About Iraq..

[stillcool]

British Companies Making a Fortune
out of Iraq Conflict
By Robert Verkaik
Independent
March 13, 2006

A total of 61 British companies are identified as benefiting from at least £1.1bn of
contracts and investment in the new Iraq. But that figure is just the tip of the iceberg.
British businesses have profited by at least £1.1bn since coalition forces toppled Saddam
Hussein three years ago, the first comprehensive investigation into UK corporate investment
in Iraq has found. The company roll-call of post-war profiteers includes some of the best
known names in Britain's boardrooms as well many who would prefer to remain anonymous. They
come from private security services, banks, PR consultancies, urban planning consortiums,
oil companies, architects offices and energy advisory bodies.
---------------------------------
Corporate Watch believes it could be as much as five times higher, because many companies
prefer to keep their relationship secret. The waters are further muddied by the Government's
refusal to release the names of companies it has helped to win contracts in Iraq...<read more>
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13385

Blood, Sweat & Tears:
Asia’s Poor Build US Bases in Iraq
By David Phinney
CorpWatch
October 3, 2005

Called “third country nationals” (TCN) in contractor’s parlance, they hail largely from impoverished Asian countries such as the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan, as well as from Turkey and countries in the Middle East. Once in Iraq, TCNs earn monthly salaries between $200 to $1,000 as truck drivers, construction workers, carpenters, warehousemen, laundry workers, cooks, accountants, beauticians, and similar blue-collar jobs.

Invisible Army of Cheap Labor

Tens of thousands of such TNC laborers have helped set new records for the largest civilian workforce ever hired in support of a U.S. war. They are employed through complex layers of companies working in Iraq. At the top of the pyramid-shaped system is the U.S. government which assigned over $24 billion in contracts over the last two years. Just below that layer are the prime contractors like Halliburton and Bechtel. Below them are dozens of smaller subcontracting companies-- largely based in the Middle East --including PPI, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting and Alargan Trading of Kuwait, Gulf Catering, Saudi Trading & Construction Company of Saudi Arabia. Such companies, which recruit and employ the bulk of the foreign workers in Iraq, have experienced explosive growth since the invasion of Iraq by providing labor and services to the more high-profile prime contractors.
<read more>http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12675

Worry Grows as Foreigners Flock
to Iraq's Risky Jobs
By Sonni Efron
Los Angeles Times
July 30, 2005

For hire: more than 1,000 U.S.-trained former soldiers and police officers from Colombia. Combat-hardened, experienced in fighting insurgents and ready for duty in Iraq.

This eye-popping advertisement recently appeared on an Iraq jobs website, posted by an American entrepreneur who hopes to supply security forces for U.S. contractors in Iraq and elsewhere. If hired, the Colombians would join a swelling population of heavily armed private military forces working in Iraq and other global hot spots. They also would join a growing corps of workers from the developing world who are seeking higher wages in dangerous jobs, in what some critics say is a troubling result of efforts by the U.S. to "outsource" its operations in Iraq and other countries.

In a telephone interview from Colombia, the entrepreneur, Jeffrey Shippy, said he saw a booming global demand for his "private army," and a lucrative business opportunity in recruiting Colombians. Shippy, who formerly worked for DynCorp International, a major U.S. security contractor, said the Colombians were willing to work for $2,500 to $5,000 a month, compared with perhaps $10,000 or more for Americans. But where Shippy sees opportunity, others see trouble. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, worries that U.S. government contractors are hiring thousands of impoverished former military personnel, with no public scrutiny, little accountability and large hidden costs to taxpayers. ----------------------------------------------------------------
Fijians, Ukrainians, South Africans, Nepalese and Serbs reportedly are on the job in Iraq. Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, author of a book on the private military industry, said veterans of Latin American conflicts, including Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Nicaraguans, also had turned up. "What we've done in Iraq is assemble a true 'coalition of the billing,' " Singer said, playing off President Bush's description of the U.S.-led alliance of nations with a troop presence in Iraq as a "coalition of the willing."

There are no reliable figures on the number of guards from Colombia or other countries. According to Shippy, private military experts and news reports, North Carolina-based Blackwater USA has sent 120 Colombians to Iraq. In addition, the firm reportedly has hired 122 Chileans. The reports are difficult to verify because many large companies, including DynCorp, which is based in Texas and operates in 40 countries, have policies against speaking to the media. Gary Jackson, president of Blackwater USA, said he had no comment. <<read more>>
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/contract/2005/0730risky.htm

Colombia & Iraq: Halliburton Makes the Connection
By Daniel Leal Diaz
World War 4 Report
January 17, 2005

The Bogota daily El Tiempo recently reported that the US military contractor Halliburton has recruited 25 retired Colombian police and army officers to provide security for oil infrastructure in Iraq. One of the men, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the officers met in Bogota on Dec. 2 with a Colombian colonel working on behalf of Halliburton Latin America, who offered them monthly salaries of $7,000 to provide security for oil workers and facilities in several Iraqi cities. The claim was confirmed by a Colombian government source, said El Tiempo, but denied by a Halliburton representative in Bogota. US media have reported that former soldiers from Chile, South Africa and Spain are being recruited to beef up Iraqi security forces.Halliburton, the oil services giant once run by US Vice President Dick Cheney, has won billions of dollars in Iraq contracts, but has been accused of overcharging and accounting irregularities. (Al-Jazeera, Dec. 13; AP, Dec. 17)-------------------------------------
The US has transformed Colombia's soldiers into some of the best mercenaries in the world through decades of a mutating war that never seems to end: communism, drugs and--the latest version--terrorism. As Halliburton exploits this expertise for the Iraq campaign, Colombia becomes poorer in every dimension: violation of human rights, indiscriminate violence, loss of sovereignty and a crumbling democracy.<<read more>>http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/intervention/2005/0117coliraq.htm

Why the US Is Not Leaving Iraq: The Booming Business of War Profiteers
By Prof. Ismael Hossein-zadeh *
Global Research
January 12, 2007
...................Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the Bush Administration's doctrine of preventive war took a major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate ‘post-conflict’ plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries ‘at the same time,’ each lasting ‘five to seven years.’" 11

Here we get a glimpse of the real reasons or forces behind the Bush administration’s preemptive wars. As Klein puts it, "a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction." Klein also documents how (through Pascual’s office) contractors drew "reconstruction" plans in close collaboration with various government agencies and how, at times, contracts were actually pre-approved and paper work completed long before an actual military strike:

"In close cooperation with the National Intelligence Council, Pascual's office keeps ‘high risk’ countries on a ‘watch list’ and assembles rapid-response teams ready to engage in prewar planning and to ‘mobilize and deploy quickly’ after a conflict has gone down. The teams are made up of private companies, nongovernmental organizations and members of think-tanks Pascual told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in October, some will have ‘pre-completed’ contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken. Doing this paperwork in advance could ‘cut off three to six months in your response time.’"
<<read more>>http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/contract/2007/0112warprofiteers.htm

'Mercenaries' to Fill Iraq Troop Gap
By Brian Brady
Scotsman
February 25, 2007

The size of the private-security companies market is difficult to determine, but an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 private security contractors are thought to be working in Iraq. At a conference of British private-security companies last month, delegates said that the industry had increased about tenfold over the past decade and was worth the equivalent of about $4bn (£2.04bn) a year.

Almost 40 international PSCs are licensed to operate in Iraq, and the Foreign Office has paid out tens of millions of pounds to a handful of the largest British firms over the past four years. The department's bill for bodyguard protection alone rose from £19m in 2003-04 to £48m the following year. Most of the firms employ veterans from the forces, including former members of the SAS and SBS, who can command wages of up to £600 a day. One company has taken £112m in just three years. Another has been paid £42m for work in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Both the Foreign Office and the MoD are believed to have supported an expanded role since early in the Iraq operation and Downing Street is now rumoured to favour the move as part of the accelerated withdrawal announced by Blair last week. "There are genuine worries that the government is trying to privatise the Iraq conflict," said War on Want's campaigns director, John Hilary. "The occupation of Iraq has allowed British mercenaries to reap huge profits. How can Tony Blair hope to restore peace and security in Iraq while allowing mercenary armies to operate completely outside the law?"<<read more>>..
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/contract/2007/0225mercenariesfill.htm

Census Counts 100,000 Contractors In Iraq
Civilian Number, Duties Are Issues
By Renae Merle
Washington Post
December 5, 2006
There are about 100,000 government contractors operating in Iraq, not counting subcontractors, a total that is approaching the size of the U.S. military force there, according to the military's first census of the growing population of civilians operating in the battlefield.

The survey finding, which includes Americans, Iraqis and third-party nationals hired by companies operating under U.S. government contracts, is significantly higher and wider in scope than the Pentagon's only previous estimate, which said there were 25,000 security contractors in the country.
........................................................
Kellogg, Brown and Root, one of the largest contractors in Iraq, said it does not delineate its workforce by country but that it has more than 50,000 employees and subcontractors working in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait. MPRI, a unit of L-3 Communications, has about 500 employees working on 12 contracts, including providing mentors to the Iraqi Defense Ministry for strategic planning, budgeting and establishing its public affairs office. Titan, another L-3 division, has 6,500 linguists in the country.
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The census gives military commanders insight into the contractors operating in their region and the type of work they are doing, Wittkoff said. "It helps the combatant commanders have a better idea of food and medical requirements they may need to provide to support the contractors," she said.
<<read more>>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/04/AR2006120401311_pf.html

Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq
By Max Fuller
November 10, 2006
The phenomenon of death squads operating in Iraq has become generally accepted over recent
months. However, in its treatment of the issue, the mainstream media has zealously followed
a line of attributing extrajudicial killings to unaccountable Shia militias who have risen to prominence with the electoral victory of Ibramhim Jafaari’s Shia-led government in January. The following article examines both the way in which the information has been widely presented and whether that presentation has any actual basis in fact. Concluding that the attribution to Shia militias is unsustainable, the article considers who the intellectual authors of these crimes against humanity are and what purpose they serve in the context of the ongoing occupation of the country.
............................................
In response to the accusations of police involvement, drawing on eyewitness accounts, Iraq’s new Ministry of the Interior claims that it is easy to get hold of police uniforms and that the killings are the work of ‘insurgents’ masquerading as security forces in order to create sectarian divisions (BBC). Such denials are echoed by US special advisor to the ministry Steven Casteel, who has stated that, ‘The small numbers that we’ve investigated we’ve found to be either rumor or innuendo’ (Salihee, op. cit.).

Despite such denials, few journalists have been able to dismiss what the Observer’s foreign editor Peter Beaumont describes as the ‘extraordinary sense of impunity with which these abductions and killings take place’ as mere innuendo (Observer), or the consistent eye-witness accounts of the kidnappers appearing with expensive foreign equipment issued to the security forces, such as the Toyota Land Cruisers and the Glock 9mm pistols, as simply rumour (Salihee, op. cit.). The Interior Ministry’s explanation of large, heavily armed groups of resistance fighters moving freely about the capital becomes even less plausible when one considers that many of the killings took place following the onset of Operation Lightning/Thunder in late May. This divisional-size operation saw the deployment of 40,000 Iraqi troops, who sealed Baghdad and installed 675 checkpoints around the city (Associated Press). Hundreds of arrests followed as the security forces began to ‘hunt down insurgents’ (BBC). According to the AMS, in one instance, on 13 July, dozens of Interior Ministry commandos stormed several houses in northern Baghdad and detained 13 people, before torturing and killing them in a nearby apartment (Gulf Daily News).

However, instead of placing the blame squarely on the apparatus of the new Iraqi state, the mainstream media has almost exclusively chosen to shift the emphasis away, resorting to a number of standardised literary devices. The first device is to frame extrajudicial killings in the context of a wider panoply of supposed retaliatory sectarian violence. For example, Francis Curta of the Associated French Press writes that ‘A series of tit-for-tat killings has raised sectarian tension to boiling points’ (eg. Mail&Guardian Online), Mohamad Bazzi writing for Newsday refers to a ‘wave of retaliatory killings’ (Newsday), and James Hider of the London Times believes that ‘the only certainty is that once are identified, someone will want revenge’ (Times Online). The second device is to state or imply that the security forces are closely associated with largely unaccountable Shia militias, especially the Badr Brigade. For instance, Patrick Cockburn of the UK Independent writes that ‘Some carrying out the attacks appear to belong to the 12,000-strong paramilitary police commandos’, while, in almost the same breath he adds that ‘Fear of Shia death squads, perhaps secretly controlled by the Badr Brigade, the leading Shia militia, frightens the Sunni’ (Independent); in a similar vein, the BBC claims that ‘Angry mourners at a funeral for some of those killed said they had died at the hands of police and Shia militiamen’ (BBC).
.......................................................................
To penetrate the media smokescreen of spontaneous, uncontrollable violence and understand
the role of intelligence operations in the creation of a beholden, occupied client state or
series of statelets is fundamental to understanding the processes in Iraq today. It is also
fundamental to recognising that the presence of Anglo-American forces in Iraq does not merely exacerbate the present violence; in Iraq we are the violence.
<<read more>>http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=FUL20051110&articleId=1230
Max Fuller is the author of ‘For Iraq, the Salvador Option Become Reality’ published by the
Centre for Research on Globalisation. He can be contacted at [e-mail] .

Death Squad Democracy
Mike Whitney
March 19, 2006
The notion that Iraq is now consumed by civil war depends on a number of assumptions that
are inherently false. First of all, it assumes that the Pentagon is ignoring the fundamental
principle which underscores all wars: "Know your enemy". In this case, there’s no doubt
about who the enemy is; it is the 87% of the Iraqi people who want to see an immediate end
to the American occupation. Therefore, the greatest threat to American objectives of permanent bases and occupation is the camaraderie that that manifests itself in the form of Arab solidarity or Iraqi nationalism. To this end, the Pentagon, through its surrogates in the media, has created a "self-fulfilling" narrative that civil war is already under way. Most of the war coverage now makes it appear as though the violence is generated from ethnic tensions and sectarian hatred. But is it? Some of the more astute observers have noticed that other parts of the propaganda war, (like references to the "imaginary" al-Zarqawi) have vanished from the newspapers, as government spin-doctors are now devoting all their time to promoting their latest product-line; civil war.
.........................................................
In a larger sense, the "alleged" sectarian violence is consistent with what we have seen in
previous CIA-run operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Negroponte
are alumna of those conflicts (which, according to Cheney, succeeded quite admirably) so it’s probable that they would apply what they have learned about counterinsurgency to the ongoing war in Iraq. The El Salvador-experiment proved that the masses can eventually be terrorized into compliance.....................................
Death Squad Democracy Video footage of a massacre outside of Nahrwan, east of Baghdad, has appeared on the Internet showing the bodies of Shiite laborers who were allegedly killed by Sunni death squads. Journalist Paul McGeough was given the tapes and is planning to report on their content in the "Sydney Morning Herald". http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12376.h...
In one incident, four adults were pulled from their vehicle and either shot or stabbed to death in front of a 5 year old boy whose father was one of the victims. When the townspeople came to investigate the scene, they discovered the bodies of 48 men and women who had been dumped in a ditch. The corpses showed the signs of having been "systematically murdered. Most were shot but some appear to have been stabbed and mutilated". It is the "stabbed and mutilated" part that should interest us. After all, the intention of the Iraqi resistance is to gather greater support for their cause, not to alienate ordinary Iraqis through gratuitous acts of murder. If, however, this was the work of American-backed death squads, then the alternate goal of "governing through terror" has been achieved.
<<read more>>http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-whitney200306.htm
www.uruknet.info?p=21713

What is Covert Action?
J.V. Grady, ICH
September 21, 2005
There are many types of Covert Action operations, not all of them violent. For example, if a government wishes to influence the politics of another country’s government, the government may secretly fund an opposition party in that country in order to influence that country’s elections. Another method is to employ foreign newspaper reporters to write articles that give the version of events, the propaganda, that you want people to believe, even if it is the furthest thing from the truth. Or perhaps the owners or editors of a newspaper or media service can be bought or won over to allow articles or news stories created by the Intelligence organization for propaganda purposes to be planted in the newspaper or media service. A slant can then be given to influence public perceptions. For example, mercenaries can be referred to as “contractors”, thus making people believe that casualties among the mercenaries are innocent civilian construction workers who were unjustly victimized.

The main thing about Covert Action is that it must be deniable. There is a term called “plausible deniability”. When a government authorizes a covert action operation, the operation must be done in such a way that the government can claim that it knows nothing about it; in other words, the operation must not be attributable to the government that authorized it.

Covert Action operations are often Disinformation Operations, which are conducted in such a way as to discredit the opposition or the enemy. This is done, for example, by doing a violent action, such as a bombing, but making it look like the forces of another country or group did it. Such operations are sometimes called False-Flag Operations, meaning that the operation is conducted to make it look like it was done by people serving under another flag, preferably the enemy’s flag. If the operation succeeds as designed, people will blame the action on the wrong party (the enemy). Thus, public opinion will be won over to the side that actually did the killing. Such false-flag, covert action operations are often referred to as Dirty Tricks.
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So, who is behind many of the bombings against the Shi’ia and Sunni populations? It is quite possible, even probable, that many of them are being carried out by American, British, and even Israeli Covert Action operatives. So, when you watch the news, think more deeply about what you’re seeing; and when you read your newspapers, try reading between the lines or wonder about the source or the writer behind the article. Has the article been planted? Is the writer in the pay of an intelligence service?<<read more>>http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15994&s2=23
J.V. Grady is a former member of US Military Intelligence
informationclearinghouse.info/article10356.htm

[stillcool]

1. I must have over-done it ...again...

The reason for my posting the above was this:
First the Civil War scenario.
If there are all of these foreign companies, mercenaries, workers..operating in a country the size of California...and
If the size of our military is 140,000....and
If the number of Iraqi's killed or who have fled must run into the millions..

Who is fighting who, and why is Iraq not a parking lot? Four years of this shit, and what has changed...and even more pertinent..is how so many repeat the media's talking points as a valid interpretation of what's going on...How can this be?