When America was intelligent in foreign policy

[skeewhiff]

Gee, didnt know the guardian was biased?

skeewhiff and Meest both quoted UMMMMMMM a bit biased sites...

I cross reference both biased medias, left and right. Not trying to be a centrist, just look for the truth. Clinton was as big a liar as any president, he even got impeached. I just think killing innocent civilians to get oil/military regional access is worse than getting a blow job and lying about it.

[Darth Wong]

The "it's a biased site" is the oldest right-wing evidence-dismissal trick in the book. Note how they don't even try to prove that the information therein is fraudulent; they simply dismiss it because the site is perceived to be against Bush (a bit like saying that any and all facts about Hitler which happen to come from Jewish historians should be assumed false).

[theski]

Point taken..... But they still have not address my main point... Neither Bush or Cheney has personally enriched themselves from the war... Or that THe Oil for food issue was a BRIBE.... not a gain in income[/b]

[Meest]

Don't attack the point just the source like it doesn't exist, even if taken from a bias standpoint its still presenting the facts, so how about trying to disprove some of it, attack the argument for once. What do you want a spy photo of Bush exchanging money envelopes? It's so obvious what's going on its not funny.

Top US defense contractors, 2001, according to www.govexec.com:


1. Lockheed Martin (manufacturer of the PAC-3 missile), 2. Boeing (Apache helicopters), 3. Northrop Grumman Corp., 4. Raytheon (Tomahawk and cruise missiles), 5. General Dynamics Corp., 6. United Technologies Corp., 7. TRW, 8. SAIC, 9. General Electric, 10. Carlyle Group (papa Bush's company, and formerly, the bin Laden's.)

As Secretary of Defense, Cheney worked to privatize the system, awarding a particularly large contract worth millions to Brown and Root, a division of Halliburton. Then, when Cheney became a private citizen, he was hired as CEO of Halliburton and earned around $50 million in five short years to continue to contribute to the growth of that oil company. (An Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this morning reports how Cheney's privatization of the Department of Defense plus his Pentagon connections have paid off. In five short years the feds have awarded his company $3.2 billion.)

For instance, Frank C. Carlucci, a Reagan secretary of defense who as much as anyone is responsible for Carlyle's success, said he met in February with his old college classmate Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, and Vice President Dick Cheney, himself a defense secretary under former President Bush, to talk about military matters — at a time when Carlyle has several billion-dollar defense projects under consideration.... "Carlyle is as deeply wired into the current administration as they can possibly be," said Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit public interest group based in Washington. "George Bush is getting money from private interests that have business before the government, while his son is president. And, in a really peculiar way, George W. Bush could, some day, benefit financially from his own administration's decisions, through his father's investments. The average American doesn't know that and, to me, that's a jaw-dropper."

[Meest]

And you first started with show Bush and Co. making money, then changed your tune to show them being bribed, you're just playing semantics to avoid the point. Even in the article you posted Annan's did the exact same shit the Bushes are doing, just it was the father approving the son's company opposed to Bush Jr helping Bush Sr's and friends companies. The article just uses the word bribe but its the same shit. Halliburton and Carlyle do the same essentially by contributing to the presidential campaign coffers.

But what has to be clear by now is that the U.N. itself was either corrupt, or so stunningly incompetent as to require total overhaul. There are by now enough questions, there has been enough secrecy, stonewalling, and rising evidence of graft all around the U.N. program in Iraq, so that it is surely worth an independent investigation into the U.N. itself — and Annan's role in supervising this program. If Kofi Annan will not exercise his authority to set a truly independent inquiry in motion, it is way past time for the U.S., whose taxpayers supply about a quarter of the U.N. budget, to call the U.N. itself to account for Oil-for-Food — in dollar terms the biggest relief operation it has ever run, and by many signs, one of the dirtiest.

LOL just like the current commissions going on here right? I'm not defending the UN bullshit just saying why isn't the US bullshit looked at the same way.

[MKSheppard]

Don't attack the point just the source like it doesn't exist, even if taken from a bias standpoint its still presenting the facts, so how about trying to disprove some of it, attack the argument for once. What do you want a spy photo of Bush exchanging money envelopes? It's so obvious what's going on its not funny.

If so, why has the BUsh team cancelled the XM-2001 Crusader and RAH-66
Comanche? And why is the JSF buy looking less and less likely?

[skeewhiff]

There are other weapons in the pipeline, low yield nukes for instance. Either way these military industrials get paid.

[Meest]

They tried to keep the Crusader afloat for so long, but there was so much public knowledge about it they had to scrap it, it went against their own policy for a fast mobile army. Too bad they already had money invested in it.

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0218/gray.php

Late this March, as part of the post-9-11 military buildup, Donald Rumsfeld gave United Defense, Carlyle's subsidiary, the full monty: over $470 million to continue development on the problem-riddled Crusaders, puzzling some military analysts.

[PainRack]

PainRack wrote

What's the difference? Kofi didn't directly profit from Saddam giving him huge loads of cash. He just benefited from UN programmes that somehow or another put cash into his pockets. Same here

WTF..... What did the Money farie slip him some cash under his pillow???

A bribe is different then a stock transaction... They are not even in the same universe

Right, where in that story you posted, proved that Kofi Annan took money from Saddam himself? Or that his son did?

His son played an ethically incorrect deal out in Iraq. Guess what, Haliburton is doing the exact same thing. Overpricing the US taxpayer, while submitting a bid that was chosen not because it was the lowest or most reliable, but most it had a certain Cheney on its board.

[PainRack]

I also like to say this. In all the issues of the Oil for money not going to the relief of the Iraqi people but to the UN pockets in that, where oh where, is the outcry over 30-50% of the revenue going to war reparations to Kuwait and the Iraqi council in exile, 20-30% going to the Kurds in the north and several other percentiles going to the Shiites relief funds, and then after the UN took its overhead, the remaining funds are released to Saddam?