| |
 |
Sunday, February 4, 2007 |
CommonDreams: "You know your empire's crumbling when just about your entire military land force is tied up in a worse-than-useless war launched on the basis of complete fabrications, that every day is actually making you less - not more - secure from external threat.
You know your empire's crumbling when almost half the soldiers in that war are high-paid mercenaries, and you don't dare institute a draft.
You know your empire's crumbling when you send soldiers into war with two weeks training and a lack of armor, and then you keep them there for three, four and five rotations."
The American Empire will abort or self-destruct before it has even had a chance to be born.
Scotsman: "Britain broke a United Nations treaty banning the use of child soldiers by sending underage troops - including 17-year-old girls - to Iraq, it has been revealed."
France24: "Between 30,000 and 50,000 mercenaries are working in Iraq, making them the second largest military force there after the occupying United States."
Guardian: "Deep in the mountains of eastern Iraq, a cluster of mud huts and the chatter of machine gun fire reveal another piece of the jigsaw puzzle called Kurdistan.
Here, recruits are training to fight Iran, one of the four countries that rule the fractured Kurdish people. And although they belong to an organization officially outlawed as terrorist by Washington, they appear to be operating unhindered from Iraqi territory controlled by U.S. forces."
NYTimes: "In April 2005, federal law enforcement officials summoned reporters to a Manhattan news conference to announce the capture of an Afghan drug lord and Taliban ally. While boasting that he was a big catch - the Asian counterpart of the Colombian cocaine legend Pablo Escobar - the officials left out some puzzling details, including why the Afghan, Haji Bashir Noorzai, had risked arrest by coming to New York.
Now, with Mr. Noorzai's case likely to come to trial this year, a fuller story about the American government's dealings with him is emerging.
Soon after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Mr. Noorzai agreed to cooperate with American officials, who hoped he could lead them to hidden Taliban weapons and leaders, according to current and former government officials and Mr. Noorzai's American lawyer. The relationship soured, but American officials tried to renew it in 2004. A year later, Mr. Noorzai was secretly indicted and lured to New York, where he was arrested after nearly two weeks of talks with law enforcement and counterterrorism officials in a hotel."
In the meantime at home the Bush regime is functioning like a racket.
NYTimes: "In June, short of people to process cases of incompetence and fraud by federal contractors, officials at the General Services Administration responded with what has become the government's reflexive answer to almost every problem.
They hired another contractor.
It did not matter that the company they chose, CACI International, had itself recently avoided a suspension from federal contracting; or that the work, delving into investigative files on other contractors, appeared to pose a conflict of interest; or that each person supplied by the company would cost taxpayers $104 an hour. Six CACI workers soon joined hundreds of other private-sector workers at the G.S.A., the government's management agency.
Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government."
The Roman Empire tumbled for reasons of greed and corruption; the American Empire will fall for the same reasons. It's a racket, not a government.
11:28:20 AM 
|
|
© Copyright 2008.
|
|
|
|
|
