Ain't Misbehaving, Saving My Contracts for You
By Jason Sigger Thursday Nov 12, 2009 9:00am
I am shocked, shocked to discover that US contractors bribed Iraqi government officials to overlook its misconduct... Really, does this surprise anyone when it comes to Blackwater?
Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.
Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
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The four former Blackwater executives, who had held high-ranking posts at the company, would speak only on condition of anonymity. Two of them said they took part in talks about the payments; the two others said they had been told by several Blackwater officials about the discussions. In agreeing to describe those conversations, the four officials said that they were troubled by a pattern of questionable conduct by Blackwater, which had led them to leave the company.A senior State Department official said that American diplomats were not aware of any payoffs to Iraqi officials.
Of course the US government was blind to this - they didn't want to know, they turned a blind eye to what Blackwater was doing because it would have been too hard to arrange for another contractor to do all the security missions that it had ongoing. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, there are as many private contractors as there are uniformed military personnel. Most of them are not security guards as Blackwater's most visible function was. The lack of oversight is abhorrent but not surprising; the State Dept's failure to can this company is inexcusable.
My only observation on this article is to suggest how the US government got into this predicament, and it's pretty easy to see. The Bush administration wanted to hold onto the fiction of a few conservative principles, one of those being the concept of a small federal government. Since it already blew that "principle" with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, I'm betting there was White House guidance that directed "no more personnel growth in DOD or State." That didn't mean that there wasn't lots of work to be done, however. The beans and the bullets still had to get out to the Middle East, and it was still dangerous Injun country for all those unarmed State Dept civilians doing Condi's work out there.
So out come the sole source, cost-plus contracts for KBR, Haliburton, and Blackwater, adding tens of thousands of additional personnel to the mix. The growth of contractors wasn't only apparent overseas, it's very apparent in the Washington DC area in support of larger defense contracts and operations (confession: I is one of them). Now SecDef Gates is trying to flush out the system, and it's going to prove much harder than he puts on in his speeches. Everyone admits there's a problem - but no one wants to create the necessary oversight mechanism to stop this misbehavior in the future. Regulating industry is bad, don't you know.
It's a good thing that people insist that the government investigate important scandals like ACORN, isn't it? It's your tax money, going to only the best and brightest that money can buy.
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I have always thought the idea of "private contracts and contractors" was insane.
It means those private contractors are in it for a profit.
That used to be considered unethical.
insurance companies making huge profits by denying health care to policyholders..?
They used to just kill people who crossed them.
Cheney won't recall any of this. the chump
State Department uses private contractors at all. Onceupon a time, the Marines Corps supplied much of the security, and the State Deartment made up the slack with its own security employees. Since privatization always costs a lot more than the government doing things for itself, How can the State Department justify doing what they are doing? Screw Blackwater or Ze or whatever those thugs are calling themselves, their contract should be canceled and the government should be supplying its own security throught the military or with government employees.
we didn't have some kind of government agency, I don't know maybe something like a military or something, that could perform security operations in our foreign occupations.
It's far more efficient to let that cash go directly into the hands of the MIC. Less big government waste, more private profit - what's not to like?
It's almost like our "greatest in the world" military is just another big lie. Heck our military can't even provide food services?
WTF - how does a trillion dollar military justify the need for ANYTHING?
Grrrrrrrr
have been known to spit in food when the chef's back was turned.
That is why professional food preparation is a must.
as our military is a big, BIG mistake.
"It looks like this war is winding down but we are starting another one in another 3rd world country that has a lot of natural resources. Buy more stock now so you will be able to get in while the stock is cheap."
with his own private profit and cannot be concerned with the common good lest some competitor captures his profit making opportunity.
are called death squads.
Private SECURITY contractors tend to shoot first, ask questions later, but they only make up less than 20% of the private contractor force overseas. Most private contractors are serving food, building things, driving people around, pretty innocuous, but all get paid a lot more than if they were doing it in their home country.
no doubt most of the contractors are labor of all sorts but there exist a special picked group for certain missions. the other 80% of contracted labor just dilutes/deflects from the special mission group. this is a mercenary strategy to avoid rules and consequences. the people in this small group are empowered to be above the law so anything goes. these are people that have a track record of secrecy and loyalty.
the problem is that there seems to be no real oversight as to making sure that they actually do the jobs for which they were paid handsomely.
read the article in rolling stone from a year or so back about the unbelievable money and waste having to do with contractors over there.
they are taking our money to build stuff and take care of business, but they're not doing it.
I don't necessarily have a problem hiring outside workers to do things like building a school or a hospital or whatever.
but for fucks sake, can we please make sure that they actually DO IT??
to me it appears to be by design. the mind set is to be above and beyond the law. some people will do what others may not do when they are told there will be no consequences.
The construction work is shoddy beyond comment, there are electrocutions in showers, the food lines are very wasteful. Corporations making wayyyyy too much. the oversight is absolutely absent. I was just correcting the comment that "private contractors" equals "death squads." I don't think the third country nationals serving hamburgers in the mess hall or driving trucks from the airport are "death squads."
.
or janitor in Iraq for $50 an hour!
* calgarylady, please feel free to say "Xed".
"Xe people" is so French.
~
I shall do that!
;)
the Blackwater executives were only lobbyists. that way there isn't any bribery. it's called campaign contributions.
Everytime time I hear someone complaing about big government spending or wasting money propping up the economy, it always brings me right back to this subject and I shove it in their face.
We have flushed billions and billions, trillions even, into the money toilet that is the pentagon and contractors. We spend a trillion dollars each year in military spending. That is the defense budget plus war funding. There is waste upon waste that the average person cannot even imagine in money being used to wipe the defense industry's collective asses.
No, we cannot afford 1 trillion over 10 years for healthcare. But 1 trillion EACH year for bombs and bullets is just fine.
to maintain their ability to perform their contract in Iraq,
how much would they have been willing to pay to get the contract?
I think with cost plus contracts it shows as a line item
DIPLOMATIC SERVICES..................$1,200,000.00
GOVERNMENT COMPLICITY................$ PRICELESS
The State Department will not touch Xe/Blackwater or Eric Prince. Prince is just doing the Lord's work for the U.S.
There will be NO repercussions from this. This is all "business as usual".
The Congress/State Department etc. are just one giant criminal enterprise....all "above the law".
Birds of a feather flock together.
Pfffttt!!!!!!!
sabotage this country?
ready to consume on Black Friday.
blogger "gear" also
Get rid of the contractors. Do it fast. Have the military assume the duties they've carried out throughout our history. Take the trillions thrown away on Halliburton and Blackwater and start paying military personnel what they should be paid.
Yes, the mercenary scum will cause trouble and try blackmailing their way back into power. Yes, they will disclose things that aren't pretty. But the longer we let them run the show, the deeper the hole we're in becomes. Soon we'll be in so deep that sunlight will no longer reach us. When that happens, we're in for a long, long, dark night...
No more soldier's kids on food stamps. No more having to pay out of pocket for Kevlar jackets! No more! And the G-ddamned Repugs pretend to be pro-military and patriotic. Pro military contractors, more like. Too bad the contractors who made armor weren't better connected.
i'm still pissed about this story. KBR will do this to troops and point their finger at the government. beyond the burden on the individuals/families the associated social/health care cost will be put on the public TAX payers. the contractor strategy was also part of the NO rules strategy.....NO consequences. i thought about this more yesterday with increasing number of homeless veterans/reduced/denial of medical care......it seems like the fall of the roman empire all over again.
Defense contractor KBR may have exposed as many as 100,000 people, including US troops, to cancer-causing toxins by burning waste in open-air pits in Iraq, says a series of class-action lawsuits filed against the company.
At least 22 separate lawsuits claiming KBR poisoned American soldiers in Iraq have been combined into a single massive lawsuit that says KBR, which until not long ago was a subsidiary of Halliburton, sought to save money by disposing of toxic waste and incinerating numerous potentially harmful substances in open-air "burn pits."
According to one of the lawsuits (PDF), filed in a federal court in Nashville, KBR burned "tires, lithium batteries ... biohazard materials (including human corpses), medical supplies (including those used during smallpox inoculations), paints, solvents, asbestos insulation, items containing pesticides, polyvinyl chloride pipes, animal carcasses, dangerous chemicals, and hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles."
And they did so within plain sight of US troops operating in Iraq, the lawsuit states. "In some instances, the burn pit smoke was so bad that it interfered with the military mission," the Nashville lawsuit states. "For example, the military located at Camp Bucca, a detention facility, had difficulty guarding the facility as a result of the smoke."
The plaintiffs note that the military "did not prevent" KBR from disposing of the waste "in a safe manner that would not have harmed plaintiffs. The military wanted the defendants to solve the burn pit problems."
http://rawstory.com/2009/11/kbr-poisoned-1000...
The U.S. military has polluted Iraq and Afghanistan with depleted uranium!!! Nothing will ever come of any of this!
The U.S. government is a criminal enterprise that is above the law. The same as Israel.
The U.S. and Israel will continue to skip along and do what ever they please with no repercussions from the Congress or the U.N. or the American people.
All business as usual.
The United States can actively kill the planet and nary a peep out of anyone.
We just need to shut up and go shopping for Christmas like good little Stepford Americans.
to me Blackwater/KBR is the corporation's militia. NO rules.....NO consequences. i tried voicing my opinion with revealing materials about KBR/Blackwater on some of the "conservative" sites but they're so preoccupied with ACORN, ms.california and opposing pres.obama they can't see outside of their mental box. if this fragmentation continues among demographics we will NOT overcome this corporation/government relationship/strategy.
It is hard to believe our state department thinks twice about depleted Uranium. EVEN though our own soldiers could be walking and breathing in that stuff too.
According to the health report I have posted here, 454 people who worked in the 9/11 cleanup have died of a range of illnesses. While it is hard to determine that all the illnesses were a direct result from working in such a toxic environment, the large number seems to be a strong indication that the environmental protection agency (EPA) deliberately lied abut the safety of the air quality. It is hard to beleive the EPA could not anticipate what was going to happen to many of these people working at the cleanup site.
http://www.nyhealth.gov/environmental/investi...
Really? You find it hard to believe, even now, that the EPA or any gov't agency would care what happens to citizens in such a situation?
Nah, they wanted that stuff cleaned up and moved out before anyone had a chance to do a real investigation - doesn't matter how many more had to die at 'ground zero' in order to protect the perps.
Sarcasm
I forgot to mention which is difficult to pick up from just reading a post. My bad.
That the federal government and the Attorney General of New York allowed the crime scene evidence in the form of steel to be shipped out of the country within days of 9/11 to China.
Then they took some of the steel and built an aircraft carrier! They just paraded it around the NY harbor a few days ago....
Sickening display of chutzpah.
was Ashcroft. Spitzer is a mere horn dog, not a war criminal.
It's pretty obvious what the answer is, isn't it? The author of the article gave us the solution without even realizing it.
ACORN needs to become a defense contractor.
Think about it: it would instantly eliminate any and all questions as to ACORN's legitimacy or business practices, because it is verboten to question or attack or criticize or even scrutinize the activities of defense contractors! Plus, it would open up trillions in new potential funding sources for ACORN, and all they'd have to do would be to, say, help with voter registration among the poor in Iraq and Afghanistan... by shooting them!
You'd think that the mass murder of 17 people would be sufficient to break most any contract.
But they know where the bodies are buried - literally - and the Bushies must be protected.
you would think so. call me krazy i have always felt some of these acts of violence by Blackwater/KBR and the various torture acts/locations was to perpetuate the war(s). give them public meaning/propaganda.
so i'm speculating it was done purposely....a strategy.....i'm probably wrong.
But there's no need for Obama to purposely join in these crimes by protecting and rewording the criminals. Eric Prinz and Blackwater murdered more people in only one incident than were killed at Fort Hood, yet somehow I don't think the Fort Hood shooter is going to get his contract renewed.
Presidents change, administrations changes, members of Congress change BUT the one thing that does not change is the United States foreign policy.
Henry Kissinger said "Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy."
I completely disagree with Kissinger, but it definitely makes you think about just whose interests the elite power brokers in the military industrial complex have in mind.
These Blackwater bastards all should be hung for the innocent lives they sacrificed.
"According to one of the lawsuits (PDF), filed in a federal court in opping Nashville, KBR burned "tires, lithium batteries ... biohazard materials (including human corpses), medical supplies (including those used during smallpox inoculations), paints, solvents, asbestos insulation, items containing pesticides, polyvinyl chloride pipes, animal carcasses, dangerous chemicals, and hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles."
What a nightmare scenario this evinces.
It should be self evident to humans on earth that engaging in activities that produce scenes such as this is inherently evil.
The privatization of war is morally wrong.It promotes war as a profitable growth industry.
This is a video contains images that depicts the horrors of war. It is not an entire video of graphic images. In the video you will see Uranium mentioned as well as statistics of the numbers of unarmed civilians killed since WWII. This video calls out to the war resisters to continue the fight. If you don't want to see all images, skip to the 7 minute mark to hear the most poignant message of this video.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/arti...
US taxpayers bribed Iraqi government officials to protect Blackwater. That WAS our money that our government gave Blackwater. And it's disgusting that out government uses our money like this!
So what else is new ? Billions went " missing " under Bush and if you'll recall the Repugs blocked any investigations to find out where it went if you'll recall , so this is hardly a shocker or a revelation . To this day I don't think there has been any investigations ?One million is peanuts .
Why the fuck are these assholes not in jail?
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