29 posts tagged “iraq”
Ahhhh, finally a Democrat who will not shirk from fighting with the republicans on national security issues! Not only that, but in Barack, we have someone who can simply and eloquently state the truth... and with that a devastating and damning argument...
Barack Obama continues hitting back hard today at the false McCain/GOP assaults on him for allegedly seeing terrorism as only a law-enforcement problem...
"I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the recent history of the United States. The other side likes to use 9/11 as a political bludgeon. Well, let's talk about 9/11.
"The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice. They are Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their sponsors -- the Taliban. They were in Afghanistan. And yet George Bush and John McCain decided in 2002 that we should take our eye off of Afghanistan so that we could invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The case for war in Iraq was so thin that George Bush and John McCain had to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein, and make false promises that we'd be greeted as liberators. They misled the American people, and took us into a misguided war.
"Here are the results of their policy. Osama bin Laden and his top leadership -- the people who murdered 3000 Americans -- have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That's the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism."
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was taking questions at a town hall meeting in Wisconsin yesterday when he fielded a rather unexpected question about who he might have helping implement his Iraq policy.
A questioner asked if Obama would send George W. Bush to Iraq, as ambassador, after the president leaves office. Obama, who was sipping from a bottle of water, seemed to almost do a spit-take at the absurdity of the suggestion.
You have got to read this front page story in the NY Times today. This just borders on farce, if it wasn't the Bush administration, I wouldn't believe that it was true... but sadly, it is only too true. I can tell you, the Joseph Heller's of the future will have no shortage of material to write the 21st century Catch-22...
How does a 22 year-old get a $300 million defense contract to supply arms to the Afghan army? First, make sure you're not zinged with a felony when police find your fake ID. Then hire a licensed masseur to be your VP. Find some shady arms dealers, make the lowest bid and voila -- you're in business with the Bush administration.
As the Times found out, AEY fulfilled that contract by dealing with a variety of shady arms dealers (one Czech, one Swiss) to get their hands on ammo stockpiles in the old Eastern bloc. And as far as ensuring the quality of the munitions? Here's how it went in Albania:
Albania offered to sell tens of millions of cartridges manufactured as long ago as 1950. For tests, a 25-year-old AEY representative was given 1,000 cartridges to fire, according to Ylli Pinari, the director of the arms export agency at the time of the sale.
No ballistic performance was recorded, he said. The rounds were fired by hand.
Not surprisingly, the Afghan army has been unhappy with the product. AEY shipped the decades-old ammo in cardboard boxes -- apparently to save money on shipping charges. And the Times reports that the boxes arrived in Afghanistan spilling out of the boxes, "revealing ammunition manufactured in China in 1966." It's illegal to deal in Chinese arms.
[T]he company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.
It just keeps getting better though... the story goes into the dude's the 22 year-old CEO's personal life, and it is just insane. He was under 21 when he started defense contracting, and was going out with a fake ID, and was caught. He only avoided a felony charge for fraud by doing a diversion program. It should be noted that the felony conviction would have made him ineligible to contract with the Defense department. He was also involved in numerous domestic disputes with various girlfriends which got the police called on him, including stalking, and physical violence. Wow, an incompetent asshole, sounds like a good fit for the Bushies!
Great post from the Tapped...
There are many differences between the first and second Bush administrations, but none more revealing than the fact that we've gone from Bush 41 "thousand points of light" to Bush 43's "thousand lies on point."
OK, Bush-the-Younger and company came up 65 short, but 935 rounds up close enough to 1,000 ... and surely some of the lies just never made it into the public record. I say we give them the benefit of the doubt on this score. They earned it.
I just wanted to say a big "thank you" to Bush, Cheney, and the whole republican war machine. Why? you ask... Well, 'cause they just helped themselves to twenty grand from me. Oh yeah, and from you. And from everyone you know.
The economic costs to the United States of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far total approximately $1.5 trillion, according to a new study by congressional Democrats....[The] report, titled "The Hidden Costs of the Iraq War," estimates that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have thus far cost the average U.S. family of four more than $20,000.
So even though I was out on the streets before the war protesting - even though I was against this stupid ridiculous war in Iraq from the get go - they still get twenty grand from me. How sweet is that?
Well, at least I'm glad that Blackwater, Haliburton, Lockheed Martin, et al. are going to get a huge chunk of that cash. I'd hate to think that republican backers, apologists, warmongers, and poor defenseless mega-corporations didn't get some of my cash too. That my friends, would just be tragic...
I just wanted to let you know that in about a minute, the US government will have spent $500,000 on the war in Iraq. Wait another minute.... yup, another half a million dollars.
Just wanted to let you know. In case, you know... you forgot...
We learned today from Sidney Blumenthal about what President Bush had been told about Iraqi WMD by then-CIA Director George Tenet in the fall of 2002:
On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.
Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.
Blumenthal talked to "two former senior CIA officers" who provided accounts of what Tenent briefed to Bush:
"Tenet told me he briefed the president personally," said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush's response was to call the information "the same old thing." Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. "The president had no interest in the intelligence," said the CIA officer. The other officer said, "Bush didn't give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up."
From TPM, read it here.
And today brings fresh news of the wonderful state of our glorious little war...
President Bush plans to ask Congress next month for up to $50 billion in additional funding for the war in Iraq, a White House official said yesterday, a move that appears to reflect increasing administration confidence that it can fend off congressional calls for a rapid drawdown of U.S. forces.
The request — which would come on top of about $460 billion in the fiscal 2008 defense budget and $147 billion in a pending supplemental bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — is expected to be announced after congressional hearings scheduled for mid-September featuring the two top U.S. officials in Iraq. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker will assess the state of the war and the effect of the new strategy the U.S. military has pursued this year.
The request is being prepared now in the belief that Congress will be unlikely to balk so soon after hearing the two officials argue that there are promising developments in Iraq but that they need more time to solidify the progress they have made, a congressional aide said.
You see a "surge" isn't what we would call a temporary thing. Bush needs another $50 billion for his war. Seriously, what's another $50 billion among warmongers? This will bring the defense budget for this year to somewhere around $700 billion. That is for THIS YEAR. Good thing that we are so strapped for cash that we have that kind of money for a war built upon lies, but no money for medical care, or basic infrastructure, or anything else except for corporate welfare...
This is a crucial post by Josh Marshall at TPM.
Beginning in the months just after 9/11 and ever since the president and his deputies have tried to float their foreign policy on the shock, fear and desire for revenge spawned by the 9/11 attacks. The first signs (though these weren't clear in their details at the time) came in the decision to pull troops away from the hunt for bin Laden himself in late 2001 in order to ready them for the assault on Iraq little more than a year later. There we have the kernel of deception which is like the original sin of the Iraq War and, because of that, keeps coming resurfacing again and again. The claim that attacking Iraq was attacking the people who attacked the United States on 9/11, that the two things were related in anything more than a mental figment.
So at the outset it was that Iraq and al Qaeda are connected and either did attack us together (as Dick Cheney frequently suggested) or could in the future (as everyone else did). Then the beginnings of the insurgency were not a problem because we were drawing al Qaeda into Iraq to fight them on our own terms. Then we couldn't leave Iraq because doing so would hand it over to al Qaeda.
As the cycle progressed there was an mounting tendency for the administration to argue that we could not abandon its policies precisely because of the scope of the failure of those policies up to the present point -- a veritable perpetual motion machine of incompetence and disaster. But setting that aside, the enduring pattern has been for the White House to ask us to make our decisions about Iraq not based on what is happening in Iraq but on what happened in New York and Washington on 9/11.
Don't look at Iraq to make this decision, look at the Twin Towers. That's been the administration strategy for over five years. So when we see the scam popping up in a slightly different guise, even if it requires getting deep into the weeds and raising an alarm over key points of word choice and emphasis, then we simply must do so. Because this is the original sin, the founding deceit upon which everything has been built and from which the entire catastrophe unfolded.
I just read this article in the NY Times this morning about the theft of a quarter BILLION dollars in Iraq yesterday. That's right, a quarter billion dollars - in cash. You don't just stuff that in a couple of sacks and blaze off in your Chevy Caprice... That takes serious logistics, and a lot of big trucks to haul that kind of stash. Just think about that. We're talking Baghdad here. Some group is going to be driving several semis, or else, a convoy of smaller trucks filled with money, through Baghdad - and not be stopped by an army post, a police cordon, or a militia? That takes some planning. No doubt this was done by one of the really bad groups of people there, probably one of the militias. Now I wonder what they are going to be doing with that kind of cash? Retire to Monaco? Fill a Swiss bank account? Hmmmm.... now many suicide vests does a couple of hundred million buy? Fuck... what a disaster this whole thing is...
BAGHDAD, July 11 — In an astonishing heist, guards at a bank here made off with more than a quarter-billion dollars on Wednesday, according to an official at the Interior Ministry.
The robbery, of $282 million from the Dar Es Salaam bank, a private financial institution, raised more questions than it answered, and officials were tight-lipped about the crime. The local police said two guards engineered the robbery, but an official at the Interior Ministry said three guards were involved.
Both confirmed that the stolen money was in American dollars, not Iraqi dinars. It was unclear why the bank had that much money on hand in dollars, or how the robbers managed to move such a large amount without being detected.
