THE MERCENARIES! Sightings from The Catbird Seat.

THE MERCENARIES!

From Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, College Edition:

mer-ce-nar-y - adj. 1. working or done for payment only; motivated by a desire for money or other gain; venal; greedy. ... n. 1. a professional soldier serving in a foreign army for pay. 2. A person paid for his work or services; hireling. . . .

ve-nal - adj. 1. that can readily be bribed or corrupted; mercenary: as, a venal judge. 2. capable of being obtained for a price; as, venal services. 3. Characterized by corruption or bribery; as a venal bargain. . . .

greed - n. excessive desire for acquiring or having; desire for more than one needs or deserves . . .

Sightings from The Catbird Seat

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September 21, 2007

Congressional Testimony About Blackwater Mercenaries: Hired Guns, Above the Law

Jeremy Scahill, The Nation

Testimony of Jeremy Scahill before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, September 21, 2007

My name is Jeremy Scahill. I am an investigative reporter for The Nation magazine and the author of the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. I have spent the better part of the past several years researching the phenomenon of privatized warfare and the increasing involvement of the private sector in the support and waging of US wars. During the course of my investigations, I have interviewed scores of sources, filed many Freedom of Information Act requests, obtained government contracts and private company documents of firms operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. When asked, I have attempted to share the results of my investigations, including documents obtained through FOIA and other processes, with members of Congress and other journalists.

View special YouTube Video of Jeremy Scahill.

I would like to thank this committee for the opportunity to be here today and for taking on this very serious issue. Over the past six days, we have all been following very closely the developments out of Baghdad in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of as many as 20 Iraqis by operatives working for the private military company Blackwater USA. The Iraqi government is alleging that among the dead are a small child and her parents and the prime minister has labeled Blackwater's conduct as "criminal" and spoke of "the killing of our citizens in cold blood."

While details remain murky and subject to conflicting versions of what exactly happened, this situation cuts much deeper than this horrifying incident. The stakes are very high for the Bush administration because the company involved, Blackwater USA, is not just any company. It is the premiere firm protecting senior State Department officials in Iraq, including Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

This company has been active in Iraq since the early days of the occupation when it was awarded an initial $27 million no-bid contract to guard Ambassador Paul Bremer. During its time in Iraq, Blackwater has regularly engaged in firefights and other deadly incidents. About 30 of its operatives have been killed in Iraq and these deaths are not included in the official American death toll.

While the company's operatives are indeed soldiers of fortune, their salaries are paid through hundreds of millions of dollars in US taxpayer funds allocated to Blackwater. What they do in Iraq is done in the name of the American people and yet there has been no effective oversight of Blackwater's activities and actions. And there has been absolutely no prosecution of its forces for any crimes committed against Iraqis.

If indeed Iraqi civilians were killed by Blackwater USA last Sunday, as appears to be the case, culpability for these actions does not only lie with the individuals who committed the killings or with Blackwater as a company, but also with the entity that hired them and allowed them to operate heavily-armed inside Iraq--in this case, the US State Department.

While the headlines of the past week have been focused on the fatal shootings last Sunday, this was by no means an isolated incident. Nor is this is simply about a rogue company or rogue operators. This is about a system of unaccountable and out of control private forces that have turned Iraq into a wild west from the very beginning of the occupation, often with the stamp of legitimacy of the US government.

What happened Sunday is part of a deadly pattern, not just of Blackwater USA's conduct, but of the army of mercenaries that have descended on Iraq over the past four years. They have acted like cowboys, running Iraqis off the road, firing indiscriminately at vehicles and, in some cases, private forces have appeared on tape seemingly using Iraqis for target practice. They have shown little regard for Iraqi lives and have fueled the violence in that country, not just against the people of Iraq but also against the official soldiers of the United States military in the form of blowback and revenge attacks stemming from contractor misconduct. These private forces have operated in a climate where impunity and immunity have gone hand in hand.

Active duty soldiers who commit crimes or acts of misconduct are prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the court martial system. There have been scores of prosecutions of soldiers-- some 64 courts martial on murder-related charges in Iraq alone. That has not been the case with these private forces. Despite many reports--some from US military commanders--of private contractors firing indiscriminately at Iraqis and vehicles and killing civilians, not a single armed contractor has been charged with any crime. They have not been prosecuted under US civilian law; US military law and the Bush administration banned the Iraqi government from prosecuting them in Iraqi courts beginning with the passage of Coalition Provisional Authority Order 17 in 2004.

The message this sends to the Iraqi people is that these hired guns are above any law.

US contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: "What happens here today, stays here today." That should be chilling to everyone who believes in transparency and accountability of US operations and taxpayer funded activities-- not to mention the human rights of the Iraqis who have fallen victim to these incidents and have been robbed of any semblance of justice.

The Iraqi government says it has evidence of seven deadly incidents involving Blackwater. It is essential that the Congress request information on these incidents from the Iraqi authorities. What we do know is that in just the past nine months, Blackwater forces have been involved with several fatal actions.

Last Christmas Eve, as Katy mentioned, an off-duty Blackwater contractor allegedly killed a bodyguard for the Iraqi Vice President. Blackwater whisked that individual out of the country. Iraqi officials labeled the killing a "murder" and have questioned privately as to why there has apparently been no consequences for that individual. Blackwater says it fired the individual and is cooperating with the US Justice Department. To my knowledge no charges have yet been brought in that case.

This past May, Blackwater operatives engaged in a gun battle in Baghdad, lasting an hour, that drew in both US military and Iraqi forces, in which at least four Iraqis are said to have died. The very next day in almost the same neighborhood, the company's operatives reportedly shot and killed an Iraqi driver near the Interior Ministry. In the ensuing chaos, the Blackwater guards reportedly refused to give their names or details of the incident to Iraqi officials, sparking a tense standoff between American and Iraqi forces, both of which were armed with assault rifles.

The actions of this one company, perhaps more than any other private actor in the occupation, have consistently resulted in escalated tension and more death and destruction in Iraq--from the siege of Fallujah, sparked by the ambush of its men there in March of 2004, to Blackwater forces shooting at Iraqis in Najaf with one Blackwater operative filmed on tape saying it was like a "turkey shoot" to the deadly events of the past week.

Colonel Thomas Hammes, the US military official once overseeing the creation of a new Iraqi military, has described driving around Iraq with Iraqis and encountering Blackwater operatives. "[They] were running me off the road. We were threatened and intimidated," Hammes said. But, he added, "they were doing their job, exactly what they were paid to do in the way they were paid to do it, and they were making enemies on every single pass out of town." Hammes concluded the contractors were " hurting our counterinsurgency effort."

Brigadier General Karl Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division said of private security contractors, "These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There's no authority over them, so you can't come down on them hard when they escalate force.... They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all over the place." Horst tracked contractor conduct for a two month period in Baghdad and documented at least a dozen shootings of Iraqi civilians by contractors, resulting in six Iraqi deaths and the wounding of three others. That is just one General in one area of Iraq in just 60 days.

The conduct of these private forces sends a clear message to the Iraqi people: American lives are worth infinitely more than theirs, even if their only crime is driving their vehicle in the wrong place at the wrong time. One could say that Blackwater has been very successful at fulfilling its mission--to keep alive senior US officials. But at what price?

It is long past due for the actions of Blackwater USA and the other private military firms operating in Iraq--actions carried out in the names of the American people and with US tax dollars--to be carefully and thoroughly investigated by the US Congress. For the Iraqi people, this is a matter of life, and far too often, death.

In the bigger picture, this body should seriously question whether the linking of corporate profits to war making is in the best interests of this nation and the world. I would humbly submit that the chairs of relevant committees in both the House and Senate use their power of subpoena to compel the heads of the major war contracting companies operating on the US payroll in Iraq to appear publicly before the American people and answer for the actions of their forces. I am prepared to answer any questions.

http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/articleid/8477

September 20, 2007

The Age of Irresponsibility

How Bush has created a moral vacuum in Iraq
in which Americans can kill for free.

By Michael Hirsh, Newsweek

Imagine a universe where a man can gun down women and children anytime he pleases, knowing he will never be brought to justice. A place where morality is null and void, and arbitrary killing is the rule. A place that has been imagined hitherto only in nightmarish dystopian fiction, like “1984,” or in fevered passages from Dostoevsky—or which existed during the Holocaust and Stalinist purges and the Dark Ages.

Well, that universe exists today. It is called Iraq.

And the man who made it possible is George W. Bush.

The moral vacuum of Iraq—where Blackwater USA guards can kill 10 or 20 Iraqis on a whim and never be prosecuted for it—did not happen by accident. It is yet another example of something the Bush administration could have prevented with the right measures but simply did not bother about as it rushed into invading and occupying another country.

With America’s all-volunteer army under strain, the Pentagon and White House knew that regular military cannot be used for guarding civilians. As far back as 2003, then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld convened a task force under Undersecretary of Defense David Chu to consider new laws that might be needed to govern the privatization of war.

Nothing was done about its recommendations.

Then, two days before he left Iraq for good, L. Paul Bremer III, the Coalition Provisional Authority administrator, signed a blanket order immunizing all Americans, because, as one of his former top aides told me, “we wanted to make sure our military, civilians and contractors were protected from Iraqi law.” (No one worried about protecting the Iraqis from us; after all, we still thought of ourselves as the “liberators,” even though by then the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib and other places were known.)

Nor can these private armies even be prosecuted in America under U.S. law. The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000, which permits charges to be brought in U.S. courts for crimes abroad, apparently applies only to Defense Department contractors (and even then the administration has rarely used it).

Blackwater and other security firms work for the State Department. Even today, despite the crucial role of Blackwater and other private security firms—who employ up to 30,000 operatives in keeping the civilian side of the U.S. occupation going — Iraqis can do nothing if they are abused or killed by them....

As anyone who has been in Iraq (like me) knows, on the ground the unspoken rule of Bush’s counterinsurgency efforts over the past four years has been that almost all Iraqis, at least the males, are guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings at the hands of security firms and sometimes U.S. military units are arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis have no recourse whatever to justice except in a few cases like Haditha. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have a furious, traumatized population.

And a country out of control.

And now we have the awful absurdity of U.S. diplomats going out to make allies among Iraqis and build civil society—winning “the battlefield of the mind,” Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone told The Washington Post—surrounded by security guards who operate in an amoral universe and are hated by Iraqis.

The Blackwater phenomenon undermines the Petraeus surge, which applies counterinsurgency principles that require winning over the local population, and isolating the bad guys from them. Instead, Blackwater is seen by Iraqis as the face of a malignant occupation....

As Maureen Dowd has pointed out, so passé is the concept of taking responsibility that people who do bad things are even skipping the usual stage of shame, or “slinking away.” Instead they are “slinking back” into public life.

The Bush administration’s lack of concern about holding its employees responsible for their actions extends to obstructing civil suits against rogue contractors under the False Claims Act. “None of the lawsuits has been successful,” says lawyer Alan Grayson. “In a couple of the cases the government has said the case has to be shut down because it involves state secrets.” (The Justice Department has said it is carefully looking at the suits.)

Who has been in charge of this? None other than Peter Keisler, the former head of Justice’s civil division who is now acting attorney general, says Grayson, who is involved in several cases against Blackwater and other contractors.

“They run people off the road. They treat the local population like it’s some big shooting gallery. It’s not just Blackwater; it’s everybody.”

No, that’s letting the responsible party off too easily: it’s the Bush administration.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20892483/site/newsweek/

From AMERICAN DYNASTY - Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Deceit in the House of Bush, by Kevin Phillips:

INDIANA BUSH AND THE AXIS OF EVIL

As president, Bush senior gloried in the Gulf War and the 1989 invasion of Panama, both cast as strikes for democracy–even if the dictators attacked were former friends. Over a decade...his web of covert international relationships prompted charges of his participating in and covering up in three actual or alleged illegalities: the Republican Party’s “October Surprise” negotiations with Iran in 1980, supposedly undertaken to ensure that no hostages taken in Iran would be released before the election; the Iran-Contra scandal; and “Iraqgate,” secretly arming Iraq from 1984 to 1990 before hurriedly changing course after Saddam Hussein took Kuwait.

Two catchphrases recur in the family resume: “arms deals” and “clandestine operations.” A third recurring association would be “cover-up.”

George W. Bush was a willing recipient of the inheritance–witness the CIA and BCCI ties of some who finance him, from Arbusto to Harken Energy a decade later. For example, James Bath, who invested fifty thousand dollars in the 1979 and 1989 Arbusto partnerships, probably do so as U.S. business representative for rich Saudi investors Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz (Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law). Both men were involved with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the rogue bank and occasional CIA front known for financing arms deals – indeed, bin Mahfouz owned 20 percent of its stock.

Bath, who made his fortune investing for the two Saudis, was a colorful Texan – and then some. According to former Houston Post reporter Pete Brewton, Bath was “an asset of the CIA, reportedly recruited by George Bush himself” in 1976 to keep the Agency up to date on Saudi activities.

A decade later, Harken Energy, the company willing to handsomely buy out George W.’s crumbling oil and gas business, had its own CIA connections. Chairman Alan Quasha was the son of a Philippine lawyer connected to the Nugan Hand Bank, a notorious Australian bank closely linked to the CIA.

Equally to the point, 17.6 percent of Harken’s stock was owned by Abdullah Bakhsh, another Saudi magnate reported by some to be representing Khalid bin Mahfouz.

A U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating BCCI in 1992 reported on how the bank bought friendship and favors from politicians around the world; details of the investigation were published in two books: False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire, by Peter Truell, and The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI, by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne. According to the latter, the story of the Bush involvement in the BCCI scandal involved the “trails that branched, crossed one another or came to unexpected dead ends.”...

As we have seen, Jeb Bush began his business career in Miami collaborating with Cubans tied to the CIA or to kindred intelligence agencies in pre-Castro Cuba. He socialized with Adbur Sakhia, BCCI’s Miami branch manager and later its top U.S. Official. Jeb Bush’s partners and early associates included a number of Cuban emigres with CIA, Nicaraguan ‘contra, or Batista-era Cuban intelligence connections.

To say that armaments, clandestine operations, and money-laundering banks recur in the history of the Walker-Bush family is no exaggeration at all. No other presidents have been so caught up in this kind of foreign policy. And the Bushes’ preoccupations are not clear until you consider the whole dynasty. It is the dynastic aspect that truly reveals the pattern – the clandestine behavior over multiple generations....

December, 1997

From African Business -

Soldier of Fortune-The Mercenary
as Corporate Executive

As the danger posed by armed insurgents and criminals increases, so does the number of sophisticated 'private' armies. In the old days, these ex-soldiers were simply called mercenaries and their activities were outside the law. Today, they have changed their image and their orientation. The security business is booming. Francois Misser and Anver Versi reveal the scale of this new growth industry.

They hate to be called mercenaries - particularly in Africa where the term conjures up horrific images of blood-crazed dogs of war killing, burning, raping and looting.

"That era, the era of 'Mad' Mike Hoare, 'Black' Jacques Schramme and Bob Denard, is finished, " they say. Today, they want to be called contract soldiers. They are businessmen first. They have plush offices replete with works of art. They undertake a variety of specialised services - training, intelligence gathering, personal and site protection and, when necessary, they will go out and out your enemy for you. They sign complex deals - bartering security against mining concessions for example, or acting as arms purchasing agents.

"We are an international business like any other business," a pin-striped, bespectacled and utterly harmless looking corporate head told us. "We have highly specialised, intensely trained and thoroughly disciplined teams able to deliver a unique service: security. The demand for all sorts of security is increasing. We go where we are wanted and where the people can pay our fees."

Most of these organisations will only work with legitimate governments and only carry out certain functions. What they now want is respectability.

And large profits.

They seem to be getting both. Organisations based in London and South Africa have to be cleared by the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence respectively. Contracts range from $1m to over $100m. Including perks and spin-offs, earnings can be as high as $400m-$500m. Clients include not only weak or beleaguered regimes but multinational companies and, as seems likely in the near future, the UN and other agencies.

There is little doubt that this is a major growth industry. The only cloud on the horizon is the public and media perception of these contract soldiers as pariah soldiers of fortune. The Geneva Convention bans the use of mercenaries but the distinction between soldiers of fortune and private security firms is blurred.

The fall of the Berlin wall and the general thawing of the Cold War, added to the end of Apartheid and South Africa's proxy wars in neighbouring states, have led to a significant scaling down of regular armies both in Europe and Africa.

Demobilised soldiers, used to a regulated and cocooned world in barracks, have found it difficult if not impossible to adjust to civilian life. Add to this the loss of a sense of comradarie - 'the brotherhood of arms,' a life of adventure and danger and often a genuine love for the profession - and you have a ready made pool of men eager, if not desperate, to be recruited into private armies.

At the same time, the need for military muscle is increasing not only in Africa but around the globe. The major superpower confrontations have been replaced by hundreds of 'small wars.'

Cuts in African military budgets, failed demobilisation programmes and bad governance have also created new areas of instability as unemployed soldiers find no other solution but to go on the rampage - as has been the case in Zaire, Congo and Sierra Leone. Only disciplined armed forces can bring renegade soldiers to heel.

International armed intervention has not been the answer, witness the fiasco following the intervention of UN peace-making and peace-keeping forces in Somalia, Rwanda and Angola. In addition the huge costs of these operations have made the West increasingly reluctant to send troops to the continent. There is also a growing antipathy towards sending expensively trained Western soldiers to sort out murderous little civil wars in the developing world.

This has been largely behind US thinking as it works to create a pan-African force to deal with conflict resolution. Here again there are mounting problems. Cost and effectiveness are major considerations even if one were to ignore the convoluted political adjustments that will have to be made if the force is to be regarded as neutral. The general failure of ECOMOG, the military arm of the West African Economic Community is a case in point.

Thus the argument for 'privatising' security and conflict resolution is now being given a sympathetic ear instead of being rejected out of hand. The day of Mercenary Incorporated as a legitimate, even respectable service organisation may be dawning.

Security has become an obsession for Africa's big business, especially mining. It is no coincidence that De Beers, Anglo-American and the First National Bank fund research at the Institute for Security Studies.

Among the organisations to first see opportunities in this climate of growing insecurity was Executive Outcomes (EO) - perhaps the best known of the modern 'mercenary' corporations.

Clandestine warfare

EO is led by a former Civil Cooperation Bureau officer, Mr Eeben Barlow and specialises in clandestine warfare, combat air patrols, advanced battle handling and sniper training.

Set up as a sophisticated operational unit from the word go, EO was among the first of a new group of security specialist firms to sign important contracts. Under a $40m contract in 1993, followed by a $95m contract in 1994, and additional month-to-month contracts ending in January 1996, an estimated 500 EO personnel were flown to Angola.

In Sierra Leone, EO had deployed 170 men by May 1995. The country's finance minister, Mr Thiamu Bangura was reported to have said that by September 1996, the government was in debt to the company at a rate of $1.2m per month. But, following pressure from IMF, the monthly payment was cut down to below $1m.

In both countries EO inflicted severe damage to rebel groups - UNITA in Angola and to the Revolutionary United Front (RFU) in Sierra Leone, and drove the rebels out of vital diamond mining areas thus enabling mining companies to keep operational.

The highly professional and disciplined manner in which EO carried out its objectives helped create a new climate of acceptance in some quarters. A symposium on the privatisation of security in sub-Saharan Africa, sponsored by the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency last June in Washington, invited Mr Barlow and other top guns - like British Colonel Tim Spicer from Sandline International and retired DIA-officer, Lt. General Edward Soyster, who represented the Virginia-based Military Professional Resources Inc.(MPRI).

US oil giants like Texaco and Exxon, the mining company Sierra Rutile, NGOs, the UNHCR and UNICEF were also represented. Interestingly, in contrast to the OAU condemnations of mercenary activities during the 1960s and 70s, African states such as Angola, Guinea-Conakry, Uganda and Zambia sent military attaches to the symposium.

According to the organisers, the aim is not to stop mercenary activities but "to make private forces effective, efficient and loyal" and avoid "unlicensed firms or rogue states" from creating havoc. (However, the deadlines of the profession, masked behind business suites and glass-fronted offices, was soberingly exposed when Colonel Tim Spicer was later to come to grief in Papua New Guinea).

Pentagon database

Although EO is better known than other organisations, it is by no means the biggest player world-wide or even on the continent. MPRI, for instance, had a turnover of $24m in 1996. It has nearly 300 employees on its pay-roll and about 2,000 ex-Pentagon officers available on database. In 1995, it won a contract to train the Angolan police Rapid Intervention Force in, and is likely to extend its operations to, West Africa or the Horn.

Probably the largest private security transnational is Vinnell Corporation (Fairfax, Virginia), a subsidiary of BDM International Inc. Since 1993, it has been controlled by the Carlyle Group with former ex-CIA's vice-director Mr Frank Carlucci and US Secretary of State Mr James Baker among the shareholders.

In 1995, BDM had a total turnover of $890m, of which 54% came from arms sales. Last May Vinnell was awarded a three-year contract worth $163m for the Saudi Arabian National Guard modernisation programme. It also has a training contract for military systems in Egypt, according to the Antwerp-based International Peace Information Service (IPIS).

Another US group, Armor Holdings Inc., is indirectly becoming a major force on the African market. Last April, it pooled interests with Defence Systems Ltd. (DSL), with headquarters in Buckingham Gate, London, whose net revenues for 1996 amounted to $33.1m.

DSL, founded in 1981 by ex-SAS officers, has a world-wide staff of 4,000 people and many clients in Africa. They include the Angolan parastatals Sonangol (oil) and Endiama (diamonds), a cement factory, four embassies (including the American) in Luanda and the main hotels. According to ex-DSL-security advisers, the company also has an arrangement to train the Angolan police.

In Congo-Kinshasa, DSL's subsidiaries USDS and Sapelli SARL, whose soldiers carry Uzi rifles, are protecting the installations belonging to the SOCIR oil refinery of Congo-SEP (the Belgian oil company Petrofina's subsidiary), and the US embassy.

Other DSL clients include De Beers, Shell, Mobil, Amoco, BP and Chevron; NGOs (CARE and GOAL), UNICEF, UNDP, UNHCR, UNAVEM and ONUMOZ.

DSL claims also to have experience in Algeria, Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda. Its French subsidiary, CIAS, is now trying to get a contract to protect the projected 1,100km pipe-line between the Southern Chad oil fields and the port of Kribi in Cameroon.

The French connection

Although EO is no doubt the leading South African company, it is not the only one. One competitor is Omega Support Ltd., led by the ex-SA military attache in Angola, Mr John Smith.

According to The Guardian, Omega is closely tied to Strategic Concepts, created by the former Military Intelligence officer Mr Sean Cleary, a staunch supporter of Jonas Savimbi. South Africa's National Intelligence Service is convinced that Omega was involved in supplying and training Laurent Kabila's Banyamulenge fighters during their campaign against General Mobutu's army.

French companies, mostly run by ex-gendarmes, also have a presence. Secrets, created by a former captain of the French gendarmerie intervention group, Mr Paul Barril, signed, in 1992, its first three month contract to train Cameroonian President Paul Biya's presidential guard.

Another ex-gendarme, Mr Robert Montoya, set up a company in Lome, called Service and Security. It provides training to the Togolese anti-riot forces and equips them with electric bludgeons, according to Le Monde.

Mr Jean-Louis Chanas, an ex-member of the French equivalent of the M16, the Direction de la Securite Exterieure, has his own company, Eric SA, which competes with DSL to win oil installations security contracts in Algeria.

The Israelis are also aggressive competitors. In 1994, according to the daily, Yedioth Aharonoth a company called Levadan led by the retired General Ze'ev Zachrin, signed a $50m contract with the government of Congo-Brazzaville, to train the local army and former President Pascal Lissouba's "zulu" militia.

Another Isreali daily, Ha'aretz revealed that Silver Shadow, a security company led by retired Lt. Colonel, Mr Amos Golan, recently made an offer to President Kabila of the DRC to build up a special protection unit. But the Israeli government ordered the company to stop the negotiations, since it is now prohibiting any security assistance in countries with "unstable regimes."

Over the years, the services have become more specialised. Some firms focus on providing protection, security, military training and sometimes participating in actual combat. Others, tied to mining interests, are building business empires.

For example, EO is involved not only in military-related activities but undertakes to provide functioning hospitals, reconstruction of devastated areas and de-mining operations. In Sierra Leone, when the government faced difficulties in paying EO, its sister company Branch Energy, which also belongs to the Strategic Resources Corporation holding, obtained diamond concessions in the Kono region.

EO's boss, Mr Eeben Barlow has stakes in Diamond Works, a company registered on the Vancouver stock exchange which owns concessions in Angola.

IDAS Resources, a Belgo-Dutch company with Israeli connections, based in the Dutch West-Indies, has a joint venture agreement with American Mineral Fields International on diamond concessions in the Lunda Norte province.

And the Israeli firm Levadan is a subsidiary of Kardan Investment, an import-export company active in the diamond trade.

Despite the corporate-executive image that these groups are at pains to provide, difficult ethical, moral and even pragmatic questions remain unanswered. For example, although Mr Barlow claims that EO only works in coordination with governments, last August, two Canadian papers, the Vancouver Sun and the Toronto Globe and Mail, revealed that an Indian banker, Mr Rakesh Saxena, who owns a bauxite mine in Sierra Leone, paid $70,000 to EO's parent company, Sandline to prepare a counter-coup there. The disclosure of these plans jeopardised the entire operation.

Nobody can ignore the high human cost of these operations. It even remains to be seen whether it really is cost-effective in the long run for a company or for a government to buy private protection if the social causes of instability are not being addressed.

The DIA symposium concluded anyway that the issue will not go away and called for some sort of code of conduct. But who sets the criteria? To whom will these companies be accountable? Some African intellectuals complain that these firms only secure the areas which are profitable, and protest against their disguised "recolonisation" strategy.

On the other hand, there is no denying that armed insecurity is on the increase. With weapons becoming cheaper, what is to stop bands of armed thugs terrorising and paralysing countries or businesses under one political pretext or another?

Copyright © IC Publications Limited 1998. All rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means or used for any business purpose without the written consent of the publisher. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that the information contained herein is as accurate as possible, the publisher cannot accept responsibility for any consequences arising from its use.

November 18, 2002

More Than 90 Arrested in
Fort Benning Protest

The Courier-Journal

COLUMBUS, GA. - More than 90 people, including at least six nuns, were arrested after marching onto Fort Benning yesterday during an annual protest of a program that trains Latin American soldiers.

“I feel anger at the deliberate teaching of violence,” Caryl Hartjes, a nun from Fond du Lac, Wis., said as she entered the compound, where she was arrested.

About 6,000 protesters gathered for the 13^th annual demonstration by the School of the Americas Watch, which continues to protest the Nov. 19, 1989, killings of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador.

Protesters say people responsible for the killings were trained at the School of the Americas, a Fort Benning program that was replaced last year by a new institute.

Protesters say the change was only cosmetic.

August 26, 2001

From Al Martin Raw, by Al Martin:

US State Department Sponsors Training of Would-Be Terrorists

Huntsville, Alabama - The US State Department sponsors the training of would-be terrorists at the Redstone Arsenal's Hazardous Devices School, which offers "explosive ordinance disposal training."

This is the most exclusive explosives school in the United States. It's where firemen, policemen, and municipal bomb squads are trained. It also provides training for the US armed forces, FBI, CIA, as well as foreign army and intelligence personnel. This is the most elite of the munitions schools in the United States and it's part of the Redstone Arsenal complex.

This facility is not run by the US Army or by the military. It is technically run by US State Department employee Ray Funderberg, who's been covertly in charge of it for about twenty years. An added note -- although Funderberg works for the State Department, he dresses in a US Army Colonel's uniform. Official records indicate that he supposedly works for the FBI.

According to a reliable source, one of the Iranians involved in the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, took training courses at the Redstone Arsenal's school of explosives. He enrolled in this course under the guise of a Pakistani military officer with Pakistani uniform and credentials.

This is important to note because Al Martin Raw has previously reported that many hostile nations have a visible presence at the US Redstone Arsenal. Evidently "terrorists," as well as regular armed forces and intelligence officers, are also being "trained" at the Redstone Arsenal.

In other news, five new shipments of "marshmallows" (anti-personnel land mines) have left the Redstone Arsenal. And this week the Friendly Colonel is once again doing business under the "Gulf Coast Trucking and Receiving" moniker.

An inside source wants the Friendly Colonel to provide the State Department employment forms necessary to bring more people in. One of the arms merchants has a deal with the Russians to bring Palestinians into this explosives training program.

For instance, Palestinians would be brought in -- technically as members of the Chinese (Taiwan) Army, even though they are Palestinians. They would hardly pass as "Chinese," but since nobody cares, it's a done deal. Al Martin Raw readers should understand that no one asks any questions about any thing at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama.

In fact, there are two Palestinians being trained there now in "explosives." As mentioned before, none of them are who they appear to be. It's all just convenience for paperwork. In case the Redstone Arsenal gets investigated, they will claim, "No, these people are legitimate; here's the paperwork."

Suddenly an Afghani guy named Mohammed Habib winds up being a Colonel Sven Larssen in the Swedish Army. This is an actual case. And it shows just how ridiculous it is.

This deception at the Hazardous Devices School is really another School of Americas story. The Friendly Colonel is being offered a $12,000 fee per person to fill out the appropriate State department documents to allow people into the United States on green cards for short stays - 30, 60, 90 day stays - and to enlist foreign nationals into this program. What they're doing is using this program as a cover to bring people in to be trained at the explosives school. The US State Department is actually conspiring with foreign arms merchants and the governments they represent to allow hostile foreign nationals to come to the United States using false documents to be trained at this facility.

They're asking the Friendly Colonel if he would "hire" these people as "trucking agents." ... To make this offer even more appealing, the Colonel is guaranteed that "there will be no heat" - because the US State Department is complicit. This is a standing offer to him from the State Department - to provide false documents for these foreign nationals for $12,000 each.

Aiding in this enormous illegal covert operation of the United States Government, the Colonel expects to make a million dollars by this time next year.

It is our opinion that these illicit operations at the Redstone Arsenal and adjoining facilities - US Missile Command etc - now exceed the volumes of money and egregious conduct of Iran-Contra itself. Now there are thousands of people involved making millions of dollars.

At lunch, the brigadier general and others involved were all licking their chops at the new F-22 Raptor program. They can't wait for that to get scaled up. There will be many Chinese arms merchants who will supply fraudulent spare parts that don't work as usual. They're looking at this program as "a fresh source to defraud more billions with the Department of Defense with the complicity of senior officers through a complex offshore network of arms dealers, not only foreign arms dealers, but cutouts for American corporations that are producing components and systems for this aircraft.

The bottom line is that we are training individuals and foreign military personnel who are hostile to the United States.

Al Martin Raw readers should also understand how the fraud is systemic, how the fraud is all inter-connected, and how conspiratorial the fraud is, namely that it's all being controlled by an elite group that runs through foreign governments, the Department of Defense, and defense contractors.

Their agenda is clear - terrorism is good for business.

Terrorism pumps up everybody's budgets, especially defense, law enforcement, interdiction, etc.

As long as we can keep "foreign terrorism" alive, everyone benefits -- the Department of Defense, the CIA, Department of State, the National Security Agency and many others. They can all ask for more money in their budgets by pointing to the "terrorists." We are in effect augmenting that threat, making sure it stays alive and healthy, so that federal agencies can be funded with ever-increasing amounts of money, especially those agencies that do not have to account for the expenditures of those monies.

They don't have to account for the missing monies because even if they're nominally supposed to account for their budgets they don't. Witness the missing $1.1 trillion from the Department of Defense.

The brigadier general who's in charge was actually concerned because he and his associates (higher-ranking generals in the Department of Defense, who are committing these frauds) have been notified by the foreign banks where they have deposits that their deposits have grown to such enormous amounts of money that they are unmanageable. They are being asked to transfer their money into other offshore illicit accounts. Some of the banks they're doing business with are very small and obscure offshore banks that simply can not handle such enormous flows of money.

But you can understand the enormity of the fraud, when you're talking about trillions of dollars. This fraud is deep and systemic and involves a conspiracy of thousands of high ranking military officers, high ranking State Department officials, Department of Justice officials, CIA, National Security Agency officials, etc. and their "foreign counterparts."

This is the "Very Real Vast Right Wing Conspiracy," which has never been called to accounting.

Now the Russians are coming on board with the ABM missile treaty. It can be predicted that the Russians will drop their objections to our development of an ABM system in exchange for advanced US military technology, with which, by the way, we are already supplying the Russians and covertly rearming them. That was just an offer on the table, yet we are already supplying the Russians with US highly advanced technology.

Like the notorious School of the Americas which trained foreign nationals in American torture, interrogation and warfare techniques, the US State Department trains "terrorists".

In the final analysis, though, nothing is new.

The United States Government has covertly sponsored these activities in the past, especially during "Iran-Contra" and "Iraq-Gate". We virtually built the Iraqi military and there are many past correlations. For instance, the US did not stop supplying Iraq with illegal weapons systems until three days before the beginning of the Gulf War.

During "Iran-Contra," the US allowed the Sandinista regime to deal in narcotics so they could generate revenues to purchase more East Bloc weapons in order to become a greater threat to the US, so we could counter that threat by building the Contra Army in which all sorts of fraud against the American taxpayers, corporations, security firms, and banks could be hidden.

It is interesting to note that the Sandinista regime used two of the same companies to purchase weapons for the Contras as well as the Sandinistas. These companies were TransWorld Armaments Corp, based in Quebec City and owned by the infamous Immanuel von Weigensburg and Defcon Industries of Lisbon, Portugal, a CIA-controlled arms merchant cutout also controlled by Major General Richard V. Secord, as noted in the famous Lake Resources lawsuit (United States v. Richard Secord, cv 1202-A 1991 Eastern District Court of Virginia) . [See "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider"]

Iraq Gate and Iran Contra are perfect examples of how similar these two operations are compared to what's going on now.

We are creating an enemy and we are also supporting existing enemies for the purpose of enriching a small clique of defense contractors, senior military and intelligence officers, and politicians on the right. We are financing terrorism against us as well as attempting to rebuild Russia and then build China into a new power under the concept that covert wars are very profitable.

The "Fight Against Terrorism" has done an awful lot for the Republican Party. And it has enriched a lot of people and corporations.

The drumbeat against "terrorism" continues full speed ahead....

~ ~ ~

AL MARTIN is America's foremost whistle-blower on government fraud and corruption. A retired US Navy Lt. Commander and former officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence, he has testified before Congress (the Kerry Committee and the Alexander Committee) regarding Iran-Contra. Al Martin is the author of "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider" (2001, National Liberty Press, $19.95; order line: 1-866-317-1390.) He lives at an undisclosed location, since the criminals named in his book have been returned to national power and prominence. His column "Behind the Scenes in the Beltway" is published regularly on Al Martin Raw: Criminal Govt Conspiracy (www.almartinraw.com).

January 24, 2000:

German Inquiry Hints
at Old Boy Network

By Joseph Fitchett, International Herald Tribune

PARIS - Germany's political funding scandal shows signs of bringing to light a political culture that has grown up outside the public eye and runs counter to Germany's reputation for transparency in its governing practices.

The parliamentary inquiry that gets into full swing this week will investigate not only former Chancellor Helmut Kohl but also a wider cast of prominent Germans, according to officials close to the process. If the investigation reveals influence peddling with the slush funds, and not just a practice of topping up campaign war chests, the dimensions of the scandal could escalate and lead to a crisis of confidence in the system of political parties in Germany.

So far, allegations have surfaced about at least one insider, Walter Leisler Kiep, a well-known international figure in the German and U.S. power elite, who is under investigation in connection with the transfer of a suitcase of cash from an arms dealer in 1991 - the incident that led to the discovery of the slush funds.

Often described simply as a former treasurer of the Christian Democrats, a description suggesting an obscure party bureaucrat, Mr. Kiep is in reality a much larger figure. A successful businessman, he has also been an international go-between with wide connections throughout the German and U.S. establishments.

For decades, he has enjoyed access to top corporate management and academic institutions in both countries, chairing the international advisory board at Marsh & McLennan, the giant U.S. brokerage, until the end of last year. He has been a pillar in the sophisticated institutional world of private trans-Atlantic exchanges via the organization he headed, Atlantik-Brucke.

The investigation surrounding Mr. Kiep involves a possible charge of tax evasion in connection with a suitcase of money handed over in a parking lot in Switzerland by Karlheinz Schreiber, an arms dealer who is now in detention in Canada. Mr. Kiep has maintained that he passed along the funds to the Christian Democrats as a contribution for which other party officials were responsible. . . .

But the still murky transaction in Switzerland - which Mr. Kiep insisted involved payment not to himself but to the Christian Democrats under Mr. Kohl - has been widely portrayed in the German and international media as linked to an arms sale to Saudi Arabia that required Kohl government approval. Mr. Kohl has denied that he was influenced by any payment over the arms sale or any other political decision.

Mr. Kiep has denied any knowledge of improprieties in connection with the payment he passed on or any close acquaintance with the contributor who turned out to be an arms dealer. But Mr. Schreiber told a German newspaper, Bild, that he subsequently met Mr. Kiep again at an event sponsored by Atlantik-Brucke.

No suggestion has surfaced that Mr. Kiep used his position at Atlantik-Brucke or corporate access to facilitate bribes from the United States - which has had tough anti-corruption laws since a rash of arms-related scandals in the 1970s - or any wrongdoing of the sort that has led to Mr. Kohl's embarrassing discrediting.

But Americans and Germans closely acquainted with Mr. Kiep say that his role - simultaneously fund-raiser for a political party, prominent corporate leader and philanthropic promoter of international cooperation - runs counter to perceptions about the separation of politics and business in Germany and points up the existence of an extensive ''old boy network'' among Bonn politicians that was never apparent to voters.

Beyond the Schreiber incident, the current inquiry is expected to investigate alleged kickbacks, perhaps running to millions of dollars, during the privatization of the oil industry in former East Germany. French and German intermediaries under investigation by Swiss magistrates were quoted by Le Monde in Paris as saying that Mr. Kohl's demand for payments was pressed on French officials by a company run by Mr. Kiep.

Whatever the outcome of the investigation, the mingling of business and politics at the top of the Christian Democratic party has already jolted perceptions in Germany. The notion that their country has a clear separation of government and business is part of the reason most Germans have prided themselves on thinking that they have cleaner politics than other European countries.

In practice, German political life and corporate business have overlapped via an elite that includes Mr. Kiep. . . .

Trim and patrician at 73, Mr. Kiep has been an influential figure for decades in the rarefied world of elite trans-Atlantic contacts. In 1984, he took charge of Atlantik-Brucke, a privately funded body designed to promote closer ties, in meetings largely out of the public eye, among government officials and business and financial communities in the United States and West Germany.

In the course of a business career that took him to the top of a German insurance company, he always worked closely with American companies, including a stint as an executive in West Germany for Marsh & McLennan. The American company took over a German brokerage in which Mr. Kiep was a senior partner in 1990 until his retirement in 1996.

On the U.S. side of Marsh & McLennan, Mr. Kiep was chairman of the company's international advisory board - a group of dozen influential people from outside the United States - before his term ended on schedule in December.

He has served on similar bodies at Columbia University and other American and German academic institutions. He kept all of these positions during a criminal trial that ended last year - with his discharge - over alleged financial malfeasance when he was party treasurer for the Christian Democrats....

For more on Marsh & McLennan, GO TO > > > The Marsh Birds

From the net:

What Happens in Congress May Not Be As Important As What Happens With CIA, The Military and The Private Contractors Leading Us To War in Colombia . . .

WHEN THE CHILDREN OF THE BULL MARKET BEGIN TO DIE

By Michael C. Ruppert

[Bill Clinton arrives in Cartagena Colombia on August 30, 2000 on the heels of three unpublicized massacres by right wing paramilitaries designed to inflame FARC guerillas. The real shooting and the American publicity machine churning out war fever will start on the same day. This was the lead story in the June issue of "From The Wilderness."]

While attention is being increasingly focused on a billion dollar military aid package for Colombia that is nearing Bill Clinton's desk for signature, experience - especially that taken so painfully from Vietnam - tells us that the real determinants of how deeply involved we will become in Colombia are not in Washington, but already down there stirring the pot.

As in Vietnam, and unlike the Contra War, Congress may just be playing "catch-up" with events created by various interests serving more than one master. And experts are becoming increasingly persuaded that our current Colombian experience is more like Vietnam than anything since.

The likelihood of direct involvement of U.S. forces in a dense hostile terrain, controlled by experienced, organized, well-armed, indigenous forces, toughened by three decades of civil war is growing daily. And indicators of the imminence of conflict are not to be found in whether the Senate or the House chops or adds a few dollars or helicopters which can all be restored without fanfare to the Foreign Aid Bill in Conference Committee at the last minute.

They are to be found in the movements and actions of money, the U.S. military and some CIA/DoD connected corporations, possibly using "sheep-dipped" CIA and military personnel disguised as employees of private companies in roles that can only expand the conflict.

The money flow in and around Colombia, both as connected to the drug trade, to vast oil reserves and to the