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Fri 16 May, 2003 08:38 am
Do you still believe "the terrorists struck at the heart of America"? Is the Pentagon the heart of America? The World Trade Center? The employees (whose names are being withheld) of a semi-covert operation in Riyadh? If you take a fresh look at their choices, you might discern a pattern suggesting that the real targets of these terrorists are representatives of America's largest private imperialists. Have you seen the articles in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Washington Times and at Bloomberg.com, excerpted below? Have you wondered about whose offices were in the World Trade Center? Have you considered the interconnections between big money, big defense, covert operations, and both Bush administrations? What we Americans are now paying for may not be "freedom, mom and apple pie," but something much closer to a private vendetta against a large and specific gang of corporations -- corporations with close ties to the administration and with significant amounts of blood on their hands. Worth consideration and research, I believe. P.S.: You might want to remember the tremendous effort to keep Dick Cheney well guarded in the aftermath of 9/11...
US company has long history with Saudis
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff, 5/15/2003
WASHINGTON -- Vinnell Corp., the American company whose employees were killed Monday by terrorists in Saudi Arabia, has been a key link between the US and Saudi governments, providing retired US military officials to train the elite armed forces that protect the royal family. That link appears to have led the Virginia-based company to be a target of Al Qaeda terrorists, analysts said.
Vinnell has a sometimes controversial history with the Saudis. It includes a congressional investigation of its activities, questions about whether it has ties to the CIA, and past links to President Bush and his father, President George H. W. Bush.
''They hit Vinnell as opposed to McDonald's. It has certainly been a centerpiece of the US-Saudi relationship for a very long time,'' said John Pike, a defense analyst at Globalsecurity.org. ''It is absolutely at the core of the legitimacy of the monarchy and the symbiotic relationship between these two countries.''
Since 1975, Vinnell has trained the Saudi National Guard, which is far more prominent than the US National Guard. The Saudi guard is overseen by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz and is considered by some analysts to be the most effective armed force in Saudi Arabia.
Judith Kipper, a Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said: ''The National Guard have the biggest group of Americans working for them of all the official Saudi things. This is a very big job for Vinnell. It is not just being a subcontractor to build something.''
Nine employees of Vinnell were killed Monday night by terrorists with suspected links to Al Qaeda. The attackers, using a car bomb, crashed into a company housing complex and blew up a building.
The Washington Post reported today that Vinnell and US officials said they had no plans to publicly identify the dead.
A spokesman for the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, Edward Dickens, cited ''privacy laws'' and said the company had asked that the names not be released. A Vinnell spokesman, Jay McCaffrey, said the company had made such a request.
The newspaper identified three victims: Obadiah Y. Abdullah, a former Army sergeant with a wife and daughter in Colorado Springs; Clifford Lawson, 46, a retired Army staff sergeant, whose wife, Grace, lives in Atlanta; and Todd Bair, 37, a Lake Wales, Fla., native who retired from the Army a year ago this month.
In 1995, a car bombing at a building shared by Vinnell and the National Guard, according to news accounts from the time, killed five Americans, but none of them were Vinnell employees.
Vinnell, founded in 1931 and a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, operates in Saudi Arabia under a contract from the US Department of Defense that is managed by the US Army Materiel Command, according to Janis Lamar a spokeswoman for Vinnell. The company's latest four-year contract, effective in 1999, is worth $159 million, she said.
From the beginning of the arrangement in Saudi Arabia, the company's closeness to the Pentagon has caused controversy, according to a book published this year, ''The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group.''
The title of the book, written by Dan Briody, refers to the Carlyle Group, which owned Vinnell from 1992 to 1997 and is well-known for its employment of former top US government officials.
Vinnell began its Saudi work in 1975 when it received a $77 million contract to train the national guard.
A congressional investigation was launched into whether Vinnell was performing mercenary work for the Saudis and a clause, later dropped from the initial contract, that forbade the employment of Jews, the book said.
Company officials denied doing mercenary work. The book also quotes an unnamed Vinnell executive as saying that Vinnell ''had been a cover for the CIA for decades.''
This story ran on page A20 of the Boston Globe on 5/15/2003.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/135/nation/US_company_has_long_history_with_SaudisP.shtml
* * * *
Vinnell, which operates as part of Northrop's Reston-based Mission Systems division, trains foreign military services and operates Job Corps centers in the United States under contract with the Department of Labor. The U.S. Army awarded Vinnell its current contract in Saudi Arabia, which is worth about $800 million.
Vinnell was founded in 1931 with a mission to pave roads in Los Angeles. It gained notoriety by managing military assignments during World War II, and in 1975 the company won a $77 million contract to train Saudi Arabian military units to defend oil fields. It was the first time civilians were allowed to train foreign forces. The U.S. Senate held hearings on the contract, but the work went forward.
Until 1997, Vinnell was a subsidiary of BDM International, which was controlled by the Carlyle Group, a Washington investment firm led by several former Pentagon and White House officials. BDM's president, Philip Odeen, led a task force formed by the Pentagon to modernize the military. He is now a director with Northrop Grumman.
The issue of private companies providing military training remains contentious. Opponents say it undermines the ability of the United States to control the actions of foreign troops. But that has not deterred military contractors.
Earlier this year, Computer Sciences Corp. acquired Dyncorp*, a Falls Church-based defense company with a military training arm, and in June of 2003 L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. bought Military Professionals Resources Inc. of Alexandria.
http://washingtontimes.com/business/20030514-67420400.htm
*Dyncorp is another story and a very complicated one, taking in paramilitary operations in Colombia and Bosnia/Kosovo (where they engaged in a slave trade). Dyncorp is worth Googling, believe me.
* * * * *
And from Bloomberg.com, 5/15:
Paris, May 15 (Bloomberg) -- The car-bomb attacks on three residential compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed nine Vinnell Corp. employees have triggered alarm bells among the hush- hush coterie of some 200 firms that, like Vinnell, specialize in ``sutling.'' That is, the business of supplying U.S. military operations abroad with logistical support and of training foreign armies in the art of war.
``They are in the terrorist cross-hairs and being targeted,'' says P.W. Singer, an analyst at the Brookings Institution and author of the recently published ``Corporate Warriors: The Rise and Ramifications of the Privatized Military Industry.''
Adds former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey, ``These companies need to be concerned. It's of extraordinary importance.'' ...
...``We do not detail our assessments and precautions in support of our efforts,'' says Halliburton public relations manager Wendy Hall. Since 1987 KBR has maintained a joint venture with Vinnell to maintain three U.S. military bases in Turkey. [KBR -- Kellogg Brown Root is,of course, a subsidiary of Halliburton...] ``All of these firms are targets for attacks,'' Singer explains. ``The original rationale for the Defense Department contracting them was to lower the U.S. military presence and profile abroad. That logic may play in Washington, but it doesn't play on the ground. Adversaries make absolutely no distinction between uniformed U.S. soldiers and ex-military men working for a private company.''
As a profession, sutling is a world mostly inhabited by former soldiers, complete with all the pomp and flourish of the armed forces. KBR, for instance, for years has minted limited- edition, silver-dollar-sized medals to honor its employees who work in hostile regions.
Good work, tartarin! I hope folks will quickly read through your first post - it's really loooooooong.... I am so glad that my pal Armadillo got out of the Halliburton corp, but it is a bit of the frying pan to the fire for him with his present employer. But what can you do in Dallas that is NOT related to the oil industry, tech industry, or some form of cartel?
It is long!! But if I don't post the back-up, someone is bound to ask for it...
That's all very interesting, Tartarin (what I read of it). So, it looks like the terrorists are being strategic in choosing targets. Who'd have thunk it?
Of course, Bush et al would rather we didn't think it. Each attack is against America in toto...
And I'm beginning to read more and more in more public journals. Is it possible that all the quashing techniques used are beginning not to work in some places?
And part of what it says explains why Bush talks about a never-ending war - they really need it.
Is there ever a point where the lust for money and power starts to turn against the lustee?
Tartarin,
I have been listening to my radio a lot more recently since our house was struck by lightning last Saturday and we lost TV, computers, telephones, etc. This morning I was listening to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now...our local Pacifica Radio site. Wow! She talked about Vinnell and interviewed Briody, the author of "The Iron Triangle" about the Carlyle Group and its pervasive tentacles. I sent for the book immediately!
I think the Globe and others as well as yourself have struck gold here, my dear. This is not some kooky conspiracy theory here.
Tartarin wrote:Do you still believe "the terrorists struck at the heart of America"? Is the Pentagon the heart of America? The World Trade Center? The employees (whose names are being withheld) of a semi-covert operation in Riyadh? If you take a fresh look at their choices, you might discern a pattern suggesting that the real targets of these terrorists are representatives of America's largest private imperialists.
Hmm, such statements are not far from justifying terror attacks on the American citizens... IMO, this is a blatant support of terror.
It's not "supporting terror" to see a pattern behind the terrorism, steissd. If this is true, it may finally give us some answers about why 9/11 and other events have happened. IMO, it's worth looking into...
Tartarin, to clarify, you didn't mean to suggest that the choice of targets JUSTIFIED the terrorism, did you?
Hey, steissd, I hope you're not taking your "secret agent man" avatar too seriously. Trying to understand why terrorists do what they do is NOT the same as justifying what they do...
No -- Steissd is certifiable!!
Well, such an understanding is very simple: terrorists want to force their opponents to act the way they want to. It does not require intensive mulling. It is necessary to make the terrorists to pay such an enormous price in manpower for their actions, that they would fear repeating this.
And I am not sure that Americans should modify their way of life only because a bunch of rabid mullahs wants them to. If the mullahs resort to violence, they should get an American response delivered to their homeland, and this response should many times exceed the actual damage they have inflicted by terror.
Vnn -- I heard about your lightning strike and have proof it was engineered from the Pentagon. Huge conspiracy behind it: Mossad probably ultimately responsible. In the meantime, I'm glad you survived and am grieved about the loss of the tulip tree.
Yes, Briody is interesting -- heard a long interview with him ?last week?. He's done his homework. Thanks for mentioning the Amy Goodman interview -- which is usually available online so I'll have a listen.
Mamaj -- Yes, there is more and more overt interest in the why's and wherefore's. Have you noticed that bits and pieces of connecting dots turn up in the NYTimes quite regularly, but mostly in the Business Section?
Another journalist working on terrorism theories is a Canadian named Barrie Zwicker who has a national program in Canada about the media. I don't know anything about him and have no opinions on him or his work, but evidently he's put together a video about "terrorism" which uses news footage to drive great holes in the current theories about 9/11 etc. He also writes for the Globe and Mail, and the Star, and one of them has had a story on him recently.
Visitor -- I've always believed that inquiry and knowledge lead straight to hell, don't you, particularly if they don't affirm the majority opinion? But seriously, when new facts offer themselves, I don't accept them or reject them according to whose ox will ultimately be gored, I hope. Just to clarify: if every single Republican now in Washington were suddenly vaporized by invisible aliens, I might snicker just a little bit before composing my face into an attitude of shock and mourning.
Here is a link to the interview with Dan Briody VNN mentioned (above):
http://www.webactive.com/webactive/pacifica/demnow/dn20030515.html
And this is the best pack of cards I've seen in a long time:
http://www.warprofiteers.com/
Don't miss it!
LOL, Tartarin! I ordered the War Profiteers deck of cards this am while listening to Amy Goodman. I can't wait to see them!
Did everyone see the Times (London) article on the connection with the CIA? If interested, I'll post...
I'm still waiting for the library to tell me "The Iron triangle" is in. Means a lot of people are reading it. When you put together various pieces - Vinnell, PNAC, the Carlyle Group, the refusal to make public papers that belong in the public domain (Cheney's energy meeting papers, Reagan's and Bush's presidential papers, etc etc etc) a pattern is there.
SteissD - I think that just as you would like us to understand your position, you should try to understand ours. The WH keeps sitting on a congressional request for an inquiry into events leading up to 9/11. We want to know why. The WH is one of the most secretive we've ever had, which leads to the natural conclusion that there are bad things to hide. They try to cloak everything in terms of security risk, but it ain't so. There was a lot of discussion here about going into Iraq, by some pretty knowledgeable and intelligent and experienced people, and they were afraid that what is now happening would indeed be the case.
Where have we been so effective in fighting terrorism? In Afghanistan, the first experiment, we went in, routed the Taliban, promised we would help build a free Afghanistan, and left. All accounts coming out of that country now report that it is in the hands of the warlords, that the Taliban have emerged in large numbers and ally themselves with the warlords, that we haven't even begun to build the road we promised, that there is no "free Afghanistan." In Iraq, there is terror in the streets, there is chaos, the people still don't have water, electricity, food, phones. And there's an interesting little tidbit about the fact that cell phones are now the only workable things, and a contract for their making and delivery was given to a private company that has yet to deliver. And we are losing control.
And suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia, tonight in Morocco, tomorrow where? How many terrorist attacks, and where will they be? And they are obviously planned and coordinated. And meanwhile, the cabal goes on with its plans for the making of still more money.
That's what we see. It used to be that we pointed with pride at the military's ability to establish services so quickly, now we're told they can shoot at looters. That's us as an occupying force.
Tartarin, I learned a while ago to look in the business sections first. And for the smaller items on the inside pages. And to listen to the throwaway sentences. It's all in the details. The Bush people paint with broad strokes, hoping the details will escape our notice.
Very good points, Mamaj. No one can deny that if an entire political party is constantly engaged in secrecy and cover-ups -- particularly when they're in power -- they are just asking for trouble. It's our job to ask the questions and insist on answers.
Steissd may not remember (for example) Watergate. It wasn't a simple situation in which a president gets involved in something screwy and pretty soon cute, intrepid journalists track him down. It took forever. Woodward and Bernstein came in for a huge amount of flack and disbelief* from all quarters -- not to mention backstopping from the White House and Congress. No one wanted to believe what they were intimating. Their editor almost gave up on them. It took a long time and a lot of Steissds were jeering along the sidelines, but they did it. I think something similar is probably in the works now among the Nagourneys (he has a bone to pick with Bush!) and the Isakoffs (sp?) and many others, not to mention the independent journalists and webbers who are going after Bush hammer and tongs.
Democracy or not, we have had a series of administrations which, over the period of my lifetime, have lied themselves blue in the face with amazing regularity. My first real political involvement -- fresh out of college -- was with a group investigating unreported aggressions and nuclear accidents. It often takes YEARS to get the public's attention and to present the full and documented facts, but it happens. This time, thanks to the internet, we may be able to make it happen much sooner.
*It's also pretty funny how those jeerers and disbelievers, once the facts are known, become self-appointed authorities on the subject and are heard to say things like, "I knew all along something funny... but I didn't like those people who were trying to shove it in our faces. And they went and ruined a perfectly decent president who ONLY committed JUST NINE little impeachable felonies and WASN'T EVEN impeached...."
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