Economic Hit Men:

The U.S. objective is simply to control the economic decisions of a country. The preferred instrument of U.S. foreign policy from about 1945 to 1980 was military dictatorships. Between 1980 and 1990 there were two tracks in U.S. policy. One was actually increasing support for repressive governments in Central America and elsewhere. But at the same time, you had a movement in the direction of utilizing debt as leverage, and, for the International Monetary Fund, structural adjustment programs became more important in the 1980s. Today, the U.S. prefers to exercise its power through economic channels. It wants a favorable investment economy. It wants to make sure that unions aren't strong. It wants to make sure that a country is not diverting its resources to the needs of its people, resources that are necessary for paying debt and doing other things. So what the U.S. wants is control, economic control, and it will use whatever leverage it has. What's happening in Haiti, the other thing the U.S. doesn't want, is a progressive government in power. It wants a government more valuable to its own interests and power. Holding back the [$146 million] Inter- American Development Bank loan (see Haiti Progrès, Vol. 19, No. 37, 11/28/01) is a way of trying to force a change of government. The U.S. doesn't want authentic democracy. It wants democracy within various narrow channels that it dictates in terms of what economic choices are available to countries and peoples. (Nelson-Pallmeyer) Network Solutions, a subsidiary of the National Science Foundation, registered all I.P. addresses as a free public service. Scientific Applications International Corp (SAIC) purchased Network Solutions and now I.P. addresses cost $50 per year. SAIC is an arm of the military industrial establishment, with forty thousand employees and over 90% of its $1.9 billion in 1994 revenues obtained from government contracts. The SAIC board is composed of three former Directors of CIA, ( Robert Gates, John Deutch, Bobby Ray Inman, NSA) two former heads of the DOD, (William Perry, Melvin Laird) and assorted generals. SAIC has been engaged in the creation and implementation of technology for the Army Global Command and Control System-the renovation of the Pentagon‘s computer and communication systems-and the upgrading of the national, state, and local law enforcement databases. In 1995 the Rand Corp., a research arm of the DOD, published a study entitled, ―Strategic Information Warfare‖, that predicted the importance of information dominance and speculated on how to repel and absorb internet attacks on the US and its allies. The unclassified version of the report stated that it was not necessary to take over and control the internet, but the purchase by SAIC of Network Solutions leads one to believe the classified version of the Rand report said something completely different. SAIC also was involved in the Remote Viewing/psychic spying studies for the CIA and DIA, along with Stanford Research Institute. It's also interesting that SAIC is involved in developing and promoting so-called "non-lethal weapons", which may be using remote-viewing as a front. Also interesting is that Information Warfare is often included as a sub-category of non-lethal warfare in military journals. Info War includes all the hacker and virus stuff, but it is broader than that. It includes the capability to intercept TV and radio transmissions from hostile countries, synthesize the voice and even the video of a foreign leader addressing his country, change the content, and re-broadcast it via satellite jamming. In the literature this technology is a reality to the folks at the Pentagon, and they're not overlooking its potential for covert ops and psy- war. Another subset of Information Warfare involves "controlling the beliefs" of its subjects, including domestic ones. This used to be known as propaganda, or good-ole- fashioned lying, but "Information Warfare" has that oh-so-sexy Wired appeal to it. Military theorists like general Michael Aquino, US Army PSYOPS expert and founder of the Temple of Set, have argued that all war is psychological, and that killing people only provides an edge for the propaganda, which should not be limited to the enemy or during wartime. After 9/11 the fortunes of SAIC have progressed at an astonishing rate. The Global War on Terror, a war without end, is perfectly suited for the corporation that functions as the brains of the National Security State. Revenues for 2006 were $8 billion dollars, with 9,000 government contracts now worth $13.6 billion in the pipeline. SAIC is now bigger than Halliburton or Bechtel and employs more people than the Department of labor, DOE, and HUD combined. Despite defrauding the government in a systematic manner and changes in political parties, their stock with the military industrial complex continues to rise. Civilians at SAIC joke that the company has so many admirals and generals in its ranks that it could start its own war. Some might argue that, in the case of Iraq, it did. Four years before the war it established the Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis. Testimony by SAIC employees were key to making the case that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat. The company virtually created the Iraq Reconstruction and Development Council, managed them, and paid them $33 million prior to the war. The operation reported to Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense policy at the Pentagon. Feith, a key architect of the invasion, employed Christopher ―Ryan‖ Henry, former SAIC senior vice president. SAIC employed Shaha Riza, the girlfriend of Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense. SAIC also contracted for the Office of Strategic Influence, set up by Rumsfeld to function as a ―Voice of America‖ program to supply good news about the war. In the wake of the disastrous intelligence failures before the war, SAIC personnel staffed the commission that was set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong. This is a curious turn of events, considering it was SAIC personnel who supplied the false intelligence in the first place. Their report concluded, ―The Commission found no indication the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq‘s weapons of mass destruction‖. In the 1970‘s and 1980‘s SAIC was hired by the government to reconstruct the radiation dose received by military personnel during atomic bomb tests. When SAIC did the numbers, very few veterans qualified for compensation. The Pentagon was off the hook and the ailing veterans were out of luck. In 1988 Congress waived the rules and gave veterans dying of cancer the benefit of the doubt. By then most of the veterans were dead. SAIC and Bechtel are partners in constructing Yucca Mountain, the $3.1 billion repository for high-level nuclear waste, waste that will remain lethal for at least 10,000 years. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy came under pressure from executives in the nuclear industry to help them cut costs of storing waste. The idea was to recycle the contaminated metals, nickel, aluminum, copper, steel, by mixing them with other metals. The diluted metals could then be made into useable items, knives, forks, baby strollers, eye glass frames, bicycles, frying pans...even used in construction. This had occurred before in the 1980‘s when radioactive table legs began turning up in the US everywhere from restaurants to nursing homes. A radioactive ring cost one man his arm. Because of this in 1992 Congress banned this form of recycling. The latest scheme worked because SAIC wrote the regulations for the N.R.C. that established a safe dose limit for recycling (there is no safe dose of radiation). SAIC at the same time contracted with the D.O.E. to recycle the materials for which it was drafting the regulations. This conflict of interest was discovered by accident and the contract put on hold. SAIC denied there was a conflict of interest. (Vanity Fair 3/07) DynCorp is one of the three pre-eminent private mercenary corporations in the world, and is the dominant entity for training security forces in the Middle East. Herbert ―Pug‖ Winokur a lead investor and creator of DynCorp (CEO 1987-91) previously chaired the finance committee at Enron, where he somehow escaped the scrutiny of federal prosecutors. DynCorp is ubiquitous, it manages the Congressional telephone system and does the computerized bookkeeping for a dozen federal agencies, including DOD and HUD, and as such has presided over the loss (or theft) of trillions of dollars. DynCorp has a contract to manage the police and court systems in US-occupied Iraq. Arthur Anderson is the financial auditor of DynCorp, they are the same auditor that handled Enron‘s books. The HUD Inspector General testified before Congress that HUD had lost $17 billion in 1998 and $59 billion in 1999. In 2001 it was disclosed that the Pentagon could not account for $1.1 trillion for the fiscal year 2000. In a separate loss, it later became public that the DOD could not account for $2.3 trillion dollars, amounting to over 25% of its assets. The DOD budget is $480 billion a year, more than all the non- American military spending in the world combined, yet they managed to lose trillions. The financial data processing for US government accounting systems is done by DynCorp and Lockheed-Martin. DynCorp was given a $322 million contract to develop, produce, test, and store FDA licensed vaccines for the DOD. DynCorp owns Blackwater, the company that employs the majority of the tens of thousands of security contractors in Iraq. (Rupert) Hadron was founded in the 1980‘s by Dr. Earl Brian, who was an associate of Attorney General Edwin Meese. Brian was convicted on fraud charges in the 1980‘s. Ken Alibek is president of the subsidiary Hadron Advanced Biosystems, formerly Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov, who headed up Project Bonfire, the crash USSR program to destroy the US with biological weapons after an initial nuclear exchange. DARPA gave the company $12 million in funding for medical biodefense research, the focus of which is non- specific immunity. (Rupert pg479) (Rupert pg 251) The Rendon Group, whose services have been retained during ―nearly every shooting conflict in the past two decades,‖ as James Bamford, an investigative reporter, wrote in Rolling Stone last fall. Hired by the CIA after the first gulf war to pave the way for regime change in Iraq, John Rendon helped to organize the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi‘s dissident group (which was later responsible for feeding bogus stories about Iraq‘s weapons of mass destruction to the press). More recently, though, as Bamford has reported, Rendon‘s firm received a Pentagon contract to mount ―a worldwide propaganda campaign deploying teams of information warriors to allied nations to assist them ̳in developing and delivering specific messages to the local population, combatants, front-line states, the media and the international community.‖ (Daniel Schulman, CJR) Schlumberger is the world‘s premier oil drilling company that is present in some manner wherever oil is being developed. Schlumberger is also comprised of the world‘s most advanced surface seismic company, WesternGeco, jointly owned by Baker-Hughes. James Baker founded and runs Baker-Hughes, he is the world‘s foremost petroleum lawyer, a key player in the Caspian oil exploration in the 1990‘s. Schlumberger‘s board of directors include John M. Deutch, former CIA director for Clinton, along with Jamie S. Gorelick. Gorelick is one of only four of the 9/11 commission members allowed to review presidential intelligence records. Oil companies are routinely used as cover for information gathering by US intelligence agencies, particularly because oil is a strategic commodity, and also because employees have an excuse to travel to just about anywhere in the world. Exxon Mobil, by virtue of its size, employs more intelligence assets than any other entity. Anthropologist and journalists as well are able to travel anywhere in the world without raising too much attention and have also historically been recruited by the CIA.