Libya and Camp X Ray

You probably haven't heard the story of the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian who have been sentenced to death in Libya. After an HIV outbreak in Benghazi hospital that infected over 400 children in 1998, the Libyan government arrested all foreign workers at the hospital. Eventually, they settled on charging the six.

The amount of hysteria Libya has responded with might be funny ... if human lives weren't at stake.

Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddafi, has made a spectacle of himself, accusing the US of releasing the virus after experiments on Haitians ran out of control. He insists that the infection was a plot by the CIA or Moussad against the people of his country.

Instead of recognizing the true cause, tragically underfunded and equipped hospitals strangled for decades by US sanctions, Gaddafi has instead chosen to live in fantasy land.

When some of the women held reported that they had been beaten and raped by their guards, the Libyan government responded by leveling further charges against them. Slander.

Despite pleas from around the globe and offers by the British to release a Libyan prisoner in exchange for the nurses, Gaddafi remains unmoved. Meanwhile, the nurses continue to fight for their freedom, filing an appeal that could eventually lead to their release.

Now that you're caught up on that, let's talk about Camp X-Ray.

Better known as Guantanamo, the detention center for men and children collected by the US government accused of either being terrorists or aiding them.

Those Bulgarian nurses in ass-backward Islamic Libya? Their on their Nteenth appeal (I mean really, after three who keeps track?). But you will be happy to know that no such Amnesty will be granted to the 435-ish potential sworn enemies of the United States. Because on Tuesday, a US court decided that Guantanamo Detainees Can't Challenge Cases. This adds to the list:

Due Process for Detainees Lacking Under New Gitmo Panel
Judge Rules Gitmo Detainees Have No Rights
US Military Wants War Crimes Compound for Gitmo Detainees
Bush: Guantanamo Detainees Have No Rights in US Courts
Guilty Until Confirmed Guilty
Guantanamo Defense Lawyer Forced Out of Navy
Guantanamo Detainees May Remain Indefinitely
Bush seeks to extend Guantánamo procedures to American citizens

and of course:

Pentagon Confirms Use of Guantanamo Sex Tactics

Although no charges have ever, ever been filed against the prisoners, no evidence has ever been made public of their crimes, countless innocents were jailed in vengeful grudge settlements, and nothing good can come from the prison we are going to refuse them the rights extended by such champions of human rights as Libya?

Libyan hysteria. American hysteria. Libyan torture. American torture. I guess the only thing that separates us from the barbarians in other nations is who extends the most civil rights. Because as Robert Ingersoll said, "Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself."

Which means it's not looking so good for US. Now Halliburton, that's another story...

~Lila Schow
Because Responsible Citizens Clean Up After Their Government
http://goodusgov.org/

Our Tax Dollars Hard At Work

I guess Bush and his minions are desperate to prove that they are the best at something. Of course, it's not education, health care, foreign policy... no, of course not. No, they get to hang their hats on the fact that this is the single most corrupt Administration in the history of the United States. Let's all give them a big round of applause for that, huh? I must say, that's quite an achievement.

The full depth of the corruption may never be known, but we're getting a clearer and clearer picture of just how rampant it is. Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Ca), new chairman of the House Government Reform committee has been conducting hearings, finally digging into the corruption, waste and fraud of the Bush Administration. And what he's turned up so far has been utterly astonishing.

We now know that the Bush Administration had ordered the disbursement of billions of dollars to Iraq with no record keeping and no oversight. Shortly before Viceroy L. Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) handed control of the country back to the Iraqis, Bush ordered the Federal Reserve to issue 4 billion dollars. That cash was packed onto pallets, loaded onto military transports and sent to Iraq. Amazing, isn't it? Huge bundles of money, 363 tons of cold, hard cash, just strapped to cargo pallets and shipped on out.

"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did," said Waxman.

Once the money planes landed in Iraq, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of meticulous record keeping detailing where that money went or how it was disbursed. I don't know about you, but I'm thinking that a lot of it was disbursed to private accounts in Switzerland and the Grand Caymans. To date, there is still more than 9 billion dollars completely unaccounted for and billions more wasted or handed out as bribes. In his defense, Bremer told the Congressional Committee that it would have been impossible to apply modern accounting standards in the midst of a war.

"We were in the middle of a war, working in very difficult conditions, and we had to move quickly to get this Iraqi money working for the Iraqi people," said
Bremer.

The stink has gotten so bad that even true conservatives are beginning to hold their noses. According to the American Conservative, the waste and fraud is rampant and far reaching.

At least $20 billion that belonged to the Iraqi people has been wasted, together with hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Exactly how many billions of additional dollars were squandered, stolen, given away, or simply lost will never be known because the deliberate decision by the CPA not to meter oil exports means that no one will ever know how much revenue was generated during 2003 and 2004.

This is utterly amazing. They're taking our tax dollars and quite literally handing it out of the back of trucks. There is no oversight, there is no record keeping and in some cases, it seems that they don't even know who they're handing money to!

From the American Conservative:

Money also disappeared in truckloads and by helicopter. The CPA reportedly distributed funds to contractors in bags off the back of a truck. In one notorious incident in April 2004, $1.5 billion in cash that had just been delivered by three Blackhawk helicopters was handed over to a courier in Erbil, in the Kurdish region, never to be seen again. Afterwards, no one was able to recall the courier’s name or provide a good description of him.

And this:

Paul Bremer, meanwhile, had a slush fund in cash of more than $600 million in his office for which there was no paperwork. One U.S. contractor received $2 million in a duffel bag. Three-quarters of a million dollars was stolen from an office safe, and a U.S. official was given $7 million in cash in the waning days of the CPA and told to spend it “before the Iraqis take over.” Nearly $5 billion was shipped from New York in the last month of the CPA.

And all of this waste, fraud and corruption isn't even taking the American contractors like Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater doing "work" on behalf of the government into account. That list of waste and corruption is far more than I want to even go into at the moment.

It certainly seems that a lot of money is just disappearing like a puff of smoke over there. I would venture to guess that there are a lot of people getting rich as well. Can you even imagine the good that could have been done in this country with those countless billions that have been stolen or wasted in Iraq? With all of that money, we could have fed countless millions of homeless men, women and children. We could have given health care to the uninsured. We could have vastly improved our education system nationwide. We could have, you know, rebuilt New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. There are so many good things that could have been done with that amount of money here in this country. But no, the robber barons of the Bush Administration are more interested in fattening up their own bank accounts rather than do good works on behalf of this country and our people.

Hundreds of billions of our tax dollars have already gone to fund Bush's immoral war of choice in Iraq. In the budget he just sent to Congress, Bush is earmarking nearly a trillion dollars more. And this is the money that's accounted for. How many more billions of our tax dollars are going to vanish into thin air?

I urge everybody to write to their Congresscritter and Senators and urge them to pull the plug on the funding for this war. Fu*k these non-binding resolutions everybody and their dog is trying to debate and pass. That's nothing but a circle-jerk and we the people all playing the catcher. The only recourse we have left open to us is the power of the purse. The only way to stop this war, to stop the needless slaughter of our troops and Iraqi civilians and to stop this corruption and waste is for Congress to pull those pursestrings shut. Write your Congresscritters and your Senators. Tell them it's past time to shut down the war machine.

~Kevin S.

Gee, This Sounds Vaguely Important...

The headline reads: "Ohio Elections Officials Convicted of Tampering with 2004 Presidential Recount." But of course, most of America hasn't seen this headline because the mainstream media outlets have barely touched this story. Call me crazy, but this seems like too big of a story to only be running in the local Ohio press and alternative media sources on these here internets. Apparently, the mainstream media has forgotten that the state of Ohio is the state that handed Bush a second term on a silver platter. It seems to me that the fact that the recount of the presidential freaking election was rigged is a pretty big story. But then again, I'm not part of the mainstream media so what do I know about big stories?

Two election workers in one of Ohio's most densely populated areas and traditional Democratic stronghold, Cuyahoga County, were convicted of illegally rigging the county's recount. According to Erie County Special Proesecutor Kevin Baxter, the recount was fixed not necessarily for political reasons, but because the election employees were too damn lazy to do their jobs properly. Election coordinator Jacqueline Maiden and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer were both covicted of "negligent misconduct of an elections employee," a felony that carries a possible sentence of 6 to 18 months in prison. A third woman, Rosie Grier, the assistant manager of the board's ballot department was indicted but acquitted of the charges.

Under Ohio law, a county is supposed to randomly count 3% of its ballots by hand and by machine. If there are no discrepancies in those counts, the rest of the votes can be counted by machine. If there are discrepancies between the two supposedly random samples, a full recount, by hand, is ordered. According to Special Prosecutor Baxter, what Dreamer and Maiden did, to avoid the labor intensive hand count, was to employ a method known as "hack and stack." The "hack and stack" method, according to blackboxvoting.org works like this:

Some recounts and audits rely on so-called "random" manual counts of a small percentage of the ballots, which are then compared against the voting computer counts for those precincts. The safeguard can be defeated by manipulating the precinct selection process, or by manipulating the ballots in the selected precincts to make sure they match before counting them. This "stacks" the recount or audit so that only subsets of data that match machine counts are examined.

In Cuyahoga County, citizens noticed that the ballots arrived for the public
recount already sorted into sets for Bush and sets for Kerry. Kathleen Wynne videotaped the sorted piles and videotaped as she asked Kathleen Dreamer and Jacqui Maiden to explain the sorting and pre-selected piles. She captured them on videotape admitting that they had not chosen randomly.

So let me get this straight... there is evidence beyond the shadow of a doubt that the recount in one Ohio county was rigged. Is it unreasonable to think that there may have been election fraud in other counties? Nahhhh... I'm sure the results from the other counties were all on the up and up, right? We can take them at their word, can't we?

Oh but wait... there's more. You knew there had to be, didn't you? Oh yes, there's a wrinkle in this story that should really bear some scrutiny. It seems that both Dreamer and Maiden have chosen to fall on their swords to protect their bosses. To date, neither Cuyahoga Elections Director Michael Vu nor Cuyahoga County Board of Elections chair Bob Bennett have publicly answered a single question about the fraudulent election results. But the cherry on top is that the defense attorney for Dreamer and Maiden was one Roger Synenberg, formerly the chairman of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board. Interesting that as defense counsel for Maiden and Dreamer, neither was advised to take a plea bargain. They both could have lessened their sentences had they cooperated with the prosecutors investigating the case. Makes you wonder what dirty little secrets they would have uncovered, doesn't it?

But no, there's no story here. Nothing to see here, move along. Just ask the media.

~Kevin S.

Chaos, Confusion and Still More Death

With 112 U.S. deaths in Iraq, December was the third deadliest month of Bush's immoral war of choice. 80 soldiers have lost their lives in January, bringing the total body count to 3,080 dead. Tens of thousands of wounded. Iraq is in a state of total chaos and utter confusion as the Sunni insurgents battle the Shi'ite militias and our troops are caught in the middle with both sides taking shots at them. Unless somebody has a weapon pointed directly at them, how are they supposed to know who the enemy is? And now George W. Bush is bound and determined to drop 22,000 more American men and women into this mess, into this hornet's nest that he's stirred up. Our legislators are so intent on finding the right word to call it, whether it be "escalation" or "augmentation" or whatever today's pretty little euphamism is, that it seems like some of them have forgotten the fact that lives are being lost every single day. And things aren't getting any better. In fact, the chaos and confusion is getting worse, despite the pretty picture Bush is trying to paint. New, highly sophisticated tactics are being employed to kill U.S. soldiers.

A team of gunmen, posing as a US security team entered the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala and abducted 4 US soldiers. Iraqi security, believing the group of black SUV's to be a governmental convoy, waved them through a checkpoint and allowed them to enter the compound. The gunmen, who by accounts of the incident, spoke english, wore US combat fatigues and carried American weapons, entered the portion of the center that housed US soldiers and opened fire, killing one US soldier and abducted four others. The abducted soldiers were later found in a neighboring province about 25 miles from the compound where they'd been taken. They'd been handcuffed and executed. Three were dead at the scene and the fourth died of a gunshot wound to the head on the way to the hospital. The US military initially described the incident as a raid on an Iraqi governor's office and said that the soldiers were killed "repelling" the assault. Within hours of the AP reporting that the dead soldiers had been abducted and executed though, the military finally gave a detailed and accurate account of the incident.

"The precision of the attack, the equipment used and the possible use of explosives to destroy the military vehicles in the compound suggests that the attack was well rehearsed prior to execution," said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, spokesman for Multi-National Division-Baghdad.

Gee, that's just great. So now our soldiers have to worry about the insurgents who want to kill them, the militias who want to kill them, the random IED attacks that are killing them and now, in addition to all of that, they have to worry about the people wearing US uniforms that want to kill them. With all of that confusion swirling around them, how in the hell are they supposed to know who the enemy is? How are they supposed to achieve this "victory" that Bush keeps talking about? Adding another 22,000 people into the absolute horror show that is Iraq is only going to make matters worse, is only going to give the insurgents/militia/death-squads/terrorists more targets to shoot at.

The number of deaths in Iraq isn't dropping, it's rising. The number of attacks is increasing and the level of violence grows with each passing day. The "victory" that Bush seems to think can be achieved in Iraq is nothing but a farce. We lost this war long, long ago. But his pride and his ego won't let him admit failure, won't let him admit defeat. There is no vicotry to be had in Iraq. And our brave men and women will continue to pay the price for his mistakes and his arrogance.

~Kevin S.

Scary Oil Chart

Taken from this site (they have a pie chart there as well)

~Lila Schow
Because Responsible Citizens Clean Up After Their Government
http://goodusgov.org/