WRITTEN ON July 1st, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, What do we want?
One of the big UK public-sector suppliers, CACI, is in the news for the wrong reasons again….
Four Iraqi men say they are suing US military contractors for torturing them while they were detained at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
The allegations are pretty unpleasant. CACI says the charges are baseless.
But the question of to what extent we want companies steeped in the culture of military control to design and operate the systems in which British people are supposed to enjoy freedom and public services remains a weighty one. The militarists forge a lot of new ground and do a lot of new thinking, largely uninhibited by considerations of equality and respect for human dignity. The possibilities they envisage can impress naive central policy makers who often have a bossy tendency, uncluttered by direct experience of front line services such a teaching or nursing.
Just like we had an Entnazifizierung programme before rebuilding Germany after the war, perhaps we need a cultural demilitarisation programme before arms suppliers are invited into the UK market for outsourced public services such as running our censuses. We could test their vocabulary, run polygraph tests to see whether they revel in violent images, and measure they weren’t excessively punctual, or their shoes obsessively shiny.
Wibbi both government and all military contractors had to prove they had a credible 30-year plan for switching to non-violent techniques for sustainable security before they were permitted to undertake any projects intended for normal civilian life?
UPDATE:
Iraq says the US has – finally – agreed to waive immunity from prosecution of the trigger-happy mercenaries working for contractors in Iraq, says the Beeb.
Take for example Raytheon:
1. Integrated Defense Systems (provide affordable, integrated solutions to customers in the U.S. and abroad. As our leader in Joint Battlespace Integration, this business serves the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, the U.S. Armed Forces and the Department of Homeland Security)
2. Intelligence and Information Systems (provide solutions that enable intelligence professionals to obtain and decipher timely information that is key to our national security)
3. Missile Systems (design and manufacture of key weapons and critical requirements, including air-to-air, strike, surface Navy air defense, land combat missiles, guided projectiles, exoatmospheric kill vehicles, and directed energy weapons)
4. Network Centric Systems (develop and produce mission solutions for networking, command and control, battlespace awareness, and air traffic management)
5. Technical Services Company (Mission Support, counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism, base and range operations, and customized engineering services)
6. Space and Airborne Systems (design and develop integrated systems for crucial missions. Our forward-thinking technology has made us a leader among both military and civilian customers for decades)
7. Trusted Borders (a consortium of companies led by Raytheon Systems Limited of the UK, has signed a contract with the Home Office to develop and implement the nation’s ‘e-Borders’ project, an advanced border control and security programme)
(The single most frequent identifiable visitor to my website is Raytheon. Not many people know that.)