The Mercenary’s Cookbook

One of the more entertaining reactions by the Press to Scott McClellan’s very critical new book about his days in the Bush Administration, has been this claim that they had been tough all along. David Gregory defended his profession by claiming, “I think the questions were asked.” Those of us who turned elsewhere for our information remember things a bit differently.

Eric Alterman expressed the frustration many felt at the time when he wrote an entire column basically asking the questions he wished reporters would ask that turned out to be rather prescient.  And he wrote it in 2002. Here’s the list of just some of the questions Eric Alterman wanted asked in 2002:

Why did the Bush national security team ignore the Al Qaeda briefing it received from President Clinton’s National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, in the fall of 2000?

Why has no one, apparently, been fired, anywhere, despite a clear systemwide breakdown?

Who besides Rudy Giuliani thought it was a smart idea to build a terrorism crisis control center inside an obvious terrorist target?

What about those detention camps Ashcroft wanted for the purposes of indefinitely incarcerating US citizens deemed to be “enemy combatants,” while stripping them of all constitutional rights, including the right to trial? Is that still happening? That sounds kinda bad.

How did Bush decide on war with Iraq without consulting the uniformed military, the intelligence agencies, the UN, NATO, the Republican national security establishment–including both of his dad’s secretaries of state and his National Security Adviser–the Republican Party in Congress, the Democratic majority or just about anyone who did not already want to go to war with Iraq?

Got any real evidence about those nukes Saddam is building? Got any real evidence regarding his CBW and WMD delivery capabilities? Why is he not deterrable again?

What happens with Iran if Iraq collapses? 

But this one has to be the kicker: “Is anybody thinking about this stuff?”

Yes. They just didn’t have jobs in DC.

Update: Digby reminds us of Mr. Wolcott’s efforts.

Update II: And Greenwald reminds us of what happened to Donahue.

What could the overly-spunky, more-than-occasionally annoying Rachael Ray, host of twenty-minute meals, have to do with national security? No, it’s not because she’s good with a knife. We’ll give you a hint: see if you can spot the “hate-couture” in this photo:

A few months after doughnuts became a presidential campaign issue, they stood at the center of a storm created by right-leaning bloggers. This was a story about “donuts and dumb celebrities” who were “mainstreaming terrorism” to make a buck, asserted Little Green Footballs and Michele Malkin. And Atlas Shrugs revised a bell-ringing catchphrase thusly: “TIME TO MAKE THE JIHAD!”

Suddenly, Dunkin’ Donuts was accused of promoting terrorism, thanks to the wardrobe choices of Rachael Ray, its celebrity spokesman, during an online advertisement. According to the bloggers, she had decided to embrace “hate couture” by wearing a keffiyeh, a scarf popular in the Arab world and preferred by Yasir Arafat and other Palestinian militants during their rise in the West Bank and Gaza.

Now, Dunkin’ Donuts has pulled the ads. Not since the Little Mermaid video cover was found to have palaces shaped like phalluses have our impressionable children been this safe.

We believe there is a far greater threat to our National Security. Watch, if you dare:

  Does that skirt look like anyone’s headscarf that we know?

You may have heard that Senate Republican Candidate for Ohio, Bob Schaffer, got burned when it was revealed that he went parasailing while on a fact-finding trip to uncover human rights abuses in the Mariana Islands, all on disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s dime. Abramoff, who considered the Mariana islands a “perfect petri dish of capitalism”, chose someone he thought would keep the Darwinian experiment pristine. Thus, Schaffer got a nice vacation to look the other way from any exploitation of foreign workers.

Today, new journalism icon Josh Marshall reveals that Schaffer is on the witness list of a Federal investigation into the business dealings of a nonprofit which Schaffer was a member of the board.

If Abramoff wasn’t already in jail, we’d suspect these FBI agents were angling for a free ski trip.

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.

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.