DIANA WEST TODAY
MEANWHILE BACK IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2440/Meanwhile-Back-in-Afghanistan-and-Iraq.aspx
Waste, fraud and US-taxpayer-abuse.
The final Special Inspector General’s Iraq Report (SIGIR) is out this week. Curl up with it and find out where $60 billion taxpayer dollars went in Iraq (spoiler alert: down the drain). Boosters point to the relative success of Iraqi security forces in “keeping order” (trained at a cost of $20-plus billion) — and Petraeus and Crocker, in their introduction to the report, still burble on, old Western-serial-style, about providing “new opportunity to the citizens of the Land of the Two Rivers” — although somehow it seems relevant to note that Iraqi security forces under dictator Saddam Hussein also “kept order,” sans such costly US training.
Out of Afghanistan, the waste, fraud and abuse story is even more grotesque. Afghanistan’s Special Inspector General estimates that Americans have spent $100 billlion (and counting) on construction projects. After all, there was little to re-construct, except the Kajaki Dam, which we first built back in the 1950s. Now, USAID is pulling the plug on it.
Enough said? Not on your life.
RAND PAUL’S FILIBUSTER
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2441/Rand-Pauls-Fillibuster-The-Opening-Statement.aspx
Yesterday, March 6, 2013, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), embarked on a filluster to block the nomination of John Brennan to director of the CIA pending confirmation from the Obama White House that it agrees the president is bound by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees Americans’ right to due process, and therefore will never use drones to kill American non-combatants on American soil.
To date, the White House answer is silence.
Here are Paul’s opening remarks, which began at 11:47 am, excerpted from the uncorrected transcript to be found at Paul’s official website. Paul’s dramatic, public, and instructive defense of Constitutional rights against executive overreach is the best thing to have happened to America in a long time.
American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character by Diana West (May 28, 2013)
COMING MAY 28, 2013
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