NOW can we stop giving these criminals contracts?

Of all the government spending that teabaggers complain about, strangely missing is the billions of dollars of taxpayer money that goes into the coffers of Halliburton (and by extension, of Dick Cheney, who still receives about $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from his tenure there). Even when Halliburton receives industry contracts, it’s because of taxpayer money squandered, as with its recently-announced contract to refurbish oil wells in Iraq for ExxonMobil— wells that would not be available to them had George W. Bush and Dick Cneney not decided to invade Iraq. But Halliburton made plenty of money off of the BushCheney war adventure:

March 2003: Halliburton is awarded a contract by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to put out oil fires and make emergency repairs to Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

May 2003: Halliburton’s Iraq and Afghanistan contracts are valued at $600 million.

December 2003: An audit shows that Halliburton overcharged the U.S. government by as much as $64 million.

May 2004: Then still a subsidiary of Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root already has received $5 billion in LOGCAP (Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program) contract money. KBR has electrocuted American soldiers, given them tainted water to drink and spoiled food to eat.

February 2006: Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root is awarded a $385 million contract to build temporary immigration centers. You know, the ones that the teabaggers think Obama built to hold THEM.

June 2010: Halliburton is awarded a rebuilding contract for Haiti following the devastating earthquake. There is currently a cholera epidemic in Haiti — six months after Halliburton’s contract is awarded.

And it isn’t just the U.S. government for whom Halliburton does shoddy work, for it was the company behind the cement used to attempt to seal the bottom of the Macondo Deepwater Horizon well. And the company knew damn well that the cement was unstable — and used it anyway:

In the first official finding of responsibility for the blowout, which killed 11 workers and led to the largest offshore oil spill in American history, the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.

The result of at least one of those tests was given on March 8 to BP, which failed to act upon it, the panel’s lead investigator, Fred H. Bartlit Jr., said in a letter delivered to the commissioners on Thursday.

Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, yet those findings were never sent to BP, Mr. Bartlit found.

Although Mr. Bartlit does not specifically identify the cement failure as the sole or even primary cause of the blowout, he makes clear in his letter that if the cement had done its job and kept the highly pressured oil and gas out of the well bore, there would not have been an accident.

“We have known for some time that the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the Macondo well must have failed in some manner,” he said in his letter to the seven members of the presidential commission. “The cement should have prevented hydrocarbons from entering the well.”

And we all know how THAT turned out.

This is what 4.416 American soldiers gave their lives for

I want an apology from every fucking wingnut who insisted we were not in Iraq for oil and to line Dick Cheney’s pockets:

Further to our report last week Halliburton has confirmed that it has been awarded a letter of intent by Shell Iraq Petroleum Development B.V. for the development of the Majnoon field in Southern Iraq.

Dow Jones suggests the contract for the 15 wells could be worth $150m.

The giant Majnoon field is one of the world’s largest oilfields. The letter of intent provides that Halliburton will serve as project manager for the development work, in affiliation with Nabors Drilling and Iraq Drilling Company (IDC). The contract is still subject to final approval by the appropriate Iraqi authorities.

Shell is lead operator and holds a 45 percent share, partner Petroliam Nasional Berhad (Petronas) holds 30 percent and the Iraqi state holds 25 percent of the participating interests in all licenses. Shell has announced that the consortium intends to increase production from the current ~45,000 barrels of oil per day to a targeted production plateau of 1.8 million barrels of oil per day.

“Halliburton has made a sizeable investment in Iraq and we look forward to providing services to Shell and the consortium in order to increase production at this historic oil field,” said Dave Lesar, Halliburton’s Chairman, President and CEO. “We have in place the technology, equipment and personnel to ensure that we deliver the solutions that will help our customers in this region to meet their production goals.”

Halliburton has been active in the Middle East since 1946. Currently, Halliburton has more than 4,000 employees in the Middle East, and construction on phase I of Halliburton’s 400-man base in Burjisia, Iraq is complete.

George W. Mengele

When we have evidence that George W. Bush authorized experimentation on detainees in his so-called War On Terror, is it OK to post the above headline now?

In the most comprehensive investigation to date of health professionals’ involvement in the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program (EIP), Physicians For Human Rights has uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody. The apparent experimentation and research appear to have been performed to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies governing the use of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The PHR report, Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program, is the first to provide evidence that CIA medical personnel engaged in the crime of illegal experimentation after 9/11, in addition to the previously disclosed crime of torture.

(via)

This evidence indicating apparent research and experimentation on detainees opens the door to potential additional legal liability for the CIA and Bush-era officials. There is no publicly available evidence that the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel determined that the alleged experimentation and research performed on detainees was lawful, as it did with the “enhanced” techniques themselves.

“The CIA appears to have broken all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation,” said Frank Donaghue, PHR’s Chief Executive Officer. “Not only are these alleged acts gross violations of human rights law, they are a grave affront to America’s core values.”

[snip]

Physicians for Human Rights demands that President Obama direct the Attorney General to investigate these allegations, and if a crime is found to have been committed, prosecute those responsible. Additionally, Congress must immediately amend the War Crimes Act (WCA) to remove changes made to the WCA in 2006 by the Bush Administration that allow a more permissive definition of the crime of illegal experimentation on detainees in US custody. The more lenient 2006 language of the WCA was made retroactive to all acts committed by US personnel since 1997.

“In their attempt to justify the war crime of torture, the CIA appears to have committed another alleged war crime – illegal experimentation on prisoners,” said Nathaniel A. Raymond, Director of PHR’s Campaign Against Torture and lead report author. “Justice Department lawyers appear to never have assessed the lawfulness of the alleged research on detainees in CIA custody, despite how essential it appears to have been to their legal cover for torture.”

PHR’s report, Experiments in Torture, is relevant to present-day national security interrogations, as well as Bush-era detainee treatment policies. As recently as February, 2010, President Obama’s then director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, disclosed that the US had established an elite interrogation unit that will conduct “scientific research” to improve the questioning of suspected terrorists. Admiral Blair declined to provide important details about this effort.

“If health professionals participated in unethical human subject research and experimentation they should be held to account,” stated Scott A. Allen, MD, a medical advisor to Physicians for Human Rights and lead medical author of the report. “Any health professional who violates their ethical codes by employing their professional expertise to calibrate and study the infliction of harm disgraces the health profession and makes a mockery of the practice of medicine.”

Of course what else would you expect from a guy who does this:

“We were terrible to animals,” recalled Mr. Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush home turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out.

“Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “Or we’d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.”

Perhaps this is why the right is so bound and determined to paint Barack Obama as the antichrist. It’s just projection of their worship for his predecessor — a sociopath just like them.

Special Bonus Link: Connecting the Oil Dots.

The Obama Administration is protecting a war criminal

When the history books write about the Obama Administration, Barack Obama’s biggest shortcoming won’t be his coziness with Wall Street, but his refusal to see justice done to the worst war criminal in the history of the United States: Richard Bruce Cheney.

Here’s how confident Cheney is that he won’t be prosecuted: Not only did he advocate waterboarding a suspect who was already talking, as I noted yesterday, but he came right out and said that he was a “big supporter of waterboarding”, and also came right out and said that the orders for CIA operatives to torture detainees came right from himself and his ventriloquist’s dummy from Texas:

The reason I’ve been outspoken is because there were some things being said, especially after we left office, about prosecuting CIA personnel that had carried out our counterterrorism policy or disbarring lawyers in the Justice Department who had — had helped us put those policies together, and I was deeply offended by that, and I thought it was important that some senior person in the administration stand up and defend those people who’d done what we asked them to do.

So now you have the most recent vice-president of the United States admitting to a war crime, and NOTHING is going to be done about it by his successor.

And THAT is going to be the biggest failing of Barack Obama.

More here, here, and here,

Tuesday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today’s honoree: Roger Shuler, a.k.a. The Legal Schnauzer, on how Obama still doesn’t fully “get it” about Republicans.

Money quote:

For roughly 30 years, since Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a speech about states’ rights, conservative Republicans have been marked by four traits:

* A willingness to twist the truth for political gain;

* A willingness to act corruptly in order to gain and consolidate political power;

* A willingness to make expert use of the race-based fear card in order to attract middle-class white voters; and

* A tendency to govern in such an incompetent fashion that voters turn to Democrats to clean up Republican messes.

Obama clearly wants to break this dysfunctional cycle. But we fear he’s going about it the wrong way.

The president tried to reason with Republicans last Friday–politely, but bluntly, calling them on their false statements. For good measure, Obama seemingly tried to shame them into realizing that they needed to work with Democrats in a bipartisan, constructive fashion.

But here, we suspect, is the ugly truth about the modern GOP: You can’t reason with them, and you can’t shame them into doing the right thing.

That’s because the modern Republican political brand, shaped by Reagan with several dollops of Nixonian skulduggery, remains intact. It never has been discredited the way it should have been long ago.

You may not agree with the tinfoil with which he closes the post (I actually do), but it is apot on the money.

Put on your tinfoil bonnet with the blue ribbons on it…

Maybe you haven’t put on your tinfoil hat in a while. Maybe it’s buried deep in your closet, behind all the half-pairs of globes, the old acrylic knit mufflers with lint-pills all over them and the old holiday wreath you decided you didn’t like anymore and are just waiting till it’s warm enough to hold a garage sale so you can see if someone else might be willing to pay a quarter for it. But I think it’s time to take it out.

Remember Dr. David Kelly? He was the U.N. weapons inspector who doubted the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and later showed up “suicided” in a park near his home. His death was, in fact, ruled a suicide, despite the fact that first responders at the scene doubted that he had taken his own life.

Larisa Alexandrovna has unearthed this little tidbit of tinfoiliana:

A highly unusual ruling by Lord Hutton, who chaired the inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death, means medical records including the post-mortem report will remain classified until after all those with a direct interest in the case are dead, the Mail on Sunday reported.

And a 30-year secrecy order has been placed on written records provided to Lord Hutton’s inquiry which were not produced in evidence.

The Ministry of Justice said decisions on the evidence were a matter for Lord Hutton. But Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who has conducted his own investigations into Dr Kelly’s death, described the order as “astonishing”.

Dr Kelly’s body was found in woods close to his Oxfordshire home in 2003, shortly after it was revealed that he was the source of a BBC report casting doubt on the Government’s claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction capable of being fired within 45 minutes.

An inquest was suspended by then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, who ruled that Lord Hutton’s inquiry could take its place. But in the event, the inquiry focused more on the question of how the BBC report came to be broadcast than on the medical explanation for Dr Kelly’s death.

Lord Hutton’s report in 2004 concluded that Dr Kelly killed himself by cutting an artery in his wrist. But the finding has been challenged by doctors who claim that the weapons inspector’s stated injuries were not serious enough.

One of the doctors seeking a full inquest, former assistant coroner Michael Powers, told the Mail on Sunday he had seen a letter from the legal team of Oxfordshire County Council explaining the unusual restrictions placed by Lord Hutton on material relating to his inquiry.

The letter states: “Lord Hutton made a request for the records provided to the inquiry, not produced in evidence, to be closed for 30 years, and that medical (including post-mortem) reports and photographs be closed for 70 years.”

…and asks:

If Dr. Kelly committed suicide, then his medical records should not be sealed as there is no reason to seal them. If, however, Dr. Kelly was murdered, then the sealing of the medical records only adds more weight to what most reasonable people already suspect actually happened.

Someday, long after ALL of us are dead, perhaps the truth about the extent of the Bush Administration/Tony Blair crimes to gin up a war in Iraq will be known. But between this astonishing ruling and the lack of will to hold these criminals to account, even here in the U.S., where a kid can be put away for years for smoking pot, it’s clear that what Nixon said is de facto true: When the president does it, then it is not illegal.

Unless he’s a Democrat, of course. Then all bets are off.

If only Barack Obama had the balls to renege on his apparent deal to not prosecute the Bush/Cheney junta

With Dick Cheney emerging from his hidey-hold to call Barack Obama a pussy and a Threat to America, it would seem to be time to declare that all previous agreements to not look backwards are off, and that it’s full speed ahead on investigation of the crimes of George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney.

Especially now that it’s pretty clear that the Bush Administration’s torture tactics were NOT for the purpose of stopping a potential terrorist attack, but were instead used to further the aim of ginning up a phony Iraq/Al Qaeda link to justify their dick-waving war in Iraq.

As usual, only Rachel Maddow has the guts to report the truth:

I know that we have a great many problems to deal with in this country. But if you think that any of the potential Republican hopefuls for 2012 aren’t looking at the Bushcheney tactics and thinking “I’d like to do that”, guess again.

Of course, I’m not necessarily convinced that Barack Obama hasn’t embraced them as well.

So if you want to know what makes a 23-year-old from a privileged background decide to sign up with jihadists, perhaps it’s because the leaders of the country the jihadists want to attack decided it was perfectly OK to use torture to gin up a phony case for war against a country that did nothing to us.

SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

God, will this overcompensating limpdick NEVER go away:

MCLEAN, Va. — On the eve of the unveiling of the nation’s new Afghanistan policy, former Vice President Dick Cheney slammed President Barack Obama for projecting “weakness” to adversaries and warned that more workaday Afghans will side with the Taliban if they think the United States is heading for the exits.

In a 90-minute interview at his suburban Washington house, Cheney said the president’s “agonizing” about Afghanistan strategy “has consequences for your forces in the field.”

“I begin to get nervous when I see the commander in chief making decisions apparently for what I would describe as small ‘p’ political reasons, where he’s trying to balance off different competing groups in society,” Cheney said.

“Every time he delays, defers, debates, changes his position, it begins to raise questions: Is the commander in chief really behind what they’ve been asked to do?”

After reading that I have to either perform a self-lobotomy with a chef’s knife just to make it stop, or look at some major league cuteness.

I choose Teh Cute:

OK. I feel better now.

Will this lie told often enough become truth?

WTF?

Dana Perino says that we did not have a terrorist attack on this country during George W. Bush’s term:

http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/flash/player.swf

We already know that the Way of the Republican is to lie, lie, lie, and tell the same lie often and consistently: Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. No one could have anticipated the breach of the levees. Barack Obama ordered “In God We Trust” removed from coins.

They don’t even try to relate facts anymore, these Republicans, they just pull stuff out of their asses and call it truth. Fox News puts it out there and because it has “News” in its name, it has credibility. So now we’re supposed to believe that the 9/11 attacks happened, when? During Bill Clinton’s administration? Or are they trying to erase George W. Bush entirely and make their idiotic, unthinking, willfully ignorant minions think we went right from Clinton to Obama?

So yes, let’s call the Fort Hood attacks terrorism. And then let’s call the killing of Dr. George Tiller terrorism as well. But don’t sit there and tell me that no terrorists attacked this country on George Bush’s watch. That worthless piece of shit was on vacation when he received warning of an imminent attack, and he chose to do nothing — or worse, let it play out as planned so he could get his war with Iraq (an idea that no longer seems unthinkable as it once did). I know that a lie told often enough becomes truth these days. But this one cannot be allowed to become an “alternative view.”

And oh yeah. What Jed said.

And thanks to commenter russell1958 over at Firedoglake, for compiling tbe following list of terrorist attacks that took place in this country during the Bush years:

• 9/11/01
• Anthrax letters
• DC Snipers
• Grenade blasts outside U.K. embassy in New York
• Ohio sniper attacks
• Knoxville church shootings
• Arson attack on women’s health clinic in Concord, NH (5/2000)
• Catholic priest who drove his car into the Northern Illinois Health Clinic then pulled out an ax before being shot at by a security guard; (9/2000)
• Bombing of Tacoma, Washington women’s health clinic (6/2001)
• Anthrax hoax letters send by Clayton Waagner to 554 women’s health clinics (11/2001)
• Arson attack on women’s health clinic in Palm Beach (7/2005)
• Molotov cocktail thrown at women’s health clinic in Shreveport, LA (12/2005
• David McMenemy of Rochester Hills, Michigan, crashed his car into the Edgerton Women’s Care Center in Davenport, Iowa, then doused the lobby in gasoline and started a fire (9/2006)
• Package left at a women’s health clinic in Austin, Texas, contained an explosive device capable of inflicting serious injury or death (4/2007)
• Planned Parenthood clinic in Virginia Beach, Virginia, set afire (12/2007)
• 20% of all women’s health clinics in the U.S. attacked during 2008

Nope. No terrorism at all during the Bush years. Nosirree.

Is anyone actually surprised by this?

This is supposed to be Big!! Breaking!!! News!!!!!??? My reaction to this is a Cheneyesque “So?”

Why is anyone surprised by this:

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful.

The question of how completely the C.I.A. informed Congress about sensitive programs has been hotly disputed by Democrats and Republicans since May, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to reveal in 2002 that it was waterboarding a terrorism suspect, a claim Mr. Panetta rejected.

The law requires the president to make sure the intelligence committees “are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.” But the language of the statute, the amended National Security Act of 1947, leaves some leeway for judgment, saying such briefings should be done “to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters.”

In addition, for covert action programs, a particularly secret category in which the role of the United States is hidden, the law says that briefings can be limited to the so-called Gang of Eight, consisting of the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees.

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

Newsweek reported yesterday in a profile of Eric Holder that the Attorney General is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush Administration’s torture activities. That doesn’t have me as excited as it does some of my compatriots, because the Justice Department is still lousy with Bush appointees, and I suspect any “investigation” will end in a proclamation of “bad activities done out of goodwill for our nation” and nothing will be done.