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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJames Risen: The Post-9/11 Homeland Security Industrial Complex Profiteers and Endless War
Unintimidated by the efforts of two administrations to force him to reveal a confidential source who disclosed the betrayal of the public by the government, Pulitzer Prize- winning New York Times reporter James Risen exposes more about the reality of greed, power and endless war in his new book, Pay Any Price. ........... Risen tells Truthout:
"Four trillion dollars is the best estimate for the total price tag of the war on terror, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and much of it has gone to shadowy contractors. It is one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, and yet it has gone largely unnoticed."
Mark Karlin: In your third chapter, you state that the "corporate leaders at its vanguard can rightly be considered the true winners of the war on terror." You refer to these people as post-9/11, corporate entrepreneurs and opportunists. Can you provide a couple of brief examples?
James Risen: In chapter three, I focus on corporate leaders who have largely tried to avoid the limelight, but have nonetheless been among those who have profited the most from the war on terror. People like the Blue brothers, whose company, General Atomics, has produced the Predator and Reaper drones, the signature weapons of the global war on terror.
I also write about J. Philip London, executive chairman of CACI, the huge defense and intelligence contractor that was caught up in the Abu Ghraib scandal but then managed to continue to thrive in the war on terror, and Robert McKeon, a clever Wall Street maven who acquired Dyncorp as it profited from rival Blackwater's problems. McKeon eventually committed suicide, and the sale of assets by his estate after his death provided a glimpse at the massive wealth accumulated by the corporate leaders who benefit from being on the top rung of the war on terror.
Your prologue refers to the "homeland security-industrial" complex (including the related wars since 9/11) costing an estimated $4 trillion. Where did all that money go?
The Homeland Security Industrial Complex operates differently than the traditional Military Industrial Complex. Instead of spending on ships, airplanes and other big weapons systems, much of the money goes to secretive intelligence contractors who perform secret counterterrorism work for the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon and other agencies. Because it is all classified, there is no public debate about the massive amounts of money being poured into these contractors. And with little oversight, there is no way to determine whether these contractors have performed well or poorly. Four trillion dollars is the best estimate for the total price tag of the war on terror, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and much of it has gone to shadowy contractors. It is one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, and yet it has gone largely unnoticed.
..............................
If you recall, just after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney famously said that "the gloves come off." What that really meant was that the US was deregulating national security, getting rid of the rules and regulations that had governed national security since the post-Watergate reform era of the 1970s. As a result, we have conducted the war on terror in a climate in which there are few rules or limits on American actions. The message was clearly sent throughout the government that nothing should get in the way of stopping any future terrorist attack - and that message created a dangerous climate that we still live in today.
The Rest:
http://truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/27425-james-risen-the-post-9-11-homeland-security-industrial-complex-profiteers-and-endless-war
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Remember Richard (PNAC) Perle? Just after September 11 and the Washington-Wall Street axis of war profiteering was heating up, Perle hit up Adnan (Iran-Contra/BCCI) Khashoggi for $100 million to make his new "Trireme Partnerships" take off.
Khashoggi's money would help launch the Carlyle Group-like investment group Perle founded. The petromoney was not for arms, directly. It was for investing in companies that were going to be making a killing off of homeland security related areas.
Interesting selling point: Perle already had secured financing from in from Boeing and some other bigwigs like Henry Kissinger.
One of the most important articles The New Yorker ever published:
Lunch with the Chairman
by Seymour M. Hersh
17 March 2003
At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.
Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.
The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the countrys strategic defense policies.
Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Triremes main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.
CONTINUED...
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/17/030317fa_fact
PS: Thank you for the great OP from Truth-Out, kpete! Risen is TOPS!
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)indepat
(20,899 posts)into an overwhelming stench undermining perhaps every principle our founders foresaw. Go USA.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)MrMickeysMom
(20,453 posts)nice eclectic group you have there
peace MrMickeysMom,
kp
MrMickeysMom
(20,453 posts)
is to expose the HELL out of it!
MMM
Rex
(65,616 posts)so that their pay masters can steal more money from the working class.
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)Make our society a worse place, and profit nicely from it.
Somebody needs to be stood against a wall.
johnnyreb
(915 posts)Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)I'm sure we can remember when a story like this would have been featured on 60 Minutes.
Leon Panetta said, "Cut entitlements, not the military." This was in response to the effects of the sequester on military spending.
All these people working in government are having their palms greased. There is so much dirty money to spread around.
It is corruption from sea to shining sea.
EEO
(1,620 posts)Overseas
(12,121 posts)I don't know how we will be able to dismantle it, or reduce the secrecy.
This helps me understand why Risen's sources gave him the information. Hoping something could be done about it, if we all knew how bad things had gotten.
He has been so brave and honorable in resisting the pressure to reveal his sources.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)It was my fault I was stopped. I had lost my driver's license. (It was returned to me in the mail yesterday. Thanks to the anonymous person who found it.)
I'm 71, petite and obviously very American and very harmless.
I felt embarrassed for her and assured her I am 71 and have had two children. I tried to make it as easy for her as I could. It is not her fault that she is a cog in a system that has gone completely berserk.
But the money and time wasted on those long airport lines. It's ridiculous. Vetting people who enter this country and checking all luggage for arms and explosives makes sense, but the system is way out of proportion with the problem.
Overseas
(12,121 posts)got lots of consulting work. As did his predecessor Tom Ridge's group.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/23/fear_pays_chertoff_n_787711.html
Chertoff has a lot to gain financially if some of these measures are adopted. Between his private consulting firm, The Chertoff Group, and seats on the boards of giant defense and security firms, he sits at the heart of the giant security nexus created in the wake of 9/11, in effect creating a shadow homeland security agency. Chertoff launched his firm just days after President Barack Obama took office, eventually recruiting at least 11 top officials from the Department of Homeland Security, as well as former CIA director General Michael Hayden and other top military brass and security officials.
(Chertoff's predecessor at DHS, Tom Ridge, has also parlayed his experience into a lucrative career. Since 2005, he has served on the board of Savi Technology, the primary technology provider for the Pentagon's wireless cargo-monitoring network, and he has served as a senior advisor to TechRadium, Inc., a Texas-based security technology company.)
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)Witness Chertoff. And Feinstein.
Overseas
(12,121 posts)I thought I'd followed the stories fairly closely, but there's a lot more I didn't know.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)in the invasion of France to begin the end of WWII.
malaise
(268,993 posts)then weep