The Dick Cheney Business Plan: first bomb them flat, then get the contract to rebuild them

Arianna Huffington writes about Dick Cheney’s deals with Iraq:

The two were clearly on the outs back during the Gulf War, when Cheney was Secretary of Defense, and the first President Bush dubbed Saddam “Hitler revisited.” Then Cheney moved to the private sector and suddenly things between him and Saddam warmed up considerably. With Cheney in the CEO’s seat, Halliburton helped Iraq reconstruct its war-torn oil industry with $73 million worth of equipment and services — becoming Baghdad’s biggest such supplier. Kinda nice how that worked out for the vice-president, really: oversee the destruction of an industry that you then profit from by rebuilding.

When, during the 2000 campaign, Cheney was asked about his company’s Iraqi escapades, he flat out denied them. But the truth remains: When it came to making a buck, Cheney apparently had no qualms about doing business with “Hitler revisited.” Link

From [[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]

The three stages of blog-awareness

1) There must be something to blogs because so many people are into it, but I don’t have a clue.

2) OK, it does seem kind of cool and there is much, much more to it than I expected. I just don’t see any really practical applications.

3) Oh my God, the things I can do with this are coming to me faster than I can keep up with.”

From Ernie the Attorney — a well-known law Blog.

Blogging from a mobile phone? Surely not

But Karlin Lillington says so:”Dublin-based NewBay Software, with its new application that lets people create weblogs entirely by mobile phone, is getting a lot of interested press lately on the back of the company’s appearance at the big 3GSM conference in Cannes.” Source: [[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]

Glenn Reynolds on the Blogging phenomenon

Nice Guardian Online piece emphasising the way blogging calls traditional media to account.

A review of five (yes, FIVE) books on Blogging

Steam media catching up?

Son of Patriot — coming soon from Ashcroft Productions Inc
Anita Ramasastry’s analysis of the next piece of Orwellian legislation in the Ashcroft dogpile.

“Soon after the terrorist acts of September 11, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, which conferred broad new powers upon the federal government. Now John Ashcroft and his scribes at the Justice Department have been working secretly to create new, 120-page draft legislation that, if enacted, would expand greatly upon these already sweeping powers.

This daring sequel to the USA Patriot Act is known internally as the Domestic Security Enhancement Act. It is also nicknamed Patriot II (the name by which I’ll refer to it here), or Son of Patriot. On February 7 of this year, a January 9 draft of Patriot II was revealed to the public – but not by the government. It was made public only through a leak.

[…]

Perhaps the Bush Administration is looking to repeat its experience with the original USA Patriot Act. Amidst the emotional turmoil after September 11, the Administration introduced the Act and got it enacted in a matter of weeks. The Senate Judiciary Committee had only a brief, one-and-a-half-hour hearing on the Act, in which Attorney General Ashcroft testified but took no questions. In the House, meanwhile, there was no testimony from opponents of the bill.

After September 11, there was at least some rationale for this expedited consideration. Now, however, there is far less exigency. If the introduction of Patriot II in Congress coincides with the Iraq war, it may well be because the Administration has planned it that way, to take advantage of circumstances to ram the bill through both Houses quickly.

Even if Patriot II does end up being introduced in wartime, citizens and their representatives should fight this legislation tooth and nail, for it threatens to take even more of our liberties away. It is a wholesale assault on privacy, free speech, and freedom of information…”

Krugman on why the US public can’t understand what’s going on

Their media aren’t telling them, that’s why. Paul Krugman is one of the smartest people writing in America today and in this NYT column he comes straight to the point:

” Most people … get their news from TV — and there the difference is immense. The coverage of Saturday’s antiwar rallies was a reminder of the extent to which U.S. cable news, in particular, seems to be reporting about a different planet than the one covered by foreign media.

What would someone watching cable news have seen? On Saturday, news anchors on Fox described the demonstrators in New York as “the usual protesters” or “serial protesters.” CNN wasn’t quite so dismissive, but on Sunday morning the headline on the network’s Web site read “Antiwar rallies delight Iraq,” and the accompanying picture showed marchers in Baghdad, not London or New York.

This wasn’t at all the way the rest of the world’s media reported Saturday’s events, but it wasn’t out of character. For months both major U.S. cable news networks have acted as if the decision to invade Iraq has already been made, and have in effect seen it as their job to prepare the American public for the coming war.

So it’s not surprising that the target audience is a bit blurry about the distinction between the Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda. Surveys show that a majority of Americans think that some or all of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi, while many believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11, a claim even the Bush administration has never made. And since many Americans think that the need for a war against Saddam is obvious, they think that Europeans who won’t go along are cowards.

Europeans, who don’t see the same things on TV, are far more inclined to wonder why Iraq — rather than North Korea, or for that matter Al Qaeda — has become the focus of U.S. policy. That’s why so many of them question American motives, suspecting that it’s all about oil or that the administration is simply picking on a convenient enemy it knows it can defeat. They don’t see opposition to an Iraq war as cowardice; they see it as courage, a matter of standing up to the bullying Bush administration….”

At last: some horse sense in the mainstream US media
(thanks to Karlin Lillington for finding it.)

Tom Friedman has a direct and thoughtful column today, critical of nearly all participants in the argument over Iraq, and very pointed in its criticism of Bush and his administration. But he argues there is a need to take on Saddam. Do read the whole piece, no matter what your perspective is — or you think it should be:

I side with those who believe we need to confront Saddam ? but we have to do it right, with allies and staying power, and the Bush team has bungled that.

The Bush folks are big on attitude, weak on strategy and terrible at diplomacy. I covered the first gulf war, in 1990-91. What I remember most are the seven trips I took with Secretary of State James A. Baker III around the world to watch him build ? face-to-face ? the coalition and public support for that war, before a shot was fired. Going to someone else’s country is a sign you respect his opinion. This Bush team has done no such hands-on spade work. Its members think diplomacy is a phone call…

…It is legitimate for Europeans to oppose such a war, but not simply by sticking a thumb in our eye and their heads in the sand. It’s also legitimate for the Bush folks to focus the world on Saddam, but two years of their gratuitous bullying has made many people deaf to America’s arguments.

[[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]

The mobile phone and you
BBC Online report.

“Mobile phones are used by people to decide how and when they communicate with the rest of the world, say researchers.

The findings are the result of a three-year study into the evolution of consumer mobile behaviour, entitled Me, My Mobile and I, by a team at Lancaster University in the UK.

The report, presented at 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, suggest that mobile devices are increasingly offering people a way to control their relationships, location and self-image.

This idea likely to provoke mixed feelings of fear and excitement in operators determined to exploit the potential of mobiles by offering a wide variety of services…”.

‘Leadership’ takes its toll

Watching the televised reports of the news conferences given yesterday by Blair in London and Dubya in Washington, I was struck by how the strain is showing in the British Prime Minister’s demeanour. He was wide-eyed (and sometimes wild-eyed) and pale; his hair was sticking up; and there were times when he appeared to be stammering, lost for words.

He looked, to be honest, like a guy who was losing it.

Dubya, in contrast, was tanned, smiling and relaxed.