A Window Into CIA's Embrace of Secret Jails

NY Times reports:
In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists.

Kyle D. Foggo, who helped build jails for the C.I.A. in the campaign against terrorism, after his arraignment in San Diego in 2007.

Brent R. Wilkes, right, with his lawyer, Mark Geragos, arriving for a 2007 arraignment connected to dealings with Mr. Foggo.

Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator, someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly obtain weapons, food, money — whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt, Germany, was strained by the spy agency’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment.

“It was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters,” he said in an interview. “I was proud to help my nation.”

With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth. They were kept in isolated cells.

The existence of the network of prisons to detain and interrogate senior operatives of Al Qaeda has long been known, but details about them have been a closely guarded secret. In recent interviews, though, several former intelligence officials have provided a fuller account of how they were built, where they were located and life inside them.

Mr. Foggo acknowledged a role, which has never been previously reported. He pleaded guilty last year to a fraud charge involving a contractor that equipped the C.I.A. jails and provided other supplies to the agency, and he is now serving a three-year sentence in a Kentucky prison.

The C.I.A. prisons would become one of the Bush administration’s most extraordinary counterterrorism programs, but setting them up was fairly mundane, according to the intelligence officials.

Mr. Foggo relied on C.I.A. finance officers, engineers and contract workers to build the jails. As they neared completion, he turned to a small company linked to Brent R. Wilkes, an old friend and a San Diego military contractor.

The business provided toilets, plumbing equipment, stereos, video games, bedding, night vision goggles, earplugs and wrap-around sunglasses. Some products were bought at Target and Wal-Mart, among other vendors, and flown overseas. Nothing exotic was required for the infamous waterboards — they were built on the spot from locally available materials, the officials said.

Mr. Foggo, 55, would not discuss classified details about the jails. He was not charged with wrongdoing in connection with the secret prisons, but instead accused of steering other C.I.A. business to Mr. Wilkes’ companies in exchange for expensive vacations and other favors. Before leaving the C.I.A. in 2006, he had become its third-highest official, and his plea was an embarrassment for the agency.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the intelligence world’s embrace of dark-of-night snatch-and-grabs, hidden prisons and interrogation tactics that critics condemned as torture has stained the C.I.A.’s reputation and led to legal challenges, investigations and internal divisions that may take years to resolve. The Justice Department is now considering opening a criminal investigation, with much of the attention focused on the agency’s network of secret prisons, which have become known as the “black sites.”

From Fringes to Spotlight

The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had transformed Mr. Foggo from a fringe player into the C.I.A.’s indispensable man. Before the 9/11 attacks, the Frankfurt base was a relatively sleepy resupply center, running one or two flights a month to outlying stations. Within days of the attacks, Mr. Foggo had a budget of $7 million, which quickly tripled.

He managed dozens of employees, directing nearly daily flights of cargo planes loaded with pallets of supplies, including saddles, bridles and horse feed for the mounted tribal forces that the spy agency recruited. Within weeks, he emptied the C.I.A.’s stockpile of AK-47s and ammunition at a Midwest depot.

He was a logical choice for the prison project: aggressive, resourceful, patriotic, ready to dispense a favor; some inside the C.I.A. jokingly compared him to Milo Minderbinder, the fictional character who rose from mess hall officer to the black-market magnate of Joseph Heller’s World War II novel “Catch-22.”

Early in the fight against Al Qaeda, agency officials relied heavily on American allies to help detain people suspected of terrorism in makeshift facilities in countries like Thailand. But by the time two C.I.A. officials met with Mr. Foggo in 2003, that arrangement was under threat, according to people briefed on the situation. In Thailand, for example, local officials were said to be growing uneasy about a black site outside Bangkok code-named Cat’s Eye. (The agency would eventually change the code name for the Thai prison, fearing it would appear racially insensitive.) The C.I.A. wanted its own, more permanent detention centers.

Eventually, the agency’s network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that was dubbed Strawberry Fields, officials said. (It was named after a Beatles song after C.I.A. officials joked that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, “forever.”)

The C.I.A. has never officially disclosed the exact number of prisoners it once held, but top officials have put the figure at fewer than 100.

At the detention centers Mr. Foggo helped build, several former intelligence officials said, the jails were small, and though they were built to house about a half-dozen detainees they rarely held more than four.

The cells were constructed with special features to prevent injury to the prisoners during interrogations: nonslip floors and flexible, plywood-covered walls to soften the impact of being slammed into the wall.

The detainees, held in cells far enough apart to prevent communication with one another, were kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. For their one hour of daily exercise, they were taken out of their cells by C.I.A. security officers wearing black ski masks to hide their identities and to intimidate the detainees, according to the intelligence officials.

Just like prisons in the United States, the jailers imposed a reward and punishment system: well-behaved detainees received books, DVDs and other forms of entertainment, which were taken away if they misbehaved, the officials said.

C.I.A. analysts served 90-day tours at the prison sites to assist the interrogations. But by the time the new prisons were built in mid-2003 or later, the harshest C.I.A. interrogation practices — including waterboarding — had been discontinued.

Winning a Promotion

Mr. Foggo’s success in Frankfurt, including his work on the prisons, won him a promotion back in Washington. In November 2004, he was named the C.I.A.’s executive director, in effect its day-to-day administrative chief.

The appointment raised some eyebrows at the agency. “It was like taking a senior NCO and telling him he now runs the regiment,” said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.’s executive director from 2001 to 2004. “It popped people’s eyes.”

Mr. Foggo soon became embroiled in agency infighting. The C.I.A. was reeling from criticism that it had exaggerated Iraq’s weapons programs. Mr. Foggo came to Washington as part of a new team that almost immediately began firing top C.I.A. officials, causing anger among veteran clandestine officers. Mr. Foggo’s fast rise and blunt approach unsettled some headquarters officials, according to Brant G. Bassett, a former agency officer and friend who served with Mr. Foggo.

“Dusty went in there with a blowtorch,” Mr. Bassett said. “Some people were overjoyed, but there were a few others who said, we’ve got to take this guy down.”

In 2005, before he came under investigation, Mr. Foggo and other officials, including John Rizzo, the agency’s top lawyer, paid a rare visit to some of the prison sites, assuring C.I.A. employees that their activities were legal, according to former intelligence officials. Mr. Foggo also met with representatives of Eastern European security services that had helped with the prisons. He expressed gratitude and offered assistance — a gesture the officials politely declined.

In February 2007, Mr. Foggo and Mr. Wilkes were indicted. Prosecutors believed that the C.I.A. had paid an inflated price to Archer Logistics, a business connected to Mr. Wilkes that had a $1.7 million C.I.A. supply contract. In return, the prosecutors claimed, Mr. Wilkes had taken Mr. Foggo on expensive vacations, paid for his meals at expensive restaurants and promised him a lucrative job when he retired.

“I was taking a trip with my best friend,” Mr. Foggo said in his defense. “It looked bad, but we had been taking trips together since we were 17 years old.”

Mr. Foggo said he had turned to Mr. Wilkes’ companies to bypass the cumbersome C.I.A. bureaucracy, not to provide a sweetheart deal to his oldest friend. “I needed something done by someone I trusted in private industry,” Mr. Foggo said.

Downfall in Court

Mr. Wilkes maintains his innocence, but he was eventually convicted in a bribery scandal involving former Representative Randall Cunningham of California. Mr. Foggo pleaded guilty and is serving a sentence on the fraud count, but he still maintains that he was unfairly prosecuted.

His lawyer, Mark J. MacDougall, said he believed that Mr. Foggo’s legal problems stemmed in part from controversies over his stint as executive director. “Nobody ever accused Dusty Foggo of putting a dime in his pocket, failing to do his job, or compromising national security,” Mr. MacDougall said. “Dusty may have made some mistakes, but this case was driven by professional animosity at C.I.A. and personal ambition.”

When Mr. Foggo’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully to obtain access to agency files about his role in the prison program, prosecutors complained that he was trying to disclose a secret program. Mr. Foggo claimed that he was reluctant to divulge his role in classified programs and pleaded guilty, in part, to avoid revealing his secrets.

In an Aug. 1, 2007, letter, a C.I.A. lawyer informed Mr. Foggo’s lawyers that they could not review any classified files related to the prisons. The agency’s letter concluded, “In light of the president’s statements regarding the extraordinary value and sensitivity of the C.I.A. terrorist detention and interrogation program, the C.I.A. denies your request in its entirety.”

2 U.S. Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11's Wake

NY Times reports:
Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.

Dr. Bruce Jessen joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

A former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman, Dr. Jim Mitchell and his colleague had no expertise on Al Qaeda and had never conducted an actual interrogation. But they had psychological credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists.

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.

So “Doc Mitchell” and “Doc Jessen,” as they had been known in the Air Force, helped lead the United States into a wrenching conflict over torture, terror and values that seven years later has not run its course.

Dr. Mitchell, with a sonorous Southern accent and the sometimes overbearing confidence of a self-made man, was a former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman. Dr. Jessen, raised on an Idaho potato farm, joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

Seven months after President Obama ordered the C.I.A. interrogation program closed, its fallout still commands attention. In the next few weeks, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to decide whether to begin a criminal torture investigation, in which the psychologists’ role is likely to come under scrutiny. The Justice Department ethics office is expected to complete a report on the lawyers who pronounced the methods legal. And the C.I.A. will soon release a highly critical 2004 report on the program by the agency’s inspector general.

Col. Steven M. Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator and intelligence officer who knows Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, said he thought loyalty to their country in the panicky wake of the Sept. 11 attacks prompted their excursion into interrogation. He said the result was a tragedy for the country, and for them.

“I feel their primary motivation was they thought they had skills and insights that would make the nation safer,” Colonel Kleinman said. “But good persons in extreme circumstances can do horrific things.”

For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency’s “mistakes.”

The psychologists’ subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring.

With a possible criminal inquiry looming, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen have retained a well-known defense lawyer, Henry F. Schuelke III. Mr. Schuelke said they would not comment for this article, which is based on dozens of interviews with the doctors’ colleagues and present and former government officials.

In a brief e-mail exchange in June, Dr. Mitchell said his nondisclosure agreement with the C.I.A. prevented him from commenting. He suggested that his work had been mischaracterized.

“Ask around,” Dr. Mitchell wrote, “and I’m sure you will find all manner of ‘experts’ who will be willing to make up what you’d like to hear on the spot and unrestrained by reality.”

A Career Shift

At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, Dr. Mitchell had just retired from his last military job, as psychologist to an elite special operations unit in North Carolina. Showing his entrepreneurial streak, he had started a training company called Knowledge Works, which he operated from his new home in Florida, to supplement retirement pay.

But for someone with Dr. Mitchell’s background, it was evident that the campaign against Al Qaeda would produce opportunities. He began networking in military and intelligence circles where he had a career’s worth of connections.

He had grown up poor in Florida, Dr. Mitchell told friends, and joined the Air Force in 1974, seeking adventure. Stationed in Alaska, he learned the art of disarming bombs and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology.

Robert J. Madigan, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska who had worked closely with him, remembered Dr. Mitchell stopping by years later. He had completed his doctorate at the University of South Florida in 1986, comparing diet and exercise in controlling hypertension, and was working for the Air Force in Spokane.

“I remember him saying they were preparing people for intense interrogations,” Dr. Madigan said.

Military survival training was expanded after the Korean War, when false confessions by American prisoners led to sensational charges of communist “brainwashing.” Military officials decided that giving service members a taste of Chinese-style interrogation would prepare them to withstand its agony.

Air Force survival training was consolidated in 1966 at Fairchild Air Force Base in the parched hills outside Spokane. The name of the training, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, suggests its breadth: airmen and women learn to live off the land and avoid capture, as well as how to behave if taken prisoner.

In the 1980s, Dr. Jessen became the SERE psychologist at the Air Force Survival School, screening instructors who posed as enemy interrogators at the mock prison camp and making sure rough treatment did not go too far. He had grown up in a Mormon community with a view of Grand Teton, earning a doctorate at Utah State studying “family sculpting,” in which patients make physical models of their family to portray emotional relationships.

Dr. Jessen moved in 1988 to the top psychologist’s job at a parallel “graduate school” of survival training, a short drive from the Air Force school. Dr. Mitchell took his place.

The two men became part of what some Defense Department officials called the “resistance mafia,” experts on how to resist enemy interrogations. Both lieutenant colonels and both married with children, they took weekend ice-climbing trips together.

While many subordinates considered them brainy and capable leaders, some fellow psychologists were more skeptical. At the annual conference of SERE psychologists, two colleagues recalled, Dr. Mitchell offered lengthy put-downs of presentations that did not suit him.

At the Air Force school, Dr. Mitchell was known for enforcing the safety of interrogations; it might surprise his later critics to learn that he eliminated a tactic called “manhandling” after it produced a spate of neck injuries, a colleague said.

At the SERE graduate school, Dr. Jessen is remembered for an unusual job switch, from supervising psychologist to mock enemy interrogator.

Dr. Jessen became so aggressive in that role that colleagues intervened to rein him in, showing him videotape of his “pretty scary” performance, another official recalled.

Always, former and current SERE officials say, it is understood that the training mimics the methods of unscrupulous foes.

Mark Mays, the first psychologist at the Air Force school, said that to make the fake prison camp realistic, officials consulted American P.O.W.’s who had just returned from harrowing camps in North Vietnam.

“It was clear that this is what we’d expect from our enemies,” said Dr. Mays, now a clinical psychologist and lawyer in Spokane. “It was not something I could ever imagine Americans would do.”

Start of the Program

In December 2001, a small group of professors and law enforcement and intelligence officers gathered outside Philadelphia at the home of a prominent psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, to brainstorm about Muslim extremism. Among them was Dr. Mitchell, who attended with a C.I.A. psychologist, Kirk M. Hubbard.

During a break, Dr. Mitchell introduced himself to Dr. Seligman and said how much he admired the older man’s writing on “learned helplessness.” Dr. Seligman was so struck by Dr. Mitchell’s unreserved praise, he recalled in an interview, that he mentioned it to his wife that night. Later, he said, he was “grieved and horrified” to learn that his work had been cited to justify brutal interrogations.

Dr. Seligman had discovered in the 1960s that dogs that learned they could do nothing to avoid small electric shocks would become listless and simply whine and endure the shocks even after being given a chance to escape.

Helplessness, which later became an influential concept in the treatment of human depression, was also much discussed in military survival training. Instructors tried to stop short of producing helplessness in trainees, since their goal was to strengthen the spirit of service members in enemy hands.

Dr. Mitchell, colleagues said, believed that producing learned helplessness in a Qaeda interrogation subject might ensure that he would comply with his captor’s demands. Many experienced interrogators disagreed, asserting that a prisoner so demoralized would say whatever he thought the interrogator expected.

At the C.I.A. in December 2001, Dr. Mitchell’s theories were attracting high-level attention. Agency officials asked him to review a Qaeda manual, seized in England, that coached terrorist operatives to resist interrogations. He contacted Dr. Jessen, and the two men wrote the first proposal to turn the enemy’s brutal techniques — slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding — into an American interrogation program.

By the start of 2002, Dr. Mitchell was consulting with the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center, whose director, Cofer Black, and chief operating officer, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., were impressed by his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon. One person who heard some discussions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. officials what they wanted to hear. In this person’s words, Dr. Mitchell suggested that interrogations required “a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings.”

By the end of March, when agency operatives captured Abu Zubaydah, initially described as Al Qaeda’s No. 3, the Mitchell-Jessen interrogation plan was ready. At a secret C.I.A. jail in Thailand, as reported in prior news accounts, two F.B.I agents used conventional rapport-building methods to draw vital information from Mr. Zubaydah. Then the C.I.A. team, including Dr. Mitchell, arrived.

With the backing of agency headquarters, Dr. Mitchell ordered Mr. Zubaydah stripped, exposed to cold and blasted with rock music to prevent sleep. Not only the F.B.I. agents but also C.I.A. officers at the scene were uneasy about the harsh treatment. Among those questioning the use of physical pressure, according to one official present, were the Thailand station chief, the officer overseeing the jail, a top interrogator and a top agency psychologist.

Whether they protested to C.I.A. bosses is uncertain, because the voluminous message traffic between headquarters and the Thailand site remains classified. One witness said he believed that “revisionism” in light of the torture controversy had prompted some participants to exaggerate their objections.

As the weeks passed, the senior agency psychologist departed, followed by one F.B.I. agent and then the other. Dr. Mitchell began directing the questioning and occasionally speaking directly to Mr. Zubaydah, one official said.

In late July 2002, Dr. Jessen joined his partner in Thailand. On Aug. 1, the Justice Department completed a formal legal opinion authorizing the SERE methods, and the psychologists turned up the pressure. Over about two weeks, Mr. Zubaydah was confined in a box, slammed into the wall and waterboarded 83 times.

The brutal treatment stopped only after Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen themselves decided that Mr. Zubaydah had no more information to give up. Higher-ups from headquarters arrived and watched one more waterboarding before agreeing that the treatment could stop, according to a Justice Department legal opinion.

Lucrative Work

The Zubaydah case gave reason to question the Mitchell-Jessen plan: the prisoner had given up his most valuable information without coercion.

But top C.I.A. officials made no changes, and the methods would be used on at least 27 more prisoners, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.

The business plans of Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, meanwhile, were working out beautifully. They were paid $1,000 to $2,000 a day apiece, one official said. They had permanent desks in the Counterterrorist Center, and could now claim genuine experience in interrogating high-level Qaeda operatives.

Dr. Mitchell could keep working outside the C.I.A. as well. At the Ritz-Carlton in Maui in October 2003, he was featured at a high-priced seminar for corporations on how to behave if kidnapped. He created new companies, called Wizard Shop, later renamed Mind Science, and What If. His first company, Knowledge Works, was certified by the American Psychological Association in 2004 as a sponsor of continuing professional education. (A.P.A. dropped the certification last year.)

In 2005, the psychologists formed Mitchell Jessen and Associates, with offices in Spokane and Virginia and five additional shareholders, four of them from the military’s SERE program. By 2007, the company employed about 60 people, some with impressive résumés, including Deuce Martinez, a lead C.I.A. interrogator of Mr. Mohammed; Roger L. Aldrich, a legendary military survival trainer; and Karen Gardner, a senior training official at the F.B.I. Academy.

The company’s C.I.A. contracts are classified, but their total was well into the millions of dollars. In 2007 in a suburb of Tampa, Fla., Dr. Mitchell built a house with a swimming pool, now valued at $800,000.

The psychologists’ influence remained strong under four C.I.A. directors. In 2006, in fact, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, pushed back against the C.I.A.’s secret detention program and its methods, the director at the time, Michael V. Hayden, asked Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen to brief State Department officials and persuade them to drop their objections. They were unsuccessful.

By then, the national debate over torture had begun, and it would undo the psychologists’ business.

In a statement to employees on April 9, Leon E. Panetta, President Obama’s C.I.A. director, announced the “decommissioning” of the agency’s secret jails and repeated a pledge not to use coercion. And there was another item: “No C.I.A. contractors will conduct interrogations.”

Agency officials terminated the contracts for Mitchell Jessen and Associates, and the psychologists’ lucrative seven-year ride was over. Within days, the company had vacated its Spokane offices. The phones were disconnected, and at neighboring businesses, no one knew of a forwarding address.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 15, 2009
An article on Wednesday about two former military psychologists who designed the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program in 2002 misstated the credentials of an Air Force officer who criticized the interrogation methods but suggested that the two psychologists had acted out of patriotic motives. The officer, Steven M. Kleinman, is a career intelligence officer and former interrogator; he is not a psychologist and is not “Dr. Kleinman.” (He has master’s degrees in strategic intelligence and forensic sciences, but does not have a doctorate.)

Transcript of Democracy Now! Interview with Jeremy Scahill, March 4, 2009

Blackwater CEO Erik Prince Resigns in Latest Attempt to Rebrand Tarnished Mercenary Firm

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, has announced his resignation as the company’s CEO. The move comes weeks after the company changed its name to Xe in an attempt to rebrand the firm. Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, assesses the latest developments.

Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s go from the issue of whether there are a permanent bases, which he did not address, to another issue he didn’t address: mercenaries, or the paramilitaries, the private contractors. I had a chance to question Senator Obama a year ago when he was on the campaign trail. He spoke at Cooper Union here in New York. As he was walking out, I asked him why he wasn’t calling for a total withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in accordance with the 70 percent of Iraqis who say they want the US out.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Obama, quick question: 70 percent of Iraqis say they want the US to withdraw completely; why don’t you call for a total withdrawal?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I do, except for our embassy. I call for amnesty and protecting our civilian contractors there.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve said a residual force—

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, but—

AMY GOODMAN: —which would be tens of thousands of troops.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, no. I mean, I don’t think that you’ve read exactly what I’ve said. What I said is that we do need to have a strike force in the region. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in Iraq; it could be in Kuwait or other places. But we do have to have some presence in order to not only protect them, but also potentially to protect the territorial integrity.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you call for a ban on the private military contractors like Blackwater?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I’ve actually—I’m the one who sponsored the bill that called for the investigation of Blackwater and those folks, so—

AMY GOODMAN: But would you support the Sanders one now?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Here’s the problem: we have 140,000 private contractors right there, so unless we want to replace all of or a big chunk of those with US troops, we can’t draw down the contractors faster than we can draw down our troops. So what I want to do is draw—I want them out in the same way that we make sure that we draw out our own combat troops. Alright? I mean, I—

AMY GOODMAN: Not a total ban?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I mean, I don’t want to replace those contractors with more US troops, because we don’t have them, alright? But this was a speech about the economy.

AMY GOODMAN: The war is costing $3 trillion, according to Stiglitz.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: That’s what—I know, which I made a speech about last week. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Senator Barack Obama a year ago at Cooper Union here in New York. Lawrence Korb, I know you have to leave for another appointment, but I did want to ask about the mercenaries, about the private contractors. They number, what, about the same as the US soldiers right now in Iraq.

LAWRENCE KORB: Troops, yeah. That’s correct. But again, as you draw down the troops, you’ll need less of them, because one of the things that they’re doing is providing logistic support, you know, for the troops, and you will need, obviously, less of that.

Remember, under the Status of Forces Agreement, they no longer have immunity. If these people act up again, they are going to be subject to the Iraqi justice system. And obviously, you’re going to need some sort of private contractors to guard the number of personnel that are in the country in this embassy. And again, I would not have built such a big embassy, but it is there, and hopefully, over the years, we can get that back to a normal size, if we ever get back to having a normal relationship with Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Lawrence Korb, I want to thank you for being with us, from the Center for American Progress, former Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan. And, Jeremy Scahill, if you would just stay with us for a few more minutes, I want to stay on this issue of the private contractors.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Can I say something about what—about this issue first? I mean, on the issue of the US embassy, I think that the Obama administration should turn it over to the Iraqi people and let them decide what they want to use that massive city within their city for. And the fact is that—

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking about like a four mile square area in downtown Baghdad.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean, you’re talking—yeah, you’re talking about a small city unto itself that’s going to have 1,200 employees and hundreds of CIA operatives, was the initial plan for it. And all these people are going to necessitate deadly and lethal security. So that would be a real message of change to send to the Iraqi people, to say this was an embassy built on slave labor as part of an illegal occupation of your country—

AMY GOODMAN: Why do you say “slave labor”?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Because there were people that were brought in. It was essentially indentured servitude. There were people that were brought in from other countries that worked on the construction of that project, much like Africans abducted from the African continent and brought here as slaves, they and their descendants were building the White House in this country. Here we are, years later, with the US government having the embassy built largely on labor that was forced labor or dramatically underpaid labor by people that were essentially forced by their economic conditions or by being taken into the country under false pretenses to participate in the construction of that embassy. And this is the subject of a major congressional investigation that I don’t know is going to go anywhere now that Obama is in the White House.

But on the issue of the contractors, I mean, what you asked Obama about a year ago is very, very important, because Obama said in his answer to you that he didn’t want to draw down contractors at a faster rate than he drew down US troops. So, even when Obama is talking about 50,000 troops remaining in the country, presumably that would mean 50,000 contractors to support them. So we’re always talking about deflated numbers when we hear them come out of the mouths of administration officials.
On the issue of the mercenaries, though, the armed security contractors, Blackwater, the company formerly known as Blackwater, now, you know, called Xe, which is—you know, I mean, it’s very, very interesting, this—

AMY GOODMAN: Spelled X-e.

JEREMY SCAHILL: X-e—you know, in the midst of a major rebranding campaign. What happened with Blackwater is that the Obama administration, through the State Department, informed Xe, Blackwater, that they were not going to renew their highly lucrative contract in Iraq. I think this was a result, in large part, of massive public pressure. I think that activists and concerned people and journalists who were exposing this really made it politically untenable for the Obama administration to at least publicly continue that kind of a relationship with this company, Blackwater, and I think the people who took this seriously should take heart in that.

Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, did make a pledge on the campaign trail that she was going to endorse legislation to ban Blackwater’s operations, and she took a lot of heat for that. Whether or not this was a decision that she influenced, I don’t know. I mean, it seemed like it was sort of a cynical decision on the campaign trail aimed at outflanking Obama from the left. But the fact is that Blackwater’s contract has not been renewed.

Having said that, Blackwater is firmly entrenched in Afghanistan, continues with many lucrative US government contracts, has now changed its name. Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater and the CEO, this week announced that he was stepping down as the CEO but will remain as the chairman. So, you know, I mean, Erik Prince is not in control of Blackwater, the same way that Vladimir Putin is not in control of Russia; he is in control of it, he just isn’t officially the head of it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, wait. So, let’s explain all of this. Let’s really talk about Blackwater now. I think it astonished many when first they heard that Blackwater’s new name would be Xe.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Xe, right.

AMY GOODMAN: X-e.

JEREMY SCAHILL: It’s a kind of gas.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, that Erik Prince was stepping down as CEO.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: But his position now?

JEREMY SCAHILL: He’s the chair, remains the chairman of Blackwater. And he appointed a guy named Joseph Yorio, who was a former vice president at the international shipping company DHL, to be the president of Blackwater. And what’s interesting about that is Erik Prince has consistently said that his vision for Blackwater is that it’s going to be like the Federal Express of the national security apparatus. So he didn’t hire a FedEx VP; he went with DHL, which has more of an international reputation. It’s all very fascinating. But—

AMY GOODMAN: Erik Prince is still there.

JEREMY SCAHILL: So, Erik Prince, right, he stepped down from the running of the day-to-day operations of Blackwater, but he’s still the owner, and he’s still the chairman of the company. He still has his private intelligence company that is marketing CIA-type services to—

AMY GOODMAN: Headed by…?

JEREMY SCAHILL: —Fortune 1000 corporations. Well, it’s been headed by Cofer Black and Robert Richer, both CIA veterans, although in Prince’s statement announcing his stepping down, he indicated that there have been sweeping either resignations or departures at the company. Gary Jackson, the president of Blackwater, is out. This was a guy who just a few months ago had said that they would have to carry him out of Blackwater if he was ever going to leave there, essentially saying he was going to be at that company for life. He’s gone. Other vice chairmen have left. Other people—there’s clearly been a major shake-up there.

AMY GOODMAN: And their symbol is changed.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right, their symbol—well, now they don’t even call—it used to be that Blackwater was the name of all of Prince’s network of security companies and training companies. Now they’ve changed the name of their training facilities just to the “US Training Center.” That’s what it’s called. And instead of the sort of more sexy, you know, red-and-black bear paw in the sniper scope logo, they now have this crude drawing, that looks like it was like done by a high school art student, of an American bald eagle with a yellow beak. I mean, it’s really strange. Maybe Prince stopped spending money on all of these PR firms or rebranding agencies or what have you. But it all appears very crude.

One thing that hasn’t been crude, though, is that Blackwater clearly has learned at least some semblance of a lesson about the power of activist campaigns and bringing out into the light their activities, because there’s been a group operating under the banner of Blackwater Watch for a couple of years now, and it’s from San Diego, where they have it, to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, all the way to North Carolina, Blackwater’s home state. And they have blackwaterwatch.net. A year ago, Amy, last April, Blackwater registered the domain names for Xe Watch dot org, dot com, dot net, as a—this was a year before they basically even announced that the company was changing its name, although Blackwater Watch now has rebranded itself, and they call themselves Xe Watch, but they’re still operating at blackwaterwatch.net.

So, I think that Blackwater got what it needed from Iraq. It made a lot of money. It secured a reputation that, in its world, is actually a good reputation, because they may have killed a lot of people, but they never lost a principal, as they say.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to talk about “killed a lot of people.” Let’s go back to Nisoor Square.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: I think people will be surprised to hear that Blackwater is not banned from Iraq by the Iraqi government.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. Well, I mean, the fact is, and Mr. Korb said this earlier when he was on, that the immunity has been taken away. I will believe that the immunity has been taken away from these killers when the first one of them appears in Iraqi court. The fact is, the US government is not going to hand over its citizens, especially former Navy Seals working for these kinds of companies, to an Iraqi court. It’s just not going to happen. So, you know, the Iraqi government can talk until it’s blue in the face about not renewing licenses and all that; the US has made it clear, Democrat and Republican, that it’s going to do what it needs to do to protect its forces and personnel in Iraq, and if that meant keeping Blackwater there, the Obama administration would keep Blackwater there.

AMY GOODMAN: Could you explain, though, if Barack Obama says he’s keeping 50,000 troops—there’s a lot of troops leaving then—why doesn’t he have enough troops to protect the embassy? Why do mercenaries, do private contractors, have to protect the embassy?
JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, this is a debate now that, as a result of the radical privatization of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security division—that’s where these mercenary companies primarily work; they work for the State Department doing what’s called diplomatic security. There has never been a mission of the size of this for diplomatic security.

This actually—this program started in the ’90s. When the US restored Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in Haiti, they hired private companies through the State Department to serve as his protective force and to protect US diplomats that were going in there with Aristide. That started this whole mercenary industry being a part of the US State Department. So, Bush turned it into a paramilitary force in Iraq, and what that meant was that the people that were specifically trained to do this kind of executive protection were largely private contractors. And so, the State Department does not currently have full-time employees that would be able to do that job, and the military has said it doesn’t want to be body guarding US diplomats. So the US has painted itself into a corner. The Democrats have aggressively funded this program, along with the Bush administration. And, of course, it started and expanded under Clinton. And so, it’s now a Catch-22. The Obama administration says it wants to make them all full-time employees. It will take years to do that. Private contractors are going to be in Iraq for a very long time.

AMY GOODMAN: And you mentioned Afghanistan, but, of course, not only private contractors. There is a surge going on now that President Obama has announced, talking about escalating the war in Afghanistan. Just before we went on air, word of a car bomb exploding outside the main US military base in Kabul, wounding three people on Wednesday. The Taliban have claimed responsibility. The blast outside the main base at Bagram wounded three civilian contractors working for a US company, wasn’t clear what the nationalities of the three were.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, the last thing I’ll say is this: You can look at the direction of US policy like this: We have a president now who said he’ll use preemptive military action inside of the borders of another country without informing the leadership of that country, if he deems it’s in the interests of the US, as in the case of Pakistan; a president who’s just delivered what, for all practical purposes, sounded like the victory speech of the previous president for his war based on lies and illegal acts of aggression, and who is surging, beyond the wildest hopes of the Republicans, in Afghanistan, putting more troops than almost any other politician was calling for, and is going to get the US further just sunk into the hole of a very violent and bloody war of occupation in Afghanistan.

This is, once again, an imperial presidency, and I think it’s cause for great, great concern. And unfortunately, the spines of many people that actually have the ear of Obama seem to have been surgically removed now that he is president. And I think it’s very disturbing that people don’t speak truth to power. This is a very dangerous course this president is continuing.

AMY GOODMAN: The alternative in Afghanistan?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I think that, you know, Representative Marcy Kaptur, who you had on recently discussing the fact that people should squat in their homes if these banks are trying to take their homes away from them and say, “Produce the note,” I think put it best when she said that President Obama should call Russia and ask them what happened in Afghanistan. I think the United States has no respect for self-determination or independence of these countries. And I think that there are international diplomats who have wide experience in both Iraq and Afghanistan whose counsel should be sought out, because the United States should be about the business of paying reparations to these countries that it has participated in the destruction of and looking for regional diplomatic solutions that inherently are non-military in their scope and are aimed at actual self-determination for the people of those countries. There’s no internationalization of US policy. There’s no listening to indigenous voices. It’s been military solutions first.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, I want to thank you for being with us. I think it’s interesting, Jeremy, the book for which you won the George Polk Award, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, when it came out in paperback, it was going to be released on the day that Erik Prince’s book, long delayed, was also going to be released, but they pulled it.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. Yeah, I haven’t—there were a couple of times that Erik Prince’s book was supposed to come out. Instead, this executive producer at CNN, Suzanne Simons, who’s been an apologist for the mercenary industry, she seems to have written it for him. Her book comes out in June. I think it’s called Master of War.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, thanks for being with us. Jeremy Scahill, award-winning investigative journalist, author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater and Democracy Now! correspondent.

Transcript of Democracy Now! For March 4, 2009

Despite Celebrated Speech, Has Obama Really Ordered an End to US Occupation of Iraq?

President Obama’s plan to withdraw US combat troops from Iraq has both been hailed by some as a signal of the coming end of the war while criticized by others as an extension of the occupation. We host a debate between Lawrence Korb, the former assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan, and Jeremy Scahill, award-winning author and investigative journalist.

Lawrence Korb, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan. He is author of more than twenty books. His latest article is “The Promised Withdrawal from Iraq”.

Jeremy Scahill, Award-winning investigative journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He extensively reported from Iraq in the run-up to the 2003 invasion. His latest article is “All Troops Out By 2011? Not So Fast; Why Obama’s Iraq Speech Deserves a Second Look”.

Partial transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: One of the main themes of President Obama’s campaign was his opposition to the war in Iraq. He heavily criticized the Bush administration for the 2003 invasion and vocally opposed the war from the very beginning, when he was still an Illinois state senator. Now, as President of the United States, Obama has finally announced his plan to pull US troops out of Iraq. In a speech at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina on Friday, Obama appeared to spell out a clear date for a withdrawal.

[Video]:
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: As a candidate for president, I made clear my support for a timeline of sixteen months to carry out this drawdown, while pledging to consult closely with our military commanders upon taking office to ensure that we preserve the gains we’ve made and to protect our troops. These consultations are now complete, and I have chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next eighteen months.

AMY GOODMAN: Under President Obama’s plan, up to 50,000 US troops would remain in Iraq through 2011.

[Video]:
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: As I have long said, we will retain a transitional force to carry out three distinct functions: training, equipping and advising Iraqi Security Forces as long as they remain non-sectarian; conducting targeted counterterrorism missions; and protecting our ongoing civilian and military efforts within Iraq. Initially, this force will likely be made up of 35,000 to 50,000 US troops.

AMY GOODMAN: But President Obama’s decision to keep 50,000 troops in Iraq has angered some critics of the war. Iraq Veterans Against the War described Obama’s proposal as a “plan for almost three more years of an unjustified military occupation.”
Obama’s speech on Iraq left several major questions unanswered. He did not address whether the US will keep permanent military bases in Iraq, and he made no promise to withdraw the over 100,000 private US military contractors and mercenaries stationed in Iraq.

For a debate today on President Obama’s Iraq plan, we’re joined by two guests. Lawrence Korb is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He’s a former Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan. He’s the author of more than twenty books. His latest article is called “The Promised Withdrawal from Iraq.” He’s joining us from Washington, D.C.

And joining me here in our firehouse studio is Jeremy Scahill, award-winning investigative journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He reported extensively from Iraq in the run-up to the 2003 invasion. His latest article, called “All Troops Out by 2011? Not So Fast; Why Obama’s Iraq Speech Deserves a Second Look.” It appeared at alternet.org.

Lawrence Korb, can you assess the plan laid out by President Obama and why you support it?

LAWRENCE KORB: Well, basically, the plan is exactly what he laid out in the campaign. He said he was going to withdraw all combat troops within sixteen months, so he put it up by two months. And he said he would leave a residual force in there to carry out the three missions that he mentioned: going after the remnants of al-Qaeda, helping the Iraqi Security Forces deal with any type of violence other than sectarian, and to protect Americans there.

In many ways, what—the campaign promise that Obama made was actually overcome by events, because President Bush, who for the longest time had resisted a timeline, agreed in the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqis in December of 2008 that all forces would be out by the end of 2011. So, what President Obama is just doing is carrying out that agreement, because these residual forces have to be out by the end of 2011.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, your assessment?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, I agree with something that Larry said there at the end. I mean, Obama essentially gave Bush’s victory in Iraq speech when he appeared in front of Camp Lejeune. I mean, this, for all practical purposes, was policy the day that Bush left office. So we’re not seeing any radical departure from official US policy at the end of the Bush administration. And, of course, as Lawrence indicates, that was the result of a very complicated process where the Bush administration was outright criminal in its refusal to recognize anything even vaguely resembling the sovereignty of the people of Iraq.

But let’s be clear here on three major problems with the Obama Iraq plan. First of all, this residual force that Obama is going to be implementing, right now the numbers they’re discussing are 35,000 to 50,000 troops. I’ve long spoken out against this residual force, and there are many activist groups in this country that, when Obama was running for president, called his office and said, “No residual forces remaining in Iraq.” The scope of the mission of these residual forces, while it sounds specific to some—phrases such as “counterterrorism” have become almost meaningless in the America we now live in when uttered by politicians. We see how they’ve been applied over the past eight years and, quite frankly, under the Clinton administration, as well. So I’m very concerned about the type of operations that this 35,000 to 50,000—if it actually gets down to that number under the timeline Obama has stated.

Secondly, Obama has refused to scrap this massive, monstrous US embassy that was built on basically slave labor, a $700 million embassy that’s the size of Vatican City. The Vatican has embassies of its own around the world. And the US has built this abomination in Iraq on slave labor, and the Obama administration is going to maintain a staff of over a thousand people there who are going to necessitate heavily armed security to go anywhere inside of the country. That’s been a cocktail for death and destruction in Iraq. Blackwater has been the company that primarily has been guarding US diplomats. Now it’s probably going to be a different company, although many of the same operatives will probably jump over to that company. So, change in name, but not necessarily in policy. Even if Obama hires these people through the State Department officially and says there’s some system of accountability, they’re still going to be putting US lives at a premium over Iraqi lives.

And the third problem that I have with the Obama Iraq plan is that it’s full of loopholes. The Status of Forces Agreement, first of all, Article 27 allows the United States and the Iraqi government to agree that the United States can stay in the country, can engage in any kind of military operations and also can take action, including military action, to address any, quote, “threat,” internal or external. Well, what’s a threat? The wrong people win an election? We’ve seen that happen before. Look at the case of Hamas in Palestine.

So, the fact of the matter is, you take these three, combined with the fact that senior military officials have told journalists, such as Jim Miklashevski of NBC News, that the Pentagon is preparing for US forces to remain in Iraq potentially for twenty more years, and I think we have reason to be very concerned about the fact that Obama basically is giving Bush’s final Iraq speech.

AMY GOODMAN: Lawrence Korb, your response?

LAWRENCE KORB: Well, I think a couple of things are important. And there’s no doubt about the fact that any agreement can be abused. But remember, it was the Iraqis who wanted us out. The Iraqis never really wanted us there, and they’re the ones who insisted on the timeline.

The other is the Iraqi people get to vote this summer on a referendum about whether they want to support the Status of Forces Agreement. If they decide not to, all the forces have to be out within a year. So I think that’s the key thing to keep in mind. And I know our military commanders have talked about, and Secretary Gates has talked about, staying there, but we could only do that with the permission of the Iraqis.
The final thing is, come 1 July, our forces are out of the cities, they’re out of the towns. They’re basically back on their bases. They can only go out with the permission of the Iraqi government. Now, I agree, there can be abuses, and I do worry that Prime Minister Maliki might try get US forces to go against some of his enemies. That’s why I think in President Obama’s speech, when he said not to deal with sectarian issues—I mean, they can ask us, but we don’t have to do that, and I would hope that the President and his national security team make that clear to our military commanders, exactly what they can and cannot do.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, see, one of the issues I have here is, going back to this issue of what if the wrong people win an election, the Iraqi people have a right to choose leaders that are hostile to the United States, that are hostile to US corporate aims in the Middle East, more broadly, and in Iraq, specifically. And I think that US history has shown that when the wrong people win elections, the US will intervene militarily, overtly, covertly, behind-the-scenes, in front of the world public. And I think that the fact that Thomas Ricks, one of the most well-informed journalists covering this war, has indicated that it’s very likely that a leader will emerge in Iraq that is hostile to US interests, that is close to Tehran and is not going to be someone that’s perceived by the United States to be a friend—so the fact is that the Maliki government could be substantially weakened by indigenous forces within Iraq, and the Obama administration could step in and say, “We’re going to defend this flailing regime.”

What I found very disturbing about Obama’s speech, among other things, was the fact that he officially co-signed Bush’s major lies on Iraq. When he talked about the mission of US troops in Iraq, he said, “I want to be very clear: We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein’s regime, and you got the job done.” I’m sorry, Mr. Obama, the troops were sent to Iraq on the lie of weapons of mass destruction. And he co-signed that Bush administration lie.

He also said, “We will leave the Iraqi people with a hard-earned opportunity to live a better life. That is your achievement,” he said to the US troops. “That is the prospect that you have made possible.” Again, no, not a better life. We’re talking about upwards of a million Iraqis that have been killed, their lives decimated, 20 percent of the country either in need of desperate medical attention, internally displaced, another 20 percent living outside of the country. And this has been an utter mess. And he talks about a better future. Iraq has never been in more shambles than it has been over the course of the US military occupation.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to come back to this discussion, Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, has written a piece on Alternet, online at alternet.org. Lawrence Korb, with the Center for American Progress, has also written a piece called "The Promised Withdrawal from Iraq.” He’s former Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan. Back in a minute.

[BREAK]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests, Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army—and I want to get to talking about Blackwater—well, it’s now called Xe. We’re also joined by President Reagan’s former Assistant Secretary of Defense. He is now with the Center for American Progress. He’s written a piece called “The Promised Withdrawal from Iraq.”

Lawrence Korb, the last point that Jeremy made about President Obama—well, he called President Bush right before he gave his Camp Lejeune speech, and then telling the troops at Camp Lejeune that they had succeeded in their mission in removing Saddam Hussein.

LAWRENCE KORB: Well, I think it’s very important, because the troops did what they were told. I agree that the war was fought under false pretences. We should never have gone there. It was probably the greatest strategic blunder in US history. But that’s not the fault of the troops. They were sent there. Their mission was overthrow the regime, and that’s—you know, that’s what they did. We can’t fault them, however much we want to be opposed to this war.

The other point he made is certainly true, that there are potential for abuses. I have enough confidence in Senator Obama that he will not let that happen. But yes, there certainly is the potential for us to make some of the mistakes we’ve made in previous—our previous history when we didn’t like the results of the election.

But I think it is important—and I did like that part, because as a young man, I went and got involved in a—you know, another terrible war. But the people I went with in Vietnam, we did what we were told. Then, when you come back and you find out, for example, that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was a sham, that’s not our fault. And that’s what—and I was glad that he did that, because it is true that these people have suffered—not only the Iraqis, but our men and women have been asked to do something that no other military in our history has been asked to do, to go back two, three, four times into a combat zone with very little, you know, time in between. And what it has done to them and their families, I think, is something that we’re going to be paying for a long time—for a long time.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, part of the problem here, though, it’s not about faulting the troops. I mean, I agree with Lawrence in the sense that troops are given orders, and then they can decide whether they’re going to follow out those orders or not follow them out. We’ve seen many soldiers through IVAW, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and others who have actually resisted or have refused to participate in a war they consider to be illegal or immoral. And that, though, is separate from what President Obama did.

What President Obama did is he completely reformed his position on Iraq, co-signed the lies of the Bush administration, and cast aside his campaign rhetoric, where he did talk about this being a fraudulent war, where he did criticize the prosecution of this war. To listen to President Obama at Camp Lejeune, you would think that this war was prosecuted beautifully and that the point of it was to liberate the people of Iraq. That was not the point of this administration—of the Bush administration’s occupation of Iraq. That came like two or three justifications later, after the fraud and the lies.

So, the fact that Obama gives this speech, does not mention the fact that Iraqis have suffered under the US occupation, doesn’t mention the incredible price that the Iraqis have paid as a result of US military action in Iraq, to me, I think that sends a very disturbing message to the Iraqi people and the region, more generally.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, I wanted to ask about the response of the Democratic leaders to President Obama’s speech, like Nancy Pelosi, like Harry Reid.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. Well, first of all, yeah, you look at Obama’s top allies, it’s people like John McCain, it’s people like Mitch McConnell, who praised Obama for implementing the Bush administration’s Iraq strategy at the end. And, I mean, some of this is partisan politics. And, please, the Republicans have no credibility on this. I mean, if we can be critical of Barack Obama, I mean, the Republicans are just merciless criminals when it comes to, you know, US policy in Iraq and toward the world, more broadly.

But the fact that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer all acted like astonished that there’s going to be 35,000 to 50,000 troops in a residual capacity in Iraq and were criticizing this, I mean, this is a classic example of what’s wrong with the Democratic Party when it comes to foreign policy and what’s been wrong with this party for a long time. And that is that when it actually mattered, when Pelosi or Reid could have said to candidate Obama, “Back off that residual force,” as many activists were calling for, they were deafeningly silent. We were at the Democratic convention, Amy, walking around, trying to find anyone to criticize that aspect of the Obama policy, and not even antiwar Democrats, who were firmly against the war from the beginning, would dissent from the policy positions of the dear leader. This is cult activity, when you refuse to go after someone to try to criticize their policies when it matters and then later act like you’ve been hoodwinked. They knew exactly what was going on.

AMY GOODMAN: Lawrence Korb?

LAWRENCE KORB: Well, I think in the speech, as I read it, he did make reference to the suffering of the Iraqi people and talked about, you know, the refugee problem, so I think he did that. But again, I think Jeremy is right. I mean, you got to go back. Obama mentioned this in the campaign. So, if people are upset, they should have, you know, made these views known during the primaries. And again, while I thought the war was the greatest strategic disaster, remember that the Congress voted to approve this, including some of the other people who ran against Obama, and I think they—you know, they should be held accountable for this, as well. So I think there’s a lot of blame to go—that got to go round.

The question is, OK, we are where we are; are we, you know, doing the right thing? And I just hope that the President carries out what he says, and we’re completely out of there, no permanent bases, and that he does not allow Americans to participate in any type of operations that are done solely to deal with one ethnic group being concerned about what the other is doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s go from the issue of whether there are a permanent bases, which he did not address, to another issue he didn’t address: mercenaries, or the paramilitaries, the private contractors. I had a chance to question Senator Obama a year ago when he was on the campaign trail. He spoke at Cooper Union here in New York. As he was walking out, I asked him why he wasn’t calling for a total withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in accordance with the 70 percent of Iraqis who say they want the US out.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Obama, quick question: 70 percent of Iraqis say they want the US to withdraw completely; why don’t you call for a total withdrawal?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I do, except for our embassy. I call for amnesty and protecting our civilian contractors there.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve said a residual force—

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, but—

AMY GOODMAN: —which would be tens of thousands of troops.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, no. I mean, I don’t think that you’ve read exactly what I’ve said. What I said is that we do need to have a strike force in the region. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in Iraq; it could be in Kuwait or other places. But we do have to have some presence in order to not only protect them, but also potentially to protect the territorial integrity.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you call for a ban on the private military contractors like Blackwater?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I’ve actually—I’m the one who sponsored the bill that called for the investigation of Blackwater and those folks, so—

AMY GOODMAN: But would you support the Sanders one now?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Here’s the problem: we have 140,000 private contractors right there, so unless we want to replace all of or a big chunk of those with US troops, we can’t draw down the contractors faster than we can draw down our troops. So what I want to do is draw—I want them out in the same way that we make sure that we draw out our own combat troops. Alright? I mean, I—

AMY GOODMAN: Not a total ban?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I mean, I don’t want to replace those contractors with more US troops, because we don’t have them, alright? But this was a speech about the economy.

AMY GOODMAN: The war is costing $3 trillion, according to Stiglitz.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: That’s what—I know, which I made a speech about last week. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Senator Barack Obama a year ago at Cooper Union here in New York. Lawrence Korb, I know you have to leave for another appointment, but I did want to ask about the mercenaries, about the private contractors. They number, what, about the same as the US soldiers right now in Iraq.

LAWRENCE KORB: Troops, yeah. That’s correct. But again, as you draw down the troops, you’ll need less of them, because one of the things that they’re doing is providing logistic support, you know, for the troops, and you will need, obviously, less of that.

Remember, under the Status of Forces Agreement, they no longer have immunity. If these people act up again, they are going to be subject to the Iraqi justice system. And obviously, you’re going to need some sort of private contractors to guard the number of personnel that are in the country in this embassy. And again, I would not have built such a big embassy, but it is there, and hopefully, over the years, we can get that back to a normal size, if we ever get back to having a normal relationship with Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Lawrence Korb, I want to thank you for being with us, from the Center for American Progress, former Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan. And, Jeremy Scahill, if you would just stay with us for a few more minutes, I want to stay on this issue of the private contractors.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Can I say something about what—about this issue first? I mean, on the issue of the US embassy, I think that the Obama administration should turn it over to the Iraqi people and let them decide what they want to use that massive city within their city for. And the fact is that—

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking about like a four mile square area in downtown Baghdad.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean, you’re talking—yeah, you’re talking about a small city unto itself that’s going to have 1,200 employees and hundreds of CIA operatives, was the initial plan for it. And all these people are going to necessitate deadly and lethal security. So that would be a real message of change to send to the Iraqi people, to say this was an embassy built on slave labor as part of an illegal occupation of your country—

AMY GOODMAN: Why do you say “slave labor”?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Because there were people that were brought in. It was essentially indentured servitude. There were people that were brought in from other countries that worked on the construction of that project, much like Africans abducted from the African continent and brought here as slaves, they and their descendants were building the White House in this country. Here we are, years later, with the US government having the embassy built largely on labor that was forced labor or dramatically underpaid labor by people that were essentially forced by their economic conditions or by being taken into the country under false pretenses to participate in the construction of that embassy. And this is the subject of a major congressional investigation that I don’t know is going to go anywhere now that Obama is in the White House.
But on the issue of the contractors, I mean, what you asked Obama about a year ago is very, very important, because Obama said in his answer to you that he didn’t want to draw down contractors at a faster rate than he drew down US troops. So, even when Obama is talking about 50,000 troops remaining in the country, presumably that would mean 50,000 contractors to support them. So we’re always talking about deflated numbers when we hear them come out of the mouths of administration officials.
On the issue of the mercenaries, though, the armed security contractors, Blackwater, the company formerly known as Blackwater, now, you know, called Xe, which is—you know, I mean, it’s very, very interesting, this—

AMY GOODMAN: Spelled X-e.

JEREMY SCAHILL: X-e—you know, in the midst of a major rebranding campaign. What happened with Blackwater is that the Obama administration, through the State Department, informed Xe, Blackwater, that they were not going to renew their highly lucrative contract in Iraq. I think this was a result, in large part, of massive public pressure. I think that activists and concerned people and journalists who were exposing this really made it politically untenable for the Obama administration to at least publicly continue that kind of a relationship with this company, Blackwater, and I think the people who took this seriously should take heart in that.

Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, did make a pledge on the campaign trail that she was going to endorse legislation to ban Blackwater’s operations, and she took a lot of heat for that. Whether or not this was a decision that she influenced, I don’t know. I mean, it seemed like it was sort of a cynical decision on the campaign trail aimed at outflanking Obama from the left. But the fact is that Blackwater’s contract has not been renewed.

Having said that, Blackwater is firmly entrenched in Afghanistan, continues with many lucrative US government contracts, has now changed its name. Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater and the CEO, this week announced that he was stepping down as the CEO but will remain as the chairman. So, you know, I mean, Erik Prince is not in control of Blackwater, the same way that Vladimir Putin is not in control of Russia; he is in control of it, he just isn’t officially the head of it.


"The Promised Withdrawal from Iraq" by Lawrence Korb

"All Troops Out By 2011? Not So Fast; Why Obama's Iraq Speech Deserves a Second Look" by Jeremy Scahill

Deals With Iraq Are Set To Bring Oil Giants Back

The NY Times reports:


Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the war and already under pressure because of record high oil prices, senior officials of two of the companies, speaking only on the condition that they not be identified, said they were helping Iraq rebuild its decrepit oil industry.

For an industry being frozen out of new ventures in the world’s dominant oil-producing countries, from Russia to Venezuela, Iraq offers a rare and prized opportunity.

While enriched by $140 per barrel oil, the oil majors are also struggling to replace their reserves as ever more of the world’s oil patch becomes off limits. Governments in countries like Bolivia and Venezuela are nationalizing their oil industries or seeking a larger share of the record profits for their national budgets. Russia and Kazakhstan have forced the major companies to renegotiate contracts.

The Iraqi government’s stated goal in inviting back the major companies is to increase oil production by half a million barrels per day by attracting modern technology and expertise to oil fields now desperately short of both. The revenue would be used for reconstruction, although the Iraqi government has had trouble spending the oil revenues it now has, in part because of bureaucratic inefficiency.

For the American government, increasing output in Iraq, as elsewhere, serves the foreign policy goal of increasing oil production globally to alleviate the exceptionally tight supply that is a cause of soaring prices.

The Iraqi Oil Ministry, through a spokesman, said the no-bid contracts were a stop-gap measure to bring modern skills into the fields while the oil law was pending in Parliament.

It said the companies had been chosen because they had been advising the ministry without charge for two years before being awarded the contracts, and because these companies had the needed technology.

A Shell spokeswoman hinted at the kind of work the companies might be engaged in. “We can confirm that we have submitted a conceptual proposal to the Iraqi authorities to minimize current and future gas flaring in the south through gas gathering and utilization,” said the spokeswoman, Marnie Funk. “The contents of the proposal are confidential.”

While small, the deals hold great promise for the companies.

“The bigger prize everybody is waiting for is development of the giant new fields,” Leila Benali, an authority on Middle East oil at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said in a telephone interview from the firm’s Paris office. The current contracts, she said, are a “foothold” in Iraq for companies striving for these longer-term deals.

Any Western oil official who comes to Iraq would require heavy security, exposing the companies to all the same logistical nightmares that have hampered previous attempts, often undertaken at huge cost, to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

And work in the deserts and swamps that contain much of Iraq’s oil reserves would be virtually impossible unless carried out solely by Iraqi subcontractors, who would likely be threatened by insurgents for cooperating with Western companies.

Yet at today’s oil prices, there is no shortage of companies coveting a contract in Iraq. It is not only one of the few countries where oil reserves are up for grabs, but also one of the few that is viewed within the industry as having considerable potential to rapidly increase production.

David Fyfe, a Middle East analyst at the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based group that monitors oil production for the developed countries, said he believed that Iraq’s output could increase to about 3 million barrels a day from its current 2.5 million, though it would probably take longer than the six months the Oil Ministry estimated.

Mr. Fyfe’s organization estimated that repair work on existing fields could bring Iraq’s output up to roughly four million barrels per day within several years. After new fields are tapped, Iraq is expected to reach a plateau of about six million barrels per day, Mr. Fyfe said, which could suppress current world oil prices.

The contracts, the two oil company officials said, are a continuation of work the companies had been conducting here to assist the Oil Ministry under two-year-old memorandums of understanding. The companies provided free advice and training to the Iraqis. This relationship with the ministry, said company officials and an American diplomat, was a reason the contracts were not opened to competitive bidding.

A total of 46 companies, including the leading oil companies of China, India and Russia, had memorandums of understanding with the Oil Ministry, yet were not awarded contracts.

The no-bid deals are structured as service contracts. The companies will be paid for their work, rather than offered a license to the oil deposits. As such, they do not require the passage of an oil law setting out terms for competitive bidding. The legislation has been stalled by disputes among Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties over revenue sharing and other conditions.

The first oil contracts for the majors in Iraq are exceptional for the oil industry.

They include a provision that could allow the companies to reap large profits at today’s prices: the ministry and companies are negotiating payment in oil rather than cash.

“These are not actually service contracts,” Ms. Benali said. “They were designed to circumvent the legislative stalemate” and bring Western companies with experience managing large projects into Iraq before the passage of the oil law.

A clause in the draft contracts would allow the companies to match bids from competing companies to retain the work once it is opened to bidding, according to the Iraq country manager for a major oil company who did not consent to be cited publicly discussing the terms.

Assem Jihad, the Oil Ministry spokesman, said the ministry chose companies it was comfortable working with under the charitable memorandum of understanding agreements, and for their technical prowess. “Because of that, they got the priority,” he said.

In all cases but one, the same company that had provided free advice to the ministry for work on a specific field was offered the technical support contract for that field, one of the companies’ officials said.

The exception is the West Qurna field in southern Iraq, outside Basra. There, the Russian company Lukoil, which claims a Hussein-era contract for the field, had been providing free training to Iraqi engineers, but a consortium of Chevron and Total, a French company, was offered the contract. A spokesman for Lukoil declined to comment.

Charles Ries, the chief economic official in the American Embassy in Baghdad, described the no-bid contracts as a bridging mechanism to bring modern technology into the fields before the oil law was passed, and as an extension of the earlier work without charge.

To be sure, these are not the first foreign oil contracts in Iraq, and all have proved contentious.

The Kurdistan regional government, which in many respects functions as an independent entity in northern Iraq, has concluded a number of deals. Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, for example, signed a production-sharing agreement with the regional government last fall, though its legality is questioned by the central Iraqi government. The technical support agreements, however, are the first commercial work by the major oil companies in Iraq.

The impact, experts say, could be remarkable increases in Iraqi oil output.

While the current contracts are unrelated to the companies’ previous work in Iraq, in a twist of corporate history for some of the world’s largest companies, all four oil majors that had lost their concessions in Iraq are now back.

But a spokesman for Exxon said the company’s approach to Iraq was no different from its work elsewhere.

“Consistent with our longstanding, global business strategy, ExxonMobil would pursue business opportunities as they arise in Iraq, just as we would in other countries in which we are permitted to operate,” the spokesman, Len D’Eramo, said in an e-mailed statement.

But the company is clearly aware of the history. In an interview with Newsweek last fall, the former chief executive of Exxon, Lee Raymond, praised Iraq’s potential as an oil-producing country and added that Exxon was in a position to know. “There is an enormous amount of oil in Iraq,” Mr. Raymond said. “We were part of the consortium, the four companies that were there when Saddam Hussein threw us out, and we basically had the whole country.”

In The Mideast, America Casts An Imperial Shadow

Yankee, Go Home

In the Washington Post, Rashid Khalidi* writes:

Most Americans think that our role as a world power began with World War II, the "good war," and then continued with the similarly noble Cold War. We like to think that the United States acts in the world exclusively in the name of ideals such as freedom and democracy.

So it may come as a bit of a shock to learn that the United States has had an uninterrupted military presence in the Middle East for 65 years, dating to 1942. Most Americans would also bristle at the idea that this presence, from the arrival of GIs in North Africa onward, has essentially become a continuation of nearly a century and a half of European military adventures in the region. But history shows a disturbing continuity between what the European colonial powers did in the Middle East, starting with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, and what the United States is now doing in Iraq and elsewhere. Indeed, the United States has managed in a few short years to do more damage in the region than did the hated colonial powers that were finally driven out only a few decades ago.

Of course, the European powers did not stint in their use of force in the Middle East. As Juan Cole of the University of Michigan has shown, Napoleon's troops savagely repressed Egyptian resistance even while the French proclaimed the ideals of their Revolution. Aerial bombing of civilians was pioneered by the Italians in Libya in 1911, perfected by the British in Iraq in 1920 and used by the French in 1925 to level whole quarters of Syrian cities. Home demolitions, collective punishment, summary execution, detention without trial, routine torture -- these were the weapons of Europe's takeover.

But Britain and France understood that naked power was not enough to achieve lasting imperial control. They learned that they also needed expertise, a knowledge of local languages and culture, and some form of indirect rule that eventually removed their military forces from direct contact with the local population. And although they faced decades of stubborn resistance in an arc running from Morocco to Iran, they managed to hold onto the reins until World War II shattered their economies and unleashed the changes that brought independence to all these countries.

During the Cold War, neither superpower crossed a red line by deploying large numbers of troops or by occupying parts of the region outright -- until the Kremlin made the fatal, foolish mistake of invading Afghanistan in 1979. That was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, and of the Cold War era.

But since 2000, no one in a position of power in Washington seems to have bothered to read any history. Believing that the demise of the Soviet Union meant an end to checks and balances at home and to limits abroad, and seduced by the blandishments of shallow-minded theorists who believe that the rules that applied to all previous great powers do not apply to the United States, the current administration has plunged into not one but two land wars in Asia.

Once upon a time, after Korea and Vietnam, the words "land war in Asia" might have inspired caution in Washington. But slaying the "Vietnam Syndrome" that limited the executive branch's power to act abroad was an uncontrollable obsession for the clique that has surrounded several presidents since Richard M. Nixon, including such notables as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. These were men who, by and large, had never seen combat, knew little of war and scorned history, geography and expertise based on personal experience. Some of them were probably unaware that Iraq was in Asia, and would not have cared if they knew.

Thus armed with the conviction that theirs were the noblest of purposes and buoyed by the popular support that a president always receives after an attack (particularly one as dastardly as 9/11), President Bush and his advisers ignored 200 years of Middle Eastern history and invaded Iraq, supposedly to spread democracy to the entire region.

As a general rule, democracy does not grow out of the barrel of a gun. Moreover, few prologues are as unpropitious for the establishment of democracy as war, invasion and occupation. Apologists for the Iraq invasion have suggested ahistoric parallels between Iraq and postwar Japan and Germany, ignoring the fact that the latter had been two of the world's most highly developed industrial powers, with large middle classes and established, generations-old traditions of parliamentary government before they gave way to dictatorship in the 1930s.

We are told that Iraq is a recently created, artificial state; and it is, like scores of other states that colonialism carved across three continents. One would think that that would be all the more reason to keep in place the institutions that held Iraq together, but the arrogance of those in charge of the Pentagon and in Baghdad was as limitless as their ignorance, and they swept away the entire Iraqi governmental structure, putting in its place an overstretched American army of occupation to control a vast, devastated country of more than 25 million people with a history of resistance to foreign control.

After the first shock of the invasion wore off, what people in Iraq and all over the Middle East remembered was two centuries of Western powers attempting to bring their countries under imperial control through military force. They recalled decades of Western petroleum companies controlling their oil. And unsurprisingly, the United States quickly became as unpopular as the European colonial powers had ever been.

Iraq has changed everything. In Washington, a city obsessed with the present, it was easy to forget that as recently as a few years ago, the United States was not particularly disliked in the Middle East and that al-Qaeda was a tiny underground organization with almost no popular support. It was equally easy to forget that in the last phases of the Cold War, the United States had managed to protect its interests in the Middle East with no land forces on the ground, through an over-the-horizon presence.

Today, al-Qaeda in Iraq threatens the security of entire districts of the country; policymakers hint at a "South Korean" model of an indefinite U.S. military presence in Iraq; the Pentagon is weighing long-term plans for U.S. bases all over the region; and Washington seems to assume that U.S. national interests require our troops to fight their way across West Asia and North Africa to stop "the terrorists," failing which we will find them crawling up the beaches of Miami and Long Island.

This is madness. People in the Middle East are angry at the United States not because of our values, many of which they share: democracy, free enterprise, even many of our cultural values such as love of family and respect for religion. They are angry at us, essentially, because our forces are doing things in their back yard that we would never tolerate from foreign troops in our own region.

We are the greatest power in world history. But that will make not a whit of difference to the outcome in Iraq. We will not -- we cannot -- force the Iraqis to do what we want, any more than the British could toward the end of their own attempt to rule Iraq, although they managed to hold on for much longer than our doomed occupation will.

Our political leaders must recognize that force does not solve the problem of terrorism. The real terrorists -- those blowing up civilians in marketplaces and office towers, as opposed to Iraqis resisting U.S. occupation -- can be dealt with only by means far more subtle than military might. Dealing effectively with this elusive enemy requires patience and a far more precise, carefully targeted and politically sophisticated toolkit than the mighty bludgeon of the U.S. armed forces.

No true U.S. interest has been served by the invasion, destruction and occupation of Iraq. We have done incalculable harm to that tragic country and to our position in the world. Perhaps we can limit the damage if we substitute a little humility for the blind hubris that led us into this disaster -- an understanding of the limitations of armed force and "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," especially those whose hearts we hope to win.


*Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University. His latest book is "The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood."

Iraqi-Americans Removed From Flight For Speaking Arabic

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An American Airlines flight from San Diego to Chicago was delayed when passengers complained about a group of Iraqi men speaking Arabic, US media reported today.

The flight was supposed to leave about 11pm on Tuesday when a woman boarding the plane complained about the other passengers, airline spokeswoman Mary Francis Fagan said.

The dispute delayed the plane which was then forced to cancel when it fell under the curfew at San Diego airport, Ms Fagan said, acccording to the Daily Herald online.

According to media reports, the woman complained because the men were speaking Arabic.

Irene McCormack, a spokeswoman for the San Diego Unified Port District said the woman expressed concerns to the flight crew before boarding that six men were speaking a foreign language and exhibiting “strange behaviour”.

The passenger continued telling the crew her concerns, within earshot of the men, after the jet taxied from the gate, Ms McCormack said yesterday.

She said the pilot decided to return to the gate and police were called.

An Associated Press report said the six Iraqi men had been training Marines at Camp Pendleton and worked for Defense Training Systems, a unit of International Logistics Services.

The six Iraqis had been training US Marines at Camp Pendleton and worked for Defence Training Systems, a unit of the Alaska-based International Logistics Services Corp, said the company's chief executive R David Stephens.

“They did nothing wrong,” he said.

A company news release called it “an unfortunate situation for all flight passengers.”

"We were hired for this Government. We can prove ourselves. We are good people, not a bad people," said one of the men involved, Dave Alwatan, who is a US citizen.

"How can we be bad if we are helping our people here - American people? Why are we getting treated like that?" he was quoted as saying by ABC7 Chicago.

All 126 passengers had to be acccommodated overnight and put on other flights on Wednesday.

Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Chicago, was upset about the airline's actions.

"It is one thing to flag suspicious behavior, but to flag a global language? We are deplaning people for who they are, not what they do," Mr Rehab said.