Of course they do. That is an indespensible factor in why wars happen in the first place (at the very least speaking in the current nation-state, corporate state era). Wars would not be initiated by the ruling elites if they had not calculated profit from them.

Slush funds, oil sheiks, prostitutes, Swiss banks, kickbacks, blackmail, bagmen, arms deals, war plans, climbdowns, big lies and Dick Cheney - it’s a scandal that has it all, corruption and cowardice at the highest levels, a festering canker at the very heart of world politics, where the War on Terror meets the slaughter in Iraq. Yet chances are you’ve never heard about it - even though it happened just a few days ago.

But here’s how the deal went down. On December 14, the UK attorney general, Lord Goldsmith (Pete Goldsmith as was, before his longtime crony Tony Blair raised him to the peerage), peremptorily shut down a two-year investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into a massive corruption case involving Britain’s biggest military contractor and members of the Saudi royal family. SFO bulldogs had just forced their way into the holy of holies of the great global back room - Swiss bank accounts - when Pete pulled the plug. Continuing with the investigation, said His Lordship, “would not be in the national interest.”

It certainly wasn’t in the interest of BAE Systems, the British arms merchant that has become one of the top 10 US military firms as well, through its voracious acquisitions during the profitable War on Terror - including some juicy hook-ups with the Carlyle Group, the former corporate crib of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and still current home of the family fixer, James Baker. BAE director Phillip Carroll is also quite at home in the White House inner circle: a former chairman of Shell Oil, he was tapped by George II to be the first “Senior Adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Oil” in those heady “Mission Accomplished” days of 2003. BAE has allegedly managed to “disappear” approximately $2 billion in shavings from one of the largest and longest-running arms deals in history - the UK-Saudi warplane program known as “al-Yamanah” (Arabic for “The Dove”). Al-Yamanah has been flying for 18 years now, with periodic augmentations, pumping almost $80 billion into BAE’s coffers, with negotiations for $12 billion in additional planes now nearing completion. SFO investigators had followed the missing money from the deal into a network of Swiss bank accounts and the usual Enronian web of offshore front companies.

What is really shameful about all of this is the fact that a terror-sponsor state of oligarchic despots has our foreign policy, our entire national well-being, wrapped in the palm of its dirty little autocratic hands. These dictators are, of course, long time family friends and associates of another crime family, the Bush family. And to think that people continue to support the current American political elites as somehow being for ‘national security.’

Read The Complete Article

And then there is this new evidence of political manipulation to create a war in Iraq from the Australian side of things.

On February 27, 2002 - just five months after 15 Saudis, 2 Lebanese, and 2 Yemenis flew airplanes into US buildings - Trevor Flugge, who was then chairman of AWB, the Australian Wheat Board, a private corporation, told AWB’s board that John Dauth, who was then Australia’s ambassador to the United Nations, had revealed to Flugge the plans of the US and Australian governments for war on Iraq. Tragically for war profiteers everywhere, somebody took minutes of the meeting.

Read about those minutes Here

For more on this, I recommend Gen. Smedley Butler’s timeless tract “War Is A Racket”

There is a reason why its called the ‘military-industrial complex’. You’re looking at one of them right here (albeit one of its less-publicized manifestations).

Monsanto Teams Up with the U.S. Military to Force Genetically Engineered Soybeans on Paraguay
GM Watch Daily
July 23, 2006

The US military are establishing bases and new collaborations with the Paraguayan military.  Many ask why.

With the excuse of fighting terrorism, the presence of these forces in a US friendly territory may yet give some measure of discomfort to the neighboring governments of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia, all of whom continue to build opposition to US hegemony in the hemisphere.

One thing is clear, however: internal military and paramilitary repression has found an immediate use in promoting the spread of GMO soy.  Herbicide resistant transgenic soy has brought to this South American region a form of agriculture that is incompatible with campesino or indigenous ways of life. Instead of changing agriculture to fit people, the landscape is being cleansed through violence to make it fit mechanized, high-input, monoculture soybean production.  National armies are now protecting GMO, export-oriented soybean plants against the diverse ecosystems of the region, but also against the citizens of those countries who insist on rejecting them.  Infusing the CIA and the US military into this formula simply adds deadly power to an already raging fire.

In reading these news, one should not forget that the international market for soybeans is being artificially inflated, not least by the new craze to exploit globalized sources of biofuels.

So it is that the Pentagon is finding a new cause in common with environmentalists.

For more on this ongoing development, check out The US Military Descends on Paraguay by Benjamin Dangl in The Nation

This brings an enhanced meaning to the term ‘making a killing.’

The litany of US mistakes and excessive force has the Pentagon commissioning at least two secret strategy studies in Afghanistan and Iraq. “This is a struggle for the soul of the Army,” said Colonel Peter Mansoor, the head of the Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center.

Just as odorous, a mountain of corporate cash grows next to the piles of bodies. In this bizarre war where Iraqi civilians fear both suicide bombers and the United States, the biggest sacrifice that President Bush asked of American civilians was to get on a plane and show those terrorists a thing or two by going to Disney World.

Defense contractors took that request to a logical extreme. They built their own fantasy land.

There is no evidence of a contractor having a soul in the 13th annual Executive Excess CEO survey by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, and the Boston-based United for a Fair Economy. The report found that 34 defense CEOs have been paid nearly $1 billion since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

As soldiers have died in displaying personal patriotism, the pay gap between soldiers and defense CEOs has exploded. Before 9/11, the gap between CEOs of publicly traded companies and army privates was already a galling 190 to 1. Today, it is 308 to 1. The average army private makes $25,000 a year. The average defense CEO makes $7.7 million.

As Chalmers Johnson said, when war becomes this profitable, you are going to see a lot more of it.

Read the complete Boston Globe editorial

William Rivers Pitt takes on the heart of the problem with this essay on the power and influence of what Eisenhower termed “The Military-Industrial Complex” (actually, his original statement referred to it by it’s more appropriate moniker of “Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex”).

Only the dead, said Plato, have seen the end of war. As true as this may be, it does beg the question: why? Why is there so much conflict in the world? Why are there so many wars? Ethnic and religious tensions have been casus belli since time out of mind, to be sure. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War ruptured a framework that held for almost fifty years, bringing about a series of conflicts that are understandable in hindsight.

There is a simpler answer, however, one that lands right in our back yard here in America. Why so much war? Because war is a profitable enterprise. George W. Bush and his people can hold forth about the wonders of democracy and peace, and can condemn worldwide violence in solemn tones. Until the United States stops being the world’s largest arms dealer, these words from our government absolutely reek of hypocrisy.

As Chalmers Johnson stated in Eugene Jarecki’s film “Why We Fight” in reference to the dramatically increasing profits being reaped by the weapons manufacturers in the last couple years, “When war becomes that profitable, you’re going to see a lot more of it.”

Read The Full Essay

The Neo-Cons are at it again. But then, when have they ever not been. Cenk Ugyur outlines, in their own words, how America’s warmongers are openly calling for the U.S. to push for enlarging the fighting in the Mideast into full-scale war.

It is sometimes the realm of over-heated rhetoric to call people ‘warmongers’, but in this case, it is the exactly correct terminology. Of particular note is the violent insanity of the likes of Limbaugh and the white-collared brown shirts of Fox. There is a special level of hell for these so-called ‘conservatives’ and their molestation of Christ and Christianity for their bloodlust and war fever.

I guess we are supposed to just forget about that ‘wimp’ Jesus and his “blessed are the peacemakers” thing.

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” - George Orwell

Read Cenk Ugyur on The Huffington Post

The former head of the so-called ‘Star Wars’ missile defense program under Presidents Ford and Carter, Dr. Robert M. Bowman, has gone public to say that the official version of 911 is a conspiracy theory and his main suspect for the architect of the attack is Vice President Dick Cheney.  Bowman has since joined Scholars for truth. Yes, these are people who believe we do not have nearly anything remotely resembling all the facts pertaining to the attacks of September 11th, and this dearth of information is most likely not due to benign reasons.

Read The Full Report Here

Now we’re talking. Good to see some of the major media voices starting to point out the facts at hand and bring some much-needed awareness to this issue.

Little known to the American public, there are some 50,000 private contractors in Iraq, providing support for the U.S. military, among other activities. So why not go all the way, hints Ted Koppel in a New York Times op-ed on Monday, and form a real “mercenary army”?

Such a move involving what he calls “latter-day Hessians” would represent, he writes, “the inevitable response of a market economy to a host of seemingly intractable public policy and security problems.”

Koppel points out what is in essence the only conclusion possible under the current trajectory national defense policy (or any policy, for that matter) is going these days.

“So, what about the inevitable next step — a defensive military force paid for directly by the corporations that would most benefit from its protection? If, for example, an insurrection in Nigeria threatens that nation’s ability to export oil (and it does), why not have Chevron or Exxon Mobil underwrite the dispatch of a battalion or two of mercenaries?”

The only thing I would point out here, though, is that the Cheney administration already has formed that corporate army. In fact, the real power elites in this nation have regularly used their own private police forces to enforce their own control (Pinkerton strike breaking to name just one example). The CIA running cladestine armies and covert operations to protect corporate interests around the world is certainly another.

Read the report in Editor & Publisher Here

Guess it was only a matter of time. Can we really be surprised, considering this is the regime that has sold out our defense to private contractors, our port security to foreign government owned operations, our nation’s wealth to foreign creditors, etc… The privatization scam is reaching critical mass in absurdity.

“Once cleared, they can get a higher salary outside and they are gone,” the official said. “We’re leasing back our former employees.”

The phenomenon is partly the result of Congress’s approving large funding increases for intelligence activities but not increasing the limit on the number of full-time persons that agencies can hire. “We don’t have the billets,” the official said, so the surge is taken care of by contracting out the jobs.

Retired Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who ran Iraqi military training from 2003 to 2004, describes the hiring of civilians to do jobs previously done by the military as a “shell game” created by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to keep the “force strength static on paper.” In an op-ed piece in yesterday’s New York Times, Eaton wrote, “This tactic may help for a bit, but it will likely fall apart in the next budget cycle with those positions swiftly eliminated.”

“The Pentagon ramped up so fast, it had to turn to contract personnel to have continuity,” said another former senior intelligence official who now does contract work. He pointed out that some jobs are so complex, military personnel on three-year rotations are facing reassignment just as they master their jobs.

The trend toward contracting for intelligence analysts will hurt the ability of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to retain and keep high-quality people, said a former senior intelligence official who helped supervise the rebuilding of the CIA’s case officer and analyst corps. “It takes time to get the young up to snuff, and you need 10 to 20 years to get the value for that investment,” this former official said, asking for anonymity because of his past role in government.

Wonder if they even have to be American citizens?

Read The Full Article

Here it is, the untold tale of the latest Pentagon budget is the wastage and overpricing that continue to lard it up to the tune of perhaps $100 billion - with Congress scarcely paying attention.

Lard for the pig. They call it defense spending, but who is defending our wallets?

Wanna know whose paying for this ’security’? Here’s a clue.

In regards to the Independent UK report on the insurgency and increasing conditions of civil war in Iraq, I admit to having a slightly cynical view of the situation. It turns out that if you’re a country or a multinational corporation (and that distinction is getting blurry for the U.S.) then it’s actually cheaper and easier to exploit the resources of a country that’s in the middle of a civil war.

Rather than paying taxes or tarriffs, you just play both sides against the other, supply some old weapons and maybe give a fraction of the processed resource back to the hosts. Sure, there are periodic interruptions of the resource, let’s say when a pipeline gets bombed. But with every attack, the “legitimate” government gets more desperate for outside help until the situation develoves to what you have today in some countries where the only thing an oil company has to do to stay in the country and continue taking the oil is to protect, monitor, and repair the oil pipeline.

What people forget about Iraq (because the media has been relentless in trying to force them to forget) is that, before our invasion it was a SECULAR country. Most people in Iraq did not pay that much attention to the Mullahs under Saddam. After the invasion, after their existing society was completely destroyed, and after two years of occupation when U.S. policies ensured that there would be no jobs for the Iraqis except military, the people have, predicictably, turned to religion.

The most frequent victims of murder and assassination in Iraq for the past two years have been the professional class–Educated men and women who were the doctors, engineers, and educators in the old regime. Our occupation forces have not investigated these murders (even before the ‘insurgency’ got going), which commenced immediately with our occupation, because these voices of reason needed to be silenced before the civil strife could really get going.

In other countries, the reasons given for the conflict may be different, Maosim, Communism, Independence, but if you look at the situation strictly in terms of cash and resource extraction, you can’t make a sweeter deal than the one you can make with a rebel group–no taxes, no tarriffs, no environmental or labor regs, just pure profit.

So, yes, Iraq is heading towards civil war, but no that’s not a failure of Bush policies, it’s a success. The Busheviks have probably been tearing their hair out that it’s taken this long to get some really serious civil strife going. Remember, before they started fighting each other, the Sunnis and the Shiites were united to fight us. It must have taken a lot of agents a lot of effort to turn them away from us and towards each other.

As to the meltdown of Bush’s credibility, the oligarchs running the country have successfully shifted us to a British-style system. In Britain, poll numbers for the ruling party are typically very low in between elections. Then, just before the election, some manufactured crisis like the Falklands or mad cow disease comes along, and for just a few months people feel so insecure that they don’t dare change their government. Of course, eventually the ruling party does get ousted, but by then the opposition is so thoroughly infiltrated and comprimised that it doesn’t really matter. In England that translates to Tony Blair–a “labor” leader who has slashed labor protections and health care. In the U.S. that was Bill Clinton, a “liberal” whose welfare and trade policies did more to impoverish people and destroy the environment world-wide than any previous president.

Essential to this, of course, is absolute control of the media. We see that in the New York Times waiting until AFTER the mid-term election cycle to release the wire-tapping story. We saw it again this week as the media focused on the delightful Katrina tapes as the Senate was debating and passing the permanent Unpatriotic Act. We saw it after the 2004 elections as NPR stations carried gavel to gavel coverage of some bush appointment or another as the black congressional caucus desperately tried to contest the election results. Etc. Etc. Etc.

However, having said all that, I do agree that there is reason to hope. At least there IS a resistance. At least the black caucus DID try to contest the vote. Ten Senators DID vote against the Unpatriotic Act. The U.S. is not Britain with its history of oligarchy, slavery and servitude. We won’t settle for what they’ve got. I agree that the resistance is gaining strength and I love it.

- Posted by ‘Joe From Buffalo’ for USTV Media