BEAU GROSSCUP
Author of The Newest Explosions of Terrorism and professor of international relations at California State University in Chico, Grosscup said on an Institute for Public Accuracy news release on April 3, 2003: “The U.S. invasion of Iraq increases the likelihood of attacks against the U.S.” He said today: “It would seem that this is the first shot fired from Al-Qaeda or other anti-Saudi monarchy elements since the invasion of Iraq, though it’s curious that they have not claimed responsibility…. Just as the U.S. government backed Saddam Hussein during the height of his atrocities and the Taliban were deemed useful and politically acceptable business partners if they would make pipeline deals, so too might allegations of Saudi Arabia’s ties to terrorist groups be used as a justification for military action against the Saudi monarchy if it doesn’t co-operate with western oil interests in the future.”

WILLIAM HARTUNG
Director of the World Policy Institute’s Arms Trade Resource Center, Hartung said today: “The fact that one of the targets in Saudi Arabia was a U.S. private military corporation called Vinnell raises serious questions about the role of ‘executive mercenaries’ and corporations that profit from war and instability. This is the second time in eight years that Vinnell’s operations in Saudi Arabia have been the target of a terrorist attack. In 1995 a car bomb blasted through an Army training program Vinnell was involved with.” Hartung wrote an article for the Progressive magazine about Vinnell entitled “Mercenaries Inc.: How a U.S. Company Props Up the House of Saud.”
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PRATAP CHATTERJEE
Chatterjee is with CorpWatch and wrote the article “Vinnell Corporation: ‘We Train People to Pull Triggers.'” He said today: “[Vinnell] has been controlled in the past through a web of interlocking ownership by a partnership that included James A. Baker III and Frank Carlucci, former U.S. secretaries of state and defense under presidents George [H.W.] Bush and Ronald Reagan respectively…. In an interview with Newsweek, a former U.S. Army officer who now works for Vinnell described the company’s first recruitment as putting together ‘a ragtag army of Vietnam veterans for a paradoxical mission: to train Saudi Arabian troops to defend the very oil fields that Henry Kissinger recently warned the U.S. might one day have to invade.’ The article quoted another Vinnell employee, also a former U.S. army officer, as saying: ‘We are not mercenaries because we are not pulling triggers… We train people to pull triggers.'”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167