The Writing on the Latrine Walls

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080904A.shtml

 

The Writing on the Latrine Walls

By William Rivers Pitt

 

 

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 

Monday 09 August 2004

 

I sat with a photographer from Reuters who had

just returned from a six-month tour of Iraq. He had

been tagging along with the Kellogg Brown & Root

operation, subsidiary of Halliburton, and saw

everything there was to see. He went from new military

base to new military base, from the oil work in the

north and back to the south, observing how busy were

the contactors for Halliburton.

 

" I feel like I compromised every one of my

principles by even being over there, " he told me after

the story had been spun out a bit. His eyes, which had

seen too many things through the lens of his camera,

were haunted.

 

It was two years ago that talk about invading Iraq

began to circulate. Reasons for the invasion were

bandied about - they had weapons of mass destruction,

they had a hand in September 11, they will welcome us

as liberators - but it wasn't until the Project for

the New American Century got dragged into the

discussion that an understanding of the true motives

behind all this became apparent.

 

The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC

for short, is just another right-wing think tank,

really. One cannot swing one's dead cat by the tail in

Washington D.C. without smacking some prehensile

gnome, pained by the sunlight, scuttling back to its

right-wing think tank cubicle. These organizations are

all over the place. What makes PNAC different from all

the others?

 

The membership roll call, for one thing:

 

* Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United

States, former CEO of Halliburton;

* Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense;

* Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense;

* Elliot Abrams, National Security Council;

* John Bolton, Undersecretary for Arms Control

and International Security;

* I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's top National

Security assistant;

 

Quite a roster.

 

These people didn't enjoy those fancy titles in

2000, when the PNAC manifesto 'Rebuilding America's

Defenses' (Adobe document) was first published. Before

2000, they were just a bunch of power players who had

been shoved out of the government in 1993. In the time

that passed between Clinton and those hanging chads,

these people got together in PNAC and laid out a

blueprint. 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' was the

ultimate result, and it is a doozy of a document. 2000

became 2001, and the PNAC boys - Cheney and Rumsfeld

specifically - suddenly had the fancy titles and a

chance to swing some weight.

 

'Rebuilding America's Defenses' became the roadmap

for foreign policy decisions made in the White House

and the Pentagon; PNAC had the Vice President's office

in one building, and the Defense Secretary's office in

the other. Attacking Iraq was central to that roadmap

from the beginning. When former Counterterrorism Czar

Richard Clarke accused the Bush administration of

focusing on Iraq to the detriment of addressing

legitimate threats, he was essentially denouncing them

for using the attacks of September 11 as an excuse to

execute the PNAC blueprint.

 

Iraq, you see, has been on the PNAC menu for

almost ten years.

 

The goals codified in 'Rebuilding America's

Defenses,' the manifesto, can be boiled down to a few

sentences: The invasion and occupation of Iraq, for

reasons that had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein.

The building of several permanent military bases in

Iraq, the purpose of which are to telegraph force

throughout the region. The takeover by Western

petroleum corporations of Iraq's nationalized oil

industry. The ultimate destabilization and overthrow

of a variety of regimes in the Middle East, friend and

foe alike, by military or economic means, or both.

 

" Indeed, " it is written on page 14 of 'Rebuilding

America's Defenses,' " the United States has for

decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf

regional security. While the unresolved conflict with

Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need

for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf

transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein. "

 

Two years after the talk began, the invasion is

completed. There are no weapons of mass destruction,

there is no connection to September 11, and the Iraqi

people have in no way welcomed us as liberators. The

cosmetic rationales for the attack have fallen by the

wayside, and all that remains are the PNAC goals, some

of which have been achieved in spectacularly

profitable fashion.

 

The stock in trade of Halliburton subsidiary

Kellogg Brown & Root is the construction of permanent

military bases. The Reuters reporter I spoke to had

been to several KBR-built permanent American military

bases in his six month tour of Iraq. " That's where the

oil industry money is going, " he told me. " Billions of

dollars. Not to infrastructure, not to rebuilding the

country, and not to helping the Iraqi people. It's

going to KBR, to build those bases for the military. "

 

According to the Center for Public Integrity,

Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root has made

$11,475,541,371 in Iraq as of July 1. So that's one

PNAC goal checked off the list.

 

As for the corporate takeover of the Iraqi oil

industry, that has become the prime mission of the

American soldiers engaged there. Kellogg Brown & Root

also does a tidy business in the oil-infrastructure

repair market. " The troops aren't hunting terrorists

or building a country, " said the Reuters photographer.

" All they do is guard the convoys running north and

south. The convoys north are carrying supplies and

empty tankers for the oil fields around Mosul and

Tikrit. The convoys south bring back what they pull

out of the ground up there. That's where all these

kids are getting killed. They get hit with IEDs while

guarding these convoys, and all hell breaks loose. "

 

That last goal, about overthrowing other regimes

in the region, hasn't been as easy to follow through

on as the PNAC boys might have hoped. The Iraqi people

are fighting back, and the small-by-comparison force

Rumsfeld said would be enough to do the job can't seem

to pacify the country. Perhaps that is because too

many troops are dedicated to guarding the oil supply

lines. More likely, however, it is because of the

sincere belief among the Iraqi people that they have

been conquered - not 'liberated' but conquered - and

their conquerors don't give a tinker's damn whether

they live or die.

 

" The Americans over there have all these terms for

people who aren't Americans, " the Reuters photographer

said. " The Iraqi people are called LPs, or 'Local

Personnel.' They get killed all the time, but it's

like, 'Some LPs got killed,' so it isn't like real

people died. Iraqi kids run along the convoys, hoping

a soldier will throw them some food or water, and

sometimes they get crushed by the trucks. Nothing

stops, those are the orders, so some LPs get killed

and the convoy keeps rolling. The labels make it

easier for them to die. The people are depersonalized.

No one cares. "

 

" Everyone is an 'insurgent' over there, " the

photographer told me. " That's another label with no

meaning. Everyone is against the Americans. There is a

$250,000 bounty on the head of every Westerner over

there, mine too, while I was there. The Americans

working the oil industry over there are the dumbest,

most racist jackasses I've ever seen in my life.

That's the American face on this thing, and the Iraqi

people see it. "

 

930 American soldiers have died to achieve goals

the PNAC boys gamed out before they ever came in with

this Bush administration. Well over 10,000 Iraqi

civilians have likewise died. Over $200 billion has

been spent to do this. Fighting today rages across

several sections of Iraq, and the puppet 'leaders'

installed by U.S. forces are about to drive a final

stake into the heart of the liberation rhetoric by

declaring nationwide martial law.

 

Two enemies of the United States - the nation of

Iran and Osama bin Laden - are thrilled with the

outcome to date. Saddam Hussein was an enemy to both

Iran and bin Laden, and he has been removed. The

destabilization and innocent bloodshed bolsters Iran's

standing against the U.S., and sends freshly motivated

martyrs into the arms of Osama.

 

Yes, the Halliburton contracting in Iraq for

military bases and petroleum production is a cash cow

for that company. The bases are being built. The oil

industry has been privatized. The resulting chaos of

the PNAC blueprint, however, has left the entire

theater of the war in complete chaos. The Bush

administration has insisted all along that this

invasion was central to their 'War on Terror.' It has,

in truth, become a failed experiment in global

corporate hegemony writ large, foisted upon us by some

men named Cheney and Rumsfeld who thought it would all

work out as they had planned it in 2000.

 

It hasn't, except for the profiteering. For all

their white papers, for all their carefully-laid

plans, for all the power and fancy titles these

erstwhile think-tankers managed to gather unto

themselves, their works are now blood-crusted dust.

They are clearly not as smart as they thought they

were. The overall 'War on Terror' itself has plenty of

examples of these boys not being too swift on the

uptake. Iraq is only the largest, and costliest,

example.

 

The case of Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan is another

perfect example. Khan was a mole, deep undercover

within the ranks of al Qaeda, who was sending vital

data on the terror organization from Pakistan to

British and American intelligence. But officials with

the Bush administration, desperate to show the

American people they were making headway in the terror

war, barfed up Khan's name to the press while bragging

about recent arrests. Khan's position as a mole within

al Qaeda was summarily annihilated. The guy we had

inside was blown.

 

Pretty smart, yes? " The whole thing smacks of

either incompetence or worse, " said Tim Ripley, a

security expert who writes for Jane's Defense

publications, in a Reuters article on the blown agent.

" You have to ask: what are they doing compromising a

deep mole within al Qaeda, when it's so difficult to

get these guys in there in the first place? It goes

against all the rules of counter-espionage,

counter-terrorism, running agents and so forth. It's

not exactly cloak and dagger undercover work if it's

on the front pages every time there's a development,

is it? "

 

This would be the second agent we know of who has

been blown by the arrogant stupidity of the Bush

administration. The other, of course, was Valerie

Plame. Plame was a 'Non-Official Cover' agent, or NOC,

for the CIA. NOC designates the deepest cover an agent

can have. Plame's deep-cover assignment was to run a

network dedicated to tracking any person, nation or

group that might give weapons of mass destruction to

terrorists. Because her husband, Ambassador Joseph

Wilson, had the temerity to accuse the Bush

administration of lying in the public prints, the

administration blew Plame's cover as a warning to

Wilson and any other whistleblowers who might have

thought of coming forward.

 

The Bush administration blew Khan's cover because

they wanted to get a soundbite out for the election

campaign. They blew Plame out of sheer spite, and out

of desperation. The mole we had inside al Qaeda, and

an agent we had tracking the movement of weapons of

mass destruction, are both finished now because the

PNAC boys are watching all their plans go awry, and

they don't quite know what to do about it. That makes

them stupid and exceedingly dangerous.

 

The soldiers over there are hip to the jive at

this point. Michael Hoffman, a Marine corporal in

artillery, was part of the original March invasion.

Before Hoffman's unit shipped out, his battery first

sergeant addressed all the enlisted men. " Don't think

you're going to be heroes, " said Hoffman's sergeant.

" You're not going over there because of weapons of

mass destruction. You're not going there to get rid of

Saddam Hussein, or to make Iraq safe for democracy.

You're going there for one reason and one reason

alone: Oil. "

 

The Reuters photographer I spoke to couldn't get

any soldiers to talk about how they felt when

surrounded by their fellow soldiers. " They don't talk

in the ranks, or just about anywhere on base, " he

said. " You have to go out to the latrine area, to the

Port-O-Potties. For some reason, they talk there. You

can read how they really feel - all the anti-Bush

stuff, all the wanting to go home - in the writing on

the shithouse walls. "

 

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and

international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq:

What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know' and 'The

Greatest Sedition is Silence.'

 

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