Private Military Contractors - Data Dump

[David Guyatt]

Due to his illegal activities in the Iran-Contra affair, Clarridge was indicted in November 1991 on seven counts of perjury and false statements. On Christmas Eve 1992 in the waning hours of his presidency, George H. W. Bush pardoned Clarridge before his trial could finish.

[Ed Jewett]

Will the Last Mercenary Turn Out the Lights On U.S. Empire

Tue, 01/25/2011 - 21:32 Glen Ford



A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
The United States' use of mercenaries is unprecedented in scope for a major power in modern times, and further weakens a decaying empire. Unable to defeat the resistance in two of the poorest nations on the planet, America increasingly depends on high-paid killers-for-profit to man the battlements. In Iraq, where the U.S. is reluctantly making an exit, "President Obama plans to substitute outgoing U.S. troops with mercenaries." The same may happen, soon, in Afghanistan.

Will the Last Mercenary Turn Out the Lights On U.S. Empire
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
"Washington is likely to find out that its privatization of war cannot save the empire's last toehold in Iraq."
The soldier of fortune has become an indispensable element of U.S. imperial rule. Mercenaries are a key item in President Obama's menu for continued American domination of Afghanistan and Iraq, as deadlines arrive for withdrawal of uniformed American troops. With foreign wars going badly for the United States, more and more it looks like the last defenders of America's imperial Alamo will be murder-for-hire corporations like the one formerly known as Blackwater.
All U.S. troops whether the Americans call them combat soldiers or not are scheduled to leave Iraq at the end of this year. The Americans never intended to leave, but were forced on the way out the door by the Iraqis during George Bush's presidency. Now President Obama plans to substitute outgoing U.S. troops with mercenaries, who would guard remaining U.S. installations, the Green Zone and the U.S. Embassy, the biggest embassy in the world and really a base, itself. But the Iraqis hold a special hatred for the American mercenaries, who roamed the country, killing civilians for pleasure, often in sprees of mass murderous drunkenness. Washington is likely to find out that its privatization of war cannot save the empire's last toehold in Iraq.
The same moment will come in Afghanistan, where civilian contractors outnumber U.S. soldiers. American mercenaries under arms number 26,000, which is about one and a half times the size of a U.S. Marine division. President Obama has promised to begin the process of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July. It's quite clear that the Americans never plan to actually leave, but the Afghans want them to go, and for that reason they will be going. The Americans would surely try to dominate the country through their huge mercenary army. However, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, like most people, doesn't like mercenaries running around his country. He's already applied a variety of measures to constrain their freedom of movement, and it is difficult to imagine that Karzai or any other Afghan leader would permit the mercenaries to stay on after the U.S. soldiers leave. So, some guy from Blackwater may wind up turning out the lights on the U.S. imperial presence in Afghanistan, a couple of years from now. The most expensive army in the world, supplemented by even more expensive hired killers, cannot defeat one of the world's poorest countries.
"The Americans would surely try to dominate the country through their huge mercenary army."
How about two of the world's poorest countries? Somalia hasn't had a national government since the early Nineties, but its people refuse to allow foreigners to rule them. The puppet regime set up in Mogadishu by the Americans and Europeans controls only a few city blocks. Soldiers rented by the U.S. from Uganda guard the escape route to the airport. The richest nation on the planet cannot defeat one of the world's most poorly financed resistance movements, the Islamist Shabab. So, who ya gonna call? Blackwater, whose founder, Erik Prince, was awarded a contract to try to create an army to defend the puppet Somali state. But mercenaries like Erik Prince are incapable of creating armies that will defend a country's sovereignty. They can only create mercenaries like themselves, who fight for money. And such mercenaries cannot, in the end, defeat genuine people's movements in Somalia, or anywhere else. Not anymore.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.




embedded audio at the link
http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/...-us-empire

[Magda Hassan]

PNG goldmine acts over allegations of torture and rape

Lindsay Murdoch

February 10, 2011

DARWIN: The operator of the multibillion-dollar Porgera goldmine in Papua New Guinea has sacked five employees over an alleged pattern of violent abuse against villagers, including pack rapes.
Scores of women say they were beaten, tortured or raped by members of Barrick Gold Corporation's 450-strong private security force in abuses dating to 2008.
One woman told how she and three other women were raped by 10 security personnel, one of whom forced her to swallow a used condom that he had used while raping the other victims.
Advertisement: Story continues below
The alleged rape of a 26-year-old woman, who was collecting native vegetables near the mine, occurred last month after Barrick had conducted an internal investigation into alleged abuses and only days before the company issued a statement announcing improved security to protect villagers near the mine.
Because the woman resisted, her genitals were repeatedly burnt with a hot rod, said the Porgera Alliance, a non-government organisation.
Three girls aged 14 were allegedly raped last July. Victims told investigators from Human Rights Watch that after being arrested for illegal mining, guards gave them a choice of submitting to gang rape or facing fines and possible jail.
''The women that Human Rights Watch spoke to said they feared reporting abuses to authorities given the fear of retribution, the threat of punishment for illegal mining and the social stigma that affect rape victims around Porgera,'' the US organisation said in a report.
The Porgera mine is in Enga Province, in a remote part of PNG's restive highlands. It has sparked controversy in the past over its discharge of waste into the nearby Porgera River and accusations of extrajudicial killings by security personnel.
The mine has produced more than 16 million ounces of gold, worth more than $US20 billion at today's prices, and accounted for about 12 per cent of PNG's total exports over two decades.
Responding to accusations by Human Rights Watch, Barrick Gold said it had sacked employees and was upgrading security at the mine after an internal investigation.
''Our deepest concern is for the women who may have been the victims of these alleged crimes,'' Barrick said in a statement released at its headquarters in Toronto.
The company said further dismissals and other disciplinary action may occur pending the results of a police investigation. A company spokesman told the Herald that all of those sacked were PNG nationals. The spokesman said as well as the five sacked employees, eight former employees have been implicated in the allegations.
Human Rights Watch has also warned that small-scale and illegal miners around Porgera are being exposed to mercury poisoning when they attempt to separate gold from ore-bearing rock.
A local doctor said many of the miners were ''zombies'' by the time they reached hospital and added that ''some will recover, some will not''.
Human Rights Watch recommended a public health survey of communities around Porgera to determine the extent of the exposure to dangerous levels of mercury and to identify an appropriate response to the problem.
Barrick's security force arrested 45 people panning gold in the area in a sweep on January 29.
Barrick took over Porgera in 2006 from Placer Dome, the Canadian company that opened the mine in 1990. The mine is expected to continue producing gold until at least 2023.http://www.smh.com.au/world/png-goldmine...1an05.html

[Ed Jewett]

Mercenary Deaths Surpass U.S. Military Losses in Both Iraq and Afghanistan

February 10th, 2011 Via: Foreign Policy:
…more than 2,000 contractors have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Contractor deaths now represent over 25 percent of all U.S. fatalities" in those conflicts, write Steven Schooner and Collin Swan of the George Washington University Law School.

[Ed Jewett]

US investigating war contractor con jobs

April 25, 2011 by legitgov


US investigating war contractor con jobs 26 Apr 2011 The US Commission on Wartime Contracting says hired contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan have been caught bilking billions of dollars from the United States government. The commission discovered that billions of dollars are missing, misspent, or defrauded by private contractors in Afghanistan, and questioned why companies caught cheating the US taxpayer have not been barred from doing business with the government, the Press TV correspondent in Washington reported on Monday.

http://www.legitgov.org/US-investigating...r-con-jobs

[Ed Jewett]

WikiLeaks: U.S. saw Israeli firm's rise in Latin America as a threat

Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/05/09/1...z1M2moHrUI

TIM JOHNSON - MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON A security company led by the former head of operations for the Israeli military made such inroads into Latin America a few years ago that U.S. diplomats saw it as a security risk and moved to thwart the company's expansion, U.S. diplomatic cables show.

The diplomats' efforts were made easier when an interpreter for the Israeli firm, Global CST, was caught peddling classified Colombian Defense Ministry documents to Marxist guerrillas seeking to topple the state, one cable said.

Still, the ability of the Israeli security consultancy to obtain contracts in Colombia, Peru and Panama in rapid succession speaks to the prowess of retired Israeli military officers in peddling security know-how amid perceptions that they'd bring better results than official U.S. government assistance.



Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/05/09/1...z1M2mc4WiX

[Ed Jewett]

A reminder:

"MsSparky.com is an excellent web site and source of information."
~Maj. Glenn MacDonald, USAR (Ret.) editor-in-chief, MilitaryCorruption.com

http://mssparky.com/

[Magda Hassan]

Thanks for that reminder. It is an excellent site :rocker:

[Ed Jewett]

Former Blackwater Officials Form Global Intelligence Company

Team boasts of "human assets" in Iran and access to "lobbying firms, intelligence officials" in Washington

By Shane Harris

From the team that brought you Blackwater and the pre-9/11 counterterrorism program Able Danger comes "Jellyfish Intelligence."

That's the name a group of former US intelligence officials and executives from the controversial security firm have chosen for a new private outfit that offers "predictive intelligence" for Fortune 500 corporations and senior-level executives and that aims to "protect human lives and their business interests throughout the world.



The company blends traditional models of a strategic consulting firm with what it claims is an extensive network of human sourcespeople who, in an official context, would be called spies. Jellyfish employs a network of "over 200 intelligence assets on the ground" in global hot spots, according to a marketing document, including countries undergoing political upheaval in the Middle East. The company won't disclose its sources' identities, but the document calls them "figures inside key circles . . . including within the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, clerical circles in Iran, and tribal leaderships on the Pakistani side of the [Afghanistan-Pakistan] border region.

If trueand none of the claims could be independently verifiedthat would make Jellyfish a private rival to the CIA. The company also says its assets are "well-connected among key opposition groups throughout the Middle East," a claim, one company official boldly asserts, that the US spy agencies couldn't make, as evidenced by its failure to predict political and civic uprisings in Egypt and other countries in the region.

Jellyfish's network includes people in more than two dozen countries in Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. At least one asset is in Tehran, the company says, in a country where US corporations and citizens are officially banned from doing business. An exectuive says that because Jellyfish was employing "foreign nationals," it didn't run afoul of the sanctions regime.

The market for high-level, customized intelligence about global political risk isn't a new one. Companies such as Stratfor and any number of consulting firms staffed by former government officials, including Kissinger Associates, offer some variation on the "private CIA" model. These groups warn companies when to pull their employees out of a dangerous location. They help dig up intelligence on competitors. And they identify problems on the horizon that may affect a company's ability to do business either because it can't physically operate there or because doing so is too difficult politically.

Jellyfish doesn't shy away from its controversial pedigree. In fact, it leads with Blackwater and Able Danger in the headline of a press release announcing the company's formation. [See http://press.org/events/operation-jellyf...conference ] Jellyfish CEO Keith Mahoney decided to "put the issue on the table," because, he says, it wouldn't be difficult to connect him and his colleagues to their previous employers. Mahoney ran Blackwater's Total Intelligence Solutions division. And Jellyfish's vice president for business development, Michael Yorio, is a former sales executive for Xe Services, the name Blackwater chose after it attracted controversy for its military work in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Blackwater has been implicated in civilian deaths in Iraq and is among the most notorious war contractors of the past decade. Able Danger was an intelligence effort led by the US Army that used pre-Google era search and data-mining technology to map out the global network of al-Qaeda. The operation used publicly available data from the Web, but it ran afoul of privacy regulations that bar collecting personal information about American citizens. Some of its members, two of whom are working with Jellyfish, claim they identified some of the 9/11 hijackers before the 2001 attacks. Other members of Able Danger dispute those claims.

Don't expect Jellyfish to get into the "gates, guns, and guards" business like Blackwater, Mahoney says. It won't be providing armed guards or physical security, nor will it be pursuing any contracts with the US government, even though the company is headquartered in DC, or, as the company calls it, "Jellyfish Station Washington." Most of the business partners live in the city, Mahoney says, and Washington allowed Jellyfish to conduct what the marketing document calls its "Swarm operations," giving clients access to "political intelligence operatives, lobbying firms, intelligence officials and military strategists" with whom executives said they have relationships.

In addition to its human network, Jellyfish has added technological component to its services, a system for processing large amounts of information and plucking out the most useful nuggets of intelligence. File that attribute under "holy grail," as it's precisely what the US intelligence community has been trying do to for years without much success.

It's difficult to ascertain how successful Jellyfish has been because it won't disclose its clients, nor will it provide a mockup of the customizable system it offers to high-level executives.

The tech team is headed by former Able Danger contractor J.D. Smith. Another team member, Tony Shaffer, is the military-operations adviser. Shaffer wrote a book about his career as a military intelligence officer called Operation Dark Heart. The Defense Department bought 9,500 copies of the memoirnearly its entire first print runand then destroyed them. Officials said Shaffer hadn't vetted his manuscript with the government and that it contained classified information.

http://www.washingtonian.com/blogarticle...19436.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

From the team that brought you Blackwater and the pre-9/11 counterterrorism program Able Danger comes "Jellyfish Intelligence."

That's the name a group of former US intelligence officials and executives from the controversial security firm have chosen for a new private outfit that offers "predictive intelligence" for Fortune 500 corporations and senior-level executives and that aims to "protect human lives and their business interests throughout the world.

Jellyfish anatomy: A jellyfish does not have a brain or central nervous system, but rather has a loose network of nerves, located in the epidermis.

Predictive intelligence: a highly sophisticated, ethical and proven method of identifying atrocities before they happen and preventing their occurrence.

I made one of those italicized statements up. The other is factually correct.

Do you know which is which?