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Edited on Sat Apr-10-04 12:46 PM by bigtree
"It would be better if we simply handed the money to the defense industry and let them invest it themselves" ~Richard Perle The present war with Iraq is the ambition of the corporate wing of the conservative establishment who views Iraq as a potential wedge against the domination of Mideast oil-producing nations which, in many respects, are openly hostile to American economic interests in the region. Having failed to turn the first war to their corporate advantage, the exiled power brokers brooded and plotted to revive a public campaign against Saddam Hussein which would unseat the dictator and allow the U.S. to install an authority there compliant to American business concerns.
The election of George Bush and Dick Cheney was a watershed for the military corporations. Both had been stalwart supporters of the multibillion dollar military industry; Bush in his home state and Cheney, wherever he could exploit his tenure as defense secretary during the first Iraq war, and build on his past deal-making with the coalition members.
During the 2000 campaign Cheney complained that "developments of new military technologies (had) reached all-time lows." But that would only be a concern to the industry, not to the average American. The U.S. arsenal is full of high-tech weapons that don't work or that they don't use.
This call for a new generation of weapons is intended to facilitate the agendas of Bush administration hawks who would project U.S. influence around the globe like mercenary carpetbaggers; through intimidation from the force of our weaponry; with our soldiers; and through the supplying of ‘commercial’ armies whenever a commitment of our forces is politically difficult, or prohibited by Congress.
President Bush intends for there to be more conquest - like in Iraq - as the United States exercises its military force around the world; our mandate, our justification, presumably inherent in the mere possession of our instruments of destruction.
Our folly is evident in the rejection of our ambitions by even the closest of our allies, as we reject all entreaties to moderate our manufactured mandate to conquer. Isolation is enveloping our nation like the warming of the atmosphere and the creeping melt of our planet's ancient glaciers.
We are unleashing a new, unnecessary fear between the nations of the world as we dissolve decades of firm understandings about an America power which was to be guileless in its unassailable defenses. The falseness of our diplomacy is revealed in our scramble for ‘useable', tactical nuclear missiles, new weapons systems, and our new justifications for their use.
The PNAC ‘Rebuilding America' report was used after the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks to draft the 2002 document entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States," which for the first time in the nation's history advocated "preemptive" attacks to prevent the emergence of opponents the administration considered a threat to its political and economic interests. 58
It states that ". . . we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country." And that, "To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively."
This military industry band of executives promoted the view, in and outside of the White House that, " must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends. . . We must deter and defend against the threat before it is unleashed."
‘Peace through strength; big kid on the block,' is a posture which is more appropriately used to counter threats by nations; not threats by rouge individuals with no known base of operations.
Their strategy asserts that "The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction - and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack."
So their plan is to attack whomever, whenever they feel our security is threatened, no matter if the nature and prevalence of the attack is uncertain. The U.N. should have studied this document before it wasted its time trying to reign President Bush in.
One would expect that President Bush would be humbled by his lack of experience in the military and that his same shallow depth of involvement in foreign affairs would cause him to wield our armed forces with caution and restraint.
Yet, upon assuming the moniker of the commander-in-chief he reflexively aligned himself with the armed forces' bureaucracy which has, in the last decade, involved itself more with the projection and preservation of U.S. monied interests around the globe, than with the actual defense of democratic ideals of economic and social justice.
It was that alignment which fostered the unprecedented appointments of hundreds of the who's-who in the military industrial world to the most sensitive positions in our government offices.
The biggest threat to the World community is the proliferation of WMDs here in the U.S., facilitated by a nest of former military-industrial executives (military-industrial warriors) and shareholders in the Defense department and throughout the Bush administration.
In 1999, when Bush was governor, Texas had 219 aircraft companies, with 47,757 workers. The industry exported $10.0 billion to the top five export markets of Mexico, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.
Major aircraft industry employers in Texas are: Fairchild Aircraft Inc; Lockheed Martin; Northrop Grumman; and Raytheon Systems Co. 59
A World Policy Institute review found that 32 major policy makers in the current administration have significant ties to the arms industry now, and prior to joining the administration. 60
Vice-president Dick Cheney is among the wealthiest members of the administration with an estimated booty of $70 million. He has invested heavily in state governments, which account for as much as $12.5 million of his fortune. The bulk of his assets is in savings accounts, certificates of deposit etc., totaling nearly $50 million. He holds stock with Electronic Data Systems and Anadarko Petroleum 61. He also retains ‘unpaid' directorships at the nation's leading companies, including Procter & Gamble, EDS and Union Pacific. (stock in lieu of payments).
He is still receiving a yearly paycheck from Halliburton.
-Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense owns shares of General Electric stock worth $100,001 to $250,000 (GE has a wide range of government contracts and regulatory issues. It is one of the largest defense contractors, with $1.7 billion worth of contracts in 2000 62). Rumsfeld previously served as CEO of the pharmaceutical manufacturer G.D. Searle, a subsidiary of Pharmacia and served on the board of the drug research and development company, Gilead Science.
As a director for Gulfstream Aerospace, Rumsfeld’s stock in the company reportedly was valued at $11 million when the company was acquired by defense contractor General Dynamics in 1999. 63
Rumsfeld was chosen as defense chief to usher in the next cash cow for the military industry: Space-Based Weaponry. He chaired the Rumsfeld Commission a.k.a.: "Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States" 64
Wolfowitz was on the board, and Iraq reconstruction's Gen. Jay Garner was there too. The propped up space commission; the invention of Rep. Curt Weldon of Pa. (a frequent traveler to Russia and a friend of the Russian elite), was formed to refute the CIA's assessment that Star Wars was costly, unnecessary, and unworkable. Not surprisingly the commission came down in favor of restarting the Space nuclear race.
Bush talked up the renewal of the Star Wars program during the campaign, money was put into research, and the program is waiting for the war to die down so they can pump more money in.
In the 2004 defense budget, Congress appropriated $100 million to reinstate one of the canceled missile defense tests. The total amount the administration requested for Ballistic Missile Defense: $9.1 billion; Senate's bill: $9.1 billion.
Lockheed and possibly Raytheon stands to receive the lion's share of future space contracts because of Boeing's suspension for spying on Lockheed.
-Peter B. Teets, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, is the former president and chief operating officer of Lockheed Martin who retired from the company in late 1999.
Teets now serves as the director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) 65, Undersecretary of the Air Force, and chief procurement officer for all of military space, controlling a budget in excess of $65 billion, a figure that includes $8 billion a year for missile defense and $7 billion annually for NRO spying.
To date it is believed that the NRO has provided more than $500 million each to Lockheed-Martin and Boeing. "A key player in supplying revolutionary breakthrough technology has been, and will continue to be, the National Reconnaissance Office," Teets said February in a Pentagon briefing. 66
Teets boasted that the military makeover now underway is geared to "make the world's best space forces even better." 67
- Stephen Hadley, 53, served as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy from 1989 to 1993 and was responsible for defense policy on NATO and Western Europe, nuclear weapons and ballistic missile defense, and arms control. He was active in the negotiations that resulted in the START I and START II treaties.
Hadley was also a member of the National Security Council staff during the earlier Bush administration. Former Lockheed president, Bruce Jackson and former Lockheed counsel, Hadley have worked closely together on the Committee to Expand NATO. 68 Jackson was president of this entity, based in the Washington offices of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute; Hadley was its secretary.
As reported by Karl Grossman of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space 69, Stephen Hadley told an Air Force Association Convention in a speech September 11, 2000, "Space is going to be important. It has a great feature in the military," 70
- Douglas J. Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and Director of Iraq Reconstruction is president and managing partner of former law firm, Feith & Zell; clients include Northrop-Grumman and Loral Space Communications 71. Feith created International Advisors Incorporated, a lobbying firm whose main client was the government of Turkey. The firm retained Richard Perle as an adviser between 1989 and 1994. 72
Feith owns shares of AT&T stock worth $500,00 to $1 million, (AT&T is the DOD's 43d largest contractor), Ford Motor Co. stock worth $250,001 to $500,000 (Ford is lobbying the DOD over appropriations), Verizon Communications stock worth $500,001 to $1 million, and Lucent Technologies stock worth $250,001 to $500,000.
Bechtel awarded a $25 million subcontract in October to shareholder Feith's Lucent Technologies to carry out ‘emergency' repair and rehabilitation of the communications network in Iraq. This was the first major communications infrastructure subcontract Bechtel awarded in Iraq. 73
- Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of DOD, and former assistant to Dick Cheney, was a Northrop-Grumman consultant.
Wolfowitz, along with Condi Rice and Richard Perle, and others, formed the Bush campaign foreign policy and national security team with others, which Ms. Rice named "The Vulcans," after a statue of the Roman god in Rice's hometown. 74
Wolfowitz is a longtime member of the PNAC, and a veteran of both the Reagan and Bush I administrations.
- Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State is president and partner of Armitage Assoc. LLP 75, was a Boeing consultant, a Raytheon consultant and an advisory board member. Armitage was also President Bush's special emissary to Jordan's King Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War. Armitage has also worked in the past for Halliburton. From March 1992 until 1993, Armitage as ambassador, funneled U.S. dollars into the new independent states of the former Soviet Union. In January 1992, the Bush Administration's desire to cozy up to the NIS (and their oil) resulted in Armitage's appointment as Coordinator for Emergency Humanitarian Assistance.
During this time Armitage took on the other international patronage projects that normally follow war, accommodating the assuagement of the European Community, Japan and other donor countries.
Armitage owns Electronic Data Systems stock worth $250,001 to $500,000 (EDS is the 49th largest defense contractor, and lobbies the Defense Dept. over various appropriations issues), General Electric stock worth $500,001 to $1 million, Merck & Co. stock worth $100,001 to $250,000 (Merck lobbied the Defense Dept. over the Biological Weapons Convention implementation protocol), and Verizon Communications stock worth $250,001 to $500,000.
- Robert Card, Undersecretary of Energy owns CH2M stock worth more than $1 million - $5 million (CH2M's subsidiary, Kaiser-Hill, has contracts with the Department of Energy, including cleanup of the Rocky Flats nuclear site in Colorado).
- Colin Powell, owned more than $1 million in General Dynamics stock before joining the administration.
He also owns Merck & Co. stock worth $500,000. Raymond Gilmartin, CEO of Merck & Co., personally contributed $32,000 to the Republicans ($1000 of which went to Bush). Merck gave $526,534 in PAC, soft money, and individual contributions, with 78 percent going to Republicans.
In 1999, Merck reported lobbying expenditures of $5,320,000.
- Gordon England, Secretary of the Navy was a General Dynamics contractor and a former president of Lockheed. General Dynamics will benefit from administration initiatives to extend the life of the Trident submarine by utilizing it both to carry submarine-launched ballistic missiles and new "conventional strike" munitions.
- Undersecretary of Defense Michael Wynne, was Senior Vice President for International Planning and Development at General Dynamics before joining the administration.
- Richard Perle, White House Defense Policy Advisor, worked for Trireme, a company of which he is a managing partner, involved in security and military technologies, and agreed to work as a paid lobbyist for Global Crossing, a telecommunications giant seeking a major Pentagon contract. 76 After the 1991 Gulf War, Perle was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to sell security systems to the Saudi's.
Perle accepted an offer from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to chair the Defense Policy Board, which is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members 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 country's strategic defense policies.
Three of Trireme's Management Group members currently serve on the Defense Policy Board: Perle, Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State. Gerald Hillman, an investor and a close business associate of Perle's, had almost no senior policy or military experience in government before being offered a post on the policy board.
Perle now serves as a director of the Autonomy Corporation, a British firm that recently won a major federal contract in homeland security. 77
-Alliant Techsystems has five retired senior government officials on its board, including David Jeremiah, an ex-admiral who currently sits on the Defense Policy Board along with Richard Perle. 78
-Karl Rove, Senior Advisor to the President is a Boeing shareholder who ran George W. Bush's presidential campaign. Mr. Rove is worth nearly $5 million.
Rove met with Intel executives while serving in the White House despite owning as much as $250,000 in Intel stock. He holds shares of Enron, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and USA Education Group. His largest holding is the River Oaks Lodge in Ingram, Texas, worth as much as $1 million.
-Michael Jackson, Deputy Secretary of Transportation is the former Vice President, Former CEO of Lockheed Information and Management Services and a shareholder. Lockheed Martin has $77 billion in federal contracts, primarily with the Defense Dept., but also with Transportation, and has lobbied the Federal Aviation Administration in 2001, which is a component of the Transportation Dept.
-Norman Mineta, Secretary of Transportation is a former Vice President, shareholder of Lockheed, who fell out of Congress and into Lockheed's financial cradle.
-John Bolton, Undersecretary of State holds Merck & Co. stock worth $250,001 to $500,000 (Merck lobbied the State Dept. over the Biological Weapons Convention implementation protocol).
-Otto Reich, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America was a paid consultant for Lockheed when the company was seeking a reversal of the U.S. ban on the sale of high tech weapons to Latin America.
-James G. Roche, Secretary of the Air Force is a former president of Northrop-Grumman, a subsidiary of Lockheed. "We have encouraged and exploited the rapid advancement and employment of innovative technologies and have taken significant action to implement the findings of the Space Commission in our new role as the executive agent for space," he said to a Senate committee in 2002.
-Dov Zakheim - Under Secretary for Comptroller of Defense was a paid advisory board member of Northrup-Grumman.
-Nelson F. Gibbs, Air Force; Assistant Secretary for Installations, Environment and Logistics is a former corporate comptroller for Northrop-Grumman.
-Sean O'Keefe, NASA Administrator was on a paid advisory board of Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.
-I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff and Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs was a Northrup-Grumman consultant. Libby served on the advisory Board for RAND Corporation's Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He was managing partner of Washington office of international law firm Dechert, Price and Rhoads. He also served in the Department of Defense under Pres. George H.W. Bush.
Retired general Jay Garner, who served briefly as the administrator for postwar Iraq, is the President of SYColeman Corp., which is owned by L-3, one of Lockheed-Martin's communications technology units. 79
The CDI reports that the United States military budget exceeds that of the next 25 nations combined; $400 billion a year, and that's just the public accounting. Russia follows the U.S. with a $60 billion defense budget. U.K. spends only about $35 billion a year.
Since 1992, the United States has exported more than $142 billion worth of weaponry around the world. North America accounts for more than 65% of the world's arms exports. Of the 43 countries with over $500 million in arms imports, 23 obtained 2/3 or more from the U.S. 80
With the new money appropriated for homeland defense ($38 billion for FY 2003), virtually all of the big defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon have started hawking their products for use in domestic security.
In order to replace weapons used in Afghanistan, and in concert with the military conflict in Iraq, most U.S. weapons makers have increased production. Bombs are big business again and the Bush administration has opened the candy store, exporting death, conquest, and perpetual war.
With a share of 24% of U.S. arms exports, Lockheed-Martin is the world's largest arms exporting company. Lockheed leads the pack of defense contractors who do business with the U.S. with valuable Pentagon contracts worth a total of nearly $30 billion and an advertised $70 billion backlog. 81
Lockheed has 125,000 employees in the United States and overseas with 939 facilities in 457 cities and 45 states throughout the U.S.; internationally, with business locations in 56 nations and territories.
Lockheed leads the defense industry in lobbying expenditures. Lockheed Martin made over $10.6 million in campaign contributions to candidates and party committees from 1990 to 2000, including $3.4 million in donations in the run-up to the year 2000 elections. 82
The company actively lobbies for the need to retain substantial numbers of existing nuclear weapons while developing new ones. Lockheed Martin receives more than $1 billion per year from the Department of Energy - to operate the Sandia National Laboratories (involved in the design and production of nuclear warheads) and help run the Nevada Test Site for "sub-critical testing" of new nuclear weapons designs. 83
The ex-Lockheed Martin employees with the most direct connections to nuclear and missile defense policy are:
Former chief operating officer Peter B. Teets, who is now Under Secretary of the Air Force and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a post that includes making decisions on the acquisition of everything from reconnaissance satellites to space-based elements of missile defense.
And, Everet Beckner, who served as the chief executive of Lockheed Martin's division that helped run the United Kingdom's Atomic Weapons Establishment. 84
Beckner is now Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs at the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration 85, charged with oversight of maintenance, development, and production of nuclear warheads.
In their new positions, both Teets and Beckner are well-positioned to make decisions on procurement and research programs that will directly or indirectly benefit their former employer (Lockheed),which has major portfolios in nuclear weapons, missile defense, and military space systems.
Current Lockheed chairman Vance Coffman said that his company would "honor the trust shown by the Pentagon."
However, these corporations simply cannot be trusted to keep their word or their commitments over the length of these multibillion, multi-year contracts which are awarded and maintained with responsibility for oversight falling into the hands of several successive administrations and legislatures.
Ronald Sugar, the new head of Northrup-Grumman, at a recent conservative policy forum on the defense industry remarked, that he expects the government to be responsible for a financially stable military industry.
"Time is risk, . . . the defense industry needs steady, predictable growth," he said.
Pentagon senior defense consultant Richard Perle, who also spoke at the conference, opined that, "A profitable defense industry keeps America strong."91
Profits have been pretty darn good; CEO pay, however, has been even better. According to the study by United for a Fair Economy, More Bucks for the Bang: ", the median CEO salary at the 37 largest publicly traded defense contractors rose 79% between 2001 and 2002 whereas overall CEO salary increased only 6%. In 2002, defense industry CEOs earned an average of $5.4 million - or 577 times as much as a private in Iraq - while other U.S. CEOs, on average, earned "only" $3.7 million." 92
The Pentagon just can't seem to keep our own military contractors from proliferating their sensitive technology around the globe. They are pitting nation against nation in a death race as they steadily increase our military corporation- compromised arsenal. And then they turn around and destroy the weapons again in phony conflicts.
They lord over our defense' dollars in our government houses and shepherd the money into some death merchant's bank account. Where's the security?
Congressional contributors such as Hughes, Raytheon, TRW, Madison Research, Texas Instruments, Teledyne, Northrop-Grumman and Rockwell all have ongoing co-mingled defense and missile projects that requires them to work together on a contractor/subcontractor basis to develop their military projects.
There is no question that in this incestuous weapons production pyramid, the shareholder's bottom line dictates the amount of support and funding an individual project would receive, especially when so many of the principles in and out of government have large amounts of money and prestige invested in the success of these weapon's deals.
There seems to be no limit to aerospace ambitions. The administration is pushing ahead with the expansion of the military space program, despite the limitations of the nation's weak economy and the adoption of many other costly ‘priorities' for the armed forces.
Of course, there exists the possibility that President Bush actually assembled the Pentagon's recent pack of aerospace executives to run his foreign policy in his own anticipation of a credible 'space threat', to deter a future assault on our nation's security.
What foresight he must have had from his Texas ranch. What of it, if executives and shareholders in the space industry happen to rape of our treasury to fulfill their own hunger to dominate military and commercial space?
At the military industry conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, defense policy advisor Richard Perle mused that, "It would be better if we simply handed the money to the defense industry and let them invest it themselves, . . . but Congress likes to control that . . . , but it gives the impression that the merchants of death are unduly licenced." 91
Perle then made a weak plea for less regulation of arms exports ($140 + billion since 1992), and suggested that export licencing be consolidated into one agency. I wonder who the administration executives will suggest to head that office. Industry lawyers; resumes at the ready!
You can hear the regret in his statement. If we would only just give the industry the money they want, no strings attached; they would provide for the nation's defense needs.
The industry wants us to believe that they are the best judges of what the next generation's needs are in terms of weaponry.
But the existence of these corporations and their new hi-tech boondoggles will not make us anymore secure than the existence of these same executives in our government have kept our sons and daughters from dying in senseless wars.
These are excerpts from my book, Power Of Mischief: http://www.returningsoldiers.us/pompage.htm
Download the book for free!
http://www.returningsoldiers.us/Power%20Of%20Mischief4.pdf
Here's my list of numbered, linked references for the book (253 links):
http://returningsoldiers.us/biblio.htm
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