Reply #3: It's no longer about abstract "justice", or holding the bastards "responsible."

[mojowork_n]

For a lot of people, it could involve the most fundamental issues of freedom, and personal survival.

According to the article flagged in this thread, there are 773,000 names are on the "terror suspect" watchlist. The list grows by 20,000 names a month.



Who's on the list? Anyone that ever attended an anti-Klan rally, protested the Jena 6, or attended a Green Party meeting?

At the same time, on the "other side", the worst sort of corruption (they used to call it "war profiteering") is being covered up:

August 31, 2007
U.S. Says Company Bribed Officers for Work in Iraq
By ERIC SCHMITT and JAMES GLANZ
WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 — An American-owned company operating from Kuwait paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to American contracting officers in efforts to win more than $11 million in contracts, the government says in court documents.

The Army last month suspended the company, Lee Dynamics International, from doing business with the government, and the case now appears to be at the center of a contracting fraud scandal that prompted Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to dispatch the Pentagon inspector general to Iraq to investigate.

Court documents filed in the case say the Army took action because the company was suspected of paying hundreds of thousands in bribes to Army officers to secure contracts to build, operate and maintain warehouses in Iraq that stored weapons, uniforms, vehicles and other matériel for Iraqi forces in 2004 and 2005.

...The case is now part of a broader investigation in which the Army has a high-level team reviewing 18,000 contracts valued at more than $3 billion that the Kuwait office has awarded over four years...

...One of the officers, Maj. Gloria D. Davis, a contracting official in Kuwait, shot and killed herself in Baghdad in December 2006. Government officials say the suicide occurred a day after she admitted to an Army investigator that she had accepted at least $225,000 in bribes from the company... ...

Full text here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/31/washington/31contract.html?ei=5090&en=379525d15e30c78d&ex=1346212800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1188584312-oewPz7sFi4/FHTdMel0fSg&pagewanted=print

Those corruption investigations could lead to General David Petraeus. Col. Ted Westhusing (the Army's top "ethicist" -- who knew they had one -- was investigating fraud in Iraq when he was said to have committed "suicide." His superior officer at the time was Petraeus.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/an-american-death-col-_b_11373.html

After seeing the SF Chronicle report in that D.U. thread, I checked one of my favorites, among the farther-out-there news reporting websites, to ping for echoes. (Where you sometimes do find things that never make it into the Post, or the Times, until after they happen.)









edit: I mis-copied the first link.

E-mail to John Conyer's office sent.