weekend update April 25/26, 2009

4-26-09—[The Senate Armed Services Committee report released last week] found that Maj. Paul Burney, a US Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantanamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce that intelligence. In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a ear resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. –Frank Rich, NYT WK 14

4-26-09—Mr. Siggfusson [53 year old Left-Green Party leader and former truck driver] was finance minister in [Iceland’s] caretaker government, a position he is expected to keep after the election, and he tells interviewers he wants to free Iceland from the consequences of embracing the unrestrained free-marketing that had its origins in the United States. “What are the people of the United States made about now?” he said in a recent interview. “It is the same poisonous philosophy that we had here, based on a lack of moral awareness and greed, and people who thought nothing of flying Elton John into Iceland fo their 50th birthday and paying him 70 million Icelandic kronors,” or roughly $600,000. NYT A8

4-25-06—In a confidence game that made a mockery of the US military’s most secure compound in Iraq, a ring of Americans posing as contractors and their Nepalese truck drivers used tanker trucks, forged documents and sheer brazenness to steal at least $40 million worth of jet and diesel fuel from an Army depot... NYT A6