WHO IS GEN. MARK KIMMITT: PR Man for Iraq War; Dad Is DC Lobbyist for Defense Industry Cur : Melbourne Indymedia

WHO IS GEN. MARK KIMMITT: PR Man for Iraq War; Dad Is DC Lobbyist for Defense Industry Current

Brig. Gen. Mark T. Kimmitt, US Army, is the spokesman for the US military in Iraq. He is also the deputy operations commander. He currently is the main apologist for US misdeeds in Falluja and southern Iraq.

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In this article we put a face on the faceless voice of the invaders, the Mouth of the Euphrates.

As part of his PR efforts, he frequently employs email. His email address is kimmitt.m (at) skynet.be <mailto:kimmitt.m (at) skynet.be>. He used the private Belgian ISP during his service at NATO's SHAPE headquarters in Belgium

Kimmitt's father, Joseph Stanley (Stan) Kimmitt, a former Col. in Army (an artilleryman like Mark), has parlayed his military service into a Washington, DC, public relations, or lobbyist, firm -- Kimmitt, Senter, Coates, & Weinferter. As Gen. Kimmitt promotes the war in Iraq, his father represents defense contractors such as Textron Defense Systems, Talley Defense Systems, and Boeing (maker of the Army's Apache attack helicopter).

The Kimmitts are a classic example of the revolving-door syndrome of U.S. military officers and defense contractors. Such double-dipping is commonplace. It is one of the things President Eisenhower meant when he referred to the dangers of the "military-industrial complex." It is a self-replicating monster that feeds on war, death, and destruction

Ironically, S. Joseph Kimmitt was the secretary and close friend of Sen. Mike Mansfield of Montana, after Kimmitt's military service. Sen. Mansfield came to see the Vietnam war as unnecessary and would doubtless be opposed to the Iraq war if he were still alive.

Gen. Kimmitt's brother, Joseph "Jay" Kimmitt, is a Washington, DC, lobbyist employed by Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Truck Corp. the No. 1 maker of concrete mixers, trash haulers and military trucks. Now it wants a bigger slice of the homeland-security pie, too. And Jay Kimmitt hired a Washington-based PR firm (not his father's) to get it. Another example of the revolving door, Jay Kimmitt served 27 years in the Army he is now selling to.

Gung-Ho Kimmitt

Besides the benign smiling face shown at the top, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt has another side, too. In the bottom photo, he is shown in full military regalia and visage.

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Just four days after four US mercenaries' burned and dismembered bodies were strung up on a bridge, American military might was poised to bring Fallujah’s brief spell as a no-go area to an end. Up to 4,000 locally-based US Marines, whose original mission was to woo locals with a $500m humanitarian aid budget, were preparing to roll in with full battle armour on. Even Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the normally impassive Coalition spokesman in Baghdad, seemed to be relishing the prospect. Declaring Fallujah "the town that just doesn’t get it", he vowed to "hunt down the people responsible for this bestial act". He added: "It will be at a time and a place of our choosing. It will be methodical, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming."

We are all aware by now of what he was promising. Falluja has gotten "it." Over 700 of its citizens are no longer living, breathing human beings. Thousands more have been mutilated. An overwhelming proportion of them had nothing to do with killing the mercenaries.

Of course, to realize the full promise of Kimmitt's words, his boss, Gen. Abizaid, has asked the Defense Department for more troops, as the resistance inflamed by the reprisal has proved more formidable than expected.

These people are worse than those who betray a political entity. They spend most of a lifetime being warriors and the rest of a lifetime selling WMD and more personal homicidal tools to their successors.
The military-industrial complex has fundamentally changed our country. Things will not get better until the military-industrial complex is dismantled. Carried to its logical conclusion, such a complex leads to a fascist state like the Third Reich, capable of exterminating whole towns like Lidice, Czechoslovakia, in reprisal.