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The Rachel Maddow Show covered the meeting of the mercenary trade group, the International Peace Operations Association. In this segment, I suggest a new, softer name for the organization…
if you are in the Washington DC area, come out to this event!:
A Panel Discussion on the Private Military Industry in Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa
October 27, 2009, 6 pm
True Reformer Building: 1200 U Street, NW, Washington, DC
6pm: The Detainee Project photo exhibit by Chris Bartlett
6:30pm: Panel discussion begins
Despite grave human rights abuses at the hands of U.S. private military contractors in Iraq, the private military industry is currently expanding in unprecedented ways. Contractors far outnumber U.S. military in Afghanistan and peacekeeping and security operations throughout Africa have become a multi-billion dollar industry for these corporations.
Join the Center for Constitutional Rights for a panel discussion on the harmful and dangerous impact of privatized conflict on human rights, and the implications it has for future wars and conflicts. Learn about current efforts to secure corporate accountability and redress for the victims of human rights abuses, and find out how you can get involved. Photographer Chris Bartlett will also display The Detainee Project, an exhibit that features CCR clients who were allegedly tortured by contractors in Iraq.
Panelists:
Vince Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights
Jeremy Scahill, Journalist and Author of Blackwater: Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army
Emira Woods, Co-Director of Foreign Policy in Focus
Representative Jan Schakowsky, Congressional Representative from the 9th District of Illinois
ALSO:
Protest the Mercenary Industry!
End War Profiteering!
Demonstrate on Tuesday, October 27
from Noon to 2pm
in Farragut Square Park (1634 I St. NW)
As the mercenary industry gathers in DC for their annual summit, we will gather in Farragut Square Park to say NO! to mercenaries profiting off of wars and the suffering of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa.
U.S. Corporations are making billions off of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout Africa. On October 27, activists and supporters of human rights, peace and justice, sustainable development, and true human security will be speaking out about abuses by private military contractors in these regions, poets and musicians will help us make some noise, and we will shine the spotlight on the mercenaries’ meeting in DC during a critical time for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the escalation of U.S. military involvement in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and other Africa nations.
Come out in support of peace and justice!
Video from my brief appearance Friday morning on Democracy Now! discussing my story for The Nation: Judge Refuses to Dismiss War Crimes Case Against Blackwater
A new State Department audit zeroes in on a politically-connected Kuwaiti company over shoddy work in constructing the world’s largest embassy
By Jeremy Scahill
The extent of the massive waste and abuse surrounding the construction of the monstrous US embassy in Baghdad continues to expand. The State Department has just released another audit of the embassy’s construction and suggests that the Kuwaiti contractor hired by the Bush administration to do most of the construction work may have to repay more than $130 million to US taxpayers as a result of construction deficiencies, incomplete and undocumented design work, inadequate quality control and interest on unauthorized payments.
First a bit of background:
The Baghdad embassy—the largest of any nation on planet earth and ten times bigger than any other US embassy—is striking evidence indicating a continued US presence in the country for many years to come. The structure cost more than $700 million and is the size of 80 football fields. It is bigger than the Vatican, six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York and is about two thirds the size of the National Mall in Washington. It has space for 1,000 employees who are guarded by scores of paramilitary mercenary forces. In other words it is the perfect structure for a nation that claims to be leaving Iraq very soon.
The embassy is more like a fortress and hardly sends a message of warm diplomacy. “What kind of embassy is it when everybody lives inside and it’s blast-proof, and people are running around with helmets and crouching behind sandbags?” said Edward Peck, the former US ambassador to Iraq when the embassy was first being constructed.
The company that was contracted to build the embassy was First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting (FKTC). It’s run by Mohammad I. H. Marafie, “a member of one of the most powerful mercantile families in Kuwait,” according to CorpWatch. “FKTC’s general manager and co-owner, Wadih al-Absi jets back and forth to the United States, dreaming of magazine covers celebrating his rise to a global player in large-scale engineering and construction… FKTC is one of the many Middle East companies that collectively ship tens of thousands of cheap day laborers to Iraq’s war zones where they are paid just dollars a day.”
In 2006, David Phinney reported: “Several other contractors that competed for the embassy contracts… believe that a high-level decision at the State Department was made to favor a Kuwait-based firm in appreciation for Kuwait’s support of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. ‘It was political,’ said one contractor.”
FKIT has been plagued by allegations from whistleblowers who worked on the embassy that say the company “brought workers, mostly South Asians and Filipinos, to Baghdad under false pretenses, then abused and threatened them while there.” The company, predictably, denies those charges.
Rory Mayberry, who first worked with First Kuwaiti in March 200 as a medic on the embassy construction site, “alleges that when he showed up at the Kuwait airport for his flight into Baghdad, there were 51 Filipino employees of First Kuwaiti also waiting for the same flight — except the Filipinos believed they were going to Dubai,” reported NBC News. “He says the Filipinos were told to proceed to “GATE 26” at the Kuwait airport — but no Gate 26 existed. There was only a door to a staircase that led to a white plane on the tarmac:”
Mayberry says even he was given a boarding pass that was marked for Dubai, though he knew he was going to Baghdad.
“The steward was having problems keeping guys in their seats because they were so upset, wanted to get off the airplane,” says Mayberry. “They were upset they weren’t headed to Dubai where they were promised they were working.”
He says when he arrived in Baghdad he notified the State Department official in charge of the embassy project about what had happened on his flight and she replied “that’s the way they do it.”
First Kuwaiti is now back in the spotlight as the State Department Inspector General on October 22 released an audit of the company’s five Iraq embassy contracts worth some $470 million. The audit suggests that First Kuwaiti may be asked to repay more than $130 million—more than a quarter of the total project money paid to the company— to the US government. According to the audit:
As a result of construction deficiencies, incomplete and undocumented design work, additional maintenance charges attributable to inadequate quality control and commissioning procedures, and unrecovered liquidated damages and interest on unauthorized advance mobilization payments, we recommend that the Department of State attempt to recover more than $132 million from First Kuwaiti.
Among the allegations against First Kuwaiti in the State Department audit are:
The audit also found that First Kuwaiti had an “inadequate quality control program,” while some contracted tasks “either were not performed or were performed incorrectly.”
The audit also examines the conduct of the Emergency Project Coordination Office (EPCO), an ad hoc organization set up to coordinate the embassy’s construction. EPCO administered the First Kuwaiti contracts. According to the audit:
EPCO did not adequately discharge its contract administration responsibilities. EPCO was managed by an individual who did not enforce contract provisions, most notably design and construction requirements, which resulted in many of the construction deficiencies listed. Of prime significance, construction deficiencies prevented the contracts from being completed on time, and Embassy personnel could not move as planned to the more secure facilities at the [embassy]. Even though First Kuwaiti did not meet the required contract completion dates for three contracts, covering housing, infrastructure, and support facilities, EPCO did not require First Kuwaiti to pay $10.9 million in liquidated damages. EPCO also approved $69.1 million in advance mobilization payments that were not authorized by the contracts and did not require First Kuwaiti to pay $3.3 million in interest for the use of those funds. EPCO approved contractor invoices without adequate documentation and did not require First Kuwaiti to comply with the reporting requirements of the Cargo Preference Act.
What makes this story all the more outrageous is that the Obama administration is moving forward with a plan to build a $736 million massive US embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan that is modeled after the Baghdad embassy.
While the DoD targets a community group that does no business with the Pentagon, actual corporate crooks go un-confronted and continue to rake in $ billions in contracts.
By Jeremy Scahill
On Tuesday night, US Undersecretary of Defense Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s top contracting official, sent a memo to the commanders and directors of all branches of the military instructing them to cease all business with the embattled community organization ACORN and to take “all necessary and appropriate” steps to prevent future contracts with the organization. Assad’s brief memo [PDF] contained the two-page guidelines issued October 7 by Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Orszag’s guidelines were issued following the passage of Congressional legislation aimed at “defunding ACORN.”
Orszag’s guidelines were sent on October 7 to “the heads of Executive Departments and Agencies” and instructed them to “immediately commence all necessary and appropriate steps” to comply with the terms of the Defund ACORN Act. These include: no future obligation of funds, suspension of grant and contract payments and no funding of ACORN and its affiliates through Federal grantees or contractors. “Your agency should take steps so that no Federal funds are awarded or obligated” to ACORN, wrote Orszag.
While the DoD memo sent by Assad is basically a formality initiated by Orszag’s guidelines to all federal agencies, it is nonetheless remarkable given that ACORN is not a Defense Department contractor. According to an ACORN spokesperson, the group has not received Pentagon funds, nor has the community group even considered applying for such funds. “Of course we were hoping to win the contract to build the B-1 bomber, but we didn’t get that one,” says Brian Kettering, ACORN’s Deputy Director of National Operations, sarcastically. “This is all just silly, but the travesty here is that once again the witch-hunt against ACORN continues while there is a total neglect of [the misconduct] of the likes of Blackwater and Halliburton.”
While the DoD sends out memos regarding an organization that it does not contract with, the Pentagon currently does business with a slew of corporate criminals whose billions of dollars in annual federal contracts make the $53 million in government funds received by ACORN over the past 15 years look like, well, acorns. The top three government contractors—all of them weapons manufacturers—committed 109 acts of misconduct since 1995, according to the Project on Oversight and Government Reform. In that period, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Boeing paid fines or settlements totaling nearly $3 billion. In 2007 alone, the three companies won some $77 billion in federal contracts. There has been no letter sent around to federal agencies instructing them to cancel contracts with these companies that have ripped off taxpayers and engaged in a variety of fraudulent activities with federal dollars.
Also, it is not just the Defense Department that continues to hire corporations with real rap sheets. Contracting fraud and abuse is a corrupt cancer that permeates the federal bureaucracy. Overall, the top 100 government contractors make about $300 billion a year in federal contracts. Since 1995, they have paid a total of $26 billion in fines to settle 676 cases stemming from fraud, waste or abuse. According to the 2008 Corporate Fraud Task Force Report to the President, “United States Attorneys’ offices opened 878 new criminal health care fraud investigations involving 1,548 potential defendants. Federal prosecutors had 1,612 health care fraud criminal investigations pending, involving 2,603 potential defendants, and filed criminal charges in 434 cases involving 786 defendants. A total of 560 defendants were convicted for health care fraud-related crimes during the year.” Last month, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer settled a series of cases, including Medicaid fraud and illegally marketing banned drugs, in what the Department of Justice said is “the largest civil fraud settlement in history against a pharmaceutical company.” The company has also been ordered to pay a criminal fine of $1.195 billion, “the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the United States for any matter,” according to the DoJ.
ACORN, which, like all recipients of federal dollars, certainly should be subjected to scrutiny, but these stats are a damning commentary on the upside down priorities when it comes to fighting contracting corruption.
Florida Representative Alan Grayson has argued that the Defund ACORN Act as written by the Republican geniuses on the Hill should actually apply to all government contractors. As he told Salon’s Glenn Greenwald after the bill passed: “The barn door has been opened, and the horses and the cows have both left. It’s done. It’s passed; there’s nothing they can do. There’s not take-backs in legislation; that’s not the way it works. And if they were sloppy in writing up this bill, then maybe they should have read the bill before they went ahead and tried to ram it through the House. Read their own bill, for a change.”
If the law is to be applied equally, then Peter Orszag should be firing off memos instructing all federal agencies to cease business and cancel contracts with massive financial institutions, weapons manufacturers, mercenary firms and pharmaceutical companies. Given the incredible government reliance on corporations, particularly in the defense industry and in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, don’t hold your breath waiting for such a memo on DoD stationary any time soon.
Aerospace giant Boeing is a recidivist corporate crook, yet in a visit to Moscow, Clinton acted like a Boeing spokesperson.
By Jeremy Scahill
On a recent visit to Moscow, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was there to deliver a “shameless pitch” to the start-up Russian airline Rosavia to sign a major contract with Boeing to purchase a new fleet of aircraft from the US aerospace giant. “This has been a consistent commitment on the part of the United States Government here in Moscow to promote this, because it really does illustrate very powerfully what we can do together,” Clinton said during an October 13 visit to Boeing Design Center Moscow. She said the Export-Import Bank of the United States “would welcome an application for financing from Rosavia to support its purchase of Boeing Aircraft, and I hope that on a future visit I’ll see a lot of new Rosavia-Boeing planes when I land in Moscow.”
Boeing is the leading aerospace company in the world and a major US defense contractor. Overall, it is the third largest US government contractor with some $24 billion in annual federal contracts. The company does more than $60 billion in annual sales.
Boeing is also a major recidivist corporate crook.
Since 1995, Boeing has paid $1.5 billion in fines to settle more than 30 instances of misconduct, according to the non-partisan Project on Government Oversight. According to POGO, these include multiple violations of the Arms Export Control Act, including selling defense technology to Russia and China showing “blatant disregard” for State Department directives. According to POGO, Boeing settled cases with the US government for:
Other misconduct by Boeing, according to POGO, includes “unauthorized possession of defense information,” gender discrimination, violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, the False Claims Act and anti-trust laws, water pollution in California, contaminating thousands of homes in Colorado with radioactive waste from the Department of Energy’s Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, radioactive and toxic contamination near Los Angeles, over-billing and illegal hiring of government officials.
In Moscow, Clinton said: “During his last visit to Moscow in July, President Obama said that when our economies grow more intertwined, all of us can make progress. And I can’t think of a better illustration than what we see here at the Boeing Design Center.” Perhaps Boeing’s victims and the prosecutors that pursued the company’s repeated violations of US laws may have a different perspective from Clinton on that comment. But when said she was engaged in a “shameless pitch,” Clinton was telling the truth: A shameless pitch for a shameless corporation.
The ‘McCain Conference on Ethics and Military Leadership’ appears to be ahead of the senator when it comes to the US use of mercenary forces.
By Jeremy Scahill
A little-publicized US Naval Academy conference named after Senator John McCain and bankrolled by his wealthy wife, Cindy, issued a call earlier this year for the US government to ban the use of armed private security contractors like Blackwater in US war zones, stating bluntly, “contractors should not be deployed as security guards, sentries, or even prison guards within combat areas.”
“[T]he use of deadly force must be entrusted only to those whose training, character and accountability are most worthy of the nation’s trust: the military,” reads the executive summary of the U.S. Naval Academy’s 9th Annual McCain Conference on Ethics and Military Leadership, which was held in April at the Annapolis Naval Station. “The military profession carefully cultivates an ethic of ‘selfless service,’ and develops the virtues that can best withstand combat pressures and thus achieve the nation’s objectives in an honorable way. By contrast, most corporate ethical standards and available regulatory schemes are ill-suited for this environment.”
In 2001, Cindy McCain, who may be worth as much as $100 million, first endowed the McCain conference “in honor of her husband” with a $210,000 gift that was specifically intended to fund conferences that would “bring together key military officers and civilian academics responsible for ethics education and character developments.”
According to the Fall 2009 newsletter, “Taking Stock,” published by the US Naval Academy’s Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership—the host of the McCain Conference—among the speakers at the 2009 event was none other than Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater. Prince’s company is the most infamous of those engaged in the type of armed activity explicitly condemned by the conference’s leadership.
The executive summary released by the McCain conference was recently highlighted in a report completed on September 29 by the Congressional Research Service on the use of private contractors. That report said that the US is “relying heavily” on armed contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and suggests their use could continue to rise. The report also states that misconduct and the killing of civilians by armed security contractors “may have undermined U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Despite the fact that the McCain conference, which publicly advocated against the use of armed contractors in combat areas bears Sen. McCain’s name and was bankrolled by his wife, when it has come to making this a major issue on Capitol Hill, the Arizona Senator has been largely silent. In 2007, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Jan Schakowsky introduced the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, which sought to do precisely what the McCain conference called for two years later: to ban the use of mercenaries in US war zones. McCain did not endorse or co-sponsor that legislation, which would certainly have benefited from his support (neither did then-Senator Barack Obama). Responding to a reporter’s question on the campaign trail in July 2008 about whether he believed that US troops and not private guards should protect US diplomats in Iraq, McCain said, “I’d like it, but we don’t have enough. Yes, and I’d love to see pigs fly, but it ain’t gonna happen.”
The McCain campaign hired people with deep ties to the mercenary industry to work on his presidential bid. Among these was senior strategist, Charlie Black, whose firm BKSH & Associates worked for Blackwater’s owner Erik Prince, helping to guide Prince through his appearance on Capitol Hill in the aftermath of the September 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad. McCain also brought on as a senior foreign policy advisor Richard Armitage, the former deputy Secretary of State. After leaving the government, Armitage served as a senior adviser for Veritas Capital from 2005 to 2007. Veritas owns the mercenary giant DynCorp, which holds billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan security and training contracts.
Moreover, the International Republican Institute, which has deep ties to McCain, hired Blackwater as its private security force in Iraq, paying Blackwater an average of more than $17 million a year since 2005 for security services, according to records.
As the Obama administration weighs a substantial troops increase in Afghanistan, leading Democrats and Republicans are calling for an expanded role for US trainers for the Afghan military, which will mean more business for private contractors. Blackwater continues to play a central role in the CIA’s drone bombing program in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which vice president Joe Biden and others are suggesting should intensify. At present, there are 74,000 contractors on the DoD payroll in Afghanistan—roughly 10,000 more than the number of US troops. Thousands of other contractors work for the US State Department and other agencies.
The McCain conference raised questions about “the privatization of combat support functions,” including intelligence collection and analysis, as well as “advising/training for combat.” It concluded, “In irregular warfare environments, where civilian cooperation is crucial,” barring the use of armed contractors “is both ethically and strategically necessary.”
From my latest article in The Nation:
The nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight and Reform recently revealed that the top 100 government contractors made nearly $300 billion from federal contracts in 2007 alone. Since 1995 these same contractors have been involved with 676 cases of “misconduct” and paid $26 billion in fines to settle cases stemming from fraud, waste or abuse. Fines and other penalties, it seems, are simply the stunningly small price of doing government business.
Take the case of the top three war contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. These companies have engaged in 108 instances of misconduct since 1995 and have paid fines or settlements totaling nearly $3 billion. In 2007 they won some $77 billion in federal contracts. Or consider pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which in September paid $2.3 billion to settle a slew of criminal and civil cases, including Medicaid fraud. According to the Justice Department, this was “the largest healthcare fraud settlement” in its history. Yet Pfizer made more than $40 billion in profits last year and won $73 million in federal contracts in 2007; it continues to do robust business with the government. Not bad for a “corporate felon.” Unfortunately, neither Pfizer nor the largest US military contractors are targets of significant Congressional action. Instead it’s ACORN, a community organization that trains and advocates for poor and working-class Americans.
A small but growing number of lawmakers are fighting to confront out-of-control corporations.
This video, “Return of the Warlords”: Afghan Elections Marred by Fraud, Warlord Dominance,” was just produced by my great friend Rick Rowley of BigNoise Films. He is simply the best un-embedded journalist in the field today. If we had a sane nation with a democratic media, Rick’s reporting would appear on network news in the US and not just on Al Jazeera. Rick’s story will appear in full tonight on Al Jazeera English.
ENDING OBAMA’S WAR: SOLIDARITY WITH THE PEOPLE OF AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN
Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 7:00pm
Proshansky Auditorium, The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave at 34th Street [BDFV & NQRW trains to 34th St, 6 train to 33]
October 7th marks the eighth anniversary of the launch of the US led “War on Terror” in Afghanistan. Defending it as a “war of necessity,” the Obama administration is on the precipice of an enormous troop surge in Afghanistan and an escalation in Pakistan, which has already begun with drone attacks. This strategic dialogue will explore a deeper historic analysis of the realities on the ground in order to inform our resistance in the U.S. and to develop a more effective solidarity with the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Speakers Include:
Jeremy Scahill: Independent journalist, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine and a correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now! He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. He has appeared on ABC World News, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS’s The NewsHour, Bill Moyers Journal
http://rebelreports.com
Zoya: a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). Like many RAWA members, Zoya has witnessed and endured more tragedy and terror than most people do in a lifetime. Zoya grew up during the wars that ravaged Afghanistan and was robbed of her mother and father when they were murdered by fundamentalists - Zoya was only fourteen. Devastated by so much death and destruction, she fled Kabul with her grandmother and started a new life in exile in Pakistan. After attending a school funded by RAWA, she joined the underground women’s organization and continues their work resisting fundamentalism and war today.
http://www.rawa.org
Bill Fletcher: the Executive Editor of The Black Commentator and founder of the Center for Labor Renewal. A longtime labor, racial justice and international activist, he is the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum.
http://blackcommentator.com
Adaner Usmani: works with the Labor Party of Pakistan (LPP) and Action for a Progressive Pakistan (APP). With these and other groups, he has been involved in antiwar work, principally in Pakistan but also in the US, as well as assorted campaigns for peasant and worker rights. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology from NYU.
http://progpak.wordpress.com
Sponsored by the South Asia Solidarity Initiative & Center for Place, Culture and Politics
