[Note for TomDispatch Readers: For a recent Foreign Policy in Focus review of my new book The United States of Fear, click here; for a recent interview that David Walsh of the website History News Network did with me based on the book, click here. If you buy a copy via this book link (or any other TD book link) at Amazon.com, you’ll also be contributing a small percentage of your purchase to TomDispatch at no cost to you. Finally, visit our donation page and for $75 or more, you can get a signed, personalized copy of the book. Tom]
They say you can’t keep a good man down, but the “good” part of that equation is often negotiable. If you thought you had seen the last of the then-disgraced Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, you know what I mean. The same goes for corporations. Even scandals, swindles, and sanctions don’t seem to matter -- at least when the company is valued in the tens of billions of dollars.
Founded in 1919, Halliburton -- a Houston-based oil services company -- always did well, but it catapulted to fame and further fortune during the 2000s as it made a killing off the killing in Iraq. With former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dick Cheney in the White House, Halliburton, mostly through its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, or KBR, reaped billions in Iraq War contracts. As the money piled up, so did the scandals. As Politifact.com observed in 2010:
“Government officials have raised many questions about KBR's fulfillment of its contracts, everything from billing for meals it didn't serve to charging inflated prices for gas to excessive administrative costs. Government auditors have noted that KBR refused to turn over electronic data in its native format and stamped documents as proprietary and secret when the documents would normally be considered public records.
“Over the course of several years, the Defense Contract Audit Agency found that $553 million in payments should be disallowed to KBR, according to 2009 testimony by agency director April Stephenson before the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
In 2007, amid outrage over its actions, Halliburton sold off KBR. But like a bad penny, the company continued to pop up in all the wrong places for all the wrong reasons. In February 2009, KBR pled guilty to violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for bribes paid out in Nigeria while it was still part of Halliburton. In the spring of 2011, the New York Times reported, a lawyer “accused of helping steer bribe money" from KBR (then still part of Halliburton) to Nigerian government officials in exchange for "more than $6 billion in contracts for liquefied natural gas facilities,” pled guilty to federal charges and was ordered to forfeit almost $150 million.
And then there’s the Gulf of Mexico where, in 2010, an oil rig explosion killed 11 people, injured dozens more, and resulted in the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. This past fall, the Department of the Interior cited Halliburton, along with BP and another company, “for numerous safety and environmental violations in the operation of the doomed Deepwater Horizon well.”
It’s hardly surprising then that, as TomDispatch regular Ellen Cantarow reveals in groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of the latest grassroots uprising in America, Halliburton also has a down and dirty history when it comes to the controversial natural gas drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” This time, however, Halliburton may have met its match in the towns and hamlets of upstate New York. Nick Turse
Shale-Shocked
Fracking Gets Its Own Occupy Movement
By Ellen CantarowThis is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it. New York is what you might call a “water state.” Its rivers and their tributaries only start with the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna. The best known of its lakes are Great Lakes Erie and Ontario, Lake George, and the Finger Lakes. Its brooks, creeks, and trout streams are fishermen’s lore.
Far below this rippling wealth there’s a vast, rocky netherworld called the Marcellus Shale. Stretching through southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, the shale contains bubbles of methane, the remains of life that died 400 million years ago. Gas corporations have lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of them plotted with the Atomic Energy Agency to explode a nuclear bomb to unleash it. That idea died, but it’s been reborn in the form of a technology invented by Halliburton Corporation: high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing -- “fracking” for short.
Fracking uses prodigious amounts of water laced with sand and a startling menu of poisonous chemicals to blast the methane out of the shale. At hyperbaric bomb-like pressures, this technology propels five to seven million gallons of sand-and-chemical-laced water a mile or so down a well bore into the shale.
Up comes the methane -- along with about a million gallons of wastewater containing the original fracking chemicals and other substances that were also in the shale, among them radioactive elements and carcinogens. There are 400,000 such wells in the United States. Surrounded by rumbling machinery, serviced by tens of thousands of diesel trucks, this nightmare technology for energy release has turned rural areas in 34 U.S. states into toxic industrial zones.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called it “utterly deplorable.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “total dismay.” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was “deeply disturbed” that the actions in question would “erode the reputation of our joint force.” Marine Corps Commandant General James Amos declared them to be “wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history,” and Senator John McCain claimed they made him “so sad.”
Seldom have so many high officials in Washington lined up to denounce an event so quickly or emphatically. I’m talking, of course, about the video of four wisecracking U.S. Marines in Afghanistan pissing on what might be three dead Taliban or simply -- since we may never know whose bodies those are -- the corpses of three dead Afghans. (“Have a good day, buddy... Golden -- like a shower, ” you hear them say, seemingly addressing the bodies.) The video went viral in the Muslim world, and the Obama administration moved fast to contain the damage. After all, no one wanted another Abu Ghraib.
On this subject Washington has been remarkably united (with the exception of Rick Perry, who offered a half-hearted defense of the Marines -- “to call it a criminal act, I think, is over the top”). Pardon me, though, if I find this chorus of condemnation to be too little, too late. It feels like a malign version of one of Casablanca’s famous final lines: “Round up the usual suspects.”
After all, these last years in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan have been utterly deplorable, totally dismaying, and deeply disturbing from start to finish. On occasion after occasion, U.S. troops, aka “America’s heroes,” as well as private contractors and others in Washington’s employ have run riot. There is no way to catalogue what’s been deplorable, dismaying, and deeply disturbing, but if you wanted to start, it really wouldn't be that hard.
In fact, you wouldn't have to go farther than this website. If, for instance, it was deeply disturbing pictures taken by our troops you were curious about, you could have read David Swanson’s 2006 piece "The Iraq War as a Trophy Photo," which focused on the “war porn” photos U.S. soldiers were already taking (or even setting up) and then proudly submitting to an actual porn website for posting (something, by the way, that’s still going on).
Or if checkpoint killings by U.S. soldiers in Iraq were what you were interested in, all you had to do was read Chris Hedges at TomDispatch in 2008, based on interviews he did with American soldiers for the book Collateral Damage: “Iraqi families,” he wrote, “were routinely fired upon for getting too close to checkpoints, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a .50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son.” ("'It's fun to shoot sh-t up,' a soldier said.") And if his word wasn’t enough, you could turn to U.S. Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal who, in a moment of bluntness in April 2010, commented: “We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”
Or consider something no one has yet denounced as deplorable, dismaying, or deeply disturbing: the obliteration of wedding parties. Over the years, TomDispatch has counted up at least six weddings in Iraq and Afghanistan that were wiped out in part or full by the U.S. Air Force. All of these, including the first in December 2001 in which a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, armed with precision weapons, killed 110 of 112 Afghan revelers, were reported individually. But next to no one in our world thought them dismaying or disturbing enough to write about them collectively or, for that matter, to deplore them. (Of a wedding in Western Iraq in which U.S. planes killed 40 people, including wedding musicians and children, Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, asked: "How many people go to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?")
The troves of documents leaked to the website WikiLeaks, for which Army Pfc. Bradley Manning has been charged, certainly caused a stir, but the carnage in them was, in truth, easily available without access to a single secret document. Washington’s crocodile tears can’t wash away the stain of all this on American honor, as TomDispatch regular Chase Madar, author of the upcoming book The Passion of Bradley Manning, makes all too clear. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Madar discusses the coming trial of Bradley Manning, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Blood on Whose Hands?
Bradley Manning, Washington, and the Blood of Civilians
By Chase MadarWho in their right mind wants to talk about, think about, or read a short essay about... civilian war casualties? What a bummer, this topic, especially since our Afghan, Iraq, and other ongoing wars were advertised as uplifting acts of philanthropy: wars to spread security, freedom, democracy, human rights, gender equality, the rule of law, etc.
A couple hundred thousand dead civilians have a way of making such noble ideals seem like dollar-store tinsel. And so, throughout our decade-long foreign policy debacle in the Greater Middle East, we in the U.S. have generally agreed that no one shall commit the gaucherie of dwelling on (and “dwelling on” = fleetingly mentioned) civilian casualties. Washington elites may squabble over some things, but as for foreigners killed by our numerous wars, our Beltway crew adheres to a sullen code of omertà.
Club rules do, however, permit one loophole: Washington officials may bemoan the nightmare of civilian casualties -- but only if they can be pinned on a 24-year-old Army private first class named Bradley Manning.
These days, with a crisis atmosphere growing in the Persian Gulf, a little history lesson about the U.S. and Iran might be just what the doctor ordered. Here, then, are a few high- (or low-) lights from their relationship over the last half-century-plus:
Summer 1953: The CIA and British intelligence hatch a plot for a coup that overthrows a democratically elected government in Iran intent on nationalizing that country’s oil industry. In its place, they put an autocrat, the young Shah of Iran, and his soon-to-be feared secret police. He runs the country as his repressive fiefdom for a quarter-century, becoming Washington’s “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf -- until overthrown in 1979 by a home-grown revolutionary movement, which ushers in the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs. While Khomeini & Co. were hardly Washington’s men, thanks to that 1953 coup they were, in a sense, its own political offspring. In other words, the fatal decision to overthrow a popular democratic government shaped the Iranian world Washington now loathes, and even then oil was at the bottom of things.
1967: Under the U.S. “Atoms for Peace” program, started in the 1950s by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Shah is allowed to buy a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor for Tehran (which -- call it irony -- is still playing a role in the dispute over the Iranian nuclear program). Defense Department officials did worry at the time that the Shah might use the “peaceful atom” as a basis for a future weapons program or that nuclear materials might fall into the wrong hands. “An aggressive successor to the Shah,” went a 1974 Pentagon memo, “might consider nuclear weapons the final item needed to establish Iran’s complete military dominance of the region.” But that didn’t stop them from aiding and abetting the creation of an Iranian nuclear program.
The Shah, like his Islamic successors, argued that such a program was Iran's national “right” and dreamed of a country that would get significant portions of its electricity from a string of nuclear plants. As a 1970s ad by a group of American power companies put the matter: “The Shah of Iran is sitting on top of one of the largest reservoirs of oil in the world. Yet he’s building two nuclear plants and planning two more to provide electricity for his country. He knows the oil is running out -- and time with it.” In other words, the U.S. nuclear program was the genesis for the Iranian one that Washington now so despises.
September 1980: Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein launches a war of aggression against Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. In the early 1980s, he becomes Washington’s man, our “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf, and we offer him our hand -- and also "detailed information" on Iranian deployments and tactical planning that help him use his chemical weapons more effectively against the Iranian military. Oh, and just to make sure things turn out really, really well, the Reagan administration also decides to sell missiles and other arms to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran on the sly, part of what became known as the “Iran-Contra Affair” and which almost brings down the president and his men. Success!
March 2003: Saddam Hussein is, by now, no longer our man in Baghdad but a new “Hitler” who, top Washington officials claim, undoubtedly has a nuclear weapons program that could someday leave mushroom clouds rising over U.S. cities. So the Bush administration launches a war of aggression against Iraq, which like Iran just happens to -- in the words of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -- “float on a sea of oil.” (Bush officials hope, in the wake of a “cakewalk” of a war to revive that country’s oil industry, to privatize it, and use it to destroy OPEC, driving down the price of oil on world markets.) Nine years later, a Shiite government is in power in Baghdad closely allied with Tehran, which has gained regional strength and influence thanks to the disastrous U.S. occupation.
So call it an unblemished record of a kind not easy to find. In more than 50 years, America’s leaders have never made a move in Iran (or near it) that didn’t lead to unexpected and unpleasant blowback. Now, another administration in Washington, after years of what can only be called a covert war against Iran, is preparing yet another set of clever maneuvers -- this time sanctions against Iran’s central bank meant to cripple the country’s oil industry and crack open the economy followed by no one knows what.
And honestly, I mean, really, given past history, what could possibly go wrong? Regime change in Iran? It’s bound to be a slam dunk and if you don’t believe it, check out Pepe Escobar, that fabulous peripatetic reporter for Asia Times and TomDispatch regular. Tom
The Myth of “Isolated” Iran
Following the Money in the Iran Crisis
By Pepe EscobarLet's start with red lines. Here it is, Washington’s ultimate red line, straight from the lion’s mouth. Only last week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the Iranians, “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us.”
How strange, the way those red lines continue to retreat. Once upon a time, the red line for Washington was “enrichment” of uranium. Now, it’s evidently an actual nuclear weapon that can be brandished. Keep in mind that, since 2005, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stressed that his country is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran from the U.S. Intelligence Community has similarly stressed that Iran is not, in fact, developing a nuclear weapon (as opposed to the breakout capacity to build one someday).
What if, however, there is no “red line,” but something completely different? Call it the petrodollar line.
After almost two months in abeyance and the (possibly temporary) loss of Shamsi Air Base for its air war, the CIA is again cranking up its drone operations in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. The first two attacks of 2012 were launched within 48 hours of each other, reportedly killing 10 ___s, and wounding at least four ___s. Yes, that’s right, the U.S. is killing ___s in Pakistan. These days, the dead there are regularly identified in press accounts as “militants” or “suspected militants” and often, quoting never-named Pakistani or other “intelligence sources,” as “foreigners” or "non-Pakistanis." They just about never have names, and the CIA’s robots never get close enough to their charred bodies to do whatever would be the dehumanizing techno-equivalent of urinating on them.
It all sounds so relatively clean. Last year, there were 75 such clean attacks, 303 since 2004, killing possibly thousands of ___s in those borderlands. In fact, the world of death and destruction always tends to look clean and “precise” -- if you keep your distance, if you remain in the heavens like the implacable gods of yore or thousands of miles from your targets like the “pilots” of these robotic planes and the policymakers who dispatch them.
On the ground, things are of course far messier, nastier, more disturbingly human. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has estimated that U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have, over the years, killed at least 168 children. In a roiled and roiling situation in that country, with the military and the civilian government at odds, with coup rumors in the air and borders still closed to U.S. Afghan War supplies (since an “incident” in which American air strikes killed up to 26 Pakistani troops), the deeply unpopular drone attacks only heighten tensions. Whomever they may kill -- including al-Qaeda figures -- they also intensify anger and make the situation worse in the name of making it better. They are, by their nature, blowback weapons and their image of high-tech, war-winning precision here in the U.S. undoubtedly has an instant blowback effect on those who loose them. The drones can’t help but offer them a dangerous and deceptive feeling of omnipotence, a feeling that -- legality be damned -- anything is possible.
If, as Nick Turse has long been arguing in his reportage on our latest wonder weapons, drones are, in the end, counterproductive tools of war, this has yet to sink in here. After all, our military planners are now projecting an investment of at least $40 billion in the burgeoning drone industry over the next decade for more than 700 medium- and large-size drones (and who knows how much is to go into smaller versions of the same).
Turse's work on drones in his TomDispatch series on the changing face of empire relies on seldom noted realities hidden away in U.S. Air Force documents. He has a way of bringing the robotic planes down to earth. They are, as he has written, wonder weapons with wings of clay. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Turse discusses why drone warfare is anything but failure-proof, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
The Crash and Burn Future of Robot Warfare
What 70 Downed Drones Tell Us About the New American Way of War
By Nick TurseAmerican fighter jets screamed over the Iraqi countryside heading for the MQ-1 Predator drone, while its crew in California stood by helplessly. What had begun as an ordinary reconnaissance mission was now taking a ruinous turn. In an instant, the jets attacked and then it was all over. The Predator, one of the Air Force’s workhorse hunter/killer robots, had been obliterated.
An account of the spectacular end of that nearly $4 million drone in November 2007 is contained in a collection of Air Force accident investigation documents recently examined by TomDispatch. They catalog more than 70 catastrophic Air Force drone mishaps since 2000, each resulting in the loss of an aircraft or property damage of $2 million or more.
These official reports, some obtained by TomDispatch through the Freedom of Information Act, offer new insights into a largely covert, yet highly touted war-fighting, assassination, and spy program involving armed robots that are significantly less reliable than previously acknowledged. These planes, the latest wonder weapons in the U.S. military arsenal, are tested, launched, and piloted from a shadowy network of more than 60 bases spread around the globe, often in support of elite teams of special operations forces. Collectively, the Air Force documents offer a remarkable portrait of modern drone warfare, one rarely found in a decade of generally triumphalist or awestruck press accounts that seldom mention the limitations of drones, much less their mission failures.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Our deepest thanks to those of you whose early contributions are already giving TomDispatch a good financial start in 2012. Keep in mind that anyone wanting to contribute $75 or more to this site can receive in return a signed, personalized copy of my just-published book, The United States of Fear. You can check it all out at our donation page. In addition, for those of you who are regulars at Amazon.com, if you travel to that site via a TomDispatch book link or the link in the cover image embedded in any TD post, we get a modest cut of whatever you purchase, book or otherwise, at no extra cost to you. Tom]
Obama's Mission Accomplished Moment?
And a Military-First Policy on a Destabilizing Planet
By Tom Engelhardt
Here’s the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it): Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world. Needs advice. Will pay. Pls respond qkly. PO Box 1776-2012, Washington, DC.
Here’s the way it actually went down in Washington last week: a triumphant performance by a commander-in-chief who wants you to know that he’s at the top of his game.
When it came to rolling out a new 10-year plan for the future of the U.S. military, the leaks to the media began early and the message was clear. One man is in charge of your future safety and security. His name is Barack Obama. And -- not to worry -- he has things in hand.
Unlike the typical president, so the reports went, he held six (count 'em: six!) meetings with top Pentagon officials, the Joint Chiefs, the service heads, and his military commanders to plan out the next decade of American war making. And he was no civilian bystander at those meetings either. On a planet where no other power has more than two aircraft carriers in service, he personally nixed a Pentagon suggestion that the country’s aircraft carrier battle groups be reduced from 11 to 10, lest China think our power-projection capabilities were weakening in Asia.
His secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, spared no words when it came to the president’s role, praising his “vision and guidance and leadership” (as would Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin E. Dempsey). Panetta described Obama’s involvement thusly: “[T]his has been an unprecedented process, to have the president of the United States participate in discussions involving the development of a defense strategy, and to spend time with our service chiefs and spend time with our combatant commanders to get their views.”
In other words, Obama taking ownership of the rollout of “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” a 16-page document summarizing a review of America’s strategic interests, defense priorities, and military spending. Its public unveiling was to reflect the steady hand of a commander-in-chief destined to be in charge of American security for years to come.
