Below is my article this weekend in Al Jazaerra on the powerful lobby and industry supporting our various conflicts abroad as well as counterterrorism efforts. I previously testified before Congress on this industry and the government’s inflation of counterterrorism numbers to justify huge domestic budgets at the Justice Department FBI, and other agencies. I wrote the article for the anniversary this month of Eisenhower’s famous Military-Industrial Complex speech.
In January 1961, US President Dwight D Eisenhower used his farewell address to warn the nation of what he viewed as one of its greatest threats: the military-industrial complex composed of military contractors and lobbyists perpetuating war.
Eisenhower warned that “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” had emerged as a hidden force in US politics and that Americans “must not fail to comprehend its grave implications”. The speech may have been Eisenhower’s most courageous and prophetic moment. Fifty years and some later, Americans find themselves in what seems like perpetual war. No sooner do we draw down on operations in Iraq than leaders demand an intervention in Libya or Syria or Iran. While perpetual war constitutes perpetual losses for families, and ever expanding budgets, it also represents perpetual profits for a new and larger complex of business and government interests.
The new military-industrial complex is fuelled by a conveniently ambiguous and unseen enemy: the terrorist. Former President George W Bush and his aides insisted on calling counter-terrorism efforts a “war”. This concerted effort by leaders like former Vice President Dick Cheney (himself the former CEO of defence-contractor Halliburton) was not some empty rhetorical exercise. Not only would a war maximise the inherent powers of the president, but it would maximise the budgets for military and homeland agencies.
This new coalition of companies, agencies, and lobbyists dwarfs the system known by Eisenhower when he warned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex”. Ironically, it has had some of its best days under President Barack Obama who has radically expanded drone attacks and claimed that he alone determines what a war is for the purposes of consulting Congress.
Investment in homeland security companies is expected to yield a 12 percent annual growth through 2013 – an astronomical return when compared to other parts of the tanking economy.
Good for economy?
While few politicians are willing to admit it, we don’t just endure wars we seem to need war – at least for some people. A study showed that roughly 75 percent of the fallen in these wars come from working class families. They do not need war. They pay the cost of the war. Eisenhower would likely be appalled by the size of the industrial and governmental workforce committed to war or counter-terrorism activities. Military and homeland budgets now support millions of people in an otherwise declining economy. Hundreds of billions of dollars flow each year from the public coffers to agencies and contractors who have an incentive to keep the country on a war-footing – and footing the bill for war.
Across the country, the war-based economy can be seen in an industry which includes everything from Homeland Security educational degrees to counter-terrorism consultants to private-run preferred traveller programmes for airport security gates. Recently, the “black budget” of secret intelligence programmes alone was estimated at $52.6bn for 2013. That is only the secret programmes, not the much larger intelligence and counterintelligence budgets. We now have 16 spy agencies that employ 107,035 employees. This is separate from the over one million people employed by the military and national security law enforcement agencies.
The core of this expanding complex is an axis of influence of corporations, lobbyists, and agencies that have created a massive, self-sustaining terror-based industry.
The contractors
In the last eight years, trillions of dollars have flowed to military and homeland security companies. When the administration starts a war like Libya, it is a windfall for companies who are given generous contracts to produce everything from replacement missiles to ready-to-eat meals.
In the first 10 days of the Libyan war alone, the administration spent roughly $550m. That figure includes about $340m for munitions – mostly cruise missiles that must be replaced. Not only did Democratic members of Congress offer post-hoc support for the Libyan attack, but they also proposed a permanent authorisation for presidents to attack targets deemed connected to terrorism – a perpetual war on terror. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) offers an even steadier profit margin. According to Morgan Keegan, a wealth management and capital firm, investment in homeland security companies is expected to yield a 12 percent annual growth through 2013 – an astronomical return when compared to other parts of the tanking economy.
The lobbyists
There are thousands of lobbyists in Washington to guarantee the ever-expanding budgets for war and homeland security. One such example is former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff who pushed the purchase of the heavily criticised (and little tested) full-body scanners used in airports. When Chertoff was giving dozens of interviews to convince the public that the machines were needed to hold back the terror threat, many people were unaware that the manufacturer of the machine is a client of the Chertoff Group, his highly profitable security consulting agency. (Those hugely expensive machines were later scrapped after Rapiscan, the manufacturer, received the windfall.)
Lobbyists maintain pressure on politicians by framing every budget in “tough on terror” versus “soft on terror” terms. They have the perfect products to pitch – products that are designed to destroy themselves and be replaced in an ever-lasting war on terror.
The agencies
It is not just revolving doors that tie federal agencies to these lobbyists and companies. The war-based economy allows for military and homeland departments to be virtually untouchable. Environmental and social programmes are eliminated or curtailed by billions as war-related budgets continue to expand to meet “new threats”.
A massive counterterrorism system has been created employing tens of thousands of personnel with billions of dollars to search for domestic terrorists.
With the support of an army of lobbyists and companies, cabinet members like former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, are invincible in Washington. When citizens complained of watching their children groped by the TSA, Napolitano defiantly retorted that if people did not want their children groped, they should yield and use the unpopular full-body machines – the machines being sold by her predecessor, Chertoff.
It is not just the Defense and DHS departments that enjoy the war windfall. Take the Department of Justice (DOJ). A massive counterterrorism system has been created employing tens of thousands of personnel with billions of dollars to search for domestic terrorists. The problem has been a comparative shortage of actual terrorists to justify the size of this internal security system.
Accordingly, the DOJ has counted everything from simple immigration cases to credit card fraud as terror cases in a body count approach not seen since the Vietnam War. For example, the DOJ claimed to have busted a major terror-network as part of “Operation Cedar Sweep”, where Lebanese citizens were accused of sending money to terrorists. They were later forced to drop all charges against all 27 defendants as unsupportable. It turned out to be a bunch of simple head shops. Nevertheless, the new internal security system continues to grind on with expanding powers and budgets. A few years ago, the DOJ even changed the definition of terrorism to allow for an ever-widening number of cases to be considered “terror-related”.
Symbiotic relationship
Our economic war-dependence is matched by political war-dependence. Many members represent districts with contractors that supply homeland security needs and our on-going wars.
Even with polls showing that the majority of Americans are opposed to continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the new military-industrial complex continues to easily muster the necessary support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. It is a testament to the influence of this alliance that hundreds of billions are being spent in Afghanistan and Iraq while Congress is planning to cut billions from core social programmes, including a possible rollback on Medicare due to lack of money. None of that matters. It doesn’t even matter that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called the US the enemy and said he wishes that he had joined the Taliban. Even the documented billions stolen by government officials in Iraq and Afghanistan are treated as a mere cost of doing business.
It is what Eisenhower described as the “misplaced power” of the military-industrial complex – power that makes public opposition and even thousands of dead soldiers immaterial. War may be hell for some but it is heaven for others in a war-dependent economy.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and has testified in Congress on the massive counter-terrorism budgets and bureaucracy in the United States.
Gosh Lance, I dunno, but somehow that just doesn’t make you sound so intelligent.
Lance:
Such a magnificent poem!
I have a poem,too:
A yellow bird
With a yellow bill
Was sitting on
My window sill
I coaxed him in
With a piece of bread
and then I smashed
His f**king head!
Garry Owen. Scouts out!
Paratus et fidelis.
For the non-liberal readers here, I offer the following words of wisdom.
Liberals are eggheads.
If you want to be the hit of any party in Beacon Hill, the Upper West Side, Chevy Chase or Marin County, just go on a rant about how stupid Republicans are.
All my life I’ve heard from Dems and libs that Republicans are idiots.
Their presidents are idiots.
Ford was a bumbling idiot, Reagan was a dithering idiot, idiots all except Nixon.
He was a crook.
If you try to argue their point you will lose.
However, Republicans are not idiots because they are uncivilized rednecks, but because they are stupid enough to think they can outflank Democrats by being more liberal.
This essentially erases the difference between them and makes them just as stupid as the Dems.
In spite of claiming moral superiority, higher humanity, and more intelligence, the incontrovertible truth is that liberals are the biggest morons on the planet.
They are too stupid to see the forest through the trees, come out of the rain, or find their own a$$holes with a compass and a funnel.
Take any issue and the liberal stance defies logic, rational thought, or the intelligence of anything smarter than a sparrow. In fact, if they transplanted a typical liberal brain into a canary, it would likely fly backwards while sh*tting all over itself.
Their way to create more jobs is to make life unbearable for anyone who wants to hire a worker.
Their way to preserve forests is to forbid any harvesting so wildfires have more dead-wood kindling to burn uncontrollably.
Their way to prevent violent crime is make it harder for law abiding citizens to protect themselves.
Their way to prevent illegal immigration is to make illegal immigrants citizens.
Have I yet to state anything that is not factual?
The next time you have a disagreement with a liberal they will not debate the substance of the issue but make accusations against your compassion, tell you you are wrong without backing what they say, call you names, and bring up Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, George Bush, et al.
Excellent tactics for a four-year-old.
Don’t despair or take their bait.
Simply ask them if their head hurts.
If they say no, tell them it’s because they don’t have a brain.
If they say yes, just say, “Good”.
Remind them that conservatives are that way because they have given it thought and that liberals are too stupid to see through the three biggest lies.
1. The check is in the mail.
2. I won’t c*me in your mouth.
3. Obama is not in the Muslim Brotherhood.
Lance, sadly, I must admit that I feel the same about so many of our fellow Americans. Believing that any tax, tariff, subsidy or protectionist policy does not, in the long run, raise prices and distorts the competitive benefits and nature of a lassie fare economy goes beyond rational thinking. The question remains how much of these policies, as a society, are we willing to subject ourselves to. A classical liberal was once a person that believed in lassie fare economic policies, sadly that is not the case anymore either.
The liberals will not admit it, but many embrace Marxist and other authoritarian statist economic policies and than wonder why our system is not providing the solutions to so many of the socio-economic problems we face today. blaming it instead on lassie fare economic policies that no longer even exist. Our money is not even market derived today, but printed at the whim of those in positions of political power. We have placed into our laws the very mecantilistic polices, King George and his aristocracy would have been proud of and wonder why we are treated as subjects rather than sovereigns our Constitution provides. Shame on us all.
Suddenly my comments must await moderation. Yep, I’m in the right place.
Retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich has a new article out detailing the U.S. Army’s frantic efforts to avoid funding cuts — even as those barely armed goat herders in the Hindu Kush drive them out of yet another bungled quagmire in Afghanistan — by getting involved in yet another unspecified quagmire — any one will do — somewhere in East Asia. He calles it The Endless Army. He ought to know. I just call it:
Looks like our General Custers can’t wait to get another one of these bloody bungles started again before they’ve even finished losing the last one. If that counts as “courage,” then I certainly want no part of it. Dumber than dirt, or too stupid to stipulate seems more like it to me.
As the late Gore Vidal — a World War II veteran — truthfully said: “Americans are among the most easily frightened people on earth.” This explains why the the United States miliary keeps attacking relatively unarmed, impoverished peasant nations — but keeps losing to them anyway. Hence, sometime this year, we will see:
Another Catastrophic Success
With their tails tucked proudly ‘tween their legs
Advancing towards the exit march the dregs
Of empire, whose retreat this question begs:
No promised omelet, just the broken eggs?
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2011
I think you meant “scrape,” Lance, and not “scrap,” although that is what I consider you. And if you wear your “jump” boots to bed as I suppose you do — mud and all — just lull yourself to sleep with this little rhyme I wrote specifically for REMFs like you:
Batman Sleeps with a Nightlight
(From The Triumph of Strife: an homage to Dante Alighieri and Percy Shelley)
The fanboy fascist, Prince of Gotham geek,
Up late at night, both hands beneath the sheets;
His Batman Bible urging him to seek
An ideal evil that he never meets:
A super villain menacing his race
Within his fearful chest a faint heart beats;
Vicarious, it ticks a timid pace
His vaguely apprehended angst demands
Revenge for all the acne on his face,
Exacted by some super hero’s hands
While safe at home, a nightlight by his bed,
Imaginary navies he commands:
A vigilante fleet launched in his head
That cut and ran before the fight he fled
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2006
You sound just like Five Deferment Dick Cheney and the AWOL Deputy Dubya Bush, about as cowardly as they come, but heroes, no doubt, to the likes of you. You never came any closer to real war than jerking off in the back row of a porno movie theater. So go pound sand with your “former soldier” shit. You don’t fool anyone who has actually served in a war. Back to your “combat action” video game, REMF. About as close to war as cowards like you ever get.
Lance:
They think that people who think like you arent real because they dont think that way so it must be fabricated.
Dredd,
You honor me, sir. But, alas, I’m just a free agent.
Michael Murry,
It appears my jump boots stepped all over and squished your dainty sensibilities. I’ll just scrap it off my boots like I do dog shit and be on my way.
Your writing style is so milk soppy and… feminine. I’ll bet you’re one of those “cowardly soldiers.” Takes one to know one. I’ll also bet you’re a voluble conversationalist. I wonder how you’ll reconcile your current ignominy.
And nobody gives a felch what you think. Go play in traffic and leave the work to the men. Your intransigence isn’t worth my generous retort. Just consider me a glutton for watching sissies spew hyperbole.
I can’t help myself. I’m just another amaranthine Manchurian Candidate, a quondam soldier, a rube with a high IQ. Can you wrap your peanut shell around this concept?
You strike me a generic ineluctable libtard.Two things I know for sure: No matter where I go, there I am, and everybody’s gotta be someplace. Right now I’m here.
BTW: Islamofascist, n., A euphemism for Islamotard.
“I’m a former soldier, not a coward who fires spitballs from my computer.” — Lance
Oh, you mean like those soldiers at a military base outside Las Vegas who sit at computer consoles and fire missiles from robot drones at Afghan boys out collecting firewood in the foothills of the Hindu Kush? Speaking of cowardice! And these ass-hats have the colossal gall to insist that they deserve medals of valor for killing anything that moves from half a world away?
In truth, the United States has many cowardly soldiers: from the bottom ranks all the way up through the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense to the Commander In Brief. Some media outlets in the United States, including Al Jazeera, occasionally report on the wanton destruction our cowardly military has wreaked on impovershed foreign civilians for over half-a-century now. Not as often as these cowardly attacks acutally happen, mind you. But sometimes.
I can remember sitting in the operations center at our remote ATSB a few kilometers from the southern tip of South Vietnam — Solid Anchor — as the watch officer randomly stuck pins in a large acetate map on the wall. Then an enlisted man would transcribe some co-ordinates from the map for use by the guys manning our base artillery piece. These colleagues of mine woud then fire explosive ordnance out into the surrounding countryside at odd times of the day or night on the theory that any Vietnamese peasants who died or suffered wounds from the explosions “deserved” it because they had no business being out in their own countryside — what we called a “free-fire-zone.” As the base translator/interpreter, I sometimes had to help out in our sick bay when Vietnamese peasants would bring themselves or their kids to us so our doctor could remove the shrapnel from their bleeding bodies. That and other experiences of like kind left open wounds on my soul that will never heal
Nick Turse has recently written a book about the things we did to the Vietnamese in Vietnam. He entitled it: “Kill Anything That Moves.” He knows from whence he speaks. From what I’ve heard, seen, and read over the past four decades of my life, the American military’s modus operandi in its ongoing wars-to-have-wars-for-“warrior”-careers-and-corporate-profits hasn’t changed much, if at all.
So I don’t give a rat’s ass about what some “former soldier” — or current one, either — says about needing a behemoth corpoate military establishment just because some news outlets occasionally report on the cowardly, industrial-scale terrorism that America’s military regularly dishes out all over planet earth. The Lunatic Leviathan — as I prefer to call our Pusillanimous Politicians, Vaunted Visigoths, Dogs-of-War Mercenaries, and Corporate Camp Followers — contains legions of cowards, and what few genuinely brave souls do exist within its bloated bowels don’t matter because of their low rank and lack of options for a better life.
We the people of the USA have had unknown and unelected people running this so-called government since November 1963. And every president since has heard that sound in Dallas. The real power that calls for war is unknown to the citizens of the United States.
gbk:
If you had to fund the war out of your pocket, the actual cost would be known to you. As it is, we just pay a certain amount without knowing exactly how much is going to war and supporting programs.
I figured war was acceptable to use. I guess I could have used wars. Does it matter? I wasnt talking about a specific conflict just war in general as a concept.
Please let me know, thanks for pointing that out.
Is the chaos in the mideast part of the neocon plan to reorder the mideast…???
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/11/neoconservatives-planned-regime-change-throughout-the-middle-east-and-northern-africa-20-years-ago.html
US FUNDS THE TALIBAN????
One of the most important issues today is the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan and
the fact that US
Military Aid to Pakistan is being used to fund the Pakistani ISI which is in turn funding Taliban
and Al Quada fighters. While this has been reported sporadically in the media for whatever
reason political pundits on the left and right have effectively ignored this issue.
Joe Klein in an article for Time, August 9, 2010, p. 19, has written an article that every American
citizen should go to their library and read, he writes,
“The commanders are unanimous in their belief that the ISI is running the show….And so,
despite professions of alliance with the US by Pakistan’s then dictator Pervez Musharraf, a
decision was made to keep the Taliban alive. A spigot of untargeted military aid from the George
W. Bush Administration helped fund the effort. A commander of the vicious Haqqani Taliban
network tells Waldman that their funding comes from ‘the Americans–from them to the
Pakistani military, and then to us.’ Waldman reports that the commander receives from the
Pakistanis ‘a reward for killing foreign soldiers, usually $4000 to $5000 for each soldier killed'”.
American tax dollars if not directly, then indirectly are being used to fund the Taliban and put
a bounty on American boys and girls head… Makes one wonder why the establishment right
or left is not reporting on this? If the right is covering for
the mistakes of the Bush administration…why is the establishment left not reporting on this???
…this is the most important issue of the day…we will never win a war where if not directly then
indirectly the US is funding the opposition!!!!
No Win War???
The New American for November 9, 2009, has an interesting article on General Barry McCaffrey’s statement that the US “faces 10 more years of war in Afghanistan” and that the US should “focus upon a long and expensive nation-building process for Afghanistan’s tribal culture.” There seems to be a mindset in the establishment for the US to maintain a long term presence in the MidEast.
For a long time, the US has operated in the region through hidden agendas. In his book, The New World Order, Mr. Pat Robertson, states that George Bush 1 suggested that the fate of Kuwait was not the main issue, “launching the New World Order was the main thing.” Mr. Robertson further writes, “By words and by silence, the United States flashed Saddam Hussein a green light” … to move into Kuwait and suggests this was used as a pretext for the 1st Gulf War…the implication is that Saddam was entraped with Green Light Diplomacy but there was a much larger agenda(hidden) for moving against Hussein………..
For the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the evidence suggests that the US and its allies are not doing all that can be done to win this war and there is some agenda for prolonging this conflict.
The Advocate quotes Hillary Clinton(Dec. 7, 2009, p. 5A), stating it is “hard to believe” that no one in Islamabad knows where the al-Qaida leaders are hiding and couldn’t get them “if they really wanted to.”
In the aftermath of 9.11, the bombing of the wrong escape route out of Afghanistan into Pakistan and the nighttime airlift by the US of the Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives that were allowed to escape(The New Yorker, Jan 28, 2002, p. 36); Gary Berntsen, the head of the CIAs team at Tora Bora said they tracked bin Laden and (he) “…could have been caught.”(Newsweek, Aug 15, 2005, p. 5); There is evidence that the Pakistani ISI is funding the Taliban and knows where they live but dont arrest them.(Time, Nov. 29, 2004, p. 44)
There is a strategy by the Pakistani government “…which pays tribes and insurgent networks to attack each other with a goal of preventing any one group from getting too strong”.(US News, Oct 13/Oct 20, 2008, p. 24)(a strategy used by the Brits) Pakistani Ambassador, Haqqani presents evidence in his book that the Pakistani military and ISI make “…the pretense of arresting militants in order to get funds from Washinton. But it never shut down the networks.”(Newsweek, May 11/May 18, 2009, p. 29)
The CIA never takes a junior partner role with any of these groups and we have to assume wants this to continue. The New York Times(Oct. 27, 2009) reports that Karzai’s brother is on the CIAs payroll and is a suspected player in the opium trade which finances the Taliban.
All of this only contributes to a more chaotic situation which feeds a hidden agenda for a “no win war” and prolonged conflict at the expense of American boys and girls lives!!
woody voinche
This continual war time economy was initiated by the two evil DULLASS brothers and we apparently are unable or unwilling to return to a peacetime economy where all the funds wasted on perpetual wars could be used to improve our own society. I would recommend reading the new book out on the DULLASS brothers
lottakatz
…
It would be nice to see this Blawg posting lifted and dropped as a column n one of the papers you write for, it’s needed as a reminder.
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JT wrote this post for Al Jazerra too (“Below is my article this weekend in Al Jazaerra…”).
Your request has been granted. 😉