Know your BFEE: GW Bush Covers Up His Lying America Into War

[Octafish]

George W Bush doesn’t want you to know he lied America into an illegal – and immoral – war.



For monkey and his minions, it’s not just business.

It’s personal.

The Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community went through all the documents they could find from Baghdad to Bumfook looking for evidence of a tie between Saddam Hussein, the government of Iraq or anything else that ties … with the attacks of 911.

They found zip.

Yet, unlike previous reports., the report will not be distributed to the media and interested public. A Pentagon spokesman said it is “too politically sensitive.”

Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida

Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: March 10, 2008 07:39:58 PM
McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

He and others spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because the study isn't due to be shared with Congress and released before Wednesday.

President Bush and his aides used Saddam's alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

CONTINUED…

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/v-print/story/29959.html

Here’s a PDF of the report – or a good chunk of it:

http://a.abcnews.com/images/pdf/Pentagon_Report_V1.pdf



Hey, Bush! I got your “politically sensitive” right here!



Here’s another damn good reason for war Bush doesn’t want you to know about:

His family makes big money off of war.

Will Congress Finally Cut Them Off?

Bush Family War Profiteering

By EVELYN PRINGLE
April 12, 2007

On Monday, April 9, 2007, the Boston Herald reported that the US military had announced the Easter weekend deaths of 10 more American soldiers, including six killed on Sunday. The Associated Press reports that, since the war began in March 2003, over 3,000 members of the US military have been killed in Iraq, as of April 8, 2007.

The military reported the deaths of four more US soldiers on Tuesday.

Its nearly impossible to estimate the number of deaths of civilians in Iraq, but the Herald reports that at least 47 people were killed or found dead in violence on Easter Sunday, including 17 execution victims dumped in the capital.

News releases out of Iraq also report that a woman wearing a black veil and strapped with explosives blew herself up outside a police station in Iraq on Tuesday, killing 16 people.

According to the January 14, 2007 LA Times, Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, says that, starting with the anti-terrorism appropriation a week after the 9/11 attacks, he estimates the US has spent $400 billion fighting terrorism through fiscal 2006, which ended on September 30, 2006.

In January 2007, Marine Corps spokeswoman, Lt Col Roseann Lynch, told Reuters that the war in Iraq is costing about $4.5 billion a month for military "operating costs," which did not include new weapons or equipment.

CONTINUED…

http://www.counterpunch.org/pringle04122007.html

So does Dick Cheney:



I like to think of Sneer as Smirk's CIA "handler." Heh heh heh.

Dick Cheney: War Profiteer

by Tom Turnipseed
Published on Thursday, November 17, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

Questions persist about Vice-President Cheney’s role in the ongoing investigation and scandal swirling about the White House. His chief of staff and confidante Lewis “Scooter” Libby has been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Let’s take a look at some personal incentives for Cheney’s selling war to our country.

Cheney has pursued a political and corporate career to make himself very rich and powerful. He is the personification of a war profiteer who slid through the revolving door connecting the public and private sectors of the defense establishment on two occasions in a career that has served his relentless quest for power and profits.

As Defense Secretary, Mr. Cheney commissioned a study for the U.S. Department of Defense by Brown and Root Services (now Kellogg, Brown and Root), a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton. The study recommended that private firms like Halliburton should take over logistical support programs for U.S. military operations around the world. Just two years after he was Secretary of Defense, Cheney stepped through the revolving door linking the Department of Defense with defense contractors and became CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton was the principal beneficiary of Cheney’s privatization efforts for our military’s logistical support and Cheney was paid $44 million for five year's work with them before he slipped back through the revolving door of war profiteering to become Vice-President of the United States. When asked about the money he received from Halliburton, Cheney said. "I tell you that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it."

The Bush administration has dished out lucrative reconstruction contracts in Iraq to favored U.S. based corporations including Halliburton and denied contracts to many Iraqi and foreign based companies. To the conquerors go the spoils was the message on December 11, 2003 when Bush said, “The taxpayers understand why it makes sense for countries that risk lives to participate in the contracts in Iraq, It's very simple. Our people risk their lives, friendly coalition folks risk their lives, and therefore the contracting is going to reflect that.”

Bush’s statement is a stunning admission of how much corrupt corporations control our foreign policy. Under Cheney’s leadership Halliburton out did Enron in using offshore subsidiaries as tax shelters to hide profits to bilk U.S. taxpayers. Halliburton also utilized off-shore subsidiaries to contract for services and sell banned equipment to rogue states like Iran, Iraq and Libya. This would be illegal if done directly by Halliburton.

CONTINUED…

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1117-22.htm

Sie denken: "Gott mit Uns."



Gott hilfen Uns.

[nashville_brook]

1. oh hell yeah -- thanks for the PDF link, and the commentary.

[Octafish]

4. What Erasmus Knew (And We Didn’t)

Seeing how Corporate McPravda plays dead for Bush and his crimes, here's a bit more on the war profiteering:

What Erasmus Knew (And We Didn’t)

by Jacob Boas
Published on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

It has been reported that in the summer of 2003 Pentagon employees viewed a special screening of The Battle of Algiers, the late Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 classic film of terrorist insurgency and counter insurgency. Presumably the Pentagon’s purpose in showing the film was to help it get a handle on the insurgency in Iraq. (Arguably and however belatedly, the film may have inspired President Bush’s troop “surge.”) Whoever came up with the idea of viewing The Battle of Algiers might have paired it with a reading of On the War against the Turks (1530), a disquisition on the perils of war with Europe’s archenemy by the Dutch humanist and theologian Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1469 - 1536). The year before, the Ottoman armies under Suleiman the Magnificent had stood poised to take Vienna, failing, in the end, thanks to a fortuitous combination of effective defense strategies and unseasonably rainy weather. But despite their seemingly miraculous deliverance, few Europeans believed that they had seen the last of the Turkish host. Anti-Muslim feeling ran deep, and shouts of “‘War on the Turks! War on the Turks!”‘ ran out across Europe.

It was against this backdrop of fear and anxiety that the acclaimed author of The Praise of Folly wrote On the War against the Turks (De Bellum Turco). In it Erasmus, a life-long opponent of war, urged his fellow Christians to think twice before rushing off to war against the Ottoman Turks. “Merely to clamor for war against the Turks,” he wrote, “calling them inhuman monsters, traitors to the Church and a race tainted with all kinds of crime and villainy, is simply to betray the ignorant mob to the enemy.”

Erasmus did not rule out such a war altogether. But if war was to be made - and with the mob howling for Muslim blood, he knew it well might — it was imperative, he stated, “that our intentions be pure and honorable.” Nothing good can come of a war against the Turks, he argued, “if we take up arms without correcting the errors which have provoked God to punish us through their barbaric cruelty.” Among the errors he decried among his Christian contemporaries was a taste for cruelty that was the equal of, if not greater than, that manifested by the enemy. Another was a desire to possess the Turk’s riches and “to rule his subjects,” risking “the danger that we ourselves shall degenerate into Turks rather than bring them into Christ’s fold.”

A further danger of making war on the Turks, Erasmus warned, was that it could serve as a pretext for a “tiny clique” to seize power and use that power to undermine our freedoms, abrogating the rule of law, “removing the authority of parliaments,” and plundering the people, so that by “overthrowing the tyranny of the Turks, … we bring a new and worse tyranny upon ourselves.”

A third danger, according to Erasmus, is that the money it takes to make war winds up in the pockets of the few. There are many “holy sermons” about “crusading expeditions” and “valiant deeds and boundless hopes,” but in the end, remarked the humanist, noting how the collection monies and taxes have disappeared into the pockets of the war profiteers, “the only thing that has triumphed has been money.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/30/1517/

You're welcome, nashville_brook! Thanks for giving a damn, my Friend!

[nashville_brook]

8. "Thanks for giving a damn, my Friend!" -- funny you should say this, because i deleted a whole rant

about how difficult it is get my outrage gland in gear these days -- it's bled dry, dessicated -- and that's EXACTLY WHY now is the time to stretch, breathe deep and persevere.

the bushies have only months left, and by all accounts they are STEPPING UP their aggression and obfuscation rather than doing the things that would indicate retirement planning. this is a great example. so is the dismantling of the espionage oversight board.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/03/14/president_weakens_espionage_oversight/

i think most people are expecting this era to shrink away in the next few months, and so we read the news of the day thru that lens. all these messages that conflict with a "shrinking away" of the old regime are getting lost in mix...and yet they come like war drums.

[Octafish]

10. 2004 Report: No WMD stockpiles in Iraq

Thanks for reminding me, nashville_brook! I left something important out of the OP!

Plus: Pre-emptive war doesn't just suck. It's what NAZI Germany did to Austria. And Poland. And France... (And what Napoleon did to Germany and Russia and ...).

Report: No WMD stockpiles in Iraq

CIA: Saddam intended to make arms if sanctions ended

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and had not begun any program to produce them, a CIA report concludes.

In fact, the long-awaited report, authored by Charles Duelfer, who advises the director of central intelligence on Iraqi weapons, says Iraq's WMD program was essentially destroyed in 1991 and Saddam ended Iraq's nuclear program after the 1991 Gulf War.

The Iraq Survey Group report, released Wednesday, is 1,200 to 1,500 pages long.

The massive report does say, however, that Iraq worked hard to cheat on United Nations-imposed sanctions and retain the capability to resume production of weapons of mass destruction at some time in the future.

"(Saddam) wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted," a summary of the report says.

SNIP...

The report was released nearly two years ago to the day that President Bush strode onto a stage in Cincinnati and told the audience that Saddam Hussein's Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons" and "is seeking nuclear weapons."

"The danger is already significant and it only grows worse with time," Bush said in the speech delivered October 7, 2002. "If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today -- and we do -- does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?"

Speaking on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, Bush maintained Wednesday that the war was the right thing to do and that Iraq stood out as a place where terrorists might get weapons of mass destruction.

"There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks, and in the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take," Bush said.

CONTINUED...

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/06/iraq.wmd.report/

Ouch! Sorry to read that you deleted your work. If possible, please reincarnate the thing and post as an OP or on this thing. While it may seem few people read something -- or seem to care -- the reality is that these ideas get spread far and wide thanks to the Internets or intertubes or whatever the heck these electrons do.

[Karenina]

12. ANYONE who thinks this *regime

will allow something as petty an an "election" to strip them of the power they've spent decades consolidating is 2 tacos short of a combination plate.

:hi:

[Octafish]

16. Remember: Poppy also lied America into a war with, er, ON Iraq.

Like his dim son, George H.W. Bush likes to use troops for props, too.
Among other things.



Like cannon fodder.

The Lies We Are Told About Iraq

by Victor Marshall
Published on Sunday, January 5, 2003 by the Los Angeles Times:

OAKLAND -- The Bush administration's confrontation with Iraq is as much a contest of credibility as it is of military force. Washington claims that Baghdad harbors ambitions of aggression, continues to develop and stockpile weapons of mass destruction and maintains ties to Al Qaeda. Lacking solid evidence, the public must weigh Saddam Hussein's penchant for lies against the administration's own record. Based on recent history, that's not an easy choice.

The first Bush administration, which featured Dick Cheney, Paul D. Wolfowitz and Colin L. Powell at the Pentagon, systematically misrepresented the cause of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the nature of Iraq's conduct in Kuwait and the cost of the Persian Gulf War. Like the second Bush administration, it cynically used the confrontation to justify a more expansive and militaristic foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era.

When Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, the first President Bush likened it to Nazi Germany's occupation of the Rhineland. "If history teaches us anything, it is that we must resist aggression or it will destroy our freedoms," he declared. The administration leaked reports that tens of thousands of Iraqi troops were massing on the border of Saudi Arabia in preparation for an invasion of the world's major oil fields. The globe's industrial economies would be held hostage if Iraq succeeded.

The reality was different. Two Soviet satellite photos obtained by the St. Petersburg Times raised questions about such a buildup of Iraqi troops. Neither the CIA nor the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency viewed an Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia as probable. The administration's estimate of Iraqi troop strength was also grossly exaggerated. After the war, Newsday's Susan Sachs called Iraq the "phantom enemy": "The bulk of the mighty Iraqi army, said to number more than 500,000 in Kuwait and southern Iraq, couldn't be found."

CONTINUED...

http://www.representativepress.org/LiesAboutIraq.html

Yeah. We may have to go to the root of the problem.


And I know you, Karenina, remember how all the aspens are connected.

[samplegirl]

2. They'll make anyone a four star general

that will say yes to Iran.

[Octafish]

6. All the good Admiral wanted to do was keep America safe.

That's not what Bush and his neo-conmen want, though.

The Man Between War and Peace

As the White House talked up conflict with Iran, the head of U.S. Central Command, William "Fox" Fallon, talked it down. Now he has resigned.

By Thomas P.M. Barnett
Esquire
March 11, 2008, 3:11 PM

If, in the dying light of the Bush administration, we go to war with Iran, it'll all come down to one man. If we do not go to war with Iran, it'll come down to the same man. He is that rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance. His name is William Fallon, although all of his friends call him "Fox," which was his fighter-pilot call sign decades ago. Forty years into a military career that has seen this admiral rule over America's two most important combatant commands, Pacific Command and now United States Central Command, it's impossible to make this guy -- as he likes to say -- "nervous in the service." Past American governments have used saber rattling as a useful tactic to get some bad actor on the world stage to fall in line. This government hasn't mastered that kind of subtlety. When Dick Cheney has rattled his saber, it has generally meant that he intends to use it. And in spite of recent war spasms aimed at Iran from this sclerotic administration, Fallon is in no hurry to pick up any campaign medals for Iran. And therein lies the rub for the hard-liners led by Cheney. Army General David Petraeus, commanding America's forces in Iraq, may say, "You cannot win in Iraq solely in Iraq," but Fox Fallon is Petraeus's boss, and he is the commander of United States Central Command, and Fallon doesn't extend Petraeus's logic to mean war against Iran.

So while Admiral Fallon's boss, President George W. Bush, regularly trash-talks his way to World War III and his administration casually casts Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as this century's Hitler (a crown it has awarded once before, to deadly effect), it's left to Fallon -- and apparently Fallon alone -- to argue that, as he told Al Jazeera last fall: "This constant drumbeat of conflict...is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions."

What America needs, Fallon says, is a "combination of strength and willingness to engage."

Those are fighting words to your average neocon -- not to mention your average supporter of Israel, a good many of whom in Washington seem never to have served a minute in uniform. But utter those words for print and you can easily find yourself defending your indifference to "nuclear holocaust."

How does Fallon get away with so brazenly challenging his commander in chief?

The answer is that he might not get away with it for much longer. President Bush is not accustomed to a subordinate who speaks his mind as freely as Fallon does, and the president may have had enough.

CONTINUED...

http://www.esquire.com/features/fox-fallon

Prescient.

Thanks for understanding what's going on, samplegirl.

[seemslikeadream]

3. Did you stop to read the writing at the wall?

I've heard it all before

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5G4zgk9xao


Do vampires read?

[Octafish]

7. 3,987

http://icasualties.org/oif/

Plus a million innocent Iraqis.

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

As far as reading, no. Unaccustomed to mirrors, they believe what they see on TV.

[SpiralHawk]

5. The K and the R

That the truth might be known. Thank you, Octafish.

Spiral Hawk wannabe gives wicked pissah Truth Kick for America:

[Octafish]

9. How White House Warmongers Learned to Love Empire

Wow, SpiralHawk! That truly is a most wicked pissah Truth Kick for America!

Reminds me of my boss and what happened when I marched into his office and asked for a raise.

How White House Warmongers Learned to Love Empire

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on September 27, 2006, Printed on September 28, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/42073/

Long before President Bush articulated his Middle East doctrine, an earlier Republican administration argued that a different region was so corrupt, so in need of reform, and was saddled with such oppressive and backward rulers that bringing about stability and the potential for prosperity for its citizens was beyond the realm of politics or diplomacy.

Ronald Reagan smilingly asserted that only U.S.-backed violence and American-style nation building could give the benighted people of Central America a chance to join the modern world.

He followed the claim with his infamous "dirty wars," and his administration framed the bloodshed in the loftiest and most idealistic terms. The Reagan administration launched an intensive public relations campaign to convince Americans that the tens of thousands of civilian deaths that resulted were regrettable but necessary, not only because of the United States' mission to promote human rights and democracy around the world but also in order to defeat terrorism.

Clearly, there are differences between Reagan's wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua two decades ago and Bush's debacle in Iraq today. But there are also threads that bind the two.

In his new book, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, historian Greg Grandin pulls those threads together and argues that U.S. intervention in Latin America, especially during the 1980s, served as a laboratory in which a group of neocons -- many of whom served both administrations -- distilled their unique and lethal worldview.

AlterNet caught up with Grandin recently to get the scoop on his new book.

Joshua Holland: Your book looks at the United States’ long history with Latin America, and you argue that during Reagan’s dirty wars in the 1980s in Central America, much of the ideology and the tactics and -- how should I put it? -- the sales pitch for supporting aggressive military action back home that we’ve come to associate with the Bush Doctrine were developed, and you say that it was possible precisely because Central America wasn’t important, that it wasn’t a focus of the international community and wasn’t caught up in the competition of the Cold War.

Greg Grandin: Of course Latin America as a whole has been extraordinarily important in terms of the development of both American foreign policy and our own domestic politics. What I try to do with the book is look at how U.S. corporate elites -- the Guggenheims, the Rockefellers and so forth -- first established themselves in Latin America with their overseas subsidiaries and how U.S. political elites viewed the region as the first place to project American power.

But Central America in the 1980s, I argue, was really a backwater and securely within the U.S. sphere of power. Washington could act there without fear of real consequences.

When Reagan came to power, despite his rhetoric as a Cold Warrior, he actually carried out a policy of moderation, and even conciliation, in much of the rest of the world; he pulled out of Lebanon, in the end he agreed to sanctions against South Africa and he negotiated with Gorbachev. And this is where Central America’s unimportance comes in. He gave the region to conservative movement cadres – it was a form of “wish fulfillment,” the place where they could match words to deeds, where they could carry out their fantasy of not just rehabilitating aggressive American militarism after our defeat in Vietnam, but of hitching that militarism to a reinvigorated sense of American purpose. This I argue is the core of the Bush Doctrine, or what I call in the book “punitive idealism.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/story/42073/

Thanks for helping me keep my eyes on target, my Friend!

[Supersedeas]

11. k&r - well done

[Octafish]

15. Inside the world of war profiteers -- from Super Bowl tickets to prostitutes

One would think this kind of story would have legs:

Inside the world of war profiteers

From prostitutes to Super bowl tickets, a federal probe reveals how contractors in Iraq cheated the U.S.

By David Jackson and Jason Grotto
Tribune reporters
chicagotribune.com
TRIBUNE INVESTIGATION
February 21, 2008

ROCK ISLAND, Ill.—Inside the stout federal courthouse of this Mississippi River town, the dirty secrets of Iraq war profiteering keep pouring out.

Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the war's largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.

The graft continued well beyond the 2004 congressional hearings that first called attention to it. And the massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it lined contractors' pockets, records show.

SNIP...

A common thread runs through these cases and other KBR scandals in Iraq, from allegations the firm failed to protect employees sexually assaulted by co-workers to findings that it charged $45 per can of soda: The Pentagon has outsourced crucial troop support jobs while slashing the number of government contract watchdogs.

The dollar value of Army contracts quadrupled from $23.3 billion in 1992 to $100.6 billion in 2006, according to a recent report by a Pentagon panel. But the number of Army contract supervisors was cut from 10,000 in 1990 to 5,500 currently.

SNIP...

KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton Co., says it has been paid $28 billion under LOGCAP III. The firm says it quickly reports all instances of suspected fraud and has repaid the Defense Department more than $1 million for questionable invoices.

CONTINUED...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-kbr-war-profiteers-feb21,0,5934269.story

Thanks for the kick, Supersedeas. Really appreciate it, my Friend!

[Supersedeas]

23. the advertisers and marketers that fund Cable News would rather Americans ignore these things

[Ichingcarpenter]

13. Once again you nail it....... kick and nominated n/t

[Octafish]

21. For One California Profiteer, Iraq is Going Great

Guess whose pay is going up, up, up?

For One California Profiteer, Iraq is Going Great

By Sarah Anderson, AlterNet
Posted on November 2, 2006, Printed on November 2, 2006

"War is hell," Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman once stated. This Civil War giant clearly did not hold stock in a major defense contractor.

For soldiers on the frontlines in Iraq, Sherman's words might still resonate. But for defense executives and their shareholders, the open-ended "War on Terror" has been anything but hell for the bottom line.

SNIP...

Koffel and URS are booming. One big reason: Equipment under war-time stress, as URS officials happily report, wears out five times as fast as equipment in peacetime. In all, the defense contracts that URS has snared have brought in over $1 billion in each of the three years since the Iraq invasion, compared to only a few hundred million in 2002.

URS stock, not surprisingly, is worth nearly five times what it was before the war started.

These stock gains have bloated CEO Koffel's personal bottom line. Last year, he cashed in more than $10 million worth of stock options, bringing his total compensation to $14.4 million.

In his good fortune, Koffel hardly stands alone, according to a study from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy (PDF). According to the report, CEOs at the top 34 publicly held defense contractors have doubled their averaged pay during the four years since the "War on Terror" began.

The highest-paid defense executive -- George David, the CEO of helicopter maker United Technologies -- has hauled in more than $200 million total over the past four years. The CEO of another company laden with Pentagon contracts, Health Net's Jay Gellert, has seen his pay leap over 1,000 percent during the post-9/11 period.

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/story/43548/

Thanks, Ichingcarpenter! Please know I very much appreciate what you do to get the word out, too.

[robertpaulsen]

14. War Profiteer Unparalleled!

From Project Censored's Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007:


#24 Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year

Sources:
Raw Story, October 2005
Title: “Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Options Rose 3,281 Percent Last Year, Senator Finds”
Author: John Byrne

Senator Frank Lautenberg’s website
Title: “Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Options Soar to $9.2 Million”

Faculty Evaluator: Phil Beard
Student Researchers: Matthew Beavers and Willie Martin

Vice President Dick Cheney’s stock options in Halliburton rose from $241,498 in 2004 to over $8 million in 2005, an increase of more than 3,000 percent, as Halliburton continues to rake in billions of dollars from no-bid/no-audit government contracts.

An analysis released by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) reveals that as Halliburton’s fortunes rise, so do the Vice President’s. Halliburton has already taken more than $10 billion from the Bush-Cheney administration for work in Iraq. They were also awarded many of the unaccountable post-Katrina government contracts, as off-shore subsidiaries of Halliburton quietly worked around U.S. sanctions to conduct very questionable business with Iran (See Story #2). “It is unseemly,” notes Lautenberg, “for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his administration funnels billions of dollars to it.”

According to the Vice President’s Federal Financial Disclosure forms, he holds the following Halliburton stock options:

100,000 shares at $54.5000 (vested), expire December 3, 2007
33,333 shares at $28.1250 (vested), expire December 2, 2008
300,000 shares at $39.5000 (vested), expire December 2, 2009

The Vice President has attempted to fend off criticism by signing an agreement to donate the after-tax profits from these stock options to charities of his choice, and his lawyer has said he will not take any tax deduction for the donations. However, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) concluded in September 2003 that holding stock options while in elective office does constitute a “financial interest” regardless of whether the holder of the options will donate proceeds to charities. Valued at over $9 million, the Vice President could exercise his stock options for a substantial windfall, not only benefiting his designated charities, but also providing Halliburton with a tax deduction.

CRS also found that receiving deferred compensation is a financial interest. The Vice President continues to receive deferred salary from Halliburton. While in office, he has received the following salary payments from Halliburton:

Deferred salary paid by Halliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2001: $205,298
Deferred salary paid by Halliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2002: $162,392
Deferred salary paid by Halliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2003: $178,437
Deferred salary paid by Halliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2004: $194,852

(The CRS report can be downloaded at: http://lautenberg.senate.gov/Report.pdf)

These CRS findings contradict Vice President Cheney’s puzzling view that he does not have a financial interest in Halliburton. On the September 14, 2003 edition of Meet the Press in response to questions regarding his relationship with Halliburton, where from 1995 to 2000 he was employed as CEO, Vice President Cheney said, “Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush’s vice president, I’ve severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven’t had, now, for over three years.”

Comment: A similar undercovered story of conflicting interest and disaster profiteering by those in the top echelon of the U.S. Government is of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s connections to Gilead Sciences, the biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu—the influenza remedy that is now the most-sought after drug in the world. This story was brought forward by Fortune senior writer, Nelson D. Schwartz, on October 31, 2005 in an article titled “Rumsfeld’s growing stake in Tamiflu,” and by F. William Engdahl for GlobalResearch, on October 30, 2005, in an article titled “Is avian flu another Pentagon hoax?”

Rumsfeld served as Gilead’s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to Federal Financial Disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.
The forms don’t reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but whipped up fears of an avian flu pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu sent Gilead’s stock from $35 to $47 in 2005, making the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer.

What’s more, the federal government is emerging as one of the world’s biggest customers for Tamiflu. In July 2005, the Pentagon ordered $58 million worth of the treatment for U.S. troops around the world, and Congress is considering a multibillion dollar purchase. Roche expects 2005 sales for Tamiflu to total at about $1 billion, compared with $258 million in 2004.

UPDATE BY JOHN BYRNE
The media has routinely downplayed Cheney’s involvement and financial investment in Halliburton, one of the largest U.S. defense contractors that received supersized no-bid contracts in Iraq. Ultimately, the importance of the story is that the Vice President of the U.S. is able to use his position of power to reap rewards for his former company in which he has a financial investment. Halliburton may also benefit from a chilling effect in which the Pentagon is more likely to favor Cheney’s firm to seek favor with the White House.

Cheney continues to hold 433,333 Halliburton stock options, and receives a deferred salary of about $200,000 a year. According to Cheney’s most recent tax returns, he held $2.5 million in retirement accounts, much of which likely came from his former defense firm.

Cheney recently filed disclosure reports that show he is valued at $94 million.

Senator Lautenberg’s disclosure, brought forward by Raw Story, received no mainstream coverage. While the press has often noted that Cheney was formerly Halliburton’s CEO, they routinely fail to mention how much money he accrued from the firm during his service there. They also fail to mention that he continues to receive a pension.

RawStory.com regularly reports on Halliburton and contracts awarded to the company. SourceWatch.org also has a good library of resources on Halliburton and other defense contractors as well as the Vice President.Another way to get involved is to contact your local senator or representatives about your concerns, and to ask them to push the Vice President to sell his stock options in Halliburton.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/01/359131.html

Great post, Octafish! If MSM wasn't beholden to these same corporate interests, they might actually report the truth that you so diligently expose.

[Octafish]

22. How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury

Great post, yours, robertpaulsen! Thank you for the info on Sneer's bad memory regarding his stock options.



Unable to read at even a third grade level, Smirk has people to help him with the paperwork.

The Great Iraq Swindle

How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury

Rolling Stone
From Issue 1034
Posted Aug 23, 2007 8:51 AM

How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.

You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress -- until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.

Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good -- four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life.

A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that's supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.

You've done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: "We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate," they write, adding that "the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles" and that "during our visit, a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member's shirt." The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.

When Congress gets wind of the fias­co, a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company decides to send you to the Hill -- after all, you're a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.

You blink. Fuck if you know. "I have some conjecture, but that's all it would be" is your deadpan answer.

The room twitters in amazement. It's hard not to applaud the balls of a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money and offers to guess where it all might have gone.

Next thing you know, the congressman is asking you about your company's compensation. Touchy subject -- you've got a "cost-plus" contract, which means you're guaranteed a base-line profit of three percent of your total costs on the deal. The more you spend, the more you make -- and you certainly spent a hell of a lot. But before this milk-faced congressman can even think about suggesting that you give these millions back, you've got to cut him off. "So you won't voluntarily look at this," Van Hollen is mumbling, "and say, given what has happened in this project . . . "

"No, sir, I will not," you snap.

". . . 'We will return the profits.' . . ."

"No, sir, I will not," you repeat.

CONTINUED...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle

Reading yours makes me glad I wrote the OP. Normally,
as its been as busy busy as a UPS commercial, I probably wouldn't have written it.
The reason I did:

My conservative friend at work came by this morning to pillory Hillary and attack Barack.
After listening to the latest about the Rev. Wright, I had to remind him that words are one thing.
Attacking a country that had NOTHING to do with 9-11 is another.
I asked if he'd heard about the Pentagon report Bush was trying to censor.
He said, "No." I told him a bit and that got him to leave my cubicle PDQ.

Ha ha ha ha (maniacal Democratic Donkey laugh)!!!!

[HCE SuiGeneris]

17. Great work Octafish.

K & R

[Octafish]

25. What Bush made me feel when he ordered the attack on Iraq...

...your sig photo captures it perfectly.

This is NOT the country I was born in.
It didn't start on March 18, 2003 or whatever.
I trace it back to 22 November 1963.

The Frenchman was photographed as he watched the NAZIs march into Paris in 1940.



When Bush attacked, I burned up inside. So, I posted this photo.
It was the last time I posted as Oblomov on the Old DU.

Bush-Nazi business model boasts horizontal, vertical integration...

No wonder the Bushes don’t like the Kennedys. As Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. was giving his life fighting the Nazis, the Bushes were busy doing business with them.
Is there any question why the Corporate Media only spit on the memory of the Kennedys and all they have done for this country? Can you say comprehensive global hegemony, Duhbya?

As the following article demonstrates, the people, organizations and events to which it refers are the real deal. Truly, uniting western capital with history's most heinous minds has created a first-class criminal operation. They must be stopped before they act again. Their Achilles heel is the Smirkelgruber.

--------

Anti-Semitism, Racism and a Bush Family Organization

By Carla Binion

December 19, 2000 | Barbara Bush and George H. W. Bush's brother, Prescott Bush, belong to a political organization, AmeriCares. AmeriCares is a CIA front that supports rightwing military operations while posing as a humanitarian group.

The late J. Peter Grace, the chair of AmeriCares from 1982 to 1995, also worked with the ultra-right racist think tank, the Liberty Lobby. Grace was the key participant in Project Paperclip, a covert operation which recruited 900 Nazi scientists to work in the U. S. after World War II. Many of those Nazis had been found guilty of experimentation on humans. ("Censored 1999: The News That Didn't Make The News," Seven Stories Press, 1999)

… more …

http://www.bartcop.com/18binion.htm

Sorry, I can't find the original.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=4400&forum=DCForumID38&archive=yes

What's cool, though, are the DU archives.

Thanks for your kind words and for understanding what's happening, BushDespiser12!

Bush and his NAZI gangster horde are out to destroy America.

I'm still crying. And I'm just getting madder and madder.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

18. But can he hide the trillion dollar debt this will cost America?

That pesky debt that will affect America for decades to come?

[Octafish]

26. Very true. Plus they can't account for a couple other trillion from BEFORE the war...

Money wouldn't be that big a problem if they spent it better.

It seems a big chunk of what goes to the Military Industrial Complex just...disappears.

Like magic, from Sept. 10, 2001:

The War On Waste

"How do we know we need $48 billion since we don't know what we're spending and what we're buying?" -- Retired Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan

CBS
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 29, 2002

On Sept. 10, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared war. Not on foreign terrorists, "the adversary's closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy," he said.

He said money wasted by the military poses a serious threat.

"In fact, it could be said it's a matter of life and death," he said.

Rumsfeld promised change but the next day – Sept. 11-- the world changed and in the rush to fund the war on terrorism, the war on waste seems to have been forgotten.

Just last week President Bush announced, "my 2003 budget calls for more than $48 billion in new defense spending."

More money for the Pentagon, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, while its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends.

"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.

$2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million.

"We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on," said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service.

CONTINUED...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml

Like the stolen election, another story that sort of dropped off the media radar.

Thanks for standing up and giving a damn, aint_no_life_nowhere.

[malaise]

19. Bush can lie and lie and lie and lie and lie

Truth will out!

[Octafish]

27. George Bush's Al Qaeda Lies Exposed

Bush and his fellow traitors are running scared.

George Bush's Al Qaeda Lies Exposed

By , National Security Network
Posted on July 25, 2007, Printed on March 14, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/57889/

President Bush makes fallacious connections between Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Al Qaeda who attacked the US on 9/11. "Some say that Iraq is not a part of the broader war on terror. They claim that the organization called al Qaeda in Iraq is an Iraqi phenomenon -- that it's independent of Osama bin Laden and it's not interested in attacking America. That would be news to Osama bin Laden. I presented intelligence that clearly establishes this connection. The facts are that al Qaeda terrorists killed Americans on 9/11, they're fighting us in Iraq and across the world, and they're plotting to kill Americans here at home again." (CNN, 7/24/07 )

The nation's 16 intelligence agencies agree that Al Qaeda has regenerated its ability to strike at the United States through its bases on the Afghan-Pakistan Border. "We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership."

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Al-Qaeda "was only 10% of the problem in Iraq and Nouri al-Maliki, its prime minister, lacked the political will to establish an effective government." He went on to say that even even if the military surge has been a partial success in areas such as Anbar province, where Sunni tribes have turned on Al-Qaeda, it has not been accompanied by the vital political and economic "surge" and reconciliation process promised by the Iraqi government.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is not the same as Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Some of the extremists in Iraq have chosen to call themselves "Al Qaeda in Iraq," and they are in fact inspired by Osama Bin Laden's extremist ideology. While there is some level of cooperation and exchange of information, these groups did not exist in Iraq prior to the invasion in 2003.

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/story/57889

These traitors fear one thing more than anything: The TRUTH.

They fear being labeled the NAZI scum they are.

Once a person finds out what Bush and his cronies are, they never forget.

Thanks for remembering, malaise!

[bobthedrummer]

20. It looks like Iran is next, barring refusal to follow illegal orders eom.

[Octafish]

28. Bush and the Iran NIE: Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Remember that NIE that came out last fall? The document showed Iran was no threat, consensus the heads of 16 or whatever organizations that make up the "intelligence community."

Bush didn't like what he heard.

Bush and the Iran NIE: Don't Ask, Don't Tell

George W. Bush has some adjustments to make.

At a news conference on October 17, President George W. Bush dropped a rhetorical bomb: "I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

SNIP...

The issue is not just that his saber-rattling was not in sync with the intelligence but that Bush did not take care to vet his hyperbole before displaying it in public. At the press conference today, NBC News' David Gregory referred to Bush's World War III comment, noted that the Iranian program had apparently long been suspended before Bush uttered that remark, and asked Bush, "Can't you be accused of hyping this threat."

Bush replied by noting he had only been made aware of the NIE last week. But Bush went on to explain that intelligence czar Mike McConnell had told him in August that the intelligence community had developed "new information" on Iran. (This was obviously intelligence indicating that Iran was not operating an active nuclear weapons program.) McConnell, though, didn't tell Bush what this "new information" was. According to Bush, McConnell said it would take time to analyze the data.

But Bush did not do two things.

He did not ask McConnell what this "new information" indicated. Nor did he ask McConnell whether it might support or undermine the administration's current policy and talking points on Iran. Moreover, if Bush's account is the full story, McConnell did not come back to Bush after the World War III comment and suggest that he tone down the tough talk.

Think of it this way: if the intelligence committee had uncovered intelligence demonstrating that Iran was furiously developing a nuclear weapon, wouldn't that information had been quickly brought to the attention of the president? At least, Bush probably would have been informed that the analysts were working intensively on hot stuff that might back up his claims about Iran. But with new material contradicting the president, it took several months before he was made aware of its significance. Throughout that time, Bush apparently never asked what the new-but-not-fully-analyzed information might mean for his policy.

CONTINUED...

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2007/12/6406_bush_and_the_ir.html

Do you ever get the feeling that this awful horror is trying to create a truly monstrous reality?

Thanks for all you do and for shining the spotlight on these traitors since the beginning of DU, bobthedrummer!

[bobthedrummer]

30. Sir, you gave me some some maps to follow that showed some places where I had previously got lost.

The details on those maps helped me in many ways.
Thank you.

[G_j]

24. Aggressive war is an international war crime

a Crime Against The Peace.

Lying America into war is treason.

[Octafish]

33. The Bush Crimes Commission Hearings

Precisely, G_j!

Here are some folks who have organized:

When the possibility of far-reaching war crimes and crimes against humanity exists, people of conscience have a solemn responsibility to inquire into the nature and scope of these acts and to determine if they do in fact rise to the level of war crimes " -- from the Charter

The Bush Crimes Commission Hearings

1. Wars of Aggression
2. Torture and Indefinite Detention
3. Attacks on Global AIDs Programs
4. Destruction of the Global Environment
5. Responsise to Hurricane Katrina: Before, During and After

Crimes Against Humanity: The Bush Record

A documentary of the five indictments brought by the Intenrational Commission of Inquiry Into the Crimes Against Humanity of the Bush Administration

A Project of The Not In Our NAme Statement of Conscience

SOURCE: http://www.bushcommission.org/

With a little bit of luck, we may see Justice served and these traitors held accountable.



"Actions has consequences."

[Initech]

29. Yup... money trumps peace. ALWAYS.

We have some seriously corrupt motherfuckers at the controls of our country. They must be stopped.

[Karenina]

32. Which is why politics has become personal. n/t

[Octafish]

34. We've tried voting them out. Nothing happened.

Maybe if enough people are made aware, something will happen.

Not that ABCNNBCBSFixedNoiseNutwork would fulfill their Constitutional obligation and help spread the word.

Money Trumps Peace. Always.



Warmonger, print by John Carroll.

Thanks for knowing what it's all about, EOO!

[Initech]

35. You know it!

What's even more pathetic is that we've had two chances to remove these assholes from power and we didn't take it, which is what is really pissing me off. I hope we dont end up with fucking John McCain as president.

[Octafish]

37. McCain-Romney '08.

Just right for Chimpire!

Should Once McCain is gone, it'll be Veep Jebthro.

And their escape will be complete.

Perhaps Adm. Fallon has a LOT more than a few friends left in the Pentagon.

[magellan]

31. We've got mittens too

And ours aren't made in China. :P

[Octafish]

36. We need to get our mits on them before they escape Justice.

Paraguay, per Mod Mom.



Jawohl!