Left News and Views

Jack Bauer may be done for good – and good riddance. The fictional character on Fox’s unfortunately popular 24 is the embodiment of the rogue Central Intelligence Agency operatives and contractors who have been willing to torture detainees at the drop of a hat.

Today’s New York Times points out that for six years, Central Intelligence Agency officers have worried that someday the tide of post-Sept. 11 opinion would turn, and their harsh treatment of prisoners from al Qaeda would be subjected to hostile scrutiny and possible criminal prosecution.

That time has come.

Congressional intelligence committees have voted in conference to ban all coercive techniques, and they have announced investigations of the destruction of the videotapes by the C.I.A. and the methods they documented.

The legal siege against the Bush administration’s counterterrorism programs goes far beyond the C.I.A., the Times reported, including lawsuits brought on behalf of hundreds of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and more than 40 challenges in court to the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program.

On ABC television this week, John C. Kiriakou, who helped lead the team that caught the Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002, said he believed waterboarding was torture and should never be used again, because “we Americans are better than that.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which unsuccessfully sought charges against former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld during a recent visit to France, has pledged to pursue criminal torture charges against former Bush administration officials when they travel abroad.

“The only way to restore the moral authority of our country,” said Michael Ratner, the group’s president, “is accountability.”

In yesterday’s New York Times, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, wrote an Op Ed column titled “Help Me Spy on Al Qaeda.” If I hadn’t know better, I would have thought I was reading a spoof.

The premise of the column is to put pressure on Congress to re-enact the Protect America Act, which expires in less than two months, on Feb. 1

“Before the Protect America Act was enacted, to monitor the communications of foreign intelligence targets outside the United States, in some cases we had to operate under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, a law that had not kept pace with changes in technology,” McConnell wrote. “In a significant number of these cases, FISA required us to obtain a court order.”

My goodness, obtain a court order to ensure the CIA isn’t snooping where they shouldn’t – such as in my e-mail messages for example. Why protect basic American rights when there are boogey men out there to go after.

This contention that FISA hasn’t kept pace with changes in technology was a smoke screen from the beginning. First, FISA has rarely turned down requests and, secondly, there is a provision in FISA to allow the agency to monitor communications on an emergency basis without obtaining prior approval and then submitting the paperwork later.

Don’t you love the title of this act: the Protect America Act. Machiavelli couldn’t have come up with a better moniker. Who could be against an act to “protect America?”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really protect America, but it runs roughshod over the rights of Americans.

The American Civil Liberties Union calls the law the “Police America Act,” because it allows for massive, untargeted collection of international communications without court order or meaningful oversight by either Congress or the courts.

“It contains virtually no protections for the U.S. end of the phone call or e-mail, leaving decisions about the collection, mining and use of Americans’ private communications up to this administration,” according to the ACLU.

I think the real reason McConnell and others wanted the new act from the beginning is contained in this chilling claim in his column: “[I]t is critical for the intelligence community to have liability protection for private parties that are sued only because they are believed to have assisted us after Sept. 11, 2001. Although the Protect America Act provided such necessary protection for those complying with requests made after its enactment, it did not include protection for those that reportedly complied earlier.”

The Protect America Act allows big communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and the like to turn over all kinds of confidential information on customers without fear of being sued. Unfortunately, according to McConnell’s view, this protection only started with the new law was enacted. He wants the re-enactment to include protection of these companies all the way back to September 11, 2001.

If we didn’t have confidence in the CIA to play by the rules before, we sure don’t have reason to now after learning that the agency destroyed hundreds of hours of video tape taken during the torture of prisoners. This was done in spite of being warned not to by White House counsel Harriet Meiers. and members of Congress. CIA officials lied when they testified before the Iraq Study Group, saying no tapes existed, and then they gave two laughable excuses for destroying the tapes after the destruction was revealed.

Sure, these are the guys we should expect to respect the rights of Americans to privacy without any oversight.

Give me a break.

Now that we have learned that the CIA — in a new comedy of craziness by that ill-begotten agency – has destroyed hundreds of hours of videotape taken while torturing two “high level” detainees, the relationship of torture and America’s loss of the moral high ground are once again being hotly debated.

Fortunately, Congress seems to be coming to its senses and House and Senate conferees have reportedly come to an agreement on an intelligence measure mandating that all agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, comply with the Army Field Manual’s outlawing of torture. The manual properly reflects American law by explicitly proscribing the gamut of torture measures — including waterboarding — that have proved dear to the heart of administration zealots.

According to the New York Times, already complaining about the possible return to sanity, a White House spokesman said, “The C.I.A. program has provided valuable, actionable intelligence,” and dismissed Congress’s Army Field Manual initiative as “dangerous and misguided.”

Par for the course.

Except for the Jack Bauer crazies, most thoughtful expert interrogators agree that more often than not torture leads to false intelligence … and the United States’ embarrassing execution of the “war on terror” will probably become a text-book example of this principal.

Take for example all the hoopla surrounding the uncovering of a plot by a group of home-grown terrorists with sinister code names who sought help from al-Qaida to attack the tallest US building, the103-storey Sears Tower in Chicago.

The story of this Miami terror cell couldn’t stand up to the light of day. The members of this supposedly Jihadist cell were not Muslim and the only link to “al-Qaida” was that of a government agent provocateur. The seven alleged plotters were mostly unemployed men from a poor suburb of Miami who had no weapons, explosives or money, and were so disorganized they asked their “al-Qaida” contact for uniforms and boots for their “Islamic army”, and a camera to take pictures of their target.

Or how about the much hyped plot to blow up multiple transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives? Unlike many of those caught up in the vast net of America’s war on terror, the alleged ringleader of this plot got his day in court – in Pakistan no less – and was cleared of terrorism charges and of being a member of any terrorist group. How many thousand of bottles of perfume, water, baby formula and medicines ended up in airport trash bags as a consequence of that “terror plot?”

In his 2006 State of the Union address, President Bush said, “We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our allies have prevented, but here is some of what we do know: We stopped an al-Qaida plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast.”

He was referring to the purported plot to knock down the 73-story building in Los Angeles, the one once known as Library Tower. But within hours of the original report, it was also revealed that authorities in Los Angeles had had no idea Bush was going to make any of the details — whether serious or fanciful — public.

When it was ultimately revealed how farcical this scheme was, the LA Times quoted a source who debunked the Library Tower story and said that those who could correctly measure the flimsiness of the scheme “feared political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan than that of the president.”

We could go on with the alleged terror plots – remember Fort Dix – that were ultimately proved baseless, although we are still suffering the loss of liberties created by many of them. Although not all were hatched by someone using their imagination to avoid torture, it is certain many were.

These and many of the other terror plots were based on this administration’s concerted effort to convince Americans of the illusion that terror cells are lurking around every corner waiting to cause mayhem – an argument they use to justify torture. The Bush agenda depends on the proliferation phony terror threats in order to continue the farcical war on terror and take more of our innate freedoms at home to stifle dissent.

On November 3, 2008, perhaps we can begin the long “torturous” road back to sanity.

Keith Olbermann’s special comment on his show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann,, last night made the case that Congress should initiate impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Cheney now, regardless of how little time is left. It may be the only way to reestablish our credibility in the world. And, if there is a real danger to our national security out there, it is a lack of credibility.

I am quoting his remarks here and sending them on to my congressional representatives. I encourage others to do the same.

There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr. Bush has left us with tonight.

We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War III about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole, or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked, at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so, whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed were still even remotely plausible.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency an unapologetic warmonger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.

After spokeswoman Dana Perino’s announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear.

In August the president was told by his hand-picked major-domo of intelligence, Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what “everybody thought” about Iran might be, in essence, crap.

Yet on Oct. 17, the president said of Iran and its President Ahmadinejad:

“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon.”

And as he said that, Mr. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.
Or was it, Sir, to scare the Americans?

Does Iran not really fit into the equation here? Have you just scribbled it into the fill-in-the-blank on the same template you used to scare us about Iraq?

In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, Sir, would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.

A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience

Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Bush.

The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, Sir, that you see in the mirror.

And the mind reels at the thought of a vice president fully briefed on the revised intel as long as two weeks ago, briefed on the fact that Iran abandoned its pursuit of this imminent threat four years ago, who never bothered to mention it to his boss.

It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan’s presidency it was widely believed that he was little more than a front man for some never-viewed, behind-the-scenes string-puller.

Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance, it is inescapable that Dick Cheney is either this president’s evil ventriloquist or he thinks he is.

What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold information of this urgency and gravity and wind up back at his desk the next morning, instead of winding up before a congressional investigation or a criminal one?

Mr. Bush, if you can still hear us, if you did not previously agree to this scenario in which Dick Cheney is the actual detective and you’re Remington Steele, you must disenthrall yourself: Mr. Cheney has usurped your constitutional powers, cut you out of the information loop and led you down the path to an unprecedented presidency in which the facts are optional, the intel is valued less than the hunch and the assistant runs the store.

The problem is, Sir, your assistant is robbing you and your country blind.

Not merely in monetary terms, Mr. Bush, but, more important, of the traditions and righteousness for which we have stood, at great risk, for centuries: honesty, law, moral force.

Mr. Cheney has helped, Sir, to make your administration into the kind our ancestors saw in the 1860s and 1870s and 1880s, the ones that abandoned Reconstruction and sent this country marching backward into the pit of American apartheid.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland — presidents who will be remembered only in a blur of failure, Mr. Bush.

Presidents who will be remembered only as functions of those who opposed them, the opponents whom history proved right.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland … Bush.

Would that we could let this president off the hook by seeing him only as marionette or moron.

But a study of the mutation of his language about Iran proves that though he may not be very good at it, he is, himself, still a manipulative, Machiavellian snake-oil salesman.

The Bushian etymology was tracked by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post’s Web site.
It is staggering.

• March 31: “Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon…”
• June
  5: Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons…”
• June 19: “consequences
  to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon…”
• July
  12: “the same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons…”
• Aug.
  6: “this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build
  a nuclear weapon…”

Notice a pattern?

Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.

Then, sometime between Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, those terms are suddenly swapped out, so subtly that only in retrospect can we see that somebody has warned the president, not only that he has gone out too far on the limb of terror but there may not even be a tree there….

McConnell, or someone, must have briefed him then.

• Aug. 9: “They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program…”
• Aug. 28: “Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons…”
• Oct. 4: “you should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear) weapon…”
• Oct. 17: “until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their statements aren’t real, yeah, I believe they want to have the **capacity**, the **knowledge**, in order to make a nuclear weapon.”

Before Aug. 9, it’s: Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.

After Aug. 9, it’s: Desire, pursuit, want … knowledge technology know-how to enrich uranium.

And we are to believe, Mr.. Bush, that the National Intelligence Estimate this week talks of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program in 2003….

And you talked of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program on Oct. 17.

And that’s just a coincidence?

And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that nobody told you any of this until last week?

Your insistence that you were not briefed on the NIE until last week might be legally true, something like “what the definition of ‘is’ is,” but with the subject matter being not interns but the threat of nuclear war.

Legally, it might save you from some war crimes trial, but ethically it is a lie.
It is indefensible.

You have been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months, after the guy on the other end had already hung up.

You, Mr. Bush, are a bald-faced liar.

And moreover, you have just revealed that John Bolton and Norman Podhoretz and the Wall Street Journal editorial board are also bald-faced liars.

We are to believe that the intel community, or maybe the State Department, cooked the raw intelligence about Iran, falsely diminished the Iranian nuclear threat, to make you look bad?

And you proceeded to let them make you look bad?

You not only knew all of this about Iran in early August, but you also knew it was accurate.

And instead of sharing this good news with the people you have obviously forgotten you represent, you merely fine-tuned your terrorizing of those people, to legally cover your own backside.

While you filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of, as you phrased it Aug. 28, “nuclear holocaust,” and, as you phrased it Oct. 17, “World War III.”

My comments, Mr. Bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase “George Bush has no business being president.”

Well, guess what?

Tonight: hanged by your own words, convicted by your own deliberate lies….

You, sir, have no business being president.

As a private consultant, I have to provide my own health-care insurance. Those who are responsible for their own coverage recognize all too well how out-of-whack the health-care system is in America.

Until a couple years ago, my wife and I had the Blue Cross Personal Choice plan. Premiums, which always far out-strip increases in the cost of living, ultimately crept up to the point where to renew we would be paying – for two people in very good health – more than $16,000 a year.

Under our current plan, Keystone POS, we pay more for prescriptions, visits to doctors and specialists, procedures and have a liability of $750 if we are hospitalized. But the change was necessary to bring down the cost to a point where we could afford it and still put food on the table.

This year the renewal cost went up 14 percent – again even though our health, if anything, has improved – and our annual cost now will be in excess of $13,000.

It is no wonder then that, according to a story in Reuters, a federal report issued Monday shows that more than 40 million people in the United States say they cannot afford adequate heath care and go without drugs, eyeglasses or dental treatment.

Tragically, of those without health insurance, nearly one-quarter or more than 10 million are children.

The report stated that “Nearly 15 million adults did not obtain eyeglasses, 25 million did not get dental care, 19 million did not get needed prescribed medicine, and 15 million did not get needed medical care due to cost.”

Yet, the United States spends more on health per capita than any other country, and health spending continues to increase.

Clearly, there is something wrong here in the U S of A. Could it be that the prescription drug and health insurance companies run the system where profits trump affordable health care in every instance?

To cut out these “middle men” who are gouging the system for everything it is worth, the government needs to step in and provide a plan for universal health care. The lobbyists are very successful in scaring Americans by referring to universal health care as socialized medicine. As I sit in a doctor’s office today waiting more than 2 hours to see a physician – after waiting up to 2 months to get an appointment – I have to laugh when the health-care lobbyists warn that “socialized” medicine will lead to long waits to see a doctor and long waits in the office.

The U.S. already had two very successful “socialized medicine” health care plans: Medicare and State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

SCHIP, coincidentally, came about because of the budget surplus created under the President Clinton administration. The law authorizes states to provide health care coverage to “targeted low-income children” who are not eligible for Medicaid and who are uninsured. States receive an enhanced federal match (greater than the state’s Medicaid match) and have three years to expend each year’s allotment.

Congress passed compromise legislation to reauthorize the SCHIP program, which expired on September 30, 2007, but President Bush vetoed the compromise bill, maybe because poor children can add to his retirement fund.

So, how about universal health care? Look to the north for the answer. Under the health care system in Canada, individual citizens are provided preventative care and medical treatments from primary care physicians as well as access to hospitals, dental surgery and additional medical services. With a few exceptions, all citizens qualify for health coverage regardless of medical history, personal income, or standard of living.

And, Canada has one of the highest life expectancies (about 80 years) and lowest infant morality rates of industrialized countries, which many attribute to Canada’s health care system.

I have a close friend in Canada – an American expatriate – who can’t understand why Americans put up with the health-care system here. His family gets great care, can see specialists in a reasonable amount of time and don’t have to worry about losing their coverage if they move to a new job.

The system we have is unconscionable. If we want it to change, we have to put the greater pressure on our legislative representatives to reject the lobbyists and seek a workable universal health care system. If they fail, then throw them out and continue throwing them out until they realize that yielding to the lobbyists is more dangerous than not yielding to the voters who put them in office.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

So the saying goes and it appears the White House press corps finally found their cojones and let it be known that they won’t be fooled twice.

At a news conference yesterday following the release of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that concluded Iran had halted its nuclear weapons development program in 2003, President Bush looked – and acted – like a little boy caught in a lie and trying to argue his way out of it.

The sad truth is that all his lies leading up to and through several years of the Iraqi war were sucked up by the press corps and then disseminated to the public with little or no fact checking. And, contrary to the conventional wisdom, not everyone believed the lies.

There was ample evidence that war was unnecessary and thousands of us protested the buildup to the war. I took the photo of my wife, step-daughter and grandchildren at a peace vigil held months before the war began.

Bush once again got the world’s attention this fall when he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran might lead to World War III. Now we know that his stark warnings came at least a month or two after he had first been told about fresh indications that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program.

At his press conference yesterday, Bush said the director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, came to him in August to say there was new information to be processed, but didn’t tell him what it was – only that it would take some time to check it out.

Between August and the release of the NIE report, Bush continued to ratchet up his rhetoric about the threat posed by Iran and its nuclear ambitions, linking their goals to a potential World War III at an October press conference.

Several reporters pressed Bush, openly asking how he could expect the American public to accept such an incredulous explanation. One was left with the impression that no one in the room believed anything Bush said. Indeed, his explanations not only lacked credibility but strained logic beyond the breaking point.

According to the Toronto Star, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, chair of the Senate foreign relations committee asked, “Are you telling me a president who’s briefed every single morning, who’s fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the United States government is they had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in ‘03?”

“That’s not believable. If that’s true, he has the most incompetent staff in modern American history and he’s one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.”

According to The Hill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters, “We’ve heard the president before, in his build-up to go to war in Iraq, try to lay the same foundation for going to war in Iran. We’ve heard it … and the sixth year is a daily reminder of us that that’s the case.”

Reid charged that the president knew Iran halted its nuclear weapons program months ago even while he warned that the international community must prevent Iran from having the know-how to make a nuclear weapon and avoid “World War III.”

“There is absolutely no question that there should be oversight on this issue,” said Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) in the same Hill report. McDermott has for years been trying to push legislation that would ensure congressional authorization for any military action with Iran.

President Bush’s “credibility is absolutely zero,” McDermott said. “We are dealing with a president who has no shame. Anyone who can turn down 10 million children [for health insurance] is not going to be turned off by a report,” he added.

We have finally succeeded in exporting President Bush’s ideal democracy to Iraq. Yes indeed, the surge is working and now Iraqis are wholeheartedly embracing the American dream.

According to the New York Times, “the extent of the theft [by Iraqis] is staggering. Some American officials estimate that as much as a third of what they spend on Iraqi contracts and grants ends up unaccounted for or stolen, with a portion going to Shiite or Sunni militias.” Figuring about a third more is stolen by the private contractors Bush so loves, that leaves another third to be used for bribes.

“Everyone is stealing from the state,” said Adel Adel al-Subihawi, a prominent Shiite tribal leader in Sadr City, throwing up his hands in disgust. “It’s a very large meal, and everyone wants to eat.”

By God, I think they’ve got it.

Abdel could just have well been commenting on the countless FOB multi-nationals that have received no-bid contracts from our commander in chief. We all know of the Haliburtons and Blackwaters. But Bush is an equal opportunity gifter – he has made sure that members of his extended family have been invited to the feast as well as his friends.

According to Democracy Rising, “The extent of Iraq contracts going to corporations which involve members of President George W. Bush’s family is widespread and extensive involving hundreds of millions of dollars.” Many of these firms have no experience in the areas for which the contracts were awarded.

Following are brief descriptions of how Bush family members are profiting from the war, according to Democracy Rising:

Neil Mallon Bush the younger brother of the President, infamous for his involvement in the Silverado S and L scandal, has been hired by Crest Investment Company as a consultant for $60,000 per year to assist with their efforts to serve as a middleman to advise other companies that seek taxpayer-financed business in Iraq. Working with Crest puts Neil Bush at the center of multiple organizations profiting from the war and occupation in close alliance with long-term Bush Family allies.

William H.T. (”Bucky”) Bush, an uncle of George W. Bush, joined the board of directors of the St. Louis based company Engineered Support Systems in March 2000. Engineered Support Systems has three areas: light military support equipment, heavy military support equipment, and electronics/automation systems. Since 2000, following the presidential election and the 9-11 attacks, the company’s federal contracts, revenues and its stock value have all gone up. Engineered Support Systems has been in the top 100 contractors with the DoD since 2001. It’s contracts with the U.S. military have totaled over $1 billion.

Bucky is also a trustee for the investment firm Lord Abbott, one of Halliburton’s top 10 shareholders and also a top-ten mutual fund holder in Halliburton, which has obtained prime contracts in Iraq. Vice President Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton, still has between $18 million and $87 million invested through Vanguard, another top-ten holder in Halliburton stock.

Marvin P. Bush, the youngest brother of George W. Bush, who probably did the best of all, shares an interest in federal contracts held by companies in his firm’s portfolio. Marvin Bush is also an adviser at HCC Insurance, formerly called the Houston Casualty Company, one of the biggest insurance carriers for the World Trade Center. Bush was a director at HCC, which has benefited financially from the 9-11 insurance bailout legislation passed by Congress at the instigation of the White House. The departure of Marvin from the HCC board was announced the same day, November 22, 2002, as the passage of the bill.

Marvin Bush is co-founder and partner in Winston Partners, a private investment firm which is part of a larger firm called the Chatterjee Group. According to SEC filings, the Chatterjee Group consists of Winston Partners, LP; Chatterjee Fund Management, LP; Winston Partners II LDC, a Cayman Islands-based company; Winston Partners II LLC; Chatterjee Advisors LLC; Chatterjee Management Company; Mr. Chatterjee himself; and Furxedown Trading Limited, a company organized under the laws of the Isle of Man. The address for Winston Partners II LDC is in the Netherlands Antilles. The other subsidiaries were organized in Delaware. Jeb Bush is also an investor in the Winston Capital Fund, which happens to be managed by Marvin’s firm.

According to the Sept 30, 2003, issue of Mother Jones, an $80 million Iraq contract was awarded to Nour, a company which began in 2003 with ties to Winston Partners. Nour is an “international investment and development company” with more than 100 employees based in Iraq, and claims expertise in telecommunications, agribusiness, internet development, recruitment, construction materials, oil and power services, pharmaceuticals and fashion apparel.”

In January, 2004, Nour was awarded a $327 million contract to equip the Iraqi armed forces and Civil Defense Corps. However, not long after it was awarded, Nour came under heavy scrutiny because of questions involving the company’s president and Ahmed Chalabi, of the US appointed Iraqi Governing Council. Newsday reported, Chalabi received a $2 million “fee” for helping to arrange a $80 million contract, that was actually awarded to a firm called Erinys International “within days” of being granted the contract, Erinys became a joint venture operation with Nour.

In addition, after the $327 million contract was awarded it was revealed that Nour had no prior experience in providing military equipment. Nour’s response was it planned to subcontract its weapons procurement to the Polish firm, Ostrowski Arms – unfortunately, Ostrowski didn’t even have a license to export weapons. After these concerns the Army decided to terminate the contract with Nour. This added to the delays in body armor and other equipment that have increased the risks for U.S. soldiers. In May 2004, ANHAM, a joint venture with Nour, based in Vienna, Va., was the winner of a $259-million contract to equip the new Iraqi army and security forces with guns, trucks and other equipment. Nour lists current Iraq projects with the Ministry of Oil, the New Iraqi Army, and Criminal Intelligence in Iraq, Security in Iraq.

Winston Partners’ also are heavily invested in another military contractor, the Amsec Corp. In 2001, Amsec was awarded $37,722,000 in contracts from the Navy. Marvin Bush’s long-time business partner, Scott Andrews, sits on the Amsec board of directors, and the firm’s CEO at the time was Michael Braham, who used to work for none other than Paul Bremer, the Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
In addition, the Chatterjee Group also owns 5.5 million shares in a security company known as Sybase. SEC filings show the shares as being divided up between, Winston Partners LP with 1,036,075 shares; Winston Partners LDC holding 1,317,825 shares; and Winston Partners LLC owning 1,221,837 shares. Sybase prepared to make major profits from the Patriot Act long before it was passed. Sybase created a product called the “Sybase PATRIOT Compliance Solution” to track money laundering by terrorists.
Sybase also is a significant government contractor, with contracts from the Navy ($2.9 million in 2001), the Army ($1.8 million in 2001), the Department of Defense ($5.3 million in 2001), Commerce, the Treasury, Agriculture and the General Services Administration, among others. The federal procurement database lists Sybase’s total awards for 2001 as $14,754,000.

In 1993, shortly after the first gulf war, Marvin Bush joined his father, George H.W. Bush (three months out of office), on a trip to Kuwait. Where, according to the March 16, 2001 Austin Chronicle, “Marvin was representing U.S. defense firms selling electronic fences to the Kuwaiti Defense Ministry.”

So you see, we really are training the Iraqis well.

Well, I’m back after taking a sabbatical of sorts to make my first run at public office. I will have to say, things haven’t changed all that much since I left. Bush is still in office despite his lies and a host of crimes that would have led to impeachment if he were a Democrat instead of a Republican – and the Democrats have proved they are still gutless.

But, more on that in the days and weeks ahead as we count down to the end of what I believe history will judge as one of the darkest periods in American history.

I will resume my blogging with an insider’s view of the electoral process on the local level. My running mate – an incumbent – and I were running for two seats on the township Board of Supervisors. I have never run for office before and wasn’t really involved in the local political parties – in fact, I was registered as an Independent.

Shortly before the May primary, I received an e-mail from one of the Supervisors I knew asking if I would consider running for office. After a few days of discussions with my wife – who wasn’t happy with the prospect but supported me anyway – I agreed to run, although walk would be a more appropriate verb.

To me, local government can have a much greater impact on one’s daily life than any other form. Yet, it draws the least attention – the turnout on November 6 here was less than 30 percent. My running mate and I hope to launch an educational campaign to encourage the local citizenry to take a more active role in their government. He started during his first term by spearheading the effort to televise the meetings and making all documents available on the web.

But more on that as it progresses.

The two most important aspects of local campaigns are keeping the workers happy – the committee people are the real political junkies of this world – and getting out to meet the voters by going door-to-door and meeting the voters one on one.

I wasn’t that good about keeping the workers happy (although I got better as the election neared), but I thoroughly enjoyed the door-to-door canvassing – an activity most candidates seem to dread. I met a lot of great people and didn’t once have an unpleasant experience, even when I went to the doors of people I knew supported my opponents.

Ultimately I failed to garner enough votes on election night to win the office. My running mate had more than 700 votes over the second place candidate who had only 28 votes more than I, even though he and his running mate were a part of the scene for almost two decades.

In point of fact, we could have contested the vote since – shades of the chicanery of national elections – one of the machines in a precinct in which I won by a wide margin didn’t function – in fact, it registered all zeros. These are the new electronic machines and our county – run by Republicans, of course – opted for the ones that don’t have a paper trail.

It was sealed and taken to the county seat to determine if the data could be retrieved – which proved fruitless – while the lawyers in our party discussed possible legal action. But, we were presented with a plan B, which was quicker, less messy and much less costly.

One of the current Supervisors – in fact, the one who first asked me to run – was elected to county government and would have to resign at the end of the year. In a move that caught the opposition and the press off-guard, she resigned at the next meeting, effective immediately. That left three Republicans and one Democrat, my running mate. The Board chair, a Republican, nominated me to fill the vacancy and my running mate seconded it. Of course, the remaining two Republicans, really caught off-guard and sputtering to the point of almost drooling, objected but were told by the solicitor that it was perfectly legal. They then voted against me, creating a stalemate.

In this kind of situation, the Board has 30 days to appoint someone to the vacancy. At the end of 30 days, a vacancy board meets. It consists of the four Board members and a vacancy board chairman, who was appointed last year and serves a four-year term. The vacancy board chairman is a high ranking Democrat, so there is a good possibility I will take my seat on the Board on December 13.

Tomorrow I will return to the national scene, but I will continue to update you on what I learn as a public servant from time to time. It’s sure to be an interesting journey.