Arab thinkers voice concern over US-Iraq security deal 
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 04:45:40
Samer Dadaa, Press TV, Damascus
Bush, Talabani discuss US-Iraq security pact
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 04:03:44
Mike Kellerman, Press TV, Washington
Gerry Adams calls for Northern Ireland reunification
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:02:11
Roshan Mohammed Salih, Press TV, London
GAO report cites insufficient results in US 2007 military surge
Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:30:10
Jihan Hafiz, Press TV, Washington
Israel closes Gaza crossings despite truce
Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:49:21
Yousef Al-Helou, Pess TV, Gaza
June 26, 2008
Interesting news items today
June 12, 2008
BBC uncovers lost Iraq billions
| By Jane Corbin BBC News |
 Waxman: "It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history." |
A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.
The BBC's Panorama programme has used US and Iraqi government sources to research how much some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding.
A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations.
The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top companies.
War profiteering
While President George W Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely the gagging orders will be lifted.
To date, no major US contractor faces trial for fraud or mismanagement in Iraq.
The president's Democratic opponents are keeping up the pressure over war profiteering in Iraq.
Henry Waxman, who chairs the House committee on oversight and government reform, said:
"The money that's gone into waste, fraud and abuse under these contracts is just so outrageous, it's egregious.
"It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history."
In the run-up to the invasion, one of the most senior officials in charge of procurement in the Pentagon objected to a contract potentially worth $7bn that was given to Halliburton, a Texan company which used to be run by Dick Cheney before he became vice-president.
Unusually only Halliburton got to bid - and won.
Missing billions
The search for the missing billions also led the programme to a house in Acton in west London where Hazem Shalaan lived until he was appointed to the new Iraqi government as minister of defence in 2004.
 Judge Radhi al Radhi: "I believe these people are criminals." |
Meanwhile they diverted money into their own accounts.
Judge Radhi al-Radhi of Iraq's Commission for Public Integrity investigated.
He said:
"I believe these people are criminals.
"They failed to rebuild the Ministry of Defence, and as a result the violence and the bloodshed went on and on - the murder of Iraqis and foreigners continues and they bear responsibility."
Mr Shalaan was sentenced to two jail terms but he fled the country.
He said he was innocent and that it was all a plot against him by pro-Iranian MPs in the government.
There is an Interpol arrest warrant out for him but he is on the run - using a private jet to move around the globe.
He stills owns commercial properties in the Marble Arch area of London.
May 23, 2008
READ THIS! John Conyers! It's time to ACT!
Oh, yeah, and no US money for SCHIP.
When does this all stop?
Veeger
Iraq Spending Ignored Rules, Pentagon Says
A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.
The audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit was released Thursday in tandem with a Congressional hearing on the payments.
In one case, according to documents displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another, $11.1 million of taxpayer money was paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no indication of what was delivered.
Mary L. Ugone, the Pentagon’s deputy inspector general for auditing, told members of the committee that the absence of anything beyond a voucher meant that “we were giving or providing a payment without any basis for the payment.”
“We don’t know what we got,” Ms. Ugone said in response to questions by the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California.
The new report is especially significant because while other federal auditors have severely criticized the way the United States has handled payments to contractors in Iraq, this is the first time that the Pentagon itself has acknowledged the mismanagement on anything resembling this scale.
The disclosure that $1.8 billion in Iraqi assets was mishandled comes on top of an earlier finding by an independent federal oversight agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, that United States occupation authorities early in the conflict could not account for the disbursement of $8.8 billion in Iraqi oil money and seized assets.
“This report is further documentation of the fact that the United States had absolutely no preparation to use contracting on the scale that it needed either at the military or aid level in going to war in Iraq,” said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“We had really allowed ourselves to become more and more dependent on contractors in peacetime,” said Mr. Cordesman, who spoke in a telephone interview on Thursday. “We were unprepared to use contractors in wartime, and all of this had an immense impact.”
The Pentagon report, titled “Internal Controls Over Payments Made in Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt,” also notes that auditors were unable to find a comprehensible set of records to explain $134.8 million in payments by the American military to its allies in the Iraq war.
The mysterious payments, whose amounts had not been publicly disclosed, included $68.2 million to the United Kingdom, $45.3 million to Poland and $21.3 million to South Korea. Despite repeated requests, Pentagon auditors said they were unable to determine why the payments were made.
“It sounds like the coalition of the willing is the coalition of the paid — they’re willing to be paid,” said Mr. Waxman, who later in the day introduced what he called a “clean contracting” amendment to a defense authorization bill being debated on the House floor. The amendment, which was accepted by voice vote, would institute a number of reforms, including new whistleblower protections and requirements on competitive bidding.
The audit was carried out by the Defense Department Office of the Inspector General, which is led by Claude M. Kicklighter, a retired lieutenant general. Mr. Kicklighter was not at the Thursday hearing because of a scheduling conflict. (yeah, right .. )
Many of the previous investigations of payments to contractors in Iraq have focused on the flawed effort to rebuild the country’s decrepit electricity grid, oil infrastructure, transportation network and public institutions. The feeble accountability and spotty paperwork of the contracts examined by Mr. Kicklighter’s office make it difficult to say what many of them were for, but the report indicates that many appeared to be for things as mundane as bottles of water, truck rentals and food deliveries.
According to the report, the Army made 183,486 “commercial and miscellaneous payments” from April 2001 to June 2006 from field offices in Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt, for a total of $10.7 billion in taxpayer money. The auditors focused on $8.2 billion in so-called commercial payments to contractors — American, Iraqi and probably other foreign nationals — although the report does not give details on the roster of companies.
Because the contracts were too numerous to be examined one by one, the auditors said they took a standard approach and examined 702 statistically representative contracts, then extrapolated the results to the full set.
When the results were compiled, they revealed a lack of accountability notable even by the shaky standards detailed in earlier examinations of contracting in Iraq. The report said that about $1.4 billion in payments lacked even minimal documentation “such as certified vouchers, proper receiving reports and invoices,” to explain what had been purchased and why.
Another $6.3 billion in payments did contain information explaining the expenditures but lacked other information required by federal regulations governing the use of taxpayer money — things like payment terms, proper identification numbers and contact information for the agents involved in the transaction. Taken together, those results meant that almost 95 percent of the payments had not been properly documented.
In a separate examination, auditors found that the $1.8 billion in seized Iraqi assets paid out by American military officers had not been properly accounted for.
Examples of the paperwork for some of those payments, displayed at the hearing, depict a system that became accustomed to making huge payments on the fly, with little oversight or attention to detail. In one instance, a United States Treasury check for $5,674,075.00 was written to pay a company called Al Kasid Specialized Vehicles Trading Company in Baghdad for items that a voucher does not even describe.
In another case, $6,268,320.07 went to the contractor Combat Support Associates with even less explanation. And a scrawl on another piece of paper says only that $8 million had been paid out as “Funds for the Benefit of the Iraqi People.”
But perhaps the masterpiece of elliptic paperwork is the document identified at the top as a “Public Voucher for Purchases and Services Other Than Personal.” It indicates that $320.8 million went for “Iraqi Salary Payment,” with no explanation of what the Iraqis were paid to do.
Whatever it was, the document suggests, each of those Iraqis was handsomely compensated. Under the “quantity” column is the number 1,000, presumably indicating the number of people who were to be paid — to the tune of $320,800 apiece — if the paperwork is to be trusted.
February 11, 2008
the SPP finally hits some mainstream media
VIDEO: SPP a threat to Canadian sovereignty?
| Ross McDermott, LondonTopic.ca | Send to a Friend  |
| 02/11/2008 |
 |
| Hassan Yousseff (left), Secretary-Treasurer of the Canadian Labour Congress, and NDP Trade Critic Peter Julian address the crowd at the London forum. Photo by Ross McDermott, LondonTopic.ca |
About 90 people turned up at the London forum to hear the reasons the federal NDP are vehemently opposed to the SPP, which was thrown into the spotlight last summer when violence broke out as police clashed with protesters during the annual trilateral meeting of the leaders of Canada, Mexico and the U.S., at the Montebello Summit in Quebec.
In one instance, Quebec police officers disguised themselves as protesters and, according to the Council of Canadians, attempted to incite a riot during what was a peaceful demonstration (see video below).
Julian was hosted by London-Fanshawe MP Irene Mathyssen, and was joined by Eduardo Sousa from the Council of Canadians and Hassan Yousseff, Secretary-Treasurer of the Canadian Labour Congress. The two-hour forum provided information that could be viewed by some as a threat to Canadian sovereignty.
The SPP began in Canada as a Prime Minister Paul Martin, Liberal government initiative in March, 2005, to boost co-operation on security, trade and public-health issues between Canada, the United States and Mexico. However, staunch criticism of what some see as a closed-door agenda has raised concerns among people on all sides of the Mexico, U.S. and Canada borders.
"We are essentially giving up our ability to function independently as a nation, and essentially that is what is at stake with the SPP," said Julian.
For the most part, guidance in relation to decisions being made within the SPP is provided by a group called the North American Competitive Council (NACC). Officially launched in June of 2006, the NACC was comprised of the 30 senior, private-sector representatives, 10 from each of the three countries, with Canada's 10 including Dominic D'Alessandro (Manulife Financial); Paul Desmarais, Jr. (Power Corporation of Canada); David Ganong (Ganong Bros. Limited); Richard George (Suncor Energy Inc.); Hunter Harrison (CN); Linda Hasenfratz (Linamar Corporation); Michael Sabia (Bell Canada Enterprises); Jim Shepherd (Canfor Corporation); Annette Verschuren (The Home Depot); and Rick Waugh (Scotiabank).
Julian told those in attendance that the NDP have compiled 10-top reasons why they are opposed to the SPP.
"It's anti-democratic by design," he said, adding the SPP discussions are being held behind closed doors.
There are 19 working groups involved with the SPP, all operating behind closed doors, and over a two-year period the NDP, through access to information requests, managed to procure documents in relation to these closed-door, working group sessions. "We finally managed to get the documents…hundreds and hundreds of pages…" Julian said, holding up pages marred heavily in thick, black lines – most, if not all of the information vetted out. "Courtesy of the Government of Canada," he said.
This veil of "profound secrecy" began with Martin and the Liberals, and in a "seamless transition," is being carried on today by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government.
However, Julian continued, within those documents the party was able to determine that there were more than 300 areas of safety and protection, "important to Canadians," he said, adding the SPP contains a "deep and wide agenda." He said the SPP has been called the next logical step to follow NAFTA. But noted Canadians rejected NAFTA in two national elections, and though the majority of individuals in this country suffer economically under that agreement, with the SPP things will only get worse.
Julian talked about hazardous wastes and said during the Montebello Summit, the way Canada handles its hazardous wastes was handed over to the U.S. "While Canada's system was not perfect, in the United States there is no tracking of hazardous chemicals," Julian said.
Last spring Harper announced the harmonization of allowable pesticide residue on food to match American levels – levels much higher than those previously upheld in Canada. This is detrimental to the health of Canadians and unfair to Canadian producers, Julian said.
A major threat related to the SPP concerns natural resources such as water, oil, and natural gas, he said.
"Water stewardship is fundamental in Canada. We know that despite the fact that we have 20 per cent of the world's fresh water supply, only six per cent of the world's renewable water is found in Canada," Julian said.
The export of bulk water is not permitted under NAFTA, unless one province or jurisdiction approves such activity. At that point any company can apply for bulk water exports and if Canada does not comply, those companies can sue for compensation under the controversial Chapter 11.
"Water diversion is on the agenda of the SPP," Julian said. "Though we haven't seen any concrete plans yet there is no doubt that there is a huge appetite in the United States to simply divert Canadian water."
In relation to oil and natural gas, Canada has already given up more sovereignty in the area of energy than any other country in the world. Under NAFTA Canada is obliged to share 60 per cent of its oil and 60 per cent of its natural gas with the United States, even in the event of a major supply shortage.
"Mexico said 'No' to the same arrangement – it's crazy," Julian said, adding "Under the SPP the negotiations are going even further. Essentially our energy resources will be considered part of the strategic energy resources of the United States."
The issues surrounding softwood lumber, he continued, is just the beginning. Though Canada has seen more than 10,000 job losses in the lumber industry, and Washington having a veto over any changes to Canada's forestry policy, thanks, once again to NAFTA, "Under the SPP that veto will extend across the economic spectrum and other industries will be treated the same way."
Julian touched upon what he called "the slippery slope of civil rights," noting that already Canada has mirrored its southern neighbour – implementing a no fly list. In the area of military he said Canada's capacity is now based on "working with the U.S. military," and the tradition of Canada being thought of as a peace-keeping country, "a Canadian invention," he said, is swiftly becoming a thing of the past.
In addition, he noted, the latest foreign policy report from 2007, "specifically referred to Canada relating its foreign policy to American priorities."
Julian urged the public to speak out against the SPP, in order to stop the "deep, wide-ranging agenda."
Hassan Yousseff, Secretary-Treasurer of the Canadian Labour Congress, said engaging the public will be a challenge.
"It's hard to get the public to engage in regulatory issues in their own country, never mind what's happening at three national levels… and that is the tremendous challenge which we face."
Yousseff said one of the biggest conspiracies related to the SPP is the lack of coverage coming from the national media. Pointing to the Montebello Summit, he noted that the trilateral meeting received very little press.
"It was only when police were exposed disguising themselves as protesters – and that was the story. The bigger story of what the three leaders were doing in Montebello, of course, never got the debate that was required – never got reported," he said.
He too echoed the need for Canadians not only to speak out against the SPP, but to demand information regarding the three-country discussions that take place every year.
"I wish it were about jelly beans, then I would stop worrying," Yousseff said. "It's critical we understand the debate because if we don't understand the debate we might put the same bastards back in power."
Eduardo Sousa with the Council of Canadians said 9-11 provided a vehicle for the powers that be to propagate the SPP under the guise of security. He urged the public to visit the Council of Canadians website to view a chronological timeline (see link) outlining the events that have happened since 9-11, all directly related to Canadian sovereignty and the SPP.
"We're giving away sovereignty over our energy – sovereignty over our water – our ability to determine what is safe and what is good in more than 300 regulatory areas – to determine what is good and safe for our environment – our collective ability to decide, as Canadians, what kind of society we want to create," Julian said, adding, "What is left?"
BEYOND THE ONIONS: Time for Canadians to stand up and stop the SPP
WEB: Council of Canadians -- SPP Timeline
WEB: Government of Canada -- Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America
Comments:
| Thank you for this article!! Canadians need to know and our media is not giving this enough coverage! |
| By: Misty on 02/11/2008 |
| And from what I said before, the SPP scares the hell out of me. I'm motivated. Secret meetings!!? COWARDS. Give me a break. This bureaucratic crap has to end. So, SICK of it. |
| By: pessy on 02/11/2008 |
December 10, 2007
NYT editorial on (some) mortgage bailout. Love that Hank!!
When the - teehee - august New York Times gets riled with the US federal government on domestic issues you just know that things have to be (1) pretty dire, or (2) being covered up and/or, (3) their editorials aren't like to lose them advertisers.
I think the NYT's is overstating here, the new number to be 'bailed out' - and that's if things "go well" is actually much closer to 185,000 TOPS I've read. Less than 10% really have a chance of reprieve, and who is going to monitor that?
I'll give you a clue - no one: no one at all. Why? There simply isn't the personnel in place to do that - to keep the "numbers" straight. Never was before, when times were 'good' and not now that financial companies are laying off in huge numbers. That of course is being kept very, very quiet. There are however tons of marshalls, sheriffs, and other law enforcement to come and get these people OUT - just like there was in NOLA.
The media had ample time to see this coming and make suggestions as to steps to be taken, as clearly not one person inside the Beltway has any interest in the affairs of "ordinary folks" - the trillions in US debt, the casualties of the young in insane illegal wars and the havoc wrecked on families because of it, the breakdown in ordinary justice, ALL of it - what can be done to help Americans keep them homes? Who really knows.
The labor unions should never have been dismantled is all I am going to say; they might have helped out this entire mess.
Editorial
When he announced a new plan to try to stanch the foreclosure crisis, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. said that the officials, lenders and investors involved had been working toward it since August. That start date is a useful benchmark for measuring the plan’s inadequacy.
Only an estimated 250,000 borrowers, at best, are likely to benefit from the plan’s main relief measure — a five-year freeze on certain adjustable loans’ introductory rates. Yet, from mid-2007 to now, some 800,000 homeowners have entered foreclosure. From 2008 through mid-2010, when the last of the potentially eligible loans would otherwise reset to sharply higher payments, there will be an estimated 3.5 million loan defaults.
The plan is too little, too late and too voluntary. Mr. Paulson and his boss, President Bush, have left it to the private sector — the mortgage industry — to protect the public interest, without any negative consequences if it does not. That is not the way the private sector works. And it is not how government is supposed to work at a time when Americans are facing mass foreclosures that threaten entire communities, financial markets and the wider economy.
Many mortgage servicers — lenders and private companies that collect mortgage payments on behalf of investors — have been reluctant to modify at-risk loans, even though the alternative is to foreclose on thousands of homeowners. That is because they fear being sued by mortgage investors. For some investors, letting a troubled borrower default would actually be better business, for others not. It all depends on how their particular security is set to pay out.
The new plan establishes guidelines that lenders can use to determine which troubled borrowers might qualify for a rate freeze. But even lenders that stick to the government-brokered guidelines have no guarantee that they cannot be sued.
The criteria for who gets relief and who does not are also a problem. Some are reasonable: borrowers must live in their homes and have a good repayment record on their mortgage loan. Others are far too restrictive: borrowers can be disqualified if they have improved their credit score during the loan’s introductory period, a move that is intended to weed out anyone with even the smallest probability of being able to afford a payment that is set to explode, but which could subject homeowners who need help to delays and denials.
Investors may simply be too self-interested to pull off the aggressive, broad-based loan fixes that Mr. Paulson has said he wants — and that the nation needs. Rather than standing up to Wall Street, Mr. Paulson is hoping that the interests of investors — to make money — will magically align with the interests of homeowners, to keep a roof over their heads.
Mr. Paulson should be prepared to choose sides. If the voluntary efforts are not much more successful than expected — and soon — he should support the tougher approaches being called for on Capitol Hill. One bill would help shield lenders who modify loans from being sued by investors. Another would allow troubled borrowers to restructure their mortgages under bankruptcy court protection. Both would give the industry a strong motivation to ramp up loan modifications — or watch the courts take over. If the industry drags its feet, that is exactly what should happen.
