http://original.antiwar.com/wheeler/2010/01/15/just-what-we-need-more-pentagon-spending/

Just What We Need: More Pentagon Spending

by Winslow T. Wheeler, January 16, 2010

The Associated Press ran a January 12 article leaking some details about a new spending supplemental for the Defense Department in 2010. DOD will get another $33 billion to pay for President Obama’s surge of additional Soldiers and Marines to attempt to rescue the war effort in Afghanistan.

There are a number of things you should know about this additional money request.

We won’t see the details for weeks, maybe months. The budget request will not be officially submitted until we see the new 2011 budget and any other supplementals for 2010 that Obama wants. That will be in the first week of February. And, we may not see the details for this additional war money even then: DOD is notoriously slow at putting together its “justification materials.” Having just been decided upon, there will almost certainly be additional weeks before the bureaucracy can churn out the details of what they really want to money for. But don’t worry about the delay in the paperwork; almost no one in Congress reads those things; certainly not the Members who will give patriotic speeches on the money and then vote for it.

Also, expect the $33 billion supplemental request to be both too small and too large.

It will very probably not include whatever billions Obama wants to spend in Yemen. He will want additional money for more strikes from unmanned drones against targets declared to be al Qaeda leaders (but also including civilians) and for billions in foreign aid to a government that rivals the one in Afghanistan for its corruption, incompetence, and domestic unpopularity. We may see another supplemental, later on.

(There will not be a request to pay for actual US ground forces in Yemen; that will come in the following fiscal years, after the increased drone attacks and the contemptible government we are backing have further infuriated the civilian population and after the foreign aid fails to salve the civilian population — if any of it reaches them rather than Swiss banks.)

Nevertheless, the supplemental will be bloated. The parts of it for Afghanistan will be inflated with various goodies. In virtually every supplemental in the past, DOD has stuffed in additional spending for new aircraft and other hardware and programs that it wants for general uses not really for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama people in the Pentagon said they would end all that. I seriously doubt it; the $33 billion total is far more than they need to support the additional 30,000 troops Obama wants in Afghanistan as soon as he gets them there. Even crediting the cost of the new troops at the outlandishly high cost of $1 million per troop per year, you can’t get to $33 billion: those troops will only begin to arrive in the next few months, well after the fiscal year started last October. (30,000 troops for 6 months would be $15 billion; for 9 months would be about $23 billion, not $33, even assuming the looney $1 million per troop estimate.)

Then, of course, expect Congress to add some junk: still more superfluous C-17 cargo aircraft ($250 million each), some smaller but cost-bloated C-130 cargo aircraft (they used to cost about $20 million, but now they are up to $70 million), some F-18 fighter/bombers (the Navy and Boeing are just nuts for more) and whatever else those paragons of virtue and thrift Congressman John Murtha (D-PA) and Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) at the House and Senate Appropriations Committees can dream up to keep the rest of the pork-crazed Congress happy with their “leadership.”

And don’t forget the big picture. The additional $33 billion will bring the total DOD budget for the current fiscal year up to $708 billion.

That amount is more than we spent on the Pentagon in any year since 1946 — in dollars adjusted for inflation.

It is an amount just under what the entire rest of the world spends for defense.

It is about three times the combined defense budgets of China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, and Iran.

The Defense Department spends in a few hours more than al Qaeda spends in an entire year.

For this post-World War II high in spending, we get the smallest Army, Navy, and Air Force we have had since 1946.

And, our tanks, ships, and aircraft are, on average, older than they have ever been before.

And, major elements of our forces are getting less training than they did even during the so-called “hollow” years of the Jimmy Carter Pentagon.

Those levels of Pentagon spending do not include what we pay for foreign aid, arms sales and arms control, Veterans, Homeland Security, the Pentagon’s share of interest on the national debt, and more. To tally up our entire national security budget, we can get very cozy with $1 Trillion.

Feeling secure? I’m not.

Feeling President Obama has a handle on things? I don’t.

The only thing more depressing is what the Republicans want to do; they want to make it all worse at even higher cost — including lives.

ANJALI KAMAT: On Tuesday, President Obama made another statement on the failure of intelligence agencies to intercept the Christmas Day plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight. He said the US government had the necessary information to stop the twenty-three-year-old Nigerian suspect from boarding the Detroit-bound flight, but he excoriated the intelligence community for failing to connect the dots in time.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I will accept that intelligence, by its nature, is imperfect. But it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.

ANJALI KAMAT: Obama said intelligence agencies knew that the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had, quote, “traveled to Yemen and joined up with extremists there.” The President also addressed concerns over repatriating the ninety-odd Yemeni men who are still detained in Guantanamo.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Given the unsettled situation, I’ve spoken to the attorney general, and we’ve agreed that we will not be transferring additional detainees back to Yemen at this time. But make no mistake. We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And as I’ve always said, we will do so—we will close the prison in a manner that keeps the American people safe and secure.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s almost been a year since President Obama’s inauguration and his promise to close the prison at Guantanamo.

For a critical look back over the Obama administration’s foreign policy and national security decisions in the last twelve months, we’re joined here in New York by award-winning investigative journalist and activist Allan Nairn.

In 1991, we were both in East Timor and witnessed and survived the Santa Cruz massacre, in which Indonesian forces killed more than 270 Timorese. The soldiers fractured Allan’s skull.

Over the past three decades, he has exposed how the US government has backed paramilitary death squads in El Salvador, in Guatemala, in Haiti. He also uncovered US support for the Indonesian military’s assassinations and torture of civilians.

He’s joining us now for the rest of the hour.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Allan Nairn.

ALLAN NAIRN: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don’t you start off with a broad overview, as we move into this first anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration, of his term in office?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he struck against white racism, the cultural blow. And he accomplished that on Election Day. That was huge. This is one of the most destructive forces in world history, and by simply—by virtue of becoming president, Obama did it major damage.

But once he became president, by virtue of his actions, just like every US president before him, just like those who ran other great powers, Obama became a murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans the globe, that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have flipped the switch and turned it off. The President has—turned it off. The President has that power, but he chose not to do so.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean? Explain more fully.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the machine. The US spends about half of all—almost half of all the military spending in the entire world, equal to virtually all the other countries combined. More than half of the weapons sold in the world are sold by the United States. The US has more than 700 military bases scattered across dozens of countries. The US is the world’s leading trainer of paramilitaries. The US has a series of courses, from interrogators to generals, that have graduated military people guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in dozens upon dozens of countries. The US has a series of covert paramilitary forces of its own that get almost no attention. For example, right now in Iran, there are covert US paramilitaries attacking Iran from within, authorized by secret executive order. This was briefly reported, but it dropped from notice. In addition to that, there are the open attacks, the open bombings and invasions. Just in the recent period, the US has done this to Iran—to, I’m sorry, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Kenya. Currently in the Philippines, there are US troops in action in the south. And you could go on. This is the machine.

And then, in addition, there’s the support for a series of what the RAND Corporation itself—you know, RAND is an extension of the Pentagon—called US support for repressive non-democratic governments and for governments that commit aggression. There are about forty of them that the US backs. And I could run through the list. And the point is, Obama has not cut a single—cut off a single one of these repressive regimes. He has not cut off a single one of the terror forces. He has increased the size of the US Army, increased the size of US Special Forces. He has increased the level of overseas arms sales. In fact, the Pentagon, his Pentagon, was recently bragging about it. The same thing happened under the Clinton administration with then-Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. He has tuned it up. But you could just run down the list of countries where civilians are being killed and tortured with US weapons, with US money, with US intelligence, with US political green lights.

ANJALI KAMAT: So, Allan, what would you say is the difference between the preceding eight years under the Bush administration and this past year, as we move forward under Obama?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, in this respect, on matters I was just talking about, there’s no substantive difference. In fact, as far as one can tell, Obama seems to have killed more civilians during his first year than Bush did in his first year, and maybe even than Bush killed in his final year, because not only has Obama kept the machine set on kill, but he had his special project, which is Pakistan and Afghanistan. He used this to get elected. He had to prove himself. He had to go through what the New York Times once called the “presidential initiation rite,” under which each president must, in their words, demonstrate his willingness to shed blood. Obama did that by saying, “I’m going to attack more vigorously Afghanistan and Pakistan.” And he’s brought chaos.

I mean, you just saw the report from Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has squeezed the Pakistani military to attack their own tribal and border areas with extensive civilian death and retaliation from the residents of those areas through a series of bombings across the major cities of Pakistan.

Likewise in Somalia, Bush backed Ethiopia in an invasion of Somalia, basically an Ethiopian-US invasion of Somalia. Now Obama is pumping in new arms, new weapons, into the midst of the killing and chaos there. Somalis are streaming into Yemen as refugees. The already disastrous level of hunger and starvation is increasing. His body count probably exceeds that of Bush.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what we’ve been seeing over the last few days, I mean, what happened with the jetliner, now President Obama coming out yesterday talking about other attempts that were thwarted, like even on Inauguration Day, and that was actually Somali. And what are the approaches you think that President Obama should take?

ALLAN NAIRN: Right. Well, you know, the issue is not the safety of Americans. The issue is the safety of people. All people. You have to count not just the American deaths and potential American deaths, but the deaths everywhere, since—you know, since everyone counts. And the best solution is the one that protects the maximum number of people. And if you happen to be the party that is committing the largest number of killings in the world, as the US is now, then the solution is easy: stop committing the killings.

In this case, in the present moment in history, that would have the added side benefit of most likely making Americans safer, as well, because you would take away the main provocation. Tom Brokaw, on TV this weekend, made a very interesting comment. He described what the US was engaged in as the “war against Islamic rage.” That’s actually the most telling definition I’ve seen. I mean, think about it. In Afghanistan, Karzai, the US/UN-installed president, basically the man thought of as a US puppet, the man previously lionized by the US press before he started speaking out against the US aerial killings of civilians, Karzai started to get enraged after a series of bombings of wedding parties by the US and NATO forces. Think about it. Somebody bombs your wedding, a foreign air force bombs your wedding. How are you supposed to react? Are you supposed to be delighted? Rage is the normal human response. If you stop that, you lower the rage, and you probably get fewer attacks on Americans.

You know, there’s a man named Kilcullen, who’s Australian by origin, who’s now one of the main intellects behind the US counterinsurgency policy. He advises Secretary Gates, who of course was Bush’s Defense Secretary, as well. He said that if he were a Muslim today in a Middle Eastern country, he would probably be a jihadist. Robert Pape, the leading academic specialist on suicide bombings who studied the entire database of all the suicide bombers in recent years, said it’s a consequence primarily of occupation. So, you stop committing mass murder overseas, and you immediately, immediately, just by that action, achieve the main goal, which is minimizing the overall deaths of people, and you most likely get the side benefit of also minimizing the deaths of Americans—

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Pape—

ALLAN NAIRN: —because you’re prodding fewer people.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Pape is a conservative academic?

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes. In fact, he went on TV recently saying he was a big fan of aerial bombing. I mean, he is no peacenik. But he honestly studied the data on suicide bombings, and that was his conclusion.

And by the way, the tactic of, you know, bombs in civilian places, like outside mosques, it was not originated by the current jihadists. You know, the current jihadists, of course, as is well known, grew out of the US and Saudi Arabian operation in Afghanistan to repel the Soviet invasion, and bin Laden and the others were backed by the US. But that actual tactic dates back to times like when the CIA used it in Lebanon to try to kill a cleric, and they blew up people as they were leaving the mosque. They used a car—the US used a car bomb to do that.

Even aerial bombings, even bombings of airplanes, three of the biggest incidents before 9/11 were actually incidents of US culpability. In ’76, a Cuban airliner was brought down with—I believe the death toll was—what was it? Seventy-three, I think, something on that order—by Luis Posada Carriles, a longtime CIA operative, who was later indicted for terrorism. And the US refused to extradite him. They’re harboring—they’re harboring him. Later, in—let’s see, what year was it? The Indian Airlines bombing in ’85, I believe, an Indian jetliner was blown up, almost—about 300 killed. The bombers were later found to have received training at a US camp in Alabama, US paramilitary camp that had also, with Reagan backing, had done operations against Central America. The Iranian jetliner shot down by a US ship, the Vincennes, also with roughly 300 killed, in ’88, the captain of the ship who did that, he got a medal from Bush Senior for exceptionally meritorious service.

So these tactics, you know, bombing civilian places, even blowing up jetliners specifically, are not new. And the US itself has used them.

And, you know, they talk about how the jihadists target civilians. Well, it’s certainly true. But when bin Laden attacked the World Trade Center, he was basically using—the attack on 9/11, he was basically using US targeting principles. He attacked the Pentagon, a military target, and he attacked the World Trade Center, which had a CIA—in fact, did have a CIA office in it. Now, on this end, especially here in New York, we can see that those targeting standards are absolutely insane. I mean, we could see the cooks and the firemen dying. You know, we could breathe the dust. We could see, no, even if you are going after a CIA office, you do not do this. We can see that that’s wrong on this end. It’s also wrong on the other end, when the US does it.

When the US opened—so it’s not just a matter of targeting, and it’s not just a matter of targeting civilians. The Goldstone report found that Israel targeted civilians specifically, when they invaded Gaza, and the US has often done it. For example, in Iraq, the US adopted what they called the El Salvador option, which is a reference back to the El Salvadoran death squads of the 1960s and ‘70s, which is something I investigated extensively. And these were launched under the Kennedy administration and basically sponsored and run by the US for decades. And similar operations were done in Iraq by the US, under the direction, by the way, of General McChrystal, who now runs Afghanistan. The technical term the Pentagon used for it—uses for it is “manhunting.” So they do target civilians.

But even when they’re not targeting civilians, which is probably most of the time, they end up killing massive numbers of civilians. The Pentagon has a word for that, too. They call it “bugsplat.” In the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, they ran computer programs, and they called the program the Bugsplat program, estimating how many civilians they would kill with a given bombing raid. On the opening day, the printouts presented to General Tommy Franks indicated that twenty-two of the projected bombing attacks on Iraq would produce what they defined as heavy bugsplat—that is, more than thirty civilian deaths per raid. Franks said, “Go ahead. We’re doing all twenty-two.” So that adds up to, you know, about 660 anticipated, essentially planned, what in domestic terms would be called criminally negligent homicide, at the least, probably second-degree murder. You might even be able to get it up to first, first-degree. And that, just if—if that was the actual toll, the bugsplat estimate of the toll on the first day, that right there would give you a third of the World Trade Center death toll, just on the first day of the Iraq operation. And, of course, the Iraq operation has gone on. And that’s essentially what’s happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They claim—or they claim—or let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and they say, OK, they have an al-Qaeda target, or whatever target, some armed man in some compound somewhere, and they bomb it, and they also kill the person’s wife and the kids and their extended family and the friends who were there for dinner. Imagine. Imagine if that happened here. Let’s say al-Qaeda occupied New York. They set up checkpoints on Seventh Avenue. And if a car tried to run the checkpoints, they’d machine-gun the car, as the US does in Iraq. Or they ran drones over Washington, DC, and they were taking out US officials in their backyards as they did barbecues in suburban Virginia or as they were going for coffee in Dupont Circle. How would Americans react to that? In fact, how would Americans react if some young American went out and killed some of those al-Qaeda occupiers? The question answers itself.

I mean, when you do things like this, when you make humans into bugsplat, you invite response. So, stop the killing, and you get a benefit. You’ll probably make yourself safer, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to award-winning journalist and activist Allan Nairn. We’re going to go to break, then come back. Want to get your reaction to President Obama’s Nobel address, also to his condemning torture just about a year ago. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOOMAN: Our guest for this hour is Allan Nairn, award-winning journalist and activist.

Allan, I want to get your response to President Obama’s invocation of the concept of a just war, this in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in December.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We must begin by acknowledging a hard truth: we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations, acting individually or in concert, will find the use of force not only necessary, but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King, Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naïve, in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people, for, make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.

AMY GOOMAN: An excerpt of President Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo just about a month ago. Allan Nairn, your response?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, he’s right. There is evil in the world. And Obama should stop committing it. He should stop bombing, doing bombing raids that kill civilians. He should stop backing forces that kill civilians.

You know, it’s probably true that nonviolence couldn’t have stopped Hitler. There are just resorts to violence. If you’re standing there with your mother, someone comes in with a machine gun, you step in front. And if you’ve got a gun, you try to kill the machine gunner before they blow away you and your mother. Sure, there are lots of situations like that in life.

But that’s not in the situation of the US in foreign policy. As Obama was making that speech, he was saying, when we resort to violence, we will abide by the rules. This was exactly at the moment when the US was blocking the UN from doing precisely that. The Goldstone report had recommended, in just one example, that Israel be brought to the International Criminal Court for their assault on Gaza and that—as well as Hamas—and that let the chips fall where they may. Do an objective investigation and see if rules of law were violated, see if crimes against humanity were committed, as he said they were. And Obama blocked it.

The US itself, in its operations in dozens upon dozens of countries, is violating not just international law, but US law. People have forgotten about them, because they’re not enforced. Here are four US laws currently on the books. There can be no US weapons used for aggression. That’s the old Harkin amendment. There can be no US aid for foreign internal security forces of any kind. That’s Section 660 of the 1974 Foreign Assistance Act. There can be no US military aid for any regime that engages in a pattern of gross human rights violations. That’s 22 US Code 2304(a). There can be no US aid for any military unit that commits atrocities. That’s the Leahy amendment. Now, these are not radical political demands; these are existing US law. And the US systematically violates its own laws, not to mention the murder laws of local countries.

AMY GOOMAN: Where? Name the countries.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, just—you know, we mentioned before some of the places where the US is bombing and attacking. Less known, these are some examples of the machine being set on kill, repressive—what in RAND’s words—RAND Corporation’s words, repressive regimes being backed by the US: Algeria, where they annulled an election, they stole an election, they do systematic torture; Ethiopia, where there’s mass hunger among the population, but where the US is building up the Ethiopian army and using them against Somalia; Saudi Arabia, the most religious extremist, anti-woman dictatorship in the world; Jordan, a torture center—the Jordanian intelligence outfit was, in the words of George Tenet, owned by the CIA, and both the CIA and Israel use it for torture; Rwanda, whose army and paramilitaries have been pillaging and raping and massively killing in the eastern Congo; Congo itself, Secretary of State Clinton went there and made a good denunciation of rape by the Congolese army, and as that was happening, the US was delivering weapons and training to that same Congolese army; Indonesia, where the army now de facto occupies and terrorizes Papua and has recently resumed assassinations in Aceh, the other end of the archipelago; Colombia, where army and army-backed militaries are the world’s number-one killer of labor activists; Uzbekistan, massive torture backed simultaneously by the US and Russia; Thailand, where officers who—US officers who I spoke to use their US training in what they call “target selection” to assassinate and disappear Muslim rebels in the south; Nepal, where US Green Berets for years created old Guatemala-style civil patrols that carried out lynchings against pro-Maoist forces and civilians in the countryside; India, where the police do daily torture and where their own officers talk about using terror against villages in the Naxalite rebel areas; Egypt, one of the world’s leading torture states and Israel’s accomplice in the blockade and hungering of Gaza; Honduras, where the army recently staged a coup when the oligarchy’s president, Zelaya, turned against his fellow oligarchs; Israel, which committed aggression against Gaza using US white phosphorus and cluster bombs as the US was—the US was shipping in new materiel as this, you know, attack was underway; and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, where, as the British Guardian just reported, the security forces are doing systematic torture of Hamas people and other dissidents under CIA sponsorship. And that’s only a partial list. We’d need another twenty-minute segment to complete the list.

But in not one of these cases has Obama decided to comply with US law, comply with international law, and cut off the killer forces. In fact, in a number of them he has stepped it up. In Indonesia, for example, he’s made a push to renew aid to the Kopassus, the Red Berets, the most deadly of the killer forces, hated by the people, long trained by the US Green Berets.

AMY GOOMAN: You made a provocative statement at the beginning of this broadcast, comparing an Obama presidency with a possible Palin presidency, and whether you would see a difference when it comes to foreign policy.

ALLAN NAIRN: Right. Well, in terms of killing civilians overseas, no difference. Every single action I’ve laid out could easily be adopted by Palin. In fact, Obama is carrying them out using Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Gates, using Bush’s old counterterrorism man, Brennan, using Admiral Blair, Admiral Dennis Blair, who personally—this is something that we discussed on an earlier show and which I personally reported on—who green-lighted church massacres, massacres of Catholic churches by General Wiranto in occupied East Timor in 1999 to punish the Timorese for voting for independence. So Palin could do all those things.

AMY GOOMAN: Dennis Blair’s position at the time?

ALLAN NAIRN: He was head of the US Pacific forces, and he’s now Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. And he’s now getting some political heat over the Detroit underwear bomber incident, which I actually think is unfair. You know, you can reinforce the—I mean, Blair should have been indicted for crimes against humanity and put on trial. Blair should be in prison now for what he did with General Wiranto. But this is unfair criticism of him on the bomber. I mean, you can’t prevent someone from, you know, trying to sneak in. If you want real security, you stop it on the other end. You stop the provocations and turn down the heat.

ANJALI KAMAT: And Allan Nairn, one of the things that Obama promised—one of the ways he promised he would be different from the Republicans, different from previous presidents, and different from the enemy he’s fighting, is that he would adhere to the rule of law. There would be standards. He’s banning torture. He’s going to close Guantanamo. These were promises he made last year. Can you talk about where—you mentioned the Goldstone report and US efforts to block the Goldstone report at the UN. But can you give us an assessment of where Obama stands in terms of international law? You told us a little bit about domestic law.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the violations—and this is not—you know, we’re talking about Obama, but this is the whole US system. I mean, Bush did the same. Clinton did the same. Bush’s father, Reagan, Carter. It’s institutional policy. He’s violating not just law, but especially international law, which defines aggression as the supreme crime. And when you go in and bomb countries because you say there’s a—you know, there’s a militant there you want to kill, that is easily defined as aggression.

When you back forces that are systematically killing civilians, as many are in that list of countries I ran through, you are a party to crimes against humanity and maybe even, arguably, in some cases, genocide. That was certainly the case in Central America in the ’80s, where—actually, now a Spanish court has indicted and is trying various Guatemalan generals for those crimes, charging them with an array of crimes against humanity. And they did it with US backing, with US weapons.

Obama issued a torture ban, a supposed torture ban, which was actually a sham.

AMY GOOMAN: Let me play a clip of President Obama. It was just about a year ago, this executive order banning torture. On January 22nd of last year, this is what Obama promised to do.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This morning, I signed three executive orders. First, I can say, without exception or equivocation, that the United States will not torture. Second, we will close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and determine how to deal with those who have been held there. And third, we will immediately undertake a comprehensive review to determine how to hold and try terrorism suspects to best protect our nation and the rule of law.

AMY GOOMAN: That was President Obama just about a year ago. Allan Nairn?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, his torture ban is empty. Ninety-eight, 99 percent of the US-backed torture is not done by Americans; it’s done by foreigners acting under US sponsorship. And that continues. His ban does not affect that. And even when it comes to Americans doing hands-on torture, his ban only says they are prohibited from doing so in situations of armed conflict, like in the middle of a war. That means that even an American could today go into Venezuela, go into Cuba, going into Egypt, go into Jordan, go into most of the countries of the world and commit hands-on torture, and it would be perfectly permissible under the so-called Obama torture ban. So it’s fake.

AMY GOOMAN: And what do you mean that others can do it?

ALLAN NAIRN: An American can do it if it’s in a country that’s not in a state of armed conflict. But the vast majority of the torture is carried out by proxies. That’s the way they did it in El Salvador. That’s the way they did it in Guatemala. There’s an intelligence officer, an Army man, a policeman of the local country, and they are trained by the US, they are paid by the US, but they’re not an American citizen. And they’re the one who wields the razor blade. They’re the one who puts the hood on.

AMY GOOMAN: Allan, you spend your time traveling the world. Talk about wealth and poverty.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the biggest issue is there are more than a billion people hungry in the world. It recently increased by a hundred million or so because of the Wall Street-induced financial collapse, but it was at about 900 million during the days of top prosperity, as defined by our current economic system. That’s completely intolerable. Until everybody eats, no one should live in luxury.

You know how much it would cost to feed those billion people? Less, much less, than was spent on just the bailout of Citibank. No one in the US, no one in any party leadership, talks about shifting those resources to do that. In fact, the President could do that with his own executive authority. For a deeper, longer-term solution, you’d have to change trade rules, you would have to change the IMF and the World Bank, so that farmers in currently hungry areas would have the same opportunities and protections that US yeoman farmers once had back in the age of Jefferson, when the US protected its farmers. But a president or even a rich person like a Gates or a Carlos Slim or a Buffett could instantly feed half the world. The World Food Programme, every few months, comes out with a desperate bulletin, saying we’ve got to cut back the calorie rations because we’re not getting enough for this or that program.

You know, in US politics, people face a bitter choice. You can’t vote for the—with a two-party system, you can’t vote against murder, you can’t vote for ending starvation. So they say, “My god, I guess I’ll go for the Democrats, because if I don’t, they’re going to move my Social Security to Wall Street, they’ll end gun control, they’ll end women’s choice.” So you end up backing these direct mass murders and the allowing of babies to have their brains deformed due to lack of food. That’s not tolerable.

I agree with those lunatic tea party people: we need a revolution. We need—now, they’re talking about a revolution to put a white person in charge. I’m talking about a revolution for change. Nothing radical, really. Just enforce the laws, those US laws, the murder laws, and shift a few dollars from people who merely want it, people like us who—you know, we live in luxury; we have all the food we could possibly eat in many lifetimes—and shifting it to people who need it to keep from being stunted, who need it to keep breathing, people—we can do that. You know, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan—

AMY GOOMAN: We have fifteen seconds.

ALLAN NAIRN: —horrible regimes. Today, they’re peaceful and productive. They were crushed by violence. That’s how they transformed their societies. I hope we don’t have to be crushed in that way. We can transform ourselves, but people have to stand up and do it. Surround Congress. Occupy the military bases. The US can become peaceful also, but only if we decide to do so. And we do have that choice. We have freedoms here.

AMY GOOMAN: Allan Nairn, I want to thank you for being with us. Allan Nairn is an award-winning journalist and activist.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/yemen-the-latest-us-battl_b_416314.html

Yemen: The Latest U.S. Battleground

Stephen Zunes

Chair of Mid-Eastern Studies program at the University of San Francisco

Posted: January 8, 2010 05:10 PM

The United States may be on the verge of involvement in yet another counterinsurgency war which, as is the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, may make a bad situation even worse. The attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight by a Nigerian man was apparently planned in Yemen. There were alleged ties between the perpetrator of the Ft. Hood massacre and a radical Yemeni cleric, and an ongoing U.S.-backed Yemeni military offensive against al-Qaeda have all focused U.S. attention on that country.

Yemen has almost as large a population as Saudi Arabia, but differently lacks much in the way of natural resources. What little oil the country has is rapidly being depleted. Indeed, Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per-capita income of less than $600 per year. More than 40 percent of the population is unemployed and the economic situation is increasingly deteriorating for most Yemenis as a result of a U.S.-backed structural adjustment program imposed by the International Monetary Fund.

The county is desperate for assistance in sustainable economic development. The vast majority of U.S. aid delivered to the country, however, has been in the form of military assets. The limited economic assistance made available has been of dubious effectiveness and has largely gone through corrupt government channels.

Al-Qaeda’s Rise

The United States has long been concerned about the presence of al-Qaeda operatives within Yemen’s porous borders, particularly since the recent unification of the Yemeni and Saudi branches of the terrorist network. Thousands of Yemenis participated in the U.S.-supported anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan during the 1980s, becoming radicalized by the experience and developing links with Osama bin Laden, a Saudi whose father comes from a Yemeni family. Various tribal loyalties to bin Laden’s family have led to some support within Yemen for the exiled al-Qaeda leader, even among those who do not necessarily support his reactionary interpretation of Islam or his terrorist tactics. Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have served as migrant laborers in neighboring Saudi Arabia. There, exposure to the hardline Wahhabi interpretation of Islam dominant in that country combined with widespread repression and discrimination has led to further radicalization.

In October 2000, al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the U.S. Navy ship Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors. This led to increased cooperation between U.S. and Yemeni military and intelligence, including a series of U.S. missile attacks against suspected al-Qaeda operatives.

Currently, hardcore al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen — many of whom are foreigners — probably number no more than 200. But they are joined by roughly 2,000 battle-hardened Yemeni militants who have served time in Iraq fighting U.S. occupation forces. The swelling of al-Qaeda’s ranks by veterans of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Iraqi insurgency has led to the rise of a substantially larger and more extreme generation of fighters, who have ended the uneasy truce between Islamic militants and the Yemeni government.

Opponents of the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq correctly predicted that the inevitable insurgency would create a new generation of radical jihadists, comparable to the one that emerged following the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the Bush administration and its congressional supporters — including then-senators Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton — believed that a U.S. takeover of Iraq was more important than avoiding the risk of creating of a hotbed of anti-American terrorism. Ironically, President Obama is relying on Biden and Clinton — as well as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, another supporter of the U.S. invasion and occupation — to help us get out of this mess they helped create.

Not a Failed State

Yemen is one of the most complex societies in the world, and any kind of overreaction by the United States — particularly one that includes a strong military component — could be disastrous. Bringing in U.S. forces or increasing the number of U.S. missile strikes would likely strengthen the size and radicalization of extremist elements. Instead of recognizing the strong and longstanding Yemeni tradition of respecting tribal autonomy, U.S. officials appear to be misinterpreting this lack of central government control as evidence of a “failed state.” The U.S. approach has been to impose central control by force, through a large-scale counterinsurgency strategy.

Such a military response could result in an ever-wider insurgency, however. Indeed, such overreach by the government is what largely prompted the Houthi rebellion in the northern part of the country, led by adherents of the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam. The United States has backed a brutal crackdown by Yemeni and Saudi forces in the Houthi region, largely accepting exaggerated claims of Iranian support for the rebellion. There is also a renewal of secessionist activity in the formerly independent south. These twin threats are largely responsible for the delay in the Yemeni government’s response to the growing al-Qaeda presence in their country.

With the United States threatening more direct military intervention in Yemen to root out al-Qaeda, the Yemeni government’s crackdown may be less a matter of hoping for something in return for its cooperation than a fear of what may happen if it does not. The Yemeni government is in a difficult bind, however. If it doesn’t break up the terrorist cells, the likely U.S. military intervention would probably result in a greatly expanded armed resistance. If the government casts too wide a net, however, it risks tribal rebellion and other civil unrest for what will be seen as unjustifiable repression at the behest of a Western power. Either way, it would likely increase support for extremist elements, which both the U.S. and Yemeni governments want destroyed.

For this reason, most Western experts on Yemen agree that increased U.S. intervention carries serious risks. This would not only result in a widespread armed backlash within Yemen. Such military intervention by the United States in yet another Islamic country in the name of “anti-terrorism” would likely strengthen Islamist militants elsewhere as well.

Cold War Pawn

As with previous U.S. military interventions, most Americans have little understanding of the targeted country or its history.

Yemen was divided for most of the 20th century. South Yemen, which received its independence from Great Britain in 1967 after years of armed anti-colonial resistance, resulted from a merger between the British colony of Aden and the British protectorate of South Arabia. Declaring itself the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, it became the Arab world’s only Marxist-Leninist state and developed close ties with the Soviet Union. As many as 300,000 South Yemenis fled to the north in the years following independence.

North Yemen, independent since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, became embroiled in a bloody civil war during the 1960s between Saudi-backed royalist forces and Egyptian-backed republican forces. The republican forces eventually triumphed, though political instability, military coups, assassinations, and periodic armed uprisings continued.

In both countries, ancient tribal and modern ideological divisions have made control of these disparate armed forces virtually impossible. Major segments of the national armies would periodically disintegrate, with soldiers bringing their weapons home with them. Lawlessness and chaos have been common for decades, with tribes regularly shifting loyalties in both their internal feuds and their alliances with their governments. Many tribes have been in a permanent state of war for years, and almost every male adolescent and adult routinely carries a rifle.

In 1979, in one of the more absurd episodes of the Cold War, a minor upsurge in fighting along the former border led to a major U.S. military mobilization in response to what the Carter administration called a Soviet-sponsored act of international aggression. In March of that year, South Yemeni forces, in support of some North Yemeni guerrillas, shelled some North Yemeni government positions. In response, Carter ordered the aircraft carrier Constellation and a flotilla of warships to the Arabian Sea as a show of force. Bypassing congressional approval, the administration rushed nearly $499 million worth of modern weaponry to North Yemen, including 64 M-60 tanks, 70 armored personnel carriers, and 12 F-5E aircraft. Included were an estimated 400 American advisers and 80 Taiwanese pilots for the sophisticated warplanes that no Yemeni knew how to fly.

This gross overreaction to a local conflict led to widespread international criticism. Indeed, the Soviets were apparently unaware of the border clashes and the fighting died down within a couple of weeks. Development groups were particularly critical of this U.S. attempt to send such expensive high-tech weaponry to a country with some of the highest rates of infant mortality, chronic disease, and illiteracy in the world.

The communist regime in South Yemen collapsed in the 1980s, when rival factions of the Politburo and Central Committee killed each other and their supporters by the thousands. With the southern leadership decimated, the two countries merged in May 1990. The newly united country’s democratic constitution gave Yemen one of the most genuinely representative governments in the region.

Later in 1990, when serving as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, Yemen voted against the U.S.-led effort to authorize the use of force against Iraq to drive its occupation forces from Kuwait. A U.S. representative was overheard declaring to the Yemeni ambassador, “That was the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever cast.” The United States immediately withdrew $70 million in foreign aid to Yemen while dramatically increasing aid to neighboring dictatorships that supported the U.S.-led war effort. Over the next several years, apparently upset with the dangerous precedent of a democratic Arab neighbor, the U.S.-backed regime in Saudi Arabia engaged in a series of attacks against Yemen along its disputed border.

Renewed Violence and Repression

In 1994, ideological and regional clan-based rivalries led to a brief civil war, with the south temporarily seceding and the government mobilizing some of the jihadist veterans of the Afghan war to fight the leftist rebellion.

After crushing the southern secessionists, the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh became increasingly authoritarian. U.S. support resumed and aid increased. Unlike most U.S. allies in the region, direct elections for the president and parliament have continued, but they have hardly been free or fair. Saleh officially received an unlikely 94 percent of the vote in the 1999 election. And in the most recently election, in 2006, government and police were openly pushing for Saleh’s re-election amid widespread allegations of voter intimidation, ballot-rigging, vote-buying, and registration fraud. Just two days before the vote, Saleh announced the arrest on “terrorism” charges a campaign official of his leading opponent. Since that time, human rights abuses and political repression — including unprecedented attacks on independent media — have increased dramatically.

Obama was elected president as the candidate who promised change, including a shift away from the foreign policy that had led to such disastrous policies in Iraq and elsewhere. In Yemen, his administration appears to be pursuing the same short-sighted tactics as its predecessors: support of a repressive and autocratic regime, pursuit of military solutions to complex social and political conflicts, and reliance on failed counterinsurgency doctrines.

Al-Qaeda in Yemen represents a genuine threat. However, any military action should be Yemeni-led and targeted only at the most dangerous terrorist cells. We must also press the Yemeni government to become more democratic and less corrupt, in order to gain the support needed to suppress dangerous armed elements. In the long term, the United States should significantly increase desperately needed development aid for the poorest rural communities that have served as havens for radical Islamists. Such a strategy would be far more effective than drone attacks, arms transfers, and counterinsurgency.

The federal government is considering listing the Hawai’i population of false killer whales as an endangered or threatened species. Such a listing would create additional protections for this species from harmful longline fishing activities.  The listing may also trigger regulations that restrict Navy sonar training, which can disorient or even kill marine mammals.

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http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20100108/NEWS01/100108001/New+protection+closer+for+false+killer+whales

Posted on: Friday, January 8, 2010

New protection closer for false killer whales

By William Cole

Advertiser Staff Writer

Hawai’i’s unique population of false killer whales is one step closer to gaining new protection as an endangered or threatened species alongside humpback whales, monk seals and several types of sea turtles.

Such a listing could bring greater restrictions for Hawai’i’s longline and nearshore fisheries, which are blamed by environmentalists for hooking and entangling the up-to-20-foot, 1,500-pound mammals.

A listing as endangered for false killer whales, which are part of the dolphin family, would bring a “critical habitat” review and other recovery steps.

The federal government’s National Marine Fisheries Service this week said a petition to list Hawai’i’s false killer whales as endangered “presents substantial scientific or commercial information” that such action may be warranted.

A comprehensive year-long analysis will solicit scientific and commercial information on the species, and then a determination will be made on whether to list Hawai’i’s false killer whales as endangered.

“We think that looking at the small size of the population, its uniqueness not just to Hawai’i but on the planet, and the multiple serious threats that it’s facing — putting it on the endangered species list is the only reasonable outcome,” said Michael Jasny, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The nonprofit environmental organization in October petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service to list the whales as endangered.

uniquely coastal

The request applies to what is known as Hawai’i’s “insular” population of false killer whales, which the defense council said are the only known false killer whales in the world to live in a coastal habitat.

The whales, found around the main Hawaiian Islands, are genetically different and distinct from all other false killer whales, which are known as the “pelagic” population and live in open ocean areas.

“This indicates not only the uniqueness of the (Hawai’i) population, but also the biological importance of Hawaiian waters as an oasis for marine mammals,” the defense council said.

Studies have found the population of Hawai’i’s false killer whales to be in decline, with only about 120 animals remaining.

According to a National Marine Fisheries Service Web site, the population of pelagic false killer whales is 1,040, but environmentalists say a more recent estimate is 480.

The Hawai’i whales have dark coloration except for some lighter patches near the throat and middle chest, and are found in groups of 10 to 20.

In addition to injuries and death related to fishing, environmentalists point to toxic chemicals in the ocean and reduced food sources as impacting the false killer whales.

Separately, the National Marine Fisheries Service also has decided to create a “take reduction team” to determine ways to better protect all false killer whales, said David Henkin, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice.

In March, Earthjustice sued the federal fisheries service, claiming it had failed to devise a protection plan for the animals. Henkin said pressure from the lawsuit may have played a part in the creation of the take reduction team.

The National Marine Fisheries said that between 1994 and 2007, at least 24 false killer whales were hooked or entangled by the Hawai’i-based longline fishery.

According to Earthjustice, swordfish longline vessels trail up to 60 miles of fishing line suspended in the water with floats and as many as 1,000 baited hooks.

“We think they (the National Marine Fisheries) need to be looking at gear modification, they need to be looking at different ways to both put out the bait and haul the bait in,” Henkin said. “They need to be looking at if there needs to be area closures at certain times of the year.”

Data questioned

Scott Barrows, general manager of the Hawai’i Longline Association, questions the data on false killer whales.

“As far as I’m concerned, the data is pretty poor, and regulating on poor data has in the past caused things to be done that shouldn’t have been done,” he said.

Barrows questions whether false killer whales are endangered. He said he fished for 20 years and that the whales would eat the bait off his gear — without getting hooked: “It used to be maybe you’d get what we call ‘whaled’ (losing bait to whales) once or twice a year, and nowadays, I know a guy last trip who got whaled six times. So if there are so many less whales, why is this happening so much more?”

Barrows said the Hawai’i longliners have a $65 million impact on the economy just with the fish brought in and not including fuel and other related costs, but that the fleet represents only 3 percent of fishing in the Pacific.

“Even if they got rid of us completely, it would really not have much effect on any problem that’s out there because we’re so small of an entity,” Barrows said of the Hawai’i longliners.

Still, Barrows said “if we have to (make changes with fishing), we have to, and if there is a problem, our attitude is, let’s fix it, just as with the turtles and sea birds. We’ve done a lot to solve some of these problems.”

Reach William Cole at wcole@honoluluadvertiser.com.

Joseph Gerson of the AFSC Cambridge office sent along the following NYT op-ed by Joseph Nye, former Assistant Secretary of Defense, cautioning the U.S. in its approach to handling the dispute over military bases in Okinawa:

Throughout the Clinton era, Nye was the driving force in U.S. policy toward Asia, and before Obama appointed a major donor to his presidential campaign ambassador to Japan, it had been widely anticipated that Nye would get the position.

Note, too, his frank reporting that in revitalizing the U.S.-Japan alliance during the Clinton era, the goal was to “shape the environment into which China was emeerging” and as a hedge, lest China “turn aggressive.”

It is significant that Nye has felt it necessary to go public with his concerns about how the crisis could affect the U.S.-Japan alliance and continued U.S. Asia-Pacific dominance.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/opinion/07nye.html

Op-Ed Contributor

An Alliance Larger Than One Issue

By JOSEPH S. NYE Jr.
New York Times
Published: January 6, 2010
Cambridge, Mass.

SEEN from Tokyo, America’s relationship with Japan faces a crisis. The immediate problem is deadlock over a plan to move an American military base on the island of Okinawa. It sounds simple, but this is an issue with a long back story that could create a serious rift with one of our most crucial allies.

When I was in the Pentagon more than a decade ago, we began planning to reduce the burden that our presence places on Okinawa, which houses more than half of the 47,000 American troops in Japan. The Marine Corps Air Station Futenma was a particular problem because of its proximity to a crowded city, Ginowan. After years of negotiation, the Japanese and American governments agreed in 2006 to move the base to a less populated part of Okinawa and to move 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam by 2014.

The plan was thrown into jeopardy last summer when the Japanese voted out the Liberal Democratic Party that had governed the country for nearly half a century in favor of the Democratic Party of Japan. The new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, leads a government that is inexperienced, divided and still in the thrall of campaign promises to move the base off the island or out of Japan completely.

The Pentagon is properly annoyed that Mr. Hatoyama is trying to go back on an agreement that took more than a decade to work out and that has major implications for the Marine Corps’ budget and force realignment. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressed displeasure during a trip to Japan in October, calling any reassessment of the plan “counterproductive.” When he visited Tokyo in November, President Obama agreed to a high-level working group to consider the Futenma question. But since then, Mr. Hatoyama has said he will delay a final decision on relocation until at least May.

Not surprisingly, some in Washington want to play hardball with the new Japanese government. But that would be unwise, for Mr. Hatoyama is caught in a vise, with the Americans squeezing from one side and a small left-wing party (upon which his majority in the upper house of the legislature depends) threatening to quit the coalition if he makes any significant concessions to the Americans. Further complicating matters, the future of Futenma is deeply contentious for Okinawans.

Even if Mr. Hatoyama eventually gives in on the base plan, we need a more patient and strategic approach to Japan. We are allowing a second-order issue to threaten our long-term strategy for East Asia. Futenma, it is worth noting, is not the only matter that the new government has raised. It also speaks of wanting a more equal alliance and better relations with China, and of creating an East Asian community — though it is far from clear what any of this means.

When I helped to develop the Pentagon’s East Asian Strategy Report in 1995, we started with the reality that there were three major powers in the region — the United States, Japan and China — and that maintaining our alliance with Japan would shape the environment into which China was emerging. We wanted to integrate China into the international system by, say, inviting it to join the World Trade Organization, but we needed to hedge against the danger that a future and stronger China might turn aggressive.

After a year and a half of extensive negotiations, the United States and Japan agreed that our alliance, rather than representing a cold war relic, was the basis for stability and prosperity in the region. President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto affirmed that in their 1996 Tokyo declaration <http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/security.html> . This strategy of “integrate, but hedge” continued to guide American foreign policy through the years of the Bush administration.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the United States-Japan security treaty. <http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/q&amp;a/ref/1.html>  The two countries will miss a major opportunity if they let the base controversy lead to bitter feelings or the further reduction of American forces in Japan. The best guarantee of security in a region where China remains a long-term challenge and a nuclear North Korea poses a clear threat remains the presence of American troops, which Japan helps to maintain with generous host nation support.

Sometimes Japanese officials quietly welcome “gaiatsu,” or foreign pressure, to help resolve their own bureaucratic deadlocks. But that is not the case here: if the United States undercuts the new Japanese government and creates resentment among the Japanese public, then a victory on Futenma could prove Pyrrhic.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., a professor of government at Harvard and the author of “The Powers to Lead,” was an assistant secretary of defense from 1994 to 1995.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091221/scahill2

Is Erik Prince ‘Graymailing’ the US Government?

By Jeremy Scahill

December 4, 2009

The in-depth Vanity Fair profile of the infamous owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is remarkable on many levels–not least among them that Prince appeared to give the story’s author, former CIA lawyer Adam Ciralsky, unprecedented access to information about sensitive, classified and lethal operations not only of Prince’s forces, but Prince himself. In the article, Prince is revealed not just as owner of a company that covertly provided contractors to the CIA for drone bombings and targeted assassinations, but as an actual CIA asset himself. While the story appears to be simply a profile of Prince, it might actually be the world’s most famous mercenary’s insurance policy against future criminal prosecution. The term of art for what Prince appears to be doing in the VF interview is graymail: a legal tactic that has been used for years by intelligence operatives or assets who are facing prosecution or fear they soon will be. In short, these operatives or assets threaten to reveal details of sensitive or classified operations in order to ward off indictments or criminal charges, based on the belief that the government would not want these details revealed. “The only reason Prince would do this [interview] is that he feels he is in very serious jeopardy of criminal charges,” says Scott Horton, a prominent national security and military law expert. “He absolutely would not do these things otherwise.”

There is no doubt Prince is in the legal cross-hairs: There are reportedly two separate Grand Juries investigating Blackwater on a range of serious charges, ranging from gun smuggling to extralegal killings; multiple civil lawsuits alleging war crimes and extrajudicial killings; and Congress is investigating the assassination program in which Prince and his company were central players. “Obviously, Prince does know a lot and the government has to realize that once they start prosecuting him,” says Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “In some ways, graymail is what any good defense lawyer would do. This is something that’s in your arsenal.”

Perhaps the most prominent case of graymail was by Oliver North when he and his lawyers used it to force dismissal of the most serious charges against him stemming from his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair. In another case, known as Khazak-gate, a US businessman, James Giffen, allegedly paid $78 million in bribes to former Khazakh Prime Minister Nurlan Balgimbayev in an attempt to win contracts for western oil companies to develop the Tengiz oil fields in the 1990s. In 1993, he was charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the largest overseas bribery case in history. After Giffen was indicted, he claimed that if he did what he was accused of, he did it in the service of US intelligence agencies. The case has been in limbo ever since.

“This is as old as the hills as a tactic and it has a long track record of being very effective against the government,” says Horton. “It’s basically a threat to the government that if you prosecute me, I’ll disclose all sorts of national security-sensitive information. The bottom line here is it’s like an act of extortion or a threat: you do X and this is what I’m going to do.” Horton said that the Vanity Fair article was Prince “essentially putting out the warning to the Department of Justice: ‘You prosecute me and all this stuff will be out on the record.'”

According to Ciralsky’s article, Prince was a “full-blown asset” of “the C.I.A.’s National Resources Division [which] recruited Prince in 2004 to join a secret network of American citizens with special skills or unusual access to targets of interest:”

Two sources familiar with the arrangement say that Prince’s handlers obtained provisional operational approval from senior management to recruit Prince and later generated a “201 file,” which would have put him on the agency’s books as a vetted asset. It’s not at all clear who was running whom, since Prince says that, unlike many other assets, he did much of his work on spec, claiming to have used personal funds to road-test the viability of certain operations…

Prince was developing unconventional means of penetrating “hard target” countries–where the C.I.A. has great difficulty working either because there are no stations from which to operate or because local intelligence services have the wherewithal to frustrate the agency’s designs. “I made no money whatsoever off this work,” Prince contends. He is unwilling to specify the exact nature of his forays. “I’m painted as this war profiteer by Congress. Meanwhile I’m paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security, out of my own pocket.”

“I think that [Prince] will use all of his information and his knowledge of these secret dealings in basically what is an extortion play: ‘You come after me, and I’ll spill the beans on everything,'” says Horton. “That’s the essence of graymail and the Department of Justice will usually get its feathers all ruffled up and they’ll say, ‘You can’t deal with the government like this. This is unfair and improper.’ But in the end, it usually works.”

In the Vanity Fair article, Prince alleges that he was outed–by whom he does not say, but the implication is that CIA Director Leon Panetta named him in a closed door hearing of the Intelligence Committee last June, and then the name was leaked by one of the attendees of that hearing. Sloan, the former federal prosecutor, said that if what Prince says in the Vanity Fair article about his role in secret CIA programs is true, he has a case that laws were broken in revealing his identity. “I’m not his fan, but he’s not wrong. For somebody to leak his identity as a CIA asset clearly merits a criminal investigation,” Sloan said. “Whether they should have ever hired Erik Prince or made him into an asset is a separate question. Assuming he really was a CIA asset, basically a spy, an undercover operative, and somebody decided to leak that, that’s not acceptable and that is a violation of the same law that leaking Valerie [Plame]’s identity was. If you can’t leak one person, you can’t leak any person, not just the people you like versus the people you don’t like.”

While much of the focus in the Vanity Fair story was on Prince’s work with the CIA, the story also confirmed that Blackwater has an ongoing relationship with the US Special Forces, helping plan missions and providing air support. As The Nation reported, Blackwater has for years been working on a classified contract with the Joint Special Operations Command in a drone bombing campaign in Pakistan, as well as planning snatch-and-grab missions and targeted assassinations. Part of what may be happening behind closed doors is that the CIA is, to an extent, cutting Blackwater and Prince off. But, as sources have told The Nation, the company remains a central player in US Special Forces operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Prince’s choice of Adam Ciralsky to tell his story is an interesting one as well. Ciralsky was a CIA lawyer who in 1997 was suspended under suspicion he was having unauthorized contacts with possible Israeli intelligence agents. Ciralsky vehemently denied the allegations, saying he was the victim of a “witch-hunt” at the Agency. In any case, there is no question that Prince would view Ciralsky through the lens of his own struggle against the CIA. “When I saw the article, the first thing that just leapt off the page was his name. I thought, ‘My god, why would he go to Adam?'” said Horton. “And then I read the article and I thought, of course he’d go to Adam. There is this legal theme being developed in the article and Adam, as a lawyer who had dealt with the CIA, fully understands that. I mean I think he fully understood he was going to do a piece that would help Prince develop his legal defense and that’s what this is. The amazing thing to me is that Vanity Fair printed it. Do the editors of Vanity Fair not understand what’s going on here?”

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http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/01/blackwater-201001

Scandal

Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy

Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month. Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he’s been playing in America’s war on terror.

By Adam Ciralsky

January 2010

I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.

Erik Prince has an image problem—the kind that’s impervious to a Madison Avenue makeover. The 40-year-old heir to a Michigan auto-parts fortune, and a former navy seal, he has had the distinction of being vilified recently both in life and in art. In Washington, Prince has become a scapegoat for some of the Bush administration’s misadventures in Iraq—though Blackwater’s own deeds have also come in for withering criticism. Congressmen and lawyers, human-rights groups and pundits, have described Prince as a war profiteer, one who has assembled a rogue fighting force capable of toppling governments. His employees have been repeatedly accused of using excessive, even deadly force in Iraq; many Iraqis, in fact, have died during encounters with Blackwater. And in November, as a North Carolina grand jury was considering a raft of charges against the company, as a half-dozen civil suits were brewing in Virginia, and as five former Blackwater staffers were preparing for trial for their roles in the deaths of 17 Iraqis, The New York Times reported in a page-one story that Prince’s firm, in the aftermath of the tragedy, had sought to bribe Iraqi officials for their compliance, charges which Prince calls “lies … undocumented, unsubstantiated [and] anonymous.” (So infamous is the Blackwater brand that even the Taliban have floated far-fetched conspiracy theories, accusing the company of engaging in suicide bombings in Pakistan.)

In Hollywood, meanwhile, a town that loves nothing so much as a good villain, Prince, with his blond crop and Daniel Craig mien, has become the screenwriters’ darling. In the film State of Play, a Blackwater clone (PointCorp.) uses its network of mercenaries for illegal surveillance and murder. On the Fox series 24, Jon Voight has played Jonas Hodges, a thinly veiled version of Prince, whose company (Starkwood) helps an African warlord procure nerve gas for use against U.S. targets.

But the truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction. For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence. (Full disclosure: In the 1990s, before becoming a journalist for CBS and then NBC News, I was a C.I.A. attorney. My contract was not renewed, under contentious circumstances.)

But Prince, with a new administration in power, and foes closing in, is finally coming in from the cold. This past fall, though he infrequently grants interviews, he decided it was time to tell his side of the story—to respond to the array of accusations, to reveal exactly what he has been doing in the shadows of the U.S. government, and to present his rationale. He also hoped to convey why he’s going to walk away from it all.

To that end, he invited Vanity Fair to his training camp in North Carolina, to his Virginia offices, and to his Afghan outposts. It seemed like a propitious time to tag along.

Split Personality

Erik Prince can be a difficult man to wrap your mind around—an amalgam of contradictory caricatures. He has been branded a “Christian supremacist” who sanctions the murder of Iraqi civilians, yet he has built mosques at his overseas bases and supports a Muslim orphanage in Afghanistan. He and his family have long backed conservative causes, funded right-wing political candidates, and befriended evangelicals, but he calls himself a libertarian and is a practicing Roman Catholic. Sometimes considered arrogant and reclusive—Howard Hughes without the O.C.D.—he nonetheless enters competitions that combine mountain-biking, beach running, ocean kayaking, and rappelling.

The common denominator is a relentless intensity that seems to have no Off switch. Seated in the back of a Boeing 777 en route to Afghanistan, Prince leafs through Defense News while the film Taken beams from the in-flight entertainment system. In the movie, Liam Neeson plays a retired C.I.A. officer who mounts an aggressive rescue effort after his daughter is kidnapped in Paris. Neeson’s character warns his daughter’s captors:

If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills … skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you [don’t] let my daughter go now … I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

Prince comments, “I used that movie as a teaching tool for my girls.” (The father of seven, Prince remarried after his first wife died of cancer in 2003.) “I wanted them to understand the dangers out there. And I wanted them to know how I would respond.”

You can’t escape the impression that Prince sees himself as somehow destined, his mission anointed. It comes out even in the most personal of stories. During the flight, he tells of being in Kabul in September 2008 and receiving a two a.m. call from his wife, Joanna. Prince’s son Charlie, one year old at the time, had fallen into the family swimming pool. Charlie’s brother Christian, then 12, pulled him out of the water, purple and motionless, and successfully performed CPR. Christian and three siblings, it turns out, had recently received Red Cross certification at the Blackwater training camp.

But there are intimations of a higher power at work as the story continues. Desperate to get home, Prince scrapped one itinerary, which called for a stay-over at the Marriott in Islamabad, and found a direct flight. That night, at the time Prince would have been checking in, terrorists struck the hotel with a truck bomb, killing more than 50. Prince says simply, “Christian saved Charlie’s life and Charlie saved mine.” At times, his sense of his own place in history can border on the evangelical. When pressed about suggestions that he’s a mercenary—a term he loathes—he rattles off the names of other freelance military figures, even citing Lafayette, the colonists’ ally during the Revolutionary War.

Prince’s default mode is one of readiness. He is clenched-jawed and tightly wound. He cannot stand down. Waiting in the security line at Dulles airport just hours before, Prince had delivered a little homily: “Every time an American goes through security, I want them to pause for a moment and think, What is my government doing to inconvenience the terrorists? Rendition teams, Predator drones, assassination squads. That’s all part of it.”

Such brazenness is not lost on a listener, nor is the fact that Prince himself is quite familiar with some of these tactics. In fact Prince, like other contractors, has drawn fire for running a company that some call a “body shop”—many of its staffers having departed military or intelligence posts to take similar jobs at much higher salaries, paid mainly by Uncle Sam. And to get those jobs done—protecting, defending, and killing, if required—Prince has had to employ the services of some decorated vets as well as some ruthless types, snipers and spies among them.

Erik Prince flies coach internationally. It’s not just economical (“Why should I pay for business? Fly coach, you arrive at the same time”) but also less likely to draw undue attention. He considers himself a marked man. Prince describes the diplomats and dignitaries Blackwater protects as “Al Jazeera–worthy,” meaning that, in his view, “bin Laden and his acolytes would love to kill them in a spectacular fashion and have it broadcast on televisions worldwide.”

Stepping off the plane at Kabul’s international airport, Prince is treated as if he, too, were Al Jazeera–worthy. He is immediately shuffled into a waiting car and driven 50 yards to a second vehicle, a beat-up minivan that is native to the core: animal pelts on the dashboard, prayer card dangling from the rearview mirror. Blackwater’s special-projects team is responsible for Prince’s security in-country, and except for their language its men appear indistinguishable from Afghans. They have full beards, headscarves, and traditional knee-length shirts over baggy trousers. They remove Prince’s sunglasses, fit him out with body armor, and have him change into Afghan garb. Prince is issued a homing beacon that will track his movements, and a cell phone with its speed dial programmed for Blackwater’s tactical-operations center.

Once in the van, Prince’s team gives him a security briefing. Using satellite photos of the area, they review the route to Blackwater’s compound and point out where weapons and ammunition are stored inside the vehicle. The men warn him that in the event that they are incapacitated or killed in an ambush Prince should assume control of the weapons and push the red button near the emergency brake, which will send out a silent alarm and call in reinforcements.

Black Hawks and Zeppelins

Blackwater’s origins were humble, bordering on the primordial. The company took form in the dismal peat bogs of Moyock, North Carolina—not exactly a hotbed of the defense-contracting world.

In 1995, Prince’s father, Edgar, died of a heart attack (the Evangelical James C. Dobson, founder of the socially conservative Focus on the Family, delivered the eulogy at the funeral). Edgar Prince left behind a vibrant auto-parts manufacturing business in Holland, Michigan, with 4,500 employees and a line of products ranging from a lighted sun visor to a programmable garage-door opener. At the time, 25-year-old Erik was serving as a navy seal (he saw service in Haiti, the Middle East, and Bosnia), and neither he nor his sisters were in a position to take over the business. They sold Prince Automotive for $1.35 billion.

Erik Prince and some of his navy friends, it so happens, had been kicking around the idea of opening a full-service training compound to replace the usual patchwork of such facilities. In 1996, Prince took an honorable discharge and began buying up land in North Carolina. “The idea was not to be a defense contractor per se,” Prince says, touring the grounds of what looks and feels like a Disneyland for alpha males. “I just wanted a first-rate training facility for law enforcement, the military, and, in particular, the special-operations community.”

Business was slow. The navy seals came early—January 1998—but they didn’t come often, and by the time the Blackwater Lodge and Training Center officially opened, that May, Prince’s friends and advisers thought he was throwing good money after bad. “A lot of people said, ‘This is a rich kid’s hunting lodge,’” Prince explains. “They could not figure out what I was doing.”

Today, the site is the flagship for a network of facilities that train some 30,000 attendees a year. Prince, who owns an unmanned, zeppelin-esque airship and spent $45 million to build a fleet of customized, bomb-proof armored personnel carriers, often commutes to the lodge by air, piloting a Cessna Caravan from his home in Virginia. The training center has a private landing strip. Its hangars shelter a petting zoo of aircraft: Bell 412 helicopters (used to tail or shuttle diplomats in Iraq), Black Hawk helicopters (currently being modified to accommodate the security requests of a Gulf State client), a Dash 8 airplane (the type that ferries troops in Afghanistan). Amid the 52 firing ranges are virtual villages designed for addressing every conceivable real-world threat: small town squares, littered with blown-up cars, are situated near railway crossings and maritime mock-ups. At one junction, swat teams fire handguns, sniper rifles, and shotguns; at another, police officers tear around the world’s longest tactical-driving track, dodging simulated roadside bombs.

In keeping with the company’s original name, the central complex, constructed of stone, glass, concrete, and logs, actually resembles a lodge, an REI store on steroids. Here and there are distinctive touches, such as door handles crafted from imitation gun barrels. Where other companies might have Us Weekly lying about the lobby, Blackwater has counterterror magazines with cover stories such as “How to Destroy Al Qaeda.”

In fact, it was al-Qaeda that put Blackwater on the map. In the aftermath of the group’s October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, in Yemen, the navy turned to Prince, among others, for help in re-training its sailors to fend off attackers at close range. (To date, the company says, it has put some 125,000 navy personnel through its programs.) In addition to providing a cash infusion, the navy contract helped Blackwater build a database of retired military men—many of them special-forces veterans—who could be called upon to serve as instructors.

When al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. mainland on 9/11, Prince says, he was struck with the urge to either re-enlist or join the C.I.A. He says he actually applied. “I was rejected,” he admits, grinning at the irony of courting the very agency that would later woo him. “They said I didn’t have enough hard skills, enough time in the field.” Undeterred, he decided to turn his Rolodex into a roll call for what would in essence become a private army.

After the terror attacks, Prince’s company toiled, even reveled, in relative obscurity, taking on assignments in Afghanistan and, after the U.S. invasion, in Iraq. Then came March 31, 2004. That was the day insurgents ambushed four of its employees in the Iraqi town of Fallujah. The men were shot, their bodies set on fire by a mob. The charred, hacked-up remains of two of them were left hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates.

“It was absolutely gut-wrenching,” Prince recalls. “I had been in the military, and no one under my command had ever died. At Blackwater, we had never even had a firearms training accident. Now all of a sudden four of my guys aren’t just killed, but desecrated.” Three months later an edict from coalition authorities in Baghdad declared private contractors immune from Iraqi law.

Subsequently, the contractors’ families sued Blackwater, contending the company had failed to protect their loved ones. Blackwater countersued the families for breaching contracts that forbid the men or their estates from filing such lawsuits; the company also claimed that, because it operates as an extension of the military, it cannot be held responsible for deaths in a war zone. (After five years, the case remains unresolved.) In 2007, a congressional investigation into the incident concluded that the employees had been sent into an insurgent stronghold “without sufficient preparation, resources, and support.” Blackwater called the report a “one-sided” version of a “tragic incident.”

After Fallujah, Blackwater became a household name. Its primary mission in Iraq had been to protect American dignitaries, and it did so, in part, by projecting an image of invincibility, sending heavily armed men in armored Suburbans racing through the streets of Baghdad with sirens blaring. The show of swagger and firepower, which alienated both the locals and the U.S. military, helped contribute to the allegations of excessive force. As the war dragged on, charges against the firm mounted. In one case, a contractor shot and killed an Iraqi father of six who was standing along the roadside in Hillah. (Prince later told Congress that the contractor was fired for trying to cover up the incident.) In another, a Blackwater firearms technician was accused of drinking too much at a party in the Green Zone and killing a bodyguard assigned to protect Iraq’s vice president. The technician was fired but not prosecuted and later settled a wrongful-death suit with the man’s family.

Those episodes, however, paled in comparison with the events of September 16, 2007, when a phalanx of Blackwater bodyguards emerged from their four-car convoy at a Baghdad intersection called Nisour Square and opened fire. When the smoke cleared, 17 Iraqi civilians lay dead. After 15 months of investigation, the Justice Department charged six with voluntary manslaughter and other offenses, insisting that the use of force was not only unjustified but unprovoked. One guard pleaded guilty and, in a trial set for February, is expected to testify against the others, all of whom maintain their innocence. The New York Times recently reported that in the wake of the shootings the company’s top executives authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi higher-ups in order to buy their silence—a claim Prince dismisses as “false,” insisting “[there was] zero plan or discussion of bribing any officials.”

Nisour Square had disastrous repercussions for Blackwater. Its role in Iraq was curtailed, its revenue dropping 40 percent. Today, Prince claims, he is shelling out $2 million a month in legal fees to cope with a spate of civil lawsuits as well as what he calls a “giant proctological exam” by nearly a dozen federal agencies. “We used to spend money on R&D to develop better capabilities to serve the U.S. government,” says Prince. “Now we pay lawyers.”

Does he ever. In North Carolina, a federal grand jury is investigating various allegations, including the illegal transport of assault weapons and silencers to Iraq, hidden in dog-food sacks. (Blackwater denied this, but confirmed hiding weapons on pallets of dog food to protect against theft by “corrupt foreign customs agents.”) In Virginia, two ex-employees have filed affidavits claiming that Prince and Blackwater may have murdered or ordered the murder of people suspected of cooperating with U.S. authorities investigating the company—charges which Blackwater has characterized as “scandalous and baseless.” One of the men also asserted in filings that company employees ran a sex and wife-swapping ring, allegations which Blackwater has called “anonymous, unsubstantiated and offensive.”

Meanwhile, last February, Prince mounted an expensive rebranding campaign. Following the infamous ValuJet crash, in 1996, ValuJet disappeared into AirTran, after a merger, and moved on to a happy new life. Prince, likewise, decided to retire the Blackwater name and replace it with the name Xe, short for Xenon—an inert, non-combustible gas that, in keeping with his political leanings, sits on the far right of the periodic table. Still, Prince and other top company officials continued to use the name Blackwater among themselves. And as events would soon prove, the company’s reputation would remain as combustible as ever.

Spies and Whispers

Last June, C.I.A. director Leon Panetta met in a closed session with the House and Senate intelligence committees to brief them on a covert-action program, which the agency had long concealed from Congress. Panetta explained that he had learned of the existence of the operation only the day before and had promptly shut it down. The reason, C.I.A. spokesman Paul Gimigliano now explains: “It hadn’t taken any terrorists off the street.” During the meeting, according to two attendees, Panetta named both Erik Prince and Blackwater as key participants in the program. (When asked to verify this account, Gimigliano notes that “Director Panetta treats as confidential discussions with Congress that take place behind closed doors.”) Soon thereafter, Prince says, he began fielding inquisitive calls from people he characterizes as far outside the circle of trust.

It took three weeks for details, however sketchy, to surface. In July, The Wall Street Journal described the program as “an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives.” The agency reportedly planned to accomplish this task by dispatching small hit teams overseas. Lawmakers, who couldn’t exactly quibble with the mission’s objective, were in high dudgeon over having been kept in the dark. (Former C.I.A. officials reportedly saw the matter differently, characterizing the program as “more aspirational than operational” and implying that it had never progressed far enough to justify briefing the Hill.)

On August 20, the gloves came off. The New York Times published a story headlined “CIA sought Blackwater’s help to kill jihadists.” The Washington Post concurred: “CIA hired firm for assassin program.” Prince confesses to feeling betrayed. “I don’t understand how a program this sensitive leaks,” he says. “And to ‘out’ me on top of it?” The next day, the Times went further, revealing Blackwater’s role in the use of aerial drones to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders: “At hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan … the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Erik Prince, almost overnight, had undergone a second rebranding of sorts, this one not of his own making. The war profiteer had become a merchant of death, with a license to kill on the ground and in the air. “I’m an easy target,” he says. “I’m from a Republican family and I own this company outright. Our competitors have nameless, faceless management teams.”

Prince blames Democrats in Congress for the leaks and maintains that there is a double standard at play. “The left complained about how [C.I.A. operative] Valerie Plame’s identity was compromised for political reasons. A special prosecutor [was even] appointed. Well, what happened to me was worse. People acting for political reasons disclosed not only the existence of a very sensitive program but my name along with it.” As in the Plame case, though, the leaks prompted C.I.A. attorneys to send a referral to the Justice Department, requesting that a criminal investigation be undertaken to identify those responsible for providing highly classified information to the media.

By focusing so intently on Blackwater, Congress and the press overlooked the elephant in the room. Prince wasn’t merely a contractor; he was, insiders say, a full-blown asset. Three sources with direct knowledge of the relationship say that the C.I.A.’s National Resources Division recruited Prince in 2004 to join a secret network of American citizens with special skills or unusual access to targets of interest. As assets go, Prince would have been quite a catch. He had more cash, transport, matériel, and personnel at his disposal than almost anyone Langley would have run in its 62-year history.

The C.I.A. won’t comment further on such assertions, but Prince himself is slightly more forthcoming. “I was looking at creating a small, focused capability,” he says, “just like Donovan did years ago”—the reference being to William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who, in World War II, served as the head of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the modern C.I.A. (Prince’s youngest son, Charles Donovan—the one who fell into the pool—is named after Wild Bill.) Two sources familiar with the arrangement say that Prince’s handlers obtained provisional operational approval from senior management to recruit Prince and later generated a “201 file,” which would have put him on the agency’s books as a vetted asset. It’s not at all clear who was running whom, since Prince says that, unlike many other assets, he did much of his work on spec, claiming to have used personal funds to road-test the viability of certain operations. “I grew up around the auto industry,” Prince explains. “Customers would say to my dad, ‘We have this need.’ He would then use his own money to create prototypes to fulfill those needs. He took the ‘If you build it, they will come’ approach.”

According to two sources familiar with his work, Prince was developing unconventional means of penetrating “hard target” countries—where the C.I.A. has great difficulty working either because there are no stations from which to operate or because local intelligence services have the wherewithal to frustrate the agency’s designs. “I made no money whatsoever off this work,” Prince contends. He is unwilling to specify the exact nature of his forays. “I’m painted as this war profiteer by Congress. Meanwhile I’m paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security, out of my own pocket.” (His pocket is deep: according to The Wall Street Journal, Blackwater had revenues of more than $600 million in 2008.)

Clutch Cargo

The Afghan countryside, from a speeding perch at 200 knots, whizzes by in a khaki haze. The terrain is rendered all the more nondescript by the fact that Erik Prince is riding less than 200 feet above it. The back of the airplane, a small, Spanish-built eads casa C-212, is open, revealing Prince in silhouette against a blue sky. Wearing Oakleys, tactical pants, and a white polo shirt, he looks strikingly boyish.

As the crew chief initiates a countdown sequence, Prince adjusts his harness and moves into position. When the “go” order comes, a young G.I. beside him cuts a tether, and Prince pushes a pallet out the tail chute. Black parachutes deploy and the aircraft lunges forward from the sudden weight differential. The cargo—provisions and munitions—drops inside the perimeter of a forward operating base (fob) belonging to an elite Special Forces squad.

Five days a week, Blackwater’s aviation arm—with its unabashedly 60s-spook name, Presidential Airways—flies low-altitude sorties to some of the most remote outposts in Afghanistan. Since 2006, Prince’s company has been conscripted to offer this “turnkey” service for U.S. troops, flying thousands of delivery runs. Blackwater also provides security for U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry and his staff, and trains narcotics and Afghan special police units.

Once back on terra firma, Prince, a BlackBerry on one hip and a 9-mm. on the other, does a sweep around one of Blackwater’s bases in northeast Afghanistan, pointing out buildings recently hit by mortar fire. As a drone circles overhead, its camera presumably trained on the surroundings, Prince climbs a guard tower and peers down at a spot where two of his contractors were nearly killed last July by an improvised explosive device. “Not counting civilian checkpoints,” he says, “this is the closest base to the [Pakistani] border.” His voice takes on a melodramatic solemnity. “Who else has built a fob along the main infiltration route for the Taliban and the last known location for Osama bin Laden?” It doesn’t quite have the ring of Lawrence of Arabia’s “To Aqaba!,” but you get the picture.

Going “Low-Pro”

Blackwater has been in Afghanistan since 2002. At the time, the C.I.A.’s executive director, A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, responding to his operatives’ complaints of being “worried sick about the Afghans’ coming over the fence or opening the doors,” enlisted the company to offer protection for the agency’s Kabul station. Going “low-pro,” or low-profile, paid off: not a single C.I.A. employee, according to sources close to the company, died in Afghanistan while under Blackwater’s protection. (Talk about a tight-knit bunch. Krongard would later serve as an unpaid adviser to Blackwater’s board, until 2007. And his brother Howard “Cookie” Krongard—the State Department’s inspector general—had to recuse himself from Blackwater-related oversight matters after his brother’s involvement with the company surfaced. Buzzy, in response, stepped down.)

As the agency’s confidence in Blackwater grew, so did the company’s responsibilities, expanding from static protection to mobile security—shadowing agency personnel, ever wary of suicide bombers, ambushes, and roadside devices, as they moved about the country. By 2005, Blackwater, accustomed to guarding C.I.A. personnel, was starting to look a little bit like the C.I.A. itself. Enrique “Ric” Prado joined Blackwater after serving as chief of operations for the agency’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC). A short time later, Prado’s boss, J. Cofer Black, the head of the CTC, moved over to Blackwater, too. He was followed, in turn, by his superior, Rob Richer, second-in-command of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service. Of the three, Cofer Black had the outsize reputation. As Bob Woodward recounted in his book Bush at War, on September 13, 2001, Black had promised President Bush that when the C.I.A. was through with al-Qaeda “they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.” According to Woodward, “Black became known in Bush’s inner circle as the ‘flies-on-the-eyeballs guy.’” Richer and Black soon helped start a new company, Total Intelligence Solutions (which collects data to help businesses assess risks overseas), but in 2008 both men left Blackwater, as did company president Gary Jackson this year.

Off and on, Black and Richer’s onetime partner Ric Prado, first with the C.I.A., then as a Blackwater employee, worked quietly with Prince as his vice president of “special programs” to provide the agency with what every intelligence service wants: plausible deniability. Shortly after 9/11, President Bush had issued a “lethal finding,” giving the C.I.A. the go-ahead to kill or capture al-Qaeda members. (Under an executive order issued by President Gerald Ford, it had been illegal since 1976 for U.S. intelligence operatives to conduct assassinations.) As a seasoned case officer, Prado helped implement the order by putting together a small team of “blue-badgers,” as government agents are known. Their job was threefold: find, fix, and finish. Find the designated target, fix the person’s routine, and, if necessary, finish him off. When the time came to train the hit squad, the agency, insiders say, turned to Prince. Wary of attracting undue attention, the team practiced not at the company’s North Carolina compound but at Prince’s own domain, an hour outside Washington, D.C. The property looks like an outpost of the landed gentry, with pastures and horses, but also features less traditional accents, such as an indoor firing range. Once again, Prince has Wild Bill on his mind, observing that “the O.S.S. trained during World War II on a country estate.”

Among the team’s targets, according to a source familiar with the program, was Mamoun Darkazanli, an al-Qaeda financier living in Hamburg who had been on the agency’s radar for years because of his ties to three of the 9/11 hijackers and to operatives convicted of the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in East Africa. The C.I.A. team supposedly went in “dark,” meaning they did not notify their own station—much less the German government—of their presence; they then followed Darkazanli for weeks and worked through the logistics of how and where they would take him down. Another target, the source says, was A. Q. Khan, the rogue Pakistani scientist who shared nuclear know-how with Iran, Libya, and North Korea. The C.I.A. team supposedly tracked him in Dubai. In both cases, the source insists, the authorities in Washington chose not to pull the trigger. Khan’s inclusion on the target list, however, would suggest that the assassination effort was broader than has previously been acknowledged. (Says agency spokesman Gimigliano, “[The] C.I.A. hasn’t discussed—despite some mischaracterizations that have appeared in the public domain—the substance of this effort or earlier ones.”)

The source familiar with the Darkazanli and Khan missions bristles at public comments that current and former C.I.A. officials have made: “They say the program didn’t move forward because [they] didn’t have the right skill set or because of inadequate cover. That’s untrue. [The operation continued] for a very long time in some places without ever being discovered. This program died because of a lack of political will.”

When Prado left the C.I.A., in 2004, he effectively took the program with him, after a short hiatus. By that point, according to sources familiar with the plan, Prince was already an agency asset, and the pair had begun working to privatize matters by changing the team’s composition from blue-badgers to a combination of “green-badgers” (C.I.A. contractors) and third-country nationals (unaware of the C.I.A. connection). Blackwater officials insist that company resources and manpower were never directly utilized—these were supposedly off-the-books initiatives done on Prince’s own dime, for which he was later reimbursed—and that despite their close ties to the C.I.A. neither Cofer Black nor Rob Richer took part. As Prince puts it, “We were building a unilateral, unattributable capability. If it went bad, we weren’t expecting the chief of station, the ambassador, or anyone to bail us out.” He insists that, had the team deployed, the agency would have had full operational control. Instead, due to what he calls “institutional osteoporosis,” the second iteration of the assassination program lost steam.

Sometime after 2006, the C.I.A. would take another shot at the program, according to an insider who was familiar with the plan. “Everyone found some reason not to participate,” says the insider. “There was a sick-out. People would say to management, ‘I have a family, I have other obligations.’ This is the fucking C.I.A. They were supposed to lead the charge after al-Qaeda and they couldn’t find the people to do it.” Others with knowledge of the program are far more charitable and question why any right-thinking officer would sign up for an assassination program at a time when their colleagues—who had thought they had legal cover to engage in another sensitive effort, the “enhanced interrogations” program at secret C.I.A. sites in foreign countries—were finding themselves in legal limbo.

America and Erik Prince, it seems, have been slow to extract themselves from the assassination business. Beyond the killer drones flown with Blackwater’s help along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border (President Obama has reportedly authorized more than three dozen such hits), Prince claims he and a team of foreign nationals helped find and fix a target in October 2008, then left the finishing to others. “In Syria,” he says, “we did the signals intelligence to geo-locate the bad guys in a very denied area.” Subsequently, a U.S. Special Forces team launched a helicopter-borne assault to hunt down al-Qaeda middleman Abu Ghadiyah. Ghadiyah, whose real name is Badran Turki Hishan Al-Mazidih, was said to have been killed along with six others—though doubts have emerged about whether Ghadiyah was even there that day, as detailed in a recent Vanity Fair Web story by Reese Ehrlich and Peter Coyote.

And up until two months ago—when Prince says the Obama administration pulled the plug—he was still deeply engaged in the dark arts. According to insiders, he was running intelligence-gathering operations from a secret location in the United States, remotely coordinating the movements of spies working undercover in one of the so-called Axis of Evil countries. Their mission: non-disclosable.

Exit Strategy

Flying out of Kabul, Prince does a slow burn, returning to the topic of how exposed he has felt since press accounts revealed his role in the assassination program. The firestorm that began in August has continued to smolder and may indeed have his handlers wondering whether Prince himself is more of a liability than an asset. He says he can’t understand why they would shut down certain high-risk, high-payoff collection efforts against some of America’s most implacable enemies for fear that his involvement could, given the political climate, result in their compromise.

He is incredulous that U.S. officials seem willing, in effect, to cut off their nose to spite their face. “I’ve been overtly and covertly serving America since I started in the armed services,” Prince observes. After 12 years building the company, he says he intends to turn it over to its employees and a board, and exit defense contracting altogether. An internal power struggle is said to be under way among those seeking to define the direction and underlying mission of a post-Prince Blackwater.

He insists, simply, “I’m through.”

In the past, Prince has entertained the idea of building a pre-positioning ship—complete with security personnel, doctors, helicopters, medicine, food, and fuel—and stationing it off the coast of Africa to provide “relief with teeth” to the continent’s trouble spots or to curb piracy off Somalia. At one point, he considered creating a rapidly deployable brigade that could be farmed out, for a fee, to a foreign government.

For the time being, however, Prince contends that his plans are far more modest. “I’m going to teach high school,” he says, straight-faced. “History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-threats-to-yemen-prove-america-hasnt-learned-the-lesson-of-history-1853847.html

Patrick Cockburn: Threats to Yemen prove America hasn’t learned the lesson of history

Extraordinarily, the US is making exactly the same mistake as in Iraq and Afghanistan

Thursday, 31 December 2009

We are the Awaleq

Born of bitterness

We are the nails that go into the rock

We are the sparks of hell

He who defies us will be burned

This is the tribal chant of the powerful Awaleq tribe of Yemen, in which they bid defiance to the world. Its angry tone conveys the flavour of Yemeni life and it should give pause to those in the US who blithely suggest greater American involvement in Yemen in the wake of the attempt to destroy a US plane by a Nigerian student who says he received training there.

Yemen has always been a dangerous place. Wonderfully beautiful, the mountainous north of the country is guerrilla paradise. The Yemenis are exceptionally hospitable, though this has its limits. For instance, the Kazam tribe east of Aden are generous to passing strangers, but deem the laws of hospitality to lapse when the stranger leaves their tribal territory, at which time he becomes “a good back to shoot at”.

The Awaleq and Kazam tribes are not exotic survivals on the margins of Yemeni society but are both politically important and influential. The strength of the central government in the capital, Sanaa, is limited and it generally avoids direct confrontations with tribal confederations, tribes, clans and powerful families. Almost everybody has a gun, usually at least an AK-47 assault rifle, but tribesmen often own heavier armament.

I have always loved the country. It is physically very beautiful with cut stone villages perched on mountain tops on the sides of which are cut hundreds of terraces, making the country look like an exaggerated Tuscan landscape. Yemenis are intelligent, humorous, sociable and democratic, infinitely preferable as company to the arrogant and ignorant playboys of the Arab oil states in the rest of the Arabian Peninsula.

It is very much a country of direct action. Once when I was there a Chinese engineer was kidnapped as he drove along the main road linking Sanaa to Aden. The motives of the kidnappers were peculiar. It turned out they came from a bee-keeping tribe (Yemen is famous for its honey) whose bees live in hives inside hollow logs placed on metal stilts to protect them from ants. The police had raided the tribe’s village and had damaged hives for which the owners were demanding compensation. The government had been slow in paying up so the tribesmen had decided to draw attention to their grievance by kidnapping the next foreigner on the main road and this turned out to be the Chinese engineer.

Yemen is a mosaic of conflicting authorities, though this authority may be confined to a few villages. Larger communities include the Shia around Sanaa in the north of the country near Saada, with whom the government has been fighting a fierce little civil war. The unification of North and South Yemen in 1990 has never wholly gelled and the government is wary of southern secessionism. Its ability to buy off its opponents is also under threat as oil revenues fall, with the few oilfields beginning to run dry.

It is in this fascinating but dangerous land that President Barack Obama is planning to increase US political and military involvement. Joint operations will be carried out by the US and Yemeni military. There will be American drone attacks on hamlets where al-Qa’ida supposedly has its bases.

There is ominous use by American politicians and commentators of the phrase “failed state” in relation to Yemen, as if this some how legitimised foreign intervention. It is extraordinary that the US political elite has never taken on board that its greatest defeats have been in just such “failed states”‘, not least Lebanon in 1982, when 240 US Marines were blown up; Somalia in the early 1990s when the body of a US helicopter pilot was dragged through the streets; Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein; and Afghanistan after the supposed fall of the Taliban.

Yemen has all the explosive ingredients of Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. But the arch-hawk Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, was happily confirming this week that the Green Berets and the US Special Forces are already there. He cited with approval an American official in Sanaa as telling him that, “Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If you don’t act pre-emptively Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.” In practice pre-emptive strikes are likely to bring a US military entanglement in Yemen even closer.

The US will get entangled because the Yemeni government will want to manipulate US action in its own interests and to preserve its wilting authority. It has long been trying to portray the Shia rebels in north Yemen as Iranian cats-paws in order to secure American and Saudi support. Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) probably only has a few hundred activists in Yemen, but the government of long time Yemeni President Ali Abdulah Salih will portray his diverse opponents as somehow linked to al-Qa’ida.

In Yemen the US will be intervening on one side in a country which is always in danger of sliding into a civil war. This has happened before. In Iraq the US was the supporter of the Shia Arabs and Kurds against the Sunni Arabs. In Afghanistan it is the ally of the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara against the Pashtun community. Whatever the intentions of Washington, its participation in these civil conflicts destabilises the country because one side becomes labelled as the quisling supporter of a foreign invader. Communal and nationalist antipathies combine to create a lethal blend.

Despite sectarian, ethnic and tribal loyalties in the countries where the US has intervened in the Middle East, they usually have a strong sense of national identity. Yemenis are highly conscious of their own nationality and their identity as Arabs. One of the reasons the country is so miserably poor, with almost half its 22 million people trying to live on $2 a day, is that in 1990 Yemen refused to join the war against Iraq and Saudi Arabia consequently expelled 850,000 Yemeni workers.

It is extraordinary to see the US begin to make the same mistakes in Yemen as it previously made in Afghanistan and Iraq. What it is doing is much to al-Qa’ida’s advantage. The real strength of al-Qa’ida is not that it can “train” a fanatical Nigerian student to sew explosives into his underpants, but that it can provoke an exaggerated US response to every botched attack. Al-Qa’ida leaders openly admitted at the time of 9/11 that the aim of such operations is to provoke the US into direct military intervention in Muslim countries.

In Yemen the US is walking into the al-Qa’ida trap. Once there it will face the same dilemma it faces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It became impossible to exit these conflicts because the loss of face would be too great. Just as Washington saved banks and insurance giants from bankruptcy in 2008 because they were “too big to fail,” so these wars become too important to lose because to do so would damage the US claim to be the sole superpower.

In Iraq the US is getting out more easily than seemed likely at one stage because Washington has persuaded Americans that they won a non-existent success. The ultimate US exit from Afghanistan may eventually be along very similar lines. But the danger of claiming spurious victories is that such distortions of history make it impossible for the US to learn from past mistakes and instead it repeats them by fresh interventions in countries like Yemen.

The movie everyone is talking about is Avatar, James Cameron’s sci-fi epic adventure about a soldier who joins a mission to pursuade the Na’vi, the native humanoids on the moon Pandora, to relocate from their home, which is the site of a vast deposit of a rare and valuable ore that the humans want, and his conversion to the struggle of the Na’vi.    Debates are raging whether the film is a racist, white guilt, rehash of ‘Dances with Wolves’ , where the white hero ‘goes native’ and becomes the leader of the primitive natives who resist genocide by the greedy humans.  Or whether the film is essentially a  progressive environmentalist and anti-imperialist statement.

One review in Counterpunch that caught my eye was an analysis of the elements of real world counterinsurgency doctrine, in particular the Human Terrain System, a new element of military counterinsurgency strategy in which social scientists are deployed to study restive populations and formulate strategies for pacifying and controlling them.   Earlier this year, Counterpunch published another article about the expansion of the Human Terrain System program.

Peace and justice movements need to study the elements of counterinsurgency strategy.  The U.S. military has made a deliberate shift towards counterinsurgency doctrine in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.   This is the new direction of U.S. military operations, where the lines are blurred between war and police actions, nation building and anti-terrorism, foreign and domestic methods of maintaining social control.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/price12232009.html

December 23, 2009

Going Native

Hollywood’s Human Terrain Avatars

By DAVID PRICE

This week, as James Cameron’s 3D cinematic science fiction saga dominates the American box office, and tie-in products permeate fast food franchises and toy stores, it is worth noting an interesting bit of cultural leakage tying our own real militarized state to Cameron’s virtual world of Avatar.

Avatar is set in a world where the needs of corporate military units align against the interests of indigenous blue humanoids long inhabiting a planet with mineral resources desired by the high tech militarized invaders.  The exploitation of native peoples to capture valuable resources is a story obviously older than Hollywood, and much older than the discipline of anthropology itself; though the last century and a half has found anthropologists’ field research used in recurrent instances to make indigenous populations vulnerable to exploitation in ways reminiscent of Avatar.

Avatar draws on classic sci-fi themes in which individuals break through barriers of exoticness, to accept alien others in their own terms as equals, not as species to be conquered and exploited, and to turn against the exploitive mission of their own culture.  These sorts of relationships, where invaders learn about those they’d conquer and come to understand them in ways that shake their loyalties permeate fiction, history and anthropology.  Films like Local Hero, Little Big Man, Dersu Uzala, or even the musical The Music Man use themes where outsider exploitive adventurists trying to abuse local customs are seduced by their contact with these cultures.  These are themes of a sort of boomeranging cultural relativism gone wild.

Fans of Avatar are understandably being moved by the story’s romantic anthropological message favoring the rights of people to not have their culture weaponized against them by would be foreign conquerors, occupiers and betrayers.  It is worth noting some of the obvious the parallels between these elements in this virtual film world, and those found in our world of real bullets and anthropologists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since 2007, the occupying U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan have deployed Human Terrain Teams (HTT), complete with HTT “social scientists” using anthropological-ish methods and theories to ease the conquest and occupation of these lands. HTT has no avatared-humans; just supposed “social scientists” who embed with battalions working to reduce friction so that the military can get on with its mission without interference from local populations.  For most anthropologists these HTT programs are an outrageous abuse of anthropology, and earlier this month a lengthy report by a commission of the American Anthropological Association (of which I was a member and report co-author) concluded that the Human Terrain program crossed all sorts of ethical, political and methodological lines, finding that:

“when ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment – all characteristic factors of the HTT concept and its application – it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.”

The American Anthropological Association’s executive board found Human Terrain to be a “mistaken form of anthropology”.  But even with these harsh findings, the Obama administration’s call for increased counterinsurgency will increase demands for such non-anthropological uses of ethnography for pacification.

There are other anthropological connections to Avatar. James Cameron used University of Southern California anthropologist, Nancy Lutkehaus, as a consultant on the film.  I recently wrote Lutkehaus to see if her role in consulting for Cameron had included adding information on how anthropologists have historically, or presently, aided the suppression of native uprisings; but Lutkehaus wrote me that her consultation had nothing to do with these plot elements, her expertise drew upon her fieldwork in Papua New Guinea to consult with choreographer, Lula Washington, who designed scenes depicting a gorgeous coming-of-age-ritual depicted in the film.

Among the more interesting parallels between Avatar and Human Terrain Systems is the way that the video logs that the avatar-ethnographers were required to record were quietly sifted-through by military strategists interested in finding vulnerability to exploit among the local populous. Last week a story in Time magazine quoted Human Terrain Team social scientist in training Ben Wintersteen admitting that in battlefield situations “”there’s definitely an intense pressure on the brigade staff to encourage anthropologists to give up the subject..There’s no way to know when people are violating ethical guidelines on the field;” and the AAA’s recent report found that “Reports from HTTs are circulated to all elements of the military, including intelligence assets, both in the field and stateside.”  Like the HTT counterparts, the Avatar teams openly talked about trying to win the “hearts, mind, and trust” of the local population (a population that the military derisively called “blue monkeys”) that the military was simply interested in moving or killing.  And most significantly, the members of the avatar unit had a naive understanding of the sort of role they could conceivably play in directing the sort of military action that would inevitably occur.  Sigourney Weaver’s character, the chain-smoking, pose striking, tough talking Avatar Terrain Team chief social scientist, Grace Augustine, displayed the same sort of unrealistic understanding of what would be done with her research that appears in the seemingly endless Human Terrain friendly features appearing in newspapers and magazines.

Past wars found anthropologists working much more successfully as insurgents, rather than counterinsurgents: in World War II it was Edmund Leach leading an armed insurgent gang in Burma, Charlton Coon training terrorists in North African, Tom Harrisson arming native insurgents in Sarawak.  These episodes found anthropologists aligned with the (momentary) interests of the people they studied (but also aligned with the interests of their own nation states), not subjugating them in occupation and suppressing their efforts for liberation as misshapen forms of ethnography like Human Terrain.

Anthropologically informed counterinsurgency efforts like the Human Terrain program are fundamentally flawed for several reasons.  One measure of the extent that these programs come to understand and empathize with the culture and motivations of the people they study might be the occurrence of militarized ethnographers “going native” in ways parallel to the plot of Avatar.  If Human Terrain Teams employed anthropologists who came to live with and freely interact with and empathize with occupied populations, I suppose you would eventually find some rogue anthropologists standing up to their masters in the field.  But so far mostly what we find with the Human Terrain “social scientists” is a revolving cadre of well paid misfits with marginal training in the social sciences who do not understand or reject normative anthropological notions of research ethics, who rotate out and come home with misgivings about the program and what they accomplished.

On the big screen the transformation of fictional counterinsurgent avatar-anthropologists into insurgents siding with the blue skinned Na’vi endears the avatars to the audience, yet off the screen in our world, this same audience is regularly bombarded by media campaigns designed to endear HTT social scientists embedded with the military to an audience of the American people. The engineered inversions of audience sympathies for anthropologists resisting a military invasion in fiction, and pro-military-anthropologists in nonfiction is easily accomplished because the fictional world of a distant future is not pollinated with the forces of nationalism and jingoistic patriotism that permeate our world; a world where anything aligned with militarism is championed over the understanding of others (for reasons other than conquest).

David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologist.  He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, published by Duke University Press, and a contributor to the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ new book Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual published last month by Prickly Paradigm Press. He can be reached at dprice@stmartin.edu

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http://www.counterpunch.org/stanton08072009.html

August 7 – 9, 2009

A Key Element in Obama’s Smart Power Campaign

Expanding Human Terrain Systems?

By JOHN STANTON

On 5 August 2009 the US Government’s General Services Administration and HQ Training & Doctrine Command (TRADOC) sponsored a Bidder’s Conference for defense contractors looking to work in the US Army and Marine Corps Irregular Warfare program. The subject of that conference was new opportunities for recruiting, training, and managing the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS).  HTS is set to become a pivotal element, according to documentation, in other US combatant commands besides CENTCOM; namely, SOCOM, AFRICOM, STRATCOM, and PACOM. Can NORTHCOM and EUCOM be far behind? HTS is currently funded by US Army TRADOC’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G2) and CENTCOM. Long term requirements have been validated for funding in the Common Operating Picture funding line of the US Army budget in Presidential Review Briefing 11-15.

Citing specifications, the US Army Training & Doctrine Command (TRADOC) has broadened its efforts to include supporting the Army in combat operations with enhanced, up-to-date training oriented on a current assessment of enemy capabilities as well as predictions for enemy reactions to a dynamic battlefield. TRADOC responsibilities regarding combat and transformation have multiplied, expanded and increased in complexity. As a result, Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2 (Intelligence) has been assigned a wide range of missions and projects that require expert analysis, planning, assessments, and execution from an increasing array of capabilities offered by defense contractors through a flexible tool which brings these capabilities to bear on the challenges G-2 and TRADOC face today, and will face in an ever evolving and dynamic future.

Reach-back and HQ functions will be performed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and Hampton, Virginia. A Top Secret/SCI clearance is required for non-deploying HTS employees. HTT members require a Secret clearance.  Incumbent contractors are DYNETICS and BAE Systems. On 30 August 2009 the current HTS contract expires. Bids are due on or about 21 August 2009.

The Green Layer is People!

According to the Bidder’s Conference briefing, critical to the success of HTTs is individual replacement of team members during unit rotations in lieu of mass replacement thus mitigating loss of institutional knowledge and expertise while providing for mission continuity.  Individual Replacement of existing team members and the addition of whole teams in response to increasing demand for support requires an average of 40-50 personnel per month to fill requirements.  As a result of the existing Status of Forces Agreement with Afghanistan and Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, dated January 2009, contractor personnel filling HTT requirements must convert to government employment prior to deployment.   Average period of performance for HTT member contractor positions prior to deployment as a government Term Hire is equal to approximately six months.

Citing TRADOC documentation, the Human Terrain Teams (HTT’s) operate in the Effects Cell of the Brigade Combat Team/Regimental Combat Team and support decision making (battle command) for current and future operations. HTT’s collaborate with patrols, civil affairs, psychological operations, information operations, special operations forces, law enforcement and provincial reconstruction teams. HTT’s share information through the Distributed Ground System—Army (DCGS-A)—with other intelligence and battle command nodes in the network. They advise commanders, staffs and supporting subordinate units and support an immediate operational need which will be long term capability for peace time engagement (that’d be Peace Enforcement). Their operational research provides current, accurate and reliable data on specific social groups in the areas where supported units are operating.  Human terrain knowledge sharpens the commander’s military decision making process and enables a more effective rotation of forces through the creation and maintenance of a living, human terrain knowledge base.

Social Scientists: New Crop of Intelligent Mercenaries

According to TRADOC specifications, one of the six issues addressed in Irregular Warfare and considered a critical variable in defining the Operational environment is social/cultural dynamics. HTS supports the Irregular Warfare Focus Area by training and educating analysts, social scientists and supporting personnel.  HTS personnel and systems provide a new Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) capability in support of US Army BCT’s and USMC RCT’s.

TRADOC G-2, citing documentation, envisions long term system integrator services for the program will occur in multiple geographical locations around the globe. This will include in-theater locations in support of the US COCOMS. HTS will provide the critical human terrain or green layer in strategic and tactical defense plans, analysis of adversaries and potential threats and in the analysis of threats to ground, air, sea and space in support of information operations capabilities for STRATCOM and other major Commands. The contractor shall provide support to analyze concepts, architectures, plans, doctrines, and requirements studies. The contractor shall analyze missions and mission areas as they are promulgated and provide support to the drafting and review of requirements documents (e.g., Concepts of Operations (CONOPS), Mission Needs Statements (MNS), Operational Requirements Documents (ORDs), etc.). The contractor must consider intelligence threats and coordinate with integrated strategic and tactical defense plans, and other related studies, plans and programs. The contractor must consider all battlefield operating systems issues in coordination with integrated strategic and tactical defense plans as well as other related studies, plans and programs.

Further, data collection and dissemination of the HTS products is essential in building a Common Operating Picture for the warfighter. The HTS effort includes coordinating data collection efforts with Battle Command (BC) ; oversight of deployed team collection efforts to ensure a process is established to support staffing and implementation of future spirals and requirements; ensuring the HTS fills the Combatant Commanders requirements; development and implementation of  doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel and facilities (DOTMLPF) solutions; implementation of DOTMLPF to leverage the strengths of the capabilities while improving theater operations; capability development;  and Force integration of a “System of Systems” which provides intelligence and information to small unit leaders to increase Force effectiveness and influence operations.

What doesn’t HTS do?

Going Geospatial like the Bowman Expeditions

Citing US Army documentation, HTS provides comprehensive descriptions and analyses of the population in a given area of operations and enables Soldiers to operate effectively in accordance with US Army doctrine that defines social and cultural factors necessary to understand the operational environment. Factors include: Social Structure, Roles and Statuses, Social Norms, Culture, Identity, Beliefs, Language, Power and Authority Structure/Hierarchy, etc. Understanding a population’s support for insurgency is rooted in knowing how the population is socio-culturally constructed and understanding how the various structural elements interact with each other. HTS provides understanding and insight on the populations necessary for effective US Army operations. HTS integrates information about what people think, do, and say in patterned ways to achieve knowledge, respect and understanding in the operational environment. The contractor shall use the Tactical Ground Reporting System (TIGR) as the primary means of Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPR) data collection and storage. It will serve as the primary tool for the collection and storage of HTT field notes, field reports, or summaries of daily activity.

Further, the HTS contractor shall conduct multidisciplinary research and analysis in support of military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. The HTS contractor provides rapid analysis of qualitative and quantitative data and in the production of timely reports that meet the operational requirements of the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps units in building a common operating picture of the human terrain. The contractor shall provide all of the personnel, equipment, supplies, etc., to conduct field research in combat and provide immediate onsite qualitative insights on the drivers of human behavior and group dynamics in specific geospatially referenced locations that cannot be secured from other sources. The HTS team personnel increase force capability through continual real-time refinement of knowledge and understanding of the local population shared in the Human Terrain System Knowledge Center and an integrated common operating picture of the battlespace.

Finally, HTS is to assist in battle management. The HTS contractor is to analyze and recommend battle management strategies and Tactics, Technique, Procedures/Planning. The HTS contractor will propose optimal sighting and deployment schemes for mission accomplishment and analyze the impacts of both peacetime and wartime operations and requirements on system design and concepts of operations. HTS personnel will provide inputs to a functional, top-level, military requirements plan that leads to concepts of operation and analyze and integrate requirements and concepts to achieve militarily useful defense capabilities. The HTS contractor will also assess man-in-the-loop and autonomy control issues on system performance and requirements for maintaining positive control.

Say sources, “This was a done deal.” If so, that would make theater out of the current solicitation effort by TRADOC and GSA.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security and political matters. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com.