DES MOINES, Iowa - In what may be the first subpoena of its kind in decades, a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists.
In addition to the subpoena of Drake University, subpoenas were served this past week on four of the activists who attended a Nov. 15 forum at the school, ordering them to appear before a grand jury Tuesday, the protesters said.
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Those served subpoenas include the leader of the Catholic Peace Ministry, the former coordinator of the Iowa Peace Network, a member of the Catholic Worker House, and an anti-war activist who visited Iraq (news - web sites) in 2002.
They say the subpoenas are intended to stifle dissent.
"This is exactly what people feared would happen," said Brian Terrell of the peace ministry, one of those subpoenaed. "The civil liberties of everyone in this country are in danger. How we handle that here in Iowa is very important on how things are going to happen in this country from now on."
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According to a copy obtained by The Associated Press, the Drake subpoena asks for records of the request for a meeting room, "all documents indicating the purpose and intended participants in the meeting, and all documents or recordings which would identify persons that actually attended the meeting."
It also asks for campus security records "reflecting any observations made of the Nov. 15, 2003, meeting, including any records of persons in charge or control of the meeting, and any records of attendees of the meeting."
The focus of the inquiry is on the National Lawyers Guild, an extremely dangerous organization as judged by the aims stated on its subversive website:
• to eliminate racism;
• to safeguard and strengthen the rights of workers, women, farmers and minority groups, upon whom the welfare of the entire nation depends;
• to maintain and protect our civil rights and liberties in the face of persistent attacks upon them;
• to use the law as an instrument for the protection of the people, rather than for their repression.
The federal judge, unnamed in the article, should be asked why we ought to subpoena the Catholic Peace Ministry but not Dick Cheney's energy task force for meeting minutes, or Enron CEOs for their documents, or the White House for 9-11-01 documentation, or John Ashcroft for campaign funding, or the complete military records of George W. Bush.
Catholics are identical to "Islamofascists" in the eyes of these blind cretins. The faith-based favoritism of the Bush administration mysteriously vanishes unless the protesting faith happens to be, ironically, Protestant.
UPDATE: As I was writing the above, Dick Cheney was a few miles away with some comments of his own:
Cheney called on Congress to renew the Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism bill that critics say has curbed civil liberties but Cheney defended as allowing federal law enforcement to share more intelligence information.
"We used these tools to catch embezzlers and drug traffickers and we need these tools as well to hunt terrorists," he said.*
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The fund-raiser at Rosemont's [Illinois] convention center, sponsored by the National Republican Congressional Committee, raised money to help elect Republicans to the U.S. House. Organizers said 187 people paid $1,500 each for lunch and to hear Cheney speak, which means the event raised more than $280,000.
*Note that Dick didn't mention Catholic peace activists or anti-racism legal advocates — although they happen to be among the subpoenaed.
Note also that Dick Cheney did not include himself among the embezzlers for his role in Halliburton bribes totalling $180 million while he was CEO of that company.
Incidentally, has anyone who did not pay at least a thousand dollars ever even seen Dick Cheney? How do we know he exists?
If Terri gets her way on breast exposure and George W Bush gets his on tort reform, Terri and other traumatized tit-viewers could receive billions of dollars while Linda McDougal will receive no more than $250,000.
"The issue here is accountability," says grief-stricken Super Bowl viewer Terri Carlin, asking no more for herself than "gross annual revenues of each defendant [i.e., Justin Timberlake, Janet Jackson, CBS, MTV, Viacom] for the last three years..."
Terri is of course a fool and charlatan for claiming that "breast exposure" ruined her life and that someone must be held accountable — but so is anyone who under the guise of tort "reform" proposes that $125,000 per breast is adequate compensation for the removal of healthy tissue. That's a sure bet to ruin lives in a non-frivolous way and hold no one accountable beyond the extraction of chump change.
I wish it could be expanded to books beyond the political sphere to see what kinds of fiction or other areas of nonfiction track well with political affinities.
He doesn’t bother to attend secret CIA briefings of his fellow senators because he seldom learns anything he hasn’t read in the newspapers, but Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is convinced the U.S. will track down the elusive mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks before November.
“Obviously, he’ll be caught between now and the election,” Grassley said Monday when asked if he’s disappointed that Osama bin Laden hasn’t been killed or captured.
“I think they’re on his trail now in a way they haven’t been all year,” Grassley said. “It will happen because we will be able to divert more resources [to hunting down bin Laden].”
Grassley, who’s an overwhelming favorite to win a fifth term in November, declined to say why he’s so confident that bin Laden will be brought to justice.
How will they find bin Laden? My money's on a charred corpse with ostensible "positive" DNA identification performed by vague, unverifiable means.
The corpse is probably already in custody, hence the story above. For political purposes, it's immaterial if the body actually belonged to Osama bin Laden or not — he has already descended to evil-icon status just like Nazis, the stock villains in the B movies of the past sixty years. And the Bush-Cheney War on Terror, with its shock and awe over Baghdad, and "Mission Accomplished" flight suit, and spider-hole Hussein, is very much B movie stagecraft with D-minus effectiveness. It's as if Ronald Reagan starred in Apocalypse Now.
When will they find bin Laden? Grassley already spelled out the timetable: "Before November."
A good guess would be mid to late July, the ideal time for a preemptive action against the protests of shrill New Yorkers sickened by the cremation of their neighbors in lower Manhattan, as well as the subsequent callousness and incompetence of the Afghan, Iraqi and homeland (via the Patriot Acts) invasions. Trotting out any old corpse and calling it bin Laden will be intended to dampen the effect of the passion and outrage that New Yorkers must still feel, and create a gauzy halo of "security" around what matters most to the administration: the Republican convention.
WASHINGTON (AP)--The Justice Department is looking into allegations that a subsidiary of Halliburton Co. (HAL) was involved in payment of $180 million in bribes to win a contract for a natural gas project in Nigeria, officials said Wednesday.
The $4 billion Nigerian Liquified Natural Gas Plant was built in the 1990s by a consortium that included a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, during a time when Vice President Dick Cheney headed Halliburton.
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A French magistrate, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, is also investigating the Nigerian payments and has said in a memo that embezzlement charges could ultimately be filed against Cheney in Paris. Cheney's aides have refused comment on the allegations.
HOUSTON -- In a shuttered J.C. Penney store here, more than 500 job recruits sat at long tables and leafed through packets of information. John Watson, a staffing supervisor for Halliburton Co., welcomed them with a somber introduction.
"I'd like to start out by saying we've already had three deaths on this contract so far," he told the workers, who had signed up to support the U.S. military in Iraq. "If you're getting any pressure from home, if you have any doubt in your mind ... now is the time to tell us. We'll shake hands and get you a plane ticket home."
By the end of that early January week, four of every five recruits would be packing to leave for a one-year stint in Iraq. There, in the largest mobilization of civilians to work in a war zone in U.S. history, they drive trucks, deliver mail, install air conditioners, serve food and cut hair.
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One recruit is Skip Hoehne, a goateed 26-year-old who had been making $12 an hour hauling chickens in Destin, Fla. He had heard about the job from his brother, who was already in Iraq driving trucks for Halliburton. Mr. Hoehne was drawn by the money and a chance to see the world beyond the Florida panhandle.
The civilian wartime duty, hazardous and uncomfortable, offers a hard-to-find opportunity for blue-collar workers such as Mr. Hoehne: a paycheck of $80,000 to $100,000 and a chance to feel they are serving their country.
The Iraq-bound employees aren't adventure-seeking hired guns, there to bolster military strength. They are unemployed and underemployed workers with few opportunities in a U.S. economy that isn't producing many new jobs. They are willing to drive forklifts, install plumbing and wash clothes in a hostile environment for a substantial salary.
Halliburton, which has an open-ended logistics contract with the Army, has 7,000 workers on the ground in Iraq and is bringing another 500 each week to Houston. It posts fliers at truck stops and takes out banner ads on job-listing Web sites. Most recruits come in by word of mouth. So far, Halliburton has plenty of takers.
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All along, officials from Halliburton talk about the dangers and difficult living conditions. The company isn't just being helpful. Halliburton stands to earn a performance bonus if attrition is kept down. Under the contract, Halliburton can bill all legitimate expenses to the military, subject to auditing. When the recruits line up for dinner at an ad hoc buffet in the closed J.C. Penney, they sign their names so the military is billed for an accurate headcount. Halliburton gets a 1% profit margin and can qualify for another 2% in performance awards. So far under the contract, Halliburton has racked up $1.35 billion in revenue.
The desperate jobseekers quoted in the article come from Houston and the Florida panhandle. What these regions have in common are a couple of Bush governors, George and Jeb, who are now evidently content to wage war in central Asia at national expense to recruit the forsaken citizens of the states they mismanaged.
Planned job cuts in January were 26 percent higher than in December as U.S. jobs moved to countries like India, China and the Philippines, and as mergers made some jobs redundant, according to a report on Tuesday.
The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., said post-holiday job cuts reached 117,556 in January surpassing the 100,000 threshold for the first time since last October.
Financial markets were on their toes awaiting January's payrolls report to be issued by the Labor Department on Friday after a disappointing December report that showed an increase of only 1,000 jobs.
Analysts had expected 150,000 new jobs to show up in the data, and the worse-than-expected outcome showed that the U.S. economic recovery has yet to produce sustained jobs growth. Economists again expect a figure of 150,000 new jobs in January.
Poor job creation is a headache for President Bush as he seeks re-election in November. The economy -- specifically job creation -- is expected to be a key issue in the campaign. Since Bush took office, more than 2.3 million non-farm jobs have been lost.
Economists who "expect" 150,000 jobs to be created in January 2004 should revise their expectations to something six digits south of zilch.
From the article linked above: "Unlike anthrax, ricin is not easily absorbed through the skin. Experts say it is not an efficient way of killing large numbers of people. It's estimated that 4 tons of ricin dispersed by aerosol would be needed to kill half of the people within an area of about 40 square miles, versus only 2 pounds of anthrax."
Halliburton Co. allegedly overcharged more than $16 million for meals at a single U.S. military base in Kuwait during the first seven months of last year, according to Pentagon investigators auditing the company's work.
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This dispute focuses on meals served at Camp Arifjan, the huge U.S. military base south of Kuwait City. The e-mail memo that went out Friday said that in July alone, a Saudi subcontractor hired by KBR billed for 42,042 meals a day on average but served only 14,053 meals a day. The difference in cost for that month exceeded $3.5 million, according to Pentagon records. The Pentagon last year paid KBR more than $30 million for meals at the camp from January through July, a tab that included charges for nearly four million meals the government asserts were never served. Pentagon officials couldn't provide an estimate for the total cost of feeding troops in Iraq.
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Instead of formally paying back the money, KBR will deduct the sum from future bills to the U.S. government, a common practice when contractors agree to reimburse overcharges.*
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In television spots that began to appear last month, Halliburton highlighted the work it is doing supporting the U.S. Army under the slogan, "Halliburton, proud to serve our troops." In one ad, a U.S. soldier is shown talking on the phone and blurting out to his fellow soldiers, "It's a girl!"
KBR's troop-catering work falls under the large logistics contract the company won during 2001. Work in Iraq and vicinity tied to that contract has so far amounted to about $3.8 billion. KBR is also doing repair work on Iraq's oil fields and delivering fuel supplies from Kuwait and Turkey, under the Army Corps of Engineers contract that has cost more than $2 billion so far.
*And they get to keep the money! Overcharges are "deducted" from future overcharges. Such a deal for Halliburton — only 543 Americans had to die so far.
Oddly enough, Hallibuton refuses to say how much it cost to have an actor play a soldier and gush, "It's a girl!" in a Halliburton image ad.
Senior Pentagon officials are crafting a major aid package to help money-losing rocket programs at Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., including possibly adding hundreds of millions of dollars to existing government launch contracts.
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Such a contracting change would benefit the two companies, largely because it would cushion their businesses from the recent sharp dropoff in the number of commercial satellite launches.
Defense Department officials didn't disclose the specific size of the aid package under consideration, and they stressed that no final decisions have been made because "the acquisition strategy" for the next round of launches hasn't yet been approved. Nonetheless, their comments amounted to the first official confirmation that both White House and Pentagon leaders are mulling a package to funnel significant funds to rocket programs, over and above the fixed-price contracts for anticipated launches.
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Pentagon officials said they hope to award rocket-launch contracts by the summer, after Boeing is expected to become eligible to bid again. The Chicago aerospace company was handed a suspension last year after Air Force officials determined the company had improperly obtained thousands of pages of proprietary Lockheed Martin documents.
On Friday, Pentagon officials said Boeing's transgressions are projected to eventually cost the Air Force an extra $223 million, to switch launches, underwrite construction of a second West Coast launch facility and complete more engineering work. The Pentagon is expected to try to recover those funds from Boeing.
Boeing's velvet wrist-slap is to have to wait until summer (so long!) for its share of those hundreds of millions of dollars. By then maybe we all will have hopefully forgotten about those purloined Lockheed Martin documents, as well as the crimes of former Air Force procurement officer and Boeing CFO confidante Dragon Lady Darleen Druyun.
This still cracks me up: Michael Sears — the Boeing CFO who hired Dragon Lady Darleen Druyun away from the Air Force after she deviously took Airbus out the running — wrote and was about to publish a business management self-help book called "Soaring through Turbulence" on the theme of ethics in business. Oddly enough for an author, he had no direct experience of such a mythical concept, based on the abysmal example of his own management behavior at Boeing.
Though the 61-year-old Mr. [Ken] Lay was Enron's chief executive for some 15 years, he apparently didn't leave many fingerprints. A recent report by a court-appointed examiner in the Enron bankruptcy case, for example, said that Mr. Lay, as well as Mr. Skilling, was an infrequent user of e-mail and "also apparently did not retain many documents."
"Apparently"? Appearances can be vile and deceitful, particularly when they belong to Enron chief executives.
If you give Lay and Skilling two and a half years to learn how to operate a shredder, you think they're not gonna take it?
By now the money's long offshore, and all the documents are confetti for the afterparty.
