrol much of northern Iraq as part of their enforcement of a "no-fly" zone.

We are at war with terrorism, and here is a military target -- an enemy base camp allegedly linked to "the men who brought these buildings down." Yet Bush apparently leaves it unscathed so that it's existence can be used in support of an assault on Iraq that will involve massive bombing of cities (i.e. nonmilitary targets) and the civilians therein. You're not allowed to kill civilians...

The BBC follows up on the earlier Channel 4 report that the dossier supposedly written by British intelligence -- and commended by Colin Powell in his UN slide-show -- was actually plagiarized from a graduate student's 12-year old paper and two magazine articles.

This is the best the United States of American and the United Kingdom can come up with? A slapdash amalgam of somebody's thesis and a couple of articles from Jane's? This isn't intelligence -- it's not even competent Googling. It's an embarrassment and an insult to the Security Council. Was somebody actually paid to cut-and-paste together this irrelevancy?

You're not allowed to kill civilians. Especially when the "civilians" include Princes of the Royal House of the Capo di Tutti Capi , who are helping Dear Leader scam his own country.

Check out the good work over at the Ministry of Love

Check it out

They've got a killer website, too.

[thanks and a tip o' the tinfoil to Comrade O'Brian]

The Seeds of the Dominion

Chris Hedges:

Christianists on the March

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age—he was then close to 80—we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” were stories of this failure—personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers—those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.

These Christian utopians promise to replace this internal and external emptiness with a mythical world where time stops and all problems are solved. The mounting despair rippling across the United States, one I witnessed repeatedly as I traveled the country, remains unaddressed by the Democratic Party, which has abandoned the working class, like its Republican counterpart, for massive corporate funding. The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic—to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true—the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens. We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have legalized torture and can lock up citizens without trial. Arthur Schlesinger, in “The Cycles of American History,” wrote that “the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense—not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide.”

Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle the open society. He despaired of U.S. liberals, who, he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand-wringing by Democrats, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them “demonic” and “satanic,” would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.

His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me, I suspect half in jest, that if the Nazis took over America “60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute.” But this too was not an abstraction. He had watched academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.

Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last elections earned approval ratings of 80 to100 percent from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups—the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. President Bush has handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups and dismantled federal programs in science, reproductive rights and AIDS research to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the Christian right.

Bush will, I suspect, turn out to be no more than a weak transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck—who also used “values” to energize his base at the end of the 19th century and launched “Kulturkampf,” the word from which we get culture wars, against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck’s attacks, which split Germany and made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse, paved the way for the Nazis’ more virulent racism and repression.

The radical Christian right, calling for a “Christian state”—where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens—awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. This movement—the most dangerous mass movement in American history—will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance. The unchecked rape of America, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the democratic state and birth of American fascism.

Outsourcing the Constitution

Gonzales and the Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton Corporation: You have no inherent right to be without Company supervision for the good of the Bottom Line.

...Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about $400 billion last year from $207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does...

Contractors still build ships and satellites, but they also collect income taxes and work up agency budgets, fly pilotless spy aircraft and take the minutes at policy meetings on the war. They sit next to federal employees at nearly every agency; far more people work under contracts than are directly employed by the government. Even the government’s online database for tracking contracts, the Federal Procurement Data System, has been outsourced (and is famously difficult to use).

The contracting explosion raises questions about propriety, cost and accountability that have long troubled watchdog groups and are coming under scrutiny from the Democratic majority in Congress. While flagrant cases of fraud and waste make headlines, concerns go beyond outright wrongdoing. Among them:

¶Competition, intended to produce savings, appears to have sharply eroded. An analysis by The New York Times shows that fewer than half of all “contract actions” — new contracts and payments against existing contracts — are now subject to full and open competition. Just 48 percent were competitive in 2005, down from 79 percent in 2001 .

¶The most secret and politically delicate government jobs, like intelligence collection and budget preparation, are increasingly contracted out, despite regulations forbidding the outsourcing of “inherently governmental” work. Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said allowing CACI workers to review other contractors captured in microcosm “a government that’s run by corporations.”



¶Agencies are crippled in their ability to seek low prices, supervise contractors and intervene when work goes off course because the number of government workers overseeing contracts has remained level as spending has shot up. One federal contractor explained candidly in a conference call with industry analysts last May that “one of the side benefits of the contracting officers being so overwhelmed” was that existing contracts were extended rather than put up for new competitive bidding.

¶The most successful contractors are not necessarily those doing the best work , but those who have mastered the special skill of selling to Uncle Sam. The top 20 service contractors have spent nearly $300 million since 2000 on lobbying and have donated $23 million to political campaigns. “We’ve created huge behemoths that are doing 90 or 95 percent of their business with the government,” said Peter W. Singer, who wrote a book on military outsourcing. “They’re not really companies, they’re quasi agencies.” Indeed, the biggest federal contractor, Lockheed Martin, which has spent $53 million on lobbying and $6 million on donations since 2000, gets more federal money each year than the Departments of Justice or Energy.

¶Contracting almost always leads to less public scrutiny, as government programs are hidden behind closed corporate doors. Companies, unlike agencies, are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Members of Congress have sought unsuccessfully for two years to get the Army to explain the contracts for Blackwater USA security officers in Iraq, which involved several costly layers of subcontractors.



...the recent contracting boom had its origins in the “reinventing government” effort of the Clinton administration, which slashed the federal work force to the lowest level since 1960 and streamlined outsourcing. Limits on what is “inherently governmental” and therefore off-limits to contractors have grown fuzzy, as the General Services Administration’s use of CACI International personnel shows.

“Hi Heinz,” Renee Ballard, a G.S.A. official, wrote in an e-mail message to Heinz Ruppmann, a CACI official, last June 12, asking for six “contract specialists” to help with a backlog of 226 cases that could lead to companies being suspended or barred from federal contracting. The CACI workers would review files and prepare “proposed responses for review and signature,” she wrote.



Mr. Amey, of the Project on Government Oversight, which obtained the contract documents under the Freedom of Information Act, said such work was clearly inherently governmental and called it “outrageous” to involve contractors in judging the misdeeds of potential competitors. CACI had itself been reviewed in 2004 for possible suspension in connection with supplying interrogators to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The company was ultimately cleared, though the G.S.A. found that CACI employees had improperly written parts of the “statements of work” for its own Iraq contract.

The price of $104 an hour — well over $200,000 per person annually — was roughly double the cost of pay and benefits of a comparable federal worker, Mr. Amey said...

The G.S.A., like other agencies, said it did not track the number or total cost of its contract workers. The agency administrator, Lurita Doan, who previously ran a Virginia contracting firm, has actively pushed contracting. Ms. Doan recently clashed with her agency’s inspector general over her proposal to remove the job of auditing contractors’ proposed prices from his office and to hire contractors to do it instead.

On some of the biggest government projects, Bush administration officials have sought to shift some decision making to contractors...

Boeing, which won the $80 million first phase of the estimated $2 billion project, is assigned not only to develop technology but also to propose how to use it, which includes assigning roles to different government agencies and contractors. Homeland Security officials insist that they will make all final decisions, but the department’s inspector general, Richard L. Skinner, reported bluntly in November that “the department does not have the capacity needed to effectively plan, oversee and execute the SBInet program.”



...If the government is exporting some traditional functions to contractors, it is also inviting contractors into agencies to perform delicate tasks. The State Department, for instance, pays more than $2 million a year to BearingPoint, the consulting giant, to provide support for Iraq policy making, running software, preparing meeting agendas and keeping minutes.

State Department officials insist that the company’s workers, who hold security clearances, merely relieve diplomats of administrative tasks and never influence policy. But the presence of contractors inside closed discussions on war strategy is a notable example of what officials call the “blended work force.”

That blending is taking place in virtually every agency. When Polly Endreny, 29, sought work last year with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, she was surprised to discover that most openings were with contractors...

The shift away from open competition affects more than morale. One example among many: with troops short in Iraq, Congress in 2003 waived a ban on the use of private security guards to protect military bases in the United States. The results for the first $733 million were dismal, investigators at the Government Accountability Office found.

The Army spent 25 percent more than it had to because it used sole-source contracts at 46 of 57 sites, the investigators concluded. And screening of guards was so lax that at one base, 61 guards were hired despite criminal records, auditors reported. Yet the Army gave the contractors more than $18 million in incentive payments intended to reward good performance. (The Army did not contest G.A.O.’s findings and has changed its methods.)

...Paul C. Light of New York University, who has long tracked the hidden contractor work force to assess what he calls the “true size of government,” says the shift to contractors is driven in part by federal personnel ceilings. He calls such ceilings a “sleight of hand” intended to allow successive administrations to brag about cutting the federal work force.

Yet Mr. Light said the government had made no effort to count contractors and no assessment of the true costs and benefits. “We have no data to show that contractors are actually more efficient than the government,” he said.

Meanwhile, he said, a potent coalition keeps contracting growing: the companies, their lobbyists and supporters in Congress and many government managers, who do not mind building ties to contractors who may hire them someday. “All the players with any power like it,” he said.

That is evident wherever in Washington contractors gather to scout new opportunities. There is no target richer than the Homeland Security Department, whose Web site, in a section called “Open for Business,” displays hundreds of open contracts, including “working with selected cities to develop and exercise their catastrophic plans” ($500,000 to $1 million) and “Conduct studies and analyses, systems engineering, or provide laboratory services to various organizations to support the DHS mission” ($20 to $50 million)...

You got that right. The people who gave us Abu Ghraib, giving us the real New World Order.

Setting policy in Iraq. Running the show there. Surging there, too, it seems.

Making Skynet to oversee it all, and starring in Star Wars, Future Combat, and coming soon, the War of the Worlds.

Running Homeland Security with Company policy.

Turning America into Amerika™.

What is this Body that you speak of?

via Smoky Joe, some Robert Parry:

...Responding to questions from Sen. Arlen Specter at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Jan. 18, Gonzales argued that the Constitution doesn’t explicitly bestow habeas corpus rights; it merely says when the so-called Great Writ can be suspended.

“There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away,” Gonzales said...

Gonzales continued, “The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended” except in cases of rebellion or invasion...”

Applying Gonzales’s reasoning, one could argue that the First Amendment doesn’t explicitly say Americans have the right to worship as they choose, speak as they wish or assemble peacefully. The amendment simply bars the government, i.e. Congress, from passing laws that would impinge on these rights.

Similarly, Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution states that “the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

The clear meaning of the clause, as interpreted for more than two centuries, is that the Founders recognized the long-established English law principle of habeas corpus, which guarantees people the right of due process, such as formal charges and a fair trial.

That Attorney General Gonzales would express such an extraordinary opinion, doubting the constitutional protection of habeas corpus, suggests either a sophomoric mind or an unwillingness to respect this well-established right, one that the Founders considered so important that they embedded it in the original text of the Constitution.

Other cherished rights – including freedom of religion and speech – were added later in the first 10 amendments, known as the Bill of Rights.

Ironically, Gonzales may be wrong in another way about the lack of specificity in the Constitution’s granting of habeas corpus rights. Many of the legal features attributed to habeas corpus are delineated in a positive way in the Sixth Amendment, which reads:

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed … and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; [and] to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses.”

Gonzales’s Jan. 18 statement suggests that he is still seeking reasons to make habeas corpus optional, subordinate to President George W. Bush’s executive powers that Bush’s neoconservative legal advisers claim are virtually unlimited during “a time of war,” even one as vaguely defined as the “war on terror” which may last forever...

Or until, one supposes, the Rapture. But as the Happy Tutor says, what is the Rapture but a slaughterhouse?



[thanks to Avedon]

More than a civil war

Excerpts from the Classified National Intelligence Estimate (now how did Pravda swing that, and who does it benefit?):

...even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation in the time frame of this estimate...

Decades of subordination to Sunni political, social, and economic domination have made the Shia deeply insecure about their hold on power. This insecurity leads the Shia to mistrust U.S. efforts to reconcile Iraqi sects and reinforces their unwillingness to engage with the Sunnis on a variety of issues, including adjusting the structure of Iraq’s federal system, reining in Shia militias, and easing de-Baathification.

Many Sunni Arabs remain unwilling to accept their minority status, believe the central government is illegitimate and incompetent, and are convinced that Shia dominance will increase Iranian influence over Iraq, in ways that erode the state’s Arab character and increase Sunni repression.

The absence of unifying leaders among the Arab Sunni or Shia with the capacity to speak for or exert control over their confessional groups limits prospects for reconciliation. The Kurds remain willing to participate in Iraqi state-building but reluctant to surrender any of the gains in autonomy they have achieved.

The Kurds are moving systematically to increase their control of Kirkuk to guarantee annexation of all or most of the city and province into the Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) after the constitutionally mandated referendum scheduled to occur no later than 31 December 2007. Arab groups in Kirkuk continue to resist violently what they see as Kurdish encroachment.

Despite real improvements, the Iraqi Security Forces (I.S.F.) — particularly the Iraqi police — will be hard pressed in the next 12-18 months to execute significantly increased security responsibilities, and particularly to operate independently against Shia militias with success. Sectarian divisions erode the dependability of many units, many are hampered by personnel and equipment shortfalls, and a number of Iraqi units have refused to serve outside of the areas where they were recruited.

Extremists — most notably the Sunni jihadist group Al Qaeda in Iraq (A.Q.I.) and Shia oppositionist Jaysh al-Mahdi (J.A.M.) — continue to act as very effective accelerators for what has become a self-sustaining inter-sectarian struggle between Shia and Sunnis.

Significant population displacement, both within Iraq and the movement of Iraqis into neighboring countries, indicates the hardening of ethno-sectarian divisions, diminishes Iraq’s professional and entrepreneurial classes, and strains the capacities of the countries to which they have relocated. The U.N. estimates over a million Iraqis are now in Syria and Jordan...

The Intelligence Community judges that the term “civil war” does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent attacks on coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence. Nonetheless, the term “civil war” accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict, including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian mobilization, and population displacements...

Iraq’s neighbors influence, and are influenced by, events within Iraq, but the involvement of these outside actors is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq’s internal sectarian dynamics...

Most of the leaked report is the expected self-justification and disinformation designed to support the escalation that Bu$h wants. Reading this, one can't help but recall the wise words of Molly Ivins (and others) pre invasion:

Jan. 16, 2003: “I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war?’ ”

I'd say it's worse than that: the addition of Americans, Iranians, and the sgarrista of Capo di Tutti Capi Abdullah really clog the toilet. Josh Marshall:

I spent some of today looking at the issue of the sharp rise in the number of American helicopters shot out of the sky in the last two weeks in Iraq. And then I posted an excerpt from an AP article from December noting US intelligence reports that wealthy Saudis are shipping money and arms, including anti-aircraft missiles, to the Sunni insurgents who are still the primary force fighting US soldiers and marines in Iraq.

This suggests a series of questions, the most obvious of which is whether we're in the process of being gamed much as we were in 2002 when we allied with Saudi Arabia (which had a lot to do with 9/11) against Iraq (which had nothing to do with 9/11) to defend ourselves against another 9/11. Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how we were also allied with Pakistan (a highly unstable, quasi-Islamist regime with nuclear weapons and a big nuclear weapons program proliferator) to make sure secular Iraq didn't get nuclear weapons it didn't have to give to terrorists it wasn't allied with. But I digress ...

The point is that there's a certain illogic in our thinking that Iran is the prime destablizer of Iraq when you consider that we are currently allying ourselves with the forces in Iraq that the Iranians would probably be happy to see run the place...

It only figures that if Al Qaeda's in the mix, the King's boys would be too. The story:

Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in Iraq and much of the money is used to buy weapons, including shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, according to key Iraqi officials and others familiar with the flow of cash.

Saudi government officials deny that any money from their country is being sent to Iraqis fighting the government and the U.S.-led coalition.

But the U.S. Iraq Study Group report said Saudis are a source of funding for Sunni Arab insurgents. Several truck drivers interviewed by The Associated Press described carrying boxes of cash from Saudi Arabia into Iraq, money they said was headed for insurgents.

Two high-ranking Iraqi officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, told the AP most of the Saudi money comes from private donations, called zaqat, collected for Islamic causes and charities.

Some Saudis appear to know the money is headed to Iraq's insurgents, but others merely give it to clerics who channel it to anti-coalition forces, the officials said.

In one recent case, an Iraqi official said $25 million in Saudi money went to a top Iraqi Sunni cleric and was used to buy weapons, including Strela, a Russian shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile. The missiles were purchased from someone in Romania, apparently through the black market, he said.

Overall, the Iraqi officials said, money has been pouring into Iraq from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a Sunni bastion, since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq toppled the Sunni-controlled regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Saudi officials vehemently deny their country is a major source of financial support for the insurgents.

"There isn't any organized terror finance, and we will not permit any such unorganized acts," said Brig. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry. About a year ago the Saudi government set up a unit to track any "suspicious financial operations," he said.

But the Iraq Study Group said "funding for the Sunni insurgency comes from private individuals within Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states."

Who ya gonna believe? The mouthpiece of the Boss, or the quiet words of his consigliere to the wise men of Washington?

You get what you pay for

In this case, you get the biggest protection racket in the world:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 — The Bush administration is seeking a record military budget of $622 billion for the 2008 fiscal year, Pentagon officials have said. The sum includes more than $140 billion for war-related costs.

The administration is also seeking $93 billion in the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, to pay for military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the officials said.

The requests are part of the annual budget request to Congress for all federal spending programs. The budget is to be made public on Monday, and Congress will revise it in the coming months.

Together with money for combat operations this year already approved by Congress, the new request would push spending related to Iraq and Afghanistan to $163 billion.

“It is the highest level of spending since the height of the Korean War,” said Steven Kosiak, a military budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a policy analysis organization here.

Mr. Kosiak said that in 1952 the United States spent the equivalent of $645 billion in today’s dollars, factoring in inflation, and that in the Korean War military spending exceeded 13 percent of the gross national product. The figure is now 4 percent...

Another Good One Gone

Molly Ivins, as quoted by Krugman, via Atrios, via Avedon:

Nov. 19, 2002: “The greatest risk for us in invading Iraq is probably not war itself, so much as: What happens after we win? ... There is a batty degree of triumphalism loose in this country right now.”

Jan. 16, 2003: “I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war?’ ”

July 14, 2003: “I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would lead to the peace from hell, but I’d rather not see my prediction come true and I don’t think we have much time left to avert it. That the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald Rumsfeld. ... We don’t need people with credentials as right-wing ideologues and corporate privatizers — we need people who know how to fix water and power plants.”

Oct. 7, 2003: “Good thing we won the war, because the peace sure looks like a quagmire. ...

“I’ve got an even-money bet out that says more Americans will be killed in the peace than in the war, and more Iraqis will be killed by Americans in the peace than in the war. Not the first time I’ve had a bet out that I hoped I’d lose.”

The Rude One says it the best:

...In her writings, Ivins despised those things that were distractions from the real work of government, of doing the work of and for the people of the nation. And the impeachment of Clinton was the right wing engaging in Caligula-like decadence for the sake of itself. Ivins ripped into the conservative machine, only to see it take things to the next level of ignorance and depravity with the Iraq war.

Prescient (and right) as ever, Ivins said in a February 11, 1998 column about the crazed House of Representatives speaking in session: "Next up, several members decide to demand that if we use air strikes against Iraq, we take out Saddam Hussein. In the first place, murdering foreign leaders is not a proper tool of foreign policy, for the sensible reason that you never know what you'll get if you do. One of the most famous hypothetical questions of history is: What if someone had managed to murder Adolf Hitler early on? Suppose someone did, and then the Nazi movement had been taken over by, say, Albert Speer, who was a lot better organized than Hitler?"

Ivins never became the regular TV pundit that so many other alleged columnists became. Perhaps it was because of moments like this, being interviewed about the brewing Clinton "scandal" on some Fox "news" program in March 1998: "If we had devoted this much time and this much space in the newspapers to the single most important problem in American politics today, which is the money that finances campaigns and the way the people that get elected respond to that money, we would have solved the problem by now. We would have the people of this country so outraged, they would be demanding campaign finance reform. What are we doing? We're talking about the president's dick. It's ridiculous."

In that same interview, she said this: "I actually have a fair amount of respect for good politicians. And by 'good politicians,' I mean people who really try to move the ball in such a way that people can get helped. And they do deserve respect and they do deserve credit." But she believed all politicians, good and bad, need to be held to account, not for fucking around or drinking after work. But for what they did that affected you and everyone else in the country while on the job. If they're not dicking us over, who gives a shit about their dicks? Because of this, she reserved special scorn for the Washington press corps.

On CNN's Reliable Sources on July 14, 2001, in those heady Chandra-riffic days before everythingchangedon911, responding to Howard Kurtz's question on the press's behavior on the "Did Gary Condit kill that woman?" story, Ivins said, "It's a disgraceful performance. Look, part of what happens is that in journalism there is a contest for the limited time and space we have available to try to present what is going on to people's attention. And we had the same problem during the Monica Lewinsky scandal; two-thirds of the world's economy collapsed while the press was simply obsessed with Ms. Lewinsky."

She said, often, that the sins of omission were the real crimes of contemporary journalism. Her columns so often filled that gap, talking about labor and working people and countries like the Congo and Indonesia. She refused in the last few years to get drawn into the false debate of "would you rather Saddam still be in power," turning that around to say that the left never wanted him in power in the first place.

She was goddamned smart, so smart she didn't have to flaunt it. So smart that she could use the down to earth side to say what she meant so all of us could understand it. She didn't suffer bullies. She loved Texas like a parent loves her child even after that child has gone on a three-state killing spree. She was unfailingly polite. And she could eviscerate anyone who was failing all of us with just an image or two. Those guttings will be desperately missed. That sense and celebration of the decency of the average American will be missed even more.

We've lost one of our defenders.

It's Good to be King

Obviously for The Base, the economy is good:

... Shell reported a 21 percent rise in its fourth-quarter earnings, to $5.28 billion. That was mostly a result of a 4.1 percent increase in daily production of oil, to 3.65 million barrels, in the quarter. The company also continued to profit from its superior marketing and refining ability outside the United States.

Shell’s income in 2006 was $25.44 billion, up from $25.3 billion in 2005.

Shell predicted oil and gas production growth of 1 percent to 2 percent annually through 2010, and slightly more after that.

Exxon reported profit of $10.25 billion, or $1.76 a share, in the fourth quarter. That represented a decline of 4.3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2005, when energy prices soared after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Shares of Exxon Mobil rose 98 cents, or 1.32 percent, to $75.08, while American depository receipts of Shell rose $1.23, or 1.80 percent, to $69.48.

Occidental Petroleum, ConocoPhillips, Hess and several other oil companies have reported drops in quarterly profits in recent days, but those results are in comparison to record or near-record in the quarters a year earlier...

So how is this windfall used (via Lambert)?

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)...

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees...

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

"Right now, the whole debate is polarised," he said. "One group says that anyone with any doubts whatsoever are deniers and the other group is saying that anyone who wants to take action is alarmist. We don't think that approach has a lot of utility for intelligent policy."

One American scientist turned down the offer, citing fears that the report could easily be misused for political gain. "You wouldn't know if some of the other authors might say nothing's going to happen, that we should ignore it, or that it's not our fault," said Steve Schroeder, a professor at Texas A&M university.

The contents of the IPCC report have been an open secret since the Bush administration posted its draft copy on the internet in April. It says there is a 90% chance that human activity is warming the planet, and that global average temperatures will rise by another 1.5 to 5.8C this century, depending on emissions.

Lord Rees of Ludlow, the president of the Royal Society, Britain's most prestigious scientific institute, said: "The IPCC is the world's leading authority on climate change and its latest report will provide a comprehensive picture of the latest scientific understanding on the issue. It is expected to stress, more convincingly than ever before, that our planet is already warming due to human actions, and that 'business as usual' would lead to unacceptable risks, underscoring the urgent need for concerted international action to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. However, yet again, there will be a vocal minority with their own agendas who will try to suggest otherwise."

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: "The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they've got left is a suitcase full of cash."

Apparently the AEI/ Exxon was able to buy about 10% of the probability (the chances global warming isn't caused by humans) from the participants.

Unless, of course the reality is much worse.

It's all a matter of perspective

...The U.S. is deeply mired in a losing war in Iraq, and is also losing Afghanistan to a resurgent Taliban. The Pentagon is scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to come up with the measly 21,500 additional troops Bush has vowed to send to Iraq, and the 4000 troops that his commanders in Afghanistan are asking for.

Iran, meanwhile, poses no immediate threat to the U.S. But it does have a huge, battle-hardened army, much better equipped than Saddam Hussein's rag-tag troops, and equipped with some very sophisticated weaponry courtesy of Russia and China. Any U.S. forces that went into Iran could expect to take heavy casualties, and could hardly hope to conquer a nation with a population bigger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined - a population that, unlike Iraq's - can be expected to rise as one against a US invasion.

Even if Iran is meddling in Iraq, it hardly seems like attacking that country is likely to put a halt to that kind of thing. Indeed, attacking Iran would be more likely to lead to an escalation of Iranian efforts to hobble U.S. forces in Iraq - something Tehran could easily do through its Iraqi Shia allies.

Nor would attacking Iran put an end to that nation's nuclear program, which is spread out, carefully hidden, and in many cases located in underground bunkers. Nuclear experts agree that an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would only slow down its efforts, not end them, and moreover, would encourage the country to redouble its efforts to get the Bomb and achieve the kind of protection against future attack that countries with the bomb have.

Oh. I haven't mentioned the economic disaster part, have I?

Iran is the second largest oil producing country in the world, and it borders the entire eastern shore of the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world's oil passes every year. If it was attacked, all of Iran's oil, and most of the oil produced by Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, would be taken out of circulation indefinitely. Oil prices would soar way past $100/barrel, and maybe past $200 a barrel, causing a U.S. and a global depression.

So why are we even talking about this?

We're talking about this because the President of the United States, the Vice President, and the neoconservative political gang that has brought the nation six years of war, destruction and Constitution-wrecking, is under attack, and this cabal of madmen and mad women has decided that chaos, death and destruction offers the best hope of salvation.

We are, it appears, about to witness the American equivalent of Hitler's suicide orders to the German people as he scurried to his bunker in Berlin.

What to do? The answer is simple.

It is time for the Congress, and the American people, to act.

If Senators and Representatives pass a resolution barring the use of any military forces against Iran, or the expenditure of any funds for war against Iran, Bush will not be able to push the country over the precipice. American military leaders would have reason to ignore any orders that would put them in violation of the law of the land.

This would be a historic moment‹a reassertion by Congress of its Constitutional primacy in matters of war and peace.

Members of Congress should follow up that move by initiating impeachment proceedings against this whacko immediately.

Congress must not duck its patriotic duty. President Clinton was impeached for a little blowjob. This president wants to blow a hell of a lot more than an intern.

An attack on Iran would be an international crime under the Nuremberg Charter, which calls the invasion of a country that doesn't pose an immediate threat a "Crime Against Peace" But even aside from such matters, anyone with a lick of sense knows that it would be crazy to go into another even larger war while the American military is completely tied down in two other desperate situations.

The whole Bush administration has clearly gone stark raving mad, and is willing to sacrifice the nation for its own short-term gain.

But that's only the beginning of the madness. There's what the Democratic leadership is doing, in an attempt to disturb the public complacency.

...To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to make permanent the favorable treatment afforded combat pay under the earned income tax credit, and for other purposes...

Of course the only people that would end up serving with this kind of law in effect would be those without the financial or political or educational clout to sidestep it. The Bu$hes and the Cheneys? Fuhgeddaboudit.

And for those of you sincere enough and naive enough to believe something like this could be written to be fair I ask please go to Iraq, trust your Dear Leader, whichever party he or she may be, and see how far down to Hell your simplicity takes you.

For the sophists who claim Mr. Rangel doesn't even intend on voting for it himself, I say, stranger things have happened this century than a sham bill used to justify an atrocity. Good intentions are the easiest to pervert. The administration actively creates chaos for their perception of national good.

So watch how you act, Congress, because how you react may be part of someone's proactive plan.