05/17/13 – David Vine – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
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All right, and now you guys are familiar with the name.
I talk about him all the time because it just always seems to come up.
David Vine, he's the author of the book Island of Shame about the United States, United Kingdom conspiracy against the people of the Chagos Archipelago, and especially the island Diego Garcia where they hold the world hostage with their hydrogen bombers.
Anyway, so Island of Shame is such a well-done piece of journalism, and I do hope that you will take a look at it.
Like I was telling you earlier on the show, David basically, like Nick Terse, has picked up the cudgels where Chalmers Johnson left off on keeping track of America's empire of bases, our global empire of bases.
I believe, David, it was in your book that I first read the figure pegging the number of American bases outside the United States at over 1,000.
Is that correct?
And welcome back to the show.
Oh, thanks, Scott.
It's just great to be back on the show.
Yes, the number of bases overseas is always notoriously difficult to get a handle on.
The Pentagon itself doesn't even know for sure how many bases it has outside the 50 states in D.C.
Nick Terse actually, I think, has done the best accounting work, and he put the figure at over 1,100 a couple of years ago.
Since then, a significant number of bases are in the process of closing in Afghanistan.
So it's hard to say exactly, but it's probably around 1,000 at least right now.
Yes, I was wondering about that, whether this counted the height of the Iraq and Afghan occupations or not.
The 1,100 figure, I believe, didn't count the bases in Iraq.
So when those bases were open, the figure probably neared 1,500 at least.
But now it's probably somewhere around 1,000, just 1,000.
Wow.
So now how many countries are there in the world again, and how many countries are these bases in?
That also is challenging to get a handle on, especially because some of it depends on how you define a base.
The Pentagon plays lots of linguistic games about what is a base and what isn't a base.
But there is a U.S. military presence, and I think that's really the most important thing to focus on.
Whether it's formally a U.S. base or it's another base that's hosting U.S. forces, the distinctions matter, of course, in a variety of ways.
But I think what's most important to focus on is the U.S. military presence overseas.
And there's a U.S. military presence in upwards of 160, 165, maybe 170 countries around the world.
And the presence is relatively small, deployments to tens of thousands of troops in Germany and Japan and South Korea still to this day.
But it is a rather remarkable occupation of countries around the world.
Well, and I know it also depends on how you count the various countries that the CIA is breaking off from other countries and that kind of thing.
But it's somewhere right around, what, 192 nations in the world?
Yeah, that's about right, yeah.
I think that's the count at the General Assembly or somewhere right around there.
And so, wow, I mean, that really only leaves out Russia, China, and what I guess Mongolia is between the two of them.
But we even have bases in Kyrgyzstan, which is, you know, goes to show that even being directly in Russia and or China's backyard is not a reason that our government would stay out at all.
You can find them there, too.
No, absolutely, and in many ways it's precisely a reason to be there for some, for many in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the national security bureaucracy.
The U.S. military has large numbers of bases surrounding China and Russia and has for decades, going back to the Cold War, the number of bases in the Persian Gulf surrounding Iran has gone up dramatically since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq.
And, you know, I think we need to turn the tables, in our minds at least, and think how we in the United States would feel if China or Russia established just a single base in Mexico or the Caribbean or anywhere remotely near the United States.
I think we know how people in the United States respond.
Meanwhile, we literally have hundreds of bases in East Asia and Central Asia surrounding China and Russia.
Well, yeah, you know, it's funny, isn't it, the way, just how effective the narrative is that we're all raised with, where this is perfectly acceptable and you never have to think about the other guy's point of view, where when the president of Ecuador said, yeah, you can have your military base here as long as we can have a military base in Florida, it was absolutely ridiculous.
No one took it seriously for a moment.
But no one ever had to, at the same time they were laughing about it, they still didn't really take the point.
They're like, wow, what if I was from Ecuador and I really didn't want an American military base?
You know, what must it be like for them?
You know what I mean?
It was silly that they would have a base in Florida, but still not silly that we would have a base there.
That's absolutely right, and that's why it was so brilliant, a comment by President Correa, to at least for some people in the United States to think about what it would be like to contemplate a foreign base in a place like Miami.
It is truly inconceivable to most people in the United States.
And meanwhile, we don't think twice about how natural it is, seemingly natural it is, that the United States has bases in hundreds of countries overseas.
And by the way, it's a good question.
Hooper in the chat room is asking, what exactly defines a base?
Is that just a closet full of guns somewhere, or does there actually have to be some boots, some cots, or what?
You know, it's a great question.
There are many definitions, first of all, and the various services have different names for bases, posts, air bases, air stations, and the like.
So I think there are a whole range of kinds of installations and facilities.
Some are sort of city-sized bases like we see in Rammstein, Germany, places in Okinawa, elsewhere in Japan and South Korea.
There are relatively small bases with several hundreds of troops in places like Honduras, which is a place where if you go to the base in Honduras, you'll be told firmly by U.S. and Honduran personnel there is no U.S. base.
The United States is simply a guest on a Honduran military base, which is really something of a fiction.
Then there are also warehouses.
Some bases are simply warehouses, stockpiling, weaponry, materiel, other supplies.
So it might just have a handful of military personnel guarding the facility, or often military contractors.
There are radar installations that are technically bases.
So there's a whole range of kinds of facilities with different functions.
So we have to think about the whole breadth of types of bases.
All right, and now, again, everybody, I'm talking with David Vine, the author of the great book Island of Shame.
It's about Andrew Jackson's trail of tears to Oklahoma, only this time in the Indian Ocean, but otherwise it's exactly the same morality at work there and the very same kind of result.
Now, you got this piece here, David, at TomDispatch.com.
It also ran under Tom's name at AntiWar.com, Tom Englehart, that is.
It's called Base World Profiteering, Where Has All the Money Gone?
And you know that makes me think of Dick Cheney, because wasn't that kind of the deal that he was really bad at running the oil services company and he made a bunch of really bad decisions as CEO of Halliburton, like buying a company that was just about to have to settle on an asbestos claim for a bazillion dollars and stuff like that, and so he said, don't worry, I'm just going to put you on military welfare and we'll just build Army bases around the world from now on and you'll get a lot of money for free, and that was kind of the deal.
I probably shouldn't comment on the quality of Dick Cheney's leadership as president and CEO of Halliburton, but you're absolutely right that the now former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, Kellogg, Brown & Root, which was a part of Halliburton when Dick Cheney ran it, has been the major beneficiary of Pentagon contract dollars, bases overseas, contract dollars that go to building bases, running bases, supplying bases.
KBR has made, by my estimate in this Tom Dispatch article, somewhere around $40 billion since around the beginning of the war in Afghanistan to build and support maintaining U.S. bases overseas.
A lot of that, of course, has been to build and support bases in Iraq, but KBR makes money at bases in many parts of the world.
Guantanamo Bay is another example, and they're just one of the beneficiaries, but they are the major beneficiary.
They've made about five times the next closest rival on the list of Pentagon beneficiaries.
In fact, one of the striking things I found in doing this accounting of how much money the United States has been spending to build and maintain bases overseas, who's been benefiting from all this spending, one of the major findings I came upon was that a very small number of contractors are reaping the largest benefit.
So the top 10 have secured about one-third of the $385 billion we've spent since late 2001.
The top 25 have secured that total.
So a small number of often well-connected companies like KBR, like Halliburton, that have reaped literally billions of dollars to build and maintain bases overseas.
Yeah, you know, it was a game.
People don't really play it that much anymore, I guess, from time to time, but there was a game that people played for years and years called, why exactly did we invade Iraq anyway?
And, of course, the answer was there was a lot of different reasons, none of them good enough.
So that was why there was always such a debate about what got it done.
But I remember at one point Juan Cole wrote a piece called The Purloin Letter that said, come on, the answer is obvious right out here in front of everyone.
It was all about Dick Cheney putting Halliburton on the dole.
That's it.
Yeah, as you said, it's a complicated question with many, many reasons, but I think we can't overlook, I think in Iraq alone, it was about $37 billion that KBR earned on contracting from the Pentagon.
Well, it started back in the 90s, too, because didn't they build Camp Bonsteel in Kosovo?
That's right.
The shift actually begins in the war in Vietnam.
The company that KBR, its previous incarnation was a company called Brown and Root, which actually dates back to some caving roads in Texas in 1919.
But in the war in Vietnam, it was a consortium of other private contractors began building bases in South Vietnam.
But the real shift does, as you said, begin in the 1990s.
Even prior to Kosovo, Brown and Root, still not yet Kellogg Brown and Root, Brown and Root begins building bases and supplying bases in places like Somalia, Kenya, and then most prominently and to the greatest profit in Camp Bonsteel and elsewhere in the Balkans.
And boy, you know what?
If people want a picture of the American empire, if your book had been illustrated, for example, the chapter where you count the bases could add a great picture there of Camp Bonsteel.
And if anybody wants to get a kick out of something interesting, go to your Google images or whatever your favorite brand of search engine is and just search Bonsteel in your local image search engine and get a good bird's eye view of that thing, and that will just blow you away.
It says only one thing to me, let's waste money.
And that's one of the other major findings in my article, that this waste, and sometimes not just waste, outright fraud and abuse, it's fairly well documented, although the scope of the spending and the base network is so broad, it's really a mammoth task to try to account for all the money and account for all the waste and fraud.
But there is a clear, consistent pattern of fraud at bases around the world.
The Commission on Wartime Contracting, which is the commission that Congress established to look into waste and fraud and abuse in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, estimated total fraud at somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion, truly astronomical sums.
And that's just Afghanistan and Iraq.
So if you look at waste and fraud and abuse worldwide, the total would be even higher.
Well, yeah, and the thing about that is, how do you make it stop once you have all those vested interests?
You know, it's sort of the same question about the entire world empire as about the Iraq war.
Well, why do we even have a world empire anyway?
I mean, I guess some very liberal interventionist, internationalist ideologue might say, well, collective security and keep the peace and that kind of thing.
But, I mean, mostly it's a puzzle to people, right?
But the real answer is the vested interests of all the different people who have jobs servicing the empire, whether they're generals or whether they're contractors or whether they're selling spy equipment or whatever it is, bombs.
No, I think that's a huge part of the answer.
There are deeply entrenched vested interests, and they have created in ways that really, President Eisenhower's military industrial complex speech has created a sort of self-perpetuating system that is like Frankenstein's sort of come to take on a life of its own and is out of the control of any one company or one group of generals in the Pentagon.
It's really a living, breathing system that we've fed with billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts and just been cut off the tap of money.
There are some encouraging signs of late with sequestration and other planned budget cuts, but the growth in spending at least is being cut off and that there are actually some cuts.
But we've got a long way to go to trim the Pentagon budget and the overall military spending down to something that is reasonable in any sense of the term.
Well, now, how many bases are there in the U.S.?
Do you know?
About 4,500, so around 1,000 outside the 50 states in D.C. and 4,500 within the United States, so a very large collection here, too.
Although it's important to point out that I think the most recent estimate is that there's excess capacity just in the United States of about 20%, so the base infrastructure here is far larger than is needed to support the number of troops that it maintains and with planned troop production at home and abroad, there's really a tremendous amount of room to close bases and shrink bases both domestically and around the world.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's almost like they expect the lost continent of Atlantis to rise up, militarize, and ready for action.
I mean, what do we need 4,500 military bases to protect from?
Invasion from the north?
From the south?
I mean, I know that there are laborers who are invading from the south, in scare quotes, right?
But it's not like the Mexicans have an army they can field here or anything.
No, absolutely.
You know, these bases are not primarily designed to defend the borders of the United States, and that's one of the major problems that the U.S. military pretty much since World War II has not been geared around defending the borders of the United States.
Instead, it's been designed to maintain a global military presence with a very large and advanced, at least technologically, military.
And, you know, in my mind and the minds of many, that really needs to change, especially in these times when there are so many unfunded needs in the United States and around the world, when so many people are out of work, when there are health care needs, housing needs, educational needs, infrastructure needs that are not being met.
You know, where is all that money that's needed?
So much of it has been poured into the U.S. military, and I think I'm encouraged that a growing number of people are pointing that out and demanding that we shift money from the military, from bases, from other military spending.
Well, you know, they push that mythology that, you know, war is good for business.
But it is, I think you're right, that it's becoming more apparent that what they really mean is, well, it's really good for Lockheed, it's really good for Halliburton, it's really good for connected businessmen, it's really good for lobbyists.
But that doesn't mean it's good for the American people in that General Motors sense, you know what I mean?
No, that's absolutely right.
You know, although, of course, part of the problem is that members of Congress, anytime there's any threat that a base in their district or their state would be closed, members of Congress basically freak out.
They are frightened, and rightfully so, given the realities of U.S. politics.
They're frightened that they'll, you know, if any single job is lost at a base in their district or state, they'll lose their job in Congress too.
So they, you know, put aside any, the well-being of the country, they put aside even the well-being of any notion of national security in favor of their own interest in remaining in Congress and to some extent the interest of people in their district or state.
Although if you look at, you know, bases in the United States and the communities surrounding them, many of them are not prosperous communities.
And what we've seen is that in the wake of base closures following the Cold War, many communities, while that represented an economic blow when a base closed, many communities have actually come back stronger and rebuilt their economies stronger after a base was closed.
So we really need to question the logic that a base closure or any cuts in military spending is a deadly blow to our economic well-being.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's something here that I think, well, you may have mentioned it, but I think we kind of overlooked it when we were talking about the economics of it.
But you have it in your article here.
You know, because these companies are working with the government, most of their wrongdoing, I guess sometimes somebody gets made an example of or whatever, but most of their wrongdoing is overlooked and covered up and hushed up and ignored and that kind of thing.
And not just for collecting a lot of money for projects not completed and, you know, that sort of stuff, you know, $900 toilet seats and whatever.
But also you talk about in this section of your article here you call a pattern of misconduct.
You talk about real crimes that these contractors commit and get away with because of their closeness to the government.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And one of the most shocking things that I've found that these companies that have demonstrated patterns of abuse, as I said, continue to get their contracts.
And KBR is one prominent example.
DynCorp, another, which actually in the Balkans, as you mentioned, you know, has a history, a documented history of sex trafficking, sexual harassment, among other forms of misconduct and crime.
And they just continue to get contracts.
It's deeply troubling.
Yeah, Chalmers Johnson, I think, I remember reading Stars of Empire and going, wow, he's really going off about the occupations of Korea and Japan kind of over time here.
But I guess he really needed to to really make that point of just, you know, Americans conceive of our soldiers as very welcome guests over there.
Boy, it sure doesn't seem to feel like that to the locals when their little girls are getting raped.
That's sadly, sadly right.
There is also a pattern which Chalmers Johnson, better than anyone, documented.
We're unfortunately based overseas.
Troops again and again have committed crimes, including rape, including murder, including theft, any number of crimes.
And where you see bases outside the United States, you see friction with local communities.
You see, in many cases, growing anti-American sentiment.
It's really generally not been a very good way of building friendship and solidarity with people around the world.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry we have very little time for this, but I was hoping maybe you could tell us has there been any good news in the case of the Chagossians suing and trying to get some of their property and dignity back?
I wish I could say there was.
Instead, it's actually there's been bad news in a case that they've been waiting on for almost a decade.
Before the European Court of Human Rights, the Chagossians had their suit dismissed back in December, a couple days before Christmas, in fact.
It was a very sad Christmas news, which meant that the British government was victorious and allowed to maintain their exile.
But the people are, I guess the good news is that the people are, again, refusing to be defeated and will continue to wage their struggle to return to their homeland and be properly compensated for all that's been taken from them.
So they are very much not giving up their struggle.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the ratio between the level of injustice and the amount of publicity here is just so far out of whack, and it's just heroic, the work that you've done on it.
Again, the book is Island of Shame, the Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia.
That's something that everybody should know about.
It should be on 60 Minutes every Sunday from now on until somebody cares.
I don't know.
But anyway, it's great work.
I do hope everyone will take a look at it, and I really appreciate your time on the show again, David.
Good to talk to you.
Thank you, Scott.
Thanks for all your support.
All right, everybody.
That is David Vine.
He is an assistant professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C.
And again, the book is Island of Shame, the Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, and he's working on a new one about the empire of bases.
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