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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector-Advanced Search Anthrax/Bio/Chem Weapons A President's Warnings on Military-Industrial Juggernaut Still Ring True A Guest Editorial John Hanchette -- 03/14/2002 "In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." WASHINGTON -- This is a pop history quiz. What popular American president more than four decades ago issued that stern admonition, little remarked upon at the time, which still reverberates with astounding relevance in the beginning years of a brave new millennium? Hint: The warning came in his farewell address to the nation, delivered on radio and TV. You say it sounds like some rubber-spined reformer? Maybe a liberal Democrat? Truman? John F. Kennedy? Lyndon Johnson? Nope. It was a rock-ribbed Republican, a proven friend of big business, and himself perhaps the most admired American military hero of the 20th century -- Dwight David Eisenhower. And Ike didn't stop there. In his January 17, 1961 speech, delivered just four days before JFK was inaugurated, the departing two-term president acknowledged the necessity of a "military-industrial complex" -- a term he coined in that address -- in the wake of two World Wars and the Korean conflict. In responding to such constant onslaught and to the Cold War prospect of more, Eisenhower reminded Americans, "we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions." But his caution was unmistakable: "We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications." This kind of talk from Eisenhower still surprises students, younger academics and politicians, and thirtysomething government researchers. And for good reason. Ike was certainly no proselytizing peacenik. This was the Allied supreme commander who had beaten back Hitler. This was a man who had quadrupled the Pentagon's budget during his eight years in the Oval Office. This was a president who embraced massive nuclear retaliation as linchpin defensive strategy, and who allowed coups in Iran and Guatemala under sponsorship of American intelligence interests. So where did this granite-tough defender of western freedoms come by his newfound nervousness over the growing might of military lobbyists and weapons producers? Was Ike really a man of such amazing prescience? Some historians think Ike was startled and angered in his White House years by the overwhelming persistence, guile, and implacability of the military-industrial lobby. They point to his 1956 re-election campaign for a second term, in which Eisenhower was thundered at by conservative Democrats and back-biting Air Force brass for allowing the alleged growth of a "bomber gap" and Soviet air dominance, just because he denied funding to the untested B-70 bomber, an expensive wish-list plane the Pentagon coveted. As noted by military funding expert William D. Hartung -- an author, historian, and presidential fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York City -- that gap turned out to be imagined by the tub-thumpers for a bigger bomber budget, as did the so-called "missile gap" that JFK in 1960 accused Ike and his vice-president Richard Nixon of fostering. Eisenhower politically survived the empty "bomber gap" accusations. Nixon did not survive the spurious "missile gap" claims in the 1960 election. In the intervening decades, Ike's chary feeling about military dominance in America's public economic life was proven justified so often that some Pentagon purchasing stories have become legend -- and not just the ones over paying hundreds of dollars for a single hammer or a toilet seat. The entire process evolved into egregious regional pork barrel fights -- fueled by unimpeded campaign funding and bloated lobbying expenditures -- a pervasive competition in which members of Congress vied to bring home defense industry bacon without regard to true need. No one, Democrat or Republican, was immune. One example among many that Hartung and others have cited: The General Accounting Office reports during a 20-year period that ended in 1998, Congress approved funding for purchase of more than 255 of the huge C-130s, the workhorse transport plane we see now almost nightly on the news, an aircraft built by Lockheed Martin in Georgia. The Air Force had requested five. The fact that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican, and former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn, a Democrat, both from Georgia, were in power for much of that period may have had something to do with it. On a larger horizon, American taxpayers have coughed up about $95 billion -- according to the Center for Defense Information -- for development of a "Star Wars" missile defense program after President Ronald Reagan proposed the project 19 years ago. President George W. Bush is renewing the effort, despite the absence of a successfully protecting missile system, or of very promising tests. Just four politically generous firms -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and TRW -- receive 60 percent of the missile defense contracts. According to CorpWatch, a San Francisco-based public advocacy group, some critics of the "Star Wars" program see the space missile system "as a government bail out for the ailing aerospace industry." Such weighty public policy problems are still with us, but the military-industrial complex in recent years has exhibited a sort of "mission creep" that is far subtler and just as dangerous. It involves disinformation and the muting of public criticism. Recent examples abound. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently throttled a new Pentagon agency in its military crib after complaining it had "clearly been so damaged" by negative publicity it couldn't function properly. The new Office of Strategic Influence, dreamed up after September 11th to rebut militant Islamic propaganda and reassure citizens of countries where we are hunting down terrorists, came apart after The New York Times discovered its agenda included "tactical deception" abroad, and plans to provide false news stories to foreign media organizations so as to influence policy-makers in friendly and hostile nations alike. Since news is instantly global these days, our adoption of Cold War propaganda tactics perfected by our former enemy struck some Americans as self-defeating and risky. Cartoonists had a field day. One by Bill Schorr showed a two-star general bragging to a one-star as he pointed to his chest ribbons: "I got this one for lying to the Times . . . this one for lying to the Post . . . and this one for lying to the networks." Another, by Tom Toles of the Buffalo News, leaves a troubling thought. It shows Rumsfeld, having just boarded up a door labeled "Office of Strategic Lying," telling the press "Okay, it's closed. Locked up. Bad idea. Out of business." When the reporters depart, a bureaucrat opens the door and exults: "Our first mission success!" More apparent Pentagon "disinformation" surfaced in early March on the 11th anniversary of destruction by American troops of one of Saddam Hussein's largest chemical weapons depots at a place called Khamisiyah. After a cease-fire in the 1991 Gulf War, combat engineers blew up the Iraqi bunker complex filled with missiles, some containing warheads armed with deadly nerve gas. The operation was dangerous and sloppy, and the Pentagon for years had denied any troops were sick from exposure to chemical weapons -- even though more than 100,000 had complained on return of mysterious chronic illnesses known to occur from low level exposures. But in 1997, after a combat veteran blew the whistle with a video of deadly debris clouds, defense officials were forced to reconstruct unit locations and begin extensive computer modeling. The Pentagon finally admitted as many as 100,000 American troops may have been downwind and may have been exposed to low levels of chemical weaponry. Here's where it gets tricky. Three years later, in 2000, the Pentagon quietly revised the "footprint" of the vapor plume, shifted its location and parameters, and cited new historical evidence of wind vectors and troop locations. The Pentagon dropped 34,000 soldiers from the "at risk" group. A similar number of other soldiers - under the new "footprint" of the gas cloud -- was added to the vulnerable group. When the Veterans Affairs Department began crunching the numbers early this year, it compared the two computer disks containing the separate groups. On the first one that was removed, there have been 1,011 deaths since the end of the Gulf War. On the one that was added, only 105 veterans have died. In other words, you were 10 times more likely to die if you were in the group the Pentagon called out of harm's way -- the group you were supposed to forget about -- than you were if you belonged to the one the Pentagon said was more at risk. Did the military medical brass suspect a suspicious number of deaths would occur in the first downwind cohort of soldiers? In a military population being studied specifically for mortality and disability, the Pentagon removed dead and dying soldiers from the numerator of the equation, possibly to influence the eventual percentages -- thus coming close to skewing the results of an important study without detection. The new Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Anthony Principi, described himself as "surprised and concerned" over the "troubling" discovery of the switched disks and he ordered an immediate review of the numbers. The Pentagon has cautioned it is "premature" to draw conclusions from the conflicting Khamisiyah numbers that the VA unearthed, and will likely resort to blaming many of the 1,011 deaths in question on natural causes, auto accidents, and other bad things the civilian population is familiar with. After all, the tactic worked for years in attributing the mystery symptoms complained of by one-sixth of the troops who fought in theater to "stress," gold-bricking, and hypochondria. And if you're wondering about an industrial connection to the military's preference that the death of numerous Americans from possible exposure to nerve gas doesn't become conventional public wisdom -- some Houston lawyers think they have an answer to that. It exists in an 8-year-old class action law suit they've brought in Texas courts on behalf of more than 4,000 Gulf War veterans. In it, they seek compensation from over 80 companies -- many of them American -- they claim supplied Iraq chemical and biological warfare materials, plus the necessary technology to develop them into weapons, during the years running up to that 1991 war. The lawsuit claims many of these shipments were made in knowing violation of Commerce Department export restrictions, and in deliberate disregard of global knowledge that Saddam was a dangerous maniac thirsty for war. As might be expected, the combined weight of industry and the military to reach foregone conclusions does not lead to robust scientific research. A Connecticut congressman delved into this in late January, 11 full years after Desert Storm was raging. Rep. Christopher Shays, a Republican, and chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security, called a hearing -- pretty much ignored by the mainstream press -- of prominent private researchers, military medical experts, and VA medical officials. Shays said he had done so to ask pointed questions about the expensive but futile government effort in trying to riddle Gulf War Syndrome. "Why does it appear," asked Shays, "privately funded studies have yielded more tangible results and more promising hypotheses than federal projects? Does the interagency review process ignore, or actively stifle, research that does not conform to preconceived notions of a war without lingering toxic after-effects?" Dr. Robrt Haley, a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) epidemiologist who heads such clinical research at the prestigious University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, had an answer for him. Haley -- who had to go to Texan billionaire and philanthropist Ross Perot for initial funding of his own promising research on destructive brain chemistry changes triggered by nerve gas exposures -- accused VA research heads and Pentagon officials of "scientific fraud" in continuing to deny widespread illness and insistence on backing "stress" as the chief cause of Gulf War Syndrome afflictions. "I'm fed up with it," Haley told Shays and the other members of the Subcommittee. "The word is out and has been for many years, that if you get a DoD research grant, and the findings don't conform to the findings they want, you will be crucified, and you will be maligned. That's the word at all the major universities." Prominent private sector researchers, said Haley, "know that research that does not conform to the stress theory will not be accepted" by the Pentagon or VA. If you think this was dynamite testimony, wait till you read what Perot had to say at the same hearing. The former computer services magnate and presidential candidate -- a recognized defender and private funder of ill combat veterans -- demolished the Pentagon's cherished "stress" theory and accused both the DoD and VA of a smothering cover-up. Perot noted that instead of immediately giving the CDC and National Institutes of Health their traditional chartered role in looking at new symptom clusters like those exhibited by returning Gulf War veterans, the Pentagon and VA quietly set up a Research Working Group of civilian government employees "with little research experience" to keep the medical probe within the walls of the two huge agencies. "Over the years," Perot testified, "it became more and more apparent that this group's mission, as directed by the Clinton White House and his Presidential Advisory Committee, was to dismiss these serious health problems as stress and ignore these wounded soldiers." Any advances in understanding the veterans' afflictions, he said, "have come from private sector scientists," and he charged that Pentagon and VA officials running the working group "have repeatedly tried to impede this research." The dual-agency working group, Perot said "insists -- no matter what evidence is presented about the soldier's disabilities -- that these men are only suffering from stress." Perot offered to "put this stress theory into perspective with prior wars." About 16 percent of the 697,000 troops who served in the Gulf War, a war in which the ground fighting lasted about 100 hours, have been awarded disability benefits, the VA confirms. Only 9.6 percent of Vietnam veterans -- who fought in a bloody, savage, stressful war that lasted a decade -- were awarded disability benefits. Only 5 percent of Korean War veterans got them. Even veterans of World War II had only 6.6 percent awarded benefits. When the General Accounting Office in 2001 analyzed the official government research on Gulf War Syndrome, it was shocked to find the Research Working Group had doled out $500 million so far in research grants. Yet, the GAO concluded, not one of the 21 "high priority" questions set down at the beginning a decade before as vital to solving Gulf War illnesses had been answered. Perot concluded the research funded by the Pentagon-VA working group "seems to have been put through a filter, and only that showing stress gets through. All the rest is filtered out." Perot continued: "Any government employee who questions the stress theory is open to sudden intense criticism, as are the researchers with distinguished credentials in the private sector. This is inexcusable." Incredibly, Eisenhower's farewell address spoke to the above problem, too. Ike warned the nation on that night in 1961: "Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. . . . The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded." Imagine, Dwight Eisenhower and Ross Perot, echoing each other half a century apart. Want another example of my-way-or-the-highway Pentagon thinking? How about another tidy military-industrial connection that's been in the news in recent months -- the Pentagon's smoochy relationship with BioPort Corp. of Lansing, Mich., the sole American producer of a vaccine to protect against anthrax? The production lab had been owned by the state of Michigan until the Food and Drug Administration threatened to revoke its license for failing inspections. When the state put it up for sale in 1998, a Lebanese entrepreneur with German citizenship, one Fuad El-Hibri, formed a firm called BioPort and -- with the help of his father Ibrahim El-Hibri -- won the bidding with an offer of $25 million. Within just two weeks, the Pentagon had tossed BioPort a no-bid $45 million contract to supply anthrax vaccine for the military. Also in on the deal, with about a 22 percent stake of the holding company that controls BioPort: retired Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. >From the day the deal was closed in September of 1998 until late January of 2002, BioPort could not deliver the vaccine because the FDA still wouldn't approve the production line, finding multiple safety violations and questionable manufacturing practices. The Pentagon's reaction was extremely generous. It reworked the contract so that BioPort would get an additional $24 million -- and be responsible for providing far fewer doses. To the taxpayer, this extraordinary largesse had the practical effect of more than tripling the cost per dose. A spokesman for Admiral Crowe said the former Pentagon chief didn't pay a penny for his stake. Larry Halloran, staff director of the House National Security Subcommittee -- which has been investigating the anthrax vaccine situation -- told the Wall Street Journal that Crowe's role in BioPort was "the man in the window," lending only "his good name." The Pentagon continued to give troops the anthrax vaccine from vials left over from the Michigan lab days, and the shots proved so reactive they triggered over 300 disciplinary actions and forced resignations from the armed forces, and more than 100 courts martial of military personnel who flat refused to take the inoculations in fear of their health. Finally, in late January, the FDA approved BioPort and its shipping company for supplying the anthrax vaccine to the Pentagon. In early March, the National Academy of Sciences concluded the vaccine was safe and effective for inoculating the troops. But the Pentagon hasn't announced resumption of its plans to inoculate all 2.5 million active duty personnel, and the NAS panel warned against using the vaccine "indiscriminately" -- which some interpreted to mean, not for civilians. That question came up in October when some psychotic mailed a virulent strain of anthrax to congressional leadership offices and a Florida tabloid, shutting down post offices, killing five civilians, and rendering 22 seriously ill. In the midst of that chaos, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested at the time that civilians who had already tested positive for anthrax exposure might benefit from the vaccine, but the response rates were lukewarm. Good thing. In January of this year, the CDC cited a Navy study in warning that the anthrax vaccine might be linked to birth defects if given during pregnancy. In another burgeoning military-industrial controversy, Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White has several senators on his neck for his alleged failure to make full disclosure of his previous activities as a $5.5 million a year executive with the now disgraced Enron Corp., which recently filed the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. business history. Fully nine congressional panels are investigating the firm's apparent corruption. White was Rumsfeld's choice for the Pentagon's homeland security coordinator after the September 11th attacks. White is not your normal worker-bee bureaucrat. He and his wife, as reported in the Washington Post, just put up for sale his Georgetown penthouse on the banks of the Potomac -- all yours for just under $6 million. Also for sale by the Whites: two houses in the posh Aspen ski community for $7.25 million and $3.85 million respectively. They apparently plan to hang onto their $6 million-plus Naples, Florida house. A West Point grad and Vietnam veteran, White was a brigadier general, and executive assistant to former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell (now Secretary of State) before White quit the Pentagon in 1990 to join Enron. There he rose to vice chairman of Enron Energy Services before joining the Bush administration last May. As an Enron can-do exec, White was in charge of the push-the-envelope firm's effort to get in on the action when the Pentagon decided to privatize utilities on military bases, and farm out to the private sector the repair of natural gas pipes and transmission lines on bases. White's internal memos at Enron indicated such business from the defense department was worth a whopping $75 billion if they could capture it all. Even after he assumed the Army Secretary post, White was quoted as saying energy provision on bases "is a stupid business practice for the Army" and the he could see "no reason whatsoever" for the Army's remaining in a portion of it. White has acknowledged to congressional investigators that he's had at least 30 meetings and phone contacts with Enron executives since becoming Army secretary, including with some Enron officials from his old unit which was trying to obtain the Pentagon business. None of this may be illegal, of course, but Congress -- belatedly -- sure seems interested in it. None of it is really new, either. This expensive back-scratching between military and industry has been going on for decades. Two years ago, former House Armed Services Committee investigator Anthony Battista documented several incidents in his 228-page doctoral dissertation "Pentagon Lying and Congressional Indifference: The Legislation of Mediocrity, Apathy, and Waste." Battista concludes in this remarkably thorough document that the situation is so out of hand "the national security of the United States is being undermined." In a chapter called "The Real Pentagon," Battista writes: "Money and power drive the Pentagon's annual budget. Don't believe for one minute the Pentagon always buys weapons needed for our national security. Don't believe these weapons always perform as expected. Don't believe the procurement of many malfunctioning weapons is killed by the Pentagon or Congress, but do believe Defense industry PACs (Political Action Committees that provide immense amounts of money for election campaigns) result in burgeoning defense budgets that provide our military with an over-priced weapons system that may work or plain and simple junk that doesn't work. This is all done at the taxpayers' expense." When the Pentagon wants a new weapon, writes Battista, "it creates a 'new threat.' " At a pivotal time in our nation's history, at a time when our nation truly is threatened by a looming cloud of terrorism, no one wants to fault the Pentagon's response to the events of September 11th -- especially when that response seems eminently laudable, especially when many of those super new weapons appear to be working just as advertised in keeping American troops out of harm's way until absolutely necessary. The military deserves the backing of every American, and the big defense industry giants developing these new working weapons do, too. But that doesn't change the fact that a five-star general's warning four decades ago still carries gravitas in considering the entrenched and powerful military-industrial complex -- especially considering the Pentagon's $48 billion increase in defense spending just since Sept. 11th, and the Pentagon's staggering 2003 budget request of $379 billion. "We must never let the weight of this (military-industrial) combination endanger out liberties or democratic processes," Ike intoned that evening long ago. "We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together." That Ike - he was one smart president. John M. Hanchette is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who until his recent retirement was national affairs correspondent for Gannett News Service in its Washington capital bureau. In over two decades in Washington, he has covered for Gannett and USA TODAY stories from the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, State and Justice Departments, all the major health agencies, and the entire federal government structure. Besides reporting on 15 national political conventions and 8 presidential campaigns, Hanchette covered the White Houses under Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Besides the Pulitzer, Hanchette has won several other national awards, including the Westinghouse Award for science writing, the John Hancock Award for financial writing, two Silver Gavels from the American Bar Association for best legal writing, two Investigative Reporters and Editors awards, and the Best of Gannett award twice. www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/ <A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/";>ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
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