India is seeking both to modernize and expand its military forces. It has dramatically increased its military budget, up over 34% alone this year. India now has the 10th-highest military spending in the world. It's becoming a major market for U.S. arms sales. U.S. weapons makers Lockheed Martin and Boeing have already racked up deals worth billions of dollars. But the real bonanza is still to come. India is said to be planning to spend as much $55 billion on weapons over the next five years.

obama's secret war profiteering:
More important than even the Democrats' declaring that oil company profits are undeserved, is their implicit understanding that the profits are the spoils of war.
And that's another reason to tax the oil industry's ill-gotten gain. Vietnam showed us that foreign wars don't end when the invader can no longer fight, but when the invasion is no longer profitable.

laboratory for a fortressed world:
Here’s another theory: Israel’s economy isn’t booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines, but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-nineties, when Israel was in the vanguard of the information revolution – the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners.
(...) Within three years, large parts of Israel’s tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms: Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the “flat world” to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom—a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.
(...) Discussions of Israel’s military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country—US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank and British companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel’s huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2 billion in “defense” products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defense products—well over a billion more than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain. Much of this growth has been in the so-called “homeland security” sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion—an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems – precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock-in the occupied territories.
(...) Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the “global war on terror.”
(...) So in a way Friedman is right: Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn’t the imagination of its techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target “suspects.” And fear, it turns out, is the ultimate renewable resource.

the banality of greed
This week’s evidence of the continuing corruption of Halliburton and its subsidiaries profiteering from contracts costing American taxpayers an unbelievable $22 billion stems from a report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The report, only one of many about Halliburton’s recently severed subsidiary KBR, focuses on work done in Baghdad’s super-secure Green Zone. While parent company Halliburton insults U.S. taxpayers by relocating its headquarters to the tax shelter of Dubai, subsidiary KBR has been spun off to focus more directly on the American military contracts that form the core of its operations.
(...) It is claimed by American officials that KBR’s accountability issues are being addressed. In one instance cited, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad—a spiraling enterprise well on its way to becoming a nation-within-a-nation akin to the Vatican in Italy—announced that, as a means of avoiding food theft, its personnel would no longer be allowed to bring large bags into the eating halls. Such sacrifice for the mission of securing Iraqi freedom.

reading mark twain on imperialism:
"But what does it amount to?" says Twain, using one of his story's characters, an angel to convey the idea: "nothing at all. You gain nothing. You always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously re-performing this dull nonsense ­ to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touches them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not shamed of it, but proud."

democracynow summary (may 8, 2007):
Iraq's infant mortality rate has soared by 150 percent since 1990 according to a new report by the charity Save the Children. One in eight Iraqi children now die of disease or violence before the age of five. In 2005 alone, 122,000 Iraqi children died before reaching their fifth birthday. Save the Children said Iraq's child-survival ranking is now the lowest in the world.
(...) The New York Times is reporting, the U.S. oil company Chevron is preparing to pay up to $30 million in fines for illegally paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein for access to Iraq's oil before the U.S. invasion in 2003. The penalty, which is still being negotiated, would be the largest so far in the United States in connection with investigations of companies involved in the oil-for-food scandal. It appears Chevron began paying Iraq kickbacks in August 2000. At the time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was a member of Chevron's board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.
(...) In Los Angeles, two high-ranking police department commanders have been reassigned over their role in the police department's violent crushing of a lawful immigrants rights rally last week. Police dressed in riot gear fired 240 rounds of rubber bullets and tear gas. Officers were seen on video clubbing protesters and journalists with batons. Overall 10 people – including seven journalists -- were taken to hospitals with injuries. On Sunday LA Police Chief William Bratton took 60 members of the police department's elite Metropolitan Division's B Platoon off the street.
(...) Investigative reporter Tim Shorrock of Salon.com has revealed that former CIA Director George Tenet has made at least $2.3 million since he left the agency by working for four corporations that are directly profiting from the so-called war on terror and the war in Iraq. Tenet did not disclose any of his corporate ties in his new book "At the Center of the Storm." Tenet sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tenet is also a member of an advisory board for Analysis Corporation which is designing terrorist watch lists for the government. Tenet also serves on the boards of two other government contractors, Guidance Software and Kinetic.
(...) A new report from Amnesty International has revealed that Native American women are more than two and a half times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than women in the United States in general. Studies show that one in three Native American women will be raped during their lifetime. Amnesty said many rape cases are never prosecuted because there is confusion regarding tribal and county jurisdiction. It is estimated that 86 percent of rapes against Native women are committed by non-Native men, but tribal councils have no jurisdiction over non-Native offenders even if the crime takes place on tribal lands.

culture as collateral damage (englehart/chalmers johnson [july 2005]):
The destruction began as Baghdad fell. Words disappeared instantly. They simply blinked off the screen of Iraqi history, many of them forever. First, there was the looting of the National Museum. That took care of some of the earliest words on clay, including, possibly, cuneiform tablets with missing parts of the epic of Gilgamesh. Soon after, the great libraries and archives of the capital went up in flames and books, letters, government documents, ancient Korans, religious manuscripts, stretching back centuries -- all those things not pressed into clay, or etched on stone, or engraved on metal, just words on that most precious and perishable of all commonplaces, paper -- vanished forever. What we're talking about, of course, is the flesh of history. And it was no less a victim of the American invasion -- of the Bush administration's lack of attention to, its lack of any sense of the value of what Iraq held (other than oil) -- than the Iraqi people. All of this has been, in that grim phrase created by the Pentagon, "collateral damage."
[chalmers johnson starts here]
(...) In their "joint statement on Iraq's future" of April 8, 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair declared, "We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit."[1] In this they were true to their word. Among the few places American soldiers actually did guard during and in the wake of their invasion were oil fields and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. But the real Iraqi patrimony, that invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, was another matter. At a time when American pundits were warning of a future "clash of civilizations," our occupation forces were letting perhaps the greatest of all human patrimonies be looted and smashed.
(...) No other places in the Bible except for Israel have more history and prophecy associated with them than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia -- different names for the territory that the British around the time of World War I began to call "Iraq," using the old Arab term for the lands of the former Turkish enclave of Mesopotamia (in Greek: "between the [Tigris and Eurphrates] rivers").[3] Most of the early books of Genesis are set in Iraq (see, for instance, Genesis 10:10, 11:31; also Daniel 1-4; II Kings 24).
(...) Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the indifference -- even the glee -- shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments. These events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, "the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years." Eleanor Robson of All Souls College, Oxford, said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale."[6] Yet Secretary Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and shrugged it off with the comment that "Freedom's untidy. . . . Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes."[7]
(...) Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and over a thousand have been confiscated in the United States.[10] Curtis noted that random checks of Western soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the U.S. then found more. Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled in from Iraq; in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland, 250. Lesser numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad.
(...) The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the National Library was in itself a historical disaster of the first order. Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Márquez, the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La Destrucción de Los Libros (2004), about a million books and ten million documents were destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003.[12] Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent of the Independent of London, was in Baghdad the day of the fires. He rushed to the offices of the U.S. Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty precise map locations for the two archives and their names in Arabic and English, and pointed out that the smoke could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a colleague, "This guy says some biblical library is on fire," but the Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.[13]
(...) In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, an American delegation of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They specifically warned that Baghdad's National Museum was the single most important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute said, "I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected."
(...) However, a more ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the April 14, 2003, London Guardian: Rich American collectors with connections to the White House were busy "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad." On January 24, 2003, some sixty New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new group called the American Council for Cultural Policy and met with Bush administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.[16] Opening up private trade in Iraqi artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they could receive in Iraq.
(...) First on Gen. Garner's list of places to protect was the Iraqi Central Bank, which is now a ruin; second was the Museum of Antiquities. Sixteenth was the Oil Ministry, the only place that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually defended.
(...) At the 6,000-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive ziggurat, or stepped temple-tower (built in the period 2112 - 2095 B.C. and restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C.), the Marines spray-painted their motto, "Semper Fi" (semper fidelis, always faithful) onto its walls.[20] The military then made the monument "off limits" to everyone in order to disguise the desecration that had occurred there, including the looting by U.S. soldiers of clay bricks used in the construction of the ancient buildings.
(...) However, the U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways measuring 12,000 and 9,700 feet respectively and four satellite camps. In the process, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truckloads of dirt in order to build 350,000 square feet of hangars and other facilities for aircraft and Predator unmanned drones. They completely ruined the area, the literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological research or future tourism. On October 24, 2003, according to the Global Security Organization, the Army and Air Force built its own modern ziggurat. It "opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located with [a] . . . Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more service men and women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that takes them back home."[21]
(...) Before our invasion of Afghanistan, we condemned the Taliban for their dynamiting of the monumental third century A.D. Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March, 2001. Those were two gigantic statues of remarkable historical value and the barbarism involved in their destruction blazed in headlines and horrified commentaries in our country. Today, our own government is guilty of far greater crimes when it comes to the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, and few here, when they consider Iraqi attitudes toward the American occupation, even take that into consideration. But what we do not care to remember, others may recall all too well.

iraq war profiteering:
"Now that the dictator's gone," he stated, "we and our coalition partners are helping Iraqis to lay the foundations of a free economy." Apparently he was referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority that took up residence in Saddam's luxurious palace in May 2003, with the newly appointed King, Paul Bremer. The CPA was granted the authority to award reconstruction contracts in Iraq and it used that authority to implement what will go down in the history books as the most blatant war profiteering scheme of all time.
(...) [nepotism] Bush filled the top slots of the CPA with the administration cronies. For instance, a friend of Cheney's, Peter McPherson, took a leave of absence as president of Michigan State University to serve as Bremer's economic deputy. The leader of the CPA's private development sector was Thomas Foley, an old college classmate of Bush, who served as finance chairman for his Presidential campaign in Connecticut and also raised more than $100,000 for Bush. Relatives of the administration were also given jobs, such as Ari Fleischer's brother Michael, and Simone Ledeen, the daughter of Michael Ledeen. Cheney's daughter Liz, also did a short stint. However, it should be noted that none of them lounged around for too long in what soon became a hellhole in Iraq.
(...) With one swipe of the pen, Bremer granted himself the authority to run the government ministries, appoint Iraqi officials and award contracts for reconstruction. Next he fired 500,000 Iraqis, most of them soldiers, but pink slips also went out to many doctors, nurses, teachers and other public employees as well.
(...) [money] For the most part, the CPA financed its activities with billions of dollars that belonged to the Iraqis. On May 22, 2003, a UN Security Council passed a resolution that directed the proceeds from Iraqi oil to be placed in a Development Fund for Iraq, and the CPA was granted authority to control the fund and decide which profiteers would get contracts. During the year that Bremer controlled the purse strings, the Iraqi Development Fund received $20.2 billion, including $8.1 billion from the UN's oil-for-food program, $10.8 billion from Iraqi oil, and the rest from repatriated funds, vested assets and donations.
(...) A report released by the House Government Reform Committee in February 2007, shows that in the 13 months that Bremer ruled, from May 2003 to June 2004, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York shipped nearly $12 billion in a cash to Iraq. ... nspector Bowen later said that he determined that some of this cash went to pay salaries for thousands of "ghost employees" and Iraqi civil servants who did not exist.
(...) Reports of flat out-fraud remained steady throughout Bremer's reign in Iraq. One audit showed that the CPA Ministry of Finance could not provide documentation for about $17 million spent on employee salaries in February 2004, and a CPA Advisor to the Ministry of the Interior said the Ministry was paid for 8,602 guards but only 602 could be verified.
(...) He also testified that millions of dollars in $100 bills were stored in the basement of the CPA offices and distributed to favored contractors with little accounting discipline. For instance, in the year that the CPA ruled, Custer was awarded contracts worth more than $100 million. Two former Custer employees ended up filing a lawsuit under the Federal False Claims Act, saying Custer had swindled $50 million from the CPA with scams like double-billing for salaries and repainting the forklifts found at the Baghdad airport and then leasing them back to the US government. The employees said the CPA paid the Custer $15 million to provide security for Iraq's civilian airline, when no services were needed because the airline was grounded during the time covered by the contract. These employees said they kept informing the CPA about Custer's fraudulent conduct for more than a year and when they asked why the firm continued to get contracts, they were told: "Battles is very active in the Republican party, and speaks to individuals he knows in the Whitehouse almost daily."
(...) [!] In June 2004, the Government Accounting Office estimated that more than $1 billion in had been wasted due to illegal overcharges by contractors since the war began. A later audit by the Iraqi government found that as much as $1.27 billion was lost to accounting irregularities between June 2004 and February 2005.
(...) Not surprisingly, Cheney's Halliburton remained the top profiteer under Bremer's rule. A July 23, 2004, audit conducted by Bowen, showed the company had received 60% of all contracts paid for with Iraq money, including 5 no-bid contracts worth $222 million, $325 million, $180 million, and the last 2 together totaled $194 million for the last two. In comparison, the audit showed that the CPA awarded only 2% of the reconstruction contracts to Iraqi companies. ... In one example of blatant fraud, an audit found that Halliburton was charging for more than 41,000 meals a day for soldiers when only about 14,000 were served.
(...) Senator Robert Byrd said he was outraged over the inability to monitor CPA spending. "There is no reason why any arm of the executive branch charged with making such significant spending decisions," he said, "should not be working directly with Congress."
(...) All total, the CPA had control of Iraqi money for one year between June 2003 and June 2004, but unfortunately no auditors arrived to take a look at the agency's spending until April 2004, two months before the CPA's rule was scheduled to end.
(...) The favored companies enjoyed a fraud-free-all. For instance, Halliburton said it had lost over $60 million worth of government property including trucks, office furniture and computers. Inspector Bowen reported that 6,975 items valued at $61.1 million were lost, and in June 2005, the Defense Contract Audit Agency reported that the Halliburton had overcharged or presented questionable bills for close to $1.5 billion.
(...) The whistleblower case against Custer Battle went to trial and a jury found that Custer had committed 37 acts of fraud and filed $3 million in false claims, and rendered a verdict with a $10 million penalty. However, the verdict was overturned by Republican appointed US District Court Judge TS Ellis III, who ruled that the CPA was not a US entity and therefore the false claims act does not apply to it.