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Wikileaks Breaks $3 Billion Corruption Story
James Hardine writes Wikileaks, the website for whistleblowers, has broken one of the world's biggest corruption stories in the international press (Guardian, BBC, Forbes, Sydney Morning Herald). The site has leaked a secret report on looting by ex-president Moi of Kenya — and possibly altered the outcome of an impending national election. Moi has become a key player in political life in Kenya, and is now an essential pillar in President Kibaki's campaign for re-election in December 2007. From the Wikileaks page: 'The suppressed auditor's report reveals that currency worth billions of US dollars was looted from Kenya by President Moi and his associates. The money was laundered across the world and includes properties and shell companies in London, New York and South Africa and even a 10,000 hectare ranch in Australia.'"
What about the oil sale to Occidental Petroleum?
What about the companies who make "official" signs every time wording gets changed?
What about the monopoly money poured into porkbarrel and boondoggle projects?
TFA is about real theft, so its not really so much "whistle-blowing" as it is awareness-raising. Whistle-blowing on bunk government pork is far more important.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
to find out how this is George Bush's fault...
Do you have ESP?
See, this is why I stay away from Kenya and only deal with my legitimate business partners from Nigeria.
End transmission.
Socialism which centralizes all p;power in the government, causes this. When the same government that is responsible for policing, is repsonsible for economic activity such as providing electricity and even news to the public .. seriously fucked up shit like this can happen. It irreverasbly fucks a country hard.
Show me where socialism and government control over business activity has brought about prosperity and lifted a country out of poverty? I can show examples for capitalism: China, Singapore, South Korea (contrast with North Korea which was considered richer than S. Korea before the split -- and S. Korea was as poor as any African country).
Probably not but the link to the Guardian is wrong and you end up on http.com which is a dummy front site, using firefox 2 and linux, using open link in new window (or tab) because Firefox then completes http with .com for its target domain. The link to the Guardian in the article is http://http//politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffair s/story/0,,2160256,00.html
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
how do we know we can trust them to leak to? What security mechanisms are available to protect leakers?
I knew they had lions in Kenya, but I'd never suspect they'd have any bi-lions, let alone three of them!
Apparently Bush thinks it's one of his accomplishments to have met this alleged embezzler.
h ttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2Finfocus%2Fafrica% 2Fafrica_accomplishments.pdf&ei=NMTZRqrcF6WqxAGf5M 2OAw&usg=AFQjCNGsylMvKy5w5W7fvYJ9XGJdSbcpQw&sig2=T 3B32gMv7qDOnRQkSthpoQ0 021205-2.html
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/12/2
So, not exactly his fault, but perhaps unwise to be supporting someone who the EU, Denmark and UK had warned they would stop aid to if corruption wasn't dealt with. It seems that the magical "Support for the War on Terrorism" phrase was used.
Deleted
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
You know what's even sadder? When stripped of sarcasm, I actually agree with 99% of your comment.
Hey, I don't apologize for being the moron that I am. In thirty or forty years, I'll have maggots crawling through my eye sockets anyways. So, I figure me being wrong 90% of the time is far better a success rate than being 10% right on everything else in life. And I'm taking that to the grave with a smile...
I was completely serious!
Anonymous Coward Sig 2.0:
--
Madonna is awesome! No one else has any talent!
Show me where socialism and government control over business activity has brought about prosperity and lifted a country out of poverty? My socialist prosperity, let me show you it: http://www.hydroquebec.com/profile/index.html
Interestingly enough, when deregulation in Ohio led to the great blackout of 2003, the Quebec grid was mostly unaffected because Hydro-Quebec keeps its grid out of sync with its neighbors because they expected something like that to happen, since the states around it are dangerously under-regulated.
And the CBC is a much more reliable source of news than any of the conglomerate-operated sources in the USA, FOX news they ain't. prosperity and lifted a country out of poverty? I can show examples for capitalism: China http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/364
It was not clear of the counterfeit powder included any toxic ingredients, but some children were reported to have died within three days of being fed the fake milk.
Others were hospitalised when their parents realised they were ill. Fuyang's People's Hospital alone received more than 60 babies who had been fed fake milk formula, according to the Beijing News.
You can't take the sky from me...
Or look at TFA ;-)
There a picture of the 2 presidents side by side.
See ? that's scientific bulletproof evidence right there.
So no more waiting for you, we already have all the evidence we will ever need, if you had just looked at TFA in the first place ;-)
just kidding of course ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Yup, because politicians in capitalist countries are never corrupt, right? ;-)
What I find really fascinating here is that WikiLeaks was promising to begin releasing stuff around March or so, but all they've had for a while was that Somali report (which was interesting, sure, but not as impressive as their media coverage would justify); so this is an interesting report on its own merit but also because it's another and more major interesting thing. Perhaps they've finally finished development and are producing the goods? That'd be good: it would be sad if they failed or were some sort of CIA puppet (or somesuchness).
That's the LAST thing I ever expected to hear.
Fortunately, China is raping that continent now instead of Europe, and we know how the Chinese deal with corruption. When it's really obvious. And someone notices. And someone dares to write about it.
The latest Slashdot meme.
We can compare the Russian revolution to the Meij restoration in Japan. Both Imperial Russia and the Shogunate were agricultural, with no heavy industry to speak of. Soviet Russia was a superpower by 1945, only 28 years later. Japan only caught up around the same time, and then got bombed back to the beginning. Another fun comparison is Yugoslavia. From Wikipedia we have that Yugoslavia had 6% annual GDP growth during the 1960's and 1970's. The collapse of the economy was brought about by following the advice of the IMF.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Okay, I started investigate. A number of things don't ring fully true. They are very careless about discussing physical and local security for the whistleblowers. I found this worrying but decided to try to correct it. I noticed that they claim to be a normal open wiki and so I tried to sign up... no sign up page on the login page. Then I tried forcing the link by copying from wikipedia: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special :Userlogin&type=signup&returnto=Wikileaks:Main_Pag e "You are not allowed to create an account / To be allowed to create accounts in this wiki you have to log in and have the appropriate permissions.". https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Advisory_Board shows that the Advisory board has some credibility, but does it really exist? Interestingly several of them have blogs http://iq.org/ http://www.wangdan1989.com/ http://www.links.org/ but I haven't been able to find any references to Wikileaks. Why is there no information from the EFF or other similar bodies?
I call BS on your post. The Scandinavian countries is a clear example of how wrong your post is. The fact that Norway has the highest human development index suggests that government control has positive sides as well.
So instead of talking straight out of your ass while praising what you think work best, you should instead shut up and think a bit. Newsflash: The World is not just black and white! Who would have guessed?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Just couldn't resist to mount your favourite hobby horse, could you? Kenya is not a socialist country. It was as single party state before and is still corrupt, but has had a capitalist system with free private enterprise for decades.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Now, please, go one step further and tell me which political leaders the Left likes.
Kenya is a perfect example of a corrupt capitalist dictatorship. Why is this shit being modded insightful?
Governmental corruption in Africa is about as newsworthy as finding water in the Atlantic Ocean.
Funny how there's no link in "related stories" to the original Slashdot post about Wikileaks. You know, the one that was all about how Wikileaks was a scam and would never get off the ground.
I can't believe it has been over 80 posts without anyone actually congratulating Wikileaks on this great feat.
So let me be the first to welcome our new, leaking overlords!
Congratulations, Wikileaks!! Keep up the good work!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
"I'm fucking tired of people putting down one of our most ethical presidents since Andrew Jackson."
Better than Gore would have been. Better than Clinton. But not the most ethical since A. Jackson.
"George W. Bush is not a lazy president. He has done a lot. He has given the Iraqis something they didn't know before: freedom from an evil man."
Agreed.
"He has worked to spread Christianity around the world."
Yeah, and Osama bin Laden used similar Military Tactics to Spread the Muslim beliefs. George W. just used semi-non-Terrorist type Military
"He has lowered taxed..."
Depends on which Tax bracket you are in.
"...and improved education with No Child Left Behind."
I would not consider this to be improving Education. The No Child Left Behind measure was pure stupidity.
"George W. Bush has fought evil terrorists and the War on Drugs with success."
Terrorists...many but not all...N. Korea, Iran, etc.. War on Drugs...NO! And success is a little bit strong of a term for what it currently is...
"He has helped make the Judicial branch more ethical by putting in judges that will support life (no playing God with stem cells)..."
Let other countries surpass the US in Medical Research...let sick people die...Yeah, he did that.
"...keep media free from obscenity,..."
Free of Speech. With so many Cable, standard TV, website, newspapers, and other media outlets out there, there is no need to restrict media. Let it do what it wants, with ratings, and let people choose to watch, read, and listen to what they want. Else if you want government control of Media...move to China.
"...and oppose evil gay marriage."
HAHAHAHAHA. Evil Gay Marriage. Evil Right-wing Christian Nuts.
"George W. Bush should have another term so we can win the War on Terrorism like we won the war in Iraq."
No. New Blood in the Oval Office is needed.
"Hillary Clinton is evil."
Agreed!
You guys don't get it at all. This fraud is happening because the kenyan government is using Windows, and we all know that everything goes corrupt with Windows. If only they'd chosen Linux!
So don't start the fight of capitalism vs communism, it is only a red herring to hide the truth. Just to prove how wrong you are, just think about that...
What OS does the Shrub use in the White House?
Windows.
Do you see now where the truth lies? Governing with capitalism, socialism or communism wont make a difference as long as you use the wrong leaders, people who welcome corruption like Windows. So next time, vote for suspenders and beard, not Armani suits.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Minus the sarcasm, the post would be empty.
Socialism which centralizes all p;power in the government, causes this.
The term "socialism" is overloaded these days. A better description would be Dictatorship or Totalitarianism. Socialism should be reserved for heavier gov't control over the economy, but such government may still be an elected gov't and have 3+ branches for checks and balances.
Table-ized A.I.
Cripes, $3 Billion is nothing compared to the outright looting of the fed that's going on right now in the United States.
How good government is really depends on the given selection, and the willingness of the people to oppose a bad government.
If you have a democratic-style government, and your choices are Adolph Hitler, Beezelbub, and OJ Simpson, chances are that no matter whom you choose it isn't going to work out very well. In contrast, if you have a dictatorship, monarchy, or whatever, and you happen to have a *good* government (I've heard the King of Thailand is well looked upon), then your country will prosper.
Given a combination of the government and the people, a semi-communist or semi-socialist philosophy may work (although too much of anything is usually not a good thing), but it's pretty hard to build anything on a weak foundation. Corrupt government, or weak citizens in most any case do not make a good foundation for any policy, and abuse will run rampant regardless.
All this discussion about "capitalism" versus "socialism" - as if worshiping the correct ideology could ward off the corrupt, who will take anything and everything, given the chance. It isn't the ism. There's no magic ism that make all your children beautiful and virtuous, and all of some competing ism's children ugly thieves. That mistake is the one Cheney's people made: that if we just give corrupt foreign lands democracy-ism they'll become virtuous paradises of freedom.
Not that the isms make no difference. But the difference is of style, not virtue. It's like the difference between rock-n-roll-ism and jazz-ism. Most rock-n-roll, and most jazz, is a faint and corrupted echo of the truly great exemplars. Virtue in a musician isn't a matter of which ism they've pursued, but of how they've pursued it. There are great jazz bands, and lousy ones; great rock bands, and lousy ones; great socialist countries (e.g. Sweden), and lousy ones (e.g. Burma); great capitalist countries (e.g. Taiwan), and lousy oness (e.g. Nigeria). Your taste in examples my differ; the point remains that its not what you do (socialist, capitalist, whatever), it's how you do it.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
It's nothing to do with race, it's a third-world country. Cry "politically correct" all you want, I counter with "America".
HELLO and GREETINGS Sir,
I am writing to you with an offer to execute a TRANSACTION with a value
of $3.000.000.000 USD (THREE THOUSAND MILLIONS) of American Dollars.
This transaction requires strict and secure confidences, of which I
trust we can be including in the matter at hand.
I was in the employ as Senior Executive Treasurer General Officer of
the President of an African NATION for which I cannot disclose at this time,
and I have managed a worldwide network of shell companies, secret trusts,
and front-men to disguise the aforementioned funds. While this required
massive deception and fraud, I assure you that our own transaction will
be conducted with full confidence, assurances, trust, honesty, integrity
and good-faith.
Please provide your credit card numbers (with validation numbers and any
PINs), along with bank account numbers, online banking credentials, images
of your identification cards and passport, and anything else you deem
necessary to gain my trust in this matter. When you consider the sum involved
($3.000.000.000 USD), you can understand my concern.
After the transaction, whatever it might be, I will have to ask that you
tell no one about this. Please delete this e-mail and destroy your
computer, and perhaps burn down your house, and sever all social contacts
before moving to a new country. This will demonstrate your confidence and
integrity in the forthcoming phase of assurance and dealings of which we
transacted and expounded hereforth.
Urgently awaiting your sincere reply,
Mr. X
They've got Lions & Tigers too http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/kenya/
I'm fucking tired of people putting down one of our most ethical presidents since Andrew Jackson.
Wow. It's amazing that a president can do a few things you agree with and you can gloss over what is probably the least ethical presidency since the Nixon administration (possibly worse). How can you look at no-bid contracts given to Haliburton and not at the very least think "appearance of impropriety." You've got one messed up definition of ethics there. How about putting a businessman with no real political experience in charge of rebuilding Iraq? Do you have any idea how many tens of thousands of Iraqi's and thousands of American lives were lost because of L. Paul Bremer's fucked up theories of nation building?
Yeah that's some seriously ethical cronyism. I'll take someone lying about getting a blow job to a hundred thousand dead humans any day.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
....regardless of race. Africa is one huge corruption factory, which is why it will NEVER be anything than a basket case. I know; I lived in Africa for > 50 years.
Stone the flamin' crows, there aint no flamin' ranches in Australia ya flamin' drongos. Struth!
My company is currently working on resurrecting Reagan's head and mounting it on a killbot JSN-5000, once our project is complete you can add "winning the war on drugs" to the list of Republican accomplishments.
After your nice mention of Jackson our engineering team leapt into action and read the wikipedia entry to see if his resurrected head should be part of the presidential killbot project, but we quickly discovered he was a democrat... DOT DOT DOT! This makes me doubt your honesty and sincerity.
In a lot of places in Africa, the presence of corruption at lower levels is just tacitly accepted. It's not hard to understand why when sometimes people need bribe money just to put food on their table.
The problem it's that in many cases when you deal with "donor" money, they don't consider it necessarily stealing from their people, but just getting "free" money from the donors.
I've seen it first hand on the national scale:
In Tanzania, during the midst of a severe power crisis I sat down in a cafe in Dar and had chai with the president of the Richmond Development Corperation "based" in Houston TX. They were under contract to import and install emergency power generators to the country. This was a deal worth 10s of millions of USD (This money was of course aid money, Tanzania doesn't have 10 Million in hard currency to toss about). We talked about the power situation and how nice it would be to have it fixed, about foreign aid, and about the USA and Tanzania in general. He was a very pleasant man overall, he gave me his business card and even paid my tab.
Several weeks later it came to light that RDC was basically a shell company with no real corporate presence anywhere, or capability to buy and ship generators (Google it if you want). It was purely an attempt to swindle millions of dollars (the attitude being that since it was donor money, it wasn't really taking money from Tanzania) How the heck did they win the contract in the first place? I'm sure they greased a few palms along the way.
Even on the village level, if you write a grant for a building and budget X TSH money for concrete, you can damn well be sure that someone will try their hardest to short a bag or two and pocket the money (concrete is very expensive FWIW). Receipt tracking for grants would be hell if you were not solely in charge of buying and paying for things.
Considering the harshness of life there, I can't be to angry at people for trying for a few bucks, but with that in mind, the people stealing millions are even more reprehensible.
RPCV Tanzania 2005-2007
Still have the business card and newspaper clippings
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
Disallow:
davecb5620@gmail.com
And you believe capitalism is utopia? Why not look in your own backyard at the Halliburtons, the Cheneys, the power wielding mega-corporations, at the people and companies who really run the show? Do you really think you have a say in the way your government does anything? You're living in a dream world.
We can all learn from countries like Germany who implement a balance between socialist type legislation and control and capitalist style free market.
It was not clear of the counterfeit powder included any toxic ingredients, but some children were reported to have died within three days of being fed the fake milk.
Others were hospitalised when their parents realised they were ill. Fuyang's People's Hospital alone received more than 60 babies who had been fed fake milk formula, according to the Beijing News. Makes me REALLY wonder about the quality of the stuff we eat, use and abuse; since when I was young the news has been telling many things that products need to be troughoutly tested before they can be used as medicine or healthcare products.
Feeding a baby who has just been put on the world is considered health care. These kids cannot care of themselves or tell us they are missing something; the language is just not there yet for that to happen. The responsibility does not only lie in the hands of its parents but also of the manufacturers who are selling "genuine" products while they are not even that "genuine" at all. The missing of an important vitamin B1 ingredient could cause complications which could have been forseen before by sampling the products throughout to look for any missing and needed contents to be called "milk".
Ok, on the other hand, different countries, different rules, but; we are obliged to carry a number, nationality and pay taxes, I'd sure expect the governments to protect that certain asset of citizenship?
What could be the conclusion of this?
- What we eat, drink and use is not all so throughoutly tested as we think? (shocking in the age of technology)
- In other words, look what you put in your mouth first! (what's new?)
- News is overrated ? (what's new?)
- The government is not "doing its job" to protect it's citizen? (what's new?)
- I rather stick with my real milk which I'm drinking since I'm born; still liking every glass of it; (mmmm)
- But find the quality of the taste in the milk disturbingly worse than it used to be in the past of different brands. (what changed?)
It's not only milk but a lot of different products which we use in daily lives;
The quality of everything we use is not deemed to be quality; we do not demand the quality enough, it's too expensive to be quality so cheaper components will be used or left behind or we simply don't pay enough to get quality. It's the industry which gives us what we demand; if we demand better products, better tested and it will still be sold in large amounts; the price will be somewhat the same and the product has a better background check too. In my book you still pay for quality; although in the food sector quality is not always visible through the naked eye. Food is still something which keeps us alive or kills us (in an instant) if we do not know for sure what is (missing) in those products we put in our mouths.
I never really saw the use of using artificial products over the real thing and why giving them to babies while they should get most of the real nature to grow up? Most possibly naivity which is caused by ignorance and totally not knowing/caring about what we really buy. Welcome to the industrial age.
Add to it we have lost the right of privacy some time ago too and I'll feel a lot better already
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Advocacy groups and charities have accused Nestlé of unethical methods of promoting infant formula over breast-milk to poor mothers in third world countries.[15][16] For example, IBFAN claim that Nestlé supports the distribution of free powdered formula samples to hospitals and maternity wards; after leaving the hospital, the formula is no longer free, but because the supplementation has interfered with lactation the family must continue to buy the formula. IBFAN also allege that Nestlé uses "humanitarian aid" to create markets, does not label its products in a language appropriate to the country where they are sold, and offers gifts and sponsorship to influence health workers to promote its products. [17] Nestlé denies these allegations.
That article talks about stuff from the 70's onward, but the whole deal is much older than that. In the fifties doctors were used to promote this corporate line of thought, and people were led to believe that artificial substitute were better than the natural alternative.
If I had three wishes, one of them would be to raise the level of awereness of humanity so that they might be able to see other people's agendas throuh their misleading speeches and to see the result of their actions on others.
When a corparation says 'this is good for your baby', they probably mean 'this is good for out money'. Because corporations care about nothing else. Yet people still choose to believe their sales speech, rather than this simple truth.
You can't take the sky from me...
Also, who exactly will be held accountable when it's used, say, to swing an election, only for us to discover that the information in question was bogus? Wikileaks? Will they hand over the leaker?
Who is called accountable as it is? Say a presidential candidate lied/carefully misinformed using half-truths for his own ends. Now say major news agencies collaborate the lies/misinformation. Who gets held accountable? If dissenting views are presented somewhere, even somewhere less reputable and sometimes full of crackpots, is that worse than not having them at all?
I can't help but feel that Wikileaks may, in fact, do more harm than good. A few bad incidents at Wikileaks, and it's highly likely that the law (and government, business etc.) is going to come down hard to silence legitimate whistle-blowers under the pretext of protecting themselves from slander and libel.
If they do, it's only to attack freedom to express non-controlled views. These kinds of abuses would destroy the credibility of Wikileaks, which makes slander and libel impossible.
Wikileaks allow starting points for more credible investigations that would not be explored if no one thought anything was wrong.
News could be censored so only the truth is aired. This would be more accurate as long as the censor only edited out false and misleading information. Just like a benign dictator can do more good for the people of his country with his greater power than the leader of a democracy. But dictatorships have a nasty habit of not retaining benign leader and censors have a nasty habit of blocking information they shouldn't even when they are full of good intentions.
Despite all the crap that comes out of free speech, very important ideas that would have been suppressed emerged too. Some societies have decided that suppressing these important ideas causes more damage than allowing bad ideas be expressed.
Nu, what makes you think he lives in the USSA? Slashdotters live around the globe. He writes English like a non native, and based on his name and attitude I assume he is Ukrainian.
$META_SIG_JOKE
I love how the first picture on the page has George W. Bush in it. The article has nothing to do with the US President in any way, but whatever we can do to somehow link him to every bad thing that has ever happened is first priority! Freaking liberals.
-Kris "Insert witty or mildly amusing catch phrase here"
It's obviously off topic, but it's really funny. I mean no one would seriously be stupid enough to support an international war criminal so passionately, would they?
I don't therefore I'm not.
Lets blame Capitalism for what that twat did. Oh wait they had a socialist system there.. then That is the root of all evil. It can't *possibly* be that the same types of fuckwads screw all types of systems in all the countries across the globe. You can have a perfect system designed by Angels after extensive testing on the holy beowulf clusters of Magrathea but it can and will be screwed in the ass by the people with the power to do that.
But hey who am I kidding, we can't even talk about international issues without getting into a country/religion specific fight so lets blame the first thing in our hate list as soon as we come across it.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.