Obama Is Bush Redux [$ Update]
By SusanUnPC on April 7, 2009 at 9:59 AM in Civil Rights, Counterterrorism, George Bush, President Barack Obama, Rendition
Mind you, I received the following from a downcast Obama supporter and longtime pal who worked ’round the clock for Barack. Hey, we tried to warn these people, didn’t we, that he does not care about, or know about, policy. They dismissed us as racists and Republicans. No. Our candidate, Hillary Clinton, promised to end these terrible practices, and she, unlike he, meant it.
Expediency is the game plan because all Obama does care about is the campaign, the adulatory and fainting fans, and the big “O” he gets from winning, not the dictated drudgery of governance (which is why the incurious man didn’t know that Austrians don’t speak “Austrian”). The “high” is fleeting so he must keep campaigning, and it doesn’t matter if the screaming fans are Czech or American. His enormous ego requires enormous venues with enormous numbers of fans, and for that he requires enormous amounts of money, which come not from little people (myth) but from fat-cats like AIG’s top earners and, perchance, military contractors, perhaps ones with roots in Chicago? (SEE UPDATE BELOW.)
After a month in office, the Obama administration has surprised many of its supporters by embracing or appearing receptive to key parts of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism strategy, from indefinite detention, to kidnapping and rendition, to invoking “state secrets” privileges. Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald joins The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer to discuss. [includes rush transcript]
What’s odd about my friend’s e-mail — I think he’s still my friend although I haven’t heard from him ever since No Quarter declared for Hillary and exposed Barack’s lack of qualifications and experience, as well as his dubious motives for seeking the presidency (actually, he had one motive, which was getting that cool title and perks like AF1) — is that this show aired in February, yet he only now is bringing himself to share this story.
However, this is hardly dated material. After all, yesterday, the hot e-mail circulating among the writers was this story: “Obama follows Bush policy on wiretapping.”
One friend who shared that story, wrote in his Subject title, “did I really read this?” In the body, he added, “i seriously hope i am hallucinating.”
From Democracy Now, here’s JANE MAYER on Obama’s strategy:
UPDATE: Writer Jeremy Scahill, who wrote the bestseller on Blackwater, told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman on April 2nd that:
… I’m starting to call a series of pieces I’m doing “Operation Rebranded,” because what we’re seeing unfold with the Obama administration’s foreign policy is basically continuing many of the worst parts of Bush’s foreign policy and sort of repackaging these policies. So, for instance, the Obama administration has dropped the use of the term “global war on terrorism” and uses phrases like “contingency operations” to describe the US occupation of Iraq. The latest news we have is that the Obama’s administration has decided on its mercenary firm of choice. Clearly, Obama did not want to continue at least a public relationship with Blackwater. …
Scahill describes the company that OBAMA has hired to protect the huge embassy in Baghdad – a company that was founded in Chicago, Illinois:
Obama picked this firm Triple Canopy, which interestingly was founded in Chicago, in the home state of Barack Obama. And then in 2005, they changed their location to Herndon, Virginia, so that they’d be closer to the epicenter of US war contracting, though on the Israeli contract, that I’m going to talk about in a moment, they list their Lincolnshire, Illinois address as their primary address for the contract.
AMY GOODMAN: Who heads up Triple Canopy?
JEREMY SCAHILL: It was founded by former Special Forces operatives from the US Army. They were minor contributors to the Bush/Cheney campaign, but not real big political players. They clearly started the company as a result of the US invasion in Iraq. They started it in 2003. By 2004, they got one of the primary contracts in Iraq.
An interesting fact about Triple Canopy is that it was one of the big three US companies. Triple Canopy, DynCorp, and Blackwater shared this mother contract. Blackwater had the biggest share of it, to guard US officials in the Baghdad area. DynCorp had the north of Iraq. Triple Canopy had the south of Iraq.
Triple Canopy also, though, did a very lucrative business servicing other war contractors like KBR, and Triple Canopy was also known for being the company that brought in the largest number of so-called third country nationals, non-Iraqis, non-Americans. They hired, for instance, former Salvadoran commandos who were veterans of the bloody counterinsurgency war in El Salvador that took the lives of 75,000 Salvadorans, minimum. Chileans—they used the same recruiter, Jose Miguel Pizarro Ovalle, that Blackwater used when they hired Chileans. This was a former Pinochet military officer.
And this company has been around, you know, for five or six years. The Obama administration has hired them in Iraq, and many of the Blackwater guys are believed to be jumping over to Triple Canopy to continue working on in Iraq. Obama, though, is keeping Blackwater on, and the State Department has not ruled out that they’re going to stay on for much longer, the aviation division of Blackwater in Iraq, and also Blackwater is on the US government payroll in Afghanistan, also working for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
The news that I’m breaking on Triple Canopy, though, is that I obtained federal contracts that were signed in February and March by the Obama administration with Triple Canopy to act as a private paramilitary force operating out of Jerusalem. And this is also part of a very secretive State Department program called the Worldwide Personal Protective Service, which was started under the Clinton administration as a privatized wing of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security division. Triple Canopy was paid $5 million in February, March by the Obama administration to provide, quote, “security services” in Israel.
In congressional testimony in 2007, Ambassador David Satterfield, who was an Under Secretary of State, said that he had been guarded by private security companies when he traveled in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. Triple Canopy had the contract, has had this contract since 2005, the Obama administration continuing it.
I think that the Obama administration should be required to explain to US taxpayers, particularly with the atrocious human rights abuses that we’ve been seeing in Israel, why he’s using a US mercenary company to protect US officials when they potentially come in contact with civilians. And we’ve seen how deadly that’s been in Iraq. And before May 7th, his administration should be required to explain to the American people why he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are continuing the Bush administration’s policy of using deadly paramilitary forces in Iraq. …
There’s a point that needs to be made here: Scahill is a leftist who seems to oppose all private contractors, but as Larry Johnson and others have explained to me, the U.S. military hasn’t the manpower to guard all of the State Department’s facilities and personnel around the world. There’s nothing per se “evil” with hiring private contractors. It’s what they do on the job that matters. So President Obama and Secretary Clinton aren’t necessarily implementing “deadly paramilitary forces”; they are hiring people to protect staff and facilities.
THAT said, I am attempting to find out what this company — Triple Canopy — has donated to the Obama campaign.
I’m also looking up who is on the board of Triple Canopy. One recent addition is AOL founder Jim Kimsey.
… more to come …
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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