Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
January 22
/ 24, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Prince
Harry's Travails
January 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
A
Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)
Sharon Smith
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria
Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration
Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert
Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services
Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
How
the Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
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Gore Vidal
The
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Francis Boyle
Impeach
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Click
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|
Weekend Edition
January 22 / 24, 2005
The Company That Runs the Empire
Lockheed
and Loaded
By
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Lockheed-Martin is headquartered in
the Bethesda, Maryland. No, the defense titan doesn't have a
bomb-making factory in this toney Beltway suburb. But as the
nation's top weapons contractor, it migrated to DC from southern
California because that's where the money is. And Lockheed rakes
it in from the federal treasury at the rate of $65 million every
single day of the year.
From nuclear missiles to fighter
planes, software code to spy satellites, the Patriot missile
to Star Wars, Lockheed has come to dominate the weapons market
in a way that the Standard Oil Company used to hold sway over
the nation's petroleum supplies. And it all happened with the
help of the federal government, which steered lucrative no bid
contracts Lockheed's way, enacted tax breaks that encouraged
Lockheed's merger and acquisition frenzy in the 1980s and 1990s
and turned a blind eye to the company's criminal rap sheet, ripe
with indiscretions ranging from bribery to contract fraud.
Now Lockheed stands almost
alone. It not only serves as an agent of US foreign policy, from
the Pentagon to the CIA; it also helps shape it. "We are
deployed entirely in developing daunting technology," Lockheed's
new CEO Robert J. Stevens told the New York Times report Tim
Weiner. "That requires thinking through the policy dimensions
of national security as well as technological dimensions."
Like many defense industry
executives, Stevens is a former military man who cashed in his
Pentagon career for a lucrative position in the private sector.
The stern-jawed Stevens served in the Marines and later taught
at the Pentagon's Defense Systems Management College, an institution
which offers graduate level seminars in how to design billion
dollar weapons deals. From the Marines, Stevens landed first
at Loral, the defense satellite company. Then in 1993 he went
to work at Lockheed, heading its "Corporate Strategic Development
Program". There Stevens wrote the gameplan for how Lockheed
would soar past Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and
the others, as the top recipient of Pentagon largesse.
The plan was as simple as it
proved profitable. Instead of risking the competition of the
marketplace, Lockheed, under Stevens' scheme, would target the
easy money: federal contracts. The strategy was also straightforward:
flood the congress with PAC money to get and keep grateful and
obedient members in power. Those friendly members of congress
would also be surrounded by squads of lobbyists to develop and
write legislation and insert Lockheed-friendly line items
into the bloated appropriations bills that fund the government.
It also called for seeding the Pentagon and the White House with
Lockheed loyalists, many of whom formerly worked for the company.
"We need to be politically
aware and astute," said Stevens. "We need to work with
the congress. We need to work with the executive branch. We need
to say: we think this is feasible, we think this is possible.
We think we have invented a new approach."
The scheme succeeded brilliantly.
By the end of the 1990s, Lockheed had made the transition from
an airplane manufacturer with defense contracts to a kind of
privatized supplier for nearly every Pentagon weapons scheme,
from the F-22 fighter to the Pentagon's internet system. Then
9/11 happened and the federal floodgates for spending on national
security, airline safety and war making opened wide and haven't
closed. Lockheed has been the prime beneficiary of this gusher
of federal money.
Since September 2001, the Pentagon's
weapons procurement program has soared by more than $20 billion,
from $60 billion to $81 billion in 2004. Lockheed's revenues
over the same time period jumped by a similar 30 percent. And,
despite the recession and slumping Dow, the company's stock tripled
in value.
Almost all of this profiteering
came courtesy of the federal treasury. More than 80 percent of
Lockheed's revenues derives directly from federal government
contracts. And most of the rest comes from foreign military sales
to Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Chile. Israel alone
spends $1.8 billion a year on planes and missile systems purchased
from Lockheed. Lockheed sells its weaponry, from F-16 fighters
to surveillance software, to more than 40 nations. "We're
looking at world domination of the market," gloated Bob
Elrod, a senior executive in Lockheed's fighter plane division.
And there's little risk involved.
Nearly all of these sales are guaranteed by the US government.
After 9/11, Bush tapped Lockheed's
Stevens to lead his presidential commission on the Future of
the US Aerospace Industry, a body which, not surprisingly, wasted
little time pounding home the importance of sluicing even more
federal dollars in the form of defense and air traffic control
contracts to companies such as Lockheed.
But Stevens' position was just
the icing on a very sweet cake. Former Lockheed executives and
lobbyists toil every day on behalf of the defense giant from
the inside the administration and the Pentagon. At the very top
of the list is Steven J. Hadley, recently tapped to replace Condoleezza
Rice as Bush's National Security Advisor. Prior to joining the
Bush administration, Hadley represented Lockheed at the giant
DC law firm of Shea and Gardner. Other Lockheed executives have
been appointed to the Defense Policy Board and the Homeland Security
Advisory Council. Bush's Transportation Secretary, Norman Mineta,
and Otto Reich, the former deputy Secretary of State for the
Western Hemisphere, both once worked as Lockheed lobbyists.
But the revolving door swings
both ways for Lockheed. On its corporate board reposes E.C. Aldridge,
Jr. Before retiring from the Defense Department, Aldridge served
as the head of the Pentagon's weapon procurement program and
signed the contracts with Lockheed to build the F-22, the world's
most expensive airplane.
When insiders don't get you
everything you need, there's always political bribery. In the
US, politicians who serve Lockheed's interests get annual dispensations
of cooperate swill courtesy of the company's mammoth political
action committee. Each year Lockheed's corporate PAC doles out
more than $1 million, mainly to members of the crucial defense
and appropriations committees.
Overseas, the Lockheed has
often resorted to a direct bribe of government officials. In
the 1970s, Lockheed famously handed out $12.5 million in bribes
to Japanese officials (and organized crime figures) to secure
the sale of 21 Tristar aircraft to Nippon Airlines. The ensuing
scandal brought down Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, who
was convicted of being on the receiving end of Lockheed's payola.
Even though the imbroglio lead the enactment of the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act in 1977 which set stiff penalties for bribery,
Carl Kochian, Lockheed's CEO at the time, defended the practice
of handing out covert cash inducements as a cost-effective way
of securing billions in contracts for the company. Bribery was
just a cost of doing big business.
And indeed the Corrupt Practices
Act didn't deter Lockheed from handing out financial incentives
to foreign officials to speed things along. In the 1990s, Lockheed
admitted to stuffing the pockets of an Egyptian official with
$1.2 million dollars in order to grease the sale of three Lockheed-made
C-130 transport planes to the Egyptian military.
The clunky old C-130 Hercules
continues to bring millions to Lockheed, which sells the cargo
plane to Jordan, Egypt and Israel. But the biggest profits continue
to derive from sales to the Pentagon, even though the latest
model of the transport has been plagued with operational problems
and cost overruns. Of course, in the funhouse economics of defense
contracts "cost over-runs" simply mean more millions
in taxpayer money going into the accounts of the very defense
contractors that performed the untimely or shoddy work in the
first place.
Since 1999, the Air Force has
purchased 50 of the new C-130J prop planes from Lockheed. But
none of these planes have performed well enough to allow the
Air Force to put them into service. An audit of the C-130 contract
by  the Inspector General of the
Air Force revealed a host of problems with the new plane that
had been gilded over by Lockheed and Pentagon weapons buyers.
One of the biggest problems
with the plane is an ineptly designed propeller system that keeps
the C-130 from being flown in bad weather. The C-130J is powered
by six-propellers covered in composite material that becomes
pitted or even dissolves under sleet, hail or even heavy rain.
Ironically, many of the first batch of planes were delivered
to an Air Force reserve unit in Biloxi, Mississippi, where they
were supposed to function as "Hurricane Hunters," plying
through thunderstorms and heavy winds in search of the eye of
the storm. The planes proved useless for the task. As a result,
most of the C-130Js have been used only for pilot training.
"The government fielded
C-130J aircraft that cannot perform their intended mission, which
forces the users to incur additional operations and maintenance
costs to operate and maintain older C-130 mission-capable aircraft
because the C-130J aircraft can be used only for training,"
the IG audit concluded.
Nevertheless, the Air Force
paid Lockheed 99 percent of the contract price for the useless
planes.
"This is yet another sad
chapter in the history of bad Pentagon weapons systems acquisitions,"
said Eric Miller, a senior Defense Investigator at the Project
on Government Oversight. "For years, the Air Force has known
it was paying too much for an aircraft that doesn't do what it's
supposed to. Yet it has turned a blind eye. The aircrews who
have to fly these aircraft should be very angry. They've been
betrayed by the very government that should be ensuring that
the weapons they receive are safe and effective."
The profits from the C-130
are a mere pittance compared to what Lockheed stands to make
from its contracts to produce the two costliest airplanes ever
envisioned: the Joint Strike Fighter and the F-22 Raptor.
The Joint Strike Fighter, also
known as the F-35, is slated to replace the venerable F-16. Even
though the initial designs for the F-35 proved faulty (there
continue to be intractable problems with the weight of the plane),
the Pentagon, under prodding from influential members of Congress,
awarded the Lockheed a $200 billion contract to build nearly
2,000 of the still unairworthy planes. Lockheed plans to sell
another 2,500 planes at a sticker price of $38 million apiece
to other nations, starting with Great Britain. Once again, most
of these sales will be underwritten by US government loans.
The F-35 contract was awarded
on October 16, 2001. Already, costs have soared by $45 billion
over the initial estimate with no end in sight.
But the F-22 Raptor stands
in a class of its own. With a unit price of more than $300 million
per plane, the Raptor is the most expensive fighter jet ever
designed. One congressional staffer dubbed it, "Tiffany's
on wings." Conceived in the 1980s to penetrate deep into
the airspace of the Soviet Union, the F-22 has no function these
days, except to keep a slate of defense contractors in business,
from Lockheed, which runs the project, to Boeing which designed
the wings to Pratt-Whitney which designed the huge jet engines.
The F-22 was supposed to be
operational a decade ago. But the latest incarnation of the plane
continues to suffer severe problems in fight testing. Its onboard
computer system is mired with glitches and its Stealth features
haven't prevented the plane from popping up "like a fat
strawberry" on radar. Even worse, several test pilots have
gotten dizzy to the point of nearly passing out while trying
to put the fighter through evasive maneuvers at high altitudes.
Even so, the doomed project
moves forward, consuming millions every week, and no one with
the power to do so seems to show the slightest inclination to
pull the plug.
* *
*
By one account, Lockheed garners
$228 in federal tax money from every household in the US each
year. But when it comes time to paying taxes Lockheed pleads
poverty. By taking advantage of a bevy designer loopholes, Lockheed's
legion of accountants has reduced the corporation's annual tax
liability to a mere 7 percent of its net income. By comparison,
the average federal tax rate for individuals in the US is around
25 percent.
Of course, these kinds of special
dispensations don't come cheaply. Lockheed spends more money
lobbying congress than any other defense contractor. In 2004,
a banner year for the company, it spent nearly $10 million on
more than 100 lobbyists to prowl the halls of congress, keeping
tabs on appropriations bills, oversight hearings and tax committees.
Over the past five years, only Philip Morris and GE spent more
money lobbying congress.
With Lockheed, it's sometimes
difficult to discern whether it's taking advantage of US foreign
policy or shaping it. Take the Iraq war. Lockheed's former vice-president,
Bruce Jackson, headed an ad hoc group called the Committee for
the Liberation of Iraq. This coven of corporate executives, think
tank gurus and retired generals includes such war-mongering luminaries
as Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Gen. Wayne Downing and former
CIA director James Woolsey. The Washington Post reported that
group's goal was to "promote regional peace, political freedom
and international security through replacement of the Saddam
Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the
rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community
of nations."
This supposedly independent
body seems to have gotten its marching orders from inside the
Bush White House. Jackson and others met repeatedly with Karl
Rove and Steven Hadley, Condoleezza's Rice's number two at the
National Security Council and a former Lockheed lobbyist. The
group eventually got a face-to-face meeting with the dark lord
himself, Dick Cheney. After meeting with White House functionaries,
members of the Committee would fan out on cable news shows and
talk radio to inflame the fever for war against Saddam.
Jackson has long enjoyed close
ties to the Bush inner circle. In 2000, he chaired the Republican
Party's platform committee on National Security and Foreign Policy
and served as a top advisor to the Bush campaign. Naturally,
the platform statement ended up reading like catalogue of Lockheed
weapons systems. At the top of the list, the RNC platform pledged
to revive and make operational the $80 billion Missile Defense
program supervised by Lockheed.
In 2002, the Bush administration
called on Jackson to help drum up support in Eastern Europe for
the war on Iraq. When Poland and Hungary came on board, Jackson
actually drafted their letter supporting an invasion of Iraq.
His company was swiftly rewarded for his efforts. In 2003, Poland
purchased 50 of Lockheed's F-16 fighters for $3.5 billion. The
sale was underwritten by a $3.8 billion loan from the Bush administration.
Lockheed also made out quite
nicely from the Iraq war itself. It's F-117 Stealth fighters
inaugurated the start of the war with the "Shock and Awe"
bombing of Baghdad. Later, the Pentagon stepped up orders of
Lockheed's PAC 3 Patriot missile. The missile batteries, designed
for use against SCUD missiles that Iraq no longer possessed,
sell for $91 million per unit.
After the toppling of Saddam,
Lockheed executives saw an opportunity to gobble up one of the
big private contractors doing business in Iraq, Titan Corporation.
The San Diego-based company was awarded a $10 million contract
to provide translators for the Pentagon in Iraq. Two of those
translators, Adel Nakhl and John Israel, were later accused of
being involved in the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib
prison. Titan translators, who are paid upwards of $107,000 a
year, were also implicated in a scandal at Guantanamo prison.
Like Lockheed, after 9/11 Titan
jettisoned almost all of its commercial operations and began
to focus entirely on government work. By 2003, 99 percent of
its $1.8 billion in corporate income came courtesy of government
contracts. The firm also went on a buying spree of other smaller
defense contractors. Since 2001, Titan gobbled up ten other defense-related
companies. The most lucrative acquisition proved to be BMG, Inc.,
a Reston, Virginia based company that specializes in information
collection and analysis for the Pentagon and the CIA. BMG alone
held Pentagon contracts worth $650 million.
The abuse scandals didn't deter
Lockheed from pursuing Titan. Indeed, Christopher Kubasik, Lockheed's
chief financial officer, told the Los Angeles Times that the
torture allegations "were not significant to our strategic
decision."
The merger was later delayed
for other reasons by the Justice Department, which was looking
into allegations that Titan executives and subsidiaries paid
bribes to government officials in Africa, Asia and Europe in
order to win contracts--a method of doing business that Lockheed
executives must have admired.
Titan, which was formed amid
the Reagan defense build up of the early 1980s, saw itself as
a new kind of defense contractor, a weapons company that didn't
make weapons. Instead of building missiles or planes, Titan concentrated
on developing software and communication packages for Pentagon
programs. Its first big contract was for the development of a
communications package for the guidance system of the Minuteman
missile. Since then Titan has become a major player in the lucrative
information technology market.
In recent years, Lockheed has
begun to aggressively pursue the same types of "soft defense"
programs. In the past decade, Lockheed's Information Technology
sales have increased by more than four hundred percent. The
bonanza began during the Clinton administration, when Al Gore's
"reinventing government" scheme auctioned off most
of the data-management tasks of the federal government to the
private sector. Now nearly 90 percent of the federal government's
Information Technology has been privatized, most of it to Lockheed,
which is not only the nation's top arms contractor but also its
top data-management supplier.
This opened vast new terrains
of the government to conquest by Lockheed. It now enjoys contracts
with the Department of Health and Human Services, Department
of Energy and EPA. Lockheed also just corralled a $550 million
contract to take over the Social Security Administration's database.
The privatization of Social Security has already begun.
But even in the IT sector,
the big bucks are to be made in the burgeoning surveillance and
Homeland Security business. Lockheed now runs the FBI's archaic
computer system, which took some much deserved heat for letting
the 9/11 hijackers slip through its net without detection. It
also won the $90 million contract to manage the top secret computer
network for the Department of Homeland Security, a system that
is supposed to function as a kind of "deep web", linking
the systems of the FBI, CIA and Pentagon.
All of this is a precursor
to even bigger plans hatched by Lockheed and its pals in the
Pentagon to develop an all-encompassing spying system called
the Global Information Grid, an internet system that is meant
to feed real time tracking information on terrorists suspects
directly into automated weapons systems, manufactured, naturally,
by Lockheed.
"We want to know what's
going on anytime, any place on the planet," pronounced Lorraine
Martin, Lockheed's vice-president for Command, Control and Communications
Systems. And eliminate them, naturally.
On the battlefield of defense
contractors, Lockheed has now achieved full-spectrum dominance.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature.
This profile of Lockheed-Martin is excerpted from his forthcoming
book Grand
Theft Pentagon, to be published in July by Common Courage
Press.
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