But back to the news.
First, The NYT reports that KBR essentially threatened the Army that if they refused to pay their fees, the contractor would simply withhold services even if that meant the Army being unable to function. A civilian overseer was pushed out when he challenged KBR's accounting.
Meanwhile, the Houston Chronicle reports that KBR overcharged the Navy after Katrina. Nice to know that profiteering is such a popular business, and that those profiteers were sheltered by this administration and Republican leadership. Or did I miss those hearings when the supposedly fiscal conservative Republicans ran the show?
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Meanwhile, as Newt Gingrich compared the recent Scotus ruling on habeas corpus to Dred Scott, John McCain called it "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." Well, Mr. Senator, when even George Will thinks you are being duped by "some clever ignoramus" (I think he means your staff--the same ones who didn't know John Hagee was crazy and that Clayton Williams thinks that rape is funny), then perhaps you need to rethink those conservative credentials. You know, the ones that say that government power is something to be feared and controlled?
Well, as Sullivan notes, "defending suspected terrorists' human rights isn't popular--especially when those suspects are foreign, have brown skin and speak a different language. But if most Americans fully understood how many innocents have been swept into the Bush gulag, they might be more circumspect." I think Sullivan overestimates the American concern for judicial fairness for these people. And the concept of the "gulag" seems to have completely faded in American memory. I remember just how stark the difference was between our system of law and the Soviet kangaroo courts.
Evidently, most Americans either have forgotten or never knew.
Oh, and speaking of gulags, a new Senate report suggests that the Pentagon (and administration leadership) have been lying about torture. Remember when the President said this?
My only point to you is, is that yes, I mean, we certainly wish Abu Ghraib hadn't happened, but that should not reflect America. This was the actions of some soldiers. That doesn't show the heart and soul of America.Yeah. Turns out that isn't true.
The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.Get that? These techniques didn't come from some "soldiers" but from the very Pentagon.
But memos and e-mails obtained by investigators reveal that in July 2002, Haynes and other Pentagon officials were soliciting ideas for harsh interrogations from military experts in survival training, according to two congressional officials familiar with the committee's investigation. By late July, a list was compiled that included many of the techniques that would later be formally approved for use at Guantanamo Bay, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and the hooding of detainees during questioning. The techniques were later used at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq.It is enough to make your heart hurt.
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Speaking of that, I saw this first when Tony blogged about how bad this was, but it just didn't register or I was distracted.
A republican friend just emailed me to tell me that the vendor selling these has been banned from further activities with the Republican party. So there is some good news from this. But the racism angle just scares me. Unfortunately, most of the racism will be cloaked in other language.
Anyway, hope you all have a good Wednesday.
2 comments:
I was indifferent toward the Lakers for years (I grew up in Portland, so I usually only seriously follow the Trailblazers), but when they became the dynasty of jerks while I was living in L.A. a few years back, I decided I'd cheer for whoever they were playing against. I was glad to see Boston run a milk truck over them last night, and at the beginning of the run when it still had all the milk.
Words fail me in describing McCain's staff. If there were a movie about a presidential candidate that featured all their antics, I wouldn't believe it.
I tend to agree with Will on this matter. While this decision isn't perfect (for one, it doesn't provide any useful guidance), I can think of probably a hundred cases off the top of my head that are way worse.
As for the pin, there are plenty of vendors that sell stuff that is far more tasteless and offensive. T Shirt Hell is one of the more mainstream ones. They were booted out, as they should have been. Was anyone wearing one there?
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