The Wake-Up Call

Scandal Sheet
Former White House counsel Ted Olsen and Eugene Scalia (the son of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia) reviewed and approved Paul Wolfowitz’s transfer of his then-girlfriend Shaha Riza to a higher-paying job at the State Department. They concluded that the contract was “a reasonable resolution of the perceived underlying conflict of interest.”

And here’s Wolfwotiz channeling Tony Soprano, when he was confronted about the transfer by World Bank officials last year: “If they fuck me or Shaha, I have enough on them to fuck them too.”

Crimes & Misdemeanours
Eurasian crime syndicates have been scamming the government since the 1970s, reports Los Angeles Daily News writer Troy Andersen. Of the $300 billion lost to health care fraud in the U.S. every year, about half of it ends up in the pockets of organized crime.

National Security
Fired federal air marshal Robert MacLean’s legal battle with the Department of Homeland Security continues. In the summer of 2003, MacLean tried to blow the whistle within the DHS on an attempt to reduce air marshal coverage of “high-risk” flights amidst heightened warnings based on intelligence that terrorists were planning on hijacking planes.

Blogging the Revolution
Imprisoned Egyptian blogger Abdel-Monem Mahmoud manages to smuggle out his first blog post: “The blog that terrifies the dissolved regime? Ohhh how much I long for it. It was my life-partner. I think of it all night then work on developing it all day.”

Popularity: 2%

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 9:49 am and is filed under International, National Security, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.