GOP *FAIRLY* Branded as Racist

Oh, wah. Do you want a little cheese to go with your whine?

It is for that reason and more that I was so disappointed with Obama’s recent comments regarding Republicans and race. At a fundraiser in Florida before a majority African-American audience, the senator said, “We know what kind of campaign [Republicans are] going to run. They’re going to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. ‘He’s young and inexperienced, and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?’”

It's worth noting that Obama didn't call Douglas MacKinnon racist. And, it's worth noting that MacKinnon selected only the parts of that speech that have appeared, repeatedly, on various anti-Obama blogs and sites.

Here is an enlarged quote from that same speech, from Reuters:

"It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy," Obama told a fundraiser in Jacksonville, Florida. "We know what kind of campaign they're going to run. They're going to try to make you afraid.

"They're going to try to make you afraid of me. He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?"

He said he was also set for Republicans to say "he's got a feisty wife," in trying to attack his wife Michelle.

"We know the strategy because they've already shown their cards. Ultimately I think the American people recognize that old stuff hasn't moved us forward. That old stuff just divides us," he said.

But why not go to the pictures? I got this from McCainblogs:



These are just the ones I could show you:











Now, where would we get the crazy fucking idea that the Republicans could be racist? It's bad enough that a lot of this stuff probably comes from the wackos who pretend to be Democrats.

Wilkes Doesn't Get Enough Time In Jail

The "Duke Stir"
Americans never pay attention to what matters. Corruption during wartime? Hey, that matters. People end up dead or maimed for life because of contracting fraud. It ain't sexy, but it's real. And it matters. It matters what gear the troops get and it matters how that money is spent.

Today, something that matters happened and I doubt you could find more than a handful of people who get the significance of it.

SAN DIEGO - A defense contractor was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison Tuesday for bribing former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham with cash, trips, the services of prostitutes and other gifts in exchange for nearly $90 million in Pentagon work.

Brent Wilkes was labeled "a predatory wolf (in) self-styled patriot's clothing" and a "poster boy for war profiteering" by prosecutor Phillip Halpern. U.S. District Judge Larry Burns said he was troubled that Wilkes continued to maintain his innocence.

"If you were to do the right thing about this, today is the day to own up," Burns told Wilkes at the sentencing hearing.

Well, of course, there's no way in hell Wilkes is ever going to own up to being a world class sleaze. Isn't there a war on? Wouldn't Wilkes qualify for the Death Penalty if somehow, somewhere, there was just an ounce of shame left in the US Justice system? Twelve years for a slam dunk case like this? What do you want to bet that a whole lot of prominent people wrote the judge nice letters about Wilkes?

This is what it was all about:

Prosecutors argued during a three-week trial that Wilkes lavished Cunningham with more than $700,000 in perks, including cash, submachine gun shooting lessons and the services of prostitutes. In return, they said, Cunningham helped Wilkes secure $87 million in Pentagon contracts, mainly for scanning paper documents.

Wilkes' attorney asked for a sentence less than the eight years and four months Cunningham received. Prosecutors asked for a "significantly higher punishment," and federal probation officials had recommended 60 years.

Wilkes acknowledged no wrongdoing in a brief statement in which he asked the judge to look beyond his dealings with Cunningham.

"I am a man who cares deeply for this community, for my family, for my country," Wilkes said.

Bullshit. Wilkes cared about that contract, and nothing else. This country was at war and he profited from it by bribing a Congressman. AND THAT DOESN'T GET YOU THE DEATH PENALTY IN THIS COUNTRY? I mean, what the hell?

This war has been a massive transfer of spending from social programs and entitlements to a defense contracting world that is stuffed full of contracts like the one Wilkes got Cunningham to send his way. Was he the lowest bidder? Probably not. Was it rigged? Obviously. So scanning paper documents probably isn't a sexy, glamorous contract. Not like, say, providing Marines with Mine Resistant Vehicles. Except that instead of money going to something that would save lives, here's a classic case of a bullshit contract eating up tens of millions of dollars that should have gone somewhere else. Isn't it weird to see Kit Bond actually doing something decent for once? Gotta take note of that.

Anyway, this contract also went into the Homeland Security realm, including a link to a limosine company. Nice to see how that money was pissed away, too.

This is what set me off tonight, though:

Authorities said Wilkes bribed Cunningham to win work for ADCS Inc., a data and document storage company he owned.

"Wilkes coldly and successfully exploited the simplemindedness of one of this country's war heroes, now a tortured shadow of his former self," prosecutors wrote in a pre-sentencing court filing last week. "Wilkes stands now revealed as a war profiteer, a thug, a bully, a lecherous old man who preyed on his young female staffers and hired prostitutes."

BULLSHIT! How loud can I scream it. Bull fucking shit.

Cunningham was not duped--Cunningham made a fucking list of what he wanted! He wrote it out on his office stationery! He knew exactly what he wanted, including spending time doing weird shit with women on the Duke Stir.

This went back years, for crying out loud. And Cunningham was always the bully in the room, NOT the one being bullied:

In the case of Cunningham, Stern remembers an incident he witnessed in 1996 between Duke and Congressman Barney Frank, the gay congressman from Massachusetts, embroiled at the time in his own scandal involving a former male companion who had been caught running a prostitution ring from the congressman's basement. The exchange happened at a meeting on immigration during which Republicans were maneuvering to prevent Democrats from commenting on a related bill. Frank objected to being steamrolled.

“When Barney started to make his plea, Cunningham cut him off and said, ‘Well, would you like to talk about prostitutes and basements,'” Stern remembered. “The room just fell silent.”

Yeah, so good riddance to you, Mr. Wilkes. May you rot in prison and then find a way to rot in hell as well.

Cunningham gets to rot with you...

The Phony Soldier as CEO

Blue Girl picked up on this guy last week, but neither one of us got around to doing much with the story because, well, we're busy people and there was so much going on.

How is it that several actual Veterans can work for a man who "claims" to have been a Veteran but never actually served? I'm scratching my head because nothing in this story makes sense. These are people at the executive level. There's a former one-star General who works for a man claiming military service. Did they ever sit down and talk? Did they ever compare notes? Or are the executives at this company complicit in hiding the fact that the owner of the company didn't serve because it would drive away business? Because the easiest thing in the world to spot is a phony Veteran, and what should follow when one discovers that the CEO of the company you work for is lying about being a Veteran are outrage and resignations.

Here's what we know about Barrett H. Moore: he is a donor to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth AND a donor to George W Bush. He apparently shares with those entities an affinity for lying and filing bankruptcy. He has, working for him, some very distinguished people who actually served in the military.

Here's the story of a phony soldier:

In December 2003, the founders of Triple Canopy, a private security firm in Baghdad, caught their first big break, signing a contract with the Coalition Provisional Authority governing Iraq. Within four months, Triple Canopy had signed six contracts worth more than $28 million to guard U.S. facilities throughout Iraq.

For the military veterans who founded the company and Barrett H. Moore, who was then Triple Canopy's chief executive officer, these agreements launched the company on the path to what it is today: one of the leading private military contractors, sharing a $1 billion contract with Blackwater USA and DynCorp to guard U.S. personnel in the Middle East.

Moore, 43, a Chicago businessman, now presents himself as a former U.S. Army Intelligence officer and business "visionary" who revolutionized the private security market but an Army spokesman said Moore was never an officer and never had intelligence training. Moore, fired by Triple Canopy in 2004, has launched a new private security firm called Sovereign Deed. He has parlayed his Triple Canopy success into political influence, persuading Republican and Democratic state officials to rewrite state law so that Sovereign Deed can receive $10 million in tax abatements and other incentives to establish a "national response center" for its private disaster relief business in northern Michigan.

I'd sure like to find out what was paid to those state officials--whether it was in campaign contributions or drinks and dinner--to get such a sweet deal.

In promoting Sovereign Deed, Moore has emphasized the military expertise of himself and the company's top officials. On the company's Web site, Moore states that he "served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, specializing in issues related to the non-proliferation of biological weapons and related weapons of mass destruction (WMD)."

What Moore's Pentagon patrons and political allies in Michigan have not known is the true story of Moore's military service. According to U.S. Army record keepers, Moore never completed his Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program in college and was discharged from an inactive branch of the Reserves in 1994 without ever having gone through basic training. Contrary to the claims on Sovereign Deed's Web site, Moore never served as an Army intelligence officer, or in any other branch of the country's armed forces.

Moore's brushes with law enforcement also escape detection. He was convicted of three counts of criminal fraud in Australia in 1992 and served time in prison, according to court records there. An appeals court later reversed Moore's conviction. But in a related criminal trial, Moore acknowledged participating in an "illegal enterprise" to smuggle cars from Chicago to Melbourne and admitted fabricating documents as part of the operation.

Can you say two-bit crook? How did this clown ever get within shouting distance of doing major business with the Federal Government and the State of Michigan?

Moore and his associates at Sovereign Deed have emphasized military experience as a key feature of the company. The firm's spokesman in northern Michigan is retired Brigadier General Richard Mills, a former deputy commanding general for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.

In community meetings about Sovereign Deed's plans in November, Mills received hearty applause when he was introduced as a 30-year military veteran. He said he was proud to associate with veterans whom he called "the most magnificent of people."

In a phone interview Mills said that Moore was among the people who brought military experience to Sovereign Deed, adding he knew people who had served with him. He declined to provide any names.

But a spokesman for the National Personnel Records Service in St. Louis, which maintains records on all armed service personnel, said the NPRS has no record of Moore's service. Another search by the Army Human Resources Command in Alexandria, Va., determined that Moore never completed his college ROTC training at DePauw University in Indiana in 1985-86, had never gone into basic training or been on active duty or had intelligence responsibilities.

In response to questions from Michigan Messenger, a Sovereign Deed official stressed the accusation, if true, was quite serious.

"Stating that one has falsified military service goes to the very core of pride, honor, and integrity of those who have served," wrote Glenn Collins, the chief operating officer of Sovereign Deed, in an email.

So the very excellent Michigan Messenger, which deserves a mighty tip of the hat for this story, has now been "sued" because this story is "defamatory."

Michigan Messenger's reporting on Barrett Moore, founder of the Sovereign Deed private security firm, is "unscrupulous and defamatory," says the firm's attorney in a letter sent to Michigan Messenger last Friday. The letter demanded that Michigan Messenger remove from its Web site a story headlined "Sovereign Deed CEO lied about military service, records show." Sovereign Deed also requested withdrawal of another Messenger story published last week, "Hypocrisy and Ambition: What the Barrett Moore story says about America" by Ed Brayton.

If the Messenger did not remove the stories by 9 a.m. Tuesday morning, Sovereign Deed's lawyers threatened "all appropriate legal proceedings," including "likely alleging defamation, tortious interference with business relationships and prospective business relationships."

Michigan Messenger declined to remove the stories.

If the US Army says you didn't fucking serve, you didn't fucking serve. They do tend to make minor mistakes here and there. They don't confuse a dropout cadet with someone who did thirty years as a commissioned officer. It just doesn't work that way.

Here's the biographical sketch from the Sovereign Deed website--see how long it takes for them to remove this para from the page:

Mr. Moore served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, specializing in issues related to the non-proliferation of biological weapons and related weapons of mass destruction (WMD). After completion of his service, Mr. Moore continued his entrepreneurial activities and founded several organizations, including Duramitt (AMI) and Knight International (an overseas based manufacturer and trading company, respectively).

I'm guessing if you click the link today and nothing happens, it means someone had an "oh shit!" moment and took it down. I find it hard to believe that, in this day and age, someone is stupid enough to have confused a thirty year career as an active duty commissioned officer with dropping out of ROTC after a year and thinks they can simply get away with it. It's not 1971 and you really can't pull that shit these days, what with those two or three big computer databases they got now and all that.

UPDATE I - MORE ON SOVEREIGN DEED

Also on the payroll and working for Moore is Former Los Angeles Fire Chief William R. Bamattre, who resigned last year:

The city's fire chief, given his job a decade ago with a mandate to stamp out racism and sexism, is leaving amid controversy over a black firefighter's claim that his white colleagues served him spaghetti with dog food.

Here's one of the legitimate soldiers who work for Moore: former Brigadier General Richard W Mills, as pictured in 2002 with President Bush at Fort Bragg, NC:



PHOTO SOURCE: whitehouse.gov

Now, General Mills is an actual soldier with a verifiable biography:

Richard W. Mills, Executive Vice President — Strategic Development

Mr. Mills joined Sovereign Deed after having achieved the rank of Brigadier General during a distinguished 32 year career with the U.S. Army. Having served as a U.S. Army Special Forces Officer for 27 years in a variety of operational, staff and command positions, he has an extensive background in military and interagency operations.

Now, when do you suppose Moore will simply claim that his biography was "confused" with that of General Mills?

UPDATE II - BARRETT HOLLOWAY MOORE ON TRIAL IN AUSTRALIA

Here's what appears in the legal proceedings against Moore in 1992:

Page 24:

The first witness called by the plaintiff was Mr. Moore who, as a 25 year old, had come to Australia in early 1988 to work as an equity options trader with the Macquarie Bank in Sydney.

UPDATE III - PALE RIDER

I made a mistake in not more clearly stating that I think that Moore might wriggle out of this by claiming that his "bio" was confused with that of one of the legitimate Veterans at his company, and I should not have insinuated that he was claiming that he, Moore, served for "thirty years" when that is what General Mills actually served on active duty. Moore does not state for how long her served (that would reveal how much rank or responsibility he might have accrued) and that was the real point I was, clumsily, trying to get at.

A Rant

This is just a rant. I can't decide which thing to do--a dismantling of something I found last week by Victor Davis Hanson or just the latest outrage.

Rudy Guiliani went on Meet the Press over the weekend and I am glad I didn't see it. Nothing ruins a Sunday Morning like the dishonesty of Meet the Press.

de·base (d-bs)
tr.v. de·based, de·bas·ing, de·bas·es
To lower in character, quality, or value; degrade

The Republican Party has decided that it cannot achieve anything in this country until it completely and utterly debases the culture to the point where we can accept the likes of Guiliani as a viable candidate for the Presidency.

Now, the first election I paid attention to was 1984. It was a disaster. Walter Mondale stood up and told the truth--we needed to raise taxes. They all laughed. Reagan won by assuring people that wasn't the case. Not too long after that, taxes were raised. That was an honest lie, as it were--a lie that didn't do anything other than trick the taxpayers and the voters. There's no shame in lying to the taxpayers and the voters, but there's also no shame in having those same people scream "bullshit!" and not vote for you. The rule of law is not flushed down the toilet when a politician breaks a campaign promise. The Republic is not shaken by a basic political lie.

Guiliani on Meet the Press is a debasement of everything decent. A man so self-involved and self-obsessed and convinced of his righteousness basically explains that his fucking girlfriend deserves to be protected by people being paid to the taxpayers.

In no other time in American history would something so open and dishonest have ever gotten past the laughing stage. As in, when I was much younger, Guiliani would be laughed off the national stage for what he's trying to say. I mean, where are the people who would basically walk up to him and scream in his face that he's a douchebag? Where is the collective hooting and hollering of an engaged, thoughtful population? Surely, the Republican Party is not THAT bad, is it? Perhaps it is. Perhaps they have gone from collapsing on the fainting couch at the idea that a man would get serviced in the White House by a consenting adult to embracing a man who used public money--the dollars of almighty taxpayer!--to pay for someone to watch his girlfriend walk her dog. While his wife and children were, umm, living in the official residence of his office, you know, on the dime of the taxpayers. While he lived elsewhere. Oh my!

A Republican Presidential candidate told the world that his mistress deserves Secret Service Protection. You can follow the link and go look at it yourself. That's what he's saying. And this country is utterly debased by the thought that this man is anything other than an insane crank trying to grab power with both hands.

Damned near every President has had girlfriends, mistresses, friends with privileges, whatever and whathaveyou. Some of those were boys, most were girls. This is not about being Puritanical or prudish. This is about tacitly having the least bit of shame and humility to kinda keep that shit under wraps and private.

Guiliani wants to live his immaturity and his infidelity out in the public. If he can get people to accept that he will fuck around on his obligations, cheat on his wife, humiliate his children, shack up with whoever looks good and lie about it, then he can have free rein as President to do whatever he wants. He wants to debase the process and bring into the open what you're supposed to handle privately and discreetly because he doesn't want to be discreet about ruining people and running around with more power than God himself.

This is a great country. I have great faith that this line of debasement will be rejected. I know it is. I'm not worried about whether Guiliani becomes President. I can't for the life of me see how he can be.

But if he does, then everyone decent better get the hell out of Dodge, because if you liked the matinee--Cheney and Bush--you better not stick around for the main event, which would be Guiliani and his goons running wild through this country like a free-for-all nightmare of police powers, corruption on demand, and blatant lies forcefed down the gullets of an unthinking population.

Dershowitz Caught With His Pants Around His Ankles...

This is the kind of article or column that I expected--wingnuts and uninformed people are going to claim there's a bias in the intel community.

Alan Dershowitz claims bias and fraud. And he claims to know what is going on in the intelligence field. And then he goes on to claim there’s some sort of bias within the intelligence community against going to war against Iran. Uh, no. The possiblity that unfiltered bias could once again get through was removed through institutional changes. Those cherry-picked mistakes, you know--the ones that embarrassed Colin Powell at the UN--were there because the White House, which is run by Dick Cheney, suppressed all of the dissenting views that should have gone into that NIE. The intel community just wants to get it right.

And I can’t emphasize this one salient point enough—if there WAS dissent, it would be heard. If there WAS a credible piece of intelligence that pointed to a credible Iranian threat to the United States, Israel, or any other country, the intelligence community would get behind that piece of information and stand behind it. Dershowitz and his ilk cannot fathom this point.
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Dershowitz:
Stupid Intelligence
The recent national intelligence estimate that concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 is just about the stupidest intelligence assessment I have ever read. It falls hook, line and sinker for a transparent bait and switch tactic employed not only by Iran, but by several other nuclear powers in the past. The tactic is obvious and well-known to all intelligence officials with an IQ above room temperature. It goes like this: There are two tracks to making nuclear weapons: One is to conduct research and develop technology directly related to military use. That is what the United States did when it developed the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project. The second track is to develop nuclear technology for civilian use and then to use the civilian technology for military purposes.
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I had no idea that this was the preferred activity and field of expertise of Alan Dershowitz—reading the intelligence products that have been declassified for public consumption produced by our intelligence agencies. And to cite the “Manhattan Project” in a discussion about modern nuclear weapons proliferation is to demonstrate complete ignorance of what the likes of what Abdul Qadeer Khan have been doing for years. Khan claims he has been supplying Iran with knowledge. The NIE deals with that information accordingly. Nowhere does Dershowitz deal with the issue of what Khan has or has not been doing with Iran.

Here’s a takedown of the involvement of AQ Khan from 2005, and it is extremely prescient and details exactly why Dershowitz is completely rabid and wildly mistaken in virtually all of his opinions:

This raises an interesting question: In a post-AQ Khan world, is uranium conversion the chokepoint for would-be bombmakers? Alex Montgomery…argues that converting uranium is a difficult technical barrier for entrants into the nuclear club:

Although A.Q. Khan supplied both plans and parts, it appears that without the tacit knowledge required to develop nuclear weapons, successfully developing a capability requires much trial and error. ... Iran is building a yellowcake-to-UF6 (uranium hexafluoride) conversion plant at Isfahan based on Chinese blueprints. Yet Iran has had difficulties producing high quality UF4 (uranium tetrafluoride) and turning it into UF6. Although less evidence is available from Libya’s program, the lags in time and difficulties seem to indicate that similar problems were encountered there.

If you want to enrich uranium with a centrifuge, you have to convert uranium yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas, a process that requires the element fluorine. Fluorine is not user friendly.

Dr. Khan’s nuclear Wal-Mart sold finished UF6 gas, but not the uranium conversion facility (UCF) for the hardcore DIY bombmaker. Libya’s experiments were apparently unsuccessful. Libya attempted to buy secretly a modular UCF (from Japan), but never received all the modules. Ultimately, Tripoli just bought UF6 from Khan.

Iran, we now know, has also had a tough time. US nonproliferation policy probably deserves much of the credit for creating the technical problems that Iran is experiencing in attempting to create uranim hexafloride.

Woo hoo! We got SOMETHING right! But, sadly and without shame, Dershowitz goes on:
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"Iran is also building a heavy water reactor at its research center at Arak. This reactor is ideal for producing plutonium for nuclear bombs, but is of little use in an energy program like Iran's, which does not use plutonium for reactor fuel. India, Israel and Pakistan have all built similar reactors -- all with the purpose of fueling nuclear weapons. And why, by the way, does Iran even want a nuclear energy program, when it is sitting on an enormous pool of oil that is now skyrocketing in value? And why is Iran developing long-range Shahab missiles, which make no military sense without nuclear warheads to put on them?
"...the halting of its secret enrichment and weapon design efforts in 2003 proves only that Iran made a tactical move. It suspended work that, if discovered, would unambiguously reveal intent to build a weapon. It has continued other work, crucial to the ability to make a bomb, that it can pass off as having civilian applications."
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First of all--oil. Iran's oil industry is collapsing, not prospering:

At first glance, Iran looks like an energy superpower. It is the second largest oil producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). It owns 11 percent of the world's conventional oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia. It also sits on 16 percent of the world's gas reserves, the largest reserve after Russia. With rising oil prices, Iran's oil export revenues have increased steadily, from $32 billion in 2004, to $47 billion in 2006. Finally, its geographic position on the world's most important energy corridor, the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world's oil traffic passes, gives Iran the ability to disrupt the flow of oil to global markets.

A closer look, however, reveals that Iran's energy sector is a house of cards. It is neglected, crumbling and underinvested. Many of its oil and gas fields are in dire need of foreign technical expertise to help reverse their natural decline. An analysis published last year in Proceedings, a journal of the National Academy of Sciences, asserts that, "Iran is suffering a staggering decline in revenue from its oil exports, and if the trend continues, income could virtually disappear by 2015." Iran's deputy oil minister, Mohammed Hadi Nejad-Hosseinian, confirmed recently that, "if the projects for increasing the capacity of the oil and protection of the oil wells will not happen, within ten years there will not be any oil for export."

Oil may be Iran's greatest strength, but it is also Iran's greatest weakness. As such, the debate in the West on how to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons should focus less on the risky military option, or the seemingly ineffective diplomatic option, and more on a comprehensive economic warfare strategy that targets Iran's energy sector. With oil exports accounting for half the government's budget and around 80 to 90 percent of total export earnings, the surest strategy to bring down Tehran's Islamic regime is to break its economic backbone.

Here’s what Fox News had to say in 2005 about the facility at Arak, and maybe you can pick up on what Dershowitz is saying (and maybe who he gets his misinformation from):

PARIS — A heavy water reactor in central Iran should be able to produce enough plutonium for a nuclear bomb by 2007 — years ahead of its official completion date, an exiled Iranian opposition group claimed Thursday.
The National Council of Resistance said the site near Arak was already producing heavy water. Nuclear experts consider heavy water reactors a danger because they provide for a simpler way of producing bomb fuel than units using light water.
Mohammed Mohaddessin, head of the group's foreign affairs committee, said work on a 40-megawatt heavy water reactor is "near an end" and should be ready in 2006 or 2007. When that reactor is completed, the Arak facility will capable of producing up to 22 pounds of plutonium, enough for a nuclear bomb, he said.
Heavy water is used in nuclear power plants and can be used to produce plutonium for weapons.
Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that the reactor near Arak would be finished in 2014.
"The Iranian regime is engaged in an all-out race against time" to finish construction, Mohaddessin told a news conference in Paris. The objective is "to obtain plutonium to build a nuclear bomb," he claimed.

Doesn't that perfectly encapsulate how wrong these people have been? Since 2005, at least, they have been lying, whining, and spreading disinformation around in order to further some other agenda. That small snippet from the Fake News site is a crystal clear and perfect example of your Republican Crime Syndicate at work. Arak won’t be operational until 2009, at the earliest, by the way. Some say it won’t be ready for many years after that. The IAEA is now allowed to inspect it and monitor it. But who are you going to believe? Reality or the hysterical cries of so-called resistance movements (see Curveball) and Alan Dershowitz, who has apparently bought this line of reasoning hook, line and sinker?

If you get into the details, you find that the people who want war are usually the ones who can’t be bothered to deal with the details. And that’s why this country is so fucked up right now—no one pays attention to detail. But they damned sure pay too much attention to Fox News.

Your State Department At Work

McClatchy picks up the story and reveals exactly what kind of a State Department we have right now. I don't fault the career diplomats or the civilian employees of the State Department--these are people under siege from insanely corrupt and incompetent political appointees. The fault rests with whoever thought it was a good idea to let criminals run wild with taxpayer dollars in a war zone.

State Dept. retains manager of troubled embassy project
By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — A State Department project manager banished from Iraq by the U.S. ambassador and under scrutiny by the Justice Department continues to oversee the construction of the much-delayed new American embassy in Baghdad from nearby Kuwait, State Department officials disclosed Thursday.

James L. Golden, a contract employee, is still managing the $740 million project, said Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, the department's top management official.

"Mr. Golden is still . . . our project manager, and still is working with the contractor, at their base in Kuwait," Kennedy said.

This is where a little bit spin enters the story. I can't tell whether they're proud or embarrassed. I can't tell whether they're trying to express outrage or just simply flip Waxman the bone and laugh hysterically:

One State Department official with detailed knowledge of the unopened embassy expressed outrage that his superiors haven't replaced Golden.

"I find it absolutely amazing that State senior management doesn't seem to think it a trifle odd that two people under investigation . . . are still making all the management decisions under this same contract," the official said in an e-mail. The official asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation by his superiors.


So it's either a Republican who is tired of waking up in the middle of the night terrified of prosecution or a Republican tired of waking up in a puddle because their conscience won't let them rest. I can't figure out which one it is anymore because, quite frankly, this is just the outrage of the morning, here on December 7, and we have a whole day to get through. We have a whole, entire day of revelations and wrongdoing to shove our way through. When the Pentagon dumps its bad news at 6:30PM, what then? How much outrage can you display in just one day with these people?

Golden and the Baghdad-based embassy construction coordinator, Mary French, have been implicated in a Justice Department criminal investigation into how embassy construction subcontracts were issued, according to current and former U.S. officials and congressional testimony.

Neither Golden nor French has been charged with any wrongdoing.

You'd need a measure of competence, shame, and humility to actually charge someone who's done something illegal with a crime in the Bush Administration. One need not apply if you're not willing to look the other way, shove money in your pants, and let people die because you can't do your job. This is your Republican Party at work, circa 2007.

Construction and safety problems have plagued the Baghdad embassy, originally scheduled to open in September. Kennedy and other top department officials have declined to provide a firm date for when it will be ready to house nearly 1,000 U.S. diplomats and staff.

Kuwaiti-based First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Co. is constructing the embassy, which will be the largest American embassy in the world once it's completed.

Department officials defended the decision to leave Golden in place, saying it was necessary to provide continuity on the project. The department is working to overcome construction flaws that range from questions about the strength of blast walls to a fire-suppression system that failed inspection.

U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker banished Golden from Iraq after an incident last May in which a mortar round damaged a wall at the new embassy that was supposed to be blast resistant. Golden, along with First Kuwaiti, attempted to repair the damage before an investigation could be conducted, U.S. officials said.

Crocker obviously doesn't matter, does he? Don't look to him for anything more than a polite complaint. Just a hint--you resign, you give a lengthy interview to 24 news outlets, and you go on TV and you say, "these incompetent sons of bitches are pissing US tax dollars away on a project that threatens the safety of US personnel and they're not doing anything about it."

Oh, and you'll laugh, you'll cry:

New details were made public a month later during a congressional hearing, in which it became known that the State Department's inspector general, Howard Krongard, had met personally with Golden and French despite warnings from his staff that such a personal meeting would "taint the investigation," according to a congressional report.

The two embassy project managers weren't mentioned by name in the report by majority Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Golden was referred to as a "person of interest" in the Justice investigation, and French as a "subject of investigation."

But Krongard divulged their names publicly. "I would like to tell you what exactly I was doing, both with Mr. Golden and Ms. French," he told the committee.

According to the committee's report, Golden hasn't returned to the United States or made himself available for a follow-up interview since the August meeting with Krongard. Krongard has since recused himself, at Justice's request, from the embassy investigation.

Many details of the probe remain under wraps.

Thank God Condoleeza Rice is on the job--no snark about her need to shop for shoes is necessary, is it?

What The Hell Is Really Going On HERE?

While no one was awake or paying attention, the White House went to court:

FROM MSNBC: WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is laying out a new secrecy defense in an effort to end a court battle about the White House visits of now-imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The administration agreed last year to produce all responsive records about the visits "without redactions or claims of exemption," according to a court order.

But in a court filing Friday night, administration lawyers said that the Secret Service has identified a category of highly sensitive documents that might contain information sought in a lawsuit about Abramoff's trips to the White House.

Abramoff? We're still dealing with issues related to Abramoff? Talk about a story with legs. One would have thought that Jack would be sitting in his cell, having washed his hands of this and finished telling everything he knew.

But no, it gets better:

'Sensitive Security Records'
The Justice Department, citing a Cold War-era court ruling, declared that the contents of the "Sensitive Security Records" cannot be publicly revealed even though they could show whether Abramoff made more visits to the White House than those already acknowledged.

"The simple act of doing so ... would reveal sensitive information about the methods used by the Secret Service to carry out its protective function," the Justice Department argued.

"This is an extraordinary development and it raises the specter that there were additional contacts with President Bush or other high White House officials that have yet to be disclosed," said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that filed the suit. "We've alleged that the government has committed misconduct in this litigation and frankly this is more fuel for that fire."

A response by White House spokesman Trey Bohn referred to the Secret Service, saying, "We have nothing to add to the USSS. position as stated in the court filing."

Unadulterated bullshit, that's what this is. The White House is on the cusp of getting caught doing something ELSE that betrays the Constitution, ignores the rule of law, and does nothing but feed money into the Republican political apparatus.

Your Republican Party at work.

Will Abramoff STILL be a relevant issue on 2008? It's starting to look like he will be.

"I don't know him," Bush said at the presidential news conference in January 2006. "I've never sat down with him and had a discussion with the guy."

After Bush's comments, Abramoff wrote an e-mail to the national editor of Washingtonian magazine saying that Bush had seen him "in almost a dozen settings, and joked with me about a bunch of things, including details of my kids. Perhaps he has forgotten everything, who knows."

Another lie, another example of pure corruption, another stain on a record full of stains.

What else is there to be outraged about? What else have they done in the last 24 hours. I'm sooooooo glad dignity and honor have been restored to the White House. I'm so glad the adults have been in charge for the last seven years. You know, this country has been so very well taken care of by having two former oil men in charge and by having such professional corporate types running things.

Yeah, it's hard to find the appropriate level of outrage. I'm just being half-heartedly sarcastic because I just can't believe it...I can't.

Wow.

Bribes, Bribes, and more Bribes

The NY Times does a number on BAE--the British defense firm that does major business in this country--and exposes for at least a few of us some of the inherent corruption that has prolonged the Iraq war.

Britain is leaving Iraq because of political change--not because it's the right thing to do, but because the people are fed up. In Australia and Poland--more of the same. The governments in those countries would love to stay in Iraq and keep spending billions in their defense sectors. Nothing pads the coffers of a politician, regardless of who they are or what country they practice their trade, more than defense spending. Corruption is exposing the war for what it is. It's a massive transfer of wealth from social programs to the defense sector. It doesn't matter if this is London, Canberra, Washington DC or Warsaw--that's what it is.

The people have spoken and they will continue to speak. Even the Pope wants the war in Iraq to end. Wow. Talk about your non-headline headline. The Pope is Against War. Who would have thunk it?

Now the Brits aren't all that fired up about corruption--they could use their own Henry Waxman over there, I suppose, or his equivalent in rough parliamentary terms. But even they have had to look into how BAE was doing business with the Saudis and how it connected to public funds. But in this country, we go about things a little differently. A law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) is forcing the Justice Department to pay attention to how BAE has done business with the Saudis:

Much of the debate turns on the fact that BAE made billions of dollars in clandestine and questionable payments to Saudi royals over the last 20 years as part of an $80 billion contract to supply the kingdom with advanced fighter jets and other military hardware. While the investigation of BAE’s business practices has followed a circuitous path in Britain, it has recently gained independent momentum in the United States, where the Justice Department is now investigating the company.
BAE generates nearly half its revenue in the United States, and it recently acquired a major supplier of armored Humvees used by American forces in Iraq. American officials who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter said the Justice Department is examining whether BAE violated domestic laws banning international bribery and money laundering. Accounts in Switzerland, the Caribbean and elsewhere are involved, and, like Britain, the United States has a strategic relationship with the Saudis that the investigation threatens.

This decision to apply the FCPA to actual real world events shocks me, because, normally, "the rule of law" and "enforcing regulations" is a quaint afterthought left on the desk of an incompetent hack in the Bush Administration. The Saudis are the drivers behind our "strategery" in Iraq--that is, they summoned Dick Cheney and told him that the US was now going to do business with Sunni tribal leaders and give them guns and money. How much we upset the Saudis is dependent upon what they tell us we can and can't do, apparently.

But no--this is what the BAE investigation could force the Department of Justice to start looking into:

The revelation that British investigators had discovered that BAE deposited $2 billion in payments into Prince Bandar’s Washington bank accounts led the Justice Department to enter what analysts describe as the highest-profile F.C.P.A. case to date. Passed by Congress three decades ago in the wake of Watergate, it is only in the last five years that the F.C.P.A. has become a powerful tool for prosecuting domestic and overseas companies suspected of bribing foreign officials to secure business.
Justice Department officials estimate that there are about 60 such cases under investigation or prosecution in the United States, with a new, five-member F.B.I. team dedicated to examining possible violations of the act.

How enthusiastically these 60 cases will be looked at depends on whether or not the new Attorney General actually believes in the rule of law. I'm not holding my breath--it'll probably take an AG appointed by a Democrat to actually turn over the rocks and expose the corruption. Better yet, a Truman Committee could be created in January 2009.

Til then, we can only hold our head in our hands and wonder what might have been.

Excuse Me? No, We Do NOT Need to Do That

I'm sorry--did you say that we need to CHANGE the definition of privacy?

WASHINGTON — As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information.

Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.

The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans' privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering because, as technology has changed, a growing amount of foreign communications passes through U.S.-based channels.

The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people's private e-mails and phone calls without a FISA court order between 2001 and 2007.

Hell no. We're NOT going to do that.

For an official like that--and no wonder it was one of the vast number of assistants and deputies who threw this idea out there to test the reaction--to suggest that the American people have to suck it up and eat a little humility and part with their rights is ludicrous. But what do you expect these days? What do you expect when your outrage is outpaced by your inability to keep up with all the insane things we're supposed to be outraged about.

We never needed to amend FISA for the existing threats to our country. We amended FISA because the Republicans knew they were going to be caught spying on their political enemies, not terrorists. We need better Democrats to learn these issues and fight for the privacy rights of all Americans. You do not turn the eavesdropping intelligence apparatus of this country back onto its own citizens--at least, not without first getting a warrant to ensure that no one is abusing their power.

Republicans will, on January 20, 2009, at about 2PM Eastern, rediscover:

1. The Constitution
2. Privacy Rights
3. The Bill of Rights
4. Every other thing they've taken a dump on

And they will start jumping up and down and screaming about privacy as soon as a Democrat takes office. They will agitate as if the Republic itself is in danger of imminent collapse. They won't just do it for the gun nut lobby or for the paranoids and for the Black Helicopter crowd--which is about all that's left of their shrinking constituency.

No--they'll rediscover that they were supposed to be Americans during the period from January 20, 2001 to January 20, 2009. They're suddenly remember the rule of law and Habeus and the right to be free from unlawful search and seizure. They'll scream as if they've been stabbed with a million poison pens.

I say, let us have that debate now.

When I talk about better Democrats, what I mean is that I want to see Democrats step up and fight hard--don't give the telecoms immunity. They already have all the immunity they need. What we need is accountability. If they broke the law, let's sort out punishing and fining them and get BACK to the rule of law in this country.

I suspect we need to see a few hundred people marched off to jail. So be it.