51 Who funds the Taliban? Western contractors' Protection Money

(1) Who funds the Taliban? Western contractors' Protection Money
(2) Afghans join Taliban to avenge civilian victims. War unwinnable; build infrastructure instead
(3) Britain expects Afghan war to go on for 40 years
(4) Iraq bans dual citizenship for political leaders
(5) Only winners from Iraq & Afghan Wars are Pentagon contractors Lockheed, Boeing et al

(1) Who funds the Taliban? Western contractors' Protection Money

From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: 18.08.2009 05:04 PM

Who is Funding the Afghan Taliban? You Don't Want to Know By Jean MacKenzie

August 16, 2009 "GlobalPost" --- KABUL

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23276.htm

It is the open secret no one wants to talk about, the unwelcome truth that most prefer to hide. In Afghanistan, one of the richest sources of Taliban funding is the foreign assistance coming into the country.

Virtually every major project includes a healthy cut for the insurgents. Call it protection money, call it extortion, or, as the Taliban themselves prefer to term it, "spoils of war," the fact remains that international donors, primarily the United States, are to a large extent financing their own enemy.

"Everyone knows this is going on," said one U.S. Embassy official, speaking privately.

It is almost impossible to determine how much the insurgents are spending, making it difficult to pinpoint the sources of the funds.

Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, former Taliban minister to Pakistan, was perhaps more than a bit disingenuous when he told GlobalPost that the militants were operating mostly on air.

"The Taliban does not have many expenses," he said, smiling slightly. "They are barefoot and hungry, with no roof over their heads and a stone for their pillow." As for weapons, he just shrugged. "Afghanistan is full of guns," he said. "We have enough guns for years."

The reality is quite different, of course. The militants recruit local fighters by paying for their services. They move about in their traditional 4x4s, they have to feed their troops, pay for transportation and medical treatment for the wounded, and, of course, they have to buy rockets, grenades and their beloved Kalashnikovs.

Up until quite recently, most experts thought that drug money accounted for the bulk of Taliban funding. But even here opinion was divided on actual amounts. Some reports gauged the total annual income at about $100 million, while others placed the figure as high as $300 million - still a small fraction of the $4 billion poppy industry.

Now administration officials have launched a search for Taliban sponsors. Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told a press conference in Islamabad last month that drugs accounted for less of a share of Taliban coffers than was previously thought.

"In the past there was a kind of feeling that the money all came from drugs in Afghanistan," said Holbrooke, according to media reports. "That is simply not true."

The new feeling is that less than half of the Taliban's war chest comes from poppy, with a variety of sources, including private contributions from Persian Gulf states, accounting for much of the rest. Holbrooke told reporters that he would add a member of the Treasury Department to his staff to pursue the question of Taliban funding.

But perhaps U.S. officials need look no further than their own backyard.

Anecdotal evidence is mounting that the Taliban are taking a hefty portion of assistance money coming into Afghanistan from the outside.

This goes beyond mere protection money or extortion of "taxes" at the local level - very high-level negotiations take place between the Taliban and major contractors, according to sources close to the process.

A shadowy office in Kabul houses the Taliban contracts officer, who examines proposals and negotiates with organizational hierarchies for a percentage. He will not speak to, or even meet with, a journalist, but sources who have spoken with him and who have seen documents say that the process is quite professional.

The manager of an Afghan firm with lucrative construction contracts with the U.S. government builds in a minimum of 20 percent for the Taliban in his cost estimates. The manager, who will not speak openly, has told friends privately that he makes in the neighborhood of $1 million per month. Out of this, $200,000 is siphoned off for the insurgents.

If negotiations fall through, the project will come to harm - road workers may be attacked or killed, bridges may be blown up, engineers may be assassinated.

The degree of cooperation and coordination between the Taliban and aid workers is surprising, and would most likely make funders extremely uncomfortable.

One Afghan contractor, speaking privately, told friends of one project he was overseeing in the volatile south. The province cannot be mentioned, nor the particular project.

"I was building a bridge," he said, one evening over drinks. "The local Taliban commander called and said 'don't build a bridge there, we'll have to blow it up.' I asked him to let me finish the bridge, collect the money - then they could blow it up whenever they wanted. We agreed, and I completed my project."

In the south, no contract can be implemented without the Taliban taking a cut, sometimes at various steps along the way.

One contractor in the southern province of Helmand was negotiating with a local supplier for a large shipment of pipes. The pipes had to be brought in from Pakistan, so the supplier tacked on about 30 percent extra for the Taliban, to ensure that the pipes reached Lashkar Gah safely.

Once the pipes were given over to the contractor, he had to negotiate with the Taliban again to get the pipes out to the project site. This was added to the transportation costs.

"We assume that our people are paying off the Taliban," said the foreign contractor in charge of the project.

In Farah province, local officials report that the Taliban are taking up to 40 percent of the money coming in for the National Solidarity Program, one of the country's most successful community reconstruction projects, which has dispensed hundreds of millions of dollars throughout the country over the past six years.

Many Afghans see little wrong in the militants getting their fair share of foreign assistance.

"This is international money," said one young Kabul resident. "They are not taking it from the people, they are taking it from their enemy."

But in areas under Taliban control, the insurgents are extorting funds from the people as well.

In war-ravaged Helmand, where much of the province has been under Taliban control for the past two years, residents grumble about the tariffs.

"It's a disaster," said a 50-year-old resident of Marja district. "We have to give them two kilos of poppy paste per jerib during the harvest; then we have to give them ushr (an Islamic tax, amounting to one-tenth of the harvest) from our wheat. Then they insisted on zakat (an Islamic tithe). Now they have come up with something else: 12,000 Pakistani rupee (approximately $150) per household. And they won't take even one rupee less."

It all adds up, of course. But all things are relative: if the Taliban are able to raise and spend say $1 billion per year - the outside limit of what anyone has been able to predict - that accounts for what the United States is now spending on 10 days of the war to defeat them.

(2) Afghans join Taliban to avenge civilian victims. War unwinnable; build infrastructure instead

From: Kristoffer Larsson <kristoffer.larsson@sobernet.nu> Date: 17.08.2009 04:37 PM

Saturday 8 August 2009 (17 Sha`ban 1430)

Dialogue only option

Shabana Syed | shabanasyed33@hotmail.com

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=125258

Obama's Cairo speech heralded a decisive shift in the strategy of US imperialism, away from the dangerous Islamophobic rhetoric of the Bush regime to a policy highlighting the necessity of rebuilding America's image in Muslim countries.

A few months after the speech, the image of America and its allies appears to be floundering as the Afghan conflict gets bloodier. If the speech marked a rhetorical shift and hinted at change, it did not chart new ground in terms of US foreign policy.

There is a danger that the Afghan conflict may become another quagmire of violence reminiscent of Vietnam unless a change is made. According to critics, this may be the time for Obama to start implementing some of the recommendations that were made in a report called "Changing Course — A New Direction for US Relations with the Muslim World," on which he partly relied on for his Cairo speech.

The report, the initiative of the "US Muslim Engagement Project" included high-profile political figures such as Madeleine Albright former US secretary of state and Richard Armitage, former US deputy secretary of state. It highlighted the need for the West to include grass-root Islamist organizations in the political discourse in the hope their experiences and know-how in Muslim countries may help resolve some global conflicts.

As the death toll of British and American troops in Afghanistan begins to rise, the conflict which is costing the tax payers millions of dollars a year is now being questioned and criticism of the war is increasing.

In Britain, a recent poll for The Guardian showed that 56 percent want all British troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year, and 60 percent by 2011.

The war with the Taleban is now fast turning into a counterinsurgency as more and more Afghans have joined the once despised extremist group and the conflict is being dubbed by those aware of Afghanistan's history, as the "unwinnable war."

There has been very little in the mainstream media about why the Taleban — which after the war in 2001 was a weak, small and dispersed group — has now grown in strength and numbers. What the media have failed to highlight in its reports may be an unpalatable fact but it is still a fact that the Taleban today have popular support and the West's boast to implement Western-style democracy and change in Afghanistan has failed.

Illiteracy and the position of women are worse than before the war in 2001.

The warning signs that the situation was getting worse were ignored; news report after news report about drone attacks and bombs killing innocent Afghans at wedding parties, in madrasas and villages failed to alert the British and American governments that a change of policy and strategy was needed.

Less than a year ago Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith who completed a six-month mission in Afghanistan advised the governments and NATO allies that "We are not going to win this war" and he advised that the new aim should be to change the nature of the debate so that disputes were settled by negotiation and not by violence.

Support for President Hamid Karzai has never really been there; the government is seen as corrupt and his international backers are viewed as the same people who continue to bomb the country, killing innocent women and children.

According to the average Afghan on the street this once loathed group, the Taleban, is today fighting to rid their country of foreign intruders who are attacking Muslims. The Taleban have grown in strength as many people joined them to avenge the civilian victims who, if not dead, are either homeless or wounded. As recently as May, nearly a whole village was annihilated by an American bomb in Afghanistan. The battle for "hearts and minds" has been lost by the West and the Taleban are now in a favored position.

One of the main Islamist groups that the "Changing Course" report recommended dialogue with was the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), and as the Afghan conflict spirals out of control, there is a school of thought which believes that consulting these organizations may help to resolve the problem.

Kamal Helbawy, a Ph.D. in political science, who runs the "Center for the Study of Terrorism" argues that the Muslim Brotherhood operated in Afghanistan in the 1980s at the time of the Soviet occupation and is well acquainted with the tribal laws of the country. It also, he says, has the ability to advise the West on methods that could be implemented to diminish the violence and lead to peace. The group renounced violence years ago and has condemned the approaches adopted by violent groups, including Osama Bin Laden and his followers. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda's second in charge has criticized the MB for discouraging the queues for jihad and encouraging voting queues.

Helbawy has for the past few decades been the spokesperson for the MB and through this association was, and still is, an active figure in Afghan politics. He is well known by all the key players such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, former Prime Minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, former minister Deljoo Hossaini, former President Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ayatollah Asif Mohseni. He resigned as the MB's spokesperson in 1997 but is still playing an active role "dealing with the rise of extremism from the East and the West." Kamal believes that Western leaders can learn a great deal from the MB's experiences in Afghanistan. An opponent of extremism, he defends the Brotherhood's position, which is against violence. "Even during the Mujahedeen's fight against Soviet occupation, the Brotherhood was there as a support system supplying teachers, doctors and coordinating between Mujahedeen leaders."

He is very critical of Western policies affecting the region: "I believe that America owes a debt to the Afghans for shedding their blood to get the Soviets out; soon after this the Soviet empire collapsed and so made America the only world power. No American blood was spilt in the accomplishment of this task."

He doesn't believe the reason for the war is to keep streets in Britain and America safe from terrorism. Kamal: "None of the perpetrators of 9/11 was Afghan. What has killing poor dispossessed Afghans to do with keeping the West safe? This war is creating bitterness among the people as they watch innocents being bombed and made homeless. This will surely create a backlash." He argues that several steps are essential for the prevention of further conflict.

Firstly, he argues the West should seek proper channels for dialogue with the Taleban. "If you have a problem with the Taleban, then try and talk to them directly, instead of talking to someone you have no problem with, like Karzai." Secondly, he believes the West has to draft a plan for withdrawal from Afghanistan and prepare the ground for free and proper elections devoid of rigging and vote purchasing.

Finally, he argues the West should plan for peace rather than war. "If Britain and America used the money they were spending on war on developing infrastructure, the Afghan people would never forget the favor. In the same way, if they continue the war, the Afghans will never forget the killing of their kith and kin and this will fuel extremism and may finally spill over to the West."

(3) Britain expects Afghan war to go on for 40 years

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8191018.stm

Page last updated at 15:50 GMT, Saturday, 8 August 2009 16:50 UK

UK 'may have 40-year Afghan role'

The UK's commitment to Afghanistan could last for up to 40 years, the incoming head of the Army has said.

Gen Sir David Richards, who takes over on 28 August, told the Times that "nation-building" would last decades.

Troops will be required for the medium term only, but the UK will continue to play a role in "development, governance [and] security sector reform," he said.

Shadow defence minister Gerald Howarth said the UK had to be there long-term to achieve its objectives.

Gen Richards commanded 35,000 troops from 37 nations when he was head of Nato's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan between May 2006 and February 2007.

He will take over from Gen Sir Richard Dannatt as the UK's chief of the general staff.

'Campaign winnable'

Gen Richards' comments came as it emerged that three servicemen, from the Parachute Regiment, had been killed north of Lashkar Gah, in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan, on Thursday afternoon.

Their deaths - in an attack on a Jackal armoured vehicle which left a colleague critically injured - take to 195 the number of British troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001.

The Army has suffered its heaviest losses of the entire campaign in recent weeks, but its soon-to-be chief said he strongly believed the campaign was "winnable".

"Demanding, certainly, but winnable," he said.

He added: "The end will be difficult to define; it won't be neat and clear-cut like the end of some old-fashioned inter-state war might have been."

He said it would take "a long time and considerable investment", adding: "We must remember, though, that we are not trying to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland."

Gen Richards said great efforts must be made to expand the Afghan National Army and build up the police force - only then could the UK's military role "decline".

Equipment

"I believe that the UK will be committed to Afghanistan in some manner - development, governance, security sector reform - for the next 30 to 40 years," he said.

"It is not just reconstruction; jobs and simple governance that works are key, and there has to be a strong reconciliation element to the latter."

For the Tories, Mr Howarth said: "It would not be fair to those who have given their lives for this conflict to say, 'actually, we need to find out how we can scuttle out of here as quickly as possible'."

However, he said the general was not suggesting maintaining the current level of operations for the next 40 years.

Gen Dannatt has called for the government to commit more troops and equipment to Afghanistan, but Gen Richards said he would not be presenting a "shopping list" to ministers.

However, he said the Army and the government needed to "continue to respond flexibly and quickly to the evolving requirements of our campaign in Afghanistan".

Labour MP Mike Gapes, chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, said there were "serious questions" to be asked about why other Nato countries were "not pulling their weight".

Mr Gapes asked: "Why are only a few countries taking the major burden of this?

"That is the big issue for the international community - not just for the UK."

(4) Iraq bans dual citizenship for political leaders

From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: 18.08.2009 05:04 PM

Iraq aims to ban dual citizenship for top officials , Wed Aug 12,2009

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h0EkOkQ-K8PN3kSUr4F6e9qKKiVg

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraq's cabinet has approved a bill to require all top government and security officials to renounce any foreign citizenships they hold or to step down, the government spokesman said on Wednesday.

The bill, which must be approved by parliament, would apply to the president, prime minister, speaker of parliament and their deputies, as well as key ministers and army and police commanders, Dabbagh said in a statement.

The ministers affected are those of the interior, defence, finance, oil and foreign affairs.

"Those that wish to keep their foreign nationality would have to give up their government positions," Dabbagh said.

Many senior positions in Iraq are filled by former exiles who returned to the country from abroad after the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

More than half of ministers hold dual nationalities.

(5) Only winners from Iraq & Afghan Wars are Pentagon contractors Lockheed, Boeing et al

From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: 18.08.2009 05:04 PM

Winners And Losers In The American Warfare State

By Sherwood Ross , August 17, 2009 "Information Clearing House" --

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23287.htm

"On my last day in Iraq," veteran McClatchy News correspondent Leila Fadel wrote August 9th, "as on my first day in Iraq, I couldn't see what the United States and its allies had accomplished. ...I couldn't understand what thousands of American soldiers had died for and why hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed."

Quite a few oil company CEO's and "defense" industry executives, however, do have a pretty good idea of why that war is being fought. As Michael Cherkasky, president of Kroll Inc., said a year after the Iraq invasion boosted his security firm's profits 231 percent: "It's the Gold Rush." What follows is a brief look at some of the outfits that cashed in, and at the multitudes that got took.

"Defense Earnings Continue to Soar," Renae Merle wrote in The Washington Post on July 30, 2007. "Several of Washington's largest defense contractors said last week that they continue to benefit from a boom in spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan..." Merle added, "Profit reports from Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin showed particularly strong results in operations in the region." More recently, Boeing's second-quarter earnings this year rose 17 percent, Associated Press reported, in part because of what AP called "robust defense sales."

But war, it turns out, is not only unhealthy for human beings, it is not uniformly good for the economy. Many sectors suffer, including non-defense employment, as a war can destroy more jobs than it creates. While the makers of warplanes may be flying high, these are "Tough Times For Commercial Aerospace," Business Week reported July 13th. "The sector is contending with the deepening global recession, declining air traffic, capacity cuts by airlines, and reduced availability of financing for aircraft purchases."

The general public suffers, too. "As President Bush tried to fight the war without increasing taxes, the Iraq war has displaced private investment and/or government expenditures, including investments in infrastructure, R&D and education: they are less than they would otherwise have been," write Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in "The Three Trillion Dollar War"(Norton). Stiglitz holds a Nobel Prize in economics and Bilmes is former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce. They say government money spent in Iraq does not stimulate the economy in the way that the same amounts spent at home would.

The war has also starved countless firms for expansion bucks. "Higher borrowing costs for business since the beginning of the Iraq war are bleeding manufacturing investment," Greg Palast wrote in "Armed Madhouse"(Plume). And when entrepreneurs---who hire so many---lack growth capital, job creation takes a real hit.

We might recall too, the millions abroad who filled the streets to protest President Bush's impending attack on Iraq and who have quit buying U.S. products, further reducing sales and employment. "American firms, especially those that have become icons, like McDonald's and Coca-Cola, may also suffer, not so much from explicit boycotts as from a broader sense of dislike of all things American," Stiglitz and Bilmes write. "America's standing in the world has never been lower," they say, noting that in 2007, U.S. "favorable" ratings plunged to 29 percent in Indonesia and nine percent in Turkey. "Large numbers of wealthy people in the Middle East---where the oil money and inequality put individual wealth in the billions---have shifted banking from America to elsewhere," they say.

Because the Iraq war crippled that country's oil industry, output fell, supplies tightened, and, according to Palast, "World prices leaped to reflect the shortfall..." What's more, he points out, after the Iraq invasion the Saudis withheld more than a million barrels of oil a day from the market. "The one-year 121% post-invasion jump in the price of crude, from under $30 a barrel to over $60, sucked that $120 billion windfall to the Saudis from SUV drivers and factory owners in the West." Count the Saudis among the big winners.

The oil spike subtracted 1.2% from the gross domestic product, "costing the USA just over one million jobs," Palast reckoned. Stiglitz and Bilmes said the oil price spike means "American families have had to spend about 5 percent more of their income on gasoline and heating than before." Last year, the Iraq and Afghan wars cost each American household $138 per month in taxes, they estimated. Count the Joneses among the big losers.

Palast writes, "It has been a very good war for Big Oil---courtesy of OPEC price hikes. The five oil giants saw profits rise from $34 billion in 2002 to $81 billion in 2004...But this tsunami of black ink was nothing compared to the wave of $120 billion in profits to come in 2006: $15.6 billion for Conoco, $17.1 billion for Chevron and the Mother of All Earnings, Exxon's $39.5 billion in 2006 on sales of $378 billion.

Palast notes the oil firms have their own reserves whose value is tied to OPEC's price targets, and "The rise in the price of oil after the first three years of the war boosted the value of the reserves of ExxonMobil oil alone by just over $666 billion...Chevron Oil, where Condoleezza Rice had served as a director, gained a quarter trillion dollars in value...I calculate that the top five oil operators saw their reserves rise in value by over $2.363 trillion." Who's surprised when Forbes reports of the ten most profitable corporations in the world five are now oil and gas companies---Exxon-Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, and Petro-China.

"Since the Iraq War began," Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive wrote, "aerospace and defense industry stocks have more than doubled. General Dynamics did even better than that. Its stock has tripled." An Associated Press account published July 23rd observed: "With the military fighting two wars and Pentagon budgets on a steady upward rise, defense companies regularly posted huge gains in profits and rosier earnings forecasts during recent quarters. Even as the rest of the economy tumbled last fall, military contractors, with the federal government as their primary customer, were a relative safe haven."

Among the big winners are top Pentagon contractors, as ranked by WashingtonTechnology.com as of 2008. Halliburton spun off KBR in 2007 and their operations are covered later. Data was selected for typical years 2007-09.

# Lockheed Martin, of Bethesda, Md., a major warplane builder, in 2007 alone earned profits of $3 billion on sales of nearly $42 billion.

# Boeing, of Chicago, saw its 2007 net profit shoot up 84% to $4 billion, fed by "strong growth in defense earnings," according to an Agence France-Presse report.

# Northrop Grumman, of Los Angeles, a manufacturer of bombers, warships and military electronics, had 2007 profits of $1.8 billion on sales of $32 billion.

# General Dynamics, of Falls Church, Va., had profits in 2008 of about $2.5 billion on sales of $29 billion. It makes tanks, combat vehicles, and mission-critical information systems.

# Raytheon, of Waltham, Mass, reported about $23 billion in sales for 2008. It is the world's largest missile maker and Bloomberg News says it is benefiting from "higher domestic defense spending and U.S. arms exports."

# Scientific International Applications Corp., of La Jolla, Calif., an engineering and technology supplier to the Pentagon, had sales of $10 billion for fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2009, and net income of $452 million.

# L-3, of New York City, has enjoyed sales growth of about 25% a year recently. Its total 2008 sales of $15 billion brought it profits of nearly $900 million. Its primary customer is the Defense Department, to which it supplies high tech surveillance and reconnaissance systems.

# EDS Corp., of Plano, Tex., purchased by Hewlett-Packard in May, 2008, had 2007 sales of nearly $20 billion. Its priority project is building the $12 billion Navy-Marine Corps Intranet, said to be the largest private network in the world.

# Fluor Corp., of Irvine, Tex., an engineering and construction firm, had net earnings of $720 million in 2008 on sales of $22 billion.

The good times continue to roll for military contractors under President Obama, who has increased the Pentagon's budget by 4 percent to a total of about $700 billion. One reason military contractors fare so well is that no-bid contracts with built-in profit margins tumble out of the Pentagon cornucopia directly into their laps. The element of "risk," so basic to capitalism, has been trampled by Pentagon purchasing agents even as its top brass rattle their missiles at socialist governments abroad. If this isn't enough, in 2004 the Bush administration slipped a special provision into tax legislation to cut the tax on war profits to 7% compared to 21% paid by most U.S. manufacturers.

Former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, according to author Pratap Chatterjee in his "Halliburton's Army"(Nation Books), raked in "more than $25 billion since the company won a ten-year contract in late 2001 to supply U.S. troops in combat situations around the world." As all know, President Bush's Vice President Dick Cheney previously headed Halliburton (1995-2000) and landed in the White House the same year Halliburton got its humungous outsourcing contract. Earlier, as Defense Secretary, (1989-1993) Cheney sparked the revolutionary change to outsourcing military support services to the privateers. Today, Halliburton ranks among the biggest "defense" winners of all.

Halliburton's army "employs enough people to staff one hundred battalions, a total of more than 50,000 personnel who work for KBR, a contract that is now projected to reach $150 billion," Chatterjee writes. "Together with the workers who are rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure and the private security divisions of companies like Blackwater, Halliburton's Army now outnumber the uniformed soldiers on the ground in Iraq."

Accompanying Pentagon outsourcing, Chatterjee writes, "is the potential for bribery, corruption, and fraud. Dozens of Halliburton/KBR workers and their subcontractors have already been arrested and charged, and several are already serving jail terms for stealing millions of dollars, notably from Camp Arifjan in Kuwait."

There's likely no better example of how Halliburton/KBR literally burned taxpayers' dollars than its destruction of $85,000 Mercedes and Volvo trucks when they got flat tires and were abandoned. James Warren, a convoy truck driver testified to the Government Affairs Committee in July, 2004, "KBR didn't seem to care what happened to its trucks...It was common to torch trucks that we abandoned...even though we all carried chains and could have towed them to be repaired."

Bunnatine Greenhouse, once top contract official at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, made headlines by demanding old-fashioned free enterprise competitive bidding. She told a Senate committee in 2005: "I can unequivocally state the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper abuse I have witnessed" in 20 years of working on government contracts. Greenhouse was demoted for her adherence to the law, Chatterjee said, but she became a cover girl at "Fraud" magazine and was honored by the Giraffe Society, a tribute to one Federal employee who stuck her neck out.

Tales of Halliburton/KBR's alleged swindles fill books. Rory Maybee, a former Halliburton/KBR contractor who worked at dining facilities in Camp Anaconda in 2004 told the U.S. Senate Democratic Policy Committee "that the company often provided rotten food to the troops and often charged the army for 20 thousand meals a day when it was serving only ten thousand." Food swindling, though, is small potatoes. Say Stiglitz and Bilmes: "KBR has also been implicated in a lucrative insurance scam that has gouged U.S. taxpayers for at least $600 million."

To fatten profit margins, contractors who cheat U.S. taxpayers apparently think nothing of underpaying their help. "While the executives of KBR, Blackwater, and other firms are making profits, many of those performing the menial work, such as cooking, driving, cleaning, and laundry, are poorly paid nationals from India, Pakistan, and other Asian and African countries," Stiglitz and Bilmes write. "Indian cooks are reported to earn $3-$5 a day. At the same time, KBR bills the American taxpayer $100 per load of laundry." Blackwater, the security firm repeatedly charged with shoot-first tactics, fraudulently obtained small-business set-aside contracts worth more than $144 million, they assert.

According to "Blackwater"(Nation Books) by Jeremy Scahill, the security firm in 2004 got a five-year contract to protect U.S. officials in Iraq totaling $229 million but as of June, 2006, just two years into the contract, it had been paid $321 million, and by late 2007 it had been paid more than $750 million. Scahill reports an audit charged that Blackwater included profit in its overhead and its total costs. The result was "not only in a duplication of profit but a pyramiding of profit since in effect Blackwater is applying profit to profit." Scahill writes, "The audit also alleged that the company tried to inflate its profits by representing different Blackwater divisions as wholly separate companies."

"As of summer, 2007, there were more 'private contractors' deployed on the U.S. government payroll in Iraq (180,000) than there were actual soldiers (160,000)," Scahill said. "These contractors worked for some 630 companies and drew personnel from more than 100 countries around the globe. ...This meant the U.S. military had actually become the junior partner in the coalition that occupies Iraq." And each Blackwater operative was costing the American taxpayers $1,222 per day. The Defense Department remains, of course, America's No. 1 Employer, with 2.3 million workers (roughly twice the size of Wal-Mart, which has 1.2 million staffers) perhaps because America's biggest export is war.

"Who pays Halliburton and Bechtel?" philosopher Noam Chomsky asks rhetorically in his "Imperial Ambitions" (Metropolitan Books). "The U.S. taxpayer," he answers. "The same taxpayers fund the military-corporate system of weapons manufacturers and technology companies that bombed Iraq. So first you destroy Iraq, then you rebuild it. It's a transfer of wealth from the general population to narrow sectors of the population." It's also been a body blow to Iraq, killing a million inhabitants, forcing two million into exile and millions more out of their homes. Incredibly, the U.S. proposed to reconstruct the nation it invaded with their oil revenues---and then, after taking perhaps $8 billion left the job undone. (Since the U.S. kept no records of how the dough was dispensed, it is not possible to identify the recipients.)

As Stiglitz and Bilmes remind us, "The money spent on Iraq could have been spent on schools, roads, or research. These investments yield high returns." In an article in the August 24th Nation, policy analyst Georgia Levenson Keohane cites the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to the effect that 48 states are reporting deficits totaling nearly $166 billion, projected to reach, cumulatively, $350 billion-$370 billion by 2011. "Although many states have attempted tax increases, these are politically challenging and often insufficient to close the gaps. Consequently, statehouses have been forced to cut vital services at a time when the need for them is ever more desperate," Keohane writes.

In the same issue, reporter Marc Cooper notes the poverty rate in Los Angeles county borders on 20 percent; that California's schools are ranked 47th nationally; that the state college system has suspended admissions for Spring, 2010; that thousands of state workers are being laid off and/or forced to take furlough days; that unemployment has reached 12 percent; that state parks are being closed; that personal bankruptcies peaked last; that one in four "capsized mortgages in the U.S. is in California." Plus, California's bond rating is just above the junk level and it faces a $26 billion budget shortfall.

California's woes need to be examined in the light of the $116 billion the National Priorities Project of Northampton, Mass., says its taxpayers have shelled out for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Those same dollars roughly would put four million California students through a four-year college. Bear in mind, too, outlays for those wars are but a fraction of all Pentagon spending, so the total military tax bill is far higher than $116 billion to California.

In calling for a reduction in military spending, Rep. Barney Frank (D.-Mass.) said, "The math is compelling: if we do not make reductions approximating 25 percent of the military budget starting fairly soon, it will be impossible to continue to fund an adequate level of domestic activity even with a repeal of Bush's tax cuts for the very wealthy....(American] well-being is far more endangered by a proposal for substantial reductions in Medicare, Social Security or other important domestic areas than it would be by canceling weapons systems that have no justification from any threat we are likely to face." On the other hand, maybe Americans want to keep paying to operate 2,000 domestic and foreign military bases and spend more money on armies and weapons of death than all other nations combined. Maybe they like living in the greatest Warfare State the world has ever known. My hunch, though, is a lot of Americans haven't connected the country's looming bankruptcy with the greedy, gang from the military-industrial complex out to control the planet, its people, and its precious resources.

After the long-suffering civilian population of Iraq, whose "crime" was having oil---a country Stiglitz says that has been rendered virtually unlivable---the big losers are the American taxpayers who are bleeding income, jobs, and quality of life, not just sacrificing family members, on behalf of a runaway war machine. California's plight is being repeated everywhere. A great nation is being looted and millions of its citizens are being pauperized before our eyes.

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant who has worked as a reporter for major dailies, a publicist in the civil rights movement, and as a wire service columnist. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com  or visit his web site Sherwood Ross Associates.)