Scores are still being settled from the Iran Iraq War in the 1980s. It is no wonder. If anyone has any doubt about Iran’s ruthless use of all its human resources at the Mullahs’ disposal, let me describe for you what I witnessed on the marshes in the swamps along the Shatt Al Arab near Al Qurna, Iraq, in February 1984 when CNN sent me to cover the Iran Iraq War. As I approached the front on an old Soviet helicopter, I saw what I thought was a huge sandstorm. But, as I got closer, I realized I was witnessing a human wave attack from Iran. What unfolded was a huge and furious battle.

After transferring to another, smaller helicopter, used to find targets for Iraqi artillery, I got a closer view of how poison gas and every other lethal tool available to Saddam Hussein – all with American approval – were being employed. Hussein’s U.S.-provided arms supplier, Sarkis Soghanalian, had done his job well. As I landed in an abandoned schoolyard at the front a few miles from al-Qurna, where the Garden of Eden supposedly once existed, and crossed by flatboat in the canals Saddam’s army had dug to flood the marshes, I witnessed the endless line of corpses of very old men and adolescents, some children, in tattered Iranian uniforms. The Iranian Mullahs’ defense of the 1979 Revolution and Saddam’s invasion ended festering in Iraqi mud. A million people died in the Iran Iraq War. Almost no one in the United States paid any attention.

In a city known for the sometimes overwhelming presence of acronyms, two have been noticeably absent from the Senate floor for over a decade.  The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) both pertain to nuclear nonproliferation measures. Almost ten full years after the passage of the CTBT failed in the Senate, President Obama said in Prague in April 2009, “My administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.”  Little has been mentioned of the CTBT since.

Have these measures lost their importance? According to John Isaacs of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and many others concerned about national security, limiting the number and testing of nuclear weapons remains a pressing issue. In a recent debate concerning nuclear nonproliferation, Issacs said, “Nearly every national security expert today agrees that terrorist’s use of nuclear weapons is the greatest security threat to the United States.” If this is true, why hasn’t President Obama moved more aggressively to pursue ratification of the CTBT?

The bungled attempt by the young Nigerian to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day has raised a lot of eyebrows in and out of government.  Within days The New York Times was reporting that Abdulmutallab had been trained in Yemen by the one-time Guantanamo detainee Ali al-Shihri, that his wealthy father, the Nigerian businessman Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had “urgently sought help from American and Nigerian security officials when cell phone text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent radical,” and that the CIA “in November compiled biographical data about Mr. Abdulmutallab – including his plans to study Islamic law in Yemen – but did not share the information with the other security agencies,” most significantly the National Counterterrorism Center.  The Center already had Abdulmutallab on a 550,000-person list of individuals with “possible ties to terrorism” but declined to include him on “more refined watch lists” or the worldwide no-fly list vital for airport security.

 

Had President Obama been aware of what the CIA did to the government of New Zealand in 2006 he might have been even more angry at his national security team. John Brennan, his counterterrorism advisor, conducted an investigation that failed to connect some old CIA dots that would have gone a long way in explaining why the CIA does not like to share information, even with the President of the United States.

When Brennan expressed surprise that Yemeni Al Qaeda operatives had advanced to the point of being capable of attacking the US homeland, it seemed inexplicable since they had orchestrated the attack on the USS Cole on October 12, 2000. Yemen, a known hotbed of Al Qaeda activity, has a long history of hosting the terrorist organization. Maybe Brennan was surprised because the last time the CIA let a known Yemeni Al Qaeda operative fly, it only resulted in political embarrassment.

 

Politicians have long made promises that if taxpayers spend enough money, they can be protected from evil forces. The Maginot Line was supposed to protect France from a German invasion. The Germans defeated it easily because it was poorly conceived and largely built as a boon to French contractors. America’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the hugely expensive — $50 billion and counting — and failed “Star Wars” missile defense system envisioned by President Reagan, has so far only protected the bottom line of defense contractors.

Now once again — as with the Maginot Line and Star Wars — eight years after 9/11 the government has wasted $40 billion on a poorly conceived, largely contractor-inspired effort, this time on master intelligence lists for commercial aviation. And President Obama and his national security team seem to be embracing the same failed security and intelligence polices that offer little real protection.

 

A recent NEWSWEEK cover story – HOW WE (COULD HAVE) WON IN VIETNAM, by Evan Thomas and John Barry  (November 16, 2009) – has responded to the ever-louder jungle drums of the recovering Right and pulled the stake and raised up for more recent generations the vampire logic behind the argument that “..the United States could have won in Vietnam – if only the U.S. Congress hadn’t cut off military aid to South Vietnam.”  It quotes Dwight Eisenhower as maintaining that “if you fight you must fight to win.”  It discovers several stages during that time of debilitating national anguish when “..the military was finally having success with a new counterinsurgency strategy” and urges our ground commanders in Afghanistan to continue with tactics that replicate “..what the Phoenix Program was designed to do 40 years ago in Vietnam: target and assassinate Viet Cong leaders.” The implication is that Vietnam was a rushed, incidental involvement for the United States, which we abandoned too quickly.

A spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Washington is an ex-USA Today reporter who resigned under pressure amid accusations of plagiarism, DCBureau has learned. The reporter, Tom Squitieri, once covered the Iraqi Kurds, who now pay him $8,000 a month as a registered agent of the KRG.

In 2005, Squitieri, then a Pentagon correspondent with the Gannett-owned USA Today, left the paper after his editors learned that he had lifted quotes from other publications. Several years later, he found himself gainfully employed by the Kurds—a group that has sought to become one of the most powerful foreign lobbies in the United States. Led by their Washington envoy, Qubad Talabani, the son of Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, the rulers of Iraqi Kurdistan have garnered widespread support from members of Congress, the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House. Enlisting the services of K Street’s boutique PR firms, Talabani has effectively portrayed the autonomous Kurdish region—home to 20 percent of Iraq’s population—as the sole bright spot in a conflict-ridden nation.

“When you have contractors that have demonstrated that they have fleeced the government agency or the taxpayer, I don’t think there should be a slap on the wrist or a pat on the back. They should be debarred. …This is the most significant waste and fraud in the history of our country. It’s not even close.” Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND)

After a flurry of Pentagon contracting scandals involving KBR went unaddressed by Republican lawmakers under the Bush administration, Democrats ran on promises of “real and serious” oversight in their successful 2006 campaign to win back Congress.

Military Exposure Guidelines permissible exposure limit for chromium: 5,700 parts per million.

Chromium soil concentrations found by KBR samples at Qarmat Ali on August 7, 2003: 16,459 parts per million

Like KBR, the military failed to look after its own at Qarmat Ali.

“Unfortunately,” Sgt. Russell Powell said in Congressional testimony, “many of the soldiers who served at Qarmat Ali are paying the consequences for the Army’s failure to warn and protect the troops.”

At the treatment plant, as soldiers expressed concerns about sodium dichromate, the military brass remained taciturn and downplayed the danger posed by the chemical. Once the toxic conditions at Qarmat Ali were revealed, the Army relied on a questionable and surreptitiously administered medical test to fend off claims of a hazard, and used the results to deny health care for exposed veterans.

KBR, a global engineering and construction firm, has become a poster child for war profiteering. Questions about the company’s dubious activities and astronomical profits have served as powerful ammunition for those warning of what President Dwight Eisenhower called “A Military Industrial Complex,” created from a dangerous symbiosis between private corporations and the U.S. military.

The origin of KBR’s role in Iraq has already shrouded the company—and its political patrons—in controversy. In 2004, reports surfaced that the contract under which KBR was working in Basra, Project Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO), was awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers under a secret, no-bid agreement in coordination with the office of then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney became a multi-millionaire in the 1990s as the head of Halliburton, KBR’s parent company. A further outcry followed an investigation last year by the Boston Globe, which found that KBR hired workers for project RIO through two shell companies in the Cayman Islands as part of a ploy to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in Social Security and Medicare taxes.