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Coming Soon! From Common Courage Press Recent Stories July 25, 2003 Francis A. Boyle Impeaching Bush David Krieger 15 Questions Harvey Wasserman Pat Robertson's Supreme Fatwah Steve Dunifer Seize the Airwaves! Dan Bacher Federal Judge Throws Out Bush Salmon Plan for Klamath River Kurt Nimmo Bread, Circuses, Uday and Qusay Steve Perry Bush's Wars Weblog Website of the Day Stop the Wall!   July 24, 2003 Elaine Cassel Ashcroft Loses...Again Robert Fisk The Ugly Story of Camp Cropper: The US Torture Camp in Iraq David Lindorff Dumb and Dumber in Iraq Christopher Brauchli Ashcroft Demands Death Penalty in Puerto Rico David Vest Dylan in Bend Tom Turnipseed Killing Saddam & His Family Won't Stop Killing of US Troops Douglas Valentine A Nation of Assassins Stew Albert Contract Killing Steve Perry Bush's Wars Weblog Website of the Day Report on Palestinian Child Prisoners July 23, 2003 Uri Avnery Caesar's Favor David Lindorff Lynne Stewart's Big Win: Ashcroft Rebuked Mano Singham Iraq's Missing WMD Scientists Steve Perry Better Late Than Never: the Press, the Dems, and Bush's Lies John Stanton Avoiding Plato's Republic in America: Is Anarchy the Only Hope? Patrick Bond Bush and South Africa: a Petro-Military-Commerce Mission Harry Browne A Victory for a Disarming Irishwoman Paul Beaulieu When the WTO Comes to Montreal Robert Fisk The Sons are Dead, But the Resistance Will Grow William Witherup Georgie Porgie Website of the Day Lieberman & Falwell: True Love at Last July 22, 2003 Diane Christian Bad Guy / Good Guy: War Forces; Peace Frees Jeremy Brecher Solidarity and Student Protests in Iran Steve Kretzmann and Jim Vallette Plugging Iraq into Globalization Sam Smith Greening the Golden Triangle James Plummer Smile, You're on Federal Camera Lucretia Stewart This Day Shall Not Define My Life: January 18, 2003 Website of the Day Iraq Coalition Casualties   July 21, 2003 Edward Said Imperial Arrogance and the Vile Stereotyping of Arabs Ron Jacobs Shut Up and Shoot Allan J. Lichtman Why is George Bush President? Elaine Cassel How's the Occupation Going? Ask the People of Iraq Christopher Brauchli History Recapitulates: Guantanamo and the Japanese Internment Camps Bruce Jackson Third and Arizona, Santa Monica Website of the Day John Dean: Taking Apart Bush's State of the Union Speech, Claim by Claim   July 19 / 20, 2003 Arthur Mitzman Will the Pax Americana be More Sustainable Than the Dot.com Bubble? Julian Bond We Shall be Heard Cynthia McKinney Bush's Racial Politics at Home and Abroad Mel Goodman What is to be Done with the CIA? Jason Leopold Tenet Blames Wolfowitz Mickey Z. History Forgave Churchill Doug Giebel Impeachment as the Message Jon Brown Whipping the Post Mano Singham Cheney's Oil Maps Steven Sherman Nickle, Dimed and Slimed at UNC Robin Philpot Liberia: History Doesn't Repeat Itself, It Stutters Khaldoun Khelil Capturing Friedman Jeffrey St. Clair You Must Leave Home, Again: Gilad Atzmon's A Guide to the Perplexed Lenni Brenner Sitting in with Mingus Vanessa Jones Three Dog Night Adam Engel Video Judas Video Poets' Basement Foley, Smith and Curtis Website of the Weekend Illegal Art   July 18, 2003 David Vest Drowning in Deep Doo-Doo Rahul Mahajan Deceit Runs Deep John Chuckman Enron-style Management in a Dangerous World Harold A. Gould The Bush-Musharraf Conclave Alvaro Angarita In the Eye of the Storm: Colombia's War on Journalists David Grenier Sovereignty and Solidarity in Indian Country...Rhode Island Dave Lindorff Bush and Hitler: a Response to the Wall Street Journal Website of the Day Murder of a Whistleblower? Timeline in David Kelly Affair   July 17, 2003 Ron Jacobs Sometimes Even the President of the United States Has to Stand Naked Lisa Walsh Thomas Bush Country: the Venom and Adulation of Ignorance Martin Schwarz Bush Pre-emptive Strike Doctrine is the Bane of Non-Proliferation Watchdogs Heidi Lypps Better Justice Through Chemistry? Forced Drugging and the Supreme Court Norman Madarasz Third Ways and Third Worlds: Lula at the Progressive Governance Conference Pankaj Mehta Criminalizing the Palestinian Solidarity Movement Marjorie Cohn Bush, War Lies & Impeachment: the Boy Who Cried Wolf Hammond Guthrie (Dis) Intelligence Revisited Website of the Day No Force, No Fraud: the Soul of Libertarianism July 16, 2003 Jason Leopold Wolfowitz Told White House to Hype Dubious Uranium Claims William Cook Defining Terrorism from the Top Down Elaine Cassel Judge Brinkema v. Ashcroft: She Whom Must Not Be Obeyed Jason Leopold How Can They Justify the War If WMDs Are Never Found? Linda Heard Bondage or Freedom? Raymond Barrett From Detroit to Basra Jeffrey St. Clair Back to the Future in Guatemala: The Return of Gen. Ríos Montt   July 15, 2003 Kathleen and Bill Christison Why We Resigned from VIPS Elaine Cassel Ashcroft's War on Legal Whistleblowers: the Ordeal of Jesselyn Radack Chris Floyd Barge Poles: Oil Wars and New Europe's Mercenaries Jason Leopold CIA Warned White House Last October that Niger Docs were Forgeries Gaius Publius Considering the Obvious: Fool Us Once, Fool Us Twise...Please John Troyer The Niger Syndrome Becky Gillette No Conspiracy at Coffeen Nature Preserve: a Response to David Orrr Uri Avnery The Bi-National State: The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb Website of the Day Cost of Iraq War   July 14, 2003 Lisa Taraki Hot Days in Ramallah Walter Brasch Bush: the Pretend Captain SOA Watch Training Colombia's Killers in the US Dan Bacher Yurok Tribe Denounces Klamath River Salmon Killers Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Intelligence Unglued Website of the Day Coalition for Democratic Rights and Civil Liberties July 12 / 13, 2003 Arthur Mitzman The Double Wall Before the Future Standard Schaefer The Coming Financial Reality: an Interview with Michael Hudson John Feffer A Fearful Symmetry: Washington and Pyongyang Ron Jacobs Shades of Gray in Iran Elaine Cassel Judicial Terrorism Against the Bill of Rights Tom Stephens Civil Liberties After 9/11 David Lindorff New White House Slogan: "Case Closed. Just Move On" Jason Leopold The Mini-War Against Iraq Prior to 9/11 Lee Sustar What's Behind the Crisis in Liberia? Mickey Z. AIDS Dissent and Africa Sam Hamod Semitic is a Language Group, Not a Race or Ethnic Group Ramzy Baroud Awaiting Justice on an Old Blanket Jeffrey St. Clair Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller Adam Engel Parable of the Lobbyist Robert Sanders A Review of Ralph Lopez's American Dream Poets' Basement Albert, Witherup, Guthrie   July 11, 2003 Conn Hallinan The Coin of Empire Tim Wise God Responds to Bush Mokhiber / Weissman The Two Faces of Bush in Africa Edward S. Herman Whitewashing Sandra Day O'Connor David Orr Coffeen-gate: What's Going on at the Sierra Club Foundation? David Lindorff An Iraq War & Occupation Glossary Website of the Day Dead Malls   July 10, 2003 Ron Jacobs Dealing with the Devil: the Bloody Profits of General Dynamics Sean Donahue Bush and the Paramillitaries: Coddling Terrorists in Colombia Yemi Toure Who Outted Bush in Afrika? Robert Jensen Politics and Sustainability: an Interview with Wes Jackson Ali Abunimah US Leaves Injured Iraqis Untreated Joanne Mariner Federal Courts, Not Military Commissions Website of the Day Electronic Iraq   July 9, 2003 David Lindorff Is the Media Finally Turning on Bush? David Krieger and Angela McCracken 10 Myths About Nuclear Weapons Mickey Z. Why Speak Out? Lee Sustar The Great Medicare Fraud John Chuckman The Worst Kind of Lie Gary Leupp "Pacifist" Japan and the Occupation of Iraq Website of the Day Hail to the Thief: Songs for the Bush Years   July 8, 2003 Elaine Cassel Bully on the Bench: the Pathological Dissents of Scalia Alan Maass Nights of Fire and Rage in Benton Harbor Chris Floyd Troubled Sleep: Getting Used to the American Gulag Linda S. Heard America's Kangaroo Justice Brian Cloughley They Tell Lies to Nodders Charles Sullivan Bush the Christian? Saul Landau The Intelligence Culture in the National Security Age Website of the Day Occupation Watch   July 7, 2003 William Blum The Anti-Empire Report Harvey Wasserman The Nuke with a Hole in Its Head Ramzy Baroud Peace for All the Wrong Reasons Simon Jones What Progressives Should Think About Iran Lesley McCulloch Fear, Pain and Shame in Aceh Uri Avnery The Draw Steve Perry Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3   July 4 / 6, 2003 Patrick Cockburn Dead on the Fourth of July Frederick Douglass What is Freedom to a Slave? Martha Honey Bush and Africa: Racism, Exploitation and Neglect Jeffrey St. Clair The Rat in the Grain: Amstutz and the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture Standard Schaefer Rule by Fed: Anyone But Greenspan in 2004 Lenni Brenner Jefferson is for Today Elaine Cassel Fucking Furious on the Fourth Ben Tripp How Free Are We? Wayne Madsen A Sad Independence Day John Stanton Happy Birthday, America! 227 Years of War Jim Lobe Bush's Surreal AIDS Appointment John Blair Return to Marble Hill: Indiana's Rusting Nuke Lisa Walsh Thomas Heavy Reckoning at Qaim David Vest Wake Up and Smell the Dynamite Adam Engel Queer as Grass Poets' Basement Christian, Witherup, Albert & St. Clair Website of the Weekend The Lipstick Librarian   Hot Stories Wendell Berry Small Destructions Add Up CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From Elaine Cassel Civil Liberties Watch Michel Guerrin Embedded Photographer Says: "I Saw Marines Kill Civilians" Uzma Aslam Khan The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War: What America Says Does Not Go Paul de Rooij Arrogant Propaganda Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online Search CounterPunch

July 26, 2003 Onward and Downward Book Cooking at Boeing By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Early this summer, a top Wall Street stock picker issued a glowing report about Boeing: buy, buy, buy. The unusually rosy assessment for the troubled company had nothing to do with the need to replenish the Pentagon's arsenal of cruise missiles depleted by the Iraq war or the Bush administration's drive to implement Star War, both of which will net Boeing billions. No, this analysis, written by Heidi Wood, a vice-president at Morgan Stanley, pointed to "a no risk" risk deal with the federal government to lease 100 Boeing-767 tanker aircraft. According to Wood's report, the deal will generate $2.3 billion in profit for Boeing. To put this in perspective, that's about as much profit as Boeing reaps for the sale of 1,033 of its 737 commercial airliners. From Boeing's perspective, the great part of the tanker deal is that the company has few obligations, yet the government is locked into the leases, even if it proves that the Pentagon doesn't need the planes. Boeing is guaranteed a 15 percent profit on each plane it delivers. "There's substantially less risk than is common in the commercial aircraft market," Wood wrote. Wood should know what she's talking about. The Wall Street Journal calls her the top stock analyst in the Aerospace / Defense sector and she also serves as a Bush appointee to the Commission on the Future of the US Aerospace Industry. Under the deal approved by the Pentagon last month, Boeing will convert 100 B-767s into military refueling tankers. It's quite a coup, because many Air Force generals have said that the planes aren't needed, an assessment backed up by a Government Accounting Office investigation. There are currently 545 KC-135 tankers in the Air Force fleet. More than 400 of them are new, fully upgraded "R" models. The other 134 tankers are older "E" models that some inside the Pentagon and the Congress are anxious to replace with the leased planes from Boeing. On the surface, the Boeing proponents appear to have an argument: the E tankers are aging. Most of the planes are 35 years old. However, the Air Force primarily assesses the life span of planes based not on age but on flight hours. The engines for the "E" model has a projected life of 36,000 flying hours. A 1995 GAO report revealed that the majority of the "E" tankers have accumulated about 13,000 hours. The report projected that not one of the tanker planes in the fleet would reach its limit until 2040. The new plan is to begin replacing the E tankers with the Boeing planes in 2006. Even if the Air Force decided it needed to upgrade the engines on the E planes sooner, because of added usage and stress from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it would be much cheaper to simply upgrade the engines instead of entering into a lease arrangement with Boeing. The GAO estimates that the entire fleet of "E" tankers could be upgraded with "R" engines for about $3.6 billion. This is more than seven times cheaper than the $26 billion the Air Force will have to fork out for the Boeing commercial tankers. Despite the fact that Boeing famously fled Seattle to set up its new headquarters in Chicago, the tanker lease deal was engineered through the tireless work of the Washington State congressional delegation, led by Sen. Patty Murray and Congressman Norm Dicks. Wood, who demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the political economics of the Beltway, cautions investors that Boeing may need to demonstrate its gratitude to the Washington delegation by agreeing to locate some of its manufacturing plant for the new 7E7 commercial jet in Seattle rather than in a more corporate friendly environs. "A subtle negative may be the payback required considering political capital BA [Boeing] has expended to land the tanker deal," Wood warned. "Now the company is somewhat beholden to its hard-working Washington constituency. This may limit some of the latitude the company would probably like to have in deciding where to build the 7E7, adding pressure to keep some of the 7E7 work in expensive, union-dominated Seattle." Of course, the congressional delegation couldn't have prevailed on its own. Boeing got some vital help greasing this deal from the inside as well in the form of Darleen Druyun, a top Air Force official who called herself the Godmother of the C-17-the troubled air transport plane made by Boeing. According to Pentagon sources, she helped craft the tanker deal, fought off skeptical Pentagon accountants and auditors, worked the appropriations committees and, finally, when it all seemed nicely tied up, retired from the Pentagon and joined Boeing as an executive vice-president, where she now supervises the company's interests before congress and the Pentagon. Druyun is not the only Pentagon powerbroker to be recruited into Boeing's corporate hangar. Recently, Boeing's board has boasted both former Defense Secretary William Perry and John M. Shalikashvili, at one time the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 2001, Boeing also hired Rudy de Leon, Clinton's Deputy Secretary of Defense, to run its Washington office. Although De Leon is known as a hawk and a masterful dealmaker, his hiring may have been a rare misstep for Boeing, since congressional Republicans howled that the company should have picked one of their own from the Pentagon's rolls. It's just this kind of zealous devotion to political payback and behind-the-scenes influence peddling that has landed Boeing in a rare spot of trouble. According to a one paragraph item in Reuters from early June, the Inspector General of the Air Force has opened an investigation into Boeing whether or not Boeing should be debarred from bidding on contracts with the federal government. The probe stems from allegations that Boeing executives received proprietary information from Lockheed concerning bids on Pentagon contracts. The Lockheed affair is not Boeing's only transgression. The Project on Government Oversight, a DC-based Pentagon watchdog group, reported last year that since 1990 Boeing has committed more than 36 violations and has been forced to pay more than $350 million in fines, penalties, restitution and settlement. Among the more recent allegations: Boeing placed defective gears in Chinook helicopters; Company officials offered bribes to officials of the Bahamas government as a means of securing a contract; Produced a defective safety system for the Apache helicopter; Misrepresented the progress of clean-up at Rocky Flats nuclear weapons site; Charges from the State Department that Boeing violated the Arms Export Control Act and International Traffic in Arms Regulations-more than 100 instances are cited; Accused of civil rights violations in hiring and salary practices toward blacks and women; Routinely mistated labor costs and exaggerated overhead costs. These are serious charges of criminal and civil malfeasance, some of which Boeing didn't even dispute. Yet, despite the rap sheet, Boeing has never been suspended or debarred from bidding on contracts since 1990. Federal contract guidelines require that contractors to the government sanction violators and only award contracts to "responsible" contractors with a record of "integrity and business ethics". Of course, Boeing is hardly alone in getting a pass from these high-minded rules. In the past decade, out of the top 50 defense contractors the Pentagon has only suspended the contract privileges of only one major company, General Electric Avionics Division, and that lasted for only five days. Even so, some in Congress aghast at the mere possibility of a crackdown on cheating contractors make haste to loosen the rules even further. At the behest of Boeing and other big contractors, Rep, Tom Davis, the Virginia Republican who chairs the House Government Reform Committee, has just introduced legislation that will unravel many of the key provisions governing the regulation of Pentagon contracts. One of the changes proposed by Davis is for the Pentagon to shift to so-called Time and Material and Labor Hour contracts, where the weapons firms would get paid for how much time they spent working on a project rather than by such standards as to whether they completed it on time or according to code. This amounts to a blank check without any incentive ever finish the job. Davis even includes a provision that would prohibit government auditors from examining the contractor's billing records. The congressman, who once won a Harvard rock trivia contest by correctly identifying the Blues Magoos as the group that performed the 1966 hit "(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet, also wants to expand the use of Share-in-Savings Contracts, a kind of Enron-style financial speculation that allows contractors to be lavishly reimbursed for investments in infrastructure upgrades, such as computer systems. The companies are allowed to charge the government for "efficiency savings" over the lifetime of the contract. But even the Bush administration is skeptical of such claims. In hearings before Congressman Davis's committee last year, Angela Styles, the chief procurement analyst for the White House, testified that her office had examined dozens of the contracts and "we have seen no real savings." The program is so ripe for fraud that one expert in defense contracts compared it to the savings-and-loan scandal. "Share-in-Savings contracts could propagate problems similar to those that accompanied deregulation of the government-insured savings-and-loans institutions or procurement of defense spare parts in the 1980s by sole-source contracts," says Charles Tiefer, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. The biggest prize for the defense contractors is Davis's plan to scrap key provisions in two hated laws: the Truth in Negotiations Act and the Cost Accounting Standards Act. Back in the late 1960s, Senator William Proxmire teamed with Admiral Hyman Rickover to standardize accounting procedures for defense contractors during the spending frenzy of the Vietnam War. They also set up a board to oversee the enforcement of the standards and deflate the complex accounting tricks of the defense contractors which were costing the government more than $6 billion a year. The Truth in Negotiations Act forced weapons manufacturers to come clean with the true basis of their pricing and cost data. Under current guidelines, defense contractors must comply with TINA for any contract over $550,000. Davis's measure would effectively gut the bill by making the reporting requirements apply only to contracts involving more than $200 million. After the defense industry consolidation frenzy of the 1990s, many Pentagon contract offerings now receive only one bid. To allow the defense companies to set their own accounting and pricing rules in this sole-source environment is to invite the kind of runaway fraud last seen in the procurement scandals of the 1970s and 1980s. It's one way to jumpstart the economy. No wonder Wall Street's bullish on Boeing. [Postscript: This article was written in June. On July 25, the Pentagon announced that it was prepared to impose sanctions on some of Boeing's subsidiaries for contract fraud. This is the first tiime in more than a decade that the Pentagon has taken action against one of its prime contractors. The terms of the sanction have not yet been announced. But don't expect the sentence to be too harsh. The last time the Pentagon barred a big contractor from bidding on new contracts the ban only lasted five days. --JSC] Jeffrey St. Clair is author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature (Common Courage Press) and coeditor, with Alexander Cockburn, of The Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press). Both books will be published in October. Weekend Edition Features for July 19 / 20, 2003 Arthur Mitzman Will the Pax Americana be More Sustainable Than the Dot.com Bubble? Julian Bond We Shall be Heard Cynthia McKinney Bush's Racial Politics at Home and Abroad Mel Goodman What is to be Done with the CIA? Jason Leopold Tenet Blames Wolfowitz Mickey Z. History Forgave Churchill Doug Giebel Impeachment as the Message Jon Brown Whipping the Post Mano Singham Cheney's Oil Maps Steven Sherman Nickle, Dimed and Slimed at UNC Robin Philpot Liberia: History Doesn't Repeat Itself, It Stutters Khaldoun Khelil Capturing Friedman Jeffrey St. Clair You Must Leave Home, Again: Gilad Atzmon's A Guide to the Perplexed Lenni Brenner Sitting in with Mingus Vanessa Jones Three Dog Night Adam Engel Video Judas Video Poets' Basement Foley, Smith and Curtis Website of the Weekend Illegal Art   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /