State Department

Perhaps up to 1,000 laptops, of which 400 could be tied to the anti-terrorism program:

It has surfaced that the US State Department can't account for up to about 1,000 laptops, perhaps as many as 400 of which belonged to the department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program.

The State Department's Inspector General has been conducting an equipment audit for three months. Only the first stage, an inventory, has been completed.

Internal auditors found that the department lost track of US$30 million worth of computer equipment, "the vast majority of which... perhaps as much as 99 percent," were laptops, according to one official.

Another official calculated that the average State Department laptop costs US$3,000 and figured that meant as many as 1,000 laptops might be astray - not 10,000 laptops as the US$30 million figure suggests.

First - those are some fucking expensive laptops. Second - where is the accountability George Bush promised us? They had to find this out through an audit and aren't even sure exactly what is missing? Please let McCain pick Condi as her running mate. Her incompetence writes ads on it's own.

UPDATE:
An anonymous source has claimed to CQ Politics that the laptops have been found. Not sure how much I buy into that.

Undersecretary of state Nicholas Burns is stepping down. Burns is also one of the chief warmongers when it comes to Iran and has been referred to as the "chief American strategist on Iran".

It looks like Condi's plan of forcing diplomats to Iraq is meeting some resistance.

Uneasy U.S. diplomats yesterday challenged senior State Department officials in unusually blunt terms over a decision to order some of them to serve at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or risk losing their jobs.

At a town hall meeting in the department's main auditorium attended by hundreds of Foreign Service officers, some of them criticized fundamental aspects of State's personnel policies in Iraq. They took issue with the size of the embassy -- the biggest in U.S. history -- and the inadequate training they received before being sent to serve in a war zone. One woman said she returned from a tour in Basra with post-traumatic stress disorder only to find that the State Department would not authorize medical treatment.

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