The Consciousness of Being at War
"...the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival." -- George Orwell, 1984, Part 2, Chapter 9, pg. 192
Not talking to Jihadis, per se; I'm talking to you, Oceania.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Old news to you, JEB. Completely missing from our television screens and public "discussion."
KA-CHING: The Company Getting Rich Off the ISIS War
For the Middle East, the growth of the self-proclaimed Islamic State has been a catastrophe.
For one American firm, it’s been a gold mine.
by Kate Brannen
08.02.15
The war against ISIS isn’t going so great, with the self-appointed terror group standing up to a year of U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.
But that hasn’t kept defense contractors from doing rather well amidst the fighting. Lockheed Martin has received orders for thousands of more Hellfire missiles. AM General is busy supplying Iraq with 160 American-built Humvee vehicles, while General Dynamics is selling the country millions of dollars worth of tank ammunition.
SOS International, a family-owned business whose corporate headquarters are in New York City, is one of the biggest players on the ground in Iraq, employing the most Americans in the country after the U.S. Embassy. On the company’s board of advisors: former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz—considered to be one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq—and Paul Butler, a former special assistant to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.
The company, which goes by “SOSi,” says on its website that the contracts it’s been awarded for work in Iraq in 2015 have a total value of more than $400 million. They include a $40 million contract to provide everything from meals to perimeter security to emergency fire and medical services at Iraq’s Besmaya Compound, one of the sites where U.S. troops are training Iraqi soldiers. The Army awarded SOSi a separate $100 million contract in late June for similar services at Camp Taji. The Pentagon expects that contract to last through June 2018.
A year after U.S. airstrikes began targeting the so-called Islamic State in Iraq, there are 3,500 U.S. troops deployed there, training and advising Iraqi troops. But a number that is not discussed is the growing number of contractors required to support these operations. According to the U.S. military, there are 6,300 contractors working in Iraq today, supporting U.S. operations. Separately, the State Department is seeking janitorial services, drivers, linguists, and security contractors to work at its Iraqi facilities.
While these numbers pale in comparison to the more than 163,000 working in Iraq at the peak of the Iraq War, they are steadily growing. And with the fight against ISIS expected to take several years, it also represents a growing opportunity for defense, security, and logistics contractors, especially as work in Afghanistan begins to dry up.
“It allows us to maintain the façade of no boots on the ground while at the same time growing our footprint,” said Laura Dickinson, a law professor at George Washington University whose recent work has focused on regulating private military contractors.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/02/the-company-getting-rich-off-of-the-isis-war.html
As one who's been interested in this guy's comblicking companions in and out of government, including the cough Pentagon and cough cough cough CIA Wall Street Swiss banks cough Wendy Gramm of a combover War Party cough cough cough AKA BFEE, I hope they do. The traitors and warmongers who lied America into war may yet be held to account and face Justice.
JFK ordered withdrawal from Vietnam. LBJ reversed it four days after Dallas.
The 1,000 advisors were the beginning. All US military personnel were to be out of the country by the end of 1965, reported James K. Galbraith.
Then in NSAM 273, four days after the assassination in Dallas, LBJ changes the policy to stay and support South Vietnam in its "contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy."
I, too, am old enough to recall days when the US Government was "We the People." Thank you for caring about that time, KoKo.
People like Richard Perle of PNAC "Pearl Harbor" fame. He's doing big business off war, a la Carlyle Group, with the likes of Adnan "Iran-Contra to Florida" Khashoggi.
Just after September 11 and the Washington-Wall Street axis of war profiteering was heating up, Perle hit up Adnan (Iran-Contra/BCCI) Khashoggi for $100 million to make his new "Trireme Partnerships" take off.
Khashoggi's money would help launch the Carlyle Group-like investment group Perle founded. The petromoney was not for arms, directly. It was for investing in companies that were going to be making a killing off of homeland security related areas.
Interesting selling point: Perle already had secured financing from in from Boeing and some other bigwigs like Henry Kissinger.
One of the most important articles The New Yorker ever published:
Lunch with the Chairman
by Seymour M. Hersh
17 March 2003
At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.
Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.
The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.
Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.
CONTINUED...
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/17/030317fa_fact
A bit on the new TRIREME business...
At Hollinger, Big Perks in A Small World
By Steven Pearlstein
Wednesday, November 19, 2003; Page E01
It's amazing the coincidences you find digging into Hollinger International, the publishing empire that includes Chicago's Sun-Times and London's Daily Telegraph and is quickly slipping from Conrad Black's control.
Let's start with the board of directors, which includes Barbara Amiel, Conrad's wife, whose right-wing rants have managed to find an outlet in Hollinger publications.
And there's Washington superhawk Richard Perle, who heads Hollinger Digital, the company's venture capital arm. Seems that Hollinger Digital put $2.5 million in a company called Trireme Partners, which aims to cash in on the big military and homeland security buildup. As luck would have it, Trireme's managing partner is none other than . . . Richard Perle.
Perle, of course, has been pushing hard for just such a military buildup from his other perch at the Pentagon's secretive and influential Defense Policy Board, where there are a number of other Friends of Hollinger.
CONTINUED (archived nowadays)...
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-309818.html
Those who remember the JFK Administration know it wasn't always this way. It's also why I keep bringing up Dallas, to the dismay of more authoritarian and right wing posters on DU.
Of course, with all the contracts going on, who can keep track? Let's see who's still implementing policy in UKRAINE?
PS: You know who used to have a bug like that in their sig line drove me crazy? LO0nix. That great DUer believes in peace, too. That also explains the fly swatters from authoritarian and rightwing DUers. Thanks for standing up to them, 2naSalit.
