FOR LOVE AND BLOOD MONEY

"Everybody knows Northrop Grumman and G.E., but if you went out on the street and asked who the top 10 [defense] contractors are, I can guarantee you that SAIC would not be one of them."
~ Glenn Grossenbacher, in "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow".

Last Thursday, I posted a link to a long article on the Wolfowitz scandal from The New Yorker and carried at Truthout, noting that the article suggested that Wolfowitz had been appointed to the World Bank in an effort to keep events in Iraq moving according to the Bush Administration playbook.

More on that has come out today, from the NYTimes:

The Defense Department directed a private contractor in 2003 to hire Shaha Ali Riza, a World Bank employee and the companion of Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense, to spend a month studying issues related to setting up a new government in Iraq, the contractor said Monday.

The contractor, Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, said that it had been directed to hire Ms. Riza by the office of the under secretary for policy. The head of that office at the time was Douglas J. Feith, who reported to Mr. Wolfowitz.

After her trip to Iraq, Ms. Riza briefed members of the executive board of the World Bank on efforts to rebuild after the American invasion and specifically on the status of Iraqi women, according to Ms. Riza’s supervisor at the time.

All of this is very loaded. For example, SAIC is perhaps one of the worst corporate parasites sucking blood money out of Iraq. Check this excellent rundown on the SAIC bloodsuckers at in a Vanity Fair article from last month:

The company's annual revenues, almost all of which come from the federal government, approached $8 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, and they are continuing to climb. SAIC's goal is to reach as much as $12 billion in revenues by 2008. As for the financial yardstick that really gets Wall Street's attention—profitability—SAIC beats the S&P 500 average. Last year ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, posted a return on revenue of 11 percent. For SAIC the figure was 11.9 percent. If "contract backlog" is any measure—that is, contracts negotiated and pending—the future seems assured. The backlog stands at $13.6 billion. That's one and a half times more than the backlog at KBR Inc., a subsidiary of the far better known government contractor once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, the Halliburton Company.

And since we just celebrated Tax Day in the US, check this out:

It is a simple fact of life these days that, owing to a deliberate decision to downsize government, Washington can operate only by paying private companies to perform a wide range of functions. To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS.

How much did you donate last year to SAIC's war industry welfare?

What everyone agrees on is this: No Washington contractor pursues government money with more ingenuity and perseverance than SAIC. No contractor seems to exploit conflicts of interest in Washington with more zeal. And no contractor cloaks its operations in greater secrecy. SAIC almost never touts its activities in public, preferring to stay well below the radar.

Naturally, there's a link to what Sibel Edmonds has referred to as Dime-a-Dozen Generals:

Civilians at SAIC used to joke that the company had so many admirals and generals in its ranks it could start its own war. Some might argue that, in the case of Iraq, it did.

[ . . . ]

SAIC executives have been involved at every stage of the life cycle of the war in Iraq. SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the first place, and that war was the only way to get rid of them. Then, as war became inevitable, SAIC secured contracts for a broad range of operations in soon-to-be-occupied Iraq. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission that was set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong.

It's all an inside job, and a completely cynical one at that. There's more backgrounder on SAIC at CorpWatch, and a search of that site for "Science Applications International Corporation" reveals more info. Then there's a listing at Sourcewatch.

Another connection between the Wolfowitz girlfriend scandal and Sibel's information is the mention of Douglas Feith. In the NYTimes article, once again Feith feigns Alzheimer's disease by claiming that he can't recall a damned thing about ordering Wolfowitz's main squeeze to be hired by SAIC or to be sent to Iraq. Of course, "Doug Feith's International Advisors Inc, a registered agent for Turkey in 1989 - 1994, netted $600,000 per year from Turkey . . ." as Lukery has previously posted, meaning that Feith is deep into the deep shit of the Deep State.

More on Feith's stupidity vis-a-vis Iraq here. Feith also cooked the books, so to speak, on the al-Qaeda/Saddam connection.

And what about Shaha Ali Riza? Well, for one thing, the arrangements Wolfowitz made for her put her in the State Department and increased her salary from $132,660/year to $193,590/year--with no donations to SAIC required because, not being a resident of the US, Riza paid no taxes on income. That tax-free salary definitely put her way over Condoleeza Rice, who earns $186,000 before taxes, according to the BBC.

Riza herself took to playing the helpless, innocent victim last week, an angle that the LATimes has begun to manufacture. But is Riza really so helpless or innocent?

The story is that Riza moved out of the World Bank to the State Department because Wolfowitz took over as the World Bank chief and you can't have that kind of conflict of interest at the World Bank. But with the news today of Doug Feith's involvement with this business, I suspect Riza's move was contrived to continue to facilitate blood money rolling in to war industry contractors, like SAIC, from Iraq. In the build-up to the Iraq war, there was considerable tension, if not downright hostility, between the State Department and CIA, and the Pentagon. Kanan Makiya talked about the hostility in a PBS Frontline interview in 2003. That hostility continued during the so-called reconstruction and continues this day through the neoconservative gang vs. Baker-Hamilton gang (read that as Pentagon gang vs. State/CIA gang).

If Wolfowitz was appointed to lead the World Bank in order to facilitate the Pentagon gang's interests in Iraq, then my money says Riza was moved to the State Department not to avoid a conflict of interest at the World Bank, but to keep tabs on the State Department's handling of Iraq for the Pentagon gang. That's the real reason why everyone's making a big deal of this affair.

With the big blood bucks of the war industry on the line in Iraq, the antagonism between the Pentagon gang and the State/CIA gang continues, only this time underground and with a mole--Shaha Ali Riza.

HOW TO RUN AN EMPIRE

"Lockheed is the company that runs the empire."
~ Richard Cummings.

Lukery at WotIsItGood4 has a link to a radio interview with the guy who wrote the Lockheed Martin article for Playboy, Richard Cummings. Go here to get the mp3 link to the interview, and I highly recommend a listen because it goes into a lot of information that was edited out of Cummings' article for the sake of brevity. He was supposed to write 7,000 words on Lockheed but ended up with 15,000 words.

Cummings stresses the point that what is new and significant about the Lockheed Martin complex is that it has moved from a focus on working solely as a government contractor to one of participation in the policy-making process of the US government. Why? Well, for the same reason I have said a hundred times if I've said it once (and I have)--Money.

One example given in the interview is that of US support for Israel, which is a circular process: Congress approves "aid" to Israel and delivers the funds. Israel turns around and spends the funds on Lockheed Martin products. This creates the necessity of an ideology which will perpetuate this business deal for Lockheed, resulting in an emphasis on the similarity between American "values" and Israeli "values." But as Cummings points out, this cycle is extremely cynical; the fact that Lockheed Martin and the rest of the war industry are the only ones to profit by this "policy," without so much as a peep from the mainstream media is cynicism in the extreme.

This cyclical process is the very same one that guides the American-Turkish relationship, which was highlighted in a Federation of American Scientists report from 1999. As Scott Horton, the interviewer, remarks, this system is one in which a select group of people are basically looting the American treasury. Isn't it odd that this select group has dominated government for decades . . . like Joseph Ralston, Marc Grossman, and William Cohen, for example?

Money, again, is at the heart of the rejection of the PKK ceasefire and proposal for a political solution to the Kurdish situation in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan. I'm willing to bet that money is at the heart of the continuing violence in Iraq. Cummings also notes that in the build-up to the Iraq war, the intelligence agencies were arrogant in their assessment of the use of high-technology and air power as the methods for easily overthrowing the Saddam regime, thus requiring fewer boots-on-the-ground. According to Cummings, the creator of this new, high-tech means of warfare originated with none other than Lockheed Martin and the American intelligence community swallowed this gimmick hook, line, and sinker. The most high-profile salesman of Lockheed Martin's new war doctrine was Donald Rumsfeld, from the UK's Telegraph:

Victory in Iraq has given added impetus to the drive by Donald Rumsfeld, the United States defence secretary, to transform the way his country will fight future wars.

Donald Rumsfeld

Mr Rumsfeld is a key supporter of a new warfare doctrine called "Rapid Decisive Operations".

Unofficially known as "the Rumsfeld Doctrine", it has replaced the "Powell Doctrine" of using overwhelming force. It concentrates on the use of special forces, air power and high technology so that conflicts can be won more swiftly and with fewer troops.

Speed of action is at the centre of the new thinking. The US army and marines will be told to shift to lighter equipment so that more of their forces can be airlifted to the battlefield rather than having to be moved by ship.

[ . . . ]

The new doctrine includes elements of the "shock and awe" concept formulated by Harlan Ullman in the 1996 book Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance.

As for Harlan Ullman, he's a senior consultant for CSIS. CSIS is one of those little turnstiles between Lockheed Martin and government. For example, Bruce Jackson, Lockheed's old director for strategic planning, is also affiliated with CSIS. Coincidence? Not on your life.

As we see now, in the latest National Intelligence Estimate, released Friday by the same arrogant bastards who bought into (or were paid off by) Lockheed and its new warfare doctrine, the security situation inside Iraq is dismal and is predicted to become more dismal over the next 18 months. This is a direct result of a minimal troop presence plus an unwillingness since Day 1 to enforce any kind of law and order. Remember the scenes of looting? Consider, too, that during the Gulf War, the US deployed 694,550 troops as contrasted to the 165,000 deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

This was a purposeful policy dictated by Lockheed Martin to create chaos in Iraq and the wider region so that it could capitalize on the obscene bloodshed. The Bush Administration's "surge" of some 20,000 additional troops is consistent with Lockheed Martin's warfare lite doctrine. The more bloodshed, the more money for them and the Cheney family (Listen to the interview).

Stephen J. Hadley, former lawyer for Lockheed Martin--also convicted for fraud in the US--and current National Security Advisor has been engaging in damage control in the wake of the new intelligence estimate. More on Hadley earlier on Rastî There's a tidy little wrap-up on that, complete with press conference video, at The Blue State. How convenient is that, to have yet another Lockheed Martin hack to lie to the public about the real reasons why the security situation in Iraq sucks and will continue to suck.

Hidden under the shadow of the new intelligence estimate on Iraq was the release of an International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) report on Ankara and Teheran's joint battle against the big, bad PKK. The IISS is a European version of American neocon and elitist think-tanks, as described by Sourcewatch:

"The Institute has 3,000 members drawn from the government, business and academic élites of over 100 countries. Its current roster of around 200 Corporate and Institutional Members includes some 55 research centres and institutes, 25 media organisations, 35 government ministries and agencies and 40 commercial organisations along with numerous military staff colleges and university departments. The wide range of business interests represented include finance and investment, international banking, insurance, computing, shipping, infrastructure development, automobile production, management consulting, gas and oil, power generation and transmission, aerospace and defence, major media outlets and telecommunications."

Apparently there is cross-over between the American warmongering elitists and IISS warmongering elitists, such as with J. Paul Bremer, Charles Horner, William R. Van Cleave,and the now dead Philip Merrill.

The funniest thing about the report on Ankara/Teheran joint cooperation is the part about PKK planning to commit "terrorist" attacks "using remote-controlled model aircraft." Uh-huh. Like no one would ever see or hear those coming? Apparently, Turkish intelligence is the source of the model-airplane attack fabrication. It's things like this that keep MIT awake at night. Morons.

Given that the Lockheed Martin government is running the same playsheet for Iran that it ran for Iraq in 2002/2003, any bets on how much LMT stock will skyrocket with an attack on Iran? After all, that is the entire purpose for all of those who are so gung-ho to screw up things even more. As Richard Cummings said, the ideology follows the money; that means that the ideology is propaganda created for the justification of the war and to deflect attention from investigating all of those who are truly benefiting from Lockheed Martin's control of the US government. For an excellent analysis of the Iran situation, check an excellent recent article from AsiaTimes.

On last item . . . Sibel Edmonds is having the official screening of her Kill the Messenger documentary today in DC. Check Lukery's KTM blog for details. There will also be a screening for the general public on Sunday. I wish Sibel the best.

SERKEFTIN!