…Each of the Bush Administration’s three signature initiatives — Homeland Security, the Iraq war and reconstruction in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina recovery — has been linked to wasteful contract spending.

Spending is categorized in the report as highly concentrated on a few large contractors, with the five largest contractors receiving over 20 percent of contract dollars awarded in 2005. Last year, the largest federal contractor, Lockheed Martin, received contracts worth more than the total combined budgets of the Department of Commerce, the Department of the Interior, the Small Business Administration and the U.S. Congress.

But the fastest growing contractor under the Bush Administration has been Halliburton. Federal spending on Halliburton contracts shot up an astonishing 600% between 2000 and 2005.
rawstory.com

GOP Kills Bill to Police Halliburton
…”What we have discovered is pretty unbelievable,” said Dorgan last week. “We have direct testimony from physicians, Army doctors and others about providing nonpotable water for shaving, brushing teeth, that is in worse condition as water than the raw water coming out of the Euphrates River.

“Let me describe some of the firsthand eyewitness issues in Iraq,” Dorgan continued. “Brand new $85,000 trucks that were left on the side of the road because of a flat tire and then subsequently burned. Twenty-five tons, 50,000 pounds, of nails ordered by Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), the wrong size, that are laying in the sands of Iraq. Forty-two thousand meals a day charged to the taxpayers by Halliburton and only 14,000 are actually served.”

After telling the amazing tale of the KBR Halliburton subsidiary ordering hand towels for soldiers embroidered with the “KBR” logo, to allow them to double the price of the towels, Dorgan told one Halliburton whistleblower’s story of his company serving food date-stamped “expired” to American troops rather than throwing it away.

“[Halliburton was] serving food at a cafeteria in Iraq for the soldiers, and a man named Roy who was the supervisor in the food service kitchen said that the food was date-stamped ‘expired,”’ said Dorgan. “In other words, it had a date stamp, which meant the food wasn’t good anymore, and he was told by superiors that it doesn’t matter. Feed it to the troops. It doesn’t matter that they had an expired date stamped — feed it to the troops.”

But apparently the support-the-troops types on the Republican side of the aisle only support them until their major contributors are caught feeding them possibly tainted food before they go into battle — at that point, I guess the love is gone.

STOCKHOLM – US spending in Iraq and Afghanistan is expected to help push global military expenditure further up in 2006 after hitting US$1.12 ($1.81) trillion a year earlier, a research body said.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in its latest yearbook that the United States was behind 48 per cent of total world arms spending in 2005 and had accounted for most of the year’s 3.5 per cent overall gain.
nzherald.co.nz

The Pentagon activated its new U.S. ground-based interceptor missile defense system, and officials announced yesterday that any long-range missile launch by North Korea would be considered a “provocative act.”

Poor weather conditions above where the missile site was located by U.S. intelligence satellites indicates that an immediate launch is unlikely, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

However, intelligence officials said preparations have advanced to the point where a launch could take place within several days to a month.

Two Navy Aegis warships are patrolling near North Korea as part of the global missile defense and would be among the first sensors that would trigger the use of interceptors, the officials said yesterday.

The U.S. missile defense system includes 11 long-range interceptor missiles, including nine deployed at Fort Greeley, Alaska, and two at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The system was switched from test to operational mode within the past two weeks, the officials said.
washtimes.com

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has asked for National Guard troops and state police to patrol the city and help quell violence after five teenagers were killed over the weekend, local media said on Monday.

Five teens were shot to death before dawn on Saturday in one of the most deadly attacks in the history of the city, which left residents reeling.

Nagin responded at a special city council meeting by saying he would ask Gov. Kathleen Blanco for the troops, local television stations WWL-TV and WVUE said on their Web sites.

The weekend shooting raised the number of murders to 52 so far this year, police said, and residents and local media say they feel crime is accelerating.

New Orleans was once one of the most dangerous cities in the United States, but the level of violence dropped sharply in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent evacuation.
reuters.com

The leader of the Islamists who now control most of southern Somalia accused the United States on Saturday of orchestrating what he called a border incursion by hundreds of Ethiopian troops.

“We want the whole world to know what’s going on,” Sheik Sharif Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, told reporters in the provincial town of Jowhar. “The United States is encouraging Ethiopia to take over the area.”

American officials said they were not involved in an incursion, and Ethiopian authorities denied the claims that several hundred of their soldiers had entered Somalia in the southwestern Gedo region on Saturday morning. What had occurred, Ethiopian officials told reporters in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, was that their troops had massed on their side of the border to prevent an incursion from the Islamists in Somalia.
iht.com

Americans ignored pleas to stop funding warlords, Somalians say
MOGADISHU, Somalia – In March, nine of Mogadishu’s most prominent community leaders secretly flew to neighboring Djibouti and pleaded with U.S. officials to stop funding the warlords who were devastating the city. Backing the warlords, they said, would end up strengthening an Islamist militia with a shadowy radical wing.

The Americans ignored their warnings, three of the Somalians at the meeting told Knight Ridder in separate interviews, and the community leaders’ fears came to life this month when the Islamic Courts Union militia defeated the warlords and took control of the Somalian capital.

Now the Bush administration’s Somalia strategy is in tatters. And the Islamist militia is poised to extend its control to all of southern Somalia, where intelligence officials think at least two senior al-Qaida operatives are hiding.

It was impossible to confirm the Somalian leaders’ version of events. U.S. officials in Washington have declined to comment on whether the United States provided aid to the warlords. However, two U.S. intelligence officials, speaking anonymously because they aren’t authorized to talk to journalists, confirmed that CIA financial support was coordinated by the agency’s station chief in Nairobi.

Somalia: Who supports who?
…President Abdullahi Yusuf’s first visit was to Addis Ababa, and it was reported that he wanted a 20,000-strong mainly Ethiopian force to reinforce his government.

This was strenuously resisted by many Somalis, and by a number of neighbouring governments.

So who is arming President Abdullahi Yusuf and the transitional government? Apart from the support his government has received from Ethiopia, there are a number of reports of Yemeni planes arriving in Baidoa, bringing arms and ammunition.

Finances for the courts are reportedly being provided by rich individuals in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

There have also been reports that Eritrea – which has a long-running border dispute with Ethiopia – has been supplying arms to the Islamists. This is denied by the authorities in Asmara.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as many as a hundred people have died in a suspected outbreak of pneumonic plague in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Nineteen of the deaths were in the northeast Ituri district, an area known to be the most active area of human plague in the world with some 1,000 cases each year.

The WHO says some cases of bubonic plague have also been reported, but as yet there are no figures.

The outbreak began there in mid-May; both strains of the plague are spread mostly by fleas, causing an infection in the lungs which slowly suffocates the victim.

If treated promptly with antibiotics, survival is usually assured, but when left untreated, the pneumonic strain which can also be spread from human to human via respiratory droplets, has a very high fatality rate.
news-medical.net

AK-47s known as “credit cards” in lawless Congo
BUNIA, Congo (Reuters) – Some fight in flip-flops, others hope potions will turn their enemy’s bullets into water and most take little time to aim, trusting in the theory: “He who makes most noise wins”.

But the government soldiers, militia fighters and bush bandits in eastern Congo all have one thing in common – an AK-47 assault rifle.

“At $20 to $50 each, it’s pretty easy to get your hands on an AK out here,” explains a source close to the militia groups in Democratic Republic of Congo’s lawless Ituri district.

“There is no shortage of weapons, there are plenty of them,” the source added. “Of course ammunition is needed, but that comes in from Uganda easily.”

Ituri is a particularly bloody corner of Congo, a mineral-rich but shattered country where four million people have been killed, mostly from war-related hunger and disease, since 1998.

Far removed from central government authority, Ituri has long porous borders with countries coveting its natural resources and a thinly stretched body of United Nations peacekeepers. The region highlights the challenges of controlling the flow of arms around Africa’s Great Lakes.

WASHINGTON „ The Bush administration is lobbying to prevent Venezuela from securing an open seat on the U.N. Security Council because of concern that its leading South American rival could confound plans to step up pressure on Iran.

Under United Nations rules, Latin American governments are entitled to pick a country from the region to fill the rotating seat that comes open next year. Venezuela has been campaigning for the post.

But the Bush administration is urging Latin American countries to vote for a U.S. ally, Guatemala, instead, warning that the populist government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez cannot be trusted on crucial issues such as Iran’s nuclear program, given its “disruptive and irresponsible behavior” in international organizations.

Behind the scenes, U.S. officials have been applying pressure, even to close allies, Latin American diplomats say. For example, Washington has agreed to sell F-16 fighter jets to Chile, but are warning that Chilean pilots will not be trained to fly them if the government supports Venezuela’s Security Council bid, the diplomats said.
ktla.trb.com

The first heavy attack on Ramadi by the American and Iraqi forces was launched last Friday, the 9th of June. Ramadi is the capital of the Anbar province and is situated about 100 km west of Baghdad, on the Euphrates. The city’s population numbers approximately four hundred thousand and it is well-known for its strong opposition to the foreign occupation. The anti-war front meticulously followed the build-up of the assault, but the official press didn’t seem to be aware. The press mentioned rumors about a pending offensive against Ramadi a few times, but spokespersons of the US Army denied those plans.
brusselstribunal.org

An environmental disaster is brewing in the heartland of Iraq’s northern Sunni-led insurgency, where Iraqi officials say that in a desperate move to dispose of millions of barrels of an oil refinery byproduct called “black oil,” the government pumped it into open mountain valleys and leaky reservoirs next to the Tigris River and set it on fire.
The resulting huge black bogs are threatening the river and the precious groundwater in the area. The suffocating plumes of smoke are carried as far as 65 kilometers, or 40 miles, downwind to Tikrit, the provincial capital that formed Saddam Hussein’s base of power.

An Iraqi environmental engineer who has visited the area described it as a kind of black swampland consisting of oil-saturated terrain and large standing pools of oil stretching across several mountain valleys. The clouds of smoke, said the engineer, Ayad Younis, “were so heavy that they obstructed breathing and visibility in the area and represent a serious environmental danger.”

At Iraq’s damaged and outdated refineries, as much as 40 percent of what is produced pours forth as this heavy, viscous substance, which used to be extensively exported to more efficient foreign operations for further refining. But the insurgency has stalled government- controlled exports from the area containing Iraq’s major northern refinery complex at Bayji, the officials say.

So the backed-up black oil – known to the rest of the world as the lower grades of fuel oil – was sent along a short pipeline from Bayji and dumped in a mountainous area, called Makhool.
iht.com

Hours before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees. This cable, marked “sensitive” and obtained by The Washington Post, outlines in spare prose the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees’ constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government.
washingtonpost.com