Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
20, 2003
Halliburton's Secret
Deal
Contracts
vs. Politics in Iraq
By MARK SCARAMELLA
When American troops are stationed overseas the
US will have a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the host
country which defines the legal responsibilities of the US and
the host country.
The SOFA will address entry and exit
of personnel and personal belongings, labor conditions, damage
claims, and US contractor restrictions or requirements, and the
susceptibility of companies and employees to taxes, etc.
SOFAs also deal with civil and criminal
legal jurisdiction. The Department of Defense is required "to
protect ... the rights of United States personnel who may be
subject to criminal trial by foreign courts and imprisonment
in foreign prisons."
This can get complicated since crimes
can be committed as part of one's service (shooting innocent
civilians) or under contract, or outside of service or contractual
requirements.
When a defense contract calls for overseas
work the contract will include its own status of forces agreement
on top of the specific contract terms. Status of forces agreements
are usually just boilerplate addressing the status of the contractor
personnel -- and their families ("dependents"), or
if they marry and have kids in the foreign country -- while they
are performing the contracted work. Typically status of forces
agreements will address employee diplomatic immunity, the carrying
of weapons, responsibilities for crimes committed while in country,
who is to provide security, etc.
Unless a war is declared, contractor
personnel are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The Pentagon's recent huge no-bid contract
with Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton (the
company that Vice President Dick Cheney ran before he moved over
to take the VP job) is classified. The terms are secret.
The Bush administration says that the
reason that the KBR contract is a secret is also a secret. All
the Army has said publicly about the contract is, "Brown
& Root offered the best value to government, considering
price and non-price factors," according to Army lawyer Dave
Defrieze. "Cost was considered but because of the nebulous
nature of cost in the contract, it wasn't the most significant."
So what was most significant?
Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) is known
to provide a wide range of support services for the military
and oil field development. Normally such government contracts
are public documents, of course, including the status of forces
agreements and the specific contract provisions.
But in Iraq we have a very unusual --
and secret -- situation, and defense contracts with an extremely
wide variety of "nebulous" possibilities.
Say an Iraqi national is employed by
a subcontractor of KBR to provide security services for another
company working on the electrical grid in Baghdad. What if the
Iraqi security guard is bribed by an insurgency group to turn
the other way while a suicide bomber drives a car bomb up to
a contractor's office complex? Who investigates the security
guard's role? Who does the contractor sue for property damage?
Who is responsible for tightening up the security around the
contractor facilities?
Or what if a corporate executive is kidnapped
by Iraqi outlaws while a private Iraqi security firm was supposed
to be providing security under contract to Kellog, Brown &
Root? Who handles the negotiations and investigations? The private
security firm? Kellog, Brown & Root? Iraqi police? US military
police?
Or what if a Humvee driven by a drunk
US citizen contractor employee runs into a cafe on a Baghdad
street, damaging the restaurant and killing or injuring its customers?
Who investigates and prosecutes? Who does the cafe owner submit
his loss claim to?
Etcetera.
Such scenarios might be the stuff of
a Graham Greene novel. Or, such very real problems ultimately
fall to the occupying country's military authority, i.e., the
United States.
And there's the rub. The US has already
awarded dozens of multi-million dollar contracts to dozens of
US companies in Iraq, each with more subcontractors from who
knows where. If those companies commit big sums of money and
personnel to carry out these lucrative contracts but are prevented
from carrying them out because of hazardous conditions or lax
security, those companies can probably sue the US government
for whatever their losses may be. They might have secret contract
provisions, possibly in the status of forces agreement, that
says any the US is liable for financial losses stemming from
inadequate security.
According to Army Captain Isolde K. Garcia-Perez,
in a recently published review of the Army's increased use of
contractors in combat zones, "Since contractors will live
and work in the field environment, the Army must provide certain
support services. ... Since the theater commander is responsible
for the security and support of the contractor, the military
support plan must include requirements for supporting them. As
a minimum, the commander must plan to provide field service support,
protection from enemy action, individual weapons, and training
in basic military skills. Having to support the contractor work
force places additional logistics and security requirements on
the deploying units. Commanders must include contractor needs
when considering the unit's life support, security, and mission
requirements. ... There may be a contract condition requiring
the military to provide security to contractor personnel and
their equipment. ... Even an enemy with relatively unsophisticated
conventional battlefield capabilities can have very sophisticated
operatives who can sabotage information processing systems. But
attacks on civilian logistics operations can be more direct than
infiltration. For example, civilian organizations rely on civilian
communications systems, which are more vulnerable to terrorist
strikes..."
Even if the KBR contract wasn't secret,
the problems of administering a country like Iraq would be staggering.
But the current occupation is a situation unique in modern times
and ordinary status of forces agreements are probably not enough
to handle the unusual status of contractor personnel under these
conditions.
The KBR contract is secret for secret
reasons. The press has not delved very far into the conditions
of US taxpayer-paid contract work in Iraq. This leaves the public
to speculate about the real reason the US is staying in a country
with escalating unrest and ongoing guerrilla attacks. Although
Iraq can and should be turned over to its own citizens as soon
as possible, the United States may be contractually obligated
to maintain an increasingly unpopular military security presence
in Iraq for as long as the well-connected, highly paid high-profile
contractors are there -- no matter what the losses in lives and
dollars, and no matter how the political winds here in the US
may blow.
Mark Scaramella
is the managing editor of the Anderson
Valley Advertiser, the nation's greatest weekly newspaper.
He can be reached at: themaj@pacific.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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