Origins on crossfooting (from a once upon a time, a long time ago, accounting major) This was something done to double check on your figure compiliations. As an example, if you were totalling various expense accounts on a monthly basis to get yearly totals, you would set up columns with the types of expense as headings (office supplies, utilities, equipment rental payments, etc.) along the top, then set up rows of months with the month on the left, so for the first row – January – you would have figures under the headings that apply, and so forth.

To get your pre-excel totals, first you would “foot” which would mean to go under each column heading and go down the rows and total the column – then to do the same thing with each row, so you would end up with “totals” for all Jan expenses on the right side of your sheet, and all office supply expenses for all the months on the bottom of the sheet, under the column heading. To help double check your figures, you would “cross foot” by adding all the number totals across the bottom (totals by expense type), then you would add all the number totals down the right side (totals by month) and the two figures should be the same – i.e., you cross footed.

It kind of evolves to mean belts and suspenders checking and/or digging in to make sure all the numbers make sense. I wonder if the slang was meant to really reference numbers per se, or to reference making sure all ducks were definitely in a row. I wouldn’t trust much from it in any event.

One thing that might be interesting on the $$ flow front, though, would tie to the reports that the same woman who alledgely signed off on the the el-Masri kidnap to torture and didn’t want to let him go – who was also supposedly one who went to watch waterboarding for the vicarious thrill of it without any need to be there and got a censure supposedly for using the interrogations as her personal torture porn – that she was also the one that Jose Rodriguez sent to have the tapes destroyed. How she was getting paid or her trips were being paid for might, I guess, conceiveably be a tangential issue, but I don’t really see it.

@68 – thank you. That’s a bit more upbeat.

@64 – I’m not an uber-expert on them, but I think most are negotiated for fairly long terms, however, I know part of what is going on in Iraq is that the SOFA is being used in part as the draw-down of forces document as well as an agreement on how to handle “coalition” forces actions in sovereign Iraq. Originally, the SOFA that Maliki put in place last year was supposed to go before the Iraqis in July of this year. But no one proposed a bill before the July elections, so it was left hanging. Some were not happy and pushed, so that at one point there was talk that whether, and the terms on which, US soldiers were going to stay in Iraq which was supposed to be voted on in July, would now be included in and addressed in the Jan 2010 elections.

So to get the SOFA originally, the only way they could pull it off was to include the provision that the people of Iraq would get to vote on US continued presence this last July – that’s how the got it approved to start with. But it looks from polling like if the matter went to vote – Iraqis would overwhelming vote US forces out. So Maliki and others have not really wanted to put any of this to a vote. So after the discussion post-July elections on moving the vote to the Jan elections, since last month the word is that Maliki won’t get any bill before the public for vote in Jan either, he’s just going to ignore all that for awhile bc he’s too worried about what will happen once all forces are gone.

But the US SOFA with Iran given by the Shah was used by Khomenei as propaganda leverage to overthrow the Shah – some well known quote about an American dog being more protected than an Iranian from a US soldier under the SOFA.