Tag: military industrial complex

It’s Time To Reassess Our Relationship With Israel

In April 1996, Israeli artillery shells rained down on a United Nations compound where hundreds of civilians were taking refuge. As the shells exploded and the building collapsed, 106 civilians died and another 116 were injured.

The attack, now known as the Qana Massacre, was part of a larger Israeli offensive known as Operation Grapes of Wrath, a 16-day campaign of aggression in southern Lebanon.

The United Nations investigated the Qana Massacre and determined the Israeli shelling was deliberate. Then-UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghani condemned the attack, writing it was “all the more serious because civilians, including women and children, had sought refuge” in the compound the Israelis destroyed.

The commander of the unit that launched the assault was a man named Naftali Bennett, who’d go on to boast, “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life and there’s no problem with that.”

Bennett, of course, is now Israel’s prime minister. And on August 25, he arrived for a visit at the White House.

When President Biden took office, he promised to pursue a foreign policy based on human rights and the “rules-based international order.”

Those commitments already seemed at odds with the long-running U.S. support for Israel. Whether it’s giving Israel nearly $4 billion in military aid every year or providing diplomatic protection at the United Nations, the United States allows Israel to act with impunity even after repeated instances of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But Biden’s promise to put human rights and international law first seem especially at odds with supporting a government like Bennett’s. Bennett’s war criminal past is troubling enough, but his current positions flout international law – and longstanding US support for a two-state solution – just as aggressively.

Keep reading

US Navy is developing sonic weapon that blasts the target’s own voice back at them leaving them disoriented and unable to communicate

The US Navy is working on a non-lethal weapon that would render a person unable to communicate.

The handheld Acoustic Hailing And Disruption (AHAD) system records a subject’s voice with a long-range microphone then amplifies it and plays it back on two distinct tracks, one nearly simultaneous with the original and another on a slight delay, perhaps a few hundred milliseconds.

Using a parametric speaker, it directs the sound back at the person speaking, with the resulting echo theoretically disorienting the person and impeding their attempts to continue talking.

‘Due to the delayed auditory feedback effect, the target speaker’s concentration will be disrupted, making it difficult for them to continue speaking,’ according to the weapon’s patent application, approved in early August.

The chatter would be inaudible to anyone else, New Scientist reports, ‘so, as far as any bystanders can tell, the target will seem to have trouble speaking for no obvious reason.’

Keep reading

Army Wants to Install Facial Recognition, Video Analytics at Child Development Centers

The Army wants to use facial recognition and advanced machine learning algorithms to monitor kids at base Children Development Centers and plans to launch a pilot program at Fort Jackson in the near future.

Army contracting officers posted a solicitation to SAM.gov for a vendor capable of developing a facial recognition and video analytics system and integrating that with the Fort Jackson CDC’s closed-circuit television system.

If successful, the system will be used for “monitoring the health and well-being of children in the CDC,” according to the performance work statement.

“The use of close-circuit television video-recording is common in CDCs for security purposes, however these feeds are not continually monitored during all hours of operation in live time,” the solicitation notes. “Instead, CDC staff log scheduled hours by watching the live video feeds periodically throughout the day for the mandated metrics.”

The center is hoping adding video analytics to the CCTV system will allow for continuous monitoring of students, “used as an addition to the human CCTV monitoring,” and capable of automatically alerting staff to situations as they arise.

Keep reading

Bring All the Troops Home: Stop Policing the Globe and Put an End to Endless Wars

“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate

It’s time to bring all our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

It’s not enough to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, America’s longest, bloodiest and most expensive war to date.

It’s time that we stop policing the globe, stop occupying other countries, and stop waging endless wars.

That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.

Keep reading

Even as Afghan War Ends, GOP Attempts to Add $25B to Military Budget

Just as the United States completed its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan on Monday after two decades of war and occupation, House Republicans announced plans to push for a $25 billion increase in annual military spending—a proposal that progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups swiftly rejected.

Led by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, the GOP intends to pursue a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) amendment that would add $25 billion to President Joe Biden’s $753 billion topline military spending request for Fiscal Year 2022.

The House Armed Services panel—which is awash in donations from weapons makers and other major industry players—is expected to begin marking up Biden’s request on Wednesday.

“Rogers’ amendment would dole out $15 billion to address a spate of military unfunded priorities that weren’t included in the Pentagon’s budget request,” Politico reported Monday. “It would add $9.8 billion to weapons procurement accounts, including money for four more Navy ships, more planes and helicopters for the Navy, Marine Corps, and National Guard, and upgraded Army combat vehicles.”

Approval of the GOP’s amendment would bring the House version of the NDAA—a sprawling annual defense policy bill that typically passes with overwhelming bipartisan support—into line with the Senate’s. Last month, as Common Dreams reported, the Senate Armed Services Committee agreed to pile $25 billion onto Biden’s proposal, which already calls for an increase over Trump-era Pentagon spending levels.

Keep reading

Warmongers Keep Raging About The Phrase ‘Ending The Forever Wars’ And We Should Laugh At Them

In the wake of the Afghanistan withdrawal influential promoters of western militarism have been absolutely fuming about the popular idea of ending the forever wars, and their tantrums are not even trying to disguise it as something else. They’re literally using that phrase, “ending the forever wars”, and then saying it’s a bad thing.

I mean, what a bizarre hill to die on. War is the very worst thing in the world, and forever is the very worst amount of time they could go on for, yet they’re openly condemning the “doctrine of ending the forever wars”. How warped does your sense of reality have to be to even think this is a view anyone who isn’t paid by defense contractors could possibly be sympathetic to?

Yet they are indeed trying. Citing the chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal as though every single day of the twenty-year occupation has not been far worse, career-long warmongers are trying to spin “ending the forever wars” as a disdainful slogan that everyone should reject.

Keep reading

“War Is a Racket”: The US War in Afghanistan Validates General Smedley Butler

“I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” – Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940) in his book “War is a Racket” (1935).

The ending of the 20-year-war in Afghanistan, the longest ever engagement in a single conflict by the United States armed forces, has been variously described as a “catastrophe”, a “disaster” and a “debacle”. Yet this national failure from which parallels have been drawn with the Vietnam War has not had the same ring of misfortune for some.

Indeed, long before the recent scenes of calamity and collapse in Kabul brought home with resounding finality the futility of a supposed nation-building exercise, the profit-motive for the initial US invasion and the preservation of an enduring occupation was an open secret to anyone who bothered to embark on the slightest inquiry.

The gravy train of American defence spending was in full effect, facilitated by the tentacles of what US President Dwight D. Eisenhower prophesied would become the Military Industrial Complex. For the last two decades have witnessed what has been described as a “wealth transfer from US taxpayers to military contractors”.  But the war, apart from confirming Afghanistan’s reputation as the “Graveyard of Empires”, also validates the phrase coined by US Major General Smedley Butler that war is a racket.

The blame game currently being played out in the United States media by the political class risks obscuring one fundamental issue: the centrality of money and the profit motive in the waging of America’s two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.

The invasion of that country had been planned well in advance of the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the event which provided the impetus for mounting a military response including the country’s occupation. The United States has long coveted gaining access to the mineral and oil rich Caspian region and Central Asia, and the coming to power of the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban movement was not seen at the time by US policy makers as an impenetrable obstacle.

As the French writers Jean-Charles Briscard and Guillaume Dasquie wrote in their book Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden, which was published in 2002, the American government had been prepared to accept Taliban rule on condition that they agreed to the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia.

Keep reading

Lawmakers Benefit From Booming Defense Stocks

Since U.S. military actions in Afghanistan were authorized in September 2001, the stocks of the top five defense companies have risen in value by an average of nearly 900%, strongly outperforming the S&P 500 index.

Among those who have benefitted from investments in the stocks are nearly four dozen members of Congress, the people who approve funding for the contracts that make up the bulk of the companies’ revenues.

At least 47 members of Congress and their spouses hold between $2 million and $6.7 million worth of stock in companies that are among the top 100 defense contractors, a Sludge analysis of financial disclosures found. 

The war in Afghanistan has caused an estimated up to 174,000 direct war deaths, according to the Costs of War Project, with economic costs reaching over $2.26 trillion there and in Pakistan. The total cost of post-9/11 wars including Iraq and other operations has surpassed $6.4 trillion through last year.

At least 11 U.S. senators hold up to $1.7 million in defense industry stocks and at least 36 U.S. representatives hold a maximum value of over $5 million. Congress only reports its investments in broad ranges, so it’s not possible to know exactly how much their stocks are worth. Members of Congress have at least 108 investments in 16 major defense contractors, including all of the top 10 companies by defense revenue.

Keep reading