In this post I excerpted the following conversation Sean Penn had during his November trip to Iraq.
“Yeah,” I say. “Your ID card says contractor. What do you build?”
And with a smile, he says, “Elections.”
“How do you do that?”
He grins a little more and says, “Whatever it takes.”
(Could this guy be from Florida?)
Could there be a connection?
Excerpted from an Institute for Public Accuracy e-mail:
RAHUL MAHAJAN, rahul@tao.ca, http://www.empirenotes.org/sou.html,
www.progressive.org/sept03/maha0903.html
Mahajan, author of the book “Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond,” is just back from Iraq. He said today: “I saw no evidence of any reconstruction worthy of mention in all of Baghdad, a city of six million people. Not only has nothing been rebuilt, even the rubble from bombed-out buildings hasn’t been swept up. The new government of Iraq has been deliberately given no power and no authority; the talk of ‘transfer of sovereignty’ is nonsense. The claim that the United States does not seek to dominate or to be an empire is hardly compatible with long-term plans to leave over 100,000 American troops in Iraq. The claim that these new imperial policies have anything to do with fighting al-Qaeda is particularly hollow, and it’s no accident that there was no mention of Osama bin Laden in Bush’s speech. The proposal to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy poses a clear and present danger to democracy everywhere; in the past four years, the NED was involved in buying the 2000 Yugoslavia elections and plotting toward and funding the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela….”