Friday, April 09, 2004
National Lampoon's American Vacation
This is Bush's 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.
For what it's worth.
posted by chris at 11:47 AM
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Thursday, April 08, 2004
Mix-n-match
These two stories in the news recently aren't really related, but reading them side-by-side sent a couple chills up my spine.
U.S. Marines in a fierce battle for this Sunni Muslim stronghold fired rockets that hit a mosque compound filled with worshippers today, and witnesses said as many as 40 people were killed. Shiite-inspired violence spread to nearly all of the country.
And this one:
....another prominent neo-conservative, Daniel Pipes of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum (MEF), recently declared that the ''ultimate goal'' of the war on terrorism had to be Islam's modernization, or, as he put it, ''religion-building''.
Such an effort needs to be waged not only in the Islamic world, geographically speaking, added Pipes, who last year was appointed by President George W. Bush to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP), but also among Muslims in the West, where, in his view, they are too often represented by ''Islamist (or militant Islamic)'' organizations.
Pipes is currently seeking funding for a new organization, tentatively named the ''Islamic Progress Institute'' (IPI), which ''can articulate a moderate, modern and pro-American viewpoint'' on behalf of U.S. Muslims and that, according to a grant proposal by Pipes and two New York-based foundations obtained by IPS, can ''go head-to-head with the established Islamist institutions''.
''Through adroit media activity and political efforts'', says the proposal, ''advocates for a supremacist and totalitarian form of Islam in the United States -- such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) -- have effectively established themselves as the spokesmen for all Muslims in the country''.
''This situation is fraught with dangers for moderate Muslims as well as for non-Muslims'', the proposal continues, adding, ''Islam in America must be American Islam or it will not be integrated; there can be no place for an Islam in America that functions as a seditious conspiracy aimed at wiping out American values, undermining American inter-faith civility, and, in effect, dictating the form of Islam that will be followed in America''.
posted by chris at 4:47 PM
Vote No on Propostion Wal-Mart!
Voters in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood on Tuesday rejected by a 2-1 margin a ballot measure that would have allowed Wal-Mart to build a sprawling shopping center in the heart of their town.
In voting down the referendum, residents appeared to have taken their cue from elected officials in working-class Inglewood, who fought bitterly to keep Wal-Mart from building a supercenter there, despite the promise of 1,200 jobs and millions of dollars in sales tax revenue.
"This was a major victory," said Jerome Horton, a state assemblyman representing Inglewood. "This was a test site for Wal-Mart. This would have set a national precedent and developers all over the nation were watching to see whether or not a developer could exempt themselves from complying with local laws. This was a much bigger issue than just jobs."
A spokesman for Wal-Mart said, "Fine. We'll just buy the whole damn town then."
posted by chris at 4:38 PM
Condi vs. CAP
Condoleezza Rice testified today. Well, the Center for American Progress has something to say about it. And it goes something like this.
posted by chris at 4:34 PM
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Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Nine questions
To ask Condoleezza Rice at tomorrow's 9/11 hearing. Hopefully, we'll hear some of them.
posted by chris at 10:58 PM
Privatizing the military
The work of the four American civilians slaughtered in Fallujah last week was so shadowy that their families struggled to explain what exactly the men had been hired to do in Iraq. Marija Zovko says her nephew Jerry said little about the perils of the missions he carried out every day. "He wouldn't talk about it," she says. Even representatives for the private security company that employed the men, Blackwater USA, could not say what exactly they were up to on that fateful morning. "All the details of the attack at this point are haphazard at best," says Chris Bertelli, a spokesman for Blackwater. "We don't know what they were doing on the road at the time."
What the murder of the four security specialists did reveal is a little known reality about how business is done in war-torn settings all over the globe. With U.S. troops still having to battle insurgents and defend themselves, the job of protecting everyone else in Iraq—from journalists to government contractors to the U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer—is largely being done by private security companies stocked with former soldiers looking for good money and the taste of danger. Pentagon officials count roughly 20 private companies around the world that contract for security work, mainly in combat areas. They are finding plenty of it in Iraq.
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The security firm's website notes that "Blackwater has the people to execute any requirement." Blackwater recruits from the ranks of active-duty special-forces units—particularly Navy SEALs, Army Rangers and Delta Force troops—many of which are based in nearby Ft. Bragg, N.C. The best and brightest among private security consultants earn salaries that run as high as $15,000 a month. And as various commitments have strained the military's capacity to provide day-to-day security for relief workers and diplomats, Blackwater has prospered by filling the void. Since 2002, Blackwater has won more than $35 million in government contracts.
The current business boom is in Iraq. Blackwater charges its clients $1,500 to $2,000 a day for each hired gun. Most security contractors, like Blackwater's teams, live a comfortable if exhausting existence in Baghdad, staying at the Sheraton or Palestine hotels, which are not plush but at least have running water. Locals often mistake the guards for special forces or CIA personnel, which makes active-duty military troops a bit edgy. "Those Blackwater guys," says an intelligence officer in Iraq, "they drive around wearing Oakley sunglasses and pointing their guns out of car windows. They have pointed their guns at me, and it pissed me off. Imagine what a guy in Fallujah thinks." Adds an Army officer who just returned from Baghdad, "They are a subculture."
Indeed, the relationship between the private soldiers and the real ones isn't always collaborative. "We've responded to the military at least half a dozen times, but not once have they responded to our emergencies," says Custer. "We have our own quick-reaction force now." But the private firms are usually cut off from the U.S. military's intelligence network and from information that could minimize risk to their employees. Noel Koch, who oversaw terrorism policy for the Pentagon in the 1980s and now runs TranSecur, a global information-security firm, says private companies "aren't required to have an intelligence collection or analytical capability in house. It's always assumed that the government is going to provide intelligence about threats." That, says Koch, means "they are flying blind, often guessing about places that they shouldn't go."
It's still unclear whether the four Blackwater employees found themselves in Fallujah inadvertently or were on a mission gone awry. Even by Pentagon standards, military officials were fuzzy about the exact nature of the Blackwater mission; several officers privately disputed the idea that the team was escorting a food convoy. Another officer would say only the detail was escorting a shipment of "goods." Several sources familiar with Blackwater operations told TIME that the company has in some cases abbreviated training even for crucial missions in war zones. A former private military operator with knowledge of Blackwater's operational tactics says the firm did not give all its contract warriors in Afghanistan proper training in offensive-driving tactics, although missions were to include vehicular and dignitary-escort duty. "Evasive driving and ambush tactics were not—repeat, were not—covered in training," this source said. Asked to respond to the charges, Blackwater spokesman Bertelli said, "Blackwater never comments on training methods and operational procedures."
At the Pentagon, which has encouraged the outsourcing of security work, there are widespread misgivings about the use of hired guns. A Pentagon official says the outsourcing of security work means the government no longer has any real control over the training and capabilities of thousands of U.S. and foreign contractors who are packing weapons every bit as powerful as those belonging to the average G.I. "These firms are hiring anyone they can get. Sure, some of them are special forces, but some of them are good, and some are not. Some are too old for this work, and some are too young. But they are not on the U.S. payroll. And so they are not our responsibility."
Story, via Tom.
posted by chris at 10:52 PM
Tax time! But not for corporations!
More than 60% of U.S. corporations didn't pay any federal taxes for 1996 through 2000, years when the economy boomed and corporate profits soared, Tuesday's Wall Street Journal reported, citing the investigative arm of Congress.
The disclosures from the General Accounting Office are certain to fuel the debate over corporate tax payments in the presidential campaign. Corporate tax receipts have shrunk markedly as a share of overall federal revenue in recent years, and were particularly depressed when the economy soured. By 2003, they had fallen to just 7.4% of overall federal receipts, the lowest rate since 1983, and the second-lowest rate since 1934, federal budget officials say.
The GAO analysis of Internal Revenue Service data comes as tax avoidance by both U.S. and foreign companies also is drawing increased scrutiny from the IRS and Congress. But more so than similar previous reports, the analysis suggests that dodging taxes, both legally and otherwise, has become deeply rooted in U.S. corporate culture. The analysis found that even more foreign-owned companies doing business in the U.S. -- about 70% of them -- reported that they didn't owe any U.S. federal taxes during the late 1990s.
The basic federal corporate-tax rate for big corporations is 35%. But the federal tax code also offers many credits and loopholes that allow many companies to pay far less than that.
Despite the rising rate of tax avoidance among corporations, collections from the federal corporate income tax rose to more than $200 billion in 2000, from $ 171 billion in 1996. But over the next three years they fell each year, reaching $131.8 billion in 2003 -- the lowest annual total since 1993. They are projected to reach $168.7 billion this year.
I don't imagine that 60% of the US population could get away with that. Via Tom Tomorrow.
posted by chris at 10:43 PM
Missle defense, not terrorism
On Sept. 11, 2001, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to outline a Bush administration policy that would address "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday" -- but the focus was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.
The speech provides telling insight into the administration's thinking on the very day that the United States suffered the most devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups, according to former U.S. officials who have seen the text.
The speech was postponed in the chaos of the day, part of which Rice spent in a bunker. It mentioned terrorism, but did so in the context used in other Bush administration speeches in early 2001: as one of the dangers from rogue nations, such as Iraq, that might use weapons of terror, rather than from the cells of extremists now considered the main security threat to the United States.
The text also implicitly challenged the Clinton administration's policy, saying it did not do enough about the real threat -- long-range missiles.
Says a lot, I think.
posted by chris at 10:30 PM
And he's back!
Sorry for the absence of posts, but I just got back from a long weekend vacation. But I'm back now and there's plenty to highlight, so stay tuned . . .
posted by chris at 10:27 PM
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