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August 25, 2005
Karpinski Blames Contractors for Abu Ghraib Torture
Interesting comments by former Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski about the contractors working at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq when incidents of were occuring in fall 2003. She was technically in charge at that time and after being reprimanded, she was demoted to Colonel for her failure to properly supervise the prison guards. Karpinski is the highest ranking officer to be sanctioned for the mistreatment of prisoners.
The interview is by Marjorie Cohn for Truthout.org.
-- I just find it incredible that the system - the Pentagon and the Judicial System - can continue to keep those soldiers in jail when there are simply volumes of documents and information that is emerging, and continues to emerge, that says exactly what one, in particular, Graner, was saying all along: that he was ordered to do these things by the Military Intelligence people and the interrogators, the contract interrogators. And there's more and more information to support that.
-- It's just incredible that these three contractors that they brought over were hired by the Justice Department in Washington, and it was the same Justice Department - there aren't two separate entities - it was the same Justice Department that, between 30 and 60 days before hiring these people to come to Baghdad, the same Justice Department had fired them from their positions in the Utah Corrections Facility for prisoner abuse.
-- When the war was declared over on the aircraft carrier, then sustainment operations - engineers, civilian contractors, military police, military police organizations - all those organizations kind of kick into high gear to get things moving down the same road. Well there was no sustainment plan. And I can tell you, Marjorie, my opinion is that there was no sustainment plan because, by that time, there were a lot of contractors - US contractors exclusively - who realized they could make a lot of money in Iraq.
-- My soldiers were saying, I heard this often: "Ma'am, I want to get out of the Army and come back over here. I could be making five times the money that I'm making as a soldier. And these guys never go out and do anything. We're doing all the work, and they're drawing all the pay!" I heard it a dozen times a week from every level of soldier, every rank, in every one of my units. They could see it. They knew what was going on. Here's these three contractors who are supposed to restore the prison system with the help of the military, and they never - I don't want to say never - they hardly leave the confines of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
-- And those civilian contractors who were imported were not subjected to the same Uniform Code of Military Justice discipline as the soldiers. They were cleared, removed from the face of the earth, and seven soldiers are being held responsible. It was grossly unfair.
-- All of these reports now would indicate that these techniques were designed and tested and implemented down at Guantánamo Bay and in Afghanistan. And when you take those same techniques and put them in the hands of irresponsible and non-accountable people, like these civilian contractors were, you are combining lethal ingredients. And what happens? You get civilian contractors who have a playground, and they get out of control. And unfortunately, at Abu Ghraib they suck the military into that same playground. There's no doubt in my mind that they ordered these things to be done.
-- They being the civilian contractors - Titan, CACI. The majority of those contractors were either in Guantánamo Bay or Afghanistan prior to being sent to Abu Ghraib. There were a lot of translators who were working for Titan. Some of them were locally hired, some of them were brought in from the United States. And they were given an opportunity to upgrade their positions to be interrogators - without any kind of formal training whatsoever. So now you have a deadly mix. You have people who have been exposed and who have used these techniques first-hand in other locations. They know that there is no supervision or control. They have been directed, using whatever words, to get Saddam, get the information and get these prisoners to start talking, use more aggressive techniques. So you have allowed people who have no responsibility whatsoever to use techniques that were originally, perhaps originally designed and used by very experienced hands. And it got out of control. It clearly got out of control.
-- In my little corner of the world and my exposure down at the Coalition Provisional Authority, I saw corruption like I've never seen before - millions of dollars just being pocketed by contractors. Everything was on a cash basis at the time. You take a request down - literally, you take a request to the Finance Office. If the Pay Officer recognized your face and you were asking for $450,000 to pay a contractor for work, they would pay you in cash: $450,000. Out of control.
-- There were contractors who were coming in there, hired. It's an excellent question, how the soldiers felt about these contractors. The security guys, the bodyguards, and the security firms that were hired to provide security for visiting dignitaries or Congressional delegations - they were all making a minimum of $300 a day. $300 a day. And never left the Green Zone. They escorted the convoys to the front gate, and then the Military Police or the military units would pick up the responsibility from the gate of the Green Zone out. And here you have soldiers who are now responsible for the lives of these delegations, and some of them are making $3,000 a month.
Posted by davidphinney at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2005
Biologicial and Chemical Weapons
The scavenger hunt in Iraq proved futile, but the threat of terrorists getting their busy little hands on these gruesome weapons of mass destruction appears to be alive and kicking in Russia, according to The Moscow Times:
Earlier this summer, the chief of the Defense Ministry's nuclear safety and security department said there was a constant stream of intelligence from the FSB (Russia's Federal Security Service) indicating that terrorist groups were developing plans to target the military's nuclear arsenals....
Patrushev's comments came after Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev vowed to "do everything possible" to end the second Chechen war. Basayev had ordered radioactive materials planted in Moscow and threatened to detonate them to end the first Chechen war.
Reminds me of a series I wrote some seven years ago, preserved for posterity by UCLA's Web Project.
I always enjoyed the interactive map -- and, no, I couldn't find any evidence of existing biological or chemical weapons in Iraq either.
Posted by davidphinney at 09:51 PM | Comments (0)
Soldiers' Tales
High impact theater swept into the Washington, DC, area last night: "The Sand Storm: Stories From the Front."
The play places front-and-center those who are part of the collateral damage: soldiers struggling to make sense of it all.
Through a series of gripping monologues by U.S. Marines fighting in Iraq during the opening days of the invasion, it is made painfully clear that the kids in uniform see more than the regurgitated wire copy narrating the all too timid television coverage that brings the war into American homes.
Soldiers are the ones who unleash the storm of bullets, wade among the body parts after a firefight, pull an injured father from a bombed Toyota after his wife and children have been burned beyond recognition. The soldiers may do everything possible to make sure the father lives even as they recognize that saving his life may be worse than his dying: the father will always remember losing his family in the carnage.
This is the stuff of fiction, but playwright Sean Huze witnessed the war firsthand as a combat Marine who enlisted the day after 9-11. He wanted to stand for those who had fallen on that sorry day and he believed President Bush's stated reasons for invading Iraq were just.
Instead he witnessed innocent civilians mowed down in firefights; children killed; and frenzied soldiers struggling to maintain psychological balance in the slaughter and wrestled to make sense of what they were doing.
"I saw more than a few dead children littering the streets in Nasiriyah, along with countless other civilians. And through all this, I held on to the belief that it had to be for some greater good," Huze wrote in a letter widely circulated on the Internet to filmmaker Michael Moore that praises Fahrenheit 9/11.
Then came the rising certainty that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction or links to al Qaeda -- an uneasy signal that their commander-in-chief President Bush, who declared on May 1, 2003, that "major combat operations" were over, was dead wrong.
"Months have passed since I've been back home and the unfortunate conclusion I've come to is that Bush is a lying, manipulative [expletive] who cares nothing for the lives of those of us who serve in uniform," he continued in his letter to Moore. "Hell, other than playing dress-up on aircraft carriers, what would he know about serving this nation in uniform?"
As insurgency attacks gathered increasing momentum by July of that year, President Bush then uttered another now regrettable insight: "Bring 'em on."
To Huze, it was an unforgivable, he recently told The Washington Post:
"It was a provocation that no one who had experience in combat ever would have issued," he says. "Who bleeds in order for him to look tough?"
The Post continues:
....On patrol near Baghdad and Tikrit, he also saw for himself how little was being done to secure the peace: Looters ran wild after Hussein's rapid fall. No way were there enough Marines, he realized, to stop the constant theft of AK-47s and artillery rounds from Iraqi Army resupply points. ("The administration went to war on the cheap," he says now. "The troops did the best we could with what we had.")
The play is presented by Charlie Fink, a former AOL and Disney executive who also put his fingerprints on "The Lion King" at its fruition.
Posted by davidphinney at 05:51 AM | Comments (0)
August 20, 2005
Halliburton Manager Pleads Guilty to Kickback
Reporting about the quiet case of Glenn Powell pleading guilty yesterday to taking a kickback of more than $100,000 from an Iraqi contractor leaves one wondering what unnamed Iraqi company put up the bribe.
Powell worked for KBR from October 2003 until Jan. 6, 2005 when KBR claims to have discovered his wrongdoing and relieved him of his position.
"When KBR learned that one of its employees was allegedly receiving improper payments from a subcontractor, the company initiated an investigation, the employee was questioned and admitted wrongdoing," the company said in a statement. "KBR immediately terminated the individual's employment and reported the issue to government investigators." -- The Houston Chronicle
Powell is described as a "project manager" in a story about Iraq contractors in a July 26, 2004, Engineering News-Record while the contract involving a kickback to Powell is said to have occurred on July 24 of that year.
There may be more to come on this and other allegations of under-the-table deal making by KBR employees:
Several other KBR managers in Kuwait have quit or were fired in mysterious circumstances in what appears to be a major house-cleaning, once the news started to circulate about overcharging and fraud.The first indication of these problems came in December 2003, when Halliburton publicly announced that it had returned $6.3 million to the military and admitted to the Pentagon that two unnamed KBR employees had taken kickbacks in return for a lucrative contract from an unnamed Kuwaiti company.
An internal KBR memo, dated May 2003, also cautioned employees not to "discard, shred, delete or dispose" of any documents relating to La Nouvelle and two other companies - Altanmia and Tamimi. Both companies have also been accused of possible overcharges in their billings.
In November 2004, Halliburton filed a declaration with the Securities and Exchange Commission stating that the Pentagon would be investigating two employees who worked on the Iraq contracts.
"The Inspector General's Office may investigate whether these two employees may have solicited and/or accepted payments from these third-party subcontractors while they were employed by us," the company stated. Once again, no names were disclosed. -- CorpWatch
Posted by davidphinney at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2005
Latin America Tapped for Iraq's Private Security Contractors
Typos aside, this advertisement offering 1,000 Colombians for private security work in Iraq on the Iraqi Job Center Web site makes one wonder.
"These troops have been trained by the US Navy Seals and the US DEA to conduct counter-drug/counter-terror ops in the jungles and rivers of Colombia, and with thier (sic) experiance (sic) I noticed a match-up in your current missions."
Is US funding for training Latin American para-military types now funding farm teams for private security in Iraq? That may end up pulling the rug out from under the investment in training for anti-narcotics efforts in Colombia, doesn't it?
That's one good question. Here's another possible one:
Have any of the recruiters or the recruitees ever passed through the controversial School for Americas, aka, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the US-funded Fort Benning, Ga., facility for training Latin American military types have in the past been accused of rape, torture, disappearances and some other nasty business in their home countries . Well, maybe that just echoes too much of a 1990s question....
Still, all these stories about private security recruiters heading off to Latin America to fill their ranks for work in Iraq are mounting: The Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, Knight Ridder.....
Now we have the Associated Press picking up on The Los Angeles Times and reporting on an American entrepreneur offering to supply more than 1,000 "combat experienced" former Colombian soldiers and police for counterinsurgency duty. The American, Jeffrey Shippy, is working out of an office in Ecuador. In case his advertisement disappears, here's an excerpt:
"Dear Sirs, Greetings from Bagdad, my name is Jeffrey Shippy and I represent a large Colombian x-military recruiting firm from Bogota Colombia. I decided to write you because I think you might have an interest in our company and operations. We currently have over one thousand well trained and combat experianced Colombian x-Military Soldiers and Police available for Force Protection/Provider/Mulitplier status ready and able to to to work. These forces have been fighting terrorists the last 41 years and are experts in thier prospective fields...."These troops have been trained by the US Navy Seals and the US DEA to conduct counter-drug/counter-terror ops in the jungles and rivers of Colombia, and with thier experiance I noticed a match-up in your current missions. I believe our Forces would be considerably cheaper than hiring other less effective and in-experianced TCN (Third Country Nationals) Forces, even after overhead such as long flights from south america to thier final destinations, and would save you a considerable amount of money while still having a high quality product."
That prompted Foreign Minister Antonio Parra to tell reporters that if Shippy was using Ecuador as a base to procure mercenaries, the government should "sanction, close and remove" his business from the country.
Posted by davidphinney at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)
Video: Mercenary Sniper in Iraq
This video, allegedly of a 5-man Blackwater security outfit will surely make it to the network news.
Posted by davidphinney at 04:36 PM | Comments (1)
Marines Arrest Security Convoy: A Story with Legs
It's always gratifying to break a new story: the US Marines arresting and jailing a Zapata private security convoy over Memorial Day weekend near Fallujah without charges. An investigation continues, of course, as first reported June 2 in this blog and picked up by the other media June 8.
Not only did my June 7 story set the pace for hundreds of others around the world (thanks to a kind source), it has now become a touchstone and anecdote for most of the significant stories about private security companies in Iraq ever since, including the latest piece on Triple Canopy in The New York Times.
I also enjoy the echo effect or headlines. My original story had the kicker: "Tension and Confusion Grow Amid the 'Fog of War.'" A July 10 Washington Post report on the same Zapata convoy: "Tension and Confusion Between Troops, and Contractors on the Battlefield."
Posted by davidphinney at 04:30 AM | Comments (0)
August 11, 2005
The Rolling Stones Take on Pentagon and Halliburton
Maybe this new Rolling Stones song will catch someone's attention. Reported by the Associated Press, it will at least put the group back in the mix of things just in time for a US Tour:
There is no mention of Bush or Iraq, but it does refer to military contractor Halliburton, formerly run by US Vice President Dick Cheney and has been awarded key Iraq contracts, and the rising gasoline price. "How come you're so wrong? My sweet neo-con, where's the money gone, in the Pentagon," goes one refrain. "It's liberty for all, democracy's our style, unless you are against us, then it's prison without trial," goes another line. "It is certainly very critical of certain policies of the administration, but so what! Lots of people are critical," Jagger said.
Posted by davidphinney at 07:47 AM | Comments (0)
August 08, 2005
Fare Well, Peter Jennings
In my three years at ABC, Peter Jennings always stood out as a generous and perceptive soul to many of the best at the network.
In what has become an all too often cutthroat business that takes the easy story over hard work, passion and dedication, and which places an increasingly heavier thumb on the sobering scale between corporate careerism and public service, Peter's legacy celebrates much of what is good in journalism.
He was kind and encouraging and a leading light not only for network TV news, but those journalists whose lives he touched in the past four decades.
Peter will be sorely missed and long remembered.
I will think of him in his canoe on the St. Lawrence -- perhaps a martini close by -- many loved ones in his heart and always sensing another good story of the world around the bend.
Posted by davidphinney at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)