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Should the Left Cheer the Dollar's Drop? How to make the bankers scream: Robert Pollin, world's best obituarist of Clintonomics, explains it all for you. Do police states make people feel safer? Vicente Navarro on Franco's Spain, Cockburn on Ireland in the Fifties under the Catholic Hierarchy, Alevtina Rea on growing up in Brezhnev-time. Capitalism's true utopia? St Clair on the Pentagon's no-bid arms contracts. How's the press doing in Iraq? Patrick Cockburn tells all to Omar Waraich. Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories May 3, 2005 Peter
Linebaugh May 2, 2005 Ron
Jacobs Stan
Goff Karyn
Strickler Joshua
Frank Kevin
Zeese Vicente
Navarro
April 30 / May 1, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Gabriel
Kolko Jennifer
Loewenstein Lee
Sustar Saul
Landau T.W.
Croft Nikolas
Kozloff William
Blum Dave
Lindorff Joshua
Frank Doug
Giebel Steven
Erlanger Fred
Gardner Mike
Whitney Kurt
Nimmo Joe
DeRaymond Michael
Dickinson Mickey
Z. Justin
Taylor Poets
Basement Website
of the Weekend
April 29, 2005 W.
John Green Luke
Brothers Norman
Solomon M.
Junaid Alam Jackie
Corr Hunter
Greer Sharon
Smith Website
of the Day
April 28, 2005 Omar
Waraich Kevin
Zeese Dave
Lindorff Greg
Moses Toni
Solo Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Werther
April 27, 2005 John
Ross Joshua
Frank Ray
McGovern Mark
Donham Dan
Smith
April 26, 2005 Dave
Lindorff Alevtina
Rea Greg
Moses Joshua
Frank Diana
Johnstone
April 25, 2005 Uri
Avnery Alison
Weir Lee
Sustar Leonardo
Boff Gary
Leupp
April 23 / 24, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Gary
Leupp James
Petras Harry
Browne Fred
Gardner Ron
Jacobs Elizabeth
Schulte Chris
Floyd
April 22, 2005 Saul
Landau Kevin
Zeese Joshua
Frank Mike
Whitney Michael
Flynn Lee
Sustar Website
of the Day
April 21, 2005 Bill
Quigley Dave
Lindorff Jason
Leopold Kathleen
Christison
April 20, 2005 John Ross Kevin Zeese Uri Avnery Website of the Day
April 19, 2005 Jean-Guy Allard Dave Lindorff Neve Gordon Brian Concannon, Jr Murray Hudson Frank B. Ford Monty Python Michael Dickinson Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
Linda Schade
/ Kevin Zeese John Ross Brian McKenna Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn Dave Zirin Eli Stephens Harry Browne Website of
the Day
April 16 / 17, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Mark Dow Omar Waraich Robert Buzzanco Sherry Wolf Fred Gardner Ron Jacobs Mark Weisbrot John Pardon Yoshie Furuhashi Mike Roselle Ralph Nader Ramzy Baroud Jackson Thoreau Michael Dickinson Richard Neville Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
April 15, 2005 Brian Cloughley Bill Glahn Mickey Z. Stephanie McMillan Josh Mahan David Russitano Jorge Mariscal Rodolfo "Corky"
Gonzales Tom Reeves
April 14, 2005 Karyn Strickler Pat Williams Jessica Pupovac Joshua Frank Jerzy Mankowski Talli Naumann Antony Loewenstein Virginia Rodino Saul Landau
/ Farrah Hassen Website of the Day
April 13, 2005 Maria Carrión Mike Whitney Terry Jones Dave Lindorff Nathaniel Livingston, Jr. Kurt Nimmo Don Fitz Tom Crumpacker JG Jack McCarthy Kevin Zeese Jeffrey St.
Clair
April 12, 2005 John Wheat
Gibson Kevin Zeese Alan Farago Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Nelson P. Valdes Dave Zirin Website of the Day
April 11, 2005 Tom Barry Saul Landau Monique Dols Phil Gasper Mike Whitney Edwin Krales Paul de Rooij Website of the Day
April 9 / 10, 2005 Jeffrey St.
Clair William A. Cook Gary Leupp Alan Maass Laura Carlsen Joe DeRaymond Nikolas Kozloff Dave Lindorff Greg Moses Fred Gardner Justin Smith Ron Jacobs M. Junaid Alam Ira Kay Elizabeth Schulte Jackie Corr Christopher
Brauchli Leslie A. Fiedler Ben Tripp Poets Basement Website of
the Weekend
April 8, 2005 Rob Eshelman Hom Raj Acharya
/ Sally Acharya Felice Pace Neve Gordon Mike Whitney Don Monkerud Adam Engel Vicente Navarro Website of the Day
April 7, 2005 Joshua Frank Yitzhak Laor Alan Maass Steven Sherman Dave Lindorff Gerry Adams John Chuckman Michael Dickinson John Ross Website of the Day
April 6, 2005 Peter Camejo Kevin Wehr Matt Vidal Robert Creeley
/ Bruce Jackson Nikolas Kozloff Sea Shepherd Crew Brenda Child Terry Eagleton David Swanson Cindy Ellen
Hill Website of
the Day
April 5, 2005 Jim Connolly Paul Craig
Roberts Gary Leupp Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Dan Smith Mark Engler Richard Oxman Greg Moses Website of the Day
April 4, 2005 Kevin Zeese Paul Craig Roberts Larry Birns
/ Sarah Schaffer Karyn Strickler Joshua Frank Michael Dickinson Surendra R.
Devkota Derrick O'Keefe Uri Avnery Website of the Day
April 2 / 3, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Stan Goff John Ross Saul Landau Robert Creeley Mike Roselle Joshua Frank Fred Gardner Greg Moses Fran Quigley Kurt Nimmo Nicole Colson Chris Genovali Alan Farago Lawrence Reichard Ben Tripp Avantika Regmi Lee Sustar Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Poets' Basement Website of
the Day
April 1, 2005 Tom Barry Rahul Mahajan Charlie Cray
/ Jim Vallette Dave Lindorff Zeynep Toufe Suzan Mazur Michael Dickinson Stan Cox Ra Ravishankar Daniel Wolff
March 31, 2005 Sharon Smith Ron Jacobs Tariq Ali Michael Dickinson Kanak Mani
Dixit Mitchell Zimmerman Xuan-Trang
Ho Dave Zirin Joe Bageant Jeff Halper Website of
the Day
Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Subcomandante
Marcos Norman Finkelstein Steve Niva Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams Steve
J.B. Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber Wendell
Berry CounterPunch
Wire Cindy
Corrie Gore Vidal Francis Boyle
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May 3, 2005 Halliburton's War LootCorruption in Bush's IraqBy BRIAN CLOUGHLEY New Zealand. There is a squalid little wart called Mark Steyn whose blinkered worship for Bush and the Crazy Crusaders is intense. He is the darling of the Murdoch-style, mind-bending, non-information media and of some other formerly respectable US and British publications which have lost their way in the fetid jungle of Bush idolatry. Steyn is the prat who wrote in the UK's Telegraph newspaper a year ago that "I don't think it's possible for anyone who looks at Iraq honestly to see it as anything other than a success story . . . ". The man has the horizon of a visually-challenged mole on tranquilizers but is held in high regard by loony Bush fundos who are never reluctant to believe the impossible and embrace the incredible. Steyn detests the UN. In particular he despises Mr Kofi Annan and describes his fellow UN-hater John (Kiss-up, Kick-down) Bolton in the manner of a love-struck ten year-old gushing about a pop icon. Bolton approved of Wolfowitz's insane predictions that everything would be fine in Iraq, just as Steyn looked into his crystal ball in April 2003 and forecast that "In a year's time, Iraq will be, at a bare minimum, the least badly-governed state in the Arab World and, at best, pleasant, civilized and thriving." He and the other clods who made such bird-witted prophecies have been proved entirely wrong. But marvelous Mark carries on crusading. Selectively. When the scandal broke about corruption in the oil-for-food program that was supervised by the UN, marvelous Mark rushed to castigate Mr Annan. He wrote "Given that the Oil-for-Fraud program was run directly out of Kofi Annan's office, the Secretary-General ought to have the decency to recognize that he had his chance with Iraq, he blew it, and a period of silence from him would now be welcome." This is in line with such statements as "I'd be in favor of destroying the UN - or, failing that, at least moving its headquarters to Rwanda", and "Oil-for-Fraud is everything the Left said the war was: it was all about oil - for [UN official] Benon Sevan, the UN, France, Russia and the others who had every incentive to maintain Saddam in power. Every Halliburton invoice to the Pentagon is audited to the last penny, but Saddam can use Kofi Annan's office as a front for a multi-billion dollar global kickback scheme . . ." We can be forgiven for roaring with laughter at his imbecile observation about Halliburton invoices because everyone except marvelous Mark was aware that Cheney's old firm was overcharging on a scale that would excite the admiration of an Enron accountant. Hundreds of millions of dollars went down the drain, but it didn't matter to Washington because it was in the cause of Bush-style freedom and democracy. Last month Rumsfeld went to Iraq to lecture its citizens about, as he put it, "corruption in government" knowing (one supposes, because we keep being told how smart he is) that just before he went to Baghdad it was discovered there had been "$108 million in overcharges by [Halliburton's] Kellogg Brown and Root [KBR] for delivering gasoline to Iraq. The Pentagon had previously released a redacted version of the audit to conceal the overcharge from the public, at KBR's request." Use of the word 'redacted' is fascinating. Its correct meaning is "shaping into proper form for publication". But what it now conveys is "censored by the Bush White House", which is exactly the same thing as shaping into proper form for publication if you look at it from the viewpoint of the Washington warriors. It was Rumsfeld, CEO of the Pentagon, who was complicit in trying to conceal KBR's shenanigans by allowing his people to censor sections of critical audit reports, and it might just be possible that poor little Steyn actually believed Halliburton to be white as the driven snow. * * * What entity, person or nation did marvelous Mark omit from his list of criminals who indulged in corruption because they "had every incentive to maintain Saddam in power"? At the time when he wrote about Benon Sevan and France and Russia being the guilty parties in the oil scam it was known by everyone else but Steyn that good old Texas was up to its oily armpits in Saddam's swindles. Money, after all, is the root of all power, and where there's money to be made, there are Babbitty Texans getting in there to get more than their share of both. But there was not a peep out of Steyn about that. Did the Texans involved have "every incentive to maintain Saddam in power"? If so, why? If not, then why are they different from those who, Steyn claims, insolently and preposterously, wanted to keep Saddam in power? It is worth reading UN Security Council resolution 986 of 1995 on the oil-for-food scheme. Among other things it "Authorizes States . . . to permit the import of petroleum and petroleum products originating in Iraq, including financial and other essential transactions directly relating thereto . . . ". Note the key word "States". The Council authorized national governments to make possible the oil flow from Iraq. It was national governments that were responsible for endorsing financial arrangements concerning the transport of oil and payment for it into the UN escrow account. The Security Council "Oil-for-Fraud" programme, as Steyn described it, involved Texas figures described by the FBI as "Motivated by greed, they flouted the law, made a mockery of the stated aims of the oil-for-food program and willingly conspired with a foreign government with whom our country was on the brink of war". Further, the FBI stated, they used the program as a "cash cow masquerading as a humanitarian venture." Steyn's next comments on the "global kickback scheme" will be interesting, because he might condemn the Texas cashocracy for being greedy and corrupt, just as he condemned Kofi Annan for being at the head of the UN at a time when some of the scum of Big Oil were scamming the world. The money criminally obtained through the US-supported oil-for-food program is a tiny portion of what has been stolen by all sorts of corrupt blackguards in the wake of the ridiculously-named Operation 'Iraqi Freedom'. As the Christian Science Monitor's Mark Rice-Oxley noted March 17 "A January report by special [US] inspector Stuart Bowen found that $8.8 billion dollars had been disbursed from Iraqi oil revenue by US [occupation] administrators to Iraqi ministries without proper accounting." Not even Steyn and Rove can blame Kofi Annan for the US handover of eight billion dollars without any sort of follow-through supervision or line item accountability. (But "Every Halliburton invoice to the Pentagon is audited to the last penny," says Steyn . . . .). It is scandalous that the black holes down which all this cash has gone have not been identified, and verging on the incredible that nobody is being held responsible. The people who authorized movement of the money down the chain to the drain were the so-called "administrators" appointed by Bush and Rumsfeld and headed by the spectacularly inefficient Paul Bremer who was described by Bush as "a can-do type person". After Bremer showed he was a can't-do type person he was awarded the Bush Medal of Freedom, and for that reason there isn't the slightest chance that he or anyone associated with him will be held to account for the missing billions. Anyone to whom Bush hands out a medal cannot be criticized, because that would mean the Great Leader had been wrong. Heads would roll - not the heads of the people to blame for gross incompetence or flagrant corruption, to be sure, but the heads of people who tried to expose incompetence and corruption. This is the trademark of the Bush presidency, and we have to admit that the Rove control apparatus is extremely effective. The great pity is that its expertise has been directed to concealing dishonesty rather than exposing it. Representative Henry A Waxman of California pointed out to the House Subcommittee on National Security [etc, etc] on March 15 that the successor to the oil-for-food program is the Development Fund for Iraq which was created in May 2003. The Fund came under "the authority of the US-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority" which, as insisted upon by the Bush administration, was to "manage and spend Iraqi funds, which belong to the Iraqi people, for their benefit." The Bush appointees were required to disburse monies "in a transparent manner to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people . . . and for other purposes benefiting the people of Iraq". That is perfectly clear. It is an honorable and laudable objective of which we should all approve. The phrase "transparent manner" is specially welcome. The Fund's transparency was
to be overseen by a group appointed by the Security Council (thus
by definition approved by Bush Washington), drawn from UN members,
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Arab
Fund for Economic Development. It is known as the International
Advisory and Monitoring Board, but its advice was treated with
contempt and it was prevented from monitoring anything by Washington's
usual expedient of ignoring requests for information. The Monitoring Board thought it strange that there were no independent checks and balances involved in committing this enormous sum of money to Halliburton, so on April 5 last year, after the Fund had been operating for a year, it asked for details. Specifically, it wanted to know why Iraqi money (the US taxpayers' money being none of its business) went to prosper a US company that had been awarded a monster contract by the US government without any competitive bids being sought. In doing this, the Board was performing the supervisory task it had been specifically instructed to carry out by the Security Council, of which the most influential member is the United States. The Monitoring Board asked repeatedly for audit details. Seven months after its first request it was given "redacted copies of the Defense Contract Audit Agency audit reports on sole source contracts". So marvelous Mark was right, in a sort of way, because Halliburton was indeed audited. But the Pentagon refused to release details of the audit. These were far too secret and sensitive to be given to the Board appointed by the Security Council to oversee how US administrators spent $1.6 billion of Iraqi money. As Congressman Waxman discovered, however, the secret and sensitive parts of the audit that the Pentagon refused to release, and blacked-out - "redacted" - to prevent the Board seeing them, consisted of observations that Rumsfeld's Pentagon presumably considered would have been threatening to national or commercial security if anyone outside the Pentagon was allowed to know them. These included such censored comments as "KBR was unable to reconcile the proposed costs to its accounting records" ; and "KBR did not always provide accurate information" ; and "KBR did not comply with the stated terms and conditions of its own subcontract clauses" ; and "We found significant purchasing system deficiencies during related audits". Not one of these critical audit observations (and there are many others of equal seriousness) could possibly be interpreted as having either national security implications or information that would be detrimental to commercial competitiveness. There had been, after all, no commercial competition of any sort. And the idea that national security might be involved is absurd. The reason for the Pentagon's censorship was simple : Halliburton/KBR had made a howling (but extremely profitable) nonsense of everything they touched, and those responsible for allowing them to do so are Pentagon people. So of course there must be "redaction". It would be terrible for the image of the Bush administration to make it possible to identify exactly who is to blame for wasting billions of dollars. The real lulu in the Iraq tragedy-as-farce is that "KBR faces a number of investigations for overcharging, including one case where it charged the Army more than 27 million dollars to transport $82,000 worth of fuel from Kuwait to Iraq . . . In a written statement, Halliburton defended the cost, explaining that delivering the fuel was 'fraught with danger'." Oh wow. 27 million dollars of danger money. So where did it go, all that cash-for-danger? Into the pockets of the Egyptian and Turkish truck drivers who are in Iraq doing jobs that should have been given to Iraqis? (Which was one of the dumbest Bush administration decisions of all time.) Don't believe it. The money went where that sort of money always goes - into the pockets of the people who thought up the scam and knew they would be allowed to get away with it. The tale of the US occupation of Iraq is one of incompetence and chicanery followed by stone-walling and cover-up, ending with fat wallets, promotions and devalued medals all round. It's a cash cow for crooked companies and career progression for generals. Maybe that's why marvelous Mark said it would be a success story. Brian Cloughley writes on military and political affairs.
He can be reached through his website www.briancloughley.com
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