Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Denton Sally
Title : The profiteers Bechtel and the men who built the world
Year : 2016

Link download : Denton_Sally_-_The_profiteers.zip

Mission Accomplished. April 2003. American soldiers had seized Saddam Hussein’s opulent Republican Palace in some of the fiercest fighting of the entire Iraq War. Iraq was smoldering in ruins, “conquered” by President George W. Bush. Its cities bombed out. Baghdad’s museums and shopping centers, villas and military bases, looted, its hospitals torched. Aerial bombardment of the colossal royal palace-the official headquarters of the Iraqi presidency-was tactical as well as symbolic. Under a turquoise dome considered an architectural wonder of the world, the palace held valuable Iraqi government documents in addition to priceless art and furnishings. Overlooking the Tigris River, the palace had been built in 1958 by the US-sponsored monarch King Faisal II, who was assassinated in a bloody coup before he could take up residence. Its capture by US-led troops, forty-five years later, was emblematic of the victorious return of American influence in the Persian empire-an oil-rich region that had eluded the West since its puppet Faisal was overthrown. Joining American Special Forces as they sorted through the rubble of the fortress- once the sex and porn parlor of one of Saddam’s two sadistic sons, Uday-was a select group of employees of the San Francisco–based construction company Bechtel. “This place is surreal,” Bechtel’s Thor Christiansen said of the sumptuousness of the grounds now occupied by the “Bechtelians,” who were overseeing the US government’s $3 billion job to rebuild war-torn Iraq. Saddam, Uday, and his other son, Qusay, had fled during the final air strikes on the palace, but evidence of the debauchery remained, from gold-plated Russian Kalashnikovs, to mirrored beds, to photos of Uday beating naked women. Uday called one room that served as a torture chamber his Tower of Babylon. “Saddam’s ‘I’m-oncrack’ decorating style had been left untouched,” is how a State Department official described the scene. Strewn throughout the sprawling complex were pornography, designer wardrobes, fine wines, liquor, Cuban cigars, heroin, swords and submachine guns, and boxes of handguns amid piles of Guns & Ammo magazines. Hundreds of photos of nude Playboy magazine “Playmates” donned the bedroom walls, along with portraits of President Bush’s twin twenty-one-year-old daughters, Jenna and Barbara, and posters of Iraqi university coeds whom Saddam’s sons trolled for sexual encounters. ...