This book by James Risen is essentially a series of stories
about events and people that most of us have never heard of. He uses these
events and people to weave a story about three things – greed, power and
endless war.
One of the stories he talks about is the huge misuse of
money by the American government during the war. In 2003, pallets of $100 bills
were driven from the Federal Reserve in New Jersey, and then put on a cargo
plane and taken to Iraq where they…disappeared. $12-$14 billion in cash and
another $5.8 billion in electronic funds transfers are unaccounted for, largely
because there were no clear orders on how to use the money. An investigation
led to the discovery that $2 billion was stolen and secretly transported to
Lebanon, but the government seemingly has no intention of getting it back, even
going as far as to block the lead investigator from entering Lebanon to go see
the warehouse where they believed it was being kept. U.S. forces also found $4
million in $100 bills in Saddam’s palace, which belonged to the Iraqi Central
Bank, but the U.S. simply kept it and gave it to military commanders to use as
they saw fit. A large chunk of money was also stolen by soldiers and
contractors working in Iraq. Between 2004 and 2008, there were at least 35 convictions
in the U.S. and more than $17 million in fines, forfeitures and restitution
payments made in fraud cases in connection with the American reconstruction of
Iraq (and that’s just the people they caught…). The U.S. also used money from
the Development Fund of Iraq, which was money from the sales of Iraqi oil,
meaning it belonged to the people of Iraq. This would have been fine if they
had actually used the money to rebuild Iraq, but clearly money was incredibly
poorly managed.
Another story was about how quickly the government threw
money at people, without making sure they could provide what they promised. He
tells the story of a conman named Dennis Montgomery who convinced the CIA & the
Pentagon that his technology could help them catch Al Qaeda – but it was all
fake. He even got Bush to ground several planes around Christmas 2003, and they
even discussed shooting down passenger planes. Some of the planes grounded were
from France and they demanded to see the technology, quickly identifying it as
a hoax. The CIA didn’t tell anyone about this incident and no one was
reprimanded, meaning that Montgomery continued to get contracts from Special
Ops and the Pentagon for years after this happened. For me, this just indicates
how much secrecy surrounds these organizations and the negative effects that it
can have.
He also talks about General Atomics, the privately held
company that is the maker of the predator drones. They are the beneficiaries of
one of the largest transfers of wealth from public to private hands in American
history, having received $1.8 billion in government contracts in 2012 alone. It
has made the owners, Neal and Linden Blue (brothers), oligarchs of 9/11. He
says that government spending on homeland security has been so excessive that
the only way it could be considered cost effective would be if it funded
programs that prevented 1,667 terrorists attack each year (4 every day). I’m
not sure where he gets this number – presumably he is putting a value on the
lives of American citizens? The Blue brothers originally bought General Atomics
for $50 million, which is quite the deal. Interestingly, General Atomics
started off as a subsidiary of General Dynamics before being sold off. They
have also been allowed to begin selling unarmed predators to other nations,
even in the Middle East. Demonstrating the high use of drones, the author says
that the air force is now training more personnel to operate drones than to
actually fly manned aircraft.
He then goes on to talk about KBR, an offshoot of
Halliburton, which is the contracting firm that made the most money from the
war on terror, surviving many scandals and controversies, with some thinking it
was ‘too big to fail’. At the height of the war, they had 50,000 people working
in Iraq. They had giant open burn pits outside of every base to dispose of
waste, even though they were supposed to use other methods. Many soldiers came
back with lung problems such as asthma, bronchitis, etc. all caused by the burn
pits. Another soldier was electrocuted (and died) while taking a shower in his
quarters in Iraq, which was due to the fact that KBR had improperly wired and
grounded the area. His mother pushed for answers after his death and discovered
that at least 18 American military personnel were electrocuted during the war
in Iraq, and another soldier had reported that he was electrocuted in that same
shower a few weeks earlier, but the problem was never addressed. Overall, KBR
received $39.5 billion in contracts during the war. Anyone who stood against
them, like one auditor who tried to get them to show paperwork for their
expenses, was quickly removed from their position.
The last piece he talks about is the effect that endless war
has. Going into the war, psychologists knew that torture can’t be used to
collect accurate intelligence, that it was used for compliance – to break
people. However the APA (American Psychological Association) went along with
the torture, ‘supervising’ the interrogations and changing its ethics code to
allow more questionable behaviour. The soldiers that were ordered to torture
prisoners were also severally damaged, with most of them suffering from severe
PTSD. After the public found out, the government didn’t reprimand any
superiors, but tried to use the soldiers as scapegoats and brought charges against
them. He also talks about how after 9/11, the 5,500 mile long border with
Canada was considered a vulnerability that had to be sealed off, even though
there was no evidence that the Canadian border had become a real threat. The
level of resources devoted to fighting terrorism still remains out of proportion
to the actual threat level posed by terrorism.
One senator said that ‘it’s almost like there are 2 sets of
laws, one the public can read, and one the government has developed in secret’.
While some people at the NSA and in oversight committees tried to stop the data
collection programs as soon as they found out it was targeting Americans, they
were quickly pushed out and ignored. The New York Times even found out about
the NSA surveillance but held the story for over a year at the request of the
government – long enough for Bush to get re-elected. Lastly, the author
finishes off by mentioning that the new focus is cybersecurity, and that the
NSA is now one of the world’s leaders in the use of offensive cyberattacks. No
longer focused on the military-industrial complex, the U.S. has shifted to a
cyber-industrial complex and a homeland security-industrial complex.
“War must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and
unnatural state of affairs” –Jeh Johnson.
No comments:
Post a Comment