Lessons in corrupt contracting (and something increasingly relied upon by Western allies in Iraq): The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad paid millions to a government contractor for meals and snacks that nobody ate, according to a new internal State Department report. The State Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that the embassy overpaid by…
Showing all posts tagged Iraq
Chilean paramilitaries protecting Aussie embassy in Baghdad
What better way to show affection for an occupied nation? Hire thugs to protect a space that only exists due to the Australian government’s desperate desire to join the Bush administration into the country in 2003: The Defence Department plans to fully privatise security at Australia’s Baghdad embassy by the end of the year, after…
What erasing Iraq means on the ground
Iraqis still remain almost invisible when the war is being discussed. Far easier for the corporate press to interview a US general who blathers about something. But Iraqi refugee schoolchildren are struggling in Syria and literally millions of Iraqis are displaced, abused and lost. All these issues are addressed in my friend Mike Otterman’s recently…
A massive payout coming the way of Assange?
Guy Rundle reports in today’s Crikey that Julian Assange should be defended and supported by those who believe in human rights (and don’t want to back imperial wars in the Middle East or beyond): The treatment of WikiLeaks’ spokesperson Julian Assange, facing investigations of harassment and rape, has been disgraceful, leading international human rights lawyer…
Wikileaks needs an army to stop it?
This would be funny if it weren’t so serious. One website, Wikileaks, now requires so much American power to try and stop/manage/control it. If only the same effort was spent on actually stopping the wars in the first place: In a nondescript suite of government offices not far from the Pentagon, nearly 120 intelligence analysts,…
Mandela knows about ethics and Blair has no idea
What a true statesman said about a war-monger: Nelson Mandela expressed fury to the British government over Britain’s decision to join with the Americans in invading Iraq, it emerged yesterday. The former South African president picked up the phone and called London to spell out his anger about the decision to join the US-led mission…
What the MSM wants to forget about Iraq
L. Craig Johnstone writes in the Washington Post about Western responsibility for what we have created in Iraq: Thirty-five years ago, two young Foreign Service officers went AWOL from Henry Kissinger’s staff at the State Department to go to Vietnam in the days before the collapse of Saigon. I was one of them. Our action…
Fidel visits a dolphin show and reflects on his legacy
Credit where it’s due. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg may have spread propaganda about Saddam, Iran and Israel, but he can write and his latest dispatch about meeting Fidel Castro (here’s the first) is fascinating: There were many odd things about my recent Havana stopover (apart from the dolphin show, which I’ll get to shortly), but…
Wasted dollars and lives in Iraq
The latest estimate by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes is that the Iraq war has cost US$3 trillion and beyond.
Blair “miscalculated” and he shrugs his shoulders
A softball ABC interview with Tony Blair where he essentially acknowledges he was wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet we’re still supposed to take him seriously on Middle East “peace”?