http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind…..orporation

Why Titan?

From Rumsfeld’s Congressional Testimony on May 7, 2004:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..ay7_4.html

AKAKA: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Secretary Rumsfeld, according to General Taguba’s report, civilian contractors were found wandering around Abu Ghraib unsupervised and with free access to the detainee area. I have two questions on that.

What are the roles of the private contractors at this and other detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan? And who monitors and supervises these contracted employees?

(snip)

SMITH: Sir, I might add to that — in this particular case there’s a tiger team that interrogates and goes through that process. One is an interpreter, normally. One is an analyst. And one is an interrogator. And where we have shortages in the military of interrogators and translators, we go to contractors to do that.

And I said the numbers wrong. The numbers were 27 is how we — are the number of contractors we have with CACI for interrogators. Then we have hundreds of translators that are under contract throughout the country under Titan Corporation.

—

If Titan had the Contract for the Interpreters/Linguists, then who had the Contract for the Interrogators?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..ay7_4.html

BILL NELSON: When did you first tell the president, Mr. Secretary?

RUMSFELD: I don’t know. Dick Myers and I see the president every week, and he recalls that some time after we were apprised of it through the press, through CENTCOM’s announcement, that it was brought up in one of our meetings.

Do you recall?

MYERS: I don’t recall specifically because I think the day it was brought up it was General Pete Pace that was standing in for me, but he remembers exactly when it was — well, roughly, with a week or so of when he was in that meeting and informed the president. They talked about it.

BILL NELSON: And was this back in January, Mr. Secretary?

MYERS: I think General Pace would say early February, is what I think he would say. It could have been late January.

RUMSFELD: I meet with the president once or twice a week, we cover eight, 10, 15 different points. General Myers or General Pace are generally there with me. And I don’t keep notes about what I do. I just don’t remember when it was.

BILL NELSON: And when you all had this discussion with the president, what did the president say that you should do about those abuses?

RUMSFELD: Well, I don’t know that I’m going to get into private discussions with the president. If I don’t remember when it was, my guess is it was more an information item from us to him where we were transmitting and saying, “here’s the problem.”

—

So, the January 29, 2004 missing date from both Bush and Cheney is, imho, the strongest candidate for the Day Bush was told about Abu Ghraib by Gen. Pace (with Rumsfeld present.) The early February dates would also be contenders for follow-up discussion on the same topic.

You are saying Henry Waxman needed an “excuse” to try and get some publicity.

Ah, come on now. He never needs an excuse.

The only thing I say is “so what?”

Nothing is added to the mix. All this was known, and was useless.

Unless the bloggers really need something else to carry on about which I guess must be the case.

Delete some!

1. attack on bush

2. global warming and science

3. Us contention that business would be hurt if you paid attention to global warming.

Doesn’t seem like enough to delete emails over though. But maybe to someone. Related to energy and pollution?

1. attack on bush

2. global warming and science

3. Us contention that business would be hurt if you paid attention to global warming.

I suspect a need for emails related to faking science to show no global warming and ginning up economic data to show how govt should not interfere.

Does Waxman have his hands tied invountarily? I’m inclined to think not. At this point I’m more inclined to believe that the Democratic leadership (Waxman and others included) are answering to the same crew of neocon/A*P*C types as the Republicans. I’m also beginning to believe that even if we elect a Democrat in 2009 nothing much is going to change. Although all the D candidates talk about change do you really see much talk about ‘real’ changes? It’s all on the margins. It’s like all the guys who talk about how big their ‘units’ are – if it really is, do you need to talk about it?

Fact is, Waxman hasn’t done anything and if he believed something needed to be done he could resign in protest. Let me know when he (or any of the other Democrats whose hands are supposedly tied) does so. At some point they have to be held responsible for their own actions and not be allowed to constantly attribute their lack of action to things supposedly outside their control.

I work on much smaller systems than some of you. Basically 150 users or less (the majority less than 50) for smaller businesses, none of whom have strict legal requirements for keeping old emails for an extended period of time. These are mostly small companies (construction, manufacturing, etc.) whose biggest problem is getting employees to delete ANYTHING at all. Five, six, seven GB mailboxes are common and getting more common now that disk space is so cheap. These are companies that don’t have ‘IT’ departments in the traditional sense but hire people like me on an hourly basis to do maintenance and whatever else is necessary in case of an emergency. Of course, backups are a part of maintenance and these days everything I do has been taken off tape systems. Backup files are made, transferred to external hard drives and those external drives are stored for safekeeping. Archiving is mostly done through Outlook and the .pst files are stored on network drives which are also regularly backed up. If someone tried to go back and personally delete old emails there would be any number of old backups that could be brought out to obtain the old data. All I would need would be the dates. In fact, I keep a server mostly set up and ready to go that I can easily configure in case of an emergency and get a backup restored and the company back online receiving email in less than a day. It’s been quite a while since I thought about journaling but I’ll include a link at the end for anyone who wants a short explanation of the subject. It’s on jounaling in 2003 but 2000 wouldn’t be very different. The way we do things means that you may miss emails that are immediately deleted (since there is no jounaling) but assuming a full backup once a week what you are essentially doing is backing up the same items repeatedly with only the most recent week’s items being new. The same goes for the .pst files on the network which also get backed up on the same routine basis. So, for something that is, let’s say, a year old, and assuming everything older than 60 days is automatically archived through Outlook, even for small companies I would have multiple backups that could potentially have the data.

And did someone say that the WH spent 60 million on its systems and now can’t produce a single copy of old emails given a specific date range? LMAO. Waxman doesn’t want those emails – he just wants you folks to think he wants them. If he got them he might have to actually do something.

Here is a link to an article on jounaling:

http://www.msexchange.org/tuto…..aling.html

Archiving can be done on an individual basis through Outlook or on the server itself.

Why hasn’t Waxman just called in a couple guys (or ladies) working the midnight shift and asked them what happened? Are IT jobs in the White House political appointments? Let’s say the White House group is responsible for less than 500 people (mailboxes). Do we know exactly how many servers were dedicated to this group alone? Just set up a duplicate server(s), restore from the backups and start going through the mailboxes. We’re not talking 2500 or 25000 people here. It shouldn’t take more than a day to get it set up. If they don’t want to produce those tapes then shut the government down – don’t give them any more money. Otherwise, Waxman is just using legal niceties as a means of avoiding having to actually do anything.

1. attack on bush

2. global warming and science

3. Us contention that business would be hurt if you paid attention to global warming.

I suspect a need for emails related to faking science to show no global warming and ginning up economic data to show how govt should not interfere.

Did you hear Britney was photographed looking at pregnancy test kits in a drugstore!

Britney Belley Afficianado Syndrome (BBAS)

The fact that you could have seen a picture of Britney’s abdomen in a drug store more than 10X in one 12 hour period on a Cable from NBC Universal, i.e. MSNBC, and enough people watch it to continue the airhead programming, is one reason why you have a White House who views Americans as so dumb that they can just tell their IT people to forget the Hatch Act, and the Presidential Records Act, and deliberately not to archive mail and erase it from their servers.

They may have backups or copies of all the emails, but they’ll never see the light of day as far as anyone else who wants to examine them.

Or that the twit Bush would make a nebulous speech about an economic stimulus program with Paulson staring blankly into space that’s going nowhere as the recession begins–that’s aimed at the Britney Belly afficianados.