MEDIA ROOTS — In recent months, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has been performing deadly operations in Honduras to combat the War on Drugs.  Abby Martin of Media Roots and RT interviews Professor Adrienne Pine of American University about the most recent DEA slayings in the region.  They discuss the complete disregard for sovereignty, due process and rules of engagement.  

Professor Pine points out that America’s War on Drugs is enhanced by stunting the roots of democracy in Honduras.  She cements this assertion by sharing, “The police and the military forces in Honduras were the forces responsible for carrying out a coup in 2009 and then for violently enforcing it.”  Professor Pine goes on to explain that the U.S. financially supports the Honduran police and military, despite the State Department’s own warnings of widespread corruption among the agencies.  Rather than pulling back from the overt sanctioning of corruption to promote an undercurrent of civilian led democracy, the U.S. continues to fan the flames by inserting military and DEA assets.

DEA Agents out of Control in Honduras

Professor Pine focuses on the origins of the disastrous American foreign policy in Latin America with the Plan Columbia incentives where civilians were murdered and dressed like guerillas to collect U.S. taxpayer funded bounties.  She then compares the U.S. sanctioned murders on foreign soil to the streets of America, where impoverished African-American and Latino-American populations pay a disproportionate price for the failed policies of the Drug War.  

Drawing a correlation from the War on Terror to the War on Drugs, the professor explains how America’s brutal imperial policies are now coming full-circle as the Iraq model is being adopted across Central and South America.  The interview takes an interesting turn as the discussion turns to U.S. government complicity in drug trafficking.  

The total cost of the DEA from 1972 to 2009 exceeds $536 billion.

Chris Martin for Media Roots

Photo by HonCOAwikiMpubdom

MEDIA ROOTS – Over a decade ago, the U.S. Air Force expressed interest in fielding a next-generation, hypersonic missile known as the High Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW).  Recognizing the lucrative money available in Department of Defense contracts, war industry officials began conceptualizing suitable prototypes.  Understanding the nature of HSSW and the corrupt practices of its primary developer should lead one to question the core operating conventions inherent to the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Corporate manufacturers of HSSW must meet certain design goals set by the Department of Defense.  These operational functions require an HSSW which launches from submarines, traditional surface ships, bombers, and fighter jets, and which reaches a top speed of around five-times the speed of sound. 

The Pentagon’s design goals for HSSW also include “classified elements,” necessitating a SECRET security clearance (considering the number of U.S. citizens with SECRET clearance exceeds two million, this restriction shouldn’t pose a problem).  Although Boeing and GenCorp Aerojet have tendered their own HSSW design, Alliant Techsystems Inc. (ATK), which is known for corporate success with the X-43 and also supplying the Department of Homeland Security with up to 450 million hollow point rounds of .40 caliber ammunition, is the leading candidate for Pentagon funding.

CORRUPT PRACTICES

ATK’s Board of Directors and senior corporate leadership fester within an environment rife with conflicts of interest.  Mark Ronald and Ron Fogleman possess the most egregious of them among the company’s Directors.   Mr. Ronald is Vice Chairman of the Defense Business Board (DBB), an organization which claims to provide the Secretary of Defense with “independent advice” and “outside private sector perspective” about successful business practices.  However, Mr. Ronald cannot possibly provide advice of an “independent” nature, given unimpeded access to both senior Pentagon officials and ATK’s Board of Directors.

Ron Fogleman, former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, is a charter member of The Durango Group, an organization which pays its members to “help private companies win and administer Pentagon contracts.”  The Durango Group’s gurus “move seamlessly between roles as paid advisers to the [Armed] Services and paid consultants to defense companies in the same subject areas.”  As USA Today reports, Durango employees like Fogleman get paid by “the military for advice and by defense contractors who want consulting help.”  This corrupt arrangement further benefits The Durango Group as its gurus “serve as corporate directors or advisers for other companies” across the industry.  And the wheel of corruption goes ‘round.

Corruption on ATK’s Board of Directors can also occur subtly through the diaphanous, revolving door between private corporations and public service:  Martin Faga wields clout as former Director of the National Reconnaissance Office; April Foley was once a member of the Board of Directors at the U.S. Export-Import Bank; and Tig Krekel was once Vice Chairman of J.F. Lehman & Company, a private equity firm whose chairman helped run the unscrupulous 9/11 Commission.  ATK’s day-to-day corporate leadership also exists in a climate ripe for unprincipled behavior, as its members possess experience and influence in General Motors, Lockheed Martin, the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the National Defense Industrial Organization.  With this insider economic, political, and military might, ATK is in prime position to place corporate profit ahead of integrity.

Unfortunately, these conflicts of interest are commonplace in the U.S. war industry and elicit no formal, sustained Congressional concern.  Within this culture of Congressional complicity, senior executives from Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and EADS pled privately with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in June to avoid Pentagon budget cuts.  Such collusion tacitly reaffirms the Pentagon’s prioritization of U.S. corporate profit over U.S. national interest.  ATK is certainly pleased with this arrangement, since the U.S. government accounts for 68% of its sales.  By allowing “one-on-one sessions with interested prime contractors,” the Pentagon continues to abet graft, collusion, and industry corruption.

QUESTIONS FROM CONCERNED CITIZENS

Given the corrupt nature of ATK’s leadership and the war industry in general, it is rational for U.S. citizens to inquire further. Pertinent questions include:

How does HSSW contribute to the escalatory cycle of global arms manufacturing?  

Since World War II, the U.S. arms industry has produced weapons to confront inflated threats (e.g. communism, terrorism).  In response, various “enemies” produce weaponry to deter U.S. aggression.  The Pentagon then uses the enemies’ weapon production, however minute, as justification to continue allocating vast sums of taxpayer dollars to the U.S. arms industry, resulting in an upward spiral of militarization, which clogs all ends of the globe.  Production of the HSSW continues this deleterious tradition.

Is HSSW another black hole at which the Pentagon can throw funding, while enriching corporate weapon manufacturers?  

Yes.  As Wired.com pointed out, the Pentagon has a mediocre track record producing hypersonic technologies.  For example, this spring the Pentagon lost a costly Falcon prototype over the Pacific.  Bloomberg reports this loss cost the U.S. taxpayer at least $320 million, but the Air Force places the cost at half a billion dollars.  Despite these expenditures, the project continues.  The combination of existing weapon-delivery systems (e.g. strategic bombing, SLBM, and ICBM) and weapon systems in development (e.g. Prompt Global Strike weapon) render HSSW excessive.  There is no need, aside from corporate profit, to kill human beings with any greater speed or glut.

Profligacy isn’t confined to USAF programs; espionage and infantry programs can be equally wasteful.  Among these programs are NSA’s Trailblazer, which cost $4 billion before being cancelled, and the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS), which cost roughly $1.5 billion before cancellation.  Moreover, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) has easily identified another $700 billion in wasteful Pentagon funding (these figures do not include the trillions wasted on wars of aggression since 2001).  To put these figures in perspective, $700 billion is enough money to give every inmate in the United States an Ivy League education and $91,000 spending money.

What does HSSW tell us about the Defense Department contracting process?  

The core architecture in which the Pentagon develops and purchases weaponry is fundamentally flawed.  Although HSSW’s procurement process is relatively mild compared to the disasters besetting other weapons platforms, it still highlights the flaw of overestimating performance while underestimating costs.

Many more questions remain unexplained: In a world hyped as rife with “asymmetric threats,” why is the Pentagon stuck in a Cold War mindset building weaponry to strike conventional targets anywhere in the world within an hour?  At what point does weapon manufacturing cease to protect the country and start to provoke conflict? 

Instead of being a valuable addition to the welfare of U.S. citizens, HSSW merely increases global arms manufacturing, wastes taxpayer dollars, and exposes fundamental flaws in the Pentagon’s weapon procurement process.  Concerned citizens marvel at the rabbit hole’s depth. What began as a passing curiosity into the basics of the ATK and its HSSW has revealed a confluence of incompetence and corruption between the defense company and the Pentagon.  Given such wasteful venality, it is incumbent upon the U.S. citizenry to inquire, educate, mobilize, engage, and advocate to change the status quo of the military-industrial complex.

Written by Christian Sorensen for Media Roots

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Photo provided by Flickr user Dapper Snapper.

MEDIA ROOTS — The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is the next looming threat to internet freedom, as the American government continues its relentless siege of the digital domain.  Coming on the heels of SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, CISPA sounds more like the final name in a quartet of lovable Disney characters as opposed to draconian internet legislation.  However, this latest incarnation appears to be the internet’s biggest foe to date.  If CISPA becomes law, the risk to civil liberties is greater than all the previous bills combined.

U.S. Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) is the architect of CISPA, or H.R.3523.  Prior to his political calling, Rogers served as a Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent.  Currently, he serves as the chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.  This latest effort to undermine the internet focuses less on intellectual property and does not burden private companies with policing their information flow.  Rather, CISPA makes a broader and more sinister reach for power by simply forcing companies to comply with new government regulations, in the name of cyber security.  As Andrew Couts of digitaltrends.com aptly points out, “Whereas SOPA and PIPA were bad for many companies that do business on the Internet, and burdened them with the unholy task of policing the Web (or face repercussions), this bill makes life easier for them; it removes regulations and the risk of getting sued for handing over our information to the law. Not to mention doing what the bill says it’s going to do: protecting them from cyber threats.”

CISPA aims to grant non-civilian agencies unrestricted access to all digital information.  So, it stands, the National Security Agency will benefit the most from the legislation.  If this initiative succeeds, the NSA will have access to emails, social media, library records, online banking and credit card information.  In a letter sent by opposition groups and a number of Democratic lawmakers to CISPA sponsors Mike Rogers and C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersburger (D-MA) these alarming implications are made clear. The letter says, “Without specific limitations, CISPA would, for the first time, grant non-civilian federal agencies, such as the National Security Agency, unfettered access to information about Americans’ Internet activities and allow those agencies to use that information for virtually any purpose.” 

Supporters of the bill say it will allow private companies to easily share customer communications related to “significant” cyber and national security threats with government agencies.  As long as the information meets these two criteria, government agencies can use it on a wide scale.  In turn, private companies would be shielded from lawsuits filed by customers.  A number of Silicon Valley companies have already pledged their support for the bill including: Facebook, Microsoft, Symantec and IBM. 

However, a vocal opposition has developed in an attempt to beat back CISPA.  U.S. Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) has been CISPA’s most notable opponent, calling it “Big Brother writ large.”  RT (formerly known as Russia Today), a cable news station with an American audience of 50 million, was one of the first media outlets to decry CISPA and to use the phrase “worse than SOPA.”  CISPA is particularly dangerous because it would void current privacy laws and create channels for companies to share digital information with government agencies without the need for court orders. 

In addition to this attack on internet privacy, the bill contains numerous other disturbing implications.  One is the erosion of barriers between the private sector, government and military.  Also, like so many bills of the post 9/11 era, the language is ambiguous.  The language describing what can be spied on and how that information can be used is extremely vague.  Moreover, if a private company violates your privacy, the ensuing legal battle to prove liability is a Herculean task.  A complete summary of CISPA’s threats to cyber privacy can be found at Time’s Techland section.

Despite widespread opposition to the legislation, the bill passed the House of Representatives on April 26, 2012.  Whereas SOPA and PIPA squared off Hollywood and Silicon Valley against one another, in a fight over piracy, CISPA goes beyond that and zeroes in on privacy.  As a result, there is much more widespread support for the bill in the tech-community.  Whereas SOPA, PIPA and ACTA would have placed the burden of cyber-policing onto companies, CISPA relieves them of this duty and places the onus government.  According to The Vigilant Citizen “Privacy and free speech are not exactly mutually exclusive. Loss of privacy threatens free speech, and the loss of free speech is inevitably a loss of privacy.” 

As the American government becomes more authoritarian and American people more paranoid, the battles fought over the privacy of the public digital domain will intensify.  Much like the government and the military-industrial complex dumping vast amounts of our America’s wealth into wars abroad, yielding questionable results, the government will continue its aim to control one of the last bastions of free speech.  Only time will tell how successful their surge will be.  Have the shut downs of SOPA, PIPA and ACTA taught Americans to remain vigilant and make their voices heard, or will CISPA prevail?

Learn more about what you can do here.

Adam Miezo for Media Roots, Edited by Eric Aragon

Photo by Rock1997

MEDIA ROOTS – Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange confronts twelve mainstream media pundits and elite politicians about the secretive and elusive Bilderberg Group, a group of the top 130 elite in the world that meet annually behind closed doors.  The media members that are confronted are willfully ignorant about the mere existence of the Bilderberg Group, and the politicians that have attended the meetings skirt the issue: they either run away or evading Luke’s questions.

Here are the twelve confrontations below:

Tony Blair Lies to Parliament about Bilderberg

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell “Too Lazy” to Research the Bilderberg Group

Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan Confronted about the Bohemian Grove and Bilderberg Group

Former NY Governor George Pataki Lies about Attending Bilderbeg with Kissinger

PBS’s Charlie Rose Runs away from Bilderberg Questions

Ted Turner Supports Population Reduction to Two Billion

War Criminal Henry Kissinger Confronted about Mass Murder, Bilderberg

NY Times Editor-in-chief Jill Abrasom Runs from Bilderberg Questions

Clinton Adviser on Bilderberg: “We Don’t Want Any Press.”

Former World Bank President James Wolfensohn: “I don’t want to talk about Bilderberg.”

FOX’s Lou Dobbs on Bilderberg, New World Order

CNN’s Paula Zahn Completely Ignorant Of Bilderberg Group

Lord Jacob Rothschild Confronted

http://www.WeAreChange.org

twitter.com/LukeWeAreChange