Pentagon Spends Billions to Outsource Torture

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted September 7, 2006.

In addition to Joshua Holland's article below, five other progressive media outlets have produced articles on war profiteering in Iraq in conjunction with Robert Greenwald's documentary, Iraq for Sale. Make sure to check out these articles, and AlterNet's compendium of recent stories on the war profiteers.

The thousands of mercenary security contractors employed in the Bush administration's "War on Terror" are billed to American taxpayers, but they've handed Osama Bin Laden his greatest victories -- public relations coups that have transformed him from just another face in a crowd of radical clerics to a hero of millions in the global South (posters of Bin Laden have been spotted in largely Catholic Latin America during protests against George W. Bush).

The internet hums with viral videos of British contractors opening fire on civilian vehicles in Iraq as part of a bloody game, stories about CIA contractors killing prisoners in Afghanistan, veterans of Apartheid-era South African and Latin American death squads discovered among contractors' staffs and notoriously shady Russian arms dealers working for occupation authorities. One Special Forces operator told Amnesty International that some contractors are in it just because they "really want to kill somebody and they can do it easier there ... [not] everybody is like that, but a dangerously high element."

While most experts believe that Al Qaeda no longer has the ability to mount the kind of sophisticated attacks that brought it so much notoriety in the first place, its media operations are stronger than ever. From their caves -- or wherever they are holed up -- Bin Laden and his henchmen claim that the "War on Terror" is just a thin cover for a U.S.-led war on Islam. Rightly or wrongly, these incidents prove his point to millions of people around the world.

Osama Bin Laden's greatest victories in the crucial media war have been the series of prisoner abuse scandals at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and a number of detention centers across Iraq, the most infamous of which is Saddam Hussein's former torture complex at Abu Ghraib.

According to a report by Corpwatch, what ties these facilities together are the abundance of private contractors involved in their operations. The Taguba Report (PDF) named four private contractors in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Steven Stephanowicz, an investigator for CACI, a multinational with extensive government contracts (92 percent of which are in defense), encouraged MPs under his command to terrorize inmates, and "clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse."

Another interrogator at Abu Ghraib was John Israel, who, according to the Taguba Report, didn't even have a security clearance, and should never have been hired for an operation as sensitive as prisoner interrogation in the first place. It's not clear whether Israel worked for CACI or a competitor, Titan Corp. (a target of numerous federal investigations for its work in Iraq and elsewhere), but Titan denies it ever provided interrogators to Abu Ghraib. Another un-named private contractor at Abu Ghraib allegedly raped a teenage boy in his custody.

According to Amnesty, half of the interrogators at Abu Ghraib were private contractors -- about 30 in all. Torin Nelson was a military intelligence officer at Gitmo before becoming a CACI interrogator at Abu Ghraib. After the scandal broke, Nelson resigned and charged the military with scapegoating a handful of low-level soldiers -- the only people who have been brought to trial for the abuses -- to "divert attention away from ingrained problems in the military detention and interrogation system." He said: "The problem with outsourcing intelligence work is the limit of oversight and control by the military administrators over the independent contractors."

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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