Iraq War Costs Skyrocketing, But Congress Unable to Scrutinize Spending

Source: Jason Leopold, The Intelligence Daily:

Nearly all of the $516 billion allocated by Congress to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has come in the form of emergency spending requests, a method the White House has abused, depriving Congress the ability to scrutinize how the Pentagon spends money in the so-called global war on terror. The use of emergency supplemental bills to fund the wars has likely resulted in the waste of billions of taxpayer dollars, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office.

Dozens of emergency funding requests that Congress has approved since 2001 is unprecedented compared with past military conflicts when war funding went through the normal appropriations process. As of March, the GAO said average monthly costs to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has reached roughly $12.3 billion, $10 billion for Iraq alone, more than double what it cost to fund the war in 2004.

“Over 90% of [the Department of Defense] funds were provided as emergency funds in supplemental or additional appropriations; the remainder were provided in regular defense bills or in transfers from regular appropriations,” the report said. “Emergency funding is exempt from ceilings applying to discretionary spending in Congress’s annual budget resolutions. Some Members have argued that continuing to fund ongoing operations in supplementals reduces congressional oversight.”

Vernonique de Rugy, a senior research fellow and budget scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said funding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through emergency legislation is troubling because the money “doesn’t get counted in deficit projections, making it hard to track the real cost of the war and effectively removing any upper limits on spending for the war.”

“Even seven years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, and five years after the start of the war in Iraq, Congress and the president are still using “emergency” funding bills to cover costs, rather than going through the regular appropriations process,” said de Rugy, who just published an article on the issue, “The Trillion-Dollar War,” in the May issue of Reason magazine. “While other wars have initially been funded using emergency supplementals, they have quickly been incorporated into the regular budget. Never before has emergency supplemental spending been used to fund an entire war and over the course of so many years.”

Most troubling about this trend, the GAO said in a report issued in February, is that while the Pentagon’s budget requests has steadily increased annually the reasons the Defense Department has cited to explain its skyrocketing costs “do not appear to be enough to explain the size of and continuation of increases.”

“Although some of the factors behind the rapid increase in DOD funding are known — the growing intensity of operations, additional force protection gear and equipment, substantial upgrades of equipment, converting units to modular configurations, and new funding to train and equip Iraqi security forces — these elements” fail to justify the increase, the GAO report stated, adding that “little of the $93 billion DOD increase between [fiscal year] 2004 and [fiscal year] 2007 appears to reflect changes in the number of deployed personnel.”

Furthermore, a $70 billion “placeholder” request included in the fiscal year 2009 budget that the Pentagon says will be used to finance operations in Iraq does not include any details on how the money will be spent “making it impossible to estimate its allocation,” according to the report.

The GAO added the Pentagon has used emergency supplemental requests to get Congress to fund equipment and vehicle upgrades that would otherwise come out of the Pentagon’s annual budget. The Pentagon has succeeded largely due to a new way it now defines the war on terror.

“Although some of this increase may reflect additional force protection and replacement of “stressed” equipment, much may be in response to [Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon] England’s new guidance to fund requirements for the “longer war” rather than DOD’s traditional
definition of war costs as strictly related to immediate war needs,” the GAO report says, adding that Congress must immediately begin to demand a more transparent accounting of Pentagon emergency spending in order to put an end to the agency’s accounting chicanery.

“For example, the Navy initially requested $450 million for six EA-18G aircraft, a new electronic warfare version of the F-18, and the Air Force $389 million for two Joint Strike Fighters, an aircraft just entering production; such new aircraft would not be delivered for about three years and so could not be used meet immediate war needs,” the GAO report said.

On Wednesday, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff, said the military will soon run out of cash if lawmakers don’t act to approve a $102 billion emergency supplemental spending bill to continue funding military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We start running out of military pay for our force in June, we start running out of operational dollars that we can flow to the force in early July,” Cody said. “It’s all about time now. Those will be the consequences of not getting the supplemental.”

The GAO generally agrees with Cody, but said the Pentagon could dip into its budget and transfer funds to finance operations in Iraq until late September or early October, which would give Congress more time to scrutinize the emergency funding request.

Still, these dire warnings from Bush administration officials and military personnel about imminent funding shortfalls have become routine since Democrats won control of Congress in November 2006. Last year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates threatened to fire more than 200,000 Defense Department employees and terminate contracts with defense contractors because Congressional Democrats did not immediately approve a spending package to continue funding the Iraq war. The GAO and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) advised Congress that Gates could tap into the Pentagon’s $471 billion budget to fund the war while Congress continued to debate the merits of giving the White House another “blank check” for Iraq.

Government auditors have said that these predictions are untrue and have been cited publicly by the White House to prod Congress into quickly passing legislation to appropriate funds. Republican lawmakers and administration officials have also said failure by Democrats to fund the war is tantamount to not supporting the troops. But the rhetoric has been enough to spook Democrats into passing the emergency funding requests, often without being aware of how the money is being spent.

Other federal agencies, including the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), have testified to Congress about the limited transparency in DOD’s emergency budget requests.

“While DOD has provided considerably more justification material for its war cost requests beginning with the [fiscal year] 2007 supplemental, many questions remain difficult to answer — such as the effect of changes in troop levels on costs — and there continue to be unexplained
discrepancies in DOD’s war cost reports, the GAO report stated.

That led the GAO to draft a letter to Congress March 17, saying the $108 billion the Pentagon has recently requested is based on “unreliable” financial data and should be considered an “approximation,” which, technically, could be interpreted to mean the Pentagon’s accounting methods underestimated the cost of the war.

“Over the years, we have conducted a series of reviews examining funding and reported obligations for military operations in support of [the global war on terror], the letter, addressed to Congressional committees, says. “Our prior work has found the data in DOD’s monthly Supplemental and Cost of War Execution Report to be of questionable reliability. Consequently, we are unable to ensure that DOD’s reported obligations for [the global war on terror] are complete, reliable, and accurate, and they therefore should be considered approximations…GAO has assessed the reliability of DOD’s obligation data and found significant problems, such that these data may not accurately reflect the true dollar value of obligations [for the global war on terror.]”

A Pentagon spokesman did not return calls for comment. But a GAO spokeswoman said the DOD has been struggling with “deficiencies in the Pentagon’s financial management system” that contributed to the unreliable data. She would not elaborate.

Although studies have surfaced stating that the cost of the Iraq war could soar past $2 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office said trying to estimate future costs for the war is difficult “because DOD has provided little detailed information on costs incurred to date.”

“The Administration has not provided any long-term estimates of costs despite a statutory reporting requirement that the President submit a cost estimate for [fiscal year] 2006-2011 that was enacted in 2004,” the GAO said.

Jason Leopold is the author of the National Bestseller, “News Junkie,” a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. He is also a two-time winner of the Project Censored award, most recently, in 2007, for an investigative story related to Halliburton’s work in Iran. He was recently named the recipient of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s Thomas Jefferson Award for a series of stories he wrote that exposed how soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been pressured to accept fundamentalist Christianity. Leopold is working on a new nonprofit online publication, expected to launch soon.

WRH.Com Classic: How To Rig An Election In The United States

Source: What Really Happened.com:

Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program. The New Zealand Media blows the lid off of US vote fraud! Local copy

How the Back-door was discovered in the voting machines. Local copy

How the system integrity problem was discovered. Local copy

Bald-Faced Lies About Black Box Voting Machines. Local copy

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THE REAL SCOOP ON DIEBOLD Did the US Mainstream Media do an end run around the REAL scandal? “When asked to comment on allegations by Bev Harris that the Diebold software may have been designed to facilitate fraud, Rubin described the claim as “ludicrous.” Rubin could dismiss the allegation of deliberately fraudulent design in Diebold software, because his team never examined the Diebold software in question. Incredibly, this software keeps not one, but two Microsoft Access data tables of voting results. It’s like a business keeping two sets of account books. The two tables are notionally identical copies of the votes collated from all polling stations. The software uses the first table for on-demand reports which might uncover alteration of the data — such as spot checks of results from individual polling stations. The second of the two tables is the one used to determine the election result. But the second table can be hacked and altered to produce fake election totals without affecting spot check reports derived from the first table.“

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The Full Stash Of Diebold Memos Above is a link to an incriminating stash of Diebold Election Systems memos.

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Diebold Magic? 2002 “Surprise upsets” went to the GOP.	Origins of American Vote Fraud
The Greatest Cover-Up Of All: Vote Fraud In America	Voter fraud, again!
Pandora’s Black Box: Did It Really Count Your Vote?	How George W. Bush Won the 2004 Presidential Election
The foreign press starts to pick up the US vote fraud scandal The US media proclaims itself the “watchdog on government abuse”. Yet on the subject of rigged elections they remain quite silent.	A VERY AMERICAN COUP The voting machine fraud story grows!
Election Theft 2000! A New Bombshell! Al Gore ended up with a vote-count of -16,022. That’s NEGATIVE 16,022!	Irregularities in California 2003 race – Diebold machines yield fishy results!

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VOTE FRAUD AND THE BANKRUPTCY OF THE UNITED STATES If the elections are rigged, are you really responsible to pay off the government’s debts?

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See also: The 2004 US Elections: The Mother of all Vote Frauds

Yoo Disbarment Sought

by Steve Fournier of OpenEd News:

When there are citations to actual cases, these are steeped in deception, with only a pretense of responsible legal reasoning. The overall presentation seems intended to obfuscate rather than illuminate. Yoo relies principally on a 1942 case that was unprecedented at the time (wartime, officially, pursuant to a congressional declaration) and that hasn’t ever been followed by the Supreme Court. He cites a work from 1612 for the proposition that people who don’t obey laws aren’t entitled to their protection, and he cites opinions from the Israeli Supreme Court laying out what is and isn’t cruel and unusual punishment.

Among the most outrageous legal claims made by Yoo:

· The Justice Department has no authority to prosecute crimes committed in the course of military activities (citing Justice Department opinions)

· Congress has no authority to regulate the military, and criminal laws that explicitly cover government employees are to be interpreted to exclude the president and his military subordinates

· Torture during the interrogation of military “detainees” is exempt from criminal laws

· The President can suspend or terminate any treaty or provision of a treaty

Yoo employs the word “detain” (detention is temporary, by definition) when he means “imprison,” and this exemplifies his dishonest use of language throughout. Phrases without legal meaning, such as “unlawful combatant” and “Commander-in-chief power,” are used to justify vast areas of unlawful conduct. Coinages and neologisms have no place in legal writing, but they are a staple of this author.

Taken in sum, Yoo’s arguments, which are without legal merit, amount to a prescription for tyranny. Although the memo has since been “withdrawn,” it served as legal justification for uncounted acts of torture and kidnapping, atrocities for which Yoo is personally responsible.

Yoo includes a ten-page discourse on the definition of assault, concluding that torture in the course of interrogation doesn’t qualify. A third of the opinion is devoted to the Convention against Torture, which the US ratified and which Yoo sifts for loopholes. It turns out this treaty is all but unenforceable against the U. S. president. There’s no legal scholarship in the voluminous arguments meant to support Yoo’s finding on these points, just a lot of miscellaneous musings, almost as if the opinion were bulked up to compensate for the weakness of its logic.

Yoo must have been very confident that this memo would remain forever secret, because the arguments expose the author as an anti-lawyer and an enemy of the rule of law. Or maybe he’s just confident of his own immunity to accountability. He can be fairly certain that there will be no searching legal analysis of his arguments by any major news organization. His memo has already been critiqued and tossed aside by the people who tell us what to believe, as if the document itself were something less than a crime against humanity and an assault on the Constitution.

The House Judiciary Committee has invited Yoo to testify about the memo. Committee staffers are presumably taking the memo apart now piece-by-piece, and we can only hope that they take the miscreant to task for his grievous breach of professional responsibility. The committee might do well to hear from the Guild’s lawyers on the Yoo memo.

www.currentinvective.com

Hartford, Connecticut, lawyer, grandfather, Air Force veteran. Organizer: xdem.org

Fake Photos Helped Lead US to Invade Iraq

By Walter Brasch of Dissident Voice:

Add faked photos to the list of lies told by the Bush–Cheney Administration before its invasion of Iraq.

In a town hall meeting in Bloomsburg, Pa. this week, Rep. Paul Kanjorski, a 12-term congressman, said that shortly before Congress was scheduled to vote on authorizing military force against Iraq, top officials of the CIA showed select members of Congress three photographs it alleged were Iraqi Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones. Kanjorski said he was told that the drones were capable of carrying nuclear, biological, or chemical agents, and could strike 1,000 miles inland of east coast or west coast cities.

Kanjorski said he and four or five other congressmen in the room were told UAVs could be on freighters headed to the US. Both secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and President Bush wandered into and out of the briefing room, Kanjorski said.

Kanjorski said it was the second time he was called to the White House for a briefing. He had opposed giving the President the powers to go to war, and said that he hadn’t changed his mind after a first meeting. Until he saw the pictures, Kanjorski said, “I hadn’t thought that Iraq was a threat.” That second meeting changed everything. After he left that meeting, said Kanjorski, he was willing to give the President the authorization he wanted since the drones “represented an imminent danger.”

Kanjorski said he went to see Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a retired Marine colonel. Murtha, said Kanjorski, “turned white” when told about the drones; Murtha, a former intelligence officer, believed that such information was classified.

Several years later, Kanjorski said he learned that the pictures were “a god-damned lie,” apparently taken by CIA photographers in the desert in the southwest of the US. The drone story itself had already been disproved, although not many major media carried that story.

In October 2002, President Bush said in Cincinnati that, “Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas.” He said that he was concerned “that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States.” In that same speech, he claimed, “Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles — far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations — in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work.” Bush further claimed, “Surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons.” Those claims were later proven false.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said that at the time the President made his speech, intelligence analysts had already discounted that threat. Nelson had told Florida Today in December 2003 that no analysts had “found anything that resembles an UAV that has that capability.” Any drones that Iraq did have, John Pike, director of Global Security, a major military and intelligence “think tank,” told Florida Today, had limited range, and would not be able to target Tel Aviv, let alone the U.S.

Nelson, on the floor of the Senate in January 2004, said that the information presented by the Administration was crucial in getting him and others to authorize a pre-emptive strike.

* Assisting on this story were Bill Frost, and John and Sandie Walker. In a four-day period after that meeting in northeast Pennsylvania, Rep. Kanjorski did not return phone calls to follow up on his statements. The Department of Defense and the CIA did not comment. Certain representatives who could confirm the meeting were unavailable.

Walter Brasch is a professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. His current books are America’s Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Government’s Violation of Constitutional and Civil Rights; “Unacceptable”: The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina; and Sex and the Single Beer Can: Probing the Media and American Culture. They are available through amazon.com and other on-line sources. Forthcoming is Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush. He can be reached at: brasch@bloomu.edu. Read other articles by Walter, or visit Walter’s website.

Clintons Made $100m Since 2000, So Why Must Taxpayers Pay $2m/Year for Post-Presidential Perks?

By Edward A. Zelinsky of TaxProf Blog:

The Clintons’ tax returns raise one further issue which also requires public discussion: The federal subsidy the Clintons have received over the last seven years while earning in excess of $100 million. Mr. Clinton’s aggressive pursuit of post-presidential income is incompatible with the extensive public support he has received from federal taxpayers since leaving office. That public support was designed to preclude the nation’s chief executives from facing financial hardship after their terms of office. It was not intended to subsidize the aggressive pursuit of a post-presidential fortune.

The federal taxpayer’s subsidy of Mr. Clinton has several components. First, as a former president, Mr. Clinton is entitled to receive, for the remainder of his life, the salary of a cabinet secretary. That salary is today $191,000 per annum. In addition, as a former president, Mr. Clinton also receives, at taxpayer expense, “suitable office space appropriately furnished and equipped.” Mr. Clinton’s office in New York City costs federal taxpayers over $700,000 per year to lease and operate. Federal taxpayers also defray the salary and benefits for office staff and some of Mr. Clinton’s travel outlays. The General Services Administration currently budgets for all of these costs a yearly total of $1,162,000 for Mr. Clinton. The equivalent annual figures for former President Bush and former President Carter are $786,000 and $518,000 respectively. In addition, Mr. Clinton is also entitled, at taxpayer expense, to Secret Service protection for the remainder of his lifetime – even though, as president, Mr. Clinton signed legislation limiting Secret Service protection for his successors to the first ten years after they leave office. …

For President and Senator Clinton, however, this post-presidential package merely provided a tax-financed base for the aggressive pursuit of unprecedented financial gain for a former chief executive. Mr. Clinton has apparently treated as tax-free much of the federal largesse he has received. …

This post-presidential package and the federal subsidy it represents were not intended as a conventional deferred compensation arrangement. They instead reflect the judgment that former presidents should not be required to hustle in the marketplace after they leave office.

Can Criticism of Israel Be Stopped?

By Alan Hart of Information Clearing House:

How can criticism of Israel be stopped? By labeling it as anti-Semitism, or so supporters of Israel right or wrong believe. This has always been Zionism’s game but now the U.S. State Department, no doubt under immense pressure from the Zionist lobby and its Christian fundamentalist allies, is playing it, too. In my view the State Department’s 94-page study, Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism, is a disengenuous and dangerous document which might well make all Jews everywhere more not less vulnerable.

In his report of the study, Ron Kampeas of the JTA (“The Global News Service of the Jewish People”) says: “U.S. diplomats and other officials will be expected to take their cues from this forceful language in how they deal with political groups and individuals overseas.”

The “forceful” language of the State Department study includes the following two paragraphs (my emphasis added for comment below)

“Anti-Semitism has proven to be an adaptive phenomenon. New forms of anti-Semitism have evolved. They often incorporate elements of traditional anti-Semitism. However, the distinguishing feature of the new anti-Semitism is criticism of Zionism or Israeli policy – whether intentionally or unintentionally – has the effect of promoting prejudice against all Jews by demonizing Israel and Israelis and attributing Israel’s perceived faults to its Jewish character.

“Regardless of the intent, disproportionate criticism of Israel as barbaric and unprincipled, and correspondingly discriminatory measures adopted by the UN against Israel, have the effect of causing audiences to associate negative attributes with Jews in general, thus fuelling anti-Semitism.”

I am very much aware that telling the truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of conflict in and over Palestine could provoke classical anti-Semitism, this because the truth of history includes the fact that Israel was created, mainly, by Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleaning. Though the two crimes against humanity were different in scale, the denial by supporters of Israel right or wrong of Zionism’s ethnic cleansing in Palestine is as obscene as the denial of the Nazi holocaust.

The question is… How can the truth of history be told, and Israel be criticised, without provoking classical anti-Semitism? The short answer is that the context must explain the difference between Judaism and Zionism. As I never tire of writing and saying, knowledge of this difference is the key to understanding why it is perfectly possible to be passionately anti-Zionist (opposed to Zionism’s colonial enterprise) without being in any way shape or form anti-Semitic; and, also, why it is wrong to blame all Jews everywhere for the crimes of the hardest core Zionist few in Israel.

If citizens of all faiths and none in the nations of the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian world were aware of the differencies between Judiasm and Zionism, and how Zionism has made a mockery of and has contempt for the moral values and ethical principles of Judaism, there would be no danger of the truth of history and criticism of Israel provoking anti-Semitism.

As it relates to those of us who, with our books and public speaking, are on the frontline of the war for the truth of history and are by definition anti-Zionist, the State Department’s assertion (emphasised above) that we attribute Israel’s “perceived faults” to it’s “Jewish character” is libellous nonsense. We say the very opposite – that Israel is a Zionist state, not a Jewish state.

In conversation with me for a forthcoming television production, Professor Ilan Pappe, Israel’s leading “revisionist” or honest historian, offered a most penetrating observation. He was talking about the principle of the One State solution and he said:

“The One State would replace the racist and apartheid state with a shared democracy, a state for all of its citizens. This would create a state that was far more Jewish than the Zionist state because the Zionist state is not a Jewish state and abuses the principles of Judaism.” (My emphasis added).

As emphasised above, the State Department’s study also asserts that regardless of intention, “disproportionate criticism of Israel” (what the hell is that?) has the effect of “causing audiences to associate negative attributes with Jews in general.” This could not happen if audiences were aware of the difference between Judaism and Zionism.

Memo to the State Department: If you really want to play a part in stopping the monster of classical anti-Semitism going on the rampage again, take the lead in explaining the difference between Judaism and Zionism. (And read my two-volume book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews).

Iran Accuses U.S. of Faking Persian Gulf Video

Source: NAZILA FATHI of the New York Times:

United States Navy, via Getty Images

The United States Navy released this photograph of a speedboat suspected of being from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy maneuvering near three Navy warships on Sunday in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States has said five armed Iranian speedboats confronted the warships.

TEHRAN — Iran’s Revolutionary Guard accused the United States on Wednesday of fabricating a video showing Iranian speedboats confronting United States Navy warships in the Persian Gulf over the weekend, according to a report carried by the semiofficial Fars news agency and state-run television.

“Images released by the U.S. Department of Defense about the Navy vessels were made from file pictures, and the audio was fabricated,” an unnamed Revolutionary Guard official said, according to Fars, which has close links to the Revolutionary Guard. It was the first time Iran had commented on the video that the Pentagon released Tuesday.

The audio includes a statement that says, “I am coming to you,” and adds, “You will explode after a few minutes.” The voice was recorded from the internationally recognized channel for ship-to-ship communications, Navy officials have said.

The Pentagon immediately dismissed the assertion that the video, which shows Iranian speedboats maneuvering around and among the Navy warships, had been fabricated. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said Iran’s “allegation is absurd, factually incorrect and reflects the lack of seriousness with which they take this serious incident.”

Naval and Pentagon officials have said that the video and audio were recorded separately, then combined. On Wednesday, Pentagon officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak officially, said they were still trying to determine if the transmission came from the speedboats or elsewhere.

The unnamed Revolutionary Guard official quoted in the Iranian news media asserted that the video of the speedboats had been released to coincide with a trip by President Bush to the Middle East and “was in line with a project of the Western media to create fear.” The official said the sounds and images on the video did not go together, adding, “It is very clear that they are fake.”

The Fars news agency had said that the confrontation had been fabricated to present Iran as a threat to its neighbors before Mr. Bush’s trip so he could justify United States forces in the gulf.

The episode was initially described Monday by American officials who said it took place Sunday in the Strait of Hormuz.

They said five armed Iranian speedboats approached three United States Navy warships in international waters, then maneuvered aggressively as a radio threat was issued that the American ships would be blown up. No shots were fired. The video runs slightly more than four minutes and, Pentagon officials said, was shot from the bridge of the guided-missile destroyer Hopper.

The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the Navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.

Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore, or from another ship nearby, although it might have come from one of the five fast boats with a high-quality radio system.

The Revolutionary Guards arrested 15 British sailors in Persian Gulf waters last year and accused them of entering Iranian waters. They were kept in a secret location for two weeks before they were released in April. Their boats were seized by Iranian authorities and have not been returned. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Wednesday that Iran was willing to return the boats but that British authorities had not followed up, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.

Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, NRA hired ‘black ops’ company that targeted environmental groups

Dumpster-diving firm collected Social Security numbers of activists

Source: John Byrne of Raw Story:

A private security firm managed by former Secret Service officers spied on myriad environmental organizations throughout the 1990s and the year 2000, thieving documents, trying to plant undercover operations and collecting phone records of members, according to a new report.

Documents obtained by James Ridgeway, a Mother Jones correspondent formerly with the Village Voice, reveals the contractor collected confidential internal records — donor lists, financial statements — even Social Security numbers, for public relations outfits and “corporations involved in environmental controversies.”

Beckett Brown International also offered “intelligence” services to the Carlyle Group, the controversial DC-based investment company; “protective services” for the National Rifle Association; “crisis management” for the Gallo wine company and for Pirelli; “information collection” for Wal-Mart.

“Also listed as clients in BBI records,” Ridgeway reveals: “Halliburton and Monsanto.”

Like other firms specializing in snooping, Beckett Brown turned to garbage swiping as a key tactic. BBI officials and contractors routinely conducted what the firm referred to as “D-line” operations, in which its operatives would seek access to the trash of a target, with the hope of finding useful documents. One midnight raid targeted Greenpeace. One BBI document lists the addresses of several other environmental groups as “possible sites” for operations: the National Environmental Trust, the Center for Food Safety, Environmental Media Services, the Environmental Working Group, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, an organization run by Lois Gibbs, famous for exposing the toxic dangers of New York’s Love Canal. For its rubbish-rifling operations, BBI employed a police officer in the District of Columbia and a former member of the Maryland state police.

Taco Bell genetic corn fiasco

The documents reveal spy thriller-like absurdities: a spy job on groups that had discovered Kraft’s Taco Bell was using genetically-engineered corn not approved for human consumption and planned to make a fuss. A former Secret Service agent working for the company emailed another man on the payroll — an erstwhile Maryland police officer.

Received a call from Ketchum yesterday afternoon re three sites in DC. It seems Taco Bell turned out some product made from bioengineered corn. The chemicals used on the corn have not been approved for human consumption. Hence Taco Bell produced potential glow-in-the-dark tacos. Taco Bell is owned by Kraft. The Ketchum Office, New York, has the ball. They suspect the initiative is being generated from one of three places:

1. Center for Food Safety, 7th & Penn SE

2. Friends of the Earth, 1025 Vermont Ave (Between K & L Streets)

3. GE Food Alert, 1200 18th St NW (18th & M)

#1 is located on 3rd floor. Main entrance is key card. Alley is locked by iron gates. 7 dempsters [sic] in alley—take your pick.

#2 is in the same building as Chile Embassy. Armed guard in lobby & cameras everywhere. There is a dumpster in the alley behind the building. Don’t know if it is tied to bldg. or a neighborhood property. Cameras everywhere.
#3 is doable but behind locked iron gates at rear of bldg.

Taco Bell has also raised the heckles of activists for the price it paid those who produced its tomatoes. After a protracted campaign by a Florida group, the firm agreed to pay an extra penny for each pound of tomatoes it buys from farm workers.

The company took three years to increase their payment per pound by a cent, which they did in 2005.

Taking out Greenpeace’s trash

An eyewitness described a ‘black op’ on Greenpeace, one of the world’s largest environmental activist groups.

“It was Mission Impossible-like,” the witness remarked. The firm collected internal reports from Greenpeace’s garbage. They attempted to crack the codes on the organization’s front doors.

Technically, the firm has dissolved. But they’re not down and out.

“As for BBI’s principals,” Ridgeway writes, “they are still operating. Tim Ward now runs a security firm called Chesapeake Strategies, which bills itself as ‘a multinational security and investigative firm comprised of professionals with extensive security experience.’ Jay Bly works there. Its website boasts that it maintains affiliated offices in Paris, Beijng, Tokyo, Qatar, and Kuwait and that ‘many team members continue to hold Secret and Top Secret government security clearances.’

Genocide Alert: Israel has cut off all fuel supplies to Gaza’s 1.4 million residents

By Aaron Heller of the Associated Press:

Israel cut off all fuel supplies to Gaza’s 1.4 million residents Thursday, a day after four Palestinian militants infiltrated the Israeli depot that is the territory’s sole source of fuel, and shot dead two civilian workers.

The brazen daylight raid in southern Israel threatened to set off a new round of fighting in Gaza after a monthlong lull and could jeopardize recently renewed peace efforts.

Three smaller militant factions claimed they carried out the attack, but the Israeli government held Gaza’s Hamas rulers responsible. It sent tanks, troops and aircraft into the Palestinian territory after the raid, killing at least eight Palestinians, including three civilians. And it warned that more reprisals could be coming.

“We will chose the time and the place to respond. The blame lies on Hamas as the responsible authority there,” Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defense minister, told Israel’s Army Radio.

The Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad, which took part in the attack, called the raid, which was carried out under cover of mortar fire, a “unique and complicated operation.”

Abu Ahmed of Islamic Jihad said the attack was intended to target the fuel depot on which Gazans depend.

The fuel “is dipped in humiliation,” he said, because people wait for it for hours. “If their fuel means humiliation for us, we don’t want it.”

Maj. Tal Levram, an Israeli army spokesman, said the militants apparently were planning to carry out a broader attack on a neighboring Israeli village or to kidnap soldiers, but were thwarted by the arrival of Israeli troops.

Palestinian militants frequently attack the Israeli border, but they rarely succeed in getting through. In another daring daytime raid in June 2006, militants tunneled into Israel, killed two soldiers and captured a third. The soldier, Cpl. Gilad Schalit, remains in captivity in Gaza.

Wednesday’s attack upset more than a month of calm following a broad Israeli military offensive that killed more than 120 Gazans, including dozens of civilians. Since the offensive ended in early March, Egypt has been trying to mediate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, and the sides appear to have been honoring an informal truce.

Israel sealed its borders with Gaza after the Islamic militant group seized control of the territory in June, and has reduced the flow of fuel, electricity and basic goods. The sanctions have hit hard and Hamas threatened on Tuesday to blow up Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt to relieve the strain.

Israel has taken the threat seriously because Hamas breached the Egyptian border in January, allowing tens of thousands of people to pour into Egypt for more than a week before the border was resealed.

On Thursday, an Israeli think tank reported that Hamas’ military buildup is at its peak, despite the international blockade on Gaza.

The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center said the Islamic militant Hamas group has organized 20,000 armed forces and acquired longer-range rockets and advanced anti-tank weapons.

It also said Iran and Syria supply Hamas with weapons, technical know-how and training. The major points of the report were not new, but were significant because of the center’s close links to Israel’s defense establishment. Some of the material in the report was based on data from the Shin Bet security agency.

Israel stopped pumping gas on Thursday and at least two Israeli ministers said Israel should cut it off permanently following the attack. However, officials said the flow would be renewed shortly to avert a humanitarian crisis.

Gazans received fuel supplies on Wednesday before the attack.

The infiltration also serves as a reminder that Israel, which is conducting peace talks with the rival Palestinian government of President Mahmoud Abbas, will not be able to implement a deal as long as Hamas rules Gaza. Hamas is not a party to those talks.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said the raid would not disrupt peace talks. The two sides hope to reach a final peace deal by the end of the year.

“We decided that we will continue to talk and will not let terrorists have a veto voice on the talks with the pragmatic forces,” Mekel said.

Growing Hunger: Let Them Eat Ethanol!

By SHARON SMITH from Counterpunch.org:

[...]

Hunger is also rising in the U.S. The unregulated greed unleashed over thirty years of neoliberalism that wreaked havoc on the world’s poorest countries is now exposing the class divide in the world’s richest. It can no longer be claimed that all of those residing in the global North gain prosperity at the expense of the global South.

To be sure, growing hunger in America has only earned passing reference from U.S. media outlets, which still largely take their cue from Wall St. and the White House. On April 7, for example, Tribune Newspapers preposterously featured an article on the plight of that tiny slice of Americans now curbing their exorbitant spending habits. The article feature a down-on-her-luck mortgage broker forced to forego the Botox treatments for which she once regularly dropped $1,800. “I would rather have Botox than go out to dinner,” the woman told reporters-who reported it without irony.

Food inflation in the U.S. has reached a level not seen in decades, with food staples like milk rising 17 percent over the last year, rice, pasta and bread rising over 12 percent and eggs increasing by 25 percent. As job losses mount in the current recession, an unprecedented 28 million Americans are expected to receive food stamps to survive this year. One in six people in West Virginia, and one in ten in Ohio and New York, are now relying on food stamps to survive. And one in three children in Oklahoma have been on food stamps at some time in the last year.

Food stamp “entitlements” are far from generous in the world’s most affluent society, and it safe to say that most people suffering from rising food prices do not qualify for help. According to guidelines posted on the USDA’s website, a family of four is eligible to receive food stamps only if their net monthly income is at or below $1,721. This same family of four is then entitled to a maximum monthly food stamp allotment of $542-the same amount as in 1996. The average subsidy amounts to roughly $1 per meal per person. And 800,000 mostly elderly and disabled food stamp recipients currently receive the minimum benefit of a mere $10 per month, according to the New York Times.

* * *

Mainstream economists have usually described the global food crisis as a food “shortage”, but the shortage has been greatly exacerbated by the merciless laws of the free market. In many cases, the problem is not an immediate shortage of food but merely a shortage of the money to pay for it. World Food Program Executive Director Josette Sheeran recently remarked about Sub-Saharan Africa, “We are seeing more urban hunger than ever before. Often we are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it.”

The agricultural/food business is now the second most profitable industry in the world, lagging only behind pharmaceuticals. Indeed the automaker Mitsubishi, which also controls the second largest bank in the world, has become one of the world’s largest beef processors, demonstrating the degree to which capital has flocked to the agribusiness sector. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2008 heaped approval on the role of agribusiness, commenting, “The private agri-business sector has become more vibrant. New, powerful actors have entered agricultural value chains and have an economic interest in a dynamic and prosperous agricultural sector and a voice in political affairs.”

But just as agribusiness wiped out small U.S. farmers in the 1980s, it has repeated this pattern around the world ever since. As global justice activist Vandana Shiva wrote in 2006, in India “without market regulation agribusiness corporations will make profits selling costly seeds, buying cheap farm produce, and locking farmers in debt. This has been the process by which the small family farmer has disappeared in U.S.A, Argentina, Europe.”

Now the law of supply and demand has dictated that the new market for biofuels should reduce the production of corn for food by 25 percent in the U.S.–triggering a manmade shortage and a rise in corn prices. Speculators have been hoarding crops on the expectation that prices will rise further. Meanwhile, investors around the world have been fleeing the falling dollar to buy up commodities such as rice and wheat, adding to the speculative momentum and forcing staple prices higher for the world’s poorest people.

The neoliberal agenda long ago lost its shine for the vast majority of the world’s population, although its most earnest proponents have been the last to recognize this stubborn reality. The most recent World Economic Outlook, published by the IMF last fall, did note rising inequality in the richest countries: “Among the largest advanced countries, inequality appears to have declined only in France The recent experience (of increasing inequality) seems to be clear change in the course from the general decline in inequality in the first half of the 20th century.”

Yet the IMF remained optimistic about the future of neoliberalism: “from 2002 to the present, the world economy has enjoyed its strongest period of sustained growth since the late 1960s and early 1970s, while inflation has remained at low levels. Not only has recent global growth been high but expansion has also been broadly shared across countries. The volatility of growth has fallen.”

In recent weeks, neoliberal policymakers appear to have finally realized that widespread hunger could ignite a level of protest that threatens the ruling order worldwide. World Bank president Robert Zoellick recently worried on the organization’s website, “33 countries around the world face potential social unrest because of the acute hike in food and energy prices.”

Perhaps these out-of-touch policy wonks should suggest that the world’s poor start eating ethanol, in keeping with their long-standing bourgeois tradition. And U.S. workers now teetering into the neoliberal abyss should consider following their brothers and sisters around the world in fighting back.

Sharon Smith is the author of Women and Socialism and Subterranean Fire: a History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States. She can be reached at: sharon@internationalsocialist.org