Saturday, June 18, 2005
When Life Imitates a Z Magazine Comic Strip
It never fails to amaze me how good the Bush administration is at acting like the Bush administration ... or, actually, I guess it has been failing to amaze me lately because I can't remember feeling outraged for quite some time; however, the following is so like bad satire or like something that one might insinuate as a sort of off-the-top-of-one's-head throw-away joke that it kind of surprised me that it's true...
After a slight uptick in the amount of criticism being directed towards America's extra-legal extra-US prison system -- Joseph Biden and even Thomas Friedman calling for Guantanamo Bay to be shut down -- Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld et al. said go to hell, called Amnesty International's charges "outlandish" even though the allegations were mostly uncontroversially sourced from military investigations, and a week later it turns out that our little Cuban Club Med is going to be expanded and further, I kid you not, that Halliburton has ... umm ... "won" the contract: (from The Independent)
Frequent readers of this blog know that usually at this point I would write Man, you can't make this shit up but the really sad thing here is that you can make this shit up, pretty easily. Just pick a topic in foreign affairs, sketch out a policy that is stupid, greedy, and ideological then sit around and wait for the Bush administration to start advocating it...
After a slight uptick in the amount of criticism being directed towards America's extra-legal extra-US prison system -- Joseph Biden and even Thomas Friedman calling for Guantanamo Bay to be shut down -- Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld et al. said go to hell, called Amnesty International's charges "outlandish" even though the allegations were mostly uncontroversially sourced from military investigations, and a week later it turns out that our little Cuban Club Med is going to be expanded and further, I kid you not, that Halliburton has ... umm ... "won" the contract: (from The Independent)
A subsidiary of Halliburton, the oil services group once led by the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, has won a $30m (£16m) contract to help build a new permanent prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Pentagon announcement, giving further details of the planned two-storey jail, complete with air conditioning and exercise and medical facilities, is a further sign that the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is determined to keep the jail in operation.
There are some 520 inmates from 40 countries at Guantanamo, some of them held there for more than three years. The new jail will be capable of holding 220 people. Under the contract with the US Naval Engineering Command, the work is to be finished by the end of July 2006. The final deal could be worth as much as $500m.
The work will be carried out by Halliburton's contracting subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR). It will include site work, heating, ventilation and air conditioning, plumbing and electrical work.
Frequent readers of this blog know that usually at this point I would write Man, you can't make this shit up but the really sad thing here is that you can make this shit up, pretty easily. Just pick a topic in foreign affairs, sketch out a policy that is stupid, greedy, and ideological then sit around and wait for the Bush administration to start advocating it...
