Tag: military industrial complex

Pentagon Paid Nearly 8,000 Percent Markup on Boeing’s Bathroom Soap Dispenser

The bathroom on the C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane is nothing special. The soap dispensers are exactly the same kind of pump that customers might find on a civilian airliner or in a restaurant bathroom. But the U.S. government paid 7,943 percent more for the soap machine than what it should have, costing taxpayers $149,072, a new report by the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Defense found.

The report was the result of a two-year audit of U.S. Air Force purchases from the Boeing Company. Out of a selected sample of 46 spare parts for the C-17, the Pentagon’s internal watchdog found that the Air Force overpaid for 12 of them, costing taxpayers an additional $992,856 on top of the parts’ $4.3 million value.

The C-17 is the workhorse of U.S. military airlifts. Capable of carrying heavier loads over longer distances than any other aircraft in the American arsenal, the transport jet has become a symbol of U.S. resupply efforts for Israel and Ukraine. The U.S. Air Force maintains a fleet of 223 of them.

Overcharging is a massive problem for the U.S. military budget. In 2015, the Pentagon found that it was severely overpaying for Patriot missiles, and negotiated a new contract that saved $550 million. In 2019, the inspector general found that the military was paying $4,300 for a half-inch metal drive pin that should have cost $46.

The similarly extreme markup on soap dispensers is what led to the audit of C-17 parts in the first place. The Office of the Inspector General says that it opened its investigation in June 2022 after a whistleblower told its anonymous tip line that Boeing was severely overcharging for airplane bathroom fixtures.

The inspector general found that the Air Force did not “validate the accuracy of the data used for contract negotiation, conduct contract surveillance to identify price increases during contract execution, or review invoices to determine fair and reasonable prices before payment.”

Boeing cooperated with the investigation on the condition that specific price data would not be released to Congress or the public, arguing that this data is a trade secret. Therefore, the inspector general report only includes the total extra cost of the soap dispensers, not the number that the Air Force purchased or how much Boeing charged for each one.

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Spain cancels arms deal with Israeli company worth billions

The Spanish government has canceled a contract to buy ammunition for its Civil Guard police force from an Israeli defense company, Madrid announced in a statement on 29 October.

“The Spanish government maintains the commitment not to sell weapons to the Israeli state since the armed conflict broke out in the territory of Gaza,” Spain’s Interior Ministry announced. 

“Although in this case it is an acquisition of ammunition, the Interior Ministry has initiated the administrative procedure to cancel the purchase,” it added. 

It also said Israeli firms will be excluded from any outstanding tenders. 

The Cadena SER radio station reported earlier that Spain’s Civil Guard police force had agreed to a sale of over 15 million nine-millimeter rounds for $6.48 million from Guardian LTD Israel. 

The announcement comes the week after the Spanish Defense Ministry told local media that it had halted the purchase of weapons from Israel. The European country had said it would stop arms sales to Israel after the start of the war on 7 October 2023.

This decision marks the first signal that the Spanish pledge will include purchases from Israel and not just sales.

Spain has been vocal about Israel’s genocide and continuous war crimes in the Gaza Strip, as well as in Lebanon. 

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez urged other members of the EU on 14 October to suspend the bloc’s free trade agreement with Israel. 

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Who has the authority to bring down NHI-UAP?

Journalist Ross Coulthart made the astonishing claim during the Global Disclosure Day 2024 event, that Non-Human technology is being intentionally brought down by elements of the *United States* government. He states that ‘High pulse microwave weapons’ are being used against non-human craft, and we are bringing those craft down so we can retrieve them and salvage the technology. 

Firstly, let me say that I have had my own scepticism around this concept for a few years now. Ufologist Steven Greer has long maintained that cases of crash retrievals have resulted from ‘shoot downs’. Others have suggested that electro-magnetic pulse weapons – artefacts attributed to nuclear weapons, have brought down UAP inadvertently. While others, myself included, have suggested the UAP-dogfight scenario – multiple UAP are bringing down other UAP.

The truth is that we don’t have enough data to conclude either way. We simply don’t know *why* they are crashing – what we can state with some confidence is that they are coming down – thanks to whistleblowers. Perhaps non of the above is accurate, or maybe all of the above has some merit and is occurring simultaneously. We don’t know conclusively yet.

An article by my friend Chris Sharpe has shed some light on the UAP retrieval programs – Unacknowledged Special Access Programs that are hidden illegally from Congress. Chris has postulated from his in-the-know sources that the secrecy is partly derived from ‘shoot-downs’.

“A haunting possibility—& perhaps a large reason behind the UAP cover-up—is the alleged deliberate downing of non-human crafts. Two sources have told LT that UAP are being brought down using a specific radar waveform repeater, a method which is also used to attract them.”

– Chris Sharpe 

Now let us be clear, we can only hypothetically address the concept of shoot-downs by government agencies and/or defense contractors. However what we can say, is that *if* true, we are facing a constitutional and political crisis on an unprecedented level.

Let us consider that hiding evidence of non-human intelligence (NHI), the existence of advanced technological capabilities, and the fundamental understanding of the reality of humanities place in the universe is arguably the worst acts ever committed. These may be considered crimes against humanity on an unparalleled scale. That is only part one of this detrimental mess.

And we can consider that these acts were relatively understandable at the time of conception –  particularly given the circumstances of the Cold War, the Atomic age, and the threats of nuclear annihilation that faced the United States and her allies in the mid-twentieth century.

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‘The Military Has Lost Its Way’: Former Service Member Rips DOD’s Use of Remdesivir

The military’s use of remdesivir to treat COVID-19 caused the deaths of at least 600 service members, according to the recently released “Remdesivir Papers.”

For one former service member, it was a sign that “the military has lost its way.”

Brad Miller, a former lieutenant colonel with the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army — and a founding member of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Military Chapter — was able to review “The Remdesivir Papers” before their release on Oct. 4.

He joined “The Defender In-Depth” this week to discuss the papers’ revelations.

Miller left the military after 19 years of service after deciding not to comply with its COVID-19 vaccine mandate. He told “The Defender In-Depth” that current military leadership “led this institution into disarray” when it caved to financial and political pressure to administer the controversial antiviral drug remdesivir — despite its known risks — to “a captive population.”

According to Miller, “The Remdesivir Papers” reveal “some collusion” in early 2020 between the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He said the military’s collusion with other government agencies “served as an indicator of what would happen across the wider society shortly thereafter.”

Miller said he was offered the opportunity to review “The Remdesivir Papers” before their publication by the anonymous military whistleblower who later released them. The whistleblower was aware of Miller’s “personal skepticism” about a lot of the stories that came out of the DOD regarding COVID-19.

“I think what people will immediately see … is there’s more to just the entire COVID-19 situation than just the lockdowns or the potential problems — either medical or legal — with the COVID shot mandates.”

Miller said:

“What ‘The Remdesivir Papers’ do is allow us to kind of open our aperture and realize that what happened over the last couple of years is bigger than just lockdowns. It’s bigger than just COVID shots.

“There were other things that were just as problematic, like the widespread use of remdesivir as an ostensible treatment protocol for those that ostensibly had COVID-19.”

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Raytheon To Pay Over $950 Million In Settlement Over Fraud, Qatari Bribery, And Export Violations

Raytheon, a subsidiary of defense contractor RTX, has agreed to pay more than $950 million to resolve federal investigations into government contract fraud, as well as violations of anti-corruption and export control laws.

The settlement, announced by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Oct. 16, addresses allegations involving defective pricing on military contracts with the U.S. government, as well as illegal bribes to a Qatari official, with the resolution involving both civil and criminal penalties.

An RTX spokesperson confirmed the settlement, telling The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that the company acknowledges responsibility for the misconduct and has cooperated with investigators. The company also emphasized its commitment to bolstering its compliance and ethics programs.

Raytheon has admitted to two major fraud schemes affecting Department of Defense (DoD) contracts, including the provision of PATRIOT missile systems and radar systems.

In the first case, Raytheon employees provided defective pricing information, leading the DoD to overpay on two contracts by roughly $111 million between 2012 and 2018.

In a separate scheme, Raytheon failed to provide accurate cost or pricing data for numerous DoD contracts, including a weapons maintenance agreement, leading to further inflated payments.

Under the terms of a three-year deferred prosecution agreement, Raytheon will pay a criminal monetary penalty of $146.8 million and $111.2 million in victim compensation and retain an independent compliance monitor for three years.

The company received a 25 percent reduction in penalties for taking remedial actions, such as firing employees responsible for the misconduct and implementing new controls to prevent future fraud.

Additionally, Raytheon has agreed to pay $428 million to settle False Claims Act allegations related to providing false data during contract negotiations with the DoD. As part of the settlement, Raytheon admitted it misrepresented labor and material costs for weapon systems and double-billed on a radar station contract.

“The department is committed to holding accountable those contractors that knowingly misrepresent their cost and pricing data or otherwise violate their legal obligations when negotiating or performing contracts with the United States,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the DOJ’s Civil Division, said in a statement.

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Battlespace Of The Brain: The Military Conquest To “Master The Human Domain”

In 1970, Zbigniew Brzezinski published his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era.[i]Brzezinski was a futurist who cofounded the globalist Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller and Jimmy Carter in 1973, and served as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter between 1977 and 1981. Brzezinski understood the impact of science on society:

Speaking of a future at most decades away, an experimenter in intelligence control asserted, “I foresee a time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.” (Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, p. 15)

Another threat, less overt but no less basic, confronts liberal democracy. More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. (pp. 252–253)

In an August 2017 seminar at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) guest speaker Dr. James Giordano, of Georgetown University Medical Center, offered a sobering view of the calculated war on our brains, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all the people, and the potential for weaponizing neuroscientific discoveries and neurotechnologies.

Dr. Giordano is a professor in the Departments of Neurology and Biochemistry, Chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program, and Co-director of the O’Neill-Pellegrino Program in Brain Science and Global Health Law and Policy at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC. He is a Senior Researcher and Task Leader of the Working Group on Dual-Use of the EU Human Brain Project, and has served as a Senior Science Advisory Fellow of the Strategic Multilayer Assessment group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Pentagon.

His 2017 briefing, “Brain Science from Bench to Battlefield: The Realities—and Risks—of Neuroweapons,”[ii]explores the potentials of brain science in the context of public/private research for national defense, including using nano-pharmaceutical low-dose toxins or other chemicals as a controlled vector.

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Peter Thiel: From Gaza AI War Criminal To White House Puppet Master

The screams of babies as buildings collapse in Gaza. Terrified parents carrying the remains of their children away in plastic carrier bags. These scenes – altogether too familiar today – come enabled by German-American tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his company, Palantir, whose software uses AI and big data to help the Israeli military surveil, target and slaughter hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. It is also used by ICE, the FBI and U.S. law enforcement to destroy privacy, to attack whistleblowers, and to turn the Orwellian concept of “pre-crime” (identifying and tracking potential subversives before they commit any offense) into a reality.

The Silicon Valley oligarch has deep ties to the CIA and the military-industrial complex and is one of the Republican Party’s most powerful backers. Already one of the world’s most influential individuals, if Donald Trump wins in November, Thiel has set himself up to become a “shadow president,” wielding gigantic power over us all. This is his story.

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A Year of War in the Middle East Cost Americans Nearly $23 Billion

War is not cheap, especially not the past year of Middle Eastern wars. While Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, and others pay with their lives by the tens of thousands, Americans are paying much of the financial cost of keeping the violence going.

A new study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University pinned down exactly what that cost is: at least $22.76 billion from October 7, 2023, to September 30, 2024. The bulk of the money, $17.9 billion, was spent on U.S. aid to the Israeli military—both financial grants given to Israel to purchase weapons, and the cost of replacing munitions such as artillery shells sent directly from American stockpiles to the Israeli army.

“The United States can walk and chew gum at the same time, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told reporters on October 13, 2023. “U.S. security assistance to Israel will flow in at the speed of war.”

But the U.S. military itself has also burned through expensive ammunition dealing with the spillover of the war into Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.

The study only counts the direct burden on the U.S. military budget. It doesn’t include indirect costs, “such as increased U.S. security assistance to Egypt, Saudi Arabia or any other countries, and costs to the commercial airline industry and to U.S. consumers.” Nor does it count the $1 billion in U.S. humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

And the study’s time frame doesn’t include the ongoing Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, which prompted even more U.S. military deployments to the region, or Iran’s October 1 missile attack on Israeli military bases. During the latter incident, the U.S. Navy says it fired “about a dozen interceptors” at the Iranian missiles. “Assuming they were SM-3 interceptors, that represents the production run for an entire year, at a cost of about $400 million total,” Middlebury Institute professor Jeffrey Lewis noted on social media.

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Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel

In late January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 25,000 and droves of Palestinians fled their razed cities in search of safety, Israel’s military asked for 3,000 more bombs from the American government. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, along with other top diplomats in the Jerusalem embassy, sent a cable to Washington urging State Department leaders to approve the sale, saying there was no potential the Israel Defense Forces would misuse the weapons.

The cable did not mention the Biden administration’s public concerns over the growing civilian casualties, nor did it address well-documented reports that Israel had dropped 2,000-pound bombs on crowded areas of Gaza weeks earlier, collapsing apartment buildings and killing hundreds of Palestinians, many of whom were children.

Lew was aware of the issues. Officials say his own staff had repeatedly highlighted attacks where large numbers of civilians died. Homes of the embassy’s own Palestinian employees had been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.

Still, Lew and his senior leadership argued that Israel could be trusted with this new shipment of bombs, known as GBU-39s, which are smaller and more precise. Israel’s air force, they asserted, had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians when using the American-made bomb and had “demonstrated an ability and willingness to employ it in [a] manner that minimizes collateral damage.”

While that request was pending, the Israelis proved those assertions wrong. In the months that followed, the Israeli military repeatedly dropped GBU-39s it already possessed on shelters and refugee camps that it said were being occupied by Hamas soldiers, killing scores of Palestinians. Then, in early August, the IDF bombed a school and mosque where civilians were sheltering. At least 93 died. Children’s bodies were so mutilated their parents had trouble identifying them.

Weapons analysts identified shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs among the rubble.

In the months before and since, an array of State Department officials urged that Israel be completely or partially cut off from weapons sales under laws that prohibit arming countries with a pattern or clear risk of violations. Top State Department political appointees repeatedly rejected those appeals.

Government experts have for years unsuccessfully tried to withhold or place conditions on arms sales to Israel because of credible allegations that the country had violated Palestinians’ human rights using American-made weapons.

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Industry ‘hamstrung’ by Space Force-intel community’s turf war

The space industry is waiting for the Space Force and intelligence community to come to an agreement over buying commercial satellite imagery and related analysis—a fight, some say, that is preventing troops from making the fullest use of orbital capabilities. 

Currently, the National Reconnaissance Office is in charge of buying intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance imagery from commercial space providers, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in charge of purchasing analytic products. But in the five years since the Space Force was created, the young service has increasingly pushed for funds and leeway to work directly with commercial firms, arguing that it can more quickly get important information to combatant commands.

Earlier this year, Space Force launched a $40 million pilot program to show just how fast it could move information and insights from orbiting sensors to troops on ground. It began soliciting bids for “tactical surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking,” or TacSRT, through a “marketplace,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told reporters last month. 

“What TacSRT is doing with this pilot in particular is: we simply ask a question into the marketplace: ‘Hey, what generally does it look like around Air Base 201? Are there any items of interest, trucks, that are massing? Is there a huge parking lot? Do we see people milling around?’ We simply ask the question. And commercial industry provides us products that try to help us answer the question,” he said.

Saltzman has emphasized that the pilot program buys analysis based on imagery but not images themselves, carefully skirting NRO’s territory.  

Executives with commercial space companies that have participated in the pilot’s marketplace call it revolutionary. Some jobs have moved from a work statement announcement to the start of a mission in as little as 24 to 72 hours. 

But these executives say that unless TacSRT gets more funding, and the intel community gives more leeway to the Space Force, commercial companies and combatant commands could suffer. 

Under the current NGA-centric process, it can take weeks for military analysts in a relatively quiet command—i.e., anywhere that’s not China, Ukraine, or the Middle East—to hear back on a request for satellite imagery, said Joe Morrison, the vice president of remote sensing at Umbra, which operates a synthetic aperture radar constellation and provides data to analytics firms in the TacSRT program. 

Morrison said the current system was designed to manage requests for a scarce number of very-high-quality, very-much-in-demand “national assets”—not to draw efficiently on commercial offerings to make sure all needs are met in timely fashion. He said this has discouraged analysts from even putting in a request for imagery or insights, which has artificially depressed apparent demand for them and has “hamstrung” Umbra’s ability to demonstrate its utility.

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