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Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
Volume 6, No. 14
(Editor's note: Gore Vidal, now 81, has spent a lifetime critiquing America's imperial impulses and has—through two dozen novels and hundreds of essays—argued that the US should retreat back to its more Jeffersonian roots, that it should stop meddling in the affairs of other nations and the private affairs of its own citizens.
That the thread that runs through Vidal's best seller published soon after September 11 titled Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated. To answer the question in his subtitle, Vidal posits that we have no right to scratch our heads over what motivated the perpetrators of the two biggest terror attacks in our history: the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the September 2001 twin tower holocaust.
Vidal writes: "It is a law of physics (still on the books when last I looked) that in nature there is no action without reaction. The same appears to be true in human nature—that is, history." The "action" Vidal refers to is the hubris of an American empire abroad (illustrated by a twenty-page chart of two hundred US overseas military adventures since the end of World War II and a budding police state at home. The inevitable "reaction," says Vidal, is nothing less than the handiwork of Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh. "Each was enraged," he says, "by our government's reckless assaults upon other societies" and was therefore "provoked" into answering with horrendous violence.
Here follows Vidal's perspective on September 11th, 2001:
Gore Vidal: I don't think we, the America people, deserved what happened. Nor do we deserve the sort of governments we have had over the last forty years. Our governments have brought this upon us by their actions all over the world. I have a list in my new book that gives the readers some idea how busy we have been. Unfortunately we get only disinformation from the New York Times and other official places. Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief. The number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947-48 is more than 250. These are major strikes everywhere from Panama to Iran. And it isn't even a complete list. It doesn't include places like Chile, as that was a CIA operation. I was listing only military attacks.
Americans are either not told about these things or are told we attacked them because…well…Noriega is the center of all world drug traffic and we have to get rid of him. So we kill some Panamanians in the process. Actually we killed quite a few. And we brought in our air force. Panama didn't have an air force. But it looked good to have our air force there, busy, blowing up buildings. Then we kidnap their leader, Noriega, a former CIA man who worked loyally for the US. We arrest him. Try him in an American court that has no jurisdiction over him and lock him up—nobody knows why. And that was supposed to end the drug trade because he had been demonized by the New York Times and the rest of the imperial press.
The government plays off Americans' relative innocence or ignorance to be more precise. This is probably why geography has not really been taught since World War II—to keep people in the dark as to where we are blowing things up. Because Enron wants to blow them up. Or Unocal, the great pipeline company, wants a war going some place.
And people in the countries who are recipients of our bombs get angry. The Afghans had nothing to do with what happened to our country on September 11. But Saudi Arabia did. It seems like Osama is involved, but we don't really know. I mean, when we went into Afghanistan to take over the place and blow it up, our commanding general was asked how long it was going to take to find Osama bin Laden. And the commanding general looked rather surprised and said, "Well, that's not why we are here."
Oh no? So what was all this about? It was about the Taliban being very, very bad people and that they treated women very badly, you see. They're not really into women's rights, and we here are very strong on women's rights; and we should be with Bush on that one because he's taking those burlap sacks off women's heads. Well, that's not what it was about.
What it was really about is that this is an imperial grab for energy resources. Until now, the Persian Gulf has been our main source for imported oil. We went there, to Afghanistan, not to get Osama and wreak our vengeance. We went to Afghanistan partly because the Taliban—whom we had installed at the time of the Russian occupation—were getting too flaky and because Unocal, the California corporation, had made a deal with the Taliban for a pipeline to get the Caspian-area oil, which is the richest oil reserve on earth. They wanted to get that oil by pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan to Karachi and from there to ship it off to China, which would be enormously profitable. Whichever big company could cash in would make a fortune. And you'll see that all these companies go back to Bush or Cheney or to Rumsfeld or someone else on the gas-and-oil junta, which, along with the Pentagon, governs the US.
We had planned to occupy Afghanistan in October, and Osama, or whom ever it was who hit us in September launched a preemptive strike. They knew we were coming. And this was a warning to throw us off guard.
With that background, it now becomes explicable why the first thing Bush did after we were hit was to get Senator Daschle and beg him not to hold an investigation of the sort any normal country would have done. When Pearl Harbor was struck, within twenty minutes the Senate and the House had a joint committee ready. Roosevelt beat them to it because he knew why we had been hit, so he set up his own committee. But none of this was to come out, and the story of Pearl Harbor is only coming out now.)
3 Articles
1. How Truth Slips Down the Memory Hole
2. The Possibility of a US Attack on Iran
3. Who Will Stop the US Shadow Army in Iraq?
1. HOW TRUTH SLIPS DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE
BY
JOHN PILGER
One of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston was a Palestinian news cameraman, Imad Ghanem. On 5 July, he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he filmed them invading Gaza. A Reuters video shows bullets hitting his body as he lay on the ground. An ambulance trying to reach him was also attacked. The Israelis described him as a "legitimate target." The International Federation of Journalists called the shooting "a vicious and brutal example of deliberate targeting of a journalist." At the age of 21, he has had both legs amputated.
Dr. David Halpin, a British trauma surgeon who works with Palestinian children, emailed the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. "The BBC should report the alleged details about the shooting," he wrote. "It should honor Alan [Johnston] as a journalist by reporting the facts, uncomfortable as they might be to Israel."
He received no reply.
The atrocity was reported in two sentences on the BBC online. Along with 11 Palestinian civilians killed by the Israelis on the same day, Alan Johnston's now legless champion slipped into what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four called the memory hole. (It was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth to make disappear all facts embarrassing to Big Brother.)
While Alan Johnston was being held, I was asked by the BBC World Service if I would say a few words of support for him. I readily agreed, and suggested I also mention the thousands of Palestinians abducted and held hostage. The answer was a polite no; and all the other hostages remained in the memory hole. Or, as Harold Pinter wrote of such unmentionables: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened... It didn't matter. It was of no interest."
The media wailing over the BBC's royal photo-shoot fiasco and assorted misdemeanors provide the perfect straw man. They complement a self-serving BBC internal inquiry into news bias, which dutifully supplied the right-wing Daily Mail with hoary grist that the corporation is a left-wing plot. Such shenanigans would be funny were it not for the true story behind the facade of elite propaganda that presents humanity as useful or expendable, worthy or unworthy, and the Middle East as the Anglo-American crime that never happened, didn't matter, was of no interest.
The other day, I turned on the BBC's Radio 4 and heard a cut-glass voice announce a program about Iraqi interpreters working for "the British coalition forces" and warning that "listeners might find certain descriptions of violence disturbing." Not a word referred to those of "us" directly and ultimately responsible for the violence. The program was called Face the Facts. Is satire that dead? Not yet. The Murdoch columnist David Aaronovitch, a warmonger, is to interview Blair in the BBC's "major retrospective" of the sociopath's rule.
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four lexicon of opposites pervades almost everything we see, hear and read now. The invaders and destroyers are "the British coalition forces," surely as benign as that British institution, St. John Ambulance, who are "bringing democracy" to Iraq. BBC television describes Israel as having "two hostile Palestinian entities on its borders," neatly inverting the truth that Israel is actually inside Palestinian borders. A study by Glasgow University says that young British viewers of TV news believe Israelis illegally colonizing Palestinian land are Palestinians: the victims are the invaders.
"The great crimes against most of humanity," wrote the American cultural critic James Petras, "are justified by a corrosive debasement of language and thought... [that] have fabricated a linguistic world of terror, of demons and saviors, of axes of good and evil, of euphemisms" designed to disguise a state terror that is "a gross perversion" of democracy, liberation, reform, justice. In his reinauguration speech, George Bush mentioned all these words, whose meaning, for him, is the dictionary opposite.
It is 80 years since Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, predicted a pervasive "invisible government" of corporate spin, suppression and silence as the true ruling power in the United States. That is true today on both sides of the Atlantic. How else could America and Britain go on such a spree of death and mayhem on the basis of stupendous lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, even a "mushroom cloud over New York"? When the BBC radio reporter Andrew Gilligan reported the truth, he was pilloried and sacked along with the BBC's director general, while Blair, the proven liar, was protected by the liberal wing of the media and given a standing ovation in parliament.
The same is happening again over Iran, distracted, it is hoped, by spin that the new Foreign Secretary David Miliband is a "skeptic" about the crime in Iraq when, in fact, he has been an accomplice, and by unctuous Kennedy-quoting Foreign Office propaganda about Miliband's "new world order."
"What do you think of Iran's complicity in attacks on British soldiers in Basra?" Miliband was asked by the Financial Times.
Miliband: "Well, I think that any evidence of Iranian engagement there is to be deplored. I think that we need regional players to be supporting stability, not fomenting discord, never mind death..."
FT: "Just to be clear, there is evidence?"
Miliband: "Well no, I chose my words carefully..."
The coming war on Iran, including the possibility of a nuclear attack, has already begun as a war by journalism. Count the number of times "nuclear weapons program" and "nuclear threat" are spoken and written, yet neither exists, says the International Atomic Energy Agency. On 21 June, the New York Times went further and advertised an "urgent" poll, headed: "Should we bomb Iran?" The questions beneath referred to Iran being "a greater threat than Saddam Hussein" and asked: "Who should undertake military action against Iran first... ?" The choice was "US. Israel. Neither country."
So tick your favorite bombers.
The last British war to be fought without censorship and "embedded" journalists was the Crimea a century and a half ago. The bloodbath of the First World War and the Cold War might never have happened without their unpaid (and paid) propagandists. Today's invisible government is no less served, especially by those who censor by omission.
However, there are major differences. Official disinformation now is often aimed at a critical public intelligence, a growing awareness in spite of the media. This "threat" from a public often held in contempt has been met by the insidious transfer of much of journalism to public relations. Some years ago, PR Week estimated that the amount of "PR-generated material" in the media is "50 per cent in a broadsheet newspaper in every section apart from sport. In the local press and the mid-market and tabloid nationals, the figure would undoubtedly be higher. Music and fashion journalists and PRs work hand in hand in the editorial process... PRs provide fodder, but the clever high-powered ones do a lot of the journalists' thinking for them."
This is known today as "perception management." The most powerful are not the Max Cliffords but huge corporations such as Hill & Knowlton, which "sold" the slaughter known as the first Gulf war, and the Sawyer Miller Group, which sold hated, pro-Washington regimes in Colombia and Bolivia and whose operatives included Mark Malloch Brown, the new Foreign Office minister, currently being spun as anti-Washington. Hundreds of millions of dollars go to corporations spinning the carnage in Iraq as a sectarian war and covering up the truth: that an atrocious invasion is pinned down by a successful resistance while the oil is looted.
The other major difference today is the abdication of cultural forces that once provided dissent outside journalism. Their silence has been devastating. "For almost the first time in two centuries," wrote the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." The lone, honorable exception is Harold Pinter. Eagleton listed writers and playwrights who once promised dissent and satire and instead became rich celebrities, ending the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and Shaw.
He singled out Martin Amis, a writer given tombstones of column inches in which to air his pretensions, along with his attacks on Muslims. The following is from a recent article by Amis:
Tony strolled over [to me] and said, "What have you been up to today?" "I've been feeling protective of my prime minister, since you ask." For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming mildly but deplorably flirtatious.
What these elite, embedded voices share is their participation in an essentially class war, the long war of the rich against the poor. That they play their part in a broadcasting studio or in the clubbable pages of the review sections and that they think of themselves as liberals or conservatives is neither here nor there. They belong to the same crusade, waging the same battle for their enduring privilege.
In The Serpent, Marc Karlin's dreamlike film about Rupert Murdoch, the narrator describes how easily Murdochism came to dominate the media and coerce the industry's liberal elite. There are clips from a keynote address that Murdoch gave at the Edinburgh Television Festival. The camera pans across the audience of TV executives, who listen in respectful silence as Murdoch flagellates them for suppressing the true voice of the people. They then applaud him. "This is the silence of the democrats," says the voice-over, "and the Dark Prince could bathe in their silence."
2. THE POSSIBILITY OF A US ATTACK ON IRAN
(Excerpts of presentation, Vancouver 9/11 Truth Conference)
BY
PETER DALE SCOTT
"I have been speaking in public for 60 years, but this is perhaps the most important topic I have ever spoken about."
"I want to talk about the threat to world peace, and the possibility of a US attack, possibly a nuclear attack, on Iran."
Even The New York Times is worried about it, and has reported on the split between the pro-war Vice-President's office and Condoleezza Rice's State Department . . . the plans are there, and they concern a lot of people within the Bush administration, who are leaking them. One thing the leaks show is that the plans are massive."
"There has been talk of this for three years now, and Seymour Hersh has been predicting it about every three months . . . Does that mean we shouldn't be alarmed [because it keeps getting predicted and doesn't happen]?
"The recent replacement of Robert Gates [as US Secretary of Defense] may be taken as a sign that the Bush administration has become less likely to attack Iran. However, paradoxically the lessening influence of the hawks increases the chance of another 9/11 . . . The plans were drawn up to be in response to a supposed attack on the US" [hence pro-war factions may require one in order to trigger the war].
Scott quotes a military officer: "As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional with Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism against the United States" A similar warning has been given by former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
On the 9/11 movement:
"Like all research movements, the 9/11 movement is becoming ingrown, debating matters that alienate the general public. [This debate] focuses on detail rather than analysis . . . false simplicities as opposed to analytic depth [a mirror opposite of the Bush simplicities]. LIHOP [the theory that the Bush administration allowed 9/11 to happen] and MIHOP [the theory that the Bush administration caused 9/11 to happen] are also false simplicities . . ."
"The 9/11 movement is a movement that wants the truth. It cannot be said to be a movement that has the truth."
"I find it very hard to believe that the Bush administration either let or made it happen. It's clear that people within government were involved, but we should avoid condemning an entire administration."
"There is a whole milieu of Saudi capital allied with Texas capital . . . somewhere within the Saudi/Texas/Geneva [banking] milieu there is the place for a meta-group . . . with resources necessary for a successful plot."
Quotes Russian general: "'9/11 changed the direction of the world in the direction desired by transnational oligarchs and an international mafia.' That's what I mean by a meta group."
Nevertheless, Scott regards Cheney as likely involved: "Cheney should be made to testify again under oath . . . The most likely candidate for involvement in the first 9/11 for Iraq is also the most likely for a second attack on Iran."
"The more status someone has in this society, the harder it is for them to accept that there is something wrong with that society . . . my book [The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, forthcoming from the University of California Press] is addressed to the problem of the ignorance of the highly educated."
"The 9/11 report only lies in certain places. . . there is a pattern: a diminishment of the role played by Cheney on that day." Scott cites [former Secretary of Transportation] Norman Minetta's testimony that Cheney was in the White House bunker by 9:20; 9/11 commission simply ignored it, and reported instead that he arrived shortly before 10."
Cheney himself told the press five days after 9/11 that he had arrived in the bunker before the Pentagon was hit. He later changed his account. "One of the accounts has to be wrong. Should we believe this man when he comes before us and says we should go to war with Iran? I think we need more information about the first thing he told us."
"If he was in the bunker before 9:37, he had time to issue all the salient commands on that morning."
"It is inconceivable that the Secret Service waited 14 minutes to rush Cheney into the bunker. And we now know that the first report of a plane incoming to The Pentagon was at 9:21. If we ever receive the Secret Service timeline, we will most likely find that that is when he was taken there."
The 9/11 Commission didn't investigate the flagrant contradiction between Minetta's testimony and Cheney's [statements]. The White House implied that Minetta got the time and plane wrong, based on the account given by Cheney. "A third version comes from Mrs. Cheney and the leading White House perjurer, I. Lewis Libby . . . that's the one the 9/11 Commission chose."
"On the basis of the track record, the one that would carry the most credibility is Norman Minetta's. The notes of I. Lewis Libby should be subjected to severe scrutiny. Mr. Cheney should be recalled, leading either to charges of perjury or a very different version of what happened."
In the 1980's, during the Reagan administration, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. were charged with creating a plan that, in the event of a national emergency, would "dispense with legal procedures and replace them with a secret procedure for putting in place a new President and his staff," in the name of continuity of government. George H. W. Bush also had input.
"By this means Cheney was able to put in place a radical change of government before 9:54 on Sept. 11, 2001."
"What we have seen since 9/11 is the constitutional government being replaced by deep government."
Similar tactics were used in the JFK assassination. "When deep government makes these encroachments, they turn to their ties in drug trafficking . . . in the case of 9/11, those drug proxies were almost certainly people embedded in 9/11 . . . my hypothesis is that there is still a deep-state, there is still an Al Qaeda involved in drug trafficking, and they are still capable of creating another 9/11."
"We are talking about the largest single homicide in the history of the US, and it is a homicide that hasn't yet been properly investigated."
"We know that Cheney disappeared for long periods of time to a bunker on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border and became, according The Washington Post, the leader of a shadow government."
On the morning of 9/11, Both Cheney and Rumsfeld absented themselves from their staffs. Rumsfeld claimed he was outside the Pentagon, helping carry stretchers. But Scott proposes they were absent "in order to discuss a topic their staffs were not cleared to know about, and that was COG ["Continuity of Government.]"
Areas to focus on:
1. Who authored the June, 2001 document giving control of the air command to Cheney?
2. The contested time of Cheney's arrival in the White House bunker.
3. Cheney's orders regarding the plane approaching the Pentagon [see Norman Minetta's testimony to the 9/11 Commission].
4. Cheney's calls with Bush and Rumsfeld on the morning of 9/11, and did they talk about COG?
"My last paragraph is addressed to you in this room. If what I have said about peace and 9/11 has any meaning to you, then what you do in the months to come will be very important."
3. WHO WILL STOP THE US SHADOW ARMY IN IRAQ?
DON'T LOOK TO THE CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS
BY
JEREMY SCAHILL
The Democratic leadership in Congress is once again gearing up for a great sellout on the Iraq war. While the wrangling over the $124 billion Iraq supplemental spending bill is being headlined in the media as a "showdown" or "war" with the White House, it is hardly that. In plain terms, despite the impassioned sentiments of the antiwar electorate that brought the Democrats to power last November, the congressional leadership has made clear its intention to keep funding the Iraq occupation, even though Sen. Harry Reid has declared that "this war is lost."
For months, the Democrats' "withdrawal" plan has come under fire from opponents of the occupation who say it doesn't stop the war, doesn't defund it, and ensures that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq beyond President Bush's second term. Such concerns were reinforced by Sen. Barack Obama's recent declaration that the Democrats will not cut off funding for the war, regardless of the president's policies. "Nobody," he said, "wants to play chicken with our troops."
As the New York Times reported, "Lawmakers said they expect that Congress and Mr. Bush would eventually agree on a spending measure without the specific timetable" for (partial) withdrawal, which the White House has said would "guarantee defeat." In other words, the appearance of a fierce debate this week, presidential veto and all, has largely been a show with a predictable outcome.
The Shadow War in Iraq
While all of this is troubling, there is another disturbing fact which speaks volumes about the Democrats' lack of insight into the nature of this unpopular war – and most Americans will know next to nothing about it. Even if the President didn't veto their legislation, the Democrats' plan does almost nothing to address the second largest force in Iraq – and it's not the British military. It's the estimated 126,000 private military "contractors" who will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war.
The 145,000 active-duty U.S. forces are nearly matched by occupation personnel that currently come from companies like Blackwater USA and the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close personal and political ties with the Bush administration. Until Congress reins in these massive corporate forces and the whopping federal funding that goes into their coffers, partially withdrawing U.S. troops may only set the stage for the increased use of private military companies (and their rent-a-guns) which stand to profit from any kind of privatized future "surge" in Iraq.
From the beginning, these contractors have been a major hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely central to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq. While many of them perform logistical support activities for American troops, including the sort of laundry, fuel and mail delivery, and food-preparation work that once was performed by soldiers, tens of thousands of them are directly engaged in military and combat activities. According to the Government Accountability Office, there are now some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq. These not-quite GI Joes, working for Blackwater and other major U.S. firms, can clear in a month what some active-duty soldiers make in a year. "We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of defense," said House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. "How in the hell do you justify that?"
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman estimates that $4 billion in taxpayer money has so far been spent in Iraq on these armed "security" companies like Blackwater – with tens of billions more going to other war companies like KBR and Fluor for "logistical" support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the House Intelligence Committee believes that up to 40 cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors.
With such massive government payouts, there is little incentive for these companies to minimize their footprint in the region and every incentive to look for more opportunities to profit – especially if, sooner or later, the "official" U.S. presence shrinks, giving the public a sense of withdrawal, of a winding down of the war. Even if George W. Bush were to sign the legislation the Democrats have passed, their plan "allows the president the leeway to escalate the use of military security contractors directly on the battlefield," Erik Leaver of the Institute for Policy Studies points out. It would "allow the president to continue the war using a mercenary army."
The crucial role of contractors in continuing the occupation was driven home in January when David Petraeus, the general running the president's "surge" plan in Baghdad, cited private forces as essential to winning the war. In his confirmation hearings in the Senate, he claimed that they fill a gap attributable to insufficient troop levels available to an overstretched military. Along with Bush's official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of contract security forces," Petraeus told the senators, "give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission." Indeed, Gen. Petraeus admitted that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq not by the U.S. military, but "secured by contract security."
Such widespread use of contractors, especially in mission-critical operations, should have raised red flags among lawmakers. After a trip to Iraq last month, Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey observed bluntly, "We are overly dependent on civilian contractors. In extreme danger – they will not fight." It is, however, the political rather than military uses of these forces that should be cause for the greatest concern.
Contractors have provided the White House with political cover, allowing for a backdoor near doubling of U.S. forces in Iraq through the private sector, while masking the full extent of the human costs of the occupation. Although contractor deaths are not effectively tallied, at least 770 contractors have been killed in Iraq and at least another 7,700 injured. These numbers are not included in any official (or media) toll of the war. More significantly, there is absolutely no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law – military or civilian – being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts – and, no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts. Before Paul Bremer, Bush's viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in 2004 he issued an edict, known as Order 17. It immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq which, today, is like the Wild West, full of roaming Iraqi death squads and scores of unaccountable, heavily-armed mercenaries, ex-military men from around the world, working for the occupation. For the community of contractors in Iraq, immunity and impunity are welded together.
Despite the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq and several well-documented incidents involving alleged contractor abuses, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to the possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison. While dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed – 64 on murder-related charges – not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.
As one armed contractor recently informed the Washington Post, "We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night." According to another, U.S. contractors in Iraq had their own motto: "What happens here today, stays here today."
Funding the Mercenary War
"These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies," argues Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S. contractors from Iraq. "They charge whatever they want with impunity. There's no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their activities are."
Until now, this situation has largely been the doing of a Republican-controlled Congress and White House. No longer.
While some congressional Democrats have publicly expressed grave concerns about the widespread use of these private forces and a handful have called for their withdrawal, the party leadership has done almost nothing to stop, or even curb, the use of mercenary corporations in Iraq. As it stands, the Bush administration and the industry have little to fear from Congress on this score, despite the unseating of the Republican majority.
On two central fronts, accountability and funding, the Democrats' approach has been severely flawed, playing into the agendas of both the White House and the war contractors. Some Democrats, for instance, are pushing accountability legislation that would actually require more U.S. personnel to deploy to Iraq as part of an FBI Baghdad "Theater Investigative Unit" that would supposedly monitor and investigate contractor conduct. The idea is: FBI investigators would run around Iraq, gather evidence, and interview witnesses, leading to indictments and prosecutions in U.S. civilian courts.
This is a plan almost certain to backfire, if ever instituted. It raises a slew of questions: Who would protect the investigators? How would Iraqi victims be interviewed? How would evidence be gathered amid the chaos and dangers of Iraq? Given that the federal government and the military seem unable – or unwilling – even to count how many contractors are actually in the country, how could their activities possibly be monitored? In light of the recent Bush administration scandal over the eight fired US attorneys, serious questions remain about the integrity of the Justice Department. How could we have any faith that real crimes in Iraq, committed by the employees of immensely well-connected crony corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton, would be investigated adequately?
Apart from the fact that it would be impossible to effectively monitor 126,000 or more private contractors under the best of conditions in the world's most dangerous war zone, this legislation would give the industry a tremendous PR victory. Once it was passed as the law of the land, the companies could finally claim that a legally accountable structure governed their operations. Yet they would be well aware that such legislation would be nearly impossible to enforce.
Not surprisingly, then, the mercenary trade group with the Orwellian name of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has pushed for just this Democratic-sponsored approach rather than the military court martial system favored by conservative Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. The IPOA called the expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act – essentially the Democrats' oversight plan – "the most cogent approach to ensuring greater contractor accountability in the battle space." That endorsement alone should be reason enough to pause and reconsider.
Then there is the issue of continued funding for the privatized shadow forces in Iraq. As originally passed in the House, the Democrats' Iraq plan would have cut only about 15 percent or $815 million of the supplemental spending earmarked for day-to-day military operations "to reflect savings attributable to efficiencies and management improvements in the funding of contracts in the military departments."
As it stood, this was a stunningly insufficient plan, given ongoing events in Iraq. But even that mild provision was dropped by the Democrats in late April. Their excuse was the need to hold more hearings on the contractor issue. Instead, they moved to withhold – not cut – 15 percent of total day-to-day operational funding, but only until Secretary of Defense Robert Gates submits a report on the use of contractors and the scope of their deployment. Once the report is submitted, the 15 percent would be unlocked. In essence, this means that, under the Democrats' plan, the mercenary forces will simply be able to continue business-as-usual/profits-as-usual in Iraq.
However obfuscated by discussions of accountability, fiscal responsibility, and oversight, the gorilla of a question in the congressional war room is: Should the administration be allowed to use mercenary forces, whose livelihoods depend on war and conflict, to help fight its battles in Iraq?
Rep. Murtha says, "We're trying to bring accountability to an unaccountable war." But it's not accountability that the war needs; it needs an end.
By sanctioning the administration's continuing use of mercenary corporations – instead of cutting off all funding to them – the Democrats leave the door open for a future escalation of the shadow war in Iraq. This, in turn, could pave the way for an array of secretive, politically well-connected firms that have profited tremendously under the current administration to elevate their status and increase their government paychecks.
Blackwater's War
Consider the case of Blackwater USA.
A decade ago, the company barely existed; and yet, its "diplomatic security" contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone, total more than $750 million. Today, Blackwater has become nothing short of the Bush administration's well-paid Praetorian Guard. It protects the U.S. ambassador and other senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting congressional delegations; it trains Afghan security forces and was deployed in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region, setting up a "command and control" center just miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect FEMA operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 a day from the American taxpayer, billing $950 a day per Blackwater contractor.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the company has invested its lucrative government pay-outs in building an impressive private army. At present, it has forces deployed in nine countries and boasts a database of 21,000 additional troops at the ready, a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gun-ships, and the world's largest private military facility – a 7,000 acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. It recently opened a new facility in Illinois ("Blackwater North") and is fighting local opposition to a third planned domestic facility near San Diego ("Blackwater West") by the Mexican border. It is also manufacturing an armored vehicle (nicknamed the "Grizzly") and surveillance blimps.
The man behind this empire is Erik Prince, a secretive, conservative Christian, ex-Navy SEAL multimillionaire who bankrolls the president and his allies with major campaign contributions. Among Blackwater's senior executives are Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA; Robert Richer, former deputy director of operations at the CIA; Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon inspector general; and an impressive array of other retired military and intelligence officials. Company executives recently announced the creation of a new private intelligence company, Total Intelligence, to be headed by Black and Richer.
For years, Blackwater's operations have been shrouded in secrecy. Emboldened by the culture of impunity enjoyed by the private sector in the Bush administration's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater's founder has talked of creating a "contractor brigade" to support U.S. military operations and fancies his forces the "FedEx" of the "national security apparatus."
As the country debates an Iraq withdrawal, Congress owes it to the public to take down the curtain of secrecy surrounding these shadow forces that undergird the U.S. public deployment in Iraq. The president likes to say that defunding the war would undercut the troops. Here's the truth of the matter: Continued funding of the Iraq war ensures tremendous profits for politically-connected war contractors. If Congress is serious about ending the occupation, it needs to rein in the unaccountable companies that make it possible and only stand to profit from its escalation.
