War & Disaster Profiteering

Moves by the U.S. military to relinquish responsibility to Iraq's security forces raise big questions over who will safeguard the shattered country's reconstruction in what is the biggest effort since the Marshall Plan. Read More

About 30 Ecuadorians have been enlisted to travel to Iraq as mercenaries by US recruiting firms at the US-occupied Manta air base, a Parliamentary source denounced Thursday. Read More

A former employee of the U.S. security contracting firm DynCorp International was quoted last month by the Los Angeles Times saying that he saw a booming global demand for his "private army," and a lucrative business opportunity in recruiting Colombians. Read More

A lawsuit accusing North Carolina-based Blackwater Security Consulting of wrongful death and fraud in the deaths of four guards killed and mutilated in Iraq should be heard in a North Carolina courts, a federal judge has ruled. Read More

One of the largest private security companies in Iraq, Triple Canopy, was born immediately after the invasion. Plenty of other companies have done the same, some that were more established before the American invasion, some less. Read More

U.S. looking into Carlyle Group links to teacher funds. Read More

No. 1 in dealing with Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi: Never underestimate him. A year after observers pronounced him finished - spurned by one-time American sponsors and with no apparent political base in Iraq - Chalabi has emerged more powerful than ever. Read More

Earlier this summer, Marines detained a group of private contractors in Iraq for allegedly firing on their positions in Fallujah; the contractors, who worked for North Carolina-based Zapata Engineering, were expelled from Iraq after their release. That highly publicized incident followed questions from lawmakers about oversight of contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read More

What a break for U.S. corporations, such as Monsanto. The important information about Iraqi Order 81 is that it was designed to have a major impact on the way farming is done in Iraq. This order prohibits Iraqi farmers from using saving seeds from one year to the next. Read More

Since 2003, the disbursement of aid and reconstruction funds in Iraq has not been in the hands of the United Nations, and if anything the record is even more dismal. Read More