Who Killed Hammarskjold? The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa

 

Who Killed Hammarskjold? The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa

by Susan Williams

Hurst and Company London (2016)

Book Review

This book details the author’s extensive investigation into a suspicious 1961 air crash that killed the second UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold. Her first edition, published in 2011, would trigger a new UN investigation, in 2015, into the cause of his death. In 2016, UN investigators concluded that Hammarskjold died as a result of foul play. However owing to US and UK refusal to release classified files, they couldn’t conclusively identify the individuals responsible.

The book begins by setting the stage for what was clearly an assassination. Williams describes in detail the role of foreign mining companies in fighting full independence of the Congo from Belgian rule. Belgian officers loyal to these companies continued to command Congolese troops following “official”  independence in 1960. When these troops mutinied, the UN declined a request for assistance from Congo’s first prime minister Patrice Lumumba.

His appeal to the Soviet Union (and the arrival of Soviet troops) would lead Katanga province (where most of the mines were located) to secede – with the support of Belgian troops and a bevy of white mercenaries from Rhodesia, South Africa, Britain and France.

At this point, the UN Security Council passed resolution 143, ordering Belgian troops to withdraw and installing UN peacekeepers in Katanga to prevent civil war. The CIA’s response was to assassinate Lumumba and Install their protege Mobutu Sese Seko (who would brutally ruled the Congo/Zaire from 1965-1997) as chief of Congo’s military.

Mobutu, in turn, arrested, tortured and executed all the senior members of the Congolese senate. The Security Council responded with Resolution 161, calling for the withdrawal of all foreign advisors and authorizing the UN to take “all necessary measures” to prevent civil war. This included supplying armed UN troops to protect the Congolese government.

When it was became clear the UN troops (who had significantly  inferior weapons) had no chance against the mercenaries’ superior fire power and Belgian air support, Hammerskjold set out for Nolda in Northern Rhodesia to try to negotiate a ceasefire with Katanga’s acting president Moise Tsombe. The secretary general’s jet mysteriously crashed as it approached Nolda airport.

In additions to hundreds of eyewitnesses (including a crash survivor who spent a week in hospital before he died) who saw Hammerskjold’s plane explode before it crashed, the most intriguing evidence comes from radio traffic between a pilot (reporting his attack on Hammerskjold’s jet) picked up by a US NSA operative in Cyprus and an Ethiopiann short wave operator and mysterious telexes* discovered in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation files in 1998. The latter refer to the plot to assassinate the Secretary General as “Operation Celeste,” run by shadowy South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAMIR) mercenaries.

As best as investigators can reconstruct, Operation Celeste planted a bomb on the DC-6 prior to its departure from Leopoldville.** When it failed to explode on take-off, two smaller planes were sent to intercept the jet and prevent it from landing. One pilot fired shots at the DC-6 that triggered the bomb to explode.

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* Prior to the advent of the Internet, the telex network was an international system of teleprinters electronically interconnected by telephone lines.

**Leopoldville has since been renamed Kinshasha.

How the US Recycles Child Soldiers as Paid Mercenaries

Child Soldiers Reloaded: The Privatisation of War

Al Jazeera (2017)

Film Review

This documentary explores the hidden history of the private mercenaries (aka “contractors”) who have been fighting the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Bush invaded Afghanistan (in 2001) and Iraq (in 2003), unbeknownst to the American public, he deployed nearly as many private mercenaries as enlisted troops. Although they cost at least ten times as much as GIs, using private mercenaries was far more palatable to taxpayers. For several reasons.

When the media reports “boots on the ground” in any given conflict, they never include private mercenaries. Likewise, deaths and injuries of mercenaries are never reported in casualty figures.

Besides the enormous expense of using mercenaries to fight US wars, an even bigger drawback is their failure to engage in “hearts and minds” operations that are essential in winning civilian support for US military occupation. For the post part, US-funded mercenaries are despised in Iraq and Afghanistan because of their arrogance, recklessness and lack of accountability for civilian deaths. The filmmakers depict this cocksure flamboyant swaggering quite brilliantly.

Initially a second major drawback was a total absence of coordination between number private companies providing mercenaries in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon “solved” this problem by hiring yet another private company, the London-based firm Aegis, to coordinate all the other private companies.

When Bush finally withdrew US troops from Iraq in 2007-2008, the private mercenaries remained. However owing to the massive unpopularity of the war, the Defense Department significantly reduced their budget. Whereas mercenaries from the US and other developed countries are paid $1,000 a day, Peruvian and Columbia mercenaries are paid $1,000 a month (see America’s $33 Mercenaries).

Initially Aegis cut costs by switching to Ugandan mercenaries they paid $800 a month. Then they hit pay direct in Sierra Leon, with former child soldiers willing to fight in Iraq for $250 a month.

All the former child soldiers kidnapped to fight in Sierra Leone’s civil war (1991-2002) have been deeply traumatized. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars western countries have pumped into rehabilitating them, many remain too impulsive and aggressive to integrate into society. There are no jobs for them in Sierra Leone: thus their willingness to fight and die in Iraq for $8.30 a day.

The Pentagon keeps no official record of the number of mercenaries it deploys in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor the number killed there, nor the number who are former child soldiers.

 

America’s $33 Mercenaries

America’s $33 Mercenaries

Press TV (2013)

Film Review

This is a Press TV documentary about the $33 third world mercenaries lured into the Iraq war by private US private security companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy. Unbeknownst to the American public, shortly after the 2003 invasion and occupation, the Pentagon began using private security firms to recruit private mercenaries to serve on the front line. In 2008, 70,000 of the western combatants were mercenaries, with 10% from the US and 90% from developing countries like Peru, Uganda and India.

The mercenaries were contracted through extremely profitable private security agencies like Triple Canopy (later renamed Special Operations Consulting), who charged the US government $15,000 a month per mercenary and paid the mercenaries $1,000 a month ($33 a day). By 2011, SOC discovered they could recruit mercenaries from poorer countries for $11 a day and reduced the pay scale even further.

The film follows the plight of Peruvian mercenaries SOC deliberately misled into believing they would be working as security guards in the Baghdad Green Zone (which is protected by US troops). Instead they found themselves deployed to the Basra front line in Basra when they finished their training in Jordan.

Those who were injured were denied proper medical care, resulting in needless deaths and horrendous disabilities. At present, the Peruvians in the film are suing SOC for reneging on the health and disability benefits injured mercenaries were guaranteed in their contract.

The documentary is in 2 parts, with Part 2 starting automatically when Part 1 finishes.

Blackwater: the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

 

Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

by Jeremy Scahill

2008 (with 2013 epilogue)

Book Review

Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill (2008 with 2013 epilogue) is an in-depth examination of the systematic privatization of the US military. In 1988, as Secretary of Defense to Bush senior, Dick Cheney initiated the process of outsourcing to private companies of military training and security and intelligence roles. Thanks to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Rumsfeld Doctrine, this outsourcing would extend to combat roles during the 2003-2008 occupation of Iraq.

Scahill’s book places special emphasis on the US failure to hold mercenary soldiers accountable for human rights violations. It also highlights the total absence of financial oversight, allowing Blackwater, Halliburton and other private military contractors to bilk taxpayers out of hundreds of billions of dollars. Finally it raises the troubling specter of corporations or even wealthy individuals hiring a standing mercenary army, such as Blackwater, to declare war against sovereign states.

Cheney Downsizes the US Military

Scahill begins by discussing the major downsizing of the US military that began in 1988, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and break-up of the former Soviet Union. In his first year as Secretary of Defense, Cheney reduced military spending by $10 billion, by canceling expensive weapons systems and decreasing US troop strength from 2.2 to 1.6 million. As the cuts continued, there was a growing tendency to outsource various non-combat functions to private contractors. Clinton continued the trend, when he hired Military Professionals Resources Inc (staffed by retired military officers) to “train” the Croatian military* in their secessionist war against Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine

Following George W Bush’s election in 2000, Rumsfeld pursued even more aggressive privatization of the Pentagon bureaucracy. The primary neoconservative rationale for shifting both combat and non-combat duties to private mercenaries was to allow the President to engage in potentially unpopular overseas military interventions.

Other advantages included the ability of private mercenaries to engage in unlawful activities (such as extraordinary rendition**), for which regular forces would be subject to court martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice – and a massive gravy train of unmonitored, no-bid contracts for wealthy Republican donors. In June 2004, after only fifteen months of US occupation, $9 billion of Iraqi reconstruction funds were unaccounted for.

The Blackwater Lodge and Training Center

Blackwater itself was first formed in 1996. It felled a big hole in training capacity, particularly in the Navy, resulting from Cheney’s extensive DOD cuts. Former Navy SEALS Erik Prince and Al Clark initially established the Blackwater Lodge and Training Center in North Carolina to offer private tactical training to Special Forces and local law enforcement personnel. A long time SEAL trainer, Clark supplied the concept. Prince, who came from a wealthy conservative Christian family, bankrolled it.

In 2002, Blackwater branched out into providing personnel as well as training. Their first contract would be to provide twenty security guards for Kabul’s CIA station in Afghanistan. In 2003, the State Department would award their largest documented (non-classified) contract providing security for US officials in Iraq. This included a $27.7 million no-bid contract to protect Paul Bremer. Bremer, who Bush appointed to run Iraq during the US occupation, quickly became the most hated man in Iraq.

Iraqi Resistance to Occupation

The book provides an interesting historical perspective on the rise of the Iraqi resistance movement in reaction to the virtual takeover of Iraq by US corporate interests. Contrary to the US media portrayal of the Iraqi opposition as al Qaeda terrorists, it was a genuine home grown movement which formed in reaction to Bremer’s refusal to allow free elections and his de-Baathification program. The latter instantly plunged the vast majority of Iraqis into abject misery. In addition to decommissioning 350,000 former Iraqi troops, it also threw hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, teachers, government workers out of work (who were required to join the Baath party as a condition of employment). The loss of these front line personnel would result in the total collapse of Iraqi society.

As Scahill carefully documents, the original Iraqi resistance was peaceful and nonviolent until the US military and Blackwater contractors deliberately fired on peaceful civilian protestors.

Blackwater and other mercenaries are typically paid $600-800 a day for mercenaries. This contrasts with an average of $270 a day for active duty GIs.

The Ambush in Fallujah

Blackwater devotes five chapters to the horrific ambush in Fallujah on March 30, 2004, in which a local mob killed, burned and dismembered four Blackwater contractors before hanging them from a bridge. It was this event that would bring Blackwater to world attention, while setting off a chain of events that would compel (due to an overstretched enlisted force) the Pentagon to hire Blackwater and other private security contractors* as mercenary soldiers in Iraq.

At a pay rate of $600-800 a day (in contrast to an average of $270 for active duty GIs), private security companies had no difficulty recruiting mercenaries. In fact, the worse the violence got, the more profits rolled in for Blackwater.

By June 2004, there were 20,000 private mercenaries in Iraq. By the time Rumsfeld resigned in 2006, there was a one to one ratio between troops and mercenary soldiers maintaining the US occupation in Iraq (100,000 mercenaries vs 100,000 troops).

In 2004-2005, the Blackwater role expanded to guarding the US oil industries pipeline in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, to “protecting” FEMA reconstruction contracts in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and to providing immigration security at the Mexican border. By 2007, Blackwater had 2300 private soldiers fighting in nine countries, as well as a database of 22,000 former troops, special forces operatives and retired law enforcement officers who could be deployed at short notice.

Immunity from Prosecution

As of 2013, when Scahill published the revised edition, no Blackwater contractors had ever been prosecuted for criminal human rights abuses. Under an edict Bremer enacted in 2004, US mercenaries were immune from prosecution under Iraqi law. Prosecuting them in American courts is extremely difficult owing to the difficulty of transporting foreign witnesses to the US. However in October 2014, a Washington DC federal district court found four of them guilty of murder and manslaughter for the 2007 shooting of seventeen civilians in Baghdad.

Erick Prince sold Blackwater in 2010 and it has since merged with its main rival Triple Canopy to form Academi. Although Blackwater was banned from Iraq in 2009,  Academi still provides security for State Department personnel across many countries.They also continue to receive contracts from the Defense Department and US intelligence agencies.

Links to free epub and kindle versions of Blackwater are available at Blackwater the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

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*In the mid-1990s, the Croatian military was dominated by right-wing Nazi sympathizers similar to those in the present Ukrainian government.
** Extraordinary or irregular rendition is the US sponsored abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person to countries known to practice torture. It’s also known as torture by proxy.
***Other companies that entered the lucrative mercenary market in 2004 include Control Risks Group, DynCorp, Erinys, Algis, Armor Group, Hart, Kroll and Steele Foundation. British security contractors were also extremely pro-active in Iraq. By October 2006, there were 21,000 British mercenaries in Iraq, in contrast with 7.200 conventional duty troops.

Also published at Veterans Today

A Novel About Extraordinary Rendition

A Delicate Truth

by John LeCarre (Viking Adult 2013)

Book Review

In my view, a fiction writer has a fundamental responsibility to reflect the era they write about. The majority of contemporary novelists balk at accurately depicting the criminal element that has seized control of our western democracies. Most 21st century spy thrillers are a hollow glorification of the War on Terror, celebrating the virtue and bravery of patriotic intelligence operatives who keep us safe from so-called fanatical Islamic fundamentalists.

Not Le Carre. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the British author used his gift for characterization to write masterful thrillers in which we made the intimate acquaintance of British and Russian spymasters, moles and bureaucratic government careerists with all their flaws and foibles. With the advent of the War on Terror, his more recent novels revolve around the privatization and criminalization of British intelligence, under the influence of the CIA and thuggish security contractors like Blackwater, who have no official accountability whatsoever to the taxpayers who pay their salaries.

Most of LeCarre’s recent thrillers end on a pretty bleak note. Owing to the mafia-like grip the sociopathic elite and their hired mercenaries have over British and US intelligence, the good guys almost always lose.

A Delicate Truth ends somewhat more optimistically. The plot revolves around the cover-up of a failed extraordinary rendition (i.e. the kidnapping of a suspected terrorist to a country where he can be legally tortured). A program that clearly hasn’t ended under Obama, despite his campaign promises. The heroes are two would-be whistleblowers who try to expose the cover-up because they’re too naïve to appreciate the total depravity of the forces arrayed against them.

I think I can detect the influence of real life whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in LeCarre’s new note of cautious optimism.