KPFA– Abby Martin co-hosts this edition of Project Censored radio with Peter Phillips for KPFA’s nationally syndicated show. This episode covers updates in the peace community,  the Bohemian Grove’s exclusion of women, and whistleblowers who have put everything on the line.

Listen to Media Roots’s in depth update on US wars and empire at 8:00 or read the transcription below:

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This is Abby Martin from Media Roots, reporting war and empire news & analysis for Project Censored.

A recent report from Global Research revealed that prisoners are making 23 cents an hour to manufacture weapons components for high tech missile systems for the US defense industry. The use of prison slave labor to increase profits for huge corporations, such as BP did in their clean-up efforts, is unfair to workers and is an egregious expansion of the corporate state.

In an article called The Military Industrial Complex: The Enemy from Within, John Whitehead writes:

        “Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors and corrupt politicians, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe…In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.”     

In his June 22nd speech, Obama cited the official cost of the Afghanistan & Iraq wars at 1 trillion dollars, but according to economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the US has spent well over $3 trillion dollars on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq– and that assessment is three years old.

The Iraq war is still going strong, even though we don’t hear about it much through the corporate press. June marked the deadliest month for the US military in the region since 2009. And still, the corporate media touts the official death toll for Iraqi civilians at approximately 100,000, despite a comprehensive 2008 survey from Opinion Research Business that placed the number of dead Iraqis well over one million. Again, this toll is from 2008 and does not account for the last three years of combat.

In an article written for The Nation, Jeremy Scahill reports:

        “Under the terms of the Status of Forces agreement, all US forces are supposed to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Using private forces is a backdoor way of continuing a substantial US presence under the cover of “diplomatic security.” The kind of paramilitary force that Obama and Clinton are trying to build in Iraq is, in large part, a byproduct of the monstrous colonial fortress the United States calls its embassy in Baghdad and other facilities the US will maintain throughout Iraq after the “withdrawal.”

For Rebel Reports, Jeremy Scahill writes:

        “According to recent Pentagon statistics, w/ Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan. Overall, contractors (armed and unarmed) now make up approximately 50% of the total military force, meaning there are a whopping 242,657 contractors left in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

About 46,000 US troops remain in Iraq, and there are negotiations to keep at least 10,000 troops there past the December 31st deadline. In protest to this inevitable expansion of the US occupation, 100 Iraqi lawmakers recently signed a document calling on the Iraqi government to demand departure of U.S. troops from the country as scheduled by the end of 2011 according to the Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

Earlier this year, the cost of the Afghanistan war started to outpace that of Iraq by ten billion dollars a month- 6.7 billion compared to Iraq’s 5.5 billion. Even though the rhetoric coming from the White House suggests that the Afghanistan war is getting scaled down- with reductions being carried out as planned- the amount of troops remaining in the country will actually still be more than there were before Obama’s 2009 military surge in the country and more than any time during Bush’s presidency. 

On another front, the America’s secret war in Pakistan has drastically escalated under the Obama administration. Every month more innocent civilians are killed by drones, and there are US troops stationed in Pakistan performing covert CIA operations against alleged militants. On May 22, Seven thousand people in Karachi Pakistan protested America’s use of unmanned drones and demanded an immediate end to the missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Activists from the Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) participated in a two-day sit-in pleading the government to end its cooperation with America’s “war on terror.”

We are now coming up on the fourth month anniversary of the US-NATO’s bombing campaign in Libya, which costs US taxpayers approximately $40 million every month. Every missile being dropped costs one million dollars alone! The US is paying more than 75% of the defense budget for the 28 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Libya and by September the official cost of the Libyan invasion will total a whopping $844 million.

There are still covert wars and unmanned drone attacks happening in Yemen and Somalia too, which the empire rationalizes as mere police actions instead of aggressive acts of war. With all the talk about the federal deficit and the need to cut back on social programs and spending in this country, there is little discussed about cutting the Pentagon’s ever expanding annual military budget, which has more than doubled in the last decade. In 1995, when defense spending was a fraction of what it is now, a poll done by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that a majority of Americans were “convinced that defense spending has weakened the US economy.”

Before any more bombs are dropped in our name, we must voice our opposition to end these unconstitutional wars. The American taxpayers’ hard earned money needs to be applied here at home and not to the expansion of the military industrial complex– it’s the only way this country can be saved.

This is Abby Martin from Media Roots reporting for Project Censored News & Analysis