Friday Fling

NYT's James Glanz reports this morning that the comptroller and financial officer for the American authority and Iraq who been charged with taking kickbacks served prison time for felony fraud in 1990.

Along with a web of other conspirators who have not yet been named, Mr. [Robert J.] Stein and his wife received "bribes, kickbacks and gratuities amounting to at least $200,000 per month" to steer lucrative construction contracts to companies run by another American, Philip H. Bloom, an affidavit outlining the criminal complaint says.

How soon do these two get their Medals of Freedom?

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Hooray for Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha. The Vietnam veteran and retired Marine Colonel who once supported the war has called for the troops in Iraq to be pulled out in six months. From NYT's Eric Schmitt:

"Our military has done everything that has been asked of them. It is time to bring them home," Mr. Murtha said, at times choking back tears. Mr. Murtha's proposal, which goes well beyond the phased withdrawal of United States forces from Iraq that other moderate Democrats have proposed, stunned many Republicans who quickly held their own news conference to criticize the plan.

Among those Republican critics was House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who said Murtha had adopted a policy of "cut and run." Hastert, if you hadn't guessed, is one of many pro-war Republicans who never served in the military.

Murtha made his views on the "chicken hawks" abundantly clear when asked his opinion of Vice President Dick Cheney's recent incendiary remarks about critics of the war.

"I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done."

Keep it coming, Congressman Murtha. It's people like you who will give the rest of the legislature the spine to stand up and take its constitutional authority back from the White House.

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Speaking of Congress growing a spine, NYT's Eric Lichtblau tells us…

A tentative deal to extend the government's antiterrorism powers under the law known as the USA Patriot Act appeared in some jeopardy Thursday, as Senate Democrats threatened to mount a filibuster in an effort to block the legislation.

"This is worth the fight," Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who serves on the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview.

"I've cleared my schedule right up to Thanksgiving," Mr. Feingold said, adding that he was making plans to read aloud from the Bill of Rights as part of a filibuster if necessary.

As we've discussed here before, the Patriot Act violates key provisions of the Constitution's fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth amendments, and illegally gives the president the power to suspend the write of habeas corpus privilege, and empowers him to exercise bills of attainer which are specifically prohibited by the Constitution.

So while I'm glad to see Senate Democrats opposing the extension of the Patriot Act, I'm somewhat dismayed that they have to. The Patriot Act should never have been passed. It not only gives Mister Bush unconstitutional powers, it was unconstitutional for Congress to have given them to him.

Andrew Young has a good account of the debate over Abraham Lincoln's war powers over at LewRockwell.com. Roger Taney, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, thoroughly refuted Lincoln's authority to suspend habeas corpus.

Near the end of his opinion [in the Ex parte Merryman case, Taney] says that, if the executive branch can, in any situation, overstep other branches, then “the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws.” In Taney’s view, the Constitution is not a mere suggestion of how government should operate under ideal circumstances. Instead, it is a concrete document to which the executive must adhere at all times, including times of emergency. If presidents can abandon the Constitution “upon any pretext or under any circumstances,” the Constitution means nothing.

Keep that in mind the next time you hear Mister Bush talk about "rule of law."

And have a great weekend!

The Torture Never Stops

There's more.

NYT's Leslie Wayne reports that the Navy's biggest contractor will get special help recovering from Hurricane Katrina.

PASCAGOULA, Miss. - The destruction is everywhere at the Northrop Grumman shipyards here…

But as the cleanup begins, Northrop will have a much easier time than most other Hurricane Katrina victims, at least financially. Unlike many small businesses and families that may never fully recover from the storm, Northrop - through a combination of insurance and, most important, support from the Pentagon - is likely to end up having to pay little, if anything at all, from its own coffers to repair the damage.

The Navy is asking for $2 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds, saying in a memo that it wants to restore Northrop's three Gulf Coast yards, where most of the Navy's surface ships are built, to their pre-Katrina "capacity and profit opportunities."

Donald C. Winter, recently confirmed by the Senate to become the next Secretary of the Navy, is a senior executive with Northrup Grumman.

How about that?

Speaking of Setting Examples

From NYT's James Glanz:

In what is expected to be the first of a series of criminal charges against officials and contractors overseeing the rebuilding of Iraq, an American has been charged with paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks to American occupation authorities and their spouses to obtain construction contracts, according to a complaint unsealed late yesterday.

The man, Philip H. Bloom, who controlled three companies that did work in Iraq in the multibillion-dollar reconstruction effort, was charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, conspiracy to launder money and interstate transportation of stolen property, all in connection with obtaining up to $3.5 million in reportedly fraudulent contracts.

The complaint, unsealed in the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia, also cites two unnamed co-conspirators who worked in the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American administration that governed Iraq when the contracts were awarded in early 2004. These were the officials who, with their spouses, allegedly received the payments.

Ah, heck, what's a little graft in wartime? At least they didn't torture anybody. That we know of.

Oak Trees and Acorns

It looks like Iraq's democracy is turning out to be more like American democracy than we expected.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A top Interior Ministry official said Wednesday the 173 malnourished prisoners found by U.S. forces included all Iraqi sects, playing down allegations of a campaign by Shiite-led security forces to suppress Sunni Arabs ahead of next month's election.

Iraq's president even sounds like ours:

President Jalal Talabani said there was "no place for torture and persecution in the new Iraq" and that anyone involved "would be severely punished."

Can we expect to see a handful of bad apple enlisted personnel in the Iraqi Security Force take the fall for this?

Tongues on Fire

AMERICAblog has a synopsis of 51 occasions when Vice President Cheney misled America about Iraq.

A-blog also has this link to "Iraq on the Record: the Bush Administration's Public Statements on Iraq," prepared for Congressman Henry Waxman by the House Committee on Government Reform.

The document contains a database of 237 misleading statements on the threat posed by Iraq made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice between March 17, 2002 and January 22, 2004.

The 30-day period with the greatest number of misleading statements was the period before the congressional vote on the Iraq war resolution. Congress voted on the measure on October 10 and October 11, 2002. From September 8 through October 8, 2002, the five officials made 64 misleading statements in 16 public
appearances. A large number of misleading statements were also made during the two months before the war began. Between January 19 and March 19, 2003, the five officials made 48 misleading statements in 26 public appearances.

The document concludes:

Because of the gravity of the subject and the President’s unique access to classified information, members of Congress and the public expect the President and his senior officials to take special care to be balanced and accurate in describing national security threats. It does not appear, however, that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice met this standard in the case of Iraq. To the contrary, these five officials repeatedly made misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq. In 125 separate appearances, they made 11 misleading statements about the urgency of Iraq’s threat, 81 misleading statements about Iraq’s nuclear activities, 84 misleading statements about Iraq’s chemical and biological capabilities, and 61 misleading statements about Iraq’s relationship with al Qaeda.

Have you read about this report in the mainstream media yet?

Big Oil Slicks

Wapo's Dana Milbank and Justin Blum blow the whistle on the big oil execs who zoomed Congress last week.

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

Ho, ho!

In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate "to my knowledge," and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know.

Strictly speaking, the oil barons aren't subject to perjury charges because Commerce Chairman Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens of Alaska decided not to make them testify under oath.

Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg will ask the Justice Department to investigate whether oil execs are lying about their role in manipulating the energy policy.

Nice gesture, Frank, but what kind of investigation do you expect 'Berto "Torture Guy" Gonzalez to conduct on Dick and Dubya's big oil cronies?

Isn't that a bit like putting Pat Roberts in charge of investigating the Bush administration's manipulation of the intelligence on Iraq?

Underway

The Officer of the Deck, Jack's roommate, Lieutenant (junior grade) Gary Constantine, flipped an equally half-assed salute back at him. Gary had the short, bald, flabby ass look of a classic surface warfare officer. "Permission granted. Good of you to join us, Jackie. Better late than never, huh? You mind going over to the starboard side and getting that boss of yours off my back before he has an embolism?"

Jack looked to his right and caught the eye of the navigator, a squat, salt-and-pepper haired commander with a set of pilot wings on his chest and sourpuss on his puss. The gator, sitting in his elevated, barbershop style chair just aft of the navigation table, said, loudly enough for everyone on the bridge to hear, "Jack, glad you could make it. You know, they have these new things called alarm clocks. You should invest in one. They don't cost much."

Jack made his way starboard, twisting his shoulders through the swarm of watch standers, safety observers, and lookie-loos that always overpopulated the bridge when Connie got underway.

"I'll put one on my shopping list, Gator. What do they look like?"

That got a guffaw from all the enlisted men. Funny guy, that Mister Hogan. Frosted the gator's ass with that one, didn't he?

Jack took station at the navigation table next to wiry, mustachioed Chief Petty Officer Kirk, the senior enlisted quartermaster in the navigation department, who reeked of cheap pipe tobacco he'd no doubt just consumed in the small office behind the bridge that he and Jack shared.

"You ready to do this, Mister H?"

"I was born ready, Chief. The compass kids all set?"

The compass kids were junior enlisted men assigned to shoot visual navigation bearings as the ship transited the channel on its way out to sea.

Chief Kirk nodded. "Everybody's on station, sir, all compass repeaters check four-oh." In Jack's ear, he whispered, "About that alarm clock crack, sir. I don't recommend pitching the gator too much shit this morning. He ain't the happiest camper in the trailer park right now. The captain's been whipping him like a step child all morning."

Jack took the sunglasses from the map pocket of his flight jacket and slid them over his face. "At least the morning fog has burned off, Chief. The kids should see all their landmarks." He pointed out the bridge windscreen. "Look, up in the sky..."

Across the channel, a Boeing 707 with UNITED AIRLINES smeared all over it skimmed the skyscrapers as it made its final approach to San Diego International.

"Couldn't ask for a prettier day to go to sea," Chief Kirk said.

"No," Jack said, and making sure the gator wasn't listening, he whispered, "Don't worry about the elephants, Chief. We'll hose their shit over the side once we're out to sea."

"Roger that," Chief Kirk said. "Hey, speaking of which..." He looked at his watch, and tapped it, and held it to his ear, and looked at it again. "It's about that time, and I don't see nobody moving in that direction." He tapped the watch again, like that would do a shit bit of good if the watch had anything wrong with it. It was a digital plastic Jap job, like everybody else's watch was.

Jack looked across the bridge at Gary, who stood next to the captain's chair. "Officer of the Deck, are we ready to get underway?"

Hagel on Foreign Policy and the Middle East

Some pretty good stuff released from Chuck Hagel's office yesterday.

America must approach the world with a sense of purpose in world affairs that is anchored by our ideals, a principled realism that seeks not to re-make the world in our image, but to help make a better world.

We must avoid the traps of hubris and imperial temptation that come with great power. Our foreign policy should reflect the hope and promise of America tempered with a mature wisdom that is the mark of our national character. In this new era of possibilities and responsibilities, America will require a wider lens view of how the world sees us, so that we can better understand the world, and our role in it.

Trust and confidence in America is about more than our military might or economic power. Power alone will not build coalitions, will not inspire trust, will not demonstrate confident leadership, will not resolve complicated problems, and will not defeat the threats that the United States will confront in the 21st century...

Good News or Cheesy Campaign Trick?

This is good news. I think.

From the NYT:

The Senate voted on Tuesday to press the Bush administration to provide more public information about the course of the war in Iraq as lawmakers of both parties made it clear they wanted chief responsibility for securing the country shifted to the Iraqi government within the next year.

Lawmakers voted 79 to 19 for a Republican plan to seek new quarterly reports on matters like the number of Iraqi troops ready to take the lead in combat operations. The proposal expressed the Senate view that "2006 should be a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty."

On one hand, this seems to signal that the Senate "gets it" when it comes to the majority of Americans' opinion of the administration's handling of the war in Iraq. The Senate also appears to understand that American's are tired of the job Mister Bush is doing, and it wants Congress to step up to the plate and execute its Constitutional duties.

But don't get too excited just yet. As the NYT article points out…

…the practical consequences of the bipartisan vote on the Republican proposal may be limited and largely symbolic.

The president, through his officers in the Pentagon, is already required to make quarterly reports to Congress on the war by the War Powers Act of 1973. We may wind up getting nothing more than we've had in the past: Rummy gets grouchy and berates the armed services committees while his generals shrug and mumble.

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I'm willing to give Congress the benefit of the doubt for the time being, but it needs to keep up the momentum and drive the executive branch back into its Constitutional box. It must pass the interrogation limits bill, and it must not exclude the CIA from constraints on the treatment of prisoners. If Mister Bush vetoes the bill, Congress must override it.

Congress must force the administration's hand on the Guantanamo situation. Holding prisoners there without granting them POW status or a right to trial is a bill of attainer, something specifically prohibited by the Constitution.

Most importantly, Congress must repeal the Patriotic Act, which not only enables bills of attainer, but expressly violates the fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth amendments of the Constitution. (The Patriot Act is itself unconstitutional. Congress doesn't have the constitutional power to pass laws that allow a president to violate the Constitution.)
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I hope the current issues being debated in the Senate wake the good people of South Carolina up to just what an administration patsy their Lindsey Graham has become.

Graham wrote the legislation that blocks Guantanamo prisoners from access to the courts, and yesterday he voted against the Senate bill to hold Mister Bush to account for the Iraq war.

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So I'll be very happy if this Senate bill on the war signals the beginning of Congress taking its powers back from the executive office and doing its job. But I'm waiting to see if it's just a campaign strategem to get everybody back in office in 2006 so they can go back to sleep.

What They Called Things...

Jack double-timed it across the empty hangar bay--the air wing wouldn't fly aboard until that afternoon--trying not to gag on the smell of metal and jet fuel that stank up every corner of the ship.

He slipped through a hatch on the port side. They called it a hatch; it was just a big door with a watertight fitting. He started climbing ladders. They weren't ladders, really. They were more like stairs. They went up at an angle like stairs, and had handrails like stairs, and had steps instead of rungs. They probably called them ladders because that's what they'd really been on old Navy ships, and when they switched over to stairs, they forgot to change the name. Or something like that.

He'd taken this route to his stateroom so many times that his head didn't have to think about where it was going, because his feet knew their way by heart. Pretty soon, though, his legs started bitching at the rest of him that the rest of him was making them work too hard.

Jack realized he'd gone up three flights of stairs you called ladders too many. He slammed his gym bag against the wall you called a bulkhead, looked up at the ceiling you called an overhead, and begged God to spare him this shit right now. He turned around and started back down ladders. He tried not to think about why you called them ladders so he wouldn't go past the O3 level again (where his stateroom was), and keep on going until he was going down decks instead of levels.

Levels turned into decks when you got to the first deck, which was the hangar deck, also known as the hangar bay. Deck numbers got bigger as you went down--second deck, third deck, and so on. Level numbers got bigger as you went from the hangar deck, except that as you went up levels, you used different kinds of numbers to count them: O1 level, O2 level, etcetera.

It was an easy system to keep straight in your head, because it was all very consistent. Except that the flight deck was up on the O4 level. And you always called the floor a deck, regardless of whether you were standing on a deck or a level.

Jack didn't have a clue who had come up with the Navy's system for naming and numbering things. But he'd like to meet the bastard someday, and put a boot in his ass, because with all this interior monologue about why you called things what you called them on a Navy ship, he'd gotten himself all the way down to the hangar deck again.

This was just the sort of thing that happened when you drank like a whale for three days to get ready to go to sea.

He should be grateful, thinking about it. Being underway for two months would do him good. You couldn't drink alcohol on a U.S. Navy ship, so he'd get a good detox thing going. But he didn't want to think about his drinking too much either, because he didn't want to climb past the O-3 level again.

Up at the O3 level, Jack got off the ladder and turned left, which, when you were on the port side, was forward. Port and starboard were easy to keep straight too. Port was left and starboard was right, unless you turned aft and faced the ass end of the ship. Then everything turned ass-backwards, and port was right and starboard was left.

Right?

Jack made his way forward, reflecting that as ass backwards as things on a Navy ship were, he understood them a damn sight better than he understood anything in the real world, where you called things by their right names.

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In his stateroom, he threw his civvies and flight jacket on the lower bed, which you also called a berth, and sometimes a bunk, but that you normally called a rack. From a metal closet welded to the bulkhead, he pulled a fresh set of brutally starched khakis. He put them on the way he'd learned to from the Marine drill instructors at Aviation Officer Candidate School: the shirt (that nobody called a blouse anymore) first, then trousers (which real people called pants). The shirt tucked in neater that way. He slipped on tan socks and aviator's brown shoes, and looked in the mirror over the stateroom's metal sink.

Shit. He'd forgotten to pin his shirt shit on his shirt.

Come on Jack, he thought. Focus.

He draped the shirt that wasn't a blouse anymore over the back of his metal chair and jerked open the metal dresser drawer where he kept his shirt shit. Lieutenant bars went on the collar points. Nametag over the right breast pocket, dual anchored naval flight officer (NFO) wings over the left. On the button flap of his left pocket, Jack attached his Surface Warfare Pin.

He'd been all shot up about qualifying as a surface warfare officer when he'd wrangled his way into this assistant navigator job. You could count the number of Navy pilots and NFOs of his rank who were also qualified to drive ships on one hand. That might mean something to the ship drivers on his captain and admiral selection boards--if he made it that far before he pissed off the entire known universe.

He'd paid a price to earn the surface pin, though. Thousands of extra hours aboard the ship when it was home, studying engineering and weapon systems. Hours that Liz had loudly complained he should be spending with her.

Fuck Liz. Jack had been a naval officer for six years when he met her at the Miramar Officers' Club. First thing out of her mouth, when she saw his two anchored NFO wings, was that cheesy crack about "non-flying officer." What a crack she turned out to be. He'd told her on their first date that he was a career man, and that the Navy would always come first. Maybe he shouldn't have told her that; let her figure it out for herself. What he should have done was tell her to go take a non-flying fuck at a rolling donut from the get go.

He buttoned the shirt, jammed its tails into the waistband of his trousers, and grabbed his flight jacket from his rack and his sunglasses and Connie ball cap from his metal nightstand. Sixty-two seconds later, up on the O-9 level, he breezed onto the navigation bridge, which you sometimes called the pilothouse, and flipped a two fingered salute at the Officer of the Deck.

"OOD, request permission to enter the bridge."