Evelyn Pringle April 25, 2007
When President Bush announced "Mission Accomplished," and the end of the war in May 2003, he also said we would help the citizens of Iraq rebuild their country. "Now that the dictator's gone," he stated, "we and our coalition partners are helping Iraqis to lay the foundations of a free economy."
Apparently he was referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority that took up residence in Saddam's luxurious palace in May 2003, with the newly appointed King, Paul Bremer. The CPA was granted the authority to award reconstruction contracts in Iraq and it used that authority to implement what will go down in the history books as the most blatant war profiteering scheme of all time.
In large part, the masterminds of the reconstruction disaster that would occur after the CPA took over Iraq were Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and Undersecretary of Defense, Douglas Feith.
But to ensure control of the contracting process on the ground in Iraq, Bush filled the top slots of the CPA with the administration cronies. For instance, a friend of Cheney's, Peter McPherson, took a leave of absence as president of Michigan State University to serve as Bremer's economic deputy.
The leader of the CPA's private development sector was Thomas Foley, an old college classmate of Bush, who served as finance chairman for his Presidential campaign in Connecticut and also raised more than $100,000 for Bush.
Relatives of the administration were also given jobs, such as Ari Fleischer's brother Michael, and Simone Ledeen, the daughter of Michael Ledeen. Cheney's daughter Liz, also did a short stint. However, it should be noted that none of them lounged around for too long in what soon became a hellhole in Iraq.
On May 16, 2003, the CPA issued its first regulation and described its authority in no uncertain terms stating:
"The CPA is vested with all executive, legislative, and judicial authority necessary to achieve its objectives, to be exercised under relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions, including resolution 1483 (2003), and the laws and usages of war. This authority shall be exercised by the CPA Administrator."
With one swipe of the pen, Bremer granted himself the authority to run the government ministries, appoint Iraqi officials and award contracts for reconstruction. Next he fired 500,000 Iraqis, most of them soldiers, but pink slips also went out to many doctors, nurses, teachers and other public employees as well.
For the most part, the CPA financed its activities with billions of dollars that belonged to the Iraqis. On May 22, 2003, a UN Security Council passed a resolution that directed the proceeds from Iraqi oil to be placed in a Development Fund for Iraq, and the CPA was granted authority to control the fund and decide which profiteers would get contracts.
During the year that Bremer controlled the purse strings, the Iraqi Development Fund received $20.2 billion, including $8.1 billion from the UN's oil-for-food program, $10.8 billion from Iraqi oil, and the rest from repatriated funds, vested assets and donations.
The CPA accounting system was cash and carry and a steady stream of cash was flown into Bagdad from the US. Inspector General, Stuart Bowen later said that he knew of one $2 billion flight.
A report released by the House Government Reform Committee in February 2007, shows that in the 13 months that Bremer ruled, from May 2003 to June 2004, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York shipped nearly $12 billion in a cash to Iraq.
One can only imagine the Bank service charges associated with these shipments because to accomplish this feat, according to the Democratic chairman of the Reform Committee, Henry Waxman, the cash weighed 363 tons and the Bank had to count and pack 281 million individual bills, including more than 107 million $100 bills, and then load them onto wooden pallets to be shipped to Bagdad on C-130 cargo planes.
Inspector Bowen later said that he determined that some of this cash went to pay salaries for thousands of "ghost employees" and Iraqi civil servants who did not exist.
Within a few months of the CPA's arrival in Iraq reports of corruption in the contracting process began appearing in the media. A British adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council told the BBC that officials in the CPA were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for contracts.
Reports of flat out-fraud remained steady throughout Bremer's reign in Iraq. One audit showed that the CPA Ministry of Finance could not provide documentation for about $17 million spent on employee salaries in February 2004, and a CPA Advisor to the Ministry of the Interior said the Ministry was paid for 8,602 guards but only 602 could be verified.
A CPA advisor to the Ministry of Finance was so concerned about payroll corruption that he submitted a formal complaint that stated in part: "Of the 1.6 million government employees currently on payroll, credible estimates put the number of ghost workers at somewhere between 250,000-300,000 employees."
An October 2004, audit performed for the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, created by the UN to monitor the spending of Iraqi money, found one case where a payment of $2.6 million was authorized by a CPA senior adviser to the Ministry of Oil, and auditors were unable to obtain an underlying contract or any evidence that the services had been rendered.
The auditors in this group found 37 cases where files could not be located for contracts worth $185 million all total. In another 52 cases, there was no record that goods had been received for a total of $87.9 million.
People on the ground in Iraq said that doing business with the CPA was reminiscent of the Wild West. Former CPA employees told a congressional committee that sackfuls of cash were tossed around like footballs. Franklin Willis, showed pictures of himself and others holding up bundles of $100 notes totaling $2 million, which he said was used to pay the contractor Custer Battles. "We told them to come in and bring a bag," Willis said.
He also testified that millions of dollars in $100 bills were stored in the basement of the CPA offices and distributed to favored contractors with little accounting discipline. For instance, in the year that the CPA ruled, Custer was awarded contracts worth more than $100 million.
Two former Custer employees ended up filing a lawsuit under the Federal False Claims Act, saying Custer had swindled $50 million from the CPA with scams like double-billing for salaries and repainting the forklifts found at the Baghdad airport and then leasing them back to the US government.
The employees said the CPA paid the Custer $15 million to provide security for Iraq's civilian airline, when no services were needed because the airline was grounded during the time covered by the contract.
These employees said they kept informing the CPA about Custer's fraudulent conduct for more than a year and when they asked why the firm continued to get contracts, they were told: "Battles is very active in the Republican party, and speaks to individuals he knows in the Whitehouse almost daily."
In June 2004, the Government Accounting Office estimated that more than $1 billion in had been wasted due to illegal overcharges by contractors since the war began. A later audit by the Iraqi government found that as much as $1.27 billion was lost to accounting irregularities between June 2004 and February 2005.
Inspector Bowen cited two examples of poor oversight in a November 3, 2005 interview on National Public Radio where $28 million was paid to build 5 power plants and $1.8 million was paid to rebuild a library, but the work was never performed and the money
"simply disappeared," he said.
A recent report by Bowen says DynCorp was paid $43.8 million for a residential camp for police training personnel and has been empty for months and that the company may also have billed $18 million in other unjustified costs.
About $4.2 million, he says, was improperly spent on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-size pool and an additional $36.4 million in spending for weapons such as armored vehicles, body armor and communications equipment that cannot be accounted for.
Not surprisingly, Cheney's Halliburton remained the top profiteer under Bremer's rule. A July 23, 2004, audit conducted by Bowen, showed the company had received 60% of all contracts paid for with Iraq money, including 5 no-bid contracts worth $222 million, $325 million, $180 million, and the last 2 together totaled $194 million for the last two. In comparison, the audit showed that the CPA awarded only 2% of the reconstruction contracts to Iraqi companies.
In one example of blatant fraud, an audit found that Halliburton was charging for more than 41,000 meals a day for soldiers when only about 14,000 were served.
By the fall of 2003, the country was realizing that the rational for war was based on lies and that the only ones drawing any benefits were the profiteers. So when Bush asked Congress for another $20 billion for the CPA, Bremer was summoned to Washington to explain where all the money was going and of course he testified in full stonewall mode.
Before the Appropriations Committee on September 22, 2003, Bremer said the CPA had detailed records of all its receipts and outlays that could be audited by Congress. But when he testified before the Armed Services Committee 3 days later he said the Office of Management and Budget was responsible for maintaining the CPA records and that Congress would have to go to the White House to access the records.
That arrogant assertion went over like a lead balloon with many members of Congress. Senator Robert Byrd said he was outraged over the inability to monitor CPA spending. "There is no reason why any arm of the executive branch charged with making such significant spending decisions," he said, "should not be working directly with Congress."
"When we're talking about handing over another $20 billion to the CPA," he said, "there is a real need for Congress to confirm that the CPA has its finances in order and that it is managing the taxpayer's money responsibly."
"We don't even know how much of the $20 billion," Byrd said, "will flow to government contractors in Iraq."
"Whatever the amount is," he noted, "we know that the size and scope of the profits being made will be enormous."
"Former Bush Administration officials," he warned fellow Senators, "are even setting up consulting firms to act as middlemen for contractors hoping to take part in the bonanza."
"Are we turning the U.S. Treasury into a grab bag for favorite campaign contributors to be financed at taxpayer expense?" he asked.
The answer was yes, and what a grab bag it was. Media reports revealed that Bush's ex-campaign manager and Feith's former law partner had set up consulting firms to profit off the war by lining up contracts for clients through their partners in crime within the CPA.
Other reports revealed that contracts worth $407 were awarded to a firm called Nour that was formed less than 2 months after the war began. The names linked to the profits from Nour, among many others, included former Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, Ahmad Chalabi via a $2 million kickback, his nephew Salam Chalabi as the attorney handling the deal, and the money trail even led to the First Brothers, Marvin and Jeb Bush.
But come to find out, Doug Feith the ringleader on the ground in Washington, had awarded a batch of no-bid contracts to a favored company the month before the war began for the purpose of controlling the media in post-war Iraq.
In October 2003, the Center for Public Integrity obtained copies of 7 contracts awarded to the San Diego-based Science Applications. The total value of the contracts was redacted but the Center was able to determine that they were all awarded in February 2003, and called for the work to be directed by Feith.
However, the Center's most stunning discovery was that when the contracts were awarded, Feith's top deputy at the time, Christopher "Ryan" Henry, had been a senior vice president at SAIC until October 2002.
In addition, one of SAIC's board members was Army General, Wayne Downing, who ran counterterrorism in the Bush administration for almost a year after 9/11, and had even went to the CIA with Cheney to discuss intelligence on Iraq. Downing had also served as an advisor to Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, and was well-known advocate for a war against Saddam.
Some of the SAIC contracts required that specific persons referred to as "executive management consultants" be hired and the pay range listed went as high as $209 and $273 per hour. The Center said congressional sources estimated the value of the media contract as $38 million for the first year and as high $90 million in 2004.
The SAIC had no special expertise to justify the award of these contracts. One company executive, quoted in the media, said the firm's only credential for setting up an independent media, supposedly modeled after the BBC, was military work in "informational warfare"-signal jamming, "perception management," and the like.
Under these contracts, the Iraq Media Network (IMN) was established and journalist, Mark North, who covered the Iraq invasion for National Public Radio, was hired to train Iraqi journalists to report for the IMN.
In one of the many Congressional hearings, North testified about the control of the IMN by the CPA and said CPA officials regularly directed and censored the activities of the news station and provided "a laundry list of CPA activities" to cover in the news reports instead of stories about security or the lack of electricity and jobs
While testifying, he also described the CPA's shabby treatment of Iraqi employees and its refusal to pay their wages. "For the first two months," North said, "the local staff of about 200 journalists and technicians were not paid their salaries."
When the staffers went on strike in attempt to get paid, he said, the CPA told the Iraqis to get back to work or the US Army would remove them from the studios.
All total, the CPA had control of Iraqi money for one year between June 2003 and June 2004, but unfortunately no auditors arrived to take a look at the agency's spending until April 2004, two months before the CPA's rule was scheduled to end.
And as so often happens when it comes to giving solid advice or warnings, the senior Senator from Virginia was absolutely right. It was far too late for audits, because the CPA and its gang of profiteers had already robbed the Iraqis blind.
The favored companies enjoyed a fraud-free-all. For instance, Halliburton said it had lost over $60 million worth of government property including trucks, office furniture and computers. Inspector Bowen reported that 6,975 items valued at $61.1 million were lost, and in June 2005, the Defense Contract Audit Agency reported that the Halliburton had overcharged or presented questionable bills for close to $1.5 billion.
In the end, Bowen's audit concluded that "the CPA's internal controls for approximately $8.8 billion in DFI funds disbursed to Iraqi ministries through the national budget process failed to provide sufficient accountability for the use of those funds."
As of February 2007, according to Bowen, audits of the CPA have resulted in 300 criminal and civil investigations, 5 arrests and convictions, and another 23 cases are currently under prosecution at the DOJ, and he is working on 76 on-going investigations.
One of the convictions involved Robert Stein, a former CPA comptroller and funding officer, who recently pleaded guilty to 5 felony counts including conspiracy, money laundering, and bribery in stealing more than $2 million of reconstruction funds and taking more than $1 million in kickbacks to rig the bids on contracts that exceeded $8 million.
The whistleblower case against Custer Battle went to trial and a jury found that Custer had committed 37 acts of fraud and filed $3 million in false claims, and rendered a verdict with a $10 million penalty. However, the verdict was overturned by Republican appointed US District Court Judge TS Ellis III, who ruled that the CPA was not a US entity and therefore the false claims act does not apply to it.
In the ruling, the judge said Custer's accusers "failed to prove that the U.S. government was ever defrauded. Any fraud that occurred was perpetrated instead against the Coalition Provisional Authority, formed to run Iraq until a government was established."
Legal experts say this ruling is great news for the CPA and contractors because from now on anyone charged with any act of fraud related to the Iraqi money doled out by the CPA in Bagdad will use it in attempt to avoid civil or criminal prosecution.
Showing posts with label Feith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Feith. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
Iraq Money Trail to Bush Cronies Must End
Evelyn Pringle April 2007
It's time for Americans to face the cold hard truth that nothing will be accomplished by allowing the daily carnage in Iraq to continue, and if Bush has his way, our young people will be dying in this war profiteering scheme until hell freezes over. Congress needs to authorize funding to pull our troops out of that deathtrap and not one dime more.
It apparent that Bush is a madman who will listen to no one. After Bush's speech on January 10, 2007, about the plan to send more troops, retired Army Col Doug McGreggor, a former advisor to Don Rumsfeld in 2003, said in a broadcast interview, “There seems to be a complete failure to understand that we have been trying to suppress a rebellion against our occupation.”
“As long as we are there,” he warned, “we are the number one public enemy for the Muslim-Arab world.”
“We were after all,” he points out, “a Christian army occupying a Muslim Arab country, something which in the Middle East, is essentially a disaster.”
This decorated combat veteran says Bush's strategy will never work. “We did not go to Iraq originally,” he explains, “to dismantle the state, dismantle the army, the police, and the government, to occupy the place with the object of changing the people that lived there into something they did not want to become.”
After Bush's speech, military families also spoke out publicly against the decision to send more troops. “I don’t have words for it,” said Nancy Lessin, of Military Families Speak Out, a group of 3,100 families, including 100 who have lost a loved one in the war.
“This is a war,” she said, “that should never have happened, that has wreaked so much havoc on our loved ones, Iraqi children, women and men, and now to be facing, almost four years into it, this news of an escalation of the war, is just unbearable.”
An Associated Press-Ipsos poll showed that 70% of Americans opposed sending more troops, but Bush went right ahead and did it anyways. And then to make matters worse, this month he announces the plan to extend the 12-month tours to 15-months to allow his 30,000-troop buildup in Baghdad to stay for another year.
This war is going to bankrupt the US. A January 2007 study by Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, who won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes, estimated that the total costs of the Iraq war could be more than $2 trillion when the long-term medical costs for the soldiers injured so far are factored in.
The only people who are benefiting from Bush’s war on terror are members of the Military Industrial Complex. Since 9/11, the pay for the CEOs of the top 34 defense contractors in the US has doubled, according to the August 2006 report, "Executive Excess 2006," by the Institute for Policy Studies, and the United for a Fair Economy.
The bill is rising so fast because the level of war profiteering is unprecedented. The Excess Report lists George David, CEO of United Technologies, as the top earner, making more than $200 million since 9/11, despite investigations into the poor quality of the firm's Black Hawk helicopters.
Halliburton CEO David Lesar made $26.6 million in 2005, and nearly $50 million since 9/11, an amount that even beats the $24 million that Dick Cheney received in exchange for the guarantee that Halliburton would be the number one military contractor during the Bush administration.
Cheney himself is also taking in war profits, contrary to what he told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" in 2003, when he denied making any money off his former employer. “Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president," he said, "I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest."
"I have no financial interest in Halliburton," Cheney told Tim, "of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years.”
Those statements were proven false when financial disclosure forms showed that Cheney had received a deferred salary from Halliburton of $205,298 in 2001, $262,392 in 2002, $278,437 in 2003, and $294,852 in 2004.
In 2005, an analysis released by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), reported that Cheney continued to hold over 300,000 Halliburton stock options and said their value had risen 3,281% over the previous year, from $241,498 to more than $8 million.
"It is unseemly for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his Administration funnels billions of dollars to it," Senator Lautenberg said.
Cheney may be the most visible profiteer to those who find it difficult to follow the war on terror money trail, but many other members of the administration with insider knowledge set themselves up to profit early on as well.
For instance, there was the Undersecretary of Defense, Doug Feith, largely credited for fabricating the tales that got the US into the war to begin with, along with his fellow neocons and best buddy, Ahmed Chalabi.
Feith was a partner with Marc Zell, in the Feith & Zell, DC law firm before joining the administration. After he left for the White House, Zell renamed the firm, Zell, Goldberg & Co, and teamed up with Salem Chalabi, Ahmed nephew, to solicit contracts for clients in Iraq. This scam operated under the name, "Iraqi International Law Group."
At the time, the National Journal quoted Salem as saying that Marc Zell was the firm's "marketing consultant" and had been contacting law firms in Washington and New York to ask if they had clients interested in doing business in Iraq.
According to its web site back then, the IILG was made up of lawyers and businessmen who “dared to take the lead in bringing private sector investment and experience” to the war-torn country and offered to “be your Professional Gateway to the New Iraq.”
"The simple fact is," the site stated, "you cannot adequately advise about Iraq unless you are here day in and day out, working closely with officials at the CPA, the newly constituted governing council and the few functioning civilian ministries [oil, labor and social welfare, etc]."
It is highly likely that the preceding statement was absolutely true when made because Feith helped set up the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2003, with its leader Paul Bremer, and Feith's office and the CPA were in charge of awarding reconstruction contracts with Iraqi money.
For his part, Salem was a legal adviser to Iraq's governing council, of which his Uncle was a member, and Bremer even tried to appoint him to lead the tribunal that would try Saddam.
Uncle Chabali footprints in the profiteering racket can be traced back to September 2003, when the CPA awarded an $80 million contract to Nour USA, a company with ties to Winston Partners, which is a whole other story in itself because Winston Partners is headed by none other than Marvin Bush, the brother to the president.
In May 2003, Nour was founded by, Abul Huda Farouki, whose financial ties to Ahmed Chalabi date back to 1989, when Chalabi was CEO of the Petra Bank, and helped Farouqi finance projects around the world.
Nour's website at the time described the firm as an "international investment and development company" with more than 100 employees based in Iraq, and listed expertise in telecommunications, agribusiness, internet development, recruitment, construction materials, oil and power services, pharmaceuticals and fashion apparel.
In January 2004, Nour picked up another contract to equip the Iraqi armed forces and police worth $327 million. However, shortly thereafter, Nour came under fire when a shady deal surfaced involving the first $80 million contract and Ahmed Chalabi.
Newsday reported that Chalabi had received $2 million for helping to arrange the contract, but as it turned out, the contract was actually awarded to Erinys International, a firm set up in Iraq immediately after the invasion. The problem arose, Newsday said, because within days of receiving the contract, Erinys became a joint venture operation with Nour.
Next, the $327 million contract was in jeopardy after it was revealed that Nour had no experience providing military equipment and Nour claimed that it planned to subcontract its weapons procurement to Ostrowski Arms. However, the army soon learned that Ostowski had no license to export weapons.
The contract was finally axed in March 2004, after six of the 17 firms that bid on it complained that Nour's winning bid was impossibly low.
Following the money trail on this insider deal turned up the names of a few more suspects. According to the National Journal, a Nour executive said the Cohen Group "introduced us to people in the U.S. government who were involved in oil-industry security."
Former Republican Congressman and Secretary of Defense under President Clinton, William Cohen, sits at the helm of the Cohen Group, and according to a report by David Hilzenrath in the Washington Post on May 28, 2006, when he left office in January 2001, Cohen was saddled with debt and his final financial disclosure form, "listed tens of thousands of dollars of charge-account debts at interest rates as high as about 25 percent."
However, within a matter of weeks Cohen and his wife were residing in a $3.5 million mansion. It seems Cohen had wanted this house but was still in office and had no way to finance the purchase, so Frank Zarb, then chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, sold the house to Michael Ansari, chairman and CEO of defense contractor MIC Industries, in October 2000, and the Cohen took up residence in January or February of 2001, according to the Post.
From there, Cohen went on to join the board and audit committee of the Nasdaq Stock Market, and 11 days after he left office, MIC announced Cohen's appointment as chairman of its board of advisers in a press release.
In no time at all the Cohen Group was raking in mega-bucks. In applying for one contract, that earned the Group $490,000 over seven months, the firm bragged that it had helped Lockheed win a $3.6 billion contract for the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Poland, financed by the US government.
The Group's proposal said its efforts for the Lockheed deal included "advocacy with key decision-makers in the White House, Office of the Vice President, National Security Council, Department of Defense and the State Department during an 18-month campaign," according to the Post.
In regard to helping Nour get contracts in Iraq, according to the Post, where the government disclosure form for Nour asks the firm to identify "Specific lobbying issues," the Group's filings say: "Exploring overseas business opportunities."
When it comes to war profiteering, members of the Bush administration have given a whole new meaning to the "revolving door." A whole gang of thugs has been robbing us blind in Iraq since day one and nobody seems to be able to stop it.
Congress knows what's going on. Back on September 30, 2003, during the Senate debate over the first Iraq spending bill, Senator John Edwards said he refused to funnel the $87 billion to Cheney and other Bush cronies after learning that Bush‘s former campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, who was later appointed to head FEMA, had quit his job 3 weeks before the bombs began to fall in Iraq to start the consulting firm, New Bridge Strategies, for clients seeking contracts in Iraq.
“First, Vice President Cheney's Halliburton receives more than $2 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts," he said, "and now this.”
He called it outrageous and disrespectful to the young people serving in Iraq. "President Bush should start addressing this credibility gap by calling on Joe Allbaugh and his friends to stop using their influence to secure government contracts in Iraq," he said.
Senator Edwards said there used to be talk about money for Iraq being a blank check but we now "know the president is writing it out to Joe Allbaugh and Halliburton and it's all endorsed by Vice President Cheney," he said.
In hindsight, Edwards should have expressed outrage at a few more people because the profiteering team at New Bridges was stacked with Republicans. The company's address was the same as a lobbying firm run by Haley Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee that went under the name of Barbour Griffith & Rogers.
And as luck would have it, Lanny Griffith was the CEO of New Bridge, and Ed Rogers was the vice president.
The firm's initial web site told potential clients, "the opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in Washington, D.C., and on the ground in Iraq."
And these greedy thugs were so shameless that they didn't even try to hide their elation over all the money they planned to make in Iraq. “Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products can be a gold mine,” one of the firm’s partners told Naomi Klein, quoted in an article in Harper's Magazine in September 2004.
“One well-stocked 7-Eleven,” the partner said, “could knock out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country.”
There were rumors that a McDonald's might open, a Starwood hotel was mentioned, and General Motors was said to be planning a factory and according to Ms Klein, Citigroup was preparing to offer loans guaranteed against future sales of Iraqi oil.
However since the war never did end, in 2004, Joe Allbaugh abandoned the quest for reconstruction gold mine in Iraq and started a consulting firm with the former director of Cheney's secret energy task force, Andrew Lundquist, and their first client was Lockheed Martin.
The marriage between the ex-campaign manager, Cheney's buddy, and Lockheed apparently worked out much better than the plan to build 7-Elevens in Iraq, because Lockheed stock value has doubled since 2001, and according to the Excess Report, the firm's CEO has made $50 million since 9/11.
It may well have been that Joe's new firm was simply an outgrowth from the many other firms set up by this same gang because Haley Barbour had already worked as a lobbyist for a Lockheed.
On thing is certain, Lockheed was not lacking for administration insiders when Allbaugh came knocking. For instance, before Cheney took over as VP, his wife, Lynne served on the board of Lockheed, receiving deferred compensation to the tune of half a million dollars in stock and fees, according to a January 16, 2007 report by Richard Cummings.
Cummings notes that Cheney's "2004 financial disclosure statement lists Lockheed stock options and $50,000 in Lockheed stock."
In addition, Cheney's son-in-law, Philip Perry, Cummings says, was appointed to serve as general counsel to the Department of Homeland Security, and he had been a registered lobbyist for Lockheed who had worked for a law firm representing Lockheed with the Department of Homeland Security.
According to Cummings, less than a month after 9/11, in October of 2001, the Pentagon announced a $20 billion contract for Lockheed for the development of the Joint Strike Fighter, called the F-35. At the time, Edward Aldridge was Undersecretary of Defense for acquisitions, technology and logistics, which was responsible for the approval of the contract. Aldridge left his government post in 2003, and he now just happens to serve on Lockheed's board of directors.
However, the most stunning revelation in the Cummings report, is that in November 2002, Stephen Hadley, deputy national security advisor at the time, called Lockheed employee, Bruce Jackson, to a meeting at the White House and told him that the US was definitely going to war in Iraq but there was one small hitch, the administration could not decide what reason to use to justify it.
So Jackson formed the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq," and its mission statement said it was "formed to promote regional peace, political freedom and international security by replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations."
According to Cummings, the "pressure group began pushing for regime change - that is, military action to remove Hussein - in the usual Washington ways, lobbying members of congress, working with the media and throwing money around."
Jackson told Cummings that he did not see the point of going on about WMDs or an Al Queda link because he thought the human rights issue was enough to justify the war.
However, Hadley did not agree. "The committee's pitch," Cummings says, "or rationale as Hadley would call it, was that Saddam was a monster -- routinely violating human rights -- and a general menace in the Middle East."
Jackson said he closed down the Committee in June 2003 because its human rights rationale had been abandoned. "We were cut out," he told Cummings, "after the whole thing went to Rumsfeld," and Hadley explained that "terrorism and WMDs" were now the rationale for the war, not human rights.
However, Cummings reports that members of the war sales team that served with Jackson have done well for themselves. The president of the Committee, Randy Scheunemann, became the president of the Mercury Group, and lobbied for Lockheed and others, and then set up the firms, Scheunemann and Associates, and Orion Strategies, which, among other things, consults with companies and countries looking to do business in Iraq.
In November 2003, another Committee member, Rend Al-Rahim Francke, was appointed Iraqi ambassador to the US.
Meanwhile back in Iraq goldmine, the Iraqis have nothing to show for all the torture that they have endured for the past 4 years. On average, Iraqis still get only about two hours of electricity a day, and the situation won't be improving anytime soon because the US has not built a single major power plant.
And despite the $22 billion funneled to the war profiteers for reconstruction, a US official recently said, Baghdad may not have continuous 24-hour electricity until the year 2013.
For the people drawn to Iraq to fight against the occupation, this is not a war against Americans; it’s a war against Bush. He tore this country apart for no reason and then just as the Iraqis predicted, the greedy gang of thugs swooped in and ripped everybody off.
And there is no reason to believe that the thievery has ended or the situation in Iraq will get better because an audit released on January 31, 2007, by Inspector General, Stuart Bowen, reported that the $300 billion war and reconstruction effort continues to be plagued with waste and corruption, and yet Bush now wants us to hand over another $100 billion to be funneled through Iraq to the exact same gangsters.
We will never win in Iraq no matter how long we stay because the other side will always have more people willing to die for the cause, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if the number of daily attacks continues to escalate as they have for the last 4 years, the US will run out of troops before they do.
It's time for Americans to face the cold hard truth that nothing will be accomplished by allowing the daily carnage in Iraq to continue, and if Bush has his way, our young people will be dying in this war profiteering scheme until hell freezes over. Congress needs to authorize funding to pull our troops out of that deathtrap and not one dime more.
It apparent that Bush is a madman who will listen to no one. After Bush's speech on January 10, 2007, about the plan to send more troops, retired Army Col Doug McGreggor, a former advisor to Don Rumsfeld in 2003, said in a broadcast interview, “There seems to be a complete failure to understand that we have been trying to suppress a rebellion against our occupation.”
“As long as we are there,” he warned, “we are the number one public enemy for the Muslim-Arab world.”
“We were after all,” he points out, “a Christian army occupying a Muslim Arab country, something which in the Middle East, is essentially a disaster.”
This decorated combat veteran says Bush's strategy will never work. “We did not go to Iraq originally,” he explains, “to dismantle the state, dismantle the army, the police, and the government, to occupy the place with the object of changing the people that lived there into something they did not want to become.”
After Bush's speech, military families also spoke out publicly against the decision to send more troops. “I don’t have words for it,” said Nancy Lessin, of Military Families Speak Out, a group of 3,100 families, including 100 who have lost a loved one in the war.
“This is a war,” she said, “that should never have happened, that has wreaked so much havoc on our loved ones, Iraqi children, women and men, and now to be facing, almost four years into it, this news of an escalation of the war, is just unbearable.”
An Associated Press-Ipsos poll showed that 70% of Americans opposed sending more troops, but Bush went right ahead and did it anyways. And then to make matters worse, this month he announces the plan to extend the 12-month tours to 15-months to allow his 30,000-troop buildup in Baghdad to stay for another year.
This war is going to bankrupt the US. A January 2007 study by Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, who won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes, estimated that the total costs of the Iraq war could be more than $2 trillion when the long-term medical costs for the soldiers injured so far are factored in.
The only people who are benefiting from Bush’s war on terror are members of the Military Industrial Complex. Since 9/11, the pay for the CEOs of the top 34 defense contractors in the US has doubled, according to the August 2006 report, "Executive Excess 2006," by the Institute for Policy Studies, and the United for a Fair Economy.
The bill is rising so fast because the level of war profiteering is unprecedented. The Excess Report lists George David, CEO of United Technologies, as the top earner, making more than $200 million since 9/11, despite investigations into the poor quality of the firm's Black Hawk helicopters.
Halliburton CEO David Lesar made $26.6 million in 2005, and nearly $50 million since 9/11, an amount that even beats the $24 million that Dick Cheney received in exchange for the guarantee that Halliburton would be the number one military contractor during the Bush administration.
Cheney himself is also taking in war profits, contrary to what he told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" in 2003, when he denied making any money off his former employer. “Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president," he said, "I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest."
"I have no financial interest in Halliburton," Cheney told Tim, "of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years.”
Those statements were proven false when financial disclosure forms showed that Cheney had received a deferred salary from Halliburton of $205,298 in 2001, $262,392 in 2002, $278,437 in 2003, and $294,852 in 2004.
In 2005, an analysis released by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), reported that Cheney continued to hold over 300,000 Halliburton stock options and said their value had risen 3,281% over the previous year, from $241,498 to more than $8 million.
"It is unseemly for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his Administration funnels billions of dollars to it," Senator Lautenberg said.
Cheney may be the most visible profiteer to those who find it difficult to follow the war on terror money trail, but many other members of the administration with insider knowledge set themselves up to profit early on as well.
For instance, there was the Undersecretary of Defense, Doug Feith, largely credited for fabricating the tales that got the US into the war to begin with, along with his fellow neocons and best buddy, Ahmed Chalabi.
Feith was a partner with Marc Zell, in the Feith & Zell, DC law firm before joining the administration. After he left for the White House, Zell renamed the firm, Zell, Goldberg & Co, and teamed up with Salem Chalabi, Ahmed nephew, to solicit contracts for clients in Iraq. This scam operated under the name, "Iraqi International Law Group."
At the time, the National Journal quoted Salem as saying that Marc Zell was the firm's "marketing consultant" and had been contacting law firms in Washington and New York to ask if they had clients interested in doing business in Iraq.
According to its web site back then, the IILG was made up of lawyers and businessmen who “dared to take the lead in bringing private sector investment and experience” to the war-torn country and offered to “be your Professional Gateway to the New Iraq.”
"The simple fact is," the site stated, "you cannot adequately advise about Iraq unless you are here day in and day out, working closely with officials at the CPA, the newly constituted governing council and the few functioning civilian ministries [oil, labor and social welfare, etc]."
It is highly likely that the preceding statement was absolutely true when made because Feith helped set up the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2003, with its leader Paul Bremer, and Feith's office and the CPA were in charge of awarding reconstruction contracts with Iraqi money.
For his part, Salem was a legal adviser to Iraq's governing council, of which his Uncle was a member, and Bremer even tried to appoint him to lead the tribunal that would try Saddam.
Uncle Chabali footprints in the profiteering racket can be traced back to September 2003, when the CPA awarded an $80 million contract to Nour USA, a company with ties to Winston Partners, which is a whole other story in itself because Winston Partners is headed by none other than Marvin Bush, the brother to the president.
In May 2003, Nour was founded by, Abul Huda Farouki, whose financial ties to Ahmed Chalabi date back to 1989, when Chalabi was CEO of the Petra Bank, and helped Farouqi finance projects around the world.
Nour's website at the time described the firm as an "international investment and development company" with more than 100 employees based in Iraq, and listed expertise in telecommunications, agribusiness, internet development, recruitment, construction materials, oil and power services, pharmaceuticals and fashion apparel.
In January 2004, Nour picked up another contract to equip the Iraqi armed forces and police worth $327 million. However, shortly thereafter, Nour came under fire when a shady deal surfaced involving the first $80 million contract and Ahmed Chalabi.
Newsday reported that Chalabi had received $2 million for helping to arrange the contract, but as it turned out, the contract was actually awarded to Erinys International, a firm set up in Iraq immediately after the invasion. The problem arose, Newsday said, because within days of receiving the contract, Erinys became a joint venture operation with Nour.
Next, the $327 million contract was in jeopardy after it was revealed that Nour had no experience providing military equipment and Nour claimed that it planned to subcontract its weapons procurement to Ostrowski Arms. However, the army soon learned that Ostowski had no license to export weapons.
The contract was finally axed in March 2004, after six of the 17 firms that bid on it complained that Nour's winning bid was impossibly low.
Following the money trail on this insider deal turned up the names of a few more suspects. According to the National Journal, a Nour executive said the Cohen Group "introduced us to people in the U.S. government who were involved in oil-industry security."
Former Republican Congressman and Secretary of Defense under President Clinton, William Cohen, sits at the helm of the Cohen Group, and according to a report by David Hilzenrath in the Washington Post on May 28, 2006, when he left office in January 2001, Cohen was saddled with debt and his final financial disclosure form, "listed tens of thousands of dollars of charge-account debts at interest rates as high as about 25 percent."
However, within a matter of weeks Cohen and his wife were residing in a $3.5 million mansion. It seems Cohen had wanted this house but was still in office and had no way to finance the purchase, so Frank Zarb, then chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, sold the house to Michael Ansari, chairman and CEO of defense contractor MIC Industries, in October 2000, and the Cohen took up residence in January or February of 2001, according to the Post.
From there, Cohen went on to join the board and audit committee of the Nasdaq Stock Market, and 11 days after he left office, MIC announced Cohen's appointment as chairman of its board of advisers in a press release.
In no time at all the Cohen Group was raking in mega-bucks. In applying for one contract, that earned the Group $490,000 over seven months, the firm bragged that it had helped Lockheed win a $3.6 billion contract for the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Poland, financed by the US government.
The Group's proposal said its efforts for the Lockheed deal included "advocacy with key decision-makers in the White House, Office of the Vice President, National Security Council, Department of Defense and the State Department during an 18-month campaign," according to the Post.
In regard to helping Nour get contracts in Iraq, according to the Post, where the government disclosure form for Nour asks the firm to identify "Specific lobbying issues," the Group's filings say: "Exploring overseas business opportunities."
When it comes to war profiteering, members of the Bush administration have given a whole new meaning to the "revolving door." A whole gang of thugs has been robbing us blind in Iraq since day one and nobody seems to be able to stop it.
Congress knows what's going on. Back on September 30, 2003, during the Senate debate over the first Iraq spending bill, Senator John Edwards said he refused to funnel the $87 billion to Cheney and other Bush cronies after learning that Bush‘s former campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, who was later appointed to head FEMA, had quit his job 3 weeks before the bombs began to fall in Iraq to start the consulting firm, New Bridge Strategies, for clients seeking contracts in Iraq.
“First, Vice President Cheney's Halliburton receives more than $2 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts," he said, "and now this.”
He called it outrageous and disrespectful to the young people serving in Iraq. "President Bush should start addressing this credibility gap by calling on Joe Allbaugh and his friends to stop using their influence to secure government contracts in Iraq," he said.
Senator Edwards said there used to be talk about money for Iraq being a blank check but we now "know the president is writing it out to Joe Allbaugh and Halliburton and it's all endorsed by Vice President Cheney," he said.
In hindsight, Edwards should have expressed outrage at a few more people because the profiteering team at New Bridges was stacked with Republicans. The company's address was the same as a lobbying firm run by Haley Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee that went under the name of Barbour Griffith & Rogers.
And as luck would have it, Lanny Griffith was the CEO of New Bridge, and Ed Rogers was the vice president.
The firm's initial web site told potential clients, "the opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in Washington, D.C., and on the ground in Iraq."
And these greedy thugs were so shameless that they didn't even try to hide their elation over all the money they planned to make in Iraq. “Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products can be a gold mine,” one of the firm’s partners told Naomi Klein, quoted in an article in Harper's Magazine in September 2004.
“One well-stocked 7-Eleven,” the partner said, “could knock out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country.”
There were rumors that a McDonald's might open, a Starwood hotel was mentioned, and General Motors was said to be planning a factory and according to Ms Klein, Citigroup was preparing to offer loans guaranteed against future sales of Iraqi oil.
However since the war never did end, in 2004, Joe Allbaugh abandoned the quest for reconstruction gold mine in Iraq and started a consulting firm with the former director of Cheney's secret energy task force, Andrew Lundquist, and their first client was Lockheed Martin.
The marriage between the ex-campaign manager, Cheney's buddy, and Lockheed apparently worked out much better than the plan to build 7-Elevens in Iraq, because Lockheed stock value has doubled since 2001, and according to the Excess Report, the firm's CEO has made $50 million since 9/11.
It may well have been that Joe's new firm was simply an outgrowth from the many other firms set up by this same gang because Haley Barbour had already worked as a lobbyist for a Lockheed.
On thing is certain, Lockheed was not lacking for administration insiders when Allbaugh came knocking. For instance, before Cheney took over as VP, his wife, Lynne served on the board of Lockheed, receiving deferred compensation to the tune of half a million dollars in stock and fees, according to a January 16, 2007 report by Richard Cummings.
Cummings notes that Cheney's "2004 financial disclosure statement lists Lockheed stock options and $50,000 in Lockheed stock."
In addition, Cheney's son-in-law, Philip Perry, Cummings says, was appointed to serve as general counsel to the Department of Homeland Security, and he had been a registered lobbyist for Lockheed who had worked for a law firm representing Lockheed with the Department of Homeland Security.
According to Cummings, less than a month after 9/11, in October of 2001, the Pentagon announced a $20 billion contract for Lockheed for the development of the Joint Strike Fighter, called the F-35. At the time, Edward Aldridge was Undersecretary of Defense for acquisitions, technology and logistics, which was responsible for the approval of the contract. Aldridge left his government post in 2003, and he now just happens to serve on Lockheed's board of directors.
However, the most stunning revelation in the Cummings report, is that in November 2002, Stephen Hadley, deputy national security advisor at the time, called Lockheed employee, Bruce Jackson, to a meeting at the White House and told him that the US was definitely going to war in Iraq but there was one small hitch, the administration could not decide what reason to use to justify it.
So Jackson formed the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq," and its mission statement said it was "formed to promote regional peace, political freedom and international security by replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations."
According to Cummings, the "pressure group began pushing for regime change - that is, military action to remove Hussein - in the usual Washington ways, lobbying members of congress, working with the media and throwing money around."
Jackson told Cummings that he did not see the point of going on about WMDs or an Al Queda link because he thought the human rights issue was enough to justify the war.
However, Hadley did not agree. "The committee's pitch," Cummings says, "or rationale as Hadley would call it, was that Saddam was a monster -- routinely violating human rights -- and a general menace in the Middle East."
Jackson said he closed down the Committee in June 2003 because its human rights rationale had been abandoned. "We were cut out," he told Cummings, "after the whole thing went to Rumsfeld," and Hadley explained that "terrorism and WMDs" were now the rationale for the war, not human rights.
However, Cummings reports that members of the war sales team that served with Jackson have done well for themselves. The president of the Committee, Randy Scheunemann, became the president of the Mercury Group, and lobbied for Lockheed and others, and then set up the firms, Scheunemann and Associates, and Orion Strategies, which, among other things, consults with companies and countries looking to do business in Iraq.
In November 2003, another Committee member, Rend Al-Rahim Francke, was appointed Iraqi ambassador to the US.
Meanwhile back in Iraq goldmine, the Iraqis have nothing to show for all the torture that they have endured for the past 4 years. On average, Iraqis still get only about two hours of electricity a day, and the situation won't be improving anytime soon because the US has not built a single major power plant.
And despite the $22 billion funneled to the war profiteers for reconstruction, a US official recently said, Baghdad may not have continuous 24-hour electricity until the year 2013.
For the people drawn to Iraq to fight against the occupation, this is not a war against Americans; it’s a war against Bush. He tore this country apart for no reason and then just as the Iraqis predicted, the greedy gang of thugs swooped in and ripped everybody off.
And there is no reason to believe that the thievery has ended or the situation in Iraq will get better because an audit released on January 31, 2007, by Inspector General, Stuart Bowen, reported that the $300 billion war and reconstruction effort continues to be plagued with waste and corruption, and yet Bush now wants us to hand over another $100 billion to be funneled through Iraq to the exact same gangsters.
We will never win in Iraq no matter how long we stay because the other side will always have more people willing to die for the cause, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if the number of daily attacks continues to escalate as they have for the last 4 years, the US will run out of troops before they do.
Top War Profiteer Doug Feith Retires Wealthy
Evelyn Pringle September 2005
Douglas Feith, the recently resigned undersecretary of defense, who just happened to be one of the main people who for years on end advocated for a war in Iraq, and who in large part developed the disastrous policies for the war in Iraq, planned ahead for his retirement and will not be seen in the unemployment line.
On January 27, 2005, the Washington Post announced: "A principal architect of the Defense Department's postwar strategy in Iraq ... will leave his post this summer."
The announcement came after years of rumors that top administration officials had decided that Feith had to go, but were dissuaded by Donald Rumsfeld who argued that his ouster would be viewed as an admission that the war in Iraq was a mistake. But the administration had definitely reduced Feith's authority over the past 2 years.
In announcing his departure, Feith claimed he was leaving for personal reasons, citing the desire to spend more time with his children. "For the last four years, they haven't seen me a lot," he told the Post.
He used the standard administration exit line. Sort of like the noticeably absent in light of Katrina, ex-FEMA director, Joe Albaugh, who left his job to spend time with his family. Joe was Bush’s chief of staff when he was governor of Texas and his campaign manager in 2000. Once Bush took office, Joe accepted a gig as director of FEMA.
Like Feith, when he announced his resignation, Joe said, "Now I am going to take the opportunity to spend some time with my wife and children."
I sure hope Doug spends more time with his kids than Joe did, because judging from hindsight, Joe should have been a psychic. He somehow knew at the beginning of March 2003, that he should quit FEMA and go into the business of securing reconstruction contracts in Iraq for wealthy clients before the first bomb was dropped. And his family could not have enjoyed much quality time at all with Joe, being he opened up New Bridge Strategies for business within a few short weeks of leaving the White House.
At the time, Josh Marshall, who writes a column for the Washington newspaper, The Hill, said that he believed that each new piece of legislation needs a catchy title, and came up with title "The Bush Crony Full-Employment Act of 2003," for the $87 billion allocated for rebuilding Iraq.
According to Josh, New Bridge was actually an outgrowth of Haley Barbour’s lobbying firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers. Josh says he reached that conclusion after he learned that both firms were located in the same office space. And also because Lanny Griffith was the CEO of New Bridge and Ed Rogers was the vice president. Sounds like a logical conclusion to me.
When the company began, the New Bridges official web site said, "the opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in Washington, D.C., and on the ground in Iraq." That phrasing was quickly changed.
How could it get any sweeter than this? Joe quits FEMA, moves into the office space of one of the most successful and powerful GOP lobbying firms in the country and starts advertising for clients who want to win reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
First Brother, Neil Bush, also jumped on this money train and landed a $60,000 a year consultant contract with a principal in New Bridge. According to Neil's testimony in his divorce deposition in March 2004, in return for his salary, he took phone messages for about 3 hours a week.
However, 3 people contacted by the Financial Times of London reported seeing letters written by Neil that recommend business ventures promoted by New Bridges in the Middle East. So we had Neil being paid an annual fee to "help companies secure contracts in Iraq," the Times reported.
I'm not too worried about Doug Feith ending up in the unemployment lines because following in Joe's footsteps, Feith and his law partner stayed very busy behind the scenes planning for Feith's retirement when it came time to leave the White House.
The Iraqi International Law Group
Before Feith was inducted into the Bush administration, he was the Feith half of the Feith & Zell, law firm in Washington. His partner, Marc Zell, simply renamed the firm, Zell, Goldberg & Co, when they decided to set up shop to start cashing in on the Iraq contracting business.
According to The Hill, Zell, was helping with international marketing for a concern called the Iraqi International Law Group. Billing itself as a group of lawyers and businessmen interested in helping investors in Iraq, the venture was run by Ahmed Chalabi's nephew Salem, who doubled as a legal adviser to Iraq's governing council, of which his uncle was a member.
How powerful was Feith in awarding contracts? Extremely. According to a June, 2004, by an article in Time Magazine entitled, "The Paper Trail: Did Cheney Okay a Deal? Feith is the person who approved the controversial no-bid contract for Halliburton in Iraq.
Time Magazine quoted an email sent by Stephen Browning of the Army Corps of Engineers, that said the contract for construction of oil pipelines was approved by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith "contingent on informing WH tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP,s [Vice President,s] office.
Browning, later said in an interview that he wrote the memo after he and retired Lt Gen. Jay Garner met with Feith. According to Browning, Feith told him that he had already informed Cheney's office. The email was dated March 5, 2003, and Halliburton was awarded the contract three days later with no bids tendered by any other companies.
If he could pull this off for Halliburton, what he could do for the IILG, goes without saying. According to its web site, the IILG was made up of lawyers and businessmen who claimed to have, "dared to take the lead in bringing private sector investment and experience" to the war-torn country and offered to "be your Professional Gateway to the New Iraq."
The way it was set up, nephew Salem was charge of the IILG and Feith's partner, Zell, was in charge of international marketing. The IILG's website claimed that it was the only firm worth consulting. "At IILG, our task is to provide foreign enterprise with the information and tools it needs to enter the emerging Iraq and to succeed," it said.
"Our clients number among the largest corporations and institutions on the planet" it said, "They have chosen IILG to provide them with real-time, on the ground intelligence they cannot get from inexperienced local firms or from overburdened coalition and local government officials."
Imagine that, the top firms on the planet.
"Many firms outside the country purport to counsel companies about doing business in Iraq," the web site read. "The simple fact is: you cannot adequately advise about Iraq unless you are here day in and day out, working closely with officials at the CPA, the newly constituted governing council and the few functioning civilian ministries [oil, labor and social welfare, etc]."
The truth is, the IILG was nothing more than another one of many front companies, in a web-like profiteering network, that was specifically set up to funnel tax dollars through Iraq and back into the pockets of the Bush gang.
And talk about blatant. When the company was set up, its website was not registered to Salem Chalabi; it was registered under the name of Marc Zell, located at the very same address as Zell, Goldberg & Co.
According to Salem, quoted in the National Journal, Zell was IILG's "marketing consultant" and had been contacting law firms in Washington and New York to ask if they had clients interested in doing business in Iraq.
This tied in with an announcement by Zell, Goldberg & Co, that it had set up a "task force" dealing with issues and opportunities relating to the "recently ended" war in Iraq, and to assist companies "in their relations with the United States government in connection with Iraqi reconstruction projects as prime contractors and consultants."
Of course Zell made no mention of the firm's ties to the infamous nephew Salem or the IILG. Zell said it was working with the Federal Market Group, an organization which specialized in helping companies win government contracts, which boasted of having a 90% success rate.
Considering all of its boasting about high level connections, IILG was also rather modest about the family ties of its founder. The website did not mention that he was the nephew of Ahmed Chalabi even once. Geez, I wonder why.
Implementing The Iraq Profiteering Scheme
Feith had been pushing for the ouster of Saddam for years. In 1998, him and Richard Perle sent a letter to President Bill Clinton proposing that the US team up with Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress to get rid of Saddam. Clinton refused.
As we all know, Ahmed had strong support within the Pentagon. In fact, two of his staunchest supporters were Feith, and Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board.
Perle, an assistant defense secretary during the Reagan administration, was appointed by his old crony, Donald Rumsfeld, to lead the board in 2001. Its a well-known fact that the board exerts tremendous influence when it comes to war policies.
As soon as Bush took office, Perle, Feith and Ahmed Chalabi all started working diligently together to get the war in Iraq off the ground, with Ahmed providing bogus intelligence about WMDs and bragging about a secret network within Iraq which could take over running the country after the invasion.
"There was a close personal bond, too, between Chalabi and Wolfowitz and Perle, dating back many years," according to Seymour Hersh in the May 5, 2003 the New Yorker.
"Their relationship deepened after the Bush Administration took office, and Chalabi’s ties extended to others in the Administration, including Rumsfeld; Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; and I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff," Hersh wrote.
"With the Pentagon’s support, Chalabi’s group worked to put defectors with compelling stories in touch with reporters in the United States and Europe," Hersh said, "The resulting articles had dramatic accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction or told of ties to terrorist groups. In some cases, these stories were disputed in analyses by the C.I.A." he noted.
Almost immediately after September 11th, "the I.N.C. began to publicize the stories of defectors who claimed that they had information connecting Iraq to the attacks, Hersh said.
For example, in a October 14, 2001, interview on PBS "Frontline," Sabah Khodada, an Iraqi Army captain, said that the 9/11 attack "was conducted by people who were trained by Saddam," and that Iraq had a program to instruct terrorists in the art of hijacking. Another defector, who was identified as a retired lieutenant general in the Iraqi intelligence service, said that in 2000 he witnessed Arab students being given lessons in hijacking on a Boeing 707 parked at an Iraqi training camp near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.
Feith then fed this type of INC data into a fabrication mill operating at top speed known as the Office of Special Plans and some of the information processed through the OSP was not even shared with official intelligence agencies. In many instances it was passed on to the National Security Council, Cheney, and Bush without having been vetted by anyone besides this group of nitwits.
And they had to know that much of the information was false. A former high-level intelligence official told Hersh that American Special Forces units had been sent into Iraq in mid-March 2003, before the start of the war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. "They came up with nothing," the official told Hersh. "Never found a single Scud."
A 46 page report, based on a 15-month investigation, titled, Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis of the Issue of an Iraq-al Qaeda Relationship, was released on October 21, 2004, which said, "There is ample evidence that the Bush Administration had a predisposition to overthrow Saddam Hussein before the 9/11 attacks."
The report accused Feith's office of compiling "selective reinterpretations of intelligence" that went beyond the views of American spy agencies in order to help make the case for an invasion of Iraq.
The report concluded that Feith and his staff were convinced that a relationship existed between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and that the office had advanced that perspective by trying to change the intelligence community's views and "by taking its interpretation straight to policymakers."
"That alleged relationship," the report said, "coupled with the assertion that Iraq possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), was the major argument presented by the Administration for invading Iraq."
Relying on selective reporting, irrespective of credibility and reliability, Feith’s briefing concluded the following:
• Iraq had "more than a decade of numerous contacts" with al Qaeda;
• there were "multiple areas of cooperation" between Iraq and al Qaeda;
• Iraq and al Qaeda had a "shared interest and pursuit of WMD;" and
• there was "[o]ne indication of Iraq coordination with al Qaeda specifically related to 9/11," presumably a reference to the alleged (but doubted by the IC) Atta meeting in Prague.
The report states that there are no known intelligence reports, other than those provided by Feith's office, that could explain where this view originated. "A pattern emerges of senior administration officials exaggerating the extent of the relationship in public statements which more closely reflect the Feith analysis" than those of the intelligence community, it said.
As an obvious example, the report said Feith's office repeatedly asserted in the months leading up to the war that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in the spring before the September 11 attacks, an account that the CIA dismissed because evidence existed that Atta was elsewhere at the time.
And in at least one case, according to the report, the Pentagon office included the purported meeting in a report sent to the White House, but omitted it from the version of the same report sent to the CIA.
The meeting was then constantly referred to by senior administration officials, and especially Cheney, as evidence of a possible Saddam link to 9/11. In fact, Cheney said the Feith analysis was the "best source of information," according to the report.
However, not only had the alleged meeting never been "known," at the time of the briefing to the White House, the Intelligence Community was skeptical in late spring 2002 that such a meeting ever took place. Yet in September of 2002, Feith called the meeting a "known contact" in a crucial misstatement about the intelligence, since it indicated a link which did not exist.
"The professional objectivity and independence required in the assessment of the Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship, a major reason given for going to war, were compromised to support a predetermined policy -- to present the government of Saddam Hussein as a serious threat to the security of the United States" the report wrote.
Finally, relative to the attacks, the final 911 Commission Report itself said that the "Intelligence Community has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaida strike."
Inventing bogus intelligence was bad enough but during the pre-war planning, the military experts were systematically excluded from participating in that process as well. In the end, Feith and the OSP had so grossly underestimated the Iraqi resistance that it caused General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion in Iraq, to call Feith "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth," according Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack.
Feith and the Defense Policy Board
The DPB is a group of 30 people, who for the most part were chosen by Rumsfeld and Feith, that advises officials on whether to go to war or not. Many of its members are literally making a fortune off a war which they had been promoting for years. At least 9 members have ties to companies that won more than $76 billion in defense contracts during 2001 and 2002.
Feith excluded many top Middle East experts from the State Department from playing any meaningful role in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Feith's office and the CPA were tasked with awarding reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
So this was another sweet setup. Feith was deciding who would get contracts, at the same time that his middleman law partner, Zel, was hustling up business deals in Iraq for rich clients. Of course, for members of the Bush war profiteering club, this was merely business as usual.
Among the firms that have profited the most, are those with consultants serving on the DPB, many of which were hand-picked by Feith.
Some of the construction and defense companies with direct ties to DPB members include Boeing, Bechtel, TRW, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton, along with smaller players like Symantec Corp, Technology Strategies and Alliance Corp, and Polycom Inc.
How much money was up for grabs when it came to doling out defense contracts? For starters, during the major combat phase of the war, the US military launched over 800 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraqi forces, according to figures released by the US Navy.
At a price of about $569,000 each, replacing those missiles no doubt generated a lofty amount for Raytheon Systems, the Pentagon contractor for Tomahawks. Close to a 100 more missiles were fired during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
Occupation forces later launched over 19,000 guided munitions in Iraq, most of which came from the US, according to a report on Operation Iraqi Freedom published by the US Central Command Air Forces on 30 April 2003.
There was a $10.3 billion proposal for the development of a missile defense program in Bush’s 2005 defense spending budget, of which Lockheed Martin would be heavily involved in, according to a report from the World Policy Institute.
Northrop Grumman, the country's third largest defense contractor, secured contracts to build new weapons systems such as the unmanned predator drones. The firm is the prime contractor for the Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Bush proposed $12 billion for UAV development for the years between 2004 - 2009. Northrop earned a company record of $11.1 billion in defense contracts in 2003.
And Bush is funneling our tax dollars to known crooks. Northrop's Vinnell subsidiary was awarded a $48 million contract to train the new Iraqi Army, even though Northrop was forced to pay $191.7 million in penalties over the previous 4 years.
In less than a year after he took office, Bush got rid of regulations implemented by President Clinton that barred contracts for companies convicted or penalized for crimes during the previous 3 years. Clinton strengthened the rules before leaving office, and said that repeated violations would make a company ineligible for new contracts. Bush suspended the regulations within his first 3 months in office. By December 2001, he had revoked them entirely.
Who Else Is Raking In War Profits?
Lets look at a couple members of the Defense Policy Board. Former CIA Director, James Woolsey, is a prime example of how the revolving door never stops spinning for this gang of war profiteers. After he left the CIA, Woolsey remained a senior advisor on intelligence and national security issues, and specifically the war in Iraq. When the war began, he worked for two private companies that did business in Iraq, and was a partner in a company that invested in firms that provide security and anti-terrorism services.
At the time, Woolsey was a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton. In that role, less than 2 months after the war began, he was a featured speaker at a May 2003 conference titled "Companies on the Ground: The Challenge for Business in Rebuilding Iraq," at which 80 corporate executives paid $1,100 to attend. He spoke about the many potential business opportunities in Iraq and about Bush's decision to steer reconstruction contracts to US firms.
With Woolsey in a Vice President position, Booz Allen became a subcontractor for a $75-million telecommunications contract in Iraq. Of course in true Dick Cheney style, Woolsey denies any involvement in that work. But then, it really does not matter whether he was directly involved or not because as VP of the company he would get a cut of the profits resulting from any contracts the firm enters into.
Soon after 9/11, Woolsey wrote an op ed piece in the Wall Street Journal saying a foreign state had aided Al Qaeda in preparing the attacks and named Iraq as the leading culprit. In October 2001, Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz sent Woolsey to the UK to hunt for evidence to link Saddam to the attacks.
Before the war, Woolsey was up to his neck in war planning. In addition to sitting on the DPB and giving direct advice to Rumsfeld, he was a founding member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), an organization set up by the WH in 2002 to help garner public support for going to war in Iraq.
They actually put together a promotion team to rally support for the war funded with our tax dollars no less. Tell me this scheme wasn't well planned and directed.
Before the war, another DPB member, Margaret Bartel, managed the funds channeled to Amhed Chalabi's exile group, the INC, including funds for its bogus prewar intelligence program on WMDs. Once it began, Bartel went on to head a consulting firm which helped investors find Iraqi partners.
Bartel established Global Positioning and told the LA Times that the firm's primary purpose was to "introduce clients to the Iraqi market, help them find potential Iraqi partners, set up meetings with government officials … and provide on-the-ground support for their business interests." So here was another sweet set up.
As for the chairman of the DPB, Richard Perle was a "special government employee," subject to federal ethics rules, including the rule that bars the chairman from using his public office for private gain.
Perle decided to resign as chairman after a little ethical problem came under scrutiny in March 2003. It was discovered that at the same time that he was advising the Pentagon on war policies, Perle had been retained by the telecommunications company Global Crossing to help overcome opposition by the Department of Defense and the FBI to the firms proposed sale to a Chinese company.
The agencies objected to the sale citing national security and law enforcement problems, because it would put Global's fiber-optic network, used by the US government, under Chinese ownership.
According to a legal notice that Global was preparing to file in bankruptcy court at the time, Perle was set to make $725,000, including $600,000 if the government approved the sale of the firm to the joint venture of Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, and Singapore Technologies Telemedia Pte, a company controlled by the Singapore government.
Perle was quick to pipe up to reporters and make the distinction that he was not involved in the lobbying of Defense Department officials, that his job was merely to advise Global on the process of gaining approval. That sure put my mind at ease.
In the end, I don't think its likely that Feith will end up in the welfare lines. Due to careful post-White House planning, I think its safe to say that Feith and his band of cronies will enjoy financial benefits for life, just so long as their never-ending war policies are carried on by their successor.
Douglas Feith, the recently resigned undersecretary of defense, who just happened to be one of the main people who for years on end advocated for a war in Iraq, and who in large part developed the disastrous policies for the war in Iraq, planned ahead for his retirement and will not be seen in the unemployment line.
On January 27, 2005, the Washington Post announced: "A principal architect of the Defense Department's postwar strategy in Iraq ... will leave his post this summer."
The announcement came after years of rumors that top administration officials had decided that Feith had to go, but were dissuaded by Donald Rumsfeld who argued that his ouster would be viewed as an admission that the war in Iraq was a mistake. But the administration had definitely reduced Feith's authority over the past 2 years.
In announcing his departure, Feith claimed he was leaving for personal reasons, citing the desire to spend more time with his children. "For the last four years, they haven't seen me a lot," he told the Post.
He used the standard administration exit line. Sort of like the noticeably absent in light of Katrina, ex-FEMA director, Joe Albaugh, who left his job to spend time with his family. Joe was Bush’s chief of staff when he was governor of Texas and his campaign manager in 2000. Once Bush took office, Joe accepted a gig as director of FEMA.
Like Feith, when he announced his resignation, Joe said, "Now I am going to take the opportunity to spend some time with my wife and children."
I sure hope Doug spends more time with his kids than Joe did, because judging from hindsight, Joe should have been a psychic. He somehow knew at the beginning of March 2003, that he should quit FEMA and go into the business of securing reconstruction contracts in Iraq for wealthy clients before the first bomb was dropped. And his family could not have enjoyed much quality time at all with Joe, being he opened up New Bridge Strategies for business within a few short weeks of leaving the White House.
At the time, Josh Marshall, who writes a column for the Washington newspaper, The Hill, said that he believed that each new piece of legislation needs a catchy title, and came up with title "The Bush Crony Full-Employment Act of 2003," for the $87 billion allocated for rebuilding Iraq.
According to Josh, New Bridge was actually an outgrowth of Haley Barbour’s lobbying firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers. Josh says he reached that conclusion after he learned that both firms were located in the same office space. And also because Lanny Griffith was the CEO of New Bridge and Ed Rogers was the vice president. Sounds like a logical conclusion to me.
When the company began, the New Bridges official web site said, "the opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in Washington, D.C., and on the ground in Iraq." That phrasing was quickly changed.
How could it get any sweeter than this? Joe quits FEMA, moves into the office space of one of the most successful and powerful GOP lobbying firms in the country and starts advertising for clients who want to win reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
First Brother, Neil Bush, also jumped on this money train and landed a $60,000 a year consultant contract with a principal in New Bridge. According to Neil's testimony in his divorce deposition in March 2004, in return for his salary, he took phone messages for about 3 hours a week.
However, 3 people contacted by the Financial Times of London reported seeing letters written by Neil that recommend business ventures promoted by New Bridges in the Middle East. So we had Neil being paid an annual fee to "help companies secure contracts in Iraq," the Times reported.
I'm not too worried about Doug Feith ending up in the unemployment lines because following in Joe's footsteps, Feith and his law partner stayed very busy behind the scenes planning for Feith's retirement when it came time to leave the White House.
The Iraqi International Law Group
Before Feith was inducted into the Bush administration, he was the Feith half of the Feith & Zell, law firm in Washington. His partner, Marc Zell, simply renamed the firm, Zell, Goldberg & Co, when they decided to set up shop to start cashing in on the Iraq contracting business.
According to The Hill, Zell, was helping with international marketing for a concern called the Iraqi International Law Group. Billing itself as a group of lawyers and businessmen interested in helping investors in Iraq, the venture was run by Ahmed Chalabi's nephew Salem, who doubled as a legal adviser to Iraq's governing council, of which his uncle was a member.
How powerful was Feith in awarding contracts? Extremely. According to a June, 2004, by an article in Time Magazine entitled, "The Paper Trail: Did Cheney Okay a Deal? Feith is the person who approved the controversial no-bid contract for Halliburton in Iraq.
Time Magazine quoted an email sent by Stephen Browning of the Army Corps of Engineers, that said the contract for construction of oil pipelines was approved by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith "contingent on informing WH tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP,s [Vice President,s] office.
Browning, later said in an interview that he wrote the memo after he and retired Lt Gen. Jay Garner met with Feith. According to Browning, Feith told him that he had already informed Cheney's office. The email was dated March 5, 2003, and Halliburton was awarded the contract three days later with no bids tendered by any other companies.
If he could pull this off for Halliburton, what he could do for the IILG, goes without saying. According to its web site, the IILG was made up of lawyers and businessmen who claimed to have, "dared to take the lead in bringing private sector investment and experience" to the war-torn country and offered to "be your Professional Gateway to the New Iraq."
The way it was set up, nephew Salem was charge of the IILG and Feith's partner, Zell, was in charge of international marketing. The IILG's website claimed that it was the only firm worth consulting. "At IILG, our task is to provide foreign enterprise with the information and tools it needs to enter the emerging Iraq and to succeed," it said.
"Our clients number among the largest corporations and institutions on the planet" it said, "They have chosen IILG to provide them with real-time, on the ground intelligence they cannot get from inexperienced local firms or from overburdened coalition and local government officials."
Imagine that, the top firms on the planet.
"Many firms outside the country purport to counsel companies about doing business in Iraq," the web site read. "The simple fact is: you cannot adequately advise about Iraq unless you are here day in and day out, working closely with officials at the CPA, the newly constituted governing council and the few functioning civilian ministries [oil, labor and social welfare, etc]."
The truth is, the IILG was nothing more than another one of many front companies, in a web-like profiteering network, that was specifically set up to funnel tax dollars through Iraq and back into the pockets of the Bush gang.
And talk about blatant. When the company was set up, its website was not registered to Salem Chalabi; it was registered under the name of Marc Zell, located at the very same address as Zell, Goldberg & Co.
According to Salem, quoted in the National Journal, Zell was IILG's "marketing consultant" and had been contacting law firms in Washington and New York to ask if they had clients interested in doing business in Iraq.
This tied in with an announcement by Zell, Goldberg & Co, that it had set up a "task force" dealing with issues and opportunities relating to the "recently ended" war in Iraq, and to assist companies "in their relations with the United States government in connection with Iraqi reconstruction projects as prime contractors and consultants."
Of course Zell made no mention of the firm's ties to the infamous nephew Salem or the IILG. Zell said it was working with the Federal Market Group, an organization which specialized in helping companies win government contracts, which boasted of having a 90% success rate.
Considering all of its boasting about high level connections, IILG was also rather modest about the family ties of its founder. The website did not mention that he was the nephew of Ahmed Chalabi even once. Geez, I wonder why.
Implementing The Iraq Profiteering Scheme
Feith had been pushing for the ouster of Saddam for years. In 1998, him and Richard Perle sent a letter to President Bill Clinton proposing that the US team up with Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress to get rid of Saddam. Clinton refused.
As we all know, Ahmed had strong support within the Pentagon. In fact, two of his staunchest supporters were Feith, and Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board.
Perle, an assistant defense secretary during the Reagan administration, was appointed by his old crony, Donald Rumsfeld, to lead the board in 2001. Its a well-known fact that the board exerts tremendous influence when it comes to war policies.
As soon as Bush took office, Perle, Feith and Ahmed Chalabi all started working diligently together to get the war in Iraq off the ground, with Ahmed providing bogus intelligence about WMDs and bragging about a secret network within Iraq which could take over running the country after the invasion.
"There was a close personal bond, too, between Chalabi and Wolfowitz and Perle, dating back many years," according to Seymour Hersh in the May 5, 2003 the New Yorker.
"Their relationship deepened after the Bush Administration took office, and Chalabi’s ties extended to others in the Administration, including Rumsfeld; Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; and I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff," Hersh wrote.
"With the Pentagon’s support, Chalabi’s group worked to put defectors with compelling stories in touch with reporters in the United States and Europe," Hersh said, "The resulting articles had dramatic accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction or told of ties to terrorist groups. In some cases, these stories were disputed in analyses by the C.I.A." he noted.
Almost immediately after September 11th, "the I.N.C. began to publicize the stories of defectors who claimed that they had information connecting Iraq to the attacks, Hersh said.
For example, in a October 14, 2001, interview on PBS "Frontline," Sabah Khodada, an Iraqi Army captain, said that the 9/11 attack "was conducted by people who were trained by Saddam," and that Iraq had a program to instruct terrorists in the art of hijacking. Another defector, who was identified as a retired lieutenant general in the Iraqi intelligence service, said that in 2000 he witnessed Arab students being given lessons in hijacking on a Boeing 707 parked at an Iraqi training camp near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.
Feith then fed this type of INC data into a fabrication mill operating at top speed known as the Office of Special Plans and some of the information processed through the OSP was not even shared with official intelligence agencies. In many instances it was passed on to the National Security Council, Cheney, and Bush without having been vetted by anyone besides this group of nitwits.
And they had to know that much of the information was false. A former high-level intelligence official told Hersh that American Special Forces units had been sent into Iraq in mid-March 2003, before the start of the war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. "They came up with nothing," the official told Hersh. "Never found a single Scud."
A 46 page report, based on a 15-month investigation, titled, Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis of the Issue of an Iraq-al Qaeda Relationship, was released on October 21, 2004, which said, "There is ample evidence that the Bush Administration had a predisposition to overthrow Saddam Hussein before the 9/11 attacks."
The report accused Feith's office of compiling "selective reinterpretations of intelligence" that went beyond the views of American spy agencies in order to help make the case for an invasion of Iraq.
The report concluded that Feith and his staff were convinced that a relationship existed between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and that the office had advanced that perspective by trying to change the intelligence community's views and "by taking its interpretation straight to policymakers."
"That alleged relationship," the report said, "coupled with the assertion that Iraq possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), was the major argument presented by the Administration for invading Iraq."
Relying on selective reporting, irrespective of credibility and reliability, Feith’s briefing concluded the following:
• Iraq had "more than a decade of numerous contacts" with al Qaeda;
• there were "multiple areas of cooperation" between Iraq and al Qaeda;
• Iraq and al Qaeda had a "shared interest and pursuit of WMD;" and
• there was "[o]ne indication of Iraq coordination with al Qaeda specifically related to 9/11," presumably a reference to the alleged (but doubted by the IC) Atta meeting in Prague.
The report states that there are no known intelligence reports, other than those provided by Feith's office, that could explain where this view originated. "A pattern emerges of senior administration officials exaggerating the extent of the relationship in public statements which more closely reflect the Feith analysis" than those of the intelligence community, it said.
As an obvious example, the report said Feith's office repeatedly asserted in the months leading up to the war that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in the spring before the September 11 attacks, an account that the CIA dismissed because evidence existed that Atta was elsewhere at the time.
And in at least one case, according to the report, the Pentagon office included the purported meeting in a report sent to the White House, but omitted it from the version of the same report sent to the CIA.
The meeting was then constantly referred to by senior administration officials, and especially Cheney, as evidence of a possible Saddam link to 9/11. In fact, Cheney said the Feith analysis was the "best source of information," according to the report.
However, not only had the alleged meeting never been "known," at the time of the briefing to the White House, the Intelligence Community was skeptical in late spring 2002 that such a meeting ever took place. Yet in September of 2002, Feith called the meeting a "known contact" in a crucial misstatement about the intelligence, since it indicated a link which did not exist.
"The professional objectivity and independence required in the assessment of the Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship, a major reason given for going to war, were compromised to support a predetermined policy -- to present the government of Saddam Hussein as a serious threat to the security of the United States" the report wrote.
Finally, relative to the attacks, the final 911 Commission Report itself said that the "Intelligence Community has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaida strike."
Inventing bogus intelligence was bad enough but during the pre-war planning, the military experts were systematically excluded from participating in that process as well. In the end, Feith and the OSP had so grossly underestimated the Iraqi resistance that it caused General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion in Iraq, to call Feith "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth," according Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack.
Feith and the Defense Policy Board
The DPB is a group of 30 people, who for the most part were chosen by Rumsfeld and Feith, that advises officials on whether to go to war or not. Many of its members are literally making a fortune off a war which they had been promoting for years. At least 9 members have ties to companies that won more than $76 billion in defense contracts during 2001 and 2002.
Feith excluded many top Middle East experts from the State Department from playing any meaningful role in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Feith's office and the CPA were tasked with awarding reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
So this was another sweet setup. Feith was deciding who would get contracts, at the same time that his middleman law partner, Zel, was hustling up business deals in Iraq for rich clients. Of course, for members of the Bush war profiteering club, this was merely business as usual.
Among the firms that have profited the most, are those with consultants serving on the DPB, many of which were hand-picked by Feith.
Some of the construction and defense companies with direct ties to DPB members include Boeing, Bechtel, TRW, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton, along with smaller players like Symantec Corp, Technology Strategies and Alliance Corp, and Polycom Inc.
How much money was up for grabs when it came to doling out defense contracts? For starters, during the major combat phase of the war, the US military launched over 800 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraqi forces, according to figures released by the US Navy.
At a price of about $569,000 each, replacing those missiles no doubt generated a lofty amount for Raytheon Systems, the Pentagon contractor for Tomahawks. Close to a 100 more missiles were fired during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
Occupation forces later launched over 19,000 guided munitions in Iraq, most of which came from the US, according to a report on Operation Iraqi Freedom published by the US Central Command Air Forces on 30 April 2003.
There was a $10.3 billion proposal for the development of a missile defense program in Bush’s 2005 defense spending budget, of which Lockheed Martin would be heavily involved in, according to a report from the World Policy Institute.
Northrop Grumman, the country's third largest defense contractor, secured contracts to build new weapons systems such as the unmanned predator drones. The firm is the prime contractor for the Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Bush proposed $12 billion for UAV development for the years between 2004 - 2009. Northrop earned a company record of $11.1 billion in defense contracts in 2003.
And Bush is funneling our tax dollars to known crooks. Northrop's Vinnell subsidiary was awarded a $48 million contract to train the new Iraqi Army, even though Northrop was forced to pay $191.7 million in penalties over the previous 4 years.
In less than a year after he took office, Bush got rid of regulations implemented by President Clinton that barred contracts for companies convicted or penalized for crimes during the previous 3 years. Clinton strengthened the rules before leaving office, and said that repeated violations would make a company ineligible for new contracts. Bush suspended the regulations within his first 3 months in office. By December 2001, he had revoked them entirely.
Who Else Is Raking In War Profits?
Lets look at a couple members of the Defense Policy Board. Former CIA Director, James Woolsey, is a prime example of how the revolving door never stops spinning for this gang of war profiteers. After he left the CIA, Woolsey remained a senior advisor on intelligence and national security issues, and specifically the war in Iraq. When the war began, he worked for two private companies that did business in Iraq, and was a partner in a company that invested in firms that provide security and anti-terrorism services.
At the time, Woolsey was a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton. In that role, less than 2 months after the war began, he was a featured speaker at a May 2003 conference titled "Companies on the Ground: The Challenge for Business in Rebuilding Iraq," at which 80 corporate executives paid $1,100 to attend. He spoke about the many potential business opportunities in Iraq and about Bush's decision to steer reconstruction contracts to US firms.
With Woolsey in a Vice President position, Booz Allen became a subcontractor for a $75-million telecommunications contract in Iraq. Of course in true Dick Cheney style, Woolsey denies any involvement in that work. But then, it really does not matter whether he was directly involved or not because as VP of the company he would get a cut of the profits resulting from any contracts the firm enters into.
Soon after 9/11, Woolsey wrote an op ed piece in the Wall Street Journal saying a foreign state had aided Al Qaeda in preparing the attacks and named Iraq as the leading culprit. In October 2001, Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz sent Woolsey to the UK to hunt for evidence to link Saddam to the attacks.
Before the war, Woolsey was up to his neck in war planning. In addition to sitting on the DPB and giving direct advice to Rumsfeld, he was a founding member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), an organization set up by the WH in 2002 to help garner public support for going to war in Iraq.
They actually put together a promotion team to rally support for the war funded with our tax dollars no less. Tell me this scheme wasn't well planned and directed.
Before the war, another DPB member, Margaret Bartel, managed the funds channeled to Amhed Chalabi's exile group, the INC, including funds for its bogus prewar intelligence program on WMDs. Once it began, Bartel went on to head a consulting firm which helped investors find Iraqi partners.
Bartel established Global Positioning and told the LA Times that the firm's primary purpose was to "introduce clients to the Iraqi market, help them find potential Iraqi partners, set up meetings with government officials … and provide on-the-ground support for their business interests." So here was another sweet set up.
As for the chairman of the DPB, Richard Perle was a "special government employee," subject to federal ethics rules, including the rule that bars the chairman from using his public office for private gain.
Perle decided to resign as chairman after a little ethical problem came under scrutiny in March 2003. It was discovered that at the same time that he was advising the Pentagon on war policies, Perle had been retained by the telecommunications company Global Crossing to help overcome opposition by the Department of Defense and the FBI to the firms proposed sale to a Chinese company.
The agencies objected to the sale citing national security and law enforcement problems, because it would put Global's fiber-optic network, used by the US government, under Chinese ownership.
According to a legal notice that Global was preparing to file in bankruptcy court at the time, Perle was set to make $725,000, including $600,000 if the government approved the sale of the firm to the joint venture of Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, and Singapore Technologies Telemedia Pte, a company controlled by the Singapore government.
Perle was quick to pipe up to reporters and make the distinction that he was not involved in the lobbying of Defense Department officials, that his job was merely to advise Global on the process of gaining approval. That sure put my mind at ease.
In the end, I don't think its likely that Feith will end up in the welfare lines. Due to careful post-White House planning, I think its safe to say that Feith and his band of cronies will enjoy financial benefits for life, just so long as their never-ending war policies are carried on by their successor.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Halliburton Contracts Illegal - But Bush Busts The Whistleblower
Evelyn Pringle August 31, 2005
In October, 2004, Bunnatine Greenhouse, a top military official responsible for making sure the Army Corps of Engineers complies with contracting rules, came forward and revealed that top Pentagon officials showed improper favoritism to Halliburton when awarding military contracts.
The allegations made by this official were first reported by Time Magazine.
Greenhouse said that when the Pentagon awarded Halliburton a five-year $7 billion contract, it pressured her to withdraw her objections, actions which she claimed were unprecedented in her experience.
In a letter from her attorney's office, Greenhouse told members of Congress that the Army gave the no-bid contracts to Halliburton's subsidiary KBR for political reasons.
Greenhouse charged that contracts were approved over her reservations, some of which were handwritten on the original contracts, and extensions of contracts were awarded because underlings signed them in collusion with senior officials without her knowledge.
A five-year Iraq contract was awarded less than a month before the invasion, under a clause which allowed for no-bid contracts in the case of a "compelling emergency." Greenhouse contends that she objected to the 5-year terms of the contract, questioning the probability of an emergency lasting for five years.
When her superiors signed off on the contract and sent it back for her approval, she wrote the following message next to her signature: "I caution that extending this sole-source effort beyond a one year period could convey an invalid perception that there is not strong intent for a limited competition."
Federal contracting rules say contracts must be awarded by career civil servants, not political appointees. Greenhouse claimed the Army ignored this requirement when giving contracts to Halliburton and violated "the integrity of the federal contracting program as it relates to a major defense contractor."
"Employees of the U.S. government have taken improper action that favored KBR's interests," Greenhouse wrote. "This conduct has violated specific regulations and calls into question the independence" of the contracting process, she said.
She also said the Army altered documents in order to justify the Halliburton's contract work in the Balkans. In a letter from Michael Kohn, Greenhouse's attorney, to then acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee, Greenhouse charged that on a Balkan's contract, a deputy assistant secretary of the Army had ordered changes in documents to legitimize the contract "for political reasons."
According to Kohn's letter, in January 2002, Greenhouse sent an investigative team to review the Halliburton operation in the Balkans. After which she reported: "The general feeling in the theater is that the contractor (KBR) is 'out of control'" and was able to manipulate Corps of Engineer officials.
The Balkan's contract was scheduled to expire no later than May 27, 2004. However, it was extended without Greenhouse's knowledge, after a search for other contractors was stopped. Although the contract was originally awarded a "compelling emergency" exception, the extended contract was awarded under another exception, that KBR was the "one and only source."
Nothing was ever done about the illegal contracts awarded to Halliburton. Instead, less than a year after she reported these blatant violations of procurement law, Bush decided to bust the Whistleblower, Ms Greenhouse.
The August 29, 2005 New York Times reports: "A top Army contracting official who criticized a large, noncompetitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq was demoted Saturday for what the Army called poor job performance.
"The official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse," the Times wrote, "has worked in military procurement for 20 years and for the past several years had been the chief overseer of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that has managed much of the reconstruction work in Iraq."
Ms Greenhouse's lawyer, Michael Kohn, "called the action an "obvious reprisal" for the strong objections she raised in 2003 to a series of corps decisions involving the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, which has garnered more than $10 billion for work in Iraq," according to the Times.
Whistleblower Told The Truth
When Cheney appeared on NBC's Meet the Press on Sept 14, 2003, he arrogantly stated: "And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government."
And when Cheney was specifically asked whether he had known about Halliburton's no-bid contract, he said, "I don't know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stayed away from any information on that."
Those statements were proven false on June, 2004, by an article in Time Magazine entitled, “The Paper Trail: Did Cheney Okay a Deal?”
The truth is, Bush and Cheney both were informed that Halliburton would get the contract before it was ever awarded. Time Magazine quoted an email sent by the Army Corps of Engineers, that said the contract for construction of oil pipelines was approved by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith “contingent on informing WH tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP’s [Vice President’s] office.”
The author of the email, Stephen Browning, said in an interview that he wrote the memo after he and retired Lt Gen Jay Garner met with Douglas Feith about plans to declassify the earlier $1.8 million contract with the Halliburton.
According to Browning, Feith told him that he had already informed Cheney's office.
The email was dated March 5, 2003, and Halliburton was awarded the contract three days later without allowing for any bids from other companies.
The email totally contradicts Cheney's televised claims that he had no involvement in Halliburton's contracts whatsoever and proves that Cheney and the White House played a key role in boosting Halliburton into the number one war profiteering position in Iraq.
When confronted with the email, Bush dismissed it by saying the Corp of Engineers was just trying to give the Vice President's office a heads-up on the process. Now I suppose people's opinions could vary as to what the email actually meant, depending on what the definition of co-or-di-na-ted is.
No Political Appointees Were Involved - None
In the heat of the debate over Halliburton contracts, some readers may recall a news conference, where Richard Boucher, spokesman for State Department at the time, explained how decisions are made on military contracts. "The decisions are made by career procurement officials. There's a separation, a wall, between them and political-level questions when they're doing the contracts," he said.
Then the chief counsel of the Army Corp of Engineers appeared on "60 Minutes" where he denied that there was any involvement by political appointees in the Halliburton contract. He specifically said: "The procurement of this particular contract was done by career civil servants."
We also heard from a spokesman from the Department of Defense, Major Joseph Yoswa, who claimed safeguards existed to insure that the process was free of favoritism. "Most important,” he said, “career civil servants, not political appointees, make final decisions on contracts," according to The New Yorker.
Next Halliburton spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, stepped up to the mike in August, 2003, and said Halliburton's military contracts were awarded "not by politicians but by government civil servants, under strict guidelines."
Finally, during a hearing on March 11, 2004, before the Government Reform Committee, six senior government officials from the CPA and DOD testified under oath, and were each asked the following question by Republican Committee Chairman, Tom Davis:
"I want to get this on the record, and everybody is under oath. Have you or anyone in your office ever discussed with the Vice President or with his office the award of a contract for Iraqi reconstruction prior to any contract being awarded?"
Every single one of those six officials said "no sir," which means every single one of them lied under oath. I may not know how Cheney got this number of people to lie under oath, but the fact is he did it and nothing was ever done about it.
Three months after the hearing, the June 14, 2004, LA Times reported: "The Pentagon admitted that a $7 billion no-bid contract to extinguish oil fires in Iraq was awarded to Halliburton after a political appointee from the Bush administration recommended the company for the job."
The political appointee referred to was Michael Mobbs, a special assistant to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
During the Summer of 2002, the Times wrote, "Mobbs was in charge of the Pentagon's Energy Infrastructure Planning Group (EIPG) to develop a plan for reconstructing Iraq's oil industry."
This is how the Halliburton contract got set up. In November 2002, a Pentagon group led by Mobbs (under Cheney's instruction), came up with the idea to pay Halliburton $1.9 million to develop a secret contingency plan for handling the Iraqi oil industry. Its important to understand that it was this order to develop a contingency plan, that ultimately led to the firm being awarded the $7 billion oil infrastructure contract.
To ensure that Halliburton would get the contract, Cheney used the exact same strategy that he developed back when he was secretary of defense during the first Bush Presidency. The way it works is actually quite simple. Halliburton gets funding to create a market for its services and then it becomes the logical company to carry out the plan when the time for awarding contracts rolls around.
I'm sure no one needs reminding of how well this plan paid off for Cheney when he left office in 1992 and soon thereafter became very gainfully employed with Halliburton. Ten years later, his method of contract manipulation worked like a charm again.
According to testimony at a House oversight hearing, by GAO investigator, William Woods, it was discovered that Michael Mobbs even acknowledged in a memo that the $1.9 million task order would uniquely position Halliburton to win the far larger sole-source contract to actually do the restoration work to Iraqi oil fields.
In fact, Mobbs himself later admitted that he had described the contingency plan in a meeting of the Deputies' Committee to an audience that including Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, Rice's deputy national security adviser, Steven Hadley (guy who took the fall for the 16 words about uranium in Africa in Bush's state of the union address), the deputy secretaries of state and defense, and the deputy director of the CIA.
On March 8, 2003, Halliburton was awarded the $7 billion contract and the war began on March 20, 2003.
When the topic of the no-bid contract came up in the media, Bush claimed that it was merely a deal to put out oil well fires. However, Pentagon officials were soon forced to admit that it was a very big deal and would in fact amount to billions of dollars for Halliburton. But even then, the story of the day was that the contract was only temporary and would be replaced by competitive bidding shortly.
After months of senseless delays, new contracts were finally awarded on January 16, 2004 but once again, Halliburton netted the top prize. The Parsons Corporation was awarded an $800 million contract, but the $1.2 billion contract went to Halliburton.
During a June 8, 2004, briefing to staff members of the House Committee on Government Reform, Mobbs and Pentagon officials were asked about the specific details of the contracting procedure that was employed with Halliburton.
Before making a final decision, Mobbs admitted that he briefed top officials from several executive agencies, in the Deputies Committee, to make sure they had no objections. According to Mobbs, White House Staff members were also at the meeting. After that meeting, Mobb's said that a White House official told Douglas Feith that the group did not object.
These disclosures prove that Cheney and Bush were informed about the Halliburton contracts on at least two key occasions during the procurement process.
So we've got all these high level officials plotting together for 6 months to set up a plan to hand Halliburton billions of dollars, and Bush and Cheney expect us to believe that not one of these guys uttered a word about contracts to either one of them.
And the media is no help.
During the Clinton administration, it chased after a stupid story about a 20-year-old land deal involving $100,000 (hardly the crime of the century) for 8 years and to this day, I still have never figured out what they were expecting to find exactly. I do know one thing, it wasn't that the Clintons and their cronies were accused of funneling billions of tax dollars through the bodies of our slain and injured young soldiers like what is going on right now in the Bush administration.
The media in fact spends very little effort and time investigating and reporting on the real crimes within the current administration, even when they involve fraud and corruption by officials at every level of government who are openly handing our tax dollars to war profiteers to the tune of a billion dollars a month.
I often find myself wondering whether the mainstream media has been bought off entirely.
Who's Next In Line For Retaliation?
The question is, who's next? Greenhouse wasn't the only official to report on the illegal procurement practices of the Bush administration. According to a report on an investigation of Halliburton by the Government Accounting Office titled, Rebuilding Iraq: Fiscal Year 2003 Contract Award Procedures and Management Challenges, contracts worth billions of dollars were awarded to Halliburton without full and open competition, including Iraq's oil infrastructure contract.
The GAO determined that the administration had violated procurement law when it issued various task orders under already existing contracts and that out of 11 task orders examined, more than half were awarded outside the scope of their contracts.
As an example of the inept procurement process, the GAO report described how "a military review board approved a six-month renewal contract with Halliburton worth $587 million in just ten minutes and based on only six pages of documentation."
After wasting millions of tax dollars conducting the investigation, the GAO concluded that the contracts should have never been awarded to the company in the first place and yet Halliburton remains the number one contractor in Iraq. Go figure.
In October, 2004, Bunnatine Greenhouse, a top military official responsible for making sure the Army Corps of Engineers complies with contracting rules, came forward and revealed that top Pentagon officials showed improper favoritism to Halliburton when awarding military contracts.
The allegations made by this official were first reported by Time Magazine.
Greenhouse said that when the Pentagon awarded Halliburton a five-year $7 billion contract, it pressured her to withdraw her objections, actions which she claimed were unprecedented in her experience.
In a letter from her attorney's office, Greenhouse told members of Congress that the Army gave the no-bid contracts to Halliburton's subsidiary KBR for political reasons.
Greenhouse charged that contracts were approved over her reservations, some of which were handwritten on the original contracts, and extensions of contracts were awarded because underlings signed them in collusion with senior officials without her knowledge.
A five-year Iraq contract was awarded less than a month before the invasion, under a clause which allowed for no-bid contracts in the case of a "compelling emergency." Greenhouse contends that she objected to the 5-year terms of the contract, questioning the probability of an emergency lasting for five years.
When her superiors signed off on the contract and sent it back for her approval, she wrote the following message next to her signature: "I caution that extending this sole-source effort beyond a one year period could convey an invalid perception that there is not strong intent for a limited competition."
Federal contracting rules say contracts must be awarded by career civil servants, not political appointees. Greenhouse claimed the Army ignored this requirement when giving contracts to Halliburton and violated "the integrity of the federal contracting program as it relates to a major defense contractor."
"Employees of the U.S. government have taken improper action that favored KBR's interests," Greenhouse wrote. "This conduct has violated specific regulations and calls into question the independence" of the contracting process, she said.
She also said the Army altered documents in order to justify the Halliburton's contract work in the Balkans. In a letter from Michael Kohn, Greenhouse's attorney, to then acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee, Greenhouse charged that on a Balkan's contract, a deputy assistant secretary of the Army had ordered changes in documents to legitimize the contract "for political reasons."
According to Kohn's letter, in January 2002, Greenhouse sent an investigative team to review the Halliburton operation in the Balkans. After which she reported: "The general feeling in the theater is that the contractor (KBR) is 'out of control'" and was able to manipulate Corps of Engineer officials.
The Balkan's contract was scheduled to expire no later than May 27, 2004. However, it was extended without Greenhouse's knowledge, after a search for other contractors was stopped. Although the contract was originally awarded a "compelling emergency" exception, the extended contract was awarded under another exception, that KBR was the "one and only source."
Nothing was ever done about the illegal contracts awarded to Halliburton. Instead, less than a year after she reported these blatant violations of procurement law, Bush decided to bust the Whistleblower, Ms Greenhouse.
The August 29, 2005 New York Times reports: "A top Army contracting official who criticized a large, noncompetitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq was demoted Saturday for what the Army called poor job performance.
"The official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse," the Times wrote, "has worked in military procurement for 20 years and for the past several years had been the chief overseer of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that has managed much of the reconstruction work in Iraq."
Ms Greenhouse's lawyer, Michael Kohn, "called the action an "obvious reprisal" for the strong objections she raised in 2003 to a series of corps decisions involving the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, which has garnered more than $10 billion for work in Iraq," according to the Times.
Whistleblower Told The Truth
When Cheney appeared on NBC's Meet the Press on Sept 14, 2003, he arrogantly stated: "And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government."
And when Cheney was specifically asked whether he had known about Halliburton's no-bid contract, he said, "I don't know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stayed away from any information on that."
Those statements were proven false on June, 2004, by an article in Time Magazine entitled, “The Paper Trail: Did Cheney Okay a Deal?”
The truth is, Bush and Cheney both were informed that Halliburton would get the contract before it was ever awarded. Time Magazine quoted an email sent by the Army Corps of Engineers, that said the contract for construction of oil pipelines was approved by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith “contingent on informing WH tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP’s [Vice President’s] office.”
The author of the email, Stephen Browning, said in an interview that he wrote the memo after he and retired Lt Gen Jay Garner met with Douglas Feith about plans to declassify the earlier $1.8 million contract with the Halliburton.
According to Browning, Feith told him that he had already informed Cheney's office.
The email was dated March 5, 2003, and Halliburton was awarded the contract three days later without allowing for any bids from other companies.
The email totally contradicts Cheney's televised claims that he had no involvement in Halliburton's contracts whatsoever and proves that Cheney and the White House played a key role in boosting Halliburton into the number one war profiteering position in Iraq.
When confronted with the email, Bush dismissed it by saying the Corp of Engineers was just trying to give the Vice President's office a heads-up on the process. Now I suppose people's opinions could vary as to what the email actually meant, depending on what the definition of co-or-di-na-ted is.
No Political Appointees Were Involved - None
In the heat of the debate over Halliburton contracts, some readers may recall a news conference, where Richard Boucher, spokesman for State Department at the time, explained how decisions are made on military contracts. "The decisions are made by career procurement officials. There's a separation, a wall, between them and political-level questions when they're doing the contracts," he said.
Then the chief counsel of the Army Corp of Engineers appeared on "60 Minutes" where he denied that there was any involvement by political appointees in the Halliburton contract. He specifically said: "The procurement of this particular contract was done by career civil servants."
We also heard from a spokesman from the Department of Defense, Major Joseph Yoswa, who claimed safeguards existed to insure that the process was free of favoritism. "Most important,” he said, “career civil servants, not political appointees, make final decisions on contracts," according to The New Yorker.
Next Halliburton spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, stepped up to the mike in August, 2003, and said Halliburton's military contracts were awarded "not by politicians but by government civil servants, under strict guidelines."
Finally, during a hearing on March 11, 2004, before the Government Reform Committee, six senior government officials from the CPA and DOD testified under oath, and were each asked the following question by Republican Committee Chairman, Tom Davis:
"I want to get this on the record, and everybody is under oath. Have you or anyone in your office ever discussed with the Vice President or with his office the award of a contract for Iraqi reconstruction prior to any contract being awarded?"
Every single one of those six officials said "no sir," which means every single one of them lied under oath. I may not know how Cheney got this number of people to lie under oath, but the fact is he did it and nothing was ever done about it.
Three months after the hearing, the June 14, 2004, LA Times reported: "The Pentagon admitted that a $7 billion no-bid contract to extinguish oil fires in Iraq was awarded to Halliburton after a political appointee from the Bush administration recommended the company for the job."
The political appointee referred to was Michael Mobbs, a special assistant to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
During the Summer of 2002, the Times wrote, "Mobbs was in charge of the Pentagon's Energy Infrastructure Planning Group (EIPG) to develop a plan for reconstructing Iraq's oil industry."
This is how the Halliburton contract got set up. In November 2002, a Pentagon group led by Mobbs (under Cheney's instruction), came up with the idea to pay Halliburton $1.9 million to develop a secret contingency plan for handling the Iraqi oil industry. Its important to understand that it was this order to develop a contingency plan, that ultimately led to the firm being awarded the $7 billion oil infrastructure contract.
To ensure that Halliburton would get the contract, Cheney used the exact same strategy that he developed back when he was secretary of defense during the first Bush Presidency. The way it works is actually quite simple. Halliburton gets funding to create a market for its services and then it becomes the logical company to carry out the plan when the time for awarding contracts rolls around.
I'm sure no one needs reminding of how well this plan paid off for Cheney when he left office in 1992 and soon thereafter became very gainfully employed with Halliburton. Ten years later, his method of contract manipulation worked like a charm again.
According to testimony at a House oversight hearing, by GAO investigator, William Woods, it was discovered that Michael Mobbs even acknowledged in a memo that the $1.9 million task order would uniquely position Halliburton to win the far larger sole-source contract to actually do the restoration work to Iraqi oil fields.
In fact, Mobbs himself later admitted that he had described the contingency plan in a meeting of the Deputies' Committee to an audience that including Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, Rice's deputy national security adviser, Steven Hadley (guy who took the fall for the 16 words about uranium in Africa in Bush's state of the union address), the deputy secretaries of state and defense, and the deputy director of the CIA.
On March 8, 2003, Halliburton was awarded the $7 billion contract and the war began on March 20, 2003.
When the topic of the no-bid contract came up in the media, Bush claimed that it was merely a deal to put out oil well fires. However, Pentagon officials were soon forced to admit that it was a very big deal and would in fact amount to billions of dollars for Halliburton. But even then, the story of the day was that the contract was only temporary and would be replaced by competitive bidding shortly.
After months of senseless delays, new contracts were finally awarded on January 16, 2004 but once again, Halliburton netted the top prize. The Parsons Corporation was awarded an $800 million contract, but the $1.2 billion contract went to Halliburton.
During a June 8, 2004, briefing to staff members of the House Committee on Government Reform, Mobbs and Pentagon officials were asked about the specific details of the contracting procedure that was employed with Halliburton.
Before making a final decision, Mobbs admitted that he briefed top officials from several executive agencies, in the Deputies Committee, to make sure they had no objections. According to Mobbs, White House Staff members were also at the meeting. After that meeting, Mobb's said that a White House official told Douglas Feith that the group did not object.
These disclosures prove that Cheney and Bush were informed about the Halliburton contracts on at least two key occasions during the procurement process.
So we've got all these high level officials plotting together for 6 months to set up a plan to hand Halliburton billions of dollars, and Bush and Cheney expect us to believe that not one of these guys uttered a word about contracts to either one of them.
And the media is no help.
During the Clinton administration, it chased after a stupid story about a 20-year-old land deal involving $100,000 (hardly the crime of the century) for 8 years and to this day, I still have never figured out what they were expecting to find exactly. I do know one thing, it wasn't that the Clintons and their cronies were accused of funneling billions of tax dollars through the bodies of our slain and injured young soldiers like what is going on right now in the Bush administration.
The media in fact spends very little effort and time investigating and reporting on the real crimes within the current administration, even when they involve fraud and corruption by officials at every level of government who are openly handing our tax dollars to war profiteers to the tune of a billion dollars a month.
I often find myself wondering whether the mainstream media has been bought off entirely.
Who's Next In Line For Retaliation?
The question is, who's next? Greenhouse wasn't the only official to report on the illegal procurement practices of the Bush administration. According to a report on an investigation of Halliburton by the Government Accounting Office titled, Rebuilding Iraq: Fiscal Year 2003 Contract Award Procedures and Management Challenges, contracts worth billions of dollars were awarded to Halliburton without full and open competition, including Iraq's oil infrastructure contract.
The GAO determined that the administration had violated procurement law when it issued various task orders under already existing contracts and that out of 11 task orders examined, more than half were awarded outside the scope of their contracts.
As an example of the inept procurement process, the GAO report described how "a military review board approved a six-month renewal contract with Halliburton worth $587 million in just ten minutes and based on only six pages of documentation."
After wasting millions of tax dollars conducting the investigation, the GAO concluded that the contracts should have never been awarded to the company in the first place and yet Halliburton remains the number one contractor in Iraq. Go figure.
Halliburton Contracts Illegal - Bush Says So What
Evelyn Pringle February 2005
After millions of tax dollars were spent investigating how Halliburton ended up being awarded billions of dollar worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq, the Government Accounting Office determined that the company should never have been awarded the contracts in the first place.
In response to those findings, Cheney and Bush both, as much as thumbed their noses at tax payers as if to say "so what, what are you going to do about it?" Well, it's beginning to look like they were right, there is nothing we can do about it.
According to the GAO's report, Rebuilding Iraq: Fiscal Year 2003 Contract Award Procedures and Management Challenges, contracts worth billions of dollars were awarded without full and open competition, including Halliburton’s oil infrastructure contract.
The GAO found that the Bush Administration violated procurement law when it issued various task orders under existing contracts. Of the 11 task orders examined, more than half were awarded outside the scope of their contracts, according to the report.
As an example of the inept procurement process, the GAO told how "a military review board approved a six-month renewal contract with Halliburton worth $587 million in just ten minutes and based on only six pages of documentation," the report said.
Once and For All - How Did Halliburton Get Those Contracts?
Remember back when Cheney appeared on NBC's Meet the Press on Sept 14, 2003, and said, "And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government."
And remember when he was asked whether he had known about Halliburton's noncompetitive contract, and he said, "I don't know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stayed away from any information on that."
Those statements were proven false by a June, 2004, article in Time Magazine entitled, “The Paper Trail: Did Cheney Okay a Deal?” As it turns out, Bush and Cheney both were informed that Halliburton would get the contract before it was awarded. Time quoted an email sent by the Army Corps of Engineers, that said the contract for construction of oil pipelines was approved by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith “contingent on informing WH tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP’s [Vice President’s] office.”
This email totally contradicts Cheney's nationally televised assertion that he had no involvement in Halliburton's contracts whatsoever. It proved once and for all that Cheney and the White House had played a key role in making Cheney's ex-employer the number one war profiteer in Iraq.
The email was dated March 5, 2003, and Halliburton was awarded the contract three days later without any bids by other companies.
The administration tried to dismiss the email by saying the employee at the Corp was just trying to give the Vice President's office a heads-up on the process. Now I suppose opinions on what the email mean could differ. However, people's opinions on what it means are likely based on what their definition of co-or-di-na-ted IS.
No Political Appointees Involved - None
Some people may recall the news conference, where State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, explained who makes the decisions on contracts. "The decisions are made by career procurement officials. There's a separation, a wall, between them and political-level questions when they're doing the contracts," he maintained. Boucher lied.
Then there was the time that the chief counsel of the Army Corp of Engineers appeared on "60 Minutes" and denied that there was any involvement by political appointees in the Halliburton contract. He specifically said: "The procurement of this particular contract was done by career civil servants." Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this guy is a liar too.
Major Joseph Yoswa, a Department of Defense spokesman, also claimed safeguards existed to insure that the process was free of favoritism. "Most important,” he said, “career civil servants, not political appointees, make final decisions on contracts," according to The New Yorker. As it turns out, the Major has a problem telling the truth as well.
Then back in August, 2003, there was Halliburton spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, who said the company’s military contracts were awarded "not by politicians but by government civil servants, under strict guidelines." I for one, would like to see the list of strict guidelines, and then, I'd like to have the names of the civil servants Wendy dealt with.
Finally, during a March 11, 2004, hearing before the Government Reform Committee, six senior officials from the CPA and DOD testified under oath, and were asked to answer the following question by Republican Committee Chairman, Tom Davis:
"I want to get this on the record, and everybody is under oath. Have you or anyone in your office ever discussed with the Vice President or with his office the award of a contract for Iraqi reconstruction prior to any contract being awarded?"
Every single one of those six officials said "no sir," which means every single one of them lied under oath. So how Cheney could pull this off? How could he get all these people to lie? I may not know how he did it, but the fact is he did it and nothing has been done about it.
Because, according to the June 14, 2004, LA Times, "The Pentagon admitted that a $7 billion no-bid contract to extinguish oil fires in Iraq was awarded to Halliburton after a political appointee from the Bush administration recommended the company for the job. ... the political appointee was Michael Mobbs — a special assistant to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. During the Summer of 2002, Mobbs was in charge of the Pentagon's Energy Infrastructure Planning Group (EIPG) to develop a plan for reconstructing Iraq's oil industry," the Times reported.
For obvious reasons, contracting experts say political appointees like Mobbs should not decide which companies compete for contracts. "The suggestion that political appointees would be directing that type of investigation does not seem consistent with maintaining the appearance of propriety," expert Steven Schooner told the Times.
How Could They Pull This Off?
In November 2002, long before the war began, a Pentagon group led by Mobbs, deceded to pay Halliburton $1.9 million to develop a secret contingency plan for handling the Iraqi oil industry.
Tax payers need to understand that it was this initial task order to develop a plan, that led to the company being awarded the $7 billion oil infrastructure contract.
Remember the strategy that Cheney's developed back when he was secretary of defense under the first President Bush. It goes like this, you give Halliburton funding so it can create a market for its services and then its the logical company to hire to carry out the plan when it comes time for contracts to be awarded.
In this particular instance, according to testimony by GAO investigator, Willim Woods, at a House oversight hearing, Mobbs even acknowledged in a memo that the $1.9 million task order would uniquely position Halliburton to win the far larger sole-source contract to actually do the restoration work to Iraqi oil fields.
So once again, Cheney’s contract manipulation strategy worked like a charm.
Mott described the Halliburton contingency plan in a meeting of the Deputies Committee. Those attending the meeting included Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, the deputy national security adviser, Steven Hadley, the deputy secretaries of state and defense, and deputy director of the CIA.
On March 8, 2003, Halliburton was chosen to carry out the plan. When the contract came up in the media, Bush claimed the contract was merely a deal to put out oil well fires. However, it wasn't long before Pentagon officials were forced to admit that it was a big deal and would involve billions of dollars. But even then, they said that the contract was only temporary and would be replaced by competitively bid contracts shortly.
After umteen delays, new contracts were finally awarded on Jan 16, 2004 and surprise, surprise, Halliburton won the big prize again. An $800 million contract went to the Parsons Corporation, and a $1.2 billion contract went to Halliburton.
Bush and Cheney In Up To Their Necks
During a June 8, 2004 briefing to staff members of the House Committee on Government Reform, Pentagon officials, including Mobbs, were asked about the specific details of the contracting procedure that was employed with Halliburton.
Before making a final decision, Mobbs admitted that he briefed top officials from several executive agencies, in the Deputies Committee, to make sure they had no objections. According to Mobbs, White House Staff members were among those at the meeting.
So, we've got Cheney's top dog, Libby, and Rice's second in command, Hadley, and White House staff members, and political appointee, Mobbs, leading the pack. And Bush and Cheney want us to believe that not one of these officials uttered a word about Halliburton contracts to either one of them. Yea right.
Following the June 8th Mobb's briefing, Waxman sent a letter to Cheney and gave reporters a copy. "These new disclosures appear to contradict your assertions that you were not informed about the Halliburton contracts," Waxman wrote. "They also seem to contradict the administration's repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of the contracts to Halliburton," he said.
The letter described the briefing at which Mobbs acknowledged that he chose Halliburton. After that meeting, Mobb's said that a White House official told Douglas Feith the group did not object, according to Waxman's letter.
Waxman also raised questions about the March 5, 2003, e-mail that Cheney received. The author of that email, Stephen Browning, said in an interview that he wrote the memo after he and retired Lt Gen Jay Garner met with Douglas Feith about plans to declassify the earlier $1.8 million contract with the Halliburton.
According to Browning, Feith told him that he had already informed Cheney's office. Three days later, Halliburton got the $7 billion contract and the war began March 20, 2003. At the briefing, "Browning repeated his story," Waxman wrote.
"These disclosures mean that your office was informed about the Halliburton contracts at least twice at key moments," Waxman wrote.
When Waxman tried to investigate the matter further, Cheney simply refused to respond to a request for records of any communications he and his staff had with Halliburton, or actions they took on the contracts. And in what has by now become a pattern when it comes to Cheney, Congress did nothing about it.
The Whistleblower
Finally, in October, 2004, Bunnatine Greenhouse, a top official responsible for making sure the Army Corps of Engineers complies with contracting rules, came forward and revealed that top Pentagon officials showed improper favoritism to Halliburton.
Greenhouse said that when the Pentagon awarded the company a 5-year $7 billion contract, it pressured her to withdraw her objections, actions that were unprecedented in her experience, she said.
The Greenhouse allegations were first reported by Time Magazine. In a letter, Greenhouse told members of Congress that the Army gave the no-bid contract to Halliburton for political reasons. She also said the Army altered documents in order to justify the company's contract work in the Balkans.
Federal contracting rules say contracts must be awarded by career civil servants, not political appointees. Greenhouse said the Army ignored this requirement when giving contracts to Halliburton. She said the Army violated "the integrity of the federal contracting program as it relates to a major defense contractor."
"Employees of the U.S. government have taken improper action that favored KBR's interests," Greenhouse said in the letter. "This conduct has violated specific regulations and calls into question the independence" of the contracting process.
Bush and Cheney Are Busted - So What?
The media chased after that dumb 20-year-old Whitewater story (hardly the crime of the century) for 8 years To this day, I still don't know what they were trying to prove exactly. I do know it wasn't that the Clintons and their cronies had scammed billions of dollars from tax payers. Yet now with Bush administration, the media spends little or no effort exposing crimes involving real fraud and corruption even though the schemes are costing tax payers billions of dollars.
Has the mainstream media been bought off entirely?
After millions of tax dollars were spent investigating how Halliburton ended up being awarded billions of dollar worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq, the Government Accounting Office determined that the company should never have been awarded the contracts in the first place.
In response to those findings, Cheney and Bush both, as much as thumbed their noses at tax payers as if to say "so what, what are you going to do about it?" Well, it's beginning to look like they were right, there is nothing we can do about it.
According to the GAO's report, Rebuilding Iraq: Fiscal Year 2003 Contract Award Procedures and Management Challenges, contracts worth billions of dollars were awarded without full and open competition, including Halliburton’s oil infrastructure contract.
The GAO found that the Bush Administration violated procurement law when it issued various task orders under existing contracts. Of the 11 task orders examined, more than half were awarded outside the scope of their contracts, according to the report.
As an example of the inept procurement process, the GAO told how "a military review board approved a six-month renewal contract with Halliburton worth $587 million in just ten minutes and based on only six pages of documentation," the report said.
Once and For All - How Did Halliburton Get Those Contracts?
Remember back when Cheney appeared on NBC's Meet the Press on Sept 14, 2003, and said, "And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government."
And remember when he was asked whether he had known about Halliburton's noncompetitive contract, and he said, "I don't know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stayed away from any information on that."
Those statements were proven false by a June, 2004, article in Time Magazine entitled, “The Paper Trail: Did Cheney Okay a Deal?” As it turns out, Bush and Cheney both were informed that Halliburton would get the contract before it was awarded. Time quoted an email sent by the Army Corps of Engineers, that said the contract for construction of oil pipelines was approved by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith “contingent on informing WH tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP’s [Vice President’s] office.”
This email totally contradicts Cheney's nationally televised assertion that he had no involvement in Halliburton's contracts whatsoever. It proved once and for all that Cheney and the White House had played a key role in making Cheney's ex-employer the number one war profiteer in Iraq.
The email was dated March 5, 2003, and Halliburton was awarded the contract three days later without any bids by other companies.
The administration tried to dismiss the email by saying the employee at the Corp was just trying to give the Vice President's office a heads-up on the process. Now I suppose opinions on what the email mean could differ. However, people's opinions on what it means are likely based on what their definition of co-or-di-na-ted IS.
No Political Appointees Involved - None
Some people may recall the news conference, where State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, explained who makes the decisions on contracts. "The decisions are made by career procurement officials. There's a separation, a wall, between them and political-level questions when they're doing the contracts," he maintained. Boucher lied.
Then there was the time that the chief counsel of the Army Corp of Engineers appeared on "60 Minutes" and denied that there was any involvement by political appointees in the Halliburton contract. He specifically said: "The procurement of this particular contract was done by career civil servants." Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this guy is a liar too.
Major Joseph Yoswa, a Department of Defense spokesman, also claimed safeguards existed to insure that the process was free of favoritism. "Most important,” he said, “career civil servants, not political appointees, make final decisions on contracts," according to The New Yorker. As it turns out, the Major has a problem telling the truth as well.
Then back in August, 2003, there was Halliburton spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, who said the company’s military contracts were awarded "not by politicians but by government civil servants, under strict guidelines." I for one, would like to see the list of strict guidelines, and then, I'd like to have the names of the civil servants Wendy dealt with.
Finally, during a March 11, 2004, hearing before the Government Reform Committee, six senior officials from the CPA and DOD testified under oath, and were asked to answer the following question by Republican Committee Chairman, Tom Davis:
"I want to get this on the record, and everybody is under oath. Have you or anyone in your office ever discussed with the Vice President or with his office the award of a contract for Iraqi reconstruction prior to any contract being awarded?"
Every single one of those six officials said "no sir," which means every single one of them lied under oath. So how Cheney could pull this off? How could he get all these people to lie? I may not know how he did it, but the fact is he did it and nothing has been done about it.
Because, according to the June 14, 2004, LA Times, "The Pentagon admitted that a $7 billion no-bid contract to extinguish oil fires in Iraq was awarded to Halliburton after a political appointee from the Bush administration recommended the company for the job. ... the political appointee was Michael Mobbs — a special assistant to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. During the Summer of 2002, Mobbs was in charge of the Pentagon's Energy Infrastructure Planning Group (EIPG) to develop a plan for reconstructing Iraq's oil industry," the Times reported.
For obvious reasons, contracting experts say political appointees like Mobbs should not decide which companies compete for contracts. "The suggestion that political appointees would be directing that type of investigation does not seem consistent with maintaining the appearance of propriety," expert Steven Schooner told the Times.
How Could They Pull This Off?
In November 2002, long before the war began, a Pentagon group led by Mobbs, deceded to pay Halliburton $1.9 million to develop a secret contingency plan for handling the Iraqi oil industry.
Tax payers need to understand that it was this initial task order to develop a plan, that led to the company being awarded the $7 billion oil infrastructure contract.
Remember the strategy that Cheney's developed back when he was secretary of defense under the first President Bush. It goes like this, you give Halliburton funding so it can create a market for its services and then its the logical company to hire to carry out the plan when it comes time for contracts to be awarded.
In this particular instance, according to testimony by GAO investigator, Willim Woods, at a House oversight hearing, Mobbs even acknowledged in a memo that the $1.9 million task order would uniquely position Halliburton to win the far larger sole-source contract to actually do the restoration work to Iraqi oil fields.
So once again, Cheney’s contract manipulation strategy worked like a charm.
Mott described the Halliburton contingency plan in a meeting of the Deputies Committee. Those attending the meeting included Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, the deputy national security adviser, Steven Hadley, the deputy secretaries of state and defense, and deputy director of the CIA.
On March 8, 2003, Halliburton was chosen to carry out the plan. When the contract came up in the media, Bush claimed the contract was merely a deal to put out oil well fires. However, it wasn't long before Pentagon officials were forced to admit that it was a big deal and would involve billions of dollars. But even then, they said that the contract was only temporary and would be replaced by competitively bid contracts shortly.
After umteen delays, new contracts were finally awarded on Jan 16, 2004 and surprise, surprise, Halliburton won the big prize again. An $800 million contract went to the Parsons Corporation, and a $1.2 billion contract went to Halliburton.
Bush and Cheney In Up To Their Necks
During a June 8, 2004 briefing to staff members of the House Committee on Government Reform, Pentagon officials, including Mobbs, were asked about the specific details of the contracting procedure that was employed with Halliburton.
Before making a final decision, Mobbs admitted that he briefed top officials from several executive agencies, in the Deputies Committee, to make sure they had no objections. According to Mobbs, White House Staff members were among those at the meeting.
So, we've got Cheney's top dog, Libby, and Rice's second in command, Hadley, and White House staff members, and political appointee, Mobbs, leading the pack. And Bush and Cheney want us to believe that not one of these officials uttered a word about Halliburton contracts to either one of them. Yea right.
Following the June 8th Mobb's briefing, Waxman sent a letter to Cheney and gave reporters a copy. "These new disclosures appear to contradict your assertions that you were not informed about the Halliburton contracts," Waxman wrote. "They also seem to contradict the administration's repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of the contracts to Halliburton," he said.
The letter described the briefing at which Mobbs acknowledged that he chose Halliburton. After that meeting, Mobb's said that a White House official told Douglas Feith the group did not object, according to Waxman's letter.
Waxman also raised questions about the March 5, 2003, e-mail that Cheney received. The author of that email, Stephen Browning, said in an interview that he wrote the memo after he and retired Lt Gen Jay Garner met with Douglas Feith about plans to declassify the earlier $1.8 million contract with the Halliburton.
According to Browning, Feith told him that he had already informed Cheney's office. Three days later, Halliburton got the $7 billion contract and the war began March 20, 2003. At the briefing, "Browning repeated his story," Waxman wrote.
"These disclosures mean that your office was informed about the Halliburton contracts at least twice at key moments," Waxman wrote.
When Waxman tried to investigate the matter further, Cheney simply refused to respond to a request for records of any communications he and his staff had with Halliburton, or actions they took on the contracts. And in what has by now become a pattern when it comes to Cheney, Congress did nothing about it.
The Whistleblower
Finally, in October, 2004, Bunnatine Greenhouse, a top official responsible for making sure the Army Corps of Engineers complies with contracting rules, came forward and revealed that top Pentagon officials showed improper favoritism to Halliburton.
Greenhouse said that when the Pentagon awarded the company a 5-year $7 billion contract, it pressured her to withdraw her objections, actions that were unprecedented in her experience, she said.
The Greenhouse allegations were first reported by Time Magazine. In a letter, Greenhouse told members of Congress that the Army gave the no-bid contract to Halliburton for political reasons. She also said the Army altered documents in order to justify the company's contract work in the Balkans.
Federal contracting rules say contracts must be awarded by career civil servants, not political appointees. Greenhouse said the Army ignored this requirement when giving contracts to Halliburton. She said the Army violated "the integrity of the federal contracting program as it relates to a major defense contractor."
"Employees of the U.S. government have taken improper action that favored KBR's interests," Greenhouse said in the letter. "This conduct has violated specific regulations and calls into question the independence" of the contracting process.
Bush and Cheney Are Busted - So What?
The media chased after that dumb 20-year-old Whitewater story (hardly the crime of the century) for 8 years To this day, I still don't know what they were trying to prove exactly. I do know it wasn't that the Clintons and their cronies had scammed billions of dollars from tax payers. Yet now with Bush administration, the media spends little or no effort exposing crimes involving real fraud and corruption even though the schemes are costing tax payers billions of dollars.
Has the mainstream media been bought off entirely?
Friday, July 30, 2010
Bush Team Has Good Reason To Worry
Evelyn Pringle November 15, 2005
In its systematic and concerted effort to portray a link between Saddam and bin Laden, the White House propaganda team was so successful, that a poll conducted in late 2002, showed that over half of the people polled believed that Saddam was connected to 9/11.
While that may have been great news for the home team back then, the problem for Bush today, is that he is never going to get 50% of Americans to erase their memory of all the statements that were made and believe the line that members of the administration never said anything to make people think that Saddam was involved in 9/11.
The truth is that the story about Saddam supporting al Qaeda was a key component in case for war and the administration worked non-stop to promote it even though the basis for the story was debunked early on by intelligence officials.
When making public remarks and speeches indicating a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Candy Rice consistently failed to mention the fact that intelligence agencies had dismissed it as false.
According to the March 16, 2004, report, “Iraq On The Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements On Iraq,” from the Committee on Government Reform, together the above 5 top officials “made 61 misleading statements about the strength of the Iraq-al Qaeda alliance in 52 public appearances.”
The new Senate investigation hasn't even got off the ground and already, the future is looking grim for the Bush team. It has now been revealed that US military intelligence specifically warned the administration in February 2002, that the key source of information about Al-Qaeda's ties to Iraq had provided "intentionally misleading" data, in a newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document made public this month.
While this is clear evidence that they should have known better, over the following year, top officials continued to make false claims that the Iraqi government was training and supporting members of bin Laden's terrorist group to bolster their rationale for war.
For instance, eight months later, in a speech on November 7, 2002, Bush told the audience: Saddam Hussein is “a threat because he is dealing with Al Qaida. . . . [A] true threat facing our country is that an Al Qaida-type network trained and armed by Saddam could attack America and not leave one fingerprint.”
In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, Bush said, “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.”
On January 26, 2003, when speaking at the World Economic Forum, Colin Powell stated, “The more we wait, the more chance there is for this dictator with clear ties to terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, more time for him to pass a weapon, share a technology, or use these weapons again.
In his February 5, 2003 speech at the UN, Powell told the audience: “what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder."
"Iraq today," Powell said, "harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants.”
To intentionally play on the public's emotions, around the second anniversary of 9/11, Dick Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press, that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
Cheney also told the Heritage Foundation on October 10, 2003, that Saddam Hussein “had an established relationship with al Qaeda.”
The Bush Team Should Be Worried
The administration has good reason to worry about the investigation. Last year, it got a glimpse of the kind of information that will likely come out, on March 9, 2004, during then CIA Director, George Tenet's testimony before the Armed Services Committee, when Democrats revealed that Scooter Libby, had received secret intelligence briefings in August 2002, on Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda, from then Assistant Secretary of Defense, Douglas Feith.
Prior to that hearing, Feith had already said that he never gave any such briefings, which in turn supported the theory that a private secret intelligence group in the White House was set up to manufacture the case for war. Tenet, himself told the committee that he had only first learned of Feith's private briefings "last week."
Feith better not be too comfortable in his retirement because he is definitely going to be spending some time up on the Hill. Virtually everything that went wrong in Iraq, relating to matters that Congress will be investigating, can be traced back to Feith's door. He played a leading role in the run-up to war.
The buck stops with Feith on its way to Cheney and Bush. Who knows, maybe Feith will agree to take the hit and he and Libby can bunk together in prison.
The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans (OSP), were both established under Feith's authority and will in all likelihood garner particular interest during the investigation.
The OSP, with the help of Ahmed Chalabi and his band of defectors, is believed to have cooked up the most alarming pre-war intelligence and "stovepiped" it to Bush through Rumsfeld and Cheney, without the vetting of any intelligence offical, in order to establish the existence of a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
The content of Feith's August 2002, private briefings have been described as a cherry-picked collection of raw, uncorroborated pieces of information, which painted a false picture of a link between Saddam and 9/11
The investigation will surely focus on October 2003, when Feith sent a memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing proof of a definite relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it somehow got published in the November 2003, Weekly Standard, complete with the memo’s classified annex claiming that its list of Iraq–al Qaeda contacts proved “an operational relationship from the early 1990s” and that “there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans.”
The Defense Department immediately ran for cover and issued a statement saying that “[t]he classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions.”
And on March 9, 2004, when Tenet again testified before the Armed Services Committee, he made sure to tell the committee that the CIA “did not agree with the way the data was characterized in that document.”
The investigation team will no doubt want to interview the neocon's best friend, Ahmed Chalabi, but he has already demonstrated that he could care less if he's accused of deliberately misleading the US in making the case for war, being he got what he wanted.
"We are heroes in error," he told the News Telegraph on February 19, 2004. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad," he said, "What was said before is not important."
In its systematic and concerted effort to portray a link between Saddam and bin Laden, the White House propaganda team was so successful, that a poll conducted in late 2002, showed that over half of the people polled believed that Saddam was connected to 9/11.
While that may have been great news for the home team back then, the problem for Bush today, is that he is never going to get 50% of Americans to erase their memory of all the statements that were made and believe the line that members of the administration never said anything to make people think that Saddam was involved in 9/11.
The truth is that the story about Saddam supporting al Qaeda was a key component in case for war and the administration worked non-stop to promote it even though the basis for the story was debunked early on by intelligence officials.
When making public remarks and speeches indicating a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Candy Rice consistently failed to mention the fact that intelligence agencies had dismissed it as false.
According to the March 16, 2004, report, “Iraq On The Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements On Iraq,” from the Committee on Government Reform, together the above 5 top officials “made 61 misleading statements about the strength of the Iraq-al Qaeda alliance in 52 public appearances.”
The new Senate investigation hasn't even got off the ground and already, the future is looking grim for the Bush team. It has now been revealed that US military intelligence specifically warned the administration in February 2002, that the key source of information about Al-Qaeda's ties to Iraq had provided "intentionally misleading" data, in a newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document made public this month.
While this is clear evidence that they should have known better, over the following year, top officials continued to make false claims that the Iraqi government was training and supporting members of bin Laden's terrorist group to bolster their rationale for war.
For instance, eight months later, in a speech on November 7, 2002, Bush told the audience: Saddam Hussein is “a threat because he is dealing with Al Qaida. . . . [A] true threat facing our country is that an Al Qaida-type network trained and armed by Saddam could attack America and not leave one fingerprint.”
In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, Bush said, “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.”
On January 26, 2003, when speaking at the World Economic Forum, Colin Powell stated, “The more we wait, the more chance there is for this dictator with clear ties to terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, more time for him to pass a weapon, share a technology, or use these weapons again.
In his February 5, 2003 speech at the UN, Powell told the audience: “what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder."
"Iraq today," Powell said, "harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants.”
To intentionally play on the public's emotions, around the second anniversary of 9/11, Dick Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press, that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
Cheney also told the Heritage Foundation on October 10, 2003, that Saddam Hussein “had an established relationship with al Qaeda.”
The Bush Team Should Be Worried
The administration has good reason to worry about the investigation. Last year, it got a glimpse of the kind of information that will likely come out, on March 9, 2004, during then CIA Director, George Tenet's testimony before the Armed Services Committee, when Democrats revealed that Scooter Libby, had received secret intelligence briefings in August 2002, on Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda, from then Assistant Secretary of Defense, Douglas Feith.
Prior to that hearing, Feith had already said that he never gave any such briefings, which in turn supported the theory that a private secret intelligence group in the White House was set up to manufacture the case for war. Tenet, himself told the committee that he had only first learned of Feith's private briefings "last week."
Feith better not be too comfortable in his retirement because he is definitely going to be spending some time up on the Hill. Virtually everything that went wrong in Iraq, relating to matters that Congress will be investigating, can be traced back to Feith's door. He played a leading role in the run-up to war.
The buck stops with Feith on its way to Cheney and Bush. Who knows, maybe Feith will agree to take the hit and he and Libby can bunk together in prison.
The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans (OSP), were both established under Feith's authority and will in all likelihood garner particular interest during the investigation.
The OSP, with the help of Ahmed Chalabi and his band of defectors, is believed to have cooked up the most alarming pre-war intelligence and "stovepiped" it to Bush through Rumsfeld and Cheney, without the vetting of any intelligence offical, in order to establish the existence of a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
The content of Feith's August 2002, private briefings have been described as a cherry-picked collection of raw, uncorroborated pieces of information, which painted a false picture of a link between Saddam and 9/11
The investigation will surely focus on October 2003, when Feith sent a memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing proof of a definite relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it somehow got published in the November 2003, Weekly Standard, complete with the memo’s classified annex claiming that its list of Iraq–al Qaeda contacts proved “an operational relationship from the early 1990s” and that “there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans.”
The Defense Department immediately ran for cover and issued a statement saying that “[t]he classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions.”
And on March 9, 2004, when Tenet again testified before the Armed Services Committee, he made sure to tell the committee that the CIA “did not agree with the way the data was characterized in that document.”
The investigation team will no doubt want to interview the neocon's best friend, Ahmed Chalabi, but he has already demonstrated that he could care less if he's accused of deliberately misleading the US in making the case for war, being he got what he wanted.
"We are heroes in error," he told the News Telegraph on February 19, 2004. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad," he said, "What was said before is not important."
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Woolseys - Mom & Pop War Profiteering Team
January 21, 2005
Evelyn Pringle
The Defense Policy Board (DPB) is a hand-picked group of 30 people that advises Bush administration officials on matters such as whether and when to go to war, or not. The current group was selected by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, and approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Everyone who is anyone in the arms and defense industry knows that palling up to DPB members is the ticket to getting a Pentagon contract.
Shortly after the war in Iraq began, the April 10, 2003 New York Times pointed out that several board members stood to benefit financially from the war. It reported that the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) documented that 9 of the members were "linked to companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002."
Promote War & Garner Positions For Profits
One of the members mentioned who stood to profit was R. James Woolsey. In addition to being a member of the DPB, Woolsey also sits on Navy and CIA advisory boards; and he is also a founding member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a private group that was specifically set up by Bush in 2002, to find ways to increase public support for a war against Iraq.
Let me say right here and now that I think bold lines are crossed when people like Woolsey, who promote a specific war, financially benefit from their successful promotion. There should be a law that requires a standard recusal from all war profits by any policy advisor who advocates sending our young men and women off to die in that same war.
And I don't know about anybody else, but I've never heard of our government forming a group of promoters to rally support for a war before. I dare anyone to try and convince me that this war profiteering scheme wasn't well planned and managed from the get-go.
Mom & Pop Team Of War Profiteers
I would rate the husband and wife team of James and Suzanne Woolsey up there as one of the most blatant examples of war profiting that I‘ve ever seen. They both remain policy advisors on Iraq, even though they both work for private firms that do business there. James has long wanted to use US military might to transform the Middle East. "And he has pushed for war with Iraq as hard as anyone, even before the terrorist attacks of Sep 11, 2001," according to the April 8, 2003 Global Policy Forum.
That's right - long before 9/11. In January 1998, James signed the now infamous letter to Clinton from the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) calling for regime change in Iraq (which Clinton trashed). In 1998, he also successfully lobbied to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), which allocated nearly $100 million for the Iraqi opposition, mainly the Iraq National Congress (INC), headed by none other than Ahmed Chalabi.
9/11 - Gift To Profiteering Team
The lobby for the war in Iraq immediately moved into high gear after 9/11. Within days, the DPB convened to discuss how they could use 9/11 to justify a war in Iraq. James was sent overseas to try to find a link between Saddam and bin Laden. He returned with the tale that an unnamed source had told the Czech intelligence that in April, 2001, he had observed a meeting between the lead 9/11 skyjacker and an Iraqi agent in Prague.
Even though the tale was deemed not credible by US, British, Israeli, and French, intelligence agencies, it became the basis of a major neo-con disinformation campaign against Saddam on cable news shows and editorial pages in major US newspapers.
James himself wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that said a foreign state had aided Al Qaeda in preparing the 9/11 attacks and pointed to Iraq as the prime suspect. In fact, James even went so far to allege that Saddam was behind the 1993 WTC bombing and the anthrax letters sent out after 9/11. In large part, the propaganda campaign was successful. A poll conducted in late 2002, showed that over half of those polled believed that Saddam was somehow linked to 9/11.
Woolsey & Chalabi - Secret Long-Time Buddies
Just when I think I have seen every dirty filthy angle by which money can be made in the war profiteering trade, something else turns up. I recently discovered a little tid-bit that I was unaware of. In addition to getting $100 million tax dollars allocated for the INC and Ahmed Chalabi in 1998, James also became lawyer and adviser to Iraq's "President in Waiting" in the same year.
With the help of the media, James must have forgot to mention this obvious conflict of interest while he was alleging collusion in 9/11 between Chalabi's enemy Saddam and bin Laden. This relationship definitely should have been made public before the war began because of its relevance to the truth or falsity of the justification given for waging war in Iraq to begin with.
Back in 1998, Chalabi sought legal help from Woolsey to secure the release of 6 of his INC associates from the detention center in Guam, even though the CIA said they were threats to US interests. James successfully freed Chalabi's minions and mowed a path for the so-called Iraqi defectors to feed bogus information to US intelligence teams.
The false information about WMDs and collusion between Saddam and bin Laden, that originated from the relationship of Chalabi and Woolsey, along with the resulting diversion of financial and military resources to Iraq, and away from the real terrorist bin Laden, has left the US with a limited ability to project military power anywhere else in the world. Any unexpected conflict would be a disaster with the military so overstretched in Iraq, and it looks like in large part, we can thank Woolsey and Chalabi for this predicament.
And as it turns out the CIA was right. One of men Woolsey freed, Aras Habib Karim, went on to become Chalabi's Chief of Intelligence, and has since leaked classified information to Iran, and is currently under investigation by the FBI. I wonder if James is representing the guy now?
James & Booz Allen Hamilton
At the same time that they were advocating for war in Iraq, its more than obvious that James and Suzanne Woolsey were positioning themselves for a future in defense-related firms, with an eye on the anticipated war profits.
James is a shining example of how the revolving door policy works in Washington. Although he left his position as director of the CIA in 1995, he remained a senior advisor on intelligence and national security policies.
And he also now works for several private firms that do business in Iraq. According to Citizens for Public Integrity, in July, 2002, James joined Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm that "had contracts worth more than $680 million" that year.
In May, 2003, in his capacity as a vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, James was a featured speaker at a seminar entitled "Companies on the Ground: The Challenge for Business in Rebuilding Iraq." He spoke of the potential business opportunities in the reconstruction of Iraq and how Bush planned to steer the contracts to US companies. Approximately 80 corporate executives paid $1100 to listen to what he had to say.
May, 2003 was only 2 months after the war began. If not for his advisory positions in the Bush administration, how would James possibly be able to put together a investor seminar with information on how to make money in Iraq?
In addition, "Booz Allen is a subcontractor for a $75-million telecommunications project in Iraq. The company does extensive work for the Defense Department as well. Recently, the Navy awarded it $14 million in contracts," according to the Aug 15, 2004 LA Times.
In true Dick Cheney style, James said in an interview that "he had not been involved in Booz Allen's Iraq contracts," the Times reports. But then it really doesn't matter whether he was involved in a particular contract or not, because as a Vice President of the firm, he benefits from profits resulting from all contracts.
Besides his recent statement to the Times belies the title of his own May, 2003 seminar which was: "Companies on the Ground: The Challenge for Business in Rebuilding Iraq." What is he trying to say? That he never got paid for speaking at that seminar? That none of the 80 executives that attended ever contacted Booz work in Iraq? Yea right.
James & Paladin Capital Group
James positioned himself all over the map. He is now a principal in the Paladin Capital Group, another defense-related firm. In part, here is how the firm describes itself on its web site, Paladin Homeland Security Fund, L.P. Investment Strategy
As widely reported in public media, billions of dollars are being appropriated by the United States and foreign governments for replenishment of military stockpiles, deployment of new means to create more secure societies and creation of new standards, equipment, technologies and policies for coping with and recovering from the myriad forms of terrorism and attack. ... the General Partner believes that the Federal and State governments ... and indeed governments throughout the world, will look to ... private enterprise to address these issues. The General Partner believes that the private sector thus will look to expend billions of dollars to execute defense and security plans for security in the public sector and to deploy growth equity to produce the products and services that non-governmental organizations will require.
Fund Management
Operation of the Fund starts with an experienced management team. ... additional individuals who have prominent and distinguished records in relevant fields, including security, defense and information and technology sciences, have associated with Paladin Capital in connection with the Fund. These additional principals of the Fund include R. James Woolsey, ...
The Fund's Principals have extensive domestic and international experience in fund investments and in originating, underwriting, closing, monitoring and exiting investments similar to those that are proposed for the Fund. The additional Principals, including Mr. Woolsey, ... have extensive and distinguished track records in service within the security, defense and related fields.
Investment Guidelines Characteristics
Small to medium-sized, worker-friendly companies with the following characteristics: Must relate to defense, prevention, coping or recovery from disaster. Dual use: commercial and government applicability for products and services.
Surely no one could ever allege a possible conflict of interest between James serving on 3 defense-related boards (Navy, DPB, & CIA) with the US government and his involvement with this firm.
Global Options - James & DPB Member Livingstone
James is also plugged into Global Options, which is headed by his fellow DPB member Neil Livingstone. In addition to sitting on the DPB, Livingstone has served as a Pentagon and State Department advisor and has long called for overthrowing Saddam.
Livingstone was already promoting war against Iraq back in 1993, when he wrote an editorial for Newsday that said the US "should launch a massive covert program designed to remove Hussein." Well 11 years later, it looks like he finally got his wish, and just like his pal James, Livingstone is a regular speaker at investment seminars on Iraq.
Global Options provides contacts and consulting services to firms doing business in Iraq and "offers a wide range of security and risk management services," according to its website. Although James admits that he is a paid advisor at Global Options, he again says the work he does at the firm does not involve Iraq. And of course I believe him (not).
Suzanne - Better Half Of Profiteering Team
From 1993 - 2003, Suzanne was an executive with the National Academies, an institution that advises the government on science, engineering, and medicine. There's probably no big money to be made in that position and that's probably what motivated Suzanne seek a more potentially profitable government position.
And she sure found one. According to the Aug 15, 2004 LA Times, Suzanne is a trustee of a little-known arms consulting group that had access to senior Pentagon leaders directing the Iraq war.
Although she had zero experience with military or national security matters, in 2000 she became a trustee at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a nonprofit corporation paid to do research for the Pentagon. During the attack against Iraq, the IDA provided senior Pentagon officials with assessments of the operation.
Through this position, Suzanne had unlimited insider access to valuable information. For instance, the Times reported that in a June 3, 2003, briefing, Brigadier General Robert Cone of the Army, described the group's operation. "This team did business" within the Army Central Command "on a daily basis, by observing meeting and planning sessions, attending command updates, watching key decisions being made, watching problems being solved, and generally being provided unrestricted access to the business of the conduct of this war," Cone said, according to a transcript of the session.
The question is did Suzanne use the info to benefit the family business? I'll let the reader be the judge. She was appointed to "Fluor's board in January 2004, while Fluor and a partner, AMEC, were competing for two federal contracts to do reconstruction work in Iraq. A little more than a month after she was named, Fluor and AMEC got both contracts, with a combined value of $1.6 billion," according to the LA Times.
Although a Fluor official refused to discuss why Suzanne was chosen for the job, the official confirmed SEC filings that show, "Fluor pays outside directors (like Suzanne) $40,000 a year, plus stock options and additional fees for attending meetings," the Times reports.
As for the financial worth of her stock in the company, its looking good. Fluor's stock has risen steadily since the war in Iraq began. The Times reports that in August, 2004, it was $45 a share, up from a little more than $30 a share in March 2003. Reports filed with the SEC show Suzanne owns 1,500 shares of Fluor stock.
With Fluor making a bundle, it only stands to reason that all the more money can be funneled back into the Woolsey piggy bank. SEC filings show that Fluor reported that its revenue for the first quarter of the current fiscal year from work in Iraq totaled "approximately $190 million. There was no work in Iraq in the comparable period in 2003," reports the Times.
I would be willing to bet that any defense related firm would have given an arm and a leg to find out what was being said during those IDA meetings and war planning sessions. Oh of course I'm not suggesting that Suzanne was feeding Fluor information before she came on board and that's why she was hired. But at the same time, its sure difficult to think of any other reason why she would be hired.
Here's another profiteering trick that I would never have thought of. Suzanne even managed to get paid while she gathered the insider information. Tax records show that in 2003, she was paid $11,500 for serving on the IDA. Who wouldn't want this gal on their team?
The overlapping public and private associations of the Woolsey's are merely 2 examples of the all too familiar pattern in the Bush administration, in which people who play key roles in advising officials on policies, are involving themselves financially with firms in related fields. And it should be noted that the profiteering is certainly not limited to war policies. Its rampant in every area of policy within the Bush administration.
Long-Term War - Thriving Family Business
Hands down, James should be awarded a plaque for being the #1 Iraq War Monger, and it should say: "What could be more sickening than a war-hungry non-combatant? A war-hungry non-combatant reaping profit from the blood of slaughtered women, children and men of Iraq," (Bill Berkowitz).
War-hungry James is still hard at it; promoting war for as far as the eye can see. On August 15, 2004, the LA Times reported that, "Last month, Woolsey appeared at a ... news conference to announce the creation of a group called the Committee of the Present Danger, which he said would attempt to focus public attention on the threat to the US and the civilized world from Islamic terrorism."
On September 29, 2004 he participated in a forum entitled: "World War IV: Why We Fight, Whom We Fight, How We Fight," sponsored by the Committee on Present Danger and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
I wonder how many people who went to the polls on Nov 2, 2004, realized that a vote for Bush meant rubber-stamping more of World War IV?
Plan To Destroy and Conquer Iraq
The Iraqi citizens had no say-so in the Bush administration's decision to bomb the hell out of their country and the Iraqi people, now suffering the most as a result of the war, are not allowed to be involved in making decisions about the reconstruction of Iraq.
In comments that could have been made yesterday, Naomi Klein described what would happen to the Iraqis under Bush's war plan in the April 14, 2003 issue of the Guardian, "A people, starved and sickened by sanctions, then pulverized by war, is going to emerge from this trauma to find that their country had been sold out from under them. They will also discover that their new-found "freedom" - for which so many of their loved ones perished - comes pre-shackled by irreversible economic decisions that were made in boardrooms while the bombs were still falling. They will then be told to vote for their new leaders, and welcomed to the wonderful world of democracy. "
Every one of her predictions has come true and Iraqis may be worse off than we realize. Klein reports that on October 13, 2004, Iraq's "health ministry issued a harrowing report on its post-invasion health crisis, including outbreaks of typhoid and tuberculosis and soaring child and mother mortality rates," while at the same time the "State Department announced that $3.5 billion for water, sanitation and electricity projects was being shifted to security."
How can anybody in their right mind expect the Iraqi people to be grateful to America for all this good fortune?
Stop The War Profiteering
It seems to me that we've taken our eye off the ball here. Granted, the web of corruption is bad enough in itself, but too little consideration is being given to the Iraqi lives at stake. Every profiteering dollar bilked or wasted is a dollar that could be spent on improving Iraq's basic living conditions like getting water, sanitation and electricity up and running again, or training Iraqi police and military forces, or developing jobs for Iraqis.
Instead our tax dollars are being funneled back to profiteers like the Woolseys, over the backs of not only our dead soldiers; but over 100,000 dead Iraqis as well. The administration had the chance to rebuild Iraq, and at the same time earn the trust of the Iraqi people, but instead it chose to rape and torture innocent Iraqi prisoners, raid the reconstruction fund, and deprive the Iraqis of everything essential to normal human life.
The blatant acts of corruption by the occupational authority and US contractors have given the Iraqis every reason under the sun to mistrust the motives of Americans who say they want to help rebuild their country. And how can we expect their opinions to change as long as the obvious corruption continues?
If we ever expect to regain the trust of Iraqis, we have to stop the Woolseys, and others like them, who engage in this filthy, disgusting trade. For starters, I say all Bush war profiteers should be given 2 options: they can either recuse themselves from advising government officials on any matter of national security period, or they can donate all profits made through affiliations with defense-related companies to soldiers wounded in the war and families of soldiers killed in the war.
While this would definitely be a good first step, I won't hold my breath while waiting to see which option the greedy war-mongers choose.
Evelyn Pringle
The Defense Policy Board (DPB) is a hand-picked group of 30 people that advises Bush administration officials on matters such as whether and when to go to war, or not. The current group was selected by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, and approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Everyone who is anyone in the arms and defense industry knows that palling up to DPB members is the ticket to getting a Pentagon contract.
Shortly after the war in Iraq began, the April 10, 2003 New York Times pointed out that several board members stood to benefit financially from the war. It reported that the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) documented that 9 of the members were "linked to companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002."
Promote War & Garner Positions For Profits
One of the members mentioned who stood to profit was R. James Woolsey. In addition to being a member of the DPB, Woolsey also sits on Navy and CIA advisory boards; and he is also a founding member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a private group that was specifically set up by Bush in 2002, to find ways to increase public support for a war against Iraq.
Let me say right here and now that I think bold lines are crossed when people like Woolsey, who promote a specific war, financially benefit from their successful promotion. There should be a law that requires a standard recusal from all war profits by any policy advisor who advocates sending our young men and women off to die in that same war.
And I don't know about anybody else, but I've never heard of our government forming a group of promoters to rally support for a war before. I dare anyone to try and convince me that this war profiteering scheme wasn't well planned and managed from the get-go.
Mom & Pop Team Of War Profiteers
I would rate the husband and wife team of James and Suzanne Woolsey up there as one of the most blatant examples of war profiting that I‘ve ever seen. They both remain policy advisors on Iraq, even though they both work for private firms that do business there. James has long wanted to use US military might to transform the Middle East. "And he has pushed for war with Iraq as hard as anyone, even before the terrorist attacks of Sep 11, 2001," according to the April 8, 2003 Global Policy Forum.
That's right - long before 9/11. In January 1998, James signed the now infamous letter to Clinton from the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) calling for regime change in Iraq (which Clinton trashed). In 1998, he also successfully lobbied to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), which allocated nearly $100 million for the Iraqi opposition, mainly the Iraq National Congress (INC), headed by none other than Ahmed Chalabi.
9/11 - Gift To Profiteering Team
The lobby for the war in Iraq immediately moved into high gear after 9/11. Within days, the DPB convened to discuss how they could use 9/11 to justify a war in Iraq. James was sent overseas to try to find a link between Saddam and bin Laden. He returned with the tale that an unnamed source had told the Czech intelligence that in April, 2001, he had observed a meeting between the lead 9/11 skyjacker and an Iraqi agent in Prague.
Even though the tale was deemed not credible by US, British, Israeli, and French, intelligence agencies, it became the basis of a major neo-con disinformation campaign against Saddam on cable news shows and editorial pages in major US newspapers.
James himself wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that said a foreign state had aided Al Qaeda in preparing the 9/11 attacks and pointed to Iraq as the prime suspect. In fact, James even went so far to allege that Saddam was behind the 1993 WTC bombing and the anthrax letters sent out after 9/11. In large part, the propaganda campaign was successful. A poll conducted in late 2002, showed that over half of those polled believed that Saddam was somehow linked to 9/11.
Woolsey & Chalabi - Secret Long-Time Buddies
Just when I think I have seen every dirty filthy angle by which money can be made in the war profiteering trade, something else turns up. I recently discovered a little tid-bit that I was unaware of. In addition to getting $100 million tax dollars allocated for the INC and Ahmed Chalabi in 1998, James also became lawyer and adviser to Iraq's "President in Waiting" in the same year.
With the help of the media, James must have forgot to mention this obvious conflict of interest while he was alleging collusion in 9/11 between Chalabi's enemy Saddam and bin Laden. This relationship definitely should have been made public before the war began because of its relevance to the truth or falsity of the justification given for waging war in Iraq to begin with.
Back in 1998, Chalabi sought legal help from Woolsey to secure the release of 6 of his INC associates from the detention center in Guam, even though the CIA said they were threats to US interests. James successfully freed Chalabi's minions and mowed a path for the so-called Iraqi defectors to feed bogus information to US intelligence teams.
The false information about WMDs and collusion between Saddam and bin Laden, that originated from the relationship of Chalabi and Woolsey, along with the resulting diversion of financial and military resources to Iraq, and away from the real terrorist bin Laden, has left the US with a limited ability to project military power anywhere else in the world. Any unexpected conflict would be a disaster with the military so overstretched in Iraq, and it looks like in large part, we can thank Woolsey and Chalabi for this predicament.
And as it turns out the CIA was right. One of men Woolsey freed, Aras Habib Karim, went on to become Chalabi's Chief of Intelligence, and has since leaked classified information to Iran, and is currently under investigation by the FBI. I wonder if James is representing the guy now?
James & Booz Allen Hamilton
At the same time that they were advocating for war in Iraq, its more than obvious that James and Suzanne Woolsey were positioning themselves for a future in defense-related firms, with an eye on the anticipated war profits.
James is a shining example of how the revolving door policy works in Washington. Although he left his position as director of the CIA in 1995, he remained a senior advisor on intelligence and national security policies.
And he also now works for several private firms that do business in Iraq. According to Citizens for Public Integrity, in July, 2002, James joined Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm that "had contracts worth more than $680 million" that year.
In May, 2003, in his capacity as a vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, James was a featured speaker at a seminar entitled "Companies on the Ground: The Challenge for Business in Rebuilding Iraq." He spoke of the potential business opportunities in the reconstruction of Iraq and how Bush planned to steer the contracts to US companies. Approximately 80 corporate executives paid $1100 to listen to what he had to say.
May, 2003 was only 2 months after the war began. If not for his advisory positions in the Bush administration, how would James possibly be able to put together a investor seminar with information on how to make money in Iraq?
In addition, "Booz Allen is a subcontractor for a $75-million telecommunications project in Iraq. The company does extensive work for the Defense Department as well. Recently, the Navy awarded it $14 million in contracts," according to the Aug 15, 2004 LA Times.
In true Dick Cheney style, James said in an interview that "he had not been involved in Booz Allen's Iraq contracts," the Times reports. But then it really doesn't matter whether he was involved in a particular contract or not, because as a Vice President of the firm, he benefits from profits resulting from all contracts.
Besides his recent statement to the Times belies the title of his own May, 2003 seminar which was: "Companies on the Ground: The Challenge for Business in Rebuilding Iraq." What is he trying to say? That he never got paid for speaking at that seminar? That none of the 80 executives that attended ever contacted Booz work in Iraq? Yea right.
James & Paladin Capital Group
James positioned himself all over the map. He is now a principal in the Paladin Capital Group, another defense-related firm. In part, here is how the firm describes itself on its web site, Paladin Homeland Security Fund, L.P. Investment Strategy
As widely reported in public media, billions of dollars are being appropriated by the United States and foreign governments for replenishment of military stockpiles, deployment of new means to create more secure societies and creation of new standards, equipment, technologies and policies for coping with and recovering from the myriad forms of terrorism and attack. ... the General Partner believes that the Federal and State governments ... and indeed governments throughout the world, will look to ... private enterprise to address these issues. The General Partner believes that the private sector thus will look to expend billions of dollars to execute defense and security plans for security in the public sector and to deploy growth equity to produce the products and services that non-governmental organizations will require.
Fund Management
Operation of the Fund starts with an experienced management team. ... additional individuals who have prominent and distinguished records in relevant fields, including security, defense and information and technology sciences, have associated with Paladin Capital in connection with the Fund. These additional principals of the Fund include R. James Woolsey, ...
The Fund's Principals have extensive domestic and international experience in fund investments and in originating, underwriting, closing, monitoring and exiting investments similar to those that are proposed for the Fund. The additional Principals, including Mr. Woolsey, ... have extensive and distinguished track records in service within the security, defense and related fields.
Investment Guidelines Characteristics
Small to medium-sized, worker-friendly companies with the following characteristics: Must relate to defense, prevention, coping or recovery from disaster. Dual use: commercial and government applicability for products and services.
Surely no one could ever allege a possible conflict of interest between James serving on 3 defense-related boards (Navy, DPB, & CIA) with the US government and his involvement with this firm.
Global Options - James & DPB Member Livingstone
James is also plugged into Global Options, which is headed by his fellow DPB member Neil Livingstone. In addition to sitting on the DPB, Livingstone has served as a Pentagon and State Department advisor and has long called for overthrowing Saddam.
Livingstone was already promoting war against Iraq back in 1993, when he wrote an editorial for Newsday that said the US "should launch a massive covert program designed to remove Hussein." Well 11 years later, it looks like he finally got his wish, and just like his pal James, Livingstone is a regular speaker at investment seminars on Iraq.
Global Options provides contacts and consulting services to firms doing business in Iraq and "offers a wide range of security and risk management services," according to its website. Although James admits that he is a paid advisor at Global Options, he again says the work he does at the firm does not involve Iraq. And of course I believe him (not).
Suzanne - Better Half Of Profiteering Team
From 1993 - 2003, Suzanne was an executive with the National Academies, an institution that advises the government on science, engineering, and medicine. There's probably no big money to be made in that position and that's probably what motivated Suzanne seek a more potentially profitable government position.
And she sure found one. According to the Aug 15, 2004 LA Times, Suzanne is a trustee of a little-known arms consulting group that had access to senior Pentagon leaders directing the Iraq war.
Although she had zero experience with military or national security matters, in 2000 she became a trustee at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a nonprofit corporation paid to do research for the Pentagon. During the attack against Iraq, the IDA provided senior Pentagon officials with assessments of the operation.
Through this position, Suzanne had unlimited insider access to valuable information. For instance, the Times reported that in a June 3, 2003, briefing, Brigadier General Robert Cone of the Army, described the group's operation. "This team did business" within the Army Central Command "on a daily basis, by observing meeting and planning sessions, attending command updates, watching key decisions being made, watching problems being solved, and generally being provided unrestricted access to the business of the conduct of this war," Cone said, according to a transcript of the session.
The question is did Suzanne use the info to benefit the family business? I'll let the reader be the judge. She was appointed to "Fluor's board in January 2004, while Fluor and a partner, AMEC, were competing for two federal contracts to do reconstruction work in Iraq. A little more than a month after she was named, Fluor and AMEC got both contracts, with a combined value of $1.6 billion," according to the LA Times.
Although a Fluor official refused to discuss why Suzanne was chosen for the job, the official confirmed SEC filings that show, "Fluor pays outside directors (like Suzanne) $40,000 a year, plus stock options and additional fees for attending meetings," the Times reports.
As for the financial worth of her stock in the company, its looking good. Fluor's stock has risen steadily since the war in Iraq began. The Times reports that in August, 2004, it was $45 a share, up from a little more than $30 a share in March 2003. Reports filed with the SEC show Suzanne owns 1,500 shares of Fluor stock.
With Fluor making a bundle, it only stands to reason that all the more money can be funneled back into the Woolsey piggy bank. SEC filings show that Fluor reported that its revenue for the first quarter of the current fiscal year from work in Iraq totaled "approximately $190 million. There was no work in Iraq in the comparable period in 2003," reports the Times.
I would be willing to bet that any defense related firm would have given an arm and a leg to find out what was being said during those IDA meetings and war planning sessions. Oh of course I'm not suggesting that Suzanne was feeding Fluor information before she came on board and that's why she was hired. But at the same time, its sure difficult to think of any other reason why she would be hired.
Here's another profiteering trick that I would never have thought of. Suzanne even managed to get paid while she gathered the insider information. Tax records show that in 2003, she was paid $11,500 for serving on the IDA. Who wouldn't want this gal on their team?
The overlapping public and private associations of the Woolsey's are merely 2 examples of the all too familiar pattern in the Bush administration, in which people who play key roles in advising officials on policies, are involving themselves financially with firms in related fields. And it should be noted that the profiteering is certainly not limited to war policies. Its rampant in every area of policy within the Bush administration.
Long-Term War - Thriving Family Business
Hands down, James should be awarded a plaque for being the #1 Iraq War Monger, and it should say: "What could be more sickening than a war-hungry non-combatant? A war-hungry non-combatant reaping profit from the blood of slaughtered women, children and men of Iraq," (Bill Berkowitz).
War-hungry James is still hard at it; promoting war for as far as the eye can see. On August 15, 2004, the LA Times reported that, "Last month, Woolsey appeared at a ... news conference to announce the creation of a group called the Committee of the Present Danger, which he said would attempt to focus public attention on the threat to the US and the civilized world from Islamic terrorism."
On September 29, 2004 he participated in a forum entitled: "World War IV: Why We Fight, Whom We Fight, How We Fight," sponsored by the Committee on Present Danger and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
I wonder how many people who went to the polls on Nov 2, 2004, realized that a vote for Bush meant rubber-stamping more of World War IV?
Plan To Destroy and Conquer Iraq
The Iraqi citizens had no say-so in the Bush administration's decision to bomb the hell out of their country and the Iraqi people, now suffering the most as a result of the war, are not allowed to be involved in making decisions about the reconstruction of Iraq.
In comments that could have been made yesterday, Naomi Klein described what would happen to the Iraqis under Bush's war plan in the April 14, 2003 issue of the Guardian, "A people, starved and sickened by sanctions, then pulverized by war, is going to emerge from this trauma to find that their country had been sold out from under them. They will also discover that their new-found "freedom" - for which so many of their loved ones perished - comes pre-shackled by irreversible economic decisions that were made in boardrooms while the bombs were still falling. They will then be told to vote for their new leaders, and welcomed to the wonderful world of democracy. "
Every one of her predictions has come true and Iraqis may be worse off than we realize. Klein reports that on October 13, 2004, Iraq's "health ministry issued a harrowing report on its post-invasion health crisis, including outbreaks of typhoid and tuberculosis and soaring child and mother mortality rates," while at the same time the "State Department announced that $3.5 billion for water, sanitation and electricity projects was being shifted to security."
How can anybody in their right mind expect the Iraqi people to be grateful to America for all this good fortune?
Stop The War Profiteering
It seems to me that we've taken our eye off the ball here. Granted, the web of corruption is bad enough in itself, but too little consideration is being given to the Iraqi lives at stake. Every profiteering dollar bilked or wasted is a dollar that could be spent on improving Iraq's basic living conditions like getting water, sanitation and electricity up and running again, or training Iraqi police and military forces, or developing jobs for Iraqis.
Instead our tax dollars are being funneled back to profiteers like the Woolseys, over the backs of not only our dead soldiers; but over 100,000 dead Iraqis as well. The administration had the chance to rebuild Iraq, and at the same time earn the trust of the Iraqi people, but instead it chose to rape and torture innocent Iraqi prisoners, raid the reconstruction fund, and deprive the Iraqis of everything essential to normal human life.
The blatant acts of corruption by the occupational authority and US contractors have given the Iraqis every reason under the sun to mistrust the motives of Americans who say they want to help rebuild their country. And how can we expect their opinions to change as long as the obvious corruption continues?
If we ever expect to regain the trust of Iraqis, we have to stop the Woolseys, and others like them, who engage in this filthy, disgusting trade. For starters, I say all Bush war profiteers should be given 2 options: they can either recuse themselves from advising government officials on any matter of national security period, or they can donate all profits made through affiliations with defense-related companies to soldiers wounded in the war and families of soldiers killed in the war.
While this would definitely be a good first step, I won't hold my breath while waiting to see which option the greedy war-mongers choose.
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