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February
27, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Daniel
Pearl: Should His
Editors Have Sent Him There?
February
26, 2002
Jonathan
Steele
Kabul's
Loss
Vasily
Streltsov
The
Pentagon in
the Transcaucusas
CounterPunch
Wire
How
Corporations Use Shadowy "527" Groups to Influence
Politicians
Lt. Col.
Robert Bowman
ABM
Treaty: Alive or Dead?
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
A
Prayer for America
February
25, 2002
John Clarke
Interrogated
at US Border
Blankfort,
Poirier, Zeltzer
ADL
Blinks, Settles Spying Case
Alex Lynch
Naked
from Sin:
The Ordeal of Nahla
and Sami Al-Arian
John Chuckman
Ashcroft
Speaks in Tongues
February
24, 2002
David
Vest
Skate
Date
February
23, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Axis
of Evil and
Media Monopolies
Bahour/Dahan
Cracks
in the Occupation
February
22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Axel
of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution
February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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February 27,
2002
Nature
and Politics
Rumble from the
Jungle
Ecuadorian Farmers Fight DynCorp's
Chemwar on the Amazon
By Jeffrey St. Clair and
Alexander Cockburn
"Imagine that scene for a moment--you
are an Ecuadorian farmer, and suddenly, without notice or warning,
a large helicopter approaches, and the frightening noise of
the chopper blades invades the quiet. The helicopter comes closer,
and sprays a toxic poison on you, your children, your livestock
and your food crops. You see your children get sick, your crops
die." These are the words of Bishop Jesse de Witt, president
of the International Labor Rights Fund, in a letter to Paul V.
Lombardi, CEO of DynCorp.
DeWitt's organization has filed suit
in US federal court on behalf of 10,000 Ecuadorian peasant farmers
and Amazonian Indians charging Lombardi's company with torture,
infanticide and wrongful death for its role in the aerial spraying
of highly toxic pesticides in the Amazonian jungle, along the
border of Ecuador and Colombia. DynCorp's chances of squirming
out the suit were dealt a crushing blow in January when federal
judge Richard Roberts denied the company's motion to dismiss
the case on grounds that their work in Colombia involved matters
of national security.
DynCorp, the Reston, Virginia-based all-purpose
defense contractor, is rapidly acquiring the kind of reputation
for global villainy and malfeasance that used to be Bechtel's
calling card in the 60s and 70s. As we reported a few weeks ago,
DynCorp has been hit with a RICO suit by a former employee alleging
that the company fired him after he reported improprieties by
company supervisors in Bosnia to the Army CID. According to the
lawsuit, those improprieties included "coworkers and supervisors
literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment,
and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of
the individual slaves they had purchased."
The very origins of the company are somewhat
murky. President Harry Truman established DynCorp shortly after
the end of World War II, supposedly to provide jobs for veterans
and to market surplus military equipment. Certainly, DynCorp
has never severed its umbilical relationship to the federal government.
The billion-dollar company enjoys contracts with the CIA, Pentagon,
State Department, EPA, IRS and DEA. It trains "police forces"
in some of the US's most brutal client states, including El
Salvador, Panama, Haiti and Bosnia. Many of its top employees
were recruited from the Pentagon, the CIA or and State Department.
Indeed theories are rife across Latin America, in particular,
that DynCorp has always functioned as a cut-out for Pentagon
and CIA covert operations.
As Ken Silverstein reports in a profile
of DynCorp in his excellent book Private Warriors, beginning
in the early 1990s the company went into Latin America big time,
often working under State Department contracts. Usually, the
pretext was the drug war. But, as is so often the case, the real
objective seemed to be a kind of privatized counter-insurgency
operation against rebel groups. In Peru, for example, DynCorp
was awarded a contract to provide maintenance services on a fleet
of helicopters the State Department had loaned to Peruvian anti-drug
forces.
But in 1992, one of those helicopters
crashed in the jungle. On board were three DynCorp employees,
including a man named Robert Hitchman. As Silverstein notes,
"Hitchman was not in Peru to repair helicopters". He
was a covert-ops specialist, who had worked for the CIA's Air
America in the war on Laos and ran former CIA agent Edward Wilson's
Libyan operation for Muammar Qaddafy. The State Department said
that the plane simply crashed due to "crew fatigue".
But Hitchman's son told Silverstein that in fact the plane had
been shot down by Shining Path guerillas and that then-Secretary
of State James Baker asked him to keep quiet about the true nature
of his father's death. Hitchman said that far from fixing planes,
his father was flying DEA agents and Peruvians on missions into
guerrilla territory to destroy cocaine labs, bomb coca and coordinate
the herbicide spraying program. He said his father was also training
Peruvian pilots to fly combat missions.
The Peruvian operation turned out to
be a kind of test run for DynCorp's much bigger role in Colombia,
where DynCorp employees not only fly fumigation planes, but train
Colombian soldiers and police to do battle with the FARC and
other insurgent groups.
"It's very handy to have an outfit
not part of the U.S. armed forces," former US ambassador
to Colombia Myles Frechette, told the St. Petersburg Times, in
December 2000. "Obviously, if somebody gets killed or whatever,
you can say it's not a member of the armed forces. Nobody wants
to see American military men killed."
Under Plan Colombia, DynCorp was awarded
a $600 million contract to fumigate coca fields across Colombia.
As of January of this year, the corporation's crop dusters had
sprayed more than 14 percent of the entire land area of Colombia.
The suit brought on behalf of the Ecuadorian
farmers and tribes is based on an investigation by Acción
Ecológica of pesticide drift from DynCorp's Colombian
spraying operations. The study found that DynCorp had been using
a souped-up version of Monsanto's Round-Up herbicide, called
Round-Up Ultra. The effects of Round-Up Ultra are not that much
different from Agent Orange, the defoliant used to such malign
effect by the US in Southeast Asia. It is an indiscriminate killer,
poisoning not only cocoa fields by vegetable crops, wildlife,
forests, waterways and people.
"These fumigations are contaminating
the Amazon, destroying the forest and killing our people,"
says Emperatriz Cahuache, president of the Organization of Indigenous
Peoples of the Colombian Amazon.
The primary toxin in Round-Up is glyphosate.
Both the State Department and DynCorp have said that this is
a relatively harmless concoction. But Monsanto itself warns that
it should not be used near humans or water sources. But the toxic
punch of the herbicides that DynCorp has been using has been
amplified by the addition of surfactants. These additives increase
the plant killing power of the fumigations and also its lethality
to humans.
The Acción Ecológica study
uncovered significant pesticide drift in the Sucumbîos
region of Ecuador, a patchwork of Amazonian forests and villages
populated by the Quechua subsistence farmers. It concluded that
the spraying had caused "harm to the health and crops of
100 percent of the population within five kilometers of the border
with Colombia." More than 1,100 cases of illness have been
documented, including the deaths of at least two children.
Again DynCorp and the State Department
appear to have flouted Monsanto's own guidelines. In order to
minimize pesticide drift, Monsanto advises that aerial spraying
not be done any higher than three meters from the tops of the
tallest plants. But in Colombia, DynCorp's planes routinely fly
as high as 15 meters above the vegetation, greatly expanding
the drift of the poison.
The lead lawyer for the Indians is Cristobal
Bonifaz, an Amherst, Massachusetts attorney. Bonifaz used the
Alien Tort Claims Act to sue Texaco in 1993 on behalf of another
group of Ecuadorian tribes whose land had been despoiled by the
oil company's rampages in the rainforest. The DynCorp spraying
has contaminated roughly the same area.
"It is a tragedy of major proportions
that, in the same region where Texaco devastated the environment
and caused untold suffering to the people of the rainforest,
a new enemy now comes from the air, poisoning the people, killing
their crops and destroying their land," says Bonifaz.
In addition to the Alien Tort Claim,
Bonifaz's complaint against DynCorp also charges that the company
violated the US Torture Victim Protection Act. It seeks an immediate
halt to the spraying and millions in compensatory damages.
The lawsuit had the misfortune to be
filed on September 11. While it has largely been ignored by the
US press, it did not escape the attention of DynCorp's CEO. Indeed,
Lombardi seemed to take a personal interest in the case and took
it upon himself to try to bully one of the plaintiffs, the International
Human Rights Fund, into pulling out.
On October 25, 2001, Lombardi fired off
a letter to each board member of the International Labor Rights
Fund, an AFL-CIO affiliated group. Lombardi suggested that the
Rights Fund was being used as a front for the Colombian drug
cartels. "Considering the worldwide support for the elimination
of harmful drugs from our cities and schools, it has been suggested
by those who are aware of the lawsuit that the most logical supporters
of such an action would be the drug cartels themselves. Notably,
consistent with the drug cartel's objectives, the complaint also
seeks to permanently enjoin further spraying of coca and opium
poppy," Lombardi wrote.
Lombardi didn't stop there. He went on
to suggest the in the post-September 11 world the Rights Fund's
lawsuit was unpatriotic and might serve to undermine the war
on terrorism. "Considering the major international issues
with which we are all dealing as a consequence of September 11,
none of us need to be sidetracked with frivolous litigation the
aim of which is to fulfill a political agenda."
But the Rights Fund didn't back down.
Indeed, its chairman, Bishop DeWitt, responded by telling Lombardi
that if he didn't stop these strong-arm tactics they would amend
the complaint and "charge you personally with knowingly
conducting aerial attacks on innocent people".
Here's hoping that one federal judge
and 10,000 Ecuadoran Indians can achieve what the Democrats in
congress have failed to do: halt the US's chemical war on the
Amazon.
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