Subscribe"Most [of the building contract] has gone to a Kuwait builder, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, with the rest awarded to six contractors working on the project’s 'classified' portion — the actual embassy offices.More on First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting:
Higgins declined to identify those builders, citing security reasons, but said five were American companies."*
"The four-dozen Nepalese workers were waiting for jobs on American military bases in Iraq, but then a horrifying video on TV changed everything.
Footage of 12 of their countrymen executed at the hands of insurgents in Iraq last year set off a panic in the Kuwaiti compound where the workers waited. The Nepalis didn't want to risk the same fate.
But a manager for First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Co., the contractor sending them to Iraq, gathered them together and issued an ultimatum: Agree to travel to Iraq and they would get more food and water. Refuse, and they would get nothing and be put out on the streets of Kuwait City to find their way home.
'The company was forcing them to go to Iraq,' said Lok Bahadur Thapa, the former acting Nepalese ambassador to Saudi Arabia."
And the irony lies where?
The Democratic staff who authored the report twisted policy makers’ statements and cherry picked intelligence in order to reach their misleading conclusions, often leaving out pertinent intelligence;
A majority of the Iraqi parliament has written to Congress rejecting a long-term security deal with Washington if it is not linked to a requirement that U.S. forces leave.
[Ron] Suskind describes the Cheney doctrine as follows: "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about 'our analysis,' as Cheney said. It's about 'our response.' … Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence,' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."The problem is the Bush Administration didn't say they thought Iraq might have WMD and we couldn't afford to take a chance, they said they absolutely knew they did.
There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It's been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.Data didn't back Bush claims on Iraqi weapons, officials say
"Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have 'been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,' a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.
A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.
The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator."
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posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 12:19 PM on June 5