Say Anything Blog

AAARRRGGGHHH!!!
Why can’t Kerry just go away?!?

CIA director George Tenet told President Bush that WMD’s in Iraq were a “slam dunk.”

And that’s why Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom?

Turns out he was wrong. Oh well. That was only part of the reason why we went to Iraq.

The other reason being Saddam’s links to Al Qaeda, right?

You’re batting .000 today, Bub.

Rob said

Parts of these reports are routinely made public.

But the original article said

Portions of NIEs are sometimes declassified and made public.

A subtle difference but a difference nonetheless.

You guys are into denial. Cheney is the biggest crook to come along since Al Capone and he’s in the White House. He got us into the war because of Halliburton look at it if you had any brains you’d know thats all been a lie right there.
As I write a young woman pleads for her life Jill Carroll I hope she gets away but if she doesent I blame Bush and people like you who voted for him.

You guys are into denial. Cheney is the biggest crook to come along since Al Capone and he’s in the White House. He got us into the war because of Halliburton look at it if you had any brains you’d know thats all been a lie right there.

The left is like the little boy who cried “wolf!” one too many times when it comes to these “we went to war for Halliburton” claims.

As I write a young woman pleads for her life Jill Carroll I hope she gets away but if she doesent I blame Bush and people like you who voted for him.

Right Dave.  Don’t blame the people who kidnapped her and are threatening her life or anything crazy like that.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

The left is like the little boy who cried “wolf!” one too many times when it comes to these “we went to war for Halliburton” claims.

Fuck that, watch the video:

Dick Cheney is a liar.

Any questions?

Any questions?

Have you ever agreed with anything done by Bush/Cheney, or is the impression that I get from your comments here (that you’re a knee-jerk partisan) accurate?

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

Oh yeah, I’m a partisan, no doubt about it. I have not pretended to be anything but partisan on this board. Kind of pointless to ask.

But let’s be fair and have you answer the same question, and if you deny you’re a partisan expect many, many quotes from your archives to be reproduced.

Regardless of whether I agree with Bush, Cheney or any of the cabal, I have provided conclusive evidence that the the Vice-President is a liar.

Having watched the video, can you dispute that fact?

Mcair: I could care less about your delusions about Cheney and Haliburton.

As for me being a partisan, I think that if you peruse my archives you will see that I have routinely criticized President Bush, and Republicans in general, over such issues as spending, illegal immigration, corruption and entitlement.

So while I may be a partisan, in that I am a card-carrying Republican, I am hardly as mindless as you are.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

So far what I’v seen as your reponses is you can throw insults "Left is like a little boy," doesent do much for an argument. But to add to what I’ve said before why is it that we invaded a country with no weapons of mass destruction?  That was the premise "Weapons of mass destruction that we were sold to get us to invade. Its not smart thinking to invade a country on false premises and to be sold a bill of goods as a people.

We got into Iraq because of Cheney’s ulterior motives that is Oil and Halliburton and even the troops are saying it. Before you go bellyaching about Saddam Hussein let me remind you we were  after Osama Bin Laden but he got away. Why? you tell me.

Another thing Iraq was not a breeding ground for the Al Queda until we gave the Arab world a reason to send them there i.e an outrageous invasion.

Jill Carroll is somebody and how would you like it if she was related to you? That is if you had a relative that had been captured in a lawless country.

If Bush or Cheney had read the first thing about the world of Iraq and how you cant unite its people. The late Lawrence of Arabia pointed out but no we just had to go in there.

Cheney is a liar and if you support him with a war thats ruining the economy your pretty foolish and thats my insult  in return for the day.

How about this, run over to Daily Kos and start complaining about poor American civilians caught in the wrath of war and talk about what happened to Daniel Pearl or to the contractors in Fallujah.

Better yet, go over to Amnesty International and have a look at what they said about the things Saddam was doing to prisoners in their country before we deposed him.

And check the unemployment rate of 4.7% and GDP growth rate of almost 4%.  Compare them both to France that is not involved in our little immoral war.  Ruining our economy?  Hillarious.  Thanks for the laugh.

Oil and Halliburton?  Then what was President Clinton’s motive when he launched cruise missiles into Iraq over WMDs in 1998?

What exactly is the difference between being a private security contractor in Iraq and being a Journalist in Iraq?  Both go there because it is where the story or the job is.  These are people.  Just normal folks that risk death to do their jobs.

Yet Kos says "Fuck ‘em" to the Security folks killed and beaten in Iraq in Fallujah.  So the left thinks what is happening in Iraq is horrible when reporters get kidnapped and killed.  Well, Saddam and his sons kidnapped, raped and killed over a million people, including doing it with nerve gas.  So if one reporter is so damned important that Bush should be impeached, don’t the deaths of a million under Saddam warrant some kind of action?  Or should we just leave him in charge to kill at will?

So random thugs killing and raping plus blowing up cars to kill civilians is horrible, but a brutal dictator running the place raping and killing and filling mass graves is somehow better?  A murderous dictator who had a history of trying to get WMDs and paying suicide bombers in Isreal?  Whether he had WMDs or not, he DID PAY $25k to the families of Suicide bombers and violated dozens of UN resolutions.  And he filled mass graves with over a million Iraqis.  You think his possession of WMDs that has not been proven is more of a story than the rapes, tortures, mass graves, and payments to suicide bombers that has been proven?

 Don’t you just love them Repubs they have such faith in the things that the President they elected did in the past 6 1/2 years that they have to dig up irrelevant things about Clinton. When do you remember Clinton taking over Iraq and leading our economy into an unprecedented deficit? anyway more food for thought about Halliburton.

Why was Dick Cheney so eager to invade Iraq? Why did he repeatedly link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda after Sept. 11, and why did he maintain that not only did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction but that he, Cheney, knew exactly where they were?

Cheney clearly came into office wanting a war on Iraq, as revealed by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.

Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton in 1995-200. Halliburton is a corporation that does a number of things, including energy, oil and military contracting.

In 2001, Halliburton won a contract from the Department of Defense to provide "emergency services" to the Pentagon. The contract was above-board. Bids were taken from five competitors, and Halliburton won with the low bid. There was nothing illegal or irregular about such a process. But that contract may explain Cheney and his gang on Iraq.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Purloined Letter," the blackmail note that the police are looking for is in plain sight. It isn’t hidden, just crumpled as though it were trash. The police don’t bother to examine it for that reason.

It is the contract itself that is the scam. It is quite simple. A standing contract to provide "emergency services" to the Pentagon is a potential gold mine under exactly one circumstance. If a major war breaks out, the need for "emergency services" will inevitably be enormous. The contract was worth billions. But only if there was a war. If there was peace, the need for "emergency services" would be small. Halliburton was not doing that well. It needed the big bucks.

In 1998, when Cheney was CEO, Halliburton secretly changed its accounting techniques to show a higher level of profit. Without the change, it would have come in below expectations, which would have hurt its price. The change was unorthodox and "aggressive," and should have been communicated to the stockholders, which only happened after a long and quite improper delay. Halliburton finally settled this case with the Securities and Exchange Commission, by paying a paltry $7.5 million fine.

Part two of the scam is also in plain view. It is the very idea that "emergency services" should and could be supplied to the U.S. military by a private company.

The fact is that civilian employees of private firms cannot be ordered into a war zone. Halliburton, and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root, was to supply air-conditioned Quonset huts to the U.S. troops for summer 2003. It did not do so. It could not do so. Once the guerrilla war broke out, it was impossible to get enough civilian workers out to the troop positions to build the Quonset huts and put in air conditioning. As a result, U.S. troops "looked like hobos and lived like pigs" in the words of one, with their shaving cream cans exploding in the 140 degrees heat.

If, on the other hand, U.S. troops had been assigned to build the Quonset huts and put in the air conditioning, that could easily have been accomplished.

So, the "emergency services contract" was a boondoggle only in the case of a war, but in case of a war, many of the services contracted for could not actually be supplied, at least in a timely manner.

Of course, other sorts of work could be done, including in the oil fields. The Iraq war has been worth billions of dollars to Halliburton. Additional Pentagon work was thrown its way once the war began, on the grounds that it was the only corporation with the necessary experience to undertake certain tasks. Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root has been accused of not being able to account for some charges it sent to the Pentagon, and of overcharging for some services it did provide.

And now Halliburton’s $13 billion contract with the Pentagon is being re-bid. There are not, however, very many companies that can do what Halliburton and its subsidiaries do, and which have a long association with the Pentagon and its various bureaucratic techniques, such that they know how to fit in with the Department of Defense bureaucracy.

What was in it for Cheney? I don’t think it was a matter of money. At least I hope it wasn’t. Cheney sold half his Halliburton stock options in 2000 for $5 million, and it is hard to imagine a man taking his country to war to increase the other half in value by a few million.

I suspect it is political. Not all corporations make money on war. Some actually lose money. But Halliburton, Bechtel and a few other components of the military industrial complex do benefit from war. Strengthening that sector of the American economy strengthens the political Right. Turning the republic into a praetorian state would permanently yield profits for the military industrial complex in such a way as to create a permanent Republican dominance of all the branches of the U.S. government.

 Don’t you just love them Repubs they have such faith in the things that the President they elected did in the past 6 1/2 years that they have to dig up irrelevant things about Clinton. When do you remember Clinton taking over Iraq and leading our economy into an unprecedented deficit? anyway more food for thought about Halliburton.

Why was Dick Cheney so eager to invade Iraq? Why did he repeatedly link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda after Sept. 11, and why did he maintain that not only did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction but that he, Cheney, knew exactly where they were?

Cheney clearly came into office wanting a war on Iraq, as revealed by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.

Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton in 1995-200. Halliburton is a corporation that does a number of things, including energy, oil and military contracting.

In 2001, Halliburton won a contract from the Department of Defense to provide "emergency services" to the Pentagon. The contract was above-board. Bids were taken from five competitors, and Halliburton won with the low bid. There was nothing illegal or irregular about such a process. But that contract may explain Cheney and his gang on Iraq.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Purloined Letter," the blackmail note that the police are looking for is in plain sight. It isn’t hidden, just crumpled as though it were trash. The police don’t bother to examine it for that reason.

It is the contract itself that is the scam. It is quite simple. A standing contract to provide "emergency services" to the Pentagon is a potential gold mine under exactly one circumstance. If a major war breaks out, the need for "emergency services" will inevitably be enormous. The contract was worth billions. But only if there was a war. If there was peace, the need for "emergency services" would be small. Halliburton was not doing that well. It needed the big bucks.

In 1998, when Cheney was CEO, Halliburton secretly changed its accounting techniques to show a higher level of profit. Without the change, it would have come in below expectations, which would have hurt its price. The change was unorthodox and "aggressive," and should have been communicated to the stockholders, which only happened after a long and quite improper delay. Halliburton finally settled this case with the Securities and Exchange Commission, by paying a paltry $7.5 million fine.

Part two of the scam is also in plain view. It is the very idea that "emergency services" should and could be supplied to the U.S. military by a private company.

The fact is that civilian employees of private firms cannot be ordered into a war zone. Halliburton, and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root, was to supply air-conditioned Quonset huts to the U.S. troops for summer 2003. It did not do so. It could not do so. Once the guerrilla war broke out, it was impossible to get enough civilian workers out to the troop positions to build the Quonset huts and put in air conditioning. As a result, U.S. troops "looked like hobos and lived like pigs" in the words of one, with their shaving cream cans exploding in the 140 degrees heat.

If, on the other hand, U.S. troops had been assigned to build the Quonset huts and put in the air conditioning, that could easily have been accomplished.

So, the "emergency services contract" was a boondoggle only in the case of a war, but in case of a war, many of the services contracted for could not actually be supplied, at least in a timely manner.

Of course, other sorts of work could be done, including in the oil fields. The Iraq war has been worth billions of dollars to Halliburton. Additional Pentagon work was thrown its way once the war began, on the grounds that it was the only corporation with the necessary experience to undertake certain tasks. Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root has been accused of not being able to account for some charges it sent to the Pentagon, and of overcharging for some services it did provide.

And now Halliburton’s $13 billion contract with the Pentagon is being re-bid. There are not, however, very many companies that can do what Halliburton and its subsidiaries do, and which have a long association with the Pentagon and its various bureaucratic techniques, such that they know how to fit in with the Department of Defense bureaucracy.

What was in it for Cheney? I don’t think it was a matter of money. At least I hope it wasn’t. Cheney sold half his Halliburton stock options in 2000 for $5 million, and it is hard to imagine a man taking his country to war to increase the other half in value by a few million.

I suspect it is political. Not all corporations make money on war. Some actually lose money. But Halliburton, Bechtel and a few other components of the military industrial complex do benefit from war. Strengthening that sector of the American economy strengthens the political Right. Turning the republic into a praetorian state would permanently yield profits for the military industrial complex in such a way as to create a permanent Republican dominance of all the branches of the U.S. government.