War profiteering out of control

Abraham Lincoln created the False Claims Act to punish war profiteers, to allow whistle-blowers to file suit for fraud on behalf of the tax-paying public.

It appears former employees of Halliburton subsidiary KBR are coming forward and doing just that.

Much of their testimony is, for some strange reason sealed... but there is much that is now coming out. Maybe someday we'll know the whole truth. Under another administration. This one keeps it's secrets -- and profiteering is obviously one of them.

One particularly grisly story is about a KBR truck that was used as a mortuary in the hot, Iraqi sun... then packed with ice and food -- without even being cleaned.

I'd rather not go into detail... I'll let the author do that horrible job.

In the midday heat of June 16, 2003, Conyers was summoned to fix a broken refrigerated truck-a "reefer," in contractor parlance-at Log Base Seitz, on the edge of Baghdad's airport. He and his colleagues had barely begun to inspect the sealed trailer when they found themselves reeling from a nauseating stench. The freezer was powered by the engine, and only after they got it running again, several hours later, did they dare open the doors.

The trailer, unit number R-89, had been lying idle for two weeks, Conyers says, in temperatures that daily reached 120 degrees. "Inside, there were 15 human bodies," he recalls. "A lot of liquid stuff had just seeped out. There were body parts on the floor: eyes, fingers. The goo started seeping toward us. Boom! We shut the doors again." The corpses were Iraqis, who had been placed in the truck by a U.S. Army mortuary unit that was operating in the area. That evening, Conyers's colleague Wallace R. Wynia filed an official report: "On account of the heat the bodies were decomposing rapidly.... The inside of the trailer was awful."

It is not unheard of for trucks in a war zone to perform hearse duty. But both civilian and U.S.-military regulations state that once a trailer has been used to store corpses it can never again be loaded with food or drink intended for human consumption. According to the U.S. Army's Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine, "Contact with whole or part human remains carries potential risks associated with pathogenic microbiological organisms that may be present in human blood and tissue." The diseases that may be communicated include aids,hepatitis, tuberculosis, septicemia, meningitis, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of mad cow.

But when Bud Conyers next caught sight of trailer R-89, about a month later, it was packed not with human casualties but with bags of ice-ice that was going into drinks served to American troops. He took photographs, showing the ice bags, the trailer number, and the wooden decking, which appeared to be stained red. Another former KBR employee, James Logsdon, who now works as a police officer near Enid, says he first saw R-89 about a week after Conyers's grisly discovery. "You could still see a little bit of matter from the bodies, stuff that looked kind of pearly, and blood from the stomachs. It hadn't even been hosed down. Afterwards, I saw that truck in the P.W.C.-the public warehouse center-several times. There's nothing there except food and ice. It was backed up to a dock, being loaded."

Shadow goverment of private contractors

I consider this to be one of the biggest threats to our government (along with the attacks on our Constitution and of course the threat that Cheney will drop a bomb on Iran,) so am posting content that is almost entirely from Think Progress - you can go over there and read their terrific investigative work, or get the overall gist of it right here; but its their work... I'm just a 'repeater' here, because I want this to get around.

As blogged by Think Progress, a new report by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform concludes that a “shadow government of contractors working under the Bush federal government has grown secretly in our government like a cancer.

Between 2000 and 2005 (Bushie heyday,) procurement spending increased by over $175 billion dollars, making federal contracts the fastest growing component of federal discretionary spending.” That may be even higher than the handouts to faith based organizations.

It comes down to this: corporate contractors like Halliburton and AshBritt have been raking in the profits while “billions of dollars of taxpayer money have been squandered.” And of course, Iraq is in ruins... so its not like they've been doing a lot of rebuilding.

Some highlights from the report, as listed by Think Progress:

1. Halliburton: “fastest growing contractor.” Under the Bush administration, federal spending to Halliburton “increased over 600% between 2000 and 2005.” The Government Accountability Office recently found that the government has wasted at least $2.7 billion to Halliburton on “overpriced contracts or undocumented costs.” At the end of 2005, Cheney’s stock options were valued at more than $8 million, a 3,281 percent gain from 2004.
   
2. Growth in federal contracting exceeds inflation rate. In 2000, the value of federal contracts totaled $203 billion. By 2005, the value was $377.5 billion, an 86 percent increase. The new report notes that this “growth in contracting was over five times faster than the overall inflation rate and almost twice as fast as the growth in other discretionary federal spending over this period.” A record level of “nearly 40 cents of every discretionary federal dollar now goes to private contractors.”
3. Noncompetitive contracts skyrocket. Sole-source and noncompetitive contracts grew by “an even faster rate than overall procurement spending, rising by 115% from $67.5 billion in 2000 to $145 billion in 2005.” Many of these no-bid contracts during the Iraq war and Katrina reconstruction went to Bush administration cronies who wasted money and performed shoddy work.

Of the 500 contracts that were actually reviewed, 118 contracts - $745.5 billion - “experienced significant overcharges, wasteful spending, or mismanagement over the last five years.” A report by American Progress Senior Fellow Scott Lilly has some advice for Congress on what they can do to clean up the mess, should they have any real interest in doing so. I wish I had more faith that they weren't also somehow 'in' on this.

Video of Henry Waxman (D-CA) discussing the new report.

This time we really mean it

Yes, it turns out climate change is not only real, it could wipe us all off the face of the planet.

And yes, some of us were already aware of this fact. For the rest (including the Bush White House,) scientists in the United States, speaking via the UK (where newspapers will actually report this news) have stated the civilization is in "imminent peril:"

Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in "imminent peril".

Well actually they say that the planet is in peril, but I'm guessing the planet will still be here; it is we who will be missing from this watery picture.

The unnatural "forcing" of the climate as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatens to generate a "flip" in the climate that could "spark a cataclysm" in the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, the scientists write.

Dramatic flips in the climate have occurred in the past but none has happened since the development of complex human societies and civilisation, which are unlikely to survive the same sort of environmental changes if they occurred now.

"Civilisation developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end," the scientists warn. Humanity cannot afford to burn the Earth's remaining underground reserves of fossil fuel. "To do so would guarantee dramatic climate change, yielding a different planet from the one on which civilisation developed and for which extensive physical infrastructure has been built," they say.

Basically -- this means that we have to stop using that oil we keep fighting over, and we have to stop using it now.

Yes, now: even before we completely run out. Yes -- before 'peak oil.' And yes, even before Exxon, Chevron, BP and Halliburton are done making their a killing on it. It appears mass planetary extinction and a total annihilation of civilization trumps most financial killings, even when the profits are going to bloated, greedy oil companies.

Ah, if only we mere mortals could get their attention...

Dr Hansen said we have about 10 years to put into effect the draconian measures needed to curb CO2 emissions quickly enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperature. Otherwise, the extra heat could trigger the rapid melting of polar ice sheets, made far worse by the "albedo flip" - when the sunlight reflected by white ice is suddenly absorbed as ice melts to become the dark surface of open water.

The glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland in the northern hemisphere, and the western Antarctic ice sheet in the south, both show signs of the rapid changes predicted with rising temperatures. "

The albedo flip property of ice/water provides a trigger mechanism. If the trigger mechanism is engaged long enough, multiple dynamical feedbacks will cause ice sheet collapse," the scientists say. "We argue that the required persistence for this trigger mechanism is at most a century, probably less."

(Bush leans back in his chair and grins at Dick. "Well heck - we got like, maybe a whole century before this happens, right? I mean - before everybody dies? I know I won't be around. Dick - you won't be around either, right?")

The beginning of the end

Ever wake up so disillusioned... that you can just barely write?

I was reading some great commentaries out on Daily Kos this morning, and I came across this - a diary entited "Will Bush walk away in 2009?". Many of the components add up to what I have believed may... maybe even will happen in our country within the next couple of years. There are just too many signs that we are headed down this road. The pieces are all in place. Any student of history can see them now. It is as though Bush and Co. are following a script... and perhaps they are.

I have known about the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive since shortly after it was released. I even blogged about it, while keeping my real fears to myself. I tried to take the Jon Stewart route and turn it into a joke. W in my yard with a bulldozer.

I have heard all about these Halliburton concentration camps, being built right here, in our country. What I hadn't known, was that there are actually satellite photos available. Actually seeing at them makes my blood run cold.

Nazis. All over again. God help us.

First, our Executive branch goes on a power-grabbing spree - and nobody stops them. The Republican congress just kept giving Bush and Cheney the rubber 'whatever you want' stamp - with Democrat capitulation of course, over and over again.

Next, government officials started beating their chests and promoting torture, flaunting the Geneva conventions. The media has already been compromised: all mainstream media now regularly 'black out' certain vital news stories and fill our heads with sensationalism and utter nonsense, while at the same time promoting violence and torture via '24' (on Fox, of course.) Army generals are having a terrible time trying to undo the damage... and convince army recruits that torture isn't the army way. It is, however, the Vice President's way.

Halliburton is building concentration camps on our national soil. And everyone is watching American Idol.

When I was in third grade and studying WWII, I apparently drew the short straw and found myself researching the Holocaust. I can't imagine who thought this would be a good idea - for a third grader to see photos of bodies stacked like cord wood - but I saw them. I saw photos of the inspection lines full of women, grandparents and children departing from the deportation trains. Left, work. Right, gas chambers.

I didn't sleep for weeks. No, more like months. And there were the nightmares, about marching Nazis with high, black, shiny boots... always marching, pounding on our door, carrying us away to be tortured and killed. In my memory, throughout my entire life, there is nothing that has ever scared me so much... as Nazis.

For a greater portion of my life I even denied my own German heritage. I could not be German. I would not accept being German, in any part. I blamed the German people for allowing the Nazis to go that far and for doing nothing to stop it.

I think I understand a little better now. Governments are subverted in a slow and secret creep. It is invariably an inside job. To see it coming, you have to look quite closely. People in this country don't look closely at anything these days. Ask them, and they'll say they're just 'too busy.' They're all working several jobs, racing all over town - kids in tow - and at night they collapse in front of American Idol. Our newspapers are full of useless fluff, with real news relegated to the middle sections with the ads. We are a culture of excess and denial.

And so of course, there was a golden opportunity. And someone- some group of Machiavellian plotters - saw that opportunity and raced into the vacuum.

The only thing left now is the wait for the inevitable boots marching in the streets, the banging on the door, and the trains. Perhaps in this day and age, they will simply use trucks.

My greatest fear coming true, and in my own country. I would rather have died of strep as a child than to have lived long enough to see this happen.

Oh sure, we may somehow avoid this total democratic collapse. But judging from the nervous capitulation - or perhaps partisan arrogance - of our Democratic 'majority,' I somehow think we won't. We are on a collision course with hell.

Will Bush really step down in 2009? Good question. Does he have to? Not anymore.