B4 The Bell Frieday May 28

[Guest]

Stained,

 

I c you. Give us a post..comon..even 1

 

 

 

Crossposted

 

Well I guess we will c but I'm almost sure I'll leveraged long after 6/10-12

[phatbubble]

"Uranus-Pluto squares and Neptune in Pisces have coincided with monkey traps for emperors, kings, premiers and presidents for hundreds of years...."

 

The Monkey Trap

[Guest]

Remember the Top Secret Meeting of the Energy Task Force? Remember how Cheney fought to keep the details of that meeting (and even the names of those in attendance) secret? Think this might be related? A multibillion dollar no-bid contract? Are we simply to take leave of all our senses and accept the completely illogical explanation that Cheney's prior role as CEO of Haliburton in no way affected the awarding of this contract? Are we to assume that Cheney has no loyalty to his prior employer, and has no interest in seeing them do well?

 

Beyond tone-deaf, beyond arrogant, beyond ridiculously stupid...this is starting to make the Enron fiasco pale by comparison:

 

 

The Paper Trail

??By Timothy J. Burger and Adam Zagorin

??Time

 

??Sunday 30 May 2004

 

 

Did Cheney Okay a Deal?

 

 

TIME has obtained an internal Pentagon e-mail sent by an Army Corps of Engineers official-whose name was blacked out by the Pentagon-that raises questions about Cheney's arm's-length policy toward his old employer.

 

The e-mail says Douglas Feith, a high-ranking Pentagon hawk, got the "authority to execute RIO," or Restore Iraqi Oil, from his boss, who is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. RIO is one of several large contracts the U.S. awarded to Halliburton last year.

 

The e-mail says Feith approved arrangements for the contract "contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP's [Vice President's] office.

 

Halliburton last year invoked an insurance policy to indemnify Cheney for what could be steep legal bills "arising from his service" at the company. Past and present Halliburton execs face an array of potentially costly litigation, including multibillion-dollar asbestos claims.

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/053104E.shtml

[Guest]

Here comes the focus where in rightly belongs...Cheney is toast:

 

 

The Price Of Giving Bad Advice

??By William A. Whitlow

??The Washington Post

 

??Sunday 30 May 2004

 

??As the war in Iraq drags on, conservative citizens, mostly Republican, face a growing dilemma in the November election.

 

??In the face of growing evidence that the president was deceived and misguided about the cause and urgency for waging war on Saddam Hussein, it is time for those responsible to stand forth and accept accountability. True, the president is ultimately responsible for the actions of his vice president, his Cabinet and the executive departments. But it has become clear that the counsel the president received from the vice president, secretary of defense, deputy secretary of defense and senior uniformed leadership was severely flawed and uncorroborated. Whether the president was intentionally misled by neoconservatives or whether their advice was a result of pure incompetence remains to be seen. The fact is that he was misled sufficiently to require him to take bold action to restore his diminished credibility.

 

??The supposedly urgent need to attack Iraq was based partly on inflated, creative intelligence information, some of which originated with Ahmed Chalabi, an associate of the vice president and deputy secretary of defense. The information from Chalabi led the vice president and defense secretary to believe that war with Iraq would be a "cakewalk" and U.S. forces would be received with open arms.

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/053104B.shtml

[Guest]

CHENEY'S WAR BY FRAUD NOW STANDS EXPOSED!

 

Posted By: Rosalinda

Date: Monday, 23 February 2004, 1:53 p.m.

 

In a discussion with EIR last week, retired Air Force Lt.

Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who served for ten months in the Near

East South Asia (NESA) policy shop at the Pentagon, which housed

the Office of Special Plans, described how OSP personnel,

including Col. William Brunner--a former military aide to

then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich--had regularly arranged

debriefings of Iraqi defectors--set up through Chalabi and the INC.

 

While CIA and DIA personnel participated in the debriefings,

and sent the information to anal cysts, for cross-checking and

evaluation, the OSP unit, led by former Cheney Vice Presidential

staffer William Luti, funneled the undigested and unverified

information right to Cheney's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby--as

if it were fully vetted intelligence.

 

Cheney's office was tasking Luti and OSP to go out and

dig up whatever disinformation could be found, to sell the

war--to the President, the Congress and a duped American public.

 

Further tightening the noose around Cheney, in June 2002, a

Washington representative of the INC sent a letter to the staff

of the Senate Appropriations Committee, identifying Luti and

Cheney's deputy chief of staff John Hannah, as two people who

directly received the intelligence generated by the INC, under

the Information Collection Program.

 

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=44890

[Guest]

Friday, July 18, 2003

 

Cheney's war. Within two months of assuming the vice presidency, Dick Cheney embarked on a series of secret meetings among the members of the Cheney Energy Task Force. He has battled ever since to keep the content of those meetings secret.

But Judicial Watch has fought for and won access to some of the task force's documents, including this smoking gun ? a map of Iraq oil fields.

 

http://skimble.blogspot.com/2003_07_13_skimble_archive.html

[Guest]

Looking back to the time before Cheney's War:

 

 

Cheney's War

 

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

 

 

"If you don't want war with Iraq, says the vice president, you are engaging in "wishful thinking or willful blindness."

 

Actually, there is a third option: some people don't like unrelenting war mongering that seeks the wholesale demolition of Iraq, a once-liberal, once-wealthy country that has been painfully impoverished in eleven years of US bombings and sanctions, a war which will only incite more anger in the Moslem world, inspire more terror attacks.

 

The Bush administration is capable of making false claims about anything, and no one doubts it. In fact, should it become public that the US has made up this nuclear weapons thing out of whole cloth, it can count on the neoconservative pundits to defend the right of the government to lie.

 

Cheney, Bush, and Baker are nursing a serious grudge against Saddam that dates to the term of Bush's father as president. There are oil interests at work too, of course.

 

Second, the Bush administration believes that it has found its groove in the war-making mode. Bush's own popularity ratings were their highest when he bombed Afghanistan, while at home the people were compliant and deferential.

 

A president with a grudge in love with his war-making persona, and a population largely convinced that the only path to security is amassing and using ever-more weapons of mass destruction: this is the dangerous situation in which we find ourselves. Never has it been more important for the friends of freedom to reassert the moral urgency of peace.

[DrStool]

I think we will know its over for them when these articles hit the mainstream media en masse. Time Magazine is a good starting point.

[Guest]

Hard to trust Cheney's war biz

 

Who else got to bid for this plum?

 

No one. That's right. It was all done in secret. It was even signed in secret - the deal was made final March 8 and not announced until two weeks later.

 

"We couldn't find out who to talk to," said Bob Grace, head of GSM, an Amarillo, Tex.-based company that helped douse Kuwait's oil fires the last time around.

 

Despite this expertise, when he wanted to bid on this war's cleanup, he couldn't. "We tried calling everybody we could think of - the Department of Defense, the Corps of Engineers, and they just didn't know anything about it. It was weird."

 

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/story/72038p-66718c.html

[Guest]

CHENEY'S WAR FOR OIL: IT'S EVEN WORSE THAN YOU THOUGHT

 

* Cheney's 'official' White House biography gives details from his entire

sixty-three years on Earth, except for one very important chunk of missing

information: five years as CEO of Halliburton is not even mentioned; that

part of his career is summed up by describing him simply as a "businessman."

 

* Cheney earned $44 MILLION while at Halliburton.

 

* Cheney continues to collect deferred compensation from Halliburton worth

some $150,000 a year; he has stock options worth over $18 MILLION, but he

has announced that he will donate proceeds from the stock options to

'charity'. Nice of him to promise chump change to a non-profit. Wonder who

will get it? Probably some Right-Wing Think Tank he'll go to work for when

he get's booted out of office. ie his own pockets via the normal Washington

'laundry' service.

 

http://homepage.mac.com/museumofstupidity/...4783/E52693892/

[Guest]

I think we will know its over for them when these articles hit the mainstream media en masse. Time Magazine is a good starting point.

A Google search of "Cheney's War" returns some amazing results.

 

I think those two words sum it up nicely.

 

Imagine how powerful you have to be to have what could escalate into World War III named after you!

[Guest]

Cheney's war plan to put Iraq's oil in the hands of American companies was counterproductive - the mind bogglingly incompetent Anglo imperial war now threatens to drive US business out of the Middle East altogether.

 

At a conference on oil depletion in Berlin this year, Colin Campbell, a world-renowned geologist and founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, said: "There are vested interests on all sides hoping somehow to evade the grip of oil depletion, or at least to put it off until after the next election or until they can develop some strategy for their personal or corporate survival. As the moment of truth approaches, so does the heat, the deceptions, the half truth and the flat lies."

 

The Los Angeles Times revealed last week that the US oil industry employed influential former government officials to help mount a successful campaign after 1998 in partnership with the president of Kazakhstan to "convince the world that his oil-rich, authoritarian regime was actually a budding democracy".

 

The campaign "seized on America's need for oil to win US support for a government with a penchant for shuttering newspapers and manipulating elections", and included commissioning positive stories by corrupted journalists in the mainstream media.

 

 

http://www.warmwell.com/04may16oil.html

[beardrech]

Canadian banks have been releasing earnings this week..Four of the big five netting 2.3 billion with BNS to go.

 

My battle getting CASH out of my bank account continued a few days ago. When trying to withdraw 9000 dollars cash I was informed, after much screaming on my part, that 2000 dollars CASH is now the maximum amount a client can withdraw without 2 BUSINESS DAYS PRIOR NOTICE! UFB

 

Fractional Reserve Banking at its best. The Jekyll lives.

Lock L D

I've been trying to get my friend to test market this thesis for months--just simply go into his bank and ask for a nice sum of cash --in 5's and 10's and then see the response--he refuses;its as if hes afraid he'll discover the skelton behind the door--

or maybe sheer ---------????

beardrech Bd why ddo you go yo that stupid little bank on the corner?--you know its NOT fdic INSURED and it looks trashy

 

beardrech--I patronise the place for my kids--its so much fun climbing up the ladder and making my deposits through the slot in the roof---

[wonmug]

Something in Doc?s comments yesterday has been creeping thru the frayed wiring in my brain?.

 

Posted: May 30 2004, 03:46 PM Quote:

?Pulishers have always influenced the slant of the news. Nothing new there. But if they want to keep their audiences, they need at least a modicum of credibility. Every news organization has a constituency, a market. Competition among those constituencies eventually results in the truth coming out. Very rarely does it come out soon enough, but it does come out in the end.?

(my bolding)

 

So- we now may be seeing some media organizations stirring in search of that modicum, to retain their constituencies or perhaps scrambling not to become historical laughing-stocks- the result may be the same?

 

Except with regard to that rare timliness- in Colonial times it used to take 6 weeks for dispaches to cross the Atlantic- anyone care to bet on how long it will take for the widely read/ believed establishment organs to disclose what really has been happening in the current regime for the past 3 years? I?m not saying there isn?t a battle going on to pry loose information from said regime; but hey, if I can sit here with my laptop on a dialup & manage to piece together a semi-coherent picture of how we?ve managed to trash a couple centuries worth of goodwill, respect, and security (not all in 3 years, to be sure)- if this lamebrain (me) can do that -largely by studiously ignoring media ?of record?-, I find it hard to believe that the revealing stories & evidence isn?t sitting in files & on desks at the NYT, CBS, the WaPo? & will be parcelled out as is convenient & profitable to us peons.

 

Well, fine. That?s?. the system. As long as the internet plus a few magazines isn?t restricted, I can attempt to be an informed citizen. But I wonder how much time we have:

 

The Smart Money and al-Q'aeda Ian Welsh

?So, let's say that who won wasn't something you had a stake in, but you could place a bet. What odds would you put on al-Q'aeda and what odds would you put on the US?

[?]

And when you add in the fact that a huge new recession is coming down the pike even without such problems... Well let's just say that things look a little dicey for the US on this front.

 

Al-Q'aeda's has a specific goal. To create a Muslim caliphate from Morocco to Pakistan. Let's say they manage to turn two key stones - Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. At that point they have two things - nuclear deterrent and economic deterrent (turning off the Saudi oil taps.) If the US tries to invade Saudi Arabia - say goodbye to that oil. It's not a solution. Now, as Muslim revolutionaries spread throughout the rest of the Muslim world, fifth columns trying to destabilize repressive and hated governments like Egypt and Syria and Algeria - what's the US going to do? Do you really want to play nuclear chicken with someone like bin Laden? This isn't some Saddam Hussein - a bully who was chickenshit at heart. This is a man who led troops from the front, a man not just willing but happy to die for his faith.

 

So - what do you have? ??

 

 

Some takes on editorial process at the NYT:

 

Rummy's Rules for the NYT Reading A1 The NY Times Front Page Project

 

The word from Pastor Dan. http://blogs.salon.com/0003364/2004/05/30.html#a230

Daniel Okrent's rhetorical stance is always, "We journalists." His job, as he seems to take it, is to offer the (perversely uncomprehending) masses a glimpse into the mysteries of the trade. Okrent writes as if the "public" part of public editor were a suggestion of taint: as if his chief concern was to make sure that nobody in the fraternity could mistake him for one of those hairy, gap-toothed outsiders. [?]

 

Orcinus (David Neiwert) has proposed:

 

As the conglomeration and consolidation of the mass media has proceeded apace through the past two decades unchecked, that independence has largely vanished or become effectively strangled, and with it a responsible treatment of the public interest by the nation's press. The traditional media filters have instead become bottlenecks, preventing information that is in fact vital for the public well-being from ever reaching them ?

[?]

It seems to me that a manifesto -- a definitive statement of revolt against the media status quo and an outline of the purposes and strategies of that revolt -- is what's needed.

 

So I've written one. I wouldn't want to presume to speak on behalf of the entire blogosphere, nor for those who perceive the need for media reform and are working to enact it. But it's clear to me that we need a manifesto of some kind -- which means we need a starting point. Here is mine.

The Media Revolt Manifesto

[Guest]

http://www.troho.com/issues/2004-02-17/lunatic.html

 

A January New York Times poll found Cheney's favorable ratings slid from 39 percent to 20 percent. Yet despite his declining popularity, Cheney shows no signs of backing down from his arguments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or alleged links to al Qaeda. If anything, Cheney is beating the war drum louder than ever before. He appeared on National Public Radio for an interview last month in which he claimed, ?There's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government...I am very confident that there was an established relationship there.?

 

All evidence points to the contrary. The New York Times reported that top al Qaeda officials in U.S. custody testified that Osama Bin Laden ?rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Saddam.? According to the National Journal , ?Three former Bush administration officials who worked on intelligence and national security issues said the prewar evidence tying al Qaeda [to Saddam] was tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies.? Even Bush himself has conceded that there was no link between Hussein and Sept. 11.

 

David Kay, former head of the WMD search in Iraq, recently disputed the Bush administration's WMD allegations, particularly Cheney's mobile WMD labs, which were most likely ?intended to produce hydrogen or perhaps rocket fuel, not biological weapons,? Kay told the New York Times . He added that Cheney's assertions were an ?embarrassing fiasco.?

 

Dick Cheney, who once lent the Bush administration an air of gravitas, has grown so ridiculous that even fellow Republicans see him as an obstacle to Bush's reelection.