Aftermath of 9/11: Follow The Money

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[Music] September 11th, 2001. A day no one who lived through it will ever forget. Almost 3,000 lives were lost and an entire nation stopped in disbelief. Whether you believe 9/11 was an inside job or not, that’s a debate that’s been going on for over 20 years. There’s more than enough information out there for you to decide what you believe. But that’s not what this episode is about. Today, we’re going to talk about what happened after. The part that didn’t make the headlines. The part I saw with my own eyes, not from a news desk, but on the battlefields of Iraq, serving with the Second Marine Logistics Group, and the money grab that followed. Because when you follow the money, the numbers don’t lie. So, how did a day of unimaginable loss turn into a profit machine? Who made the most money off the war on terror and how did they do it? Was it all about security or was it about business? Let’s try and find out. Hello, I’m Mike Joberg, Marine Corps veteran and filmmaker, and we will try to answer these questions on today’s episode of Forgotten History. I’m fire. In the weeks after September 11th, America came together. Flags on porches, songs on the radio, unity everywhere you looked. I saw it firsthand serving as a Marine Corps recruiter in Tampa, Florida. People flooded my office, ready to get payback. But behind that unity, something else was happening in Washington. The government had just written itself a blank check. Within months, trillions of dollars were committed to a new mission called the war on terror. And when you hand out that much money that fast, someone’s going to cash in. [Applause] Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda. But it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. [Music] The defense budget almost doubled. Entire agencies were created overnight. Homeland Security, the TSA, the Office of National Intelligence, and all of them needed contracts. Most of that money didn’t stay in Washington. It flowed to private companies promising to make America safe again. Hallebertton, Bectal, and Loheed Martin to name a few. All lined up. Their contracts guaranteed profit no matter how much they spent. And oversight took a backseat to urgency. Afghanistan made sense to most Americans. That’s where al-Qaeda was. That’s where the training camps were. But less than two years later, the crosshairs shifted. Suddenly, the mission wasn’t about Bin Laden anymore. It was about Saddam Hussein. The administration claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, all tied to al-Qaeda. Neither turned out to be true. The 9/11 Commission later confirmed there was no operational link between Saddam Hussein and the hijackers. But by then, the damage was done. The country was angry, afraid, and ready for answers. Iraq became the answer. On television, the message was simple. If we didn’t stop them there, they’d come here. What most people didn’t see were the maps of Iraq’s oil fields already circulating inside energy meetings and think tank reports, the reconstruction contracts already drafted, the defense budgets already rewritten. When the invasion began in 2003, Iraq became the proving ground for everything the new war on terror promised. Unlimited spending, minimal oversight, and guaranteed profit. It was the perfect storm of politics, fear, and opportunity. It had morphed into an economy built on taxpayer dollars. Every new deployment, every airport scanner, every reconstruction deal meant another payout. not from profit but from public funds. It became a cycle where fear justified spending and spending kept the machine alive. Years later, I’d see the end result of that system for myself and Iraq. But before we get there, we need to understand how it started and who is writing the checks. Once the money started flowing, it didn’t stop. The ink was barely dry on the first contracts when new ones appeared, each bigger than the last. Hallebertton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root KBR became the face of the boom, taking over everything from food service to fuel delivery to base construction. They called it log cap, a cost plus contract that guaranteed profit on top of whatever they spent. If a convoy burned twice as much fuel as planned, no problem. The company still got paid. If a building project ran over budget, that just meant more revenue. The more they used, the more they earned. Beto handled reconstruction of power plants and water systems. Rathon Lockheed filled order books for smart bombs and missiles. And private security firms like Black Order signed deals that would make small nations jealous. Every crisis became a new opportunity. Every problem solved with another contract. Oil was part of the picture, too. Iraq holds the fifth largest proven reserves on Earth. Before the invasion, those fields were closed to Western Investment for decades. After 2003, companies like BP, Shell, and Hallebertton Oil Service Division, One Access, under new production sharing agreements brokered through the coalition provinority. Officially, it was about stabilizing global energy markets. In practice, it opened one of the richest petroleum frontiers in the world, the private capital right in the middle of a war zone. By 2004, the war effort wasn’t just a military operation. It was an economic engine. Wall Street investors treated it like a growth sector. Defense stocks doubled, some tripled, and the government borrowed money it didn’t have to keep the machine fed. Inside Iraq, billions were allocated for reconstruction. But very little actually reached the people it was meant to help. Projects were abandoned, half finishedish. Equipment disappeared. And audits found entire warehouses full of supplies that no one could account for. And the money pouring into Iraq wasn’t just big, it was clean. Under special rules for overseas contractors, billions of dollars in profits were earned tax-free. Employees working for companies like KBR or Dinoorb didn’t pay US income tax on the first chunk of their salaries, and corporations themselves used offshore subsidiaries in places like the Cayman Islands and Dubai to shelter even more. And while all this was happening, soldiers on the ground were still short on armor, still welding scrap metal onto their vehicles just to stay alive. That’s how you knew something was wrong. The money was moving, but it wasn’t reaching the fight. I’d see it for myself later, riding in janky Humvees and seeing whole airfields filled with unused pallets of plywood burnt because it was easier to destroy them than to transfer them or to give them to the people who needed it. By 2009, the talking points back home were all about progress and reconstruction. The surge had stabilized things and we were supposedly rebuilding Iraq, winning hearts and minds. But on the ground, that version of the story didn’t exist. Entire projects existed only on paper. You’d see a school in a report, then drive to the GPS coordinates and find a crater or an empty lot. Power plants that were paid for twice still didn’t run. Roads crumbled faster than they were built because the contracts were written for completion, not durability. The irony was hard to ignore. We called it nation building, but most of the nation we were building was back home in the boardrooms and stock portfolios. The Iraqis weren’t partners in reconstruction. They were props in a trillion dollar performance. I served in the Marines for over 22 years, and I love the people I served with. It’s a breed of warriors most civilians will never truly understand. Sure, I’d make a few different career choices if I had the chance, but I do it all over again. Best job I ever had. I’m a patriot. I love this country and always will. But after years in uniform, that realization hit harder than anything the enemy ever threw at us. We weren’t just fighting a war. We were sustaining a business model. And when the business depends on chaos, peace is bad for profit. So how big was the payday? Let’s put real numbers on it. From 2001 to 2020, defense and homeland security spending rose by more than $9 trillion. That’s right, 9 trillion. Hallebertton and subsidiary KBR earned over $50 billion from a single logistics contract known as Log Cap 3. Beal took in billions more for reconstruction projects that were abandoned halfway through. Private security companies such as Black Order signed government deals worth nearly $3 billion before the decade was out. Before 911, the US spent about $3 billion a year on defense. Within a decade, that figure had almost tripled and it never came back down. The Pentagon’s annual budget now exceeds $800 billion, larger than the next 10 countries combined. Add in veterans care and interest payments and the total cost of post 911 wars is projected to top eight trillion dollars. And that’s not counting the price we’ll pay for decades of medical care for veterans or moral debt that comes from waging endless wars. Two decades later, the same revolving door spin. The generals become consultants. The consultants become lobbyists. And the budgets keep rising. The enemy may have changed. The headlines may have changed, but the business stays the same. Numbers tell part of the story, but they’re not the story that matters most. Nearly 15,000 American service members and contractors were killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the operations that followed. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the crossfire. Millions more displaced. Every one of those lives was worth more than every contract, every bonus, every speech about freedom. We said we were bringing democracy, but most Iraqis never asked for our version of it. What they wanted was security, electricity, clean water, and a chance to live without fear. Instead, we gave them a system built on paperwork and profit margins. In contrast, Russian elections are rigged. Political opponents are imprisoned or otherwise eliminated from participating in the electoral process. The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine. arrived to anyway. Uh 75. Uh it makes you wonder what if even a fraction of that $8 trillion had been spent here at home on bridges that don’t collapse on schools that actually prepare our kids for the future. And for teachers who are paid what they’re worth instead of scraping by. on health care that doesn’t bankrupt families and care for the elderly who built this country long before any of us. That’s the part that keeps me up some nights. We can’t change what’s been spent or who’s been lost, but we can remember what it cost us. Not just in dollars, but in lives. Because when a nation turns tragedy into business, eventually the bill comes due. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Thank you for watching Forgotten History. Please like, share, and subscribe. If you have any comments or show ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Thanks again. [Music] Experience Socialism

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