Yep, repairing your infrastructure is a spree

BBC NEWS | Africa | Nigeria launches $10bn oil spree

But the real push to spend such a large chunk of money from the nation’s oil coffers came not from the public, but from state governors.

Haggling

Nigeria’s power grid has all but totally collapsed.

Investment and job creation are almost impossible without a reliable electricity supply. The government promised to repair it, and said it needs to spend some of the nation’s savings to do so.

But state governors refused to allow funds to be withdrawn without getting a share.

“It was necessary to carry the state governments along,” a Ministry of Finance spokesman said.

“They have to plug holes in their budgets or deliver programmes they have promised their people.”

But civil society activists say there might be a more sinister outcome - the money might be frittered away or stolen.

I feel sad about this story, because there’s such a strong undercurrent of opinion that Nigeria shouldn’t have a functioning electrical grid, because they broke the one they had, or something. Electricity is, as the article notes, an essential ingredient for economic development. And the country has $18 billion in oil revenues socked away, of which it plans to spend $5 billion for the power grid. But oh, no, this “spree” could result in inflation (even though an enormous chunk of the money will be going to foreign contractors).

And yeah, the other $5 billion for provincial governments: maybe ugh, maybe not. Without a little more detail we have no idea whether the activists are blowing smoke. But the overall impression I get is that the best thing according the the BBC would be for the $18 billion to keep sitting in banks in rich countries, drawing minimal interest, while Nigerians remain desperately poor and without the capital to help themselves.

Worse than Hell

The tragic story of 1st Sgt. Jeff McKinney - Army News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports - Army Times

Studies by the Army, the Defense Department, Rand Corp. and others cite the same reasons why troops with mental health issues don’t seek help: fear of being seen as “weak,” inadequate access to care, concern that asking for help can hurt a career, and guilt about letting battle buddies go out on patrol without them.

Among the troubling factors is that, like McKinney, many of those who choose suicide aren’t young first-tour junior troops. Forty-seven percent of soldiers who have killed themselves in theater are older than 30. And half were in paygrades E-5 or above. Experts are concerned that it’s harder to spot signs of potential suicide in such war-hardened veterans.

McKinney’s family believes that if his chain of command had paid closer attention to the symptoms, his death might have been avoided. And they hope that by talking about it now, months after his death, they might help prevent other suicides.

This isn’t people who don’t know what war is about. It’s people who do. Read the whole damn thing. The whole story reeks of people who just didn’t want to see that there was any kind of problem, didn’t even bother to think that going without sleep for days on end is really a bad idea.

A new definition for chutzpah?

newsobserver.com | U.S. company: crash lawsuit governed by Islamic law

The crash of Blackwater Flight 61 occurred in the rugged mountains of central Afghanistan in 2004, killing three soldiers and the three-man crew.

The widows of the soldiers sued Presidential Airways, Blackwater’s sister company, which was under contract with the U.S. military to fly cargo and personnel around Afghanistan.

Presidential Airways argued that the lawsuit must be dismissed; legal doctrine holds that soldiers cannot sue the government, and the company was acting as an agent of the government.

Last year, a series of federal judges dismissed that argument.

In April, Presidential asked a federal judge in Florida to dismiss the lawsuit because the case is controlled by Afghanistan’s Islamic law. If the judge agrees that Afghan law applies, the lawsuit would be dismissed. The company also plans to ask a judge to dismiss the lawsuit on the constitutional grounds that a court should not interfere in military decision-making.

The National Transportation Safety Board has blamed the crash on Presidential for its “failure to require its flight crews to file and fly a defined route,” and for not providing oversight to make sure its crews followed company policies and Pentagon and FAA safety regulations.

Apparently they’re trying to throw everything at the wall and see if any of it with stick, and ignoring the fact that pretty much all of their rationales for why the suit should be thrown out contradict each other. (And anyway, just how do you determine the “law” of a country where much of the territory is governed by “I don’t like you, I shoot you if I can get away with it”?)

But what really struck me is that this pleading to be judged under Sharia law, Erik Prince has perhaps become the first honest-to-goodness Islamofascist to be spotted outside the confines of neocon ravings.

Supporting the troops the army way

Soldiers risk ruin while awaiting benefit checks - NYTimes.com

Most permanently disabled veterans qualify for payments from Social Security and the military or Veterans Affairs. Those sums can amount to about two-thirds of their active-duty pay. But until those checks show up, most disabled veterans draw a reduced Army paycheck.

The amount depends on the soldier’s injuries, service time and other factors. But a typical veteran and his family who once lived on $3,400 a month might have to make do with $970 a month.
…

In a change in policy that took effect last August, the Army is allowing wounded soldiers to continue to draw their full Army paychecks for up to 90 days after discharge, Baker said. It is also sending more VA workers to Army posts to process claims more quickly, and trying to do a better job of informing soldiers of the available benefits and explaining the application process.

…

She acknowledged, however, that the changes have been slow to take hold across an Army stretched by war. ”It’s definitely a practice that is new. It takes awhile for new practices to be institutionalized,” the colonel said.

So let me understand this: the DoD in its wisdom decides that a soldier is too badly injured to remain in the service. Then, and only then, do they begin the process of deciding whether they’re badly-injured enough to receive disability payments. And while they’re doing that, if the former soldier disagrees with their assessment of disability, the soldier gets bupkis — not even the lesser amount — while the disagreement is being worked out. Oh, and if the soldier moves, say to a lower-cost area closer to family, or to somewhere closer to a VA hospital that can treat their disability, they get bupkis for another few months until someone has shuffled the paperwork around.

And the excuse for this is that the war has put strains on the Army. You mean strains like having tens of thousands of young men and women who have lost arms, legs, faces, brain function? Nah. Strains like having tens of thousands of additional files to pass around.

Gives you a warm feeling

‘Lyrical terrorist’ has conviction quashed | UK news | guardian.co.uk

A former Heathrow shop assistant who called herself the “lyrical terrorist” and was the first woman sentenced under new anti-terror laws today had her conviction overturned.

Samina Malik, 24, from Southall, west London, was convicted under section 58 of the Terrorism Act in November last year after she wrote poems celebrating the beheading of non-Muslims.

Today, she won an appeal against her conviction for collecting personal information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.
…
The lord chief justice, Lord Phillips, sitting in the court of appeal with Justice Goldring and Justice Plender, quashed the conviction after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) conceded it was unsafe.
…

Phillips explained in today’s judgment that in February the court of appeal gave detailed consideration to section 58 of the Terrorism Act. It ruled that an offence would be committed only if the document or record concerned was likely to provide practical assistance to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.

Propagandist or theological material did not fall within the section, he said.

In Malik’s case, the jury was told 14 documents - out of 21 – that did not fall within Section 58 were also capable of founding a conviction.

I’m a little confused by the prosecution’s closing comment, along the lines that, yeah, they clearly couldn’t get a conviction at retrial with the evidence they had left, but they were glad they’d brought the case anyway.

Proud to be an american

Indian Workers Decry Recruitment Tactics - washingtonpost.com

When about 500 Indian recruits reached Mississippi in the fall of 2006, Kumar and the others said, they found that they had been deceived. Their new employer, Signal International Corp., had hired them as temporary “guest” workers with 10-month H2B visas. There was no possibility of obtaining permanent residency for themselves, let alone their families back home. Signal denies that it knew the workers had been promised U.S. residency.

Or the Raw Story version, a bit heavier on the fraud, exploitation and violence:

The Raw Story | Human trafficking of Indian guest workers alleged in Mississippi shipyard; Contractor defends 290-man camp

The workers said that armed security guards were holding some workers prisoner in the TV room of the Signal International Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where the company’s 290 welders and pipe fitters live.

The men told Soni that Signal International – a sub-contractor for mammoth defense contractor Northrop Grumman – had staged a pre-dawn raid and that six Indian workers had been detained in the “TV room,” flanked by security guards, one of whom carried a gun. About 200 other Indian employees at Signal were standing outside the room.

Signal says they detained the guest workers at the advice of US immigration officials, in an attempt to forcibly deport them following a labor dispute.

Oh, that’s all right then. We always respond to labor disputes by having people deported.

Lots of other vicious company-town tactics, e.g. supposed wages of $18.50 an hour, but $250 a week off the top for mandatory food and board in windowless trailers holding 20-24 workers (That would be a clawback by the company of $21K a month for each trailer). And commissions of $15-20K upfront to the recruiting agents.

Here’s my plan: if the slimeballs in charge of this operation can’t come up with the permanent residency they promised or refund the $5M-plus they scammed the workers out of, they should all forfeit their own right to reside in the US. I’m not sure which country would be stupid enough to take them, but I’m sure someone would.

Wanker of the day

BBC NEWS | Americas | Head-to-head: Refuge for deserters?

JONATHAN KAY, CANADA’S NATIONAL POST
Should Corey Glass have enlisted in the US National Guard back in 2002? Probably not. From what I saw and heard of his 21 May press conference in Toronto, my first impression was that this pale, lanky 25-year-old should be playing synth in a Gothic emo band

blah, blah blah blah even though he was told he was signing up for disaster relief and homeland defense he was really signing up to invade another country sot blah blah blah.

But the most obvous reason Kay is full of crap is Abu Grhaib, Haditha and uncounted thousands of other war crimes. Once Glass had determined (as his statement says he did) that the things he and his fellow soldiers were being ordered to do in Iraq were unlawful (whether the small-scale war crimes of torture, murder and baseless imprisonment or the larger-scale ones of collective punishment and failure to provide security for the occupied population) he was in a no-win situation. Stay, and face the risk of being one of the low-ranking (and only low-ranking) soldiers sent to prison for doing what he was told to do, or leave and face the risk of being sent to prison for not doing it.And that’s not something a mostly-civilized country like Canada should collude with.

Golda Meir redux

via Alas

genderberg.com - Content

The switch from the “build better prostitutes” paradigm to the “build more sexually responsible men” paradigm is the Swedish solution and that’s the basket I’m putting my eggs in, but other solutions are possible from this new perspective.

Instead of the Swedish model, tricking men could be licensed and be made to openly register with governments in countries where they use prostitutes. We could implement a 5-hour course in responsible prostitute-use similar to responsible driver or gun permit courses. We could make STD checks mandatory for every would-be john

There would still be a core of men for whom the whole unlicensed thing would be the point of hiring a prostitute, and there would be the guys who would be embarassed, but I can also see a subsector of lads feeling all macho when they got their tricking papers. (Would you have to renew it? could you lose it?)

Which part of “defend the constitution” didn’t you understand?

Talking Points Memo | Lawyer: Gitmo interrogators told to trash notes

“The mission has legal and political issues that may lead to interrogators being called to testify, keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimize certain legal issues,” the document is quoted as saying in an affidavit signed by Kuebler.

For a corporation involved in civil litigation against other corporations, minimizing the amount of stuff available for discovery is a perfectly reasonable, if sometimes sleazy, strategy. For a government all of whose members are pledged to uphold the law, not so much. If they had really thought what they were doing was legitimate, they would have preserved the evidence, not destroyed it. (And if it ever comes to criminal prosecution, this will be important, because a policy of destroying evidence pretty much eliminates the defense of believing that the orders in question were legal.)

This kind of procedure also reinforces the conclusion that interrogators were torturing people just for the sake of torturing them. If you really want information from an interrogation, you preserve every scrap of information from every session, because you never know what little bit might turn out to be important in the context of some other fact that turns up. (There’s an irony — who knows what crucial intelligence from the real terrorists was shredded because of some obstruction-happy lawyer?)

Can’t even run a show trial right

Talking Points Memo | Gitmo judge removed from Canadian’s case

The chief judge for the Guantanamo tribunals, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, dismissed Brownback and appointed a new judge for Khadr’s case without explanation, defense lawyer Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler said.

In November, Brownback said in court that Defense Department officials “didn’t like” a ruling that dismissed the charges over a lack of jurisdiction. That decision was overturned on appeal.

Khadr’s case has been on track to be one of the first to trial at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba. Khadr, the son of an alleged al-Qaida financier, was captured in Afghanistan at age 15 and accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. Special Forces soldier.

Military prosecutors have been pressing Brownback to set a trial date, but he has repeatedly directed them first to satisfy defense requests for access to potential evidence. At a hearing earlier this month, he threatened to suspend the proceedings altogether unless the detention center provided records of Khadr’s confinement.

Debacles like this really show what incompetent managers inhabit this administration. If you’re going to have a kangaroo court, then appoint some effing kangaroos to run it, not anyone who might develop even the tiniest shred of conscience or respect for legal process. Having to swap out apparatchiks because you can’t get the rulings you want is a sign of planning right in line with “they’ll greet us with flowers.”

This maneuver is also of a piece with messes like the warrantless-wiretapping scandal. It’s not as if the people who have been calling foul are great civil libertarians, it’s just that the behavior of this administration goes beyond the pale for all but the most dedicated psychopaths.