The Mercenary’s Cookbook

In the upside-down world of the Bush Administration the FDA is supposed to prevent private entrepreneurs from voluntarily testing their cattle for Mad Cow, the EPA is supposed to stop states from voluntarily enacting emissions standards, and the Veteran’s Administration is supposed compare PTSD to football injuries:

VA secretary Peake suggested some of the concern about post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury has been overblown.

Many of the brain injuries are serious but some of them are akin to what anyone who played football in their youth might have suffered, Peake [said].

That’s right. On the heels of a report saying veteran suicides could outnumber casualties, the VA secretary is saying we’re making too much of PTSD. After all, they volunteered for this, right?

The article goes on to say that the Vietnam Vet Peake was talking to found the answer “unsatisfying”, but I think the award for best response goes to VoteVets’, Brandon Friedman :

Frankly, Peake’s casually dismissive attitude sucks.  Being hunted by other humans every day for 15 months, watching your friend bleed to death, and having your brain flattened like a pancake from a thousand-pound detonation are not comparable to football injuries.  

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Progressivefuture has been interviewing an Iraqi veteran all week about the abuses she witnessed firsthand by contractors. Take a look.

Contractors Aren’t Free

 

Sewage in with the Bathwater

 

Witness Weighs in on KBR Water Scandal Reports

 

The Trauma of Silence

 

Contractor Accountability

.Section 325 of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2008 prohibits the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from directing or requiring the Secretary of Defense or Secretary of a Military Department to undertake a public-private competition under OMB Circular No. A-76.

The Free Market means, “Free for me to do what I want when I write the rules.”

Perhaps listening to the advice of Whoopi Goldberg, the NYTs has compiled a panel of neo-cons and war enablers to discuss how they would clean up their own mess. Opinions range from “it’s not my fault”, and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, to basically what war opponents have been saying since 2003. But that doesn’t count because that was just their anti-American reflex.

Neo-cons, always right in real-time; reality-based community, always right in retrospect.

There is a central question those of us who follow the media closely tend to ask: Are the DC elites with the magaphone getting duped, or just playing dumb? Well, we may have finally found our answer.

Consider this interesting part of an exchange between Hillary Clinton and George Stephanopoulos on This Week :

The interview took another unpleasant turn when Stephanopoulos tried to pin down Clinton over her position on NAFTA, a trade program introduced by her husband during his presidency. Clinton has come out against the plan saying it was not good for American workers. Stephanopoulos said, “The Clinton administration didn’t do enough to address the downside of globalization and therefore failed the workers in Indiana and the workers of the West?”

Clinton clearly took offense to the tone of the question and while answering, decided to take a jab at the host.

“Well I believe, George, in the 1990s we had a booming economy that created nearly 23 million new jobs, more people were lifted out of poverty in any time in our near history. It was an economy that worked for everyone, not just the rich, the wealthy and the well connected, but there were underlying issues that we didn’t understan fully. Now, you remember this, because George did work in that ‘92 campaign - George and I actually were against NAFTA - I’m talking about him in his previous life, before he was an objective journalist,” Clinton said to a visibly annoyed Stephanopoulos.

Now, David Gergen, who is about as earnest a commentator there is (a Republican who worked for the Clinton Administration), said this to Jake Tapper of ABC, who is less reliable, but gets it right in this case:

“The was considerable division within the White House about whether NAFTA was right on the merits,” says Gergen, “and I always associate her with those who had questions about it on the merits.”

This is where it gets interesting. “Arguments about policy are always before a decision is made. Once the president makes a decision everybody falls in line. I feel like she was among those who leaned against it on the merits. I do not remember her at a meeting arguing it out, I just felt she always had reservations.”

Then the decision was made and the first lady fell in line, along with the rest of the administration, Gergen says, to help get NAFTA passed.

About the Nov. 10, 1993 meeting, Gergen says, “she was not suddenly a convert to NAFTA. It’s just that when the president decides something, people around him are going to support that decision. I thought she was a good soldier on that.”

I saw Gergen answer this question in another interview where he said pretty much the same thing: Hillary didn’t think NAFTA was worth spending a lot of political capital on. Now here’s the thing: George Stephanopoulos was there. George knows what Hillary’s position on NAFTA was because George saw it with his own eyes. And according Hillary, he was her ally in leading the charge against it.

Like Hillary, once the decision was made, he fell in line. Yet, Stephanopoulos tries to pin her down, suggesting to the audience that, as someone who was there behind the scenes, in his journalistic judgement there is some doubt about where Hillary stood on this issue.

So no, when George spent a lot of time asking Obama about flagpins or questions raised during his stop on Sean Hannity’s radio program, he hasn’t been tricked, or played for a fool, he’s playing dumb. When they hand him these questions (or he comes up with them himself), it doesn’t matter that he was there when Hillary opposed pushing NAFTA.

Consider what this says about our chattering class: they feel absolutely no obligation to inform viewers, and what’s worse, do feel an obligation to pass on accusations they know are false. There is what he knows, and what he tells you, and the two don’t have to agree.

So, how is this different from lying, exactly?

In a new tell-all by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story, the former Commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq takes his turn finger-pointing over where Iraq went wrong. Considering this Administration’s track record for punishing prescience and promoting loyal incompetence among its ranks, the fact that the three-star general took the fall for Abu Ghraib speaks in his favor. (Because, as we all know, it’s the soldier’s fault a few Bad Apples got “out of hand” — if by Bad Apples you mean, the White House.)

It might surprise you to learn (/snark) Sanchez thinks Rumsfeld might have had something to do with the failures of the first year:

“Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty.”

Okay… what soldier doesn’t march through some Baghdad street, exchanging the evil eye with the locals, and think, “I could paid four times as much working for Dyncorp.” Well, the private sector does have its down side:

AN AMERICAN security guard recruited by DynCorp International to serve at the As Sayliyah base has been “stranded” in Qatar for over a year after he was sacked by his employers in April 2007.

Remember, Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal? I’m betting this guy wishes he was stuck in an airport.

What’s worse is this disgruntled (to put it mildly) employee claims it was all a negotiating tactic on the part of Dyncorp:

“[T]hings started to fall apart as I arrived here in October 2006. I was forced to sign an employment contract in which the emoluments were less than what had been promised and agreed in the US.

“One of the major setbacks was the absence of a pension plan which figured prominently in the promises made in the US. There was also a shortfall of about $15,000 in the annual package in the new offer.”
 

According to him, things came to a head when he, along with eleven other contractors, complained to Qatar’s Labour Department. Then Dyncorp refused to pay up, so they fired him and told him to take the next plane home. So he gets an injunction against his deportation so his suit could go forward, and his former employers handed over his passport to the police and reported him as an absconder.

Dyncorp managed to dodge service for three months, and he sat, waiting around in Dyncorp housing for over a year to have his day in court. That is, until this past week when the company tried to have him evicted, which is what prompted him to go to the paper. The American embassy couldn’t help because it was a “civil matter”, which is a clever way of placing PMC’s outside of the law — US laws don’t apply because they are in Qatar, Qatar is dragging its feet about getting involved in a dispute between an American company and American employee, and the US embassy won’t get involved because… I don’t know why.

Dyncorp employees have been pushing on various fronts to find some avenue for compensation or accountability of the Guantanamos of business law. A former sub-conractor testified before Congress that a comrade would not have been killed if the armored  car was not being used to transport prostitutes to Dyncorp hotels. In 2002, two former employees won in court after Dyncorp fired them for blowing the whistle on the trafficing of sex slaves in Bosnia.

I feel safer already:

Some federal air marshals have been denied entry to flights they are assigned to protect when their names matched those on the terrorist no-fly list, and the agency says it’s now taking steps to make sure their agents are allowed to board in the future.

Sweet.

The International Crisis Group has released their report “Iraq After the Surge”.  So how are we doing?

Against the odds, the U.S. military surge contributed to a significant reduction in violence. Its achievements should not be understated. But in the absence of the fundamental political changes in Iraq the surge was meant to facilitate, its successes will remain insufficient, fragile and reversible. The ever-more relative lull is an opportunity for the U.S. to focus on two missing ingredients: pressuring the Iraqi government to take long overdue steps toward political compromise and altering the regional climate so that Iraq’s neighbours use their leverage to encourage that compromise and make it stick. As shown in these two companion reports, this entails ceasing to provide the Iraqi government with unconditional military support; reaching out to what remains of the insurgency; using its leverage to encourage free and fair provincial elections and progress toward a broad national dialogue and compact; and engaging in real diplomacy with all Iraq’s neighbours, Iran and Syria included.

So, basically our troops have had their benefits cut, their tours extended, and still managed to clamp down on the violence to give the politicians the breathing room they needed to form a government. For the politicians’ part, they have bungled it even worse than before. For the military’s trouble, those politicians get to tout our troops’ success so they can justify extending out troops tours even longer.

Hasn’t this pretty much been the theme of the war?

You can download the PDF version here.

Hussein says he’s innocent. Which Bush says is proof of his guilty.