01 October 21
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Republicans are now committed to fierce obstruction. All the high-minded rhetoric about bipartisan cooperation is background static. The clearest proof will play out this week as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) leads a filibuster against a bill to lift the debt ceiling so that the United States does not default on the debts it already owes. Default would probably have catastrophic effects on bond markets, credit and the United States’s standing around the world. McConnell risks this because he wants Democrats to take the blame.
McConnell’s obstruction comes as no surprise, but what’s telling is that there are not 10 Republican senators responsible enough to break the filibuster. Virtually without exception, they echo the lie that Democratic spending is the reason the debt ceiling must be lifted. In fact, the raise would cover much of the past debts accumulated when Republicans held power under President Donald Trump. Sustaining the full faith and credit of the United States by empowering the government to pay its debts does not require a profile in courage. Republicans — in unison — are more committed to partisan posturing than to simple patriotic service.
In the face of this, Democrats must demonstrate that they are prepared to govern. This week, the House is slated to vote on a traditional infrastructure bill. It supposedly has bipartisan support, but the Republican House leadership has announced it will whip members to vote “no.” At the same time, intense negotiations go forward on the heart of the president’s “Build Back Better” agenda, packaged in a budget reconciliation bill to avoid a Senate filibuster.
The $3.5 trillion plan contains reforms that enjoy overwhelming public support. In its current form, it improves families’ lives by sustaining the monthly child allowance, investing in daycare, providing universal pre-K and guaranteeing paid family leave. It makes community college tuition free. It extends Medicare to cover hearing, vision and dental expenses. It lowers prescription drug prices to help seniors and save the government over $500 billion. It makes the first serious investments addressing the threat of climate change. And these measures would be paid for largely by raising taxes on the richest and corporations (at or below the rates before the 2017 tax cuts), cracking down on tax avoidance and curbing fossil fuel subsidies. What’s not to like?
The overwhelming majority of Democrats in both Houses support the president’s plan. But with a margin of three votes in the House, and the 50-50 split in the Senate, any one senator or three House members can torpedo the package. Much of the press portray the Democratic conflict as pitting “moderates” against progressives; the former threatening to vote against the reconciliation package; the latter demanding passage of both bills or neither.
But the dissenters are far from “centrists” or “moderates.” They oppose the plan of the president of their own party, a lifelong moderate, who was just elected with a record number of votes. They undermine a plan that has popular support — both for the package and the individual reforms. If anything, the progressives have acted as the moderates, compromising from their initial $6 trillion plan, giving up favored programs to bring the caucus together.
The few dissenters more accurately should be labeled as corporate Democrats. They enjoy lavish support from corporate lobbies mobilized to oppose all tax hikes and reductions in industry subsidies. Their objections are informed by deep pocket interests that pay for their campaigns. For example, Democrats have long campaigned to allow Medicare to negotiate bulk discounts on drugs. Yet the reform was torpedoed in committee by three House Democrats who have hauled in roughly $1.6 million in campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry. Joining them is Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), another leading recipient of Big Pharma donations.
Or the dissenters could simply be labeled conservative Democrats because the excuses they use to oppose the popular reforms echo conservative mantras. They object to the cost, raising fears about the deficit and about inflation. Yet $3.5 trillion over 10 years constitutes only a 5 percent increase in projected spending. It pales next to the recently expanded Pentagon budget that will cost a whopping $9.7 trillion over 10 years — which these conservative Democrats supported without objection. And most of their major objections concern raising taxes on the rich or corporations or lowering drug prices and ending fossil fuel subsidies, all of which are designed to pay for the program.
Can Democrats unite to pass the president’s popular program? Or will corporate Democrats gut the reforms to protect the moneyed interests that so corrode our politics? All Democrats realize that failure to act will be political suicide. Whether the president and the Democratic leaders get to agreement on a package that can pass may well be a measure less of their skill than of how corrupted our politics have become.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the Capitol on Thursday. She decided it would be better for the president's agenda for her to put off action on the infrastructure bill than see it voted down. (photo: Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times)
ALSO SEE: Pelosi Regroups on Infrastructure With Hopes for Friday Vote
The vote was yanked after it became obvious that House Democratic leaders didn't have enough support to clear the bill and send it to Biden's desk. With a three-vote margin for error in the 220-212 chamber, Pelosi had predicted success and tried brushing aside the sizable hurdles before her.
"I'm only envisioning taking it up and winning it," she said at a Thursday press conference, adding: "You cannot tire, you cannot concede. This is the fun part."
House Democrats were advised that a vote could still take place Friday. The White House said congressional Democrats would continue trying to resolve their differences as they negotiated a larger social-spending bill capable of drawing support across the party.
"A great deal of progress has been made this week, and we are closer to an agreement than ever," the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said in a statement. "But we are not there yet, and so we will need some additional time to finish the work starting tomorrow morning first thing."
House progressives revolted this week after Pelosi decoupled the bipartisan infrastructure bill from passage of the $3.5 trillion social-spending plan. The larger plan addresses tuition-free community college, affordable childcare, Medicare and Medicaid expansion, and a renewal of the child allowance, among climate initiatives and other measures.
Pelosi initially linked the two bills and insisted they needed to move in tandem. But on Monday, she told House Democrats that the lack of progress on the social-spending package meant they had to approve the bipartisan infrastructure bill. She had also previously promised House moderates she'd put it to a House vote this week.
The past few days of infighting underscore deep divides among Democrats on their spending priorities and the taxes they hope to levy on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations. Their slim majorities in both chambers of Congress afford Biden and Democratic leaders little room to maneuver.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont had encouraged the brewing resistance in the House. "If there is a vote, I hope it loses," Sanders told Insider on Thursday.
Progressive anger escalated after moderate Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia issued a statement Thursday assailing the $3.5 trillion social-spending plan as "the definition of fiscal insanity." Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the House Progressive Caucus, told reporters soon after that progressives in turn were digging in and about half of her 96-member caucus were prepared to derail the bill.
Still, House moderates chiefly led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey insisted the bill would prevail with "1,000% certainty." After the vote was pulled, he tweeted, "It ain't over yet!"
Other moderates were pressing for it to go ahead earlier in the day, even in the face of staunch liberal opposition. "If we let a big piece of the Biden agenda fall down, we can't blame the Republicans," Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas told Insider. "We control everything, so it's important that we have that vote."
Progressive lawmakers said they held their ground after months of saying they would do so. "In Congress, we don't make predictions like this until we know we have the votes," Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota wrote on Twitter. "Some of us get this, others bluff & fall on their face."
'They should close this deal'
On Thursday, Manchin said he was seeking a $1.5 trillion social-spending plan, less than half the amount that Democrats approved in a budget plan in August. He said any sum higher than that could cause the US to slip into an "entitlement-based society."
Many Democrats are fed up with Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. The two are pivotal votes in the 50-50 Senate, where Democrats cannot afford a single defection under the budget process known as reconciliation. It requires only a simple-majority vote for Democrats to skirt united GOP opposition, but that means all 50 Democratic senators must stick together.
Manchin and Sinema attended back-to-back meetings at the White House this week with Biden and his senior aides to discuss the size and scope of the plan. But there's little sign of a breakthrough.
"They've had their chance, they've made their case," Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, told reporters on Thursday. "They should close this deal. Too much is at stake."
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
But Durham used a 27-page indictment to lay out a far more expansive tale, one in which four computer scientists who were not charged in the case “exploited” their access to internet data to develop an explosive theory about cyberconnections in 2016 between Donald Trump’s company and a Kremlin-linked bank — a theory, he insinuated, they did not really believe.
Durham’s version of events set off reverberations beyond the courtroom. Trump supporters seized on the indictment, saying it shows that suspicions about possible covert communications between Russia’s Alfa Bank and Trump’s company were a deliberate hoax by supporters of Hillary Clinton and portraying it as evidence that the entire Russia investigation was unwarranted.
Emails obtained by The New York Times and interviews with people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss issues being investigated by federal authorities, provide a fuller and more complex account of how a group of cyberexperts discovered the odd internet data and developed their hypothesis about what could explain it.
At the same time, defense lawyers for the scientists say it is Durham’s indictment that is misleading. Their clients, they say, believed their hypothesis was a plausible explanation for the odd data they had uncovered — and still do.
The Alfa Bank results “have been validated and are reproducible. The findings of the researchers were true then and remain true today; reports that these findings were innocuous or a hoax are simply wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist and one of the researchers whom the indictment discussed but did not name.
Steven Tyrrell, a lawyer for Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and another of the four data experts, said his client had a duty to share the information with the FBI and that the indictment “gratuitously presents an incomplete and misleading picture” of his role.
Durham’s indictment provided evidence that two participants in the matter — Joffe and Michael Sussmann, the cybersecurity lawyer accused of falsely saying he had no client when he brought the findings of the researchers to the FBI — interacted with the Clinton campaign as they worked to bring their suspicions to journalists and federal agents.
A spokesperson for Durham declined to comment. The special counsel’s office issued a fresh grand jury subpoena to Sussmann’s former law firm, Perkins Coie, sometime after Sussmann was indicted Sept. 16, in a development first reported Thursday by CNN and confirmed by a person familiar with the matter. It is unclear whether the subpoena pertained to Alfa Bank or whether Durham has finished his investigation into that case.
Durham uncovered law firm billing records showing that Sussmann, who represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers, had logged his time on the Alfa Bank matter as work for the Clinton campaign. Sussmann has denied lying to the FBI about whom he was representing in coming forward with the Alfa Bank data, while saying he was representing only Joffe and not the campaign.
Durham also found that Joffe had met with one of Sussmann’s law firm partners, Marc Elias, who was then the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, and researchers from Fusion GPS, an investigative firm Elias had commissioned to scrutinize Trump’s purported ties to Russia. Fusion GPS drafted a paper on Alfa Bank’s ties to the Kremlin that Sussmann also provided to the FBI.
In the heat of the presidential race, Democrats quickly sought to capitalize on the research. On Sept. 15, four days before Sussmann met with the FBI about the findings, Elias sent an email to the Clinton campaign manager, Robbie Mook; its communications director, Jennifer Palmieri; and its national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whose subject line referred to an Alfa Bank article, the indictment said.
Six weeks later, after Slate ran a lengthy article about the Alfa Bank suspicions, the Clinton campaign pounced. Clinton’s Twitter feed linked to the article and ran an image stating the suspicions as fact, declaring, “It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia.”
The FBI, which had already started its Trump-Russia investigation before it heard about the possible Trump-Alfa connections, quickly dismissed the suspicions, apparently concluding the interactions were probably caused by marketing emails sent by an outside firm using a domain registered to the Trump Organization. The report by the Russia special counsel, Robert Mueller, ignored the issue.
The data remains a mystery. A 2018 analysis commissioned by the Senate, made public this month, detailed technical reasons to doubt that marketing emails were the cause. A Senate report last year accepted the FBI’s assessment that it was unlikely to have been a covert communications channel but also said it had no good explanation for “the unusual activity.”
Whatever caused the odd data, at issue in the wake of the indictment is whether Joffe and the other three computer scientists considered their own theory dubious and yet cynically went forward anyway, as Durham suggests, or whether they truly believed the data was alarming and put forward their hypothesis in good faith.
Earlier articles on Alfa Bank, including in Slate and The New Yorker, did not name the researchers and used pseudonyms like “Max” and “Tea Leaves” for two of them. Durham’s indictment did not name them, either.
But three of their names have appeared among a list of data experts in a lawsuit brought by Alfa Bank, and Trump supporters have speculated online about their identities. The Times has confirmed them, and their lawyers provided statements defending their actions.
The indictment’s “Originator-1” is April Lorenzen, chief data scientist at the information services firm Zetalytics. Her lawyer, Michael Connolly, said she has “dedicated her life to the critical work of thwarting dangerous cyberattacks on our country,” adding, “Any suggestion that she engaged in wrongdoing is unequivocally false.”
The indictment’s “Researcher-1” is another computer scientist at Georgia Tech, Manos Antonakakis. “Researcher-2” is Dagon. And “Tech Executive-1” is Joffe, who in 2013 received the FBI Director’s Award for helping crack a cybercrime case and retired this month from Neustar, another information services company.
In addition, the Alfa Bank suspicions were only half of what the researchers sought to bring to the government’s attention, according to several people familiar with the matter.
Their other set of concerns centered on data suggesting that a YotaPhone — a Russian-made smartphone rarely seen in the United States — had been used from networks serving the White House, Trump Tower and Spectrum Health, a Michigan hospital company whose server had also interacted with the Trump server.
Sussmann relayed their YotaPhone findings to counterintelligence officials at the CIA in February 2017, the people said. It is not clear whether the government ever investigated them.
The involvement of the researchers traces back to spring 2016. Darpa, the Pentagon’s research funding agency, wanted to commission data scientists to develop the use of so-called DNS logs, records of when servers have prepared to communicate with other servers over the internet, as a tool for hacking investigations.
Darpa identified Georgia Tech as a potential recipient of funding and encouraged researchers there to develop examples. Antonakakis and Dagon reached out to Joffe to gain access to Neustar’s repository of DNS logs, people familiar with the matter said, and began sifting them.
Separately, when the news broke in June 2016 that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers, Dagon and Lorenzen began talking at a conference about whether such data might uncover other election-related hacking.
Lorenzen eventually noticed an odd pattern: a server called mail1.trump-email.com appeared to be communicating almost exclusively with servers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health. She shared her findings with Dagon, the people said, and they both discussed it with Joffe.
“Half the time I stop myself and wonder: am I really seeing evidence of espionage on behalf of a presidential candidate?” Dagon wrote in an email to Joffe on July 29, after WikiLeaks made public stolen Democratic emails timed to disrupt the party’s convention and Trump urged Russia to hack Clinton.
By early August, the researchers had combined forces and were increasingly focusing on the Alfa Bank data, the people said. Joffe reached out to his lawyer, Sussmann, who would take the researchers’ data and hypothesis to the FBI on Sept. 19, 2016.
Defense lawyers contend the indictment presented a skewed portrait of their clients’ thinking by selectively quoting from their emails.
The indictment quotes August emails from Lorenzen and Antonakakis worrying that they might not know if someone had faked the DNS data. But people familiar with the matter said the indictment omitted later discussion of reasons to doubt any attempt to spoof the overall pattern could go undetected.
The indictment says Joffe sent an email Aug. 21 urging more research about Trump, which he stated could “give the base of a very useful narrative,” while also expressing a belief that the Trump server at issue was “a red herring” and they should ignore it because it had been used by the mass-marketing company.
The full email provides context: Trump had claimed he had no dealings in Russia, and yet many links appeared to exist, Joffe noted, citing an article that discussed aspirations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Despite the “red herring” line, the same email also showed that Joffe nevertheless remained suspicious about Alfa Bank, proposing a deeper hunt in the data “for the anomalies that we believe exist.”
He wrote, “If we can show possible email communication between” any Trump server and an Alfa Bank server “that has occurred in the last few weeks, we have the beginning of a narrative,” adding that such communications with any “Russian or Ukrainian financial institutions would give the base of a very useful narrative.”
Tyrrell, his lawyer, said that research in the weeks that followed, omitted by the indictment, had yielded evidence that the specific subsidiary server in apparent contact with Alfa Bank had not been used to send bulk marketing emails. That further discussion, he said, changed his client’s mind about whether it was a red herring.
“The quotation of the ‘red herring’ email is deeply misleading,” he said. “The research process is iterative, and this is exactly how it should work. Their efforts culminated in the well-supported conclusions that were ultimately delivered to the FBI.”
The indictment also quoted from emails in mid-September, when the researchers were discussing a paper on their suspicions that Sussmann would soon take to the FBI. It says Joffe asked if the paper’s hypothesis would strike security experts as a “plausible explanation.”
The paper’s conclusion was somewhat qualified, an email shows, saying “there were other possible explanations,” but the only “plausible” one was that Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization had taken steps “to obfuscate their communications.”
The indictment suggested Lorenzen’s reaction to the paper was guarded, describing an email from her as “stating, in part, that it was ‘plausible’ in the ‘narrow scope’ defined by” Joffe. But the text of her email displays enthusiasm.
“In the narrow scope of what you have defined above, I agree wholeheartedly that it is plausible,” she wrote. “If the white paper intends to say that there are communications between at least Alfa and Trump, which are being intentionally hidden by Alfa and Trump I absolutely believe that is the case,” her email said.
The indictment cited emails by Antonakakis in August, in which he flagged holes and noted they disliked Trump; and in September, in which he approvingly noted that the paper did not get into a technical issue that specialists would raise.
Antonakakis’ lawyer, Mark Schamel, said his client had provided “feedback on an early draft of data that was cause for additional investigation.” And, he said, their hypothesis, “to this day, remains a plausible working theory.”
The indictment also suggests Dagon’s support for the paper’s hypothesis was qualified, describing his email response as “acknowledging that questions remained, but stating, in substance and in part, that the paper should be shared with government officials.”
The text of that email shows Dagon was forcefully supportive. He proposed editing the paper to declare as “fact” that it was clear “that there are hidden communications between Trump and Alfa Bank” and said he believed the findings met the probable cause standard to open a criminal investigation.
“Hopefully the intended audience are officials with subpoena powers, who can investigate the purpose” of the apparent Alfa Bank connection, Dagon wrote.
In the end, Durham came to investigate them.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. (photo: AP)
Sinema, elected in 2018, was a key player in drafting and passing the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. Currently, she's playing an outsize role in determining the fate of the other part of Biden's infrastructure and economic agenda - the Build Back Better bill, a $3.5 trillion package that Democrats will pass along party lines via budget reconciliation.
With the Senate equally divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, Sinema and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin opposing the size of the package can make or break its passage and command Biden's attention. Sinema, for her part, went to the White House three times on Tuesday alone, with White House officials coming to see her again on Wednesday.
Sinema appears to be against some of the spending provisions and the tax increases proposed to pay for them, but has reportedly been tight-lipped with the White House when it comes to a specific number she would be comfortable with.
In a Thursday statement, however, Sinema refuted reporting in Politico suggesting she wanted to hold off on getting down to the brass tacks of the reconciliation package until the House passes the infrastructure bill.
"Senator Sinema said publicly more than two months ago, before Senate passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, that she would not support a bill costing $3.5 trillion," the statement from her office said. "In August, she shared detailed concerns and priorities, including dollar figures, directly with Senate Majority Leader Schumer and the White House. Claims that the Senator has not detailed her views to President Biden and Senator Schumer are false."
The statement added that "while we do not negotiate through the press - because Senator Sinema respects the integrity of those direct negotiations - she continues to engage directly in good-faith discussions" with Biden and Schumer.
Manchin has represented deep-red West Virginia for years, and is often much more willing to explain publicly his opposition to large amounts of government spending. Sinema, by contrast, represents a diversifying swing state that is now trending blue and is often elusive about her reasoning for opposing certain parts of Biden's agenda, far less regularly issuing public statements or speaking to reporters at the US Capitol.
The progressives who knocked on doors for Sinema in 2018 now feel frustrated and betrayed by her opposition to large parts of Biden's Build Back Better agenda and what they see as a lack of urgency on her part to address climate change and protect voting rights, The New York Times reported. Sinema and Manchin oppose eliminating or amending the filibuster threshold to pass liberal priorities, like voting rights, with a simple majority.
In addition to anger from her supporters and Democratic activists on the ground, Sinema also got a major rebuke from the Democratic party in her own state, which approved a resolution threatening a vote of no confidence for Sinema's opposition to the Build Back Better agenda and filibuster reform.
And while Sinema isn't up for reelection until 2024, NBC News reported on Thursday that two groups are launching efforts to fund a potential challenger to her in the Democratic primary to place pressure on her to support more progressive priorities.
One of the efforts, the Primary Sinema PAC, is backed by the well-funded progressive group Way To Win and is working on building up the infrastructure to fund a possible primary challenger for Sinema down the line.
Another effort, Either Sinema Votes to End the Filibuster OR We Fund a Primary Challenger, is aiming to gather $100,000 that will be put toward a primary challenger unless Sinema votes for the full reconciliation bill and votes to end the filibuster.
A major Silicon Valley Democratic donor Karla Jurvetson has also turned on the Arizona senator, Puck News reported, with a source telling the outlet that Jurvetson, who is particularly focused on voting rights, "fucking hates" Sinema and is throwing her financial resources and powerful network behind the effort to find a primary challenger.
Researchers estimated that nearly 31,000 Americans were killed by the police over a four-decade period. (photo: Caroline Yang/The New York Times)
Review of 40 years of data shows many fatal police encounters are misclassified, most often when the victim is Black or Hispanic
Research at the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found that in the US between 1980 and 2018, more than 55% of deaths, over 17,000 in total, from police violence were either misclassified or went unreported.
The study also discovered that Black Americans are more likely than any other group to die from police violence and are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans.
“Recent high-profile police killings of Black people have drawn worldwide attention to this urgent public health crisis, but the magnitude of this problem can’t be fully understood without reliable data,” said Fablina Sharara, a researcher at the University of Washington School of Medicine and co-lead author of the study.
To fully understand the underreporting of police-involved killings, researchers compared data from the US National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), a government database for tracking the US population, with non-governmental, open-source databases that track police brutality including the Guardian’s two-year investigation into police violence The Counted. Open-source databases aggregate information from news reports and public record requests, capturing a wider range of fatal police-involved incidents.
“Open-sourced data is a more reliable and comprehensive resource to help inform policies that can prevent police violence and save lives,” said Sharara.
In total, the NVSS database misclassified nearly 60% of all fatal police encounters involving Black Americans. NVSS also missed approximately 50% of all police-involved deaths of Hispanic people, 56% of all police-involved deaths of non-Hispanic white people, and 33% of deaths involving non-Hispanic people across other races.
“Inaccurately reporting or misclassifying these deaths further obscures the larger issue of systemic racism that is embedded in many US institutions, including law enforcement,” Sharara said.
The paper found that men die from police violence at higher rates than women, with 30,600 police-involved deaths recorded among men and 1,420 among women between 1980 and 2019.
Researchers also noted the large conflict of interests inherent in tracking police-involved deaths. Coroners are often embedded within police departments and can be disincentivized from determining that deaths are caused by police violence.
“The same government responsible for this violence is also responsible for reporting on it,” said Sharara.
Past studies have analyzed underreporting of fatal police incidents and how Black Americans disproportionately die from police violence, but previous research was conducted over much shorter time periods.
The new study published by Lancet is the longest study period to date, though researchers acknowledged that future studies are needed to fully examine the impact of police violence in the US as data collected did not include police officers killed by civilians, police violence in US territories or abroad, and used death certificates that could not identify non-cisgender people, notably masking police violence against trans people.
Overall, an increased use of open-source data collection is needed to document and understand disparities in police brutality by race, ethnicity, and gender, the researchers said, allowing for more targeted changes to policing and public safety protocols. The authors also acknowledged that more needs to be done to combat police-involved violence.
“As a community we need to do more. Efforts to prevent police violence and address systemic racism in the USA, including body cameras that record interactions of police with civilians along with de-escalation training and implicit bias training for police officers, for example, have largely been ineffective,” said co-lead author Eve Wool.
More than one-third of all contracts now go to just five major weapons companies - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. (photo: ViperZero)
Since the start of the Afghanistan War in 2001, Pentagon spending has totaled a staggering $14 trillion. And half of it has gone directly to the biggest beneficiaries of US empire: defense contractors.
Corporations large and small have left the financial feast of that post-9/11 surge in military spending with genuinely staggering sums in hand. After all, Pentagon spending has totaled an almost unimaginable $14 trillion plus since the start of the Afghan War in 2001, up to one-half of which (catch a breath here) went directly to defense contractors.
“The Purse is Now Open”: The Post-9/11 Flood of Military Contracts
The political climate created by the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, as George W. Bush administration officials quickly dubbed it, set the stage for humongous increases in the Pentagon budget. In the first year after the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan, defense spending rose by more than 10 percent and that was just the beginning. It would, in fact, increase annually for the next decade, which was unprecedented in US history. The Pentagon budget peaked in 2010 at the highest level since World War II — over $800 billion, substantially more than the country spent on its forces at the height of the Korean or Vietnam Wars or during President Ronald Reagan’s vaunted military buildup of the 1980s.
And in the new political climate sparked by the reaction to the 9/11 attacks, those increases reached well beyond expenditures specifically tied to fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Harry Stonecipher, then vice president of Boeing, told the Wall Street Journal in an October 2001 interview, “The purse is now open. . . . [A]ny member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November.”
Stonecipher’s prophecy of rapidly rising Pentagon budgets proved correct. And it’s never ended. The Joe Biden administration is anything but an exception. Its latest proposal for spending on the Pentagon and related defense work like nuclear warhead development at the Department of Energy topped $753 billion for fiscal year 2022. And not to be outdone, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have already voted to add roughly $24 billion to that staggering sum.
Who Benefited?
The benefits of the post-9/11 surge in Pentagon spending have been distributed in a highly concentrated fashion. More than one-third of all contracts now go to just five major weapons companies — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. Those five received more than $166 billion in such contracts in fiscal year 2020 alone. To put such a figure in perspective, the $75 billion in Pentagon contracts awarded to Lockheed Martin that year was significantly more than one-and-a-half times the entire 2020 budget for the State Department and the Agency for International Development, which together totaled $44 billion.
While it’s true that the biggest financial beneficiaries of the post-9/11 military spending surge were those five weapons contractors, they were anything but the only ones to cash in. Companies benefiting from the buildup of the past twenty years also included logistics and construction firms like Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) and Bechtel, as well as armed private security contractors like Blackwater and DynCorp. The Congressional Research Service estimates that in fiscal year 2020 the spending for contractors of all kinds had grown to $420 billion, or well over half of the total Pentagon budget. Companies in all three categories noted above took advantage of “wartime” conditions — in which both speed of delivery and less rigorous oversight came to be considered the norms — to overcharge the government or even engage in outright fraud.
The best-known reconstruction and logistics contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan was Halliburton, through its KBR subsidiary. At the start of both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Halliburton was the recipient of the Pentagon’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program contracts. Those open-ended arrangements involved coordinating support functions for troops in the field, including setting up military bases, maintaining equipment, and providing food and laundry services. By 2008, the company had received more than $30 billion for such work.
Halliburton’s role would prove controversial indeed, reeking as it did of self-dealing and blatant corruption. The notion of privatizing military-support services was first initiated in the early 1990s by Dick Cheney when he was secretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration, and Halliburton got the contract to figure out how to do it. I suspect you won’t be surprised to learn that Cheney then went on to serve as the CEO of Halliburton until he became vice president under George W. Bush in 2001. His journey was a (if not the) classic case of that revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense industry, now used by so many government officials and generals or admirals, with all the obvious conflicts of interest it entails.
Once it secured its billions for work in Iraq, Halliburton proceeded to vastly overcharge the Pentagon for basic services, even while doing shoddy work that put U.S. troops at risk — and it would prove to be anything but alone in such activities.
Starting in 2004, a year into the Iraq War, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a congressionally mandated body designed to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, along with congressional watchdogs like Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), exposed scores of examples of overcharging, faulty construction, and outright theft by contractors engaged in the “rebuilding” of that country. Again, you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to find out that relatively few companies suffered significant financial or criminal consequences for what can only be described as striking war profiteering. The congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated that, as of 2011, waste, fraud, and abuse in the two war zones had already totaled $31 billion to $60 billion.
A case in point was the International Oil Trading Company, which received contracts worth $2.7 billion from the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency to provide fuel for U.S. operations in Iraq. An investigation by Congressman Waxman, chair of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, found that the firm had routinely overcharged the Pentagon for the fuel it shipped into Iraq, making more than $200 million in profits on oil sales of $1.4 billion during the period from 2004 to 2008. More than a third of those funds went to its owner, Harry Sargeant III, who also served as the finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party. Waxman summarized the situation this way: “The documents show that Mr. Sargeant’s company took advantage of U.S. taxpayers. His company had the only license to transport fuel through Jordan, so he could get away with charging exorbitant prices. I’ve never seen another situation like this.”
A particularly egregious case of shoddy work with tragic human consequences involved the electrocution of at least eighteen military personnel at several bases in Iraq from 2004 on. This happened thanks to faulty electrical installations, some done by KBR and its subcontractors. An investigation by the Pentagon’s Inspector General found that commanders in the field had “failed to ensure that renovations . . . had been properly done, the Army did not set standards for jobs or contractors, and KBR did not ground electrical equipment it installed at the facility.”
The Afghan “reconstruction” process was similarly replete with examples of fraud, waste, and abuse. These included a US-appointed economic task force that spent $43 million constructing a gas station essentially in the middle of nowhere that would never be used, another $150 million on lavish living quarters for US economic advisors, and $3 million for Afghan police patrol boats that would prove similarly useless.
Perhaps most disturbingly, a congressional investigation found that a significant portion of $2 billion worth of transportation contracts issued to US and Afghan firms ended up as kickbacks to warlords and police officials or as payments to the Taliban to allow large convoys of trucks to pass through areas they controlled, sometimes as much as $1,500 per truck, or up to half a million dollars for each 300-truck convoy. In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that “one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money” paid from just such transportation contracts.
A Two-Decade Explosion of Corporate Profits
A second stream of revenue for corporations tied to those wars went to private security contractors, some of which guarded US facilities or critical infrastructure like Iraqi oil pipelines.
The most notorious of them was, of course, Blackwater, a number of whose employees were involved in a 2007 massacre of seventeen Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. They opened fire on civilians at a crowded intersection while guarding a US Embassy convoy. The attack prompted ongoing legal and civil cases that continued into the Donald Trump era, when several perpetrators of the massacre were pardoned by the president.
In the wake of those killings, Blackwater was rebranded several times, first as Xx Services and then as Academi, before eventually merging with Triple Canopy, another private contracting firm. Blackwater founder Erik Prince then separated from the company, but he has since recruited private mercenaries on behalf of the United Arab Emirates for deployment to the civil war in Libya in violation of a United Nations arms embargo. Prince also unsuccessfully proposed to the Trump administration that he recruit a force of private contractors meant to be the backbone of the US war effort in Afghanistan.
Another task taken up by private firms Titan and CACI International was the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners. Both companies had interrogators and translators on the ground at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a site where such prisoners were brutally tortured.
The number of personnel deployed and the revenues received by security and reconstruction contractors grew dramatically as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wore on. The Congressional Research Service estimated that by March 2011 there were more contractor employees in Iraq and Afghanistan (155,000) than American uniformed military personnel (145,000). In its August 2011 final report, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan put the figure even higher, stating that “contractors represent more than half of the U.S. presence in the contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, at times employing more than a quarter-million people.”
While an armed contractor who had served in the Marines could earn as much as $200,000 annually in Iraq, about three-quarters of the contractor work force there was made up of people from countries like Nepal or the Philippines, or Iraqi citizens. Poorly paid, at times they received as little as $3,000 per year. A 2017 analysis by the Costs of War project documented “abysmal labor conditions” and major human rights abuses inflicted on foreign nationals working on US-funded projects in Afghanistan, including false imprisonment, theft of wages, and deaths and injuries in areas of conflict.
With the US military in Iraq reduced to a relatively modest number of armed “advisors” and no American forces left in Afghanistan, such contractors are now seeking foreign clients. For example, a US firm — Tier 1 Group, which was founded by a former employee of Blackwater — trained four of the Saudi operatives involved in the murder of Saudi journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi, an effort funded by the Saudi government. As the New York Times noted when it broke that story, “Such issues are likely to continue as American private military contractors increasingly look to foreign clients to shore up their business as the United States scales back overseas deployments after two decades of war.”
Add in one more factor to the two-decade “war on terror” explosion of corporate profits. Overseas arms sales also rose sharply in this era. The biggest and most controversial market for US weaponry in recent years has been the Middle East, particularly sales to countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have been involved in a devastating war in Yemen, as well as fueling conflicts elsewhere in the region.
Donald Trump made the most noise about Middle East arms sales and their benefits to the US economy. However, the giant weapons-producing corporations actually sold more weaponry to Saudi Arabia, on average, during the Barack Obama administration, including three major offers in 2010 that totaled more than $60 billion for combat aircraft, attack helicopters, armored vehicles, bombs, missiles, and guns — virtually an entire arsenal. Many of those systems were used by the Saudis in their intervention in Yemen, which has involved the killing of thousands of civilians in indiscriminate air strikes and the imposition of a blockade that has contributed substantially to the deaths of nearly a quarter of a million people to date.
Forever War Profiteering?
Reining in the excess profits of weapons contractors and preventing waste, fraud, and abuse by private firms involved in supporting U.S. military operations will ultimately require reduced spending on war and on preparations for war. So far, unfortunately, Pentagon budgets only continue to rise and yet more money flows to the big five weapons firms.
To alter this remarkably unvarying pattern, a new strategy is needed, one that increases the role of US diplomacy, while focusing on emerging and persistent non-military security challenges. “National security” needs to be redefined not in terms of a new “cold war” with China, but to forefront crucial issues like pandemics and climate change.
It’s time to put a halt to the direct and indirect foreign military interventions the United States has carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and so many other places in this century. Otherwise, we’re in for decades of more war profiteering by weapons contractors reaping massive profits with impunity.
Cattle graze in the Jamanxim National Forest, state of Para, northern Brazil. (photo: Antonio Scorza/Getty)
The organization said some slaughterhouses were granted new sanitary permits in states containing Brazil's worst illegal deforestation. The permits allow the slaughterhouses to export beef to the United States if they meet certain sanitary regulations yet disregards whether cattle are sourced from illegally cleared land.
"As beef exports from Amazon states grow," the report said, "and more slaughterhouses in the region receive sanitary permits to sell to the American market, it is urgent that U.S. importers are mandated to monitor their supply chains for environmental abuses."
The U.S. banned beef imports from Brazil in 2018 but reversed the measure in February 2020. Since then, exports to the U.S. have been climbing to pre-ban levels as the Department of Agriculture approves more permits for slaughterhouses.
The report highlighted one facility in the municipality of Chupinguaia, in Rondônia state, where deforestation rates have risen from 435 km2 (168 mi2) to over 1,000 km2 (368 mi2) over the last decade, much of it due to cattle ranching, the report said. The facility is owned by Marfrig, one of the largest beef producers in the world.
Last year, Mongabay reported that Marfrig was associated with illegal deforestation in the Amazon yet received financial backing from Blackrock, one of the world's largest asset managers.
Earthsight's report also highlighted the Vale Grande facility in Mato Grosso, another state in the Amazon that has historically struggled with deforestation. The Vale Grande facility received its sanitary permit in December 2020.
There are 34 facilities licensed for export to the U.S., Earthsight noted, and almost 20% of them are located in the Amazon.
"Our argument is that it's very hard for U.S. importers to monitor this beef to make sure it's not linked to illegal deforestation or other illegal practices," said Rubens Carvalho, one of the authors of the Earthsight report. He added that because places like Rondônia are so complex, it is extremely risky to purchase from there at all.
Currently, environmental regulations require that slaughterhouses track the activity of any cattle ranchers acting as direct suppliers. However, slaughterhouses also have indirect suppliers – cattle ranchers that sell to other cattle ranchers – and it is much more difficult to ensure they haven't participated in the illegal clearing of land.
Adding to the concern is the recent decision by Rondônia lawmakers to rush a bill through the state legislature that reduces the Jaci Paraná Extractive Reserve by 171,000 hectares (422,550 acres). The report points out that almost half of the lawmakers in Rondônia's congress are connected to the cattle ranching industry.
There is hope that a bill in the U.S. Congress will implement more robust import regulations for the international cattle industry. However, the inherent difficulties involved in monitoring indirect suppliers could call into question the effectiveness of the regulations.
"Laws that impose conditions or prohibit the sale of beef from areas that are illegally deforested are generally a good thing," said Adriana Abdenur of Plataforma CIPÓ, a climate, governance and peacebuilding think tank in Latin America. "Obviously, they're not sufficient because we know, for instance, that there is a lot of 'cattle washing' going on in the Amazon."
Abdenur added that regulations would only be effective in conjunction with greater transparency by Brazilian companies and Brazilian and US law enforcement collaboration.
Earthsight, for its part, called on lawmakers to ensure that the legislation is ambitious in its scope, with truly dissuasive penalties:
"(Importers) must be required to demonstrate that their goods are clean, rather than U.S. authorities being expected to prove beyond doubt that a specific shipment is dirty."
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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