NBC’s Lisa Myers had a piece yesterday on allegations of waste by former Halliburton employees. Some highlights:

$50,000 a month for soda, at $45 a case
$1 million a month to clean clothes � or $100 for each 15-pound bag of laundry
A labor foreman paid $82,000 a year with no employees to supervise
Halliburton employees living in 5-star hotels

When questioned about this matter, Halliburton offered what’s become a standard response these days: those who are critical of the war effort must be on the side of the terrorists:

The company declined an interview but suggests in an e-mail to NBC News that critics are politically motivated: “When Halliburton succeeds, Iraq progresses. Sadly, a few people don’t want either of those results.”

Right.
This is more accurate: When Halliburton rips taxpayers off, America loses. Sadly, most people don’t seem to care.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the federal government may soon be moving hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees to the U.S. mainland in response to the Supreme Court ruling that such prisoners must have access to the judicial system. Makes me wonder: was that whole camp intentionally set up so the administration could claim it was outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts?
At any rate, here’s another shocking development; you may want to sit down for this. Apparently the administration didn’t have a plan to allow the detainees to have a hearing:

“They didn’t really have a specific plan for what to do, case by case, if we lost,” a senior Department of Defense official said on condition of anonymity. “The Justice Department didn’t have a plan. State didn’t have a plan. This wasn’t a unilateral mistake on Department of Defense’s part. It’s astounding to me that these cases have been pending for so long and nobody came up with a contingency plan.”

I know, I know. They’ve only been holding these people for two and a half years. And with the “war on terror” to fight a government can’t be troubled with petty hearings and things of that nature.

The New York Times has the disturbing account about how a Nepalese man with an expired tourist visa was held for three months in solitary confinement for videotaping a building.
The man essentially got buried within the system, with little contact to the outside, and were it not for the extraordinary efforts of an FBI agent involved in his capture, he might have been imprisoned much longer.
One thing that continues to baffle me is how many so-called conservatives, who supposedly distrust broad, unchecked federal power, don’t join civil libertarians in protesting the abuses of individual rights in the “war on terror.” Apparently to these people, party unity is much more important than self-identified principles.

In an effort to placate hardline, anti-Castro, Cuban-American (Florida) voters, the Bush administration is severely tightening regulations on travel to Cuba. People can now only go there once every three years. Oh, and they can only spend $50/day on shopping.
Great policy for all those who still have relatives in Cuba. But that’s a small sacrifice to make for rules which are sure to break Castro’s decade’s-long reign.

This story fits in pretty well with what I wrote yesterday:

The networks spent considerable time and money flying in high-priced talent to cover the handover, which had been scheduled for tomorrow. But when U.S. officials decided that an earlier handover might minimize the chances of violence aimed at overshadowing the ceremony, the cloak-and-dagger stuff began. At 12:30 a.m. (8:30 a.m. Baghdad time), the Coalition Provisional Authority began calling journalists and telling them that they had half an hour to get inside the heavily guarded Green Zone for a background briefing by U.S. occupation chief Paul Bremer.
. . .
When about 30 journalists and photographers, including a Washington Post correspondent, arrived, they were not told anything about a transfer of sovereignty.
At 2 a.m., authorities took the reporters’ cell phones and placed them in brown envelopes to prevent them from calling their news organizations. The journalists were then told that the handover ceremony was about to unfold, but that the news was embargoed until 4 a.m.

In other words, journalists were bent because they were left out of the loop. And in their minds these events are largely about the journalists.
Oh, and that “surprise” handover really wasn’t that surprising:

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper said from Baghdad that he was not that surprised. “We’d been getting word that June 30 was just a date, more of a deadline,” he said. U.S. officials “had been very reluctant about the details. There was definitely a sense that it wasn’t necessarily a June 30 event.” The turn of events produced “an incredibly exciting day from a coverage standpoint,” Cooper said.

So since they got caught with their pants down, they had to hype the unexpected nature of the story. That’s how that after a fourteen month occupation, a two day change in the official phasing out became a big, big deal.