Month: February 2005

UPI reports:

Military experts have said the plane was too high — at 15,000 feet — to be reached by [an anti-tank missile], the Sun newspaper reported Tuesday.

A senior ministry source told the paper: “It is clear the C-130 exploded in midair and shattered into thousands of pieces.

“This is almost exactly what happened when the Pan Am jet was blown up over Lockerbie (Scotland) by an on-board bomb.

“The most obvious explanation for this is that the disaster was caused by a midair explosion.”

“It was election day throughout Iraq, and to the insurgents, downing a big plane like an RAF Hercules would be a huge coup.”

The Royal Air Force Hercules was flying from Baghdad to Balad when it came down 25 miles north of the capital.

It turns out that people think conflicts of interest don’t much matter. “If you disclose a conflict of interest, people in general don’t know how to use that information,” George Loewenstein, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon, says. “And, to the extent that they do anything at all, they actually tend to underestimate the severity of these conflicts.”

Usually, conflicts of interest lead not to corruption but, rather, to unconscious biases. Most analysts try to do good work, but the quid-pro-quo arrangements that govern their business seep into their analyses and warp their judgments.

“People have a pretty good handle on overt corruption, but they don’t have a handle on just how powerful these unconscious biases are,” Loewenstein says.

To test the idea, Loewenstein and his colleagues Don Moore and Daylian Cain devised an experiment. One group of people (estimators) were asked to look at several jars of coins from a distance and estimate the value of the coins in each jar. The more accurate their estimates, the more they were paid. Another group of people (advisers) were allowed to get closer to the jars and give the estimators advice. The advisers, however, were paid according to how high the estimators’ guesses were. So the advisers had an incentive to give misleading advice. Not surprisingly, when the estimators listened to the advisers their guesses were higher. The remarkable thing was that even when the estimators were told that the advisers had a conflict of interest they didn’t care. They continued to guess higher, as though the advice were honest and unbiased. Full disclosure didn’t make them any more skeptical.

In the course of the experiment, Loewenstein discovered something even more startling: that disclosure may actually do harm. Once the conflict of interest was disclosed, the advisers’ advice got worse. “It’s as if people said, ‘You know the score, so now anything goes,’ ” Loewenstein says. Full disclosure, by itself, may have the perverse effect of making analysts and auditors more biased, not less.

Obviously, we shouldn’t keep conflicts of interest secret. But revealing them doesn’t fix a thing. To restore honesty to analyses and audits, you need to get rid of the conflicts themselves.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?021209ta_talk_surowiecki

An official US audit provided evidence yesterday of widespread corruption in postwar Iraq, finding that L. Paul Bremer’s occupation authority failed to keep track of nearly $9,000,000,000 in reconstruction funds. The critique added to warnings from US and international auditors about weak financial controls in Iraq, and growing evidence of cronyism and fraud.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1403034,00.html

President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to former CIA director George Tenet, who told Bush it was a “slam dunk” that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction, and L. Paul Bremer, who presided over the first 14 months of Iraq reconstruction.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63623-2004Dec14.html

Commentator Armstrong Williams was paid $241,000 by the Education Department to promote Bush’s education policy. Columnist Maggie Gallagher received $21,500 from the Health and Human Services Department to work on the president’s marriage initiative; syndicated columnist Michael McManus received about $4,000, and his group Marriage Savers $49,000, to work on the program. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002164731_pundits30.html

Halliburton has the largest number of Iraqi reconstruction contracts. It was the Pentagon’s No. 7 overall contractor in 2003, up from 37th place in 2002. In Iraq, The U.S. Government Accountability Office said Halliburton overcharged the government by more than $165,000,000. The agency said the company had charged three times what the Defense Department spends to send gasoline into Iraq.
http://www.iht.com/articles/530577.html

Halliburton is still making annual payments of up to $1,000,000 per year to its former chief executive, the vice-president Dick Cheney.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,912515,00.html

High-level government officials engaged in criminal, terrorist-related conduct, jeopardizing thousands of American lives to protect foreign business and diplomatic relations.
http://www.antiwar.com/edmonds/?articleid=3230

The Defense Policy Board, a group of outside advisors to the Pentagon, got a classified presentation from the super-secret Defense Intelligence Agency on crises in North Korea and Iraq. Three weeks later, the then-chairman of the board, Richard N. Perle, offered a briefing of his own at an investment seminar on ways to profit from possible conflicts with both countries. He also, reportedly, solicited money from a Saudi who was seeking to influence U.S. policy on Iraq.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0507-03.htm

At least $1,000,000,000 made its way from the Saudis to the Bush-allied companies and institutions. The bin Laden family’s Texas money manager, James Bath, invested in Arbusto, a company founded by George W. Bush. When George W. was investigated by the S.E.C., Robert Jordon (James Baker’s law partner) helped him beat the rap; when Bush became president, Jordon was appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia. George H.W. Bush invested in the Carlyle Group, a major defense contractor, and became a member of the company’s Asia Advisory Board. Saudis close to Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister, were encouraged to put money into Carlyle as a favor to the elder Bush. Under the leadership of ex-officials like former Secretary of State (and Carlyle Senior Counselor) James Baker and former Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci, Carlyle developed a specialty in buying defense companies and doubling or quadrupling their value. When relatives of 9/11 victims sued the Saudi Defense Minister, Baker’s law firm to defend him. George W. Bush served on the board of directors for CaterAir, a company owned by the Carlyle Group. The 27 classified pages of a congressional report about Sept. 11 describe direct, specific links between Saudi officials, two 9/11 hijackers and other potential co-conspirators.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/warroom/f911notes/index.php?id=17
http://www.michaelmoore.com/warroom/f911notes/index.php?id=18
http://www.michaelmoore.com/warroom/f911notes/index.php?id=19
http://www.michaelmoore.com/warroom/f911notes/index.php?id=20

Also see “Imagine Accountability.”

U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3– United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

. . . A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam….

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Read the rest of this “Blast from the past” on the dailykos website, here. Hat tip: Needlenose.

Noam Chomsky gave a talk (broadband Real Video link) at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, on November 16, 2004, and during the question period, this exchange took place;

Q. “Could you think of or imagine any form or shape in which you might support American military action which is taken in anticipation of – like the present justification – of an imminent and dangerous threat to the United States?
Can you conceive of any form in which you might support such action?”

NC. “Why don’t you generalize it? And say can you conceive of any action which any state might take?
Yeah sure, you can imagine such things, i mean let’s say you’re in Iran right now … [laughter from crowd] Iran is, uh, I mean there’s a real problem, Iran is – first of all Iran is under attack by the world’s superpower, with embargoes, this that and the other thing; it’s surrounded by states either occupied by its superpower enemy, or having nuclear weapons. A little way down the road, is the regional superpower, which has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction and is, essentially, an offshore US military base, and has the biggest air force, and technologically most advanced air force in NATO, more than any NATO power (outside the United States), and in the past year, has been supplied by the global superpower with a hundred advanced jet bombers, openly advertised as able to fly to Iran and back to bomb it; and also provided (I’m talking about Israel) [laughter from crowd] with what the Hebrew press calls “special weaponry”. Well, nobody knows what that means, but if if you’re an Iranian intelligence analyst, you’re going to give a worst case analysis of it, of course; and has actually been publicly provided with smart bombs and deep penetration weapons and so on. I mean they have a terrific case for anticipatory self-defense – better than any other case I can think of, but do I approve of it? Like, do I approve of their bombing Israel, or carrying out terrorist acts in Washington or so on? no. Even though they have a pretty strong case. Better than anything I can think of here, just as the Japanese had a much better case than any I can think of here, but I don’t approve of Pearl Harbor; so yeah, we can conceive of cases, and in fact, some of them are right in front of our eyes, but none of us approve of them. None of us.
Chomsky goes on to say;

“And in fact, the threat of terror and weapons of mass destruction is very severe, very severe, and the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration, doesn’t care about it. In fact, they are acting, consciously, in ways to increase the threat.

If you want to listen to this exchange, move the slider near the 1:02:13 mark, although the entire talk is well worthwhile.

What happened yesterday?

That’s the topic tonight on PBS’ News Hour, with Jim Lehrer, and one of the guests is, to my delight, Juan Cole, whose rational, clear-eyed analysis has provided a welcome alternative to the party-lining neocons, shouters, and dithering mandarins who populate the world of televised commentary.

The election, said Cole, was a triumph of the Iraqi spirit. It was their day. The Americans weren’t enthusiastic about one person one vote elections, due to the Balkan experience. He reminds the audience that the original plan was not to have direct elections. This was something that the Iraqi people wanted, and they carried it off.

Question: How important is ethnic-religious identity?

Juan debunks the idea of separatism culminating in partition as a political program on the ground in Iraq. Except perhaps iin the case of some of the Kurds. Iraqis will lecture people about over-emphasizing ethnic and religious divisions, and there is a sense of Iraqi nationalism. But when you look at their political behavior, you can see sectional interests coming to the fore. Most Shi’ites voted for the Sistani list. Most Sunnis stayed home.

Q: What effect will the elections have on the insurgency?

The insurgents want to chase the Americans out and make a coup. They are relentless. The election won’t stop them. They want to kill the emerging political class. This is like the Lebanese civil war of the 1980s. But it cannot win, and will, he said, die down.

Me: Well, yes: if we let it. However, the amount of “blowback” that is being generated by the U.S. military in Iraq, and the continued military operations, may be enough to keep the insurgency going well beyond its natural lifespan.

In any case, Cole’s emphasis in the interview was on the growing capability of the Iraqis to take up the task of building their own nation — or, rather, rebuilding it — even going so far as to venture that U.S. troops are not needed in Basra, which is being run with reasonable efficiency without outside interference. The Iraqi armed forces, he is confident, will remain loyal to the elected government.

Adeed Dawisha, a professor at the University of Miami, appeared with Cole on the same program: in answer to Lehrer’s question about an exit strategy, he practically pleaded for some kind of “a ballpark figure,” if only to appease Arab “conspiracy theories” that suspected the Americans of planning a permanent stay.

Yeah, they’re “paranoid” alright: I don’t know why they are wondering about those 14 “enduring” bases — I mean, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re, like, permanent … does it?

Keith Olbermann is burning up the airwaves with his scorching “Countdown” news program tonight. First, a little vignette about a “rumor” spread in Tikrit that food rations would be cut off to non-voters in Iraq’s election. Then a bit about of the “missing” nine billion bucks the Occupation Authority can’t seem to find that described Proconsul Bremer’s response to inquiries as “We can’t stop the reconstruction of Iraq and bother ourselves with differing accounting methods and spreadsheets.” Yeah, spreadsheets made of gold. Topping it all off: a discussion about exit strategies for Iraq. Is there one? His guest — a journalist — seemed to be giggling throughout the whole thing, in awe of Olbermann’s wickedness.

Ewwwwww! There’s David Frum — again! That little troll is everywhere. He’s declaring that the Bush occupation-election will show the powerlessness of terrorists like Bin Laden. Bull. We are recruiting for Al Qaeda. Steve Emerson, on the same program, marveled that the Iraqi insurgents could recruit 12 suicide bombers for a single day’s operations: “No other terrorist group I know of can do that.”

It’s telling how the different interviews showed varying reactions to Olbermann’s upfront anti-war skepticism: Emerson managed to look wistful and resentful at the same time as he basically acknowledged the truth of Olbermann was saying. The other guy, a journalist, giggled like a schoolboy. I applauded.

Go, Keith, go!

Hmmmm… I wonder how long they’ll let him get away with it.

UPDATE: Oh, wait .. Now Olbermann’s talking about his run-in with the James Dobson fundies, who think Sponge-Bob is gay — or something — at any rate, it looks like the fundies spammed him with thousands of emails, and now he’s reading their illiterate hate mail on air. Too funny. And sinister: There ‘s one that says “Don’t you remember what we did to Dan Rather?”

Yeah, now I know whether they’ll let him get away with it.