I wonder if you’ve noticed, as I
have, a prominent, somewhat new corporate sponsor of the PBS News Hour. It
calls itself BAE Systems and it seems to be a rather high-minded tech company
with the appealing brand motto “inspired
work.” Oh yeah, they’re inspired alright, inspired to produce some of the
most deadly machinery on the planet. BAE Systems, that is, used to be British
Aerospace and changed to the more mild-sounding BAE Systems in 1999. That
would’ve been after 1985 when British Aerospace was involved in the biggest
(and perhaps most scandalous) arms deal of all time, the Al Yamamah trade
supplying Saudi Arabia with over £43 billion worth of aircraft, specialized
naval vessels, missiles, shells, support services and infrastructure. In return, the Saudis pledged to supply Britain
with 400,000 barrels of oil a day. It was the deal that saved British
Aerospace, and allowed it to thrive and establish subsidiary companies in the
U.S. among other places, including no less than seven sites in the San
Francisco Bay Area. This is the story that Andrew Feinstein tells in his 2011
book, The Shadow World: Inside the Global
Arms Trade. It’s filled with gems like the story of the Al Yamamah deal,
including luscious details about the scandal involving the Saudi Royal Family
and a personal slush fund operated for them by BAE, and the massive commissions
the dealers (including Maggie Thatcher’s son Mark, who received about £12
million as an agent, and Prince Bandar al Sultan of 9/11 fame) got for greasing
the wheels of the deal. According to the story Feinstein cites from Britain’s Guardian newspaper, the principal
beneficiary of the slush fund was Prince Turki Bin Nasser, head of the Saudi
Royal Air Force, who in addition to about £17 million in personal benefits,
(some of which took care of his mistress, Anouska Bolton-Lee), also got gifts
for his family: “a $30,000 Mercedes for his daughter, a blue Rolls Royce for
his wife (Rolls is one of BAE’s subcontractors), and a £175,000 Aston Martin Le
Mans for himself.” These cars were
regularly shipped between Saudi Arabia and Los Angeles on privately chartered
airplanes; in 1995, for example, one cargo plane cost $300,000 to carry cars
and assorted shopping booty home to Saudi Arabia. So were the members of the
royal family, all paid for by BAE’s slush fund—the total, by 2002 amounting to
more than 1 million pounds a month and 7 million pounds a year. Gives you an
idea of the kind of money involved in the arms trade.
The
shady characters involved are equally staggering. Feinstein begins by charting
the origins of a company called Merex. It started with the Nazis, courtesy of
U.S. intelligence’s decision to rescue a general named Reinhard Gehlen, who had
been chief of Nazi intelligence on the Eastern Front and so knew a lot about
the Russians and their industrial plants. So Gehlen and several colleagues were
shipped to Washington in a private plane, and then, after supplying lots of
intel, were within a year returned to Germany to head a huge German spy ring to
monitor the Russians. That led to the ex-Nazi’s promotion to head the West
German intelligence agency until his retirement in 1968, but that’s not all. In
the 1950s, Gehlen asked one of his old SS associates, Gerhard Mertins, to “act
as middleman for German arms sales to the Third World,” which is where the
action was and still is. The idea was, Germany could remilitarize if it could
sell its old surplus arms stock, and Mertins was to be the agent for the
selling. In 1963, he established a new company that he called Merex based in
Bonn and Switzerland. Some of Merex’s first deals, aided by one Sam Cummings of
the CIA, were selling old Luftwaffe stock to Castro’s Cuba and to Venezuela. It
was, and is, typical of such arms dealers to sell fighting equipment to both
sides in a conflict, as they did to Pakistan and India. Like BAE, Merex
established an American branch in Bethesda Maryland, a convenient location for
working with the CIA, as when they managed to ship arms to the CIAs favorite
“freedom fighters,” the Nicaraguan Contras. Of course, for the arms merchants
in the shadow world, the pedigree of those who want to buy arms never enters
the calculation. The motto seems to be, ‘If you got the money, honey, we got
the guns, planes, bullets, rockets or whatever suits your fancy.’ Africa after
colonialism thus became one of the great illegal arms markets. As Feinstein
points out, lovely episodes like the Rwandan genocide could not have happened
without the immense influx of arms from unscrupulous arms dealers. Between 1992
and 1994, Rwanda became one of Africa’s major arms importers, spending over
$112 million on mainly hand grenades and AK-47s—much of it from former Soviet
countries—which amounted to 20 times what it had spent in the entire 1980s. Grenades
were so easy to come by “they could be bought from local vegetable markets for
$3 apiece.” It was grenades and weapons, not machetes, that were necessary to
kill masses of young men in Rwanda’s stadiums. Hence, the genocide.
What
Feinstein makes clear, though, is that unsavory as these foreign arms dealers
were and are, it’s in the United States and its pitbull, Israel, where the big
money lies (in 2008, over 2/3 of all
new arms sales agreements worldwide went to US companies) especially since the bonanza for
arms manufacturers known as the War on Terror. In 2003, the US Government
issued 3,500 contracts to companies for security, and from then to the end of
2006, the Department of Homeland security issued 115,000 contracts, most on the
no-bid basis made possible by the contract initiated by Dick Cheney when he was
head of the Pentagon. It’s called LOGCAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program)
and it invites bids from American companies to supply logistical support for
the US military, with NO DOLLAR VALUE in the contract. It's cost-plus: all costs
covered plus a guaranteed profit; in short, corporate welfare for the types
who regularly inveigh against welfare to the poor—chump change by comparison. Thanks
to this kind of largesse, the US Government regularly spends about $550 per
household on homeland security alone. And that doesn’t even begin to consider
the amount spent on keeping our redoubtable military up to date, as with the
Boeing $26 billion contract of 2001 to
lease 100 KC-767 in-air-refueling tankers from Boeing over a ten-year
period (the CBO determined that buying the damn things outright would have cost
$5 billion less!). So corrupt was this deal that the Deputy Assistant Secretary
of the Air Force for Acquisition, Darleen Druyun, who oversaw the deal, was
charged with ethics violations (she got her son-in-law a job with Boeing and
then got herself one), and eventually accepted a plea deal of 9 months in
prison and a $5000 fine—though she still collects her government pension.
Boeing’s CFO and CEO both resigned, with the CFO sentenced to 4 months in
prison, while the company paid a big fine for its chicanery. But
probably the best example of ‘price creep’ under LOGCAP involves Lockheed
Martin’s F-22 Raptor, the most expensive fighter jet in history and one that is
considered basically useless in any foreseeable war. The original intent
(contract is meaningless here) was to buy 750 planes for a projected cost of
$25 billion. By 1999, the cost had ballooned and plans had shrunk to 339 planes
at a projected cost of more than $62 billion—i.e. half as many planes for twice
the cost! The practice here is known as “buying in”, where the company bids at
what it knows is a low price and then jacks up the price later, using “gold
plating” or setting ever higher performance requirements after the plane is in
development. Moreover, to protect their contracts, companies like Lockheed
don’t do what one would normally expect a company to do to minimize risk—that
is, build several prototypes to test before starting production. No, they start
production based on lies and then simply jack up costs to keep the money
flowing.
There’s
more about Lockheed and other military contractors, especially those that made
a killing in Iraq (the mother of all military-procurement boondoggles) like
Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton. Just to give a sense of the big bucks
involved here, it should surprise no one that Cheney’s personal wealth rose
from about $1 million before he became VP to $60 to $70 million when he left
office. During his 7 years in office, “Halliburton was awarded with more than
$20 billion in contracts,” most of them on the usual no-bid basis. So blatant
was their cheating that in the end Halliburton was fined for overcharging the government
and using misleading accounting practices. But Dick Cheney seems to have emerged
scot-free, wealthy, and with the chutzpah to regularly criticize the current
president for failing to live up to the standards set by the Bush
administration. Feinstein’s comment provides the real picture: “In the Bush
administration the war profiteers weren’t just clamouring to get access to
government, they were the government”
(209).
As
to Israel, Feinstein devotes an entire chapter to their arms dealing entitled
“America’s Shop Window.” By that he means that “Israel is the ‘primary testing
ground’ for American weapons…It is, in effect, a shop window for the American
weapons industry.” Feinstein goes on to note that in 2008, Israel’s military
contracts were worth over $6.3 billion, “the 7th highest of 32
countries for which information is available,” spending no less than 8% of its
GDP on the military (the US spends 4.5% while most comparable countries spend
only 1% of GDP). It was also the 11th
largest arms importer between 2005 and 2010, when its imports rose 102%. But
the real story lies in its arms exports, ranking it as the 4th
largest arms exporter to developing countries (always a great market),
including “rogue states in Africa, Latin America, and even the Middle East.”
One of the reasons Israel ranks so high here is that, given its long experience
suppressing Palestinians, its arms industry specializes in “equipment designed
to control civilians.” In this regard, the War on Terror was crucial in
bolstering—even saving—Israel’s economy. Its sales pitch to arms purchasers
highlights its experience in this regard: “We have been fighting a War on
Terror since our birth, we’ll show you how it’s done.” When it comes to heavy
equipment, of course, Israel 'buys' most of that from its chief sponsor and
enabler, the United States: in 2007, the two countries signed a 10-year MOU
(Memorandum of Understanding) calling for $30 billion in US military aid. In
this, Israel is unique in that it is the only country permitted to use US
military aid to build its own military industry, including the development of
weapons systems based on US designs, and to fund joint military research and
development with its donor, as with its “Iron Dome” anti-missile system. This
has allowed Israel to amass an arsenal of 226 F-16 jet fighters, over 600 M-690
tanks, no less than 6,000 armoured personnel carriers, and countless transport
planes, attack helicopters, cluster bombs and white phosphorus. Only Saudi
Arabia buys more, but it pays for its
equipment.
The
story of Israeli arms dealers and deals is too long, and in some ways too well-known
to go into here. Suffice it to say that its former officers train security
forces all around the world, boasting a
one-stop shop that includes all
requirements for riot control, ground forces, homeland security, counter- and
anti-terror, K9 dogs, and identification of and protection against nuclear, biological
and chemical weapons (385).
Israeli arms dealers dominate the
shadow world, according to Feinstein, helped by the citizenship, travel
privileges and protection their government provides them. Yossi Melman, an
Israeli investigative reporter, is quoted by Feinstein as wryly describing the
two wings of the entire Israeli business community thusly: ‘Those who are arms
dealers and those who don’t admit they’re arms dealers.’ Perhaps most
important, Israel comprises the chief testing ground for weapons the US thinks
it might some day need. Feinstein spoke to one army source who testified to
using ammunition in recent battles that was not even approved for use in the
US:
It came from the American company
ALS, where it was still in the testing phase, and thus, not legally usable in
the US. But it was being used against people in the occupied territories by the
IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) (393).
Of course, Israel is no laggard
when it comes to developing its own high-tech equipment for dealing death to
its enemies. It even sets up US subsidiaries so that it can utilize US aid
money to buy the latest military equipment from
its own companies. It is a leader in drone development, and its notorious
separation barrier (some call it an apartheid wall) is similarly outfitted for
long-distance monitoring:
The separation barrier is equipped
with unmanned, armed observation points that, through personnel in a distant,
secure location, identify and fire on anyone who comes too near to the barrier.
(394)
Like drones, this amounts to “the
creation of a robotic non-culpability for death…” Perhaps all the merchants of
death, including the gun dealers and manufacturers in the US, would claim the
same non-culpability for themselves: ‘We don’t kill anyone. We just sell them
the equipment; what they do with it is not our affair.’
Lawrence DiStasi
No comments:
Post a Comment