The Pentagon and All Its Suckers (That Would Be Us)

Gargantua's mouth:
The Pentagon and the suckers

By Saul Landau and Nelson P. Valdes / February 27, 2010

The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionally degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors. The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters, is neither remote nor difficult; but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions, to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power." -- Alexander Hamilton

"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 Eisenhower, January 17, 1961, Farewell Address.

During pre-game Super Bowl ceremonies Queen Latifah sang America the Beautiful. Following her, American Idol winner Carrie Underwood began warbling the Star Spangled Banner. Four jet fighters swished over the stadium. Did any of the cheering crowd or the tens of millions watching on TV ask how much it cost to have the thrill of two screaming jets offer the public supersonic foreplay before extra large men smashed and bashed through the thin membrane (the line) to reach the tantalizing quarterback?

In his farewell address, Eisenhower would not have dreamed of adding military sports/entertainment complex to his now fabled military industrial, military scientific and academic complexes. Rather, he called for "statesmanship" by which he meant molding, balancing, and integrating "these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."

Empty rhetoric? Now, 44 cents of every taxpayer's dollar feeds the military budget at a time when no nation has a military capable of challenging us. Maybe Obama should call for a national holiday just to appreciate the failure of Presidents and Congresses to take Ike's warning seriously.

The Orwellian name change from War Department to Defense Department should have sparked national skepticism. Since 1947, DoD holds the world record for spending, but has yet to defend the United States. Under the pretext of defense, Truman sent troops to Korea (Eisenhower stopped U.S. involvement in that war). Subsequently, U.S. troops have attacked and occupied more than a dozen countries, none of which threatened U.S. territory (Korea, Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan).

The DoD, however, cannot claim victory in its four major wars: Korea (1950-3), Vietnam (1964-75), Afghanistan (2001-?), and Iraq (2003-?). Before each invasion, war advocates shook the impending "domino" effect. Now it's the spread of terrorism. During the Cold War, all Asia would somehow fall under red rule if the Chinese or Vietnamese Communists won in Korea or Vietnam. The Communist Party still rules in China and Vietnam, both major U.S. trade partners. U.S. forces triumphed in Grenada and Panama where they met no major and ongoing resistance, and during Gulf War I, when Iraqi troops retreated and got "turkey shot.")

Last December, despite the DoD's no-win record when the enemy fights back and without any sign that a rival nation plans an attack against us or any of our vulnerable allies, Congress passed without debate the highest "defense" budget in human history.

Since 1988, as the Soviet Union neared collapse and no major power threatened, the military has ingested some $5.1 trillion. From 1999 to 2010, the DoD budget increased 153%. After 2001, when 19 suicidal men armed with box cutters hijacked and crashed planes into buildings, the Pentagon spent more than it did in Cold War years.

Every two years since 2001, the military budget has grown approximately $100 billion. Did this reasoning presume more military prowess would defeat civilian suicide bombers? Add to the Pentagon budget, $17 billion in military-related items from the Department of Energy, plus $70 billion for Homeland Security (isn't that redundant with Defense Department?), $38 billion from the Military Retirement Funds found within the Department of the Treasury, and military-related aid within the Department of State: the present budget exceeds $1 trillion.

By 2008, total weapons acquisition "cost growth" had reached nearly $300 billion over initial estimates. In other words, cost overruns of weapons alone surpassed the total 2000 defense budget! Why did the United States government invest more, and at an increased rate, than when it faced all the Soviet divisions and 20,000 nuclear weapons?

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, "the USA is responsible for 41.5 per cent of the world's total defense spending, distantly followed by China (5.8% of world share), France (4.5%), the UK (4.5%), and Russia (4%)."

In 2005, the total value of DoD assets was estimated at $1.3 trillion, with $1.9 trillion in liabilities. The Department has a workforce of over 2.9 million of military and civilian personnel, much larger than any other organization worldwide.

Wal-Mart, the largest corporate employer, has 1.8 million on payroll. The Pentagon's workforce is twice as large. The net income of the top 10 global Fortune 500s (including Exxon, Wal-Mart, BP, and Chevron) does not reach even 50% of DoD's budget.

Last year, the Pentagon had 539,000 facilities (buildings, structures, and linear structures), and 5,570 military sites; it also occupies 29 million acres of land, almost half the size of the United Kingdom.

The United States also has 837 overseas military bases, not including undisclosed secret bases. The Pentagon has 716 bases in 150 of the 192 countries in the world; others in U.S. territories abroad. The DoD does not count facilities with value of less than $10 million or those occupying less than 10 acres. The Pentagon itself claims the record for biggest building in human history (6.5 million square feet), 37 times larger than the Capitol.

Business scams promise high rates of return at little risk to investors. The Pentagon, however, pledges only to keep the nation well defended from all outside threats. Since no military threats have existed for almost two decades, DoD officials and their neo-con cousins invent them. And the suckers -- U.S. taxpayers -- invest.

[Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow whose A Bush and a Botox World was published by Counterpunch. Nelson P. Valdés is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico.]

Source / CounterPunch

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Juan Cole on the U.S. Defense Budget

Gates Wants Europe to Beggar Itself on War Expenditures the Way the U.S. Has

By Juan Cole / February 25, 2010

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates decries Europe for general anti-war sentiment, unwillingness to beggar itself with expenditures on war.

But as far as I can tell, Europe is the world's largest economy and got there without any recent substantial wars except those the U.S. dragged it into. Moreover, the fastest-growing economy for the past nearly 30 years has been China, which spends a fraction on their military of what the US spends on its, and, aside from a skirmish with Vietnam in the early 1980s, has been at peace. Apparently massive war expenditures are unrelated to economic growth or prosperity.

In contrast, the U.S. has been at war for 19 of the last 47 years (not counting U.S.-backed insurgencies such as 1980s Afghanistan, on which we spent billions) but has not grown faster than the other two economically.

Moreover, the increasingly unwieldy U.S. national debt, deriving from the U.S. government spending more than it took in in recent decades, would not exist if the U.S. military budget had been the same as that of the European Union since 1980. The U.S. overspent on its military because Washington mistakenly thought the Soviet economy was twice as big as it actually was, and vastly over-estimated Soviet military capabilities.

The bloated military budgets continue now, apparently because of a couple thousand al-Qaeda operatives hiding out in caves in the Hadhramawt and Waziristan.

Some statistics to ponder:

U.S. Military Budget 2009: $711 billion
European Union Military Budget 2009: $289 billion
China Military Budget 2009: $122 billion.

U.S. GDP 2009: $14.4 trillion
European Union GDP 2009: $16.5 trillion (PPP)
China GDP 2009: $8.8 trillion (PPP)

U.S. economic growth 2009: 0.2%
European Union economic growth 2009: -4%
China economic growth 2009: 8.7 %

The real military-related expenditures of the U.S. are closer to $1 trillion. If the US cut those back to the level of the European Union and spent the money on promoting solar energy and making it inexpensive, America would have a chance of remaining a great power in the 21st century. If it goes on rampaging around the world bankrupting itself by invading and occupying other countries, the Chinese will laugh at us all the way to world dominance.

Source / Informed Comment

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AfPak War : Not a Pretty Picture

Here there be monsters. Graphic from Asia Times.
War destabilizing Pakistan;
Veteran officer urges Afghan drawdown

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / October 16, 2009

The news regarding the war in Afghanistan just keeps getting worse. The NATO alliance war in Afghanistan is increasingly morphing into "AfPak" war that is also destabilizing Pakistan. Meanwhile the Taliban is steadily increasing in strength whereas the US/NATO forces are regarded by the population as corrupt and ineffective.

In one recent case, the Italian NATO troops bribed the Taliban to maintain the peace. When the French troops who were sent in to replace them were not in on the deal, they were attacked and mutilated.

Here is an exclusive report by a journalist who interviewed a top Taliban commander who outlines their strategy; an interview rather unlikely to be granted if the Taliban were not confident of victory.

Most observers, including even top generals like McChrystal, who are actively trying to promote an escalation of the war, agree that we are currently losing strength to the Taliban guerrillas.

Independent military observers think that any US escalation will strengthen the insurgents, and that we are unlikely to be able to prop up the unpopular Afghan army. And that if we could do so, it would take a long time.

Veteran Army Officer Urges Afghan Troop Drawdown

A veteran Army officer who has served in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars warns in an analysis now circulating in Washington that the counterinsurgency strategy urged by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is likely to strengthen the Afghan insurgency, and calls for withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. combat forces from the country over 18 months.

In a 63-page paper representing his personal views, but reflecting conversations with other officers who have served in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis argues that it is already too late for U.S. forces to defeat the insurgency...

In the paper, Davis argues that the counterinsurgency strategy recommended by McChrystal would actually require a far larger U.S. force than is now being proposed. Citing figures given by Marine Corps Col. Julian Dale Alford at a conference last month, Davis writes that training 400,000 Afghan army and police alone would take 18 brigades of U.S. troops – as many as 100,000 U.S. troops when the necessary support troops are added.

The objective of expanding the Afghan security forces to 400,000, as declared in McChrystal's "initial assessment", poses other major problems as well, according to Davis.

He observes that the costs of such an expansion have been estimated at three to four times more than Afghanistan's entire Gross Domestic Product. Davis asks what would happen if the economies of the states which have pledged to support those Afghan personnel come under severe pressures and do not continue the support indefinitely.

"It would be irresponsible to increase the size of the military to that level," he writes, "convincing hundreds of thousands of additional Afghan men to join, giving them field training and weapons, and then at some point suddenly cease funding, throwing tens of thousands out of work." -- Gareth Porter / IPS

Not only is the war in Afghanistan costly and nearly certain to be protracted into a war lasting years, but it is a logistical nightmare, with no clear goals. The few operable roads leading into the capital of Kabul are now frequently mined with IEDs. The Pentagon is reporting to Congress that the fuel to fight the war is costing the US $400 per gallon to deliver. Given the logistics, often the only way to supply US/NATO troops is by helicopter.

The Pentagon pays an average of $400 to put a gallon of fuel into a
combat vehicle or aircraft in Afghanistan....

The Pentagon comptroller’s office provided the fuel statistic to the committee staff when it was asked for a breakdown of why every 1,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan costs $1 billion....

According to a Government Accountability Office report published earlier this year, 44 trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel were lost due to attacks or other events while delivering fuel to Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan in June 2008 alone....

The Marines in Afghanistan, for example, reportedly run through some 800,000 gallons of fuel a day.

Thanks to S. M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

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Dick Cheney : Assassination Nation

Dick Cheney: More tales from the dark side

Peter Berger, a security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute thinks that, judging from Congressional reaction, the program must have involved much more than killing some Al Qaeda people.

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / July 27, 2009

We have learned that Vice President Dick Cheney, in 2002, recommended sending troops into the Buffalo area to apprehend the “Lackawanna Six.” These people were accused of involvement in terrorism, which Cheney thought was enough of an excuse to bypass legal barriers to the use of soldiers to seize property or carry out police functions.

One wonders if he was interested in creating a precedent for the use of troops in American cities on a more regular basis. We know that he and his friend Donald Rumsfeld have been involved in continuation of government planning since the Reagan presidency and we suspect that all these contingency plans involved a greatly expanded role for the military.

We also know that under the Bush-Cheney administration, a Northern Command was established and that special units from it are now functioning in the U.S. to protect military property and that of defense contractors.

Rather than obsessing over why Dr. Louis Henry Gates dissed a Cambridge policeman, the mainstream media and we citizens should be showing more interest in health care reform, and far more important, the actions taken by Dick Cheney and George Bush that endanger the very health of this democratic republic.

So far, the Obama administration has not taken these matters very seriously. When Barack Obama took power, he refused to support calls for a truth commission to look into violations of the law connected with detention, torture, and domestic surveillance. He promised to close the Guantanamo detention center but retained others and continued rendition. His Justice Department defended the Bush Administration’s use of the state secret privilege and it did nothing to protect whistle blowers, firing one employee who outed Bush Administration abuses. Now Obama is threatening to veto any legislation that would curb the state secret privilege.

In Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the CIA had repeatedly lied to Congress, but some evidence developed showing she knew something about torture before she claimed she had. She said little about it then because she had concluded only a change of administration would resolve the matter. It was also clear that the agency was not telling the Congressional leaders everything.

Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, defended his agency against her charges. Then, in July, he told Congressional intelligence committees that after 9/11, the Bush administration opened a new covert operation that Congress had not been told about. Democrats expressed shock, but Republicans said it was an on and off operation of little consequence. However, Peter Berger, a security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute thinks that, judging from Congressional reaction, the program must have involved much more than killing some Al Qaeda people.

Panetta terminated the program and told the Congressmen that the agency had been misled about what was going on in the program. Apparently, the CIA was more interested in training people in Afghanistan to carry out these tasks. CIA people are telling the press that few were involved in the executive assassinations operation with the possible exceptions of general counsel John Rizzo and deputy director Stephen Kappes. The only part of the CIA involved in the military-directed assassinations program was the Special Activities Unit, which had a number of former Delta Force people.

Some CIA people are delighted to see Cheney in hot water and hope he pays a heavy price for his death squads. They see Cheney as abetting a long-term Pentagon plan to swallow up the CIA. This dispute continues in the Obama administration in disputes between Admiral Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, and Director Panetta. Don’t expect Cheney to face too much heat. A serious investigation would be politically damaging for Obama, and Cheney has left a number of “stay-behinds” who are embedded deep in the national security and cabinet departments who can obstruct any investigation.

It was soon learned that Vice President Dick Cheney had ordered the CIA not to brief the Congress about it and that it involved finding and killing terrorists abroad. Some thought it was the same “executive assassination teams” that Seymour Hersh had uncovered in March. Some believed it also involved in domestic spying and the killing of several foreign leaders, an Iranian nuclear scientist, and a Hezbollah military leader.

After 9/11, teams sought to find and kill Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Iraq. The precedent for this was the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. The assassination program was expanded into George Tenet’s Worldwide Attack Matrix . It targeted enemies in numerous countries, including, possibly, the United States.

Some have attributed the murder of Abu Seger, Saddam’s money man, to the executive assassination plan. He knew where Saddam had huge stashes of cash. He was beaten to death by interrogators, even though those who arrested him had already found $40 million in plastic bags in his bedroom. But that was chickenfeed. Some attribute a 2002 Iranian plane crash to the operation because the downed craft carried Ukranian and Russian scientists. At least five other Iranian plane crashes have been attributed to this operation.

The bungled assassination of a politician in Kenya created embarrassment and the apparent shelving of the program. One cannot help wondering if British scientist Dr. David Kelly was offed by these people. Kelly told a former British ambassador that if Iraq were invaded,” I will probably be found dead in the woods.”

Due to problems with the CIA, Cheney came to rely upon people from the Joint Special Operations Command. Most of the personnel came from Delta Force. The JSOC was created in the Reagan administration and could have been used on occasion for sabotage and assassinations. The present commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McCrystal, commanded JSOC beginning in September, 2003.

It, in turn, works with the Mossad’s “Kidon” Department, which does assassinations and kidnappings. Indeed, the Cheney program was based upon the successful Israeli program of preemptive assassinations. As the rift between the Rumsfeld Pentagon and the CIA widened, the agency began to back away from joint operations, seeing them as potential threats to its normal operations. Hersh maintains that the CIA withdrew early and all the wet work was done by the Pentagon’s people.

On the other hand, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, once a top aide to Colin Powell, told Rachel Maddow the CIA did get involved in the assassinations, though it noted that much of the work was probably done by people from Delta Force. He added that it was laughable to claim the CIA never lied to Congress.

Some knowledgeable Pakistanis believe that the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007, was carried out by elements within Al Qaeda and the Taliban that were indirectly controlled, probably through the Pakistan ISI, by Cheney’s assassination apparatus. She was shot in the neck and chest before the bomb went off. Perhaps the assassination was an effort to keep General Perez Musharraf in power, suggesting a professional hit.

Investigations of Bush era crimes will damage Democratic political prospects because the MSM lacks the integrity to separate these investigations from mere political witch hunts. In previous eras, there would have been some Republicans in national life who would have been very concerned about assassinations, the state secret privilege abuses, domestic spying, and more. Alas, that is not the case today. Almost all will simply parrot the McConnell-Boehner line that probing the Cheney-Bush abuses is nothing but politics. These matters go to the very fabric of our republic, and steps must be taken make certain these actions are not precedents for future abuses.

[Sherman DeBrosse, the pseudonym for a retired history professor, is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog and also blogs at Sherm Says and on DailyKos.]

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John McMillian : Mac the Knife: The Passing of a War Criminal

Robert S. McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, speaks at Harvard on March 3, 2004. J. Errol Morris' Academy Award-winning documentary, 'The Fog of War,' plays on the monitor as McNamara (left) and Ernest May address the audience. Photo by Stephanie Mitchell / Harvard News Office.
Mac the Knife

Robert McNamara -- debonair, genial and still very lucid at age 87 -- sat... before 700 members of the Harvard community, who... 'received him with courteous applause...'

By John McMillian / The Rag Blog / July 8, 2009

[Much has already been written about the legacy of Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under two presidents and the primary architect of the War in Vietnam, who died this past Monday, July 6. But John McMillian sent us the following remembrance, adapted from a piece he originally wrote for the March 9, 2004, Harvard Crimson, and we think Rag Blog readers will find it especially incisive. John McMillian was an editor of The New Left Revisited and The Radical Reader.]

Growing up, I’ve often lamented that I missed out on the zeitgeist of the 1960s. For better or worse, I think I might have enjoyed the frothy exuberance and moral drama. As an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I even once wrote a fairly maudlin poem that listed all of the things I’d like to have done if I had been alive then. It included such items as looking forward to the next Beatles album, sneaking a sophomore out of her dormitory window after curfew, sitting around the television with my family when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon… and heckling Robert S. McNamara.

I might have had a chance to finally do the latter when the former secretary of defense appeared at the Kennedy School of Government on March 3, 2004, to discuss film clips from Errol Morris’ documentary, The Fog of War. Unfortunately, I arrived just a moment too late to get a seat in the auditorium; the most I could do was watch the video feed from the overflow room. This made the whole occasion seem even more surreal. Robert McNamara -- debonair, genial and still very lucid at age 87 -- sat just a room away, before 700 members of the Harvard community, who, The Crimson reported, “received him with courteous applause.”

That was a mistake.

Robert McNamara was a war criminal. We need not quibble about this. By his own, well-publicized admission, during World War II both he and General Curtis E. LeMay “were behaving as war criminals” when they incinerated hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in massive firebombing raids. If not for the Allied victory, an international war crimes tribunal might have recommended that McNamara be blindfolded and shot. Instead, he got a promotion.

During the eight years that McNamara served as secretary of defense, he helped mastermind the killing of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, many of them civilians. Fragmentation bombs, napalm and the chemical weapon Agent Orange were all used to devastating effect. By the time the war ended, at least 2 million Vietnamese had been slaughtered. As McNamara helpfully reminded the Kennedy School crowd, if the U.S. population had suffered an equivalent percentage of losses during that war, 27 million Americans would have been killed. According to the Nuremberg Principles, war crimes include the “wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”

Unlike other famous war criminals, McNamara never tried to deny that he knew about the carnage that was happening under his watch. In a 1967 memo to President Lyndon B. Johnson, he betrayed his discomfiture with his own policy recommendations when he said “there may be a limit beyond which… much of the world may not permit us to go.” With chilling understatement, he continued: “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”

How, then, did McNamara rationalize his actions? “I just felt that I was serving at the request of the president, who had been elected by the American people,” he says in The Fog of War. “And it was my responsibility to help him carry out the office as he believed was in the interest of our people.”

McNamara continued to just follow orders even after he’d privately concluded that the Vietnam War could not be won. He also lied repeatedly to Congress about the war. Owing to some absurd genteel code (apparently known only to himself), McNamara argued later that it’s “irresponsible for an ex-Secretary of Defense to comment… about a president who is in the midst of war… ” But even this is a prevarication. At the Kennedy School, McNamara made no secret of his disapproval of President Bush’s foreign policy, and he told Toronto’s Globe and Mail that, “It’s just wrong what we’re doing [in Iraq]. It’s morally wrong, it’s politically wrong, it’s economically wrong.” If ex-Secretary of Defense McNamara could criticize President Bush then, why couldn’t he have spoken out against the Vietnam War in 1968, when doing so might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives?

Journalist Mickey Kaus once asked, “Has any single American of [the 20th] century done more harm than Robert McNamara?” It’s a good question. Although most of us hold it as an article of faith that war criminals ought to be punished, people generally have a hard time holding their own leaders to the same standards of accountability they demand from others. McNamara literally spent his retirement skiing in Aspen and vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard. It would have been more appropriate for him to have been locked away, and shame on the Harvard community for not telling him so.

Please see Exclusive: Robert McNamara deceived LBJ on Gulf of Tonkin, documents show by Gareth Porter / The Raw Story / July 8, 2009

And McNamara’s Ghosts in Afghanistan by Tom Hayden / The Huffington Post / July 8, 2009

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Honduran Coup Leaders Reportedly Trained at U.S. Army School in Georgia

Reported Honduras coup leader General Romeo Vasquez trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Key leaders of Honduras military coup trained in U.S.

The Georgia-based U.S. military school is infamous for training over 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including infamous dictators, "death squad" leaders and others charged with torture and other human rights abuses.

By Chris Kromm / June 29, 2009

At least two leaders of the coup launched in Honduras on June 28 were apparently trained at a controversial Department of Defense school based at Fort Benning, Georgia infamous for producing graduates linked to torture, death squads and other human rights abuses.

Leftist President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and transported to Costa Rica on Sunday morning after a growing controversy over a vote concerning term limits. Over the last week, Zelaya clashed with and eventually dismissed General Romeo Vasquez -- who is now reportedly in charge of the armed forces that abducted the Honduran president.

According to the watchdog group School of Americas Watch, Gen. Vasquez trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at least twice -- in 1976 and 1984 -- when it was still called School of Americas.

The Georgia-based U.S. military school is infamous for training over 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including infamous dictators, "death squad" leaders and others charged with torture and other human rights abuses. SOA Watch's annual protest to shut down the Fort Benning training site draws thousands.

According to SOA Watch, the U.S. Army school has a particularly checkered record in Honduras, with over 50 graduates who have been intimately involved in human rights abuses. In 1975, SOA Graduate General Juan Melgar Castro became the military dictator of Honduras. From 1980-1982 the dictatorial Honduran regime was headed by yet another SOA graduate, Policarpo Paz Garcia, who intensified repression and murder by Battalion 3-16, one of the most feared death squads in all of Latin America (founded by Honduran SOA graduates with the help of Argentine SOA graduates).

General Vasquez isn't the only leader in the Honduras coup linked to the U.S. training facility. As Source Kristin Bricker points out:

The head of the Air Force, Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, studied in the School of the Americas in 1996. The Air Force has been a central protagonist in the Honduran crisis. When the military refused to distribute the ballot boxes for the opinion poll, the ballot boxes were stored on an Air Force base until citizens accompanied by Zelaya rescued them. Zelaya reports that after soldiers kidnapped him, they took him to an Air Force base, where he was put on a plane and sent to Costa Rica.

For previous Facing South coverage of controversy surrounding the School of Americas/Western Hemisphere Center, see here.

Source / Facing South

Also see Military Coup : Resistance and Repression in Honduras by Kristin Bricker / The Rag Blog / June 29, 2009

Thanks to Victor Agosto / The Rag Blog

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Petraeus Angry : Obama Overrides His Bid to Delay Iraq Withdrawal

A campaigning Barack Obama with Gen. David Patraeus in a helicopter ride over Baghdad. Pool photo by Ssg. Lorie Jewell / AP.
'A White House staffer present at the meeting was quoted by the source as saying, "Petraeus made the mistake of thinking he was still dealing with George Bush instead of with Barack Obama."'

By Gareth Porter / February 2 / 2009

WASHINGTON -- CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, supported by Defence Secretary Robert Gates, tried to convince President Barack Obama that he had to back down from his campaign pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months at an Oval Office meeting Jan. 21.

But Obama informed Gates, Petraeus and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen that he wasn't convinced and that he wanted Gates and the military leaders to come back quickly with a detailed 16-month plan, according to two sources who have talked with participants in the meeting.

Obama's decision to override Petraeus's recommendation has not ended the conflict between the president and senior military officers over troop withdrawal, however. There are indications that Petraeus and his allies in the military and the Pentagon, including Gen. Ray Odierno, now the top commander in Iraq, have already begun to try to pressure Obama to change his withdrawal policy.

A network of senior military officers is also reported to be preparing to support Petraeus and Odierno by mobilising public opinion against Obama's decision.

Petraeus was visibly unhappy when he left the Oval Office, according to one of the sources. A White House staffer present at the meeting was quoted by the source as saying, "Petraeus made the mistake of thinking he was still dealing with George Bush instead of with Barack Obama."

Petraeus, Gates and Odierno had hoped to sell Obama on a plan that they formulated in the final months of the Bush administration that aimed at getting around a key provision of the U.S.-Iraqi withdrawal agreement signed envisioned re-categorising large numbers of combat troops as support troops. That subterfuge was by the United States last November while ostensibly allowing Obama to deliver on his campaign promise.

Gates and Mullen had discussed the relabeling scheme with Obama as part of the Petraeus-Odierno plan for withdrawal they had presented to him in mid-December, according to a Dec. 18 New York Times story.

Obama decided against making any public reference to his order to the military to draft a detailed 16-month combat troop withdrawal policy, apparently so that he can announce his decision only after consulting with his field commanders and the Pentagon.

The first clear indication of the intention of Petraeus, Odierno and their allies to try to get Obama to amend his decision came on Jan. 29 when the New York Times published an interview with Odierno, ostensibly based on the premise that Obama had indicated that he was "open to alternatives".

The Times reported that Odierno had "developed a plan that would move slower than Mr. Obama's campaign timetable" and had suggested in an interview "it might take the rest of the year to determine exactly when United States forces could be drawn down significantly".

The opening argument by the Petraeus-Odierno faction against Obama's withdrawal policy was revealed the evening of the Jan. 21 meeting when retired Army Gen. Jack Keane, one of the authors of the Bush troop surge policy and a close political ally and mentor of Gen. Petraeus, appeared on the Lehrer News Hour to comment on Obama's pledge on Iraq combat troop withdrawal.

Keane, who had certainly been briefed by Petraeus on the outcome of the Oval Office meeting, argued that implementing such a withdrawal of combat troops would "increase the risk rather dramatically over the 16 months". He asserted that it would jeopardise the "stable political situation in Iraq" and called that risk "not acceptable".

The assertion that Obama's withdrawal policy threatens the gains allegedly won by the Bush surge and Petraeus's strategy in Iraq will apparently be the theme of the campaign that military opponents are now planning.

Keane, the Army Vice-Chief of Staff from 1999 to 2003, has ties to a network of active and retired four-star Army generals, and since Obama's Jan. 21 order on the 16-month withdrawal plan, some of the retired four-star generals in that network have begun discussing a campaign to blame Obama's troop withdrawal from Iraq for the ultimate collapse of the political "stability" that they expect to follow U.S. withdrawal, according to a military source familiar with the network's plans.

The source says the network, which includes senior active duty officers in the Pentagon, will begin making the argument to journalists covering the Pentagon that Obama's withdrawal policy risks an eventual collapse in Iraq. That would raise the political cost to Obama of sticking to his withdrawal policy.

If Obama does not change the policy, according to the source, they hope to have planted the seeds of a future political narrative blaming his withdrawal policy for the "collapse" they expect in an Iraq without U.S. troops.

That line seems likely to appeal to reporters covering the Iraq troop withdrawal issue. Ever since Obama's inauguration, media coverage of the issue has treated Obama' s 16-month withdrawal proposal as a concession to anti-war sentiment which will have to be adjusted to the "realities" as defined by the advice to Obama from Gates, Petreaus and Odierno.

Ever since he began working on the troop surge, Keane has been the central figure manipulating policy in order to keep as many U.S. troops in Iraq as possible. It was Keane who got Vice President Dick Cheney to push for Petraeus as top commander in Iraq in late 2006 when the existing commander, Gen. George W. Casey, did not support the troop surge.

It was Keane who protected Petraeus's interests in ensuring the maximum number of troops in Iraq against the efforts by other military leaders to accelerate troop withdrawal in 2007 and 2008. As Bob Woodward reported in "The War Within", Keane persuaded President George W. Bush to override the concerns of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the stress of prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq on the U.S. Army and Marine Corps as well its impact on the worsening situation in Afghanistan.

Bush agreed in September 2007 to guarantee that Petraeus would have as many troops as he needed for as long as wanted, according to Woodward's account.

Keane had also prevailed on Gates in April 2008 to make Petraeus the new commander of CENTCOM. Keane argued that keeping Petraeus in the field was the best insurance against a Democratic administration reversing the Bush policy toward Iraq.

Keane had operated on the assumption that a Democratic president would probably not take the political risk of rejecting Petraeus's recommendation on the pace of troop withdrawal from Iraq. Woodward quotes Keane as telling Gates, "Let's assume we have a Democratic administration and they want to pull this thing out quickly, and now they have to deal with General Petraeus and General Odierno. There will be a price to be paid to override them."

Obama told Petraeus in Baghdad last July that, if elected, he would regard the overall health of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and the situation in Afghanistan as more important than Petraeus's obvious interest in maximising U.S. troop strength in Iraq, according to Time magazine's Joe Klein.

But judging from Petraeus's shock at Obama's Jan. 21 decision, he had not taken Obama's previous rejection of his arguments seriously. That miscalculation suggests that Petraeus had begun to accept Keane's assertion that a newly-elected Democratic president would not dare to override his policy recommendation on troops in Iraq.

[Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 200.]

Source / IPS News

Thanks to S. M. Wilhellm / The Rag Blog

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Senate Report on Torture : Blood on Rummy's Hands

Rummy the Impaler. Photo by Roger L. Wollenberg / UPI
Senate places blame on Rumsfeld:
'The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own.'
By Joby Warrick / December 11, 2008

WASHINGTON - A bipartisan Senate report released today says that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charges that decisions by those officials led to serious offenses against prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.

The Senate Armed Services Committee report accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the principal architects of the plan to use harsh interrogation techniques on captured fighters and terrorism suspects, rejecting the Bush administration's contention that the policies originated lower down the command chain.

"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the panel concludes. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."

The report, released by Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz., and based on a nearly two-year investigation, said that both the policies and resulting controversies tarnished the reputation of the United States and undermined national security. "Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority," it said.

The panel's investigation focused on the Defense Department's use of controversial interrogation practices, including forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and use of dogs. The practices, some of which had already been adopted by the CIA at its secret prisons, were adapted for interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and later migrated to U.S. detention camps in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

"The Committee's report details the inexcusable link between abusive interrogation techniques used by our enemies who ignored the Geneva Conventions and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody," McCain, himself a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, said in a statement. "These policies are wrong and must never be repeated."

White House officials have maintained the measures were approved in response to demands from field officers who complained that traditional interrogation methods weren't working on some of the more hardened captives. But Senate investigators, relying on documents and hours of hearing testimony, arrived at a different conclusion.

The true genesis of the decision to use coercive techniques, the report said, was a memo signed by President Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the Geneva Convention's standards for humane treatment did not apply to captured al-Qaida and Taliban fighters. As early as that spring, the panel said, top administration officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, participated in meetings in which the use of coercive measures was discussed. The panel drew on a written statement by Rice, released earlier this year, to support that conclusion.

In July 2002, Rumseld's senior staff began compiling information about techniques used in military survival schools to simulate conditions that U.S. airmen might face if captured by an enemy that did not follow the Geneva conditions. Those techniques - borrowed from a training program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE - included waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and were loosely based on methods adopted by Chinese communists to coerce propaganda confessions from captured U.S. soldiers during the Korean war.

The SERE program became the template for interrogation methods that were ultimately approved by Rumsfeld himself, the report says. In the field, U.S. military interrogators used the techniques with little oversight and frequently abusive results, the panel found.

"It is particularly troubling that senior officials approved the use of interrogation techniques that were originally designed to simulate abusive tactics used by our enemies against our own soldiersand that were modeled, in part, on tactics used by the Communist Chinese to elicit false confessions from U.S. military personnel," the report said.

Defenders of the techniques have argued that such measures were justified because of al-Qaida's demonstrated disregard for human life. But the panel members cited the views of Gen. David Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, who in a May, 2007 letter to his troops said humane treatment of prisoners allows Americans to occupy the moral high ground.

"Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right," wrote Petraeus, who at the time was the top U.S. commander in Iraq. "Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy."

Source / CommonDreams

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"Message Force Multipliers" to Be Investigated

Needless to say, I have a $20 bill that says this turns itself into a quiet whitewash for those poor, retired generals and the Pentagon weasels. Nothing whatsoever will come of this aside from a little neatly-bound report that sits on a back shelf in the National Archive and Library of Congress in perpetuity.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

FCC to Probe Defense Department's 'Propaganda' Program
By E&P Staff / October 07, 2008

NEW YORK The Federal Communications Commission has announced that it will investigate a Department of Defense propaganda program to determine whether news networks or military analysts violated the Communications Act of 1934 and FCC rules.

Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that a Department of Defense program had ex-military officers presenting the Bush administration’s position on the War on Terror as objective analysis on major television news programs and 24-hour cable news networks. Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro and Congressman John Dingell wrote to the FCC to investigate allegations that the news networks and the analysts failed to disclose the ex-military officers’ ties to the Pentagon -- and if that violated sponsorship identification requirements in the Communications Act.

“Given the revelations in the [New York Times] article, had the FCC not heeded our request for an investigation, it would have raised serious questions about their oversight capabilities. I am pleased with today's news, but will continue to monitor the situation to ensure the FCC fully investigates the networks in addition to the analysts,” DeLauro said in a statement Tuesday.

According to the Times report, Department of Defense documents described the analysts as “message force multipliers” instructed to deliver “administration themes and messages” to the public “in the form of their own opinions.” The report found that these analysts -- who The Times called “a media Trojan horse” for the administration -- were encouraged to convey specific Defense Department talking points to the public, even when they suspected the information could be exaggerated or false.

Network officials cited in the Times story acknowledged “a limited understanding” of the on-air analysts’ ties to the government. They argued that it was the analysts’ responsibility to disclose any potential conflicts of interest.

Source / Editor and Publisher

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Pentagon : The Five Secret Billion-Dollar Companies

Billionaire Ronald Perelman's holding company MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings Inc. received $3,360,739,032 from the Department of Defense in 2007.
Sucking Obscene Amounts of Taxpayer Money
By Nick Turse / June 26, 2008

At $34 billion, you're already counting pretty high. After all, that's Harvard's endowment; it's the amount of damage the triple hurricanes -- Charley, Ivan, and Jeanne -- inflicted in 2004; it's what car crashes involving 15-to-17-year-old teenage drivers mean yearly in "medical expenses, lost work, property damage, quality of life loss and other related costs"; it's the loans the nation's largest, crippled, home lender, Countrywide Financial, holds for home-equity lines of credit and second liens; it's Citigroup's recent write-off, mainly for subprime exposure; it's what New Jersey's tourism industry is worth -- and, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, it's the minimal figure for the Pentagon's "black budget" for fiscal year 2009 -- money for, among other things, "classified weapons purchases and development," money for which the Pentagon will remain unaccountable because almost no Americans will have any way of knowing what it's being spent for.

Now, imagine that, due to a little more Pentagon/Bush administration wizardry, even this black budget estimate is undoubtedly a low-ball figure. One reason is simple enough: The proposed $541 billion Pentagon 2009 budget doesn't even include money for actual wars. George W. Bush's wars are all paid for by "supplemental" bills like the $162 billion one Congress will soon pass -- so the Department of Defense's $34 billion black budget skips "war-related funding." This means that even the overall figure for that budget remains darker than we might imagine (as in "black hole"). The Pentagon not only produces stealth planes, it is, in budgetary terms, a stealth operation. If honestly accounted, the actual Pentagon yearly budget, including all the "military-related" funds salted away elsewhere, is probably now more than $1 trillion a year.

There is, however, another stealth side to the Pentagon -- the corporate side where a range of giant companies you've never heard of are gobbling up our tax dollars at phenomenal rates. Nick Turse, author of the single best account of how our lives are being militarized, our civilian economy Pentagonized, and the Pentagon privatized -- I'm talking about The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives -- now turns to the stealth corporate side of the Pentagon to give us a glimpse into the larger black hole into which our dollars pour.

Tom Engelhardt / TomDispatch / June 26, 2008

Billion-Dollar Babies
By Nick Turse

The top Pentagon contractors, like death and taxes, almost never change. In 2002, the massive arms dealers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman ranked one, two, and three among Department of Defense contractors, taking in $17 billion, $16.6 billion, and $8.7 billion. Lockheed, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman did it again in 2003 ($21.9, $17.3, and $11.1 billion); 2004 ($20.7, $17.1, and $11.9 billion); 2005 ($19.4, $18.3, and $13.5 billion); 2006 ($26.6, $20.3, and $16.6 billion); and, not surprisingly, 2007 as well ($27.8, $22.5, and $14.6 billion). Other regulars receiving mega-tax-funded payouts in a similarly clockwork-like manner include defense giants General Dynamics, Raytheon, the British weapons maker BAE Systems, and former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, as well as BP, Shell, and other power players from the military-petroleum complex.

With the basic Pentagon budget now clocking in at roughly $541 billion per year -- before "supplemental" war funding for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the President's Global War on Terror, as well as national security spending by other agencies, are factored in -- even Lockheed's hefty $28 billion take is a small percentage of the massive total. Obviously, significant sums of money are headed to other companies. However, most of them, including some of the largest, are all but unknown even to Pentagon-watchers and antiwar critics with a good grasp of the military industrial complex.

Last year, in a piece headlined "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow," Vanity Fair published an exposé of one of the better known large stealth contractors, SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation). SAIC, however, is just one of tens of thousands of Pentagon contractors. Many of these firms receive only tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Pentagon every year. Some take home millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

Then there's a select group that are masters of the universe in the ever-expanding military-corporate complex, regularly scoring more than a billion tax dollars a year from the Department of Defense. Unlike Lockheed, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, however, most of these billion-dollar babies manage to fly beneath the radar of media (not to mention public) attention. If appearing at all, they generally do so innocuously in the business pages of newspapers. When it comes to their support for the Pentagon's wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are, in media terms, missing in action.

So, who are some of these mystery defense contractors you've probably never heard of? Here are snapshot portraits, culled largely from their own corporate documents, of five of the Pentagon's secret billion-dollar babies:

1. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings Inc.

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $3,360,739,032

This is billionaire investor Ronald Perelman's massive holding company. It has "interests in a diversified portfolio of public and private companies" that includes the cosmetics maker Revlon and Panavision (the folks who make the cameras that bring you TV shows like 24 and CSI). MacAndrews & Forbes might, at first blush, seem an unlikely defense contractor, but one of those privately owned companies it holds is AM General -- the folks who make the military Humvee. Today, says the company, nearly 200,000 Humvees have been "built and delivered to the U.S. Armed Forces and more than 50 friendly overseas nations." Humvees, however, are only part of the story.

AM General has also assisted Carnegie Mellon University researchers in developing robots for the Pentagon blue-skies outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's "Grand Challenge," an autonomous robot-vehicle competition. Last year, AM General and General Dynamics Land Systems, a subsidiary of mega-weapons maker General Dynamics, formed a joint venture "to compete for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program." AM General has even gone to war -- dispatching its "field service representatives" and "maintenance technical representatives" to Iraq where they were embedded with U.S. troops.

As such, it's hardly surprising that, earlier this year, the company received one of the Defense Logistics Agency's Outstanding Readiness Support Awards. Nor should anyone be surprised to discover that a top MacAndrews & Forbes corporate honcho, Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Administrative Officer Barry F. Schwartz, contributed a total of at least $10,000 to Straight Talk America, the political action committee of presidential candidate John McCain, who famously said it would be "fine" with him if U.S. troops occupied Iraq for "maybe a hundred years" (if not "a thousand" or "a million").

Perhaps hedging their bets just a bit, MacAndrews & Forbes is diversifying into an emerging complex-within-the-Complex: homeland security. Recently, AM General sold the Department of Homeland Security's Border Patrol "more than 100 HUMMER K-series trucks for use in border security operations."

2. DRS Technologies, Inc.

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,791,321,140

Incorporated during the Vietnam War, DRS Technologies has long been "a leading supplier of integrated products, services and support to military forces, intelligence agencies and prime contractors worldwide"; that is, they have been in the business of fielding products that enhance some of the DoD's deadliest weaponry, including "DDG-51 Aegis destroyers, M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, M2A3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters, AH-64 Apache helicopters, F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and F-16 Fighting Falcon jet fighters, F-15 Eagle tactical fighters... [and] Ohio, Los Angeles and Virginia class submarines." They even have "contracts that support future military platforms, such as the DDG-1000 destroyer, CVN-78 next-generation aircraft carrier, Littoral Combat Ship and Future Combat System."

In addition to 2007's haul of Pentagon dollars, DRS Technologies has continued to clean up in 2008 for a range of projects, including: a $16.2 million Army contract for refrigeration units; $51 million in new orders from the Army for thermal weapon sights (part of a five-year, $2.3-billion deal inked in 2007); a $10.1 million contract to build more than 140 M989A1 Heavy Expanded Mobility Ammunition Trailers (to transport "numerous and extremely heavy Multiple Launch Rocket System pods, palletized or non-palletized conventional ammunition and fuel bladders"); and a $23 million deal "to provide engineering support, field service support and general depot repairs for the Mast Mounted Sights (MMS) on OH-58 Kiowa Warrior attack helicopters," among many other contracts.

Fitch Ratings, an international credit rating agency, recently made a smart, if perhaps understated, point -- one that actually fits all of these billion-dollar babies. DRS, it wrote, "has benefited from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan..."

3. Harris Corporation

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,501,163,834

Harris is "an international communications and information technology company serving government, defense and commercial markets in more than 150 countries." It has an annual revenue of more than $4 billion and an impressive roster of former military personnel and other military-corporate complex insiders on its payroll. Not only does Harris assist and do business with a number of the Pentagon's largest contractors (like Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems), it is also an active participant in occupations abroad. On its website, the company boasts that "Harris technology has been used for a variety of commercial and defense applications, including the War in Iraq where the [Harris software] system provided detailed, 3-D representations of Baghdad and other key Iraqi cities."

Last year, Harris signed multiple deals with the military, including contracts to create a high-speed digital data link that transmits tactical video, radar, acoustic, and other sensor data from Navy MH-60R helicopters to their host ships. It also supplies the Navy with advanced computers that provide the "highly sophisticated moving maps and critical mission information via cockpit displays" used by flight crews.

In the first six months of this year, Harris has continued its hard work for the Complex. In January, the company was "selected by the U.S. Air Force for the Network and Space Operations and Maintenance (NSOM) program" for "a base contract and six options that bring the potential overall value to $410 million over six-and-a-half-years" to provide "operations and maintenance support to the 50th Space Wing's Air Force Satellite Control Network at locations around the world."

In May, the company was "awarded a three-year, $20 million contract by [top 10 Pentagon contractor] L3 Communications to provide products and services for a next-generation Tactical Video Capture System (TVCS)" -- a system that integrates real time video streams to enhance tactical training exercises -- "that will support training at various U.S. Marine Corps locations across the U.S. and abroad." That same month, Harris was also "awarded a potential five-year, $85 million Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract from the U.S. Navy for multiband satellite communications terminals that will provide advanced communications for aircraft carriers and other large deck ships."

In addition, Harris is now hard at work in the Homeland. Not only did the company pick up more than $3 million from the Department of Homeland Security last year, but national security expert Tim Shorrock, in a 2007 CorpWatch article, "Domestic Spying, Inc.," specifically noted that Harris and fellow intelligence industry contractors "stand to profit from th[e] unprecedented expansion of America's domestic intelligence system."

4. Navistar Defense

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,166,805,361

Still listed in Pentagon documents under its old name, International Military and Government, LLC, Navistar is the military subsidiary of Navistar International Corporation -- "a holding company whose individual units provide integrated and best-in-class transportation solutions." While the company has served the U.S. military since World War I, it's known, if at all, by the public for making some of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles designed to thwart Iraqi roadside bombs. As of April 2008, the U.S. military had "ordered 5,214 total production MaxxPro MRAP vehicles" from Navistar and, that same month, the company was awarded "a contract valued at more than $261 million... for engineering upgrades to the armor used on International MaxxPro MRAP vehicles."

But Navistar makes more than MRAPs. Just last month, the company signed a "multi-year contract valued at nearly $1.3 billion" with the U.S. Army "to provide Medium Tactical Vehicles and spare parts to the Afghanistan National Police, Afghan National Army, and the Iraqi Ministry of Defense." This followed a 2005 multi-year Army contract, worth $430 million, "for more than 2,900 vehicles and spare parts."

Quite obviously, the company is significantly, profitably, and proudly involved in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Tom Feifar, the Global Defense and Export general manager for Navistar Parts, put it late last year, "It's an honor to be a part of the effort to support our troops."

5. Evergreen International Airlines

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,105,610,723

A privately held global aviation services company, it has subsidiaries in related industries such as helicopter aviation (Evergreen Helicopters, Inc.), as well as a few unrelated efforts like producing "agricultural, nursery and wine products" (Evergreen Agricultural Enterprises, Inc.). Evergreen has been on the Pentagon's payroll for a long time. Back in 2004, Ed Connolly, the executive vice president of Evergreen International Airlines, stated, "Evergreen has flown continuously for the [U.S. Air Force] Air Mobility Command since 1975 and is proud to continue its long standing history of supporting the U.S. Armed Forces global missions with quality and reliable services."

Not surprisingly, Evergreen has been intimately involved in the occupation of Iraq. In fact, in 2004, the company received "approximately 200 awards for its support of international airlift services during the Iraq war" from the Air Force's Air Mobility Command. An Air Force general even handed out these medals and certificates of achievement to Evergreen's employees.

In Amnesty International's 2006 report, "Below the Radar: Secret Flights to Torture and 'Disappearance,'" the human rights organization noted that Evergreen was one of only a handful of private companies with current permits to land at U.S. military bases worldwide. That same year, the company even airlifted FOX News personality Bill O'Reilly and his TV show crew to Kuwait and Iraq to meet and greet troops, sign books and pictures, and hand out trinkets. And just last year the company was part of a consortium, including such high profile commercial carriers as American, Delta, and United Airlines that the Pentagon awarded a "$1,031,154,403 firm fixed-price contract for international airlift services... [that] is expected to be completed September 2008."

Under the Radar

All told, these five stealth corporations from the military-corporate complex received more than $8.9 billion in taxpayer dollars in 2007. To put this into perspective, that sum is almost $2 billion more than the Bush administration's proposed 2009 budget for the Environmental Protection Agency. Put another way, it's about nine times what one-sixth of the world's population spent on food last year.

Tens of thousands of defense contractors -- from well-known "civilian" corporations (like Coca-Cola, Kraft, and Dell) to tiny companies -- have fattened up on the Pentagon and its wars. Most of the time, large or small, they fly under the radar and are seldom identified as defense contractors at all. So it's hardly surprising that firms like Harris and Evergreen, without name recognition outside their own worlds, can take in billions in taxpayer dollars without notice or comment in our increasingly militarized civilian economy.

When the history of the Iraq War is finally written, chances are that these five billion-dollar babies, and most of the other defense contractors involved in making the U.S. occupation possible, will be left out. Until we begin coming to grips with the role of such corporations in creating the material basis for an imperial foreign policy, we'll never be able to grasp fully how the Pentagon works and why we so regularly make war in, and carry out occupations of, distant lands.

[Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com.]

Source. / AlterNet

The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives by Nick Turse on Amazon.com.

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House Resolution Calls for Naval Blockade against Iran

Proposed actions could lead to war with Iran
by Andrew W Cheetham

A US House of Representatives Resolution effectively requiring a naval blockade on Iran seems fast tracked for passage, gaining co-sponsors at a remarkable speed, but experts say the measures called for in the resolutions amount to an act of war.

H.CON.RES 362 calls on the president to stop all shipments of refined petroleum products from reaching Iran. It also "demands" that the President impose "stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains and cargo entering or departing Iran."

Analysts say that this would require a US naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

Since its introduction three weeks ago, the resolution has attracted 146 cosponsors. Forty-three members added their names to the bill in the past two days.

In the Senate, a sister resolution S.RES 580 has gained co-sponsors with similar speed. The Senate measure was introduced by Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh on June 2. In little more than a week’s time, it has accrued 19 co-sponsors.

AIPAC's Endorsement

Congressional insiders credit America’s powerful pro-Israel lobby for the rapid endorsement of the bills. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) held its annual policy conference June 2-4, in which it sent thousands of members to Capitol Hill to push for tougher measures against Iran. On its website, AIPAC endorses the resolutions as a way to ''Stop Irans Nuclear Proliferation" and tells readers to lobby Congress to pass the bill.

AIPAC has been ramping up the rhetoric against Iran over the last 3 years delivering 9 issue memos to Congress in 2006, 17 in 2007 and in the first five months of 2008 has delivered no less than 11 issue memos to the Congress and Senate predominantly warning of Irans nuclear weapons involvement and support for terrorism.

The Resolutions put forward in the House and the Senate bear a resounding similarity to AIPAC analysis and Issue Memos in both its analysis and proposals even down to its individual components.

Proponents say the resolutions advocate constructive steps toward reducing the threat posed by Iran. "It is my hope that…this Congress will urge this and future administrations to lead the world in economically isolating Iran in real and substantial ways," said Congressman Mike Pence(R-IN), who is the original cosponsor of the House resolution along with Gary Ackerman (D-NY), Chairman of the sub committee on Middle East and South Asia of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Foreign policy analysts worry that such unilateral sanctions make it harder for the US to win the cooperation of the international community on a more effective multilateral effort. In his online blog, Senior Fellow in the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Ethan Chorin points out that some US allies seek the economic ties to Iran that these resolutions ban. "The Swiss have recently signed an MOU with Iran on gas imports; the Omanis are close to a firm deal (also) on gas imports from Iran; a limited-services joint Iranian-European bank just opened a branch on Kish Island," he writes.

These resolutions could severely escalate US-Iran tensions, experts say. Recalling the perception of the naval blockade of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the international norms classifying a naval blockade an act of war, critics argue endorsement of these bills would signal US intentions of war with Iran.

Last week’s sharp rise in the cost of oil following Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz’s threat to attack Iran indicated the impact that global fear of military action against Iran can have on the world petroleum market. It remains unclear if extensive congressional endorsement of these measures could have a similar effect.

In late May, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reportedly urged the United States to impose a blockade on Iran. During a meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in Jersusalem, Olmert said economic sanctions have "exhausted themselves" and called a blockade a "good possibility."

Source. / Global Research / Posted June 18, 2008. Go there for text of resolution.

Proposed bill needs attention, opposition
By Robert Naiman and Mike Lynn / June 23, 2008

The U.S. House of Representatives is considering a new resolution that could effectively demand a blockade against Iran -- an act that would be widely seen as an act of war and could invite Iranian retaliation, possibly leading us into a shooting war.

Over the last three weeks, 77 House Democrats and 92 Republicans have agreed to cosponsor this resolution, but we think many do not realize its dangerous implications.

This resolution (H. Con. Res. 362) was introduced by Representative Gary Ackerman. The most alarming provision "demands that the President initiate an international effort to immediately and dramatically increase the economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear enrichment activities by, inter alia, prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran; and prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran's nuclear program."

Such a blockade imposed without United Nations authority (which the resolution does not call for) would be seen as an act of war. Congressional sources say the bill might first go to committee, which gives us a little more time to pressure our representatives. But whether or not it goes first to committee, or directly to the floor of the House, action on H. Con. Res. 362 is needed now. We urge you to ask your representative not to support this dangerous step toward war with Iran.

Congressional leaders seem to have assumed that there would be little opposition to this punitive measure against Iran, and they have put it on a fast track to passage. But due to the threat of war, many organizations and reasonable members of Congress are working overtime to stop this bill.

Please take action now -- ask your representative to oppose this dangerous path that could lead directly to war with Iran.

You can find the full text of the resolution and list of co-sponsors
here.

Source. / United for Peace and Justice

Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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The Return of the Neocons

Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, an architect of the neocon philosophy. Illustration by Paul Giambarba / Courtesy truthout.
Bush Hawks Aggressively Working to
Rewrite Accepted Iraq War History
By James Risen / June 19, 2008

Ever since the Rumsfeld era at the Pentagon ended abruptly in the aftermath of the Democratic victory in the 2006 mid-term elections, the civilian hawks who ruled the Defense Dept. during the early years of the Iraq war have remained largely silent. They have not engaged publicly even as their culpability for the Iraq war's myriad failures has congealed into accepted wisdom.

But for the Pentagon troika most identified with Iraq – former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith -- silence has not equaled happiness. It certainly has not meant acceptance of their fate at the hands of the many journalists, former generals and assorted ex-members of the Bush administration who have taken to the cable talk fests and the nation’s media outlets to reject and denounce them. Nor does it mean they walk the aisles at Barnes & Noble with equanimity while scanning shelves filled with books that lay the fault for George W. Bush’s failed presidency at their doorstep.

This anti-Pentagon historical narrative is straightforward and seems well established: Wolfowitz and Feith ran a neoconservative frat house while an arrogant, fiddling Rumsfeld roared against anyone who dared try to bring him the truth.

Neoconservatives -- a loose association of pundits, politicians and analysts who put a right-wing spin on American exceptionalism and coupled that with an embrace of the doctrine of pre-emptive war -- began pushing for regime change in Iraq in the 1990s. Wolfowitz and Feith brought this desire to oust Saddam Hussein with them when they joined the Bush administration.

After 9/11, neoconservatives inside and outside the administration argued for war; Washington must act because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and might share them with terrorists. Inside the government, Rumsfeld, not a neoconservative himself, embraced and advanced these arguments, following the lead of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Perhaps Rumsfeld also sensed that the war in Afghanistan had been too quick and remote to serve as a true demonstration of U.S. power in the Middle East.

And so, during the critical 18 months between the Sept. 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith were united at the forefront of the administration's march to war.

Five years later, 4,000 young Americans have died. No Pentagon leaders have been so thoroughly repudiated since the days of Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War.

When the Iraq war was young, and they were at the height of their power, few men in America seemed less concerned by or more disdainful of their public critics. The image created by a compilation of Rumsfeld’s most famous quotations, words that will surely appear in the first paragraphs of his obituary -- “stuff happens,” "democracy is messy," “You go to war with the Army you have” -- is of a man too busy and important to do anything other than casually mock the little people getting in his way.

Perhaps being out of power makes one more susceptible to the slings and arrows; perhaps at night they wake with visions of a future in which some young filmmaker comes to them with a request to remake “The Fog of War.” For whatever reason, it is clear that the incoming fire from the left, right and center has finally gotten to be too much. Feith, in particular, is now willing to reveal how much it all has hurt.

“You wind up having the first, second and third drafts of history shaped by the first set of leaks,” Feith lamented. “You can imagine, from my point of view, that is grim to see.”

Now, the Rumsfeld team is starting to fight back. Rumsfeld recently announced that he is writing his memoirs, while Feith’s account, “War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism,” came out this spring.

In a series of lengthy interviews over several weeks, Feith explicitly stated that his objective in writing his book was to start the process of altering the accepted history of the Iraq war, to adjust the Rumsfeld team’s place in history. He wants to change the narrative -- before it is too late.

Feith sees his book as nothing less than the opening salvo in what he and many of his allies hope will be a major and prolonged campaign by Bush administration hawks to develop a new school of revisionist history of the early 21st century, in which they will be heroes, rather than the villains. They see this fight for historical dominance as the last battle of the war in Iraq.

How far this devolves into the “stabbed in the back” school of history remains to be seen. But the outlines are already clear.

Feith argues that the Pentagon team’s historical standing has been victimized by its unilateral disarmament in the leak and access wars of the Bush administration, even as their foes at the State Dept. and the Central Intelligence Agency whispered to the press about the evil men at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld so hated leaks and leakers, Feith says, that the Pentagon team allowed themselves to be Swiftboated by the forces under Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and CIA Director George Tenet.

“It caused enormous damage to me personally,” Feith said. “I wasn’t in a position to contradict false and damaging things said about me.”

And yet, he added, top State and CIA officials were too cowardly to raise any objections to the war during White House meetings.

Feith does not view this as journalists did at the time -- which was that many in the Bush administration were reluctant to criticize Iraq policy out of fear of retribution from a powerful vice president and an intimidating secretary of defense. He sees hypocrites who went along with the war, who told the president to his face that they supported his policies, but then through bureaucratic petulance made sure that critical decisions were never made, that paralysis was the order of the day. Meanwhile, they sought to convince friends outside the administration that they were not really allied with the neoconservatives.

“What I find interesting is that they chose to not take on the strategic questions in the Situation Room when they had a chance,” says Feith. “If Powell or Tenet, or somebody like that, wanted more meetings, more debates, they could have had them.”

Instead, State and CIA sulked and pouted and refused to collaborate, effectively sabotaging post-war planning, Feith says. The best-laid plans for Iraq’s political reconstruction put forth by the Pentagon were left stillborn in a confused inter-agency process in the weeks leading up to the invasion, he argues; and no one, certainly not National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, ever tried to bring order out of the bureaucratic chaos.

Yet it is Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith who were left holding the bag for the failures in Iraq, while pretty much everyone else seems to have skated from the judgment of history, Feith seethes. “The now-standard story portrays the president and his supporters in the administration as militaristic and reckless, closed-minded and ideological, thoughtless at best and even dishonest – and hell bent on war with Iraq from the administration’s inception,” he writes in his book. It is a false narrative, he writes, that “has swept the field.”

Other top officials from Rumsfeld’s inner circle agree that the truth is far more complex and has yet to come out. “The pundits have it pretty much wrong about Rumsfeld,” said retired Air Force Gen. Richard Meyers, chairman of the joint chiefs during Rumsfeld’s tenure, who is now also writing his memoirs. “I think they have it 85 percent wrong. Not many people who have written about Rumsfeld have worked with him and been in the room. I don’t think anybody has captured it yet.”

Feith and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
Wolfowitz is pleased that the counter-offensive has begun, noting that he believes that Feith, through his book, finally, “explodes some of the myths that have become conventional wisdom.” Wolfowitz added, “it’s a beginning point,” for a serious discussion.

As the first out of the gate with a book, Feith is setting the tone for the Pentagon counter-campaign. He begins by recognizing the need to tackle big, damning issues head on. So he focuses on what he describes as the most damaging lie -- that the Pentagon team was trying to anoint Ahmed Chalabi as ruler of Iraq.

“I’m putting out a bold challenge – I have gone through the documents, senior level Pentagon documents, and I can’t find any documents supporting the extremely important conspiracy charge that we were plotting to anoint Chalabi,” said Feith. “It is frustrating to me to deal with these canards, because no senior person at the Pentagon was proposing that.”

As head of the largest Iraqi exile group operating in the West in the years before the invasion, Chalabi had gained prominence through his success at convincing key political leaders in Washington and London of the rightness of ousting Saddam. Yet he had also won powerful enemies, notably at the CIA, where officers who worked with Chalabi had concluded that he was a liar and a crook. During the run-up to the 2003 invasion, Chalabi's group, the Iraqi National Congress, began to force-feed Washington many Iraqi "defectors," who claimed to have information about Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction. His information found its way through the Pentagon right to the president, and was crucial in bolstering the public case for war.

But Chalabi's star began to fall when it turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that his defectors had been feeding disinformation to the U.S. intelligence community. The Americans broke with him in 2004, when the CIA and the National Security Agency alleged that he had told Iran that the United States had broken their codes.

His relations with the Bush administration have run hot and cold since. But it is now clear that the men who ran the Pentagon at the time of the invasion are eager to disown Chalabi.

That is easier said than done. Feith recognizes that the notion the Pentagon wanted Chalabi to rule Iraq is not only accepted as fact today, it was conventional wisdom within large swaths of the Bush administration during the run-up to the war. And the impression that Pentagon neoconservatives were pushing a huckster destroyed the Rumsfeld team's ability to gain acceptance of its post-war plans throughout the administration, he argues.

"The view that we were doing that was enormously important in influencing policy at the time," Feith said, "because the State Department and CIA opposed a series of specific measures that were designed to facilitate the political transition and general reconstruction of Iraq because they saw them all through their particular prism of antagonism to Chalabi. Every time we denied that we were trying to anoint Chalabi, people at State or CIA would say that was just part of the cover-up of our conspiracy.”

Feith adds that the Pentagon leadership was actually agnostic about Chalabi. “We didn’t think of ourselves as pro-Chalabi,” Feith insisted, “but we didn’t think of ourselves as anti-Chalabi, either.”

Rather than simply pushing to anoint Chalabi, Feith says his office developed a formal plan for political reorganization built around an entity to be known as the Iraq Interim Authority. The plan -- abandoned by the White House in the immediate aftermath of the invasion -- called for a temporary government that would include U.S. officials, leading Iraqi exiles and Iraqis who had remained in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s rule. Chalabi was to be among the exiles playing a leading role, but Feith insists that no one in the Pentagon leadership ever sought to impose Chalabi as the leader.

He says that the Chalabi conspiracy charge can be disproven by the fact that the two men sent to run the post-war reconstruction – former general Jay Garner, followed by former ambassador L. Paul Bremer – were never given orders to anoint Chalabi. “If they were not told to favor Chalabi, then there couldn’t have been a conspiracy,” Feith said. “Then there was no drive shaft connecting the engine to the wheels.”

Both Garner and Bremer said in interviews that they were never given directions by the Pentagon to anoint Chalabi. Garner, briefly in charge of reconstruction in Iraq after the invasion, said, “I heard Rumsfeld say several times I have no candidate,” for ruler of Iraq. “I never saw any inclination he was pushing Chalabi.”

Garner observed that “Feith, I think, was a friend of Chalabi. And he took me through the positives and negatives of the exiles and candidates, but he never told me to appoint Chalabi. It never happened that he said, 'Make Ahmed the premier.' But he respected him. He told me that he, Perle (Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board for Rumsfeld) and Wolfowitz had met frequently with Chalabi in the past to discuss the freedom of Iraq.”

“For me, I don’t like Chalabi,” Garner volunteered. “He and I instantly disliked each other. He’s a crook, a man who can’t be trusted.”

Bremer added, “Nobody ever said to me the plan was for Chalabi to have the job. Nobody ever told me to put Chalabi in power.”

In an interview from Baghdad, Chalabi also insisted, “I know of no discussion at all between me and the Pentagon or any one in the U.S. government and anyone close to me, to install me in any capacity in Iraq.” He complained that “the adversaries of Feith and Wolfowitz seemed to fear that I would emerge as a leader in post-war Iraq, and so they had an ABC doctrine -- 'Anybody But Chalabi.'”

But while Feith sees this as solid evidence dispelling the Chalabi conspiracy charge, his legion of critics from the Bush administration remain unconvinced. They say these arguments – no orders to Garner and Bremer, no Pentagon documents supporting Chalabi’s ascension -- are only used by Feith as part of a legalistic effort to obscure what happened.

“Do you really think they would have written it down?” asked one former senior administration official.

The critics say that, to varying degrees, Wolfowitz and Feith at the Pentagon, Cheney at the White House, and Perle on the outside all promoted Chalabi before the war. But, they were unable to convince either Rumsfeld or, more important, Bush.

“Bush was very clear," said one former top administration official, critical of the neoconservatives, “he said, I will not put my thumb on the scales. He wasn’t going to favor one guy.”

And no matter how badly Wolfowitz, Feith and the others might have wanted Chalabi, they didn’t have the power to install him.

Perle, perhaps Chalabi’s most vocal and influential patron in Washington at the time of the invasion, said in an interview that he believes that the fact that Rumsfeld was never a Chalabi supporter was critical -- since that meant the Pentagon was not going to push him on Bush.

“Rumsfeld’s view was that the cream will rise to the surface,” recalled Perle. “He did not want to get into the business of picking leaders for Iraq, although I don’t think he ever thought that meant Iraq would be leaderless. But Rumsfeld never fought for Chalabi. The idea that he was the Pentagon’s boy is wrong. One person made decisions at the DOD, and that was Don Rumsfeld. Those people who kept saying the Pentagon’s policy was Chalabi didn’t understand how DOD worked.”

Asked whether he thought Feith and Wolfowitz would have installed Chalabi if they had been in charge, Perle said: “Early on, they would have supported a government-in-exile and the INC [the Iraqi National Congress, Chalabi’s group] would certainly have been at the center of it. And to do it right there would have had to have been a transparent process. …They certainly thought that Chalabi was, if not the most competent Iraqi, at least in the top two or three.”

But Chalabi was not installed, and a U.S. occupation, through Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, was launched instead.

An anti-American insurgency followed, and now, five bloody years later, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith are just beginning their long struggle for historical redemption.

[James Risen is an investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration." He won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, for his pieces about government surveillance programs.]

Source. / The Washington Independent

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