Our Chinese connection runs a piece by Tom Englehardt.
...Abu Ghraib prison is the place where Saddam's functionaries tortured (and sometimes killed) many enemies of his regime, and where Bush's functionaries, as a series of notorious digital photos revealed, committed what the US press still likes to refer to as "prisoner abuse"....
Of course its prisoners, who remained generally uncharged and without access to Iraqi courts, weren't just released to the winds. Quite the opposite: more than 3,000 of them were redistributed to two other US prisons, Camp Bucca in Iraq's south and Camp Cropper at the huge US base adjoining Baghdad International Airport...
...Camp Cropper, which started out as a bunch of tents, has now become a US$60 million "state-of-the-art" prison. The upgrade, on the drawing boards since 2004, was just completed and hardly a word has been written about it. We really have no idea what it consists of or what it looks like, even though it's in one of the few places in Iraq that an American reporter could safely visit, being on a vast US military base constructed, like the prison, with taxpayer dollars.
Had anyone paid the slightest attention - other than the Pentagon, the Bush administration, and whatever company or companies had the contract to construct the facility - it would still have been taken for granted that Camp Cropper wasn't the business of ordinary Americans (or even their representatives in Congress) - despite the fact that the $60 million, which made the camp "state of the art", was surely Americans', no one in the United States debated or discussed the upgrade and there was no serious consideration of it in Congress before the money was anted up, any more than Congress or the American people are in any way involved in the constant upgrading of US military bases in Iraq.
Camp Bucca is a story you can't read anywhere in the United States - and yet it may, in a sense, be the most important American story in Iraq right now...
First we had those huge military bases that officials were careful never to label "permanent". (For a while, they were given the charming name of "enduring camps" by the Pentagon.) Just about no one in the mainstream bothered to write about them for a couple of years as quite literally billions of dollars were poured into them and they morphed into the size of US towns with their own bus routes, sports facilities, Pizza Huts, Subways, Burger Kings, and mini-golf courses. Huge as they now are, elaborate as they now are, they are still continually being upgraded. Now, it seems that on one of them we have $60 million worth of the first "permanent US prison" in Iraq. Meanwhile, in the heart of Baghdad, the Bush administration is building what's probably the largest, best-fortified "embassy" in the solar system, with its own elaborate apartment complexes and entertainment facilities, meant for a staff of 3,500.
If, for a moment, Americans stop listening to the arguments about, or even the news about, Iraq here at home and just concentrate on the ignored reality of those facts-on-the-ground, you're likely to assess our world somewhat differently...
Whatever arguments may be going on in Washington over which "tools" or "interrogation techniques" the CIA is to be allowed to use or over exactly how the 14 al-Qaeda detainees just transferred to Guantanamo will be tried, this set of facts-on-the-ground adds up to America's own global Bermuda Triangle of Injustice into which untold numbers of human beings can simply disappear. The "crown jewel" of America's mini-gulag is, of course, Guantanamo. And again, whatever the fierce arguments in the US may be about Guantanamo "methods" or what kinds of commissions or tribunals (if any) may finally be chosen for the run-of-the-mill prisoners there, one fact-on-the-ground points us toward the actual lay of the land. A little-publicized $30 million maximum-security wing at Guantanamo is now being completed by the US Navy, just as at the US prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, there has been an upgrade...
And don't imagine that this is an anomaly, applicable only to imprisonment abroad. Almost anywhere you look, the facts on the ground tell a story at odds with what's important, what's real as we Americans imagine it.
Let's take, for instance, what's now referred to as the Intelligence Community (IC), a collection of at least 16 agencies, ranging from the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Consider then just one recent piece about the IC by Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times, headlined "Spy agencies outsourcing to fill key jobs".
As Miller points out, the overall intelligence budget has gone up about $10 billion a year in recent years and for that we've got an upgrading (or at least upsizing) of almost every one of those 16 agencies plus a whole new, sprawling layer of intelligence bureaucracy headed by John Negroponte, the intelligence tsar, who runs the new Office of the Director of National Intelligence (not even included in the count above). Miller reports another interesting fact-on-the-ground as well: enormous numbers of private contractors are flooding into the IC.
"At the National Counterterrorism Center - the agency created two years ago to prevent another attack like [that of] September 11 [2001] - more than half of the employees are not US government analysts or terrorism experts. Instead, they are outside contractors. At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, senior officials say it is routine for career officers to look around the table during meetings on secret operations and be surrounded by so-called green-badgers - non-agency employees who carry special-colored IDs."
At some clandestine CIA overseas posts such as Islamabad and Baghdad, Miller reports, private contractors can make up as many as three-quarters of the employees, while at home private contractors at the CIA now also outnumber its estimated 17,500 employees. He concludes: "Senior US intelligence officials said that the reliance on contractors was so deep that agencies couldn't function without them. ‘If you took away the contractor support, they'd have to put yellow tape around the building and close it down,' said a former senior CIA official who was responsible for overseeing contracts before leaving the agency earlier this year."
The same could, of course, be said of the US military, which is quite literally incapable of existing today without its private contractors such as Halliburton's KBR, nor could its wars be carried on without the proliferation of hired guns - mercenaries - who are now a given in any such situation. This transformation of the military into first an all-volunteer, then an increasingly privatized as well as outsourced, and now an increasingly mercenary institution is another fact-on-the-ground, another building block to America's future...
This is a reality that no future US administration, nor any better-empowered Congress, would be likely to reverse, no less erase, any time soon. No matter how the details of the argument about NSA spying turn out, for example, it's in essence a given that the National Security Agency will continue to grow and make itself ever more available in ever more ingenious ways, trolling ever more extensively in communications of every sort. These are the facts being established on the ground, while in Washington they argue over the (sometimes significant) details and the media focus their main attention on all of this as the essence of the news of the day.
Take for example the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), yet another sprawling, ill-organized, inefficient bureaucracy established after September 11 and not likely to do anything but grow in our lifetimes. Around it has sprung into existence an anti-terrorism homeland-security industry (thank you, Osama bin Laden!) of staggering proportions. "Seven years ago," writes Paul Harris of The Guardian, "there were nine companies with federal homeland-security contracts. By 2003 it was 3,512. Now there are 33,890."
Think about that. They are there to divide a terrorism/security pie that has, since 2000, resulted in about $130 billion in contracts and now, according to USA Today, is a $59 billion a year business globally - one based on that surefire best-seller, fear, whose single major customer is, of course, the DHS.
Not surprisingly, around those 33,000 companies has sprung up a whole network of Washington-based lobbyists (including the lobbying firm of John Ashcroft, the previous attorney general, the Ashcroft Group), a plethora of security conferences and trade magazines; in short, the full panoply of a thriving business world. Already at least 90 officials have left the Homeland Security Department to become lobbyists or consultants in the business that surrounds it, including Tom Ridge, the first head of the department. After only five years, the homeland-security business, according to USA Today, has already eclipsed "mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue"...
An industry tracker, Homeland Security Research, points the way to one possible future on which Americans are never likely to vote. "A major attack in the United States, Europe or Japan could increase the global market in 2015 to $730 billion, more than a twelvefold increase."
Or consider the Pentagon's Northcom - United States Northern Command, now responsible for "the continental United States, Alaska, Canada, Mexico and the surrounding water out to approximately 500 nautical miles", including the Gulf of Mexico and the Straits of Florida. Before October 1, 2002, there was no Northern Command. Less than four short years later, it's not only up and running but has multiple missions. It's preparing for the next hurricane (since we already know the Federal Emergency Management Agency can't do the job), deploying forces to battle wildfires in the west, and getting ready for an avian-flu pandemic. And don't think for a moment that where an institution springs up (especially one with a budget like the Pentagon's behind it), a world of on-the-ground realities doesn't arise as well. Just as it will when, in the near future, the Pentagon redivides its imperial domains by creating a new Africacom (United States Africa Command), supposedly to "anchor US forces on the African continent" - a decision that will be sold around town based on "terrorism security threats", but will in essence be about energy flows and oil (see America's Africa Corps, September 21). Each new structure like this, each decision, will result in new facts on the ground, new flows of money, and new sets of private contractors...
These are increasingly the crucial realities of our world - and it's not the world of a republic. It's not a world of checks and balances. It's not a world where even a change of ownership in one or both houses of the US Congress in November would prove a determining factor. It's not a world where people out there are just "starting to question whether we're following our own high standards". It's distinctly not the world as we Americans like to imagine it, but it is the world we are, regrettably enough, lost in. It's the world created not just by a commander-in-chief presidency, but by a Pentagon-in-chief-dominated government, and by a corporation-in-chief style of imperial rule...
That's a 500 lb gorilla
you'll never hear about in the main$tream media. Think Darth Rumsfeld's quitting anytime soon? Guess again. He's got too many shareholders to be invited onward, and even if the War fails, as long as his investors take home a bundle, he remains the Sith Executive Officer of Bu$hCo- Cheneyburton.
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