Bad Deeds for 6-13-2007

Pentagon Confirms It Sought To Build A ‘Gay Bomb’ – A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting. Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed that military leaders had considered, and then subsequently rejected, building the so-called “Gay Bomb.”

$30 Million Vote From Abroad System Doesn’t Work – Over the last six years, the Defense Department has spent more than $30 million trying to find an efficient way for American soldiers and civilians living abroad to vote in elections back home. 63 voters used it in the 2006 election to request and return ballots over the Internet, according to a Defense Department study. Fewer than 20 local election officials in the United States have said they want to use the military’s Web system in the coming election. With the presidential primaries approaching, the Pentagon’s system, which is Web-based, remains slow, confusing and plagued with security and privacy problems. And that has left many of the five million Americans overseas uncertain that their vote will be counted.

Iraq is Failing to Meet Benchmarks – Iraq’s political leaders have failed to reach agreements on nearly every law that the Americans have demanded as benchmarks, despite heavy pressure from Congress, the White House and top military commanders. With only three months until progress reports are due in Washington, the deadlock has reached a point where many Iraqi and American officials now question whether any substantive laws will pass before the end of the year. Kurds have blocked a vote in Parliament on a new oil law. Shiite clerics have stymied an American-backed plan for reintegrating former Baathists into government. Sunnis are demanding that a constitutional review include more power for the next president. And even if one or two of the proposals are approved — the oil law appears the most likely, officials said — doubts are spreading about whether the current benchmarks can ever halt the cycle of violence gripping Iraq’s communities.

Justice Department Official Gave MisLeading Testimony – The Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee criticized a Justice Department staffer connected to the US Attorneys controversy for reversing testimony he gave to the Committee last Thursday. The statement came after Bradley Schlozman, the Associate Counsel to the Director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, wrote a letter Monday to Senate correcting some of his statements. “It is deeply troubling that after weeks of preparation Mr. Schlozman appears to have misled the Committee and the public about his decision to file an election eve lawsuit in direct conflict with longstanding Justice Department policy,” said Senator Leahy

Republican-Supported $63 Million Airplane is 0 for 49 in Tests – An experimental airplane, designed to take off like a helicopter and then fly at high speed, failed to remain in the air for more than a few seconds in 49 separate tests last year, according to John Kinzer of the Office of Naval Research. “None of these attempts resulted in controlled hover for more than a few seconds,” Kinzer told members of the House Committee on Science and Technology. Since 1986, Pentagon analysts have consistently rejected the aircraft design as “technically flawed,” but Congress has continued to pour money into the project. Congressman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., has led the effort on behalf of a hometown company, DuPont Aerospace. Hunter has received at least $36,000 in campaign contributions from the owner of the company, Anthony DuPont.

Neocons Invade Churches – What are neocon groups like Project for the New American Century and The Heritage Foundation doing funding something called “Institute for Religion and Democracy”? Hint: it has to do with reversing any dividend from churches doing peace stuff.

We’ve Found the WMD. The Bad News Is They’re Ours and We Found Them Dumped In The Sea – It is no secret that the U.S. military has used the ocean as trashcan for munitions in the past. Federal lawmakers were pressing the US Army to reveal everything it knows about a massive international program to dump chemical weapons off homeland and foreign shores. The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste – either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.

Lurita Doan: Unqualified, Unlawful, and Uncooperative – GSA head Lurita Doan’s qualifications to head the nation’s main federal contracting agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), seemed to have been primarily that she and her husband had given hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions to Bush and other right wing politicians. Yesterday Bush’s Office of Special Counsel recommended she be fired for engaging in “the most pernicious of political activity” banned by the 1939 Hatch Act and for refusing to cooperate with the investigation. ““Doan solicited the political activity of over 30 of her subordinate employees when she asked ‘How can we help our [Republican] candidates?’” The recommendation points out that “Doan has shown no remorse and lacks an appreciation for the seriousness of her violation.”

Regards,

Jim