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| SYRIA: US technology used to censor the Internet in Syria
by Pratap Chatterjee, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
October 23rd, 2011
Technology from a major Silicon Valley company, Blue Coat, is being used by the Syrian government to censor the Internet and monitor dissidents, according to activists. The equipment can be used to monitor users and block access to certain websites, such as social networking applications like Facebook and internet phone sites like Skype, which were key to the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia |
| LIBYA: Censorship Inc.
by Paul Sonne and Margaret Coker, The Wall Street Journal
August 30th, 2011
Amesys of France, VASTech of South Africa and ZTE Corp. of China provided technology to Libya that was allegedly used for the repression of Libyan citizens during the four decade rule of Colonel Gadhafi. |
| LIBERIA: Hunting for Liberia’s Missing Millions
by Doreen Carvjal, New York Times
May 30th, 2010
How much money did Charles G. Taylor, the deposed president of Liberia, siphon out of his war-shattered country, and where is it? Investigators are developing a new strategy involving filing civil damage claims against companies, governments and international banks that they contend aided Mr. Taylor in illegal transactions. |
| US/AFGHANISTAN/PAKISTAN: U.S. Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts
by Mark Mazzetti, New York Times
May 15th, 2010
Top military officials continue to rely on a secret network of private spies set up by Michael D. Furlong, despite concerns about the legality of the operation. A New York Times review found Mr. Furlong’s operatives still providing information, with contractors still being paid under a $22 million contract, managed by Lockheed Martin and supervised by a Pentagon office. |
| AFGHANISTAN: Policing Afghanistan: How Afghan Police Training Became a Train Wreck
by Pratap Chatterjee, Tom Dispatch
March 21st, 2010
The Pentagon faces a tough choice: Should it award a billion-dollar contract for training the Afghan National Police to Xe (formerly Blackwater), a company made infamous when its employees killed 17 Iraqis in Baghdad in 2007, or to DynCorp, a company made infamous in Bosnia in 1999 when some of its employees were caught trafficking young girls for sex? |
| AFGHANISTAN/US: Outsourcing intelligence
by David Ignatius, Washington Post
March 17th, 2010
The headline read like something you might see in the conspiracy-minded Pakistani press: "Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants." But the story appeared in Monday's New York Times, and it highlighted some big problems that have developed in the murky area between military and intelligence activities. |
| AFGHANISTAN/US: Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants
by DEXTER FILKINS and MARK MAZZETTI, New York Times
March 15th, 2010
Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States. The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. |
| AFGHANISTAN: Iraq Lessons Ignored at Kabul Power Plant
by Pratap Chatterjee, Inter Press News Service
February 4th, 2010
A diesel-fueled power plant, nearing completion just outside Kabul, demonstrates that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its contractors have failed to learn lessons from identical mistakes in Iraq, despite clearly signposted advice from oversight agencies. |
| US: Obama's Budget Calls for Billions in New Spending for Drones
by Jason Leopold, Truthout
February 2nd, 2010
Shares of major US defense contractors including Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman rose upon the unveiling of President Barack Obama's fiscal year 2011 spending plan for the Pentagon, part of the president's overall $3.8 trillion budget proposal. More than $2 billion will be used to purchase unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, blamed for a significant rise in civilian casualties in the "war on terror." |
| US/KUWAIT: Settlement possible in military contractor fraud case
by Bill Rankin, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
January 29th, 2010
Kuwaiti firm Agility (formerly Public Warehousing) indicted here for overcharging the Army on an $8.5 billion contract is negotiating a possible settlement with the Justice Department. On Nov. 9, a federal grand jury in Atlanta indicted the firm on charges it gouged the U.S. government by overcharging on its contract to supply food to American troops in Iraq. |
| US: F.B.I. Charges Arms Sellers With Foreign Bribes
by Diana B. Henriques, New York Times
January 20th, 2010
On Tuesday, 22 top-level arms industry executives, including a senior sales executive at Smith & Wesson, were arrested in what Justice Department officials called the first undercover sting ever aimed at violations of the federal ban on corporate bribes paid to get foreign business. The individuals are being prosecuted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. |
| US/IRAQ: U.S. Companies Join Race on Iraqi Oil Bonanza
by TIMOTHY WILLIAMS, New York Times
January 13th, 2010
American companies have been arriving in Iraq to pursue an expected multibillion-dollar bonanza of projects to revive the country’s petroleum industry. But there are questions about the Iraqi government’s capacity to police the companies. “These are for-profit concerns and they are trying to make as much money as they can,” said Pratap Chatterjee of CorpWatch. |
| NIGERIA: Ex-militant leader heads SPDC’s patrol team
by Chris Ejim, Nigerian Compass
January 8th, 2010
Authorities of Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) have unveiled a new security strategy for securing oil pipelines and platforms within the Niger Delta region. Shell has appointed former MEND militant commander, Eris Paul, and his company, Eristex Pipeline Patrol, to secure oil facilities in the Southern Ijaw area of the Delta. |
| AFGHANISTAN: Lost in Limbo: Injured Afghan Translators Struggle to Survive
by Pratap Chatterjee, ProPublica
December 17th, 2009
Local translators are hidden casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. military uses defense contractors to hire local residents to serve as translators for the troops. These local translators often live, sleep and eat with soldiers. And yet when they are wounded, they are often ignored by the U.S. system designed to provide them medical care and disability benefits, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica. |
| JORDAN: For AIG’s Man in Jordan, War Becomes a Business Opportunity
by T. Christian Miller, ProPublica
December 17th, 2009
For Emad Hatabah, the war in Iraq became a business opportunity. As AIG's chief representative in Jordan, he was responsible for coordinating the care for hundreds of Iraqis who had been injured while working under contract for U.S. troops. He fulfilled his functions by sending business to himself, his friends and business associates, according to interviews and records. |
| US: Up to 56,000 more contractors likely for Afghanistan
by Walter Pincus , Washington Post
December 16th, 2009
The surge of 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan could be accompanied by a surge of up to 56,000 contractors, vastly expanding the presence of personnel from the U.S. private sector in a war zone, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service. |
| US: Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret C.I.A. Raids
by JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI, New York Times
December 10th, 2009
Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials. |
| IRAQ: Oil Companies Look to the Future
by Timothy Williams, New York Times
December 2nd, 2009
More than six and a half years after the United States-led invasion here that many believed was about oil, the major oil companies are finally gaining access to Iraq’s petroleum reserves. But they are doing so at far less advantageous terms than they once envisioned. The companies seem to have calculated that it is worth their while to accept deals with limited profit opportunities now, in order to cash in on more lucrative development deals in the future. |
| US: DynCorp Fires Executive Counsel
by August Cole, Wall Street Journal
November 28th, 2009
DynCorp International Inc. said it has terminated one of its top lawyers, a move that comes on the heels of the government contractor's disclosure that some of its subcontractors may have broken U.S. law in trying to speed up getting licenses and visas overseas. |
| AFGHANISTAN: Paying Off the Warlords,
Anatomy of an Afghan Culture of Corruption
by Pratap Chatterjee, TomDispatch.com
November 17th, 2009
Among the dozens of businesses with lucrative Afghan and U.S. taxpayer-financed reconstruction deals are two extremely well connected companies -- Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid -- that helped to swell the election coffers of President Hamid Karzai as well as the family business of his running mate, the country's new vice president, warlord Mohammed Qasim Fahim. |
| US: Despite Slump, U.S. Role as Top Arms Supplier Grows
by Thom Shanker, New York Times
September 6th, 2009
Despite a recession that knocked down global arms sales last year, the United States expanded its role as the world’s leading weapons supplier, increasing its share to more than two-thirds of all foreign armaments deals, according to a new Congressional study. |
| AFGHANISTAN: Wackenhut aids inquiry into its Afghanistan contractor
CNN.com
September 3rd, 2009
This week the Project on Government Oversight released damning allegations of deviant hazing at a camp for security guards in Afghanistan. Sparking questions from the State Department, POGO warned the problems are "posing a significant threat to the security of the embassy and its personnel." |
| US: New Hire Highlights Altegrity's Growing Ambition
by Thomas Heath, Washington Post
August 17th, 2009
For more than 12 years, Falls Church-based USIS quietly scrutinized the backgrounds of individuals who needed security clearance to work in the U.S. government or in the private sector. Now re-named Altegrity, the company has ambitions of securing government contracts for much more than investigation and data-collection. |
| US: DynCorp Billed U.S. $50 Million Beyond Costs in Defense Contract
by V. Dion Haynes, Washington Post
August 12th, 2009
A Defense Department auditor, appearing before the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, testified Tuesday that DynCorp International billed the government $50 million more than the amount specified in a contract to provide dining facilities and living quarters for military personnel in Kuwait. |
| IRAQ: Big Oil Ready for Big Gamble in Iraq
by Gina Chon, Wall Street Journal
June 24th, 2009
Next week, Iraqi officials will auction off oil contracts to foreign companies for the first time since Iraq nationalized its oil industry three decades ago. Some 120 companies expressed interest in bidding for the contracts, and thirty-five companies qualified. They include Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Italy's Eni SpA, Russia's Lukoil and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., or Sinopec. |
| IRAN: Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology
by Christopher Rhoads and Loretta Chao, Wall Street Journal
June 22nd, 2009
The Iranian regime has developed one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet. The Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection. The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company. |
| US: Contractors Vie for Plum Work, Hacking for U.S. Government
by CHRISTOPHER DREW and JOHN MARKOFF, New York Times
May 30th, 2009
The Obama administration’s push into cyberwarfare has set off a rush among the biggest military companies for billions of dollars in new defense contracts. Nearly all of the largest military companies — including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies. |
| US: Chevron annual meeting heats up over Ecuador suit
by Jordan Robertson, Washington Post
May 27th, 2009
In a combative and sometimes colorful annual meeting, Chevron's CEO and chairman exchanged barbs with activists over pollution in the Amazon rain forest and the company's human rights record. The nation's second-largest oil company is awaiting a verdict from a judge in Ecuador that could come with a $27 billion price tag. |
| US: U.S. Cracks Down on Corporate Bribes
by DIONNE SEARCEY, Wall Street Journal
May 26th, 2009
The Justice Department is increasing its prosecutions of alleged acts of foreign bribery by U.S. corporations, forcing them to take costly steps to defend against scrutiny. The crackdown under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA -- a post-Watergate law largely dormant for decades -- now extends across five continents and penetrates entire industries. |
| FRANCE/UAE: Gulf base shows shift in France’s focus
by Ben Hall and Andrew England, Financial Times
May 25th, 2009
France's new naval base in Abu Dhabi, its first overseas military base in 50 years, has sparked a round of lobbying on behalf of lucrative business for French companies including Dassault, the military aircraft maker, and a consortium of Total, GdF-Suez and Areva, which is bidding to build two nuclear power stations in the UAE. Dassault is hoping to sell as many as 60 of its Rafale fighters to the UAE. |
| WORLD: When Chevron Hires Ex-Reporter to Investigate Pollution, Chevron Looks Good
by Brian Stelter, New York Times
May 10th, 2009
When Chevron learned that “60 Minutes” was preparing a potentially damaging report about oil company contamination of the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador, it hired a former journalist to produce a mirror image of the report, from the corporation’s point of view. An Ecuadorean judge is expected to rule soon on whether Chevron owes up to $27 billion in damages. |
| IRAN/CHINA: Iranians and Others Outwit Net Censors
by John Markoff, New York Times
April 30th, 2009
The Internet is no longer just an essential channel for commerce, entertainment and information. It has also become a stage for state control — and rebellion against it. Computers are becoming more crucial in global conflicts, not only in spying and military action, but also in determining what information reaches people around the globe. |
| US: Contracting Boom Could Fizzle Out
by Dana Hedgpeth, Washington Post
April 7th, 2009
The surge in the U.S. military contracting workforce would ebb under Defense Secretary Gates's budget proposal as the Pentagon moves to replace private workers with full-time civil servants. The move could affect companies such as CACI and SAIC. "We are right-sizing the defense acquisition workforce so we can improve our contract oversight and get a better deal for the taxpayers," said the Pentagon's director of defense procurement and acquisition policy. |
| US: Gates Proposes Major Changes to Military Programs, Weapons Buys
by August Cole, Wall Street Journal
April 6th, 2009
Defense Secretary Robert Gates unveiled a sweeping overhaul of the Pentagon's top weapons priorities. The shake-up, a combination of defense contract cutbacks and policy changes, will stoke a smoldering debate in Congress, with cuts proposed for Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-22 Raptor and replacement of the president's fleet of Marine One helicopters. |
| IRAQ: Ex-Blackwater Workers May Return to Iraq Jobs
by Rod Nordland, New York Times
April 3rd, 2009
Late last month Blackwater Worldwide lost its billion-dollar contract to protect American diplomats in Iraq, but by next month many of its private security guards will be back on the job here. The same individuals will just be wearing new uniforms, working for Triple Canopy, the firm that won the State Department’s new contract. |
| US: Pentagon Weighs Cuts and Revisions of Weapons
by Christopher Drew, New York Times
April 3rd, 2009
U.S. defense executives and consultants are worried about the sweeping changes in military programs that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is expected to announce on Monday. Weapons systems like missile defense are likely to endure deep cuts. |
| US/AFGHANISTAN: Unknown Afghanistan
by Pratap Chatterjee, TomDispatch.com
March 17th, 2009
Want a billion dollars in development aid? If you happen to live in Afghanistan, the two quickest ways to attract attention and so aid from the U.S. authorities are: Taliban attacks or a flourishing opium trade. For those with neither, the future could be bleak. This piece take a look at the lack of reconstruction aid in areas like Bamiyan, Afghanistan. |
| UGANDA/IRAQ: Why 10,000 Ugandans are eagerly serving in Iraq
by Max Delany, Christian Science Monitor
March 6th, 2009
Hired out to multibillion-dollar companies for hundreds of dollars a month, 10,000 Ugandans risk their lives seeking fortunes protecting US Army bases, airports, and oil firms in Iraq for as little as $600 per month. Many are looking to go to Afghanistan as the Obama administration increases contracts there. |
| US: 70 Youths Sue Former Judges in Detention Kickback Case
by Ian Urbina, New York Times
February 26th, 2009
More than 70 juveniles and their families filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday against two former judges who pleaded guilty this month in a scheme that involved their taking kickbacks to put young offenders in privately run detention centers. The two privately operated centers are run by PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care. |
| MEXICO: U.S. Is Arms Bazaar for Mexican Cartels
by James C. McKinley, Jr., New York Times
February 25th, 2009
Phoenix-based gun dealer George Iknadosian of X-Calibur Guns will go on trial on charges he sold hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, to smugglers, knowing they would go to a drug cartel in the western state of Sinaloa. The guns helped fuel the gang warfare in which more than 6,000 Mexicans died last year. |
| US: The Looming Crisis at the Pentagon
by Chalmers Johnson, TomDispatch.com
February 2nd, 2009
Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the U.S. automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal decline. A similar crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the corrupt and deceitful practices that have long characterized the high command of the Armed Forces, civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists and pay-to-play criminals. |
| US/AFGHANISTAN: Short-staffed USAID tries to keep pace
by Ken Dilanian, USA Today
February 1st, 2009
Like other government functions, U.S. foreign aid and reconstruction largely has been privatized. USAID now turns to contractors to fulfill its basic mission of fighting poverty and promoting democracy. CorpWatch's 2006 "Afghanistan, Inc" documented problems with Chemonics and other contractors operating in Afghanistan. |
| US: Deputy SecDef could earn $500K lobbying Pentagon
by Lara Jakes, Washington Post
January 27th, 2009
William J. Lynn, the man nominated to be the Pentagon's second-in-command could make a half-million dollars next month with vested stock he earned as a lobbyist for military contractor Raytheon. This is despite an Obama administration order against "revolving door" lobbyists who become public officials. |
| IRAQ: Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders
by JAMES GLANZ and T. CHRISTIAN MILLER, The New York Times
December 13th, 2008
An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure. |
| US: Plea by Blackwater Guard Helps Indict Others
by GINGER THOMPSON and JAMES RISEN, New York Times
December 9th, 2008
On Monday, the Justice Department unsealed its case against five Blackwater private security guards, built largely around testimony from a sixth guard about the 2007 shootings that left 17 unsuspecting Iraqi civilians dead at a busy Baghdad traffic circle. |
| US/IRAQ: Indiana guardsmen sue defense contractor KBR
by Farah Stockman, Boston Globe
December 4th, 2008
Sixteen Indiana national guardsmen filed a lawsuit yesterday against military contractor KBR. The complaint alleges that several reservists contracted respiratory system tumors and skin rashes after guarding reconstruction work at the Qarmat Ali treatment plant, strewn with the toxin chromium dichromate. |
| US: One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex
by DAVID BARSTOW, The New York Times
November 29th, 2008
The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles. |
| CANADA/IRAQ: Drill, Garner, Drill
by Anthony Fenton, Mother Jones
November 24th, 2008
In the history of the Iraq War, one name is perhaps synonymous with the collapse of the Bush administration's hopes for a post-Saddam world: Retired Lt. General Jay M. Garner, who served as the first post-war administrator. This year, he and a small group of former US military leaders, officials, and lobbyists have quietly used their Kurdistan connections to help Canadian companies access some of the region's richest oil fields. |
| US: The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America
by Amy Goodman and James Bamford, Democracy Now!
October 14th, 2008
The Bush administration’s wiretapping program has come under new scrutiny. Two influential congressional committees have opened probes into allegations US intelligence spied on the phone calls of U.S. military personnel, journalists and aid workers in Iraq. James Bamford discusses the NSA’s domestic sprying, the agency’s failings pre-9/11 and the ties between NSA and the nation’s telecommunications companies. |
| IRAQ: U.S. to Fund Pro-American Publicity in Iraqi Media
by Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus, Washingtom Post
October 3rd, 2008
The Defense Department will pay private U.S. contractors in Iraq up to $300 million over the next three years to produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to "engage and inspire" the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government. |
| SOUTH AFRICA: Apartheid lawsuit back in US court
SABC News
September 25th, 2008
After six years of battling, the plaintiffs must prove whether certain multinationals enabled the apartheid government to commit acts of gross human rights violations. Among the 21 defendants are oil, vehicle and financial companies which continue to operate in South Africa -- the likes of BP, Shell, Chevron Texaco, Barclays, Daimler Chrysler and Rio Tinto. They stand accused of supporting the former regime with arms and ammunition, financing, fuel, transportation and military technology. |
| ISRAEL: U.S. approves $330 million in arms deals for Israel
by Andrea Shalal-Esa, Reuters
September 9th, 2008
The U.S. government on Tuesday said it had approved up to $330 million in three separate arms deals for Israel, and sources tracking a much bigger deal for 25 Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jets said that agreement could be approved later this month. |
| UK-Zimbabwe: BAE linked to Zimbabwean arms dealer
by Christopher Thompson and Michael Peel , Financial Times/UK
July 31st, 2008
According to documents seen by the Financial Times, BAE Systems has been linked to Zimbabwean arms trader John Bredenkamp. BAE reportedly paid at least £20m to Bredenkamp via offshore entities in the British Virgin Islands between 2003 and 2005. The payments raise fresh questions about bribery in BAE's dealings. |
| US: Pentagon Auditors Pressured To Favor Contractors, GAO Says
by Dana Hedgpeth, The Washington Post
July 24th, 2008
Auditors at a Pentagon oversight agency were pressured by supervisors to skew their reports on major defense contractors to make them look more favorable instead of exposing wrongdoing and charges of overbilling, according to an 80-page report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office. |
| IRAQ: Iraq Case Sheds Light On Secret Contractors
by Siobhan Gorman and August Cole, Wall Street Journal
July 17th, 2008
Court documents and interviews with whistleblowers shed light on persistent problems in the operations of private military and security company MVM, Inc., a top provider of secret security to U.S. intelligence agencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. |
| US: General Misled Lawmakers on KBR Work, Senator Says
by JAMES RISEN, The New York Times
July 10th, 2008
The senator, Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, said at a hearing that Maj. Gen. Jerome Johnson, who was commander of the Army Sustainment Command until last year, made inaccurate statements to the Senate Armed Services Committee about problems with water supplied to American soldiers in Iraq by KBR, the largest defense contractor in Iraq. |
| Iraq: U.S. Advised Iraqi Ministry on Oil Deals
by Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times
June 30th, 2008
The Bush administration has disclosed that U.S. advisors in Iraq played a key role in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies. The no-bid contracts are expected to be awarded Monday to Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, as well as to several smaller oil companies. |
| US: Arms Dealer Had Troubled History
by ERIC SCHMITT, The New York Times
June 25th, 2008
When the Army last year awarded a contract worth up to nearly $300 million to a tiny Miami Beach munitions dealer to supply ammunition to Afghanistan’s army and police forces, it was in spite of a very checkered past. |
| US: Cover-Up Is Cited on Illegal Arms
by ERIC SCHMITT, The New York Times
June 24th, 2008
A military attaché has told Congressional investigators that the American ambassador to Albania endorsed a plan by that country’s defense minister to remove evidence of illegal Chinese origins on ammunition being shipped from Albania to Afghanistan by a Miami Beach arms-dealing company. |
| US: KBR stake under attack
by Jon Ortiz, Sacramento Bee
June 20th, 2008
Sacramento for Democracy and other groups presented CalPERS with what they said were the names of 20,000 petitioners asking the fund to shed its KBR holdings. CalPERS owns about $27 million in KBR stock. |
| US: Army Overseer Tells of Ouster Over KBR Stir
by James Risen, New York Times
June 17th, 2008
Charles M. Smith, the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war, says he was ousted for refusing to approve payment for more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR. The Pentagon has recently awarded KBR part of a 10-year, $150 billion contract in Iraq. |
| US: Lockheed Faulted for Failure to Control Costs
by Dana Hedgpeth, Washington Post
June 4th, 2008
Lockheed Martin, the biggest U.S. defense contractor, failed to follow military guidelines to track and manage costs on major weapons programs, according to an internal Pentagon document released yesterday by a government watchdog group. |
| IRAQ: Controversial Contractor’s Iraq Work Is Split Up
by JAMES RISEN, The New York Times
May 24th, 2008
For the first time since the war began, the largest single Pentagon contract in Iraq is being divided among three companies, ending the monopoly held by KBR, the Houston-based corporation that has been accused of wasteful spending and mismanagement and of exploiting its political ties to Vice President Dick Cheney. |
| US: Halliburton CEO says Dubai base the 'right decision'
by Brett Clanton, Houston Chronicle
May 21st, 2008
Shareholder John Harrington questioned Halliburton CEO David Lesar during the 2008 annual meeting of the company's shareholders Wednesday at the Houstonian Hotel, Club and Spa, over his motives to move to Dubai, suggesting it was designed to dodge paying U.S. taxes or escape blame for past wrongs. |
| AFGHANISTAN: Supplier Under Scrutiny on Aging Arms for Afghans
by C. J. CHIVERS, The New York Times
March 27th, 2008
With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces. Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials.
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| AFGHANISTAN: Missing: The £5bn aid needed to rebuild lives
by JEROME STARKEY AND ROSS LYDALL, The Scotsman
March 25th, 2008
Vast sums of aid are lost in corporate profits of contractors and sub-contractors, which can be as high as 50 per cent on a single contract. A vast amount of aid is absorbed by high salaries, with generous allowances, and other costs of expatriates working for consulting firms and contractors. |
| IRAQ: KBR Faulted on Water Provided to Soldiers
by Dana Hedgpeth, The Washington Post
March 11th, 2008
U.S. soldiers at a military base in Iraq were provided with treated but untested wastewater for nearly two years by KBR, the giant government contractor, and may have suffered health problems as a result, according to a report released yesterday by the Pentagon's inspector general. |
| CAYMAN ISLANDS: Top Iraq contractor skirts US taxes offshore
by Farah Stockman, The Boston Globe
March 6th, 2008
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. |
| US: Inside the world of war profiteers
by David Jackson and Jason Grotto|Tribune reporters, Chicago Tribune
February 21st, 2008
Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the war's largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand. |
| US: 12 Years for Contractor in Bribery Case
by ELLIOT SPAGAT, AP
February 20th, 2008
A defense contractor was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison Tuesday for bribing former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham with cash, trips, the services of prostitutes and other gifts in exchange for nearly $90 million in Pentagon work. |
| UK: BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince
by David Leigh and Rob Evans, The Guardian (UK)
February 15th, 2008
Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE. |
| US: Court dismisses lawsuit on secret kidnapping
by Adam Tanner, Reuters
February 14th, 2008
A federal judge, saying the case involved a state secret, dismissed a lawsuit on Wednesday against a unit of Boeing Co that charged the firm helped fly terrorism suspects abroad to secret prisons. |
| US: Limbo for U.S. Women Reporting Iraq Assaults
by JAMES RISEN, The New York Times
February 13th, 2008
Ms. Kineston is among a number of American women who have reported that they were sexually assaulted by co-workers while working as contractors in Iraq but now find themselves in legal limbo, unable to seek justice or even significant compensation. |
| US: Contractor Abuses Rarely Punished, Groups Say
by Ali Gharib, IPS
January 21st, 2008
Out of the dozens upon dozens of reports of abuses by private contractors as part of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only one prosecution of a contractor has taken place. |
| US: A Mission to Rebuild Reputations
by Dana Hedgpeth, Washington Post
January 17th, 2008
Now those promises -- and the public's perception of the Air Force's ability to spend its money prudently -- are being tested by new contracting and public relations challenges. The Air Force is about to award two key contracts worth a total of about $55 billion, and Boeing is in the running for both deals. |
| IRAQ: 2005 Use of Gas by Blackwater Leaves Questions
by JAMES RISEN, New York Times
January 10th, 2008
In 2005 Blackwater accidentally dropped teargas on US soldiers, which has raised significant new questions about the role of private security contractors in Iraq, and whether they operate under the same rules of engagement and international treaty obligations that the American military observes. |
| IRAQ: Sexual Violence: An Occupational Hazard -- In Iraq and at Home
by Marie Tessier, Women's Media Center
December 26th, 2007
Jamie Leigh Jones was just 20 in 2005 when she took a leap of faith to work in Iraq for her employer, military contractor Kellogg, Brown & Root, then a subsidiary of Halliburton. She went on a mission she believed in. Shortly after her arrival in Iraq, however, Jones' ambitions were dashed in an alleged gang rape by co-workers. |
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IRAQ: Bosses didn't want to expose Iraqi police corruption
by Henry McDonald, Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian
December 24th, 2007
"It appears that ArmorGroup, by taking on extra staff ... and quickly making some redundant, is essentially transferring the risk inherent in such contract work to employees while making fat profits for itself," his MP, Dr Phyllis Starkey, told the House of Commons earlier this year. |
| US: Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry
by Eric Lichtblau, James Risen and Scott Shane, New York Times
December 16th, 2007
The Bush administration is waging a high-profile campaign to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program. At stake is the federal government's partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime. |
| US: DOJ Questioned About '05 Iraq Rape Case
by John Porretto, AP News
December 12th, 2007
The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee asked the Justice Department on Tuesday to give a full account of its investigation into the alleged rape of a female contract worker in Iraq two years ago. |
| US: Life Was Lost in Maelstrom of Suspicion
by Ginger Thompson and Eric Schmitt, New York Times
December 4th, 2007
The suicide of a top Air Force procurement officer casts a cloud of suspicion, threatening to plunge a service still struggling to emerge from one of its worst scandals into another quagmire. |
| US: Blackwater Mounts a Defense With Top Talent
by John M. Broder and James Risen, NY Times
November 5th, 2007
lackwater Worldwide, its reputation in tatters and its lucrative government contracts in jeopardy, is mounting an aggressive legal, political and public relations counterstrike. |
| US: Blackwater's Owner Has Spies for Hire
by Dana Hedgpeth, Washington Post
November 3rd, 2007
The Prince Group, the holding company that owns Blackwater Worldwide, has been building an operation that will sniff out intelligence about natural disasters, business-friendly governments, overseas regulations and global political developments for clients in industry and government. |
| US: Protest Leads Army to Reconsider Big Contract
by Dana Hedgpeth, Washington Post
November 1st, 2007
One of the biggest military contracts to house, feed and provide other services to U.S. military troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait may be canceled and renegotiated after the Government Accountability Office said yesterday that it upheld a protest from two teams that lost the bid. |
| US: Rice Says ‘Hole’ in U.S. Law Shields Contractors in Iraq
by John M. Broder, NY Times
October 26th, 2007
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice conceded on Thursday that there was a “hole” in United States law that had allowed Blackwater USA employees and other armed contractors in Iraq to escape legal jeopardy for crimes possibly committed there. |
| NAMIBIA: All Hiring for Iraq Halted
by Brigitte Weidlich, The Namibian
October 16th, 2007
A Namibian labour hire company, which processed the applications of Namibian ex-combatants who wanted to become 'security' guards in Iraq and Afghanistan, has stopped the process.
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| US: The People vs. the Profiteers
by David Rose, Vanity Fair
October 4th, 2007
Americans working in Iraq for Halliburton spin-off KBR have been outraged by the massive fraud they saw there. Dozens are suing the giant military contractor, on the taxpayers' behalf. Whose side is the Justice Department on?
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| US: Billions over Baghdad; The Spoils of War
by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Vanity Fair
October 1st, 2007
Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency--much of it belonging to the Iraqi people--was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. |
| IRAQ: Blackwater Shooting Crisis Rallies Baghdad
by Philip Shishkin, Wall Street Journal
September 24th, 2007
An escalating controversy over the alleged shooting of Iraqi civilians by a U.S. security firm has triggered the strongest challenge yet to legal immunity for some foreigners in Iraq, while providing a rare rallying cry for the country's polarized factions. |
| IRAQ: Big oil’s waiting game over Iraq’s reserves
by Ed Crooks and Sheila McNulty, Financial Times
September 19th, 2007
Oil companies face a dilemma in Iraq over whether to wait for a new oil law which will give them a legal framework in which to operate or to sign agreements now with the Kurdistan Regional Government at the risk of sullying relations with Baghdad and the rest of the country. |
| US: Families Cannot Sue Firm for Israel Deaths
by Ed Pilkington, Guardian (London)
September 19th, 2007
The parents of Rachel Corrie, the US peace activist who was crushed to death four years ago in the then Israeli-occupied Gaza as she was protesting against the demolition of Palestinian homes, have been refused permission to sue the company which made the bulldozer that killed her. |
| US: U.S. Contractor Banned by Iraq Over Shootings
by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times
September 18th, 2007
Blackwater USA, an American contractor that provides security to some of the top American officials in Iraq, has been banned from working in the country by the Iraqi government after a shooting that left eight Iraqis dead and involved an American diplomatic convoy. |
| IRAQ: Will Iraq Kick Out Blackwater?
by Adam Zagorin and Brian Bennett, TIME Magazine
September 17th, 2007
TIME has obtained an incident report prepared by the U.S. government describing a fire fight Sunday in Baghdad in which at least eight Iraqis were reported killed and 13 wounded. The loss of life has provoked anger in Baghdad, where the Interior Ministry has suspended Blackwater's license to operate around the country. |
| CHINA: An Opportunity for Wall St. in China’s Surveillance Boom
by Keith Bradsher, New York Times
September 11th, 2007
China Security and Surveillance Technology, a fast-growing company that installs and sometimes operates surveillance systems for Chinese police agencies, jails and banks, has just been approved for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s listing is just a sign of ever-closer ties among Wall Street, surveillance companies and the Chinese government’s security apparatus. |
| US: Iraq convoy was sent out despite threat
by T. Christian Miller, LA Times
September 3rd, 2007
Senior managers for defense contractor KBR overruled calls to halt supply operations in Iraq in the spring of 2004, ordering unarmored trucks into an active combat zone where six civilian drivers died in an ambush, according to newly available documents. |
| US: Army to examine Iraq contracts
by Richard Lardner, Associated Press
August 29th, 2007
The Army will examine as many as 18,000 contracts awarded over the past four years to support U.S. forces in Iraq to determine how many are tainted by waste, fraud and abuse. |
| IRAQ: U.S. Pays Millions In Cost Overruns For Security in Iraq
by Steve Fainaru, The Washington Post
August 12th, 2007
U.S. military has paid $548 million over the past three years to two British security firms that protect the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on reconstruction projects, more than $200 million over the original budget, according to previously undisclosed data that show how the cost of private security in Iraq has mushroomed. |
| US: As Iraq Costs Soar, Contractors Earn Record Profits
by Eli Clifton, Inter Press Service News Agency
August 2nd, 2007
In a report to lawmakers earlier this week, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that the war in Iraq could cost U.S. taxpayers over a trillion dollars when the long-term costs of caring for soldiers wounded in action, military and economic aid for the Iraqi government, and ongoing costs associated with the 190,000 troops stationed in Iraq are totaled up. |
| US: Blackwater-U. of I. tie
by E.A. Torriero and Jodi S. Cohen, The Chicago Tribune
July 31st, 2007
The University of Illinois is investigating potential conflicts of interest involving the director of the school's prestigious police-training institute and Blackwater U.S.A., the military contractor. |
| IRAQ: Foreign Workers Abused at Embassy, Panel Told
by William Branigin, The Washinton Post
July 27th, 2007
Two American civilian contractors who worked on a massive U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad told Congress yesterday that foreign laborers were deceptively recruited and trafficked to Iraq to toil at the site, where they experienced physical abuse and substandard working conditions. |
| US: Blackwater supports inquiry into fatal shooting
by Bill Sizemore, Virginian-Pilot
July 25th, 2007
After one of his personal bodyguards was shot to death by a Blackwater USA security contractor last Christmas Eve, Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi assured the U.S. ambassador that he was trying to keep the incident out of the public eye. |
| US: 'America's private army' under fire for Illinois facility
by E.A. Torriero, Chicago Tribune
July 23rd, 2007
Blackwater North, as the North Carolina-based firm calls its new site, is designed primarily as a tactical training ground for domestic law enforcement and contractors. Using civilians schooled in military warfare, the site offers training in weaponry, hostage dealings and terror reaction. Still, the sudden appearance of Blackwater is attracting criticism and questions from miles around. Anti-war activists and locals are wary about the new training site. |
| US: Filling Gaps in Iraq, Then Finding a Void at Home
by John M. Broder, New York Times
July 17th, 2007
Taking the place of enlisted troops in every American army before this one, contract employees in Iraq cook meals, wash clothes, deliver fuel and guard bases. And they die and suffer alongside
their brothers and sisters in uniform. About 1,000 contractors have been killed in Iraq since the war began; nearly 13,000 have been injured. The consequences of the war will be lasting for many of them and their families, ordeals that are largely invisible to most Americans. |
| US: Katrina Ice Being Melted After 2 Years
Associated Press
July 14th, 2007
After nearly two years, thousands of truck miles and $12.5 million in storage costs, the federal government is getting rid of thousands of pounds of ice it had sent south to help Katrina victims, then north when it determined much of the ice wasn't needed. |
| IRAQ: A Private Realm Of Intelligence-Gathering; Firm Extends U.S. Government's Reach
by Steve Fainaru and Alec Klein, Washington Post Foreign Service
July 1st, 2007
On the first floor of a tan building inside Baghdad's Green Zone, the full scope of Iraq's daily carnage is condensed into a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation. The intelligence was compiled not by the U.S. military, but by a British security firm, Aegis Defence Services Ltd. The Reconstruction Operations Center is the most visible example of how intelligence collection is now among the responsibilities handled by a network of private security companies that work in the shadows of the U.S. military. |
| WORLD: US probes Saudi-linked UK arms firm
by David Robertson and Tom Baldwin, The Times (London)
June 28th, 2007
The British and US governments are on a diplomatic collision course after the US Department of Justice launched a formal investigation into allegations of corruption at defence company BAE Systems. The US investigation will scrutinise BAE's dealings with Saudi Arabia to expose an account allegedly held by the Bank of England that is used to facilitate Saudi payments for arms.
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| IRAQ: U.S. Security Contractors Open Fire in Baghdad
by Steve Fainaru and Saad al-Izzi, The Washington Post
May 27th, 2007
Employees of Blackwater USA, a private security firm under contract to the State Department, opened fire on the streets of Baghdad twice in two days last week, and one of the incidents provoked a standoff between the security contractors and Iraqi forces, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. |
| IRAQ: Death Toll for Contractors Reaches New High in Iraq
by John M. Broder and James Risen, New York Times
May 19th, 2007
Casualties among private contractors in Iraq have soared to record levels this year, setting a pace that seems certain to turn 2007 into the bloodiest year yet for the civilians who work alongside the American military in the war zone, according to new government numbers. |
| IRAQ: 'Pentagon Moved to Fix Iraqi Media Before Invasion'
by Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service
May 9th, 2007
In the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon planned to create a 'Rapid Reaction Media Team' (RRMT) designed to ensure control over major Iraqi media while providing an Iraqi 'face' for its efforts, according to a ‘White Paper' obtained by the independent National Security Archive (NSA) which released it Tuesday. |
| US: Chevron Seen Settling Case on Iraq Oil
by Claudio Gatti and Jad Mouwad, New York Times
May 8th, 2007
Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, is preparing to acknowledge that it should have known kickbacks were being paid to Saddam Hussein on oil it bought from Iraq as part of a defunct United Nations program, according to investigators. |
| US: Firms Protest Exclusion From Iraq Security Bid
by Alec Klein and Steve Fainaru, Washington Post
May 5th, 2007
Two private security contractors have lodged formal protests against the Army, claiming they have been unfairly excluded from competing for one of the largest security jobs in Iraq, according to government documents and sources familiar with the matter. |
| UK: Spat erupts between medical journals
by Andrew Jack, Financial Times
March 16th, 2007
A rare spat has broken out in the usually decorous world of medical journals. In a highly critical editorial, the BMJ, the former British Medical Journal, accuses Reed Elsevier, the publishing group, of “warmongering” through its international arms-fairs division, and calls on authors to boycott the Lancet, its flagship academic publication, until the links are severed. |
| US: Halliburton to move headquarters to Dubai
by Brett Clanton, Houston Chronicle
March 11th, 2007
Halliburton Co. surprised the energy world, members of Congress and the city of Houston today by announcing it will open a new corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates and relocate its chief executive officer there. |
| US: DynCorp Hired for Somalia Peacekeeping
by Chris Tomlinson, Forbes
March 7th, 2007
The State Department has hired a major military contractor to help equip and provide logistical support to international peacekeepers in Somalia, giving the United States a significant role in the critical mission without assigning combat forces. |
| US: Committee subpoenas former Walter Reed chief
by Kelly Kennedy, Army Times
March 3rd, 2007
The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has subpoenaed Maj. Gen. George Weightman, who was fired as head of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, after Army officials refused to allow him to testify before the committee Monday.
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| US: Iraq's Mercenary King
by Robert Baer , Vanity Fair
March 1st, 2007
As a former C.I.A. agent, the author knows how mercenaries work: in the shadows. But how did a notorious former British officer, Tim Spicer, come to coordinate the second-largest army in Iraq—the tens of thousands of private security contractors? |
| US: PUC Not Letting Verizon off Hook
by Ann S. Kim, Portland Press Herald (MAINE)
January 30th, 2007
The Maine Public Utilities Commission decided Monday to begin contempt proceedings against Verizon Communications for failing to affirm the truthfulness of statements the company made about its possible role in the government's warrantless surveillance program. |
| US: New Scanners for Tracking City Workers
by Sewell Chan, New York Times
January 23rd, 2007
The Bloomberg administration is devoting more than $180 million toward state-of-the-art technology to keep track of when city employees come and go, with one agency requiring its workers to scan their hands each time they enter and leave the workplace. |
| US: Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
by Richard Cummings, Playboy.com
January 16th, 2007
If you think the Iraq war hasn't worked out very well for anyone, think again. Defense contractors such as Lockheed are thriving. And no wonder: Here's the story how Lockheed's interests- as opposed to those of the American citizenry- set the course of U.S. policy after 9/11. |
| AFGHANISTAN: The Reach of War; U.S. Report Finds Dismal Training of Afghan Police
by James Glantz and David Rohde; Carlotta Gall, The New York Times
December 4th, 2006
Five years after the fall of the Taliban, a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department has found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone. |
| US: Muslim Says He Was Abducted By U.S.
by Armen Keteyian and Phil Hirschkorn., CBS News
November 28th, 2006
Khaled El-Masri says he is not after money but answers about why he spent five months in harsh captivity as a prisoner in the war on terrorism. |
| WORLD: Controlling the Corporate Mercenaries
by Nick Dearden, War on Want, Zmag
November 7th, 2006
While Iraq represents bloodshed and death on a massive scale to most people, to Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) it has brought a boom time, boosting the revenues of British-based PMSCs alone from £320 million in 2003 to more than £1.8 billion in 2004. In the same year income for the industry worldwide reached $100 billion. |
| IRAQ: Idle Contractors Add Millions to Iraq Rebuilding
by James Glantz, The New York Times
October 25th, 2006
Overhead costs have consumed more than half the budget of some reconstruction projects in Iraq, according to a government estimate released yesterday, leaving far less money than expected to provide the oil, water and electricity needed to improve the lives of Iraqis. |
| US: THE C.I.A.’S TRAVEL AGENT
by Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
October 23rd, 2006
On the official Web site of Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company, there is a section devoted to a subsidiary called Jeppesen International Trip Planning, based in San Jose, California. The write-up mentions that the division “offers everything needed for efficient, hassle-free, international flight operations,” spanning the globe “from Aachen to Zhengzhou.” The paragraph concludes, “Jeppesen has done it all.” |
| IRAQ: Pentagon Audit Clears Propaganda Effort
by Mark Mazzetti, New York Times
October 20th, 2006
An American military propaganda campaign that planted favorable news articles in the Iraqi news media did not violate laws or Pentagon regulations, but it was not properly supervised by military officials in Baghdad, an audit by the Pentagon Inspector General has concluded. |
| IRAQ: Corporate Torture in Iraq
by
Ali Eteraz, Counter Punch
October 11th, 2006
What remains under-reported and under-appreciated is the fact that this war has afforded a vast collection of corporations to reap the benefits of lucrative government contracts. A number of such companies are involved in supervising, maintaining, and providing support for the numerous prisons in Iraq in the areas of interrogation, interpretation, and translation. |
| EU: EU firms getting round China arms embargo
by Andrew Rettman, EU Observer
October 3rd, 2006
European firms such as AugustaWestland and Eurocopter are supplying components for Chinese combat helicopters via networks of global subsidiaries and re-exporters despite the EU's 17-year old China arms embargo, NGOs have warned. |
| IRAQ: Heralded Iraq Police Academy a 'Disaster'
by Amit R. Paley, Washington Post
September 28th, 2006
A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found. |
| US: Congress Is Told of Failures of Rebuilding Work in Iraq
by James Glanz, The New York Times
September 28th, 2006
In a sweeping new assessment of reconstruction failures in Iraq, a federal inspector told Congress on Thursday that 13 of 14 major projects built by the American contractor Parsons that were examined by his agency were substandard, with construction deficiencies and other serious problems. |
| IRAQ: Contractor's Work in Iraq Is Under Scrutiny
by Griffe Witte, The Washington Post
September 28th, 2006
The contractor that botched construction of a $75 million police academy in Baghdad so badly that it was deemed a health risk has produced shoddy work on 13 out of 14 projects reviewed by federal auditors, the top official monitoring Iraq's reconstruction told Congress today. |
| IRAQ: Firm That Paid Iraq Papers Gets New Deal
by Rebecca Santana, Associated Press
September 27th, 2006
A public relations company that participated in a controversial U.S. military program that paid Iraqi newspapers for stories favorable to coalition forces has been awarded another multimillion-dollar media contract with American forces in Iraq. |
| US: Army Corps Faked Budget Entries
by T. Christian Miller, The Los Angeles Times
September 23rd, 2006
The Army Corps of Engineers improperly created fake entries in government ledgers to maintain control over hundreds of millions of dollars in spending for the reconstruction of Iraq, according to a federal audit released Friday. |
| US: Border Security Contract Goes To Boeing
Reuters
September 22nd, 2006
Boeing Co. has been chosen to build a "virtual fence" using sensors and cameras along the U.S. border with Mexico and Canada to help control illegal immigration in a contract projected to be worth up to $2 billion. |
| US: Spy Agencies Outsourcing to Fill Key Jobs
by Greg Miller, The Los Angeles Times
September 17th, 2006
At the National Counterterrorism Center — the agency created two years ago to prevent another attack like Sept. 11 — more than half of the employees are not U.S. government analysts or terrorism experts. Instead, they are outside contractors. |
| US: Pentagon Spends Billions to Outsource Torture
by Joshua Holland, Alternet
September 14th, 2006
The thousands of mercenary security contractors employed in the Bush administration's "War on Terror" are billed to American taxpayers, but they've handed Osama Bin Laden his greatest victories -- public relations coups that have transformed him from just another face in a crowd of radical clerics to a hero of millions in the global South (posters of Bin Laden have been spotted in largely Catholic Latin America during protests against George W. Bush). |
| SOMALIA: US accused of covert operations in Somalia
by Antony Barnett and Patrick Smith, The Observer (UK)
September 10th, 2006
Dramatic evidence that America is involved in illegal mercenary operations in east Africa has emerged in a string of confidential emails seen by The Observer. The leaked communications between US private military companies suggest the CIA had knowledge of the plans to run covert military operations inside Somalia - against UN rulings - and they hint at involvement of British security firms. |
| KATRINA: Entergy's Costly Stinginess
by Pam Radtke Russell, New Orleans Times-Picayune
August 9th, 2006
Despite asking for millions of dollars from New Orleans customers and the federal government to rebuild its shattered electric and gas system, Entergy Corp. on Tuesday reported millions in profits for the third quarter in a row since Hurricane Katrina struck. |
| KATRINA: Small Clause, Big Problem
by Joseph B. Treaster, The New York Times
August 4th, 2006
Marilyn Haverty, whose house in Waveland, Miss., was buffeted by wind and surging water in Hurricane Katrina, thought her homeowner’s insurance would cover at least the wind damage. But it never paid her a penny. |
| IRAQ: Audit Finds U.S. Hid Actual Cost of Iraq Projects
by James Glanz, The New York Times
July 30th, 2006
The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found. |
| IRAQ: Series of Woes Mar Iraq Project Hailed as Model
by James Glanz, The New York Times
July 28th, 2006
The United States is dropping Bechtel, the American construction giant, from a project to build a high-tech children’s hospital in the southern Iraqi city of Basra after the project fell nearly a year behind schedule and exceeded its expected cost by as much as 150 percent. |
| VIETNAM: Vietnam to clean dioxin in hot spots
by Lao Dong, Translated by The Vinh, Thanh Nien News
July 19th, 2006
Vietnam will carry out detoxification of dioxin in several “hot spots,” especially former US military bases that had stored chemical defoliants used during the Vietnam War, heard a conference last week. |
| KATRINA: Hurricane Victims Say Agents Advised Against Flood Coverage
by Joseph B. Treaster, The New York Times
July 14th, 2006
Richard F. Scruggs, a Pascagoula lawyer who rose to prominence as he helped win a $250 billion settlement from the tobacco industry a few years ago, argues that in selling home insurance with many references to windstorms and hurricanes, Nationwide and other insurers led customers to believe that any hurricane damage — whether from wind or water — would be covered. |
| US: The Rise and Fall of a War Profiteer
by Sarah Anderson, AlterNet
July 13th, 2006
Bulletproof vest maker David H. Brooks' reign as America’s most ostentatious war profiteer does appear to be over. On July 10, the DHB Board of Directors issued a terse statement to the effect that Brooks had been put on indefinite “administrative leave” pending the outcome of unspecified investigations. |
| IRAQ: Army to End Expansive, Exclusive Halliburton Deal
by Griff Witte, Washington Post
July 12th, 2006
The U.S. Army is discontinuing a controversial multibillion-dollar deal with oil services giant Halliburton to provide logistical support to U.S. troops worldwide, a decision that could cut deeply into the firm's dominance of government contracting in Iraq.
(Read CorpWatch's response.) |
| KATRINA: Needing Builders, Gulf City Looks to China
by Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times
June 27th, 2006
Frustration over the pace of rebuilding is rampant along the Mississippi Gulf Coast some 10 months after Hurricane Katrina. But in the small city of D'Iberville, leaders are hoping to jump-start construction with an unorthodox solution: importing hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Chinese laborers to build shopping malls, condominiums and casinos. |
| IRAQ: Army Cancels Contract for Iraqi Prison
by James Glanz, The New York Times
June 20th, 2006
The Army Corps of Engineers said Monday that it had canceled a $99.1 million contract with Parsons, one of the largest companies working in Iraq, to build a prison north of Baghdad after the firm fell more than two years behind schedule, threatened to go millions of dollars over budget and essentially abandoned the construction site. |
| KATRINA: Contractors rake it in as they clean it up
by Martin Wolk, MSNBC
May 31st, 2006
In addition to being the largest natural disaster in U.S. history, Hurricane Katrina was a boon for companies that specialize in recovering from such devastation. It opened the spigot to billions of dollars in federal contracts to haul debris, make emergency repairs to damaged homes and buildings, and provide temporary housing and other structures. |
| IRAN: Iran Target of Apparent Disinformation Campaign
by Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service
May 23rd, 2006
A story authored by a prominent U.S. neo-conservative regarding new legislation in Iran allegedly requiring Jews and other religious minorities to wear distinctive colour badges circulated around the world this weekend before it was exposed as false. The article by a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Iranian-American Amir Taheri, was initially published in Friday's edition of Canada's National Post, which ran alongside the story a 1935 photograph of a Jewish businessman in Berlin with a yellow, six-pointed star sewn on his overcoat, as required by Nazi legislation at the time. The Post subsequently issued a retraction.
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| These Guns for Hire
by Ted Koppel, The New York Times
May 22nd, 2006
Ted Koppel says "There is something terribly seductive about the notion of a mercenary army. Perhaps it is the inevitable response of a market economy to a host of seemingly intractable public policy and security problems." |
| IRAQ: How Iraq Police Reform Became Casualty of War
by Michael Moss, with David Rohde and Kirk Semple, The New York Times
May 22nd, 2006
So was much of the rest of Iraq. An initial effort by American civilians to rebuild the police, slow to get started and undermanned, had become overwhelmed by corruption, political vengeance and lawlessness unleashed by the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
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