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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: redfish who wrote (28899)	7/18/2005 5:48:41 AM
From: redfish	Respond to of 362296

When Scandals Collide I'm not sure why the vast corruption, waste and abuse in the Iraq "reconstruction" effort isn't getting more media coverage. The press used to love those kind of stories ($300 military toilet seats, $200 presidential haircuts, whatever.) But these days, everybody just seems resigned to throwing enormous quantities of taxpayer money down whatever ratholes the Cheney administration and the Pentagon take a fancy to. And when some (but hardly all) of the money being wasted belongs to the Iraqi people -- well, empires have a habit of doing that, don't they? But at least a few reporters still seem to be interested in documenting the absolutely mindboggling corruption in Iraq -- a Texas-sized boondoggle that began within days after the fall of Baghdad and continues right up to the present day. A full accounting of these various swindles will, of course, never be made -- except maybe to God, if she can ever take a break from her war crimes deliberations. But it seems likely the Iraq money pit will set some kind of modern record: Instead of skimming some of the funds intended for real projects and diverting them to corrupt uses, the authors of this particular scandal appear to have taken a small fraction of the money intended for corruption and diverted it to legitimate projects. And so we get stories like this, from the London Review of Books: The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8bn that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it has gone. A further $3.4bn appropriated by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance "security". And this, from Knight Ridder: The Iraqi Defense Ministry has squandered more than $300 million buying faulty and outdated military equipment in what appears to be a massive web of corruption that flourished under American-appointed supervisors for a year or longer, U.S. and Iraqi military officials said this week. Vendors are suspected of vastly overcharging for substandard equipment, including helicopters, machine guns and armored vehicles, and kicking back money to Iraqi Defense Ministry buyers. If that's what a couple of journalists could find out, imagine what a Justice Department task force or a Senate investigating committee armed with subpoenas could uncover. I can't imagine the paper trail is all that complex -- it would take an army of Enron executives and Arthur Andersen auditors a couple of decades to come up with the phony accounting required to conceal theft on such a grand scale. On the other hand, for a lot of these heists there is no paper trail -- except a whole bunch of unmarked $100 bills that ended up in somebody's pockets. This guy, for example: An Iraqi hospital administrator told me that, as he was about to sign a contract, the American army officer representing the CPA had crossed out the original price and doubled it. The Iraqi protested that the original price was enough. The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1 million) was his retirement package. I guess we can call it the GOP approach to pension reform in action. Meanwhile, here's what my friend Chris Allbritton at Back to Iraq 3.0 has to say about the condition of Iraq's hospitals -- which became a rather critical issue for him recently when his interpreter and his housekeeper were both badly wounded by an IED: While my colleague . . . handled the local medical arrangements, I handled the Jordanian side of the issue, and even flew with Capt. Salah to Amman to make sure he got into King Hussein Medical City all right. (No slam on Iraqi doctors, who are quite capable, but their hospitals just don't have the equipment or supplies to do more than WWI-style battlefield medicine . . . Abu Karam [who went to a Iraqi hospital] continues to take anti-biotics and other injections because the hospital only bound his wounds and stopped the bleeding. They never gave him shots for tetanus or anything else. Yet another problem with supplies in the hospitals. I wonder if our modern-day Milo Minderbinder was able to get the bloodstains off his "retirement package." Now all this would be bad enough, but the New Pravda tells us that Sy Hersh is reporting (the story itself isn't up yet at the New Yorker) that the Cheney administration took another huge slug of somebody's money and used it to subsidize Iyad Allawi and his gang of Baathist retreads in last January's elections. (Allawi: "Fuck the purple thumbs, jerk offs, just gimme the cash.") Hersh reports that the administration proceeded with the covert plan over the Congressional objections. Several senior Bush administration officials disputed that, although they recalled renewed discussions within the administration last fall about how the United States might counter what was seen as extensive Iranian support to pro-Iranian Shiite parties. As always, the slogan "best democracy money can buy" isn't just for domestic use. According to the Times, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi screamed bloody murder (or bloody fraud, anyway) about the plan, causing the White House to back down. But according to Hersh (as quoted by the Times) the Cheneyites refused to take no for answer -- or maybe it would be more accurate to say that Cheney gave Pelosi the same answer he gave Pat Leahy. In any case, Hersh says the operation went ahead, using "funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress." I wouldn't be surprised to learn they contracted the whole enterprise out to Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist. But my real point is this: Given how much untraceable cash has disappeared down the Iraqi drain, anyone care to place any bets on what sewer pipe "funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress" might have been siphoned from? Sure beats the hell out of selling missiles to the Iranians. If Ollie North had had that kind of dough at his disposal, he probably could have run the Sandinistas out of Nicaragua and chased the Democrats completely out of Congress. Tough luck Ollie -- I guess you were born just a little too early. billmon.org

To: redfish who wrote (28899)	7/18/2005 7:24:43 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 362296

Greg Palast Is Making Sense jameswolcott.com

To: redfish who wrote (28899)	7/18/2005 10:36:37 AM
From: James Calladine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362296

Thanks for posting that. Justin Raimondo is, I think, dead-on in his comments. How many people would have visualized Judith Miller as a multi-directional link working: -- Office of Special Plans to Miller to desired destination -- Administration to Miller to desired destination -- Any source to Judith Miller to the pages of the New York Times (can you do page1?) ALL protected by "a journalist does not/cannot/will die first" before revealing a source. VERY NICE PIECE OF DECEPTIVE STRUCTURING (POSSIBLY BY THE MODERN DAY MACHIAVELLI--KARL ROVE) As suggested by Raimondo, very likely the PRIMARY relationship was with the Office of Special Plans (our soon to retire Douglas Feith, wonder why?). And the two people driving that as I understand it were Feith (on behalf of Rumsfeld) and Libby (on behalf of the Big Dick). Now we need Fitzgerald to follow the Plame situation all the way back to the Office of Special Plans and from there over to AIPAC, pausing to connect the Larry Franklin case somehow.....with the interested cooperation of the FBI.....and then... Show that actually Bush knew ALL about it always, right from the start.......! But somehow it shouldn't even stop there. Somehow it should be necessary for the Big Dick to reveal: -- his ENERGY PLANNING MEETING -- the top figures in the energy field who attended and if the money arriving (where is it, where did it go--the Florida Turnpike Authority?) could be found and traced back to its sources, the Iraq war would then be understood as: The Military-Industrial Complex writing up a Purchase Order for one war to acquire one country (Iraq), with the costs fronted by the American Public, financed with borrowed Asian money and with the payback to the Pols coming via endless overcharges of Halliburton and a myriad of private contractors. Why so few Iraqi contractors used?--they pay off the wrong people! Probably at least 10 billion in bribes! Not bad for a relatively few years work! Enough money to look after all the key players. And we see that Sharon is getting his bid in for a quarter a mil per settler--how much of that will trickle down to the "settlers" after deducting all the "tactical" expenses...? And of course, this whole "grand event" could NOT have been staged without 9/11. Did the same gang pull off that number? Namaste! Jim