Government Auditors Blast Weapons Budget

Government auditors issued a scathing review yesterday of dozens of the Pentagon's biggest weapons systems, saying ships, aircraft and satellites are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average. In addition, none of the systems that GAO looked at had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages.

Auditors said the Defense Department showed few signs of improvement since the GAO began issuing its annual assessments of selected weapons systems six years ago. "It's not getting any better by any means," said Michael Sullivan, director of GAO's acquisition and sourcing team. "It's taking longer and costing more."

Chris Isleib, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a written statement, "We'd like to look at what GAO has said, and then at the appropriate time make an informed comment."

The Pentagon has doubled the amount it has committed to new systems, from $790 billion in 2000 to $1.6 trillion last year, according to the 205-page GAO report. Total acquisition costs in 2007 for major defense programs increased 26 percent from first estimates. In 2000, 75 programs had cost increases totaling 6 percent. Development costs in 2007 for the systems rose 40 percent from initial projections, compared with 27 percent in 2000. Current programs are delivered 21 months late on average, five months later than in 2000.

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Iraq Offensive Backfires

When President Bush said Friday that the Iraqi government's unprecedented offensive against Shiite militias would be a "defining moment in the history of a free Iraq," he surely didn't have in mind the results evident today.

Despite strong backing from U.S. forces, the week-long offensive failed, leaving militias holding the port city of Basra, which controls 80% of Iraqi oil. That failure appears to have weakened Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his government, which are central to U.S. hopes for Iraq.

Just as discouraging, the setback strengthened the hand of Muqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric whose forces were the primary target of the attack and who the United States has long seen as a primary threat to stability. Not only did al-Sadr beat back government troops, he managed to portray himself as a peacemaker and al-Maliki and America as not-very-competent aggressors.

In another piece of bad news, all this helped Iran, where al-Sadr met emissaries of the Iraqi government seeking to broker a cease-fire.

Perhaps the damage will be mitigated in coming days. Fighting and political maneuvering continue. But after months of declining violence, it's hard not to chalk the offensive up as a significant setback and a recurrence of the strategic mistakes that characterized the war until the success of the recent troop "surge."

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Israel to Build on Contested Land

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had barely left Israel on Monday after her latest peacekeeping mission when Israeli officials announced plans to build 1,400 new homes on land Palestinians claim for a future state.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed to keep building in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, dismissing Palestinian claims that construction on contested land is the greatest obstacle to peace.

The disclosure of the construction plans immediately after Rice's visit demonstrated the intensity of the political pressures that Olmert faces.

He continues to support construction in disputed areas, over the objections of the Palestinians and the U.S., because it allows him to keep his fragile coalition intact.

The Israeli construction plans threatened to make it even harder for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to overcome his people's skepticism that diplomacy, not violence, would win them a state.

Rice arrived in the region on Saturday for three days of talks with Israeli and Palestinian officials meant to advance the U.S. goal of achieving a peace agreement before President Bush leaves office in January 2009.

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Former Pentagon Official Pleads Guilty to Espionage

A Pentagon official pleaded guilty Monday to passing US military secrets to an agent working for China after being showered with gifts and gambling money, the Department of Justice said.

Gregg William Bergersen, 51, faces up to 10 years in jail after admitting to one count of conspiracy to disclose national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it, the department said in a statement.

It said Bergersen started handing secret information in March 2007 to Tai Shen Kuo, 58, a Taiwan-born US citizen with business interests in New Orleans.

Bergersen worked as a weapons systems policy analyst at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which implements the Pentagon's foreign military sales program.

Unbeknown to Bergersen, Kuo was passing the information to an unnamed Chinese government official. But the DoJ statement said the US official knew the documents, many of which were about US weapons sales to Taiwan, were classified and should not be shared with outsiders.

"During the course of the conspiracy, Kuo cultivated a friendship with Bergersen, bestowing on him gifts, cash payments, dinners, and money for gambling during trips to Las Vegas," it said.

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Americans Should Brace for Trillion Dollar Meltdown

Be it ever so devalued, $1 trillion is a lot of dough.

That's roughly on a par with the Russian economy. More than double the market value of Exxon Mobil Corp. About nine times the combined wealth of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

Yet $1 trillion is the amount of defaults and writedowns Americans will likely witness before they emerge at the far side of the bursting credit bubble, estimates Charles R. Morris in his shrewd primer, ``The Trillion Dollar Meltdown.'' That calculation assumes an orderly unwinding, which he doesn't expect.

``The sad truth,'' he writes, ``is that subprime is just the first big boulder in an avalanche of asset writedowns that will rattle on through much of 2008.''

Expect the landslide to cascade through high-yield bonds, commercial mortgages, leveraged loans, credit cards and -- the big unknown -- credit-default swaps, Morris says. The notional value for those swaps, which are meant to insure bondholders against default, covered about $45 trillion in portfolios as of mid-2007, up from some $1 trillion in 2001, he writes.

Morris can't be dismissed as a crank. A lawyer, former banker and author of 10 other books, he knows a thing or two about the complex instruments that have spread toxic debt throughout the credit system. He once ran a company that made software for creating and analyzing securitized asset pools. Yet he writes with tight clarity and blistering pace.

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Charges Dropped Against 3rd Marine in Haditha Massacre Case

The Marine Corps on Friday dismissed all charges against Lance Cpl. Stephen B. Tatum in connection with the massacre of civilians in Haditha, Iraq. This is the third exoneration of an enlisted Marine linked to the November 2005 killings.

Charges against two other enlisted Marines were previously dropped. The only charges remaining are against Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, who faces court martial on nine counts of voluntary manslaughter later this year.

Tatum had been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of two unarmed children in Haditha. He was also facing charges of reckless endangerment and aggravated assault. If convicted, he could have faced 18 years in prison.

The charges against him were dismissed only hours before he was to go to trial. In exchange for the dropping of charges he has agreed to testify at Wuterich’s trial, although his lawyers say there has been no agreement with prosecutors on what he will say.

The dismissal of charges against Tatum is but the latest in a string of decisions in the Haditha case which has served to exonerate the military at all levels and justify its actions in the November 19, 2005 atrocity.

No soldier involved in the killings of two dozen unarmed Iraqi men, women and children will face murder charges. None of the commanding officers will face criminal charges in connection with the massacre.

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UN Could Lead New 9/11 Investigation, Says Japanese MP

Japanese member of Parliament Yukihisa Fujita told the Alex Jones Show yesterday that a potential new investigation of the 9/11 cover-up could be led by global parliamentarians he has been in contact with, or even by the United Nations itself.

Fujita, an MP for the Japanese Democratic Party, and a member of the House of Councillors in the Diet (national legislature), presented evidence which contradicted the official 9/11 story during a widely publicized Japanese Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee meeting in January of this year.

Following Fujita’s presentation in the Japanese Diet, he also took part in a 9/11 truth conference at the EU Parliament in Brussels on February 26th which was hosted by Italian MEP Giullietto Chiesa (both presentations can be viewed at the end of this article).

"This is something Parliamentarians of various countries could ask - I was in Europe meeting with European MP’s and they are also thinking about asking the UN to investigate, so these kind of efforts need to be done internationally," said Fujita, adding that he had visited eleven different European countries in an attempt to garner support for the move.

Fujita said the reaction to his presentation of the evidence during a session of the Japanese Parliament was encouraging, adding that several members of his party were already aware of some of the issues surrounding the incredulity of the official story.

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Justices Let Ruling Stand on Illegal F.B.I. Search

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a lower court ruling that the F.B.I. went too far in searching the office of Representative William J. Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat accused of using his position to promote business deals in Africa.

Without comment, the justices declined to review a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which concluded last August that agents had violated the Constitution by the methods it used in the May 2006 search.

The appeals court did not find that the raid itself was unconstitutional; rather, it found that the F.B.I. violated constitutional separation of powers by allowing agents to look freely through Congressional files for incriminating evidence.

The ruling last August told the bureau to return legislative documents to Mr. Jefferson. It did not, however, affect other items seized from his office, including computer hard drives. Nor did it affect evidence seized in a separate raid on the Congressman’s Washington-area home, including $90,000 found wrapped in aluminum foil in frozen-food containers in his kitchen freezer.

The 18-hour search of Mr. Jefferson’s office on Capitol Hill marked the first time that the F.B.I. had searched a Congressional office, and it touched off a clash between the Bush administration and lawmakers of both parties.

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Saudi Arabia Preparing for Nuclear Fallout from US Attack on Iran

Popular government-guided Saudi newspaper Okaz recently reported that the Saudi Shura Council approved of nuclear fallout preparation plans only a day after US Vice President Dick Cheney met with the Kingdom's high ranking officials, including King Abdullah.

As a result of the Shura ruling, the Saudi government will start the implementation of 'national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the Kingdom following expert warnings of possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors'.

As the details of Cheney's recent discussions with his Arab allies remain unclear, pundits have begun to question the timing of the drastic measure by the Shura.

Analysts claim the Bush administration had long rattled sabers with Iran over its nuclear program and is now informing its Arab allies of a potential war, in turn, allowing them to take precautionary measures.

With the sudden resignation of Admiral William Fallon, a high-ranking US military official who was a fierce critic of White House war rhetoric against Iran, and reports of the recent deployment of a US nuclear submarine in the Persian Gulf; there is speculation that Washington is moving forward with yet another war plan in the oil-rich Middle East.

US Funded Colombian Army Offensive Killing Civilians and Dressing Corpses as Rebels

SAN FRANCISCO, Colombia -- All Cruz Elena González saw when the soldiers came past her house was a corpse, wrapped in a tarp and strapped to a mule. A guerrilla killed in combat, soldiers muttered, as they trudged past her meek home in this town in northwestern Colombia.

She soon learned that the body belonged to her 16-year-old son, Robeiro Valencia, and that soldiers had classified him as a guerrilla killed in combat, a claim later discredited by the local government human rights ombudsman. "Imagine what I felt when my other son told me it was Robeiro," González said in recounting the August killing. "He was my boy."

Funded in part by the Bush administration, a six-year military offensive has helped the government here wrest back territory once controlled by guerrillas and kill hundreds of rebels in recent months, including two top commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

But under intense pressure from Colombian military commanders to register combat kills, the army has in recent years also increasingly been killing poor farmers and passing them off as rebels slain in combat, government officials and human rights groups say. The tactic has touched off a fierce debate in the Defense Ministry between tradition-bound generals who favor an aggressive campaign that centers on body counts and reformers who say the army needs to develop other yardsticks to measure battlefield success.

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CIA Enlists Google's Help for Spy Work

Google has been recruited by US intelligence agencies to help them better process and share information they gather about suspects.

Agencies such as the National Security Agency have bought servers on which Google-supplied search technology is used to process information gathered by networks of spies around the world.

Google is also providing the search features for a Wikipedia-style site, called Intellipedia, on which agents post information about their targets that can be accessed and appended by colleagues, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The contracts are just a number that have been entered into by Google's 'federal government sales team', that aims to expand the company's reach beyond its core consumer and enterprise operations.

In the most innovative service, for which Google equipment provides the core search technology, agents are encouraged to post intelligence information on a secure forum, which other spies are free to read, edit, and tag - like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Depending on their clearance, agents can log on to Intellipedia and gain access to three levels of info - top secret, secret and sensitive, and sensitive but unclassified. So far 37,000 users have established accounts on the service, and the database now extends to 35,000 articles, according to Sean Dennehy, chief of Intellipedia development for the CIA.

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9/11 Truth: A Modern Day Noah's Ark

"You wanna know what I think? You guys who think 9/11 was an inside job are crazy as hell. My wife was the senator from New York when that happened. I was down at Ground Zero. I saw the victims' families. You're nuts." --- William Jefferson Clinton

By Alicia Hope / GangsterGovernment.com

Early writers discovered elaborate allegorical meanings for Noah and the Ark. In the 1st Epistle of Peter those saved by the Ark from the waters of the Flood are said to prefigure the salvation of Christians through baptism.

St. Hippolytus of Rome, seeking to demonstrate that "the ark was a symbol of the Christ who was expected," stated that the vessel had its door on the east side, that the bones of Adam were brought aboard together with gold, frankincense and myrrh, and that the Ark floated to and fro in the four directions on the waters, making the sign of the cross, before eventually landing on Mount Kardu.

The deluge is coming!

Will it be another terror attack perpetrated by our own government? Will it be the economic recession of 2008? Will the real "threat to world peace" turn out to be a biological attack that kills 80% of the world's inhabitants? Will the Violent Radicalization Act cause many with "extreme beliefs" to be round up and shipped off to KBR's clandestine detention centers? Take your pick!

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Republicans and “Free Market” Zealots Bring Death to America

By Paul Craig Roberts

Crude oil for April delivery hit $110 per barrel. The US dollar fell to a new low against the Euro. It now takes $1.55 to purchase one Euro.

These new highs against the dollar are the ongoing story of the collapse of the US dollar as world reserve currency and corresponding collapse of American power.

Each new decision from the insane Bush Regime pushes the dollar a little further along to oblivion. The same Fed announcement that boosted the stock market on March 11 sent the dollar reeling and the price of oil up. The Fed’s announcement that it and other central banks are going to deal with the derivative crisis by monetizing $200 billion of the troubled instruments signaled more dollar inflation.

Of course, something needed to be done to forestall an implosion of the financial system, but a less costly alternative was at hand. The mark-to- market rule could have been suspended in order to halt the forced sale and write down of assets and to provide time in which to sort out derivative values, which are higher than the fire sale prices.

Debt economy has overreached its limit

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States Maneuver to Avoid Penalties of New Federal ID Program

The governors of Maine and South Carolina are working with the Department of Homeland Security to avert a showdown before tomorrow's deadline over a federal demand for new driver's licenses that could leave residents of those states unable to board aircraft, officials said.

Forty-six other states have formally sought and received extensions of a May deadline for starting work on the new licenses, and Montana and New Hampshire struck a deal a week ago that prompted DHS to grant them extensions they had not requested.

Over the past three years, DHS has struggled to fulfill the counterterrorism mandate set by Congress in 2005 to produce the new licenses by May. As DHS's timetable has slipped, resistance to the plan, known as Real ID, has grown across the country.

The plan was enacted because all but one of the hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001, had acquired, legitimately or by fraud, IDs allowing them to board planes and travel. The law, which overhauls how state ID cards and driver's licenses must be awarded, is meant to combat forgery and fraud by standardizing license data to be shared across government databases.

It requires, for example, that states verify applicants' citizenship status, check identity documents such as birth certificates, and cross-check information with other states and the federal government.

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Baghdad Curfew Extended Indefinitely

Iraqi authorities on Saturday extended a curfew in Baghdad indefinitely in an attempt to contain clashes between Shi'ite militants and Iraqi security forces that have threatened to spiral out of control.

But in an indication that the violence was set to continue, Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr ordered his followers not to lay down their weapons, defying a five-day-old crackdown by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who has ordered them to disarm.

The latest violence has spread from the southern city of Basra through towns in Iraq's southern Shi'ite heartland and neighborhoods of Baghdad.

"Moqtada al-Sadr asks his followers not to deliver weapons to the government. Weapons should be turned over only to a government which can expel the (U.S.) occupiers," Sadr aide Hassan Zargani told Reuters by telephone.

Maliki has staked his authority on disarming Sadr's followers with a major military operation. But his forces have made little progress driving fighters from the streets and instead have provoked rebellion in towns across the south.

The prime minister initially gave Sadr's followers in Basra 72 hours to disarm, but with little progress on the ground he extended the deadline until April 8.

The curfew in Baghdad, imposed on Thursday, was due to expire early on Sunday.

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Bush Is "Biggest Thug" Ever To Occupy White House, Historian Parenti Says

By Sherwood Ross

President George W. Bush is “the biggest thug” ever to occupy the White House, writes historian Michael Parenti, adding that most post-World War II U.S. presidents have also acted like “thugs.”

His “thug” list includes Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Conspicuously absent from his list are Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Jimmy Carter.

What the thugs have in common, Parenti says, is their dedication “to a U.S. global interventionist policy” and support for “gargantuan, bloated, criminally wasteful military budgets” to execute those interventions.

President Kennedy “undermined the democratic government in Guyana and supported a lot of the counter-insurgency dirty works that were going on in Central America,” Parenti writes in The Long Term View, a journal of informed opinion published by The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

President Johnson followed him, perpetrating “the first major escalation of Vietnam” and also invading the Dominican Republic “when it threatened to have a reformist left government that would take over and move in a democratic revolutionary course.”

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Senior Pentagon Officials Orchestrating Detainees Prosecutions to Benefit GOP?

By Carol Rosenberg / Miami Herald

The Navy lawyer for Osama bin Laden's driver argues in a Guantánamo military commissions motion that senior Pentagon officials are orchestrating war crimes prosecutions for the 2008 campaign.

The Pentagon declined late Friday to address the defense lawyer's allegations, noting that the matter is under litigation.

The brief filed Thursday by Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer directly challenged the integrity of President Bush's war court.

Notably, it describes a Sept. 29, 2006, meeting at the Pentagon in which Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, a veteran White House appointee, asked lawyers to consider Sept. 11, 2001, prosecutions in light of the campaign.

''We need to think about charging some of the high-value detainees because there could be strategic political value to charging some of these detainees before the election,'' England is quoted as saying.

A senior Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, declined to address the specifics, saying ``the trial process will surface the facts in this case.''

''It has always been everybody's desire to move as swiftly and deliberately as possible to conduct military commissions,'' he added. ``But I can tell you emphatically that leadership has always been extraordinarily careful to guard against any unlawful command influence.''

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U.S. Has Few Options in Iraq's Volatile South

Also see: 19 Tense Hours in Sadr City Alongside the Mahdi Army

As U.S. warplanes attacked targets in Basra yesterday, Bush administration officials acknowledged that their hands-off strategy toward southern Iraq in recent years has left them with little knowledge of the conflicts among competing Shiite groups there and few ways of influencing them.

President Bush yesterday hailed the decision of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to launch a full-scale military offensive against militias in Basra as a "defining moment" for his leadership. But other officials said the administration remains unsure of Maliki's motives and warned that the ongoing battle risks sending the country spiraling back toward the cataclysmic violence levels of 2006 and early 2007.

"This is a precarious situation," a senior official familiar with U.S. intelligence in southern Iraq said, with "a lot to be gained and a lot to lose." This official and others said that even as Maliki takes needed military action in Basra, he appears to be positioning himself and his Shiite political allies for dominance in provincial elections this fall.

Competition for power and resources in the oil-rich south has been ongoing for months among the Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr; the Badr Corps militia of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the largest single party in the Iraqi parliament; and the breakaway Sadrist movement known as Fadhila. The Shiite groups are opposed and allied with each other in a tangle of national and local issues, with many divisions reflected in factions of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces.

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Ex-Afghanistan Detainee Alleges Torture by U.S.

A resident of Germany who was imprisoned for two months at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan has told an interviewer that his interrogators hung him from a ceiling for five days and that several doctors periodically checked him before authorizing the torture to continue.

Murat Kurnaz said that shortly after his capture in Pakistan in fall 2001, the American interrogators insisted he admit to being an al-Qaeda operative and associate of 9/11 plotter Mohamed Atta. Kurnaz said when he said he did not know Atta or refused to talk, the interrogators punished him by hanging him by his arms to the rafters of a freezing aircraft hangar.

Kurnaz's allegations about his abusive treatment in a prison at the U.S. military base in Kandahar are to be publicly aired for the first time tomorrow on CBS's "60 Minutes." He was released by the U.S. military in August 2006 after spending nearly five years at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Kurnaz made similar allegations of systematic torture in 2005 when he was still a U.S. prisoner, according to newly declassified notes his attorney took during a conversation at Guantanamo. Kurnaz said then that interrogators in Kandahar dunked his head in water, administered electric shocks to the soles of his feet and hung him by his hands -- when he denied being a terrorist.

Kurnaz, who the U.S. military eventually freed without giving a reason, is publishing a book in April that describes his experiences in custody. An ethnic Turk raised in Germany, Kurnaz traveled to Pakistan to study Islam in 2001. He was seized by Pakistani police after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and was turned over to U.S. troops as a terrorism suspect for a cash bounty, military records show.

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Residents of Maine & South Carolina in Jeopardy With Federal ID Law

Starting in May, driver’s licenses issued in Maine and South Carolina may not be accepted as identification at airports and federal buildings unless the states work out a last-minute agreement with the federal Department of Homeland Security.

The states are refusing to ask the agency to extend the deadline for applying new layers of security in their identification systems as required under the federal Real ID Act. Congress passed the legislation in 2005 with the intention of making it harder for terrorists to obtain driver’s licenses.

The final Real ID regulations were released Jan. 11, and states have until Monday to request an extension of the compliance date. Without an extension, driver’s licenses from Maine and South Carolina will no longer be deemed valid as identification at airports and federal buildings starting May 11, the original date of compliance. As an alternative, travelers could use passports.

“If an individual shows up at an airport on May 11 or later and their licenses are from any state not in compliance, it’s effectively showing up without federal identification of any kind,” said Amy Kudwa, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. “Individuals in those scenarios will have to have added security and screening.”

Maine and South Carolina are among a number of states that have passed laws barring participation in the Real ID program. The others have all won extensions, and Maine and South Carolina hope to be granted extensions as well, without formally requesting them.

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