On Wednesday, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord revealed that the Department of Defense had failed its sixth audit in a row, with no significant improvements over the last year.
“We are working hard to address audit findings as well as recommendations from the Government Accountability Office,” McCord said in a statement. “The Components are making good progress resulting in meaningful benefits, but we must do more.”
In a repeat of last year’s audit, just one in four of the Pentagon’s auditing units received a clean bill of financial health, though auditors claimed they made some progress in accounting for the agency’s $3.8 billion in assets. McCord said that a clean audit likely remains years away, according to Reuters.
The Pentagon remains the only federal agency to have never passed an audit. Its failure to make significant progress has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who called for an independent audit of the department.
“The recent failure of the Pentagon's 6TH audit couldn't make it clearer that we need accountability & transparency,” Paul posted on X. “No institution is above scrutiny, especially the DoD [with] the largest budget of ANY [federal] agency.”
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee also slammed the Pentagon for its financial troubles, arguing in a post on X that the department’s “inability to adequately track assets risks our military readiness and represents a flagrant disregard for taxpayer funds, even as it receives nearly a trillion dollars annually.”
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said the news showed that it’s “time to stop misdirecting hundreds of billions of dollars away from domestic and human needs to pad unnecessary budget lines for endless wars, failed weapons, & the Pentagon’s corporate handouts.”
The news could reinvigorate efforts to impose a 1 percent budget cut on any parts of the military that fail an audit, a policy that would “provide a much greater incentive to get financial books in order,” according to Jennifer Knox of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“[T]his isn’t just a matter of clean accounting; it’s a matter of security,” Knox argued. “Ensuring that defense dollars are spent effectively and appropriately will improve performance while reducing spending.”
Connor Echols is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft. He was previously an associate editor at the Nonzero Foundation, where he co-wrote a weekly foreign policy newsletter. Echols received his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University, where he studied journalism and Middle East and North African Studies.
Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg (L) moderates a conversation with Palantir CEO Alex Karp (R) during a forum in the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. (Screengrab via thehillandvalleyforum.com)
It’s only been six years since thousands of Google employees forced their employer to pull out of an AI contract with the U.S. military. At the time, it seemed like a watershed moment: Despite long historical links to the Pentagon, Silicon Valley appeared poised to shake off its ties with the world’s most powerful military.
But a lot can change in half a decade, as Palantir CEO Alex Karp gleefully reminded his audience in the U.S. Capitol Wednesday. “I historically would have been one that would rage against Silicon Valley venture [capitalists],” Karp said, joking that he used to have “all sorts of fantasies of using drone-enabled technology to exact revenge.”
Now, patriotic investors and officials are “coming together around some obvious truths,” he argued. In Karp’s telling, these principles include a realization that Western values must be protected against burgeoning threats from America’s adversaries in China and Russia as well as the dangerous “pagan” forces behind pro-Palestinian protests.
Karp’s free-wheeling presentation was the most entertaining of Wednesday’s Hill and Valley Forum, a four-hour-long event featuring a who’s-who of the growing defense tech ecosystem. But, rhetorical flourishes aside, the series of talks gave a unique window into the increasingly porous border between Silicon Valley’s most hawkish entrepreneurs and their ideological allies in Washington.
Above all, the two groups came together around their shared hatred for the Chinese Communist Party and its various nefarious doings. Panelists called for everything from slashing regulation of the weapons industry to fielding fully autonomous weapons, lest our enemies get a chance to do it first.
“Technology is moving extremely quickly, and you have your adversaries that are moving super quickly as well,” remarked Alex Wang of Scale AI. “We’re in a moment where we have to act really quickly.”
The conduit for this growing collaboration is Jacob Helberg, the event’s baby-faced organizer. In recent years, Helberg has shed his more conventional think tank background to become Silicon Valley’s man in Washington. He’s convened countless meetings between policymakers and tech leaders where attendees pitch policies to stick it to China.
Helberg now works both as an adviser to Palantir and a member of a congressional commission on U.S.-China relations. Some say this dual-hatting amounts to a conflict of interests given that he now “stands to benefit from ever-frostier relations between the two countries,” a claim that Helberg strenuously denies.
Some of Helberg’s efforts, like the campaign to ban TikTok, have already paid off. But he has his sights set on something bigger, according to the Washington Post, which reported Wednesday that the young hotshot has already started drafting an executive order for a potential future Trump administration that would strip away President Joe Biden’s AI regulations (limited as they may be).
Helberg’s convening powers were on full display Wednesday: Some of Washington’s most powerful politicians graced the stage, including Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), as well as Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), who holds an important position on the House Appropriations Committee.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) — who, you may remember, is currently fighting for his political life — took time out of his schedule to warn the crowd about the threat China poses to our very way of life. “We must make clear that if America and American companies lose, that means China wins,” Johnson said.
Even Donald Trump made an appearance, if only in the form of a brief, pre-recorded statement filmed on what appeared to be the ex-president’s private jet. “Our country’s going through a lot of problems right now, but we’re going to make it bigger, better, and even stronger than before,” Trump said, noting that he’d had a “very productive” meeting about AI with Helberg.
The day’s panels had an odd quality to them, possibly because none of the journalists in attendance were invited to moderate. Instead, the audience was treated to a series of largely unstructured conversations between politicians and the kind of people who can buy an island.
Graham warned the audience that Chinese cars could be little more than “roving spy labs” meant to gather information on American patriots. Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) argued that Americans will have to come around to the idea of AI drones that make “life and death decisions” because our enemies will surely do the same.
The growing bonds between Silicon Valley and Washington are “recreating a culture that says it is great to be American,” remarked Josh Wolfe, a VC at Lux Capital, adding that “we do have adversaries with malicious aims” that can only be countered with good old-fashioned American capitalism.
The funhouse mirror aspects of the event, plentiful as they were, are a distraction from the fundamental problem: A growing part of Silicon Valley is ready to unshackle AI from most if not all oversight, and Congress is more than happy to help them.
There is perhaps no greater evidence of this fact than the effusive praise Sen. Booker lavished on his fellow panelists, all of whom lead various AI firms. “Often unsung heroes are those that are the innovators and the scientists and those who are creating systems and opportunities that we now in our generation take for granted,” the lawmaker said. “You three are frontline players in ways that have me humbled and in awe.”
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Army mariners assigned to the 368th Seaport Operations Company and 331st Transportation Company construct a causeway adjacent to the Merchant Vessel Maj. Bernard F. Fisher off the coast of Bowen, Australia, July 29, 2023. (Photo Credit: Sgt. Ashunteia' Smith)
According to reports today, satellite images are showing that the massive U.S. project to build a pier and causeway to help surge humanitarian aid into Gaza has finally begun.
President Joe Biden first announced the plan during his State of the Union speech, on March 4.
The problem is it was supposed to be complete in "early May" but Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, system is no where near being in place. In fact, according to this Associated Press report, an American military engineering unit is currently "training" to build the 1800-foot causeway, which is supposed to be anchored right off the Gazan beach, with another Israeli military unit, up the coast. The article doesn't say how the American unit is accomplishing this without boots on the ground, which was promised up and down and sideways by the Biden administration.
The U.S. Naval vessels are in place about 7 miles away in the waters between Gaza and Crete. They will first build a floating pier onto which humanitarian aid will brought from inspection centers in Crete. Then the aid will be shipped by vessels to the causeway and then onto a staging area on the beach. This is where this gets tricky. Supposedly the Israelis will be providing security on the beach and the U.N. will be delivering it into Gaza, but the project came under mortar fire on the beach last week and Hamas has pledged to "resist" Israel or any other foreign force brought in to guard the area. In short, the entire gambit has become a head scratcher.
Furthermore, according to Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh, the whole thing is going to cost the U.S. taxpayers $320 million (in addition to the $26 billion approved last week) up front. This is quite a bit to swallow given that there are check points and ports in Israel that could be surging aid into the starving Palestinian population but are not. Nevertheless, officials say they still expect this to be up and running in "early May."
None of this has escaped the attention of even the biggest pro-Israel hawks on Capitol Hill. "This dangerous effort with marginal benefit will now cost the American taxpayers at least $320 million to operate the pier for only 90 days,” charged Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), in an interview with Reuters, which broke the story about the cost.
“How much will taxpayers be on the hook once – or if – the pier is finally constructed?” Wicker asked further.
“For every day this mission continues, the price tag goes up and so does the level of risk for the 1,000 deployed troops within range of Hamas’s rockets.”
Interestingly the pier is no longer considered a temporary fix. According to CNN this morning, "the ultimate goal is to turn it into a full-time commercial operation that can be used by other countries and non-governmental organizations."
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A black strip placed by censors masks the identity of a detainee in an undated photo from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, among 198 images released in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense in Washington, DC February 5, 2016. REUTERS/DoD/Handout via Reuters
“To this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me… The time I spent in Abu Ghraib — it ended my life. I’m only half a human now.” That’s what Abu Ghraib survivor Talib al-Majli had to say about the 16 months he spent at that notorious prison in Iraq after being captured and detained by American troops on October 31, 2003. In the wake of his release, al-Majli has continued to suffer a myriad of difficulties, including an inability to hold a job thanks to physical and mental-health deficits and a family life that remains in shambles.
He was never even charged with a crime — not exactly surprising, given the Red Cross’s estimate that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country’s War on Terror.
The Abu Ghraib “Scandal”
On April 28th, 2004, CBS News’s 60 Minutes aired a segment about Abu Ghraib prison, revealing for the first time photos of the kinds of torture that had happened there. Some of those now-infamous pictures included a black-hooded prisoner being made to stand on a box, his arms outstretched and electrical wires attached to his hands; naked prisoners piled on top of each other in a pyramid-like structure; and a prisoner in a jumpsuit on his knees being threatened with a dog. In addition to those disturbing images, several photos included American military personnel grinning or posing with thumbs-up signs, indications that they seemed to be taking pleasure in the humiliation and torture of those Iraqi prisoners and that the photos were meant to be seen.
Once those pictures were exposed, there was widespread outrage across the globe in what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, that word “scandal” still puts the focus on those photos rather than on the violence the victims suffered or the fact that, two decades later, there has been zero accountability when it comes to the government officials who sanctioned an atmosphere ripe for torture.
Thanks to the existence of the Federal Tort Claims Act, all claims against the federal government, when it came to Abu Ghraib, were dismissed. Nor did the government provide any compensation or redress to the Abu Ghraib survivors, even after, in 2022, the Pentagon released a plan to minimize harm to civilians in U.S. military operations. However, there is a civil suit filed in 2008 — Al Shimari v. CACI — brought on behalf of three plaintiffs against military contractor CACI’s role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Though CACI tried 20 times to have the case dismissed, the trial — the first to address the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees — finally began in mid-April in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. If the plaintiffs succeed with a ruling in their favor, it will be a welcome step toward some semblance of justice. However, for other survivors of Abu Ghraib, any prospect of justice remains unlikely at best.
The Road to Abu Ghraib
”My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture… And therefore, I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.” So said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in 2004. He failed, of course, to even mention that he and other members of President George W. Bush’s administration had gone to great lengths not only to sanction brutal torture techniques in their “Global War on Terror,” but to dramatically raise the threshold for what might even be considered torture.
As Vian Bakir argued in her book Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building Struggles, his comments were part of a three-pronged Bush administration strategy to reframe the abuses depicted in those photos, including providing “evidence” of the supposed legality of the basic interrogation techniques, framing such abuses as isolated rather than systemic events, and doing their best to destroy visual evidence of torture altogether.
Although top Bush officials claimed to know nothing about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the war on terror they launched was built to thoroughly dehumanize and deny any rights to those detained. As a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, “The Road to Abu Ghraib,” noted, a pattern of abuse globally resulted not from the actions of individual soldiers, but from administration policies that circumvented the law, deployed distinctly torture-like methods of interrogation to “soften up” detainees, and took a “see no evil, hear no evil,” approach to any allegations of prisoner abuse.
In fact, the Bush administration actively sought out legal opinions about how to exclude war-on-terror prisoners from any legal framework whatsoever. A memorandum from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to President Bush argued that the Geneva Conventions simply didn’t apply to members of the terror group al-Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Regarding what would constitute torture, an infamous memo, drafted by Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, argued that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Even after the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials never relented when it came to their supposed inapplicability. As Rumsfeld put it in a television interview, they “did not apply precisely” in Iraq.
In January 2004, Major General Anthony Taguba was appointed to conduct an Army investigation into the military unit, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which ran Abu Ghraib, where abuses had been reported from October through December 2003. His report was unequivocal about the systematic nature of torture there: “Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison.”
Sadly, the Taguba report was neither the first nor the last to document abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, prior to its release, the International Committee of the Red Cross had issued multiple warnings that such abuse was occurring at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
Simulating Atonement
Once the pictures were revealed, President Bush and other members of his administration were quick to condemn the violence at the prison. Within a week, Bush had assured King Abdullah of Jordan, who was visiting the White House, that he was sorry about what those Iraqi prisoners had endured and “equally sorry that people who’ve been seeing those pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.”
As scholar Ryan Shepard pointed out, Bush’s behavior was a classic case of “simulated atonement,” aimed at offering an “appearance of genuine confession” while avoiding any real responsibility for what happened. He analyzed four instances in which the president offered an “apologia” for what happened — two interviews with Alhurra and Al Arabiya television on May 5, 2004, and two appearances with the King of Jordan the next day.
In each case, the president also responsible for the setting up of an offshore prison of injustice on occupied Cuban land in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 managed to shift the blame in classic fashion, suggesting that the torture had not been systematic and that the fault for it lay with a few low-level people. He also denied that he knew anything about torture at Abu Ghraib prior to the release of the photos and tried to restore the image of America by drawing a comparison to what the regime of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had done prior to the American invasion.
In his interview with Alhurra, for example, he claimed that the U.S. response to Abu Ghraib — investigations and justice — would be unlike anything Saddam Hussein had done. Sadly enough, however, the American takeover of that prison and the torture that occurred there was anything but a break from Hussein’s reign. In the context of such a faux apology, however, Bush apparently assumed that Iraqis could be easily swayed on that point, regardless of the violence they had endured at American hands; that they would, in fact, as Ryan Shepard put it, “accept the truth-seeking, freedom-loving American occupation as vastly superior to the previous regime.”
True accountability for Abu Ghraib? Not a chance. But revisiting Bush’s apologia so many years later is a vivid reminder that he and his top officials never had the slightest intention of truly addressing those acts of torture as systemic to America’s war on terror, especially because he was directly implicated in them.
Weapons of American Imperialism
On March 19th, 2003, President Bush gave an address from the Oval Office to his “fellow citizens.” He opened by saying that “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” The liberated people of Iraq, he said, would “witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military.”
There was, of course, nothing about his invasion of Iraq that was honorable or decent. It was an illegally waged war for which Bush and his administration had spent months building support. In his State of the Union address in 2002, in fact, the president had referred to Iraq as part of an “axis of evil” and a country that “continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.” Later that year, he began to claim that Saddam’s regime also had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn’t and he knew it.) If that wasn’t enough to establish the threat Iraq supposedly posed, in January 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that it “aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”
Days after Cheney made those claims, Secretary of State Colin Powell falsely asserted to members of the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, had used them before, and would not hesitate to use them again. He mentioned the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” 17 times in his speech, leaving no room to mistake the urgency of his message. Similarly, President Bush insisted the U.S. had “no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”
The false pretenses under which the U.S. waged war on Iraq are a reminder that the war on terror was never truly about curbing a threat, but about expanding American imperial power globally.
When the United States took over that prison, they replaced Saddam Hussein’s portrait with a sign that said, “America is the friend of all Iraqis.” To befriend the U.S. in the context of Abu Ghraib, would, of course, have involved a sort of coerced amnesia.
In his essay “Abu Ghraib and its Shadow Archives,” Macquarie University professor Joseph Pugliese makes this connection, writing that “the Abu Ghraib photographs compel the viewer to bear testimony to the deployment and enactment of absolute U.S. imperial power on the bodies of the Arab prisoners through the organizing principles of white supremacist aesthetics that intertwine violence and sexuality with Orientalist spectacle.”
As a project of American post-9/11 empire building, Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners there should be viewed through the lens of what I call carceral imperialism — an extension of the American carceral state beyond its borders in the service of domination and hegemony. (The Alliance for Global Justice refers to a phenomenon related to the one I’m discussing as “prison imperialism.”) The distinction I draw is based on my focus on the war on terror and how the prison became a tool through which that war was being fought. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the capture, detention, and torture through which Iraqis were contained and subdued was a primary strategy of the U.S. colonization of Iraq and was used as a way to transform detained Iraqis into a visible threat that would legitimize the U.S. presence there. (Bagram prison in Afghanistan was another example of carceral imperialism.)
Beyond Spectacle and Towards Justice
What made the torture at Abu Ghraib possible to begin with? While there were, of course, several factors, it’s important to consider one above all: the way the American war not on, but of terror rendered Iraqi bodies so utterly disposable.
One way of viewing this dehumanization is through philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, which defines a relationship between power and two forms of life: zoe and bios. Zoe refers to an individual who is recognized as fully human with a political and social life, while bios refers to physical life alone. Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were reduced to bios, or bare life, while being stripped of all rights and protections, which left them vulnerable to uninhibited and unaccountable violence and horrifying torture.
Twenty years later, those unforgettable images of torture at Abu Ghraib serve as a continuous reminder of the nature of American brutality in that Global War on Terror that has not ended. They continue to haunt me — and other Muslims and Arabs — 20 years later. They will undoubtedly be seared in my memory for life.
Whether or not justice prevails in some way for Abu Ghraib’s survivors, as witnesses – even distant ones — to what transpired at that prison, our job should still be to search for the stories behind the hoods, the bars, and the indescribable acts of torture that took place there. It’s crucial, even so many years later, to ensure that those who endured such horrific violence at American hands are not forgotten. Otherwise, our gaze will become one more weapon of torture — extending the life of the horrific acts in those images and ensuring that the humiliation of those War on Terror prisoners will continue to be a passing spectacle for our consumption.
Two decades after those photos were released, what’s crucial about the unbearable violence and horror they capture is the choice they still force viewers to make — whether to become just another bystander to the violence and horror this country delivered under the label of the War on Terror or to take in the torture and demand justice for the survivors.
This piece has been republished with permission from TomDispatch.