Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Friday, May 23, 2008

Follow The Iraq Money

By Cernig



Two senate Democrats want an investigation into Iraqi government fraud and corruption involving billions of US taxpayers' dollars - and want to know whether any Iraqi officials have set up bank accounts outside of Iraq "that might contain ill-gotten proceeds."



A new internal audit of $8 billion in Pentagon contracts for Iraq has revealed that 98% of those contracts didn't have a complete paper trail - nearly every transaction failed to comply with federal laws or regulations aimed at preventing fraud, in some cases lacking even basic invoices explaining how the money was spent.



Various officers in the US military - including one of Petraeus' key aides - have been implicated or arrested in connection with 73 criminal cases involving the purchase and delivery of billions of dollars of weapons, supplies and other mat�el to Iraqi and American forces. The inquiries involve contracts valued at more than $5 billion and charges have been laid involving more than $15 million in bribes.



Petraeus himself admits to insufficient oversight in the handling of a couple of hundred tons of weaponry worth up to $800 million on the black market while he was responsible for the US military's program to arm Iraqi security forces. Some of those weapons ended up in Turkey, in the hands of terrorists and criminals.



Given Abramoff, "Duke" Cunningham, "Dusty" Foggo and a ream of other unsavoury and corrupt military/industrial and political insiders at the highest levels of Republican power, why is no-one asking how high complicity in all this goes?



Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)