The complaint was filed this Jan. 31 in U.S. District Court in Oregon by former ICI vice president and co-owner Danny O’Brien and his wife, Lorrie, who live in Lakewood, Wash. The lawsuit names Boquist; his wife, Peggy; and their business partner, Marcus Hines of Arizona, as defendants.
The complaint says Boquist forced the O’Briens out of the firm, ICI Wyoming, at the end of last year, following a disagreement over the direction of the company.
After Boquist forced the O’Briens out, the complaint says, the company’s bookkeeper resigned. The bookkeeper, lawsuit says, then provided the O’Briens with evidence that Boquist and his wife had been secretly diverting money from the firm to other projects, including a new company they had started in 2008 called Powder River Cartridge Company, LLC.
Through this new company, the complaint says, “the Boquists directed thousands of dollars of revenue generated by ICI Wyoming to their own use and without [the O’Briens’] knowledge or consent, including but not limited to political campaign contributions for causes supported or advocated by Defendant Brian Boquist, in his capacity as an Oregon State Senator.”
I followed up this news in another article for WW, which explained in greater detail how Boquist makes his money, but I never heard back from any of the plaintiffs. Nick R. Martin at Talking Points Memo also followed up, but succeeded only in obtaining a cryptic comment from Boquist’s wife.
]]>“Afghans themselves see corruption as pervasive; it affects nearly every aspect of their lives and leads to security concerns, limited economic development, and human rights abuses…”
“[A] large majority of Afghans (76%) see corruption as a major problem in the country; only 5% said it was not a problem…
Corruption frequently affects Afghans in their daily life: 56% saw it as a major daily problem…”
Assuming this survey is accurate, that works out to roughly 17.3 million Afghans who personally deal with corruption on a daily basis.
Also assuming, as the survey indicates, that perceived corruption in Afghanistan takes the form of bribery about 17 percent of the time, one can venture a wild, unscientific guessestimate of the number of bribes that Afghans are asked to pay every year.
That number is just north of 1 billion, or approximately 3 million bribes a day.
I can hear the statisticians screaming. These are huge assumptions. Trying to put a number on bribery in one of the world’s most corrupt countries using a public opinion survey is about as reliable as asking teenagers how often they masturbate. But the surveys do give some sense of scale.
All the information above is quoted from a report released today by U.S. military auditors. The report, a quarterly update from the Office of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, also offers some numbers on the work it did to tackle that corruption problem during the last three months of 2011.
Here are a few “accomplishments” the office thought noteworthy:
• completed three audits… • participated in investigations that resulted in two individuals sentenced for bribery… • referred 40 individuals and companies for suspension and debarment • opened 20 new investigations…
SIGAR, as this auditing office is known, has a staff of 133. That’s clearly not enough to cover a war that’s costing U.S. taxpayers more than $2 billion a week. And many government and military auditors are honest, dedicated people doing the best they can in a bureaucracy that can bring tremendous pressure to bear against them.
That said, even the most cash-strapped, podunk county prosecutor’s office would be embarrassed by these numbers. Three audits completed. Two bribery convictions. Three million bribes a day.
No wonder “Afghans also said that ISAF and international development partners need to play larger roles in efforts to address the problem.”
The report is titled “10 Years of Reconstruction,” as though what it contains were somehow worth celebrating. In it, the word failure appears 7 times. The word progress appears 81 times.
What the auditors, however well-meaning, cannot say is that the International Security Assistance Force—which brings boatloads of American dollars into the country, and tries to make legitimate statesmen out of guys who are essentially gang leaders—plays a large role in enabling corruption in Afghanistan.
To wit, here’s another “important development” the report offers as a sign of progress:
[T]he MoM awarded China National Petroleum Corporation International (CNPC) the rights to develop three oil blocks in the Amu Darya Basin in the north. The MoM estimated that the basin contains more than 80 million barrels of crude oil reserves, plus a potential of 80 million barrels in yet-to-be discovered reserves. CNPC agreed to pay the government a 15% royalty and has partnered with Watan Oil and Gas Afghanistan Ltd. to begin production within a year.
The U.S. Army banned Watan Oil and Gas from receiving contracts a full two years ago for—you guessed it—corruption! Its security affiliate, Watan Risk Management, is affiliated with some notorious relatives of the U.S.-backed President, Hamid Karzai. Now that the Chinese are paying them, instead of the Americans, everything is presumably above-board.
Progress!
]]>You can read POGO’s report online here. A couple of years ago, while living in New Mexico, I wrote a primer on this project for the Santa Fe Reporter, which remains online here.
It seems odd, doesn’t it? How did a $6 billion nuclear weapons program—a program, as POGO notes, that seems at odds with Obama’s stated nukes policy—slip by without mention during the recent debate over military spending? Aren’t nuclear weapons, after all, the constant preoccupation of all foreign and national security thought—not just within the U.S., but around the world?
In the shallowest sense, the omission is understandable, considering how amazing it is that there was such a debate at all, given the militaristic drift of the past decade.
But ultimately I believe there’s one overarching reason why you’ve probably heard little to nothing about this project: Language. Specifically, the language of obfuscation.
The nuke lab in question will be run by the Department of Energy, not the Department of Defense. This is a longstanding bureaucratic fact of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, but nonetheless similar to the shell game whereby the costs of American private security contractors in Iraq shifted to the Department of State prior the withdrawal of military ground forces.
It’s also not called a nuke lab. Instead, it’s euphemistically described as a “chemistry and metallurgy” facility—still awake?—and a “replacement” one at that. So it’s not even really new, you see!
I could be wrong, of course. It could be that Americans really do care about the development of nuclear weapons—just not their own.
]]>TAPI, as the pipeline is known, ought to be called TBD. It’s been a Big Oil dream since the mid-1990s, and a decade’s-long American military presence in the region has brought it no closer to reality. The Afghan news outfit Killid Media reported yesterday that “Little has happened on the TAPI natural gas project involving four countries a year after [an] agreement was signed by the governments.”
Planners are promising the project could be in operation by 2016. … Work which was delayed by security concerns will start from early 2012 and finish in two years…
Are the pipeline planners scheduling based on the projected 2014 timeline for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, or vice-versa? Does it matter? Either way, there are signs that the U.S. government is doubling down on the project as Pakistani leaders have indicated they might prefer a competing pipeline proposed to connect Pakistan and a U.S. adversary, Iran.
Pakistan’s Express Tribune reports:
Addressing students of Lahore University of Management Sciences…US ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter had termed Pakistan-Iran gas pipeline deal unfeasible. A viable alternative, in his view, was the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan- Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline project via Afghanistan. …
Sources inform The Express Tribune that the Export-Import Bank (EIB) of the United States as well as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), an “independent” US agency, have offered Pakistan financing for TAPI.
The U.S. is also the key shareholder in the Asian Development Bank, another financing agency for TAPI, as W.I.B. noted previously.
But promises of more American dollars may ring hollow, as the following letter in a prominent English-language Pakistani newspaper about the competing pipeline projects suggests.
“Pakistan,” the letter begins, will “not take any dictation from anyone.”
The gas pipeline project with Iran is a lifeline for us for overcoming the energy crisis. The US energy team…came up with a strange demand that Pakistan should abandon this project and instead offered assistance for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project (TAPI) as an alternative option. …
Washington has already successfully persuaded India to jump out of the deal, leaving Iran and Pakistan to implement the project. It is an undeniable fact that Pakistan has no cheaper and safer option than getting the Iranian gas. The laying of the pipeline on our side of the border must be taken up immediately, since Iran has already constructed their part of the pipeline up to Pakistani border. Any effort to undo this vital project would be a criminal act against national interests.
Catch that? While the American-backed pipeline might be done in two years’ time, the Iranian-backed pipeline is already built up to the border with Pakistan, just waiting for the hookup.
Happy New Year!
]]>Roose’s eBay username: “mr.f.u.up.”
Investigators got a hold of Roose’s emails. In one, he reacted defensively to a prospective customer on eBay who pointed out that he appeared to be dealing in stolen government property.
“You know what man,” Roose began,
]]>I spent three tours overseas and it isn’t my responsibility to police the world. … Take a load off and try worrying about your life, not stupid federal ITAR rules or stolen property. There is more government property wasted in a dumpster overseas then [sic] you will ever see on ebay. Sorry to be rude, but it’s the god honest truth. … Check feedback before you accuse someone of potentially having stolen property. Deal with it, it happens. It’s your tax dollars.
And keep checking back for updates—I expect WIB to resume a more regular posting schedule by the end of the year.
]]>The contractor, FLIR Systems, has claimed more Department of Defense and Homeland Security contracts than any other in the state, which has relatively few big contracts. It makes advanced imaging technology coveted by armed forces around the world.
Since 9/11, its revenues have increased sixfold, to $1.4 billion last year. As impressive as that may be, consider FLIR’s profitability: from a $29 million loss in 2000 to a $56 million profit last year.
Chairman and CEO Earl Ray Lewis III this year signed a contract that sets his base salary at $875,000 next year, several times what he made when he joined the company before 9/11. Forbes magazine says Lewis’ compensation last year totaled $5.4 million.
Late last month, blaming uncertainty around the military budget, FLIR announced it would lay off 40 workers in Wilsonville—one-tenth of its workforce in the state. Then last week, FLIR won a three-year, $52 million U.S. Navy contract for the Star SAFIRE thermal-imaging systems it manufactures in Wilsonville.
Recently the company struck deals with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two nominal US allies with spotted human rights records.
]]>I got lured back to the States to work for a newspaper (again). Between the cross-continental move on short notice and the urgent demands of my new job (special projects reporter and web investigations czar for Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon), I simply haven’t had the time to keep the site fresh.
What does this mean for War Is Business? It means it will continue, but at a somewhat slower pace. The goal with the next round of fundraising will be to hire a part-time editor who can help with aggregation and site maintenance. Anyone who’s interested should contact me.
As it happens, my first cover story for Willamette Week revisits a subject I last covered for the Santa Fe Reporter one year ago: the unraveling of the Sikh Dharma business empire.
Sikh Dharma is a group founded by the late Yogi Bhajan, who converted thousands of white Americans to Sikhism. The group owns a number of large companies, the largest of which is Akal Security, a $500 million-a-year US government contractor that guards federal courthouses in 40 states, at least one US Embassy abroad and a number of international airports.
My story last year included many previously obscure details on Akal, including some long-ago connections to a would-be arms smuggler and the family of a CIA deputy director. The connections this group has are truly incredible. I also found out that Sikh Dharma leaders apparently sat in on negotiations between the Indian government and the US government for the sale of enriched uranium.
The story out on the streets of Portland today, and online here, focuses on allegations of subterfuge and fraud stemming from the legal fight for control of Akal’s parent company in Oregon.
The Oregon Attorney General’s office got involved in the case last year. Which begs a question that no one I’ve spoken to has been able to answer: If the state of Oregon believes the board of Akal Security is led by untrustworthy people, then why do the departments of Defense and Homeland Security continue to award contracts to the company? Akal won a four-year $150 million contract to guard the Kansas City airport this spring—months after the Oregon AG filed its complaint.
Granted, the rank-and-file security guards don’t know what’s going on in the boardroom, but the conduct of the leadership does speak to the future reliability of the company as a whole.
]]>I just returned from Crete, the Greek island that serves as a stop-over for NATO aircraft and warships on their way to Libya. Graffiti such as this was the most visible public sentiment regarding those controversial bombing missions.
It’s worth noting that Greece is a NATO member.
In late March, cretalive.gr obtained video of NATO craft coming and going from the Souda Bay naval station, pictures of the sort I wasn’t well-positioned to duplicate.
OnAlert.gr has more recent PR photos demonstrating Greek cooperation in NATO’s Libya attacks. Striking a less congratulatory note, here is the latest statement from the Greek foreign minister, Capt. Obvious: “We cannot reach a solution in Libya through military means alone.”
Whatever else one thinks of it, the allied military presence was not evidently providing much of a boost to Crete’s tourism economy, which has been suffering. A taverna owner told me that, in his 21 years of experience, NATO personnel rarely venture far from their (publicly inaccessible) bases; when they do, they tend to stay in the higher-end resorts. That’s not much of a surprise, nor is it a crime (unless you happen to manage a small bungalo).
Indeed, from what I saw, Crete was anything but overrun with foreign troops and contractors. Of the latter group, there were a few traces. Brinks, known for its armored trucks, ran passenger security at the Heraklion airport, which serves both civilian and military aircraft. And I caught sight of the G4S logo in a few places. That’s the same fast-growing contractor whose vehicles I spotted guarding the plaza in Marrakech, a couple of months before it was bombed by a 25-year-old admirer of Al Qaeda who learned how to make explosives online from his parents’ house, where he lived.
I mention that little detail only to show that the opinions of frustrated, under-employed and poorly educated young men are sometimes worth paying attention to. They’re just the sort of people who spray graffiti near national landmarks, or, under more desperate circumstances, blow up a café full of tourists.
]]>The New York Times and MSNBC are among those reporting that US intelligence agencies obtained the name of bin Laden’s most trusted courier some four years ago, but only last August were able to track his movements to bin Laden’s apparently custom-built compound in a Pakistani tourist town.
What not yet known is how US forces tracked the courier. Homing device? Aerial surveillance? Foursquare?
It’s always dangerous to speculate, especially on big stories. But that never stops anyone from doing it, and it won’t stop us. Onward!
We’ve got to wonder, to what extent were contractors involved in the lead-up to the bin Laden raid? Many who’ve followed the news out of South Asia these past few months are guessing about the possible involvement of Raymond Davis, the CIA agent and Blackwater employee who fled Pakistan following a murder charge there. Personally, I think that’s a stretch, considering how many people are involved in the US military and intelligence apparatus in the region. But even if it turns out that the diplomatic incident involving Davis had something to do with the hunt for bin Laden, that would only answer part of the “how” question.
At National Journal, Marc Ambinder reports that a combination of “basic criminal forensic techniques and…highly advanced and still-classified technology” were used in the bin Laden hunt.
On Twitter, US Navy veteran Robert Caruso sounds fairly confident that US forces tracked bin Laden’s couriers with some semi-secret surveillance technologies known collectively as TTL. That would make sense, given what’s been made public through the sporadic press reports and bare-bones disclosures about the TTL “Manhattan Project” over the past few years.
TTL stands for “tagging, tracking and locating”—an accurate description of what the technologies involved are supposed to do. In unclassified documents that reference the program, it’s also referred to as HF-TTL, for “hostile forces” tracking, and CTTL, for “clandestine” or “continuous” tracking.
Based on those code words, W.I.B. compiled the following list of some US military contractors that appear to be involved in the development and deployment of the TTL technologies that may—emphasis on the uncertainty—have been used to find bin Laden.
Contracting Agency
Contract signed
Contract completed
Description
Recipient
Recipient AKA
97ZS: U.S. Special Operations Command
4/22/10
1/31/11
HF-TTL LCSM SUPPORT
L-3 COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION
97ZS: U.S. Special Operations Command
10/18/10
1/31/11
HF-TTL LCSM SUPPORT
LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION
97ZS: U.S. Special Operations Command
3/9/10
6/11/10
HF-TTL Equipment
TYONEK ENGINEERING AND AGILE MANUFACTUING LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY
TEAMCOR
97ZS: U.S. Special Operations Command
1/9/09
9/28/09
Tagging Tracking and Locating Systems – to develop a hybrid networked TTL solution which consists of energy-efficient relay nodes/radios low-power tag radios and self-healing mesh network protocols.
ARGON ST INC.
SAN DIEGO RESEARCH CENTER
1700: NAVY Department of the
9/3/10
8/31/11
TTL Training and Technical Services
BLACKBIRD TECHNOLOGIES INC.
1700: NAVY Department of the
9/29/09
9/28/10
ENGINEERING SUPPORT SERVICES FOR HF-TTL PROJECT IN Z17
EG&G TECHNICAL SERVICES INC
5700: AIR FORCE Department of the (Headquarters USAF)
11/22/06
3/31/07
Tactical TTL System Prototype
HARRIS CORPORATION
Again, it remains unclear what, if any, role TTL technology played or didn’t play in the bin Laden raid. The key intelligence came—no surprise here—from a human source. And the actual work of tracking bin Laden’s couriers could conceivably have been done with less flashy surveillance methods. For all anyone knows, was completely irrelevant to the bin Laden hunt—in which case, the question becomes whether this program is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
That said, I’m betting we’ll be hearing more about TTL as this story plays out, and more about one company in particular that seems to have won the most TTL contracts (at least the unclassified ones): Blackbird Technologies of Virginia.
Blackbird’s “core competencies” include “[t]agging, tracking, and locating expertise, including experience with technical systems that provide a clear picture of operational assets and targets.”
Its key executives, Mary M. Styer, Richard Moxley and Steven Penn, are also partners in an investment fund, Razor’s Edge Fund LP.
Last year, Razor’s Edge moved to purchase a stake in HBGary, the security contractor whose plans to disrupt Wikileaks were revealed by Anonymous hackers.
All these connections are interesting but don’t add up to much, yet. And, frankly, the logistics of the raid itself will quickly become a sideshow.
The story to follow now is the foreign policy angle—specifically, “what Pakistan knew” about bin Laden’s whereabouts in the months and years before his death.
The answer to that question will have some bearing on the future of America’s annual $3.2 billion gift of military aid to Pakistan, which, in turn, will affect the domestic politics and that nuclear-armed country, and potentially its relationship to neighboring powers. What looks like a victory today could be the segue to an even more dangerous future. It is too soon to celebrate.
]]>One of the proposed cuts could effectively cripple this website and similar experiments in online journalism.
According to Federal News Radio:
The White House requested $35 million for the e-government fund in 2011. The House allocated only $2 million in its bill, H.R. 1. The Senate, meanwhile, would provide $20 million for the e-government fund.
The e-government fund pays for some key government transparency websites. The most important of those, as far as War Is Business is concerned, is USASpending.gov, which tracks government contracts. USASpending has a lot of problems, but it remains the go-to source for a decade’s worth of federal contract data. It has quickly become a valuable tool not only for journalists, lawyers and bureaucrats, but for small businesses seeking to compete for those contracts.
To my mind, $35 million was already insufficient. Sunlight Foundation policy counsel Daniel Schuman told FNR that the cuts would ensure that the data on sites like USASpending
will slowly go out of date—and finally, as the money runs out, they’ll have to pull the plug. We could see the data disappearing off the internet.
That is not hyperbole. The stakes here are very high.
Transparency is essential to any government’s claim of legitimacy. Without a public accounting of government expenses and revenue, there can be no transparency. Money, as the saying goes, is power. Secret budgets are as democratic as secret laws.
The internet is becoming the dominant medium of the 21st Century. If detailed government spending data is not online, it is, in a practical sense, not really public at all.
For those reasons, pulling government spending data offline will weaken the nation’s already enfeebled democratic process.
In much the same way that the government creates terrorist recruits by torturing prisoners and bombing civilians, the removal of public spending information from freely accessible online sources will fuel the dangerous and ultimately undemocratic efforts of self-aggrandizing info-vigilantes like Anonymous and Wikileaks.
If Congress kills online transparency programs now, Americans really will need hackers to tell them what’s going on.
That is my fear. I hate to say it, because I’ve been so critical of Wikileaks’ methods.
Most news organizations no longer have have the budget to file routine Freedom of Information Act requests, let alone fight for access to documents in court. For many working journalists and bloggers, once public data goes offline, it may as well be gone for good.
As the papers fill space with useless churnalism and the government removes public information from the web, stealing data and throwing it up online will begin to seem like a more reasonable approach to newsgathering. At the least, dumps of ill-gotten data will become more and more commonplace. Nobody who believes in an individual’s right to privacy should welcome that trend.
Enough speculation. What about the merits of the Republican proposal? Isn’t there a budget crisis? Isn’t it time to cut all but the most essential public services?
Here’s some important context to the debate, from a Government Accountability Office report that, just coincidentally, also came out last week (pdf).
The GAO analyzed the performance of 98 major Department of Defense acquisition programs, such as the Joint Strike Fighter, the Littoral Combat Ship and the Predator drone.
All together, the Pentagon’s total planned investment in such programs has risen to $1.68 trillion. That’s an amount equivalent to nearly half of what the federal government spends on everything in a year. War machines are a bigger expense than the bank bailouts.
GAO found that fewer than half of those major weapons programs “are meeting established performance metrics for cost growth.” Simply put, they’re running way, way over budget.
What’s worse, they’re not over budget because the Pentagon has decided to buy more of those high-tech jets, missiles and warships. They’re over budget due to mismanagement and incompetence—not to mention fraud and corruption.
The language in the report is more diplomatic:
“GAO found that a lack of technology maturity, changes to requirements, increases in the scope of software development, and a lack of focus on reliability were all characteristics of programs that exhibited poorer performance outcomes. …
[T]he total cost of the [major weapons purchasing] programs in DOD’s portfolio has grown by about $135 billion, or 9 percent, over the last 2 years, of which about $70 billion cannot be attributed to quantity changes.
Got that? The Pentagon has wasted $70 billion on its biggest weapons programs since President Obama took office.
Why aren’t the Republicans screaming about that? And why aren’t the Democrats and the White House using these facts as ammunition in their own fight?
After all, the $70 billion in weapons waste accounts for nearly 2 percent of the annual federal budget. The $35 million for e-government amounts to zero percent.
Seriously. Without magnification, it doesn’t even show up on the Excel chart I made.
Politicians don’t care about these facts because there’s no powerful constituency pushing for increased government transparency.
However, there is an extremely powerful constituency—the defense industry—that is constantly pushing for increased military spending. And what looks to most people like Pentagon waste looks to Pentagon lobbyists like a down payment on a summer home.
Who benefits if the open data websites disappear? Defense contractors do. So do their patrons in Congress. So do their lobbyist go-betweens.
Who loses? Pretty much everybody else.
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, BAE Systems—the very companies that are raiding the US Treasury through cost-overruns on major weapons programs—are top donors to the campaigns of Republicans and Democrats alike.
That doesn’t mean there’s a grand conspiracy to kill a few transparency websites. Nobody at Lockheed said, “Let’s get rid of USASpending so it’s harder for guys like Bill Hartung to tell people what we’re up to.”
But surely no tears will be shed for the loss of the transparency sites in the boardrooms of major defense contractors. And I’ll bet that, as the Democrats hash out the budget with Republicans in Congress, many members would sooner sacrifice an obscure, $35 million transparency program than a pet project in their own districts.
That is why, instead of fighting the waste and corruption in military procurement, Congress is getting ready to kill a program that makes it easier to root out that corruption and waste.
You think the military-industrial complex is too powerful today? Wait until government contract data starts disappearing from the web. The next time the director of a major agency hands out a contract to her family company, you probably won’t even hear about it. And you may never know the next iteration of Blackwater.
OK. So I’ve got a cynical streak. But I’m still doe-eyed enough to believe that enough phone calls could change that grim outcome.
I’m usually a Scrooge when it comes to signing petitions and whatnot, but today I made an exception, and joined the Sunlight Foundation’s letter-writing campaign to “save the data.” I urge all readers of this website to do the same.
If you care to know who’s going to make a killing on the next war, signing their petition is worth 30 seconds of your time.
]]>Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. When it comes to arming the Libyan rebels, many of the people saying “just do it” are the same people who were gung-ho about the last couple of American wars. It’s not entirely fair to say that the mainstream journalists and overpaid think-tankers who supported the Iraq invasion early on ought to be banned from advising anyone about anything—but, well, they probably ought to be.
As painful as it is to give any number of discredited warmongers a fair hearing, it would be a bigger mistake to treat the horrific situation in Libya as a chance to reenact an eight-year-old domestic political dispute. Any seemingly reflexive stance on the matter—whether in favor of military action or against it—cannot, by definition, be based on an honest evaluation of the unique circumstances in Libya.
I’m always at pains to note that W.I.B. is not an antiwar website—it’s an anti-war profiteering website. With that said, to my mind, the anti-intervention camp has produced the most persuasive arguments so far on Libya. There is absolutely no guarantee those arguments will persuade the right people. Indeed, at this point, it appears that Western leaders have already decided in favor of steadily increasing military involvement. Obama has already bypassed Congress to wage a bombing campaign (euphemistically known as the “no-fly zone”); absent domestic opposition, he is free to escalate as long as the uniformed military can bear the strain.
Keep reading for a brief roundup of the latest takes on the most crucial foreign policy question of 2011 (so far).
Forces loyal to Libya’s leader of nearly 42 years spent much of this week pushing the rebels back about 100 miles along the coast, and the opposition was trying to regroup. The rebels had mortars Friday, weapons they previously appeared to have lacked, and on Thursday night they drove in a convoy with at least eight rocket launchers — more artillery than usual.
••• This report raises a question it doesn’t answer: Where’d those new weapons come from? Here’s one possibility:
The CIA personnel were sent in to contact opponents of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and assess their capabilities, two U.S. officials said.
“They’re trying to sort out who could be turned into a military unit and who couldn’t,” said Bob Baer, a former CIA case officer…
U.S. officials familiar with Obama’s covert action order said while it authorizes a potentially sweeping range of measures to support Libyan rebels, each specific operation — for example, sending in U.S. trainers, money or weapons — would require further “permissions” from the White House.
… The New York Times reported that “dozens” of British special forces soldiers and officers from Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, known as MI-6, are working inside Libya.
••• American and British intelligence agents are already in Libya. Reading between the lines of multiple international news accounts, it seems that Yanks are limiting themselves to supplying “training” and intelligence to the rebel forces, while leaving the Brits (or other allied nations) to hand out hardware. This is pure speculation, but it jibes with the equivocal public statements of US and UK leaders.
There are those who would caution that the United States does not know enough about the Libyan opposition to support it, but this is not entirely true. Some of the opposition leaders are former cabinet ministers and generals in the Libyan government, known to the United States and its allies. …
The U.S. decision to support victims of aggression paid off in Bosnia and advanced America’s interests and values. Involvement on the side of the democracy movement in Libya would enable the United States to exercise a positive influence on Libya’s evolution and prevent destabilizing outcomes.
••• This pro-war argument comes from an upstanding Quiet American at the RAND Corporation, the most prestigious think-tank of the US military-industrial complex.
Paul Wolfowitz, a deputy secretary of defense under former President George W. Bush, said it’s vital the U.S. supports arming the rebels.
“I think we should be doing everything we can to support the opposition,” he said. “It’s true, we don’t know what the opposition would be like when they take over, but there are actually some promising signs.”
••• The architect of the Iraq invasion thinks getting deeply involved in an Arab civil war is a fantastic idea.
Under what doctrine or posture might the Administration prosecute Viktor Bout on the one hand and, on the other, provide weaponry to ragtag Libyan rebels whose principles, capacity, training, discipline, and understanding of international human-rights norms seem so doubtful—and may prove to be no better than those of many of Bout’s alleged African clients?
… There is no way to police the rebels’ conduct or to hold them accountable for their actions on the battlefield. It is not clear what the rebels are fighting for, other than survival and the possible opportunity to take power in a country loaded with oil.
••• Party-pooper Steve Coll thinks he’s so smart, with his facts and logic, and is just oh-so-superior the way he brings up morality and all that. Harrumph.
NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen has ruled out arming Libyan rebels now that the organisation has assumed command of international military operations in the country.
Speaking to reporters, Rasmussen said: “We are there to protect the Libyan people, not to arm the people.”
••• All this statement means, from what I can tell, is that a coup in Libya supported by key NATO members wouldn’t officially be a NATO operation.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday he did not support the idea of arming Libyan rebels fighting to oust Muammar Gaddafi from power.
“Doing that would create a different situation in Libya and we do not find it appropriate to do that,” Erdogan told reporters at a joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron in London.
••• This must rank amont the least-articulate antiwar arguments expressed by a head of state in the last several decades years. But there it is.
Global domestic policy probably shouldn’t include handing out guns to lots of unknown forces, even if we may be heartbroken that the Libyan people can’t fight back as effectively as they might otherwise. If we supply them with weapons, the fight may start to look more like ours than theirs, and that may backfire down the road. But the coalition should surely provide intelligence, logistical, and political support, and hope that the neighbors can find a way to clean up the neighborhood as best they can.
••• John Torpey, a guest-poster on Juan Cole’s blog, seems to cautiously support the current official US policy of providing “training” to the rebels, but like many liberals is wary of handing out weapons. From a military point of view, this seems ill-considered. What will those hands-off American advisers do when their rebel allies start losing because they’re outgunned? That outcome seems likely, given reports like this one:
With all the talk of arming Libyan rebels for their campaign against Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, it might be worthwhile to look at what the rebels are actually carrying and using in the field. …
Have look at the picture [here]. The butt stock of that weapon belongs to a Degtyaryov DP machine gun, another of the Soviet Union’s successful and long-lasting infantry arms. The DP lies three generations back in Eastern bloc machine gunnery…
There is simply no telling how long such weapons will last. And this one…fires one of the most common types of combat ammunition on earth, the 7.62x54R — which means that it could remain well-supplied with ammunition for decades.
••• CJ Chivers muddies the debate with pesky details.
The picture at the top of this post came to me via Facebook. Does anyone know the original source? I’m curious whether everything I’m reading in to the image (support for the Libyan rebels) was intended by its creator.
Is this culture-jamming as propaganda? Or vice versa?
]]>And isn’t that what happens to most people when they get caught blatantly ripping off the government?
It isn’t what happened to Sargeant. Ergo, the man is a genius.
Today, the politically connected businessman lives in reclusive luxury in Boca Raton, Florida, thanks in part to the tens of millions of dollars he allegedly personally received from an ill-gotten US military supply contract.
Earlier this month, freelance reporter Penn Bullock and Washington Post writer Kimberly Kindy wrote the latest chapter in Sargeant’s story. It is a story of egregious misconduct and impunity by a member of the political-military-business elite—a story that may help future historians seeking to understand the advanced rot in the democratic foundations of 21st Century America.
The story opens in 2004, when Sargeant’s company, IOTC, won a huge wartime fuel-supply contract for US forces in Iraq. Since then, the government has overpaid Sargeant’s company by $200 million, according to a new Pentagon audit report.
The audit is classified, but its findings were revealed by Bullock and Kindy in the Post; its conclusions confirmed the findings of an earlier Congressional investigation.
Back in 2008, an IOTC competitor based in the UAE, Surpeme Fuels, filed a lawsuit that outlines the basic elements of Sargeant’s scheme.
The lawsuit alleged that Sargeant’s partner in the oil shipping business bribed officials in Jordan to obtain an exclusive license to transport fuel through the country. By obtaining preferential treatment from powerful people in Jordan, Sargeant effectively forced the Pentagon to hire his company, IOTC, to deliver fuel to Iraq.
And because Jordan had granted IOTC an exclusive license, the Pentagon had little choice but to pay Sargeant’s inflated prices.
Like many grand moneymaking schemes, this one would blow up in Sargeant’s face. It wasn’t just that reporters and Congressional investigators had gotten wind of IOTC’s price-gouging. The guy who had actually paid off the Jordanian officials turned around and sued Sargeant.
The disgruntled money-man—who happens to be the brother-in-law of Jordan’s King Abdullah—claimed that after he went through all the trouble of paying off the Jordanians to secure that exclusive transport license, Sargeant and IOTC’s other one-third partner tried to cut him out of the profits.
Remember that scene in The Dark Knight where The Joker’s gang is robbing a bank and, one after another, the gang members keep shooting their comrades in the back so they don’t have to share the loot? That’s basically what Sargeant was accused of doing.
The 2008 Congressional investigation, led by US Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), accused Sargeant of “the worst kind of war profiteering.”
Last year, in a separate Congressional investigation into yet another corrupt fuel supply contract—the one for US forces in Afghanistan, which W.I.B. has covered previously—Sargeant’s company once again fell under suspicion. The Congressional report suggested that IOTC supplied Defense Logistics Agency officials with a document of dubious authenticity in hopes of winning the Afghanistan fuel supply contract.
This little detail, amounting to a fresh allegation against IOTC, has gone previously unreported. That is in keeping with the lackadaisical mainstream press treatment of the IOTC scandal, and war profiteering in general.
Although his case never generated the kind of massive headlines and widespread public outrage reserved for the likes of Charlie Sheen the steady pileup of negative publicity led Sargeant to withdraw from public life.
Following the Waxman investigation, Sargeant was forced to resign as finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party. Then the feds indicted an employee of Sargeant’s for steering illegal campaign contributions to Gov. Charlie Crist.
Sargeant’s attorney, Ron Uscher, has tried to cast his client as a victim:
“A guy like Harry Sargeant has a lot of targets on his chest,” Uscher said. “He’s a rich guy, an oil guy, and he is bidding on war contracts.”
Yet Sargeant evidently still has some influential friends. Last year, Florida State University named him an honored alumnus of its business school. For innovations in the field of highway robbery?
Even since Sargeant’s name became mud, his West Palm beach aviation company has won new contracts with the Defense Department.
The oil contract remains Sargeant’s sweetest military deal, but his company Palm Beach Aviation has won five Defense Department contracts since 2009-that’s after the profiteering scandal-worth at least $120,000.
Three of those contacts originated with the US Special Operations Command. The descriptions of work are vague. One is “flight time,” another is “air support.” But the third contract specifies “4th POG Airborne Operations.”
That’s a reference to the 4th Psychological Operations Group out of Fort Bragg, NC. It’s a pretty secretive outfit that’s involved with everything from interrogations to propaganda broadcasts and leaflets. The 4th POG was in the news recently for posting “interns” in civilian US newsrooms. The contract summaries do not make clear unclear exactly what the psyops group needs with Sargeant’s aircraft.
Like the veiled allegation against IOTC in Congressional report on Manas Transit Center fuel contracts, the recent contracts awarded to Sargeant’s other company have also gone unreported, until now.
The new contracts highlight the strangest thing about Sargeant’s story. Although evidence continues to pile up in civil courtrooms that Sargeant’s company bribed its way into a billion-dollar logistics contract and proceeded to soak American taxpayers for $200 million, the US military has kept shoveling money his way.
Why?
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]]>Following the amendment to the contract, the Joint Stock Company sent a third letter to DLA- Energy thanking the agency for the solicitation amendment and reiterating that it must pre- approve all offerors to the agency’s tender. The Joint Stock Company’s letter attached a single memorandum of authorization for operations at Manas – for Mina Corporation (Red Star). Two of the other three offerors, AvCard and AeroControl, were not able to obtain authorization letters from the Joint Stock Company. International Oil Trading Company (IOTC) did provide a commitment letter, but an official at DLA-Energy questioned the authenticity of the letter “because it looks substantially different than the Mina (Red Star) letter…. We believe that Red Star’s letter is authentic.”
The big headline from the latest report on trends in the arms trade, by the SIPRI research group, is that India has become the world’s top importer of conventional weapons.
The map above shows the top five arms arms exporting nations, along with their top customers. (The pinpoints for nations are marked by a dot; they share a color with their customers.)
What it shows is more or less consistent with previous years. But there are signs of a troubling shift in the global marketplace for the tools of violence.
According to SIPRI, the “average volume of worldwide arms transfers in 2006–10 was 24 per cent higher than in 2001–2005.” Arms sales have increased dramatically in a short period of time. As if that weren’t bad enough:
The top five suppliers accounted for 75 per cent of all exports of major conventional weapons in 2006–10, compared with 80 per cent in 2001–2005.
The overall share of the volume of international arms transfers accounted for by the top five recipients dropped from 39 per cent in 2001–2005 to 30 per cent in 2006–10.
A greater diversity of suppliers, a broader market of buyers, a significantly higher total sales volume: What’s the upshot?
In a word, proliferation. Public works and welfare are out. Guns and bunkers are in.
As the global economy continues to unravel, food prices climb, joblessness spreads, reactionary movements grow in popularity, long wars of occupation drain Western blood and treasure, Middle Eastern oligarchies face a wave of popular uprisings, and Far Eastern nations build the environmentally catastrophic surveillance states of the future, the people who control the world’s traditional, waning centers of power—national governments—are arming up.
Anecdotally, it seems that the rising centers of power—corporations, transnational political movements—are loading up on guns, too. But those “non-state transfers” beyond the scope of the SIPRI report.
**Supplier
Share of global arms exports
Top recipient
Share of supplier’s transfers
Second recipient
Share of transfers
Third recipient
Share of transfers
United States
30%
South Korea
14%
Australia
9%
United Arab Emirates
8%
Russia
23%
India
33%
China
23%
Algeria
13%
Germany
11%
Greece
15%
South Africa
11%
Turkey
10%
France
7%
Singapore
23%
United Arab Emirates
16%
Greece
12%
United Kingdom
4%
United States
23%
Saudi Arabia
19%
India
13%
Source: SIPRI (pdf)
]]>Hastings was criticized for sensationalizing the story. That’s a typical fallback complaint when a reporter speaks plainly about something which the people involved with would rather obscure. Hastings’ haters also sidestepped legitimate concerns about the military’s attempts to tilt the political process toward courses of action favored by some—but certainly not all—of its leadership.
Fact is, the Rolling Stone piece had an important point to make. And here’s another example of military propaganda directed toward a domestic audience. Instead of a PSYOPS team, however, this one involves private contractors.
Last month the US Special Operations Command issued a call for “strategic communications” instructors. As the contract specs show, the purpose of this program is to train a class of 72 Army officers to better persuade elected officials—in effect, to turn soldiers into lobbyists, so that some generals and their future employers in the defense industry can get what they want.
Here again are the important bits:
The [strategic communications] course should be specifically designed to teach communications skills when briefing Ambassadors, Senior Embassy Staff, Members of Congress, General Officers and other executive level decision makers.
[The training should] teach soldiers how to establish credibility…communicate key themes and messages…and convince decision makers to decide favorably.
On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with training officers to “effectively communicate.” But that is a euphemism. The language of the contract itself is also a form of “strategic communications,” designed to cloud over the actual activities it describes: lobbying. (Is there a shorter word that describes attempts to persuade elected officials?)
I’ll be genuinely shocked if, at some point in the future, it turns out the that the graduates of these courses have used their “strategic communications” training to advocate for military de-escalation and smaller defense budgets. As Hastings correctly noted, the military’s lobbying objectives are typically twofold: “more troops and more funding.” No big deal—just war and peace, is all.
Who knows? If Gen. MacArthur had only had some better advice about “strategic communications,” he might’ve won that little argument with Truman.
Ridiculous PowerPoing chart via CB3 Communications.
]]>Praise be to God and rejoice: Full feeds are back, for all posts.
With the recent introduction of aggregated items, the tempo of this site has picked up. To keep the feed manageable, I’ve tweaked some settings so readers can tell right away whether something is an original W.I.B. story or something we’ve (gag) “curated.” Here’s what to look for:
I know that for some people, the steady flow of sarcasm W.I.B.-certified Investment Advice—which ranges between 3 and 10 quickie posts a day—is too much of a good thing. If you’d prefer to follow a less frequently updated feed, one that only shows W.I.B.’s original work, subscribe using this link instead.
Personally, I don’t think 10 posts a day is too much for a news site that covers a beat as big as the global arms trade. Given the budget to hire enough reporters, I’d have 100 items a day. Until then, a good deal of care goes into the selection of those aggregated items, which represent maybe 1/50th of the war-and-business-related news I follow. In other words, I sift through a lot of crap to find the rare stuff worth knowing about—and when I find something good, I pass it on.
For that reason I’ll continue to recommend the full feed. Subscribe here if you’re not already.
While we’re on the subject: The truly hopeless, un-rehabbable news junkies out there should definitely follow @warisbusiness on Twitter. That feed contains all of our original stories, links to all the aggregated items, plus a lot more news we think is worth checking out, faster than it appears on the site.
Another favor to ask: It took some creative coding to get the full RSS feeds to play nice with the custom architecture of this site. If you notice any annoying bugs, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Finally, if you’re one of those RSS readers who never clicks through to the website—I know you’re out there—consider making a donation.
]]>“I recently went on a fact finding mission in Afghanistan with other members of Congress as part of my new role as Chairman of House Armed Services. This picture was taken on that trip with some of the wonderful children of Afghanistan.”
••• Buck McKeon traveled all that way for a photo-op, then ruined it by blinking just as his aide hit the camera shutter.
USAID has given $39 million for the reconstruction of schools in Swat but due to bureaucratic hurdles the transfer of money from centre to the province has been delayed.
••• Read: “due to corruption.” Maybe this calls for a fact-finding mission?
Third-country nationals, originating from places such as Latin America, Africa, and Asia, compose 40% of the overall DoD contractor workforce in CENTCOM AOR, totaling over 70,000 people. There is no exact number as to how many third country nationals have served as contractors worldwide…
••• Status check on America’s outsourced wars.
Food shortages in eastern Libya, the largest rebel-controlled area, have reached dire levels. Fighting has left food stocks depleted and food supply chains in shambles. Around Benghazi, food prices have reportedly risen by 50 to 75 percent.
••• What a relief, then, that “aid” is on the way
“I assume that a lot of weapons are going to find their way there (to rebels in Libya) from one means or another over the course of the next weeks,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, from Obama’s Democratic Party, told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.
••• One means…
TRAFFICKING ALERT Suspect arms flights to Côte d’Ivoire and Libya
••• Or another.
A United Nations Security Council arms embargo imposed on Libya on Friday could cost global defence manufacturers billions of dollars…
••• The real victims in this tragedy are, of course, Russian arms manufacturers…
“There seems to be this idea that if people are supporting Qaddafi, it must be mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa, because it could not be the work of Libyans,“ says Mr. Souare. “It must be these savage Africans.”
••• Rumors of sub-Saharan mercs in Libya part of a divide-and-conquer strategy?
The New Republic published an article sympathetic to Qaddafi that had been written by a prominent American intellectual paid by a firm that was being compensated by Libya to burnish the dictator’s image.
••• What? It’s a free market.
“On the issue of trade and on defence: We have some of the toughest controls anywhere in the world for selling [weapons abroad]… I don’t think that trade is wrong in every circumstance. How can we expect a small country to manufacture and make all the things it needs to defend itself?”
••• David Cameron defends the timing of his Middle Eastern arms sales tour to an Al Jazeera English interviewer on February 25.
BAE Systems hires Britain’s former envoy to Saudi Arabia: Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles played a key role in ending the Serious Fraud Office’s investigation into BAE’s al-Yamamah arms deal
••• Total coincidence. He just answered the ad in the paper.
“For the very same money, Russia buys 14 tanks a year, and India 100.”
••• A Russian military prosecutor estimates that between 45 and 50 percent of the money budgeted for arms procurement “simply ended up in someone’s pocket.”
The Pentagon’s premiere research arm, Darpa, awarded a substantial contract to a company co-founded by the agency’s director and currently run by her father.
••• You call it a “conflicts of interest”. I call it “good business.”
“We constantly hear statements,” Kharoba began, “that Islam is a religion of peace, and we constantly hear of jihadists who are trying to kill as many non-Muslims as they can.” Kharoba’s course would establish for his students that one of these narratives speaks to a deep truth about Islam, and the other is a calculated lie…
Kharoba belongs to a growing profession, one that is ballooning on the spigot of federal and state dollars set aside for counterterrorism efforts since the attacks of September 11, 2001. He is a counterterrorism instructor to America’s beat cops, one of several hundred working the law enforcement training circuit. Some are employed by large security contractors; others, like Kharoba, are independent operators.
••• Read about the massive, costly, state-sponsored program of Islamophobic indoctrination for local security officers throughout the US.
The software he patented — which he claimed, among other things, could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; identify terrorists from Predator drone videos; and detect noise from hostile submarines — prompted an international false alarm that led President George W. Bush to order airliners to turn around over the Atlantic Ocean in 2003.
••• What happens when misplaced faith in the miracles of technology combines with an unlimited expense account? Things like this.
“We don’t tell the whole story” in our ads, says Randy Belote, a Northrop Grumman spokesman. “We let the reader try to determine what’s going on.”
Ordinary citizens who are baffled by Washington’s ads can take comfort in the fact that people targeted by these ads sometimes don’t understand them, either.
••• Also this: Behind the mysterious ads on the DC Metro.
Argentina seized the contents of a U.S. Air Force plane that was delivering equipment for a U.S.-led police-training course. Buenos Aires is claiming that the equipment was undeclared and thus subject to confiscation. “The United States must understand that they can’t send war materials without informing the government,” [Argentine foreign minister Héctor Timerman] told CNN.
••• Well, Argentina must understand that THESE COLORS DON’T ASK PERMISSION!
••• “Badass,” or disquieting? Depends on your outlook.
“Most of the big defense companies have been anticipating a downturn in military demand since at least the last decade,” he said. “They’re surprised that the downturn did not materialize when President Obama took office, and now they’re beginning to suspect there won’t be a downturn at all.”
••• Signed, sealed, delivered.
Beginning in 1982, The Knights of Malta began an intensely collaborative partnership with the international aid organization AmeriCares—a charity group unique in its selective disaster relief to countries friendly to both U.S. business investment and foreign policy objectives. Literally billing itself as “The humanitarian arm of corporate America,” AmeriCares was founded and headed until 2002 by Robert Macauley: a college roommate of George H. W. Bush, a paper mill millionaire and a self-described (then self-denied) agent in the CIA’s WWII-era precursor, the OSS. Macauley was also the first non-Catholic to receive the coveted Cross of the Commander of the Order of Malta.
••• A long reply to Sy Hersh’s critics by Russ Baker.
]]>In an effort to enhance efficiency and service to its staff, BearingPoint created accounts at Kabul Bank for its 400 local employees. Opening these accounts introduced these Afghans – most of which had never before been exposed to a financial institution – to commercial banking systems.
Since then, Afghanistan’s introduction to modern commercial banking has come full circle. Kabul Bank has been revealed to the world as an enormous scam, and thousands of Afghan civil servants have been screwed over by the bank’s politically-connected shareholders. Likely as not the people who posed for that USAID photo op have gone back to stuffing their Afghanis under the mattress.
Who will undo the damage? Another contractor.
The Afghanistan USAID mission is hiring a “Financal Sector/Banking Advisor.”
The chosen candidate must be “an internationally known expert in the financial sector strengthening field”—but the pay scale starts at $99,628, roughly equivalent to the annual salary of a mid-sized public school principal in the United States.
On the other hand, with unemployment so bad, somebody will be desperate enough to take this job.
The solicitation alludes to the Kabul Bank crisis only vaguely:
The Financial Sector/Banking Advisor will design, report on, and oversee the implementation of activities responsive to country needs in building economic infrastructure such as: capacity building of key Government of Afghanistan institutions in the areas of procurement, financial management, planning, staff training, anti-corruption measures, monitoring, promotion and other management areas.
Given the current financial sector situation in Afghanistan, the Advisor will function as the primary research and design manager on these and related issues as they become of interest to the portfolio and to the USAID Mission, operational planning and strategy. Therefore, a background in these areas is highly preferred.
So far, only two small companies have expressed interest in the position on the central US government contracts board. By way of comparison, 56 companies recently signed up for a job building an ammo supply point at a forward operating base. The relative popularity of a combat-zone job should tell you something about “the current financial sector situation in Afghanistan.”
The full USAID solicitation follows. Hurry! The application deadline is March 20.
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