January 2010 archive

Blackwater settles civil lawsuits over Iraq deaths

By MIKE BAKER, Associated Press Writer

Thu Jan 7, 4:34 pm ET

RALEIGH, N.C. – The security firm formerly known as Blackwater has reached a settlement in a series of federal lawsuits in which dozens of Iraqis accused the company of cultivating a reckless culture that allowed innocent civilians to be killed.

It was a princely settlement- $30,000 for each person wounded and $100,000 for people who were murdered.

Not all the plaintiffs appeared happy with the decision. Sami Hawas Hamoud Abu al-Iz also was wounded during the 2007 Nisoor Square incident along with his son. His mother was killed. He said the agreement came after the plaintiffs were told by their lawyers that there was a risk that they might not receive anything.

…

The lawsuits sought compensation for deaths and injuries. Unlike federal probes that have specifically targeted company contractors for their actions, the civil lawsuits accused the Moyock, N.C.-based company – and founder Erik Prince – of producing a climate in which it was acceptable for innocent Iraqis to die.

“Mr. Prince personally directed and permitted a heavily-armed private army … to roam the streets of Baghdad killing innocent civilians,” one of the lawsuits said.

But you know you can’t let pesky things like that affect the bottom line.  This is a free market economy, not socialism.

“This enables Xe’s new management to move the company forward free of the costs and distraction of ongoing litigation, and provides some compensation to Iraqi families,” the company said.

They hate us for our freedoms you know, like the freedom to fire Hellfire missiles from drones at anything that moves, just like wolves from a helicopter.

Faithless Heathens: Scriptural Economics of Judaism, Christianity and Islam–

Two of the dead, Jeremy Wise, 35, a former member of the Navy Seals from Virginia Beach, Va., and Dane Clark Paresi, 46, of Dupont, Wash., were security officers for Xe Services, the firm formerly known as Blackwater.

As long as it’s brown and furrin’.

Because we’re not cowards!

The problem is that these mooslim rag heads don’t value life like us bible believin’ ‘muricans.

Open Thread

I have always hated Darrell Issa.  I live in California and Darrell Issa is largely the reason that we now have Arnold “will my term ever end?” Schwarzenegger in the governor’s hot tub.   He’s also, quite simply, a scumbag.

But remiscent of the Bush years, when I found myself agreeing more with Pat “I’m also a scumbag” Buchanan, than I did with most “mainstream” Democrats like, well, almost all of them, I now want to pat Scumbag Issa on the back.

Why?

Because he’s come out with this:

Geithner’s Fed tried to keep sweet deal for banks a secret

The controversy surrounding Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s role in the 2008 Wall Street bailouts was ramped up Thursday with the revelation of emails that show the New York Federal Reserve — then run by Geithner — pressured insurance giant AIG to withhold information about payments the company made to its creditors.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) obtained emails between AIG employees showing that the company had planned to disclose in its filings to the SEC that it had paid 100 cents on the dollar to creditors like Goldman Sachs and other banks, but “the New York Fed crossed out the reference,” Bloomberg News reports.

AIG has received $183 billion in taxpayer relief. The news that the New York Fed attempted to keep from the public how that money was spent will likely increase political opposition to Geithner’s appointment as Treasury Secretary.

The Bloomberg.com article is here.

Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a “backdoor bailout” of financial firms.

“It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information,” said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers “deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.”

Will this become a mainstream story?   Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?  After all, it paints a “Democrat” in a negative light, and it’s being pushed by a Republican.

But we’re talking about Banksters here, and they don’t play by the rules.   They run the place.  

All these people need to be in jail.  

The internetine blogosphere evinced a collective yawn as the toobzual chattering classes learned that, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, tax cheat Timothy Geithner advised AIG to withhold critical information from its SEC filing, information taxpayers deserve to know, because they were the ones Geithner was looting, and that by law shareholders have a right know, because, well, they’re the fucking shareholders.  None of the relevant disclosures were made until after the deal was done and Geithner was confirmed as Treasury Secretary.

Because yawning occurs on both the upward and downward limbs of motivational excitement, i.e., both when waking up and when going to sleep, it was unclear whether the collective yawn was due to the irrational exuberance, excitement, liveliness, energy, high spirits and cheerfulness related to President Obama’s promises of an era of unprecedented transparency in   government, or whether having been rapidly conditioned and  habituated to the new President’s lies and the general lack of accountability for law-breaking by the ruling elites, the yawning response rather reflected the quickly-formed hard-boiled, apathetic, blind to, careless, case-hardened, cold, cold-blooded, deaf to, hard, hard-bitten, hard-boiled, hardened, hardhearted, heartless, impassive, impenitent, indifferent, indurated, inflexible, insensate, insensible, insensitive, insentient, inured, obdurate, soulless, spiritless, stiff, stony, stubborn, thick-skinned, torpid, tough, toughened, unaffected, unbending, uncaring, uncompassionate, unconcerned, unfeeling, unimpressionable, unresponsive, unsusceptible, unsympathetic attitudes required to survive the next decade from fucking Hell.

Early indicators are that Las Vegas and Wall Street bookmakers are aggressively shorting “optimism.”

I guess now that it’s the dead of winter, the time when people can really get sick, the “Swine Flu” panic is a thing of the past.

We have many more things to panic about now, right?   I mean, we’ve got the official CNN 24/7 “terrorgasm”, we’ve got coffers to bill at Big Corporations who can Supply Things To Us That Will Keep Us Safe.

And considering that there was a case of a suicide bomber somewhere (Afghanistan?) hiding the bomb up his rectum, Colbert’s suggestion that all Muslim men have a colonoscopy before boarding an aircraft doesn’t seem like something that would be far-fetched in today’s world.

But that’s not what this is about.  This is about — gosh, I almost forgot it myself, how distracting today’s panics are! — “Swine Flu”, you know that thing that was supposed to kill all of us, that thing we were all geared up to be SCARED SCARED SCARED about — and more importantly that thing that was designed to open all our wallets.

You’ll never see this on our 24-hour news terror programs, but for some reason the European Parliament has decided to investigate this scam:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/i…

The Council of Europe member states will launch an inquiry in January 2010 on the influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the global swine flu campaign, focusing especially on extent of the pharma’s industry’s influence on WHO. The Health Committee of the EU Parliament has unanimously passed a resolution calling for the inquiry. The step is a long-overdue move to public transparency of a “Golden Triangle” of drug corruption between WHO, the pharma industry and academic scientists that has permanently damaged the lives of millions and even caused death.

The parliament motion was introduced by Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former SPD Member of the German Bundestag and now chairman of the Health Committee of PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council  of Europe). Wodarg is a medical doctor and epidemiologist, a specialist in lung disease and environmental medicine, who considers the current “pandemic” Swine Flu campaign of the WHO to be “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the Century.”[1]

The text of the resolution just passed by a sufficient number in the Council of Europe Parliament says among other things, “In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines. The “bird-flu”-campaign (2005/06) combined with the “swine-flu”-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies.”[2]

The Parliamentary inquiry will look into the issue of „falsified pandemic” that was declared by WHO in June 2009 on the advice of its group of academic experts, SAGE, many of whose members have been documented to have intense financial ties to the same pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Novartis, who benefit from the production of drugs and untested H1N1 vaccines. They will investigate the influence of the pharma industry in creation of a worldwide campaign against the so-called H5N1 “Avian Flu”  and H1N1 Swine Flu. The inquiry will be given “urgent” priority in the general assembly of the parliament.

In his official statement to the Committee, Wodarg criticized the influence of the pharma industry on scientists and officials of WHO, stating that it has led to the situation where “unnecessarily millions of healthy people are exposed to the risk of poorly tested vaccines,” and that, for a flu strain that is “vastly less harmful” than all previous flu epidemics.

There you have it, in plain English.    

What everybody knew, who was paying attention.  Of course NOW they decide to do this, NOW, after the pharmaceutical companies have sold all the vaccines they could, I mean, if you haven’t gotten a vaccine by now, you’re probably not gonna get one, right?

This reeks of the “I am shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on here” line from Casablanca (and forgive me if i’m not quoting it correctly).

I mean, the EU sure wouldn’t want to actually infringe on a corporation’s god-given natural rights to scam the public into making money?    But to keep a little legitimacy in the public eye, they’ll sure pretend to investigate it afterwards, probably to slap a few fines on the perps so they can share the wealth, you know?

I was saying it back when they fear was being ramped up to fever pitch (excuse the pun) over this bogus flu.   That the WHO must have been corrupted.   Because it was, well, just obvious as fuck (pardon the language)..  

The world is completely corrupt.  You can’t believe anything any more.

But the public keeps getting punked.    It seems every year the public is ever-more-easy to punk.

Why is that?

Back on October 2nd, I wrote a piece here titled “Lockerbie Bomber” case getting fishier and fishier”.

And not long prior to that I wrote a piece titled “Angry about the “Lockerbie bomber” getting released?”.

In both these essays were quite a few links to other information regarding the wholly bogus nature of the “official” Lockerbie story.

Well, 20 years after the fact, and many years after all of this information was publicly known, the BBC decides to finally report the following:

BBC probe casts doubt on Lockerbie evidence

LONDON – A BBC investigation has cast doubt on key evidence in the case against the Libyan convicted of blowing up a US jet over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, the broadcaster said Wednesday.

A tiny fragment of the timer allegedly used to blow up Pan Am flight 103 — crucial in linking Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi to the bomb — was not properly tested and was also unlikely to have survived the explosion, it said.

Megrahi was jailed in 2001 for the attack which left 270 people dead, but was controversially released from his Scottish prison in August 2009 because he was suffering from terminal cancer and only had months to live.

Investigators believe the plane bomb was contained in a Toshiba radio cassette player inside a brown suitcase with various items of clothing, and was triggered by a digital timer that was later linked to Libya.

But according to the BBC’s Newsnight programme, the fragment of the timer — found embedded in a charred piece of clothing three weeks after the bombing — was never tested to confirm if it had actually been in a blast.

Even now, they pull back, far back, from the truth of this story.  It’s not just that this was “never tested”.  

This key piece of evidence was reportedly planted by the CIA.  

A fragment of circuit board alleged to have been part of the bomb’s timing mechanism is the sole item of physical evidence linking the two Libyans to the December 1988 bombing. But Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Linlithgow, declared: “I have come to suspect that the timing device in question was not that of Pan Am 103 but a different timing device that the CIA had picked up from the Libyans … I have been driven to the conclusion that the device was a CIA plant.”

Mr Dalyell, a long-standing critic of US and British government insistence that Libya was behind the attack, said an analysis of the fragment had shown it had been exposed to a temperature of 4,000deg C. But a Swiss police specialist had cast doubt on this, saying the explosion would have lasted only a fraction of a second in outside air temperatures of about minus 40C.

Accusing the Crown Office, the Scottish prosecuting authority, of failing to follow up the right leads, Mr Dalyell said – to strident denials from Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, the Scottish Office minister – that it had allowed itself for six years “to be suborned by political pressure into failing to carry out its duty”.

He said this was a “wicked” dereliction of duty that brought shame on Britain.

That’s from 1995.   Thanks, BBC, for being on the ball here!

There’s also this:

Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the tragedy, describes the ruling of Megrahi as the most disgraceful miscarriages of justice in history, blaming both the Scottish legal system and US intelligence.

“The Americans played their role in the investigation and influenced the prosecution,” Swire told the Scotsman Newspaper.

Top level UK diplomats tend to agree with him, such Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya.

“No court is likely get to the truth, now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence,” Miles told the BBC.

The spectacular decision of the SCCRC is certain to give a second life to the dozen of alternative theories of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Nearly two decades later, the case is back to square one.

Back to square one

Let us give Lord Sutherland, Lord Coulsfield and Lord Maclean some credit. After hearing 230 witnesses and studying 621 exhibits during 84 days of evidence, spread over eight months, the three judges of the Lockerbie trial almost got correctly the date of the worst act of terror in the UK.

In the first line of the first paragraph of the most expensive verdict in history they wrote: “At 1903 hours on 22 December 1988 Pan Am flight 103 fell out of the sky.” As a matter of fact, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded on December 21st 1988.

Michael Scharf is an international law expert at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Scharf joined the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser for Law Enforcement and Intelligence in April 1989. He was also responsible for drawing up the UN Security Council resolutions that imposed sanctions on Libya in 1992.

“It was a trial where everybody agreed ahead of time that they were just going to focus on these two guys, and they were the fall guys,” Sharf wrote.

“The CIA and the FBI kept the State Department in the dark. It worked for them for us to be fully committed to the theory that Libya was responsible. I helped the counter-terrorism bureau draft documents that described why we thought Libya was responsible, but these were not based on seeing a lot of evidence, but rather on representations from the CIA and FBI and the Department of Justice about what the case would prove and did prove.”