Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

As a result of September 11 the powers of the CIA and the FBI have been broadened significantly. Once barred from domestic surveillance because of concerns of abuse by an all-powerful spy agency, the CIA has now effectively been given carte blanche.

The C.I.A.’s Domestic Reach

“The C.I.A. is now permitted to read secret grand jury testimony, without a judge’s prior approval. It can obtain private records of institutions and corporations seized under federal court-approved searches.

In proposed legislation circulated on Capitol Hill last month, the C.I.A. is also seeking the power to intercept e-mail messages routed through the United States from abroad, on the say-so of the director of central intelligence, without a warrant. In addition, the F.B.I. would like to expand its ability to eavesdrop on individuals in the United States. …

“The case for breaking down the barriers to work against international terrorists seeking to kill Americans is absolutely compelling,” said Morton H. Halperin, himself the target of an illegal wiretap when he worked in the Nixon White House. After many years of court battles, he won a belated apology from his former boss, Henry A. Kissinger.

“But the government insistently refused to limit it to that,” he said. “Most of the new authorities are directed as much at American citizens as foreigners.”

The expansion of government power to spy at home is taking place in a political environment charged by the attacks. To oppose the powers that the government seeks, Attorney General John Ashcroft warned Congress last month, is to side with the terrorists.”

I’m also worried about all of these billions and billions of dollars being spent without oversight and with the say-so of people who most likely do not have the best interests of Americans on their minds.

A busy weekend:

1. Berated Philippine Govt. Backtracks on U.S. Troops Smart move. I’m not sure what I would be scared of more. Living under US rule or living in a country where the US has decided it has an interest.
2. Pentagon makes new plans for US control to go global
   “We are interested in a lot more than al-Qaeda,” the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, said. …

   That new focus is expected to shift US military strength away from its large standing armies in Europe and East Asia to near-permanent bases in Central and South-East Asia and other regions where the military has had few recent ties. …

   While Washington is asking its European allies to do more, it has also been lobbying Japan to play a larger security role in Asia. Tokyo has recently changed its pacifist Constitution to allow its forces to operate further from Japan’s shores. “

3. Rumsfeld hints at much broader military mission Let global destabilization begin. Rumsfeld is a real slime. I was with my father once and he was agog with admiration for Rumsfeld when he came on tv. It was freaky.
4. US to do a frame-up on Saddam Hussein since there has been no apparent connection between Iraq and Al-Quaeda. Man, our government is so despicable. It makes me sick the Machiavellian way in which they behave.
   “I expect Saddam Hussein to let inspectors back into the country. We want to know whether he’s developing weapons of mass destruction. He claims he’s not; let the world in to see,” Bush said.

   “And if he doesn’t, we’ll have to deal with that at the appropriate time,” Bush added.

   Asked what the U.S. would do if Saddam Hussein defied the inspectors, Bush replied: “If he doesn’t let them in? He’ll find out.”

   In reality, the US is the largest manufacturer of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in the world. They would never support inspections of US facilities. The United States has a real credibility problem. It doesn’t help that they take every opportunity to lie and mislead and manipulate their own people.

5. U.S. throws wrench into Russia ties More and more and more lies and shadiness. The US made some deals with Russia but now that they’ve gotten what they wanted they’re backing out.
   First it was the unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over sharp Russian objections. Then came indications that Washington is contemplating establishment of long-term military bases in formerly Soviet Central Asia. Last week the administration revealed it is planning to retain nuclear weapons that the Russians thought would be destroyed as part of a mutual arms reduction agreement the former Cold War rivals are negotiating.
6. Even though the United States wants to oust Hussein they won’t support Kurdish independence. Their big ally Turkey has been fighting Kurdish separatists for many years. Kurds make up one sixth of the population of Turkey. In fact, the US spooks helped find Kurdish rebel Abdullah Ocalan in Nigeria and helped Turkey abduct him. In an all to familiar scenario with rebels, he was sent back to Turkey and sentenced to execution. One wonders which side the American government would support if the American War for Independence were fought somewhere else today.
7. Who are the real terrorists? America’s best friend, Turkey, and their human rights record:
   According to international observers like Amnesty International, in many cases, people who have dared to speak out against the government, even peacefully, have been imprisoned, or have disappeared.

As the US military creeps around the world into the Philippines and the Far East to prosecute its ‘War on Terror’ more and more people around the globe are discovering how arrogant and corrupt our government really is. Instead of exhibiting true leadership and being a real example of democracy our leaders have chosen the cowardly way out. The way of empire and conquest, greed and dishonesty. They have chosen to answer the deaths of thousands of innocent people by raining death upon thousands more innocent lives. And this is just the beginning.

While the Bush administration lies and stonewalls and while Taleban POWs “unlawful combatants” are kept in outdoor cages on foreign soil and the International Red Cross is kept muzzled, the US spouts meaningless rhetoric about being the shining light of freedom and justice. Who’s buying this load of crap?

Related:

1. UN attacks treatment of detainees
2. Russian Border Chief Says U.S. Bases in Central Asia Can Only be Temporary
3. US accused of risking the rights it went to war for
4. U.S. troops set up Philippines camp
5. Afghan tribes balk at aiding search for Taliban: report

It is estimated that about ninety percent of street-level governmental operations are actually “outsourced” to private corporations. This means that private business is literally taking the place of government. The problem is that the private corporations who win government contracts are primarily anti-union, undemocratic, and completely resistant to public scrutiny.

The result is that in places like Colombia government “contractors” are acting as corporate surrogates for the military and US law enforcement. They are mercenaries who carry out American interdiction efforts without the restrictions and constraints which would be placed on US Armed forces. From an article at globalexchange.org:

“In the old days, the British maintained that because the pirate ships did not fly the English flag, the Crown was not responsible for their actions. While the new privateers are underwritten through U.S. taxes, they are technically “contract employees.” Like the sixteenth century pirates, if they get caught in an embarrassing crime, or are killed, the U.S. government can deny responsibility for their actions. What’s more only a select few in Congress know of their activities and their operations are not subject to public scrutiny, despite the fact that they are on the government payroll. …

What is new is that now contract employees are in the forefront of operations. In the Colombian war, private outsourced military men are out on the frontlines, while the real U.S. troops are hidden on bases as trainers. The exact number of contract employees in Colombia is not known. A recent State Department report states that there are only 200 U.S. military soldiers and about 170 American contractors working in Colombia. Historically, official counts of U.S. personnel and contractors tend to be underestimated in counter-insurgency operations. ”

One of the largest government contractors, DynCorp, has been on the front lines of the so-called ‘war on drugs’ in Central and South America. Their main business is spraying herbicides over Colombia in an attempt to destroy the coca harvest. While government contracts account for 98% of DynCorp’s business they operate as a private army with minimal accountability. It is troubling how the use of private contractors is used to maintain secrecy about operations which are completely funded by the American public.

DynCorp is tight lipped when it comes to its clients. Company spokesperson Janet Wineriter refused to comment on the company’s overseas operations. Nor will the State Department make on-the-record statements about DynCorp’s operations. Company paramedic Michael Demons apparently recently died of a heart attack on a Colombian military base and the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá attempted to keep his death secret. Because Demons was not a military officer and didn’t work directly for the U.S. government, there was no official report and his death was treated as if he were a tourist. DynCorp has also lost three pilots in action. None of these deaths were reported in the news media.

DynCorp has recently had some public relations trouble in Bosnia. A lawsuit has been brought against DynCorp and several employees for buying and selling 12-15 year old girls in an international sex-slave trade. It’s your tax dollars at work.

“None of the girls,” continues Johnston, “were from Bosnia. They were from Russia, Romania and other places, and they were imported in by DynCorp and the Serbian mafia. These guys would say ‘I gotta go to Serbia this weekend to pick up three girls.’ They talk about it and brag about how much they pay for them — usually between $600 and $800. In fact, there was this one guy who had to be 60 years old who had a girl who couldn’t have been 14. DynCorp leadership was 100 percent in bed with the mafia over there. I didn’t get any results from talking to DynCorp officials, so I went to Army CID and I drove around with them, pointing out everyone’s houses who owned women and weapons.”

Additional resources on DynCorp and other contractors:

1. The Whores of War A good source for information on US financed mercenaries
2. Are they civilians or mercenaries? from Colombia Report
3. DynCorp: Beyond the Rule of Law
4. U.S. Mercenaries in Colombia
5. State Outsources Secret War from The Nation
6. DynCorp From Kosovo to Peru from Narconews
7. Excerpts from the DynCorp-State Department Contract
8. Bush’s Janissaries “Look for yet deeper involvement in the quagmire of South American drug politics. Quoting Robert Zoellick, Bush’s trade representative, the U.S. “cannot continue to make a false distinction between counterinsurgency and counternarcotics efforts.” However, expect to see the dollars funneled into DynCorp and similar companies mushroom, since they provide such excellent political cover for military adventurism. “

realpolitik: n. (re·al·po·li·tik) (sometimes cap.) politics or national policy governed by principles of power, expansion, and expediency rather than by ideals or ethics.

1. Central Asia: U.S. Military Buildup Shifts Spheres Of Influence
2. America quietly changes war aim
3. Dismay With Saudi Arabia Fuels Pullout Talk The US won’t pullout unless the Saudis make them. We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars building bases there.
4. US defends their skirting of the Geneva Convention
5. Spraying Poisonous Herbicides on Colombians: Your tax dollars at work. The US will be increasing assistance to the Colombian government against the FARC in the name of the ‘War on Drugs’. Sounds almost as funny as the ‘War Against Terrorism’.
6. New Criticism Signals Tension Between U.S. and Russia
7. Russia: No Need for Post-War U.S. Forces in C. Asia

From The “Green Peril”:
Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat a policy analysis by Leon Hamar of the Cato institute written in August 1992 after the Gulf War and at the end of the first Bush administration. Some great points are made here. It’s a long read but very informative. Discovered via Cryptome:

Now that the Cold War is becoming a memory, America’s
foreign policy establishment has begun searching for new ene-
mies. Possible new villains include “instability” in Europe
–ranging from German resurgence to new Russian imperialism–
the “vanishing” ozone layer, nuclear proliferation, and
narcoterrorism. Topping the list of potential new global
bogeymen, however, are the Yellow Peril, the alleged threat
to American economic security emanating from East Asia, and
the so-called Green Peril (green is the color of Islam).
That peril is symbolized by the Middle Eastern Moslem funda-
mentalist–the “Fundie,” to use a term coined by The Econo-
mist(1)–a Khomeini-like creature, armed with a radical ideolo-
gy, equipped with nuclear weapons, and intent on launching a
violent jihad against Western civilization. …

The Islam vs. West paradigm, reflected in such observa-
tions, is beginning to infect Washington. That development
recalls the efforts by some of Washington’s iron triangles
as well as by foreign players during the months leading up
to the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis. Their use of the media
succeeded in building up Saddam Hussein as the “most danger-
ous man in the world”(6) and as one of America’s first new
post-Cold War bogeymen. Those efforts, including allega-
tions that Iraq had plans to dominate the Middle East,
helped to condition the American public and elites for the
U.S. intervention in the gulf.(7) …

The problem with that campaign is that the legitimacy
of the Saudi regime is based on its own Islamic fundamental-
ist principles. The Saudi government is actually more rigid
in its application of Islamic law and more repressive in
many respects than the one in Tehran. For example, Saudi
Arabia has no form of popular representation, and political
rights are totally denied women and non-Moslems. The Saudi
regime has been able to stay in power largely because it has
had both direct and indirect American military support, most
recently during the Gulf War. To paraphrase President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Saudis are Islamic fundamental-
ists–but they are our Islamic fundamentalists.(30) …

Indeed, the Bush administration’s response to the Alge-
rian coup is only the most recent manifestation of a policy
that subordinates the political will of Middle Eastern popu-
lations to the preservation of a profoundly undemocratic
status quo. In the name of combating the elusive threat of
Islamic fundamentalism, which has emerged as one of the most
important engines of change in the region, the United States
allies itself with some of the most anti-democratic forces
there.

I could quote selections all day. Hadar does provide a superb amount of information and from our point of view of a decade later his analysis is right on in most respects.

In bringing a new tone to Washington, Bush Jr. selects Iran-Contra zealots to head key posts in American foreign policy. Yeah, we really need more veterans of the Reagan era. According to this article the two cold-warriors are quite unsavory. John Negroponte, once U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, “abetted and covered up human rights crimes” and Otto Reich, as head of the Office of Public Diplomacy, “funnelled pro-contra op-ed pieces to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post without revealing its role in the writing of these pieces.” He also “engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities” under the direction of Reagan and his military junta. In light of the cooling of relations between the U.S. and North Korea and Russia, there seems to be little if any hope that Bush will change anything for the better.