corruption, oil, iraq:
Rumors are rife among suspicious Iraqis about the failure to measure the oil flow. "Iraq is the victim of the biggest robbery of its oil production in modern history," blazed a March 2006 headline in Azzaman, Iraq's most widely read newspaper. A May 2006 study of oil production and export figures by Platt's Oilgram News, an industry magazine, showed that up to $3 billion a year is unaccounted for.
(...) "Iraqi oil is regularly smuggled out of the country in many different ways," an oil merchant in Amman told the Nation (U.S.) magazine last month. "Emir al-Hakim [the head of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq] is spending all his time in Basra selling oil as if it were his own. People there call him Uday al-Hakim, meaning he is behaving the same way Uday Saddam Hussein was acting. Other merchants like myself have to work through him with the big deals or smuggle small quantities on our own. The petroleum is now divided among political parties in power."
(...) Saddam was accused of selling some $5.7 billion worth of petroleum products on the black market over the six years of the Oil-for-Food program while United Nations inspectors turned a blind eye. Today, his successors stand accused of similar abuses.
(...) Iraq sits on 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the third largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia and Canada). From a society that once used its oil revenue to create a social welfare state that provided education, health care and social services, the country has plummeted into the ranks of the poorest countries of the world.
(...) Almost four years after the DFI was created, officially logged crude sales have generated more than $80 billion. The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) managed the DFI from the immediate aftermath of Saddam's removal until June 28, 2004, when the CPA was disbanded. During those 14 months, the CPA spent $19.6 billion of Iraq's DFI funds. The three succeeding governments have been officially in charge of the DFI revenues, although the influence of the U.S. military and political advisors has remained significant throughout. In the 32 months after the CPA left, the three governments spent $47 billion more.
(...) In January 2004, under project Restore Iraqi Oil II (RIO II), the Bush administration contracted with Halliburton to fix southern Iraq's oil fields and with Parsons to handle the northern fields. The two companies were supposed to be supervised by yet another contractor, New Jersey-based Foster Wheeler. (The first RIO contract was the infamous, secret no-bid contract issued to Halliburton before the invasion of Iraq. Although RIO II was competitively bid, Sheryl Tappan, a former Bechtel employee wrote a book criticizing the award as unfair.)
(...) Halliburton and Parsons have long histories in Iraq, going back more than 40 years. Brown & Root, which is now part of Halliburton , began work in Iraq in 1961, while Parsons dipped into Iraq's oil sector in the 1950s. Foster Wheeler dates its work in Iraq to the 1930s.
(...) Neither US officials nor contractors have provided good reasons why, four years into the US occupation, the meters have not been calibrated, repaired, or replaced. One excuse is that the job of calibration requires special devices to assess the current meters and security issues make importing these devises problematic. Yet that and other security-related explanations fall apart given that the oil terminals are under 24 hour high security guard, lie more than 50 miles off-shore, and are accessible only by helicopter or ship.
(...) There are two possible explanations: that the project has been delayed by bureaucracy or that vested interests benefiting from the lack of oil metering (such as smugglers or corrupt officials) have prevented the project from moving forward.
(...) But despite not starting work until November 2004, the company charged the government millions of dollars for engineers who sat idle. Halliburton 's $296 million bill included at least 55 percent overhead. (In an estimate due later this month, SIGIR may predicts even higher overhead costs.)
(...) A Parsons joint venture (with Worley of Australia), was also issued a contract in January 2004, given detailed task orders in June, and started work in July 2004. It has also been accused of charging high overhead costs while idle, although not as much as Halliburton . SIGIR estimate pegs its overhead at 43 percent.

ujp on the democrats bill:
The anticipated veto of the Iraq war funding bill demonstrates the extent of White House extremism. Bush is not rejecting a "bring all the troops home and end the war" bill but rather rejecting a compromise bill that would provide $100 billion to continue the war, would set only a "goal" of removing some troops by March 2008, would allow 60-80,000 troops to remain indefinitely, would not restrict a U.S. attack on Iran, would allow the 100,000+ U.S.-paid mercenaries in Iraq to continue with only insignificant restrictions, would require Iraq to accept a new oil bill, and would allow Bush to ignore suggested requirements for adequate training, equipping and rest of U.S. troops.
(...) More significantly, like the earlier draft the bill exempts from the "redeployment" four categories of troops which together could constitute up to 60,000-80,000 troops. They include training, counter-terrorism, and protection of U.S. diplomatic positions (such as the huge Green Zone) and personnel. It allows maintaining the over 100,000 mercenaries who back up U.S. troops in Iraq, calling only for 15% of the U.S. funding for mercenaries to be made contingent on certain benchmarks being met. Like the earlier bill it takes no steps to restrict the president's ability to attack Iran, and demands that the Iraqi government pass a new oil bill. (The oil bill under parliamentary consideration would not simply divide Iraq's oil wealth, the feature U.S. officials and media like to point to, but would privatize control of a huge proportion of Iraq's oil industry and resources in the hands of private international oil companies, with special privileged access likely for U.S. companies.) And like the earlier drafts it would allow Bush to simply announce his intention to ignore the Pentagon's own requirements regarding providing troops with adequate training, equipment, and rest between deployments.
(...) Congressmembers are not afraid that an end to funding, and thus an end to the war, will actually hurt the troops, but they are very much afraid of newspaper headlines and Sunday talk show hosts accusing them of abandoning the troops. There is a better chance that Congress could overcome its fear and thus make feasible this seemingly impossible scenario if the peace movement, speaking with and for the antiwar majority of the American people, maintains absolute clarity on our core demand to end ALL funding for the war. That includes opposition to all funding for the war regardless of rhetorical restrictions. Of course a decision to authorize $50 billion would be much less damaging than one authorizing $100 billion; but that does not mean we should support a bill authorizing $50 billion. Rather, our continued principled opposition to ANY funding for waging an illegal war will provide the best support to those in Congress who might be considering efforts to qualitatively reduce actual funding for the war, or to impose real and not just rhetorical restrictions on White House freedom to wage unlimited endless war. Congress is not the peace movement. It is an institution designed to make compromises; we help our friends most if we don't.

a private surge after a public withdrawal:
While all of this is troubling, there is another disturbing fact which speaks volumes about the Democrats' lack of insight into the nature of this unpopular war -- and most Americans will know next to nothing about it. Even if the President didn't veto their legislation, the Democrats' plan does almost nothing to address the second largest force in Iraq -- and it's not the British military. It's the estimated 126,000 private military "contractors" who will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war.
(...) The 145,000 active duty U.S. forces are nearly matched by occupation personnel that currently come from companies like Blackwater USA and the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close personal and political ties with the Bush administration. Until Congress reins in these massive corporate forces and the whopping federal funding that goes into their coffers, partially withdrawing U.S. troops may only set the stage for the increased use of private military companies (and their rent-a-guns) which stand to profit from any kind of privatized future "surge" in Iraq.
(...) While many of them perform logistical support activities for American troops, including the sort of laundry, fuel and mail delivery, and food-preparation work that once was performed by soldiers, tens of thousands of them are directly engaged in military and combat activities. According to the Government Accountability Office, there are now some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq. These not-quite G.I. Joes, working for Blackwater and other major U.S. firms, can clear in a month what some active-duty soldiers make in a year. "We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of Defense," said House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. "How in the hell do you justify that?"
(...) House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman estimates that $4 billion in taxpayer money has so far been spent in Iraq on these armed "security" companies like Blackwater -- with tens of billions more going to other war companies like KBR and Fluor for "logistical" support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the House Intelligence Committee believes that up to forty cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors.
(...) David Petraeus, the general running the President's "surge" plan in Baghdad, cited private forces as essential to winning the war. In his confirmation hearings in the Senate, he claimed that they fill a gap attributable to insufficient troop levels available to an overstretched military. Along with Bush's official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of contract security forces," Petraeus told the Senators, "give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission." Indeed, Gen. Petraeus admitted that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq not by the U.S. military, but "secured by contract security."
(...) lthough contractor deaths are not effectively tallied, at least 770 contractors have been killed in Iraq and at least another 7,700 injured. These numbers are not included in any official (or media) toll of the war. More significantly, there is absolutely no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law -- military or civilian -- being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent Congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts -- and, no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts. Before Paul Bremer, Bush's viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in 2004 he issued an edict, known as Order 17. It immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq which, today, is like the wild West, full of roaming Iraqi death squads and scores of unaccountable, heavily-armed mercenaries, ex-military men from around the world, working for the occupation. For the community of contractors in Iraq, immunity and impunity are welded together.
(...) Despite the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq and several well-documented incidents involving alleged contractor abuses, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to the possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison. While dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed -- 64 on murder-related charges -- not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.
(...) "These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies," argues Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S. contractors from Iraq. "They charge whatever they want with impunity. There's no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their activities are."
(...) Not surprisingly, then, the mercenary trade group with the Orwellian name of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has pushed for just this Democratic-sponsored approach rather than the military court martial system favored by conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. The IPOA called the expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act -- essentially the Democrats' oversight plan -- "the most cogent approach to ensuring greater contractor accountability in the battle space." That endorsement alone should be reason enough to pause and reconsider.
(...) As originally passed in the House, the Democrats' Iraq plan would have cut only about 15% or $815 million of the supplemental spending earmarked for day-to-day military operations "to reflect savings attributable to efficiencies and management improvements in the funding of contracts in the military departments." ... But even that mild provision was dropped by the Democrats in late April. Their excuse was the need to hold more hearings on the contractor issue. Instead, they moved to withhold -- not cut -- 15% of total day-to-day operational funding, but only until Secretary of Defense Robert Gates submits a report on the use of contractors and the scope of their deployment. Once the report is submitted, the 15% would be unlocked. In essence, this means that, under the Democrats plan, the mercenary forces will simply be able to continue business-as-usual/profits-as-usual in Iraq.
(...) Consider the case of Blackwater USA. A decade ago, the company barely existed; and yet, its "diplomatic security" contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone, total more than $750 million. Today, Blackwater has become nothing short of the Bush administration's well-paid Praetorian Guard. It protects the U.S. ambassador and other senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting Congressional delegations; it trains Afghan security forces and was deployed in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region, setting up a "command and control" center just miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect FEMA operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 a day from the American taxpayer, billing $950 a day per Blackwater contractor.
(...) At present, it has forces deployed in nine countries and boasts a database of 21,000 additional troops at the ready, a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gun-ships, and the world's largest private military facility -- a 7,000 acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. It recently opened a new facility in Illinois ("Blackwater North") and is fighting local opposition to a third planned domestic facility near San Diego ("Blackwater West") by the Mexican border. It is also manufacturing an armored vehicle (nicknamed the "Grizzly") and surveillance blimps.
(...) The President likes to say that defunding the war would undercut the troops. Here's the truth of the matter: Continued funding of the Iraq war ensures tremendous profits for politically-connected war contractors. If Congress is serious about ending the occupation, it needs to rein in the unaccountable companies that make it possible and only stand to profit from its escalation.

on the 'culture of fear' that underlies the war of terror:
The war on terror has disseminated fear everywhere. Fear is a much greater threat to nations than the most lethal weapons. Fear numbs the mind and sparks the weakest, most cowardly and basest instincts. It makes people easy prey to the whims and follies of demagogues and dictators. It was by playing on fear that Bush could mount his invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Whenever his project bogs down or he comes under fire, Bush instructs his aides to drum up people's fear of another terrorist attack. This was the climate that smoothed the passage of the Patriot Act and the erosion of civil and personal liberties under government surveillance and secret detentions. This act, moreover, set the model for other governments, which never would have dared introduce a law like it before. Now that the greatest democracy on earth has it, it has become the right of every ruler on earth to impose a patriot act of his own; in our case, to make it an eternal constitutional cornerstone and perpetual font of legislation. The perpetuation of fear has turned back the tide of democracy, stymied the march of liberty, and let absolute rulers rule more absolutely.
(...) [and a boom for business?] But the culture of fear has also sparked a great boom in the private security sector. On top of the slew of already pre-existing security firms -- some transnational -- there have emerged hundreds of new ones, all dedicated to providing protection to politicians, film and music stars, influential families, and the rich and famous of every stripe. With all those guards, hidden cameras and metal detectors everywhere, is it any wonder that everyone is feeling increasingly nervous? Security now means big money. In Iraq alone, some 100,000 private security entrepreneurs are raking in billions of dollars protecting US armed forces personnel and those America installed in government there. The phenomenon is widespread and growing -- here in Egypt, too -- and it feeds on the culture of fear, without the continuation of which some very important and wealthy people would lose a lot of money and influence.