[Dialogue] Pentagon Spends Billions to Outsource Torture

Thu Sep 7 13:03:23 EST 2006

AlterNet

Pentagon Spends Billions to Outsource Torture

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on September 7, 2006, Printed on September 7, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/41314/

In addition to Joshua Holland's article below, five other progressive media
outlets have produced articles on war profiteering in Iraq in conjunction
with Robert Greenwald's documentary, Iraq for Sale
<http://iraqforsale.org/buy.php?track=alternet> . Make
<http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/41320/>  sure to check out these
articles, and AlterNet's compendium
<http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/41320/>  of recent stories on the war
profiteers.

The thousands of mercenary security contractors employed in the Bush
administration's "War on Terror" are billed to American taxpayers, but
they've handed Osama Bin Laden his greatest victories -- public relations
coups that have transformed him from just another face in a crowd of radical
clerics to a hero of millions in the global South (posters of Bin Laden have
been spotted in largely Catholic Latin America during protests against
George W. Bush).

The internet hums with viral videos of British contractors opening
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20051204&ar
ticleId=1402>  fire on civilian vehicles in Iraq as part of a bloody game,
stories about CIA contractors killing
<http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/06/17/afghan.indictment/>  prisoners in
Afghanistan, veterans of
<http://www.amnestyusa.org/magazine/outsourcing.html>  Apartheid-era South
African and Latin American death squads
<http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/18967/>  discovered among contractors'
staffs and notoriously shady
<http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1214-04.htm>  Russian arms dealers
working for occupation authorities. One Special Forces operator told Amnesty
International that some contractors are in it just because they "really want
to kill somebody and they can do it easier there ... [not] everybody is like
that, but a dangerously high element."

While most experts believe that Al Qaeda no longer has the ability to mount
the kind of sophisticated attacks that brought it so much notoriety in the
first place, its media operations are stronger than ever. From their caves
-- or wherever they are holed up -- Bin Laden and his henchmen claim that
the "War on Terror" is just a thin cover for a U.S.-led war on Islam.
Rightly or wrongly, these incidents prove his point to millions of people
around the world.

Osama Bin Laden's greatest victories in the crucial media war have been the
series of prisoner abuse scandals at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram airbase in
Afghanistan and a number of detention centers across Iraq, the most infamous
of which is Saddam Hussein's former torture complex at Abu Ghraib.

According to a report by Corpwatch
<http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11285> , what ties these facilities
together are the abundance of private contractors involved in their
operations. The Taguba Report (PDF
<http://www.corpwatch.org/upload/document/taguba.pdf> ) named four private
contractors in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Steven Stephanowicz, an investigator
for CACI, a multinational with extensive government contracts (92 percent
<http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/10/1086749826916.html>  of which are
in defense), encouraged MPs under his command to terrorize inmates, and
"clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse."

Another interrogator at Abu Ghraib was John Israel, who, according to the
Taguba Report, didn't even have a security clearance, and should never have
been hired for an operation as sensitive as prisoner interrogation in the
first place. It's not clear whether Israel worked for CACI or a competitor,
Titan Corp. (a target of numerous federal
<http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=10848>  investigations for its work
in Iraq and elsewhere), but Titan denies it ever provided interrogators to
Abu Ghraib. Another un-named private contractor at Abu Ghraib allegedly
raped a teenage boy in his custody.

According to Amnesty <http://www.amnestyusa.org/magazine/outsourcing.html> ,
half of the interrogators at Abu Ghraib were private contractors -- about 30
in all. Torin Nelson was a military intelligence officer at Gitmo before
becoming a CACI interrogator at Abu Ghraib. After the scandal broke, Nelson
resigned and charged the military with scapegoating a handful of low-level
soldiers -- the only people who have been brought to trial for the abuses --
to "divert attention away from ingrained problems in the military detention
and interrogation system." He said: "The problem with outsourcing
intelligence work is the limit of oversight and control by the military
administrators over the independent contractors."

CACI's contract to provide interrogators for Abu Ghraib stunningly didn't
require the personnel to have had any training whatsoever in military
interrogation techniques. According to a report by the Army inspector
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5487793/>  general, 11 of the 31 CACI
interrogators had no training in what most experts agree is one of the most
difficult and sensitive areas of intelligence gathering. CACI has become a
major player in the private intelligence business in recent years, but its
core competence is in information technology, not the incredibly delicate
process of prisoner interrogation. They filled the contract like any other
order -- with warm bodies that could be listed on an invoice.

"It's insanity," former CIA agent Robert Baer told The Guardian. "These are
rank amateurs, and there is no legally binding law on these guys as far as I
could tell. Why did they let them in the prison?"

Abu Ghraib was a perfect storm, destined to result in torture and murder.
The Department of Justice was redefining
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23373-2004Jun7.html>
torture to be "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious
physical injury, such as organ failure," 90 percent of U.S. troops
<http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1075>  believed they were in Iraq
for "retaliation for Saddam's role in 9/11" and, according
<http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/reports/ar15-6/index.html>  to the Army, brigade
leaders "failed to supervise or provide direct oversight, to properly
discipline their soldiers ... and to provide continued mission-specific
training." The results were those all-too-familiar images of grinning
soldiers posed next to brutalized corpses on ice, stacks of naked prisoners,
hooded prisoners in "stress positions" trussed in electrical cords and all
the rest. The only winners -- beside Al Qaeda recruiters -- were CACI's
shareholders -- its invoices were duly processed.

Amnesty notes that contractors "neither fall under the Military Code of
Justice, nor are they answerable to Iraqi law, having been specifically
excluded under a decree issued by Paul Bremer, the head of the U.S.-run
administration in Iraq." Theoretically, a recent law, the Military
Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, could be used to prosecute contractors,
but the administration has not tried it out yet. According to the Legal
Times, it's "narrowly crafted and ... may not cover some of the abuses --
and abusers -- involved in the torture of Iraqi detainees at U.S.-run
prisons." It doesn't cover intelligence contractors working for the CIA.

That may be the whole point; critics have argued that one reason the United
States has employed so many contractors to handle prisoners is to shield
members of the military high command and their civilian leadership from
culpability for war crimes or other violations of international and domestic
laws.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky said that you can tell what a nation is like by the way
it treats its prisoners, and by that measure the United States has not
exactly been a beacon of light for the world. But what does the fact that we
outsource these crimes to big, faceless transnational corporations say about
us?

CACI, for California Analysis Center, Inc. (also known as Colonels and
Captains), is among the top 10 information providers in the Fortune 500. The
company was founded in 1962 as a computer-engineering firm, and later moved
into network management for federal, state, and local governments. The
company claims that, since Abu Ghraib, it no longer is in the interrogation
business, but it remains a major intelligence contractor. Corporate spying
has become a booming business -- it's
<http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2005/01/12_400.html>  estimated
that half of the $46 billion classified intelligence budget is handled by
the private sector, including everything from intelligence analysis to
managing spy satellites.

To understanding how a company that started out as a dull computer business
ended up implicated in torture scandals, one has to go back to the 1980s and
1990s.

In 1983, then-White House budget director David Stockman -- a dedicated
supply-sider best known for his recommendation that the Department of
Education reclassify ketchup as a vegetable -- issued a directive calling on
government to rely only on "commercial sources to supply the products and
services the government needs." Two years later, the military created the
Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program, LOGCAP, to transfer its logistics
functions to the private sector. But the military was slow to implement it
in a significant way at first.

Following the Cold War, a convergence of ideological imperatives broke the
military's resistance. With the decline of the Soviet Union, there was
little reason to continue military spending at the same clip as the United
States had done during the previous four decades. However, Ronald Reagan had
largely rehabilitated American militarism after it had taken a public hit
during Vietnam, and after the Soviets' fall, Washington's strategic class
was intoxicated with American hard power.

At the same time, both parties had embraced -- to varying degrees -- a
pronounced antipathy towards government, another piece of the Reagan legacy
(these were the years following Walter Mondale's crushing defeat at Reagan's
hands that gave rise to the Democratic Leadership Council). The goals of
downsizing the military, maintaining U.S. firepower and privatizing many of
its functions led to military "modernization" -- much of which meant
outsourcing to the private sector.

That task, under the first George Bush, fell to then-Defense Secretary Dick
Cheney, who fought a tough battle against the military leadership to
eliminate billions of dollars in pet defense projects. Cheney hired Kellogg
Brown & Root -- a subsidiary of Halliburton -- to write a classified report
detailing how private companies could help support the military in hot spots
around the world. Not long after, the Pentagon awarded the first
comprehensive five-year LOGCAP contract to none other than Kellogg Brown &
Root

The 1992 election brought two of the founding members of the DLC to the
White House, and the privatization of defense functions accelerated at a
dizzying rate.

Al Gore was tasked with "reinventing government," and he took to it with
gusto, attacking a federal government that he called "bloated, inefficient
and wasteful." He headed Clinton's National Performance Review (NPR), which
was charged with instituting "revolutionary" changes in the way government
works and identifying jobs that the government "should simply stop doing."

Writing in the
<http://www.pepeace.org/current_reprints/16/Nation%20Builders%20for%20Hire.h
tm> New York Times, Dan Baum explained that Cheney, who became CEO of
Halliburton in 1995, got a huge lift under Clinton:

A lot of Halliburton's business depends on foreign customers getting loans
from U.S. banks, which are in turn guaranteed by the government's
trade-promoting Export-Import Bank. In the five years before Cheney took the
helm, the Ex-Im Bank guaranteed $100 million in loans so foreign customers
could buy Halliburton's services; during Cheney's five years as C.E.O., that
figure jumped to $1.5 billion.

The intelligence community was a laggard, for obvious reasons. But following
the attacks of Sept. 11, lawmakers were itching to pour tens of billions of
new dollars into intelligence and didn't have the personnel to do it. Firms
like CACI were simply at the right place at the right time. They had
well-established revolving doors to the defense and intelligence communities
-- the hawkish former undersecretary of state Richard Armitage once sat on
CACI's board, and Barbara A McNamara, former deputy director of the NSA,
continues to do so -- and they hired thousands of former intelligence
officials at premium prices to fill a host of new contracts.

John Gannon, a former CIA deputy director for intelligence and now head of
BAE Systems' Global Analysis Group, told journalist
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/news21/20060901/ts_news21/the_outsourcing_of_u_s_in
telligence>  Sebastian Abbot that an intelligence contractor "is going to
look at a government requirement, and it's going to go and find people
wherever it can and get the greatest number of people at the lowest price
and maximizing the profit to the business to do it." "When I was in
government hiring people," he continued, "I was looking for the best
possible people I could get ... [but] that is not what the private sector
does." Gannon warned that these companies "are not looking to be right or
looking to ensure that they are getting access to the best information and
expertise; they are looking to please a customer at the lowest common
denominator." It's as clear a case of ideology and cronyism trumping common
sense as one could find.

For further reading on war profiteering in Iraq, check out
<http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/41320/>  these articles from other
progressive media outlets and AlterNet's recent coverage on this vital
topic. 

Joshua Holland <mailto:%20joshua.holland at alternet.org>  is an AlterNet staff
writer. 

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