For specifics on the downing of the Malaysia Airlines jet over Ukraine, the best sources are the Joint Investigative Team reports, available at the official website of the Netherlands Public Prosecutor’s Office (www.om.nl/onderwerpen/mh17-crash/).
There has been much investigation, official and journalistic, into Russian efforts to use social media to muck around in Ukraine’s politics, which turned out to be something of a warm-up for the United States in 2016. Radio Free Europe was on the Ukraine case early, and so too was Paul Roderick Gregory, much of whose work on the subject was published by Forbes.
ExxonMobil, Rosneft, and Seadrill all have energetic public affairs teams that produced a steady stream of information through their respective official corporate websites. If you want to know their stated rationale for any given move, it’s right there in black and white. Like ExxonMobil’s successful drilling efforts in the Kara Sea, the undoing of Yevtushenkov and Bashneft, which was happening at the same time, was a well-covered event. But for Sechin’s takedown of Russia’s minister for economic development Alexei Ulyukayev, check out Karina Orlova’s “Sechin’s Sausages: A Glimpse of the Underbelly of Russia’s Oil Industry” in The American Interest, September 2017.
The Tillerson quotations at the end of chapters 22 and 23 are from his aforementioned talk at the University of Texas in February 2016.
CHAPTERS TWENTY-FOUR AND TWENTY-FIVE
Austin Holland’s 2017 sworn deposition notwithstanding, the deepest well of information about power and politics around the earthquake issue is the reporting of investigative journalist Mike Soraghan for Energywire. The documents he turned up, often pried away from government agencies using the Oklahoma Open Records Act, form the backbone of this part of the story. The Bloomberg reporter Ben Elgin unearthed some other notable emails about Harold Hamm and the pressure he was putting on OGS administrators. Rivka Galchen’s “Weather Underground” (The New Yorker, April 6, 2015) provided a nice snapshot of both Holland and the seismicity issue in Oklahoma at the time.
Statements and papers from the U.S. Geological Survey and the OGS are available at their respective websites. Zoë Schlanger at Newsweek elicited the quotation from Representative Lewis Moore at the end of chapter 24.
The eagle-eyed reporters from Reuters who spotted and reported all the strange changes in Continental Resources were Joshua Schneyer, who also did yeoman’s work on the Oklahoma school budget situation, and Brian Grow, who had earlier reported on some of Aubrey McClendon’s slippery behavior.
CHAPTERS TWENTY-SIX AND TWENTY-SEVEN
There was a fantastically entertaining slew of reportage on that confab of nutty hard-right political groups in St. Petersburg, Russia, in March 2015. Great stuff was dug up by Max Seddon for BuzzFeed News, Anna Nemtsova for The Daily Beast, Ilay Azar for Meduza (an online newspaper out of Riga, Latvia), Paula Chertok for Euromaidan Press, and Neil MacFarquhar for The New York Times. A full transcript of the Putin speech at the Valdai Discussion Club in 2013, which was referenced in the conservative forum’s literature, can be found at en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/19243.
There is a lot of information about the inception, mission, management, and operations of the Internet Research Agency in the February 2018 and September 2018 indictments filed by the Office of Special Counsel in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. But there was a lot of really good reporting being done in real time, long before the U.S. Department of Justice got involved. Reporters for the local St. Petersburg newspaper My Region kick-started this story. Shaun Walker at The Guardian and Adrian Chen at The New York Times Magazine both filed excellent, detailed reports on the firm in the spring of 2015. For a clear-eyed insider account of working at the Internet Research Agency, tune in to Lyudmila Savchuk’s talk at the Atlantic Council’s 2018 Transatlantic Forum on Strategic Communications (www.youtube.com/watch?v=klyhzAumPfU&t=1252s).
Both the two special counsel indictments of the Internet Research Agency and the separate indictment of members of the Russian Federation’s GRU intelligence services (United States of America v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho et al.) offer clear and straightforward accounts of Russian Federation government interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Statistics about how and how far those operations reached into the American polity are further spelled out in “The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,” a report by New Knowledge, commissioned by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. You can find it at documentcloud.org/documents/5632786-NewKnowledge-Disinformation-Report-Whitepaper.html.
The full complement of Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous “I love it” email exchange was published in The New York Times on July 11, 2017. Trump junior himself released them on Twitter when it became clear the Times had the goods. Many other publications followed suit. So they are there for the reading. And then blinking, and then reading again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The specifics of Aubrey McClendon’s death and the finding of cause come from the official reports from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Oklahoma. You can access the full March 1, 2016, indictment of McClendon at www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2016/03/01/the-federal-indictment-of-aubrey-mcclendon/#37eeecd8574a.
The statement released by the attorneys Lowell and Flood on behalf of McClendon was quoted in Forbes and the Oklahoman website, among others.
The fiscal and economic situation in Oklahoma remained easily traceable in the state treasurer’s monthly reports.
Footage of the town hall meeting featuring Lewis Moore in Edmond can be found at www.desmogblog.com/2016/01/19/fracking-industry-linked-earthquakes-oklahoma-crack-political-party-lines.
Jake Walter, the current state seismologist in Oklahoma, was especially helpful for understanding not only the science of seismicity but also how the political and regulatory steps taken in the governor’s office and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission helped reverse the enormous ten-year rise in earthquakes. Mike Cantrell was also helpful with the politics and constraints of OCC.
Darryl Fears of The Washington Post deserves credit for alerting the wider public to the long, slow seep of an oil spill that was in the process of overtaking Deepwater Horizon as the biggest oil spill in the United States.
If you want to watch Harold Hamm’s full speech to the 2016 Republican convention you can access it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6NmkiXMe0I.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The statistics about oil and gas industry election spending are compiled and analyzed at OpenSecrets.org. The Guardian, with an assist from Global Witness, did key reporting on ExxonMobil’s dealings in Nigeria. Senator Sherrod Brown called it out on the Senate floor during the debate about Section 1504 at the beginning of 2017. The best stories about the “bonus” ExxonMobil paid to the Guyanese government, including quotations from the ExxonMobil exec there, were in local publications including Caribbean360, The Gleaner, and IslandVibez.
The current situation concerning the Obiang family and Equatorial Guinea is detailed in the June 2017 report by Human Rights Watch, “ ‘Manna from Heaven’? How Health and Education Pay the Price for Self-Dealing in Equatorial Guinea.” Philip Willan laid out the details of Roberto Berardi’s imprisonment in a July 2015 story for The Italian Insider.
Jay Branegan’s essay, “EITI Pull-Out: Another Blow to U.S. Leadership on Fighting Corruption,” is worth reading in full (www.thelugarcenter.org/blog-eiti-pull-out).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award–winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, as well as the author of Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, a #1 New York Times bestseller. Maddow received a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University and earned her doctorate in political science at Oxford University. She lives in New York City and Massachusetts with her partner, artist Susan Mikula.
Read on for an excerpt from Rachel Maddow’s #1 New York Times bestseller Drift
Broadway Books
Available wherever books are sold
Prologue
Is It Too Late to Descope This?
In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a “Public Safety Complex” around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith–esque fire station. In the cascade of post-9/11 Homeland Security money in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, our town’s share of the loot bought us a new fire truck—one that turned out to be a few feet longer than the garage where the town kept our old fire truck. So then we got some more Homeland money to build something big enough to house the new truck. In homage to the origin of the funding, the local auto detailer airbrushed on the side of the new truck a patriotic tableau of a billowing flaglike banner, a really big bald eagle, and the burning World Trade Center towers.
The American taxpayers’ investment in my town’s security didn’t stop at the new safety complex. I can see further fruit of those Homeland dollars just beyond my neighbor’s back fence. While most of us in town depend on well water, there are a few houses that for the past decade or so have been hooked up to a municipal water supply. And when I say “a few,” I mean a few: I think there are seven houses on municipal water. Around the time we got our awesome giant new fire truck, we also got a serious security upgrade to that town water system. Its tiny pump house is about the size of two phone booths and accessible by a dirt driveway behind my neighbor’s back lot. Or at least it used to be. The entire half-acre parcel of land around that pump house is now ringed by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and fronted with a motion-sensitive electronically controlled motorized gate. On our side of town we call it “Little Guantánamo.” Mostly it’s funny, but there is some neighborly consternation over how frowsy Little Guantánamo gets every summer. Even though it’s town-owned land, access to Little Guantánamo is apparently above the security clearance of the guy paid to mow and brush-hog. Right up to the fence, it’s my neighbors’ land and they keep everything trim and tidy. But inside that fence, the grass gets eye-high. It’s going feral in there.
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It’s not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It’s the big-ticket stuff too. Nobody ever made an argument to the American people, for instance, that the thing we ought to do in Afghanistan, the way we ought to stick it to Osama bin Laden, the way to dispense American tax dollars to maximize American aims in that faraway country, would be to build a brand-new neighborhood in that country’s capital city full of rococo narco-chic McMansions and apartment/office buildings with giant sculptures of eagles on their roofs and stoned guards lounging on the sidewalks, wearing bandoliers and plastic boots. No one ever made the case that this is what America ought to build in response to 9/11. But that is what we built. An average outlay of almost $5 billion a month over ten years (and counting) has created a twisted war economy in Kabul. Afghanistan is still one of the four poorest countries on earth; but now it’s one of the four poorest countries on earth with a neighborhood in its capital city that looks like New Jersey in the 1930s and ’40s, when Newark mobsters built garish mansions and dotted the grounds with lawn jockeys and hand-painted neo-neoclassic marble statues.
Walking around this Zircon-studded neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Kha¯n (named for the general who commanded the Afghan Army’s rout of the British in 1842), one of the weirdest things is that the roads and the sewage and trash situation are palpably worse here than in many other Kabul neighborhoods. Even torqued-up steel-frame SUVs have a hard time making it down some of these desolate streets; evasive driving techniques in Wazir Akbar Kha¯n often have more to do with potholes than potshots. One of the bigger crossroads in the neighborhood is an ad hoc dump. Street kids are there all day, picking through the newest leavings for food and for stuff to salvage or sell.
There’s nothing all that remarkable about a rich-looking neighborhood in a poor country. What’s remarkable here is that there aren’t rich Afghan people in this rich Afghan neighborhood. Whether or not the owners of these giant houses would stand for these undrivable streets, the piles of garbage, the sewage running down the sidewalk right outside their security walls, they’re not here to see it. They’ve moved to Dubai, or to the United States, or somewhere else that’s safer for themselves and their money. (Or our money.) Most of these fancy properties in Wazir Akbar Kha¯n were built by the Afghan elite with profits from the international influx of cash that accompanied the mostly American influx of war a decade ago—built to display status or to reap still more war dollars from the Western aid agencies and journalists and politicians and diplocrats and private contractors who need proper places to stay in the capital. The surges big and small have been good to the property barons of Wazir Akbar Kha¯n: residential real estate values were reportedly up 75 percent in 2008 alone. Check the listings under Kabul “villas” today and you’ll find properties priced from $7,000 to $25,000 a month with specs like this: four floors, a dozen rooms, nine toilets, three big kitchens, sleeps twenty.
No one sold the American people on this incarnation of Wazir Akbar Kha¯n as one of the desired outcomes of all those hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent in Afghanistan. But it is what we have built at Ground Zero Afghanistan. Whatever we were aiming at, this is the manifest result.
Consider also the new hundred-million-dollar wastewater treatment facility in Fallujah, Anbar Province, Iraq, which provides only spotty wastewater treatment to the people of that city. In 2004, after the US military all but demolished Fallujah in the deadliest urban battle of the Iraq War, it was decided that the way to turn the residents of the recalcitrant Sunni Triangle away from Al-Qaeda and toward their country’s fledgling government would be to build a sewage system for all of Fallujah. The initial $33 million contract was let to a South Carolina company in June 2004, while the city was still smoldering. There was no time to waste. The Bush administration’s Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office identified the sewage system as a “key national reconciliation issue.” The goal was to have it up and running by the beginning of 2006.
Nearly five years after the deadline, having clocked in at three times its initial budget, there was still not a single residence on line. Accordingly, the plan was “descoped”—scaled down—to serve just a third of the city. In the midst then of doing a third of the work for triple the money, there was talk of walking away from the project without connecting even that one-third of Fallujah residences to the aborted plant. We had built a shit-processing plant that didn’t process shit.
And it gets worse. According to a 2008 report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, about 10 percent of the money paid to Iraqi subcontractors for the Fallujah project ended up in the hands of “terrorist organizations.” According to that same report, residents near two particular pump stations “[might] become angry” if the system ever did come on line, because “funding constraints” made “odor control facilities” impractical. Even households that were not part of the collection system would still be subject to what the Iraqi minister of municipalities and public works delicately called the “big stink.” The eighty-page report also noted, with dry finality, “The project file lacked any documentation to support that the provisional Iraqi government wanted this project in the first place.”
When, finally, late in 2011, seven years into the project, at a cost of $108 million, we managed to get a quarter of the homes in Fallujah hooked into that system, this partial accomplishment was not met with resounding huzzahs. “In the end it would be dubious to conclude that this project helped stabilize the city, enhanced the local citizenry’s faith in government, built local service capacity, won hearts or minds, or stimulated the economy,” the Special Inspector General said in 2011. “It is difficult to conclude that
the project was worth the investment.” A hundred million American dollars, partially diverted to the groups fighting US troops, to build (poorly) a giant, unwanted wastewater-treatment project that provides nothing but the “big stink” for three-quarters of the city. No one would argue for something like this as a good use of US tax dollars. But it is in fact what we bought.
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Here at home, according to an exhaustive and impressive two-year-long investigation by the Washington Post, the taxpayer-funded Global War on Terror also built enough ultra-high-security office space (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities, or SCIF, in bureaucrat-speak) to fill twenty-two US Capitol Buildings: seventeen million square feet of offices in thirty-three handsome and generously funded new complexes powered up twenty-four hours a day, where an army of nearly one million American professionals spies on the world and the homeland. It’s as if we turned the entire working population of Detroit and Milwaukee into high-security-clearance spooks and analysts.
Blowout Page 48