The AC Phoenix
March 2003
Page 19
U.S. Comp
Warm
Profit From
rn Iraq
INCIRLIK, Turkey (IPS)—Everyday the United States Air Force F-15
Strike Eagles and F-16 Fighting Falcons roar aloft over the Kurdish
quarter of the city of Adans, about an hour’s drive inland from the
Mediterranean coast of central Turkey, to patrol the skies over Northern
Iraq.
The jet pilots are catered and housed at the Incirlik military base nine
miles outside the city by a company named Vinnell, Brown & Root (VBR),
a joint venture of two U.S. multinationals—Vinnell of Fairfax, Virginia,
and Kellogg, Brown & Root of Fiouston, Texas.
Brown & Root is a subsidiary of Fialliburton, the company that U.S.
vice-president Dick Cheney headed before taking up his present position
with President George W. Bush’s administration. It is also the world’s
largest oil field services company, building pipelines and drilling rigs for
multinationals like Chevron in countries from Angola to the Gulf of
Mexico.
Vinnell is also a construction company but its most important contract
is training the 75,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guard, a military unit
descended from the Bedouin warriors who helped the Saud clan impose
control on the peninsula early last century.
The joint venture’s latest contract, which started July 1, 1999 and will
expire in September 2003, was initially valued at $118 million and
includes a guaranteed profit.
In the next few months VBR employees expect workloads to increase
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substantially if the war against Iraq goes ahead. Over 30,000 U.S.
soldiers may be based at Incirlik and other local military airports at
Batman, Corlu, Diyarbakir, Konya, Malatya and Mus.
VBR’s role at Incirlik began on Oct. 1,1988 when the company won its
first contract to run support services at the base as well as at two more
minor military sites in Turkey: Ankara and Izmir.
VBR site manager Alex Daniels, who has worked at Incirlik for almost
15 years, explains what the company does for the military; “We provide
support services for the United States Air Force in areas of civil
engineering, motor vehicles transportation, in the services arena here—
that includes food service operations, lodging, and maintenance of a golf
course. We also do U.S. customs inspection.”
During the Gulf war in January 1991, the base was a major staging
post for thousands of sorties flown against Iraq and occupied Kuwait
dropping over 3,000 tons of bombs on military and civilian targets. “We
were working overtime during the Gulf war. I was working at the fire
department as a fire inspector. A lot of airplanes landed and we had to
support them 24 hours a day,” says Orhan Sener, president of Flarbis, the
war workers union.
Right now the U.S. Air Force and VBR employ some 1,450 local
workers at the base to support approximately 1,400 U.S. soldiers
currently living at incirlik, who staff Operation northern Watch monitoring
the no-fly zone above the 36th parallel in Iraq.
Saving money is the primary reason for outsourcing services, says
Major Toni Kemper, head of Public affairs at the base.
“The reason that the military goes to contracting is largely because it’s
more cost-effective in certain areas. I mean, there was a lot of studies
years ago as to what services can be provided via contractor versus'
military personnel. Because when we go contract, we don’t have to pay
health care and all the other things for the employees, that’s up to the
employer,” he said.
But activist watchdogs say that the company has a record for
overspending and wasting taxpayers’ money. Frida Berrigan at the
World Policy Institute in Washington, says Brown and Root were chosen
for this contract despite the fact that the General Accounting Office had
filed a report in 2000 that said that Brown and Root had over-billed the
U.S. government in huge proportion while they were providing services
for U.S. military personnel in Kosovo.
“They had four timios as many personnel as they needed for particular
jobs; they had people working around the clock getting overtime for no
apparent reason. They imported plywood, sheets of plywood, at a cost
of $80 per sheet, when they could have purchased them locally for less
than $20 a sheet,” she said.
“What we (are) seeing in the war on terrorism is that (there are) a lot of
different companies that are profiting. Brown and Root is special
because it has this relationship with Vice President Cheney,” she added.
Major Bill Bigelow, a public relations officer for the U.S. Military at the
Ramstein Air Base in Germany, which oversees much of the work at
Incirlik, defends the Army: “If you’re going to ask a specific question like,
do you think it’s right that contractors profit in wartime, I would think that
might be better (asked) at a higher level, to people who set the policy.
We don’t set the policy, we work within the framework that’s been
established,” he said.
“And of course those questions have been asked forever, because
they go back to World War II, when Chrysler, Ford and Chevy stopped
making cars and started making guns and tanks. Obviously it’s a ques
tion that’s been around for quite some time. But it’s true that nowadays,
there are very few defense contractors, if you will, but go back 60 years
to the World War II era almost everybody was manufacturing something
that either directly or indirectly had something to do with defense,” he
added.