The International Herald Tribune reports
that a company being paid $1 billion per year to provide meals in Iraq is under investigation for price-gouging. The company, formerly Public Warehousing, now Agility Logistics, appears to be so well-connected that ConAgra, Tyson Foods and Sara Lee were excluded from at least some business. (Scratch the surface here, I’m afraid, and we’ll find firms complaining - nominally - that other peole are stealing - when what they’re
actually upset about is not the stealing - but the
other people who are doing it.
Federal agents are investigating whether several large food companies charged the government excessively high prices for supplies to U.S. troops in Iraq and Kuwait, according to administration officials.Widening their previously disclosed inquiries into contract fraud and corruption in Kuwait and Iraq, investigators from the Justice and Defense departments are examining deals that Sara Lee, ConAgra Foods and other U.S. companies made to supply the military, officials said.
The inquiry centers on whether the companies overcharged Agility Logistics, a Kuwait-based company formerly named Public Warehousing that is the U.S. Army’s principal food supplier for the war zones. Investigators are also reviewing whether Agility Logistics improperly took payments from the food companies.
Agility Logistics, which supplies enormous amounts of fruits, vegetables and meats for more than 160,000 troops in combat zones, said in a statement that it had done nothing wrong and was fully cooperating with the investigation.
But a Justice Department lawyer, Brian Mizoguchi, told a Federal Claims Court judge in Washington on June 12 that the company’s business arrangements were the target of “a very large and active investigation into criminal fraud involving amounts in the hundreds of millions of dollars.” Continue reading ‘International Herald Tribune: U.S. widens contract fraud inquiry to include military’s food suppliers’
Journalist and photographer Lindsay Beyerstein has an excellent blog called MajikThise. Here’s her account of encountering Blackwater personnnel while covering Katrina (internal links omitted):
The scariest people I’ve ever met were the Blackwater guys I found clustered around a van behind a New Orleans hotel shortly after Hurricane Katrina.I saw a lot of disconcerting things during those two weeks, but the one experience that haunts me two years later was a five-minute conversation that crew.
We’d already encountered a few other Blackwater guys during our trip. One juiced up freak in mirrored sunglasses and a Blackwater bearclaw t-shirt actually lunged at our car when my colleague tried to take a picture of the hotel he was guarding. He didn’t point his weapon or yell, or do anything a rational person in a defensive posture might have done. He just grunted really loudly and tried to stick his head in our window.
Mind you, he wasn’t holding a position in an emergency. We were driving in broad daylight through downtown New Orleans with a bunch of other traffic (military and civilian).
The Blackwater dude was acting as a glorified rent-a-cop on the sidewalk, about two blocks from the main media staging area for New Orleans, which was already amply secured by US military and law enforcement.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that these Blackwater guys thought of themselves as frontline soldiers in a literal war zone, ready to use deadly force at the slightest provocation. That was an unfounded estimate, in the middle of the day in downtown New Orleans several days after the city had been secured by the legitimate authorities. Continue reading ‘Majikthise : Hurricane Katrina’
The following picture, taken by Joao Silva, accompanies Andrew E. Kramer and James Glanz’s report on a recent incident in Baghdad.
This is, necessarily, the price of our course of action. I don’t know whether or not the United States should withdraw. But it seems to me self-evidence that we’re responsible for creating the situation. Should we stay, we need - even at greater risk, at greater cost - to treat Iraqi lives as though they were as precious as American lives. American lives that we care about, mind you - not quite like Americans who live in New Orleans, if you take my meaning.
Link to Kramer/Glanz piece.
Overwhelming evidence that outsourcing - especially the use of force - has few virtues, if any. Scahill calmly reviews the company’s founding by Erik Prince - former Navy Seal, and scion of a wealthy right-wing Republican family in Michigan, through its involvement in post 9/11 U.S. military activities, principally in Iraq.
Blackwater is an example of everything that’s wrong with outsourcing, in covert/classified and regular government operations. There’s no transparency or accountability:
- Â - especially when work is contracted and subcontraced through multiple sucontracts; in money-laundering cases, the use of additional transactions to obscure source is called “layering,” and is a violation of federal law. With respect to Blackwater, Halliburton/KBR et al., it’s Bush Administration policy.
- because there’s no civilian or military “chain of command,” there’s no regular reporting and recording functions (think of the deskbook in a police station, the bound volumes in a county clerk or court clerk’s office, the log on a ship)
- Blackwater has, at the same time, claimed in court cases (wrongful death actions brought by surviving family members of Blackwater employees - all killed in circumstances suggesting cost-cutting and recklessness) that because it’s working on behalf of the military, or other U.S. government agencies, it’s immune from the civilian court system. In other words - ‘heads I win, tails you lose.’
- Because they’re private contractors , they ‘re not flexibly integratable into existing command structures
- While they claim to be cheaper, it’s not clear that that’s true; to the extent that it is true - it may be because they’re increasingly using Third World employees who they pay less than they do to American ex-service people
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Blackwater tried to characterize its services as “donated,” motivated by humanitarian concerns.
- Blackwater claimed to have, in cooperation with the Coast Guard, “saved some 150 people that otherwise wouldn’t have been saved.” (Cofer Black, former head of the CIA’s CounterTerrorism Center, then a Blackwater executive). Scahill says that the Coast Guard told him they’d asked Blackwater not to assist in water rescues - and that, in any case, they had no record of Blackwater saving anyone. (pp. 325- 326).
- Blackwater made at least $33 million on Katrina-related services (325)
And, in case you needed to be reminded, the first FEMA director in the Bush II administration was Joseph Allbaugh - Bush’s campaign manager in 2000. His lobbying clients, Halliburton/KBR and the Shaw Group got Katrina contracts worth $30 million and $950 million. Plus other Katrina contracts to firms with names that are likely to be familiar:
- $1.4 billion for Fluor
- $575 million for Bechtel
Well-written and disturbing. The book is available in bookstores now, and also has its own website: www.blackwaterbook.com. We’re proud to note that Jeremy Scahill lives in Brooklyn.
