Top Secret America

A hidden world, growing beyond control

Washington Post investigation

By Dana Priest and William M. Arkin

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counter terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.

They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation's security.

"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not just for the CIA, for the secretary of defense - is a challenge," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration.

"I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."

The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."

CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed by The Post last week, said he's begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels of spending since 9/11 are not sustainable. "Particularly with these deficits, we're going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that," he said. "Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that."

In an interview before he resigned as the director of national intelligence in May, retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair said he did not believe there was overlap and redundancy in the intelligence world. "Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored intelligence for many different customers," he said.

Blair also expressed confidence that subordinates told him what he needed to know. "I have visibility on all the important intelligence programs across the community, and there are processes in place to ensure the different intelligence capabilities are working together where they need to," he said.

Weeks later, as he sat in the corner of a ballroom at the Willard Hotel waiting to give a speech, he mused about The Post's findings. "After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country," he said. "The attitude was, if it's worth doing, it's probably worth overdoing."

Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in McLean, a line of cars idles every weekday morning as a new day in Top Secret America gets underway. The drivers wait patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any public map and not announced by any street sign.

Liberty Crossing tries hard to hide from view. But in the winter, leafless trees can't conceal a mountain of cement and windows the size of five Wal-Mart stores stacked on top of one another rising behind a grassy berm. One step too close without the right badge, and men in black jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.

Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.

Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government agencies and corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001 attacks. But it is not nearly the biggest, the most costly or even the most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.

In an Arlington County office building, the lobby directory doesn't include the Air Force's mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there's a big "Welcome!" sign in the hallway greeting visitors who know to step off the elevator on the third floor. In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it's in a modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.

Each day at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, workers review at least 5,000 pieces of terrorist-related data from intelligence agencies and keep an eye on world events. (Photo by: Melina Mara / The Washington Post)

Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.

Much of the information about this mission is classified. That is the reason it is so difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including whether money is being spent wisely. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counter terrorism programs.

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur. To remedy this, at the recommendation of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, the George W. Bush administration and Congress decided to create an agency in 2004 with overarching responsibilities called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the colossal effort under control.

While that was the idea, Washington has its own ways.

The first problem was that the law passed by Congress did not give the director clear legal or budgetary authority over intelligence matters, which meant he wouldn't have power over the individual agencies he was supposed to control.

The second problem: Even before the first director, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, was on the job, the turf battles began. The Defense Department shifted billions of dollars out of one budget and into another so that the ODNI could not touch it, according to two senior officials who watched the process. The CIA reclassified some of its most sensitive information at a higher level so the National Counter terrorism Center staff, part of the ODNI, would not be allowed to see it, said former intelligence officers involved.

And then came a problem that continues to this day, which has to do with the ODNI's rapid expansion.

When it opened in the spring of 2005, Negroponte's office was all of 11 people stuffed into a secure vault with closet-size rooms a block from the White House. A year later, the budding agency moved to two floors of another building. In April 2008, it moved into its huge permanent home, Liberty Crossing.

Today, many officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear about what the ODNI is in charge of. To be sure, the ODNI has made some progress, especially in intelligence-sharing, information technology and budget reform. The DNI and his managers hold interagency meetings every day to promote collaboration. The last director, Blair, doggedly pursued such nitty-gritty issues as procurement reform, compatible computer networks, tradecraft standards and collegiality.

But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the increased flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system's ability to analyze and use it. Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

Clusters of top-secret work exist throughout the country, but the Washington region is the capital of Top Secret America.

About half of the post-9/11 enterprise is anchored in an arc stretching from Leesburg south to Quantico, back north through Washington and curving northeast to Linthicum, just north of the Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. Many buildings sit within off-limits government compounds or military bases.

Others occupy business parks or are intermingled with neighborhoods, schools and shopping centers and go unnoticed by most people who live or play nearby.

Many of the newest buildings are not just utilitarian offices but also edifices "on the order of the pyramids," in the words of one senior military intelligence officer.

Not far from the Dulles Toll Road, the CIA has expanded into two buildings that will increase the agency's office space by one-third. To the south, Springfield is becoming home to the new $1.8 billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters, which will be the fourth-largest federal building in the area and home to 8,500 employees. Economic stimulus money is paying hundreds of millions of dollars for this kind of federal construction across the region.

Construction for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Springfield (Photo by: Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post)

It's not only the number of buildings that suggests the size and cost of this expansion, it's also what is inside: banks of television monitors. "Escort-required" badges. X-ray machines and lockers to store cellphones and pagers. Keypad door locks that open special rooms encased in metal or permanent dry wall, impenetrable to eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force capable of responding within 15 minutes. Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.

SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it. "In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF," said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction business. "They've got the penis envy thing going. You can't be a big boy unless you're a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF."

SCIFs are not the only must-have items people pay attention to. Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.

"You can't find a four-star general without a security detail," said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. "Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, 'If he has one, then I have to have one.' It's become a status symbol."

Among the most important people inside the SCIFs are the low-paid employees carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the analysts, the 20- and 30-year-olds making $41,000 to $65,000 a year, whose job is at the core of everything Top Secret America tries to do.

At its best, analysis melds cultural understanding with snippets of conversations, coded dialogue, anonymous tips, even scraps of trash, turning them into clues that lead to individuals and groups trying to harm the United States.

Their work is greatly enhanced by computers that sort through and categorize data. But in the end, analysis requires human judgment, and half the analysts are relatively inexperienced, having been hired in the past several years, said a senior ODNI official. Contract analysts are often straight out of college and trained at corporate headquarters.

When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries - Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan - and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The ODNI doesn't know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. "Like a zombie, it keeps on living" is how one official describes the sites.

More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more - more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had.

The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can't find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded.

More building, more expansion of offices continues across the country. A $1.7 billion NSA data-processing center will be under construction soon near Salt Lake City. In Tampa, the U.S. Central Command’s new 270,000-square-foot intelligence office will be matched next year by an equally large headquarters building, and then, the year after that, by a 51,000-square-foot office just for its special operations section.

Just north of Charlottesville, the new Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility will consolidate 1,000 defense intelligence analysts on a secure campus.

Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a $3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon, a major landmark in the alternative geography of Top Secret America and four times as big as Liberty Crossing.

Chomsky: U.S. Savage Imperialism

Part three of a Z Media Institute talk, June 2010
February 2011

By Noam Chomsky


In parts one and two of "U.S. Savage Imperialism," Chomsky talks about the U.S. global mission and the Mideast with particular regard to Iran and Israel/Palestine. He closes by speculating on whether, with world pressure, the U.S. might shift its policy and insist on Israel accepting the international consensus on a two-state solution. What follows is a transcript of the first group of questions asked by the students attending Z Media Institute 2010.


Q: Can you talk about Egypt's role in supporting the siege of Gaza and also about the steel wall it's building?


CHOMSKY: You're quite right that Egypt has been complicit in Israel's savage siege of Gaza. Actually, Egypt is more frightened by Hamas than Israel is. Egypt is a brutal dictatorship, strongly supported by President Obama who has said straight out that he's not going to criticize them because Egypt helps us maintain stability in the Middle East. That's why nobody in the Middle East with a brain functioning can take Obama seriously when he talks about human rights.

But Egypt's very worried because if they ever allowed anything remotely like a democratic election, there's a popular force in Egypt which could turn into a majority—namely the Muslim Brotherhood. And the U.S. supports them in that. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt was horrified by their popular victory in Palestine. Egypt also understands U.S./Israeli policy, which is not very obscure. The U.S. and Israel want to throw Gaza, which has been virtually destroyed by the Israelis, into the hands of Egypt. Israel doesn't want it, the U.S. doesn't want it. They can't just kill everybody the way they could in the 19th century because you couldn't get away with it now. So the idea is to keep the population in Gaza barely alive, to abandon any responsibility for them, and to toss them into the hands of Egypt, which doesn't want them. For that reason, and because of the fact that they're ruled by an offshoot of the Muslim brotherhood, Egypt has been participating in the siege.

They are, as you said, also building a wall—apparently with U.S. engineering support—to seal off the country totally, partly just to increase the savagery of the siege, but also partly to confound U.S./Israeli policy of attempting to toss Gaza into Egypt's hands, which they don't want.


I've been interested in Israel's motivations for the Gaza attack. Norman Finkelstein has written that it was to restore Israel's deterrence capacity. I wonder if you agree with his thesis and his position that Israel at some point must suffer a military defeat, possibly at the hands of Hezbollah.

I think Finkelstein has a case. Israel was defeated in 2006 and they need to maintain a posture of invincibility after being so terrible harmed. Maybe they thought by smashing up Gaza, they could restore it, but I don't know exactly who they thought they were impressing. To show that an advanced modern army can destroy a totally defenseless population which can't even fire a pistol in response is not a very impressive demonstration of deterrence capacity.

They know that they can stop the rocket attacks, but to do so would mean accepting an agreement with Hamas and providing some legitimacy for the elected government in Palestine. And they don't want to provide any legitimacy. It can't be tolerated. They've got most of the cabinet in prison, in fact. They want to destroy it is an independent force.

What about a military defeat? I was in Lebanon recently and I talked to some of the leading Western Middle East correspondents. Some of them have been based there for decades so they know the region very well. The most knowledgeable of them expect a war. In fact, they think both Israel and Hezbollah want a war. Israel wants a war so it can show it really can destroy Lebanon—it won't be beaten, as it was last time. And if Israel, with U.S. backing, decides to attack Iran, as might happen, they have to destroy Lebanon first because Lebanon has deterrence capacity—namely Hezbollah.

So they may attack and there could be a war and the two of them will destroy each other. It could happen soon.

States don't necessarily act rationally and Israel is becoming extremely irrational, paranoid, and ultra-nationalist. Take the attack on the flotilla. It was a completely irrational act. If they wanted to they could have easily disabled the boats. Attacking a Turkish-flagged ship and killing Turks is about the craziest thing they could do from a strategic point of view. Turkey has been their one close regional ally since 1958.

Attacking your one regional ally for absolutely no reason is a kind of insanity. And they've done it before. Earlier, Israel had purposely humiliated the Turkish ambassador in a manner that I don't think has a precedent in diplomatic history. That's pretty irrational.

They claim there's an existential threat from Iran, but according to the U.S. strategic analysis, the threat is that Iran doesn't obey orders and is a deterrent to Israel's efforts at regional dominance. But if the Israelis fool themselves into thinking Iran is an existential threat, the outcome of that you can't even think of.

It's not that Iran is that rational either. There's a possible conflict brewing in the region, which is really frightening to think about. As you may know, Iran has announced that it intends to send ships to break the Gaza blockade. If that happened, all bets are off. Israel could go berserk. It's a powerful state with hundreds of nuclear weapons. They could decide to destroy the region and destroy themselves in the process. Who knows. It's scary.

Israel has a doctrine that goes back to the 1950s. They sometimes call it the Samson Complex, named after the most respected and honored suicide bomber in the world. Samson was a famous hero who killed a lot of Philistines. As the story goes, Delilah cut off his hair and he lost his strength and the Philistines captured and blinded him. But his hair grew back and he regained his strength. He was in the temple surrounded by thousands of Philistines when he pulled down the temple walls and killed himself and more Philistines in his death than in his lifetime.

The Samson Complex means if the world presses Israel too far, they will go crazy and bring down the temple walls. Of course, they'll be killed too. This attitude is part of the national psyche and it's expanding now.

And it's not a joke. It could happen.


Talk about Netanyahu's attempt to crush left dissidents.


It's not just Netanyahu. It's blamed on him, but it is the national mood, which is shifting very far to the ultra-nationalist right. Take a look at the polls. The national mood is paranoid. Part of it is the feeling that Israel has to crush any attempt to question the legitimacy and magnificence of what they are doing. This change in the country in the last few years is dramatic.

When the international community asks for an independent investigation, who are these investigators and do they have any legitimacy at all?

Most of what's going on doesn't get reported. But a couple of days ago, there was an important meeting of what we call the international community—which means the United States and anybody who happens to agree with us.

Maybe the whole world disagrees, but then they're against the international community. I'm not joking. Take the idea that the international community is calling on Iran to stop enriching uranium. You read that everywhere.


Exactly who is this international community? It's not the non-aligned countries, which are most of the world. They vigorously support Iran's right to enrich uranium, so they can't be part of the international community.

A couple of years ago the majority of Americans agreed with them. So the majority of Americans also aren't part of the international community because the international community is Washington and whoever happens to be going along with it.

It was pretty striking what happened in the last couple of weeks about this. Turkey and Brazil made a deal with Iran, which was pretty similar to what the U.S. had proposed. They would arrange for uranium to be enriched outside of Iran and then return it to them for medical purposes. It turns out that Obama had written a letter to Lula, the president of Brazil at the time, advocating a similar deal, probably because Obama believed that Iran would never agree and then he'd be able to refer to the letter and say, well, we tried and they wouldn't do it. But Iran did agree and the U.S. instantly reacted by ramming through a UN Security Council resolution, which is so weak that China and Russia agreed to it instantly. If you read the terms of the resolution—which was passed and praised here—if you look at the small print, it does almost nothing. Its only effect is to transfer to China even greater control over Iran's resources. So China's happy with it.

Russia's happy with it because it permits them to sell all the arms they want to Iran. But the U.S. had to ram the resolution through to make the world know who's boss. Not Brazil and Turkey. Turkey is the most important regional power, with a long border with Iran. So they're not allowed to be boss. Brazil is the most important, most respected country in the South, so they can't be boss. In fact, if you read the New York Times, the headlines say that there's a "spot on Lula's legacy" for standing up to the U.S. Today there's a report quoting some high level official saying, we've got to do something to make sure Turkey stays in line.

That's kind of like the Mafia. You have to make sure nobody interferes with your right to control everything. So the U.S. rams through an almost meaningless UN resolution to block a Turkish/Brazilian initiative which could have made some progress.

The relevant part of the international community is actually the Asian security system, CICA—I think. It includes most of the Asian states—China, India, Iran, Israel, and so on. They had a security meeting and decided strongly to call for an international investigation into Israel's attack on the flotilla. The rules of the organization, however, require consensus. Of course, Israel didn't agree so the vote was 22-1, or something close to that. Therefore, the group made a separate declaration calling for an international investigation.

Obama immediately blocked that Security Council resolution calling for an independent investigation and the Asian security organization was blocked out of the media. So it didn't happen, except that it did happen.

International relations theory doesn't amount to much. There are some principles. Probably one of the most important is the Mafia principle. The Godfather does not accept disobedience. A small storekeeper somewhere who doesn't pay protection money can't get away with it. Maybe you don't even need the money, but if one storekeeper gets away with it, somebody else will get the idea and pretty soon the system erodes. So you don't just send in your goons to get the money, you send them to beat them to a pulp so everybody gets the idea.

That's how international affairs works. Sometimes it's called the domino theory or some other thing. But you look at case after case and it constantly works like that.

Does it mean anything that Turkey is in NATO and Israel attacked a Turkish ship in International waters?


There's some debate about technically how the ship was flagged, but if it was a Turkish flagged ship, as was claimed, that means it's Turkish territory. Under maritime law, a ship in waters is part of the territory of the country that flags it. There is a NATO treaty that requires NATO powers to go to the assistance of any NATO country under attack. So, if treaties meant anything, which, of course, they don't, the NATO countries, led by the United States, should have immediately gone to the support of the Turkish ship. If an Iranian ship had attacked a NATO vessel, probably Iran would have been blown off the face of the earth.



You mentioned this boss who says what can happen and what can't as a model of the way nation states work. Other times don't you have to look at economic classes instead? How does that work?


That's an interesting question and Iran is a very interesting case. There are a couple of principles of international affairs and all of them are missing from international relations theory. As I mentioned, one of these is the Mafia principle: another traces back to Adam Smith. We're supposed to worship Adam Smith, but we're not supposed to read him. That's much too dangerous. He's nowhere near the crazed capitalist lunatic that's constructed in ideology. He's a pretty sensible guy. Smith pointed out that in England—I'm quoting him

—"the principle architects of policy are the merchants and manufacturers," the people who own the economy. And they make sure that "their own interests are most peculiarly attended to" no matter how "grievous" to the people of England, let alone others who were subjected to, what he called, "the savage injustice of the Europeans."

Sometimes these principles conflict and those cases are important for the study of policy formation. With Iran, for example, the major economic forces would be pretty happy to have the U.S. normalize relations with Iran.

The U.S. energy corporations are not delighted that China is picking up all the goodies. But state policy requires that we give Iran's resources to China over the objections of U.S. energy corporations, which usually have a crucial impact on policy making.

That's the conflict between two doctrines: the Mafia doctrine and the Adam Smith doctrine. In this case, the Mafia doctrine wins. It's striking—if you look over the history, you find that the very same individuals will make different decisions depending on whether they are running a corporation or running the government. The same people who are making the decisions about Iran—let's give the resources to China—if they were still running their energy corporations, they'd make the opposite decision. They now have an institutional role in state policy, which is different from the role of the CEO of a corporation. The CEOs of corporations have an institutional role as well—to maximize profits. It's a legal requirement and if they don't do it, they're out and someone else comes in who will do it. The role of the same individual in, for example, the state department or the Pentagon is to consider the long-term consequences of policy choices that sometimes conflict with the parochial interests of a particular sector of the economy. So what you get is a conflict and, in Iran's case, the Mafia principle wins. The same individuals who might have run oil companies, now must decide that for the long-term goal of controlling the Middle East, it's necessary to take positions which, in fact, harm the energy corporations.

Iran is not the only case. U.S. policy toward Cuba is quite interesting to study for understanding
international relations theory. For 50 years, ever since Cuban independence, the U.S. has been attacking and punishing the people of Cuba. And we know exactly why. The documents are all out. You have to punish the people of Cuba—this is Kennedy, Eisenhower, and so on—because Cuba isn't following orders. They are carrying out what the Kennedy and Johnson administrations called "successful defiance" of U.S. policies going back to the Monroe Doctrine, which said the U.S. runs the hemisphere.

Meanwhile, for decades the large majority of the U.S. population has been in favor of normalizing relations with Cuba. The rest of the world is totally opposed to U.S. policy towards Cuba. Just take a look at the UN Assembly votes every year. It's the World v. the United States—and the Marshall Islands or something. That's not unusual. What's striking in this case is that major sections of American business are also opposed. That includes energy, pharmaceutical, and agricultural corporations. They all want to normalize relation with Cuba. Following the Adam Smith principle, you'd expect them to determine policy, but it's overridden by the Mafia principle .

If you really want to study international affairs, those are the cases you should look at. Just as, if you want to understand U.S. Cold War policy, you should look at what happened in 1990. But those are exactly the topics that are off the agenda. You don't study them in graduate school, there's no academic literature about them, there's no commentary about them. They're just too revealing.

Incidentally, it's not the first time in the case of Iran. In 1953, when the U.S. and Britain overthrew the parliamentary regime and installed the Shah, the U.S. government wanted U.S. oil companies to take 40 percent of the British concession. It was part of the long-term U.S. policy of edging the British out of the Middle East and taking over and turning them into a junior partner. The oil companies didn't want to do it for short-term reasons. It turned out that there was an oil glut at the time and if they took over the Iranian concession, they would have to reduce their liftings in Saudia Arabia, which was much more important for them.

But they were compelled by the government to take it. They were even threatened with anti-trust penalties, so they followed orders. In this case, long-term concerns about the control of oil overrode the specific parochial interest of the architects of policy.


I should mention that during the Second World War there was a kind of mini-war going on between Britain and the U.S. over control of Middle East oil, mainly in Saudi Arabia. It was understood by the 1930s that it was the real prize, the jewel in the crown. Britain wanted to keep it and the U.S. wanted to take it away. So there was a battle going on—we have the documents—and, of course, the U.S. won. Britain was in dire straits at the time, so the U.S. took over Saudi Arabia.


At the end of the war, the British understood that their role as the international hegemon was essentially over and the foreign office recognized that they would have to be what they called "junior" partners of the U.S. They had no illusions about what the U.S. was up to: they said, the U.S. is taking over the world under the pretext of benevolence, but they're just after power and we have no choice, except to be junior partners.


The U.S. treats them with total contempt and Britain just takes it. The most striking case was during the 1962 missile crisis. U.S. leaders—the Kennedys—were making decisions which they understood could lead to the destruction of England and all of Europe. They were pushing things to the point where there might be a Russian retaliation and they weren't telling the British about it. In fact, Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, didn't know what was going on, but tried desperately to find out. At one point, one of Kennedy's senior advisers—probably Dean Acheson—defined what he called the "special relationship" between the U.S. and Britain, which he said means that "Britain is our lieutenant—the fashionable word is 'partner'."


Of course, Britain has a choice. They could be part of the Eurozone, but they prefer to be a junior partner and think of themselves as independent actors in world affairs. Of course, Europe, too, has choices and these have been a serious concern for U.S. policy since 1950. U.S. planners understood that there would be industrial recovery in Europe in the early post-war period. Once they do, they're a power on the scale of the United States with a large economy, a larger educated population, with a lot of advantages. They could become an independent force in world affairs—what is called a third force. That's a big danger. You can't run the world if there's a big independent force. A lot of efforts were meant to prevent that. One of them is NATO. Part of the goal of NATO was to ensure that Europe would remain a vassal under U.S. control.


What happened in 1990 is striking in this respect. If anybody believed the propaganda of the preceding 50 years, then as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, you'd expect NATA to be disbanded. The propaganda about NATO, at the time, was that it was there to protect us from the Russian hordes. Okay, no more Russian hordes, let's disband NATO. Is that what happened? No. NATO expanded in quite an interesting way. Gorbachev made an incredible concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO. If you think about it, that's pretty astonishing. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia a couple of times in the last century. Now Gorbachev was agreeing to let unified Germany join a hostile military alliance. Why did he do it? Because there was a quid pro quo. He made an agreement with the Bush (senior) administration that NATO would not expand "one inch to the East." It would not include East Germany and obviously nothing beyond it. Well, Gorbachev was naive.

Bush was careful never to put the agreement on paper—we have a detailed scholarly record of this. Gorbachev made the stupid error of thinking he could make a gentleman's agreement with the U.S. Well, that's pretty stupid. The U.S. hadn't the slightest intention of living up to the agreement. And it didn't. So, of course, NATO expanded to the east and, under Clinton, right up to the Russian border—and even further.



NATO's official role now is to control the global energy system, the sea lanes, and pipelines. There was a conference in Washington recently led by former Secretary of State Albright, which outlined a global mission for NATO. The idea is that NATO should become a U.S.-run global intervention force. There's a conflict about this. The Europeans aren't all that happy about spending the money and the U.S. is charging them with being too non-violent and so on.



What happened with NATO is a dramatic illustration of the fact that all the propaganda of the Cold War was complete lies. NATO doesn't disappear when the Russian hordes are gone, it expands to make sure that Europe doesn't carry out that dangerous option of becoming an independent third force in world affairs.

Z

Noam Chomsky is Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at MIT and author of dozens of books and articles, mainly

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives

Congo Resource Wars and Rwanda

Following the Mineral Trail: Congo Resource Wars and Rwanda

Thursday, 18 February 2010 12:23 John Lasker

The Rwandan government and its military have largely been suspected by a UN Panel of Experts, human rights organizations and independent journalists, of financially supporting a number of violent militias that have destabilized the eastern Congo region to illegally traffic millions-of-dollars worth of minerals such as coltan, gold, and cassiterite. These minerals are then brought from neighboring Congo into Rwanda for eventual sale on the international market.

In 2000, Rwanda, an African ally of Washington, produced 83 tons of coltan from its own mines but found a way to export a total of 603 tons that year, as discovered by Danish journalist Bjorn Willum, after he requested the figures from the National Bank of Rwanda. Willum also found the Rwandan army, which at the time was receiving funding and training from the US military, made $250 million that year by selling stolen Congolese minerals, most likely purchased from their shadow militias.

Roughly ten years later, a UN Panel of Expert's report titled The 2009 Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo states that the illegal traffic of Congolese minerals still flows into Rwanda mostly from these violent militias that continue to profit greatly, presumably passing earnings onto their Rwandan backers. The report also implicated a number of Western-based mining companies and metal brokers of indirectly financing the resource war as their buyers simply waited in Rwanda for the minerals to make their way across the border.

What's more, this is not the first UN Panel of Expert's report on the exploitation of Congolese resources; similar findings were also publicized in 2001 and 2003. While a consensus can not be reached among government agencies and human rights groups, the International Rescue Committee believes the resource war which started in the mid-1990s has taken the lives of 4 to 5 million people, most of whom are Congolese.

Given the implication of such violence and illegal trade, one would expect US embassy officials in Rwanda to have an opinion on the subject. Sasha Lezhnev is the director of the Grassroots Reconciliation Group, a nonprofit that aids former child soldiers. Of late, he's spent time in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In 2008 Lezhner spoke to the outgoing US ambassador to Rwanda about the resource conflicts in the region.

"I asked the ambassador," says Lezhnev, "'What are your feelings about Rwanda's influence in the eastern Congo?'" The ambassador immediately responded: "I don't know what you're talking about."

Lezhnev was shocked at what he believes is simply the former ambassador's ignorance of Rwanda's influence. "We have to open our eyes to what's going on," he says.

Yet after years of apparent indifference to the eastern Congo resource wars, it appears the US is finally starting to take measures to help end the conflict; the U.S. Senate is pushing forward the Congo Conflict Minerals Act of 2009. The bill calls for, among other things, a system of oversight to keep watch on all US-based industries that utilize Congolese coltan, cassiterite, wolframite and gold, and make sure the minerals were not extracted from conflict mines controlled by illegal armed groups.

However, the bill makes no mention of the Paul Kagame regime, which has led Rwanda since the genocide of 1994, or his administration's influence in eastern Congo. Kagame has said any strategic maneuvers on Rwanda's part in the eastern Congo, which also includes the deployment of regular Rwandan troops, is so to keep the pressure on those groups that took part in the 1994 massacre.

But according to Professor Yaa-Lengi, who runs the New York-based Coalition for Peace, Justice and Democracy in the Congo, millions of Congolese - a number corroborated by several American-based human-rights organizations interviewed for this article - believe Kagame's claims are a ruse, a smoke-screen to loot Congolese minerals. He says it is part of an elaborate plan that many Congolese believe was initiated by the US; and thus Rwanda is an American proxy with a mission to keep Congolese minerals moving cheaply to Western-based mining companies.

Yaa-Lengi says these theories, deemed far-fetched by many experts, don't end there. "Bill Clinton was behind the (1994) genocide," he stated. "Millions of Congolese believe this."

Lezhnev and representatives of other human rights groups working in the eastern Congo scoff at Yaa-Lengi and the charges he levels against the Clinton administration. But they agree the Congolese have plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the US and their regional interests.

For instance, David Sullivan of the Enough Project says during the Bush administration, the White House had a public relations official working in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa. When Bush's term ended in 2008, he says the official quickly took a job with the mining company Freeport-McMoRan and its operations in the country, which mainly extracts copper and cobalt.

"There are some really dangerous arguments about this [Rwanda's interests in the Congo]," says Sullivan. "There are a lot of conspiracy theories. And many people overstate the influence of the US in Rwanda and the region."

Fueling those conspiracy theories in part is President Kagame, who gained power immediately following the 1994 genocide. Kagame went through a U.S. military training program on American soil during the years leading up to the massacre. There's also historical evidence that points to how important Congolese minerals are to the US; the US military acquired uranium from a mine in the DRC town of Skinkolobwe to build the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The U.S. continues to maintain strong ties with Rwanda: US assistance to the country "has increased four-fold over the past four years," according to the US State Department.

Lezhnev says, "We have a lot of leverage with Kagame and we have to use that." Meaning that the US needs to pressure the Rwandan government into ending its destabilizing role in the eastern Congo.

Yet what specific influences the US ultimately has over Rwanda remains a mystery. One element that contradicts the conspiracy theories offered by Yaa-Lengi, however, is the new Senate bill. Sullivan says it could end the resource war in eastern Congo. But he acknowledges the bill is no panacea.

"We would like to see a provision in the bill that makes [all metal brokers who sell minerals acquired from the eastern Congo] disclose the minerals exact origin, the exact mine it came from," he says. "If they say they are getting the minerals from Malawi, then they have to have an independent verification saying so." When selling their minerals onto the international market, metal traders have faked records saying the minerals were actually from countries other than the Congo.

Essentially, what Sullivan and the Enough Project are calling for is an independent auditing effort based in the eastern Congo. This could be expensive, but if established, could lead to new successes in the fight against the looting. For example, say a metal broker is caught selling minerals from a mine that is a source of conflict and controlled by a violent militia - a reality for many eastern Congolese mines. In this case "[the metal broker] will lose access to international markets," says Sullivan.

Some experts on the eastern Congo say the bill is flawed and if passed, won't have the muscle to end the resource war.

"Given the many links in the supply chain [of eastern Congo minerals], any of them can simply claim they don't know where the minerals are coming from and it is currently difficult to prove them wrong," says David Barouski, a student from the University of Wisconsin, who has documented first-hand the resource war in the eastern Congo. "The U.S. claims it wants to help implement ways to certify this chain, but how are they going to do it for every mine in a conflict zone? Certification at the mines would require agents to go on site, but with such poor infrastructure it would be years before this is feasible and there would need to be peace to rebuild the infrastructure."

Besides the U.S., the Congolese people don't trust the UN either, says Yaa-Lengi. Throwing fuel on their UN speculation, he says, is the 2009 UN Panel of Experts' report on the eastern Congo, The Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At first the report was leaked, angering members of the Security Council. Then its official release was delayed.

"The UN delayed publishing it because it points a finger back to the UN and the Security Council," says Yaa-Lengi. "This is because they are allowing the Congolese to die and be raped. The UN knows it, but they are allowing it. All members of the Security Council are benefiting from the resources of the Congo. The UN does only what the Security Council wants and by that we mean what the super powers want."

The U.N. Security Council is comprised of the U.S., Great Britain, France, Russia and China as permanent members and two other rotating member nations. Companies in every one of these nations, claims Yaa-Lengi, have benefitted in some way from the cheap minerals taken from eastern Congo, one of poorest nations on the planet. But according to the African Business Magazine, the DRC currently has an estimated total mineral wealth of $24 trillion, equivalent to the GDP of Europe and the US combined.

Sullivan of the Enough Project agrees the Congolese are suspect of the UN, as they are of the US. Yet, he says to "keep in mind the [UN] Panel of Experts is independent of the Security Council." For the most part, this UN Panel of Experts is made up of regional experts of the eastern Congo, its culture, government and society, he says, adding "The new report has pretty much been ignored by the Security Council."

Indeed, past UN Panel of Experts' reports on the eastern Congo, published in 2001 and 2003, were also mostly ignored by members of the Security Council. Even though the UN Panel of Experts had evidence piled high implicating scores of Western-based mining companies and metal brokers of buying looted minerals from conflict mines of the eastern Congo.

Take, for example, the story of Robert Raun, a former metal broker who worked just across the eastern Congolese border in Rwanda. He was the beneficiary of a strange response on the part of the UN in 2004, a response that sends mixed messages about the West and their intentions for the eastern Congo resource war.

Raun and his mining company, Trinitech of Cleveland, Ohio, which processed and traded coltan, had been implicated in the UN's 2001 report, The Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This report essentially accused Trinitech and over 100 other Western-based mining companies of looting minerals from the eastern Congo. The minerals included coltan, a black metal ore that is needed to meet the West's insatiable thirst for personal technology. It is a key ingredient in the manufacture of cell phones, lap tops and video-game consoles. (Also see Inside Africa's PlayStation War in Toward Freedom.)

When Raun stepped onto the 20th floor of the Secretariat Tower of the United Nations in 2004 to respond to their charges, the "power of accusation" from the UN, he says, had already ruined Trinitech. The UN also accused Raun of aligning with "elite networks" of Rwandan government officials and high-ranking military officers. The elite networks were apparently forcing Congolese children and captives to mine for coltan.

"The allegations we were using child labor was a fabrication," insists Raun, a devout Christian. "[But] accusation is a powerful thing. It ruined us. Nobody wants to buy from the company that's wearing the Scarlet Letter. We're just a shell of what we used to be. But we're standing, by the power of God, we're standing."

Nevertheless, on that day in New York City in 2004, the UN would surprisingly drop its charges against Trinitech. Indeed, at that time, the UN was giving a lot of Western-based mining companies and metal brokers working in eastern Congo a pass. Out of the 100 or so mining companies accused of looting minerals, the UN dropped the charges against each one, infuriating mining watchdog efforts such as MiningWatch Canada.

Raun only answers to the child labor charges, however. When asked who Trinitech was buying its coltan from, and whether it came from conflict-ridden mines in the eastern Congo, he responds, "No comment".

John Lasker is a freelance journalist from Columbus, Ohio.

Wikileaks, Washington on Haiti

Wikileaks Show Why Washington Won’t Allow Democracy in Haiti

By Mark Weisbrot

This column was published by The Guardian Unlimited (UK) on December 17, 2010. original.

The polarization of the debate around Wikileaks is pretty simple, really. Of all the governments in the world, the United States government is the greatest threat to world peace and security today. This is obvious to anyone who looks at the facts with a modicum of objectivity. The Iraq war has claimed hundreds of thousands, and most likely more than a million lives. It was completely unnecessary and unjustifiable, and based on lies. Now, Washington is moving toward a military confrontation with Iran.

As Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, pointed out in an interview recently, in the preparation for a war with Iran, we are at about the level of 1998 in the build-up to the Iraq war.

On this basis, even ignoring the tremendous harm that Washington causes to developing countries in such areas as economic development (through such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization), or climate change, it is clear that any information which sheds light on U.S. "diplomacy" is more than useful. It has the potential to help save millions of human lives.

You either get this or you don’t. Brazil’s president Lula da Silva, who earned Washington’s displeasure last May when he tried to help defuse the confrontation with Iran, gets it. That’s why he defended and declared his "solidarity" with embattled Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, even though the leaked cables were not pleasant reading for his own government.

One area of U.S. foreign policy that the Wikileaks cables help illuminate, which the major media has predictably ignored, is the occupation of Haiti. In 2004 the country’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown for the second time, through an effort led by the United States government. Officials of the constitutional government were jailed and thousands of its supporters were killed.

The Haitian coup, besides being a repeat of Aristide’s overthrow in 1991, was also very similar to the attempted coup in Venezuela in 2002 – which also had Washington’s fingerprints all over it. Some of the same people in Washington were even involved in both efforts. But the Venezuelan coup failed – partly because Latin American governments immediately and forcefully declared that they would not recognize the coup government.

In the case of Haiti, Washington had learned from its mistakes in the Venezuelan coup and had gathered support for an illegitimate government in advance. A UN resolution was passed just days after the coup, and UN forces, headed by Brazil, were sent to the country. The mission is still headed by Brazil, and has troops from a number of other Latin American governments that are left of center, including Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay. They are also joined by Chile, Peru and Guatemala from Latin America.

Would these governments have sent troops to occupy Venezuela if that coup had succeeded? Clearly they would not have considered such a move, yet the occupation of Haiti is no more justifiable. South America’s progressive governments have strongly challenged U.S. foreign policy in the region and the world, with some of them regularly using words like imperialism and empire as synonyms for Washington. They have built new institutions such as UNASUR to prevent these kinds of abuses from the north. Bolivia expelled the U.S. ambassador in September of 2008 for interfering in its own internal affairs.

Is it because Haitians are poor and black that their most fundamental human and democratic rights can be trampled upon?

The participation of these governments in the occupation of Haiti is a serious political contradiction for them, and it is getting worse. The Wikileaks cables illustrate how important the control of Haiti is to the United States.

A long memo from the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince to the U.S. Secretary of State answers detailed questions about Haitian president Rene Preval’s political, personal, and family life, including such vital national security questions as "How many drinks can Preval consume before he shows signs of inebriation?" It also expresses one of Washington’s main concerns:

"his reflexive nationalism, and his disinterest in managing bilateral relations in a broad diplomatic sense, will lead to periodic frictions as we move forward our bilateral agenda. Case in point, we believe that in terms of foreign policy, Preval is most interested in gaining increased assistance from any available resource. He is likely to be tempted to frame his relationship with Venezuela and Chavez-allies in the hemisphere in a way that he hopes will create a competitive atmosphere as far as who can provide the most to Haiti."

This is why they got rid of Aristide – who was much to the left of Preval — and won’t let him back in the country. This is why Washington funded the recent "elections" that excluded Haiti’s largest political party, the equivalent of shutting out the Democrats and Republicans in the United States. And this is why MINUSTAH is still occupying the country, more than six years after the coup, without any apparent mission other than replacing the hated Haitian army – which Aristide abolished – as a repressive force.

People who do not understand U.S. foreign policy think that control over Haiti does not matter to Washington, because it is so poor and has no strategic minerals or resources. But that is not how Washington operates, as the Wikileaks cables repeatedly illustrate. For the State Department and its allies, it is all a ruthless chess game, and the pawns matter. Left governments will be removed or prevented from taking power where it is possible to do so; and the poorest countries – like Honduras last year – present the most opportune targets. A democratically elected government in Haiti, due to its history and the consciousness of the population, will inevitably be a left government – and one that will not line up with Washington’s foreign policy priorities for the region. Hence, democracy is not allowed.

Thousands of Haitians have been protesting the sham elections, as well as MINUSTAH’s role in causing the cholera epidemic, which has already taken more than 2,300 lives and can be expected to kill thousands more in the coming months and years. Judging from the rapid spread of the disease, there may have been gross criminal negligence on the part of MINUSTAH – i.e. large-scale dumping of fecal waste into the Artibonite river. This is another huge reason for them to leave Haiti.

This is a mission that costs over $500 million a year, when the UN can’t even raise a third of that to fight the epidemic that the mission caused, or to provide clean water for Haitians. And now the UN is asking for an increase to over $850 million for MINUSTAH.

It is high time that the progressive governments of Latin America quit this occupation, which goes against their own principles and deeply held beliefs, and is against the will of the Haitian people.

also

OAS Removes its Special Representative in Haiti for Telling It Like It Is About UN Peacekeeping Mission

Posted on December 30, 2010 by magbana

0

OAS Removes Special Representative in Haiti from Post

ST. DOMINGO – The Organization of American States removed its special representative in Haiti, Ricardo Seitenfus, from his post, a diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

The move came after the publication in a Swiss newspaper of remarks attributed to the diplomat in which he questioned the role of the U.N. Stabilization Mission for Haiti, or Minustah, which has been in the country since 2004, and the policy of the international community toward the Caribbean nation.

Seitenfus said in the interview published Dec. 20 that the U.N. had “imposed” the presence of its troops in Haiti despite the fact that the country was not involved in a civil war.

“Haiti is not an international threat. We’re not in a situation of civil war. Haiti is neither Iraq nor Afghanistan. However, the (U.N.) Security Council, given the lack of any alternative, has imposed the blue helmets since 2004, after the exit of the president (Jean-Bertrand Aristide),” the OAS diplomat told Switzerland’s Le Temps.

The Brazilian diplomat, who had been scheduled to leave the post anyway in the coming months, also said in the interview that Haiti “is on the international stage mainly due to its great proximity to the United States. Haiti has been the object of negative attention on the part of the international system. For the U.N., this is about freezing power and transforming the Haitians into prisoners on their own island,” namely Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic.

“The Haitians committed the unacceptable in 1804 (the year of their independence): a crime of lese majesty for an anxious world. The West (was) then a colonial, slave-holding and racist world that based its wealth on the exploitation of conquered lands. So, the Haitian revolutionary model made the great powers afraid,” Seitenfus said.

The OAS official also analyzed the role of non-governmental organizations in Haiti, in particular after the Jan. 12 earthquake, and he said that “the cooperative (organizations) that arrived after the quake are not very old; they came to Haiti without any experience … (and) after the earthquake, the professional quality fell a great deal. There exists a maleficent or perverse relationship between the NGOs’ strength and the Haitian state’s weakness.”

Seitenfus, in addition to his responsibilities with the OAS, was that organization’s delegate to the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, or IHRC.

Wiki-Leaks on Shell

Wiki-Leaks on Shell Oil Company: The Vampires Sucking the Blood of Nigerians

Shell Oil Company: The Vampires Sucking the Blood of Nigerians

The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians’ every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.

The company’s top executive in Nigeria told US diplomats that Shell had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew “everything that was being done in those ministries”. She boasted that the Nigerian government had “forgotten” about the extent of Shell’s infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.

The cache of secret dispatches from Washington’s embassies in Africa also revealed that the Anglo-Dutch oil firm swapped intelligence with the US, in one case providing US diplomats with the names of Nigerian politicians it suspected of supporting militant activity, and requesting information from the US on whether the militants had acquired anti-aircraft missiles.

Neo-Colonialist Blood Suckers:

Cables from Nigeria show how Ann Pickard, then Shell’s vice-president for sub-Saharan Africa, sought to share intelligence with the US government on militant activity and business competition in the contested Niger Delta – and how, with some prescience, she seemed reluctant to open up because of a suspicion the US government was “leaky”.

But that did not prevent Pickard disclosing the company’s reach into the Nigerian government when she met US ambassador Robin Renee Sanders, as recorded in a confidential memo from the US embassy in Abuja on 20 October 2009.

At the meeting, Pickard related how the company had obtained a letter showing that the Nigerian government had invited bids for oil concessions from China. She said the minister of state for petroleum resources, Odein Ajumogobia, had denied the letter had been sent but Shell knew similar correspondence had taken place with China and Russia.

The ambassador reported: “She said the GON [government of Nigeria] had forgotten that Shell had seconded people to all the relevant ministries and that Shell consequently had access to everything that was being done in those ministries.”

Nigeria is Africa’s leading oil producer and the eighth biggest exporter in the world, accounting for 8% of US oil imports. Although a recent UN report largely exonerated the company, critics accuse Shell, the biggest operator in the delta, and other companies, of causing widespread pollution and environmental damage in the region. Militant groups engaged in hostage-taking and sabotage have proliferated.

The WikiLeaks disclosure was today seized on by campaigners as evidence of Shell’s vice-like grip on the country’s oil wealth. “Shell and the government of Nigeria are two sides of the same coin,” said Celestine AkpoBari, of Social Action Nigeria. “Shell is everywhere. They have an eye and an ear in every ministry of Nigeria. They have people on the payroll in every community, which is why they get away with everything. They are more powerful than the Nigerian government.”

The criticism was echoed by Ben Amunwa of the London-based oil watchdog Platform. “Shell claims to have nothing to do with Nigerian politics,” he said. “In reality, Shell works deep inside the system, and has long exploited political channels in Nigeria to its own advantage.”

Nigeria tonight strenuously denied the claim. Levi Ajuonoma, a spokesman for the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, said: “Shell does not control the government of Nigeria and has never controlled the government of Nigeria. This cable is the mere interpretation of one individual. It is absolutely untrue, an absolute falsehood and utterly misleading. It is an attempt to demean the government and we will not stand for that. I don’t think anybody will lose sleep over it.”

Another cable released today, from the US consulate in Lagos and dated 19 September 2008, claims that Pickard told US diplomats that two named regional politicians were behind unrest in the Rivers state. She also asked if the American diplomats had any intelligence on shipments of surface to air missiles (SAMs) to militants in the Niger Delta.

“She claimed Shell has ‘intelligence’ that one to three SAMs may have been shipped to Nigerian militant groups, although she seemed somewhat sceptical of that information and wondered if such sensitive systems would last long in the harsh environment of the Niger Delta,” the cable said.

Pickard also said Shell had learned from the British government details of Russian energy company Gazprom’s ambitions to enter the Nigerian market. In June last year, Gazprom signed a $2.5bn (£1.5bn) deal with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations.

Shell put a request to the US consulate for potentially sensitive intelligence about Gazprom, a possible rival, which she said had secured a promise from the Nigerian government of access to 17trn cubic feet of natural gas – roughly a tenth of Nigeria’s entire reserves. “Pickard said that amount of gas was only available if the GON were to take concessions currently assigned to other oil companies and give them to Gazprom. She assumed Shell would be the GON’s prime target.” Pickard alleged that a conversation with a Nigerian government minister had been secretly recorded by the Russians. Shortly after the meeting in the minister’s office she received a verbatim transcript of the meeting “from Russia”, according to the memo.

The cable concludes with the observation that the oil executive had tended to be guarded in discussion with US officials. “Pickard has repeatedly told us she does not like to talk to USG [US government] officials because the USG is ‘leaky’.” She may be concerned that … bad news about Shell’s Nigerian operations will leak out.”

Shell declined to comment on the allegations, saying: “You are seeking our views on a leaked cable allegedly containing information about a private conversation involving a Shell representative, but have declined to share this cable or to permit us sufficient time to obtain information from the person you say took part in the conversation on the part of Shell. In view of this, we cannot comment on the alleged contents of the cable, including the correctness or incorrectness of any statements you say it contains.”

See also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-cables-shell-nigeria-spying