The New Colombian Gold and What the FARC Is Up With Weapons Dealers?

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As you may recall, there is a lot of spooky intrigue raising it’s ugly head lately in South America. It is hard to tell if the Bushies are just trying to screw up every continent before they leave office, or if there is some type of master plan, especially between South America and the Middle East. As a quick recap, early in March we saw Soviet Russian arms dealer extraordinaire Viktor Bout arrested in Thailand on what appears to have been a US warrant stemming from information "obtained" in a Colombian execution raid into Ecuador to kill Raul Reyes, the FARC Number 2, based upon US suggestion and intelligence. The upstart of all that seemed to be that FARC was trying to either obtain and/or sell uranium. Oh and by the way, the rumor was nicely planted that FARC had been given $300 million to get involved in this uranium terrorism by Hugo Chavez our new arch-enemy from Venezuela. Then, of course, there is our old friend Chiquita Bananas who, as opposed to Chavez/Venezuela, we do know has supported FARC terrorism. Jeebus.

The latest piece of this convoluted puzzle comes today with the announcement that the FARC uranium has been "found".

The seizure of up to 66 pounds of low-grade uranium linked to the FARC rebels adds weight to the evidence found in a captured rebel laptop that the guerrillas were interested in buying and selling the material, according to the Colombian Defense Ministry.

But the 30 kilos of uranium found Wednesday in plastic bags dug up about three feet from a road in southern Bogotá was "impoverished," the ministry said, and in that state could not have been used to make a radioactive bomb.

Uranium is the new "Colombian Gold"! The bit about the uranium being found 3 feet from the road to the FARC camp is almost hilarious. Almost. Um, let’s see, Chavez, terrorists, uranium and a fortuitously discovered laptop computer. That doesn’t sound at all like any Fourth Branch government we all know and love does it? Especially not on the heels of the recent visit the Saudis received from Cheney.

The other half of this two headed post involves a different arms merchant freakshow, this one being underwritten by the US government. In a long expose just published in the New York Times, the story is told of a couple of skateboard punk looking Read more →

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Sometimes You Eat The Bear, Sometimes The Bear Eats You – Stearns Thoughts

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That whole financial disaster, black hole rivaling the Great Depression, collapse of the American economy thing is oh so last week eh? Because from what I can tell this week, Britney has been on a sitcom, Barrack (gasp!) has listened to a fiery preacher man, Bush and McCain say stupid things (okay, that is not news, but it is being reported on), and Hillary (gasp!) won’t quit a race that is essentially neck and neck (and this reference does not make this a thread for discussion of the horserace, so give that a rest). What happened to the biggest financial crisis in our nation’s history?

What was the the Bear Stearns takeover/bailout about anyway? Who really benefitted in the present? What does it portend for the future? I don’t have these answers; but I have a lot of questions and the ground seems to be morphing so fast on this that not only are we not getting answers, the real questions are getting left behind in the wake. To paraphrase Wilson Pickett, we need to "slow this mustang down" and think about what has occurred and where it will lead us for the future. Really, the implications are pretty incredible. The federal government, under the cover of a spring weekend, stepped in to force one private financial company to sell itself to another private financial company at a price more than fifteen times less than the market valuation at the time. And then the government pledged the public’s money to guarantee the worst parts of the deal. Wow. And here I thought the free market was the golden holy rule for those currently running our country into the ground.

How did something so huge, and with so many far ranging implications, happen literally overnight? One thing is sure, if the economy was as great as they say, and Bush and his band of merry pillagers were on top of everything as much as they claim, this never would have happened. There has been plenty of discussion about the sub-prime shitpile and the exponential rise in derivitives in the financial industry, but my question here is what really happened with the Bear Stearns deal itself? Thankfully, people that know a whole lot more about this than I do are starting to ask the right questions. Today’s example is an outstanding Read more →

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What To Get Teh Woman Who Knows Everything

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I am probably going to get in deep doo doo for this, but, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm". I have thought about doing this since Marcy took off for vacation, but have been hesitating because I wasn’t sure about letting the cat out of the bag as to her birthday. But, what da ya know, Looseheadprop has freed that kitty in her latest post at FDL (very nice post and timeline she did I might add, so take a gander at it).

At any rate, Friday is our intrepid leader Marcy’s birthday. I am here to tell you, keeping this here car known as the Emptywheel blog well maintained, full of fuel and on the road is more work than it looks like. Marcy not only does that consistently day in and day out, she does it with a style, grace, competence and consistency that is unmatched in the blogosphere. The effort she leads here is not only informational and enjoyable reading, it is of demonstrated importance in the effort to expose and repair all of that which is currently broken in our government. Quite frankly, I think you all know this better than I can put into words anyway.

So, in light of the foregoing, I am going to suggest that we have a little fundraising effort for the one that makes all of this possible here. I feel a little goofy doing this, but, you know, I can’t think of any more valuable or worthwhile endeavors. So, if you have a couple of extra Euros, please contribute to keeping this the finest forum in the toobz. You folks are the greatest readers and participants anywhere. Thank you.

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Who Let The Dogs Out? The Hounds Of Hatfill and the Federal Rules of Evidence

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On Marcy’s most recent Hatfill post, I made a mostly flippant comment on the dogs in the Hatfill case:

What if Hatfill is just a pig and leaves pizza crusts around everywhere he goes and the dogs are smelling that? What are the customary industry standards for certification of anthrax sniffing dogs anyway; and who sets and regulates them? Or is this just some “wonder mammal” like Lassie or Flipper or something? Was there video of the searches with the wonder dogs? Because there sure should have been. Or are these yet more video items of evidence that have been “misplaced”? What was the nature of the dog’s response? Did it emit a “plaintiff wail” like Nicole Simpson’s Akita? (Great trivia: Nicole’s Akita was named “Kato” too). I don’t see how the dog(s) here meet any evidentiary standards for admissibility or reliance by a court.

Despite it being mostly in jest, that comment had what I consider to be a critical, if not the critical, point in it. From what it appears, the only bit of "evidence" (and I use that descriptor loosely here, and in the generic sense, because I don’t think there was any proper evidence at all) against Hatfill that served as the basis for identifying him was that the dogs had alerted.

We all saw, in the tragic case of the late Richard Jewell, the horrendous and deleterious effects of a defective identification on an individual for an infamous crime. It is simply unconscionable to hang such a collar on someone without substantial credible hard evidence. And, quite frankly, the aura and implications of the anthrax case were, and are, far worse that the Atlanta Olympic park bombing. An entire nation was brought to a standstill and was trembling from a terrorist act that was capable of being repeated anywhere, at any time, in the country via the mail. So the United States government better have a pretty strong case before it implicates someone such as Hatfill in such a crime.

What substantial and credible hard evidence was the identification of Hatfill based on? Well, as has been previously discussed, he had worked in the bio-agent/anthrax field, had the technical expertise and, according to profilers, the personality to do the anthrax deed. The government indicates that he may be one of 50 or fewer people who had the skills to do it and had access to the strain. Then you add in allegations of violence in his past and ties to South African apartheid militias, and you can certainly understand why he was being looked at. While such information is not all entirely innocuous background, it is certainly nothing more than circumstantial and does not inculpate Hatfill; the only alleged link of Hatfill to the actual crime with the anthrax letters, at least that we are aware of to date, was the dogs. That’s it; there is nothing else. What are the standards for admissibility of dog scent Read more →

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Feith Based Initiative At The Pentgon

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Grover Norquist can pretty much pull the drain plug now; the job of eviscerating the United States Government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" is about complete. The latest breaking news out of the Pentagon is that the US mistakenly shipped ICBM warhead nuclear triggering mechanisms to Taiwan.

The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that it mistakenly shipped non-nuclear components for an intercontinental ballistic missile to Taiwan from a U.S. Air Force base in Wyoming.
…
At a Pentagon news conference, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne said the misshipped items were four nose cone assemblies for ICBMs. He also said they were delivered to Taiwan in March 2005 and had been sent instead of helicopter batteries that had been ordered by Taiwan.
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”It is a component for the fuse in the nosecone for a nuclear system,” Wynne said. ”We are very concerned about it.”

Well, that’s understandable. Because thermonuclear warhead triggers probably look just like helicopter batteries, right? Oy and ugh.

Apparently, the Cheney/Bush Administration planting of "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the planet" at the Pentagon is paying dividends even after Doug Feith is long gone, because there seems to be some real competence issues over there, and, critically, with regard to our military’s handling of it’s nuclear weapons. As you might recall, it was not long ago that there were some empty quivers and bent spears out of another upper mid-west Air Force Base. In late August, 2007, six live nuclear cruise missiles went missing.

The nuclear weapons were “lost” for 36 hours after taking off on August 29 on a cross-country journey from the remote Minot air force base in North Dakota to Barksdale in Louisiana. Major-General Richard Newton, air force deputy chief of staff, said there was an “unprecedented” series of procedural errors, which revealed “an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards”.

There is bound to be a lot of speculation and discussion on the latest incident that is just now being revealed in spite of the fact that it occurred all the way back in 2005. Hopefully, it will also renew the discussion of the Minot/Barksdale incident, which kind of faded from the national conscience (if you want a decent rundown on some of the various theories and weird facts on the Minot/Barksdale event, see here). So how will the Six Sigma management geniuses of the Bush Administration respond to these disturbing examples Read more →

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Of Easter Eggs, Spitzer and Stones In Glass Houses

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Ah, the constantly evolving case of Bungalow Eliot and all the Spitzer snitchers. I have, for the most part, held off on too deep of an analysis on Spitzer because I didn’t think we had anything resembling the real story to operate from, and it kind of plays into the hands of the puppetmasters to constantly race down the false paths they provide (works on the media every time though eh?). That has not changed; the one thing we know for sure is that we don’t know the whole story for sure.

If I wasn’t the first to say that this was an investigation of a person searching for a crime to validate it after the fact, I was right up there. Every now and then even brain dead squirrels find a nut. The Public Corruption section of the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, clearly in conjunction with DOJ Main, went on an Easter egg hunt in Eliot Spitzer’s yard under the pre-determined assumption that there were eggs there, and were prepared to plant some if they couldn’t find any. That much is fairly evident at this point, but how did this convoluted persecution really start? And why?

The latest revelation is, of course, that the mondo bondage Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone is knee deep in the primordial muck on the Spitzer hunt. Sex, prostitutes, money, power and dirty political tricks; who could have ever imagined that the Stoner might be involved? Eh, okay, we all should have known. By now, you have all probably got the basics on the Stone angle that has emerged; but just in case, here is a brief recap. Roger Stone is a long time GOP dirty trick and bag man. On Friday March 21, by way of a McClatchey article from the Miami Herald, we learned that:

Almost four months before Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a sex scandal, a lawyer for Republican political operative Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI alleging that Spitzer ”used the services of high-priced call girls” while in Florida.

The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Miami Beach resident Stone learned the information from ”a social contact in an adult-themed club.” It offered one potentially identifying detail: The man in question hadn’t taken off his calf-length black socks "during the sex act.”

Interesting that Roger Read more →

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Hard Drives To Hell

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Emails? We don’t need no stinkin hard drives and email! And that is pretty much what the Bush Administration has told Judge John Facciola and the DC District Court, not to mention you, me and the rest of the citizens the government is supposed to work for. As you will recall, CREW and the National Security Archive (NSA) have been fighting Bushco for some time now over the missing emails. Yesterday I received the following in an email from the lead attorney on the matter for the NSA, Meredith Fuchs:

Since you have been following the White House e-mail story, I thought you would be interested in the latest government filing. Striking that they failed to respond to the court’s specific questions. Even though they are engaged in a major project trying to find hundreds of days worth of e-mail, they still don’t scknowledge that they have a problem.

Moreover, there are some things that simply are not credible in Ms. Payton’s declaration. For instance, she claims that EOP replaces 1/3 of their computers each year and so there are not likely to be any around from 2003-2005. Yet, she also says EOP has no record of which computers were replaced and when. How do they know they are not replacing the same 1/3 each year if there is no record.

Ms. Fuchs has a knack for the understatement when she muses that "there are some things that simply are not credible", both as to Theresa Payton’s statements and the government’s position as a whole. In a sick kind of way, you almost have to marvel at the intestinal fortitude of the Bushies to so ferociously and completely yank the chain of every court they come in contact with. Whatever the people and their Congress want, whatever the courts demand, the answer from the Bush Brigade is always "nope". The audacity of nope.

Here is the EOP (Government) Response pleading filed yesterday (3/21/08), and Here is the sworn declaration in support thereof filed by everybody’s favorite technical guru, Theresa Payton.

As you will recall, CREW and NSA had applied for an Order To Show Cause, which was granted by Judge Facciola with a return deadline of yesterday. In a nutshell, the Administration has responded that it has destroyed most all of the hard drives that could contain the missing Read more →

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March Madness – Bracketology and Other Chides of March Trash Talk

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Spring is in the air! And, thanks to the Bush EPA, a whole bunch of toxic substances are in the air with it. But, for the moment, lets leave the real work aside and get our swerve on again with the trash talk. There is a lot of ground to cover with March Madness in full swing, MLB opening day a heartbeat away, the stretch run in the NBA at hand and, my own pet favorite, the start of the Formula One Grand Prix season. Here is a very brief rundown; we will fill in the details together in the comments.

The Madness: Ya gots ta love March Madness. It may not be the biggest sporting event in the world (although it seems to be getting there fast), but it is awfully special. The energy and passion of the kids, before they turn into cynical and self centered pros, is really special. Every year there are shots and storylines that become the stuff of legend. As you all know by now, there is no joy of the Big Dance in Sun Devil Country, but the future is looking very bright and they will be there next year. I will be riding the Kevin Love Boat with UCLA all the way. Bracket up and tell why your team is better.

America’s Pastime: I predict this is the year we end the curse. The curse of suffering the incessant high and mighty chatter from the Beantown Batfans that is. The Shill is gone baby, or at least on the shelf for a good long time anyway, and the Sawx have never won a thing without him. That is my story, and I am sticking to it. As you might would guess my hopes ride with the Baby Backs of the Diamond variety. Young solid talent everywhere, deep farm system, and good pitching (I again want to thank Freepatriot for giving us Dan Haren, a very shiny gift. Really, you should not have been so generous). In the Senior Circuit, I think the Padres, Cubbies and Mets are going to also be very good. Especially the Mets now thaqt they have added Johan Santana, and the early reports on the newly rehabilitated Pedro Martinez are that he is looking scary good already. In the Designated Read more →

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Waxman Attempts to Plug Truck-Sized Loophole for Theft

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Remember that truck-sized loophole for theft the Bush Administration created? The one that takes a rule that says contractors have to reveal contracting fraud, and adds a loophole for anyone doing business outside the US? Well, Waxman is on it:

On May 23, 2007, the Department of Justice (DOJ) requested that the Federal Acquisition Regulation be amended to “require contractors to establish and maintain internal controls to detect and prevent fraud in their contracts, and that they notify contracting officers without delay whenever they become aware of a contract overpayment or fraud, rather than wait for its discovery by the government.” DOJ believed such a rule was necessary because few government contractors voluntarily disclose suspected instances of fraud. DOJ proposed specific changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

In response, on November 14, 2007, the Civilian Agency Acquisition Council and the Defense Acquisition Regulations Council published a proposed rule on “Contractor Compliance Program and Integrity Reporting.” This rule requires contractors to have a code of ethics and business conduct, to establish and maintain specific internal controls to detect and prevent improper conduct in connection with the award or performance of government contracts or subcontracts, and to notify contracting officers without delay whenever they become aware of violations of Federal criminal law with regard to such contracts or subcontracts. The proposed changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation closely track the DOJ proposal, with two primary substantive changes: the exemption for contracts to be performed overseas and a second exemption for contracts for commercial items.

On January 14, 2008, DOJ filed a comment on the proposed rule stating that “we do not agree with” the exemption for overseas contracts. According to DOJ, “[a]lthough these contracts may be performed outside the United States, the United States still is a party to these contracts and potentially a victim when overpayments are made or when fraud occurs in connection with the contracts. Under these circumstances, the government still maintains jurisdiction to prosecute the perpetrators of the fraud. Moreover, these types of contracts, which in many cases support our efforts to fight the global war on terror, need greater contractor vigilance because they are performed overseas where U.S. government resources and remedies are more limited.”

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Tom Reynolds Won’t Seek Re-Election

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The Albany Project reports that the guy who gave Christopher Ward carte blanche to (allegedly) steal from the NRCC, Tom Reynolds, has announced he will not run for re-election. I’m just guessing, mind you, but I predict this means that the investigation into the NRCC finance scandal is finding what is already readily apparent–that while Tom Reynolds was Chair, the NRCC organized itself in such a way to make it very easy for the Treasurer for all these committtees to either launder or steal money.

If I’m right, it also suggests just how incendiary the NRCC might become. After all, Reynolds was intimately involved in attempts to cover up Mark Foley’s pursuit of former male pages.

News reports indicate that a former Foley chief of staff, by all indications Fordham, tried to broker a deal with ABC News’ Brian Ross. According to Howard Kurtz’s column in the The Washington Post yesterday, Ross had asked to interview the Florida Republican after obtaining dozens of instant messages that Foley sent to teenage House pages. Foley’s former chief of staff told Ross on Friday that the congressman was quitting and that Ross could have that information exclusively if he agreed not to publish the raw, sexually explicit messages. [Washington Post, 10/2/06]

Some Questions About Reynolds’s Involvement:

1. Why did Congressman Reynolds authorize his own chief of staff to negotiate on behalf of disgraced Congressman Mark Foley? Did Reynolds know about the lewd IM conversations when he let Fordham advise Foley, and if so, when was he informed? Did Fordham share the IMs with Reynolds?

2. Instead of dispatching his chief-of-staff to keep ABC News from breaking the story, why didn’t Reynolds put the children first and go to authorities? Was Reynolds more worried about a political scandal than the safety of the children serving as Congressional pages?

3. What other assistance did Reynolds provide to help Foley avoid the scandal and the disgrace and possible criminal prosecution that would result?

4. Why is the NRCC refusing to return $100,000 from Foley, given that Reynolds knew of this disturbing behavior when the money was given in July of this year?

That was a scandal that contributed greatly to the GOP defeat. Yet Reynolds showed no remorse for his role in that scandal and stayed in the race.

Which raises the question–what about the NRCC scandal makes it worse then covering up the solicitation of minors?

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