Tag Archives: contractors

Drain Clogs – 02-28-2011

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The Republican class war continues in Wisconsin, and has spread to Indiana and Maine.

The US has wasted tens of billions of dollars on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, we must cut money from the poors, not these rich companies!

US Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) laughed along with the crowd when a supporter asked him when someone was going to shoot President Obama. I’m sure he laughed peacefully at the peaceful questioner who only wants Obama to be shot with a camera, and peacefully reported him to the secret service.

Fucking insane Georgia Republican state rep. Bobby Franklin wants to make miscarriages illegal. Every time a miscarriage happens, there will be a criminal investigation and the woman must prove she didn’t do it herself. Or she gets the death penalty. Culture of life, bitches! Considering like 1/3 of all pregnancies end in miscarriages (many without the woman even knowing), invest your money in death penalty chemicals!

I guess Georgia is sick of Arizona being the worst state in the Union…

South Dakota was going to make it legal to kill abortion doctors, but instead have decide to just make women who want to have abortions have “counseling”

(3) Provide the pregnant mother with the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all pregnancy help centers that are registered with the South Dakota Department of Health pursuant to this Act, and provide her with written instructions that set forth the following:
(a) That prior to the day of any scheduled abortion the pregnant mother must have a consultation at a pregnancy help center at which the pregnancy help center shall inform her about what education, counseling, and other assistance is available to help the pregnant mother keep and care for her child, and have a private interview to discuss her circumstances that may subject her decision to coercion;
(b) That prior to signing a consent to an abortion, the physician shall first obtain from the pregnant mother, a written statement that she obtained a consultation with a pregnancy help center, which sets forth the name and address of the pregnancy help center, the date and time of the consultation, and the name of the counselor at the pregnancy help center with whom she consulted;

Why these are bad.
What South Dakota already requires women who want abortions to do:

(a) The name of the physician who will perform the abortion;
(b) That the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being;
(c) That the pregnant woman has an existing relationship with that unborn human being and that the relationship enjoys protection under the United States Constitution and under the laws of South Dakota;
(d) That by having an abortion, her existing relationship and her existing constitutional rights with regards to that relationship will be terminated;
(e) A description of all known medical risks of the procedure and statistically significant risk factors to which the pregnant woman would be subjected, including:
(i) Depression and related psychological distress;
(ii) Increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide;
(iii) A statement setting forth an accurate rate of deaths due to abortions, including all deaths in which the abortion procedure was a substantial contributing factor;
(iv) All other known medical risks to the physical health of the woman, including the risk of infection, hemorrhage, danger to subsequent pregnancies, and infertility;
(f) The probable gestational age of the unborn child at the time the abortion is to be performed, and a scientifically accurate statement describing the development of the unborn child at that age; and
(g) The statistically significant medical risks associated with carrying her child to term compared to undergoing an induced abortion.

Florida Senate teabag candidates are hiring assistants for over $100K/year:

But to help them do it they hired 61 assistants, each making more than a $100,000 a year. Salaries in the speaker’s office rose one and a half percent.

Cannon’s top aide, Matthew Bahl, makes $146,000 a year; that’s more than three-and-a-half times the speaker’s salary. Haridopolos’ top aide, Stephen MacNamara, makes more than $175,000, or more than four times the Senate president’s salary.

Fiscal Responsibility!

Cartoon of the Day:

A little more light on privatized intelligence

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The Washington Post has added a new feature on the subject named Top Secret America.  It has stories as well as interactive features to see where companies and agencies are located, who they contract with, etc.  The way this stuff has expanded over the past decade is extremely creepy and almost never really reported on.

A major reason for concern about it is that necessity is not what’s driving its growth:

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials – called Super Users – have the ability to even know about all the department’s activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.

“I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn’t take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ”Stop!” in frustration.

“I wasn’t remembering any of it,” he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

“I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said in an interview. “The complexity of this system defies description.”

The result, he added, is that it’s impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. “Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste,” Vines said. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.”

Another good resource is Spies for Hire, which has some information on the activities of some of the major contractors.

I’ll see if I can find more interesting stuff to post about this now that I have some more substantial background to work from than scattered news stories. For now,  I’ll leave you with another recent one: Police Video Shows ProPublica Photographer Detained in Texas (includes video)

Major media outlet finally notices “secret” wars

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Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.

This has been making me feel borderline insane for a while now.  I’ve been able to find government documents acknowledging the existence of these forces under various special programs such as Section 1206, but I haven’t had a way of finding all of them.  Congress is so awful about executive oversight that I’m not sure the extent to which they’re even aware for that matter.  The authorization for operations in Pakistan for example are covered by one sentence about a “Pakistan counterinsurgency fund” in the annual defense authorization bill.

The report continues:

Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush’s administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“We have a lot more access,” a second military official said. “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.”

The White House, he said, is “asking for ideas and plans . . . calling us in and saying, ‘Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.’ ”

The Special Operations capabilities requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them. In Yemen, for example, “we are doing all three,” the official said. Officials who spoke about the increased operations were not authorized to discuss them on the record.

At least some of this is likely run by contractors, particularly the “counterinsurgency” training like they’re doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Jeremy Scahill provides additional details:

The expansion of special forces includes both traditional special forces, often used in training missions, and those known for carrying out covert and lethal, “direct actions.” The Nation has learned from well-placed special operations sources that among the countries where elite special forces teams working for the Joint Special Operations Command have been deployed under the Obama administration are: Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including in Balochistan) and the Philippines. These teams have also at times deployed in Turkey, Belgium, France and Spain. JSOC has also supported US Drug Enforcement Agency operations in Colombia and Mexico. The frontline for these forces at the moment, sources say, are Yemen and Somalia. “In both those places, there are ongoing unilateral actions,” said a special operations source. “JSOC does a lot in Pakistan too.” Additionally, these US special forces at times work alongside other nations’ special operations forces in conducting missions in their home countries. A US special operations source described one such action where US forces teamed up with Georgian forces hunting Chechen rebels.

….

Sources say that much of the most sensitive and lethal operations conducted by JSOC are carried out by Task Force 714, which was once commanded by Gen. McChrystal, the current commander of the war in Afghanistan. Under the Obama administration, according to sources, TF-714 has expanded and recently changed its classified name. The Task Force’s budge has reportedly expanded 40% on the request of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and has added additional forces. “It was at Mullen’s request and they can do more now,” according to a special forces source. “You don’t have to work out of the embassies, you don’t have to play nice with [the State Department], you can just set up anywhere really.”

Further reading on how this stuff works:

Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse:    The Shadow War, 666 to 1

Anand Gopal: Afraid of the Dark in Afghanistan

Jeremy Scahill: The Secret US War in Pakistan, The Expanding US War in Pakistan