http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/pers-j15.shtml
Toward the end of his article, Dreyfuss quotes “Tom” Pickering, whom he indentifies as “a veteran US diplomat who’s been involved in unofficial talks with Iranian counterparts.”
Thomas Pickering is a long-time US State Department operative who served as US ambassador to El Salvador in the 1980s and was implicated in the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scheme to illegally fund the US proxy war against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. He later served as US ambassador to Israel, US ambassador to the United Nations and, under Clinton, as US ambassador to Russia.
Pickering sits on the board of directors for the American-Iranian Council. This organization was granted permission by the US government to open an office in Iran, making it, according to Wikipedia, “the only US-based peace and conflict resolution non-governmental organization operating in Iran.”
There can be little doubt about the character of Pickering’s “unofficial talks with Iranian counterparts.”
Showing posts with label People. Show all posts
Showing posts with label People. Show all posts
Thursday, 16 July 2009
Richard Dreyfuss
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/pers-j15.shtml
The World Socialist Web Site has pointed out Dreyfuss’s curious credentials as a supposed proponent of democracy in Iran. A former member of the fascistic organization led by Lyndon LaRouche, Dreyfuss was “Middle East intelligence director” of its magazine Executive Intelligence Review. In 1981, Dreyfuss published a book—Hostage to Khomeini—calling for the Reagan administration to organize the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and denouncing President Jimmy Carter for having betrayed the Shah.
The current issue of the Nation features a lengthy article by Dreyfuss entitled “Iran’s Green Wave.” What is remarkable about this article is its frank characterization of the forces that dominate the Iranian opposition and the reactionary and anti-working class policies upon which it is based.
The World Socialist Web Site has pointed out Dreyfuss’s curious credentials as a supposed proponent of democracy in Iran. A former member of the fascistic organization led by Lyndon LaRouche, Dreyfuss was “Middle East intelligence director” of its magazine Executive Intelligence Review. In 1981, Dreyfuss published a book—Hostage to Khomeini—calling for the Reagan administration to organize the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and denouncing President Jimmy Carter for having betrayed the Shah.
The current issue of the Nation features a lengthy article by Dreyfuss entitled “Iran’s Green Wave.” What is remarkable about this article is its frank characterization of the forces that dominate the Iranian opposition and the reactionary and anti-working class policies upon which it is based.
Michael Jackson
.......Jackson, by the end, was heavily in debt and had weathered a $22 million out-of-court settlement payment to Jordy Chandler, as well as seven counts of child sexual abuse and two counts of administering an intoxicating agent in order to commit a felony......
Friday, 10 July 2009
Scott Roeder, Dr. George Tiller, Rev. Donald Spitz, Fahad Hashmi, Junaid Babar, Andrew Stepanian, animal rights and environmental activists.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090708_two_standards_of_justice/
Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion zealot charged with killing Dr. George Tiller, has been busy. He called the Associated Press from the Sedgwick County Jail in Kansas, saying, “I know there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal.” Charged with first-degree murder and aggravated assault, he is expected to be arraigned July 28. AP recently reported that Roeder has been proclaiming from his jail cell that the killing of abortion providers is justified. According to the report, the Rev. Donald Spitz of the Virginia-based Army of God sent Roeder seven pamphlets defending “defensive action,” or killing of abortion clinic workers.......
....... Juxtapose Roeder’s advocacy from jail with the conditions of Fahad Hashmi.
Hashmi is a U.S. citizen who grew up in Queens, N.Y., and went to Brooklyn College. He went to graduate school in Britain and was arrested there in 2006 for allegedly allowing an acquaintance to stay with him for two weeks. That acquaintance, Junaid Babar, allegedly kept at Hashmi’s apartment a bag containing ponchos and socks, which Babar later delivered to an al-Qaida operative. Babar was arrested and agreed to cooperate with the authorities in exchange for leniency.
While the evidence against Hashmi is secret, it probably stems from the claims of the informant Babar.
Fahad Hashmi was extradited to New York, where he has been held in pretrial detention for more than two years. His brother Faisal described the conditions: “He is kept in solitary confinement for two straight years, 23- to 24-hours lockdown. ... Within his own cell, he’s restricted in the movements he’s allowed to do. He’s not allowed to talk out loud within his own cell. ... He is being videotaped and monitored at all times. He can be punished ... denied family visits, if they say his certain movements are martial arts ... that they deem as incorrect. He has Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) ... against him.”........
...... Similarly, animal rights and environmental activists, prosecuted as “eco-terrorists,” have been shipped to the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ new “communication management units” (CMUs). Andrew Stepanian was recently released and described for me the CMU as “a prison within the actual prison. ... The unit doesn’t have normal telephone communication to your family ... normal visits are denied ... you have to make an appointment to make one phone call a week, and that needs to be done with the oversight of ... a live monitor.”
Stepanian observed that up to 70 percent of CMU prisoners are Muslim—hence CMU’s nickname, “Little Guantanamo.” As with Hashmi, it seems that the U.S. government seeks to strip terrorism suspects of legal due process and access to the media—whether in Guantanamo or in the secretive new CMUs. The American Civil Liberties Union is suing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Bureau of Prisons over the CMUs. ......
Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion zealot charged with killing Dr. George Tiller, has been busy. He called the Associated Press from the Sedgwick County Jail in Kansas, saying, “I know there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal.” Charged with first-degree murder and aggravated assault, he is expected to be arraigned July 28. AP recently reported that Roeder has been proclaiming from his jail cell that the killing of abortion providers is justified. According to the report, the Rev. Donald Spitz of the Virginia-based Army of God sent Roeder seven pamphlets defending “defensive action,” or killing of abortion clinic workers.......
....... Juxtapose Roeder’s advocacy from jail with the conditions of Fahad Hashmi.
Hashmi is a U.S. citizen who grew up in Queens, N.Y., and went to Brooklyn College. He went to graduate school in Britain and was arrested there in 2006 for allegedly allowing an acquaintance to stay with him for two weeks. That acquaintance, Junaid Babar, allegedly kept at Hashmi’s apartment a bag containing ponchos and socks, which Babar later delivered to an al-Qaida operative. Babar was arrested and agreed to cooperate with the authorities in exchange for leniency.
While the evidence against Hashmi is secret, it probably stems from the claims of the informant Babar.
Fahad Hashmi was extradited to New York, where he has been held in pretrial detention for more than two years. His brother Faisal described the conditions: “He is kept in solitary confinement for two straight years, 23- to 24-hours lockdown. ... Within his own cell, he’s restricted in the movements he’s allowed to do. He’s not allowed to talk out loud within his own cell. ... He is being videotaped and monitored at all times. He can be punished ... denied family visits, if they say his certain movements are martial arts ... that they deem as incorrect. He has Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) ... against him.”........
...... Similarly, animal rights and environmental activists, prosecuted as “eco-terrorists,” have been shipped to the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ new “communication management units” (CMUs). Andrew Stepanian was recently released and described for me the CMU as “a prison within the actual prison. ... The unit doesn’t have normal telephone communication to your family ... normal visits are denied ... you have to make an appointment to make one phone call a week, and that needs to be done with the oversight of ... a live monitor.”
Stepanian observed that up to 70 percent of CMU prisoners are Muslim—hence CMU’s nickname, “Little Guantanamo.” As with Hashmi, it seems that the U.S. government seeks to strip terrorism suspects of legal due process and access to the media—whether in Guantanamo or in the secretive new CMUs. The American Civil Liberties Union is suing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Bureau of Prisons over the CMUs. ......
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
McNamara, Vietnam,
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090707_robert_scheer_july_8_column/
Is holocaust too emotionally charged a word? How many millions of dead innocent civilians does it take to qualify labels like holocaust, genocide or terrorism? How many of the limbless victims of his fragmentation bombs and land mines whom I saw in Vietnam during and after the war? Or are America’s leaders always to be exempted from such questions? Perhaps if McNamara had been held legally accountable for his actions, the architects of the Iraq debacle might have paused.
Instead, McNamara was honored with the Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson, to whom he had written a private memo nine months earlier offering this assessment of their Vietnam carnage: “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”
He knew it then, and, give him this, the dimensions of that horror never left him. When I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times in 1995, after the publication of his confessional memoir, his assessment of the madness he had unleashed was all too clear:
“Look, we dropped three to four times the tonnage on that tiny little area as were dropped by the Allies in all of the theaters in World War II over a period of five years. It was unbelievable. We killed—there were killed—3,200,000 Vietnamese, excluding the South Vietnamese military. My God! The killing, the tonnage—it was fantastic. The problem was that we were trying to do something that was militarily impossible—we were trying to break the will; I don’t think we can break the will by bombing short of genocide.”
We—no, he—couldn’t break their will because their fight was for national independence. They had defeated the French and would defeat the Americans who took over when French colonialists gave up the ghost. The war was a lie from the first. It never had anything to do with the freedom of the Vietnamese (we installed one tyrant after another in power), but instead had to do with our irrational Cold War obsession with “international communism.” Irrational, as President Richard Nixon acknowledged when he embraced détente with the Soviet communists, toasted China’s fierce communist Mao Tse-tung and then escalated the war against “communist” Vietnam and neutral Cambodia.
Is holocaust too emotionally charged a word? How many millions of dead innocent civilians does it take to qualify labels like holocaust, genocide or terrorism? How many of the limbless victims of his fragmentation bombs and land mines whom I saw in Vietnam during and after the war? Or are America’s leaders always to be exempted from such questions? Perhaps if McNamara had been held legally accountable for his actions, the architects of the Iraq debacle might have paused.
Instead, McNamara was honored with the Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson, to whom he had written a private memo nine months earlier offering this assessment of their Vietnam carnage: “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”
He knew it then, and, give him this, the dimensions of that horror never left him. When I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times in 1995, after the publication of his confessional memoir, his assessment of the madness he had unleashed was all too clear:
“Look, we dropped three to four times the tonnage on that tiny little area as were dropped by the Allies in all of the theaters in World War II over a period of five years. It was unbelievable. We killed—there were killed—3,200,000 Vietnamese, excluding the South Vietnamese military. My God! The killing, the tonnage—it was fantastic. The problem was that we were trying to do something that was militarily impossible—we were trying to break the will; I don’t think we can break the will by bombing short of genocide.”
We—no, he—couldn’t break their will because their fight was for national independence. They had defeated the French and would defeat the Americans who took over when French colonialists gave up the ghost. The war was a lie from the first. It never had anything to do with the freedom of the Vietnamese (we installed one tyrant after another in power), but instead had to do with our irrational Cold War obsession with “international communism.” Irrational, as President Richard Nixon acknowledged when he embraced détente with the Soviet communists, toasted China’s fierce communist Mao Tse-tung and then escalated the war against “communist” Vietnam and neutral Cambodia.
Tuesday, 7 July 2009
Honduras, Zelaya
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22983.htm
Pres. Zelaya Calls for Non-Violent Demonstrations
Full text translation to English of the Statement of President Manuel Zelaya, issued July 4
July 04, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- Compañeros and compañeras, fellow Hondurans, your president, Manuel Zelaya Rosales, speaks to you. I want to tell you that my destiny is tied to the destiny of the Honduran people. On the morning of June 28, while I was preparing to exercise my vote in a nationwide survey, I was the victim of assaults, abuses, violations and kidnapping, I was taken captive and expelled from my country by Honduran military forces. By these military forces that today have put themselves in the service of and in complicity with the voracious elite that squeezes and asphyxiates our people, obeying their orders and not defending our nation or our democracy. This is a blow to the Honduran nation and has made clear to the world that in Honduras there is still a kind of barbarity, and people who are unaware of the harm they cause to our country and to future generations.
Through these means of communication, I call for you to continue the participation of the people. The people are the principle actors of our democracy and of the solutions that must be found to the grave problems of poverty and inequality in our country.
As Hondurans, we have faced major problems and we have always know how to come together to move forward, and this is a huge opportunity to show the world that Hondurans are capable of confronting these problems in spite of the attacks by a criminal sector that today seeks to appropriate the fate of our nation and of our children.
I speak to the coup leaders, traitors, Judases that kissed me on the cheek to then carry out this major strike against our country and democracy: You must rectify your actions as soon as possible. You are surrounded, the world has isolated you, all the nations of the world have condemned you, without exception. There is general repudiation of your actions, your actions will not be ignored because international tribunals will hold you accountable for the genocide you are carrying out in our country by repressing basic freedoms and by repressing our people.
I am organizing my return to Honduras and I ask all campesinos, housewives, city-dwellers, indigenous peoples, youth and all the groups of workers, businesspeople and politicians that I have throughout the nation--mayors, legislators--that you accompany me on my return to Honduras. This is the return of the elected president, elected by the sovereign will of the people, which is the only form of electing presidents in Honduras. Let us not lose our rights and not permit that certain individuals begin to make decisions that should be made by the Honduran people, through their legitimacy and their popular will.
I am willing to make any effort and sacrifice to obtain the freedom that our country needs. We will either be free or we will be permanent slaves unless we have the courage to defend ourselves. Do not take arms, practice what I have always taught-- non-violence. Let them be the ones who bring violence, arms and repression. Make the coup responsible for every life of every person, for the physical integrity and dignity of the Honduran people.
We are going to arrive in the International Airport of Honduras in Tegucigalpa with several presidents and members of the international community. On Sunday we will be in Tegucigalpa, we will be accompanying you and embracing you to defend what we have always defended, which is the will of God through the will of the people.
Greetings fellow countrymen and women, may God protect you and bless you all.
Pres. Zelaya Calls for Non-Violent Demonstrations
Full text translation to English of the Statement of President Manuel Zelaya, issued July 4
July 04, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- Compañeros and compañeras, fellow Hondurans, your president, Manuel Zelaya Rosales, speaks to you. I want to tell you that my destiny is tied to the destiny of the Honduran people. On the morning of June 28, while I was preparing to exercise my vote in a nationwide survey, I was the victim of assaults, abuses, violations and kidnapping, I was taken captive and expelled from my country by Honduran military forces. By these military forces that today have put themselves in the service of and in complicity with the voracious elite that squeezes and asphyxiates our people, obeying their orders and not defending our nation or our democracy. This is a blow to the Honduran nation and has made clear to the world that in Honduras there is still a kind of barbarity, and people who are unaware of the harm they cause to our country and to future generations.
Through these means of communication, I call for you to continue the participation of the people. The people are the principle actors of our democracy and of the solutions that must be found to the grave problems of poverty and inequality in our country.
As Hondurans, we have faced major problems and we have always know how to come together to move forward, and this is a huge opportunity to show the world that Hondurans are capable of confronting these problems in spite of the attacks by a criminal sector that today seeks to appropriate the fate of our nation and of our children.
I speak to the coup leaders, traitors, Judases that kissed me on the cheek to then carry out this major strike against our country and democracy: You must rectify your actions as soon as possible. You are surrounded, the world has isolated you, all the nations of the world have condemned you, without exception. There is general repudiation of your actions, your actions will not be ignored because international tribunals will hold you accountable for the genocide you are carrying out in our country by repressing basic freedoms and by repressing our people.
I am organizing my return to Honduras and I ask all campesinos, housewives, city-dwellers, indigenous peoples, youth and all the groups of workers, businesspeople and politicians that I have throughout the nation--mayors, legislators--that you accompany me on my return to Honduras. This is the return of the elected president, elected by the sovereign will of the people, which is the only form of electing presidents in Honduras. Let us not lose our rights and not permit that certain individuals begin to make decisions that should be made by the Honduran people, through their legitimacy and their popular will.
I am willing to make any effort and sacrifice to obtain the freedom that our country needs. We will either be free or we will be permanent slaves unless we have the courage to defend ourselves. Do not take arms, practice what I have always taught-- non-violence. Let them be the ones who bring violence, arms and repression. Make the coup responsible for every life of every person, for the physical integrity and dignity of the Honduran people.
We are going to arrive in the International Airport of Honduras in Tegucigalpa with several presidents and members of the international community. On Sunday we will be in Tegucigalpa, we will be accompanying you and embracing you to defend what we have always defended, which is the will of God through the will of the people.
Greetings fellow countrymen and women, may God protect you and bless you all.
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/views_on_countriesregions_bt/618.php?nid=&id=&pnt=618&lb=
US President Barack Obama has the confidence of many publics around the world - inspiring far more confidence than any other world political leader according to a new poll of 20 nations by WorldPublicOpinion.org. A year ago, President Bush was one of the least trusted leaders in the world.
(Official White House Photo)
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin now have the most negative confidence ratings around the world. On average across all nations about half have little or no confidence that they will "do the right thing regarding world affairs" while just a third or less do have confidence.
WorldPublicOpinion.org conducted the poll of 19,224 respondents in nations that comprise 62 percent of the world's population. This includes most of the largest nations--China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Russia--as well as Mexico, Germany, Great Britain, France, Poland, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Kenya, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, and South Korea. Publics were also polled in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. The margins of error range from +/-3 to 4 percent.
And
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/jun09/WPO_Leaders_Jun09_countries.pdf
US President Barack Obama has the confidence of many publics around the world - inspiring far more confidence than any other world political leader according to a new poll of 20 nations by WorldPublicOpinion.org. A year ago, President Bush was one of the least trusted leaders in the world.
(Official White House Photo)
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin now have the most negative confidence ratings around the world. On average across all nations about half have little or no confidence that they will "do the right thing regarding world affairs" while just a third or less do have confidence.
WorldPublicOpinion.org conducted the poll of 19,224 respondents in nations that comprise 62 percent of the world's population. This includes most of the largest nations--China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Russia--as well as Mexico, Germany, Great Britain, France, Poland, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Kenya, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, and South Korea. Publics were also polled in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. The margins of error range from +/-3 to 4 percent.
And
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/jun09/WPO_Leaders_Jun09_countries.pdf
Sunday, 28 June 2009
Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan,
http://www.daily.pk/politics/politicalnews/10321-is-us-trying-to-save-agent-mehsud.html
.......The US has in the past shown no interest in striking Baitullah Mehsud’s insurgent militia which calls itself Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. The U.S. carefully avoided targeting TTP with its Predator and Reaper drones run by the CIA.
Statements from captured TTP commanders and weapons recovered from them have confirmed Pakistan Army’s belief that the Americans and Indians are training, funding and supplying weapons to the TTP terrorists.
“This is what the Indians tried to do before the Sri Lankan (army) got to Prabhakaran. His capture would have uncovered Indian intelligence links with the LTTE. They tried and failed to rescue him, so they had him executed before the army got to him”, says a senior intelligence official on condition of anonymity.
“The Americans don’t want Baitullah Mehsud to be captured alive either, and they cannot eliminate him with an air-strike anymore since Pakistan Army is advancing towards him already. They will either take him out before he is captured, or he will mysteriously disappear only to re-emerge later at a different location. This announcement has nothing to do with Osama or Mullah Omar. They have been saying Osama is in Pakistan for years. Why haven’t they acted before?”
The Pakistan Army must capture Baitullah Mehsud alive. But before that, they have to ensure they block Baitullah Mehsud’s supply lines from Afghanistan – with aggression if necessary – and ensure he does not disappear towards the Afghan border where there is a getaway crew waiting for him. Ahmed Quraishi
.......The US has in the past shown no interest in striking Baitullah Mehsud’s insurgent militia which calls itself Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. The U.S. carefully avoided targeting TTP with its Predator and Reaper drones run by the CIA.
Statements from captured TTP commanders and weapons recovered from them have confirmed Pakistan Army’s belief that the Americans and Indians are training, funding and supplying weapons to the TTP terrorists.
“This is what the Indians tried to do before the Sri Lankan (army) got to Prabhakaran. His capture would have uncovered Indian intelligence links with the LTTE. They tried and failed to rescue him, so they had him executed before the army got to him”, says a senior intelligence official on condition of anonymity.
“The Americans don’t want Baitullah Mehsud to be captured alive either, and they cannot eliminate him with an air-strike anymore since Pakistan Army is advancing towards him already. They will either take him out before he is captured, or he will mysteriously disappear only to re-emerge later at a different location. This announcement has nothing to do with Osama or Mullah Omar. They have been saying Osama is in Pakistan for years. Why haven’t they acted before?”
The Pakistan Army must capture Baitullah Mehsud alive. But before that, they have to ensure they block Baitullah Mehsud’s supply lines from Afghanistan – with aggression if necessary – and ensure he does not disappear towards the Afghan border where there is a getaway crew waiting for him. Ahmed Quraishi
Mousavi, James "Ace" Lyons , Bob Baer
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22903.htm
Mousavi, prime minister for most of the 1980s, personally selected his point man for the Beirut terror campaign, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, and dispatched him to Damascus as Iran's ambassador, according to former CIA and military officials.
The ambassador in turn hosted several meetings of the cell that would carry out the Beirut attacks, which were overheard by the National Security Agency.
"We had a tap on the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon," retired Navy Admiral James "Ace" Lyons related by telephone Monday. In 1983 Lyons was deputy chief of Naval Operations, and deeply involved in the events in Lebanon.
"The Iranian ambassador received instructions from the foreign minister to have various groups target U.S. personnel in Lebanon, but in particular to carry out a 'spectacular action' against the Marines," said Lyons.
"He was prime minister," Lyons said of Mousavi, "so he didn't get down to the details at the lowest levels. "But he was in a principal position and had to be aware of what was going on."
Lyons, sometimes called "the father" of the Navy SEALs' Red Cell counter-terror unit, also fingered Mousavi for the 1988 truck bombing of the U.S. Navy's Fleet Center in Naples, Italy, that killed five persons, including the first Navy woman to die in a terrorist attack.
Bob Baer agrees that Mousawi, who has been celebrated in the West for sparking street demonstrations against the Teheran regime since he lost the elections, was directing the overall 1980s terror campaign.
But Baer, a former CIA Middle East field officer whose exploits were dramatized in the George Clooney movie "Syriana," places Mousavi even closer to the Beirut bombings.
"He dealt directly with Imad Mughniyah," who ran the Beirut terrorist campaign and was "the man largely held responsible for both attacks," Baer wrote in TIME over the weekend.
"When Mousavi was Prime Minister, he oversaw an office that ran operatives abroad, from Lebanon to Kuwait to Iraq," Baer continued.
"This was the heyday of [Ayatollah] Khomeini's theocratic vision, when Iran thought it really could export its revolution across the Middle East, providing money and arms to anyone who claimed he could upend the old order."
Baer added: "Mousavi was not only swept up into this delusion but also actively pursued it."
Retired Adm. Lyons maintained that he could have destroyed the terrorists at a hideout U.S. intelligence had pinpointed, but he was outmaneuvered by others in the cabinet of President Ronald Reagan.
"I was going to take them apart," Lyons said, "but the secretary of defense," Caspar Weinberger, "sabotaged it."
Mousavi, prime minister for most of the 1980s, personally selected his point man for the Beirut terror campaign, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, and dispatched him to Damascus as Iran's ambassador, according to former CIA and military officials.
The ambassador in turn hosted several meetings of the cell that would carry out the Beirut attacks, which were overheard by the National Security Agency.
"We had a tap on the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon," retired Navy Admiral James "Ace" Lyons related by telephone Monday. In 1983 Lyons was deputy chief of Naval Operations, and deeply involved in the events in Lebanon.
"The Iranian ambassador received instructions from the foreign minister to have various groups target U.S. personnel in Lebanon, but in particular to carry out a 'spectacular action' against the Marines," said Lyons.
"He was prime minister," Lyons said of Mousavi, "so he didn't get down to the details at the lowest levels. "But he was in a principal position and had to be aware of what was going on."
Lyons, sometimes called "the father" of the Navy SEALs' Red Cell counter-terror unit, also fingered Mousavi for the 1988 truck bombing of the U.S. Navy's Fleet Center in Naples, Italy, that killed five persons, including the first Navy woman to die in a terrorist attack.
Bob Baer agrees that Mousawi, who has been celebrated in the West for sparking street demonstrations against the Teheran regime since he lost the elections, was directing the overall 1980s terror campaign.
But Baer, a former CIA Middle East field officer whose exploits were dramatized in the George Clooney movie "Syriana," places Mousavi even closer to the Beirut bombings.
"He dealt directly with Imad Mughniyah," who ran the Beirut terrorist campaign and was "the man largely held responsible for both attacks," Baer wrote in TIME over the weekend.
"When Mousavi was Prime Minister, he oversaw an office that ran operatives abroad, from Lebanon to Kuwait to Iraq," Baer continued.
"This was the heyday of [Ayatollah] Khomeini's theocratic vision, when Iran thought it really could export its revolution across the Middle East, providing money and arms to anyone who claimed he could upend the old order."
Baer added: "Mousavi was not only swept up into this delusion but also actively pursued it."
Retired Adm. Lyons maintained that he could have destroyed the terrorists at a hideout U.S. intelligence had pinpointed, but he was outmaneuvered by others in the cabinet of President Ronald Reagan.
"I was going to take them apart," Lyons said, "but the secretary of defense," Caspar Weinberger, "sabotaged it."
Saturday, 27 June 2009
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,632827,00.html#ref=nlint
Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has reportedly taken a job as a consultant for the Nabucco pipeline project, which will deliver natural gas from the Caspian region to Europe. His expertise at smoothing ruffled diplomatic feathers will come in handy.
Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has reportedly taken a job as a consultant for the Nabucco pipeline project, which will deliver natural gas from the Caspian region to Europe. His expertise at smoothing ruffled diplomatic feathers will come in handy.
Thursday, 25 June 2009
Layla
http://www.uruknet.de:80/?s1=1&p=55419&s2=24
One of these exceptions comes from an email I received from an Arab-American, who prefers to remain anonymous. I am publishing his/her mail with his/her consent.
I think this person is one of the very few who understood...I hope you will read that mail slowly and let it sink in, because it holds many important insights and truths.
Dear Layla,
I happened upon your website by accident and ever since, I have been hooked...
Thank you for the depth of your analysis and the clarity of your vision. I live in the United States...I can tell you that what thrills me the most about your prose is the fact that you have no illusion about the "Good Cop" in that tired and despicable vicious cycle we are pitted in, namely, having to listen to the "Good Cop" apologizing for the actions of the "Bad Cop" while at the same time, both take a break and drink coffee together. The false dichotomy of bleeding heart "Liberals" and security minded "Conservatives" is the favorite currency of political dialogue in the United States. They play the game like husbands and wives have done for thousands of years. One punishes and the other tells you to please moderate your naughty behavior and stop being stubborn, while accusing the other of being too harsh. The game is so crude that I wonder whether they really care if we believe what they claim or not. Crude as it has been all along, it has lost any effect it ever had, thanks to the war on Iraq.
Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed, the USA felt no more the need to play a smart game or don a pretty disguise in pursuit of its ugly policy. Propaganda and its actors are no more the pretty faces, the pleasant cartoons, the creative ads selling exotic goods, the claimed lush lifestyle, the claimed beacon of democracy, or in the case of the Media, the clever cover of diversity. The old propaganda has died and in its place has risen and taken shape a ghost-like apparition : Instead of striving to appear diverse, now their only hope is that listeners believe them to be "appearing diverse"; instead of striving to convince you that they are spreading democracy, they are now desperately hoping that you at least believe that they are appearing to be on the side of democracy; Instead of making a case to you that they are on the side of human rights around the world, now their best hope is that you do not laugh when they try to appear to be on the side of human rights around the world; instead of claiming to be fighting drugs, they now strive to confirm the "appearance" of fighting drugs. This is Neo-propaganda, a propaganda that wears a sign that says, " I am propaganda, do not believe me." This is how clownish the situation is: the same old tired stale joke told by a clown who expects you to smile at his joke, not because you like them, but because you feel pity for him. It is as weird as seeing an old man playing "Hide and Seek" and loving it.
The "beauty" of propaganda in what was a bi-polar World has completely been discarded and replaced with one-liners and clichés told by the incredulous. If you appear to appear honest, you are a bad faker leaves an effect no better than that of movies played by bad actors who do not believe what they are playing and it shows on their faces. At no time did this situation become so porn-like clear than in the selling of the invasion of Iraq and …of course… the war on terrorism.
I have been in the United States for more than 20 years and have seen how "funny" their salesmanship was, how crude their pitch was, and how delusional these people were, no matter what creed they adhere to or what walk of life they belong to. Smart replaced intelligent and clichés replaced analysis and smirks replaced apparent seriousness. You should see how they are now trying to sell us "Iran the Normal Country" and force feed us the "need to talk to Iran".
The crudeness and "laughability" of their claims on Iraq are matched only by the crudeness of their claims that Iran is a "great nation that must be talked to, not fight against" and in between the two, one can but feel dizzy at the whopping 180-degree reversal of politics. These people are no longer trying to impress you or brainwash you. They do not even aspire to fool some people sometime; they just want to convince some people that they appear convincing…sometime.
Remember, more than any other politics around the World, American politics live through a heavy dose of propaganda about who Americans are and what their mission in life is. The Intravenous serum of propaganda has been severed for good with the war on Iraq. Nothing will replace it neither now, nor in the future. This is the direct result of the belief of "Winner Takes All." A little modesty could have saved the day; millions of lives and the image of decency, shredded or intact, wrong or right, the Americans have of themselves. Out are the days of "we are basically good people;" in are the days of crude and frightful awakening.
One of these exceptions comes from an email I received from an Arab-American, who prefers to remain anonymous. I am publishing his/her mail with his/her consent.
I think this person is one of the very few who understood...I hope you will read that mail slowly and let it sink in, because it holds many important insights and truths.
Dear Layla,
I happened upon your website by accident and ever since, I have been hooked...
Thank you for the depth of your analysis and the clarity of your vision. I live in the United States...I can tell you that what thrills me the most about your prose is the fact that you have no illusion about the "Good Cop" in that tired and despicable vicious cycle we are pitted in, namely, having to listen to the "Good Cop" apologizing for the actions of the "Bad Cop" while at the same time, both take a break and drink coffee together. The false dichotomy of bleeding heart "Liberals" and security minded "Conservatives" is the favorite currency of political dialogue in the United States. They play the game like husbands and wives have done for thousands of years. One punishes and the other tells you to please moderate your naughty behavior and stop being stubborn, while accusing the other of being too harsh. The game is so crude that I wonder whether they really care if we believe what they claim or not. Crude as it has been all along, it has lost any effect it ever had, thanks to the war on Iraq.
Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed, the USA felt no more the need to play a smart game or don a pretty disguise in pursuit of its ugly policy. Propaganda and its actors are no more the pretty faces, the pleasant cartoons, the creative ads selling exotic goods, the claimed lush lifestyle, the claimed beacon of democracy, or in the case of the Media, the clever cover of diversity. The old propaganda has died and in its place has risen and taken shape a ghost-like apparition : Instead of striving to appear diverse, now their only hope is that listeners believe them to be "appearing diverse"; instead of striving to convince you that they are spreading democracy, they are now desperately hoping that you at least believe that they are appearing to be on the side of democracy; Instead of making a case to you that they are on the side of human rights around the world, now their best hope is that you do not laugh when they try to appear to be on the side of human rights around the world; instead of claiming to be fighting drugs, they now strive to confirm the "appearance" of fighting drugs. This is Neo-propaganda, a propaganda that wears a sign that says, " I am propaganda, do not believe me." This is how clownish the situation is: the same old tired stale joke told by a clown who expects you to smile at his joke, not because you like them, but because you feel pity for him. It is as weird as seeing an old man playing "Hide and Seek" and loving it.
The "beauty" of propaganda in what was a bi-polar World has completely been discarded and replaced with one-liners and clichés told by the incredulous. If you appear to appear honest, you are a bad faker leaves an effect no better than that of movies played by bad actors who do not believe what they are playing and it shows on their faces. At no time did this situation become so porn-like clear than in the selling of the invasion of Iraq and …of course… the war on terrorism.
I have been in the United States for more than 20 years and have seen how "funny" their salesmanship was, how crude their pitch was, and how delusional these people were, no matter what creed they adhere to or what walk of life they belong to. Smart replaced intelligent and clichés replaced analysis and smirks replaced apparent seriousness. You should see how they are now trying to sell us "Iran the Normal Country" and force feed us the "need to talk to Iran".
The crudeness and "laughability" of their claims on Iraq are matched only by the crudeness of their claims that Iran is a "great nation that must be talked to, not fight against" and in between the two, one can but feel dizzy at the whopping 180-degree reversal of politics. These people are no longer trying to impress you or brainwash you. They do not even aspire to fool some people sometime; they just want to convince some people that they appear convincing…sometime.
Remember, more than any other politics around the World, American politics live through a heavy dose of propaganda about who Americans are and what their mission in life is. The Intravenous serum of propaganda has been severed for good with the war on Iraq. Nothing will replace it neither now, nor in the future. This is the direct result of the belief of "Winner Takes All." A little modesty could have saved the day; millions of lives and the image of decency, shredded or intact, wrong or right, the Americans have of themselves. Out are the days of "we are basically good people;" in are the days of crude and frightful awakening.
Wednesday, 22 April 2009
One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex Barry R. McCaffrey
November 30, 2008
One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex
By DAVID BARSTOW
In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity.
The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles.
Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially worth billions in sales, and Defense Solutions soon found its man. The company signed Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007.
Four days later the general swung into action. He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, strongly recommending Defense Solutions and its offer to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles from Eastern Europe. “No other proposal is quicker, less costly, or more certain to succeed,” he said.
Thus, within days of hiring General McCaffrey, the Defense Solutions sales pitch was in the hands of the American commander with the greatest influence over Iraq’s expanding military.
“That’s what I pay him for,” Timothy D. Ringgold, chief executive of Defense Solutions, said in an interview.
General McCaffrey did not mention his new contract with Defense Solutions in his letter to General Petraeus. Nor did he disclose it when he went on CNBC that same week and praised the commander Defense Solutions was now counting on for help — “He’s got the heart of a lion” — or when he told Congress the next month that it should immediately supply Iraq with large numbers of armored vehicles and other equipment.
He had made similar arguments before he was hired by Defense Solutions, but this time he went further. In his testimony to Congress, General McCaffrey criticized a Pentagon plan to supply Iraq with several hundred armored vehicles made in the United States by a competitor of Defense Solutions. He called the plan “not in the right ballpark” and urged Congress to instead equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.
“We’ve got Iraqi army battalions driving around in Toyota trucks,” he said, echoing an argument made to General Petraeus in the Defense Solutions briefing packet.
Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired generals, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and defense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.
Few illustrate the submerged complexities of this world better than Barry McCaffrey.
General McCaffrey, 66, has long been a force in Washington’s power elite. A consummate networker, he cultivated politicians and journalists of all stripes as drug czar in the Clinton cabinet, and his ties run deep to a new generation of generals, some of whom he taught at West Point or commanded in the Persian Gulf war, when he rose to fame leading the “left hook” assault on Iraqi forces.
But it was 9/11 that thrust General McCaffrey to the forefront of the national security debate. In the years since he has made nearly 1,000 appearances on NBC and its cable sisters, delivering crisp sound bites in a blunt, hyperbolic style. He commands up to $25,000 for speeches, his commentary regularly turns up in The Wall Street Journal, and he has been quoted or cited in thousands of news articles, including dozens in The New York Times.
His influence is such that President Bush and Congressional leaders from both parties have invited him for war consultations. His access is such that, despite a contentious relationship with former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon has arranged numerous trips to Iraq, Afghanistan and other hotspots solely for his benefit.
At the same time, General McCaffrey has immersed himself in businesses that have grown with the fight against terrorism.
The consulting company he started after leaving the government in 2001, BR McCaffrey Associates, promises to “build linkages” between government officials and contractors like Defense Solutions for up to $10,000 a month. He has also earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a defense industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, he is the chairman of HNTB Federal Services, an engineering and construction management company that often competes for national security contracts.
Many retired officers hold a perch in the world of military contracting, but General McCaffrey is among a select few who also command platforms in the news media and as government advisers on military matters. These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives. But with their business ties left undisclosed, it can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests.
On NBC and in other public forums, General McCaffrey has consistently advocated wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests. But those interests are not described to NBC’s viewers. He is held out as a dispassionate expert, not someone who helps companies win contracts related to the wars he discusses on television.
The president of NBC News, Steve Capus, said in an interview that General McCaffrey was a man of honor and achievement who would never let business obligations color his analysis for NBC. He described General McCaffrey as an “independent voice” who had courageously challenged Mr. Rumsfeld, adding, “There’s no open microphone that begins with the Pentagon and ends with him going out over our airwaves.”
General McCaffrey is not required to abide by NBC’s formal conflict-of-interest rules, Mr. Capus said, because he is a consultant, not a news employee. Nor is he required to disclose his business interests periodically. But Mr. Capus said that the network had conversations with its military analysts about the need to avoid even the appearance of a conflict, and that General McCaffrey had been “incredibly forthcoming” about his ties to military contractors.
General McCaffrey declined to be interviewed but released a brief statement.
“My public media commentary on the war labeled me as an early and serious critic of Rumsfeld’s arrogance and mismanagement of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the statement said. “The New York Times noted my strong on-air criticism as an NBC commentator. My op-ed objections to the execution of the war were published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, USA Today and other media. Hardly the stuff of someone shilling a war for the administration — or privately pushing his business interests with the Pentagon. Thirty-seven years of public service. Four combat tours. Wounded three times. The country knows me as a nonpartisan and objective national security expert with solid integrity.”
In earlier e-mail messages, General McCaffrey played down his involvement in lobbying for contracts, suggesting he mainly gave companies “strategic counsel.” His business responsibilities, he wrote, simply do not conflict with his duty to provide objective analysis on NBC. “Never has been a problem,” he wrote. “Period.”
General McCaffrey did in fact emerge as a tough critic of Mr. Rumsfeld, describing him as reckless and incompetent. His central criticism — that Mr. Rumsfeld fought the Iraq war “on the cheap” — reflected his long-stated views on waging war. But it also dovetailed with his business interests. And his clashes with Mr. Rumsfeld were but one facet of a more complex and symbiotic relationship with the Bush administration and the military’s uniformed leaders, records and interviews show.
With a few exceptions General McCaffrey has consistently supported Mr. Bush’s major national security policies, especially the war in Iraq. He advocated invasion, urged building up the military to sustain the occupation and warned that premature withdrawal would invite catastrophe.
In an article earlier this year, The New York Times identified General McCaffrey as one of some 75 military analysts who were the focus of a Pentagon public relations campaign that is now being examined by the Pentagon’s inspector general, the Government Accountability Office and the Federal Communications Commission. The campaign, begun in 2002 but suspended after the article’s publication, sought to transform the analysts into “surrogates” and “message force multipliers” for the Bush administration, records show. The analysts, many with military industry ties, were wooed in private briefings, showered with talking points and escorted on tours of Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The Pentagon inspector general is investigating whether special access gave any of these analysts an improper edge in the competition for contracts.
General McCaffrey offers a case study of the benefits that can flow from favored access: an inside track to sensitive information about strategy and tactics; insight into the priorities of ground commanders; a private channel to officials who oversaw war spending, as the Defense Solutions example shows. In that case the company has yet to win the contract it hired General McCaffrey to champion.
More broadly, though, his example reveals the myriad and often undisclosed connections between the business of war and the business of covering it.
A Move to Television
General McCaffrey made his debut as a military analyst in the weeks after 9/11. NBC anchors typically introduced him by describing his medals or his exploits in the gulf war. Or they noted he was a West Point professor, or the youngest four-star general in the history of the Army.
They did not mention his work for military contractors, including a lucrative new role with Veritas Capital.
Veritas was a relatively small player in 2001, looking to grow through acquisitions and Pentagon contracts. Competing for contracts is a complex and subtle sport, governed by highly bureaucratic bidding rules and the old-fashioned arts of access and influence.
Veritas would compete on both fronts.
Just days before the terrorist attacks — on Sept. 6, 2001 — Veritas had announced the formation of an “advisory council” of well-connected retired generals and admirals, including General McCaffrey. “They can really pick up the phone and call someone,” Robert B. McKeon, the president of Veritas, would later tell The Times.
Access was also part of what drew NBC to General McCaffrey. Mr. Capus said General McCaffrey “opens doors with generals and others who we would not otherwise be able to talk to.”
Veritas gave its advisers board seats on its military companies, along with profit sharing and equity stakes that were all the more attractive because Veritas intended to turn quick profits through initial public offerings. On Sept. 6, this might have been considered a gamble. Revenue growth — a key to successful I.P.O.’s — required sustained increases in military spending. But after Sept. 11, the only question was just how big those increases would be.
From his first months on the air, General McCaffrey called for huge, sustained increases in military spending for a global campaign against terrorism. He also advocated spending for high-tech weapons, including some like precision-guided munitions and unmanned aerial vehicles that were important to the Veritas portfolio. He called the C-17 cargo plane — also a source of Veritas contracts — a “national treasure.”
In a statement, Veritas said it had gained no “discernible benefit” from General McCaffrey’s television appearances and called his TV work “completely independent” from his role with Veritas.
In their corporate filings, Veritas military companies told investors they were well positioned to benefit from a widening global struggle against terrorism. The approaching conflict with Iraq, though, would create new areas of tension between General McCaffrey’s fiduciary obligations to Veritas and his duties to NBC.
General McCaffrey harbored significant doubts about the invasion plan. An informal participant in the war planning, he was troubled by Mr. Rumsfeld’s resistance to an invasion force of several hundred thousand, he acknowledged months and years later in interviews. Mr. Rumsfeld’s team, he said, was bent on making an “ideological” point that wars could be fought “on the cheap.” There were not enough tanks, artillery or troops, he would say, and the result was a “grossly anemic” force that unnecessarily put troops at risk.
That is not what General McCaffrey said when asked on NBC outlets to assess the risks of war. As planning for a possible invasion received intense news coverage in 2002, he repeatedly assured viewers that the war would be brief, the occupation lengthy but benign.
“These people are going to come apart in 21 days or less,” he told Brian Williams on MSNBC.
In the fall of 2002 General McCaffrey joined the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group formed with White House encouragement to fan support for regime change. He also participated in private Pentagon briefings in which network military analysts were armed with talking points that made the case for war, records show.
In early 2003 Forrest Sawyer asked General McCaffrey on CNBC what could go wrong after an invasion. Anticipating this very question, the Pentagon had invited General McCaffrey and other analysts to a special briefing. Years later General McCaffrey would say he knew that the post-invasion planning was a disaster. “They were warned very categorically and directly by many of us prior to that war,” he said.
Given a chance by Mr. Sawyer to raise an alarm, the general reiterated Pentagon talking points about the “astonishing amount” of postwar planning.
And when Tom Brokaw asked him, days before the invasion, “What are your concerns if we were to go to war by the end of this week?” he replied, “Well, I don’t think I have any real serious ones.”
Only when the invasion met unexpected resistance did General McCaffrey give a glimpse of his misgivings. “We’ve placed ourselves in a risky proposition, 400 miles into Iraq with no flank or rear area security,” he told Katie Couric on “Today.”
Mr. Rumsfeld struck back. He abruptly cut off General McCaffrey’s access to the Pentagon’s special briefings and conference calls.
General McCaffrey was stunned. “I’ve never heard his voice like that,” recalled one close associate who asked not to be identified. He added, “They showed him what life was like on the outside.”
Robert Weiner, a longtime publicist for General McCaffrey, said the general came to see that if he continued his criticism, he risked being shut out not only by Mr. Rumsfeld but also by his network of friends and contacts among the uniformed leadership.
“There is a time when you have to punt,” said Mr. Weiner, emphasizing that he spoke as General McCaffrey’s friend, not as his spokesman.
Within days General McCaffrey began to backpedal, professing his “great respect” for Mr. Rumsfeld to Tim Russert. “Is this man O.K.?” the Fox News anchor Brit Hume asked, taking note of the about-face.
For months to come, as an insurgency took root, General McCaffrey defended the Bush administration. “I am 100 percent behind what the administration, what the president of the United States, is doing in Iraq,” he told Mr. Williams that June.
A Corporate Troubleshooter
Mr. Rumsfeld’s swift reaction underscored the administration’s appreciation of General McCaffrey’s influence. His comments were catalogued and circulated at the White House and Pentagon.
Other network analysts were monitored, too, but not the way General McCaffrey was. He was different. He was one of the few retired four-star generals on television, and his well-known friendships with men like General Petraeus and Gen. John P. Abizaid gave him added currency.
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, General McCaffrey increasingly gave public expression to the private frustrations of generals pressing their civilian bosses for more troops, weapons and reconstruction money. The Army, he repeatedly warned, could break under the strain.
These were politically charged topics, and so the administration worked to influence his commentary, using carrots and sticks alike. In 2005, for example, Mr. Rumsfeld took umbrage at remarks General McCaffrey made to The Washington Times about the impact of unchecked poppy production in Afghanistan. Mr. Rumsfeld wrote to Gen. Peter Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, demanding to know where General McCaffrey “got his information,” records show. No less than an assistant secretary of defense was dispatched to speak with General McCaffrey, who said he had been misquoted.
In a letter to The Times, General McCaffrey’s lawyer, Thomas A. Clare, said the general’s recurring criticisms had cost him “business opportunities with defense contractors.” NBC executives said they, too, fielded high-level complaints, and General McCaffrey was not invited back to the Pentagon’s analyst briefings.
On the other hand, when Pentagon officials noticed that General McCaffrey was scheduled to appear on programs like “Meet the Press,” they asked generals close to him to suggest themes, records show. The Pentagon also began paying for General McCaffrey to travel to Iraq and Afghanistan. Other military analysts were invited on trips, but only in groups. General McCaffrey went by himself under the sponsorship of Central Command’s generals.
The stated purpose was for General McCaffrey to provide an outside assessment in his role as a part-time professor at West Point. But his trips were also an important public relations tool, meticulously planned to arm him with anecdotes of progress. Records show that Central Command’s generals expected him to “publicly support their efforts” upon his return home and solicited his advice on how to “reverse the perception” in Washington of a lost war.
After each trip General McCaffrey embarked on a news media campaign, writing opinion articles, granting interviews, publishing “after action” reports on his firm’s Web site. Each time he extolled Central Command’s generals and called for a renewed national commitment of money and support.
At the same time, General McCaffrey used his access to further business interests, as he did during the summer of 2005, when Americans were turning against the Iraq war in droves.
Veritas had been on a shopping spree, buying military contractors deeply enmeshed in the war. Its biggest acquisition was of DynCorp International, best known for training foreign security forces for the United States government. By 2005 operations in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for 37 percent of DynCorp’s revenues.
The crumbling public support, though, posed a threat to Veritas’s prize acquisition. The changing political climate and unrelenting violence, DynCorp warned investors, could force a withdrawal from Iraq.
What is more, some of DynCorp’s Iraq contracts were in trouble, plagued by cost overruns, inept work by subcontractors and ineffective training programs. So when DynCorp executives learned that General McCaffrey was planning to travel to Iraq that June, they asked him to sound out American commanders and reassure them of DynCorp’s determination to make things right.
“It is useful both ways,” Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman, said in an interview. “If there were problems, and there were, then we could get an independent judgment and fix them.”
Mr. Lagana said General McCaffrey had been a troubleshooter for DynCorp on other trips. “He’ll say: ‘I’m going over. Is there anyone you want me to see?’ ” Mr. Lagana said. “And then he’d go in and say, ‘I’m on the board. What can you tell me?’ ”
The Pentagon had its own agenda. For eight days, General McCaffrey was given red-carpet treatment. Iraqi commandos even staged a live-fire demonstration for him. But General McCaffrey also was given access to officials whose decisions were important to his business interests, including DynCorp, which was planning an I.P.O. He met with General Petraeus, who was then in charge of training Iraqi security forces and responsible for supervising DynCorp’s 500 police trainers. He also met with officials responsible for billions of dollars’ worth of contracts in Iraq.
General McCaffrey would not discuss these sessions, and General Petraeus said in an e-mail message to The Times that he had no reason to discuss DynCorp with General McCaffrey because he would have gone directly to DynCorp’s executives in Iraq.
Back home, General McCaffrey undertook a one-man news media blitz in which he contradicted the dire assessments of many journalists in Iraq. He bore witness to progress on all fronts, but most of all he vouched for Iraq’s security forces. A year earlier, before joining DynCorp’s board, he had described these forces as “badly equipped, badly trained, politically unreliable.” Just months before, Gary E. Luck, a retired four-star Army general sent to assess progress in Iraq, had reported to Mr. Bush that security training was going poorly. Yet General McCaffrey now emphasized his “surprising” conclusion that the training was succeeding.
After Mr. Bush gave a speech praising Iraq’s new security forces, Brian Williams asked General McCaffrey for an independent assessment. “The Iraqi security forces are real,” General McCaffrey replied, without noting the concerns about DynCorp.
His financial stake in the policy debates over Iraq was not mentioned. He did not disclose that he owned special stock that allowed him to share in DynCorp’s profits, up 87 percent that year largely because of the Iraq war.
“I took as objective a look at it as I could,” he told David Gregory, the NBC correspondent.
A Contract in Iraq
In his written statements to The Times, General McCaffrey said his role with Veritas was “governance, not marketing,” and Veritas insisted that he never “solicited new or existing government contracts.”
General McCaffrey did, however, play an indirect role in helping Veritas win one of its largest contracts, to supply more than 8,000 translators to the war in Iraq. The contract had been held by L-3 Communications, but when General McCaffrey got wind that the Army was considering seeking new bidders, he called his friend James A. Marks, a major general in the Army who was approaching retirement and was versed in the uses of translators, having served as intelligence chief for land forces during the Iraq invasion.
As General Marks recalls it, General McCaffrey asked him to lead an effort to win the contract for Veritas.
General Marks, who became a CNN military analyst after his retirement in 2004, would be named president of a new DynCorp subsidiary, Global Linguist Solutions, created in July 2006 to bid for the translation contract. In August 2006 Veritas designated General McCaffrey as chairman of Global Linguist. According to a 2007 corporate filing, General McCaffrey was promised $10,000 a month plus expenses once Global Linguist secured the contract. He would also be eligible to share in profits, which could potentially be significant: the contract was worth $4.6 billion over five years, but only if the United States did not pull out of Iraq first.
In the fall of 2006, that was hardly a sure thing. With casualties rising, the nation’s discontent had been laid bare by the November elections. Then, in December, the Iraq Study Group recommended withdrawing all combat brigades by early 2008.
That month, in a flurry of appearances for NBC, General McCaffrey repeatedly ridiculed this recommendation, warning that it would turn Iraq into “Pol Pot’s Cambodia.”
The United States, he said, should keep at least 100,000 troops in Iraq for many years. He disputed depictions of an isolated and deluded White House. After meeting with the president and vice president on Dec. 11 in the Oval Office, he went on television and described them as “very sober-minded.”
General McCaffrey was hardly alone in criticizing the Iraq Study Group, and in his e-mail messages to The Times he said his objections reflected his judgment that it was folly to leave American trainers behind with no combat force protection. But in none of those appearances did NBC disclose General McCaffrey’s ties to Global Linguist.
NBC executives asserted that the general’s relationships with military contractors are indirectly disclosed through NBC’s Web site, where General McCaffrey’s biography now features a link to his consulting firm’s Web site. That site, they said, lists General McCaffrey’s clients.
While the general’s Web site lists his board memberships, it does not name his clients, nor does it mention Veritas Capital, by one measure the second-largest military contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, after KBR. In any event, Mr. Capus, the NBC News president, said he was unaware of General McCaffrey’s connection to the translation contract. Mr. Capus declined to comment on whether this information should have been disclosed.
CNN officials said they, too, were unaware of General Marks’s role in the contract. When they learned of it in 2007, they said, they were so concerned about what they considered an obvious conflict of interest that they severed ties with him. (General Marks, who also spoke out against the withdrawal plan on CNN, said business considerations did not influence his comments.)
On Dec. 18, 2006, the Pentagon stunned Wall Street by awarding the translation contract to Global Linguist. DynCorp’s stock jumped 15 percent.
Hiring a General
After touring Iraq in March 2007 and meeting with American officials responsible for equipping Iraq’s military, General McCaffrey published a trip report recommending that the United States equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.
This kind of access had strong appeal to Mr. Ringgold, Defense Solutions’ chief, who had a plan to rebuild Iraq’s decimated fleets of armored vehicles by culling “leftovers” from depots across Eastern Europe. “I was looking for an advocate,” Mr. Ringgold recalled.
General McCaffrey soon arrived for an audition at the Defense Solutions headquarters outside Philadelphia. “Frankly,” Mr. Ringgold recalled, “I had to get over the sticker shock of what he was going to cost me.”
General McCaffrey liked his basic concept but told him to think bigger, Mr. Ringgold said. Instead of minimally refurbished equipment, he urged Mr. Ringgold to sell “Americanized” armored vehicles upgraded with thermal sights and other expensive extras. And why not also team up with DynCorp and others to supply the maintenance, logistics and training to keep them running?
The suggestions vastly increased the proposal’s scale and price tag, but the general seemed to have a read on the complex interplay between the Iraqi government and the American military leadership, Mr. Ringgold recalled. For a retainer and an undisclosed equity stake, General McCaffrey signed on weeks later, then promptly wrote to General Petraeus.
His letter, drafted with help from Defense Solutions, explained that in the three months since his trip to Iraq, he had found just one feasible way to equip Iraq with enough armored vehicles to permit a “phased redeployment” of American combat forces — the proposal by Defense Solutions. He urged General Petraeus to act quickly but did not disclose that he had just been hired by Defense Solutions.
In his e-mail message to The Times, General Petraeus said he received “innumerable” letters from “would be” contractors. In this case, he wrote, he simply sent General McCaffrey’s material “without any endorsement” to James M. Dubik, the general then responsible for training Iraq’s security forces.
General Dubik, now retired, said in an interview that he, too, received a letter and information packet, and as a result briefed Iraq’s defense minister. “Quite frankly,” he said, “I thought it was a good idea.”
General Dubik emphasized that although he used Defense Solutions briefing materials, he first “sanitized” them of any mention of the company. He said he presented the idea as his own, intending to ask Defense Solutions to bid if the Iraqis liked the concept. But the defense minister reacted coolly, he said, arguing that Iraq deserved advanced American-made vehicles.
General McCaffrey also sent letters to top lawmakers and approached contacts inside the Defense Department bureaucracy that oversees foreign military sales. His influence was immediately apparent. For example, General McCaffrey reached out to Maj. Gen. Timothy F. Ghormley, chief of staff at Central Command, who promptly invited Mr. Ringgold to a meeting in Tampa, Fla. Mr. Ringgold recalled General Ghormley’s first words: “Why aren’t we doing this already?”
Nevertheless, by late 2007, Defense Solutions still had no deal. General McCaffrey, Mr. Ringgold recalled, said the company needed to get to Baghdad and meet directly with Iraqi leaders and important Americans.
On Oct. 26, 2007, General McCaffrey wrote an e-mail message to General Petraeus proposing to return to Iraq. He said his “principal interest would be to document progress in standing up Iraqi security forces,” and he proposed traveling soon, before the presidential primaries, so he could “speak objectively — before politics goes to roar level.”
In early December General McCaffrey arrived in Baghdad, where he met with Generals Petraeus and Dubik, among others.
General Petraeus said he did not recall them discussing Defense Solutions. General Dubik recalled giving General McCaffrey a detailed briefing on the effort to equip Iraq’s army, including the plans for armored vehicles. He said it was a measure of General McCaffrey’s integrity that he did not raise Defense Solutions. “He’s not going to cross the line,” General Dubik said.
Mr. Ringgold said General McCaffrey “made it perfectly clear” that he would not discuss their proposal with the two generals and even sent instructions that he was not to be contacted in Iraq “to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest.”
But Defense Solutions used information General McCaffrey gleaned from his meetings to refine its proposal. Mr. Ringgold followed General McCaffrey to Baghdad in February 2008 and then made plans to return in the spring to meet with Generals Dubik and Petraeus. “General McCaffrey insisted that I see you,” Mr. Ringgold wrote to General Petraeus in a March 20 e-mail message.
General Petraeus forwarded Mr. Ringgold’s message to General Dubik, who warned Mr. Ringgold that while he was happy to meet, Iraq’s defense minister was still hesitant. “They’ve gone back and forth on the refurbished stuff,” General Dubik wrote.
Defense Solutions turned to the White House. On May 9, Mr. Ringgold and Tom C. Korologos, a Republican lobbyist, met with a military aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and two National Security Council officials.
The next day, in an e-mail memorandum to his staff, Mr. Ringgold discussed other ways to press Iraqi and American officials, including generating news media coverage to suggest that Iraq’s “failure to ready its Army” was prolonging the occupation. General McCaffrey had been making a similar argument for months on NBC and elsewhere. “The end of the game is that the Iraqis got to maintain internal order,” he told Ann Curry, the NBC journalist.
Mr. Ringgold said he had never asked the general to take positions supporting Defense Solutions in his news media appearances. On the other hand, he added, “I hope he was thinking of us.”
Mr. Weiner, the general’s longtime publicist, said General McCaffrey worked with clients “to get your mission achieved in the media.” General McCaffrey, he said, often speaks out with the twin goals of shaping policy and generating favorable coverage for clients with worthy products or ideas.
“His motive is pure,” Mr. Weiner said. “It is national interest.”
Despite Defense Solutions’ efforts, Iraq recently placed orders for billions of dollars’ worth of American-made armored vehicles. But the company is not giving up, and it continues to rely on the advice of General McCaffrey, who returned to Iraq on Oct. 31 for another visit sponsored by the Pentagon.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 2, 2008
Because of a production error, an article on Sunday about Barry R. McCaffrey’s ties to a military contractor omitted, in some editions, the credit for one photograph and carried incorrect credits for three others. The photograph of General McCaffrey and Wayne A. Downing, another retired general, was taken by Brendan Smialowski for Getty Images. The photograph of Gen. David H. Petraeus was by Jason Reed for Reuters. The photograph of Donald H. Rumsfeld was by Ron Edmunds for The Associated Press. And the photograph of Gen. James M. Dubik was by Win McNamee for Getty Images.
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Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex
By DAVID BARSTOW
In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity.
The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles.
Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially worth billions in sales, and Defense Solutions soon found its man. The company signed Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007.
Four days later the general swung into action. He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, strongly recommending Defense Solutions and its offer to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles from Eastern Europe. “No other proposal is quicker, less costly, or more certain to succeed,” he said.
Thus, within days of hiring General McCaffrey, the Defense Solutions sales pitch was in the hands of the American commander with the greatest influence over Iraq’s expanding military.
“That’s what I pay him for,” Timothy D. Ringgold, chief executive of Defense Solutions, said in an interview.
General McCaffrey did not mention his new contract with Defense Solutions in his letter to General Petraeus. Nor did he disclose it when he went on CNBC that same week and praised the commander Defense Solutions was now counting on for help — “He’s got the heart of a lion” — or when he told Congress the next month that it should immediately supply Iraq with large numbers of armored vehicles and other equipment.
He had made similar arguments before he was hired by Defense Solutions, but this time he went further. In his testimony to Congress, General McCaffrey criticized a Pentagon plan to supply Iraq with several hundred armored vehicles made in the United States by a competitor of Defense Solutions. He called the plan “not in the right ballpark” and urged Congress to instead equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.
“We’ve got Iraqi army battalions driving around in Toyota trucks,” he said, echoing an argument made to General Petraeus in the Defense Solutions briefing packet.
Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired generals, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and defense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.
Few illustrate the submerged complexities of this world better than Barry McCaffrey.
General McCaffrey, 66, has long been a force in Washington’s power elite. A consummate networker, he cultivated politicians and journalists of all stripes as drug czar in the Clinton cabinet, and his ties run deep to a new generation of generals, some of whom he taught at West Point or commanded in the Persian Gulf war, when he rose to fame leading the “left hook” assault on Iraqi forces.
But it was 9/11 that thrust General McCaffrey to the forefront of the national security debate. In the years since he has made nearly 1,000 appearances on NBC and its cable sisters, delivering crisp sound bites in a blunt, hyperbolic style. He commands up to $25,000 for speeches, his commentary regularly turns up in The Wall Street Journal, and he has been quoted or cited in thousands of news articles, including dozens in The New York Times.
His influence is such that President Bush and Congressional leaders from both parties have invited him for war consultations. His access is such that, despite a contentious relationship with former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon has arranged numerous trips to Iraq, Afghanistan and other hotspots solely for his benefit.
At the same time, General McCaffrey has immersed himself in businesses that have grown with the fight against terrorism.
The consulting company he started after leaving the government in 2001, BR McCaffrey Associates, promises to “build linkages” between government officials and contractors like Defense Solutions for up to $10,000 a month. He has also earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a defense industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, he is the chairman of HNTB Federal Services, an engineering and construction management company that often competes for national security contracts.
Many retired officers hold a perch in the world of military contracting, but General McCaffrey is among a select few who also command platforms in the news media and as government advisers on military matters. These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives. But with their business ties left undisclosed, it can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests.
On NBC and in other public forums, General McCaffrey has consistently advocated wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests. But those interests are not described to NBC’s viewers. He is held out as a dispassionate expert, not someone who helps companies win contracts related to the wars he discusses on television.
The president of NBC News, Steve Capus, said in an interview that General McCaffrey was a man of honor and achievement who would never let business obligations color his analysis for NBC. He described General McCaffrey as an “independent voice” who had courageously challenged Mr. Rumsfeld, adding, “There’s no open microphone that begins with the Pentagon and ends with him going out over our airwaves.”
General McCaffrey is not required to abide by NBC’s formal conflict-of-interest rules, Mr. Capus said, because he is a consultant, not a news employee. Nor is he required to disclose his business interests periodically. But Mr. Capus said that the network had conversations with its military analysts about the need to avoid even the appearance of a conflict, and that General McCaffrey had been “incredibly forthcoming” about his ties to military contractors.
General McCaffrey declined to be interviewed but released a brief statement.
“My public media commentary on the war labeled me as an early and serious critic of Rumsfeld’s arrogance and mismanagement of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the statement said. “The New York Times noted my strong on-air criticism as an NBC commentator. My op-ed objections to the execution of the war were published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, USA Today and other media. Hardly the stuff of someone shilling a war for the administration — or privately pushing his business interests with the Pentagon. Thirty-seven years of public service. Four combat tours. Wounded three times. The country knows me as a nonpartisan and objective national security expert with solid integrity.”
In earlier e-mail messages, General McCaffrey played down his involvement in lobbying for contracts, suggesting he mainly gave companies “strategic counsel.” His business responsibilities, he wrote, simply do not conflict with his duty to provide objective analysis on NBC. “Never has been a problem,” he wrote. “Period.”
General McCaffrey did in fact emerge as a tough critic of Mr. Rumsfeld, describing him as reckless and incompetent. His central criticism — that Mr. Rumsfeld fought the Iraq war “on the cheap” — reflected his long-stated views on waging war. But it also dovetailed with his business interests. And his clashes with Mr. Rumsfeld were but one facet of a more complex and symbiotic relationship with the Bush administration and the military’s uniformed leaders, records and interviews show.
With a few exceptions General McCaffrey has consistently supported Mr. Bush’s major national security policies, especially the war in Iraq. He advocated invasion, urged building up the military to sustain the occupation and warned that premature withdrawal would invite catastrophe.
In an article earlier this year, The New York Times identified General McCaffrey as one of some 75 military analysts who were the focus of a Pentagon public relations campaign that is now being examined by the Pentagon’s inspector general, the Government Accountability Office and the Federal Communications Commission. The campaign, begun in 2002 but suspended after the article’s publication, sought to transform the analysts into “surrogates” and “message force multipliers” for the Bush administration, records show. The analysts, many with military industry ties, were wooed in private briefings, showered with talking points and escorted on tours of Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The Pentagon inspector general is investigating whether special access gave any of these analysts an improper edge in the competition for contracts.
General McCaffrey offers a case study of the benefits that can flow from favored access: an inside track to sensitive information about strategy and tactics; insight into the priorities of ground commanders; a private channel to officials who oversaw war spending, as the Defense Solutions example shows. In that case the company has yet to win the contract it hired General McCaffrey to champion.
More broadly, though, his example reveals the myriad and often undisclosed connections between the business of war and the business of covering it.
A Move to Television
General McCaffrey made his debut as a military analyst in the weeks after 9/11. NBC anchors typically introduced him by describing his medals or his exploits in the gulf war. Or they noted he was a West Point professor, or the youngest four-star general in the history of the Army.
They did not mention his work for military contractors, including a lucrative new role with Veritas Capital.
Veritas was a relatively small player in 2001, looking to grow through acquisitions and Pentagon contracts. Competing for contracts is a complex and subtle sport, governed by highly bureaucratic bidding rules and the old-fashioned arts of access and influence.
Veritas would compete on both fronts.
Just days before the terrorist attacks — on Sept. 6, 2001 — Veritas had announced the formation of an “advisory council” of well-connected retired generals and admirals, including General McCaffrey. “They can really pick up the phone and call someone,” Robert B. McKeon, the president of Veritas, would later tell The Times.
Access was also part of what drew NBC to General McCaffrey. Mr. Capus said General McCaffrey “opens doors with generals and others who we would not otherwise be able to talk to.”
Veritas gave its advisers board seats on its military companies, along with profit sharing and equity stakes that were all the more attractive because Veritas intended to turn quick profits through initial public offerings. On Sept. 6, this might have been considered a gamble. Revenue growth — a key to successful I.P.O.’s — required sustained increases in military spending. But after Sept. 11, the only question was just how big those increases would be.
From his first months on the air, General McCaffrey called for huge, sustained increases in military spending for a global campaign against terrorism. He also advocated spending for high-tech weapons, including some like precision-guided munitions and unmanned aerial vehicles that were important to the Veritas portfolio. He called the C-17 cargo plane — also a source of Veritas contracts — a “national treasure.”
In a statement, Veritas said it had gained no “discernible benefit” from General McCaffrey’s television appearances and called his TV work “completely independent” from his role with Veritas.
In their corporate filings, Veritas military companies told investors they were well positioned to benefit from a widening global struggle against terrorism. The approaching conflict with Iraq, though, would create new areas of tension between General McCaffrey’s fiduciary obligations to Veritas and his duties to NBC.
General McCaffrey harbored significant doubts about the invasion plan. An informal participant in the war planning, he was troubled by Mr. Rumsfeld’s resistance to an invasion force of several hundred thousand, he acknowledged months and years later in interviews. Mr. Rumsfeld’s team, he said, was bent on making an “ideological” point that wars could be fought “on the cheap.” There were not enough tanks, artillery or troops, he would say, and the result was a “grossly anemic” force that unnecessarily put troops at risk.
That is not what General McCaffrey said when asked on NBC outlets to assess the risks of war. As planning for a possible invasion received intense news coverage in 2002, he repeatedly assured viewers that the war would be brief, the occupation lengthy but benign.
“These people are going to come apart in 21 days or less,” he told Brian Williams on MSNBC.
In the fall of 2002 General McCaffrey joined the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group formed with White House encouragement to fan support for regime change. He also participated in private Pentagon briefings in which network military analysts were armed with talking points that made the case for war, records show.
In early 2003 Forrest Sawyer asked General McCaffrey on CNBC what could go wrong after an invasion. Anticipating this very question, the Pentagon had invited General McCaffrey and other analysts to a special briefing. Years later General McCaffrey would say he knew that the post-invasion planning was a disaster. “They were warned very categorically and directly by many of us prior to that war,” he said.
Given a chance by Mr. Sawyer to raise an alarm, the general reiterated Pentagon talking points about the “astonishing amount” of postwar planning.
And when Tom Brokaw asked him, days before the invasion, “What are your concerns if we were to go to war by the end of this week?” he replied, “Well, I don’t think I have any real serious ones.”
Only when the invasion met unexpected resistance did General McCaffrey give a glimpse of his misgivings. “We’ve placed ourselves in a risky proposition, 400 miles into Iraq with no flank or rear area security,” he told Katie Couric on “Today.”
Mr. Rumsfeld struck back. He abruptly cut off General McCaffrey’s access to the Pentagon’s special briefings and conference calls.
General McCaffrey was stunned. “I’ve never heard his voice like that,” recalled one close associate who asked not to be identified. He added, “They showed him what life was like on the outside.”
Robert Weiner, a longtime publicist for General McCaffrey, said the general came to see that if he continued his criticism, he risked being shut out not only by Mr. Rumsfeld but also by his network of friends and contacts among the uniformed leadership.
“There is a time when you have to punt,” said Mr. Weiner, emphasizing that he spoke as General McCaffrey’s friend, not as his spokesman.
Within days General McCaffrey began to backpedal, professing his “great respect” for Mr. Rumsfeld to Tim Russert. “Is this man O.K.?” the Fox News anchor Brit Hume asked, taking note of the about-face.
For months to come, as an insurgency took root, General McCaffrey defended the Bush administration. “I am 100 percent behind what the administration, what the president of the United States, is doing in Iraq,” he told Mr. Williams that June.
A Corporate Troubleshooter
Mr. Rumsfeld’s swift reaction underscored the administration’s appreciation of General McCaffrey’s influence. His comments were catalogued and circulated at the White House and Pentagon.
Other network analysts were monitored, too, but not the way General McCaffrey was. He was different. He was one of the few retired four-star generals on television, and his well-known friendships with men like General Petraeus and Gen. John P. Abizaid gave him added currency.
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, General McCaffrey increasingly gave public expression to the private frustrations of generals pressing their civilian bosses for more troops, weapons and reconstruction money. The Army, he repeatedly warned, could break under the strain.
These were politically charged topics, and so the administration worked to influence his commentary, using carrots and sticks alike. In 2005, for example, Mr. Rumsfeld took umbrage at remarks General McCaffrey made to The Washington Times about the impact of unchecked poppy production in Afghanistan. Mr. Rumsfeld wrote to Gen. Peter Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, demanding to know where General McCaffrey “got his information,” records show. No less than an assistant secretary of defense was dispatched to speak with General McCaffrey, who said he had been misquoted.
In a letter to The Times, General McCaffrey’s lawyer, Thomas A. Clare, said the general’s recurring criticisms had cost him “business opportunities with defense contractors.” NBC executives said they, too, fielded high-level complaints, and General McCaffrey was not invited back to the Pentagon’s analyst briefings.
On the other hand, when Pentagon officials noticed that General McCaffrey was scheduled to appear on programs like “Meet the Press,” they asked generals close to him to suggest themes, records show. The Pentagon also began paying for General McCaffrey to travel to Iraq and Afghanistan. Other military analysts were invited on trips, but only in groups. General McCaffrey went by himself under the sponsorship of Central Command’s generals.
The stated purpose was for General McCaffrey to provide an outside assessment in his role as a part-time professor at West Point. But his trips were also an important public relations tool, meticulously planned to arm him with anecdotes of progress. Records show that Central Command’s generals expected him to “publicly support their efforts” upon his return home and solicited his advice on how to “reverse the perception” in Washington of a lost war.
After each trip General McCaffrey embarked on a news media campaign, writing opinion articles, granting interviews, publishing “after action” reports on his firm’s Web site. Each time he extolled Central Command’s generals and called for a renewed national commitment of money and support.
At the same time, General McCaffrey used his access to further business interests, as he did during the summer of 2005, when Americans were turning against the Iraq war in droves.
Veritas had been on a shopping spree, buying military contractors deeply enmeshed in the war. Its biggest acquisition was of DynCorp International, best known for training foreign security forces for the United States government. By 2005 operations in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for 37 percent of DynCorp’s revenues.
The crumbling public support, though, posed a threat to Veritas’s prize acquisition. The changing political climate and unrelenting violence, DynCorp warned investors, could force a withdrawal from Iraq.
What is more, some of DynCorp’s Iraq contracts were in trouble, plagued by cost overruns, inept work by subcontractors and ineffective training programs. So when DynCorp executives learned that General McCaffrey was planning to travel to Iraq that June, they asked him to sound out American commanders and reassure them of DynCorp’s determination to make things right.
“It is useful both ways,” Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman, said in an interview. “If there were problems, and there were, then we could get an independent judgment and fix them.”
Mr. Lagana said General McCaffrey had been a troubleshooter for DynCorp on other trips. “He’ll say: ‘I’m going over. Is there anyone you want me to see?’ ” Mr. Lagana said. “And then he’d go in and say, ‘I’m on the board. What can you tell me?’ ”
The Pentagon had its own agenda. For eight days, General McCaffrey was given red-carpet treatment. Iraqi commandos even staged a live-fire demonstration for him. But General McCaffrey also was given access to officials whose decisions were important to his business interests, including DynCorp, which was planning an I.P.O. He met with General Petraeus, who was then in charge of training Iraqi security forces and responsible for supervising DynCorp’s 500 police trainers. He also met with officials responsible for billions of dollars’ worth of contracts in Iraq.
General McCaffrey would not discuss these sessions, and General Petraeus said in an e-mail message to The Times that he had no reason to discuss DynCorp with General McCaffrey because he would have gone directly to DynCorp’s executives in Iraq.
Back home, General McCaffrey undertook a one-man news media blitz in which he contradicted the dire assessments of many journalists in Iraq. He bore witness to progress on all fronts, but most of all he vouched for Iraq’s security forces. A year earlier, before joining DynCorp’s board, he had described these forces as “badly equipped, badly trained, politically unreliable.” Just months before, Gary E. Luck, a retired four-star Army general sent to assess progress in Iraq, had reported to Mr. Bush that security training was going poorly. Yet General McCaffrey now emphasized his “surprising” conclusion that the training was succeeding.
After Mr. Bush gave a speech praising Iraq’s new security forces, Brian Williams asked General McCaffrey for an independent assessment. “The Iraqi security forces are real,” General McCaffrey replied, without noting the concerns about DynCorp.
His financial stake in the policy debates over Iraq was not mentioned. He did not disclose that he owned special stock that allowed him to share in DynCorp’s profits, up 87 percent that year largely because of the Iraq war.
“I took as objective a look at it as I could,” he told David Gregory, the NBC correspondent.
A Contract in Iraq
In his written statements to The Times, General McCaffrey said his role with Veritas was “governance, not marketing,” and Veritas insisted that he never “solicited new or existing government contracts.”
General McCaffrey did, however, play an indirect role in helping Veritas win one of its largest contracts, to supply more than 8,000 translators to the war in Iraq. The contract had been held by L-3 Communications, but when General McCaffrey got wind that the Army was considering seeking new bidders, he called his friend James A. Marks, a major general in the Army who was approaching retirement and was versed in the uses of translators, having served as intelligence chief for land forces during the Iraq invasion.
As General Marks recalls it, General McCaffrey asked him to lead an effort to win the contract for Veritas.
General Marks, who became a CNN military analyst after his retirement in 2004, would be named president of a new DynCorp subsidiary, Global Linguist Solutions, created in July 2006 to bid for the translation contract. In August 2006 Veritas designated General McCaffrey as chairman of Global Linguist. According to a 2007 corporate filing, General McCaffrey was promised $10,000 a month plus expenses once Global Linguist secured the contract. He would also be eligible to share in profits, which could potentially be significant: the contract was worth $4.6 billion over five years, but only if the United States did not pull out of Iraq first.
In the fall of 2006, that was hardly a sure thing. With casualties rising, the nation’s discontent had been laid bare by the November elections. Then, in December, the Iraq Study Group recommended withdrawing all combat brigades by early 2008.
That month, in a flurry of appearances for NBC, General McCaffrey repeatedly ridiculed this recommendation, warning that it would turn Iraq into “Pol Pot’s Cambodia.”
The United States, he said, should keep at least 100,000 troops in Iraq for many years. He disputed depictions of an isolated and deluded White House. After meeting with the president and vice president on Dec. 11 in the Oval Office, he went on television and described them as “very sober-minded.”
General McCaffrey was hardly alone in criticizing the Iraq Study Group, and in his e-mail messages to The Times he said his objections reflected his judgment that it was folly to leave American trainers behind with no combat force protection. But in none of those appearances did NBC disclose General McCaffrey’s ties to Global Linguist.
NBC executives asserted that the general’s relationships with military contractors are indirectly disclosed through NBC’s Web site, where General McCaffrey’s biography now features a link to his consulting firm’s Web site. That site, they said, lists General McCaffrey’s clients.
While the general’s Web site lists his board memberships, it does not name his clients, nor does it mention Veritas Capital, by one measure the second-largest military contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, after KBR. In any event, Mr. Capus, the NBC News president, said he was unaware of General McCaffrey’s connection to the translation contract. Mr. Capus declined to comment on whether this information should have been disclosed.
CNN officials said they, too, were unaware of General Marks’s role in the contract. When they learned of it in 2007, they said, they were so concerned about what they considered an obvious conflict of interest that they severed ties with him. (General Marks, who also spoke out against the withdrawal plan on CNN, said business considerations did not influence his comments.)
On Dec. 18, 2006, the Pentagon stunned Wall Street by awarding the translation contract to Global Linguist. DynCorp’s stock jumped 15 percent.
Hiring a General
After touring Iraq in March 2007 and meeting with American officials responsible for equipping Iraq’s military, General McCaffrey published a trip report recommending that the United States equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.
This kind of access had strong appeal to Mr. Ringgold, Defense Solutions’ chief, who had a plan to rebuild Iraq’s decimated fleets of armored vehicles by culling “leftovers” from depots across Eastern Europe. “I was looking for an advocate,” Mr. Ringgold recalled.
General McCaffrey soon arrived for an audition at the Defense Solutions headquarters outside Philadelphia. “Frankly,” Mr. Ringgold recalled, “I had to get over the sticker shock of what he was going to cost me.”
General McCaffrey liked his basic concept but told him to think bigger, Mr. Ringgold said. Instead of minimally refurbished equipment, he urged Mr. Ringgold to sell “Americanized” armored vehicles upgraded with thermal sights and other expensive extras. And why not also team up with DynCorp and others to supply the maintenance, logistics and training to keep them running?
The suggestions vastly increased the proposal’s scale and price tag, but the general seemed to have a read on the complex interplay between the Iraqi government and the American military leadership, Mr. Ringgold recalled. For a retainer and an undisclosed equity stake, General McCaffrey signed on weeks later, then promptly wrote to General Petraeus.
His letter, drafted with help from Defense Solutions, explained that in the three months since his trip to Iraq, he had found just one feasible way to equip Iraq with enough armored vehicles to permit a “phased redeployment” of American combat forces — the proposal by Defense Solutions. He urged General Petraeus to act quickly but did not disclose that he had just been hired by Defense Solutions.
In his e-mail message to The Times, General Petraeus said he received “innumerable” letters from “would be” contractors. In this case, he wrote, he simply sent General McCaffrey’s material “without any endorsement” to James M. Dubik, the general then responsible for training Iraq’s security forces.
General Dubik, now retired, said in an interview that he, too, received a letter and information packet, and as a result briefed Iraq’s defense minister. “Quite frankly,” he said, “I thought it was a good idea.”
General Dubik emphasized that although he used Defense Solutions briefing materials, he first “sanitized” them of any mention of the company. He said he presented the idea as his own, intending to ask Defense Solutions to bid if the Iraqis liked the concept. But the defense minister reacted coolly, he said, arguing that Iraq deserved advanced American-made vehicles.
General McCaffrey also sent letters to top lawmakers and approached contacts inside the Defense Department bureaucracy that oversees foreign military sales. His influence was immediately apparent. For example, General McCaffrey reached out to Maj. Gen. Timothy F. Ghormley, chief of staff at Central Command, who promptly invited Mr. Ringgold to a meeting in Tampa, Fla. Mr. Ringgold recalled General Ghormley’s first words: “Why aren’t we doing this already?”
Nevertheless, by late 2007, Defense Solutions still had no deal. General McCaffrey, Mr. Ringgold recalled, said the company needed to get to Baghdad and meet directly with Iraqi leaders and important Americans.
On Oct. 26, 2007, General McCaffrey wrote an e-mail message to General Petraeus proposing to return to Iraq. He said his “principal interest would be to document progress in standing up Iraqi security forces,” and he proposed traveling soon, before the presidential primaries, so he could “speak objectively — before politics goes to roar level.”
In early December General McCaffrey arrived in Baghdad, where he met with Generals Petraeus and Dubik, among others.
General Petraeus said he did not recall them discussing Defense Solutions. General Dubik recalled giving General McCaffrey a detailed briefing on the effort to equip Iraq’s army, including the plans for armored vehicles. He said it was a measure of General McCaffrey’s integrity that he did not raise Defense Solutions. “He’s not going to cross the line,” General Dubik said.
Mr. Ringgold said General McCaffrey “made it perfectly clear” that he would not discuss their proposal with the two generals and even sent instructions that he was not to be contacted in Iraq “to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest.”
But Defense Solutions used information General McCaffrey gleaned from his meetings to refine its proposal. Mr. Ringgold followed General McCaffrey to Baghdad in February 2008 and then made plans to return in the spring to meet with Generals Dubik and Petraeus. “General McCaffrey insisted that I see you,” Mr. Ringgold wrote to General Petraeus in a March 20 e-mail message.
General Petraeus forwarded Mr. Ringgold’s message to General Dubik, who warned Mr. Ringgold that while he was happy to meet, Iraq’s defense minister was still hesitant. “They’ve gone back and forth on the refurbished stuff,” General Dubik wrote.
Defense Solutions turned to the White House. On May 9, Mr. Ringgold and Tom C. Korologos, a Republican lobbyist, met with a military aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and two National Security Council officials.
The next day, in an e-mail memorandum to his staff, Mr. Ringgold discussed other ways to press Iraqi and American officials, including generating news media coverage to suggest that Iraq’s “failure to ready its Army” was prolonging the occupation. General McCaffrey had been making a similar argument for months on NBC and elsewhere. “The end of the game is that the Iraqis got to maintain internal order,” he told Ann Curry, the NBC journalist.
Mr. Ringgold said he had never asked the general to take positions supporting Defense Solutions in his news media appearances. On the other hand, he added, “I hope he was thinking of us.”
Mr. Weiner, the general’s longtime publicist, said General McCaffrey worked with clients “to get your mission achieved in the media.” General McCaffrey, he said, often speaks out with the twin goals of shaping policy and generating favorable coverage for clients with worthy products or ideas.
“His motive is pure,” Mr. Weiner said. “It is national interest.”
Despite Defense Solutions’ efforts, Iraq recently placed orders for billions of dollars’ worth of American-made armored vehicles. But the company is not giving up, and it continues to rely on the advice of General McCaffrey, who returned to Iraq on Oct. 31 for another visit sponsored by the Pentagon.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 2, 2008
Because of a production error, an article on Sunday about Barry R. McCaffrey’s ties to a military contractor omitted, in some editions, the credit for one photograph and carried incorrect credits for three others. The photograph of General McCaffrey and Wayne A. Downing, another retired general, was taken by Brendan Smialowski for Getty Images. The photograph of Gen. David H. Petraeus was by Jason Reed for Reuters. The photograph of Donald H. Rumsfeld was by Ron Edmunds for The Associated Press. And the photograph of Gen. James M. Dubik was by Win McNamee for Getty Images.
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Wednesday, 15 April 2009
Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete
Kufuor has company in Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete of Tanzania. After multiparty general elections in Dec. 2005, Kikwete was declared winner by the Electoral Commission and was sworn in as the fourth president of the United Republic of Tanzania on Dec. 21, 2005. If his track record of integrity is anything to go by, he will be handing his office over to an elected successor at the end of his tenure.
Kikwete drank from Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s fountain of wisdom. Kikwete, being very close to the Mwalimu (teacher), has a governing philosophy and political views that were greatly influenced by Nyerere. He has been celebrated at home and abroad, especially in the donor community for fighting corruption, investing in people, particularly in education, and pushing for new investments.
His successes led the United States government to grant Tanzania $698 million under the Millennium Challenge Account assistance program. Indeed, then-President George W. Bush voiced a vote of confidence in Kikwete: “I’d like to express my happiness and satisfaction on the way you are committed to improving the economy, good governance and maintaining peace, not only in Tanzania but also Africa and the world at large.” Kikwete’s first notable success as African Union chairman was to help bring a two-month political crisis in Kenya to an end by brokering a power-sharing deal between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga.
The benchmarks used to select Tanzania for the Millennium Challenge Corporation agreement were good governance, investment in manpower through education and health care, and economic policies. The U.K. government also granted the country the equivalent of $500 million for education. In recognition of the giant leaps made by the small country, the New York-based Africa-America Institute awarded Tanzania the Africa National Achievement Award in September 2007.
Kikwete drank from Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s fountain of wisdom. Kikwete, being very close to the Mwalimu (teacher), has a governing philosophy and political views that were greatly influenced by Nyerere. He has been celebrated at home and abroad, especially in the donor community for fighting corruption, investing in people, particularly in education, and pushing for new investments.
His successes led the United States government to grant Tanzania $698 million under the Millennium Challenge Account assistance program. Indeed, then-President George W. Bush voiced a vote of confidence in Kikwete: “I’d like to express my happiness and satisfaction on the way you are committed to improving the economy, good governance and maintaining peace, not only in Tanzania but also Africa and the world at large.” Kikwete’s first notable success as African Union chairman was to help bring a two-month political crisis in Kenya to an end by brokering a power-sharing deal between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga.
The benchmarks used to select Tanzania for the Millennium Challenge Corporation agreement were good governance, investment in manpower through education and health care, and economic policies. The U.K. government also granted the country the equivalent of $500 million for education. In recognition of the giant leaps made by the small country, the New York-based Africa-America Institute awarded Tanzania the Africa National Achievement Award in September 2007.
John Agyekum Kufuor
Among Africa’s credible leaders is John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana, who recently handed over power in a peaceful transition of government to Ghana’s new president, John Atta Mills. Kufuor himself took over from President Jerry Rawlings in a flawless exchange of democratic power in 2001. Ghana has therefore experienced its second peaceful transition of power from one political party to another in a decade.
Kufuor, an Oxford-educated barrister, always wanted to be president. He became a member of Parliament and deputy foreign minister at the age of 30, hoping to achieve his dream from there. But that lasted only two and a half years. The regime was overthrown. Taking to the trenches to be a warlord was, however, not his style, even though he is about 1.93 meters tall (6 foot 4) and weighs over 110 kilograms (240 pounds). He stuck it out as an entrepreneur, once running a brick and tile factory, only to jump back into politics each time democracy was restored. He eventually became his country’s president at age 62 in 2001, after Rawlings defeated him when he ran for president in the 1996 elections. Kufuor’s victory marked the first peaceful democratic transition of power in Ghana since the country’s independence in 1957.
At the end of the stipulated two terms, Kufuor made no attempt to amend the constitution to extend his stay in office and allowed Ghanaians to freely choose their next leader. This was despite the fact that one of the foremost presidential candidates, Nana Dankwa Akufo-Addo, represented Kufuor’s political party, the New National Party (NNP). Akufo-Addo eventually lost to the rival party’s candidate.
Ghana’s peaceful transition of power attracted global attention. French President Nicolas Sarkozy described Atta Mills’ election as a “victory for democracy.” Canada’s foreign minister, Lawrence Cannon, also said in a written statement: “Canada congratulates the Ghanaian people for the overall peaceful, orderly and transparent manner in which the country’s 2008 parliamentary and presidential elections were conducted.”
Kufuor left office with high popularity ratings. A Primary Research Associates poll shows that nearly 70 percent of Ghanaians think President Kufuor gave the performance of his life in his tenure as president of the republic. Seventy and a half percent of those polled said Kufuor’s government had done “things important to them.” Fifty-eight and a half percent of interviewees expressed satisfaction “with the way the Kufuor government has handled the economy.”
Under his watch, Ghana’s gross domestic product quadrupled from 4 billion U.S. dollars in 2000 to almost $16 billion in 2008. With this windfall, Kufuor halved the level of poverty and increased the number of children in primary school by almost a quarter. He introduced free medical care for the poor in 2004 and free meals in schools. He took Ghana’s daily minimum wage from 58 cents to $2.25, reduced inflation from 42 percent to 18 percent and took measures to enhance press freedom.
Still, these leaders and their countries are not without issues. For instance, Tanzania is in the bottom 10 percent of the world’s economies in terms of per capita income. And despite Botswana’s diamond wealth, unemployment is 18 percent, and about one-third of the people are poor. The election of Chissano was not uncontroversial. His son was implicated in the death of journalist Carlos Cardoso, a progressive Mozambican journalist who was murdered in 2000. Kufuor is presently under attack for what many Ghanaians believe is an over-the-top retirement package.
Kufuor, an Oxford-educated barrister, always wanted to be president. He became a member of Parliament and deputy foreign minister at the age of 30, hoping to achieve his dream from there. But that lasted only two and a half years. The regime was overthrown. Taking to the trenches to be a warlord was, however, not his style, even though he is about 1.93 meters tall (6 foot 4) and weighs over 110 kilograms (240 pounds). He stuck it out as an entrepreneur, once running a brick and tile factory, only to jump back into politics each time democracy was restored. He eventually became his country’s president at age 62 in 2001, after Rawlings defeated him when he ran for president in the 1996 elections. Kufuor’s victory marked the first peaceful democratic transition of power in Ghana since the country’s independence in 1957.
At the end of the stipulated two terms, Kufuor made no attempt to amend the constitution to extend his stay in office and allowed Ghanaians to freely choose their next leader. This was despite the fact that one of the foremost presidential candidates, Nana Dankwa Akufo-Addo, represented Kufuor’s political party, the New National Party (NNP). Akufo-Addo eventually lost to the rival party’s candidate.
Ghana’s peaceful transition of power attracted global attention. French President Nicolas Sarkozy described Atta Mills’ election as a “victory for democracy.” Canada’s foreign minister, Lawrence Cannon, also said in a written statement: “Canada congratulates the Ghanaian people for the overall peaceful, orderly and transparent manner in which the country’s 2008 parliamentary and presidential elections were conducted.”
Kufuor left office with high popularity ratings. A Primary Research Associates poll shows that nearly 70 percent of Ghanaians think President Kufuor gave the performance of his life in his tenure as president of the republic. Seventy and a half percent of those polled said Kufuor’s government had done “things important to them.” Fifty-eight and a half percent of interviewees expressed satisfaction “with the way the Kufuor government has handled the economy.”
Under his watch, Ghana’s gross domestic product quadrupled from 4 billion U.S. dollars in 2000 to almost $16 billion in 2008. With this windfall, Kufuor halved the level of poverty and increased the number of children in primary school by almost a quarter. He introduced free medical care for the poor in 2004 and free meals in schools. He took Ghana’s daily minimum wage from 58 cents to $2.25, reduced inflation from 42 percent to 18 percent and took measures to enhance press freedom.
Still, these leaders and their countries are not without issues. For instance, Tanzania is in the bottom 10 percent of the world’s economies in terms of per capita income. And despite Botswana’s diamond wealth, unemployment is 18 percent, and about one-third of the people are poor. The election of Chissano was not uncontroversial. His son was implicated in the death of journalist Carlos Cardoso, a progressive Mozambican journalist who was murdered in 2000. Kufuor is presently under attack for what many Ghanaians believe is an over-the-top retirement package.
Chissano
Chissano won the first Mo Ibrahim prize in 2007 for “his role in leading Mozambique from conflict to peace and democracy.” In 1994 he won the first multiparty elections in the history of the country, and was re-elected president of the republic in 1999. Despite the fact that the Mozambican constitution allowed him to stand in the 2004 presidential elections, Chissano decided voluntarily not to do so. He bowed out of office for an elected successor, Armando Emilio Guebuza.
Chissano was one of the founding members of the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO), which fought Portuguese colonial rule. He played a crucial role in negotiating the 1974 Lusaka Accord, which ended colonial rule, and he has been at the forefront of Mozambican political life since then. He was prime minister of the transitional government that led up to independence in 1975 and was later appointed foreign minister under independent Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel.
When President Machel died in a mysterious air crash in 1986, Chissano succeeded him as leader and devoted himself to restoring peace to his country. He led negotiations with the Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO) that in October 1992 succeeded in ending 16 years of internal conflict. His ability to compromise and negotiate is hailed for helping Mozambique become a stable, democratic country. He also initiated the constitutional and economic reforms which culminated in the adoption of the 1990 constitution that led Mozambique to a multiparty system and an open market.
Announcing Chissano’s win in 2007, Kofi Annan, chair of the prize committee, said that “President Chissano’s achievements in bringing peace, reconciliation, stable democracy and economic progress to his country greatly impressed the committee. So, too, did his decision to step down without seeking the third term the constitution allowed.”
Chissano was praised by the award committee for “his government’s economic progress, poverty reduction programs, infrastructure development, anti-AIDS efforts and his role in leading Mozambique from conflict to peace and democracy.” He was also commended for his contributions outside his country’s borders, which included providing “a powerful voice for Africa on the international stage.”
Mo Ibrahim paid tribute to Chissano as “a man who has reconciled a divided nation and built the foundations for a stable, democratic and prosperous future for the country,” saying “he is a role-model not just for Africa, but for the rest of the world.”
But the rest of the world thought Chissano was a fluke in Africa’s murky waters. According to BBC Southern Africa correspondent Peter Biles, “Chissano is something of a rarity in Africa as a leader who has left office with his reputation intact.”
Indeed, a persistent concern raised about the prize is that the committee might soon run out of candidates. The fact that the prize can only go to a president who won a free election and then left office in accordance with the nation’s constitution rules out most of the continent’s rulers. History, however, leaves no vacuum. And addressing this concern, Ibrahim says with a mischievous smile that “there are so many potential great African leaders that the continent has even been able to lend one to the United States.”
Chissano was one of the founding members of the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO), which fought Portuguese colonial rule. He played a crucial role in negotiating the 1974 Lusaka Accord, which ended colonial rule, and he has been at the forefront of Mozambican political life since then. He was prime minister of the transitional government that led up to independence in 1975 and was later appointed foreign minister under independent Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel.
When President Machel died in a mysterious air crash in 1986, Chissano succeeded him as leader and devoted himself to restoring peace to his country. He led negotiations with the Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO) that in October 1992 succeeded in ending 16 years of internal conflict. His ability to compromise and negotiate is hailed for helping Mozambique become a stable, democratic country. He also initiated the constitutional and economic reforms which culminated in the adoption of the 1990 constitution that led Mozambique to a multiparty system and an open market.
Announcing Chissano’s win in 2007, Kofi Annan, chair of the prize committee, said that “President Chissano’s achievements in bringing peace, reconciliation, stable democracy and economic progress to his country greatly impressed the committee. So, too, did his decision to step down without seeking the third term the constitution allowed.”
Chissano was praised by the award committee for “his government’s economic progress, poverty reduction programs, infrastructure development, anti-AIDS efforts and his role in leading Mozambique from conflict to peace and democracy.” He was also commended for his contributions outside his country’s borders, which included providing “a powerful voice for Africa on the international stage.”
Mo Ibrahim paid tribute to Chissano as “a man who has reconciled a divided nation and built the foundations for a stable, democratic and prosperous future for the country,” saying “he is a role-model not just for Africa, but for the rest of the world.”
But the rest of the world thought Chissano was a fluke in Africa’s murky waters. According to BBC Southern Africa correspondent Peter Biles, “Chissano is something of a rarity in Africa as a leader who has left office with his reputation intact.”
Indeed, a persistent concern raised about the prize is that the committee might soon run out of candidates. The fact that the prize can only go to a president who won a free election and then left office in accordance with the nation’s constitution rules out most of the continent’s rulers. History, however, leaves no vacuum. And addressing this concern, Ibrahim says with a mischievous smile that “there are so many potential great African leaders that the continent has even been able to lend one to the United States.”
Festus Gontebanye Mogae
Festus Gontebanye Mogae is Botswana’s former president, and he is probably as little known as his country. Botswana, acclaimed as Africa’s brightest star, rose from the ashes of grinding poverty to middle-income status in a generation. Its elections are peaceful, its politicians retire voluntarily, its civil society is vibrant and its natural resources are not a curse but a blessing shared by all.
Mogae recently attracted meager attention when he won the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. The annual prize was established by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation and launched in October 2006 as an African initiative “to strengthen governance and affirm the importance of nurturing outstanding leaders on the continent.” The prize aims to encourage leaders like Mogae who dedicate their tenures of office to surmounting the development challenges of their countries, improve the livelihoods and welfare of their people and consolidate the foundation for sustainable development.
The Mo Ibrahim Prize is the world’s largest annually awarded prize. Mogae will receive $5 million over the next 10 years and $200,000 per year thereafter for the rest of his life. Over the coming decade, the foundation may also grant another $200,000 a year to causes of Mogae’s choice.
Even though Mogae is known to maintain a modest lifestyle, the windfall should come in handy for the Oxford-trained economist. According to the founder of the prize, Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim, “the fact that African leaders are able to steal billions of dollars doesn’t mean that those who don’t shouldn’t have any money.”As The New York Times reported, Mogae was honored “for consolidating his nation’s democracy, ensuring that its diamond wealth enriched its people and providing bold leadership during his country’s AIDS pandemic.” Mogae scored his democracy pass mark by stepping down well ahead of the end of his second term as president and handing over power to his vice president, Ian Khama, in a smooth transition that stands out against the tango between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai in Zimbabwe, or between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga in Kenya.
While the democratic landmark in Botswana went virtually unnoticed, however, blow-by-blow accounts of the democratic woes of Zimbabwe and the electoral debacle in Kenya made headlines around the world. The Mo Ibrahim Prize may have been designed to correct such skews. According to Ibrahim, “it is intended to turn the spotlight on men and women who contribute the most but receive far less attention than leaders like Zimbabwe’s president.”
As president of Botswana, Mogae also made a mark with his defense of civil liberties and the rule of law, as well as his anti-corruption and transparency measures. But by far his most enduring legacy is the progressive and comprehensive programs he put in place for dealing with Botswana’s galloping AIDS figures. Botswana has one of the world’s highest known rates of HIV/AIDS infection. Approximately one in six Batswana has HIV, giving Botswana the second-highest infection rate in the world after Swaziland. In 2006, it was estimated that life expectancy at birth in Botswana had dropped from 65 to 35 years due to AIDS.
His government took drastic measures to tackle the pandemic, such as free anti-retroviral drug treatment and a nationwide Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission program. Botswana became the first sub-Saharan African country where free anti-retroviral drugs are widely available. As a tribute to his astuteness in dealing with the crisis, anti-retrovirals are known in Botswana as “Mogae’s tablets.”
Mogae was selected for the Mo Ibrahim Prize by a six-member panel led by Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations. The award committee paid glowing tribute to his anti-AIDS efforts: “President Mogae’s outstanding leadership has ensured Botswana’s continued stability and prosperity in the face of an HIV and AIDS pandemic which threatened the future of his country and his people.”
The panel based its judgment on the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, which ranks the quality of governance in sub-Saharan Africa based on economic and social development, peace and security, human rights, democracy and the rule of law. The index was developed under the direction of professor Robert Rotberg of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The Ibrahim Index aims to promote debate not just in Africa but around the world on the criteria by which governments should be assessed.
The panel also noted that Mogae’s economic management produced “remarkable growth, stymied inflation, attracted investment and allowed him to pursue diversification away from diamonds, while simultaneously using tax revenue to fund investment infrastructure, health and education.”
Botswana has been a leading light in African democracy. Formerly the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, Botswana adopted its new name when it gained independence in 1966. The country boasts four decades of uninterrupted civilian leadership. It has never had a coup and has had regular multiparty elections since independence.
Botswana also boasts one of the most dynamic economies in Africa. The country has maintained one of the world’s highest economic growth rates since independence, though growth slowed to about 5 percent annually in 2006-08. Mineral extraction, primarily diamond mining, dominates the economy. Botswana is the world’s largest producer of diamonds. Through sound management, its diamond wealth has transformed Botswana from one of the world’s poorest countries to one of the wealthiest in the Southern Africa region, with a per capita GDP of nearly $15,800 in 2008. Botswana has Africa’s highest average income. By one estimate, it has the fourth-highest gross national income at purchasing power parity in Africa, giving it a standard of living equal to that of Mexico or Turkey.
Unlike the majority of African countries, Botswana has a negligible level of foreign debt. It earned the highest sovereign credit rating in Africa and has stockpiled foreign exchange reserves (over $7 billion in 2005/2006), amounting to almost two and a half years of current imports. And according to Transparency International, an NGO that monitors official corruption globally, it is Africa’s least corrupt country. Indeed, Botswana is ranked as the best credit risk in Africa. These are definitely not the kinds of credentials that are usually associated with African countries.
“Botswana has a wonderful story,” said Mo Ibrahim when the prize was awarded to Mogae. “Every man, woman and child knows about Mugabe, but people say, ‘Mogae, who is that?’ It’s great we honor people who honestly and cleanly served, and served well, and left when their time was up.”
Not many people know that Africans have leaders who honestly and cleanly serve, serve well and leave when their time is up. Africa’s better-known leaders have been despots such as Amin, Mobutu, Abacha and Mugabe. As Ibrahim noted when Mogae was announced as winner of the 2008 prize, “I am sure I am going to hear people say, ‘Who is Mogae? Like last year, people said: ‘Who is Chissano?’ ” Ibrahim was referring to the inaugural winner of the prize, former Mozambique President Joaquim Chissano, who stepped down voluntarily at the end of his tenure. “But everybody knows Mugabe,” he quipped.
Mogae recently attracted meager attention when he won the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. The annual prize was established by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation and launched in October 2006 as an African initiative “to strengthen governance and affirm the importance of nurturing outstanding leaders on the continent.” The prize aims to encourage leaders like Mogae who dedicate their tenures of office to surmounting the development challenges of their countries, improve the livelihoods and welfare of their people and consolidate the foundation for sustainable development.
The Mo Ibrahim Prize is the world’s largest annually awarded prize. Mogae will receive $5 million over the next 10 years and $200,000 per year thereafter for the rest of his life. Over the coming decade, the foundation may also grant another $200,000 a year to causes of Mogae’s choice.
Even though Mogae is known to maintain a modest lifestyle, the windfall should come in handy for the Oxford-trained economist. According to the founder of the prize, Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim, “the fact that African leaders are able to steal billions of dollars doesn’t mean that those who don’t shouldn’t have any money.”As The New York Times reported, Mogae was honored “for consolidating his nation’s democracy, ensuring that its diamond wealth enriched its people and providing bold leadership during his country’s AIDS pandemic.” Mogae scored his democracy pass mark by stepping down well ahead of the end of his second term as president and handing over power to his vice president, Ian Khama, in a smooth transition that stands out against the tango between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai in Zimbabwe, or between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga in Kenya.
While the democratic landmark in Botswana went virtually unnoticed, however, blow-by-blow accounts of the democratic woes of Zimbabwe and the electoral debacle in Kenya made headlines around the world. The Mo Ibrahim Prize may have been designed to correct such skews. According to Ibrahim, “it is intended to turn the spotlight on men and women who contribute the most but receive far less attention than leaders like Zimbabwe’s president.”
As president of Botswana, Mogae also made a mark with his defense of civil liberties and the rule of law, as well as his anti-corruption and transparency measures. But by far his most enduring legacy is the progressive and comprehensive programs he put in place for dealing with Botswana’s galloping AIDS figures. Botswana has one of the world’s highest known rates of HIV/AIDS infection. Approximately one in six Batswana has HIV, giving Botswana the second-highest infection rate in the world after Swaziland. In 2006, it was estimated that life expectancy at birth in Botswana had dropped from 65 to 35 years due to AIDS.
His government took drastic measures to tackle the pandemic, such as free anti-retroviral drug treatment and a nationwide Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission program. Botswana became the first sub-Saharan African country where free anti-retroviral drugs are widely available. As a tribute to his astuteness in dealing with the crisis, anti-retrovirals are known in Botswana as “Mogae’s tablets.”
Mogae was selected for the Mo Ibrahim Prize by a six-member panel led by Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations. The award committee paid glowing tribute to his anti-AIDS efforts: “President Mogae’s outstanding leadership has ensured Botswana’s continued stability and prosperity in the face of an HIV and AIDS pandemic which threatened the future of his country and his people.”
The panel based its judgment on the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, which ranks the quality of governance in sub-Saharan Africa based on economic and social development, peace and security, human rights, democracy and the rule of law. The index was developed under the direction of professor Robert Rotberg of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The Ibrahim Index aims to promote debate not just in Africa but around the world on the criteria by which governments should be assessed.
The panel also noted that Mogae’s economic management produced “remarkable growth, stymied inflation, attracted investment and allowed him to pursue diversification away from diamonds, while simultaneously using tax revenue to fund investment infrastructure, health and education.”
Botswana has been a leading light in African democracy. Formerly the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, Botswana adopted its new name when it gained independence in 1966. The country boasts four decades of uninterrupted civilian leadership. It has never had a coup and has had regular multiparty elections since independence.
Botswana also boasts one of the most dynamic economies in Africa. The country has maintained one of the world’s highest economic growth rates since independence, though growth slowed to about 5 percent annually in 2006-08. Mineral extraction, primarily diamond mining, dominates the economy. Botswana is the world’s largest producer of diamonds. Through sound management, its diamond wealth has transformed Botswana from one of the world’s poorest countries to one of the wealthiest in the Southern Africa region, with a per capita GDP of nearly $15,800 in 2008. Botswana has Africa’s highest average income. By one estimate, it has the fourth-highest gross national income at purchasing power parity in Africa, giving it a standard of living equal to that of Mexico or Turkey.
Unlike the majority of African countries, Botswana has a negligible level of foreign debt. It earned the highest sovereign credit rating in Africa and has stockpiled foreign exchange reserves (over $7 billion in 2005/2006), amounting to almost two and a half years of current imports. And according to Transparency International, an NGO that monitors official corruption globally, it is Africa’s least corrupt country. Indeed, Botswana is ranked as the best credit risk in Africa. These are definitely not the kinds of credentials that are usually associated with African countries.
“Botswana has a wonderful story,” said Mo Ibrahim when the prize was awarded to Mogae. “Every man, woman and child knows about Mugabe, but people say, ‘Mogae, who is that?’ It’s great we honor people who honestly and cleanly served, and served well, and left when their time was up.”
Not many people know that Africans have leaders who honestly and cleanly serve, serve well and leave when their time is up. Africa’s better-known leaders have been despots such as Amin, Mobutu, Abacha and Mugabe. As Ibrahim noted when Mogae was announced as winner of the 2008 prize, “I am sure I am going to hear people say, ‘Who is Mogae? Like last year, people said: ‘Who is Chissano?’ ” Ibrahim was referring to the inaugural winner of the prize, former Mozambique President Joaquim Chissano, who stepped down voluntarily at the end of his tenure. “But everybody knows Mugabe,” he quipped.
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