Lawmaker takes 9/11 doubts global

By JOHN SPIRI

Special to The Japan Times

In a September 2003 article for The Guardian newspaper, Michael Meacher, who served as Tony Blair’s environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003, shocked the establishment by calling the global war on terrorism “bogus.” Even more controversially, he implied that the U.S. government either allowed 9/11 to happen, or played some role in the destruction wrought that day. Besides Meacher, few politicians have publicly questioned America’s official 9/11 narrative — until Diet member Yukihisa Fujita.

Speaking out: Democratic Party of Japan lawmaker Yukihisa Fujita addresses the Diet and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on his doubts about the official story of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. COURTESY OF YUKIHISA FUJITA

In January 2008 Fujita, a member of the Democratic Party of Japan, asked the Japanese Parliament and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to explain gaping holes in the official 9/11 story that various groups — including those who call themselves the “911 Truth Movement” — claim to have exposed.

Fujita, along with a growing number of individuals — including European and American politicians — are leading a charge to conduct a thorough, independent investigation of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

“Three or four years ago I saw some Internet videos like ‘Loose Change’ and ‘911 In Plane Site’ and I began to ask questions,” Fujita said in an interview, “but I still couldn’t believe this was done by anyone but al-Qaida.

“Last year I watched more videos and read books written by professor David Ray Griffin (a professor emeritus of philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University who wrote the most famous Truth Movement book, ‘The New Pearl Harbor’) about things such as the collapse of World Trade Center No. 7. This building, which was never hit by an airplane, collapsed straight down. Between the videos showing the way it fell, and the numerous reports of explosions, many are convinced that this building was demolished.”

Fujita’s presentation to the Diet and Fukuda focused a great deal on yet another aspect of 9/11 that now quite a few around the world find extremely suspicious: the Pentagon crash.

“I don’t think (a) 767 could have hit the Pentagon,” Fujita reckons. “There is no evidence of the plane itself. Almost nothing identifiable was left on the lawn or inside. The official story says the entire plane disintegrated, but the jet engines in particular were very strong (two 6-ton titanium steel turbine engines). And the damage to the building is much smaller than the size of the supposed airplane. The official claims just don’t fit the facts.”

While some label that claim “wacky” and label critics of the official 9/11 story “conspiracy theorists,” Fujita has impressive company. For one, former Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, who was commanding general of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security until 1984, is quoted on the “Patriots Question 911″ Web site as saying, “I look at the hole in the Pentagon and I look at the size of an airplane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon. And I said, ‘The plane does not fit in that hole.’

“So what did hit the Pentagon? What hit it? Where is it? What’s going on?”

Fujita urges the Bush administration to put the issue to rest simply by showing videos that show the plane that hit the Pentagon. Instead, only a few grainy images have been released to the public. More disconcertingly, many videos taken by surrounding businesses were confiscated by the FBI immediately after the Pentagon explosion.

The Pennsylvania crash, like the Pentagon explosion, also yielded virtually no recognizable plane parts at the crash site. Rather, small pieces of debris were found up to 10 km away. The official story — that the plane “vaporized” when it hit the ground — is inconsistent with the evidence left by every other plane crash in the history of aviation.

Plane crashes always yield plane fragments, Fujita explained, which can be identified by the plane’s serial number, but that’s not the case for the four planes which crashed on 9/11. Strangely, the U.S. government managed to produce passports and DNA samples of individuals killed, but no identifiable plane parts. In an online article entitled “Physics 911,” 34-year U.S. Air Force veteran Col. George Nelson notes, “It seems . . . that all potential evidence was deliberately kept hidden from public view.”

Fujita has largely relied on the voluminous amount of video and written material published in books and on the Internet, including the “Patriots Question 911″ site, on which hundreds of allegations are leveled against the official story by senior officials from the military, intelligence services, law enforcement, and government, as well as pilots, engineers, architects, firefighters and others.

While not many other Japanese have taken an interest in this story, a few notable individuals besides Fujita have disputed the U.S. government’s version, including Akira Dojimaru, a Japanese writer living in Spain. In his book, written in Japanese, “The Anatomy of the WTC Collapses: Flaws in the U.S. Government’s Account,” he uses photos, drawings and blueprints of the WTC buildings to back up his claim that buildings one and two could not have fallen in the manner they fell due to the plane crashes and subsequent fires. “And even if it was conceivable that they could fall due to the damage that day,” Dojimaru wrote in an e-mail, “they never would have collapsed horizontally, and would have scattered steel beams and smashed concrete much farther than 100 meters.”

For Fujita, it was Dojimaru’s meticulous research, combined with the aforementioned Web sites, that convinced him the official story was nothing more than a house of cards.

One book that Fujita found unconvincing was the “9/11 Commission Report.”

“The head of the 9/11 Commission is close with (U.S. Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice and (Vice President Dick) Cheney. One commission member (Sen. Max Cleland) resigned, saying the White House did not disclose enough information.”

On Democracy Now’s radio show in March 2004, Cleland even went as far as to say, “This White House wants to cover it (the facts of 9/11) up.”

More recently, a New York Times article in January quoted Thomas Kean, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, as saying that “the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives,” and concluded that that “obstructed our investigation.”

Following the lead of Fujita, Karen Johnson, a conservative Republican senator from Arizona, has publicly voiced her doubts about 9/11 before the U.S. Senate. Inspired by Blair Gadsby — who on May 27 started a hunger strike to bring attention to the 911 Truth Movement — Johnson, like Fujita, is encouraging politicians to conduct a thorough, independent investigation.

Fujita, who worked for more than 20 years for the international conflict resolution NGO group MRA and the Japanese Association for Aid and Relief (AAR), has become something of a global cause celebre since his extraordinary questioning at the Diet. In February 2008, he participated in a conference at the European Parliament led by EMP Guilietto Chiesa calling for an independent commission of inquiry into 9/11. While in Europe, he met with NGOs from 11 European countries to discuss 9/11.

One month later Fujita spoke at the “Truth Now” conference in Sydney, Australia. One focus of these meetings was the Italian documentary “ZERO,” whose release will mark the first time the 9/11 movement’s message has moved from the “cyberworld” to public venues. Fujita has also spoken about his 9/11 doubts on two U.S. radio shows, one hosted by Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, and another by Alex Jones of infowars.com.

He is also making ripples in Japan. Fujita was featured in a March 2 article by well-known critic Takao Iwami on “How to deal with doubts about 9/11″ in the Sunday Mainichi weekly. He was also featured in a March 26 Spa! magazine piece headlined, “European conference discusses 9/11 doubts.”

However, not everyone is enthralled with Fujita’s bold line of questioning.

“One person showed strong anger towards me,” Fujita noted, “and another (Japanese person) threatened my life. A few others advised me to be extremely careful.”

Still, Fujita says, the vast majority — around 95 percent — have been positive.

“One man said, ‘You’re a true samurai.’ Another man came all the way from Okayama in western Japan to thank me personally. And among other Parliament members, I received only words of encouragement and support.”

While in Europe, Fujita met British former MP Meacher, who dared to question the official story when it was still considered gospel. Time, the Iraq war and well-sourced online videos are emboldening many people, including politicians, to step out of the cyberworld and voice their doubts in newspapers, magazines, theaters, and — most importantly — government chambers.

“Now Blair is gone, and Bush will soon be gone,” Meacher told Fujita. “Our time is coming.”

The Project for the New American Century.

Technorati Tags: PNAC

The People versus the Powerful is the oldest story in human history. At no point in history have the Powerful wielded so much control. At no point in history has the active and informed involvement of the People, all of them, been more absolutely required.

By William Rivers Pitt

02/25/03 ICH

THE PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY, or PNAC, is a Washington-based think tank created in 1997. Above all else, PNAC desires and demands one thing: The establishment of a global American empire to bend the will of all nations. They chafe at the idea that the United States, the last remaining superpower, does not do more by way of economic and military force to bring the rest of the world under the umbrella of a new socio-economic Pax Americana. The fundamental essence of PNAC’s ideology can be found in a White Paper produced in September of 2000 entitled

“Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century.”

In it, PNAC outlines what is required of America to create the global empire they envision. According to PNAC, America must:

Reposition permanently based forces to Southern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East;

Modernize U.S. forces, including enhancing our fighter aircraft, submarine and surface fleet capabilities;

Develop and deploy a global missile defense system, and develop a strategic dominance of space;

8Control the “International Commons” of cyberspace;

Increase defense spending to a minimum of 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, up from the 3 percent currently spent.

Most ominously, this PNAC document described four “Core Missions” for the American military. The two central requirements are for American forces to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars,” and to “perform the ‘constabulary’ duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions.” Note well that PNAC does not want America to be prepared to fight simultaneous major wars. That is old school. In order to bring this plan to fruition, the military must fight these wars one way or the other to establish American dominance for all to see.

Why is this important? After all, wacky think tanks are a cottage industry in Washington, DC. They are a dime a dozen. In what way does PNAC stand above the other groups that would set American foreign policy if they could? Two events brought PNAC into the mainstream of American government: the disputed election of George W. Bush, and the attacks of September 11th. When Bush assumed the Presidency, the men who created and nurtured the imperial dreams of PNAC became the men who run the Pentagon, the Defense Department and the White House. When the Towers came down, these men saw, at long last, their chance to turn their White Papers into substantive policy.

Vice President Dick Cheney is a founding member of PNAC, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is the ideological father of the group. Bruce Jackson, a PNAC director, served as a Pentagon official for Ronald Reagan before leaving government service to take a leading position with the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

PNAC is staffed by men who previously served with groups like Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America, which supported America’s bloody gamesmanship in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and with groups like The Committee for the Present Danger, which spent years advocating that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was “winnable.”

PNAC has recently given birth to a new group, The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which met with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in order to formulate a plan to “educate” the American populace about the need for war in Iraq. CLI has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to support the Iraqi National Congress and the Iraqi heir presumptive, Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi was sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court in 1992 to 22 years in prison for bank fraud after the collapse of Petra Bank, which he founded in 1977. Chalabi has not set foot in Iraq since 1956, but his Enron-like business credentials apparently make him a good match for the Bush administration’s plans.

PNAC’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” report is the institutionalization of plans and ideologies that have been formulated for decades by the men currently running American government. The PNAC Statement of Principles is signed by Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, as well as by Eliot Abrams, Jeb Bush, Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, and many others. William Kristol, famed conservative writer for the Weekly Standard, is also a co-founder of the group. The Weekly Standard is owned by Ruppert Murdoch, who also owns international media giant Fox News.

The desire for these freshly empowered PNAC men to extend American hegemony by force of arms across the globe has been there since day one of the Bush administration, and is in no small part a central reason for the Florida electoral battle in 2000. Note that while many have said that Gore and Bush are ideologically identical, Mr. Gore had no ties whatsoever to the fellows at PNAC. George W. Bush had to win that election by any means necessary, and PNAC signatory Jeb Bush was in the perfect position to ensure the rise to prominence of his fellow imperialists. Desire for such action, however, is by no means translatable into workable policy. Americans enjoy their comforts, but don’t cotton to the idea of being some sort of Neo-Rome.

On September 11th, the fellows from PNAC saw a door of opportunity open wide before them, and stormed right through it. Bush released on September 20th 2001 the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America.” It is an ideological match to PNAC’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” report issued a year earlier. In many places, it uses exactly the same language to describe America’s new place in the world.

Recall that PNAC demanded an increase in defense spending to at least 3.8% of GDP. Bush’s proposed budget for next year asks for $379 billion in defense spending, almost exactly 3.8% of GDP.

In August of 2002, Defense Policy Board chairman and PNAC member Richard Perle heard a policy briefing from a think tank associated with the Rand Corporation. According to the Washington Post and The Nation, the final slide of this presentation described “Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot, and Egypt as the prize” in a war that would purportedly be about ridding the world of Saddam Hussein’s weapons. Bush has deployed massive forces into the Mideast region, while simultaneously engaging American forces in the Philippines and playing nuclear chicken with North Korea. Somewhere in all this lurks at least one of the “major theater wars” desired by the September 2000 PNAC report.

Iraq is but the beginning, a pretense for a wider conflict. Donald Kagan, a central member of PNAC, sees America establishing permanent military bases in Iraq after the war.

This is purportedly a measure to defend the peace in the Middle East, and to make sure the oil flows. The nations in that region, however, will see this for what it is: a jump-off point for American forces to invade any nation in that region they choose to.

The American people, anxiously awaiting some sort of exit plan after America defeats Iraq, will see too late that no exit is planned.

All of the horses are traveling together at speed here. The defense contractors who sup on American tax revenue will be handsomely paid for arming this new American empire. The corporations that own the news media will sell this eternal war at a profit, as viewership goes through the stratosphere when there is combat to be shown. Those within the administration who believe that the defense of Israel is contingent upon laying waste to every possible aggressor in the region will have their dreams fulfilled. The PNAC men who wish for a global Pax Americana at gunpoint will see their plans unfold. Through it all, the bankrollers from the WTO and the IMF will be able to dictate financial terms to the entire planet. This last aspect of the plan is pivotal, and is best described in the newly revised version of Greg Palast’s masterpiece, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.”

There will be adverse side effects. The siege mentality average Americans are suffering as they smother behind yards of plastic sheeting and duct tape will increase by orders of magnitude as our aggressions bring forth new terrorist attacks against the homeland. These attacks will require the implementation of the newly drafted Patriot Act II, an augmentation of the previous Act that has profoundly sharper teeth. The sun will set on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The American economy will be ravaged by the need for increased defense spending, and by the aforementioned “constabulary” duties in Iraq, AfghaAnistan and elsewhere. Former allies will turn on us. Germany, France and the other nations resisting this Iraq war are fully aware of this game plan. They are not acting out of cowardice or because they love Saddam Hussein, but because they mean to resist this rising American empire, lest they face economic and military serfdom at the hands of George W. Bush. Richard Perle has already stated that France is no longer an American ally.

As the eagle spreads its wings, our rhetoric and their resistance will become more agitated and dangerous.

Many people, of course, will die. They will die from war and from want, from famine and disease.

At home, the social fabric will be torn in ways that make the Reagan nightmares of crack addiction, homelessness and AIDS seem tame by comparison.

This is the price to be paid for empire, and the men of PNAC who now control the fate and future of America are more than willing to pay it. For them, the benefits far outweigh the liabilities.

The plan was running smoothly until those two icebergs collided. Millions and millions of ordinary people are making it very difficult for Bush’s international allies to keep to the script. PNAC may have designs for the control of the “International Commons” of the Internet, but for now it is the staging ground for a movement that would see empire take a back seat to a wise peace, human rights, equal protection under the law, and the preponderance of a justice that will, if properly applied, do away forever with the anger and hatred that gives birth to terrorism in the first place.

Tommaso Palladini of Milan perhaps said it best as he marched with his countrymen in Rome. “You fight terrorism,” he said, “by creating more justice in the world.”

“You fight terrorism by creating more justice in the world…”

Tommaso Palladini

The People versus the Powerful is the oldest story in human history. At no point in history have the Powerful wielded so much control. At no point in history has the active and informed involvement of the People, all of them, been more absolutely required. The tide can be stopped, and the men who desire empire by the sword can be thwarted. It has already begun, but it must not cease. These are men of will, and they do not intend to fail.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times bestselling author of two books – “War On Iraq” (with Scott Ritter) available now from Context Books, and “The Greatest Sedition is Silence,” available in May 2003 from Pluto Press. He teaches high school in Boston, MA. Scott Lowery contributed research to this report.

Martial Law Inc.

Technorati Tags: KBR,Haliburton,Dick Cheney,PNAC,Deep Integration,SPP Summit,CFR,CCCE,Canadian Council of Chief Executives,FEMA Camps,DHS,ICE,Endgame

Martial Law, Inc.
KBR: A Halliburton Subsidiary

by Andrew G. Marshall

KBR, or Kellogg Brown & Root, was a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation until 2007, when bad publicity and indictments against KBR forced Halliburton to sell its shares in KBR.

KBR and Vietnam:

KBR, having financed Lyndon Johnson from the 1940s and into the Vice Presidential position, was rewarded after Kennedy’s assassination with lucrative contracts in the escalated Vietnam War. “Johnson, who became president in 1963 after Kennedy’s assassination and who was elected with broad support in 1964, used the Gulf of Tonkin incident,” in order to “justify the sending of ground troops into Vietnam. The result of that move was the need for billions of dollars worth of bases, airstrips, ports, and bridges. Enter Brown & Root.”

With that, “In 1965, a year after Johnson stepped up America’s participation in Vietnam, Brown & Root joined three other construction and project management behemoths, Raymond International, Morris-Knudsen, and J.A. Jones to form one of the largest civilian-based military construction conglomerates in history.” That team of corporations was known as RMK-BRJ, which, “literally changed the face of Vietnam, clearing out wide swaths of jungle for airplane landing strips, dredging channels for ships, and building American bases from Da Nang to Saigon.” KBR, as a member of this joint conglomerate, was also contracted to build new prison cells in Vietnam, replacing the “horribly inhumane prison cells built by the French government 75 years earlier to hold prisoners.”

KBR and the Rwandan Genocide:

In 1990, the first invasion of Rwanda took place by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a militant organization from Uganda, overseen by a man by the name of Paul Kagame. The aim of this Tutsi rebel organization was the overthrow of Rwanda’s then-Hutu President Habyarimana, who was at the time, using World Bank loans to import enormous numbers of machetes under World Bank surveillance of Rwanda’s expenditure. This was the offset of the Rwandan civil war, which lasted until 1993, when a peace agreement was being brokered between Rwanda’s president and other neighboring leaders, including the President of Burundi. When the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were flying back to Rwanda during the time of peace settlements, in 1994, their plane, also carrying on board many French officials, was shot down. This is the event that triggered the Rwandan genocide.

The first invasion of Rwanda by the RPF in 1990 “had the military backing of the first Bush administration [1989-1993], including Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.” In 1992, “then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney commissioned Brown & Root to produce a classified report examining the benefits of greatly expanding logistics privatization. The report led the Pentagon to solicit bids from thirty-seven firms for an unprecedented five-year contract to provide the bulk of the Army’s overseas logistics needs. Later that year, the Defense Department chose Brown & Root as the first such umbrella logistics contractor.”

In 1993, newly elected President Bill Clinton continued this policy of supporting the RPF. His trusted allies in the United Nations, Madeline Albright, then US Ambassador to the United Nations and Kofi Annan, then head of the UN’s peacekeeping operations, ensured that the relationship would be concealed from the public. Wayne Madsen reported that both Albright and Annan, “conveniently chose to ignore evidence that a US-trained and supplied guerrilla force – the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) – was responsible for the fateful April 6, 1994 terrorist missile attack on the aircraft carrying the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi home from a peace summit in Tanzania.”

Paul Kagame, leader of the RPF, had been trained at US military bases in the United States in guerilla warfare tactics, and had very close ties to the Pentagon, the US State Department and the CIA. It also turns out that the US supplied the RPF with the missiles used to shoot down the plane carrying the two presidents, and that a UN investigation revealed that the warehouse which was used in assembling the missile launchers was leased to a company linked to none other than the CIA. Albright and Annan also ensured that information did not reach the public.

Madsen revealed that a French investigation in 2004 about the shooting down of the plane, carried out on behalf of the French citizens who were killed on the plane, revealed that there was a startling connection to an organization that goes by the name of the, “International Strategic and Tactical Organization” [ISTO], which represents powerful political and corporate interests, including Armitage and Associates LC, a firm founded by George W. Bush’s first Deputy Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage, and KBR, or Kellogg Brown & Root, then a subsidiary of Halliburton. In 1994, KBR was in Rwanda under a $6.3 million contract called “Operation Support Hope.”

As a result of the Rwandan genocide, many of the key players got handsomely rewarded with promotions. Paul Kagame became President of Rwanda, Kofi Annan became Secretary-General of the United Nations, and Madeline Albright became Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State. A year later, in 1995, Dick Cheney went to become the CEO of Halliburton until the year 2000.

KBR and The Congo Civil War:

Kellogg-Brown & Root, which was connected to the, “International Strategic and Tactical Organization” (ISTO), made another appearance in Africa. This time, it was to do with the Congo civil war, which started in the late 1990s. The Congo was invaded in 1996 by forces from Rwanda under the leadership of Paul Kagame, as well as Burundi and Uganda sending in troops supporting rebel Congolese leader, Laurent Kabila, to overthrow the then-President of Congo [Zaire], Mobutu Sese Seko. KBR, “reportedly built a military base on the Congolese/Rwandan border, where the Rwandan army has trained,” and, what’s more, “The Bechtel Corporation provided satellite maps and reconnaissance photos to Kabila so that he could monitor the movements of Mobutu’s troops.” Bechtel’s board of directors includes former Secretary of State George Schultz and has former Secretary of Defense, Caspar Wienberger, as a legal counsel, while Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR at this time.

After deposing the former President of Congo, Kabila gave out juicy contracts to big corporations ready to rape the Congo’s resources. American Mineral Fields (AMF) got a huge contract for exploration rights over many rich minerals, and “Mike McMurrough, a friend of US President Bill Clinton, was the chair of AMF.” Another big company to profit off the death of millions of Congolese people is Barrick Gold Corporation, a Canadian mining company, with former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Clinton Adviser Vernon Jordan on its board of directors, and George H. W. Bush as a company adviser.

KBR in Bosnia and Kosovo:

As economics professor at the University of Ottawa, Michel Chossudovsky, noted, “Throughout the 1990s, the Pakistan Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) was used by the CIA as a go-between – to channel weapons and Mujahideen mercenaries to the Bosnian Muslim Army in the civil war in Yugoslavia.” Quoting a report by the International Media Corporation, Chossudovsky wrote:

Reliable sources report that the United States is now [1994] actively participating in the arming and training of the Muslim forces of Bosnia-Herzegovina in direct contravention of the United Nations accords. US agencies have been providing weapons made in … China (PRC), North Korea (DPRK) and Iran… … It was [also] reported that 400 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran) arrived in Bosnia with a large supply of arms and ammunition. It was alleged that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had full knowledge of the operation and that the CIA believed that some of the 400 had been detached for future terrorist operations in Western Europe.

During September and October [1994], there has been a stream of “Afghan” Mujahedin … covertly landed in Ploce, Croatia (South-West of Mostar) from where they have traveled with false papers … before deploying with the Bosnian Muslim forces in the Kupres, Zenica and Banja Luka areas…

The Mujahedin landing at Ploce are reported to have been accompanied by US Special Forces equipped with high-tech communications equipment, … The sources said that the mission of the US troops was to establish a command, control, communications and intelligence network to coordinate and support Bosnian Muslim offensives – in concert with Mujahideen and Bosnian Croat forces.

Further, a Congressional report issued in 1997, “confirms unequivocally the complicity of the Clinton Administration with several Islamic fundamentalist organisations including Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda,” and that, “The “Bosnian pattern” described in the 1997 Congressional RPC report was replicated in Kosovo. With the complicity of NATO and the US State Department. Mujahideen mercenaries from the Middle East and Central Asia were recruited to fight in the ranks of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998-99, largely supporting NATO’s war effort.” It was revealed that, “the task of arming and training of the KLA had been entrusted in 1998 to the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Services MI6.”

After the US/British instigated conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, Halliburton subsidiary KBR got another interesting contract. As the Asia Times reported, KBR’s “big break came in December 1995. Dick Cheney had been the chief executive officer of parent company Halliburton for only two months. KBR was sent to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo to build two army camps in the middle of two deserted wheat fields. Instead it built two cities, one in Bosnia and one in Kosovo – complete with mail delivery and 24-hour food and laundry. In other words: without KBR, there would be no operating US Army in Bosnia and Kosovo. And the money was great: from 1995-2000, the KBR bill to the US government was more than $2 billion.” On top of this:

KBR’s strategic masterpiece is Camp Bondsteel – the largest and most expensive US Army base since Vietnam, still in use today, complete with roads, its own power generators, houses, satellite dishes, a helicopter airfield and of course a Vietnam-style prison. By a fabulous coincidence, Camp Bondsteel is right on the path of the Albanian-Macedonian-Bulgarian Oil (AMBO) Trans-Balkan Pipeline. This key piece of Pipelineistan is supposed to connect the oil-and-gas-rich Caspian Sea with Europe. The feasibility project for AMBO was conducted by none other than KBR.

As Michel Chossudovsky wrote, “The plans to build Camp Bondsteel under a lucrative multibillion dollar DoD [Department of Defense] contract with Halliburton’s Texas based subsidiary KBR were formulated while Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s CEO,” and that, “The US and NATO had advanced plans to bomb Yugoslavia before 1999, and many European political leaders now believe that the US deliberately used the bombing of Yugoslavia to establish camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. According to Colonel Robert L. McCure, ‘Engineering planning for operations in Kosovo began months before the first bomb was dropped’.” The reasoning behind this was that:

One of the objectives underlying Camp Bondsteel was to protect the Albanian-Macedonian-Bulgarian Oil pipeline project (AMBO), which was to channel Caspian sea oil from the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Burgas to the Adriatic.

Coincidentally, two years prior to the invasion, in 1997, a senior executive of `Brown & Root Energy, a subsidiary of Halliburton, Edward L. (Ted) Ferguson had been appointed to head AMBO. The feasibility plans for the AMBO pipeline were also undertaken by Halliburton’s engineering company, Kellog, Brown & Root Ltd.

KBR in Afghanistan and Iraq:

As Dan Briody wrote in The Halliburton Agenda, “When troops were deployed to Afghanistan, so was Kellogg Brown & Root. They built US bases in Bagram and Kandahar for $157 million. As it had done in the past, KBR has men on the ground before the first troops even arrived in most locations.” It was reported that KBR “was awarded a $100 million contract in 2002 to build a new U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, from the State Department.”

As the Center for Public Integrity reported, “KBR, Inc., the global engineering and construction giant, won more than $16 billion in U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2006—far more than any other company.”

Indeed, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq presented Halliburton and its subsidiary, KBR, with an amazing opportunity of war profiteering on a scale never before seen. Not only was the company enriching itself, but its former CEO, Dick Cheney, currently Vice President of the United States, “sold most of his Halliburton shares when he left the company, but retained stock options worth about $8m,” and the Guardian reported in 2003 that KBR “is still making annual payments to its former chief executive, the vice-president Dick Cheney.”

In December of 2005, the Chicago Tribune reported that, “A proposal prohibiting defense contractor involvement in human trafficking for forced prostitution and labor was drafted by the Pentagon last summer, but five defense lobbying groups oppose key provisions.” The lobbying groups, “say they’re in favor of the idea in principle, but said they believe that implementing key portions of it overseas is unrealistic.

They represent thousands of firms, including some of the industry’s biggest names, such as DynCorp International and Halliburton subsidiary KBR, both of which have been linked to trafficking-related concerns.” However, human trafficking experts have criticized the move by the lobbying groups, and told “the Pentagon that the policy would merely formalize practices that have allowed contractors working overseas to escape punishment for involvement in trafficking.”

The allegations of human trafficking include, “the alleged involvement of DynCorp employees in buying women and girls as sex slaves in Bosnia during the U.S. military’s deployment there in the late 1990s,” and that, “Middle Eastern firms working under American subcontracts in Iraq, and a chain of human brokers beneath them, engaged in the kind of abuses condemned elsewhere by the U.S. government as human trafficking,” which pertained to KBR. The Chicago Tribune then reported in 2006 that, “some of KBR’s subcontractors, and a chain of human brokers stretching to South and Southeast Asia, allegedly engaged in the same kinds of abuses routinely condemned” as human trafficking.

In December of 2007, it was reported that, “A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.” The article continued, “Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” Jones filed a lawsuit against Halliburton and KBR, and “says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave. Jones described the container as sparely furnished with a bed, table and lamp.”

KBR and the North American Union:

More recently, KBR has been awarded contracts by Shell Canada, now majority owned by its parent company, Royal Dutch Shell, “to provide field construction and module fabrication services by Shell Canada for the Scotford Upgrader Expansion east of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.” Business Wire reported that, “The Scotford Upgrader Expansion project is part of the Athabasca Oil Sands Project (AOSP) Expansion, which will add approximately 100,000 barrels per day of capacity to the AOSP bitumen mining and upgrading facilities. AOSP is a joint venture between Shell Canada, Chevron Canada Limited and Western Oil Sands L.P. The total estimated cost of the project is between Cdn $10 billion and $12.8 billion.”

This is significant because it directly relates to the “deep integration” of Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a North American Union under the auspices of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). The Independent Task Force on the Future of North America was a joint task force created between the US-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE). The purpose of this task force was to produce a document, which would serve as a blueprint for the implementation of “integrating” the three countries of North America into a regional block, ultimately into a North American Union.

The report was issued 2 months after the leaders of the 3 nations signed the Security and Prosperity Partnership agreement in 2005, and is titled, “Building a North American Community.”

In this document, regarding integrating energy sectors, it stated, “Canada’s vast oilsands, once a high-cost experimental means of extracting oil, now provide a viable new source of energy that is attracting a steady stream of multibillion dollar investments, and interest from countries such as China, and they have catapulted Canada into second place in the world in terms of proved oil reserves.

Production from oilsands fields is projected to reach 2 million barrels per day by 2010.”29 The report further stated, “the three governments need to work together to ensure energy security for people in all three countries. Issues to be addressed include the expansion and protection of the North American energy infrastructure.”

In 2006, the SPP created a new organization with the specific purpose of “advising” and “directing” the three governments on how to integrate properly and to set deadlines for specific programs. This organization is called the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC).

The Canadian membership of the North American Competitiveness Council includes Dominic D’Alessandro, President and CEO of Manulife Financial, who is also Chairman of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), David A. Ganong, President of Ganong Bros. Limited, as well as being a director of the CCCE and a director of Sun Life Financial, Hunter Harrison, President and CEO of Canadian National Railway Company and member of the CCCE, Linda Hasenfratz, CEO of Linamar Corporation who also sits on the board of CIBC, Michael Sabia, President and CEO of Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), Annette Verschuren, President of The Home Depot Canada and member of the board of the CCCE, Richard E. Waugh, President and CEO of The Bank of Nova Scotia who also is on the board of the Institute for International Finance, is a member of the Chairman’s Advisory Council for the Council of the Americas, and the IMF’s Capital Markets Consultative Group. Further members of the NACC include Richard L. George, President and CEO of Suncor Energy Inc., an American who is Honourary Chair of the CCCE, and Paul Desmarais, Jr., Chairman and Co-CEO of Power Corporation of Canada.

Suncor, one of the Canadian corporations on the NACC, has as a member of its board of directors an American by the name of John Huff. John R. Huff, also happens to be on the board of directors of KBR, now in a joint project with Shell in developing the oil sands, as recommended by the SPP.

KBR and Concentration Camps:

The New York Times reported in 2003, that, “Since the attacks of Sept. 11, Kellogg Brown & Root has won significant additional business from the federal government and the Pentagon. It has built cells for detainees at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and is the exclusive logistics supplier for the Navy and the Army, providing services like cooking, construction, power generation and fuel transportation.” In 2005, the Independent reported that, “A subsidiary of Halliburton, the oil services group once led by the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, has won a $30m (£16m) contract to help build a new permanent prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”

On January 24, 2006, KBR, which was still a subsidiary of Halliburton at the time, got a contract from the Department of Homeland Security, “to support the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in the event of an emergency.” The press release on KBR’s website further stated that the contract has a “maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term, consisting of a one-year based period and four one-year options, the competitively awarded contract will be executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District. KBR held the previous ICE contract from 2000 through 2005.” The Executive Director of the KBR Government and Infrastructure division was quoted in the release as saying the contract, “builds on our extremely strong track record in the arena of emergency operations support.”

The contract awarded to KBR, a construction firm, “provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs,”.

Further,

“The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster.”

As author, professor and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott notes in his book, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, “On February 6, 2007, homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff announced that the fiscal year 2007 federal budget would allocate more than $400 million to add sixty-seven hundred additional detention beds (an increase of 32 percent over 2006).” Scott goes on to state that this was “in partial fulfillment of an ambitious ten-year Homeland Security strategic plan, code-named Endgame, authorized in 2003,” whose goal was to “remove all removable aliens,” as well as “potential terrorists.”

As Scott wrote in an article shortly after the KBR contract was issued in 2006, “the contract evoked ominous memories of Oliver North’s controversial Rex-84 ‘readiness exercise’ in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary ‘refugees,’ in the context of ‘uncontrolled population movements’ over the Mexican border into the United States.” Scott quoted Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 as a military analyst leaked the “Pentagon Papers” about the military’s activities in Vietnam, as saying, “Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters,” and that, “They’ve already done this on a smaller scale, with the ’special registration’ detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo.”

A recent San Francisco Chronicle article, co-authored by a former US Congressman, reported that, “Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.”

Conclusion

As the preparations of martial law are being put in place, it is of vital important to identify the specific corporations involved in this process. Administrations change, politicians go in and out of power, but the corporation is a consistent powerhouse. In this case, KBR has been a force to be reckoned with since the rise of Lyndon Johnson. Today, it has reached new heights. It was necessary to examine the recent history of this company’s activities, much the same as identifying a person’s own history and experiences to account for their present personality: so as to better understand their actions today. Given KBR’s history related to war and violence, more light should be shed on their current activities with the Department of Homeland Security, as morality is not a concept KBR seems to understand.