Blackwater security contractors in Iraq have been involved in at least 195 “escalation of force” incidents since early 2005, including several previously unreported killings of Iraqi civilians, according to a new congressional account of State Department and company documents.

In one of the killings, according to a State Department document, Blackwater personnel tried to cover up what had occurred and provided a false report. In another case, involving a Blackwater convoy’s collision with 18 civilian vehicles, the firm accused its own personnel of lying about the event.

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Former New York mayor and US Republican presidential ‘hopeful’ Rudy Giuliani’s been in town and dissing the NHS.

Speaking at an event at a London hotel, he said: “Healthcare right now in America - and I think it has been true of your experience of socialised medicine in England - is not only very expensive, it’s increasingly less effective.

“I had prostate cancer seven years. My chance of survival in the US is 82%; my chance of survival if I was here in England is below 50%.

I think he probably ‘misspoke‘. What he, of course, meant was:

A prominent politician’s chance of survival in the US is 82%…

I’d be interested to see, to pluck an example at random, the survival rates of black men from New Orleans having no medical insurance. It’s a question of who you are, I would say.

A bit like having a dodgy ticker over here. One imagines that if Gordon Brown were to wake up this morning with a prostate gland the size of a grapefruit, his chance of survival would be considerably greater than 50%.

[W]hy do the Saudis need military aid at all? Their favourite weapon seems to be the stone. I suppose now if a woman commits adultery or speaks out of turn she’ll be battered to death with a bloody great ruby instead.

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‘Mr Bush was “in good humour” afterwards and ready to resume “his normal activities” at Camp David, Mr Stanzel said.’

I love this Tony Snow bloke. He makes Alastair Campbell look like the paragon of virtue. Here’s Snow on Bush commuting Scooter Libby’s jail sentence.

(via Mr E.)

Michael Moore was on The Daily Show the other night (promoting his new movie about the disgrace that is the US health system) and said he’d been bumped from the Larry King show to make room for the poor little rich girl. Classy.

Transcript here.

Zod for 2008.

Mission accomplished.

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

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Transcript here.

‘I really, really hate America,’ I thought to myself today while out listening to Queens of the Stone Age on my new iPod. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got and when I got home I had to have a shot of Bulleit bourbon to calm down.

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You have to smile grimly at the incompetence of the American administration in Iraq that has managed to ‘lose’ $12 billion in $100 bills. The cash was flown into Iraq on military transport planes in shrink-wrapped bricks during 2003. After that, nobody’s quite sure where most of it went.

Some was given to contractors (what we used to call ‘mercenaries’). A bunch of modern day ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ lifted $740,000 from an army division’s vault. Enterprising Iraqi ministries created thousands of ‘ghost’ employees, put them on the payroll and watched the good times roll in.

Oh, and some of it might have reached the insurgency. American dollars may very well have bought the guns and ammunition that were later fired at American troops. And they say you can’t please all the people all the time. Saddam Hussein isn’t the only dead president in Iraq - the country’s awash with them.

As Congressman Henry Waxman, chairman of the US Congress’ committee on oversight and government reform, which is trying to get to the bottom of the spendthriftery, said this week: ‘The numbers are so large that it doesn’t seem possible that they’re true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?’

Who indeed? Right minds have been in short supply in Iraq in recent years. They say if the cap fits, wear it. But if you were a milliner making caps for right minds in the American administration right now, you’d be out of business in less than a week. Has Waxman asked them if they’ve checked down the back of the sofa?

In an attempt to grasp the enormity of it, here are some quick sums.

$12,000,000,000 is 120,000,000 $100 bills. An American $100 bill is 6.1 inches by 2.6 inches. So 120,000,000 bills gives us an area of 1,923,048,000 square inches. Or 30,351 square miles.

That’s enough to paper the whole of Scotland with a single layer of $100 bills.

All the bills laid end to end would stretch for 11,630 miles. That’s almost all the way from the North Pole to the South Pole. Or twice around John Prescott. Also, by pleasing coincidence, 11,630 is the number of years it’s going to take Tony Blair to live down his role in this fiasco. Or apologise.

Clearly, once The War Against Terror is won, stupidity has got to be the next abstract noun on our list. One day we’ll all look back on all this and have a good laugh.

In about 11,630 years.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing.)

Transcript here.

Futurama was The Simpsons’ much misunderstood younger cousin, running for four seasons before being being cancelled by dullard Fox Network suits. The show, it would seem however, remains influential.

In the episode, ‘Crimes of the Hot‘, as the planet looks doomed at the hands of global warming, malevolently dweebish scientist Ogden Wernstrom announces:

‘I have placed in orbit a giant mirror that will reflect 40% of the sun’s rays, thus cooling Earth.’

The plan comes unstuck when a piece of space debris hits the mirror, spinning it so it becomes a giant magnifying glass, scorching a furrow across the planet.

I guess the Bush administration turned the episode off before it got to that part:

The US government wants the world’s scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming, the Guardian has learned. It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be “important insurance” against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a major UN report on climate change, the first part of which will be published on Friday.

Of course, if that doesn’t work, they could always go with a Futurama Plan B from the same episode:

‘…we simply drop a giant ice cube into the ocean every now and then.’

Sorted.

Update: How US government scientists hope the Earth will look in 2050.

Mr. Bush did not mention that while our people are trying to do that, the factions in the civil war will no longer have to focus on killing each other, but rather they can focus anew on killing our people.

Because last night the president foolishly all but announced that we will be sending these 21,500 poor souls, but no more after that, and if the whole thing fizzles out, we’re going home.

Or the shorter version…

This senseless, endless war.

But — it has not been senseless in two ways.

It has succeeded, Mr. Bush, in enabling you to deaden the collective mind of this country to the pointlessness of endless war, against the wrong people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

It has gotten many of us used to the idea — the virtual “white noise” — of conflict far away, of the deaths of young Americans, of vague “sacrifice” for some fluid cause, too complicated to be interpreted except in terms of the very important-sounding but ultimately meaningless phrase “the war on terror.”

And the war’s second accomplishment — your second accomplishment, sir — is to have taken money out of the pockets of every American, even out of the pockets of the dead soldiers on the battlefield, and their families, and to have given that money to the war profiteers.

Because if you sell the Army a thousand Humvees, you can’t sell them any more until the first thousand have been destroyed.

The service men and women are ancillary to the equation.

This is about the planned obsolescence of ordnance, isn’t, Mr. Bush? And the building of detention centers? And the design of a $125 million courtroom complex at Gitmo, complete with restaurants.

Simon Hoggart: Dead fish day

Our prime minister looked pretty rough. But he was James Bond at the poker tables compared with the president. At the best of times - and these are not the best of times - Bush finds it hard to find the right words, so he thrashes about in the hope that some will pop into his head, like wasps into a jam jar. (At one point he called the sectarian attacks in Iraq “unsettling”. It’s a word, I suppose.)

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Matthew Norman: Together they rode off into the sunset…

As they walked out together to face the press, smiling with a sort of studied sombre courage, the closing scene that came to mind was the one in which Butch turns to Sundance and says, with the sort of inspired gallows humour we can only hope they reprised in the Oval Office yesterday: “For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.”

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…as a wise man once said.

Leading on from comments about freedom of speech made by the Prime Minister’s senior policy adviser, his former press secretary and the director of the Press Complaints Commission, we have this: Keith Olbermann (again) on former US Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s musings on the First Amendment.

It’s said from time to time by bloggers prepared to sail close to the wind on matters such as libel, that their blogs can’t be touched under British law because they’re not hosted in the UK. One or two bloggers like to point out that their blogs are hosted on blogspot in the US. Well, they might want to keep an eye on Newt and his own ideas about freedom of speech:

“This is a serious, long-term war,” Gingrich added, “and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country. It will lead us to learn how to close down every Web site that is dangerous.”

And now the apposite quote from a significant piece of prescient fiction (it’s 1984’s day off today unfortunately - it’s knackered through overwork):

Goose-stepping morons [...] should try reading books instead of burning them.

‘It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again.’

The ‘when did you stop beating your wife?‘ smear just got a makeover. Here’s CNN’s Glenn Beck interviewing Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to be elected to congress.

BECK: History was made last Tuesday when Democrat Keith Ellison got elected to Congress, representing the great state of Minnesota. Well, not really unusual that Minnesota would elect a Democrat. What is noteworthy is that Keith is the first Muslim in history to be elected to the House of Representatives. He joins us now.

Congratulations, sir.

ELLISON: How you doing, Glenn? Glad to be here.

BECK: Thank you. I will tell you, may I — may we have five minutes here where we’re just politically incorrect and I play the cards face up on the table?

ELLISON: Go there.

BECK: OK. No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. I’ve been to mosques. I really don’t believe that Islam is a religion of evil. I — you know, I think it’s being hijacked, quite frankly.

With that being said, you are a Democrat. You are saying, “Let’s cut and run.” And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, “Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”

And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.

Why not just get Ellison to swear on the bible?

Watch the video for the full flesh-creeping effect.

(Cheers to Tim for the link.)

Update: More enemies right here. (via The Nether-World)

The stench of death and defeat that’s now hanging around George Bush’s presidency is reminiscent of downtown Baghdad on a hot day. There are bodies all over the place. And just as Saddam, the architect of Iraq’s pre-war abattoir got notice of his come-uppance this week (a long drop and a short stop), the architect of its post-war slaughter was also pushed from his perch (with an admittedly softer landing, cushioned, no doubt, with lucrative job offers from the defence industry).

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Right here.

No YouTube version yet - I’ll post one if it comes up.

Update: Here it is…