If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again… . . . → Read More: “Iranian” IEDs—made in Texas?
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The U.S. military’s demonstration of “Iranian” weapons in Iraq fails to convince… . . . → Read More: More twisted ‘intelligence’ on “Iranian IEDs” in Iraq There’s a revealing tidbit in a “Sporting Scene” article in the current New Yorker that sheds some light on today’s front page Washington Post story about how the Bush administration wants American troops to start killing Iranians in Iraq… . . . → Read More: “I got to figure out Iran”: Condoleezza Rice advances a pawn Media Bloggers Association president Robert Cox has secured press credentials to be shared among members of the organization during the upcoming perjury trial of Dick Cheney’s top assistant, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. BTC News White House correspondent Eric Brewer is tentatively scheduled to participate in the coverage. The witness list for the high-profile trial is . . . → Read More: BTC News among bloggers to cover Libby trial The Washington Post had a front-page article yesterday on the major surge in Iraqi civilian deaths that occurred during the second half of 2006. The article pins the blame for the surge on sectarian strife stirred up by the bombing of Samarra’s Golden Mosque in February. But I was puzzled by the graph that accompanies the article… . . . → Read More: Blaming the Golden Mosque Last week, Nicolo Pollari, the head of SISMI (the Italian counterpart to our CIA), was fired. . . . → Read More: Italy’s top intelligence official canned The Center for Constitutional Rights and German lawyers have filed an historic lawsuit against current and former US officials including outgoing secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, US attorney general Alberto Gonzales and others accused of violating international law by abusing prisoners at Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison and the US internment camp at Guantanamo . . . → Read More: Act I in historic drama: Rumsfeld war crimes suit proceeds In his Washington Post column today, Dan Froomkin flagged a Dick Cheney interview in which Cheney appeared to acknowledge and endorse US use of the technique known as waterboarding. Q Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives? Most human rights organizations regard waterboarding as torture, and the Bush administration have consistently refused to confirm or deny the use of it in US interrogations. Now, Cheney appears to have explicitly acknowledged and endorsed its use, and even identified Khalid Sheik Mohammed as one individual subjected to the practice. Continue reading Cheney: US uses waterboarding; “It’s a no brainer for me” Undaunted by the fiasco that was Michael Brown, president Bush has told Congress to butt out of the hunt for the next FEMA chief. Brown, the Arabian horse aficionado who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency into the Katrina disaster, had no previous disaster management experience and Bush says he has the authority to appoint equally unqualified successors. What Congress did was write a set of minimum qualifications for the position into the budget authorization bill for the Department of Mothership Security. What Bush did was issue a signing statement saying that the bill “purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the President may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office.” In other words, the Congressional demand for someone with the expertise to run the office rules out most of the president’s applicant pool. (This is the same signing statement in which the president asserted the right to edit or suppress Congressionally mandated reports from Homeland Security on the agency’s compliance with privacy rules.) Continue reading Bush reserves right to name his friend Flicka as FEMA chief Yesterday’s excerpt from the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq documented president Bush’s success at spreading terror. So how much has it cost us to make the country less safe at the same time as a gang of criminal deviants in Congress and the White House work to bury for once and all whatever claim to moral authority we may have had? According to a Congressional Research Service report — unclassified and produced at taxpayer expense but officially unavailable to the public — the cost of “military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care” associated with Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terra® through the just-ended fiscal year 2006 is $437 billion. That figure is expected to top $500 billion either this week or early in the next session of Congress. CRS says 95% of the funds are apportioned between Iraq (75%) and Afghanistan (20%), with 1% going for medical care for veterans. The Iraq and Afghanistan figures include foreign aid to those countries, which accounts for about 8% of the funds appropriated for the wars there. And of course we know what happened to a big chunk of that 8%: it’s been lost to corruption, incompetence and steadily escalating violence. That’s $500 billion and counting to “shape a new generation of terrorist leaders” and increase both the “number and geographic dispersion” of religious jihadists. And as BTC News White House correspondent Eric Brewer has shown on several occasions, the NIE assessments of the worsening terrorism problem are based wholly in reality. Continue reading $500 billion and all I got was this lousy NIE-shirt |
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