Archief - Bin Laden bedreigt ons: "Weg met vrijheid van mening"

I’ve been joking the last few years that if you invested in military stocks on January 20, 2001, you’d be sitting pretty right now.

Well, now I’ve got some more evidence to back up that not-so-funny joke.

Since the Iraq War began, aerospace and defense industry stocks have more than doubled.

General Dynamics did even better than that.

Its stock has tripled.

Banking on its Abrams tanks and Stryker troop transports, General Dynamics gobbled up $2.35 billion “in war revenue last year,” according to Bloomberg News.

“The war has been a huge benefit to almost all contractors,” William Hartung of the New America Foundation told Bloomberg.

War profiteering is not news, I suppose. But it is disgusting. And those who are profiting from the war are Bush and Cheney’s cronies in the corporate boardrooms. For them, war is not a bloody tragedy, it’s a golden opportunity. Bush’s “base” is doing just fine.

Almost 100 years ago, back in 1911, Fighting Bob La Follette, the pioneer of the Progressive movement and founder of the magazine I’m working for, opposed U.S. intervention in Mexico and asked a crucial question:

“Have we come to this point, that patriotism, valor, and life and death are openly made the pawns of Wall Street’s politicians, to be moved about as suits the greater profits of Wall Street’s master spirits?”

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is yes.

La Follette also said, in January 1917, “If our nation manufactured its own munitions in its own factories at cost, it would take the private profit out of war, and the war traders out of American politics.’

Alas, the war traders have not yet been expelled from the temple of American politics.

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Vice President Dick Cheney’s stock options in Halliburton rose from $241,498 in 2004 to over $8 million in 2005, an increase of more than 3,000 percent, as Halliburton continues to rake in billions of dollars from no-bid/no-audit government contracts.

An analysis released by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) reveals that as Halliburton’s fortunes rise, so do the Vice President’s. Halliburton has already taken more than $10 billion from the Bush-Cheney administration for work in Iraq. They were also awarded many of the unaccountable post-Katrina government contracts, as off-shore subsidiaries of Halliburton quietly worked around U.S. sanctions to conduct very questionable business with Iran (See Story #2). “It is unseemly,” notes Lautenberg, “for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his administration funnels billions of dollars to it.”

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Rumsfeld served as Gilead’s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to Federal Financial Disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.
The forms don’t reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but whipped up fears of an avian flu pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu sent Gilead’s stock from $35 to $47 in 2005, making the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer.

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While here, the hijackers did all they could to stay below our radar. They contacted no known terrorist sympathizers. They committed no egregious crimes. They dressed and acted like Americans, shopping and eating at places like Wal-Mart and Pizza Hut, blending into the woodwork all the while. When four got speeding tickets in the days leading up to September 11th, they remained calm and aroused no suspicion. Since none were known terrorists, law enforcement had no reason to question or detain them.

The hijackers also left no paper trail. In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper – either here in the U.S. or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere – that mentioned any aspect of the September 11th plot. The hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any kind. They used hundreds of different pay phones and cell phones, often with prepaid calling cards that are extremely difficult to trace. And they made sure that all the money sent to them to fund their attacks was wired in small amounts to avoid detection.

In short, the terrorists had managed to exploit loopholes and vulnerabilities in our systems, to stay out of sight, and to not let anyone know what they were up to beyond a very closed circle.

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With jury deliberations resuming today in the trial of six Miami men accused of planning an attack on Chicago's Sears Tower, legal experts say the outcome will put the credibility of U.S. efforts to crack down on "homegrown terrorists" very much at stake.

The case is "more hype than evidence," Neal Sonnett, past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told ABCNews.com, and it's a viable argument that the government's informant "created the crime."

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WASHINGTON - U.S. lawmakers have a financial interest in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a review of their accounts has revealed.

Members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon contracts to provide goods and services to U.S. armed forces, say nonpartisan watchdog groups.

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