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VIDEO: Rare Footage - Flight 93 crashes

Monday, December 17th, 2007

Rare Footage - Flight 93 - September 11 2001

investigate911.se/

“Ultra-rare news footage from the crash site of United Flight 93 which has never been seen again since 9/11″

Do you see any airplane?

Excerpts

”The debris is spread over a 3 or 4 mile area,

“Pictures tell the story, pictures really tell the story, the most horrifying aspect of this crash is how little debris is visible…”

“There is a large crater in the ground and tiny tiny bits of debris, the investigators have found nothing larger than a phone book.”

“There seems there is nothing there except a hole in the ground”

“Any large pieces of debris? No. There was nothing , nothing that you could have distinguished that a plane had crashed there. You could not see anything. No smoke, no fire…. You could see dirt ash and people walking around.”

Footage from NBC and Fox News. Source of video: Youtube

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VIDEO: The brutal reality of Americas police

Monday, December 17th, 2007

A shocking look at american justice . in 3 years there were 2002 people killed in police custudy.

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VIDEO: US Soldiers getting tasered in training

Monday, December 17th, 2007

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VIDEO: Cops confronted over illegal parking

Monday, December 17th, 2007

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VIDEO: Example of the 1 Minute Voting Machine Hack

Monday, December 17th, 2007

It only takes a minute to steal a U.S. Election!

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BBC should not decide how society develops

Monday, December 17th, 2007

By Janet Daley

What is the BBC for? You might think that there was a pretty straightforward answer to that question, or at least that the answer provided by Lord Reith (”to inform, educate and entertain”) could scarcely be bettered for simplicity and felicitousness. But, oh dear, no - this is a more complex world than the one into which the BBC was born.

So the great Sphinx-like question hangs over the corporation like a threat of death. In fact, that apparently philosophical inquiry, to which the BBC has devoted endless internal meditation and debate, is designed to address a logically intractable dilemma summed up in two rather more specific questions.

Quite apart from the extraordinary (when you think of it) capacity to have people imprisoned for refusing to pay to support their activities, why should the BBC have the crushing advantage over its competitors, not only in television and radio, but on the internet as well, that is provided by a huge public subsidy?

And, given that it has that £3.2 billion subsidy, why should it then seek to compete ruthlessly with commercial rivals, for all the world as if it were as dependent on advertising revenue to survive as they were?

Once uttered, those questions answer themselves - or rather, it becomes clear that they have no answer. There is no good reason why the BBC should have exclusive access to an ever-increasing subsidy when it behaves just like one more crassly competitive broadcasting company, especially as its public funding allows it to distort the markets in which it competes by, for example, offering humungous fees to celebrity presenters or running a news website whose vast resources no newspaper site could possibly match.

That, apparently, is the sound conclusion of the Conservative Party, which plans to endorse an idea that has been going the rounds for some time: that the money provided by the licence fee for public service broadcasting should cease to be monopolised by the BBC. A share of it should be available to any broadcasting outfit that proposes to make programmes deemed to be in the public interest. Not only would this be more just, but it would be a stimulus to all the channels to raise their game.

British television broadcasting is plunging downmarket in a desperate race for the “mass audience”. Serious documentaries and grown-up political discussion have been the biggest losers.

ITV has axed its last remaining political programme, Channel 4 clings desperately to the prestige of its single evening news broadcast, and BBC News 24 (which should have been the last redoubt of proper current affairs programming) is killing off Dateline London and Head to Head.

Ironically, in the supposedly cut-throat commercial environment of American television, no major network or cable news channel would dream of ditching the great flagship political discussion programmes - Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Late Edition, Fox on Sunday - which appeal to small, specialised audiences but are hugely influential.

Being able to bid for public funding to make serious, high-quality programmes, whether factual documentaries, political debates or original drama, would provide a counter-balancing influence for broadcasting organisations which now have to rely on crude market share to attract advertising revenue.

It would also put an end to the existential musings of the great BBC monolith (What are we for? Why are we here? Can we go on?) which, in the great tradition of metaphysical system building, have produced sinister, self-serving results. For, in fact, the BBC - with the help of some credulous parliamentarians - has answered its own question with a huge leap into the social policy business.

The new BBC Charter resolves the insoluble dilemma of why the corporation should be treated differently from all other broadcasting companies by elevating it on to another plane entirely. You may not have been aware of this (even though you pay for it) but the BBC - rather like M&S food in those memorable TV adverts - is not just a broadcaster. In the words of its new chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, it must be much more than a mere “commissioner, producer and transmitter of wonderful programmes”.

In order to justify its unique role (and its unique form of income) it should engage with licence payers as “citizens” as well as audiences. There is a new Charter commitment to “sustain citizenship and civil society”, which is elaborated as “reflecting and strengthening cultural identities”, as well as “promoting awareness of different cultures and alternative viewpoints”.

As Sir Michael put it in a speech last month, the BBC is being “challenged to play its part in reinforcing social cohesion in an increasingly diverse society”. He went on to give his personal commitment to that objective in these terms: “All of my previous work has convinced me that diversity both within and between local communities is a source of strength rather than weakness - and that the UK will become stronger the more it recognises and builds on that diversity. The BBC can and should help with this.”

Whether you agree with those sentiments is neither here nor there. Who precisely is Sir Michael, not to say all those hundreds of faceless programme producers, writers and editors, to decide that the UK will become stronger if it embraces diversity? Who elected them?

Sir Michael’s account of the BBC’s mission is explicitly, tendentiously and presumptuously political. Whether licence fee payers believe that their country will become stronger “the more it recognises and builds on” diversity is a matter between them and their mandated government. It is entirely inappropriate for the BBC to enforce a particular systematic view of how society should develop and how, as Sir Michael himself notes, its rapidly changing structure should be addressed.

Engaging in a clash of overtly political objectives is properly the business of political parties or opposing lobby groups, not a supposedly neutral, publicly subsidised broadcaster.

If there is a case for diversity, it must be among the viewpoints of broadcasters themselves. But I doubt that was what Sir Michael had in mind.

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British Investigator Is Subject of Probe

Monday, December 17th, 2007

By Joby Warrick

He has criticized British officials in nuclear smuggling case.

A British customs agent who investigated the nuclear smuggling network of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has himself become the target of a British criminal probe after being prominently featured in a book by American researchers.

Atif Amin’s house and car were searched last week by British authorities with warrants alleging violations of the country’s Official Secrets Act, according to legal documents obtained by The Washington Post. The action came less than two months after the publication of “America and the Islamic Bomb,” which chronicles Amin’s efforts to uncover the Khan network in 2000, more than three years before U.S. and British intelligence officials broke up the smuggling ring.

The book’s authors, David Armstrong and Joseph Trento, contend that Western intelligence agencies knowingly allowed the smuggling ring to operate for years before moving to shut it down. During this interlude, Khan passed nuclear parts and know-how to Iran, North Korea and Libya, the authors contend. U.S. officials familiar with the case have acknowledged that the Bush administration confronted Pakistan about Khan’s activities in 2003.

”It’s a story Washington and London do not want out,” said Armstrong, who, with Trento, works for the National Security News Service, a Washington-based nonprofit that hires investigative journalists to research security and intelligence topics. “If Amin can be discredited, it would distract the public from the fact that the U.S. and Britain prevented the most dangerous nuclear smuggling operation in history from being shut down when the opportunity existed.”

Amin, who formerly led a counterproliferation unit of the British customs service’s commercial fraud division, could not be reached for comment.

In the book, Amin is described as the director of Operation Akin, a customs investigation that in 2000 began targeting Persian Gulf-based companies allegedly involved in the trafficking of militarily sensitive technology. While working on the investigation in Dubai, Amin began tracing the flow of nuclear-related equipment through companies with ties to Khan, a Pakistani engineer and a key player in his country’s decades-long effort to build nuclear weapons.

In the spring of 2000, as Amin closed in on Khan at the center of the smuggling operation, he was ordered to quit the case and return to Britain, the authors state. The reason given to Amin for the abrupt change was that British and U.S. spies who were monitoring the network were worried that his questioning would disrupt their operation and expose informants.

Amin complied with his orders, but in the book he is depicted as complaining bitterly about what he says was a missed opportunity to crush the smuggling ring early.

”They knew exactly what was going on all the time,” Amin is quoted as saying. “If they’d wanted to, they could have blown the whistle on this long ago.”

Other independent researchers, including Ron Suskind, a journalist and author of “The One Percent Doctrine,” have alleged that Western governments were aware of Khan’s nuclear trading years before President Bush announced the takedown of the ring.

Khan acknowledged his role in a February 2004 speech televised in Pakistan, but he insisted that Pakistan’s military and government leaders had no knowledge of his activities at the time.

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Top Republican defies Bush

Monday, December 17th, 2007

Top Republican defies Bush, pledges investigation into destroyed CIA tapes

WASHINGTON — The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee defied the Bush administration Sunday and pledged to investigate the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes.

“We want to hold the community accountable for what’s happened with these tapes. I think we will issue subpoenas,” said Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich.

The Justice Department has urged Congress not to investigate and advised intelligence officials not to cooperate with a legislative inquiry.

“You’ve got a community that’s incompetent. They are arrogant. And they are political,” Hoekstra said. “And I think that we’re going to hold (CIA Director) Mike Hayden accountable.”

Earlier this month, the CIA acknowledged destroying videos showing the harsh interrogation of top al-Qaida suspects. Hayden said the videos, which were made in 2002, were destroyed in 2005 out of fear the tapes would leak and reveal the identifies of interrogators. Hayden said the sessions were videotaped to provide an added layer of legal protection for officers using tough interrogation methods authorized by President Bush to help break down recalcitrant prisoners.

The House panel subsequently vowed to investigate, requesting documents and making plans to call several witnesses.

But on Friday, Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein and CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, who are heading a separate Justice-CIA preliminary inquiry into the videotape destruction, asked Hoekstra and House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, to postpone the review until it’s clear where the government’s preliminary inquiry will lead. They said they could not predict how long that would take.

Wainstein and Helgerson explained their inquiry would need the same documents and witnesses the committee has requested.

“Our ability to obtain the most reliable and complete information would likely be jeopardized if the CIA undertakes the steps necessary to respond to your requests in a comprehensive fashion at this time,” they wrote in a letter to the committee. In particular, they cited the committee’s request to interview CIA inspector general personnel “because they are potential witnesses in the matter under our inquiry.”

On Sunday, Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., said a congressional review was necessary because it was an “independent branch of government.” She noted that Congress and the Justice Department have conducted many parallel inquiries in the past.

Harman said that when she was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee in 2003, she sent a letter to the CIA warning the agency not to destroy the videotapes and “they did it anyway and they didn’t tell us.”

“So I am worried. It smells like the cover-up of the cover-up,” Harman said.

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., reiterated his call for Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint a special counsel to investigate, citing Mukasey’s refusal during confirmation hearings in October to describe waterboarding as torture. Mukasey has said there is no need right now to appoint a special prosecutor.

“I don’t have confidence in the president. I don’t have confidence in the vice president. And I don’t have confidence in the Justice Department. That’s as simple as I can put it,” said Biden, a 2008 presidential contender.

Hoekstra and Harman spoke on “Fox News Sunday,” and Biden appeared on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

Associated Press

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Griffiths urged to oppose plan for national ID cards

Monday, December 17th, 2007

EDINBURGH South MP Nigel Griffiths has been urged to withdraw his support for the Government’s ID cards scheme by his Lib Dem rivals.

Former councillor Fred Mackintosh, the Liberal Democrat’s Edinburgh South parliamentary spokesman, has written to the Labour MP asking him to stop supporting the National Identity Register in which the Government wants to store the personal information of everyone in the country.

He said: “The recent fiasco at HMRC has shown the dangers of the Government holding huge amounts of information about each one of us whilst being slipshod in the way that same information is kept.

“This is a clear illustration of the real dangers of a Big Brother centralised state,” he said. ”

The Government should now abandon its ID card scheme.”

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Britain bows out of a war it could never have won

Monday, December 17th, 2007

By Patrick Cockburn

Britain handed over security in Basra province yesterday, bringing a formal end to its ill-starred attempt over almost five years to control southern Iraq.

The transfer of power was marked by a parade of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police beside the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which runs past Basra. As helicopters roared overhead it was the biggest show of strength by the Iraqi army forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The great majority of people in Basra were glad to see the British go. “You can see the happiness on the faces of everyone,” said Adel Jassam, a teacher. “It feels like a heavy burden has been lifted off our chests.”

The unpopularity of the British presence is underlined by the results of an opinion poll commissioned by the BBC showing that just 2 per cent of people in Basra believed that the British presence had had a positive effect on their province since 2003. Some 86 per cent said they saw British troops as having a negative impact.

Britain did not suffer a military defeat in southern Iraq, though it lost 134 soldiers and never really established control of the city, the second largest in Iraq.

By the time of yesterday’s handover ceremony it had 4,500 troops in Iraq, confined to Basra airport, whose numbers will be reduced to 2,500 by mid-2008.

The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who was at the ceremony in Basra, said that Britain was not handing over “a land of milk and honey”. This is an understatement, since the Basra that Britain leaves behind will be controlled by semi-criminal Shia militias and political movements whose differences are often over carving up local resources.

“This remains a violent society whose tensions need to be redressed,” said Mr Miliband, “but they need to be addressed by Iraqi political leaders, and it is politics that is going to come to the fore in the months and years ahead.”

The British Army some time ago concluded that its patrols simply provided targets for militiamen without doing any good.

The steady retreat of the British has not so far been followed by a battle for Basra between the three main contenders for power. These are the Fadhila movement, which controls much of the government, the Mehdi Army militia, loyal to the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Badr Organisation of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

All these groups control in part or in full different units of the security forces, as well as valuable economic concessions, such as Basra port, through which flows much of Iraq’s imports. Iran also retains a pervasive though often invisible influence over the militias.

Britain is officially handing over control, nominal though it may have been, of Basra to government security forces. This has supposedly long been the aim of the US and Britain in southern Iraq, but in practice both countries have increasingly favoured one only of the Shia parties, ISCI, as its favoured ally. This may eventually lead to a backlash by the Mehdi Army and Fadhila.

Violence in Basra was never as bad as it was in Baghdad or Mosul, because the city was overwhelmingly Shia. The Sunni and other minority groups have been progressively driven out. The British Army also never tried to impose its authority on the four southern provinces of Iraq to the degree that the US forces tried to win control of central Iraq.

The area where they were meant to be bringing a better life is one of the most devastated in Iraq. Because it was Shia it was never favoured by the over-whelmingly Sunni regime of Saddam. It was also in the frontline in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, when the city was shelled.

The date palms for which southern Iraq was famous were burned or cut down. In the marshes where the Tigris and Euphrates meet, a distinct civilisation had survived for 5,000 years until Saddam drained them so they could no longer provide a sanctuary for his opponents.

There seems to be no end to the miseries that Basra has suffered since the war with Iran started in 1980. The Iran-Iraq war was followed by the first Gulf War, and this in turn by the great Shia uprising of 1991, which began in a square in Basra when a tank gunner fired a shell into one of the omnipresent pictures of Saddam. In the fighting which followed, thousands of Shia were killed and more fled to Iran.

The fall of Saddam was highly popular in Basra, as it was in the rest of Shia Iraq, but while liberation was popular, occupation was not.

British forces had an early lesson about this when they entered the notoriously violent town of al-Majir al-Kabir north of Basra. An attempt to search for weapons led to friction, and during a second patrol this escalated into fighting, and the slaughter on 24 June 2003 of six members of the Royal Military Police who were trapped in the local police station.

Rivalries between different Shia militias remain intense and could explode at any moment. The Mehdi Army is currently obeying a truce called by Mr Sadr. His declared purpose is to root out criminals, and he wants to avoid a military confrontation with ISCI when it is backed by the Americans.

Mr Miliband may be right that Iraqi politicians are better able to handle Iraqi problems than the British, but this does not mean they are effective. The ruling elite in Basra is heavily criminalised, and although the three southernmost Iraqi provinces stand on a reservoir of oil, they remain miserably poor. For this the local leadership is partly to blame, but the leadership of the Shia community in Iraq comes primarily from Baghdad and the shrine cities of Kerbala and Najaf. Basra has always felt exploited and neglected.

Britain stumbled into a small war in southern Iraq which it did not expect to fight and where its aims were always unclear. It is now stumbling out with very little achieved and its military reputation dented, after a conflict in which a victory could never have been won.

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Congress vows to probe CIA tapes

Monday, December 17th, 2007

US Congress has vowed to investigate the CIA’s destruction of videotapes despite Justice Department advice that the agency not cooperate.

Republican US Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan said on Sunday that “we want to hold the community accountable for what’s happened to these tapes,” adding that “our investigation should move forward”.

Hoekstra said CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden should be held accountable for what he called misleading statements by the agency during his term, which began in 2006 after the tapes had been destroyed.

The Justice Department last week urged the CIA not to cooperate, saying it could interfere with the department’s investigation, however, under new Attorney General Michael Mukasey, it said it would investigate the destruction.

The CIA said it destroyed the tapes lawfully and did so out of concern for the safety of agents involved in the negotiations if the recordings were ever made public.

SB/RA

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Bush ‘twisting NIE to support Iran war’

Monday, December 17th, 2007

US intelligence agencies would not have published the NIE with ‘high confidence’ unless they were quite sure, a US analyst has said.

Bush is now trying his best to twist and warp the published report so that it complements rather than contradicts his dire warnings about Iran, Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, says.

“Still, even by historical standards, President Bush has been unusually averse to admitting error. But Bush’s reaction to the considered view of his own intelligence agencies sets a new standard. He and his aides quite obviously wish the intelligence community had kept its views to itself,” he added in an article published by the San Francisco Chronicle.

“By some accounts, the administration was building a case to attack Iran. At the very least, it was trying to convince China and Russia to accept a more stringent United Nations Security Council resolution. Now, of course, the odds of passing that resolution are slim,” Brinkley said.

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted in his speech, with obvious displeasure, that the intelligence agencies decide on their own what to report and when to make it public, he added.

“That wasn’t always so. During the buildup to the Iraq invasion, the White House pressured the agencies to produce ‘intelligence’ to support his case for war. The agencies complied. Quite obviously Bush and his aides remain wistful for those days,” the article concluded.

BGA/RE

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FOX News Almost Silent As Violence Escalates

Monday, December 17th, 2007

FOX News Becomes Almost Silent As Violence Escalates All Across Iraq

BILL CORCORAN

FOX News has fallen back into their pre-”surge” days when finding news about the Iraq war was like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. A few months back, the “surge” started to show signs of improving conditions in Iraq and suddenly FOX News discovered there really was a war going on in Iraq. However, in the past week the violence has taken a dramatic turn for the worse, thus making arguments about the “success” of the Bush policies harder to justify. Some might even say there has been a news blackout on the Iraq war at FOX News, except for a few mentions by Brit Hume on Special Report. Instead, FOX News has devoted practically round-the-clock coverage to the Presidential races along with the usual “T &A” footage designed to arouse and provide vicarious enjoyment for the conservative middle-aged white males who make up much of the FOX news viewer base.

As we have done for many weeks here, we will show through documented stories how the war in Iraq has taken a decided turn for the worse. This is the fallout from the war which never gets told by Fox News, or if it is mentioned, it is slanted to provide cover for the Bush administration.

Until recently, FOX News boasted about how Iraqi refugees were pouring back into Iraq from Syria, Jordan and other Middle Eastern countries where they had fled to escape the violence in their homeland. But now we learn there is another side to the Iraqi refugee story that is not being told to FOX viewers.

Harsh refugee life rather than improved security spurs return of Iraqi refugees

Reuters

The recent return of considerable numbers of Iraqi refugees to their homeland has been hailed by some as evidence of an improvement in the security situation inside Iraq. Many Iraqi refugees face little alternative, however, than to return to their homeland, according to a survey by the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) in Syria.

Most returnees did so because they were running out of money or because their visas had expired, states the report, with less than 15 per cent found to be returning because they believed the security situation had improved.

Few Iraqis Returning Home from Jordan
UN Refugee Agency says not encouraging Iraqis in Jordan to return to their homeland.

Middle East Online

AMMAN - Due to the fragile security situation in Iraq, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is not encouraging Iraqis in Jordan to return to their homeland, but it is ready to help those who are determined to do so, according to Imran Riza, UNHCR representative in Jordan.

“We still need to make a thorough evaluation of the situation before we can say it is safe [for them] to return. We are not in a position to encourage Iraqis to leave Jordan, but we are ready to help those who desire to do so,” said Riza, who noted that the number of Iraqis returning to their country from Jordan is very small, in contrast to Syria where thousands of Iraqi asylum seekers are returning every day.

Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, more than two million Iraqis have fled to neighbouring countries, with Jordan (500,000-750,000) and Syria (1.2-1.4 million) hosting the greatest numbers.

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Comment: There is also another part of the Iraqi refugee story that has been overlooked.

Illiteracy increasing among Iraq’s refugee children

McClatchy

DAMASCUS, Syria — Illiteracy is spreading rapidly among refugee children from Iraq, with at least 300,000 young Iraqis not attending school in the countries where their families have sought safety.

Alarmed aid workers in Syria and Jordan report that a growing number of children can’t read or write because cash-strapped parents have withdrawn them from school to cut down on expenses. In many cases, displaced families can afford to send only one of their children to school, creating a painful gap between educated children and their illiterate siblings, humanitarian workers say.

UNICEF, the U.N. education agency, is beginning a census to determine the size of the problem. There’s no program in place yet to deal broadly with the issue. Aid workers admit that the development surprised them, in part because Iraq once boasted some of the highest literacy rates in the Middle East. The Iraqis’ legendary thirst for knowledge is encapsulated in an Arabic saying, “The Egyptians write, the Lebanese publish, the Iraqis read.”

“We are finding that a lot of participants in the youth programs we’re running — a very high number, sometimes up to 30 percent per class — are illiterate or close to illiterate,” said Jason Erb, the deputy country director for emergency programs in the Jordan office of Save the Children. He said that more than 90,000 Iraqi children were out of school in Jordan.

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Comment: And now comes word of the saddest part of the Iraq war story - more evidence that veterans are not getting the proper treatment they deserve after their service to this country.

Commentary: The disgraceful treatment of our veterans

McClatchy

As you do your holiday shopping this year and think about a big turkey dinner and piles of gifts and the good life that most Americans enjoy, please spare a thought for those who made it all possible: Those who serve in our military and the veterans who’ve worn the uniform.

There are some new statistics that give us reason to be ashamed for the way that our country has treated those who’ve served and sacrificed for us.

Those statistics damn the politicians who start every speech by thanking the troops and veterans and blessing them. They indict our national leaders who turn up at military bases and the annual conventions of veteran’s organizations and use troops and veterans as a backdrop for their photo-ops.

Consider this:

* An average of 18 veterans commit suicide each and every day of the year, according to recent statistics from the Veterans Administration (VA). That’s 126 veterans who kill themselves every week. Or some 6,552 who take their own lives each year. Our veterans are killing themselves at twice the rate of other Americans.

* One quarter of the homeless people in America are military veterans. That’s one in every four. Is that ragged man huddled on the steam grate in a brutal winter wind a Vietnam vet? Did that younger man panhandling for pocket change on the street corner fight in Kandahar or Fallujah?

For the past four years, the Department of Veterans Affairs has been insisting that it’s doing everything it needs to for the nation’s veterans. That’s simply not true, particularly when it comes to the VA’s treatment of mental health issues.

As my McClatchy colleague Chris Adams has reported in a series of groundbreaking stories this year, the VA mental health system — even by its own measures — wasn’t prepared to give returning veterans the mental health care they need.

The experts say that between 20 and 30 percent of all troops returning from combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But many of VA hospitals didn’t have the special PTSD programs that experts say are vital. Soldiers returning from Iraq are allowed to slip unnoticed into their old lives, and neither the Department of Defense nor the VA does anything to monitor their mental health.

The VA keeps telling Congress that all is well. That’s not true, either. As Adams reported, the VA has been using fudged or inflated numbers to do so. And after years of promising that it’s getting a growing backlog of disability compensation applications under control, things actually got worse this year.

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Comment: Adding insult to injury, the Bush administration has named a war profiteer to head up the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Corporate profiteering against Iraq vets?

Salon (Registration may be required.)

Bush’s nominee to head the Department of Veterans Affairs is the second to come from a private company that rakes in millions from VA contracts.

President Bush late last month nominated retired Lt. Gen. James Peake to be the next secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. It is not an inconsequential wartime post: The department is the second-largest government agency after the Defense Department. And the VA faces the awesome responsibility of caring for several generations of veterans, including the crush of American service members back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

On paper, Peake seems qualified. Wounded twice in Vietnam, he retired in 2004 from his post as Army surgeon general, the Army’s top medical officer, with 40 years of experience in the field of military medicine.

But Bush plucked Peake directly from a private company that has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from contracts with the VA — and Peake himself helped develop proposals for the company to contract with the VA. That has raised questions about conflict of interest, potentially pitting veterans’ care against corporate profits. Moreover, if he is confirmed, Peake will be the second head of the VA under the Bush administration to come from that same private contractor, QTC Management Inc.

Observers say QTC Management has performed high-quality work, and its former president, who also headed the VA under Bush, withstood past scrutiny by congressional investigators. But ever since Dick Cheney left Halliburton to become vice president, Bush administration critics have sounded the alarm about war profiteering seeping into the heart of the U.S. government. The changing leadership at the VA represents a little-known turn of the revolving door between contractors and the Bush administration. Veterans’ advocates also worry that Peake’s nomination suggests the White House may be interested in privatizing veterans’ healthcare to an unhealthy degree.

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Comment: The treatment of wounded veterans is not the only disgrace of the Iraq war. Scandal continues to plague the rehabilitation of Iraq and late this week the following was reported by the Washington Post.

Inspector General for Iraq Under Investigation
FBI, Congress among those probing allegations of overspending, mismanagement.

Truthout

Over the past four years, Inspector General Stuart W. Bowen Jr. and his staff have probed allegations of waste and fraud in the $22 billion U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq. Their work has led to arrests, indictments and millions of dollars in fines. And it has earned Bowen, who had been a legal adviser to President Bush, many admirers among both parties on Capitol Hill for his efforts to identify overspending and mismanagement.

But Bowen’s office has also been roiled by allegations of its own overspending and mismanagement. Current and former employees have complained about overtime policies that allowed 10 staff members to earn more than $250,000 each last year. They have questioned the oversight of a $3.5 million book project about Iraq’s reconstruction modeled after the 9/11 Commission report. And they have alleged that Bowen and his deputy have improperly snooped into their staff’s e-mail messages.

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Comment: The reason FOX News has suddenly turned a blind eye to Iraq is easy to understand in light of the fact that what is taking place in Iraq that doesn’t jibe with the past two months’ “happy talk” about the success of the “surge.”

71 Iraqis Killed, 177 Wounded

Antiwar.com

A large triple bombing killed or wounded scores of people in the southern city of Amarah. Meanwhile a smaller blast in Baghdad left over a dozen casualties there. Overall, 71 Iraqis were killed and 152 more were wounded in the latest violence. No Coalition deaths were reported.

At least 42 people were killed and another 125 were wounded during a triple car bombing in Amarah. Although small arms attacks against civilians have been increasing in recent weeks throughout Maysan province, the news of a triple bombing in Amarah stunned Iraq this morning. The area had been relatively peaceful since the British handed over control to Iraqi forces in April. British forces promise that an expected handover of neighboring Basra province will go on schedule this Sunday despite the bombing.

In Baghdad, a booby-trapped car in the al-Ghadeer neighborhood left five dead and 13 injured. In Doura, gunmen injured a policeman. Three employees were wounded during an armed attack in al-Tobchi. Mortas in al-Ganat injured three more people. Also, five dumped bodies were recovered.

A roadside bomb killed one person and wounded two others in Kirkuk.

Two Sunni tribal council members were found dead in Latifiya.

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Fresh Wave of Violence Hits Baghdad

Press TV

Fourteen people have been killed and dozens of others wounded as a fresh wave of violence hits the shattered Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

Five prisoners were killed at a holding cell on a base in eastern Baghdad’s Rusafa district on Monday, the US military said.

Several rockets were fired at the facility, at least one of which was on target. Twenty-five people were wounded in the attack.

Two civilians were killed when gunmen fired into their car from another vehicle in Karrada district, Interior Ministry officials said.

In another attack in the same area, two mortars landed in the neighborhood and wounded three civilians.

In eastern Baghdad’s Baladiat district, five people -four of them police officers- were wounded when a roadside bomb detonated near an Iraqi national police convoy.

Earlier on the day, mortar shelling of an Interior Ministry prison killed at least seven inmates and seriously injured 23 others including five police officers, a ministry official said.

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Bomb Targets Iraqi Politicians’ Offices

Yahoo News

BAGHDAD - A suicide car bomber struck in one of the capital’s most heavily guarded neighborhoods Tuesday, killing two guards at a checkpoint near the home and offices of two prominent politicians, including the first prime minister after Saddam Hussein.
Both politicians were out of the country at the time.

The explosion took place in a neighborhood bordering the U.S.-protected Green Zone in western Baghdad, less than a quarter-mile from buildings that included the home and office compound of Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, and offices of Saleh al-Mutlaq, the head of the Iraqi National Dialogue Front, a Sunni political bloc.

It was the second bombing in two days to strike guards of Allawi, who is on a short list of possible future national leaders and a fierce critic of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

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Mortar Shells Hit Baghdad Prison

MSNBC

BAGHDAD - Mortar shells slammed into an Interior Ministry prison Monday, killing at least five inmates and wounding 25, police and a hospital official said. Separately, a fire broke out at one of Iraq’s main oil refineries, but the U.S. military said it was due to an industrial accident, not an attack.

Iraq’s foreign minister, meanwhile, said a new security pact with the United States would set a time limit on the American troop presence, saying the government’s eventual goal was “to reach a level of preparedness that leaves us with absolutely no need for foreign forces to remain in the country.”

The mortar rounds hit a prison made up of several cellblocks, each containing prisoners accused of terrorism-related crimes or civil offenses, police said.

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Car bombing Kills 2 in Northern Iraq

China View

BAGHDAD, Dec. 5 (Xinhua) — A car bomb went off in Kirkuk, some 250 km north of Baghdad, killing at least two people and wounding 10 others on Wednesday, a local police source said.

“A car bomb parked near the Samir Restaurant on a main road in Kirkuk detonated near a passing Kurdish soldiers’ convoy,” Brigadier Burhan Wasif, the city police chief told Xinhua.

The blast apparently targeted Kurdish Peshmerga forces, guarding a police chief, but missed its target, killing at least two people and wounding ten others, Wasif said.

The blast damaged several nearby buildings and civilian cars, he added.

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Baghdad blast kills at least 14 people

China View

BAGHDAD, Dec. 5 (Xinhua) — At least 14 persons were killed and some 30 others wounded in a car bombing attack in a crowded Baghdad suburb on Wednesday, said official sources.

The incident took place in a largely Shiite neighborhood of central Baghdad at about 5 p.m. on Wednesday when a parked car bomb went off, a local police source said.

At least 15 people and some 30 others injured, said the source, adding the explosion also caused damage to a Shiite mosque.

Gunfire and sirens followed the blast in the neighborhood, and a plume of smoke rose to the sky, according to police and hospital officials.

The blast came as the U.S. defense secretary is visiting here to press for political reconciliation.

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CLOSING COMMENT & GRAPHIC VIDEO OF THE IRAQ WAR

Thanks to a very good friend, Sharin Bowers, I learned of this graphic video of what it is like when a bomb is dropped on a house in Iraq.

Warning: The language is rough, but war is rough and these GIs are expressing their true feelings during combat.

10 Second Impact - Iraq

“They’re dropping a 5 f*cking hundred pound bomb on that house over there… You don’t get sh*t like this on the 4th of July”

No, you don’t.

And you don’t get Iraq war video like this on FOX News.

Have Your Say: FOX News Almost Silent As Violence Escalates
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This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 11:04 pm and is filed under 9/11 Truth, General, Latest News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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