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Know your BFEE: WikiLeaks Stratfor Dump Exposes Continued Secret Government Warmongering
War is big business. It's an insider's game. It's why we have so much secret government.
The last remaining enormous wads of cash in the Treasury are to be had for purchasing today's modern military industrial intel complex.
There's more than a trillion to be grabbed -- just for the Lockheed-Martin F-35.
Now keeping tabs on us -- people interested in using some of the nation's treasure for more peaceful purposes -- are for-hire spies. How do I know this? Julian Assange and Anonymous:
WikiLeaks' Stratfor Dump Lifts Lid on Intelligence-Industrial Complex
WikiLeaks' latest release, of hacked emails from Stratfor, shines light on the murky world of private intelligence-gathering
by Pratap Chatterjee
Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 by The Guardian/UK
What price bad intelligence? Some 5m internal emails from Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based company that brands itself as a "global intelligence" provider, were recently obtained by Anonymous, the hacker collective, and are being released in batches by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website, starting Monday.
The most striking revelation from the latest disclosure is not simply the military-industrial complex that conspires to spy on citizens, activists and trouble-causers, but the extremely low quality of the information available to the highest bidder. Clients of the company include Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, as well as US government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Marines.
SNIP...
Assange notes that Stratfor is also seeking to profit directly from this information by partnering in an apparent hedge-fund venture with Shea Morenz, a former Goldman Sachs managing director. He points to an August 2011 document, marked "DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS", from Stratfor CEO George Friedman, which says:
"What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor's intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like."
CONTINUED...
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/28-10?print
If it weren't for Anonymous and WikiLeaks, we probably wouldn't know about any of that.
It's no joke. It's no unimportant story. It's no boring history. Run by insiders, the secret government is key to making the system run on behalf of the few -- the 1-percent of 1-percent. Central to that is intelligence -- economically, politically and military useful information.
Which brings up the nation's purported free press, the only business mentioned by name in the entire United States Constitution, and how the organizations therein have miserably failed to feature prominently the sundry and myriad ways the insiders on Wall Street and their toadies in Washington do the work for Them.
The problem is systemic. The corruption is systemic.
Because it involves oversight of secret organizations -- the Pentagon, Homeland Security, CIA, etc -- Congress and the Administration often have no clue, let alone oversight, to what is happening because the corruption is marked "Top Secret."
Secret government also means We the People can't do our job as citizens, which is to hold them accountable and find the ones responsible in order to vote the crooks out and, it is hoped, the honest ones in.
With no citizen oversight, anything goes. And it doesn't stop.
Remember this fine fellow, US Navy fighter ace Randy "Duke" Cunningham?
Later a member of the United States Congress, he used his position to feather his nest, Big Time.
In his political career, Cunningham was a member of the Appropriations and Intelligence committees, and chaired the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Human Intelligence Analysis and Counterintelligence during the 109th Congress. He was considered a leading Republican expert on national security issues.
Currently, he's in USP Tuscon or another fine facility where he gets three squares, medical and dental.
He's due for release in a year or so. He'll be able to pick up his pension.
"The Duke Cunningham Act, also known as the Federal Pension Forfeiture Act, was introduced by U.S. Senator John F. Kerry in 2006. The bill would have denied pension benefits to any members of Congress convicted of bribery, conspiracy or perjury. The bill died in committee. (Source: The Press Enterprise)
Duke wasn't alone. He really was just one snake in a long line of snakes. Remember Dusty Foggo, Number 3 at CIA and close associate of CIA Director and former Congressman Porter Goss? Swells sitting atop the peak of political and military secrecy and power.
Unfortunately, when it comes to modern governance, no oversight means means the insiders are getting away with murder, and warmongering and treason and all the power that they bring. Appointed pretzeldent George W Bush on Valentine's Day 2007 put it in words: "Money trumps peace."
Secret government warmongering and war profiteering are systemic. Secret government is rotten to the core. What's more, in a democracy that once really was land of the free and home of the brave, secret government poses the greatest threat to true national security.
47 replies
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...we really as a government seem to be into the overkilling enemies foreign and domestic thing a lot since November 22, 1963.
How to Make Money Off War (The Short Form)
Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anti-Communism
Author: Stephen G. Rabe
University of North Carolina Press, 1988
The Republicans captured the White House in 1953 after they claimed that the Truman administration had been "soft on Communism" and after stating that they were determined to turn the tide against the "Red menace." Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, had spoken of "twenty years of treason," and Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had pledged that Republicans would "roll back the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe."
Secretary Dulles warned that conditions in Latin America were comparable to "conditions as they were in China in the mid-thirties when the Communist movement was getting started," and that the time to deal with this rising menace was "now." In a telephone conversation with his brother, Allen, head of the CIA, he said that "the Communists trying to extend their form of despotism in this hemisphere." In a cabinet meeting he spoke of the need to convince Latin Americans that Communism was "an international conspiracy, not an indigenous movement."
In 1954, Latin America had 13 dictators among its 20 nations, and the anti-Communist declarations by dictators pleased the Eisenhower administration. According to the author, Stephen Rabe, when people wanted the U.S. State Department to "intercede on behalf of the political prisoners rotting in the dungeons of the dictator Pérez Jiménez," Dulles refused. President Eisenhower awarded a Legion of Merit to Peru's dictator, Manuel Odría. Jiménez received his Legion of Merit from the U.S. ambassador in a grand ceremony in Venezuela, winning congratulations for his "energy and firmness of purpose" in having "greatly increased the capacity of the Armed Forces of Venezuela to participate in the collective defense of the Western Hemisphere" and his "concern toward the problem of Communist infiltration."
In Guatemala in 1954 the regime of President Arbenz was pursuing democracy and reform and worried the Eisenhower administration. Arbenz had become Guatemala's president in 1951, according to Rabe the country's first ever peaceful transition of power. Arbenz pledged to create an economically independent capitalist state and had begun to build ports and highways. He convinced the legislature to enact a modest income tax, the first in Guatemala's history, and launched a program of land redistribution, including a loss of 1,700 fallow acres that had belonged to his family. Rabe estimates that "Guatemala's new social welfare programs were more modest than those advocated by liberal Democrats in the United States and Laborites in Great Britain." In 1953 the Eisenhower administration estimated that Communists in Guatemala numbered around 1,000, and it saw Communist influence in organized labor and in the agrarian reform movement. Arbenz's ruling coalition consisted of 51 congressional deputies, four of whom were Communists. In January, 1954, President Eisenhower told Guatemala's foreign minister that he "couldn't help a government which was openly playing ball with Communists" and that the United States was "determined to block the international Communist conspiracy." The Arbenz regime replied that their land reform would undermine the appeal of Communism. According to Rabe, the Eisenhower administration rejected explanations from the Arbenz administration and concluded that Arbenz was either a "dupe" of the Communists or worse. Secretary Dulles spoke of the impossibility of producing evidence tying the Guatemalan government to Moscow but that he and the administration had a "deep conviction that such a tie must exist."
CONTINUED...
It's the strangest thing. Devilish, really.
http://www.alternet.org/world/89432/
The Five Secret Billion-Dollar Companies Sucking Obscene Amounts of Taxpayer Money
Meet the mystery defense contractors that are raking in billions in taxpayer dollars without notice.
June 26, 2008 | World headlines via email.
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.
The Five Secret Billion-Dollar Companies Sucking Obscene Amounts of Taxpayer Money
Meet the mystery defense contractors that are raking in billions in taxpayer dollars without notice.
June 26, 2008 | World headlines via email.
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.
A slashed budget.
From your outstanding article, lonestarnot:
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.
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:
CONTINUED...
Gee. Companies like:
And a heckuva lot more.
Talk about welfare...
From your outstanding article, lonestarnot:
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.
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:
CONTINUED...
Gee. Companies like:
MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings Inc.
DRS Technologies, Inc.
Harris Corporation
Navistar Defense
Evergreen International Airlines
And a heckuva lot more.
Talk about welfare...
A good chunk of life is visible in this detail from "The Cocktail Party":
Her web site has more outstanding examples.
Things I've learned in looking up other things:
Above is a never-before-published picture of the wine locker at the Capital Grille that defense contractor Brent R. Wilkes shared with Kyle Dusty Foggo when Foggo was the executive director of the CIA and illegally steering contracts to Wilkes. Wilkes paid for many expensive meals for Foggo at the restaurant. (Photo by Jerry Kammer)
No sacrifice is too great when it comes to defending dinner. I mean, democracy.
Corruption Touched CIA’s Covert Operations
by Marcus Stern
ProPublica, Feb. 25, 2009, 12 a.m.
Paramilitary agents for the CIA’s super-secret Special Activities Division, or SAD, perform raids, ambushes, abductions and other difficult chores overseas, including infiltrating countries to “light up” targets from the ground for air-to-ground missile strikes. This week the government acknowledged for the first time that some of SAD’s sensitive air operations were swept up in a fraud conspiracy that reached the highest levels of the CIA and cost the government $40 million.
That information was contained in a series of court filings released in advance of the long-awaited sentencing of Kyle Dustin “Dusty” Foggo, the disgraced former No. 3 official at the CIA.
One remarkable affidavit came from a leader of SAD, a branch of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, which handles covert actions. It indicates that Foggo forced SAD to use a shell company set up by defense contractor Brent R. Wilkes to handle its sensitive air operations, even though Wilkes and his company had no experience in clandestine aviation operations.
SNIP...
The documents also argue that Wilkes and Foggo tried to incorporate the military’s need for armored vehicles into an array of contracts that involved not only the CIA’s sensitive air operations but also water for troops in Iraq. Wilkes’ and Foggo’s deals—during which they hid their long, personal friendship from other government officials—included markups of up to 60 percent on the goods and services they sold the CIA.
CONTINUED...
http://www.propublica.org/article/corruption-touched-cias-covert-operations
True patriots, these guardians of the free market, Capitalism's Invisible Army.
Stinks to high heaven. Amazing how silent the MSM is on this huge leak. Hmmmm, wonder why? 
You are a valuable asset to DU.
You will know them by their WORKS,
not by their excuses.
[font size=5 color=green]Solidarity99![/font][font size=2 color=green]
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From a notes file I started back in the day...
Investigations impacted:
Cunningham conspiracy
Lam) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/18/AR2007031801263.html
Cunningham -Plea bargain -Cooperated
Brent Wilkes, Dusty Foggo -indicted
The U.S. attorney in San Diego notified the Justice Department of search warrants in a Republican bribery scandal last May 10, one day before the attorney general's chief of staff warned the White House of a "real problem" with her, a Democratic senator said yesterday.
The prosecutor, Carol S. Lam, was dismissed seven months later as part of an effort by the Justice Department and the White House to fire eight U.S. attorneys.
(Lam) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/27/AR2007032701492.html
On January 13, the San Diego Union-Tribune quoted Dan Dzwilewski, head of FBI's San Diego office, as saying Lam was crucial to ongoing investigations. "I guarantee politics is involved," he was quoted saying.
Feinstein said her chief counsel had called the FBI's San Diego office to verify the accuracy of the story. She said the office confirmed it was true "but they also said they'd been warned to say no more."
Rep Jerry Lewis: (Lam) http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-usattys15mar15,1,5413433.story?coll=la-news-a_section
On May 11 the month after Sampson told the White House counsel's office that Lam was being targeted for dismissal. The Times reported that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles had begun an investigation into Lewis. They were trying to connect Lewis, who at that time chaired the powerful House Appropriations Committee, to a Washington lobbyist linked to the Cunningham bribery case, The Times said.
Shortly before noon Washington time that day, Sampson e-mailed Kelley to complain about Lam.
The Lewis probe was an extension of the case Lam started in San Diego. But it was being handled by the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles because Lewis' Redlands headquarters falls under its purview.
Seems writing about the truth is unsportsmanlike.
Blogging About WikiLeaks Could Get You Fired
A State Department employee is under investigation for disclosing classified information. His big disclosure? Linking to a widely publicized WikiLeaks document on his personal blog.
—By Peter Van Buren | Tom Dispatch / Mother Jones, Tue Sep. 27, 2011 12:56 PM PDT
On the same day that more than 250,000 unredacted State Department cables hemorrhaged out onto the Internet, I was interrogated for the first time in my 23-year State Department career by State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) and told I was under investigation for allegedly disclosing classified information. The evidence of my crime? A posting on my blog from the previous month that included a link to a WikiLeaks document already available elsewhere on the web.
As we sat in a small, gray, windowless room, resplendent with a two-way mirror, multiple ceiling-mounted cameras, and iron rungs on the table to which handcuffs could be attached, the two DS agents stated that the inclusion of that link amounted to disclosing classified material. In other words, a link to a document posted by who-knows-who on a public website available at this moment to anyone in the world was the legal equivalent of me stealing a top secret report, hiding it under my coat, and passing it to a Chinese spy in a dark alley.
The agents demanded to know who might be helping me with my blog ("Name names!"
, if I had donated any money from my upcoming book on my wacky year-long State Department assignment to a forward military base in Iraq, and if so to which charities, the details of my contract with my publisher, how much money (if any) I had been paid, and—by the way—whether I had otherwise "transferred" classified information.
Had I, they asked, looked at the WikiLeaks site at home on my own time on my own computer? Every blog post, every Facebook post, and every tweet by every State Department employee, they told me, must be precleared by the Department prior to "publication." Then they called me back for a second 90-minute interview, stating that my refusal to answer questions would lead to my being fired, never mind the Fifth (or the First) Amendment.
CONTINUED...
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/wikileaks-classified-information-state-department-investigates-employee
Thank you, unkachuck! It's probably illegal to even think about Wikileaks. Wouldn't know it, with all these secret laws and courts.
Speaking of which... Whatever happened to that Constitution paper thing, anyway? Did it go the way of the Dodo, 5-4, too?
Thanks, Quantess.
It gets better. Ah. Worse.
Goss Knew Foggo Shared A Girlfriend With Russian Spy, But Hired Him Anyway
Zachary Roth | February 26, 2009, 4:24PM
The Dusty Foggo story has never reflected well on Porter Goss -- the man who, as CIA director, gave Foggo the number 3 job at the agency. But it looks like we didn't know the half of it.
Congressional Quarterly has a juicy scoop:
Kyle "Dusty" Foggo's CIA dossier included allegations that he was sharing a woman with a suspected Russian mole, according to a top former spy agency official and other sources.
CIA Director Porter J. Goss knew about the allegation when he hired Foggo to be the agency's executive director, its third highest official, an aide said today.
But Merrell Moorhead, an aide to Goss at the CIA from 2004 to 2006, said CIA security officials later withdrew that and other serious allegations about Foggo's record and "gave him a clean bill of health."
CONTINUED...
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/dusty-foggo/2009/02/
Too bad. Really, too bad.
he loves his country...
