Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by Iamwhomiam » Sun Feb 23, 2014 7:22 pm
Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword.
by JackRiddler » Sun Feb 23, 2014 10:50 pm
by JackRiddler » Mon May 12, 2014 2:08 pm
ABSTRACT
National security policy in the United States has remained largely constant from the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration. This continuity can be explained by the “double government” theory of 19th-century scholar of the English Constitution Walter Bagehot. As applied to the United States, Bagehot’s theory suggests that U.S. national security policy is defined by the network of executive officials who manage the departments and agencies responsible for protecting U.S. national security and who, responding to structural incentives embedded in the U.S. political system, operate largely removed from public view and from constitutional constraints. The public believes that the constitutionally-established institutions control national security policy, but that view is mistaken. Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight is dysfunctional; and presidential control is nominal. Absent a more informed and engaged electorate, little possibility exists for restoring accountability in the formulation and execution of national security policy.
by JackRiddler » Mon May 12, 2014 3:18 pm
Sadly Missed Simulist wrote:If there really are a series of organic cues and "behavioral rules" at work, guiding the collective "drivers" of U.S. intelligence, then this contextualizes the utility of belief in even demonstrably false American narratives, which probably serve nonetheless as a sort of coded "software" in order for the hive to continue to function and orient itself.
by JackRiddler » Mon May 12, 2014 3:24 pm
www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/02/the-off ... ties/print
Weekend Edition May 2-4, 2014
Understanding the US Policy of Diplomacy, Development, and Defense
The Office of Transition Initiatives and the Subversion of Societies
by HORACE C. CAMPBELL
Introduction
On March 1, 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order establishing the United States Peace Corps with the objective of ‘helping’ underdeveloped nations struggling for economic growth and social progress. This order appealed to many of America’s young and brightest. Thousands of American youths flocked to serve a number of societies in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. These young people assisted in the building of sewer and water systems, constructed schools, helped in agricultural methods, and health initiatives among many things. The Peace Corps appealed to young idealistic Americans looking to change the world. Many had been brought into the Civil Rights struggles of that era. But, as with all things, capital and the opportunity for profit making was sure to follow. In those days, transnational corporations such as International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) and the seven sisters of oil dominated the planning for manipulation, today, these forces are called capital equity firms and are more tenacious in seeking to manipulate idealistic youths.
Since the end of the Cold War, the imperial centers have been working hard to control the thinking and actions of youths who want real social change. The buzz words of ‘Sustainable Development,’ ‘Humanitarian Assistance’ and ‘Good Governance’ had been mobilized to sustain the ideation plane of the neo-liberal order. ‘Nation Building,’ ‘Peacekeeping,’ ‘Transitions and Reconstruction Operations’ represents the new template for the Wall Street, Military and Information complex. This ‘mission’ of US capitalism has now been refined into the promoting of good governance internationally. US capitalists organized in ‘capital equity’ groups now work through ‘development’ NGO’s . These fronts for capital equity have replaced the idea that humanitarian organizations should be neutral, independent, and impartial in providing assistance to the exploited.
In this paper we will outline how contractors are central to the new ‘militaristic humanitarianism. The implementing agencies of the capital equity forces require cooperation between the State Department, USAID and the Department of Defense in the form of Development, Diplomacy and Defense. Recent information on the role of the top ‘development’ contractors for the USAID in a program of the Office for Transition Initiatives in planning for regime change in Cuba and Venezuela should assist Third World societies in evaluating the ‘development’ projects submitted to their societies by international development agencies, especially those from the United States and Britain. These exposures of the numerous SWIFT (Support Which Implements Fast Transitions) subcontractors of the Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI) place the British Department of International Development (DIFID) on the list of reliable ‘subcontractors’ for the US corporate and military interests. The subversion of the USAID/OTI may take different forms as in twitter accounts in Cuba, recovery initiative in Haiti, ‘democratic transition ‘ in Libya or ’yes youth can’ Kenya, but the ultimate objective is to advance US corporate interests.
It is important to outline how the interests of the youth who are seeking to make social change are divergent from the interests of the organizations for which they work. Progressive students, peace activists and pacifists need to be vigilant that in the demilitarization campaigns that focus on the plans and operations of the US military or intelligence agencies alone will not shed light on the numerous fronts that are being opened to subvert democratic participation and alternative forms of economic organizations. Since the African Awakenings in Tunisia and Egypt, US capital has gone way out to co-opt social media platforms to serve the top 1 per cent. We will end with a reflection on the need to demilitarize the ‘development’ field so that the neo-cons and Wall Street will discontinue the manipulation of idealistic young persons in the USA who are bogged down by massive student loans. Under the IMF and the ‘structural adjustment’ policies, neoliberalism has intensified the exploitation of all peoples around the world. Even, within the US military, it is difficult for the rank and file to defend the interests of Goldman Sachs, the other top Bankers and Private equity elements such as the Carlyle Group and Cerberus. The US military is on the defensive at home and abroad and the role of the progressive forces internationally is to expose their activities, out their front operations and bring the private military companies under democratic control by constant exposure on the forms that the new military contractors are taking.
Office of Transition Initiative, Creative Associates and the New Security Infrastructure
In 2003, a group of Harvard and Georgetown college students founded an organization called, “Roots of Hope” with a shared interest in Cuba. (www.rootsofhope.org). The stated goal of the organization is “empowering Cuban youth to be the authors of their own future.” According to its Wikipedia page, the organization grew to be “a network of more than 4,000 high school students, college students and young professionals across the United States and abroad, with chapters in major cities such as New York, Miami, Washington DC and Madrid.”
It was revealed in an Associated Press investigative report in April, that the leaders of this organization of idealistic youngsters were in fact supported by the US government with the aim of toppling the Cuban government. [i] The leaders of Roots of Hope were approached by the federal government’s secret “Cuban Twitter” program connecting contractors with potential investors and even serving as paid consultants.
The investigative report by the Associated Press that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) had worked with Creative Associates International (CAI) to set up a Twitter-like social media network as an instrument for subverting the government of Cuba is only the latest in the revelations surrounding the humanitarian industry as one arm of the military and intelligence capabilities of the United States. [ii] Many idealistic graduates from elite centers such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Maxwell School of Citizenship of Syracuse University or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University among others had been seduced by the skilled public relations work of Creative Associates, Casals and Associates, International Resources Group and other ‘development’ contractors. I teach in one of these Universities and it has been painful to see the ways in which the so called NGO Initiatives have been refined over the past twenty years to support neo-liberalism and to depoliticize idealistic students. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) a university-wide center involving multiple entities is at the top of higher education infrastructure that has been reprogrammed to mobilize youthful energies into transnational non-governmental service to do ‘development’ work.
These are the new cadre of ‘development’ NGO’s that are now integrated into the activities with political aims that are presented in the form of Diplomacy, Development, and Defense (3Ds). The 3Ds are represented by the Department of State (State), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Department of Defense (DoD or Defense) and have become the basis for the melding of militarism and humanitarianism. Outright military forays are now supplemented by private contracting firms such as Booz Allen Hamilton that gobble up information that serves private equity elements. I remember over thirteen years ago when it was difficult to reach those students who believed that working for consulting and accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen was the dream job. Some woke up after the massive scandals that exposed Enron, World Com and the collapse of this accounting and consulting group that covered up the illegal activities of Private Equity firms. The most notable private equity firms include the Carlyle Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Goldman Sachs Principal Investment Group, The Blackstone Group, Bain Capital and TPG Capital. In turn these moguls of capitalism have firms that are called ‘consulting’ groups. ‘Consulting’ groups such as Bain Capital, McKinsey, the Boston Consulting Group and until recently the Monitor Group have all had their share of media attention in the past few years as Trojan horses for the rich and powerful. [iii]
The revelations about Booz Allen Hamilton, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the intelligence enterprise have brought new focus on so called ‘management consultants’ who are ‘bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.’ [iv] Until the full revelations of the activities that were revealed by Edward Snowden, Booz Allen Hamilton, a subsidiary of the Carlyle group represented itself as just another management consulting group. Policy makers had long been aware of the importance of the Carlyle group for the military/ financial complex and the fact that this company owns other companies that make equipment, vehicles and munitions for the US military. Books on this group have exposed the linkages between politicians, militarists and the fund managers of Wall Street.[v] Now the rank and file knows that it is this same Carlyle that is the parent company for Booz Allen Hamilton the full picture emerges of how private contractors are at the center of a rogue surveillance state in the USA and outside. Tim Shorrock who worked extensively on the outsourcing of intelligence to private contractors called this new relationship, “The Digital Blackwater.” This is in reference to the role of the private military contractors that have become the mainstay for the US military fighting capabilities since the start of the 21st century. [vi] It should be noted that the outing of Blackwater has forced this military front to change its name more than once. Younger students will not have known the foundations of Blackwater and its linkages to the intelligence community but the shootings at Nisour Square in Iraq had forced this organization to change its name.[vii] Blackwater and other intelligence organs cannot openly recruit on university campuses so the development NGO’s in the SWIFT league now serves the militaristic interests of the United States. Once the agitation over the CIA recruitment on campus reached a high point after the expanded war on terror, the intelligence agencies were defensive about open recruitment on University campuses. [viii]
While the overt actions of the University/ intelligence infrastructure has been exposed by vigilant groups such as Concerned Anthropologists there are now numerous fronts that have been appropriated and one of these is the ‘development and humanitarian front.’ Already on top university campuses engineering, computer science, mathematics, astronomy, and chemistry departments had become increasingly dependent on Pentagon funding. Policy studies centers were among the last to be controlled by the long arm of Pentagon funding and much of this funding goes to centers dealing with security sector reform.
For many idealistic graduates who want to serve their fellow humans it is still not crystal clear how ‘development NGO’s had been integrated into this very large, secretive and unwieldy military/intelligence apparatus. These international ‘development’ NGO’s from the outset must be distinguished from the thousands of local humanitarian organs that do not associate themselves with the intelligence/security apparatus of the United States and Britain.
Where previously it was the belief that private military contractors had become essential to the spying and surveillance operations of the strategic planners, the news that Creative Associates International was involved in the planning of subverting the government of Cuba brought into clear light the reality that there is no real distinction between private military contractors, NSA snooping, development contractors, non-governmental organizations and the US military itself. From the period of the wars against the people Afghanistan and Iraq, academics, non-governmental organizations, development agencies and the military worked hand in glove.
While many of these relationships had been tentative in the years prior to 2001, explicit commandeering of ‘development’ agencies for the projection of US defense capabilities were formalized in 2005 by Donald Rumsfeld who was the Secretary of Defense. It was under the Rumsfeld-Cheney period when there was the refinement of the Top Secret world of spying and militarism in the establishment of the Stability, Security, Transitions and Reconstruction Operations (SSTRO) office in the DoD. Formally, the US Army had integrated the OTI into peacekeeping and operations Institute of the military and this was proudly displayed on the web platforms of the US Army School at Carlyle, Pennsylvania. A decade earlier, Colin Powell had already outlined the integration of NGO’s in the military planning in a speech when he stated that,
“Just as surely as our diplomats and military, American NGOs…are out there serving and sacrificing on the front lines of freedom, NGOs are such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team.” [ix]
In line with the integration between the US government and the research agenda of the NGO public policy institutes, Journals such as Global Governance carried favorable articles to the idea that NGO’s should act as force multiplier for the US military.
After Colin Powell had served as Secretary of State, in came another person of ‘color’ Condoleezza Rice who proposed new forms of military development cooperation as ‘Transformational diplomacy’ in order to elevate ‘democracy-promotion’ activities inside countries. The democracy –promotion activities in Cuba and Venezuela were at the other side of the coin where in societies such as Kenya, the subcontractors worked to subvert real democratic participation and expression.
OTI and ‘democracy promotion’ in Kenya?
In December 2007 soon after the elections young Kenyans developed a unique networking tool to provide firsthand accounts of the violence that was erupting. Faced with a media blackout from tne state, young Kenyans developed free and open source software for information collection, interactive mapping and data collection. This new social media site was called Ushahidi. Here was a clever and innovative use of mobile services that bypassed the censorship of the government. In the midst of this innovation, in stepped the SWIFT type operation of the USAID to divert the revolutionary potentialities of the USHAIDI crowdsourcing application. A number of international NGO’s entered the fray to divert the discussions from democratic rights to ‘so-called peace.’ These same NGO’s mobilized the “ Rural Women’s Peace Link (RWPL), to conduct community dialogue and reconciliation meetings,” while those who stole the elections unleashed violence against innocent citizens.
In January 2008, the future of Kenya had hung in balance and what was necessary was for US strategic planners to intervene to divert attention from the fraudulent elections. [x] Any mass mobilization to win in the streets – that which was stolen at the ballot box – threatened the more than decade infrastructure that had been established in Kenya as the beachhead for Western NGO’s in Africa. Slowly after the intervention of the USAID and the State Department, those diplomats from the EU and Canada who had stood on the steps of the Kenya International Conference Centre (KICC) to condemn the theft of the elections fell in line as Condi Rice flew to Nairobi to give coherence to the Transition activities of the USAID operators on the ground. Once the dust settled and the architects of election violence were back in power, the USAID organized a US$55 billion dollar project to demobilize the Kenyan youths in all parts of the country. [xi] This project mimicked the Obama slogan of Yes I Can with the slogan Yes Youth Can. Dubbed as a project to empower Kenyan youth, the materials of this USAID initiative was meant to turn young Kenyans away from the heritages of Dedan Kimathi, Pio Gama Pinto, Markham Singh, Wangaari Mathai and those who wanted a new social system in Kenya. There were over 4,000 NGO’s in Kenya and top of the line Development contractors all had their base in Kenya to divert the energies of the youths and workers of Africa into paths of ’sustainable development.’ Kenya was a prime base for the work of USAID because of the clever mobile applications that had developed in Kenya such as M-Pesa and Ushaidi. [xii]
Kenya and Uganda have been prime targets for the USAID because of the fear that once progressive social movements take root, the repercussions would be felt all across eastern and central Africa. NGO’s such as Creative Associates Casals and the International Resources Group function at the top of the OTI front. Since the establishment of the OTI overt military contractors such as Dyncorp, Lockheed Martin and L-3 Communications and others have established their own development NGO’s in so far as all activities of the US foreign policy engagement, (especially in Africa) falls under the military.
Under the rubric of full spectrum dominance, the strategic planners also came up with an information warfare program dubbed Operation Objective Voice to harness and orient all information operations and influence the media internationally. Douglas Feith (Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for United States President George W. Bush from July 2001 until August 2005 ) had given a clear account of how much Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, himself and Cheney worked to shape the domination of the US government by the Pentagon. [xiii] At the height of the debacle of the US military occupation of Iraq, Secretary of State Secretary Rice outlined her vision for diplomacy changes that she referred to as “transformational diplomacy” to meet this 21st Century world. Rice was concerned that the bureaucracy of the State Department and the training of public service officers needed to be realigned for the military requirements of the George W. Bush Administration. [xiv] General Keith Alexander was an appointee of Rumsfeld at the National Security Agency replacing Michael Hayden. Slowly after the Snowden revelations ordinary citizens began to hear of the names of senior military personnel such as Keith Alexander, Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Michael McConnell and the other cyber warriors who saw themselves above the law. More importantly, was the revolving door that was established between the National Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and entities such as Booz Allen. [xv]
While the revelations of Edward Snowden has brought the questionable activities of the cyber warriors into an ongoing debate with weak efforts at reforming this behemoth,[xvi] there has been less attention paid to the Office of Transition Initiatives. OTI was taken to a new level during the Hilary Clinton years when the OTI intensified its work to dominate social media platforms, using NGO’s such as Creative Associates as fronts. Regime change in Cuba and Venezuela fits into the OTI pattern of subversion because as long as there are societies committed to an alternative to neo-liberal capitalism, those in the revolving doors between intelligence gathering and private equity are threatened.
Diplomacy, Development, and Defense – The Pentagon as a ‘Development Agency.’
The new ‘strategic framework for foreign assistance’ that had been refined by the State Department under Condi Rice at the State Department and Donald Rumsfeld at (DoD) operated outside of Congressional Oversight and the details of the restructuring were first brought to the US public by WikiLeaks in February of 2009. At the height of the NATO bombing of Libya on 26 July 2011, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Vicki Huddleston testified before the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Africa and declared that the Department of Defense was now a ‘Development Agency’ and was taking the lead in coordinating the foreign policy objectives of the United States to promote Development, Diplomacy and Defence. The very next day on July 27, Ambassador Yamamoto of the State Department testified to underscore how the work of development in Africa was being coordinated by the US Africa Command. Yamamoto was shedding light on the organizational changes within the bureaucracy to support the military missions of the USA. Inside the USAID there had been the new coordination of three entities, (I ) Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation (USAID/CMM) (!!) Office of Transition initiatives (USAID/OTI), and (III) the US Department of State’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS).
In their testimony we learnt that:
First, AFRICOM provides greater unity of command on a continent that DOD previously split between three geographic combatant commands, and multiple functional commands.
Further, AFRICOM provides a command structure capable of coordinating and commanding a multitude of U.S. military components engaged in programs in Africa, enhancing DOD’s operational effectiveness, in cooperation with our embassies, ambassadors and USAID mission directors. In the past several years, DOD components have grown to become the largest non-State Department presence in several of our missions.
Second, AFRICOM is an important partner for USAID and State as we seek to tackle problems, pursue solutions, and expand partnerships in Africa
AFRICOM has a civilian Department of State official as its deputy commander, as well as other State and USAID officers directly integrated into its headquarter structures, which improves coordination between agencies, which is a unique organizational arrangement not commonly found in military formations.
Duplicating in other commands, AFRICOM’s unique approach is directly relevant to Secretary Clinton’s launching of the QDDR Process, through which we are rethinking how we do business and integrate the interagency in achieving our common national goals and objectives. [xvii]
This double-speak about reconstruction and stabilization had taken a new turn at the height of the war against the peoples of Iraq when the Pentagon justified its war as ‘nation building.’ Academics and NGO’s were mobilized and it was in 2004 when Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) was created. Political Scientists and other policy wonks were drafted to be part of this destruction project called ‘nation building.’ Larry Diamond has written for posterity the role of such academics in the Office of Transition Initiatives and the Disaster Assistance Response Teams (DART) that supplemented the military actions against civilians in Iraq. [xviii] Trillions of dollars were expended on this project of division and destruction in Iraq which was soon taken off the front pages by the establishment of the Iraq Study Group. However, after the disaster in Libya where the NATO forces destroyed the society, the US military have ducked spouting about the US Africa Command and have embarked on the ideational plane to promote ‘development’ and humanitarian assistance. After the prolonged NATO bombardment of Libya, the US laid out a ‘transition’ plan for Libya. The people of Libya are currently reaping the results of the military humanitarianism where the West invoked the principle ‘Responsibility to Protect’ in order to carry out regime change. After the regime change, the US laid out a ‘transition program’ to bring democracy and good governance to Libya. [xix] The world has seen clearly the results of the Transition Initiatives” in Libya where more than 50,000 have perished after the regime change.
OTI Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance
The business model of the USA in the twenty first century not only depends on financial speculators, hedge fund managers, oil majors, pharmaceuticals, born again religious entrepreneurs and Agribusiness, this model seeks to cover the more than US $18 billion humanitarian industry. Part of the mandate of this industry is to shift the focus of intellectual work from exploitation to so called ‘aid.’ From the time when Henry Kissinger had been challenged by the Group of 77, the US establishment derided international organizations not under the thumb of the US as being bureaucratic.
The attacks against the ‘bureaucratic’ UNESCO and UNCTAD were then supplemented by the deployment of US consulting firms that paved the way for the IMF and the World Bank to promote neo-liberal forms of external domination. Up to the time of the financial meltdown in 2008, the core ideas of neoliberalism that are propounded by the IMF and the World Bank were disseminated through training and conversion of technocrats who go on to occupy key decision making positions in finance ministries of developing countries. After the financial crisis, this kind of training was not enough since the USA was facing stiff competition from their allies in Europe and even stiffer competition from the so called ’emerging states.’ The Libyan intervention, the direct influences of US agribusiness and pharmaceuticals on the ground paved a new path for international competition in Africa. Africa is a base for intense activities in so far as in Latin America the rise of democratic forces have placed US AID activities in its proper perspective. [xx]
Office of Transition Initiatives in Cuba and Venezuela
The role of international non-governmental organizations as fronts for the western military agencies has grown rapidly since the start of the 21st century. During the period of the so called Alliance for Progress in Latin America under John F Kennedy, the work of the USAID went hand in glove with the education of anti-communist military leaders at the School of the Americas and the training of Torturers. The Orwellian approach to diplomacy was very clear in the fact that the training of torturers was carried out through the Office of Public Safety, a U.S.A.I.D. police training program. The pressures of the peace and justice forces forced the US military to reorganize their activities and closed the School of the Americas. Afterwards, the Pentagon set up Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. This Western Hemisphere Institute was the overt military arm while the National Endowment for Democracy became the ‘civilian’ arm of the counterinsurgency work of the US political class.
The reported information of the Office for Transition Initiatives supplements the work of other ‘democracy’ promotion centers such as the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela and Bolivia. The demonstrations that are ongoing in Caracas Venezuela have all of the footprints of the US anti-communist footprints. Poor Venezuelans and most of the people of Latin America know that the DAI/USAID has given more than US$11,575,509 to more than 360 groups and projects in Venezuela, under the program “Venezuela: Initiatives for the Construction of Trust” (VICC). The majority of the programs funded by DAI (according to their materials) focus on “political dialogue, public debate, citizen’s participation and the training and capacitation of democratic leaders.” Garry Leech further expanded on the attempts to ensnare Venezuelan youths into the web of US subversion,
“Between 2006 and 2010, USAID spent some $15 million in Venezuela with a significant portion of the money used to fund university programs and workshops for youth, no doubt with the objective of “pulling them slowly away from Chavismo.” The prominent role of university students in the current protests suggests that the US strategy has paid off. “[xxi]
Eva Golinger expanded on the role of the OTI in Venezuela stating that, “At the beginning of 2011, after being publically exposed for its grave violations of Venezuelan law and sovereignty, the OTI closed its doors in Venezuela and USAID operations were transferred to its offices in the US.”[xxii] The work of USAID and its OTI in the planning for destabilization and subversion had its parallel in Africa where governments that were independent of the United States were targeted for subversion.
The news of the role of Creative Associates in their work in Cuba has brought back focus on the role of Allan Gross of the USAID who was arrested in Cuba by the Cuban government in December 2009 for attempting to set up satellite communications networks on the island, as part of the USAID program. After his arrest it was revealed in court documents that his employer, the ‘development NGO’ Development Alternatives Inc (DAI) was one component of the USAID-sponsored “Democracy” program aimed at the subverting social peace in Cuba. Peter Kornbluh wrote at the time of the discussion about Allan Gross that the USAID had orchestrated “between five to seven different transition plans” for Cuba.[xxiii]
USAID Failure in Cuba
Even though the Office of Transition Initiatives had been criticized as being spread too thin in its first ten years, [xxiv] when Hillary Clinton took over as the Secretary of State in 2009 the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review prepared under her stewardship singled out OTI as “an example of the kind of flexible and adaptive programming other offices at the State Department and USAID could emulate as they increasingly seek to work in the world’s most challenging environments.” Within the State Department OTI was regarded by “some as being somewhat audacious and overly proud, according to its own director’s admission.” This audacity took numerous forms and we now know that the audacity took the form of “Support youth-led independent media initiatives.” Translated in laypersons terms, the establishment of support for Youth Led initiatives in Cuba took the form of an operation, dubbed ZunZuneo. This operation reported extensively by investigative reporters of the Associated Press exposed how the organization Creative Associates was a front for a covert operation that was aimed at promoting political upheavals in Cuba. Starting in 2007 the ostensive plan was to build a subscriber base of twitter followers in Cuba which was to build up to the critical number of 200,000. By the time this Operation was shut down because they found out that the Cubans were on to them, ZunZuneo had ensnared up to 40,000 subscribers in Cuba.
US intelligence and military strategists were more than embarrassed when the mainstream pro-military Washington Post flashed the headlines, “U.S. secretly created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest.”[xxv] “Creative Associates envisioned using the list to create a social networking system that would be called “Proyecto ZZ,” or “Project ZZ.” The service would start cautiously and be marketed chiefly to young Cubans, who USAID saw as the most open to political change.” These young Cubans were dubbed as “smart mobs” capable of inciting unrest.
“We should gradually increase the risk,” USAID proposed in a document. It advocated using “smart mobs” only in “critical/opportunistic situations and not at the detriment of our core platform-based network.”
We learnt of the layers of subcontractors, shell companies, and offshore bank accounts and multinational locations that were formed and refined to place a distance between the USAID and the planners of ZunZuneo. This kind of planning followed the same kind of front companies that had been established by Project Coast in South Africa when the South Africans and the US were collaborating in biological warfare and bioterrorism. Then as now, the US militarists with fake organizations as the front routed funds through layers of dummy companies and foreign computer servers located in Spain, Costa Rica, Ireland and the UK, and an offshore bank account in the Cayman Islands. Plausible deniability was the objective in order to conceal the US government’s responsibility for ZunZuneo’s creation and operation, not merely from the Cuban government, but from the tens of thousands of Cubans who were signed up as subscribers.
The vigilance of the Cuban leadership and people meant that this line of subversion never had any chance of success.
OTI in Angola
After the military defeat of the South African army at Cuito Cuanavale in 1988 the USAID intensified its support for Jonas Savimbi of UNITA via the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). The principal subcontractors for the USAID funding were reliable and trusted cold war ‘humanitarian’ agencies such as the International Rescue Committee. [xxvi] I remember travelling to Northern Angola in 1996 when the NGO workers of the International Rescue Committee were working closely with UNITA at a moment when UNITA had carried out massive atrocities. USAID funded projects in Angola provided crucial links between the Pentagon and UNITA at a time when the Clinton Administration for the first time recognized the government of the MPLA. It was then not by accident that when in 1994 the USAID created the Office for Transition Initiatives, Angola was one of the first places that it worked to intensify its work in support of Jonas Savimbi and UNITA.
In the Congressional Report on the start of OFI in Angola and Haiti in 1994 there is no mention of the linkages between the Pentagon and Jonas Savimbi. Instead the report stated,
“Angola, the first country where OTI operated, was selected in 1994 for several reasons: its oil and other natural resources represented a security and commercial interest to the United States; a peace process was underway; and there was evidence that significant gains could be made through targeted programs related to land mine awareness, demining, and reintegration of ex-combatants.”[xxvii]
The role of the OTI then was to subvert the government of Angola just as how today we have learnt that one of the contractors for OTI was working to subvert the government of Cuba. The exposure of Creative Associates will give new assignments for those who want to fully understand when the OTI calls itself the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance. In their official statements, the USAID states that The Office of Transitions Initiatives (OTI) was created in 1994 to “provide short-term assistance in post-conflict situations or crises in order to support peaceful and democratic transitions. By promoting reconciliation, jumpstarting economies and helping democracy take hold, the intent is to lay the foundations for long term successful development.”
Integrating international non-governmental organizations as Force Multipliers for the USA
During the nineties military Journals such as Parameters honed the discussion of the planning for the increased engagement of international NGO’s and by the end of the 20th century the big international NGO’s Care, Catholic Relief Services , Save The Children, World Vision, and Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF ) were acting like major international corporations doing subcontracting work for the US military. At the time when the book The Road to Hell: the Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity was written by Michael Maren to expose the role of humanitarian agencies in Somalia, there was already enough information to expose the militarization of humanitarian work. [xxviii] This kind of Humanitarian intervention as a front for military operations is not new. It has been the standard fare in Africa since King Leopold II of Belgium and the partitioning of Africa. At all moments of external military interventions, the imperial occupation of Africa was spurred by noble motives such as ‘feeding’ starving children. USAID perfectly represented the continuity of the militarization of humanitarian work.
Sections of the USAID – Office of Food for Peace (FFP) work assiduously to pressure UN Organizations to accept genetically modified food for distribution. Whether it was food, medicine or education, the OTI had identified a cluster of international NGO’s that would be integrated into the missions of subversion. After the launch of the War on Terror and the restructuring of the State Department for ‘transformational diplomacy,’ the US government identified a number of ‘development partners who were supposed to be us pre-qualified contractors who were able to quickly establish offices and begin approving activities and disbursing grants. These prequalified contractors would be labeled Swift Partners – (Support Which Implements Fast Transitions). This cluster would be labeled partner firms for Awards and these firms covered the gambit of everything that could fall under the rubric of development, diplomacy and defense.
It was precisely in the midst of the Iraq debacle when military humanitarianism was to reach new levels of desperation. Andrew Naistos who became the head of UASID under Bush symbolized the revolving door between the military, the State Department, Congress, Development Agencies and religious zealots of World Vision. Rumsfeld and the planners of psychological and information warfare took this integration of the military, born again zealots and humanitarianism to all sections of the bureaucracy.”[xxix]
An illuminating study from American University drew attention to 45 interventions in 36 countries by OTI and how the Transition Initiatives were focused on Iraq and Afghanistan during the George W. Bush years. [xxx] USAID’s Office of Military Affairs was tasked to coordinate stabilization and reconstruction in the war on terrorism.
OTI in practice: Lessons from Creative Associates.
Once USAID became subsumed under the military and intelligence arms of the US capital equity forces, it was necessary to restructure the bureaucracy to create the USAID Office of Military Affairs (OMA). This restructuring was slow from the time of Iraq and with every exposure, USAID changed the nomenclature. Hence, at the time of the Libyan war when negative attention was brought to the role of the US military in the destruction of Libya, in November 2011, the State Department changed the name of the Office of Military Affairs (OMA) to the Office of Civilian-Military Cooperation (CMC). This office of civilian military cooperation served as USAID’s primary point of contact with the Department of Defense (DoD). In their own words, “CMC works to align defense and development policies, plans and programs to leverage the unique capabilities of each agency to achieve better development outcomes. The office responds to the National Security Strategy’s demand that development be a strong and equal partner with diplomacy and defense in the achievement of national security.”
The government admits that the Office of Civilian Military Cooperation works as a force multiplier for the military and outlined three core functions.
1. Support to the Force. Any activity designed to create support for the military force from within the indigenous population.
2. Civil-Military Liaison. Coordination and joint planning with civilian agencies in support of the mission.
3. Support to the Civil Environment. The provision of any of a variety of forms of assistance (expertise, information, security, infrastructure, capacity-building, etc.) to the local population in support of the military mission.
CMC is tasked with working with non-governmental organizations and local governments.
These tasks of subverting societies to serve the geo-political interests of the USA are labelled as Coordinating Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS). “The Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation (CMM) was established in 2003 within USAID’s Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA), and works to integrate conflict management into the implementation of USG ‘development’ aid. The office provides support and resources, such as analytical tools, conflict resolution training, and policy recommendations, to existing USAID missions and other government agencies.” It is where academics and the myriad number of Conflict Resolution Centers sponsored by USAID and US foundations get fed into the entire Office of Civilian Military Cooperation.
While the head of USAID was quibbling before Congress over whether the ZunZuneo operation was a discreet operation rather than a ‘covert’ operation, this exposure forced serious researchers on US subversion in Africa to follow the evolution of the other nine firms that are currently working under the framework of the USAID OTI Swift Award scheme. Inside the US establishment itself Senator Patrick Leahy pointed out how these programs exposed US imperialism and the youths who were working as aid suppliers. At the hearings in April 2014 Leahy noted, “We’re already getting emails from USAID employees all over the world saying, and ‘How could they do this to put us in danger.’
Who are the forces putting the youth in danger?
We have learnt from the OTI own records that there were eight other ‘development contractors other than Creative Associates who were at the top of the line, meaning that they were prequalified to do this kind of work that had been done in Cuba and Kenya. These were the partner firms that are at the top of the food chain in ‘development’ work. The firms won this fourth iteration of the SWIFT award. They were listed as: AECOM, Casals and Associates, Chemonics International, Creative Associates International, DAI, International Relief and Development, International Resources Group/Engility, Management Systems International, and RTI International.
From this list it is possible to discern two important facts. There is not one area of so called ‘development’ work that is not covered by these contractors. For example, AECOM says of itself that is “a global provider of architecture, design, engineering, and construction services for public and private clients across a broad range. AECOM is a global provider of professional technical and management support services to a broad range of markets, including transportation, facilities, environmental, energy, water and government. With approximately 45,000 employees around the world, AECOM is a leader in all of the key markets that it serves. AECOM provides a blend of global reach, local knowledge, innovation and technical excellence in delivering solutions that create, enhance and sustain the world’s built, natural, and social environments. A Fortune 500 company, AECOM serves clients in more than 150 countries and had revenue of $8.1 billion during 12 months ended Dec. 31, 2013.”
Casals and Dyncorp
Many US private military companies are subsidiaries of some Fortune 500 companies. They are indispensable to US military. The clear linkages between the ‘development ‘agencies and Wall Street are best exemplified by the place of Casals- as a subsidiary of Dyncorp. In 2010 it was reported by the New York Times that DynCorp International, the private military contractor was acquired by Cerberus Capital Management for $1.5 billion. In this press report, we were also informed that Cerberus received financing commitments from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Barclays, and Deutsche Bank.[xxxi] This information placed the direct link between finance capital, the Department of Defense and private military contractors.
Dyncorp is further subdivided into three specialized areas such as Dyncorp Aviation, Dyn Logistics and Dyn Globalcorp Intelligence training and solutions and the Development arm called Casals. In order to better present itself as humanitarian, in line with competing for contracts with the Office of Transition Initiatives, DynCorp International made several acquisitions in 2009 and 2010 to adapt to the shift towards diplomacy and development work, in particular, acquiring Casals, then an international development firm in order to enter the international aid community
With the full knowledge that the State Department was moving in the direction of the 3Ds, in January 2010 DynCorp International acquired Casals & Associates in 2010. In its self-description, Casals says of itself “Casals & Associates, Inc. (Casals) is an international development firm delivering groundbreaking solutions to social, institutional and political challenges. “We work globally addressing democracy solutions to social, institutional and political challenges. We work globally addressing democracy and governance, rule of law and justice, local governance, conflict management and recovery, health and other urgent issues facing societies today.”
In over 25 countries, Casals & Associates has completed projects advancing good governance, transparency, peace, justice, health and other sustainable development challenges. Some of our successes include helping the citizens of Malawi roll back government corruption; youths from Bolivia’s impoverished rural regions find jobs; support the drafting and passing of the Access to Information and the Government Ethics Laws in El Salvador; communities in Central America develop solutions to gang violence; business leaders in Kazakhstan develop robust corporate ethics programs; and women in Albania increase their involvement in democratic, legal and judicial reforms.”
In Africa, Casals prides itself in:
Work in Uganda— USAID/OTI funded project in Uganda
Building Anticorruption Institutions in Madagascar
Nigeria – Promoting Transparent Government
Strengthening Government Financial Management in Ghana
Helping Malawi to achieve MDG goals.
What was significant was that while Casals was working to build anticorruption institutions in Africa, right within the stable of the USAID subcontractors was one of the most well-known Academy for Educational Development (AED) where in 2007 the President and CEO of this NGO was paid over US$900,000.
This author will encourage students and activists to dig deep into the background of the other contractor worth mentioning in this explicit web of military/development contractors is the group called Engility’ which was launched in 2012 as a subsidiary of the military contractor L3 Communications.
Militarization, Regime Change and subversion
Revelations about Creative Associates and OTI will assist the recruiters in Ivy league schools of Public Policies of the dangers to which they are exposing naive youths who want to ’assist’ the ‘underdeveloped.’ There are many idealistic youths who have now been caught unawares that they have been working for front companies for the 3ds of the security establishment. These are the youths now sending e mails to Senator Patrick Leahy complaining that they have been placed in danger. It is the task of the progressive and anti-militarist community to continue to expose outfits such as Creative Associates or Bancroft Global Development in order to fully call for the dismantling of the OTI’s infrastructure for subversion. The United States has lost credibility and from time to time there are new outfits such as Invisible Children that are presented to build up the profile of the US Military. The experimentation with the Video Kony 2012 that signed up 100 million young persons (mostly students) in 2012 revealed the experimentation with social media that was being carried out by NGO’s who were in league with the military. In Uganda where the form of constitutional dictatorship has taken new and offensive forms, the engagement of the US military and these NGO’s can be called into question.
In Africa in the so called field of ‘development’ the United States has been compromised whether the programs are presented under the rubric of the National Security Education Program (NSEP), Police Training, OTI or the Pentagon’s office for Social Science Research. From Uganda to Kenya and from Malawi to Nigeria, even the partners of the USA have to cover themselves in anti-imperialist rhetoric. It is for this reason that those commentators who go on about the increased US military activities in Africa and focus on the press releases of the US Africa Command are off the mark. They would be on the mark if they were including the work of Casals, Creative Associates, Bancroft Global Development and those SWIFT partners who have been pre-qualified to do subversive work in Africa. In order to distance the US military even further, there is now subcontracting of US covert activities through the British Department of International Development (Difid). Since the start of OFI there has been the launch of the USAID/DFID Humanitarian Innovation Initiative.
Global awareness and the changed situation
At the time of the start of OTI and the destabilization of Angola and Haiti, the United States was already on the defensive intellectually and diplomatically. In Haiti where militarism and dictatorship had bled the country, the USAID Initiatives supported the destabilization of the society and undermining the Aristide government. [xxxii] Where the NGO’s succeeded in Haiti, they failed in Angola, Cuba, Venezuela and South Africa. In particular, it was difficult for the USA to convince Africans that the USA was fighting communism in Southern Africa. In the transition after apartheid, the USA and the supporting foundations expended more than US$1 billion to motivate the youths to join ‘conflict management’ fronts and to move from grasping the social contradictions within South Africa. [xxxiii] However, the contradictions of exploitation and impoverishment in South Africa could not be papered over and while the NGO’s were working in the “conflict resolution centers’, the conditions of oppression were clear and brought to international headlines after the shooting of unarmed workers at the Marikana mines in 2012.
There have been numerous changes since this century, but the most important has been the emergence of a more engaged youthful population who has taken new steps for political intervention in societies such as the Sudan, Tunisia and Egypt. After spending billions of dollars to suborn the Egyptian military, the removal of Mubarak in 2011 shook the USAID and their ‘development partners’ in Egypt., USAID ramped up its ‘transition to democracy in Egypt’ calling this a top priority. Yet, after the military coup in 2013, the US government did not call the military intervention a coup d etat. Hilary Clinton and the State Department were afraid of the positive examples that we set by the mobilized youth in Egypt and the potentialities for new forms of organization among the youth.
The OTI and USAID now have great difficulty managing the changed situation in Bolivia, Venezuela and Angola. Gone are the days when the USA could intervene and support UNITA and intervene to support a Mobutu sese Seko. The Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance had morphed into OTI but the US was unsuccessful in Angola and can only be successful in states such as Equatorial Guinea and Uganda where the leaders lack credibility. In a situation such as the South Sudan where there was one of the largest concentrations of the USAID projects, once the divisions in the political leadership exploded into violence, the OTI operatives had to flee Juba. Even in that situation, the much vaunted US military had to take a back seat while the Ugandan military assisted in the evacuation of US personnel.
This is not to downplay the role of the US military, but to state clearly that since the clear opposition of the peace movement to the Libyan intervention, the Office of Transition Initiatives had to develop caution in propagating their work. Initially, after NATO declared the NATO intervention a success, The USAID Office of Transition worked out an elaborate scheme “to construct functional media outlets and civil society organizations, as well as build links between the government and its citizen and support education and reconstruction programming.” [xxxiv] The real dynamics of ‘these transition efforts’ were exposed after the death of the US ambassador Christopher Stevens. The strategists have had to downplay their transition work in Libya and divert attention from the call for the UN to fully evaluate the results of the NATO intervention in Libya.
Whether it is on the ideational plane of supporting the neo-liberal policies of the IMF and World Bank or in the day to day work of defense, diplomacy and development, the United States is on the defensive in all parts of the world. Mobilizing computer scientists, engineers, and technical professionals to serve the interests of the military and private equity forces cannot resolve the deep-seated contradictions of the accumulation of wealth by a few. What the actions of OTI and Creative Associates did in Cuba was to reawaken the history of the US attempts to reverse the Cuba revolution and the exposures of the US support for dictators and torturers through the USAID. Those staffers of Congress who are receiving the e mails about putting NGO’ workers in danger will also have to examine what is taught in those centers that are the main recruiting grounds for the SWIFT partners.
No amount of military, intelligence, Special Forces or drones can conceal the contradictions of the quality of the lives of the peoples of the South. In Africa and Latin America, the success of the US military is directly related to the underdevelopment of the political forces. For fifty years the USA has sought to implement regime change in Cuba and the attempts to mobilize the youths of Cuba was one more desperate effort at regime change. The idea of security sector reform is also another front for the marketing of weapons supplied by the USA. Even in this area, the USA is now facing competition from Brazil, Russia, India and China. In face of these reversals on multiple fronts, the USA is falling back on the pull of the prestigious Universities to recruit idealistic young people into ‘development’ work. Many of these bright youths accumulate huge debts in paying tuition and are therefore desperate for jobs after graduation. The SWIFT contractors go after the brightest of these idealistic youths. Within the public policy institutes there are neo-liberal Professors who prepare these idealistic youths for this market. Just as how there was an intense debate on campus about the role of CIA recruitment, there should be a spirited discussion of the role of SWIFT organizations such as Creative Associates and their work to ensnare unsuspecting youths.
Today, the major dangers lay in the role of the private military contractors that are acting without any kind of legal basis. Private military and security companies operate in a legal vacuum: they pose a threat to civilians and to international human rights law. The UN Human Rights Council has been calling for more control over these PMC’s and the progressive scholars need to give more publicity to the work of the Human Rights Council of the United Nations. Those international NGO’s that are not working to subvert Africa and Latin America need to take a hold of NGO platforms such as InterAction so that those who are integrated into the SWIFT pre-qualified subversive forces can be disbanded. The same goes for those peace and humanitarian organizations that need to separate themselves from the private military contractors who have formed the International Peace Association. We need to draw attention to the need for the USA to support peacekeeping and for a re-engagement with UNESCO and those platforms of international solidarity that breaks the choke hold of the surveillance state.
Horace G. Campbell, a veteran Pan Africanist is a Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. He is the author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review Press, 2013.
Notes.
[i] http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/ ... 2-03-36-16)
[ii][ii] Alberto Arce, Desmond Butler and Jack Gillum, “U.S. secretly created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest,” Washington Post, April 3, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... story.html
[iii] When General David Petraeus former head of the US Central Command and former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency was recruited to become chairman of the new Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR ) Global Institute , some of the more enlightened began to pay closer attention to these entities that are called capital equity groups. Petraeus was hired to focus on ‘economic forecasts, communications, public policy and emerging markets’ and he sought an academic cover at City College in New York city for legitimacy.
[iv] Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer, “NSA revelations put Booz Allen Hamilton, Carlyle Group in uncomfortable limelight,” Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ ... story.html
[v] Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group, John Wiley & Sons, 2003. See also Geoffrey Colvin and Ram Charan,”Private Equity: Private lives, CNN Money, November 27, 2006, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/ ... 2006112713
From their own platforms we have learnt that Carlyle’s private equity business has been one of the largest investors in leveraged buyout transactions over the last decade, while its real estate business has actively acquired commercial real estate. Since its inception, Carlyle has completed investments in such notable companies as Booz Allen Hamilton, Dex Media, Dunkin’ Brands, Freescale Semiconductor, Getty Images, HCR Manor Care, Hertz, Kinder Morgan, Nielsen, and United Defense. The Carlyle Group operates in four business areas: private equity, real assets, market strategies, and fund of funds, through its AlpInvest subsidiary.
[vi] Tim Shorrock, “Meet the contractors analyzing your private data,” Salon, June 10, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/06/10/digital ... al_dataSee also his book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, Simon & Schuster, 2009
[vii] Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army,
[viii] David Wise, “Campus Recruiting and the CIA,” New York Times, June 8, 1986. See also Phillip Zwerling, The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State, Macfarland 2011
[ix] Colin Powell, ‘Remarks by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to the National Foreign Policy Conference For Leaders of Non-Governmental Organizations’, 26 October 2001, http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/01102606.htm. See also Abby Stoddard, “With us or against us? NGO neutrality on the line,”Humanitarian Practice Network, Issue No 25, December 2003, http://www.odihpn.org/humanitarian-exch ... n-the-line
[x] Shashank Bengali, “How Kenya’s election was rigged,” McClatchy News, January 31, 2008, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/01/31/2 ... igged.html. See also Horace Campbell, “Drama of the popular struggle for democracy in Kenya,” Pambazuka News, January 3, 2008, http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/books/45210
[xi] For the description of this project from USAID see Yes Youth Can, http://www.usaid.gov/kenya/fact-sheets/ ... -wa-vijana
[xii] Ushaidi means testimony or witness in the Kiswahili language. For an analysis see Meier, Patrick and Kate Brodock (2008). “Crisis Mapping Kenya’s Election Violence: Comparing Mainstream News, Citizen Journalism and Ushahidi.” (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, HHI, Harvard University: Boston).
[xiii] Douglas Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, Harper Books, 2008
[xiv] Kennon H. Nakamura and Susan B. Epstein, “Diplomacy for the 21st Century: Transformational Diplomacy,” CRS Report For Congress, RL34141, August 2007. See also Connie Veillette “Restructuring U.S. Foreign Aid: The Role of the Director of Foreign Assistance in Transformational Development,” Congressional Research Service, January 2007
[xv] Pratap Chatterjee, “The National Security Industrial Complex and NSA Spying: The Revolving Doors Between State Agencies and Private Contractors,” Global Research, June 18, 2013, http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-nation ... rs/5339634
[xvi] Report and Recommendations of The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, “Liberty and Security in a Changing World,” December 12, 2013, file:///C:/Users/horace-user/Downloads/addb723d-ae06-4a3f-a4bf-ca220fe3062d.pdf
[xvii] http://www.africom.mil/Newsroom/Transcr ... -us-africa
[xviii] Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (New York, Times Books 2005
[xix] Christopher M. Blanchard, “Libya: Transition and U.S. Policy, “Congressional Research Service, October 18, 2012, https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33142.pdf
[xx] Jenny Pearce, “Is social change fundable? NGOs and theories and practices of social change.” Development in Practice, Vol. 20, No. 6 (August 2010), pp. 621-635. See also James Petras, “Imperialism and NGO’s in Latin America,” Monthly Review 49, 1997
[xxi] Garry Leech, “Washington Seeks Regime Change in Venezuela: Agents of Destabilization,” Counterpunch, March 4, 2014
[xxii] Eva Golinger,”Agents of Destabilization: the Dirty Hand of the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela, Counterpunch, April 24, 2014, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/25/ ... venezuela/
[xxiii] Marian Lawson, “USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives After 15 Years: Issues for Congress,” Federation of American Scientists, May 27, 2009, done for the Congressional Research Office. Report 7-5700
[xxiv] Rotberg, Robert. “The First Ten Years: An Assessment of the Office of Transition Initiatives.” Cambridge, MA, Program on Intrastate Conflict, Belfer Center, J. F. Kennedy School, Harvard University, 2005
[xxv] Associated Press, “U.S. secretly created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest,” Washington Post, April 2, 2014.The name ZunZuneo was chosen for the sound made by a Cuban hummingbird.
[xxvi] Chester, Eric. 1995 . Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA (Armonk: M.E.Sharpe
[xxvii] Marian Lawson, “USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives After 15 Years: Issues for Congress,” page 2
[xxviii] Sara Kenyon Lischer, “Military Intervention and the Humanitarian “Force Multiplier” Global Governance, Volume 13, No 1, 2007
[xxix] Andrew Naistos, “Foreign assistance in the Age of Terror.” 2004
[xxx] Sarah Beller, Graig Klein, and Ronald Fisher, “US Government Innovations in Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution,” International Peace and Conflict Resolution Program , American University, 2009 , https://www.american.edu/sis/ipcr/uploa ... ummary.pdf
[xxxi] New York Times, “Cerberus to Buy DynCorp for $1.5 Billion,” April 10, 2010, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/ ... 5-billion/
[xxxii] Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment, Verso Books, London 2010. See especially Chapter 13 on the role of international NGO’s
[xxxiii] Julie Hearn, “Aiding Democracy? Donors and Civil Society in South Africa,” Third World Quarterly, Vol 21, No 5, 2000
[xxxiv] Christopher M. Blanchard,” Libya, Transition and US Policy, Congressional Research Service. 2012
by JackRiddler » Sat Aug 02, 2014 10:47 pm
Lisa Martino Taylor, whose research led to the senators' query, had this to say:
"The focus of my research was on the lack of consent, secrecy, deception, organizational structure, and possible connection to a broader radiological program. The Army's letter seems to be relatively silent on those issues.
"Whether or not this satisfies the senators' concern and curiosity I cannot say, but I do know that it does not mine, and I believe that there are many aspects of this which merit further study.
"Given the level of secrecy, the original deception, and lack of public input and consent, it would be helpful for further government inquiry to include public hearings and statements from those with concerns and recollections from the open-air study."
Titre du Document
THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-ACADEMIC COMPLEX AND A NEW SOCIAL AUTISM
Auteur(s)
MARTINO-TAYLOR Lisa
Résumé
This article adds the third element of academia to C. Wright Mills' theory regarding the Military-Industrial Complex, and examines the dynamics, power, and secrecy that support chemical and biological weapons testing on human beings. Within the insular community of the Military-Industrial-Academic (MIA) Complex, chemical and biological weapons testing and use on humans is seen as normal and desirable, and secrecy is employed to pursue these activities. This secrecy creates a new social autism which encompasses a societal misunderstanding of reality, a minimal appreciation of danger, and a suppression of full and open debate regarding the manufacture, use, and testing of biological and chemical weaponry on humans. By identifying those activities that are hidden behind a shroud of secrecy, society can compare the moral universe of the MIA complex to that of a democratic society. If in conflict or harmful to citizens, society can challenge the parameters of the MIA's powerful local moral universe and remedy the social autism.
Editeur
Journal of Political and Military Sociology
Identifiant
ISSN : 0047-2697
Source
Journal of political and military sociology A. 2008, vol. 36, n° 1, pp. 37-52 [16 pages] [bibl. : 2 p.3/4]
Langue
Anglais
by cptmarginal » Wed Sep 17, 2014 12:40 pm
In 2003, Forbes magazine revealed that media mogul Ted Turner was America's top land baron -- with a total of 1.8 million acres across the U.S. The nation's ten largest landowners, Forbes reported, "own 10.6 million acres, or one out of every 217 acres in the country." Impressive as this total was, the Pentagon puts Turner and the entire pack of mega-landlords to shame with over 29 million acres in U.S. landholdings. Abroad, the Pentagon's "footprint" is also that of a giant. For example, the Department of Defense controls 20% of the Japanese island of Okinawa and, according to Stars and Stripes, "owns about 25 percent of Guam." Mere land ownership, however, is just the tip of the iceberg.
In his 2004 book, The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson opened the world's eyes to the size of the Pentagon's global footprint, noting that the Department of Defense (DoD) was deploying nearly 255,000 military personnel at 725 bases in 38 countries. Since then, the total number of overseas bases has increased to at least 766 and, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, may actually be as high as 850. Still, even these numbers don't begin to capture the global sprawl of the organization that unabashedly refers to itself as "one of the world's largest 'landlords.'"
The DoD's "real property portfolio," according to 2006 figures, consists of a total of 3,731 sites. Over 20% of these sites are located on more than 711,000 acres outside of the U.S. and its territories. Yet even these numbers turn out to be a drastic undercount. For example, while a 2005 Pentagon report listed U.S. military sites from Antigua and Hong Kong to Kenya and Peru, some countries with significant numbers of U.S. bases go entirely unmentioned -- Afghanistan and Iraq, for example.
Pentagon's $800 Billion Real Estate Problem
The U.S. Military Has No Idea What It Owns
By Matthew Gault
The U.S. Department of Defense owns more than half a million properties worth in excess of $800 billion dollars. The military’s real estate holdings span the globe and, all together, sprawl across 30 million acres.
Pentagon auditors can’t explain what half the properties are for—and doesn’t have a plan for finding out. All this according to a Sept. 8 report from the Government Accountability Office.
The nearly trillion-dollar real estate glut is merely another example of egregious military waste.
Way back in 1997, the GAO identified the Pentagon’s real estate record-keeping as a “high risk” problem. The Defense Department could sell unused facilities and save billions.
It just needed to figure out exactly what buildings it owned and how it used them all. But military bureaucrats made only passing attempts to find out. The Defense Department is probably still sitting on billions of dollars’ worth of properties it has no use for, despite 17 years of GAO goading.
“We found in September 2011 that DoD was limited in its ability to reduce excess inventory because DoD did not maintain accurate and complete data regarding the utilization of its facilities,” the GAO states in its new report.
The Pentagon won’t sell off facilities because it has no idea what’s going on in many of them. Nobody’s keeping good, centralized records. Individual property managers aren’t performing mandatory audits—and the Pentagon isn’t holding them accountable.
Land and large installations, however, are not all that the Defense Department owns. Until relatively recently, the U.S. Navy operated its own dairy, complete with a herd of Holsteins. Even though it did get rid of those cows in 1998, it kept the 865-acre farm tract in Gambrills, Maryland, and now leases it to Horizon Organic Dairy.
While it doesn't have a dairy, the Army still operates stables -- such as the John C. McKinney Memorial Stables where many of the 44 horses from its ceremonial Caisson Platoon live. It also has a big farm (the Large Animal Research Facility). In fact, the Pentagon owns hundreds of thousands of animals -- from rats to dogs to monkeys. In addition to an unknown number of animals used for unexplained "other purposes," in 2001 alone, the DoD utilized 330,149 creatures for various types of experimentation.
Then, there's the equipment the DoD owns, loads of it. For instance, it is the unlikely owner of "over 2,050 railcars, know[n] as the Defense Freight Rail Interchange Fleet." The DoD also reportedly ships 100,000 sea containers each year and spends $800 million annually on domestic cargo, primarily truck and rail shipments. And when it comes to trucks, the Army, alone, has a fleet of 12,700 Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Trucks (huge, eight-wheeled vehicles used to supply ammunition, petroleum, oils, and lubricants to other combat vehicles and weapons systems in the field) and 120,000 Humvees. All told, according to a 2006 Pentagon report, the DoD had a total of at least "280 ships, 14,000 aircraft, 900 strategic missiles, and 330,000 ground combat and tactical vehicles."
The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the DoD's largest combat support agency (with operations in 48 of the 50 states and 28 foreign countries) boasts: "If America's forces eat it, wear it, maintain equipment with it, or burn it as fuel. DLA probably provides it." In fact, the DLA claims that it "manages" some 5.2 million items and maintains an inventory, in its Defense Distribution Depots (which stretch from Italy and Japan to Korea and Kuwait), valued at $94.1 billion.
The DLA runs the Defense National Stockpile Center (DNSC) which stores 42 "strategic and critical materials" -- from zinc, lead, cobalt, chromium, and mercury (more than 9.7 million pounds of it in 2005) to precious metals such as platinum, palladium, and even industrial diamonds -- at 20 locations across the U.S. With a stockpile valued at over $1.5 billion and $5.7 billion in sales of excess commodities since 1993, the DNSC claims that there is "no private sector company in the world that sells this wide range of commodities and materials."
All told, the Department of Defense owns up to having "[o]ver $1 trillion in assets [and] $1.6 trillion in liabilities." This is, no doubt, a gross underestimate given the DoD's historic penchant for flawed book-keeping and the fact that, according to a study by its own inspector general, it cannot even account for at least $1 trillion dollars in money spent -- or perhaps, according to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as much as $2.3 trillion. Cooking the books and stashing cash is fitting enough for an American organization, in the age of Enron, that thinks of itself not just as a government agency but, in its own words, as "America's oldest company, largest company, busiest company and most successful company." In fact, on its website, the DoD makes the point that it easily bests Wal-Mart, Exxon-Mobil, and General Motors in terms of budget and staff.
by Elvis » Fri Mar 06, 2015 9:31 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/07/us/major-overhaul-set-for-cia-with-thousands-to-be-reassigned.html?_r=0
C.I.A. to Be Overhauled To Fight Modern Threats
By MARK MAZZETTI
MARCH 6, 2015
LANGLEY, Va. — John O. Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is planning to reassign thousands of undercover spies and intelligence analysts into new departments as part of a restructuring of the 67-year-old agency, a move he said would make it more successful against modern threats and crises.
Drawing from disparate sources — from the Pentagon to corporate America — Mr. Brennan’s plan would partly abandon the agency’s current structure that keeps spies and analysts separate as they target specific regions or countries. Instead, C.I.A. officers will be assigned to 10 new mission centers focused on terrorism, weapons proliferation, the Middle East and other areas with responsibility for espionage operations, intelligence analysis and covert actions.Related Coverage
United Nations workers prepared for the destruction of Iraqi nerve-agent weapons by sealing leaks in the rockets.
C.I.A. Is Said to Have Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons FEB. 15, 2015
Details of the C.I.A.’s internal review have emerged amid a partisan battle over one of the nation’s most polarizing chapters.
C.I.A. Report Found Value of Brutal Interrogation Was InflatedJAN. 20, 2015
During a briefing with reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Brennan gave few specifics about how a new structure would make the C.I.A. better at spying in an era of continued terrorism, cyberspying and tumult across the Middle East. But he said the current structure of having undercover spies and analysts cloistered separately — with little interaction and answering to different bosses — was anachronistic given the myriad global issues the agency faces.
“I’ve never seen a time when we have been confronted with such an array of very challenging, complex and serious threats to our national security, and issues that we have to grapple with,” he said.
One model for the new divisions is the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, an amalgam of undercover spies and analysts charged with hunting, and often killing, militant suspects across the globe. Once a small, occasionally neglected office in the C.I.A., the Counterterrorism Center has grown into a behemoth with thousands of officers since the Sept. 11 attacks as the C.I.A. has taken charge of a number of secret wars overseas.
But Mr. Brennan also cited another model for his new plan: the American military. He said that the Defense Department’s structure of having a single military commander in charge of all operations in a particular region — the way a four-star commander runs United States Central Command — was an efficient structure that led to better accountability.
Mark M. Lowenthal, a former senior C.I.A. analyst, said that the reorganization “is not going to go down smoothly” at the agency, especially among clandestine spies who have long been able to withhold information from analysts, such as the identity of their foreign agents. “The clandestine service is very, very guarded about giving too much information about sources to the analysts,” he said.
But Mr. Lowenthal, who said he had not been briefed about the reorganization and was basing his understanding of Mr. Brennan’s plan on news accounts, said that the new mission centers could help avoid a debacle like the intelligence assessments before the Iraq war, when analysts trusted information from sources they knew little about, and who were later discredited.
During his two years as C.I.A. director, Mr. Brennan has become known for working long days but also for being loath to delegate decisions to lower levels of C.I.A. bureaucracy. During the briefing on Wednesday, he showed flashes of frustration that, under the C.I.A.’s current structure, there is not one single person in charge of — and to hold accountable for — a number of pressing issues.
He avoided citing any specific examples of how the C.I.A.’s current structure was hampering operations, and often used management jargon while describing his vision for the agency.
He spoke of wanting to “wring efficiencies” out of the system and trying to identify “seams” in the agency’s current structure that hinder the C.I.A. from adequately addressing complex problems. The C.I.A. needed to modernize even if the current system was not “broken,” he said, citing how Kodak failed to anticipate the advent of digital cameras.
Mr. Brennan said he was also adding a new directorate at the agency responsible for all of the C.I.A.’s digital operations — from cyberespionage to data warehousing and analysis.
Mr. Brennan discussed his plans with reporters on the condition that nothing be made public until he met with C.I.A. employees to discuss the new structure. That meeting was Friday.
While adding the new digital directorate, Mr. Brennan chose not to scuttle the C.I.A.’s four traditional directorates sitting at the top of the bureaucracy — those in charge of clandestine operations, intelligence analysis, science and technology research, and personnel support.
The C.I.A.’s clandestine service, the cadre of undercover spies known for decades as the Directorate of Operations and in recent years renamed the National Clandestine Service, will get its original name back under Mr. Brennan’s plan.
Amy Zegart, an intelligence expert at Stanford, said that the C.I.A. risked being drawn further into the daily churn of events rather than focusing on “over-the-horizon threats” at a time when the C.I.A. has already come under criticism for paying little attention to long-term trends.
For his part, Mr. Brennan said this was the very thing he was trying to avoid — reacting to the world’s crises and not giving policy makers sufficient warning before they happened.
“I don’t want to just be part of an agency that reports on the world’s fires, and the collapse of various countries and systems,” he said.
by Iamwhomiam » Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:40 pm
by JackRiddler » Sat Mar 07, 2015 12:53 am
by Elvis » Sat Mar 07, 2015 9:25 pm
JackRiddler » Fri Mar 06, 2015 9:53 pm wrote:Like a lot of trends since 9/11 the proposed CIA reorganization (a case of "silo management") brings further to the surface the reality of cross-sector networks and parapolitics that has always obtained below the official policy level. These teams of joint analysis and operations will of course integrate contractors as the likely majority. It probably won't mean much as it hardly means the networking and parapolitics will cease. It's an important ideological statement as it says that there should be no formal restrictions or firewalls between functions, the thing that already functions as a deep state (deep empire, actually) should not pretend otherwise.
C.I.A. officers will be assigned to 10 new mission centers focused on terrorism, weapons proliferation[.] FULL STOP
by semper occultus » Fri May 01, 2015 6:52 am
by cptmarginal » Tue May 26, 2015 1:33 pm
Exclusive: Leaked Report Profiles Military, Police Members of Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs
By Jana Winter and Jordan Smith
05/22/2015
Nuclear power plant technicians, senior military officers, FBI contractors and an employee of “a highly-secretive Department of Defense agency” with a Top Secret clearance. Those are just a few of the more than 100 people with sensitive military and government connections that law enforcement is tracking because they are linked to “outlaw motorcycle gangs.”
A year before the deadly Texas shootout that killed nine people on May 17, a lengthy report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives detailed the involvement of U.S. military personnel and government employees in outlaw motorcycle gangs, or OMGs. A copy of the report was obtained by The Intercept.
The report lays out, in almost obsessive detail, the extent to which OMG members are represented in nearly every part of the military, and in federal and local government, from police and fire departments to state utility agencies. Specific examples from the report include dozens of Defense Department contractors with Secret or Top Secret clearances; multiple FBI contractors; radiological technicians with security clearances; U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees; Army, Navy and Air Force active-duty personnel, including from the special operations force community; and police officers.
“The OMG community continues to spread its tentacles throughout all facets of government,” the report says.
The relationship between OMGs and law enforcement has come under scrutiny after it became known that law enforcement were on site in Waco bracing for conflict.
The 40-page report, “OMGs and the Military 2014,” issued by ATF’s Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information in July of last year, warned of the escalating violence of these gangs. “Their insatiable appetite for dominance has led to shootings, assaults and malicious attacks across the globe. OMGs continue to maim and murder over territory,” the report said. “As tensions escalate, brazen shootings are occurring in broad daylight.”
The ATF report is based on intelligence gathered by dozens of law enforcement and military intelligence agencies, and identifies about 100 alleged associates of the country’s most violent outlaw motorcycle gangs and support clubs who have worked in sensitive government or military positions.
Those gangs “continue to court active-duty military personnel and government workers, both civilians and contractors, for their knowledge, reliable income, tactical skills and dedication to a cause,” according to the report. “Through our extensive analysis, it has been revealed that a large number of support clubs are utilizing active-duty military personnel and U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) contractors and employees to spread their tentacles across the United States.”
The report predicted that six dominant OMGs — Mongols, Hells Angels, Outlaws, Pagans, Bandidos and Vagos — would continue to expand, with escalating violence. The groups are known as “one-percenter” clubs, a moniker they proudly use to denote their outlaw status. The report identifies the most violent as Bandidos and Hell’s Angels support clubs — the same groups involved in a deadly shootout in Waco, Texas on Sunday.
The deadly confrontation involved the Bandidos and a rival club, the Cossacks MC, who are backed by Bandidos’ arch rivals, the Hell’s Angels. The shootout was part of a ongoing turf battle: Without permission from the Bandidos, Cossacks members have begun wearing a patch on their vests that claims Texas as the club’s territory — a figurative thumb in the eye of the Bandidos, long the state’s dominant motorcycle club. Nine people were killed and more than 170 bikers were arrested in the noontime showdown.
On Wednesday, law enforcement in Texas confirmed to several media outlets that one of the bikers arrested in the massive post-shootout sweep was a former San Antonio police detective, who joined the Bandidos after retiring from the department after 32 years.
The ATF report identifies the Bandidos as the dominant and most violent of the motorcycle gangs in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and identifies a staff sergeant instructor in the United States Air Force, currently stationed at Keesler Air Force Base, as the president of the local Pistoleros chapter, a Bandidos support club. According to the report, he routinely hosts parties for active duty military personnel.
In response to questions about the report, an ATF spokesperson said, “This was supposed to be solely a law enforcement tool to help fight violent crime. It was not supposed to be out there in the ether for general consumption.” The Intercept, after consulting with ATF, has redacted some portions of the report.
In an interview, Edward Winterhalder, a former high-ranking member of the Bandidos who left the club in 2003, said that while military veterans have long been involved in motorcycle clubs — many of the current outlaw clubs were formed in the wake of World War II — current-duty military or law enforcement members are not generally involved in the most violent gangs.
According to Winterhalder, biker clubs not associated with the violent one-percenters have many government employees — current military, law enforcement and firefighters — as members. Indeed, some clubs have emerged that pointedly disavow any connections to violence or lawlessness, or that specifically bill themselves as a LEMC — law enforcement motorcycle club.
Among those are the Iron Circle LEMC, a Texas club formed in 2006; the Arizona-founded Roughnecks Country MC — for the “99 percent … that gives a shit about society and the laws that govern the world we live in”; the Iron Order MC, a fiercely independent club that strongly rejects the ethos of the one-percenters; and the Protectors LEMC, which requires a criminal background check for prospective members.
Nonetheless, the report documents extensive involvement of current-duty military and government personnel in the outlaw groups, and does not mention LEMCs.
The report is a testament to how seriously law enforcement takes the issue of outlaw motorcycle gangs, detailing extensive surveillance; the document includes copies of military or government identification photos, some gained from traffic stops, and information from what appears to be close monitoring of military and government officials who attend the groups’ gatherings and activities across the country.
by cptmarginal » Sun Jan 10, 2016 12:01 am
Dana Priest wrote:Just looking at the maps in David Vine's thoroughly documented Base Nation will give you the chills — and seduce you into reading the book. He's performed a kind of modern day treasure hunt, finding and displaying our military forces all over the globe, and then thinking deeply about whether their far-flung presence will achieve or undermine the goal of fostering a peaceful and prosperous world.
As of 2015, the United States controlled approximately 800 bases outside the fifty U.S. states and Washington, D.C. The sheer number of bases as well as the secrecy and lack of transparency of the overseas base network make any graphic depiction challenging. This map reflects the bases' relative number and positioning given the best available information.
From a hilltop at the Guantánamo Bay naval station, you can look down on a secluded part of the base bordered by the Caribbean Sea. There you'll see thick coils of razor wire, guard towers, search lights, and concrete barriers. This is the U.S. prison that has garnered so much international attention and controversy, with so many prisoners held for years without trial. But the prison facilities take up only a few acres of the forty-five-square-mile naval station. Most of the base looks nothing like the detention center. Instead, the landscape features suburban-style housing developments, a golf course, and recreational boating facilities. This part of the base has received much less attention than the prison. Yet in its own way, it is far more important for understanding who we are as a country and how we relate to the rest of the world.
What makes most of the naval station so remarkable is just how unremarkable it is. Looking out on Guantánamo Bay, a U.S. flag flies outside base headquarters. Nearby, an outdoor movie theater has a regular schedule of Hollywood blockbusters. Next door, there are bright-green artificial turf fields for football and soccer, at a new sports facility that also features two baseball diamonds, volleyball and basketball courts, and an outdoor roller-skating rink. In the air-conditioned gym, ESPN's Sportscenter plays on TV. Across the main road there's a large chapel, a post office, and a sun-bleached set of McDonald's golden arches. Neighborhoods with names like Deer Point and Villamar have looping drives and spacious lawns with barbecue grills and children's toys. There's a high school, a middle and elementary school, and a childcare facility. There are pools and playgrounds, several public beaches, a bowling center, barber and beauty shops, a Pizza Hut, a Taco Bell, a KFC, and a Subway.
From the hilltop you can also faintly see two nearby Cuban towns, but most everywhere else on base it's easy to forget you're in Cuba. What base residents call "downtown," for example, could be almost anywhere in the United States-or at another of the hundreds of U.S. military bases spread around the globe, which often resemble self-contained American towns. The downtown is where you find the commissary and the Navy's version of the post exchange, or PX-the shopping facility present on U.S. military bases worldwide. Surrounded by plentiful parking, the commissary and exchange feel like a Walmart, full of clothing and consumer electronics, furniture, automotive products, and groceries. At Guantánamo, the base souvenir shop is one of the few reminders of where you really are. There, along with U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay postcards and mugs, you can buy a T-shirt bearing the words DETAINEE OPERATIONS.
During years of debates over the closure of Guantánamo Bay's prison, few have asked why the United States has such a large base on Cuban territory in the first place, and whether we should have one there at all. This is unsurprising.
Most Americans rarely think about U.S. military bases overseas. Since the end of World War II and the early days of the Cold War, when the United States built or acquired most of its overseas bases, Americans have considered it normal to have U.S. military installations in other countries, on other people's land. The presence of our bases overseas has long been accepted unquestioningly and treated as an obvious good, essential to national security and global peace. Perhaps these bases register in our consciousness when there's an antibase protest in Okinawa or an accident in Germany. Quickly, however, they're forgotten.
Of course, people living near U.S. bases in countries worldwide pay them more attention. For many, U.S. bases are one of the most prominent symbols of the United States, along with Hollywood movies, pop music, and fast food. Indeed, the prevalence of Burger Kings and Taco Bells on many of our bases abroad is telling: ours is a supersized collection of bases with franchises the world over. While there are no freestanding foreign bases on U.S. soil, today there are around eight hundred U.S. bases in foreign countries, occupied by hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops.
Although the United States has long had some bases in foreign lands, this massive global deployment of military force was unknown in U.S. history before World War II. Now, seventy years after that war, there are still, according to the Pentagon, 174 U.S. bases in Germany, 113 in Japan, and 83 in South Korea. There are hundreds more dotting the planet in Aruba and Australia, Bahrain and Bulgaria, Colombia, Kenya, and Qatar, to name just a few. Worldwide, we have bases in more than seventy countries. Although few U.S. citizens realize it, we probably have more bases in other people's lands than any other people, nation, or empire in world history.
And yet the subject is barely discussed in the media. Rarely does anyone ask whether we need hundreds of bases overseas, or whether we can afford them. Rarely does anyone consider how we would feel with a foreign base on U.S. soil, or how we would react if China, Russia, or Iran built even a single base somewhere near our borders today. For most in the United States, the idea of even the nicest, most benign foreign troops arriving with their tanks, planes, and high-powered weaponry and making themselves at home in our country-occupying and fencing off hundreds or thousands of acres of our land-is unthinkable.
Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, highlighted this rarely considered truth in 2009 when he refused to renew the lease for a U.S. base in his country. Correa told reporters that he would approve the lease renewal on one condition: "They let us put a base in Miami-an Ecuadorian base."
"If there's no problem having foreign soldiers on a country's soil," Correa quipped, "surely they'll let us have an Ecuadorian base in the United States."1
THE SCALE
At the height of the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the total number of bases, combat outposts, and checkpoints in those two countries alone topped one thousand.2 With American troops largely withdrawn, almost all of those have been shut down. Yet officially, according to the most recent publicized count, the U.S. military currently still occupies 686 "base sites" outside the fifty states and Washington, D.C.3
While 686 is quite a figure, that tally strangely excludes many well-known U.S. bases, such as those in Kosovo, Kuwait, and Qatar. Less surprisingly, the Pentagon's count also excludes secret (or secretive) American bases, such as those reported in Israel and Saudi Arabia. There are so many bases, the Pentagon itself doesn't even know the true total.4 By my count, eight hundred is a good estimate.
But what exactly is a "base"? Definitions and terminology vary widely, and each of the military's services has its own preferred vocabulary, including "post," "station," "camp," and "fort." The Pentagon defines its generic termbase site as a "physical (geographic) location"-meaning land, a facility or facilities, or land and facilities-"owned by, leased to, or otherwise possessed" by an armed service or another component of the Department of Defense.5 To avoid linguistic debates and because it's the simplest and most widely recognized term, I generally use "base" to mean any place, facility, or installation used regularly for military purposes of any kind.6
Understood this way, bases come in all sizes and shapes, from massive sites in Germany and Japan to small radar facilities in Peru and Puerto Rico. Other bases include ports and airfields of all sizes, repair facilities, training areas, nuclear weapons installations, missile testing facilities, arsenals, warehouses, barracks, military schools, listening and communications posts, and drone bases. While I exclude checkpoints from my definition, military hospitals and prisons, rehab facilities, paramilitary bases, and intelligence facilities must also be considered part of the base world because of their military functions. Even military resorts and recreation areas in places such as Tuscany and Seoul are bases of a kind; worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.7
The Pentagon says that it has just sixty-four "active major installations" overseas and that most of its base sites are "small installations or locations." But it defines "small" as having a reported value of up to $915 million.8 In other words, small can be not so small.
by zangtang » Sun Jan 10, 2016 7:39 am
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