01-09-2009, 10:07 AM
From Ed. More to come.
War is a Racket: Private Military Contractors
http://www.afhub.com/images/hottoys/mili...MC07_2.jpg
Key early elements of this post are taken from a “data dump” here: http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/vi...php?t=8573 :
Here is a list of private military contractors. It is not intended to be complete, or definitive. Others may use this for further research or follow-up.
Aegis Defence Services Ltd
Olive Group FZ LLC
ISI
International Charters, Inc. (ici)
Blackwater usa
Blackstone
Titan Corp
Zapata Engineering (ordinance handling)
Armor Holdings Inc
Cochise Consultancy
DynCorp International LLC
SAIC-Science Applications Intl Corp.
Special Operations Consulting LLC
Triple Canopy Inc.
Triple Options
MPRI-Military Professional Resources Incorporated
Vinnell
BDM International Inc.
Sandline Ltd.
Executive Outcomes
“The Government Accountability Office reviewed U. S. contracts last year [2005] in an attempt to evaluate the size of the private security business in Iraq. The GAO found that the 22 contracts it reviewed were worth more than $ 766 million, but said none of the principal agencies responsible for Iraq reconstruction had complete data on their security costs. Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, a Washington-based trade group, estimated that the roughly 100 companies providing support to the military in Iraq are making a total of about $ 20 billion a year. He said some $ 2 billion of that goes to companies, such as Olive, that strictly provide security. Olive Group pulled in more than $ 100 million of it last year — not bad for a company in business only since 2001…”
The trade association in this industry in America is the International Peace Operations Association; Wikipedia has a list of its members:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internation...ssociation
There is an interview with Doug Brooks, IPOA founder…
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/...rooks.html
Here are some other “snapshots” from the data dump:
“Most of the private security companies are privately held, though DynCorp International LLC, owned by Veritas Capital Fund LP, is planning to sell stock to the public. DynCorp, which has provided security to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, received about 37 percent of its $1.9 billion in revenue in fiscal 2005 from operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“Triple Canopy, formed in 2003 by military veterans, has made several changes in recent months. It named a new president, Roger A. Young, a former senior executive at Maximus Inc., and established a strategic advisory board, which includes Catherine Yoran, a former assistant general counsel at the CIA. It also unveiled a new strategic plan, which includes expanding its training facility in West Virginia, traditionally used for its own employees.”
in St Bernard Parish
Storm-battered parish considers hired guns
[B]Contractors in Louisiana would make arrests, carry weapons[/B]
By Renae Merle
The Washington Post
Updated: 1:06 a.m. ET March 14, 2006
ST. BERNARD PARISH, La. - Maj. Pete Tufaro scanned the fenced lot packed with hundreds of stark white trailers soon to be inhabited by Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Shaking his head, he predicted the cramped quarters would ignite fights, hide criminals and become an incubator for crime, posing another test for his cash-strapped sheriff's department, which furloughed 206 of its 390 officers after the storm.
Tufaro thinks the parish has the solution: DynCorp International LLC, the Texas company that provided personal security to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and is one of the largest security contractors in Iraq. If the Federal Emergency Management Agency approves the sheriff's department's proposal, which would cost $70 million over three years, up to 100 DynCorp employees would be deputized to be make arrests, carry weapons, and dress in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Department khaki and black uniforms.
"You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between us and them," said Tufaro, who developed the proposal.
Blackwater USA, which protected the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and lost four employees in a brutal ambush in Fallujah in 2004, earned about $42 million through the end of December on a contract with Federal Protective Service, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, to provide security to FEMA sites. Most of the 330 contract guards now working in Louisiana are employed by the company.
The Homeland Security Department's Inspector General said the company's costs in its FEMA contract -- it earns $950 a day for each employee -- were "clearly very high," and it expressed hope that competition would lower them. But costs are not the only concerns raised by critics of the companies.
"Katrina broke all of the rules. It was the first time you had the deployment of armed private security contractors in the U.S.," said Peter W. Singer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry." That book is savailable online here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=VyIl3fd...q=&f=false
or at Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Warriors...0801441145
Here is its Amazon description: “Singer describes three categories of privatized military systems. "Provider firms" (the best known being the now reorganized Executive Outcomes) offer direct, tactical military assistance ranging from training programs and staff services to front-line combat. "Consulting firms," like the U.S.-based Military Professional Resources Inc., draw primarily on retired senior officers to provide strategic and administrative expertise on a contract basis. The ties of such groups to their country of origin, Singer finds, can be expected to weaken as markets become more cosmopolitan. Finally, the overlooked "support firms," like Brown & Root, provide logistic and maintenance services to armed forces preferring (or constrained by budgetary factors) to concentrate their own energies on combat. Singer takes pains to establish the improvements in capability and effectiveness privatization allows, ranging from saving money to reducing human suffering by ending small-scale conflicts. He is, however, far more concerned with privatization's negative implications. Technical issues, like contract problems, may lead to an operation ending without regard to a military rationale. A much bigger problem is the risk of states losing control of military policy to militaries outside the state systems, responsible only to their clients, managers, and stockholders, Singer emphasizes. So far, private military organizations have behaved cautiously, but there is no guarantee will continue. Nor can the moralities of business firms be necessarily expected to accommodate such niceties as the laws of war. Singer recommends increased oversight as a first step in regulation, an eminently reasonable response to a still imperfectly understood development in war making.”
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
“Boasts MPRI executive retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, most prominent of the private contractors: "We've got more generals per square foot here than in the Pentagon."
“MPRI, founded in 1988 by former Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono & 7 other retired generals, has trained militaries throughout the world under contract to the Pentagon. It counts 20 former senior military officers on its board of directors. The firm operates from a bland office building in Alexandria, VA., its halls as hushed as an insurance firm. Decor betrays its founders' tough credentials . A statue of a knight in armor stands in a corner of the lobby. MPRI's emblem is an unsheathed sword.
"These guys are not about to destroy reputations they've spent 30 years building just for a buck," said Soyster, who once headed the Defense Intelligence Agency. "We go someplace because we are either sent there by the U. S. govt or we're contracted by another govt. We do it for the money, I'm not ashamed to say. But we do it right."
[B]The financial rewards presumably beat Pentagon salaries. Since 9.11.01, per-share price of stock in L3 Communications, which owns MPRI, has more than doubled. The top 5 executives at Science Applications Intl Corp. of San Diego made between $825,000 and $1.8 million in salaries in 2001, and each held more than $1.5 million worth of stock options.
[/B]Revenues from the global international security market, of which the firms are a part, are expected to rise from $55.6 billion in 1990 to $202 billion in 2010, according to a 1997 study by Equitable Services Corp., security industry analyst. Renting trained killers dates back hundreds of years; privately recruited regiments were common in the U. S. Civil War. But selling military expertise has roots in Vietnam, when commercial teams funded by the Pentagon provided military & police training to South Vietnamese forces.
In 1975, McLean, VA based Vinnell Corp. won a $77-million contract to train Saudi Arabian infantry & artillery battalions to defend oil fields. It was the first time American civilians were permitted to sell military training directly to a foreign military. The job was controversial, and Senate Democrats held hearings. But the contract stuck. Other similar firms began to emerge. End of cold war led to dramatic growth. Suddenly, there was a pool of skilled former officers, some from Special Forces units, eager to sell the expertise they had developed as relatively low-paid soldiers. They found a ready market at the Pentagon, and in dozens of countries in Africa, Asia and the former Soviet sphere eager to professionalize their militaries.
The major U. S. firms in the field include MPRI, Vinnell, BDM International Inc. of Fairfax, Va., Armor Holdings Inc. of Jacksonville FL.; DynCorp of Reston, Va., and SAIC. Armor Holdings was among Fortune magazine's 100 fastest-growing companies in 1999 and 2000, one of the few firms on the list not related to technology. The people they hire are hardly soldiers of fortune. They are generally former military officers with 20 to 30 years of experience, generously pensioned retirees for whom the money is just part of the allure.
Many describe their work as public service, a way to practice military diplomacy. Often they freelance, taking on contracts that send them abroad for a year or so. They train armies how to use such complex hardware as armored personnel carriers, surface-to-air missiles, shoulder-fired antitank missiles, ships and aircraft, and other equipt typically sold to foreign armies by U.S.. They prep officers in military strategy, run battle simulation centers, and have helped support peacekeeping efforts in troubled regions under contract to the Pentagon & State Dept.
MPRI has trained military forces in dozens of countries, including Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Colombia. DynCorp trained the Haitian police force after the 1994 U. S. intervention in the island nation. MPRI & several other firms, under contract to the State Dept, established the African Ctr for Strategic Studies to teach fledgling democracies how to run professional armies. French Foreign Legion they are not. "One leitmotif of the business is how boring the individual jobs can be on almost all of the contracts that the big U. S. firms have. It is like being in the peacetime Army, Navy or Air Force," said one Special Forces former member, airborne infantry who for more than 2 decades has trained foreign militaries in Indochina & the MidEast. "I'm not a mercenary," this trainer said. "I like excitement, but I have to be on the side of angels. Do not look for me to look for excitement [by] working on the side of vicious people."
But even the most polished of the firms have blemished histories. Employees of DynCorp were fired after being accused 2 years ago of keeping Bosnian women as concubines. Companies hired by the CIA in the 1980s trained foreign fighters later charged with atrocities in El Salvador and Honduras. When the firms are hired by the Pentagon or State Dept, as they would be in Afghanistan, their work is audited and sometimes supervised by U.S. military personnel, a process the State Dept says helps prevent abuse. But when they sell their services directly to other countries, there are minimal controls.
The only U. S. regulation of such foreign contracts is through the State Dept, which issues export licenses under the Arms Export Control Act. The law regulates the sale of military services just as it does the export of a crate of guns.
The dept reviews applications to ensure that no sales are made or services performed that would "undercut U. S. interests," spokesman Jason Greer said. The firms say this prevents them from working with govts that the U. S. disapproves of. When MPRI tried to get a license to train the Angolan army in 1994, for example, the State Dept turned it down.
But Congress is notified only of contracts worth more than $50 million. Sometimes there are conflicting views of what is in the U. S. interest. Once a license is granted, there are no reporting requirements or oversight of work that typically lasts years and takes the firms' employees to remote, lawless areas. In 1998, MPRI applied for a license to help the govt of Equatorial Guinea build its coast guard. The tiny African country is run by a military dictator who has been implicated in human rights abuses. It has no U. S. Embassy. The contract was initially rejected by 2 State Dept desks, according to a dept official & Soyster. But the decision was reversed 2 years later after MPRI lobbyists argued that if it was not allowed to do the job, a competitor from another country would.
"There are people who think you should not help people, that they don't deserve to be helped, even though they want to make a change," Soyster said. "We say, don't let past mistakes get in the way of doing something that should be done today." Even when doing the job they describe, the firms' role is sometimes cloudy. In 1995, during a UN embargo on arms sales to Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Yugoslavia, MPRI persuaded the State Dept to grant it a license to train Croatia's military, pledging that it would teach only leadership skills, budgeting and military ethics. When the Croatian military, in a highly effective offensive called Operation Storm, captured the Serb-held Krajina enclave later that year, there were suspicions that MPRI instructors must have been directly involved. The operation played a key role in reversing the tide of war against the Serbs and, consistent with American policy, in bringing both sides to the negotiating table. But the same Croatian military was subsequently implicated in uprooting more than 150,000 Serbs from their homes.
The company denies that its employees played any direct role in the Croatian army's sudden transformation into an effective fighting force. "I can assure you if we had the capability to train an army in a month to turn it around that fast, I wouldn't be talking to you, I'd be flying you over to the Riviera on the way to see it for yourself," Soyster said. "If we could do that to Croatia, we could straighten out Afghanistan in a couple of months." But critics charge that the help MPRI provided the Croatians may have allowed the U. S. to secretly influence events in the war while maintaining its neutral posture and without sending U. S. troops, advisors or trainers.
"MPRI had all these different meetings with top Croatian defense officials right before the offensive. It's inconceivable that they did not have some kind of impact," said one military analyst who has followed the company's involvement in the Balkans. "It was followed by massive ethnic cleansing. Now, had American troops been on the ground, we would have been held accountable for that. The fact that it was a private company made the connection a lot less clear." The line between training foreign troops and fighting with them sometimes blurs.”
“… the government is in the midst of its most radical privatization in history, and companies like Blackwater are becoming ever more deeply embedded in the war apparatus. Until this system is brought down, the world's the limit for Blackwater Worldwide--and as its rebranding campaign shows, Blackwater knows it.”
www.sjcite.info/gurkha.html 23 Nov 2005
There is a thread on the Blackwater Case here:
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...t=krongard
BREAK
From SourceWatch (most of the links stay within SourceWatch):
“… the phenomena of private companies offering services on the world market that have normally been duties of national military forces or involve armed security detail for business in unstable regions.
These services include risk advisory, training of local forces, armed site security, cash transport, intelligence services, workplace and building security, war zone security needs, weapons procurement, personnel and budget vetting, armed support, air support, logistical support, maritime security, cyber security, weapons destruction, prisons, surveillance, psychological warfare, propaganda tactics, covert operations, close protection and investigations.
The industry is growing with some estimating annual contracts in the $10-$20 billion range and others citing numbers as high as $100 billion.
The single largest issue introduced by the evolution of military services by the private sector is the degree to which corporations are now transcending the power of governments, rising as an influential variable within international and regional diplomacy, and redefining sovereignty in the 21st century. Advocates of the industry claim they are economically efficient and point towards the failure of the UN and the system of world governments to cease violence, genocide and civil war around the world. Those who are cautious of the emerging industry see this market as an encroachment into inherent government functions and question the real economic efficiency heralded as a true result of privatization. And there are, of course, many in between, who see benefits and drawbacks to the variety of services out there now on the world market.
The war in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the promised long global war against terror has created a boom in the security and risk advisory market. Trained and experienced military personnel from Special Forces units in the US, UK, Israel and South Africa are retiring to take part. The same is true for the intelligence agencies as companies aiding business ventures in Iraq like GlobalOptions and Diligence see executives on the boards from the CIA, DIA, FBI, the Secret Service, FEMA and MI6.
Many companies are subsidiaries of larger firms. MPRI and Titan were bought by L-3 Communications which is traded on the NYSE. Defence Systems Limited was bought by Armor Holdings, Inc., renamed ArmorGroup than bought out by its board. Group 4 Securicor is a merger between Group 4 Falck and the Wackenhut Corporation providing services from armed prison guards to guarding embassies to supplying electronic surveillance. Computer Sciences Corporation acquired DynCorp.
Many of these companies, while paid with taxpayer money when working under government contracts, are often registered offshore somewhere, escaping tax on many profits from re-entering the representative, public Treasury.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=PMC
"Since 1994, the U.S. Defense Department has entered into 3,061 contracts with 12 of the 24 U.S.-based PMCs identified by ICIJ, a review of government documents showed. Pentagon records valued those contracts was more than $300 billion. More than 2,700 of those contracts were held by just two companies: Kellogg Brown & Root and Booz Allen Hamilton. Because of the limited information the Pentagon provides and the breadth of services offered by some of the larger companies, it was impossible to determine what percentage of these contracts was for training, security or logistical services." [10]
The Center for Public Integrity: Making A Killing: The Business of War
http://www.publicintegrity.org/bow/default.aspx
In 2002, Peter W. Singer wrote the following in "Corporate Warriors: The Rise and Ramifications of the Privatized Military Industry" by Peter W. Singer. (Links to 91K/46 page .pdf file.)
[/FONT]
In "Transfering Costs of War to Latin America is Morally, Politically Wrong" in The Miami Herald, January 29, 2005, Geoff Thale observes:
The July 3, 2003 cover feature, Soldiers of Good Fortune by Barry Yeoman for The Independent Weekly makes the following assertions:
Accountability
Lt. Col. Tim Spicer makes the following remarks in his book, An Unorthodox Soldier: Peace and War and the Sandline Affair:
Related SourceWatch articles
BREAK
Corporate warriors: the rise of the privatized military industry
By Peter Warren Singer
http://books.google.com/books?id=VyIl3fd...rs&f=false
http://www.brookings.edu/topics/private-...ctors.aspx
http://www.amnestyusa.org/military-contr...id=1101665
Private Military Contractors Writing the News?
The Pentagon's Propaganda at Its Worst
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted October 17, 2008.
“the so-called "War on Terror" has cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in propaganda costs alone.”
http://www.alternet.org/world/103345/pri...its_worst/
Senator Barack Obama then introduced companion legislation in the Senate, the Security Contractor Accountability Act of 2007 (S. 2147). ... but it died in committee.
Contractor Accused of Death Threats 28 Aug 2009 A military contractor under investigation on allegations he overbilled and did faulty repair work on Navy and Army aircraft has been charged with threatening to kill witnesses in the case, according to a complaint unsealed Thursday. Keith E. Shaw, owner of Shaw Aero in Louisville, traveled to Tennessee to buy explosives as part of a plot to blow up his former business partner's plane, according to an affidavit filed in federal court by an investigator for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Remember also the role of the private firms CACI and Titan in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
See also
WACKENHUT CORPORATION
AND THE INSLAW PROMIS SOFTWARE
At http://www.american-buddha.com (requires registration)
There is also a list of CIA cut-out companies (? Age and accuracy) as well as other files on “the invisible government (ontelligence community)”
INSIDE THE SHADOW CIA
by John Connolly
SPY Magazine - Sept 1992 - Volume 6
http://prop1.org/legal/prisons/92wack.htm
“What? A big private company -- one with a board of former CIA, FBI and Pentagon officials; one in charge of protecting Nuclear-Weapons facilities, nuclear reactors, the Alaskan oil pipeline and more than a dozen American embassies abroad; one with long-standing ties to a radical right-wing organization; one with 30,000 men and women under arms -- secretly helped IRAQ in its effort to obtain sophisticated weapons? And fueled unrest in Venezuela? This is all the plot of a new best-selling thriller, right? Or the ravings of some overheated conspiracy buff, right? Right?
WRONG.”
“George Wackenhut had two personal attributes that were instrumental in the company's growth. First, he got along exceptionally well with important politicians. He was a close ally of Florida governor Claude Kirk, who hired him to combat organized crime in the state; and was also friends with Senator George Smathers, an intimate of John F. Kennedy's. It was Smathers who provided Wackenhut with his big break when the senator's law firm helped the company find a loophole in the Pinkerton law, the 1893 federal statute that had made it a crime for an employee of a private detective agency to do work for the government. Smathers's firm set up a wholly owned subsidiary of Wackenhut that provided only guards, not detectives. Shortly thereafter, Wackenhut received multimillion-dollar contracts from the government to guard Cape Canaveral and the Nevada nuclear-bomb test site, the first of many extremely lucrative federal contracts that have sustained the company to this day.
The second thing that helped make George Wackenhut successful was that he was, and is, a hard-line right-winger. He was able to profit from his beliefs by building up dossiers on Americans suspected of being Communists or merely left-leaning -- "subversives and sympathizers," as he put it -- and selling the information to interested parties. According to Frank Donner, the author of "Age of Surveillance", the Wackenhut Corporation maintained and updated its files even after the McCarthyite hysteria had ebbed, adding the names of antiwar protesters and civil-rights demonstrators to its list of "derogatory types." By 1965, Wackenhut was boasting to potential investors that the company maintained files on 2.5 million suspected dissidents -- one in 46 American adults then living.”
“It is not possible to overstate the special relationship Wackenhut enjoys with the federal government. It is close. When it comes to security matters, Wackenhut in many respects *is* the government. In 1991, a third of the company's $600-million in revenues came from the federal government, and another large chunk from companies that themselves work for the government, such as Westinghouse.
Wackenhut is the largest single company supplying security to U.S. embassies overseas; several of the 13 embassies it guards have been in important hotbeds of espionage, such as Chile, Greece and El Salvador. It also guards nearly all the most strategic government facilities in the U.S., including the Alaskan oil pipeline, the Hanford nuclear-waste facility, the Savannah River plutonium plant and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Wackenhut maintains an especially close relationship with the federal government in other ways as well. While early boards of directors included such prominent personalities of the political right as Captain Eddie Rickenbacker; General Mark Clark and Ralph E. Davis, a John Birch Society leader, current and recent members of the board have included much of the country's recent national-security directorate: former FBI director Clarence Kelley; former Defense secretary and former CIA deputy director Frank Carlucci: former Defense Intelligence Agent director General Joseph Carroll; former U.S. Secret Service director James J. Rowley; former Marine commandant P. X. Kelley; and acting chairman of President Bush's foreign-intelligence advisory board and former CIA deputy director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Before his appointment as Reagan's CIA director, the late William Casey was Wackenhut's outside legal counsel. The company has 30,000 armed employees on its payroll.
We wanted to know more about this special relationship; but the government was not forthcoming. Repeated requests to the Department of Energy for an explanation of how one company got the security contracts for nearly all of America's most strategic installations have gone unanswered.”
“We have spoken to numerous experts, including current and former CIA agents and analysts, current and former agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration and current and former Wackenhut executives and employees, all of whom have said that in the mid-1970's, after the Senate Intelligence Committee's revelations of the CIA's covert and sometimes illegal overseas operations, the agency and Wackenhut grew very, very close. Those revelations had forced the CIA to do a housecleaning, and it became CIA policy that certain kinds of activities would no longer officially be performed. But that didn't always mean that the need or the desire to undertake such operations disappeared. And that's where Wackenhut came in.
Our sources confirm that Wackenhut has had a long- standing relationship with the CIA, and that it has deepened over the last decade or so. Bruce Berckmans, who was assigned to the CIA station in Mexico City, left the agency in January 1975 (putatively) to become a Wackenhut international-operations vice president. Berckmans, who left Wackenhut in 1981, told SPY that he has seen a formal proposal George Wackenhut submitted to the CIA to allow the agency to use Wackenhut offices throughout the world as fronts for CIA activities. Richard Babayan, who says he was a CIA contract employee and is currently in jail awaiting trial on fraud and racketeering charges, has been cooperating with federal and congressional investigators looking into illegal shipments of nuclear-and-chemical-weapons-making supplies to Iraq. "Wackenhut has been used by the CIA and other intelligence agencies for years," he told SPY. "When they [the CIA] need cover, Wackenhut is there to provide it for them."
“We have uncovered considerable evidence that Wackenhut carried the CIA's water in fighting Communist encroachment in Central America in the 1980s (that is to say, during the Reagan administration when the CIA director was former Wackenhut lawyer William Casey, the late superpatriot who had a proclivity for extralegal and illegal anti-Communist covert operations such as Iran-contra). In 1981, Berckmans, the CIA agent turned Wackenhut vice president, joined with other senior Wackenhut executives to form the company's Special Projects Division. It was this division that linked up with ex-CIA man John Phillip Nichols, who had taken over the Cabazon Indian reservation in California, as we described in a previous article ["Badlands," April 1992], in pursuit of a scheme to manufacture explosives, poison gas and biological weapons -- and then, by virtue of the tribe's status as a sovereign nation, to export the weapons to the contras.”
“In addition to attempted weapons supply, Wackenhut seems to have been involved in Central Americain other ways. Ernesto Bermudez who was Wackenhut's director of international operations from 1987 to '89, admitted to SPY that during 1985 and '86 he ran Wackenhut's operations in El Salvador, where he was in charge of 1,500 men. When asked what 1 ,500 men were doing for Wackenhut in El Salvador, Bermudez replied coyly, "Things." Pressed, he elaborated: "Things you wouldn't want your mother to know about." It's worth noting that Wackenhut's annual revenues from government contracts -- the alleged reward for cooperation in the government's clandestine activities -- increased by 150 million, a 45 percent jump, while Ronald Reagan was in office.”
“Wackenhut's connection to the CIA and to other government agencies raises several troubling questions:
First, is the CIA using Wackenhut to conduct operations that it has been forbidden to undertake? Second, is the White House or some other party in the executive branch working through Wackenhut to conduct operations that it doesn't want Congress to know about? Third, has Wackenhut's cozy relationship with the government given it a feeling of security-or worse, an outright knowledge of sensitive or embarrassing information-that allows the company to believe that it can conduct itself as though it were above the law? A congressional investigation into Wackenhut's activities in the Alyeska affair last November began to shed some light on Wackenhut's way of doing business; clearly it's time for Congress to investigate just how far Wackenhut's other tentacles extend.”
Break
“Having expanding into providing food services for U.S. prisons in the 1960s, Wackenhut in 1984 launched a subsidiary to design and manage jails and detention centers for the burgeoning private prison market. Wackenhut then became that nation's second largest for-profit prison operator. Although the corrections division was financially successful, critics claimed that the company's guards abused inmates in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana.[citation needed]
In 1999, Wackenhut was stripped from a $12-million-a-year contract in Texas and fined $625,000 for failing to live up to promises in the running of a state jail; moreover, several guards were indicted for having sex with female inmates.[citation needed] In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, five guards at a Wackenhut work-release facility were fired or punished for having sex with inmates.[citation needed] In April 1999 the state of Louisiana took over the running of Wackenhut's 15-month-old juvenile prison after the U.S. Justice Department accused Wackenhut of subjecting its young inmates to "excessive abuse and neglect."[citation needed] In the same year a New Mexico legislative report called for a near-total revamp of prison operations, including two run by Wackenhut.[citation needed] U.S. journalist Gregory Palast commented on the case: "New Mexico's privately operated prisons are filled with America's impoverished, violent outcasts — and those are the guards."[2][ http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=868 ] He catalogued lax background checks before hiring guards, which led to several alleged cases of guards physically and sexually abusing inmates. In the U.S., Wackenhut has appeared in the federal courts 62 times since 1999, largely resulting from prisoners' claims of human rights abuses.[2] The company has been accused of trying to maximise profits in its private prisons at the expense of drug rehabilitation, counselling and literacy programs. In 1995 Wackenhut was investigated for diverting $700,000 intended for drug treatment programs at a Texas prison.”
“Frequent rumors that his company was in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, particularly in the 1960s, were never substantiated, but Wackenhut, who was obsessive about high-tech security gadgets in his private life, did not discourage the suggestion. Several of his senior executives were former CIA operatives, and his company's board of directors included former FBI director Clarence M. Kelley, former National Security Agency director Bobby Ray Inman, and former Defense secretary and deputy CIA director Frank Carlucci.[citation needed] On rare occasions, the company's clandestine work did land in the headlines.[citation needed] In 1991, a U.S. House of Representatives committee investigated charges that a Wackenhut executive, working for a consortium of oil companies, illegally spied on a whistleblower, former independent oil executive Chuck Hamel, exposing environmental damage caused by the Exxon Valdez oil spill.[4] The executive, who had also discussed trying to implicate a California congressman in his sting, resigned immediately after a meeting with George Wackenhut.[citation needed]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wackenhut
'They were war crimes.' Blackwater Founder Accused in Court of Intent to Kill 29 Aug 2009 The founder of Blackwater USA deliberately caused the deaths of innocent civilians in a series of shootings in Iraq, attorneys for Iraqis suing the security contractor mercenaries told a federal judge Friday. The attorneys singled out Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL who is the company's owner, for blame in the deaths of more than 20 Iraqis between 2005 and 2007. Six former Blackwater guards were criminally charged in 14 of the shootings, and family members and victims' estates sued Prince, Blackwater (now called Xe Services LLC) and a group of related companies. "The person responsible for these deaths is Mr. Prince,'' Susan L. Burke, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. "He had the intent, he provided the weapons, he provided the instructions, and they were done by his agents and they were war crimes.''
Contractor Accused of Death Threats 28 Aug 2009 A military contractor under investigation on allegations he overbilled and did faulty repair work on Navy and Army aircraft has been charged with threatening to kill witnesses in the case, according to a complaint unsealed Thursday. Keith E. Shaw, owner of Shaw Aero in Louisville, traveled to Tennessee to buy explosives as part of a plot to blow up his former business partner's plane, according to an affidavit filed in federal court by an investigator for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Blackwater Tapped Foreigners on Secret CIA Program --Nearly a dozen Blackwater 'surrogates' were recruited to join the Blackwater-CIA death squad program. 30 Aug 2009 When the CIA revived a plan to kill or capture terrorists in 2004, the agency turned to the well-connected security company mercenaries then known as Blackwater USA... The former senior CIA official said that close to a dozen Blackwater "surrogates" were recruited to join the death squad program. The recruits, the former official said, were not told they were working for the CIA. The program reportedly cost millions of dollars over an eight-year span.
April 02, 2009
AMY GOODMAN: Who heads up Triple Canopy?
JEREMY SCAHILL: It was founded by former Special Forces operatives from the US Army. They were minor contributors to the Bush/Cheney campaign, but not real big political players. They clearly started the company as a result of the US invasion in Iraq. They started it in 2003. By 2004, they got one of the primary contracts in Iraq.
An interesting fact about Triple Canopy is that it was one of the big three US companies. Triple Canopy, DynCorp, and Blackwater shared this mother contract. Blackwater had the biggest share of it, to guard US officials in the Baghdad area. DynCorp had the north of Iraq. Triple Canopy had the south of Iraq.
Triple Canopy also, though, did a very lucrative business servicing other war contractors like KBR, and Triple Canopy was also known for being the company that brought in the largest number of so-called third country nationals, non-Iraqis, non-Americans. They hired, for instance, former Salvadoran commandos who were veterans of the bloody counterinsurgency war in El Salvador that took the lives of 75,000 Salvadorans, minimum. Chileans—they used the same recruiter, Jose Miguel Pizarro Ovalle, that Blackwater used when they hired Chileans. This was a former Pinochet military officer…..
The news that I’m breaking on Triple Canopy, though, is that I obtained federal contracts that were signed in February and March by the Obama administration with Triple Canopy to act as a private paramilitary force operating out of Jerusalem. And this is also part of a very secretive State Department program called the Worldwide Personal Protective Service, which was started under the Clinton administration as a privatized wing of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security division. Triple Canopy was paid $5 million in February, March by the Obama administration to provide, quote, "security services” in Israel.
In congressional testimony in 2007, Ambassador David Satterfield, who was an Under Secretary of State, said that he had been guarded by private security companies when he traveled in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. Triple Canopy had the contract, has had this contract since 2005, the Obama administration continuing it.
I think that the Obama administration should be required to explain to US taxpayers, particularly with the atrocious human rights abuses that we’ve been seeing in Israel, why he’s using a US mercenary company to protect US officials when they potentially come in contact with civilians. And we’ve seen how deadly that’s been in Iraq. And before May 7th, his administration should be required to explain to the American people why he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are continuing the Bush administration’s policy of using deadly paramilitary forces in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: The alternative?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, the alternative, as Representative Jan Schakowsky has said, is to not use these companies, to ban their use in the war zone and to scale down the scope of what you classify as civilians or diplomats in Iraq.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/2/oba..._on_triple
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· From
http://www.thejefffariasshow.com/?tag=triple-canopy
· Blackwater’s World of Warcraft | Mother Jones
· The Spy Who Billed Me: Not Blackwater, but Xe, as in Xena Warrior
· Blackwater in Liberia – Deena Metzger, CounterPunch, April 2009
· The dark truth about Blackwater | Salon News
· Justice Department Grapples with Blackwater Case : NPR
· EXCLUSIVE – Family Members of Slain Iraqis Sue Blackwater USA for Murder
· Blackwater guards still at work in Iraq despite lacking license to operate – M.Lee & M.Baker. Armed guards from the security firm once known as Blackwater Worldwide are still protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq, even though the company has no license to operate there and has been told by the State Department its contracts will not be renewed two years after a lethal firefight that stirred outrage in Baghdad.
· U.S. Colonel: Blackwater “Actually Drew Their Weapons On U.S. Soldiers.”
· Blackwater (Xe) Scours War Torn Africa For New Hires – The American Conservative
· Blackwater’s Private Spies – Jeremy Scahill, This article appeared in the June 23, 2008 edition of The Nation – While the firm is quietly maintaining its Iraq work, it is aggressively pursuing other business opportunities.
…In September it was revealed that Blackwater had been “tapped” by the Pentagon’s Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office to compete for a share of a five-year, $15 billion budget “to fight terrorists with drug-trade ties.” According to the Army Times, the contract “could include antidrug technologies and equipment, special vehicles and aircraft, communications, security training, pilot training, geographic information systems and in-field support.” A spokesperson for another company bidding for the work said that “80 percent of the work will be overseas.” As Richard Douglas, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, explained, “The fact is, we use Blackwater to do a lot of our training of counternarcotics police in Afghanistan. I have to say that Blackwater has done a very good job.”
[B]Such an arrangement could find Blackwat...
War is a Racket: Private Military Contractors
http://www.afhub.com/images/hottoys/mili...MC07_2.jpg
Key early elements of this post are taken from a “data dump” here: http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/vi...php?t=8573 :
Here is a list of private military contractors. It is not intended to be complete, or definitive. Others may use this for further research or follow-up.
Aegis Defence Services Ltd
Olive Group FZ LLC
ISI
International Charters, Inc. (ici)
Blackwater usa
Blackstone
Titan Corp
Zapata Engineering (ordinance handling)
Armor Holdings Inc
Cochise Consultancy
DynCorp International LLC
SAIC-Science Applications Intl Corp.
Special Operations Consulting LLC
Triple Canopy Inc.
Triple Options
MPRI-Military Professional Resources Incorporated
Vinnell
BDM International Inc.
Sandline Ltd.
Executive Outcomes
“The Government Accountability Office reviewed U. S. contracts last year [2005] in an attempt to evaluate the size of the private security business in Iraq. The GAO found that the 22 contracts it reviewed were worth more than $ 766 million, but said none of the principal agencies responsible for Iraq reconstruction had complete data on their security costs. Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, a Washington-based trade group, estimated that the roughly 100 companies providing support to the military in Iraq are making a total of about $ 20 billion a year. He said some $ 2 billion of that goes to companies, such as Olive, that strictly provide security. Olive Group pulled in more than $ 100 million of it last year — not bad for a company in business only since 2001…”
The trade association in this industry in America is the International Peace Operations Association; Wikipedia has a list of its members:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internation...ssociation
There is an interview with Doug Brooks, IPOA founder…
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/...rooks.html
Here are some other “snapshots” from the data dump:
“Most of the private security companies are privately held, though DynCorp International LLC, owned by Veritas Capital Fund LP, is planning to sell stock to the public. DynCorp, which has provided security to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, received about 37 percent of its $1.9 billion in revenue in fiscal 2005 from operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“Triple Canopy, formed in 2003 by military veterans, has made several changes in recent months. It named a new president, Roger A. Young, a former senior executive at Maximus Inc., and established a strategic advisory board, which includes Catherine Yoran, a former assistant general counsel at the CIA. It also unveiled a new strategic plan, which includes expanding its training facility in West Virginia, traditionally used for its own employees.”
in St Bernard Parish
Storm-battered parish considers hired guns
[B]Contractors in Louisiana would make arrests, carry weapons[/B]
By Renae Merle
The Washington Post
Updated: 1:06 a.m. ET March 14, 2006
ST. BERNARD PARISH, La. - Maj. Pete Tufaro scanned the fenced lot packed with hundreds of stark white trailers soon to be inhabited by Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Shaking his head, he predicted the cramped quarters would ignite fights, hide criminals and become an incubator for crime, posing another test for his cash-strapped sheriff's department, which furloughed 206 of its 390 officers after the storm.
Tufaro thinks the parish has the solution: DynCorp International LLC, the Texas company that provided personal security to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and is one of the largest security contractors in Iraq. If the Federal Emergency Management Agency approves the sheriff's department's proposal, which would cost $70 million over three years, up to 100 DynCorp employees would be deputized to be make arrests, carry weapons, and dress in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Department khaki and black uniforms.
"You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between us and them," said Tufaro, who developed the proposal.
Blackwater USA, which protected the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and lost four employees in a brutal ambush in Fallujah in 2004, earned about $42 million through the end of December on a contract with Federal Protective Service, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, to provide security to FEMA sites. Most of the 330 contract guards now working in Louisiana are employed by the company.
The Homeland Security Department's Inspector General said the company's costs in its FEMA contract -- it earns $950 a day for each employee -- were "clearly very high," and it expressed hope that competition would lower them. But costs are not the only concerns raised by critics of the companies.
"Katrina broke all of the rules. It was the first time you had the deployment of armed private security contractors in the U.S.," said Peter W. Singer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of "Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry." That book is savailable online here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=VyIl3fd...q=&f=false
or at Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Warriors...0801441145
Here is its Amazon description: “Singer describes three categories of privatized military systems. "Provider firms" (the best known being the now reorganized Executive Outcomes) offer direct, tactical military assistance ranging from training programs and staff services to front-line combat. "Consulting firms," like the U.S.-based Military Professional Resources Inc., draw primarily on retired senior officers to provide strategic and administrative expertise on a contract basis. The ties of such groups to their country of origin, Singer finds, can be expected to weaken as markets become more cosmopolitan. Finally, the overlooked "support firms," like Brown & Root, provide logistic and maintenance services to armed forces preferring (or constrained by budgetary factors) to concentrate their own energies on combat. Singer takes pains to establish the improvements in capability and effectiveness privatization allows, ranging from saving money to reducing human suffering by ending small-scale conflicts. He is, however, far more concerned with privatization's negative implications. Technical issues, like contract problems, may lead to an operation ending without regard to a military rationale. A much bigger problem is the risk of states losing control of military policy to militaries outside the state systems, responsible only to their clients, managers, and stockholders, Singer emphasizes. So far, private military organizations have behaved cautiously, but there is no guarantee will continue. Nor can the moralities of business firms be necessarily expected to accommodate such niceties as the laws of war. Singer recommends increased oversight as a first step in regulation, an eminently reasonable response to a still imperfectly understood development in war making.”
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
“Boasts MPRI executive retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, most prominent of the private contractors: "We've got more generals per square foot here than in the Pentagon."
“MPRI, founded in 1988 by former Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono & 7 other retired generals, has trained militaries throughout the world under contract to the Pentagon. It counts 20 former senior military officers on its board of directors. The firm operates from a bland office building in Alexandria, VA., its halls as hushed as an insurance firm. Decor betrays its founders' tough credentials . A statue of a knight in armor stands in a corner of the lobby. MPRI's emblem is an unsheathed sword.
"These guys are not about to destroy reputations they've spent 30 years building just for a buck," said Soyster, who once headed the Defense Intelligence Agency. "We go someplace because we are either sent there by the U. S. govt or we're contracted by another govt. We do it for the money, I'm not ashamed to say. But we do it right."
[B]The financial rewards presumably beat Pentagon salaries. Since 9.11.01, per-share price of stock in L3 Communications, which owns MPRI, has more than doubled. The top 5 executives at Science Applications Intl Corp. of San Diego made between $825,000 and $1.8 million in salaries in 2001, and each held more than $1.5 million worth of stock options.
[/B]Revenues from the global international security market, of which the firms are a part, are expected to rise from $55.6 billion in 1990 to $202 billion in 2010, according to a 1997 study by Equitable Services Corp., security industry analyst. Renting trained killers dates back hundreds of years; privately recruited regiments were common in the U. S. Civil War. But selling military expertise has roots in Vietnam, when commercial teams funded by the Pentagon provided military & police training to South Vietnamese forces.
In 1975, McLean, VA based Vinnell Corp. won a $77-million contract to train Saudi Arabian infantry & artillery battalions to defend oil fields. It was the first time American civilians were permitted to sell military training directly to a foreign military. The job was controversial, and Senate Democrats held hearings. But the contract stuck. Other similar firms began to emerge. End of cold war led to dramatic growth. Suddenly, there was a pool of skilled former officers, some from Special Forces units, eager to sell the expertise they had developed as relatively low-paid soldiers. They found a ready market at the Pentagon, and in dozens of countries in Africa, Asia and the former Soviet sphere eager to professionalize their militaries.
The major U. S. firms in the field include MPRI, Vinnell, BDM International Inc. of Fairfax, Va., Armor Holdings Inc. of Jacksonville FL.; DynCorp of Reston, Va., and SAIC. Armor Holdings was among Fortune magazine's 100 fastest-growing companies in 1999 and 2000, one of the few firms on the list not related to technology. The people they hire are hardly soldiers of fortune. They are generally former military officers with 20 to 30 years of experience, generously pensioned retirees for whom the money is just part of the allure.
Many describe their work as public service, a way to practice military diplomacy. Often they freelance, taking on contracts that send them abroad for a year or so. They train armies how to use such complex hardware as armored personnel carriers, surface-to-air missiles, shoulder-fired antitank missiles, ships and aircraft, and other equipt typically sold to foreign armies by U.S.. They prep officers in military strategy, run battle simulation centers, and have helped support peacekeeping efforts in troubled regions under contract to the Pentagon & State Dept.
MPRI has trained military forces in dozens of countries, including Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Colombia. DynCorp trained the Haitian police force after the 1994 U. S. intervention in the island nation. MPRI & several other firms, under contract to the State Dept, established the African Ctr for Strategic Studies to teach fledgling democracies how to run professional armies. French Foreign Legion they are not. "One leitmotif of the business is how boring the individual jobs can be on almost all of the contracts that the big U. S. firms have. It is like being in the peacetime Army, Navy or Air Force," said one Special Forces former member, airborne infantry who for more than 2 decades has trained foreign militaries in Indochina & the MidEast. "I'm not a mercenary," this trainer said. "I like excitement, but I have to be on the side of angels. Do not look for me to look for excitement [by] working on the side of vicious people."
But even the most polished of the firms have blemished histories. Employees of DynCorp were fired after being accused 2 years ago of keeping Bosnian women as concubines. Companies hired by the CIA in the 1980s trained foreign fighters later charged with atrocities in El Salvador and Honduras. When the firms are hired by the Pentagon or State Dept, as they would be in Afghanistan, their work is audited and sometimes supervised by U.S. military personnel, a process the State Dept says helps prevent abuse. But when they sell their services directly to other countries, there are minimal controls.
The only U. S. regulation of such foreign contracts is through the State Dept, which issues export licenses under the Arms Export Control Act. The law regulates the sale of military services just as it does the export of a crate of guns.
The dept reviews applications to ensure that no sales are made or services performed that would "undercut U. S. interests," spokesman Jason Greer said. The firms say this prevents them from working with govts that the U. S. disapproves of. When MPRI tried to get a license to train the Angolan army in 1994, for example, the State Dept turned it down.
But Congress is notified only of contracts worth more than $50 million. Sometimes there are conflicting views of what is in the U. S. interest. Once a license is granted, there are no reporting requirements or oversight of work that typically lasts years and takes the firms' employees to remote, lawless areas. In 1998, MPRI applied for a license to help the govt of Equatorial Guinea build its coast guard. The tiny African country is run by a military dictator who has been implicated in human rights abuses. It has no U. S. Embassy. The contract was initially rejected by 2 State Dept desks, according to a dept official & Soyster. But the decision was reversed 2 years later after MPRI lobbyists argued that if it was not allowed to do the job, a competitor from another country would.
"There are people who think you should not help people, that they don't deserve to be helped, even though they want to make a change," Soyster said. "We say, don't let past mistakes get in the way of doing something that should be done today." Even when doing the job they describe, the firms' role is sometimes cloudy. In 1995, during a UN embargo on arms sales to Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Yugoslavia, MPRI persuaded the State Dept to grant it a license to train Croatia's military, pledging that it would teach only leadership skills, budgeting and military ethics. When the Croatian military, in a highly effective offensive called Operation Storm, captured the Serb-held Krajina enclave later that year, there were suspicions that MPRI instructors must have been directly involved. The operation played a key role in reversing the tide of war against the Serbs and, consistent with American policy, in bringing both sides to the negotiating table. But the same Croatian military was subsequently implicated in uprooting more than 150,000 Serbs from their homes.
The company denies that its employees played any direct role in the Croatian army's sudden transformation into an effective fighting force. "I can assure you if we had the capability to train an army in a month to turn it around that fast, I wouldn't be talking to you, I'd be flying you over to the Riviera on the way to see it for yourself," Soyster said. "If we could do that to Croatia, we could straighten out Afghanistan in a couple of months." But critics charge that the help MPRI provided the Croatians may have allowed the U. S. to secretly influence events in the war while maintaining its neutral posture and without sending U. S. troops, advisors or trainers.
"MPRI had all these different meetings with top Croatian defense officials right before the offensive. It's inconceivable that they did not have some kind of impact," said one military analyst who has followed the company's involvement in the Balkans. "It was followed by massive ethnic cleansing. Now, had American troops been on the ground, we would have been held accountable for that. The fact that it was a private company made the connection a lot less clear." The line between training foreign troops and fighting with them sometimes blurs.”
“… the government is in the midst of its most radical privatization in history, and companies like Blackwater are becoming ever more deeply embedded in the war apparatus. Until this system is brought down, the world's the limit for Blackwater Worldwide--and as its rebranding campaign shows, Blackwater knows it.”
www.sjcite.info/gurkha.html 23 Nov 2005
There is a thread on the Blackwater Case here:
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...t=krongard
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From SourceWatch (most of the links stay within SourceWatch):
“… the phenomena of private companies offering services on the world market that have normally been duties of national military forces or involve armed security detail for business in unstable regions.
These services include risk advisory, training of local forces, armed site security, cash transport, intelligence services, workplace and building security, war zone security needs, weapons procurement, personnel and budget vetting, armed support, air support, logistical support, maritime security, cyber security, weapons destruction, prisons, surveillance, psychological warfare, propaganda tactics, covert operations, close protection and investigations.
The industry is growing with some estimating annual contracts in the $10-$20 billion range and others citing numbers as high as $100 billion.
The single largest issue introduced by the evolution of military services by the private sector is the degree to which corporations are now transcending the power of governments, rising as an influential variable within international and regional diplomacy, and redefining sovereignty in the 21st century. Advocates of the industry claim they are economically efficient and point towards the failure of the UN and the system of world governments to cease violence, genocide and civil war around the world. Those who are cautious of the emerging industry see this market as an encroachment into inherent government functions and question the real economic efficiency heralded as a true result of privatization. And there are, of course, many in between, who see benefits and drawbacks to the variety of services out there now on the world market.
The war in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the promised long global war against terror has created a boom in the security and risk advisory market. Trained and experienced military personnel from Special Forces units in the US, UK, Israel and South Africa are retiring to take part. The same is true for the intelligence agencies as companies aiding business ventures in Iraq like GlobalOptions and Diligence see executives on the boards from the CIA, DIA, FBI, the Secret Service, FEMA and MI6.
Many companies are subsidiaries of larger firms. MPRI and Titan were bought by L-3 Communications which is traded on the NYSE. Defence Systems Limited was bought by Armor Holdings, Inc., renamed ArmorGroup than bought out by its board. Group 4 Securicor is a merger between Group 4 Falck and the Wackenhut Corporation providing services from armed prison guards to guarding embassies to supplying electronic surveillance. Computer Sciences Corporation acquired DynCorp.
Many of these companies, while paid with taxpayer money when working under government contracts, are often registered offshore somewhere, escaping tax on many profits from re-entering the representative, public Treasury.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=PMC
"Since 1994, the U.S. Defense Department has entered into 3,061 contracts with 12 of the 24 U.S.-based PMCs identified by ICIJ, a review of government documents showed. Pentagon records valued those contracts was more than $300 billion. More than 2,700 of those contracts were held by just two companies: Kellogg Brown & Root and Booz Allen Hamilton. Because of the limited information the Pentagon provides and the breadth of services offered by some of the larger companies, it was impossible to determine what percentage of these contracts was for training, security or logistical services." [10]
The Center for Public Integrity: Making A Killing: The Business of War
http://www.publicintegrity.org/bow/default.aspx
In 2002, Peter W. Singer wrote the following in "Corporate Warriors: The Rise and Ramifications of the Privatized Military Industry" by Peter W. Singer. (Links to 91K/46 page .pdf file.)
- "With the rise of the privatized military industry, actors in the global system can access capabilities that extend across the entire spectrum of military activity-from a team of commandos to a wing of fighter jets-simply by becoming a business partner."? (pg. 1-2)
- "Many PMFs operate as "virtual companies." Similar to Internet firms that limit their expenditure on fixed (brick and mortar) assets, most PMFs do not maintain standing forces but draw from databases of qualified personnel and specialized subcontractors on a contract-by-contract basis." (pg. 15)
- "The unrestricted access to military services ushered in by the rise of the privatized military industry has clearly enhanced the role of nonstate groups which at one time had been at a disadvantage in a system dominated by states. PMFs provide these groups with new options and new paths to power not imagined until very recently." (pg. 31)
- "The ultimate problem with PMFs is that they diffuse responsibility. Questions about who monitors, regulates, and punishes employees or companies that go astray are still to be fully answered. That many of these firms are chartered in offshore accounts complicates the matter further." (pg. 34)
[/FONT]
In "Transfering Costs of War to Latin America is Morally, Politically Wrong" in The Miami Herald, January 29, 2005, Geoff Thale observes:
- "In El Salvador, the security firms are said to be pleased with the candidates they have found. Many of them served in the Salvadoran armed forces; they are highly motivated, because they are being paid several times what they could earn in the Salvadoran economy; and they are cheap, because even paying five times what an average Salvadoran earns means that the security firms are paying far less than they would have to pay to recruit U.S. civilians to do this work."
- "The U.S. military contracts out elements of security operations to U.S. companies, who recruit relatively low-cost Latin Americans to fill the jobs. The contractors keep labor costs down, thus helping their bottom line. The Latin Americans are poor, need the work and benefit from what are -- by their standards -- high salaries."
- "Latin America and other less-developed regions shouldn't serve as a cheap labor pool to recruit people for dangerous jobs that are part of the U.S. military mission in Iraq. It may be tempting to pay others to take risks for us. It may be particularly tempting to pay people from foreign countries such as El Salvador, Colombia or Chile, so that we don't experience the human cost of casualties or deaths ourselves. But it's not morally acceptable."
- "U.S. military and government officials are attempting to avoid paying the political cost in the United States of the war in Iraq by hiring poor Latin Americans to do part of the fighting and the dying in place of U.S. citizens. Whether one supports or opposes the U.S. war in Iraq, one can agree that it is the U.S. military that ought to bear the burden of fighting a war that the United States initiated. Allies may join in and send their own troops in support if they so choose. But U.S. contractors working for the Pentagon shouldn't be recruiting civilians in Latin America to bear the burden of carrying out a U.S. military mission."
- "When a U.S. soldier is wounded or killed in combat, his or her family, neighbors and community feel the weight of the war and ask themselves, Is it worth it? In a democracy such as the United States, it is important for citizens to share the burden related to military action abroad, feel the impact and make the judgment about whether it's worthwhile."
The July 3, 2003 cover feature, Soldiers of Good Fortune by Barry Yeoman for The Independent Weekly makes the following assertions:
- "Private military corporations become a way to distance themselves and create what we used to call 'plausible deniability,'" says Daniel Nelson, a former professor of civil-military relations at the Defense Department's Marshall European Center for Security Studies. "It's disastrous for democracy."
- "The lack of oversight alarms some members of Congress. "Under a shroud of secrecy, the United States is carrying out military missions with people who don't have the same level of accountability," says Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a leading congressional critic of privatized war. "We have individuals who are not obligated to follow orders or follow the Military Code of Conduct. Their main obligation is to their employer, not to their country."
- "An analysis shows that 17 of the nation's leading private military firms have invested more than $12.4 million in congressional and presidential campaigns since 1999."
- "In 2001, according to the most recent federal disclosure forms, 10 private military companies spent more than $32 million on lobbying."
- "Federal law bans U.S. soldiers from participating in Colombia's war against left-wing rebels and from training army units with ties to right-wing paramilitaries infamous for torture and political killings. There are no such restrictions on for-profit companies, though, and since the late 1990s, the United States has paid private military companies an estimated $1.2 billion, both to eradicate coca crops and to help the Colombian army put down rebels who use the drug trade to finance their insurgency."
- "The Pentagon has become so dependent on private military companies that it literally cannot wage war without them. Troops already rely on for-profit contractors to maintain 28 percent of all weapons systems."
- "There are some weapons systems that the U.S. military forces do not have the capability to do their own maintenance on," concedes David Young, a deputy commander at the Defense Contract Management Agency."
Accountability
Lt. Col. Tim Spicer makes the following remarks in his book, An Unorthodox Soldier: Peace and War and the Sandline Affair:
- "Another frequent allegation about PMCs is that they are "not accountable." Not accountable to whom? World opinion? Outside politicians? I can only speak for Sandline, but we are always accountable, to our own policies and ethos and to our client government, with whom we always have a binding contract."? (pg. 24)
- "[T]he majority of legitimate PMCs are quite capable of continuing to operate and grow without the introduction of a regulatory regime. PMCs will accept external regulation if it is manageable and adds to their commercial aspirations and operational effectiveness. [ ] I would suggest that since PMCs operate in an international setting and in high-risk, volatile situations, the sort of heavy-handed regulation employed in other areas of public concern might not be entirely appropriate." (pg. 27)
- "Any PMC must adhere to the law of armed conflict, as defined by the Geneva Convention, and show a respect for human dignity and human rights. Although our operatives are always enlisted in the forces of the governments who employ us, not least to ensure a clear chain of command, if one of our people were told, for example, to attack a village, an action which would unnecessarily endanger innocent lives, he would not do it." (pg. 53)
Related SourceWatch articles
- Abu Ghraib
- Blackwater Watch
- British Association of Private Security Companies
- Coalition Provisional Authority
- Col. Theodore S. Westhusing
- Coup Attempt in Equatorial Guinea
- Defense contractors
- DESECON - Defence and Security Consultants
- Facilities engineering
- International Convention Against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries
- International Peace Operations Association
- Loose Cannon Pentagon
- Military-industrial complex
- Northrop Grumman
- Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization
- Post-war Iraq
- Prison-industrial complex
- Private Security Company Association of Iraq
- Privatization of Iraq
- Reconstruction of Iraq contractors
- Simon Mann
- Surveillance-industrial complex
- Joe Ryan Abu Ghraib diary April 2004
- Tim Spicer
- War in Iraq
- War profiteering
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Corporate warriors: the rise of the privatized military industry
By Peter Warren Singer
http://books.google.com/books?id=VyIl3fd...rs&f=false
http://www.brookings.edu/topics/private-...ctors.aspx
http://www.amnestyusa.org/military-contr...id=1101665
Private Military Contractors Writing the News?
The Pentagon's Propaganda at Its Worst
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted October 17, 2008.
“the so-called "War on Terror" has cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in propaganda costs alone.”
http://www.alternet.org/world/103345/pri...its_worst/
Senator Barack Obama then introduced companion legislation in the Senate, the Security Contractor Accountability Act of 2007 (S. 2147). ... but it died in committee.
Contractor Accused of Death Threats 28 Aug 2009 A military contractor under investigation on allegations he overbilled and did faulty repair work on Navy and Army aircraft has been charged with threatening to kill witnesses in the case, according to a complaint unsealed Thursday. Keith E. Shaw, owner of Shaw Aero in Louisville, traveled to Tennessee to buy explosives as part of a plot to blow up his former business partner's plane, according to an affidavit filed in federal court by an investigator for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Remember also the role of the private firms CACI and Titan in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
See also
WACKENHUT CORPORATION
AND THE INSLAW PROMIS SOFTWARE
At http://www.american-buddha.com (requires registration)
There is also a list of CIA cut-out companies (? Age and accuracy) as well as other files on “the invisible government (ontelligence community)”
INSIDE THE SHADOW CIA
by John Connolly
SPY Magazine - Sept 1992 - Volume 6
http://prop1.org/legal/prisons/92wack.htm
“What? A big private company -- one with a board of former CIA, FBI and Pentagon officials; one in charge of protecting Nuclear-Weapons facilities, nuclear reactors, the Alaskan oil pipeline and more than a dozen American embassies abroad; one with long-standing ties to a radical right-wing organization; one with 30,000 men and women under arms -- secretly helped IRAQ in its effort to obtain sophisticated weapons? And fueled unrest in Venezuela? This is all the plot of a new best-selling thriller, right? Or the ravings of some overheated conspiracy buff, right? Right?
WRONG.”
“George Wackenhut had two personal attributes that were instrumental in the company's growth. First, he got along exceptionally well with important politicians. He was a close ally of Florida governor Claude Kirk, who hired him to combat organized crime in the state; and was also friends with Senator George Smathers, an intimate of John F. Kennedy's. It was Smathers who provided Wackenhut with his big break when the senator's law firm helped the company find a loophole in the Pinkerton law, the 1893 federal statute that had made it a crime for an employee of a private detective agency to do work for the government. Smathers's firm set up a wholly owned subsidiary of Wackenhut that provided only guards, not detectives. Shortly thereafter, Wackenhut received multimillion-dollar contracts from the government to guard Cape Canaveral and the Nevada nuclear-bomb test site, the first of many extremely lucrative federal contracts that have sustained the company to this day.
The second thing that helped make George Wackenhut successful was that he was, and is, a hard-line right-winger. He was able to profit from his beliefs by building up dossiers on Americans suspected of being Communists or merely left-leaning -- "subversives and sympathizers," as he put it -- and selling the information to interested parties. According to Frank Donner, the author of "Age of Surveillance", the Wackenhut Corporation maintained and updated its files even after the McCarthyite hysteria had ebbed, adding the names of antiwar protesters and civil-rights demonstrators to its list of "derogatory types." By 1965, Wackenhut was boasting to potential investors that the company maintained files on 2.5 million suspected dissidents -- one in 46 American adults then living.”
“It is not possible to overstate the special relationship Wackenhut enjoys with the federal government. It is close. When it comes to security matters, Wackenhut in many respects *is* the government. In 1991, a third of the company's $600-million in revenues came from the federal government, and another large chunk from companies that themselves work for the government, such as Westinghouse.
Wackenhut is the largest single company supplying security to U.S. embassies overseas; several of the 13 embassies it guards have been in important hotbeds of espionage, such as Chile, Greece and El Salvador. It also guards nearly all the most strategic government facilities in the U.S., including the Alaskan oil pipeline, the Hanford nuclear-waste facility, the Savannah River plutonium plant and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Wackenhut maintains an especially close relationship with the federal government in other ways as well. While early boards of directors included such prominent personalities of the political right as Captain Eddie Rickenbacker; General Mark Clark and Ralph E. Davis, a John Birch Society leader, current and recent members of the board have included much of the country's recent national-security directorate: former FBI director Clarence Kelley; former Defense secretary and former CIA deputy director Frank Carlucci: former Defense Intelligence Agent director General Joseph Carroll; former U.S. Secret Service director James J. Rowley; former Marine commandant P. X. Kelley; and acting chairman of President Bush's foreign-intelligence advisory board and former CIA deputy director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Before his appointment as Reagan's CIA director, the late William Casey was Wackenhut's outside legal counsel. The company has 30,000 armed employees on its payroll.
We wanted to know more about this special relationship; but the government was not forthcoming. Repeated requests to the Department of Energy for an explanation of how one company got the security contracts for nearly all of America's most strategic installations have gone unanswered.”
“We have spoken to numerous experts, including current and former CIA agents and analysts, current and former agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration and current and former Wackenhut executives and employees, all of whom have said that in the mid-1970's, after the Senate Intelligence Committee's revelations of the CIA's covert and sometimes illegal overseas operations, the agency and Wackenhut grew very, very close. Those revelations had forced the CIA to do a housecleaning, and it became CIA policy that certain kinds of activities would no longer officially be performed. But that didn't always mean that the need or the desire to undertake such operations disappeared. And that's where Wackenhut came in.
Our sources confirm that Wackenhut has had a long- standing relationship with the CIA, and that it has deepened over the last decade or so. Bruce Berckmans, who was assigned to the CIA station in Mexico City, left the agency in January 1975 (putatively) to become a Wackenhut international-operations vice president. Berckmans, who left Wackenhut in 1981, told SPY that he has seen a formal proposal George Wackenhut submitted to the CIA to allow the agency to use Wackenhut offices throughout the world as fronts for CIA activities. Richard Babayan, who says he was a CIA contract employee and is currently in jail awaiting trial on fraud and racketeering charges, has been cooperating with federal and congressional investigators looking into illegal shipments of nuclear-and-chemical-weapons-making supplies to Iraq. "Wackenhut has been used by the CIA and other intelligence agencies for years," he told SPY. "When they [the CIA] need cover, Wackenhut is there to provide it for them."
“We have uncovered considerable evidence that Wackenhut carried the CIA's water in fighting Communist encroachment in Central America in the 1980s (that is to say, during the Reagan administration when the CIA director was former Wackenhut lawyer William Casey, the late superpatriot who had a proclivity for extralegal and illegal anti-Communist covert operations such as Iran-contra). In 1981, Berckmans, the CIA agent turned Wackenhut vice president, joined with other senior Wackenhut executives to form the company's Special Projects Division. It was this division that linked up with ex-CIA man John Phillip Nichols, who had taken over the Cabazon Indian reservation in California, as we described in a previous article ["Badlands," April 1992], in pursuit of a scheme to manufacture explosives, poison gas and biological weapons -- and then, by virtue of the tribe's status as a sovereign nation, to export the weapons to the contras.”
“In addition to attempted weapons supply, Wackenhut seems to have been involved in Central Americain other ways. Ernesto Bermudez who was Wackenhut's director of international operations from 1987 to '89, admitted to SPY that during 1985 and '86 he ran Wackenhut's operations in El Salvador, where he was in charge of 1,500 men. When asked what 1 ,500 men were doing for Wackenhut in El Salvador, Bermudez replied coyly, "Things." Pressed, he elaborated: "Things you wouldn't want your mother to know about." It's worth noting that Wackenhut's annual revenues from government contracts -- the alleged reward for cooperation in the government's clandestine activities -- increased by 150 million, a 45 percent jump, while Ronald Reagan was in office.”
“Wackenhut's connection to the CIA and to other government agencies raises several troubling questions:
First, is the CIA using Wackenhut to conduct operations that it has been forbidden to undertake? Second, is the White House or some other party in the executive branch working through Wackenhut to conduct operations that it doesn't want Congress to know about? Third, has Wackenhut's cozy relationship with the government given it a feeling of security-or worse, an outright knowledge of sensitive or embarrassing information-that allows the company to believe that it can conduct itself as though it were above the law? A congressional investigation into Wackenhut's activities in the Alyeska affair last November began to shed some light on Wackenhut's way of doing business; clearly it's time for Congress to investigate just how far Wackenhut's other tentacles extend.”
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“Having expanding into providing food services for U.S. prisons in the 1960s, Wackenhut in 1984 launched a subsidiary to design and manage jails and detention centers for the burgeoning private prison market. Wackenhut then became that nation's second largest for-profit prison operator. Although the corrections division was financially successful, critics claimed that the company's guards abused inmates in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana.[citation needed]
In 1999, Wackenhut was stripped from a $12-million-a-year contract in Texas and fined $625,000 for failing to live up to promises in the running of a state jail; moreover, several guards were indicted for having sex with female inmates.[citation needed] In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, five guards at a Wackenhut work-release facility were fired or punished for having sex with inmates.[citation needed] In April 1999 the state of Louisiana took over the running of Wackenhut's 15-month-old juvenile prison after the U.S. Justice Department accused Wackenhut of subjecting its young inmates to "excessive abuse and neglect."[citation needed] In the same year a New Mexico legislative report called for a near-total revamp of prison operations, including two run by Wackenhut.[citation needed] U.S. journalist Gregory Palast commented on the case: "New Mexico's privately operated prisons are filled with America's impoverished, violent outcasts — and those are the guards."[2][ http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=868 ] He catalogued lax background checks before hiring guards, which led to several alleged cases of guards physically and sexually abusing inmates. In the U.S., Wackenhut has appeared in the federal courts 62 times since 1999, largely resulting from prisoners' claims of human rights abuses.[2] The company has been accused of trying to maximise profits in its private prisons at the expense of drug rehabilitation, counselling and literacy programs. In 1995 Wackenhut was investigated for diverting $700,000 intended for drug treatment programs at a Texas prison.”
“Frequent rumors that his company was in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, particularly in the 1960s, were never substantiated, but Wackenhut, who was obsessive about high-tech security gadgets in his private life, did not discourage the suggestion. Several of his senior executives were former CIA operatives, and his company's board of directors included former FBI director Clarence M. Kelley, former National Security Agency director Bobby Ray Inman, and former Defense secretary and deputy CIA director Frank Carlucci.[citation needed] On rare occasions, the company's clandestine work did land in the headlines.[citation needed] In 1991, a U.S. House of Representatives committee investigated charges that a Wackenhut executive, working for a consortium of oil companies, illegally spied on a whistleblower, former independent oil executive Chuck Hamel, exposing environmental damage caused by the Exxon Valdez oil spill.[4] The executive, who had also discussed trying to implicate a California congressman in his sting, resigned immediately after a meeting with George Wackenhut.[citation needed]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wackenhut
'They were war crimes.' Blackwater Founder Accused in Court of Intent to Kill 29 Aug 2009 The founder of Blackwater USA deliberately caused the deaths of innocent civilians in a series of shootings in Iraq, attorneys for Iraqis suing the security contractor mercenaries told a federal judge Friday. The attorneys singled out Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL who is the company's owner, for blame in the deaths of more than 20 Iraqis between 2005 and 2007. Six former Blackwater guards were criminally charged in 14 of the shootings, and family members and victims' estates sued Prince, Blackwater (now called Xe Services LLC) and a group of related companies. "The person responsible for these deaths is Mr. Prince,'' Susan L. Burke, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. "He had the intent, he provided the weapons, he provided the instructions, and they were done by his agents and they were war crimes.''
Contractor Accused of Death Threats 28 Aug 2009 A military contractor under investigation on allegations he overbilled and did faulty repair work on Navy and Army aircraft has been charged with threatening to kill witnesses in the case, according to a complaint unsealed Thursday. Keith E. Shaw, owner of Shaw Aero in Louisville, traveled to Tennessee to buy explosives as part of a plot to blow up his former business partner's plane, according to an affidavit filed in federal court by an investigator for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Blackwater Tapped Foreigners on Secret CIA Program --Nearly a dozen Blackwater 'surrogates' were recruited to join the Blackwater-CIA death squad program. 30 Aug 2009 When the CIA revived a plan to kill or capture terrorists in 2004, the agency turned to the well-connected security company mercenaries then known as Blackwater USA... The former senior CIA official said that close to a dozen Blackwater "surrogates" were recruited to join the death squad program. The recruits, the former official said, were not told they were working for the CIA. The program reportedly cost millions of dollars over an eight-year span.
April 02, 2009
AMY GOODMAN: Who heads up Triple Canopy?
JEREMY SCAHILL: It was founded by former Special Forces operatives from the US Army. They were minor contributors to the Bush/Cheney campaign, but not real big political players. They clearly started the company as a result of the US invasion in Iraq. They started it in 2003. By 2004, they got one of the primary contracts in Iraq.
An interesting fact about Triple Canopy is that it was one of the big three US companies. Triple Canopy, DynCorp, and Blackwater shared this mother contract. Blackwater had the biggest share of it, to guard US officials in the Baghdad area. DynCorp had the north of Iraq. Triple Canopy had the south of Iraq.
Triple Canopy also, though, did a very lucrative business servicing other war contractors like KBR, and Triple Canopy was also known for being the company that brought in the largest number of so-called third country nationals, non-Iraqis, non-Americans. They hired, for instance, former Salvadoran commandos who were veterans of the bloody counterinsurgency war in El Salvador that took the lives of 75,000 Salvadorans, minimum. Chileans—they used the same recruiter, Jose Miguel Pizarro Ovalle, that Blackwater used when they hired Chileans. This was a former Pinochet military officer…..
The news that I’m breaking on Triple Canopy, though, is that I obtained federal contracts that were signed in February and March by the Obama administration with Triple Canopy to act as a private paramilitary force operating out of Jerusalem. And this is also part of a very secretive State Department program called the Worldwide Personal Protective Service, which was started under the Clinton administration as a privatized wing of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security division. Triple Canopy was paid $5 million in February, March by the Obama administration to provide, quote, "security services” in Israel.
In congressional testimony in 2007, Ambassador David Satterfield, who was an Under Secretary of State, said that he had been guarded by private security companies when he traveled in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. Triple Canopy had the contract, has had this contract since 2005, the Obama administration continuing it.
I think that the Obama administration should be required to explain to US taxpayers, particularly with the atrocious human rights abuses that we’ve been seeing in Israel, why he’s using a US mercenary company to protect US officials when they potentially come in contact with civilians. And we’ve seen how deadly that’s been in Iraq. And before May 7th, his administration should be required to explain to the American people why he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are continuing the Bush administration’s policy of using deadly paramilitary forces in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: The alternative?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, the alternative, as Representative Jan Schakowsky has said, is to not use these companies, to ban their use in the war zone and to scale down the scope of what you classify as civilians or diplomats in Iraq.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/2/oba..._on_triple
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· From
http://www.thejefffariasshow.com/?tag=triple-canopy
· Blackwater’s World of Warcraft | Mother Jones
· The Spy Who Billed Me: Not Blackwater, but Xe, as in Xena Warrior
· Blackwater in Liberia – Deena Metzger, CounterPunch, April 2009
· The dark truth about Blackwater | Salon News
· Justice Department Grapples with Blackwater Case : NPR
· EXCLUSIVE – Family Members of Slain Iraqis Sue Blackwater USA for Murder
· Blackwater guards still at work in Iraq despite lacking license to operate – M.Lee & M.Baker. Armed guards from the security firm once known as Blackwater Worldwide are still protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq, even though the company has no license to operate there and has been told by the State Department its contracts will not be renewed two years after a lethal firefight that stirred outrage in Baghdad.
· U.S. Colonel: Blackwater “Actually Drew Their Weapons On U.S. Soldiers.”
· Blackwater (Xe) Scours War Torn Africa For New Hires – The American Conservative
· Blackwater’s Private Spies – Jeremy Scahill, This article appeared in the June 23, 2008 edition of The Nation – While the firm is quietly maintaining its Iraq work, it is aggressively pursuing other business opportunities.
…In September it was revealed that Blackwater had been “tapped” by the Pentagon’s Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office to compete for a share of a five-year, $15 billion budget “to fight terrorists with drug-trade ties.” According to the Army Times, the contract “could include antidrug technologies and equipment, special vehicles and aircraft, communications, security training, pilot training, geographic information systems and in-field support.” A spokesperson for another company bidding for the work said that “80 percent of the work will be overseas.” As Richard Douglas, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, explained, “The fact is, we use Blackwater to do a lot of our training of counternarcotics police in Afghanistan. I have to say that Blackwater has done a very good job.”
[B]Such an arrangement could find Blackwat...
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
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