Torture Memos Released

Rethinking Afghanistan - part one

http://rethinkafghanistan.com/troop_trailer.php

This is the first of three installments of a very good film by Robert Greenwald and the Brave New Foundation. This documentary focuses on the financial burden of the undeclared and illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rampant criminal war profiteering.I It side-steps the cost in civilian lives, the destruction of societies and immorality and wickedness of these barbarous conflicts.

Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now!

"Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War”

AMY GOODMAN: The private military contractor KBR was awarded a $35 million contract for electrical work in Iraq by the Army Corps of Engineers last week. The former Halliburton subsidiary got the Pentagon contract even though it’s under criminal investigation for the deaths of at least two American soldiers in Iraq caused by improperly installed or maintained electrical equipment.

Separately, the US government charged KBR on Friday with criminal bribery charges for promising and paying tens of millions of dollars to Nigerian officials in exchange for four lucrative contracts between 1995 and 2004. Last month, Halliburton said it would pay $559 million to end the investigation if the government approved a settlement.

Another lawsuit filed last week accused Halliburton and KBR of the wrongful death of a truck driver they had employed. He was killed two years ago by US soldiers who allegedly mistook him for an insurgent at a checkpoint near Baghdad. The lawsuit accuses Halliburton and KBR of negligence.

As the allegations against Halliburton and its former subsidiary KBR, Kellogg Brown & Root, continue to grow, we turn to the award-winning investigative journalist Pratap Chatterjee, who has traced their record in Iraq for years. His latest book releases today. It’s called Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. Pratap Chatterjee joins us now in our firehouse studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Thank you for having me on, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. As the US government says that the troops will draw down over the next year, year and a half, in Iraq, what’s happening with Halliburton and, as you call it, Halliburton’s Army?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, the US military is completely dependent on Halliburton. Despite all the news that you read of, you know, soldiers being electrocuted, drivers being shot, the company continues to get contracts. And it’s because half the people in Iraq are contractors, and a large number of them are KBR employees. You know, they’re South Asian workers, they’re Indians, Pakistanis, they’re Southeast Asian Filipinos. They are Halliburton’s Army, and they make this military tick. They make this army—allow this army to march forward on its stomach. It’s because they feed that stomach.

So, you had Peter Singer on last week talking about the jobs that are dirty, dull or dangerous and, you know, how they use robots to kill from the sky. Well, they still need to launch those robots, those drones, and they need to have people in place to feed them. And that’s what the Indians who—Indian—

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to P.W. Singer for a minute. We’ll play a clip of our interview. You know, he wrote the book Wired for War, about the robotics revolution in this country.

P.W. SINGER: Now, the problem is, what are the implications of that for our democracy? So, for example, if you are sending less and less Americans into harm’s way, does it make you more cavalier about the use of force? And one of the people that was fascinating that I interviewed was a former assistant secretary of Defense for Ronald Reagan, who actually had this to say about these systems. He worried that they would create more marketization of war, as he put it. We might have more shock and awe talk to defray discussion of the true costs of war.

You know, my grandfather served in the Pacific fleet in World War II. When he went to war, you know, he went to a place where danger took place, and the family didn’t know if he was ever coming back. And that’s very different than the experience of, for example, a Predator drone pilot that I met with who described that basically his experience of fighting in the Iraq war was getting in his Toyota Corolla, driving to work—he’s doing this in Nevada—driving into work, for twelve hours he puts missiles on targets, then gets back in the Toyota, commutes back home, and within twenty minutes he’s talking to his son at the dinner table.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s P.W. Singer, Wired for War. Pratap Chatterjee?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, my great-uncle actually served in Iraq under the British, and his job was to accompany the British troops. He was a doctor. Today, Indians are still serving in the war, and just as the French film that came out last year called Days of Glory, where they showed that half of Charles de Gaulle’s army was actually North African soldiers. So war has always used, you know, people from other countries to support and do the dirty, dull and dangerous work.

Today, some of that most dangerous work is done by robots, and the dirty and dull stuff that Peter Singer talks about is done by South Asians, Southeast Asians, and they comprise, you know, Halliburton’s Army. So companies like KBR, a former—Kellogg Brown & Root, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, are now able to make money by providing—my book opens with Donald Rumsfeld saying, “Why should we, you know, Americans, be doing these things like cleaning toilets? We can outsource that. We need our soldiers to be able to do, you know, the important things in war.” And really, this is only possible, because with a volunteer army, as opposed to a draft army, you can recruit people from other countries.

I talked to drivers. They’re Fijian truck drivers. I think you might even have an interview that I did with this Fijian truck driver, who—ironically, Peter Singer’s, you know, grandfather was a soldier in the South Pacific; now you have truck drivers being flown from Fiji, you know, and people being flown from Sri Lanka, to come to fight in somebody else’s war, the American war. And their job, you know, for $300 a month, is to make sure that American troops can fight in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to that clip that you describe. You can set it up for us, the clip of the Fijian driver.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: The clip—the driver’s name is Titoko Savuwati, and he’s from Fiji, from Totoya Lau, and he basically was lured to Iraq with promise of a $3,000 salary. Once he actually got there, he discovered he’s going to be paid 50 KD a trip, which is about—

AMY GOODMAN: KD are…?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: A KD is a Kuwaiti dinar, so that’s about $170.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to the clip.

TITOKO SAVUWATI: They never gave us any insurance. Most of our friends were shooting. Some was very badly shot, accident. But company never paid me anything. No single money. Like myself, I was fall down. My truck was tumbled, fall down. Yeah. So now, see my leg? I’m not going good now. I complained, but the company never gave me any money. Most of our trip to Iraq, we were only paid with 50 KDs allowance for trip. That’s all. Yeah. For 175 in one trip, they pay us 50 KD only for cross the border.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: There and back?

TITOKO SAVUWATI: Yeah. Go, come back. Yeah. I think that 50 KD is filter for the drivers to go to Iraq, come back. I was asking, if anything happened to my life, I’m shooting from the Iraq people, maybe I die, is that 50 KD can send to my family to make my family survive by that 50 KD?

AMY GOODMAN: Pratap Chatterjee?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: I mean, this is $180 he’s talking about. Now, actually, it’s $170, because of the exchange rates, that he’s getting paid. And the irony of Titoko, one day he dropped me off, and he said, “Hey, listen. Can I borrow one KD”—that was $3.50—“so I can go get some lunch?” Here’s this man driving, you know, twice—he’s driven a hundred trips into Iraq, you know, each time being paid $180 from this company, Agility. It’s a subcontractor to KBR. And at the end of the day, he’s bringing food, he’s bringing ice cream and bagels and turkey and—you know, to American soldiers. But his life, when he gets injured, nobody pays him. If he dies, you know, who’s going to take care of his family?

But that is Halliburton’s Army. It is an army of cheap labor, you know, working for big contractors in Houston that keeps the US Army—the US Army will not shut this operation down. Obama is not going to kick these guys out, because how does he ship back the equipment from Iraq to the United States? He’s going to have to use these contractors. Everything went in with the contractors. It’s like shutting down a nuclear power station. Who knows the system best, you know, to shut down a nuclear power station? You go back to the Bechtels who built it to shut it down. Same thing here. When Obama—if he moves soldiers out of that theater, he’s either going to use more contractors, or he’s going to use those contractors to bring them back. So, they’ve made $25 billion in contracts so far. They’re going to make another $10 billion, at least.

AMY GOODMAN: The title of your book is Halliburton’s Army; the subtitle, How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. Very quickly, the history, how did this happen?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, this actually goes back many years. Most people think, you know, well, Halliburton was brought in by Dick Cheney. Not true at all. Kellogg Brown, & Root, or Brown & Root at the time, was building warships during the Second World War. In Vietnam, they built almost all the bases there. You can go to Cam Ranh Bay in Southeast Asia. I talk about Donald Rumsfeld actually arriving in 1966. He visits the bases, and then he comes back to the US Congress, and he speaks in the House of Representatives, and he says, “This company, you know, they don’t have receipts. They are wasting money, and they’re paying off the President.” This, you know—

AMY GOODMAN: And they were paying…?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: They were paying off the President.

AMY GOODMAN: Lyndon Baines Johnson.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: In this case, Lyndon B. Johnson. So, fast-forward thirty-seven years, and he is the man who’s giving them a contract. And actually, it’s Rumsfeld really; it’s not even Cheney. It’s Rumsfeld who’s looking to this system of outsourcing war, of finding Indians to clean toilets and that sort of thing, so that Americans, you know, can invade Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: But it’s Cheney who was head of Halliburton.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Cheney was the head of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000, and he made out well. He was actually a very bad CEO in some ways and a very good CEO in other ways. I mean, he took the company from making $100 million in US contracts to $2.3 billion in the five years he was there, so a large increase for the company. In fact, he made some very bad business decisions. He bought up a company that had a billion dollars in asbestos liability.

People often ask me, did Cheney get the contract—did he give the contract to Halliburton? I really think the question should be reversed: why did Halliburton hire Cheney, as opposed to why did Cheney hire Halliburton? Well, Cheney hired—Halliburton hired Cheney because of the revolving door, because they knew he could bring business to them. And once he actually became Vice President, Halliburton’s lobbying budget actually dropped by half. They stopped having to recruit—you know, having to lobby, because they already knew they were in.

They had these contracts set up from so many years ago. I mean, starting in Vietnam, building Diego Garcia. You know, I talk about them in Turkey in Adana. You know, Operation Northern Watch was supported by people working for a consortium called VBR, which was partly Brown & Root, Halliburton. So this has gone on for a long time. In Bosnia, you know, in Kosovo, under Clinton, Kellogg Brown & Root, then just Brown & Root, subsidiary of Halliburton, was, you know, cooking for the soldiers, building Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. And today that continues. So this is not something that’s new. It is, in fact, you know, par for the course that Cheney would come in and work for them.

AMY GOODMAN: Pratap Chatterjee, we are seeing a huge discussion right now on this global economic meltdown and dealing with what is the solution to it. But rarely, in the concerns about the amount of taxpayer money that’s going out, are—is there a discussion about US taxpayer money going to corporations like Halliburton.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, $25 billion in the last five years has gone to Halliburton, now Kellogg Brown & Root, their subsidiary, in Iraq, to be able to build the bases for American soldiers and to do this war. They get a guaranteed profit; these contracts are cost plus. So whatever Halliburton, or now Kellogg Brown & Root, do in Iraq, they are going to get two percent. In Bosnia, it was seven percent, nine percent. Doesn’t matter how much they charge, they are guaranteed—how much is spent, they’re guaranteed to get a profit. They never make a loss. And so, for them, this is—you know, it’s gravy, in some ways, because whether Obama withdraws from Iraq or continues there, they’re going to get the contract to supply the military.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, I asked Obama at Cooper Union, when he was running for office, if he’s going to support a ban on the military contractors, but he said no.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: No. His point is, I will make them more accountable. I mean, in his legislation he’s promoted, he has never said that he’s going to withdraw the contractors. And in a sense, this is actually quite important, making them accountable, because this has not happened. I mean, the Iraq war, is—you know, there’s so much waste, so much incompetence there, and—

AMY GOODMAN: Afghanistan?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: In Afghanistan it’s exactly the same thing. I was just there in November for three weeks, and you have the same thing. You have, you know, troops who sit behind tanks, living on bases like Bagram, where you have, once again, workers from KBR who supply them with food and clean the toilets and that sort of thing. And nobody’s watching them, partly because—when I was in Kuwait, I asked one of the commanders there, I said, “I can prove to you that this particular subcontract by this company PWC was awarded—you know, should never have been awarded, because they lied on the paperwork. The drivers they hired from Fiji didn’t know how to drive these big reefers. You know, why are they here?” He said, “It doesn’t matter to me. It matters to me now that the soldiers are being fed.” I said, “Will you question this contract? Will you question?” He says, “No, not at all, because in order for me to send my troops into battle, I need to feed them, and I need to make sure that they’re taken care of, and KBR provides that service.”

AMY GOODMAN: Pratap Chatterjee, we just have two minutes, and I want to go to that top story, reading the introduction, how it was just awarded KBR $35 million for electrical work, despite the fact that it’s under criminal investigation for the deaths of at least two Americans, and separately, the US government has just charged KBR with criminal bribery charges for promising and paying tens of millions of dollars to Nigerian officials in exchange for lucrative contracts. Explain both of those quickly.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, the contract in Nigeria, which was a contract with a consortium called TSKJ, Albert “Jack” Stanley, who was the head of KBR at the time, worked for Cheney, paid tens of millions of dollars to Nigerian officials. So they’re paying a half-billion-dollar fine to the US government for what happened at those times. So, this is a huge—I mean, this should be a much bigger story.

AMY GOODMAN: This is money that comes from taxpayers, US taxpayers. So US taxpayers are bribing Nigerian officials, or they’re doing it in our name.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Absolutely, that is exactly how—

AMY GOODMAN: And the Americans?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: So, now, when KBR works in a place like Iraq, they are able to get away with a lot of shoddy work. And my book covers the fact that a lot of the work that was done, you know, because people weren’t watching, there wasn’t oversight, there wasn’t accountability, they were able to get away with shoddy electrical work, often bad food, overpriced items. A lot of times, there’s also a lot of detail of how, you know, people walked away with—the book opens with this guy Jeff Alex Mazon walking away with a $1 million check. And he’s paid that by a subcontractor to Halliburton. When the case came up at the Rock Island Arsenal, he said, “Look,” he says, “what’s wrong with this, getting this money? You know, this is money that is owed to me, because I did this work for Halliburton.”

AMY GOODMAN: The two Americans who died? We have twenty seconds.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, the Americans who died—Donald Tolfree was killed by the US Army when he was driving a truck. It’s extremely dangerous for the contractors who live there, because, you know, they don’t—they are effectively fighting in somebody else’s war, and they don’t wear a uniform. So when they go to work for Halliburton, many truck drivers have been killed, because they are actually civilians in a war zone fighting a war, you know, with—where, you know, uniforms don’t count for anything.

AMY GOODMAN: Pratap Chatterjee’s book is Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War.

Seymour Hersh: Secret US Forces Carried Out Assassinations in a Dozen Countries, Including in Latin America

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir last month when he said the Bush administration ran an executive assassination ring that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney. Hersh made the comment during a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10th.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination wing, essentially. And it’s been going on and on and on. And just today in the Times there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven, ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It’s been going in—under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.


AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, CNN interviewed Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser, John Hannah. Wolf Blitzer asked Hannah about Sy Hersh’s claim.

WOLF BLITZER: Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?

JOHN HANNAH: There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.

WOLF BLITZER: And so, this would be, and from your perspective—and you worked in the Bush administration for many years—it would be totally constitutional, totally legal, to go out and find these guys and to whack ’em.

JOHN HANNAH: There’s no question that in a theater of war, when we are at war, and we know—there’s no doubt, we are still at war against al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and on that Pakistani border, that our troops have the authority to go after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.


AMY GOODMAN: That’s John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser. Seymour Hersh joins me now here in Washington, D.C., staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His latest article appears in the current issue, called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace.”

OK, welcome to Democracy Now!, Sy Hersh. It was good to see you last night at Georgetown. Talk about, first, these comments you made at the University of Minnesota.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it was sort of stupid of me to start talking about stuff I haven’t written. I always kick myself when I do it. But I was with Walter Mondale, the former vice president, who was being amazingly open and sort of, for him—he had come a long way in—since I knew him as a senator who was reluctant to oppose the Vietnam War. And so, I was asked about future things, and I just—I am looking into stuff. I’ve done—there’s really nothing I said at Minnesota I haven’t written in the New York Times. Last summer, I wrote a long article about the Joint Special Operations Command.

And just to go back to what John Hannah, who is—was—I think ended up being the senior national security adviser, almost—if not the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff for Dick Cheney in the last three or four years, what he said is simply that, yes, we go after people suspected—that was the word he used—of crimes against America. And I have to tell you that there’s an executive order, signed by Jerry Ford, President Ford, in the ’70s, forbidding such action. It’s not only contrary—it’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s counterproductive.

The evidence—the problem with having military go kill people when they’re not directly in combat, these are asking American troops to go out and find people and, as you said earlier, in one of the statements I made that you played, they go into countries without telling any of the authorities, the American ambassador, the CIA chief, certainly nobody in the government that we’re going into, and it’s far more than just in combat areas. There’s more—at least a dozen countries and perhaps more. The President has authorized these kinds of actions in the Middle East and also in Latin America, I will tell you, Central America, some countries. They’ve been—our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need, and that’s simply—there’s no legal basis for it.

And not only that, if you look at Guantanamo, the American government knew by—well, let’s see, Guantanamo opened in early 2002. “Gitmo,” they call it, the base down in Cuba for alleged al-Qaeda terrorists. An internal report that I wrote about in a book I did years ago, an internal report made by the summer of 2002, estimated that at least half and possibly more of those people had nothing to do with actions against America. The intelligence we have is often very fragmentary, not very good. And the idea that the American president would think he has the constitutional power or the legal right to tell soldiers not engaged in immediate combat to go out and find people based on lists and execute them is just amazing to me. It’s amazing to me.

And not only that, Amy, the thing about George Bush is, everything’s sort of done in plain sight. In his State of the Union address, I think January the 28th, 2003, about a month and a half before we went into Iraq, Bush was describing the progress in the war, and he said—I’m paraphrasing, but this is pretty close—he said that we’ve captured more than 3,000 members of al-Qaeda and suspected members, people suspected of operations against us. And then he added with that little smile he has, “And let me tell you, some of those people will not be able to ever operate again. I can assure you that. They will not be in a position.” He’s clearly talking about killing people, and to applause.

So, there we are. I don’t back off what I said. I wish I hadn’t said it ad hoc, because, like I hope we’re going to talk about in a minute, I spend a lot of time writing stories for The New Yorker, and they’re very carefully vetted, and sometimes when you speak off the top, you’re not as precise.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Joint Special Operations Command is and what oversight Congress has of it.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it’s a special unit. We have something called the Special Operations Command that operates out of Florida, and it involves a lot of wings. And one of the units that work under the umbrella of the Special Operations Command is known as Joint Special Op—JSOC. It’s a special unit. What makes it so special, it’s a group of elite people that include Navy Seals, some Navy Seals, Delta Force, our—what we call our black units, the commando units. “Commando” is a word they don’t like, but that’s what we, most of us, refer to them as. And they promote from within. It’s a unit that has its own promotion structure. And one of the elements, I must tell you, about getting ahead in promotion is the number of kills you have. Of course. Because it’s basically devised—it’s been transmogrified, if you will, into this unit that goes after high-value targets.

And where Cheney comes in and the idea of an assassination ring—I actually said “wing,” but of an assassination wing—that reports to Cheney was simply that they clear lists through the Vice President’s office. He’s not sitting around picking targets. They clear the lists. And he’s certainly deeply involved, less and less as time went on, of course, but in the beginning very closely involved. And this is the elite unit. I think they do three-month tours. And last summer, I wrote a long article in The New Yorker, last July, about how the JSOC operation is simply not available, and there’s no information provided by the executive to Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: What countries, Sy Hersh—what countries are they operating in?

SEYMOUR HERSH: A lot of countries.

AMY GOODMAN: Name some.

SEYMOUR HERSH: No, because I haven’t written about it, Amy. And I will tell you, as I say, in Central America, it’s far more than just the areas that Mr. Hannah talked about—Afghanistan, Iraq. You can understand an operation like this in the heat of battle in Iraq, killing—I mean, taking out enemy. That’s war. But when you go into other countries—let’s say Yemen, let’s say Peru, let’s say Colombia, let’s say Eritrea, let’s say Madagascar, let’s say Kenya, countries like that—and kill people who are believed on a list to be al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-linked or anti-American, you’re violating most of the tenets.

We’re a country that believes very much in due process. That’s what it’s all about. We don’t give the President of United States the right to tell military people, even in a war—and it’s a war against an idea, war against terrorism. It’s not as if we’re at war against a committed uniformed enemy. It’s a very complicated war we’re in. And with each of those actions, of course, there’s always collateral deaths, and there’s always more people ending up becoming our enemies. That’s the tragedy of Guantanamo. By the time people, whether they were with us or against us when they got there, by the time they’ve been there three or four months, they’re dangerous to us, because of the way they’ve been treated. But I’d love to move on to what I wrote about in The New Yorker.

AMY GOODMAN: One question: Is the assassination wing continuing under President Obama?

SEYMOUR HERSH: How do I know? I hope not.

Spanish Court May Indict Bush Officials

From "Indict Bush Now.org":

The indictment and prosecution of Bush administration officials is becoming a reality.

"A Spanish court has agreed to consider opening a criminal case against six former Bush administration officials," the Associated Press confirmed.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes are under scrutiny for sanctioning torture in violation of the Geneva conventions. Under Spanish law, the courts have jurisdiction to prosecute war criminals and torturers anywhere in the world. A judge has already called on prosecutors to review the charges.

Clearly, millions of people worldwide stand with the mission of IndictBushNow and all those who are fighting for accountability.

First, you go after the smaller fish. Then, the bigger fish are easier to nail!

The Old Bastard Squawks on, Cooking his Own Goose (part 6)

The Annotated Interview Vice President Richard Cheney by Jon Ward and John Solomon, The Washington Times

Office of the Vice President
December 22, 2008
Vice President's West Wing Office

Q You would disagree that policy on detainee treatment was made opaque enough that these abuses at Abu Ghraib were–
(WTF am I trying to say without saying it?)
-- obviously not directed from the top,
(No. Obviously not from the top… cuz then that would mean that you and the ‘Dee-cider’ made the wrong dee-cisions. Better to lay the blame on a handful of moronic, under-educated yokels who don’t know any better than to follow orders.)
but under pressure for more intelligence
(More pressure but NOT from the top, aheh-heh…, like we said. Gotta get more intelligence, better intelligence. )
-- were allowed -- not allowed, but basically
(Oh, cripes, I’m in deep doo-doo and you got the shovel. Eeep…)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Abu Ghraib, like I say, I don't think had anything to do with policy, as I understand it.
( I say, ‘I don’t think’ but actually you know, it’s more like ‘I think but don’t say’. And as I understand it, I can say whatever the fuck I want because you two dweebs ain’t gonna press me on anything. Otherwise I would never have set up this phoney-baloney Q&A session with your bosses.)
And the people that they were –
(We’ll call them ‘people’ for the sake of their mothers.)
the people that were subjected to abusive practices there
(Not torture or cruel and inhuman punishment – ‘abusive practices’.)
I don't think had any special intelligence understandings, or if you will, special intelligence information that we needed.
(But since we couldn’t torture the ‘special intelligence understandings’ out of them, who’s to say?)
I mean, this was not --
(Maybe I’d better not bring that up…)
as I say, I don't think it was related to policy.
(And as I say, I think my opinion is Law around here so if it were policy – or related to policy – than that policy is Law and therefore I can do whatever the fuck I want to do and not worry about trifles like ‘legality’.)
I think it was, in fact, a case of individual personnel
(Not even members of a group; just individuals in a military hive.)
who were perhaps not properly supervised.
(I’m banking on you being so stupid as to ignore what patent nonsense this is: improperly supervised, individualistic, military security personnel who were acting outside of the chain of command even though they were constantly monitored by the CIA and their own superior officers in direct contact with the Pentagon on an almost daily basis. To put it another way – everybody knew about it from top to bottom but it’s nobody’s fault. Nevertheless, we’ll blame the enlisted bastards. )
And I think the military deserves a lot of credit for the way they handled it because they're the ones that cleaned it up.
(Like they had any choice in the matter.)


Q Foreign perception of the United States as we've had to fight these dual wars,
(Forced upon us as they were by unfortunate unforeseen circumstances, our own righteous honor and sense of duty as the appointed guardians and saviors of the Free world compelled us to use military force. If only those ‘Foreigners’ would come to realize how much America sacrifices for the common good the weight that we’ve been ordained to bear would feel lighter. Sigh…)
can you talk -- what you think has happened?
(Oops, I dropped my syntax again and it’s shattered to smithereens.)
Why has America – the perception of America changed so much in the last eight years?
(After all, in your administration, we’ve invaded two separate sovereign nations under the flimsiest of pretenses which were supported by bold-faced lies, overthrown the respective governments, slaughtered tens of thousands, forced the displacement, starvation and destitution of hundreds of thousands, destroyed the lives of millions more. Why would they change their perception of us? )
And what do you think will happen over the next few years?
(Oh, Great and Knowledgeable OZ! [Stoop here to lick boot])

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, has the perception of America changed?
(Didn’t think I’d turn the question back on itself, now, did you? Oh… you expected that, eh? Right…)
I suppose it has in some quarters.
(The hind-most, heh-heh.)
I think that some of the things we had to do after 9/11
(We were forced by panic, fear and greed. We had no choice.)
to respond to it and to protect the nation against a further attack
(Since we hadn’t see 9/11 coming, we were flying blind in a shitstorm.)
clearly generated controversy in some quarters.
(Limp-dicked, bleeding-heart liberals. Always whining about civil rights and due process. Makes me sick.)
But what a lot of our friends overseas never really understood,
(Because so many of them cling hopelessly to a shared outmoded concept of international law.)
at least not initially,
(Not until we agreed to spread the profits around.)
was that 9/11 fundamentally changed the way we looked at this question of terror attacks.
(Since this is one of the lynch-pins of our over-arching rationalization of the horrific and unlawful things we’ve done, let me recite it chapter and verse. Ahem…)
Prior out-of-date 9/11,
(Say what?)
we looked upon terrorist incidents as a law enforcement problem.
(Got that?: international terrorists; Black September, Bader-Meinhoft, Hamas, the PLO, Hezbollah, the IRA, al Qaeda, etc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_organization ; the Cole, the embassy bombings, the first WTC, the whole violent enchilada was left to the cops – not the Marines, or the Army or the Air Force, the Navy or the CIA . Can you swallow that?)
You go out and find the bad guy, try him and put him in jail.
(Simple as a Tom Mix movie.)
That's the way we dealt with the World Trade Center bombing in '93.
(Never mind all of the other governmental organizations (State Department, CIA, etc) that went into the tracking, arming and infiltration that went before and after the act and the apprehension of the perpetrators. This was strictly ‘Barney Miller/Joe Friday stuff. Try to keep in mind these two gross distortions of facts that we’ll distill into this little catch phrase, ‘cops & robbers’. Otherwise the next set of bull-shit will leave you in the dust and I hate to repeat myself. )
After 9/11, we made a decision, and I think it was exactly the right decision,
(Of course it was exactly the right decision because I made it. Ergo: it was the Right one.)
and that when you -- when these actions result in the deaths of 3,000 people here on the homeland,
(Again, who’s counting ? The real emotional hook is that it happened on our homeland! The one we stole from the red savages and the Mexicans.)
more than we'd ever before lost in this kind of incident, more than Pearl Harbor,
(Actually, 2,402 were killed and 1,282 were wounded in that ‘Day of Infamy’. So, the 9/11 attacks yielded a roughly similar level of death and mayhem. No need to quibble, though. Both were disastrous. We just don’t want to cloudy the murk with verifiable information when falsely aligning two completely dissimilar events.
The apples-to-oranges elephant that you’ll have to ignore in the room, is the fact that Japan, a sovereign, imperialistic nation, attacked colonial military installations and targets with its own imperial military forces under its national battle flag whereas, al Qaeda, which is not a sovereign country or governmental or diplomatic entity, hijacked 4 commercial airliners with a force of 19 civilians armed with box-cutters.
Are you keeping the ‘cops & robbers’ concept in mind? Now, we’ve juxtaposed the Pearl Harbor ‘meme’ with all its strong emotive qualities with the false comparison of that event to attacks on 9/11 to shut down logical thought completely. A skillful blend of ‘Does not compute’ and cynically manipulated cinematic patriotism. Here comes the kicker - )
then this was a strategic threat to the United States.
(There’s no need to justify, quantify or in any way substantiate or support this preposterous statement with fact or argument. If I say, it was a strategic threat, that’s just what it was. Even though, tragic as the loss of 3,000 people is, their loss and the destruction of property did not cripple the functioning of state, local or federal government, the economy, nor the preparedness of the national armed services. Americans were stunned – the whole world was shocked – but the loss of less than 3,000 people from a population of over 200,000,000 does not constitute a strategic threat. )
And when you view it in those terms,
(Which are in near total disregard to the facts...)
then we believed we were fully justified, and indeed obligated, to use all the resources at our command
(And many that were legally outside of our command…)
to defeat that enemy so that they couldn't do it again.
(Which on the face of it – apart from the byzantine illogical blend of sophistry, non sequitur and red herring - would seem a reasonable aim.)
And that means you're prepared to use military force,
(No need to justify this statement for the reasons cited above. But if you idiots had brain ‘One’ between you, you’d have asked yourselves: ‘Why would the 9/11 attacks mean we’d prepare to use military force to forestall subsequent attacks by an undetermined group or groups of expatriated, stateless militant radicals who have no central command, air or naval forces when obviously the attacks of 9/11 were not deterred by the mightiest, best equipped military juggernaut in human history.)
use your intelligence asset
(Military intelligence; the original oxymoron.)
to go after those who support terrorism financially,
(Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, for example but never mind that or why two ill-advised and illegal invasions and two violent coup d’états were necessary to ‘go after those who support terrorism financially’.)
to go after those states that sponsor terror and provide sanctuary or safe harbor to terror. And that's what we did.
(Even though proof for such sponsorship by either Iraq or Afghanistan was tenuous at best at the times of the respective invasions.)
I think some of our friends overseas didn't agree with those policies.
(Most of the member countries of the United Nations, as a matter of fact.)
I think over time that has -- the situation has improved.
(But don’t quote me on that. I give two shits either way.)
And after people saw what happened here, but then saw what happened in London when the -- I guess the subways were bombed and buses and so forth,
(I wasn’t paying much attention to the internal security matters of our closest lap-dog... uh… ally. Of course, the bombings in July, 2005 were a direct response to Britain choice to go to war in Iraq.)
or what happened in Madrid, the train bombings,
(In 2004, also as a direct result of the Spanish joining the ‘Coalition of the willing’. After massive demonstrations against the ruling party, Spain withdrew from the coalition, so I’m really stretching the argument by referencing this.)
or more recently, what's happened in Mumbai,
(Though not on the same scale of any of the aforementioned attacks .)
that this kind of international terrorism is indeed a threat to those of us who lived in the developed world.
(Lived? Did I just let that slip? Lived?)
And tough, aggressive policy is what's required to succeed against it, and that's what we put in place.
(And if we get tough enough and aggressive enough with a large enough military force we could lock down the world and dare anybody to raise their head to protest. The fact that it hasn‘t worked so far should be proof that we aren’t tough or aggressive enough yet. Global gulags – that’s the answer; built by Halliburton.)
As I say, some of our friends weren't all that happy with it, but a lot of them were, in fact, and supported it.
(Our noble ‘Coalition of Patsies’)
And even as we went into Iraq, while some of our historic friends and allies criticized that, an awful lot –
(The pussies with their goofy ‘international law’ and stupid ‘multi-lateralism. Diplomacy is for the weak.)
for example, the NATO states, especially the new member states,
(The ones feeding at the trough of US ‘aid’ that we bought memberships for.)
sent troops to serve alongside our guys.
(Our guys. Oh, yeah, I guess there are girls there, too. Probably dykes, But that’s better than faggots, so far as I’m concerned.)
So I think it's evolved over time.
(From being a disaster in the making to a grade ‘A’ double-prime generational cluster-fuck.)
I think that it's less controversial now than it was,
(When we were still able to keep a tight lid on the whole mess.)
although there's still, obviously, controversy about things like Guantanamo and so forth.
(Silly, foreigners and their antiquated sense of morality and due process.)

End of part 6