MEDIA ROOTS- Project Censored hosts a special tenth anniversary 9/11 commemoration show on KPFA radio. Abby Martin of Media Roots gives a special news report on 9/11 at 6:55 going over the costs of 9/11 wars, the neglect to the first responders and the true threat of terrorism. The show also features guests Dr. Anthony Hall, Professor of Globalization Studies and Kathy McGrade, Engineer and member of Architects and Engineers of 9/11 Truth.
MEDIA ROOTS- Perhaps one of the most abhorrent aspects of US foreign policy in the 21st
century is the privatization of the US military and the government’s
outsourcing of military jobs to corrupt war contractors.
Despite Obama’s early campaign rhetoric about scaling down the use of contractors, he has increased their presence– they now make up approximately 50% of the total military force in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Military contractors are murderous thugs-for-hire who act above the law and hold zero allegiance to any constitutional body. Blackwater’s sordid slew of contemptuous behavior and criminal actions during the Iraq war might have cast a negative light upon them, but it didn’t stop the Obama administration from awarding their criminality with a quarter billion dollar contract to continue working in US war zones.
This unaccountability for criminal acts is not unique to Blackwater. Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) is a private security company that employs more US private contractors and holds larger contracts with the US government than any other firm in Iraq.
In 2007, a KBR employee named Jamie Leigh Jones claimed that she was gang raped by multiple KBR workers at a camp in Iraq’s Green Zone. After she reported the rape, she was reportedly locked in a shipping container and threatened with her job if she took further action. Appallingly, KBR has turned the case around and is now suing Jones for making “frivolous claims”, demanding $2 million in damages.
“They have beaten us and now they are attempting to crush us,” her lawyer, Todd Kelly, told the Wall Street Journal. “This is an attempt by KBR to chill other people from bringing claims against them.”
It’s shameful that these corporations have essentially no oversight from the US government– the Crime Victims Office at the Department of Justice was unable to investigate the incident because of a lack of jurisdiction over private contractors in Iraq.
Now it’s Jones’s word against KBR, and it doesn’t look like she has much of a chance to win against the monolithic corporation. Let’s just hope she can walk away without having given them a dime.
Written by Abby Martin
Photo by flickr user wenews
MEDIA ROOTS- This year marked the tenth anniversary of America’s invasion of Afghanistan, officially making it the longest war in US history. Now that Osama Bin Laden is finally confirmed dead, the federal government’s logic of continuing the occupation remains unclear.
Initially, the Bush administration irrationally insisted that any sovereign nation harboring terrorists was itself complicit in “terror” and therefore open for pre-emptive US military action. This rationale is absurd– just because one criminal might be living inside of a particular country doesn’t make that entire country guilty of the criminal’s crimes.
In 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was quick to tell CNN that US forces had successfully pushed the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of the region, and reports reveal that Osama Bin Laden hadn’t even been in Afghanistan since 2001. Additionally, a White House spokesperson recently admitted that there hasn’t been a terrorist threat in the country for the last eight years.
So what has the US been doing in Afghanistan for the last decade?
War has always been about two things: resources and control. Alongside the supposed surprise discovery of Afghanistan’s $1 trillion wealth of untapped minerals, it’s more than coincidental that before the US invasion, the Taliban along with the UN had successfully eradicated the opium crop in the Golden Crescent. Now 90% of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan.
As reported by Global Research:
Heroin is a multibillion dollar business supported by powerful interests, which requires a steady and secure commodity flow. One of the “hidden” objectives of the war was precisely to restore the CIA sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug routes.
Immediately following the October 2001 invasion, opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the opium price (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.
In 2001, under the Taliban opiate production stood at 185 tons, increasing to 3400 tons in 2002 under the US sponsored puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai.
While highlighting Karzai’s patriotic struggle against the Taliban, the media fails to mention that Karzai collaborated with the Taliban. He had also been on the payroll of a major US oil company, UNOCAL. In fact, since the mid-1990s, Hamid Karzai had acted as a consultant and lobbyist for UNOCAL in negotiations with the Taliban.
In today’s globalized world, one can’t discount the role that multinational corporations play in US foreign policy decisions. Not only have oil companies and private military contractors made a killing off the Afghanistan occupation: big pharmaceutical companies, who collectively lobby over $250 million to Congress annually, need opium latex to manufacture drugs for this pill happy nation.
Another fact worth mentioning is that Karzai, a notable player in Afghanistan’s opium trade, has been receiving regular payments from the CIA since the invasion. Even more infuriating, the US government has been paying Taliban insurgents to protect supply routes and to “switch sides” in a poor attempt to neutralize the insurgency and buy loyalty from the fighters. The fundamental logic of funding both sides of the war to “win” is possibly the most incomprehensible concept to grasp. Clearly, this war is meant to be sustained– not won.
Fast forward to ten years later, and the turmoil within the country still looms heavy. Last Thursday, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a deadly attack that killed 27 US soldiers and wounded dozens more. Earlier this month marked the deadliest day for US troops since the war started when a rocket propelled grenade shot down a helicopter and killed 30 US soldiers.
In June of this year, Obama delivered a speech about drawing down in Afghanistan, which corporate media outlets touted as a major step to ending the war (Media Roots cut through the speech rhetoric). Yet, a glaringly under reported factor of the praised “drawdown” is the fact that even if the reductions are carried out as planned, the US will still have far more troops in Afghanistan than at any point during Bush’s administration. Furthermore, the US and Afghanistan are about to sign a strategic pact that will allow thousands of special forces troops to remain in Afghanistan until 2024.
Considering how the US is spending at least $6.7 billion a month in Afghanistan and over 55% of Americans think that the US should immediately withdrawal, this issue should be a constant hot topic in the public dialogue– especially amidst the debate of economic sacrifice. Yet in 2010, the corporate news only allotted a measly 4% of its coverage to the war in Afghanistan.
The unsustainability of America’s endless wars and imperialistic foreign policy is the elephant in the room that not enough people in the public arena seem to want to discuss. Sadly, because Americans are conditioned to not bring up politics and religion with others, many are confined to their own rigid perspective fed by biased corporate media outlets. We must begin to challenge this societal dogma if we ever want to progress our society and evolve our collective human consciousness.
Written by Abby Martin
Photo by flickr user DVIDSHUB
MEDIA ROOTS- Abby Martin from Media Roots co-hosts Project Censored’s special three and a half hour KPFA program “Costs of War.” At the beginning of each hour, there is an MR report on the economic, human and environmental costs of US wars in the Middle East. During the program multiple, multiple experts in different fields of study are interviewed on the show about their research for the extensive Brown University study Costs of War. The show focuses on on the socio-economic impacts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and related subjects from scholars worldwide. Listen to the show here or below.
Interview Schedule:
12:00-12:20 Catherine Lutz, Professor Anthro, Brown University, Project Director, Solders and Contractors: Recommendations and Neta Crawford, Professor Political Science at Brown University, Cost of War Project Director,
12:30-12:50 Norah Niland: Former Director Human Rights: United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Afghanistan, social change and women, and Matthew Evangelista, Professor of History and Political Science, Cornell University, Alternatives to War
1:00-1:20 Winslow Wheeler, of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information Washington DC. Department of Defense Budget, Military Cost of War
1:30-1:50 Dahr Jamail, Human Costs of War, Refugees, Life on the Ground and resistance in the military, Author: “The Will to Resist,”
2:00-2:20 John Tirman, MIT, Author of “The Deaths of Others” The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars, Topic: Civilian Civilan Deaths In War—
2:30-2:50 Linda Bilmes, Professor Public Policy Harvard Kennedy School, Topic: Costs of Veteran Care
3:00-3:20 John Pilger, Journalist and Film Producer, covering his new documentary, “The War We Don’t See”
Catherine Lutz, Director of Costs of War: Catherine Lutz on Why We Can’t Turn the Page on America’s Wars {Costs of War} from Watson Institute on Vimeo.
Visit www.CostsOfWar.org for more information
KPFA– Abby Martin co-hosts this edition of Project Censored radio with Peter Phillips for KPFA’s nationally syndicated show. This episode covers updates in the peace community, the Bohemian Grove’s exclusion of women, and whistleblowers who have put everything on the line.
Listen to Media Roots’s in depth update on US wars and empire at 8:00 or read the transcription below:
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This is Abby Martin from Media Roots, reporting war and empire news & analysis for Project Censored.
A recent report from Global Research revealed that prisoners are making 23 cents an hour to manufacture weapons components for high tech missile systems for the US defense industry. The use of prison slave labor to increase profits for huge corporations, such as BP did in their clean-up efforts, is unfair to workers and is an egregious expansion of the corporate state.
In an article called The Military Industrial Complex: The Enemy from Within, John Whitehead writes:
“Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors and corrupt politicians, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe…In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.”
In his June 22nd speech, Obama cited the official cost of the Afghanistan & Iraq wars at 1 trillion dollars, but according to economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the US has spent well over $3 trillion dollars on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq– and that assessment is three years old.
The Iraq war is still going strong, even though we don’t hear about it much through the corporate press. June marked the deadliest month for the US military in the region since 2009. And still, the corporate media touts the official death toll for Iraqi civilians at approximately 100,000, despite a comprehensive 2008 survey from Opinion Research Business that placed the number of dead Iraqis well over one million. Again, this toll is from 2008 and does not account for the last three years of combat.
In an article written for The Nation, Jeremy Scahill reports:
“Under the terms of the Status of Forces agreement, all US forces are supposed to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Using private forces is a backdoor way of continuing a substantial US presence under the cover of “diplomatic security.” The kind of paramilitary force that Obama and Clinton are trying to build in Iraq is, in large part, a byproduct of the monstrous colonial fortress the United States calls its embassy in Baghdad and other facilities the US will maintain throughout Iraq after the “withdrawal.”
For Rebel Reports, Jeremy Scahill writes:
“According to recent Pentagon statistics, w/ Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan. Overall, contractors (armed and unarmed) now make up approximately 50% of the total military force, meaning there are a whopping 242,657 contractors left in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
About 46,000 US troops remain in Iraq, and there are negotiations to keep at least 10,000 troops there past the December 31st deadline. In protest to this inevitable expansion of the US occupation, 100 Iraqi lawmakers recently signed a document calling on the Iraqi government to demand departure of U.S. troops from the country as scheduled by the end of 2011 according to the Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
Earlier this year, the cost of the Afghanistan war started to outpace that of Iraq by ten billion dollars a month- 6.7 billion compared to Iraq’s 5.5 billion. Even though the rhetoric coming from the White House suggests that the Afghanistan war is getting scaled down- with reductions being carried out as planned- the amount of troops remaining in the country will actually still be more than there were before Obama’s 2009 military surge in the country and more than any time during Bush’s presidency.
On another front, the America’s secret war in Pakistan has drastically escalated under the Obama administration. Every month more innocent civilians are killed by drones, and there are US troops stationed in Pakistan performing covert CIA operations against alleged militants. On May 22, Seven thousand people in Karachi Pakistan protested America’s use of unmanned drones and demanded an immediate end to the missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Activists from the Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) participated in a two-day sit-in pleading the government to end its cooperation with America’s “war on terror.”
We are now coming up on the fourth month anniversary of the US-NATO’s bombing campaign in Libya, which costs US taxpayers approximately $40 million every month. Every missile being dropped costs one million dollars alone! The US is paying more than 75% of the defense budget for the 28 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Libya and by September the official cost of the Libyan invasion will total a whopping $844 million.
There are still covert wars and unmanned drone attacks happening in Yemen and Somalia too, which the empire rationalizes as mere police actions instead of aggressive acts of war. With all the talk about the federal deficit and the need to cut back on social programs and spending in this country, there is little discussed about cutting the Pentagon’s ever expanding annual military budget, which has more than doubled in the last decade. In 1995, when defense spending was a fraction of what it is now, a poll done by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that a majority of Americans were “convinced that defense spending has weakened the US economy.”
Before any more bombs are dropped in our name, we must voice our opposition to end these unconstitutional wars. The American taxpayers’ hard earned money needs to be applied here at home and not to the expansion of the military industrial complex– it’s the only way this country can be saved.
This is Abby Martin from Media Roots reporting for Project Censored News & Analysis
