Just How Swampy Are US-Saudi Arms Deals?

Let’s just say that Americans representing the kingdom are making a killing while pushing U.S. jobs overseas.

Andrew COCKBURN

The old maxim that “the U.S. government exists to buy arms at home and sell arms abroad” was never truer than today. Our defense budget is soaring to previously undreamed-of heights and overseas weapons deals are setting new records.

Indeed, the arms sales industry has become so multi-faceted that while some American corporations push weapons, other U.S. firms are making money by acting on behalf of the buyers. Thus a Lockheed Martin-Raytheon team recently dispatched to Riyadh to negotiate the finer points of the ongoing $15 billion deal for seven Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries jointly manufactured by the two companies, found themselves facing not Saudis across the table, but a team of executives from the Boston Consulting Group. This behemoth, which has $7.5 billion in global revenues, is just one of the firms servicing Mohammed “Bone Saw” Bin Salman’s vicious and spendthrift consolidation of power in the kingdom.

Among other lucrative revenue streams, BCG enjoys a contract to overhaul the defense ministry’s arms buying practices, a challenging task given the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons MBS has on order.

For arms dealers doing business in the kingdom, the most visible overhaul to date has been the consolidation of control over Saudi weapons purchases, and all branches of the armed forces, in the hands of MBS himself.

Previously, control in this area had been distributed among different factions of the ruling family, thus enabling each to enjoy the financial rewards (read: kickbacks) traditionally attendant to such deals. But MBS has made it his business, in every sense of the word, to cut out potentially rival middlemen by centralizing all Saudi defense business under the umbrella of the General Authority of Military Industries, with management in the trustworthy (he hopes) hands of close relatives and henchmen such as Mutlaq bin Hamad Al Murashid, the Princeton-trained nuclear engineer charged with developing the Saudi nuclear program.

The Boston Group has cultivated a market in advising foreign governments on arms buying, promoting the fostering of their own military-industrial complexes, or, as BCG executives demurely expressed the strategy in a 2018 paper: “Unlike the way business was done in the past, today’s buyers want the defense contractor to invest in their country’s infrastructure, help develop their local defense capabilities, and diversify their economies.”

So-called “offset” agreements have long been a feature of major weapons export deals in which the exporter undertakes to award sub-contracts for the weapon system in the purchasing country, or else offer some other quid quo pro in the form of business or technology transfer. Their massive expansion in recent times, as highlighted in the BCG paper, brings an additional benefit for all parties involved. But it comes at a risk of sending U.S. defense jobs overseas, and opens up security vulnerabilities, since sensitive technology is now being shared with foreign arms manufacturers abroad.

But the promise of a lucrative offset contract to a company in which an influential figure on the buy side has an interest could be a powerful inducement to swing the decision in a favorable direction, an elegant solution to pesky prohibitions against bribery, including the hated 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that was inspired in part by revelations of arms-deals bribes by Lockheed and others. 

As the well-informed Paris-based security news service Intelligence Online delicately puts it: “One of the reasons for [the success of such arrangements] is that they are not totally covered by the transparency criteria governing commission payments [AKA bribes]which were brought into force by OECD convention in 1997.” (Not, of course, to suggest that BCG itself has base motivations in facilitating offset deals today.) 

Of course, if the Riyadh based BCG office (“always buzzing with a motivating and inspiring vibe,” according to the corporate website) had the true interests of Saudi Arabia at heart, they would have thrown the THAAD sales force out on their ears. THAAD is a system distinguished not only by its enormous cost ($1 billion plus per six-launcher battery),  but also by its total uselessness for the Saudis.  Presumably, the Saudis have been sold on the THAAD as a defense against Iranian ballistic missiles like the old Soviet Scud and its various Iranian upgrades.

As its name suggests, the THAAD aims to intercept  incoming short range or medium range ballistic missiles arcing down into the top of the atmosphere 25 to 90 miles up and no further away than 125 miles. The THAAD’s radar must therefore “acquire”–spot– the actual missile warhead, distinguishing it from nearby broken up pieces of its spent booster rocket or from  decoys deliberately launched with it. The radar must then track and predict the future trajectory of the warhead itself, not confusing it with any of the accompanying bits and pieces. Relying on the radar’s predictions, the THAAD missile interceptor,  once launched, must quickly accelerate to MACH 8 speed and guide with absolute precision to hit the target warhead  directly, like a bullet. Near misses won’t do.

After a series of early, disastrous failures, the Pentagon is now touting a fifteen out of fifteen string of successful THAAD launchings. Needless to say, not one of these tests has been against a ballistic missile target accompanied by booster debris or decoys, much less against half a dozen of such missiles fired at once.

This alone should be reason enough for the Saudis to toss the deal, but even if the system could perform as advertised, it would have been entirely irrelevant as a defense against the September 14 Houthi attacks on Abqaiq and Kurais.  The drones and cruise missiles employed clearly came in at low altitude, while THAAD is designed to operate against high altitude targets. The Patriot and Hawk batteries already in place are of course no better suited to confront low altitude threats, which are inevitably masked by ground clutter.

Even if the attackers had been obliging enough to send in ballistic missiles with a high-altitude trajectory, the THAAD would have offered little succor, since its infra-red seeker, as noted, cannot distinguish between actual warheads and decoys. Nor would the Russian S-400 system cheekily offered by Putin in the aftermath of the attack have fared better, and for many of the same reasons.

Such realities have found little place in the outpouring of commentary on the attacks, with little or no attention paid to easily available evidence. For example, published pictures of the damage at Abqaiq clearly show a number of liquified natural gas storage tanks pierced in the same place on their western sides.  As former Pentagon analyst Pierre Sprey pointed out to me, this clearly shows that the attacks came from the west, not the north, as claimed in numerous media reports.

The consistent accuracy demonstrated by these impact holes indicates that the terminal guidance was not GPS, but rather human drone controllers, manually steering the slow flying drones, via the drones’ video cameras, into the target.  For control purposes they would have to have been in line of sight to the drones (the only alternative would be an easily detectable satellite link) so they could have been no further than 36 miles away at most, assuming the drones were flying at a likely 300 feet altitude.

Instead of such cogent analysis, we have been presented with unquestioning reports of Saudi “evidence” that the attacks came directly from Iran in the form of pictures of an alleged wrecked Iranian drone discovered somewhere close to the targeted area.

Motivated and inspired, presumably, by the enormous sums of money to be made, the Boston Consultants and others advising the Saudi regime must have little interest in drawing attention to such tiresome details. There are arms to be bought and sold, and that is the whole point, bringing that old maxim, “the U.S. government exists to buy arms at home and sell arms abroad,” into a sharper, and yet more twisted, focus.

theamericanconservative.com

The Drone Strikes on the Saudi Oil Facilities Have Changed Global Warfare

by PATRICK COCKBURN

Email

Photograph Source: VOA – Public Domain

The devastating attack on Saudi oil facilities by drones and missiles not only transforms the balance of military power in the Middle East, but marks a change in the nature of warfare globally.

On the morning of 14 September, 18 drones and seven cruise missiles – all cheap and unsophisticated compared to modern military aircraft – disabled half of Saudi Arabia’s crude oil production and raised the world price of oil by 20 per cent.

This happened despite the Saudis spending $67.6bn (£54bn) on their defence budget last year, much of it on vastly expensive aircraft and air defence systems, which notably failed to stop the attack. The US defence budget stands at $750bn (£600.2bn), and its intelligence budget at $85bn (£68bn), but the US forces in the Gulf did not know what was happening until it was all over.

Excuses advanced for this failure include the drones flying too low to be detected and unfairly coming from a direction different from the one that might have been expected. Such explanations sound pathetic when set against the proud boasts of the arms manufacturers and military commanders about the effectiveness of their weapons systems.

Debate is ongoing about whether it was the Iranians or the Houthis who carried out the attack, the likely answer being a combination of the two, but perhaps with Iran orchestrating the operation and supplying the equipment. But over-focus on responsibility diverts attention from a much more important development: a middle ranking power like Iran, under sanctions and with limited resources and expertise, acting alone or through allies, has inflicted crippling damage on theoretically much better-armed Saudi Arabia which is supposedly defended by the US, the world’s greatest military super-power.

If the US and Saudi Arabia are particularly hesitant to retaliate against Iran it is because they know now, contrary to what they might have believed a year ago, that a counter-attack will not be a cost-free exercise. What happened before can happen again: not for nothing has Iran been called a “drone superpower”. Oil production facilities and the desalination plants providing much of the fresh water in Saudi Arabia are conveniently concentrated targets for drones and small missiles.

In other words, the military playing field will be a lot more level in future in a conflict between a country with a sophisticated air force and air defence system and one without. The trump card for the US, Nato powers and Israel has long been their overwhelming superiority in airpower over any likely enemy. Suddenly this calculus has been undermined because almost anybody can be a player on the cheap when it comes to airpower.

Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, succinctly sums up the importance of this change, writing that “the strikes on Saudi Arabia provide a clear strategic warning that the US era of air supremacy in the Gulf, and the near US monopoly on precision strike capability, is rapidly fading.” He explains that a new generation of drones, cruise missiles, and precision strike ballistic missiles are entering the Iranian inventories and have begun to spread to the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Similar turning points in military history have occurred when the deployment of an easily produced weapon suddenly checkmates the use of a more complicated one.

A good example of this was the attack on 11 November 1940, on five Italian battleships, moored at their base at Taranto by 20 slow moving but sturdy British Swordfish biplanes, armed with torpedoes and launched from an aircraft carrier. At the end of the day, three of the battleships had been sunk or badly damaged while only two of the British planes were missing. The enormity of the victory achieved at such minimal cost ended the era when battleships ruled the sea and replaced them with one in which aircraft carriers with torpedo/bomber were supreme. It was a lesson noted by the Japanese navy which attacked Pearl Harbor in similar fashion a year after Taranto.

The Saudis showed off the wreckage of the drones and missiles to assembled diplomats and journalists this week in a bid to convince them that the Iranians were behind the air raid. But the most significant feature of the broken drone and missile parts was that, in full working order, the weapons that had just rocked the world economy would not have cost a lot. By way of contrast, the US-made Patriot anti-aircraft missiles, the main air defence of Saudi Arabia that were so useless last Saturday, cost $3m apiece.

Cost and simplicity are important because they mean that Iran, the Houthis, Hezbollah and almost any country can produce drones and missiles in numbers large enough to overwhelm any defences they are likely to meet.

Compare the cost of the drone which would be in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to the $122m (£97.6m) price of a single F-35 fighter, so expensive that it can only be purchased in limited numbers. As they take on board the meaning of what happened at Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities, governments around the world will be demanding that their air force chiefs explain why they need to spend so much money when cheap but effective alternatives are available. Going by past precedent, the air chiefs and arms manufacturers will fight to their last breath for grossly inflated budgets to purchase weapons of dubious utility in a real war.

The attack on Saudi Arabia reinforces a trend in warfare in which inexpensive easily acquired weapons come out on top. Consider the track record of the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), usually made out of easily available fertiliser, detonated by a command wire, and planted in or beside a road. These were used with devastating effect by the IRA in South Armagh, forcing the British Army off the roads and into helicopters.

IEDs were used in great numbers and with great effect against US-led coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Immense resources were deployed by the US military into finding a counter to this deadly device, which included spending no less than $40bn (£32bn) on 27,000 heavily armoured vehicles called MRAPs. A subsequent army study revealed that that the number of US servicemen killed and wounded in an attack on an MRAP was exactly the same as in the vehicles which they had replaced.

It is unthinkable that American, British and Saudi military chiefs will accept that they command expensive, technically advanced forces that are obsolete in practice. This means they are stuck with arms that suck up resources but are, in practical terms, out of date. The Japanese, soon after they had demonstrated at Pearl Harbour the vulnerability of battleships, commissioned the world’s largest battleship, the Yamato, which fired its guns only once and was sunk in 1945 by US torpedo aircraft and bombers operating from aircraft carriers.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of  The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.

We are all hostages of 9/11

After years of reporting on the Global War on Terror, many questions behind the US attacks remain unresolved

ByPEPE ESCOBAR

A week back as the U.S. marked the 18th anniversary of the highly suspicious incident of the collapse of New York’s landmark 110-storey high twin-tower World Trade Center, it was once again the repetition of preposterous lies by American politicians and the mainstream western media, which think they can fool the world by continuing to hide the truth.

The following is an interesting article in this regard for the ‘Asia Times’ by investigative Brazilian journalist, Pepe Escobar, titled: “We are all hostages of 9/11”.

Afghanistan was bombed and invaded because of 9/11. I was there from the start, even before 9/11. On August 20, 2001, I interviewed commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, the “Lion of the Panjshir,” who told me about an “unholy alliance” of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the ISI (Pakistani intel).

Back in Peshawar, I learned that something really big was coming: my article was published by Asia Times on August 30. Commander Massoud was killed on September 9: I received a terse email from a Panjshir source, only stating, “the commander has been shot.” Two days later, 9/11 happened.

And yet, the day before, none other than Osama bin Laden, in person, was in a Pakistani hospital in Rawalpindi, receiving treatment, as CBS reported. Bin Laden was proclaimed the perpetrator already at 11am on 9/11 – with no investigation whatsoever. It should have been not exactly hard to locate him in Pakistan and “bring him to justice.”

In December 2001 I was in Tora Bora tracking bin Laden – under B-52 bombers and side by side with Pashtun mujahideen. Later, in 2011, I would revisit the day bin Laden vanished forever.

One year after 9/11, I was back in Afghanistan for an in-depth investigation of the killing of Massoud. By then it was possible to establish a Saudi connection: the letter of introduction for Massoud’s killers, who posed as journalists, was facilitated by commander Sayyaf, a Saudi asset.

Saudi-born alleged terror mastermind Osama bin Laden is seen in a video taken at a secret site in Afghanistan. This was aired by Al-Jazeera on Oct. 7, 2001, the day the US launched bombing of terrorist camps, airbases and air defense installations in its campaign against the Taliban for sheltering bin Laden. Photo: AFP

For three years my life revolved around the Global War on Terror; most of the time I lived literally on the road, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, the Persian Gulf and Brussels. At the start of ‘Shock and Awe’ on Iraq, in March 2003, Asia Times published my in-depth investigation of which neo-cons concocted the war on Iraq.

In 2004, roving across the US, I re-traced the Taliban’s trip to Texas, and how a top priority, since the Clinton years all the way to the neo-cons, was about what I had baptized as “Pipelineistan” – in this case how to build the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline, bypassing Iran and Russia, and extending US control of Central and South Asia.

Later on, I delved into the hard questions the 9/11 Commission never asked, and how Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign was totally conditioned by and dependent on 9/11.

Michael Ruppert, a CIA whistleblower, who may – or may not – have committed suicide in 2014, was a top 9/11 analyst. We exchanged a lot of information, and always emphasized the same points: Afghanistan was all about (existent) heroin and (non-existent) pipelines.

In 2011, the late, great Bob Parry would debunk more Afghanistan lies. And in 2017, I would detail a top reason why the US will never leave Afghanistan: the heroin rat line.

Now, President Trump may have identified a possible Afghan deal – which the Taliban, who control two-thirds of the country, are bound to refuse, as it allows withdrawal of only 5,000 out of 13,000 US troops. Moreover, the US ‘Deep State’ is absolutely against any deal, as well as India and the rickety government in Kabul.

But Pakistan and China are in favor, especially because Beijing plans to incorporate Kabul into the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and have Afghanistan admitted as a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, thus attaching the Hindu Kush and the Khyber Pass to the ongoing Eurasia integration process.

Praying for a Pearl

Eighteen years after the game-changing fact, we all remain hostages of 9/11. US neocons, gathered at the Project for the New American Century, had been praying for a “Pearl Harbor” to reorient US foreign policy since 1997. Their prayers were answered beyond their wildest dreams.

Already in The Grand Chessboard, also published in 1997, former National Security Adviser and Trilateral Commission co-founder Zbigniew Brzezinski, nominally not a neocon, had pointed out that the American public “supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”

So, Brzezinski added, America “may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”

As an attack on the homeland, 9/11 generated the Global War on Terror, launched at 11pm on the same day, initially christened “The Long War” by the Pentagon, later sanitized as Overseas Contingency Operations by the Obama administration. This cost trillions of dollars, killed over half a million people and branched out into illegal wars against seven Muslim nations – all justified on “humanitarian grounds” and allegedly supported by the “international community.”

Year after year, 9/11 is essentially a You Have The Right to Accept Only The Official Version ritual ceremony, even as widespread evidence suggests the US government knew 9/11 would happen and did not stop it.

Three days after 9/11, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that in June 2001, German intelligence warned the CIA that Middle East terrorists were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.”

In August 2001, President Putin ordered Russian intel to tell the US government “in the strongest possible terms” of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings, MSNBC revealed in an interview with Putin that was broadcast on September 15 that year.

No US government agency has released any information on who used foreknowledge of 9/11 in the financial markets. The US Congress did not even raise the issue. In Germany, investigative financial journalist Lars Schall has been working for years on a massive study detailing to a great extent insider trading before 9/11.

Mr Mueller, I presume

Robert Mueller was the Director of the FBI from 2001 to 2003. He was appointed by President Bush only one week before 9/11. Three days after 9/11, Mueller said, “there were no warning signs that I’m aware of” pointing to the possibility of airplanes crashing into buildings.

In fact FBI agents repeatedly accused HQ of blocking myriad investigations before 9/11 that could have prevented it.

In a devastating book, The FBI Accomplice of 9/11 (Documents), written in French and recently translated into English, Patrick Pasin painstakingly tracks all warnings on record: not only to the FBI, directly, but also including the by now notorious “August 6 memo,” which referred to planned attacks involving multiple airplane hijackings. Then National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice famously dismissed the memo as “very vague,” “very non-specific” and “nothing really new here.”

Pasin meticulously aims to prove that the FBI knew all there was to know about indications toward the possibility of a 9/11. But then the bureau silenced them; buried them; made them disappear; fell into a prolonged comma; and, in quite serious instances, may have even forged false evidence, as in arguably fabricating a list of Muslim hijackers, complete with the finding of indestructible passports, and forging impossible phone calls placed at 30,000 feet.

Trump knows buildings

Discrediting the official, immutable 9/11 narrative remains the ultimate taboo. Hundreds of architects and engineers engaged in meticulous technical debunking of all aspects of 9/11’s official story are summarily dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”

In the afternoon of 9/11, Donald Trump the real estate developer (not yet President of the United States) was interviewed by phone by Channel 9 in New York.

Fasten your seat belts, because this is incandescent. The serial money quotes start rolling at 5:20:

Channel 9: “There is a great deal of questions about whether or not the damage and the ultimate destruction of the buildings was caused by the airplanes, by architectural defect or possibly by bombs, or after-shocks. Do you have any thoughts on that?”

Donald Trump: “It wasn’t architectural defect. The World Trade Center was always known as a very, very strong building. Don’t forget that it took a big bomb in the basement [in 1993]. Now the basement is the most vulnerable place, because that is your foundation and it withstood that. And I got to see that area about 3 or 4 days after it took place, because one of my structural engineers actually took me for a tour because he did the building. And I said ‘I can’t believe it’. The building was standing solid and half of the columns were blown out. This was an unbelievably powerful building if you know anything about structure. It was one of the first buildings that was built from the outside. The steel, the reason the WTC had such narrow windows is that in between all the windows you had steel on the outside of the building. That’s why when I first looked at it you had big, heavy I-beams. When I first looked at it I couldn’t believe it because there was a hole in the steel. And this was steel that was … you remember the width of the windows of the World Trade Center, folks, I think that you know, if you were ever up there, they were quite narrow and in between was this heavy steel. I said: How could a plane, even a 767 or 747 or whatever it might have been, how could it possibly go through the steel? I happen to think that they had not only a plane, but they had bombs that exploded almost simultaneously. [italics mine]. Because I just can’t imagine anything being able to go through that wall. Most buildings are built with the steel on the inside around the elevator shafts. This one was built from the outside, which is the strongest structure you can have. And it was almost just like a can of soup.”

Channel 9: “You know…we were looking at pictures all morning long of that plane coming into Building #2. And when you see that approach the far side, then all of a sudden within another millisecond the explosion pops out the other side.”

Donald Trump: “Right. I just think that there was a plane with more than jet fuel.” [italics mine]

Donald Trump may be extremely controversial – and all things for all people. But one thing the former real estate developer and current President of the United States does know about is building construction.

Serious questions

In contrast, skepticism rooted in Greek and Latin tradition came up with arguably the best documentary on 9/11: Zero, an Italian production. Just as arguably the most stimulating book on 9/11 is also Italian: The Myth of September 11, by Roberto Quaglia, which offers a delicately nuanced narrative of 9/11 as a myth structured as a movie. The book became a huge hit in Eastern Europe.

Serious questions suggest quite plausible suspects to be investigated regarding 9/11, far more than 19 Arabs with box cutters. Ten years ago, in Asia Times, I asked 50 questions, some of them extremely detailed, about 9/11. After reader demand and suggestions, I added 20 more. None of these questions were convincingly addressed – not to mention answered – by the official narrative.

World public opinion is directed to believe that on the morning of 9/11 four airliners, presumably hijacked by 19 Arabs with box cutters, traveled undisturbed – for two hours – across the most controlled airspace on the planet, which is supervised by the most devastating military apparatus ever.

American Airlines Flight 11 deviated from its path at 8.13am and crashed into the first World Trade Center tower at 8.57am. Only at 8.46am did NORAD – the North American Aerospace Defense Command – order that two intercepting F-15s take off from Otis military base.

By a curious coincidence a Pentagon war game was in effect on the morning of 9/11 – so air-controllers’ radars may have registered only ‘ghost signals’ of nonexistent aircraft simulating an air attack. Well, it was much more complicated than that, as demonstrated by professional pilots.

‘Angel was next’

World public opinion is also directed to believe that a Boeing 757 – with a wingspan of 38 meters – managed to penetrate the Pentagon through a six-meter-wide hole and at the height of the first floor. A Boeing 757 with landing gear is 13 meters high. Airliners electronically refuse to crash – so it’s quite a feat to convince one to fly five to 10 meters above the ground, landing gear on, at a lightning speed of 800 kilometers an hour.

According to the official narrative, the Boeing 757 literally pulverized itself. Yet even after pulverization, it managed to perforate six walls of three rings of the Pentagon, leaving a two-meter wide hole in the last wall but only slightly damaging the second and third rings. The official narrative is that the hole was caused by the plane’s nose – still quite hard even after pulverization. Yet the rest of the plane – a mass of 100 tons traveling at 800 kilometers an hour – miraculously stopped at the first ring.

All that happened under the stewardship of one Hani Hanjour, who three weeks before had been judged by his flight instructors to be incapable of piloting a Cessna. Hanjour, nonetheless, managed to accomplish an ultra-fast spiral descent at 270 degrees, aligning at a maximum 10 meters above ground, minutely calibrating the trajectory, and keeping a cruise speed of roughly 800 kilometers an hour.

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, left, and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brief reporters at the Pentagon on Oct. 8, 2001 following the US bombing raids on Afghanistan in response to 9/11 attacks. Photo: AFP / Luke Frazza

At 9.37am, Hanjour hit precisely the Pentagon’s budget analysts’ office, where everyone was busy working on the mysterious disappearance of no less than $2.3 trillion that Defense Secretary Donald “Known Unknowns” Rumsfeld, in a press conference the day before, said could not be tracked. So, it’s not only Boeings that get pulverized inside the Pentagon.

World public opinion is also directed to believe that Newtonian physics was suspended as a special bonus for WTC 1 and 2 on 9/11 (not to mention WTC 7, which was not even hit by any plane). The slower WTC tower took 10 seconds to fall 411 meters, starting from immobility. So it fell at 148 kilometers an hour. Considering the initial acceleration time, it was a free fall, not the least impeded by 47 massive, vertical steel beams that composed the tower’s structural heart.

World public opinion is also directed to believe that United Airlines Flight 93 – 150 tons of aircraft with 45 people, 200 seats, luggage, a wingspan of 38 meters – crashed in a field in Pennsylvania and also literally pulverized itself, totally disappearing inside a hole six meters by three meters wide and only two meters deep.

Suddenly, Air Force One was “the only plane in the sky.” Colonel Mark Tillman, who was on board, recalled: “We get this report that there’s a call saying ‘Angel’ was next. No one really knows now where the comment came from – it got mistranslated or garbled amid the White House, the Situation Room, the radio operators. ‘Angel’ was our code name. The fact that they knew about ‘Angel,’ well, you had to be in the inner circle.”

This means that 19 Arabs with box cutters, and most of all their handlers, surely must have been “in the inner circle.” Inevitably, this was never fully investigated.

Already in 1997, Brzezinski had warned, “it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.”

In the end, much to the despair of US neocons, all the combined sound and fury of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror/Overseas Contingency Operations, in less than two decades, ended up metastasized into not only a challenger but a Russia-China strategic partnership. This is the real “enemy” – not al-Qaeda, a flimsy figment of the CIA’s imagination, rehabilitated and sanitized as “moderate rebels” in Syria.

Why America’s Military Capabilities Are Failing

Eric ZUESSE

On 17 January 1961, US President Dwight Eisenhower famously introduced the phrase “military-industrial complex”, referring to what he said might become a threat to American democracy — a takeover of the US Government by a “complex,” composed of generals and other national-security brass on the one side, and corporations such as Lockheed and their financiers, on the other. That warning turned out to have been prophetic. The revolving door, between the military top brass and the boardrooms of the arms-contractors and associated corporations and think tanks, spins ever-faster now, and it controls the news-media and the US Government ever-more, so as to produce more and more invasions, of countries that never had invaded, nor even threatened to invade, us. Such “aggressive wars” (unprovoked aggressions) are international war crimes, but are never prosecuted when the US does them. The threat that Eisenhower talked of was real, and it has actually won out against, and defeated, democracy in America, and it has since become a catastrophe, taking up more and more of the US Government’s resources, and delivering — to the people of the United States, and especially to the world-at-large — only more wars, and bloodshed, and poverty, and suffering, and less security, for everyone, but with increasing wealth for the few at America’s top, who have invested in this permanent militarization of the United States.

The chief beneficiaries have been owners of the arms-makers (such as Lockheed Martin) and of the fossil-fuels extraction firms (such as ExxonMobil). Controlling those types of firms is to participate in controlling the US Government, because the US Government serves those firms. Also, high-tech, such as Amazon corporation (whose cloud-computing for the US Government provides almost all of its profits), benefits enormously not only from the wars, but from the extension of the American empire. A threat by the US Government is a threat on behalf of those owners, and yet the owners who control those international corporations get none of the blame for those wars, which always serve their interests, by extending their empire even when the wars are lost.

How did this ongoing decades-long catastrophe happen?

It didn’t even strengthen the US militarily. Look at the record, and consider not only the phenomenon itself, but its actual results — a ceaseless string of military defeats:

Why did the US lose the war in Vietnam?

Why did the US lose the war in Afghanistan?

Why did the US lose the war in Iraq?

Why did the US lose the war in Libya?

Why did the US lose the war in Syria?

What produces this doubly-bad habit — actually badness squared — of the American Government, during the past fifty years: aggressions that fail?

Could it be because the takeover of America’s Government, by its arms-manufacturers and fuel-extraction firms — and their lobbyists and other agents — has been accompanied by soaring corruption? We’ll deal with that question later here. But first, let’s consider the shocking present condition of America’s military:

On 19 August 2019, the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia — a prime US ally in that part of the world — headlined a lengthy study and report: “AVERTING CRISIS: AMERICAN STRATEGY, MILITARY SPENDING AND COLLECTIVE DEFENCE IN THE INDO-PACIFIC”. Its Executive Summary presented the following key points:

America no longer enjoys military primacy in the Indo-Pacific, and its capacity to uphold a favourable balance of power is increasingly uncertain. …

Over the next decade, the US defence budget is unlikely to meet the needs of the National Defense Strategy owing to a combination of political, fiscal and internal pressures. …

America has an atrophying force that is not sufficiently ready, equipped or postured for great power competition in the Indo-Pacific — a challenge it is working hard to address. …

A strategy of collective defence is fast becoming necessary as a way of offsetting shortfalls in America’s regional military power and holding the line against rising Chinese strength.

But did China actually cause this “atrophying”? Clearly not.

The problem is internal to America itself. Casting the blame elsewhere is only for idiots to believe, but foreign ‘enemies’ (such as China) are needed in order for the military-industrial complex to thrive. Can you imagine the military-industrial complex growing and thriving if the public believe that domestic corruption is actually behind this consistent and constant record, of US military failures?

Did China cause America’s defeat in Vietnam, or in Afghanistan, or in Iraq, or in Libya, or in Syria?

Let’s be more general about this: Did North Korea cause it? During the four-day period of 24-27 August 2019, an Economist/YouGov poll of 1,500 adult US citizens asked them “Do you consider the countries listed below to be a friend or an enemy of the United States?” and listed 13 countries. The ones scoring highest for “Enemy” — the most-commonly selected, as being an “Enemy” — were: North Korea 53%, Iran 46%, Russia 35%, and China 21%. Did any of those nations cause this “atrophying”?

Ever since 2001, Gallup has asked, almost annually, and always in February, “What one country anywhere in the world do you consider to be the United States’ greatest enemy today?” No countries were ever listed for that question; the respondent in these polls always just answered it however that person wanted. In February 2001, 2% said “North Korea.” 6% said “Russia.” 8% said “Iran.” 14% said “China.” And a whopping 38% said “Iraq.” 4% said “Saudi Arabia.” Those were the most-frequently mentioned countries, shortly before 9/11 struck. 0% said “Afghanistan.” How accurately informed were Americans, by ‘our’ ‘news’-media, then? In February 2001, the top “enemy,” overwhelmingly (at 38%), was Iraq — which had never posed any threat, at all, to America. It was no enemy, whatsoever, to Americans. But we invaded and destroyed it in 2003 — after having long been strangulating its population, by means of an economic blockade, “sanctions,” following Saddam Hussein’s having invaded Iraq’s neighboring country, Kuwait, in 1990, and trying to take it from its owner, Kuwait’s royal Al-Sabah family. Americans then strangled Iraqis with sanctions for what their ruler Saddam Hussein had done to the Sabah clan, and then we invaded and destroyed Iraq altogether in 2003, for nothing but our Government’s, and its ‘news’-media’s, war-mongering lies — the ‘news’-media serving as mere stenographers for (instead of as investigators of) the Government’s ceaseless lies about ‘Saddam’s WMD’, etc.

Gallup’s next poll on this question was 2005, and the top “Enemy”s at that time were 22% each for “North Korea” and for “Iraq,” 14% for “Iran,” 10% for “China,” 3% for “Afghanistan,” and 2% each for “Saudi Arabia,” “Syria,” and “the United States itself.” How accurately informed were Americans, then? (Well: 2% got the answer right — or, maybe, 4% did, if the correct answer was both “the United States itself” and “Saudi Arabia.” That 2% or 4% was the highest percentage ever who got it right.)

By 2012, 10% said “North Korea.” 2% said “Russia.” 32% said “Iran.” 23% said “China.” 5% said “Iraq.” 7% said “Afghanistan.” How accurately informed were Americans, then?

In 2018 (the latest such poll), 51% said “North Korea.” 19% said “Russia.” 7% said “Iran.” 11% said “China.” 2% said “Iraq.” 0% said “Afghanistan. How accurately informed were Americans, then?

Isn’t it remarkable how malleable — changing over time — Americas’ opinions are, of which nations are ‘enemies’? The designation of which ones are ‘enemies’, at any given time, is controlled by the Government and its stenographic press — the ‘news’-media — and by the billionaires’ think tanks (such as Brookings Institution) that provide many of the ‘experts’, which the ‘news’-media cite and interview in order to validate the lies.

None of those countries had ever attacked America (except America’s own Deep State had, if that’s what was being referred to as “the United States itself”). Nonetheless, the US Government has threatened each one of those other countries many times, and has actually invaded some of them, but did even a single one of those countries ever commit aggression against the United States? Not even Afghanistan did, though the US-and-Saud-created Taliban had protected the Saudi aristocrat Osama bin Laden leading up to the 9/11 attacks. However, the Afghan Government afterward never invaded America. Not only was the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 unprovoked aggression, but (though less clearly) the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan also was. And yet, for some reason, Americans don’t view the US Government as a global criminal outlaw. Instead, Americans view the targeted foreign governments as if they were that. This is the consequence of a ceaselessly propagandistic national press, which protects itself and its masters (never revealing the truth about either itself or its masters — the regime’s propaganda that supplants truth), and fools its public to hate and fear those masters’ targeted ‘enemies’ — instead of to loathe those masters and their press (which have actually engendered such malleable mass-hatreds and the resulting unprovoked invasions by the US).

Is it the case that Americans’ fear and hatred of foreign governments varies according to what the owners of America’s major news-media have had their reporters report during the year before, and that the latter is, in turn, unskeptical stenographic reporting from whatever the US Government had just told them during the year before, and that it’s always full of lies, and none of it should be uncritically believed, and the American public are merely fools who are constantly being manipulated by the owners of the military-industrial complex, which actually controls not only the President, but the Congress, in both Parties, as well as their deceiving media? If that’s the case, then the generals and the armaments and extraction firms could be making lots of money, from manipulating the public, in this carefully coordinated way, by the controlling owners, the big stockholders — America’s 607 billionaires. It’s sometimes called “the Deep State.” But it’s not aiming for any actual victory by a military that actually represents the interests of the American people; it is instead merely aiming to generate sales of weapons and spreading of fear, and a continual succession of wars, so as to feed the controlling owners’ bloody greed to sell more weapons, oil, and gas. It’s safe for them to do, because international laws aren’t ever enforced against them, nor even against their top agents (such as America’s President, members of Congress, the CEOs of Lockheed Martin and of CNN, and all other agents of the billionaires). They’re all immune, no matter how many times they have deceived their public into supporting the perpetration of international war-crimes, on the basis of lies about their ‘humanitarian’ concern to spread ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’.

Is there any alternative explanation for these catastrophic continual results?

The US military is so profoundly corrupt that there are “Trillions of Dollars in US Military Spending Unaccounted For”, and yet the US military remains, by far, the most-trusted and highest-approved, of all institutions in America, respected above the Presidency, above the Congress, above the courts, above the schools, above any, at all, year after year, for decades. And the public accept this even when the US public themselves disapprove of the Government’s wars. So: there is total impunity for the mega-profiteers from all of these international war-crimes that are so routinely perpetrated by the US In fact, there is sound reason to believe that the corruption is so enormous that not only is the military-industrial complex the most corrupt part of the American nation, but this nation itself is actually, according to the most-reliable measures, the world’s most corrupt at its very top, and perhaps even below the very top. Perversely, the military is not only the most respected, but it’s also the most corrupt, of America’s institutions: it is corruption on top of corruption, the peak of corruption. And this is the reason why it’s the only federal department that is — and has always been — unauditable.

This is how the country that actually (though not in the official figures) spends around half of the world’s entire military budget can lose war after war after war and its military still retain the highest respect from its public — the highest of all of the nation’s institutions — regardless of its astounding longstanding record of failure and ongoing global catastrophes, producing benefits virtually only for the nation’s billionaires and their top agents, while mass-murdering millions abroad, for no other real purpose than to keep the profits flowing. Like Barack Obama (the invader of Libya and Syria on the basis of lies) repeatedly bragged, “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation”, meaning that all others are “dispensable.” Those others serve their purpose, as ‘allies’ to buy US-made weapons, or else as ‘enemies’ for those weapons to be used against. Even if the wars are lost, the weapons were sold, and the ‘enemies’ had served as target-practice, to keep the juices flowing, for America’s owners — people like this, and these. Such a nation used to be called an “Empire,” but now it’s called “hegemony”, in the wake of WW II. Perhaps it’s now called “the one indispensable nation,” and “hegemony,” because FDR had been opposed to empires, so they can’t call it an empire. Opposition to empires was FDR’s guiding principle in international relations, and this conviction he held was a major reason behind his plan for the UN to become the basis of an international democracy to emerge — no empires, at all. Today’s America is the reverse of that, more like a posthumous victory of fascism, which is based upon empire: this fascist victory after World War II is the burial of FDR’s plan and dream for the world. His dream has been buried by America’s own fascists.

The German intelligence-analyst who blogs anonymously as “Moon of Alabama,” and whose predictions, which I have closely watched for five years and found to be stunningly accurate, wrote, on September 5th, that, “The US military and its weapons are regularly hyped in ‘western’ media. But it has long been clear to (non-US) experts that US military technology is not superior to that of other countries. In several important fields Russian, Chinese and even Indian build weapons have much better capabilities. The reason is simple. US weapons are not developed or built with a real strategic need in mind. They don’t get developed for achieving the most effect in an existential war against a capable enemy, but to create profit.”

Given that America spends around half of the entire world’s military budget, and yet gets very bad military results, there can be no reasonable doubt that the reason is massive corruption. One prominent example is James Comey, who served President Clinton 1996-2001, President Bush 2002-2005, and President Obama 2013-2017; and he was Lockheed Martin’s second-or third-highest-paid executive, and then the chief lawyer for Lockheed Martin’s second-biggest owner, during the interim period 2005-2013, between Presidents Bush and Obama.

As I wrote in March of this year:

The liberal Republican James Comey became the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Lockheed Martin Corporation during 2005-2010, where his 2009 pay was $6,113,797. During that time, he also was a Director of the US Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center, which works to support business interests in the courts, especially the interests of US-based international corporations, including Lockheed Martin. Furthermore, as of 12 March 2010, Comey also had been granted 162,482 free shares of stock in Lockheed Martin, which number was higher than that of anyone except the Chairman, the CEO President, and an Executive Vice President; so, Comey was among the very top people at Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin’s largest foreign customer was the Saudi Government, which is 100% owned by the Saud family. Today, those Comey shares are worth $47,119,780 — after his five years with the company, plus nearly nine years of growth in that stock, from the war-producing policies that Comey had helped to initiate.

Then, Comey bought a $3M mansion in Connecticut and became the General Counsel and a Member of the Executive Committee at the gigantic hedge Fund, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, in Connecticut, where Comey’s only publicly known pay was $6,632,616 in 2012. Dalio and Comey became very close — Dalio called Comey his “hero.” But Obama then hired the liberal Republican Comey as FBI Director in 2013, replacing the liberal Republican Mueller in that role, from which Obama’s successor President Trump fired Comey, and congressional Democrats then succeeded in getting Mueller assigned to become the Special Counsel who would supposedly investigate the legitimacy of that firing.

On 21 May 2013, Marketwatch bannered “Bridgewater Associates’ trades for Q2” and reported that

“After a number of tech companies — including those we’ve mentioned [Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel] and EMC — the largest single-stock holding in the fund’s portfolio was its roughly 220,000 shares of Lockheed Martin LMT, +1.93%. The company recently reported an increase in earnings compared with the first quarter of 2012, but revenue was down slightly and there is a good deal of speculation that the business will be impacted by cuts in US military spending. … Billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group reported a position of 1.2 million shares at the end of December.”

Lockheed Martin is by far the largest US ‘defense’ contractor, taking 8.3% of all US Government purchases during 2015, as compared to #2 Boeing’s 3.8%, and #3 General Dynamics’s 3.1%.

That’s where the big money is being made: not in Government-service, but in the private-sector side of the revolving door between Government-service and the private sector. Phrased in a different way, and using a different metaphor: Government-service is the career’s entré, but the private sector is its dessert, in America’s corrupt system. Outright bribes aren’t necessary, in this system — the aristocratic system — where what matters is not what you know, but whom you know; not what skills you have, but whom your friends are. It doesn’t produce efficiency, but it does produce supercharged wealth at the very top, amongst the richest and most powerful few.

And it produces gargantuan and longstanding military failure.

On August 29th, the US Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General issued its “Report of Investigation of Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s Disclosure of Sensitive Investigative Information and Handling of Certain Memoranda”, which identified US criminal statutes that Comey had personally violated in order to precipitate the Obama Administration’s Russiagate investigations against then-candidate Donald Trump. It noted that “Comey’s closest advisors used the words ‘surprised,’ ‘stunned,’ ‘shocked,’ and [expressed] ‘disappointment’ to describe their reactions to learning what Comey had done.” And it stated, not just once but a number of times, the terse phrase that “After reviewing the matter, the [Justice] Department [now under Trump] declined prosecution.” Ironically, some of the very same criminal statutes that they said Comey had violated had been the same ones on which Comey had earlier refused to recommend prosecution of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — that the documents were his (her) personal property, and not the property of his (her) employer, the US Government. The I.G.’s report stated unequivocally, in his own case, “We conclude that the Memos were official FBI records, rather than Comey’s personal documents.” Perhaps Comey had felt free to do this because he had earlier refused to recommend prosecution of her for having done it. Perhaps he felt that his actions, as FBI Director, had, in her case, established a legal precedent, which superseded the congressionally passed and Presidentially signed-into-law criminal statutes that he was actually oath-bound to enforce and possessed no legal authority to either override or ignore. Perhaps that’s why he did it — perhaps he had persuaded himself that he wasn’t a criminal who was at the top. Perhaps he had deceived himself about that.

At the top, in the United States, corruption is not only massive; it is entirely bipartisan. There’s no way around it.

On 10 September 2019, the independent investigative journalist Sarah Carter headlined “Flynn Hearing Reveals Existence of Bombshell DOJ Memo Exonerating Michael Flynn”, and revealed evidence that Michael Flynn’s guilty plea in the Russiagate-Trump case had been based on Comey’s having hidden from Flynn exculpatory evidence, and that therefore the plea-agreement might be ruled invalid. Furthermore: “the existence of a Justice Department memo from Jan. 30, 2017 exonerating Flynn of any collusion with Russia,” and the document continues to be hidden from the public, but might soon be released. Yet the resulting war-mongering lies have shaped the public’s attitudes, and those attitudes could last for years and continue to shape American politics even long after the fraud has been exposed.

And that’s just one person’s case, Comey. The entire military-industrial complex operates this way, and long has been doing so, very successfully for America’s billionaires and their foreign allies, such as for the Sauds, and for the billionaires who control Israel. (Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid, and virtually all of that aid from US taxpayers pays for Israel’s purchases of weapons from Lockheed Martin and other US weapons-firms.)

That’s the “swamp,” and Trump is part of it, like all recent US Presidents have been. There is no accountability, at the top. And this is why America’s military capabilities are failing.

Eric ZUESSE

American writer and investigative historian