i-eclectica.org

Salon features what seems to be quite a comprehensive article on the Bush administration’s ties to Blackwater, the so-called ’security’ company more aptly described as the biggest and most ruthless band of mercenaries doing America’s bidding. And following the history of christianity rather than the essential teachings of that religion, links are close between the christian right, the US government and that band of state sanctioned killers.

When Blackwater contractors guarding a U.S. State Department convoy allegedly killed 11 unarmed Iraqi civilians on Sept. 16, it was only the latest in a series of controversial shooting incidents associated with the private security firm. Blackwater has a reputation for being trigger-happy. Since 2005, the North Carolina-based company, which has about 1,000 contractors in Iraq, has reported 195 “escalation of force incidents”; in 163 of those cases Blackwater guns fired first. According to the New York Times, Blackwater guards were twice as likely as employees of two other firms protecting State Department personnel in Iraq to be involved in shooting incidents.

Today the State Department announced that Blackwater personal will from now on be accompanied by government agents during their missions; their vehicles will also have to be equipped with cameras and microphones - all supposedly to “gather factual information” on future Blackwater engagements. Given the history of the relationship between company and the State Department as well as the US administration in general, both effectiveness and sincerity of these measures are rather doubtful. US senator Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, alleged the Department arranged for Blackwater to pay $15,000 to the family of an Iraqi guard who was shot and killed by a drunken Blackwater employee. In another shooting death, the payment was $5,000. As CNN reported Monday, the State Department also allowed a Blackwater employee to write State’s initial “spot report” on the Sept. 16 shooting incident - a report that did not mention civilian casualties and claimed contractors were responding to an insurgent attack on a convoy.

The State Department’s protective actions though are just a small reflection of the overall deep entanglement between the Bush gang, christian right-wingers, prominent Republicans and Blackwater, a coziness that has paid handsomely for the mercenary company:

• From 2001 to 2007, the firm has increased its annual federal contracts from less than US$1 million to more than US$500 million
• Canadian Robert Young Pelton, author of “Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror,” has reported that one of Blackwater’s earliest contracts in the national arena was a no-bid US$5.4 million deal to provide security guards in Afghanistan, which came after Prince made a call to then CIA executive director Buzzy Krongard
• Harper’s Ken Silverstein has reported that Prince has a security pass for CIA headquarters and “meets with senior people” inside the CIA
• Prince’s most important benefactor was fellow conservative Roman Catholic convert Paul Bremer, former head of the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government in Iraq; in August 2003, Blackwater won a US$27.7 million contract to provide personal security for Bremer; in charge of the Blackwater team guarding Bremer was Frank Gallagher, who had provided personal security for former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when Bremer was managing director of Kissinger’s consulting firm, Kissinger and Associates, in the 1990s
• Blackwater was recently one of five companies awarded a Department of Defense counter-narcoterrorism contract that could reportedly be worth as much as US$15 billion
• Blackwater also became involved in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and profited handsomely; according to Jeremy Scahill, author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army“, the company had made roughly US$73 million for Katrina-related government work by June 2006, less than a year after the hurricane hit

And while Blackwater made hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to the American government’s largess, employees passed through a turnstile between Blackwater and the administration, several leaving important posts in the Pentagon and the CIA to take jobs at the “security” company. Below is a list of some of Blackwater’s luminaries with their professional - and political - résumés.

Erik Prince, founder and CEO:

• Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL, founded Blackwater in 1996 but reportedly took a behind-the-scenes role in the company until after 9/11
• His late father, auto-parts magnate Edgar Prince, was instrumental in the creation of the ‘Family Research Council‘ (FRC), one of the right-wing Christian groups most influential with the current Bush administration
• Erik Prince’s mother Elsa has served on the boards of the FRC and another influential Christian-right organization, Dobson’s ‘Focus on the Family‘ (James Dobson is a stalwart of the Christian conservative movement); she currently runs the ‘Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation’ (EEPF - with her son Erik being a vice president); between July 2003 and July 2006, the EEPF gave at least $670,000 to the FRC and $531,000 to ‘Focus on the Family’
• Both Edgar and Elsa have been affiliated with the ‘Council for National Policy‘ (CNP), the secretive Christian conservative organization whose meetings have been attended by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer, and whose membership is rumored to include Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Dobson; the EEPF gave the CNP $80,000 between July 2003 and July 2006
• Erik’s sister Betsy married into the Amway founding DeVos family, one of the country’s biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes; she chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006
• Erik Prince and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees; through his ‘Freiheit Foundation’ he gave $500,000 to ‘Prison Fellowship Ministries‘, run by former Nixon official Charles Colson, in 2000; in the same year, he contributed $30,000 to the ‘American Enterprise Institute‘, a neo-conservative think tank; during college, he interned in George H.W. Bush’s White House, and also interned for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher; Rohrabacher and fellow California Republican Rep. John Doolittle have visited Blackwater’s Moyock, N.C., compound, on a trip arranged by the ‘Alexander Strategy Group‘ (ASG), a lobbying firm founded by former aides of then House Majority Leader Tom Delay; ASG partner Paul Behrends is a longtime associate of Prince’s

Joseph Schmitz, chief operating officer and general counsel:

• In 2002 Bush nominated Schmitz to oversee and police the Pentagon’s military contracts as the Defense Department’s inspector general; Schmitz presided over the largest increase of military-contracting spending in history: as of 2005, 77 companies were awarded 149 “prime contracts” worth $42.1 billion, with hundreds of millions going to Blackwater; Schmitz reported directly to the secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld
• Schmitz has close ties to the Republican Party establishment; is father, John G. Schmitz, was a two-term Republican congressman, and his brother, Patrick Schmitz, served as George H.W. Bush’s deputy counsel from 1985 to 1993; Joseph himself worked as a special assistant to Reagan-era Attorney General Edwin Meese
• Schmitz resigned in 2005 under mounting pressure from both Democratic and Republican senators, who accused him of interfering with criminal investigations into inappropriately awarded contracts, turning a blind eye to conflicts of interest and other failures of oversight
• According to an October 2005 article in Time magazine, Schmitz showed the White House the results of his staff’s multiyear investigation into a contract in which the Air Force leased air-refueling tankers from Boeing for more than it would have cost to buy them, then agreed to redact the names of senior White House staffers involved in the decision before sending the final report to Congress
• In September 2005 Schmitz went to work for Blackwater

J. Cofer Black, vice chairman:

• Black spent most of his 28-year CIA career running covert operations in the Directorate of Operations, where he worked with Rob Richer (below); at the time of the 9/11 attacks, he was director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), a role in which he convinced Bush that the CIA should lead initial U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan after 9/11
• Black is a man with a flair for the dramatic, the kind of briefer Bush likes; in one briefing for example, Black told Bush, “When we’re through with [terrorists in Afghanistan], they will have flies walking across their eyeballs”; Black also ordered CIA field officer Gary Schroen to bring back Osama bin Laden’s head packed in dry ice so Black could show it to Bush; Black’s Afghanistan presentation earned him “special access” to the White House
• Black is also one of the more prominent faces associated with the Bush administration’s interrogation and extraordinary rendition policies; the group within the CIA responsible for extraordinary renditions - operations in which covert agents grab terror suspects and take them to secret prison facilities for interrogations that would normally be prohibited as torture - fell under Black at the CTC
• Black later became the State Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism with the rank of Ambassador at Large from December 2002 to November 2004, where one of his roles was to begin coordinating security for the 2004 Olympics in Greece; in 2003, the State Department gave Blackwater a contract to train the Olympic security teams
• In 2004, Black left the State Department to join Blackwater, part of what Harper’s Silverstein termed a “revolving door to Blackwater” from the CIA; in addition to his work with Blackwater and his own company, Total Intelligence Solutions, Black also recently joined the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, where he serves the Republican hopeful as senior advisor for counterterrorism and national security

Rob Richer, vice president for intelligence:

• From 1999 to 2004, Richer was head of the CIA’s Near East division and the agency’s liaison with King Abdullah of Jordan
• In 2003, he briefed Bush on the nascent Iraqi insurgency
• In late 2004, he became the associate deputy director in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, making him the second-ranking official for clandestine operations
• He left the agency for Blackwater in the Spring of 2005, effectively taking the agency’s relationship with Abdullah with him; the CIA is pissed off: it had invested millions of dollars in training Jordan’s intelligence services; there was an obvious quid pro quo: in exchange for the training, Jordan would share information; Jordan has now hired Blackwater’s intelligence division, headed by Richer, to do its spy training instead
• Rob Richer is currently CEO of Cofer Black’s Total Intelligence Solutions

Fred Fielding, former outside counsel:

• Blackwater hired Fielding, the consummate Republican insider, to represent the company against the families that sued Blackwater after four of their family members and Blackwater employees were tortured and killed in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004
• From 1970 to 1972, Fielding was an associate White House counsel in the Nixon administration; from 1972 to 1974, he was present for the denouement of that administration as deputy White House counsel; he is also widely regarded as Deep Throat, the unnamed source for articles written by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
• Under Reagan, he served as White House counsel from 1981 to 1986, where he was the boss of a young assistant counsel named John Roberts, now the chief justice of the United States
• After the 2000 election, he served the current administration as transition counsel, and he also held a spot on the 9/11 Commission
• In January 2007, Bush chose him as White House counsel.

Ken Starr, outside counsel:

• Fielding represented Blackwater as outside counsel for about six months beginning in February 2005; after he left the case, the law firm Greenberg Traurig, which was once home to Jack Abramoff and worked for George W. Bush in the Florida recount, represented Blackwater till October 2006; Blackwater then hired another high-profile lawyer with impeccable Republican credentials, Ken Starr, now the dean of Pepperdine Law School in California
• Starr was appointed to the federal bench by Reagan, was U.S. solicitor general under George H.W. Bush and was on Bush’s shortlist to replace William Brennan on the Supreme Court
• He is best known, however, as the independent counsel who investigated Bill Clinton; he revealed the intimate details of Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky in the infamous Starr Report and set in motion Clinton’s impeachment by Congress
• Blackwater continues to assert that the state of North Carolina lacks jurisdiction in the wrongful-death lawsuit against the security firm; in 2006, Starr petitioned Chief Justice Roberts on behalf of Blackwater, asserting that the company was “constitutionally immune” to the lawsuit; Roberts denied the petition on Oct. 24; in December, Starr filed a motion to bring the matter before the entire Supreme Court; the motion was denied in February

For more information ob Blackwater see also the following two Salon articles: What happens to private contractors who kill Iraqis? Maybe nothing and America’s shadow army in Iraq.

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I’m not sure when or even whether this movie will be released here; it’ll certainly come out on DVD at one stage. Starhawk’s thoughts on the films though are interesting enough for me to post them here:

Due to a series of odd events and a couple of generous invitations, I was able to see a new film at the Toronto Film Festival: In the Valley of Elah. Written and directed by Paul Haggis, who won an Oscar for Crash, it’s a very powerful and tragic story of the toll that the war in Iraq takes on those who wage it. A young soldier, Mike Deerfield, goes missing on his first weekend back from Iraq. His father, Hank Deerfield, played superbly by Tommy Lee Jones, is a retired military man and investigator, and when he sets out to find his son, one grim layer of truth after another is peeled back. Mike, it turns out, has been brutally murdered. As Hank tracks the murderers, he is both helped and hindered by Charlize Theron in the role of a woman police officer with a young son whose sweetness and vulnerability play off perfectly against Hank’s toughness and bottled-up emotions. For Hank, who truly believes in America and all it is supposed to stand for, the horror of what has been done to Mike is slowly eclipsed by the horror of finding out what his son has seen and become in Iraq.

In the Valley of Elah is not the Iraqis’ story. That story needs to be told and heard, although probably Hollywood won’t tell it. Elah is a story about Americans, told from an American perspective, aimed at an American audience. But it is also a story we desperately need to hear, the counterpoint to the drumbeats of endless war, for it faces us with the real price of our militarism, and the real limitations of its power—that the violence of war also destroys those who wield the weapons, and poisons the society that sent them forth.

One of the pleasures of watching thrillers and mysteries is akin to waking up from a bad dream. We all have secrets, things we’re ashamed of and things we fear being found out. When a fictional killer is tracked, his murderous secrets revealed, we can squirm vicariously and then wake up with that bright sense of relief we get when a nightmare proves to be only a phantom. Whatever we might be concealing, generally it’s not a corpse, and whatever we’ve done, we probably haven’t committed a heinous crime. Murder stories put our sins and troubles into perspective.

But with this film, there’s no easy waking. Because we are culpable. The horrors are real, and they are still going on in Iraq, and all our efforts have not stopped them. Whatever we have done, we’ve clearly not done enough.

Eatnineghost.com has an interesting series of photos from historical events over the last fifty years, ranging from anti-segregation struggles in the US to Iraq war. Interestingly, 60% the photos below can be linked to direct US involvement, showing once again showing the truth behind the US’ claims of being the beacon for democracy, justice and human rights. Looking back over theose pictures it’s hard not to get the feeling that nothing much has changed in essence in the ways we humans live our lives.

I’m showing here just a selection of those photos on Eatnineghost …

1957. The first day of Dorothy Counts at the Harry Harding High
School in the United States . Counts was one of the first black
students admitted in the school, and she was no longer able to
stand the harassments after 4 days.

1963. Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist priest in Southern Vietnam,
burns himself to death protesting the government’s torture
policy against priests. Thich Quang Dug never madea sound
or moved while he was burning.

1966. U.S. troops in South Vietnam are dragging a dead Vietkong
soldier.

February 1, 1968. South Vietnam police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan
shots a young man, whom he suspects to be a Viet Kong soldier.

1973. A few seconds before Chile ’s elected president Salvador
Allende is dead during the coup.

1975. A woman and a girl falling down after the fire escape
collapses.

1980. A kid in Uganda about to die of hunger, and a missionary.

1989. A young man in China stands before the tanks during
protests for democratic reforms.

1994. A man who was tortured by the soldiers since he was
suspected to have spoken with the Tutsi rebels.

2003. An Iraqi prisoner of war tries to calm down his child.

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Israel historically is well-acquainted with so-called terrorism. On this day, 61 years ago, a violent Jewish right-wing underground movement in Palestine, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, blew up a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 soldiers and civilians.

Irgun (Hebrew; shorthand for Ha’Irgun Ha’Tsvai Ha’Leumi B’Eretz Yisrael, “National Military Organization in the Land of Israel”) was a clandestine militant Zionist group that operated in Palestine from 1931 to 1948. In Israel, this group is commonly referred to as Etzel, an acronym of the Hebrew initials. For secrecy reasons, people often referred to the Irgun, in the time in which it operated, as Haganah Bet, Haganah Ha’leumit or Ha’ma’amad.

The group made retaliation against Arab attacks a central part of their initial efforts. It was armed expression of the nascent ideology of Revisionist Zionism, expressed by Ze’ev Jabotinsky as that “every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arabs and the British; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state”. The organisation was a political predecessor movement to Israel’s right-wing Herut (or “Freedom”) party, which led to today’s Likud party.

The most well-known attack by Irgun was the bombing of King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946. British authorities condemned Irgun as terrorist already in the 1930s. The commander of Etzel/Irgun from 1943-1948 was Menachem Begin who later became Israel’s sixth prime minister.

[for more information see Wikipedia]

The Russell-Einstein Manifesto was issued in London on July 9, 1955 by Bertrand Russell in the midst of the Cold War. It highlighted the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and called for world leaders to seek peaceful resolutions to international conflict. The signatories included 11 pre-eminent intellectuals and scientists, most notably Albert Einstein, days before his death on April 18, 1955.

The manifesto called for a conference where scientists would assess the dangers posed to the survival of humanity by weapons of mass destruction (then only considered to be nuclear weapons). Emphasis was placed on the meeting being politically neutral. It extended the question of nuclear weapons to all people and governments. One particular phrase is quoted often, including by Rotblat upon receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995:

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

A few days after the release, philanthropist Cyrus Eaton offered to sponsor a conference - called for in the manifesto - in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Eaton’s birthplace. This conference was to be the first of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, held in July 1957.

Background

The first detonation of a nuclear weapon took place on July 16, 1945 in the desert north of Alamogordo, New Mexico (see: History of nuclear weapons). On August 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and three days later, “Fat Man” on Nagasaki. At least 100,000 civilians were killed outright by these two events (see: Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

On August 18, 1945, the Glasgow Forward published the first known recorded comment by Bertrand Russell on atomic weapons, which he began composing the day Nagasaki was bombed. It contained threads that would later appear in the manifesto:

The prospect for the human race is sombre beyond all precedent. Mankind are faced with a clear-cut alternative: either we shall all perish, or we shall have to acquire some slight degree of common sense. A great deal of new political thinking will be necessary if utter disaster is to be averted.

After learning of the bombing of Hiroshima and seeing an impending nuclear arms race, Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project on moral grounds, remarked that he “became worried about the whole future of mankind.”

Over the years that followed Russell and Rotblat worked on efforts to curb nuclear proliferation, collaborating with Albert Einstein and other scientists to compose what became known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.

Press conference, July 9, 1955

The manifesto was released during a press conference at Caxton Hall, London. Rotblat, who chaired the meeting, describes it as follows:

“… It was thought that only a few of the Press would turn up and a small room was booked in Caxton Hall for the Press Conference. But it soon became clear that interest was increasing and the next larger room was booked. In the end the largest room was taken and on the day of the Conference this was packed to capacity with representatives of the press, radio and television from all over the world. After reading the Manifesto, Russell answered a barrage of questions from members of the press, some of whom were initially openly hostile to the ideas contained in the Manifesto. Gradually, however, they became convinced by the forcefulness of his arguments, as was evident in the excellent reporting in the Press, which in many cases gave front page coverage.”

Russell had begun the conference by stating:

“I am bringing the warning pronounced by the signatories to the notice of all the powerful Governments of the world in the earnest hope that they may agree to allow their citizens to survive.”

[source: Wikipedia]

Our future?

I find it quite mind boggling that 52 years later we as a species have not only made no progress in getting any closer to eliminating weapons of mass annihilation, we have done the reverse. Biological and chemical weapons are still being developed (and have been used); conventional weapons have become much more sophisticated and lethal (e.g. land mines and cluster bombs); nuclear weapons have proliferated, both in terms of size and number (including more countries having them), and the US, the ultra aggressive warring overlord, has successfully over the last two decades laid a foundation with its space war programs for a new international arms race.

Given the massive amount of people working on refining the lethal nature of these different weapon systems, the quality of brainpower available for this purpose and the seemingly unabated desire for war and other forms of terror, I am not sure what it will take for the intentions of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto to become a reality. This pessimism seems even more warranted by the fact that war and related form of violence and aggression cannot be simply isolated and treated as a single issue. They are part of a much bigger human behaviour pattern and its underlying supporting value systems that have led to such cultural expressions as the evolution of a greed based economy, the destruction of our natural environment or an ethical self-understanding based on hierarchical structures.

Fortunately though solutions in highly complex systems do not come from applying formal logic; instead they often emerge unforeseen and spontaneous from the chaos, uncertainties and unpredictabilities that are part and parcel of the vagaries certainly of human life. Because of the complex interrelationships in systems like human societies or natural ecological environments, solutions can and do arise in many areas, many different situations and over long periods of time. Since the Manifesto we have not only seen the rise of more lethal and destructive weapon systems, we also have witnessed the evolution of anti-war, environmental and global justice movements. They might be part of a slowly changing mass-consciousness; events like Live Earth would not have been possible 50 years ago (not just because the technology wasn’t available). Therefore, as long as we KEEP ACTING against the forces of systemic terror and destruction, we will add to the pool of possibilities for positive change and keep alive the potential for our species to reconnect to the wisdom of the web of life.