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

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July 22/23, 2006

Lebanon and Gaza invasions planned last
month in Colorado meetings between
Netanyahu, Sharansky, and Cheney.

Wayne Madsen Report

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.

www.waynemadsenreport.com/

 


 

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


 

IRAQ BODY COUNT

 


 

National Priorities Project – Cost of War

 


 

A Timeline of Oil and Violence in Iraq

 


 

THE EAGLE HOODED: THE 9-11 COVERUP

PART IPART II PART III

 


 

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 the latest REAL news:

The Republic Network

 


 

March 29, 2005

Pentagon Strips Air Force of
21 Major Weapons Programs

Las Vegas Review-Journal

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:

JOSHUA GOTBAUM

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

~ o ~

For more recent poop on Joshua Gotbaum, GO TO > > > Hawaiian Airlines

~ o ~


 

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 froom 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.

WHO PAYS THE TAB?

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

Take the Rich Off Welfare

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 iin 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
CEO and President

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
President

0

Richard D. Hearney Gen., USMC (Ret.)

McDonnell Douglas Europe
Managing Director

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
President and CEO

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
Managing Director, Washington DC

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
Director

Think tank that receives some funding from the Defense Department and numerous defense contractors.

James P. McCarthy Gen., USAF (Ret.)

Air Force Academy
Professor

N/A

Janne E. Nolan

Brookings Institution
Senior Fellow

Defense contractors are clients of Brookings’ executive education programs. **

Robert W. RisCassi Gen., USA (Ret.)

L-3 Communications Corp., and Lockheed Martin Corp.
Vice President

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 Douglashave “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 nests!

PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!

/

 


 

Battelle Memorial InstituteFrom their website:

What We Do

Battelle serves industry and government in developing new technologies and products. We develop the technology behind the products of some of the most successful companies in the world. Our focus is on developing high-quality solutions and products and reducing time-to-market for our clients.

We insert technology into systems and processes for manufacturers; pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries; trade associations; and government agencies supporting energy, the environment, health, national security, and transportation. . . .

History

Battelle (Memorial Institute), which began operations in 1929, was established in Columbus, Ohio, by Gordon Battelle and serves as a memorial to his family——leaders in America’s early steel industry.

Business Statistics

Battelle has a staff of 7,500 scientists, engineers, and support specialists. Each year, thousands of technology projects are in progress at Battelle’s various business operations. These projects are performed for nearly 2,000 companies and government agencies. Battelle’s business volume is nearly $1 billion a year. Typically, this work results in between 50-100 patented inventions each year.

Legal Structure

Governed by a self-perpetuating Board of Directors, Battelle is a nonprofit (non-stock) Ohio corporation formed in 1925 under chapter 1719 of Ohio law, which provides for the incorporation of charitable trusts. Its nonprofit status notwithstanding, Battelle pays local, state, and federal taxes….

* * *

CIA “Fronts”

From: Harry Sweeney <Sweenfam@teleport.com>
Newsgroups: alt.politics.org.cia
Subject: Re: Known CIA fronts (200+ listed here)
Date: 20 Sep 1996

The following several hundred firms and persons represent “suspected” or reported fronts as found in various published resources or based on my personal beliefs arrived at through personal experience and research.

Most of these are out of date, out of business (disbanded or evolved to some new operation), but the list serves as example of the marvelous diversity and clever (or not so clever) naming conventions applied….

Keep in mind that there ARE NO FRONTS. CIA was ordered by Congress to divest, and they have. The CIA obeys Congress and the law… by “selling” the fronts to “retired” CIA.

Of course, if they should still do favors for CIA, that would be OK. If CIA gives them business, that would be OK. So it is business as usual, with LESS oversight by Congress, thanks to their “crack down” on errant CIA activities. . . .

~ ~ ~

Here are just a few familiar names from Harry Sweeney’s list:

>> Battelle Memorial Institute and other Battelle operations (hires retired spooks in quantity): Jim Hougan, Spooks

>> Bill (Slick Willy) Clinton (President, and CIA operative): The Spotlight.

>> Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham and Wong: Johathan Kwitny, The Crimes Of Patriots

>> Price Waterhouse (not a true front, but certified obviously fraudulent books for CIA fronts): Kwitny, The Crimes Of Patriots

>> Quantum Corp (not the hard drive maker): Jim Hougan, Spooks

>> Resorts International (Parent of Intertel): Jim Hougan, Spooks

>> Wackenhut: Jim Hougan, Spooks; Michael Riconosciuto, Wackenhut/CIA operative . . .

~ ~ ~

For more on the CIA connection, GO TO > > > The Secret Nests


 

Bay Ship Management, Inc.From the FBI Website:

Fraud Against the Government —
Maritime Procurement Initiative (MPI)

In June 1994, allegations of fraud regarding repair contracts for work onboard United States Naval Ships (USNS) were reported to law enforcement Agents. The allegations indicated that the fraud was rampant and could possibly impact the seaworthiness of these vessels.

Kickbacks, false claims, and fraudulently inflated contracts were the most flagrant violations reported.

A task force of Agents from the FBI, Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service was quickly formed to investigate. The task force agreed that the most effective approach to investigate was the use of an undercover operation utilizing a covert contracting business. The covert business, staffed by undercover Agents, would give investigators the ability to gain the best evidence of fraud through direct contact with the subjects.

The initial phase of the investigation corroborated allegations that certain employees of Bay Ship Management, Inc. (BSM) were demanding kickbacks and fraudulently inflating contracts for certain subcontractors. In some cases, contracts were processed for work that was never performed.

The task force learned that BSM was awarded a $200 million privatized ship management contract for eight USNS which operate under the direction of the Military Sealift Command (MSC). The MSC is responsible for sustaining U.S. military forces through the sea delivery of equipment and supplies.

As the investigation developed, the undercover business expanded, eventually operating in Jacksonville, FL; New Orleans, LA; Houston, TX; Norfolk, VA; and San Francisco, CA. In total, the undercover Agents recorded more than 3,000 conversations and videotaped dozens of meetings with subjects. The covert business processed more than 400 contracts for repairs onboard the USNS. The majority of these contracts were fraudulently inflated or issued for work that was never performed.

The covert phase of the investigation concluded in August 1998 when Agents executed a search warrant at BSM headquarters in Englewood, NJ. Simultaneously, dozens of subjects across the country were interviewed and federal grand jury subpoenas were issued for testimony and documents.

In August 1999, the initial charges against 21 individuals and one company were announced to the public. The investigation is continuing and criminal charges against other subjects are expected. Additionally, debarment actions against dozens of companies are underway. The debarment action will prevent these companies from doing business with the United States government.

For more on U S Navy contracts, GO TO > > > The Sinking of the Ehime Maru; The Torch of Eric Shine


 

Carlyle Group – See Birds that Drink from Cesspools


 

Charles Rosoetti – IRS CHIEF ON THE TAKE?

CHARLES ROSSOTTI
GETS KICKBACKS

By: Uri Dowbenko

The multi-millionaire IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti acts as if the usual rules don’t apply to him. And actually he’s right. They don’t.

In a glaring conflict of interest, Charles Rossotti, Commissioner of the US Internal Revenue Service and former Chairman of American Management Systems Inc. (AMS), has retained between $16 million and $80 million of AMS stock.

It’s the ultimate insider’s deal. In essence, Rossotti gets a kickback every time AMS, a computer data-processing company based in Fairfax, Virginia, gets a new government contract.

Rossotti’s ownership of AMS stock was revealed in financial disclosure forms filed in May 2000.

In 1998, the New York Times reported that Rossotti was the largest individual shareholder in AMS, a company that had revenues of $1.28 billion in 2000.

Unlike Vice President Dick Cheney who sold his Halliburton Corp. stock and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill who sold $100 million worth of his Alcoa Corp. stock, Rossotti refuses to divest.

In fact, Rossotti flaunts his conflict of interest and ethically challenged behavior.

Appointed by President Clinton in 1997, Rossotti’s brazen ethics-be-damned position is buttressed by the fact that later he received an executive waiver of conflict of interest rules from the Clinton Administration.

According to Insight Magazine (“IRS Boss Snagged Clinton Waiver” by John Berlau, April 30, 2001), Rossotti got a waiver from Stuart Eizenstat, Clinton’s deputy Treasury Secretary. This last minute waiver allows Rossotti to participate in decisions regarding AMS contracts with the IRS. In essence, Rossotti can continue to ensure that AMS interests – and his own – continue to be served by new as well as ongoing government contracts.

Incidentally AMS is supposed to be paid more than $17 million by the IRS this year for “add-ons” to existing contracts for internal software systems — the so-called Custodial Accounting Project (CAP).

IRS continues to give AMS these add-on contracts without taking new bids from any AMS competitors.

This egregious corporate-government fraud by IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti is unprecedented in recent history.

AMS: Corporate Insiders at the Government Trough

Founded by Charles Rossotti in 1970, AMS has leveraged its insider contacts and government contracts into a $1.28 billion global business with clients that include more than 43 state governments and federal agencies.

From 1965 to 1969, Rossotti himself was one of the so-called “Whiz Kids” of Defense Department Secretary (and unindicted war criminal) Robert McNamara, whose legacy remains the failed policy to prosecute the bogus Vietnam War.

Rossotti worked in the Office of Systems Analysis within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The Office’s claim to fame was inventing the use of “body counts” (dead “enemy” soldiers) as a gauge of “success” during the infamous war. McNamara received an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1939, and Rossotti got his MBA from Harvard in 1964.

Headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, AMS has approximately 8,750 employees in 512 offices worldwide. According to the AMS website, its clients include the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), General Services Administration (GSA), the Army Reserve, State Department, Treasury Department and the Department of Defense.

In its 1997 Annual Report, AMS claims that the “US Department of Defense (DoD) has contracted with AMS for the Standard Procurement System to automate and streamline the DoD-wide procurement system.”

The automation has evidently been so “successful” that four years later, whistle-blower Al Martin, a former Naval Intelligence officer, reports that Defense Department fraud is at an all time high.

In his report on government fraud, Al Martin writes that “at the party, there was an active lieutenant general, an active three star general no less, who was talking about moving his fraud money to Corsica. This is the type of scam that’s been done for years. He’s just doing it a little more professionally. It’s called the Old Double-Inventory-Whammo-Scam, and it’s often done against the Department of Defense. The general is doing it with his clique of ten confederates. Some are in DoD Procurement. Some are in DoD Inventory Control. Some are in DoD Payment and Disbursement. And some are in DoD Audit. You have to have someone in each of these offices to make the scam work”

“He was bragging about it,” Martin continues. “We just committed this scam last week. It cost $40,000 and it netted $2.5 million.’’ He said his end was $250,000 and it just got wired to his offshore account. He’s going to bury the money by buying a piece of beachfront property in Corsica because he doesn’t have anything else to do with it.”

“The scam is relatively simple,” Martin writes. “They are reselling back to the Department of Defense actual Department of Defense inventory items that the Department of Defense already owns, but doesn’t realize it owns. They go through the massive Department of Defense inventory list. They look for some esoteric but generic part. It doesn’t have to be big. Just something that can be easily misplaced or mislaid.”

“What this guy does on the inside is he simply deletes from the computer. That’s all he does. He deletes it. He doesn’t leave a paper trail pretending it was sold to some other company. It’s just erased. It’s just deleted.”

By the way, at Donald Rumsfeld’s confirmation hearing, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) said, “I seriously question an increase in the Pentagon budget in the face of the Department’s recent Inspector General’s report.

How can we seriously consider a $50 billion increase in the Defense Department budget when DoD’s own auditors say the Department cannot account for $2.3 trillion transactions in one year alone?

Rossotti’s IRS Shakedowns:
Political Enemies Audited

The long-standing tradition of failing upward has finally landed Rossotti in the office of Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.

According to his website bio, Charles Rossotti “assumed his duties as Commissioner on November 13, 1997, pledging to turn the IRS into an organization that will consistently provide first-class service to the American public.”

This stance belies the ugly reality of the IRS and its ongoing shakedowns of perceived political enemies. Its well-known tactics of fear and intimidation have been increasing steadily, marking the IRS as a reasonable facsimile of Soviet thuggery and/or banana republic corruption.

Since Rossotti assumed office, many political enemies of the administration have suffered IRS audits. These audits can only be construed as politically motivated de facto harassment.

A partial list of those targeted by Rossotti and his allegedly “kinder gentler” IRS include:

> Joseph Farah and The Western Journalism Center

> Juanita Broaddrick, who publicly accused Clinton of raping her while he was Arkansas attorney general

> National Center for Public Policy, a group critical of Clinton’s environmental policies

> Bill O’Reilly of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor

> Citizens Against Government Waste.

> Catherine Austin Fitts, former FHA Commissioner under Jack Kemp and President of Hamilton Securities, a company which ironically saved HUD $2.2 billion through its innovative loan sales/auction.

Rosssotti Hires AMS Pals
for High-Paying IRS Jobs

The IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 mandated that the IRS Commissioner hire non-IRS personnel for top positions in the tax-collection agency.

In an obvious quid pro quo, IRS Commissioner Rossotti then managed to hire two state tax honchos who had a prior history with AMS.

John LaFaver, Secretary of Revenue for the State of Kansas, was appointed IRS deputy commissioner for modernization, while Val Oveson, formerly chairman of the Utah State Tax Commission, was appointed national taxpayer advocate.

Even though both officials have since left IRS, both LaFaver and Oveson headed state agencies, which hired AMS to oversee the modernization of their respective states’ tax collection computer systems.

In another instance of the revolving door syndrome between corporate and government networks, LaFaver’s successor as Kansas Secretary of Revenue, Karla Pierce, went to work for Computer Sciences Corp, the lead contractor in IRS “modernization” project. Pierce, likewise, had been project manager when AMS’s Kansas contract began….

For more, GO TO > > > HUD: The Housing & Urban Disaster


 

Charlie Trie A foreigner who might just have helped buy the U.S. presidency and sell out the U.S. of A.

Nov, 1994:

President Clinton travels to Indonesia with a U.S. delegation including Webb Hubbell and Bruce Lindsey. They meet twice with Mochtar and James Riady. The Asian-Pacific Economic Council (APEC) Conference is hosted in Jakarta by President Suharto. In attendance is Pauline Kanchanalak, Gene and Nora Lum, and Charlie Trie. The number one priority for Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, according to some sources, was the sale of U.S. weapons, such as the F-16 Fighting Falcon jet fighters, to Indonesia.

Feb, 1996:

Ron Brown meets with Wang Jun, chairman of the state-owned China International Trust & Investment Corp. Wang and Charlie Trie attended a White House coffee with Clinton. President Clinton approves the launch of four U.S. satellites on China Aerospace rockets, after signing assault weapon waivers – despite evidence that China was still exporting nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan and Iran.

March, 1996:

Ron Brown is granted a delay in scheduled testimony in a civil case brought by Judicial Watch. Charlie Trie presents Michael Cardozo, executive director of the Presidential Legal Expense Trust (a defense fund set up by Bill & Hillary Clinton to help pay their legal bills) with two manila envelopes containing checks and money orders for more than $450,000. The fund returned about $70,000 of this immediately, but deposited $378,300.

Apr 3, 1996:

A plane carrying Ron Brown and 34 others crashes over Croatia. There are no survivors….


 

Dan Inouye – U.S. Senator (D) from Hawaii, called by some Hawaii’s “Political Godfather”.

From Army Magazine, July 2001:

SENATE TURNOVER

With the defection of Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords from Republican to Independent, the Senate has shifted to Democratic Party control. Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) has become the Majority Leader and Harry Reid (D-NV) the Majority Whip.

A previous agreement between Daschle and then-Majority Leader Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) called for an even division of committee seats between Democrats and Republicans until one party “attains a majority of the whole number of senators.”

Therefore, even though the current committee and subcommittee chairmen will surrender their posts to Democrats, the committees and subcommittees will still reflect the close split in the Senate.

The Armed Services Committee chairman Sen. John Warner (R-VA) will relinquish his seat to Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI). The subcommittee leadership positions will also pass to Democrats but have not been finalized.

The Defense Appropriations gavel will go to Sen. Dan Inouye (D-HI).

* * *

From AllPolitics:

FISCAL 1997 PORK TOTALS
Per Capita, Per State, June 9, 1997:

Rank: #1Hawaii

Population: 1,183,723

Pork/per Capita: $131.01

Pork Dollars: $155,078,000

(For comparison: Michigan ranked at the bottom of the pork barrel with a Population of 9,594,350, with Pork/per Capita of $0.96, for total Pork Dollars of $9,594,350.)

* * *

ABC News, 2/2/97, by James Walker: The King of Pork . . . Dan Inouye is the second largest industry in the state of Hawaii,” says Richard Borreca of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

That’s because in just the last five years, Inouye has brought home almost half a billion in federal tax dollars. The senator has mastered the recipe for pork: one part seniority, mixed with a choice assignment on a powerful spending committee….

Pork Barrels at Sea

When local historians wanted to build a replica of a Polynesian canoe, they went to Sen. Inouye and he delivered.

Two million dollars in federal funds and the Hawaii`iloa was built– all 57 feet, 17 thousand pounds of it. The goal was to show how the first Hawaiians sailed to their new home.

Donald Duckworth of Bishop Museum is an admirer of Inouye’s ways. “Certainly out here, we admire and respect Senator Inouye’s translation of our needs.”

But what some call need, others call waste.

How does a boondoggle like this get funded anyway?

Read Between the Lines

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, says it’s because some lawmakers slip requests for special projects into huge appropriations bills that no one is likely to scrutinize.

McCain claimed he knew nothing of the Polynesian canoe. “Many times we don’t know what’s in these bills until after they’re signed into law.”

Inouye also used a 203-page military-appropriations bill to get a company a 30-year monopoly on the cruise business in Hawaii.

“You give one company a monopoly to cruise the very beautiful islands of Hawaii, the consumers are going to pay, and clearly, far in excess of what they otherwise would if there was competition,” said Sen. McCain.

Senator Inouye declined ABC News’ request for an interview.

Meanwhile, the pork projects keep flowing into Hawaii.

And Senator Inouye keeps spending your money….

~ ~ ~

Catbird comment: What the preceding article doesn’t tell you: Bishop Museum was endowed by Charles Reed Bishop, the husband of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop AND THE TRUSTEES FOR THE C.R. BISHOP ESTATE ARE THE SAME POLITICALLY-CONNECTED TRUSTEES AS FOR THE KAMEHAMEHA SCHOOLS / BISHOP ESTATE !

AND WHO WAS THE PROJECT DIRECTOR FOR THE $2 MILLION CANOE?

Try guessing NAINOA THOMPSON – one of the five NEW TRUSTEES (and son of retired trustee, Myron Thompson, one of the co-investors in the infamous McKenzie Methane deal!)

Another coincidence?

* * *

Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 10/28/96, by Ian Y. Lind:

Isle Woman Part of Campaign Probe

Former resident Nora Lum figures in congressional
investigation into ‘92 finances.

Congressional investigators have renewed a probe of former Hawaii resident Nora T. Lum, and a 1992 campaign project which she headed, because of their links to Democratic National Committee fund-raiser John Huang and former DNC official Melinda Yee.

David Bossie, staff investigator for Rep. Dan Burton, said last week that investigators are “extremely interested” in Lum’s association with Huang and Yee in the Asian Pacific Advisory Council (APAC-Vote), a DNC project that operated out of offices in Torrance, Calif, during the fall of 1992.

Bossie said APAC-Vote is drawing new scrutiny because its “cast of characters” included Huang, then an officer of the Indonesian-owned Lippo Bank in Los Angeles; the late Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown, then chairman of the DNC; and Melinda Yee, an assistant to Brown at the DNC and national director of Asian Pacific American affairs for the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign.

Following the 1992 elections, Brown was appointed secretary of commerce and named Huang and Yee to key positions in the department….

Huang and Yee have been ordered to testify in a lawsuit by the conservative organization, Judicial Watch, which wants to know whether Commerce Dept trade missions were used to raise funds for the Democratic Party….

APAC-Vote officially opened its office on Sept 9, 1992, the same day then-candidate Bill Clinton announced the formation of the Asian Pacific American Committee for Clinton-Gore, whose roster included Sen. DAN INOUYE, Sen. DAN AKAKA, Rep. PATSY MINK, and then-Gov. JOHN WAIHEE….

* * *

January, 1997

New York Mob at Mena

By Ace R. Hayes, Portland Free PressYet another CIA-Mafia drug connection: Richard Brenneke puts mob boss John Gotti and CIA boss Donald Gregg in the middle of contra drug operations at Mena Airport.

In Dec 1996, the Portland Free Press secured a copy of Richard Brenneke’s 21 June 1991 sworn-deposition before Congressman William Alexander, Jr, and Chad Farris, chief deputy attorney general of Arkansas. . . .

We secured former congressman William Alexander’s fax number and sent him a request for confirmation. We got more than we hope for – Jan 1997: “… the Brenneke transcript, along with other evidence of money laundering by Barry Seal at Mena, Arkansas, was delivered to Judge Walsh for action. Nothing followed. I agree that the American people deserve to know the truth about our government. Thank you for providing it. Good luck.” (signed Bill Alexander) . . .

The American people, since World War II, or World War I, or the Spanish American War– take your choice– have witnessed the tip of many criminal icebergs. The official investigations of the criminal icebergs almost always stopped at the waterline. The other 90 percent of the criminal icebergs were never hauled onto the beach for complete examination, prosecution and correction.

The criminal cases of 1980 to the present are in perfect harmony with this honored tradition. This is, of course, why Americans are the most profoundly ignorant people on planet earth. The illusion of knowledge is far worse than knowing you don’t know.

The Iran-Contra-cocaine criminal iceberg was subjected to a series of bogus investigations and damage control “exposes.”

The Tower Commission and Select Committee of the House and Senate on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition in 1987, began the damage control operation for the Imperial state.

But the Hall of Shame did not stop with John Tower, Ed Muskie and Brent Scowcroft or Dan Inouye and Lee Hamilton. It included Senator John Kerry and his Special Counsel Jack Blum and Staff Aid Dick McCall.

It reached to the Special Counsel, Judge Lawrence E. Walsh….

* * *

From Shadow, by Bob Woodward: . . .

THE REAL THREAT to the Reagan presidency, Harold Baker and Arthur Culvahouse knew, lived across town in the Watergate Hotel . . . In room 609 of the hotel, Lawrence E. Walsh, 75, had set up living quarters after being named by the three-judge panel as the independent counsel for Iran-contra….

One of Walsh’s first stops was the CIA, which gave his team space and filing cabinets in the basement of agency headquarters in Virginia so they could look at top-secret codeword documents. Early in the investigation, the IRS gave Walsh 11 agents who were experts in tracing hidden money so Walsh could attempt to understand the “Enterprise” that North had set up using Swiss bank accounts for the Iran arms sales, the secret contras resupply and other covert operations.

Iran-contra had dozens of tentacles, and Walsh chose to pursue nearly all of them. He was not sure if he was chasing rabbits or where they might take him. His authority from the three-judge panel called on him to prosecute any related crimes he uncovered, even by underlings. His preoccupation became (Oliver) North and (John) Poindexter, the operational officers….

Iran-contra would not go away for Bush. Although on September 29 the judge in the (Caspar) Weinberger case dismissed a key obstruction charge, ruling the independent counsel had not shown that Weinberger corruptly worked with others, he demanded a proper reindictment within the next month….

On Wednesday, October 28, six days before the election, Barrett faxed a copy of the new indictment to Walsh in Oklahoma….

Walsh was determined to proceed with the Weinberger trial. He approved an expenditure of $32,600 for Brosnahan to conduct a mock trial before 36 citizens who were paid to act as jurors. After the presentation of the prosecution and defense cases, the 36 people were divided into three separate juries….

Bob Bennett, Weinberger’s attorney, told Gray his client’s trial could be embarrassing for Bush, who might be called as a witness.

Gray said he was exploring the pardon option.

“What can I do?” Bennett asked.

“Get some Democratic cover,” Gray said, “and I’ve got to be convinced it’s a one- or two-day story.”

Among others, Bennett recruited House Speaker Tom Foley, the Washington State Democrat, to phone Gray pledging his support for a Weinberger pardon.

Bennett also enlisted Senators Daniel Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, and Warren Rudman, who headed the Senate Iran-contra probe, to write a letter of support….

Bush had some reservations. On Tues, Dec 22, he dictated into his diary, “The pardon of Weinberger will put a tarnish, kind of a downer, on our legacy.”

Before going to Camp David that Christmas weekend, where he planned to make the final decision on pardons, Bush was in the Oval Office . . . “Okay, Marlin,” Bush asked Fitzwater. “What’s your final recommendation?”

“Pardon all of them.”

Gray was strongly in favor of pardons. It would end the Walsh investigation. He had his deputies call around to the lawyers for other convicted Iran-contra figures to see if they would accept pardons. Four did: two CIA officers, Elliott Abrams, and former national security adviser Bud McFarlane.

Gray helped draft a three-page executive order explaining the reasoning.

Bush signed it on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1992….

For more on Sen. Dan Inouye, GO TO > > > Broken Trust


 

DynCorp – Go to > > > Dying for DynCorp


 

EG&G – A Carlyle Group company that just may be involved in one of the greatest conspiracies in history.

For much more, GO TO > > > Down the Rabbit-Hole


 

Eagle-Picher TechnologiesFrom Hoovers On-Line: . . . From filters to forklifts, Eagle-Picher Industries (EPI) makes products for the automotive, aerospace, construction, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, and food and beverage industries….

The company’s Technologies Segment makes batteries for satellites, launch vehicles, and missiles, as well as boron for nuclear applications.

Dutch investment firm Granaria Holdings owns EPI. . . .

* * *

Dec. 6, 2001

Smart Bombs Made Dumb?

Did Faulty Batteries Cause Failure
Of Precision Guided Weapons?

JOPLIN, MO (CBS) – In Afghanistan, American aircraft have dropped more so-called smart bombs than in any other war, reports CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales.

But dozens of these missiles and guided bombs have missed their target, some hitting civilians, allied troops, even our own soldiers.

Sometimes faulty coordinates or bad weather are to blame, but in other cases the weapons’ guidance systems fail, as happened twice one October weekend.

“Preliminary indications are that the weapons guidance system malfunctioned,” said Victoria Clarke, assistant Secretary of Defense.

A 1,000-pound smart bomb went off target and hit a senior citizens’ center near Herat. In Kabul, 500-pound guided bombs went astray and slammed into a residential area, reportedly killing 25 civilians.

“People’s lives depend on those weapons working and chances are, they’re not going to work,” said Rick Peoples.

Peoples used to work at Eagle-Picher Technologies in Joplin, Mo. The plant makes sophisticated batteries that power the guidance systems inside virtually all of America’s precision guided weapons.

“It’s very possible that these failures, and it’s very likely these failures are happening because of the batteries,” Peoples said.

Due to production and testing problems at the plant, Peoples said, some were duds. Others exploded. Many developed cracks and should have been discarded, costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But employees tell us after-hours – with government inspectors gone that they were ordered to seal the cracks with an unapproved material called loctite.

“And Eagle Picher did this not on hundreds, not on thousands, but on millions of batteries that they sold,” Peoples said.

The airtight batteries are supposed to survive inside stored missiles for years, but loctite can degrade, letting air in and rendering the batteries useless.

Eagle-Picher officials declined our requests for an on-camera interview, but the company said there is no evidence to support the allegations, and that their batteries work just as they should.

Former chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen. Ronald Fogleman, said this potential problem needs to be checked out.

“Any end-to-end investigation I think will require them to go back and look at the internal components of the guidance system to make sure there is no history of failure,” Fogelman said.

Peoples, a former Marine, has filed a whistle-blower suit against Eagle-Picher.

The alleged cover-up, Peoples said, “has jeopardized our national defense to the point where it is criminal fraud and someone should pay.”

© MMI, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.


 

Frank C. Carlucci – 16th U.S. Secretary of Defense, Reagan Administration, November 23, 1987 – January 20, 1989

From Biography

Frank C. Carlucci, who had served as Caspar Weinberger’s deputy secretary between 1981 and 1983, succeeded him as secretary of defense. Carlucci was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on 18 October 1930. After graduation from Princeton University in 1952, he served two years as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. In 1956 after study at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and a short stint in private business, Carlucci joined the Department of State as a foreign service officer….

In 1975 Carlucci returned to the State Department to serve as ambassador to Portugal until 1978, when he went to the Central Intelligence Agency as deputy director, staying until January 1981. The next month he joined Weinberger at the Department of Defense as deputy secretary….

After he left the Pentagon, Carlucci joined the Carlyle Group, a Washington investment partnership, as vice president and managing director; he later became chairman.

In the ensuing years, he wrote, spoke, and testified frequently on defense issues.

He addressed again the problem of congressional micromanagement of DoD, continued to advocate rail deployment of the MX, and supported the new B-2 bomber as necessary in the nuclear deterrent triad….

For more on the Carlyle Group, GO TO > > > Birds that Drink from Cesspools


 

General Dynamics – Watch this nest grow.

For more on Gordon R. England and General Dynamics, GO TO > > > Homeland Security


 

General Electric – The world’s most valuable corporation.

From Corporate Predators: . . . Meet Neutron Jack Welch. He is the chief executive officer of General Electric, the world’s most valuable corporation. Perhaps America’s most ruthless manager, Welch puts profits above human and community concerns….

Enter Thomas O’Boyle. O’Boyle, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and current assistant managing editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has written a hard-hitting expose titled “At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric and the Pursuit of Profit” (Knopf, 1998), in which he raises the question–”Is profit and return on investment all we should care about?”

To which he answers, “Of course not.” But this simple question, and obvious answer, has shaken the business media out of its complacency….

Over 17 years as CEO, Welch eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs, bought and sold hundreds of businesses, and shifted the company’s focus from manufacturing to entertainment, O’Boyle reports.

During the same period, the company was caught in a web of scandals including defective refrigerators brought to market, industrial wastes improperly buried, excessive radiation in the workplace, fraud in military contract procurement, and the Kidder, Peabody financial disaster— all reported in detail in the book….

For more, GO TO > > > General Electric


 

Goldman Sachs The Goldman Sachs Group is a leading global investment banking and securities firm with many eggs in the Pentagon nests.

For More GO TO > > > Dirty Gold in Goldman Sachs?


 

Halliburton, Inc. – Dick Cheney’s nest where he hatched his humongous U.S.-taxpayer-paid-for eggs.

February 9, 2002

Big Contractor Settles
Lawsuit in Fraud Case

The New York Times

SACRAMENTO (AP) —— A military contractor will pay the government $2 million to settle accusations that it defrauded the government, the United States attorney’s office here said.

Kellogg Brown & Root, a Houston subsidiary of the multinational energy services corporation Halliburton, was accused of inflating contract prices for maintenance and repairs at Fort Ord, a military base, now closed, near Monterey, Calif.

The company admitted no liability in the settlement and denied any wrongdoing, said a Halliburton spokeswoman, Wendy Hall. The settlement precludes further investigations and penalties, Ms. Hall said, and Halliburton expects to continue as a major military contractor.

Under the terms of its contract, Kellogg Brown & Root did not bid against other contractors for maintenance and repair projects; instead, it presented the military with fixed costs that it said were necessary for specific projects.

The suit, filed in Sacramento, said the company submitted false claims and made false statements in connection with 224 delivery orders between April 1994 and September 1998.

Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chairman and chief executive when the government says Kellogg Brown & Root made the false claims and statements, but no evidence has surfaced that Mr. Cheney knew of them….

For more, GO TO > > > Halliburton from Hell


 

Honeywell International – From AFL-CIO Executive Pay Watch: . . . AlliedSignal changed its name to Honeywell International after it acquired its manufacturing rival in Dec 1999.

“Back at old Honeywell, there was a culture that took care of the employees and the community,” explains stock analyst Nicholas Heymann . . . After the merger, the new Honeywell announced it would increase job cuts from 3,500 to 8,000 in the year 2000.

As head of the USA-NAFTA corporate coalition, CEO Lawrence Bossidy stated on national television that if NAFTA passed he did not anticipate the export of additional American jobs to Mexico.

Two years after passage of the free trade agreement, AlliedSignal had the largest number of petitions at the U.S. Dept of Labor from workers displaced by NAFTA….

* * *

From The Project On Government Oversight, Executive Summary, Sept 1999:

Defense Waste and Fraud Camouflaged
As Reinventing Government

Overpriced spare parts horror stories from the 1980s taught us how to prevent fraud, and led to useful reforms. By the 1990s, however, defense industry interests dovetailed with Vice President Gore’s Reinventing Government campaign, and new policies bypassed some of the earlier reforms.

In the name of adopting “commercial” practices, the Administration’s defense Acquisition Reform effort has gone beyond cutting red tape into throwing out important protections against contractor abuse that are needed even in a more commercial environment. For example, a new greatly expanded definition for a “commercial” product has exempted many more purchases from normal oversight.

The problem has predictably begun to appear in the form of more overpriced parts stories:

AlliedSignal corporation was found to have overcharged the government for spare parts by as much as 618%. The government overpaid on the overall contract with AlliedSignal by 54.5%.

Prices were inflated by more than 1,000 percent on a variety of spare parts. For example, the Boeing price for a commercially-available $24.72 “spoiler actuator sleeve” was $403.39 – a markup of 1,532 percent. Another contractor charged $714 for an electric bell worth $46.68.

The cause – Acquisition Reform’s new policies, including drastic staff cuts to oversight agencies:

The AlliedSignal cases provide examples of the government paying more for spare parts under the new “commercial” rules than it paid under the earlier reforms. As the Defense Department’s Office of the Inspector General has noted, the loose definition of commercial items “qualifies most items that DoD procures as commercial items” [Emphasis added].

A Defense Department Inspector General’s report indicates how adopting commercial practices has come to mean subservience to contractors and blind acceptance of their claimed costs and prices: “contracting officers shall require information … when necessary to determine price reasonableness for commercial items, but there is a strong Department of Defense preference not to use that mechanism and the Government has not asserted its right to have the data.”

Despite highly favorable dollar returns on taxpayer investment in oversight agencies, many of them have been gutted by personnel cuts. For example, the Defense Contract Audit Agency saves almost $10 for each dollar invested, but staff positions have been cut by 19% from Fiscal Year (FY) 1993 to FY 1997. As of 1998 the Administration scheduled it to suffer a total loss of more than 3,000 staffers – a 44% cut – over the period FY 1990 to FY 2002.

The Administration has pushed defense corporate mergers, at a time when Acquisition Reform has failed to create adequate competition, a key requirement for the government to benefit from commercial markets.

As a Department of Defense Inspector General noted, “If anything, the risks may be greater today because there is such market dominance by a few very large suppliers. In this environment, getting cost information and maintaining audit rights is a prudent business practice. Failure to do so will be very costly for the Department and ultimately the taxpayer.” . . .

(For more, GO TO > > > Global Beat Home Page.)


 

Hughes Electronics – One of the big boys.

From Betrayal-How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security, by Bill Gertz:

President Clinton has turned upside down President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning about a too-powerful military-industrial complex.

Using the end of the Cold War as cover, and to please corporate bigshots targeted for campaign contributions, Clinton has loosened export controls on several high-technology sectors, including U.S. high-speed computer manufacturers, software makers, and communications satellite makers who want to sell to China.

Two such companies are Loral Space & Communications, Ltd. and Hughes Electronics, both the subject of a federal investigation to determine how they passed embargoed militarily-useful rocket technology to Beijing without licenses…

Hughes was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, who was named head of the influential President’s Export Council after lobbying vigorously — and successfully — for the easing of U.S. National security export controls.

Shortly after the “decontrols” took place, American supercomputers began showing up in both Chinese and Russian nuclear weapons development centers — helping to build nuclear arms that might one day be turned against the United States….

* * *

December 15, 2001

French Media Giant Buys into EchoStar

PARIS (AP) – Vivendi Universal is investing $1.5 billion in the U.S. satellite TV company EchoStar Communications . . .

Under the eight-year deal announced yesterday, Vivendi will feed EchoStar’s 6 million DISH Network satellite customers in the United States a range of television programming, films and music.

In return for its investment, the French group gets a 10 percent stake in EchoStar – money that will help the No. 2 satellite television company in the United States finance a planned $30 billion merger with rival satellite TV service operator Hughes Electronics.

Hughes is a division of automaker General Motors….

The partnership will leave Vivendi with a holding of just less than 5 percent in a merged EchoStar-Hughes Communications should that deal be approved by U.S. regulators….


 

Intertek Testing Services – London-based environmental testing company accused of falsifying results of environmental safety tests.

From New York Times, 9/23/99:

Federal authorities said that thousands of environmental safety tests at Superfund locations, landfills and other hazardous waste sites between 1994 and 1997 will have to be repeated because the company that performed the tests falsified the results.

The phony test results mean that some sites thought to be safe from carcinogens and other contaminants might hold chemicals or other harmful materials, the federal authorities said….

Federal prosecutors announced on Thurs that 13 former employees of the London-based company, Intertek Testing Services, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Dallas and charged with up to 30 counts of fraud and lying to the government. Prosecutors said the test results were falsified to save the company time and money.

All 13 employees worked for an Intertek subsidiary, Environmental Laboratories, in Richardson, Texas. But documents unsealed on Thursday also show that former employees have told investigators that similar problems existed at the subsidiary’s laboratory in Houston.

The most senior Intertek official indicted was Martin Dale Jeffus, 52, of Greenville, Texas. . . . If convicted on all counts, Jeffus could face as much as 155 years in prison and a $7.5 million fine, prosecutors said….

Intertek tested soil, water and air samples for carcinogens and other toxins, mostly for environmental consulting and engineering firms and for the federal government and state governments….

From Jan 1994 to Dec 1997 … the company performed tests on more than 59,000 sample projects, including many from Superfund sites and military facilities, generating $35.7 million in billings. . . . One EPA official said it was likely more than 1,000 sites are involved….

The tests were falsified on a grand scale,” said Paul Coggins, the US atty for the Northern District of Texas. “None of the data coming out of this Richardson lab can be relied on. Too many employees and ex-employees have told investigators that the falsifications were routine and commonplace.”

* * *

Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 9/23/00: Pearl’s Safety Test Data May Be Phony: . . . Environmental safety testing at the Navy’s Superfund cleanup site at Pearl Harbor was performed by a Texas laboratory, where former employees have told federal investigators that work performed from 1994 to 1997 was falsified.

* * *

From the FBI website:

Environmental Crimes —— Lab Fraud

Lab fraud is committed by providers of environmental services. It takes the form of fraudulent testing/analysis designed to either show compliance and serve as the basis for false statements to regulatory government agencies or show violations in order to induce individuals and businesses to contract for unnecessary services.

Lab fraud cases go to the heart of a regulatory system that relies upon accurate reporting. The Lab Fraud Initiative is a prime example of criminal enforcement making the regulatory system work.

* * *

Catbird Comment: My crystal egg says that this is only the tip of the tail-feather. Improper expenditures of federal Superfund monies have been suspected for decades, with critics saying that billions of dollars were being spent largely on attorneys and litigation costs, with little going to the actual clean-up. It seems now that millions are also going to companies for fraudulent and worthless tests. My crystal egg also says that the major reason for this is may be to sell the government and huge corporations a “clean” report. This enables these corporations to get away with not cleaning up the sites, thus saving billions of dollars but costing workers and local citizens billions in health care costs, illnesses and deaths. (09/24/00)

Recommended Movie: Erin Brockovich


 

John Poindexter – Iran-contra convicted conspirator. Now spook-in-charge of the new Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is responsible for developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

* * *

From: Name Withheld for Security Purposes

To: The Catbird

Subject: Big John Poindexter Is Watching You

Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002

This is must read information:

http://www.sierratimes.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/topic.cgi?forum=21&topic=75

http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2002/11/12/231645

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2002Nov/gee20021112017253.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html?ex=1037941200&en=04a52

~ ~ ~

“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.

–Henrietta

~ ~ ~

November 9, 2002

Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would
Peek at Personal Data of Americans

By JOHN MARKOFF

The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe —— including the United States.

As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States….

Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to take charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is responsible for developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private information.

The possibility that the system might be deployed domestically to let intelligence officials look into commercial transactions worries civil liberties proponents.

“This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America,” said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington.

“The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has been briefed on the project by Admiral Poindexter and the two had a lunch to discuss it, according to a Pentagon spokesman….

An F.B.I. official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said the bureau had had preliminary discussions with the Pentagon about the project but that no final decision had been made about what information the F.B.I. might add to the system….

“A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this administration then by a future one,” said Barbara Simon, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery.

“Once you’ve got it in place you can’t control it.”…

If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.

The new system will rely on a set of computer-based pattern recognition techniques known as “data mining,” a set of statistical techniques used by scientists as well as by marketers searching for potential customers.

The system would permit a team of intelligence analysts to gather and view information from databases, pursue links between individuals and groups, respond to automatic alerts, and share information efficiently, all from their individual computers.

The project calls for the development of a prototype based on test data that would be deployed at the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Va. Officials would not say when the system would be put into operation.

The system is one of a number of projects now under way inside the government to lash together both commercial and government data to hunt for patterns of terrorist activities.

“What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts,” said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.

Before taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who was convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had worked as a contractor on one of the projects he now controls.

Admiral Poindexter’s conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal appeals court because he had been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress about the case….

~ ~ ~

November 21, 2002

Pentagon to Track
American Consumer Purchases

By Major Garrett

WASHINGTON —— A massive database that the government will use to monitor every purchase made by every American citizen is a necessary tool in the war on terror, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

Edward Aldridge, undersecretary of Acquisitions and Technology, told reporters that the Pentagon is developing a prototype database to seek “patterns indicative of terrorist activity.” Aldridge said the database would collect and use software to analyze consumer purchases in hopes of catching terrorists before it’s too late.

“The bottom line is this is an important research project to determine the feasibility of using certain transactions and events to discover and respond to terrorists before they act,” he said.

Aldridge said the database, which he called another “tool” in the war on terror, would look for telltale signs of suspicious consumer behavior.

Examples he cited were: sudden and large cash withdrawals, one-way air or rail travel, rental car transactions and purchases of firearms, chemicals or agents that could be used to produce biological or chemical weapons.

It would also combine consumer information with visa records, passports, arrest records or reports of suspicious activity given to law enforcement or intelligence services.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is home to the Pentagon’s brightest thinkers — the ones who built the Internet. DARPA will be in charge of trying to make the system work technically.

Rear Adm. John Poindexter, former national security adviser to President Reagan, is developing the database under the Total Information Awareness Program. Poindexter was convicted on five counts of misleading Congress and making false statements during the Iran-Contra investigation. Those convictions were later overturned, but critics note that his is a dubious resume for someone entrusted with so sensitive a task.

Aldridge said Poindexter will only “develop the tool, he will not be exercising the tool.” He said Poindexter brought the database idea to the Pentagon and persuaded Aldridge and others to pursue it.

“John has a real passion for this project,” Aldridge said.

TIAF’s office logo is now one eye scanning the globe. The translation of the Latin motto: knowledge is power. Some say, possibly too much power.

“What this is talking about is making us a nation of suspects and I am sorry, the United States citizens should not have to live in fear of their own government and that is exactly what this is going to turn out to be,” said Chuck Pena, senior defense policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

Pena and others say the database is an even greater violation of privacy rights than Attorney General John Ashcroft’s nixed proposal to turn postal workers and delivery men into government tipsters. No matter what protections Congress requires, Pena fears a database big enough and nimble enough to track the entire nation’s spending habits is ripe for abuse.

“I don’t think once you put something like this in place, you can ever create enough checks and balances and oversight,” Pena said.

But proponents say big business already has access to most of this data, but don’t do anything with it to fight terrorism.

“I find it somewhat counter intuitive that people are not concerned that telemarketers and insurance companies can acquire this data but feel tremendous trepidation if a government ventures into this arena. To me it just smacks of paranoia,” said David Rivkin, an attorney for Baker & Hostetler LLP….

* * *

From Derailing Democracy, by David McGowan:

CRACK WHORES

On July 22, 1989, the Associated Press reported that Costa Rica, considered the most democratic of all the Central American nations, officially declared that it considered several high level U.S. officials to be drug traffickers, and that they would henceforth be barred from entering the country.

The list included Lt. Col. Oliver North, Major General Richard Secord, and John Poindexter.

The American press collectively ignored the AP release.

~ ~ ~

“You are instructed that the United States has admitted for purposes of this trial the following facts to be true . . .

“In late August 1986, North reported to Admiral Poindexter that a representative of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega had asked North to meet with him. Nloreiga’s representative proposed that, in exchange for a promise from the U.S. government to help clean up Noriega’s image and a commitment to lift the U.S. government ban on military sales to the Panamanian defense forces, Noriega would assassinate the Sandinista leadership for the U. S. government….”

* * * * *

From Diplomacy by Deception, by Dr. John Coleman:

COVERT OPERATIONS

The excuse that Bush didn’t know what was going on in the Iran/Contra covert operation cannot be sustained because of the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which was tailor-made to knock the supports out from under such a defense.

The amendment was meant to make the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies accountable: “… unless and until the President finds that each such operation is important to the national security of the United States and reports in a timely fashion to the appropriated committee of the Congress, including the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee,” the covert operation would become unlawful.

So if either President Reagan or President Bush knew about the Iran/Contra operation, or, if they did not, then those engaged in it were acting in an illegal manner.

In the Iran/Contra covert operation, Admiral John Poindexter was the “fall guy” for President Reagan and President Bush, both of whom claimed to have no knowledge of it.

This is shocking, because it implies that here are two presidents who had no control over their military and intelligence departments. If Poindexter had not taken the stand to say that he never informed Bush about the specifics of the Iran/Contra operation, impeachment proceedings would have followed, which Bush with all of his powerful protection would not have been able to avoid.

In this, Bush was ably assisted by Congressman Lee Hamilton, whose investigation of the covert action was so poorly carried out at to amount to a total whitewash of the guilty parties, including Reagan and Bush….

~ ~ ~

For more on the Iran/Contra connection, GO TO : Meet Big Brother: John Poindexter & the Iran-Contra Gang


 

Lockheed Martin – From tripod.com, by Kaplan and Dubro: . . . Perhaps the best-known case of underworld involvement with political figures is the bribery scandal in the early 1970s involving Lockheed Corp’s attempt to win All Nippon Airways Co. Ltd’s business.

A key figure in this affair was Yoshio Kodama, a liaison between politicians and underworld groups.

Using money from Lockheed, Mr. Kodama, whose power and influence with gangsters as well as politicians remains unmatched even after his 1984 death, targeted payments to key government officials– including former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka– and employed the yakuza in a variety of capacities … to ensure that ANA selected Lockheed’s TriStar L-1011 wide-bodied jet over the competition’s planes….

* * *

From The Laundrymen: . . .

Crooks aren’t the only ones
who launder money.

Corporations do it to avoid or evade taxes, to defraud their shareholders, to get around currency control regulations, and to bribe prospective clients….

The Lockheed Corporation laundered $25.5 million through a Liechtenstein trust to pay off Italian politicians.

Lockheed also subscribed to the laundry facilities of Deak-Perera, then an important American foreign exchange dealer, to bribe Japanese politicians.

As Lockheed’s behest, Deak put $8.3 million into the washing cycle, then brought it out in 15 untraceable payments to a Spanish priest in Hong Kong, who hand-carried the cash in flight bags and orange crates to Lockheed’s customers in Tokyo. . . .

* * *

Before being named Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce,

NORMAN MINETA

– a former California congressman –

was an

EXECUTIVE

and

LOBBYIST

for

LOCKHEED MARTIN!

* * *

In January, 2001, President GEORGE W. BUSH (R) named NORMAN MINETA (D) as his SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION.

~ ~ ~

On September 11, 2001, under the watch of NORMAN MINETA, four U.S. airliners were hijacked.

~ ~ ~

On October 27, 2001, LOCKHEED MARTIN was granted the largest military contract in the history of our country.

~ ~ ~

For more, GO TO > > > Tarnished Wings


 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

GO TO > > > NASA


 

People’s Republic of China – From Year of the Rat: . . . Our thesis is simple. The Clinton administration has made a series of Faustian bargains and policy blunders that have allowed a hostile power to further its aims in Washington.

In the main, Bill Clinton and Al Gore did it for money….

* * *

Associated Press, by Joe McDonald, 9/21/00: . . . The U.S. Senate’s 85-13 vote Tuesday for permanent normal trade ties ended the contentious annual reviews of China’s trade status that buffeted relations for the past decade.

Chinese officials want the impending loss of trade barriers to prod farmers, factories and other companies to modernize. That serves their reform agenda, but in the short run, membership in the global free-trade body will lead to job losses and wrenching changes.

Although China’s WTO entry has been 14 years in the making, it isn’t clear whether Chinese firms, from farming to insurance, are ready to shed state protection and face richer, more sophisticated rivals from abroad. . . .

“In the long term, it’s beneficial for both sides,” said Patrick Powers, director of China operations for the U.S.-China Business Council, which represents 300 American companies….

* * *

For more >>> Year of the Dragon

For more >>> Crouching Dragon…Hidden Rats

For more >>> Dubious Deals in Arkansas

For more >>> Sen. Dan Burton’s Oversight Committee

For more >>> Johnny Chung Tells of Dealings with Chinese Donors

For more >>> Tripping With Secretary Ron Brown


 

Raytheon – One of the largest U.S. defense contractors. Two of the largest institutional owners of Raytheon are Britain’s Barclays Bank (a key member of the Committee of 300) and Citigroup.

Wiretap Suggests Raytheon Representative
Used Bribes to Secure $1.4 Billion
Contract in Brazil

Based on Reports in the Boston Globe, The LA Times and Associated Press

In November of 1995, a wiretap of Julio Cesar Gomes dos Santos, a special advisor to the Brazilian President Fernando Enrique Cardoso, indicated that Raytheon’s lobbyist may have bribed a senator to gain backing for a $1.4 billion dollar radar project.

According to transcripts published by the Brazilian weekly Isto E, Brazilian police wiretapped a telephone conversation between Gomes dos Santos and Raytheon’s operative in Brazil, Jose Afonso Assumpcãão.

When Assumpcãão told Gomes dos Santos that Brazilian Sen. Gilberto Miranda might block the Raytheon contract, Gomes dos Santos responded, “Damn, did you already pay this guy?”

Assumpcãão had also curried favor with Gomes dos Santos with a series of “gifts.” Gomes dos Santos and Brazil’s aviation minister were forced to resign because of the bribery scandal and their close association with Assumpcãão.

Ironically, according The Los Angeles Times, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had previously helped Raytheon to take the lead in gaining the contract by making bribery charges against a French competitor, Thomson, CSF.

The radar project, known as SIVAM, was eventually approved by the Brazilian Senate after Brazil’s President blocked a parliamentary investigation into accusations of corruption in the Raytheon contract.

The project will caste an electronic net over the Amazon, allegedly to protect the border, fight drug trafficking and to prevent environmental crime.

Raytheon Settles: Justice Department
Alleges Swindle of Taxpayers

On October 14, 1993, Raytheon paid $3.7 million to settle allegations that it misled the Defense Department by overstating the labor costs involved in manufacturing Patriot missiles.

The Justice Department said Raytheon failed to disclose that less skilled, lower-paid workers could produce the weapons, which gained fame as an “effective” weapon during the Persian Gulf war.

”The recovery of this money is yet another warning to contractors that the Truth in Negotiations Act’s information disclosure requirements will be strictly and sternly enforced,” Frank Hunger, assistant attorney general, said in a statement.

Although mere citizens would be thrown in jail for committing fraud on the scale alleged by the Justice Department, Raytheon was rewarded for this fraud when it received a $62.5 million contract just weeks before the settlement from the Army to upgrade Patriot radars under the Patriot Growth Program and an $18 million contract from the Marine Corps for mobility enhancement kits for the Hawk air defense system.

The true performance of the Patriot missiles during the Gulf War was grossly exaggerated by the Pentagon and Raytheon. Although they claimed that the Patriots were successful in intercepting incoming SCUD missiles, few if any of the SCUDS were actually stopped. Unfortunately, this military fraud on the public was never given due coverage in the mainstream press.

The story of the Patriot’s poor performance was recognized by Project Censored as one of the most censored stories in 1991.

* * *

Chief Executive Daniel Burnham

Earned $23.7 Million in 1998 for Six Months Work

Raytheon Chief Executive Daniel Burnham, who joined the defense contractor in July and was elevated to his current post on Dec. 1, raked in $23.7 million in salary, bonus and restricted stock awards in 1998, the company said in regulatory filings.

In a proxy filing on Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Raytheon said Burnham’s package covered salary of $425,004, a bonus of $1.5 million, and restricted stock awards worth $21.87 million. The stock awards vest over seven years, beginning July 1.

In addition, Burnham, who left his job as vice chairman at AlliedSignal Inc. in Morristown, N.J., to join the Lexington, Mass., company, received relocation expenses of $234,271, the company said.

Raytheon said Burnham’s huge stock grant was intended to compensate him for “forfeitures” he made for leaving AlliedSignal.

“That is predominantly just replacing what he left behind,” said spokeswoman Toni Simonetti.

Credit Reuters, 3/30/99

– Raytheon Watch is a project sponsored by J. Whitfield Larrabee & Associates, A People’s Law Firm.

~ ~ ~

For more, GO TO > > > P-s-s-t. Wanna buy a good audit?


 

Technology Strategies and Alliances – From The Buying of the President: . . . Defense Dollars and Deal Making. . . .

In Feb of 1995, the administration announced that for the first time it would consider the financial state of U.S. defense contractors when negotiating overseas arms sales. The administration has also pushed to relax export restrictions on high-tech equipment used to manufacture sophisticated weapons systems.

Part of what has ingratiated the Clinton administration to weapons manufacturers has been the presence of William J. Perry, first as Deputy Secretary and later as Secretary of Defense.

Perry is a former defense consultant who headed Technology Strategies and Alliances (TSA) between 1985 and 1993. TSA’s 1994 clients included Boeing, Grumman, Lockheed, Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop, Textron, Texas Instruments, TRW, Westinghouse, and 20 other defense contractors.

While Perry severed his ties with the company, he had amassed more than a million dollars in consulting fees from TSA’s clients. Not long after he joined the Defense Department, Perry began going to bat for the industry.

One of Deputy Defense Secretary Perry’s extra base hits came when he and then-Defense Undersecretary for Acquisitions and Technology John Deutch quietly agreed to provide U.S. defense contractors with taxpayer-finance subsidies for mergers and acquisitions.

That was a dramatic shift in Pentagon policy. Usually, such issues are taken before Congress. Instead, Deutch, in a July 21, 1993 memo, reversed the Pentagon’s ban on the subsidies and underwrote $270 million worth of TSA client Martin Marietta’s acquisition of General Electric’s Aerospace Division.

Just seven weeks earlier, on June 3, 1993, industry CEOs, including Martin Marietta’s Norman Augustine, had sent a letter to Perry and Deutch asking for DOD funding of “restructuring costs” for mergers and acquisitions. Perry also approved Northrop’s $2.1 billion acquisition of Grumman. Both were TSA clients. The Pentagon called the policy shift a “clarification” that did not require congressional consent. . . .

The policy shift required both Perry and Deutch to seek ethics waivers from rules that call for a one-year “cooling off” period before Pentagon officials can deal with former clients. They got them from then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin, whom Perry replaced in February 1994. Paul Kaminski got an ethics waiver in November of 1994, when he was named to head the Pentagon’s Acquisitions and Technology Department, replacing Deutch.

Deutch remained in the Pentagon loop a while longer and became Deputy Secretary of Defense before moving to the CIA.

Kaminski, who worked at TSA, is responsible for awarding $43 BILLION in defense programs to Pentagon contractors.

The Kaminski appointment marked the first time former defense industry consultants filled the Pentagon’s top three policy posts….


 

The Council on Foreign Relations – From And the Truth Shall Set You Free: . . .

With every year of the 20th century, the quickening pace of the New World Order agenda can be identified. A network of organizations developed rapidly after the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919, and today this network is the most influential of all the Global Elite structures in controlling world events. The organisations within this network are presented as harmless ‘think tanks’ and forums, but they are, in truth, part of a global web of deception and manipulation.

They were introduced to infiltrate all areas of politics, banking, business, the media, education, science, and the military. Their role is to recruit members who support the New World Order philosophy and ensure that they are appointed to positions of power and influence in all these areas of national and international life. . . .

All are offshoots of the original Round Table which began to give birth to this network after Versailles, with the creation of the Institute of International Affairs, based at Chatham House in London. It became the ‘Royal’ Institute when the sitting monarch became its official head in 1926. It was founded by members of the British and American delegations at Versailles when they gathered at the Hotel Majestic in Paris on May 30th, 1919. … Quite simply they were dedicated to the creation of the New World Order.

The Round Table had close links with the Rothschild, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Empires, and these connections were extended to the Royal Institute of International Affairs….

By far the most important of the Institute’s creations was the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the United States, which was to penetrate all areas of American life. This was formed in 1921 at the Harold Pratt House at 58 East 68th Street in New York, the former mansion of the Pratt family, close friends of the Rockefellers. Soon afterwards, the day-to-day administration was taken over by Colonel House and his associates, including the Rockefellers and, particularly, J.P. Morgan.

The CFR’s founding president was John W. Davis, J.P. Morgan’s personal attorney….

The power of the Council on Foreign Relations grew rapidly, and today it controls the administration of the United States, especially its foreign policy. Its goal is to introduce world government and it has spanned the United States with support groups….

There are circles of members answering to a central elite. The inner circle knows the agenda and works full time towards that target. The next circle knows all or most of the agenda and seek to use their own sphere of influence, politics, banking, the media, whatever, to lead the world in the desired direction. Other circles of people know some or a little of the real story and are persuaded to support the organisation by accepting the idea that a world government is the only answer to the ills of humanity. What this latter group doesn’t realise is that those ills are being created by the very organisations they are members of….

A few members of these Elite front-groups have had the courage to speak out when they have seen the game plan. Admiral Chester Ward, a former US Judge Advocate General of the Navy, was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations for 16 years. He said the purpose of the organisation was the “…submergence of US sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government”.

In his book, Kissinger On The Couch … Ward said: “The lust to surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States is pervasive throughout most of the membership … the main clique is composed of the one-world global-government ideologists….”

The Council on Foreign Relations is the Royal Institute, Stateside branch….

Since the formation of the CFR, every president of the United States has been a member except for Ronald Reagan. In truth Reagan was not president, his vice-president George Bush, a CFR member, was running the show. It was the Council on Foreign Relations … that brought the United Nations … into being.

This was the jewel of the post-war manipulators and one of the main reasons the Second World War was fashioned….

For more on think tanks, GO TO > > > Drowning in Think Tanks


 

The Lobbyists – From Washington on $10 Million a DayHow Lobbyists Plunder the Nation:

PIMPS TO POWER

Lobbyists and the Destruction of Democracy

The link between campaign donations and political policy was brought into sharp focus by the campaign finance scandals that erupted during the 1996 campaign. Even jade observers were started by the Clinton administration’s selling of the Lincoln bedroom to the highest bidder, and its organizing of White House coffee klatsches to reward donors and encourage them to make additional contributions.

But political contributions are only one way that big business wins favors in Washington. …

Understanding how the capital works, and how business prospers here, requires a trip through the world of beltway lobbying and a review of the vast army of hired guns working at the behest of Corporate America.

Dollar for dollar, lobbying is a better investment than campaign contributions— one reason business spends far more on the former than on the latter….

For more, GO TO > > > Birds in the Lobby; Drowning in Think Tanks


 

Thomas E. White – Thomas E. White became the 18th Secretary of the Army on May 31, 2001, after nomination to that post by President Bush and confirmation by the United States Senate.

As Secretary of the Army, Secretary White has statutory responsibility for all matters relating to Army manpower, personnel, reserve affairs, installations, environmental issues, weapons systems and equipment acquisition, communications, and financial management.

Secretary White is responsible for the department’s annual budget of nearly $70 billion.

The Secretary leads a work force of just over one million active duty, National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers and 270,000 civilian employees, and has stewardship over 15 million acres of land.

Prior to his appointment as Secretary of the Army, Secretary White served as Vice Chairman of Enron Energy Services, the Enron Corporation subsidiary responsible for providing energy outsource solutions to commercial and industrial customers throughout the United States.

Mr. White was responsible for the delivery component of energy management services, which included commodity management; purchasing, maintaining, and operating energy assets; developing and implementing energy information services; capital management; and facilities management.

Secretary White also served as a member of Enron’s Executive Committee and was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for Enron Operations Corporation.

He was also responsible for the Enron Engineering and Construction Company, which managed an extensive construction portfolio with domestic and international projects….

Secretary White retired from the Army in July, 1990.

– Online Biography

* * *

July 2001

THOMAS E. WHITE IS THE
NEW SECRETARY OF THE ARMY

Army Magazine

Thomas E. White has become the 18th Secretary of the Army. The Senate confirmed his nomination on May 24. Secretary White will be responsible for some 1 million active duty, National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers and 225,000 civilian employees.

Speaking for the first time as Secretary to the graduates of the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy, White vowed that he would do his best “to do things that are good for soldiers and their families” and work hard to make the Army Vision a reality.

He committed himself to improving schools, community infrastructure and family housing. He also compared Army transformation to the changes the Army went through after Vietnam, changes which contributed to victory in the Persian Gulf War.

White also promised action on the following:

>> Continuing to integrate active and reserve components.

>> Returning more training time to local commanders.

>> Revisiting national security goals that call for deployments.

>> Creating an Army personnel system that bolsters unit cohesion and readiness.

>> Issuing black berets and furnishing the U.S. textile plants that produce them with plaques that read, “We make the berets for the finest Army in the world!”

White retired from the Army in 1990 as a brigadier general. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam and worked as Gen. Colin Powell’s executive assistant when Powell was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. . . .

For more, GO TO > > > Black Berets…Red China

* * *

July 19, 2002

White Defends his Record as
Executive with Enron

by Matt Kelley, Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Army Secretary Thomas White said yesterday he is “appalled and angered” by the scandals that drove Enron Corp. into bankruptcy but denied any role in or knowledge of wrongdoing while he was an Enron executive.

In testy exchanges with skeptical senators, White repeatedly said he had played no part in manipulating California energy prices and knew nothing of other improprieties while he helped run an Enron subsidiary….

Although White said after the hearing he had no plans to resign his Pentagon post, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., urged him to do just that in a letter late yesterday.

“I believe it is in the best interest of the country for you to step down as the Secretary of the Army as I believe today’s hearing will spark more investigations and more distraction from your crucial duties,” Boxer wrote.

Boxer said she was not satisfied with White’s testimony: “I found him evasive, argumentative, not contrite about what happened, not forthcoming.”…

Most of yesterday’s questioning concerned the electricity crisis in California and neighboring states in 2000 and 2001 that caused soaring utility bills, rolling blackouts and the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric.

Boxer and other senators grilled White about trading strategies in California’s electricity market detailed in December 2000 Enron memos. The memos described several schemes that critics say took advantage of California’s power crisis, including the one that involved White’s Enron subsidiary, Enron Energy Services….

See also: United Defense Industries


 

TRW Inc. – Another cog in the military-industrial machine.

March 8, 2003

Missile-defense lawsuit dismissed
over security

The New York Times

At the request of the government, a federal judge has dismissed a suit against a contractor for the nation’s antimissile defense system. The judge agreed with the government’s contention that national security would be endangered if the suit went forward.

The suit was brought by Dr. Nira Schwartz, an engineer who once worked for the contractor, TRW, Inc.

Schwartz has long argued that the key component of the system is flawed and that the company and the government have conspired to cover up its problems.

Schwartz worked on the system when she was employed by TRW.

The government had argued that hearing her suit in court would result in public disclosure of information that would harm national security.

Judge Ronald Lew of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles agreed.

The case began when Schwartz, a senior engineer in 1995 and 1996 at TRW, a military contractor now owned by the Northrop Grumman Corp., accused her employer of falsifying test results on a prototype sensor meant to distinguish enemy warheads from decoys.


 

United Defense Industries – Developer of the Crusader artillery system, and one of the nests belonging to The Carlyle Group.

Pentagon, Army fight over weapon

MSNBC NEWS SERVICES

WASHINGTON, May 2, 2002 —— An internal battle over the Pentagon’s plan to cancel an $11 billion Army program broke into the open Thursday when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said his office was looking into reports that Army officials had gone behind his back to Congress.

“I HAVE a minimum of high regard for that kind of behavior,” Rumsfeld told reporters.

Rumsfeld disclosed that he intended to cancel the program, possibly by the end of this month. The Army considers development of the new artillery system, called Crusader, a top priority.

Rumsfeld’s comments suggested that he felt that his authority as the Pentagon’s top civilian official was being challenged.
It also raised questions about the future of Army Secretary Thomas White, who is under political pressure as a result of his contacts with Enron Corp. officials during the company’s collapse last year. White had headed Enron Energy Services, a subsidiary, before he became Army secretary.

THE END FOR ARMY SECRETARY?

Loren Thompson, a defense expert at the Lexington Institute, a conservative think tank, said Thursday that he thought it likely that the flap over Crusader would be the final straw for White.

“Mr. White has finally found a matter of principle on which to depart,” Thompson said in an interview.

Col. Tom Begines, an Army spokesman, would not comment.

Top Pentagon aides gave White 30 days to report how he would use the $475.2 million earmarked for the Crusader in President Bush’s 2003 budget for alternative emerging technologies.

The Army considers the Crusader vital to its strategy for modernizing U.S. land forces and transforming them to a lighter, more mobile force. The Crusader has undergone initial tests of its firing capabilities and is scheduled to enter service in 2008.

But opponents say the weapon, a self-propelled 155mm howitzer, has become a symbol of an outdated Cold War-era weapons system that has survived at the Pentagon for political reasons and because of vested interests, rather than military relevance.

The conflict over Crusader is part of a wider battle Rumsfeld has waged with the Army and other services since he took office last year and pledged to transform the military to meet 21st-century challenges.

Rumsfeld has called into question the future of several major weapons programs, although canceling the Crusader would be the biggest and boldest move in his campaign to force change.

“Crusader now becomes a symbol of whether Rumsfeld’s priorities will prevail or not,” Thompson said.

REARGUARD ACTION

Rumsfeld seemed disturbed by reports that the Army’s office of legislative affairs had sought to fight the planned cancellation by preparing “talking points” for members of Congress to lobby for the Crusader.

Asked by a reporter whether he believed that Army leaders were fighting a rear-guard action against him, Rumsfeld said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was looking into that.

Rumsfeld made it clear, however, that he expected Army leaders to fall in line once he made decisions.

“Are you talking about every single human being in the Army is going to behave himself or herself? Not likely,” he said. “Ought a president and a secretary of defense and a deputy secretary of defense be able to expect that the leadership … will in fact be supportive once a decision is made? Of course.”

The Crusader is being developed by United Defense Industries Inc., a defense contractor controlled by the Carlyle Group, an investment firm led by Frank Carlucci, a former secretary of defense.

Members of Congress from Oklahoma, where the Crusader would be assembled, have vociferously defended the program.

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., a member of the Armed Services Committee, issued a statement Wednesday saying the fight to save what he called the “crown jewel of our Army modernization program” would continue in Congress.

White also appeared ready to fight Rumsfeld to retain the project. A spokesman for Inhofe told The Washington Post that Inhofe spoke to White on Tuesday and was told that “he was in a fight to save the Crusader within the building.”…

For more, GO TO > > > United Defense Industries


 

U.S. State Department – From Al Martin Raw, 08/26/01 by Al Martin:

US State Department Sponsors Training
of Would-Be Terrorists

Huntsville, Alabama – The US State Department sponsors the training of would-be terrorists at the Redstone Arsenal’s Hazardous Devices School, which offers “explosive ordinance disposal training.”

This is the most exclusive explosives school in the United States. It’s where firemen, policemen, and municipal bomb squads are trained. It also provides training for the US armed forces, FBI, CIA, as well as foreign army and intelligence personnel. This is the most elite of the munitions schools in the United States and it’s part of the Redstone Arsenal complex.

This facility is not run by the US Army or by the military. It is technically run by US State Department employee Ray Funderberg, who’s been covertly in charge of it for about twenty years. An added note — although Funderberg works for the State Department, he dresses in a US Army Colonel’s uniform. Official records indicate that he supposedly works for the FBI.

According to a reliable source, one of the Iranians involved in the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, took training courses at the Redstone Arsenal’s school of explosives. He enrolled in this course under the guise of a Pakistani military officer with Pakistani uniform and credentials….

Iraq Gate and Iran Contra are perfect examples of how similar these two operations are compared to what’s going on now.

We are creating an enemy and we are also supporting existing enemies for the purpose of enriching a small clique of defense contractors, senior military and intelligence officers, and politicians on the right. We are financing terrorism against us as well as attempting to rebuild Russia and then build China into a new power under the concept that covert wars are very profitable.

The “Fight Against Terrorism” has done an awful lot for the Republican Party.

And it has enriched a lot of people and corporations….

AL MARTIN is America’s foremost whistle-blower on government fraud and corruption. A retired US Navy Lt. Commander and former officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence, he has testified before Congress (the Kerry Committee and the Alexander Committee) regarding Iran-Contra. Al Martin is the author of “The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider” (2001, National Liberty Press, $19.95; order line: 1-866-317-1390.) He lives at an undisclosed location, since the criminals named in his book have been returned to national power and prominence. His column “Behind the Scenes in the Beltway” is published regularly on Al Martin Raw: Criminal Govt Conspiracy (www.almartinraw.com).

For more, GO TO > > > The Mercenaries


 

Unocal – From AFL-CIO Executive Pay WatchIn 1998, Unocal reduced its workforce by 6.1%, while the top five most highly paid executives received salary increases of 22.2% . . .

Unocal is the last major American company still doing business in Burma. In addition to using torture, forced labor and abductions to maintain its rule, the Burmese government has killed thousands of protesters and jailed countless others. For those reasons, the federal government has prohibited any new investments in Burma by U.S. companies.

Unocal is helping the military rulers of Burma build a 416-mile natural gas pipeline with the use of 10,000 slave laborers, according to a lawsuit filed by Burmese refugees against the company in California….

For more, GO TO > > > The Nests of Osama bin Laden


 

U.S. Fuel and Security Inc.A Washington-based nuclear-fuel security firm.

For more, GO TO > > > The Nuclear Nests


 

Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson, and HandThe nation’s number one lobbying firm.

From The Money Men: . . .

The number one lobbying firm— Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand— acquired its marquee names over a relatively short stretch in the mid-1990s. They included two former Senate majority leaders, Bob Dole and George Mitchell, and a former treasury secretary, Lloyd Bentsen….

Even though they are prohibited by ethics laws from lobbying their former colleagues for a year after they leave the Hill, ex-lawmakers were still in high demand. The reason: their job was to manage entire persuasion campaigns, not just to beg for favors themselves….

Size didn’t matter when it came to lobbying-company clout. Verner Liipfert had 185 lobbyists and lawyers, but Barbour Griffith employed just thirteen.

* * *

Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 4/10/96, by Rick Daysog: . . .

Former Hawaii Republican Party Chairman Jared Jossem plans to join former Gov. John Waihee as a local partner in a Washington, DC, law firm.

According to a source close to the deal, Jossem will join Verner, Liipfert Bernhard McPherson Hand.

Besides Jossem and Waihee, the firm’s big-name recruits include former Land Use Commissioner Renton Nip and Norma Wong, former Office of State Planning deputy director in the Waihee administration….

Jossem, a longtime partner in the firm of Torkildson Katz Jossem Fonseca Jaffe Moore & Hetherington, declined comment on the matter. He took over as GOP chairman in 1991 and stepped down in 1994….

Besides Honolulu, Verner Liipfert has offices in Houston and Austin, Texas.

Locally, the firm has represented Bishop Estate in its lobbying efforts in Washington. The firm lobbied under contract for the state Department of Transportation on aviation, highway and mass transit funding issues.

Last year, Gov. Ben Cayetano canceled that nonbid contract, saying the circumstances surrounding it created the appearance of impropriety.

Waihee and the law firm, which earned some $1 million in fees from the contract, insisted the contract was proper….

* * *

The Buying of the President 2000: . . . Elizabeth Dole raised only $3.5 million through the first half of 1999. Her husband’s prestigious Washington law firm, Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson, and Hand, is the top patron of her current campaign….

* * *

For more on George Mitchell, GO TO > > > The American Red Double-Cross!

For more on Lobbyists, GO TO > > > Birds in the Lobby


 

Westinghouse Corporation – From The Buying of the President (1996): . . .

In 1993, the Ex-Im Bank’s Advisory Committee was headed by Warren H. Hollinshead, CFO of the Westinghouse Electric Co.

During that same year, Ex-Im awarded $98,075,505 to Westinghouse.

Ex-Im also provided financing for and loan guarantees to the Westinghouse Corporation from 1993 through mid-1995 worth a total of $572,774,329.

Defense Dollars and
Deal Making

Despite the president’s previous anti-war inclinations and his much-publicized avoidance of military service, President Clinton has consistently backed policies favorable to the defense industry….

The administration has also pushed to relax export restrictions on high-tech equipment used to manufacture sophisticated weapons systems.

Part of what has ingratiated the Clinton administration to weapons manufacturers has been the presence of William J. Perry, first as deputy secretary and later as secretary of defense….

Perry is a former defense consultant who headed Technology Strategies and Alliances (TSA) between 1985-93. TSA’s clients included … Westinghouse … While Perry severed his ties with the company, he had amassed more than a million dollars in consulting fees from TSA clients.

Not long after he joined the Defense Department, Perry began going to bat for the industry….

~ ~ ~

Or take the case of Vice President Al Gore and Export-Import Bank chairman Ken Brody, who in 1994 along with others in the administration urged the Czech Republic to award Westinghouse a contract to finish building a nuclear power plant.

The Czechs are funding the overhaul using a U.S.-backed [aka US taxpayers] loan worth $317 million from the Export-Import Bank. Gore, who as a senator wrote a best-selling environmentalist book entitled Earth in the Balance, supported the loan and contract, reasoning that if Westinghouse did not get the contract, it would have gone to a Western European firm instead.

The contract caused some tensions, not only between the administration and environmentalists, but also with the government of Austria, which believed the facility, located roughly 100 miles upwind from Vienna, posed an environmental hazard.

Westinghouse contributed $140,000 to the Democratic party in 1991-1992….

* * *

From No Contest by Ralph Nader and Wesley Smith:

THE CASE OF THE DEPOSED DICTATOR

It isn’t too often that the public gets to look behind the scenes of material blocked from view by pretrial orders. However, several years ago the curtain of secrecy was lifted in a case involving Westinghouse Electric Corporation and the Republic of the Philippines.

On Dec 1, 1988, the Philippine government of President Corazon Aquino filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Westinghouse and the New Jersey engineering firm Burns and Roe Enterprises, Inc. … The charges were serious, accusing Westinghouse and Burns and Roe of conspiring in mid-1970s to bribe former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in order to secure a contract to build a nuclear power plant.

The Philippine government contended that $17.2 million in sales commissions Westinghouse paid a Marcos crony named Herminio T. Disini, plus another $2.3 million Burns and Roe paid, were in fact bribes that were passed on to Marcos.

During the pretrial stage of the trial, the Philippines and Westinghouse lawyers agreed, at Westinghouse’s request, to a protective order granting Westinghouse the power to declare which documents turned over to discovery were to be confidential. That maneuver effectively kept the evidence regarding the allegations against Westinghouse out of the public eye.

But then Westinghouse lawyers filed a written motion for summary judgment … The Philippines filed a brief opposing the motion. The judge, Dickinson Debevoise, heard oral arguments on the motion, and this hearing was open to the public. In arguing the motion, the lawyers quoted evidence from the court record.

On Sept 20, 1991, Judge Debevoise denied Westinghouse’s motion. Thereafter, Westinghouse asked the judge to seal the briefs and the documents….

But by now the documents had been placed before a court as evidence. They concerned a matter of strong public interest— alleged bribery by Westinghouse, one of the United States’ most powerful defense contractors and business conglomerates, as well as relationships between the United States and the Philippines.

Two civic groups, Public Citizen and Essential Information, intervened in the lawsuit to seek public release of the documents. They requested a court order unsealing the records on the basis that the protective order was inconsistent with the long-established public right of access to judicial records, as well as with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Westinghouse appealed to the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals….

In Judge Debevoise’s decision granting the request to unseal the records of the motion he wrote:

“First, there is evidence that by decree President Marcos had placed NPC [National Power Company] directly under the control of his office.

Second, there is evidence that both Westinghouse and Burns & Roe believed that in order to obtain the PNPP contracts … they would need the assistance of a powerful person having influence with President Marcos. Disini was the person they selected …

Third, there is evidence that Disini communicated with President Marcos and obtained from him the authority to handle the PNPP contracts.

Fourth, it is undisputed that both Westinghouse and Burns & Roe entered into commission agreements with companies controlled by Disini pursuant to which millions of dollars were paid to those companies….

Fifth, there is evidence that President Marcos personally intervened in the PNPP project to ensure that Burns & Roe and Westinghouse obtained the contracts….

Sixth, there is evidence that both Westinghouse and Burns & Roe took steps to cover up the payments, suggesting guilty minds … After 1977 reports in the press suggested that Westinghouse may have made improper payments to obtain the PNPP contract, Westinghouse burned the files in Manila relating to the procurement of the contract. Other records were destroyed and other efforts were made to avoid discovery of the … agreement.”…

Writing for the appellate court, Judge Dolores Sloviter affirmed the strong public interest in ensuring that such proceedings are open to public scrutiny. “Certainly, the allegations of bribes by a major U.S. corporation to the leader of a foreign country is a matter of public interest, which could give rise to public debate.”

Sloviter concluded that openness should be the general rule because “access to the judicial process reinforces the democratic ideals of our society.

The judges had made the right decision. Big corporations and their power lawyers cannot turn public courts into private domains simply because they are embarrassed about their own behavior….


 

William S. Cohen – Secretary of Defense under William Clinton, 1997-2001; currently chairman and CEO of The Cohen Group, his international business consulting firm based in Washington, D.C.

From Radio Islam (http://abbc.com/islam/links/sources/english/w-cohen.htm):

February 15, 1998

UNITED STATES OF ISRAEL

William Cohen: Israel’s Man at the Helm

The following article is excerpted from the
Jerusalem Post’s Internet edition 15-FEB-1998:

= = = = = = = = =

Man at the helm

By Hillel Kutler

In the early 1980s William Cohen cast the deciding vote in the Senate on behalf of the Reagan administration’s plans to sell AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia.

It was not a popular decision, but Cohen did not shirk from it, not when Senate majority leader Howard Baker offered to let him skip the vote, nor when it came to defending himself to constituents back home in Maine.

Cohen told member of Portland’s Jewish community that he was concerned about a potential antisemitic backlash in the US if the AWACS sale was blocked and an oil embargo resulted.

Last week, Cohen briefly found himself in hot water again when, as secretary of defense, he told a television interviewer he would urge Israel not to respond if attacked by Iraq.

The statement was at odds with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s assertions that Israel had the “absolute right” to defend itself. By the time Cohen met on Sunday with Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai in Germany, he had changed his tune and was in sync with Albright, almost word-for-word.

Cohen’s original statement and subsequent backtracking were odd. Throughout a quarter-century in Congress he earned a reputation as an intellectual heavyweight, someone who examined an issue thoroughly and once he made a decision stuck with it. This was true even back when Cohen was a freshman congressman – a Republican – and supported the articles of impeachment against his party’s president, Richard Nixon.

As a longtime member of the Senate armed services and intelligence committees, Cohen became one of Congress’s foremost defense experts and established a strong pro-Israel record. As chairman of the seapower subcommittee, he pushed for the US Navy to purchase the Israeli-made Barak system for defending against low-flying anti-ship cruise missiles, and also favored joint military exercises and strategic cooperation with Israel on the Arrow missile and Drone surveillance programs. He supported funding for expanding Haifa’s port to serve as a home base for the Sixth Fleet.

In addition, Cohen was one of the first senators to support the 1991 Kasten-Inouye amendment providing $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel.

One of Cohen’s first acts upon taking over at the Pentagon was to issue a directive ordering that foreign companies be sought out for cooperative armaments ventures.

Marvin Klemow, Israel Aircraft Industries’ representative in Washington, said the order stands to benefit IAI, among others, because it “sets the tone from the top to encourage people to look for international agreements, not to reinvent the wheel if the technology already exists.”

Although Cohen mastered the issues on Capitol Hill and ascended to the Pentagon’s top spot, he did not always aspire to a national security-oriented career. According to Cohen’s former chief of staff Thomas Daffron, it was only following a trip to China as a freshman senator that Cohen focused his attention on military and foreign affairs.

He could afford to. The largest private employer in his state is the Bath Iron Works (which relies on military contracts) and there are numerous Air Force bases and Navy yards throughout Maine.

Cohen also developed into one of Congress’s top experts on arms control. For many years he led the Senate’s delegation to the annual midwinter meeting of NATO defense ministers in Munich. But he typically defied partisan orthodoxy….

“He had a depth and breadth of understanding of US foreign policy, intelligence and defense objectives,” said former AIPAC lobbyist Dan Cohen….

The basics are oft-told: Billy Cohen, the son of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother; the Hebrew-school student for whom the Orthodox rabbi refused a bar mitzva for not being halachically Jewish; the humiliated adolescent who wrenched the mezuza off his neck and flung it into the Penobscott River.

Yet William Cohen the man, who identifies himself as a Unitarian, is comfortable with his Jewish background. When he first hosted Yitzhak Mordechai in the Pentagon last year, he opened the breakfast discussion with the hamotzi blessing over bread, delivered in flawless Hebrew….

Joel Abromson recalled a 1979 trip to Israel sponsored by the Portland Jewish Federation. He was standing in line in front of the reception counter at a Tiberias hotel when, just ahead of him, he saw Cohen signing the register with his Hebrew name, Zeˈev Cohen.

Before returning home, the group bought him a ring saying Zeˈev, and Cohen wore it for many years after….

For more, GO TO > > > William Cohen & the BBB (Bipartisan Business Birds)


 

World Bank – The bank of the global elite.

From And the Truth Shall Set You Free: . . .

THE MONEY POLICE

After the Second World War, with the nations of Europe devastated by conflict and debt to the Elite’s bankers, the next stage in the global domination of money and credit was installed through groupings like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

The World Bank, IMF, and GATT were all agreed upon by British and American negotiators at a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. Most influential in these agreements were the economist, Lord Keynes, from Britain, and the US Treasury Secretary, Harry Dexter White, who, with Alger Hiss, the secretary general at the launch of the United Nations, would later be exposed as communist spies.

The technical secretary at Bretton Woods was Virginius Frank Coe, an official of the US Treasury. He was appointed secretary of the new IMF until it was revealed in 1952 during congressional testimony that he was also a member of Dexter White’s communist ring!

These were the guys who created the IMF, World Bank, and GATT. . . .

The role of the World Bank (not to be confused with a world central bank) is to make loans to governments for large capital projects. These have been used, as intended, to finance projects in poor countries designed to meet the needs of the multinationals. These include policies forcing people from the land, thus destroying self-sufficient lifestyles and creating dependency on the Elite’s global economy.

Much of the destruction of the rainforests has been done with loans from the World Bank, which … is always headed by appointees from the Committee on Foreign Relations, The Committee of 300, Bilderberg, establishment, and has eugenics as a key pillar of its policy.

This subsidised environmental destruction has another plus for the Elite. It helps them to justify world control by the need to ‘save the planet’.

The role of the World Bank and other global economic “agencies” is to make a fortune for the multinational construction companies like the Bechtel Group. This is normally done by making loans to Third World countries for mega construction projects which are irrelevant, even disastrous, for the needs of the local people.

In April 1995, President Bill Clinton successfully nominated James Wolfensohn to be the president of the World Bank. Wolfensohn, an Australian-born, naturalized American, has the perfect background for the post. In the 1960s, he worked for the J. Henry Schroder Bank in London and went on to serve on the Rockefellers’ ‘population control’ organisation, The Population Council….

Add to that his position on the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission, and you have the perfect man to head the Global Elite’s World Bank. . . .

In 1992, Wolfensohn joined forces with Lord Rothschild to form R. Rothschild, Wolfensohn, a ‘business advice consultancy’. As chairman, they appointed Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and leading member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Bilderberg Group.

Volker was the man who launched the devastating economic policies in the United States and the UK in the 1980s which were fronted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher….

Every year vastly more wealth is transferred from poor countries to rich than goes the other way. We are bleeding them to death.

And the overseas aid that is made available is not aimed at helping developing countries. It is used to bribe corrupt politicians, to build the infrastructure needed by the multinationals, or to subsidise industries in the rich countries, like Bechtel, who carry out the work as part of the aid deal….

There is no need for starvation and horrific suffering in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

It is not the result of ‘natural disasters’, but of coldly calculated design….

# # #


 

FOR MORE ON YOUR NATIONAL SECURITY

GO TO

/

/

/

WHO’S GUARDING THE HEN HOUSE?

BIRDS ON THE POWER LINES

BIRDS THAT DRINK FROM CESSPOOLS

A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING KAMEHAMEHA’S COURT

ALOHA, HARKEN ENERGY

APOLLO ADVISORS

BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS

THE BRIBES & BOONDOGGLES OF BOEING

CONDOLEEZZA & THE CHICKEN HAWKS

DOWN THE RABBIT-HOLE

DROWNING IN THINK TANKS

THE FALL OF THE TITAN

FIRST HAWAIIAN BANK: CAPTURED BY THE FRENCH IN ‘98

GENERAL ELECTRIC

GLOBAL CROSSING

NASA AND THE ‘WAR ON TRUTH’

PIMPS TO POWER

THE EAGLE AWAKES

THE EAGLE HOODED

INVESTIGATING INVESTCORP

THE KISSINGER OF DEATH

THE MERCENARIES

THE SECRET LIVES OF DUKE & DUSTY

THE SECRET NESTS

THE TORCH OF ERIC SHINE

TRACKING TREX

THE TURKEY NESTS

THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

RAND CORPORATION

SONGS OF THE DRUG VULTURES

TARNISHED WINGS: THE GREED AT LOCKHEED

THORNS IN THE ROSE GARDEN

THE NUCLEAR NESTS

THE NESTS OF OSAMA BIN LADEN

UNCLE SAM’S GUINEA PIGS

 


 

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Last update September 5, 2006, by The Catbird

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