Author: Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

When I was researching my recent piece on Taliban extortion rackets in Afghanistan, it was easy to find examples of the Taliban extorting private contractors hired by western governments and companies engaged in humanitarian and reconstruction projects. What was tricky was connecting payoffs to the Taliban by contractors who were moving supplies and food to U.S/NATO troops in the field. But the evidence is out there if you look hard enough — it’s just no one wants to talk about the possibility that we are paying off the enemy in order to maintain the occupation. It’s madness.

That’s what the French are saying today, just after the The Times (UK) broke a story charging that the Italian secret service had been systematically paying off the Taliban in exchange for protection in the Italian army’s area of operation — a charge that has since been denied — adamantly — by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. But the French say when they took over that territory in July they were never told about the bribes and therefore made a “catastrophically incorrect threat assessment.” They blame the brutal killing and mutilation of 10 French soldiers in an ambush August 18 in the Uzbin Valley on the Italian secret service. The Italians had left just a month before,and had all but declared the area benign — they had only lost one combat soldier in the previous year. Now we may be getting some insight as to why.

Western officials say that because the French knew nothing of the payments they made a catastrophically incorrect threat assessment…

“One cannot be too doctrinaire about these things,” a senior Nato officer in Kabul said. “It might well make sense to buy off local groups and use non-violence to keep violence down. But it is madness to do so and not inform your allies.”

One wonders how widespread the protection rackets are, and how far up the food chain they operate. Private contractors paying  bribes trying to get their convoys through insurgent-riddled communication lines to military installations are bad enough –  but governments paying the Taliban directly? And not doing it to eventually end the war, but to merely get through the next rotation? Catastrophically incorrect is a good way of putting it.

Not much can top a federally-funded ACORN associate telling a (supposed) prostitute how she can launder her income — on camera. Except for maybe this:

or this:

Those are guards from the federally-funded ArmorGroup, which has a $184 million contract to protect our embassy in Afghanistan. When these photos emerged from a FOIA request by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), ArmorGroup fired 14 guards for a whole host of inappropriate, and perhaps even illegal activities. Subsequent reports indicate that the guards may have even been involved in running a prostitution ring.

According to Ryan Grim over at Huffington Post, the ironies have not been lost on Democratic lawmakers who have been whipsawed in recent days by legislation passed by the House and Senate to punish ACORN. The  House bill , however, would in essence de-fund any federally-funded organization guilty of a wide range of ethical and legal violations, including fraud. That, according to POGO, would apply not only to ACORN, but to possibly the ArmorGroup, and a long line of federal defense contractors, including tip-toppers like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. So far, they have identified 87 cases of fraud among 43 contractors.  Here’s the list — have fun.

Published originally @TAC

I am glad that Stars and Stripes has nailed the story about the Pentagon profiling journos headed overseas for embed duty, not only because it is only fair that we know how our taxpayer dollars are being spent in so-called military “strategic communications” and that the Fourth Estate knows exactly where it stands with the military establishment, but that it was Stars and Stripes, virtually inoculated from any rightwing sniping about ‘flyover’ and ‘driveby media’, that has been bird-dogging this latest example of government manipulation of the news in wartime.

Simmering for over a week, the story is starting to sprout earnest legs, but given a few more hours and days, will likely slide off into familiar media narcissism, as more reporters begin demanding their profiles and posting them online. Given the hyper-competition in the foreign policy reporting space, one can easily imagine one scribe scrambling over the other with contempt for the Pentagon out of one side of his face, using the other to call attention to his overseas bonefides. Not all are that egotistical, of course, and seeing your life’s work clinically analyzed like a FBI background check has to be quite disquieting. Nevertheless, some may want to think twice before broadcasting their profile: the Pentagon may like you and that could be kind of icky, especially when you’re trying to pay it cool.

The thing that gets me is none of this is really a surprise. The Rendon Group didn’t come out of a hole in the desert, it helped start the war. In fact its propaganda and message management work for the government goes back decades. Meanwhile, the military has put all sorts of restrictions on its official embeds and that’s why we have independent reporters who risk life and limb to get the story. The military hired a covert PR firm to plant “good news” in Iraqi papers — why wouldn’t it want to keep tabs and try to manage journalists it couldn’t outright buy or silence?

It’s amazing, as I see the first signs of this profiling story on major television news networks, I recall how none of them — save PBS — would touch the explosive Message Force Multipliers story of 2008. Because it involved the corporate broadcast media participating in the Pentagon/Bush Administration-led Spin of the Century, they acted as though it never even happened. Now that they are the victims, it is a different story?

Billionaire gasbag “T Boone” Pickens has made a bold attempt over the last year to transform his image of oil-greased rightwing godfather to grandfatherly wind energy guru, endlessly blowing his hot air at bipartisan audiences in Washington (and reminding everyone outside the beltway that money can buy you anything in the Imperial City, even a new personae)

That’s why it’s refreshing when a senator steps up and reminds everyone that the emperor (in this case, audacious Texas oil man and corporate raider) has no clothes. Or maybe Sen. Al Franken is still too new to know when to keep his mouth shut. Or maybe he just cannot stomach the thought of a man who helped elect George W. Bush twice and funded Swift Boat Veterans for Truth over $2 million to torpedo a decorated Vietnam veteran’s presidential candidacy and reputation, getting the VIP treatment from his Democratic colleagues:

Five years after he put his money behind the Swift Boat ads that helped tank John Kerry’s presidential campaign, Senate Democrats gave T. Boone Pickens a warm welcome at their weekly policy lunch Thursday.

Or at least most of them did.

Kerry skipped the regularly scheduled lunch; his staff said the Massachusetts Democrat “was unable to attend because he had a long scheduled lunch with his interns and pages.”

Sen. Al Franken managed to make time for the lunch — but then let Pickens have it afterward.

According to a source, the wealthy oil and gas magnate and author of “The First Billion Is the Hardest” stepped up to introduce himself to Franken in a room just off the Senate Floor after the lunch ended

Franken, who was seated talking to someone else, did not stand when Pickens said hello. Instead, Franken began to berate him about the billionaire’s financing of the Swift Boat ads in 2004.

According to a source, the confrontation grew heated ….

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25667.html#ixzz0N23eHrbA