by Naomi Klein
Once the prisoners arrive at the destination, they face interrogators, some of whom will not be employed by the CIA or the military but by private contractors. According to Bill Golden, who runs the job Web site www.IntelligenceCareers.com, “Over half of the qualified counter-intelligence experts in the field work for contractors.”56 If these freelance interrogators are to keep landing lucrative contracts, they must extract from prisoners the kind of “actionable intelligence” their employers in Washington are looking for. It’s a dynamic ripe for abuse: just as prisoners under torture will usually say anything to make the pain stop, contractors have a powerful economic incentive to use whatever techniques are necessary to produce the sought-after information, regardless of its reliability. (Part of the reason the Bush administration has relied so heavily on private intelligence contractors working in new structures like Rumsfeld’s secretive Office of Special Plans is that they have proven far more willing than their counterparts in governments to massage and manipulate information to meet the political goals of the administration—after all, their next contract depends on it.)
Then there is the low-tech version of this application of market “solutions” to the War on Terror—the willingness to pay top dollar to pretty much anyone for information about alleged terrorists. During the invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence agents let it be known that they would pay anywhere from $3,000 to $25,000 for al Qaeda or Taliban fighters handed over to them. “Get wealth and power beyond your dreams,” stated a typical flyer handed out by the U.S. in Afghanistan, introduced as evidence in a 2002 U.S. federal court filing on behalf of several Guantánamo prisoners. “You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taleban forces…. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.”57
Soon enough, the cells of Bagram and Guantánamo were overflowing with goatherds, cabdrivers, cooks and shopkeepers—all lethally dangerous according to the men who turned them over and collected the rewards.
“Do you have any theories about why the government and the Pakistani intel folks would sell you out and turn you over to the Americans?” a member of a military tribunal asked an Egyptian prisoner held in the Guantánamo prison.
In the declassified transcript, the prisoner appears incredulous. “Come on, man,” he replied, “you know what happened. In Pakistan you can buy people for $10. So what about $5,000?”
“So they sold you?” the tribunal member asked, as if the thought had never before occurred to him.
“Yes.”
According to the Pentagon’s own figures, 86 percent of the prisoners at Guantánamo were handed over by Afghan and Pakistani fighters or agents after the bounties were announced. As of December 2006, the Pentagon had released 360 prisoners from Guantánamo. The Associated Press was able to track down 245 of them; 205 had been freed or cleared of all charges when they returned to their home countries.58 It is a track record that is a grave indictment of the quality of intelligence produced by the administration’s market-based approach to terrorist identification.
In just a few years, the homeland security industry, which barely existed before 9/11, has exploded to a size that is now significantly larger than either Hollywood or the music business.59 Yet what is most striking is how little the security boom is analyzed and discussed as an economy, as an unprecedented convergence of unchecked police powers and unchecked capitalism, a merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison. When information about who is or is not a security threat is a product to be sold as readily as information about who buys Harry Potter books on Amazon or who has taken a Caribbean cruise and might enjoy one in Alaska, it changes the values of a culture. Not only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.
When new economies emerged in the past, from the Fordist revolution to the IT boom, they sparked a flood of analysis and debate about how such seismic shifts in the production of wealth were also altering the way we as a culture worked, the way we traveled, even the way our brains process information. The new disaster economy has been subject to none of this kind of far-reaching discussion. There have been and are debates, of course—about the constitutionality of the Patriot Act, about indefinite detention, about torture and extraordinary rendition—but discussion of what it means to have these functions performed as commercial transactions has been almost completely avoided. What passes for debate is restricted to individual cases of war profiteering and corruption scandals, as well as the usual hand-wringing about the failure of government to adequately oversee private contractors—rarely about the much broader and deeper phenomenon of what it means to be engaged in a fully privatized war built to have no end.
Part of the problem is that the disaster economy sneaked up on us. In the eighties and nineties, new economies announced themselves with great pride and fanfare. The tech bubble in particular set a precedent for a new ownership class inspiring deafening levels of hype—endless media lifestyle profiles of dashing young CEOs beside their private jets, their remote-controlled yachts, their idyllic Seattle mountain homes.
That kind of wealth is being generated by the disaster complex today, though we rarely hear about it. According to a 2006 study, “Since the ‘War on Terror’ began, the CEOs of the top 34 defense contractors have enjoyed average pay levels that are double the amounts they received during the four years leading up to 9/11.” While these CEOs saw their compensation go up an average of 108 percent between 2001 and 2005, chief executives at other large American companies averaged only 6 percent over the same period.60
The disaster industry may be approaching dot-com levels of profit, but it generally has CIA levels of discretion. Disaster capitalists dodge the press, play down their wealth and know better than to brag. “We are not celebrating that there is this huge industry blossoming around protecting ourselves from terrorism,” said John Elstner of the Chesapeake Innovation Center, a homeland security incubator. “But there is big business going on, and CIC is in the middle of it.”61
Peter Swire, who served as the U.S. government’s privacy counselor during the Clinton administration, describes the convergence of forces behind the War on Terror bubble like this: “You have government on a holy mission to ramp up information gathering and you have an information technology industry desperate for new markets.”62 In other words, you have corporatism: big business and big government combining their formidable powers to regulate and control the citizenry.
CHAPTER 15
A CORPORATIST STATE
REMOVING THE REVOLVING DOOR, PUTTING IN AN ARCHWAY
I think that’s weird and it’s nuts. To suggest that everything we do is because we’re hungry for money, I think that’s crazy. I think you need to go back to school.
—George H. W. Bush in response to an accusation that his son invaded Iraq to open up new markets for U.S. companies1
There’s something civil servants have that the private sector doesn’t. And that is the duty of loyalty to the greater good—the duty of loyalty to the collective best interest of all rather than the interest of a few. Companies have duties of loyalty to their shareholders, not to the country.
—David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States, February 20072
He doesn’t see the difference between public and private interests.
—Sam Gardiner, retired U.S. Air Force colonel, on Dick Cheney, February 20043
In the heat of the midterm elections in 2006, three weeks before announcing Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, George W. Bush signed the Defense Authorization Act in a private Oval Office ceremony. Tucked into its fourteen hundred pages is a rider that went almost completely unnoticed at the time. It gave the president the power to declare martial law and “employ the armed forces, including the National Guard,” overriding the wishes of state governors, in the event of a “public emergency” in or
der to “restore public order” and “suppress” the disorder. That emergency could be a hurricane, a mass protest or a “public health emergency,” in which case the army could be used to impose quarantines and to safeguard vaccine supplies.4 Before this act, the president had these martial law powers only in the face of an insurrection.
With his colleagues on the campaign trail, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy was a lone voice of alarm, entering into the public record that “using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy” and pointing out that “the implications of changing the act are enormous, but this change was just slipped in the defense bill as a rider with little study. Other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”5
In addition to the executive branch, which gained the extraordinary new powers, there was at least one other clear winner: the pharmaceutical industry. In the case of any kind of disease outbreak, the military can now be called in to safeguard their labs and drug supplies and impose quarantines—a long-standing policy goal of the Bush administration. That was good news for Rumsfeld’s former company Gilead Sciences, which owns the patent on Tamiflu, used to treat avian flu. The new law, as well as continued avian flu scares, may even have contributed to Tamiflu’s stellar performance after Rumsfeld left office; in just five months, its stock price went up 24 percent.6
What role did industry interests play in shaping the specifics of the law? Perhaps none, but the question is worth asking. Similarly, and on a much wider scale, what role did the benefits to contractors such as Halliburton and Bechtel and oil companies such as ExxonMobil play in the Bush team’s enthusiasm for invading and occupying Iraq? These questions of motivation are impossible to answer with any precision, because the people involved are notorious for conflating corporate interests with the national interest, to the extent that they themselves are seemingly incapable of drawing distinctions.
In his 2006 book Overthrow, the former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer tries to get to the bottom of what has motivated the U.S. politicians who have ordered and orchestrated foreign coups d’état over the past century. Studying U.S. involvement in regime change operations from Hawaii in 1893 to Iraq in 2003, he observes that there is often a clear three-stage process that takes place. First, a U.S.-based multinational corporation faces some kind of threat to its bottom line by the actions of a foreign government demanding that the company “pay taxes or that it observe labor laws or environmental laws. Sometimes that company is nationalized or is somehow required to sell some of its land or its assets,” Kinzer says. Second, U.S. politicians hear of this corporate setback and reinterpret it as an attack on the United States: “They transform the motivation from an economic one into a political or geo-strategic one. They make the assumption that any regime that would bother an American company or harass an American company must be anti-American, repressive, dictatorial, and probably the tool of some foreign power or interest that wants to undermine the United States.” The third stage happens when the politicians have to sell the need for intervention to the public, at which point it becomes a broadly drawn struggle of good versus evil, “a chance to free a poor oppressed nation from the brutality of a regime that we assume is a dictatorship, because what other kind of a regime would be bothering an American company?”7 Much of U.S. foreign policy, in other words, is an exercise in mass projection, in which a tiny self-interested elite conflates its needs and desires with those of the entire world.
Kinzer points out that this tendency has been especially pronounced in politicians who move directly from the corporate world into public office. For instance, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, worked as a high-powered international corporate lawyer for most of his life, representing some of the richest firms in the world in their conflicts with foreign governments. Dulles’s various biographers have concluded, like Kinzer, that the secretary of state was simply incapable of distinguishing between the interests of corporations and the interests of his country. “Dulles had two lifelong obsessions: fighting Communism and protecting the rights of multinational corporations,” writes Kinzer. “In his mind they were…‘interrelated and mutually reinforcing.’”8 That meant he didn’t need to choose between his obsessions: if the Guatemalan government took an action that hurt the interests of the United Fruit Company, for instance, that was a de facto attack on America and worthy of a military response.
As it pursues its twin obsessions of fighting terrorism and protecting the interests of multinational corporations, the Bush administration, packed with CEOs fresh from the boardroom, is subject to the same confusions and conflations. But there is a significant difference. The companies with which Dulles identified were multinationals with large international investments in foreign countries—in mining, agriculture, banking and oil. These companies generally shared a straightforward objective: they wanted stable, profitable environments in which to do business—loose investment laws, pliant workers and no nasty expropriation surprises. Coups and military interventions were a means to that end, not the goal itself.
As proto-disaster capitalists, the architects of the War on Terror are part of a different breed of corporate-politicians from their predecessors, one for whom wars and other disasters are indeed ends in themselves. When Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld conflate what is good for Lockheed, Halliburton, Carlyle and Gilead with what is good for the United States and indeed the world, it is a form of projection with uniquely dangerous consequences. That’s because what is unquestionably good for the bottom line of these companies is cataclysm—wars, epidemics, natural disasters and resource shortages—which is why all their fortunes have improved dramatically since Bush took office. What makes their acts of projection even more perilous is the fact that, to an unprecedented degree, key Bush officials have maintained their interests in the disaster capitalism complex even as they have ushered in a new era of privatized war and disaster response, allowing them to simultaneously profit from the disasters they help unleash.
For instance, when Rumsfeld resigned his post after the Republican defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, the press reported that he was returning to the private sector. The truth was that he never actually left. When he accepted Bush’s nomination as defense secretary, Rumsfeld, like all public officials, was required to divest himself of any holdings that stood to lose or gain from decisions he might make while in office. Simple enough—that meant selling everything related to national security or defense. But Rumsfeld had a great deal of trouble. He was so weighed down with holdings in various disaster-related industries that he claimed it was impossible to disentangle himself in time to meet the deadlines, and he tied the ethics rules in knots trying to hold on to everything he could.
He sold off his directly owned stocks in Lockheed, Boeing and other defense companies and put up to $50 million worth of stocks in a blind trust. But he still was part or complete owner of private investment firms that were devoted to defense and biotechnology stocks. Rumsfeld was unwilling to take losses to sell those companies quickly and instead asked for two three-month extensions to the time limit—extremely rare at that level of government. That meant he was still looking for what he considered suitable buyers for his companies and assets a full six months into his term as defense secretary, possibly even longer.9
When it came to Gilead Sciences, the company Rumsfeld used to chair and that held the patent on Tamiflu, the secretary of defense put his foot down. Asked to choose between his business interests and his public calling, he simply refused. Epidemics are national security issues and therefore squarely within the portfolio of the defense secretary. Yet despite this glaring conflict of interest, Rumsfeld failed to sell off his Gilead stocks for his entire term in office, holding on to somewhere between $8 million and $39 million worth of Gilead holdings.10
As the Senate Ethics Committee tried to bring him into compliance with st
andard conflict rules, Rumsfeld was openly belligerent. At one point, he wrote a letter to the Office of Government Ethics complaining that he had to spend $60,000 on accountants’ fees to help him with “excessively complex and confusing” disclosure forms. For a man bent on holding on to $95 million in shares while in office, $60,000 in finessing fees hardly seemed out of proportion.11
Rumsfeld’s adamant refusal to stop making money from disaster while in the top security post in the country affected his job performance in several concrete ways. For much of his first year in office, while he looked to off-load his holdings, Rumsfeld had to recuse himself from an alarming range of crucial policy decisions: according to the Associated Press, “he has avoided Pentagon meetings in which AIDS is discussed.” And when the federal government had to decide whether to intervene in several high-profile mergers and sales involving top defense contractors, including General Electric, Honeywell, Northrop Grumman and Silicon Valley Graphics, Rumsfeld recused himself from those top-level talks as well. It turned out, according to his official spokesperson, that he had financial ties to several of the companies listed above. “I have tended to stay away from them thus far,” Rumsfeld told a reporter who asked about one of the sales.12
