roger said…

Actually, this is known as economizing, and should be done more often. All the war pundits can have the same piece copied and published in their usual places, and then, every six months, they can change it, usually to find somebody to blame for the total failure of what they have been advising. The Perle-to-Krauthammer stretch (I wanted a war with more closet space! A-and a jacuzzi! This war is really yucky and old. When are we going to get the war on Iran, Daddy!) is fascinating to watch – mindless irresponsibility seguing into dyspeptic irresponsibility.

So Foers might be on to something.

Waxman on warpath over Blackwater payments:

Joseph Neff and Jay Price, Staff Writers

The Democrat slated to be the U.S. House’s lead watchdog next year demanded answers Thursday about why Blackwater USA was paid so much for security work in Iraq — and why, in fact, the North Carolina company was paid at all.

Taxpayers paid exorbitant prices for Blackwater’s services, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman wrote in a letter to outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Waxman said it wasn’t clear precisely how much taxpayers overpaid because the Army hasn’t provided answers to questions first raised two years ago,

The California congressman said that Blackwater’s services were not just pricey, but prohibited, because the Army never authorized Blackwater or any other Halliburton subcontractors to guard convoys or carry weapons. Houston-based Halliburton has been paid at least $16 billion to provide food, lodging and other support for troops in Iraq, and $2.4 billion to work on Iraqi oil infrastructure.

Waxman demanded “whether and how the Army intends to recover taxpayer funds paid to Halliburton and Blackwater for services prohibited under [Halliburton’s] contract.”

The high cost of private military contractors and the use of multiple layers of subcontractors surfaced after four Blackwater men were massacred in Fallujah in March 2004. Wesley Batalona, Scott Helvenston, Michael Teague and Jerry Zovko were guarding a convoy for ESS, a food supplier to the military, when they were ambushed. A mob dragged their charred corpses through the streets and hung the remains of two from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The grotesque images were broadcast around the world and triggered a deadlier phase of the war.

Waxman, the next chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, has tried to get answers about the Blackwater and Halliburton contracts for two years, since The News & Observer detailed how multiple layers of contracts inflated war costs.

At the lowest level, Blackwater security guards were paid $600 a day. Blackwater added a 36 percent markup, plus overhead costs, and sent the bill to a Kuwaiti company that ordinarily runs hotels, according to the contract.

Tacked on costs, profit

That company, Regency Hotel, tacked on costs and profit and sent an invoice to ESS. The food company added its costs and profit and sent its bill to Kellogg Brown & Root, a division of Halliburton, which added overhead and profit and presented the final bill to the Pentagon.

In his letter Thursday, Waxman said he had not received accurate answers from the Army and Blackwater when their officials testified under oath before his committee.

Tina Ballard, an undersecretary of the Army, testified in September that the Army had never authorized Halliburton or its subcontractors to carry weapons or guard convoys. Ballard testified that Blackwater provided no services for Halliburton or its subcontractors.

Waxman said ESS had sent him a memo saying the food company had hired Blackwater to provide security services under the Halliburton contract.

“If the ESS memo is accurate, it appears that Halliburton entered into a subcontracting arrangement that is expressly prohibited by the contract itself,” Waxman wrote. “After more than two years, we still do not know how much ESS and Halliburton charged for these security services.”

At a hearing in June, Blackwater vice president Chris Taylor testified that Blackwater’s 36 percent markup included all the company’s costs. Rep. Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican, interrupted, reminded Taylor he was under oath and ordered Blackwater to provide the documents to back up his testimony. Blackwater has not provided any of the contracts and other documents requested by the committee.

In Thursday’s letter, Waxman said Taylor’s testimony was wrong: Blackwater’s contracts posted on The N&O’s Web site showed that Blackwater billed separately for insurance, room and board, travel, weapons, ammunition, vehicles and office space, as The N&O article reported.

A spokeswoman for Ballard did not immediately return a call Thursday. Joseph C. Schmitz, chief operating officer and general counsel for Blackwater’s parent company, The Prince Group, said he would have to defer comment until he could obtain and read the documents referred to in Waxman’s letter.

Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary, released a statement: “All information available to KBR confirms that Blackwater’s work for ESS was not in support of KBR and not under a KBR subcontract.”

Lance Mannion: Ideas in search of a post:

Tolstoy on marriage; Hemingway on non-violence

David Brooks wrote an incredibly (fill in the blank) _____________ column the other day advocating joint checking accounts as a way to ensure that the human race survives the next Martian attack, or something.

I’m not sure. It’s hard to say. It’s not clear that Brooks even knows what he’s saying. Matt Yglesias captures the muddledheaded flavor of Brooks’ writing these days.

The man thinks. . . well, it’s hard to say exactly what he thinks, but it’s something about married couples maintaining independent checking accounts. He thinks that’s a bad thing. But he doesn’t deny that under some circumstances, it could be a good thing. He just thinks it would be a bad thing if this became the normal procedure — i.e., the one most people use. But he doesn’t try to go down the list to calculate whether the considerations that make separate accounts a good idea for some people do or do not apply to most couples, or are or are not likely to apply to most future couples. So it’s a bit puzzling. He also doesn’t think people should be forced to maintain unified accounts. He just thinks they should be discouraged in some unspecified way.

All of Brooks’ columns suffer from an on this hand/on that hand woolyness. It’s what happens when you try to maintain your reputation as a open-minded, reasonable although conservative thinker while simultaneously writing propaganda for a pack of Right wing zealots. They’re mutually contradictory exercises.

It’s like Bertie Wooster says about the aspiring fascist dictator Spode who it turns out runs a lingerie shop on the side.

Jeeves: Mr Spode designs ladies’ underclothing, sir. He has a considerable talent in that direction, and has indulged it secretly for some years. He is the founder and proprietor of the emporium in Bond Street known as Eulalie Soeurs.

Bertie: You don’t mean that?

Jeeves: Yes, sir.

Bertie: Good Lord, Jeeves! No wonder he didn’t want the thing to come out.

Jeeves: No, sir. It would unquestionably jeopardize his authority over his followers.

Bertie: You can’t be a successful Dictator and design women’s underclothing.

Jeeves: No, sir.

Bertie: One or the other, but not both.

Jeeves: Precisely, sir.

You can’t be a good writer and shill for a gang of ideological thugs. One or the other, but not both.

What’s clear though is that Brooks thinks that the basis of a happy marriage is an abjection of ego, particularly on the part of uppity wives who want to keep control of the money they earn.

Brooks’ teacher in the ways of blissful conjugality is…

Leo Tolstoy.

Brooks:

Tolstoy’s story captures the difference between romantic happiness, which is filled with exhilaration and self-fulfillment, and family happiness, built on self-abnegation and sacrifice.

The story he’s referring to is Family Happiness.

This is a story in which the young wife narrating the tale of her marriage realizes that she has lost her husband’s interest and affection, deservedly, through trying to enjoy herself in life and then concludes, with a shrug, well, it’s ok, at least she has the kids and the grocery shopping to make her happy again.

That day ended the romance of our marriage; the old feeling became a precious irrecoverable remembrance; but a new feeling of love for my children and the father of my children laid the foundation of a new life and a quite different happiness; and that life and happiness have lasted to the present time.

TolstoyThis is the writer Brooks wants to make our collective marriage counselor.

I have never met a woman who has read War and Peace who wasn’t appalled by what Tolstoy does to his smart and vivacious heroine Natasha at the end of the novel. I haven’t met any man who’s read Anna Karenina who doesn’t think the Kitty-Levin subplot is insipid and a waste of time and who wouldn’t rather be married to an cuckolding Anna than to the vaccouous and docile like an over-affectionate puppy is docile Kitty.

(Of course I haven’t met a man who isn’t convinced that if he was married to an Anna she wouldn’t have reason to look twice at any Vronksys swaggering by.)

The Kreuzter Sonata was the single most misogynistic piece of writing in the Western Canon before Hemingway sweated out The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber after waking up in the middle of the night screaming from yet another feverish nightmare in which his mother came at him with a meat cleaver

Brooks wants us to take advice on a how to live happily ever after from the author of The Kreutzer Sonata?

Tolstoy’s ideas on family happiness aren’t a recipee for a happy marriage. They were a recipee for a very unhappy Mrs Tolstoy.

This is so intrinsic to both Tolstoy’s work and his biography that I wondered if Brooks had actually read anything by him. I’ve always suspected that despite the way conservatives tout for The Great Books and push to have college literature courses teach them to the exclusion of all else, they themselves have never actually read any of The Great Books and don’t want to. I think this because I believe that if they had read those books and absorbed their lessons they wouldn’t be conservatives.

Wishful thinking, I suppose. Education rarely trumps vanity and self-interest, even in liberal academics.

But I was thinking that Brooks couldn’t have read even the story he quotes from. I figured he has a well-thumbed edition of Bartlett’s on his desk and he had flipped to the index and looked for quotes that included the words “family” and “happiness.”

Then I remembered the time in Doonesbury when Trip Trippler went to work for George Will as a quote boy. (And liberal admirers of Brooks who keep asking ruefully what happened to Brooks’ writing skills should re-read some of Will’s books. I think Brooks is trying to rewrite Wills’ old columns from memory and he needs to take more ginseng tablets.) Maybe, I thought, Brooks has a quote boy celebrating his last day on the job by playing a practical joke.

Hee hee. Mr Brooks thinks I’m giving him a quote that supports his argument. He’s also writing a column on humility and I’m going to slip him this great quote from Nietzsche.

Family Happiness is a great story—and very interesting to read in conjunction with Chekhov’s better story The Party. Chekhov was a highly critical admirer of Tolstoy.—but its basic message on the subject of marriage is the same as in all of Tolstoy’s work: Intellectually and sexually independent women are scary as all get out and the key to happiness for a man is to marry a doll.

I couldn’t believe that Brooks would honestly think that using a story by Tolstoy as an example would be persuasive to an audience of 21st Century readers, particularly his female readers.

But Amanda Marcotte at Mouse Words set me straight. She’s got Brooks’ number. Marital happiness isn’t Brooks’ concern. The happiness of men is. Brooks, she says, “is a firm Victorian, completely convinced that a man’s life is empty without the rustle of petticoats in his home, soothing the tired brain after a day of man-work.”

What Brooks wants, Amanda says, is to bring back the Victorian idea of The Angel of the House. Victorian men insisted that

…there were two realms, the private/feminine one and the public/masculine one, and that women were to be relegated to the private one with their main duty to be subservient to men and make the home pleasant for men who were doing the hard, manly work in the public realm. Brooks avoids using gender-specific terms in this paragraph, but the fact that the only examples he uses of spouses who are too fond of their independence are wives makes it clear who he thinks has the duty of sacrificing for the private realm.

Daily Kos: Bush did NOT know there was difference between Sunni & Shiite Muslims until Jan ’03:

n case you missed it like me, here’s more proof our president is in over his head, a national security risk. According to Peter Galbraith former U.S. diplomat on a Channel 4 special aired Nov 21, Bush didn’t know there was a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims as late as January 2003. The report (link to video at the Dossier below) has a lot more …here’s the part where Bush shows again how in over his head he really is.

Oborne: I traveled to Boston to meet a former U.S. diplomat who had been a leading authority on Iraq for over a decade. A chance remark made just two months before the war, hinted at how the complexities of Iraq had bewildered Americans at the highest levels.

Peter Galbraith – former U.S. diplomat: January 2003 the President invited three members of the Iraqi opposition to join him to watch the Super Bowl. In the course of the conversation the Iraqis realized that the President was not aware that there was a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. He looked at them and said, “You mean…they’re not, you know, there, there’s this difference. What is it about?”

continuing with Galbraith:

For the United States to launch a war where the president is not aware of this very fundamental difference between Sunni and Shiite Arabs is really stunning. It’s a bit like the U.S. president intervening in Ireland and being unaware that there are two schools of Christianity – Catholics and Protestants. -snip-

Oborne: It’s perfectly clear that neither Tony Blair here in London or George Bush in Washington had the faintest idea what to do after the invasion of Iraq.

Video of the report from the Dossier

Dispatches – Iraq: The Reckoning — Peter Oborne reports on the West’s exit strategy for Iraq. He believes the invasion of Iraq is proving to be the greatest foreign policy failure since Munich. Oborne argues that the plan to transform Iraq into a unified liberal democracy, a beacon of hope in the Middle East, is pure fantasy

From Channel 4 Dispatches: Iraq: the Reckoning Peter Oborne, political editor of the Spectator, reports on the West’s exit strategy for Iraq. He believes the invasion of Iraq is proving to be the greatest foreign policy failure since Munich. Oborne argues that the plan to transform Iraq into a unified liberal democracy, a beacon of hope in the Middle East, is pure fantasy. Reporting on location with US troops in Sadr City, and through interviews with leading figures in Britain and the US, Oborne argues that the coalition and its forces on the ground are increasingly irrelevant in determining the future of Iraq – a future that’s unlikely to be either unified, liberal or democratic.

The film includes interviews with Richard Perle, Peter Galbraith, Deputy Chief of Army staff General Jack Keane. Oborne also interviews Rory Stewart, who worked as a deputy governor in Nasyriah and witnessed first hand the rise of the pro-Iranian fundamentalist parties that are now at the heart of the Iraqi government.

Tags: George W. Bush, Iraq war (all tags)

FUBAR – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

BEIFT – Behold, Every Indicator Forebodes Trouble; pronounced “beefed”

TULLYCAST IT!

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Just an abdication of any sense of journalism. Tip is twirling in his grave.
Three things that are most troubling about this goddamned case lately:
1: Lawrence O’Donnell at the end of this summer, all of a sudden declares on Olbermann’s Countdown program that it’s
all over(the Fitzgerald case) and that it was much ado about nothing (possibly in reference to Armitage’s confession/reveal that he was blabbing about Valerie Wilson as well around that time)
2: Bob Woodward’s complete skullduggery about this sickening political payback/blowback and his public, blatant disregard for honest disclosure about his direct involvement in this possible illegal act while simultaneously mocking it in the press.
3: That Washington Post Op-Ed after the Armitage reveal. Worst day in their history.
Disgusting.

JT

New York Herald Sun

War Room – Salon.com:

The president’s power to imprison people forever

The administration is obviously aware of the transparent, and really quite pitiful, election-based fear that is consuming Democrats and rendering them unwilling to impede (or even object to) the administration’s seizure of more and more unchecked power in the name of fighting terrorism. As a result of this abdication by the Democrats, the Washington Post reports, the administration spent the weekend expanding even further the already-extraordinary torture and detention powers vested in it by the McCain-Warner-Graham “compromise.” To illustrate just how profoundly dangerous these powers are, it is worthwhile to review a specific, current case of an actual detainee in the administration’s custody.

Bilal Hussein is an Associated Press photographer and Iraqi citizen who has been imprisoned by the U.S. military in Iraq for more than five months, with no charges of any kind. Prior to that, he was repeatedly accused by right-wing blogs of being in cahoots with Iraqi insurgents based on the content of his photojournalism — accusations often based on allegations that proved to be completely fabricated and fictitious. The U.S. military now claims that Hussein has been lending “support” to the Iraqi insurgents, whereas Hussein maintains that his only association with them is to report on their activities as a journalist. But Hussein has no ability to contest the accusations against him or prove his innocence because the military is simply detaining him indefinitely and refusing even to charge him.

Under the military commission legislation blessed by our Guardians of Liberty in the Senate — such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham — the U.S. military could move Hussein to Guantánamo tomorrow and keep him there for the rest of his life, and he would have absolutely no recourse of any kind. It does not need to bring him before a military commission (the military only has to do that if it wants to execute someone) and as long as it doesn’t, he is blocked from seeking an order from a U.S. federal court to release him on the ground that he is completely innocent. As part of his permanent imprisonment, the military could even subject him to torture and he would have no legal recourse whatsoever to contest his detention or his treatment. As Johns Hopkins professor Hilary Bok points out, even the use of the most extreme torture techniques that are criminalized will be immune from any real challenge, since only the government (rather than detainees) will be able to enforce such prohibitions.

Put another way, this bill would give the Bush administration the power to imprison people for their entire lives, literally, without so much as charging them with any wrongdoing or giving them any forum in which to contest the accusations against them. It thus vests in the administration the singularly most tyrannical power that exists — namely, the power unilaterally to decree someone guilty of a crime and to condemn the accused to eternal imprisonment without having even to charge him with a crime, let alone defend the validity of those accusations. Just to look at one ramification, does one even need to debate whether this newly vested power of indefinite imprisonment would affect the willingness of foreign journalists to report on the activities of the Bush administration? Do Americans really want our government to have this power?

The changes that the administration reportedly secured over the weekend for this “compromise” legislation make an already dangerous bill much worse. Specifically, the changes expand the definition of who can be declared an “enemy combatant” (and therefore permanently detained and tortured) from someone who has “engaged in hostilities against the United States” (meaning actually participated in war on a battlefield) to someone who has merely “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.”

Expanding the definition in that way would authorize, as Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies points out, the administration’s “seizure and indefinite detention of people far from the battlefield.” The administration would be able to abduct anyone, anywhere in the world, whom George W. Bush secretly decrees has “supported” hostilities against the United States. And then they could imprison any such persons at Guantánamo — even torture them — forever, without ever having to prove anything to any tribunal or commission. (The Post story also asserts that the newly worded legislation “does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant,” although the Supreme Court ruled [in the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld] that there are constitutional limits on the government’s ability to detain U.S. citizens without due process.)

The tyrannical nature of these powers is not merely theoretical. The Bush administration has already imprisoned two American citizens — Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi — and held them in solitary confinement in a military prison while claiming the power to do so indefinitely and without ever having to bring charges. And now, it is about to obtain (with the acquiescence, if not outright support, of Senate Democrats) the express statutory power to detain people permanently (while subjecting them, for good measure, to torture) without providing any venue to contest the validity of their detention. And as Democrats sit meekly by, the detention authority the administration is about to obtain continues — literally each day — to expand, and now includes some of the most dangerous and unchecked powers a government can have.

— Glenn Greenwald

Skype founders to launch broadband TV service:

Skype founders to launch broadband TV service
The founders of Skype, the free internet phone service, have just announced their plan to launch a broadband television service early next year. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the entrepreneurs who were also behind the Kazaa file-sharing service, are said to have invested part of the money they made from the sale of Skype to eBay last year in developing the new project, which is still code-named The Venice Project.In an interview with the Financial Times, Friis claimed, “At the time we launched Skype, broadband capacity was extremely ripe for communication. Now three years later it’s the same thing for video: you can do TV over the internet in a really good way. TV is a huge medium – that’s something we’d like to be part of.”

At present, some 6000 users are said to be testing the service, which utilises IPTV technology, or Internet Protocol Television. While this term may still be unfamiliar to most users, it has attracted much attention from media and telecoms companies, as the use of IPTV on sites like YouTube and MySpace has proved successful.

In fact, 2006 has seen a mini-revolution in the online video and television experience since the world’s leading search engine, Google, bought YouTube for a staggering $1.65 bn earlier this year. It was announced last week that British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) would be teaming up with Google in the UK in order to provide their customer base with a range of products, including a user-generated video service. Furthermore, bigmouthmedia reported last week that four of the USA’s largest media companies were discussing the possibility of a joint venture to implement a video service as a rival to YouTube.

However, the broadband TV offered by the Skype team will be fundamentally different from the hugely popular YouTube service. While YouTube allows any of its users to upload videos onto the web, Skype’s TV service will offer professionally produced content, which will be uploaded by content owners and encrypted before being released. In fact, British television station Channel 4 is already reputed to be in talks to supply content for the project.

Friis further commented in the FT, “We’re also bringing something back from that old TV – of having a shared experience with your friends, something you can talk about, rally around and enjoy with others.”

The service is capable of displaying high quality and full-screen videos on a computer screen. Through the service, users must download software onto their PC or Mac, and can search through channels from a menu on the left hand side of their screen. Users will even be able to pause, rewind or fast-forward the video they are viewing, as well as being permitted to share video playlists with friends. What’s more, Skype users will be able to use their conference call facility to chat to others watching the same programme.

In the UK, it appears that The Venice Project’s main competitors will be the BBC’s planned catch-up TV service, and BT’s latest video-on-demand project. It remains to be seen, however, in which direction the entrance of Skype’s TV project will propel the online video and television experience. And as the stratospheric rise of YouTube proves, it will really lie with users to make or break this particular product – after all, Time didn’t name ‘you’ the person of the year for nothing.