Ron Paul is sooooo correct….
Wake Up America…
Coffee Talk!
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BAGHDAD – A U.S. audit has found that the Pentagon cannot account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraq reconstruction money, spotlighting Iraqi complaints that there is little to show for the massive funds pumped into their cash-strapped, war-ravaged nation.
The $8.7 billion in question was Iraqi money managed by the Pentagon, not part of the $53 billion that Congress has allocated for rebuilding. It’s cash that Iraq, which relies on volatile oil revenues to fuel its spending, can ill afford to lose.
“Iraq should take legal action to get back this huge amount of money,” said Sabah al-Saedi, chairman of the Parliamentary Integrity Committee. The money “should be spent for rebuilding the country and providing services for this poor nation.”
The report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction accused the Defense Department of lax oversight and weak controls, though not fraud.
“The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss,” the audit said.
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- US audit finds weakness in Pentagon controls for Iraq funds; $8.7 billion missing (foxnews.com)
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- 8.7 billion dollars in Iraq funds not accounted for: audit (alternet.org)
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Many of the freedoms we enjoy here in the U.S. are quickly eroding as the nation transforms from the land of the free into the land of the enslaved, but what I’m about to share with you takes the assault on our freedoms to a whole new level. You may not be aware of this, but many Western states, including Utah, Washington and Colorado, have long outlawed individuals from collecting rainwater on their own properties because, according to officials, that rain belongs to someone else.
Coffee Talk!
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Oh, yeah. Because eventually cars will have a communication system that by law will have to be able to communicate with the police. This will be factory-installed in the name of safety. It will amount to this: You’ll pass by a cop’s location, and your car will tell the laptop in his car how fast you’re going.
Don’t think so? Live long enough, you’ll get to enjoy this and much more. Rental car companies are already letting subcontractors spy on you and fine you. Retailers are tagging their crappy clothes so that they can track your movements and spending habits. A respected American aircraft manufacturer, maker of one of the aeronautic icons of WWII, is proud to offer a high-altitude, long-flying spy drone that will undoubtedly spy on Americans. I’ve already written a post about the day when the Earthly landscape itself spies on you using “smart dust.”
I hate all this because I’m getting intensely beleaguered of being observed, tracked, and otherwise spied upon in “the Land of the Free.” I must point out, however, that at times I submit voluntarily to observation either because I simply can’t get around it, or a desired activity results in observation.
Coffee Talk!
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- I’m Sick of Being Observed, Tracked, and Spied Upon (lewrockwell.com)
- You will be watched while you read this (trueslant.com)
- Big Mouth and Liar…
Doubts surface on North Korea’s role in ship sinking:
Some in South Korea dispute the official version of events: that a North Korean torpedo ripped apart the Cheonan.
July 23, 2010|By Barbara Demick and John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Seoul — The way U.S. officials see it, there’s little mystery behind the most notorious shipwreck in recent Korean history.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calls the evidence “overwhelming” that the Cheonan, a South Korean warship that sank in March, was hit by a North Korean torpedo. Vice President Joe Biden has cited the South Korean-led panel investigating the sinking as a model of transparency.
But challenges to the official version of events are coming from an unlikely place: within South Korea.
Armed with dossiers of their own scientific studies and bolstered by conspiracy theories, critics dispute the findings announced May 20 by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, which pointed a finger at Pyongyang.
They also question why Lee made the announcement nearly two months after the ship’s sinking, on the very day campaigning opened for fiercely contested local elections. Many accuse the conservative leader of using the deaths of 46 sailors to stir up anti-communist sentiment and sway the vote.
The critics, mostly but not all from the opposition, say it is unlikely that the impoverished North Korean regime could have pulled off a perfectly executed hit against a superior military power, sneaking a submarine into the area and slipping away without detection. They also wonder whether the evidence of a torpedo attack was misinterpreted, or even fabricated.
“I couldn’t find the slightest sign of an explosion,” said Shin Sang-chul, a former shipbuilding executive-turned-investigative journalist. “The sailors drowned to death. Their bodies were clean. We didn’t even find dead fish in the sea.”
Shin, who was appointed to the joint investigative panel by the opposition Democratic Party, inspected the damaged ship with other experts April 30. He was removed from the panel shortly afterward, he says, because he had voiced a contrary opinion: that the Cheonan hit ground in the shallow water off the Korean peninsula and then damaged its hull trying to get off a reef.
“It was the equivalent of a simple traffic accident at sea,” Shin said.
The Defense Ministry said in a statement that Shin was removed because of “limited expertise, a lack of objectivity and scientific logic,” and that he was “intentionally creating public mistrust” in the investigation.
The doubts about the Cheonan have embarrassed the United States, which will s begin joint military exercises Sunday in a show of unity against North Korean aggression. On Friday, an angry North Korea warned that “there will be a physical response” to the maneuvers.
Two South Korean-born U.S. academics have joined the chorus of skepticism, holding a news conference this month in Tokyo to voice their suspicions about the “smoking gun:” a piece of torpedo propeller with a handwritten mark in blue ink reading “No. 1″ in Korean.
“You could put that mark on an iPhone and claim it was manufactured in North Korea,” scoffed one of the academics, Seunghun Lee, a professor of physics at the University of Virginia.
Lee called the discovery of the propeller fragment five days before the government’s news conference suspicious. The salvaged part had more corrosion than would have been expected after just 50 days in the water, yet the blue writing was surprisingly clear, he said.
“The government is lying when they said this was found underwater. I think this is something that was pulled out of a warehouse of old materials to show to the press,” Lee said.
South Korean politicians say they’ve been left in the dark about the investigation.
“We asked for very basic information: interviews with surviving sailors, communication records, the reason the ship was out there,” said Choi Moon-soon, an assemblyman with the Democratic Party.
The legislature also has not been allowed to see the full report by the investigative committee, only a five-page synopsis.
“I don’t know why they haven’t released the report. They are trying to cover up small inconsistencies, and that has cost them credibility,” said Kim Chul-woo, a former Defense Ministry official who is now an analyst with the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a government think tank.
A military oversight body, the Board of Inspection and Audit, has accused senior naval officers of lying and concealing information.
“Military officers deliberately left out or distorted key information in their report to senior officials and the public because they wanted to avoid being held to account for being unprepared,” an official of the inspection board was quoted as telling the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo.
The Cheonan, a 1,200-ton corvette, sank the night of March 26 about 12 miles off North Korea. The first report issued by Yonhap, the official South Korean news agency, said the ship had been struck by a torpedo, but soon afterward the story changed to say the ship sank after being grounded on a reef.
The military repeated that version for days. The audit board found that sailors on a nearby vessel, the Sokcho, who fired off 35 shots with a 76-millimeter cannon around the time of the sinking, were instructed to say they’d been shooting at a flock of birds, even though at first they had said they’d seen a suspected submarine on radar.
On April 2, as Defense Minister Kim Tae-young was testifying before the National Assembly, a cameraman shooting over his right shoulder managed to capture an image of a handwritten note from the president’s office instructing him not to talk about North Korean submarines.
Such inconsistencies and reversals have fueled the suspicions of government critics. U.S. officials, however, say the panel’s conclusion is irrefutable.
Rear Adm. Thomas J. Eccles, the senior U.S. representative on the panel, said investigators considered all possibilities: a grounding, an internal explosion, a collision with a mine. But they quickly concluded that the boat was sunk by a bubble-jet torpedo, which exploded underneath the vessel and didn’t leave the usual signs of an explosion, he said.
“The pattern of damage was exactly aligned with that kind of weapon,” Eccles said in a telephone interview. “Torpedoes these days are designed to drive underneath the target and explode. They use the energy of their explosion to make a bubble that expands and contracts. It is designed to break the back of the ship.”
Pyongyang, meanwhile, denies involvement in the sinking and calls the accusation against it a fabrication.
South Koreans themselves appear to be confused: Polls show that more than 20% of the public doesn’t believe North Korea sank the Cheonan.
Wi Sung-lac, South Korea’s top envoy for North Korean affairs, says the criticism from within has made it difficult to get China and Russia on board to punish Pyongyang for the attack.
“They say, ‘But even in your own country, many people don’t believe the result,’ ” Wi said.
Ju-min Park of The Times’ Seoul Bureau and David S. Cloud of the Washington bureau contributed to this report.
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- North Korea Threatens To Launch ‘Sacred War,’ Use Nukes [Threats] (gawker.com)
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- Is This America’s Fate?
Our game is almost up. We have been giving the Asians paper IOU’s for their goods for decades. Now that we are printing paper money 24x7x365 the Asians are going to start buying anything in America that’s not nailed down before their paper becomes worthless. When all of that paper gets in the economy, can anyone say hyperinflation?
Soon we will all be millionaires…
Coffee Talk!
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A soldier who lost his leg in Afghanistan will lose his disability allowance after he learnt to walk 400m.
Pte Aron Shelton was told in a letter from the Department for Work and Pensions his £180-a-month benefit, would stop because he was able to walk 400 metres unaided.
He told BBC Radio 5 live Victoria Derbyshire program”I felt like I had been let down by my own government“.
A spokeswoman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: “Issues such as this one are why we are making changes to the way we assess eligibility to DLA.
“We want to introduce a new, more objective assessment to ensure the system is fairer and targets those most in need.”
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Could This Be The Beginning of The End of Wall Street?
On June 18, the symbol of the German company Deutsche Telekom, DT, made its last run across the ticker at the New York Stock Exchange. Europe’s largest telecom company left the world’s biggest and most recognizable exchange after nearly 14 years of trading.
The company is currently in the process of delisting from all foreign exchanges and will soon only be traded on its home stock market in Frankfurt.
Deutsche Telekom is just the latest German blue chip to say goodbye to the American capital market. In an emblematic departure, Daimler, the first German firm to be listed in New York in 1993, officially quit trading on the NYSE on June 4, saying that it no longer needed a presence in New York to attract international investors. And Munich-based insurance and financial services giant Allianz abandoned the NYSE last fall.
Coffee Talk!
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We keep searching for ways to punish North Korea and North Korea did nothing wrong… We really are a sick country…
SEOUL — Searching for new ways to punish North Korea after blaming it for sinking a South Korean warship in March, the Obama administration announced Wednesday that it will strengthen existing sanctions against the North and impose new restrictions on its weapons trade and trafficking in counterfeit currency and luxury goods.
I guess it does not matter that there is no proof that North Korea did it. Can you give proof? Can you take it to a court of law and say North Korea did it and prove it…
Didn’t think so…
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The Washington Post has broke the barrier and now it is up to us to support this explosion from the norm.
If we allow this information site to be squelched than we are in a lot of trouble.
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
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