War on Terror

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War on Terror

« March 2011

Commission On Wartime Contracting

Highway Robbery! U.S. Losing Hundreds of Millions To Rampant Afghan Fuel Theft

Susan Crabtree | March 3, 2011, 11:55AM

After nearly a decade of mismanagement, theft and fraud, the U.S. military still hasn't found a way to staunch the flow of what is likely hundreds of millions -- if not billions -- of dollars in lost fuel in Afghanistan, some of which is sold on the black market and winds up in Taliban hands, a TPM investigation has found.

With political unrest in the Middle East sending oil over $100 per barrel and Congress more intent than ever at cutting government waste, fraud and abuse in tough budgetary times, the Defense Department is under intense pressure to find a way to monitor and track the flow of fuel in and out of its bases in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The extensive corruption associated with disappearing fuel in Afghanistan provides another illustration of the problems associated with the heavy use of private contractors on the battlefield. Earlier this week, the non-partisan Commission for Wartime Contracting reported that the U.S. government has spent $117 billion on private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002, and tens of billions of those dollars have been wasted.

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Topics: Afghanistan Corruption, Commission On Wartime Contracting, Darrell Issa, Gen. James Mattis, House Oversight, House Oversight and Government Reform, House of Representatives , Inspector General Report, Iraq, Iraq Contractors, Iraq Corruption, Iraq War, Jim Moran, Private Contractors, War In Afghanistan, War on Terror

Cheney: 'All Well And Good' That Obama's Using Our Tactics Now (VIDEO)

Rachel Slajda | January 18, 2011, 9:48AM

Former Vice President Dick Cheney (R)

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said in an interview that President Obama has finally learned to use Bush administration tactics in the War on Terror.

"I think he's found it necessary to be more sympathetic to the kinds of things we did," Cheney said on the Today Show, noting Obama's use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere.

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Topics: Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, Drones, Guantanamo, Torture, War on Terror, Wiretapping

Wikileaks

Wikileaks Releases Docs Showing Pakistan-Taliban Cooperation Against U.S. In Afghanstan

Rachel Slajda | July 26, 2010, 9:50AM

Soldiers in Afghanistan

The web site Wikileaks has released 92,000 documents related to the Afghanistan War, many of them classified, that paint a bleak picture of the ongoing war.

Wikileaks released the documents, which amount to a daily war diary dating from 2004 to 2009, to the New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian, in addition to publishing them online themselves.

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Topics: Afghanistan, Central Intelligence Agency, Pakistan, U.S. Military, War In Afghanistan, War on Terror, Wikileaks

Fox and Friends

Doocy On Bible Rifle Scopes: If Anybody's Making This A Religious Thing, The Terrorists 'Started It' (VIDEO)

Justin Elliott | January 21, 2010, 8:44AM

Fox's Steve Doocy came out this morning with a new defense of the controversial U.S. military rifle scopes featuring inscriptions that cite the New Testament: if anyone made America's wars about religion, our Muslim extremist foes started it!

"My wife made a good observation yesterday when we were taking about this story, and that is, 'Hey, wait a minute, the Taliban and the extremists -- what is it they say just before they blow themselves up which kills somebody, they say, 'Allahu Akbar.'' So if anybody's making this a religious thing, they started it," Doocy said.

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Topics: Fox and Friends, Iraq War, Steve Doocy, Trijicon, War In Afghanistan, War on Terror

AirTran Flight 297

NASA Diver Insists Tale Of Porn-Watching Muslim Hijackers Is True, Despite Discrepancies

Justin Elliott | December 7, 2009, 1:39PM

A scene from the 1997 film Air Force One

A man who claims he witnessed a "dry run" by Muslim hijackers on a plane at Atlanta's airport last month told TPMmuckraker this morning he is standing by his story, despite several holes in the tale and the carrier's claim he was not even on the plane.

In an email account of his experience that went national on right-wing blogs last week, Tedd Petruna describes a group of 11 Muslim men "in full attire" who created a disturbance on a Nov. 17 AirTran flight on the runway at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport.

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Topics: AirTran, AirTran Flight 297, Hijackers' Dry Run?, Muslims, NASA, Raytheon, Tedd Petruna, War on Terror

Bush

Fran Townsend: We Discussed If Raising The Terror Alert Would Hurt Bush

Versha Sharma | August 21, 2009, 10:44AM

Fran Townsend, Bush's Homeland Security adviser and CNN contributor, appeared on the network again this morning to refute Tom Ridge's new claim that he was pushed to raise the terror alert on Election Eve 2004 for political reasons.

She repeated much of what she said on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer last night - namely, that "there was no discussion of politics whatsoever," but she added some new contradictory information about "discussion on the margins."

"The only discussions I recall were on the margin - there was concern that if the intelligence supported raising the threat level, it might actually [be] to the detriment of President Bush because people might perceive it as being political," said Townsend.

Here's the video:

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Topics: Bush, Tom Ridge, War on Terror

Tom Ridge

Tom Ridge: I Fought Against Raising Security Threat Level On The Eve Of 2004 Election

Versha Sharma | August 20, 2009, 5:10PM

In his new tell-all book, former Secretary Of Homeland Security Tom Ridge reveals that he was under intense political pressure to raise the national security threat level on the eve of the 2004 presidential election.

In The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege...and How We Can Be Safe Again, to be released September 1st, Ridge says that he fought against changing the terror alert and wondered at the time whether the Ashcroft- and Rumsfeld-backed request was about "security or politics," because while there was "nothing to indicate a specific threat and no reason to cause undue public alarm...Post-election analysis demonstrated a significant increase in the president's approval rating in the days after the raising of the threat level."

From the book:

On Friday, October 29, 2004, Osama bin Laden delivered a new videotape message that aired on the Arab language network Al Jazeera. The presidential election scheduled for the following Tuesday was tightening. The most recent polls had Bush leading Kerry by no more than two or three points. Having won my first congressional election by 729 votes and experienced the volatility of the election cycle during several campaigns, this race was literally a dead heat going into the final seventy-two hours.
...

We huddled that Friday night. Next morning we met early at the department's headquarters. The country was unaware that all levels of government had quietly ramped up security several weeks before the election, although not to the level that would have been required had we actually gone to a higher public threat level (orange). The timing of the tape may have been a surprise; the content was not. Within the department no one felt it necessary to consider additional security measures or to call the Homeland Security Council into session.

In a conference call with members of the Bush administration's national security and counter-terrorism team, Ridge pushed back against the request, which Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were eagerly promoting.