Why Was $8.5 million Miami protest taken from $87 billion Iraq bill?

[otohara]

Congress earmarked $8.5 million from this month's $87.4 billion emergency spending bill for the Iraq war specifically for costs associated with the FTAA meeting.

http://www.sunspot.net/news/printedition/bal-te.bz.protest19nov19,0,4660372.story?coll=bal-pe-asection

Excellent and graphic footage of yesterday's brutal police force used in Miami is on today's Democracy Now report. Worth the watch, frightening what the Miami police chief said. democracynow.org

[dmr]

1. Damn! That's a very good question!

Wonder where else money is going or being funneled to.

[nostamj]

4. remember what Sen. Byrd said..........

bush* can use the $$$ anyway way he wants. period.

he can bronze his toenail clippings or feed the poor or whatever the hell he feels like..........

[arcane1]

2. but tortured US POW's get not one damned cent

U.S. Opposes Money for Troops Jailed in Iraq
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 - The Bush administration is seeking to block a group of American troops who were tortured in Iraqi prisons during the Persian Gulf war in 1991 from collecting any of the hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen Iraqi assets they won last summer in a federal court ruling against the government of Saddam Hussein.

In a court challenge that the administration is winning so far but is not eager to publicize, administration lawyers have argued that Iraqi assets frozen in bank accounts in the United States are needed for Iraqi reconstruction and that the judgment won by the 17 former American prisoners should be overturned.

If the administration succeeds, the former prisoners would be deprived of the money they won and, they say, of the validation of a judge's ruling that documented their accounts of torture by the Iraqis - including beatings, burnings, starvation, mock executions and repeated threats of castration and dismemberment.

"I don't want to say that I feel betrayed, because I still believe in my country," said Lt. Col. Dale Storr, whose Air Force A-10 fighter jet was shot down by Iraqi fire in February 1991.

-snip-
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/international/middleeast/10POWS.html

[ComerPerro]

3. Because

When it comes to giving free money to your CEO buddies, giving money in the form of tax cuts to your best contributors, giving money to your Vice President's company so they can clean up the war you lied start, or giving money to agencies that will help enforce your fascist reign, then there is always more money.

But when it is time to give money to those you put out of work, or to the poverty-stricken, or to the underpaid, or to fund public education, then there simply isn't enough money to go around.

[truthspeaker]

5. anarchist civil disobedience = terrorism

The protesters even hate our freedom (our freedom to expand our capitalist empire, that is).

[glitch]

6. you don't expect bushco to pay their co-conspirators themselves

do you, that's what taxpayers are for!

Looting the treasury takes many forms.