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Grand Theft Pentagon :Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror

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Once upon a time in America, there was a form of newspaper reporting known as muckraking. Some folks preferred to call this form of reporting "investigative reporting." No matter. Whatever it was called, the purpose of the reporting, the reporters, and the papers that ran the articles was to expose corruption, graft and just plain old evil in the echelons of government and big business. Of course, there was also a hope that this exposure would end the reported abuses or, at the least, get rid of the worst abusers and most corrupt men involved. Magazines in the first wave of muckraking included McClure's, Colliers, and Everybody's and some of the better known writers were Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell.
Over the years this type of reporting has become harder to find. Many of the magazines and journals that used to run the often long articles that investigative reporting requires fell victim to the machinations of monopoly capitalism. Of course, this was fine with the capitalists, who were often the targets of the muckrakers. Other magazines and newspapers became the victim of the news media's shift to broadcast journalism. Except for the occasional series on city crime or local graft, these papers and magazines are mere shadows of their earlier selves.

Fortunately, there is Counterpunch. Like a select few of its counterparts on the right and the left, this paper expands the limits of journalism, running investigative reports, commentary, announcements and cultural criticism both online and in a paper version. Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, this journal often reminds me of Ramparts in its glory days. Going well beyond other leftish magazines like The Nation, Mother Jones and The Progressive, and maintaining a stubborn independence not found in organizational journals, Counterpunch is a consistent source of reporting that goes to the heart of the matter. "Radical" in its essential definition.
Jeffrey St. Clair's most recent book, Grand Theft Pentagon, is a collection of muckraking exposes of the corruption and greed that help fuel Washington's wars. Many of the pieces in the book originally appeared in Counterpunch, but their presence here in one volume brings together the full force of the theft and corruption we live with. Although the scope of the ruling elites' arrogance is easy enough to see, the scope of the corruption isn't. St. Clair's book changes that. The relentlessness of his reporting details exactly how broad and how deep the graft and outright theft of our national treasury and soul by the rich and powerful truly is. Needless to say, it's a depressing tale.
Whether he's detailing the fraudulent manipulations of federal contracts specified for indigenous peoples by white guys with offices in Virginia or the no-bid contracts of Halliburton and General Dynamics, St. Clair provides the reader with detail after researched detail of the grandest larceny in history. Let me remind you--there's been some tough competition for that title. His profiles of the US's biggest war profiteers are as detailed as his profiles of those men who deal with (and for) them. His most biting and even humorous words are saved for his profiles of the men who currently run this land. I chuckled loudly more than once while reading his chapter on George Bush that he titles "High Plains Grifter." The guy sitting next to me on the bus thought I was reading something intentionally comic, not a book about government corruption and war.
St. Clair's reportage on the apparent refusal of the Bush administration to take Osama bin Laden out of business before September 11, 2001 is a story that should get much greater play than it has. His chapters on the business of war and its accompanying corruption and graft are like bookends to that chapter. After all, if the events of 9/11 had not happened, one wonders if the US would be at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, one wonders if the Bush administration would even be in power, especially since it is their use of the 9/11 events that helps them maintain their fearful hold on a substantial part of the US electorate. Of course, if Bush weren't in the White House, one wonders how much difference it would make anyhow.
That's the danger of muckraking--it can render the reader hopeless and cynical, especially in today's world of surveillance and all-encompassing barcode-produced data storage. That's where the intention of the original muckrakers is important to recall. Sinclair, Steffens, Tarbell and the rest of those reporters wrote their exposés to anger and inspire their readers into taking action. It wasn't enough to be ticked off that your government was a den of thieves and your leaders were well-connected criminals. You had to take this knowledge and use it to change things. Remember this after you finish Grand Theft Pentagon.

I sent a copy of Grand Theft Pentagon to a Pentagon Contracts Officer I know. He read it and his take was: "Next time, have St. Clair call me. He only scratched the surface. It's far more complicated and more corrupt than even he knows."

And, St. Clair knows plenty. This book is an informative and witty take on the many scams that go along with the constant war munitions industry and the symbiotic relationship between CEOs and the Brass.

One could fund all edcuation in America with just the money spent on some of completely useless systems unearthed here. When one considers the perpetual overcharging and outright graft, Universal Health Care can be added.

I post this wonderful review by Ashley Smith. My sentiments exactly.

--
Pigs Feeding on the Trough of War

Jeffrey St. Clair, Grand Theft Pentagon: How War Contractors Rip Off America and Threaten the World. Common Courage Press, 2005, 336 pages, $18.95.

The Bush administration's reign of error and terror has left a pile of corruption, waste and destruction that rivals the muck of the Augean stable. Jeffrey St. Clair's new book, Grand Theft Pentagon, accomplishes the Herculean task of exposing these abuses with brilliant investigative journalism carried off with unmatched sarcasm.

After the Cold War, the military industrial complex was desperate for a new conflict to legitimize profligate spending on war, weapons systems and their associated services. St. Clair chronicles how Bush's so-called "war on terror" has enabled our rulers to rekindle the incestuous relationship between politicians, the Pentagon and military contractors.

The marriage counselor of this foul union is none other than George Bush himself.

In perhaps the funniest exposé of the Bushes yet written, St. Clair tells the story of this company masquerading as a family. The portrait is not very flattering, politically or personally. Demonstrating their congenital penchant for putting profit before all else, the dynasty's founder, Prescott Bush, barely escaped charges of treason for wheeling and dealing with the Nazis during the Second World War.

The unlikely hero of this family saga is "W." St. Clair shows how he spent his youth boozing, snorting coke, womanizing, failing classes, securing draft deferments, dodging national guard duty, and starting and wrecking corporations for which other people paid the price.

But this loser found himself reincarnated as a caring conservative. With the help of corporate money, lessons at the foot of Karl Rove, lots of dirty tricks and apparently direct conversations with the deity, he found himself selected by the Supreme Court as U.S. ruler on the eve of 9/11.

Bush and the military-industrial complex used the tragedy to fulfill their imperial fantasies and line their pockets. With Bush threatening war on the planet, the Pentagon got the useless and dangerous Star Wars Missile Defense, the unneeded B-767 tanker plane, the practically untested F-22 fighter and the Stryker armored personnel carrier that is almost useless in Iraq since it is vulnerable to improvised explosive devices.

Boeing, Lockheed and a handful of other corporations thus bilked American taxpayers of billions of dollars for senseless weapons.

These weapons contracts were just the tip of the iceberg. The Bush administration also gave no-bid contracts to various private corporations to service the "war on terror."

Clinton and Gore opened up this new space for corporate plunder through their "Reinventing Government" program that opened the floodgate to subcontracting government services and industries. Halliburton, Bechtel and others were consequently able to get contracts for everything from doing military laundry to rebuilding Iraq's oil industry.

Disproving neoliberal nostrums, they overcharged the government, provided inferior service, and, in the case of rebuilding Iraq, completely failed to restore electricity, running water or reconstruction of buildings destroyed by the U.S. conquest. Despite being investigated, they got off scot-free and, astonishingly, got new contracts to rebuild New Orleans.

Far from calling the Bush administration, the politicians of both parties have aided and abetted the process. As St. Clair writes, "Today, the roots of the two dominant political parties intertwine and are irrigated by the same freshets of corporate money, much of it coming from the weapons industry cartel."

None of this military gluttony would have been possible without Bush's war on terror. As St. Clair proves, this war was without cause either in Afghanistan or Iraq. He documents how Bush overruled offers from his own emissary Kabir Mohammed as well as the Taliban to deliver Bin Laden to U.S. custody. Instead, hungry for revenge and imperial domination, Bush launched a vengeful war for imperial domination of Central Asia, its oil and natural gas reserves, and the revitalization of the military industrial complex.

He also shows how, from the very beginning, the Bush administration set its eyes on Iraq, despite the fact that it had no connection to 9/11. In Rumsfeld's words, the Bush regime should "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." So they concocted lies about weapons of mass destruction to justify a war for empire and oil.

And they found willing liars in the rest of the establishment, from the CIA to the Democratic Party and the servile corporate media. One CIA manager told his staff, "If Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so." Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and the rest of the Democrats save for a handful of dissenters joined the chorus of liars.

But now the tide has turned against Bush, the war and its profiteers. As St. Clair concludes, the task is to reinvigorate "a militant and uncompromising popular movement, unaligned with either political party, whose first task must be to put an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and snuff out further imperial adventurism in Iran, Syria and North Korea." Grand Theft Pentagon is an invaluable tool in the building of just such a movement.

This review first appeared in the Socialist Worker.

--Ashley Smith

St.Clair is a muckracker par excellence. Muckracking tends to date quickly; old scandals are no longer scandalous. What makes St.Clair's work so compelling, and so likely to endure, is his focus on people, the villains and the very few heroes of the piece.

St.Clair does not caricature; he feels his subjects like a novelist. George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld come alive in all their creepiness, but when the curtain falls it is Bunnatine Greenhouse, the unsung Halliburton whistleblower, who gets center stage. St.Clair brings ample research and devastating argument to his attack on indecent powerbrokers. In the end, though, it is his humanity that illuminates the tale.

Grand Theft Pentagon takes you behind the curtains of Washington's power plays, exposing all the sweetheart deals and gaudy sleaze that exploit taxpayers and promote warfare. The lead characters in Jeffrey St. Clair's latest exposé, from Duke Cunningham to GW Bush, come to life in rich and bitter detail -- revealing not only their banality, but also their quest for global dominance.

The turn style nature of DC politics fattens the bank accounts of many. Indeed, there are reasons why we are in a state of perpetual war -- for those who profit most are in positions of power.

This should be required reading for anyone who is concerned with the state of this planet and the wars that are driving its demise. Grand Theft Pentagon spares nobody who is culpable.

Jeffrey St. Clair has long been a tireless compaigner for the environment, for political and journalistic integrity, and for human rights. Now he takes on the Pentagon and its corporate bunk buddies, and cuts them down in a withering hail of truth. His research is rock-solid, and since he's one of the best non-fiction writers alive, Grand Theft Pentagon is a good read as well. Just don't expect it to turn up on George W. Bush's reading list.

Jeffrey St. Clair has long been a tireless campaigner for the environment, for political and journalistic integrity, and for human rights. Now he takes on the Pentagon and its corporate bunk buddies, and cuts them down in a withering hail of truth. His research is rock-solid, and since he's one of the best non-fiction writers alive, Grand Theft Pentagon is a good read as well. Just don't expect it to turn up on George W. Bush's reading list.

Full to the brim with tasty tidbits of pentagon waste and corruption. A great read.
It must have gone to press in a hurry as it has many typo's.
Each chapter appears to be simply a transposed magazine article.

This book is primarily of historical interest and consists of articles written by Jeffrey St. Clair between 2001 and 2005. It is an enjoyable read because St. Clair is a very facile writer. Yet it is also a terminally superficial book that provides polemics rather than a reasoned examination of the U.S. Defense Department (DOD) and its acquisition process.
St. Clair makes some quite serious accusations against President George W. Bush and his national security establishment. These are controversial and the jury is still out concerning whether these accusations have merit or not. Certainly his arguments seem persuasive, but this may be because so many senior members of that establishment such as Vice President Cheney and SecDef Donald Rumsfeld are apparently naturally secretive and unpleasant folks. Indeed President Bush himself often appeared to be indifferent or incompetent in dealing with the many challenges that occurred during his eight year administration. History will have to judge all of this.
The main theme of the book is the wholesale looting of the DOD by unscrupulous contactors; well this is a complicated issue. There is ample evidence that the DOD wastes millions if not billions of dollars on ill-conceived, badly managed programs. There is also ample evidence that large and small contractors representing the private sector made substantial amounts of money on even failed programs. The question which St. Clair should have asked, but didn't was why this was so. He seems to believe it was caused by collusion between greedy contractors and stupid or venal generals or high level DOD officials. There is of course some truth in this as there is in that much of the waste is due to corrupt or incompetent members of congress.
Yet the issue is more complicated than this. Not all general officers in the U.S. Military are corrupt, venal or stupid. Most are quite patriotic and more than a few are highly intelligent. The same can be said for contractors who of course are driven by the bottom line, but who are also genuinely interested in providing for the defense of the U.S. and supporting its military. The villains that St. Clair finds throughout both DOD and the defense industries are largely phantoms. Yet the tales of waste and inefficiency are true.
So what is the problem? Some (this reader included) would argue that the problem is with the DOD requirements and procurement systems both of which are badly designed and poorly executed. The senior DOD officials can be faulted for an utter failure in leadership while the U.S. Officer Corps can be faulted for being unable to come to grips with the DOD requirement and procurement cycles. At the same time private contractors should be more proactive in guiding the cycles towards realistic goals in the form of practical weapons platforms and other programs.
This book nibbles at the surface but fails to take a real bite of this issue.

snappy prose, compelling evidence, one of the great muckrakers.

the people who imply that the book is written by a knee jerk pacifist have not been paying attention. The article on the Warthog, and others demonstrated not only the man's opposition to waste and corruption, but the fact that the man genuinely cares about having a functioning military for DEFENSE purposes.

The points he raise cannot be simply dismissed out of hand, why keep spending so much money on cold war era weapons when our old enemy no longer exists/