Privatization of War

Ed.'s note: Why would anyone expect anything differently than from the following when war has been privatized? Col. Ted Westhusing knew all about the greed, the unbelievable corruption, graft and the abuses that went on with private contractors (PMCs) before he was assassinated in Iraq in 2005. Notice that just after this report was released on Afghanistan showing that officials misled the public on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban now announce that they agree to a cease-fire. Yes Pat Tilman, whether you were killed to silence your opposition to the war in Afghanistan, or if you were killed by "friendly fire," you will be encouraged to know the war in Afghanistan and $1 trillion later is now all being brought into serious question.
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Source: RT News

US military contractors sued for funding terrorism in Afghanistan with 'protection' payments to Taliban

December 28, 2019

FILE PHOTO: A construction site in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan © AFP / Farshad Usyan

Bribes paid by international military contractors in Afghanistan were used by the Taliban to fund attacks on companies that didn't make the payments, according to a lawsuit filed by families of those injured or killed as a result.

"Large corporations that had lucrative businesses in Afghanistan" paid off the Taliban through a series of subcontractors, bribing the Afghan militants in order to save money on security, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday in federal court by the families of 143 US soldiers and contractors injured and killed during the longest war in American history. The 288-page civil suit alleges the Taliban then used the money to finance acts of terrorism against companies that didn't bribe them, detailing the grisly circumstances that led to the deaths and injuries of the victims.

Those protection payments aided and abetted terrorism by directly funding an Al-Qaida-backed Taliban insurgency that killed and injured thousands of Americans.

An employee of the US Embassy in Kabul referred to the payments as "organized crime," according to the suit, which seeks unspecified relief for their families under the Anti-Terrorism Act.

Anywhere between 20 and 40 percent of the funding for major projects like the Kajaki Dam and a portion of the Ring Road went into the pockets of Afghan militants between 2009 and 2017, the lawsuit alleges.

Contractors used Pentagon cash to hire sub-contractors, who hired their own sub-contractors and so on, until some of the money – amounting to millions of dollars, if not more – ended up in the hands of the Taliban.

Some government estimates show the Taliban strength in 2019 greater than at any time over the past 18 years of war that claimed the lives of more than 38,000 Afghan civilians, 2,400 US soldiers, and over $2 trillion in taxpayer funds.

Read more: Congress must investigate why America was lied to about Afghanistan for all these years – Gabbard

Two defendants, DAI Global and Louis Berger Group, received approximately half the total contracts in Afghanistan distributed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2007 to 2009 – about $1 billion. DAI stands accused of paying off the Taliban from 2006 to 2012 while executing contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the areas they controlled.

"Standard practice in such circumstances was to pay protection money in order to discourage the Taliban from attacking their projects," the suit claims. Louis Berger allegedly categorized the Taliban recipients of its payments as "moderate," because they weren't actively destroying the corporation's work.

Other American contractors being sued are Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp., Centerra Group LLC, and Janus Global Operations LLC. British contractor G4S PLC and South African MTN Group are also on the list of defendants. None of the companies responded to requests for comment from the Wall Street Journal, the first outlet to report the lawsuit, except a Black & Veatch spokesman who claimed the contractor had followed US government instructions and was "proud" of its work in Afghanistan.

Please go to RT News to read the entire article.
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Source: American Greatness

Navy SEALs Told Trump: 'Nobody Knows What They're Doing' in Afghanistan

By Eric Lendrum | December 27th, 2019

According to a new book about President Trump's foreign policy, the president held a number of private meetings with U.S. service members to talk about what was going wrong with the Afghanistan War, Business Insider reports.

The book, "Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos," is written by national security expert Peter Bergen. According to Bergen's account, these meetings began shortly after President Trump took office in January 2017, and consisted of multiple servicemembers who had been deployed to Afghanistan, including Navy SEALs.

The move was largely unprecedented, since presidents usually discuss the workings of war with high-ranking officers rather than enlisted members. However, President Trump specifically said that when it came to these meetings, he didn't want "any generals" or "any officers…I just want enlisted guys."

As such, those he met with were free to speak of the war in much more critical terms, as did several SEALs who, in one meeting, called the war "unwinnable," and described NATO as "a joke," also adding that "nobody knows what they're doing."

These meetings most likely contributed to President Trump's continued promises to reduce American involvement in Afghanistan, reinforcing a skepticism that Donald Trump has long held since he was only a candidate for president. Most recently, he has taken steps to withdraw approximately 4,000 U.S. troops from the war-torn country, where the U.S. has been for 18 years in what is by far the longest war in American history.
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Related:

Why the 'Afghanistan Papers' Matter

Families of Afghan war dead say contractors bribed Taliban

THE CRIMES OF SEAL TEAM 6

John Cale - Mercenaries (Ready For War) 7" version