Corporate Pillaging and Military Contractors
Introduction to the panel.
Kelly was a military police sergeant with the Colorado National Guard. She escorted convoys of KBR trucks. They regularly broke down, and the convoy would continue while MPs were left behind to guard the trucks until they could be towed away. Iraqi civilians would gather, hoping to loot the trucks because the Iraqis were poor and the cargo was valuable. Often, they would later be ordered to destroy and abandon the trucks. Once, when they were ordered to destroy a truck loaded with food, she proposed to her superior that they let the people have the food. But he told her that would be too dangerous because people would come close to the MPs and might attack them. So she wound up pointing a machine gun at Iraqis people to keep them away as the food burned. "When you're in the military, you want to feel proud, you want to feel good about what you're doing," she said. "That made me feel really ashamed."
Captain Luis Montalvan describes his service in Iraq starting in September, 2003, when he was a scout platoon leader with 30 to 40 soldiers assigned to handle 100 kilometers of the border with Syria including a major border crossing site, an “absolutely absurd” assignment that “drives to the heart of the lack of troops that we had there from the get-go.” In 2007, Monalvan was invited to join the Iraq Planning Group of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. He briefed them on the enormous extent of corruption in Iraq. He also wrote a New York Times op-ed piece on the same subject. “Thirty to 50 percent of Iraqi security forces on the payrolls are ghosts—they don’t exist,” he says, and their salaries go to cronies at the top of the Iraqi government. Montalvan says that “when you follow the crumb trail with respect to Iraqi corruption, it leads to American corruption.”
Antonia Juhasz is the author of several books about the oil industry and a visiting scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies. She notes that even Alan Greenspan, in his memoirs, wrote that “the war in Iraq is about oil,” although he later retreated from that statement under attack from the right. Juhasz says giving control of Iraqi oil to Western companies was a central part of the Bush Administration war plan. “This oil is sitting there like a gleaming prize at the end of the finish line,” she says. Juhasz also says US military planners wanted to employ 500,000 Iraqi soldiers for reconstruction, but the Bush Administration wanted to use private contractors. The soldiers were fired—“half a million men with guns made unemployed without jobs, without money, and their families left without hope,” she says, creating an enormous, hostile group that, including the families, may amount to 10 percent of Iraqis.
Jeremy Scahill is the author of Blackwater, the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He describes the Sept. 16, 2007 incident in which Blackwater guards killed 17 civilians in a Baghdad square. The Iraqi government demanded that Blackwater leave the country, but all that happened was a three-day pause, because US operations depend on Blackwater. Scahill says a US military investigation determined that all 17 killings were unprovoked. But US actions have kept the killers from prosecution and “they’re walking around as free people.” Of the hundreds of thousands of contractors who have worked in Iraq, says Scahill, only two have ever been charged with any crime: One for having child pornography on his computer at Abu Ghraib, and the other for allegedly stabbing another contractor.
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