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Massive military contractor's media
mess
By Katrin Dauenhauer and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - It is no secret that
US defense and construction 
companies - particularly those with close
ties to the administration of President George W Bush -
are making a lot of money in the post-war rush for
contracts in Iraq.
Firms whose directors held
membership in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
Defense Policy Board (DPB) or in the "Committee for the
Liberation of Iraq" (CLI) did not appear to suffer any
handicap, either.
Two big winners, of course,
were Halliburton, whose last CEO was Vice President Dick
Cheney, and engineering giant Bechtel, whose senior vice
president, Jack Sheehan, serves on the DPB. Former
Secretary of State George Shultz, a Bechtel board member
and former top executive, also chaired CLI, a supposedly
non-governmental body that helped lead the march to war
and dissolved itself late last month.
Less well
known is San Diego-based Scientific Applications
International Corporation (SAIC), one of the Pentagon's
largest, most lucrative and politically connected
contractors. Of the six billion dollars it earned in
revenue last year, about two thirds came from the US
Treasury, mostly from the defense budget.
SAIC
is among the most mysterious and feared of the big 10
defense giants - feared because of its ruthlessness in
procuring contracts, says the Washington Post;
mysterious, in part because, as an employee-owned
company, it does not have to file with the Securities
and Exchange Commission (SEC), and because its press
officers are notorious for not providing information.
Indeed, for this article, SAIC press officers referred
all questions to the Pentagon's general press office.
SAIC, which specializes in advanced technologies
that can be applied to the battlefield, particularly in
command and control systems, is now deeply involved in
the Pentagon's most important operations in Iraq.
That it should be is really no surprise, taking
into account its various connections. Among the hawks on
the DPB, Rumsfeld's mini-think tank, for example, is
retired Admiral William Owens, a former vice chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff who also served as SAIC's
president and CEO and is currently its vice chairman.
Another member of SAIC's board is retired Army
General Wayne Downing, who until last summer served as
the chief counter-terrorism expert on the National
Security Council (NSC) staff.
Before that,
Downing also served as a lobbyist for the Iraqi National
Congress (INC) led by Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial
Iraqi expatriate long championed by the
neo-conservatives in the administration and the DPB.
Like Shultz, Downing was also on the board of the CLI,
which, not coincidentally, worked closely with the INC.
Another prominent SAIC executive and former vice
president also has a long-standing connection with Iraq:
David Kay, the former UN weapons inspector who was hired
by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in June to head
the effort to track down Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction (WMD).
A former senior science
official in the Reagan administration, Kay argued
forcefully last fall against relying on UN weapons
inspections to "contain" Iraq and for removing Saddam
Hussein from power.
These connections may
account for some of SAIC's success in landing
Iraqi-related contracts.
For example, it has
been running the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development
Council (IRDC) since the body was established by the
Pentagon in February.
According to press
accounts, the 150 mostly-expatriate Iraqis employed in
the program, most of whom have been in Baghdad since
May, are to serve as the "Iraqi face" of the occupation
authority. Senior members of the IRDC, many of who have
been closely associated with the INC, hold posts at each
of Iraq's 23 ministries with a mandate to rebuild them.
Perhaps not coincidentally, SAIC's corporate
vice president for strategic assessment and development,
Christopher Ryan Henry, joined the Pentagon as deputy
undersecretary of defense for policy at the same time as
the IRDC got underway, serving with Under Secretary of
Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who was in overall
charge of preparing for post-war Iraq.
SAIC is
also a subcontractor under Vinnell Corporation, another
big defense contractor that has long been in charge of
training for the Saudi National Guard, hired to
reconstitute and train a new Iraqi army.
Not
much is known about the progress that is being made in
either of those projects, but a third has become, by all
accounts, a major disaster.
The Iraqi (sometimes
referred to as "Indigenous") Media Network (IMN)
project, valued initially at a minimum of US$25 million,
was formally launched in mid-April as a successor to a
psychological warfare program that beamed radio
broadcasts before and during the war into Iraq from a
C130 cargo plane called "Commando Solo".
But the IMN
was considerably more ambitious in scope, since its aim,
as an outgrowth of the IRDC operation, was to put
together a new information ministry, complete with
television, radio and a newspaper, and the content that
would make all three attractive to average Iraqis.
To oversee the job, SAIC hired away the director
of Voice of America (VOA), Robert Reilly, an outspoken
right-wing ideologue who began his public career in the
1980s as a propagandist in the White House for the
Nicaraguan contras.
Reilly tangled immediately
with his deputy, Mike Furlong, a Pentagon contractor who
worked on media issues in Kosovo. Both men were out of
the project by the end of June, according to
knowledgeable sources.
"SAIC didn't have any
suitable qualification to run a media network,"
according to Rohan Jayasekera, who has kept an eye on
media developments in Iraq for London-based Index on
Censorship. "The whole thing was so incredibly badly
planned by them that no one could make sense of what
they were doing," he said.
Jayasekera noted, for
example, that SAIC ordered equipment that was
incompatible with existing systems in Iraq and that it
had made no plans for TV programming. When it asked for
help from VOA, which considers itself a professional
news organization, it was forced to rely on hastily
patched together and dubbed network news programs, much
of which would appeal only to a domestic audience.
"Increasingly, the newscasts became irrelevant
for Iraqis," one source told The Washington Post in May.
"They're not really interested in the Laci Peterson
[murder] case."
A page reserved for the project
on the website of the US provisional authority in Iraq
said Wednesday, "There is no information available at
this time."
Three months into the project, Ahmad
Rikabi, a highly-regarded Iraqi expatriate brought in to
help manage the operation, abruptly quit, apparently
frustrated at the lack of planning, resources and
investment that SAIC put in the project and the
hemorrhaging of his professional staff, some of whom had
not been paid for weeks.
"Saddam Hussein is
doing better at marketing himself, through al-Jazeera
and al-Arabiya Gulf channels," Rikabi told reporters.
One of the project's principal trainers, Don
North, who had worked with media in Afghanistan, has
also quit, complaining to the New York Times that the
Pentagon was not interested in professional journalism.
"Its role was envisioned to be an information
conduit," he said, "and not just rubberstamp flacking
for the CPA", the initials of the occupation authority
run by L Paul Bremer.
The Pentagon itself has
kept the project stumbling along on short-term contracts
with SAIC, but, according to Jayasekera, is actively
looking for an alternative. The fact that that SAIC was
hired in the first place, however, "appears to have been
a serious mistake".
(Inter Press Service)
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