Things We Never Hear About Iraq

I mentioned yesterday that Nouri al-Maliki's relative died in a US airstrike, in an incident that is straining relations between the US and Iraq at a time when the status of forces agreement is being negotiated. This is getting almost no coverage in the American media, and really that's not an isolated circumstance.

For instance, Spencer Ackerman has uncovered a security assessment from an Iraqi contractor that is wildly different with the official "We're winning!" line that we're fed from the military and the conservative noise machine:

The following charts appeared in GardaWorld's June 30 intelligence briefing for its clients and were obtained by The Washington Independent. On page 2 of the briefing, GardaWorld prints two charts tracing the trajectory of security both Iraq-wide and in Baghdad specifically. Take a look at the Iraq-wide chart:



As you can see, the incident level spikes and ebbs, but responsible statisticians will see -- as signified by the black bar -- that the daily incident frequency is basically flat since October 1. If anything, it's ticked up somewhat, from about 50 daily security incidents in October to about 70 through the winter and coming in at around 60 presently.

Then there's the very long Pentagon study finally admitting that the war planning was botched at best, nonexistent at worst, and commanders who requested more troops were totally rebuffed (but remember, Bush always listens to the commanders on the ground).

We probably won't hear too much about this, either. From Reuters:

The Iraqi government sued dozens of companies, including oil giant Chevron Corp., for more than $10 billion on Monday, saying they paid kickbacks to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's government under the U.N. oil-for-food program.

The civil lawsuit, filed in U.S. federal court in Manhattan, seeks to recover damages from companies investigated by a U.N.-commissioned inquiry, claiming they cheated the Iraqi people out of benefits of the $67 billion U.N. program.

What's hilarious about oil-for-food is that the only individuals who have been indicted thus far in the probe are two American oilmen, also implicated in this lawsuit. For all the talk of the dreaded UN, it was the multinationals bribing Saddam all along.

It's amazing what you can find out about Iraq if you dig on the Internet for hours and hours instead of passively consuming broadcast media. Must be why everyone's so well-informed...

Remembering To Forget

Hey, remember when the oil for food scandal was simply the gravest episode of corruption in world history? Remember how it discredited the UN and proved that our allies in Old Europe were working with our enemies? Remember when the very serious Paul Volcker was brought in to investigate, and how this was the lead story on wanker cable news shows like Brit Hume's for about a year? Remember when that lightweight Norm Coleman made the scandal his personal crusade and accused George Galloway of getting more in kickbacks than Zaire's Mobutu? Remember when every documented incident of defense contractors stealing billions from the US Treasury as a result of the war was met with cries of "Oil for food, oil for food"?

Well, now that it's completely out of the wingnut spotlight, not only does it turn out that the only guy who's been actually convicted of fraud in this scandal is a Texas oilman, but the latest two companies to be investigated are pharmaceuticals.

GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca have been asked to hand over papers as part of a probe into bribes allegedly paid to Saddam Hussein's former Iraq regime.

The Serious Fraud Office is examining allegations of bribes paid to secure lucrative contracts in breach of Iraq's 1996 to 2003 oil-for-food programme.

The programme, established in the wake of UN sanctions, allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy humanitarian provisions.

I eagerly await the 24-hour news channels to cover this with all the vigor of a missing girl in Aruba.

(Also, Chevron knew about illegal payments too, and they acknowledged their executives did nothing to stop it, including this member of the board of directors named Condoleezza Rice).

Things You Won't See On Conservative Websites

Of all the huff and puff about the oil-for-food program and how the UN, France, Germany, Russia, liberals, Dan Rather and vegans have been totally discredited by it, I think it's of slight interest to note that the first person to be convicted in the case is a Texas oilman.

Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt Jr. was sentenced to a year in prison Tuesday for his role in corrupting the U.N. oil-for-food program, winning leniency from a judge who cited his military service during World War II and his many good deeds during his lifetime.

Wyatt, 83, cried as he addressed the court, saying he ''would never do anything to hurt my country.''

Moments later, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin imposed a sentence below the year and a half to two years in prison to which Wyatt had agreed when he pleaded guilty to conspiracy last month. Wyatt also agreed to forfeit $11 million.

By the way, this guy who got leniency after numerous letters to the judge, including from members of Congress and Farrah Fawcett (!), paid Saddam-era Iraqi officials $8 million dollars to get favorable oil contracts, and maintained close relations with Saddam throughout this period.

Somehow, this won't be the first thing that comes up when you hear "oil-for-food." But American oil companies were among the biggest offenders.

That Which Is Less Discussed

I was listening to David Sirota on Thom Hartmann for a little bit today, and Sirota made a great point, that what the media chooses NOT to report is often as much proof of subjectivity as what they choose to put on the front page. It's the sin of omission, and it's amazing how regular that sin is employed to protect the rich and confuse their motives.

For example, take the case of George Tenet. He's out there pushing a book which claims that there was no substantive debate leading up to the war in Iraq, that the architects of the war were ready to go in within days of 9-11, and that it was wrong to scapegoat the intelligence for what essentially was a political failure of unnecessarily hyping WMDs. To the extent that Tenet's motives for writing the book are discussed, and his willingness to come forward now instead of during the run-up to war when it would have counted, we hear about collecting a fat payday from his publisher, or his weak kowtowing to power, or maybe that setting the record straight is valuable. What we don't hear too much about is the fact that the war itself was financially profitable for him.

While the swirl of publicity around his book has focused on his long debated role in allowing flawed intelligence to launch the war in Iraq, nobody is talking about his lucrative connection to that conflict ever since he resigned from the CIA in June 2004. In fact, Tenet has been earning substantial income by working for corporations that provide the U.S. government with technology, equipment and personnel used for the war in Iraq as well as the broader war on terror.

Tenet sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company recently acquired two of the CIA's hottest contractors for its growing intelligence outsourcing business. At the Analysis Corp. (TAC), a government contractor run by one of Tenet's closest former advisors at the CIA, Tenet is a member of an advisory board that is helping TAC expand its thriving business designing the problematic terrorist watch lists used by the National Counterterrorism Center and the State Department.

Tenet is also a director of Guidance Software, which makes forensic software used by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence to search computer hard drives and laptops for evidence used in the prosecution and tracking of suspected terrorists. And Tenet is the only American director on the board of QinetiQ, the British defense research firm that was privatized in 2003 and was, until recently, controlled by the Carlyle Group, the powerful Washington-based private equity fund. Fueled with Carlyle money, QinetiQ acquired four U.S. companies in recent years, including an intelligence contractor, Analex Inc.

This never gets discussed on any of the talk shows on which Tenet has appeared. But surely he knew that he could board the defense/intelligence merry go-round after he left the CIA and reap untold fortunes.

Here's another example. A couple years back we heard a whole lot of chatter about this "UN oil-for-food" scandal, where Saddam Hussein was gaming the international community by bribing people and doing business outside the system to enrich his government's coffers. It was obvious then that the biggest malefactors in that scandal were corporations who ignored the UN guidelines and did business with the dictator while allowing him to get kickbacks worth up to $1.8 billion dollars. That was less remarked upon, even to this day:

Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, is preparing to acknowledge that it should have known kickbacks were being paid to Saddam Hussein on oil it bought from Iraq as part of a defunct United Nations program, according to investigators.

The admission is part of a settlement being negotiated with United States prosecutors and includes fines totaling $25 million to $30 million, according to the investigators, who declined to be identified because the settlement was not yet public.

The penalty, which is still being negotiated, would be the largest so far in the United States in connection with investigations of companies involved in the oil-for-food scandal.

At the time, who sat on the board of directors for Chevron? The same person that has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.

According to the Volcker report, surcharges on Iraqi oil exports were introduced in August 2000 by the Iraqi state oil company, the State Oil Marketing Organization. At the time, Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, was a member of Chevron’s board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.

Ms. Rice resigned from Chevron’s board on Jan. 16, 2001, after being named national security advisor by President Bush.

These are the types of things that don't make the headlines. They would inform the public about decisions that are made affecting their lives and the lives of their families. But they're never at the top of the page. You hear about Fred Thompson but not that he's a career lobbyist. You hear about Condi Rice but not that she was on the board that allowed Saddam Hussein to enrich himself. You hear about George Tenet but not that he's making a mint off the Iraq war. You hear about the surge but not about the covert action that the US and the Saudis are sponsoring inside Iran, a cooperative effort against Shiite power maintained by the same strain of Wahhabist Sunnis that attacked us on 9-11.

These sins of omissions are debilitating to the public interest of making decisions about our future. Fortunately there's the Internet, so these sins are harder to hide these days. But as long as conglomerates run the traditional news, this is going to happen. And it's also a powerful argument for ensuring a free and open Internet that cannot be restricted for content of ability to pay off wealthy telecom companies.