September 6, 2003
Strategic AbuseOutsourcing Human Rights Violations
By NEVE GORDON
In her book
Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, Janice Thomson describes government before company, imparts a definition which helps explain a pervasive strategy used these days to abuse basic human rights: outsourcing, the contracting of violations from sources outside a government, company, or area....
Outsourcing has been put to use primarily in order to abdicate social and moral responsibility. Its benefits are legal, political, and economic.
From a legal perspective, employing subcontractors is an effective device since it obfuscates the connection between the perpetrator and the contravening act, making it extremely difficult to hold the violator legally accountable for the abuses it sanctions.
Human rights groups disclosed that
Nike employed children in substandard working conditions that endangered their health; they also revealed that
Nike's Southeast Asian employees receive a salary of two dollars per day, which cannot sustain them, let alone provide for health insurance and pension funds. When first interviewed,
Nike CEO and founder
Philip Knight asserted that his company wasn't responsible for the violations because subcontractors were committing them. It was later disclosed that
Nike didn't own any manufacturing companies; all production was subcontracted to firms in countries like Thailand.
The
CIA has already transferred one hundred suspects to ally countries whose brutal torture methods have been amply documented in the
State Department's own annual human rights reports. "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them," one government official told the
Washington Post. "We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them." ...
Amnesty International reports that torture practiced by
Israel's subcontractor resulted in physical injury and, on a number of occasions, the death of detainees.
Military training and support of governmental security forces and mercenaries, used extensively by
United States and the former
Soviet Union after
World War II, are also mechanisms of outsourcing violations. More recently,
Private Military Contractors (PMCs), frequently run by retired military generals, have been utilized to do the dirty work previously carried out by foreign mercenaries
. PMCs are the new big business on the block. Their job is to provide stand-ins for active soldiers, engaging in everything from actual fighting and battlefield training to logistical support and military advice at home and abroad. Writing for
Mother Jones,
Barry Yeoman suggests that they enjoy an estimated $100 billion in business each year, with much of this money going to
Fortune 500 firms like
Lockheed Martin,
Raytheon, Halliburton and DynCorp. In the recent
U.S. war on Iraq, the United States employed an estimated twenty thousand corporate workers in the region; that is one civilian for every ten soldiers a tenfold increase over the
1991 Iraqi War.
The advantage of subcontracting to
PMCs is clear: it allows the executive branch to avoid public debate or legislative controls.
While Congress capped the number of
U.S. soldiers who could be sent to
Colombia at five hundred, the
Pentagon together with the
Colombian government have been employing additional corporate soldiers from
DynCorp to carry out anti-drug operations. According to
Peter Singer from the
Brookings Institute, the firm utilizes armed reconnaissance planes and helicopter gunships designed for counterguerrilla warfare, and has been involved in several firefights with local rebels.
DynCorp has lost several planes and employees to rebel fire, but there has been no public outcry about the losses, simply because "corporate soldiers" were killed rather than "real soldiers."
In
Bosnia, the addition of two thousand corporate soldiers helped evade the Congressional limit of twenty thousand troops. The issue isn't only that the
Pentagon uses
PMCs to undercut restrictions made via democratic procedures, but also that corporate soldiers are accountable solely to the corporations that retain them, rather than to governments.
Employees of
DynCorp in
Bosnia were caught operating a sex-slave ring of underage women and even
videotaping a rape.
Leslie Wayne from the
New York Times reported that while
DynCorp employees trafficked in women including buying one for $1,000 the company turned a blind eye. Since
the DynCorp employees involved weren't soldiers, their actions weren't subject to military discipline. Nor did they face local justice; they were simply fired and sent home.
... An additional example wherein outsourcing is used to systematically violate human rights is the private prison complex, which currently holds over one hundred thousand inmates. In this case both political and civil rights, as well as economic and social rights, are violated.
The Nation's Eric Bates argues that the real danger of prison privatization isn't merely the inhumanity on the part of guards, but rather the added financial incentives that reward inhumanity. ...
Health services, when provided, are often inadequate and arrive too late, according to
Allison Campbell, coeditor of
Capitalist Punishment: Prison Privatization and Human Rights. Rehabilitative or educational programs are seen as superfluous luxuries that prisoners don't deserve and that businesses cannot afford. Finally, lack of adequate food is also a major issue in private prisons. One released inmate reported that he would receive one good meal a month; the rest consisted of instant potatoes, canned vegetables, and pizzas.
"When the prison is a business, such cost reductions make a certain kind of sense,"
Campbell claims. "However, physical abuse, inadequate health care and a lack of adequate programming too often amounts to gross abuse of state-sanctioned power and authority."
Outsourcing is, however, not merely employed as a strategy to help the perpetrator abdicate responsibility for the violations it authorizes. It also assists the aggressor in maintaining a respectable aura in the public's eye. It isn't the
United States that tortures
Al-Qaeda suspects,
Egypt does; it isn't the transnational corporation that neglects the health of its employees, but rather its subsidiary in
Thailand.
The state and transnational corporations use subcontractors in order to conceal pernicious practices, because the success of those in power, as
Michel Foucault convincingly argued, "is in proportion to its ability to hide its own mechanisms." Thus, outsourcing should be considered a technique employed by power in order to conceal its own mechanisms. It is motivated by governments and corporations' unwavering efforts to remain in control.
Neve Gordon teaches politics and human rights at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and has written about the outsourcing technique within the Israeli context for the Journal of Human Rights
http://www.counterpunch.org/gordon09062003.html
Pedophile,
Brian Doyle -
Homeland Security - part of the network "keeping us safe".
In
April 1989, John Kerry’s Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terror-ism, Narcotics and International Operations released an exhaustive report that concluded that the
Contras were involved in drug trafficking and that
Reagan administration officials were aware of that involvement.
In an
April 14, 1989, Washington Post article,
Isikoff trivialized the report’s findings and asserted that claims of drug trafficking by high-level
Contras “could not be substantiated.” Subsequently,
Newsweek’s “
Conventional Wisdom Watch” dubbed
Kerry “a randy conspiracy buff.”
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/firststone/
When
Cynthia McKinney grilled
Rumsfeld about the sex slave trade, she suddenly became a "loose cannon" and lost her congressional seat courtesy of
Diebold corruption.
Truth, honor and integrity have little to do with the direction of the country these days, as
Canada and the
USA follow corporate treason off a cliff, we continue to kill the
Frodos holding the door open to freedom.
Next time
John Kerry stands to speak the truth about
Iran contra, and
Viet Nam - let us listen. Next time
Cynthia McKinny stands to speak the truth about the sex SLAVE scandal, we had best all listen - while we still can.
Fox, Bush and Martin (Mexico, USA and Canada), each signed an agreement that merges the three countries into a North American Union. The agreement was not put to a vote of any of the countries involved nor was it passed by the respective elected parliaments of each country. This implies our countries are under organized crime, with our elected representatives ignored. (The photo has the latest suit in office (for Canada, Stephen Harper, FAR RIGHT both in the photo and in life)
Kerry surrounded himself on his staff with tough, intelligent and independent-minded investigators, and he ordered them to follow the trail. In south Florida, they found men accused of drug running who were shipping guns to the Nicaraguan Contras and claiming to have been instructed to do so by the National Security Council. They tracked down a Contra advisor in Costa Rica known as "Colonel Flaco," who had evidence that North was involved in financing the Contras with Colombian drug money. The path led further to Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and to Saudi funding sources. Kerry won support from Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to launch an official investigation in large part because of the drug aspect. (Since Vietnam, concerned about the destructive heroin addiction of many veterans, Kerry had keenly followed the geopolitics of drugs andCIA complicity
http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/blumenthal/2004/07/22/kerry/index.html
