agitprop version 2.0

Hey Paul, Where's the $9 Billion?

An audit by a U.S. inspector says the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority that governed Iraq after the 2003 invasion failed to keep track of nearly $9 billion it transferred to Iraqi ministries. The audit released Sunday by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction says the Coalition Provisional Authority failed to establish control systems to verify how the money was spent, which opened it to corruption.

In some instances, money was used to pay what the report calls "ghost" employees, explaining that out of 8,206 guards on the payroll at one ministry, only 602 could be accounted for. In a written response included in the report, the former chief of the occupation authority, L. Paul Bremer III, strongly disputed its conclusions. He said the inspectors had seemed to assume that "Western-style budgeting and accounting procedures could be immediately and fully implemented in the midst of a war." Mr. Bremer says delaying payment to Iraqi public servants could have created additional security threats.

So let's see, $200+ billion already spent on the war. The neo-cons originally proposed that the U.S. would only spend about $5 billion and that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the cost of the war. Well that wasn't true. Just like WMD was not true. And now Bush wants $80 billion more and says that troops will be there through 2006. Well, where is the money going? Into the pockets of Bremer the con and Allawi the stooge? Maybe its all going to Halliburton and Bechtel. Little money is going to reconstruction or troop training. This is your tax dollars at work. Iraq, the final frontier.

Indecision 2005: The New Iraq

Iraqis vote on January 30. They aren't voting for candidates or propositions. They are voting for party lists, not individual candidates. Actually, no one knows who the candidates are or what the parties stand for unless you can infer from their names. Iraqis must rank 100 different parties to fill a 275-seat assembly on their ballots meanwhile dodging bullets and mortar attacks by insurgents at polling stations. Will civil war ensue? We'll see what happens.

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Oh, and you thought torture ended with Abu Gharib? Think again...

BAGHDAD, Jan. 24 -- Twenty months after Saddam Hussein's government was toppled and its torture chambers unlocked, Iraqis are again being routinely beaten, hung by their wrists and shocked with electrical wires, according to a report by a human rights organization. Iraqi police, jailers and intelligence agents, many of them holding the same jobs they had under Hussein, are "committing systematic torture and other abuses" of detainees, Human Rights Watch said in a report to be released Tuesday.

Legal safeguards are being ignored, political opponents are targeted for arrest, and the government of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi "appears to be actively taking part, or is at least complicit, in these grave violations of fundamental human rights," the report concludes.
A spokesman for Allawi declined to comment, Monday and said "I will put this report on the prime minister's desk tomorrow to see if he has any reaction."

Ibrahim Jafari, an interim vice president, said in an interview that security forces needed to be tougher to combat the campaign of violence by opponents of the election. "I think the security people are not arresting enough and are releasing them too quickly," Jafari said. "And many of the security people are cooperating with the criminals. I think we have to put security as our priority."

The Human Rights Watch report acknowledged that Iraq was "in the throes of a significant insurgency" in which 1,300 police officers and thousands of civilians were killed in the last four months of 2004. But it argued that "no government, not Saddam Hussein's, not the occupying powers and not the Iraqi Interim Government, can justify ill-treatment of persons in custody in the name of security."

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And look at the fun going on in Guantanamo. (Does Castro know about this?)

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider's written account.

A draft manuscript obtained by The Associated Press is classified as secret pending a Pentagon review for a planned book that details ways the U.S. military used women as part of tougher physical and psychological interrogation tactics to get terror suspects to talk.

"I have really struggled with this because the detainees, their families and much of the world will think this is a religious war based on some of the techniques used, even though it is not the case,'' the author, former Army Sgt. Erik R. Saar, 29, told AP. Saar didn't provide the manuscript or approach AP, but confirmed the authenticity of nine draft pages AP obtained. He requested his hometown remain private so he wouldn't be harassed. Saar, who is neither Muslim nor of Arab descent, worked as an Arabic translator at the U.S. camp in eastern Cuba from December 2002 to June 2003. At the time, it was under the command of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had a mandate to get better intelligence from prisoners, including alleged al-Qaida members caught in Afghanistan.

The female interrogator wanted to "break him,'' Saar adds, describing how she removed her uniform top to expose a tight-fitting T-shirt and began taunting the detainee, touching her breasts, rubbing them against the prisoner's back and commenting on his apparent erection. The detainee looked up and spat in her face, the manuscript recounts. The interrogator left the room to ask a Muslim linguist how she could break the prisoner's reliance on God. The linguist told her to tell the detainee that she was menstruating, touch him, then make sure to turn off the water in his cell so he couldn't wash. Strict interpretation of Islamic law forbids physical contact with women other than a man's wife or family, and with any menstruating women, who are considered unclean.

Sadistic yet kinky, eh?