AlterNet Special

AlterNet:
Rove Exits With His Usual M.O.: Delusional and Deceptive

By Arianna Huffington, HuffingtonPost.com
Posted on August 14, 2007

So this is the way the Rove ends, not with an indictment but with a "rambunctious" resignation.

Having dodged the Plamegate bullet and confident of executive privileging his way out of the U.S. Attorney firings scandal he no doubt masterminded, Rove is heading out the door the doughy personification of the Bush White House.

In his exit-announcing interview with WSJ editorial page editor Paul Gigot, the man dubbed the Boy Genius manifested all the worst traits of the administration he helped forge: he was delusional, fanatical, and deceptive.

The delusions are front and center. Gigot describes Rove as "relaxed" and "cheerful." So with Iraq an unmitigated disaster, Afghanistan slipping further into chaos (largely because of Iraq), Bush's popularity at an all-time low, his signature efforts on Social Security and immigration dead, and his dreams of a permanent GOP majority crumbling around him, Rove is relaxed and cheerful? The 2006 thumping must have left him positively giddy.

Rove also shows that he is not among the reality-based when he predicts that by Bush wielding his veto pen in the upcoming budget fight, the GOP will restore its reputation on spending restraint. Spending restraint? After six and a half years of watching a GOP-controlled Congress bloat the budget by 50 percent, and the promotion of a war that will eventually cost over a trillion dollars? What kind of pills is Bush's Brain popping? Or, after successfully selling the American people a double dose of Bush, does Rove believe he can sell them anything?

Rove's delusional thinking clearly extends to the times he looks in the mirror. In discussing the 2006 election, Rove tells Gigot that his biggest tactical mistake was not working soon enough to replace Republicans tainted by scandal. Uh, you mean scandal-tainted like yourself, Karl? Or have you forgotten all that stuff about leaking the name of an undercover CIA agent or your boss reneging on his promise to fire the leaker (unless of course that leaker turned out to be his right hand man)? And since "not working soon enough to replace Republicans tainted by scandal" was such a big mistake in '06, wouldn't it stand to reason that showing Alberto Gonzales the door now would be a good idea if the GOP wants to avoid another thumping in '08?

Then there is the full-throated fanaticism. Exhibiting the profound unwillingness to allow evidence to get in the way of unshakable belief that is the hallmark of a fanatic, Rove announces to Gigot that "Iraq will be in a better place" come the fall.

And like all fanatics, Rove can't admit mistakes. Remember how Bush famously couldn't think of a single mistake he'd made? Same with Rove. When Gigot asks about mistakes he has made while in the White House, Rove says, "I'll put my feet up in September and think about that." So with invading Iraq, forgetting bin Laden, and advising Bush against immediately visiting New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina all bobbing on the surface, Rove has to wait until he can kick back in September and wrack his brain before he can come up with a mistake? Wow.

As for being deceptive: does Rove really think that the old "I've got to do this for the sake of my family" line is going to fly? Is he that unaware of how ludicrous that sounds - how spit-your-milk-back-through-your-nose mockable the cliché has become? Apparently, his underestimation of the intelligence of the American people knows no bounds. Why else would he gild the believability lily by saying that his resignation hand was forced when Josh Bolten warned senior White House staffers that if they stayed on past Labor Day they would be expected to serve through the remainder of Bush's term. Sure, Karl. Whatever you say.

My favorite tidbit in the WSJ interview is the "insider color" tossed in about how Rove and Bush talk politics every Sunday morning on the phone, and about the contest the two friends have to see who can read the most books. According to Gigot, "Mr. Rove is winning."

It's so emblematic of Rove and his relationship to Bush. After 14 years of diligently working to construct an image of Bush as a thoughtful leader - Bush as bookworm? - he has to toss another brick on the edifice, even as he's heading out the door. Rove says that after leaving the White House, he plans to write a book about the Bush years. Wonder if that will be part of the contest. Somehow I have a feeling the first line won't be, "Call me Turd Blossom."

Find more Arianna at the Huffington Post.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/59630/

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Oil Companies Are Using a Simple Trick
to Bilk Consumers out of Billions

By Brian Beutler, Media Consortium
Posted on August 14, 2007

It's probably intuitive to most people that the gasoline in their fuel tank expands in the heat - just like doorframes and cookware and everything else on the planet. What's probably less intuitive is that, in the United States, this physical phenomenon pumps a nearly $2 billion annual windfall out of consumers' pockets and into oil company coffers, according to numerous calculations, including a recent House of Representatives study.

The North Carolina-based company Gilbarco Veeder-Root manufactures a device - a temperature-sensitive chamber for fuel - that, if affixed to gasoline pumps across the country, would return that money to consumers and help relieve some of our storied gas-price pressures. The device - and others like it - is simple, functional and, in fact, already in widespread use at gas stations all across Canada. Last month, Democratic presidential hopeful and Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, chair of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee, held the second in a series of hearings to investigate why the technology has never made it into the American market.

Temperature is just one of the many variables that determine how much energy one tank of gasoline contains, and therefore how many miles it will pull your car. But the effects of temperature change are easier to calculate than, say, ethanol content or petroleum grade - and are therefore also easy to correct for. Here's how it works.

A gallon of gasoline contains a certain number of molecules, which combust in your car's engine to provide it with energy. If you heat up that gallon of gasoline it will expand, leaving you with a larger volume of gas than the gallon with which you started. But your new volume will contain the same number of combustible molecules and therefore will provide the same amount of energy as it did prior to the heating. That means a tank full of "hot" gas will provide a car with less energy than will the same tank full of "cool" gas, which is why you've probably been advised (correctly) not to buy gasoline when it's hot outside. Simple, right?

It is if you live in Canada, at least. There, gasoline retailers install metering systems in their pumps to determine how much the fuel they sell has cooled or heated from its standardized refinery temperature, and then adjust the price accordingly. If the fuel has become warmer, it also becomes cheaper. If it has cooled, it becomes more expensive. Which is to say that Canadians - to a greater extent than Americans - pay for the energy they get out of the gasoline and not for the volume of liquid fuel they purchase.

Of course, on average, Canada is pretty cold and the United States is pretty hot. So it benefits both retailers and oil companies to correct for temperature in Canada, but to price by volume in the United States But the idea of correcting price for temperature has deep roots in the industry: oil companies have done so for gasoline wholesalers for nearly a century. The only ones in the North American energy chain who pay by volume rather than by energy value are U.S. consumers.

Kucinich's hearings were designed to shed light on this and other double standards. Oil company executives, testifying under threat of subpoena, told the subcommittee that gas retailers in the United States don't use heat meters - known as "automatic temperature compensation" - because state regs don't let them. "State weights and measures regulations have not adopted temperature correction," said Hugh Cooley, a Shell Oil Company vice president, in answer to Kucinich's inquiries. Ben Soraci, Director of General Sales for ExxonMobil, echoed Cooley, insisting that "across the U.S. a gallon is still defined as 231 cubic inches by law."

But Kucinich offered evidence to the contrary. His subcommittee asked the National Institutes of Standards and Technology to survey all 50 states and the District of Columbia about their weights and measures rules. "Most states permit the use of temperature compensation at both the wholesale and retail level," Kucinich said the survey found. "In fact, NIST could find that automatic temperature compensation is only expressly prohibited in nine states for retail."

Further, Kucinich found that Gilbarco Veeder-Root sought certification for its automatic temperature compensation equipment in California. Gilbarco was responding to what it has said was the stated interest of California gas retailers, but it found no buyers when the state gave its product the OK.

Cooley and Soraci say that's unsurprising because the cost for implementing devices like Gilbarco's, an investment estimated to be about $2,500 per unit, would be borne by retailers - the majority of which are affiliated only loosely with big oil companies - and then ultimately passed on to the consumer. The oil execs' contention is true as far as it goes, but belies the fact that oil companies maintain funds - called "image" and "development" funds - meant to help so-called arms-length retailers pay for modifications and improvements to their gas stations. The money is there to extend to consumers the same fair deal wholesalers get, but the companies don't particularly want to spend it.

Kucinich's subcommittee is now also investigating whether that's the reason California retailers balked when given the chance to use Gilbarco Veeder-Root's system, and whether states should be encouraged to mandate pricing by amount of energy bought rather than volume of gas sold.

Brian Beutler is a reporter for the Media Consortium.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/59593/

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Flush with Profits from the Iraq War,
Military Contractors See a World of Business Opportunities

By Jeremy Scahill, Indypendent
Posted on August 13, 2007

If you think the U.S. has only 160,000 troops in Iraq, think again.

With almost no congressional oversight and even less public awareness, the Bush administration has more than doubled the size of the U.S. occupation through the use of private war companies.

There are now almost 200,000 private "contractors" deployed in Iraq by Washington. This means that U.S. military forces in Iraq are now outsized by a coalition of billing corporations whose actions go largely unmonitored and whose crimes are virtually unpunished.

In essence, the Bush administration has created a shadow army that can be used to wage wars unpopular with the American public but extremely profitable for a few unaccountable private companies.

Since the launch of the "global war on terror," the administration has systematically funneled billions of dollars in public money to corporations like Blackwater USA , DynCorp, Triple Canopy, Erinys and ArmorGroup. They have in turn used their lucrative government pay-outs to build up the infrastructure and reach of private armies so powerful that they rival or outgun some nation's militaries.

"I think it's extraordinarily dangerous when a nation begins to outsource its monopoly on the use of force and the use of violence in support of its foreign policy or national security objectives," says veteran U.S. Diplomat Joe Wilson, who served as the last U.S. ambassador to Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War.

The billions of dollars being doled out to these companies, Wilson argues, "makes of them a very powerful interest group within the American body politic and an interest group that is in fact armed. And the question will arise at some time: to whom do they owe their loyalty?"

Precise data on the extent of U.S. spending on mercenary services is nearly impossible to obtain - by both journalists and elected officials-but some in Congress estimate that up to 40 cents of every tax dollar spent on the war goes to corporate war contractors. At present, the United States spends about $2 billion a week on its Iraq operations.

While much has been made of the Bush administration's "failure" to build international consensus for the invasion of Iraq, perhaps that was never the intention. When U.S. tanks rolled into Iraq in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of "private contractors" ever deployed in a war. The White House substituted international diplomacy with lucrative war contracts and a coalition of willing nations who provided token forces with a coalition of billing corporations that supplied the brigades of contractors.

There's no democratic control

During the 1991 Gulf War, the ratio of troops to private contractors was about 60 to 1. Today, it is the contractors who outnumber U.S. forces in Iraq. As of July 2007, there were more than 630 war contracting companies working in Iraq for the United States. Composed of some 180,000 individual personnel drawn from more than 100 countries, the army of contractors surpasses the official U.S. military presence of 160,000 troops.

In all, the United States may have as many as 400,000 personnel occupying Iraq, not including allied nations' militaries. The statistics on contractors do not account for all armed contractors. Last year, a U.S. government report estimated there were 48,000 people working for more than 170 private military companies in Iraq. "It masks the true level of American involvement," says Ambassador Wilson.

How much money is being spent just on mercenaries remains largely classified. Congressional sources estimate the United States has spent at least $6 billion in Iraq, while Britain has spent some $400 million. At the same time, companies chosen by the White House for rebuilding projects in Iraq have spent huge sums in reconstruction funds - possibly billions on more mercenaries to guard their personnel and projects.

The single largest U.S. contract for private security in Iraq was a $293 million payment to the British firm Aegis Defence Services, headed by retired British Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, who has been dogged by accusations that he is a mercenary because of his private involvement in African conflicts. The Texas-based DynCorp International has been another big winner, with more than $1 billion in contracts to provide personnel to train Iraqi police forces, while Blackwater USA has won $750 million in State Department contracts alone for "diplomatic security."

At present, an American or a British Special Forces veteran working for a private security company in Iraq can make $650 a day. At times the rate has reached $1,000 a day; the pay dwarfs many times over that of active duty troops operating in the war zone wearing a U.S. or U.K. flag on their shoulder instead of a corporate logo.

"We got [tens of thousands of] contractors over there, some of them making more than the Secretary of Defense," House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D-Penn.) recently remarked. "How in the hell do you justify that?" In part, these contractors do mundane jobs that traditionally have been performed by soldiers. Some require no military training, but involve deadly occupations, such as driving trucks through insurgent-controlled territory.

Others are more innocuous, like cooking food or doing laundry on a base, but still court grave risk because of regular mortar and rocket attacks.

These services are provided through companies like KBR and Fluor and through their vast labyrinth of subcontractors. But many other private personnel are also engaged in armed combat and "security" operations. They interrogate prisoners, gather intelligence, operate rendition flights, protect senior occupation officials and, in at least one case, have commanded U.S. and international troops in battle.

In a revealing admission, Gen. David Petraeus, who is overseeing Bush's troop "surge," said earlier this year that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq by "contract security." At least three U.S. commanding generals, not including Petraeus, are currently being guarded in Iraq by hired guns. "To have half of your army be contractors, I don't know that there's a precedent for that," says Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating war contractors.

"Maybe the precedent was the British and the Hessians in the American Revolution. Maybe that's the last time and needless to say, they lost. But I'm thinking that there's no democratic control and there's no intention to have democratic control here."

The implications are devastating. Joseph Wilson says, "In the absence of international consensus, the current Bush administration relied on a coalition of what I call the co-opted, the corrupted and the coerced: those who benefited financially from their involvement, those who benefited politically from their involvement and those few who determined that their relationship with the United States was more important than their relationship with anybody else. And that's a real problem because there is no underlying international legitimacy that sustains us throughout this action that we've taken."

Moreover, this revolution means the United States no longer needs to rely on its own citizens to fight its wars, nor does it need to implement a draft, which would have made the Iraq war politically untenable.

An arm of the Bush administration

During his confirmation hearings in the Senate this past January, Petraeus praised the role of private forces, claiming they compensate for an overstretched military. Petraeus told the senators that combined with Bush's official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of contract security forces give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission."

Taken together with Petraeus's recent assertion that the surge would run into mid-2009, this means a widening role for mercenaries and other private forces in Iraq is clearly on the table for the foreseeable future.

"The increasing use of contractors, private forces or as some would say 'mercenaries' makes wars easier to begin and to fight - it just takes money and not the citizenry," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose organization has sued private contractors for alleged human rights violations in Iraq.

"To the extent a population is called upon to go to war, there is resistance, a necessary resistance to prevent wars of self-aggrandizement, foolish wars and in the case of the United States, hegemonic imperialist wars. Private forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on retaining its declining empire. Think about Rome and its increasing need for mercenaries."

Privatized forces are also politically expedient for many governments. Their casualties go uncounted, their actions largely unmonitored and their crimes unpunished. Indeed, four years into the occupation, there is no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law - military or civilian being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts. And no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts because in 2004 the U.S. occupying authority granted them complete immunity.

"These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies," argues Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S. contractors from Iraq. "They charge whatever they want with impunity. There's no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their activities are."

That raises the crucial question: what exactly are they doing in Iraq in the name of the U.S. and U.K. governments? Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a leading member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which is responsible for reviewing sensitive national security issues, explained the difficulty of monitoring private military companies on the U.S. payroll: "If I want to see a contract, I have to go up to a secret room and look at it, can't take any notes, can't take any notes out with me, you know - essentially, I don't have access to those contracts and even if I did, I couldn't tell anybody about it."

A marketplace for warfare

On the Internet, numerous videos have spread virally, showing what appear to be foreign mercenaries using Iraqis as target practice, much to the embarrassment of the firms involved. Despite these incidents and the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to possessing child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison.

Dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed - 64 on murder-related charges alone - but not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.

U.S. contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: "What happens here today, stays here today." International diplomats say Iraq has demonstrated a new U.S. model for waging war; one which poses a creeping threat to global order.

"To outsource security-related, military related issues to non-government, non-military forces is a source of great concern and it caught many governments unprepared," says Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year veteran U.N. diplomat, who served as head of the U.N. Iraq mission before the U.S. invasion.

In Iraq, the United States has used its private sector allies to build up armies of mercenaries many lured from impoverished countries with the promise of greater salaries than their home militaries can pay. That the home governments of some of these private warriors are opposed to the war itself is of little consequence.

"Have gun, will fight for paycheck" has become a globalized law.

"The most worrying aspect is that these forces are outside parliamentary control. They come from all over and they are answerable to no one except a very narrow group of people and they come from countries whose governments may not even know in detail that they have actually been contracted as a private army into a war zone," says von Sponeck.

"If you have now a marketplace for warfare, it is a commercial issue rather than a political issue involving a debate in the countries.

You are also marginalizing governmental control over whether or not this should take place, should happen and, if so, in what size and shape. It's a very worrying new aspect of international relations. I think it becomes more and more uncontrollable by the countries of supply."

In Iraq, for example, hundreds of Chilean mercenaries have been deployed by U.S. companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy, despite the fact that Chile, as a rotating member of the U.N. Security Council, opposed the invasion and continues to oppose the occupation of Iraq. Some of the Chileans are alleged to have been seasoned veterans of the Pinochet era.

"There is nothing new, of course, about the relationship between politics and the economy, but there is something deeply perverse about the privatization of the Iraq War and the utilization of mercenaries," says Chilean sociologist Tito Tricot, a former political prisoner who was tortured under Pinochet's regime.

"This externalization of services or outsourcing attempts to lower costs - third world mercenaries are paid less than their counterparts from the developed world - and maximize benefits. In other words, let others fight the war for the Americans. In either case, the Iraqi people do not matter at all."

New World disorder

The Iraq war has ushered in a new system. Wealthy nations can recruit the world's poor, from countries that have no direct stake in the conflict, and use them as cannon fodder to conquer weaker nations. This allows the conquering power to hold down domestic casualties - the single-greatest impediment to waging wars like the one in Iraq. Indeed, in Iraq, more than 1,000 contractors working for the U.S. occupation have been killed with another 13,000 wounded. Most are not American citizens, and these numbers are not counted in the official death toll at a time when Americans are increasingly disturbed by casualties.

In Iraq, many companies are run by Americans or Britons and have well-trained forces drawn from elite military units for use in sensitive actions or operations. But down the ranks, these forces are filled by Iraqis and third-country nationals. Indeed, some 118,000 of the estimated 180,000 contractors are Iraqis, and many mercenaries are reportedly ill-paid, poorly equipped and barely trained Iraqi nationals.

The mercenary industry points to this as a positive: we are giving Iraqis jobs, albeit occupying their own country in the service of a private corporation hired by a hostile invading power.

Doug Brooks, the head of the Orwellian named mercenary trade group, the International Peace Operations Association, argued from early on in the occupation, "Museums do not need to be guarded by Abrams tanks when an Iraqi security guard working for a contractor can do the same job for less than one-fiftieth of what it costs to maintain an American soldier. Hiring local guards gives Iraqis a stake in a successful future for their country. They use their pay to support their families and stimulate the economy. Perhaps most significantly, every guard means one less potential guerrilla."

In many ways, it is the same corporate model of relying on cheap labor in destitute nations to staff their uber-profitable operations. The giant multinationals also argue they are helping the economy by hiring locals, even if it's at starvation wages.

"Donald Rumsfeld's masterstroke, and his most enduring legacy, was to bring the corporate branding revolution of the 1990s into the heart of the most powerful military in the world," says Naomi Klein, whose upcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, explores these themes.

"We have now seen the emergence of the hollow army. Much as with so-called hollow corporations like Nike, billions are spent on military technology and design in rich countries while the manual labor and sweat work of invasion and occupation is increasingly outsourced to contractors who compete with each other to fill the work order for the lowest price. Just as this model breeds rampant abuse in the manufacturing sector - with the big-name brands always able to plead ignorance about the actions of their suppliers-so it does in the military, though with stakes that are immeasurably higher." In the case of Iraq, the U.S. and U.K. governments could give the public perception of a withdrawal of forces and just privatize the occupation. Indeed, shortly after former British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he wanted to withdraw 1,600 soldiers from Basra, reports emerged that the British government was considering sending in private security companies to "fill the gap left behind."

The spy who billed me

While Iraq currently dominates the headlines, private war and intelligence companies are expanding their already sizable footprint. The U.S. government in particular is now in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in its history. According to a recent report in Vanity Fair, the government pays contractors as much as the combined taxes paid by everyone in the United States with incomes under $100,000, meaning "more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to [contractors] rather than to the [government]."

Some of this outsourcing is happening in sensitive sectors, including the intelligence community. "This is the magnet now. Everything is being attracted to these private companies in terms of individuals and expertise and functions that were normally done by the intelligence community," says former CIA division chief and senior analyst Melvin Goodman. "My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control. It's outrageous."

RJ Hillhouse, a blogger who investigates the clandestine world of private contractors and U.S. intelligence, recently obtained documents from the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) showing that Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $17.54 billion in 2000. Currently that spending represents 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget going to private companies.

Perhaps it is no surprise then that the current head of the DNI is Mike McConnell, the former chair of the board of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the private intelligence industry's lobbying arm. Hillhouse also revealed that one of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence documents, the Presidential Daily Briefing, is prepared in part by private companies, despite having the official seal of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

"Let's say a company is frustrated with a government that's hampering its business or business of one of its clients. Introducing and spinning intelligence on that government's suspected collaboration with terrorists would quickly get the White House's attention and could be used to shape national policy," Hillhouse argues.

Multinational mercenaries

Empowered by their new found prominence, mercenary forces are increasing their presence on other battlefields: in Latin America, DynCorp International is operating in Colombia, Bolivia and other countries under the guise of the "war on drugs" - U.S. defense contractors are receiving nearly half the $630 million in U.S. military aid for Colombia; in Africa, mercenaries are deploying in Somalia, Congo and Sudan and increasingly have their sights set on tapping into the hefty U.N. peacekeeping budget (this has been true since at least the early 1990s and probably much earlier). Heavily armed mercenaries were deployed to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while proposals are being considered to privatize the U.S. border patrol.

Brooks, the private military industry lobbyist, says people should not become "overly obsessed with Iraq," saying his association's "member companies have more personnel working in U.N. and African Union peace operations than all but a handful of countries." Von Sponeck says he believes the use of such companies in warfare should be barred and has harsh words for the institution for which he spent his career working: "The United Nations, including the U.N. Secretary General, should react to this and instead of reacting, they are mute, they are silent."

This unprecedented funding of such enterprises, primarily by the U.S. and U.K. governments, means that powers once the exclusive realm of nations are now in the hands of private companies with loyalty only to profits, CEOs and, in the case of public companies, shareholders. And, of course, their client, whoever that may be. CIA-type services, special operations, covert actions and small-scale military and paramilitary forces are now on the world market in a way not seen in modern history. This could allow corporations or nations with cash to spend but no real military power to hire squadrons of heavily armed and well-trained commandos.

"It raises very important issues about state and about the very power of state. The one thing the people think of as being in the purview of the government - wholly run and owned by - is the use of military power," says Rep. Jan Schakowsky. "Suddenly you've got a for-profit corporation going around the world that is more powerful than states, can effect regime possibly where they may want to go, that seems to have all the support that it needs from this administration that is also pretty adventurous around the world and operating under the cover of darkness.

"It raises questions about democracies, about states, about who influences policy around the globe, about relationships among some countries. Maybe it's their goal to render state coalitions like NATO irrelevant in the future, that they'll be the ones and open to the highest bidder. Who really does determine war and peace around the world?"

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/59571/

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Innocent Man Sentenced to Death
Under Cruel Texas Law

By Liliana Segura, The Brooklyn Rail
Posted on August 14, 2007

Kenneth Foster's time is running out.

On Tuesday, August 7, in a six-to-three decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied his final writ of habeas corpus, giving the legal green light for his execution. Foster, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection on August 30, is now at the mercy of the merciless Board of Pardons and Paroles. The odds are bad. Five out of seven board members must recommend clemency before Governor Rick Perry will consider it - and in a state that has executed nearly 400 people in thirty years, clemency has only been granted twice. But Foster's supporters, who are spearheading a letter-writing campaign to the board and governor, are relying on one particularly salient detail to move their minds, if not their hearts: Foster didn't kill anyone.

Foster was convicted for the 1996 murder of Michael LaHood Jr., who was shot following a string of robberies, by a man named Mauriceo Brown. Brown admitted to the shooting and was executed by lethal injection last year. Now Foster faces the same fate. So, if Brown was the shooter, what did the 19-year-old Foster do to get a death sentence? He sat in his car, 80 feet away, unaware that a murder was taking place.

Foster was convicted under Texas's "law of parties," a twist on a felony murder statute that enables a jury to convict a defendant who was not the primary actor in a crime. This can mean sentencing someone to death even if he or she had no proven role in a murder. Texas's law states that "if, in the attempt to carry out a conspiracy to commit one felony, another felony is committed by one of the conspirators, all conspirators are guilty of the felony actually committed, though having no intent to commit it." Defendants, the Texas courts say, can be held responsible for "failing to anticipate" that the "conspiracy" - in Foster's case, the robberies, for which he was the getaway driver - would lead to a murder. Foster's sentence, death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal recently commented, "criminalizes presence, not actions."

In theory, the law of parties is "a well-recognized legal document," says Houston defense attorney Clifford Gunter, and most states with the death penalty on the books include a similar provision for "non-triggermen." Nevertheless, critics of the Texas law say it's an aberration - a slippery legal statute that stands in direct violation of the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Enmund v. Florida. Still the "prevailing view," according to Gunter, Enmund held that the death penalty was unconstitutional for a defendant "who aids and abets a felony in the course of which a murder is committed by others but who does not himself kill, attempt to kill, or intend that a killing take place or that lethal force will be employed." In Texas today, the law or parties says exactly the opposite.

Even more troubling is the law in practice. When Justice Byron White wrote the Enmund decision in 1982, he observed that the Court was not aware of a single execution of someone who did not kill or intend to kill. What a difference another quarter-century makes. Months after Enmund was decided, Texas executed its first prisoner since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. In the tidal wave of capital cases that followed, numerous defendants would be sentenced to die under the law of parties.

One was Norman Green. Green was charged for a murder during a botched robbery in an electronics store in 1985. He got death. His accomplice, the man who actually pulled the trigger, got life. The arbitrary result exemplifies what Green's appellate lawyer, Verna Langham - who also handled Kenneth Foster's first appeal - sees as the danger of the law of parties. "[It] is subject to such loose interpretation," she told the Austin Chronicle in 2005. "A kid in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people can end up being sentenced to death." Green was executed in 1999.

No formal study has been done on the number of defendants subjected to the law of parties in Texas. Anti-death penalty activists estimate that Texas death row has 80 to 100. This number seems high to David Dow, founder and director of the Texas Innocence Network and author of Executed on a Technicality (2005). But he says that it could be an accurate measure of the number of prisoners whose juries were given the choice of applying the law of parties, even if their conviction did not hinge on it. "In a lot of cases, you have a [law of parties] instruction, but jurors have to find one or the other: Either the person was responsible for killing the victim or they are responsible for participating in a crime where it should have been anticipated that a murder would take place." For a defendant facing lethal injection, it's a distinction without a difference. Regardless of the number of times the law of parties has been used, its clear effect has been to broaden the pool of defendants eligible for death. By inviting a jury to speculate whether a defendant "should have known" a murder could happen, it drastically lowers the burden of proof for a punishment supposedly reserved for "the worst of the worst."

From the zeal of prosecutors to the legal machinery that supports them, "the structure of the Texas's legal system makes it easier to sentence people to death," says Dow. Between the Polunsky Unit in Livingston and the women's death row in Gatesville, nearly 400 prisoners are awaiting execution. By the end of the summer, Texas will have killed its 400th prisoner since the death penalty was brought back. The state that famously carried out 152 executions under Governor George W. Bush has seen Gov. Rick Perry surpass his record. Since taking office in December 2000, Perry has signed off on over 158 executions - a number that will be dated when this piece goes to press (and which would be higher still were it not for the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons, which forced Perry to commute the death sentences of 28 prisoners who were younger than 18 at the time of their crime). In this context, it's hard not to see the law of parties as an irresistible tool in a legal system designed to summarily execute people. Especially if the defendant is black and the victim is white.

Kenneth Foster's case is a good example. He's not just a black man accused of killing a white man; he was convicted for killing the son of an attorney highly esteemed by the legal community. As with so many other cases involving families of influence, the media was all over it, and the LaHood family's wish for an execution quickly became public knowledge. (LaHood's mother reaffirmed her support of Mauriceo Brown's execution last year.) In other particularly high-profile cases, the law of parties has come in similarly handy for the prosecution. In the trial of Patrick Murphy Jr. - one of the notorious "Texas Seven," who in 2000 escaped from prison, killed a police officer on Christmas Eve, and were summarily sentenced to die - prosecutors seeking death sentences across the board used the law of parties to circumvent the fact that Murphy was not at the scene of the crime. Prospective jurors were asked not just how they felt about capital punishment, but also about the law of parties specifically. (It worked. Murphy is now sitting on death row.)

The many excesses of Texas capital law offer a portrait of a brutal and broken system - one that has long been protested by anti-death penalty activists. More recently, prisoners themselves have begun to organize from the inside. Kenneth Foster is among them. In 2005 he helped found D.R.I.V.E, a group of death row prisoners who protest the death penalty as well the abusive conditions of their incarceration. D.R.I.V.E, which stands for "Death Row Inner-Communalist Vanguard Engagement," is multi-racial, highly political, and, perhaps most important, thriving - on one of the most repressive death rows in the country. Members encourage fellow prisoners to protest on execution days, and to protest their own executions (refusing to walk to the van that takes them to the executions chamber; refusing last meals). They also protest inhumane prison conditions. Last fall, a dozen death row prisoners at Polunsky went on a hunger strike to protest the inedible food and constantly overflowing toilets in their cells, among other abuses. Comparing themselves to the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay, they eventually caught the attention of the New York Times.

Some members of the group also invoke the legacy of Gary Graham - a.k.a. Shaka Sankofa - the Texas death row prisoner who was executed in 2000, despite overwhelming evidence that he could be innocent. Graham, who was put to death amidst widespread protests, maintained his innocence until the end, declaring in his last statement, "They are murdering me tonight." This era, which Dow considers the "heyday" of protest around executions, coincided with increased repression on Texas death row. Following an attempted prison break in the late 90s, the death row population was relocated. At their new home in the Polunsky Unit, prisoners are housed for 23 hours a day in cells that are 60 square feet (the American Correctional Association recommends a minimum of 80 feet). Work and recreation privileges are pretty much non-existent, and the few prisoners entitled to small luxuries can easily have them taken away. Such is the case of Stephen Moody, whose participation in last fall's hunger strike led to the confiscation of his radio. Texas death row prisoners are allowed no contact visits, and only a few phone calls a year.

Despite this, Kenneth Foster and D.R.I.V.E. have allies on the outside. In addition to his supporters and family in Texas, a New York-based political hip-hop group called the Welfare Poets is speaking out on behalf of Foster and other prisoners on Texas death row; grassroots groups like the Campaign to End the Death Penalty are working to protest Foster's execution, from Harlem to Austin. With Foster's legal recourses almost dried up, a letter campaign to members of the appeal board is underway. But it's a long shot. "Perry has never granted clemency in a capital case before, even when the Board recommended it," says Bryan McCann, a CEDP activist in Austin. In a state that will have executed 400 people by September, clemency has only been granted two times. "If Kenneth Foster has a good innocence claim, that would be great for him," Dow says, noting that innocence is what gets attention these days. But while Foster's supporters argue that Foster is innocent - that nobody should be executed "for driving a car," in the slaughterhouse state of Texas, innocence can be harder to prove than guilt.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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