War Profiteer & Rape Club KBR Back in the News!

Dick Cheney's old colleagues at KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary until 2007, are in the news today AGAIN, courtesy of our friends at the New York Times. Check it out here.

KBR is the Army's single largest contractor. They provide vital services, and that gives them leverage. And like the good businessmen that they are, they use it.
It's a not very funny story about how KBR got the Army to pay them $1BILLION for questionable charges in Iraq, and to fire the Army contract manager, Charles M. Smith, who tried to hold KBR accountable. Hah! What an idiot. Didn't he realize he was dealing with Halliburton?
When the Army's Mr. Smith told KBR that he would be withholding payments until KBR provided proper documentation, KBR threatened to withhold battlefield services. So, the U.S. Army . . . well, they totally caved in and gave KBR all the money it wanted. I doubt this type of thing would have happened in the pre-privatization era, when those same battlefield services were provided by people who were actually in the Army.

Who's The Boss?

KBR CEO William P. Utt

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates

KBR has also had a couple of very bad rape cases find media daylight in the past few years. Here are links to these stories.

http://www.injuryboard.com/national-news/kbr-defends-itself-against-jones.aspx?googleid=28782

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/houppert

Now, for reasons that are not exactly clear to me, our government's position on these is that the American rapists who attacked these American women cannot be arrested or held criminally accountable by either American or Iraqi law enforcement. The argument goes that the U.S. has no jurisdiction over civilian "contractors" in Iraq, and the Iraqis, per their new Constitution, have no legal authority over Americans who are involved in the occupation/war.
I really do not believe that this can possibly be true. If it is, then it seems that we could use the same legal loophole to just shoot/hang/castrate/rape/behead/alloftheabove these rapists in Iraq. If they've managed to get back home, we could "render" them back to Iraq. Not the best solution, but sometimes in war you have to improvise.
Plaudits to Senator Bill Nelson of Florida for caring about this. I don't know a lot about Bill Nelson, but I hope he follows through on this.

Florida Senator Bill Nelson

Bad Week For The Pentagon

Dr. Gates Has A Bad Week
At The Hands Of

Muslims, Lesbians, and Boeing

Dr. Robert Gates - SecDef

Wisconsin's very own Democratic Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin , who has a Facebook page, and her wife of 10 years, Lauren Azar, two of the most pleasant looking women in our Nation's Capital, were initially denied boarding on a Defense Department plane last week, because the DOD doesn't consider Ms. Azar to be a spouse of Rep. Baldwin. Since they are both women, and are married to each other, they are "lesbians" and being a "lesbian" is supposed to be a very secret thing at the Defense Department. This is because of DOD's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. But unfortunately someone apparently did ask, and was subsequently told. Uh oh.

So, of course, the US Secretary of Defense and the US Speaker of the House had to get involved and resolve this stand-off on the tarmac. It had to be a tough situation. Two smiling middle-aged women facing off against the US Air Force.

You guessed it. The chicks won. Off they went into the wild blue yonder.

Holding hands, no doubt.

Lauren Azar - in tres froid black and white

Rep. Tammy Baldwin - WI 2nd District

So, if you're like most normal people, you're wondering, "What the hell? This is what they're spending time on in DC?" Apparently so. Just fyi, Tammy voted against the Iraq War, and in favor of impeaching Dick Cheney. She also likes universal health care. She and Lauren are both lawyers.

I'm hoping that Dr. Gates, who is a career CIA spook and generally a smart guy, was embarrassed about wasting time on this silliness. Sadly though, the initial evidence points the other way. Instead of a quick apology and a stern phone call to the airbase, the good doctor insisted that Nancy Pelosi send him written instructions to let the ladies catch their flight, which Ms. Pelosi, to her credit, promptly did, no doubt thinking she had just wasted 10 minutes of her valuable time on a really stupid made-up problem. Then, Dr. Gates, apparently with plenty of time on his hands, tried to lure Fancy Nancy into a verbal pissing contest over whose rules were being followed, the DOD's or Congresses, strongly implying that Nancy had asked him to break a House rule and that he had done so only because she made him.

Very ironically, this little (and it's really little) temper tantrum makes Dr. Gates look like the biggest pussy in this teapot tempest.

Speaking of national defense, back in Iraq, our allies the Shiites seemed to have almost lost the war last week, to other Shiites. The fact that our guy Maliki even started the fight seemed to take Dr. Gates by surprise. And Gates is supposed to be our intel superstar! God only knows what this all means, but the word from the tv people is that Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army beat the pants off the Iraqi government forces, even when our Air Force sent in planes to help. Maybe our Air Force didn't do a good job because it was focused on bigger issues here in the U.S., like keeping girlie girls off their planes. Let's hope that was what happened, and that this was not an example of their best work.

Muqtada - Winning Ugly

I don't know how he does it, but Sadr just keeps on keeping on. He has friends in Iran, where he stays when he needs a few days off. This drives our guys crazy, but I really don't understand why we care. If we had any sense, we would be the ones cutting a deal with Sadr, and not letting the Iranians have him. Duh. So, count this as loss number 2 for the week for Dr. Gates.

And of course, number 3 is Boeing's successful whining about losing the Air Force's KC-45A air tanker contract to Northrop Grumman, after the Air Force screwed up the process five years ago by their officers taking bribes from Boeing. Now Boeing, after phoning in it's bid effort, is trying to call itself, untruthfully, the only domestic plane builder, and accuses the DOD of putting our defense into the hands of dirty little foreigners, including the French. While this is not entirely Gate's fault, he should have seen it coming and managed it better.

KC 45A

I really can't hardly wait for the Democrats to take over.