by Farah Stockman
CAYMAN ISLANDS - Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.0306 02
More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.
The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars.
But the use of the loophole results in a significantly greater loss of revenue to the government as a whole, particularly to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. And the creation of shell companies in places such as the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes has long been attacked by members of Congress.
A Globe survey found that the practice is unusual enough that only one other ma jor contractor in Iraq said it does something similar.
“Failing to contribute to Social Security and Medicare thousands of times over isn’t shielding the taxpayers they claim to protect, it’s costing our citizens in the name of short-term corporate greed,” said Senator John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee who has introduced legislation to close loopholes for companies registering overseas.
With an estimated $16 billion in contracts, KBR is by far the largest contractor in Iraq, with eight times the work of its nearest competitor.
The no-bid contract it received in 2002 to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure and a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services to troops have long drawn scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive from 1995 until he joined the Republican ticket with President Bush in 2000.
The largest of the Cayman Islands shell companies - called Service Employers International Inc., which is now listed as having more than 20,000 workers in Iraq, according to KBR - was created two years before Cheney became Halliburton’s chief executive. But a second Cayman Islands company called Overseas Administrative Services, which now is listed as the employer of 1,020 mostly managerial workers in Iraq, was established two months after Cheney’s appointment.
Cheney’s office at the White House referred questions to his personal lawyer, who did not return phone calls.
Heather Browne, a spokeswoman for KBR, acknowledged via e-mail that the two Cayman Islands companies were set up “in order to allow us to reduce certain tax obligations of the company and its employees.”
Social Security and Medicare taxes amount to 15.3 percent of each employees’ salary, split evenly between the worker and the employer. While KBR’s use of the shell companies saves workers their half of the taxes, it deprives them of future retirement benefits.
In addition, the practice enables KBR to avoid paying unemployment taxes in Texas, where the company is registered, amounting to between $20 and $559 per American employee per year, depending on the company’s rate of turnover.
As a result, workers hired through the Cayman Island companies cannot receive unemployment assistance should they lose their jobs.
In interviews with more than a dozen KBR workers registered through the Cayman Islands companies, most said they did not realize that they had been employed by a foreign firm until they arrived in Iraq and were told by their foremen, or until they returned home and applied for unemployment benefits.
“They never explained it to us,” said Arthur Faust, 57, who got a job loading convoys in Iraq in 2004 after putting his resume on KBRcareers.com and going to orientation with KBR officials in Houston.
But there is one circumstance in which KBR does claim the workers as its own: when it comes to receiving the legal immunity extended to employers working in Iraq.
In one previously unreported case, a group of Service Employers International workers accused KBR of knowingly exposing them to cancer-causing chemicals at an Iraqi water treatment plant. Under the Defense Base Act of 1941, a federal workers compensation law, employers working with the military have immunity in most cases from such employee lawsuits.
So when KBR lawyers argued that the workers were KBR employees, lawyers for the men objected; the case remains in arbitration.
“When it benefits them, KBR takes the position that these men really are employees,” said Michael Doyle, the lawyer for nine American men who were allegedly exposed to the dangerous chemicals. “You don’t get to take both positions.”
Founded by two brothers in Texas in 1919, the construction firm of Brown & Root quickly became associated with some of the largest public-works projects of the early 20th century, from oil platforms to warships to dams that provided electricity to rural areas.
Its political clout, particularly with fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson, was legendary, and it became a major overseas contractor, building roads and ports during the Vietnam war.
Halliburton, a Houston-based oil conglomerate, acquired Brown & Root in 1962. And after the Vietnam cease-fire agreement in 1973, it all but stopped doing overseas military work for two decades.
But in 1991, during the Gulf War, Halliburton decided to try to revive its military business. The next year, Brown & Root won a $3.9 million contract from the Defense Department under Secretary Dick Cheney to develop contingency plans to support, feed, house, and maintain the US military in 13 hot spots around the world.
That small contract soon grew into a massive logistical-support contract under which the company did everything from building military camps to cooking meals and providing transportation for troops. Under the contract, the military agreed to reimburse Brown & Root for all expenses, and to pay a profit of between 1 and 9 percent, depending on performance.
In Somalia, starting in December 1992, Brown & Root employees helped US soldiers and UN workers dig wells and collect garbage, among many other tasks. The company quickly became the largest civilian employer in the country, with about 2,500 people on its payroll. Its headquarters in Texas had a “war room,” where executives would get daily updates about events in Mogadishu.
Later the company would play similar roles supporting US troops in Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan.
As its military work increased, Brown & Root sent more American workers overseas. Americans working and living abroad receive significant breaks on their income tax, but still must pay Social Security and Medicare taxes if they work for an American company. The reasoning is that such workers are likely to return to the United States and collect benefits, so they and their employers ought to help pay for them.
But the taxes drive up costs. A former Halliburton executive who was in a senior position at the company in the early 1990s said construction companies that avoid taxes by setting up foreign subsidiaries have obvious advantages in bidding for military contracts.
Payroll taxes can be a significant cost, he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “If you are bidding against [rival construction firms] Fluor and Bechtel, it might give you a competitive advantage.”
Service Employers International was set up in 1993, as Brown & Root was ramping up its roster of overseas workers. Two years later, the company set up Overseas Administrative Services, which serves more senior workers and provides a pension plan.
The parent company became Kellogg Brown & Root in 1998, when it joined with the oil-pipe manufacturer, M. W. Kellogg.
Around that time, KBR lost its exclusive contract to provide logistical support to the US military. But in 2001 it outbid DynCorp to win it back, by agreeing to a maximum profit of 3 percent of costs.
Then, in 2002, the firm received a secret contract to draw up plans to restore Iraq’s oil production after the US-led invasion of Iraq. The Defense Department has said the firm was chosen mainly for its assets and expertise, not its ability to control costs.
Nonetheless, KBR’s top competitors in Iraq do not appear to have gone to the same lengths to avoid taxes. Other top Iraq war contractors - including Bechtel, Parsons, Washington Group International, L-3 Communications, Perini, and Fluor - told the Globe that they pay Social Security and Medicare taxes for their American workers.
“It has been Fluor Corporation’s policy to compensate our employees who are US citizens the same as if they worked in the geographic United States,” said Keith Stephens, Fluor’s director of global media relations. “With the exception of hardship and danger pay additives for work performed in Iraq, they receive the same benefits as their US-based colleagues, and Fluor pays or remits all required US taxes and payroll burdens, including FICA payments and unemployment insurance.”
Only one other top contractor, the construction and logistics firm IAP Worldwide Services Inc., said it employs a “limited number” of Americans through an offshore subsidiary.
Officials at DynCorp, the company that KBR outbid for the logistics contract, did not return numerous calls.
KBR is now widely believed to be the largest private employer of foreigners in Iraq, and it hires twice as many workers through its Cayman Island subsidiaries as it does by direct hires. Service Employers International alone employs more than 20,000 truck drivers, electricians, accountants, and engineers, roughly half of whom are American, according to Browne, the KBR spokeswoman.
KBR declined to release salary information. But workers interviewed by the Globe who served in a range of jobs said they earned between $48,000 and $85,000 per year. If KBR’s American workers averaged even as much as $63,000 per year, they and KBR would have owed more than $100 million per year in Social Security and Medicare taxes, split evenly between them. Over the course of the five-year war, their tax bill would have been more than $500 million.
In 2004, auditors with the Pentagon’s Defense Contract Audit Agency questioned KBR about the two Cayman Island companies but ultimately made no complaint. The auditors told the Globe in an email exchange facilitated by Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Brian Maka that any tax savings resulting from the offshore subsidiaries “are passed on” to the US military.
Browne, the KBR spokeswoman, said the loss to Social Security could eventually be offset by the fact that the workers will receive less money when they retire, since benefits are generally based on how much workers and their companies have paid into the system.
Medicare, however, does not reduce benefits for workers who don’t contribute, and Browne acknowledged that KBR has not calculated the impact of its tax practices on the government as a whole.
She said KBR does not save money from the practice, since its contracts allow for its labor expenses to be reimbursed by the US military. But the practice gives KBR a competitive advantage over other contractors who pay their share of employment taxes.
And critics of tax loopholes note that the use of offshore shell companies to avoid payroll taxes places a greater burden on other taxpayers.
“The argument that by not paying taxes they are saving the government money is just absurd,” said Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington advocacy group.
To the people listed as its workers, Service Employers International Inc. - known to them as SEII - remains something of a mystery.
“Does anybody know what or where in the Grand Cayman Islands SEII is located?” a recently returned worker wrote in a complaint about the company on JobVent.com, an employment website. He speculated that the office in the Cayman Islands must be “the size of a jail cell . . . with only a desk and chair.”
In fact, the address on file at the Registry of Companies in the Cayman Islands leads to a nondescript building in the Grand Cayman business district that houses Trident Trust, one of the Caymans’ largest offshore registered agents. Trident Trust collects $1,000 a year to forward mail and serve as KBR’s representative on the island.
The real managers of Service Employers International work out of KBR’s office in Dubai. KBR and Halliburton, which also moved to Dubai, severed ties last year.
Both KBR and the US military appear to regard Service Employers International and KBR interchangeably, except for tax purposes. According to the Defense Contract Auditing Agency, KBR bills the Service Employers workers as “direct labor costs,” and charges almost the same amount for them as for direct hires.
The contract that workers sign in Houston before traveling to Iraq commits workers to abide by KBR’s code of ethics and dispute-resolution mechanisms but states that the agreement is with Service Employers International.
Some workers said they were told that Service Employers International was just KBR’s payroll company. Others mistook the name as a reference to the well-known, large union, Service Employees International.
Henry Bunting, a Houston man who served as a procurement officer for a KBR project in Iraq in 2003, said he first found out that he was working for a foreign subsidiary when he looked closely at his paycheck.
“Their whole mindset was deceit,” Bunting said. He said that he wrote to KBR several times asking for a W-2 form so he could file his taxes, but that KBR never responded.
David Boiles, a truck driver in Iraq from 2004 to 2006, said that he realized he was working for Service Employers International when he arrived in Iraq and his foreman told him he was not a KBR employee, despite the fact that his military-issued identification card said “KBR.”
“At first, I didn’t believe him,” Boiles said.
Danny Langford, a Texas pipe-fitter who was sent to work in a water treatment plant in southern Iraq in July 2003, said he, too, initially believed that he was an employee of KBR.
But when he allegedly got ill from chemicals at the plant and was terminated that fall, he said, his application for unemployment compensation was rejected because he worked for a foreign company.
“Now, I don’t know who I was working for,” he said in a telephone interview.
For decades Congress has sought to crack down on corporations that use offshore subsidiaries to lower their taxes, but most of the debates have focused on schemes that reduce corporate income taxes, not payroll taxes. Last year a Senate subcommittee estimated that US corporations avoid paying $30 and $60 billion annually in income taxes by using offshore tax havens.
Senators Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat; Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat; and Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican, are trying to pass the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, which would give the US Treasury Department the authority to take special measures against foreign jurisdictions that impede US tax enforcement.
American companies that evade payroll taxes face fines or other criminal penalties. The use of foreign subsidiaries to avoid payroll taxes, while allowed by the Defense Department, may still be subject to challenge by the Internal Revenue Service, according to Eric Toder, a former director of the office of research for the IRS.
Toder said the IRS could try to take action against a firm if the sole purpose of setting up an offshore subsidiary was to reduce tax liability. The practice could become a more costly problem in the future, Toder said, as an increasing number of American companies register subsidiaries overseas and bring American employees to work abroad.
“It obviously looks unseemly where you have a situation where, if you did it in a straightforward way, they would pay payroll taxes,” Toder said. “If this becomes the norm, and other companies do that as well, it could further erode the tax base.”
Peter Singer, a specialist in the outsourcing of military functions at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, said the practice will probably attract more scrutiny in the future, as the military expands its outsourcing and as workplaces become increasingly global.
“It is fascinating and troubling at the same time,” Singer said. “If you are an executive in a company, you are thinking: ‘Wow. Cash savings and a potential loophole from certain domestic laws, lawsuits, and taxes. It’s win-win.’ But if you are a US taxpayer, it is not a positive synergy.”
Globe correspondents Stephanie Vallejo and Matt Negrin contributed to this report.
© 2008 The Boston Globe
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Thursday, March 6, 2008
Breaking the Nuremberg Code: The US Military’s Human-Testing Program Returns
by Heather Wokusch
The Pentagon is slated to release a suspected toxicant in Crystal City, Virginia this week, ostensibly to test air sensors.The operation is just the latest example of the Defense Department’s long history of using service members and civilians as human test subjects, often without their consent or awareness.
Gas chambers in Maryland
Wray C. Forrest learned about the US military’s human-testing program the hard way. In 1973, the Army sent then 23-year-old Forrest to its Edgewood Arsenal chemical-research center in Maryland, promising patriotic service and a four-day work week.
Instead, he became one of roughly 6,720 soldiers used as Edgewood Arsenal test subjects between 1950-1975.
Forrest was given a new identity at Edgewood: Research Subject #6692. He says, “That was the number assigned to me … similar to the numbers assigned to the Jews in the concentration/death camps in Germany during WWII.”
The US military tested heart drugs on Forrest, which he says were administered by IV and various types of injections. Forrest was also exposed to “contaminated drinking water, food, and various ground contaminates that permeate Edgewood Arsenal. BZ [a chemical incapacitating agent], napalm, mustard agents, and any number of other contaminates in the ground and drinking water there, from previous testing done there by the military.”
A total of 254 different chemicals were researched on soldiers at Edgewood, and Forrest notes, “We were never informed as to exactly what we were being given. We also did not sign any informed consent prior to the testing. This was a direct violation of the Geneva Convention rules for the use of humans in chemical and drug experiments/research.”
The Edgewood Arsenal facility played a role in WWII human subject testing as well. Roughly 4,000 US soldiers were used as human guinea pigs in chemical research which often took place in gas chambers.
US Navy member Nat Schnurman, for example, was sent to an Edgewood gas chamber six times one week in 1942. As The Detroit Free Press reported: “On his last visit, a blend of mustard gas and lewisite was piped in. Schnurman was overcome with toxins, vomited into his mask and begged for release. The request was denied. His next memory is of coming to on a snowbank outside the chamber.”
A pattern of abuse and neglect
If the sagas of Forrest and Schnurman were isolated, they would represent a disgraceful yet closed chapter of US military history. Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s human-testing program has extended far beyond Edgewood Arsenal.
Human Experimentation , a 1994 report from the congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), lays out the Defense Department’s sordid history in detail.
Between 1949 and 1969, for example, the Army sprayed bacterial tracers or simulants on unsuspecting populations in hundreds of biological warfare tests. According to the GAO: “Some of the tests involved spraying large areas, such as the cities of St. Louis and San Francisco, and others involved spraying more focused areas, such as the New York City subway system and Washington National Airport.”
No coherent attempt was made to warn those affected or to offer follow-up medical care.
Between 1952-1975, the CIA tested LSD and other psychochemical agents on “an undetermined number of people without their knowledge or consent.”
No coherent attempt was made to offer follow-up information or care.
Over 235 atmospheric nuclear tests and experiments were conducted on roughly 210,000 personnel affiliated to the US Defense Department from 1945-1962. A further 199,000 “were exposed to radiation through work.”
No coherent attempt was made to warn those affected or to offer follow-up medical care.
One of the best known examples of US military human-testing is Project 112, whereby the Pentagon used biological/chemical agents on 5,842 service members in secret trials conducted over a ten-year period (1962-73).
Project 112, and the affiliated Project SHAD, tested everything from Sarin nerve agent to an E. coli simulant aboard Navy ships and in land trials. Tests were conducted in six states (Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Utah) Canada and Britain and often without the consent or awareness of those exposed.
Only in 2003, after crucial documents slowly became declassified, did the veterans’ health complaints start to be acknowledged. By then, over 750 Project 112 veterans were already dead.
The Veterans’ Administration still had not notified more than 40% of those used in Project 112/SHAD human testing by 2004. The Defense Department was blamed for foot-dragging in identifying the potentially affected service members and civilians.
The battle to receive care
Wray Forrest knows firsthand about fighting official neglect and denial over human-testing. When his health started to deteriorate, Forrest was forbidden to get medical support: “We could not tell what we were exposed to due to the classification of the project, nor could we seek medical help due to the alleged non-disclosure papers we signed.”
Forrest was discharged from the military in 1982 for health reasons (deemed “unsuitable for service”). He was still unable to talk to anyone about Edgewood Arsenal, so kept his “agreed silence, and took what the military dished out calling me, UNSUITABLE.”
In July 2006, the Veterans’ Administration (VA) released a document on health care eligibility listing Edgewood Arsenal survivors as a Category 6 disability rating, which meant that affected veterans would be eligible for clinical evaluation and “necessary treatment of conditions related to exposure without copays.” But when Forrest called the VA to seek help, he was told that the publication was an error and in fact Edgewood Arsenal veterans have no VA health care eligibility.
“How sweet, they have killed us, buried us, and now they want us to go away,” he concluded.
Forrest is not the only veteran subjected to human-testing who has fought to receive care. Even in well-documented and recent cases, compensation is elusive.
In December 2007, for example, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by the widows of five veterans who died after being enrolled in fraudulent drug studies at the Stratton VA Medical Center in Albany, NY.
Stratton had been plagued by allegations of research violations from the early 1990s. Then in 1999, the facility hired Paul Kornak to be its Research Coordinator, despite the fact that Kornak had forged his credentials, falsified his college transcript and been arrested in Pennsylvania years earlier for related fraud. Apparently, background checks for health professionals were minimal at Stratton VA Medical Center.
From 1999-2003, Kornak falsified veterans’ medical records at Stratton, inappropriately enrolling them in studies for drug marketability. In 2001, for example, Stratton tested a powerful three-drug chemotherapy combination on Carl M. Steubing, a 78-year-old Battle of the Bulge veteran, despite his previous bout with cancer and poor kidney function.
Steubing died in early 2002. His widow still wonders if the fraudulent human-test studies at Stratton cost her husband his life.
In court, the five widows’ lawyer argued that Stratton “committed every kind of research ethics violation imaginable,” adding “when you use individuals, humans, as guinea pigs, you do them harm.”
The US government responded by saying there was no way to prove the veterans had experienced pain or died early as a result of the corrupt drug experiments.
Case closed.
Open-air testing
If veterans with solid proof of having been used as test subjects cannot receive compensation, the possibilities are miniscule for service members and civilians used in trials without their consent or awareness.
Open-air testing of chemical and biological (CB) agents is one such case.
After 6,000 sheep died following the apparent release of a nerve agent at an Army facility in Utah in 1969, open-air testing was officially said to have ended in the US.
But the Defense Department’s April 2007 report to Congress on “Chemical and Biological Defense” strongly suggests an imminent resumption.
According to Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, at least three passages of the Pentagon’s 2007 report indicate a planned continuance of open-air testing.
While one section of the document, for example, mentions the use of “live-CB-agent full system test chambers,” another passage (page 67) reads:
“More than thirty years have passed since outdoor live agent chemical tests were banned in the United States, and the last outdoor test with live chemical agent was performed, so much of the infrastructure for the field testing of chemical detectors no longer exists or is seriously outdated. The currently budgeted improvements in the T&E infrastructure will greatly enhance both the developmental and operational field testing of full systems, with better simulated representation of threats and characterization of system response.”
As Dr. Boyle notes, both “test chambers” and “field testing” are mentioned in the report.
In addition, the passage says that improvements in the T&E (testing and evaluation) infrastructure and “better simulated representation of threats” are going to be carried out using “full systems” rather than simulants.
Dr. Boyle says, “It is clear they will be engaging in ‘Field Trials’ (not in test chambers) of ‘full systems,’ which means ‘live CB agents,’ not simulants.”
Another troublesome passage from the Defense Department’s April 2007 report (page 65) is:
“Current T&E shortfalls lie in the full systems and platform test chambers and supporting instrumentation and fixtures. These test fixtures must be able to introduce and adequately control live CB agent challenges and provide a range of environmental and challenge conditions to simulate evolving threats, while performing end-to-end systems operations of CBD equipment.”
Dr. Boyle points out that the passage says “full systems” rather than “simulants,” and it makes a distinction between “test fixtures” and “test chambers.” He adds that talking about “‘a range of environmental and challenge conditions’ in a test chamber” is nonsensical. “A test chamber does not have a ‘range of environmental and challenge conditions.’”
“What they are talking about here,” Dr. Boyle concludes, “is testing live CB (chemical and biological) agents in Field Tests - open-air testing, where there will be a ‘range of environmental and challenge conditions’ to confront, test and verify.”
Gassing Crystal City
In May 2007, just one month after the Defense Department’s controversial report to Congress, the Pentagon quietly announced it would release “a dust simulating a biological attack in the Pentagon South Parking Lot.” The stated purpose was to study “the subsequent clean-up of roadways, people and equipment after the release.”
The announcement cryptically described the “dust” as containing “a harmless inert bacterium found in soil, water and air.”
Kirt P. Love, Director of the Desert Storm Battle Registry (DSBR), a Gulf War veterans’ group dealing with the exposures of the 1991 conflict, repeatedly phoned the Pentagon to clarify exactly what “dust” would be used in the imminent open-air test.
He soon found, however, that “the departments involved were not communicating with each other … only the people who handled the agent knew anything.”
Love described the situation as “disquieting” and said, “I thought this was very unfair to the Pentagon Police and other innocent bystanders who didn’t need to be kept in the dark about this. How could they conduct an open air test of a microbe and not tell people what it was up front?”
Eventually, Love’s phone calls paid off. A Pentagon representative told him the substance to be tested was Bacillus Subtilis, which intriguingly, was also used during the US military’s Project SHAD human testing in the 1960s-70s.
The Pentagon’s announcement was correct in saying that Bacillus Subtilis is found in soil. It failed to mention, however, that the bacterium has been linked to pulmonary disease and irreversible lung damage.
The Defense Department quietly carried out its Bacillus Subtilis release in early June 2007. A Pentagon spokesperson would not confirm if the roughly 50 test subjects and numerous bystanders had been informed about the possible health risks.
And the open air tests continue.
In the next few days, the Pentagon is slated to release perfluorocarbon tracers and sulfur hexafluoride in Crystal City, Virginia.
Dubbed “Urban Shield: Crystal City Urban Transport Study,” the operation will test the effectiveness of the city’s chemical sensors, and according to The Examiner newspaper, “the data will help the Pentagon and Arlington shape their lockdown policies for chemical and biological attacks or accidents.” Lockdown policies.
According to a Pentagon press release from late February 2008, the study “will involve releasing a colorless, odorless, tasteless, and inert tracer gas that poses no health or safety hazards to people or the environment.”
But it’s not quite that simple. Sulfur hexafluoride is a suspected respiratory toxicant ; as such, exposure in certain amounts may be harmful for those with asthma, emphysema and other respiratory issues. It also is a suspected neurotoxicant, with potential untold consequences for the nervous systems of those vulnerable.
That part is left out of the Pentagon’s press release.
Crystal City is one of the “urban villages” of Arlington County, Virginia. It features upscale offices and residential areas - in other words a lot of civilians. You would think that if the Pentagon is releasing suspected toxicants into such a compressed urban area there would be more warning about potential health risks.
Yet repeated phone calls to the Pentagon yesterday yielded no results. The Force Protection Agency seemed unaware of the upcoming test and the press office was of no help either. No one could - or would - answer basic questions such as how many people could be exposed in the open-air test, if any attempt had been made to brief citizens on potential health risks or if there would be any medical follow-up provided.
Perfectly legal
The Pentagon’s laissez faire approach to these open-air tests raises questions about the possibilities for further testing on the general US population.
There is a tricky clause in Chapter 32/Title 50 of the United States Code (the aggregation of US general and permanent laws). Specifically, Section 1520a lists the following cases in which the Secretary of Defense can conduct a chemical or biological agent test or experiment on humans if informed consent has been obtained:
(1) Any peaceful purpose that is related to a medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or research activity.
(2) Any purpose that is directly related to protection against toxic chemicals or biological weapons and agents.
(3) Any law enforcement purpose, including any purpose related to riot control.
In other words, there are many circumstances under which the Secretary of Defense can test chemical or biological agents on human beings, but at least informed consent has to be obtained in advance.
Or does it. Section 1515, another part of Chapter 32, is entitled “Suspension; Presidential authorization” and says:
After November 19, 1969, the operation of this chapter, or any portion thereof, may be suspended by the President during the period of any war declared by Congress and during the period of any national emergency declared by Congress or by the President.
Essentially, if the President or Congress decides that we are at war then the Secretary of Defense does not need anybody’s consent to test chemical or biological agents on human beings. Gives one pause during these days of a perpetual “war on terror.”
Ominously, in June 2007, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell gained White House approval to update a 1981 presidential order on how US spy agencies operate. Potentially up for review in the highly secretive overhaul, referred to as Order 12333, is the topic of human experimentation.
A surge in US WMD spending
The Bush administration has quietly channeled tens of billions of dollars into chemical and biological weapons. Bush’s 2007 budget, for example, earmarked almost $2 billion for biodefense research and development via the National Institutes of Health alone.
Research aims are often dubious. In October 2005, for example, US scientists resurrected the 1918 Spanish flu, a virus which had killed almost 50 million people. And a virologist in St. Louis has been working on a more lethal form of mousepox (related to smallpox) just to try stopping the virus once it has been created.
Since the R&D is top secret and oversight limited, the public is rarely aware of escalating dangers. As of August 2007, for example, biological weapons laboratories across the country had reported 36 lost shipments and accidents for that year, almost double the number for all of 2004.
In addition to challenging international non-proliferation agreements and risking a global arms race, the Bush administration’s surge in chemical and biological weapons spending raises questions over what deadly weapons may have been tested on populations abroad. And what may be tested domestically, with or without the public’s consent.
For Wray Forrest, the battle for government accountability continues: “On September 29, 2006, Congress passed a bill that will inform veterans exactly what they were exposed to, within the next two or three years. I can just see it now: They visit my grave site and post it on my tomb stone, in order to inform me of what I was exposed to and just what exposure caused me to die.”
Heather Wokusch is the author of The Progressives’ Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now series and can be reached at www.heatherwokusch.com. Wray Forrest and other veterans have put together a DVD on “how our Federal Government treated its troops at not only Edgewood Arsenal, but also at other military installations in the United States of America.” For a free copy, send a blank DVD+R and self-addressed postage paid DVD Envelope to: EDGEWOOD RESEARCH VETERAN, 3910 Patrick Drive Apt 14, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80916.
The Pentagon is slated to release a suspected toxicant in Crystal City, Virginia this week, ostensibly to test air sensors.The operation is just the latest example of the Defense Department’s long history of using service members and civilians as human test subjects, often without their consent or awareness.
Gas chambers in Maryland
Wray C. Forrest learned about the US military’s human-testing program the hard way. In 1973, the Army sent then 23-year-old Forrest to its Edgewood Arsenal chemical-research center in Maryland, promising patriotic service and a four-day work week.
Instead, he became one of roughly 6,720 soldiers used as Edgewood Arsenal test subjects between 1950-1975.
Forrest was given a new identity at Edgewood: Research Subject #6692. He says, “That was the number assigned to me … similar to the numbers assigned to the Jews in the concentration/death camps in Germany during WWII.”
The US military tested heart drugs on Forrest, which he says were administered by IV and various types of injections. Forrest was also exposed to “contaminated drinking water, food, and various ground contaminates that permeate Edgewood Arsenal. BZ [a chemical incapacitating agent], napalm, mustard agents, and any number of other contaminates in the ground and drinking water there, from previous testing done there by the military.”
A total of 254 different chemicals were researched on soldiers at Edgewood, and Forrest notes, “We were never informed as to exactly what we were being given. We also did not sign any informed consent prior to the testing. This was a direct violation of the Geneva Convention rules for the use of humans in chemical and drug experiments/research.”
The Edgewood Arsenal facility played a role in WWII human subject testing as well. Roughly 4,000 US soldiers were used as human guinea pigs in chemical research which often took place in gas chambers.
US Navy member Nat Schnurman, for example, was sent to an Edgewood gas chamber six times one week in 1942. As The Detroit Free Press reported: “On his last visit, a blend of mustard gas and lewisite was piped in. Schnurman was overcome with toxins, vomited into his mask and begged for release. The request was denied. His next memory is of coming to on a snowbank outside the chamber.”
A pattern of abuse and neglect
If the sagas of Forrest and Schnurman were isolated, they would represent a disgraceful yet closed chapter of US military history. Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s human-testing program has extended far beyond Edgewood Arsenal.
Human Experimentation , a 1994 report from the congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), lays out the Defense Department’s sordid history in detail.
Between 1949 and 1969, for example, the Army sprayed bacterial tracers or simulants on unsuspecting populations in hundreds of biological warfare tests. According to the GAO: “Some of the tests involved spraying large areas, such as the cities of St. Louis and San Francisco, and others involved spraying more focused areas, such as the New York City subway system and Washington National Airport.”
No coherent attempt was made to warn those affected or to offer follow-up medical care.
Between 1952-1975, the CIA tested LSD and other psychochemical agents on “an undetermined number of people without their knowledge or consent.”
No coherent attempt was made to offer follow-up information or care.
Over 235 atmospheric nuclear tests and experiments were conducted on roughly 210,000 personnel affiliated to the US Defense Department from 1945-1962. A further 199,000 “were exposed to radiation through work.”
No coherent attempt was made to warn those affected or to offer follow-up medical care.
One of the best known examples of US military human-testing is Project 112, whereby the Pentagon used biological/chemical agents on 5,842 service members in secret trials conducted over a ten-year period (1962-73).
Project 112, and the affiliated Project SHAD, tested everything from Sarin nerve agent to an E. coli simulant aboard Navy ships and in land trials. Tests were conducted in six states (Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Utah) Canada and Britain and often without the consent or awareness of those exposed.
Only in 2003, after crucial documents slowly became declassified, did the veterans’ health complaints start to be acknowledged. By then, over 750 Project 112 veterans were already dead.
The Veterans’ Administration still had not notified more than 40% of those used in Project 112/SHAD human testing by 2004. The Defense Department was blamed for foot-dragging in identifying the potentially affected service members and civilians.
The battle to receive care
Wray Forrest knows firsthand about fighting official neglect and denial over human-testing. When his health started to deteriorate, Forrest was forbidden to get medical support: “We could not tell what we were exposed to due to the classification of the project, nor could we seek medical help due to the alleged non-disclosure papers we signed.”
Forrest was discharged from the military in 1982 for health reasons (deemed “unsuitable for service”). He was still unable to talk to anyone about Edgewood Arsenal, so kept his “agreed silence, and took what the military dished out calling me, UNSUITABLE.”
In July 2006, the Veterans’ Administration (VA) released a document on health care eligibility listing Edgewood Arsenal survivors as a Category 6 disability rating, which meant that affected veterans would be eligible for clinical evaluation and “necessary treatment of conditions related to exposure without copays.” But when Forrest called the VA to seek help, he was told that the publication was an error and in fact Edgewood Arsenal veterans have no VA health care eligibility.
“How sweet, they have killed us, buried us, and now they want us to go away,” he concluded.
Forrest is not the only veteran subjected to human-testing who has fought to receive care. Even in well-documented and recent cases, compensation is elusive.
In December 2007, for example, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by the widows of five veterans who died after being enrolled in fraudulent drug studies at the Stratton VA Medical Center in Albany, NY.
Stratton had been plagued by allegations of research violations from the early 1990s. Then in 1999, the facility hired Paul Kornak to be its Research Coordinator, despite the fact that Kornak had forged his credentials, falsified his college transcript and been arrested in Pennsylvania years earlier for related fraud. Apparently, background checks for health professionals were minimal at Stratton VA Medical Center.
From 1999-2003, Kornak falsified veterans’ medical records at Stratton, inappropriately enrolling them in studies for drug marketability. In 2001, for example, Stratton tested a powerful three-drug chemotherapy combination on Carl M. Steubing, a 78-year-old Battle of the Bulge veteran, despite his previous bout with cancer and poor kidney function.
Steubing died in early 2002. His widow still wonders if the fraudulent human-test studies at Stratton cost her husband his life.
In court, the five widows’ lawyer argued that Stratton “committed every kind of research ethics violation imaginable,” adding “when you use individuals, humans, as guinea pigs, you do them harm.”
The US government responded by saying there was no way to prove the veterans had experienced pain or died early as a result of the corrupt drug experiments.
Case closed.
Open-air testing
If veterans with solid proof of having been used as test subjects cannot receive compensation, the possibilities are miniscule for service members and civilians used in trials without their consent or awareness.
Open-air testing of chemical and biological (CB) agents is one such case.
After 6,000 sheep died following the apparent release of a nerve agent at an Army facility in Utah in 1969, open-air testing was officially said to have ended in the US.
But the Defense Department’s April 2007 report to Congress on “Chemical and Biological Defense” strongly suggests an imminent resumption.
According to Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, at least three passages of the Pentagon’s 2007 report indicate a planned continuance of open-air testing.
While one section of the document, for example, mentions the use of “live-CB-agent full system test chambers,” another passage (page 67) reads:
“More than thirty years have passed since outdoor live agent chemical tests were banned in the United States, and the last outdoor test with live chemical agent was performed, so much of the infrastructure for the field testing of chemical detectors no longer exists or is seriously outdated. The currently budgeted improvements in the T&E infrastructure will greatly enhance both the developmental and operational field testing of full systems, with better simulated representation of threats and characterization of system response.”
As Dr. Boyle notes, both “test chambers” and “field testing” are mentioned in the report.
In addition, the passage says that improvements in the T&E (testing and evaluation) infrastructure and “better simulated representation of threats” are going to be carried out using “full systems” rather than simulants.
Dr. Boyle says, “It is clear they will be engaging in ‘Field Trials’ (not in test chambers) of ‘full systems,’ which means ‘live CB agents,’ not simulants.”
Another troublesome passage from the Defense Department’s April 2007 report (page 65) is:
“Current T&E shortfalls lie in the full systems and platform test chambers and supporting instrumentation and fixtures. These test fixtures must be able to introduce and adequately control live CB agent challenges and provide a range of environmental and challenge conditions to simulate evolving threats, while performing end-to-end systems operations of CBD equipment.”
Dr. Boyle points out that the passage says “full systems” rather than “simulants,” and it makes a distinction between “test fixtures” and “test chambers.” He adds that talking about “‘a range of environmental and challenge conditions’ in a test chamber” is nonsensical. “A test chamber does not have a ‘range of environmental and challenge conditions.’”
“What they are talking about here,” Dr. Boyle concludes, “is testing live CB (chemical and biological) agents in Field Tests - open-air testing, where there will be a ‘range of environmental and challenge conditions’ to confront, test and verify.”
Gassing Crystal City
In May 2007, just one month after the Defense Department’s controversial report to Congress, the Pentagon quietly announced it would release “a dust simulating a biological attack in the Pentagon South Parking Lot.” The stated purpose was to study “the subsequent clean-up of roadways, people and equipment after the release.”
The announcement cryptically described the “dust” as containing “a harmless inert bacterium found in soil, water and air.”
Kirt P. Love, Director of the Desert Storm Battle Registry (DSBR), a Gulf War veterans’ group dealing with the exposures of the 1991 conflict, repeatedly phoned the Pentagon to clarify exactly what “dust” would be used in the imminent open-air test.
He soon found, however, that “the departments involved were not communicating with each other … only the people who handled the agent knew anything.”
Love described the situation as “disquieting” and said, “I thought this was very unfair to the Pentagon Police and other innocent bystanders who didn’t need to be kept in the dark about this. How could they conduct an open air test of a microbe and not tell people what it was up front?”
Eventually, Love’s phone calls paid off. A Pentagon representative told him the substance to be tested was Bacillus Subtilis, which intriguingly, was also used during the US military’s Project SHAD human testing in the 1960s-70s.
The Pentagon’s announcement was correct in saying that Bacillus Subtilis is found in soil. It failed to mention, however, that the bacterium has been linked to pulmonary disease and irreversible lung damage.
The Defense Department quietly carried out its Bacillus Subtilis release in early June 2007. A Pentagon spokesperson would not confirm if the roughly 50 test subjects and numerous bystanders had been informed about the possible health risks.
And the open air tests continue.
In the next few days, the Pentagon is slated to release perfluorocarbon tracers and sulfur hexafluoride in Crystal City, Virginia.
Dubbed “Urban Shield: Crystal City Urban Transport Study,” the operation will test the effectiveness of the city’s chemical sensors, and according to The Examiner newspaper, “the data will help the Pentagon and Arlington shape their lockdown policies for chemical and biological attacks or accidents.” Lockdown policies.
According to a Pentagon press release from late February 2008, the study “will involve releasing a colorless, odorless, tasteless, and inert tracer gas that poses no health or safety hazards to people or the environment.”
But it’s not quite that simple. Sulfur hexafluoride is a suspected respiratory toxicant ; as such, exposure in certain amounts may be harmful for those with asthma, emphysema and other respiratory issues. It also is a suspected neurotoxicant, with potential untold consequences for the nervous systems of those vulnerable.
That part is left out of the Pentagon’s press release.
Crystal City is one of the “urban villages” of Arlington County, Virginia. It features upscale offices and residential areas - in other words a lot of civilians. You would think that if the Pentagon is releasing suspected toxicants into such a compressed urban area there would be more warning about potential health risks.
Yet repeated phone calls to the Pentagon yesterday yielded no results. The Force Protection Agency seemed unaware of the upcoming test and the press office was of no help either. No one could - or would - answer basic questions such as how many people could be exposed in the open-air test, if any attempt had been made to brief citizens on potential health risks or if there would be any medical follow-up provided.
Perfectly legal
The Pentagon’s laissez faire approach to these open-air tests raises questions about the possibilities for further testing on the general US population.
There is a tricky clause in Chapter 32/Title 50 of the United States Code (the aggregation of US general and permanent laws). Specifically, Section 1520a lists the following cases in which the Secretary of Defense can conduct a chemical or biological agent test or experiment on humans if informed consent has been obtained:
(1) Any peaceful purpose that is related to a medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or research activity.
(2) Any purpose that is directly related to protection against toxic chemicals or biological weapons and agents.
(3) Any law enforcement purpose, including any purpose related to riot control.
In other words, there are many circumstances under which the Secretary of Defense can test chemical or biological agents on human beings, but at least informed consent has to be obtained in advance.
Or does it. Section 1515, another part of Chapter 32, is entitled “Suspension; Presidential authorization” and says:
After November 19, 1969, the operation of this chapter, or any portion thereof, may be suspended by the President during the period of any war declared by Congress and during the period of any national emergency declared by Congress or by the President.
Essentially, if the President or Congress decides that we are at war then the Secretary of Defense does not need anybody’s consent to test chemical or biological agents on human beings. Gives one pause during these days of a perpetual “war on terror.”
Ominously, in June 2007, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell gained White House approval to update a 1981 presidential order on how US spy agencies operate. Potentially up for review in the highly secretive overhaul, referred to as Order 12333, is the topic of human experimentation.
A surge in US WMD spending
The Bush administration has quietly channeled tens of billions of dollars into chemical and biological weapons. Bush’s 2007 budget, for example, earmarked almost $2 billion for biodefense research and development via the National Institutes of Health alone.
Research aims are often dubious. In October 2005, for example, US scientists resurrected the 1918 Spanish flu, a virus which had killed almost 50 million people. And a virologist in St. Louis has been working on a more lethal form of mousepox (related to smallpox) just to try stopping the virus once it has been created.
Since the R&D is top secret and oversight limited, the public is rarely aware of escalating dangers. As of August 2007, for example, biological weapons laboratories across the country had reported 36 lost shipments and accidents for that year, almost double the number for all of 2004.
In addition to challenging international non-proliferation agreements and risking a global arms race, the Bush administration’s surge in chemical and biological weapons spending raises questions over what deadly weapons may have been tested on populations abroad. And what may be tested domestically, with or without the public’s consent.
For Wray Forrest, the battle for government accountability continues: “On September 29, 2006, Congress passed a bill that will inform veterans exactly what they were exposed to, within the next two or three years. I can just see it now: They visit my grave site and post it on my tomb stone, in order to inform me of what I was exposed to and just what exposure caused me to die.”
Heather Wokusch is the author of The Progressives’ Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now series and can be reached at www.heatherwokusch.com. Wray Forrest and other veterans have put together a DVD on “how our Federal Government treated its troops at not only Edgewood Arsenal, but also at other military installations in the United States of America.” For a free copy, send a blank DVD+R and self-addressed postage paid DVD Envelope to: EDGEWOOD RESEARCH VETERAN, 3910 Patrick Drive Apt 14, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80916.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
The Cost of a Week in Hell
By Tom Engelhardt and William Hartung
05/03/08 "Tomgram" -- - How far off were they? Well, it depends on which figure you choose to start with. Here's the range: According to key officials in the Bush administration back in 2002-2003, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq was either going to cost $60 billion, or $100-$200 billion. Actually, we can start by tossing that top figure out, since not long after Bush economic advisor Larry Lindsey offered it in 2002, he was shown the door, in part assumedly for even suggesting something so ludicrous.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz championed the $60 billion figure, but added that much of the cost might well be covered by Iraqi oil revenues; the country was, after all, floating on a "sea of oil." ("To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he told a congressional hearing.) Still, let's take that $60 billion figure as the Bush baseline. If economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes are right in their recent calculations and this will turn out to be more than a $3 trillion war (or even a $5-7 trillion one), then the Bush administration was at least $2,940,000,000,000 off in its calculations.
That definitely qualifies as a ballpark figure for an administration that never saw a budget estimate for one of its imperial dreams that it couldn't hike. Take just one of its major "reconstruction" projects: getting the vast U.S. embassy staff out of a former palace of Saddam Hussein and into a brand-new, almost Vatican-sized "embassy," a genuine mother ship, being built from the ground up inside Baghdad's heavily fortified (and often heavily shelled) Green Zone. Originally scheduled to open in mid-2007, what will undoubtedly be the largest "diplomatic" mission on the planet was initially budgeted for $592 million. Predictably, its price tag soared another $144 million, and now comes in at $736 million, as yet unopened. In December 2007, the State Department officially certified it "substantially complete," but, as with most Bush administration construction projects in that country, it remains in a state of staggering unreadiness; two of the State Department employees who worked on it are now "under criminal investigation"; and the State Department is dragging its feet about handing over relevant documents to Congress. Ho-hum.
Nothing, of course, has been cheap for American taxpayers who are financing the Bush administration's war policies. It's been like putting up money for an administration staffed by shopaholics let loose in Neiman Marcus or gambling addicts freed to roam Las Vegas with no betting limits.
But what does money matter? After all, this administration has been spending as if there were no tomorrow. And now, with tomorrow staring them in the face, the latest scare tactic seems to be claiming that doing anything about present policies will simply be… too expensive. Not long after the price of oil crested above $103 a barrel, Karl Rove, for instance, predicted that any serious "redeployment" from Iraq would mean… $200 a barrel oil.
Sigh… Fortunately, we've got William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, to try to put Bush spending policies in its wars of choice into perspective. Tom
War is Hell, But What the Hell Does it Cost?
One Week at War in Iraq and Afghanistan for $3.5 Billion
By William D. Hartung
War is hell -- deadly, dangerous, and expensive. But just how expensive is it?
In a recent interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz asserted that the costs of the Iraq war -- budgetary, economic, and societal -- could reach $5 trillion.
That's a hard number to comprehend. Figuring out how many times $5 trillion would circle the globe (if we took it all in one dollar bills) doesn't really help matters much, nor does estimating how many times we could paper over every square inch of Rhode Island with it. The fact that total war costs could buy six trillion donuts for volunteers to the Clinton, Obama, McCain, and Huckabee campaigns -- assuming a bulk discount -- is impressive in its own way, but not all that meaningful either. In fact, the Bush administration's war costs have already moved beyond the human scale of comprehension.
But what if we were to try another tack? How about breaking those soaring trillions down into smaller pieces, into mere millions and billions? How much, for instance, does one week of George Bush's wars cost?
Glad you asked. If we consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan together -- which we might as well do, since we and our children and grandchildren will be paying for them together into the distant future -- a conservative single-week estimate comes to $3.5 billion. Remember, that's per week!
By contrast, the whole international community spends less than $400 million per year on the International Atomic Energy Agency, the primary institution for monitoring and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons; that's less than one day's worth of war costs. The U.S. government spends just $1 billion per year securing and destroying loose nuclear weapons and bomb-making materials, or less than two days' worth of war costs; and Washington spends a total of just $7 billion per year on combating global warming, or a whopping two weeks' worth of war costs.
So, perhaps you're wondering, what does that $3.5 billion per week actually pay for? And how would we even know? The Bush administration submits a supplemental request -- over and above the more than $500 billion per year the Pentagon is now receiving in its official budget -- to pay for the purported costs of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and for the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). If you can stay awake long enough to read the whole 159-page document for 2008, it has some fascinating revelations.
For example, to hear the howling of the white-collar warriors in Washington every time anyone suggests knocking a nickel off administration war-spending requests, you would think that the weekly $3.5 billion outlay is all "for the troops." In fact, only 10% of it, or under $350 million per week, goes to pay and benefits for uniformed military personnel. That's less than a quarter of the weekly $1.4 billion that goes to war contractors to pay for everything from bullets to bombers. As a slogan, insisting that we need to keep the current flood of military outlays flowing "for Boeing and Lockheed Martin" just doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
You could argue, of course, that all these contracting dollars represent the most efficient way to get our troops the equipment they need to operate safely and effectively in a war zone -- but you would be wrong. Much of that money is being wasted every week on the wrong kinds of equipment at exorbitant prices. And even when it is the right kind of equipment, there are often startling delays in getting it to the battlefield, as was the case with advanced armored vehicles for the Marine Corps.
But before we get to equipment costs, let's take a look at a week's worth of another kind of support. The Pentagon and the State Department don't make a big point -- or really any kind of point -- out of telling us how much we're spending on gun-toting private-contract employees from companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy, our "shadow army" in Iraq, but we can make an educated guess. For example, at the high end of the scale, individual employees of private military firms make up to 10 times what many U.S. enlisted personnel make, or as much as $7,500 per week. If even one-tenth of the 5,000 to 6,000 armed contract employees in Iraq make that much, we're talking about at least $40 million per week. If the rest make $1,000 a week -- an extremely conservative estimate -- then we have nearly $100 million per week going just to the armed cohort of private-contract employees operating there.
Now, let's add into that figure the whole private crew of non-government employees operating in Iraq, including all the cooks, weapons technicians, translators, interrogators, and other private-contract support personnel. That combined cost probably comes closer to $300 million per week, or almost as much as is spent on uniformed personnel by the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marines.
By one reliable estimate, there are more contract employees in Iraq alone -- about 180,000 -- than there are U.S. troops. There are thousands more in Afghanistan. But since many of these non-military employees are poorly paid subcontract workers involved in cooking meals, doing laundry, and cleaning latrines, the total costs for the services of all private-contractor employees in Iraq probably runs somewhat less than the costs of the uniformed military. Hence our estimate.
So, if $650 million or so a week is spent on people, where does the other nearly $3 billion go? It goes for goods and services, from tanks and fighter planes to fuel and food. Most of this money ends up in the hands of private companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the former Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root.
The list of weapons and accessories paid for from our $3.5 billion is long and daunting:
$1.5 million for M-4 carbines (about 900 guns per week);
$2.3 million for machine guns (about 170 per week);
$4.3 million for Hellfire missiles (about 50 missiles per week);
$6.9 million for night vision devices (about 2,100 per week);
$10.8 million for fuel per week;
$5 million to store and transport that fuel per week;
$14.8 million for F-18E/F fighter planes per week (one every four weeks);
$23.4 million for ammunition per week;
$30.7 million for Bradley fighting vehicles (10 per week).
And that's only a very partial list. What about the more mundane items?
"Laundries, showers, and latrines" cost more than $110,000 per week;
"Parachutes and aerial delivery systems" cost $950,000 per week;
"Runway snow removal and cleaning" costs $132,000 per week;
Flares cost $50,000 per week.
Some of these figures, of course, may cover worldwide military operations for the U.S. armed forces. After all, by sticking the acronym GWOT in the title of any supplemental war-spending request, you can cram almost anything into it.
Then there are the sobering figures like: $2.4 million per week for "death gratuities" (payments to families of troops killed in action) and $10.6 million per week in "extra hazard pay."
And don't forget that all the death and destruction lurking behind these weekly numbers makes it that much harder to get people to join the military. But not to worry, $1 million per week is factored into that supplemental funding request for "advertising and recruitment" -- not enough perhaps to fill the ranks, but at least they're trying.
Keep in mind that this only gives us a sense of what we do know from the public Pentagon request; there's plenty more that we don't know. As a start, the Pentagon's breakdown of the money in its "emergency" supplemental budget leaves huge gaps.
Even your own congressman doesn't know for sure what is really in the U.S. war budget. What we do know is that the Pentagon and the military services have been stuffing more and more projects that have nothing to do with the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, or even the war on terror, into those war supplementals.
Layered in are requests for new equipment that will take years, or even decades, to build and may never be used in combat -- unless the Iraq war really does go on for another century, as John McCain recently suggested. These "non-war" items include high-tech armored vehicles and communications devices for the Army as well as new combat aircraft for the Air Force.
Even though these systems may never be used on our current battlefields, they are war costs nonetheless. If they weren't inserted into the supplemental requests for Iraq and Afghanistan, they might never have been funded. After all, who wants to vote against a bill that is allegedly all "for the troops," even if it includes weapons those troops will never get?
These add-ons are not small change. They probably cost in the area of $500 million per week.
Given all of this, it may sound like we have a fair amount of detail about the costs of a week of war. No such luck. Until the "supplemental" costs of war are subjected to the same scrutiny as the regular Pentagon budget, there will continue to be hundreds of millions of dollars unaccounted for each and every week that the wars go on. And there will be all sorts of money for pet projects that have nothing to do with fighting current conflicts. So don't just think of that $3.5 billion per week figure as a given. Think of it as $3.5 billion… and counting.
Doesn't that make you feel safer?
William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. He is the author of And Weapons for All (Harper Collins, 1994) and How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration (Nation Books, 2004). His commentaries on military and economic issues have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Nation magazine.
[Source Note: Readers who want to check out the latest Department of Defense supplemental request for war-fighting funds can click here (PDF file) and read, "FY 2008 Global War on Terror Pending Request" from the Office of the Secretary of Defense.]
Copyright 2008 William D. Hartung
05/03/08 "Tomgram" -- - How far off were they? Well, it depends on which figure you choose to start with. Here's the range: According to key officials in the Bush administration back in 2002-2003, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq was either going to cost $60 billion, or $100-$200 billion. Actually, we can start by tossing that top figure out, since not long after Bush economic advisor Larry Lindsey offered it in 2002, he was shown the door, in part assumedly for even suggesting something so ludicrous.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz championed the $60 billion figure, but added that much of the cost might well be covered by Iraqi oil revenues; the country was, after all, floating on a "sea of oil." ("To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he told a congressional hearing.) Still, let's take that $60 billion figure as the Bush baseline. If economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes are right in their recent calculations and this will turn out to be more than a $3 trillion war (or even a $5-7 trillion one), then the Bush administration was at least $2,940,000,000,000 off in its calculations.
That definitely qualifies as a ballpark figure for an administration that never saw a budget estimate for one of its imperial dreams that it couldn't hike. Take just one of its major "reconstruction" projects: getting the vast U.S. embassy staff out of a former palace of Saddam Hussein and into a brand-new, almost Vatican-sized "embassy," a genuine mother ship, being built from the ground up inside Baghdad's heavily fortified (and often heavily shelled) Green Zone. Originally scheduled to open in mid-2007, what will undoubtedly be the largest "diplomatic" mission on the planet was initially budgeted for $592 million. Predictably, its price tag soared another $144 million, and now comes in at $736 million, as yet unopened. In December 2007, the State Department officially certified it "substantially complete," but, as with most Bush administration construction projects in that country, it remains in a state of staggering unreadiness; two of the State Department employees who worked on it are now "under criminal investigation"; and the State Department is dragging its feet about handing over relevant documents to Congress. Ho-hum.
Nothing, of course, has been cheap for American taxpayers who are financing the Bush administration's war policies. It's been like putting up money for an administration staffed by shopaholics let loose in Neiman Marcus or gambling addicts freed to roam Las Vegas with no betting limits.
But what does money matter? After all, this administration has been spending as if there were no tomorrow. And now, with tomorrow staring them in the face, the latest scare tactic seems to be claiming that doing anything about present policies will simply be… too expensive. Not long after the price of oil crested above $103 a barrel, Karl Rove, for instance, predicted that any serious "redeployment" from Iraq would mean… $200 a barrel oil.
Sigh… Fortunately, we've got William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, to try to put Bush spending policies in its wars of choice into perspective. Tom
War is Hell, But What the Hell Does it Cost?
One Week at War in Iraq and Afghanistan for $3.5 Billion
By William D. Hartung
War is hell -- deadly, dangerous, and expensive. But just how expensive is it?
In a recent interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz asserted that the costs of the Iraq war -- budgetary, economic, and societal -- could reach $5 trillion.
That's a hard number to comprehend. Figuring out how many times $5 trillion would circle the globe (if we took it all in one dollar bills) doesn't really help matters much, nor does estimating how many times we could paper over every square inch of Rhode Island with it. The fact that total war costs could buy six trillion donuts for volunteers to the Clinton, Obama, McCain, and Huckabee campaigns -- assuming a bulk discount -- is impressive in its own way, but not all that meaningful either. In fact, the Bush administration's war costs have already moved beyond the human scale of comprehension.
But what if we were to try another tack? How about breaking those soaring trillions down into smaller pieces, into mere millions and billions? How much, for instance, does one week of George Bush's wars cost?
Glad you asked. If we consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan together -- which we might as well do, since we and our children and grandchildren will be paying for them together into the distant future -- a conservative single-week estimate comes to $3.5 billion. Remember, that's per week!
By contrast, the whole international community spends less than $400 million per year on the International Atomic Energy Agency, the primary institution for monitoring and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons; that's less than one day's worth of war costs. The U.S. government spends just $1 billion per year securing and destroying loose nuclear weapons and bomb-making materials, or less than two days' worth of war costs; and Washington spends a total of just $7 billion per year on combating global warming, or a whopping two weeks' worth of war costs.
So, perhaps you're wondering, what does that $3.5 billion per week actually pay for? And how would we even know? The Bush administration submits a supplemental request -- over and above the more than $500 billion per year the Pentagon is now receiving in its official budget -- to pay for the purported costs of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and for the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). If you can stay awake long enough to read the whole 159-page document for 2008, it has some fascinating revelations.
For example, to hear the howling of the white-collar warriors in Washington every time anyone suggests knocking a nickel off administration war-spending requests, you would think that the weekly $3.5 billion outlay is all "for the troops." In fact, only 10% of it, or under $350 million per week, goes to pay and benefits for uniformed military personnel. That's less than a quarter of the weekly $1.4 billion that goes to war contractors to pay for everything from bullets to bombers. As a slogan, insisting that we need to keep the current flood of military outlays flowing "for Boeing and Lockheed Martin" just doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
You could argue, of course, that all these contracting dollars represent the most efficient way to get our troops the equipment they need to operate safely and effectively in a war zone -- but you would be wrong. Much of that money is being wasted every week on the wrong kinds of equipment at exorbitant prices. And even when it is the right kind of equipment, there are often startling delays in getting it to the battlefield, as was the case with advanced armored vehicles for the Marine Corps.
But before we get to equipment costs, let's take a look at a week's worth of another kind of support. The Pentagon and the State Department don't make a big point -- or really any kind of point -- out of telling us how much we're spending on gun-toting private-contract employees from companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy, our "shadow army" in Iraq, but we can make an educated guess. For example, at the high end of the scale, individual employees of private military firms make up to 10 times what many U.S. enlisted personnel make, or as much as $7,500 per week. If even one-tenth of the 5,000 to 6,000 armed contract employees in Iraq make that much, we're talking about at least $40 million per week. If the rest make $1,000 a week -- an extremely conservative estimate -- then we have nearly $100 million per week going just to the armed cohort of private-contract employees operating there.
Now, let's add into that figure the whole private crew of non-government employees operating in Iraq, including all the cooks, weapons technicians, translators, interrogators, and other private-contract support personnel. That combined cost probably comes closer to $300 million per week, or almost as much as is spent on uniformed personnel by the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marines.
By one reliable estimate, there are more contract employees in Iraq alone -- about 180,000 -- than there are U.S. troops. There are thousands more in Afghanistan. But since many of these non-military employees are poorly paid subcontract workers involved in cooking meals, doing laundry, and cleaning latrines, the total costs for the services of all private-contractor employees in Iraq probably runs somewhat less than the costs of the uniformed military. Hence our estimate.
So, if $650 million or so a week is spent on people, where does the other nearly $3 billion go? It goes for goods and services, from tanks and fighter planes to fuel and food. Most of this money ends up in the hands of private companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the former Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root.
The list of weapons and accessories paid for from our $3.5 billion is long and daunting:
$1.5 million for M-4 carbines (about 900 guns per week);
$2.3 million for machine guns (about 170 per week);
$4.3 million for Hellfire missiles (about 50 missiles per week);
$6.9 million for night vision devices (about 2,100 per week);
$10.8 million for fuel per week;
$5 million to store and transport that fuel per week;
$14.8 million for F-18E/F fighter planes per week (one every four weeks);
$23.4 million for ammunition per week;
$30.7 million for Bradley fighting vehicles (10 per week).
And that's only a very partial list. What about the more mundane items?
"Laundries, showers, and latrines" cost more than $110,000 per week;
"Parachutes and aerial delivery systems" cost $950,000 per week;
"Runway snow removal and cleaning" costs $132,000 per week;
Flares cost $50,000 per week.
Some of these figures, of course, may cover worldwide military operations for the U.S. armed forces. After all, by sticking the acronym GWOT in the title of any supplemental war-spending request, you can cram almost anything into it.
Then there are the sobering figures like: $2.4 million per week for "death gratuities" (payments to families of troops killed in action) and $10.6 million per week in "extra hazard pay."
And don't forget that all the death and destruction lurking behind these weekly numbers makes it that much harder to get people to join the military. But not to worry, $1 million per week is factored into that supplemental funding request for "advertising and recruitment" -- not enough perhaps to fill the ranks, but at least they're trying.
Keep in mind that this only gives us a sense of what we do know from the public Pentagon request; there's plenty more that we don't know. As a start, the Pentagon's breakdown of the money in its "emergency" supplemental budget leaves huge gaps.
Even your own congressman doesn't know for sure what is really in the U.S. war budget. What we do know is that the Pentagon and the military services have been stuffing more and more projects that have nothing to do with the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, or even the war on terror, into those war supplementals.
Layered in are requests for new equipment that will take years, or even decades, to build and may never be used in combat -- unless the Iraq war really does go on for another century, as John McCain recently suggested. These "non-war" items include high-tech armored vehicles and communications devices for the Army as well as new combat aircraft for the Air Force.
Even though these systems may never be used on our current battlefields, they are war costs nonetheless. If they weren't inserted into the supplemental requests for Iraq and Afghanistan, they might never have been funded. After all, who wants to vote against a bill that is allegedly all "for the troops," even if it includes weapons those troops will never get?
These add-ons are not small change. They probably cost in the area of $500 million per week.
Given all of this, it may sound like we have a fair amount of detail about the costs of a week of war. No such luck. Until the "supplemental" costs of war are subjected to the same scrutiny as the regular Pentagon budget, there will continue to be hundreds of millions of dollars unaccounted for each and every week that the wars go on. And there will be all sorts of money for pet projects that have nothing to do with fighting current conflicts. So don't just think of that $3.5 billion per week figure as a given. Think of it as $3.5 billion… and counting.
Doesn't that make you feel safer?
William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. He is the author of And Weapons for All (Harper Collins, 1994) and How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration (Nation Books, 2004). His commentaries on military and economic issues have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Nation magazine.
[Source Note: Readers who want to check out the latest Department of Defense supplemental request for war-fighting funds can click here (PDF file) and read, "FY 2008 Global War on Terror Pending Request" from the Office of the Secretary of Defense.]
Copyright 2008 William D. Hartung
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
The Pentagon Is Financed Like Enron and Run Like General Motors
by Joseph L. Galloway
When George W. Bush disappears out the door of the White House, he’ll leave his successor a long list of horrendous problems, not least of them a Defense Department budget of more than $518 billion that doesn’t even include another $170 billion or so to continue funding a year of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you add in the war money and the bits and pieces of national security spending in other departments’ budgets, you begin closing in on the real figure for defense spending, which is close to $1 trillion for the fiscal year that will begin this October and end on September 30, 2009.
Much of that, like all of President Bush’s war spending for the last seven years, will be deficit spending. Washington will sell bonds to foreign nations such as China in a continuing Ponzi scheme, assuming that the foreigners haven’t noticed by then that the dollar is sinking like the Titanic and our economy is in the toilet.
We might hope that our representatives in Congress, who have to pass this expensive monstrosity of a bill, would hold it up to the light and see how much of our money is being poured down a rat-hole. But of course that’s much too much to expect of those courageous folks in an election year - or any year, for that matter.
Pentagon procurement spending, according to the experts, is so totally out of control that no one even attempts to separate the good and necessary weapons programs from the bad, useless and even harmful ones. When money gets tight, the brilliant thinkers in the five-sided puzzle palace even starve good programs to feed bad ones.
Under the Bush administration, defense spending has skyrocketed since 2001, but the money hasn’t been spent wisely. With a recession looming, or already here, and the national debt heading north of $10 trillion, the next president and Congress may want to give serious thought to whether we can afford to go on spending like a drunken sailor on a defense establishment that’s financed like Enron and managed like General Motors.
The military-industrial complex that Dwight D. Eisenhower, who unlike Bush knew a thing or two about the military, warned about in his farewell speech has had a field day with the Bush administration’s laissez faire defense spending policy.
Consider, if you will, the $22.9 billion we’re spending to rush as many as 20,000 mine-resistant ambush protection (MRAP) vehicles to the soldiers and Marines fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. This began in earnest only last year - too late for the troops who’ve been killed and wounded by improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
The MRAP is a huge, heavily armored truck that can carry a squad of troops, eight to 10 men, in relative safety. It’s not a fighting vehicle, just a deuce-and-a-half truck on steroids with a v-shaped bottom that deflects the force of a blast from a landmine or a buried IED around instead of through the vehicle.
Good idea. Where were they when then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was sending everyone to war in unarmored Humvees? Why wait five years, and then suddenly begin buying 20,000 of them? Why wait for American defense plants to produce an inferior version that costs more than $1 million each when Israel and South Africa are selling better designed MRAPs off the shelf for about a third of the price?
Then there’s the question of what the hell the Army and Marine Corps are going to do with 20,000 MRAPs cluttering up their motor pools when the Iraq war ends? These beasts can weigh as much as 40 tons. They can’t leave the road, and there are few bridges that can bear their weight. They can’t turn around on an average road. Their only defenses are their armor and a few small portholes through which soldiers can fire their rifles at targets they can’t see.
Are they better than the alternative, the $200,000 up-armored Humvee, which is a death trap when an IED goes off and is destroyed by its own weight in daily use? You bet they are.
But how many do we really need when the current U.S. strategy in Iraq is not to drive up and down roads and streets on “presence patrols” but to use dismounted troops patrolling on foot?
Congress hardly blinked when the Pentagon began shifting money from other programs last year to fund all-out production of the MRAPs. Why would they? Think of the jobs created in MRAP plants in South Carolina and Mississippi and dozens of other factories around the country that produce the parts and pieces that go into the vehicle.
MRAPs were a good idea five years ago when the Abominable No-Man Rumsfeld was running the Pentagon and telling soldiers to quit whining about armored vehicles because we go to war with the Army we have, not the Army we may want to have.
Today both Rumsfeld and the war have moved on, and the defense plants are humming 24/7 making a very expensive ride that’s likely to end up as tomorrow’s war surplus. Maybe we can sell them off by the pound.
Just think: The MRAP is one little $22 billion program in a trillion-dollar national security budget. How many more outdated, useless widgets are hidden in there like so many termites, eating up your money? How many worthwhile projects have been ignored, vetoed or scuttled to pay for expensive toys that don’t work, but will make big money for the military-industrial complex? (Hint: Think border fence.)
The next president might want to know the answer to that question when he takes off his overcoat and sits down in the Oval Office on the afternoon of January 20, 2009.
Joseph L. Galloway, a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, is the co-author, with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, of “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” a story of the first large-scale ground battle of the Vietnam War.
© 2008 McClatchy Newspapers
When George W. Bush disappears out the door of the White House, he’ll leave his successor a long list of horrendous problems, not least of them a Defense Department budget of more than $518 billion that doesn’t even include another $170 billion or so to continue funding a year of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you add in the war money and the bits and pieces of national security spending in other departments’ budgets, you begin closing in on the real figure for defense spending, which is close to $1 trillion for the fiscal year that will begin this October and end on September 30, 2009.
Much of that, like all of President Bush’s war spending for the last seven years, will be deficit spending. Washington will sell bonds to foreign nations such as China in a continuing Ponzi scheme, assuming that the foreigners haven’t noticed by then that the dollar is sinking like the Titanic and our economy is in the toilet.
We might hope that our representatives in Congress, who have to pass this expensive monstrosity of a bill, would hold it up to the light and see how much of our money is being poured down a rat-hole. But of course that’s much too much to expect of those courageous folks in an election year - or any year, for that matter.
Pentagon procurement spending, according to the experts, is so totally out of control that no one even attempts to separate the good and necessary weapons programs from the bad, useless and even harmful ones. When money gets tight, the brilliant thinkers in the five-sided puzzle palace even starve good programs to feed bad ones.
Under the Bush administration, defense spending has skyrocketed since 2001, but the money hasn’t been spent wisely. With a recession looming, or already here, and the national debt heading north of $10 trillion, the next president and Congress may want to give serious thought to whether we can afford to go on spending like a drunken sailor on a defense establishment that’s financed like Enron and managed like General Motors.
The military-industrial complex that Dwight D. Eisenhower, who unlike Bush knew a thing or two about the military, warned about in his farewell speech has had a field day with the Bush administration’s laissez faire defense spending policy.
Consider, if you will, the $22.9 billion we’re spending to rush as many as 20,000 mine-resistant ambush protection (MRAP) vehicles to the soldiers and Marines fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. This began in earnest only last year - too late for the troops who’ve been killed and wounded by improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
The MRAP is a huge, heavily armored truck that can carry a squad of troops, eight to 10 men, in relative safety. It’s not a fighting vehicle, just a deuce-and-a-half truck on steroids with a v-shaped bottom that deflects the force of a blast from a landmine or a buried IED around instead of through the vehicle.
Good idea. Where were they when then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was sending everyone to war in unarmored Humvees? Why wait five years, and then suddenly begin buying 20,000 of them? Why wait for American defense plants to produce an inferior version that costs more than $1 million each when Israel and South Africa are selling better designed MRAPs off the shelf for about a third of the price?
Then there’s the question of what the hell the Army and Marine Corps are going to do with 20,000 MRAPs cluttering up their motor pools when the Iraq war ends? These beasts can weigh as much as 40 tons. They can’t leave the road, and there are few bridges that can bear their weight. They can’t turn around on an average road. Their only defenses are their armor and a few small portholes through which soldiers can fire their rifles at targets they can’t see.
Are they better than the alternative, the $200,000 up-armored Humvee, which is a death trap when an IED goes off and is destroyed by its own weight in daily use? You bet they are.
But how many do we really need when the current U.S. strategy in Iraq is not to drive up and down roads and streets on “presence patrols” but to use dismounted troops patrolling on foot?
Congress hardly blinked when the Pentagon began shifting money from other programs last year to fund all-out production of the MRAPs. Why would they? Think of the jobs created in MRAP plants in South Carolina and Mississippi and dozens of other factories around the country that produce the parts and pieces that go into the vehicle.
MRAPs were a good idea five years ago when the Abominable No-Man Rumsfeld was running the Pentagon and telling soldiers to quit whining about armored vehicles because we go to war with the Army we have, not the Army we may want to have.
Today both Rumsfeld and the war have moved on, and the defense plants are humming 24/7 making a very expensive ride that’s likely to end up as tomorrow’s war surplus. Maybe we can sell them off by the pound.
Just think: The MRAP is one little $22 billion program in a trillion-dollar national security budget. How many more outdated, useless widgets are hidden in there like so many termites, eating up your money? How many worthwhile projects have been ignored, vetoed or scuttled to pay for expensive toys that don’t work, but will make big money for the military-industrial complex? (Hint: Think border fence.)
The next president might want to know the answer to that question when he takes off his overcoat and sits down in the Oval Office on the afternoon of January 20, 2009.
Joseph L. Galloway, a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, is the co-author, with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, of “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” a story of the first large-scale ground battle of the Vietnam War.
© 2008 McClatchy Newspapers
The Lies of War
by Thomas Moore
Nearly 4,000 American soldiers have died since the start of the Iraq War. As we read particulars about the lives of Americans who have died or been maimed in Iraq, the bleak comparison between a life lived fully and a life cut short, lost to a cause that was misrepresented and illegal from the outset, can only overwhelm us. This is especially poignant for Mainers since, as the Bangor Daily News pointed out in a recent article, Maine’s recruitment rate for the Iraq War ranks third in the nation.
One of the best World War I war poets, Wilfred Owen, spoke out during a similar debacle in his poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” In the poem, Owen recounts the horror of a soldier’s death by mustard gas, describing the “white eyes writhing in his face” and the blood “gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.” War is senseless and barbaric, Owen argues in the poem, and the romantic idea of dying gloriously for one’s country is founded on empty rhetoric. The poem concludes: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro Patria Mori.” “The old Lie” is a line from an ode by Horace, the Roman poet: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” Owen himself was killed in battle on Nov. 4, 1918, one week before the armistice.
Reread Owen’s poem. It should speak profoundly to American readers as we approach two appalling milestones: 4,000 Americans dead, five years of war. Granted, there are many among us who would willingly fight in a war that threatened our freedom and our way of life, but we are not in such a war. We were never threatened by Iraq, and Iraq had no part in the Sept. 11 attacks. The reasons for going to war were misrepresented and groundless. They were lies.
The deceptions and failures of the Bush-Cheney administration have placed young Americans in a war where lives are cut short and bodies maimed by IEDs, snipers and the myriad other dangers in a war zone. Our continued presence in Iraq perpetuates this havoc. The planning for the invasion was grossly inadequate in part because the administration showed disdain for the history of the Middle East. This, combined with revelations such as the Abu Ghraib humiliations and tortures, and more recently the cowboy tactics of the Blackwater mercenaries who are apparently subject to no rules at all, indicate a broad disregard for human life and human dignity. Those who have been humiliated seek revenge. They join terrorist groups.
The Islamic Middle East was my home for seven years. I taught Turks, Iranians, Kurds, Armenians, Baha’is, Jews and Azerbaijanis. I traveled through Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. I know these peoples a bit. They are like us. They want warm houses, good schools, jobs, hospitals - you can complete the list because it is your list as well - and they want peace.
They hate the condescension and arrogance of the Bush-Cheney administration’s foreign policy - the invasion, the bombings, the torturing, the surge, the mercenaries - but most do not hate Americans. They discern the difference between political arrogance and the wishes and needs of average citizens. All of us - Iraqis, Turks, Iranians and Americans - want to be able to live out our lives, to make our marks. Of course we “support our troops” as the ubiquitous ribbon counsels, but that does not mean we must support a broken government and the lies, old or new, that place our soldiers in harm’s way.
Thomas Moore of Brooksville is a retired Maine Maritime Academy professor.
© 2008 Bangor Daily News
Nearly 4,000 American soldiers have died since the start of the Iraq War. As we read particulars about the lives of Americans who have died or been maimed in Iraq, the bleak comparison between a life lived fully and a life cut short, lost to a cause that was misrepresented and illegal from the outset, can only overwhelm us. This is especially poignant for Mainers since, as the Bangor Daily News pointed out in a recent article, Maine’s recruitment rate for the Iraq War ranks third in the nation.
One of the best World War I war poets, Wilfred Owen, spoke out during a similar debacle in his poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” In the poem, Owen recounts the horror of a soldier’s death by mustard gas, describing the “white eyes writhing in his face” and the blood “gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.” War is senseless and barbaric, Owen argues in the poem, and the romantic idea of dying gloriously for one’s country is founded on empty rhetoric. The poem concludes: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro Patria Mori.” “The old Lie” is a line from an ode by Horace, the Roman poet: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” Owen himself was killed in battle on Nov. 4, 1918, one week before the armistice.
Reread Owen’s poem. It should speak profoundly to American readers as we approach two appalling milestones: 4,000 Americans dead, five years of war. Granted, there are many among us who would willingly fight in a war that threatened our freedom and our way of life, but we are not in such a war. We were never threatened by Iraq, and Iraq had no part in the Sept. 11 attacks. The reasons for going to war were misrepresented and groundless. They were lies.
The deceptions and failures of the Bush-Cheney administration have placed young Americans in a war where lives are cut short and bodies maimed by IEDs, snipers and the myriad other dangers in a war zone. Our continued presence in Iraq perpetuates this havoc. The planning for the invasion was grossly inadequate in part because the administration showed disdain for the history of the Middle East. This, combined with revelations such as the Abu Ghraib humiliations and tortures, and more recently the cowboy tactics of the Blackwater mercenaries who are apparently subject to no rules at all, indicate a broad disregard for human life and human dignity. Those who have been humiliated seek revenge. They join terrorist groups.
The Islamic Middle East was my home for seven years. I taught Turks, Iranians, Kurds, Armenians, Baha’is, Jews and Azerbaijanis. I traveled through Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. I know these peoples a bit. They are like us. They want warm houses, good schools, jobs, hospitals - you can complete the list because it is your list as well - and they want peace.
They hate the condescension and arrogance of the Bush-Cheney administration’s foreign policy - the invasion, the bombings, the torturing, the surge, the mercenaries - but most do not hate Americans. They discern the difference between political arrogance and the wishes and needs of average citizens. All of us - Iraqis, Turks, Iranians and Americans - want to be able to live out our lives, to make our marks. Of course we “support our troops” as the ubiquitous ribbon counsels, but that does not mean we must support a broken government and the lies, old or new, that place our soldiers in harm’s way.
Thomas Moore of Brooksville is a retired Maine Maritime Academy professor.
© 2008 Bangor Daily News
Monday, March 3, 2008
The Next War Will Pay for Itself
by Bill Huff
You may think it a strange statement at first – but there is little to no doubt that the next war will pay for itself. It is just as true that the present unlawful, undeclared wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will pay for themselves. War pays! That’s one reason it’s so damned popular.
The question is not whether wars pay for themselves. The bills of war get paid – All of the bills plus Interest and Penalties. In fact, the initial cost is only part of the picture. You can bet those who make it their profession to make big money on big wars will continue to get paid very well. In fact, we have a surplus of "patriotic" contractors in our own country who would give their right arm [not literally of course] to get the next big juicy contract to build and rebuild and rebuild the same infrastructure in Iraq. They seem to salivate over such things. Business is slow at home in their native land.
I doubt very much that they can be disturbed by ethical nuances. And who can blame them? They didn’t start the war. Their clients, customers and cronies did. Hopefully they will make enough to keep up their commitments for political contributions.
The long-term profits of war are Not Unintended Consequences!
If you make gunpowder, what sort of human activity increases your bottom line more than any other? Certainly not target practice in a nation that is questioning the wisdom of the Second Amendment. What about Cruise Missiles? Bombers? Bombs? Bullets? Battleships? Tanks? Prosthetic Limbs? Body Bags? Coffins? Memorials? Graveyards? Medals? The list goes on. It is precious little consolation to consider economy of scale regarding the manufacture of prosthetic limbs. But they are getting better.
Americans have bought the Party line that says war is good for the economy or that WWII got us out of the Great Depression. If you want to understand what is going on you should read The Broken Window by Frédéric Bastiat until you grasp the truth that prosperity is not created or sustained by fomenting chaos and destruction. It doesn’t work on the macro level or the micro level. Just try destroying all your own stuff and see how quickly you get rich.
War is the government sending our young people to run around other peoples’ neighborhoods breaking all their windows. The Vandals and their cousins the Visigoths were more candid about their intentions. But they were Barbarians. Our Window Breakers are "making the world safe for democracy." If Democracy were so good one would think it would be cheaper to promote.
Maybe there are some really good top-secret reasons for this war?
Please don’t make me laugh by calling me a "conspiracy nut/theorist." Does it make any difference to you if you are murdered by a conspiracy or a consensus? Very bad people get together and make very bad plans to do very bad things. Many of these plans are unlawful. Some are public. Some are secret. Some of them are very profitable. Some may even involve good intensions. Some result in wars between nations. The cognomen "conspiracy nut" is totally ragged by now. It is as profound as saying "only good people make good plans." The etymology of the word "conspiracy" speaks of "breathing together." Criminals in and out of government make plans together all the time. Get over it! Politicians do lots of heavy breathing together. And the reality is a thousand times worse than the conjured image you just experienced.
In War Is A Racket, Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC Retired, made some very serious and fully documented allegations. Even though he had received two [2] Congressional Medals of Honor, and diverse other decorations, he still didn’t completely lose his critical thinking skills – as often seems to be the case with retired generals. But "Old Gimlet Eye" got too close to his men and caught the disease of Empathy.
After WWI he began to investigate and carefully trace the money trail. His investigation eventually took him to veteran’s hospitals where he witnessed first hand the shattered bodies and minds of thousands of war veterans. General Butler shared their grief. He didn’t just give them some pretty medals. He also became keenly aware of the disgraceful way the government acted toward them once they had served their purpose. Many felt they had been used up and discarded as refuse. Later the true "compassion" of the government was displayed again in its reaction to the Bonus Army.
But we treat our veterans much better now right? Sure we do – what’s left of them.
I once asked a talk show host who was interviewing me: Do you know why we have Veteran’s Hospitals? She said, "Why is that?" I answered, "Because you can’t kill everybody in the war!" This is not to take anything away from those who are sincerely dedicated to easing the suffering of returning troops – only to point out that there are those among us who are willing to betray them more than once.
Recently a friend of mine with PTSD was qualified to receive disability payments after all his years of suffering since the Vietnam "police action." The high-ranking military doctors who interviewed him said they couldn’t believe he had made it until now without committing suicide or going on a killing spree [like so many others in their files]. He had been decorated for a Rambo-like episode where he escaped and returned to kill his captors while rescuing his comrades. In addition he had no idea of how many more Vietnamese he had dispatched during that tour of duty. There can be a heavy price to pay when you wake up from your delusions. His entire life has been ruined and wasted. How many more of these wretched souls will slip through the cracks to become ticking time bombs that our military hospitals will only be able to treat after something horrific and very preventable happens – and only if they are still alive?
In chapter three, Who Makes The Profits, you will see some familiar names among the companies who made money from the blood of WWI. Is that an unreasonable indictment to say they made money from blood? Read the chapter carefully and consider Butler’s careful documentation of the differential between pre-war and wartime profit margins for many of the major war profiteer companies. WWI certainly paid for itself in their minds. Some of those companies are still raking in dividends.
General Butler on secret profits for the bankers:
And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public – even before a Senate investigatory body.
Banking is such an exquisite craft. You can make money by lending money that costs you little to nothing, collecting interest from both sides. Then after the war you can side with the victor to extract more usury from the loser. Later you can forgive a small part of the remaining debt so you can look like Mr. Nice Guy. Then you repeat the process for as many wars as you can help stir up. And let’s not forget all the "growth" you can stimulate by funding reconstruction during the brief and tenuous peace.
Please! Tell me once again that I am a conspiracy nut! I would love to wake up from this macabre dream. I’m sure General Butler must have felt that way too. And what of a grieving parent when they discover that wars are usually planned and carried out for profits and power with little to no consideration of principles or patriotism? If our hearts truly go out to them we should be redoubling our efforts to find ways to break the cycle.
March 3, 2008
Bill Huff [send him mail] is a Classical Libertarian and proprietor of LEXREX.com and JamTheCulture.com; a former public school music teacher turned home schooling advocate; a US Navy veteran, and host of WarIsARacket.com. He is available as a guest lecturer or for interviews on talk radio.
Copyright © 2008 Bill Huff
You may think it a strange statement at first – but there is little to no doubt that the next war will pay for itself. It is just as true that the present unlawful, undeclared wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will pay for themselves. War pays! That’s one reason it’s so damned popular.
The question is not whether wars pay for themselves. The bills of war get paid – All of the bills plus Interest and Penalties. In fact, the initial cost is only part of the picture. You can bet those who make it their profession to make big money on big wars will continue to get paid very well. In fact, we have a surplus of "patriotic" contractors in our own country who would give their right arm [not literally of course] to get the next big juicy contract to build and rebuild and rebuild the same infrastructure in Iraq. They seem to salivate over such things. Business is slow at home in their native land.
I doubt very much that they can be disturbed by ethical nuances. And who can blame them? They didn’t start the war. Their clients, customers and cronies did. Hopefully they will make enough to keep up their commitments for political contributions.
The long-term profits of war are Not Unintended Consequences!
If you make gunpowder, what sort of human activity increases your bottom line more than any other? Certainly not target practice in a nation that is questioning the wisdom of the Second Amendment. What about Cruise Missiles? Bombers? Bombs? Bullets? Battleships? Tanks? Prosthetic Limbs? Body Bags? Coffins? Memorials? Graveyards? Medals? The list goes on. It is precious little consolation to consider economy of scale regarding the manufacture of prosthetic limbs. But they are getting better.
Americans have bought the Party line that says war is good for the economy or that WWII got us out of the Great Depression. If you want to understand what is going on you should read The Broken Window by Frédéric Bastiat until you grasp the truth that prosperity is not created or sustained by fomenting chaos and destruction. It doesn’t work on the macro level or the micro level. Just try destroying all your own stuff and see how quickly you get rich.
War is the government sending our young people to run around other peoples’ neighborhoods breaking all their windows. The Vandals and their cousins the Visigoths were more candid about their intentions. But they were Barbarians. Our Window Breakers are "making the world safe for democracy." If Democracy were so good one would think it would be cheaper to promote.
Maybe there are some really good top-secret reasons for this war?
Please don’t make me laugh by calling me a "conspiracy nut/theorist." Does it make any difference to you if you are murdered by a conspiracy or a consensus? Very bad people get together and make very bad plans to do very bad things. Many of these plans are unlawful. Some are public. Some are secret. Some of them are very profitable. Some may even involve good intensions. Some result in wars between nations. The cognomen "conspiracy nut" is totally ragged by now. It is as profound as saying "only good people make good plans." The etymology of the word "conspiracy" speaks of "breathing together." Criminals in and out of government make plans together all the time. Get over it! Politicians do lots of heavy breathing together. And the reality is a thousand times worse than the conjured image you just experienced.
In War Is A Racket, Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC Retired, made some very serious and fully documented allegations. Even though he had received two [2] Congressional Medals of Honor, and diverse other decorations, he still didn’t completely lose his critical thinking skills – as often seems to be the case with retired generals. But "Old Gimlet Eye" got too close to his men and caught the disease of Empathy.
After WWI he began to investigate and carefully trace the money trail. His investigation eventually took him to veteran’s hospitals where he witnessed first hand the shattered bodies and minds of thousands of war veterans. General Butler shared their grief. He didn’t just give them some pretty medals. He also became keenly aware of the disgraceful way the government acted toward them once they had served their purpose. Many felt they had been used up and discarded as refuse. Later the true "compassion" of the government was displayed again in its reaction to the Bonus Army.
But we treat our veterans much better now right? Sure we do – what’s left of them.
I once asked a talk show host who was interviewing me: Do you know why we have Veteran’s Hospitals? She said, "Why is that?" I answered, "Because you can’t kill everybody in the war!" This is not to take anything away from those who are sincerely dedicated to easing the suffering of returning troops – only to point out that there are those among us who are willing to betray them more than once.
Recently a friend of mine with PTSD was qualified to receive disability payments after all his years of suffering since the Vietnam "police action." The high-ranking military doctors who interviewed him said they couldn’t believe he had made it until now without committing suicide or going on a killing spree [like so many others in their files]. He had been decorated for a Rambo-like episode where he escaped and returned to kill his captors while rescuing his comrades. In addition he had no idea of how many more Vietnamese he had dispatched during that tour of duty. There can be a heavy price to pay when you wake up from your delusions. His entire life has been ruined and wasted. How many more of these wretched souls will slip through the cracks to become ticking time bombs that our military hospitals will only be able to treat after something horrific and very preventable happens – and only if they are still alive?
In chapter three, Who Makes The Profits, you will see some familiar names among the companies who made money from the blood of WWI. Is that an unreasonable indictment to say they made money from blood? Read the chapter carefully and consider Butler’s careful documentation of the differential between pre-war and wartime profit margins for many of the major war profiteer companies. WWI certainly paid for itself in their minds. Some of those companies are still raking in dividends.
General Butler on secret profits for the bankers:
And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public – even before a Senate investigatory body.
Banking is such an exquisite craft. You can make money by lending money that costs you little to nothing, collecting interest from both sides. Then after the war you can side with the victor to extract more usury from the loser. Later you can forgive a small part of the remaining debt so you can look like Mr. Nice Guy. Then you repeat the process for as many wars as you can help stir up. And let’s not forget all the "growth" you can stimulate by funding reconstruction during the brief and tenuous peace.
Please! Tell me once again that I am a conspiracy nut! I would love to wake up from this macabre dream. I’m sure General Butler must have felt that way too. And what of a grieving parent when they discover that wars are usually planned and carried out for profits and power with little to no consideration of principles or patriotism? If our hearts truly go out to them we should be redoubling our efforts to find ways to break the cycle.
March 3, 2008
Bill Huff [send him mail] is a Classical Libertarian and proprietor of LEXREX.com and JamTheCulture.com; a former public school music teacher turned home schooling advocate; a US Navy veteran, and host of WarIsARacket.com. He is available as a guest lecturer or for interviews on talk radio.
Copyright © 2008 Bill Huff
Sunday, March 2, 2008
George Bush Is Engaged in an Epic Battle to Cover His Ass
By Allan Uthman, Buffalo Beast
Something astonishing happened the other day in the House: The Democratic leadership found some courage. After over a year of demoralizing, often inexplicable capitulation, they actually gathered the fortitude to push back slightly against Republicans on so-called national security issues. The Republicans' response was swift: They took their ball and went home, after a brief stop at a prearranged press conference on the Capitol steps.
Two issues caused the dispute: One, in a stunning display of rudimentary oversight, the House issued contempt citations for two former Bush staffers, Harriet Meiers and Josh Bolten, who've been ducking House subpoenas for months now. This was predictably dismissed by weepy Minority Whip John Boehner as a "partisan fishing expedition," a boilerplate cliche if ever there was one.
The second issue, which the indignant Republicans preferred to discuss, for obvious reasons, was the House Democrats' refusal to cave on retroactive immunity for telecom companies, like AT&T and Sprint, for collaborating with the White House in spying on domestic internet and phone communications, which, to be clear, was tremendously illegal.
What's less encouraging, but interesting, is that the Democrats were ready to sign off on extending the repugnantly named Protect America Act, except for telecom immunity. To Bush, this made the bill dead on arrival. That's right; Bush promised to veto the bill if it reached his desk without a get out of jail free card for Comcast.
It's hard to line that up with the apocalyptic tenor of Bush's exhortations regarding the bill. If the warrantless domestic spying provisions of the Act were not renewed, Bush warned, Osama bin Laden would rain fire upon us all. But he was planning to veto them if they came to him without immunity. Naturally, this makes no fucking sense. Either Bush is willing to risk another 9/11 to embarrass the Democrats, or he's lying when it comes to the threat posed by having to get a FISA warrant -- retroactively, after the fact -- for domestic surveillance. I think he's lying, but I suppose it could be both.
It's interesting that these issues are what it takes to really outrage Republicans -- threaten huge corporate giants with lawsuits, or exercise congress's constitutional oversight powers. Of course, it's only natural that the Republicans would shudder at the prospect of effective investigations being conducted in the House. If the Democrats actually start following through on the legal options to compel testimony, it's only a matter of time before everyone's implicated. But telecom immunity?
Republicans are, of course, fundamentally pro-corporate, even more so than modern Democrats. But to go to bat this hard on behalf of an industry seems anomalous even for them. All a congressman usually has to do for his biennial bribe is vote in a corporation's interests, not engage in tantrum theatrics. There's more than pedestrian corruption at work here.
Of course, there is the terror issue, and in a most perilous election year, Republicans would like nothing more than to be able to run on the "Dems are sissies" platform. If they can keep people frightened and badly misinformed, they may manage to make telecom amnesty into a winning issue for them come November.
But to do that, they have to lie. A lot. They have to feign outrage, and actual concern for the wellbeing of their fellow Americans. They're doing their level best. To hear Republicans tell it, requiring a rubber-stamp warrant, after the fact, to spy on Americans is like mailing plutonium to Iran. Bush's spiel was grade A horseshit from start to finish:
"Because Congress failed to act, it will be harder for our government to keep you safe from terrorist attack. At midnight, the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence will be stripped of their power to authorize new surveillance against terrorist threats abroad. This means that as terrorists change their tactics to avoid our surveillance, we may not have the tools we need to continue tracking them--and we may lose a vital lead that could prevent an attack on America…. Instead, the House held partisan votes that do nothing to keep our country safer. House leaders chose politics over protecting the country--and our country is at greater risk as a result."
Then sign the bill without the telecom amnesty provision, and work on that part later. If it's nearly as vital as Bush says, he's providing aid and comfort to the enemy by not compromising, right?
"If the Protect America Act is allowed to expire, Americans will be at risk," echoed Boehner, despite having just voted against a three-week extension on the bill, like all his fellow Republicans in the House.
What the hell is going on here? When you compare the truths of this dispute with the rhetoric from the White House and its mouthpieces, there's really no other conclusion than that this country has gone fucking bonkers. Reality and public perception don't even share a zip code anymore. After years of constant, obvious lies, their ridiculousness compounded by countless revelations of their falsehood, Bush is still sticking with the same despicable, transparently manipulative bogeyman bullshit he started with. And like-minded jackasses in the media, like Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday, still have the inconceivable gall to say things like, "I think it's kind of unbelievable, frankly, that -- it's a judgment call, we don't know -- not to give the administration the benefit of the doubt."
The benefit of the doubt? A judgment call? Sorry Bill, but fuck you. Your judgment's been shit; your President's judgment's been shit, and both of you are documented liars. So forgive the hell out of the rest of us if there's no doubt to benefit from when it comes to whether the president is a fucking fraud. The entire administration is a fraud. Every department is a fraud, staffed by fraudulent people, hostile to its stated mission and intent on its nullification, by death or paralysis. There may never be proof, especially if Bush gets his way. But what thinking person can muster much doubt that the administration is listening not just for terrorist chatter, but to anyone they want -- political enemies, reporters, chicks they're into --whoever?
In 2006, after Andrea Mitchell asked New York Times reporter James Risen, who broke the domestic spying story, out of the blue, "You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?" Risen did not, but NBC scrubbed the question from its transcripts of the interview, later explaining that the story had been "released prematurely," that they had not "completed" their reporting. But they didn't call the allegation irresponsible, or speculative, or any other dismissive adjective they could have used. They essentially confirmed that they had reason to believe that Bush was secretly wiretapping a prominent CNN reporter.
And why the hell wouldn't he, after all? Without a reviewable record of warrants, it's not as if anyone can possibly find out -- unless somebody sues the telecoms, and specific, decidedly non-terrorist surveillance targets are identified in the ensuing discovery process. And that is why the Republicans are going apeshit over retroactive immunity, not just to protect the telecoms, but to cover their own asses. If it ever comes out that their secret, illegal domestic wiretaps were not targeting al Qaeda, but Al Gore, the jig is finally up. The entire "trust us, we're hunting terrorists" rationale, as thin as it always was, will lose any residual integrity, and the GOP may never recover. And they know it. And maybe, hopefully, the Democrats finally know it too.
Allan Uthman is the editor of the Buffalo Beast.
© 2008 Buffalo Beast All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/78032/
Something astonishing happened the other day in the House: The Democratic leadership found some courage. After over a year of demoralizing, often inexplicable capitulation, they actually gathered the fortitude to push back slightly against Republicans on so-called national security issues. The Republicans' response was swift: They took their ball and went home, after a brief stop at a prearranged press conference on the Capitol steps.
Two issues caused the dispute: One, in a stunning display of rudimentary oversight, the House issued contempt citations for two former Bush staffers, Harriet Meiers and Josh Bolten, who've been ducking House subpoenas for months now. This was predictably dismissed by weepy Minority Whip John Boehner as a "partisan fishing expedition," a boilerplate cliche if ever there was one.
The second issue, which the indignant Republicans preferred to discuss, for obvious reasons, was the House Democrats' refusal to cave on retroactive immunity for telecom companies, like AT&T and Sprint, for collaborating with the White House in spying on domestic internet and phone communications, which, to be clear, was tremendously illegal.
What's less encouraging, but interesting, is that the Democrats were ready to sign off on extending the repugnantly named Protect America Act, except for telecom immunity. To Bush, this made the bill dead on arrival. That's right; Bush promised to veto the bill if it reached his desk without a get out of jail free card for Comcast.
It's hard to line that up with the apocalyptic tenor of Bush's exhortations regarding the bill. If the warrantless domestic spying provisions of the Act were not renewed, Bush warned, Osama bin Laden would rain fire upon us all. But he was planning to veto them if they came to him without immunity. Naturally, this makes no fucking sense. Either Bush is willing to risk another 9/11 to embarrass the Democrats, or he's lying when it comes to the threat posed by having to get a FISA warrant -- retroactively, after the fact -- for domestic surveillance. I think he's lying, but I suppose it could be both.
It's interesting that these issues are what it takes to really outrage Republicans -- threaten huge corporate giants with lawsuits, or exercise congress's constitutional oversight powers. Of course, it's only natural that the Republicans would shudder at the prospect of effective investigations being conducted in the House. If the Democrats actually start following through on the legal options to compel testimony, it's only a matter of time before everyone's implicated. But telecom immunity?
Republicans are, of course, fundamentally pro-corporate, even more so than modern Democrats. But to go to bat this hard on behalf of an industry seems anomalous even for them. All a congressman usually has to do for his biennial bribe is vote in a corporation's interests, not engage in tantrum theatrics. There's more than pedestrian corruption at work here.
Of course, there is the terror issue, and in a most perilous election year, Republicans would like nothing more than to be able to run on the "Dems are sissies" platform. If they can keep people frightened and badly misinformed, they may manage to make telecom amnesty into a winning issue for them come November.
But to do that, they have to lie. A lot. They have to feign outrage, and actual concern for the wellbeing of their fellow Americans. They're doing their level best. To hear Republicans tell it, requiring a rubber-stamp warrant, after the fact, to spy on Americans is like mailing plutonium to Iran. Bush's spiel was grade A horseshit from start to finish:
"Because Congress failed to act, it will be harder for our government to keep you safe from terrorist attack. At midnight, the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence will be stripped of their power to authorize new surveillance against terrorist threats abroad. This means that as terrorists change their tactics to avoid our surveillance, we may not have the tools we need to continue tracking them--and we may lose a vital lead that could prevent an attack on America…. Instead, the House held partisan votes that do nothing to keep our country safer. House leaders chose politics over protecting the country--and our country is at greater risk as a result."
Then sign the bill without the telecom amnesty provision, and work on that part later. If it's nearly as vital as Bush says, he's providing aid and comfort to the enemy by not compromising, right?
"If the Protect America Act is allowed to expire, Americans will be at risk," echoed Boehner, despite having just voted against a three-week extension on the bill, like all his fellow Republicans in the House.
What the hell is going on here? When you compare the truths of this dispute with the rhetoric from the White House and its mouthpieces, there's really no other conclusion than that this country has gone fucking bonkers. Reality and public perception don't even share a zip code anymore. After years of constant, obvious lies, their ridiculousness compounded by countless revelations of their falsehood, Bush is still sticking with the same despicable, transparently manipulative bogeyman bullshit he started with. And like-minded jackasses in the media, like Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday, still have the inconceivable gall to say things like, "I think it's kind of unbelievable, frankly, that -- it's a judgment call, we don't know -- not to give the administration the benefit of the doubt."
The benefit of the doubt? A judgment call? Sorry Bill, but fuck you. Your judgment's been shit; your President's judgment's been shit, and both of you are documented liars. So forgive the hell out of the rest of us if there's no doubt to benefit from when it comes to whether the president is a fucking fraud. The entire administration is a fraud. Every department is a fraud, staffed by fraudulent people, hostile to its stated mission and intent on its nullification, by death or paralysis. There may never be proof, especially if Bush gets his way. But what thinking person can muster much doubt that the administration is listening not just for terrorist chatter, but to anyone they want -- political enemies, reporters, chicks they're into --whoever?
In 2006, after Andrea Mitchell asked New York Times reporter James Risen, who broke the domestic spying story, out of the blue, "You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?" Risen did not, but NBC scrubbed the question from its transcripts of the interview, later explaining that the story had been "released prematurely," that they had not "completed" their reporting. But they didn't call the allegation irresponsible, or speculative, or any other dismissive adjective they could have used. They essentially confirmed that they had reason to believe that Bush was secretly wiretapping a prominent CNN reporter.
And why the hell wouldn't he, after all? Without a reviewable record of warrants, it's not as if anyone can possibly find out -- unless somebody sues the telecoms, and specific, decidedly non-terrorist surveillance targets are identified in the ensuing discovery process. And that is why the Republicans are going apeshit over retroactive immunity, not just to protect the telecoms, but to cover their own asses. If it ever comes out that their secret, illegal domestic wiretaps were not targeting al Qaeda, but Al Gore, the jig is finally up. The entire "trust us, we're hunting terrorists" rationale, as thin as it always was, will lose any residual integrity, and the GOP may never recover. And they know it. And maybe, hopefully, the Democrats finally know it too.
Allan Uthman is the editor of the Buffalo Beast.
© 2008 Buffalo Beast All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/78032/
Saturday, March 1, 2008
War at Any Cost?
The Total Economic Cost of the War Beyond the Federal Budget
by Ron Paul
A Statement to the Joint Economic Committee, February 28, 2008
Mr. Chairman,
In recent months the undeclared war in Iraq seems not to have been on the minds of most Americans. News of the violence and deprivation which ordinary Iraqis are forced to deal with on a daily basis rarely makes it to the front pages. Instead, we read in the newspapers numerous slanted stories about the how the surge is succeeding and reducing violence. Never does anyone dare to discuss the costs of the war or its implications.
There are the direct costs of the war, the costs of maintaining bases, providing food, water, and supplies, which the administration vastly underestimated before embarking on their quest in Iraq. These costs run into the tens of billions of dollars per month, and I shudder to think what the total direct costs will add up to when we finally pull out.
Then there are the opportunity costs, those which decision makers in Washington almost never discuss. Imagine that the war in Iraq had never happened, and the hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent so far were still in the hands of taxpayers and businesses. How many jobs could have been created, how much money could have been saved, invested, and put to productive use?
Unfortunately, it appears too many policymakers in Washington still cling to the broken window fallacy, long since discredited by the 19th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat, that destruction is a good thing because jobs are created to rebuild what is destroyed. This pernicious fallacy is unfortunately widespread in our society today because those in positions of power and influence only recognize what is seen, and ignore what is unseen.
Running a deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars per year in order to fund our misadventure is unsustainable. Eventually those debts must be repaid, but this country is in such poor financial shape that when our creditors come knocking, we will have little with which to pay them. Our imperial system of military bases set up in protectorate states around the world is completely dependent on the continuing willingness of foreigners to finance our deficits. When the credit dries up we will find ourselves in a dire situation. Americans will suffer under a combination of confiscatory taxation, double-digit inflation, and the sale of massive amounts of land and capital goods to our foreign creditors.
The continuation of the war in Iraq will end in disaster for this country. Parallels between the Roman empire and our own are numerous, although our decline and fall will happen far quicker than that of Rome. The current financial crisis has awakened some to the perils that await us, but solutions that address the root of the problem and seek to fix it are nowhere to be found. There must be a sea change in the attitudes and thinking of Americans and their leaders. The welfare-warfare state must be abolished, respect for private property and individual liberties restored, and we must return to the limited-government ideals of our Founding Fathers. Any other course will doom our nation to the dustbin of history.
by Ron Paul
A Statement to the Joint Economic Committee, February 28, 2008
Mr. Chairman,
In recent months the undeclared war in Iraq seems not to have been on the minds of most Americans. News of the violence and deprivation which ordinary Iraqis are forced to deal with on a daily basis rarely makes it to the front pages. Instead, we read in the newspapers numerous slanted stories about the how the surge is succeeding and reducing violence. Never does anyone dare to discuss the costs of the war or its implications.
There are the direct costs of the war, the costs of maintaining bases, providing food, water, and supplies, which the administration vastly underestimated before embarking on their quest in Iraq. These costs run into the tens of billions of dollars per month, and I shudder to think what the total direct costs will add up to when we finally pull out.
Then there are the opportunity costs, those which decision makers in Washington almost never discuss. Imagine that the war in Iraq had never happened, and the hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent so far were still in the hands of taxpayers and businesses. How many jobs could have been created, how much money could have been saved, invested, and put to productive use?
Unfortunately, it appears too many policymakers in Washington still cling to the broken window fallacy, long since discredited by the 19th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat, that destruction is a good thing because jobs are created to rebuild what is destroyed. This pernicious fallacy is unfortunately widespread in our society today because those in positions of power and influence only recognize what is seen, and ignore what is unseen.
Running a deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars per year in order to fund our misadventure is unsustainable. Eventually those debts must be repaid, but this country is in such poor financial shape that when our creditors come knocking, we will have little with which to pay them. Our imperial system of military bases set up in protectorate states around the world is completely dependent on the continuing willingness of foreigners to finance our deficits. When the credit dries up we will find ourselves in a dire situation. Americans will suffer under a combination of confiscatory taxation, double-digit inflation, and the sale of massive amounts of land and capital goods to our foreign creditors.
The continuation of the war in Iraq will end in disaster for this country. Parallels between the Roman empire and our own are numerous, although our decline and fall will happen far quicker than that of Rome. The current financial crisis has awakened some to the perils that await us, but solutions that address the root of the problem and seek to fix it are nowhere to be found. There must be a sea change in the attitudes and thinking of Americans and their leaders. The welfare-warfare state must be abolished, respect for private property and individual liberties restored, and we must return to the limited-government ideals of our Founding Fathers. Any other course will doom our nation to the dustbin of history.
The True Cost Of War
By Aida Edemariam
29/02/08 "The Guardian" --- - Fitful spring sunshine is warming the neo-gothic limestone of the Houses of Parliament, and the knots of tourists wandering round them, but in a basement cafe on Millbank it is dark, and quiet, and Joseph Stiglitz is looking as though he hasn't had quite enough sleep. For two days non-stop he has been talking - at the LSE, at Chatham House, to television crews - and then he is flying to Washington to testify before Congress on the subject of his new book. Whatever their reservations - and there will be a few - representatives will have to listen, because not many authors with the authority of Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics, an academic tempered by four years on Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and another three as chief economist at the World Bank (during which time he developed an influential critique of globalisation), will have written a book that so urgently redefines the terms in which to view an ongoing conflict. The Three Trillion Dollar War reveals the extent to which its effects have been, and will be, felt by everyone, from Wall Street to the British high street, from Iraqi civilians to African small traders, for years to come.
Some time in 2005, Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, who also served as an economic adviser under Clinton, noted that the official Congressional Budget Office estimate for the cost of the war so far was of the order of $500bn. The figure was so low, they didn't believe it, and decided to investigate. The paper they wrote together, and published in January 2006, revised the figure sharply upwards, to between $1 and $2 trillion. Even that, Stiglitz says now, was deliberately conservative: "We didn't want to sound outlandish."
So what did the Republicans say? "They had two reactions," Stiglitz says wearily. "One was Bush saying, 'We don't go to war on the calculations of green eye-shaded accountants or economists.' And our response was, 'No, you don't decide to fight a response to Pearl Harbour on the basis of that, but when there's a war of choice, you at least use it to make sure your timing is right, that you've done the preparation. And you really ought to do the calculations to see if there are alternative ways that are more effective at getting your objectives. The second criticism - which we admit - was that we only look at the costs, not the benefits. Now, we couldn't see any benefits. From our point of view we weren't sure what those were."
Appetites whetted, Stiglitz and Bilmes dug deeper, and what they have discovered, after months of chasing often deliberately obscured accounts, is that in fact Bush's Iraqi adventure will cost America - just America - a conservatively estimated $3 trillion. The rest of the world, including Britain, will probably account for about the same amount again. And in doing so they have achieved something much greater than arriving at an unimaginable figure: by describing the process, by detailing individual costs, by soberly listing the consequences of short-sighted budget decisions, they have produced a picture of comprehensive obfuscation and bad faith whose power comes from its roots in bald fact. Some of their discoveries we have heard before, others we may have had a hunch about, but others are completely new - and together, placed in context, their impact is staggering. There will be few who do not think that whatever the reasons for going to war, its progression has been morally disquieting; following the money turns out to be a brilliant way of getting at exactly why that is.
Next month America will have been in Iraq for five years - longer than it spent in either world war. Daily military operations (not counting, for example, future care of wounded) have already cost more than 12 years in Vietnam, and twice as much as the Korean war. America is spending $16bn a month on running costs alone (ie on top of the regular expenses of the Department of Defence) in Iraq and Afghanistan; that is the entire annual budget of the UN. Large amounts of cash go missing - the well-publicised $8.8bn Development Fund for Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority, for example; and the less-publicised millions that fall between the cracks at the Department of Defence, which has failed every official audit of the past 10 years. The defence department's finances, based on an accounting system inaccurate for anything larger than a grocery store, are so inadequate, in fact, that often it is impossible to know exactly how much is being spent, or on what.
This is on top of misleading information: in January 2007 the administration estimated that the much-vaunted surge would cost $5.6bn. But this was only for combat troops, for four months - they didn't mention the 15,000-28,000 support troops who would also have to be paid for. Neither do official numbers count the cost of death payments, or caring for the wounded - even though the current ratio of wounded to dead, seven to one, is the highest in US history. Again, the Department of Defence is being secretive and misleading: official casualty records list only those wounded in combat. There is, note Stiglitz and Bilmes in their book, "a separate, hard-to-find tally of troops wounded during 'non-combat' operations" - helicopter crashes, training accidents, anyone who succumbs to disease (two-thirds of medical evacuees are victims of disease); those who aren't airlifted, ie are treated on the battlefield, simply aren't included. Stiglitz and Bilmes found this partial list accidentally; veterans' organisations had to use the Freedom of Information Act in order to get full figures (at which point the ratio of injuries to fatalities rises to 15 to one). The Department of Veterans Affairs, responsible for caring for these wounded, was operating, for the first few years of the war, on prewar budgets, and is ruinously overstretched; it is still clearing a backlog of claims from the Vietnam war. Many veterans have been forced to look for private care; even when the government pays for treatment and benefits, the burden of proof for eligibility is on the soldier, not on the government. The figure of $3 trillion includes what it will cost to pay death benefits, and to care for some of the worst-injured soldiers that army surgeons have ever seen, for the next 50 years.
By way of context, Stiglitz and Bilmes list what even one of these trillions could have paid for: 8 million housing units, or 15 million public school teachers, or healthcare for 530 million children for a year, or scholarships to university for 43 million students. Three trillion could have fixed America's social security problem for half a century. America, says Stiglitz, is currently spending $5bn a year in Africa, and worrying about being outflanked by China there: "Five billion is roughly 10 days' fighting, so you get a new metric of thinking about everything."
I ask what discoveries Stiglitz found the most disturbing. He laughs, somewhat mirthlessly. "There were actually so many things - some of it we suspected, but there were a few things I couldn't believe." The fact that a contractor working as a security guard gets about $400,000 a year, for example, as opposed to a soldier, who might get about $40,000. That there is a discrepancy we might have guessed - but not its sheer scale, or the fact that, because it is so hard to get insurance for working in Iraq, the government pays the premiums; or the fact that, if these contractors are injured or killed, the government pays both death and injury benefits on top. Understandably, this has forced a rise in sign-up bonuses (as has the fact that the army is so desperate for recruits that it is signing up convicted felons). "So we create a competition for ourselves. Nobody in their right mind would have done that. The Bush administration did that ... that I couldn't believe. And that's not included in the cost the government talks about."
Then there was the discovery that sign-up bonuses come with conditions: a soldier injured in the first month, for example, has to pay it back. Or the fact that "the troops, for understandable reasons, are made responsible for their equipment. You lose your helmet, you have to pay. If you get blown up and you lose your helmet, they still bill you." One soldier was sued for $12,000 even though he had suffered massive brain damage. Some families have had to buy their children body armour, saving the government costs in the short term; those too poor to afford it sustain injuries that the government then has to pay for. Then there's the fact that it was not until 2006, when Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defence, that the DOD agreed to replace Humvees with mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armoured vehicles, which are much more able to repel roadside bombs; until that time, IEDs killed 1,500 Americans. "This kind of penny-wise, pound-poor behaviour was just unbelievable."
Yet on another level, Stiglitz is unsurprised, because such decisions are of a piece with the thoroughgoing intellectual inconsistency of the Bush administration. The general approach, he says, has been a "pastiche of corporate bail-outs, corporate welfare, and free-market economics that is not based on any consistent set of ideas. And this particular kind of pastiche actually contributed to the failures in Iraq." There are the well-rehearsed reasons: ignoring international democratic processes while advocating democracy; pushing forward liberalisation before Iraq was ready. Stiglitz's twist on this was the emails he was receiving from the United States Agency for International Development, complaining about the Treasury being obstructive. "They were saying, 'Can you help us? Because we're trying to get businesses to work, but the US Treasury is trying to tighten credit, so there's no money in this country.' "
Then, of course, there is the administration's insistence on "sole-source bidding" - awarding vast, multi-year contracts to Halliburton, for example, instead of putting them out to tender. "An academic might say, 'How can you be a free market, yet demand single-source contracting?'" asks Stiglitz now, mildly - but this is not the way the current administration operates. We know quite a lot now about contractors' excesses, but it is their economic effect that Stiglitz and Bilmes are interested in, and this seems often to have been malign. Free market ideals had, of course, to apply to Iraq, if not to Halliburton (which received at least $19.3bn in single-source contracts), so Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, abolished many tariffs on imports, and capped corporate and income tax. Predictably, this led to general asset-stripping, and exposed Iraqi firms to free competition - meaning that many closed down, putting yet more people out of work. ("The benefits of privatisation and free markets in transition economies are debatable, of course," write Stiglitz and Bilmes in their book; a model of understatement, given that Stiglitz is famous for spelling out the harm sustained by poor countries in his book Globalisation and its Discontents (2002), and lost his job at the World Bank for outspokenly making the argument in the first place.) Many reconstruction jobs, in alignment with US procurement law, went to expensive American firms rather than cheaper Iraqi ones - a further waste of resources (one painting job, for example, cost $25m instead of $5m); these American firms, looking to keep their own costs down and profit margins high, imported cheap labour from such countries as Nepal - even though, at this point, one in two Iraqi men was out of work.
This is not, then, pure neocon ideology at work, says Stiglitz: "Ideology of convenience is a better description." It is an ideology illustrated even more clearly in another fact that Stiglitz can't believe - that Bush put through tax cuts while going to war. In Stiglitz and Bilmes's reading, this was downright underhand. Raising taxes, and resorting to the rhetoric of shared sacrifice used in the world wars, for example, would have made Americans more aware of exactly what the war was costing them, and would have provoked opposition sooner. The solution was to borrow the money, at interest of couple of hundred billion dollars a year, which, by 2017, will add up to another trillion dollars or so. This government will be gone in nine months; subsequent administrations, and generations, will have to pay it off.
At the same time, Stiglitz and Bilmes argue, the Federal Reserve colluded in this obfuscation, because it "kept interest rates lower than they otherwise might have been, and looked the other way as lending standards were lowered, thereby encouraging households to borrow more - and spend more." Alan Greenspan, by this account, encouraged people to take on variable-rate mortgages, even as household savings rates went negative for the first time since the Depression. Individuals were taking on unprecedented debt at the same time as a long housing bubble made them feel wealthy (and less concerned with derring-do abroad) - a scenario echoed on this side of the Atlantic.
As we now know, this couldn't continue - in part because of yet another effect of the war. Whatever the much argued reasons for bombing Baghdad, cheap oil has not been the result. In fact, the price of oil has climbed from $25 a barrel to $100 in the past five years - great for oil companies, and oil-producing countries, who, along with the contractors, are the only beneficiaries of this war, but not for anyone else. After calculations based on futures markets, Stiglitz and Bilmes conclude that a significant proportion of this rise is directly due to the disruptions and instabilities caused by Iraq. This price rise alone has cost the US, which imports about 5bn barrels a year, an extra $25bn per year; projecting to 2015 brings that number to an extra $1.6 trillion on oil alone (against which the recent $125bn stimulus package is simply, as Stiglitz puts it, "a drop in the bucket").
Higher oil prices have a direct effect on family, city and state budgets; they also led to a drop in GDP for the US. When interest rates finally rose in response, hundreds of thousands of home owners found that they were unable to keep up payments, triggering the toxic tsunami of defaulted mortgages that has put the US on the brink of recession and brought down Northern Rock - with all the ramifications for British home owners and banks that that has in turn entailed.
Thus, any idea that war is good for the economy, Stiglitz and Bilmes argue, is a myth. A persuasive myth, of course, and in specific cases, such as world war two, one that has seemed to be true - but in 1939, America and Europe were in a depression; there was all sorts of possible supply in the market, but people didn't have the cash to buy anything. Making armaments meant jobs, more people with more disposable income, and so on - but peacetime western economies these days operate near full employment. As Stiglitz and Bilmes put it, "Money spent on armaments is money poured down the drain"; far better to invest in education, infrastructure, research, health, and reap the rewards in the long term. But any idea that war can be divorced from the economy is also naive. "A lot of people didn't expect the economy to take over the war as the major issue [in the American election]," says Stiglitz, "because people did not expect the economy to be as weak as it is. I sort of did. So one of the points of this book is that we don't have two issues in this campaign - we have one issue. Or at least, the two are very, very closely linked together."
And it is the world economy that is at stake, not just America's. The trillions the rest of the world has shouldered include, of course, the smashed Iraqi economy, the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead, the price, to neighbouring countries, of absorbing thousands of refugees, the coalition dead and wounded (before the war Gordon Brown set aside £1bn; as of late 2007, direct operating costs in Iraq and Afghanistan were £7bn and rising). But the rising price of oil has also meant, accoring to Stiglitz and Bilmes, that the cost to oil-importing industrial countries in Europe and the Far East is now about $1.1 trillion. And to developing countries it has been devastating: they note a study by the International Energy Agency that looked at a sample of 13 African countries and found that rising oil prices have "had the effect of lowering the average income by 3% - more than offsetting all of the increase in foreign aid that they had received in recent years, and setting the stage for another crisis in these countries". Stiglitz made his name by, among other things, criticising America's use of globalisation as a bully pulpit; now he says flatly, "Yes, that's part of being in a global economy. You make a mistake of this order, and it affects people all over the world."
And the borrowed trillions have to come from somewhere. Because "the saving rate [in America] is zero," says Stiglitz, "that means that you have to finance [the war] by borrowing abroad. So China is financing America's war." The US is now operating at such a deficit, in fact, that it doesn't have the money to bail out its own banks. "When Merrill Lynch and Citibank had a problem, it was sovereign funds from abroad that bailed them out. And we had to give up a lot of shares of our ownership. So the largest shareowners in Citibank now are in the Middle East. It should be called the MidEast bank, not the Citibank." This creates a precedent of dependence, "and whether we become dependent on Middle East oil money, or Chinese reserves - it's that dependency that people ought to worry about. That is a big change. The amount of borrowing in the last eight years, on top of the borrowing that began with Reagan - that has all changed the US's economic position in the world."
So quite apart from the war, does he think a particular kind of unfettered market has had its day? "Yes. I think that anybody who believes that the banks know what they're doing has to have their head examined. Clearly, unfettered markets have led us to this economic downturn, and to enormous social problems." Combined with the war, whoever inherits the White House faces a crisis of epic proportions. Where do they go from here? "The way that shapes the debate," says Stiglitz, "is that Americans have to say, 'Even if we stay for another two years, just two years, and we're spending $12bn a month up front in Iraq, and it's costing us another 50% in healthcare, disability, bringing it up to $18bn a month in Iraq, and you look at that in another 24 months, we're talking about half a trillion dollars more for two years - forgetting about the economic cost, the ancillary costs, the social costs - just looking at the budgetary cost - not including the interest - you have to say, is this the way we want to spend a half a trillion dollars? Will it make America stronger? Will it make the Middle East safer? Is this the way we want to spend it?"
Far better, he suggests, to leave rapidly and in a dignified manner, and to spend some of it on helping Iraqis reconstruct their own country - and the rest on investing in and strengthening the American economy, so that it can retain its independence, and have the wherewithal, at least, to play a responsible role in the world. The book ends with a list of 18 specific reforms arising from Stiglitz and Bilmes's discoveries, focusing on exactly how to fund and run a war from now on (depend not on emergency funds and borrowing but on surtaxes, for example, so that voters know exactly what it is they are paying for, and can vote accordingly). He has been approached by Barack Obama as a possible adviser should he reach the White House, although he says, "I've gone beyond the age where I would want to be in Washington full time. I would be interested in trying to help shape the bigger picture issues, and in particular the issues associated with America positioning itself in the new global world, and re-establishing the bonds with other countries that have been so damaged by the Bush administration."
I suggest, as devil's advocate, that to count costs in the way he has, and to advise retrenchment, might be seen as encouraging America to return to isolationism. "No. I think that's fundamentally wrong. The problem with Iraq was that it was the wrong war, and the wrong set of issues. Obama was very good about this. He said, 'I'm not against war - I'm just against stupid wars.' And I feel very much the same way. While we were worried about WMD that did not exist in Iraq, WMD did occur in North Korea. To use an American expression, we took our eye off the ball. And while we were fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan got worse, Pakistan got worse. So because we were fighting battles that we couldn't win, we lost battles that we could have." To discover that those lost battles included better healthcare for millions of Americans, a robust world economy, a healthier and more independent Africa, and a more stable Middle East, seems worth a bit of green-eye-shaded number crunching.
In figures
$16bn
The amount the US spends on the monthly running costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - on top of regular defence spending
$138
The amount paid by every US household every month towards the current operating costs of the war
$19.3bn
The amount Halliburton has received in single-source contracts for work in Iraq
$25bn
The annual cost to the US of the rising price of oil, itself a consequence of the war
$3 trillion
A conservative estimate of the true cost - to America alone - of Bush's Iraq adventure. The rest of the world, including Britain, will shoulder about the same amount again
$5bn
Cost of 10 days' fighting in Iraq
$1 trillion
The interest America will have paid by 2017 on the money borrowed to finance the war
3%
The average drop in income of 13 African countries - a direct result of the rise in oil prices. This drop has more than offset the recent increase in foreign aid to Africa
The Three Trillion Dollar War, by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, is published by Allen Lane, price £20. To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
29/02/08 "The Guardian" --- - Fitful spring sunshine is warming the neo-gothic limestone of the Houses of Parliament, and the knots of tourists wandering round them, but in a basement cafe on Millbank it is dark, and quiet, and Joseph Stiglitz is looking as though he hasn't had quite enough sleep. For two days non-stop he has been talking - at the LSE, at Chatham House, to television crews - and then he is flying to Washington to testify before Congress on the subject of his new book. Whatever their reservations - and there will be a few - representatives will have to listen, because not many authors with the authority of Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics, an academic tempered by four years on Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and another three as chief economist at the World Bank (during which time he developed an influential critique of globalisation), will have written a book that so urgently redefines the terms in which to view an ongoing conflict. The Three Trillion Dollar War reveals the extent to which its effects have been, and will be, felt by everyone, from Wall Street to the British high street, from Iraqi civilians to African small traders, for years to come.
Some time in 2005, Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, who also served as an economic adviser under Clinton, noted that the official Congressional Budget Office estimate for the cost of the war so far was of the order of $500bn. The figure was so low, they didn't believe it, and decided to investigate. The paper they wrote together, and published in January 2006, revised the figure sharply upwards, to between $1 and $2 trillion. Even that, Stiglitz says now, was deliberately conservative: "We didn't want to sound outlandish."
So what did the Republicans say? "They had two reactions," Stiglitz says wearily. "One was Bush saying, 'We don't go to war on the calculations of green eye-shaded accountants or economists.' And our response was, 'No, you don't decide to fight a response to Pearl Harbour on the basis of that, but when there's a war of choice, you at least use it to make sure your timing is right, that you've done the preparation. And you really ought to do the calculations to see if there are alternative ways that are more effective at getting your objectives. The second criticism - which we admit - was that we only look at the costs, not the benefits. Now, we couldn't see any benefits. From our point of view we weren't sure what those were."
Appetites whetted, Stiglitz and Bilmes dug deeper, and what they have discovered, after months of chasing often deliberately obscured accounts, is that in fact Bush's Iraqi adventure will cost America - just America - a conservatively estimated $3 trillion. The rest of the world, including Britain, will probably account for about the same amount again. And in doing so they have achieved something much greater than arriving at an unimaginable figure: by describing the process, by detailing individual costs, by soberly listing the consequences of short-sighted budget decisions, they have produced a picture of comprehensive obfuscation and bad faith whose power comes from its roots in bald fact. Some of their discoveries we have heard before, others we may have had a hunch about, but others are completely new - and together, placed in context, their impact is staggering. There will be few who do not think that whatever the reasons for going to war, its progression has been morally disquieting; following the money turns out to be a brilliant way of getting at exactly why that is.
Next month America will have been in Iraq for five years - longer than it spent in either world war. Daily military operations (not counting, for example, future care of wounded) have already cost more than 12 years in Vietnam, and twice as much as the Korean war. America is spending $16bn a month on running costs alone (ie on top of the regular expenses of the Department of Defence) in Iraq and Afghanistan; that is the entire annual budget of the UN. Large amounts of cash go missing - the well-publicised $8.8bn Development Fund for Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority, for example; and the less-publicised millions that fall between the cracks at the Department of Defence, which has failed every official audit of the past 10 years. The defence department's finances, based on an accounting system inaccurate for anything larger than a grocery store, are so inadequate, in fact, that often it is impossible to know exactly how much is being spent, or on what.
This is on top of misleading information: in January 2007 the administration estimated that the much-vaunted surge would cost $5.6bn. But this was only for combat troops, for four months - they didn't mention the 15,000-28,000 support troops who would also have to be paid for. Neither do official numbers count the cost of death payments, or caring for the wounded - even though the current ratio of wounded to dead, seven to one, is the highest in US history. Again, the Department of Defence is being secretive and misleading: official casualty records list only those wounded in combat. There is, note Stiglitz and Bilmes in their book, "a separate, hard-to-find tally of troops wounded during 'non-combat' operations" - helicopter crashes, training accidents, anyone who succumbs to disease (two-thirds of medical evacuees are victims of disease); those who aren't airlifted, ie are treated on the battlefield, simply aren't included. Stiglitz and Bilmes found this partial list accidentally; veterans' organisations had to use the Freedom of Information Act in order to get full figures (at which point the ratio of injuries to fatalities rises to 15 to one). The Department of Veterans Affairs, responsible for caring for these wounded, was operating, for the first few years of the war, on prewar budgets, and is ruinously overstretched; it is still clearing a backlog of claims from the Vietnam war. Many veterans have been forced to look for private care; even when the government pays for treatment and benefits, the burden of proof for eligibility is on the soldier, not on the government. The figure of $3 trillion includes what it will cost to pay death benefits, and to care for some of the worst-injured soldiers that army surgeons have ever seen, for the next 50 years.
By way of context, Stiglitz and Bilmes list what even one of these trillions could have paid for: 8 million housing units, or 15 million public school teachers, or healthcare for 530 million children for a year, or scholarships to university for 43 million students. Three trillion could have fixed America's social security problem for half a century. America, says Stiglitz, is currently spending $5bn a year in Africa, and worrying about being outflanked by China there: "Five billion is roughly 10 days' fighting, so you get a new metric of thinking about everything."
I ask what discoveries Stiglitz found the most disturbing. He laughs, somewhat mirthlessly. "There were actually so many things - some of it we suspected, but there were a few things I couldn't believe." The fact that a contractor working as a security guard gets about $400,000 a year, for example, as opposed to a soldier, who might get about $40,000. That there is a discrepancy we might have guessed - but not its sheer scale, or the fact that, because it is so hard to get insurance for working in Iraq, the government pays the premiums; or the fact that, if these contractors are injured or killed, the government pays both death and injury benefits on top. Understandably, this has forced a rise in sign-up bonuses (as has the fact that the army is so desperate for recruits that it is signing up convicted felons). "So we create a competition for ourselves. Nobody in their right mind would have done that. The Bush administration did that ... that I couldn't believe. And that's not included in the cost the government talks about."
Then there was the discovery that sign-up bonuses come with conditions: a soldier injured in the first month, for example, has to pay it back. Or the fact that "the troops, for understandable reasons, are made responsible for their equipment. You lose your helmet, you have to pay. If you get blown up and you lose your helmet, they still bill you." One soldier was sued for $12,000 even though he had suffered massive brain damage. Some families have had to buy their children body armour, saving the government costs in the short term; those too poor to afford it sustain injuries that the government then has to pay for. Then there's the fact that it was not until 2006, when Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defence, that the DOD agreed to replace Humvees with mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armoured vehicles, which are much more able to repel roadside bombs; until that time, IEDs killed 1,500 Americans. "This kind of penny-wise, pound-poor behaviour was just unbelievable."
Yet on another level, Stiglitz is unsurprised, because such decisions are of a piece with the thoroughgoing intellectual inconsistency of the Bush administration. The general approach, he says, has been a "pastiche of corporate bail-outs, corporate welfare, and free-market economics that is not based on any consistent set of ideas. And this particular kind of pastiche actually contributed to the failures in Iraq." There are the well-rehearsed reasons: ignoring international democratic processes while advocating democracy; pushing forward liberalisation before Iraq was ready. Stiglitz's twist on this was the emails he was receiving from the United States Agency for International Development, complaining about the Treasury being obstructive. "They were saying, 'Can you help us? Because we're trying to get businesses to work, but the US Treasury is trying to tighten credit, so there's no money in this country.' "
Then, of course, there is the administration's insistence on "sole-source bidding" - awarding vast, multi-year contracts to Halliburton, for example, instead of putting them out to tender. "An academic might say, 'How can you be a free market, yet demand single-source contracting?'" asks Stiglitz now, mildly - but this is not the way the current administration operates. We know quite a lot now about contractors' excesses, but it is their economic effect that Stiglitz and Bilmes are interested in, and this seems often to have been malign. Free market ideals had, of course, to apply to Iraq, if not to Halliburton (which received at least $19.3bn in single-source contracts), so Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, abolished many tariffs on imports, and capped corporate and income tax. Predictably, this led to general asset-stripping, and exposed Iraqi firms to free competition - meaning that many closed down, putting yet more people out of work. ("The benefits of privatisation and free markets in transition economies are debatable, of course," write Stiglitz and Bilmes in their book; a model of understatement, given that Stiglitz is famous for spelling out the harm sustained by poor countries in his book Globalisation and its Discontents (2002), and lost his job at the World Bank for outspokenly making the argument in the first place.) Many reconstruction jobs, in alignment with US procurement law, went to expensive American firms rather than cheaper Iraqi ones - a further waste of resources (one painting job, for example, cost $25m instead of $5m); these American firms, looking to keep their own costs down and profit margins high, imported cheap labour from such countries as Nepal - even though, at this point, one in two Iraqi men was out of work.
This is not, then, pure neocon ideology at work, says Stiglitz: "Ideology of convenience is a better description." It is an ideology illustrated even more clearly in another fact that Stiglitz can't believe - that Bush put through tax cuts while going to war. In Stiglitz and Bilmes's reading, this was downright underhand. Raising taxes, and resorting to the rhetoric of shared sacrifice used in the world wars, for example, would have made Americans more aware of exactly what the war was costing them, and would have provoked opposition sooner. The solution was to borrow the money, at interest of couple of hundred billion dollars a year, which, by 2017, will add up to another trillion dollars or so. This government will be gone in nine months; subsequent administrations, and generations, will have to pay it off.
At the same time, Stiglitz and Bilmes argue, the Federal Reserve colluded in this obfuscation, because it "kept interest rates lower than they otherwise might have been, and looked the other way as lending standards were lowered, thereby encouraging households to borrow more - and spend more." Alan Greenspan, by this account, encouraged people to take on variable-rate mortgages, even as household savings rates went negative for the first time since the Depression. Individuals were taking on unprecedented debt at the same time as a long housing bubble made them feel wealthy (and less concerned with derring-do abroad) - a scenario echoed on this side of the Atlantic.
As we now know, this couldn't continue - in part because of yet another effect of the war. Whatever the much argued reasons for bombing Baghdad, cheap oil has not been the result. In fact, the price of oil has climbed from $25 a barrel to $100 in the past five years - great for oil companies, and oil-producing countries, who, along with the contractors, are the only beneficiaries of this war, but not for anyone else. After calculations based on futures markets, Stiglitz and Bilmes conclude that a significant proportion of this rise is directly due to the disruptions and instabilities caused by Iraq. This price rise alone has cost the US, which imports about 5bn barrels a year, an extra $25bn per year; projecting to 2015 brings that number to an extra $1.6 trillion on oil alone (against which the recent $125bn stimulus package is simply, as Stiglitz puts it, "a drop in the bucket").
Higher oil prices have a direct effect on family, city and state budgets; they also led to a drop in GDP for the US. When interest rates finally rose in response, hundreds of thousands of home owners found that they were unable to keep up payments, triggering the toxic tsunami of defaulted mortgages that has put the US on the brink of recession and brought down Northern Rock - with all the ramifications for British home owners and banks that that has in turn entailed.
Thus, any idea that war is good for the economy, Stiglitz and Bilmes argue, is a myth. A persuasive myth, of course, and in specific cases, such as world war two, one that has seemed to be true - but in 1939, America and Europe were in a depression; there was all sorts of possible supply in the market, but people didn't have the cash to buy anything. Making armaments meant jobs, more people with more disposable income, and so on - but peacetime western economies these days operate near full employment. As Stiglitz and Bilmes put it, "Money spent on armaments is money poured down the drain"; far better to invest in education, infrastructure, research, health, and reap the rewards in the long term. But any idea that war can be divorced from the economy is also naive. "A lot of people didn't expect the economy to take over the war as the major issue [in the American election]," says Stiglitz, "because people did not expect the economy to be as weak as it is. I sort of did. So one of the points of this book is that we don't have two issues in this campaign - we have one issue. Or at least, the two are very, very closely linked together."
And it is the world economy that is at stake, not just America's. The trillions the rest of the world has shouldered include, of course, the smashed Iraqi economy, the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead, the price, to neighbouring countries, of absorbing thousands of refugees, the coalition dead and wounded (before the war Gordon Brown set aside £1bn; as of late 2007, direct operating costs in Iraq and Afghanistan were £7bn and rising). But the rising price of oil has also meant, accoring to Stiglitz and Bilmes, that the cost to oil-importing industrial countries in Europe and the Far East is now about $1.1 trillion. And to developing countries it has been devastating: they note a study by the International Energy Agency that looked at a sample of 13 African countries and found that rising oil prices have "had the effect of lowering the average income by 3% - more than offsetting all of the increase in foreign aid that they had received in recent years, and setting the stage for another crisis in these countries". Stiglitz made his name by, among other things, criticising America's use of globalisation as a bully pulpit; now he says flatly, "Yes, that's part of being in a global economy. You make a mistake of this order, and it affects people all over the world."
And the borrowed trillions have to come from somewhere. Because "the saving rate [in America] is zero," says Stiglitz, "that means that you have to finance [the war] by borrowing abroad. So China is financing America's war." The US is now operating at such a deficit, in fact, that it doesn't have the money to bail out its own banks. "When Merrill Lynch and Citibank had a problem, it was sovereign funds from abroad that bailed them out. And we had to give up a lot of shares of our ownership. So the largest shareowners in Citibank now are in the Middle East. It should be called the MidEast bank, not the Citibank." This creates a precedent of dependence, "and whether we become dependent on Middle East oil money, or Chinese reserves - it's that dependency that people ought to worry about. That is a big change. The amount of borrowing in the last eight years, on top of the borrowing that began with Reagan - that has all changed the US's economic position in the world."
So quite apart from the war, does he think a particular kind of unfettered market has had its day? "Yes. I think that anybody who believes that the banks know what they're doing has to have their head examined. Clearly, unfettered markets have led us to this economic downturn, and to enormous social problems." Combined with the war, whoever inherits the White House faces a crisis of epic proportions. Where do they go from here? "The way that shapes the debate," says Stiglitz, "is that Americans have to say, 'Even if we stay for another two years, just two years, and we're spending $12bn a month up front in Iraq, and it's costing us another 50% in healthcare, disability, bringing it up to $18bn a month in Iraq, and you look at that in another 24 months, we're talking about half a trillion dollars more for two years - forgetting about the economic cost, the ancillary costs, the social costs - just looking at the budgetary cost - not including the interest - you have to say, is this the way we want to spend a half a trillion dollars? Will it make America stronger? Will it make the Middle East safer? Is this the way we want to spend it?"
Far better, he suggests, to leave rapidly and in a dignified manner, and to spend some of it on helping Iraqis reconstruct their own country - and the rest on investing in and strengthening the American economy, so that it can retain its independence, and have the wherewithal, at least, to play a responsible role in the world. The book ends with a list of 18 specific reforms arising from Stiglitz and Bilmes's discoveries, focusing on exactly how to fund and run a war from now on (depend not on emergency funds and borrowing but on surtaxes, for example, so that voters know exactly what it is they are paying for, and can vote accordingly). He has been approached by Barack Obama as a possible adviser should he reach the White House, although he says, "I've gone beyond the age where I would want to be in Washington full time. I would be interested in trying to help shape the bigger picture issues, and in particular the issues associated with America positioning itself in the new global world, and re-establishing the bonds with other countries that have been so damaged by the Bush administration."
I suggest, as devil's advocate, that to count costs in the way he has, and to advise retrenchment, might be seen as encouraging America to return to isolationism. "No. I think that's fundamentally wrong. The problem with Iraq was that it was the wrong war, and the wrong set of issues. Obama was very good about this. He said, 'I'm not against war - I'm just against stupid wars.' And I feel very much the same way. While we were worried about WMD that did not exist in Iraq, WMD did occur in North Korea. To use an American expression, we took our eye off the ball. And while we were fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan got worse, Pakistan got worse. So because we were fighting battles that we couldn't win, we lost battles that we could have." To discover that those lost battles included better healthcare for millions of Americans, a robust world economy, a healthier and more independent Africa, and a more stable Middle East, seems worth a bit of green-eye-shaded number crunching.
In figures
$16bn
The amount the US spends on the monthly running costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - on top of regular defence spending
$138
The amount paid by every US household every month towards the current operating costs of the war
$19.3bn
The amount Halliburton has received in single-source contracts for work in Iraq
$25bn
The annual cost to the US of the rising price of oil, itself a consequence of the war
$3 trillion
A conservative estimate of the true cost - to America alone - of Bush's Iraq adventure. The rest of the world, including Britain, will shoulder about the same amount again
$5bn
Cost of 10 days' fighting in Iraq
$1 trillion
The interest America will have paid by 2017 on the money borrowed to finance the war
3%
The average drop in income of 13 African countries - a direct result of the rise in oil prices. This drop has more than offset the recent increase in foreign aid to Africa
The Three Trillion Dollar War, by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, is published by Allen Lane, price £20. To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
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