Eideard

 
Even as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program, American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

…There is no dispute among American, Israeli and European intelligence officials that Iran has been enriching nuclear fuel and developing some necessary infrastructure to become a nuclear power. But the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to resume a parallel program to design a nuclear warhead — a program they believe was essentially halted in 2003 and which would be necessary for Iran to build a nuclear bomb. Iranian officials maintain that their nuclear program is for civilian purposes…

Not that fact has the slightest effect on the ideology of American chickenhawks.

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An undetermined amount of crude oil spilled from an ExxonMobil pipeline into the Yellowstone River in Montana, prompting evacuations of nearby residents on Saturday, authorities said.

The spill that was detected early Saturday came from a crude oil pipeline that runs from Silver Tip to Billings, Montana, the ExxonMobil Pipeline Company said in a statement. The pipe was subsequently shut down and state and federal authorities were alerted, the company said.

Nearby residents in Laurel, Montana, were evacuated in the wee hours of the morning but were able to return to their homes by 6 a.m., said a spokesman for Laurel City Fire and Ambulance…

Exxon said the cause of the rupture was not yet known and it was unclear how much oil had been released.

“We recognize the seriousness of this incident and are working hard to address it,” the company said in a statement. “Our principal focus is on protecting the safety and health of the public and our employees.”

Here – let me get my Wellies on before the crap gets any deeper.

This is the model company the Republican Party has in mind when they say we should have someone “friendly to business” running the country. I can see Mister Montana, Dick Cheney’s smiling face right now telling us “not to worry”.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have likely cost the United States $4 trillion, and have sent damaging “ripple effects” across the American economy, according to researchers at Brown University.

While President Obama recently put the price tag for the wars at $1 trillion, researchers at the nonpartisan Watson Institute for International Studies says they will cost up to four times as much.

“While most people think the Pentagon war appropriations are equivalent to the wars’ budgetary costs, the true numbers are twice that, and the full economic cost of the wars much larger yet,” the researchers wrote.

“Conservatively estimated, the war bills already paid and obligated to be paid are $3.2 trillion in constant dollars,” they found. “A more reasonable estimate puts the number at nearly $4 trillion.”

The “human and economic costs,” however, will stretch for decades, with “some costs not peaking until mid-century,” the report concludes, pointing to the care of war veterans. “Many of the wars’ costs are invisible to Americans, buried in a variety of budgets, and so have not been counted or assessed.”

While top Pentagon officials downplay the role the wars’ costs and the size of the annual Defense Department budget have had in the nation’s economic downturn, the researchers see a connection.

“The ripple effects on the U.S. economy have also been significant, including job loss and interest rate increases,” the Brown scholars found, “and those effects have been underappreciated.”

Veterans appreciate the cost of course. And they will live for many years with that cost engraved in their minds and on their bodies. Congress and the rest of our political establishment would rather focus on causing pain – rather than its alleviation or avoidance.

Oh, and BTW. Fiscally “responsible” liars in Congress who all voted to authorize this crap and whine today about the need to diminish the federal deficit – this circlejerk of death and destruction is equal to almost 30% of the whole deficit. No negotiations, No questions about debt ceiling.

Wyoming house big enough to house 2000 corporations?

Two companies incorporated at a little house in Cheyenne, Wyoming, won Pentagon contracts after their owner took advantage of the state’s liberal incorporation laws to create the firms using an alias, and then represented them as minority-owned to win favorable treatment as a military supplier. The firms and their owner were later banned from doing business with the Pentagon for providing knock-off parts.

A Reuters investigation has found that more than 2,000 companies are registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue in Cheyenne, the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business incorporation company that specializes in corporate anonymity.

Among the firms incorporated there is a small subset that make their money from government contracts.

A Reuters review of federal contracting databases found nine firms registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue have been awarded 93 contracts worth more than $1.6 million by a half dozen government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Treasury’s Internal Revenue Service, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

More than 90 percent of the contracts were awarded by the Department of Defense…

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President Barack Obama’s new executive order creating a uniform category for federal documents that are sensitive but not classified is an attempt to bring order to an unwieldy hodge-podge of 107 agency-specific terms now used across government for touchy information.

Confusion now reigns as different federal agencies use varying terms to categorize documents. Worse, agencies also sometimes use the same term but to invoke different levels of discretion. Perhaps most famously was an innovation of former Vice President Dick Cheney who, according to Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, would stamp papers “Treat As” classified when the official designation could not be obtained.

The new category will be a government-wide standard, “controlled unclassified information” or CUI.

William J. Bosanko, director of the Information Security Oversight Office within the National Archives, is heading up the government effort to standardize how sensitive documents are treated and will be soliciting public input over the next year. “It’s truly a chaotic system,” he told the Center, referring to the current state of affairs.

Advocates for open government hail the new designation as a victory.

RTFA. Anything that reduces [a] paranoid government reticence to let citizens in on whatever the hell it is they actually do with their time and our money – and [b] myriad plots and plans for classifying pieces of information to suit the security du jour – is OK by me.

Overdue.

Congress calls this nation-building
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The U.S. Defense Department is unable to properly account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money tapped by the U.S. for rebuilding the war ravaged nation…

A report by the U.S. Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction offers a compelling look at continued laxness in how such funds are being spent in a country where people complain basic services like electricity and clean water are sharply lacking seven years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The audit found that shoddy record keeping by the Defense Department left the Pentagon unable to fully account for $8.7 billion it withdrew between 2004 and 2007 from a special fund set up by the U.N. Security Council. Of that amount, Pentagon “could not provide documentation to substantiate how it spent $2.6 billion.”

The funds are separate from the $53 billion allocated by Congress for rebuilding Iraq.

Which was wasted directly by the idols of the indolent Right – Bush and Cheney.

The audit cited a number of factors that contributed to the inability to account for most of the money withdrawn by the Pentagon from the Development Fund for Iraq. It said most of the Defense Department organizations that received DFI money failed to set up Treasury Department accounts, as required.

“The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss,” the report said.

Ever notice how right-wing beancounters never seem to get round to setting up oversight or regulation on the actual spending of the money so important to their lives and well-being?

Just because a self-serving political creep talks about cutting waste and reducing deficits doesn’t mean they’re ever going to do anything other than rant their slogans in the media. That’s usually enough to get them elected. And re-elected.

Crap! They finally noticed.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

We speak often of unwinding the harm done by the years of the Bush/Cheney cabal. This may be the single largest example of profligate waste of taxpayer dollars. And Congressional cowardice in the face of Washington’s fear of being “soft” on whichever enemy rules the election hustings.

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Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration initiated new human intelligence collection programs. To that end, it detained and questioned an unknown number of people suspected of having links to terrorist organizations. As part of these programs, the Bush administration redefined acts, such as waterboarding, forced nudity, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes, stress positions and prolonged isolation, that had previously been recognized as illegal…to be “safe, legal and effective” “enhanced” interrogation techniques (EITs).

Bush administration lawyers at the Department of Justice’s (DoJ’s) Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) accomplished this redefinition by establishing legal thresholds for torture, which required medical monitoring of every application of “enhanced” interrogation. Medical personnel were ostensibly responsible for ensuring that the legal threshold for “severe physical and mental pain” was not crossed by interrogators, but their presence and complicity in intentionally harmful interrogation practices were not only apparently intended to enable the routine practice of torture, but also to serve as a potential legal defense against criminal liability for torture.

Investigation and analysis of US government documents by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) provides evidence indicating that the Bush administration, in the period after Sept. 11, conducted human research and experimentation on prisoners in US custody as part of this monitoring role. Health professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA monitored the interrogations of detainees, collected and analyzed the results of those interrogations, and sought to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations. Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity…

The use of human beings as research subjects has a long and disturbing history filled with misguided and often willfully unethical experimentation. Ethical codes and federal regulations have been established to protect human subjects from harm and include clear standards for informed consent of participants in research, an absence of coercion, and a requirement for rigorous scientific procedures. The essence of the ethical and legal protections for human subjects is that the subjects, especially vulnerable populations such as prisoners, must be treated with the dignity befitting human beings and not simply as experimental guinea pigs.

The HMO I used for the past 23 years has decided the Santa Fe market isn’t profitable enough for them to maintain a presence. They’ve become a physician-owned-practice and I guess they need to make more money than rolled in over the last half-century. So, I’m casting about, having to find a new doctor.

I’m making appointments, this week, with a few local doctors trying to find someone to carry me through my remaining years. I hope to meet someone with a conscience and backbone stronger than the sonsabitches who collaborated with the Bush/Cheney years of torture.

The United States plans to appeal a federal judge’s dismissal of charges against five Blackwater security guards accused of killing 17 people in Baghdad in 2007, Vice President Joe Biden announced Saturday.

Speaking at a joint appearance with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani in Baghdad, Biden said he was “disappointed” with the ruling, and that the Justice Department would file the appeal next week.

“The United States is determined to hold accountable anyone who commits crimes against the Iraqi people,” Biden told reporters.

The September 2007 shootout in Baghdad’s Nusoor Square left 17 Iraqis dead and two dozen wounded. The killings led Iraq’s government to slap limits on security contractors hired by Blackwater, now known as Xe, and other firms…

Last month, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina found that…the government has utterly failed to prove that it made no impermissible use of the defendants’ statements or that such use was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Each of the now-former guards — Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard, Donald Ball and Nicholas Slatten — faced 14 counts of manslaughter, 20 counts of attempted manslaughter and one count of using a firearm in the commission of a violent crime.

One of the critical examples of change offered by the Obama administration over the Cheney-Bush crime syndicate.

The Dems in Congress who hadn’t the backbone to oppose a Republican fiefdom are still there. But, now, at least, there is some leadership to direct their limpid commitment to history’s advance.

“I can’t remember which key Karl told me to press to hide all this crap!”

Computer technicians have recovered about 22 million Bush administration e-mails that the Bush White House had said were missing, two watchdog groups that sued over the documents announced Monday.

The e-mails date from 2003 to 2005, and had been “mislabeled and effectively lost,” according to the National Security Archive, a research group based at George Washington University. But Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said it could be years before most of the e-mails are made public…

The e-mail controversy dates back to the Bush administration’s 2006 firing of the top federal prosecutors in nine cities. After congressional committees demanded the administration produce documents related to the firings, the White House said millions of e-mails might have been lost from its servers. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive sued over the issue in 2007, arguing the Bush administration violated federal laws that require presidential records to be preserved.

Court records have shown that the Bush administration knew about the e-mail problems as far back as 2005 and did nothing to fix them, Sloan said.

Monday’s settlement allows for 94 days of e-mail traffic, scattered between January 2003 to April 2005, to be restored from backup tapes. Of those 94 days, 40 were picked by statistical sample; another 21 days were suggested by the White House; and the groups that filed suit picked 33 that seemed “historically significant,” from the months before the invasion of Iraq to the period when the firings of U.S. attorneys were being planned.

Also requested were several days surrounding the announcement that a criminal investigation was under way into the disclosure of then-CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity. That investigation led to the conviction of White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents investigating the leak.

Given a few civil libertarian geeks in the White House, we may yet learn even more about the corruption and cronyism that was part and parcel of the Bush-Cheney Administration. We know who the capos were. It would be useful to track who collaborated with their various deceits on the federal and state level.

I’m confident New Mexico’s senator-for-life, Pete Domenici – a hack whose core constituency was the Pentagon and the Oil Patch Boys – was one of the cogs in the machine.