AN Algerian-born man who has just been freed from Guantanamo Bay has described the US "war on terror" camp as the worst place on Earth, in an interview published in a Bosnian newspaper.
"For almost seven years, I was at the end of the world, at the worst place in the world,'' Mustafa Ait Idir told the Dnevni Avaz a day after arriving back in his adopted homeland of Bosnia.
former Iraqi officials revealed that more than $18 billion intended to rebuild Iraq may have been lost to local fraud and that millions have been funneled to al-Qaeda by corrupt IraqisMore from Think Progress:
Throughout the U.S. occupation of Iraq, billions in tax dollars have been lost due to corruption and incompetence. Some of the most egregious losses have been via “American programs”:
– The Coalition Provisional Authority delivered 363 tons of cash on an airplane, totaling $12 billion, to Iraq “without assurance the monies were properly used or accounted for.”
– The State Dept spent $36.4 million dollars on weapons and equipment that could not be accounted for because “invoices were vague and there was no backup documentation“.
– Top contractor KBR came under fire last year from government investigators for overpricing its contract by $2 billion, which, for example, included overstating labor costs by 51 percent.
– State Dept. employees testified in May 2008 that the U.S. “allowed corruption to fester at the highest levels of the Iraqi government,” resulting in the loss of billions in U.S. tax dollars.
The use of private contractors, a major source of the corruption, has skyrocketed under Bush. The government has spent $85 billion on contracts in Iraq and other countries in the first four years of the war. “Taxpayers have been bled dry with massive misuse of public dollars,” observed Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), who has spearheaded investigations into waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq.
Thus far, some $50 billion in taxpayer dollars have been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, which anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International listed as the third-most corrupt nation in the world.
One Israeli defense official expressed doubt that a unilateral Israeli strike could destroy all of Iran's nuclear facilities, which are geographically dispersed and some of which are underground.
“We could not risk an operation which would only partially succeed," the official said. "That would leave us open to a nuclear attack from Iran’s remaining weapons stock. Israel would likely need the support, the backing, of forces from a Western ally to successfully carry out the operation.”
Experience alone cannot be the grounds for entrusting someone with the Presidency. Not in his military service, but in his years as a Senator, McCain has plenty of relevant experience dealing with national and international affairs. However, his early enthusiasm for the Iraq war, and his instantaneous bluster about retaliating against Russian action in Georgia, show that his experience does not keep him from taking very controversial positions. The French generals in command in northern France when the Blitzkrieg struck in 1940 all had plenty of relevant experience, including practice in strategic judgments, expert knowledge, and (no doubt) impressive personal histories of passing one test after another for promotion. When it came to battle with the German army, they failed badly, among other ways, in not making full use of their resources, for example, more tanks than the Germans had, but not concentrated in panzer divisions, as the young DeGaulle had recommended. There is a big problem about experience and knowledge being out of date. The generals’ knowledge was out of date; DeGaulle’s was not. Judgment, backed if possible by a variety of experience. and cumulative up-to-date knowledge is what we want, but we cannot know whether we have someone with the judgment combining experience and knowledge in the right way until after the event. The best we can do meanwhile is ask for the variety of experience and the up-to-date knowledge, in candidates or if not in candidates, in their circles of advisers. Are we getting this information during the campaign? We do not seem to be getting it from either side.
Classified or “black” programs comprise some $14 billion or 17 percent of the administration’s fiscal year (FY) 1999 request for $84.8 billion in Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition funding. The classified amount consists of $7.1 billion in procurement and $7.1 billion in research and development (R&D) funding. During the Reagan buildup of the 1980s, DoD’s classified acquisition funding grew significantly, reaching some $21 billion in FY 1987. But compared to the FY 1999 requested level, it will have fallen nearly 50 percent in real (inflation-adjusted) terms since then, roughly paralleling the rate at which total DoD acquisition funding has decreased.
Because access to information on black programs is restricted, DoD and Congress generally provide less oversight for these programs than for unclassified ones. In the past, this reduced level of scrutiny, on top of the compartmentalization of information that normally accompanies classified programs, has contributed to performance problems and cost growth in a number of programs, leading some members of Congress and others to argue that the Pengaton’s classification policies should be reformed and funding further reduced for classified programs.1
The Bush Administration has requested $611 billion for national defense in fiscal year 2009. This includes $541 billion for the “base” defense budget — $518 billion for the Department of Defense, and $23 billion for Department of Energy and other defenserelated activities. The base defense budget is intended to cover the military’s longterm— essentially peace-time — force structure, readiness and modernization costs.
If approved, the 2009 request would bring the base defense budget to its highest level ever, in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. In addition, the 2009 request includes $66 billion in emergency supplemental appropriations for defense, as a partial down-payment on 2009 war-related costs. Eventually, additional 2009 funding — of at least tens of billions of dollars — will have to be provided to cover war-related costs for the full year.
The 2008 defense budget is the highest defense budget, in real terms, since the end
of World War II. Depending on how much funding is ultimately provided for military
operations, it is possible that the defense budget for 2009 (i.e., including the base
budget plus war-related funding) will end up being even higher.
Notwithstanding the recent buildup in defense spending, and the fact that, by historical standards, defense spending now accounts for a relatively small share of the economy, there is good reason to question whether spending for defense will continue to grow over the next two decades. There is also good reason to question the
affordability of the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) current long-term defense plan.
If it is not affordable, DoD will have to consider, as it has in the past, a range of options for eliminating this mismatch between likely future budget levels and the cost of implementing its existing long-term plans.
The Reagan defense buildup was a hallmark of his presidency, a free-spending crusade that lifted the nation's military industry out of the doldrums after the Vietnam War. He created a war-machine economy in a time of uneasy peace, with defense spending in amounts not seen since the heights of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts and sustained for longer than either of those wars.
