Guest Blogged by BRAD BLOG’s D.C. correspondent Margie Burns
“We don’t have a law that would make war profiteering specifically a federal crime,” Sen. Leahy (D-VT) said in this morning’s efficient hearing conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee, so he is introducing one.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is busy these days — what with the scandal over White House manipulations of the prosecutorial function of the Department of Justice, the continuing scandals of war profiteering in the “war on terror,” and other oversight matters, the Committee is in jeopardy of being overstretched. In fact, it already is overstretched.
The room was full for this morning’s hearing, which I attended, on “Combating War Profiteering,” but, as with last week’s House Oversight Comittee hearings with Valerie Plame et al, this one was also scantly attended by GOP’ers. Of Republicans, only the co-chair of the committee Arlen Specter (R-PA) and — to do him justice — Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) graced the hearing with their presence. The co-chair could do no less, and indeed did little, though I noticed that both he and Leahy alluded to their past jobs as prosecutors, from which it can safely be inferred that they too think the current manipulations of US Attorneys — prosecutors — by the DOJ look very bad…
Actually that could be safely inferred anyway, since they do look bad.
Anyway, Senators Cardin (D-MD) and the always-prepared Russ Feingold (D-WI) were present — Feingold somewhat briefly, reading a prepared statement before he had to leave to preside over a hearing being conducted by another committee, on Darfur.
In short, this administration’s Executive branch seems to be doing its best to keep Congress hopping, and with no small success. Coburn, again to do him justice, pointed out that the Homeland Security [sic] committee on which he is a member has also conducted hearings on waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq, and noted somberly that we are about to add another $21 billion in waste, fraud and abuse via the upcoming Iraq War appropriations bill — to be voted on this week or next. Would that Sen. Hillary Clinton could be so clear.
Meanwhile, as Sen. Leahy commented, the waste, fraud and abuse in the “war on terror” (my quotation marks, not his; I’m not going to pretend that that term is viable) and specifically in Iraq now proceed on a scale unprecedented in our history. Leahy — one of the senators apparently targeted by the unknown anthrax mailer, speaking of investigations — also pointed to the fact that Iraq and Afghanistan have been riddled with fraud, kickbacks and overbilling among other problems; that some of the problems have been associated with contractors including KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton; and that some of the contractors have had close ties with the administration. Presumably as a result, investigation has been lackluster — indeed the administration wanted to shut down the Inspector General’s office altogether, until the uproar in reaction forced some backpedaling and the project had to be abandoned.
Leahy cited authorities from Lincoln, who called war profiteers “worse than traitors”; to FDR, who criticized what he called “war millionaires”; to Truman, who personally spearheaded public hearings into the waste, fraud and abuse of his time.
It is indeed a staggering reflection that the big media outlets of OUR time have avoided this topic to the extent they have; the entire Washington Post was evidently going to give Halliburton a pass until I and other writers got into the topic. And even then, Dana Milbank ridiculed Democrats for harping on “Halliburton.”
BTW, Sen. Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, read that Milbank article aloud one day when I was sitting in on a congressional hearing (cutting little glances at me, if I’m not seriously mistaken, while reading with the other or good eye; O Senator, yr lips say No No but yr eyes say . . .) — Good work, Senator: as Leahy also commented today, Halliburton is about to move to Dubai, a move that is “an insult to U.S. soldiers and taxpayers” who have willingly footed the bills for Halliburton’s overcharging.
Which reminds me that I’m not reading too much about Halliburton’s move in the Post, either. I don’t know whether the Post was represented at today’s hearing, which was rather scantly attended by press as well as Republicans. Fox Television was there, though, and fully set up — probably partly because one of the panel witnesses was Barry M. Sabin, from the Department of Justice. Sabin did not fully answer several questions about the progress (or even the inception) of investigations of waste, fraud and abuse referred to the DOJ. As Leahy pointed out, that might have been a better use of DOJ time than the panoply of email correspondence about doing things to prosecutors.
One of the witnesses at this hearing was particularly well organized and interesting to listen to. More on that later.
While at the same time the Congress is apparently allowing the White House to send Meirs and Rove up to the Hill to have a hand-in-hand chat about the US Attorney situation without requirement of testifying under oath or public view.
IT IS TIME TO GO BALLISTIC ON THE DEMS.
To all those who have argued the belief the Dems are as bought and paid for as the Republicans, I concede.
This is simply a deal to prolong the lying, avoid prosecution, stall implementation of justice, derail the 2006 mandate of voters. It is stupid and without precedent.
Watergate Hearings were the standard. Present hearings are a laughable imitation.
In case you haven’t been following the Sibel Edmonds gag order case, please read……….
http://winterpatriot.blogspot.c...put-perle.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2.../20/61740/4471
http://letsibeledmondsspeak.blogspot.com/
http://wotisitgood4.blogspot.co...ase-about.html
http://lukery.dailykos.com/
With Blow Your Face Off sick, what will poor Idiot Boy do?
Oh yeah that’s right, they’ve got ranks and ranks of fall guys!
Democracy NOW!
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army
(some very lengthy excerpts by me!)
Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill joins us to talk about his new book, “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” Scahill writes, “Blackwater is the elite Praetorian Guard for the ‘global war on terror,’ with its own military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, and 20,000 private contractors at the ready. Run by a multimillionaire Christian conservative who bankrolls President Bush and his allies, its forces are capable of overthrowing governments.” From Iraq to New Orleans, Blackwater has continued to pull in multi-million-dollar government contracts, mostly without accountability and in near-secrecy.
Four years ago today, the US invasion of Iraq was in its opening hours. Hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries later, another date marked later this month has taken on nearly as much significance. March 31st, 2004. Four employees of the private U.S. security firm Blackwater USA are ambushed as they drive through the center of Fallujah. In images broadcast around the world, their burnt corpses are dragged through the streets. Two of them are strung up from a bridge. This is an excerpt of the PBS documentary, “Private Warriors”, going back to that day.
JEREMY SCAHILL: …its founder, Erik Prince. He’s believed to be, if not the wealthiest, one of the wealthiest people ever to serve in the elite US Navy Seals…Erik Prince comes from a very wealthy rightwing Christian dynasty in the town of Holland, Michigan… And Erik Prince was political at a very early age and watched as his father used his company as a cash-generating engine to fuel the rise of what we now know as the religious right in this country, as well as the Republican Revolution of 1994. His father gave the seed money to Gary Bauer to found the Family Research Council. Young Erik Prince was in the first crop of interns to serve at the Family Research Council. They gave significant funding to James Dobson and his group Focus on the Family, which is now sort of the premier evangelical organizing network in this country, the “prayer warriors.”
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. On September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary, and gathered before him was the gaggle of corporate executives that had been tapped by the Bush administration to make up the senior civilian leadership at the Pentagon. There was a sort of mixture of people at the Pentagon. On the one hand, you had people from corporate America, from all the defense and weapons manufacturers that were brought in, and then you also had the neoconservative ideologues, people like Paul Wolfowitz. And so, Rumsfeld gives a speech in which he literally declared war on the Pentagon bureaucracy. And he said, “I’ve come not to destroy the Pentagon, but to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.”
big dan | 03.20.07 – 8:19 pm | #
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And then literally the next day the Pentagon would be attacked. But the vision that Rumsfeld sort of laid out that day would become known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine, where you use high technology, small footprint forces and an increased and accelerated use of private contractors in fighting the wars. It also, at the center of the Rumsfeld Doctrine, became regime change in central strategic nations. Rumsfeld and Cheney both had been signers of the Project for a New American Century, that envisioned a new Pearl Harbor as accelerating the agenda, the neoconservative agenda. And, indeed, the day after Rumsfeld laid out that plan, the Pentagon was attacked, and all of a sudden the world became a blank canvas on which Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush could sort of paint their vision.
AMY GOODMAN: What’s happened with your website? http://www.blackwaterbook.com
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I actually got a letter from Blackwater’s — one of Blackwater’s many lawyers. They have an army of lawyers. Their counsel of record is Ken Starr, the man who led the impeachment charge against President Clinton.
Now, Blackwater has argued in its legal briefings that it can’t be sued in civilian courts and that it’s entitled to the same immunity enjoyed by the military from civilian litigation inside of the United States. And the reason that Blackwater says this, or among the top reasons, is that Donald Rumsfeld in February of 2006 classified contractors as an official part of the US total force, making up an effective part of the US war machine. So Blackwater has turned around and taken Rumsfeld’s designation of their company as an official part of the US total force and said, “This means we’re part of the US military, and you can’t sue us.” At the same time, Blackwater, since 2004, has been lobbying against having its forces placed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, commonly known as the court-martial system. So Blackwater is essentially saying, “We’re above the law. We can’t be prosecuted in military courts. We can’t be sued in civilian courts.”
So Blackwater took active command of an active-duty US Marine in a battle that Muqtada al-Sadr’s forces recall as a massacre on April 4, 2004. Blackwater guys refer to it as their Alamo. It’s unclear how many people were killed that day, but they were firing off so many rounds, the Blackwater guys and this Marine, that they had to stop every fifteen minutes to let their weapons cool. Lonnie Young, that Marine, say
that Marine, says hundreds of people were killed that day. The US government would say that there were about twenty to thirty.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Blackwater showed up in New Orleans without a contract right after Hurricane Katrina hit, beat most federal agencies to the hurricane zone, within days was hired up by the Department of Homeland Security. Blackwater paid its men, they told me, $350 a day. They billed the federal government $950 a day per Blackwater man. At one point, they had 600 men stretched from Texas all the way to Mississippi through the Gulf. Blackwater was raking in sometimes $240,000 a day.
http://www.democracynow.org/art.../03/20/1337226 (the transcript)
http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow...38;start=17:36 (video of interview)
hubbabubba:
While at the same time the Congress is apparently allowing the White House to send Meirs and Rove up to the Hill to have a hand-in-hand chat about the US Attorney situation without requirement of testifying under oath or public view.
Sorry to mess up your “I hate Dems!” rant, but no Democrats agreed to the deal. Subpoenas are full speed ahead. The vote in the House Judiciary Committee to subpoena Rove, Miers, and three others is tomorrow. The vote in the Senate, which was scheduled last week, is Thursday. Try to hold off on accusations of capitulation until then, if you can.
You know what would solve the war profiteering problem?
Nationalize the MIC.
Seems to me that would certainly squelch those suck-up lobbyists and their Republikker CongressPuppets.
Did you get that?
“””””I’ve come not to destroy the Pentagon, but to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.”
And then literally the next day the Pentagon would be attacked. “”””””
…also, Rumsfeld said on 9/10, that $2.3 trillion was missing from the Pentagon budget…hmmmmm…and the Pentagon was hit the next day, and I guess it took out all the computers to audit the $2.3 trillion! Well, THAT’s lucky, eh???
Cynthia McKinney got e-voted out of congress for grilling Rumsfeld about the missing $2.3 trillion, remember that??? Lost to Hank “Hack” Johnson. What’s HE been up to since? “Seven pro-Israel PACs gave to Johnson on Tuesday: MOPAC in Michigan, Washington PAC in D.C., SUNPAC and National Action Committee PAC in Florida, CITYPAC in Chicago, Mid-Manhattan PAC in New York and Louisiana for American Security PAC.” Seems these pro-Israeli PAC’s had interest in premominately black Dekalb County, Ga.
http://www.democracynow.org/art.../08/04/1419200
Remember the questionable runoff, covered by Brad Blog, in which “Hackin’ Hank” got something like 5,000 votes to ZERO, from the primary to the runoff, vs. McKinney??? Which proves my theory that Dem primaries are hacked, too.
Bushes latest offing : sacrifice.
Whose sacrifice? The struggling middle class, giving up their taxes for generations to come.
The struggling middle class, sacrificing their families for cannon fodder, for generations to
come. Yet, bushes- corporate- war-for- profit cronies make no sacrifice. WE THE PEOPLE
sacrifice all, Bushes pals: arms dealers, weapons manufacturers and mercenaries, can’t rake it in fast enough.
You call that sacrifice? The only way to end this war and end the immoral canker known as war profiteering, is a 100% war profits tax.
BUSH CALLS FOR SACRIFICE, LET’S SEE SOME, COMING FROM HIS SECTOR. PUT UP OR SHUT UP.
hubbabubba #1
You could not be more uninformed. A shut-down in government will happen to some degree.
In his speech yesterday, upholding Gonzales, Bush might as well have said “terrorists would benefit if Rove and Miers have to tell the truth”.
But since nobody would buy it anymore, and he knows it, he has to do a James Cagney “come and get me coppa” routine.
It came across as a spoiled brat tantrum, rather than a principled stand. Shameful nixonian criminality pure and simple.
Faith: How have the richest sacrificed for this war, by getting a tax cut? What was THEIR sacrifice? WHO is Bush asking to “sacrifice”, US again? With more social program cuts? But more tax cuts for the rich?
The social program $$$ is being cut, and directly subsidizing the elite’s tax cuts and more military spending…along with “borrowing”, which is ANOTHER tax increase for our children and grandchildren.
Halliburton, your salad days may be coming to an end…
Got the message Dredd and Chimpeach—
I am holding my breath however, because the committees in question must vote to accept or reject the WH “offer”.
I rant out of frustration. But where is the evidence the Dems have spine?
Hubbabubba #12
Frustration noted and shared.
Compare the years of republican oversite with only a few months of democratic oversite, and one can’t help notice the change of reality.
Bush never had to throw a temper tantrum during the rubber stamp 109th republican led congress, but already a couple of months into the 110th democratic led congress he is throwing temper tantrums.
He is feeling the heat because they are truly generating heat.
This is good because the people are now seeing what they suspected.
Seeing is believing.
PartII of Blackwater, on Democracy NOW! today!
http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow...38;start=47:20
There is a documentary that I saw in October or so about the issues with the no-bid contracts that were given to all the companies and the problems about war profiteering. You can see the address at http://www.iraqforsale.org, its a must see movie, it really opened my eyes to the connections of the administration and the companies that are “rebuilding” Iraq at our expense. I’m glad to finally see the dems in the house finally doing something about it. Bush needs to realize that he’s not above the law.
With a heavy heart, I came to the conclusion that big corporations in this country use war as a money making operation. While most of us citizens view war as a dispicable thing, you have to realize who benefits from war. CORPORATIONS! Johnson used the scare tactic to get us into VietNam – remember, communism was the fear word back then. Now, we were lied into Iraq – terrorism is the fear word of the day. War/Iraq is a money making operation. IF profiting from a war were illegal today, you could bet we would not be there. War should be for our defense only. You have to realize that certain people, gw included, do not view war as a bad thing – as long as they are not in harms way. Those people are guilty and we are guilty for letting get away with it.