Veterans for Common Sense

Civilian contractors in Iraq dying at faster rate as insurgency grows

By Seth Borenstein, Knight Ridder Newspapers, November 1, 2005

WASHINGTON – As the nation focused last week on the 2,000th U.S. soldier who died in Iraq, Gloria Dagit of Jefferson, Iowa, got a box filled with the belongings of her son, Keven, who was killed when his convoy of trucks was ambushed in northern Iraq.

Keven Dagit’s death Sept. 20 – along with two other truckers – didn’t register on the tally of Iraq deaths broadcast daily. That’s because they were civilians working for U.S. defense contractors.

As the violence of the protracted war continues and some 75,000 civilian employees struggle to rebuild the war-torn nation and support the military, contractor casualties mount. Their deaths have more than tripled in the past 13 months.

As of Monday, 428 civilian contractors had been killed in Iraq and another 3,963 were injured, according to Department of Labor insurance-claims statistics obtained by Knight Ridder.

Those statistics, which experts said were the most comprehensive listing available on the toll of the war, are far from complete: Two of the biggest contractors in Iraq said their casualties were higher than the figures the Labor Department had for them.

The dead and injured come from many walks of life, drawn by money and patriotism. Some are American citizens. Most are not. They are truckers, police officers and translators. They’re counted only if they were paid by companies hired by the Pentagon. Their deaths and injuries were compensated by insurance policies required by federal law.

The Labor Department lists 156 dead for an L-3 Communications subsidiary in Virginia. The company, which provides translators who work with the military, puts the death toll at 167, of whom 15 were Americans. The Labor Department’s accounting reports that Halliburton, the largest contractor in Iraq, has had 30 employees killed in Iraq and 2,471 injured. A Halliburton spokeswoman, Melissa Norcross, said Tuesday that the company had lost a total of 77 workers in Iraq, Afghanistan and its base in Kuwait. One worker is unaccounted for. Halliburton couldn’t give a breakdown by country.

The government’s listing shows the contractors’ casualty rate is increasing. In the first 21 months of the war, 11 contractors were killed and 74 injured each month on average. This year, the monthly average death toll is nearly 20 and the average monthly number of injured is 243.

“You’ve got a greater number of contractors on the ground carrying out a greater number of roles putting them in danger,” said Peter W. Singer, a contracting expert at the Brookings Institution, a Washington research center. “And issue No. 3, you’ve got a much more dangerous environment.”

Keven Dagit, a truck driver for Halliburton, knew it. The day before he was killed he told his mother, “Now, it’s really getting dangerous,” she recalled.

He left two daughters, ages 9 and 11.

“I want more people to realize that these guys are out there defenseless,” Gloria Dagit said. “It was an ambush. … They are not allowed to carry weapons.”

So far this year, 196 contractors in Iraq have been killed and 2,427 have been injured, according to Labor Department statistics.

In August, Mike Dawes of Stillwell, Okla., a longtime police officer who’d been hired to train Iraqi police, was killed by a suicide bomber in downtown Baqoubah, 36 miles northeast of Baghdad. He’d worked for DynCorp International and had survived as a private contractor in Kosovo, where he also taught police from Poland, India and Pakistan. He described that experience as “really an honor.”

Dawes “was an excellent officer,” said Stephen Farmer, the police chief at the Tahlequah Police Department in Oklahoma. “If he wasn’t the first one there on the call, he was usually the one right behind.”

The invisible nature of the contractors’ deaths irks their friends and families.

“We get hurt right next to them in many cases,” said Erick Fern, a Houston trucker for Halliburton who injured his back in Iraq and is fighting to get compensation. “It seems to be that we don’t exist since we’re getting paid.”

Private companies aren’t obligated to report deaths to the news media, as the military does. But they’re required to carry federal insurance for all their workers in Iraq and to report claims to the Labor Department under the Defense Base Act. That doesn’t include contractors who work for agencies outside of the Pentagon, however.

“Most of what you see on TV is strictly about the military,” said Steve Powell of Azle, Texas, who worked for Halliburton in the Iraqi city of Mosul and watched friends get killed. “There’s very little said about the contractors. … I felt like I was over there doing something to help the military in a way.”

Rick Kiernan, a spokesman for L-3 Communications, said his firm had had so many losses because its translators were “with the combatants; they’re with the special forces; they’re with the infantry units. That probably puts them out in the most dangerous places.”

Kiernan noted that L-3’s employees aren’t killed in combat, they’re being assassinated. Of the company’s 152 dead Iraqi employees, 105 were murdered because they collaborated with Americans, he said.

“They’ve been targeted,” Kiernan said. “A lot of these local nationals are really doing their part as well in a very courageous way.”

The workers’ families also make sacrifices.

Yvette English, a pregnant Colorado woman with a 19-month-old daughter, helps run an Internet message board to assist families with loved ones in Iraq. Her husband is a Halliburton truck driver.

“While he’s gone, it’s very lonely,” she said. “You didn’t bargain in a marriage to be alone and be a single mom. Then again, you support your husbands and what they’re doing. For them, it’s a sense of duty.”

Todd Drobnick of Everett, Wash., was one of the first American employees of L-3 to be killed, dying with two military personnel in a suicide bomb attack two years ago this month.

For his father, John Drobnick, his son’s loss is still painful. “I was just crying today,” he said.

“There are days I get angry, but that’s not the way you honor someone; you go and do something decent,” he said. So he and his wife, Sharon, plan to mark the second anniversary of their son’s death by fixing up houses that Hurricane Katrina damaged in Louisiana.

“That’s the kind of thing he would have done,” John Drobnick said, weeping. “That’s the reason he worked in the (Persian) Gulf. He was there five times. He went back because he loved the people, because he thought they needed help and he could help.”

In President Bush’s first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

When I first discussed this group in a speech recently at the New America Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005.

But it’s absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.

Dysfunction and inefficiency

Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and “guardians of the turf.”

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.

I watched these dual decision-making processes operate for four years at the State Department. As chief of staff for 27 months, I had a door adjoining the secretary of State’s office. I read virtually every document he read. I read the intelligence briefings and spoke daily with people from all across government.

Crucial decisions

I knew that what I was observing was not what Congress intended when it passed the 1947 National Security Act. The law created the National Security Council — consisting of the president, vice president and the secretaries of State and Defense — to make sure the nation’s vital national security decisions were thoroughly vetted. The NSC has often been expanded, depending on the president in office, to include the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the treasury secretary and others, and it has accumulated a staff of sometimes more than 100 people.

But many of the most crucial decisions from 2001 to 2005 were not made within the traditional NSC process. Scholars and knowledgeable critics of the U.S. decision-making process may rightly say, so what? Haven’t all of our presidents in the last half-century failed to conform to the usual process at one time or another? Isn’t it the president’s prerogative to make decisions with whomever he pleases? Moreover, can he not ignore whomever he pleases? Why should we care that President Bush gave over much of the critical decision-making to his vice president and his secretary of Defense?

Both as a former academic and as a person who has been in the ring with the bull, I believe that there are two reasons we should care.

• First, such departures from the process have in the past led us into a host of disasters, including the last years of the Vietnam War, the national embarrassment of Watergate (and the first resignation of a president in our history), the Iran-Contra scandal and now the ruinous foreign policy of George W. Bush.

• But a second and far more important reason is that the nature of both governance and crisis has changed in the modern age. From managing the environment to securing sufficient energy resources, from dealing with trafficking in human beings to performing peacekeeping missions abroad, governing is vastly more complicated than ever before in human history.

Don’t discount experience

Further, the crises the U.S. government confronts today are so multifaceted, so complex, so fast-breaking — and almost always with such incredible potential for regional and global ripple effects — that to depart from the systematic decision-making process laid out in the 1947 statute invites disaster.

Discounting the professional experience available within the federal bureaucracy — and ignoring entirely the inevitable but often frustrating dissent that often arises therein — makes for quick and painless decisions. But when government agencies are confronted with decisions in which they did not participate and with which they frequently disagree, their implementation of those decisions is fractured, uncoordinated and inefficient. This is particularly the case if the bureaucracies called upon to execute the decisions are in strong competition with one another over scarce money, talented people, ”turf” or power.

It takes firm leadership to preside over the bureaucracy. But it also takes a willingness to listen to dissenting opinions. It requires leaders who can analyze, synthesize, ponder and decide.

The administration’s performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell’s damage control. At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet. He held a youthful, inexperienced president’s hand. He told him everything would be all right because he, the secretary of state, would fix it. And he did — everything from a serious crisis with China when a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft was struck by a Chinese F-8 fighter jet in April 2001, to the secretary’s constant reassurances to European leaders following the bitter breach in relations over the Iraq war. It wasn’t enough, of course, but it helped.

Ignoring dissenters

Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38 percent and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White).

It’s a disaster. Given the choice, I’d choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from 2002 to 2005.

©2005 The Los Angeles Times

VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. “Cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.

His position is not just some abstract defense of presidential power. The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have “disappeared,” like the victims of some dictatorships. The Justice Department and the White House are known to have approved harsh interrogation techniques for some of these people, including “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning; mock execution; and the deliberate withholding of pain medication. CIA personnel have been implicated in the deaths during interrogation of at least four Afghan and Iraqi detainees. Official investigations have indicated that some aberrant practices by Army personnel in Iraq originated with the CIA. Yet no CIA personnel have been held accountable for this record, and there has never been a public report on the agency’s performance.

It’s not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration’s decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military. These decisions at the top have led to hundreds of documented cases of abuse, torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney’s counsel, David S. Addington, was reportedly one of the principal authors of a legal memo justifying the torture of suspects. This summer Mr. Cheney told several Republican senators that President Bush would veto the annual defense spending bill if it contained language prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any U.S. personnel.

The senators ignored Mr. Cheney’s threats, and the amendment, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), passed this month by a vote of 90 to 9. So now Mr. Cheney is trying to persuade members of a House-Senate conference committee to adopt language that would not just nullify the McCain amendment but would formally adopt cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as a legal instrument of U.S. policy. The Senate’s earlier vote suggests that it will not allow such a betrayal of American values. As for Mr. Cheney: He will be remembered as the vice president who campaigned for torture.

Dick’s War on Saddam

In August 2002, Dick Cheney was doing his best to shock the nation into action

by Craig Gordon, Newsday, October 26, 2005

WASHINGTON — It was the last week of August 2002, and the Bush administration’s case for war against Iraq was running into serious headwinds – internal dissent, go-slow warnings from Republican elders, grumbling in Congress.

And one man, Vice President Dick Cheney, was doing his best to shock the nation into action.

Cheney ratcheted up the war rhetoric in speeches that week that highlighted a particularly frightening notion, one Cheney had tracked intently in his Pentagon days a decade earlier: charges that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons.

“Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon,” Cheney said Aug. 26, warning of a “mortal threat” that would enable Hussein to blackmail the United States and seek domination of the Middle East.

So when former ambassador Joseph Wilson publicly charged in an op-ed article a year later that the White House had “twisted” intelligence to exaggerate Hussein’s nuclear threat, Wilson was taking direct aim at the case for war championed by the vice president himself.

It brought a sharp response from Cheney’s chief of staff and loyal confidant, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who took a significant role in trying to knock down Wilson’s charges. And he did so in part by telling reporters that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, which had sent Wilson to Niger to check out reports of Iraq’s nuclear efforts.

Wilson’s article “was a public shot across the bow, and they were bound to react,” said Gary Schmitt, a longtime friend of Libby who helped found the Project for a New American Century, a conservative group that supported war against Iraq.

The leak prompted a two-year grand jury investigation expected to produce indictments as early as today, with Libby, who had about a half-dozen conversations with reporters, viewed as the most likely target, along with the president’s top political adviser, Karl Rove.

Libby’s apparent involvement also has drawn attention to the role of Cheney in the case, and as one of the leading Iraq war hawks in the Bush administration, Cheney was doing all he could in the summer before the war to quiet the naysayers. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was pressing Bush to give weapons inspections more time, as were key figures from Bush’s father’s White House.

Cheney sought to raise the stakes in August 2002 by moving Hussein’s alleged nuclear pursuits front-and-center. Within two weeks, the White House had adopted that language as a potent talking point.

“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sept. 8, 2002.

The nuclear rhetoric by Cheney, Rice and others in the White House was running far ahead of other key agencies, such as the Pentagon and State Department. “When she first said that, a lot of eyebrows went up. ‘Wow, that’s ahead of us’ – tougher, stronger, more provocative,” one former senior administration official said.

The nuclear drumbeat was powerful from the public-relations aspect of selling the war. Coming not a full year after the Sept. 11 attacks, it wasn’t hard for Americans to grasp the horror of a nuclear 9/11. For Cheney in particular, the question of Hussein’s nuclear efforts had long been vexing, dating back to his days as defense secretary for President George W. Bush’s father at the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf war. He had made clear in subsequent years that he felt the U.S. government had wildly misjudged the seriousness of Hussein’s nuclear program then, and he appeared determined not to repeat that mistake. Libby, too, worked in Cheney’s Pentagon.

Yet even as Cheney and others talked up the nuclear threat, that evidence was some of the most circumstantial in the administration’s war dossier. The administration later pointed to reported efforts by Iraq to obtain uranium ore, known as yellow-cake, from Niger, and the CIA sent Wilson to check them out in February 2002.

So when Wilson a year later slammed the White House for slanting the nuclear intelligence, “Scooter” Libby moved into action, seeking to discredit Wilson’s report and to insulate the man who first brought the nuclear charges into the spotlight, his boss, Dick Cheney.

‘It’s very scary,” a Taunton resident told The New York Times last week. A precarious dam was stressed by a flooding river, and the town was vulnerable. ‘You start wondering, especially with all the natural disasters going on, what’s going on with this world?”

A good question. The people of Taunton know what it is to live downriver from a wall of water that just waits to be set loose, and in this season especially, they understand that it may happen. Rain and wind have traumatized whole regions, and, with the earthquake, the very earth has proven to be untrustworthy. In Pakistan, people are asking, If the ground underfoot is dangerous, what is safe? From Southeast Asia to Russia, poultry has become the thing to fear. Rarely has the contingency of life on this fragile planet been more palpable. Humans everywhere have a right to the feeling that what protects them is a tissue of hope, little more.

But in assessing our situation, we properly make distinctions between the vulnerability that arises from forces over which we have no control and the risk that results from choice. If a dam breaks with devastating effect because its disrepair made it unable to withstand the rising water, grief is compounded by anger. A disaster is ‘unnatural” if it could have been foreseen and prevented. In that case, it is urgent to establish accountability not just to right the wrong that took place, but to be sure the disaster does not happen again.

The world will never be harmless, but the world can be made to do less harm to its inhabitants. From the very origins of the human project in the far mists of time, its work has been to make that so. It is the business of the future to be dangerous, but, equally, it is the business of human beings to build a future that is safe.

That is why the recent cluster of tragedies, from nearby and far off, must be the occasion of more than regret and worry. Neither should ‘disaster fatigue” be allowed to dull the sense of urgency with which news of catastrophic suffering is normally received.

Absolute primacy belongs to the alleviation of such suffering, and when disaster strikes, nothing matters more than the rush to help. But help must be constructive and consistent. When it is not, every mistaken choice must be the occasion of criticism, learning, and reform. If dams (or levees) have been neglected ahead of time, and subsequently fail, those responsible must be challenged — for the sake of safer dams. If relief efforts after the fact are slow or inept, those responsible must be called to account. Deeper sources of carelessness or corruption are often exposed during disasters, and they must be confronted.

This work is called politics. It is not enough to pull victims out of harm’s way after the fact. Harm itself must be reduced, ahead of time. Taking reasonable measures to protect community members from foreseeable dangers, and moving quickly to help them when the unanticipated happens — these are functions that prompt communities to organize themselves in the first place. Disasters, that is, show us why we establish structures of public cooperation, also known as government. Disasters, therefore, always show us how those structures can be improved. This is true in the neighborhood — In Taunton, that dam will be repaired, and fast. It is true across the planet — Pakistan’s ongoing crisis shows how the international community must urgently sharpen its capacity to respond.

‘What’s going on with this world?” If something new is happening, it probably has less to do with the tragic occurrences that have befallen the human population this year, from the tsunami to Hurricane Wilma (although the quickened pace and ferocity of hurricanes seems a special warning), than with our recently acquired knowledge of the universal character of jeopardy. We used to speak of innovations in information flow as if they were only technical, but to have instantaneous knowledge of far off events is also to be vulnerable to them. If all politics is local, Tip O’Neill might be telling us today, all local politics is global now.

Avian flu makes the point. A disease that incubates among the world’s most impoverished people can threaten the most privileged. The melting permafrost makes the point, too. We humans are all downriver from the same coming flood. We need a new politics, one which reflects this unprecedented fact of our existence. No one is safe unless everyone is.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe. His most recent book is “Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War.”

    The White House is sweating out the possibility that one or more top officials will soon be indicted on criminal charges. But the Bush administration is immune to prosecution for its greatest offense – its colossal and profoundly tragic incompetence.

    Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressed the administration’s arrogance and ineptitude in a talk last week that was astonishingly candid by Washington standards.

    “We have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran,” said Mr. Wilkerson. “Generally, with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita … we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.”

    The investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is the most sensational story coming out of Washington at the moment. But the story with the gravest implications for the U.S. and the world is the overall dysfunction of the Bush regime. This is a bomb going “Tick, tick, tick . . .” What is the next disaster that this crowd will be unprepared to cope with? Or the next lunatic idea that will spring from its ideological bag of tricks?

    Mr. Wilkerson gave his talk before an audience at the New America Foundation, an independent public policy institute. On the all-important matter of national security, which many voters had seen as the strength of the administration, Mr. Wilkerson said:

    “The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.”

    When the time came to implement the decisions, said Mr. Wilkerson, they were “presented in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.”

    Where was the president? According to Mr. Wilkerson, “You’ve got this collegiality there between the secretary of defense and the vice president, and you’ve got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either.”

    One of the consequences of this dysfunction, as I have noted many times, is the unending parade of dead or badly wounded men and women returning to the U.S. from the war in Iraq – a war that the administration foolishly launched but now does not know how to win or end.

    Mr. Wilkerson was especially critical of the excessive secrecy that surrounded so many of the most important decisions by the Bush administration, and of what he felt was a general policy of concentrating too much power in the hands of a small group of insiders. As much as possible, government in the United States is supposed to be open and transparent, and a fundamental principle is that decision-making should be subjected to a robust process of checks and balances.

    While not “evaluating the decision to go to war,” Mr. Wilkerson told his audience that under the present circumstances “we can’t leave Iraq. We simply can’t.” In his view, if American forces were to pull out too quickly, the U.S. would end up returning to the Middle East with “five million men and women under arms” within a decade.

    Nevertheless, he is appalled at the way the war was launched and conducted, and outraged by “the detainee abuse issue.” In 10 years, he said, when this matter is “put to the acid test, ironed out, and people have looked at it from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen.”

    Mr. Wilkerson said he has taken some heat for speaking out, but feels that “as a citizen of this great republic,” he has an obligation to do so. If nothing is done about the current state of affairs, he said, “it’s going to get even more dangerous than it already is.”