What Iowa Slippage Means for Hillary
- Dick Morris, The Hill
Three More Years of Goldilocks?
- Larry Kudlow, RealClearPolitics
With Iraq Improving, Will Neocons Return?
- Victor Davis Hanson, RCP
J.F.K.'s Death, Re-Framed
- Max Holland
Two Icebergs Ahead For the Democrats
- David Broder, Washington Post
How to Beat Hillary Next November
- Karl Rove, Newsweek
Nixon 1968, Clinton 2008
- John Ellis, RealClearPolitics
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Preventing the Impending War on Iran - by Prof. Marjorie Cohn - 2007-11-23
The Financial Tsunami: Sub-Prime Mortgage Debt is but the Tip of the Iceberg- by F. William Engdahl - 2007-11-23Manufacturing Consent for World War III- by Michael Barker - 2007-11-22
Radioactive Ammunition Fired in Middle East May Claim More Lives Than Hiroshima and Nagasaki - by Sherwood Ross - 2007-11-22
Law and Resistance: The Republic in Crisis and the People’s Response- by Prof. Francis A. Boyle - 2007-11-22
Dollar Crash: The Real Challenge For OPEC - by Muriel Mirak-Weissbach - 2007-11-22Iraq's Laboratory of Repression- by Robert Parry - 2007-11-22
Pentagon Insider has dire warning
by Dr. Daniel Ellsberg
Global Research, November 19, 2007 American Free Press
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Print this article
Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, offered insights into the looming attack on Iran and the loss of liberty in the United States at a recent American University symposium. What follow are his comments from that speech. They have been edited only for space.
Let me simplify . . . and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9-11. That’s the next coup that completes the first.
The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution . . . what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world—in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.
There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.
All these violations were impeachable had they been found out at the time but in nearly every case the violations were not found out until [the president was] out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.
That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable. They weren’t found out in time. But I think it was not their intention, in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.
It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 1970s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but [they] have believed in executive government, single-branch government under an executive president—elected or not—with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.
When I say this, I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country—but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country [and the Framers of the Constitution] thought.
They believe we need a different kind of government now, an executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with ‘signing statements.’
Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says: ‘I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.’
It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the executive branch, essentially of the president—a concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.”
Now I’m appealing to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right. It’s not just ‘our way of doing things’— it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody, including Americans.
On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.
That brings me to the second point. This executive branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition [even] from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran, which, even by imperialist standards, [violates] standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the executive branch but most of the leaders in Congress.
The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …
But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.
Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t; it doesn’t even make it unlikely.
That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress—Democrats and Republicans—and the public and the media, we have freed the White House — the president and the vice president—from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.
And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.
And the question is what then, can we do about this?
We are heading toward an insane operation. It is not certain. [But it] is likely.… I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.
What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran, is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.
And . . . we will not succeed in moving Congress, probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.
However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small, perhaps—anyway not large—possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.
Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.
Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9-11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little.
We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, ‘traitor,’ ‘weak on terrorism’—names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.
How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.
I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath of office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the armed services.
And that oath is not to a commander in chief, which is not [even] mentioned. It is not to a Fuehrer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.
Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.
I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath, which I eventually came to do.
I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada—who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war—is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously [the matter of] upholding his oath.
The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. [All the personnel] under him who understand what is going on — and there are myriad — are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.
On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate—and frankly of the Republicans —that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.
I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that. Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.”
Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?
I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read [about] in The Washington Post who threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.
I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from madmen in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.
And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves —they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relations with the president to the slightest degree.
That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.”
Daniel Ellsberg is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Daniel Ellsberg
by Dr. Daniel Ellsberg
Global Research, November 19, 2007 American Free Press
Email this article to a friend Print this article Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, offered insights into the looming attack on Iran and the loss of liberty in the United States at a recent American University symposium. What follow are his comments from that speech. They have been edited only for space.
Let me simplify . . . and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9-11. That’s the next coup that completes the first.
The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution . . . what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world—in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.
There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.
All these violations were impeachable had they been found out at the time but in nearly every case the violations were not found out until [the president was] out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.
That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable. They weren’t found out in time. But I think it was not their intention, in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.
It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 1970s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but [they] have believed in executive government, single-branch government under an executive president—elected or not—with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.
When I say this, I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country—but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country [and the Framers of the Constitution] thought.
They believe we need a different kind of government now, an executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with ‘signing statements.’
Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says: ‘I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.’
It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the executive branch, essentially of the president—a concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.”
Now I’m appealing to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right. It’s not just ‘our way of doing things’— it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody, including Americans.
On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.
That brings me to the second point. This executive branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition [even] from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran, which, even by imperialist standards, [violates] standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the executive branch but most of the leaders in Congress.
The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …
But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.
Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t; it doesn’t even make it unlikely.
That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress—Democrats and Republicans—and the public and the media, we have freed the White House — the president and the vice president—from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.
And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.
And the question is what then, can we do about this?
We are heading toward an insane operation. It is not certain. [But it] is likely.… I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.
What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran, is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.
And . . . we will not succeed in moving Congress, probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.
However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small, perhaps—anyway not large—possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.
Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.
Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9-11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little.
We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, ‘traitor,’ ‘weak on terrorism’—names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.
How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.
I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath of office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the armed services.
And that oath is not to a commander in chief, which is not [even] mentioned. It is not to a Fuehrer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.
Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.
I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath, which I eventually came to do.
I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada—who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war—is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously [the matter of] upholding his oath.
The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. [All the personnel] under him who understand what is going on — and there are myriad — are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.
On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate—and frankly of the Republicans —that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.
I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that. Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.”
Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?
I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read [about] in The Washington Post who threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.
I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from madmen in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.
And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves —they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relations with the president to the slightest degree.
That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.”
Daniel Ellsberg is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Daniel Ellsberg
Treason is Not Old News we learn from the president's former press secretary, Scott McClellan, that the president himself "was involved" in sending him out to lie to the American public about the betrayal. If that isn't a high crime and misdemeanor then we don't know what is.
The Multiplier Effect by Milton Brewster I got into a discussion yesterday about the horrible state of our Economy, with a good friend who considers himself to be a liberal/progressive. He's worried about the state of our Economy just like the rest of us. He thinks that Bush has stolen so much money, that it has literally caused a minor recession, even without his horrible policies.
The Staging of Hillary Clinton by Lary Sakin A couple of weeks ago, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton got swept up in a teapot tempest about her alleged staging of questions from folks attending her rallies. The major media castigated Clinton for receiving some softball questions in the midst of heavy artillery fire questioning her record. Certainly this practice is more akin to Republican campaign politicking than supposed progressive Democrats; ...
The Multiplier Effect by Milton Brewster I got into a discussion yesterday about the horrible state of our Economy, with a good friend who considers himself to be a liberal/progressive. He's worried about the state of our Economy just like the rest of us. He thinks that Bush has stolen so much money, that it has literally caused a minor recession, even without his horrible policies.
The Staging of Hillary Clinton by Lary Sakin A couple of weeks ago, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton got swept up in a teapot tempest about her alleged staging of questions from folks attending her rallies. The major media castigated Clinton for receiving some softball questions in the midst of heavy artillery fire questioning her record. Certainly this practice is more akin to Republican campaign politicking than supposed progressive Democrats; ...
Who Needs Experience? - Michael Kinsley, Washington Post
Can Ted Olson Help Rudy Get Elected? - James Taranto, Wall Street Journal
A Better Life for Our Children - John Edwards, Des Moines Register
Is the Huckabee Surge Over? - Terry Eastland, Weekly Standard
Perot Voters Still Looking for a Candidate - Ben Smith, The Politico
America Hates Hillary and Co. - Toby Harnden, Daily Telegraph
It is the GOP Candidates Who Have the Ideas - Mark Steyn, OC Register
Does Perfection Have Its Price for Romney? - Faye Fiore, Los Angeles Times
Hesitance On the Warming Front - Derrick Jackson, Boston Globe
Biofuels Could Run Out of Gas - Richard Conniff, Smithsonian Magazine
Venezuela's Path to Self-Destruction - William Ratliff, Los Angeles Times
Is Gordon Brown Up to the Job? - Matthew Parris, Times of London
The End of the Stem-Cell Wars - Ryan Anderson, Weekly Standard
Taking Science on Faith - Paul Davies, New York Times
Canada's Moral Compass - Pierre Atlas, RealClearPolitics
Harry Reid's Junket - Robert Novak, Chicago Sun-Times
Lost in a Flood of Debt - Bob Herbert, New York Times
Can Ted Olson Help Rudy Get Elected? - James Taranto, Wall Street Journal
A Better Life for Our Children - John Edwards, Des Moines Register
Is the Huckabee Surge Over? - Terry Eastland, Weekly Standard
Perot Voters Still Looking for a Candidate - Ben Smith, The Politico
America Hates Hillary and Co. - Toby Harnden, Daily Telegraph
It is the GOP Candidates Who Have the Ideas - Mark Steyn, OC Register
Does Perfection Have Its Price for Romney? - Faye Fiore, Los Angeles Times
Hesitance On the Warming Front - Derrick Jackson, Boston Globe
Biofuels Could Run Out of Gas - Richard Conniff, Smithsonian Magazine
Venezuela's Path to Self-Destruction - William Ratliff, Los Angeles Times
Is Gordon Brown Up to the Job? - Matthew Parris, Times of London
The End of the Stem-Cell Wars - Ryan Anderson, Weekly Standard
Taking Science on Faith - Paul Davies, New York Times
Canada's Moral Compass - Pierre Atlas, RealClearPolitics
Harry Reid's Junket - Robert Novak, Chicago Sun-Times
Lost in a Flood of Debt - Bob Herbert, New York Times
Guns and the Constitution - Wall Street Journal
Thinking Beyond Annapolis Summit - New York Times
U.N. Comes Clean on AIDS Stats - New York Post
Satellite Radio Lost in Space - Chicago Tribune
For Romney & Company, Campaign Is All Business - New York Times
Clinton Team Is Quick to Bat Down Rumors - Washington Post
In Iowa, Voters' Eyes Are On Pump Prices - Los Angeles Times
Blue-collar Women See Hope in Clinton - Boston Globe
Thinking Beyond Annapolis Summit - New York Times
U.N. Comes Clean on AIDS Stats - New York Post
Satellite Radio Lost in Space - Chicago Tribune
For Romney & Company, Campaign Is All Business - New York Times
Clinton Team Is Quick to Bat Down Rumors - Washington Post
In Iowa, Voters' Eyes Are On Pump Prices - Los Angeles Times
Blue-collar Women See Hope in Clinton - Boston Globe
NYT: Suicide Manual for Dems
- Ann Coulter, Universal Press
On Iraq, a State of Denial
- Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
Clinton Hits Rough Patch as Iowa Showdown Nears
- Jackie Calmes, WSJ
Critics Are Wrong on American Economy
- Gerard Baker, Times of London
How to Beat Hillary Next November
- Karl Rove, Newsweek
Nixon 1968, Clinton 2008
- John Ellis, RealClearPolitics
Who's the Inexperienced One, Hillary?
- Maureen Dowd, New York Times
- Ann Coulter, Universal Press
On Iraq, a State of Denial
- Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
Clinton Hits Rough Patch as Iowa Showdown Nears
- Jackie Calmes, WSJ
Critics Are Wrong on American Economy
- Gerard Baker, Times of London
How to Beat Hillary Next November
- Karl Rove, Newsweek
Nixon 1968, Clinton 2008
- John Ellis, RealClearPolitics
Who's the Inexperienced One, Hillary?
- Maureen Dowd, New York Times
PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH SUPPORTS HILLARY CLINTON?
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on FoxNews.com on November 21, 2007.
Just when every poll has Hillary slipping, she has gotten a shot in the arm from a very unlikely source: President George W. Bush.
In an interview on Tuesday featuring the first couple and Charles Gibson, the president said of Mrs. Clinton "No question, there is no question that Sen. Clinton understands pressure better than any of the candidates, you know, in the race because she lived in the White House and sees it first — could see it first-hand."
By saying that she “understands the klieg lights,” Bush lent credence to Hillary’s campaign assertion that she could “hit the ground running” if she were elected president.
Would somebody please explain to us what Bush is doing, touting Hillary just as the rest of America is finally catching on to her artificial, evasive and contrived campaigning style?
This is not the first time Bush has rescued the Clintons. After they left the White House, both the former president and the new senator had low ratings in the polls. Beset by scandal — the White House gifts, the pardons-for-sale, the payments to Hillary’s brothers for pardons, the Hasidic vote-for-pardon scandal, and Bill’s nolo contender plea to obstructing justice — Bill and Hillary were sucking wind.
But, Bush swept in for the rescue, picking the former president off the ash heap of history and elevating him to parity with his father in a two-former-president effort to raise funds for the tsunami victims. By giving him a respected place alongside a former president of unquestioned integrity, Bush gave Clinton a tremendous way to climb out of disgrace and into the limelight.
Then, when the tsunami relief effort was winding down, he re-enlisted former president Clinton to work with his father again on helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Not only did Bush help the Clintons in positive ways, but he let his justice department drop the investigations of the pardons, the gifts, the payments to Hillary’s brothers and the Hasidic vote scandal with no prosecution or plea dealings.
Then Bush let Clinton off the hook another time when the former president’s former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was caught smuggling classified documents relating to 9/11 and the war on terror out of the National Archives in his pockets and socks. The Bush Justice Department accepted a plea deal with Berger which did not require him to say what documents he had taken and why he had swiped them. As a result, we never knew what aspect of the Clinton record on terrorism Berger was so anxious to cover up.
All of this kid glove treatment of the former first couple led to jokes about how George W and Bill are the two children of President George H.W. Now the president is going easy on his putative sister-in-law, Hillary.
The fact is that Hillary has no idea what it is like to be president. Unlike Bill, she did not have to face the media daily and could keep them at arms length as she toured the world, acting like a tourist, in carefully contrived photo opportunities. When she was really involved in public policy — during the health reform debate — her insistence on the secrecy of the proceedings led to a federal court order and judgment against her.
Is President Bush deliberately helping Hillary to win the nomination because he feels she would be the easiest one of the Democrats to beat? If he is, he’s making a serious mistake. She is the only Democrat who can bring 10 million new single female voters out of the woodwork to sway the election.
Or, is it an ex-president thing? A kind of exclusive club of former chiefs who treat one another with kindness, civility and bend over backwards to show respect? Whether it is through political miscalculation or elitism that Bush caters to Hillary Clinton, he should stop it. Every day, she bashes him full time on the campaign trail. His kind words for her are so out of place, they are jarring.
President George W. Bush has done quite enough to aid the election of Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States already, thank you. Without his generosity to Bill and his refusal to prosecute matters that could embarrass the Clintons, he bears a great deal of responsibility already for Hillary’s rise to front runner status in the Democratic primary.
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on FoxNews.com on November 21, 2007.
Just when every poll has Hillary slipping, she has gotten a shot in the arm from a very unlikely source: President George W. Bush.
In an interview on Tuesday featuring the first couple and Charles Gibson, the president said of Mrs. Clinton "No question, there is no question that Sen. Clinton understands pressure better than any of the candidates, you know, in the race because she lived in the White House and sees it first — could see it first-hand."
By saying that she “understands the klieg lights,” Bush lent credence to Hillary’s campaign assertion that she could “hit the ground running” if she were elected president.
Would somebody please explain to us what Bush is doing, touting Hillary just as the rest of America is finally catching on to her artificial, evasive and contrived campaigning style?
This is not the first time Bush has rescued the Clintons. After they left the White House, both the former president and the new senator had low ratings in the polls. Beset by scandal — the White House gifts, the pardons-for-sale, the payments to Hillary’s brothers for pardons, the Hasidic vote-for-pardon scandal, and Bill’s nolo contender plea to obstructing justice — Bill and Hillary were sucking wind.
But, Bush swept in for the rescue, picking the former president off the ash heap of history and elevating him to parity with his father in a two-former-president effort to raise funds for the tsunami victims. By giving him a respected place alongside a former president of unquestioned integrity, Bush gave Clinton a tremendous way to climb out of disgrace and into the limelight.
Then, when the tsunami relief effort was winding down, he re-enlisted former president Clinton to work with his father again on helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Not only did Bush help the Clintons in positive ways, but he let his justice department drop the investigations of the pardons, the gifts, the payments to Hillary’s brothers and the Hasidic vote scandal with no prosecution or plea dealings.
Then Bush let Clinton off the hook another time when the former president’s former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was caught smuggling classified documents relating to 9/11 and the war on terror out of the National Archives in his pockets and socks. The Bush Justice Department accepted a plea deal with Berger which did not require him to say what documents he had taken and why he had swiped them. As a result, we never knew what aspect of the Clinton record on terrorism Berger was so anxious to cover up.
All of this kid glove treatment of the former first couple led to jokes about how George W and Bill are the two children of President George H.W. Now the president is going easy on his putative sister-in-law, Hillary.
The fact is that Hillary has no idea what it is like to be president. Unlike Bill, she did not have to face the media daily and could keep them at arms length as she toured the world, acting like a tourist, in carefully contrived photo opportunities. When she was really involved in public policy — during the health reform debate — her insistence on the secrecy of the proceedings led to a federal court order and judgment against her.
Is President Bush deliberately helping Hillary to win the nomination because he feels she would be the easiest one of the Democrats to beat? If he is, he’s making a serious mistake. She is the only Democrat who can bring 10 million new single female voters out of the woodwork to sway the election.
Or, is it an ex-president thing? A kind of exclusive club of former chiefs who treat one another with kindness, civility and bend over backwards to show respect? Whether it is through political miscalculation or elitism that Bush caters to Hillary Clinton, he should stop it. Every day, she bashes him full time on the campaign trail. His kind words for her are so out of place, they are jarring.
President George W. Bush has done quite enough to aid the election of Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States already, thank you. Without his generosity to Bill and his refusal to prosecute matters that could embarrass the Clintons, he bears a great deal of responsibility already for Hillary’s rise to front runner status in the Democratic primary.
"A Generalized Meltdown of Financial Institutions"
Take a Look at Professor Roubini's Crystal Ball
By Mike Whitney
Reality has finally caught up to the stock market. The American consumer is underwater, the banks are buried in dept, and the housing market is in terminal distress. The Dow is now below its 200-Day Moving Average -- the first big "sell" signal. Anything below 12,500 could trigger program-trading and crash the market. The increased volatility suggests that we are watching a "real time" meltdown. Continue
Take a Look at Professor Roubini's Crystal Ball
By Mike Whitney
Reality has finally caught up to the stock market. The American consumer is underwater, the banks are buried in dept, and the housing market is in terminal distress. The Dow is now below its 200-Day Moving Average -- the first big "sell" signal. Anything below 12,500 could trigger program-trading and crash the market. The increased volatility suggests that we are watching a "real time" meltdown. Continue
Forecast: U.S. Dollar Could Plunge 90 pct
By UPI
"We are going to see economic times the likes of which no living person has seen," Trends Research Institute Director Gerald Celente said, forecasting a "Panic of 2008." Continue
By UPI
"We are going to see economic times the likes of which no living person has seen," Trends Research Institute Director Gerald Celente said, forecasting a "Panic of 2008." Continue
Banks Gone Wild
By Paul Krugman
“What were they smoking?” asks the cover of the current issue of Fortune magazine. Underneath the headline are photos of recently deposed Wall Street titans, captioned with the staggering sums they managed to lose. Continue
By Paul Krugman
“What were they smoking?” asks the cover of the current issue of Fortune magazine. Underneath the headline are photos of recently deposed Wall Street titans, captioned with the staggering sums they managed to lose. Continue
In the Realm of the Dying Dollar: The plunging greenback threatens to cripple U.S. power. Why are the candidates ignoring this critical issue?
The Financial Tsunami: Sub-Prime Mortgage Debt is but the Tip of the Iceberg: By now every serious reader has heard the term “It’s a crisis in Sub-Prime US home mortgage debt.” What almost no one I know understands is that the Sub-Prime problem is but the tip of a colossal iceberg that is in a slow meltdown. I offer one recent example to illustrate my point that the “Financial Tsunami” is only beginning.
The Holiday's Shopping Season Can't Stop the Coming 'Severe Recession'Danny Schechter, AlterNet
The media is complicit in "shop-apocalypse," as consumers go wild in a shaky economy.
The Primary Point of the Occupation of Iraq is the Occupation ItselfJoshua Holland, AlterNet
War on Iraq: Joshua Holland: Note to my rationalist friends: there will always be a new rationale for staying.
As Democrats See Progress, Tone on Iraq Shifts - Patrick Healy, NY Times
Making Sense of Ron Paul's Rise - Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, Wash Post
Hillary Has Only Herself to Blame - Michael Goodwin, New York Daily News
Obama vs. the Icon - David Broder, Washington Post
Growing Up Giuliani - Evan Thomas and Suzanne Smalley, Newsweek
Huckabee In Mitt's Rearview Mirror - Michael Shear & Juliet Eilperin, WP
Australia's Mystery Landslide - Simon Benson, Sunday Times
Best-Laid Plans Win Day - Michelle Grattan, Syndey Morning Herald
Let's Hear It For Good News From Iraq - Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe
Where Boys Grow Up to Be Jihadis - Andrea Elliott, NY Times Magazine
Unheralded Military Successes - Robert Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
Annapolis: The Cost of Failure - Henry Siegman, New York Review of Books
It is Proper to Challenge Islam - Jemima Khan, Sunday Telegraph
A Comeback for Communism - Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune
Race and Crime in New Orleans - Douglas McCollam, Wall Street Journal
How Bad Could the Economy Get? - Peter Goodman, New York Times
The Failings Of Heroic Conservatism - George Will, Indianapolis Star
Making Sense of Ron Paul's Rise - Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, Wash Post
Hillary Has Only Herself to Blame - Michael Goodwin, New York Daily News
Obama vs. the Icon - David Broder, Washington Post
Growing Up Giuliani - Evan Thomas and Suzanne Smalley, Newsweek
Huckabee In Mitt's Rearview Mirror - Michael Shear & Juliet Eilperin, WP
Australia's Mystery Landslide - Simon Benson, Sunday Times
Best-Laid Plans Win Day - Michelle Grattan, Syndey Morning Herald
Let's Hear It For Good News From Iraq - Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe
Where Boys Grow Up to Be Jihadis - Andrea Elliott, NY Times Magazine
Unheralded Military Successes - Robert Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
Annapolis: The Cost of Failure - Henry Siegman, New York Review of Books
It is Proper to Challenge Islam - Jemima Khan, Sunday Telegraph
A Comeback for Communism - Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune
Race and Crime in New Orleans - Douglas McCollam, Wall Street Journal
How Bad Could the Economy Get? - Peter Goodman, New York Times
The Failings Of Heroic Conservatism - George Will, Indianapolis Star
Editorials
Rudd Should Stay on Track - The Australian
The Lessons of Howard's Defeat - Sunday Times
Congress' Budget Challenge - Washington Times
Farm Subsidy Follies - Washington Post
Political News & Analysis
Bush Loses Another War Ally: Howard - Chicago Tribune
Romney Calls For Judge to Resign - Los Angeles Times
How Big Man In McAllen Bundles Big For Clinton - Washington Post
Thompson Woos Gun Rights Contingent - New York Times
Sponsored By Growing Up Giuliani Rudy Giuliani was raised to understand that fine, blurry line between saint and sinner. The making of his moral code.By Evan Thomas and Suzanne Smalley NEWSWEEK Updated: 3:14 PM ET Nov 24, 2007 On Sept. 16, 1992, the police in New York City held a rally that spun out of control. The cops wanted a new collective-bargaining agreement, and they were angry at Mayor David Dinkins for proposing a civilian review board and for refusing to issue patrolmen 9mm guns. More than a few of them tipsy or drunk, the cops jumped on cars near city hall and blocked traffic near the Brooklyn Bridge. According to some witnesses, they waved placards crudely mocking Mayor Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, on racial grounds, while at the same time chanting "Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!" to welcome Rudy Giuliani, the crime-busting former U.S. attorney who had arrived in their midst to shore up his political base.
It is not clear Giuliani knew exactly what he was getting himself into—he later denied that he did—but video shows him wildly gesticulating and shouting a profanity-laced diatribe against Dinkins. The next day the New York newspapers were sharply critical of Giuliani (a Daily News editorial called his behavior "shameful"), and Dinkins, years later, accused him of trying to stir up "white cops to riot." At the time, Giuliani refused to back down or apologize for his remarks, saying only: "I had four uncles who were cops. So maybe I was more emotional than I usually am." Giuliani's performance that day lost African-American voters, some permanently, but it guaranteed the informal backing of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the policemen's union, which helped him get elected mayor in 1993.
Giuliani has long had a soft spot for cops—even, in some cases, for bad ones. On the one hand, Giuliani has been a crusader against outlaw policemen, as well as mobsters, pornographers, drug dealers, crooked businessmen and politicians and death-dealing jihadists. He now offers himself as the presidential candidate who would deliver us from evil, from terrorism abroad and corruption at home. On the other hand, he was the man who appointed Bernard Kerik, now under indictment for various federal crimes, including tax evasion, to be his police commissioner, and later pushed him to become the nation's secretary of Homeland Security. (Persistently accused of ties to mobbed-up businessmen, Kerik has always protested his innocence of any criminal wrongdoing, but he pleaded guilty in the Bronx last year to ethics violations while serving as Giuliani's corrections commissioner.) Giuliani is a dramatic—and self-dramatizing—moralist. But as an intelligent, sensitive man with a solid Roman Catholic education, he knows there is sometimes a fine or blurry line between saint and sinner. He has been able to reconcile the rigidities of doctrine with the vagaries of human nature. He has long believed in the power of redemption, and he puts great faith in the virtue of loyalty. He does not shy from confrontation, but seems to welcome and even create conflict, especially if there are cameras nearby. His theatricality can be excessive, and not just because he has been known to dress up in drag as a spoof. Kerik has written that when he was welcomed into Giuliani's inner circle—in a clearly staged ceremony, with a kiss on the cheek from each member—he felt like a "made man." Leaving aside Kerik's unfortunate Mafia analogy, there is an intensity and intimacy to Giuliani that can be unsettling. He has an authoritarian streak, as well as a penchant for secrecy and dependence on loyalists, that may remind voters of the current chief executive.
The real Rudy is probably as complex and certainly as passionate as the operatic Rudy who shows up at cop rallies. He can be hero or hypocrite or both at once; he has a ripe sense of his own, and his nation's, magnificence and destiny roughly on par with that of Winston Churchill's, whose works Giuliani recommended to his schoolmates, along with his favorite operas by Verdi. Just as Churchill's character was shaped by the myths of his forebears in his ancestral home, Blenheim Palace, seat of the Duke of Marlborough, Giuliani's was forged by the moral ambiguities of his upbringing and the eternal American melodrama of rising above one's past while honoring, or at least accepting, it. Giuliani was born into an immigrant enclave—mostly Italian-American, some Jewish—in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, a neighborhood of looming dark churches and rows of modest brick and brownstone houses, far from the Manhattan skyline. Four of Giuliani's uncles were, indeed, policemen, as were four of his cousins. But another uncle was Leo D'Avanzo, a loan shark and a bookie with mob connections, who operated out of a bar named after another uncle—Vincent D'Avanzo, a policeman who acted as a frontman for the bar. Rudy's cousin, Leo's son Lewis (a.k.a. "Steve the Blond"), was a ruthless hood who later did time for armed hijacking and selling stolen cars.
The proximity of good and bad, even in Giuliani's own family, seems to have given rise to his inflexible public code but more relaxed personal one—a bifurcation that will only become more important in the next 10 weeks or so, as generally conservative Republican primary voters decide whether to trust this unconventional figure with their nomination. (When asked about the reporting in this story, Giuliani deputy communications director Maria Comella declined to comment.)
Working behind the bar at Vincent's for long stretches of time was Rudy's father, Harold. According to Wayne Barrett's biography "Rudy!," indispensable to all Giuliani profiles, Harold kept a revolver and a baseball bat with him in case the customers became too rowdy. Barrett writes that Harold Giuliani moonlighted as the "muscle" for his brother-in-law, using the bat and his fists to collect debts. A would-be boxer who was hampered by nearsightedness, Harold served more than a year in Sing Prison for mugging the milkman.
Giuliani has said he did not learn about much of his father's past until he read about it in Barrett's book in 2000. As a boy—an only child—Giuliani was smothered with love and attention (and called "the Little Prince" by relatives). When Rudy was 7, Harold moved his family from Brooklyn to Garden City, a middle-class, virtually all-white suburb on Long Island. Harold later told one of Rudy's teachers that he wanted to get his son "away from some relatives that he didn't particularly care for, and so Rudy could have a solid bringing up without any temptations to break the law." Though in 1951 East Flatbush was still relatively untouched by the great postwar migration of Southern blacks to Northern cities, white flight had begun in Brooklyn. Tony Mauro, a college classmate of Giuliani's who lived in nearby Crown Heights and whose family moved to Garden City in 1950, recalls his father's accounts of real-estate agents' scaring residents by warning of diminishing property values and crime.
Middle-class Catholic families sent their children to parochial schools if they could. Public school, as depicted in a popular 1955 movie, "The Blackboard Jungle," was a place where pupils had their lunch money stolen—or worse. At Catholic schools, students wore uniforms and stood when teachers entered the room, and they received daily religious instruction. Rudy won tuition-free admission to Bishop Loughlin Memorial, a fortress-like high school run with an iron hand by the Christian Brothers. When some students played the Everly Brothers' "Wake Up Little Susie" at a school dance, one of the brothers smashed the record over his knee and announced, "We'll have none of that filth playing here."
Sophomore year, Giuliani's homeroom teacher was a Christian Brother named Jack O'Leary. Giuliani was more of a talker than a scholar. "I hit him once," O'Leary tells NEWSWEEK. "He was talking in class and unfortunately—the custom of the time, if someone was fooling around you gave him a whack—and that's what I did." Giuliani quieted down. About a year later, in the school auditorium, O'Leary ran into Giuliani's parents, who introduced themselves. "They said, 'Do you remember the time you hit him?' And I said, 'Yes I do'," O'Leary replied. "And they said, 'We want to thank you because it made all the difference'." Sports teams were revered at Bishop Loughlin. Pudgy and not particularly athletic, Giuliani had to look for other outlets. With O'Leary, he formed an opera club. While other teens were jitterbugging and slow-dancing to the Everly Brothers, or trying to, Giuliani was listening to Verdi's "Otello," immersing himself in the beauty of Italian high-culture tragedy and romance.
He was also learning how to be a pol. John F. Kennedy ran for president in the fall of 1960, Giuliani's senior year, and Giuliani was thrilled and moved by the handsome and eloquent young man who was rising above old prejudices to become the first Catholic in the White House. Giuliani persuaded some other boys to skip school and go to a Kennedy rally in Manhattan. ("I saw him! I saw him!" he said to O'Leary when he returned to class.) Giuliani managed a friend's campaign that year, hiring a U-Haul with a loudspeaker to cruise outside the school, but his highest office was hall monitor. He seemed to enjoy wearing a badge and disciplining students for minor infractions, such as talking during a fire drill. "He had a stern look," says Jack J. Rengstl, another former Loughlin student. In the yearbook, in the usual "Most likely to …" categories, he was voted "Class Politician."
Giuliani was jovial and thick-skinned, says George Schneider, the boy for whom Giuliani served as campaign manager ("He volunteered," says Schneider). "Rudy was slouching in a chair and had his foot in the aisle," recalls Schneider. "The teacher said, 'Hey, fat boy, get your foot out of the aisle.' Everyone laughed, including Rudy. He was unfazed. Then the teacher came down [the aisle] and cuffed him in the head." Giuliani "couldn't figure out what he had done," Schneider says, and seemed a bit stunned.
Corporal punishment was routine at Bishop Loughlin. Adolescent anarchy was a fearful thing; the Brothers beat it out of kids. Some students were afraid. "When you see someone picked up by the shirt and tie and punched in the face, or other teachers throwing chalk across the room—it was very scary," says Joseph Sicinski, who was Giuliani's classmate.
At Bishop Loughlin, Giuliani was a catechist, a student who instructed younger children in Catholic doctrine. Giuliani was not remarkably pious, but like many dutiful boys of his time and background, he seriously considered the priesthood. (He would later joke to friends that he gave up his priestly ambitions because "celibacy ain't for me.") But Giuliani wound up applying for a college scholarship "to study law or medicine," the classic roads of upward mobility for the sons of immigrant families.
O'Leary, who had grown close to the Giulianis and often dined with them, recalls that Giuliani gave up the seminary for another, more personal, reason. Near the end of Giuliani's senior year, his father had a nervous breakdown. At a state park on Long Island, a policeman walked into a men's bathroom to find Harold Giuliani, with his pants down around his ankles, doing deep knee bends. Harold was arrested for loitering. It was all an embarrassing mix-up. He had been constipated and he was trying to expedite a bowel movement. Harold also stopped showing up at his job as a school custodian. O'Leary says Giuliani felt he could not leave his family for the enforced isolation of the seminary.
Always, the Manhattan skyline shimmered. After high school, Giuliani joined the flood of Long Island commuters into Gotham, to Penn Station, where he transferred to the uptown subway to the distant Bronx. There, he was enrolled at Manhattan College, another strict and demanding institution for strivers run by the Christian Brothers. Of the 744 students in his class, three were black and four were Hispanic. Blackballed by the fraternity favored by jocks and campus "big men," Giuliani joined a smaller frat he helped revive. It soon had 30 members. He honed his political skills (this time, he had campaign buttons made) and was elected class president.
Under the Christian Brothers' tutelage, Giuliani was exposed to the Christian Aristotelianism of Saint Thomas Aquinas. As writer John Judis recently noted in The New Republic, "Catholic thinkers do not see liberty as an end in itself, but as a means—a 'natural endowment'—by which to achieve the common good." Many years later, at a forum on crime, Giuliani said: "Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do." Asked to explain what he meant, Giuliani replied: "Authority protects freedom. Freedom can become anarchy." Judis notes that Norm Siegel, then executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said afterward that he was "floored" by Giuliani's definition of liberty and authority. "But anyone who studied philosophy at a Catholic college would not have been surprised by Giuliani's words," writes Judis.
Giuliani's politics in the 1960s were fairly liberal. He was influenced by Robert Kennedy, but perhaps more by RFK's law-and-order side and penchant for power than his leanings on civil rights. Though Giuliani was in college and law school during the tumultuous student revolutions of the '60s, he was untouched by flower children, and he avoided antiwar rallies. He didn't want to get arrested and jeopardize his emerging ambition: to become a prosecutor.
It's unlikely that the young Giuliani wanted to become an Inspector Javert, the sort of I-am-the-law type of prosecutor who righteously condemns wrongdoers. Giuliani was sophisticated enough to have read Victor Hugo, and his colleagues say he was fair-minded, if zealous and extremely hardworking as a young lawyer. But it is a sure bet that Giuliani wanted the thrill of standing up for the "people" in court or signing his name on a legal brief "for the United States of America."
The best way to compete against the Ivy League hotshots vying for the position of assistant U.S. attorney was to clerk first for a federal judge. Giuliani was hired by Lloyd MacMahon, known as a cranky coot who favored working-class go-getters from second- and third-tier law schools. Addressing lawyers in his courtroom as "morons" and "boobs," Judge MacMahon was not bashful on the bench. "Call your next liar," he once growled at a defense lawyer. His arbitrariness and high-handedness got him reversed so often in the court of appeals that he was pronounced one of the nation's "worst judges" in an American Lawyer magazine survey. But MacMahon fearlessly put away mobsters and communists, and he was a good mentor to Giuliani. When Giuliani's draft deferment ran out in 1969, the judge intervened personally to get his clerk another deferment. (Giuliani had dropped out of Air Force ROTC, citing a slight hearing impediment, and told colleagues that Vietnam did not meet the Catholic definition of a "just war.") Then MacMahon helped get Giuliani his dream job as an "AUSA," a junior prosecutor in the most prestigious of all U.S. attorney's offices, the Southern District of New York—Manhattan.
In the early '70s, New York City was in the midst of its worst police scandal in decades. The Knapp Commission, appointed by Mayor John Lindsay, had unearthed scores of cops on the take, accepting bribes and selling drugs, sometimes stealing cash off corpses. In 1972, the French Connection case broke—somehow, nearly 400 pounds of heroin had vanished from the police property clerk's room. Giuliani's involvement in the case is revealing of his character as shaped by his family roots.
Giuliani was working with a dirty cop who had turned informant. Having grown up in a household of cops, Giuliani was comfortable with New York's Finest, even when they weren't. Unlike FBI agents, who could be cautious and bureaucratic, New York City police officers were willing to take risks. If that meant bending the rules to meet the necessities of the street, then so be it.
Bob Leuci had done more than bend the rules. As a member of an elite group of 60 detectives known as the Special Investigative Unit (SIU), Leuci had taken money from dope dealers, done some illegal wiretapping and routinely paid informants with seized drugs. In the midst of the Knapp Commission probe, "Babyface," as he was called, decided to cooperate with the Feds, wearing a wire as he went undercover to meet with corrupt law-enforcement officials and lawyers. The French Connection case had broken, and prosecutors suspected that Leuci knew more than he was telling. It was up to Giuliani to get him to talk.
By befriending Leuci and winning his trust, by swearing never to abandon him, Giuliani succeeded. Leuci had not been involved in the French Connection case, but he was able to finger a new slew of "bad guys." Tom Puccio, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, would later say that he and Giuliani had played "bad cop/good cop" with Leuci, but Giuliani seemingly refused to look cynically at his role. He knew that a judge had once called SIU detectives "princes of the city," and to Giuliani, Leuci was still a prince—albeit a fallen one. Giuliani, Leuci said, believed in redemption.
Giuliani understood that it was "something like penance in the Roman Catholic Church—it was part of that 'I did something bad, now I need to do something good'," Leuci tells NEWSWEEK. "Rudy recognized that whole Catholic guilt stuff. I think he was smart enough to know he could play to it." Leuci was suicidal at the time and he later said that if Giuliani had pushed too hard, he would have killed himself. Instead, Giuliani befriended Leuci, talking about family, about how much he honored his father. It has never been entirely clear how much Giuliani knew about the shady past of his dad and other family members, but Giuliani was able to convey empathy and understanding about moral ambiguity. At the same time, Leuci says: "I wouldn't want Rudy as an enemy, I'll tell you that. He's not a guy that rests."
Loyalty has always been the greatest virtue to Giuliani, sometimes trumping all others. By loyalty, Giuliani's critics contend, he means "loyalty to Rudy." Disloyal subordinates learned this the hard way, even if they thought they were serving some higher master, like truth and justice. By the early '80s, Giuliani had risen to claim a top job in the Reagan administration Justice Department. At the time, the department was investigating McDonnell Douglas, the aircraft manufacturer, for making foreign bribes. Without telling career prosecutors who had been working on the case for months, Giuliani met with McDonnell Douglas defense lawyers. The career prosecutors were upset that a top official had gone over their heads, and wrote a letter to Giuliani expressing "shock" and "dismay," and warning that his secret meeting with the defense could undermine the prosecution's case. The letter leaked. Giuliani summoned the prosecutors, Michael Lubin and George Mendelson, to his office—and exploded.
"As far as I'm concerned, we were watching a madman," Lubin told Jim Stewart for his book "The Prosecutors." "I've never heard or seen anything like it, even in the movies. He ranted and raved for a full twenty minutes." Giuliani, who later dropped criminal indictments against four McDonnell Douglas executives as part of a plea agreement in which the company paid $1.2 million in fines, dismissed Lubin and Mendelson as "jerks." With petty vindictiveness, he withdrew a special Justice Department commendation awarded the two prosecutors. (A later internal Justice review found no wrongdoing on Giuliani's part.)
Giuliani's critics have long complained that Giuliani surrounds himself with yes men, or "Yes Rudys," as they are called. Loyalty is not always a two-way street for Giuliani, either in his family or professional life. Giuliani's fraught relationship with former New York senator Alfonse D'Amato is a case in point.
In 1982, Associate Attorney General Giuliani traveled to Miami to handle a complex case concerning the legal status of boatloads of Haitian refuges. While he was in Miami, he met a TV newscaster named Donna Hanover. Giuliani's first marriage was effectively over by then—Giuliani had married Regina Peruggi, his second cousin, in 1968, but they were bound for divorce. He was smitten by Hanover, who was as vivacious as Giuliani, and he wanted to follow her to New York, where she was looking for a TV job. But Giuliani's Justice job kept him in Washington, D.C.
D'Amato tells NEWSWEEK that Giuliani went to the New York senator to ask for a big favor: would D'Amato nominate Giuliani to be U.S. attorney in New York? D'Amato was in an awkward position: the job is a plum, and a committee of top lawyers had already put forth another candidate. Still, D'Amato was impressed with Giuliani, and he felt a bond as a fellow Italian-American. He gave Giuliani the nod.
At first the two men were fast friends. They garnered headlines (and a certain amount of mockery) by donning shades and traveling to Harlem to make a buy-bust. The publicity stunt was supposed to show how seriously the government took the war on drugs. It certainly suggested a budding political alliance.
But the relationship soured. In 1988, Giuliani began preparing to step down as U.S. attorney for a possible run against incumbent Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. By then, D'Amato was under an ethics cloud. As a member of the Senate Banking Committee, D'Amato had close ties to the securities industry. Giuliani had made a big show as the scourge of Wall Street, arresting analysts and brokers suspected of stock fraud and forcing them to take "perp walks" before the cameras. Giuliani said it would be irresponsible for him not to be concerned about the selection process, given the ongoing investigations into D'Amato's friends in the securities industry. Meanwhile, Giuliani was maneuvering to put one of his own deputies into the job and gossiping to reporters about D'Amato's alleged ethics problems.
D'Amato "went through the roof," says a former aide who requested anonymity to describe the details of the D'Amato-Giuliani relationship. To his aides, he began shouting profanities about Giuliani ("I'm going to kill the f–––ing c–––––––er!" he said, the aide tells NEWSWEEK). To his partisans, Giuliani had not double-crossed D'Amato, but rather showed moral rectitude by distancing himself from a crony of Wall Street inside traders. During the 1989 mayoral primary, D'Amato called his selection of Giuliani "the biggest mistake I ever made," and described his former protege as an "amoral" political opportunist. The blood feud continued: when D'Amato ally George Pataki ran for governor of New York in 1994, Giuliani endorsed liberal Democrat Mario Cuomo. Giuliani explained that "ethics will be trashed if the D'Amato-Pataki crew ever get control." Contacted by NEWSWEEK last week, D'Amato said he no longer wanted to talk about his old feud, but he is throwing fund-raisers for Fred Thompson and coaching him on how to debate Giuliani.
Loyalty to Giuliani means staying out of his limelight. Police Commissioner William Bratton discovered that in January 1996, when he made the mistake of posing for the cover of Time magazine in a trench coat to tout New York's astonishing success at fighting crime. Giuliani was not pleased; he ordered city hall's lawyers to start investigating Bratton's expenses, and the commissioner was gone in a couple of months. (Giuliani disputed that he or his staff undermined Bratton but noted that they "both had very, very strong styles.") In truth, both men deserve credit for New York's turnaround. Bratton was a vocal apostle of the "broken window" theory of crime—that small acts of vandalism can create a lawless climate conducive to bigger crimes. But Giuliani, the product of 16 years of Catholic schools where neatness and order were measures of moral health, instinctively understood that small sins can lead to big ones. Not long after his swearing-in as New York's mayor in January 1994, Giuliani had launched a no-tolerance campaign against the "squeegee men," small-time shakedown artists who would ask for payment for wiping the windows of the cars of terrified tourists and suburbanites as they waited at red lights.
Giuliani never found an equal to Bratton. The next commissioner, Howard Safir, was regarded as a "Yes Rudy" who tried too hard to please his master. ("I am very loyal to Rudy," Safir tells NEWSWEEK. "However, when I disagreed with him … I made sure I did it in private.") The police stepped up their stop-and-frisk campaign in poor, largely minority neighborhoods. A series of ugly police-brutality cases besmirched Giuliani's crimefighting record and alienated blacks and Hispanics. In 2000, when an undercover narcotics detective killed an unarmed security guard named Patrick Dorismond, who was black, Giuliani scoffed that Dorismond was no "altar boy." Actually, he was an altar boy—and had attended Bishop Loughlin high school.
Giuliani's loyalty to his last police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, bordered on the blind. The two men had come to know each other when Kerik, acting as an off-duty cop, drove Giuliani during his first mayoral campaign in 1989 (Giuliani lost to Dinkins). Kerik was the sort of diamond in the rough Giuliani appreciated—a tough street cop who got things done. Giuliani has insisted that he did not know about Kerik's questionable dealings with two businessmen with alleged mob connections. City hall records reviewed by NEWSWEEK suggest that the mayor may have been briefed on some of these problems just before Kerik was appointed commissioner. But Giuliani has said he has no memory, and his tight palace guard remains close-mouthed. ("There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik," Giuliani said earlier this month, adding that Kerik's wrongdoing should not outweigh his crimefighting successes.)
Giuliani's moralism became increasingly strident in his second term as mayor. He was outraged at an art show at the Brooklyn Museum called "Sensation." The exhibits included a picture of a black Virgin Mary surrounded by bits of pornography and a pile of elephant dung. Giuliani ordered the museum to shut down the show or lose its city subsidy. He lost in the courts; the show went on. Yet he has stood by his boyhood friend, Msgr. Alan Placa, who was accused of, though never formally charged with, child molestation. (He denies the allegation.) The boy who had grown up with cops and hoods in his family was able to maintain a somewhat selective sense of right and wrong—one influenced by tribal ties.
While Giuliani was ranting at moral decay, his personal life was a shambles. In Giuliani's last year in office, Donna Hanover learned that her husband was divorcing her when he gave a press conference. Giuliani's third wife, Judith Nathan, has provided fodder for the tabloids by wearing a tiara to a charity ball and seeming to enjoy Giuliani's perks and power a little too much.
It may be, however, that Giuliani has finally found his true soulmate, someone who shares his aspirations for power and glory. Giuliani himself can seem overly anxious to make money from his reputation as America's Mayor on 9/11. He earned $11.4 million in speaking fees between January 2006 and May of this year, as well as an additional $1.2 million in the same period from his law firm, Bracewell and Giuliani. He also took in $4.1 million from Giuliani & Co., the corporate umbrella for an array of consulting firms that have provided advice to foreign and domestic clients under arrangements that often remain secret. Giuliani's law firm also represents a long list of lobbying clients in D.C., including energy, petrochemical and defense firms. Giuliani himself hasn't registered to lobby, and doesn't believe his law-firm clients are a political liability. "Law firms aren't political, so this is kind of a silly way in which people attack each other on politics," he told reporters last July, responding to controversy over one of his firm's legal clients, an oil company owned by the government of Hugo Ch?vez, the virulently anti-American Venezuelan president. (The firm has since dropped that client.)
Giuliani didn't grow up with wealth or power. He can't take it for granted, as can the current president or one of Giuliani's leading rivals for the GOP nomination, Mitt Romney. Yet his struggle to get to the top may have left him with a chip on his shoulder: he's had to fight for what he's achieved, so what he's got he deserves. Giuliani's upbringing has also given him an appreciation for the darker elements of the soul, and the strength required to keep them in check. He can be tolerant, particularly of his own failings or of those who are loyal to him. But don't cross him. In Rudy's world, that is one sin that cannot be forgiven.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/72121 © Newsweek Mag
Iraq Sets a New Trap for Democrats - Clive Crook, Financial Times
Obama Is Right on Iran - Shelby Steele, Wall Street Journal
In '09, Dems Would Test Appetite for Change - Mort Kondracke, Roll Call
A Wide Range of Possibilities in '08 Race - Michael Barone, RealClearPolitics
Who's Winning the Electability Game? - Jason Zengerle, New York Magazine
Rudy: It's Time to Unmask Romney - Jonathan Martin, The Politico
Negativity in the Democratic Campaign - Jay Cost, HorseRaceBlog
Huckabee, the False Conservative - Robert Novak, Chicago Sun-Times
'Arms Race' May Lead to $5 Billion '08 Election - Albert Hunt, Bloomberg
Recession Fears Weigh Heavily on the Markets - McKay & Evans, WSJ
The Dangers of a Deepening Crisis - Larry Summers, Financial Times
Fixing Social Security the FDR Way - Amity Shlaes, Washington Post
A New French Revolution - Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek
Young Voters Change Channel on Howard - David Barnett, The Australian
Brawley Case is Lesson About Rushing Judgement - Stanley Crouch, NYDN
Understanding the Second Amendment - Cass Sunstein, The New Republic
The Second Amendment Wedge - Jed Babbin, Human Events
Obama Is Right on Iran - Shelby Steele, Wall Street Journal
In '09, Dems Would Test Appetite for Change - Mort Kondracke, Roll Call
A Wide Range of Possibilities in '08 Race - Michael Barone, RealClearPolitics
Who's Winning the Electability Game? - Jason Zengerle, New York Magazine
Rudy: It's Time to Unmask Romney - Jonathan Martin, The Politico
Negativity in the Democratic Campaign - Jay Cost, HorseRaceBlog
Huckabee, the False Conservative - Robert Novak, Chicago Sun-Times
'Arms Race' May Lead to $5 Billion '08 Election - Albert Hunt, Bloomberg
Recession Fears Weigh Heavily on the Markets - McKay & Evans, WSJ
The Dangers of a Deepening Crisis - Larry Summers, Financial Times
Fixing Social Security the FDR Way - Amity Shlaes, Washington Post
A New French Revolution - Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek
Young Voters Change Channel on Howard - David Barnett, The Australian
Brawley Case is Lesson About Rushing Judgement - Stanley Crouch, NYDN
Understanding the Second Amendment - Cass Sunstein, The New Republic
The Second Amendment Wedge - Jed Babbin, Human Events
Hillary Has Only Herself to Blame
- Michael Goodwin, New York Daily News
The Surge Against the Surge Failed
- Noemie Emery, Weekly Standard
As Democrats See Progress, Tone on Iraq Shifts
- Patrick Healy, NY Times
Australia's Mystery Landslide
- Simon Benson, Sunday Times
How to Beat Hillary Next November
- Karl Rove, Newsweek
Nixon 1968, Clinton 2008
- John Ellis, RealClearPolitics
Who's the Inexperienced One, Hillary?
- Maureen Dowd, New York Times
- Michael Goodwin, New York Daily News
The Surge Against the Surge Failed
- Noemie Emery, Weekly Standard
As Democrats See Progress, Tone on Iraq Shifts
- Patrick Healy, NY Times
Australia's Mystery Landslide
- Simon Benson, Sunday Times
How to Beat Hillary Next November
- Karl Rove, Newsweek
Nixon 1968, Clinton 2008
- John Ellis, RealClearPolitics
Who's the Inexperienced One, Hillary?
- Maureen Dowd, New York Times
We Face Worldwide Drought with No Contingency PlanTom Engelhardt, The Nation
Environment: As droughts reach record levels from Atlanta to Australia, no one is asking the tough question: What happens when there is not enough water to go around?
We Have to Keep Pressing Hard Against an Attack on IranMarjorie Cohn, Jurist Legal News and Research
War on Iraq: We've got to keep pressing hard against an attack on Iran: The security of the United States, as well as the Middle East, is hanging in the balance.
Blame the Leaders?
Or the people who elect them? Or the system? Article by Robert Higgs.
Or the people who elect them? Or the system? Article by Robert Higgs.
‘Reds Are Natives’
Dan Spielberg on Ron Paul-favorite Frank Chodorov as Cold War critic.
Dan Spielberg on Ron Paul-favorite Frank Chodorov as Cold War critic.
A Nation of Speculators
David Calderwood on a Federal Reserved America.
David Calderwood on a Federal Reserved America.
What Else Should Be Banned on the Road?
In addition to cell phones, how about makeup, food, and children? Article by Manuel Lora.
In addition to cell phones, how about makeup, food, and children? Article by Manuel Lora.
An Open Letter to Arab-Americans
On Ron Paul. Article by George Ajjan.
On Ron Paul. Article by George Ajjan.
Dear Rudy
What's all this about a "virtual fence"? Tom Chartier wants to know.
What's all this about a "virtual fence"? Tom Chartier wants to know.
Good Riddance to John Howard
Bush's man in Australia goes down. Article by Glenn Greenwald.
Bush's man in Australia goes down. Article by Glenn Greenwald.
US Genocide
Arthur Silber on the decline and fall of America.
Arthur Silber on the decline and fall of America.
LEADERS: The Middle East summit
Mr Palestine
George Bush is the only man who can bring an independent Palestine closer
UNITED STATES: The candidates: Mike Huckabee
Faith, Hope and populism
Is another former governor of Arkansas the answer to conservative prayers?
MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA: Iran
They think they have right on their side
Why the Iranians see themselves in a very different light
BUSINESS: Business and the credit crunch
At the gates of hell
Banks and brokers are having a terrible time. Now the misery is spreading
Mr Palestine
George Bush is the only man who can bring an independent Palestine closer
UNITED STATES: The candidates: Mike Huckabee
Faith, Hope and populism
Is another former governor of Arkansas the answer to conservative prayers?
MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA: Iran
They think they have right on their side
Why the Iranians see themselves in a very different light
BUSINESS: Business and the credit crunch
At the gates of hell
Banks and brokers are having a terrible time. Now the misery is spreading
- Role Reversal: Obama Plays Top Dog In Iowa While Hillary Scrambles In a reversal of fortune, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is barnstorming Iowa with a front-runner's swagger while Sen. Hillary…
- The Obama-Oprah Campaign Oprah Winfrey will join Democrat Barack Obama again on the campaign trail, this time visiting the early contest states…
- Sen. Trent Lott To Resign By End Of Year Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Senate's No. 2 Republican, plans to resign his seat before the end of…
<h2 class="title" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Supreme Court To Hear Landmark Case</h2> The Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it will decide a landmark lawsuit concerning the constitutionality of the District of Columbia's ban on guns. Cato scholar Robert A. Levy comments, "That's good news for all Americans who would like to be able to defend themselves where they live and sleep. And it's especially good news for residents of Washington, D.C., which has been the murder capital of the nation despite an outright ban on all functional firearms since 1976."
- Read Levy's full statement
- "Unholster the 2nd Amendment," by Robert A. Levy
- Supremes to Hear Second Amendment Case, featuring Robert A. Levy, 11/20/2007 (MP3
)
N.H. GOP: Romney Leads, Rudy Slips, Ron Paul Rises John Nichols | The new CNN/WMUR-TV poll of likely GOP Presidential primary voters in New Hampshire has former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney retaining his from-the-neighborhood lead.
The Relaunch: Can Obama Catch Clinton? | The New Yorker -- posted 11/24/2007 7:38 EST
Showdown at the DMV The Editors | The debate in New York State over driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants became a proxy for the unsettled issue of immigration reform.
President Rudy's War Council Peter C. Baker | Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Pipes consider how the newly elected President should proceed in the world arena. The first act of a five-act play.
Hired Guns
While the volunteer Army struggles, the business of war booms.
by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
While the volunteer Army struggles, the business of war booms.
by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
The armed security contractor in Iraq makes an appearance on the collective American radar only when events get so ugly they won’t go away: the charred bodies of four Blackwater guards swinging from a Fallujah bridge in 2004, the 17 civilians reportedly killed by Blackwater men in a Baghdad square in September. Mostly their presence—anywhere from 20,000- to 70,000-strong depending on who’s counting—moves on a battlefield that, in the words of the 1980s television series “Tales of the Darkside,” is “just as real, but not as brightly lit” as the news we see every night. They kill, bleed on the side of the road, and recover with stumps and prostheses, just not at Walter Reed Medical Center.
Richard Zbryski put the shadowy existence of the private parallel army in cold, hard perspective when he described how the body of his brother, Walter Zbryski, a 56-year-old retired New York City firefighter, was shipped home from his job as a contracted truck driver in Iraq. “What really upset me was that he was laying there floating in 6 inches of his own body fluids,” still wearing his bloodied clothes, with half of his head blown away, Zbryski told the Chicago Tribune.
His brother was one of the more than 1,000 civilian contractors killed since the war began. More than 180,000 remain in Iraq today. Most are unarmed, doing everything from feeding and providing basic services to the U.S. military to constructing bases, transporting equipment, and rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure.
But it’s the hired guns and spooks—the tens of thousands of guards protecting diplomats and VIPs, government buildings, reconstruction projects and convoys, plus prison interrogators—who bring into focus the fate of the mission and the implications of privatizing the military. They have people wondering what new breed of mercenary super-soldier American money is buying.
“There are many questions as to how a myriad of heavily armed private armies can serve the purpose of the US military and foreign policy,” writes Robert Young Pelton, in Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror.
Pelton has traveled with both military and private contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq throughout the conflict. He describes the new terrain shaped by outsourcing and reports that it bears little resemblance to the noble enterprise sold to the military years ago. Five years into operations, it is a darkly obscured landscape of violence, profiteering, and negligence. He senses that this parallel army is undermining the entire mission, leading to “blowback of extraordinary proportions.”
“It strikes at the core of the entire American principle, the idea of the citizen soldier,” he tells TAC. “We’ve been fighting this war longer than World War II, and the military is absolutely dependent on the private sector.”
Never in modern history has war privatization reached this level. The course was set as early as the 1980s, when post-Cold War military restructuring led to the first LOGCAP—the Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program—which furnished an open-ended, cost-plus contingency contract for private vendors to provide rapid support services to the Army in deployment operations. Military brass initially resisted the idea, write Dina Rasor and Robert Bauman in Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War: “Military commanders, at the time, expressed considerable mistrust of a contractor’s ability to supply troops on the battlefield because they would be too slow, unreliable, and uncontrollable.”
But Dick Cheney, then defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush, was still able to secure a $3.9 billion LOGCAP contract for Brown & Root before leaving office and becoming the CEO of its parent company, Halliburton, in 1995. Privatization expanded throughout the Clinton administration, with the new Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) and Dyncorp International receiving lucrative service contracts to work in Somalia, Rwanda, Southeast Asia, Kuwait, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia.
Some say Cheney was the midwife of the military-private sector alliance. With Donald Rumsfeld, a kindred spirit who has also enjoyed a lucrative public-private revolving-door career, he was able to nurture that alliance into its current mutation in the global war on terror.
“[Privatization] became a mantra, that the contractors could do so much better,” said Rasor, whose book is an exhaustive account of “what happens when you introduce a for-profit motive into the battlefield.” Rumsfeld, who famously said “you go to war with the Army you have, not the one you want,” was “thinking like a businessman,” said Rasor. “It’s not working out.”
After the Sept. 11 attacks, civilians—ex-soldiers and spies mostly—were unleashed on Afghanistan under the CIA to look for Osama bin Laden, according to Pelton, while Blackwater got its first gig guarding military facilities and, later, new Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who still enjoys the best security detail American money can buy.
As the war grew more dangerous, so did the need for armed contractors. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority until it turned over the keys to the Iraqis in 2004, introduced the first private security detail into Iraq, hiring Blackwater to the tune of $21.3 million. In an astonishing display of firepower, Bremer was routinely surrounded by 36 civilian guards and “a fleet of SUVs, two bomb-sniffing canine teams with handlers, four pilots, four aerial gunners, a ground crew and three Boeing MD-530 ‘Little Bird’ helicopters,” Pelton reports. Later on, they would add three Mamba trucks with machine gun mounts and a Saracen armored carrier for transport.
Early news coverage of private contractors centered around the bravery of the truck drivers, servers, and technicians helping to rebuild Iraqi society and provide comforts never before experienced by American soldiers in the field. To many, even today, that remains true.
But the good news was soon tempered by reports that KBR, the biggest contractor in Iraq, was overcharging the military for things like fuel and food, engaging in fraud, and using the largely no-bid LOGCAP contract like a teenager with a credit card. Soldiers began to complain back home about work stoppages, wasted and lost equipment, and jobs that didn’t get done.
Worse than that emerging fiscal and logistical nightmare was the bad press generated by the guys with guns.
Outside of the tens of thousands of unarmed contractors on the ground, it is estimated that close to 200 security companies operate in Iraq today, ranging from the elite—Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and Dyncorp—to the low-paying and less impressively equipped “mom and pop” outfits. A minority are Americans and other Westerners. The rest are Iraqi and ex-military types from far-flung places like South Africa and Chile.
Billions of dollars in government and private money floating around have been a boon for the hired-gun business. But this might be one case in which the free market is not self-regulating. Unlike Main Street, the roiling pressures of danger and political instability in Baghdad won’t wait for this particular market to self-correct.
“Guys with guns and no laws governing them—it was inevitable in a way,” says Robert Greenwald, director of the documentary film “Iraq for Sale,” a gritty take on the business of war. He thinks the latest Blackwater scandal might be the “tipping point” for American patience with hiring war out to private guns who play by wildly different rules than U.S soldiers.
“They have had an extraordinary track record of keeping people alive,” said (Ret.) Col. Gerald Schumacher, author of A Bloody Business: Contractors and the Occupation of Iraq. “They do it through intimidation. Bulldozing cars off the road. Varying degrees of aggressiveness.” Plus, “the contractor has surmised, and I think rightly so, that they are immune to prosecution.”
Iraqi anger at Blackwater is palpable. Local officials allege that contracted guards killed 17 civilians in the Sept. 16 shootout in Baghdad, including a child whose charred body was found fused to his mother’s in the backseat of a burning car. Iraqis want the company tried in their courts and banned from their country, and it is not clear at this writing that Blackwater will survive the life of its $571-million contract with the State Department.
In 2006, a drunken off-duty Blackwater guard was accused of murdering the bodyguard of Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi on Christmas Eve in the Green Zone. He was shuttled out of the country before he could be questioned by Iraqi police and was fired but never prosecuted. The family of the bodyguard was given $15,000 in compensation.
In 2005, an innocent bystander and father of six was fatally shot by Blackwater guards careening down a street in al-Hillah. Blackwater gave his family $5,000 after the State Department urged the company to “put this unfortunate matter behind us quickly,” according to an e-mail supplied to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has promised reforms, and on Oct. 25, Deputy Secretary for Diplomatic Security Richard Griffin tendered his resignation. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said the contractors’ job to protect their clients is at “cross purposes to our larger mission in Iraq,” adding, “there have been instances where, to put it mildly, the Iraqis have been offended and not treated properly.” DoD employs about 7,300 security contractors in Iraq and 1,000 in Afghanistan; around 2,500 work for the State Departmen
Richard Zbryski put the shadowy existence of the private parallel army in cold, hard perspective when he described how the body of his brother, Walter Zbryski, a 56-year-old retired New York City firefighter, was shipped home from his job as a contracted truck driver in Iraq. “What really upset me was that he was laying there floating in 6 inches of his own body fluids,” still wearing his bloodied clothes, with half of his head blown away, Zbryski told the Chicago Tribune.
His brother was one of the more than 1,000 civilian contractors killed since the war began. More than 180,000 remain in Iraq today. Most are unarmed, doing everything from feeding and providing basic services to the U.S. military to constructing bases, transporting equipment, and rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure.
But it’s the hired guns and spooks—the tens of thousands of guards protecting diplomats and VIPs, government buildings, reconstruction projects and convoys, plus prison interrogators—who bring into focus the fate of the mission and the implications of privatizing the military. They have people wondering what new breed of mercenary super-soldier American money is buying.
“There are many questions as to how a myriad of heavily armed private armies can serve the purpose of the US military and foreign policy,” writes Robert Young Pelton, in Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror.
Pelton has traveled with both military and private contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq throughout the conflict. He describes the new terrain shaped by outsourcing and reports that it bears little resemblance to the noble enterprise sold to the military years ago. Five years into operations, it is a darkly obscured landscape of violence, profiteering, and negligence. He senses that this parallel army is undermining the entire mission, leading to “blowback of extraordinary proportions.”
“It strikes at the core of the entire American principle, the idea of the citizen soldier,” he tells TAC. “We’ve been fighting this war longer than World War II, and the military is absolutely dependent on the private sector.”
Never in modern history has war privatization reached this level. The course was set as early as the 1980s, when post-Cold War military restructuring led to the first LOGCAP—the Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program—which furnished an open-ended, cost-plus contingency contract for private vendors to provide rapid support services to the Army in deployment operations. Military brass initially resisted the idea, write Dina Rasor and Robert Bauman in Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War: “Military commanders, at the time, expressed considerable mistrust of a contractor’s ability to supply troops on the battlefield because they would be too slow, unreliable, and uncontrollable.”
But Dick Cheney, then defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush, was still able to secure a $3.9 billion LOGCAP contract for Brown & Root before leaving office and becoming the CEO of its parent company, Halliburton, in 1995. Privatization expanded throughout the Clinton administration, with the new Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) and Dyncorp International receiving lucrative service contracts to work in Somalia, Rwanda, Southeast Asia, Kuwait, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia.
Some say Cheney was the midwife of the military-private sector alliance. With Donald Rumsfeld, a kindred spirit who has also enjoyed a lucrative public-private revolving-door career, he was able to nurture that alliance into its current mutation in the global war on terror.
“[Privatization] became a mantra, that the contractors could do so much better,” said Rasor, whose book is an exhaustive account of “what happens when you introduce a for-profit motive into the battlefield.” Rumsfeld, who famously said “you go to war with the Army you have, not the one you want,” was “thinking like a businessman,” said Rasor. “It’s not working out.”
After the Sept. 11 attacks, civilians—ex-soldiers and spies mostly—were unleashed on Afghanistan under the CIA to look for Osama bin Laden, according to Pelton, while Blackwater got its first gig guarding military facilities and, later, new Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who still enjoys the best security detail American money can buy.
As the war grew more dangerous, so did the need for armed contractors. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority until it turned over the keys to the Iraqis in 2004, introduced the first private security detail into Iraq, hiring Blackwater to the tune of $21.3 million. In an astonishing display of firepower, Bremer was routinely surrounded by 36 civilian guards and “a fleet of SUVs, two bomb-sniffing canine teams with handlers, four pilots, four aerial gunners, a ground crew and three Boeing MD-530 ‘Little Bird’ helicopters,” Pelton reports. Later on, they would add three Mamba trucks with machine gun mounts and a Saracen armored carrier for transport.
Early news coverage of private contractors centered around the bravery of the truck drivers, servers, and technicians helping to rebuild Iraqi society and provide comforts never before experienced by American soldiers in the field. To many, even today, that remains true.
But the good news was soon tempered by reports that KBR, the biggest contractor in Iraq, was overcharging the military for things like fuel and food, engaging in fraud, and using the largely no-bid LOGCAP contract like a teenager with a credit card. Soldiers began to complain back home about work stoppages, wasted and lost equipment, and jobs that didn’t get done.
Worse than that emerging fiscal and logistical nightmare was the bad press generated by the guys with guns.
Outside of the tens of thousands of unarmed contractors on the ground, it is estimated that close to 200 security companies operate in Iraq today, ranging from the elite—Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and Dyncorp—to the low-paying and less impressively equipped “mom and pop” outfits. A minority are Americans and other Westerners. The rest are Iraqi and ex-military types from far-flung places like South Africa and Chile.
Billions of dollars in government and private money floating around have been a boon for the hired-gun business. But this might be one case in which the free market is not self-regulating. Unlike Main Street, the roiling pressures of danger and political instability in Baghdad won’t wait for this particular market to self-correct.
“Guys with guns and no laws governing them—it was inevitable in a way,” says Robert Greenwald, director of the documentary film “Iraq for Sale,” a gritty take on the business of war. He thinks the latest Blackwater scandal might be the “tipping point” for American patience with hiring war out to private guns who play by wildly different rules than U.S soldiers.
“They have had an extraordinary track record of keeping people alive,” said (Ret.) Col. Gerald Schumacher, author of A Bloody Business: Contractors and the Occupation of Iraq. “They do it through intimidation. Bulldozing cars off the road. Varying degrees of aggressiveness.” Plus, “the contractor has surmised, and I think rightly so, that they are immune to prosecution.”
Iraqi anger at Blackwater is palpable. Local officials allege that contracted guards killed 17 civilians in the Sept. 16 shootout in Baghdad, including a child whose charred body was found fused to his mother’s in the backseat of a burning car. Iraqis want the company tried in their courts and banned from their country, and it is not clear at this writing that Blackwater will survive the life of its $571-million contract with the State Department.
In 2006, a drunken off-duty Blackwater guard was accused of murdering the bodyguard of Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi on Christmas Eve in the Green Zone. He was shuttled out of the country before he could be questioned by Iraqi police and was fired but never prosecuted. The family of the bodyguard was given $15,000 in compensation.
In 2005, an innocent bystander and father of six was fatally shot by Blackwater guards careening down a street in al-Hillah. Blackwater gave his family $5,000 after the State Department urged the company to “put this unfortunate matter behind us quickly,” according to an e-mail supplied to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has promised reforms, and on Oct. 25, Deputy Secretary for Diplomatic Security Richard Griffin tendered his resignation. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said the contractors’ job to protect their clients is at “cross purposes to our larger mission in Iraq,” adding, “there have been instances where, to put it mildly, the Iraqis have been offended and not treated properly.” DoD employs about 7,300 security contractors in Iraq and 1,000 in Afghanistan; around 2,500 work for the State Departmen