US politics and election

Fat cat profit from Iraq war

When they attacked Daschel on his tax problem, GOP never talked a bit of how much money they embezzled from Iraq. That may be the reason why GOP is so fond of "war on terror". Because they always profit from a conflict, from fat budget of defense to profitable contract.

Ordinary people pay tax. Selected politicians vote for war. Fat cats make profit. That's US politics.

Quote, "A 'fraud' bigger than Madoff
Senior US soldiers investigated over missing Iraq reconstruction billions
By Patrick Cockburn in Sulaimaniyah, Northern Iraq

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff's notorious Ponzi scheme.

"I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad," said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003. ....

The end of the Bush administration which launched the war may give fresh impetus to investigations into frauds in which tens of billions of dollars were spent on reconstruction with little being built that could be used. In the early days of the occupation, well-connected Republicans were awarded jobs in Iraq, regardless of experience. A 24-year-old from a Republican family was put in charge of the Baghdad stock exchange which had to close down because he allegedly forgot to renew the lease on its building......

Often sums paid out in cash were never recorded. In one case, an American soldier put in charge of reviving Iraqi boxing gambled away all the money but he could not be prosecuted because, although the money was certainly gone, nobody had recorded if it was $20,000 or $60,000.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/a-fraud-bigger-than-madoff-1622987.html
 
Quote, "Poor Joe the Plumber Looks Lonely at His Own Book Signing

Posted by Melissa McEwan February 27, 2009.

Wow.

The event was scheduled to last three hours, but ended after 55 minutes, with Joe having sold a total of five books.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/129297/poor_joe_the_plumber_looks_lonely_at_his_own_book_signing/

How media to cheat public

Though media makes him a popular figure, he is actually not a welcome man. Or he doesn't represent the grass root people. His story is only a soap opera conducted by GOP for their campaign. He became popular because media is controlled by Republican and they need to show that Republican Party supported by grass root people. But all that is only a propaganda. A book signing tells it all. After all Republican Party is for the interest of rich people, they are minor in US. They could win the election because they control the media and the intelligence. They selected politicians such like Bush by rigged election (becuase they control intelligence) and justify the result by fake poll. (they control media).
 
kathaksung should be elected Prime Minister of JPP. He's so the bomb. His posts are like free drugs, trippy, with a thread deeper significance.
 
Pentagon's psychological war on public. It has 27,000 people work to influence your opinion.

27,000 Work in Pentagon PR and Recruiting

By Noah Shachtman Email February 05, 2009
Pao_logo2

Forget the drone stuff. Here is your eye-popping statistic of the day: "This year, the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising and public relations - almost as many as the total 30,000-person work force in the State Department."

That's from an Associated Press investigation, "which found that over the past five years, the money the military spends on winning hearts and minds at home and abroad has grown by 63 percent, to at least $4.7 billion this year."

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/02/27000-work-in-p.html
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Spy country

Soros funds infiltration of 9/11 truth, election protection, and independent journalism

By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Feb 20, 2009, 00:2


(WMR) -- WMR has learned from well-placed sources that international hedge fund mogul and financier of progressive causes George Soros has been, for a number of years, infiltrating 9/11 truth organizations, groups advocating election reform, and so-called independent journalism enterprises in order to hijack agendas and, eventually, cause the groups to collapse from within or be absorbed into larger organizations servile to Soros and his agenda.

By far, the largest group Soros and his allies has infiltrated and taken over is the Democratic Party of the United States. It now totally adheres to a corporatist line and has purged from its leadership Dr. Howard Dean and replaced him with Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, a Democratic Leadership Council adherent. The Soros faction and its allies has also seen to it that Bill Richardson, Caroline Kennedy, and others who represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party have been shut out of the Obama administration.

In many ways, Soros operation is strikingly similar to the FBIs former Counter-Intelligence Program, also known as COINTELPRO. There is also ample evidence that Soros program is linked to Israeli intelligence operations in the United States and that some presidential campaigns in 2008 were infiltrated by the joint operation, including those of Democratic candidate and former Senator Mike Gravel, and Republican candidate Ron Paul.

Soros operations, according to our sources, involve his Open Society Institute, as well as Soros Fund Management LLC, in which his son, Jonathan Soros, plays a leading role.

For Soros, his political operations in America are much the same as they are in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, and other countries: divide, confuse the political sides, and conquer.

The modus operandi is that Soros operatives either help establish progressive organizations or join them after they are established with a new infusion of a modest to substantial funding. The agenda of the organization is then altered to make it look either like a far-out conspiracy association or the infiltrators of the organization create internecine battles between factions or tamp down its fervor. In some cases, the organizations ultimately cease to exist or are combined with other Soros-controlled or influenced organizations.

In the case of alternative journalism operations, Soros operatives launch attacks, some of them highly personal, against bona fide independent journalists and question their sources and investigations. WMR has been a primary target for such operations, according to sources familiar with Soros tactics.

Soros agents of disinformation and influence have moved in to manage the stories about jailed Alabama Democratic Governor Don Siegelman, the 2004 vote fraud in Ohio, the Turkish and Israeli intelligence penetration of the highest echelons of the U.S. government, the presence of Israeli spies among the accused 9/11 hijackers in the months prior to the terrorist attacks in 2001, and Russian-Israeli Kosher Nostra criminal activity from London to Kyiv and New York to Moscow.

Overall, Soros operations are primarily focused on controlling the left through the use of censors and online gatekeepers in the media operations he funds. Recipients of Soros money are found running web sites, some of them well known; hosting TV and radio programs; and writing regularly for major periodicals.

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4391.shtml
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A prison country

Study: 7.3 million in U.S. prison system in '07

(CNN) -- A record number of Americans served time in corrections systems across the country in 2007, according to a report released Monday by the Pew Center on the States.
The U.S. correctional population -- those in jail, prison, on probation or on parole -- totaled 7.3 million, or 1 in every 31 adults.

The Pew Center on the States compiled the information from Justice Department and Census Bureau statistics.

America's prison <http://topics.edition.cnn.com/topics/prisons> population has skyrocketed over the past quarter century. In 1982, 1 in 77 adults were in the correctional system in one form or another, totaling 2.2 million people.

The United States has 5 percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of the world's prison inmates, the center said.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/03/02/record.prison.population/index.html?iref=topnews
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A lawless country

They can wiretap without warranty. They can murder without court sentence. Is that what they said that US is a land of the free - only for the ruling class?

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh describes 'executive assassination ring'

By Eric Black * Published Wed, Mar 11 2009
Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/world/asia/10terror.html?hp> that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

http://www.minnpost.com/ericblackbl..._hersh_describes_executive_assassination_ring
 
Epicurus said:
Not really. I don't even see how you can say this with a straight face.

He told the GOP base exactly what they needed to hear (but didn't want to) during the debates.

He has inspired far more new libertarian-Republicans than he could have as a Libertian.

And he has succeeded in creating an entirely new mold of Republican a Ron Paul Republican.

Candidates with Paul's views have already succeeded in winning some key Republican primaries.

It looks like we could someday have a Republican Party that adhered to Republican principles, but it's still much to early to say with certainty.
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He told the GOP base exactly what they needed to hear (but didn't want to) during the debates.

True...

Ironic, Ron Paul told Americans exactly the same thing Jeremiah Wright did about blow back.

"America's chickens are coming home to roost."

 
Value for torture

It's kind of funny to argue on such a moral topic. Morality can't be traded. But American enable it with a value.

Torture/waterboarding works. Yes, so are other illegal things. You will have proof that Rape/murder works too. And you can defend that FBI imposed very tight restrictions on the use of torture.....

Only please you don't accuse Hitler for Facist or Saddam for torture, because they just do same thing you approved.

And because some people who think they are the outlaw and can do what ever they want to and justify their crime by "it works" or "value".

That's why President Kennedy was assassinated, so was Rober Kennedy. And Dr. Martin L. King. Because for insiders, the victim are " subject to additional limits" and up to someone's "value".

Thanks for those who boast "patriot" admit of the two standards. Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tze Tung and Kin Jong Ir gave themseves the same right openly. That's totalitarian. Bush is justified by someone like Yoo, that's democratic. Is there any difference when they did same thing? In the name of value? Or you will find some excuse to say if it was done by "them", then it's savage, inhuman but when "I" did it, it's for the value of ... eh "pratriotism", "democracy"?
 
Fascists will agree to democracy if they are allowed to control the schools and the media, major political parties, banks, and large coporations. Power to the people. LOL.
 
WASHINGTON (Reuters)

The Times said a 2005 Justice Department memorandum showed that Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner questioned in the CIA's overseas detention program in August 2002, was waterboarded 83 times, although a former CIA officer had told news media he had been subjected to only 35 seconds underwater before talking.

The Justice Department memo said the simulated drowning technique was used on Mohammed 183 times in March 2003. The Times said some copies of the memos appeared to have the number of waterboardings redacted while others did not.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE53H0DG20090420
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The purpose of torture

Zhubadh talked after 35 seconds. Why still being waterboarded 83 times? --CIA wanted some "desired words". What kind of "desired words"?

Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003. -- Still remember the time to invade Iraq? March 23 2003.

Now read the following comment, you know what the purpose for torture:


The Rachel Madow show (MSNBC) tonight interviewed Pulitzer prize winning author Ron Suskind (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Suskind>) who alleges that the Bush White House authorized torture, not to ward off future terrorist attacks in the U.S. like they claim, but to force lies out of suspects, connecting Saddam Hussein's Iraq with the 9/11/2001 attack! These "Confessions" would be used to justify the Iraq war
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To legalize the torture, government issued document in mid 2002. Then we saw Libi, Zhubadah, and Mohammed were tortured until March 2003 when Bush invaded Iraq. Obviously to force "desired words" from the victime to justify Iraq war.

Bush's 'Smoking Gun' Witness Found Dead
Global Research , May 13, 2009
IndictBushNow.org

A prisoner who was horribly tortured in 2002 until he agreed - at the demand of Bush torturers - to say that al-Qaeda was linked to Saddam Hussein is suddenly dead. Several weeks ago, Human Rights Watch investigators discovered the missing inmate and talked to him. He had been secretly transferred by the administration to a prison in Libya after having been held by the CIA both in secret “black hole prisons” and in Egypt.

Under conditions of extreme torture, the prisoner, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, agreed in 2002 to supply the Bush-ordered interrogators what they sought as a political cover for Bush’s marketing of the pending war of aggression against Iraq. Mr. Libi agreed to tell them whatever they wanted in exchange for an end to the torture. The now famous Torture Memos providing legal cover for the torture were written at the same time starting in the summer of 2002.

Libi’s tortured and knowingly fabricated testimony was the source of information used by Bush to sell the war to the U.S. Senate, and the source for Colin Powell’s bogus and lying presentation to the United Nations in 2003.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are now running around saying that the torture regime “protected the country from terrorist attack.” But the torture was used for the personal political goals of Bush and Cheney: namely, to sell their Iraq invasion to a very skeptical and disbelieving country.

Having been discovered by human rights investigators two weeks ago, Mr. Libi’s story coincided with the release of the Torture Memos and the growing clamor for criminal prosecutions of Bush officials.

His testimony is the smoking gun that would reveal that the torture regime was not for “national security” but for the personal political aims of Bush and Cheney.

He was Exhibit A in the indictment that alleges that tortured confessions and the contrived legal justifications of torture set up by Justice Department lawyers in July/August 2002 were central to the launch of the war against Iraq.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died and tens of thousands of U.S. service members have either been killed or badly wounded in a war that was based on lies fortified and promoted by the most sadistic torture.

Mr. Libi is suddenly dead. A Libyan “newspaper source” says that his death is an apparent suicide. His friends don’t believe that.

We are building a movement for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor. This is not a political choice. It is a legal imperative. Mr. Libi’s death must be the first business of the investigation. When other prisoners who had been kept at secret sites were sent to Guantanamo, the Bush administration and the CIA intentionally kept Mr. Libi from being part of that transfer. Mr. Libi was publicly stating that the Iraq-al-Qaeda links attributed to him from his torture sessions were not true.

“Who was the beneficiary” from his death? Why was he spirited away by the Bush administration to hidden foreign prisons after he recanted his tortured testimony and revealed that he was forced to make false statements about Iraq

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13613
 
Quote, "Waterboarding as Torture in U.S. Law

The former Bush/Cheney administration and its apologists in the media continue to claim that it is an open question as to whether “waterboarding” (immobilizing a person, pouring water over his/her face and breathing passages, suffocating him/her and leading him/her to believe he/she will die) is torture and forbidden in U.S. law. The question is ridiculous.

Waterboarding (as it is now called) is one of the oldest known forms of torture. In the 1500s it was used in the Spanish Inquisition.

In 1898, an American soldier (Captain Edwin F. Glenn) used the technique (then called the “water cure”) on a prisoner captured in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. When reported, Americans were shocked and protests led to Elihu Root, U.S. Secretary of War (now called Secretary of Defense) ordered Glenn court-martialed in 1902 and imprisoned. A general under whose command this and other tortures occurred was court-martialed and removed from the army.

During WWII, both the Gestapo and some Japanese soldiers used waterboarding as a form of torture. The Japanese were tried after the war and at least one hung by U.S. forces for waterboarding U.S. Airman Chase J. Nielsen.

Waterboarding was declared illegal by U.S. generals during the Vietnam War. When a journalist photgraphed an American soldier helping two South Vietnamese soldiers waterboard a captured North Vietnames soldier, and published in the Washington Post in 1968, it caused outrage across the United States. The soldier was court-martialed and dishonorably discharged from the U.S. army.

In 1983, Texas sheriff James Parker was sentenced to ten years in prison and his deputies to four years apiece for waterboarding prisoners. When his case came up for clemency years later, then Gov. George W. Bush refused to pardon Sheriff Parker, specifically stating that no one is above the law.

In 1988, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment, or Punishment of 1984. It was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1994. Since the U.S. Constitution classifies all treaties that the U.S. signs and ratifies as sharing the Constitution’s status as “highest law of the land,” then the U.S. must follow the Convention Against Torture’s provisions, including those which demand prosecution of those who authorize and those who implement torture. It also forbids the U.S. to ship people to other countries that practice torture (”rendition”) and the Bush administration was guilty of that, also.

The reluctance of the Obama administration to try those responsible is rooted in several factors:

Such trials would be highly controversial. The Washington Post published a poll today showing that Americans are about evenly divided over whether or not to have such trials. Although law enforcement is not decided by popularity, the Obama administration has to pass many pieces of legislation that will take all the public support he can muster.
The Republicans have already hinted that if the Obama administration tries anyone in the Bush administration, they will consider it “engaging in criminalizing policy differences” and they will investigate Democratic administrations when they get back in power.

But the consequences of refusing to try these cases could be even worse:

Members of the Bush administration could be indicted by the International Criminal Court or by the courts of other nations under the “global jurisdiction” where human rights violations are concerned. This would put the Obama administration in the awkward position of either arresting and extraditing former Bush officials, including, maybe the former president himself or of defying international law. If nothing else came of that, it would, at the very least, impede Obama’s attempts to rebuild America’s alliances abroad. It also undermines his attempts to re-set our relations with the Muslim world.

Failing to prosecute violaters of human rights, no matter how highly placed, invites human rights abuses on Americans traveling abroad, whether civilian or military.
If members of the Bush administration travel abroad, they could be arrested and prosecuted by others with potential for a huge international incident.

Failure to prosecute violaters of human rights in the Bush administration makes it likely that a future administration will repeat these practices. In fact, by calling them “policy differences” GOP torture apologists are already hinting that they will restart torture when their party wins the White House, again. And their horror at the release of the torture memos as “exposing to our enemies the limits of American practices” seem to indicate they will try other practices in their place (electric shock to the genitals? bamboo shoots under fingernails? ).

Not too long ago (before 11 Sept. 2001), this was not controversial. No one argued for the U.S. using torturing. Nor did anyone argue that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were not really torture. This was not a liberal vs. conservative, left vs. right, or Democratic vs. Republican issue. So, the current debate means that America has lost its way morally. To that extent, the use of these torture techniques by the Bush administration and the fact that Americans find the use of torture or prosecution of torturers controversial, means that the terrorists have won-at least in part. Trying torturers, no matter who they are, is necessary for us to regain some degree of moral clarity.

http://levellers.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/waterboarding-as-torture-in-us-law/
 
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