WikiLeaks is the greatest treason in the history of mankind.
That guy, Assange, ought to be hunted down like Osama Bin Laden.
Also, there's nothing important in any of these WikiLeaks that any of you need to be concerned about at all.
Got that?
Alright, good.
Alright, our next guest on the show today is John Lomax.
He's a staff writer for the Houston Press.
His newest piece is entitled WikiLeaks.
And that, again, to be specific here, is not they claim so.
It's they produce the document what says so.
Texas company helped pimp little boys to stoned Afghan cops.
Welcome to the show, John.
Well, thank you for having me.
Say it ain't so.
Well, you know, I heard your intro, and as of a couple of weeks ago, I was sort of of, you know, in the, you know, chattering masses who thought there wasn't much important in there.
But this certainly changed my mind.
This document, you know, once I actually started reading the damn things, you know, it's certainly revelatory.
Yeah.
Alright, well, so go ahead and get into the substance here.
Do your reporting thing, and then we'll follow up.
Well, basically, it's there was the cable was signed by Carl Ikenberry, the ambassador, and it summarized a meeting between one of his underlings named Joseph Mousameli and the former Afghan interior minister, Hanif Atmar, in which Atmar was.
It was sort of apparent from the cable that he was more or less flipping out about this party that had been thrown by DynCorp, a Virginia-slash-Texas-based security private contractor firm that is 95 to 96 percent funded by you and me, the American taxpayer.
And it was this party seemed to focus around dancing boys, and we had funded the party, and at least one dancing boy was brought on.
I'm melding this with DynCorp's official response, which they've sent me an hour or two ago.
They claim that there was only one dancer hired, and he was 17, and that the party was stopped in the middle of the action, and they seem to say that nothing happened, that it was a traditional cultural Afghan dance, but that a site manager decided to stop it right in the middle.
And then numerous DynCorp employees were fired, and 11 Afghan police and civilians were arrested for the charge was soliciting the services of a child, I believe.
Oh, wow.
Well, I guess maybe you'll need to update this blog entry, if that's true.
I did.
Well, yeah, there's a new blog entry up that just went up within the hour.
Oh, I see.
I'd missed that.
But the thing is, even in their denial, and I pressed them for more information, if nothing did happen at this party, why was it shut down, and why were all these people arrested, and why were all these people fired, and why did they completely overhaul their practices in Afghanistan, which is all stuff straight from DynCorp's mouth.
Right.
Those are all very good questions.
Maybe we can call DynCorp on three-way during the commercial.
Well, they admitted that they showed extreme cultural insensitivity.
That was their blanket answer to that question.
So I guess after they got busted running all those sex slaves back in the 1990s in Bosnia, they brought in some very politically correct Democrats to run their PR or to run their operations.
I guess so.
The key to me wording that headline as strongly as I did was that I had seen the Frontline special on, it's called the Dancing Boys of Afghanistan, and I recommend that anybody interested in the situation in Afghanistan see that.
I kind of have a feeling that the Washington Post reporter who wrote the original story on this a year and a half ago had not seen, well, the piece didn't exist, but I have a feeling that she was not aware of what went into this practice, which is called Bacha Bazi in Afghanistan.
It's basically child sex slaves who dress as women and dance for roomfuls of men to procure their services after they're done dancing.
And I think what happened possibly is that some DynCorp employee realized in the middle of the party that this was what was going on, or somebody did, after they had already arranged to throw this party.
Yeah, that is kind of what it sounds like, assuming any of what they say is true.
Yeah, yeah, assuming any of it's true.
Tell us a little bit about, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead.
Well, she also denied that there were any drugs involved, and the drug allegation came from former minister Atmar, too, and I said, well, you know, I didn't make that up.
This was in the cable, and she said, well, we have no comment on anything on the cable, and essentially told me to ask Atmar, or Atman, who has since resigned, and the entire cable revolved around his maniacal concern that any news of this, or worse still, the video of this event would get into the public, because he believed that it would, quote, endanger lives, unquote.
So, you know, on one side you have the interior minister so concerned about what happened at this party that he thinks that people are going to get killed, and then you have DynCorp saying that it was, you know, a traditional cultural party featuring a 17-year-old who danced at weddings.
Well, and of course, you know, that doesn't necessarily contradict the other part, because as they explain in the Frontline special that you referenced there, this is traditional.
Yeah, it is.
As crazy as it sounds.
It is.
It's totally traditional, and it's not an Islamic thing.
It's not even an Afghan thing.
It seems to be mainly a Pashtun thing, and it predates Islam in the region.
It's outlawed under Sharia and Afghan civil code.
It's just a sort of unique, well, not unique, it's practiced in other parts of the world, but it's a taboo and yet completely accepted Pashtun practice.
And something that the Taliban had outlawed, right?
Yes, the Taliban had cracked down on it and outlawed it.
Well, you know, they banned music, so there weren't going to be any dancing.
There weren't going to be any dancing.
But I think that they frowned on, well, I know that they frowned on pedophilia, too, and that was a huge part of this.
And, you know, you heard stories like this out of the Russian-Afghan war, where young recruits, you know, they really didn't want to be taken prisoner by Pashtuns, and, you know, they feared the consequences of that above all else.
Yeah, well, I have read soldiers' articles, too, about the American soldiers have the utmost content for the people they're supposedly training up.
They'll stand up, we'll stand down, and all that crap, because on their lunch break, these guys go and rape kids.
Yeah, yeah, and supposedly there's, well, I don't know enough about it to really speak on it, but boy sex Thursdays or something like that.
Jeez, Thursdays, like happy hour.
Yeah.
Well, and this is kind of the thing about intervening all over the world, is that look who we end up taking the side of, or at least, you know, liberating to go and commit these kinds of crimes.
Right.
At least, you know, the way we look at it.
Yeah, yeah, it's, I don't think it's what we had in mind when we said we were going to bring democracy to Afghanistan, freedom.
You know, and there's other things that the Taliban had put a lid on, that, you know, female rape was fairly endemic over there.
Do you know much more about Don Corp's operations in Afghanistan?
No, I really don't.
Or any of the cops, that kind of thing?
I read about some of their other scandals recently.
There was some.
All right, well, hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with John Nova Lomax from houstonpress.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Talking with John Lomax from houstonpress.com.
And maybe I was a little bit hyperbolic earlier in the show, beating you over the head with the empire, rounding up kids to be raped.
Sounds like maybe they just hired one kid to be raped and maybe he didn't even get raped, but maybe he did and they're just covering it up, and we don't really know, but it's more complicated than the way I was beating you over the head with it.
So I should say that and apologize.
But anyway, so John Lomax is on here, and he's talking about what we do know happened and what we don't and what remains to be discussed about it, as well as other previous scandals, recent scandals involving Dime Corp.
So anyway, go ahead, say anything you think needs to still be said about this particular case before you get into that, I guess.
Yeah, well, the bottom line is 96% of their money comes from the taxpayer, and this money did go to throw a party at which ordinarily little boys are pimped.
And I don't know how we can verify the age of this kid.
I don't know how we can verify that there was only one there.
I don't think we can ever verify why the Afghan interior minister was so terrified and was so concerned that literally heads would roll if this story got out in the way that he feared was the truth.
Yeah, it sounds like maybe my hyperbole was closer to right after all.
Yeah.
I thought it was very interesting that Dime Corp.'s official response did not— they were so forthcoming in admitting that they basically apparently overhauled the entire way they conducted their business in Afghanistan in response to this party, the way they presented it to me.
Yeah, it sounds like they were pretty concerned about just an innocent little party.
Right, exactly.
And then you had 11 people arrested by the Afghan authorities, and then the rest of the cable, the interior minister was sort of begging the U.S. Embassy to install the U.S. military in control of not just Dime Corp., but all contractors working in Afghanistan.
Yeah, and that's the thing about this, too, is these are the cops.
Right.
They're supposed to be in charge of enforcing the law that says they can't do things like this themselves.
Well, in that culture, it's the authority figures who indulge in these— it's the elite who sort of indulge in this bacha-bazi the most.
You know, these kids are sold to the highest bidder.
In the Frontline documentary, the guys— yeah, you have these warlords, you know, the most powerful guys in towns and regions sort of bragging about their little boy lovers with no shame whatsoever.
And there was one guy who was touting himself as a modern man because he would ask his wife permission every time he would buy a boy lover.
That was the sign of a sensitive warlord.
Jeez, yeah, it's unbelievable.
All right, so anyway, these guys also are in charge of— well, I guess as this indicates, they're in charge of the cops, training the cops over there.
Right.
Which means—who are these guys?
I think you say in your article, Green Berets and Delta Force types or something?
Yeah, and not just Americans.
I read somewhere that there's also Gurkhas, you know, Indian elite soldiers.
And South Africans, those South African mercenaries seem to get into a lot of American contractor scenarios.
It's essentially—a lot of these companies sort of are privatized American Foreign Legion, you know.
Right, yeah, it really is getting that way.
I mean, that's who, you know—I guess you said contractor.
That grandma that was the truck driver in Iraq, that kind of thing.
But we're talking about hardcore mercenaries here, like the Hessian soldiers during our war for independence.
And it's just amazing to me.
There's this article—it really is.
It's like reading the Rotten Onion where it's not that funny, but it seems like some kind of satire, but it's not.
It's the Chicago Tribune.
U.S. stalls on human trafficking.
Pentagon has yet to ban contractors from using forced labor.
And what it says here is—I think this was in response really to DynCorp back in the 1990s and all their sex slave trade going on in Central Europe or in the Balkans.
But all these lobbyists came out for Halliburton, which had some Nepalese slaves in Iraq, or a subcontractor of theirs did at least.
And all these lobbyists came out for these defense firms, even though George Bush had signed an edict or whatever, and they basically figured out a way to prevent the Pentagon from implementing the order that they will not do business with contractors who are implicated in human trafficking.
Right.
This is who we hire to serve our empire in Central Asia.
Yeah.
It's absolutely incredible.
And Halliburton, that's the company that former Secretary of Defense, former Vice President Dick Cheney was the CEO of.
The guys that were still paying him the whole time he was the Vice President.
Yeah, it's unbelievable.
There was a blogger I'd like to tout who follows a lot of these abuses.
You probably know of her and maybe you've already touted her, but she goes by Ms. Sparky.
Oh, no, I'm not familiar.
Go ahead.
Ms. Sparky, all one word.
I think she was the first female electrician in her local union out in Oregon somewhere.
And she's really up on the KBR and Halliburton DynCorp shenanigans.
Oh, right on.
Cool.
In fact, if you Google her, some of these websites have a lot of content.
It'll have subcategories of things on their site right there in the Google results.
And she's got all kinds of great stuff here.
Some acronyms I don't understand.
Then here's LogCap/DynCorp KBR right there in the sub search results.
Yeah.
That's google.com there.
MsSparky.com.
I'll be sure to look into that.
I appreciate that.
And, yeah, all right.
Well, so I guess I will refer people again to your articles here at the Houston Press.
It's blogs.houstonpress.com.
The first is Texas Company Help Pimp Little Boys to Stoned Afghan Cops.
The second is DynCorp Responds to Dancing Boys Scandal.
And I do hope that there will be a third attempting to sort out all those questions you asked about the contradictions in DynCorp's official statement there.
Well, it's possible that a whistleblower will emerge.
It has happened to them in the past.
You know, with the Bosnia scandal, it was Catherine Bolkovac and then the man named, I think his name was Thompson, who both helped unravel that mess.
And so who knows?
Well, we still have hundreds of thousands of WikiLeaks State Department cables to go.
Right, right.
Can't stop the signal.
Nope.
All right.
Well, I appreciate your journalism and your time on the show today, John.
Well, thanks for having me.
Good work.
Everybody, that's John Lomax at houstonpress.com.
