B4 the Bell Weak End Tread

[Guest]

The template for the Iraqi bases (notice Cheney's role):

 

When US troops arrive at Camp Bondsteel, they are more likely to be met by a Brown & Root employee directing them to their accommodation and equipment areas. According to G. Cahlink in Government Executive Magazine (February 2002), ?Army peace keepers joke that they?re missing a patch on their camouflage fatigues. ?We need one that says Sponsored by Brown & Root,? says a staff sergeant, who, like more than nearly 10,000 soldiers in the region, has come to rely on Brown and Root Services, a Houston based contractor, for everything from breakfast to spare parts for armoured Humvees.?

 

The contract to service Camp Bondsteel is the latest in a string of military contracts awarded to Brown & Root Services. Its fortunes have grown as US militarism has escalated. The company is part of the Halliburton Corporation, the largest supplier of products and services to the oil industry.

 

In 1992 Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defence in the senior Bush administration, awarded the company a contract providing support for the US army?s global operations. Cheney left politics and joined Halliburton as CEO between 1995 and 2000. He is now US vice president in the junior Bush administration. In 1992 Brown & Root built and maintained US army bases in Somalia earning $62 million. In 1994 Brown & Root built bases and support systems for 18,000 troops in Haiti doubling its earnings to $133 million. The company received a five-year support contract in 1999 worth $180 million per-year to build military facilities in Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia. It was Camp Bondsteel, however, that was dubbed ?the mother of all contracts? by the Washington based Contract Services Association of America. There, ?We do everything that does not require us to carry a gun,? said Brown & Roots director David Capouya.

 

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/apr2002/oil-a29.shtml

[Guest]

There's a lot of continuity here, too. What Americans don't realize is how remarkably hard the Clinton administration worked at promoting the Taliban in Afghanistan -- our purpose there to get a stable government in Afghanistan with which we could, then, for the sake of the Union Oil Company of California, build gas and oil pipelines from Tajikistan across Afghanistan, and emptying through Pakistan into the Arabian Sea. Jim Baker, the very distinguished former Secretary of State, his law firm, Baker Botts, has five attorneys in Baku, Azerbaijan. Now, I want to tell you, there's not a lot of legal work going on in Baku these days. This is the military-petroleum complex at work. The involvement of very high-ranking advisors in our government, of the Kissinger-Brzezinski-Scowcroft class, as advisors to these oil companies is ubiquitous.

 

We now know from Former Secretary of Treasury Paul O'Neill, as well as from Condoleezza Rice herself, that on the day the Bush administration was finally sworn in, they had decided to go to war to conquer Iraq in order to steal its resources. It's got the second largest oil reserves on earth, and it was also part of a plan that includes Camp Bondsteel in the Balkans, that includes the bases surrounding the Caspian Sea, the ring of bases along the Persian Gulf, reflecting our increasing anxiety that we were going to lose Saudi Arabia exactly the same way we lost Iran in 1979, as a result of our own bungling interventionist policy.

 

The decision on the part of, certainly, Vice President Cheney, was that we needed the oil. And yet, we know that we have the technology today to completely eliminate our requirements for Persian Gulf oil, if we would simply institute fuel conservation procedures. Instead, the symbol of the United States, after 9/11, became, at least domestically, somebody driving a Chevrolet Suburban down the freeway at high speeds with an American flag attached to their antenna. Sales of this huge SUV have doubled since 9/11. The gas mileage is rotten on the thing.

 

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/C...hnson-con4.html

[Guest]

60 Minutes duped by White House (no doubt in my mind):

 

 

How could that happen? Simple, producer Josh Howard explains. On the morning of the Sept. 8 broadcast ? as 60 Minutes producers and lawyers discussed the memos' authenticity in New York ? CBS correspondent John Roberts interviewed White House spokesman Dan Bartlett in Washington. CBS had given Bartlett the memos.

 

Bartlett didn't question their authenticity but in about six instances used information in them to bolster his argument that Bush served honorably in the Texas Air National Guard. Roberts called Howard after his interview and, Howard says, reported that "Bartlett had no quarrel with the authenticity of the documents; in fact, he read into them stuff that supported the White House position. We took that to mean, 'Well, guess there's no issue here.' "

 

Was 60 Minutes snookered? "If the documents turn out to be either re-creations or whatever, then we were snookered," Howard says. "One thing I know is that 60 Minutes didn't create the documents. This wasn't a fraud we perpetrated. If we were tricked, it would have had to have been a very elaborate hoax. And that's what we're trying to get to the bottom of."

 

http://www.usatoday.com/life/columnist/med...media-mix_x.htm