Send in Sgt. Brockovich.

“The water expert said he told company officials at the base that they would have to notify the military. ‘They told me it was none of my concern and to keep my mouth shut,’ he said.” Ah, the perks of a no-bid contract. As e-mail records prove, those patriots at Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s favorite corporate cronies, have been knowingly exposing some soldiers to contaminated water, despite being warned by their own employees about the danger. “Another former Halliburton employee who worked at the base, Ken May of Louisville, said there were numerous instances of diarrhea and stomach cramps.”

Armstrong-Gate comes to Baghdad.

“Even as the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development pay contractors millions of dollars to help train journalists and promote a professional and independent Iraqi media, the Pentagon is paying millions more to the Lincoln Group for work that appears to violate fundamental principles of Western journalism.” According to today’s NYT and in keeping with the Dubya administration’s penchant for rigging the media, it appears the Pentagon has been paying for planted propaganda in Iraqi newspapers. “‘You show the world you’re not living by the principles you profess to believe in, and you lose all credibility.‘”

We don’t torture…they do.

Another week, another secret torture center…anyone else sensing a pattern? Tensions in Iraq simmer to a boil as a secret prison holding 173 Sunnis is uncovered in Baghdad. “The discovery…created a new aura of crisis for American officials and Iraqi politicians who hold power in the Shiite-led transitional government. For many Iraqis, the episode carried heavy overtones of the brutality associated with Saddam Hussein and his Sunni-dominated government.

Whatsmore, the head of the Badr Organization, a Shiite militia suspected of pulling the strings and wielding the implements in this center, says: “This bunker is run by the Interior Ministry, the Americans are there every day.” Whether or not that’s true (and for the love of Pete, let’s hope not), it’s obvious that recent events, from Abu Ghraib to the Frist-sanctioned CIA black sites to the al-Jamadi murder, have seriously damaged our credibility as opponents of torture, in this prison and around the world.

Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World.

They say that ‘evil prevails when good men fail to act.’ It should just be ‘evil prevails.’” Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War, which I saw earlier this week, is basically an angrier, more sardonic kid brother to The Constant Gardener. But, while Gardener is probably a better-made work of cinema, I actually enjoyed myself more at Niccol’s film. At once a character study of an amoral arms dealer, a bitter tirade againt third world exploitation, and a dark comedy that may run too sour for some tastes, Lord of War is an above-average entrant in the satirical muckraking tradition. And its occasional preachiness is leavened by Nicolas Cage’s consistently-amusing and deftly-written performance, most of which is voiceover, at the center of the film.

Cage plays Yuri Orlov, a Ukrainian immigrant to Brighton Beach in the 1980s who, after an inadvertent run-in with the Russian mafia at a local cafe, realizes that guns, like the funeral business, is pretty much always a growth industry. Enlisting his more sensitive sibling (Jared Leto) as muscle and back-up (a.k.a. his “brother in arms”), Orlov embarks on a quest to arm the world and make mad bank doing it. Along the way, he woos a trophy wife (Bridget Moynahan), attracts the ire of both a more-established (and ostensibly more “moral” — he has politics as well as money in mind) rival (Ian Holm) and an idealistic, go-getter federal agent (Ethan Hawke), scavenges his former homeland after the fall of the USSR (essentially a free-for-all fire sale of tanks, munitions and ordnance), and finds himself in the company of increasingly more sadistic and unsettling despots (notably Eamonn Walker, doing a variation on Liberia’s Charles Taylor.)

What keeps Lord of War moving at a brisk clip is Cage’s deadpan voiceover, which boasts an impressive arsenal of witty bon mots. Says Orlov of his mission, “There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11?” Of his clients in the ’80s: “I never sold to Osama bin Laden. Back then, he was always bouncing checks.” Of his (brief) attempt to go on the up-and-up: “Thank God there are still legal ways to exploit developing countries.” In short, if your sense of humor runs toward the dark and twisted, Niccol’s tightly-written script pays dividends.

Whatsmore, unlike Gardener, which at times seemed to wallow in its piety, Lord of War cleverly juxtaposes its increasing contempt for Orlov’s vulturine livelihood against Cage’s natural amiability and his character’s rising fortunes (a la Richard III.) So, even as the story grows blacker, the audience has no place to go. We’re forced to empathize, at least to some degree, with Orlov’s attempt to achieve his own sick version of the American Dream on the backs of the Third World. Which, in the end, is Niccol’s point — We, too, are complicit in this story. Admittedly, the movie drops the ball somewhat in the last reel and veers too far toward polemic. (Of course, the same can be said of many quality film satires, including Catch-22 and Bamboozled.) But, until then, Lord of War is a disarmingly breezy jaunt through a highly-armed world and proof positive that, occasionally in “message movies,” honey catches more flies than vinegar.

Protecting the Trough.

“Known as a stickler for the rules on competition, Ms. Greenhouse initially received stellar performance ratings…But her reviews became negative at roughly the time she began objecting to decisions she saw as improperly favoring Kellogg Brown & Root, he said. Often she hand-wrote her concerns on the contract documents, a practice that corps leaders called unprofessional and confusing.” Via a colleague in the department, an Army contracting official is demoted for questioning no-bid contracts given to Halliburton, proving once again that Cheney conservatism has less to do with competition or capitalism than it does sheer, unmitigated cronyism.

Kenny’s Boy.

The GOP attempts to break PBS grow murkier, as Dems unearth a right-wing stooge secretly on CPB President’s Kenneth Tomlinson’s payroll, assigned to track “bias” on Bill Moyer’s NOW. Nebraska Senator Byron “Dorgan said that data concluded in one episode of ‘Now’ that Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, was a ‘liberal’ because he questioned the White House policy on Iraq and that a second ‘Now’ segment on financial waste at the Pentagon was ‘anti-Defense.’

GWOT and bothered.

The Bush administration announces they’re going to reevaluate their anti-terrorism strategies. To put it mildly, “[t]he policy review marks what many experts regard as a belated shift.” Well, perhaps a good place to start would be looking harder at who we sell weapons to, so we as advocates of freedom around the world aren’t forced to explain away situations like the recent massacre in Uzbekistan. (2nd link via Looka.)

Oh, you mean that Koran.

While the toilet incident that got Newsweek in trouble was emphatically denied, the Pentagon announces — after the release of FBI interviews obtained by the ACLU — that there have in fact been incidents of Koran mistreatment at Gitmo. (Surprise, surprise.) While “the interviews underscore that U.S. government officials were made aware of allegations of prisoner abuse and Koran mistreatment within months of the opening of Guantanamo Bay in early 2002“, just last week “Pentagon spokesman Lawrence T. Di Rita said the Defense Department had received no credible claims of such abuse.

Star Wars: Episode I.

Eager to try out new experimental weapons systems with dubious names like “Rods from God,” the Air Force looks to Dubya to greenlight space weapons programs. The Air Force believes ‘we must establish and maintain space superiority,’ Gen. Lance Lord, who leads the Air Force Space Command, told Congress recently. ‘Simply put, it’s the American way of fighting.” Hmmm. I might feel less uneasy about all this if this fellow Lord didn’t sound like he’s channeling Buck Turgidson. ‘Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny,” he told an Air Force conference in September. “Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future.“‘

The Zap-O-Terrorist doesn’t work?

“‘Everyone was standing in line with their silver bullets to make us more secure after Sept. 11,’ said Randall J. Larsen, a retired Air Force colonel and former government adviser on scientific issues. ‘We bought a lot of stuff off the shelf that wasn’t effective.'” Yep, unfortunately we purchased billions of dollars of defective garbage in the post-9/11 rush to defend the homeland, a mistake that will cost several billion more to rectify. “After 9/11, we had to show how committed we were by spending hugely greater amounts of money than ever before, as rapidly as possible,” said Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican who is the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. “That brought us what we might expect, which is some expensive mistakes.”