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Joe Biden CNN Mitt Romney president RNC Sarah Palin waterboarding torture meta Iraq George W. Bush Hillary Clinton John McCain Barack Obama 2008They Have No Shame
The Republican Party has absolutely no shame about exploiting tragedy for political gain:
One of the most enduring taboos in American politics, the airing of graphic images from the September 11 attacks in a partisan context, died today. It was nearly seven years old.
The informal prohibition, which had been occasionally threatened by political ads in recent years, was pronounced dead at approximately 7:40 CST, when a video aired before delegates at the Republican National Convention included slow-motion footage of a plane striking the World Trade Center, the towers’ subsequent collapse, and smoke emerging from the Pentagon.
The September 11 precedent was one of the few surviving campaign-season taboos. It is survived by direct comparisons of one’s opponents to Hitler.
Be afraid, be very afraid. Because then they can keep taking advantage of you.
McCain Backer: Paying People to Kill Other People
One of John McCain’s big-money fundraisers also funded terrorists:
The co-host of a recent top-dollar fundraiser for Sen. John McCain oversaw the payment of roughly $1.7 million to a Colombian paramilitary group that is today designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
Carl H. Lindner Jr., the billionaire Cincinnati businessman, was CEO of Chiquita Brands International from 1984 to 2001, and remained on the company’s board of directors until May 2002. Beginning under his tenure, Chiquita executives paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym AUC), which is described by George Washington University’s National Security Archive as an “illegal right-wing anti-guerrilla group tied to many of the country’s most notorious civilian massacres.”
Following a Justice Department indictment last year, Chiquita admitted to illegally funding the paramilitaries and agreed to pay a $25 million fine. Chiquita’s payments to the AUC began in 1997 and lasted seven years; roughly half of the funds came after the group was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department in 2001.
…
Late last week, Lindner co-hosted a $25,000-per-person fundraiser for McCain and the Republican Party in the wealthy Indian Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. The event raised about $2 million; Lindner also serves on McCain’s Ohio Victory Team.While Lindner was CEO of Chiquita, the company began sending money to the AUC through its shipping subsidiary Banadex. A report by the Organization of American States states that Banadex also engaged in arms trafficking, helping to deliver 3,000 Nicaraguan AK-47 rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition to the AUC in 2001. According to federal prosecutors, when company officials realized the arrangement was illegal, they switched to making the payments in cash.
Well, now we know why Charlie Black thinks a terorrist attack would be good news for McCain: it’s a big investment opportunity for John McCain’s campaign financiers.
Data Stolen from Military and Nuclear Research Labs
You can take “protecting Americans from identity theft” and “keeping us safe from terrorism” off of the short list of things that the Bush Administration does right. Some of our veterans learned that the hard way when a VA subcontractor lost a laptop containing veterans’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and insurance information last August. As a rational person, you might expect that since then, the government has learned to do a better job protecting personal information,
But no. The U.S. government did it again. And this time it wasn’t a subcontractor with butterfingers who lost the data. This time, someone stole personal information from two supposedly secure U.S. science facilities.
Hackers have succeeded in breaking into the computer systems of two of the U.S.’ most important science labs, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
In what a spokesperson for the Oak Ridge facility described as a “sophisticated cyber attack,” it appears that intruders accessed a database of visitors to the Tennessee lab between 1990 and 2004, which included their social security numbers and dates of birth. Three thousand researchers reportedly visit the lab each year, a who’s who of the science establishment in the U.S.
All the visitor data from 14 years at just one of the two attacked labs is gone. That’s forty-two thousand Social Security numbers out in the open. Forty-two thousand identities ready to be sold on the black market to the highest bidder. And this is from visitors, not even lab personnel. How could something like that be so insecure?
You also might be wondering what kind of experiments are being done at these labs. You probably assumed that, since they’re so insecure, the work being done there can’t be that important, right?
Wrong.
The ORNL is a multipurpose science lab, a site of technological expertise used in homeland security and military research, and also the site of one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Los Alamos operates a similar multi-disciplinary approach, but specializes in nuclear weapons research, one of only two such sites doing such top-secret work in the U.S.
Oh, so the same people who just stole thousands of American (and maybe even security-cleared) identities also might have accessed our homeland security, military, and nuclear weapons research? HOLY FUCKING FUCK! Why are any of these computer systems even accessible from the internet in the first place? Our nuclear weapons research lab must have some sort of data safeguards in place, right?
Wrong again.
Los Alamos has a checkered security history, having suffered a sequence of embarrassing breaches in recent years. In August of this year, it was revealed that the lab had released sensitive nuclear research data by email, while in 2006 a drug dealer was allegedly found with a USB stick containing data on nuclear weapons tests.
“This appears to be a new low, even drug dealers can get classified information out of Los Alamos,” Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), said at the time. Two years earlier, the lab was accused of having lost hard disks
If a drug dealer can get his hands on nuclear weapons data, who’s to say al-Qaeda can’t? The one thing that the Bush Administration has consistently pledged to do is “keep American safe from terrorism.” Apparently, they can’t even do that right anymore.