Lobby game exposed?

The following article, although from October 2006, serves as PROOF that Sex Offender Legislation in particular the Adam Walsh Act is NOT ABOUT THE CHILDREN, IT IS ABOUT MONEY. Politicians would have you believe otherwise, to ingratiate themselves to voters. Read the article, see for yourself…

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Lobby game exposed?

Utah firm got language in federal bill to help sell its product

By Matt Canham

The Salt Lake Tribune

Article Last Updated:10/13/2006 02:04:02 AM MDT

 

Board of Pardons and Parole chairman Michael Sibbett is retiring after 15 years. Utah’s former Board of Pardons chairman tapped Sen. Orrin Hatch to help pass legislation virtually guaranteeing a multimillion-dollar windfall for a Sandy-based company that sells ankle monitors for parolees, according to a state court lawsuit.

The lawsuit claims to lay bare how the former pardons chairman, lobbyist Michael Sibbett, and other former public officials purportedly sought to secure no-bid federal and state contracts for their client through their congressional ties and their connections with Utah officials.

One of their main vehicles was a sex offender bill Hatch shepherded through Congress this summer. The bill included minimum requirements for ankle monitors taken “verbatim from a description” of Secure Alert’s product, TrackerPAL, according to the suit.

Sibbett and his partner Robin Riggs, who worked as legal counsel in former Gov. Mike Leavitt’s administration, wrote the language and pushed the product to Hatch and his staffers.

“TrackerPAL is to my knowledge the only company that can meet those minimum standards,” Sibbett said.

The bill creates a pilot program providing states with grants, but the money can only be spent on ankle monitors that meet the legislation’s requirements. And according to the suit, that means TrackerPAL. The bill appropriates $15 million over the next three years but also creates a path to increase the size of the program.

Sibbett stands behind his efforts, which he says will improve public safety and help decrease the costs of housing prisoners.

But Alex Knott, of the Center for Public Integrity, said Sibbett’s push undermines the free market system, where competition allows the public to “get the top amount of products or services for their tax dollars.”

“Circumventing” the competitive process drives up costs and depresses quality, said Knott, political editor for the center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization.

Such provisions are often “written behind closed doors with a nod and a wink.”

Secure Alert’s efforts to secure contracts were brought to light after the Sandy company’s executives fired their lobbyists, who were working under the business name HGR Enterprises, because the company felt the contract provided too much compensation, according to court records. HGR is now seeking $1.3 billion in damages.

HGR’s Sibbett still backs the TrackerPAL device and said of the lawsuit, “I’m just disappointed it has finally got to this point.”

Secure Alert hired Sibbett and HGR in late January to promote TrackerPAL among politicians throughout the country.

Sibbett felt the new technology offered benefits to the criminal justice system that traditional ankle monitors couldn’t match.

Standard tracking devices rely on radio waves and phone lines to keep tabs of those on house arrest. TrackerPAL uses satellite transmitters and a built-in, two-way radio so that police officers not only know when someone left their home but also can talk to them when they do.

The upgrade in technology comes with a price. The units cost $6 each per day to operate.

The company wanted government contracts and was willing to pay its lobbyists 50 cents a day for every monitor worn by a parole or sex offender in Utah and 75 cents a day for those outside the state.

Sibbett started in Utah. He discussed the need for more ankle monitors with lawmakers who were worried about the state’s burgeoning prison population.

He persuaded state Rep. Eric Hutchings, R-Kearns, to propose intent language allowing the Department of Corrections to spend money on new tracking devices.

Sibbett then sold the TrackerPAL to his old colleagues in Corrections, who signed a contract on May 1.

The department promised to pay $173,000 for 50 ankle monitors as part of a test case, Corrections spokesman Jack Ford said.

Just two months later, the Adam Walsh Child Safety Act was signed by President Bush, giving Sibbett and Secure Alert a much bigger opportunity.

This bill, pushed by Hatch in the Senate and former Florida Rep. Mark Foley, among others, in the House, created a national sex offender registry and called for police to equip the worst sex offenders with an ankle monitor. The bill included “a single-source provision that only the TrackerPAL device can satisfy,” according to the lawsuit.

Before it was passed, Sibbett and Riggs say they recruited some high-profile supporters. Ed Smart and his daughter Elizabeth, who was famously kidnapped from her home in 2002 and found nine months later, appeared on television shows like “Good Morning America” and “America’s Most Wanted” to promote the bill. Ed Smart held up the TrackerPAL in one appearance, Hatch in the other. A picture from “America’s Most Wanted” now appears on Hatch’s Web site with the caption: “Hatch is holding an example of the ankle tracking device that will be attached to the worst of the worst convicted offenders.”

Hatch’s office declined to comment on HGR and Sibbett’s involvement in the sex offender bill.

Secure Alert has not yet signed any contracts as a result of the legislation but does promote that likelihood in materials it presents to investors.

Sibbett sees nothing wrong with his actions. He believes the device will help the criminal justice system so he pushed the connections he had to further its reach.

“We are not holding up banks or sticking a gun to somebody’s head saying, ‘You have to sign a contract,’ ” he said in an interview.

And of his effort to make hundreds of millions of dollars on its success, he says: “I don’t see anything wrong with it. That is kind of the American way, to go out and work hard, and I think I’ve worked hard.”

Lobbyists regularly use their political connections to help a specific company, said Massie Ritsch, spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., group that tracks money in politics.

But the lawsuit allows a “rare look at how business often gets done in Washington,” Ritsch said. “They’re showing how the sausage is made and sometimes it stinks a little.”

http://vote.peteashdown.org/media/articles/sltrib20061013/

mcanham@sltrib.com

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While the politicians are manipulating the facts, using fear mongering rhetoric and lying to their constituents, women, and children continue to be abused. How is it parents and women continue to accept this from their elected officials? It is time to demand better or remove these rascals from office. Call your Representative and Senators, tell them you know what they are doing, and tell them either they fix this mess that they made or you will find someone who will. Do it today for the sake of all women and children. 

Visit SOSNet for more information.

 

No Theocracy Here

The following is from Americans United web site. I agree with Bishop Jakes, God does not have a political party. The hijacking of American Politics by The Religious Right is nothing more than our version of the Taliban. Americans need to WAKE UP before it is TOO LATE.

 

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No Theocracy Here: T.D. Jakes Takes On Christian Nation Claim

 

May 15th 2007

 

The Religious Right cabal that promotes America as a Christian nation and claims the U.S. Constitution is ripped directly from the Bible has an irritant in T.D. Jakes, arguably one of the country’s most influential evangelical leaders.

In an interview with National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” Jakes, who heads a megachurch called Potter’s House in Dallas and has penned a slew of best-selling books, buttressed his contrarian reputation by taking the very anti-Religious Right tact of slamming the mixture of religion and politics.

“I don’t think that God should be assigned to a party,” Jakes told NPR yesterday during a segment that highlighted the pastor’s new book. “When the party goes bad, then the clergy are embarrassed, and I think that faith should transcend politics.”

NPR noted in its piece that not only does Jakes reach millions of Americans with the written word, but his church in Texas will typically pack in more than 100,000 followers. It’s an impressive reach that likely unnerves the blowhards of the Religious Right who have spent decades and lots of money trying to convince their followers that they need to take control of government to advance their agenda, which includes trashing the First Amendment and privacy rights.

The African-American pastor went on to slam clergy who would prod congregants to the voting booth on behalf of a specific candidate, saying that such actions are insulting to parishioners. They don’t need a pastor “to tell them how to vote,” maintained Jakes.

Finally Jakes chided the Religious Right’s demands that candidates, especially presidential contenders, be Christian.

“You have to be president of the United States,” Jakes said, “which incorporates atheists, agnostics and all brands of faith. And many, many Christians don’t understand that. They see this s a Christian nation. But I don’t see this as a theocracy. I see it as a democracy.”

This is not the first time Jakes, whom USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham has described as having “super-pastor standing,” has challenged the Religious Right’s Christian nation rhetoric. In 2005, Jakes told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he didn’t buy the claim that the nation is a Christian one and that “I don’t think we were meant to be.”

Jakes’ challenges to the Religious Right’s Christian nation rhetoric are commendable.

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http://blog.au.org/2007/05/15/no-theocracy-here-td-jakes-takes-on-christian-nation-claim/

 

 

It Can Happen Here

 

This is from Salon.com and it speaks for itself, therefore I will refrain from any comment other than I recommend you read the book before the 2008 Elections.

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It could happen here

 

In an excerpt from his new book, Salon’s columnist explains why, for the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon, Americans have reason to doubt the future of their democracy.

By Joe Conason

Feb. 19, 2007 | Can it happen here? Is it happening here already? That depends, as a recent president might have said, on what the meaning of “it” is.

To Sinclair Lewis, who sardonically titled his 1935 dystopian novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” “it” plainly meant an American version of the totalitarian dictatorships that had seized power in Germany and Italy. Married at the time to the pioneering reporter Dorothy Thompson, who had been expelled from Berlin by the Nazis a year earlier and quickly became one of America’s most outspoken critics of fascism, Lewis was acutely aware of the domestic and foreign threats to American freedom. So often did he and Thompson discuss the crisis in Europe and the implications of Europe’s fate for the Depression-wracked United States that, according to his biographer, Mark Schorer, Lewis referred to the entire topic somewhat contemptuously as “it.”

If “it” denotes the police state American-style as imagined and satirized by Lewis, complete with concentration camps, martial law, and mass executions of strikers and other dissidents, then “it” hasn’t happened here and isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

For contemporary Americans, however, “it” could signify our own more gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule. That is why Lewis’s darkly funny but grim fable of an authoritarian coup achieved through a democratic election still resonates today — along with all the eerie parallels between what he imagined then and what we live with now.

For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment.

Such foreboding, which would have been dismissed as paranoia not so long ago, has been intensified by the unfolding crisis of political legitimacy in the capital. George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted and exercised authority that he does not possess under the Constitution he swore to uphold. He has announced that he intends to continue exercising power according to his claim of a mandate that erases the separation and balancing of power among the branches of government, frees him from any real obligation to obey laws passed by Congress, and permits him to ignore any provisions of the Bill of Rights that may prove inconvenient.

Whether his fellow Americans understand exactly what Bush is doing or not, his six years in office have created intense public anxiety. Much of that anxiety can be attributed to fear of terrorism, which Bush has exacerbated to suit his own purposes — as well as to increasing concern that the world is threatened by global warming, pandemic diseases, economic insecurity, nuclear proliferation, and other perils with which this presidency cannot begin to cope.

As the midterm election showed, more and more Americans realize that something has gone far wrong at the highest levels of government and politics — that Washington’s one-party regime had created a daily spectacle of stunning incompetence and dishonesty. Pollsters have found large majorities of voters worrying that the country is on the wrong track. At this writing, two of every three voters give that answer, and they are not just anxious but furious. Almost half are willing to endorse the censure of the president.

Suspicion and alienation extend beyond the usual disgruntled Democrats to independents and even a significant minority of Republicans. A surprisingly large segment of the electorate is willing to contemplate the possibility of impeaching the president, unappetizing though that prospect should be to anyone who can recall the destructive impeachment of Bush’s predecessor.

The reasons for popular disenchantment with the Republican regime are well known — from the misbegotten, horrifically mismanaged war in Iraq to the heartless mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. In both instances, growing anger over the damage done to the national interest and the loss of life and treasure has been exacerbated by evidence of bad faith — by lies, cronyism, and corruption.

Everyone knows — although not everyone necessarily wishes to acknowledge — that the Bush administration misled the American people about the true purposes and likely costs of invading Iraq. It invented a mortal threat to the nation in order to justify illegal aggression. It has repeatedly sought, from the beginning, to exploit the state of war for partisan advantage and presidential image management. It has wasted billions of dollars, and probably tens of billions, on Pentagon contractors with patronage connections to the Republican Party.

Everyone knows, too, that the administration dissembled about the events leading up to the destruction of New Orleans. Its negligence and obliviousness in the wake of the storm were shocking, as was its attempt to conceal its errors. It has yet to explain why a person with few discernible qualifications, other than his status as a crony and business associate of his predecessor, was directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. By elevating ethically dubious, inexperienced, and ineffectual management the administration compromised a critical agency that had functioned brilliantly during the Clinton administration.

To date, however, we do not know the full dimensions of the scandals behind Iraq and Katrina, because the Republican leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives abdicated the traditional congressional duties of oversight and investigation. It is due to their dereliction that neither the president nor any of his associates have seemed even mildly chastened in the wake of catastrophe. With a single party monopolizing power yet evading responsibility, there was nobody with the constitutional power to hold the White House accountable.

Bolstered by political impunity, especially in a time of war, perhaps any group of politicians would be tempted to abuse power. But this party and these politicians, unchecked by normal democratic constraints, proved to be particularly dangerous. The name for what is wrong with them — the threat embedded within the Bush administration, the Republican congressional leadership, and the current leaders of the Republican Party — is authoritarianism.

The most obvious symptoms can be observed in the regime’s style, which features an almost casual contempt for democratic and lawful norms; an expanding appetite for executive control at the expense of constitutional balances; a reckless impulse to corrupt national institutions with partisan ideology; and an ugly tendency to smear dissent as disloyalty. The most troubling effects are matters of substance, including the suspension of traditional legal rights for certain citizens; the imposition of secrecy and the inhibition of the free flow of information; the extension of domestic spying without legal sanction or warrant; the promotion of torture and other barbaric practices, in defiance of American and international law; and the collusion of government and party with corporate interests and religious fundamentalists.

What worries many Americans even more is that the authoritarians can excuse their excesses as the necessary response to an enemy that every American knows to be real. For the past five years, the Republican leadership has argued that the attacks of September 11, 2001 — and the continuing threat from jihadist groups such as al Qaeda — demand permanent changes in American government, society, and foreign policy. Are those changes essential to preserve our survival — or merely useful for unscrupulous politicians who still hope to achieve permanent domination by their own narrowly ideological party? Not only liberals and leftists, but centrists, libertarians, and conservatives, of every party and no party, have come to distrust the answers given by those in power.

The most salient dissent to be heard in recent years, and especially since Bush’s reelection in 2004, has been voiced not by the liberals and moderates who never trusted the Republican leadership, but by conservatives who once did.

Former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, who served as one of the managers of the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the House of Representatives, has joined the American Civil Liberties Union he once detested. In the measures taken by the Bush administration and approved by his former colleagues, Barr sees the potential for “a totalitarian type regime.” Paul Craig Roberts, a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal and a former Treasury official under Reagan, perceives the “main components of a police state” in the Bush administration’s declaration of plenary powers to deny fundamental rights to suspected terrorists. Bruce Fein, who served as associate attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, believes that the Bush White House is “a clear and present danger to the rule of law,” and that the president “cannot be trusted to conduct the war against global terrorism with a decent respect for civil liberties and checks against executive abuses.” Syndicated columnist George Will accuses the administration of pursuing a “monarchical doctrine” in its assertion of extraordinary war powers.

In the 2006 midterm election, disenchanted conservatives joined with liberals and centrists to deliver a stinging rebuke to the regime by overturning Republican domination in both houses of Congress. For the first time since 1994, Democrats control the Senate and the House of Representatives. But the Democratic majority in the upper chamber is as narrow as possible, depending on the whims of Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a Republican-leaning Democrat elected on an independent ballot line, who has supported the White House on the occupation of Iraq, abuse of prisoners of war, domestic spying, the suspension of habeas corpus, military tribunals, far-right judicial nominations, and other critical constitutional issues. Nor is Lieberman alone among the Senate Democrats in his supine acquiescence to the abuses of the White House.

Even if the Democrats had won a stronger majority in the Senate, it would be naive to expect that a single election victory could mend the damage inflicted on America’s constitutional fabric during the past six years. While the Bush administration has enjoyed an extraordinary immunity from Congressional oversight until now, the deepest implication of its actions and statements, as explored in the pages that follow, is that neither legislators nor courts can thwart the will of the unitary executive. When Congress challenges that presidential claim, as inevitably it will, then what seems almost certain to follow is not “bipartisanship” but confrontation. The election of 2006 was not an end but another beginning.

The question that we face in the era of terror alerts, religious fundamentalism, and endless warfare is whether we are still the brave nation preserved and rebuilt by the generation of Sinclair Lewis — or whether our courage, and our luck, have finally run out. America is not yet on the verge of fascism, but democracy is again in danger. The striking resemblance between Buzz Windrip [the demagogic villain of Lewis's novel] and George W. Bush and the similarity of the political forces behind them is more than a literary curiosity. It is a warning on yellowed pages from those to whom we owe everything.

From “It Can Happen Here” by Joe Conason. Copyright (c) 2007 by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

 

– By Joe Conason

 

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/02/19/conason/

 

Tabloid TV at WSB-2

 

Yellow Journalism is Alive and Well at WSB-TV

First, we will reprint the news story that aired on WSB-TV News, and then we will provide a few comments…

Shack Behind Glenwood Academy Contains Porn

POSTED: 4:23 pm EDT May 8, 2007

UPDATED: 6:16 pm EDT May 8, 2007

DECATUR, Ga. — Parents are alarmed after an old shack containing porn, drug paraphernalia and beer cans was found behind their children’s school. The run-down shack sits behind the Glenwood Academy on Ponce de Leon in Decatur.

The shack is located next to a well-worn trail only a short walk from the school’s playground.

Scattered around the shack are X-rated pictures from pornographic magazines, old beer cans and bottles, a pair of pants and drug paraphernalia. Channel 2’s Tom Regan said the shack is located within 100 feet of the fenceless Glenwood Academy playing field.

“One of our concerns is that someone is back here getting high, looking at the pornographic materials and thinking, ‘This is an opportunity to get a child,’ said parent Karen Langley.

The school’s principal said they became aware of the shack last week after children attending a picnic saw it and told their parents.

Beyond the sexually explicit pictures, there are other potential dangers to kids who walk into the shack. Sheet metal with sharp edges hang down and there is broken glass all over the ground.

“This is not a safe place for kids to be,” said Langley.

Decatur Schools facilities director Mike Bruenig said, “It’s not our property, so we really can’t go in and tear it down without some kind of due process.”

According to Bruenig, the city has contacted the property owner and he has agreed to take it down.

(Copyright 2007 by WSBTV.com)

 

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Comments from SOS-Net:

What is truly amazing is that last year, they (WSB-TV) were offered an opportunity to interview Registered Sex Offenders at a local therapist’s office; SOS-Net has obtained copies of the e-mail exchange with Anchor John Pruitt. Mr. Pruitt and WSB were offered the opportunity to find out first hand, if all Registered Sex Offenders were a threat to children or if the myth was just a convenient fear-mongering venue for ratings by the media and votes by politicians.

Let’s connect the dots for our obtuse friends at WSB. First, we must point out that, according to the United States Department of Justice, in about 90% of the sex abuse cases, the victim KNOWS their offender, and that stranger danger represents less than 8% of the cases.

Secondly, WSB-TV made sure to interview a “soccer mom” and air the fear in an effort to further scare parents. In place of common sense, which tells us that teenage boys will have private meeting places where they sneak a peek at porn, hide their booze and drug stash, and in general just be boys.

Now let’s be totally clear on what this means. First, Registered Sex Offenders are not living within 1000 feet of this school. That is the law. Therefore, if a sex offender was using this shack as a “staging area,” for an “opportunity to get a child,” that person is NOT living nearby or is most likely off law enforcement’s radar screen.

If the latter is the case, then is this not proof that the sex offender registry and more importantly Georgia’s sex offender laws are ineffective? However, WSB would never report that, because this type of responsible reporting would actually work toward making children safer.

Today’s mainstream media do not want to help make children safer, why? It would greatly reduce the body bags, which would greatly reduce the source for sensational news stories, and sensational news stories are the lifeblood of our media outlets. They guarantee higher ratings.

I contend that this type of “news” and reporting (and I use these terms loosely), is nothing more than Tabloid Journalism, and it is in fact making our children less safe. This is the same conclusion and declaration the FBI made.

Fear drives ratings and advertising dollars, fear makes for political sound bites and votes. At the end of the day, it is up to parents to insure their children are safe, evidently; the media and government are just not able to do that.

Until they become responsible citizens, our children remain at risk, until they stop the pandering of fear, our children remain at risk. We are simply stuck on stupid when it comes to the sex offender issue. End of story.

 

 

(About the pictures, top left – shows inside of “porn shack”, yeah it really looks like someone other than kids was hanging out in there just waiting for a victim. Bottom right – exterior of “porn shack”, again, it looks just like the place a child molester wants to hang out in. WSB-TV should have its license pulled for running such a stupid story, at the very least; viewers should switch over to another channel. When we stop supporting ridiculous and irresponsible journalism by the media, they will feel the effects of our outrage in their bottom line, and when that happens, they will change the status quo.)

 

U.S. Shadow Army in Iraq

 

Published on Monday, April 30, 2007 by TomDispatch.com

Who Will Stop the U.S. Shadow Army in Iraq?
Don’t Look to the Congressional Democrats

by Jeremy Scahill

The Democratic leadership in Congress is once again gearing up for a great sell-out on the Iraq war. While the wrangling over the $124 billion Iraq supplemental spending bill is being headlined in the media as a “show down” or “war” with the White House, it is hardly that. In plain terms, despite the impassioned sentiments of the anti-war electorate that brought the Democrats to power last November, the Congressional leadership has made clear its intention to keep funding the Iraq occupation, even though Sen. Harry Reid has declared that “this war is lost.”

For months, the Democrats’ “withdrawal” plan has come under fire from opponents of the occupation who say it doesn’t stop the war, doesn’t defund it, and insures that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq beyond President Bush’s second term. Such concerns were reinforced by Sen. Barack Obama’s recent declaration that the Democrats will not cut off funding for the war, regardless of the President’s policies. “Nobody,” he said, “wants to play chicken with our troops.”

As the New York Times reported, “Lawmakers said they expect that Congress and Mr. Bush would eventually agree on a spending measure without the specific timetable” for (partial) withdrawal, which the White House has said would “guarantee defeat.” In other words, the appearance of a fierce debate this week, Presidential veto and all, has largely been a show with a predictable outcome.

The Shadow War in Iraq

While all of this is troubling, there is another disturbing fact which speaks volumes about the Democrats’ lack of insight into the nature of this unpopular war — and most Americans will know next to nothing about it. Even if the President didn’t veto their legislation, the Democrats’ plan does almost nothing to address the second largest force in Iraq — and it’s not the British military. It’s the estimated 126,000 private military “contractors” who will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war.

The 145,000 active duty U.S. forces are nearly matched by occupation personnel that currently come from companies like Blackwater USA and the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close personal and political ties with the Bush administration. Until Congress reins in these massive corporate forces and the whopping federal funding that goes into their coffers, partially withdrawing U.S. troops may only set the stage for the increased use of private military companies (and their rent-a-guns) which stand to profit from any kind of privatized future “surge” in Iraq.

From the beginning, these contractors have been a major hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely central to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq. While many of them perform logistical support activities for American troops, including the sort of laundry, fuel and mail delivery, and food-preparation work that once was performed by soldiers, tens of thousands of them are directly engaged in military and combat activities. According to the Government Accountability Office, there are now some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq. These not-quite G.I. Joes, working for Blackwater and other major U.S. firms, can clear in a month what some active-duty soldiers make in a year. “We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of Defense,” said House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. “How in the hell do you justify that?”

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman estimates that $4 billion in taxpayer money has so far been spent in Iraq on these armed “security” companies like Blackwater — with tens of billions more going to other war companies like KBR and Fluor for “logistical” support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the House Intelligence Committee believes that up to forty cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors.

With such massive government payouts, there is little incentive for these companies to minimize their footprint in the region and every incentive to look for more opportunities to profit — especially if, sooner or later, the “official” U.S. presence shrinks, giving the public a sense of withdrawal, of a winding down of the war. Even if George W. Bush were to sign the legislation the Democrats have passed, their plan “allows the President the leeway to escalate the use of military security contractors directly on the battlefield,” Erik Leaver of the Institute for Policy Studies points out. It would “allow the President to continue the war using a mercenary army.”

The crucial role of contractors in continuing the occupation was driven home in January when David Petraeus, the general running the President’s “surge” plan in Baghdad, cited private forces as essential to winning the war. In his confirmation hearings in the Senate, he claimed that they fill a gap attributable to insufficient troop levels available to an overstretched military. Along with Bush’s official troop surge, the “tens of thousands of contract security forces,” Petraeus told the Senators, “give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission.” Indeed, Gen. Petraeus admitted that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq not by the U.S. military, but “secured by contract security.”

Such widespread use of contractors, especially in mission-critical operations, should have raised red flags among lawmakers. After a trip to Iraq last month, Retired Gen. Barry McCaffery observed bluntly, “We are overly dependant on civilian contractors. In extreme danger–they will not fight.” It is, however, the political rather than military uses of these forces that should be cause for the greatest concern.

Contractors have provided the White House with political cover, allowing for a back-door near doubling of U.S. forces in Iraq through the private sector, while masking the full extent of the human costs of the occupation. Although contractor deaths are not effectively tallied, at least 770 contractors have been killed in Iraq and at least another 7,700 injured. These numbers are not included in any official (or media) toll of the war. More significantly, there is absolutely no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law — military or civilian — being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent Congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts – and, no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts. Before Paul Bremer, Bush’s viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in 2004 he issued an edict, known as Order 17. It immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq which, today, is like the wild West, full of roaming Iraqi death squads and scores of unaccountable, heavily-armed mercenaries, ex-military men from around the world, working for the occupation. For the community of contractors in Iraq, immunity and impunity are welded together.

Despite the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq and several well-documented incidents involving alleged contractor abuses, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to the possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison. While dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed — 64 on murder-related charges — not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.

As one armed contractor recently informed the Washington Post, “We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night.” According to another, U.S. contractors in Iraq had their own motto: “What happens here today, stays here today.”

Funding the Mercenary War

“These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies,” argues Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S. contractors from Iraq. “They charge whatever they want with impunity. There’s no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their activities are.”

Until now, this situation has largely been the doing of a Republican-controlled Congress and White House. No longer.

While some Congressional Democrats have publicly expressed grave concerns about the widespread use of these private forces and a handful have called for their withdrawal, the party leadership has done almost nothing to stop, or even curb, the use of mercenary corporations in Iraq. As it stands, the Bush administration and the industry have little to fear from Congress on this score, despite the unseating of the Republican majority.

On two central fronts, accountability and funding, the Democrats’ approach has been severely flawed, playing into the agendas of both the White House and the war contractors. Some Democrats, for instance, are pushing accountability legislation that would actually require more U.S. personnel to deploy to Iraq as part of an FBI Baghdad “Theater Investigative Unit” that would supposedly monitor and investigate contractor conduct. The idea is: FBI investigators would run around Iraq, gather evidence, and interview witnesses, leading to indictments and prosecutions in U.S. civilian courts.

This is a plan almost certain to backfire, if ever instituted. It raises a slew of questions: Who would protect the investigators? How would Iraqi victims be interviewed? How would evidence be gathered amid the chaos and dangers of Iraq? Given that the federal government and the military seem unable — or unwilling — even to count how many contractors are actually in the country, how could their activities possibly be monitored? In light of the recent Bush administration scandal over the eight fired US attorneys, serious questions remain about the integrity of the Justice Department. How could we have any faith that real crimes in Iraq, committed by the employees of immensely well-connected crony corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton, would be investigated adequately?

Apart from the fact that it would be impossible to effectively monitor 126,000 or more private contractors under the best of conditions in the world’s most dangerous war zone, this legislation would give the industry a tremendous PR victory. Once it was passed as the law of the land, the companies could finally claim that a legally accountable structure governed their operations. Yet they would be well aware that such legislation would be nearly impossible to enforce.

Not surprisingly, then, the mercenary trade group with the Orwellian name of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has pushed for just this Democratic-sponsored approach rather than the military court martial system favored by conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. The IPOA called the expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act — essentially the Democrats’ oversight plan — “the most cogent approach to ensuring greater contractor accountability in the battle space.” That endorsement alone should be reason enough to pause and reconsider.

Then there is the issue of continued funding for the privatized shadow forces in Iraq. As originally passed in the House, the Democrats’ Iraq plan would have cut only about 15% or $815 million of the supplemental spending earmarked for day-to-day military operations “to reflect savings attributable to efficiencies and management improvements in the funding of contracts in the military departments.”

As it stood, this was a stunningly insufficient plan, given ongoing events in Iraq. But even that mild provision was dropped by the Democrats in late April. Their excuse was the need to hold more hearings on the contractor issue. Instead, they moved to withhold — not cut — 15% of total day-to-day operational funding, but only until Secretary of Defense Robert Gates submits a report on the use of contractors and the scope of their deployment. Once the report is submitted, the 15% would be unlocked. In essence, this means that, under the Democrats plan, the mercenary forces will simply be able to continue business-as-usual/profits-as-usual in Iraq.

However obfuscated by discussions of accountability, fiscal responsibility, and oversight, the gorilla of a question in the Congressional war room is: Should the administration be allowed to use mercenary forces, whose livelihoods depend on war and conflict, to help fight its battles in Iraq?

Rep. Murtha says, “We’re trying to bring accountability to an unaccountable war.” But it’s not accountability that the war needs; it needs an end.

By sanctioning the administration’s continuing use of mercenary corporations — instead of cutting off all funding to them — the Democrats leave the door open for a future escalation of the shadow war in Iraq. This, in turn, could pave the way for an array of secretive, politically well-connected firms that have profited tremendously under the current administration to elevate their status and increase their government paychecks.

Blackwater’s War

Consider the case of Blackwater USA.

A decade ago, the company barely existed; and yet, its “diplomatic security” contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone, total more than $750 million. Today, Blackwater has become nothing short of the Bush administration’s well-paid Praetorian Guard. It protects the U.S. ambassador and other senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting Congressional delegations; it trains Afghan security forces and was deployed in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region, setting up a “command and control” center just miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect FEMA operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 a day from the American taxpayer, billing $950 a day per Blackwater contractor.

Since September 11, 2001, the company has invested its lucrative government pay-outs in building an impressive private army. At present, it has forces deployed in nine countries and boasts a database of 21,000 additional troops at the ready, a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gun-ships, and the world’s largest private military facility — a 7,000 acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. It recently opened a new facility in Illinois (”Blackwater North”) and is fighting local opposition to a third planned domestic facility near San Diego (”Blackwater West”) by the Mexican border. It is also manufacturing an armored vehicle (nicknamed the “Grizzly”) and surveillance blimps.

The man behind this empire is Erik Prince, a secretive, conservative Christian, ex-Navy SEAL multimillionaire who bankrolls the President and his allies with major campaign contributions. Among Blackwater’s senior executives are Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA; Robert Richer, former Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA; Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General; and an impressive array of other retired military and intelligence officials. Company executives recently announced the creation of a new private intelligence company, “Total Intelligence,” to be headed by Black and Richer.

For years, Blackwater’s operations have been shrouded in secrecy. Emboldened by the culture of impunity enjoyed by the private sector in the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater’s founder has talked of creating a “contractor brigade” to support US military operations and fancies his forces the “FedEx” of the “national security apparatus.”

As the country debates an Iraq withdrawal, Congress owes it to the public to take down the curtain of secrecy surrounding these shadow forces that undergird the U.S. public deployment in Iraq. The President likes to say that defunding the war would undercut the troops. Here’s the truth of the matter: Continued funding of the Iraq war ensures tremendous profits for politically-connected war contractors. If Congress is serious about ending the occupation, it needs to rein in the unaccountable companies that make it possible and only stand to profit from its escalation.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

© Copyright 2007 Jeremy Scahill