Air India taking five retired pilots on contract CAG criticises IA for incurring avoidable expenses Four US soldiers wounded in Baghdad ambush LG Electronics sued for "misdeclaring" fridge capacity Halliburton, Dick Cheney, and wartime spoils Controlling the news with 'embedded' journalists Air India cancels 37 flights from Gulf
CAG criticises IA for incurring avoidable expenses
Four US soldiers wounded in Baghdad ambush
DOHA, April 27 (- Four US soldiers were wounded onSunday, one seriously, in an ambush in Baghdad, the US CentralCommand (Centcom) said in Qatar. The US soldiers "were engaged with small-arms fire from anassailant" during "a public health-related mission," said Centcomin a statement. The assault came after soldiers traveling in two Humvees werestopped in mid-morning traffic The assailant approached the soldiers and fired at them, thestatement said, adding the injured were taken to a combat supporthospital.CAG criticises IA for incurring avoidable expenses77
New Delhi,Sunday, April 27, 2003: The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has castigated Indian Airlines for incurring avoidable expenditure on aircraft maintenance, including sending aircraft abroad for major checks despite having in-house facilities, in five years till March 2002.
Despite having facilities for carrying out major checks (C-checks) on A-320 aircraft, it sent 12 such planes abroad between May 1998 and March 2002 and spent Rs 296.7 million towards labour cost, a CAG report on public sector units tabled in Parliament last week said.
While IA management stated that the aircraft were being sent out due to paucity of capacity for major maintenance, the reply was "not tenable as overall capacity for C-checks during the period 1998-99 and 2001-02 was 72 against which only 59 C-checks were carried out in-house".
Similarly, the IA paid about Rs 480 million to Airbus Industrie to redesign and supply nose cowls fitted on all V-2500 engines of the A-320s, "despite the fact that nose inlet cowls were expected to last the full life of the aircraft with periodic repairs and the manufacturer failed to pinpoint the source of the problem", the report said. The excess grounding of A-300s and A-320s on account of delays in completion of various checks in engineering bases resulted in loss of revenue of about Rs 2.09 billion, it said
LG Electronics sued for "misdeclaring" fridge capacity
New Delhi,Sunday, April 27, 2003: LG Electronics has been taken to the apex consumer body by an NGO for making wrong claims about capacity of its refrigerators and thereby raking in "unjust enrichment" of over 11 crores.
The Korean multinational has been issued notice by the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission on a complaint filed by Ahmedabad-based NGO - Consumer Education and Research Centre and a user of its refrigerator who accused the company of unfair and deceptive trade practice. The matter would come up for hearing on May 23. The complainants claimed that the gross volume claimed by LG falls short of measured gross volume by about 11 per cent, which is almost four times the international permissible tolerance limit (three per cent).
Air India taking five retired pilots on contract
Mumbai,Sunday, April 27, 2003: Air India today decided to recruit five retired pilots, who still hold valid licences, on contract basis for a short period to augment its pilot strength following Indian Pilot's Guild refusal to withdraw its directives on operations to SARS affected regions.
"We have identified five retired commanders --four for Boeing 747 and one for Airbus 310-- so far and are issuing them letters to take them on contract subject to them being medically fit", AI spokesperson said here. They would undergo the necessary simulator training and flight checks before being deployed on flights, he said.The airline currently has 160 executive pilots.
AI is finalising its flight schedule for next three days as part of its contingency plans. Twenty two of the 27 flights have been scheduled for operations today.
Reacting to IPG's assertion that they had not put forward any financial demand, the spokesman said "we will like a written communication from the guild that they have no such demand and are willing to go for CAT III training". "This is the minimum they can do to prove their point", he added. The spokesman had yesterday said that IPG was demanding US dollar 35 per hour flying allowance for all pilots in view of the CAT III landing instruments installed in Delhi, irrespective of whether they fly to Delhi or not.Halliburton, Dick Cheney, and wartime spoils
Halliburton
1150 18th St NW, #200
Washington DCBy Lee Drutman and Charlie Cray, Citizen Works
When Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle revealed that he was getting $725,000 to help Global Crossing navigate the national security issues surrounding the sale of its assets, the press jumped all over Perle, and rightly so. There was indeed something fishy about the chairman of a board that advises the Pentagon making that kind of money to help a company that was having problems with national security issues. Perle is also on the board of Onset Technology, the leading provider of message conversion technology and a major supplier to Bechtel - one of the leading candidates for rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure.
As the Center for Public Integrity has documented, this kind of thing is quite prevalent on the Defense Policy Board, where at least nine of the 30 members have ties to companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002. As more and more wartime contracts are announced, more and more conflicts of interest are coming to light. After all, the Bush administration is riddled with ties to the weapons, engineering, construction, and oil companies that have the most to profit from a war in Iraq. Perle's story is certainly not unusual.
However, of all the administration members with potential conflicts of interest, none seems more troubling than Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney is former CEO of Halliburton, an oil-services company that also provides construction and military support services - a triple-header of wartime spoils.
A few weeks ago, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers awarded a no-bid contract to extinguish oil well fires in Iraq to Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton. The contract was granted under a January Bush administration waiver that, according to the Washington Post, allowed "government agencies to handpick companies for Iraqi reconstruction projects."
The contract, which was not announced until more than two weeks after it was awarded, was open-ended, with no time limits and no dollar limits. It was also a "cost-plus" contract, meaning that the company is guaranteed to recover costs and then make a guaranteed profit on top of that. Its value is estimated at tens of millions of dollars.
This is not the first buck that Cheney's former company has made off military conflict and likely won't be the last. KBR currently has thousands of military support personnel on the ground in Kuwait and Turkey as part of a multi-year contract worth close to a billion dollars. The engineering subsidiary was also one of a select few firms invited to bid on an initial $900 million USAID contract for rebuilding post-war Iraq. Though it didn't get that job, Halliburton says it is still in the running for subcontracts and there will likely be plenty more opportunities. After all, the American Academy of Sciences estimates the rebuilding Iraq will cost between $30 and $105 billion dollars. At a recent investor conference call, Halliburton reported a 30% increase in year-over-year revenues, to $1.6 billion, for KBR.
Cheney, who served as CEO from 1995 to 2000, continues to receive as much as $1 million a year in deferred compensation as Halliburton executives enjoy a seat at the table during Administration discussions over how to handle post-war oil production in Iraq.
The Cheney-Halliburton story is the classic military-industrial revolving door tale. As Secretary of Defense under Bush I, Cheney paid Brown and Root services (now Kellogg Brown and Root) $3.9 million to report on how private companies could help the U.S. Army as Cheney cut hundreds of thousands of Army jobs. Then Brown and Root won a five-year contract to provide logistics for the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers all over the globe. In 1995, Cheney became CEO and Halliburton jumped from 73rd to 18th on the Pentagon's list of top contractors, benefiting from at least $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
But the Halliburton story is more than just a simple revolving door tale. Even without the Cheney conflicts of interest, serious doubts remain about whether a company with a record like Halliburton's should even be eligible to receive government contracts in the first place. This, after all, is a company that has been accused of cost overruns, tax avoidance, and cooking the books and has a history of doing business in countries like Iraq, Iran and Libya.
Cost overruns: In September 2000, the General Accounting Office (GAO) found that the U.S. Army had not taken appropriate steps to limit the $2.2 billion costs Kellogg Brown and Root charged for logistical and engineering support in the Balkans. According to the report, Army officials "frequently have simply accepted the level of services the contractor provided without questioning whether they could be provided more efficiently or less frequently at lower cost."
Questionable Accounting: The SEC recently formalized an investigation into whether Halliburton artificially inflated revenue by $234 million over four years. Halliburton switched to a more aggressive accounting method in 1998 under Cheney.
Access to Evil -- business dealings in Iraq, Iran, and Libya: News reports suggest that Pentagon is currently using the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) to draw up a blacklist of non-US companies that have done business in Iran. Yet, Halliburton has conducted Business in Iran through subsidiaries. When Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, he inquired about an ILSA waiver to pursue oil field developments in Iran. In 1997, Halliburton subsidiary Halliburton Energy Services paid $15,000 to settle Department of Commerce allegations that the company had broken anti-boycott provisions of the U.S. Export Administration Act for an Iran-related transaction. Halliburton recently agreed to evaluate its operations in Iran, after the Securities and Exchange Commission rebuffed the company's request to dismiss a New York City police and fire pension funds shareholder proposal for the company to examine its role in Iran.
Also forgotten is that story about how Cheney's Halliburton did business with Saddam. According to the Washington Post, "Halliburton held stakes in two firms that signed contracts to sell more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer."
Halliburton has also done business in Azerbaijan, Burma, Indonesia, Libya and Nigeria. As Dick Cheney once said, "The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratic regimes friendly to the United States."
Tax Havens: Under Cheney's tenure, the number of Halliburton subsidiaries in offshore tax havens increased from 9 to 44. Meanwhile, Halliburton went from paying $302 million in company taxes in 1998 to getting an $85 million tax refund in 1999.
All told, the IRS loses about $70 billion a year in offshore tax sheltering by corporations and wealthy individuals - almost enough to cover the $75 billion Bush has asked for to cover the first six months of war.
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The Halliburton story is part of a larger dynamic that should not be forgotten in a debate over contractor responsibility. While the Halliburton contracts reek of blatant cronyism, almost all the major firms that provide this kind of work are tied to the administration.
Somebody has to do the job. However, the level of secrecy surrounding the contracts that have been given out so far is troubling, and symptomatic of a bigger problem - the very legitimacy of a reconstruction process controlled by the U.S. military and their corporate contractors. Although the United States has the obligation to pay for the costs of reconstructing Iraq, only the United Nations is the proper body to provide governance and help rebuild a new government, civil society and physical infrastructure if the current regime is overthrown, not the White House, the Pentagon and their corporate cronies.
Note: In honor of Big Business Day 2003, Citizen Works will present Dick Cheney the "Daddy Warbucks" Award for eminence in corporate war profiteering on Friday, April 4. Last Updated April 4, 2003
Controlling the news with 'embedded' journalists
In the first of a three-part series on censorship in America, we examine how coverage of the recent Iraqi conflict was profoundly influenced by Washington
By Michael Mehas The Inquisitor's United States Editor: 27 April 2003
Iraq did not prove to be a popular war, especially in the early days. US opinion polls swung up and down in the months preceding the conflict, demonstrating indecision as to whether military action was justified.
Given the large anti-war rallies taking place in the US and elsewhere, government war planners implemented a sweeping system of changes designed to control virtually all information emanating from Iraq. To accomplish this, hundreds of journalists from selected Western media agencies were "embedded" into the US military. The hand-picked reporters, photographers and camera crews were first trained in military discipline and then assigned to front-line units, where they were instructed to follow guidelines that would eliminate coverage damaging to the war effort.
Of course the US military didn't frame it quite that way. "We want to be able to protect that information that is going to determine the success of an operation, and we don't want any reporting that's going to unnecessarily jeopardize those individuals that are executing that mission," deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations Bryan Whitman told the US Public Broadcasting Service. "I have never met a journalist, particularly one that's traveling with that unit, that would have any interest in compromising the mission of the unit."
Whitman admitted that final control over all dispatches would rest with military unit commanders. "Clearly there is a need to protect any operational security out there," he stressed. "Reporters will be pre-briefed. They'll be debriefed if they come in contact with sensitive information on what it is that is inappropriate to either report on or inappropriate to report on at this time because it will affect the outcome of the operation or endanger the personnel that are engaged in that operation."
In other words, any military commander who believed it beneficial to the interests of the Department of Defense to allow journalists to see sensitive information that would normally be restricted, could first subject the reporter to a security review of their coverage.
The Pentagon rules resulted in a dearth of coverage of some of the war's most newsworthy events. In the early days there was almost no access to Iraqi civilians or prisoners of war. Reportage of so-called 'friendly fire' incidents resulting in solders' deaths was strictly controlled. Even the questions asked of military officers in press conferences often appeared tame and non-confrontational.
Concerned that soldiers might anonymously criticize their own commanders or leak news of civilian deaths as occurred in the Vietnam war, the Pentagon required that all interviews with military personnel be conducted on the record. In Iraq, any military staff violating this rule would face disciplinary action.
Journalists were also prevented from using their own means of transport in Iraq, which limited their access to battle zones and prevented them from seeing anything the military didn't want them to see. And journalists were specifically warned by military staff that the use of their satellite phones could make them targets for friendly fire. While it's doubtful that these phones could have ever been construed as military targets, the threat worked and the journalists lost independent communications access.
Former CNN correspondent Bernard Shaw was one of the many war correspondents to speak out against the Pentagon rules. "The idea of journalists allowing themselves to be taken under the wing of the United States military to me is very dangerous," he said. "I think journalists who agree to go with combat units effectively become hostages of the military, which can control the movements of the journalists and, more importantly, control their ability when they file their stories."
Censorship of the media was not limited to the Iraqi battlefield. Once they were sent to the US, journalists' reports were subjected to strict scrutiny by corporate media editors. On January 27, 2003, CNN released a document entitled, "Reminder of Script Approval Policy," which required reporters to send all of their copy to officials in Atlanta to ensure it was suitably "balanced." This represents some of the most rigorous self-censorship demonstrated by the Western media since the Cold War of the late 1950s and early 60s.
Award-winning British journalist Robert Fist quoted extracts from the document in writing for the London-based Independent newspaper. "All reporters preparing package scripts must submit the scripts for approval," it reads. "Packages may not be edited until the scripts are approved... All packages originating outside Washington, LA or NY, including all international bureaus, must come to the ROW (editors) in Atlanta for approval."
"A script is not approved for air unless it is properly marked approved by an authorized manager," the document continues. "When a script is updated it must be re-approved, preferably by the originating approving authority."
On January 31, CNN staff were told that a new computerized script approval system would allow "authorized script approvers to mark scripts in a clear and standard manner." Fisk noted that CNN had a history of doctoring reports even before their latest edicts. He cited an incident that occurred in the Israeli-occupied West Bank where a report had been doctored to produce pro-Israeli accounts of atrocities committed against Palestinians.
Of course, military commanders working hand-in-glove with the media is not a novel process. Until the Korean War of 1950-53, few journalists in any Western democracy ever really challenged the official version of events presented by government and army sources.
Press criticism reached its height in Vietnam, with more than 2,000 accredited reporters roaming freely through battle zones interviewing ordinary soldiers rather than relying on Pentagon's picture of the war. There were scattered reports of news stories endangering US troops or military operations, but the major impact of the media's coverage was to strengthen anti-war sentiment back home.
Afterwards, many in the military blamed the press for losing the Vietnam war. Thus, Pentagon officials decided to restrict press coverage of future US-involved wars. In 1983, all journalists were barred from the initial invasion of Grenada. In 1989, the Pentagon selected a dozen reporters to cover the invasion of Panama and restricted them to a small airport until nearly all the fighting had ceased.
During the 1991 Gulf War, the White House and the Pentagon imposed unprecedented censorship on media coverage. American military activities in the region were mostly off-limits to journalists. Defense Department censors cleared battlefield dispatches, photos and video footage.
Journalists were allowed to travel only in "pools" of up to 18 reporters each to visit US military units in the field. Reporters were then selected by news organizations for each pool and military escorts accompanied them into the field. Pool reporters distributed their dispatches to their news organizations and to all other non-pool reporters who were required to remain near the Kuwait border in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, or in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital.
For its part, the Pentagon said the rules were designed to protect American troops, military operations, and the journalists themselves. "There is a clear and present danger in today's instant-communications age, which may put our troops at risk, Rear Admiral John Bitoff said. "Our enemies are watching CNN."
None of this made the press very happy. After the first Gulf War a committee representing most major US news media opposed the government censorship. They cited the responsibility of the press to report accurate news, not just what military officials wanted reported. They expressed their concern that the rules limiting the press's access to the most newsworthy events posed a clear and present danger of another kind to the American people: military interference with free expression.
While many news reporters have already expressed their concerns, the executives running most of the US news media have largely accepted their circumscribed role in war coverage with disturbing ease. Perhaps the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 still haunt and constrain them. Perhaps they are afraid of losing their jobs. Either way, truth has become yet again a casualty of war. Michael Mehas is The Inquisitor's United States Editor. Based in southern California, he is also a leading civil rights attorney working in private practice.