More have died in the phoney 'war on terror' in Iraq than from terrorism.
That's 25,000 Iraqis & 2000 American soldiers & 98 British soldiers.
The hype is from the people that make money from wars on terror
Send Lawyers, Guns and Money:
Lobbying and the Merchants of Death
from the book Washington on $10 million a Day
by Ken Silverstein
Common Courage Press, 1998
"The vast sums allocated each year to the Pentagon-$260 billion in 1997- constitutes the largest gravy train for private interests in the history of mankind.
The scale of the plunder is not the only reason that military lobbyists deserve special scrutiny. When the weapons industry convinces Congress to dole out money for more tanks and planes, a de facto outcome is that less money is left for social programs. The choice truly is between guns and butter.
Yet eight years after the Berlin Wall came down, the defense budget sits at the same level, in real dollars, as it did during the 1950s, the coldest days of the Cold War. It has declined only 23 percent from its all time peak under Ronald Reagan. As of 1997, the U.S. was spending almost as much on defense as the rest of the world combined-and internal Defense Department studies show a doubling of the Pentagon's budget over the next twenty years.
The money now being spent on "defense" is completely out of proportion to any credible threat to national security. The United States accounts for about half of all military spending on the planet and with the Soviet Union gone, the gravest "threat" to national security is posed by "rogue" nations such as North Korea, Libya, Iran and Iraq.
The absurdity of this situation is matched only by the absurdity of the military industry's post-Cold War lobbying efforts, which have been greatly increased in order to fend off any threat to its money pipeline. Here's an example of just how ridiculous things have become: A few years ago, it appeared that Congress might kill off a relic of the Cold War, the V-22 Osprey, a vertical lift-off plane whose prime contractors are Boeing and Bell Helicopter. From the perspective of Pentagon porkers and arms makers, the V-22 has special appeal: since it is incapable of carrying any of the military's current inventory of fighting vehicles, it has opened the door to a subsidiary boondoggle, the armored dune buggy. Said buggy, which is capable of attaining speeds of 80 miles per hour, is being designed especially to fit on the V-22.
To help save the plane, lobbyists for the V-22 dreamed up Alyssa, Albert B the Magic Plane, a cartoon book that was distributed to members of Congress. The comic book opens with little Alyssa playing in her backyard with Albert, a stuffed animal who springs to life. The pair dream of attending the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta but grow despondent upon concluding that they won't be able to get to the games by bicycle (too far), truck (no drivers license), boat (no water near Atlanta), the Space Shuttle (not practical), or a variety of other means.
Just as the cuddly duo have reached the point of despair a V22-the "Magic Plane"-lands in the backyard to fly them to Atlanta. After "meeting people from all over the world and learning new games," Alyssa and Albert remember that "daddy would be done fixing the kitchen sink very soon and that they needed to get back home. Alyssa wished again for the Magic Plane to come take them home. And it did!"
The dramatic tale of Alyssa and other lobbying, combined with hefty campaign donations from Boeing and Bell, led Congress to save the V-22. Coming next: The arms makers sign up Barney the Dinosaur to lobby for Star Wars.
The Pentagon's Nightmare Scenario: Budget Cuts
Though the military budget remains in the stratosphere, life has become far more complicated for the arms lobby during the past decade. During the Cold War, the military-industrial complex needed only to point to the Soviet Union, and lawmakers would immediately sign over a check to cover yet another of the Pentagon's gold-plated boondoggles. With the Soviet Bear extinct and China and other future "threats" not yet on line, the public has grown somewhat more reluctant to tolerate Cold War levels of defense spending.
Hence, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall the arms industry and the Pentagon began invoking the grave threat to national security posed by the "rogue" nations. But this strategy never galvanized the public. As Michael Klare has written in The Nation, "None of the prominent rogues have made any move in recent years to threaten U.S. interests seriously, and periodic claims of major breakthroughs by these states in acquiring nuclear or chemical weapons have rarely amounted to much....Only Iran now appears as a credible enemy...[but it] spends only about 1 percent of what the United States spends on defense [and its] poorly equipped military is a mere shadow of the force assembled by Saddam Hussein in 1990."
By 1997, the Pentagon had grown desperate to find a stand-in for the Red Army, as seen in a secret document prepared by the Air Force University that year and uncovered by journalist Andrew Cockburn. Peering into the second decade of the coming millennium, Air Force soothsayers were pointing to the emergence of a terrifying specter they called The Khan (as in Genghis). By this the "futurists" mean an aggressive China, enlarged by domination of the entire Korean Peninsula, not to mention Japan and possibly Vietnam. The Khan will be an economic superpower and thus able to develop and produce the most advanced forms of weaponry. It therefore follows that U.S. defense spending will have to rise commensurably to defend the West against this ominous Asian monster.
Elsewhere in the Pentagon officials are invoking the menace of "peer competitors," by which they mean China (though not yet grown to Khan dimensions) and, bizarrely, Russia. Yet others talk of GET, which stands for Generic Emerging Threat-a menace as yet undefined but against which the U.S. had better arm itself.
The Pet Rock Lobby
In addition to its failure to drum up a new "threat" to national security, the arms industry lobby is burdened by the shoddy nature of some of its wares. The primary cause here is that the chief mission of the U.S. defense industry is not to protect national security, but to inflate contractor profits.
This is seen in the case of McDonnell Douglas's hopeless C17 cargo plane. Like many current Pentagon projects, the C-17 gained momentum following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when the Carter administration pushed for a wave of new defense spending to counter the Red Menace. The Pentagon initially planned to buy 210 C-17s for $32 billion-$152 million apiece-but in 1990 cut the order to 120 planes for $36 billion-$333 million apiece. In 1993, the program was further reduced to 40 planes, with the per copy cost soaring to $700 million.
Since the original justification for the aircraft has vanished, the Pentagon and McDonnell Douglas now insist that the cargo plane is essential to national security because of its alleged ability to move personnel and tons of equipment to distant combat zones. Just as important is the C-17's much hyped capacity to land on short, dirt airstrips, and thus handle the dangerous task of re-supplying advance troops.
In reality, the C-17 is a threat to national security, and to anyone who is forced to ride it. A 1992 Congressional Research Service report detailed a few of the problems experienced by this monstrous boondoggle, including multiple problems with the software for the C-17's nineteen on-board computers. The C-17 also has a mysterious center-of-gravity problem, which makes take-off extremely dangerous unless the plane is fully loaded. When the aircraft is empty, sources say, Air Force crews keep two 7,950 pound cement blocs-known as the "pet rocks"-in the craft's forward area to ensure safe take-off This means that the C-17 will either fly into action pre-loaded with nearly eight tons of cement or advance troops will be forced to tote along two "pet rocks" to load onto the plane after removing its cargo.
Even worse, the C-17 is incapable of carrying out its assigned task of forward re-supply. The enormous aircraft needs at least 4,000 feet of runway to land, 1,000 more than the Air Force claims. A former Pentagon official tells me that the C-17 cannot come down on a dirt airstrip because its jet engines will "ingest" earth. "You could land it on a concrete strip but if you try to put it down on dirt you'll end up with some very expensive repair hills," says this person, who points out that advance combat troops are not normally anywhere near a concrete landing strip.
This same person says that a used Boeing 747, which can be bought and modified for less than $100 million, can carry three times as much cargo as the C- 17 and twice as far. In fact, the Pentagon's old twin engine C-123, which was used in Vietnam, could perform the C-17's job perfectly well Unfortunately, the Pentagon hated that plane because it was inexpensive and lacked the glamour of a jet-engine aircraft. As the source points out, "this golden turkey represents a sizable chunk of the GNP and can be blown to smithereens by a $22 mortar shell."
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Political_Corruption/LobbyingMerchantsDeath.html
