War profiteer extraordinaire: Excellent article in New Yorker on Cheney

[Carl Brennan]

This article is one of the best I have seen for look at the process of how Cheney, and people like him, set things up to profit from wars. Halliburton's subsidiary Brown and Root was called "Burn and Loot" by war protesters and soldiers during Vietnam.



http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040216fa_fact

CONTRACT SPORT
by JANE MAYER
What did the Vice-President do for Halliburton?
Issue of 2004-02-16 and 23
Posted 2004-02-09
....Vice-President Dick Cheney is well known for his discretion, but his official White House biography, as posted on his Web site, may exceed even his own stringent standards. It traces the sixty-three years from his birth, in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1941, through college and graduate school, and describes his increasingly powerful jobs in Washington.

Yet one chapter of Cheney’s life is missing. The record notes that he has been a “businessman” but fails to mention the five extraordinarily lucrative years that he spent, immediately before becoming Vice-President, as chief executive of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil-and-gas-services company. The conglomerate, which is based in Houston, is now the biggest private contractor for American forces in Iraq; it has received contracts worth some eleven billion dollars for its work there. ........


Cheney and Rummy linked up in 1968 to help gut the Office of Economic Opportunity, a program designed to help the poor, by outsourcing all the work to private contractors and dropping democrat appointees from the payroll.

.....Their tactics were not subtle. At nine o’clock on the morning of September 17, 1969, Rumsfeld distributed a new agency phone directory; without explanation, a hundred and eight employee names had been dropped. The vast majority were senior career civil servants who had been appointed by Democrats......
.........by the time Ronald Reagan became President the overriding principle that had guided their actions at the O.E.O.—privatization—had become a central precept of the conservative movement........

[idiosyncratic]

1. I love Ann Telnaes' cartoon from today on this subject

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Thanks for posting!

[seemslikeadream]

3. Behind America's Dubious Private Alliances

According to Alexander Cockburn, Chalabi helped Erinys win an $80 million contract in 2003 to guard 140 Iraqi oil installations, "employing members of Chalabi's private militia for the purpose, as well as the son of a close Chalabi confidante as chief executive and his nephew Salem Chalabi as firm's counsel." Farouki was also implicated in the Jordanian Petra Bank scandal for which Chalabi has been convicted in absentia. (The former owed the bank $12 million at the time of its bankruptcy). Erinys has also been contracted to protect workers of American corporations Bechtel and Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root. In other words, the Americans were contracting to companies staffed by war criminals and controlled by false friends seeking to profit from exploiting Iraq's chaos.

Victor Bout: From Afghanistan to Africa to Iraq?

....

"The U.N. Security Council drafted a resolution in March to freeze the assets of mercenaries and weapons dealers who backed ousted Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. Bout should top that list, French diplomatic sources say. But the diplomats and U.N. sources say the United States has been working to keep Bout off that list.

"U.S. officials have indicated unofficially that the reason is that Bout is useful in Iraq, the sources told IPS. One of Bout's many companies is providing logistical support to U.S. forces in Iraq, well-placed French diplomatic sources say. His private airline British Gulf is supplying goods to the occupation forces, they say.

"In recognition of these services both the U.S. and the British governments have been opposing French efforts to include Bout in the UN mercenaries list, the diplomatic sources revealed."

The story had been broken days earlier in a Financial Times article revealing Britain's acquiescence to American demands for shielding Bout. However, soon thereafter a second FT article declared that the U.S. had dropped "its objections to action being taken against him."

The FT quoted Dick Armitage, Colin Powell's ally and State Department second-in-command, as saying, "as far as I'm concerned ought to be on any asset freeze list and anything else you can do to him." Yet considering that U.S. policy in Iraq has been dictated by the Pentagon, and not their alienated brethren in the State Department, one wonders as to how much the latter's opinions count for these days.

more
http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=2674


Blacklisted Russian's planes tied to U.S. contracts in Iraq

Stephen Braun, Judy Pasternak, T. Christian Miller, Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Washington -- Air cargo companies allegedly tied to a reputed Russian arms trafficker have received millions of dollars in federal funds from U.S. contractors in Iraq, even though the Bush administration has worked for three years to rein in his enterprises.

Planes linked to Victor Bout's shadowy network continued to fly into Iraq, according to government records and interviews with officials, even though the Treasury Department froze his assets in July and placed him on a blacklist for allegedly violating international arms sanctions.

Largely under the auspices of the Pentagon, U.S. agencies including the Army Corps of Engineers and the Air Force, and the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which governed Iraq until last summer, have allowed their private contractors to do business with the Bout network.

Four firms linked to the network by the CIA and international investigators have flown into Iraq more than 195 times on U.S. business, government flight and fuel documents show. One such flight landed in Baghdad last week.

The list of the Bout network's suspected clients over the years includes the Taliban, which bought airplanes for a secret airlift of arms to Afghanistan. The Taliban is known to have shared weapons with al Qaeda.

more
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/12/14/MNG71ABKAV1.DTL

Victor Bout is the poster boy for a new generation of post Cold War international arms dealers who play a critical role in areas where the weapons trade has been embargoed by the United Nations.

Afghanistan

Before September 11, Bout's involvement in Afghanistan was mentioned in the press only occasionally in passing. Western intelligence officials or anonymous investigators were quoted as saying Bout started off there, arming the government forces fighting the Taliban and other rebels groups. On January 1, 2002, the Washington Monthly took Bout's Afghan connection one step further, saying that he switched sides and started selling to the Taliban while negotiating for the release of his plane and crew in 1995. This assertion was based on a quote from a source familiar with his activities who said, "He's a very enterprising person. When his plane was detained, he used the opportunity as a business introduction to the Taliban."

A few weeks later, on January 20, the Los Angeles Times reported on the key role played by the United Arab Emirates in hosting money laundering and arms trafficking operations for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, a result of loose government oversight. The article reported that Bout teamed up with Afghan-based militants in the emirate of Sharjah, where, as recently as early 2001, a company called Flying Dolphin, flew shuttles twice a week to the Taliban headquarters in Kandahar. Its owner, Sheik Abdullah bin Zayed al Saqr al Nahyan, was the UAE ambassador to the U.S. from 1989 to 1992, and was described by the U.N. as a business associate of Bout.

Afghan and U.A.E. air industry sources reported a meeting between "two Russians" and the United Arab Emirates representative of Ariana, the Afghan national airline, in which it was agreed that Bout's Air Cess would provide wheels, tires and other military goods for the Taliban air force. Flying Dolphin would provide charter flights when Ariana was unavailable.

The Afghan permanent representative to the United Nations, citing Afghan and American intelligence reports, said Ariana flights from Sharjah had transported chemical poisons to Kandahar: "cyanide and other toxic substances purchased in Germany, the Czech Republic and Ukraine." He said the Taliban "had nothing to do with this. These chemicals were for Bin Laden and his people. It was some of the chemicals they were using in experiments." Earlier, the US had reportedly pressured the U.A.E. to clamp down on Bout's operations, which simply resulted in his moving to a neighboring Emirate.
more
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/sierraleone/bout.html



Iraq: Government Deal With a 'Merchant of Death'?



Bout: Dealing with the U.S.?
By Michael Isikoff
NewsweekDec. 20 issue - In an effort to crack down on one of the world's most notorious international criminals, President George W. Bush last summer signed an order barring U.S. citizens from doing business with Russian arms trafficker Victor Bout. But not long afterward, U.S. officials discovered Bout's tentacles were wider than anticipated: for much of this year, NEWSWEEK has learned, a Texas charter firm allegedly controlled by Bout was making repeated flights to Iraq—courtesy of a Pentagon contract allowing it to refuel at U.S. military bases. One reason for the flights, sources say, was that the firm was flying on behalf of Kellogg Brown & Root, the division of Halliburton hired to rebuild Iraq's oilfields.

U.S. officials say Bout—once dubbed a "merchant of death" by a British foreign minister—built an empire in the 1990s flying weapons to the Taliban and African dictators and rebel groups, in violation of international sanctions. Bush's order banning business with Bout, a former Soviet military officer, was for supplying guns to the rogue regime of ex-Liberian president Charles Taylor. "Our ultimate goal is to shut down his network," says Juan Zarate, assistant Treasury secretary.

But U.S. officials feared they were being undermined recently when they got evidence that Bout's aircraft were spotted in Iraq. A Pentagon official confirmed that, until last summer, a Texas carrier named Air Bas had a "fuel purchase agreement" authorizing its planes to refuel at U.S. bases there. Air Bas planes landed 142 times at U.S. bases this year, says Jack Hooper of the Defense Logistics Agency. The flights began months after a U.N. report identified Air Bas as a suspected Bout "front company." Sources say Treasury officials recently recommended naming Air Bas to a list of Bout-connected firms to be covered by Bush's order. (Air Bas president Richard Chichakli acknowledges he was in contact with Bout, but says Bout is not an owner of the firm.)

Hooper says his agency had been unaware of the Bout connection and cut off the agreement in August after the firm "repeatedly" rebuffed requests to identify what business it was conducting for the U.S. government. Chichakli says Air Bas had subcontracted with another firm, Falcon Express in Dubai, that was hired to haul cargo for two big Iraq contractors—FedEx and Kellogg Brown & Root. "I'm like Hertz or Avis," he says. "You rent my planes, you go from point A and point B." A FedEx spokeswoman says the firm recently told Falcon to drop Air Bas when it learned of the alleged Bout link. Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall says the firm had "no knowledge" of Air Bas's role, but that the firm stopped using Falcon Express "six months ago." Still, Lee Wolosky, a former National Security Council official who tracked Bout, says it's "seemingly inexplicable" that the U.S. government could have been "doing business with an international criminal organization."

more
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6700301/site/newsweek /

[Carl Brennan]

6. Thanks for expanding on this Seemslikeadream. Chalabi's

corruptions were exposed but he is now back in the running for some leadership post in Iraq. I just saw that briefly recently.

[mrfrapp]

4. From the Article

Kemp said that he is working on two business ventures in Iraq. He described the first project, a company called Free Market Global, as “an international company that trades in gas, petroleum, and other resources.” Although Kemp provided only vague details about the project, he said, “I can tell you that General Tommy Franks has joined the advisory board of Free Market Global.” Last year, General Franks commanded the invasion of Iraq.

[Karenina]

5. Gee. I wonder why?

:think: