The pinnacle of corruption: Sen. Feinstein wants Afghan surge as her husband makes millions on war

In the imperial halls of the Senate, there is some incredibly stiff competition in corruption and incompetence. Lieberman, Dodd, Durbin, Stevens, and McCain immediately come to mind, but when a Senator uses a deadly attack on American soldiers in Afghanistan to score political points, we might have a winner. Which is exactly what San Francisco's own Dianne Feinstein did when discussing the Afghan War with George Stephanopoulos.

I don't know how you put somebody in who was as crackerjack as General McChrystal, who gives the president very solid recommendations, and not take those recommendations if you're not going to pull out.

If you don't want to take the recommendations, then you -- you -- you put your people in such jeopardy, just like the base in Nuristan. We lost eight of our men. We didn't have the ability to defend them, and now the base is closing, and effectively we're -- we're retreating away from it. And so I think the decision has to be made sooner, rather than later.

Those eight men we lost were killed in an attack on Camp Keating, a military base troops calls "Ambush Alley." Plopped in a low valley in the ourskirts of northern Afghanistan, it is used to secure the roads between Nuristan and Kabul. Even the military admits that it's been an extremely vulnerable base since it opened in 2006, and then whoops, 8 more families with an empty chair at dinner.

It makes sense, however, that Feinstein would demand that 40,000 more boys be sent to lose their minds and limbs in the mountains of Afghanistan; there's a lot of money in it for her. Feinstein's multimillionaire husband, Richard Blum, oversees two large defense contractors. Given that as ranking member of the Senate's Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee, Feinstein supervised the allocation of billions of dollars a year, who do you think got the contracts? URS Corp., a San Francisco-based defense contractor partially owned by Blum, received nearly $3.5 billion from the Army. Perini, one of Blum's biggest investments, also makes nearly $2 billion a year helping the US occupy Iraq and Afghanistan. It's no wonder Feinstein is pushing for more war.

The Pentagon refers to its bloody military-industrial-congressional-complex web as the innocent sounding "defense contracting," but in a saner time, we called individuals and industries who profited from piles of corpses "merchants of death."

Keep in mind that this is our tax money being sent to Feinstein's husband, socializing his risks and privatizing his profits. Meanwhile, the Feinstein-financed war machine is hunting down the Taliban who also happen to be getting rich off of American taxpayers. Local contractors in Afghanistan who deliver supplies and equipment to NATO bases are charging the US "protection money" to pay off the Taliban, and combined with extortion and drug trafficking, they are now better financed than Al Qaeda.

The war in Afghanistan won't end because the war and its accompanying contracts are the ends, and any excuse will do: democracy, liberation, WMDs, safe havens, etc. At least we know Feinstein's excuse for perpetuating the killing fields in Afghanistan: profit.

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This article originally appeared in SF's (d)N0T blog.