Miscellaneous

I'm guessing that most folks reading this have already seen a lot of this elsewhere: yet more violence and death in Iraq, then there was the admission by Halliburton that at least two employees were a little too, uh, agressive, in working with a Kuwaiti subcontractor--from the looks of it, they demanded a kickback in exchange for steering business their way. Here's a statement by Randy Harl, spokesperson for the big H: "We have diligent internal controls and a strong corporate code of business conduct. We have a fiduciary responsibility to our clients to carefully monitor every transaction."

In other words, we promise not to do it again, unless we're CERTAIN we can't get caught.

Oh, and you've gotta love David Kay's admonishing of the CIA. Does this administration have no shame? Does anyone NOT believe that the Administration was "stovepiping" raw intelligence to the political appointees, instead of having it vetted in the normal process? That's like getting a ticket from a traffic cop for ignoring the signal light--because you were following his directions...

There's a feature series over at Southern Exposure--Atrios was where I first came across the link--discussing war profiteering both in the present conflicts and over the ages.

Here's something extremely troubling. I came across a post from Salam Pax, which included the following:

...being pushed into the corner labeled [young male of Middle Eastern / Muslim origin] hasn’t been much fun lately...The current western world view has antagonized a huge number of people, the West wasn’t that interested in dialogue. We were simply labeled as Muslim terrorist.
One of the more amusing results of this has been my friend’s G arrest by American soldiers while he was on a job for an American Newspaper. He was given the head-sack and an angry soldier shouted at him “it was you [your type] who attacked the world trade center”. Now this is funny because G. is so pro-American it gets to me sometimes, he is Christian (but he hates it when you tell him that because he really is “agnostic”), so why did the soldier accuse him of attacking the World Trade Center? Because he had a Muslim looking beard and looked “of mid-eastern origin”.

In this vein, I'd encourage a look at Orcinus, who titles the link The American Taliban--but this isn't about John Walker Lindh or Yaser Hamdi. The focus is on good old "patriots." Link to the Alternet interview with Daniel Levitas, who provides lots of information about folks every bit as hell bent upon wrecking havoc in the US, except that, far from being "swarthy Middle Easterners," they are, instead, the living confederates of Timothy McVeigh.

By way of example, here's a paragraph from the Alternet interview:

What was the reaction of these groups to 9/11?

A number of neo-Nazi groups were tremendously animated: They praised the terrorists of Al Qaeda, even though they denounced them in racist terms because they were Arabs. "We may not want them marrying our daughters. But anyone who is willing to fly a plane into a building to kill Jews is alright by me," said one of the leaders of the National Alliance. "My only concern is that we Aryans didn't do this and that the rag-heads are ahead of us on the Lone Wolf point scale," said another. These folks call themselves 'patriots' and defenders of the constitution, but some of them are just as theologically committed to murder as the most violent fanatics of radical Islam. Based on what we've seen post 9/11, we cannot afford to be concerned about terrorism as simply a "foreign" phenomenon. From the earliest days of the Ku Klux Klan, domestic hate groups have been all too eager to perpetrate terrorism against their fellow Americans.

Are these folks crackpots? Without a doubt. Are they dangerous? You decide. My attitude is: most of these lunatics woudn't even cut it with the Redneck Special Forces--but all it takes is one to really ruin your day.