Category: Authors

Hiring of Two Retired U.S. Generals

The Washington Post published last week a lengthy investigative article titled: “Air Force feared generals’ foreign consulting jobs would cause scandal” by journalists Craig Whitlock and Nate Jones. The article disclosed Azerbaijan’s offer to hire two retired U.S. Air Force generals. The Post went to extensive legal battles with the U.S. Air Force to reveal the concealed details of this scandalous transaction.

Between 2016 and 2021, the Post submitted four Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. government seeking the documents in this matter. However, the Air Force either did not respond or claimed that it could not find any documents. Finally, the Post had to file a lawsuit in court which resulted in the judge ordering the Air Force to release 400 pages of internal documents revealing the details of these two generals’ attempts “to profit” from their previous military contacts with Azerbaijan and “Pentagon’s struggles to police such behavior,” according to the Post.

The Washington Post wrote that “during the height of war in Afghanistan, U.S. military leaders flocked to…Azerbaijan to embrace its president, Ilham Aliyev” who was compared by the U.S. Embassy in Baku to the “mafia boss in the ‘Godfather.’” The newspaper added: “Corruption flourished under the Aliyevs, with the CIA describing it as ‘pervasive’ and the State Department calling it ‘systemic.’” Nevertheless, the Pentagon persuaded Aliyev to open its airspace to U.S. and NATO military supplies to go to Afghanistan. “In exchange, U.S. officials promised a closer diplomatic partnership with Aliyev and steered $369 million in defense contracts to Silk Way Airlines, an Azerbaijan cargo carrier that U.S. investigators say was controlled by the government.”

“Two U.S Air Force generals — Duncan McNabb and William Fraser III — who oversaw the supply routes from 2008 and 2014, after retirement, tried to cash in on their Azerbaijan connections,” the Washington Post wrote. The United States Transportation Command (Transcom) “had awarded 2,230 cargo airlift missions to Silk Way during McNabb’s tenure, plus 1,117 missions while Fraser was in command, for a total cost of $369 million.” Upon retiring from active duty, the four-star generals negotiated valuable consulting deals with Silk Way Airlines.

McNabb told the Washington Post: “he once hosted a Silk Way executive for dinner at his home at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.” After retiring from the Air Force in December 2011, “he said, officials with Silk Way Airlines contacted him about a possible business venture.”

The U.S. military routinely approves such jobs after retirement, however, it denied permission to General McNabb, because it had serious concerns that it would be “a potential embarrassment and a risk to national security…fearing that the consulting jobs would trigger a scandal” according to Air Force internal documents. General McNabb went to great lengths to fight the Air Force’s rejection of his job. According to a 2015 memo, General Fraser warned the U.S. military that “if the U.S. government prevented him from working for Silk Way, it would face ‘blow-back’ from Azerbaijan, and that Aliyev’s government might even block U.S. and NATO supply routes to Afghanistan in retaliation.”

Philip Deaver, a civilian Air Force lawyer, wrote in his objection that since the U.S. had given Silk Way Airlines $369 million, and since the two generals had managed the supply routes via Azerbaijan, it might look like McNabb and Fraser knew “that a perk of office is a lucrative advisory contract from Silk Way upon retirement.” McNabb said he had visited Azerbaijan five or six times.

General McNabb told the Washington Post, “he once hosted a Silk Way executive for dinner at his home at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.” After retiring from the Air Force in December 2011, he said, “officials with Silk Way Airlines contacted him about a possible business venture. Silk Way wanted to modernize its operational control center at Heydar Aliyev International Airport in Baku. The firm invited McNabb to return to Azerbaijan in June 2013 for a visit and offered to hire him as an adviser.” That same month, “he set up a consulting firm, Ares Mobility Solutions, partnering with a retired Air Force colonel and a captain in the Navy Reserve who had worked in the airline industry. Ares signed a contract with Silk Way that paid a monthly retainer of $10,000 plus expenses, documents show. Under the deal, McNabb was expected to travel to Baku every three to five months to work for a few days at a time.”

After assuming his Air Force position at Transcom in 2011, General Fraser flew to Baku and met with Pres. Aliyev. “Over the next three years, Fraser met with Aliyev twice in Azerbaijan and once in New York, according to the Azerbaijan’s government.”

In April 2014, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the United States, Elin Suleymanov, visited Scott Air Force Base in Illinois to tour Transcom headquarters. He told Fraser, who was nearing retirement, that “there are many opportunities for future military and commercial cooperation” between the United States and Azerbaijan, according to a U.S. military press release.

Within days of his retirement, Fraser received a job offer from Silk Way Group. Fraser sought in advance permission from the Air Force, stating that he “would be a consultant/advisor providing subject matter expertise” and would “help develop future business opportunities” for the pay of $5,000 a day. However, the Air Force rejected his request. Fraser submitted a second application which was also turned down. “Fraser did not mention in his application that his son, William Fraser IV, also worked in the aviation business in Azerbaijan,” the Washington Post wrote. His son, “a former U.S. Marine sergeant had taken a job two years earlier as an assistant to the president of Azerbaijan Airlines, the state-owned carrier, as a public relations and strategic communications specialist.”

U.S. federal law requires that military personnel, who served at least 20 years, obtain permission before they accept anything of value from a foreign government or companies controlled by foreign governments. When the Air Force found out that McNabb had not sought permission in advance of his work in Azerbaijan, his subsequent application was denied. He was told that he had violated U.S. law. “There is no criminal penalty for breaking the law, but the military can withhold retirement pay from those who do so. McNabb confirmed that the Defense Department docked his pension but declined to say how much,” the Post wrote.

By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier
www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com

The New York Times published on November 28, 2022, a shocking article by reporter Constant Méheut, titled: “A Paris Museum Has 18,000 Skulls. It’s Reluctant to Say Whose.”

The article reveals that the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind) in Paris, France, holds a “vast collection of human remains.” Stored in the basement of that museum are “18,000 skulls that include the remains of African tribal chiefs, Cambodian rebels and Indigenous people from Oceania. Many were gathered in France’s former colonies, and the collection also includes the skulls of more than 200 Native Americans, including from the Sioux and Navajo tribes. The remains, kept in cardboard boxes stored in metal racks, form one of the world’s largest human skull collections, spanning centuries and covering every corner of the earth.” Five of the skulls belong to Armenian Genocide victims. The museum has not made public the information about the identities of the 18,000 skulls, fearing restitution lawsuits.

I read the December 15, 2021 report of a French Senate Committee on its discussion of a proposed law about the fate of the remains at the museum. During that meeting, Sen. Catherine Morin-Desailly, co-author of the proposed law, stated: “amazingly, we find in our collections skulls dating from the Armenian Genocide.” Sen. Pierre Ouzoulias, another co-author of the proposed law, added: “I was overwhelmed learning that five Armenian skulls of victims of the Armenian Genocide, which were recovered in Deir-ez Zor [Syria], are still in the collections of the Museum of Mankind.”

Since New York Times reporter Méheut mentioned in his article that he had obtained confidential documents about the human remains in the museum, I wrote to him asking if these documents contained any details about the skulls of the five Armenian Genocide victims. He informed me that they were female skulls which were collected by Emmanuel Passemard, a French prehistory specialist, during his explorations in Syria in 1925-1926. The Bulletin of the French Prehistoric Society reported that Passemard gave a lecture at the Sorbonne University in Paris on February 16, 1927, during which he described his trip to the banks of the Euphrates River in Syria.

Méheut wrote in his article that “while France has led the way in Europe in investigating and returning colonial-era collections of artifacts — cultural objects, made by human hands — it has lagged behind its neighbors when it comes to remains.” The claimant of the remains has to prove an ancestral connection. However, “French legislation has made any return a cumbersome and time-consuming process.”

Méheut added: “As with other 19th-century museums, the Museum of Mankind was initially a repository for items gathered from around the world. The skulls were collected during archaeological digs and colonial campaigns, sometimes by soldiers who beheaded resistance fighters. Prized by researchers working in the now-debunked field of race science, the remains then fell into relative oblivion. In 1989, Philippe Mennecier, the curator [of the museum], put together the first electronic database of the collection. It enabled him to identify hundreds of what he called ‘potentially litigious’ skulls — remains of anticolonial fighters and Indigenous people, collected as war trophies or plundered by explorers — that could be claimed by people wishing to honor their ancestors.”

Christine Lefèvre, a top official at the Museum of Natural History, which oversees the Museum of Mankind, and Martin Friess, who is responsible for the museum’s modern anthropology collections, told Méheut the information was withheld because of privacy concerns, fear of controversy and because of uncertainties around some remains’ identities. “But several scholars and lawmakers said the museum’s stance stemmed from a greater concern: that transparency could open the floodgates for restitution claims,” Méheut wrote. “Over the past two decades, France has returned only about 50 sets of remains, including to South Africa, New Zealand and Algeria.”

Méheut explained that “to make matters more complicated, objects in public museum collections are the property of the French state and cannot change ownership unless the return is voted into law — a cumbersome process that has sometimes led France to lend remains instead of ceding possession. A representative for France’s culture ministry said officials were working on a sweeping law to regulate future returns of human remains.” The French government has yet to accept “a bill passed by the Senate in January that would remove the need for Parliament to approve every restitution.”

During the French Senate committee hearing, referring to the skulls of victims of the Armenian Genocide, Sen. Ouzoulias told his colleagues: “This is intolerable. We risk a major diplomatic conflict with certain countries when they become aware of the content of our collections. It is time to stop this. We can no longer live with corpses in our closets.”

Now that Armenians have learned about the storage of the skulls of five Armenian Genocide victims in a French museum, I suggest that the Armenian government, through its embassy in Paris, make an immediate request for the return of these skulls to Armenia to be buried near the Armenian Genocide Memorial complex in Yerevan. These victims deserve a respectful burial after being stored in a box in the basement of a French museum for a century.