Global Incident Map

THIS is a really interesting resource showing terrorist acts, suspicious, and other notable events overlain on a map of the world.

Fair and Balanced vs We Tried

Rupert Murdoch has come right out and said what people with functioning gray matter have said all along: that Fox News tried to shape the agenda surrounding the war in Iraq.

The Mother of All Scandals

(Of course this one doesn't count.)
From McClatchy Newspapers via Common Dreams:

Show me the money, or at least some receipts scribbled on the backs of old envelopes and grocery bags.

This week, we were treated to the spectacle of the former U.S. civilian overlord of Iraq, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, squirming in the hot seat as he attempted with little success to explain what he did with 363 TONS of newly printed, shrink-wrapped $100 bills he had flown to Baghdad.

That's $12 billion in cold, hard American cash, and no one, especially Bremer, seems to know where it went.

It may be an urban legend, but the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, the Illinois Republican, is widely quoted as saying: "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." If he didn't say it, he should have.

Bremer, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in totally screwing up the first two years of the Iraq Occupation, said that a lot of the cash was delivered to ministries of the Iraqi government to meet payrolls that were patently fraudulent.

The Department of Defense's special inspector general for Iraq, Stuart Bowen, said that a 2005 audit he conducted found that in some ministries the payroll was padded with up to 90 percent "ghost employees" - people who didn't really work there or perhaps didn't really exist.

Bremer said that he decided to provide the money to meet those payrolls, even though he knew they were bogus, for fear of starting riots and demonstrations among the Iraqis, real and imagined.

After all, the former czar told the representatives, it wasn't really our money anyway. It was Iraqi money - oil earnings and bank accounts seized from Saddam Hussein's government - that we were holding in trust.

I can think of no period in American history when we sat idly by while $12 billion just disappeared, poof, without a paper trail; without heads rolling; without someone going to prison.

And all this was happening at a time in the war when American soldiers and Marines were going without properly armored vehicles, without lifesaving body armor and even without some of the weapons they needed.

What does it take for the American people's gag reflex to kick in? When do we begin to realize that this is only the tip of an iceberg of fraud, waste, abuse and corruption perpetrated on a monumental scale by the Bush administration, its buddies among the military contractors and their handmaidens on Capitol Hill?

The cost of this war is swiftly building toward a trillion dollars. How much of that was siphoned off by crooked and incompetent contractors, greedy defense corporations and Iraqi crooks in a government that we created and installed?

No one in the congressional hearing has yet asked Bremer or the inspector general how much of that $12 billion in cash was handed out to American contractors in Baghdad, although that question begs to be asked and answered.

During the dark days of World War II, Congress established a Committee on War Profiteering and put a little-known senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, in charge. Truman, a veteran of combat service in World War I, was a bulldog.

His committee went after not only those who stole money but also those who provided shoddy or worthless equipment and supplies for our troops. He had the power to shut down an offending company or contractor, and he used it.

Where's our Truman Committee today? Where are the righteous representatives of the people charged with standing guard over our troops and our money?

We've wasted $600 billion on a war that we're losing, day by bloody day, at a time when our president presents a federal budget that cuts Medicare to find billions for more that war. The Decider boasts that if we do things his way, America's wealthiest individuals won't have to pay even one dollar more in taxes.

Meanwhile, the people's representatives, on both sides of the aisle, round up the contributions they need for re-election by putting themselves in the pockets of the very robber barons they're supposed to be investigating, interrogating and policing.

Perhaps we should let a no-bid cost-plus contract to Halliburton to construct large additions to the country club federal prisons to accommodate a population explosion in the years ahead. Or, for convenience sake, maybe we could just add a prison wing to the $500 million George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Domestic extremists and angry motorists

BBC

The police's national co-ordinator for domestic extremism said both animal rights activism and the possibility of a grudge-holding motorist were being examined as "priority lines of inquiry".

How long until animal-lovers and car-owners become potential terrorists?

Ban Secret Detentions? No Way!

From the AP via Common Dreams:

Nearly 60 countries signed a treaty on Tuesday that bans governments from holding people in secret detention, but the United States and some of its key European allies were not among them.

The signing capped a quarter-century of efforts by families of people who have vanished at the hands of governments.

...

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined comment except to say that the United States helped draft the treaty, but that the final text "did not meet our expectations."

McCormack declined comment on whether the U.S. stance was influenced by the administration's policy of sending terrorism suspects to CIA-run prisons overseas, which Bush acknowledged in September.

Many other Western nations, including Germany, Spain, Britain and Italy, also did not sign the treaty. France introduced the convention at the U.N. General Assembly in November and it was adopted in December.

Many delegates expressed hope that other nations will sign by year-end. Some European nations have expressed support for the treaty, but face constitutional hurdles or require a full Cabinet debate before signing, French and U.N. officials said.

...

Arbour said the United States had expressed "reservations" about parts of the text, but declined to elaborate, and she urged U.S. officials to sign and ratify it. She noted that America often backs activities of the UNHCR without formally signing on to them.

...

The convention defines forced disappearances as the arrest, detention, kidnapping or "any other form of deprivation of freedom" by state agents or affiliates, followed by denials or cover-ups about the detention and location of the person gone missing.

Nations that eventually ratify the text would enshrine victims' rights, and would require states to penalize any forced disappearances in their countries and enact preventative and monitoring measures.

French officials, who led the effort, counted more than 51,000 people who were disappeared by their governments in over 90 countries since 1980, Douste-Blazy said. Some 41,000 of those cases remain unsolved.

"Men and women disappear every day on every continent, for defending human rights, for just opposing their governments' policies or simply because they want justice," Douste-Blazy said. "The situation could not continue to go unpunished. It required a strong response from the international community."

Latin American states like Argentina, once plagued by disappearances, are now owning up to much of the violence that left hundreds of thousands dead or disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s. Disappearances were also a common Nazi tactic in World War II.

Argentina's first lady, lawmaker Cristina Kirchner, took part in the signing. She was in Paris in an effort to raise her profile before a potential presidential bid.

Passing the buck

This is a little out-of-date (!) but still relevant.The city guy claims the squatters are putting lives at risk.Apparently the city's responsibility is to protect people's lives. Giving people a roof over the heads appears not to be part of that responsibility. Here in France
homeless orgs have succeeded in getting a new law which stipulates the government's legal responsibility to find a home for every citizen, ie. a citizen can sue the government if it doesn't provide a home. Will the law be put into practice? Probably not. It's a step in the right direction, and the struggle continues.

Militainment Inc.

The following documentary gives a good look at the U.S. media's howlingly rabid support of the TWAT (The War Against Terrorism) with plenty of glowing predictions and pronouncements regarding the TWAT, many of which the people now say "I never said that." Also shown is the thorough militarisation of culture in the U.S. All in all a chilling view.