Eideard

There were no burning effigies, no chanted slogans, and not even a single shoe was thrown.

George W. Bush’s typical welcome wagon was missing in action when the controversial former U.S. president quietly visited Toronto Monday for an unpublicized and private speaking event.

“We had no protests,” confirmed Michael Miller, a spokesman for Northbridge Financial Corp., which jointly presented the event with its parent company, Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd.

Fairfax CEO and Toronto billionaire Prem Watsa sponsored the lunchtime talk and question-and-answer session for more than 200 invited guests at the downtown Hilton…

Watsa had also planned to host a private speaking event with Bush on Tuesday for Tyndale University, a local evangelical Christian college and seminary, but the event was abruptly cancelled last week when opposition within the school’s community quickly mounted and a petition was launched by former students.

Alumni, faculty and students who found Bush’s hawkish legacy out of sync with Tyndale’s Christian teachings celebrated the school’s decision…

Monday’s lunch and talk lasted two hours, during which the folksy former president told jokes, talked about his memoir and the U.S.’s current economic woes. Guests then had the opportunity to have their photo taken with Bush.

I presume the Harper flunkeys in attendance had a decent meal. Otherwise, they paid to spend a few hours listening to a walking example of just how useless and backwards a politician can be elected to head the United States. Perhaps a portent of what people like Watsa hope continues to be the custom in Canada, eh?

Education Management Corp. (EDMC), the second-largest U.S. for-profit college chain, used improper recruitment practices to secure more than $11 billion in U.S. student aid, prosecutors said in a civil lawsuit.

Education Management, 41 percent owned by Goldman Sachs, illegally paid recruiters based on the number of students signed up, a violation of rules for colleges that get U.S. student grants and loans, the Justice Department said today in a complaint filed in federal court in Pittsburgh.

Prosecutors spelled out their case against the company for the first time since May, when the Justice Department joined an employee whistleblower suit. Colleges that receive federal aid are barred from paying recruiters incentives tied to enrollment because it may encourage companies to register unqualified students. The government claimed Education Management enrolled students who appeared to be under the influence of drugs.

Education Management “fraudulently induced” the Education Department to make the company eligible for more than $11 billion in federal grants and loans since 2003, according to the complaint. “Each and every one of the claims it submitted or caused a student to submit violated” the U.S. False Claims Act, the government said…

The company, which enrolls almost 140,000 students, operates the Art Institute chain, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College and South University. The company reported $2.89 billion in revenue in the year ended June 30…

The Education Department in July moved to make all incentive compensation for college recruiters illegal, removing 12 types of exemptions or “safe harbors” that were put into place under President George W. Bush.

Ah, yes – the Education President. Or at least the president who helped make education profitable regardless of sleazy practices.

The problem isn’t a new one. Nor is failure to regulate and maintain standards that inhibit defrauding people who can’t afford to attend a mainstream university.

The Temple of Doom under construction in Baghdad – US Embassy

The United States has wasted some $34 billion on service contracts with the private sector in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a study being finalized for Congress…

The analysis by the Commission on Wartime Contracting, details of which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, offers the most complete look so far at the misuse of U.S. contracting funds in Afghanistan and Iraq, where more than $200 billion has been doled out in the contracts and grants over nearly a decade.

It also gives the most complete picture of the magnitude of the U.S. contracting workforce in the two countries.

The source, who declined to be named, said more than 200,000 contractors have been on the U.S. payroll at times in Iraq and Afghanistan — outstripping the number of U.S. troops currently on the ground in those countries…

The tally of private sector contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan can be surprisingly difficult to obtain since many U.S. contractors are outsourced to subcontractors who depend on temporary labor, the source said.

The report blames a lack of oversight by federal agencies for misuse of funds and warns of further waste when the programs are transferred to Iraqi or Afghan control as the United States withdraws its troops.

The report should also blame the corrupt fracking Congress that authorized the payments – for the whole war for that matter. And then throw in the sillyass voters who trundled most of the same boom-bedazzled chickenhawks back into office for George W’s second term.

If it wasn’t a secret ballot [I know, except Floriduh and Ohio] I’d fight for a law that requires everyone who voted for Bush the second time around to fork over double income taxes until the war is paid for.

The Biblical story of Lazarus is happening again in Africa. At least it looks that way.

One moment, men, women and children suffering from AIDS are lying at death’s door, barely able to move, open their eyes, or speak. Then a few days or weeks later, they are walking, talking, laughing; truly appearing to have come back from the dead.

This astonishing transformation has been repeated all over the continent thousands of times over the past decade. And, since 2003, America has been helping to pay for it.

But a budget-slashing effort in Congress this year threatens to bring much of that progress to a sudden and catastrophic halt.

“He often talked about ‘To whom much is given, much is required,’ ” said Michael Gerson, of the sponsor of the plan. “There was a motivation here of what America should do and be; that we should be a source of hope but also a kind of conscience motivation here, very much rooted in his faith.”

The “he” in question, was President George W. Bush.

In 2003, Bush started the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR — an unprecedented, $3-billion a year program to help the world fight AIDS and has resulted in an 80-fold increase in the number of Africans receiving life-saving AIDS treatments since the program began…

When PEPFAR began only 50,000 people in Sub-Saharan Africa were on AIDS drugs; today, it’s 4 million. The cost has been driven down to 40 cents per person, per day. And in a region with more than a million AIDS deaths annually, and 16 million AIDS orphans, keeping parents alive can keep families, communities, whole countries afloat, according to the film.

Gerson concedes many Americans just don’t know about the good PEPFAR has done, but he said, “I will tell you, people in Africa know that Americans were responsible; know what was done to save these societies; and they are deeply grateful.”

And they will know that it is Americans who stopped helping – if Congress, the Kool Aid Party members who especially hate aiding foreigners along with ideologues like Ron Paul succeed in crushing the PEPFAR Program.

The Ugly American is alive and well in Washington, DC – even if he doesn’t place his well-shod feet directly on the necks of poor people in Africa, Asia and Latin America, anymore. Just as people in countries around the world remember who bombed their villages, propped up dictators with American arms and aid – they will not forget which country brought back millions of people from the edge of a terrible death only to let them slide once again into the valley of death.

Any teabaggers ever join an anti-war demonstration?

After two years of struggling to balance the rights of patients against the beliefs of health-care workers, the Obama administration on Friday finally rescinded most of a federal regulation designed to protect those who refuse to provide care they find objectionable on moral or religious grounds.

The decision guts one of President George W. Bush’s most controversial legacies: a rule that was widely interpreted as shielding workers who refuse to participate in a range of medical services, such as providing birth control pills, caring for gay men with AIDS and performing in-vitro fertilization for lesbians or single women.

Friday’s move was seen as an important step in countering that trend, which in recent years had led pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for the emergency contraceptive Plan B, doctors in California to reject a lesbian’s request for infertility treatment, and an ambulance driver in Chicago to turn away a woman who needed transportation for an abortion.

“Without the rescission of this regulation, we would see tremendous discrimination against patients based on their behavior and based just on who they are,” said Susan Berke Fogel of the National Health Law Program, an advocacy group based in the District. “We would see real people suffer, and more women could die.”

The new rule leaves intact only long-standing “conscience” protections for doctors and nurses who do not want to perform abortions or sterilizations. It also retains the process for allowing health workers whose rights are violated to file complaints.

You wouldn’t ask Republicans, teabaggers and other hypocrites to give up on the Death Panels they already support, would you?

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Germany’s former foreign minister Joschka Fischer has accused the former head of the CIA George Tenet of making implausible claims about the handling of the Curveball case by the US.

On Wednesday Tenet, the director of central intelligence between 1997 and 2004, issued a statement on his website saying he discovered “too damn late” that Curveball – the Iraqi defector who became a key source for the CIA and the German secret service (BND) – might be a fabricator…

Asked by the Guardian whether Tenet’s claims were plausible, Fischer said: “No. I don’t think so.”

Germany’s former foreign minister Joschka Fischer has accused the former head of the CIA George Tenet of making implausible claims about the handling of the Curveball case by the US.

On Wednesday Tenet, the director of central intelligence between 1997 and 2004, issued a statement on his website saying he discovered “too damn late” that Curveball – the Iraqi defector who became a key source for the CIA and the German secret service (BND) – might be a fabricator…

Any of you see this interchange on your favorite network TV news show?

Fischer said the BND realised some time before the war that Curveball was not a watertight source, and passed on his testimony to the CIA with warnings attached.

“Our position was always: [Curveball] might be right, but he might not be right. He could be a liar but he could be telling the truth,” said Fischer at a press conference in Berlin to promote his memoir about the Iraq war.

Fischer said Germany was put in a “very difficult position” when the CIA asked whether they could “have” Curveball, or at least use his evidence to justify a war in Iraq. Germany’s official position was that it would not join the coalition of the willing. Fischer himself famously told Donald Rumsfeld in February 2003 that he was “not convinced” about the case for war.

“On the one hand we didn’t want to withhold from the US any bit of relevant information we had about possible WMD in Iraq. On the other hand, we did not want to take part in any propagandistic exploitation of material, which was far from proven, to justify a war,” Fischer writes in his new autobiography, I Am Not Convinced.

Propaganda, xenophobia, bigotry and lies composed all the stuff of satisfaction for what inquiry came from Congress and most Americans. We are one of those nations who prates endless criticism of politicians and corruption – and as soon as one of them stands up and waves the flag we roll over and stick all four feet into the air.

Most Americans. The rest of us are a subversive lot – who consider truth to be a more valuable quality than obedience.

Baghdad municipal workers remove US blast walls
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Iraq’s capital wants the United States to apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city not by bombs but by blast walls and Humvees since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The city’s government issued its demands in a statement on Wednesday that said Baghdad’s infrastructure and aesthetics have been seriously damaged by the American military. “The U.S. forces changed this beautiful city to a camp in an ugly and destructive way, which reflected deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste,” the statement said.

“Due to the huge damage, leading to a loss the Baghdad municipality cannot afford…we demand the American side apologize to Baghdad’s people and pay back these expenses…”

Baghdad’s neighborhoods have been sealed off by miles of concrete blast walls, transforming the city into a tangled maze that contributes to massive traffic jams. Despite a sharp reduction in overall violence in recent years only 5 percent of the walls have been removed, officials said.

The heavy blast walls have damaged sewer and water systems, pavement and parks, said Hakeem Abdul Zahra, the city spokesman.

If you know the least amount of history you’d already be aware that we helped rebuild cities we destroyed in just about all of our wars since 1941. The big one, of course, being a war where we were attacked.

Staying up-to-date, we should at least declare a special war tax on everyone who voted George W. back into a second term in office.

Colin Powell, the US secretary of state at the time of the Iraq invasion, has called on the CIA and Pentagon to explain why they failed to alert him to the unreliability of a key source behind claims of Saddam Hussein’s bio-weapons capability.

Responding to the Guardian’s revelation that the source, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi or “Curveball” as his US and German handlers called him, admitted fabricating evidence of Iraq’s secret biological weapons programme, Powell said that questions should be put to the US agencies involved in compiling the case for war. In particular he singled out the CIA and the Defence Intelligence Agency – the Pentagon’s military intelligence arm. Janabi, an Iraqi defector, was used as the primary source by the Bush administration to justify invading Iraq in March 2003. Doubts about his credibility circulated before the war and have been confirmed by his admission this week that he lied.

Powell said that both the CIA and DIA should face questions about why they failed to sound the alarm about Janabi. He demanded to know why it had not been made clear to him that Curveball was totally unreliable before false information was put into the key intelligence assessment, or NIE, put before Congress, into the president’s state of the union address two months before the war and into his own speech to the UN…

On 5 February 2003, just a month before the invasion, Powell went before the UN security council to make the case for war. In his speech he referred to “firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails … The source was an eyewitness who supervised one of these facilities”. It is now known that the source, Janabi, made up the story.

Curveball told the Guardian he welcomed Powell’s demand. “It’s great,” he said tonight. “The BND [German intelligence] knew in 2000 that I was lying after they talked to my former boss, Dr Bassil Latif, who told them there were no mobile bioweapons factories. For 18 months after that they left me alone because they knew I was telling lies even though I never admitted it. Believe me, back then, I thought the whole thing was over for me.

“Then all of a sudden [in the run up to the 2003 invasion] they came back to me and started asking for more details about what I had told them. I still don’t know why the BND then passed on my information to the CIA and it ended up in Powell’s speech.”

Neocon lies, the self-fulfilling prophecies based on their lies, even the gullible rightwingers who still babble on about the necessity of regime change in Iraq based on these fearsome – and wholly non-existent – weapons of mass destruction need to have their foolishness turned on its head.

Creeps like Cheney and Rumsfeld still trundle about the political landscape making political hay and retirement income from their deceit. True Believers line up cash in hand to plight their fealty.

Sucker!

The defector who convinced the White House that Iraq had a secret biological weapons programme has admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.

“Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right,” he said. “They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.”

Don’t concern your pointy little head over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of your fellow Iraqis.

The admission comes just after the eighth anniversary of Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations in which the then-US secretary of state relied heavily on lies that Janabi had told the German secret service, the BND. It also follows the release of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s memoirs, in which he admitted Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction programme.

The careers of both men were seriously damaged by their use of Janabi’s claims, which he now says could have been – and were – discredited well before Powell’s landmark speech to the UN on 5 February 2003.

The former CIA chief in Europe Tyler Drumheller describes Janabi’s admission as “fascinating”, and said the emergence of the truth “makes me feel better”. “I think there are still a number of people who still thought there was something in that. Even now,” said Drumheller.

Try to put this question to a schmuck like Cheney – or any of Bush’s neocon dunce brigade – and you will certainly witness repetition of all the same lies from Day One of planning for the Iraq War. Including the lies from al-Janabi. Truth, history, mean nothing to criminals.

A planned trip to Switzerland by George W. Bush was canceled after human rights activists called for demonstrations and threatened legal action over allegations that the former president sanctioned the torture of terrorism suspects.

The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights and several European human rights groups said they were planning to file a complaint against Bush and wanted Swiss prosecutors to open a criminal case against him once he arrived in the country.

In what would have been his first European trip since leaving the presidency, Bush was scheduled to speak in Geneva on Feb. 12 at a dinner in honor of the United Israel Appeal. A lawyer for the organization said Bush’s appearance was canceled because of the risk of violence, and that the threat of legal action was not an issue…

“President Bush was looking forward to speaking about freedom and offering reflections from his time in office,” David Sherzer said in an e-mailed statement…

Organizers of a rally outside the Hotel Wilson, where the speech was scheduled to take place, had called on demonstrators to each bring a shoe, an effort to echo the assault on Bush during a news conference in Baghdad in 2008 when an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at him…

“Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he canceled his trip to avoid our case,” the Center’s statement said. “The message from civil society is clear: If you’re a torturer, be careful in your travel plans. It’s a slow process for accountability, but we keep going.”

Never forget.