Pentagon Fights Disclosure Of "Revolving Door" For Defense Contractors, Ex-Workers

by Katherine Stapp

(IPS) NEW YORK -- When researchers from the Center for Public Integrity decided to delve into the arcane world of U.S. government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were met with the bureaucratic equivalent of stony silence.

Although the deals were paid for with taxpayer money, the Pentagon and State Department fought tooth and nail to avoid disclosing details.

This was perhaps not surprising, since it turned out that nearly every one of the 10 largest contracts were awarded to companies employing former high-ranking government officials.

After filing 73 Freedom of Information Act requests and several lawsuits, Center investigators also discovered that nearly one-third of the members of the influential Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group, had ties to companies that earned more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002.

"It's stunning to me, the level of control and increasing secrecy," says Charles Lewis, who just stepped down as the Washington-based Center's executive director last month. "And there's no dissent on Capitol Hill. The oversight mechanism is not working because it's the same party." In a new essay on the decline of investigative reporting in the United States titled "A Culture of Secrecy," Lewis examines the increasingly "cozy" relationship between the national news media and the officials and institutions they cover, and the advent of a "national security state" since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"What concerns me is that the so-called mainstream media is overly reliant on officialdom and not independent outside the talking points," he said in an IPS interview.

"This means that there is no dissonant information from official sources to speak of. And when you cover national security and intelligence, the ability to report outside officialdom is 10 times harder."

"It's a mysterious and difficult world to traverse," said Lewis, an award-winning investigative journalist himself. "The best reporting I see now is from these old warhorses who have had the same sources for 20 or 30 years."

"They have enough scar tissue from being spun or outright lied to, and the public trusts them because they stared into the abyss and survived," he said with a laugh.

Lewis' article is one of a four-part series published by the Center last week in which leading reporters from four countries share compelling, first-person accounts of their probes into state corruption.

"It helps reporters get new information on the mechanisms to prevent abuse of power," said Marianne Camerer, who organized the project. "These scandals don't just come out of nowhere." In other essays, Yevgenia Albots, a respected freelance journalist and author in Russia -- where as many as 15 reporters have been killed in recent years -- describes the tactics used by President Vladimir Putin to silence the private media.

Geoff Nyarota, the former editor-in-chief of Zimbabwe's Daily News, which fearlessly criticized the excesses of the Robert Mugabe government (in power since 1980), relates a surreal encounter with a would-be assassin and the man's change of heart after exchanging pleasantries with Nyarota in an elevator.

And in "The Spy Who Would Rule Peru," Gustavo Gorriti tells the long, strange tale of Vladimiro Montesinos, the seemingly untouchable "eminence gris" behind President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), who was driven into exile when a bribery scam backfired and proved the final straw for a fed-up Peruvian public.

Gorriti wrote his first expose on Montesinos 22 years ago, and pursued his quarry relentlessly despite being thrown in jail and later forced to flee to the United States.

There from the beginning, the journalist also played a part in Montesinos' final disgrace, tipping off the news media that the fugitive was sneaking back into Peru from his hideout in Panama. "Strangely enough, despite the fact that mine and Montesinos' family were close for two generations, I never met him formally in person," Gorriti told IPS by e-mail from Peru. "After his arrest, I tried to arrange an interview with him, but the authorities refused their permission to do so. I keep trying."

Gorriti firmly believes that even though the former spymaster is facing up to 30 years in prison for human rights abuses and arms and drug smuggling, "Montesinos is not finished."

"He is fighting for his life against a very weak democratic regime. He has covert allies within the military, the police and, most importantly, the political and business sector. He also can count on his extortion capability through the videos of people whose complicity with him has not been hitherto revealed."

Gorriti pointed to the example of Ernesto Schutz, a businessman who controlled Peru's powerful Channel 5 TV station. When Schutz refused to pay off Montesinos -- after his arrest -- Montesinos made arrangements to reveal a video in which Schutz is shown being bribed by Montesinos with several bags of cash. Schutz insists he is innocent.

On a more recent occasion, Montesinos was filmed at his trial dictating a cover page to the publisher of the tabloid La Raz—n, Gorriti says.

Now the executive editor of La Republica newspaper, Gorriti laments that "it is not easy to keep on reporting on my own."

"Nevertheless, I make sure that the newspaper covers energetically all issues related to Montesinos and his mafia," he says, "and keep dreaming (about) going back to do my own reporting."