Sons A Bitches

NYTimes (11.15.09), via Eschaton:

"'History should record that whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks.'"

Book Review - 'The Ground Truth - The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11

As Atrios says, "It's still deeply depressing just how willing and eager our mainstream media people were to swallow and propagate the obvious lies told by the Bush administration about 9/11, and that years later they aren't filled with revulsion at these truly horrible people."

Hit Parade

Cheney's hit squad. American Conservative (07.14.09), via BalloonJuice:

"The first hit attempt was in Kenya, was botched, and the deltas had to be bailed out by the Ambassador who had not been briefed on what was going on under his nose. The program was suspended after that but never quite terminated."

CIA Hit Teams

"The assassins were to be drawn from CIA’s own special ops group and also from delta force. They would enter the target countries as businessmen on false passports...."

Good plan, yes? Well, maybe no. The CIA "quickly discovered that white boys born in the American south sporting crewcuts and speaking no foreign language had difficulties in blending in as foreign businessmen."

Ya think?

And He's Not Even Talking About Michelle Bachman

Yglesias (03.06.09):

"Something I think most liberals don’t understand is exactly how stupid many conservative leaders are."

Rep. Kevin McCarthy Currently Reading Atlas Shrugged

"We're running out of rich people."

Poor Alberto

Guess servile ass-kissing doesn't get you as far as it used to. NYTimes (04.13.08):

"Alberto R. Gonzales, like many others recently unemployed, has discovered how difficult it can be to find a new job. Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews.

He has, through friends, put out inquiries, they said, and has not found any takers."

In Job Search, Gonzales Sees No Takers

Ouch. This hurts. "'Maybe the passage of time will provide some opportunity for him,' said one Washington lawyer who was aware of an inquiry to his firm from a Gonzales associate."

According to that lawyer ("who asked his name not be used because the situation being described was uncomfortable for Mr. Gonzales"), Alberto's inquiry wasn't "rebuffed" it was just "not taken up". As in they ignored him.

In the meantime, Alberto is making a living on the lecture circuit, though not without some controversy. "His first speech at the University of Florida last November was interrupted by protesters dressed as detainees."

Another Loyal Bushie

An idiot wind. Blowing every time he moved his mouth. Washington Post (04.13.08), via Calculated Risk:

"In late 2006, as economists warned of an imminent housing market collapse, housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson repeatedly insisted that the mounting wave of mortgage failures was a short-term 'correction.'

He pushed for legislation that would make it easier for federally backed lenders to make mortgage loans to risky borrowers who put less money down. He issued a rule that was criticized by law enforcement authorities because it could increase the difficulty of detecting and proving mortgage fraud.

HUD Chief Inattentive To Crisis, Critics Say

"As Jackson leaves office this week, much of the attention on his tenure has been focused on investigations into whether his agency directed housing contracts to his friends and political allies."

Come now! Alphonso wasn't just an obsequiously venal ideologue. He was also a first-class moron. "(C)ritics say an equally significant legacy of his four years as the nation's top housing officer was gross inattention to the looming housing crisis."

During Alphonso's tenure, "foreclosures for loans insured by HUD's Federal Housing Administration (FHA) have risen and default rates have hit a record high."

"All the while, Jackson enjoyed a chef and a full-time security detail that trailed him to Washington social events. His office launched a new $7 million auditorium and cafeteria at HUD's headquarters, money that some within the agency believed should have been directed toward housing for the poor."

He also charged you taxpayers $100,000 "to obtain oil portraits of Jackson and four other HUD secretaries".

The Times Tees Off

Damn that liberal media and their damned facts. NYTimes (03.16.08), via ThinkProgress:

"Mr. Bush boasted about 52 consecutive months of job growth during his presidency. What matters is the magnitude of growth, not ticks on a calendar. The economic expansion under Mr. Bush — which it is safe to assume is now over — produced job growth of 4.2 percent.

That is the worst performance over a business cycle since the government started keeping track in 1945."

Through Bush-Colored Glasses

"Mr. Bush also talked approvingly of the recent unemployment rate of 4.8 percent. A low rate is good news when it indicates a robust job market. The unemployment rate ticked down last month because hundreds of thousands of people dropped out of the work force altogether. Worse, long-term unemployment, of six months or more, hit 17.5 percent. We’d expect that in the depths of a recession. It is unprecedented at the onset of one."

"Mr. Bush was wrong to say wages are rising. On Friday morning, the day he spoke, the government reported that wages failed to outpace inflation in February, for the fifth straight month. Productivity growth has also weakened markedly in the past two years, a harbinger of a lower overall standard of living for Americans."

Well at least his foreign policy has been a smashing success, eh?

Condi

Pathetic. NYTimes (02.04.08), via ThinkProgress:

"The official ineptitude uncovered by the [9/11 Commission] is shocking. Dubbed 'Kinda-Lies-a-Lot' by the Jersey Girls, Ms. Rice comes across as almost clueless about the terrorist threat.

'Whatever her job title, Rice seemed uninterested in actually advising the president,' Mr. Shenon writes. 'Instead, she wanted to be his closest confidante — specifically on foreign policy — and to simply translate his words into action.'"

Tragicomic Tale of the 9/11 Report

Atrios: "What's kind of weird about Rice's incompetence is that it's so profound and so obvious and yet it doesn't seem to concern her at all."

The Legacy

As if lying our way into Iraq wasn't enough. AP (01.23.08):

"The latest deficit projections from the Congressional Budget Office forecast a sea of red ink that will only deepen under plans to jump-start the economy with tax cuts and government spending."

Govt' Red Ink Expected to Get Deeper

The CBO "says the budget deficit will greatly exceed the $163 billion in red ink registered last year. Including likely but still unapproved outlays for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the deficit for 2008 would total about $250 billion."

And that doesn't count "the likely infusion of deficit-financed economic stimulus measures such as income tax rebates, business tax breaks and help for the unemployed now under discussion on Capitol Hill and at the White House."

God, we'll be so glad when this pathetic little bastard and his ass-clown posse is finally gone.

And Now, For Sport

AP (01.09.07):

"It was a good night for a couple of the NBA's bad teams. And another reminder that the Miami Heat are now one of them. The New York Knicks snapped a seven-game losing streak, and league-worst Minnesota ended an eight-game skid.

Of course, the Timberwolves did it by beating Miami, so maybe that wasn't saying much."

Knicks, T'wolves Snap Losing Streaks

"'We're not exactly 28-5 this year,' Dwyane Wade said of his 8-27 Heat, who have the worst record in the Eastern Conference."

Last year, the Timberwolves finished the season 32-49. The Boston Celtics were 24-58. This Summer, the Timberwolves traded Kevin Garnett to the Celtics.

Currently, the Timberwolves are 5-29, the worst record in the NBA. The Celtics are 29-3, the best record in the NBA.

Go figure.

Ya think old Kevin is happy?

Uh Oh

Sounds like the CIA has some splainin' to do. AP (12.18.07):

"A federal judge has ordered a hearing on whether the Bush administration violated a court order by destroying CIA interrogation videos of two al-Qaida suspects.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy rejected calls from the Justice Department to stay out of the matter. He ordered lawyers to appear before him Friday morning.

Judge Orders Hearing on CIA Videos

"In June 2005, Kennedy ordered the administration to safeguard 'all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.'"

"Five months later, the CIA destroyed the interrogation videos."

We're thinking you might have one pissed off judge here.

The Torture Tapes

The Washington Monthly (12.08.07):

"So here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was

(a) unimportant and low-ranking,
(b) mentally unstable,
(c) had no useful information, and
(d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical 'confessions' under duress.

This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and and law enforcement personnel."

What the Tapes Would Have Shown

"And just think: there's an entire political party in this country that still thinks this is OK."

The Plan?

There is no plan. That's the plan. Washington Post (11.19.07), via Crooks and Liars:

"A few days after Thanksgiving, President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plan to open a meeting in Annapolis to launch the first round of substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks during Bush's presidency.

But no conference date has been set. No invitations have been issued. And no one really agrees on what the participants will actually talk about once they arrive at the Naval Academy for the meeting, which is intended to relaunch Bush's stillborn 'road map' plan to create a Palestinian state.

Mideast Conference Nears, With Few Plans

This would be funnier if it weren't so pathetic. "'No one seems to know what is happening,' one senior Arab envoy said last week, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid appearing out of the loop. 'I am completely lost.'"

And the Administration? "Even a senior administration official deeply involved in the preparations confided, before speaking off the record about his expectations: 'I can't connect the dots myself because it is still a work in progress.'"

Still a work in progress? Holy freakin' Martha.

Promises, Promises

Parsons' "ability to plan, design, construct, and operate diverse facilities and infrastructure systems has satisfied our clients' needs for more than 60 years." Pretty much, for the most part. NYTimes (11.06.07):

"More than a year after the Parsons Corporation, the American contracting giant, promised Congress that it would fix the disastrous plumbing and shoddy construction in barracks the company built at the Baghdad police academy, the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning.

The project, where United States inspectors found giant cracks snaking through newly built walls and human waste dripping from ceilings, became one of the most visible examples of a $45 billion American reconstruction program that is widely seen as a failure."

Iraqi Police Academy Remains Largely Unusable

Ahhh, company flaks. Don't ya just love 'em? "A company spokeswoman, Erin Kuhlman, said that Parsons, which is based in Pasadena, Calif., had strictly abided by the terms of the contract it had received from the United States Army Corps of Engineers to do the work at the academy."

"'Parsons completed its work at the Baghdad Police College in the spring of 2006,' Ms. Kuhlman said, adding that the Army Corps accepted the work as completed at about the same time."

"By July 2006, the company had been notified of problems with the plumbing. Parsons put the Army Corps, in effect the company’s client, in touch with the Iraqi subcontractors who actually carried out the construction, so that the Iraqis could fulfill their warranty to redress shortcomings in the work, Ms. Kuhlman said."

"'After we were notified by our customer of the issues, our customer worked directly with the subcontractor on the warranty work and Parsons has not been asked to provide any additional assistance on this project or with the warranty work,' Ms. Kuhlman said."

So, in a word, fuck off.

Perhaps the better question is has Parsons done anything right in Iraq? Aside from making a lot of money that is.

Captive Audience

This would be funnier if it weren't so pathetic. Washington Post (10.26.07), via Carpetbagger:

"FEMA has truly learned the lessons of Katrina. Even its handling of the media has improved dramatically. For example, as the California wildfires raged Tuesday, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, had a 1 p.m. news briefing.

Reporters were given only 15 minutes' notice of the briefing, making it unlikely many could show up at FEMA's Southwest D.C. offices. They were given an 800 number to call in, though it was a 'listen only' line, the notice said -- no questions. Parts of the briefing were carried live on Fox News, MSNBC and other outlets."

FEMA Meets the Press, Which Happens to Be . . . FEMA

"Johnson stood behind a lectern and began with an overview before saying he would take a few questions."

How did it go? Famously, sez the Post. The whole affair was "(v)ery smooth, very professional."

But wait. "(S)omething didn't seem right. The reporters were lobbing too many softballs. No one asked about trailers with formaldehyde for those made homeless by the fires. And the media seemed to be giving Johnson all day to wax on and on about FEMA's greatness."

And that was "because the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters."

The whole damned thing was staged. No "real" reporters were there at all. Sigh. Where's Billy Idol when you need him?

"Dancing with myself.
Dancing with myself.
Well there's nothing to lose,
And there's nothing to prove,
I'll be dancing with myself."

Sigh

The records are too fucked up to audit. AP (10.22.07):

"The State Department so badly managed a $1.2 billion contract for Iraqi police training that it can't tell what it got for the money spent, a new report says.

Because of disarray in invoices and records on the project — and because the government is trying to recoup money paid inappropriately to contractor DynCorp International, LLC — auditors have temporarily suspended their effort to review the contract's implementation, said Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart W. Bowen Jr."

US Suspends Iraq Audit of DynCorp

Action will be taken. "DynCorp spokesman Gregory Lagana told The New York Times on Monday: 'There was no intentional misbilling. It could be just a documents problem.' Lagana acknowledged 'that we have some problems with invoicing. It's something we're working really hard to clean up.'"

Really, really hard, mind you.

But wait! There's more. NYTimes (10.23.07):

"A State Department review of its own security practices in Iraq assails the department for poor coordination, communication, oversight and accountability involving armed security companies like Blackwater USA, according to people who have been briefed on the report. In addition to Blackwater, the State Department’s two other security contractors in Iraq are DynCorp International and Triple Canopy."

Reports Assail State Dept. on Iraq Security

Last month, Condi ordered a review of the State Department's security practices. The panel reported back to her yesterday. It "found serious fault with virtually every aspect of the department’s security practices, especially in and around Baghdad, where Blackwater has responsibility."

Other than that, things are just peachy.

Go, team, go.

It's A Secret

On our dime, too. AP (10.22.07), via Carpetbagger:

"Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.

NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years.

NASA Sits on Air Safety Survey

"Since ending the interviews at the beginning of 2005 and shutting down the project completely more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge the results publicly."

"Just last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers."

The AP fought for 14 months under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act to get the info. According to NASA's associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, "'(r)elease of the requested data, which are sensitive and safety-related, could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots participated in the survey'."

NASA also claimed pilot confidentiality was another reason it wasn't going to release the study, "although no airlines were identified in the survey, nor were the identities of pilots".

Shhh!!

It's a secret. Or at least it was. The Mayberry Machiavellis strike again. Washington Post (10.09.07):

"A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition.

It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets

"Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide."

"The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network."

Nice work, boys. All politics, all the time.

Guess we can add another fuck-up to the list.

Hmmmm

If the folks still there are looking for a way to drill old Alberto for trashing the place, this could turn into a very big deal. Washington Post (08.30.07), via Huffington:

"The Justice Department is investigating whether departing Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales gave false or misleading testimony to Congress on a broad range of issues, including the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program and the removal of nine U.S. attorneys last year, the lead investigator said today.

The disclosure by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine shows that internal investigations that began with the prosecutor firings have widened substantially to include a focus on Gonzales's actions and statements."

Justice Dept. Investigating Gonzales's Testimony

Couldn't happen to a more servile bootlicker.

Yeah, Well Duh

Duncan calls the "early economic planners" the Free Market Fairies. Pretty funny, if you're not an Iraqi. Reuters (08.12.07), via Eschaton:

"Years of economic policy mistakes after the fall of Saddam Hussein left unemployed young Iraqis easy targets for recruitment by al Qaeda and other insurgents, a U.S. Defense Department official said on Sunday.

Economic policy mistakes hurt Iraq-US official

Paul sez that the "early economic planners had made the understandable mistake of assuming that a free market would rapidly emerge to replace what he described as Saddam's 'kleptocracy', and create full employment."

"This mistaken assumption led to a series of decisions which 'sowed the seeds of economic malaise and fuelled insurgent sympathies' after industrial production collapsed and imports flooded in to replace locally made goods."

"The Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by American Paul Bremer, was set up by the western allies after the fall of Saddam and largely ran Iraq until June 2004 when an interim Iraqi government took over."

And as it turned out, they had no fucking clue what they were doing. Guess in that sense the mistake was understandable.

Visual Intermodal Prevention Response

These are at a couple of local city bus stops, mind you. Indianapolis Star (08.02.07), via DailyKos:

"Screeners from the Transportation Security Administration checked passengers at two Downtown city bus stops this morning, looking for weapons and suspicious behavior.

TSA checks IndyGo bus passengers

The TSA calls it a "'VIPR'" operation, which stand for (are you ready?) "Visual Intermodal Prevention Response." The TSA has "'plainclothes inspectors, blue-gloved uniformed security officers who are checking baggage, the behavior detection officers, and federal air marshals, which are the law enforcement arm of TSA.'"

"Some passengers were patted down or submitted to having bags checked."

The TSA "said the searches were 'by-permission,' meaning patrons could decline to be checked. Those who did would not be turned away, an official said, unless they otherwise appeared to be a security threat."

Is Al Qaeda issuing Metro Passes these days or something?