Defense Contractors Theft & Extortion

My email to Roskam:

I would like to note that as a taxpayer I am fed up with US government contractors getting away with:

HIGHWAY ROBBERY ( http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/washington/17contractor.html?_r=1&th=&adxnnl=1&emc=th&adxnnlx=1213707612-4zVo371AEaukpimfCOaPHA&pagewanted=all)

, .... not to mention RAPE
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/houppert ( Dawn Leamon was raped by a KBR employee -btw, she is from Illinois)

, pillage and MURDER in Iraq. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/world/middleeast/08blackwater.html

Please, please support our troops by ensuring that they are given the resources to do the job _AND_Bring them home. KBR is extorting them/us for money and their safety, all the while being paid so much more than our own troops to do their job. The armed forces have lost all control to the military-industrial complex. This is sickening - it has to end. THis is payola for VP Cheney and his pals. No wonder they want to stay for 100 years -they have no accountability!! At least hold them accountable to earn our untold billions. STOP this crazyness.

With all sincerety,

L_Z_

unlawful imprisonment

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that ....dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

Amen & Hallelujah

Habeus survives :

"To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on and off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say "what the law is... Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom's first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers ... Within the Constitution's separation-of-powers structure, few exercises of judicial power are as legitimate or as necessary as the responsibility to hear challenges to the authority of the Executive to imprison a person."


NY TIMES link

5 words

" Outrage fatigue musn't cause complacency " (HuffPo)

ditto.

Yesterday

Yesterday was the lowest of lows ( ok not THE lowest but you know what I mean) and a pretty good gratifying " high" .

(1) I got laid off yesterday from my job. Aargh and angst, more on that later....

(2) Obama cinched the dem nomination last night. That makes me very happy. Its something I've been waiting for for a long time.

Media Pentagon WH relationship

I guess I should have been reading the McClatchy paper all along .... ht Glenn Greenwald at Salon

So the Pentagon tells the media what kind of reporting is in- and out-of-bounds?
Hogwash. Hogwash! HOGWASH.

We confess that here at McClatchy, which purchased Knight Ridder two years ago, we do have a dog in this fight. Our team - Joe Galloway, Clark Hoyt, Jon Landay, Renee Schoof, Warren Strobel, John Walcott, Tish Wells and many others - was, with a few exceptions, the only major news media organization that before the war consistently and aggressively challenged the White House's case for war, and its lack of planning for post-war Iraq.

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