:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 8.31.2007 ::

:: "Who's profiting from the Iraq war?" ::

Military contractors that set up utilities, prepare food or make bulletproof vests are getting a big boost from the conflict. Here's who's getting the most money.
MSNBC.com
By Michael Brush

In a few weeks, Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush administration will report to Congress on the progress of the U.S. military's troop surge in Iraq.

But some of the war's winners are already clear: military contractors who supply everything from bodyguards to bombs, clean socks to ready-to-eat meals. "For the companies involved, this has been a real gravy train," says William Hartung, who tracks defense spending for the New America Foundation.

The White House has proposed military spending of $647 billion in 2008. Adjusted for inflation, that would be the highest level since World War II -- topping even expenditures during Vietnam and the Reagan years, calculates Hartung. The current request for Iraq-related spending for 2008 is $116 billion, which would raise total Iraq war spending to $567 billion.

Who's getting all that money?

Read more here.

More info:

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

The Top 10

- KBR Inc., a division of Halliburton
- Veritas Capital Fund
- Washington Group International
- Environmental Chemical
- International American Products
- Fluor
- Perini
- Parsons
- First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting
- L-3 Communications

"At the time of publication, Michael Brush did not own or control shares of companies mentioned in this column."

posted by me

:: 3:33:00 PM [+] ::
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:: The V-word ::

This is a war for credibility
Commentary by Martin Woollacott
Guardian UK
His motives are suspect but in certain crucial respects Bush is right to compare Iraq to Vietnam.

So, Bush has finally used the V-word. He has drawn the parallel he has in the past refused to draw between Iraq and Vietnam. His avoidance of it had two obvious causes, personal and political: a bystander in the first war and the instigator of the second, he did not want to remind Americans that he was a man who sent others to fight but had never fought himself. And he has not wanted, until now, to suggest that the US faces a disaster in Iraq as big as that represented by defeat in Vietnam.

Why has he invoked Vietnam in this way? Desperation is one answer. Bush paints the spectacle of national humiliation, tragic results for allies and friends, and the emboldening of America's enemies in order to strengthen his weak hold on the allegiance and attention of the American people. Alibi is another: if the war is to be lost, he wants to be on the record that he warned of the consequences if defeatists had their way. That way, Republicans could return to power at some future point claiming that the decline in American influence in the world, to which Iraq will almost certainly lead, came about because Democrats ran out on the war.

Belief is a third answer. The political school to which Bush and his key advisers on Iraq belong believe the Vietnam war was lost because America did not persevere, not because the war was unwinnable. The rift between them and those in their generation who came to see the Vietnam war as a terrible mistake or even as an act of imperialist folly has persisted through the years. This is the longstanding argument that shaped the minds of those who took the decision to invade Iraq.

But what of the parallel itself?

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 12:48:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Secret Spy Court To Consider ACLU Request For Bush Spying Orders ::

A report from Wired News
By Ryan Singel

In a surprising move, a secret spying court ordered the Bush Administration to respond to the ACLU's request for the court to reveal the legal pinnings behind its decisions that gave legal blessing to the government's warrantless wiretapping program.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered (.pdf) the government to respond by August 31 to the ACLU's request to see the court's orders, which the court described as an "unprecedented request that warrants further briefing." The court's own unprecedented response writes the latest strange chapter in the ongoing secret spying saga.

Those orders reportedly include a still-secret decision curtailing the government's spying that led the Administration to successfully press Congress to hurriedly expand the government's spying authority before the summer recess.

The Administration said the nation was at risk because of a "surveillance gap," and a Republican Congressman let slip on Fox News that the secret spying court had made a secret ruling against the Administration. The nature of the so-called "surveillance gap" remains a mystery to the public and even the large majority of Congress.

ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer says this knowledge gap is exactly why the ACLU decided, on August 8, to petition the secret court (.pdf):

"Congress has just granted the president sweeping new surveillance authorities, yet no one knows why or whether that was needed," Jaffer said. "The point of this motion is to make the orders public."

Read more here.

A L S O

The Slashdot community's discussion.

posted by me

:: 11:46:00 AM [+] ::
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:: Gettin' Wiki ::

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
Wired News
By John Borland

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.

This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.

The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.

Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush.

The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."

A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.

Read more here.

posted by me

:: 11:24:00 AM [+] ::
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