US losing even on defense contracts.

Russia forces USA out from its traditional arms markets

Russia forces the USA out from the traditional arms market. Russia has won a 4-billion-dollar contract with Saudi Arabia in a competition with the USA and France. This achievement of the Russian defense complex can be explained by both the high quality of the national military hardware defense equipment and the blunders of its Western competitors. However, Russia should not rest on its laurels: the current state of the nation’s defense industry is not good enough. It is not ruled out that the contract with Saudi Arabia may repeat the unfortunate fate of MiG supplies to Algeria.

Russia has entered the market area which has traditionally been under the USA’s control. In this case it goes about Saudi Arabia. Rumors of Russia’s intention to sign a multi-billion-dollar contract with the country appeared in November of 2007 when then-President Vladimir Putin met with the Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud. On the eve of the meeting Putin toured Arab states, and visited Arab capital Riyadh where none of Russian and Soviet leaders had been before.

The West considered it a newspaper hoax, because Saudi Arabia was totally dependant on arms supplies from the West – presumably from the USA. More importantly, the country has not voiced a desire to change the supplier. However, Russia and Saudi Arabia preferred not to reveal details of their talks on the contract, which continued for about six months.

Now it is known that the contract is evaluated at four billion dollars. The Saudi king got interested in the wide range of Russia’s defense equipment: from aircraft and armored vehicles and missile complexes. It became known that a half of the contract accounts for 100 Mil helicopters (mainly, Mi-17 and Mi-35). Half a billion dollars accounts for 150 T-90C tanks. The contract also includes 20 middle-haul air defense systems Buk-M2E and several hundreds of BMP-3 infantry combat vehicles.

Why did Riyadh prefer Russia to the USA in terms of the military hardware? Saudi Arabia has been under strong influence of the USA and the UK for decades. It was caused by the struggle between the USSR and the West for influence areas, including the Middle East. Saudi kings saw a threat to their power from the USSR that tried to develop socialist regimes in Arab states. The state of affairs is different now. The Soviet Union broke up, which gave Saudi Arabia an opportunity to negotiate and cooperate with Russia.

Speak the truth and shame the devil on Pravda.ru forum

It is worthy of note that Russian weapons have been attractive to foreign buyers from the point of view of price and quality combination. Russia used to make arms shipments to other Gulf States such as the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait before. Experts say that Russian military vehicles showed better technical qualities than their Western analogues, which made Saudi Arabia evince great interest in Russian products.

However, the better quality of Russia’s defense equipment in comparison with US analogues was demonstrated during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm. At that time most countries, including those possessing Soviet arms, joined the anti-Iraqi coalition. Syrian T-72 tanks successfully covered longer distances than USA Abrams tanks that broke down because of overheating and sand. That is only one of such episodes.

It is clear that such incidents did not make US arms more authoritative. In addition, last year the US Senate deprecated the deal with Saudi Arabia, according to which it was to obtain a set of high-precision bombs. The US administration believed that the bombs could fall into terrorists’ hands. Thus, Riyadh tried to find another supplier. They arranged the supply of helicopters and tanks with the French, but France demanded to extend the contract and to include Navy ships in it. However, Saudi Arabia did not like such impudence and apparently decided to punish France by signing a contract with Russia.

The contract evidences Russia’s success, but now the USA has nothing to worry about. Russia’s deal with Saudi Arabia is just a pinprick to them. For the time being, the Russian defense industry is a goose that lays golden eggs, but they are of poor quality. Russia should not forget that Saudi Arabia will not stand such treatment and in case of malfunction it will come back to the USA.

It is important for Russia at this juncture to save the reputation of a credible supplier. Urgent measures are necessary to improve the state of the Russian defense industry. In fact, it is the only branch of Russia’s industry that produces competitive goods on the world market. Young people do not want to engage in the defense industry because of low salaries.

Original article posted here.

More money down the military black hole for a lost war. The robots will not save us.

Robots replace trigger fingers in Iraq

By David Isenberg

WASHINGTON - Every war is a test of many things: will, resolve, heroism and sacrifice, for example. But they are also testing grounds for material things, and technology in particular. From the first rocks and flints, to spears and swords, gunpowder, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, every war has served to allow improvements to military systems and weapons.

The United States in particular has relied on its ability to leverage technology on the battlefield, both because of its advanced scientific and technology base as well as a way to compensate for having smaller forces than some of its past opponents, especially during the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union.

Iraq is no different. In fact, given the emphasis on producing a high-tech digital force as party of former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld's "force transformation" effort, technology has assumed a leading role in Iraq. Whether trying to counter improvised explosive devices (IED), proving mine-resistant vehicles, unmanned air vehicles like the Predator that can fire missiles and satellite-guided joint directed attack munitions, or the deployment of the Stryker, a new lightweight infantry carrier that can perform like a mini-tank but at higher speeds, advanced technological systems have been present in Iraq from the very beginning of the invasion.

There is no better example of this than the use of robots in Iraq. The US government will spend about US$1.7 billion on ground-based military robots between fiscal 2006 and 2012, according to the National Center for Defense Robotics, a congressionally funded consortium of 160 companies.

The US military, in fact, has deployed thousands of robotic systems to Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them is the 19-kilogram PackBot robot, manufactured by the IRobot Corp, the same company that produces the Roomba, the vacuum-cleaning robot. The PackBot rides on tracks like a miniature tank. It can climb stairs, penetrate caves, and peek around corners with video eyes so that troops can reconnoiter while avoiding the enemy as well as booby traps. The PackBot has also been deployed in Afghanistan.

The PackBot, though, is hardly the only system being used to counter the IED threat. In 2004, the Pentagon began shipping unmanned robots into Iraq in February, in response to an urgent requirement for a standoff capability to neutralize explosives along convoy routes in Iraq - namely rudimentary IEDs, which were deemed the No 1 killer in the region at the time. The deployed unmanned ground vehicles include about 10 Matildas, 22 iRobots (Packbots), 58 Vanguards, 43 Talons and 20 Mini-Andros systems. Mesa-Robotics builds the Matilda, Canada-based EOD Performance builds the Vanguard, Foster-Miller the Talon, and Northrop Grumman the Mini-Andros.

The deployed robots are designed to neutralize explosives once they are detected. Each of the systems is equipped with a "disrupter" device capable of physically disabling a threat with a burst of air or water.

However, those robots were fielded as part of a stopgap measure while the military continues with a formal acquisition plan for the Man Transportable Robotic System. That consists primarily of an operator control unit and a tele-operated vehicle. The system components will be small and light enough to be carried as a single load by a two-person team for 500 meters over semi-rugged terrain. The primary mission is reconnaissance, and the system will be enhanced to perform other explosive-ordnance tasks.

Another robot in use in Iraq is the backpackable Dragon Runner "throwbot". It was first deployed by the US marines in Iraq in 2004. The four-wheeled device is only a little more than 30 centimeters long and not quite 30cm wide and weighs 4kg. It can be thrown over walls, out a three-story window or up a flight of stairs; the flat, 12.5cm-high machine can operate whichever way it lands.

This month's issue of National Defense magazine reports that the US Army has quietly introduced a rifle-toting robot into Iraq. So far three of the Special Weapons Observation Remote Reconnaissance Direct Action System (SWORDS) have been deployed. The SWORDS is armed with an M249 rifle and is remotely controlled by a soldier through a terminal. There are no reports of the SWORDS being used in actual combat yet, however.

What all these systems have in common is that they are not truly autonomous. They all have a human operator somewhere in the loop. But that may be changing soon. An article in the August 18 Guardian noted that we are headed toward a brave new Terminator-like world where robots decide whom, where and when to kill. The US Congress has set a goal of having one-third of ground combat vehicles unmanned by 2015.

This raises complex and frightening issues. Consider that the international Law of Armed Conflict dictates that unmanned systems cannot fire their weapons without a human operator in the loop. But as new generations of armed robots are built and deployed, pressure will inevitably increase to automate the process of selecting - and destroying - targets.

If that sounds alarmist, one should note that in 2002 a new legal interpretation was proposed within the US military to deal with the issue of removing humans from the trigger-end of the killing process.

This legal theory proposed by John S Canning, chief engineer at the US Naval Surface Warfare Center, called for programming all armed robotic vehicles to aim only at weapons, not humans. For example, an autonomous vehicle spots an insurgent with an AK-47. The robotic vehicle is authorized to destroy the AK-47. If the human is killed in the process, that's what's called "collateral damage".

David Isenberg is a senior analyst with the British American Security Information Council. He is also a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute, contributor to the Straus Military Reform Project, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, and a US Navy veteran. The views expressed are his own.

Original article posted here.

And the moron warmongers said the war would pay for itself . . .

U.S. has spent $610 bln on wars since 9/11

WASHINGTON, July 9 (Xinhua) -- The United States has spent 610 billion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on protecting its bases worldwide since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a report released by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) on Monday said.

The Bush administration spends on the average 12 billion dollars a month on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the report by the CRS, an independence research agency that provides research and analysis to lawmakers.

Ten of the 12 billion dollars is spent for Iraq and nearly 2 billion dollars for Afghanistan, plus other minor costs. So far Iraq has accounted for 450 billion dollars, and in fiscal year 2007 alone, about 165.8 billion dollars has been spent on Iraq, a rise of 40 percent from last year.

If the administration's war funding requests for fiscal 2008 were granted in full, the total war spending would rise to 758 billion dollars, with 567 billion dollars spent on Iraq, according to the report.

The report forecast a total of 1.4 trillion dollars on the war on terrorism by 2017.

Original article posted here.

The Defense Contractor Gravy Train Giveaway

Unveiling US Intel Spending And Contractors

The number of contractor facilities cleared by the NSA -- meaning that classified work can go on there -- has grown 30-fold from 41 in 2002 to 1,265 in 2006.

by Shaun Waterman

A series of recent presentations by senior procurement officials in U.S. intelligence agencies shows that the proportion of their secret budget spent in the private sector has ballooned after Sept. 11, 2001 -- and could rise as high as 70 percent. One presentation was made by Terri Everett, the senior procurement executive for the director of national intelligence, at a Defense Intelligence Agency conference in May and later posted on the agency's Web site.

A slide in the presentation included a pie chart showing that 70 percent of the budget for the U.S. intelligence community -- as insiders call the sprawling collection of 16 U.S. federal agencies managed by the Director of National Intelligence -- was currently spent on contract awards.

However, that number was contested by two people with knowledge of the classified intelligence budget, neither of whom would agree to be identified discussing it.

"It is wrong," one of them said.

DNI spokesman Stephen Shaw told United Press International that the 70 percent figure provided "only a very rough order of magnitude." It was an estimate, he said, "designed to be illustrative of general trends in contracting" by U.S. intelligence agencies.

He said that the figure indicated the universe of potential spending on private sector contracts. "Basically is it everything except U.S. government personnel costs," he said.

That definition would make 70 percent the size of what federal market analysts call the "addressable market" -- the part of the budget potentially available for private sector contracts, rather than that actually spent on them. But it is still shockingly high, according to Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, who monitors U.S. intelligence agencies.

"It's a very high number," he told UPI, especially given that it was an average across the 16 agencies and that for some of them, like the National Reconnaissance Office, which buys the nation's spy satellites, it is likely to be much higher.

"It indicates that contractors are not only significant in (the) intelligence activities (of the U.S. government), but that they are dominant." he said. "It is shocking."

Other recent presentations by senior procurement officials give weight to the notion that there has been a huge growth in intelligence community spending in the private sector.

Deborah Walker, head of outreach for the senior acquisition executive of the National Security Agency, gave a talk last month at the same contractor conference at which Everett spoke.

Walker said the number of contractors who had registered as interested in doing business with the agency rose eight-fold between October 2001 and October 2002, from 144 to 1,165.

Between October 2002 and October 2006 the number rose more than four-fold again, from 1,165 to 5,425.

Of course, not all of these companies actually get to do business with the NSA, which as the agency responsible for U.S. eavesdropping and electronic surveillance operations worldwide is one of the largest government buyers of high technology.

But Walker also reported that the number of contractor facilities cleared by the NSA -- meaning that classified work can go on there -- has grown 30-fold from 41 in 2002 to 1,265 in 2006.

While any business can apply to go on the register of those interested in working with the NSA, intelligence professionals tell UPI that other agencies generally do not go to the trouble and expense of getting a clearance for a contractor facility unless classified government work will actually be taking place there.

Moreover, most analysts looking at the marketplace for government contractors see intelligence agencies as one of the few areas where spending will continue to grow robustly.

INPUT, a research group that analyzes government contract markets, said last week in its annual forecast of federal information-technology spending that the addressable market from U.S. intelligence agencies purchasing in the field will increase from $9.4 billion in 2007 to $14 billion by 2012 -- a compound annual growth rate of 8.4 percent.

Their forecast covered the three intelligence agencies with the biggest spending on information technology: the CIA, the NSA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which produces maps and analyzes satellite imagery.

John Slye, INPUT's top federal analyst, told UPI he based his estimates on unclassified procurement documents, "other published data points (and) conversations with people in the big systems integrators," as major contractors are often called.

"There's a very limited degree of visibility," he said. The data that was available "is well dispersed and not easy to put together."

Slye said that information-sharing and knowledge management were big drivers of IT spending "across the whole federal government" as well as in the intelligence sector.

"Companies are incredibly eager to break into doing business with the Intelligence Community," he said. "It is historically one of the hardest set of organizations to crack, but with the slower (federal IT) market overall, companies are pushing hard to get a foothold in this area."

Original article posted here.

Addicted to war

US Intel Budget May Reach 60 Billion Dollars

Previous estimates have tended to put the secret budget in the $40-45 billion range. In 2005 a senior intelligence official, Mary Margaret Graham, told a conference on intelligence from satellite photography and other imagery in San Antonio that the annual budget was $44 billion.

by Shaun Waterman

The secret budget for U.S. intelligence is much higher than previously thought, perhaps as much as $60 billion, according to the extrapolation of figures inadvertently left buried in a computerized government slideshow.

The presentation, made at a Defense Intelligence Agency conference in May and later posted on the agency's Web site, contained a bar chart showing the growing amount of the U.S. intelligence budget spent on contracts with the private sector since 1994. Although dollar amounts were not shown on the chart, a separate slide said that 70 percent of the budget was currently spent on contract awards.

And, as intelligence blogger R. J. Hillhouse discovered, the edit function of the program used to develop the presentation, Microsoft PowerPoint, reveals a spreadsheet of the actual dollar amounts used to generate the bar chart.

In Fiscal Year 2005 -- the latest period for which full figures are given -- the amount was listed as "#Dollar 4200."

"The numbers are in tens of millions of dollars," writes Hillhouse on her blog, "The Spy Who Billed Me," acknowledging that this is an assumption, but adding it is well known "that the amount spent on contracts is a double-digit billion-plus dollar figure."

"By taking the 70 percent of the intelligence community budget that now goes to contractors in conjunction with the actual dollars spent on contractors, it is possible to reverse-engineer the budget using simple algebra," writes Hillhouse, adding that $42 billion is 70 percent of $60 billion.

A spokeswoman for U.S. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told United Press International that "there are a lot of assumptions being made."

"The presentation was compiled using estimated numbers from a portion of the budget," said Ellen Cioccio. "They are intended to illustrate trends over time. ... They cannot be extrapolated in this fashion."

Cioccio said she could not give any more details because the budget is classified "and we cannot talk about those numbers."

One apparent problem with Hillhouse's reasoning is what it suggests about one recent year for which the intelligence budget was disclosed.

In 1997, after being sued in federal court by government transparency campaigner Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, the CIA disclosed that the U.S. intelligence budget for that year was $26.6 billion.

The figure in the spreadsheet for spending on contracts that year is given as 1800 -- which would be $18 billion following Hillhouse's logic.

But this would make contract spending in that year more than two-thirds of the intelligence budget -- almost as much as it is today. Most informed observers believe the proportion spent on contracts has grown significantly since the budget ballooned after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Hillhouse deals with this by suggesting it is "an apples and oranges comparison," because the 1997 figure would have excluded many military intelligence activities. The new numbers, compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, are much more comprehensive, she argues.

"The numbers the DNI now has ... pick up many (spending) streams that would not have been (included) in that (1997) reported budget," she writes. "The two can't be compared."

Another complicating factor is the now-annual use of supplemental appropriations bills to boost spending in the U.S. war on terrorism. The huge bills -- $93 billion this year -- contain large classified annexes, and much intelligence spending is now funded through these so-called emergency measures.

It is unclear whether the figures in the PowerPoint spreadsheet include supplemental spending -- or indeed what they do include and exclude. The presentation was given by DNI Senior Procurement Executive Terri Everett and was removed last week from the Defense Intelligence Agency Web site.

According to Aftergood, who says the CIA has spent millions fighting his efforts to get intelligence budget data under the Freedom of Information Act, "a certain amount of deliberate obfuscation surrounds the subject such that it is hard to draw a firm numerical conclusion regarding overall spending."

Previous estimates have tended to put the secret budget in the $40-45 billion range. In 2005 a senior intelligence official, Mary Margaret Graham, told a conference on intelligence from satellite photography and other imagery in San Antonio that the annual budget was $44 billion.

But the figure given by Graham, who had no authority over or expertise in the budget, was "significantly wrong," an intelligence official told UPI at the time, declining to elaborate or give a more accurate figure.

The question of whether the so-called top-line, meaning total amount, of the intelligence budget really needs to be classified has been kept open for many years, largely thanks to the advocacy of Aftergood and others, including some lawmakers.

Campaigners say that the total amount of spending is useless information except as a matter of interest to the people whose money it is.

"That aggregate number does not tell you anything about anything -- unless you are a taxpayer who wants to know how much your country spends on intelligence," Aftergood said.

The Sept. 11 Commission recommended declassifying the number, and the U.S. Senate has several times included such a provision in legislation it passed, but the language has never made it into law.

Original article posted here.

Another Decade in Empires: Cronies, Colonies, Weapons and Bribes

BAE accused of secretly paying £1bn to Saudi prince ·

Money moved via US bank
· £30m payments a quarter
· Sanctioned by MoD

David Leigh and Rob Evans
Thursday June 7, 2007
The Guardian

Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The arms company BAE secretly paid Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia more than £1bn in connection with Britain's biggest ever weapons contract, it is alleged today.

A series of payments from the British firm was allegedly channelled through a US bank in Washington to an account controlled by one of the most colourful members of the Saudi ruling clan, who spent 20 years as their ambassador in the US.

It is claimed that payments of £30m were paid to Prince Bandar every quarter for at least 10 years.

It is alleged by insider legal sources that the money was paid to Prince Bandar with the knowledge and authorisation of Ministry of Defence officials under the Blair government and its predecessors. For more than 20 years, ministers have claimed they knew nothing of secret commissions, which were outlawed by Britain in 2002.

An inquiry by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into the transactions behind the £43bn Al-Yamamah arms deal, which was signed in 1985, is understood to have uncovered details of the payments to Prince Bandar.

But the investigation was halted last December by the SFO after a review by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith.

He said it was in Britain's national interest to halt the investigation, and that there was little prospect of achieving convictions.

Tony Blair said he took "full responsibility" for the decision.

However, according to those familiar with the discussions at the time, Lord Goldsmith had warned colleagues that British "government complicity" was in danger of being revealed unless the SFO's corruption inquiries were stopped.

The abandonment of the investigation provoked an outcry from anti-corruption campaigners, and led to the world's official bribery watchdog, the OECD, launching its own investigation.

The fresh allegations may also cause BAE problems in America, where corrupt payments to foreign politicians have been outlawed since 1977.

The allegations of payments to Prince Bandar is bound to ignite fresh controversy over the original deal and the aborted SFO investigation.

The Saudi diplomat is known to have played a key role with Mrs Thatcher in setting up Britain's biggest ever series of weapons deals.

For more than 20 years Al-Yamamah, Arabic for "dove", has involved the sale of 120 Tornado aircraft, Hawk warplanes and other military equipment.

According to legal sources familiar with the records, BAE Systems made cash transfers to Prince Bandar every three months for 10 years or more.

BAE drew the money from a confidential account held at the Bank of England that had been set up to facilitate the Al-Yamamah deal. Up to £2bn a year was deposited in the accounts as part of a complex arrangement allowing Saudi oil to be sold in return for shipments of Tornado aircraft and other arms.

Both BAE and the government's arms sales department, the Defence Export Services Organisation (Deso), allegedly had drawing rights on the funds, which were held in a special Ministry of Defence account run by the government banker, the paymaster general.

Those close to Deso say regular payments were drawn down by BAE and despatched to Prince Bandar's account at Riggs bank in Washington DC.

Under the terms of a previously unknown MoD instruction from the department's permanent secretary, Sir Frank Cooper, the payment deal would have required Deso authorisation.

The money was not characterised as commission, but as quasi-official fees for marketing services. The payments are alleged to have continued for at least 10 years and beyond 2002, when Britain outlawed corrupt payments to overseas officials.

SFO investigators led by assistant director Helen Garlick first stumbled on the alleged payments, according to legal sources, when they unearthed highly classified documents at the MoD during their three-year investigation.

Before the investigation was abandoned, the SFO interviewed Alan Garwood, head of Deso. Sources close to the arms sales unit say that he and Stephen Pollard, the commercial director of the Saudi project, were questioned about the reasons for authorising the payments.

Prince Bandar, currently head of the country's national security council, was asked about the alleged payments by the Guardian this week.

He did not respond.

BAE Systems also would not explain the alleged payments. The company said: "Your approach is in common with that of the least responsible elements of the media - that is to assume BAE Systems' guilt in complete ignorance of the facts."

Its spokesman, John Neilson, added: "We have little doubt that among the reasons the attorney general considered the case was doomed was the fact that we acted in accordance with ... the relevant contracts, with the approval of the government of Saudi Arabia, together with, where relevant, that of the UK MoD."

The attorney general's office would not discuss claims about Lord Goldsmith's concerns of "government complicity" in the payments.

A spokesman said the SFO inquiry had been halted because of the "real and serious threat to national security".

"There were major legal difficulties ... given BAE's claim that the payments were made in accordance with the agreed contractual arrangements". The spokesman added: "None of this is altered by the Guardian story."

The MoD, where minister Paul Drayson runs Britain's government arms sales unit, also refused to elaborate.

"The MoD is unable to respond to the points made ... since to do so would involve disclosing confidential information about Al-Yamamah, and that would cause the damage that ending the investigation was designed to prevent," a spokesman said.

The Liberal Democrat deputy leader, Vince Cable, called for an urgent inquiry into the new disclosures last night.

"This is potentially more significant and damaging than anything previously revealed. It is unforgivable if the British government has been actively conniving in under-the-counter payments to a major figure in the Saudi government.

"There must be a full parliamentary inquiry into whether the government has deceived the public and undermined the anti-corruption legislation which it itself passed through parliament."

He added: "It increasingly looks as if the motives behind the decision to pull the SFO inquiry were less to do with UK national interests but more to do with the personal interests of one of two powerful Saudi ministers ... Tony Blair's claims that the government has been motivated by national security considerations look increasingly hollow."

Last month, Dr Cable raised the issue of BAE in the Commons and accused Prince Bandar of benefiting personally from the Al-Yamamah deal.

The new disclosures may also make BAE's attempted takeover of the US-based Armor Holdings more difficult. The deal requires approval from US regulators.

Separately, the state department has protested to the Foreign Office about the ending of the SFO inquiry, saying it undermines global efforts to stamp out corruption by exporters.

Story of a £43bn deal

1985 Al-Yamamah agreement signed by Saudi defence minister Prince Sultan and the then defence secretary Michael Heseltine. Saudis agree to buy 72 Tornado and 30 Hawk warplanes. The deal - "the dove" in Arabic - will in time be worth £43bn to BAE

1989 National Audit Office (NAO) starts inquiry into allegations that members of Saudi royal family and middlemen were secretly paid huge bribes to land Al-Yamamah contract

1992 MPs and auditor general Sir John Bourn suppress NAO report after government claims it would upset Saudis. Report never published

2001 Whistleblower alleges BAE operates "slush fund" to keep sweet the Saudi prince in charge of country's air force, but MoD covers up allegations

2004 Second whistleblower discloses to Guardian further details of slush fund. Serious Fraud Office starts investigation into alleged BAE corruption

2006 Government halts SFO inquiry; investigators were about to gain access to Swiss accounts thought to have been linked to Saudi royal family

2007 OECD, the world's anti-bribery watchdog, rebukes Blair government for terminating SFO investigation, and launches own inquiry

Original article posted here.

Terminator and Star Wars in Iraq

Marine Scientists Want Laser-Armed Drone

David Axe

Science advisors to the Marine Corps brigade deployed to western Iraq are eyeing a concept for a new flying drone armed with lethal and non-lethal weapons to help disrupt insurgent cells with sudden airborne attacks.

Such a drone would "take the fight to anti-Iraqi forces in areas where they currently perceive sanctuary," according to a briefing provided by one advisor, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press.

The concept is to take an existing "Tier II" medium-size drone in the vein of the 10-foot-wingspan Boeing/InSitu Scan Eagle, and fit it with two 40-millimeter grenade launchers, two green-laser dazzlers and a focused sound device similar to the Long-Range Acoustic Device manufactured by American Technology Corporation. This suite would give Marine operators �escalation of force options," according to the briefing.

In other words, the drone would be able to first warn off suspected insurgents by beaming a verbal message in Arabic. If the suspects don't disperse, the drone can dial up the intensity of its sound broadcast, causing pain and disorientation. If that doesn�t work, there are the laser dazzlers, which can cause temporary blindness from up to a mile away. If, after all of this, the suspects are still behaving threateningly, the drone can fire its grenade launchers.

Marine Corps officials in western Iraq signed separate official "needs statements" requesting the drone in September and November. The request is pending at Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia. But the Quantico weapons-buying bureaucracy has previously rejected scores of similar needs statements asking for a wide range of ground and air weapons.

Indeed, Quantico has earlier rejected separate requests for three of the major components of the proposed new drone. Marines in Iraq asked for additional acoustic devices for ground use and were denied. In 2005 and 2006 they repeatedly requested laser dazzlers, also for ground use, and Quantico said no, citing safety concerns. Multiple needs statements calling for hundreds of unarmed Tier II drones for surveillance missions were all ignored or turned down in favor of a planned competition for a new drone design beginning next year. The science advisors� armed drone, representing a combination of three technologies that Quantico has repeatedly denied, stands little chance of finding favor with the bureaucracy.

Marine Lieutenant Colonel P.J. Kerr, a drone expert at the Pentagon, says that unlike the Army, Navy and Air Force, the service has no plans yet to arm any of its drones. "That's something we're looking at very hard. It's being studied."

Ironically, Marine Corps units in western Iraq do benefit from the presence of armed Army Warrior drones operating on an experimental basis as part of the secretive "Task Force Odin," which uses drones, sensors and manned aircraft connected by a wireless network to quickly find, identify and kill insurgent bomb teams.

The proposed Marine Corps armed drone would end the need for Task Force Odin�s services, the anonymous advisor contends.

The disappearing distinction between military and industry, Was this what Eisenhower was talking about being afraid of?

Report: Wall Street regulators receive monthly CIA briefings

The Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates trading in America's financial markets, is getting monthly briefings from the Central Intelligence Agency on terrorist and criminal financial activities, according to a report in today's edition of Barron's.

"Each month, Chairman Christopher Cox and the four other commissioners are told about terrorists and other criminals increasingly active in the global capital markets," writes the paper's Steven M. Sears. "In an interview with Barron's last week, Cox said the intelligence reports offer the SEC a 'somewhat sharper focus' to an 'underworld of murky, illegal dealings that threaten the world capital markets.'"

Sears describes one scenario that concerns the SEC regulators.

"Criminals now purposefully disperse operations into different countries to avoid detection and prosecution," he writes. "For example, residents of Hong Kong, Malaysia, Estonia and Latvia have hacked into U.S. online brokerage accounts and used the money to bid up the price of their own stocks. In one 'account intrusion' case, criminals made more than $732,000 trading 15 Nasdaq-listed stocks."

Members of Congress are concerned with the SEC's expansion into regulating trades that are related to national security.

"A congressional delegation that includes the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees securities firms and SEC, visited key European regulators in early April to examine joint regulation issues amid concerns that regulators are ill-equipped to address coming challenges," the paper notes. "'The extension into national security is a huge issue for everyone. This will not be a secondary issue, but an extension of our ongoing talks,' says Steve Adamske, spokesman for Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank, the committee's chairman."

The SEC is also seeking a higher level of briefing than it currently receives.

"The SEC recently asked the CIA for higher security clearances. The intelligence community is currently vetting Cox and the commissioners to see if they qualify for access to even more highly classified information than they are currently shown in their intelligence briefings," Barron's reports.

The article is only available to Barron's subscribers. An excerpt is provided below.

#

A "James Bond scenario" in which terrorists buy millions of dollars of put options and blow up buildings or airplanes to increase the puts' value is deemed unlikely by intelligence authorities. Yet less developed securities markets have reported stock trading by terrorists to raise money. In February, India's national security adviser, M.K. Narayanan, said at a security-policy conference in Munich that India had evidence of "isolated incidents of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations."

Cox would not say if terrorists were active, or present, in U.S. markets. But he was clear about the reason for this increased illegal activity in global markets.

"This phenomenon is born of the arrival on the scene of so many different, and substantial, liquidity pools," Cox said. "It used to be that significant capital had to be raised in the United States," but that is no longer true.

And therein lies SEC's great regulatory challenge. While insider trading in Dow Jones, TXU and Reebok securities linked to Hong Kong, Pakistani and Croatian residents may capture public attention, more significant market threats are harder to detect.

Original article posted here.

Ending Empire

Evil Empire: Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America?

By Chalmers Johnson

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.
The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.

If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."
George W. Bush has, of course, flagrantly violated his oath of office, which requires him "to protect and defend the constitution," and the opposition party has been remarkably reluctant to hold him to account. Among the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that, under other political circumstances, would surely constitute the Constitutional grounds for impeachment are these: the President and his top officials pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to put together a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's nuclear weapons that both the administration and the Agency knew to be patently dishonest. They then used this false NIE to justify an American war of aggression. After launching an invasion of Iraq, the administration unilaterally reinterpreted international and domestic law to permit the torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at other secret locations around the world.

Nothing in the Constitution, least of all the commander-in-chief clause, allows the president to commit felonies. Nonetheless, within days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush had signed a secret executive order authorizing a new policy of "extraordinary rendition," in which the CIA is allowed to kidnap terrorist suspects anywhere on Earth and transfer them to prisons in countries like Egypt, Syria, or Uzbekistan, where torture is a normal practice, or to secret CIA prisons outside the United States where Agency operatives themselves do the torturing.
On the home front, despite the post-9/11 congressional authorization of new surveillance powers to the administration, its officials chose to ignore these and, on its own initiative, undertook extensive spying on American citizens without obtaining the necessary judicial warrants and without reporting to Congress on this program. These actions are prima-facie violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (and subsequent revisions) and of

Amendment IV of the Constitution.

These alone constitute more than adequate grounds for impeachment, while hardly scratching the surface. And yet, on the eve of the national elections of November 2006, then House Minority Leader, now Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), pledged on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that "impeachment is off the table." She called it "a waste of time." And six months after the Democratic Party took control of both houses of Congress, the prison at Guantánamo Bay was still open and conducting drumhead courts martial of the prisoners held there; the CIA was still using "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners in foreign jails; illegal intrusions into the privacy of American citizens continued unabated; and, more than fifty years after the CIA was founded, it continues to operate under, at best, the most perfunctory congressional oversight.

Promoting Lies, Demoting Democracy

Without question, the administration's catastrophic war in Iraq is the single overarching issue that has convinced a large majority of Americans that the country is "heading in the wrong direction." But the war itself is the outcome of an imperial presidency and the abject failure of Congress to perform its Constitutional duty of oversight. Had the government been working as the authors of the Constitution intended, the war could not have occurred. Even now, the Democratic majority remains reluctant to use its power of the purse to cut off funding for the war, thereby ending the American occupation of Iraq and starting to curtail the ever-growing power of the military-industrial complex.

One major problem of the American social and political system is the failure of the press, especially television news, to inform the public about the true breadth of the unconstitutional activities of the executive branch. As Frederick A. O. Schwarz and Aziz Z. Huq, the authors of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, observe, "For the public to play its proper checking role at the ballot box, citizens must know what is done by the government in their names."

Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the bureaucrat's most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a result of this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively engaged citizenry did not -- and could not -- occur. The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives -- including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment -- essentially hijacked the government.
Some respected professional journalists do not see these failings as the mere result of personal turpitude but rather as deep structural and cultural problems within the American system as it exists today. In an interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty years one of America's leading investigative reporters, put the matter this way:

"All of the institutions we thought would protect us -- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed… So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring…. What can be done to fix the situation? [long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives."

Veteran analyst of the press (and former presidential press secretary), Bill Moyers, considering a classic moment of media failure, concluded: "The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations [on February 5, 2003] seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web -- with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with 'plagiarism.'"

As a result of such multiple failures (still ongoing), the executive branch easily misled the American public.

A Made-in-America Human Catastrophe

Of the failings mentioned by Hersh, that of the military is particularly striking, resembling as it does the failures of the Vietnam era, thirty-plus years earlier. One would have thought the high command had learned some lessons from the defeat of 1975. Instead, it once again went to war pumped up on our own propaganda -- especially the conjoined beliefs that the United States was the "indispensable nation," the "lone superpower," and the "victor" in the Cold War; and that it was a new Rome the likes of which the world had never seen, possessing as it did -- from the heavens to the remotest spot on the planet -- "full spectrum dominance." The idea that the U.S. was an unquestioned military colossus athwart the world, which no power or people could effectively oppose, was hubristic nonsense certain to get the country into deep trouble -- as it did -- and bring the U.S. Army to the point of collapse, as happened in Vietnam and may well happen again in Iraq (and Afghanistan).

Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our military invaded Iraq with far too small a force; failed to respond adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army (and Baathist Party) went underground; tolerated an orgy of looting and lawlessness throughout the country; disobeyed orders and ignored international obligations (including the obligation of an occupying power to protect the facilities and treasures of the occupied country -- especially, in this case, Baghdad's National Museum and other archaeological sites of untold historic value); and incompetently fanned the flames of an insurgency against our occupation, committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.

According to Andrew Bacevich, "Next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within the capacity of the United States to determine the outcome of events there." Our former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas W. Freeman, says of President Bush's recent "surge" strategy in Baghdad and al-Anbar Province: "The reinforcement of failure is a poor substitute for its correction."

Symbolically, a certain sign of the disaster to come in Iraq arrived via an April 26th posting from the courageous but anonymous Sunni woman who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her family, she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile -- joining up to two million of her compatriots who have left the country. In her final dispatch, she wrote:

"There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends.... And to what?"

Retired General Barry McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division in the first Iraq war and a consistent cheerleader for Bush strategies in the second, recently radically changed his tune. He now says, "No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection." In a different context, Gen. McCaffrey has concluded: "The U.S. Army is rapidly unraveling."

Even military failure in Iraq is still being spun into an endless web of lies and distortions by the White House, the Pentagon, military pundits, and the now-routine reporting of propagandists disguised as journalists. For example, in the first months of 2007, rising car-bomb attacks in Baghdad were making a mockery of Bush administration and Pentagon claims that the U.S. troop escalation in the capital had brought about "a dramatic drop in sectarian violence." The official response to this problem: the Pentagon simply quit including deaths from car bombings in its count of sectarian casualties. (It has never attempted to report civilian casualties publicly or accurately.) Since August 2003, there have been over 1,050 car bombings in Iraq. One study estimates that through June 2006 the death toll from these alone has been a staggering 78,000 Iraqis.

The war and occupation George W. Bush unleashed in Iraq has proved unimaginably lethal for unarmed civilians, but reporting the true levels of lethality in Iraq, or the nature of the direct American role in it was, for a long time, virtually taboo in the U.S. media. As late as October 2006, the journal of the British Medical Association, The Lancet, published a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimating that, since March 2003, there were some 601,027 more Iraqi deaths from violence than would have been expected without a war. The British and American governments at first dismissed the findings, claiming the research was based on faulty statistical methods -- and the American media ignored the study, played down its importance, or dismissed its figures.
On March 27, 2007, however, it was revealed that the chief scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defense, Roy Anderson, had offered a more honest response. The methods used in the study were, he wrote, "close to best practice." Another British official described them as "a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones." Over 600,000 violent deaths in a population estimated in 2006 at 26.8 million -- that is, one in every 45 individuals -- amounts to a made-in-America human catastrophe.

One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans' mental make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed "rag heads" or "hajis" as murder. The cult of silence on this subject began to slip only slightly in May 2007 when a report prepared by the Army's Mental Health Advisory Team was leaked to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Based on anonymous surveys and focus groups involving 1,320 soldiers and 447 Marines, the study revealed that only 56% of soldiers would report a unit member for injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant, while a mere 40% of Marines would do so. Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly trained soldier. If so, then the answer to this problem is to ensure that, in the future, there are many fewer imperialist wars of choice sponsored by the United States.

The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

Many other aspects of imperialism and militarism are undermining America's Constitutional system. By now, for example, the privatization of military and intelligence functions is totally out of control, beyond the law, and beyond any form of Congressional oversight. It is also incredibly lucrative for the owners and operators of so-called private military companies -- and the money to pay for their activities ultimately comes from taxpayers through government contracts. Any accounting of these funds, largely distributed to crony companies with insider connections, is chaotic at best. Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, estimates that there are 126,000 private military contractors in Iraq, more than enough to keep the war going, even if most official U.S. troops were withdrawn. "From the beginning," Scahill writes, "these contractors have been a major hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely central to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq."

America's massive "military" budgets, still on the rise, are beginning to threaten the U.S. with bankruptcy, given that its trade and fiscal deficits already easily make it the world's largest net debtor nation. Spending on the military establishment -- sometimes mislabeled "defense spending" -- has soared to the highest levels since World War II, exceeding the budgets of the Korean and Vietnam War eras as well as President Ronald Reagan's weapons-buying binge in the 1980s. According to calculations by the National Priorities Project, a non-profit research organization that examines the local impact of federal spending policies, military spending today consumes 40% of every tax dollar.

Equally alarming, it is virtually impossible for a member of Congress or an ordinary citizen to obtain even a modest handle on the actual size of military spending or its impact on the structure and functioning of our economic system. Some $30 billion of the official Defense Department (DoD) appropriation in the current fiscal year is "black," meaning that it is allegedly going for highly classified projects. Even the open DoD budget receives only perfunctory scrutiny because members of Congress, seeking lucrative defense contracts for their districts, have mutually beneficial relationships with defense contractors and the Pentagon. President Dwight D. Eisenhower identified this phenomenon, in the draft version of his 1961 farewell address, as the "military-industrial-congressional complex." Forty-six years later, in a way even Eisenhower probably couldn't have imagined, the defense budget is beyond serious congressional oversight or control.

The DoD always tries to minimize the size of its budget by representing it as a declining percentage of the gross national product. What it never reveals is that total military spending is actually many times larger than the official appropriation for the Defense Department. For fiscal year 2006, Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute calculated national security outlays at almost a trillion dollars -- $934.9 billion to be exact -- broken down as follows (in billions of dollars):

Department of Defense: $499.4Department of Energy (atomic weapons):
$16.6Department of State (foreign military aid):
$25.3Department of Veterans Affairs (treatment of wounded soldiers):
$69.8Department of Homeland Security (actual defense):
$69.1Department of Justice (1/3rd for the FBI):
$1.9Department of the Treasury (military retirements):
$38.5NASA (satellite launches):
$7.6Interest on war debts,
1916-present: $206.7
Totaled, the sum is larger than the combined sum spent by all other nations on military security.
This spending helps sustain the national economy and represents, essentially, a major jobs program. However, it is beginning to crowd out the civilian economy, causing stagnation in income levels. It also contributes to the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs to other countries. On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research released a series of estimates on "the economic impact of the Iraq war and higher military spending." Its figures show, among other things, that, after an initial demand stimulus, the effect of a significant rise in military spending (as we've experienced in recent years) turns negative around the sixth year.
Sooner or later, higher military spending forces inflation and interest rates up, reducing demand in interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, notably in annual car and truck sales. Job losses follow. The non-military construction and manufacturing sectors experience the largest share of these losses. The report concludes, "Most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment."

Imperial Liquidation?

Imperialism and militarism have thus begun to imperil both the financial and social well-being of our republic. What the country desperately needs is a popular movement to rebuild the Constitutional system and subject the government once again to the discipline of checks and balances. Neither the replacement of one political party by the other, nor protectionist economic policies aimed at rescuing what's left of our manufacturing economy will correct what has gone wrong. Both of these solutions fail to address the root cause of our national decline.
I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.

For the U.S., the decision to mount such a campaign of imperial liquidation may already come too late, given the vast and deeply entrenched interests of the military-industrial complex. To succeed, such an endeavor might virtually require a revolutionary mobilization of the American citizenry, one at least comparable to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Even to contemplate a drawing back from empire -- something so inconceivable to our pundits and newspaper editorial writers that it is simply never considered -- we must specify as clearly as possible precisely what the elected leaders and citizens of the United States would have to do. Two cardinal decisions would have to be made. First, in Iraq, we would have to initiate a firm timetable for withdrawing all our military forces and turning over the permanent military bases we have built to the Iraqis. Second, domestically, we would have to reverse federal budget priorities.

In the words of Noam Chomsky, a venerable critic of American imperialism: "Where spending is rising, as in military supplemental bills to conduct the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would sharply decline. Where spending is steady or declining (health, education, job training, the promotion of energy conservation and renewable energy sources, veterans benefits, funding for the UN and UN peacekeeping operations, and so on), it would sharply increase. Bush's tax cuts for people with incomes over $200,000 a year would be immediately rescinded."

Such reforms would begin at once to reduce the malevolent influence of the military-industrial complex, but many other areas would require attention as well. As part of the process of de-garrisoning the planet and liquidating our empire, we would have to launch an orderly closing-up process for at least 700 of the 737 military bases we maintain (by official Pentagon count) in over 130 foreign countries on every continent except Antarctica. We should ultimately aim at closing all our imperialist enclaves, but in order to avoid isolationism and maintain a capacity to assist the United Nations in global peacekeeping operations, we should, for the time being, probably retain some 37 of them, mostly naval and air bases.

Equally important, we should rewrite all our Status of Forces Agreements -- those American-dictated "agreements" that exempt our troops based in foreign countries from local criminal laws, taxes, immigration controls, anti-pollution legislation, and anything else the American military can think of. It must be established as a matter of principle and law that American forces stationed outside the U.S. will deal with their host nations on a basis of equality, not of extraterritorial privilege.

The American approach to diplomatic relations with the rest of the world would also require a major overhaul. We would have to end our belligerent unilateralism toward other countries as well as our scofflaw behavior regarding international law. Our objective should be to strengthen the United Nations, including our respect for its majority, by working to end the Security Council veto system (and by stopping using our present right to veto). The United States needs to cease being the world's largest supplier of arms and munitions -- a lethal trade whose management should be placed under UN supervision. We should encourage the UN to begin outlawing weapons like land mines, cluster bombs, and depleted-uranium ammunition that play particularly long-term havoc with civilian populations. As part of an attempt to right the diplomatic balance, we should take some obvious steps like recognizing Cuba and ending our blockade of that island and, in the Middle East, working to equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, while attempting to broker a real solution to that disastrous situation. Our goal should be a return to leading by example -- and by sound arguments -- rather than by continual resort to unilateral armed force and repeated foreign military interventions.

In terms of the organization of the executive branch, we need to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947, taking away from the CIA all functions that involve sabotage, torture, subversion, overseas election rigging, rendition, and other forms of clandestine activity. The president should be deprived of his power to order these types of operations except with the explicit advice and consent of the Senate. The CIA should basically devote itself to the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence. We should eliminate as much secrecy as possible so that neither the CIA, nor any other comparable organization ever again becomes the president's private army.

In order to halt our economic decline and lessen our dependence on our trading partners, the U.S. must cap its trade deficits through the perfectly legal use of tariffs in accordance with World Trade Organization rules, and it must begin to guide its domestic market in accordance with a national industrial policy, just as the leading economies of the world (particularly the Japanese and Chinese ones) do as a matter of routine. Even though it may involve trampling on the vested interests of American university economics departments, there is simply no excuse for a continued reliance on an outdated doctrine of "free trade."

Normally, a proposed list of reforms like this would simply be rejected as utopian. I understand this reaction. I do want to stress, however, that failure to undertake such reforms would mean condemning the United States to the fate that befell the Roman Republic and all other empires since then. That is why I gave my book Nemesis the subtitle "The Last Days of the American Republic."

When Ronald Reagan coined the phrase "evil empire," he was referring to the Soviet Union, and I basically agreed with him that the USSR needed to be contained and checkmated. But today it is the U.S. that is widely perceived as an evil empire and world forces are gathering to stop us. The Bush administration insists that if we leave Iraq our enemies will "win" or -- even more improbably -- "follow us home." I believe that, if we leave Iraq and our other imperial enclaves, we can regain the moral high ground and disavow the need for a foreign policy based on preventive war. I also believe that unless we follow this path, we will lose our democracy and then it will not matter much what else we lose. In the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). It is the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy.

Original article posted here.

A bad day for the military may mean a great day for human lives

Black Day For Future Combat Systems Program As Funding Gutted

According to the most enthusiastic proponents of the FCS, "so rapidly would it destroy enemies ... that U.S. troops would no longer need armor on their vehicles," Andrew Cockburn wrote.

by Martin Sieff

It was a day of rare bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. But it was also a Black Wednesday for U.S. high-tech defense contractors and for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. For Wednesday was the day that a subcommittee in the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives slashed $867 million from one of Rumsfeld's most visionary -- and expensive -- programs: the U.S. military's Future Combat Systems.

The FCS was energetically promoted by Rumsfeld during his six-year tenure as U.S. secretary of defense as the program that would shape the high-tech future of the U.S. armed forces. The FCS was an ambitious plan to integrate, automate and centralize military firepower and combat systems. But it has attracted widespread criticism for enormous cost overruns and delays, although supporters say key programs have been making significant progress.

Defense News reported Wednesday that the cuts included $566 million in system-engineering funding, $362 million in contractor fees, $46 million from robots and $21 million from unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs.

"The FCS program has faced serious technology, cost and schedule problems in the past," Defense News quoted Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee's Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, as saying. "These issues have been pointed out by this subcommittee in past years' bills. Unfortunately, most of these same program concerns exist today."

Rep. Jim Saxton, R-N.J., the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, supported the decision to cut the FCS funding.

"I understand why the decision to decrement the program was made and I support the chairman's difficult decision in terms of balancing priorities," However, he said he would try to reduce the scale of the funding cutback for the program.

"I would ask the chairman (Abercrombie) to work with me prior to the full committee markup to find a way to mitigate the funding reduction," he added.

The Democrat-controlled 110th Congress was expected to take a critical look at the FCS. As we predicted in a UPI analysis on March 14, "it looks like tough times are ahead for Donald Rumsfeld's ... pride and joy -- the Future Combat Systems programs."

Even so, the speed with which Congress has started wielding the ax against the FCS and the scale of even the initial cuts in the program have come as a surprise to many.

The FCS offered the enticing promise of transforming warfare even more fundamentally than any effective BMD defense system would. Ironically, it was originally pushed not only by Rumsfeld during his now much criticized, immensely controversial six-year stint as U.S. secretary of defense, but also by a man Rumsfeld came to loathe, former U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki.

As Rumsfeld biographer Andrew Cockburn wrote in his recently published book "Rumsfeld," the FCS "was projected to consume at least $128 billion by 2014, and would consist of manned and unmanned air and ground vehicles all tied together by computer networks that would automatically identify targets and instantly destroy them with precise firepower."

Indeed, according to the most enthusiastic proponents of the FCS, "so rapidly would it destroy enemies ... that U.S. troops would no longer need armor on their vehicles," Cockburn wrote.

That was the theory. But it hasn't being going well. On March 2, The Hill newspaper listed the FCS as one being on a list of "several technologically complicated programs still in development" that the new Democrat-controlled 110th Congress "may be forced to quash"

The Hill put the current price of the FCS at $160 billion. It also noted that over the past three years even the Republican-controlled 108th and 109th Congresses had slashed $825 million from the troubled program.

Now, however, the Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, headed by Abercrombie, has proposed cutting more from the FCS after sitting for less than three months on Capitol Hill than the previous two Congresses did in four years. Development work on the FCS began in 2003, but in March 2005 a Government Accountability Office official told Congress, as Cockburn noted, that "only one of 50 technologies are mature."

In August 2005 even senior Army generals speaking on the record at a U.S. Army Knowledge Management conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., admitted that the problems of developing reliable software to integrate the many systems required by the FCS project remained horrendous.

By the time Rumsfeld left the Pentagon, Cockburn noted, the overall lifetime cost of the FCS as estimated by the office of the secretary of defense had soared to $307.2 billion.

As we noted on March 14, Abercrombie had made clear he was skeptical of the FCS and intended to take a close look at it. "FCS has to be pretty ruthlessly vetted. And we'll see whether we get all these complicated systems," he told The Hill.

The failure of the U.S. armed forces to yet make significant headway against the Sunni Muslim insurgency in Iraq after six years of an unparalleled drive to load them up with high-tech wonder weapons at Rumsfeld's behest has peeled the Teflon coating from the FCS in the eyes of many American lawmakers.

Abercrombie defined the new mood on Capitol Hill succinctly when he told The Hill, "We need to do a little more training and equipping and concentrate on the basics rather than the razzle-dazzle technologies."

Wednesday's budget proposals were the biggest step yet towards implementing that radically different procurement and military spending philosophy.

Original article posted here.

Tesla's Nightmare: High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP)