Snitch of the Week: 8/19 - 8/25 (Gov't Whistleblowers)

Peep this article about America's retaliation against whistleblowers exposing American government corruption.

It's hard to hold onto any semblance of national pride when reading shit like this. It's also easy to understand Mos Def's skepticism (which I dismissed) about "The War on Terror."

• For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

  There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

  He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

  The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

  "It was a Wal-Mart for guns," he says. "It was all illegal and everyone knew it."

  So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn't know whom to trust in Iraq.

  For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Sweet. We're torturing U.S. citizens.

As our country's infrastructure falls apart, metaphorically and literally, it's hard to stomach the bottomless pit of unregulated money that has been wasted over there.

• Corruption has long plagued Iraq reconstruction. Hundreds of projects may never be finished, including repairs to the country's oil pipelines and electricity system. Congress gave more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq, and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared, according to a government reconstruction audit.

How do you lose nearly $9 billion?
You don't, you just make sure the people who know where it went stay quiet.

Apparently the hood motto of "Stop Snitching" has its beginnings a little higher up the ladder, you just don't see Cheney wearing the t-shirt.

For trying to bust up the sweet gravy train that the Iraq War has created for the Bush crew, the government whistleblowers are the Snitch of the Week.