August 30, 2005
Defense Company CEOs Rake in the Money:
From the liberal think tank, United for a Fair Economy:
Defense CEO versus Military PayDefense spending boom has boosted military contractor CEO pay by 200 percent since 9/11 CEO pay among large US companies as a whole increased from 2001 to 2004 by only about 7 percent on average. By contrast, the defense contractor CEOs' average compensation increased 200 percent during this period.
CEO pay levels dropped at only 7 of the 34 companies studied. Median pay for defense CEOs of these firms was $3.9 million in 2004. Because several had off-the-charts pay packages, average compensation for the group was much higher, at $11.6 million. George David, of helicopter maker United Technologies, came in No. 1 among defense contractors, with total 2004 compensation of $88.3 million, followed by David H. Brooks, CEO of bulletproof vest producer DHB Industries, wth $70.6 million
Posted by davidphinney at 05:07 PM | Comments (0)
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 24, 2005
Who Sends Whom to War: The List
From an circulating e-mail. It is certainly selective.
Democrats:
* Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
* David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
* Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
* Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as an army
journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.
* Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam.
* Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
* John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat 5
Purple Hearts.
* Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea.
* Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star, Vietnam. Paraplegic from war injuries. Served in Congress.
* Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-53.
* Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.
* Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91.
* Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII; Bronze Star and seven campaign
ribbons.
* Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars, and
Soldier's Medal.
* Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and
Legion of Merit.
* Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.
* Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze Star
with Combat V.
* Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.
* Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57
* Chuck Robb: Vietnam
* Howell Heflin: Silver Star
* George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.
* Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments. Entered draft but
received #311 in the lottery and was not called.
* Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy.
* Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953
* John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and AirMedal with 18 Clusters.
* Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul
Wallenberg.
Republicans -- and these are the guys sending people to war:
* Dick Cheney: did not serve. Several deferments, the last by marriage.
* Dennis Hastert: did not serve.
* Tom Delay: did not serve.
* Roy Blunt: did not serve.
* Bill Frist: did not serve.
* Mitch McConnell: did not serve.
* Rick Santorum: did not serve.
* Trent Lott: did not serve.
* John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business.
* Jeb Bush: did not serve.
* Karl Rove: did not serve.
* Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee." (The man who attacked Max
Cleland's patriotism).
* Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.
* Vin Weber: did not serve.
* Richard Perle: did not serve.
* Douglas Feith: did not serve.
* Eliot Abrams: did not serve.
* Richard Shelby: did not serve.
* Jon! Kyl: did not serve.
* Tim Hutchison: did not serve.
* Christopher Cox: did not serve.
* Newt Gingrich: did not serve.
* Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57)
* George W. Bush: failed to complete his six-year National Guard; got
assigned to Alabama so he could campaign for family friend running for U.S.
Senate; failed to show up for required medical exam, disappeared from
duty.
* Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non- combat role making
movies.
* B-1 Bob Dornan: Enlisted after fighting was over in Korea.
* Phil Gramm: did not serve.
* John McCain: Vietnam POW, Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit,
Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.
* Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve.
* John M. McHugh: did not serve.
* JC Watts: did not serve.
* Jack Kemp: did not serve. "Knee problem, " although continued in NFL for 8
years.
* Dan Quayle: Indiana National Guard.
* Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.
* George Pataki: did not serve.
* Spencer Abraham: did not serve.
* John Engler: did not serve.
* Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer.
* Arnold Schwarzenegger: AWOL from Austrian army base.
Pundits & Preachers
* Antonin Scalia: did not serve.
* Clarence Thomas: did not serve.
* Sean Hannity: did not serve.
* Rush Limbaugh: did not serve
* Bill O'Reilly: did not serve.
* Michael Savage: did not serve.
* George Will: did not serve.
* Chris Matthews: did not serve.
* Paul Gigot: did not serve.
* Bill Bennett: did not serve.
* Pat Buchanan: did not serve.
* John Wayne: did not serve.
* Bill Kristol: did not serve.
* Kenneth Starr: did not serve.
* Ralph Reed: did not serve.
* Michael Medved: did not serve.
* Charlie Daniels: did not serve.
Posted by davidphinney at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)
August 23, 2005
trillion dollar war
Waging the trillion-dollar war
By Linda Bilmes The New York Times
MONDAY, AUGUST 22, 2005
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts The human cost of the more than 2,000 American military personnel killed and 14,500 wounded so far in Iraq and Afghanistan is all too apparent. But the financial toll is still largely hidden from public view and, like the suffering of those who have lost loved ones, will persist long after the fighting is over.
The cost goes well beyond the more than $250 billion already spent on military operations and reconstruction. Basic running costs of the current conflicts are $6 billion a month - a figure that reflects the Pentagon's unprecedented reliance on expensive private contractors.
Other factors keeping costs high include inducements for recruits and for military personnel serving second and third deployments, extra pay for reservists and members of the National Guard, as well as more than $2 billion a year in additional foreign aid to Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey and others to reward their cooperation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The bill for repairing and replacing military hardware is $20 billion a year, according to figures from the Congressional Budget Office.
But the biggest long-term costs are disability and health payments for returning troops, which will be incurred even if hostilities were to stop tomorrow. The United States currently pays more than $2 billion in disability claims per year for 159,000 veterans of the 1991 Gulf war, even though that conflict lasted only five weeks, with 148 dead and 467 wounded.
Even assuming that the 525,000 American troops who have so far served in Iraq and Afghanistan will require treatment only on the same scale as their predecessors from the Gulf war, these payments are likely to run at $7 billion a year for the next 45 years.
All of this spending will need to be financed by adding to the federal debt. Extra interest payments will total $200 billion or more even if the borrowing is repaid quickly. Conflict in the Middle East has also played a part in doubling the price of oil from $30 a barrel just prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to $60 a barrel today. Each $5 increase in the price of oil reduces our national income by about $17 billion a year.
Even by this simple yardstick, if the American military presence in the region lasts another five years, the total outlay for the war could stretch to more than $1.3 trillion, or $11,300 for every household in the United States.
(Linda Bilmes, an assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce from 1999 to 2001, teaches budgeting and public finance at the Kennedy School of government at Harvard University.)
Posted by davidphinney at 05:52 AM | 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)
It's All About Oil
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/magazine/21OIL.html?pagewanted=1&hp
Is this why Halliburton was hired for the RIO contract -- to gain visibility into the oil fields?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/magazine/21OIL.html?hp
But will such a situation really come to pass? That depends on Saudi Arabia. To know the answer, you need to know whether the Saudis, who possess 22 percent of the world's oil reserves, can increase their country's output beyond its current limit of 10.5 million barrels a day, and even beyond the 12.5-million-barrel target it has set for 2009. (World consumption is about 84 million barrels a day.) Saudi Arabia is the sole oil superpower. No other producer possesses reserves close to its 263 billion barrels, which is almost twice as much as the runner-up, Iran, with 133 billion barrels. New fields in other countries are discovered now and then, but they tend to offer only small increments. For example, the much-contested and as-yet-unexploited reserves in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge are believed to amount to about 10 billion barrels, or just a fraction of what the Saudis possess.
.....
But the truth about Saudi oil is hard to figure out. Oil reservoirs cannot be inventoried like wood in a wilderness: the oil is underground, unseen by geologists and engineers, who can, at best, make highly educated guesses about how much is underfoot and how much can be extracted in the future. And there is a further obstacle: the Saudis will not let outsiders audit their confidential data on reserves and production. Oil is an industry in which not only is the product hidden from sight but so is reliable information about it. And because we do not know when a supply-demand shortfall might arrive, we do not know when to begin preparing for it, so as to soften its impact; the economic blow may come as a sledgehammer from the darkness.
........
The condition of Saudi fields, and those of other OPEC nations, is a closely guarded secret. That's largely because OPEC quotas, which were first imposed in 1983 to limit the output of member countries, were based on overall reserves; the higher an OPEC member's reserves, the higher its quota. It is widely believed that most, if not all, OPEC members exaggerated the sizes of their reserves in order to have the largest possible quota -- and thus the largest possible revenue stream.
........
stated the report, assembled by Science Applications International, a research company that works on security and energy issues. ''If recent trends hold, there is little reason to expect that exploration success will dramatically improve in the future. . . . The image is one of a world moving from a long period in which reserves additions were much greater than consumption to an era in which annual additions are falling increasingly short of annual consumption. This is but one of a number of trends that suggest the world is fast approaching the inevitable peaking of conventional world oil production.''
.........
'This is not the first time that the world has 'run out of oil,''' he wrote in a recent Washington Post opinion essay. ''It's more like the fifth. Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of the oil industry.'' Yergin says that a number of oil projects that are under construction will increase the supply by 20 percent in five years and that technological advances will increase the amount of oil that can be recovered from existing reservoirs. (Typically, with today's technology, only about 40 percent of a reservoir's oil can be pumped to the surface.)
............
A concerted push for greater energy conservation in the United States, which consumes one-quarter of the world's oil (mostly to fuel our cars, as gasoline), would hurt producing nations, too. Basically, any significant reduction in the demand for oil would be ruinous for OPEC members, who have little to offer the world but oil; if a substitute can be found, their future is bleak. Another Western diplomat explained the problem facing the Saudis: ''You want to have the price as high as possible without sending the consuming nations into a recession and at the same time not have the price so high that it encourages alternative technologies.''
.........
In addition, sending less money to Saudi Arabia would mean less money in the hands of a regime that has spent the past few decades doling out huge amounts of its oil revenue to mosques, madrassas and other institutions that have fanned the fires of Islamic radicalism. The oil money has been dispensed not just by the Saudi royal family but by private individuals who benefited from the oil boom -- like Osama bin Laden, whose ample funds, probably eroded now, came from his father, a construction magnate. Without its oil windfall, Saudi Arabia would have had a hard time financing radical Islamists across the globe.
.........
That's why Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister, told his Washington audience that Saudi Arabia has embarked on a crash program to raise its capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day by 2009 and even higher in the years after that. Naimi is not unlike a factory manager who needs to promise the moon to his valuable clients, for fear of losing or alarming them. He has no choice. The moment he says anything bracing, the touchy energy markets will probably panic, pushing prices even higher and thereby hastening the onset of recession, a switch to alternative fuels or new conservation efforts -- or all three. Just a few words of honest caution could move the markets; Naimi's speeches are followed nearly as closely in the financial world as those of Alan Greenspan.
Posted by davidphinney at 06:51 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 19, 2005
The Washington Post
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3954
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/15/AR2005081501523.html
Posted by davidphinney at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)
CACI 20 percent boom
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=ind_focus.story&STORY=/www/story/08-17-2005/0004090297&EDATE=WED+Aug+17+2005,+04:05+PM
Posted by davidphinney at 02:21 AM | Comments (0)
Halliburton Manager Pleads Guilty to Iraq Kickback
This just in.... and just spewed out.
A former Halliburton project manager entered a guilty plea today to charges of accepting more than $100,000 dollars in kickbacks on a $609,000 construction contract to renovate four buildings Iraq.
This is all sort of a surprise. There never was prior news of an indictment or arrest of the manager, Glenn Allen Powell, who worked for Halliburton's subsidiary, KBR.
The public paper trail of the case begins with a press release today from U.S. Attorney Jan Paul Miller of the Central District of Illinois.
Miller's office has the lead on most of the criminal investigations against KBR because of its proximity to Rock Island Army Arsenal, home to the Army Operations and Support Command. That's where KBR's multibillion contract for logistics services was drafted, signed and is now supervised.
Miller's office is also prosecuting former KBR manager Jeff Alex Mazon and Ali Hijazi, the managing partner of a Kuwaiti business, La Nouvelle General Trading and Contracting Company. The two were indicted March 16 on charges of devising a scheme to defraud the United States of more than $3.5 million related to the awarding of a La Nouvelle subcontract to supply fuel tankers for military operations in Kuwait.
Mazon has been arraigned. Hijazi is at large, but his attorneys have requested the charges be dropped. The court has ruled Hijazi's charges can't be dropped unless he shows his mug in court. I think we have an impasse.
Powell, of Cedar Park, Texas, is scheduled for sentencing on Nov. 18 for violating the Federal anti-kickback act and fraud.
The 40-year-old from faces 10 years in prison on each count and a fine of up to $1.2 million dollars.
No mention was made of who the subcontractor is that made the payoff to Powell in Iraq and it is not named in the plea bargain.
Posted by davidphinney at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2005
Chinese Front Companies in the US
Someone just asked me about this: Chinese front companies in the United States engaged in espionage and collecting valuable technology for weapons transfer.
That was big news in 1998.
http://www.rense.com/politics4/stillopen.htm
Posted by davidphinney at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)
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)