The Rag Blog

President George W. Bush meets today with Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the turbaned leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Shiite fundamentalist party that is strongly tied to Iran. In so doing, the president is meeting with someone who, perhaps more than anyone else in Iraq, is responsible for trying to destroy Iraqi national unity, prevent national reconciliation among Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian mix, and push Iraq into civil war. Al-Hakim, who was virtually Fed-Ex’d into Iraq by the Pentagon in March 2003, was a mainstay of the Iraqi National Congress, led by neoconservative darling Ahmed Chalabi throughout the 1990s. And today al-Hakim controls the SCIRI militia, the Badr Brigade, the Iraqi interior ministry and many of Iraq’s feared death squads. Not to put too fine a point on it, Hakim is a mass murderer.

What’s stunning about Bush’s encounter with al-Hakim is that it occurs precisely at the moment when critically important bridges are being built across Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite divide—bridges that al-Hakim is trying to blow up.

Frank Rich wonders if the Great Pretender will ever face up to the reality of the damage that he has done not only to the people of Iraq but to the good name of the United States of America. Or, will the Crawford frat boy spend his last two years in office just roaming the halls of the White House chatting up the portraits like his GOP forefather Richard Nixon. — The New York Times, November 3, 2006

It turns out we’ve been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand what’s going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting instead is “The Final Days,” the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn’t merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn’t know what the truth is.

The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily responsible for the country’s spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr. Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda “extremely disorganized” in Iraq, adding that “I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the state level.” Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2 percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief who can’t even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.

The new chief of the U.S. General Services Administration is trying to limit the ability of the agency’s inspector general to audit contracts for fraud or waste and has said oversight efforts are intimidating the workforce, according to government documents and interviews.

GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan, a Bush political appointee and former government contractor, has proposed cutting $5 million in spending on audits and shifting some responsibility for contract reviews to small, private audit contractors.

Doan also has chided Inspector General Brian D. Miller for not going along with her attempts to streamline the agency’s contracting efforts. In a private staff meeting Aug. 18, Doan said Miller’s effort to examine contracts had “gone too far and is eroding the health of the organization,” according to notes of the meeting written by an unidentified participant from the Office of Inspector General (OIG).

The GSA is responsible for managing about $56 billion worth of contracts each year for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security and other agencies.

Doan compared Miller and his staff to terrorists, according to a copy of the notes obtained by The Washington Post.

Lawyers for alleged “dirty bomber” and Bush-declared enemy combatant Jose Padilla have filed a new salvo in his Miami federal court terror case with new details of the torment and physical deprivation to which he was subjected during his three years in the South Carolina military brig.

Here’s how he got taken to the dentist for a root canal:

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

The point:

To Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, the pictures capture the dehumanization of their client during his military detention from mid-2002 until earlier this year, when the government changed his status from enemy combatant to criminal defendant and transferred him to the federal detention center in Miami. He now awaits trial scheduled for late January.

Together with other documents filed late Friday, the images represent the latest and most aggressive sally by defense lawyers who declared this fall that charges against Mr. Padilla should be dismissed for “outrageous government conduct,” saying that he was mistreated and tortured during his years as an enemy combatant.

CHICAGO – The nightmares didn’t start until months after Alicia Flores returned home. The images were stark and disturbing: In one dream, a dying Iraqi man desperately grabbed her arm. In another, she was lost in a blinding sandstorm.

Sometimes, Flores awakened to discover her mouth was dust-dry — as if she were really stumbling through the scorching, 120-degree desert.

The nightmares bring Flores back to Iraq, and her service in the Army’s 92nd Chemical Company. She was just 19 when her unit arrived there. Now 23, she’s left with memories of women and children being killed, of hauling bodies, of shooting a teenage Iraqi fighter. (“It was him or me,” she says.)

American Free Press has learned that a group of foreign companies, which currently lease a toll road in Indiana and are looking at buying up other highways across the country, has its eyes on the Trans-Texas Corridor, or TTC. The TTC is a planned toll road system through the Lone Star State that will largely be used for trucking foreign merchandise into the United States on the wings of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

It will be a major leg of the so-called “NAFTA Superhighway,” and, according to watchdog groups, it will lead to more cheap goods flooding the country and will be devastating to the U.S.-based trucking industry.

In the April 17, 2006 edition, AFP reported that ITR Concessions LLC, a partnership of Cintra of Spain and the McQuarie Bank of Australia, spent $3.85 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road from the state for 75 years.

Now that same coalition is branching out into Texas. On Nov. 21, the Internet version of The Lone Star Iconoclast, a Crawford, Tex.-based publication, reported that Todd Spencer, the executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, or OOIDA, “is asking truckers to bypass the Indiana Toll Road that has been leased to the Spanish consortium, Cintra, the same outfit that Gov. [Rick] Perry and TXDOT (The Texas Department of Transportation) contracted with to operate the hated Trans Texas Corridor.”

Dec. 4 – With millions of dollars in alleged contract abuse, former Halliburton subsidiary KBR has become a symbol of the rampant corporate fraud driven by the Iraq war. But a settlement announced last week by the US Justice Department reveals that KBR’s malfeasance began long before “shock and awe” hit Baghdad.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Wednesday that it had reached an $8 million settlement with KBR over allegations that the company overcharged the US Army for support services provided during operations in the Balkans in 1999 and 2000. According to a DoJ statement, KBR continues to provide services to the military in the region.

The Justice Department would not reveal how much KBR, a construction and engineering company, was originally accused of overcharging.

“The Department of Justice remains committed to vigorously pursuing allegations of procurement abuses affecting the military,” Peter D. Keisler, an assistant attorney general, said in a statement announcing the settlement.

The latest serpent at which a drowning Washington Establishment is grasping is the idea of sending more American troops to Iraq. Would more troops turn the war there in our favor? No.

Why not? First, because nothing can. The war in Iraq is irredeemably lost. Neither we nor, at present, anyone else can create a new Iraqi state to replace the one our invasion destroyed. Maybe that will happen after the Iraqi civil war is resolved, maybe not. It is in any case out of our hands.

…

1. Rumsfeld doesn’t understand the magnitude of the crisis or the tightrope the US is walking in the Gulf. His attitude is almost lackadaisical. Doing an all right job, but it isn’t working fast enough or well enough. So maybe make some changes — apparently any old changes will do because there are infinite lives to play with and infinite monies to spend.

2. Rumsfeld spends more time plotting out how to manipulate the American public than how to win the war. Everything is about spin, about giving the image of progress even in the face of a rapid downward spiral into the abyss. Consider these phrases:

‘Publicly announce a set of benchmarks agreed to by the Iraqi Government and the U.S. — political, economic and security goals — to chart a path ahead for the Iraqi government and Iraqi people (to get them moving) and for the U.S. public (to reassure them that progress can and is being made) . . .

Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”

Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist. . . ‘

You read the news from Iraq – the death squads, the increasing number of kidnappings of government workers, the mosques used as execution chambers, the 3700 people murdered in October alone – and you wonder: what is going on inside the head of Tony Blair?

The question may not interest the many British commentators, from the left and right, who regularly assert that Blair has messianic delusions, is a liar, or even an outright scoundrel.

But those who see Blair as both more complicated and more decent than the caricature allows – a man whose strengths and flaws are in the normal range – must wonder how he feels. Does he believe he made a catastrophic mistake? Does he turn off the unbearable TV news, lie awake at night? He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t. As his prime ministership enters its final months, and rumours spread that both the Government and the bureaucracy are stalled, awaiting his departure, he is still feverishly announcing policy initiatives. Yet he looks older almost by the day; the once-easy smile is often a fixed grin. He seems oddly pumped up and his words sound at times overblown. “Here, in this extraordinary desert, is where the future of world security in the early 21st century is going to be played out,” he told British troops in Afghanistan two weeks ago.