Criminal Incompetence
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10.30.06
From The New York Times: U.S. Is Said to Fail in Tracking Arms for Iraqis (via Upyernoz):
The American military has not properly tracked hundreds of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces and has failed to provide spare parts, maintenance personnel or even repair manuals for most of the weapons given to the Iraqis, a federal report released Sunday has concluded.
[. . .]
The answers came Sunday from the inspector general’s office, which found major discrepancies in American military records on where thousands of 9-millimeter pistols and hundreds of assault rifles and other weapons have ended up. The American military did not even take the elementary step of recording the serial numbers of nearly half a million weapons provided to Iraqis, the inspector general found, making it impossible to track or identify any that might be in the wrong hands.
Exactly where untracked weapons could end up — and whether some have been used against American soldiers — were not examined in the report, although black-market arms dealers thrive on the streets of Baghdad, and official Iraq Army and police uniforms can easily be purchased as well, presumably because government shipments are intercepted or otherwise corrupted.
In a written response to the inspector general’s findings, the American military largely conceded the shortcomings.
Greeaaat. But it gets even better:
Because the inspector general is charged only with looking at weaponry financed directly by the American taxpayer, the total of lost weapons could end up being higher.
Dig them ditches, boys — on the double!
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09.16.06
Read it and weep (via Memeorandum):
After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans — restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O’Beirne’s office in the Pentagon.
[. . .]
O’Beirne’s staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .
Many of those chosen by O’Beirne’s office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.
No wonder we’re now digging trenches around Baghdad. . .
Or, as Digby puts it:
But the way the administration went about creating the CPA illustrates everything you need to know about the childlike sciolism of these so-called grown-ups. They insisted on invading a well contained country of 25 million people, ripped its society to shreds, and then put a bunch of low level cronies and inexperienced schoolkids in charge of creating a Club for Growth wet dream in the desert. And they spent billions and billions of dollars failing to do anything but lay the groundwork for civil war. I don’t know if it’s possible to screw up on a grander scale than that.
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08.28.06
“9th ward diagonal car 1″
Matt Cohen, August 26, 2006
Broken bottles, broken plates,
Broken switches, broken gates,
Broken dishes, broken parts,
Streets are filled with broken hearts.
Broken words never meant to be spoken,
Everything is broken.
– Bob Dylan, “Everything is Broken”
Last year, I posted the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Everything is Broken,” and linked various phrases to images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The degree to which Dylan’s words fit the events unfolding before us was uncanny.
A year later, New Orleans remains a city crippled not only by a natural disaster, but by a man-made one: a Republican administration that sat on its ass and ate birthday cake while a city drowned has compounded that frightening lack of human decency by breaking promise after promise to those in the region.
Of course, only a fool would think that that has been an accident. Bush put Karl Rove in charge of the administration’s post-Katrina strategy, an act of bad faith of such magnitude that one recoils from the sheer monstrosity of it. As Dan Froomkin noted at the time:
Rove’s leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush’s image.
That is Rove’s hallmark.
And that is exactly what has come to pass: a bungled recovery process that has allowed the wreckage of the storm to fester under the hot Louisiana sun. And it’s all being done with political objectives in mind, as Frank Rich noted in the The New York Times this past Sunday:
Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”
All across the media landscape, the Bush administration is being shown for what it is: a callous political machine that cares only for its own survival.
That is going to be brought home over the next two days, as President Bush attempts to whitewash his response to the storm with a series of PR stunts. After all, you don’t introduce new products in August: you just shine up the old lies and put them out on the shelf in some new packaging.
As noted here a few days ago, Matt Cohen, who blogs at 1115.org, decided to take a first-hand look behind the Bush administration’s spin. Traveling down to New Orleans with his camera, Matt has posted a powerful set of pictures on flickr that document the all-too-slow recovery of New Orleans (I thank him for granting me permission to use a few of his images here), and he has just written a searing account of his trip through the 9th Ward.
It’s called A Victory Lap for Broken Promises:
But all of that is just the least bad part. What remains of Lakeview and the Lower 9th Ward is a national embarrassment. One year after Katrina, and some houses rest off their foundations and in the streets. Cars sit upside down or crushed, some even under buildings washed away by flood waters. Water-damaged and mud-caked objects are distributed inside houses and in yards. Block after block, the damage appears infinite. The fact that $44 billion has been released for recovery, yet the ruins of the 9th ward are allowed to stand almost frozen in time, is nothing short of disgusting. With so many of our ruling Republican majority subscribing to the “Broken Window” theory, it’s amazing that the ultimate broken window is the flood damage allowed to remain across New Orleans.
It’s an amazing post that showcases the best of what blogs can do. Please go and read it.
Of all of the images that Matt has posted, the one below struck me most deeply:
“HOME This was HOME,” the spray-painted eulogy reads. The house still stands, but the home inside it is gone, for now. It will be vanquished permanently, if the Bush administration has its way.
And that is something that we will never forget.
Update: Please visit Shakespeare’s Sister for many more perspectives on the first anniversary of Hurrican Katrina. In her post, Shakes argues convincingly that “Katrina was the inevitable failure in the wake of Bush Conservatism’s success.”
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By Matt
posted in Politics, Best Posts, George W. Bush, New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, Conservative Ideology, FEMA, Michael Brown, Criminal Incompetence, Criminal Negligence, Bob Dylan, Natural Disasters, Photography, Bush Administration
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09.28.05
With Michael Brown spouting revisionist history on Capitol Hill, now seems like a good time to remind ourselves of FEMA’s criminal incompetance during the Katrina aftermath. Under Michael Brown, Michael Chertoff, and George W. Bush, this agency actively and explicitly prevented help from reaching victims in need.
From an earlier post:
Update: Terrance has a list of some other things we need to remember as the right attempts to reframe Katrina.
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09.09.05
Caught between grief and rage, anger and shame, I’ve been searching for something that would begin to release the knot in my chest.
I once was lost, but now I’m found:
George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People (MP3). (By The Legendary K.O. Produced by Kanye West. Words by Big Mon and Damien a/k/a Dem Knock-Out Boyz) [Via All-Spin Zone]
Download, listen, and repeat, repeat, repeat.
Because George Bush isn’t the only Republican who hates “naygers”.
This is the soundtrack to the revolution.
Blast it from the fucking rooftops.
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By Matt
posted in Politics, Books, Movies, Music, Television, George W. Bush, New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, Race, Conservative Ideology, FEMA, Criminal Incompetence, Criminal Negligence
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09.08.05
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land 
Rick Bowmer/AP
Some will see these photographs as an exploitation of tragedy; others will see them as unduly macabre;
and some will recognize that only when we are willing to look at what our nation has wrought can it be saved, if it still can be saved.
Found via Talk Left and Pam’s House Blend, they are graphic and disturbing. Click on them at your own risk:
Avoid them at your nation’s risk.
In an essay that appeared in an 1863 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote about Matthew Brady’s photographs of the Civil War dead — the first wartime photographs that brought the reality of war to American breakfast tables. Holmes wrote:
Many people would not look through this series. Many, having seen it and dreamed of its horrors, would lock it up in some secret drawer, that it might not thrill or revolt those whose soul sickens at such sights. It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.
We cannot allow the dead of New Orleans to be locked in a secret drawer or buried in the recesses of our cabinet. Not if we want our republic to rise from its knees and live again. Not while these people hold the reins of power.
There are too many stories yet to be told. We need to hear them. We need to see them.
But even that is not enough.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! hypocrite lecteur! –mon semblable,–mon frere!
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Clearly, the federal officials purportedly in charge of the disaster recovery efforts bear the heaviest burden for these deaths. The President who appointed them, and those who continue to support him, have revealed themselves for the callous, inhumane, immoral creatures that they are.
But I can’t help feeling that we are part of the problem, too. By continuing to participate in this corrupt and morally bankrupt society, we all bear some measure of the burden.
We live in a country whose President openly wonders “what didn’t go right?” as FEMA orders 25,000 body bags.
He will never know, because he will never face these dead.
But we can, and we must.
The last five posts I’ve written, and then deleted, have all been titled “What’s the Point?” In the face of our failed efforts to make a change before this disaster, I’m still trying to figure out the answer to that question, but the one thing I do know is that everything is different now. After Katrina, things cannot continue to go on as they did before. Something has to change. Everything has to change.
We need action. We need to open the doors of this cabinet of horrors, this grotesque nation of repulsive privilege and old bigotry.
We need a revolution.
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By Matt
posted in Politics, Science & Health, Media Criticism, Best Posts, George W. Bush, Corruption, Missing Persons, Police State, New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, Race, Journalism, Newspapers, Magazines, FEMA, Michael Brown, Criminal Incompetence, Criminal Negligence
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09.06.05
Compiled after reading this.
Broken lines, broken strings,
Broken threads, broken springs,
Broken idols, broken heads,
People sleeping in broken beds.
Ain’t no use jiving
Ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken.
Broken bottles, broken plates,
Broken switches, broken gates,
Broken dishes, broken parts,
Streets are filled with broken hearts.
Broken words never meant to be spoken,
Everything is broken.
Seem like every time you stop and turn around
Something else just hit the ground.
Broken cutters, broken saws,
Broken buckles, broken laws,
Broken bodies, broken bones,
Broken voices on broken phones.
Take a deep breath, feel like you’re chokin’,
Everything is broken.
Every time you leave and go off someplace
Things fall to pieces in my face.
Broken hands on broken ploughs,
Broken treaties, broken vows,
Broken pipes, broken tools,
People bending broken rules.
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking,
Everything is broken.
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By Matt
posted in Politics, Books, Movies, Music, Television, Best Posts, George W. Bush, New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, Criminal Incompetence, Bob Dylan
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09.05.05
Shakespeare’s Sister has a run-down of FEMA’s incompetence in the aftermath of Katrina:
My addition (please add others in comments):
FEMA Cuts Parish Emergency Communication Lines Without Notice
So what is FEMA good for?
The hip-hop.
Shakes Sis points to this FEMA rap for kids, and asks “WTF?”
Call me crazy, but I don’t think they’ll be calling in Kanye West to do the remix.
Technorati tags: FEMA, Michael Brown, Hurricane Katrina
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