Why the Limo Lib Tears over Darfur

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Why the Limo Lib Tears over Darfur

Postby greencrow0 » Mon Sep 25, 2006 10:35 pm

<!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>We finally find out why the Limosine Liberals are crying crocodile tears over Darfur</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>thanks to wayne madsen <br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/">www.waynemadsenreport.com/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <br><br>Sep. 25, 2006 -- WMR has been told by oil industry insiders that there has been a conscious plan by Big Oil to destabilize small countries and territories where space-based imagery has discovered large oil and natural gas reserves in surrounding waters or within their borders. This has manifested itself in a bloody army rebellion in East Timor, which sits on large reserves in the Timor Sea; the small Pacific island territory of Pitcairn, where members of the island government who are direct descendants of the HMS Bounty mutineers were charged with and convicted by Britain for pedophilia and incest and ordered to prison after what amounted to be a show trial; <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>and Darfur, Sudan, where premeditated genocide is depopulating the province.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <p></p><i></i>
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Onward Corporate Soldiers

Postby * » Mon Sep 25, 2006 11:48 pm

<br> You don't have to wait to hear it from Madsen. Just google person/country/event and IMF WTO. Cuts to the chase every time....<br><br><br> <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>"...For many Americans, events in <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Somalia</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->, Haiti, Rwanda, and now Yugoslavia, East Timor, and Colombia, are the product of local circumstances and conditions—tribal and ethnic hatreds, corrupt governments, out- of- control militaries, drug trafficking, a culture of vengeance, and so on. The present liberal view is that the devolution of states into atavistic violence and genocide requires an armed humanitarian response by the Great Powers on the grounds that "We had to do something."<br><br> Michel Chossudovsky's very important book, The Globalization of Poverty1 addresses the question, "Who's ‘we'?" He takes us beyond the shell game of world power—"it's the transnational corporations"; "it's G- 7 banks and the IMF"; "it's American hegemony." Chossudovsky confronts head on the links between ever higher levels of civil violence and massacre, and acute social and environmental distress, with the modalities of market expansion.<br><br> The devolution of some states into heavily militarized bands and privatized security forces, organized gangsterism, secessionist struggles, and "black" economies are part of the rearticulation of the power of other states with the dominant sources of economic power. The best expression of these hybrid forms of power are the international financial institutions, the IFIs. Chossudovsky examines the underlying mechanisms of a global economic system undergoing a deepening crisis, exploring its political dimensions, which, once understood, make piecemeal and purely economic solutions look impossibly naive or disingenuous. The book offers a darker view than most of what is at stake in the upcoming World Trade Organization (WTO) conference.<br><br> The current system, Chossudovsky argues, is one of "capital creation through destruction." He offers a new perspective that sheds much light on the recent "constitutional" pretensions to sovereignty of the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and various binding trade agreements. The IFIs' "liberalization" policies are routinely justified on the grounds they lead to development, local wealth creation, and—at some undetermined future point—the general welfare. On the contrary, says Chossudovsky, in country after country these policies function to increase both urban and rural poverty. Wages and labor costs are regulated on a world level. "Global poverty is an input on the supply side, the global economic system feeds on cheap labor."<br><br> To perceive the effects of the "new interventionist framework," of macro- economic restructuring in the developing world, the truth is in the details. Fully half the book is a meticulous study of policies implemented by the IFIs in Somalia, Rwanda, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, the Russian Federation, and the former Yugoslavia. The author's recent work on Albania and Kosovo, appearing regularly in this magazine, continues his painstaking appraisal of the civil wars, famine, genocide, economic collapse, and the wholesale destruction of entire national societies inextricably linked to the operation of this regulatory regime. Significantly, developments elsewhere in the Third World find their echo in the internal policies of the G- 7 states, dismantling their own domestic economies and casting whole segments of their national populations into increasing marginality and poverty. The chickens most definitely are returning to roost..."</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:JGFrSNGCvQkJ:www.covertaction.org/content/view/79/75/+Somalia+WTO+IMF&hl=en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=7&client=firefox-a">more</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br> ***<br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:JGFrSNGCvQk">US covert operations underway in Somalia; resource conflict escalates over Horn of Africa</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br> <br>By Larry Chin<br>Online Journal Associate Editor<br><br><br>May 22, 2006, 01:03<br><br><br>According to a May 16 report in the Washington Post, US analysts of Africa policy and officials of Somalia’s interim government say that the Bush administration is secretly supporting secular Somali warlords, whose groups are battling Islamic groups for control of Mogadishu.<br><br>While the Bush administration has continued to dodge questions about what appear to be “classic” covert operations (similar to those taking place in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Colombia, etc.), Somali government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari has unequivocally declared “the US government funded the warlords in the recent battle in Mogadishu, there is no doubt about that. This cooperation . . . only fuels further civil war.”<br><br>Somalia is considered a "terrorist haven," as well as a potential “hotbed of al Qaeda activity.” It is no surprise that in recent press conferences, new White House spokesman and propaganda mouthpiece (former Fox News pundit) Tony Snow repeatedly referred to “al Qaeda terrorists.”<br><br>A senior US intelligence official quoted in the Washington Post article (who asked not to be named) says that Somalia presents “a classic ‘enemy of our enemy’ situation” (but “not an al Qaeda safe haven yet”), while former Clinton administration Africa specialist John Prendergast (now a senior advisor for the George Soros-funded International Crisis Group think tank) notes that “the US relies on buying intelligence from warlords and other participants in the Somali conflict, and hoping that the strongest of the warlords can snatch a live suspect or two" [for interrogation or rendition-LC].”<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Competing Geostrategic and Energy Interests in Somalia</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>Somalia is of geostrategic interest to the Bush administration, and the focus of operations and policy since 2001. This focus is a continuation of long-term policies of both the Clinton administration and the George H.W. Bush administrations. Somalia’s resources have been eyed by Western powers since the days of the British Empire.<br><br>According to the US Energy Information Administration, Somalia currently has no proven oil reserves, and only 200 billion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves, and no hydrocarbon production. But this has not dimmed continuing interest in Somalia’s untapped and unexplored potential, and the possibility of an energy bonanza following any resolution of the country’s “internal security problems.” The Somalian regime currently welcomes oil interests. Conoco, Agip, Amoco, Chevron, and Phillips held concessions in the area. Of more immediate logistical and military interest, Somalia is situated on a key corridor between the Middle East and Africa, strategically located on the coast of the Arabian Sea, a short distance from Yemen.<br><br>As laid bare in the January 1993 report by Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times, "The Oil Factor in Somalia," US oil companies, including Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips were positioned to exploit Somalia’s rich oil reserves during the reign of pro-US President Mohammed Siad Barre. These companies had secured billion-dollar concessions to explore and drill in large portions of the Somali countryside prior to the coup led by warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid that toppled Barre. The US Somalia envoy at the time was CIA operative Robert Oakley, a chief “counter-terrorism” officer during the George H.W. Bush presidency, and veteran of the Afghanistan and Iran-Contra operations of the 1980s. Conoco’s Mogadishu office housed the US embassy and military headquarters.<br><br>The infamous Somalia military operation of 1993, popularly depicted in the Philadelphia Inquirer series (and subsequent Hollywood film) "Blackhawk Down," was not a humanitarian mission, but an undeclared UN/US war launched by the George H.W. Bush adminstration, and inherited by the Clinton presidency. The operation was spearheaded by Deputy National Security Adviser Jonathan Howe (who remained in charge of the UN operation after Clinton took office), and approved by Colin Powell, then head of the Joint Chiefs.<br><br>The current Bush administration’s escalation in Somalia is a trip “back to the future.” As noted by William Engdahl, “Yemen fits nicely as an ‘emerging target’ with the other target nearby, Somalia,” both of which are important geostrategic “choke points”:<br><br>“Washington’s choice of Somalia and Yemen is a matched pair, as a look at a Middle East/Horn of Africa map will confirm. Yemen sits at the oil transit chokepoint of Bab el-Mandap, the narrow point controlling oil flow connecting the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean. Yemen also has oil, although no one yet knows just how much. It could be huge. A US firm, Hunt Oil Co. is pumping 200, 000 barrels a day from there but that is likely only the tip of the find.<br><br>“A new US cleansing of Somalian ‘tyranny’ would open the door for these US oil companies to map and develop the possibly huge oil potential in Somalia. Yemen and Somalia are two flanks of the same geological configuration, which holds large potential petroleum deposits, as well as being the flanks of the oil chokepoint from the Red Sea.”<br><br>The US, and US-affiliated oil interests, must, at the very least, find ways to head off the aggressive oil and gas-related operations on the part of China and its oil companies throughout the Horn of Africa region, Kenya, and Ethiopia, and West Africa.<br><br>The intense uproar over genocide in Darfur, and shrill calls for military intervention, masks intense geostrategic resource conflict being waged between competing superpowers.<br><br>As Engdahl notes, “Sudan, as noted, has become a major oil supplier to China whose national oil company has invested more than $3 billion since 1999, building oil pipelines from the south to the Red Sea port. The coincidence of this fact with the escalating concern in Washington about genocide and humanitarian disaster in oil-rich Darfur in southern Sudan, is not lost on Beijing. China threatened a UN veto against any intervention against Sudan. The first act of a re-elected [sic] Dick Cheney late last year was to fill his vice presidential jet with UN Security Council members to fly to Nairobi to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, an eerie reminder of Defense Secretary Cheney’s ‘humanitarian’ concern over Somalia in 1991.”<br><br>Recently, exploration teams from Australia have been hunting for oil in Somalia’s Puntland. Canadian lawyer Jay Park, “one of the world’s top oil and gas lawyers,” is working with the Somalian government to create a "credible petroleum regime". According to Park, "(Somalia) is one of the poorest countries in the world, but it may be sitting on some of the greatest oil and gas treasures.”<br>With the world facing Peak Oil and Gas, the world’s superpowers are racing to secure every last drop of oil and natural gas from every remaining inch of the planet, with the African continent quickly becoming the stage for new violence and warfare. It is no surprise that Anglo-American oil interests, and the Bush administration’s covert operatives, are working Somalia, and the region, for all it is worth. (many embedded links at original)<br><br><br><br><br> <!--EZCODE IMAGE START--><img src="http://www.corpwatch.org/img/pic/peacekeeping.jpg" style="border:0;"/><!--EZCODE IMAGE END--><br><br><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11598">Darfur Diplomacy: Enter the Contractors</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><br>by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch<br>October 21st, 2004<br><br><br><br>Rwandan and Nigerian soldiers will arrive in western Sudan this week as the first deployment of a five nation 4,500 strong peacekeeping force dispatched from the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa to stem the violence in Darfur. Providing logistical support for the mission will be two private contractors from California, both of whom have mixed records carrying out similar enterprises in the past.<br><br>In Iraq and Afghanistan, it is widely known that the U.S. Army uses contractors like Halliburton to carry out its missions. However, the Sudan contracts are run, not by the military, but by the U.S. State Department, a civilian agency comparable to a foreign ministry in most governments.<br><br>Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Bittrick, the deputy director of regional and security affairs for Africa at the State Department, flew to Addis two months ago to hammer out an agreement to support African Union troops by committing to provide housing, office equipment, transport, and communications gear. This will be provided via an "indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity" joint contract awarded to Dyncorp Corporation, and Pacific Architects & Engineers (PAE) worth $20.6 million.<br><br>The two companies are already recruiting new staff to send to the region. A "resourceful retired military officer who has a through understanding of logistics" is being sought for $85,000 a year as well as security chief to lead "40-60 personnel daily" at a salary of $53,750 a year.<br><br>The State Department has assigned the work to DynCorp even as the same agency officially rebuked the company last week for its employees "aggressive behaviour" doing guard duty for Afghan leader Hamid Karzai and despite PAE's record of allegedly overcharging the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.<br><br>The Sudan work is being carried out under a five-year task order issued on May 27th, 2003 by the State Department. The open-ended contract allows the State Department to use the two companies anywhere in Africa. It is identical to the kind of contract that the Pentagon uses to employ Halliburton anywhere in the world from Afghanistan to Iraq, according to Ed Mueller, the director of international programs at the State Department's acquisition division.<br><br>"The only difference with the Pentagon contracts is that this is a smaller contract," Mueller told CorpWatch. The contract has been used to buy $67 million worth of services from both companies in Burundi, Sudan and Liberia in the past year and is capped at $100 million for each company. "These are cost-plus contracts so the companies get reimbursed for all expenses and can charge a profit that ranges between 5 and 8 percent."<br><br>Neither Andy Michels, the director of peacekeeping programs for Dyncorp, nor Stacy Rabin, Sudan program director for PAE, agreed to comment on either company's current or future role in Sudan. "We have a clause in our contract that says we are not allowed to talk to the media," said Rabin.<br>Disaster in Darfur<br><br>The situation in Darfur is grim. More than one million people have fled their homes and up to 50,000 people have been killed as a result of clashes between pro-government nomadic militias and the settled Darfur population. (Both sides are Muslim).<br><br>The conflict began in the arid and impoverished region of Darfur, which means land of the Fur, over land and grazing rights between the nomads and farmers from the Fur, Massaleet and Zagawa ethnic groups. Early in 2003 two rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), began attacking government targets, claiming that the region was being neglected by the central government in Khartoum.<br><br>The government reacted by mobilizing "self-defence militias" following rebel attacks but denies any links to the most notorious groups that have attacked the settled farmers - the Janjaweed - who have been accused of trying to "cleanse" large swathes of territory of black Africans.<br><br>Refugees from Darfur say that following air raids by government aircraft, the Janjaweed ride into villages on horses and camels, slaughtering people and stealing whatever they can find. Women have reported being kidnapped by the Janjaweed and held as sex slaves.<br><br>Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general and Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, are among the many dignitaries who have paraded through the region this summer taking stock of what the U.N. calls the worst current humanitarian crisis on the planet.<br><br>Some commentators point out that the United States sudden interest in Sudan may also have to do with the fact that the country has vast oil reserves, including in southern Darfur. In the early 1980s Chevron, an oil company from California, was exploring for oil in the country, but abandoned its concessions in 1985 when fighting broke out between government and rebel forces. Sudan turned over the rights to other countries and today the country exports 320,000 barrels of oil per day to China and Pakistan.<br><br><br>State Department officials says that PAE is expected to play the main role in the Darfur mission and that the company has already started constructing housing for the troops that will be arriving this week if all goes well (the deployment has already been delayed at least once because of the shortage of housing).<br><br>"Private companies can do the job more quickly and efficiently in the short term than a government bureaucracy," says Charles Snyder, the director of Sudan programs for the State Department who was formerly National Intelligence Officer for Africa in the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1990s. "Whether or not they can do better in the long term is situational," he told CorpWatch.<br><br>PAE already provides staff for a so-called Civilian Protection Monitoring Team (CPMT) which monitors human rights in Sudan under the State Department contract. The CPMT office is run by Brigadier General Frank Toney (retired), who was previously commander of Special Forces for the United States Army and organized covert missions into Iraq and Kuwait in the first Gulf War. Their job is to investigate complaints from the local community about human rights violations and issue independent reports on these matters.<br><br>Georgette Gagnon, deputy director of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, who has just returned from a month long trip to Darfur is concerned about the use of private contractors, based on her previous experience of monitoring private contractor human rights abuses in Bosnia.<br><br>"There is not a lot of transparency about these contracts, we don't know how they vet recruits or what kind of training they get," she says. Unlike a government agency, the private companies are not required to tell the public exactly what they do, often citing "business confidentiality."<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Military Contractors Working for Peace</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br>Dyncorp is already working in Sudan, under the same State Department contract, on the long-standing "North-South" peace negotiations to end the 21-year civil war between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, the rebel group based in the south. The company provides staff in Washington DC who arrange housing and transportation to the delegates who meet in Nairobi, Kenya.<br><br>"Why are we using private contractors to do peace negotiations in Sudan? The answer is simple," says a senior United States government official who works on Sudan-related issues who preferred to remain anonymous. "We are not allowed to fund a political party or agenda under United States law, so by using private contractors, we can get around those provisions. Think of this as somewhere between a covert program run by the CIA and an overt program run by the United States Agency for International Development. It is a way to avoid oversight by Congress."<br><br>DynCorp has dozens of these little contracts all over the world from Afghanistan to the Mexican border, several of which have landed the company in hot water. Most recently French defense minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, who recently visited Afghan president Hamid Karzai in Kabul, was quoted saying that the behavior of Karzai's DynCorp bodyguards "gives a very bad impression" because of the aggressive way they treated visitors. Indeed even Colin Powell's security staff were once reported by the Washington Post as "furious" at the way that DynCorp guards treated them.<br><br>The State Department rebuked DynCorp last week for the incident. Mike Dickerson, director of communications for Computer Sciences Corporation, DynCorp's parent company, declined to comment on the State Department scolding but pointed out that the government had also stated that DynCorp was providing "outstanding" services in difficult and dangerous circumstances in Afghanistan.<br><br>But DynCorp's role in another State Department contract also appears designed to circumvent United States law under Plan Colombia. In the Colombian conflict, Washington has supplied more than 70 Black Hawk and Huey helicopters and other military hardware that are maintained and flown by private contractors.<br><br>Anxious to avoid the "secret wars" conducted by the Pentagon in Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s, Congress limited the number of US personnel that can operate in Colombia to 400 in uniform and 400 civilian contractors at any given time. US law also requires congressional notification before the government can approve the export of military services valued at $50 million or more.<br><br>By limiting each individual contract to several million dollars; labeling them peace-keeping missions; employing retired CIA and Special Forces personnel working for private contractors as well as foreign nationals (to whom the 400 person ceiling does not apply), Congress does not have to be notified, making the contracts harder to oversee.<br><br>Gagnon also points out that in the late 1990s, DynCorp contractors in Bosnia were caught trafficking in child sex slaves in Bosnia while working on a peace-keeping mission. "Many of the private contractors didn't have a clue about the local culture or anything about the country so you wonder how effective they can be. Most of them were just ex-military or police officers," she said.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>PAE's African Past</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br>Aside from the risk of unauthorized ventures being run by the executive branch beyond the scrutiny of Congress, there's a more prosaic reason to wonder whether private contractors are the best way for the US to carry out its foreign policy. As in the well documented abuses by Halliburton and the other Iraq contractors, PAE has a history of being accused of overcharging.<br><br>PAE, which also offers support for oil drilling projects around the world, has been involved in several African peacekeeping missions such as the air and sealift of personnel and supplies, equipment maintenance, and the provision of food fuel and water for the United Nations in Sierra Leone in 2003 and in the Congo in 2001.<br><br>The company's work in the Congo was investigated by the U.N. auditors because it was so expensive. When they won the contract to support the expanded UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo, PAE had been hired to replace South African Air Force specialists. Instead, when PAE managers arrived in the Congo, they hired away the South African fire-fighters and cargo-handlers for better, dollar-based salaries - but at a higher cost to the U.N..<br><br>Allegations of favoritism in the bid award were at first dismissed but when the final costs of the mission exceeded $75 million, despite the fact that the initial contract was capped at $34.2 million an investigation ensued. United Nations auditors subsequently reviewed the contract and presented a report to the General Assembly criticizing the decision to reject the original low bid. The award had been given to PAE on the grounds that Crown Agents, the low bidder which had offered to do the contract for $12 million less, had provided incomplete information. The auditors found that the lowest bidder was "erroneously penalized," and that the information alleged to be lacking (details on equipping and maintaining seven airfields) had in fact been supplied.<br><br>PAE group executive for government services Barry Wright told a South African journalist that the matter was no longer relevant. "All of the issues were resolved a long time ago," he said.<br><br>Peter Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Corporate Warriors is not so sure that the secretive ad-hoc use of private contractors are the best way to support peace-keeping. "A trend seems to be developing that when the US government finally decides to support peacekeeping in Africa --be it in Liberia or now Sudan-- it increasingly avoids a firm political commitment by avoiding using [official] US government means. There are obvious reasons for this, but we need to take the measure of the advantages and disadvantages of this in the policy debate as well."<br><br>But clearly for the current U.S. administration, the risks of using contractors are outweighed by the benefits. If the peacekeeping mission in Darfur is successful, the government can take credit. If anything goes wrong, as in Bosnia, the contractors can be blamed for the mistakes.<br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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Re: Onward Corporate Soldiers

Postby rain » Tue Sep 26, 2006 12:35 am

U.S. spy agencies outsourcing work <br>Terror and Iraq wars create huge demand for contract workers<br>Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times<br><br>Sunday, September 24, 2006<br><br>At the National Counterterrorism Center -- the agency created two years ago to prevent another attack such as Sept. 11 -- more than half of the employees are not U.S. government analysts or terrorism experts. Instead, they are outside contractors. <br><br>At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., senior officials say it is routine for career officers to look around the table during meetings on secret operations and be surrounded by so-called "green badgers" -- nonagency employees who carry special-colored IDs. <br><br>Some of the work being outsourced is extremely sensitive. Abraxas Corp., a private company in McLean, Va., founded by a group of CIA veterans, devises "covers," or false identities, for an elite group of overseas case officers, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the arrangement. <br><br>Contractors are also turning up in increasing numbers in clandestine facilities around the world. At the CIA station in Islamabad, Pakistan, as many as three-quarters of those on hand since the Sept. 11 attacks have been contractors. In Baghdad, site of the agency's largest overseas presence, contractors at times have outnumbered full-time CIA employees, according to officials who have held senior positions in the station. <br><br>The post-Sept. 11 period has brought sweeping changes to the U.S. intelligence community. Spy budgets have swelled by more than $10 billion a year, and agencies have seen their roles and authorities altered by reform legislation. <br><br>Largely because of the demands of the war on terror and the drawn-out conflict in Iraq, U.S. spy agencies have turned in unprecedented numbers to outside contractors to perform jobs once the domain of government-employed analysts and secret agents. <br><br>The proliferation of contractors has outstripped the intelligence community's ability to keep track of them. <br><br>Former intelligence officials said most U.S. spy agencies do not have even approximate counts of the numbers of contractors they are employing -- although several officials said the number at the CIA has nearly doubled in the past five years and now surpasses the full-time workforce of about 17,500. Often, the contract employees had previous ties to the agencies. <br><br>Concerned by the lack of data and direction, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte earlier this year ordered a comprehensive study of the use of contractors. Ronald Sanders, a senior intelligence official in charge of the examination, said that all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have been instructed to turn over records on contractors, and that one focus of the study will be whether outsourcing highly sensitive jobs is appropriate. <br><br>"We have to come to some conclusion about what our core intelligence mission is and how many (full-time employees) it's going to take to accomplish that mission," Sanders said, adding that the growth in contracting over the past five years has been driven by necessity and was extremely haphazard. <br><br>"I wish I could tell you it's by design," he said. "But I think it's been by default." <br><br>Senior U.S. intelligence officials said that the reliance on contractors is so deep that agencies couldn't function without them. <br><br>"If you took away the contractor support, they'd have to put yellow tape around the building and close it down," said a former senior CIA official who was responsible for overseeing contracts before leaving the agency earlier this year. <br><br>This former official and more than a dozen other current and former U.S. intelligence officials interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of intelligence contracting work. <br><br>The use of outside companies has enabled spy agencies to tap a deep reservoir of talent during a period of unprecedented demand. Many of the people hired have been retired case officers and analysts who were eager to contribute to the response to the Sept. 11 attacks and who have more expertise and operational experience than agency insiders. In fact, the CIA has created its own roster of retired case officers -- known as the "cadre" -- who are eligible to be hired as independent contractors for temporary assignments. <br><br>Even so, the trend has alarmed some intelligence professionals, who are concerned that using contractors to do spying work carries security risks and higher costs. They point to soaring profits being made by contracting companies, and a parade of veteran officers who have left intelligence agencies only to return with green badges and higher salaries. <br><br>Even people quick to praise the contributions of contractors express discomfort with the mercenary aspect of modern intelligence work. <br><br>"There's a commercial side to it that I frankly don't like," said James L. Pavitt, who retired in 2004 as head of the CIA's clandestine service. "I would much prefer to see staff case officers who are in the chain of command, and making a day-in and day-out conscious decision as civil servants in the intelligence business." <br><br>The CIA declined to comment on specific contracts, but defended the use of contractors for intelligence work. <br><br>"Contractors give the agency enormous flexibility and are an important part of our workforce," said Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the CIA. "As partners, they help us build or enhance specific capabilities we need for a finite period." <br><br>U.S. intelligence agencies have used contractors for decades. Corporate giants such as Lockheed-Martin have long competed for classified contracts to build spy planes and satellites. Spy services routinely use private companies to handle so-called "support" functions, such as providing security or building classified computer networks. <br><br>In fact, two-thirds of the contractors at the counterterrorism center are so-called "IT" workers managing computer systems. And independent contractors have at times played significant roles in overseas operations, including pilots who flew clandestine supply runs for the CIA in Vietnam. <br><br>But current and former officials said spy agencies now depend on contractors to a greater extent than ever envisioned to carry out their basic spying missions. <br><br>The trend toward hiring contractors is particularly pronounced at the CIA. Unlike other intelligence agencies that can take advantage of employees detailed to them from branches of the military, the CIA is more dependent on a civilian workforce. <br><br>The CIA has been hiring at a record pace in recent years. But it takes years to train new case officers, let alone develop seasoned operatives capable of delicate missions in global hot spots. The agency also has turned to contractors to plug deep holes left by staff cuts and hiring freezes in the 1990s. <br><br>Meanwhile, new intelligence entities created to fix Sept. 11-related failures -- including the intelligence director's office as well as centers tracking terrorism and weapons proliferation -- have created thousands of new positions and cannibalized the ranks of the CIA and other agencies. <br><br>One former senior CIA official said the agency has outsourced an array of core jobs in its own counterterrorism center, including the task of posting names of new terrorism suspects to immigration and law enforcement watch lists. <br><br>And despite restrictions that bar contractors from holding positions of authority over agency personnel, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that contractors function as de facto team leaders in numerous stations around the world, and routinely handle clandestine meetings with CIA sources. <br><br>In Baghdad, contractors "do everything, especially 'ops' work," said a former CIA officer who has served extensively in Iraq said of the operations functions. "They're recruiting (informants), managing the major relationships we have with the military, handling agents in support of frontline combat units. The guys doing that work are contractors. They're not staff officers." <br><br>Contractors have played similarly significant roles in Afghanistan. Gary C. Schroen, who was among the first CIA employees to enter the country after the Sept. 11 attacks, continued to travel to Pakistan and Afghanistan after retiring and going to work as a CIA contractor. Among his assignments was to monitor relationships with regional warlords as well as the head of the Afghan government's intelligence service. <br><br>There are restrictions on contract employees. At the CIA, for example, contractors may not supervise staff officers, disburse money or handle personnel matters such as filling out employee evaluation forms. For high-ranking officials who leave, there are other restrictions, including a required "cool down" period of one year during which they are barred from returning to the agency to solicit business. <br><br>But former CIA leaders are in high demand, and frequently serve as officers in companies that have contracts with their former agencies. <br><br>John O. Brennan, for example, retired last year as head of the National Counterterrorism Center, and is now chief executive of The Analysis Corp., which supplies contract analysts to the center. In an interview, Brennan said that any contracts with the counterterrorism center predate his arrival at The Analysis Corp. <br><br>Contractors are subject to the same background checks and security-clearance requirements as full-time employees, officials said. But some of that clearance work itself has been outsourced, officials said, and even the screening done by the CIA hasn't been infallible. <br><br>In one well-known case, David Passaro was hired as a contractor with the CIA's paramilitary service even though he had a record of abusive behavior and had been fired by a Connecticut police department. Passaro was convicted of felony assault earlier this year in federal court in North Carolina for his role in the beating of a detainee who died in Afghanistan in 2004. <br><br>U.S. intelligence officials said Passaro's case was an aberration, and that security problems have not been more frequent among contractors than among career officers. <br><br>In another high-profile case, the CIA inspector general is investigating whether the agency's former No. 3 official, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, improperly accepted expensive vacations and other rewards for awarding CIA contracts to a lifelong friend who is linked to the bribery scandal surrounding ex-Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham. <br><br>Some officials fear that the rapid growth in contracting is fueling a so-called "spy drain," in which talented officers are being lured to the private sector by companies offering pay hikes of 50 percent or more. <br><br>At the CIA, poaching became such a problem that former Director Porter Goss had to warn several companies to stop recruiting employees in the agency cafeteria, according to former officials familiar with the matter. One recently retired case officer said he had been approached twice in the line for Starbuck's coffee at the CIA cafeteria. <br><br>"It's like sharks in the water," said the officer, an overseas veteran who has handled assignments in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. "As soon as the word went around that I was leaving, my e-mail in-box was pinging. People were calling me at home." <br><br>Sanders, the official in Negroponte's office, said it is unclear whether the spy drain problem is real. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some officers are leaving early, he said, but attrition rates have not risen in recent years. <br><br>Another worry is that the reliance on contractors is eroding agency budgets. Sanders said a recent personnel study by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that contractors are typically paid 50 percent to 100 percent more than staff officers to perform comparable work -- a disparity that can create internal tensions. <br><br>"It's a serious morale problem when you've got a guy in the field making $80,000, and a contractor making $150,000," said the former case officer who served in Iraq. "And the (staff employee) is supposed to supervise the guy making twice the money." <br><br>The spike in the use of contractors probably will diminish as the bumper crop of recruits at the CIA and other agencies rise through the ranks. Officials said that process will take years. <br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/24/MNGBSL99K61.DTL">www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/ar...L99K61.DTL</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>welcome to 'the company'<br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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Re: Onward Corporate Soldiers

Postby rain » Tue Sep 26, 2006 12:57 am

Pope Benedict and Western Christendom’s jihad: “Better the Sultan’s turban than the Cardinal’s hat”<br><br>by Colin Buchanan<br> <br>September 17, 2006 <br>endempire,blogspot.com <br><br>Apart fom the sinister decision to launch an attack on Islam at this moment in history when the supreme question of war or peace hangs in the balance, there is a rather bizarre aspect to this whole affair viz. the curious decision to quote a Byzantine emperor’s views on Islam.<br><br>Byzantium had experienced first hand the brutality of the western crusaders who, goaded on by Catholic priests in 1203 had sacked the city in one of the greatest atrocities in history, magnified several-fold by the immense cultural and intellectual loss in what was one of the great centres of world civilization. This shocking act of delinquency way surpassed the sacking of Rome by the Goths or the, relatively humane, subsequent sacking of Byzantium by the Turks. Here is how it was recorded by one Byzantine historian:<br><br>"No one was without a share in the grief. In the alleys, in the streets, in the temples, complaints, weeping, lamentations, grief, the groaning of men, the shrieks of women, wounds, rape, captivity, the separation of those most closely united. Nobles wandered about ignominiously, those of venerable age in tears, the rich in poverty. Thus it was in the streets, on the corners, in the temple, in the dens, for no place remained unassailed or defended the suppliants. All places everywhere were filled full of all kinds of crime. Oh, immortal God, how great the afflictions of the men, how great the distress!"<br><br>The Byzantine historian Nicetas Koniates wrote: "even the Muslims are human and well-disposed, reported to[compared to] those people who carrie the cross of Christ on the shoulders"<br><br>Manual II Paleologos ( the emperor who Benedict quoted) had reason to fear the Muslims since Byzantium was perpetually on the verge of falling to them, as indeed it did in 1453. But even in the midst of that final siege one of the city’s last great statesmen was heard to say “Better the Sultan’s turban than the cardinal’s hat”<br><br>In fact the destruction or a least fatal weakening of the Byzantine Empire was the main outcome of the crusades whose nominal goal was the reconquest of the Holy Land. It was rather as if todays war against Islam was really an oblique attempt to undermine Europe and Russia in accordance with the perennial goals of British foreign policy as outlined by Mackinder i.e. that Europe and Eurasia should forever be divided. (That may very well be the case.Arguably, the turn towards Iraq only came when the campaign to destabilise Serbia and then Russia reached an impasse and even the submissive Yeltsin threatened to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia.) Certainly, with regard to the deep animosity between Western Christendom and the Orthodox world, history has repeated itself and under NATO’s occupation of Kosovo we have seen again the destruction of beautiful Byzantine churches by Tony and Bill’s favourite terrorists, the KLA.<br><br>Thank you,Your Holiness , for reminding us, unconsciously, of things you would rather keep forgotten, Western Christendom’s jihad against its religious foes culminating in the destruction of the beautiful city of Byzantium, echoed nearly a thousand years later in the destruction of Kosovo’s churches.<br> <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BUC20060917&articleId=3252">www.globalresearch.ca/ind...cleId=3252</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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Re: Onward Corporate Soldiers

Postby rain » Tue Sep 26, 2006 1:11 am

<!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Sir Halford John Mackinder</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> PC (February 15, 1861 - March 6, 1947), was an English geographer and geopolitician.<br><br>He was educated at Epsom College and Christ Church, Oxford, and specialised as a physical geographer, later branching into economics and political theory, arguing that physical and human geography should be treated as a single discipline<br><br>In 1887 he was appointed Reader in Geography at Oxford University, then by far the most senior position for a British geographer, announcing: "A platform has been given to a geographer." By 1899 he had drawn together a single School of Geography. <br>The climbing of Mt. Kenya in 1899. <br>In 1902 the publication of "Britain and The British Seas", which included the first comprehensive geomorphology of Britain, and in which he described Britain as 'a lump of coal surrounded by fish'. <br>In 1895, he was one of the founders of the <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>London School of Economics.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> In 1904 Mackinder gave a paper on "The Geographical Pivot of History" at the Royal Geographical Society, in which he formulated the <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Heartland Theory</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. This is often considered as a, if not the, founding moment of Geopolitics, as a field of study, although Mackinder did not use the term. Whilst the Heartland Theory initially receiving little attention outside geography, this theory would influence the foreign policies of world powers ever since. <br>He helped found the University of Reading in 1892, and the Geographical Association in 1893 which promoted (and promotes) the teaching of geography in schools. He was GAs chair from 1913 to 1946 and President from 1916. <br>He was knighted in 1920.<br><br> Possibly disappointed at not getting a full Chair, Mackinder left Oxford and became director of the London School of Economics between 1903 and 1908. After 1908, he concentrated on advocating the cause of imperial unity and only was involved in lecturing part-time. He was elected to Parliament in 1910 as Unionist Party member for the Glasgow Camlachie constituency and was defeated in 1922.<br><br>His next major work was in 1919 - Democratic Ideals and Reality - was a perspective on the 1904 work in the light of peace treaties and Woodrow Wilson's idealism. This contains his most famous quote: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World." Although Mackinder was anti-Bolshevik (as British High Commissioner he tried to unite the White Russian forces), the principal concern of his work was to warn of the possibility of another major war (a warning also given by economist John Maynard Keynes).<br><br>The Heartland Theory was enthusiastically taken up by the German school of Geopolitik, in particular by its main proponent Karl Haushofer. Whilst Geopolitik was later embraced by the German Nazi regime in the 1930s, Mackinder was always extremely critical of the German exploitation of his ideas. The German interpretation of the Heartland Theory is referred to explicitly (without mentioning the connection to Mackinder) in The Nazis Strike, the second of Frank Capra's Why We Fight series of American World War II propaganda films.<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halford_Mackinder">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halford_Mackinder</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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Re: Onward Corporate Soldiers

Postby rain » Tue Sep 26, 2006 1:26 am

MacKinder's World<br>by<br>Francis P. Sempa<br><br>Halford Mackinder’s ideas, which began to appear in print almost a century ago, have assumed classic status in the world of political geography. Policy makers and scholars remember them now mainly for the seemingly simple formula that control of Eastern Europe would bring command of the “Heartland,” thus control of the “World-Island” (Eurasia), and ultimately the world. His ideas in their entirety, including his own later reconsiderations, form a complex, powerful body of work. The author, who is deputy attorney general for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, revisits Mackinder’s professional career. ~ Ed.<br> <br> The study of international relations is impossible without a firm grasp of geography. The geographic factor in world history is the most fundamental because it is the most constant. Populations increase and decrease, natural resources are discovered and expended, political systems frequently change, empires and states rise and fall, technologies decline and advance, but the location of continents, islands, seas and oceans has not changed significantly throughout recorded history. That is why great nations neglect the study of geography at their peril. <br>No one understood better the important relationship between geography and world history than the great British geographer, Halford John Mackinder. Born in Gainsborough, England, in 1861, Mackinder attended Gainsborough Grammar School and Epsom College before entering Oxford in 1880. As a boy, according to W. H. Parker, Mackinder had “a strong curiosity about natural phenomena, … a love of the history of travel and exploration, an interest in international affairs, and a passion for making maps.”1<br><br>At Oxford, Mackinder fell under the influence of Michael Sadler and Henry Nottidge Mosely, key figures in the effort to establish geography as an independent field of study in England. Mackinder was appointed a lecturer in natural science and economic history in 1886 and that same year joined the Royal Geographical Society. According to Brian W. Blouet, one of Mackinder’s biographers, the membership of the Royal Geographical Society “consisted of men with a general interest in the world and its affairs, officers from the army and navy, businessmen, academics, schoolteachers, diplomats, and colonial administrators.”2 The next year (1887), Mackinder wrote his first major paper, “On the Scope and Methods of Geography,” which has been called “a classic document in the history of the development of British geography.”3 In that paper, Mackinder argued that “rational” political geography was “built upon and subsequent to physical geography.” “Everywhere,” he wrote, “political questions will depend on the results of the physical inquiry.” Political geography’s function was “to trace the interaction between man and his environment.” That environment, Mackinder explained, included the “configuration of the earth’s surface,” climate and weather conditions, and the presence or absence of natural resources.4<br><br>Four of the ideas mentioned in “On the Scope and Methods of Geography” are key to understanding Mackinder’s subsequent geopolitical writings. <br><br>First, Mackinder expressed his view that the goal of a geographer was to “look at the past [so] that he may interpret the present.”<br> <br>Second, he noted that man’s great geographical discoveries were nearing an end; there were very few “blanks remaining on our maps.”<br> <br>Third, Mackinder described the two kinds of political conquerors as “land-wolves and sea-wolves.”<br> <br>And, fourth, he recognized that technological improvements made possible “the great size of modern states.”5 <br>Upon the foundation of those four ideas Mackinder later constructed his famous global theory.<br><br>In June 1887, Mackinder was appointed Reader in Geography at Oxford, and he began to lecture on the influence of geography on European history. He visited the United States in 1892, lecturing at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore, Drexel, Harvard, Princeton and Johns Hopkins. The same year, he was appointed Principal of Reading College at Oxford, a position he held for eleven years. In 1893-1894, Mackinder gave a series of ten lectures on the relations of geography to history in Europe and Asia. Five years later, he helped found the School of Geography at Oxford, and participated in an expedition that climbed Mount Kenya, Africa’s second-highest peak.6<br><br>In 1902, Mackinder wrote his first major book, Britain and the British Seas. Although primarily concerned, in Mackinder’s words, “to present a picture of the physical features and conditions” of Britain, the book’s chapters on “The Position of Britain,” “Strategic Geography,” and “Imperial Britain” contain insights on global affairs that foreshadowed Mackinder’s subsequent geopolitical works. In the book, he described Britain as being “of Europe, yet not in Europe,” and as lying “off the shores of the great continent.” British predominance in the world rested on its “command of the sea,” wrote Mackinder, because “[t]he unity of the ocean is the simple physical fact underlying the dominant value of sea-power in the modern globe-wide world.” “A new balance of power is being evolved,” Mackinder opined, and it included “five great world states, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and America.” Mackinder suggested, however, that Britain’s position as the preeminent world power was endangered due to “permanent facts of physical geography” in the form of “the presence of vast Powers, broad-based on the resources of half continents” (i.e., Russia and the United States).7<br><br>The threat to British preeminence and to the liberty of the world was the subject of Mackinder’s bold, provocative essay, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” which he delivered to the Royal Geographical Society on January 25, 1904. He began this seminal work by noting that the last stage of “geographical exploration” (which he called the “Columbian epoch”) was nearing its end. “In 400 years,” he wrote, “the outline of the map of the world has been completed with approximate accuracy.” Moreover, since conquerors, missionaries, miners, farmers and engineers “followed so closely in the travelers’ footsteps,” the world was for the first time a “closed political system.” This meant, wrote Mackinder, that “every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.” Nations, in other words, could no longer safely ignore major events that occurred in far away places of the globe.<br><br>Mackinder’s avowed purposes in writing the “pivot” paper were to establish “a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations,” to provide “a formula which shall express certain aspects… of geographical causation in universal history,” and to set “into perspective some of the competing forces in current international politics.”<br><br>Mackinder pictured Europe and Asia as one great continent: “Euro-Asia.” He described Euro-Asia as: “a continuous land, ice-girt in the north, water-girt elsewhere, measuring twenty-one million square miles….” The center and north of Euro-Asia, he pointed out, measure “some nine million square miles, … have no available waterways to the ocean, but, on the other hand, … are generally favorable to the mobility of horsemen…. ” To the “east and south of this heart-land,” he further explained, “are marginal regions, ranged in a vast crescent, accessible to shipmen.”<br><br>Mackinder noted that between the fifth and sixteenth centuries, a “succession of … nomadic peoples” (Huns, Avars, Bulgarians, Magyars, Khazars, Patzinaks, Cumans, Mongols and Kalmuks) emerged from Central Asia to conquer or threaten the states and peoples located in the “marginal crescent” (Europe, the Middle East, southwest Asia, China, southeast Asia, Korea and Japan). Beginning in the late fifteenth century, however, the “great mariners of the Columbian generation” used seapower to envelop Central Asia. “The broad political effect” of the rise of sea powers, explained Mackinder, “was to reverse the relations of Europe and Asia….” “[W]hereas in the Middle Ages Europe was caged between an impassable desert to south, an unknown ocean to west, and icy or forested wastes to north and north-east, and in the east and south-east was constantly threatened by the superior mobility of the horsemen,” Mackinder further explained, “she now emerged upon the world, multiplying more than thirty-fold the sea surface and coastal lands to which she had access, and wrapping her influence around the Euro-Asiatic land-power which had hitherto threatened her very existence.”<br><br>Often unappreciated, however, Mackinder believed, was the fact that while Europe expanded overseas, the Russian state based in Eastern Europe and Central Asia expanded to the south and east, organizing a vast space of great human and natural resources. That vast space would soon be “covered with a network of railways,” thereby greatly enhancing the mobility and strategic reach of land power.<br><br>With that geo-historical background, Mackinder identified the northern-central core of Euro-Asia as the “pivot region” or “pivot state” of world politics. He placed Germany, Austria, Turkey, India and China, lands immediately adjacent to the pivot region, in an “inner crescent,” and the insular nations of Britain, South Africa, Australia, the United States, Canada and Japan in an “outer crescent.” He then warned that, “[t]he oversetting of the balance of power in favour of the pivot state, resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight.” Mackinder suggested that either a Russo-German alliance or a Sino-Japanese empire (which conquered Russian territory) could contend for world hegemony. In either case, “oceanic frontage” would be added to “the resources of the great continent,” thereby creating the geopolitical conditions necessary for producing a great power that was supreme both on land and at sea.<br><br>“I have spoken as a geographer,” Mackinder acknowledged toward the end of the paper. But he carefully avoided geographical determinism in assessing the world situation: “The actual balance of political power at any given time is… the product, on the one hand, of geographical conditions, both economic and strategic, and, on the other hand, of the relative number, virility, equipment and organization of the competing peoples.”8<br><br>Continue reading Sempa 1 • 2 • 3 • End Notes <br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD_Issues/amdipl_14/sempa_mac1.html">www.unc.edu/depts/diploma..._mac1.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br> <p></p><i></i>
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Re: Onward Corporate Soldiers

Postby rain » Tue Sep 26, 2006 2:01 am

this is an article by CHRISTOPHER J. FETTWEIS, found at, 'ironically', of all places <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/PARAMETERS/00summer/fettweis.htm">www.carlisle.army.mil/USA...ttweis.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Sir Halford Mackinder, Geopolitics, and Policymaking in the 21st Century <br> <br>"A victorious Roman general, when he entered the city, amid all the head-turning splendor of a `Triumph,' had behind him on the chariot a slave who whispered into his ear that he was mortal. When our statesmen are in conversation with the defeated enemy, some airy cherub should whisper to them from time to time this saying: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World." --Sir Halford Mackinder, 1919[1] <br><br>"Few modern ideologies are as whimsically all-encompassing, as romantically obscure, as intellectually sloppy, and as likely to start a third world war as the theory of `geopolitics.'" --Charles Clover, 1999[2] <br><br>Haushofer's ideas probably had a larger influence upon American strategic studies during the war than they did on German policy. Wartime paranoia fed an image of a secret German science of geopolitik that was driving Nazi action, bringing Mackinder and Haushofer onto the American intellectual radar screen. In 1942 Life magazine ran an article titled "Geopolitics: The Lurid Career of a Scientific System which a Briton Invented, the Germans Used, and the Americans Need to Study,"[11] which captured the mood of the period, imagining a cabal of foreign policy "scientists" dictating policy for the dictator. Opinions differed between those who prescribed rapid acceptance of geopolitik and those who dismissed it as pseudoscience. The latter opinion was strengthened, of course, by Germany's eventual defeat<br><br>The most influential American geopolitician to emerge out of the furor created by Haushofer and the quest for Lebensraum was Yale University professor Nicholas Spykman. Spykman, considered one of the leading intellectual forefathers of containment, speculated about power projection into and out of the Heartland. Whereas Mackinder assumed that geographical formations made for easiest access from the east, Spykman argued that the littoral areas of the Heartland, or what he called the "Rimland," was key to controlling the center. He updated Mackinder, positing, "Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world."[12] Spykman put an American twist on geopolitical theory, and laid the intellectual foundation for Kennan and those who argued that the Western powers ought to strengthen the Rimland to contain the Soviet Union, lest it use its control of the Heartland to command the World Island.[13] <br><br>Geopolitics as grand strategy was one of the important intellectual foundations for the West's Cold War containment policy. Canadian geographer Simon Dalby recognizes it as one of the "four security discourses (the others being sovietology, strategy, and the realist approach to international relations) which American `security intellectuals' have drawn on in constructing the `Soviet threat.'"[14] According to one of the preeminent historians of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis, in the late 1940s "there developed a line of reasoning reminiscent of Sir Halford Mackinder's geopolitics, with its assumption that none of the world's `rimlands' could be secure if the Eurasian `heartland' was under the domination of a single hostile power."[15] Gaddis describes how the containment policy evolved from countering Soviet expansion at every point in the rimlands to concentration of defense on a few key points, especially Western Europe and Japan. <br><br>While Mackinder's warnings of the advantages inherent in central positioning on the Eurasian landmass certainly became incorporated into Cold War American strategic thought and policy, some observers seem to believe that the principle architects of US foreign policy throughout the Cold War era must have been carrying Mackinder in their briefcases. Colin Gray wrote: <br><br>By far the most influential geopolitical concept for Anglo-American statecraft has been the idea of a Eurasian `heartland,' and then the complementary idea-as-policy of containing the heartland power of the day within, not to, Eurasia. From Harry S Truman to George Bush, the overarching vision of US national security was explicitly geopolitical and directly traceable to the heartland theory of Mackinder. . . . Mackinder's relevance to the containment of a heartland-occupying Soviet Union in the cold war was so apparent as to approach the status of a cliché.[16] <br><br>Indeed, many policymakers came from the world of academia, where they were certainly exposed to Mackinder's geopolitical theories. As was described above, Henry Kissinger used the term geopolitics to denote any policy dependent upon power principles at the expense of ideology and "sentimentality." Kissinger's worldview was less dependent upon geographical realities than some of the other Cold Warriors, especially Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter's National Security Advisor and a graduate-school mentor of Madeleine Albright. Brzezinski has made Eurasia the focus for US foreign policy in all of his writing, consistently warning of the dangerous advantages that the Heartland power had over the West.[17] ....<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/PARAMETERS/00summer/fettweis.htm">www.carlisle.army.mil/USA...ttweis.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>he then proceeds to trash, or to put it in a more scholarly light, refute, the relevance of MacKinder's 'Heartland'.<br>I think Fettweiss either just doesn't understand or is rather good at disinfo.<br>I wonder if he got his Ph.D.<br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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