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.)

Company Chosen By Pentagon To Extinguish Iraqi Oil Well Fires Has History Of Supporting Terrorist Regimes
By Jason Leopold

16 April 2003

Kellogg Brown & Root, the company chosen last month by the Pentagon to extinguish oil well fires in Iraq, has a long history of supporting the same terrorist regimes vilified by the Bush administration and on at least one occasion defrauded the United States government to the tune of $2 million, according to public documents.
Halliburton, headed by Dick Cheney before he became vice president, and it’s KBR subsidiary did business with some of the world’s most notorious governments and dictators - in countries such as Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Nigeria. The company has routinely skirted U.S. sanctions placed on these countries and lobbied the U.S. government to lift sanctions so it could set up new partnerships and create new business opportunities in these countries.

Still, the Pentagon awarded the Iraqi oil well contract to KBR without competitive bidding; a move that some Democratic lawmakers in Congress said was based on favoritism because of Cheney’s ties to the company.

Charges of cronyism led the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Monday to open the job of putting out Iraqi oil well fires to other firms that will now bid for the multibillion -dollar contract and KBR would have to compete with other companies for the right to finish the job. The Army Corps of Engineers said it would seek new bidders to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure, considered the key to reviving that country’s economy.

KBR and Halliburton have broken U.S. laws on numerous occasions while Cheney was chief executive and as far back as 1978. Moreover, the company inflated the price of some of its military contracts and defrauded the government.

Last year, KBR agreed to pay the U.S. government $2 million to settle allegations it defrauded the military while Cheney was chief executive of parent company Halliburton. KBR was accused of inflating contract prices for maintenance and repairs at Fort Ord, a now-shuttered military installation near Monterey, Calif. The lawsuit, filed in Sacramento, alleged KBR submitted false claims and made false statements in connection with 224 delivery orders between April 1994 and September 1998.

KBR and Halliburton has also paid out settlements to end investigations and lawsuits on half-a-dozen other occasions.

In 1978, a grand jury indicted KBR on charges that it colluded with a competitor on marine construction work. KBR paid a $1 million fine to settle the charges. In 1995, the U.S. fined Halliburton $3.8 million for violating a ban on exports to Libya. Four years later, a Halliburton subsidiary opens an office in Iran, despite a U.S. ban on doing business in that country. In 2001, Halliburton shareholders lash out at company executives for its pipeline project in Burma, citing that country’s human-rights abuses. Also in 2001, watchdog groups blast Cheney for placing 44 Halliburton subsidiaries in foreign tax havens.

Halliburton’s dealings in six countries - Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Nigeria - show that the company’s willingness to do business where human rights are not respected is a pattern that goes beyond its involvement in Burma. A May 2001 report in the Multinational Monitor identified the following countries in which Halliburton and its KBR unit did business with, despite U.S. sanctions and charges of human rights abuses.

Azerbaijan - Dick Cheney lobbied to remove Congressional sanctions against aid to Azerbaijan, sanctions imposed because of concerns about ethnic cleansing. Cheney said the sanctions were the result only of groundless campaigning by the Armenian-American lobby. In 1997, Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root bid on a major Caspian project from the Azerbaijan International Operating Company.

Indonesia - Halliburton had extensive investments and contracts in Suharto’s Indonesia. The post-Suharto government during a purging of corruptly awarded contracts canceled one of its contracts. Indonesia Corruption Watch named Kellogg Brown & Root (Halliburton’s engineering division) among 59 companies using collusive, corruptive and nepotistic practices in deals involving former President Suharto’s family.

Iran - Dick Cheney has lobbied against the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. Even with the Act in place, Halliburton has continued to operate in Iran. It settled with the Department of Commerce in 1997, before Cheney became CEO, over allegations relating to Iran for $15,000, without admitting any wrongdoing.

Iraq - Dick Cheney cites multilateral sanctions against Iraq as an example of sanctions he supports. Yet since the war, Halliburton-related companies helped to reconstruct Iraq’s oil industry. In July 2000, the International Herald Tribune reported, “Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump Co., joint ventures that Halliburton has sold within the past year, have done work in Iraq on contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq’s oil industry, under the United Nations’ Oil for Food Program.” A Halliburton spokesman acknowledged to the Tribune that the Dresser subsidiaries did sell oil-pumping equipment to Iraq via European agents.

Libya - Before Cheney’s arrival, Halliburton was deeply involved in Libya, earning $44.7 million there in 1993. After sanctions on Libya were imposed, earnings dropped to $12.4 million in 1994. Halliburton continued doing business in Libya throughout Cheney’s tenure. One Member of Congress accused the company “of undermining American foreign policy to the full extent allowed by law.”

Nigeria - Local villagers have accused Halliburton of complicity in the shooting of a protester by Nigeria’s Mobile Police Unit, playing a similar role to Shell and Chevron in the mobilization of this ‘kill and go” unit to protect company property. Dick Cheney has been a strong advocate for preventing or eliminating federal laws that place limits on Halliburton’s ability to do business in these countries.

Before it awards the contract this time around, the Pentagon ought to consider that KBR, which the Army Corps of Engineers says is most qualified to extinguish Iraq’s oil well fires, supports the same terrorist regimes we’re at war with.

- Jason Leopold is a freelance journalist based in California, he is currently finishing a book on the California energy crisis. He can be contacted at jasonleopold@hotmail.com

(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.)

With U. S. Troops Still in the Mideast, Private Firms Must Guard Military Bases at Home
The Daily Misleader

October 22, 2003

One of George Bush Jr.’s campaign promises was to “rebuild the military power of the United States,”1 which Dick Cheney, his vice-presidential candidate, claimed had lapsed because of “multiplying missions and unclear goals.”2 However, Bush’s multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have overtaxed the military even more and now have led to hiring more civilian contractors for such basic duties as guarding U.S. military bases.
Private security firms have taken over what traditionally was a sole province of the military.3 In a typical contract, Akal Security has been awarded $70 million to guard eight stateside Army bases.4

In Iraq, almost a third of the $4 billion monthly costs are going to private contractors. One foreign policy expert estimates the current Bush Administration has five times as many civilian contractors in Iraq as his father’s administration did during the first Gulf War in 1991.5

The privatization practice, first explored when Cheney was Secretary of Defense for the senior Bush, led to an $8.9 million logistics contract for Brown and Root, a company Cheney later oversaw as head of Halliburton after he left government. Of approximately 3,000 civilian contracts awarded by the Pentagon since 1994, about 2,700 have gone to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root and one other firm.6

Sources:
“Bush Won’t Rest on Defense: GOP Candidate Says ‘Help Is On The Way’ For Military,” ABCNews.com, 8/21/00
“Military Offensive: Cheney Steps Up Attacks on Gore Defense Record,” ABCNews.com, 8/30/00
“Soldiers of Good Fortune,” Mother Jones, May/June 2003
“Akal Wins Army Contracts,” Albuquerque Business Journal, 10/13/03
“Dogs of Peace,” Newsweek Interactive, 8/25-9/1/03
“Making a Killing: The Business of War,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

(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.)

Pat Robertson Engages in Illegal Mining Operation in Liberia
By Abraham M. Williams
The Perspective

December 4, 2001

Over the past few months, columnist Colbert King of the Washington Post had used his columns to expose Pat Robertson’s dealing in Liberia. In a series of articles King had sketched out Robertson’s profit motives, and his quest to strike it in rich gold in Liberia, which has overriden any morality of doing business with one of Africa’s most notorious tyrants.
What Colbert King has been writing about is Pat Robertson’s desire to make profits at the expense of all else which has become a study in contrasts of a self-professed Christian, who has piously mouthed indignation at others for their alleged immoral conduct.

Rev. Robertson is not troubled or concerned at all about doing business with President Taylor, a man widely known for “fueling the violence in Sierra Leone” and “actively supporting the RUF at all levels.” Taylor is a known menace to his people as well as a danger to his neighbors in the West African sub-region. The heinous atrocities he inflicted upon the Liberian people are well documented, yet Pat Robertson claims to “have no knowledge of the activities in Liberia during its bitter civil war.”

But then Robertson is a man of contradictions, a self-proclaimed righteous man whose actions often betray his words. Shortly after the Sept.11 tragedy, according to GQ, an upscale men’s fashion magazine, Robertson posted an odd message on his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) web site. “The focus of many in America has been the pursuit of health, wealth, material pleasures and sexuality.” He continued “Sadly, those in the churches have been as self-indulgent as those in the world.”

But while he was calling into question the morality of others, Pat Robertson was actively engaged in a questionable, cutthroat gold-mining arrangement - for wealth - with Taylor, the infamous West African terrorist. And we suppose the good man of the cloth finds nothing inherently wrong dealing with a ruthless, corrupt dictator, who enriches himself while his people sink farther into squalor and destitution.

We now know that in April 1999, Charles Taylor and Pat Robertson signed a document labeled “Mineral Development Agreement between the Republic of Liberia and Freedom Gold Limited”. By signing his agreement, Taylor was, in fact, assigning gold mining concession rights to Pat Robertson from an established businessman, Ken Ross II, whose Bocon Jideh gold-mining operation dates back to the Tolbert administration.

According to the GQ article, Pat Robertson has committed at least US$15 million of investment to Freedom Gold. The terms of contract call for Freedom Gold to spend about US$500,000 annually in investment and rental fees in Liberia. “The agreement gives Freedom Gold the right to mine, sell, export and explore minerals, with an additional three percent royalty rate to be paid to the government of Liberia.”

Many observers believe the royalty payments would be pocket money for Charles Taylor, as Liberia has become “Taylor, Inc.” President Taylor considers state resources, including foreign investments and development assistance funds as his personal asset.

But there is one tiny problem for the Televangelist’s bloodsucker deal, perhaps not immediate; but nevertheless, a problem. And Robertson may have unwittingly entangled himself in the very issue that could unravel his gold mine and expose him to legal consequences in the future.

In his response to Colbert L. King of the Washington Post, Pat Robertson accused the columnist of ignoring Liberian political structure. He wrote, “Mr. King has ignored the constitution of Liberia, its elected Congress (Legislature), its administrative departments and its courts in order to assert that the government is an alter ego of President Charles Taylor.” But this is exactly what happened when President Taylor violated the Liberian constitution by usurping legislative power and Pat Robertson knowingly went along without protest.

Under Liberian law, specifically Chapter V: Article 34 section (f) of the Liberian constitution states “The Legislature shall have the power: to approve treaties, conventions and such international agreements negotiated or signed on behalf of the Republic.”

The Liberian Legislature refused to ratify the Freedom Gold agreement signed by President Taylor and Pat Robertson. So on Oct. 30,2000, a second contract, which is virtually identical to the first, except for one significant passage, was drawn up. Section 2 of the document was modified, according to GQ and Liberian legal experts familiar with the deal, to read that the contract will go in effect “when approved by the president of Republic of Liberia.” Gone is the language that reads that the contract is to become valid only “in accordance with the constitution and laws of the Republic.”

Clearly Mr. Robertson, a graduate of Yale Law School who was represented by Gerald Padmore, a Liberian-born Harvard Law School graduate, must know that his agreement with Taylor is unconstitutional. Also we will argue that such unconstitutional contracts are unenforceable, therefore non-binding.

www.theperspective.org
e-mail: editor@theperspective.org

(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.)

Dirty Diamonds
By Michael Barone
U.S. News & World Report

November 12, 2001

What do Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, and al Qaeda have in common?

The answer is: They all have been associated with the bloody Liberian dictator Charles Taylor.
The al Qaeda connection is the one that has most recently come to light. In a November 2 Washington Post article, Douglas Farah reported that “the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden has reaped millions of dollars in the past three years from the illicit sale of diamonds mined by rebels in Sierra Leone.” Al Qaeda has been buying the diamonds at below-market rates in Africa and selling them for higher prices in Europe. Diamonds are easy to transport and smuggle, and diamond transactions are hard to trace; al Qaeda evidently increased its purchases in July, presumably in anticipation of its bank accounts being frozen. The diamonds are mined in Sierra Leone by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, who famously hacked off the arms and legs of hundreds of people and built up an army of boys. Since 1998, the diamonds have been sold for cash in Liberia to al Qaeda agents by the RUF’s diamond dealer, alleged to be a Libyan-trained Senegalese rebel. There is big money here: A United Nations panel estimated RUF diamond sales in 1999 at $75 million. Farah writes that Taylor receives a commission on each sale in Liberia; Taylor has repeatedly denied this.

Taylor runs a regime that, according to Amnesty International, routinely imprisons, tortures, and rapes citizens for offenses like participating in peaceful demonstrations. Taylor has been the major supporter and arms provider to the RUF and its leader, Foday Sankoh. In a lengthy and well-documented article in the July 2000 New Republic, Ryan Lizza describes how Taylor’s regime has had the enthusiastic and effective support of Jesse Jackson. As Bill Clinton’s special envoy to Africa, Jackson in late 1998 pressed the president of Sierra Leone to “reach out” to Sankoh; “a man,” Lizza wrote, “who built his Revolutionary United Front (RUF) by systematically kidnapping children and forcing them to murder their parents. … Once children were conscripted, their loyalty was maintained through drugs, they were injected with speed, which numbed their sensitivity to violence and rendered them dependent on their adult suppliers, and violence. When conscripts tried to escape, RUF leaders amputated their limbs. Refugees even accused the RUF of cannibalism.” Taylor, who had taken power by starting a rebellion in Liberia in 1989 and building his own Small Boys Unit, had gone to the same revolutionary school as Sankoh.

Jackson first met Taylor in 1998, in what was billed as a friendly meeting, and in November 1998 called for the Sierra Leone government to “reach out to these RUF in the bush battlefield.” In January 1999 the RUF launched an attack Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital and, as Lizza recounted, “burned down houses with their occupants still inside, hacked off limbs, gouged out eyes with knives, raped children, and gunned down scores of people in the streets.” Even so, Jackson strongly supported the July 1999 Lome agreement, pushed through by the Clinton administration, which made Sankoh vice president, placed him in charge of a commission overseeing Sierra Leone’s diamonds, and granted amnesty to the RUF for all crimes. In May 2000 the RUF took U.N. peacekeepers hostage, and the Clinton administration sent Jackson to mediate. As Lizza told the story: “the Sierra Leonean government told him it could not guarantee his safety. One group of prominent Sierra Leonean democracy activists warned Jackson, ‘Our people will greet your presence in the country with contempt, and we’ll encourage them to mount massive demonstrations in protest.’ During a conference call with Freetown leaders in which he tried to explain himself, Jackson was openly attacked as a RUF ‘collaborator.’ His trip to Sierra Leone was canceled.” Only later were the hostages released and Sankoh captured; Taylor cpontinued to arm the RUF, who have remained in control of the diamond areas.

Pat Robertson’s tie to Charles Taylor is based on a financial connection. In 1999 Robertson’s Freedom Gold company signed a deal to mine an area in southeastern Liberia. The Liberian government, i.e. Taylor, has a 10 percent interest in Freedom Gold. “I pray that this investment may become a wonderful blessing to the people of Liberia,” Robertson said in a press release. More likely the government’s 10 percent share will go to maintain Taylor’s of the Sierra Leone diamond trade - and its big customer, al Qaeda. Colbert King of the Washington Post has written two columns criticizing Robertson for associating with the likes of Taylor. In reply, a Freedom Gold vice president faxed King, “Freedom Gold Limited was formed in response to Liberia’s need to spur economic activity after their long and devastating civil war. Dr. Robertson remains a friend of Liberia and is working to alleviate the suffering of the Liberian people. Dr. Robertson’s first and foremost goal is to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all nations.”

Robertson and Jackson, both candidates for president in the 1980s, have not had a good time in the post-September 11 season. On Robertson’s 700 Club program days after September 11, Jerry Falwell said, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’ ” Said Robertson, “Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted their agenda at the highest levels of our government.” For this both were roundly criticized, not least by conservatives, and both apologized. Jesse Jackson’s first initiative after September 11 was to volunteer to go to Afghanistan and mediate with the Taliban. First he suggested that he had been asked by the Taliban; then he said that he had been contacted by family members of Americans held captive by the Taliban; then he said it didn’t matter who asked him, he was available to help. Unsurprisingly, U.S. officials said his services weren’t needed. Then near the end of October, he suggested that children should not go trick-or-treating on Halloween. In November, he appeared on BET Tonight and said, among other things, “We are really killing a lot of innocent people.” “By saying on the one hand we have global terrorism but by focusing on one cave man in one country, it seems to me that they’re looking at this crisis through a keyhole rather than a door.” On targeting Saddam Hussein, “Even to threaten him in this way is in fact to misread his own capacity to respond perhaps chemically and biologically.”

It is impossible to believe that Jesse Jackson or Pat Robertson were aware that their friend and business ally Charles Taylor’s regime was helping fund al Qaeda by selling it diamonds. But they should have known that they were dealing with, and aiding, a very unsavory character indeed. At a time when their recent comments make their erstwhile presidential ambitions seem preposterous, they would both do well to break their ties with Charles Taylor and denounce his regime for aiding and abetting terrorism, before people start asking which side they are on.

(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 War Profiteers:
How Are Weapons Manufacturers Faring in the War?
by Frida Berrigan

Published on Tuesday, December 18, 2001
By Common Dreams

“Afghanistan hasn’t had a direct impact on sales yet.” Peter Simmons, Spokesman for Lockheed Martin’s Marietta, Georgia plane Companies like General Electric and IBM, which cashed in on the tragedy of September 11th through tax breaks in the Economic Stimulus Bill, have drawn the ire of fiscal conservatives and progressive corporate watchdogs alike. But scant attention has been paid to the biggest war profiteers, the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon.
Congress is debating a Bush administration defense budget of $343.2 billion, an increase of $32.6 billion over last year. This increase would mean that military spending would account for more than half of all discretionary spending (money that Congress must allocate each year).

This is good news to the weapons industry and while pink slips and hiring freezes are spreading like an epidemic from sector to sector, the top weapons manufacturers are awaiting new orders, holding job fairs, planning Initial Public Offerings, raising new capital and gaining new attention on the stock market.

As Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, remarked “the whole mind set of military spending changed on Sept. 11. The most fundamental thing about defense spending is that threats drive defense spending. It’s now going to be easier to fund almost anything.”

So, what better time to be Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman or even the beleaguered Boeing? The war in Afghanistan is an unequivocal success- despite friendly fire incidents, bombing accidents, mounting civilian casualties and the recent crash of a $280 million B-1 bomber- and the Bush administration is already listing new countries targeted for military action, with Somalia, Yemen and Iraq topping the list. It is a good time to be in the war business.

“For a long time*[the defense industry] just didn’t seem like a sexy area that has a lot of legs to it,” said a partner at one options trading firm. Well look again, because these former “wallflowers” are ready to go. Responding to investor interest, stock exchanges are thinking about creating a new Defense Index. The American Stock Exchange has its 15- stock index up and running, Philadelphia and Chicago are not far behind.

That is music to the ears of weapons manufacturers. And they have not wasted any time capitalizing on Congress’ new generosity. As a lobbyist for a major defense contractor boasted, “There are 150 programs on Capitol Hill that we are actively working.”

Congress is still working out the wrinkles of their versions of the military budgets, but weapons manufacturers and their supporters are confident that it will be big. “With the [Bush] administration, we’ll see a rebuilding of the military to bring it back to where it was eight years ago,” said defense analyst Paul Nisbet. “We’ll see a considerable appreciation in defense stocks, as we saw in the Reagan years.”

NORTHROP GRUMMAN

This Los Angeles-based company manufacturers planes and bombers dropping munitions on Afghanistan, including the B-2 bomber, the F-14 fighter. The company also makes the much-praised unmanned Global Hawk. The $10 million per copy Global Hawk has been deployed to Afghanistan despite the fact that it had not completed its testing requirements.

The company boasts that it has the capability to “meet current and emerging national defense needs, including anti-terrorism and homeland security.” And analysts like Loren Thompson agree, “the most immediate hardware demand that this crisis will generate is for intelligence gathering and command and control. Those are Northrop’s strengths.”

In addition to its planes and bombers, the company’s Maryland based Electronic Systems division makes high tech systems like the Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS), a control center and a huge radar disc mounted atop a Boeing 707, which serves “as the airborne nerve center for a military air campaign.” Northrop Grumman is also responsible for ALQ-15 jamming device, used to protect jets from enemy radar-guided missiles. As David Steigman, senior defense analyst for the Teal Group, boasts, “Northrop Grumman’s role is supplying the command control communications and the intelligence surveillance systems to find the bad guys and bop them in the head.”

When Wall Street opened again on September 17, 2001, Northrop Grumman was ready to bob those bad guys and its stock had risen 16% to $94 a share in anticipation of the coming war. Two days after bombing in Afghanistan began; Northrop Grumman’s stock had reached a three-year high of $107.60 a share on the New York Stock Exchange. The future looks bright and the company has job openings from more than 1,000 employees. According to a recent article in the financial magazine Barrons, Northrop Grumman is now seeking $2 billion in loans and equity investment to expand business opportunities and acquisitions.

It doesn’t hurt that Northrop Grumman has friends in high places, like Secretary of the Air Force James Roche, former Northrop Grumman Electronics Systems chief. Since September 11th, Roche has emphasized the need for more spending on intelligence systems, specifically mentioning Northrop Grumman’s AWACS plane. Not content to rest on its laurels, the company is lobbying Congress for a $300 million to upgrade the $1.3 billion B-2 Stealth Bomber, which has successfully completed bombings run in Afghanistan.

RAYTHEON

The Lexington, MA based company is best known for its Tomahawk missile. About 100 of these million dollar land-attack cruise missiles have been lobbed at Afghanistan from U.S. Navy ships since October 7th, fifty in the opening salvo alone.

Orders for Tomahawk missiles are already coming in from allies like Britain, which signed a contract for 48 Tomahawk missiles in a $87 million deal (TK date). And Raytheon is confident that significant Pentagon orders will follow. As David Polk, Raytheon spokesman, proudly said, “we are prepared to meet the urgent needs of our customers.”

Raytheon also makes the “bunker buster” GBU- 28, a 5,000-pound bomb and missiles like the TOW, Maverick and Javelin, all being used in Operation Enduring Freedom. In addition to missiles, Raytheon also builds sensors and radars used on unmanned and manned reconnaissance airplanes used extensively in Afghanistan. This diversity is part of what makes Raytheon the biggest stock percentage gainer since the war began; on September 10th the company’s stock stood at $26.85, now it is holding at about $32.80. Raytheon is looking to hire 1,400 new college graduates this year.

The company has been raising money recently. In mid-October, the company doubled its equity sales program with a major offering. The company raised about $1 billion by selling 29 million shares. Raytheon says the money will be used to reduce debt and for general corporate purposes.

In the never ending quest for more contracts, Raytheon has been pushing its agenda on Capitol Hill; $677 million to work on the next generation of Patriot cruise missiles and an undisclosed amount to upgrade Tomahawk cruise missiles.

LOCKHEED MARTIN

Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest weapons contractor, a major player in the areas of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile defense. The company was recently awarded the world’s largest weapons contract ever, a $200 billion deal to build the Joint Strike Fighter, a “next-generation” combat jet that eventually will replace aircraft used by the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.

Lockheed Martin did not win the contract on force of personality alone, or fighter plane design. During the calendar year 2000, Lockheed Martin spent more than $9.8 million lobbying members of Congress and the Clinton administration, more than double the $4.2 million the company spent during 1999. Among the company’s newest lobbyists: Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. During the 1999-2000 election cycle, Lockheed Martin contributed just over $2.7 million in soft money, PAC and individual contributions to federal candidates and parties. More than two-thirds of that money went to Republicans. Lockheed Martin spends more on lobbying Congress than any of its competitors, spending a whopping $9.7 million last year. Only General Electric and Philip Morris reported more lobbying expenses last year.

Since September 11th, the weapons giant has been steaming along. Stock prices rose almost $10, from $39.39 on September 10th to a high of $48.11 on November 12th , the stock is now steady above $46. Lockheed Martin makes the ubiquitous F-16 fighter plane, the Hellfire missile, “bunker buster” munitions and the massive C-130 transport plane. The F-16 plant in Ft. Worth, Texas expects to hire as many as 1,200 factory workers to increase production. They have more than 200 orders to fill from foreign governments for 1999-2000.

As the largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin has a lot of jobs in the pipeline. The company wants to go highest tech with its “combat Internet system,” a rugged handheld computer, that will put a “dot-com face on the modern battlefield.” The company is hiring in Silicon Valley, looking to replace “Rosie the Riveter” with “Suzie the Software Programmer.” A recent Lockheed Martin job fair attracted 1,300 applicants for 290 new positions in the company’s missile defense division. Even while Lockheed Martin celebrates its JSF successful, it is trying to shore up support for an additional $3.9 billion for development the F-22 Raptor.

BOEING

The Chicago-based Boeing Company, manufacturer of commercial and military aircraft, has not had an easy time since September 11th. While other weapons manufacturers are picking up new orders for weapons, Boeing announced the lay off of 39,000 workers in its commercial aircraft division.

On the military side, despite losing of the coveted Joint Strike Fighter contract, Boeing has a lot to be grateful for. Boeing’s JDAM (joint direct attack munitions) is the most widely used smart bomb in the war. The JDAM kit fits over a “dumb” missile and coverts it into a satellite-guided weapon using movable fins and a satellite positioning system. According to Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, of the 12,000 bombs the U.S. has dropped on Afghanistan, 7,200 (about 60%) were precision-guided. Of these, 4,600 were Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The rest were laser-guided bombs or satellite-guided Raytheon Co. Tomahawk cruise missiles. But there was a downside, the precision JDAMs have repeatedly missed their targets; crashing into a residential neighborhood near the Kabul airport on October 12th and killing at least 10 civilians, falling off target and killing three American soldiers on December 5th, and wounding five Special Forces soldiers a week earlier. The Pentagon maintains there is no problem with the weapon, and insists it will continue to use it.

Since the United States began bombing Afghanistan, Boeing has received two separate orders for more than 1,074 JDAMs, to be delivered by December 2001 and March 2002. Boeing spokesman Robert Algarotti said the company expects to receive an additional contract soon. “We don’t have anything officially from the government yet, but we are expecting a new order to come in and we’ll be producing them faster than we have before.” As David Baker, retired Air Force General now with Schwab Washington research, said approvingly, “Boeing has taken a thrashing, but their military sector is pounding away like a Ferrari on all cylinders.”

JDAMs and Ferraris notwithstanding, the Pentagon’s award of the Joint Strike Fighter contract to rival Lockheed Martin was a major setback for Boeing. Panicked about commercial losses and military snubs, Boeing has dispatched an army of lobbyists to Washington and their wish list is a mile long and more expensive. Boeing is looking for Congress’ help in the form of approval for:

Air Force purchase of 60 Boeing C-17 cargo aircraft under a special “commercial” provision that removes financial oversight;
Air Force leasing of 100 Boeing 767 planes to be converted into surveillance planes and mobile command centers for the military;
Protection from billions in potential liability claims stemming from the 9-11 attacks;
Measures to encourage Lockheed Martin to share its Joint Strike Fighter contract.

These proposals make sense if the goal is saving Boeing, but they make neither military nor financial sense.

The C-17 Globemaster is Boeing’s jumbo military transport plane, which performed high altitude food drops in Afghanistan. As recently as March 2001, Boeing tried unsuccessfully to make the plane available to commercial buyers. This time around it seems the company is capitalizing on widespread sympathy for its commercial losses, but the proposal is still a bad ideal. Selling the military planes as though they were commercial would allow the Air Force to bypass important pricing oversight. In addition, the $232 million per copy C-17s aren’t all they promised to be. A General Accounting Office report found that Boeing’s failure to rigorously test the C-17 before production resulted in increased costs of more than $2 billion to the program.

The plan to lease 100 converted Boeing 767 air-refueling aircraft for a period of 10 years is a big rip-off for taxpayers too. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that the lease plan would cost $22 billion, while purchasing the aircraft outright would cost just over $15 billion-that is a difference of $7 billion that Boeing can pocket. The aircraft is even less of a bargain when the $600 million cost of modifying existing hangers to house the plane is taken into account.

Some officials at the Congressional Budget Office and in the House and Senate budget committees oppose the leasing plan, contending it is a scam that adds to the long-term costs. “This would be a first,” said G. William Hoagland, minority staff director on the Senate Budget Committee, of Boeing’s plan. “We’ve got to maintain some discipline. This just isn’t the time to be adding in this way.”

But, cool heads like Mr. Hoagland’s might have a hard time prevailing, given Boeing’s political weight. The 767 plan goes before a House-Senate conference committee next week and Boeing has a lot of well-connected and important people looking out for its interests. John M. Shalikashvili, retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is on the Boeing board. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Rudy de Leon heads Boeing’s Washington office. After September 11th Boeing beefed up its political connections by hiring former Senator Bennett Johnson (D-LA) and former Rep. Bill Paxon (R-NY). Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, Boeing’s senior vice president for international relations since January, uses his forty years of experience to generate business for Boeing with foreign governments and corporations.

Also on the Boeing agenda is more money for its portfolio of major contracts. Boeing is currently working on more than a dozen contracts– including the expensive F/A-18 fighter jet, the crash prone V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, the AH-64 Apache Longbow helicopter and the Airborne Laser for the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization– that account for well over $10 billion in the 2002 Pentagon budget alone.

Frida Berrigan is a Research Associate at the World Policy Institute

(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.)

Democrats Focus On Halliburton
By Paul Kane and Ben Pershing
Roll Call

Wednesday 10 September 2003

Senate Leaders Promise Scrutiny of “War Profiteering”

Congressional Democrats this week launched a renewed attack on the White House’s connections to the Halliburton Co., warning that the energy concern once headed by Vice President Cheney must not benefit from “excessive profiteering” from the rebuilding of Iraq.
Democrats are trying to distinguish between the politically necessary funding of U.S. troops and ongoing military efforts in Iraq, pegged at more than $65 billion, and the proposal for more than $20 billion in reconstruction efforts, a price tag that even some key Republicans have questioned.

“We need a plan to ensure that Halliburton and other corporations like Halliburton are not in a position to profiteer on whatever money goes into Iraq,” Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said Tuesday, promising relatively smooth sailing for the military portion of funds in the more than $87 billion supplemental appropriation request.

But Daschle and Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, spelled out their intention to put up a fight over the reconstruction funds, particularly if any of that money is slated to end up in contracts for Halliburton, the company for which Cheney served as CEO before becoming President Bush’s vice presidential nominee three years ago. Democrats have long questioned Halliburton’s ties to the administration, using the firm to attack Cheney’s personal wealth, the adminstration’s approach to energy legislation and the Pentagon’s outsourcing program for many of its most basic functions in overseas work.

Democratic aides circulated reports showing that Cheney’s former firm had drawn more than $1.7 billion in contracts from the war in Iraq and was set to rake in hundreds of millions more dollars in no-bid contracts with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“I have seen questions in the press with respect to procedures in that regard, and I think we have to ask some questions,” said Byrd, who used an Armed Services hearing Tuesday to grill Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz about Halliburton’s role in the post-war reconstruction.

“These are areas which we should have questions about, and we ought to look into them,” Byrd said.

Responding to Byrd’s questioning, Wolfowitz said the Pentagon wanted to get critical services in Iraq, particularly the electricity infrastructure, running as quickly as possible and implied that the need for secrecy in pre-war planning led to the awarding of some of the no-bid contracts. However, with the traditional phase of the war over, Wolfowitz indicated that the administration should generally go with a competitive process for reconstruction contracts.

“I am quite certain the basic principle’s got to be competitive bidding,” he said.

In addition to wanting a more detailed plan for securing the peace and getting more international support for the effort, Daschle said the administration needed to “guarantee that Halliburton, and other corporations like that, aren’t just going to take these funds and with excessive profiteering run off like bandits without any competitive opportunities, without any insurance that there’s transparency.”

On the House side, Appropriations Committee staffers and Republican leadership aides received Office of Management and Budget briefings on Monday, but no timetable will be set for moving the supplemental until it receives complete details on the package from the Bush administration.

House Appropriations Chairman Bill Young (R-Fla.) discussed the measure with OMB Director Josh Bolton on Sunday, but Young has not yet decided when his committee will take up the measure. There is also no consensus yet on whether the supplemental will move as a freestanding measure or as part of another spending bill.

As with the last Iraq supplemental, Young and House leaders want to keep the bill relatively free of earmarks.

“We’d like to move it quick and clean,” said Young spokesman John Scofield, predicting that the supplemental would be a less likely target for earmarks because there are so many other fiscal 2004 spending bills still moving through the system.

Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) echoed comments from Daschle and Byrd, saying Democrats will support additional funding for the Iraqi conflict, but warned that some Democrats may suffer from sticker shock.

“What a huge miscalculation the administration made in terms of the cost of winning the peace,” Hoyer said of the $87 billion. “Not only in terms of money but in terms of the risk to our forces and personnel.”

House Republican leaders plan to give particular scrutiny to the request for an estimated $21 billion in nonmilitary reconstruction funding.

“We’ll be looking carefully to make sure it’s justified,” said a Republican leadership aide.

That portion of the supplemental could also be the spark for a small-scale panel turf war.

Since early August, House International Relations Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) has been circulating drafts of the Iraqi Liberation Act of 2003, an authorizing bill for the next year of reconstruction activities.

While his predecessor as International Relations chairman, ex-Rep. Ben Gilman (R-N.Y.), rarely bothered with authorization bills, Hyde has tried to reassert the panel’s clout rather than simply allow the Appropriations Committee to set policy.

A scheduled full committee markup of the measure has been postponed, as Hyde awaits details from the administration. It is also unclear whether the House GOP leadership would ever bring an authorizing bill to the floor, though Hyde could try to attach the measure’s language to an appropriations bill if he doesn’t get his own up-or-down vote.

In the Senate, Byrd and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) are planning to push for the reconstruction portion of the bill, including $800 million for Afghanistan, to be peeled off of the supplemental and put into a bill overseen by the foreign operations appropriations subcommittee.

And, seizing on the continuing economic stagnation domestically, Democrats are trying to use the reconstruction of Iraq to hit the Bush administration on what they consider underfunded priorities at home - a risky strategy that brought an immediate rebuke from Senate Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

“They can’t beat us over the head for increasing the deficit and demand more money at the same time,” Stevens said.

But Democrats feel they can use the issue to gain leverage on two fronts, whacking Bush and Cheney for their connections to a big energy company and accusing the administration of essentially giving away money to its friends as opposed to needed domestic priorities.

“If we’re going to say we have to provide these other funds with an urgency for Iraq, there has to be an equal urgency for the kinds of things that we care about here at home,” Daschle said.

Daschle, however, declined to spell out the Democrats’ specific strategy, declining to say whether he would push to have the reconstruction funds peeled off and whether there would be specific amendments for domestic spending to the supplemental.

“It’s too early to know just what legislative strategy we may employ,” he said.

(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.)

War Critics Zero In on Pentagon Office
By Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service News Agency
Tuesday 05 August 2003

WASHINGTON - On most days, the Pentagon’s ‘Early Bird’, a daily compilation of news articles on defence-related issues mostly from the U.S. and British press, does not shy from reprinting hard-hitting stories and columns critical of the Defence Department’s top leadership.
But few could help notice last week that the ‘Bird’ omitted an opinion piece distributed by the Knight-Ridder news agency by a senior Pentagon Middle East specialist, Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith until her retirement in April.

“What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline,” Kwiatkowski wrote. “If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of ‘intelligence’ found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam (Hussein) occupation (in Iraq) has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defence” (OSD).

Kwiatkowski went on to charge that the operations she witnessed during her tenure in Feith’s office, and particularly those of an ad hoc group known as the Office of Special Plans (OSP), constituted “a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress”.

Kwiatkowski’s charges, which tend to confirm reports and impressions offered to the press by retired officers from other intelligence agencies and their still-active but anonymous former colleagues, are likely to make her a prime witness when Congress reconvenes in September for hearings on the manipulation of intelligence to justify war against Iraq.

According to Kwiatkowski, the same operation that allegedly cooked the intelligence also was responsible for the administration’s failure to anticipate the problems that now dog the U.S. occupation in Iraq, or, in her more colourful words, that have placed 150,000 U.S. troops in “the world’s nastiest rat’s nest, without a nation-building plan, without significant international support and without an exit plan”.

Kwiatkowski’s comments echo the worst fears of some lawmakers, who have begun looking into the OSP’s role in the administration’s mistaken assumptions in Iraq. Some are even comparing it to the off-the-books operation run from the National Security Council (NSC) during Reagan administration that later resulted in the “Iran-Contra” scandal.

“That office was charged with collecting, vetting, disseminating intelligence completely outside the normal intelligence apparatus,” Rep. David Obey, a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, said last month.

“In fact, it appears that the information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with the established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than (the secretary of defence)”.

Actually, little is known about OSP, which was originally created by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to investigate possible links between Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist group.

While only a dozen people officially worked in the office at its largest, scores of “consultants” were brought in on contract, many of them closely identified with the neo-conservative and pro-Likud views held by the Pentagon leadership.

There have been published reports that a similar informal group co-ordinated closely with the OSP from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office, but these have not been confirmed.

Headed by a gung-ho former Navy officer, William Luti, and a scholarly national-security analyst, Abram Shulsky, OSP was given complete access to reams of raw intelligence produced by the U.S. intelligence community and became the preferred stop, when in town, for defectors handled by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), led by Ahmed Chalabi.

It also maintained close relations with the Defence Policy Board (DPB), which was then chaired by neo-conservative Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Feith’s mentor in the Reagan administration.

Perle and Feith, whose published views on Israeli policy echo the right-wing Likud party, co-authored a 1996 memo for then-Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that argued that Hussein’s ouster in Iraq would enable Israel to transform the balance of power in the Middle East in its favour.

The DPB included some of Perle’s closest associates, including former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey and former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who played prominent roles in pushing the public case that Iraq represented an imminent threat to the United States and that its was closely tied to al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks.

In her article, Kwiatkowski wrote that OSP’s work was marked by three major characteristics:

First, career Pentagon analysts assigned to the Secretary’s office were generally excluded from “key areas of interest” to Feith, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld, notably Israel, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. “In terms of Israel and Iraq, all primary staff work was conducted by political appointees, in the case of Israel, a desk officer appointee from the Washington Institute for Near Policy”, a think tank closely tied to the main pro-Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Second, the same group of appointees tended to work with likeminded political appointees in other agencies, especially the State Department, the NSC, and Cheney’s office, rather than with those agencies’ career analysts or the CIA.

“I personally witnessed several cases of staff officers being told not to contact their counterparts at State or the National Security Council because that particular decision would be processed through a different channel,” Kwiatkowski wrote.

The CIA’s exclusion from this network could help explain why Cheney and his National Security Advisor, I. Lewis Libby, a long-time associate of Wolfowitz, frequently visited the agency, in what analysts widely regarded as pressure to conform to OSP assessments.

This exclusion of professional and independent opinions, both within the Pentagon and across government agencies — according to Kwiatkowski — resulted in “Groupthink”, a technical term defined as “reasoning or decision-making by a group, often characterised by uncritical acceptance of conformity to prevailing points of view”.

In this case, the prevailing points of view were presumably shaped by neo-conservatives like Feith, Wolfowitz and Perle, and the “intelligence” provided by the INC.

Kwiatkowski’s broadside coincides with the appearance in neo-conservative media outlets, notably the ‘Wall Street Journal’, of defences of Feith, who is widely seen here as the Pentagon’s most likely fall guy if it is forced to shoulder blame for bad intelligence and planning. The government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair has pressed Bush to fire Feith for several months, according to diplomatic sources.

In a lengthy defence published Tuesday, the associate editor of the Journal’s editorial page described Feith’s policy workshop as “the world’s most effective think tank”.

(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.)

Common Dreams
Monday 04 August 2003
By David Morse

What was behind the Pentagon’s screwball scheme to establish an online futures market for acts of terrorism?
The $8 million betting parlor was scuttled only three days before its scheduled debut on August 1. Was it just a one-time fluke? If so, it raises questions about who is running the Pentagon. If it was part of a pattern, then it raises some serious questions about the Bush administration.

The announced purpose of the Policy Analysis Market, as it was known, was to harness the “anonymous forces of market capitalism” to predict the likelihood of acts of terrorism - much as commodity-trading speculates on the future price of coffee or pork bellies. The Pentagon’s justification was that “markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information.”

But critics in the Senate raised moral, as well as tactical concerns, in pointing out the obvious. Not only were markets faulty predictors of the future (witness the last stock market bubble and its collapse), but if anonymous online traders could bet on the probability of various acts of terrorism in the Middle East - assassinations and coups - the setup was an invitation to mischief, including insider-trading by terrorists themselves. This may have been the Pentagon’s real intent all along: to use its cyber-surveillance capability to track buyers and sellers. But even as a long-term sting operation, it was ripe for abuse by speculators of every stripe.

“Can you imagine,” asked Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, who helped blow the whistle in the Senate, “if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in - and is sponsored by the government itself - people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?”

The new toy was the latest brainstorm from its Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, DARPA, created to spearhead the War on Terrorism, and headed by the notorious John M. Poindexter. DARPA was trumpeted by Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, as “brilliantly imaginative.”

The idea was anything but brilliant, of course. It was, as one Congressman put it, “unbelievably stupid.” A New York Times editorial called it “wacky,” and demanded Poindexter’s resignation, without asking how the idea had gotten past Wolfowitz. In response to the bipartisan outrage, Wolfowitz lost no time distancing himself from the project, suggesting that the brainstormers at DARPA “got too imaginative.”

The project was scuttled. Poindexter resigned. Heads of state in the Middle East can presumably sleep better. Was it a fluke? The facts suggest otherwise.

First, never mind that this is the same rear admiral John Poindexter who was indicted during the Reagan years for his role in the scheme by which arms were sold to Iran and the proceeds funneled to the right-wing rebels in Nicaragua. Never mind that Poindexter lied to Congress, and escaped a prison sentence on a technicality. Never mind, even, that the Bush administration put this same John Poindexter in charge of DARPA, where he concocted a plan for wholesale surveillance of U.S. citizens.

The problem goes far wider and deeper than Poindexter or his boss, Wolfowitz. Or Wolfowitz’s boss, Donald Rumsfeld. Or Condi Rice. Or even George W. Bush..

Poindexter’s follies are the quintessence of what this administration has been about from the beginning. This latest scheme simply exposes the tip of an ideological iceberg that is no less wacky or dangerous, but which has escaped such noisy condemnation because it floats in a sea of general acceptance. It is the ideology of privatization, carried to extreme.

At its most benign, this ideology rests on the very dubious assumption that every aspect of government, from elections to social institutions, to foreign policy, can be governed by the so-called free market. At its most vicious, it is simply monopoly capitalism masquerading as government: profoundly antidemocratic, as well as anti-competitive, with no thought beyond lining the pockets of the powerful.

The war on Iraq reflects this more vicious mode. The war was motivated by corporate greed, and sold with false advertising. Allies were bullied and bought. Underlying the administration’s steamroller approach was the arrogance of a monopoly. No alternatives would be considered. The largest-ever mass demonstrations around the world were brushed off like consumer complaints.

The Pentagon itself is run according to a more competitive model. Troops were delivered to Iraq in accordance with industry’s just-in-time standards of efficiency, with Donald Rumsfeld playing the role of a CEO downsizing the Pentagon as if it were a recent acquisition. Instead of the supplying the 240,000 or so troops requested by Pentagon brass, Rumsfeld delivered 170,000 - not enough to perform the many tasks of occupation

In both cases, the corporate model is flawed. Wholesale greed does not yield intelligent foreign policy. And a military occupation is not the same as a corporate takeover.

As the occupation grinds on, with more loss of American lives and political rumblings at home, the corporate brainstormers running the administration have resorted ever more desperately to the ploys one would expect from runaway capitalism - the placing of bounties on Saddam Hussein, dead or alive, the degrading attempt to buy the loyalty of former Iraqi army troops with hundred dollar bills. The cynicism of these devices, and the grumbling of our own troops, all convey the essential failure to secure a just peace for the Iraqi people. But that objective was missing all along.

The corporate model for the war is flawed in other ways as well. The Pentagon outsourced some of its manpower requirements to Mexican nationals who were willing to join the U.S. Army. But while this may blunt the political impact at home, it does not translate into lower wages - the Army being the Army, and not a multinational sweatshop. We are still spending $4 billion a month in Iraq. And Americans reading of mounting U.S. casualties might not notice how many surnames are Hispanic.

As for those fat, cost-plus contracts awarded to Halliburton and other politically connected U.S. firms for rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, they will cost U.S. taxpayers far more than would the services of European firms that are more competitive and better positioned geographically to do the job.

Which takes us to the essential fallacy so evident in the wacky betting parlor scheme. It is not just Poindexter’s folly; it is the bogus assumption that privatization translates into efficiency and that marketplace greed should govern human affairs.

David Morse is a journalist whose work has appeared in Esquire, The Nation, Japan Economic Journal, and elsewhere. He writes about the globalized economy and the impact of privatization on public policy.

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