December 07, 2007
Krongard Resigns
The US State Department's top investigator, inspector general Howard Krongard, is resigning after being battered by allegations that he thwarted and halted investigations that might be embarrassing to the Bush Administration. Those investigations included claims of labor trafficking and poor work at the US embassy in Baghdad (related stories here, here , here, here and here), the possibility of arms trafficking by Blackwater and other matters.
Here's the Reuters bulletin.
The Washington Post fills in some details, but glosses over the allegations of labor trafficking by the embassy contractor -- probably because it was a story broken by non-mainstream media despite the fact that mainstream reporters are frequent visitors to this blog, including those with The Washington Post.
Will this be an end to the questions Krongard neglected to investigate? Or did his apparent foot-dragging cover up any tracks of wrongdoing? Stay tuned.
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May 24, 2007
The Contractor's Fight at Home
War for Hire: Dan Rather explores the "invisible army" in Iraq and the combat contractors face. In an extended online report for HD.net scheduled for June 4, Rather portrays the 100,000 or more civilian contract workers as being caught in the "crosshairs," whose uncounted casualties and injuries go overlooked in daily Pentagon briefings and the news media.
Interviews Include: Injured contractors who have returned to the United States only to battle for disability and medical coverage with their former employers to heal their wounds and rebuild their lives. Video from Iraq constantly suggests to viewers that the civilian truck drivers remain a largely-unarmed and untrained "soft" targets.
One contractor now missing a leg and struggling with serious loss of sight, recalls that before he took a job with KBR, President Bush announced "mission accomplished" and "major combat is over."
See It Now: Americancontractorsiniraq.com links to the entire program. The Website's founder, Knoxville, Tenn., resident Jana Crowder weighs in heavily on behalf of the challenges contractors face.
Congress Speaks: Several lawmakers in US Congress also share their thoughts about the lack of attention contractors receive. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., notes that the uncounted presence of contractors supporting the U.S. mission in Iraq "is completely unknown to the American people."
That may not be the case in the coming weeks. Major broadcast and newspapers are preparing similar reports, which echo a 2005 story originally reported by CorpWatch: 'Adding Insult to Injury.'
One Shortcoming in Rather's Report: The lack of attention to how many casualties and injuries have occurred among third country nationals and Iraqi nationals who are laboring under the U.S. flag.
Reuters Does Notice: in a Wednesday story:
The war in Iraq is killing nine civilian contractors a week on average, roughly three times the rate of last year, and U.S. government statistics show that non-Americans do most of the dying.... The contractors -- mostly Iraqis and nationals from more than 30 developing nations -- perform jobs from guarding senior U.S. officials to translating, cooking meals, driving trucks, cleaning toilets and servicing weapons systems and computers.
How many of those TCNs and Iraqi nationals are collecting their benefits as guaranteed by the Defense Base Act remains unexplored territory.
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May 01, 2007
Giant Sucking Sound at the Border?
DynCorp is Hiring Again: 120 openings. Compensation includes more than $134,000 in salary, much of it tax-free, plus a $25,000 bonus for signing up in time for a May 5 training session.
Working Conditions: Challenging. The border is in Iraq.
There has already been ongoing concern that private security companies lured away some of the best and brightest U.S. Special Forces soldiers with big salaries -- after taxpayer investment in training. Now, there's concern that U.S. border agents with Customs and Border Protection may be lured away as well to train Iraqis in border enforcement. DynCorp says there's no reason to be alarmed, although starting salaries for U.S. government Border Patrol agents start at about $35,000. Doris Meissner, who served as immigration commissioner under President Clinton, believes the DynCorp jobs at Iraq's borders could be done for less by people already in government service:
"If the people with the expertise are already in the government, why in the world aren't these missions considered government functions, and just have the government do it?" Meissner asked."I would have loved to have recruited border agents (for $134,000)."
The Houston Chronicle has the story.
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War in Iraq Costs: A Half-Trillion-Dollars and Counting
Receipts for the war in Iraq to will soon be ringing up to $564 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
That's more than ten times the $50 billion that the Bush administration once predicted before the war started in March 2003.
"It's worth it," Bush said last May, when the tab was about $320 billion. "I wouldn't have spent it if it wasn't worth it."
What Could That Money Buy? A college education for about half of the nation's 17 million high-school-age teenagers; preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old in the country for the next eight years; a year's stay in an assisted-living facility for about half of the 35 million Americans age 65 or older, Ron Hutcheson with McClatchy Newspapers suggests.
I prefer thinking that it could also buy a lot of research and development for energy independence. That, in turn, could produce a whole new generation of exports for the U.S. economy, improve the environment, enhance education, create jobs, reduce the thirst for imported oil and, perhaps, even spur oil producing nations to crack down on terrorism. It would be an enormous investment in the future with long-lasting returns.
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Willing to Please
There once was a line of thinking that the sign of a good manager is when one knows his or her weaknesses and compensates those weaknesses with the strengths of a well-rounded staff. Good presidents also go out of their way to find the strongest thinkers of opposing views to help probe policies for their weaknesses and figure out where solutions can be strengthened.
Walter Isaacson explores this phenomenon in discussing former CIA director George Tenent and draws parallels to corporate life in the media:
George Tenet's woes, it seems to me, come from the very natural instinct to please rather than tell uncomfortable truths to those in authority. Watching Bill Moyers's show on how the media failed to question the march to the war in Iraq, I reflected on how I, likewise, when I was at CNN, was too willing to accept what those in authority were telling me. And reading Bob Dallek's new book on Nixon and Kissinger, I was reminded how Kissinger, someone I once wrote about, was too willing to cater to and collaborate with the darker impulses of Nixon.
Here's his blog on Huffington Post.
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March 04, 2007
A 'Clara Barton' of the Web for Civilian Contractors Injured in Iraq
Jana Crowder, raised in Houston and now living in Tennessee, just may deserve a medal. Certainly, many owe her their thanks.
Using the Internet to optimum effect over recent years, Ms. Crowder quietly built a community network that addresses the concerns of civilian workers and shares information among those fighting for medical treatment and disability claims. In its absence, there would be little else to turn to. Certainly, the Pentagon and the news media have paid little attention. The mounting casualty and injury numbers among civilian workers are largely ignored even though contractors on the battlefield are more heavily relied upon than ever before in recent history.
As the Kristi L. Nelson so eloquently conveys in the Knoxville New Sentinel, Crowder's reaching out has given her close contact to the invisible and largely overlooked Army of workers supporting the US military in Iraq:
She knows about the former truck driver who's still haunted by the smell of his friends' charred flesh from trucks recovered after his convoy was attacked by insurgents in Iraq....Or the driver who, lured to Iraq as much by the opportunity to serve America as by large paychecks, watched through the windshield as his fellow drivers were pulled from their trucks and shot, execution-style, by insurgents.
Check out Crowder's Web site: American Contractors in Iraq.
Or go to her newest project: America at WAR and PTSD and wait for the video to start streaming.
Scroll down this second page an extensive survey of the types of injuries that contractors face. It was compiled by Houston attorney Gary Pitts. He is among a handful of lawyers in the country who has stood up for the injured contractors facing the sometimes gut-wrenching bureaucratic obstacles standing in the way of having their medical and disability claims addressed.
Nearly 800 civilians working under contract to the Pentagon have been killed and more than 3,300 hurt doing jobs formerly handled by the U.S. military, according a February 23 Associated Press report. They are Americans as well as workers from around the world who labored for US efforts in Iraq. And contrary to the Pentagon's 2005 finding that contractors are not systematically targeted, the story notes: "The insurgents in Iraq make little if any distinction between the contractors and U.S. troops."
Clara Barton, too, was a volunteer.
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March 01, 2007
Iraq Vet Says Bank Heist Might Be 'Political'
AN ARMY VET HAS BEEN TELLING THE NEWS MEDIA that he witnessed US military personnel commit war atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the rape of an Iraqi woman, the execution of 12 to 17 prisoners in Afghanistan and robberies. He claims that after reporting the crimes to his superior officers he was told "to forget about it."
Former Army Range Luke Sommer is now in Canada fighting US extradition efforts on charges that he was the mastermind behind robbingf a Tacoma bank last August. According to a December 17 Seattle Times story, Sommer "stops just short of admitting to the crime. But he says that if he did rob the bank, his motives were political."
The 20-year-old Sommer has made no direct admission of the charges relating to the $54,011 armed robbery,but he reasons that if Americans are let off the hook for war crimes and fraud in other countries, then why not forget about a little bank heist in the US? (Sommer has yet to detail the war crimes he claims he witnessed.)
CRAZY WORLD: If it's okay there, why not here?
The Army Times revisits the story this week with the headline Rangers as robbers?. It's all the standard safe re-reporting that Army Times top editors perfer, but the story does include a succinct comment from Sommer about the allegations against him: "It illustrates one very essential truth, that we are willing to tolerate it when it's against other people, but when it's against us, we will prosecute it to the fullest extent of the law."
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike Dion adds that the evidence will show that Sommer and other conspirators were planning to launch a criminal organization. "They wanted funding for it and that that's what this robbery was about," Dion tells the Army Times. Dion is leading the effort to extradite Sommer and two alleged co-conspirators from Canada.
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February 28, 2007
Al Gore Taps the Internet
From the man accused of taking credit for inventing the internet, a new political crusade is heating up to fight global warming.
Fresh off his Oscar winning power-point presentation, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore launched a chain email lobbying effort this week to pressure Washington into heeding his documentary's warning: time is running out for the world to reverse climate change. The email has a link to Gore's Web site.
THE IDEA IS: Every recipient who gets his email forward it to ten friends. No doubt, the effort will explode exponentially and create a shock and awe capable of making Washington take notice -- especially when Gore unloads those emails before Congress on March 21. (No word about whether the will be printed on recycled paper.)
Will this be a prelude to another bid for the White House? A number of prominent netizens predicted in Rolling Stone that the Democratic nomination would be his for the taking:
"If Howard Dean could raise $59 million on the Internet," says (veteran Democratic consultant Bill) Carrick, "the mind boggles as to what Al Gore might do." Joe Trippi, who managed Dean's campaign, believes Gore could raise as much as $200 million on the Internet: "Gore may have more money than anybody within days of entering the race."
Then again, Gore may have his eye on winning the Nobel Peace Prize. That would be a first for him. He already sort of, kind of, maybe won one presidential bid in 2000.
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February 01, 2007
Tim Hates Chris and Other Nasty Business
Kiss, kiss in the Beltway. Tales of media favors, backstabbing and manipulation.
This morning's Los Angeles Times reports on the Libby trial:
As they talked by phone, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby scribbled down a series of Machiavellian suggestions from Cheney's then-communications guru, Mary Matalin: What to do about MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews and his steady barrage of Iraq war criticism? "Call Tim," Libby wrote, referring to Tim Russert of NBC News. "He hates Chris."
No mention of that in MSNBC.com's wire rewrite.... Mmmm, what a love fest.
Testimony from two of the Bush administration's top media handlers -- former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and former Cheney communications director Catherine J. Martin -- have largely taken center stage during the first five days of the trial, notes reporter Greg Miller with the LA Times.
And, those crafty media handlers in the Bush White House spent a good deal of time scheming away, doling out news like bon bons:
Martin, in particular, offered in her testimony last week an unusually detailed description of how the White House seeks to manipulate the news media.She described plans to leak stories to certain reporters, including the New York Times' David E. Sanger and the Washington Post's Walter Pincus; freeze out others, such as New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof; book administration officials on talk shows such as Russert's "Meet the Press"; and release bad news on weekends, when it was more likely to be ignored.
(Now, how can a working reporter take the White House press office seriously the next time a press officer answers a question with the perennial "when's your deadline?")
It sounds as though office politics at the White House were just as manipulative. Tim may hate Chris, but somebody at the presidential mansion unsheathed the long knives for Libby as well.
Tim Reid with The Times reports on nasty accusations that West Wing power players tossed Libby out to the snarling dogs beyond the White House gate:
Mr Libby's lawyers claimed yesterday that White House officials rallied around Mr Rove but stopped short of protecting Mr Libby. Having been asked by Mr Cheney to rebut Mr Wilson's criticisms, Mr Libby felt betrayed and sought out his boss."They're trying to set me up. They want me to be the sacrificial lamb," the attorney Theodore Wells said, recalling Mr Libby's end of the conversation. "I will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected."
ADD: Justly noted. Ana Marie Cox beat the clock with her "Tim Hates Chris" item yesterday. After posting on Time.com, she later added the caveat:
UPDATE: Just to be clear, not everyone hates Chris Matthews (though apparently many commenters do); I just think there's something kind of awesome about "Everyone Hates Chris" being a show on the CW network. I am personal a long-time, committed fan of Matthew's eccentric approach to political chat, n.b.: "ALL PANTS ARE MADE IN CHINA NOW!"
(And not to burn a bridge to future TV appearances?)
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January 31, 2007
Strange Business Behind US Embassy Contract in Baghdad
A fog of secrecy has shrouded the $592 million contract for building the US embassy in Baghdad ever since it was quietly awarded in summer 2005 to a Kuwaiti contractor.
The award, in itself, is odd. New York-based Framaco claims to have made the least expensive bid. One company source told me Framaco was $60 million to $70 million less than First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, a.k.a., First Kuwaiti, the company that quietly landed the controversial contract.
Then, there is this mysterious tale as told by Cosmopolitan, Inc., of Columbia, Md.
Cosmopolitan has been building and renovating US embassies for 22 years. The company specializes in secured and controlled access areas -- just the kind of thing you might expect for a Baghdad embassy project, which is designed as if it were Fort Apache on steroids. And, as an American firm, Cosmopolitan holds top security clearances -- just the kind of thing a foreign firm like First Kuwaiti can never qualify for. (And that's another brewing story.)
In July 2005, Cosmopolitan says the US State Department's Overseas Buildings Operations division (OBO) approached the company and asked if Cosmopolitan would be interested in building the U.S. Embassy in Iraq.
That sort of meeting would be very strange, if true. Cosmopolitan didn't know it, but OBO was already soliciting competing bids for the project, which when completed will be the largest US embassy in the world -- the size of Vatican City.
Cosmopolitan said, yes, of course it would love to have the project. After all, OBO was seemingly courting Cosmopolitan for the work and we're talking the whole enchilada here: a $592-million job.
But there was just one hitch, Cosmopolitan recalls OBO as saying: The lead subcontractor for all the general construction unrelated to the classified work must be promised to a little-known Kuwait company called First Kuwaiti.
Okay....Cosmopolitan says it followed through by submitting a proposal followed by several meetings conducted with James Golden, the managing director for the Iraq Project at OBO who oversees the project to this day. A few months later, Cosmopolitan says it learned that First Kuwaiti secretly had been awarded the $592-million contract that very summer for building all the non-secured portions.
It's a long story, but the abridged version is that Cosmopolitan was aced out of the embassy work entirely. Cosmopolitan is not very happy and is not taking this quietly, especially after spending a good deal of money on getting ready to deploy....and there is a good deal more to tell.
I'll get back to it soon.
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January 29, 2007
Well, It Sounded Good Last Week....
..... According to The Washington Post:
Twenty in 10: Bush said in his State of the Union speech last week that he has a "goal of reducing U.S. gasoline usage by 20 percent in the next 10 years."The fine print: Administration officials said that the goal is 20 percent below projected annual gasoline usage, not off today's levels.
That's very significant for oil markets, where analysts look at the balance of rising supplies and rising demand.
No wonder the president looked like all he wanted to do was go home during his speech.
Not only that, the Democrats now are punching hard:
Bush's boldest-sounding energy proposal -- to replace 35 billion gallons of gasoline with "alternative" (rather than renewable) fuels by 2017 -- relies on coal-based fuel, a product that "could nearly double global warming pollution per gallon of fuel" compared to petroleum-based fuels we use today.
And, according to a New York Times editorial:
Refining and then burning a gallon of gasoline derived from coal would send nearly twice as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a conventional gallon of gasoline and would thus be a disaster for global warming. Trying to sequester the carbon dioxide underground during the refining process would be hugely expensive.
And let us not forget that the Democrats won't forget, especially with Rep. Henry Waxman of California swinging a gavel:
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hold a hearing on January 30 regarding political interference in the work of government climate change scientists.In preparation for the hearing, Chairman Waxman and Ranking Member Davis have requested documents from the Council on Environmental Quality related to allegations that officials edited scientific reports and took other actions to minimize the significance of climate change. Letter to CEQ Chairman James Connaughton.
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January 26, 2007
Civilian Reserve Corps: Private Army?
Jeremy Scahill opines in a Los Angeles Times op-ed about President Bush's proposal for a Cvilian Reserve Corps on Tuesday night:
A privatized version of it was floated two years ago by Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, conservative owner of Blackwater USA and a man who for years has served as the Pied Piper of a campaign to repackage mercenaries as legitimate forces. In early 2005, Prince -- a major bankroller of the president and his allies -- pitched the idea at a military conference of a "contractor brigade" to supplement the official military. "There's consternation in the [Pentagon] about increasing the permanent size of the Army," Prince declared. Officials "want to add 30,000 people, and they talked about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier." He added: "We could do it certainly cheaper."And Prince is not just a man with an idea; he is a man with his own army. Blackwater began in 1996 with a private military training camp "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing." Today, its contacts run from deep inside the military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House. It has secured a status as the elite Praetorian Guard for the global war on terror, with the largest private military base in the world, a fleet of 20 aircraft and 20,000 soldiers at the ready.
It ain't going to happen. Politically, it's a non-starter unless the Civilian Reserve Corps is veiled as something much more benign -- maybe the Peace Corps?
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January 04, 2007
Arianna's Aggressive Pursuit of (the) Action
Talk about swing voters!
Some readers may take interest in remembering that Arianna Huffington, publisher of the innovative and liberal Huffington Post, first spun into the American political limelight as the GOP diva and head ideological cheerleader when Republicans took control of Congress in 1995.
She could be sighted everywhere flying about town (Washington, DC, that is) in hyperdrive while hosting luncheons in the name of compassionate conservatism and toasts to "Newt's Revolutionaries."*
Commenting to me on the 1995 Republican Tsunami:
"It's about three revolutions, really," she explained. "There's the political revolution that launched the Republican landslide, the cultural revolution without which the political revolution cannot succeed, and the personal revolution in how we see the purpose of our lives."
Arianna loved talking about the revolution then and she loves talking even more about the revolution now -- although she now is cheerleading for the Democrats -- the very people that so disgusted her in 1994.
And she is once again making news. Today Rep. John Murtha, R-Pa. the incoming chair of the House appropriations defense subcommittee, announced on Huffington Post that he will recommend extensive hearingson the war in Iraq starting on Jan. 17. Murtha said he plans to shine a light on issues of accountability, military readiness, intelligence oversight and the activities of private contractors.
"We will be demanding substantive answers to questions that have gone unanswered for far too long," he says in his Huffington Post blog.
The war in Iraq and its effect on our military and our nation's future remains the most crucial issue facing the new Congress. I will be recommending an aggressive pursuit of action that will allow us to reduce our military presence in Iraq at the soonest practicable date.
*I received an autographed book from Arianna in 1995 after writing a Sunday profile on her for The Los Angeles Times. She struck me as one of the most well-read people I have ever met. Her husband, Texas oil heir Michael Huffington, had just lost the 1994 California Senate race against Democrat Dianne Feinstein. Michael spent something like $30 million of his own money on the race. The Huffingtons divorced several years later after he announced being gay and entered the movie business.
Read The Los Angeles Times story: FULL OF BIG IDEAS, ARIANNA HUFFINGTON JOINS GINGRICH BRAINTRUST
Sunday, Home Edition
Copyright 1995 The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
February 5, 1995, Sunday, Home Edition
LENGTH: 1033 words
HEADLINE: ARIANNA'S WORLD;
WITH HER 'BROWN BAG' LUNCHES AND PLANS FOR A 'BEAT THE PRESS' SHOW, MIKE HUFFINGTON'S WIFE CRUSADES IN WASHINGTON FOR GOP CAUSES
BYLINE: By DAVID PHINNEY, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
BODY:
Mike Huffington may have spent $27.5 million of his own money in his failed bid for the U.S. Senate, but that did not prevent him and his wife, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, from returning to Washington.
While former congressman Huffington cultivates a low profile in the labyrinthine social world of Washington, his wife is visibly riding on the Republican tsunami that swept over the nation's capital in November.
Welcome to Arianna's world, a constellation of right-wing thinkers and politicians accented with New Age activists, a sprinkling of reconstituted liberals and some who refuse to be classified at all.
Immersed in a flurry of activity, Arianna Huffington is putting the finishing touches on a dinner scheduled for Tuesday, featuring House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
She hopes the dinner will raise about $600,000 to benefit the nonprofit National Empowerment Television, the broadcaster of Gingrich's weekly lecture, "Progress Report," and sponsor of his "Renewing American Civilization." NET also once ran Arianna Huffington's now-discontinued program, "Critical Mass."
Price per couple for a dinner with the speaker: $50,000.
Huffington has also signed on as a senior fellow with the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank closely allied to Gingrich, and she is busy developing a television program called "Beat the Press," featuring herself as a self-styled investigative media critic.
The show would use video clips and commentary to chronicle her discoveries of press blunders and inaccuracies. Guests who have been made "victims" by media harpies will drop by to tell their side of the story, she said.
First media victim guest: Fellow Republican and political soul mate Newt Gingrich.
Huffington takes offense at a New Yorker article likening Gingrich's speech-making style to that of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and she intends to set the record straight. For "Beat the Press" she has edited a video segment of the Ayatollah sermonizing about "streets filled with blood" and combined it with tape of Gingrich talking about welfare.
"Satire is a great way to show bias," she said.
As part of her critique of the American media, she plans to feature a segment of good news. "What the media missed this week," she said. "It's so much more important than some little law that's passed."
Although she has completed much of the pilot, there are no takers for the program yet, but she has an eye on selling the idea to network television or for syndication.
There is also a new book project, Huffington's fifth in 20 years.
This one recounts the Republican revolution with frequent asides about her husband's recent defeat.
"It's about three revolutions, really," she explained. "There's the political revolution that launched the Republican landslide, the cultural revolution without which the political revolution cannot succeed, and the personal revolution in how we see the purpose of our lives."
And Arianna Huffington's purpose these days -- her public-personal purpose -- is to fill the public welfare void that will be left if the Republican majority in Congress succeeds in dismantling the welfare system.
"If you believe, as we believe, that the safety net government provides is full of holes and torn and doesn't really work anymore, then there has got to be something to take its place," she said.
And that is what her monthly lunches in a Georgetown condominium overlooking the Potomac River -- contributed by the Seagram's Corp. -- are all about, she said.
She invites people to a "brown bag lunch" so they can join in intimate discussions about how to replace the welfare state. The fare is not literally brown bag: Guests treat themselves to a beef stroganoff buffet and baby carrots served on blue-rimmed Limoges china.
Twenty-two guests attentively gathered at last month's meeting, including staffers from the Progress and Freedom Foundation, public housing professionals, members of nonprofit organizations and former Delaware Gov. Pete DuPont.
Conservative writers Marvin Olasky and Don Eberly, whose books are on Gingrich's reading list, assisted Huffington in leading the discussion. "I must admit, I have an intellectual love affair with both of these men," she said as she introduced them.
"This is the beginning of a conversation about what needs to be done," Huffington said while the chocolate cake was served. "We've got to get to work.
"Everybody knows that money alone is not going to solve the acute problems facing us," she said as she explained the group's plans to replace welfare programs soon to hit the congressional chopping block. "The question is how do you turn lives around? How do you turn around the lives of addicts and alcoholics and the single mothers?"
The answer, she says, is volunteerism, community involvement, local control and private funding of programs that have little to do with federal government. Huffington wants all facets of the private sector to chip in -- individuals, corporations and churches.
Being married to multimillionaire Mike Huffington makes her ideas an easy target for those less fortunate. But even in liberal camps, Arianna Huffington has her supporters.
"There is so much overlap between liberals and conservatives, and in many cases, we agree more than disagree," said Jane Fortsen, who once worked with the Carter Center in Atlanta. Describing herself as a liberal Democrat with a longtime involvement in public housing, Fortsen recently joined the Progress and Freedom Foundation.
"I'm not a liberal, I'm not a conservative, but they characterize us as a liberal organization," said Andrew E. Taubman, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization pushing to apply "Jeffersonian democracy" to the changes being wrought by technology.
Taubman said he was intrigued with the monthly lunch and plans to return. "They say what they think and stick their chin out. If they get hit, they get back up and keep on plugging. I like that."
Besides, it's good networking. "It's fascinating to think that Newt Gingrich could be president someday and these people around him could be his advisers," he said.
Phinney writes for States News Service.
GRAPHIC: Photo, Arianna Huffington, shown strolling in Santa Barbara last year, is immersed in a flurry of activity. Associated Press
LOAD-DATE: February 6, 1995
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January 03, 2007
Energy Independence in 10 Years
Imagine President Bush announcing a national plan to achieve US energy independence by 2011 the day after the 9-11 attack in 2001. We may have already been half way there in reaching the goal.
Bush could have muscled all of his political capital and the collective national will to support the development of energy efficient products and alternative fuels. Much of the money that has been spent in Iraq -- $350 billion and counting -- could have been spent on developing better automobiles, light bulbs, refrigerators, computers, and a sweeping catalog of other consumer products that would supply a whole new generation of high-tech exports for the United States economy.
Need the oil companies and other corporate interests to buy into the program? Well, corporations have done very well financially with the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq. Presumably, they would buy into a program at home -- especially if you paid them anything close to the money they are billing in Iraq.
Cynical? Perhaps. But a program for national energy independence also would create more jobs in the US as well. That in turn, would nurture further broad-based support for a national energy program.
Think of it as being similar to the US space program after the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik in 1957, the world's first artificial satellite. It was the size of a basketball, weighed 183 pounds, and took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path.
The modest little orb spurred Congress to fast-track the National Aeronautics and Space Act and create NASA on October 1, 1958. So began the multi-billion-dollar, decade-long U.S.-U.S.S.R space race.
The Communist achievement was a competitive humiliation that President John F. Kennedy and his administration would not tolerate. Kennedy's new 1961 commitment to landing "a man on the moon," not only gave us the powdered orange drink, Tang, and the laptop computer, but it also reinvigorated public education and sparked other lasting political, military, technological, and scientific developments.*
An energy independence program would do the same things. According to one group, the Apollo Alliance, a 10-year national investment of $313 billion would spark $1.43 trillion in economic activity, $953.87 billion in personal income and over 3.3 million new good-paying jobs.
Landing a man on the moon in may have been more possible than making the United States energy independent in 10 years, but even if the United States were 50 percent successful, the progress would have enormous impact. Oil producing nations would come begging for business while cutting prices on their barrels.
*Sputnik also inspired San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen to coin the term "beatnik" in an article about the Beat Generation on April 2, 1958.
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January 02, 2007
Shrinking Violets
They foresaw a New American Century and it was as if they planned to pump up US foreign policy with steady injections of steroids. ... Then again, maybe they just were metaphorically whacked out on the drug themselves.
In their 1997 manifesto, they posed the question: "Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?"
Their answer was no: "We are in danger of squandering the opportunity and failing the challenge. We are living off the capital -- both the military investments and the foreign policy achievements -- built up by past administrations."
The Beltway collective of Neocons became the major ideological muscle behind pushing for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Vowing to build a new America, their wish list included "a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities."
Signers of the 1997 document launching the project would later become senior officials under President George W Bush - Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams and Lewis Libby - as well as thinkers including Francis Fukuyama, Norman Podheretz and Frank Gaffney.
Signers also included vigilant right-wing, finger-wagging moralists William J. Bennett and Gary Bauer. And let's not forget present and former presidential wannabes: Dan Quayle, Jeb Bush and Steve Forbes.
Today, the gang, known as the Project for the New American Century "has been reduced to a voice-mail box and a ghostly website. A single employee has been left to wrap things up," Paul Reynolds of BBC notes.
One leading Neocon and Defense Policy Board member, Kenneth Adelman, now describes the group as having "turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."
Adelman will be giving a tell-all talk at Nathan's in Georgetown Jan. 11, noon.
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December 26, 2006
Pentagon Ponders Expanding Foreign Recruitment
Want US citizenship? Join the US Globar War on Terrorism today!
That's what the Pentagon is now considering: expanding the existing program of trading citizenship to those foreign nationals willing to pick up arms on behalf of US foreign policy and military operations.
Insiders at the Pentagon reveal discussions about opening recruiting stations overseas and putting more immigrants on a faster track to US citizenship if they volunteer, The Boston Globe reports:
The idea of signing up foreigners who are seeking US citizenship is gaining traction as a way to address a critical need for the Pentagon, while fully absorbing some of the roughly one million immigrants that enter the United States legally each year.
Supporters include the American Enterprise Institute:
"It works as a military idea and it works in the context of American immigration," said Thomas Donnelly , a military scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a leading proponent of recruiting more foreigners to serve in the military.
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December 19, 2006
Happy Birthday, CIA
Someone just sent me this link: from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting:
Extra! November/December 1997
One of the most evenhanded examples of mainstream coverage of the CIA's anniversary was on ABC News' website, where the report opens on a note of caution: "No doubt the nation's leading band of spies prefers to forget about the disastrous Bay of Pigs, bumbling plots to knock off political leaders and an abject failure to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall," writes ABC's David Phinney. "During the 1960s, the CIA experimented with LSD on unsuspecting subjects and spied on citizens protesting the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, it associated with groups found to be involved in torture and executions, and became mixed up in trading drugs for arms during the Iran/Contra era." Unlike most features on the CIA's anniversary, Phinney's story includes a quote from a CIA critic, a representative of Human Rights Watch.
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November 29, 2006
The Shadow Army
CBS and The San Francisco Chronicle both ran recent stories on contractors working in Iraq.
Privatizing support services supposedly brings down costs for the Pentagon. It also sweeps a myriad number of problems under the rug -- everything from who gets to carry guns and the liability for shooting people to the longterm health problems of the civilian workers.
Both CBS and the Chron hone in on the looming challenges of post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD is common among soldiers so it seems likely it is among civilian contractors as well, right? Especially in an asymmetrical threat environment where danger lurks around every corner and there is no frontline to hide behind.
I tried selling a story about contractors to CBS last summer -- actually several. This is that organization's effort: Civilian Contractors Face Perils in Iraq. It has an uncanny resemblance to a story I ran several years ago, including the spotlight on Sam Walker. He was eating french fries in a dining facility when a body bomber walked in and killed dozens:
"Body parts were flying all over and pieces of flesh flying in my face," Walker says.When it was over, the former contractor was drenched in the blood of the victims around him and rescue workers took him for dead. "I was so close to the bomber," he adds. "There was copper wire from the bomb embedded in my jacket."
Walker took a full blast to the side of his head and shrapnel pitted his body. But when KBR medics treated him following the bombing, he says they merely rubbed Vaseline on his burns and gave him Motrin for pain.
"For two days I told them my side was hurting but they said I would be okay, and wouldn't give me medical leave," Walker says.
The Chron's, "Civilian Workers in Iraq Suffering Combat Tauma," charts a similar course. (Yes, I did suggest the subject to a Chron editor).
Of course we all owe a debt to Jana Crowder and her Web site www.americancontractorsiniraq.com. She is the source for so much of what reporters do about the personal lives of contractors these days.
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October 22, 2006
Babylon Rising in the Jet Age
Things began looking more sketchier than ever to John Owens as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Iraq in March 2005 following some R&R in Kuwait city.
Working as a general construction foreman for First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, the lead builder for the new $592-million US embassy in Baghdad, Owen remembers being surrounded by about 50 company laborers freshly hired from the Philippines and India. Everyone was holding boarding passes to Dubai -- not to Baghdad.
"I thought there was some sort of mix up and I was getting on the wrong plane," says the 48-year-old Floridian who once worked as a fisherman with his father before moving into the construction business.
He buttonholed a First Kuwaiti manager standing near by and asked what was going on. The manager waved his hand, looked around the terminal and whispered to keep quiet.
"'If anyone hears we are going to Baghdad, they won't let us on the plane,'" Owens recalls the manager saying.
The secrecy struck him as a little odd, but he grabbed his luggage and moved on. Everyone filed out to the private jet and flew directly to Baghdad. "I figured that they had visas for Kuwait and not Iraq," Owens offers.
The deception had all the appearances of smuggling workers into Iraq, but Owens didn't know at the time that the Philippines, India, and other countries had banned or restricted their citizens from working in Iraq because of safety concerns and growing opposition to the war. After 2004, many passports were stamped "Not valid for Iraq."
Nor did Owens know that both the US State Department and the Pentagon were quietly investigating contractors such as First Kuwaiti for labor trafficking and worker abuse. In fact, the international news media had accused First Kuwaiti repeatedly of coercing workers to take jobs in battle-torn Iraq once they had been lured to Kuwait with safer offers.
A FORTRESS RISES IN BAGHDAD
The Kuwait-headquartered, Lebanese-run company has billed several billion dollars on US contracts since the war began in March 2003. Much of its work is performed by cheap labor largely hired from South Asia and the company has an estimated 7,500 foreign laborers in the theater of war. Now, with a highly secretive contract awarded by the US State Department, First Kuwait is in the midst of building the most expensive and heavily fortified US embassy in the world. Scheduled to open in 2007, the sprawling complex near the Tigris River will equal Vatican City in size.
But Owens says that working on the project proved to be one of the worst jobs he has ever had in his 27 years of construction work.
Not one of the five different US embassy sites Owens had worked on around the world previously compared to the mess he describes. Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia all had their share of dictators, violence and economic disruption, but the companies building the embassies were always fair and professional, he says. First Kuwaiti is the exception. Brutal and inhumane, he says "I've never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken."
Seven months after signing on with First Kuwaiti in November 2005, he quit.
In the resignation letter last June, Owens told First Kuwaiti and US State Department officials that his managers physically assaulted and beat the construction workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached security.
And it was all happening smack in the middle of the US-controlled Green Zone -- right under the nose of the State Department that had quietly awarded the controversial embassy contract in July 2005.
He also complained of poor sanitation, squalid living conditions and medical malpractice in the labor camps where several thousand low-paid migrant workers lived. Those workers, recruited on the global labor market from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and other poor south Asian countries, earned as little as $10 to $30 a day. As with many US-funded contractors, First Kuwaiti prefers importing labor because it views Iraqi workers as a security headache not worth the trouble.
Despite numerous emails and phone calls about such allegations, neither First Kuwaiti general manager Wadih Al Absi nor his lawyer Angela Styles, the former top White House contract policy advisor, have responded. After a year of requests, State Department officials involved with the project also have ignored or rejected opportunities for comment.
YOUR PASSPORTS PLEASE
That same March Owens returned to work in Baghdad, Rory Mayberry would witness similar events after he flew to Kuwait from his home in Myrtle Creek, Oregon.
The gravely voiced, easy-going Army veteran had previously worked in Iraq for Halliburton and the private security company, Danubia. Missing the action and the big paychecks US contractors draw Iraq, he snagged a $10,000 a month job with MSDS consulting Company.
MSDS is a two-person minority-owned consulting company that assists US State Department managers in Washington with procurement programming. Never before had the firm offered medical services or worked in Iraq, but First Kuwaiti hired MSDS on the recommendation of Jim Golden, the State Department contract official overseeing the embassy project. Within days, an agreement worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical care was signed.
The 45-year-old Mayberry, a former emergency medical technician in the Army who worked as a funeral director in Oregon, responded to a help wanted ad placed by MSDS. The plan was that he would work as a medic attending to the construction crews on the work site in Baghdad.
Mayberry sensed things weren't right when he boarded a First Kuwaiti flight on March 15 to Baghdad -- a different flight from Owen's.
At the airport in Kuwait City, Mayberry said, he saw a person behind a counter hand First Kuwaiti managers a passenger manifest, an envelope of money and a stack of boarding passes to Dubai. The managers then handed out the boarding passes to Mayberry and 50 or so new First Kuwaiti laborers, mostly Filipinos.
"Everyone was told to tell customs and security that they were flying to Dubai," Mayberry explains. Once the group passed the guards, they went upstairs and waited by the McDonald's for First Kuwaiti staff to unlock a door -- Gate 26 -- that led to an unmarked, white 52-seat jet. It was "an antique piece of shit" Mayberry offers in a casual, blunt manner.
"All the workers had their passports taken away by First Kuwaiti," Mayberry claims, and while he knew the plane was bound for Baghdad, he's not so sure the others were aware of their destination. The Asian laborers began asking questions about why they were flying north and the jet wasn't flying east over the ocean, he says. "I think they thought they were going to work in Dubai."
One former First Kuwaiti supervisor acknowledges that the company holds passports of many workers in Iraq -- a violation of US contracting.
"All of the passports are kept in the offices," said one company insider who requested anonymity in fear of financial and personal retribution. As for distributing Dubai boarding passes for Baghdad flights, "It's because of the travel bans," he explained.
Mayberry believes that migrant workers from the Philippines, India and Nepal are especially vulnerable to employers like First Kuwaiti because their countries have little or no diplomatic presence in Iraq.
"If you don't have your passport or an embassy to go to, what you do to get out of a bad situation?" he asks. "How can they go to the US State Department for help if First Kuwaiti is building their embassy?"
DEADLY 'CANDY STORE' MEDICINE
Owens had already been working at the embassy site since late November when Mayberry arrived. The two never crossed paths, but both share similar complaints about management of the project and brutal treatment of the laborers that, at times, numbered as many as 2,500. Most are from the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. Others are from Egypt and Turkey.
The number of workers with injuries and ailments stunned Mayberry. He went to work immediately after and stayed busy around the clock for days.
Four days later, First Kuwaiti pulled him off the job after he requested an investigation of two patients who had died before he arrived from what he suspected was medical malpractice. Mayberry also recommended that the health clinics be shut down because of unsanitary conditions and mismanagement.
"There hadn't been any follow up on medical care. People were walking around intoxicated on pain relievers with unwrapped wounds and there were a lot of infections," he recalls. "The idea that there was any hygiene seemed ridiculous. I'm not sure they were even bathing."
In reports made available to the US State Department, the US Army and First Kuwaiti, Mayberry listed dozens of concerns about the clinics, which he found lacking in hot water, disinfectant, hand washing stations, properly supplied ambulances, and communication equipment. Mayberry also complained that workers' medical records were in total disarray or nonexistent, the beds were dirty, and the support staff hired by First Kuwaiti was poorly trained.
The handling of prescription drugs especially bothered him. Many of the drugs that originated from Iraq and Kuwait were unsecured, disorganized and unintelligibly labeled, he said in one memo. He found that the medical staff frequently misdiagnosed patients. Prescription pain killers were being handed out "like a candy store ... and then people were sent back to work."
Mayberry warned that the practice could cause addiction and safety hazards. "Some were on the construction site climbing scaffolding 30 feet off the ground. I told First Kuwaiti that you don't give painkillers to people who are running machinery and working on heavy construction and they said 'that's how we do it.'"
The sloppy handling of drugs may have led to the two deaths, Mayberry speculates. One worker, age 25, died in his room. The second, in his mid-30s, died at the clinic because of heart failure. Both deaths may be "medical homicide," Mayberry says -- because the patients may have been negligently prescribed improper drug treatment.
If the State Department investigated, Mayberry knows nothing of the outcome. Two State Department officials with project oversight responsibilities did not return phone calls or emails inquiring about Mayberry's allegations. The reports may have been ignored, not because of his complaints, but because Mayberry is a terrible speller, a problem compounded by an Arabic translation program loaded on his computer, he says.
ACCIDENTS HAPPEN
Owens' account of his seven months on the job paints a similar picture to Mayberry's. Health and safety measures were essentially non-existent, he says. Not once did he witness a safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell and broke his back and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. "The accident might not have happened if there was a safety program and he had known how to use a safety harness."
Owens also says that managers regularly beat workers and that laborers were issued only one work uniform, making it difficult to go to the laundry. "You could never have it washed. Clothing got really bad -- full of sweat and dirt."
And while he often smuggled water to the work crews, medical care was a different issue. When he urged laborers to get medical treatment for rashes and sores, First Kuwaiti managers accused him of spoiling the laborers and allowing them simply to avoid work, he says.
State Department officials supervising the project are aware of many such events, but apparently do nothing, he said. Once when 17 workers climbed the wall of the construction site to escape, a State Department official helped round them up and put them in "virtual lockdown," Owens said.
Just before he resigned, hundreds of Pakistani workers went on strike in June and beat up a Lebanese manager who they accused of harassing them. Owens estimates that 375 laborers were then sent home.
'TREATED LIKE ANIMALS'
Recent First Kuwaiti employees agree that the accounts shared by Owens and Mayberry are accurate. One longtime supervisor claims that 50 to 60 percent of the laborers regularly protest that First Kuwaiti "treats them like animals," and routinely reduces their promised pay with confusing and unexplained deductions.
Another former First Kuwaiti manager, who declines to be named because of possible adverse consequences, says that Owens' and Mayberry's complaints only begin "to scratch the surface."
But scratching the surface is the only view yet available of what may be the most lasting monument to the US liberation and occupation of Iraq. As of now only a handful of authorized State Department managers and contractors, along with First Kuwaiti workers and contractors, are officially allowed inside the project's walls. No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site with towering construction cranes raising their necks along the skyline.
Even this tight security is a charade, says on former high-level First Kuwaiti manager. First Kuwaiti managers living at the construction site regularly smuggle prostitutes in from the streets of Baghdad outside the Green Zone, he says.
Prostitutes, he explains are viewed as possible spies. "They are a big security risk."
But the exposure that the US occupation forces and First Kuwaiti may fear most could begin with the contractor itself and the conditions workers are forced to endure at this most obvious symbol of the American democracy project in Iraq.
David Phinney is a journalist and broadcaster based in Washington, DC, whose work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, New York Times and on ABC and PBS. He can be contacted at: phinneydavid@yahoo.com.
Posted by davidphinney at 04:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 13, 2006
Just in Time for the November Election
Crude oil fell to $63.76 a barrel at the close, down nearly 3% from yesterday, as the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Energy Information Administration both cut global demand projections for the rest of 2006 and 2007.
Who has more influence over oil prices? George Bush and his Saudi friends or Nancy Pelosi and her socialite buddies?
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September 07, 2006
ABC, bin Laden, Clinton and Monica
It figures that ABC would be bending current events for reasons beyond my understanding. Ratings? Politics? Ass kissing to the current administration?
Who knows? Perhaps, it's just typical corporate incompetence.
On January 21, 1998, ABC's Jackie Judd was the first network reporter to broadcast the allegations about President Clinton and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and the accompanying Paula Jones freak show relating to sexual harassment complaints. Judd saw it all the way through, thanks to her pipeline to Kenneth Starr's engineered leaks and his seven-year, $70 million investigation of the Clinton's stupidity.
The end result? Starr found a semen-stained dress and helped spark the impeachment of a president.
What could be more decadent than for an entire Congress to be consumed by such an event? How about a news media that found easy pickings in headlining the steamy details of a president with an unzipped pecker and a willing intern on her knees?
My theory is that the Republican Congress was simply following the headlines.
So, let's have a docudrama about TV news executives and their decision making during the Monica Lewinsky days while Osama bin Laden was laying plans for attacking US embassies (257 people were killed and over 4,000 wounded) and the USS Cole (17 sailors were killed and 39 were injured).
I worked at ABC and my managers were on the brink of masturbatory delight over how many ways to describe an Oval Office blow job for family viewing. Every morning, they would look at the viewer ratings and chant "Monica, Monica, Monica."
The constant drumbeat drove a president to impeachment and when the Clinton Administration bombed Afghanistan and Sudan to hit bin Laden, ABC managers mused that it was to distract people from impeachment.
Oh, and my stories on terrorism and bin Laden? One news manager called them "thumb suckers."
I am sure he is still a consummate ass kisser.
Then again, thumb sucking, cock sucking and ass kissing is just just business. Some just make better news.
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February 24, 2006
All that Jazz about "Viva la Nueva Orleans"
New Orleans will end up looking like Los Angeles soon, thanks to the flood of illegal workers flooding in from south of the border to do the rebuilding along the Gulf Coast. That's the prediction of a Los Angeles Times commentary.
Why will this be? The Department of Homeland Security temporarily suspended sanctions against employers hiring workers who fail to document their citizenship.
The idea is to benefit Americans who may have lost everything in the hurricane with the rebuilding, but the main effect will be to let contractors hire illegal immigrants.
Given the snail's pace of rebuilding, the Bush administration's "idea" strikes pretty hollow. It's all about cheap labor.
Which is why the White House suspended the Davis-Bacon Act in Louisiana and devastated parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The pesky law inconveniently requires government contractors to pay prevailing wages when being paid with congressionally appropriated funds.
Writer Gregory Rodriguez, a contributing editor to The LA Times and Irvine Senior fellow at the New America Foundation, makes note of some fascinating historical data, stretching back to Irish immigrants building the Erie Canal, Italians building the New York Subway (great tile work, by the way), and Chinese building the transcontinental railroad.
Also, a more recent precedent:
The effects of Hurricane Andrew may better foretell New Orleans' future. The 1992 storm displaced 250,000 residents in southeastern Florida. The construction boom that followed attracted large numbers of Latin American immigrants, who rebuilt towns such as Homestead, whose Latino population has increased by 50% since then.
Unfortunately, the fascinating train of thought trails off with passing mention of the "black-white divide" and leads to nowhere but praise for the Bush administration's proposed guest worker program:
Last week, the White House said it will push its plan to allow illegal immigrants already in the U.S. to become legal guest workers. Good. Hurricane Katrina exposed the nation's black-white divide. Post-Katrina reconstruction will soon spotlight the hypocrisy of refusing to grant legal status to those who will rebuild the Gulf Coast and New Orleans.
What doe that mean? Let's ignore high unemployment among African Americans and working-class whites (many displaced across the country by Katrina's savage fury) in the favor of a new guest worker program for lower wages? Just because a guest worker program will probably happen, doesn't mean it is sensible or fair. It will just allow developers to profit off lower wages paid for by US taxpayers and perhaps trigger a "black-latino divide."
After all, African Americans helped build the US economy for more than 200 years free-of-charge until the bloodbath of the Civil War. That "pre-Katrina effect" had no guests. It was called "slavery" and enforced with whips, chains, gunpoint, and the tearing apart of families on the auction block. Those slaves that complained were greeted with threats of being sold "down river." No doubt, many of their descendents found their way to New Orleans.
I think I will leave my thoughts to trail off now.
Here's the full LA Times commentary.
Posted by davidphinney at 12:37 PM | Comments (0)