fenderbender

So it's that day again.

It is a date that will live on. Lets not let them use the memory of the incident in vain any longer. Using death as an excuse to cause more death. horrible.



I wonder if the corporations and key members of our governments have anything planned for us again this time.

Hopefully not.


RIP to all the souls who lost it all thanks to such horrible acts.


Love is going out to anyone that needs it.

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Imagine there's no heaven,It's easy if you try

<3

Roach

well, the timing of "the new terrorist threat" right before Obama's speech was a bit suspect.

Obama, Bush, and Clinton were in Shanksville Pa. today.

"never before audio tapes" were also released.

even cryptome has a special presentation...of sorts.

10 September 2011

Black Humor for War Time Debt Profligacy and Panic

We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Peter Van Buren, 2011. Peter Van Buren was a State Department officer in Iraq working with Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). He was based primarily at Forward Operating Base Hammer
Van Buren provides an informative, gorge-raising, black humorous, literal boots-on-the-ground, apology for "we have a war to fight, damn the cost, others will pay the bill" instigator of the current global panic about national debt ever bleaker humor. Rue with him being taken in by the natsec scam, laugh at each other and weep over your unpaid bills, service cutbacks, and tax duns for the cost of guiltless official malfeasance.

DoJ-celebrated task force prosecutions for terrorism, financial crime, health care fraud and child pornography are easy, small-time stuff compared to the great crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan forgiven by war-time exemptions, with very few cases for US official financial profligacy, negligence and wastage.

exerpts...

Pages 46-49:

Money and Our Meth Habit

We lacked a lot of things in Iraq: flush toilets, fresh vegetables, the comfort of family members nearby, and of course adult supervision, strategic guidance, and common sense. Like Guns N' Roses' budget for meth after a new hit, the one thing we did not lack was money. There was money everywhere. A soldier recalled unloading pallets of new US hundred-dollar bills, millions of dollars flushing out of the belly of a C-130 cargo aircraft to be picked up off the runway by forklifts (operated by soldiers who would make less in their lifetimes than what was on their skids at that moment). You couldn't walk around a corner without stumbling over bales of money; the place was lousy with it. In my twenty-three years working for the State Department, we never had enough money. We were always being told to "do more with less," as if slogans were cash. Now there was literally more money than we could spend. It was weird.

We'd be watching the news from home about foreclosures, and I'd be reading e-mails from my sister about school cutbacks, while signing off on tens of thousands of dollars for stuff in Iraq. At one point we were tasked to give out microgrants, $5,000 in actual cash handed to an Iraqi to "open a business," no strings attached. If he took the money and in front of us spent it on dope and pinball, it was no matter. We wondered among ourselves whether we shouldn't be running a PRT in Detroit or New Orleans instead of Baghdad. In addition to the $63 billion Congress had handed us for Iraq's reconstruction, we also had some $91 billion of captured Iraqi funds (that were mostly misplaced by the Coalition Provisional Authority), plus another $18 billion donated by countries such as Japan and South Korea. In 2009, we had another $387 million for aid to internal refugees that paid for many reconstruction-like projects. If that was not enough, over a billion additional US dollars were spent on operating costs for the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. By comparison, the reconstruction of Germany and Japan cost, in 2010 dollars, only $32 billion and $17 billion, respectively.

While a lot of the money was spent in big bites at high levels through the Embassy, or possibly just thrown into the river when no one could find a match to set it on fire, at the local level money was spent via two programs: CERP and QRF. CERP was Army money, the Commander's Emergency Response Program. Though originally provided to address emergency humanitarian needs and short-term counterinsurgency costs, this nearly unlimited pool of cash came to be spent on reconstruction. The local US Army Commander could himself approve projects up to $200,000, with almost no technical or policy oversight. Accounting was fast and loose; a 2009 audit, for example, found the Army could not account for $8.7 billion in funds. It might have been stolen or just lost; no one will ever know. The Army shared its money with us at the ePRTs, partly out of generosity, partly out of pity, and partly because individual military units were graded on how much cash they spent -- more money spent meant more reconstruction kudos in evaluation reports.

Pages 56-57:

Garbage

In our air-conditioned isolation, it took years to realize we needed to think about things like garbage and potable water. What had happened all around Iraq since the chaos of 2003 was a process of devolution, where populated areas lost their ability to sustain the facilities that had constituted civilization since the Romans -- water, sewage, trash removal -- things that made it possible for large numbers of people to live in close proximity to one another. Shock and awe had disrupted the networked infrastructure that allowed cities to function. What had been slow degradation through neglect under Saddam became irreversible decline by force under the United States.

The collapse of civil society left a void that the bad guys had rushed to fill. Stories circulated of neighborhood militiamen commandeering shuttered power plants and private generators for the public's use, turning the militants into local heroes. In some poor areas, especially in the south, Iranian charities were a primary source of propane, food, and other services that people expected the government to provide, as Saddam had more or less done. It had finally dawned on us that providing reliable basic utilities was critical to a successful counterinsurgency. The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) were put on the case after earlier efforts by megacontractors like Bechtel and then the Army Corps of Engineers had failed.

Almost daily my team and I would go out into the field. We'd strap on body armor and helmets and load into armored vehicles for the soldiers to drive us out of the FOB. We rode in either armored Humvees or large monster trucks called MRAPs, mine-resistant, ambush-protected carriers. These sat high off the ground and were covered with antennas and crazy electronics designed to thwart the battery-powered triggers that set off IEDs and mines along our route. The best thing about the MRAPs was that they were hermetically sealed against nonexistent chemical weapons and thus possessed near-nuclear-powered air-conditioning. You could crank that stuff and form frost. The MRAPs were so high off the ground that the turret often tore down the spaghetti web of pirated electric lines strung over most streets, lessening our popularity every time we drove in. Our parade of four or five vehicles, armed with nasty-looking machine guns and tough-looking soldiers, would nonetheless roll through small towns and slums to arrive at whatever dilapidated building served as the center of US-appointed local government. (By common consent no one was allowed to comment on the paradox of creating a democracy by appointing local leaders. It just wasn't done.) As we drove, trash was a fact anywhere we looked, like the sun and the dust. The MRAPs specifically equipped to look for roadside bombs even had giant blowers welded to their front bumpers to whip garbage aside and expose the IEDs. For a poor country, everybody seemed to have a lot of things to throw away. Even though the trash was rarely collected, there were huge dumps filled with acres of it. You couldn't help but be reminded that for all the counterinsurgency ideals about living among the people, we still lived near Iraq but not in it; on the FOB you couldn't drop a Snickers wrapper without two people telling you to pick that shit up.

http://www.amazon.com/We-Meant-Well-.../dp/0805094369

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לזיין את הקופים

KaptNemo

I've got my fingers crossed nothing happens... sadly though with as much hype as is being put out there seems like something might be up =(

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Fiat justitia ruat caelum
Qui prodest?

ChiefBongWater

May we never forget all those who lost their life that day


I remember when I first heard, I was in gym class. In 6th grade I think.
Can't believe it's been 10 years already....

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Terry

There's hype every time this date rolls around. Fifty bucks says nothing happens.

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There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

-Sylvia Plath

José

I'm almost willing to put money on that. I mean we've kind of opened ourselves up for attacks on 9/11 now. It's bound to happen eventually anyways. But it will probably be 11 years after 9/11 if I had to guess.

Sir-Ex

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Smile

Ditch the cigs!!!!!!

Stanton Peedman

or never,

a few friends and I were just discussing what tactics we think the next terrorist attack might employ. We all agreed the latest power outage in southwest America and Mexico shows us a HUGE vulnerability! One part being changed out by some APS worker caused this MAJOR power outage! Look what it caused, major traffic jams in huge cities and more! Think of the possibilities of our vulnerabilities probably realized by terrorists who also btw, have easy access to our country through the Mexican border.

Mercury

Fuck new york. I hate that just because we share the same federal government we all have to have new york shoved down our throat. i live 3500 miles away from the damn place and i still can't escape the "empire city". new york might as well be london or tokyo for all i care.

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fenderbender

dude you are such a tard



idk what else to say

wow

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Imagine there's no heaven,It's easy if you try

<3

Mercury

^Why am I a tard?

Because I don't worship New York? Ooooh it's so big and glamorous. Yeah, I know! I have hear about it in every other movie, TV show, song, book, etc. Newsflash: the country does not revolve around New York! Of course New Yorkers can't see that through their thick egos. They think the rest of the USA are a bunch of yokels who only live to marvel at New York's greatness and only dream of one day "making it" in the Big Apple.

Oh but it got hit by "terrorists" so the whole fucking country should be alarmed? New York is twice the distance from Oregon as London is from fucking Moscow. Do you think when something happens in Russia that Britain is alarmed? Of course not because it's fucking faaaar. And new york, to me, is very VERY far away.

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Sir-Ex

BECAUSE THAT SHIT IS IMPORTANT AND SCARY AND YOURE SUPPOSED TO CARE!

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Smile

Ditch the cigs!!!!!!

fenderbender

more like thousands of people died.


Your saying why should you care because they are not geographically close to you...

That is why you are a tard. That is an extremely tard thing to say.

idk how you are getting new york shoved down your throat b/c i fucking live mad close and dont hear shit.


You should be pissed off that our country has been in a decade long war all based off this suspicious and horrible incident where many many people died.

Instead you are pissed about being bombarded with media about the city where it all took place in?

That's why you are a tard bro. a homosexual tard.

__________________
Imagine there's no heaven,It's easy if you try

<3

fenderbender

And you should not only be scared but actually give a fuck because the same people that let those thousands of people die, are very very powerful in the country you live in.


ignorant bastard.

__________________
Imagine there's no heaven,It's easy if you try

<3

The Don

More importantly, it's the day I joined yhka, now I can has red name plz?

Roach

9/11 was purposely orchestrated to attack American business and government.

5 trillion dollars later, some might argue that it was a "mission accomplished".

not to mention the million or so lives lost in retaliation.

but hey, we did finally kill bin laden.

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לזיין את הקופים

Lloydy

More importantly there's football and F1 on today, get in!

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Keep the red flag flying high

kameelyun

Narrated by Ed Asner

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"The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off." - Gloria Steinem

kameelyun

__________________
"The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off." - Gloria Steinem

kameelyun

My facebook status from a couple days ago says:

"So, according to the U.S., a "specific" and "credible" threat has emerged about a terror attack in NY. But there's a "great deal of uncertainty" and the warning is being done "out of an abundance of caution." When are people going to see this bullshit for what it is?? Social control and manipulation through fear!"

Wish I could be at the WTC site right now but multiple factors forced me to stay home in Ohio.

NEVER FORGET

__________________
"The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off." - Gloria Steinem