Vultures

Salon:

In April 2007, William Winkenwerder Jr. retired from his position as assistant secretary for health affairs at the Department of Defense, where he had been in charge of all military healthcare. On June 1, he went to work for a Wisconsin-based private contractor named Logistics Health Inc., which hired him to serve on its board of directors and "advise and counsel LHI on business development," according to a company press release. It was a hire that seems to have paid quick dividends.

On June 13, 2007, the Department of Defense began accepting bids for a contract to give soldiers medical and dental exams before they head off to war. Logistics Health was among the companies bidding on the contract, which was worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years. Before he left the DOD, in addition to running military healthcare, Winkenwerder had also been in charge of the office that wrote the contract.

On Sept. 25, Logistics Health won the contract despite bidding $800 million, meaning it was not the low bidder. At least one other company bid $100 million less.

After objections by competing companies, the contract has now been "stayed," or put on hold, while the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, evaluates those complaints. At least one firm alleging unfair bidding practices has also asked congressional watchdog Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to investigate. But the contract may still be awarded to Logistics Health; the GAO will issue a decision by Jan. 14. The contract, which at one time was also going to benefit a second firm with its own revolving door to the federal government, exemplifies the culture of cronyism in privatized military healthcare. Military healthcare is a lucrative wartime bazaar for private contractors that is largely free of oversight -- and of Halliburton- or Blackwater-size headlines.

We Arm The World

New York Times:

The United States maintained its role as the leading supplier of weapons to the developing world in 2006, followed by Russia and Britain, according to a Congressional study to be released Monday. Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia were the top buyers.

The global arms market is highly competitive, with manufacturing nations seeking both to increase profits and to expand political influence through weapons sales to developing nations, which reached nearly $28.8 billion in 2006.

That sales total was a slight drop from the 2005 figure of $31.8 billion, a trend explained by the strain of rising fuel prices that prompted many developing states — except those that produce oil — to choose upgrading current arsenals over buying new weapons.

No letting up!

Associated Press:

Democrats in the House of Representatives will introduce a $460 billion (€333.2 billion) military spending bill next week that they will use to challenge the war in Iraq, try to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and increase oversight of defense contractors.

The annual legislation is considered a must-pass bill to finance the military's fleet of vehicles and aircraft, research efforts and service payrolls. It covers the 2008 budget year that begins Oct. 1.

The War Within The War

Washington Post:

Private security companies, funded by billions of dollars in U.S. military and State Department contracts, are fighting insurgents on a widening scale in Iraq, enduring daily attacks, returning fire and taking hundreds of casualties that have been underreported and sometimes concealed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and company representatives.

While the military has built up troops in an ongoing campaign to secure Baghdad, the security companies, out of public view, have been engaged in a parallel surge, boosting manpower, adding expensive armor and stepping up evasive action as attacks increase, the officials and company representatives said. One in seven supply convoys protected by private forces has come under attack this year, according to previously unreleased statistics; one security company reported nearly 300 "hostile actions" in the first four months.

The majority of the more than 100 security companies operate outside of Iraqi law, in part because of bureaucratic delays and corruption in the Iraqi government licensing process, according to U.S. officials. Blackwater USA, a prominent North Carolina firm that protects U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, and several other companies have not applied, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. Blackwater said that it obtained a one-year license in 2005 but that shifting Iraqi government policy has impeded its attempts to renew.

Merchants Of Death

In Salon, Robert Dreyfuss discusses the disappointment of war critics in the failure (thus far) of Congressional Democrats to stop Bush's Iraq disaster:

Still, Democratic criticism of administration policy in Iraq looks muscle-bound when compared with the party's readiness to go along with the president's massive military buildup, domestically and globally. Nothing underlines the tacit alliance between so-called foreign policy realists and hard-line exponents of neoconservative-style empire building more than the Washington consensus that the United States needs to expand the budget of the Defense Department without end, while increasing the size of the U.S. armed forces. In addition, spending on the 16 agencies and other organizations that make up the official U.S. "intelligence community" -- including the CIA -- and on homeland security is going through the roof.

He then points out that of our Presidential candidates, only Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Gov. Bill Richardson are calling for cuts in the defense budget, while Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are actually calling for additional 80,000-100,000 military personnel!

Then:

How astonishing are the budgetary numbers? Consider the trajectory of U.S. defense spending over the past nearly two decades. From the end of the Cold War into the mid-1990s, defense spending actually fell significantly. In constant 1996 dollars, the Pentagon's budget dropped from a peacetime high of $376 billion, at the end of President Reagan's military buildup in 1989, to a low of $265 billion in 1996. (That compares with post-World War II wartime highs of $437 billion in 1953, during the Korean War, and $388 billion in 1968, at the peak of the Vietnam War.) After the Soviet empire peacefully disintegrated, the 1990s decline wasn't exactly the hoped-for "peace dividend," but it wasn't peanuts either.

However, since Sept. 12, 2001, defense spending has simply exploded. For 2008, the Bush administration is requesting a staggering $650 billion, compared with the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in 2001. Even subtracting the costs of the ongoing "global war on terrorism" -- which is what the White House likes to call its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- for fiscal year 2008, the Pentagon will still spend $510 billion. In other words, even without the president's two wars, defense spending will have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s. Given that the United States has literally no significant enemy state to fight anywhere on the planet, this represents a remarkable, if perverse, achievement. As a famous Democratic politician once asked: Where is the outrage?

Let me repeat that: the defense budget for items that have nothing to do with 9/11 is being doubled! Except, of course, that it has everything to do with 9/11. Politically. As with every other aspect of governance, 9/11 is being used to justify political machinations that have nothing else to do with it! And with weapons proliferation, the numbers are simply staggering. Using figures from the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation (CACN), Dreyfuss points out:

-28 weapons systems will, by themselves, cost us $44 billion.

-Missile "Defense" will cost us $11 billion a year!

-Our 2008 defense spending will be 29 times the combined spending of our most hyped potential enemies: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

-Our "defense" budget is now exactly double that of the world's next six largest military powers: China, Russia, the U.K., France, Japan and Germany

-Our "defense" budget now accounts for about 48% of the entire world's military spending!

Of course, all this military spending isn't doing much good in actual wars. As the McClatchy Newspapers reported, in April:

A State Department report on terrorism due out next week will show a nearly 30 percent increase in terrorist attacks worldwide in 2006 to more than 14,000, almost all of the boost due to growing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. officials said Friday.

And it's not only not helping national security, it's actually hurting it! While our politicians like to claim that we're working to stop weapons proliferation, around the world, the Stockholm-based Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission concluded, on June 1:

There are even some waves of new armaments: the United States missile shield may be triggering countermeasures by China and Russia in the nuclear weapons area; and nuclear weapons with new missions may be under development in the United States and elsewhere. While the peaceful uses of space and satellites are developing at a dizzying pace, which facilitates global information exchange and communication, the most advanced military Powers are calculating how they can most effectively pursue war in this environment.

The International Herald Tribune also reported, earlier this month:

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in an interview published Sunday that U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe would force Moscow to target its weapons against sites in Europe.

The threat, voiced in an interview with Italy's Corriere della Sera and other foreign media, marked one of Putin's most strident statements to date against the U.S. plans and came just days before the Russian president is to join other leaders at a Group of Eight summit in Germany.

And the CACN concluded, in March:

The proposed nuclear cooperation deal between India and the US has raised concerns that it could severely weaken the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and unravel the international non-proliferation framework by setting a dangerous precedent for single-country exceptions from the non-proliferation establishment and giving India, which is not a party to the NPT, an increased ability to produce nuclear weapons. To take effect, this agreement requires that Congress make changes to long-standing US laws and international guidelines enacted to prevent transfers of nuclear technology to states outside the NPT. Legislation to do so was recently introduced in the House and Senate.

But let's not waste time trying to imagine how we could better spend all that money, how many lives would be saved, and how much more stable we would be, in both military and geopolitical terms. Let's cut to the chase: who is benefiting? You can check the company profiles here.

Let's See Where This Leads...

Guardian:

The US Department of Justice is now virtually certain to open an investigation into BAE under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

This would cover the alleged £1bn arms deal payments to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, well-placed sources say.

Washington-based sources familiar with the thinking of senior officials at the DoJ, said today it is "99% certain" that a criminal inquiry will be opened.

Such an investigation would have potentially seismic consequences for BAE, which is trying to take over US arms companies and turn the Pentagon into its biggest customer.

Yet Another Reason Why We Are Failing In Iraq

New York Times:

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

Bush is very good at breaking things. Fixing them? Not so much.

Congressional Opposition To Bush's Desire For New Nuclear Arms Race

Washington Post:

Congressional hearings over the past several weeks have shown that the Bush administration's plan to move ahead with a new generation of nuclear warheads faces strong opposition from House and Senate members concerned that the effort lacks any strategic underpinning and could lead to a new nuclear arms race.

Experts inside and outside the government questioned moving forward with a new warhead as old ones are being refurbished and before developing bipartisan agreement on how many warheads would be needed at the end of what could be a 30-year process. Several, including former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), suggested linking production of a new warhead with U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a move the Bush administration has opposed.

This is a no-brainer, which is why Bush wants it: because he has no brain.

War Profiteering

ProgressiveSouth has an important post about the ongoing hearings:

As Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) gears up for the second day of his House Hearings on Waste, Fraud and Abuse of Taxpayer Dollars, the focus will shift to North Carolina-based Blackwater International....

Blackwater's ill-fated presence in Iraq has been especially curious because, for many of their missions, no one could find the U.S. contract that actually authorized them to be working there.

UNTIL NOW. Yesterday, the Army finally disclosed who had sub-contracted Blackwater's operations -- and it's none other than our good friends Halliburton (via AP)...