American Pride

Where to begin? How about with the privatization of basic military functions and corporate muscle firing anyone who stands in their way?

The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block.

This is a version of the "too big to fail" circumstance that "forced" the government to bail out Bear Stearns - we've given so much away to companies like Halliburton that their power is outsized compared to the ability to rein them in. KBR has threatened to stop providing food to the troops in the past if they didn't get their payments promptly. It reminds me of telecoms shutting off wiretaps due to late payments. These are the companies we're supposed to consider "patriotic." And in the case of KBR, they are a middleman performing job functions that the Army has traditionally done and ought to do again, lest we continue getting in situations where soldiers' well-being is essentially held for ransom.

Then we have the creeping official secrecy department.

The White House does not have to make public internal documents examining the potential disappearance of e-mails sent during some of the Bush administration's biggest controversies, a U.S. district judge ruled yesterday.

In a 39-page opinion, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said that the White House's Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), even though its top officials had complied with the public records law for more than two decades.

This is documentation showing the possible commission of a crime, the destruction of evidence in matters like the US Attorneys firing, the CIA Leak case, and the pre-war propaganda. The precedent has been set that future governments can seek to destroy incriminating emails right out in the open and fear no discovery.

And finally, we learned this today.

A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.

The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.

I think this was actually known; Philippe Sands' Torture Team discusses Administration bigwigs like David Addington going down to Gitmo to deliver lists of torture techniques. But the gambit was to always make it look like they bubbled up from underneath, at the staff level, and that the higher-level guys were shocked at the findings. Not true. Your government authorized and directed torture.

Aren't you happy with your country today?