Propaganda Alert: Muslim Terrorists May Be Trying To Sink the Dollar

Don’t waste your time, terrorists, the Bush Crime Syndicate is doing just fine without your help!

Source: Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, Israel National News.

Mujahideen Muslim terrorists may be behind the sinking American dollar as part of a campaign to cripple the American economy, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported. The media watch group, which specializes in tracking Arabic language websites, said that postings on websites the past two years reflect a move toward waging an economic war against the United States.

Mujahideen terrorist groups that operate in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries “have come to the conclusion that it is financial, rather than military, losses that will prompt the U.S. to change its policies in the Middle East and elsewhere,” according to MEMRI.

An article recently posted in Sada Al-Jihad (Echo of Jihad) magazine and posted on several Muslim websites, discusses the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. as having influenced the decline in the dollar. It also cited the cost of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan as draining the American economy.

Another recent posting stated, “The dollar can expect two additional blows that will break its back… [namely] the announcement of the return of the [religious rule of the] Caliphate…” and the reinstatement of the gold standard in international monetary trade. It urged Mujahideen “to get rid of American dollars” before an “imminent” terrorist attack that “will put an end to the so-called United States of America and destroy its economy completely.”

MEMRI concluded, “Given that it is highly atypical for Al-Qaeda to give prior warning of its attacks, the message is probably an attempt to pressure Muslims to sell dollars, in order to generate pessimism in the dollar market and thus accelerate the drop in its value.”

American Disgrace: Many levees rarely inspected

Source: PERRY BEEMAN, The Des Moines Register.

Many Iowa levees are makeshift creations not built to federal specifications and are rarely inspected, state and federal officials acknowledged last week.

In fact, the state has no comprehensive levee-inspection program for an unknown number of levees — possibly hundreds — that haven’t been certified by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Richard Leopold, director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

Search a database of Iowa levees

Instead, a single state staffer responds to complaints about levees overseen by 140 local agencies — but doesn’t check them.

The safety of levees was front and center as national coverage of record flooding in Iowa unfolded the past couple of weeks. In some cases — including in the Birdland Park area of Des Moines — levees broke. That levee was known to be weak, didn’t meet Corps standards, and sat 15 years after record flooding in 1993 without needed improvements.

In other instances, people in Mason City, Corning, Cedar Rapids, Keokuk and elsewhere nervously watched levees as waters rose. Some of the structures were topped, especially along the Mississippi River in southeastern Iowa.

Leopold and his department this year asked the Legislature for a $300,000 appropriation for dam and levee inspections, and other flood plain work. They got nothing.

“We don’t do a lot of proactive work on these things,” Leopold said. “We mostly respond to complaints, like when property owners are disputing the location of a new levee.”

Now, with Iowa awash in flood damage, Leopold plans to ask for more than $300,000 next session. He’s not sure he’ll get it.

“I’m going to be much more aggressive about this,” Leopold said. “We should be out there and have a plan for when these go down.”

The state also needs to develop a plan for flood plain management that might focus in part on moving structures out of flood plains, rather than simply on raising levees, Leopold added. One painful lesson learned by Iowans this month is that 100-year floods or 500-year floods can come along at any time.

“This will happen again, in a year, or 10 years, or 30 years,” Leopold said. “Putting all our money into levees — is it high enough? — it’s just a guessing game. When this is over, and the danger is past, we need to take a deep breath and look at the whole situation.”

Corps, local authorities conduct inspections

Officials in Minnesota and Missouri said their resources departments don’t inspect levees, either, leaving that work to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and local levee districts, as Iowa does.

Suzanne Jiwani of Minnesota’s flood plain office said that if a levee isn’t good enough to qualify for Army Corps inspections, it isn’t worth much.

“If it’s not in the Corps program, we don’t want to be giving people the idea it’s safe,” she said.

Kerry Cordray of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources said that state also leaves levee inspections to the Corps.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inspects only levees that it designed and built, or that it has certified as meeting standards.

Corps spokesman Ron Fournier said some Iowa levees, typically built by farmers or local agencies after flooding in the 1960s, are rows of sandbags covered with dirt. Because they don’t meet Corps standards, they aren’t inspected regularly and don’t qualify for federal repair or replacement projects.

Four levees in Iowa were built in the 1890s. Nineteen others were built between 1900 and 1940. Eighteen date to the 1950s. Some of those were built by the Corps but are maintained by local agencies. Some were built by local agencies but have been certified by the Corps as meeting federal requirements for Corps inspections and repair work. Some were built locally and don’t meet Corps standards.

Only two listed in Corps records for the Rock Island District, which includes Iowa, were built in the 1990s or later.

The Rock Island District of the Corps inspects 106 levee systems covering 774 miles in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Missouri.

Of those, 97 were inspected in 2007, and the remainder are Corps-built levees that are inspected continuously. The 106 levees qualify for federal project money.

The remaining 130 levees totaling 248 miles were constructed by a mishmash of local agencies, businesses and residents. They don’t meet specifications, are rarely inspected and don’t qualify for federal assistance. The makeshift levees are prone to damage from trees and rodents.

“They are all over the place,” Fournier said.

Local agencies check some levies; others aren’t monitored at all.

Although the Corps provided The Des Moines Register with a list of 236 levees, it would not identify exact levee locations or detail which levees have problems because of security concerns, Fournier said.

“Some have problems, and some don’t,” he said. “Their owners know if they are damaged, and that’s enough.”

Fournier said federal officials fear an incident similar to 1993, when levee protection was compromised by James Scott, an Illinois man sentenced to life in prison for removing sandbags from a levee. He is blamed for the flooding of 14,000 acres and the closing of a Mississippi River bridge.

Poor levees can be difficult to identify

But the floods of 2008 showed that the public isn’t always aware of which levees need improvement.

At least 19 levees in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri have failed this year.

Kevin Bauer, owner of Glass Professionals Inc. in Des Moines, fought back the Birdland Park area flood with two pumps June 14 before police told him to leave. Frustrated that the levee broke and that police were harassing him, he refused to leave and ended up in a squad car for a while.

“We could have stayed on top of it,” Bauer said at the time.

Bill Cappuccio, a veteran flood plain worker at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said no one knows exactly how many smaller levees dot Iowa. Many were installed by local drainage districts that aren’t actively managed anymore, he said.

The integrity of those levees is questionable, Cappuccio said: “Does anyone inspect them? I don’t know. I’ve seen farmers who monitor levees perfectly, and some who don’t.”

Fournier said a large study of the Upper Mississippi River flood-control system, still under way, left the Corps with this initial view: In many cases, it isn’t worth the money to raise Mississippi River levees. In other locations, particularly in heavily developed areas, it may be worth the spending.

The widespread floods this year may mean another full-fledged analysis of flood protection across the Upper Midwest, he said.

Fournier said most of the federally certified levees are in good enough condition to hold back water, or they wouldn’t have been accepted into the Corps program and made eligible for federal improvements. However, some need trees removed, or relatively minor repairs, to ensure they are strong in the long term.

Fournier said the Corps will check any levee that protects a public area if a public official or agency requests the inspection. It does not check levees that protect only private property, such as a manufacturing plant.

If an improvement is proposed, the Corps requires the public will get at least $1 of protection benefit for every $1 the federal government spends on flood controls. Many projects don’t clear that bar. The Corps will consider improvements even if only cornfields are protected.

Jack Riessen, a longtime DNR flood plain and water-quality worker, said state law gives the DNR the authority to approve levee projects and implies that the department should be checking the structures. The agency doesn’t, and apparently never has, he said.

“There should be an active levee protection program,” Riessen said. “It’s something that doesn’t get done. We don’t have an active levee inspection program.”

Scientist, Claiming Bias, Sues U.S. Over Revoked Clearance

Source: SEAN D. HAMILL, New York Times.

PITTSBURGH — An Egyptian-born nuclear physicist who worked in a government-financed laboratory here for 18 years filed a lawsuit on Thursday saying the Energy Department had revoked his security clearance because of his ethnicity, his Muslim faith and comments he made criticizing the war in Iraq.

The physicist, Abdel Moniem Ali el-Ganayni, 57, lost his job shortly after his clearance was revoked in May by Jeffrey F. Kupfer, the Department of Energy’s acting deputy secretary, who cited “national security” in refusing to reveal what led to the revocation.

“Our contention is that the reason the D.O.E. invoked national security here was to relieve themselves of the responsibility of having to tell us what’s going on,” said Witold Walczak, one of Dr. Ganayni’s lawyers and legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Ganayni became a naturalized citizen in 1988, eight years after coming to Pittsburgh to get a master’s degree and a doctorate. His former employer, the Bettis Laboratory, has said it would rehire him if his clearance was restored.

In the lawsuit, Dr. Ganayni, who has been married to an American woman for 26 years, claims violation of his rights to free speech and religion and to equal protection and due process. He asks that he have a chance to contest the revocation of his security clearance before an impartial hearing officer.

In a statement on Thursday, the Energy Department said, “This is a personal security matter as to which the department has no public comment.”

Dr. Ganayni’s clearance was first suspended, and he was assigned to a lower-paying job, in October 2007, after an interview with an Energy Department agent and a security officer at the laboratory, which works on nuclear propulsion projects for the Navy.

He said that during that three-hour interview and a four-hour interview with the F.B.I. two weeks later, he was asked about his religious beliefs, money he has sent overseas and comments he made in 2006 at a local mosque criticizing the Iraq war. But he said he was never asked about any security breaches at his job as a senior scientist at Bettis.

“What I said about the Iraq war, many Americans have said, and many senators,” he said, “But when I said this, I became like a traitor. That’s not right.”

What the Second Amendment Really Means – And What the Supreme Court Really Means

Source: Gary Rea, Proud Political Junkie’s Gazette.

Today’s Supreme Court ruling on the Second Amendment – the first of its kind in our history – has been hailed in the corporate media as a “victory” for the Second Amendment and its defenders. It is anything but. In fact, it is a resounding defeat of our constitutionally gauranteed right to defend our lives and liberty from an increasingly despotic government.

When the founders wrote the Second Amendment, their intent was clear: in order that we, the people, may be able to ensure the future of our liberty, we must have the means to defend our most basic and fundamental of all rights: the right to life.

Much obfuscatory ado has been made about the language of the amendment being “confusing,” and to the majority of today’s dumbed down public, it probably is. However, for anyone with the ability to think critically, the language is clear enough. The main point of the amendment is stated quite clearly in its second clause, “…the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The preceding verbiage is really irrelevant to an understanding of what the amendment says.

One has only to consider that the Constitution was written, not to grant rights to the people and the states, nor to enumerate all of those rights, but to spell out the limitations of the government’s powers. It does so by clearly listing several existing rights that were recognized by the founders as necessary conditions of human life and that, among these is the right to keep and bear arms. Once one understands the purpose of the document, its “interpretation” is no mystery at all: the government cannot, under any circumstances, infringe upon the rights outlined and those left open to us by the Tenth Amendment.

By merely “considering” the Second Amendment and ruling on it, the Supreme Court has violated the very spirit, if not the exact letter of the Constitution, itself. The Constitution is the founding document of our nation, the only written guarantee we have of our freedom in the face of a corrupt and tyrannical government. For the Supreme Court to even assume that it has the power to revise, alter, or even reconsider what the Constitution says is, on its face, an act of high treason. By doing so, they have said, in effect, that the Constitution is null and void and that they will tell us what the law is.

The Supreme Court is not the law of the land – the Constitution is. It was intended to be followed to the letter, used as a guide by the court to determine whether any law or action is allowed or disallowed by the Constitution. That is the sole duty and responsibility of the Supreme Court and its own powers are also limited by the Constitution.

Having said all that, there is no way this “decision” – made in smoke filled corporate boardrooms, the White House and Congress and then handed down to the court as its instructions – is in any way a “victory” for the people. The actual language used by the court in rendering its opinion says that, while it acknowledges the people do have an individual right to own firearms, the court has added the terms, “within reasonable limitations.”

Let that sink in for a moment. What this really means is that, yes, you do have the right to own a gun, but the government will tell you under what conditions you can own and use it. It does nothing to strike down the existing plethora of gun control laws that have been accumulating on the books since 1933, and because it doesn’t, it also doesn’t really strike down the so-called D.C. handgun ban, as the media would have us believe. Think about it. If they have left the door open for further regulation, then the ban – being regulation, itself – does not “infringe” on your Second Amendment right, according to the Supreme Court’s twisted logic.

In other words, now that they have told us that further regulation of gun ownership is part of what the Second Amendment really means, then, by their interpretation, further regulation of any kind and to any extent or degree they choose to force upon us will be perfectly “constitutional.” After all, the Supreme Court has said so and who are we to question its infinite wisdom?

So, the end result of this devastating ruling is that, not only will our fundamental right to defend ourselves continue to be whittled away until it no longer is recognized at all, but so will all the other rights our constitution protects, now that the legal precedent has been set to allow the Supreme Court to dictate to us what the Constitution really means.

Five Stealth Pentagon Contractors Reaping Billions of Tax Dollars

Source: Nick Turse, TomDispatch.

At $34 billion, you’re already counting pretty high. After all, that’s Harvard’s endowment; it’s the amount of damage the triple hurricanes — Charley, Ivan, and Jeanne — inflicted in 2004; it’s what car crashes involving 15-to-17-year-old teenage drivers mean yearly in “medical expenses, lost work, property damage, quality of life loss and other related costs”; it’s the loans the nation’s largest, crippled, home lender, Countrywide Financial, holds for home-equity lines of credit and second liens; it’s Citigroup’s recent write-off, mainly for subprime exposure; it’s what New Jersey’s tourism industry is worth — and, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, it’s the minimal figure for the Pentagon’s “black budget” for fiscal year 2009 — money for, among other things, “classified weapons purchases and development,” money for which the Pentagon will remain unaccountable because almost no Americans will have any way of knowing what it’s being spent for.

Now, imagine that, due to a little more Pentagon/Bush administration wizardry, even this black budget estimate is undoubtedly a low-ball figure. One reason is simple enough: The proposed $541 billion Pentagon 2009 budget doesn’t even include money for actual wars. George W. Bush’s wars are all paid for by “supplemental” bills like the $162 billion one Congress will soon pass — so the Department of Defense’s $34 billion black budget skips “war-related funding.” This means that even the overall figure for that budget remains darker than we might imagine (as in “black hole”). The Pentagon not only produces stealth planes, it is, in budgetary terms, a stealth operation. If honestly accounted, the actual Pentagon yearly budget, including all the “military-related” funds salted away elsewhere, is probably now more than $1 trillion a year.

There is, however, another stealth side to the Pentagon — the corporate side where a range of giant companies you’ve never heard of are gobbling up our tax dollars at phenomenal rates. Nick Turse, author of the single best account of how our lives are being militarized, our civilian economy Pentagonized, and the Pentagon privatized — I’m talking about The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives — now turns to the stealth corporate side of the Pentagon to give us a glimpse into the larger black hole into which our dollars pour. — Introduction by Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch editor.

******

The top Pentagon contractors, like death and taxes, almost never change. In 2002, the massive arms dealers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman ranked one, two, and three among Department of Defense contractors, taking in $17 billion, $16.6 billion, and $8.7 billion. Lockheed, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman did it again in 2003 ($21.9, $17.3, and $11.1 billion); 2004 ($20.7, $17.1, and $11.9 billion); 2005 ($19.4, $18.3, and $13.5 billion); 2006 ($26.6, $20.3, and $16.6 billion); and, not surprisingly, 2007 as well ($27.8, $22.5, and $14.6 billion). Other regulars receiving mega-tax-funded payouts in a similarly clockwork-like manner include defense giants General Dynamics, Raytheon, the British weapons maker BAE Systems, and former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, as well as BP, Shell, and other power players from the military-petroleum complex.

With the basic Pentagon budget now clocking in at roughly $541 billion per year — before “supplemental” war funding for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the President’s Global War on Terror, as well as national security spending by other agencies, are factored in — even Lockheed’s hefty $28 billion take is a small percentage of the massive total. Obviously, significant sums of money are headed to other companies. However, most of them, including some of the largest, are all but unknown even to Pentagon-watchers and antiwar critics with a good grasp of the military industrial complex.

Last year, in a piece headlined “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow,” Vanity Fair published an exposé of one of the better known large stealth contractors, SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation). SAIC, however, is just one of tens of thousands of Pentagon contractors. Many of these firms receive only tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Pentagon every year. Some take home millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

Then there’s a select group that are masters of the universe in the ever-expanding military-corporate complex, regularly scoring more than a billion tax dollars a year from the Department of Defense. Unlike Lockheed, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, however, most of these billion-dollar babies manage to fly beneath the radar of media (not to mention public) attention. If appearing at all, they generally do so innocuously in the business pages of newspapers. When it comes to their support for the Pentagon’s wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are, in media terms, missing in action.

So, who are some of these mystery defense contractors you’ve probably never heard of? Here are snapshot portraits, culled largely from their own corporate documents, of five of the Pentagon’s secret billion-dollar babies:

1. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings Inc.

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $3,360,739,032

This is billionaire investor Ronald Perelman’s massive holding company. It has “interests in a diversified portfolio of public and private companies” that includes the cosmetics maker Revlon and Panavision (the folks who make the cameras that bring you TV shows like 24 and CSI). MacAndrews & Forbes might, at first blush, seem an unlikely defense contractor, but one of those privately owned companies it holds is AM General — the folks who make the military Humvee. Today, says the company, nearly 200,000 Humvees have been “built and delivered to the U.S. Armed Forces and more than 50 friendly overseas nations.” Humvees, however, are only part of the story.

AM General has also assisted Carnegie Mellon University researchers in developing robots for the Pentagon blue-skies outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s “Grand Challenge,” an autonomous robot-vehicle competition. Last year, AM General and General Dynamics Land Systems, a subsidiary of mega-weapons maker General Dynamics, formed a joint venture “to compete for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program.” AM General has even gone to war — dispatching its “field service representatives” and “maintenance technical representatives” to Iraq where they were embedded with U.S. troops.

As such, it’s hardly surprising that, earlier this year, the company received one of the Defense Logistics Agency’s Outstanding Readiness Support Awards. Nor should anyone be surprised to discover that a top MacAndrews & Forbes corporate honcho, Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Administrative Officer Barry F. Schwartz, contributed a total of at least $10,000 to Straight Talk America, the political action committee of presidential candidate John McCain, who famously said it would be “fine” with him if U.S. troops occupied Iraq for “maybe a hundred years” (if not “a thousand” or “a million”).

Perhaps hedging their bets just a bit, MacAndrews & Forbes is diversifying into an emerging complex-within-the-Complex: homeland security. Recently, AM General sold the Department of Homeland Security’s Border Patrol “more than 100 Hummer K-series trucks for use in border security operations.”

2. DRS Technologies, Inc.

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,791,321,140

Incorporated during the Vietnam War, DRS Technologies has long been “a leading supplier of integrated products, services and support to military forces, intelligence agencies and prime contractors worldwide”; that is, they have been in the business of fielding products that enhance some of the DoD’s deadliest weaponry, including “DDG-51 Aegis destroyers, M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, M2A3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters, AH-64 Apache helicopters, F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and F-16 Fighting Falcon jet fighters, F-15 Eagle tactical fighters… [and] Ohio, Los Angeles and Virginia class submarines.” They even have “contracts that support future military platforms, such as the DDG-1000 destroyer, CVN-78 next-generation aircraft carrier, Littoral Combat Ship and Future Combat System.”

In addition to 2007’s haul of Pentagon dollars, DRS Technologies has continued to clean up in 2008 for a range of projects, including: a $16.2 million Army contract for refrigeration units; $51 million in new orders from the Army for thermal weapon sights (part of a five-year, $2.3-billion deal inked in 2007); a $10.1 million contract to build more than 140 M989A1 Heavy Expanded Mobility Ammunition Trailers (to transport “numerous and extremely heavy Multiple Launch Rocket System pods, palletized or non-palletized conventional ammunition and fuel bladders”); and a $23 million deal “to provide engineering support, field service support and general depot repairs for the Mast Mounted Sights (MMS) on OH-58 Kiowa Warrior attack helicopters,” among many other contracts.

Fitch Ratings, an international credit rating agency, recently made a smart, if perhaps understated, point — one that actually fits all of these billion-dollar babies. DRS, it wrote, “has benefited from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan…”

3. Harris Corporation

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,501,163,834

Harris is “an international communications and information technology company serving government, defense and commercial markets in more than 150 countries.” It has an annual revenue of more than $4 billion and an impressive roster of former military personnel and other military-corporate complex insiders on its payroll. Not only does Harris assist and do business with a number of the Pentagon’s largest contractors (like Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems), it is also an active participant in occupations abroad. On its website, the company boasts that “Harris technology has been used for a variety of commercial and defense applications, including the War in Iraq where the [Harris software] system provided detailed, 3-D representations of Baghdad and other key Iraqi cities.”

Last year, Harris signed multiple deals with the military, including contracts to create a high-speed digital data link that transmits tactical video, radar, acoustic, and other sensor data from Navy MH-60R helicopters to their host ships. It also supplies the Navy with advanced computers that provide the “highly sophisticated moving maps and critical mission information via cockpit displays” used by flight crews.

In the first six months of this year, Harris has continued its hard work for the Complex. In January, the company was “selected by the U.S. Air Force for the Network and Space Operations and Maintenance (NSOM) program” for “a base contract and six options that bring the potential overall value to $410 million over six-and-a-half-years” to provide “operations and maintenance support to the 50th Space Wing’s Air Force Satellite Control Network at locations around the world.”

In May, the company was “awarded a three-year, $20 million contract by [top 10 Pentagon contractor] L3 Communications to provide products and services for a next-generation Tactical Video Capture System (TVCS)” — a system that integrates real time video streams to enhance tactical training exercises — “that will support training at various U.S. Marine Corps locations across the U.S. and abroad.” That same month, Harris was also “awarded a potential five-year, $85 million Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract from the U.S. Navy for multiband satellite communications terminals that will provide advanced communications for aircraft carriers and other large deck ships.”

In addition, Harris is now hard at work in the Homeland. Not only did the company pick up more than $3 million from the Department of Homeland Security last year, but national security expert Tim Shorrock, in a 2007 CorpWatch article, “Domestic Spying, Inc.,” specifically noted that Harris and fellow intelligence industry contractors “stand to profit from th[e] unprecedented expansion of America’s domestic intelligence system.”

4. Navistar Defense

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,166,805,361

Still listed in Pentagon documents under its old name, International Military and Government, LLC, Navistar is the military subsidiary of Navistar International Corporation — “a holding company whose individual units provide integrated and best-in-class transportation solutions.” While the company has served the U.S. military since World War I, it’s known, if at all, by the public for making some of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles designed to thwart Iraqi roadside bombs. As of April 2008, the U.S. military had “ordered 5,214 total production MaxxPro MRAP vehicles” from Navistar and, that same month, the company was awarded “a contract valued at more than $261 million… for engineering upgrades to the armor used on International MaxxPro MRAP vehicles.”

But Navistar makes more than MRAPs. Just last month, the company signed a “multi-year contract valued at nearly $1.3 billion” with the U.S. Army “to provide Medium Tactical Vehicles and spare parts to the Afghanistan National Police, Afghan National Army, and the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.” This followed a 2005 multi-year Army contract, worth $430 million, “for more than 2,900 vehicles and spare parts.”

Quite obviously, the company is significantly, profitably, and proudly involved in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Tom Feifar, the Global Defense and Export general manager for Navistar Parts, put it late last year, “It’s an honor to be a part of the effort to support our troops.”

5. Evergreen International Airlines

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,105,610,723

A privately held global aviation services company, it has subsidiaries in related industries such as helicopter aviation (Evergreen Helicopters, Inc.), as well as a few unrelated efforts like producing “agricultural, nursery and wine products” (Evergreen Agricultural Enterprises, Inc.). Evergreen has been on the Pentagon’s payroll for a long time. Back in 2004, Ed Connolly, the executive vice president of Evergreen International Airlines, stated, “Evergreen has flown continuously for the [U.S. Air Force] Air Mobility Command since 1975 and is proud to continue its long standing history of supporting the U.S. Armed Forces global missions with quality and reliable services.”

Not surprisingly, Evergreen has been intimately involved in the occupation of Iraq. In fact, in 2004, the company received “approximately 200 awards for its support of international airlift services during the Iraq war” from the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command. An Air Force general even handed out these medals and certificates of achievement to Evergreen’s employees.

In Amnesty International’s 2006 report, “Below the Radar: Secret Flights to Torture and ‘Disappearance,’” the human rights organization noted that Evergreen was one of only a handful of private companies with current permits to land at U.S. military bases worldwide. That same year, the company even airlifted FOX News personality Bill O’Reilly and his TV show crew to Kuwait and Iraq to meet and greet troops, sign books and pictures, and hand out trinkets. And just last year the company was part of a consortium, including such high profile commercial carriers as American, Delta, and United Airlines that the Pentagon awarded a “$1,031,154,403 firm fixed-price contract for international airlift services… [that] is expected to be completed September 2008.”

Under the Radar

All told, these five stealth corporations from the military-corporate complex received more than $8.9 billion in taxpayer dollars in 2007. To put this into perspective, that sum is almost $2 billion more than the Bush administration’s proposed 2009 budget for the Environmental Protection Agency. Put another way, it’s about nine times what one-sixth of the world’s population spent on food last year.

Tens of thousands of defense contractors — from well-known “civilian” corporations (like Coca-Cola, Kraft, and Dell) to tiny companies — have fattened up on the Pentagon and its wars. Most of the time, large or small, they fly under the radar and are seldom identified as defense contractors at all. So it’s hardly surprising that firms like Harris and Evergreen, without name recognition outside their own worlds, can take in billions in taxpayer dollars without notice or comment in our increasingly militarized civilian economy.

When the history of the Iraq War is finally written, chances are that these five billion-dollar babies, and most of the other defense contractors involved in making the U.S. occupation possible, will be left out. Until we begin coming to grips with the role of such corporations in creating the material basis for an imperial foreign policy, we’ll never be able to grasp fully how the Pentagon works and why we so regularly make war in, and carry out occupations of, distant lands.