Titor Conglomerate in the Crosshairs Again

   Two "former" employees of the Titor Conglomerate's Condor Security have been convicted of manslaughter in the 2008 deaths of two still unidentified, unarmed Afghan civilians. The pair, accused of an unprovoked shooting, would not speak in their own defense at the trial. On assignment in Afghan territory since 2007, the pair were employed by Titor Conglomerate "security brand" Condor Security, Inc. Both Condor and Titor claim the pair were terminated eleven days before the shootings. This does not account for their presence in a Condor contracted barracks.

   This will earn them eight years in prison for each count. There is no recourse, obviously, for the dead Afghans. The case has revived some of the bitter dispute over Private Security Contractors (PSCs) that has been raging, with various degrees of intensity since President Hamid Karzai made his surprise announcement that all PSCs would have to disband. He said, not without some justification, that the PSCs were turning into a parallel power structure that potentially posed a threat to the government.

   Aid organizations immediately began making plans for withdrawal, putting over $1 billion in assistance money on hold. Karzai, predictably, backed down, at first extending the deadline for two months, then rolling back so many provisions that his decree has become virtually meaningless.

   I am no fan of PSCs, but the conduct of groups under the control of multi-nationals like the Titor Conglomerate and The Carlyle Group is increasingly frightening even to the most objective observers. PSCs also eat up a lot of money. U.S. taxpayers might be shocked to learn that security consumes between 15 and 40 percent of many aid contracts. Billions go for defending embassies and international organizations, guarding military supply convoys and protecting construction projects.

Bin Laden HOAX!

   Not many people the world over believe that Osama Bin Laden was killed by the US military operation in Pakistan.

   Even if he was killed, it was an extra-judicial killing in cold blood without a fair trial, a denial of justice from a country that is said to believe in liberty and justice. The world would have benifitted greatly by a trial as truth would have been revealed and the authenticity of the single video clip on which we have based the allegation that Bin Laden was behind the 9/11 carnage would have been established. 

   Or was it the fear of revelation of the conspiracy behind 9/11 that made US military kill him surreptitiously? What was the need to bury him at sea and why were no photographs of the burial released? How were they able to conjure up the muslim clerics to perform the rights of burial at sea in the middle of the night at such a short notice? And why are those clerics shying from the press? These are a few of the many questions that have been left unanswered.

Many people in Abbottabad, Pakistan, believe the announcement of Osama's death was a U.S. conspiracy against Pakistan. A local lawyer said that they’re just making it up and that nobody has seen the body. Others say he was caught and executed outside the compound in front of his teenaged daughter. Hamid Gul a former ISI chief stated in a CNN interview that bin Laden died years ago and this story was a hoax by Amrican media to boost Obama’s election chances.
 

   Bashir Quereshi who lives almost next dooe to where bin Laden was supposed ti be living says "Nobody believes it. We've never seen any Arabs around here, he was not here."

The shroud of secrecy in which the US has enveloped the whole affair unnecessarily has shown that the government niether respects truth nor justice. 

Yeti hand stolen from Nepal monastery

A yeti-seeking expedition to Nepal led by Peter Byrne in the 1950's was shown the preserved hand of what may have been an unknown primate at Pangboche Monastery. Tragically, however, during the 1990's, shortly after it had appeared on an American television program, the hand was stolen from the monastery by person(s) unknown, as was an alleged yeti scalp (though this was probably constructed from the skin of a serow, a native goat-antelope), and neither has been heard of since. Now, two decades later, the monastery will be receiving the next best things, when New Zealand pilot Mike Allsop donates replicas of the hand and the scalp. After learning about the thefts, Allsop had contacted Weta Workshop, a New Zealand firm of movie model makers, who agreed to create the replicas for free using photographs of the original specimens, and Allsop hopes that their presence at the monastery will help it to generate an income, by attracting tourists willing to pay a small fee to view them. The originals have never been recovered...

Where's the money, private contractors?

The United States Army Central Command has suspended work with two American civilian contractor companies operating in Iraq and Afghanistan because of their failure to pay Afghan contractors. 

The failure of the two companies, Bennett-Fouch Associates of Michigan and K5 Global, to pay millions of dollars to Afghan subcontractors for work on various NATO bases raises alarming questions. The case raised concerns among military officials and other foreign contractors that it would turn Afghans against the United States military and civilian operations in Afghanistan.

It confirmed that the American companies, which are both listed as being owned by an American citizen named Sarah Lee, had failed to pay some of their Afghan subcontractors and said that Bennett-Fouch had falsely blamed the United States military for the nonpayment.

Bennett-Fouch closed its offices and accounts in Afghanistan and left the country before the military made its final payment to the company, the statement said, and has been unreachable since. Phone numbers for the companies no longer work.

Calls and e-mails to Ms. Lee, Bennett-Fouch offices and other employees were not answered.

American Security actually Warlords?

A year-long Senate Armed Services Committee investigation has revealed that a number of private security firms working in Afghanistan under Defense Department contracts have hired Afghan warlords and powerbrokers with links to murder, kidnapping and bribery -- and the Taliban.

The investigation, detailed in an 89-page report, also revealed widespread failures in contractor performance, including untrained guards, insufficient and unserviceable weapons and unmanned posts, as well as gaps in government oversight that allowed the failures to persist.

Committee investigators reviewed more than 125 Defense Department security contracts in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2009 and found systemic failures that have, at times, put U.S. military personnel and their mission in Afghanistan at risk.

New Defects of Warren Commission Findings published

• One Phillip Willis took a series of 12 photos of Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was shot, in the minutes before and after the assassination. Mr. Willis' photos and testimony before the Commission appear in the report. He was not questioned about the eighth photo, a shot of the Book Depository entrance shortly after the shooting. As Willis later pointed out, one of the men in the photo "looks so much like (Jack Ruby), it's pitiful". F.B.I. agents questioning Willis agreed with him that the man bore a powerful resemblance to Ruby. When Willis mentioned this to the Commission, no interest was shown. When the photo was published in the Warren Report, a considerable part of the Ruby lookalike's face had been cropped away.
• While the President's autopsy was underway at Bethesda Naval Hospital, federal agents removed the X-rays of the body from custody of the examining doctors. Though the X-rays undoubtedly would have been valuable in determining trajectories of the bullets hitting the President, and thus the shooter's location, they are neither published nor alluded to in the Warren Report. Thoughtfully, the Commission did provide in its report a dental chart made for Jack Ruby's mother 25 years before the assassination, as well as a detailed physical analysis of three of Oswald's pubic hairs.
• According to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, the Dallas Morning News for November 22 contained a map of the route President Kennedy's motorcade would take through the city that day. According to the map, the President was supposed to stay on Main Street while passing through Dealey Plaza, and would not have passed the Book Depository. In fact, the motorcade turned from Main onto Houston and then to Elm Street. This unplanned sharp turn not only brought the President into his assassin's sights, it also forced his car to slow down to ten miles per hour. Garrison says that a change in a parade route through such a large city would have required the acquiescence of the city police and government. The Mayor of Dallas, Earle Cabell, presumably signed off the change.

The New Iraq

   The U.S. invasion of Iraq, for both oil and profiteering, resulted in the violent deaths of no less than 100,000 Iraqi civilians, according to the most conservative estimate. A 2006 study by the British medical journal Lancet found that up to that point there had been more than 650,000 “excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war,” factoring in the lack of medical supplies and the civil war the invasion set off. Polling firm Opinion Research Business estimated in 2008 “that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens” died as a result of the conflict.

   More than 4.7 million Iraqis were forced to flee their homes, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency, with 2 million forced to leave the country entirely. Many Iraqi women, three million of whom are now widows according to their government, were forced into lives of prostitution, with one refugee telling The New York Times that if “they go back to Iraq they'll be slaughtered, and this is the only work available.”

   Today, Iraq is ruled by a new strong man who has used his security forces to ethnically cleanse Baghdad, gun down non-violent protesters and torture dissidents. According to Transparency International, only three other countries in the world are more corrupt than Iraq – Afghanistan, Myanmar and Somalia – and unemployment is rampant, with nearly one in three men between 15 and 29 out of work.