Monday, Feb 23rd
Last update09:12:45 AM GMT
Established by Congress to investigate and expose government waste, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan has decided to not reveal its volumes of materials to the public for another two decades.
After three years of work, the commission officially shut down last week, having concluded that the U.S. misspent between $31 billion and $60 billion in contracting for services in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Vatican called Monday for radical reform of the world's financial systems, including the creation of a global political authority to manage the economy.
Vatican pronouncements on the economy are meant to guide world leaders as well as the global church. United States Roman Catholic bishops, for example, have released a voter guide for the 2012 election that highlights social concerns such as ending poverty.
Another revisionist memoir is about to reach the book stores of America. Condoleezza Rice, like several of her neocon cohorts, has written a memoir to salvage her legacy of deceit and duplicity as the nation's National Security Adviser and Secretary of State during the Bush/PNAC years..
Predictably, and with the complicity of reviewers in the corporate media, a near decade of shame and evil will morph into the benign portrait of an American champion of liberty and democracy in a nation that could afford her No Higher Honor.
U.S. spies have been spying on their counterparts in East Germany and West Germany, recently released documents indicate.
The CIA was expected to monitor East German spies during the Cold War, but U.S. documents indicated Americans were spying on their allies in West Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst as well, The Local reported Monday.
A key piece of America’s enduring presence in Iraq — a multimillion-dollar program to train police forces — could become a “bottomless pit” for taxpayer funding if officials fail to adequately assess the needs of Iraqi security forces and obtain assurances from Iraqi officials about the program’s future, according to a new federal watchdog report.
Since 2003, the United States has spent about $8 billion to train, staff and equip Iraqi police forces. With the U.S. military preparing to leave Iraq at the end of December, responsibility for the police training program transferred to the State Department this month. The department has requested $887 million to continue operating the program this fiscal year.
The Army laboratory identified by prosecutors as the source of the anthrax that killed five people in the fall of 2001 was rife with such security gaps that the deadly spores could have easily been smuggled out of the facility, outside investigators found.
The existing security procedures _ described in two long-secret reports _ were so lax they would have allowed any researcher, aide or temporary worker to walk out of the Army bio-weapons lab at Fort Detrick, Md, with a few drops of anthrax _ starter germs that could grow the trillions of spores used to fill anthrax-laced letters sent to Congress and the media.
With all the debate about health care reform (which is NOT what is going on...see below), the epidemic of American idiocy is being totally ignored. The debate about the state of health care serves to demonstrate how economic overlords have completely destroyed the average American's ability to think critically or to see the obvious. American's are fooled into being their own worst enemies on so many levels. But when it comes to the debate on health care, it is absolutely frightening to see how stupid this nation has become.
Let's talk reality here...
Wall Street’s audacity to corrupt knows no bounds and the cooptation of government by the 1 per cent knows no limits. How else to explain $150 million of taxpayer money going to equip a government facility in lower Manhattan where Wall Street firms, serially charged with corruption, get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law abiding citizens.
According to newly unearthed documents, the planning for this high tech facility on lower Broadway dates back six years. In correspondence from 2005 that rests quietly in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s archives,
A massively thorough study – funded in part by a pair of US oil billionaires who are opponents of climate-disruption remediation – has come to the conclusion that the earth is, indeed, warming.
In fact, it's warming just as much as more-limited studies conducted by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and the UK's Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change said it was: about 1°C since 1950.
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