Ne$t$ in
The Pentagon
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961
Sightings from The Catbird Seat
~ o ~
January 7, 2009
KBR wins contract despite
criminal probe of deaths
By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press
WASHINGTON – Defense contractor KBR Inc. has been awarded a $35 million Pentagon contract involving major electrical work, even as it is under criminal investigation in the electrocution deaths of at least two U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
The announcement of the new KBR contract came just months after the Pentagon, in strongly worded correspondence obtained by The Associated Press, rejected the company's explanation of serious mistakes in Iraq and its proposed improvements. A senior Pentagon official, David J. Graff, cited the company's "continuing quality deficiencies" and said KBR executives were "not sufficiently in touch with the urgency or realities of what was actually occurring on the ground."
"Many within DOD (the Department of Defense) have lost or are losing all remaining confidence in KBR's ability to successfully and repeatedly perform the required electrical support services mission in Iraq," wrote Graff, commander of the Defense Contract Management Agency, in a Sept. 30 letter.
Graff rejected the company's claims that it wasn't required to follow U.S. electrical codes for its work on U.S. military facilities in Iraq. KBR has said it would cost an extra $560 million to refurbish buildings in Iraq used by the U.S. military, including Saddam Hussein's palaces, which among other problems are based on a 220-volt standard rather than the American 120-volt standard.
KBR announced last week it won a new $35.4 million contract from the Army Corps of Engineers to design and build a convoy support center at Camp Adder in southern Iraq. It will include a power plant, electrical distribution center, water purification and distribution systems, wastewater and information systems and road paving.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said the new KBR contract was inappropriate. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said he has formally asked the Corps of Engineers whether it was confident KBR could accomplish it and whether the Corps had any alternatives.
"This is hardly the time to award KBR a new contract for work they've already failed to perform adequately, and which put U.S. soldiers at even greater risk," Dorgan said in a statement. "Ultimately, contractors must be held accountable, and so should those who continue to award these contracts."
A KBR spokeswoman, Heather Browne, said the company was committed to providing quality services and would comply with the military's requirements in its work on the Camp Adder contract.
The AP has learned that Army criminal agents have reopened the death investigation of Staff Sgt. Christopher Lee Everett, 23, a member of the Texas Army National Guard. Everett was killed September 2005 in Iraq when the power washer he was using to clean a vehicle short-circuited. KBR and another contractor, Arkel International, performed the electrical work on the device's generator, according to a civil lawsuit filed by Everett's family.
"I think it's something that needs to be done so these electrocutions don't continue to happen," Everett's mother, Larraine McGee of Huntsville, Texas, told the AP in a phone interview. "There's no excuse for this whatsoever." McGee said the Army's senior criminal investigator at Fort Hood notified her about the reopened investigation.
The AP previously reported that the Army has reclassified another soldier's electrocution death as a negligent homicide caused by KBR and two of its supervisors. Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, 24, a Green Beret from Pittsburgh, was electrocuted in his barracks shower. An Army investigator said KBR's contractor failed to ensure qualified electricians and plumbers did the work. The case is under legal review, and KBR has said it was not responsible for Maseth's death.
The deaths of Everett and Maseth are among the 18 under review by the Pentagon's inspector general. Some of the deaths have been blamed on improperly installed or maintained electrical equipment. In three cases, service members were shocked while showering. Families of Maseth and Everett also have sued KBR in federal court for wrongful death; the company is attempting to have the lawsuits dismissed.
The Corps of Engineers said KBR has earned $615 million on 30 similar contracts as the newest it awarded to the company and noted that KBR has not been banned or suspended from winning U.S. government contracts. The government can ban companies in cases of fraud, antitrust violations, bribery, tax evasion or for actions that reflect "a lack of business integrity or business honesty," according to federal rules.
"KBR has not been debarred, suspended, nor have they been proposed for debarment from government contracting," Corps spokeswoman Joan Kibler said.
KBR was previously owned by Halliburton Co., the oil services conglomerate that former Vice President Dick Cheney once led. Democrats have long complained it benefited from ties to Cheney.
Separately, court papers filed in Houston on Friday show KBR is preparing to plead guilty to federal bribery charges for promising and paying tens of millions of dollars in bribes to officials in Nigeria in exchange for engineering and construction contracts between 1995 and 2004.
Browne, the KBR spokeswoman, said the company had no comment. The company is expected to appear in federal court next week as part of a plea deal.
February 6, 2009
Halliburton Whistleblower Requests Your Help To Protect Taxpayers
From: "National Whistleblowers Center - Bunny Greenhouse" lmw@whistleblowers.org
To: “Bobby N. Harmon”
Personal Letter From Bunny Greenhouse
Take Action! Please Urge Your Senators To Support Taxpayers!
Dear Action Alert Member:
My name is Bunny Greenhouse. I am the former Procurement Executive and highest-ranking Army Corps of Engineers civilian procurement official.
Today I am asking you to contact your Senators and Representatives to demand, in the strongest possible terms, that employees who disclose fraud in federal contracting are fully and properly protected in the 800 billion dollar stimulus package that Congress is currently debating.
Here's why.
Shortly before the Iraq War commenced, I blew the whistle on improper contracting concerning the award of a multi-billion dollar no-bid, cost plus contract to Halliburton / KBR for the reconstruction of Iraq.
I was concerned that improper contracting activity would cost the taxpayers billions – and it did. The contract should not have been awarded. From my inside prospective, it was clear that the “fix was in” – the contract was going to be awarded to Halliburton no matter what I said or did.
Those who should have protested the contract remained silent. And their silence is not surprising because, as federal employees, we have no meaningful whistleblower protection! We can be fired for reporting fraud. We can lose our careers simply for doing our job and trying to protect the taxpayer.
I know this is true. It happened to me. The top brass demanded that I drop my protests. I refused. The top brass – many of whom had longstanding relations with government contractors – retaliated. They removed me from the Senior Executive Service and from anything having to do with contract oversight. When I went to federal court to demand protection the judge dismissed my case because as a federal employee I had no protection.
The bottom line is that without access to independent courts, real judges and juries, whistleblowers don’t stand a chance, and fairness and transparency will not see the light day.
Only Congress can fix this. The House of Representatives has already acted decisively by adding H.R. 985 to the stimulus bill, by a unanimous voice vote (now called H.R. 1, Section IV). President Obama's presidential campaign is on record as supporting the same whistleblower protections now found in House version of the stimulus bill.
So, the buck stops with the Senate. I urge you to contact your Senators and let them know that whistleblower protection is a critical part of the stimulus package for protection of the public trust. I urge you to contact your Representatives and tell them to hold strong -- and refuse to cut whistleblower protections from the bill. Federal employees, like me, who risk their careers to protect taxpayer money need to be protected.
Please act now! Pass this letter to your friends! Pass this letter to your co-workers! Pass this letter to your family! Send a letter to your Senator Now!
Billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake and it is up to the Senate to do the right thing.
Very truly yours,
Bunnatine H. Greenhouse
Former Procurement Executive
Army Corps of Engineers
National Whistleblower Center Action Alert
July 27, 2008
U.S. acknowledges Baghdad victims were law-abiding, not insurgents
By Leila Fadel, McClatchy Newspapers
BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military said Sunday that the three people killed last month after U.S. soldiers shot at their car in one of the most secured areas of Iraq were civilians, not criminals as the military initially reported.
The correction came more than a month after a bank manager at a branch inside the airport, Hafeth Aboud Mahdi , and two female bank employees were shot at by U.S. soldiers as they sped to work on a road within the secured airport compound. The road is used only by people with high-level security clearance badges. The car veered off the road, hit a concrete blast wall and burst into flames.
The original statement said that Mahdi and the two women were "criminals" and that an American convoy on the side of the secured road came under small-arms fire from the vehicle. Soldiers said they shot back. A weapon was found in the debris and two U.S. military vehicles were struck by bullets from the attack, the statement on June 25 said.
"When we are attacked, we will defend ourselves and will use deadly force if necessary," said Maj. Joey Sullinger , a spokesman for 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, said at the time. "Such attacks endanger not only U.S. soldiers but also innocent civilians, including women and children, traveling the roadways of Baghdad ."
On Sunday the story changed and the tone was apologetic. A military statement said that neither the civilians who were killed nor the soldiers were at fault for the deaths. An investigation found that "the driver and passengers were law-abiding citizens of Iraq ."
Soldiers had pulled off the road because one of the vehicles in the convoy was having maintenance problems. As they worked on the vehicle they saw Mahdi's car and thought it was moving too quickly toward them, the statement said. Believing they might be in danger, the soldiers warned the car. When the driver ignored the signals they shot at the vehicle, the statement said.
The alleged attack and the weapon that was said to have been recovered from the burned vehicle were misunderstandings, the statement said.
"This was an extremely unfortunate and tragic incident," said Col. Allen Batschelet , chief of staff, MND-B and 4th Infantry Division, in a statement. "Our deepest regrets of sympathy and condolences go out to the family. We are taking several corrective measures to amend and eliminate the possibility of such situations happening in the future."
Mahdi's son, Mohammed Hafeth, said the statement was insufficient.
He said the image of his father's burning vehicle haunts him. He'd waited in his father's office that morning surprised that he wasn't there yet. They'd left at nearly the same time that morning.
Hafeth drives bank employees to work. That morning his father offered to take one of Hafeth's passengers and picked up another female bank employee who lived nearby their central Baghdad home.
As he sat in the office a colleague walked in and told Hafeth his father's car was broken down on the airport road. Hafeth reached for his car keys.
"I'll drive," he recalled his colleague saying.
As they approached his father's car he saw the flames. He jumped from the car and started to run toward the burning vehicle, but U.S. soldiers blocked his way.
"Go," he recalled them ordering. But he said he couldn't move. He dropped to the ground and wept as his father burned inside the vehicle.
"Why did they kill him like this?" Mohammed Hafeth said Sunday in a phone interview. "We demand that they send those soldiers to an Iraqi and American court."
Mahdi was the father of six, including Hafeth. Hafeth said he now shoulders the financial responsibility for his family on his approximately $100 -a-month salary.
"I was shocked that my father was killed by the Americans," he said. "Supposedly we move in a secured area ... we used to wave at them and they waved at us."
Hafeth said he didn't accept the compensation offered by the U.S. military. They offered $10,000 , he said, and that wasn't enough for his father's car let alone his father's life.
"My father was a peaceful man," he said. "He never did anything wrong. Everybody knew his good reputation and everybody liked him."
July 27, 2008
Report: Empty prison in Iraq
a $40M 'failure'
By BRIAN MURPHY and PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writers
In the flatlands north of Baghdad sits a prison with no prisoners. It holds something else: a chronicle of U.S. government waste, misguided planning and construction shortcuts costing $40 million and stretching back to the American overseers who replaced Saddam Hussein.
"It's a bit of a monument in the desert right now because it's not going to be used as a prison," said Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, whose office plans to release a report Monday detailing the litany of problems at the vacant detention center in Khan Bani Saad.
The pages also add another narrative to the wider probes into the billions lost so far on scrubbed or substandard projects in Iraq and one of the main contractors accused of failing to deliver, the Parsons construction group of Pasadena, Calif.
"This is $40 million invested in a project with very little return," Bowen told The Associated Press in Washington. "A couple of buildings are useful. Other than that, it's a failure."
In the pecking order of corruption in Iraq, the dead-end prison project at Khan Bani Saad is nowhere near the biggest or most tangled.
Bowen estimated up to 20 percent "waste" — or more than $4 billion — from the $21 billion spent so far in the U.S.-bankrolled Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund. It's just one piece of a recovery effort that swelled beyond $112 billion in U.S., Iraqi and international contributions.
But the empty prison compound — in the shadows of more than two dozen watchtowers now dotted by birds' nests — is an open sore for both American watchdogs and local Iraqi politicians who had counted on the prison as an economic boost.
The head of the municipal council in Khan Bani Saad, Sayyed Rasoul al-Husseini, called it "a big monster that's swallowed money and hopes" — including those for more than 1,200 new jobs.
He sometimes drives out to the site, near groves of date palms and a former Saddam-era military training camp about 12 miles northeast of Baghdad and just over the border in the tense Diyala Province.
Al-Husseini says he walks the perimeter and wonders what can be salvaged. A housing development is not possible, he said. Many concrete walls lack proper iron reinforcements and "can collapse at anytime," he said. Birds and small animals have found homes in the towers and crannies.
"But some of the cell blocks are good," he suggested. "So maybe it can become a factory. I don't know. It's depressing."
The idea for the modern-style prison began with the Coalition Provisional Authority running Iraq after Saddam's fall.
On behalf of the authority, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $40 million contract in March 2004 to global construction and engineering firm Parsons to design and build an 1,800-inmate lockup to include educational and vocational facilities. Work was set to begin May 2004 and finish November 2005.
Nothing went right from the start, the report says.
The Sunni insurgency was catching fire. The U.S. was under pressure to improve prison conditions following the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib.
Washington's focus shifted quickly from rebuilding to just holding its ground. The prison project got started six months late and continued to fall behind — until Parsons asked to push the completion date to late 2008, the report said.
The U.S. government pulled the plug in June 2006, citing "continued schedule slips and ... massive cost overruns." But they hadn't abandoned the hope of finishing the project — awarding three more contracts to other companies in a doomed effort.
The waste was made more egregious by the fact that Diyala badly needs more prisons to handle a growing inmate population. Bowen's team was told that about 600 inmates are crowded into an existing Diyala prison designed for 250 inmates and that the overcrowding and health conditions are so grave that several inmates have died, the report says.
The problem at Khan Bani Saad is only one example of the millions of dollars auditors found were wasted on construction projects by Parsons, which left Iraq two years ago.
In a companion report also being released Monday, Bowen said the prison was part of a $900 million Parsons contract to build border posts, courts, police training centers and fire stations. It was one of 12 contracts awarded in 2004 in hopes of restoring Iraq's infrastructure.
Of 53 construction projects in the massive Parson contract, only 18 were completed.
As of this spring, Parsons had been paid $333 million. More than $142 million of that — or almost 43 percent — was for projects that were terminated or canceled.
While the failure to complete some of the work was "understandable given the complex nature and unstable security environment in Iraq, millions of dollars" were likely wasted, the report said.
Bowen said only about 10 U.S. contracting officers and specialists were working on the $900 million contract, whereas 50 or 60 would be assigned to a comparable undertaking in the United States.
In a last wasteful act at Khan Bani Saad, the U.S. government allowed $1.2 million worth of construction supplies to be left unguarded at Khan Bani Saad after work was suspended in June 2007 — fencing, gravel, piping and other items. Most of it is now missing.
U.S. officials turned over control of the semifinished prison to Iraq's Justice Ministry nearly a year ago. The ministry promptly replied it had no plans to "complete, occupy or provide security" for the facility, the report said.
In the end, Parsons got $31 million and the other contractors got $9 million.
Some parts of the facility are usable, but construction in other parts is so substandard that demolition is the only option, the report said. Inspectors found cracking and crumbling concrete slabs, columns not strong enough to support the structure and incorrect use of reinforcement bars meant to strengthen the concrete.
Khan Bani Saad is a microcosm of the shortfalls in the reconstruction program," said Bowen.
And the choice of Parsons — in retrospect — was part of a far bigger web of alleged shortcomings by the conglomerate in Iraq.
"This is the worst performing contractor that we have identified" among the seven firms so far studied in Congress-mandated reviews of Iraqi projects, said Bowen.
It was not possible to get advance comment from Parsons. Under the rules for the release of the audit, reporters were not allowed to reveal its details until Monday.
But the report said Parsons had argued that the U.S. government misrepresented the security conditions. Parsons said that its subcontractors faced threats that either shut down or slowed work almost daily. In August 2005, the site manager for one of Parsons' subcontractors was shot to death in his office.
Diyala remains one of the most dangerous places in Iraq. In the past week, U.S. and Iraqi forces have stepped up sweeps against insurgents in one of their last footholds near Baghdad.
But officials of the Army Corps of Engineers — one of the agencies that oversaw the prison construction — countered that Parsons understood conditions in Iraq at the time. They also said Parsons rarely reported security threats, and only recorded seven days when it cited delays due to violence.
Bowen said his agency has done 120 audits on Iraqi projects. "And they tell an episodic story of waste," he said.
___
On the Net:
The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction reports:
Prison project http://www.sigir.mil/reports/pdf/assessments/PA-08-138.pdf
Audit of Parsons Delaware, Inc. http://www.sigir.mil/reports/pdf/audits/08-019.pdf
July 7, 2008
U.S. role in mass killings detailed
By Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang, Associated Press
EDITOR'S NOTE — On May 19, The Associated Press reported on the hidden history of mass executions by South Korea early in the Korean War. The following report looks in depth at the U.S. connection.
SEOUL, South Korea — The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart it ”would be permitted“ to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.
In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter thought to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, during a few weeks in mid-1950.
Extensive archival research has found no indication Far East commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur took action to stem the summary mass killing, knowledge of which reached top levels of the Pentagon and State Department in Washington, where it was classified ”secret“ and filed away.
Now, a half-century later, the South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating the killings, largely hidden from history — unlike the communist invaders' executions of southern rightists, which were widely publicized and denounced at the time.
In the now-declassified record at the U.S. National Archives and other repositories, the Korean investigators will find an ambivalent U.S. attitude in 1950 — at times hands-off, at times disapproving.
”The most important thing is that they did not stop the executions,“ historian Jung Byung-joon, a member of the 2-year-old commission, said of the Americans. ”They were at the crime scene, and took pictures and wrote reports.“
They took pictures in July 1950 at the slaughter of dozens of men at one huge killing field outside the central city of Daejeon. Between 3,000 and 7,000 South Koreans are thought to have been shot there by their own military and police, and dumped into mass graves, said Kim Dong-choon, the commission member overseeing the investigation.
The brutal, hurried elimination of tens of thousands of their countrymen, the subject of a May 19 Associated Press report, was the climax to a years-long campaign by South Korea's right-wing leaders.
In 1947, two years after Washington and Moscow divided Korea into southern and northern halves, a U.S. military government declared the Korean Labor Party, the southern communists, to be illegal. President Syngman Rhee's southern regime, gaining sovereignty in 1948, suppressed all leftist political activity, put down a guerrilla uprising and held up to 30,000 political prisoners by the time communist North Korea invaded on June 25, 1950.
As war broke out, southern authorities also rounded up members of the 300,000-strong National Guidance Alliance, a ”re-education“ body to which they had assigned leftist sympathizers, and whose membership quotas also were filled by illiterate peasants lured by promises of jobs and other benefits.
Commission investigators, extrapolating from initial evidence and surveys of family survivors, said they think most alliance members were killed in the wave of executions.
On June 29, 1950, as the southern army and its U.S. advisers retreated southward, reports from Seoul said the conquering northerners had emptied the southern capital's prisons, and ex-inmates were reinforcing the new occupation regime.
In a confidential narrative he later wrote for Army historians, Lt. Col. Rollins S. Emmerich, a senior U.S. adviser, described what then happened in the southern port city of Busan, formerly known as Pusan.
Emmerich was told by a subordinate that a South Korean regimental commander, determined to keep Busan's political prisoners from joining the enemy, planned ”to execute some 3500 suspected peace time Communists, locked up in the local prison,“ according to the declassified 78-page narrative, first uncovered by the newspaper Busan Ilbo at the U.S. National Archives.
Emmerich wrote that he summoned the Korean, Col. Kim Chong-won, and told him the enemy would not reach Busan in a few days as Kim feared, and that ”atrocities could not be condoned.“
But the American then indicated conditional acceptance of the plan.
“Colonel Kim promised not to execute the prisoners until the situation became more critical,“ wrote Emmerich, who died in 1986. ”Colonel Kim was told that if the enemy did arrive to the outskirts of (Busan) he would be permitted to open the gates of the prison and shoot the prisoners with machine guns.“
This passage, omitted from the published Army history, is the first documentation unearthed showing advance sanction by the U.S. military for such killings.
”I think his (Emmerich's) word is so significant,“ said Park Myung-lim, a South Korean historian of the war and adviser to the investigative commission.
http://www.kentucky.com/181/story/454204.html
June 17, 2008
Probe: Pentagon lawyers sought
harsh interrogation
By ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks pursued abusive interrogation techniques once used by North Korea and Vietnam on American POWs despite stern warnings by several military lawyers that the methods were cruel and even illegal, according to a Senate investigation.
The findings, detailed in a hearing Tuesday, brought rebukes of the Pentagon effort from Democrats and Republicans alike.
"The guidance (administration lawyers) provided will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an Air Force Reserve colonel who teaches military law for the service.
The hearing is the Senate Armed Services Committee's first look at the origins of harsh interrogation methods and how policy decisions were vetted across the Defense Department. Its review fits into a broader picture of the government's handling of detainees, which includes FBI and CIA interrogations in secret prisons.
The panel is expected to hold further hearings on the matter and release a final report by the end of the year.
Among its initial findings is that senior Pentagon lawyers, including the office of general counsel William "Jim" Haynes, sought information as early as July 2002 regarding a military program that trained U.S. troops how to survive enemy interrogations and deny foes valuable intelligence.
Much of the training program, known as "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape," or SERE, is based on experiences of American prisoners of war in previous conflicts, including those in Korea and Vietnam.
In response, SERE officials provided Haynes' office a list of tactics that included sensory deprivation, sleep disruption and stress positions.
Haynes, who resigned his post in February, testified that he remembers receiving the information, but that he did not recall requesting it personally.
Several of those techniques, including stress positions, were later approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a December 2002 memo for use at Guantanamo Bay. Rumsfeld and Haynes agreed to the methods, despite objections by military service lawyers that they might be illegal.
"Whatever interrogation techniques we adopt will eventually become public knowledge," wrote Col. John Ley of the Army's Judge Advocate General office in November 2002. "If we mistreat detainees, we will quickly lose the (moral) high ground and public support will erode."
Haynes said he too had misgivings, but that he was unaware of the legal objections in the military services. He said he was doing the best he could to help prevent another major terrorist attack.
"There was a limited amount of time and a high degree of urgency," Haynes said of his decision to cut short at one point a department-wide review of the legality of the interrogation methods.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said Rumsfeld's endorsement paved the way for abuses to occur in Iraq and Afghanistan and makes U.S. troops more likely to someday be tortured if captured by the enemy.
"If we use those same techniques offensively against detainees, it says to the world that they have America's stamp of approval," said Levin.
The committee also released previously secret and privately held documents on Tuesday. According to minutes from an October 2002 meeting, a top military lawyer at Guantanamo said prisoners were exposed to previously forbidden techniques, such as sleep deprivation, but that such treatment was hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
"Officially it is not happening," Lt. Col. Diane Beaver said in the meeting. "It is not being reported officially. The ICRC is a serious concern. They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave. This would draw a lot of negative attention."
A senior CIA lawyer at the meeting, John Fredman, explained that whether harsh interrogation amounted to torture "is a matter of perception." The only sure test for torture is if the detainee died.
"If the detainees dies, you're doing it wrong," Fredman said.
Beaver wrote a now-infamous Oct. 11, 2002, memo that determined abusive methods could be used against detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison because they were not considered prisoners of war. Her proposed methods included extended isolation, 20-hour interrogations, death threats and waterboarding.
On Tuesday, Beaver told the committee that she was "shocked" that her memo became the primary justification for Rumsfeld's approval to use harsher methods.
She had asked her superiors for input because those working at Guantanamo and engaged in the interrogation program "don't always have the best perspective."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the administration does not review every legal opinion, but that its position has been "to deal with these detainees humanely" and "get the information from them that we can to protect this country."
Notably absent from the hearing Tuesday was the Senate's biggest champion of detainee rights and the top Republican on the committee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. A former prisoner of war, McCain has become less visible on the issue of detainee treatment since becoming a presidential candidate.
McCain was in San Antonio on Tuesday giving a speech on energy and attending campaign fundraisers.
April 28, 2008
Syria says US reactor charges as fake
as Iraq WMD claims
AFP
Syria said on Monday that US accusations it had been building a nuclear reactor until its destruction in an Israeli air raid last September were as bogus as American claims that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction in 2003.
The ruling Baath party’s mouthpiece daily compared the photographs of the bombed site shown to US congressmen last week to the images Washington presented to the UN Security Council as alleged evidence of Iraq’s non-conventional arsenal in the run-up to the US-led invasion.
“When you look at these pictures… a single image comes to mind — that of US Secretary of State Colin Powell accusing Iraq of hiding weapons of mass destruction and presenting as proof a dossier of photographs,” Al-Baath said.
“Of course Mr Powell later acknowledged that he had been fooled by the US intelligence services and by conservatives within the administration.
“The new US campaign of lies should surprise nobody — it’s a continuation of the same policy of US pressure against Syria that’s been going on” for the past five years, the paper added.
“Syria again rejects the US allegations and reaffirms that it has nothing to hide concerning its legitimate national defences. Syria wants to see peace in the region, unlike the current US administration which has been behind all its wars and crises.”...
http://noworldsystem.com/category/michael-hayden/
March 1, 2008
Airbus parent beats Boeing for
big U.S. Air Force contract
By Leslie Wayne, International Herald Tribune
WASHINGTON: The U.S. Air Force, in a stunning decision against Boeing, awarded a $40 billion contract for aerial refueling tankers Friday to a partnership between Northrop Grumman and the European parent of Airbus, putting a critical military contract partly into the hands of a foreign company.
The contract, one of the largest at the Pentagon, has the potential to grow to $100 billion. It is also a sign of the growing influence of foreign suppliers within the Pentagon and breaks a decades-long relationship with Boeing, which built the bulk of the existing tanker fleet and fought hard to land the new contract.
"This isn't an upset," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington-area research group. "It's an earthquake."
Under the contract, Northrop and the parent of Airbus, European Aeronautic Defense & Space, or EADS, would build a fleet of 179 planes, based on the existing Airbus 330, to provide in-air refueling to military aircraft, from fighter jets to cargo planes. It gives a huge lift to EADS, whose commercial aviation program has suffered a number of setbacks in recent years.
While final assembly of the craft would take place at an Airbus plant near Mobile, Alabama, parts would come from suppliers across the globe.
At a news conference, air force officials said the creation of domestic jobs was not a factor in the decision. In response to questions about possible negative reaction to the deal in Congress, General Arthur Lichte, head of the air force's air mobility command, said, "This will be an American tanker, flown by American airmen with an American flag on its tail and, every day, it will be saving American lives."
Reaction from some in Congress, however, was swift.
"We are outraged that this decision taps European Airbus and its foreign workers to provide a tanker to our American military," the delegation from Washington State said in a joint statement. Boeing planes are assembled outside Seattle. "This is a blow to the American aerospace industry, American workers and America's men and women in uniform."
For its part, Boeing, which had been considered the strong favorite to retain the contract, said it was "very disappointed" in the outcome. But it did not say whether it would file a formal protest - something General Michael Moseley, chief of staff of the air force, has said he hopes the losing bidder will not do because it would only further delay the tanker replacement program.
In its statement, Boeing said, "We believe that we offered the air force the best value and lowest risk tanker for its mission." The company added that only after a debriefing by the Pentagon would the company "make a decision concerning our possible options, keeping in mind at all times the impact to the warfighter and the nation."
A Boeing victory was considered so certain that many Wall Street analysts had already factored the contract into their economic forecasts for the company and led one senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, to prematurely send out a press release praising Boeing for its victory.
The air force decision is also a surprise ending to a protracted contracting process that went on for nearly a decade and became mired in scandal and international politics. Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, had scuttled an earlier attempt by the air force to award the contract to Boeing, opening the door for the Northrop-Airbus bid.
McCain's campaign spokeswoman referred calls to his Senate office, which could not be reached for comment.
Norm Dicks, a Washington Democrat who is a member of the House Appropriations Committee Defense Subcommittee, said he was attending an anticipated victory party at Boeing's Washington headquarters when the mood suddenly darkened.
"Here we are in the middle of a recession and we give this to Airbus?" Dicks added. "That is not going to go down well."
Ronald Sugar, the chief executive of Northrop Grumman, said in a telephone interview that he expected members of Congress would have a "variety of views" depending on whether their districts would be gaining or losing jobs under the deal.
He said that 60 percent of the content of the new tanker would come from the United States and that the contract would create 2,000 jobs in Mobile and 25,000 overall in the United States.
"This is more about the capability that we will give to the kids fighting the wars and the cost to the taxpayer," he said.
Backing Sugar's view was Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, who hailed the decision as "great news for Alabama."
The Alabama and Mississippi delegations had lobbied hard in Congress to polish the image of Airbus. In Paris, at the annual air shows, Airbus officials and these politicians proudly displayed the proposed European tanker offering and made the argument that if the United States wanted to sell its weapons to European countries, it should also open its doors to foreign suppliers....
Replacing these tankers has been the air force's top priority since 1996, when the government first proposed obtaining new planes. The first 179 tankers will be acquired at a pace of about 15 a year. But it is expected that, over time, nearly 400 new refueling planes will be needed, which could bring the program's total cost to $100 billion.
For more than a decade the air force's effort to modernize the fleet has been thwarted by global politics, Washington scandals and an aggressive attack by McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In the end, a procurement scandal led to the departure of Philip Condit, the chief executive of Boeing, the resignation of James Roche as air force secretary and the imprisonment of two Boeing executives, one of whom had worked on the program as a Pentagon acquisition official.
The air force, short on cash and wanting to acquire the planes as fast as possible, proposed an arrangement to Congress in late 2001 under which the Pentagon would lease the Boeing 767s in a sole-source contract that would keep Boeing's aging 767 production line alive.
But just as the air force was about to sign that deal, it came under sharp attack from McCain, a former navy pilot. He denounced the deal as a sweetheart arrangement between Boeing and the air force that had been arranged with insufficient scrutiny and oversight, and that would shortchange the taxpayer.
Soon afterward, it was reported that the air force's No. 2 weapons buyer, Darleen Druyun, had been promised jobs for herself, her daughter and son-in-law in return for steering the tanker contract and billions of dollars of other air force business to Boeing. Soon after joining the company in a $250,000-a-year post, Druyun and Michael Sears, Boeing's former chief financial officer, pleaded guilty and received prison terms.
The weight of the scandal caused the deal to collapse in 2004 and opened the door to competition.
Each side spent millions to sharpen its proposal, hire lobbyists and former generals to argue their case and wage extensive advertising efforts in Washington and at military gatherings.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/01/business/eads.php
March 6, 2008
Move to restrict EADS’
foreign ownership
The Financial Times, Limited
By Gerrit Wiesmann in Frankfurt and Peggy Hollinger in Paris
France and Germany are finalising changes to EADS’ corporate by-laws to prevent foreign investors building significant stakes in – or even taking over – Europe’s flagship aerospace and defence company.
The move comes at a sensitive time for the Franco-German group, which late last week secured a breathtaking entry into the US defence market with a $35bn contract for its Airbus tanker-aircraft.
Some US politicians have said giving the contract to a foreign company could have dire security implications – a frenzy that could mount if EADS’ Russian or Middle Eastern shareholders were to increase their holdings.
Dubai International Capital, a sovereign wealth fund, bought 3.1 per cent last summer and VEB, a state-controlled Russian bank, took a 5 per cent stake in December.
But the French government, French media group Lagardère, and German carmaker Daimler, which together control 45 per cent of EADS, are planning to restrict any investor deemed predatory from owning more than 15 per cent.
That level – a working number that might change – is integral to two models the Franco-German core shareholders are working on to see whether EADS can be given additional protection against a foreign takeover.
This follows last summer’s agreement between Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, to consider issuing “golden shares” to Paris and Berlin to take pressure off the core trio to uphold their stakes.
New takeover defences could herald adjustments to the shareholders’ pact, which enshrines German and French stakes at 22.5 per cent a piece. Lagardère has been seen as a probable seller of its 7.5 per cent stake....
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5fc7f6a2-ebbb-11dc-9493-0000779fd2ac.html
March 11, 2008
McCain advisers lobbied for
European plane maker
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Top current advisers to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign last year lobbied for a European plane maker that beat Boeing to a $35 billion Air Force tanker contract, taking sides in a bidding fight that McCain has tried to referee for more than five years.
Two of the advisers gave up their lobbying work when they joined McCain's campaign. A third, former Texas Rep. Tom Loeffler, lobbied for the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. while serving as McCain's national finance chairman.
EADS is the parent company of Airbus, which teamed up with U.S.-based Northrop Grumman Corp. to win the lucrative aerial refueling contract on February 29. Boeing Co. Chairman and CEO Jim McNerney said in a statement Monday that the Chicago-based aerospace company "found serious flaws in the process that we believe warrant appeal."
McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in waiting, has been a key figure in the Pentagon's years-long attempt to complete a deal on the tanker. McCain helped block an earlier tanker contract with Boeing and prodded the Pentagon in 2006 to develop bidding procedures that did not exclude Airbus.
EADS retained Ogilvy Government Relations and The Loeffler Group to lobby for the tanker deal last year, months after McCain sent two letters urging the Defense Department to make sure the bidding proposals guaranteed competition.
"They never lobbied him related to the issues, and the letters went out before they were contracted" by EADS, McCain campaign spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said Monday.
According to lobbying records filed with the Senate, Loeffler Group lobbyists on the project included Loeffler and Susan Nelson, who left the firm and is now the campaign's finance director. Ogilvy lobbyist John Green, who was assigned the EADS work, recently took a leave of absence to volunteer for McCain as the campaign's congressional liaison.
"The aesthetics are not good, especially since he is an advocate of reform and transparency," said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the aerospace consulting firm Teal Group. "Boeing advocates are going to use this as ammunition."
McCain, a longtime critic of influence peddling and special interest politics, has come under increased scrutiny as a presidential candidate, particularly because he has surrounded himself with advisers who are veteran Washington lobbyists. He has defended his inner circle and has emphatically denied reports last month in The New York Times and The Washington Post that suggested he helped the client of a lobbyist friend nine years ago.
He has also cast himself as a neutral watchdog in the Air Force tanker contract, one of the largest in decades.
"All I asked for in this situation was a fair competition," he told reporters Monday at Lambert Field in St. Louis, home of a Boeing fighter jet plant.
On Friday, he defended his aggressive oversight: "I never weighed in for or against anybody that competed for the contract. All I asked for was a fair process. And the facts are that I never showed any bias in any way against anybody -- except for the taxpayer."
Last week, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the EADS-Northrop Gruman plane was "clearly a better performer" than the one proposed by Boeing.
It is unclear what EADS hired the lobbyists to do. Loeffler and Airbus officials did not immediately respond to phone and e-mail messages left late Monday.
A Boeing spokesman declined to comment Monday on the links between McCain and lobbying efforts on behalf of EADS.
But Boeing supporters already have begun to accuse McCain of damaging Boeing's chances by inserting himself into the tanker deal.
One of them, Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Washington, said the field was "tilted to Airbus" because the Pentagon did not weigh European subsidies for Airbus in its deliberations -- a decision he blamed on McCain. Everett, Wash., is where Boeing would perform much of the tanker work, and Dicks is a senior member of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.
In December 2006, just weeks before the Air Force was set to release its formal request for proposals, McCain wrote a letter to the incoming defense secretary, Robert Gates, warning that he was "troubled" by the Air Force's draft request for bids.
The United States had filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization alleging that Airbus unfairly benefits from European subsidies. Airbus in turn argued that Boeing also receives government support, mostly as tax breaks.
Under the Air Force proposal, bidders would have been required to explain how financial penalties or other sanctions stemming from the subsidy dispute might affect their ability to execute the contract. The request was widely viewed as hurting the EADS-Northrop Grumman bid.
The proposed bid request "may risk eliminating competition before bids are submitted," McCain wrote in a December 1, 2006, letter to Gates. The Air Force changed the criteria four days later.
Dicks said the removal of the subsidy language was a "game-changer" that favored EADS over Boeing.
"The only reason that they could even bid a low price is because they received a subsidy," Dicks said last week. "And Senator McCain jumped into this and said that (the Air Force) could not look at the subsidy issue -- which I think is a big mistake, especially when the U.S. trade representative is bringing a case in the (World Trade Organization) on this very issue."
EADS' interest in the tanker deal is evident in the political contributions of its employees. From 2004 to 2006, donations by its employees jumped from $42,500 to $141,931, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. So far this election cycle, company employees have donated $120,350. Of that, McCain's presidential campaign has received $14,000, the most of any other member of Congress this election cycle.
McCain prides himself in the role he played blocking an earlier version of the tanker deal that gave the contract to Boeing. As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and of an Armed Services subcommittee, McCain led an investigation that eventually helped kill that contract in 2004. A former Air Force official and a top Boeing executive both served time in prison, and the scandal led to the departure of Boeing's chief executive and several top Air Force officials.
"I intervened in a process that was clearly corrupt," McCain said Friday. "That's why people went to jail."
While McCain has praised Boeing for fixing its practices, his campaign said the experience prompted him to demand "a full, fair and open competition." His letters -- one to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England in September 2006 and the other to Gates -- were sent with that spirit in mind, Hazelbaker said Monday.
Once the rules were in place, Hazelbaker said, bidders submitted proposals, the Air Force reviewed them and the contract was awarded.
"That is a process that McCain, appropriately, had absolutely no role in," she said.
www.kycbs.net/McCain-Airbus-Lobby.mht
August 29, 2007
Army to examine Iraq contracts
By RICHARD LARDNER, Associated Press Writer
The Army will examine as many as 18,000 contracts awarded over the past four years to support U.S. forces in Iraq to determine how many are tainted by waste, fraud and abuse, service officials said Wednesday.
Overall, the contracts are worth close to $3 billion and represent every transaction made between 2003 and 2007 by a contracting office in Kuwait, which the Army has identified as a significant trouble spot.
Among the contracts to be reviewed are awards to former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which has received billions of dollars since 2001 to be a major provider of food and shelter services to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Democrats in Congress have claimed that KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown and Root, benefited from ties to Vice President Dick Cheney, who once led Halliburton Co., the Houston-based oil services conglomerate, and congressional Republicans.
The officials did not specify which KBR contracts would be examined or their value.
The announcement, made by Army Secretary Pete Geren, comes as the number of criminal cases related to the acquisition of weapons and other supplies for forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has grown to 76. So far, 20 military and civilian Army employees have been indicted on charges of contract fraud.
"There have been reported cases of fraud, waste and abuse of contracting operations, with many of the worst cases originating out of Kuwait," Geren said.
Geren said the Army has been auditing the contracting operation in Kuwait for more than a year. He acknowledged the expanding list of criminal investigations was a factor in appointing a special task force headed by a three-star Army general.
"There is fraud," Geren said. "We have seen more cases lately and that's cause for concern."
Lt. Gen. N. Ross Thompson has been empowered to take whatever corrective actions he determines are necessary "to prevent any further abuse, fraud or waste," Geren said.
Thompson, the military deputy to the Army's top civilian acquisition official, said his task force will "make sure that we've identified anything that needs to be looked at that hasn't been already been picked up by an ongoing investigation."...
Geren has also formed a special commission to examine long-term solutions to improve the Army's weapons and supply contracting process. That team will be headed by Jacques Gansler, a former under secretary of defense for acquisition, and its report is due in 45 days.
Separately, the Pentagon is sending a team of investigators led by Inspector General Claude M. Kicklighter to examine problems with "weapons and munitions purchased by the U.S. government and intended for use by Iraqi security forces," according to Chris Isleib, a Pentagon spokesman.
THE IRAQ STUDY GROUP
The United States Institute of Peace
The Iraq Study Group is a bipartisan group of prominent Americans supported by four premier institutions. It is led by co-chairs James A. Baker, III, the nation’s 61st Secretary of State and Honorary Chairman of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, and Lee H. Hamilton, former Congressman and Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
The other members of the study group include: Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Edwin Meese III , Sandra Day O'Connor, Leon E. Panetta, William J. Perry, Charles S. Robb, and Alan K. Simpson.
November 28, 2006
Iraq Panel's Real Agenda: Damage Control
The Iraq Study Group's makeup gives away its true purpose.
by Andrew J. Bacevich, Christian Science Monitor
Even as Washington waits with bated breath for the Iraq Study Group (ISG) to release its findings, the rest of us should see this gambit for what it is: an attempt to deflect attention from the larger questions raised by America's failure in Iraq and to shore up the authority of the foreign policy establishment that steered the United States into this quagmire. This ostentatiously bipartisan panel of Wise Men (and one woman) can't really be searching for truth. It is engaged in damage control.
Their purpose is twofold: first, to minimize Iraq's impact on the prevailing foreign policy consensus with its vast ambitions and penchant for armed intervention abroad; and second, to quell any inclination of ordinary citizens to intrude into matters from which they have long been excluded. The ISG is antidemocratic. Its implicit message to Americans is this: We'll handle things - now go back to holiday shopping.
The group's composition gives the game away. Chaired by James Baker, the famed political operative and former secretary of state, and Lee Hamilton, former congressman and fixture on various blue-ribbon commissions, it contains no one who could be even remotely described as entertaining unorthodox opinions or maverick tendencies.
Instead, it consists of Beltway luminaries such as retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and lobbyist Vernon Jordan. No member is now an elected official. Neither do its ranks include any Iraq war veterans, family members of soldiers killed in Iraq, or anyone identified with the antiwar movement. None possesses specialized knowledge of Islam or the Middle East.
Charging this crowd with assessing the Iraq war is like convening a committee of Roman Catholic bishops to investigate the church's clergy sex-abuse scandal. Even without explicit instructions, the group's members know which questions not to ask and which remedies not to advance. Sadly, the average Catholic's traditional deference to the church hierarchy finds its counterpart in the average American's deference to "experts" when it comes to foreign policy. The ISG exemplifies the result: a befuddled, but essentially passive-electorate looks for guidance to a small group of unelected insiders reflecting a narrow range of views and operating largely behind closed doors.
The guardians of the foreign policy status quo are counting on the panel to extricate the US from Iraq. More broadly, they are counting on it to avoid inquiring into the origins of our predicament. So don't think for a moment that the ISG will assess the implications of America's growing addiction to foreign oil. Don't expect it to question the wisdom of President Bush's doctrine of preventive war or the feasibility of his Freedom Agenda, which promises to implant democracy across the Islamic world.
Far be it from the group to ask whether an open-ended "global war on terror" makes sense as a response to 9/11 or to ponder the flagrant manipulation and misuse of intelligence in the months leading up to the Iraq war. The ISG won't assess the egregious flaws in US military planning for the Iraq invasion or the manifest deficiencies in American generalship since the war began. On the role that Congress has played in enabling presidential fecklessness, you can be certain that Baker and Hamilton will remain silent.
The ISG will provide cover for the Bush administration to shift course in Iraq. It will pave the way for the Democratic Congress to endorse that shift in a great show of bipartisanship. But it will hold no one responsible.
Above all, it will leave intact the assumptions, arrangements, and institutions that gave rise to Iraq in the first place. In doing so, it will ensure that the formulation of foreign policy remains the preserve of political mahatmas like Baker and Hamilton, with the American people left to pick up the tab.
In this way, the ISG will make possible - even likely - a repetition of some disaster akin to Iraq at a future date.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations
at Boston University.
Copyright © 2006 The Christian Science Monitor
www.commondreams.org/views06/1128-28.htm
July 22/23, 2006
Lebanon and Gaza invasions planned last
month in Colorado meetings between
Netanyahu, Sharansky, and Cheney.
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was planned between top Israeli officials and members of the Bush administration.
On June 17 and 18, former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud Knesset member Natan Sharansky met with Vice President Dick Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute conference in Beaver Creek, Colorado. There, the impending Israeli invasions of both Gaza and Lebanon were discussed.
After receiving Cheney's full backing for the invasion of Gaza and Lebanon, Netanyahu flew back to Israel and participated in a special "Ex-Prime Ministers" meeting, in which he conveyed the Bush administration's support for the carrying out of the "Clean Break" policy -- the trashing of all past Middle East peace accords, including Oslo.
Present at the meeting, in addition to Netanyahu, were current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres. Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir is very old and suffers from dementia and Ariel Sharon remains in a coma after a series of strokes.
After the AEI meeting, Sharansky, who has the ear of Bush, met with the Heritage Foundation in Washington and then attended a June 29 seminar at Philadelphia's Main Line Haverford School sponsored by the Middle East Forum led by Daniel Pipes.
Sharansky appeared with Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum who this past Thursday was beating the war drums against Syria, Iran, and "Islamo-fascism" in a fiery speech at the National Press Club attended by a cheering section composed of members of the neocon Israel Project, on whose board Santorum serves along with Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss and Virginia GOP Rep. Tom Davis.
Our Washington sources claim that the U.S.-supported invasions of Gaza and Lebanon and the impending attacks on Syria and Iran represent the suspected "event" predicted to take place prior to the November election in the United States and is an attempt to rally the American public around the Bush-Cheney regime during a time of wider war.
By its past and present actions, by its technological capabilities, by the merciless nature of its regime, Iraq is unique. As a former chief weapons inspector of the U.N. has said, ‘The fundamental problem with Iraq remains the nature of the regime, itself. Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.’...
“We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas. Saddam Hussein also has experience in using chemical weapons. He has ordered chemical attacks on Iran, and on more than forty villages in his own country. These actions killed or injured at least 20,000 people, more than six times the number of people who died in the attacks of September the 11th....
“Iraq is a land rich in culture, resources, and talent. Freed from the weight of oppression, Iraq's people will be able to share in the progress and prosperity of our time. If military action is necessary, the United States and our allies will help the Iraqi people rebuild their economy, and create the institutions of liberty in a unified Iraq at peace with its neighbors.”...
– George W. Bush, October 7, 2000
National Priorities Project - Cost of War
A Timeline of Oil and Violence in Iraq
THE EAGLE HOODED: THE 9-11 COVERUP
THE 10 MOST BRAZEN WAR PROFITEERS
www.alternet.org/waroniraq/41083/
< < < FLASHBACK < < <
July, 1953, from SEE Magazine:
WE CAN NEVER GET OUT OF KOREA
By Col. James E. Wilson, former Military Mayor of Seoul
Bloody, costly frontier is vital to U.S. defense
WE CAN NEVER get out of Korea – no matter who says what to the contrary.
We did try to get out five years ago. It didn’t work.
I remember the spring day in 1948 when we in the military government turned over our responsibilities to the Koreans and prepared to sail for home. I was standing in my office in the City Hall of Seoul, Korea’s capital, saying goodbye to the staff we had trained to run the city.
Someone in the rear of the room spoke up. “You’ll be back,” he said. “You’ll find that Korea is not just a little peninsula in Asia, but a frontier of the free world. You’ll be back to help us guard that frontier.”
Since then, in the past two and a half years, oceans of blood have been shed in Korea. More than 20,000 American boys have been killed in action there, and our casualty list, at 129,000 is longer than those of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, Indian wars and Spanish-American War combined.
Directly, the war has cost us about 15 billion dollars. Indirectly, it has doubled government spending, from 40 billion dollars a year to 80.
Korea has become a charnel house, with an estimated million of its civilians killed, and more millions wounded, starving and homeless.
In this frustrating, little-understood war, the persistent question is “Why?” Why has remote Korea become the inferno whose flaming cities may ignite World War III?...
Korea Checks Red Expansion
The current war again has produced the chaotic conditions that breed men like Kim Koo – which is another reason why we cannot abandon Korea again.
As long as Korea is a nation friendly to our cause, it remains as a counter-check to Communist aggression in both south and north Asia.
The Chinese Communists cannot stage an all-out offensive southward into Indo-China and Malaya while they remain exposed on the Korean front....
The fact is, South Korea’s cause is ours also. Korea is still the loaded pistol pointed at all we must defend in the Pacific. In our own self-interest, we cannot let that pistol be fired.
The Media and the Military-Industrial Complex
– From Derailing Democracy, by David McGowan
It has been 40 years since President Eisenhower, in his final address to the nation before leaving office in 1961, issued a rather extraordinary warning to the American people that the country “must guard against unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths.
The result has been that an increasingly agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state....
And it is certainly true that by all outward appearances the United States does appear to have the very epitome of a free press. . . . Yet behind this picture of plurality there are clear warning signs that an increasingly incestuous relationship exists between the media titans and the corporate military powers that Eisenhower so feared.
For example, the number-one purveyor of broadcast news in this country— NBC, with both MSNBC and CNBC under its wing, as well as NBC news and a variety of “newsmagazines”-- is now owned and controlled by General Electric, one of the nation’s largest defense contractors.
Is it not significant that as GE’s various media subsidiaries predictably lined up to cheerlead the use of U.S. military force in Kosovo, it was at the same time posting substantial profits from the sale of the high tech tools of modern warfare it so shamelessly glorifies?...
Equally alarming is that those viewers choosing to change channels to CNN, the reigning king of the cable news titans, were treated to the surreal daily spectacle of watching Christiane Amapour, who is the wife of State Department mouthpiece James Rubin, analyze her husband’s daily press briefings, as though she could objectively respond to the mounds of disinformation spewing forth from the man with whom she shares her morning coffee.
Were it to occur elsewhere, would this not be denounced as symptomatic of a state-run press?...
The Catbird Recommends for some of the latest REAL news:
March 29, 2005
Pentagon Strips Air Force of
21 Major Weapons Programs
WASHINGTON (AP) - In a highly unusual move, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer on Monday took away the Air Force’s authority to oversee 21 major programs with a combine value of $200 billion.
The move, called temporary, was made because of a civilian leadership vacuum at the Air Force after the departure last week of Peter Teets, who was under secretary of the Air Force as well as acting secretary. Teets had been fillin in since James Roche resigned as secretary in January.
It also comes amid continuing controversy over the Air Force’s handling of a multibillion-dollar Boeing aircraft lease deal that fell through last year and led to the conviction of former Air Force executive Darleen Druyun on charges of conspiring to violate conflict-of-interest rules.
Druyun admitted in court that she favored Boeing on deals worth billion of dollars because the company gave jobs to her daughter and son-in-law. Her admission led to a detailed Pentagon review of her nearly 10-year tenure as a key weapons buyer for the Air Force and prompted rival defense companies to file protests over Boeing contracts awarded during that period.
The episode has taken a tool on the Air Force. Since Roche departed, the White House has not nominated anyone to replace him as the Air Force secretary, a post that requires Senate confirmation. Some believe the current Navy secretary, Gordon England, will get the nomination.
In addition, no one has been nominated to replace Teets as the under secretary. What’s more, the post of Air Force acquisition chief has been vacant since Marvin Sambur left in January.
With Teets gone, the most senior civilian in the Air Force is Michael I. Dominquez, who has served since August 2001 as assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs....
In Monday’s announcement, the Pentagon said it was giving the decision-making authority for the 21 major Air Force weapons programs to Michael Wynne, the No. 2 Pentagon civilian in charge of weapons procurement.
The No. 1 slot has not had a Senate-confirmed holder since May 2003. Wynne was nominate for the top spot but his nomination – and others in the Air Force – have been blocked by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, as part of a long-running dispute over the Boeing lease deal....
The 21 programs include a $59.2 billion Boeing contract for C-17A Globemaster II advanced cargo aircraft, and a $31.7 billion Boeing and Lockheed Martin contract for the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle....
Among other programs affected are air-to-air missiles, B-2 bomber radar modernization, C-5 cargo plane improvements, propulsion replacement for the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile and a $18 billion communications satellite program....
< < < FLASHBACK < < <
Program Manager Interviews:
ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR ECONOMIC SECURITY
-------
Which Defense Firms Will Survive – Meet the
Man Who Helps the Pentagon Decide
A large white banner is first thing you notice upon entering the reception area of Joshua Gotbaum’s third-floor Pentagon office. In foot-high red letters, it reads:
“Please Mr. Gotbaum, Save Natick [Mass.] Labs”
Secretary Gotbaum, a former Wall Street investment banker, achieved the status of Washington insider in 1 short year. He is respected both by the Pentagon brass and defense industry officials. He influences key decisions ranging from BRAC to which defense industries will survive.
Secretary Gotbaum is the right man for the job at the right time. A 44-year-old lawyer, Secretary Gotbaum is at home in the world of mergers, acquisitions, and restructurings. He heads the new 260-person Pentagon Office of Economic Security and has won the confidence of many defense industry and military officials for helping educate the Pentagon brass on their decisions which impact the nation’s troubled defense industry. And so far, both sides appear pleased with his efforts or their behalf....
www.dau.mil/pubs/pm/pmpdf95/gotbaum.pdf
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For more recent poop on Joshua Gotbaum, GO TO > > > Hawaiian Airlines
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July 30, 2003
No Market for Terrorism
Pentagon terminates trading on violent world events
By Carl Hulse, The New York Times
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon’s new terrorism futures market is suddenly a thing of the past.
Only a day after it was disclosed, outraged senators of both parties called yesterday for the immediate end to the online trading bazaar that would have rewarded investors able to predict terror attacks and other global unrest. Pentagon officials raced to oblige, saying it would be shut down post haste.
“It is a very significant mistake,” said Sen. John Warner, R-Va., and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Department of Defense.
Democrats said the cancellation of the program was not enough and that those responsible should be fired. Attention immediately turned to retired Rear Adm. John Poindexter, a key official involved in developing the plan.
Poindexter first gained notoriety in the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan administration and more recently was involved in a controversy over a Pentagon program for extensive electronic surveillance of computer records in the search for terrorists....
Two Democratic senators, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon, revealed the futures program Monday. Under the Pentagon plan, traders were to be able to begin registering Friday to trade futures in world terrorism developments as of Oct. 1 on a Web site of the Policy Analysis Market, which the Pentagon was operating with private partners.
At a Senate hearing yesterday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said he first learned of it from news accounts.
“I share your shock at this kind of program,” he said. “We’ll find out about it, but it is being terminated.”
Warner and his colleagues summoned the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where the market idea was developed, to the Capitol to explain how the concept originated. The director, Tony Tether, put out a statement saying the program was finished, effective immediately.
Warner and other senators responsible for overseeing Defense Department spending moved quickly to disassociate themselves from the program, and they promised hearings and much more aggressive oversight of the research arm of the Pentagon. They said they had never been told any details of the $3 million program, which they harshly criticized as ill-conceived and unwarranted....
Dorgan said, “I think those who thought it up ought not only close down the program, they ought not be on the public payroll any longer.”
Republican lawmakers said the uproar over the marketing plan could jeopardize congressional support for research agency programs though they were not ready to call for the end of the terrorism information effort. As for personnel changes, they said those decisions were the responsibility of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
But Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan, who serves on both the intelligence and Armed Services committees, called the market plan “absurd,” and added, “It seems to me they are way off base and somebody should bear that responsibility and I think we know who that is.”
Poindexter was a central figure in the 1980s Iran-contra scandal and was convicted of lying to Congress; his conviction was later overturned.
At the Pentagon, spokesman Lawrence Di Rita was asked about the status of the former naval officer and said, “At the moment, Admiral Poindexter continues to serve” in the research agency.
The Pentagon market Web-site was the first step in a broader program entitled Futures Markets Applied to Predictions.
In statements over the past two days, the agency said the idea behind the project was to use a marketplace to assess the probability of events, a concept that has worked with predictions in such matters as commodity prices and elections.
Examples of potential events on the site included the overthrow of the king of Jordan, a missile strike by North Korea or the assassination of Yasser Arafat....
See also: John Poindexter
May 13, 2002
WAGES OF SIN
By Christopher H. Schmitt, U.S. News & World Report
In the mid-1970s, Lockheed Aircraft Corp. was center stage in a scorching bribery scandal. Millions in secret payments were slipped to public officials and political parties around the globe, to curry favor and win government contracts.
Stung by the blowback, the company promised stringent reforms. Two decades later, Lockheed was again in the spotlight, pleading guilty to paying off an Egyptian official to win a deal for C-130 cargo planes. Once more, the company was contrite. Standing before a federal judge in 1995, a top executive pledged Lockheed’s “commitment to the highest ethical standards of conduct.”
In the years since, however, Lockheed’s troubles have only grown. The company has been named in at least 33 more cases covering overcharges on government contracts, improper technology transfer to China, falsifying results of nuclear safety tests, job discrimination, environmental pollution, and more.
These cases, some of which were in motion before the 1995 conviction, have produced at least $145.3 million in penalties, settlements, and restitution. And at least 13 more cases are pending.
Lockheed Martin, as the company is known today, says it has a vigorous ethics and compliance program. And, it turns out, says it has a vigorous ethics and compliance program. And, it turns out, that promise is good enough for the Pentagon.
Last October, despite the company’s record, the federal government awarded Lockheed the richest military contract in history – a deal to build the nation’s next generation jet. The project, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, could be worth as much as $200 billion over several decades.
Lockheed Martin is not the only big federal contractor that continues to do business with Washington despite repeated contract difficulties and other legal and regulatory trouble. In the past dozen years, 30 of the 43 largest federal contractors have racked up more than 400 enforcement cases, resulting in at least 28 criminal convictions, 286 civil settlements, and 88 administrative settlements, mostly involving their government contracts, according to data from the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit Washington, D.C., group that investigates government activities, and additional research by U.S. News.
The companies have breached environmental, labor, and securities regulations as well, For their difficulties, the analysis shows, they have paid at least $3.4 billion in fines, penalties, and restitution.
Injuries.
The cases cover a wide swath, including price fixing, bogus testing, polluting, overcharging, hiding product defects, violating export laws, and withholding financial data from the government.
They also represent more than accounting quibbles: Company workers have been killed and seriously injured and national security potentially put at risk. Yet, together, these firms have corralled more than 4 of every 10 federal procurement dollars. “If it was a food-stamp recipient, they’d go to jail,” says Rep Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, who complains about repeat offenders.
“If it was a student-loan recipient who wasn’t paying, they’d have their wages garnished. It’s an extraordinary double standard.”
The government actually has a process for cutting off wayward contractors from future work, but in practice, purchasing officers focus on getting projects done, not holding firms accountable for past behavior. And other officials responsible for barring firms can’t legally use punishment as a motive, says Robert Meunier, head of a committee of those officials.
“We’re here to protect the government’s business interest,” he says. Even if a current contractor is prevented from doing future business, the company could continue to do billions of dollars’ worth of government work under existing agreements. As best as can be determined, the government has cut off only one of the 30 big contractors with problems – General Electric Co. – and, even then, suspended the company for just a few days.
If federal agencies wanted to crack down on offending contractors, they couldn’t.
The U.S. government is the biggest shopper on the planet, buying some $235 billion worth of goods and services last year – everything from military hardware to management of nuclear laboratories to food for school lunches. But the reasons of cost, bureaucracy, and plain indifference, it doesn’t keep tabs on the behavior of its vendors. Contracting officers don’t know, for instance, if a company has already agreed with other agencies to clean up its act, and several agencies – including the General Services Administration – can’t even produce a list of whom they have suspended or barred from further contracts.
In effect, contractors have no official history when they line up for government work.
Little guys.
The military tops the government’s buying list – with contracts for $156.5 billion last year. Not surprisingly, some of the worst offenders are military contractors.
But while the government may be reluctant to move against its biggest suppliers, federal agencies don’t have the same qualms about cracking down on small firms. Officials maintain that federal rules are written evenhandedly, but they acknowledge that larger companies can naigate them more successfully.
Take James Verlander, a Houston-area researcher who in early 1990s got tangled up in Operation Lightning Strike, a federal sting operation targeting NASA suppliers. Federal agents drew Verlander and several others into a scheme revolving around a bogus medical device that supposedly could improve monitoring of space-station astronauts.
Threatened with a heavy prison sentence, he pleaded guilty to having accepted $2,000 as part of an effort to win approval and funding for the device, says his attorney, Charles Portz. Barred from government work ever since, Verlander suffered a nervous breakdown and has since become a medical technician.
By contrast, two big contractors that came under scrutiny in the affair – Martin Marietta and General Electric – settled their involvement by paying $1 million to defray the government’s expenses.
“They didn’t want to make arrests of the higher-up people because it would damage the space program,” says Portz, “so they busted a bunch of little people.”
Small fry get nailed more often because it’s more likely that senior executives were involved in any wrongdoing, say those familiar with the issue. And large contractors have more financial juice to make a case go away – to hire pricey legal talent, create compliance programs, or pay settlements.
“They’re pretty willing to settle it to stay in business,” says Jacques Ganaler, former undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, who is now a professor of public affairs at the University of Maryland.
Oversight of military and other federal spending has been kneecapped in recent years – through budget cuts and under the banner of streamlining regulation – and new proposals would weaken it further. Reflecting those developments and changing priorities, federal prosecution of contract fraud has fallen sharply in recent years, as have attempts by federal agencies themselves to rein in abuse, according to government data obtained by the Transactional Records access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Many expect enforcement efforts to suffer further still as homeland defense comes to the fore. U.S. Department of Justice officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Corporate crime.
Even in extreme situations, the biggest firms don’t face contracting’s version of the death penalty.
Take behemoth General Electric. In the early 1990s, problems including bribery and mispricing became so pervasive that the Pentagon’s Defense Contract Management Agency took the unusual step of setting up a special investigations office just for GE. The office produced 22 criminal indictments of the company, its sub-contractors, and employees, and recovered $221.7 million.
Although individuals were booted from future government work, the company was not, despite recommendations from frustrated investigators. Not barring the firm “is clearly a disincentive to forcing a major contractor to institute [change],” they said at the time.
“Other remedial actions, including criminal prosecutions, did not seem to be effective.”
Since then, GE has been named in new cases, involving both its military and civilian businesses. GE spokesman Gary Sheffer says that the earlier cases involved a small number of people and that the company used the experience to tghten an already strong compliance program....
BIG CONTRACTS - REPEAT OFFENDERS
In the past dozen years, 30 of the federal government’s biggest contractors have accumulated more than 400 enforcement cases, resulting in at least $3.4 billion in penalties, settlements, and restitution.
The top 10 firms:
GENERAL ELECTRIC ... $982.9 million for 63 cases
TRW ... $389.5 million for 17 cases
BOEING ... $358.0 million for 36 cases
LOCKHEED MARTIN ... $231.9 million for 63 cases
UNITED TECHNOLOGIES ... $214.8 million for 18 cases
ARCHER DANIELS MIDLAND ... $208.2 million for 8 cases
UNISYS ... $182.2 million for 12 cases
RAYTHEON ... $128.7 million for 24 cases
LITTON * ... $111.5 million for 8 cases
CARGILL ... $102 million for 8 cases
* Acquired by Northrup Grumman
– Full table and report at www.usnews.com
For more on NASA’s “Wages of Sin,” GO TO > > > NASA...and the war on truth
For more on Boeing’s bribery and boondoggles, GO TO > > > Boeing Bound
For more on GE and the bad things they bring to life, GO TO > > > General Electric
For more on the “Greed at Lockheed,” GO TO > > > Tarnished Wings
January 18, 1999
Pentagon backs down over
Ritter's new book
No intimidation intended
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Pentagon is dropping a demand that former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter turn over advance copies of his new book for official clearance.
The Pentagon says the demand was the result of an overzealous contracting officer and was not an attempt to intimidate Ritter.
Ritter, a retired Marine intelligence officer, has been highly critical of the Clinton administration since stepping down as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq. Ritter criticized the administration for, in his view, not aggressively supporting the work of the U.N. weapons inspectors who were charged with pursuing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
In a December 23 letter, the Defense Department told Ritter that he was required to obtain "written authorization" before "the public release of any material obtained as a result of work performed under ... contract." The letter asked Ritter to hand over copies of the book at least two months before publication.
In an article Sunday in the "New York Times", Ritter's attorney, Matthew L. Lifflander, characterized the letter as part of an administration-wide attempt to intimidate Ritter into silence.
But David Rigby, chief of public affairs for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said the letter was sent by a contracting officer who feared Ritter might inadvertently disclose classified information."
After a "broader view" by senior officials, the agency has decided to rescind the letter and offer to assist Ritter to ensure that classified information is not released in his book. Ritter will not be required to submit manuscripts, Rigby said.
Rigby said Ritter would be officially notified of the change on Tuesday, the first official day of business after the Martin Luther King holiday.
According to the Times, Ritter's book, tentatively titled "Endgame", would provide some details about Ritter's work as an arms inspector in Iraq "but would focus primarily on his views about President Saddam Hussein and how the United States and other nations should deal with him."
All the information is in the public domain, the Times quotes Lifflander as saying.
February 21, 1999
Pentagon Revives Move to Halt
Book on Iraqi Arms
By Philip Shenon, The New York Times
WASHINGTON -- Reversing itself for a second time, the Pentagon has demanded that Scott Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector, provide it with an advance copy of a book in which he is expected to accuse the Clinton administration of hindering the search for evidence of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons.
In a letter to Ritter's lawyer on Thursday, the Defense Department said Ritter was required to turn over the book for a security review before it could be published. A security review would almost certainly delay publication of the book, which is scheduled to be printed and distributed to booksellers next month.
Ritter's lawyer, Matthew Lifflander, described the letter as an effort to intimidate his client into silence.
Ritter, he said, would refuse to agree to the Pentagon's demand for a security review, raising at least the possibility that the Defense Department would go to court to try to block publication. "I understand that the book is basically at the printers," Lifflander said in an interview.
"So you could easily conclude that this is a last-minute effort to delay publication. I don't think they have a legal leg to stand on. I find this a very destructive approach."
The Pentagon's latest letter reflected another sharp and potentially embarrassing turnaround in its strategy for dealing with Ritter's book, which is expected to include accusations that senior administration officials repeatedly hindered the work of U.N. arms inspectors.
The book is being published by Simon & Schuster. A spokeswoman said...
Ritter, a former Marine intelligence officer, resigned from the United Nations last summer and accused the administration of a vacillating policy on Iraq that had led to repeated U.S. meddling in the arms-inspection program, undermining the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He said the United States interfered with the arms inspections in an effort to avoid direct confrontations with Iraq.
The entire arms-inspection program was ended late last year when President Saddam Hussein of Iraq shut it down, a decision that resulted last December in the largest U.S. airstrikes against Iraq since the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
The Defense Department, which paid Ritter's salary while the retired Marine worked for the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq, initially demanded a prepublication security review of the book in a letter to Ritter last month. But on Jan. 17, the day that news reports first appeared about the demand, the Pentagon reversed itself, insisting that the letter had been sent in error and that there had been no attempt to intimidate Ritter.
Last week the department reversed itself again. In its letter to Ritter's lawyer on Thursday, the general counsel of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the agency of the Pentagon that paid Ritter's salary under contract, said that it expected Ritter to "comply with his responsibilities" and turn over the book for a prepublication review....
In a letter of response on Friday, Lifflander said that the Pentagon "attempts once again to impose an unenforceable censorship agreement on a former employee."
He continued, "For the agency to now reverse the position it stated publicly and once again seek a right to censor Scott Ritter's work is patently unreasonable."
He said the book did not disclose any classified information about the arms-inspection program in Iraq.
"Mr. Ritter," he said, "continues to believe that nothing in the manuscript could possibly be contested on a national-security basis by government censors, although some of what he has to say may be distasteful to some significant policy-makers."
– Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
Published July 20, 2002 in the Boston Globe
Is Iraq a True Threat
to the US?
by Scott Ritter
RECENT PRESS reports indicate that planning for war against Iraq has advanced significantly. When combined with revelations about the granting of presidential authority to the CIA for covert operations aimed at eliminating Saddam Hussein, it appears that the United States is firmly committed to a path that will lead toward war with Iraq.
Prior to this occurring, we would do well to reflect on the words of President Abraham Lincoln who, in his Gettysburg Address, defined the essence of why democracies like ours go to war: so “... that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Does Iraq truly threaten the existence of our nation? If one takes at face value the rhetoric emanating from the Bush administration, it would seem so. According to President Bush and his advisers, Iraq is known to possess weapons of mass destruction and is actively seeking to reconstitute the weapons production capabilities that had been eliminated by UN weapons inspectors from 1991 to 1998, while at the same time barring the resumption of such inspections.
I bear personal witness through seven years as a chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations to both the scope of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and the effectiveness of the UN weapons inspectors in ultimately eliminating them.
While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factory associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment, and the majority of the weapons and agent produced by Iraq.
With the exception of mustard agent, all chemical agent produced by Iraq prior to 1990 would have degraded within five years (the jury is still out regarding Iraq's VX nerve agent program - while inspectors have accounted for the laboratories, production equipment and most of the agent produced from 1990-91, major discrepancies in the Iraqi accounting preclude any final disposition at this time.)
The same holds true for biological agent, which would have been neutralized through natural processes within three years of manufacture. Effective monitoring inspections, fully implemented from 1994-1998 without any significant obstruction from Iraq, never once detected any evidence of retained proscribed activity or effort by Iraq to reconstitute that capability which had been eliminated through inspections.
In direct contrast to these findings, the Bush administration provides only speculation, failing to detail any factually based information to bolster its claims concerning Iraq's continued possession of or ongoing efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. To date no one has held the Bush administration accountable for its unwillingness - or inability - to provide such evidence.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld notes that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This only reinforces the fact that the case for war against Iraq fails to meet the litmus test for the defense of our national existence so eloquently phrased by President Lincoln.
War should never be undertaken lightly. Our nation's founders recognized this when they penned our Constitution, giving the authority to declare war to Congress and not to the president. Yet on the issue of war with Iraq, Congress remains disturbingly mute.
Critical hearings should be convened by Congress that will ask the Bush administration tough questions about the true nature of the threat posed to the United States by Iraq. Congress should reject speculation and demand substantive answers. The logical forum for such a hearing would be the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.
Unfortunately, the senators entrusted with such critical oversight responsibilities shy away from this task. This includes Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran who should understand the realities and consequences of war and the absolute requirement for certainty before committing to a course of conflict.
The apparent unwillingness of Congress to exercise its constitutional mandate of oversight, especially with regard to matters of war, represents a serious blow to American democracy.
By allowing the Bush administration, in its rush toward conflict with Iraq, to circumvent the concepts of democratic accountability, Congress is failing those to whom they are ultimately responsible - the American people.
Scott Ritter is author of “Endgame: Solving the Iraqi Problem Once and For All.”
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company
Published on Thursday, September 12, 2002 in the Toronto Star
CNN's Hatchet Job
on Scott Ritter
Media smear ex-Marine for seeking answers on Iraq
by Antonia Zerbisias
To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
OF COURSE it was just coincidental that, on Sunday, as CNN was discrediting former United Nations weapons' inspector Scott Ritter, it was running promos for the remake of Four Feathers, A.E.W. Mason's tale of the coward who would not go to war.
By Monday, professional hairdo Paula Zahn told viewers Ritter had "drunk Saddam Hussein's Kool-Aid."
Ritter, who had that day urged Iraq's National Assembly to let in weapons inspectors or face annihilation, is no chicken hawk. After his 12-year turn as a U.S. Marine intelligence officer, he faced down Saddam Hussein's goons as chief inspector of the United Nations Special Commission to disarm Iraq (UNSCOM).
In 1998, he quit in protest over differences between what Washington wanted and what Iraq allowed.
Ever since, he has been very vocal about what really led to UNSCOM's failure to complete its mission —— a failure Ritter largely blames on Washington —— and how weapons' inspectors must be allowed back in to avert what will certainly be a brutal, bloody war.
He insists that, if the Bush administration has evidence showing that Saddam is building nukes, then the American people have a right to see it before they sacrifice their lives.
So, naturally, CNN talking head Miles O'Brien on Sunday questioned Ritter on his loyalty.
"As an American citizen, I have an obligation to speak out when I feel my government is acting in a manner, which is inconsistent with the —— with the principles of our founding fathers," said Ritter.
"It's the most patriotic thing I can do."
Not in this climate. Not when there's the ironically named U.S.A. Patriot Act which abrogates civil rights.
Not when those who criticize the administration are considered to be "with the terrorists."
Not when the U.S. media let President George Bush's advisers —— who, with the exception of Secretary of State Colin Powell, have never served their country as Ritter has —— gallop all over the airwaves.
You couldn't flip a channel on Sunday without catching one of the Bush bunch, including wife Laura, Powell, vice-president Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security adviser Condoleeza Rice, promoting an attack on Iraq as if they were actors flogging their latest project on Leno and Letterman.
Certainly, the line of questioning was no more tough.
Nowhere was any of them asked seriously, if at all, about such trivia as the costs of a war, or what, if anything, is known about connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam, or what proof there is that Iraq has the ability to make and deliver nuclear weapons, or why that country as opposed to others, or what oil has to do with it, or how Cheney justifies his former business dealings with the regime he now so desperately wants to change...
Still the demonization of Ritter continued.
First CNN had on its own news chief, Eason Jordan, who had just returned from Baghdad where he was bagging the rights to cover the war. (Imagine the ratings!)
He dismissed Ritter with a "Well, Scott Ritter's chameleon-like behaviour has really bewildered a lot of people..." and a "Well, U.S. officials no longer give Scott Ritter much credibility..."
The network followed up with more interviews vilifying Ritter, neither of which cut to the heart of the matter: Why declare war? On what grounds? At what cost? Ritter was characterized as "misguided," "disloyal" and "an apologist for and a defender of Saddam Hussein."
By Monday, professional hairdo Paula Zahn told viewers Ritter had "drunk Saddam Hussein's Kool-Aid."
Over on MSNBC, Curtis & Kuby co-host Curtis Sliwa compared him to "a sock puppet" who "oughta turn in his passport for an Iraqi one."
But the nadir came later on CNN when makeup job Kyra Phillips interrogated him, implying that he was being paid by Iraq ——and all but calling him a quisling.
"Ha! Excuse me; I went to war against Saddam Hussein in 1991. I spent seven years of my life in this country hunting down weapons of mass destruction. I believe I've done a lot about Saddam Hussein," he replied. "You show me where Saddam Hussein can be substantiated as a threat against the United States and I'll go to war again. I'm not going to sit back idly and let anybody threaten the United States. But at this point in time, no one has made a case based upon facts that Saddam Hussein or his government is a threat to the United States worthy of war."
Maybe today, in his speech to the United Nations, Bush will make that case.
Maybe not.
Whatever happens, the list of cowards and traitors here won't include Scott Ritter.
Copyright 1996-2002. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
* * * * *
October 28, 2002
Ex-weapons Inspector Ritter Condemns Bush's Policy on Iraq
By Jim Adams, The Courier-Journal
LOUISVILLE, KY - If you remind Scott Ritter that his knowledge about Iraq's weaponry is now four years old - that perhaps things have changed since he left his position as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in 1998 - his voice rises, his speech quickens, his arms come alive.
"Forget the validity of my knowledge," he insists.
"Forget me. I'm not the issue."
"We're talking about war. The issue is the tens of thousands of Americans who are going to put their lives on the line for the people of Kentucky.
"The first thing I'd ask everybody in Kentucky is, are they willing to give their lives for this? Do they believe the president enough to volunteer their life, or the life of their son or daughter? How much sacrifice are they willing to make on this one? Is it just a partial belief? Or is it a total belief?"
And if it's only a partial belief, Ritter said, "maybe you need to acknowledge you don't have all the data you need to solve this problem."
Ritter had an opportunity to put that question, and many more, to a sympathetic crowd of about 500 last night in a free public appearance at the Church of the Epiphany . . . As one of the few informed American voices challenging the Bush administration's policy on Iraq, Ritter has become a media darling in recent months - while also earning intense criticism from supporters of President Bush's Iraq policy, who have portrayed him as a misdirected shill for Saddam Hussein, or worse.
Ritter was brought to Louisville last night by the Louisville Committee to Stop the War Against Iraq, a group that formed about 18 months ago ... according to Pat Geier, one of its leaders and a local peace activist as co-chairwoman of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Ritter has a complex history - he is a 41-year-old former Marine Corps captain and military intelligence officer who also was a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998.
He has been investigated by the FBI for, among other things, a documentary film he made about Iraq's weapons status about two years ago and whether his role in the film may have made him an agent of the Iraqi government, Ritter has said.
"I worked with the FBI on this. I said I'd be happy to talk about their concerns," and no violation of law was found, he has said.
But Ritter frets that so much attention upon him distracts from his message.
In an interview yesterday before his speech, he said that Bush has lied to America about the seriousness of the Iraqi threat - and that the steps that the United States has taken have wrongly put complete war power in Bush's hands prematurely.
The Bush emphasis on the need for "regime change" in Iraq has polluted what should be an orderly process to determine Iraq's current weapons status, Ritter said.
"I believe Iraq needs to be held accountable. I lived the job for seven years," he said.
But, "It's difficult to talk about the return of inspectors and holding Iraq accountable when the policy of the United States is regime removal," he said.
"Why would Iraq ever fully cooperate with an inspection regime when at the end of the day, after full cooperation, they still have the death penalty?"
The "death penalty," in Ritter's view, is Bush's authority to wage war, as given him by congressional resolution two weeks ago.
"Due process," Ritter argues, requires a determination that Iraq has violated international law, before anyone declares war against it.
The administration's ultimate objective in its Iraq policy, Ritter argues, is a form of global imperialism....
"If we attempt to impose an American imperialist agenda on the world, they will fight a war against us."
November 12, 2002
“1984" has arrived
-- Posted by Henrietta Bowman on 11:45 am on Nov. 12, 2002
Day by passing day, post-9/11 America becomes the hell envisioned in George Orwell's classic, 1984. At the rate the metamorphosis is occurring, there soon will be little recognizable in the totalitarian American police state of the Founding Fathers' dream of Liberty.
John M. Poindexter was appointed Director of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office. A retired Navy Admiral, John Poindexter lost his job as National Security Adviser under Ronald Reagan and was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying evidence in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Poindexter stated that he personally authorized the diversion of money and withheld that information from the president. Now, this unethical man will be working with Ashcroft's Fibbies to spy on Americans.
Continued at John Poindexter
THE FINGERPRINTS OF CONSPIRACY
From Rule by Secrecy, by Jim Marrs
~ ~ ~
War is a racket.... War is largely a matter of money. Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot pay, the President sends Marines to get it.
– Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler (1881-1940)
~ ~ ~
THE PERSIAN GULF
The Allied victory in the Persian Gulf war of 1991 was loudly trumpeted by the American mass media, but the actions leading to this conflict were sparsely reported throughout the coverage. These machinations involved people in secret societies and indicated a very different rationale for the war than the one presented to the public.
No one can argue that the United States military, with some assistance from British, French, and Arab forces, did not perform magnificently during this brief conflict. It took only between January 17 and February 28, 1991, for the coalition of Operation Desert Storm to soundly defeat the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein, then representing the fifth largest army in the world. This astounding military success was due primarily to the Allied forces’ superiority in both weaponry and training as opposed to Saddam’s conscripts who, through veterans of combat against Iran, had limited training and low morale.
This disparity created a lopsided war which resulted in more than 300,000 Iraqi casualties, both military and civilian, and 65,000 prisoners, compared to the extraordinary low Allied losses of 234 killed, 470 wounded, and 57 missing.
Primary leader of the war was U.S. President George Bush, a former CFR member, Trilateralist, and Skull and Bonesman.
As with most Middle East conflicts, the primary issue was oil. Both Bush and then Secretary of State James Baker were deeply involved in the oil business. Any Bush policy which increased the price of oil meant more profit to his companies, those of his oilmen supporters and, of course, to the Rockefeller-dominated oil cartel.
An added bonus was that any conflict which divided the Arab world would only strengthen the power of the U.S., Britian, and Israel in the region. A coalition of countries fighting for the United Nations could only advance the globalists’ plan for a one-world military force.
This “battle of the New World Order was some kind of manufactured crisis with a hidden agenda,” wrote conspiracy researchers Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen after study of the events leading to this conflict.
Bush and Saddam Hussein had had a close relationship for many years. In his role as CIA director, and later as vice president, George Bush had supported Saddam through his eight-year war against Iran following the ouster of the Shah in 1979.
By 1990 Saddam’s Iraq was a primary threat to the balance of power between Israel and its Arab neighbors, but Saddam was strapped for cash due to the Iraq-Iran War and couldn’t pay his bills. Under pressure from the international bankers for slow repayment of loans and from the Organization of Petroleum Producing Countries (OPEC), which refused to allow him to raise oil prices, Saddam turned his eyes to Kuwait as a source of income. At the time it was the third largest producer of oil next to Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
Kuwait had been carved out of Iraq by Britain, who in 1899 took control of Kuwait’s foreign policy under an agreement with the dictatorial Sabah family. The Sabahs had produced a series of ruling sheikhs since assuming control of the area’s nomad tribes in 1756. Kuwait became a British Protectorate in 1914 when German interest suddenly gave the area strategic importance. British dominance was solidified by sending British troops to the area in 1961 after Iraq sought to reclaim it.
The Pentagon had known that Iraqi troops were massing along the Kuwait border since mid-July 1990. On July 25 Saddam sought advice from the United States on his intentions to reclaim Kuwait. He met with U.S. ambassador April Glaspie, who told him, “I have direct instructions from President Bush to improve our relations with Iraq. We have considerably sympathy for your quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause of your confrontation with Kuwait....
“I have received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship not confrontation, regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait’s borders?”
According to transcripts released long after the war, Hussein explained that, while he was ready to negotiate his border dispute with Kuwait, his design was to “keep the whole of Iraq in the shape we wish it to be.” This shape, of course, included Kuwait, which Saddam considered still a part of Iraq.
“What is the United States’ opinion on this?” he asked.
“We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, like your dispute with Kuwait,” replied Glaspie. “Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwaiti issue is not associated with America.”
“Shortly after this, April Glaspie left Kuwait to take her summer vacation, another signal of elaborate American disinterest in the Kuwait-Iraq crisis,” noted authors Tarpley and Chaitkin in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography.
On July 31, Bush met with GOP congressional leaders but said nothing about the Gulf situation.
The crisis escalated on August 2, when Iraqi troops moved into Kuwait. Bush froze all Iraqi assets in the United States, adding to Saddam’s money woes, which had worsened in 1990 after international bankers refused him further loans. Glaspie was prohibited from speaking out by the State Department, so the American public could not learn of Bush’s duplicity.
In later testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Glaspie pointed out that the July 25 conference was her first and only meeting with Saddam, who had not met with any foreign ambassador since 1984, the midpoint of his war with Iran.
But if Saddam had not met with U.S. diplomats, the same could not be said of American businessmen. Economist Paul Adler noted, “It was known that David Rockefeller met with the Iraqi leader on at least three known occasions after the Chase Manhattan consortium became the lead banker in a number of major Iraqi credit syndications.”
It was also reported that Alan Stoga, a vice president of (Henry) Kissinger Associates met with Iraqi leaders during a two-year period preceding the Gulf conflict.
“Saddam began to realize that he could not get what he wanted from the striped-pants set. He began doing business with the people who mattered to him – foreign businessmen, defense contractors, technologists and scientists, occasionally even visiting newsmen,” reported the Washington newspaper, The Spotlight.
Following the money trail of such non-diplomatic contacts which led to the Gulf War, Congressman Henry Gonzalez, chairman of the House Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, discovered that almost $5 billion in loans had been passed to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s through the Atlanta, Georgia, branch of Italy’s government-owned bank, Banca Nazional del Lavoro (BNL). The branch manager, Christopher Drogoul, was finally brought into federal court, where he pleaded guilty to approving this huge cash transfer without the approval of BNL’s head office in Italy. However, the whole investigation was put on hold during the Gulf War.
Most observers disblieved that Drogoul could have conducted such a massive transaction without the knowledge of his superiors. Bobby Lee Cook, one of Drogoul’s several defense attorneys, argued that his client had been made the patsy in “a scheme orchestrated at the highest levels of the U.S. Government.”
In court, BNL official Franz von Wedel testified that his boss Drogoul had acted on the advice of the bank’s consultants, Kissinger Associates.
In both 1989 and 1990 the Bush Justice Department had quashed indictments against the BNL by the Atlanta Attorney General’s office following an FBI raid on the bank on August 4, 1989. Action against the bank managers was held up for more than a year. Indictments were finally handed down one day after Bush declared a cease-fire in the Gulf War.
This scandal – dubbed “Iraqgate” – prompted Gonzalez to prepare a House resolution called for the impeachment of Bush Attorney General William Barr for “obstruction of justice in the BNL scandal.” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks called on Barr to appoint a special prosecutor in the case.
In a classic case of who-will-watch-the-watchers?, Barr said he could find no evidence of wrongdoing on his part and refused to appoint a special prosecutor. It was one of the only times that an attorney general had failed to appoint a special prosecutor when asked to do so by Congress.
The clincher of this sordid story of financial scheming and official malfeasance was that not only had most of the $5 billion been used by Saddam to buy weaponry to be used against American servicemen, but the U.S. taxpayers picked up the tab.
Gonzalez said $500 million of the loans to Saddam came through the government-backed Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) and had been intended to purchase grain from U.S. farmers. However, grain shipped though the port of Houston had gone to then-Soviet bloc nations for weapons, while the remainder of the grain purchase had freed Saddam’s limited cash reserves to buy more military materials.
The Bush administration had pledged taxpayer guarantees should Saddam default on the loans, which he did after sending troops to Kuwait. According to at least one public source, more than $360 million in American tax money was paid to the Gulf International Bank in Bahrain which was owned by seven Gulf nations including Iraq. This amount was only the first of an estimated $1 billion to be paid to ten banks by the CCC to cover the $5 billion of Saddam’s defaulted loans.
“The $1 billion commitment, in the form of loan guarantees for the purchase of U.S. farm commodities, enabled Saddam to buy needed food on credit and to spend his scarce hard currency on the arms buildup that brought war to the Persian Gulf,” wrote author Russell S. Bowen.
Even after the Iraqi invasion began on August 2, Bush publicly appeared strangely noncommittal. Asked by reporters if he intended any intervention in the Gulf crisis, Bush said, “I’m not contemplating such action....”
His attitude apparently changed drastically that same day after meeting with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a regular attendee of Bilderberg meetings who had been implicated with Bush in both the Iran-Contra and October Surprise scandals.
After meeting with Thatcher, Bush began to describe Saddam as a “new Hitler” and said “the status quo is unacceptable and further expansion [by Iraq] would be even more unacceptable.”
Despite assurance from Saddam that Kuwait was his only objective and with no concrete evidence to the contrary, Bush nevertheless personally telephoned the leaders of Saudi Arabia and warned that they would be the next target of the “new Hitler.” Panicked, the Saudis handed over as much as $4 billion to Bush and other world leaders as secret payoffs to protect their kingdom, according to Sabah family member Sheik Fahd Mohammed al-Sabah, chairman of the Kuwait Investment Office.
Long after the Persian Gulf War, when audits found this money had been diverted into a London slush fund, anti-Sabah elements in Saudi Arabis criticized the payoff. They were told by al-Sabah, “That money was used to buy Kuwait’s liberation. It paid for political support in the West and among Arab leaders – support for Desert Storm, the international force we urgently needed.”
Whether this money played any role or not, Bush soon drew a “line in the sand” to block further Iraqi intrusion. It is interesting to note that this line was located between the Iraqi forces and oil interests owned by his son, soon-to-be Texas governor George W. Bush.
Bush, the president’s eldest son, was a $50,000-a-year “consultant” to and a board member of Harken Energy Corp. of Grand Prairie, Texas, near the home of the Texas Rangers baseball team of which the younger Bush was a managing general partner.
In January 1991, just days before Desert Storm was launched, Harken shocked the business world by announcing an oil-production agreement with the small island nation of Bahrain, a former British protectorate and a haven for international bankers just off the coast of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf. Bahrain was listed among the top forty countries of the world with the highest per capita Gross Domestic Product in 1996.
Veteran oilmen wondered aloud how unknown Harken, with no previous drilling experience, obtained such a potentially lucrative deal. Furthermore, it was reported that “Harken’s investments in the area will be protected by a 1990 agreement Bahrain signed with the U.S. allowing American and ‘multi-national’ forces to set up permanent bases in that country.”
The younger Bush, in October 1990, told Houston Post reporter Peter Brewton that accusations that his father ordered troops to the area to protect Harken drilling rights were “a little far-fetched.” He further claimed he sold his Harken stock before the Iraqi invasion, but Brewton cold find no record of the sale in the files of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Records of Bush’s Harken stock sale finally turned up in March 1991, eight months after the July 10, 1990, SEC deadline for filing such disclosures. One week after Saddam’s troops entered Kuwait, Harken stock had dropped to $3.03 a share. The tardy SEC records revealed that by some good fortune, Bush had sold 66 percent of his Harken stock on June 22, 1990 – just weeks prior to Iraq’s invasion – for the top-dollar price of $4.00 a share, netting him $848,560.
Despite locating productive wells in South America, the drop in oil prices in early 1999 caused Harken stock to remain about $4.00 per share.
Stock purchases, oil and grain deals, arms sales, loans and guarantees, the weakening of the Arabs to benefit Israel, the movement toward a global army and government created a mind-numbing entanglement.
“It is doubtful whether the ‘real’ reasons why the United States went to war in the Persian Gulf will ever emerge,” wrote Vankin and Whaley.
“Unlike in Vietnam, where the ambiguous outcome elicited natural suspicions, in the Gulf the decisiveness of victory has buried the reality deeper than any Iraqi or American soldier who went to a sandy grave.”
The duplicity didn’t end with the fighting. Throughout the Clinton administration there have been periodic air forays into Iraq, ostensibly to punish Saddam for preventing UN inspection of his development centers for biological and nuclear weaponry. However, this time there was a big difference – probing questions were raised by both a suspicious public and a few less timid members of the news media.
Following missile and bombing strikes in late 1998, a letter writer to a national news magazine asked, “By using weapons of mass destruction to deter Iraq from manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, would America not be doing the very thing we’re warning Iraq not to do?”
Others raised the question of why we attacked Iraq for refusing UN inspection of its sensitive military installations when President Clinton also had refused to allow such inspections in the United States – a refusal greeted with general approval by the public.
Scott Ritter, a member of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) created to locate and eliminate Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons caches, resigned in August of 1998 and accused the U.S. government of using the commission to justify an attack on Iraq.
Ritter said that before his resignation he disbelieved Baghdad’s minister of defense when he told him the UNSCOM team was being used by to “provoke a crisis,” but he slowly came to agree with the charge.
Ritter’s superiors scoffed at the allegation, claiming Ritter’s knowledge of the situation was “limited.”
However, in early 1999 it was reported that Washington had used UNSCOM to plant electronic bugs in the Ministry of Defense (Iraq’s Pentagon) and other U.S. officials confirmed much of Ritter’s accusations.
“The relationship between the United States and the inspection commission...has long been a subject of debate,” wrote U.S. News reporter Bruce B. Auster.
“The issue is sensitive because UNSCOM is an arm of the UN Security Council, not an agency of the United States, although it does rely on the United States for intelligence and personnel.”
On December 15, 1998, after stockpiling cruise missiles in the Persian Gulf during the fall, the U.S. launched a much-delayed air strike against Baghdad.
But with Christmas nearing, most Americans couldn’t get too worked up over civilian casualties halfway around the world. And any doubts about U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf – except among those unfortunates have to deal with Gulf War Syndrome caused by lethal combination of oil fires, biological agents, and radioactive uranium-tipped artillery and tank shells – had been thrown away, along with the yellow ribbons which had proudly displayed the total support of the uninformed....
– Copyright 2000, by Jim Marrs
* * * * *
The Terror of War-Corporate Greed
Feeds the US War Machine
By Katy Beinart
The attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11th were horrific, and got the deserved attention of the global media and aid and emergency services rushing to help. Four months later, the US reaction to those attacks has caused civilian death on a greater scale, as well as precipitating a massive humanitarian crisis. Far from being “satisfied” at routing the Taliban and destroying most of the country, the US Government is now planning military action against Somalia and Iraq and George Bush has dubbed Iran, Iraq and North Korea an “Axis of Evil”.
Excuse me, but on the same day he unveiled a military budget of $396.1 billion for 2003, and a plan to spend $2.1 TRILLION on the military over the next five years, which could be said to be pretty evil in itself. $380,000,000,000 per year = $1,041,095,890 per day = $43,378,995 per hour = $722,983 per minute = $12,049 per second being spent on killing machines.
Looking at what the money is being spent on and who is being contracted to carry out the work, it doesn’t look like an anti-terrorist operation. It looks more like a plan for complete global dominance, including dominance of Space....
It’s no wonder that Bob Smith and the Bush administration are such firm advocates of missile defence and military spending. The companies that have won the biggest contracts in the new defence budget, Lockheed Martin, TRW, Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop-Grumman have close links to the Bush administration, and have bankrolled politicians on both sides of the House to ensure defence spending remains top of the agenda.
Vice President Cheney is a former member of the board of TRW. His wife, Lynn Cheney, was a longtime member of the Lockheed Martin board stepping down only as her husband prepared to take office.
Bruce Jackson, vice president of corporate strategy and development of Lockheed Martin, said “I wrote the Republican Party’s foreign policy platform.”
Bush’s appointee as deputy director of the National Security Council is Stephen J. Hadley, previously a partner in Shea & Gardner, the Washington law firm of Lockheed Martin.
Other Bush administration officials drawn from the aerospace industry include Albert Smith, a Lockheed Martin vice president, appointed undersecretary of the Air Force; Gordon England, vice president of General Dynamics, named Navy secretary; and James G. Roche, retired president of a Northrop-Grumman division, appointed as Air Force secretary.
In a report by the Arms Trade Resource Center, “Tangled Web: The Marketing of Missile Defense”, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and TRW are shown to have given millions of dollars in “soft money donations” and “PAC contributions” to members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat, in the last few years. The intense lobbying of these massive multinational corporations is pushing forward the military agenda with no regard to financial, or human, cost.
The result is increased militarisation and decreased spending on “social” budgets in the US. However, this has a global impact. The direct impact of Bush’s “War against Terrorism”, as we have seen, has been the destabilization of the whole region round Afghanistan, including Kashmir, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel and the Middle East. There has been an escalation in violence in Kashmir.
Countries are now increasing their aggressions and military spending in a response to the increased aggression and military spending of the US. In Europe, some ministers have expressed concern at America’s extension plans for the war, which could be encouraging as if Europe made a stand, we could break the stranglehold the US has on world politics. However, one likely consequence of this, which is in the wings already, is a European Army, with its own nuclear deterrent.
America’s determination to scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty will lead to counter anti-missile action by China and Russia. These countermeasures are technologically simple and cheaper and will force the U.S. to attempt to counter the countermeasures. Meanwhile Non-Nuclear Weapons States will have no protection from possible attack by Nuclear Weapon States, and the level of fear and anger, and therefore likelihood of terrorism, will increase.
Along with increased military budgets worldwide, come increased social problems as less money is spent on healthcare, education, housing, aid and development. In desperately poor countries like Somalia and Iraq, the result of more war will be massive humanitarian catastrophe like that in Afghanistan, where at least 3,767 Afghan civilians had died in U.S bombing attacks, and hundreds of thousands are desperately trying to survive in refugee camps cut off by war and winter.
In other countries, the result of cuts to social and welfare budgets is likely to be, you’ve guessed it, fear and anger. And that means terrorism.
Israel’s justification for its aggression against Palestine is that it is a “War against Terrorism”. The Palestinian people are simply being destroyed by a lack of basic human rights, to homes, to education for their children, to peace. Their anger is illustrative of what could happen on a wider scale if more and more people are displaced and denied basic human rights.
The US Government is not going to suddenly change its mind while it is being bankrolled by Arms Corporations. That is why it is imperative that we build a global movement against corporate greed and capitalism, against war, and for peace and justice for all.
October 19, 2002
Navy missing computers
An audit finds "serious risk" in the loss
of 187 machines, 22 of which
may have classified data
By Gregg K. Kakesako, Honolulu Star-Bulletin
An internal audit shows that 187 computers, including some known to have handled classified documents, are missing from Pacific Fleet warships and submarines, the Navy says.
Noting that it is working to answer questions raised in the audit this summer, the Navy said 22 of the missing 187 laptop and desktop computers have the potential of processing classified information, but it was not known if they still contained the data.
The Naval Audit Service report issued July 23 found "a serious risk that personal computers containing sensitive and classified information have been lost or compromised, which presents a threat to national security and a potential embarrassment to the Department of the Navy," according to Defense Week and Reuters news service....
Reuters said the Pacific Fleet, based in Pearl Harbor and commanded by Adm. Walter Doran, sought to prevent release of the Naval Audit Service report, even though it was not classified.
"A release of this information could negatively impact national security," wrote Rear Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the fleet deputy commander in chief....
The auditors cited a breakdown in management of the leased computers and the lack of any system to track them....
October 10, 2002
Pentagon details germ
warfare tests
By Matt Kelley, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon acknowledged yesterday that some soldiers engaged in chemical and biological weapons testing in the 1960s may not have been fully informed about the secret experiments conducted at sea and in five states from Alaska to Florida.
Some tests used the military’s deadliest nerve agent, VX.
Thousands of civilians in Hawaii and Alaska also probably were unaware they were sprayed with relatively mild bacteria meant to simulate germ weapons such as anthrax, the Defense Department’s top health official said.
Dr. William Winkenwerder, assistant defense secretary for health affairs, said there’s no evidence anyone died as a result of the classified tests, which were part of biological and chemical warfare programs and United States abandoned in 1970.
Four people at the military’s Deseret Testing Center in Utah were infected during biological weapons work, but all recovered, said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, another Pentagon health official....
At a press conference, the Pentagon released declassified summaries of 28 of the tests, showing for the first time the scope of open-air testing of chemical and biological agents on American soil. About 5,500 service members participated in the tests.
TESTS IN ALASKA exposed soldiers in protective suits to deadly nerve agents, including VX, and experiments in Hawaii used a hallucinogen developed as a chemical weapon, according to Pentagon records....
For more, GO TO > > > Uncle Sam’s Guinea Pigs
RICHARD ARMITAGE QUIETLY CONFIRMED AS DEPUTY SECRETARY OF STATE
by Mike Ruppert
FTW - On March 23, after being recommended in a unanimous 18-0 vote by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, former Vietnam-era covert operative and Contra-era figure Richard Armitage was confirmed as Deputy Secretary of State in a voice vote on the Senate Floor.
The unchallenged confirmation of a figure who had previously been investigated by President Reagan's Commission on Organized Crime (1984) for alleged links to gambling and prostitution was totally ignored by the major American media. Armitage has already begun work at the State Department and is deeply involved in negotiations over a US spy plane recently captured by the Chinese government.
The total lack of opposition to Armitage's appointment indicates an apparent inability of the US Congress to muster any critical examination of appointments or policy at a time when an imperiled US economy and an almost combative Bush Administration is dealing with mounting economic and political challenges around the globe.
Armitage, who was denied a 1989 appointment as Assistant Secretary of State because of links to Iran-Contra and other scandals, served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Reagan years. U.S. Government stipulations in the Oliver North trial specifically named Armitage as one of the DoD officials responsible for illegal transfers of weapons to Iran and the Contras.
But Armitage's dirty past goes much deeper.
A Vietnam veteran and graduate of Annapolis, Armitage's roots have been thoroughly intertwined with the likes of CIA veteran Ted Shackley, Richard Secord, Heine Aderholt, Elliot Abrams, Dewey Clarridge, Edwin Wilson and Tom Clines.
All of these men have been directly linked to CIA covert operations, the drug trade, the abandonment of U.S. prisoners of War after Vietnam and/or Iran-Contra.
Armitage has also been routinely discussed in FTW as a Bush-era covert functionary who has been linked to covert operations, drug smuggling and the expansion of organized crime operations in Russia, Central Asia and the Far East.
In 1986 a private dispute between POW activist Ross Perot and Armitage went public as photos of Armitage with a topless Vietnamese nightclub owner Nguyen O'Rourke brought allegations of gambling and prostitution close to Armitage's doorstep. The stories went public when TIME and "The Boston Globe" wrote lengthy stories on the feud in 1986 and 1987. That scandal arose as a result of 1984 investigations by President Reagan's Commission on Organized Crime in which the photo and documentation of gambling charges and prostitution led to direct Armitage's close association with O'Rourke. Then LAPD Assistant Chief Jesse Brewer, a former Commanding Officer of this writer, served on the Reagan Commission.
The 1992 best-seller "Kiss The Boys Goodbye" by former "60 MINUTES" producer Monika Jensen-Stevenson details Armitage's role as Reagan point man on Vietnam POW-MIA issues and describes why Armitage has earned the enmity of many POW activists. However, in a 1995 interview with "The Washington Post", Colin Powell referred to Armitage as his "white son." This, notwithstanding the fact that the 6 foot, balding, power-lifter, now 56, can still bench press 300 or more pounds and reportedly "enjoys killing."
William Tyree, Special Forces Veteran who has provided much reliable information and documentation to FTW in the past said, "Armitage used to 'sit ambush' on the trails in Laos and Cambodia. He liked it. Now when Powell, 'the dove,' sits down at a table with Armitage 'the killer' beside him the message will be that Armitage can reach across the table and deal with the other party on the spot."
That message will not go unheard.
– Mike Ruppert, Publisher/Editor - "From The Wilderness" - www.copvcia.com
STAR WARS
Chapter 2002
ATTACK OF THE CLOWNS
May 16, 2002
Embattled test range
commander to retire
A housing fund flap marred the captain's term at Barking Sands
By Anthony Sommer, Honolulu Star-Bulletin
BARKING SANDS, Kauai >> Capt. Brian Moss, commanding officer of the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility, who investigators said misspent hundreds of thousands of dollars refurbishing his government quarters, will retire on May 24 after 30 years of active duty.
Moss also was accused of needlessly spending additional hundreds of thousands of dollars bringing senior civilian Navy employees to Kauai for temporary duty.
Moss denied that he is stepping down with a cloud hanging over his head.
"I'm in a position in which I cannot defend myself," Moss said in an interview yesterday. "But I can say this much: To the best I can determine, there never was any fraud, waste or abuse.
"And there was absolutely no misuse of enlisted men's money," he added.
"It saddens me that many people feel the commanding officer of the base is guilty of something. I'm confident that, given the opportunity to defend myself in a court of law, I could prove I did nothing wrong."
Moss's office will remain empty for six to eight months until another captain is selected. The base's executive officer, Cmdr. Ron Cavazos, will be the acting commander.
Lt. Cmdr. Jane Campbell, Navy spokeswoman at Pearl Harbor, said the yet-to-be-named new commander will be a senior captain who already has held a major command, indicating the high priority given to the Pacific Missile Range.
The Navy is testing the Theater Ballistic Missile Defense system on Kauai. The Pacific Missile Range also is expected soon to begin tests of a sophisticated new Army missile defense system.
Moss, an aeronautical engineer and a fighter pilot, worked for seven years in the Navy's missile defense program in Washington, D.C., before being given command of PMRF just as testing of the systems he worked on began.
Moss's retirement ceremony is scheduled for May 24, and the senior officer will be a vice admiral, a former deputy commander of the Pacific Fleet. Moss's office asked that the admiral's name not be printed for security reasons.
Campbell said the three-star admiral is attending on a personal invitation from Moss and is no longer assigned to Pearl Harbor. She said the only officer from Pearl Harbor attending Moss's retirement "event" (as opposed to an official retirement ceremony) will be a chaplain.
An inspector general's report April 26, 2001, found Moss took money earmarked for other projects to refurbish his government quarters and to bring in numerous high-ranking civilian government employees as consultants who performed work other than why they were sent to PMRF.
Moss was given a letter of reprimand but was not relieved of command. Navy officials at Pearl Harbor hushed up the report until it was requested by a Honolulu television station tipped off by a disgruntled PMRF employee.
Navy officials said Moss had not acted illegally, but questioned his judgment. They said he technically had the authority to reshuffle housing funds. They also said he was stripped of that authority after the investigation.
The copy ultimately provided to the press under the Freedom of Information Act was highly redacted with huge sections missing. All of Moss's comments in interviews with investigators were removed, as were investigators' recommendations.
Moss said he has never "officially" been given a copy of the investigation report but that he has read it.
"When you read the report, you have to keep in mind that all of these complaints were filed by a civilian employee I fired a couple of years ago," Moss said. . . .
The investigation found base housing officials told Moss that Congress has set a $20,000 refurbishment limit on officers' quarters. To get around the limit, Moss tapped numerous other officer and enlisted housing funds to be spent on his quarters, the report states.
In all, $137,000 was spent on the commanding officer's residence. Of the total, $13,123.89 went for carpeting -- including $2,698.60 in air freight from the mainland because Moss rejected locally available carpet. Also, $11,160.52 was spent to build a turnaround in the commander's driveway with a flagpole and garden as its centerpiece.
Moss, according to the report, did not like the off-white paint used to repaint the interior of the home and ordered it repainted bright white. The bill for painting the residence twice was $9,419.84.
Moss also approved the construction of two gazebos, actually beach houses: one adjoining his quarters, and the other for enlisted use. The original estimate for the two structures was a total of $15,000. Changes ordered by Moss brought the total cost for both buildings to $119,511.13, the investigation found.
The investigation also found Moss, who took command in 1999, increased the consulting budget for the missile range to $2.1 million in 2001 from $508,000 in 2000.
The report found that many of the consultants -- all of them senior civilian Navy employees -- often did not perform the duties outlined in the requests for their assignments. Once they arrived, they were given different assignments by Moss, the investigation found.
"This effort would require increases in personnel and resources, not then available at PMRF, because of the years of downsizing. To support this effort, experts were brought in to temporarily fill the gap until a more permanent solution could be institutionalized," Moss said.
May 3, 2002
Chemical Weapons Mishandled,
Worker Says
Incinerator near Salt Lake City is destroying stockpile
by Robert Gehrke, Associated Press
WASHINGTON – Managers at the nation’s only chemical weapons incinerator encouraged workers to cut corners so a deadly nerve agent stockpile could be destroyed before the Winter Olympics in nearby Salt Lake City, a plant employee says.
Brenda Mugleston, who has worked for eight years at the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, told The Associated Press workers were promised a $750 bonus for meeting the deadline. She said they felt pressure from managers to increase productivity and they sometimes mishandled weapons.
Mugleston said she feared workers and the public were being endangered and told managers but nothing was done. She also reported problems to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Stuart Young, attorney for EG&G Defense Materials, which runs the incinerator for the Army, said Mugleston’s allegations are being investigated and “at this point we don’t have any reason to believe there are any immediate health, safety or environmental concerns.
Mugleston said she has reported the problems to OSHA and provided a letter saying the agency is investigating. Agency spokesman Bill Wright said whistle-blower laws preclude him from identifying complainants....
Tooele, located 40 miles west of Salt Lake City, is home to the Pentagon’s incinerator, created to destroy 13,616 tons of the chemical weapons stockpile. Other incinerators are being built in Anniston, Ala.; Umatilla, Ore., and Pine Bluff, Ark.
The incinerator was forced to shut down for several months in the summer of 2000 after a tiny amount of GB nerve agent escaped from its emissions stack.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the amount was small enough that it did not endanger the public. Plant managers say it is the only time nerve agent was released.
Mugleston’s allegations come as the plant prepares to process VX nerve agent, which the CDC and Environmental Protection Agency say is 36 times more deadly than the sarin gas the facility has been handling and much more difficult to detect.
Mugleston said she is concerned what will happen when VX incineration begins because she has witnessed problems that undermined worker safety, including:
>> Backup generators routinely failed during power outages, compromising systems meant to protect workers from contamination.
>> Workers were sent into contaminated areas breathing through air hoses that already had tested positive for nerve agents.
>> Sarin-contaminated waste was stored for several days in an unprotected area.
>> Last September, dust and ash left over from the incineration process and supposedly free of any contamination billowed out of a waste bin, triggering a chemical alarm 40 feet away.
She provided internal document to support her claims.
Company officials declined to comment on specific allegations. . . .
~ o ~
Thanks, Brenda Mugleston, for your courage to stand up
and speak out! – The Catbird
April 5, 2002
Taiwan had $100 million
fund to buy favors
Current Bush officials got legal payments in their earlier jobs
The Washington Post
TAIPEI, Taiwan – Desperate for international support, Taiwan under former president Lee Teng-hui established a secret $100 million fund to buy influence with foreign governments, institutions and individuals, including some in the United States, according to current and former Taiwan officials.
The fund was the source of multi-million-dollar payments to leaders in Nicaragua, South Africa and Panama, according to senior Taiwanese officials and government reports.
It also provided financial support, legal under U.S. law, for U.S. think tanks and Washington lobbyists, they said. Several people now in senior positions in the Bush administration were beneficiaries, according to the officials and documents.
The fund operated from 1994 until 2000 under the National Security Bureau, Taiwan’s main intelligence agency, with no legislative oversight. Taiwan’s new president closed the fund following the disappearance of one of its senior accountants, Col. Liu Kuan-chun, who allegedly embezzled $5.5 million.
A former Taiwanese official, Su Chi, said Taiwan regularly funded research by U.S. academics on Taiwan; backed conferences put on by such think tanks as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation; and cultivated relationships in Congress, sending employees of legislators on free trips to Taiwan.
A Taiwanese committee set up to disburse funds used a lobbying group, Cassidy and Associates, to push for increased arms sales in Taiwan. Among the Cassidy lobbying team at the time was Carl Ford, now assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research....
On April 24 last year, the Bush administration approved an arms package for Taiwan that included destroyers, anti-submarine aircraft and submarines worth more than $4 billion.
Documents and Taiwanese government sources also said that the Taiwanese steering committee was involved in identifying influential Americans, inside and outside government, and attempting to befriend them.
Paul Wolfowitz, currently deputy secretary, and Kurt Campbell, a deputy assistant defense secretary during the Clinton administration, were targets of the group, Next magazine reported.
Taiwanese officials said the fund also paid for research by John Bolton, the current undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, who received $30,000 over three years in the mid-1990s for research papers on U.N. membership issues involving Taiwan.
See also: Birds in the Lobby; Drowning in Think Tanks
July 26, 2001
Pentagon Accounting Infuriates Congress
WASHINGTON (AP) - Almost like a broken record, the Pentagon was called on the carpet in another money matter today, members of Congress declared themselves furious, and military officials said they would do better.
“The bottom line is that over time this effort has failed,” said Greg Kutz of the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Military officials have made “only incremental” improvements in how they do business despite dozens of GAO studies a year documenting Pentagon waste and mismanagement.
Despite a decade-old law designed specifically to foil such actions, the Pentagon used accounting tricks to spend $615 million last year that it was not supposed to, the GAO found.
“I don’t know what it’s going to take to give top level Department of Defense officials a wake-up call,” Rep. Janice D. Schakowsky, D-Ill., said at a House hearing. “This infuriates me and I think the American people will be infuriated as well.”
A 1990 law said that five years after an appropriation, any money unspent had to be returned and and the account closed.
Today’s report showed that Pentagon bookkeepers kept tapping old accounts. For example, a $79 million bill for research and development costs in 1999 was covered with money from a canceled 1992 account.
From the time the law was passed to Sept 1999, the department adjusted 333 closed accounts valued at $28 billion. By comparison, all other federal agencies combined adjusted 21 closed accounts valued at $5 million in that time, under exceptions allowed for in the law, the GAO said.
As it has numerous times before, the GAO recommended changes in the military’s mammoth and outdated accounting system, and urged more oversight.
“These abuses must end,” said Repl. Stephen Horn, R-Calif., chairman of the House Governmental Reform subcommittee that held the hearing on the report.
“We want to examine how these abuses can be stopped – once and for all,” he said.
Thomas R. Bloom, director of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, told lawmakers that officials agreed with the GAO’s recommendations, had begun to “revise our procedures.”
Asked if anyone had been disciplined for the actions found by the GAO, Bloom’s deputy, Tina Jones, said officials ordered a review to see if anyone had broken the law.
Congressional auditors have documented a range of Pentagon problems, including overpaid contractors and unneeded spare parts bought because the military cannot keep an accurate inventory.
Jeffrey C. Steinhoff of the GAO said the Pentagon already spends $50 million on employee training and $21 billion a year on its computer systems and gets little improvement compared with the costs....
Military Waste & Fraud:
$172 billion/year
excerpted from the book
by Mark Zepezauer and Arthur Naiman
Odonian Press, 1996
When it comes to wasting money, the Pentagon has no peer. For one thing, there's the single question of scale. For fiscal year 1996, the Pentagon budget was $265 billion ($7 billion more than it requested). That's 5% of our gross national product, a larger percentage than in virtually any other industrialized nation.
In absolute dollars (not as a percentage of GNP), the Pentagon shells out 3 1/2 times more than the next largest military spender (Russia), 6 1/2 times more than Britain, 7 1/2 times more than France, 7 1/4 times more than Japan, 8 1/2 times more than Germany.
Our military budget is bigger than the next nine largest military budgets combined, and sixteen times larger than the combined military budgets of all of our "regional adversaries"- Cuba, Syria, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Libya. It accounts for 37% of all military spending on the planet (in comparison, our economy is only 22% of the world total).
As enormous as the Pentagon's budget is, there's more military spending buried elsewhere-in the Department of Energy's production of fuel for nuclear weapons, in the military portion of the NASA budget, in the VA, etc.
By adding in these hidden military expenses, the Center for Defense Information (CDI), a Washington think tank run by retired generals and admirals, concluded that we spend a total of $327 billion a year on the military. (When it did similar computations independently, the War Resisters League came up with $329 billion.)
But that doesn't include what we have to pay for past Pentagon budgets. The CDI went back to 1941 and multiplied the military's percentage of each year's budget by the deficit for that year. Using that method, they figured that interest on past military spending cost us $167 billion in fiscal 1996. (The War Resisters League went all the way back to 1789 and came up with $291 billion.)
Since the CDI's estimates are lower, let's be conservative and use them. Adding them together gives us a figure for total military spending-past and present-of $494 billion a year ($9 1/2 billion a week, $1 1/3 billion a day.)
Waste beyond your wildest dreams
But just the scale of the Pentagon's budget alone can't explain its prodigious ability to waste money. Another quality is required- world-class incompetence. There are so many examples of this that they tend to blur together, numbing the mind.
Here are just a few:
According to a US Senate hearing, $13 billion the Pentagon handed out to weapons contractors between 1985 and 1995 was simply "lost." Another $15 billion remains unaccounted for because of "financial management troubles."
That's $2B billion-right off the top-that has simply disappeared...
Career criminals
... According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, every single one of the top ten weapons contractors was convicted of or admitted to defrauding the government between 1980 and 1992.
For example:
* Grumman paid the government $20 million to escape criminal liability for coercing subcontractors into making political contributions.
* Lockheed was convicted of paying millions in bribes to obtain classified planning documents.
* Northrop was fined $17 million for falsifying test data on its cruise missiles and fighter jets.
* Rockwell was fined $5.5 million for committing criminal fraud against the Air Force.
In another study, the Project on Government Oversight (PGO) searched public records from October 1989 to February 1994 and found-in just that 4-year period - 85 instances of fraud, waste and abuse in weapons contracting.
For example:
* Boeing, Grumman, Hughes, Raytheon and RCA pleaded guilty to illegal trafficking in classified documents and paid a total of almost $15 million in restitution, reimbursements, fines, etc.
* Hughes pleaded guilty to procurement fraud in one case, was convicted of it in a second case and, along with McDonnell Douglas and General Motors, settled out-of-court for a total of more than $1 million dollars in a third case.
* Teledyne paid $5 million in a civil settlement for false testing, plus $5 million for repairs.
* McDonnell Douglas settled for a total of more than $22 million in four "defective pricing" cases.
But General Electric was the champ. PGO lists fourteen cases, including a conviction for mail and procurement fraud that resulted in a criminal fine of $10 million and restitution of $2.2 million.
In our own research, we found several other examples of GE crimes and civil violations:
* In 1961, GE pleaded guilty to price-fixing and paid a $372,500 fine.
* In 1977, it was convicted of price-fixing again.
* In 1979, it settled out-of-court when the State of Alabama sued it for dumping PCBs in a river.
* In 1981, it was convicted of setting up a $1.25 million slush fund to bribe Puerto Rican officials.
* In 1985, GE pleaded guilty to 108 counts of fraud on a Minuteman missile contract. In addition, the chief engineer of GE's space systems division was convicted of perjury, and GE paid a fine of a million dollars.
* In 1985, it pleaded guilty to falsifying time cards.
* In 1989, it paid the government $3.5 million to settle five civil lawsuits alleging contractor fraud at a jet-engine plant (which involved the alteration of 9,000 daily labor vouchers to inflate its Pentagon billings).
In 1990, GE was convicted of criminal fraud for cheating the Army on a contract for battlefield computers; it declined to appeal and paid $16 million in criminal and civil fines. ($11.7 million of this amount was to settle government complaints that it had padded its bids on 200 other military and space contracts - which comes to just $58,000 or so per contract.)
In 1993, GE sold its weapons division to Martin Marietta for $3 billion (retaining 23.5% of the stock and two seats on the board of directors).
The largest investigation of Pentagon fraud took place between 1986 and 1990. Called Operation Ill Wind, it began when Pentagon official John Marlowe was caught molesting little girls. He cut a deal to stay out of jail and, for the next few years, secretly recorded hundreds of conversations with weapons contractors.
There's no way of knowing how much the crimes Ill Wind looked into cost the taxpayers, but the investigation, which cost $20 million, brought in ten times that much in fines.
According to Wall Street Journal reporter Andy Pasztor, "more than 90 companies and individuals were convicted of felonies... including eight of the military's fifteen largest suppliers....Boeing, GE and United Technologies pleaded guilty...Hughes, Unisys, Raytheon, Loral, Litton, Teledyne, Cubic, Hazeltine, Whittaker and LTV...admitted they violated the law."
Unisys signed the largest Pentagon fraud settlement in history: $190 million in fines, penalties and forgone profits (which means they weren't allowed to charge for cost overruns the way military contractors usually do).
Assistant Navy Secretary Melvyn Paisley was the central figure in the Ill Wind scandal and the highest-ranking person convicted (he was sentenced to four years in prison).
He ran his office like a supermarket for weapons manufacturers, soaking up bribes, divvying up multibillion-dollar contracts and diverting work to a firm he secretly controlled with a partner.
Paisley may have been a bit more...flamboyant than most, but there was nothing terribly unusual about his approach. As of 1994, nearly 70 of the Pentagon's 100 largest suppliers were under investigation. Fines for that year totaled a record $1.2 billion.
That may sound like a lot, but it's less than 2% of the weapons industry's net income (which averaged $64 billion a year in 1994 and 1995).
A billion or two in fines is hardly an incentive to end the corruption and waste in Pentagon contracting.
The black budget
Not all Pentagon waste is visible. Hidden within the military budget is a secret "black budget" that's not subject to any congressional oversight (toothless as that usually is). It includes money for the CIA (tucked away in the Air Force budget, it gets about 10% of the total) and for less well-known but better-funded "intelligence" organizations like the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
In 1995, several members of Congress tried to argue that, with the Cold War over, there was no harm in publishing the total amount of the intelligence black budget, without details on how it was spent. Even this modest proposal went down to defeat but, in the process, led to the absurd spectacle of legislators mentioning the figure – $28 billion for fiscal 1996 – while arguing that it shouldn't be publicly disclosed.
John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists estimates that the 1996 black budget included an additional $3 billion or so in military "stealth" projects, for a total of about $31 billion – down from about $36 billion a year during the Reagan years. Pike attributes the decrease to a couple of projects that grew too huge to be hidden in the black budget.
One of the projects that "surfaced" into the public budget is the B-2 bomber.
Originally projected to cost $550 million each, B-2's ended up costing $2.2 billion each – literally more than their weight in gold.
Another is MILSTAR, which is designed to ''fight and win a six-month nuclear war...long after the White House and the Pentagon are reduced to rubble."
The Air Force has tried to kill this idiotic program four times since it emerged from the black budget, but Congress won't listen. MILSTAR has cost us between $8 and $12 billion so far, and could cost another $4.5 billion between 1996 and 2000.
Since the black budget is completely off the books, it encourages waste on a titanic scale.
As one Pentagon employee put it: "In a black project, people don't worry about money. If you need money, you got it. If you screw up and need more, you got it. You're just pouring money into the thing until you get it right. The incentive isn't there to do it right the first time. Who's going to question it?" ...
Don't call it bribery
Why do our legislators put up with military waste and fraud?
For the same reason they do anything. Defense PACs gave members of Congress $7.5 million in 1993 and 1994.
And PAC money is just part of the story.
Of the $4.5 billion in unrequested weapons funding added to the Pentagon budget for fiscal 1996, 74% was spent in or near the home districts of representatives who sit on the House National Security Committee.
Another $290 million was spent in or around Newt Gingrich's home district, Cobb County, Georgia. (Cobb gets more federal pork than any county except Arlington in Virginia, which is right next to Washington, and Brevard in Florida, where Cape Canaveral is located.)
Although the Pentagon insists that it doesn't need any more B-2 bombers, Norman Dicks (D-Washington) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) don't care.
Dicks – who's one of the largest recipients of military PAC money in the House – received over $10,000 from nine major B-2 contractors in the four months just before the battle to resurrect B-2 funding.
Stevens got $37,000 between 1989 and 1994, making him one of the top ten recipients of PAC contributions from B-2 contractors. (Isn't it amazing how little politicians cost?)
If PAC money isn't enough, military lobbyists can always argue jobs. It didn't hurt funding for the B-2 that spending for it was spread across 88% of all congressional districts and all but two states.
Liberal California Representative Maxine Waters defended her vote to continue B-2 funding by candidly admitting that it was one of the few ways she knew to bring federal jobs to her district. (Since her district is South-Central Los Angeles, you can understand her desperation.)
There's no conceivable need for Seawolf submarines (which cost $2.4 billion apiece)- except for the votes in Connecticut, where it's built, and in surrounding states. That's why liberal New England senators like Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and George Mitchell supported it, as did Bill Clinton – who needed votes from those states – in his 1992 campaign.
Neither the Air Force nor the Navy wants any part of the V-22 Osprey assault plane, which the Bush administration tried in vain to kill. But it's supported by legislators in Texas and Pennsylvania – the two states that do the most contracting for it – and by Clinton, who...oh, you get the idea.
What about the jobs we'd lose? -- If new weapons systems are nothing more than make-work programs, they're really inefficient ones. A 1992 Congressional study estimated that shifting money from the Pentagon to state and local governments would create two jobs for every one it eliminates. Building weapons we don't need is so wasteful that the economy would probably be better off if we just paid people the same money to stay at home.
The Congressional Budget Office concluded that a billion dollars spent on successfully promoting arms exports creates 25,000 jobs, but if that same billion is spent on mass transit, it creates 30,000 jobs; on housing, 36,000 jobs; on education, 41,000 jobs; or on health care, 47,000 jobs.
Aside from the cost, using federal money to prop up military contractors creates a disincentive for them to convert to civilian products. Shifting Pentagon funds to urgently needed domestic uses would be good for both the US and the rest of the world.
As President Eisenhower put it, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."
Pentagon boosters argue that military spending has already been slashed too far, since more than 800,000 military-related jobs have disappeared since 1990. But many of these layoffs were in nonmilitary divisions of the companies, and more than half of them were caused by the economy contracting in a recession, not by smaller Pentagon budgets – especially since they've dropped off only slightly from their all-time high of $304 billion (adjusted for inflation) in 1989.
Just eight companies – McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Hughes – were responsible for half of all military contractors' layoffs in 1993.
Only 15% of Boeing's layoffs and a third of McDonnell Douglas' were related to military production. After the firings, the stocks of these eight companies rose by 20% to 140%, and the salaries of their CEOs soared.
The revolving door
Another reason for Pentagon waste and fraud is the revolving door between military contractors and government personnel. Before he was Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger was a top executive at Bechtel, which does massive engineering projects for the Pentagon and foreign clients like Saudi Arabia.
Before he was Secretary of State, George Shultz was president of Bechtel.
Before his days as a Navy felon, Melvyn Paisley worked for Boeing - as did his boss at the Pentagon, Navy Secretary John Lehman.
Secretary of Defense William Perry and CIA Director John Deutch both did consulting work for Martin Marietta before they joined the Clinton administration. The list goes on and on.
Generals have an interest in keeping weapons contractors happy – at least if they want to sit on the boards of corporations after they retire.
Contractors can use their connections at the Pentagon to find work there and, like Paisley, feed lucrative contracts to their friends in the private sector.
On both sides of the revolving door, militarists live in the lap of luxury.
Nobody batted an eyelash when Paisley entertained contractors in staterooms on the Queen Elizabeth, nor is there ever much dismay when military aircraft are used, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars an hour, to fly politicians, lobbyists and weapons contractors on pleasure trips.
Direct handouts
Still, personal perks don't cost us much compared to corporate perks. For example, when Lockheed and Martin Marietta merged to become Lockheed Martin, $92 million in bonuses — or "triggered compensation," as they prefer to call it – was handed out to top executives and members of the board.
They expect the government to pick up $31 million of that.
John Deutch quietly reversed a 40-year ban on such compensation when he was at the Pentagon. The biggest bonus, $8.2 million, went to the new company's president, Norman Augustine, who Deutch and William Perry had done work for at Martin Marietta.
Both Deutch and Perry obtained waivers from an ethics regulation that prohibits Pentagon officials from dealing with people they formerly did business with until a year has passed. (Up to 30,000 employees will lose their jobs as a result of this merger.)
Military contractors milk the government in other ways as well. It's common for the State Department to give foreign aid to brutal dictatorships like Indonesia and Guatemala, with the requirement that the money be used to buy US weapons.
Each year this program results in the transfer of $5-7 billion from US taxpayers to US arms merchants (not to mention the murder of lots of innocent people in the countries involved).
The Pentagon has similar programs that not only provide subsidies to foreign countries to buy from US weapons suppliers but also help them negotiate the sale.
In 1994, General Dynamics and Lockheed received a total of $1.9 billion in foreign military sales awards – 126,567% more than the $1.5 million they gave to candidates for federal offices in the 1994 elections. (As we've already remarked, politicians sure are a bargain.)
Thanks in large part to these Pentagon programs – on which we spend $5.4 billion a year, almost half our total foreign aid expenditure – the US is the largest arms supplier on earth, with 43% of the world trade.
What's more, many of these loans are ultimately defaulted on or forgiven.
Egypt, for example, was let off the hook for $7 billion in loans, as a reward for participating in the Gulf War...
For more on the Black Budget, GO TO > > > Down the Rabbit-Hole
December 6, 2001
Auditors at Pentagon get
poor grade in new review
WASHINGTON (AP) - The agency that investigates fraud and abuse inside the Pentagon is getting a poor grade after it was caught cheating on a review of its own performance.
The Pentagon inspector general’s office was subjected to an intensive audit this fall after a discovery that the watchdog office destroyed internal documents – and created new ones – to win a favorable grade in a previous check of work.
The discovery invalidated the previous review, which had given the office a passing grade.
In a new review, also called a “peer review,” federal investigators gave the Pentagon a “qualified opinion,” the second-lowest rating a federal inspector general can receive.
The review found the agency didn’t always follow proper auditing procedures and raised new questions about its paperwork, noting that some investigative documents were prepared or changed after the fact....
The review said the Pentagon agency had a subpar performance in planning audits, documenting its conclusions and, in one instance, allowed an auditor to review a program in which he directly participated.
The Defense Department’s deputy inspector general, Robert Lieberman, said his agency is correcting the problems and that a new computer program will eliminate many of the mistakes. . . .
Lieberman would not discuss the document destruction, which was revealed by a whistle-blower and confirmed by an internal report.
Inspector general offices are installed inside federal agencies as internal watchdogs to investigate fraud, waste and abuse, and to audit financial statements, a massive task in the Pentagon, which spends some $300 billion a year.
(For more on the net, GO TO > > > Global Beat.)
December 11, 2001
THE RON BROWN
MYSTERY
By Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid
Chief Petty Officer Kathleen Janoski, who photographed Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown’s body at Dover Air Force Base, described at a recent AIM conference how the Navy punished her for raising questions about the cause of Brown’s death.
Janoski said she hasn’t come to any conclusions about whether the former Clinton cabinet official was murdered or not. But she is certain that certain top officials didn’t want the questions answered.
At the conference Janoski showed a video tape that aired on the Christian Broadcasting Network about the case. The story, narrated by Dale Hurd, noted that Brown was said to have been killed in a 1996 plane crash in Croatia. But there were several irregularities in how his death was handled.
Janoski, in photographing Brown’s corpse, saw a round hole in the top of his head that three pathologists said looked like a .45 caliber bullet wound. Head X-rays showed what appeared to be bullet fragments inside the head.
Recommendations by three pathologists, including Lt. Col. Steve Cogswell, that an autopsy be made were ignored and the head X-rays were destroyed. Colonel Cogswell was given what amounted to a demotion through a transfer out of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. His career was ruined.
Janoski, once the head of photography at the institute, was given 32 hours to clear out of her office and her staff was taken away. Her offense was having given copies of her photos of Brown’s head and the destroyed head X-rays to journalist Chris Ruddy.
Reporter Hurd asked, "is Cogswell’s and Janoski’s punishment by the AFIP [Armed Forces Institute of Pathology] simply because they shined the light on shoddy work and embarrassed the Pentagon? Or is there something more?”
Hurd found that the AFIP was continuing to lie. In a statement, it claimed that extensive forensic tests were conducted on the body. Janoski said that was completely false.
In another anomaly, Hurd said that an Indian medicine bag given to Brown by his girlfriend Yolanda Hill as a good luck charm was removed from a diplomatic pouch and destroyed. There’s no explanation for why this happened. Hurd said a Maryland private investigator had gotten his hands on a government document indicating that a top-secret investigation had been conducted into Brown’s death. But there’s no indication of what they found.
One thing is certain: the crash was not due to bad weather. The Croatian ground controller who may have been responsible for diverting the plane into a mountain allegedly killed himself before he was questioned.
The death takes on added significance because of the belief that Brown, one of Bill Clinton’s close associates, was about to cooperate with an investigation of corruption in the Clinton Administration.
For her part, Kathleen Janoski said she was isolated, relieved of her duties, and left to sit at a desk with nothing to do. Her colleagues were afraid to be seen with her. She said her faith in the Navy and its integrity was badly shaken. The chain of command failed her.
But she has no regrets and is proud of working with Chris Ruddy to bring the facts about this bungled death investigation to the public’s attention....
For more on Ron Brown, GO TO > > > Part I - The Birds
The Project On Government Oversight
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 25, 1997
The National Defense Panel:
Conflict of Interest Doesn't Get Any
Clearer Than This
- - -
Last year Congress established what should have been a crucial "National Defense Panel" (NDP) of ostensibly independent experts to comment on the Defense Department's major review of military strategy, priorities, and spending... The panel was also directed to perform its own review of military strategy...
- - -
Unfortunately, many members of the "independent" panel are far from being "neutral third-party" reviewers. The majority of the panel members work for defense contractors or companies with financial ties to defense contractors.
These companies have current and future business with the Defense Department that will be affected by the findings of the NDP.
It should come as no shock that the National Defense Panel's reported recommendations benefit defense corporations-- asserting that the Defense Department needs to spend more money on futuristic new technology and weapons.
The "spin" on the NDP will likely be that it was successful since it criticized the Defense Department's "business-as-usual" Quadrennial Defense Review.
But early reports indicate that the thrust of the NDP's recommendation amounts to spending money faster in areas where the Defense Department is already boosting spending - new high-tech weapon programs. Individuals with ties to defense contractors cannot have an objective view of issues and decisions involving tens of billions of dollars worth of their employers' potential contracts.
Danielle Brian, Executive Director of the Project On Government Oversight, comments,
"A team consisting primarily of defense contractors decides that we need to give more money to the defense industry for high-tech weapons--Congress went to the trouble of establishing the National Defense Panel for this? The NDP is a case of the foxes designing the chicken coop."
The table on the following page shows the links of some of the panel members to defense contractors:
National Defense Panel Members' Affiliations |
||
Member |
Organization |
Defense Contractor Links |
Philip A. Odeen, NDP Chairperson |
BDM International |
30th largest DOD contractor, with $407 million in contracts in Fiscal Year 1996. Chairman of the Board is former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci. |
Richard L. Armitage former officer, USN |
Armitage Associates |
0 |
Richard D. Hearney Gen., USMC (Ret.) |
McDonnell Douglas
Europe |
2nd largest defense contractor in FY 1996 with $9.9 billion in contracts. Major weapons include the C-17 transport, AH-64 helicopter, F-15 and F-18 fighters. |
David E. Jeremiah Adm., USN (Ret.) |
Technology Strategies and
Alliances |
Influential firm founded by ex-Defense Secretary William Perry and ex-acquisition chief Paul Kaminski. Used as a consulting firm by many major defense contractors. |
Robert M. Kimmitt Brig. Gen., USAR |
Wilmer, Cutler &
Pickering, Partner, and
Lehman Brothers |
When the NDP was formed, Gen. Kimmitt was with Lehman, a large investment banking firm involved with defense contractor financing, for example the merger of Lockheed Martin and Loral in 1996. |
Andrew Krepinevich Col., USA (Ret.) |
Center for Strategic &
Budgetary Assessments |
Think tank that receives some funding from the Defense Department and numerous defense contractors. |
James P. McCarthy Gen., USAF (Ret.) |
Air Force Academy |
N/A |
Janne E. Nolan |
Brookings Institution |
Defense contractors are clients of Brookings' executive education programs. ** |
Robert W. RisCassi Gen., USA (Ret.) |
L-3 Communications
Corp., and Lockheed
Martin Corp. |
When the NDP was formed, Gen. RisCassi worked for Lockheed Martin, which has since spun off several divisions to form L-3 Communications (retaining 35% ownership). Lehman Brothers Capital Partners (see Gen. Kimmitt above) owns about 50%. The spinoff continues in defense work. Lockheed Martin is the number-one defense company, with $12 billion in FY 1996 contracts. |
* International lobbying, marketing, and strategic planning consulting firm. Whether clients included defense contractors was not publicly available. Richard Armitage was an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the 1980s. |
||
** Think tank partly funded by corporate donors. Whether corporate donors included defense contractors was not publicly available. |
||
Table prepared by The Project On Government Oversight |
||
It is particularly disturbing that the two largest defense contractors in 1996 -
Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas - have "representatives" on the
NDP. (During the work of the NDP, the panel member working for Lockheed
Martin began switched to L-3 Communications Corporation, a new company
formed from several Lockheed Martin divisions.)
Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) complained that "The selection of forward-thinking members for the NDP was critical, and quite frankly the Administration missed the mark - with a few notable exceptions."
He was particularly disturbed about the choice of chairperson:
"While Mr. Odeen is well-respected for his intellect and work on previous commissions, his past experience does not support the very broad-ranging goals of the NDP. His appointment only fuels early reports that the QDR will go unchallenged and will only restate the status quo without addressing the most pressing questions facing our military today."
Given that the Defense Department's bureaucratic Quadrennial Defense Review predictably failed to come up with deep redirection in military strategy or forces, the "independent" NDP could have played a key role in exploring alternative international security structures rather than focusing on new hardware needed when the existing security system fails.
If an objective, unfettered review of U.S. defense needs in the 21st Century is actually to take place, it must be conducted by a panel not subject to this conflict of interest.
If the review is to be creative and bold, it will need to include more individuals noted for their "out of the box" thinking and fewer, if any, people with direct ties to defense contractors....
WARNING!
The following tour is extremely dangerous and
may be hazardous to your health.
You are advised to don your helmets,
flak jackets and gas masks
before entering these vulture nests!
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!
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