Not Funny
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Crime, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“The issue is not whether the Iraqi people will greet U.S. soldiers as their liberators, but what will they do six months after that.
I find it naive and disingenuous to claim that you can create democracy in Iraq any time soon.
The administration has already assured us that the U.S. will not stay there for very long, and, if that is the case, then the goal of establishing a constitutional system in Iraq is a joke.”
– Gen. William Odom, February 2003
The late Gen. Odom was my most-favorite commentator on the whole messed-up adventure in Iraq — he pulled no punches and was a welcome sight on PBS.
Of course, the network and cable news outlets wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole — they had the Pentagon’s generals to provide biased-color commentary on the Iraqi business.
Odom called the real deal: “The invasion of Iraq I believe will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.”
An ugly joke with one long, asshole-of-a-punchline.
(Illustration found here).
The latest bit of shit to come out of Iraq — beyond President Obama’s phoney-baloney announcement that ‘all’ US troops will be out of that destroyed country by this year’s end — is a report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) on another disaster within the greater disaster.
The lede graph in the CNN story tells the tale:
As the U.S. military heads towards the exits in Iraq, a new report released Sunday on a major reconstruction project there reads like a critique of the war in general — poorly planned, unexpectedly costly, years behind schedule and with an uncertain future.
The project in question is the Fallujah Waste Water System, an operation that should have raised alarms at its very conception, but back in those days, no one with any sense at all was in charge.
Another example of wasted lives and treasure — the system was supposed to handle 100,000 Iraqi homes, but up to last month, only 6,000 have been connected, and the project was suppose to cost $35 million, but now its cost is $100 million with no end in sight.
In fact:
“In the end, it would be dubious to conclude that this project helped stabilize the city, enhanced the local citizenry’s faith in government, built local service capacity, won hearts or minds, or stimulated the economy.”
“Coupled with the fact that the outcome achieved was a wastewater treatment system operating at levels far below what was anticipated, it is difficult to conclude that the project was worth the $100 million investment and the many lives lost.”
Gen. Odom would turn over in his grave with shame.
As the so-called last of US troops get ready to depart, they will leave in their wake a country that’s not only dangerous, but completely screwed.
Also included in that SIGIR report was comments from Lt. Gen. Babakir Zebari, Iraq’s defense chief, who says that the Iraqi military won’t be able to operate on its own until sometime between 2020 and 2024.
WTF!
Until then what happens?
Gen. Odom underestimated the horror — beyond the US tragedy (4,481 GIs killed, more than 32,000 wounded, and more than 30 percent of all US armed forces have some form of PTSD) the death and destruction to the Iraqi nation is near impossible to grasp.
From The Nation last week:
The Brookings Institute estimates that 115,250 Iraqi civilians were killed during the war.
Iraq Body Count puts the figure at between 103,158 and 112,724 people.
Other estimates of excess deaths from the war, such as the Lancet survey and the Opinion Research Business survey, are substantially higher, but it is enough here to grapple with the most conservative estimates.
…
But that comparison understates how devastating the war has been to Iraq, because it ignores Iraqi combatants who’ve been killed, and neither does it address displaced persons.
By a conservative estimate, 3,700,000 Iraqis have been displaced from their homes by the war.
By way of comparison, a year after Hurricane Katrina, the population of a devastated New Orleans had shrunk by 378,000 people.
Or put another way, if you cleared every last person out of Los Angeles, you could fill the city back up to its current population with displaced Iraqis.
And further to inflame an out-of-control fire, 40 percent of Iraqi professionals have left the country since 2003, and Iraq had 34,000 physicians before the invasion, now have about 12,000.
A shitty life there, and it’s George Jr.’s fault — why isn’t he in jail?
The financial cost of the Iraqi war keeps piling up — for a never-ending dial, see Cost of War — the amount this morning is $801,234,070…and climbing by the second.
The Christian Science Monitor remembers this: When President George W. Bush launched the war, charging incorrectly that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon estimated its cost at $50 billion to $60 billion. Economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey got in hot water at the White House when he guessed in public the war could cost as much as $200 billion.
Ha!
I’m not joking — If I was joking, it’d go something like this: Horse walks into a bar, bartender asks, “Why the long face?”
‘Nother ‘Nam
Filed Under Bullshit, Just Plain War, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.
“To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism.
“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”
– Walter Cronkite, February 27, 1968
Uncle Walter could have most-easily been talking about Afghanistan, where yesterday 12 US peoples were killed in Kabul when a suicide bomber struck a vehicle in a NATO military convoy.
Four Afghans, including two students, were also killed.
In the US, at least a baker’s dozen of mothers will be weeping in unimaginable sorrow — a continuing grief that apparently has no end, even as a big majority of Americans now oppose the Afghan war, a conflict which started right, but has become a beyond-Halloween horror show.
(Illustration of Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman I‘ found here).
The Afghan war has morphed into a terrible stalemate, the dying of more US military service people will continue unabated if the war continues on its current path, and there ain’t no indication it won’t.
According to the CNN story, four US GIs and eight US contractors were killed in the blast — first reports told of five American soldiers dying, but later released word one of those was Canadian.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the incident — a suicide driver/bomber drove a Toyota packed with 1,800 pounds of explosives into an armored bus, called a RhinoRunner (typically a 13-ton vehicle described by its builder as “The Toughest Bus on Planet Earth”).
Well, not so much against a Toyota packed with exploding shit.
And WTF this: Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Kabul, said the incident is indicative of an attack where a suicide bomber will “drive up and down the roads waiting for a target.”
Apparently, an opportunity kind of approach.
Also on Saturday, 10 Australian soldiers were fired upon by a trainee Afghan soldier in Kandahar Province, killing three and wounding seven — an interpreter was also killed.
The shooting occurred at a morning parade, and despite it all, the shooter was said to be a rogue soldier, yet he had been in the army for three years.
Meanwhile, one incident didn’t pan out when a female suicide bomber was stopped outside a branch of the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in northeaster Afghanistan, on the border with Pakistan, and then detonated her package, injuring five people, two civilians and three security officials — she was the only fatality and had awaited for hours at a nearby female-only bus stop before attacking.
A casual-like oddity, huh?
And this was just Saturday.
The whole theater of war has become infected — some ‘major‘ incidents:
– Sept. 20: An insurgent with a bomb wrapped in his turban assassinates former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was leading a government effort to broker peace with the Taliban.
The explosion kills four bodyguards and also wounds of a key presidential adviser working to lure Taliban fighters off the battlefield.
— Sept. 13: Taliban insurgents fire rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles at the U.S. Embassy, NATO headquarters and other buildings, killing seven Afghans in the coordinated daylight attack.
No embassy or NATO staff members were hurt.
— Aug. 19: Taliban suicide bombers storm the British Council, the U.K.’s international cultural relations body, killing eight people during an eight-hour firefight as two English language teachers and their bodyguard hid in a locked panic room on the anniversary of the country’s independence from Britain.
— Aug. 6: A CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashes in eastern Wardak province after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, killing 30 U.S. special operation troops, a translator, and seven Afghan commandos.
— June 29: Nine insurgents armed with explosive vests, rifles and rocket launchers storm the InterContinental Hotel in Kabul, killing at least 12 people and holding off NATO and Afghan forces for five hours.
…
— Feb. 26: Suicide attackers strike two residential hotels in Kabul, killing 20 people, including seven Indian nationals.
And in September, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, the head of US training for the Afghan military reported (from Wired‘s Danger Room blog): Two years of an accelerated effort to train Afghans to take over that fight, at an annual cost of $6 billion. And not a single Afghan army battalion can operate without assistance from U.S. or allied units.
Which would explain why the guy who shot and killed the Australians, supposedly a three-year veteran, was still considered a trainee.
Not only that, 1.4 percent of Afghan cops and 2.3 percent of Afghan soldiers walk off the job every month, which led Caldwell to say that if “left unchecked [attrition] could undo much of the progress made to date.”
Instead of truth, US peoples get bullshit.
From Time magazine:
Last week, the Pentagon sent Congress its required semi-annual assessment that said a “firm foundation” exists to shift responsibility for defending the country from foreign to Afghan troops.
“After five consecutive years where enemy-initiated attacks and overall violence increased sharply each year (example, up 88 percent in 2010 over 2009),” the report noted, “such attacks began to decrease in May 2011 compared to the previous year and continue to decline.”
In the latest CNN/ORC International Poll released Friday, 63 percent of US respondents opposed the war:
But that opposition is not a reflection of the original decision to get involved in Afghanistan a decade ago,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
“It’s what Afghanistan has turned into in the subsequent decade that has soured Americans on the war effort there.”
The survey indicates that 57 percent say it was not a mistake to send military forces to Afghanistan in October 2001, several weeks after the September 11th terrorist attacks.
But according to the poll, 58 percent now say that the war in Afghanistan has turned into a situation like the U.S. faced in Vietnam, six points higher than the number who felt that way a year ago.
The horror is that ordinary US peoples can’t do a thing about it.
Nowadays, we’re not as naive and ignorant as we were in February 1968, when Cronkite gave his grim assessment of the Vietnam war — LBJ’s supposedly infamous retort: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America” — but then again, there wasn’t a Fox News in them days either.
The situation in Vietnam had been highly-altered in 1968 by the Tet Offensive, which was just winding down when Uncle Walter rendered his editorial, and had changed the landscape of how US peoples viewed the grinding conflict.
From Gallop polling via PBS, Americans responded to the question, “In view of developments since we entered the fighting in Vietnam, do you think the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam?”
The results — in August 1961, 61 percent had said “no,” it was not a mistake, and by February 1968, that number had dropped to 42 percent, and by May 1971, only 28 percent.
And most-telling from those polls, however, was from a secondary question of ‘Proportion classifying themselves as “hawks”‘ — before the Tet offensive, the amount was 60 percent, after Tet, them hawks had flown down to 41 percent.
Disaster compounded by lies will change attitudes.
And with that current CNN poll of 63 percent of respondents opposing the Afghan war, it led to UK’s ultra-right-wing The Daily Mail dishing President Obama for both the war, and, the floundering health care system, comparing the two to a horrific 2012 election: It is difficult to imagine the re-election of a president whose No. 1 foreign policy and No. 1 domestic policy both flopped while unemployment rose.
Of course, no one on the right ever, never brings up the Iraqi war, which actually doomed the Afghan effort and put the US in the quagmire it finds itself today.
Party!
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Energy, history | Leave a Comment
One real scary moment for Halloween is the overcrowding mob on hand for the party — the UN claims the population of the earth will top 7 billion on Monday, embellishing a smorgasbord of dangerous problems already facing a beleaguered planet.
Despite a prognosis to the contrary:
Max Singer, founder of the Hudson Institute, warned in 1999 that the world would soon be downsizing.
“Fifty years from now,” he predicted, “the world’s population will be declining, with no end in sight.”
Throw that one on the dustbin floor of history.
(Illustration found here).
A population bomb is one with a long, long fuse (a baby born every 2.6 seconds) — the situation is not directly in your face like climate change or peak oil, both being garnished by way-too-many-folks, and this can of worms will become like the thief in the night, quiet, stealthy and dangerous.
Just as the news cycle cranks out all kinds of bullshit, the world is dying even as life comes alive, creating a most-strange take on the future.
In the next few years, some striking changes will be taking place — some you’ll be able to witness first hand, others will just be just things you need, but can’t get.
Earlier this month, Columbia University’s Earth Institute held a conference to explore and discuss the impacts of this human population explosion, and came away with at least five big examples of some real bad shit — shifting population, urbanization, water wars, energy, and, wait for it, mass extinctions.
Via LiveScience:
“In 1950, there were three times as many Europeans as sub-Saharan Africans, said Joel Cohen, a population biologist at Columbia University.
“By 2100, there will be five sub-Saharan Africans for every European.
That’s a 15-fold change in the ratio,” Cohen said.
“Could you imagine that that might have an impact, geopolitically and on international migration?”
…
Globally, the number of people living in urban areas matched and then overtook the number of rural people sometime in the past two years.
The trend will continue.
According to Cohen, the number of people living in cities will climb from 3.5 billion today to 6.3 billion by 2050.
This rate of urbanization is equivalent to “the construction of a city of a million people every five days from now for the next 40 years,” he said.
…
No resource is more precious and vital than water, and, according to economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, there are already parts of the world that, because of the rapidly changing climate, are at a severe crisis point.
“Take the Horn of Africa for example: Somalia’s population has risen roughly fivefold since the middle of the 20th century,” Sachs said.
“Precipitation is down roughly 25 percent over the last quarter century.
“There’s a devastating famine under way right now after two years of complete failure of rains, and [there is] the potential that this is entering a period of long-term climate change.”
…
Currently, there isn’t enough energy being extracted from known sources of fossil fuels to sustain 10 billion people.
This means that humans will be forced to turn to a new energy source before the end of the century. However, it’s a mystery what that new source will be.
“Energy is the basic resource which underlies every other,” said Klaus Lackner, director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy.
“And actually, technology is not quite ready to solve the [energy] problem.
We know there’s plenty of energy in solar, in nuclear, in carbon itself — in fossil carbon — for probably 100 or 200 years (if we are willing to clean up after ourselves and pay the extra to make that happen).
But none of these technologies are quite ready.
Solar has its problems and is still too expensive.”
…
As humans spread, we leave scant room or resources for other species.
“There is good evidence that we are in the sixth massive species extinction of the history of the planet, because of the incredible amount of primary production that we take as a species to maintain 7 billion of us,” Sachs said.
All that shit gives one a nice, rosy glow, huh?
And it’s already coming, and is now here.
From the UK’s The Guardian in March 2010:
The world’s mega-cities are merging to form vast “mega-regions” which may stretch hundreds of kilometres across countries and be home to more than 100 million people, according to a major new UN report.
The phenomenon of the so-called “endless city” could be one of the most significant developments — and problems — in the way people live and economies grow in the next 50 years, says UN-Habitat, the agency for human settlements, which identifies the trend of developing mega-regions in its biannual State of World Cities report.
And climate change is already causing problems, in this particular case, around the Mediterranean Sea region: “The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” said Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a paper published online in the Journal of Climate this month. “This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region’s climate to normal.”
And that most precious of material things, even more precious than oil — water.
The US will have problems with water very soon, especially in the parched, drought of the southwest, and will we be able to get that precious liquid to people.
From Reuters:
“In 1985-1986 there were historical (water level) highs and now in less than 25 years we are at historical lows.
“Those sorts of swings are very scary,” said Robert Glennon, speaking at the State of the Lakes Ecosystem Conference in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Glennon, a professor at Arizona State University and the author of “Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What To Do About It,” said that that according to climate experts, shorter, warmer winters mean less ice and greater exposure to the air, leading eventually to more water evaporation.
“We think about water like the air — infinite and inexhaustible but it is very finite and very exhaustible,” Glennon said.
“When you have a shorter ice season you have great exposure to the air and more evaporation. As temperatures go up it is very troubling,” Glennon said.
“The cycles are going to become more acute which is very troubling.”
…
The problem isn’t just getting water to obviously needy areas like the desert city of Las Vegas, Glennon said.
Areas with high rainfall and seemingly abundant freshwater sources also are increasingly exceeding capacity.
“The population of the U.S. is supposed to be 420 million by 2050,” said Glennon,
“Where are we going to get the water to support another 120 million Americans?”
The nasty economic situation right now has caused another population shift — US poor are becoming suburbanites.
In the past decade, the increase in the suburbs was 53 percent, compared with 26 percent in cities, but the recession accelerated the pace: two-thirds of the new suburban poor were added from 2007 to 2010.
Times shift the times: “The whole political class is just getting the memo that Ozzie and Harriet don’t live here anymore,” said Edward Hill, dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.
Do Ozzie and Harriet types live anywhere nowadays?
Happy Halloween — Go trick-or-treating as Lady Gaga — shock ‘em.
‘Pollyanna’ Prognosis
Filed Under Bullshit, Economy, Energy, Environment, Politics | Leave a Comment
In recent history, one has learned to not trust a lot of information from any US government agency with a hidden/or not-so-hidden agenda — recent example is the State Department’s okay of the horrendous Keystone XL pipeline, claiming the 1,711-mile tube slated to carry peanut-butter-like toxic slop through the gut of middle America “would have minimal effect on the environment.”
Wrong on a lot of counts.
Now, it’s the enthusiasm and optimism on future oil and gas supplies from the Department of Energy, painting a rosy picture that’s not only untrue, but a dangerous lie.
(Illustration found here).
In a kind of preview of next week’s meeting of the the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas USA to be held in Washington, DC, a group of distinguished energy experts representing academia, industry, think tanks, and non-profit organizations held a press conference on Wednesday in front of the DOE to highlight misleading data that supposedly shows resources “could make the United States self-sufficient in oil and gas.“
The group also dispatched a letter to DOE Secretary Steven Chu to make matters more clear.
From Jim Baldauf, President and Co-Founder of ASPO-USA:
“The risk/benefit ratio is out of balance.
If these exuberant predictions are wrong, the consequences could be catastrophic.
We need to be conservative and prudent in planning for the future.
We can’t bet America’s economy and national security on Pollyanna predictions.
Exuberance about cheap energy may serve the short-term interests of Wall Street, but it threatens the future of our country.”
Not surprising, the DOE seems under the influence: Such rosy forecasts are typical of industry sources.
Duh!
Furthermore, Tom Whipple, a former CIA analyst and chief editor of ASPO-USA’s Peak Oil Review:
“There are literally dozens of reports and analyses appearing every week around the world pointing to the fact that the world is facing major challenges in maintaining, much less growing, the global supply of oil in next few years.”
He added, “Our concern here today is the growing disconnect between the solid evidence of serious troubles ahead and the Department of Energy’s benign projections concerning the availability of fossil fuels in the next 30 years.”
The DOE’s bullshit flies in the face of a pile of reports to the contrary, even last year from the US Department of Defense, saying shortages could start appearing by as early as 2015.
From the DOD report:
“By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,” says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.
It adds: “While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds.
Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India.”
Also last year, a report was leaked from the German army that concluded peak oil is not bullshit and things could get a bit dicey as time wears on — and the report didn’t pull punches, according to spiegelonline: It warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the “total collapse of the markets” and of serious political and economic crises.
So one wonders why President Obama’s administration is so tongue-tied and dumb-ass about energy.
Of course, Obama’s been the same way with climate change, and he’s noodling around with some dangerous shit in attempts to get his ass re-elected.
Yesterday, at an University of Colorado rally talking to the young people who flocked to his name four years ago, but now recognize…
He continued to put off making a decision about the upcoming Keystone XL pipeline: “We’re looking at it right now,” Obama told the crowd. “No decision has been made. And I know your deep concern about it, so we will address it.”
‘Deep concern?’
Obama has always had a kind of Pollyanna quality to him, a notion from the old days of “yes, we can.”
Now, we all know it’s just political bullshit.
Freedom Flies
Filed Under Bullshit, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Another anniversary this morning, and a sad day indeed for US peoples.
Ten years ago today, George Jr. signed into law the infamous USA/Patriot Act, a move which revealed the end game for the great American experiment in democracy — nowadays the US is closer to George Orwell than George Washington.
And although George Jr. originally started it, the supposedly big change-master, President Obama, has signed re-authorization bills three times during his tenure so far, and has continually pushed not for transparency in government (as he campaigned), but if documents requested by the public are exempt from freedom of information laws, federal agencies should be able to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”
(Illustration found here).
Pretty-much everyone knows the Act is shitty (except the government).
In 2007, two parts of the Patriot Act was found to be unconstitutional: Search and intelligence gathering was a bit too much.
From CNN four years ago:
“It is critical that we, as a democratic nation, pay close attention to traditional Fourth Amendment principles,” wrote Judge Ann Aiken of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon in her 44-page decision.
“The Fourth Amendment has served this nation well for 220 years, through many other perils.”
The case came from a lawsuit filed by Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer thought to be involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombings — wrong!
The federal government later apologized to Mayfield and settled part of Mayfield’s lawsuit for $2 million. But Mayfield was permitted to keep pursuing the portions of his lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Patriot Act.
Mayfield claimed in the suit that his home and law offices were secretly broken into by the FBI, his clients’ files at his office were searched, his business and personal computers were secretly copied, his telephone was wiretapped and his home was bugged.
Mayfield said he was “excited and happy” with the ruling.
“This, to me, is not so much personal,” he said.
“I think it’s just the right thing to do.
It was the right thing to continue to challenge the constitutionality of the Patriot Act.”
And to be even more nasty, Nicholas Merrill, in a piece in the Washington Post yesterday, wrote of the actual, nefarious operation of the Patriot Act, and how if left alone, the US government will greatly f*ck over each and every US person without blinking an all-seeing eye.
Merrill, an owner of a small Internet provider, described the FBI seeking information on one of his clients in 2004, and (this is the big-ludicrous part) he was totally forbidden from telling “any person” the G-men had even contacted him.
Instead, to his credit, Merrill went to the ALCU.
He reflects now:
A decade later, much of the government’s surveillance policy remains shrouded in secrecy, making it impossible for the American public to engage in a meaningful debate on the effectiveness or wisdom of various practices.
The government has used NSLs to collect private information on hundreds of thousands of people.
I am the only person from the telecommunications industry who received one to ever challenge in court the legality of the warrantless NSL searches and the associated gag order and to be subsequently (partially) un-gagged.
…
For years, the government implausibly claimed that if I were able to identify myself as the plaintiff in the case, irreparable damage to national security would result.
But I did not believe then, nor do I believe now, that the FBI’s gag order was motivated by legitimate national security concerns.
It was motivated by a desire to insulate the FBI from public criticism and oversight.
The standard bullshit line — damage to national security.
Hey, kiss the ass of all US peoples.
Then absolutely no one should be surprised at the latest New York Times/CBS News poll: Not only do 89 percent of Americans say they distrust government to do the right thing, but 74 percent say the country is on the wrong track and 84 percent disapprove of Congress — warnings for Democrats and Republicans alike.
Hard to believe, huh?
Nearly 90 percent of US peoples don’t trust Washington, DC — of course, the economy is the front-burner pot on fire, but in the back of everybody’s mind is that even if you’re unemployed and your home is underwater, you still need to be watched just in case you go crazy and run off to join al-Qaeda.
Crazed all over.
And what did the most-wonderful Patriot Act actually help do?
Nothing less than create a humongous intelligence-gathering apparatus, which turned out to be completely incompetent — a more than $2 trillion waste.
In a Washington Post review of the book, “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State,” by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, comes this bottom line view: If a large chunk of the federal government is disappearing down a black hole, that hole leaks. In this, as in many other instances supplied by Priest and Arkin, “one of the greatest secrets of Top Secret America is its disturbing dysfunction.”
In line with all this shit..
Much, much more of this ‘national security’ crap — from allgov.com:
Established by Congress to investigate and expose government waste, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan has decided to not reveal its volumes of materials to the public for another two decades.
After three years of work, the commission officially shut down last week, having concluded that the U.S. misspent between $31 billion and $60 billion in contracting for services in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But it won’t allow its records to be opened for public review at the National Archives until 2031, because some of the documents contain “sensitive information,” according to one official.
Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told The Wall Street Journal that the 20-year term “seems like a long period of time, particularly for a commission whose whole purpose is to improve accountability and expose waste.”
In the shadow: “Sanity is not statistical.”