Iraq's Dismal Reality

This week, President Barack Obama made a surprise visit to Iraq to the cheers of enthusiastic US troops. But on April 9th, the day that marked the 6th anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, tens of thousands of Iraqis took to the streets to denounce the US invasion, burn George Bush in effigy and demand the immediate withdrawal of all American forces. As the President and others speak of Iraqis "standing up" and "taking responsibility" for their own affairs, journalist Nir Rosen reminds "We didn’t create a paradise in Iraq; we created a hell....And now, maybe it’s gone down from the seventh rung of hell to the second rung of hell...[but]...It’s still pretty bad."

See full interview of Nir Rosen above.



Read the transcript of Nir Rosen's interview by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! here.

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The Awakening of "The Surge"

Iraqi police survey the site of a recent car bombing in Baghdad, part of an upswing of violence in recent weeks.

"The surge worked!" What began as a Bush administration mantra was picked up by mainstream media and forced into the public consciousness through repetition rather than actual evidence. So "accepted" did this idea become that politicians that dared not say it were somehow being ridiculously stubborn and akin to dead-ender anti-war types. Dodging the issue for a long time, then presidential candidate Barack Obama was finally forced to repeat the words "the surge worked"--but offered caveats relating to the lack of a political solution, and a reminder that the war itself was wrong-headed from the jump. Still, despite what was readily availble information regarding the smoke and mirror behind the surge's "success"--ranging from bribed Sunni insurgents to ethnically cleansed neighborhoods that left little reason to continue the violence--the notion that the "surge worked" has hoisted itself into reality...or reality as some would like it. Even comedian/talk show host Bill Mahrer, who has a disturbing propensity for falling for right-wing talking points, declared last week that he's the first liberal that will admit the "surge worked."

Well, whatever the surge was--and wasn't--recent happenings in Iraq show just how tenuously it was weaved together. On Monday some 36 Iraqis died in a set of coordinated bombings, the most recent in a spate of acts that some are calling an unexpected uptick in violence. Worse still, they may be revealing old bribed and buried tensions between Sunnis and Shiites, aggravated to deadly effect by the US invasion, bubbling back to the surface.

More after the fold...


Independent journalist Dahr Jamail tracking just one case of this dissent locates fissures in the "surge" wrought peace, as the US-propped-up Shiite government finds itself at odds with a US-backed (and well-funded) Sunni militia group, The Awakening.

Last weekend, the Iraqi government arrested an Awakening Group leader of a Baghdad neighborhood, then moved into the area. With the help of US occupation forces, they disarmed the militiamen under his control, but only after fighting broke out between US-backed Iraqi government security forces and the US-formed Sunni Awakening Group militia. This disturbing event is the realization of what most Iraqis have long feared - that the relative calm in Iraq today would eventually be broken when fighting erupts between these two entities.

For well over a year now, The Awakening has been praised by supporters of the surge, who have pointed to the success they have had in battling Sunni militias attacking US forces. "Insurgents are now allies" hailed an ABC news headline in December of 2007:

Nearly 80,000-strong, paid by the Pentagon, and independent of the Iraqi government, these Sunni "awakening councils" are largely made up of former insurgents who have turned their guns on al Qaeda....President Bush has called them the hope of the future Iraq. "In Anbar, you're seeing firsthand the dramatic differences that can come when the Iraqis are more secure," Bush said during a visit to Anbar province in September. "You see Sunnis, who once fought side by side with al Qaeda against coalition troops, now fighting side by side with coalition troops against al Qaeda," Bush added.

But as Dahr Jamail notes, this relationship of convenience and money was untenable from the very start. The so-called success of "the surge" was built around paying off one group that during the ethnic violence that reached its height throughout Iraq in 2005-2006, probably engaged in ethnic killings of masses of Shiites. Flare-ups between the two were only averted by money and a continued US presence. As both money and the US military can't possibly stay there indefinitely, the unresolved divisions created by the occupation are forcing their way back to the surface.

The US policy that has led to this recent violence has been long in the making, as it has only been a matter of time before the tenuous truce between the groups came unglued. For it has been a truce built on a deeply corrupt US policy of backing the predominantly Shia Iraqi government forces while paying the Sunni resistance not to fight both government and occupation forces.

Even some who spoke glowingly of "the surge," like Times Online correspondent Martin Fletcher, spoke ominously of this situation as far back as September of 2007:

America’s new Sunni allies still regard the [Shiite] Government with profound suspicion, as a puppet of Iran. Most Sunnis have come to rely – irony of ironies – on US troops for protection. At the same time an increasing number of Shias, especially in Baghdad, look to the al-Mahdi Army militia, not the hapless Mr al-Maliki, to provide security and basic services. ...the overstretched US military cannot sustain the surge much beyond next spring. That poses several questions in a capital and country that has increasingly become a patchwork quilt of deeply antagonistic, ethnically cleansed Sunni and Shia enclaves. Will the violence return as US troops leave? Has their presence merely driven the fighters into other areas? To what extent has al-Qaeda disappeared, or is it merely lying low? Is the slowly improving Iraqi Army anywhere near ready to take the strain? Will the new Sunni police forces and “concerned citizen” groups simply metamorphose into well-armed, well-trained militias?

As the Obama administration makes its move to pull occupation troops from Iraq, these simmering conflicts may begin to center stage. As Dahr Jamial notes:

It was convenient policy to have set up the Awakening groups to temporarily quell overall violence in Iraq. Resistance fighters rushed to join the ranks for the paycheck, as well as US military protection from Shia militias, which now largely comprise the government security apparatus. Now, however, clearly the US has lost some of their interest in continuing to support the Awakening groups, and the Maliki government is ratcheting up its efforts to dismantle them. Predictably, members of the Awakening are fighting back - for without a paycheck, and with yet another broken promise by the occupation forces to spur them on, why should they sit back and allow themselves to be detained, killed or further betrayed?

We can only hope that as many cheer in relief to have US troops return home, if things turn more tragic in Iraq, that everyone will remember just how this nation helped sow the seeds of this turmoil.

For full article by Dahr Jamail, The Growing Storm, go here.

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Iraq War Turns 6

Late night March 19 and early morning March 20 of 2003 launched America's illegal and aggressive war against the Iraq. Six years on, through bombings, Abu Gharibs, displacement and a shattered infrastructure, it's uncertain whether this holy crusade was directed solely upon the Iraqi regime or the Iraqi people--who themselves have repeatedly called for an end to occupation and find shoe-throwers more heroic than US soldiers. The recent inheritors of this imperial ambition have declared the war will end...in time. Though it seems that with a sprawling embassy and a call for retaining residual forces, the imperial footprint of American hegemony never really plans on leaving completely.

So at 6 years, what have we got to show out of this colonial misadventure?

More beneath the fold...



Iraq at 6

Cost of war: $655 billion in allocated funds.

Documented civilian deaths: between 91,121 and 99,500.

Estimated Iraqi deaths due to the US invasion: 1.3 million.

Iraqi civilians killed in February 2009: 346 (including 11 children).

US casualties: 4,259 deaths: 31,131 wounded in action.

US troops deployed to Iraq since 2003: 513,000; deployed more than once: 197,000; deployed three or more times: 53,000.

US soldiers who committed suicide in January 2009: as many as 24, the highest monthly total since the Army started keeping those stats in 1980.

Iraqi unemployment rate: 18 percent; for men ages 15-29: 28 percent.

Iraqi female labor force participation: 17 percent.

Journalists killed in Iraq: 138

Estimated number of Iraqis displaced since 2003: 5 million, nearly 20 percent of the total population.

Iraqi prison population: 15,100 in US custody; 35,000 in Iraqi custody.

Average hours of electricity per day in Iraq: 13.3



*Information from The Nation April 6, 2009 edition.

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Juan Williams is a Jerk

Well he is. I remember coming to this conclusion after listening to his appearance once on Air America's The Al Franken Show, back in 2006. He was there pubbing his book Enough--yet another salvo from the Bill Cosby and Larry Elder crew, in which black America is dressed-down for numerous failings. But Williams got more than he bargained for, as Franken questioned some of his basic premises, as well as his associates at FOX News. Williams became defensive, especially when simple questions stumped him. Historian Peniel E. Joseph probably summed up the problems with Williams, his book, and his ilk, with the following review:

More than 40 years later, prophets such as Baldwin have all but vanished from intellectual discourse, replaced by a chorus of commentators whose gaze has turned decidedly inward. Lacking the political courage and personal compassion to confront the racism, segregation, poverty and violence that so disturbed Baldwin, these post-civil rights critics observe that, for black people, the enemy is us.

It seems however that at the least, Williams "blame-the-victim" routine doesn't end with black folks. In his role of "senior black correspondent" on FOX News, Williams appeared on the O'Reilly Factor to help condemn Iraqi journalist and shoe-thrower Muntader al-Zaidi, and by way all Iraqis, as unappreciative "ingrates."

But on a serious level, how many American lives have been sacrificed to the cause of liberating Iraq? How much money has been spent while they’re not spending their own profits from their oil? American money. So I just think it’s absolutely the act of an ingrate for them to behave in this way. Just unbelievable to me.

And yet Mr. Williams' reaction--given his track record--doesn't seem so unbelievable at all. This notion that the Iraqis are "ungrateful wretches" has been part of a bipartisan American political mantra adopted long ago, something I've touched on in more than one blog. In a page right out of Imperialism and Colonialism 101, the natives are supposed to smile, grin, scrape and give thanks for being "liberated"--at the barrel of a gun. And, like a modern day Gunga Din, the likes of Juan Williams answer the call to hold up that White Man's Burden. Williams had best hope, that when all is said and done, it doesn't end as badly for him as it did poor Gunga.

A more detailed account from ThinkProgress on Juan Williams and all the Iraqis should be "thankful" for below.


Juan Williams: Iraqi Protesters Are ‘Ingrate[s]’ Who Should Appreciate U.S. Invasion

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/16/williams-iraqi-ingrates/

Last night on “The O’Reilly Factor,” host Bill O’Reilly slammed Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush, and said that if he had been there, he “would have physically taken the guy down.” Guest Juan Williams agreed, but he widened his condemnation to Iraqis in general, who he said were behaving like “ingrate[s]” for not appreciating what the United States has done for them:

WILLIAMS: But on a serious level, how many American lives have been sacrificed to the cause of liberating Iraq? How much money has been spent while they’re not spending their own profits from their oil? American money. So I just think it’s absolutely the act of an ingrate for them to behave in this way. Just unbelievable to me.

Last month, National Review’s Andy McCarthy was similarly frustrated by Iraqis’ failure to shower their occupiers with thanks and gratitude:

Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely. And this despite the facts that (a) the U.S. interest in Iraqi democracy remains tenuous…and (b) Americans were assured, when the nation-building enterprise commenced, that oil-rich Iraq would underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf. Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates. That stubborn fact complicates everything.

Even President Bush is confused about Iraqis’ frustration, telling Bob Woodward, “I don’t understand that the Iraqis are not appreciative of what we’ve done for them.” Woodward explained, “He thinks we’ve done this magnificent thing for them. I think he still holds to that position.”

An Oxfam report from February 2008 put into startling focus what the U.S. invasion has really meant for Iraqis:

– More than four million Iraqis forced to flee either to another part of Iraq or abroad.
– Four million Iraqis regularly cannot buy enough food.
– 70 percent are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50 percent in 2003.
– 28 percent of children are malnourished, compared to 19 percent before the 2003 invasion.
– 92 percent of Iraqi children suffer learning problems, mostly due to the climate of fear.

The Brookings Institute’s Iraq index also notes that the national unemployment rate is somewhere between 25 and 40 percent. Fifty-six percent of Iraqis say things in Iraq are going “quite bad” or “very bad.” Sixty percent rate economic conditions as “poor” and 75 percent rate security conditions “poor.”

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Shoe Heard Around the World

"This is your farewell--dog!"

This is a gift from the Iraqis,
This is the farewell kiss you dog.
This is from the widows, the orphans
and those who were killed in Iraq (update 12/15/08)



Those were the words yelled by 28 yr old Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi as he took off his Western imported Nikes shoes and hurled them at a stunned President George W. Bush. The image of the act, which caused the US president to twice duck as if in mortal danger, has made its way around the world. And, depending on who you read, Mr. al-Zaidi is either crazy or a hero. Perhaps as he sat watching the man who was responsible for the wrecking of his country, Mr. al-Zaidi's thoughs were on the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died since the invasion; or maybe he was thinking of the 4 million refugees this war has created; or it could be he was dwelling on the deadly sectarian violence that was inflamed by the occupation; or perhaps his mind was on the senseless destruction of his nation's infrastructure. In truth, those are a fraction of the about 1000 other things that could have occupied Mr. al-Zaidi's mind. Whatever the case, in a bout of sanity (because its the rest of us that accept such affairs as normal who are truly "crazy"), he had a moment of heroic bravery. And in a country where to hit someone with shoes is a deep insult and sharp rebuke, he chose to react through a culturally appropriate theme. Ironic that this same act of defiance was used in April of 2003, that time on the statue of Saddam Hussein--which as it came toppling down was beaten with shoes by jubilant Iraqis.

At least that's how I'd like to imagine it. Who knows...

What's without a doubt however, is that the image of him hurling his weapons of choice in such defiance and anger will go down in history (already Iraqis across the country are picking up their shoes in solidarity), and speak volumes on the legacy of George Bush, his failed doctrine of preemptive war, and the sheer humanitarian madness he has inflicted on the lives of people such as Mr. al-Zaidi. And it should forever put that arrogant mantra (that only an imperialist could utter)--"the grateful Iraqis."

George W. Bush threw bombs at him. He threw back shoes. A fitting farewell.

More in an article below from NYT (Update 12/15/08)




December 15, 2008

Brother Explains Shoe-Tossing Iraqi Journalist’s Anger

By Riyadh Muhammad

http://baghdadbureau.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/brother-is-proud-of-shoe-tossing-iraqi-journalist/



In Sadr City, Maythem al-Zaidi stands before a photograph of his brother Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush. (Photo: Johan Spanner for The New York Times)

BAGHDAD — The brother of Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush during a joint press conference on Sunday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said Monday that he was “proud of his brother — as all Iraqis would be.”

Muntader al-Zaidi remains in Iraqi custody. When his brother, Maythem al-Zaidi, 28, called his cell phone at midnight, a man claiming to be one of the prime minister’s bodyguards answered. Maythem al-Zaidi said that the bodyguard threatened, “that they will get us all.”

Hitting someone with a shoe is a particularly strong rebuke in Iraqi culture. Although the president was uninjured, the incident overshadowed media coverage of the trip in the Arab world. And it has transformed Muntader al-Zaidi into a symbolic figure in the debate about the American military’s presence in Iraq.

Maythem al-Zaidi said his brother had not planned to throw his shoes prior to Sunday. “He was provoked when Mr. Bush said [during the news conference] this is his farewell gift to the Iraqi people,” he said. A colleague of Muntader al-Zaidi’s at al-Baghdadiya satellite channel, however, said the correspondent had been “planning for this from a long time. He told me that his dream is to hit Bush with shoes,” said the man, who would not give his name.

Muntader al-Zaidi appears to have a long-standing dislike of the United States presence in Iraq. He used to finish his reports by saying he was in “the occupied Baghdad.” His brother said that he hates the occupation so strongly that he canceled his wedding, saying: “I will marry when the occupation is over.”

The correspondent for Al Baghdadiya, an independent Iraqi television station, had previously been detained in November 2007 for two weeks by “a particular party” — his brother didn’t reveal whether American or Iraqi –- after videotaping the scene of an improvised explosive device that targeted an American Humvee. He was held again two months later for several hours by the American army without charges, his brother said. Other reports said he had been kidnapped by Shiite militants.

Muntader al-Zaidi was the head of the student union under Saddam Hussein and he earned a diploma as a mechanic from a technical institute before becoming a journalist. He worked at al-Qasim al-Mushterek newspaper, an Iraqi daily founded after the 2003 invasion, then he joined al-Diyar satellite channel, an Iraqi channel founded after the war. Two years later, he joined al-Baghdadiya satellite channel, another Iraqi channel, which is based in Cairo.

Maythem al-Zaidi contacted a judge to ask him if what his brother did is a crime under Iraqi law. The judge told him that he might serve two years in prison or pay a fine for insulting a president of foreign country unless Mr. Bush withdrew the case. “If they manage to imprison Muntader, there are millions of him all over Iraq and the Arab world,” Maythem al-Zaidi said.

Maythem al-Zaidi said has been contacted from about 100 Iraqi and foreign lawyers offering their services free of charge — including Saddam Hussein’s lawyer Khalil al-Dulaymi. When asked if he will accept Mr. al-Dulaymi’s services, he replied, “Why not, we are all Iraqis.”

The Rusafa office of Moktada al-Sadr organized a demonstration in Sadr City to support the shoe thrower. Across Iraq, everyone seems to have an opinion about the case.

According to his brother, Muntader al-Zaidi is “a calm man.” Both of his parents are dead, and he has 10 other siblings. Maythem al-Zaidi said that his brother is politically independent, but several people who know him mentioned that he was a Baathist who turned into a Sadrist after the war.

Meanwhile, al-Baghdadiya satellite channel’s Baghdad bureau chief is not responding to reporters to comment on the incident and he prevented all his staff of doing so.

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O.I.L.- Operation Iraqi LIberation

Anyone still in doubt over what this Iraqi colonial misadventure has been about? While there are many factors to consider, from neoconservative ideologues at PNAC to billions to be made by war profiteers, nothing ties all of these things neatly together like oil. That Iraq sits on one of the largest pool of oil in the region (some estimates put it at only second to Saudi Arabia) is why it was chosen for "liberty" and "freedom" say over...the Democratic Republic of Congo. However for some reason, within the political and corporate media culture, this has become a quiet truism that is best not spoken aloud. For years when this obvious fact was brought up by critics of the Iraq War, they were quickly chided as engaging in "fanciful conspiracies." That the US had gone to war primarily over oil was something only the "loony left" could dream up. So when GOP presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain back in early May inadvertently stated as much in a townhall meeting, saying that dependence on "oil from the Middle East" had sent American "young men and women into conflict,"--a policy he fervently endorses--there was an audible gasp from the media punditocracy, that their venerated "maverick" had let the cat out of the bag.

Last week a new development has turned the bag inside out, leaving it naked for all to see, as four major US oil giants--the Texas-based Exxon Mobile, British BP, Total of France and Royal Dutch Shell, all original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company that was ousted almost 40 years ago from Iraq after a near monopoly since the 1920s--are set to make a dramatic return in a new set of no-bid contracts with the installed and propped up Iraqi regime.

Surprise. Surprise. Finally, after 4,000 American lives, tens of thousands of wounded soldiers, hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, 4 million refugees, and a country wracked by military occupation, bombings, a shredding of infrastructure and organized chaos, Iraq is safe for the European oil conglomerates to colonize all over again.

Though I want to just go on and on about how "I told you so," some good articles on it have already been done it for me, which I share below.


Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back

BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat. The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

full article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/world/middleeast/19iraq.html


Big Oil and the war in Iraq

IT TOOK five years, the deaths of 4,100 US soldiers, and the wounding of 30,000 more to make Iraq safe for Exxon. It is the inescapable open question since the reasons given by President Bush for the invasion and occupation did not exist, neither the weapons of mass destruction nor Saddam Hussein's ties to Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

full article:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/06/24/big_oil_and_the_war_in_iraq/


No Blood for... er... um...: The Oil Majors Take a Little Sip of the Ol' Patrimony

More than five years after the invasion of Iraq - just in case you were still waiting - the oil giants finally hit the front page.

Last Thursday, the New York Times led with this headline: "Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back." And who were these four giants? ExxonMobil, Shell, the French company Total and BP (formerly British Petroleum). What these firms got were mere "service contracts" - as in servicing Iraq's oil fields - not the sort of "production sharing agreements" that President Bush's representatives in Baghdad once dreamed of, and that would have left them in charge of those fields. Still, it was clearly a start. The Times reporter, Andrew E. Kramer, added this little detail: "[The contracts] include a provision that could allow the companies to reap large profits at today's prices: the [Iraqi oil] ministry and companies are negotiating payment in oil rather than cash." And here's the curious thing, exactly these four giants "lost their concessions in Iraq" back in 1972 when that country's oil was nationalized. Hmmm. You'd think the Times might have slapped some kind of "we wuz wrong" label on the piece.

full article:

http://www.truthout.org/article/no-blood-er-um

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Iraq & The Media- The Sixth Year

The five year anniversary of the war in Iraq went by last week. Media highlights included speaking to military figures, politicians and others as they recounted incidents of battle and occupation. What was sorely lacking from most coverage however was the blatant complicity of the media itself. With the exception of investigative journalists like PBS Bill Moyers Buying the War, the media has done little in accounting its own role in the lead up to war--which unfortunately is not as uncommmon as we'd like to think. So it wasn't surprising that when confronted with a bit of truth about Iraq, that does not follow the laid out narrative that both the US government and the media has agreed upon, some news pundits aren't certain how to react. Such was the case on a recent episode of Charlie Rose, where two Iraqi nationals (now living in the US, a journalist and a professor) voiced their opposition to the US invasion and occupation of their country, and recounted the great suffering that had taken place because of it, much to the surprise of their seemingly combative (and disbelieving) host.


Investigative journalist and media critic Glenn Greenwald posted excerpts of the surprisingly frank interview on Salon.com in the article What Can and Cannot Be Spoken on Television. The Iraqis interviewed not only speak out against the Iraqi Occupation, but the entire US history in the region--from its prior support of dictator Saddam Hussein to the Gulf War to the disastrous sanctions era. Rose, who has a constant need to talk over his guests, attempting to correct or translate their words, seems to try to push the conversation where he wishes it would go, and comes off as America's apologist.

ROSE: And obviously, what we want to accomplish on this fifth anniversary of the American invasion, or the coalition invasion of Iraq, is how they see it as Iraqis, five years later.

When asked for an assessment by Charlie Rose:

ALI FADHIL: That's a big question, assessment. Well, basically, probably, I`ll kind of sum it in a few words.

It's -- we have a country where the government is not functioning after five years. We have too many internal problems. And we have the violence increasing day after day.

We have a huge crisis of refugees inside and outside Iraq. We have a total failure of the -- of the civilian -- the civilian structure and what's happening inside. We have the sectarian divisions increasing. We didn't have that before. Now we have it.

So, basically, my assessment is we have a whole nation called Iraq, now it's wiped out.

CHARLIE ROSE: And Iraq is worse off because the United States came?

ALI FADHIL: It's worse off because the United States came to Iraq, definitely, and because the United States did all these mistakes in Iraq.

And:
CHARLIE ROSE: So where do we go from here? Five years after the invasion of Iraq, what is a wise American policy?

ALI FADHIL: Let me start with telling you what is happening right now, what is the American policy right now in Iraq.

It's so shame to say that America is in Iraq right now, and particularly the State Department and also the Pentagon as well, the U.S. Army in Iraq. They're going back to Saddam's policies in everything. . . . If you, you know, name it, name the most successful project of the surge -- outcome of the surge, the (INAUDIBLE) councils. You know, these insurgents, the Sunnis, even Shiites.

CHARLIE ROSE: The so-called awakening.

ALI FADHIL: Awakening council, exactly. They're giving them money to protect their own neighborhoods. Isn't that the same what happened under Saddam? . . .

Anything [Americans] do -- probably even in good intentions -- is bad for us, everything they do, everything. There's nothing they're doing is right.

And that's what is going to happen. It's just prolonging the diaspora of the Iraqis. We're suffering more and more every day. We need, you know, to start the salvation (ph). . .

SINAN ANTOON: The president today said something really obscene to my mind. He said Iraq is witnessing the first Arab uprising against al Qaeda.

We did not have al Qaeda in Iraq before.We had a ruthless dictatorship.


You can read more excerpts of the interview here:

Excerpts of interview with Sinan Antoon and Ali Fadhil

Also view that interview here:


Video Excerpt from Charlie Rose

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Five Years of War- Winter Soldiers Speak

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. Entering its sixth year, the American adventure in Iraq has gone on longer than World War II. It has claimed close to 4,000 US soldiers lives, and wounded some 20,000 more. Iraqi deaths due to war and the indirect results of war, number anywhere from 150,000 to as high as 1 million, with sectarian violence and a shattered infrastructure left in its wake. Some 2 million Iraqis have fled the country, and remain refugees. Another 2.7 million have been scattered throughout Iraq itself, refugees in their own homeland, often living in squalor. In treasure, the war has thus far cost a staggering 500 billion--some $340 million each week--and may grow as large as 3 trillion when all is taken into account. And the most recent attempts to pacify the country, the so-called "surge," has done little more than obscured the dark realties, hoping to stem the bleeding with a bandaid of extra troops.

All of this, and no end in sight.

Last week, some 200 American veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan came togther in Silver Spring, Maryland, to speak out against the war of which they were once a part. Dubbed "Winter Soldier," in remembrance of a similar event that took place during the Vietnam War, the event experienced a near total media blackout except for alternative news outlets. Small excerpts of Winter Soldier 2008 have been reposted here. Click above and in the larger article to listen.

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Billions Over Baghdad

Sometimes a picture speaks for itself, so I won't give much of a foreword here. Just keep two things in mind: (1) Most of this money belonged to the Iraqis- so add reckless theft to our list of gross crimes committed upon that country's populace- and (2) YOUR money is being sucked into this mindless hole of incompetence, colonialism and death- in the tens of $thousands- every second. In case you need a reminder, the countdown clock labeled Cost of the Iraq War is to your right. I guess we're "Spending it over there, so we don't have to spend it here."

Disgusted yet?

Reposted here from Vanity Fair.

Billions over Baghdad

Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency—much of it belonging to the Iraqi people—was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. Following a trail that leads from a safe in one of Saddam's palaces to a house near San Diego, to a P.O. box in the Bahamas, the authors discover just how little anyone cared about how the money was handled.



by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele October 2007

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/10/iraq_billions200710

Hidden in plain sight, 10 miles west of Manhattan, amid a suburban community of middle-class homes and small businesses, stands a fortress-like building shielded by big trees and lush plantings behind an iron fence. The steel-gray structure, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, is all but invisible to the thousands of commuters who whiz by every day on Route 17. Even if they noticed it, they would scarcely guess that it is the largest repository of American currency in the world.

Officially, 100 Orchard Street is referred to by the acronym eroc, for the East Rutherford Operations Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The brains of the New York Fed may lie in Manhattan, but xeroc is the beating heart of its operations—a secretive, heavily guarded compound where the bank processes checks, makes wire transfers, and receives and ships out its most precious commodity: new and used paper money.

On Tuesday, June 22, 2004, a tractor-trailer truck turned off Route 17 onto Orchard Street, stopped at a guard station for clearance, and then entered the eroc compound. What happened next would have been the stuff of routine—procedures followed countless times. Inside an immense three-story cavern known as the currency vault, the truck's next cargo was made ready for shipment. With storage space to rival a Wal-Mart's, the currency vault can reportedly hold upwards of $60 billion in cash. Human beings don't perform many functions inside the vault, and few are allowed in; a robotic system, immune to human temptation, handles everything. On that Tuesday in June the machines were especially busy. Though accustomed to receiving and shipping large quantities of cash, the vault had never before processed a single order of this magnitude: $2.4 billion in $100 bills.

Under the watchful eye of bank employees in a glass-enclosed control room, and under the even steadier gaze of a video surveillance system, pallets of shrink-wrapped bills were lifted out of currency bays by unmanned "storage and retrieval vehicles" and loaded onto conveyors that transported the 24 million bills, sorted into "bricks," to the waiting trailer. No human being would have touched this cargo, which is how the Fed wants it: the bank aims to "minimize the handling of currency by eroc employees and create an audit trail of all currency movement from initial receipt through final disposition."

Forty pallets of cash, weighing 30 tons, were loaded that day. The tractor-trailer turned back onto Route 17 and after three miles merged onto a southbound lane of the New Jersey Turnpike, looking like any other big rig on a busy highway. Hours later the truck arrived at Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, D.C. There the seals on the truck were broken, and the cash was off-loaded and counted by Treasury Department personnel. The money was transferred to a C-130 transport plane. The next day, it arrived in Baghdad.

That transfer of cash to Iraq was the largest one-day shipment of currency in the history of the New York Fed. It was not, however, the first such shipment of cash to Iraq. Beginning soon after the invasion and continuing for more than a year, $12 billion in U.S. currency was airlifted to Baghdad, ostensibly as a stopgap measure to help run the Iraqi government and pay for basic services until a new Iraqi currency could be put into people's hands. In effect, the entire nation of Iraq needed walking-around money, and Washington mobilized to provide it.

What Washington did not do was mobilize to keep track of it. By all accounts, the New York Fed and the Treasury Department exercised strict surveillance and control over all of this money while it was on American soil. But after the money was delivered to Iraq, oversight and control evaporated. Of the $12 billion in U.S. banknotes delivered to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, at least $9 billion cannot be accounted for. A portion of that money may have been spent wisely and honestly; much of it probably wasn't. Some of it was stolen.

Once the money arrived in Iraq it entered a free-for-all environment where virtually anyone with fingers could take some of it. Moreover, the company that was hired to keep tabs on the outflow of money existed mainly on paper. Based in a private home in San Diego, it was a shell corporation with no certified public accountants. Its address of record is a post-office box in the Bahamas, where it is legally incorporated. That post-office box has been associated with shadowy offshore activities.

Coalition of the Billing
The first shipment of cash to Iraq took place on April 11, 2003—it consisted of $20 million in $1, $5, and $10 bills. It was arranged in small bills on the theory that these could quickly be circulated into the Iraqi economy "to prevent a monetary and financial collapse," as one former Treasury official put it. Those were the days when American officials worried that the gravest threat facing Iraq might be low-grade civilian unrest in Baghdad. They didn't have a clue as to the power of the insurgency that was to come. The initial $20 million came exclusively from Iraqi assets that had been frozen in U.S. banks as long ago as the Gulf War, in 1990. Subsequent airlifts of cash also included billions from Iraqi oil revenues controlled by the United Nations. After the creation of the Development Fund for Iraq (D.F.I.)—a kind of holding pit of money to be spent for "purposes benefitting the people of Iraq"—the U.N. turned over control of Iraq's oil billions to the United States.

When the U.S. military delivered the cash to Baghdad, the money passed into the hands of an entirely new set of players—the staff of the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority. To many Americans, the initials C.P.A. would soon be as familiar as those of long-established government agencies such as D.O.D. or hud. But the C.P.A. was anything but a conventional agency. And, as events would show, its initials would have nothing in common with "certified public accountant." The C.P.A. had been hastily created to serve as the interim government of Iraq, but its legality and paternity were murky from the start. The Authority was in effect established by edict outside the traditional framework of American government. Not subject to the usual restrictions and oversight of most agencies, the C.P.A. during the 14 months of its existence would become a sump for American and Iraqi money as it disappeared into the hands of Iraqi ministries and American contractors. The Coalition of the Willing, as one commentator observed, had turned into the Coalition of the Billing.

The first mention of the C.P.A. came on April 16, 2003, in a so-called freedom message to the Iraqi people by General Tommy R. Franks, commander of the coalition forces. A week after mobs ransacked Iraq's National Museum of its treasures, unchallenged by American troops, General Franks arrived in Baghdad for a six-hour whirlwind tour. He met with his commanders in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces, held a video conference with President Bush, and then quickly flew off. "Our stay in Iraq will be temporary," General Franks wrote, "no longer than it takes to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and to establish stability and help Iraqis form a functioning government that respects the rule of law." With that in mind, General Franks wrote that he created the Coalition Provisional Authority "to exercise powers of government temporarily, and as necessary, especially to provide security, to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid and to eliminate weapons of mass destruction." Three weeks later, on May 8, 2003, the U.S. and British ambassadors to the United Nations sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council, effectively delivering the C.P.A. to the United Nations as a fait accompli.

The day before, President Bush had appointed L. Paul Bremer III, a retired diplomat, as presidential envoy to Iraq and the president's "personal representative," with the understanding that he would become the C.P.A. administrator. Bremer had held State Department posts in Afghanistan, Norway, and the Netherlands; had served as an assistant to Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig; and had closed out his diplomatic career in 1989 as ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism. More recently, he had been the chairman and chief executive officer of a crisis-management business called Marsh Crisis Consulting. Despite his State Department background, Bremer had been selected by the Pentagon, which had elbowed aside all contenders for authority in post-invasion Iraq. The C.P.A. itself was a creature of the Pentagon, and it would be Pentagon personnel who did the C.P.A.'s hiring.

Over the next year, a compliant Congress gave $1.6 billion to Bremer to administer the C.P.A. This was over and above the $12 billion in cash that the C.P.A. had been given to disburse from Iraqi oil revenues and unfrozen Iraqi funds. Few in Congress actually had any idea about the true nature of the C.P.A. as an institution. Lawmakers had never discussed the establishment of the C.P.A., much less authorized it—odd, given that the agency would be receiving taxpayer dollars. Confused members of Congress believed that the C.P.A. was a U.S. government agency, which it was not, or that at the very least it had been authorized by the United Nations, which it had not. One congressional funding measure makes reference to the C.P.A. as "an entity of the United States Government"—highly inaccurate. The same congressional measure states that the C.P.A. was "established pursuant to United Nations Security Council resolutions"—just as inaccurate. The bizarre truth, as a U.S. District Court judge would point out in an opinion, is that "no formal document … plainly establishes the C.P.A. or provides for its formation."

Accountable really to no one, its finances "off the books" for U.S. government purposes, the C.P.A. provided an unprecedented opportunity for fraud, waste, and corruption involving American government officials, American contractors, renegade Iraqis, and many others. In its short life more than $23 billion would pass through its hands. And that didn't include potentially billions more in oil shipments the C.P.A. neglected to meter. At stake was an ocean of cash that would evaporate whenever the C.P.A. did. All parties understood that there was a sell-by date, and that it was everyone for himself. An Iraqi hospital administrator told The Guardian of England that, when he arrived to sign a contract, the army officer representing the C.P.A. had crossed out the original price and doubled it. "The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1 million) was his retirement package." Alan Grayson, a Washington, D.C., lawyer for whistle-blowers who have worked for American contractors in Iraq, says simply that during that first year under the C.P.A. the country was turned into "a free-fraud zone."

Bremer has expressed general satisfaction with the C.P.A.'s work while at the same time acknowledging that mistakes were made. "I believe the C.P.A. discharged its responsibilities to manage these Iraqi funds on behalf of the Iraqi people," he told a congressional committee. "With the benefit of hindsight, I would have made some decisions differently. But on the whole, I think we made great progress under some of the most difficult conditions imaginable, including putting Iraq on the path to democracy."

The Bottomless Vault
To be fair, the C.P.A. really did need money desperately, and it really did need to start spreading it among the traumatized Iraqi population. It also needed to jump-start Iraq's basic services. As the C.P.A. demanded ever greater amounts of cash, the pallets of $1, $5, and $10 bills were soon replaced by bundles of $100 bills. During the C.P.A.'s little more than a year of life, the New York Federal Reserve Bank made 21 shipments of currency to Iraq totaling $11,981,531,000. All told, the Fed would ship 281 million individual banknotes, in bricks weighing a total of 363 tons.

After arriving in Baghdad, some of the cash was shipped to outlying regions, but most of it stayed in the capital, where it was delivered to Iraqi banks, to installations such as Camp Victory, the mammoth U.S. Army facility adjacent to the Baghdad airport, and to Saddam's former presidential palace, in the Green Zone, which had become the home of Bremer's C.P.A. and the makeshift Iraqi government. At the palace the cash disappeared into a vault in the basement. Few people ever saw the vault, but the word was that during one short period it held as much as $3 billion. Whatever the figure, it was a major repository of the banknotes from America during the brief time the cash was under the care of the C.P.A. The money flowed in and out rapidly. When someone needed cash, a unit called the Program Review Board, composed of senior C.P.A. officials, reviewed the request and decided whether to recommend a disbursement. A military officer would then present that authorization to personnel at the vault.

Even those who picked up large sums usually did not actually see the vault. Once a disbursement had been made, the cash was brought to an adjoining room for pickup. This "secure room," as one military officer called it, looked a lot like a vault itself: a thick metal door at the entrance, with the room beyond starkly furnished with only a table and chairs. The table would be piled high with cash. An authorized officer would sign papers for the money, then begin carting it upstairs—sometimes in sacks or metal boxes—to the Iraqi ministry or C.P.A. office that had requested it. Upon turning over the cash, the officer would be required to obtain a receipt—nothing more.

C.P.A. officials tried to keep a rough running tab on the amount disbursed to individual Iraqi agencies such as the Ministry of Finance ($7.7 billion). But there was little detail, nothing specific, on how the money was actually used. The system basically operated on "trust and faith," as one former C.P.A. official put it. Once the cash passed into the hands of the Iraqis or any other party, no one knew where it went. The C.P.A. turned over $1.5 billion in cash to Iraqi banks, for instance, but later auditors could account for less than $500 million. The United Nations retained a team of auditors to look over American shoulders. They didn't see much, because they were largely cut off from access while the C.P.A. held power. As a report by the U.N.'s accounting consultant, KPMG, noted dryly, "We encountered difficulties in performing our duties and meeting with key C.P.A. personnel."

"There was corruption everywhere," said one former military officer who worked with the C.P.A. in Baghdad in the months after the invasion. Some of the Iraqis who were put in charge of ministries after Saddam's fall had never run a government agency before. Their inexperience aside, he said, they lived in constant fear of losing their jobs or their lives. All many cared about, he added, was taking care of themselves. "You could see that a lot of them were trying their best to get a quick retirement fund before they were ousted or killed," he added. "You just get what you can while you're in that position of power. Instead of trying to build the nation, you build yourself."

Did any withdrawals from the vault pay for secret activities by government personnel? It is an obvious possibility. Much of the cash was clearly destined for American contractors or Iraqi subcontractors. Sometimes the Iraqis came to the palace to collect their cash; other times, when they were reluctant to show up at the American compound, U.S. military personnel had to deliver it themselves. One of the riskier jobs for some U.S. military men was to fill up a car with bags of cash and drive the money to contractors in Baghdad neighborhoods, handing it over like a postal worker delivering mail.

‘Fraud" was simply another word for "business as usual." Of 8,206 "guards" drawing paychecks courtesy of the C.P.A., only 602 warm bodies could in fact be found; the other 7,604 were ghost employees. Halliburton, the government contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, charged the C.P.A. for 42,000 daily meals for soldiers while in fact serving only 14,000 of them. Cash was handed out from the backs of pickup trucks. On one occasion a C.P.A. official received $6.75 million in cash with the expectation he would shell it out in one week. Another time, the C.P.A. decided to spend $500 million on "security." No specifics, just a half-billion dollars for security, with this cryptic explanation: "Composition TBD"—that is, "to be determined."

The pervasiveness of this Why-should-I-care? attitude was driven home in an exchange with retired admiral David Oliver, the C.P.A.'s director of management and budget. Oliver was asked by a BBC reporter what had happened to all the cash airlifted to Baghdad:

Oliver: "I have no idea—I can't tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn't—nor do I actually think it's important."

Q: "Not important?"

Oliver: "No. The coalition—and I think it was between 300 and 600 people, civilians—and you want to bring in 3,000 auditors to make sure money's being spent?"

Q: "Yes, but the fact is that billions of dollars have disappeared without a trace."

Oliver: "Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah, I understand. I'm saying what difference does it make?"

The difference it made was that some American contractors correctly believed they could walk off with as much money as they could carry. The circumstances that surround the handling of comparatively small sums help explain the billions that ultimately vanished. In the south-central region of Iraq a contracting officer stored $2 million in a safe in his bathroom. One agent kept $678,000 in an unsecured footlocker. Another agent turned over some $23 million to his team of "paying agents" to deliver to contractors, but documentation could be found for only $6.3 million of it. One project officer received $350,000 to fund human-rights projects, but in the end could account for less than $200,000 of it. Two C.P.A. agents left Iraq without accounting for two payments of $715,000 and $777,000. The money has never been found.

To Frank Willis, a senior adviser to the Iraqi transportation ministry, the presence of so much cash circulating so freely gave the Green Zone a "Wild West" feel. A moderate Republican who worked for Reagan and voted for George W. Bush, Willis spent many years in executive roles in the State Department and the Department of Transportation before leaving government service in 1985. He was a top executive of a health institute in Oklahoma when, in 2003, an old friend from Washington called and asked if he would come to Iraq to help the C.P.A. get the various transportation systems running again.

"You've got to be crazy," Willis told him at first. He says he was talked into going for 30 days, but once in Baghdad became caught up in the work and stayed for six grueling months. Willis says he wasn't there a month before he felt the way things were being done was "terribly wrong." One afternoon he returned to his office to find piles and piles of shrink-wrapped $100 bills stacked on a table. "This just got wheelbarrowed in," one of his American colleagues explained. "What do you think of two million bucks?" The money had been "checked out" of Saddam's old vault in the basement, two floors below, in order to pay a U.S. contractor hired by the C.P.A. to provide security.

The neat bundles of cash looked almost like play money, and the temptation to handle them was irresistible. "We were all in the room passing those things around and having fun," Willis remembers. He and his colleagues played a game of football, tossing the bricks back and forth. "You could spin them but not throw a spiral," Willis says with a laugh. When he called the American contractor to come get his money, Willis advised him, "You better bring a gunnysack."

"Integrity Is a Core Principle"
The American contractor needing the gunnysack was a company called Custer Battles. The name was derived not from Little Big Horn but from the names of the company's owners, Scott K. Custer and Michael J. Battles. Both were former army rangers in their mid-30s, and Battles also had once been a C.I.A. operative. The pair showed up on the streets of Baghdad with the blessing of the White House at invasion's end, looking for a way to do business. At the time, the only American civilians who could gain access to the city were those approved by President Bush's staff.

The Battles half of the team brought the White House access, secured when Michael Battles became the G.O.P.-backed candidate in the 2002 Rhode Island congressional primary for the privilege of losing to the Democratic incumbent, Patrick Kennedy. Battles not only lost the primary but was fined by the Federal Election Commission for misrepresenting campaign contributions. Nevertheless, he forged important political connections. His contributors included Haley Barbour, the longtime Washington power broker and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, who is now governor of Mississippi, and Frederic V. Malek, a former special assistant to President Nixon, who survived the Watergate scandal and went on to become an insider in the Reagan administration and both Bush administrations.

The C.P.A. awarded Custer and Battles one of its first no-bid contracts—$16.5 million to protect civilian aircraft flights, of which at the time there were few, into Baghdad International Airport. The company faced immediate obstacles: Custer and Battles didn't have any money, they didn't have a viable business, and they didn't have any employees. Bremer's C.P.A. had overlooked these shortcomings and forked over $2 million anyway, in cash, to get them started, simply ignoring long-standing requirements that the government certify that a contractor has the capacity to fulfill a contract. That first $2 million cash infusion was followed shortly by a second. Over the next year Custer Battles would secure more than $100 million in Iraq contracts. The company even set up an internal Office of Corporate Integrity. "Integrity is a core principle of Custer Battles' corporate values," Scott Custer stated in a press release.

The U.S. business community was impressed by this upstart. In May 2004, Ernst & Young, the global accounting firm, announced the finalists for its New England Entrepreneur of the Year Awards, honoring an ability "to innovate, develop, and cultivate groundbreaking business models, products, and services." Among the honorees were Scott Custer and Michael Battles.

Four months later, in September 2004, the air force issued an order barring Custer Battles from receiving any new government contracts until 2009. The company had come to epitomize the way business was done in Baghdad. Custer Battles had billed the government $400,000 for electricity that cost $74,000. It had billed $432,000 for a food order that cost $33,000. It had charged the C.P.A. for leased equipment that was stolen, and had submitted forged invoices for reimbursement—all the while moving millions of dollars into offshore bank accounts. In one instance, the company claimed ownership of forklifts used to transport the C.P.A.'s cash (among other things) around the Baghdad airport. But up until the war the forklifts had been the property of Iraqi Airways. They were "liberated," along with the Iraqi people, following hostilities. Custer Battles seized them, painted over the old name, and transferred ownership to its offshore businesses. The forklifts were then leased back to Custer Battles for thousands of dollars a month, a cost that Custer Battles passed along to the C.P.A. In 2006, a federal-court jury in Virginia ordered the company to pay $10 million in damages and penalties for defrauding the government. The jury found more than three dozen instances of fraud in which Custer Battles used shell companies in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere to manufacture phony invoices and pad its bills. During the same period Battles personally withdrew $3 million from the company coffers as a kind of bonus—or, as he put it, "a draw." The jury decision in the whistle-blower lawsuit was subsequently overturned when the trial judge set the verdict aside, pointing out that the C.P.A. was not in fact a U.S.-government entity and hence Custer Battles could not be tried under the federal fraud act. That decision is under appeal.

The NorthStar Contract
How can billions of dollars simply vanish? Wasn't there any accounting mechanism in place to keep track of the money?

La Jolla, California, is about as far away from Iraq in both distance and mind-set as one can get. The house at 5468 Soledad Road is a two-story dwelling with six bedrooms and five and a half baths, a typical California home of beige stucco under a red tiled roof. The neighborhood is lush and well kept. But in one respect 5468 Soledad is not a typical suburban house at all.

On October 25, 2003, the C.P.A. awarded a $1.4 million contract "to provide accountant and audit services" to help "in the management and accounting of the Development Fund for Iraq." In other words, the purpose was to help Bremer and the C.P.A. keep tabs on the billions of dollars under their control, and to help make sure that the money was properly spent. The one-year C.P.A. contract was awarded to a company called NorthStar Consultants.

When a request was made to the U.S. government for a copy of this contract, officials at the Pentagon, which has oversight, dragged their feet for weeks. The document they eventually supplied had been strategically redacted. Nearly all the information about the contractor had been blacked out, including the name and title of the company officer who had executed the contract, the name of the person to call for information about the company, the last four digits of the company's phone number, and the name of the U.S.-government official who had awarded the contract in the first place. But by cross-referencing public records and other sources it was possible to fill in some of the missing data. One path led to 5468 Soledad Road.

The house is owned by Thomas A. and Konsuelo Howell, according to San Diego County records. The couple apparently bought it new in 1999. State records indicate that several companies operate from the house. One of them is called International Financial Consulting, Inc., though it isn't clear what this company actually does. Incorporated in 1998, I.F.C. was described as a venture in "business consulting," according to papers Howell filed with the state. The Howells are listed as the only directors.

Another company operating out of 5468 Soledad is called Kota Industries, Inc., whose stated business is the "sale of furniture, home furnishings, flooring," according to California records. Numerous business directories in the San Diego area ascribe similar activities to Kota, listing it as a remodeling, repairing, or restoration contractor. One directory describes its specialty as "kitchen, bathroom, basement remodeling." Again, the Howells are the only officers and directors.

In January 2004, in the business-names index of San Diego County, Thomas Howell indicated that a third company was now based at 5468 Soledad, noting that it was owned by International Financial Consulting. This new company was NorthStar.

How did someone whose line of work includes home remodeling end up getting the contract to audit the billions being airlifted to Iraq? Thomas Howell is 60; he and his wife have lived in San Diego for at least two decades. Over the years, the couple has also maintained addresses in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Laredo, Texas. Neighbors describe the Howells as pleasant, but can add little else. "I know them, but I don't know what they do," said one. "That's all I can tell you." Two others could say only that they saw the Howells occasionally in the neighborhood. Were they aware that a company with an Iraqi contract had operated from the house? "Really?" said one. "No. I didn't know that."

Thomas Howell refuses to discuss the NorthStar contract in detail. A telephone exchange with him, reached at 5468 Soledad Road, went as follows.

A woman answered, "Kota Industries."

"Could I speak with Mr. Thomas Howell?"

"May I ask who is calling?" the woman asked.

"My name is Jim Steele."

"Wait just a second," the woman said.

A few moments later, a man came on the line. "Tom Howell," he said.

"My name is Jim Steele, and I am a writer with the magazine Vanity Fair. I would like to talk to you about NorthStar Consultants."

Howell said, "Well, let me find a contact who can talk all this stuff with you. What is your phone number, Jim?"

Howell repeated the number and added, "O.K. Let me get somebody who can discuss all this stuff for you."

"I'd just like to make sure here. Aren't you president of the company?"

"That's right," said Howell.

"But you can't … "

"Well, I'm not … I can't … You want to talk about the D.F.I. [Development Fund for Iraq] and that sort of stuff?" asked Howell.

"Well, yeah."

"O.K.," Howell replied, "I'll get someone who's authorized to talk about all that. I'll have them give you a call or I'll call you and give you their number."

"Is this the military or your lawyer?"

"The military," said Howell, abruptly ending the conversation with "O.K. Thanks. Good-bye."

The next attempt was a visit to Howell's home the following day. A stylishly dressed woman emerged from behind a locked fence. "May I help you?" she asked. The woman confirmed that she was Konsuelo Howell, and explained that it would be impossible to speak with her husband. "He is out of the country."

He never did call back with the name of a Pentagon official "authorized" to speak about NorthStar. Nor did anyone from the Pentagon call. When a Pentagon public-affairs officer was queried about who might be able to discuss the contract, the officer said she needed a name, which, as it turned out, only Howell could provide. The Pentagon also failed to respond to a request for the information deleted from the NorthStar contract and the name of the person who had ordered it deleted.

When Howell was contacted again, three months later, he stated that the Department of Defense had told him that "they didn't have anybody anymore specifically tasked with answering these questions." As far as D.O.D. was concerned, Howell added, the issue was "closed." Once again he refused to discuss the NorthStar contract in any detail: "The way I normally work with all my clients is: my work is confidential," he said. "If they want to let it out, that's fine. But I work for them. It's their business." Howell did say that NorthStar was his one and only U.S. government contract. How did he land it? "I saw it published on the Web, that it was out for bids," he said.

As for how much auditing NorthStar really did in Iraq, the missing billions provide the best answer. The company did have personnel in Baghdad, though how many, and for how long, and for what purpose, is not known—another point Howell declines to discuss. Under the terms of C.P.A. Regulation No. 2, signed by Bremer on June 15, 2003, money coming into Iraq was supposed to be tracked by an "independent certified public accounting firm." Howell was not a certified public accountant, nor were any of the people who worked for him. Bremer seems to have been unaware of this detail. When he was asked at a congressional hearing earlier this year about NorthStar, he answered, "I don't know what kind of firm it was, other than it was an accounting firm." Would it upset him, a congressman asked, if he found out there were no accountants on NorthStar's staff? "It would," Bremer answered, "if it were true."

It is true. And rather than reissue the contract to a certified public accountant, someone in the government contract office simply eliminated the requirement, thereby making Howell eligible for the work.

The Baghdad-Bahamas Connection
When an unknown official at the Pentagon meticulously went through the NorthStar contract and used a thick-tipped marker to black out Thomas Howell's name, title, office address, and phone number, he or she neglected to conceal one of the most intriguing aspects of the contract: NorthStar's mailing address. It was P.O. Box N-3813 in Nassau, in the Bahamas.

High on a hill in Nassau, the main post office commands panoramic views of the capital city—the pink stuccoed Parliament building, bustling Bay Street with its hordes of tourists, and, beyond it, the giant cruise ships that dock in Nassau's harbor. Just as you enter the post office, on a sprawling plaza beneath an overhang offering protection from the tropical sun and rain, there stand row after row of metal boxes, each bearing the capital letter N followed by a series of numbers. These are the private post-office boxes of Nassau. Because there is no home delivery in the city, it is the way people in the capital get their mail.

Box N-3813, four inches wide by five inches high, looks like all the other post-office boxes. It harbors many secrets that its users want to keep. No one knows whether anyone at the C.P.A. or the Pentagon questioned why one of its contractors used an offshore post-office box. It is undeniably true, however, that foreigners often use post-office boxes in the Bahamas and other tax havens for three purposes: to conceal assets, to avoid taxes, and to launder money. NorthStar would not be at all unusual among Iraq contractors in setting up its affairs this way. Post-office boxes in tax havens around the world have been flooded with contractor business based in Iraq.

Box N-3813, it turns out, has been the locus for all sorts of transactions by Americans and others looking to move money offshore. In addition to Howell's NorthStar, this particular box also served as the address of record for a man named Patrick Thomson and for his Bahamian business called Lions Gate Management. Both figured prominently in one of the more spectacular offshore frauds in recent years, the collapse of Evergreen Security. The Caribbean-based Evergreen enticed thousands of investors, many of them U.S. retirees, to pour money into its so-called tax-sheltered offshore funds, with the promise of handsome returns. Some of the money came from hundreds of Caribbean trusts for which Thomson acted as trustee. A Ponzi scheme masquerading as a mutual fund, Evergreen siphoned $200 million from investors in the United States and two dozen other countries. One of its ringleaders was William J. Zylka, a New Jersey "con artist who falsified his background, credentials and wealth in order to perpetrate elaborate schemes," according to court documents. He pocketed $27.7 million of Evergreen's money.

Throughout the looting of Evergreen, Thomson was one of the firm's three directors. During that time he also arranged for Howell to establish the same Nassau post-office box as NorthStar's legal home. Identified in Nassau as a member of one of Scotland's oldest publishing families, Thomson has operated out of one or more office buildings in the heart of Nassau for many years. Like most of those in the shadowy world of offshore deals, he has generally kept a low profile, the scandal over Evergreen Security being the one great exception. Thomson incorporated NorthStar for Howell in the Bahamas in January of 1998, as what is known as an "international business company," or I.B.C. Despite their impressive name, I.B.C.'s are little more than paper operations. As a rule, they don't carry on any business; they are empty vessels that can be used for anything. They have no real chief executive officer or board of directors, and they don't publish financial statements. An I.B.C.'s books, if there are any, can be kept anywhere in the world, but no one can inspect them. I.B.C.'s aren't required to file annual reports or disclose the identity of their owners. They're shells, operating in total secrecy. In the last two decades, they have sprouted by the hundreds of thousands in tax havens worldwide.

In a telephone interview, Thomson discussed with great reluctance his role in creating NorthStar for Thomas Howell. How did they meet?

"I believe I was introduced to him through a friend with Citibank," Thomson replied. "I believe Howell used to work for Citibank." He said it was his recollection that Howell initially established NorthStar because of some consulting work he was doing in the Far East, not the Middle East. "This was before the Iraq war started," he noted. "All we did was supply a company name." Thomson said he had had no contact with Howell in years. He had heard that Howell was in Iraq, but declined to discuss the matter further.

Turning Off the Spigot
By the spring of 2004 the clock was winding down for L. Paul Bremer and the C.P.A. Within several months—on June 30—the Authority was scheduled to turn government operations over to the Iraqis, at least formally. There was palpable anxiety among officials and contractors about what would happen under the new Iraqi regime, and they launched an aggressive effort to get as much money into the pipeline as possible. On April 26, another shipment of cash-laden pallets, this one holding $750 million, arrived at Baghdad International Airport. On May 18 the Fed made a $1 billion shipment, which was followed on June 22 by the biggest single shipment ever made by the Fed anywhere—$2.4 billion. Another $1.6 billion arrived three days later, bringing the total of cash shipments to Iraq to $5 billion in the C.P.A.'s final three months.

The C.P.A. sought to make one more huge withdrawal. On Monday, June 28, as Bremer stole away from Baghdad unannounced—two days ahead of the scheduled handover of authority—another C.P.A. official put in hurried pleas to the Federal Reserve Bank for an additional $1 billion infusion, hoping to get the money before an Iraqi provisional government came to power. Internal e-mails from the Federal Reserve Bank show that the requests for money came from Don Davis, an air-force colonel serving as the C.P.A. comptroller and manager of the Development Fund for Iraq. But the Fed would have no part of the plan. Because Bremer had already "transferred authority (which is being reported in the press as 10:26 a.m. in Baghdad)," a Fed official explained, "the C.P.A. no longer had control over Iraq's assets."

In one of his last official acts before leaving Baghdad, Bremer issued an order—prepared by the Pentagon, he says—declaring that all coalition-force members "shall be immune from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their Sending States." Contractors also got the same get-out-of-jail-free card. According to Bremer's order, "contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal process with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Contract or any sub-contract thereto." The Iraqi people, who had had no say over Saddam Hussein's illegal conduct during his dictatorship, would have no say over illegal conduct by Americans in their new democracy.

And the "Sending State" itself is not interested in pursuing misconduct. With the exception of a few low-level individuals, the Bush administration's Justice Department has resolutely avoided the prosecution of corporate fraud stemming from the occupation of Iraq.

"In our fifth year in the war in Iraq," according to Alan Grayson, the attorney for whistle-blowers, "the Bush administration has not litigated a single case against any war profiteer under the False Claims Act." This at a time, Grayson told a congressional committee, when "billions of dollars are missing and many billions more wasted." Grayson knows what he is talking about. He represented the whistle-blowers in the Custer Battles case brought under the False Claims Act—a case in which the Justice Department refused to get involved, and the only one that has gone to trial.

There is no true method of calculating the human cost of the war in Iraq. The monetary cost, grossly inflated by theft and corruption, is another matter. One simple piece of data puts this into perspective: to date, America has spent twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as it did to rebuild Japan—an industrialized country three times Iraq's size, two of whose cities had been incinerated by atomic bombs. Understanding how and why this happened will take many years—if understanding comes at all. There has been no rush to explain even this one small part of the story, that of the missing Iraqi billions. No one in the U.S. government wants to talk about NorthStar Consultants, much less about the money that disappeared. Bradford R. Higgins was the C.P.A.'s chief financial officer, on loan from the State Department, where he is assistant secretary for resource management and chief financial officer. Higgins says it was "a Department of Defense–managed operation"; he says that "I don't know anyone at NorthStar" and that he did not oversee its operations. The C.P.A.'s comptroller and D.F.I. fund manager during the NorthStar days in 2003 was air-force colonel Don Davis. Through the air-force public-affairs office in the Pentagon, Davis declined to comment. L. Paul Bremer III, who wrote a 400-page book on his experiences as the C.P.A.'s administrator, stated in an interview that he had no input in the decision to hire NorthStar. He explained that "all of the contracting was done, by order of the secretary of defense, by the department of the army. They were our contracting arm … I don't think I ever heard of NorthStar until some questions came up after I left." Nor did he have any dealings with NorthStar's Howell, he said. "If I met him, I have no memory of it." Queries sent repeatedly to the army's public-affairs desk in Baghdad and the Pentagon have gone unanswered, as have those to the office of the secretary of defense.

The simple truth about the missing money is the same one that applies to so much else about the American occupation of Iraq. The U.S. government never did care about accounting for those Iraqi billions and it doesn't care now. It cares only about ensuring that an accounting does not occur.

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Blackwater- Making a Killing in Iraq

On September 16 a heavily armed State Department convoy guarded by Blackwater USA gave orders for a vehicle to move off the road. Somewhere in the chaotic traffic situation that always happens when US convoys rush through Iraqi streets, pushing everyone else off, the vehicle mistook directions and veered back onto the road. The Blackwater USA guards immediately opened fire, shooting at the vehicle and indiscriminately into the heavily populated area. "I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot," said Iraqi lawyer Hassan Jabar Salman, who was shot four times in the back. "But still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about 10 leaping in fear from a minibus--he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him. She jumped out after him, and she was killed." Some 20+ Iraqi civilians would end up dead; dozens more were badly wounded. Blackwater would at first claim a car bomb had gone off, and that they were in a firefight, and the initial vehicle was packed with insurgents. Turned out however that the only people firing were Blackwater; there was never a car bomb; and the drivers of the initial vehicle that was first struck were not insurgents, but an Iraqi man, woman and infant child. Witnesses say the bodies of the mother and child were melded together by the flames that had engulfed their vehicle.



I've written on Blackwater before, in a previous blog titled Attack of the Clones: Blackwater, Emergency Powers & the Endangered Republic. In that article I warned about the rise of the world's largest mercenary outfit, its links to the Bush administration's ever-increasing claims of executive powers, and the dangers such politically-connected private armies pose to any Republic. However Blackwater has been helping sow chaos in another country--or what's left of it--as it has literally terrorized the people of Iraq. From the circumstances that would lead to the decimation of Fullujah (a key marker of the Iraqi Insurgency) to indiscriminate, random, wanton and reckless lawless killings of Iraqis, Blackwater USA has somehow found itself in the middle. Just today, McClatchy Newspapers released a finding that in a separate incident, at the very same time that General Patreaus sat before Congress touting "progress" of the so-called surge, Blackwater guards shot 43 unarmed Iraqi civilians, killing 16. And what's worse is that through its links to powerbrokers in the Bush administration, it is making a killing--literally--by raking in over a billion of our tax dollars.

The person who has probably done the most to bring Blackwater to light is Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. In the wake of this most recent Blackwater scandal, he's written a series of recent articles. One of them is below.

Making a Killing
By Jeremy Scahill, The Nation

September 27 , 2007

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071015/scahill

It's being described as "Baghdad's bloody Sunday." On September 16 a heavily armed State Department convoy guarded by Blackwater USA was whizzing down the wrong side of the road near Nisour Square in the congested Mansour neighborhood in the Iraqi capital. Iraqi police scrambled to block off traffic to allow the convoy to pass. In the chaos, an Iraqi vehicle entered the square, reportedly failing to heed a policeman's warning fast enough.

The Blackwater operatives, protecting their American principal, a senior State Department official, opened fire on the vehicle, killing the driver. According to witnesses, Blackwater troops then launched some sort of grenade at the car, setting it ablaze. But inside the vehicle was not a small sect from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia or the Mahdi Army, the "armed insurgents" Blackwater described killing in its official statement on the incident.

It was a young Iraqi family -- man, woman and infant -- whose crime appeared to be panicking in a chaotic traffic situation. Witnesses say the bodies of the mother and child were melded together by the flames that had engulfed their vehicle.

Gunfire rang out in Nisour Square as people fled for their lives. Witnesses described a horrifying scene of indiscriminate shooting by the Blackwater guards. In all, as many as twenty-eight Iraqis may have been killed, and doctors say the toll could climb, as some victims remain in critical condition. A company spokesperson said Blackwater's forces "acted lawfully and appropriately" and "heroically defended American lives in a war zone."

Blackwater's version of events is hotly disputed, not only by the Iraqi government, which says it has video to prove the shooting was unprovoked, but also by survivors of the attack. "I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot," said Iraqi lawyer Hassan Jabar Salman, who was shot four times in the back during the incident.

"But still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about 10 leaping in fear from a minibus -- he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him. She jumped out after him, and she was killed."

Salman says he was driving behind the Blackwater convoy when it stopped. Witnesses say some sort of explosion had gone off in the distance, too far away to have been perceived as a threat. He said Blackwater guards ordered him to turn his vehicle around and leave the scene. Shortly after, the shooting began. "Why had they opened fire?" he asked. "I do not know. No one -- I repeat no one -- had fired at them. The foreigners had asked us to go back, and I was going back in my car, so there was no reason for them to shoot." In all, he says, his car was hit twelve times, including the four bullets that pierced his back.

While the shooting in Nisour Square has put the issue of private forces in Iraq -- and Blackwater's name specifically -- on the front pages of newspapers around the globe, this is hardly the first deadly incident involving these forces. What is new is that the Iraqi government responded powerfully. Within twenty-four hours of the shooting, Iraq's Interior Ministry announced that it was expelling Blackwater from the country; Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called the firm's conduct "criminal."

The next day, the State Department ordered all non-US military officials to remain inside the Green Zone, and diplomatic convoys were halted. The Iraqi government, acting as though it was in control of the country, announced that it intended to prosecute the Blackwater men responsible for the killings. "We will not allow Iraqis to be killed in cold blood," Maliki said. "There is a sense of tension and anger among all Iraqis, including the government, over this crime."

But getting rid of Blackwater would not prove to be so easy. Four days after being grounded, Blackwater was back on Iraqi streets. After all, Blackwater is not just any security company in Iraq; it is the leading mercenary company of the US occupation. It first took on this role in the summer of 2003, after receiving a $27 million no-bid contract to provide security for Ambassador Paul Bremer, the original head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Since then, it has kept every subsequent US Ambassador, from John Negroponte to Ryan Crocker, alive. It protects Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when she visits the country, as well as Congressional delegations. Since its original Iraq contract, Blackwater has won more than $700 million in "diplomatic security" contracts through the State Department alone.

The company's domestic political clout has been key to its success. It is owned by Erik Prince, a reclusive right-wing evangelical Christian who has served as a major bankroller of the campaigns of George W. Bush and his allies. Among the company's senior executives are former CIA official J. Cofer Black, who once oversaw the extraordinary-rendition program and led the post-9/11 hunt for Osama bin Laden (and who currently serves as GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's top counterterrorism adviser), and Joseph Schmitz, the Pentagon Inspector General under Donald Rumsfeld.

So embedded is Blackwater in the US apparatus in Iraq that the incident in Nisour Square has sparked a crisis for the occupation that is both practical and political. Now that Blackwater's name is known (and hated) throughout Iraq, the bodyguards themselves are likely to become targets of resistance attacks, perhaps even more so than the officials they are tasked with keeping alive. This will make their work much more difficult. But beyond such security issues are more substantive political ones, as Blackwater's continued presence on Iraqi streets days after Maliki called for its expulsion serves as a potent symbol of the utter lack of Iraqi sovereignty.

Maliki has been under heavy US pressure to back off his initial demands. While Rice immediately called the Iraqi prime minister ostensibly to apologize, she made a point of emphasizing publicly that "we need protection for our diplomats." A few days later, Tahseen Sheikhly, a representative of Maliki's government, stated, "If we drive out this company immediately, there will be a security vacuum. That would cause a big imbalance in the security situation." Given the carnage of September 16, it was a difficult statement to wrap one's head around.

Maliki then agreed to withhold judgment on Blackwater's status, pending the conclusion of a joint US-Iraqi investigation. If he ultimately goes along with the United States and tolerates Blackwater's presence, the political consequences will be severe. Among those calling for the firm's expulsion is Muqtada al-Sadr. A cave-in by Maliki could weaken his already tenuous grip on power and reinforce the widespread perception that he is merely a puppet of the US occupation. Clearly aware of this, while visiting the United States a week after the shootings, Maliki went so far as to call the situation "a serious challenge to the sovereignty of Iraq" that "cannot be accepted."

In Baghdad there is great determination to bring the perpetrators of the Nisour Square slaughter to justice. An investigative team made up of officials from Iraq's Interior, National Security and Defense ministries said in a preliminary report that "the murder of citizens in cold blood in the Nisour area by Blackwater is considered a terrorist action against civilians just like any other terrorist operation."

But Iraqi investigators claim that they have received little or no information from the US government and have been denied access to the Blackwater operatives involved in the shootings. A US official appeared to dismiss the validity of the Iraqi investigation, telling the New York Times, "There is only the joint investigation that we have with the Iraqis."

Still, Iraqi officials announced their intent to bring criminal charges against the Blackwater forces involved in the shooting, and the report stated, "The criminals will be referred to the Iraqi court system." Abdul Sattar Ghafour Bairaqdar, a member of Iraq's Supreme Judiciary Council, the country's highest court, recently said, "This company is subject to Iraqi law, and the crime committed was on Iraqi territory, and the Iraqi judiciary is responsible for tackling the case."

Unfortunately, things are not quite so simple.

On June 27, 2004, the day before Paul Bremer skulked out of Baghdad, he issued a decree known as Order 17, which granted sweeping immunity to private contractors working for the United States in Iraq, effectively barring the Iraqi government from prosecuting contractor crimes in domestic courts. The timing was curious, given that Bremer was leaving after allegedly "handing over sovereignty" to the Iraqi government.

Shortly after the Nisour shooting, Maliki said he wanted to change Order 17 to permit prosecution in Iraqi courts of criminal activities committed by contractors. The Iraqi Parliament could also try to pass a law repealing it altogether. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, characterizes Order 17 as a clear violation of Iraqi sovereignty but points out that it contains a provision that allows the United States to waive the immunity with regard to individuals.

"A possible first step for Iraq is to ask the US to waive the immunity of those involved in the killing," says Ratner, who concedes that this is an unlikely move from Washington, "as it would frighten other private contractors." He also said the immunity is a part of the US strategy for using private companies like Blackwater to deter resistance attacks on occupation personnel. "None of this is by chance; their very purpose is to brutalize and strike fear into the people of Iraq -- that is why they are back on the streets."

Former CIA case officer Robert Baer says that the cleanest solution would be for the United States to rescind Order 17. "Do we let Iraqi Embassy private security contractors race around Washington or New York, machine guns sticking out the window, to prevent carjackings?" asked Baer. "This would effectively close down private security companies. There is no reason the State Department cannot provide its own security." He points out that State Department security officers are under diplomatic immunity, but if there's a questionable shooting, the Iraqi government would have the option of expelling the perpetrators under the Vienna Convention.

This discussion of Order 17 is important but in practical terms it may well be moot, as it is hard to imagine the United States allowing the prosecution of US private security forces in an Iraqi court. Industry representatives say that in cases where contractors are alleged to have committed crimes or engaged in misconduct, Washington has told them to get the contractors in question out of Iraq quickly. As one private security contractor recently told the Washington Post, "We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night."

That is precisely what happened after an incident that occurred last Christmas Eve, in which an off-duty Blackwater operative allegedly shot and killed the Iraqi bodyguard of Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi inside the Green Zone. Blackwater officials confirm that they whisked the contractor safely out of Iraq, which they say Washington ordered them to do. Iraqi officials labeled the killing a "murder."

Blackwater says it fired the contractor, but he has yet to be publicly charged with any crime. Representative Dennis Kucinich, a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has suggested that "there's a question that could actually make [Blackwater's] corporate officers accessories here in helping to create a flight from justice for someone who's committed a murder." According to a memo from the US Embassy to Secretary Rice, after the shooting, Abdul-Mahdi tried to keep the story under wraps because he believed "Iraqis would not understand how a foreigner could kill an Iraqi and return a free man to his own country."

While there may be a debate about subjecting private forces to Iraqi courts, legal mechanisms do exist to prosecute armed contractors in US courts for crimes committed in Iraq. But the Bush Justice Department would have to press charges, and that hasn't happened. US contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: "What happens here today stays here today."

While much of the media attention stemming from the September 16 killings focuses on the current crisis, this is hardly a new situation. In just the past nine months, Blackwater forces have been at the center of several other fatal shootings that sparked protests from the Iraqi government.

There was the Christmas Eve incident, and then, in May, Blackwater forces engaged in back-to-back deadly actions in a Baghdad neighborhood near the Iraqi Interior Ministry. In one incident, Blackwater forces fired on an Iraqi vehicle they said had veered too close to their convoy, killing a civilian driver. As with the September 16 shooting, witnesses say it was unprovoked. In the ensuing chaos, the Blackwater operatives reportedly refused to give their names or details of the incident to Iraqi officials, sparking a tense standoff between Blackwater and Iraqi forces, both of which were armed with assault rifles. It might have become even bloodier if a US military convoy hadn't arrived on the scene and intervened.

A day before that incident, in almost the same neighborhood, Blackwater operatives found themselves in a gun battle lasting nearly an hour that drew in US military and Iraqi forces, in which at least four Iraqis are said to have died. US sources said the Blackwater forces "did their job," keeping the officials alive.

Iraqi officials allege that there have been at least six deadly incidents involving Blackwater in the past year alone, which in addition to the September 16 death toll have caused ten Iraqi deaths. An Iraqi official says they show Blackwater "has a criminal record." Among these are a February 4 shooting allegedly resulting in the death of Hana al-Ameedi, an Iraqi journalist, near the Foreign Ministry; a February 7 shooting in which three guards were allegedly killed outside Iraqi state television offices; a September 9 shooting during which five Iraqis were killed near a government building in Baghdad; and a September 12 shooting that wounded five people in eastern Baghdad.

US and Iraqi officials reportedly discussed Blackwater's impunity months before the September shooting. "We tried several times to contact the US government through administrative and diplomatic channels to complain about the repeated involvement by Blackwater guards in several incidents that led to the killing of many Iraqis," said deputy Interior Minister Hussein Kamal.

However, US Embassy spokesperson Mirembe Nantongo said, "We have no official documentation on file from our Iraqi partners requesting clarification of any incident." That statement is contradicted by another US official. Matthew Degn, who served as a liaison to the Iraqi Interior Ministry until August, told the Washington Post that Iraqi officials sent a flurry of memos to Blackwater and US officials well before the September 16 shootings and were rebuffed in their requests for action. "We had numerous discussions over [Iraqi government] frustrations with Blackwater, but every time [Iraqi officials] contacted the [US] government, it went nowhere."

Iraq's anger would be understandable even if the only incident involving Blackwater was the Nisour shootings -- more so if you take into account the past year of the company's actions. But this is a four-year pattern that goes beyond Blackwater. The system of "private security" being paid billions in US taxpayer dollars has not only continued despite rampant abuses; it has flourished. Blackwater and its ilk operate in a demand-based industry, and with US forces stretched thin, there has been plenty of demand. According to the Government Accountability Office, there are as many as 180 mercenary firms in Iraq, with tens of thousands of employees. Without the occupation and continued funding for the war, these companies would not be in Iraq.

Even though this scandal is about a system, not about one company or "a few bad apples," Blackwater does stand out. While it has no shortage of US and British competitors in Iraq, no other private force's actions have had more of an impact on events in Iraq than those of the North Carolina-based company. Blackwater's primary purpose in Iraq, at which it has been very effective, is to keep the most hated US occupation officials alive by any means necessary. This has encouraged conduct that places American lives at an infinitely higher premium than those of Iraqi civilians, even in cases where the only Iraqi crime is driving too close to a VIP convoy protected by Blackwater guards.

It isn't just the Iraqi government and the country's civilian population that are angered by Blackwater's conduct. Col. Thomas Hammes, the US military official who once oversaw 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 they were "hurting our counterinsurgency effort."

Just as the world was learning of the September 16 Blackwater shooting in Baghdad, another scandal involving the company was breaking in the United States. Allegations surfaced that weapons brought into Iraq by Blackwater may have ended up in the hands of the Kurdish militant group the PKK, which is designated a "foreign terrorist organization" by the State Department. According to a September 18 letter sent by Representative Henry Waxman to State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, a federal investigation into whether Blackwater "was illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq" was obstructed by Krongard, who, Waxman charged, is a partisan operative with close ties to the Bush Administration.

Waxman cited a July e-mail message from Krongard in which he ordered his staff to "stop IMMEDIATELY" cooperating with the federal prosecutor investigating Blackwater until Krongard himself could speak to him. Waxman said Krongard's actions caused "weeks of delay" and that by subsequently assigning a media relations staffer instead of an investigator to aid the prosecutor, Krongard had "impeded the investigation." Blackwater, for its part, denies that it was "in any way associated or complicit in unlawful arms activities" and is cooperating in the federal investigation. Waxman has announced that he will hold hearings on the issue in October.

In keeping with Krongard's stance, the State Department has responded to the widening Blackwater inquiry with stonewalling and evasion. Indeed, Blackwater's attorney told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which Waxman chairs, that State had directed the company "not to disclose any information" regarding its Iraq security contract without written authorization.

After Waxman protested, the department specified that this restriction applied only to classified information. Waxman, for his part, is looking for answers from the top gun: He sent Blackwater CEO Erik Prince a letter requesting his presence at a hearing. "One question that will be examined is whether the government's heavy reliance on private security contractors is serving U.S. interests in Iraq," Waxman informed Prince. "Another question will be whether the specific conduct of your company has advanced or impeded U.S. efforts."

Those are good questions. But it is unfortunate that it has taken four years of the most privatized war in US history for Congress to ask them. Last time Prince was invited to appear before Congress, he sent his lawyer instead. This time Waxman could choose to use the power of the subpoena. As has finally become clear to some in Congress, war contracting is not merely about squandered taxpayer dollars. It is about life and death. The stakes are far too high to let Prince and his cronies call (or fire) any more shots.


Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

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