Objectively Pro-Rape

Al Franken went out deep on a limb and made his first amendment to face a roll-call vote to stop the practice of defense contractors essentially allowing consequence-free rape on their overseas bases:

On Tuesday night, the Minnesota Democrat got his first piece of legislation passed by the United States Senate via roll call vote. The amendment stopped federal funding for those defense contractors who used mandatory arbitration clauses to deny victims of assault the right to bring their case to court. It passed by a 68-30 margin with nine Republicans joining each voting Democrat. And in the immediate aftermath, Franken was granted the chance to revel, ever so slightly, in his victory.\

"The story came to my attention of Jamie Leigh Jones who, when she was 19, went to Iraq to work for [defense contractor] KBR and she was put in the barracks with 400 men and was sexually harassed," Franken told the Huffington Post in a brief interview shortly after the vote. "She complained. But they didn't do anything about it. She was drugged and gang raped and they locked her up in a shipping container. She tried to sue KBR and they said you have a mandatory arbitration clause in your contract. She tried to fight back and said this is ridiculous. She took it to court and they have been fighting her for three years."

"This bill would make it so that anybody in business with the Department of the Defense can't do this," he concluded emphatically. "They can't have mandatory arbitration on issues like assault and battery."

You'd think this kind of amendment wouldn't only get 100 votes, but somehow former Senators would storm the floor and demand that they too could offer their support for the legislation. Instead, in the culture we now have in Washington, 30 Republicans voted against this. I don't know how you characterize this other than saying that they think it's perfectly reasonable for women to be raped on Defense Department-funded American bases, left in shipping containers, and barred from bringing up charges subsequently. They actually called this a political attack aimed at Halliburton, even though the bill named no contractor specifically.

Um, what would you call the "Defund ACORN Act," exactly? And while I know that was the biggest scandal in the history of scandals, AFAIK ACORN has never protected their employees from raping someone and detaining them in a shipping container. Again, to the best of my knowledge.

These Republicans should be completely ashamed of themselves.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that, while the Franken amendment was nice, the overall defense authorization bill includes lots of spending for the war in Afghanistan, and would ban the transfer of any detainee at Gitmo to the United States. As Franken would say, "Oy."

Military Industrial Complex Raises The Stakes In Iraq

This happened a few days ago, but given that the Bush Administration is frantically renegotiating the status of forces agreement with Iraq, and caving in on every detail just so they can keep a foothold in the country, I thought this framing from the real power-brokers in the military-industrial complex was significant.

An American contractor said Thursday that the U.S. mission in Iraq will be undermined if the Iraqi government succeeds in revoking blanket legal immunity for American security contractors.

Carter Andress reacted to a Wednesday government report that said the removal of legal immunity for American private security contractors could set off an "exodus" from war-ravaged Iraq and "impose significant limitations" on American reconstruction efforts.

The scenario is outlined in the quarterly report issued to Congress by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

Andress, whose firm builds bases for the Iraqi army and police and supplies those places with water, food, fuel and maintenance services, said that about 40 percent of his staff is involved in security.

"We would undermine the U.S. mission here because they are so reliant on contractors," said Andress, co-founder of the American-Iraqi Solutions Group. "For better or for worse, that's reality."

Even though 90 percent of his employees are Iraqis, he fears that new laws could force him to shut down.

You can see here the blackmail that has come out of this over-reliance on private military contractors. Decisions that should only take into account the goals of the mission and national security interests now must involve pleasing the likes of Halliburton and Blackwater. There literally is no Iraq war without these contractors, in a very real sense. And that's why the government allows for their protection and their invulnerability, and carries this to ludicrous heights:

Defense contractor KBR Inc. said it has banned the use of personal cell phones by its employees in Iraq for security reasons.

(KBR spokeswoman Heather L. Browne) said the decision was because of "a safety and security concern." She declined to elaborate, but did say KBR officials are reviewing the matter that led to the directive.

What the spokeswoman did not say is that "the matter" leading to the directive was the rape and forcible detention of a KBR employee, Jamie Leigh Jones, who used a colleague's cell phone to notify her father in Texas of the attack. There may be dozens of other victims who have yet to come forward, and KBR's move to tighten down communication is yet another effort to prevent any accountability for the actions of the company or its employees.

We have built this parallel mercenary structure supporting the US military, which is so large and so powerful that it's hard to figure which entity is calling the shots on the relative presence or withdrawal of occupying forces. The contractors in the report is literally trying to dictate a governmental decision about an international treaty - and there's no reason to believe he won't get away with it. Note too how they are really suggesting that if his people aren't allowed to shoot at random without fear of reprisal, your kids will be killed and good Americans will be strung up:

Andress said the removal of immunity would have a big impact on his business.

"You've still got remnants of the insurgents out there. You've still got ... the thieves. So, you've still got to have convoy security," said Andress, whose firm has won a quarter of a billion dollars in Defense contracts.

A security contractor, who asked not to be named because he could lose his job for talking to reporters, said he believes a removal of immunity would have a chilling effect for contractors. He said Iraqi contractors taking over security duties have improved but haven't reached the level of proficiency that Americans have.

The contractor, who said he has worked in Iraq and other countries, believes that non-Iraqi contractors could be be treated brutally and unfairly.

"It's like putting a police officer in the middle of Folsom Prison, on murderers row with five guys he put away," the contractor said. "They're not going to get a fair trial."

One of the most persistent problems we face with respect to foreign policy is that these powerful interests, which extend to practically every state and even every Congressional district, creating incredible amounts of inertia to dismantle them, have become a de facto driver of US foreign policy, and until they are put on ice, questionable interventions and occupations will continue.

A New Strategy To End The War?

Perhaps the better way to go about ending this war is to make it less profitable. Of course the military contractors are always one step ahead on that front. On the one hand the President actually signed a bill closing a tax loophole that allowed contractors to avoid payroll taxes for their employees (this is from the AP so as per my practice - read the rules, AP! - I will quote without linking):

Bush signed into law the Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act, which provides tax relief for military families. Included in the legislation is a provision that would treat foreign subsidiaries of U.S. government contractors as American employers. That means they now have to pay the taxes that finance Social Security and Medicare programs.

This may end entitlement reform as we know it, and at the same time may get the contractors to think about pulling the plug on this military adventurism if it hurts their bottom line. Maybe there's more money to be made overcharging for services during domestic natural disasters than in foreign wars (they're such selfless patriots, stealing money from the Treasury during Katrina and all...). In addition, if they were made to be culpable for the crimes they commit, maybe they'd pull up and leave too.

The US has accepted that foreign contractors in Iraq will no longer have immunity from Iraqi law under a new security agreement now under negotiation, says the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari.

Mr Zebari, speaking to The Independent in Washington, said that if there was a further incident like the one in which 17 Iraqis were killed by workers from the Blackwater security company in Baghdad last September, the Iraqis would arrest and punish the contractors held responsible.

The American concession would have a serious effect in Iraq, where there are an estimated 160,000 foreign contractors, many of them heavily armed security personnel. The contractors, who outnumber the 145,000-strong US Army in the country, have become a vital if much-resented part of the military machine in Iraq.

At the same time, the shrewder contractors like Blackwater can always find a way to wriggle off the hook.

RALEIGH - To defend itself against a lawsuit by the widows of three American soldiers who died on one of its planes in Afghanistan, a sister company of the private military firm Blackwater has asked a federal court to decide the case using the Islamic law known as Shari’a.

The lawsuit “is governed by the law of Afghanistan,” Presidential Airways argued in a Florida federal court. “Afghan law is largely religion-based and evidences a strong concern for ensuring moral responsibility, and deterring violations of obligations within its borders.”

If the judge agrees, it would essentially end the lawsuit over a botched flight supporting the U.S. military. Shari’a law does not hold a company responsible for the actions of employees performed within the course of their work.

I expect all military contractors to now put "al-" in front of their names and festoon their corporate logos with beards.

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?

War Made Easy

In the least patriotic move of all time, private military contractors who get rich off of war and occupation set up offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. They get their entire windfall of an income from the government and refuse to give their fair share back.

Congress is finally moving to shut one of the more egregious forms of Iraq war profiteering: defense contractors using offshore shell companies to avoid paying their fair share of payroll taxes. The practice is widespread and Congressional investigators have been dispatched to one of the prime tax refuges, the Cayman Islands, to seek a firsthand estimate of how much the Treasury is being shorted.

No one will be surprised to hear that one of the suspected prime offenders is KBR, the Texas-based defense contractor, formerly a part of the Halliburton conglomerate allied with Vice President Dick Cheney. According to a report in The Boston Globe, KBR, which has landed billions in Iraq contracts, has used two Cayman shell companies to avoid paying hundreds of millions in payroll, Medicare and unemployment taxes.

Right now it's a loophole, but Senators Kerry and Obama have legislation to plug it, and as long as Max Baucus can be kept far away from the bill, they ought to be able to do it. But there's more. The House voted recently to deny government contracts to companies that don't pay their corporate taxes. This is a COMMON occurrence which over 25,000 defense contractors have taken advantage of.

And some people will go on about "runaway spending" and "earmark reform." Please. The budget could be balanced, and public health programs not raided as the President wants to do, simply by no longer funding tax evaders and thieves until they pay their fair share and stop wasting taxpayer money on useless weapons programs and endless overruns. This is one of those situations where practically everyone looks the other way and pretends the problem right in front of us doesn't exist. The military budget, and military contractors, are bankrupting the country. Bottom line.

Hopefully it got through that I'm questioning Halliburton's patriotism.

The Sickening Of America

The number of stories I'm seeing about the obstacles you have to traverse in your daily life just to remain relatively healthy are going up and up. Certainly there are occupations that are increasingly dangerous, as multiple tours of duty are making our soldiers go deaf, and our good friends at Halliburton are paying no attention to contaminated drinking water. But you don't have to be serving in Iraq to have your drinking water filled with all kinds of contaminants.

A vast array of pharmaceuticals -- including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones -- have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs -- and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen -- in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

This is actually a function of the society just being completely overmedicated. The drugs get into the bloodstream and eventually into the sewer system and the reservoirs, and not all of them are cleansed. Forget a lot of drugs in the water, there are a lot of drugs in people, to a level that we really don't know the residual effects.

The sickening of America comes in all forms and fashions. Whether it's coming from treatment at clinics that aren't sufficiently sanitary or well-managed, or tainted drugs that we allow into the country, we don't have a handle on what we ingest. Basic health care costs so much money, $225,000 for every retiring couple, money that is so scarce that we're rationing health insurance like it's a lottery, and offering health care like it's charity. This is like a feedback loop. We're more sickened, we're more medicated to cover the sickness, that makes us more sick, it costs more money to medicate, and the system breaks down.

It's easy to get caught up in this primary fight and lose sight of why we need more effective leadership to repair all these systems that are so terribly broken. We need more than a health care system that doesn't rely on charity or the lottery, we need a medical system that doesn't use drugs like a band-aid and doesn't have a Food and Drug Administration that is practically nonexistent. The last thing that anyone wants is a collapsed system; even the health insurers understand that. But a system of care that is so hurried and sloppy and unconcerned with individual treatment that it becomes nothing more than "take two of these and call me in the morning" doesn't work either. A world-class health care system is focused on prevention and promoting proper diet and exercise, not supplements and substitutes and work-arounds. Otherwise, we're all bound to get sickened, and we'll all be paying for it.

The Horror Of It All: Raped And In Legal Limbo

I interrupt the usual campaign gloating and trash talking and pie fighting to bring you a disturbing and important story of the consequences of unrivaled corporate power and the shifting of our armed forces into mercenary operations.

Mary Beth Kineston, an Ohio resident who went to Iraq to drive trucks, thought she had endured the worst when her supply convoy was ambushed in April 2004. After car bombs exploded and insurgents began firing on the road between Baghdad and Balad, she and other military contractors were saved only when Army Black Hawk helicopters arrived.

But not long after the ambush, Ms. Kineston said, she was sexually assaulted by another driver, who remained on the job, at least temporarily, even after she reported the episode to KBR, the military contractor that employed the drivers. Later, she said she was groped by a second KBR worker. After complaining to the company about the threats and harassments endured by female employees in Iraq, she was fired.

For the last several years, we have in Iraq created a lawless society administered by similarly lawless corporate entities, all blessed with their own immunities and legal black holes, so that even abhorrent episodes like rape change nothing and get nobody fired except the accuser.

“I felt safer on the convoys with the Army than I ever did working for KBR,” said Ms. Kineston, who won a modest arbitration award against KBR. “At least if you got in trouble on a convoy, you could radio the Army and they would come and help you out. But when I complained to KBR, they didn’t do anything. I still have nightmares. They changed my life forever, and they got away with it.”

Mary Beth Kineston is not the only woman. According to former Halliburton employee and gang-rape victim Jennifer Leigh Jones, 38 women have told their stories of rape and assault to her, but none can come forward due to arbitration agreements:

Jamie Leigh Jones is testifying on Capitol Hill this afternoon. She says she and other women are being forced to argue their cases of sexual harassment, assault and rape before secretive arbitration panels rather than in open court before a judge and jury.

Jones returned from Iraq following her rape in 2005. She was the subject of an exclusive ABC News report in December which led to congressional hearings.

After months of waiting for criminal charges to be filed, Jones decided to file suit against Halliburton and KBR.

KBR has moved for Jones' claim to be heard in private arbitration, instead of a public courtroom, as provided under the terms of her original employment contract.

In arbitration, there is no public record or transcript of the proceedings, meaning that Jones' claims would not be heard before a judge and jury. Rather, a private arbitrator hired by the corporation would decide Jones' case.

Corporate power is the thread tying all of this together. We know they can get the government to grant them amnesty for breaking the law. And in this case, they hire their own arbitrator to conduct sham hearings looking into malfeasance by their own employees.

And honestly, the only one saying much of anything about this is a Republican.

Congressman Ted Poe, R-Texas, who has been involved in the Jones case since the beginning, will also appear at today's hearing. He disagrees with the arbitration solution.

"Air things out in a public forum of a courtroom," said Rep. Poe in an earlier interview with ABC News. "That's why we have courts in the United States."

It's his constituent that's come forward, but there are apparently dozens of others. All of them have been subject to humiliating and dehumanizing conditions, had crimes committed against them by their co-workers, and these corporations are claiming that they signed away their Constitutional right to due process of the law with a trial by jury. Not only that, but since the crimes took place in a foreign war zone, the military justice system doesn't apply to them, either.

This breeds lawlessness inside the contractor zones, for obvious reasons. When there's no accountability, why modify behavior?

Paul Brand, a Chicago psychologist who counsels contractors who have served in Iraq, said the harassment of female workers by male colleagues was common. “The extent of the harassment varies greatly from contractor to contractor, depending on how diligently they screen job candidates and management’s willingness to encourage women to report problems,” he said. “In many instances, very little or nothing is done.”

Comprehensive statistics on sexual assaults in Iraq are unavailable because no one in the government or the contracting industry is tracking them. Court documents, interviews with those who were victims, their lawyers and other professionals, along with the limited data made available by the Bush administration, suggest a troubling trend.

The Criminal Investigation Command of the Army has reported that it investigated 124 cases of sexual assault in Iraq over the last three years. Those figures, provided to Senator Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat who has taken the lead in the Senate on the issue, include cases involving both contractors and military personnel, but do not include cases involving contractors or soldiers investigated by other branches of the military.

This is especially abominable because there's no need to have so many contractors doing work previously reserved for the US military and under military control, and because it's a symptom of how corporate power has almost totally overtaken our government.

Take a few minutes out of your election coverage and really take a look at this story. It is the expected consequence of the Bush Republican era of corporate dominance.

Playing Out The String

The bottom line of this article is that there will be 100,000 or more troops in Iraq on Election Day 2008, there will still be a moral tragedy of a prison at Guantanamo, Osama bin Laden will still be at large, Iraq will still be a breeding ground for lawless contractors who allow their employees to rape and imprison, the fundamental problems of Sunni/Shiite distrust and a lack of a political solution will persist, and all of these messes will be dumped on the next President. In that sense, Robert Gates is doing exactly the job he's been asked to do by the President. Mukasey too.

UPDATE: Just let me flesh out this link a little more. Abdulaziz al-Hakim is saying that the neighborhood patrols set up as part of the "Anbar Awakening" must be under federal control. This is the last thing the Sunni former insurgents in those patrols want. The key quote is when Hakim says “Weapons should only be in the hands of the government.” Keep in mind that this is supposed to be the tangible success of the surge. It's actually heading inexorably toward confrontation. Also in the article is a UNICEF report that two million Iraqi children have suffered from "humanitarian ills" in 2007, with 60% unable to access potable water. Also there's an imminent battle for northern Iraq that'll explode at any time, with open pledges of violence by both Kurds and Sunnis. The middle of next year, in the heart of election season, could be a nightmare.

My Moment of Grudging Acknowledgment of the Democratic Majority

We wouldn't see the phasing out of the incandescent light bulb under a Republican Congress.

We wouldn't see a lot of interest in reversing the cruel injustice whereby the Pentagon was asking for bonuses back from wounded soldiers.

We wouldn't see strong oversight of incidents that shock the conscience, like what seems to be a culture of rape in Iraq inside KBR/Halliburton.

And we wouldn't see the overwhelming rejection of state secrecy in a Congressional bill to revamp and reform the Freedom of Information Act.

They've done a tactically poor job, they haven't held the Republicans accountable for their obstructionism, and their continued funding of the disaster in Iraq is a moral crime. But there is at least SOME difference between the parties.

Raped, Threatened, Humiliated

Where the military-industrial conplex intersects with the authoritarian state.

A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

When profit enters the picture, the most savage humiliations can be justified. KBR's bottom line would be hurt by the revelation of this horrible tragedy. Therefore, there's a lot of unspoken pressure to keep things like this under wraps. Add in the usual realities of power relationships and the fog of war and you have a combustible mix.

Turns out that in this case, the Army confirmed that Miss Jones was raped, and KBR forcibly acquired the rape kit and commandeered it. And the Justice Department has done absolutely nothing about it.

"There are several, I think, they're excuses, why the perpetrators haven't been prosecuted," Poe told ABC News. "But I think it is the responsibility of our government, the Justice Department and the State Department, when crimes occur against American citizens overseas in Iraq, contractors that are paid by the American public, that we pursue the criminal cases as best as we possibly can and that people are prosecuted." [...]

In her lawsuit, Jones' lawyer, Todd Kelly, says KBR and Halliburton created a "boys will be boys" atmosphere at the company barracks which put her and other female employees at great risk.

"I think that men who are there believe that they live without laws," said Kelly. "The last thing she should have expected was for her own people to turn on her."

It's hard to find the words to really explain the outrage here.

Treason Has Its Privileges

Look how anodyne this significant bit of information is presented in this AP report on Halliburton's third-quarter profits:

HOUSTON - Halliburton Co. continues to benefit from placing greater emphasis on its operations in the Eastern Hemisphere, where expanding business helped the company post a 19 percent rise in third-quarter earnings.

The Houston-based oilfield services company said Sunday its net income rose to $727 million, or 79 cents a share, in the July-September period from $611 million, or 58 cents a share, in the year-ago period.

The most-recent results included a favorable income tax benefit of $133 million, or 15 cents a share.

"Placing a greater emphasis" on Eastern Hemisphere operations is a bit of code. What they're trying to say is that Halliburton ditched the country that provided the bulk of its fortune over the past six years, instead moving its headquarters to Dubai. The "favorable income tax benefit" is nothing but TAX AVOIDANCE as a result of that offshoring.

If an individual tried to do this, they would be thrown in jail. It occurs to me at points like this just what a bunch of traitors these corporate CEOs are, particularly defense contractors. They make practically their entire living off the largesse of the federal government, and then when it's time for them to give back to a country that has given them so much, they skip town like they're walking out on lunch before the bill.

Let's call this what it is: treason. Real patriots love their country so much they think it's worth paying for. Paper patriots like these "defense" contractors want nothing more than to bleed America dry. Similarly, Blackwater is being questioned for saving tens of millions of tax dollars by classifying its personnel as "independent contractors. Whether or not this is an illegal action is an open question, actually. But there's no question that the purpose of the classification is to push the burden of taxation onto the individuals, and ultimately to save money. These corporations have absolutely no connection to this country anymore, which makes you wonder why they are still chartered to do business here.

Murky In Burma

There's a lot of surmising going on about Burma, and with communication down it's hard to knw what the truth actually is. This blogger claims that there's been a coup attempt and an Army mutiny, paving the way for dissident Aung San Suu Kyi to take over as the new leader. Considering how revered Buddhist monks are in the country, and that the junta leaders demanded that the Army attack religious leaders overnight, it makes sense that there would be defections. But we just don't know.

Meanwhile Gordon Brown says what we're all fearing.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he believes the loss of life in Burma has been "far greater" than that reported by the authorities.

He was speaking after holding talks by phone with US President George W Bush and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

Burmese officials said nine people were killed on Thursday as troops fired tear gas and bullets to disperse crowds of anti-government protesters in Rangoon.

Most internet links have been severed and mobile phone networks disrupted.

''I want to condemn absolutely the appalling level of violence against the people of Burma.

"I am afraid that we believe the loss of life in Burma is far greater than is being reported so far," Mr Brown said.

He said he hoped the combined international pressure from the US, China, the EU and UN would "begin to make the regime see this cannot continue".

From the wayback machine, we find out who was one of Burma's best customers: Fourthbranch.

For example, Halliburton is one of the few US companies that still (as of 2001 - ed.) does business with the thuggish, totalitarian rulers of Burma. Not only did Burma's thugs overthrow democracy there, but they maintain their power through human rights violations so severe that they give brutality a bad name.

Corporations like Halliburton have long done business deals with these thugs, providing the foreign capital for them to buy the weapons they need to keep repressing Burma's people. But in the 1990s, the repression got so repulsive that dozens of corporations pulled out. Not Halliburton, though.

With Cheney at the helm, Halliburton defied human rights advocates and the Burmese democracy movement by continuing to do business there. One of its joint-projects with the thugs was building the Yadana pipeline. To build it, farmers and others were conscripted by the dictators and forced at gunpoint to work on the pipeline. In turn, the thugs will pocket hundreds-of-millions of dollars from Halliburton and other foreign partners. Asked about this, Cheney said dismissively, "you have to operate in some very difficult places and oftentimes in countries that are governed in a manner that's not consistent with our principles here in the United States."

Not consistent NOW... but if Fourthbranch has anything to say about it...

A Labor Day Ignominy

On Labor Day, we celebrate the American worker who quietly does his job without complaint. Nowhere have these men and women been more exploited than in Iraq. In a bombshell story by T. Christian Miller in the LA Times, new documents reveal that contractors continued to send supply convoys through Iraq in early 2004 despite full knowledge of the threat to worker's lives.

Company e-mails and other internal communications reveal that before KBR dispatched the convoy, a chorus of security advisors predicted an increase in roadside bombings and attacks on Iraq's highways. They recommended suspension of convoys.

"[I] think we will get people injured or killed tomorrow," warned KBR regional security chief George Seagle, citing "tons of intel." But in an e-mail sent a day before the convoy was dispatched, he also acknowledged: "Big politics and contract issues involved."

You can guess who prevailed.

KBR was charged with delivering supplies in the war zone as part of a multi-billion-dollar no-bid contract. They knew that more contracts would be on the way as a reward for a job well done. Thus the profit motive outweighed the risk to their employees, and they were sent to their deaths.

After consulting with military commanders, KBR's top managers decided to keep the convoys rolling. "If the [Army] pushes, then we push, too," wrote an aide to Craig Peterson, KBR's top official in Iraq [...]

Six American truck drivers and two U.S. soldiers were killed when the convoy rumbled into a five-mile gauntlet of weapons fire on April 9, 2004, making an emergency delivery of jet fuel to the airport. One soldier and a seventh trucker remain missing [...]

Recriminations began the same day.

"Can anyone explain to me why we put civilians in the middle of known ambush sites?" demanded one security advisor in an e-mail. "Maybe we should put body bags on the packing list for our drivers."

Another wrote, "I cannot believe this has happened; the ones responsible should be held accountable for this."

This article is a detailed look at those few days, when corporate interests trumped interests of safety. When you rely on civilian contractors to fight wars, different calculations are made to justify actions. The middle managers and security advisors understood the risks and danger at work here, but were unable to stop the forward motion. The truckers were just doing their job and following orders. They expected some level of contact with the enemy in a war zone, but did not expect to be sitting ducks.

This was one of the deadliest times for contract workers in Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites were rebelling in their respective regions and practically nowhere was safe. The White House was denying the existence of an insurgency while convoys were being hit with multiple mortars and IEDs and RPGs. But the military was dependent on private contractors like KBR to keep the war machine rolling.

KBR -- then part of Halliburton Co., the company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney -- delivered 80% to 90% of the military's fuel, according to one senior logistics officer.

That meant that if KBR didn't move, neither could the U.S. Army. Unlike soldiers, contractors don't have to follow orders.

"We had to get food to the soldiers. We had to get fuel to the soldiers," the officer said. "This was a war."

So convoys moved out to various bases. And got hit, one at a time. One KBR driver died on April 8, and 70 convoys had been attacked. Despite this, there was actually a debate over whether or not to roll out the next day.

Because the next day was a Shiite holiday as well as Good Friday, security advisors worried that sectarian violence might add to the danger. They were of one voice calling for suspension of convoys.

"I say we halt them for a day at least and consider it a safety/security stand-down, and mental health day," security chief Seagle wrote on April 8. "There is tons of intel stating tomorrow will be another bad day."

Trucking chief Richard agreed. "Another day like today and we will lose most of our drivers."

But only the general managers could stop convoy shipments. KBR reduced the number of people who could stop the trucking, likely because then it would be easier to keep things going. And those in charge of suspending shipments, who referred to the army as "the customer," were loath to stop the money train. After frantic emails back and forth, it was decided that the convoys should stand down on April 9 - for about 25 minutes.

In a message time-stamped 6:44 a.m. April 9 -- nearly an hour after Chambers' order -- Richard sent a message to all drivers: "No convoys are to move" between Anaconda and the military bases south of Baghdad.

The stand-down lasted only 25 minutes.

At 7:14 a.m. another message moved over the KBR communications system. It read:

"Per Keith Richards, project manager, all traffic is to proceed as normal. All . . . traffic lanes are open in all directions."

We know what happened next. The intel was right, the battle was fierce and the employees ended up dead. One particular ambush - the one which prompted the discovery of these emails, as the families are suing KBR - is chronicled in Iraq For Sale. But that's only one. In total, 122 convoys were sent out by KBR that day. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM was attacked.

KBR has blamed the Army for selecting the wrong convoy routes. The military blamed miscommunication internally about the danger of the roads. And the wrongful death lawsuit filed by the families of the 6 employees killed has been dismissed in District Court over jurisdictional issues. The families are appealing.

And the corporate subsidiary of Halliburton doesn't want any of this information spilling out.

Attorneys for KBR reacted angrily to inquiries about the documents. In a letter urging The Times to "refrain from publishing" material under court seal, attorney Michael L. Rice also warned that the paper might be subject to unspecified legal sanctions.

Bravo for T. Christian Miller and the LA Times for getting this message out. It's painful, on Labor Day, to see the rights of workers so blatantly thrown asunder, to see their lives so devalued, in favor of the almighty dollar.

UPDATE: Tied to this, somewhat, is the CPA's effort to destroy the labor movement within Iraq by maintaining union prohibitions from the Saddam era.

What Congress Is Doing Right

Some Gallup poll numbers came out showing a plunge in approval ratings for Congress after a significant uptick. The numbers are still above what they were for the dreaded 109th Republican Congress, and other polls suggest Gallup may be an outlier. But I think that Democrats in general aren't doing enough to highlight successes. So allow me to note some.

I've been critical of the Democratic leadership for how they're handling the Iraq debate, and I think that things are moving out of conference committee entirely too slow. We have two major pieces of the first 100 hours agenda passed by both houses of Congress, and they've fallen off the radar screen for weeks. Getting those to the President's desk would do a lot to blunt criticism. Nevertheless, here are some encouraging items:

• A trio of open government bills passed by the House would compel more records to be turned over during Freedom of Information Act requests, require public acknowledgement for donors to presidential libraries, and ensure that the public can scrutinize Presidential records. They sound like inside baseball, but they're crucial for history and the public record to ensure that government secrecy goes out with the Bush Administration. All of these bills had substantial bipartisan support.

• The Accountability in Contracting Act passed the House, which would minimize no-bid contracts (and require public justification for them), eliminate "cost-plus" contracts that make it financially beneficial for contractors to waste taxpayer dollars, mandate disclosure of any cost overruns, and close the "revolving door" whereby former federal government officials become contractors seeking business from government. This should also be called "The Most Sane Legislation in the World Act." The vote was 347-73.

• Byron Dorgan is leading the charge in questioning Halliburton's move to Dubai, which appears to be an attempt to slither out of having to pay taxes after fleecing taxpayers for years.

• The House is finally giving taxpayers in Washington, DC representation, moving toward passing a bill awarding two additional seats to Congress, one to DC and another to Utah, which would get one in the next Census anyway. The Bush Administration is threatening to veto this bill because everyone knows that people who live in Washington, DC shouldn't have a say in their government (?).

• A proposed bill by California Rep. Mike Honda would amend the No Child Left Behind Act to require parental opt-ins before military recruiters take their children's personal information. Right now every school must give the personal data of all their students to the military without notifying the parents. That's wrong, and this amendment would reverse it.

• I'm most pleased to announce that Sen. Dick Durbin, as he pledged in a blogger meeting I attended last month, introduced the Fair Elections Act, which allows for public financing of Congressional elections. He even got bipartisan support, as Arlen Specter (R-PA) cosponsored.

The Fair Elections Now Act would restore public confidence in the election process by allowing qualified candidates to receive campaign funds from the Senate Fair Elections Fund instead of asking for money from private interests. In return, participating candidates would voluntarily agree to limit their campaign spending to the amount allocated to them. This voluntary alternative to traditional privately financed campaigns would free candidates from the incessant, time-consuming money chase that has tainted public perceptions of elected officials and fostered abuses that undermine our democracy. Candidates could instead devote their time and energy to talking with their constituents about the issues that are important to them.

We're never going to totally get rid of the corrosive power of money in politics. But this bill would go a long way to restoring some basic fairness and allow legislators to legislate again.

• Finally, Nancy Pelosi has promised to bring a measure requiring Congressional authorization for any attack on Iran to a vote, and I plan to hold her to it.

This is all outside of the search for justice in the US Attorney Purge scandal. But it shows that the Congress is trying to do the people's business in many respects, and they ought to be recognized for that.

Walter Reed and the Continuing Contempt for the Men and Women of the Military

Kevin Kiley resigned as Surgeon General of the Army today, the latest to be forced out of office in the continuing scandal over outpatient treatment at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Maybe Kiley will get a lavish farewell ceremony like Francis Harvey, the Secretary of the Army who resigned earlier. Or maybe he'll get a demotion in rank in retirement, as MSNBC is reporting.

But whatever the case, he will not feel the sting of the conditions at Walter Reed the way that the troops already have, and not just in the medical care department. At every step along the way of this Administration and the wars they have fought, these soldiers and Marines and airmen and midshipman have been abused, subjeced to substandard training and equipment, given no clear sense of mission, put in danger by a lack of body armor and uparmored Humvees, given cuts to their hazard pay and medical benefits, sent back into the field over and over with extended deployments and extra tours of duty, and in the latest outrage, are sent back even when injured in combat.

"This is not right," said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has a spine problem that doctors say would be damaged further by heavy Army protective gear. "This whole thing is about taking care of soldiers," he said angrily. "If you are fit to fight you are fit to fight. If you are not fit to fight, then you are not fit to fight."

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier's "physical profile," an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physical limitations because of medical problems -- from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers' profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.

About the only advances for soldiers is the medical technology that is now able to keep them alive instead of dead on the battlefield. But as Lindsay Beyerstein notes, even those advances end up screwing the soldier, as multiple surgeries and long outpatient stays are needed to sustain them and the military only pays for families to come out for the first week. And we know how the outpatient facilities are kept. There's a psychological strain on these men and women and their families that is repugnant. And the bureaucratic red tape they must negotiate, all of which could have been removed for a pittance, is even more repugnant.

A proposal to keep seriously wounded vets from falling through the cracks of the bureaucracy was shelved in 2005 when Jim Nicholson took over as the secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, according to the former VA employee who was responsible for tracking war casualties.

As a result, seriously wounded veterans continued to face long delays for health care and benefit payments after being discharged from the military, says former VA project manager Paul Sullivan.

The program, called the Contingency Tracking System, had been approved by Nicholson's predecessor but died once Nicholson took over the VA, Sullivan told ABC News.

Sullivan said he was told the cost of the system -- less than $1 million to build and requiring a handful of staff to maintain -- was prohibitive.

The soldier is pretty much disrespected at every level of his involvement, as Jon Soltz of VoteVets explains to Holy Joe Lieberman:

Senator Lieberman, I have a challenge for you. Let's call it the American Troops Challenge. Here's how it goes.

First, your office needs to give up the basic tools that it uses everyday to make it function and allows people to do their jobs. Let's say you'll only have one pen in your office, for starters.

Of course, you'll have computers, but only two of them. Then let's look at your staff. Your legislative assistants will be replaced by highly qualified gym teachers. Even though they're not trained properly to work the legislative process, they are excellent at what they do. They'll adapt the best they can, and work incredibly hard, but be patient. Remember, they were never trained for the job. Be sure to wear your sweatpants, though, because you won't be allowed to wear a nice suit. Hmm.. sweats might be too comfortable, but nevermind. Oh, pack your deodorant too, because we're going to place portable heaters in the office, and also bring a few dumptrucks of sand for the floor.

Your office staff, and you, will have to stay in the Capitol for eight months, without the chance to rest or go home. At the eight-month mark, we'll have a little surprise. You and your staff will be involuntarily extended for another few months. You know, just until you pass a couple of more pieces of legislation and complete your job.

I know that the White House is scrambling to put together blue-ribbon panels and show that they belatedly care about the troops they so blithely put in harm's way. But it's clear that they knew about how bad things were at Walter Reed for years, as surely as they know how poorly they treat the troops on every other level. The real truth here is that they don't care. They care about rewarding rich defense contractors through privatization, even to the extent of getting kickbacks from the contractors in exchange for making sure they get the work at Walter Reed, for example. And after all of that, after the contractors suck the American taxpayer dry by taking every last piece of work from the government they can get, they up and move to Dubai. There's patriotism in the 21st century corporatocracy for you. Pat Leahy is right, but then again everything this Administration has ever done has been an insult to the soldiers:

Senator Patrick Leahy called the company’s move corporate greed at its worst. “This is an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers. At the same time they’ll be avoiding U.S. taxes, I’m sure they won’t stop insisting on taking their profits in cold, hard, U.S. cash.”

This is all about profit and the soldiers are nothing more than instruments. The White House does not see them as human beings but as pieces on a chess board they can use to reach their goals. And as long as that's the mindset, we'll have a hundred Walter Reeds.

Walter Reed and the Larger Implications

Today is Walter Reed day in the Congress, with two field hearings taking place. And the weekend was pretty much all about this disaster as well. This morning Anne Hull and Dana Priest have a story suggesting that more VA hospitals than Walter Reed have been suffering from disrepair, which only makes sense, as Walter Reed is supposed to be the crown jewel of the system. Priest and Hull document the scores of letters and emails they received from around the country detailing the substandard care at various medical facilities for veterans. It's the lack of concern for these returning vets but also the lack of preparedness which induces the most anger. Our prowess in field hospitals in Baghdad is saving more lives than ever before, and yet the medical centers stateside are not being properly funded to handle these returning wounded. As Rep. Tierney mentioned this morning at the hearing, "Cockroaches and mold don't happen overnight." This has been an unfolding disaster in slow motion that could have been stopped at any time over the past four years. For some reason it wasn't.

And one major explanation for that is that the feds don't even control these hospitals anymore, preferring to contract out and privatize the service like they do everything else.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by the unstoppable Henry Waxman, uncovered the background to the scandalous living conditions of some vets housed at Walter Reed. It turns out that last September Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi wrote a memorandum (PDF) to the then head of Walter Reed, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, and sent on to the Army Medical Command (italicized words added for clarification), describing how the imposition of a privatization plan upon Walter Reed was rapidly undermining the Center's ability to serve its patients. The Army Times has the story:

The memorandum “describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel,’” the committee’s letter [to Weightman] states. “According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed.”...

During the year between awarding the contract to IAP and when the company started, “skilled government workers apparently began leaving Walter Reed in droves,” the letter states. “The memorandum also indicates that officials at the highest levels of Walter Reed and the U.S. Army Medical Command were informed about the dangers of privatization, but appeared to do little to prevent them.”

The memo signed by Garibaldi requests more federal employees because the hospital mission had grown “significantly” during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It states that medical command did not concur with their request for more people.

“Without favorable consideration of these requests,” Garibaldi wrote, “[Walter Reed Army Medical Center] Base Operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure.”

There was a $120 million dollar contract with a private contractor run by a former Halliburton official. All of the employees managing the facility at Walter Reed are now private workers answering to their corporate bosses instead of the government. So cost-cutting became the priority instead of caring for veterans. The support personnel dropped dramatically, budgets were slashed, and money was put toward studying how to privatize VA jobs rather than patient care. The whole sordid story is here.

And the lesson is that private, for-profit involvement in the health care of any citizen, veteran or civilian, man, woman or child, will inevitably produce a value placed higher on money than the well-being of the individual. This is maybe the most shocking example of that you'll ever hear.

Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.

A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.

If his mother had been insured.

If his family had not lost its Medicaid.

If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find.

If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.

By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George's County boy died.

Children are really cheap and easy to cover with full medical care, including dental, but in our society they are neglected because for-profit insurance companies feel no compunction to cover the poor, who can't really afford insurance and who have a greater percentage of maladies. The pay-to-play system is practically immoral, and for those who say that the emergency room is a de-facto universal care system, they're wrong:

According to a new report, among hospitalized children, the uninsured are twice as likely to die from their injuries as children with insurance. And this isn't some unrelated effect: The data in the report was adjusted to account for age, health, severity of injury, etc. The difference is that the uninsured get worse care, for less time, and wait longer to be treated.

None of this, of course, is a surprise. But sometimes it's worth remembering that the uninsured aren't simply a fascinating policy problem. They are people, many of them are children, and because they are unlucky enough to lack parents with health coverage, they die from conditions that insured kids survive.

We hear a lot from those who have a vested interest in sustaining the for-profit insurance system that single-payer universal coverage means long lines and substandard care. That's exactly what we have today in America. And the situation in all other Western industrialized nations gets slandered a lot, but in fact it's quite civilized compared to vermin crawling up the walls at Walter Reed. We know that we pay more than any country on Earth for health care and receive care that is less effective than that in other nations. It is rank demonization to describe this situation in the inverted way conservatives normally do, and the American people aren't buying it anymore. They live with this system every day of their lives, they want it to change and they're willing to pay for it.

Buried in the big New York Times poll released late yesterday is a number showing that a solid majority would be willing to pay higher taxes in exchange for government-guaranteed health care for all.

Respondents were asked the following question: "Would you be willing or not willing to pay higher taxes so that all Americans have health insurance that they can't lose no matter what?" Sixty percent said they were willing, while only 34% said the were not.

People are demanding a totally different health care system, one that is not employer-based, one that does not preserve the for-profit insurance industry, one that recognizes that health care is a right and not a privilege. That's why the California debate is so important. The choice is between fig leaf changes on the margins and a real revolution in how health care is distributed:

Senate Bill 840 by Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, would scrap the status quo and replace it with a government-run, single-payer system providing comprehensive health care benefits for all, financed by taxes and free to patients at the point of service.

"California needs a system of truly universal health care now more than ever," Kuehl said this week as she reintroduced her bill, which Schwarzenegger vetoed last year. "This is not the time to wait patiently for universal health care. It's time to move forward." [...]

What would all this cost? One detailed economic study, by the Lewin Group, concluded that the plan could be financed simply by redirecting all of the money Californians and the federal government already spend on health care in the state. Care for those not covered now would be paid for with savings in administrative costs and the elimination of insurance company advertising and profits.

We have everything we need to institute real change on health care except political will. As revelations like those at Walter Reed continue to emerge, perhaps that will get stronger.