Bill Maher: Stop Saying Iraq Is Another Vietnam; It's Another Enron

[marmar]

from HuffPost, via AlterNet:


Stop Saying Iraq Is Another Vietnam; It's Another Enron

By Bill Maher, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted September 29, 2007.


Bush is fighting a war with phony accounting tricks. They fudged the numbers to get us into Iraq and cooked the books to keep us there.



Iraq is Enron, and President Bush is Ken Lay. He's fighting a war with phony accounting tricks. The Bush administration fudged the numbers to get us into Iraq, and cooked the books to keep us there. "The surge" is simply another in a long series of inflated stock quotes.

This past weekend Marcel Marceau passed away at age 84. Doctors say he went quietly. Thus proving that evil thrives when good men stay silent. And just like with Enron, the good men and women who are blowing the whistle on Iraq contractor fraud are being vilified, fired, demoted, and those are the lucky ones.

Last Friday morning the Senate Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing entitled "The Mistreatment of Iraq Contracting Whistleblowers," just in time to make the Friday news dump. According to the committee more than $10 billion dollars in Iraq reconstruction and military support contracts is unaccounted for.

In other words, for every six dollars spent in Iraq one dollar is in question. And folks, it's a war-zone, you're dealing with a culture known for its haggling skills, so you've got factor in a little skimming, but this is ridiculous. If you stole that much money from the Mafia you'd be dead.

Vicente Fox may have called President Bush a "windshield cowboy," but Bush has certainly turned Iraq into a wild, wild, west. And here's another one from the War in Iraq's this-is going-to-make-you-vomit file. Some Iraq contract whistleblowers have been vilified and fired, others have been detained by the US military and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques.

Donald Vance, a Navy veteran, was working for an Iraqi-owned outfit called the Shield Group Security Company. Vance said he witnessed Shield Group selling guns, land mines, and rocket-launchers to Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry workers. Vance described Shield Groups as "a Wal-Mart for guns." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/63893/

[alfredo]

1. Excellent

[marmar]

2. Agree....

Not only is Maher funny, he gets it.

[alfredo]

4. He can be an asshole at times, but that's his job. Here he is on

the money.

[Cha]

9. Yeah, nobody is great

all the time..well, maybe a few but they're people I know..not in politics.

[alfredo]

10. He has to appeal to a wide audience, and sometimes he has to

be the devil's advocate.

[Cha]

11. And sometimes he just

bombs..nobody's perfect..it's just a matter of what they're not perfect about and what I like about them.

[alfredo]

12. He's paid for his honesty.

[blondeatlast]

3. Exactly. Maher's a self-aggrandizing prick--but he (or his writers) is/are

spot-on target too often to ignore.

[BelgianMadCow]

6. .

:hi:

[hedgehog]

5. I was going to send this to my mom and my brother, but

she's already getting depressed over this was and he needs to watch his blood pressure!

[Kurovski]

7. K&R. (nt)

[Cha]

8. Wheeew! Bill Maher has

been studying on this! Good Analogy and one I will be espousing as something I read by Bill Maher..thank you, both, marmar!~

Super Recommended! Most Americans can relate to the enron scam.