[A-List] US imperialism: the new gulag

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Blumenthal is right to be appalled by all of this, but he's a bit selective
about where to place the condemnation. The privatisation of US "national
security" and military activity proceeded apace under Clinton, whom
Blumenthal "advised", as detailed by Chalmers Johnson in "Blowback"
(published in the spring of 2000, well before the appointment of Bush as
president). He continues on this theme in his latest, "The Sorrows of
Empire" (Metropolitan Books, 2004):

"Brown & Root, long known in Texas for its political connections, was
acquired in 1962 by the oil-drilling and construction company Halliburton.
Dick Cheney was secretary of defense when Brown & Root first began to supply
logistical services to the army. According to an investigative report by
Robert Bryce in the Austin Chronicle, Cheney is the author of the idea that
the military's logistical operations should be privatized. He was trying not
so much to increase efficiency as to reward the private sector. He basically
asked how private companies could assist the army in cutting hundreds of
thousands of jobs. 'In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney's direction,
paid Brown & Root $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how
private companies -- like itself -- could help provide logistics for
American troops in potential war zones around the world. Later in 1992, the
Pentagon gave the firm an additional $5 million to update its report. That
same year, the company won a five-year logistics contract from the Army
Corps of Engineers to work alongside GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti,
Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia.'
    After the 1992 election, Cheney left the Defense Department, and between
1995 and 2000 he was the chief executive officer of Halliburton. Under his
leadership, Brown & Root took in $2.3 billion in government contracts,
almost double the $1.2 billion it earned from the government in the five
years before Cheney arrived."

-----

This is the new gulag

Bush has created a global network of extra-legal and secret US prisons with
thousands of inmates

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday May 6, 2004
The Guardian

It was "unacceptable" and "un-American", but was it torture? "My impression
is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically
is different from torture," said Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence
on Tuesday. "I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said, that
torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And
therefore I'm not going to address the torture word."

He confessed he had still not read the March 9 report by Major General
Antonio Taguba on "abuse" at the Abu Ghraib prison. Some highlights: " ...
pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle
and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape ... sodomising a detainee
with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick ... "

The same day that Rumsfeld added his contribution to the history of
Orwellian statements by high officials, the Senate armed services committee
was briefed behind closed doors for the first time not only about Abu
Ghraib, but about military and CIA prisons in Afghanistan. It learned of the
deaths of 25 prisoners and two murders in Iraq; that private contractors
were at the centre of these lethal incidents; and that no one had been
charged. The senators were given no details about the private contractors.
They might as well have been fitted with hoods.

Many of them, Democratic and Republican, were infuriated that there was no
accountability and no punishment and demanded a special investigation, but
the Republican leadership quashed it. The senators want Rumsfeld to testify
in a public hearing, but he is resisting and the Republican leaders are
blocking it.

The Bush administration was well aware of the Taguba report, but more
concerned about its exposure than its contents. General Richard Myers, the
chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was dispatched on a mission to CBS
news to tell it to suppress its story and the horrifying pictures. For two
weeks, CBS's 60 Minutes II show complied, until it became known that the New
Yorker magazine would publish excerpts of the report. Myers was then sent on
to the Sunday morning news programmes to explain, but under questioning
acknowledged that he had still not read the report he had tried to censor
from the public for weeks.

President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other officials, unable to contain the
controversy any longer, engaged in profuse apologies and scheduled
appearances on Arab television. There were still no firings. One of their
chief talking points was that the "abuse" was an aberration. But Abu Ghraib
was a predictable consequence of the Bush administration imperatives and
policies.

Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from prisons in
Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world.
There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and
almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it
applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. There has been
nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US military
embraced the Geneva conventions after the second world war, because applying
them to prisoners of war protects American soldiers. But the Bush
administration, in an internal fight, trumped its argument by designating
those at Guantánamo "enemy combatants". Rumsfeld extended this system - "a
legal black hole", according to Human Rights Watch - to Afghanistan and then
Iraq, openly rejecting the conventions.

Private contractors, according to the Toguba report, gave orders to US
soldiers to torture prisoners. Their presence in Iraq is a result of the
Bush military strategy of invading with a relatively light force. The gap
has been filled by private contractors, who are not subject to Iraqi law or
the US military code of justice. Now, there are an estimated 20,000 of them
on the ground in Iraq, a larger force than the British army.

It is not surprising that recent events in Iraq centre on these contractors:
the four killed in Falluja, and Abu Ghraib's interrogators. Under the Bush
legal doctrine, we create a system beyond law to defend the rule of law
against terrorism; we defend democracy by inhibiting democracy. Law is there
to constrain "evildoers". Who doubts our love of freedom?

But the arrogance of virtuous certainty masks the egotism of power. It is
the opposite of American pragmatism, which always under stands that
knowledge is contingent, tentative and imperfect. This is a conflict in the
American mind between two claims on democracy, one with a sense of paradox,
limits and debate, the other purporting to be omniscient, even messianic,
requiring no checks because of its purity, and contemptuous of
accountability.

"This is the only one where they took pictures," Tom Malinowski, Washington
advocate of Human Rights Watch, and a former staff member of the National
Security Council, told me. "This was not considered a debatable topic until
people had to stare at the pictures."