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Bechtel launches road show
for war profiteers
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NATION BRIEFS
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Ashcroft goes after 200-year-old
human rights law

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, May 18— US Attorney General John Ashcroft has launched a sweeping attack against a 214-year-old human rights law that has helped provide justice to Nazi Holocaust victims and peasants from Latin America and Asia.

The law, the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), has been used with increasing frequency over the past 24 years by victims of serious rights abuses committed overseas by foreign government leaders and senior military officials, as well as US and foreign-owned corporations, to get a hearing before US federal courts.

Now, however, Ashcroft’s Justice Department (DOJ) has asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California to effectively throw out all cases that deal with abuses that allegedly took place overseas, arguing that the law is “somewhat of a historical relic” that itself has been abused by plaintiffs to enforce international human rights laws and norms.

The DOJ also said that the law poses a threat to Washington’s anti-terrorist campaign by potentially penalizing or embarrassing foreign governments allied with the US.

The Department’s intervention has drawn outrage from US human rights groups.

“This is a craven attempt to protect human rights abusers at the expense of victims,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW). “The Bush administration is trying to overturn a longstanding judicial precedent that has been very important in the protection of human rights.”

“The brief is a broadside attack designed to wipe the law off the books,” agreed Elisa Massimino, director of the Washington, DC office of the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

ATCA, which was enacted by the very first US Congress as a weapon against piracy on the high seas, permits non-citizens to sue foreign and domestic individuals or companies in the United States for abuses “committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” The only requirement for federal courts to gain jurisdiction under ATCA is for legal service to be served on the defendant on US territory.

While the law fell into disuse during the 19th century, the father and sister of Joel Filartiga, a 17-year-old Paraguayan who was kidnapped and tortured to death in his country, filed a case under the Act in 1980 when the police official responsible for the killing came to the US. In that case, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Act permitted victims to pursue claims based on international human rights law.

That ruling was followed by a number of high-profile cases against foreign national leaders, such as Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, and senior army or security officers from Guatemala, Indonesia, Argentina, Ethiopia, and El Salvador, among other countries. While plaintiffs won in all of those cases, defendants generally did not contest them. Instead, most left the US soon after receiving legal service and refused to pay millions of dollars in damages that were eventually awarded by the courts.

In the early 1990s attorneys representing victims of abuses allegedly committed directly or indirectly by foreign and US corporations also began bringing suits. Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, for example, used the Act to to sue Swiss banks and companies that used slave labor during World War II. Such lawsuits often expedited out-of-court settlements.

More commonly, plaintiffs have sued for abuses committed by foreign armies or police that provided security for US companies operating abroad. Such is the case in which Ashcroft intervened with a “friend of the court” (amicus curiae) brief earlier this month.

The case, which was originally filed in 1996, was brought by attorneys from several environmental, labor, and human rights advocacy groups on behalf of 16 unnamed Burmese peasants against Unocal Corporation, which held a large interest in the construction of the Yadana gas pipeline. The case charged that the Burmese soldiers who guarded the project on behalf of Unocal and other companies involved in the project committed serious abuses against local peasants, including forced labor, rape, and murder.

In a landmark decision last September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the dismissal of the case by a trial court judge and ruled that if plaintiffs produced evidence showing that the company knew about and benefited directly from the troops’ conduct, the case should go forward.

In its brief, the Justice Department did not address a specific case. Instead, it argued against the use of the Act itself, arguing that it “has been commandeered and transformed into a font of causes of action permitting aliens to bring human rights claims in United States courts, even when the disputes are wholly between foreign nationals and when the alleged injuries occurred in a foreign country, often with no connection whatsoever with the United States.”

To the extent that the Act could be used against US allies in the war against terrorism, it “raises significant potential for serious interference with important foreign policy interests,” according to the Justice Department brief.

But rights activists argue that this argument makes little sense because the government could always intervene in a case, as the State Department did last year when it asked a judge to dismiss a claim under the Act brought by plaintiffs from Aceh, Indonesia, against ExxonMobil, if relationships with key foreign allies were at stake.

HRW Director Tom Malinowski noted that the fact that the State Department did not join in the Justice Department’s brief on the Burma case was significant.

“I don’t think this has anything to do with the war on terror,” he said. “I think this is motivated by a very hard-core ideological resistance within the Justice Department to the whole concept of international law being enforced. The notion that international norms are enforceable by anyone is repugnant to some in the Justice Department,” he said.

Source: OneWorld

Bechtel launches road show
for war profiteers

By Pratap Chatterjee

San Francisco, May 19 (IPS)-- Engineers and executives from San-Francisco-based Bechtel, one of the world’s largest construction firms, will kick off a road show this week for companies that want to win profitable contracts in the reconstruction of Iraq.

The first conference will be held a block from the White House at the Ronald Reagan Building on May 21. Two days later, the UK Department of Trade and Industry will host a meeting for the company at the Novotel in Hammersmith in southwest London; the final stop is May 28 at the Sheraton hotel in Kuwait City.

Bechtel expects to answer questions on the selection of subcontractors, insurance requirements and performance securities for winning bids to implement the firm’s $680-million reconstruction deal awarded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Apr. 17.

”Bechtel is honoured to have been asked to help bring humanitarian assistance, economic recovery and infrastructure reconstruction to the Iraqi people,” Tom Hash, president of Bechtel National, said in a press release at the time.

Several interested bidders have already followed Terry Valenzano, Bechtel’s manager for Iraq reconstruction, to the Crowne Plaza and Hilton resort in Kuwait, where the engineering teams are based, alongside many top military officials.

The travelling trade show illustrates the central role that business has played in the attack and occupation of Iraq by US-led forces, and to what extent the lines between Wall Street and the Pentagon have become blurred.

Major companies have already begun working in Iraq. Oil giants British Petroleum (BP) and Shell have sent employees to southern Iraq to work for a common British boss, Major Mark Tilley, who has been appointed interim chief executive of Iraq’s South Refineries by the occupying forces.

Paul Vick and Scott Hayward, construction managers for Houston, Texas-based engineering company Halliburton, recently arrived in the cities of Basra and Umm Qasr respectively to oversee repairs, under the supervision of Brigadier General Robert Crear, US Army Corps of Engineers.

US-led forces have already contracted out much of this nation-building to US companies or their former employees: Phil Carroll, the former head of Houston-based Shell Oil and construction giant Fluor, has been appointed head of a new advisory board that will oversee the activities of an oil ministry.

Halliburton, which was secretly given the contract to douse the oil fires set by Saddam Hussein’s regime, hired two Houston-based companies, Boots & Coots International Well Control and Wild Well Control, to put out the fires. Now the firm is overseeing repair of the oil refineries, running the pipelines and trucking propane to Iraqi consumers.

The contracts have become political hot potatoes because the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush never offered them for competitive bidding or mentioned them publicly until well after the work began, despite the fact that they were signed months before the attack even started.

“It certainly gives me the sense they have something to hide,” said Congressman Henry Waxman from California, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee and a long-time critic of Vice President Dick Cheney. “I don’t know if they do, but they’re certainly acting that way.”

Cheney was chief executive officer of Halliburton, the company that has won the most contracts in the “war on terrorism.”

Scott Saunders, a spokesman for the Corps of Engineers, says Halliburton may be permitted to export Iraqi oil in the future, so that the country can generate money to pay for the rebuilding process, unless Iraqis “can reconstitute their oil industry and bureaucracy quickly enough” to do the job themselves.

Meanwhile, Stevedoring Services of America is hard at work rebuilding Iraqi seaports, while Airlink USA is waiting in the wings to refurbish the airports as soon as they are repaired.

The actual construction work is being done by Iraqi workers, who clamour for the two-dollar-a-day jobs in the stifling heat under threat of sniper fire.

Struggling to maintain law and order, the U.S. military has turned to yet another US multinational to run a new Iraqi police force: Dyncorp, whose recruiters are manning phones just outside of Forth Worth, Texas, to hire “individuals with appropriate experience and expertise to participate in an international effort to re-establish police, justice, and prison functions in post-conflict Iraq.”

Many of these companies were hired even before the invasion began Mar. 20. For example, BP engineers travelled with the troops as the war was launched, to help them seize the oil wells.

Halliburton had 1,800 employees in the Kuwaiti desert setting up tent cities, providing food, and washing clothes for the soldiers before the invasion, while Dyncorp employees patrolled the perimeters of army bases to keep out angry civilians.

Inside the Kuwaiti bases, Military Professionals Resources Incorporated (MPRI) of Alexandria, Virginia, a private company set up by ex-U.S. military generals, trained the soldiers to use weapons.

Back in California, two San Diego companies were hired for more secretive operations before the war: Titan corporation was recruiting Kurdish spies and translators while its neighbours, Science Applications International Corporation, was hired to run a government of Iraqis in exile.

The wholesale privatisation of the US military is not surprising given that the three bureaucrats who Bush hired to run the Army, Navy, and Air Force when he became president in 2000, were all plucked from corporate America: Gordon England of General Dynamics was appointed secretary of the Navy, James Roche of Northrop Grumman was appointed Air Force secretary, and Thomas White of Enron was appointed secretary of the Army.

Although all three men have resigned in the last 12 months, the two former military men recruited to run Iraq, Jay Garner and Paul Bremer, were chief executives of consulting companies to the multinationals - SY Technologies and Marsh McLellan. SY helps design missiles while Marsh advises companies in crisis.

Richard Perle, former head of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board, was advising Goldman Sachs investors on Wall Street about reconstruction contracts.

Harvey Wasserman, author of The Last Energy War, calls the private military contracts a scandal. ”The Bush-Cheney team have turned the United States into a family business. That’s why we haven’t seen Cheney - he’s cutting deals with his old buddies, who gave him a multi-million dollar golden handshake,” he told IPS. “Have they no grace, no shame, no common sense?”