David Swanson argues that this this is a pure war, but the vote for more funding will not be a pure vote. It will include nothing that the Iraqi people need, unless you think they’re longing for larger prisons. But, it will include crumbs for all sorts of noble excuses to vote buckets of taxpayers’ money for war - things like Hurricane Katrina relief, VA benefits, etc.

The Iraq War is a pure war, a war for the sake of war. Congress is debating whether to spend another fortune on it, another fortune that could completely remake this nation if spent on useful projects, and Congress has no reason for the war. The reason is purely that the media won’t like you if you vote against a war, but there’s no actual reason for the war - not the weapons of mass destruction that Bush always knew weren’t there, not the ties to 9-11 that Bush always knew did not exist on behalf of a ruler who, anyway, is no longer in power, not reducing terrorism which has been increased by this war, not improving global relations when this war has driven global opinion of the US to a record low, not preventing a civil war which the US attack and occupation have created, not supporting the troops when most of the troops want to come home - and almost half of them openly admit to pollsters that they don’t know why they’re there.

Read the full statements

Dahr Jamail interviews American patriot Karen Kwiatkowski, who states that the neoconservatives are not new; during the Reagan era, the “Cold War” was their vehicle for credibility - this evil enemy that we must face, or else the end of the world is coming. They cannot work without this global enemy, almost a kind of class warfare. You can’t just have a mere enemy; it has to be a monstrous enemy, something that can destroy us. They’ve found that, or rather cultivated it, in what is called “Islamic Fascism.” Unfortunately this doesn’t exist.

The intellectual fathers of neoconservatism-what shapes their approach internationally-are the Bolsheviks. International revolution, international change-radical change, global revolution. And these same terms, these same ideas-of international change, revolution, transformation-these are the words of Michael Ledeen and some of the other articulators of neoconservatism. And the actual people, and they’re not ashamed to really say this, but guys like Irving Crystal and other intellectuals of the 30s had actually been Bolsheviks.

One of the characterizations of neocons today is that they are neo-Jacobins-philosophically, this idea that people are the same, all want the same thing, and should have the same thing. That ’same thing’ in a modern neoconservative view is this idea of ‘democracy.’ But is it really democracy that they want, or is democracy simply a trojan horse. Certainly for Iraq, George Bush has been left with one story as to why we went in

If they had democracy, they’d take a vote, and we’d be kicked out of there immediately.

Certainly we don’t want them to have democracy, because then they’ll make us leave. So it’s unclear that democracy is a goal, but that’s what they talk about: the God of Democracy. So it’s not like Trotskyism in the sense that they’re not advocating global communism but they are advocating universal, radical-and in effect, catastrophic-change. And this is kind of a clear thread for many years.

So the neoconservatives are not new; during the Reagan era, the ‘Cold War’ was their vehicle for credibility-this evil enemy that we must face, or else the end of the world is coming. They cannot work without this global enemy, almost a kind of class warfare. You can’t just have a mere enemy; it has to be a monstrous enemy, something that can destroy us. They’ve found that in, or rather cultivated it, in what is called ‘Islamic Fascism.’ Unfortunately this doesn’t exist. No one advocates it. No one articulates it. In the 1930s, Hitler had fascism and he talked about it. Islamic Fascism is a made up thing. But it doesn’t matter: what matters is that it’s useful in generating fear, and serves that same larger purpose-providing a platform from which to operate.

Now you can follow the money too. The neocon philosophy provides a construct within which we can-’we,’ being the establishment, corporatism-can move. So you have this construct that talks of ‘fear’ ‘protection,’ ’security.’ Which are used to advocate intervention-intervention for security, what Iraq was effectively sold as: ‘intervention for American security.’

Read The Complete Interview

Here’s something from Simon Jenkins’ blog on Huffington Post.

This has seemed clear to me since at least the initiation of the Iraq War, which distracted the US from bin Laden and, along with tax cuts, sucked the financial resources out of the nation’s treasury. What is not mentioned here is that bin Laden would also like to see the US go broke, in an expensive domestic conflagration, which is merely fighting shadows on the wall. Once weakened by tied-up forces in Iraq, and deeply in debt, it would be easy to come back and pick a weak spot for attack. The culture of jihad measures revenge by the century, when Americans forget who shot who last week (it was Dick Cheney). Waiting 10 years (from 9/11) for a major attack on a weakened adversary would not be a long time for them. Since then, our political “leaders” have done all the heavy lifting for bin Laden, reducing our civil liberties (remember those freedoms the enemy supposedly hated?) to ashes of the Constitution, which Bush, the American president himself, recently called “just a goddamned piece of paper.” In my view, bin Laden won decisively at that point. Our government is clearly no longer of the people.

There never was a “terrorist threat” to western civilisation or democracy, only to western lives and property. The threat becomes systemic only when democracy loses its confidence and when its leaders are weak, as now. Terror attacks are for the police. For Bush and Blair to demand a “long war” against bin Laden and, by implication, a long suppression of civil liberty is ludicrous. Western civilisation is not some simpering weakling that cowers before a fanatic’s might, pleading for leaders to protect it by all means, however illegal. It has been proof against Islamic expansionism since the 15th century. It is not at risk.

The American president and the British prime minister have spent half a decade exploiting bin Laden for political ends, in thrall to their security/industrial complex. They have relied on terrifying their electorates with new and bloodcurdling threats, with what Runciman calls “spook politics”. But they will pass. The half-baked “message” laws passed by Britain’s limp parliament last week will fall in disuse. The vitality of British and American democracy has always been its ability to produce antibodies when truly challenged by an internal or external menace. The west will rediscover its self-belief and restore the liberalism, properly defined as freedom, it once exemplified to the world.

Read the complete article

- Posted by Pete for USTV Media

What do you want to bet the Bush administration will reverse themselves on the issue of the military draft if this actually happens.

Ray McGovern, is a former veteran CIA analyst turned outspoken opponent of American fascism and founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, recently exclaimed: “This is what our German forbearers in the 1930s did NOT do. They sat around, blamed their rulers, said ‘maybe everything’s going to be alright.’… That is something we cannot do. Because I don’t want my grandchildren asking me years from now, ‘why didn’t you do something to stop all this?’”

Here he unravels the same M.O. at work yet again with this administration dedicated to perpetual war.

Read His Essay

Who Makes The Profits?
By General Smedley Butler, USMC
Reader’s Digest
First Published 1935

The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven’t paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits - ah! that is another matter - twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent - the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it.

Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket - and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:

Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people - didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump - or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.

There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.

Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.

Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.

Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.

A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.

Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren’t the only ones. There are still others. Let’s take leather.

For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That’s all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.

International Nickel Company - and you can’t have a war without nickel - showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.

American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.

Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.

And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public - even before a Senate investigatory body.

But here’s how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.

Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought - and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.

There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn’t any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it - so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.

Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches - one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!

Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.

There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.

Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 - count them if you live long enough - was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.

Undershirts for soldiers cost 14¢ [cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 30¢ to 40¢ each for them - a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers - all got theirs.

Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment - knapsacks and the things that go to fill them - crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them - and they will do it all over again the next time.

There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.

One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48- inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.

Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn’t ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.

The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some of the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn’t float! The seams opened up - and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.

It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.

The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.

Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying “for some time” methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee - with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator - to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn’t suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.

Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses - that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.

There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.

Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Administration Misleads On Prospects In Iraq
The Daily Mis-Lead
September 17th, 2004

In late July, a report prepared for the President by his National Intelligence Counsel spelled out “a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq.”[1] According to the New York Times, “the estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms.”[2] But that didn’t stop Bush and other members of the administration from telling the American people that Iraq was headed in the right direction.
On August 5, President Bush said, “[Iraq is] on the path to lasting democracy and liberty.”[3] On August 24, Vice President Cheney told voters in Iowa that “We’re moving in the right direction [in Iraq].”[4] And this Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Iraqis were “working at making a success out of that country…And I think they’ve got a darned good crack at making it.” [5]

Sources:

1. “U.S. Intelligence Shows Pessimism on Iraq’s Future,” New York Times, 9/16/04
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=56345
2. Ibid., http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=56345
3. “President Signs Defense Bill ,” The White House, 8/05/04
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=56346
4. “Remarks by the Vice President and Mrs. Cheney Followed by Question and Answer at a Town Hall Meeting ,” The White House, 8/24/04
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=56347
5. “Secretary Rumsfeld Town Hall Meeting at Ft. Campbell, Ky.,” U.S. Department of Defense, 9/14/04
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=56348

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Energy Task Force Documents Feature Iraqi Oilfields Cheney Energy Task Force Documents Feature Map of Iraqi Oilfields
Judicial Watch
July 17, 2003

Commerce & State Department Reports to Task Force Detail Oilfield & Gas Projects, Contracts & Exploration

Saudi Arabian & UAE Oil Facilities Profiled As Well

(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said today that documents turned over by the Commerce Department, under court order as a result of Judicial Watchís Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available on the Internet at: www.JudicialWatch.org
The Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates (UAE) documents likewise feature a map of each countryís oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supporting charts with details of the major oil and gas development projects in each country that provide information on the projects, costs, capacity, oil company and status or completion date.

Judicial Watch has been seeking these documents under FOIA since April 19, 2001. Judicial Watch was forced to file a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch Inc. v. Department of Energy, et al., Civil Action No. 01-0981) when the government failed to comply with the provisions of the FOIA law. U.S. District Court Judge Paul J. Friedman ordered the government to produce the documents on March 5, 2002.

The documents were produced in response to Judicial Watchís on-going efforts to ensure transparency and accountability in government on behalf of the American people. Judicial Watch aggressively pursues those goals by making FOIA requests and seeking access to public information concerning government operations. When the government fails to abide by these ìsunshine laws, Judicial Watch files lawsuits in order to obtain the requested information and to hold responsible government officials accountable.

“These documents show the importance of the Energy Task Force and why its operations should be open to the public,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The Private Contractor - GOP Gravy Train
By Robert Schlesinger
Salon.com

May 11th, 2004

From Blackwater to CACI, mercenary companies in Iraq have a warm and cozy relationship with the Republican politicians who are employing them.

Private armies have become ubiquitous in Iraq, supplying everything from support services to mercenary soldiers to interrogators. While Halliburton’s contracts for logistical support have been widely reported, until the firefight in Fallujah in late March left four Blackwater Security employees dead, the public knew little about the extent to which the estimated 20,000 private military forces in Iraq are participating in direct military action.
The shocking photographs of the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison raise anew questions about the U.S. military’s use of private contractors. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba’s report about practices at the prison contained information that two CACI employees “were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.” Contractors from Titan International were also present during the abuses.

“This industry really didn’t exist 10 years ago,” says Peter Singer, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry.” A decade ago, mercenary soldiering was less the stuff of corporate America than the inspiration for Soldier of Fortune fantasies. Now, as Singer reported in Salon, the industry generates over $100 billion annually worldwide.

As little known as these companies are to the general public, they are only too familiar in Washington, where they have deployed a different kind of mercenary force — phalanxes of lobbyists — along with the ammunition of modern political warfare, campaign contributions. And they have found eager friends, particularly among Republican leaders in and out of Congress.

“The move into the political game tends to happen for three reasons,” Singer says. “One, this business is growing. Second, companies that are in other industries move into the sector, bringing influence and lobbyists to bear.” Examples include Halliburton and, in the case of private security firms and other companies that provide combat- or intelligence-oriented services, firms like CACI and Titan. Finally, Singer says, “A lot of firms have picked up lobbyists as they’ve gained a public profile.”

Blackwater, the firm that guards Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer, and whose men were killed at Fallujah, has hired the well-connected Alexander Strategy Group to guide it through the current publicity storm and help influence Congress on whatever rules are generated to govern private militias in war zones, according to the Hill newspaper.

Alexander may turn out to be a clever choice: Ed Buckham, former chief of staff to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, is Alexander’s chairman. Tony Rudy, another former top DeLay operative, and Karl Gallant, who once ran DeLay’s leadership PAC, are also onboard.

Blackwater also works other angles. One of the firm’s founders is Michigan native Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL. His father, Edgar Prince, helped religious right leader Gary Bauer found the Family Research Council in 1988. Erik Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, is the chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party. But Blackwater is a relative newcomer to the Washington influence game, especially compared with CACI and Titan, which have been trailblazers.

For more than four years, CACI has employed the Livingston Group and its “strategic partner,” Louisiana law firm Jones, Walker, Waechter, Poitevent, Carrere and Denegre, to represent the company’s interests in Washington. Since 2000, CACI has poured $160,000 into Livingston and $150,000 into Jones, Walker.

The Livingston who gave the firm its name is former House Appropriations Committee chairman Bob Livingston, the Louisiana Republican designated as Newt Gingrich’s successor to the speaker’s gavel in 1998. Amid the House debate over the impeachment of President Clinton, Livingston dramatically announced his retirement because of his own sexual peccadilloes. “Livingston is the only former chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee now in private practice,” reads a bio on his firm’s Web site.

Livingston’s former top staffers, who have joined him in the private sector, also work on the CACI account, according to lobbying filings with the House and Senate. In addition, the two firms employ former legislative liaisons (bureaucratese for lobbyists) from the Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard — all registered to lobby for CACI.

More than 92 percent of CACI’s $843 million in revenues last year came from the federal government — 63 percent from the Pentagon alone. The company’s lobbyists are essential in the continuing effort to grease that wheel of fortune.

Titan’s lineup of lobbyists is even broader. Its in-house team includes chairman Gene Ray, a former top Air Force official; John Dressendorfer, a former White House lobbyist under President Reagan who also worked in President Nixon’s Pentagon; Lawrence Delaney, who closed out his service to the Clinton administration as acting undersecretary of the Air Force; and, for good measure, Susan Golding, a former Republican mayor of San Diego.

Titan’s hired guns include the law firm of Copeland, Lowery, Jacquez, Denton and Shockey, which employs Letitia White, a longtime staffer to Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., to work on Titan’s issues. Lewis, by the way, is the chairman of the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. The firm American Defense International, also employed by Titan, includes Van Hipp, a former deputy assistant secretary of the Army under then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney who was later appointed the No. 2 lawyer in the Navy, and Michael Herson, a former special assistant to then Secretary Cheney.

What’s more, Titan has engaged the services of NorthPoint Strategies, composed mainly of former top staffers to Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif. Cunningham, a former member of the Armed Services Committee, as it happens sits on the Appropriations defense subcommittee as well as the Intelligence Committee.

All told, Titan has spent $1.29 million since 2000 on Washington lobbying. In 2003 alone, it paid NorthPoint $240,000. And its lobbying has paid off. Last year, the company had revenues of $1.8 billion, according to its annual report: “Our revenues from U.S. government business represented approximately 96% of our total revenues for the year ended December 31, 2003.”

This revolving door between congressional staffers or retired military personnel and lobbying firms is not circumscribed by the requirements of the House and Senate lobby registration. Most of the private contractors operating in Iraq have high-ranking retired brass in their executive suites. CACI’s board of directors, for example, features retired Gen. Larry Welch, a former Air Force chief of staff. Carl Vuono and Ronald Griffith, the president and executive vice president, respectively, of Alexandria, Va., firm MPRI, which is helping to train and equip the new Iraqi Army, are both retired generals.

But preexisting relationships are only one weapon in the Washington operator’s arsenal. Money remains one of the most important tools.

Not surprisingly, these companies have been very generous to the Republican Party. Titan’s PAC, for example, has contributed a dozen times more money to Republicans than to Democrats during this election cycle: It kicked in $182,000 to Republican committees and candidates, including $10,000 apiece to the leadership PACs of Lewis, Cunningham, Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif. (whose leadership group is called Peace Through Strength PAC). Titan’s PAC also gave the maximum $10,000 to the campaign committees of Cunningham, Lewis and Hunter. Democrats have received a mere $15,000 from Titan.

In addition, top executives with Titan have contributed in excess of $58,000 to political candidates and committees since 2000, more than $49,000 of that amount going to Republicans. Ray alone gave $28,000, the bulk of it to Republicans. Reps. Cunningham and Hunter each got from Titan executives at least $10,000 (not including the $3,000 given to Hunter’s Peace Through Strength PAC). The Democrat who has received the most money from Titan executives is Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee.

CACI executives gave a total of $29,250 over the same time period, $25,750 of it to Republican interests. J.P. “Jack” London, CACI’s CEO, alone gave $10,000, all to Republicans.

Some of the private security firms in Iraq are clearly fresh to the political game: Three executives from Triple Canopy — whose forces fought a pitched battle against Iraqi insurgents in April — each wrote $2,000 in checks to the Bush-Cheney campaign in March.

While Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has now testified on Iraqi prisoner abuse — some of it carried out by workers employed by private firms — no hearings have yet been scheduled on the widespread use of mercenaries to fill jobs once performed by U.S. soldiers. And deployment of such workers is unlikely to decrease as election year contributions grow: The number of hired mercenaries is expected to double after the June 30 hand-over of “limited sovereignty” to an Iraqi government.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Heroin Boom In Afghanistan Overwhelms Border Nations
By Mark McDonald
Knight Ridder Newspapers

May 3rd, 2004

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan - Heroin producers in Afghanistan, some of the principal financiers of al-Qaida and other terrorists, have never before been so brazen or so wealthy.
With a bumper crop of opium poppies under cultivation, Afghan narco-barons have begun stamping their brand names on the 2.2-pound bags of heroin they smuggle out of Central Asia to buyers in Moscow, Amsterdam, London and New York.

Sacks of high-quality Afghan heroin seized last week in Tajikistan carried the trademarks “Super Power” and “555.” Some of the sacks, which were hidden inside foil-lined containers of instant cappuccino mix, even included the addresses of the labs in Afghanistan where the heroin had been refined.

A Western-led campaign against opium-growing and heroin laboratories has been a wholesale failure, and drug-control experts say the number of processing facilities in Afghanistan has exploded over the last year. The trade and huge sums of money involved threaten to undermine vulnerable bordering states such as Tajikistan.

“There’s absolutely no threat to the labs inside Afghanistan,” said Maj. Avaz Yuldashov of the Tajikistan Drug Control Agency. “Our intelligence shows there are 400 labs making heroin there, and 80 of them are situated right along our border. Some of them even work outside, in the open air.”

Some 200,000 acres of opium poppies have been planted in Afghanistan - opium serves as the raw material of heroin - and the country’s late-summer harvest will produce three-fourths of the world’s heroin. That will mean further billions for growers, smugglers, corrupt officials and Afghan warlords.

It’s also likely to mean a windfall of tithes to al-Qaida and its Islamist brethren said to be regrouping in the mountains of Central Asia.

“Drug trafficking from Afghanistan is the main source of support for international terrorism now,” Yuldashov said. “That’s quite clear.”

But in recent congressional testimony about heroin flow out of Afghanistan, Drug Enforcement Administration head Karen Tandy spoke only of “potential links” and “possible relationships” between Afghan traffickers and terrorists. Drug agents in Central Asia say they’re baffled by Tandy’s hedging.

“The connection is absolutely obvious to us,” said Col. Alexander Kondratiyev, a senior Russian officer who has served with border guards in Tajikistan for nearly a decade. “Drugs, weapons, ammunition, terrorism, more drugs, more terrorism - it’s a closed circle.”

That circle has profound and ominous implications for the U.S.-led fight against international terrorism. Regional diplomats, aid workers and law-enforcement officials fear that the expanding drug trade will destabilize one of the “stans,” the five former Soviet republics that gained independence after the U.S.S.R. collapsed.

They worry about the emergence of a Central Asian narco-state, a country dominated by the drug economy and effectively controlled by a heroin mafia with roots in Afghanistan and ties to al-Qaida and regional Islamists.

“We have a deep responsibility to keep these Central Asian republics from becoming failed states,” said a Western diplomat in Dushanbe who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Look what happened in Afghanistan. It was a failed state - and it became a nest for terrorists.

“We have to stop that same thing from happening here. For our own security, we can’t afford it.”

At particular risk is Tajikistan, a desperately poor, predominantly Muslim nation of 7 million.

Tajikistan produces almost no opium or heroin of its own, but it has become a natural pathway for traffickers due to its 900-mile border with Afghanistan. Also, enough heroin has been “falling off the trucks” in Tajikistan that it now has galloping rates of heroin addiction, drug crime and HIV infection.

The Tajik Drug Control Agency - outmanned, outgunned and poorly equipped - said it managed to seize nearly 6 tons of heroin from traffickers last year. Senior commanders estimate they catch about 20 percent of the traffic. Some analysts think it’s probably about half that much.

Tajikistan, isolated and landlocked, has almost no industrial economy other than a state-controlled aluminum smelter. Foreign investment is minuscule; not a single American firm is operating in the country. “Nobody even comes to look anymore,” said a foreign diplomat, who also asked not to be named.

The national budget is barely $300 million a year, a pittance compared with the size of the drug economy. The heroin trade alone, Yuldashov said, is 10 times bigger.

That kind of disparity leaves many Tajiks vulnerable to corruption and compromise by wealthy drug mafiosi, especially when the average salary is $10 a month and 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. A single trip as a drug courier can feed a Tajik family for a month.

Another worrisome development is in the offing for Tajikistan: Next month, along the Afghan border, Russia will begin withdrawing 2,200 border-control officers who’ve been stationed here since the Soviet era. Their departure and the loss of Russian funding could further undermine Tajikistan’s ability to defend itself from Afghan drug traffickers.

Tajik officers and army conscripts will take over from the Russians, although they’ll have no night-vision equipment, satellite phones or helicopters. Even now, many of the border posts lack two-way radios and binoculars.

It remains to be seen whether European countries, the target destinations for much of Afghanistan’s opium and heroin, will pick up the slack. The United States contributes to U.N. drug programs in the region, but the DEA has only a minimal presence here in terms of human intelligence: The DEA has deployed two agents to cover all of Afghanistan. There are no DEA agents in Tajikistan or neighboring Kyrgyzstan, another paradise for traffickers.

“We know shockingly little about how the drug trade operates out here,” said a Western official who asked not to be identified.

Heroin moves out of Afghanistan via the so-called southern route - through Iran or Pakistan - or the northern route, which makes its way through the Central Asian “stans.”

It’s unknown how much drug traffic passes through Turkmenistan. The secretive nation doesn’t release information on drug seizures and no longer cooperates with regional drug-control initiatives.

“They have open borders with Afghanistan, but not even the U.N. knows what they’re doing” about drug trafficking, said Kamol Dusmetov, the head of the Uzbek National Center for Drug Control.

Heroin is carried out of Afghanistan in vegetable trucks, fuel tankers and donkey carts. It’s hidden in women’s underwear, children’s backpacks or sacks of pistachios.

In Tajikistan, well-organized teams of couriers wade across the Amu Daria and Pyanj rivers, usually at night, backed up by accomplices armed with satellite phones, off-road vehicles, bales of bribe money and plenty of heavy weapons. In one recent seizure, troopers found $280,000 in cash stuffed among the 1-kilogram bags of heroin.

In Uzbekistan, which has an 80-mile border with Afghanistan, smuggling can be more rudimentary.

Dusmetov said rural couriers sometimes forced their dogs and donkeys to swallow balloons full of heroin. They tie a string to the balloons and wrap the other end of the string around the animal’s tooth. Once across the border, the smuggler pulls the string and retrieves the balloons.

“Borders (throughout the region) are not guarded well,” Dusmetov said. “In many places, like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, borders are virtually open. You jump across a ditch and you’re in another country.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Who Commands The Private Soldiers?
By David Leigh
The Guardian

May 17th, 2004

Allegations of abuse have raised wider questions about the role - and accountability - of civilian contractors.

Here on the outskirts of the Great Dismal Swamp, now a nature reserve, is the new face of the privatised American army. Some fear it is getting out of control.
Grim-faced men in battle fatigues are oiling their M4s and Glocks, blasting their way through mocked-up terrorist streets, and riddling old cars with bullets.

The TV set in the rest room is tuned to gung-ho Fox News and the mess tables are shared today by a mixed bunch of 200, mostly male. Some are freelances readying themselves for Iraq, some are from the overstretched real US military buying firing-range time, some are coastguards about to be deployed to an unspecified spot “overseas”. Young men at one table have Grupe Tactico Chile on their shoulders.

This is Blackwater, a commercial army base - the largest private firearms training centre in the world, according to its owner, Eric Prince, a former Navy Seal.

Blackwater guards provincial outposts for the Iraqi coalition provisional authority, and the firm has the contract to keep its head, Paul Bremer, alive. It fought in a heroic rescue of a wounded soldier in Najaf, but four of its men were ambushed and killed in Falluja, causing an international crisis.

This week the company is bulldozing a long twisting track out of its 6,000 acres of swampland so convoy troops can experience being shot at, as they will be in Iraq. The trainers will use live ammunition.

Blackwater is at the forefront of lobbying efforts to stop a clampdown on private military companies in Iraq. The US defence department has issued draft regulations seeking to bring them under US military law, instead of their present local legal immunity.

“You simply can’t do that,” said Chris Bertelli, their Washington lobbyist. “How do you enforce it? At the end of your 60-day contract, you can just go home.”

Weapons Ban

Other proposals being resisted are a ban on private weapons, or a rule that they be returned to the US military when off duty. Blackwater, whose weaponry ranges from M4 rifles to 20mm cannon on its helicopters, says this is impractical in a war zone. It suggests voluntary standards.

“We’re very particular. We only hire former special forces people. There is still a deep patriotism in many of them,” Mr Bertelli said.

The US military has gone headlong for privatization, urged on by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. One 2002 memo from the secretary of the army, Thomas White, suggests that as much as a third of its budget is going on private contractors, while army numbers are falling. The rationale is to save money on permanent soldiers by using temporary ones.

But the policy has other, political ad vantages. When a mortar shell lobbed at Baghdad airport earlier this year killed Corporal Tomasi Ramatau, 41, no one in the US media took much notice.

Names like his do not appear on the roll-calls of US soldiers killed in Iraq, solemnly enunciated on the daily TV shows. Ramatau was one of the unemployed men from the Pacific island of Fiji hired in their hundreds by another prominent private military firm, Global Risk of London, to take the bullets for the Pentagon.

The loose control of the 20,000-plus private-enterprise soldiers in Iraq has been thrown into painful relief by the accusations that hired civilian interrogators and translators encouraged obscene tortures at Abu Ghraib prison and that one even allegedly raped an Iraqi boy in his cell.

No senator or congressman appears to have had the least idea until the scandal broke that the drive to privatise the military had gone so far as to use civilian contractors for such sensitive jobs.

Aides to Democrat congressman Ike Skelton were particularly incensed with a reply by Mr Rumsfeld to a demand last month for information about private mil itary firms in Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld produced a list of 60 companies, half a dozen of them British, but withheld all mention of two of the biggest and best-connected recruiting firms alleged to be at the centre of the torture scandal - CACI in Washington and Titan in San Diego, California.

One of the few people to have conducted a full-scale study of military privatisation, Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution, said: “No lawmakers seemed to know that they were hiring civilians as interrogators. They had this concept that the civilians were there to mow lawns and answer phones.” In his recent book, Corporate Warriors, he lists dangers in excessively privatised soldiering, such as cutting corners to save money, secrecy, and hollowing out the genuine military by poaching their troops. All have duly come to pass in Iraq.

CACI, for example, placed Steve Stefanowicz, a former reservist from the Philadelphia area who had once worked in naval intelligence, in Iraq. According to his fellow interrogator Torin Nelson, CACI hired interrogators over the phone, without even meeting them.

“I was interviewed in September 2003 in a very short telephone conversation, which was more like a sales pitch of how great the company was, than a typical interview for a professional job,” Mr Nelson said. “I never met anyone from CACI until I landed in Fort Bliss [an army induction centre in Texas], and then it was some other new hires.”

Frantic

CACI website entries show increasingly frantic efforts to attract interrogators, with the qualifications required being reduced from seven years’ interrogation experience, to five years, to two.

It does not seem that CACI saved any military manpower for the US by hiring Mr Stefanowicz. According to naval records, he was on active duty as a petty officer 3rd class in the reserves already, but apparently resigned in September 2003 to join CACI. Private companies are offering pay of up to $115,000 (about £65,000) a year.

In Iraq, the status of the CACI interrogators was ambiguous. Mr Nelson said some of his colleagues went around in desert camouflage uniform. “We contractors were often able to establish our own method of actually implementing the chain of command’s intent, which was to glean information for intelligence purposes.”

Mr Stefanowicz ended up being accused in the now-notorious leaked classified Taguba report, of telling untrained and unsupervised reservist military policemen to abuse the Abu Ghraib prisoners.

He remains in Iraq, according to the US army on “administrative duties” while investigations continue. The accused soldiers below him, however, all face courts martial, beginning this month.

Unlike the gun-toting security companies, firms like CACI seem to function merely as recruiting postboxes. CACI, based in a Washington suburb, put former defence officials on its board, including the former London representative of the code-breaking National Security Agency, Barbara McNamara. It moved seamlessly from origins as an IT firm to acquiring such small companies last year as Premier Technology, also in Washington, which had contracts to supply 96 analysts to US military intelligence in Germany.

From there it was a short step, when the call went out, to recruiting freelance army interrogators. Similarly, firms like Blackwater and Global have shifted, almost unnoticed, from providing bodyguard services to engaging in fighting.

Mr Singer points out that mercenaries are nothing new, and huge standing national armies are a recent development.

But one former British special forces officer, recently returned to Europe from Iraq, said: “The trouble is the private companies often have an attitude that ‘Yeah, we can do it’. Then they become overstretched. As officers in the military, there is an integrity level we would operate under normally. And it just isn’t there.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)