The Obfuscation Report

I want to add one point which I think goes to the heart of this matter. When Newsweek's Richard Wolffe recently criticized blogs while chatting amiably with his friend, the White House Press Secretary, and afterwards when he responded to criticisms of his commentary, Wolffe made exactly the same claim that Harris, in essence, makes in his reply here: namely, that media criticisms of journalists are "ideological" or "partisan" -- that what bloggers really want is for journalists to advance the bloggers' partisan agenda -- and those criticisms can and should therefore be dismissed, because that is not the role of journalists.

But that is not the principal criticism of journalists at all. It's a distortion of the media critiques made by most bloggers -- a total strawman.

In fact, virtually all media criticism is based on the exact opposite premise -- namely, that the problem is that journalists are partisan, because they now reflexively spout government claims and right-wing narratives and, worst of all, do so lazily (i.e, uncritically) and often with extreme factual inaccuracies.

For me, there is one fact that illustrates as vividly as possible the crux of the real problem with our political journalistic class. It is this, from USA Today in September 2003:

Poll: 70% believe Saddam, 9-11 link

Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, says a poll out almost two years after the terrorists' strike against this country.

Sixty-nine percent in a Washington Post poll published Saturday said they believe it is likely the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. A majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe it's likely Saddam was involved.

Even six months after this country invaded Iraq, 70% of Americans continued to believe that Saddam helped personally plan the 9/11 attacks. That heinous fact, by itself, should have provoked a major crisis in political journalism -- a desperate effort to find out what went so fundamentally wrong. Yet it did nothing of the sort. Most of the energies of national journalists are devoted instead to defending how they operate and, most of all, condescendingly disparaging their critics as shrill partisans who don't understand the real role of journalists.

I honestly find it unfathomable that any national journalist like Wolffe or Harris can defend their profession, and deny that there are deep-seated and fundamental flaws in it, when this country started a war with the overwhelming majority of citizens -- 70% -- believing an absolute, complete myth, a known falsehood, one which, more than anything else, caused them to support that war. Leaving aside every other issue of gullible, government-propaganda-based reporting, that fact standing alone is a towering indictment of our country's press corps, and the fact that they continue to believe that the way they operate is proper, that they are sufficiently adversarial to the political powers that be, and that it is their critics who are "ideological" and therefore easily dismissed -- all reveals that they have not changed at all.

They may not know it, but the disaster of the Iraq War and the absolute myths which they allowed to take root -- and which they never investigated, exposed or attacked -- is an inescapable indictment of what they do. That is the foundation on which media criticism rests, and there is nothing "partisan" about it. It is the opposite of "partisan." It is instead a demand that the media fulfill their core responsibility -- to serve as an adversarial check on government -- a responsibility which they have profoundly abdicated.

Labels: Glenn Greenwald, media criticism, Richard Wolffe is a hack, Saddam - 9-11 link

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A billion-dollar-a-year federal reading program that ran into scathing criticism over conflicts of interest now has a new one: The government contractor that set up the program for the Education Department is also part of the team hired to evaluate it.

Reading First -- part of President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind education law -- has been under scrutiny following a string of federal reports that found it rife with conflicts of interest and mismanagement. The program provides intense reading help to low-income children in the early elementary grades.

RMC Research Corp. was the contractor hired to establish and implement the program starting in 2002, under three contracts worth about $40 million.

Recently, the Department of Education inspector general reported that RMC failed to keep the program free of conflicts of interest. For example, RMC did not screen subcontractors for relationships with publishers of reading programs.

Now, Reading First is in the midst of a five-year evaluation under a 2003 contract with a team that includes RMC, which is based in Portsmouth, N.H.

Congress required the review, spelling out that it must be an "independent evaluation."

That didn't mean for the contractor that set up the program to have any role in reviewing it, said Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy, who chairs the education committee.

"It's a classic case of the fox guarding the chicken coop," Kennedy said Friday.

Rep. George Miller, D-California, chairman of the House education committee, raised similar concerns when notified Friday of RMC's role in the evaluation.

"RMC played a significant role in the implementation of Reading First and, according to the inspector general, a sometimes flawed role. If it's true that RMC was also hired to evaluate the effectiveness of the very program it was hired to help implement, then the conflict of interest could not be any clearer," Miller said.

Both lawmakers have been investigating Reading First, and Miller announced Friday he would hold a hearing on the issue April 20.

Reading First also has been the subject of investigations by the inspector general and the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm.

The inspector general found that federal officials intervened to influence state and local decisions about reading programs, a potential violation of the law. The GAO reported states received suggestions from federal officials or contractors to adopt or eliminate certain programs or tests.

The inspector general also reported that a consultant to the program, working under RMC, may have inappropriately pushed a particular brand of reading assessment when dealing with states.

Expert panels that reviewed state applications for Reading First grants were stacked with people who shared the program director's views, according to the inspector general. In general, favored programs were highly structured and centered around phonics, a technique that relies on sounding out words.

The investigations have raised questions about whether Reading First should be reformed, or even abandoned, when No Child Left Behind comes up for renewal in Congress this year.

The job of evaluating how well the program has performed is being led by Abt Associates, a contractor based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company hired RMC as a subcontractor.

According to RMC's Web site, the company helped design and implement a method of evaluating how reading is taught in classrooms. Federal officials said RMC assisted in deciding what measures to use to collect information for the evaluation on reading instruction. They said RMC also trained classroom observers.

RMC's share of the $31 million evaluation contract, signed in 2003, is about $1.5 million, said Education Department officials. The department declined to immediately provide a copy of the contract.

"Their role in the overall study sort of is proportional to the amount of money they received," said Ricky Takai, associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, part of the department's research arm. "They do have a very circumscribed role."

Neither RMC nor Abt returned calls seeking comment.

Richard Allington, a leading reading researcher at the University of Tennessee, said RMC's involvement in helping evaluate classroom instruction is a crucial one that will have an impact on the overall study's findings.

"As a researcher, if I were to design an intervention (a reading program); if I want to find out if the intervention is working, I need to see whether it's actually being implemented. About the only way I could do that is to observe in classrooms," Allington said.

However, Phoebe Cottingham, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, said she isn't concerned about bias in this case.

"A subcontractor who is asked to do this work is given a lot of direction, and they are not freewheeling it," she said.

RMC was tasked with helping states develop plans, submit applications and implement the program.

The inspector general found RMC failed to include required conflict-of-interest clauses in its subcontracts and consulting agreements and failed to screen subcontractors for reading product relationships.

RMC subcontracted out some of its work to officials at universities. Some of those subcontractors had financial ties to reading products used under Reading First.

"RMC had its reputation smudged," said Allington. "They have a stake in demonstrating that the model that's in place -- that they largely created -- they have a stake in showing that it actually works."

Patrick Riccards, who was a senior adviser to the National Reading Panel, which reported on best practices in reading instruction, said he was disappointed to learn of RMC's role in the evaluation.

"Reading First will succeed in improving the reading skills of students throughout the nation," Riccards predicted. "But you provide Reading First critics real ammunition to attack the law when evaluation is not conducted by a completely independent third party, without even a hint of potential conflict."

Labels: Bush Administration, corrupt, education, GOP, Republican Party, Republicans

Taking One for the Team, When He Could Remember
By Dana Milbank
Friday, March 30, 2007; A02

Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, was in his fourth hour testifying yesterday about the firing of federal prosecutors when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy cut him off.

"We've just received word that the Republicans have objected, under the Senate rules, to this meeting continuing," Leahy (D-Vt.) announced before angrily bringing down the gavel.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), in the middle of questioning Sampson, was puzzled. "Does it apply to a Republican, too?" he inquired.

It turned out that nobody had really objected -- Republicans blamed a procedural mistake in their cloakroom for the false alarm -- and order in the committee was restored. But not before Democrats turned the gaffe into a PR bonanza.

"The Republicans are the ones that don't want to have the hearing," Leahy inveighed. "What bothers me is if nobody has anything to hide, why not have these hearings, why not have them in the open?" In the senatorial equivalent of the "we shall fight on the beaches" speech, he continued: "We will have the hearings if we have to have them in the evenings or on weekends or during recess!"

In the confusion, Sampson's lawyer Brad Berenson noticed that the witness chair was empty. "Where's Kyle?" he asked reporters.

Republicans had, inadvertently, produced a fitting sequel to the prosecutor imbroglio. The Bush administration's mishandling of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys and the misinformation its Justice Department sent Congress turned an embarrassing story into a full scandal. Yesterday, the Senate Republicans' procedural mishap turned a modestly embarrassing hearing into a spectacle.

That's too bad for the GOP, because Sampson seemed content to fall on his sword rather than naming names when he was questioned about the prosecutor mess. Only the red felt on the witness table concealed the blood. "I could have and should have helped to prevent this," Sampson offered. "I let the attorney general and the department down. . . . I failed to organize a more effective response. . . . It was a failure on my part. . . . I will hold myself responsible. . . . I wish we could do it all over again."

The witness fessed up to an expanding list of sins. He admitted that the Justice Department was trying to circumvent the Senate confirmation process. He confessed that he proposed firing Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the Valerie Plame leak case. "I regretted it," he explained. "I knew that it was the wrong thing to do."

But the self-sacrificing witness still managed -- inadvertently, perhaps -- to implicate Gonzales and Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove. Sampson, who resigned from the Justice Department earlier this month, admitted that Gonzales "had received a complaint from Karl Rove about U.S. attorneys in three jurisdictions." Asked about the accuracy of Gonzales's claim of non-involvement, Sampson confessed: "I don't think it's entirely accurate what he said."

Walking down the center aisle with no fewer than six lawyers, some carrying heavy briefcases, the witness made a grand entrance. His hair was trim and gelled, his frameless octagonal glasses polished clean. Described in news accounts as a young version of Rove, Sampson was indeed a bit pudgy and jowly, and he spoke in a nerdy voice that sounded strange coming from a man whose combative e-mails had been released by the Justice Department in recent weeks. His tie was a bright yellow -- the same color chosen by Sen. Chuck Schumer, who moved quickly to take control of the proceedings.

The New York Democrat warned there would be "lengthy" questioning, and he made good on his threat. Seven hours into the hearing, Schumer -- ignoring notes from Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) pleading with him to cease and desist -- announced: "We're on Round Four here."

"The purpose is, as they said in 'Dragnet,' just the facts, ma'am," Schumer advised the witness. Sampson, however, was a little fuzzy.

"I can't pretend to know or remember every fact that may be of relevance," he warned at the start -- and he wasn't kidding. He used the phrase "I don't remember" a memorable 122 times.

It may have been a tactical effort to limit his risk of perjury, but Sampson displayed the recall of a man who recently fell off a ladder.

"Since the 2004 election, did you speak with the president about replacing U.S. attorneys?" Leahy asked.

"I don't ever remember speaking to the president after the 2004 election," he said. (He later remembered that he had.) "Did you have further communications with the White House regarding the plan to regard and replace several U.S. attorneys?"

"I don't remember specifically."

"I wish you did remember," Leahy finally said. "I would hope that you would search your memory as we go along."

Sampson searched. He came up empty.

After Schumer elicited three consecutive I-don't-remembers, John Cornyn (R-Tex.) objected to the questioning style.

Leahy overruled him. "We're trying to find what in heaven's name he does remember," the chairman said.

Schumer persisted, eventually asking the witness a question about Rove's role. "I don't remember," Sampson said. "I don't remember anything like that. I don't think so. I don't remember. I don't remember."

Labels: Brain Dead, Kyle Sampson, liar

by catherineD

These are questions from an October 2003 Debate in Detroit sponsored by Fox News and the Congressional Black Caucus.

Each candidate was asked four questions --- I've selected the worst of these, to show you something about the kind of questions Fox News asks. (Be sure not to miss Lieberman's.)

All of the questions asked were not skewed, but this actually makes things worse. Instead of smearing all of the candidates equally, among the major candidates: Lieberman was favored, Kerry and Edwards each received two decent questions, Dean received one decent question, and Clark received no decent questions. Yet the talking heads took no notice of this, instead blaming the candidates, as Fox manipulated our primary.

CLARK

I wonder if you could take a moment and explain to us why, at the end of your time as the supreme allied commander of NATO, you were not re-upped and why such folks as Retired General Hugh Shelton have suggested you were effectively fired for what he called character and integrity issues.

EDWARDS

Senator Edwards, the rap on you, you're a one-term senator. You are a trial lawyer and, therefore, you're supposed to be compromised by that somehow. The expectations for you were so high in the beginning that you were on the cover of Newsweek magazine, yet in the latest Newsweek poll out today, you're in the bottom of the pack.
What happened?

KUCINICH

Congressman Kucinich, you have proposed changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of Peace, but in a world in which our enemies are willing to kill themselves to kill us, is it not better that we stand and fight? And is it not better that we wage that battle on foreign shores and not here in America?

DEAN

We are attempting to imagine each of you in the White House in the Oval Office, and in that spirit, Governor Dean, I have this question for you.

You have been unstintingly critical of this war, yet, with all due respect, you have commanded nothing more than the Vermont National Guard. You did not serve in the military.

How would you, as president, be able to exert any credibility, any command over a post-war Pentagon?

KERRY

Senator Kerry, I want to direct the next question to you, in part because you voted for the Iraq resolution but have also opposed the $87 billion. To many, that speaks to an inconsistency that your candidacy has been criticized by, for having a difficult to explain position on the Iraq war.

Is it inconsistent for you to support the resolution and not the reconstruction money?

GEPHARDT

Congressman Gephardt, here in metro Detroit, we have one of the largest concentrations of Arab-Americans in this country. By and large, they love America. They're willing to die for this country.

But at the same time, some of them will tell you they do not see the world as we see it. In fact, in the eyes of some, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are not terrorist groups, they are freedom fighters or defenders.

My question to you, would you be willing to negotiate with groups now labeled as terrorists if such an effort would end the suicide bombings in Israel and also possibly resolve the Middle East crisis?

SHARPTON

Reverend Sharpton, along the lines of budget politics, it's fairly evident that all of you up there would prefer to see the wealthiest Americans shoulder a greater part of the burden.

What sacrifice would you put upon averaging working families to carry their share of the burden in the coming Sharpton economy?

MOSELEY-BRAUN

Ambassador Braun, you've urged the current administration repeatedly to negotiate peace and to deal with other nations, and an opportunity for you, perhaps, to go back and clear the record over something in the past.

It has been reported repeatedly that in 1996, as a senator, against the wishes of the U.S. government, you visited Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, someone who, at the time, was recognized worldwide as a murderous dictator.

How does that association play to your ability to be a peace- minded commander in chief?

LIEBERMAN

Senator Lieberman, you've certainly not called the positions that your rivals have taken on the war and on the funding unpatriotic, but you have called it inconsistent. You've suggested that it's weak and that it sends a duplicitous message to the world.

You've heard a variety of opinions expressed by your rivals. Why are they wrong?

link

Labels: Al Sharpton, congressional black caucus, debate, Dennis Kucinich, Dick Gephardt, Fox News, Fox News is a Joke, Howard Dean, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, John Kerry, Wes Clark

by Meteor Blades

Labels: Britain, Faye Turney, Geneva Conventions, hostage, Iran, UK

In today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, former chief of staff to Atttorney General Alberto Gonzales confirmed that Gonzales was involved in the prosecutor purge.

Gonzales, 3/12/07:

“I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on.”

Sampson, 3/29/07:

“I don’t think the attorney general’s statement that he was not involved in any discussions of U.S. attorney removals was accurate.”

UPDATE: According to E&P, Sampson said Gonzales was involved in “at least five” discussions about the U.S. attorney firings. (via Atrios)

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, liar

By Peter Spiegel
Times Staff Writer

March 30, 2007

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday that he had been pressing others in the Bush administration to move war crimes trials of suspected terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to courts inside the U.S. because the military tribunals may appear tainted in the eye of the international community.

No matter how open the trials are under a new law, Gates said, they may not be deemed credible by the outside world because of prior military practices at the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo, which included interrogation techniques that involved physical coercion.

"My own view is that because of things that happened earlier at Guantanamo, there is a taint about it," Gates testified before the House Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee.

He continued: "I felt that no matter how transparent, no matter how open the trials, if they took place at Guantanamo, in the international community they would lack credibility."

Gates repeated his support for closing down the prison and has expressed concern before that abuses there have harmed America's reputation abroad. But his comments come at an awkward time for the administration, with the trials resuming this week after a year's hiatus.

The first man to plead guilty in the trials, Australian David Hicks, is scheduled to appear before a tribunal at Guantanamo today to admit to specific crimes and receive his sentence. Hicks, a 31-year-old former kangaroo skinner, will be asked about 24 specific allegations on a Pentagon charge sheet, which involve weapons and tactics training with reputed terrorist groups in Albania, Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as meetings with Osama bin Laden and would-be "shoe bomber" Richard Reid.

Hicks entered a plea of guilty Monday in a surprising reversal after his lawyers spent more than four hours wrangling with the military judge, Marine Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann.

The administration cites Hicks' conviction as a sign the new tribunals are legitimate, but Gates' comments could hamper the effort.

Gates has been widely credited by senior Pentagon officials and members of Congress for a more open and pragmatic style than his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld.

His views on Guantanamo have been the most visible example of substantive differences. By some accounts, his stance on treatment of terrorism suspects may be the most significant policy break from Rumsfeld in Gates' tenure.

Within weeks of taking office in December, Gates killed a $102-million plan to build a large courthouse facility at Guantanamo, a proposal first made while Rumsfeld was still in charge at the Pentagon. Gates called the proposal "ridiculous" and instead ordered existing buildings to be refurbished, at about a tenth of the cost.

His views on the military tribunals could be more consequential. In the past, top administration lawyers have pushed for retaining most existing procedures, including the use of evidence gathered through coercion, despite adverse court rulings.

But Rumsfeld and his chief lieutenant on detainee issues, Stephen A. Cambone, both have left. That leaves Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales — who, as White House counsel, urged Bush to ignore the Geneva Convention when dealing with detained Al Qaeda suspects — increasingly isolated on the issue.

In his Capitol Hill testimony, Gates said there were "some number of people at Guantanamo that, frankly, based on their own confessions, should never be released."

"Now, I'm not the attorney general; I'm not a lawyer," Gates noted, saying he wanted to work with Congress to find a way to use the military prison system for some Al Qaeda suspects.

"It may be that it requires some kind of a statutory approach to deal with it in terms of how do you keep these people — who are self-confessed terrorists, who will come back and attack the United States if they're ever released — for the long term."

---

peter.spiegel@latimes.com

Times staff writer Carol J.

Williams in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, contributed to this report.

Labels: Geneva Convention, George W Bush, Guantanamo Bay, international community, Robert M. Gates, torture

Landowner Issues Trumped Animal Protections, IG Says

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 30, 2007; A05

A senior Bush political appointee at the Interior Department has repeatedly altered scientific field reports to minimize protections for imperiled species and disclosed confidential information to private groups seeking to affect policy decisions, the department's inspector general concluded.

The investigator's report on Julie A. MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks -- which was triggered by an anonymous complaint from a Fish and Wildlife Service employee and expanded in October after a Washington Post article about MacDonald -- said she frequently sought to reshape the agency's scientific reports in an effort to ease the impact of agency decisions on private landowners.

Inspector General Earl E. Devaney referred the case to Interior's top officials for "potential administrative action," according to the document, which was reported yesterday in the New York Times.

The IG noted that MacDonald "admitted that her degree is in civil engineering and that she has no formal educational background in natural sciences" but repeatedly instructed Fish and Wildlife scientists to change their recommendations on identifying "critical habitats," despite her lack of expertise.

At one point, according to Fish and Wildlife Service Director H. Dale Hall, MacDonald tangled with field personnel over designating habitat for the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher, a bird whose range is from Arizona to New Mexico and Southern California. When scientists wrote that the bird had a "nesting range" of 2.1 miles, MacDonald told field personnel to change the number to 1.8 miles. Hall, a wildlife biologist who told the IG he had had a "running battle" with MacDonald, said she did not want the range to extend to California because her husband had a family ranch there.

In another incident described in the report, MacDonald argued with Hall over the Kootenai River sturgeon, a fish in Montana and Idaho that needs a certain level of river flow in order to spawn. Field biologists determined that the sturgeon's needed flow level ranged between 2.3 and 5.9 cubic feet per second, but MacDonald instructed them to cite only the 5.9 figure, which would have aided dam operators. After Hall demanded she put the request in writing, the report noted, "she ultimately relented and they kept the 2.3 to 5.9 range."

Devaney reported that several Fish and Wildlife officials said MacDonald yelled and cursed at them, quoting the assistant manager for California and Nevada operations as saying that his employees "were definitely stressed, pushed and yelled at by MacDonald."

The report also said MacDonald "misused her position" by disclosing confidential documents to "private sector sources" such as the Pacific Legal Foundation and the California Farm Bureau Federation, both of which have challenged endangered-species listings.

On Feb. 4, 2004, MacDonald sent the Pacific Legal Foundation a 147-page document on Interior's critical habitat policies. In an e-mail exchange with one of the foundation's lawyers, MacDonald wrote: "I will send you a copy of the draft but please do not share it with anyone else. It's still undergoing revision, although the fundamental legal/policy approach will not change. Does that work for you?"

MacDonald acknowledged to Devaney that the policy document would not have been released under a Freedom of Information Act request but "said that did not mean she could not release it to a personal friend, the PLF attorney, as long as the attorney would not post the document on the PLF's Web site."

MacDonald was not available for comment yesterday, and Interior Department spokesman Hugh Vickery said he could not comment on the report because it was "a personnel matter."

Kieran Suckling, policy director for the advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity, said the report documented MacDonald's close relationship with industry.

"She has demoralized the entire U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by deriding its scientists, overruling its decision-makers, and showing complete disregard for professional channels of decision making," Suckling said in an e-mail.

Labels: Bush Administration, Interior Department, Julie A. MacDonald is a hack, The facts are being fixed around the policy

CNN: Military Sources Respond To McCain’s Escalation Remark With ‘Laughter Down The Line’

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told radio host Bill Bennett that President Bush’s escalation is working. “There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today,” he said. Today, when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked McCain why Americans still aren’t able to safely leave the Green Zone in Iraq, the senator replied that Blitzer was giving three-month-old talking points:

General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed humvee. I think you oughta catch up. You are giving the old line of three months ago. I understand it. We certainly don’t get it through the filter of some of the media.

But according to CNN reporter Michael Ware, who has been in Iraq for four years, McCain is “way off base.” He stated, “To suggest that there’s any neighborhood in this city where an American can walk freely is beyond ludicrous. I’d love Sen. McCain to tell me where that neighborhood is and he and I can go for a stroll.”

Ware also rebutted McCain’s assertion that Petaeus travels in an unarmed humvee: “[I]n the hour since Sen. McCain’s said this, I’ve spoken to military sources and there was laughter down the line. I mean, certainly the general travels in a humvee. There’s multiple humvees around it, heavily armed.”

Labels: McCain, Moron, Right Wing Misinformation Campaign

by Hunter

Glenn Greenwald:

• ::
• 
  

Labels: media criticism, Prosecutor Purge, punditry, U.S. Attorneys

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 28, 2007; A01

Federal and state lawmakers have launched a new drive to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, reviving a feminist goal that faltered a quarter-century ago when the measure did not gain the approval of three-quarters of the state legislatures.

The amendment, which came three states short of enactment in 1982, has been introduced in five state legislatures since January. Yesterday, House and Senate Democrats reintroduced the measure under a new name -- the Women's Equality Amendment -- and vowed to bring it to a vote in both chambers by the end of the session.

The renewed push to pass the ERA, which passed the House and Senate overwhelmingly in 1972 and was ratified by 35 states before skidding to a halt, highlights liberals' renewed sense of power since November's midterm elections. From Capitol Hill to Arkansas, legislators said they are seizing a political opportunity to enshrine women's rights in the Constitution.

"Elections have consequences, and isn't it true those consequences are good right now?" Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) asked a mostly female crowd yesterday at a news conference, as the audience cheered. "We are turning this country around, bit by bit, to put it in a more progressive direction."

The amendment consists of 52 words and has one key line: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." That sentence would subject legal claims of gender discrimination to the same strict scrutiny given by courts to allegations of racial discrimination.

Although more states are considering ratifying the ERA now than at any other time in the past 25 years, activists still face serious hurdles. Every statewide officeholder in Arkansas endorsed the amendment this year, but the bill stalled in committee last week after Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly came to Little Rock to testify against the measure.

In the 1970s, Schlafly and others argued that the ERA would lead to women being drafted by the military and to public unisex bathrooms. Today, she warns lawmakers that its passage would compel courts to approve same-sex marriages and deny Social Security benefits for housewives and widows.

"It's very retro. It had 10 years of debate, very passionate debate for 10 years, and it was defeated," Schlafly said in an interview yesterday. "Anytime you get a fair forum where both sides are heard, we win."

The ERA, originally introduced in Congress in 1923, gained popularity in the mid-1960s. In March 1972, it cleared the first of two hurdles: passing both chambers of Congress by the required two-thirds vote.

Thirty state legislatures ratified it the next year. Congress extended by three years its seven-year deadline for ratification, but the decade passed without approval by the required 38 states. ERA backers have since introduced the resolution in every Congress, but only now do they believe they have a realistic chance of success.

Legal scholars debate whether the 35 state votes to ratify the amendment are still valid.

In 1997, three professors argued in the William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law that the ERA remained viable because in 1992 the Madison Amendment -- which affects congressional pay raises -- became the 27th constitutional amendment 203 years after it first won congressional approval. Under that precedent, advocates say, the ERA should become part of the Constitution once three-quarters of the states ratify it, no matter how long that takes.

Even backers of the amendment such as Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) expect a legal battle on that question. They are reintroducing the amendment in Congress and hope to start the ratification process again from scratch.

Idella Moore, executive officer of Atlanta-based 4ERA, said she and other supporters are trying to convince Americans that it makes sense to adopt the amendment, even though people have not focused on the issue for years.

"It's a hell of a challenge," Moore said. "We're trying to reposition it back into the mainstream."

ERA backers have enjoyed limited success so far -- Florida's House speaker has yet to assign the bill to committee, and the Arkansas House Committee on State Agencies and Governmental Affairs deadlocked 10 to 10. But the drive has sparked a new national discussion on women's rights.

"I think we've made a lot of people think about this and say, 'Yes, this is the right thing to do,' " said Arkansas state Rep. Lindsley Smith (D), who sponsored the ERA and has vowed to bring it up again when the legislature reconvenes in 2009. "The question I get most frequently is 'Lindsley, I thought this already was in the Constitution.' "

Jay Barth, a professor of politics at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., said the recent debate shows both the advances the women's movement has made in the South and its limitations.

"Gender equity has definitely become a no-brainer aspect of Democratic Party ideology, even in Southern states. Thirty years ago, that was not the case," Barth said. But he added that when it came to ratifying the amendment this year, "it certainly wasn't a priority for Democratic Party officials."

Opponents warn that enacting the amendment could produce unintended consequences. Arkansas state Rep. Dan Greenberg (R) said he opposes the measure because courts in two states have ruled that equal-rights amendments in state constitutions justify state funding for abortion.

"The more general language you have in a constitutional amendment, the more unpredictable the policy impact will be," Greenberg said.

Caroline Fredrickson, who directs the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that "it's hard to predict" how courts would interpret the amendment. But she said it is more likely the ERA would allow women to sue for higher pay and other benefits.

"It has really hampered women's ability to get fair treatment in the workplace and other aspects of their lives," she said.

It remains unclear whether the amendment -- which has 194 House co-sponsors and 10 Senate co-sponsors and no longer includes a deadline for ratification -- can get a two-thirds vote in Congress. Nadler, who chairs the Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights, and civil liberties, said the bill will receive its first hearing in more than two decades and "is going to be one of the items at the top of the agenda."

In many ways, yesterday's news conference on Capitol Hill underscored how much has changed since Congress last voted on the ERA. As Digital Sisters Inc. chief executive Shireen Mitchell announced that her online site is working to marshal support for the bill, Feminist Majority President Eleanor Smeal quipped: "The last time around, we didn't have Digital Sisters."

Staff researcher Rena Kirsch contributed to this report.

Labels: ERA, support it

BUSH'S SHADOW ARMY

Jeremy Scahill

The Nation

Jeremy Scahill reports on the Bush Administration's growing dependence on private security forces such as Blackwater USA and efforts in Congress to rein them in. This article is adapted from his new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books).

On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda or imagined the possibility of a "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting--many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation--Rumsfeld issued a declaration of war.

"The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America," Rumsfeld thundered. "It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." He told his new staff, "You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world.... [But] the adversary's closer to home," he said. "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the private sector. Announcing this major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience, "I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself."

The next morning, the Pentagon would be attacked, literally, as a Boeing 757--American Airlines Flight 77--smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn't take long for Rumsfeld to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war--laid out just a day before--on the fast track. The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. "We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists," Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs titled "Transforming the Military."

Although Rumsfeld was later thrown overboard by the Administration in an attempt to placate critics of the Iraq War, his military revolution was here to stay. Bidding farewell to Rumsfeld in November 2006, Bush credited him with overseeing the "most sweeping transformation of America's global force posture since the end of World War II." Indeed, Rumsfeld's trademark "small footprint" approach ushered in one of the most significant developments in modern warfare--the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of war, including in combat.

The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq--an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.

To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a "road map for change" at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the "Department's Total Force" as "its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors--constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions." This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors--conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.

Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations. "We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren't being counted, and the danger is that there's zero accountability," says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.

While the past years of Republican monopoly on government have marked a golden era for the industry, those days appear to be ending. Just a month into the new Congressional term, leading Democrats were announcing investigations of runaway war contractors. Representative John Murtha, chair of the Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Defense, after returning from a trip to Iraq in late January, said, "We're going to have extensive hearings to find out exactly what's going on with contractors. They don't have a clear mission and they're falling all over each other." Two days later, during confirmation hearings for Gen. George Casey as Army chief of staff, Senator Jim Webb declared, "This is a rent-an-army out there." Webb asked Casey, "Wouldn't it be better for this country if those tasks, particularly the quasi-military gunfighting tasks, were being performed by active-duty military soldiers in terms of cost and accountability?" Casey defended the contracting system but said armed contractors "are the ones that we have to watch very carefully." Senator Joe Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has also indicated he will hold hearings on contractors. Parallel to the ongoing investigations, there are several bills gaining steam in Congress aimed at contractor oversight.

Occupying the hot seat through these deliberations is the shadowy mercenary company Blackwater USA. Unbeknownst to many Americans and largely off the Congressional radar, Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power and protection within the US war apparatus. This company's success represents the realization of the life's work of the conservative officials who formed the core of the Bush Administration's war team, for whom radical privatization has long been a cherished ideological mission. Blackwater has repeatedly cited Rumsfeld's statement that contractors are part of the "Total Force" as evidence that it is a legitimate part of the nation's "warfighting capability and capacity." Invoking Rumsfeld's designation, the company has in effect declared its forces above the law--entitled to the immunity from civilian lawsuits enjoyed by the military, but also not bound by the military's court martial system. While the initial inquiries into Blackwater have focused on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically connected private army that has become the Bush Administration's Praetorian Guard.

Blackwater Rising

Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince--the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding, the company largely consisted of Prince's private fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land located near the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina. Its vision was "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training." In the following years, Prince, his family and his political allies poured money into Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party's takeover of Congress and the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency.

While Blackwater won government contracts during the Clinton era, which was friendly to privatization, it was not until the "war on terror" that the company's glory moment arrived. Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would become a central player in a global war. "I've been operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security," Prince told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly shortly after 9/11. "The phone is ringing off the hook now."

Among those calls was one from the CIA, which contracted Blackwater to work in Afghanistan in the early stages of US operations there. In the ensuing years the company has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the "war on terror," winning nearly $1 billion in noncovert government contracts, many of them no-bid arrangements. In just a decade Prince has expanded the Moyock headquarters to 7,000 acres, making it the world's largest private military base. Blackwater currently has 2,300 personnel deployed in nine countries, with 20,000 other contractors at the ready. It has a fleet of more than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a private intelligence division, and it is manufacturing surveillance blimps and target systems.

In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina its forces deployed in New Orleans, where it billed the federal government $950 per man, per day--at one point raking in more than $240,000 a day. At its peak the company had about 600 contractors deployed from Texas to Mississippi. Since Katrina, it has aggressively pursued domestic contracting, opening a new domestic operations division. Blackwater is marketing its products and services to the Department of Homeland Security, and its representatives have met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The company has applied for operating licenses in all US coastal states. Blackwater is also expanding its physical presence inside US borders, opening facilities in Illinois and California.

Its largest obtainable government contract is with the State Department, for providing security to US diplomats and facilities in Iraq. That contract began in 2003 with the company's $21 million no-bid deal to protect Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer. Blackwater has guarded the two subsequent US ambassadors, John Negroponte and Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as other diplomats and occupation offices. Its forces have protected more than ninety Congressional delegations in Iraq, including that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. According to the latest government contract records, since June 2004 Blackwater has been awarded $750 million in State Department contracts alone. It is currently engaged in an intensive lobbying campaign to be sent into Darfur as a privatized peacekeeping force. Last October President Bush lifted some sanctions on Christian southern Sudan, paving the way for a potential Blackwater training mission there. In January the Washington, DC, representative for southern Sudan's regional government said he expected Blackwater to begin training the south's security forces soon.

Since 9/11 Blackwater has hired some well-connected officials close to the Bush Administration as senior executives. Among them are J. Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA and the man who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden after 9/11, and Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General, who was responsible for policing contractors like Blackwater during much of the "war on terror"--something he stood accused of not doing effectively. By the end of Schmitz's tenure, powerful Republican Senator Charles Grassley launched a Congressional probe into whether Schmitz had "quashed or redirected two ongoing criminal investigations" of senior Bush Administration officials. Under bipartisan fire, Schmitz resigned and signed up with Blackwater.

Despite its central role, Blackwater had largely operated in the shadows until March 31, 2004, when four of its private soldiers in Iraq were ambushed and killed in Falluja. A mob then burned the bodies and dragged them through the streets, stringing up two from a bridge over the Euphrates. In many ways it was the moment the Iraq War turned. US forces laid siege to Falluja days later, killing hundreds of people and displacing thousands, inflaming the fierce Iraqi resistance that haunts occupation forces to this day. For most Americans, it was the first they had heard of private soldiers. "People began to figure out this is quite a phenomenon," says Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat, who said he began monitoring the use of private contractors after Falluja. "I'm probably like most Congress members in kind of coming to this awareness and developing an interest in it" after the incident.

What is not so well-known is that in Washington after Falluja, Blackwater executives kicked into high gear, capitalizing on the company's newfound recognition. The day after the ambush, it hired the Alexander Strategy Group, a K Street lobbying firm run by former senior staffers of then-majority leader Tom DeLay before the firm's meltdown in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal. A week to the day after the ambush, Erik Prince was sitting down with at least four senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including its chair, John Warner. Senator Rick Santorum arranged the meeting, which included Warner and two other key Republican senators--Appropriations Committee chair Ted Stevens of Alaska and George Allen of Virginia. This meeting followed an earlier series of face-to-faces Prince had had with powerful House Republicans who oversaw military contracts. Among them: DeLay; Porter Goss, chair of the House Intelligence Committee (and future CIA director); Duncan Hunter, chair of the House Armed Services Committee; and Representative Bill Young, chair of the House Appropriations Committee. What was discussed at these meetings remains a secret. But Blackwater was clearly positioning itself to make the most of its new fame. Indeed, two months later, Blackwater was handed one of the government's most valuable international security contracts, worth more than $300 million.

The firm was also eager to stake out a role in crafting the rules that would govern mercenaries under US contract. "Because of the public events of March 31, [Blackwater's] visibility and need to communicate a consistent message has elevated here in Washington," said Blackwater's new lobbyist Chris Bertelli. "There are now several federal regulations that apply to their activities, but they are generally broad in nature. One thing that's lacking is an industry standard. That's something we definitely want to be engaged in." By May Blackwater was leading a lobbying effort by the private military industry to try to block Congressional or Pentagon efforts to place their forces under the military court martial system.

But while Blackwater enjoyed its new status as a hero in the "war on terror" within the Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress, the families of the four men killed at Falluja say they were being stonewalled by Blackwater as they attempted to understand the circumstances of how their loved ones were killed. After what they allege was months of effort to get straight answers from the company, the families filed a ground-breaking wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater in January 2005, accusing the company of not providing the men with what they say were contractually guaranteed safeguards. Among the allegations: The company sent them on the Falluja mission that day short two men, with less powerful weapons than they should have had and in Pajero jeeps instead of armored vehicles. This case could have far-reaching reverberations and is being monitored closely by the war-contractor industry--former Halliburton subsidiary KBR has even filed an amicus brief supporting Blackwater. If the lawsuit is successful, it could pave the way for a tobacco litigation-type scenario, where war contractors find themselves besieged by legal claims of workers killed or injured in war zones.

As the case has made its way through the court system, Blackwater has enlisted powerhouse Republican lawyers to defend it, among them Fred Fielding, who was recently named by Bush as White House counsel, replacing Harriet Miers; and Kenneth Starr, former Whitewater prosecutor investigating President Clinton, and the company's current counsel of record. Blackwater has not formally debated the specific allegations in the suit, but what has emerged in its court filings is a series of legal arguments intended to bolster Blackwater's contention that it is essentially above the law. Blackwater claims that if US courts allow the company to be sued for wrongful death, that could threaten the nation's war-fighting capacity: "Nothing could be more destructive of the all-volunteer, Total Force concept underlying U.S. military manpower doctrine than to expose the private components to the tort liability systems of fifty states, transported overseas to foreign battlefields," the company argued in legal papers. In February Blackwater suffered a major defeat when the Supreme Court declined its appeal to hear the Falluja case, paving the way for the state trial--where there would be no cap on damages a jury could award--to proceed.

Congress is beginning to take an interest in this potentially groundbreaking case. On February 7 Representative Henry Waxman chaired hearings of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. While the hearings were billed as looking at US reliance on military contractors, they largely focused on Blackwater and the Falluja incident. For the first time, Blackwater was forced to share a venue with the families of the men killed at Falluja. "Private contractors like Blackwater work outside the scope of the military's chain of command and can literally do whatever they please without any liability or accountability from the US government," Katy Helvenston, whose son Scott was one of the Blackwater contractors killed, told the committee. "Therefore, Blackwater can continue accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money from the government without having to answer a single question about its security operators."

Citing the pending litigation, Blackwater's general counsel, Andrew Howell, declined to respond to many of the charges levied against his company by the families and asked several times for the committee to go into closed session. "The men who went on the mission on March 31, each had their weapons and they had sufficient ammunition," Howell told the committee, adding that the men were in "appropriate" vehicles. That was sharply disputed by the men's families, who allege that in order to save $1.5 million Blackwater did not provide the four with armored vehicles. "Once the men signed on with Blackwater and were flown to the Middle East, Blackwater treated them as fungible commodities," Helvenston told lawmakers in her emotional testimony, delivered on behalf of all four families.

The issue that put this case on Waxman's radar was the labyrinth of subcontracts underpinning the Falluja mission. Since November 2004 Waxman has been trying to pin down who the Blackwater men were ultimately working for the day of the ambush. "For over eighteen months, the Defense Department wouldn't even respond to my inquiry," says Waxman. "When it finally replied last July, it didn't even supply the breakdown I requested. In fact, it denied that private security contractors did any work at all under the [Pentagon's contracting program]. We now know that isn't true." Waxman's struggle to follow the money on this one contract involving powerful war contractors like KBR provides a graphic illustration of the secretive nature of the whole war contracting industry.

What is not in dispute regarding the Falluja incident is that Blackwater was working with a Kuwaiti business called Regency under a contract with the world's largest food services company, Eurest Support Services. ESS is a subcontractor for KBR and another giant war contractor, Fluor, in Iraq under the Pentagon's LOGCAP contracting program. One contract covering Blackwater's Falluja mission indicated the mission was ultimately a subcontract with KBR. Last summer KBR denied this. Then ESS wrote Waxman to say the mission was conducted under Fluor's contract with ESS. Fluor denied that, and the Pentagon told Waxman it didn't know which company the mission was ultimately linked to. Waxman alleged that Blackwater and the other subcontractors were "adding significant markups" to their subcontracts for the same security services that Waxman believes were then charged to US taxpayers. "It's remarkable that the world of contractors and subcontractors is so murky that we can't even get to the bottom of this, let alone calculate how many millions of dollars taxpayers lose in each step of the subcontracting process," says Waxman.

While it appeared for much of the February 7 hearing that the contract's provenance would remain obscure, that changed when, at the end of the hearing, the Pentagon revealed that the original contractor was, in fact, KBR. In violation of military policy against LOGCAP contractors' using private forces for security instead of US troops, KBR had entered into a subcontract with ESS that was protected by Blackwater; those costs were allegedly passed on to US taxpayers to the tune of $19.6 million. Blackwater said it billed ESS $2.3 million for its services, meaning a markup of more than $17 million was ultimately passed on to the government. Three weeks after the hearing, KBR told shareholders it may be forced to repay up to $400 million to the government as a result of an ongoing Army investigation.

It took more than two years for Waxman to get an answer to a simple question: Whom were US taxpayers paying for services? But, as the Falluja lawsuit shows, it is not just money at issue. It is human life.

A Killing on Christmas Eve

While much of the publicity Blackwater has received stems from Falluja, another, more recent incident is attracting new scrutiny. On Christmas Eve inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, an American Blackwater contractor allegedly shot and killed an Iraqi bodyguard protecting a senior Iraqi official. For weeks after the shooting, unconfirmed reports circulated around the Internet that alcohol may have been involved and that the Iraqi was shot ten times in the chest. The story then went that the contractor was spirited out of Iraq before he could be prosecuted. Media inquiries got nowhere--the US Embassy refused to confirm that it was a Blackwater contractor, and the company refused to comment.

Then the incident came up at the February 7 Congressional hearing. As the session was drawing to a close, Representative Kucinich raced back into the room with what he said was a final question. He entered a news report on the incident into the record and asked Blackwater counsel Howell if Blackwater had flown the contractor out of Iraq after the alleged shooting. "That gentleman, on the day the incident occurred, he was off duty," Howell said, in what was the first official confirmation of the incident from Blackwater. "Blackwater did bring him back to the United States."

"Is he going to be extradited back to Iraq for murder, and if not, why not?" Kucinich asked.

"Sir, I am not law enforcement. All I can say is that there's currently an investigation," Howell replied. "We are fully cooperating and supporting that investigation."

Kucinich then said, "I just want to point out that there's a question that could actually make [Blackwater's] corporate officers accessories here in helping to create a flight from justice for someone who's committed a murder."

The War on the Hill

Several bills are now making their way through Congress aimed at oversight and transparency of the private forces that have emerged as major players in the wars of the post-9/11 period. In mid-February Senators Byron Dorgan, Patrick Leahy and John Kerry introduced legislation aimed at cracking down on no-bid contracts and cronyism, providing for penalties of up to twenty years in prison and fines of up to $1 million for what they called "war profiteering." It is part of what Democrats describe as a multi-pronged approach. "I think there's a critical mass of us now who are working on it," says Congressman Price, who represents Blackwater's home state. In January Price introduced legislation that would expand the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 (MEJA) to include all contractors in a war zone, not just those working for or alongside the armed forces. Most of Blackwater's work in Iraq, for instance, is contracted by the State Department. Price indicated that the alleged Christmas Eve shooting could be a test case of sorts under his legislation. "I will be following this and I'll be calling for a full investigation," he said.

But there's at least one reason to be wary of this approach: Price's office consulted with the private military lobby as it crafted the legislation, which has the industry's strong endorsement. Perhaps that's because MEJA has been for the most part unenforced. "Even in situations when US civilian law could potentially have been applied to contractor crimes, it wasn't," observed P.W. Singer, a leading scholar on contractors. American prosecutors are already strapped for resources in their home districts--how could they be expected to conduct complex investigations in Iraq? Who will protect the investigators and prosecutors? How will they interview Iraqi victims? How could they effectively oversee 100,000 individuals spread across a dangerous war zone? "It's a good question," concedes Price. "I'm not saying that it would be a simple matter." He argues his legislation is an attempt to "put the whole contracting enterprise on a new accountable footing."

This past fall, taking a different tack--much to the dismay of the industry--Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, an Air Force reserve lawyer and former reserve judge, quietly inserted language into the 2007 Defense Authorization, which Bush signed into law, that places contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), commonly known as the court martial system. Graham implemented the change with no public debate and with almost no awareness among the broader Congress, but war contractors immediately questioned its constitutionality. Indeed, this could be a rare moment when mercenaries and civil libertarians are on the same side. Many contractors are not armed combatants; they work in food, laundry and other support services. While the argument could be made that armed contractors like those working for Blackwater should be placed under the UCMJ, Graham's change could result in a dishwasher from Nepal working for KBR being prosecuted like a US soldier. On top of all this, the military has enough trouble policing its own massive force and could scarcely be expected to monitor an additional 100,000 private personnel. Besides, many contractors in Iraq are there under the auspices of the State Department and other civilian agencies, not the military.

In an attempt to clarify these matters, Senator Barack Obama introduced comprehensive new legislation in February. It requires clear rules of engagement for armed contractors, expands MEJA and provides for the DoD to "arrest and detain" contractors suspected of crimes and then turn them over to civilian authorities for prosecution. It also requires the Justice Department to submit a comprehensive report on current investigations of contractor abuses, the number of complaints received about contractors and criminal cases opened. In a statement to The Nation, Obama said contractors are "operating with unclear lines of authority, out-of-control costs and virtually no oversight by Congress. This black hole of accountability increases the danger to our troops and American civilians serving as contractors." He said his legislation would "re-establish control over these companies," while "bringing contractors under the rule of law."

Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House intelligence committee, has been a leading critic of the war contracting system. Her Iraq and Afghanistan Contractor Sunshine Act, introduced in February, which bolsters Obama's, boils down to what Schakowsky sees as a long overdue fact-finding mission through the secretive contracting bureaucracy. Among other provisions, it requires the government to determine and make public the number of contractors and subcontractors (at any tier) that are employed in Iraq and Afghanistan; any host country's, international or US laws that have been broken by contractors; disciplinary actions taken against contractors; and the total number of dead and wounded contractors. Schakowsky says she has tried repeatedly over the past several years to get this information and has been stonewalled or ignored. "We're talking about billions and billions of dollars--some have estimated forty cents of every dollar [spent on the occupation] goes to these contractors, and we couldn't get any information on casualties, on deaths," says Schakowsky. "It has been virtually impossible to shine the light on this aspect of the war and so when we discuss the war, its scope, its costs, its risks, they have not been part of this whatsoever. This whole shadow force that's been operating in Iraq, we know almost nothing about. I think it keeps at arm's length from the American people what this war is all about."

While not by any means a comprehensive total of the number of contractor casualties, 770 contractor deaths and 7,761 injured in Iraq as of December 31, 2006, were confirmed by the Labor Department. But that only counts those contractors whose families applied for benefits under the government's Defense Base Act insurance. Independent analysts say the number is likely much higher. Blackwater alone has lost at least twenty-seven men in Iraq. And then there's the financial cost: Almost $4 billion in taxpayer funds have been paid for private security forces in Iraq, according to Waxman. Yet even with all these additional forces, the military is struggling to meet the demands of a White House bent on military adventurism.

A week after Donald Rumsfeld's rule at the Pentagon ended, US forces had been stretched so thin by the "war on terror" that former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared "the active Army is about broken." Rather than rethinking its foreign policies, the Administration forged ahead with plans for a troop "surge" in Iraq, and Bush floated a plan to supplement the military with a Civilian Reserve Corps in his January State of the Union address. "Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush said. The President, it seemed, was just giving a fancy new title to something the Administration has already done with its "revolution" in military affairs and unprecedented reliance on contractors. Yet while Bush's proposed surge has sparked a fierce debate in Congress and among the public, the Administration's increasing reliance on private military contractors has gone largely undebated and underreported.

"The increasing use of contractors, private forces or as some would say 'mercenaries' makes wars easier to begin and to fight--it just takes money and not the citizenry," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has sued contractors for alleged abuses in Iraq. "To the extent a population is called upon to go to war, there is resistance, a necessary resistance to prevent wars of self-aggrandizement, foolish wars and in the case of the United States, hegemonic imperialist wars. Private forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on retaining its declining empire."

With talk of a Civilian Reserve Corps and Blackwater promoting the idea of a privatized "contractor brigade" to work with the military, war critics in Congress are homing in on what they see as a sustained, undeclared escalation through the use of private forces. "'Surge' implies a bump that has a beginning and an end," says Schakowsky. "Having a third or a quarter of [the forces] present on the ground not even part of the debate is a very dangerous thing in our democracy, because war is the most critical thing that we do."

Indeed, contractor deaths are not counted in the total US death count, and their crimes and violations go undocumented and unpunished, further masking the true costs of the war. "When you're bringing in contractors whom the law doesn't apply to, the Geneva Conventions, common notions of morality, everything's thrown out the window," says Kucinich. "And what it means is that these private contractors are really an arm of the Administration and its policies."

Kucinich says he plans to investigate the potential involvement of private forces in so-called "black bag," "false flag" or covert operations in Iraq. "What's the difference between covert activities and so-called overt activities which you have no information about? There's no difference," he says. Kucinich also says the problems with contractors are not simply limited to oversight and transparency. "It's the privatization of war," he says. The Administration is "linking private war contractor profits with warmaking. So we're giving incentives for the contractors to lobby the Administration and the Congress to create more opportunities for profits, and those opportunities are more war. And that's why the role of private contractors should be sharply limited by Congress."

Labels: Bush Administration, Fleecing of America, Mercenaries