Nations in flux are nations in need. A new president will soon take office, facing hard choices not only about two long-running wars and an ever-deepening economic crisis, but about a government that has long been morally adrift. Torture-as-policy, kidnappings, ghost prisons, domestic surveillance, creeping militarism, illegal war-making, and official lies have been the order of the day. Moments like this call for truth-tellers. For Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. For witnesses willing to come forward. For brave souls ready to expose hidden and forbidden realities to the light of day.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson is such a man. He came to national prominence in October 2005 when — having left his post as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier in the year — he laid bare some of the secrets of the Bush White House as he had experienced them. He had been inside the halls of power as the invasion and occupation of Iraq took shape. In Bush's second term, on the outside, he found that he had had enough. The American people, he thought, had a right to know just how their government was really working, and so he offered them this vision of the Bush administration in action: "[S]ome of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld."

In the years since, Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, has not been reticent, especially when it came to "the militarization of America's foreign policy" and the practice of extraordinary rendition (the kidnapping of terror suspects and their deliverance into the hands of regimes ready and willing to torture them).

Nor, earlier this year, did he shy away from testifying before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about how, in 2004, while still at the State Department, he had compiled "a dossier of classified, sensitive, and open source information" on American interrogation and imprisonment practices at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that yielded, he said, "overwhelming evidence that my own government had sanctioned abuse and torture."

"We have damaged our reputation in the world and thus reduced our power," he told the panel in closing. "We were once seen as the paragon of law; we are now in many corners of the globe the laughing stock of the law."

Wilkerson has spent most of his adult life in the service of the United States government as a soldier for 31 years, including military service in Vietnam; as a special assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; as the Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College; and finally, from 2002 to 2005, as chief of staff to Powell at the State Department. His most vital service to his country, however, has arguably been in the years since.

Wilkerson has become a blunt truth-teller, and of all the truths he has told, there is one that's especially personal and painful; one that, after so many years, he could have kept to himself, but decided not to. It's a story, now decades old, of truth, consequences, and a dead little girl. It is no less timely for that, offering essential lessons, especially to U.S. troops engaged in seemingly interminable wars that have left countless civilians, little girls included, dead.

"I fault myself for it to this day"

Testifying before that congressional subcommittee in June, Wilkerson stated:

"In Vietnam, as a first lieutenant and a captain of Infantry, on several occasions I had to restrain my soldiers, even one or two of my officers. When higher authorities took such actions as declaring free fire zones — meaning that anything that moved in that zone could be killed — and you came upon a 12-year old girl on a jungle path in that zone, it was clear you were not going to follow orders. But some situations were not so black and white and you had to be always on guard against your soldiers slipping over the edge.

"As their leader, it was incumbent upon me to set the example — and that meant sometimes reprimanding or punishing a soldier who broke the rules. In all cases, it meant that I personally followed the rules and not just by 'breaking' the so-called rules of engagement, as in the designated free fire zone, but by following the rules that had been ingrained in me by my parents, by my schools, by my church, and by the U.S. Army in classes about the Geneva Conventions and what we called the law of land warfare. I had been taught and I firmly believed when I took the oath of an officer and swore to support and defend the Constitution, that American soldiers were different and that much of their fighting strength and spirit came from that difference and that much of that difference was wrapped up in our humaneness and our respect for the rights of all."

Almost two years earlier, fellow reporter Deborah Nelson and I met with Wilkerson at a Starbucks outside of Washington, D.C. We hunkered down in the back of the coffeehouse, while, amid the din of barista-speak and the whir of coffee machines, Wilkerson told us about his service in Vietnam: How he flew low and slow — often under the tree-tops — as a scout pilot for the infantry, in a OH-6A "Loach" Light Observation Helicopter, operating in the III Corps region well north of Saigon. During his 13 months in Vietnam, Wilkerson logged more than 1,000 combat hours, without ever being wounded or getting shot down. His troops — he oversaw 300 men by the end of his tour — used to call him "the Teflon guy" for good reason.

But two moments during his time in Vietnam did, by his own account, stick with him. They are, in fact, indelibly ingrained in his memory.

One occurred when, as a young lieutenant, he got into verbal battle with an infantry battalion commander — a lieutenant colonel — on the ground in Tay Ninh Province. He was in the air leading his platoon when the ground commander came in over the radio, declaring the area his helicopter was over a free fire zone.

Ubiquitous during the war, free fire zones gave American troops the authorization to unleash unrestrained firepower, no matter who was still living in an area, in contravention of the laws of war. The policy allowed artillery barrages, for example, to be directed at populated rural areas, Cobra helicopter gunships to open fire on Vietnamese peasants just because they were running in fear below, or grunts on the ground to take pot shots at children out fishing and farmers working in their fields. "Cobra pilots and some of my colleagues in the Loach platoon treated that as a license to shoot anything that moved: wild boar, tigers, elephants, people. It didn't matter," Wilkerson told us.

On this occasion, the battalion commander ordered Wilkerson and his unit to engage in "recon by fire" — basically firing from their helicopters into brushy areas, tree lines, hootches (as Vietnamese peasant homes were known) or other structures, in an attempt to draw enemy fire and initiate contact. Knowing that, too many times, this led to innocent civilians being wounded or killed, Wilkerson told the ground commander that his troops would only fire on armed combatants. "To hell with your free fire zone," he said.

A "trigger-happy" Cobra pilot under his command then entered the verbal fray on the radio, siding with the battalion commander. With that, as Wilkerson described it that day, he maneuvered his own helicopter between the Cobra gunship and the free fire zone below. "You shoot, you're gonna hit me," he said over his radio. "And if you hit me, buddy, I'm gonna turn my guns up and shoot you."

The verbal battle continued until, as Wilkerson recounted it, he caught sight of movement below. "There was nothing there but a hootch with a man, probably about seventy [years old], an old lady, probably about the same age, and two young children." When he informed the battalion commander and the Cobra pilot, Wilkerson recalled, "that calmed everybody down, 'cause they realized that, had they shot rockets into that house, they probably would have killed all those people."

A similar situation played itself out with much grimmer consequences in a "semi-jungle, rice paddy area" in Binh Duong province. Once again, a ground commander declared the area a free fire zone, and this time Wilkerson didn't immediately tell his crew to disregard the order. "I fault myself for this to this day," he told us.

About 15 minutes later, as his helicopter broke from the jungle over a road, an ox cart they had spotted earlier came into view. "Before I said anything, my crew chief let off a burst of machine gun ammunition. And he was a very good shot. It went right into the wagon." By the time Wilkerson ordered him to cease fire, it was too late. "The long and short of it was there was a little girl in the wagon and we killed her. And that will be with me the rest of my life."

Even without direct clearance from Wilkerson, the helicopter crew chief was just carrying out U.S. policy as it was laid down at the command level — a point Wilkerson emphasized as he discussed his Vietnam War experience with the congressional subcommittee in June. In doing so, he also offered one of the essential truths of the Vietnam War: that following the U.S. military's "rules of engagement" could mean violating the laws of war and the basic tenets of humanity.

"Where the skeletons are buried…"

In a recent follow-up interview by email, Wilkerson reflected on the quality of moral outrage and on the value of the willingness to confront authority — in Vietnam and, decades later, in Washington.

"I was always sort of a maverick in that sense, bucking authority when I thought that authority was mistaken, particularly if it were an ethical mistake," he wrote. "I believe that one of the reasons Powell kept me around for 11 years of directly working for him was that unlike most people around him I would tell him what I thought in a nano-second — even if it went counter to what I believed he thought."

While Vietnam may have contributed to Wilkerson's urge to speak out, the primary impetus for his public comments and writings since 2005 has been the Bush administration itself. "I felt the incompetence, the deceit, and certain actions of the administration were actually hurting the nation, diminishing our real power in the world at a time when we needed all we could get."

Wilkerson acknowledges that those who spoke out against the Bush administration did so at their peril. "People have families to consider, positions, salaries, livelihoods. So these are not easy matters — particularly when increasingly in our republic we have stacked the deck ever higher in favor of those in power." As a kind of whistleblower (even out of power and out of the government), Wilkerson certainly exposed himself to potential retaliation. Unlike former CIA official Valerie Plame, among others, however, he sees no evidence that he was targeted.

Wilkerson self-deprecatingly suggests that he was spared because "I'm a small potato in the greater scheme of things and therefore few people listen to or heed my ramblings." But he notes another possible reason as well. "Those in power likely believe that I'm still close to Powell — and they very much do fear him as he knows where many of the skeletons are buried."

Truth-Telling

Since Wilkerson came forward in 2005, whistleblowers of all stripes have surfaced — from veterans who testified on Capitol Hill in May about violence perpetrated against Iraqi civilians, to high-level insiders willing, in the closing days of a lame-duck term, to go on record about internal battles over domestic spying.

Wilkerson doesn't consider his recent disclosure of his role in the death of a Vietnamese girl analogous to his later acts as a Bush administration truth-teller, but he acknowledges the value of making her killing public.

"It wasn't truth-telling in the sense that it wasn't known before. The battalion commander on the ground knew it, the troops knew it, my crew knew it — indeed, it went into intel [intelligence] reports as far as I know. But in the larger sense, yes, it adds to the wealth of literature and information that is in the public [realm] now… In short, there is ample evidence available to the public of the hell that war is, of the carnage, destruction, ruined souls, and devastation."

Revealing such experiences, Wilkerson hopes, will be especially useful for today's troops. "I believe young GIs should read as much as possible about what others have done in previous wars, particularly 'to keep our honor clean,' as the Marine hymn goes."

In speaking out about his Vietnam experience, Wilkerson has, indeed, added to the long record of civilian suffering as a result of America's wars abroad — offering a stark lesson for U.S. troops yet to be deployed overseas. And for troops who have already served in America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has set an example of the ways in which they can continue to serve the United States by speaking out about all aspects of their service, even the dark portions that Americans often don't want to hear.

The only question is: Will they have the courage to follow in his footsteps?

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of TomDispatch.com. His work has appeared in many publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published by Metropolitan Books. His website is Nick Turse.com.

Copyright 2008 Nick Turse

On June 19th, the New York Times broke the story in an article headlined "Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back: Rare No-Bid Contracts, A Foothold for Western Companies Seeking Future Rewards." Finally, after a long five years-plus, there was proof that the occupation of Iraq really did have something or other to do with oil. Quoting unnamed Iraqi Oil Ministry bureaucrats, oil company officials, and an anonymous American diplomat, Andrew Kramer of the Times wrote: "Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP… along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields."

The news caused a minor stir, as other newspapers picked up and advanced the story and the mainstream media, only a few years late, began to seriously consider the significance of oil to the occupation of Iraq.

As always happens when, for whatever reason, you come late to a major story and find yourself playing catch-up on the run, there are a few corrections and blind spots in the current coverage that might be worth addressing before another five years pass. In the spirit of collegiality, I offer the following leads for the mainstream media to consider as they change gears from no-comment to hot-pursuit when it comes to the story of Iraq’s most sought after commodity. I’m talking, of course, about that "sea of oil" on which, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz pointed out way back in May 2003, the month after Baghdad fell, Iraq "floats."

All the News That’s Fit to Print Department

In a June 30th follow-up piece, the Times’s Kramer cited U.S. officials (again unnamed) as acknowledging the following: "A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies…"

In addition, he asserted, this "disclosure… is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism." This scoop, however, reflected none of the evidence — long available — of the direct involvement of Bush administration and U.S. occupation officials in Iraq’s oil industry. In fact, since the taking of Baghdad in April 2003, the name of the game has been facilitating relationships between Iraq and U.S.-based and allied Western energy firms when it came to what President Bush used to delicately call Iraq’s "patrimony" of "natural resources."

For instance, almost a year ago, the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus drew attention to a call by Bush’s Commerce Department for "an international legal adviser who is fluent in Arabic ‘to provide expert input, when requested’ to ‘U.S. government agencies or to Iraqi authorities as they draft the laws and regulations that will govern Iraq’s oil and gas sector.’" The document went on to state that, "as part of a U.S. government inter-agency process, the U.S. Department of Commerce" would be "providing technical assistance to Iraq to create a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraq’s key economic sectors, starting with the mineral resources sector."

This was no aberration. Back in March 2006, for instance, the U.S. Army issued a solicitation for a two-year contract "to allow any organization or entity to support IRMO [Iraq Reconstruction Management Office] (U.S. Embassy Baghdad) to deliver an effective capacity development program utilizing predominantly U.S. and European firms, universities, institutes and professional organizations for personnel within the Iraqi Ministry of Oil…" This was to include participation in "development programs" offered by "private companies," long-term development through "commercial training entities in the United States and Europe for Oil and Gas specialists from the Ministry of Oil," and the implementation of "joint government-industry activities." Translated out of bureaucratic contract-ese, this meant that the U.S. would pay for programs to, among other things, enhance relationships between the Iraq Oil Ministry and… you guessed it… foreign firms.

In October 2006, the Department of Commerce (DOC) put out a call for experts that was nearly identical to the later solicitation discovered by Pincus. They were to aid a program facilitating "the creation of a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraqs [sic] key economic sectors, starting with the mineral resources sector" and provide "expertise to DOC, to other [U.S. government] agencies, or to Iraqi authorities on creating a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraqs [sic] oil and gas sector." Such an individual would, in fact, act "as a liaison between [the DOC’s technical assistance arm] and key stakeholders in Iraq (such as Iraq’s Ministry of Oil, or the oil authorities in Kurdistan)."

In fact, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency notes that, in 2006 and 2007, it funded a "$2.5 million multifaceted training program for the Iraqi Ministry of Oil" to "provide critical knowledge transfer and establish long-term relationships between the U.S. and Iraqi oil and gas industry public and private sector representatives."

It’s worth recalling that Iraq’s oil bureaucrats, about to receive such "critical knowledge" and "expertise," were not exactly neophytes in the world of oil management. They had effectively managed the Iraqi oil industry from the time the five oil majors now slated to receive those "service contracts" were tossed out of Iraq, when its industry was nationalized in 1972, until the invasion of 2003. They had kept the country’s oil infrastructure going even after the disaster of the First Gulf War of 1990-1991, even through all the desperate final years of sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The Pentagon-Petroleum Partnership

Another connection, long ignored in the mainstream, that reporters like Kramer might consider pursuing when it comes to the complex ties among Iraqi officials, the Bush administration, the Department of Defense (DoD), and Big Oil is the overt Pentagon connection. The DoD is, as national security expert Noah Shachtman notes, "the world’s largest energy consumer." And, when it comes to Pentagon gas-guzzling, its post-9/11 wars and occupations, especially in Iraq, have been a boon. While the Bush administration has been working overtime to clear the path for Big Oil’s return to Iraq, the Pentagon has been paying out staggering amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars to the very oil majors now negotiating with Iraq’s Ministry of Oil.

According to recent reports, the proposed Iraqi service contracts, which may be paid off in cash or crude oil, will be worth $500 million each. That is roughly what the Pentagon paid out on June 18th alone — the day before the Times broke its story about Big Oil’s return to Iraq — for natural gas and aviation fuel. Over half the total amount, in excess of $268 million, was handed over to one of the oil giants set to benefit from the Iraq deal: BP (formerly British Petroleum). Only days earlier, two of the other majors from the coterie of potential no-bid contractors, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, nabbed contracts from the DoD — in Exxon Mobil’s case, a $73 million deal for gasoline and fuel oil; in Chevron’s, a $16 million contract for aviation fuel.

Keep in mind, however, that — although you won’t learn this in your daily paper — this has long been standard operating procedure. Each of the oil giants named in the original New York Times piece — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, BP, and Chevron — regularly show up on the Pentagon’s payroll. In fact, last year, Iraq’s new fave five took home more than $4.1 billion from the DoD — with Shell leading the way with $2.1 billion.

It’s no secret that the Pentagon relies on vast quantities of oil to power the ships, planes, helicopters, heavy armor, and other ground vehicles essential to its occupation of Iraq, nor that it regularly pays out vast sums of taxpayer dollars to the very companies that U.S. advisors have aided in working out oil deals with the Iraq Oil Ministry. Despite ample evidence of the Pentagon connection, this circular and mutually-reinforcing relationship has been almost totally ignored in the mainstream media. But think of it this way: Your tax dollars have given the Pentagon the opportunity to use up oil — bought from the oil majors, in prodigious quantities — in order to create a situation in Iraq in which those same majors will soon receive no-bid contracts to make money off the Iraqi oil industry and, if all goes well, get far better, longer term deals in the near future.

One Big, Happy, Oily Family

It turns out that, despite that story the Times broke as if something totally new were on the horizon, the Bush administration has been facilitating ties between the Iraqi government and foreign oil companies for years, and the same companies now likely to nab a no-bid toehold in Iraq’s oilfields are intimately tied in to the Pentagon to the tune of billions of dollars annually. It’s worth noting that most of these firms have also been closely connected to Vice President Dick Cheney from the early days of the Bush administration. In fact, executives from Exxon Mobil, Shell, and BP met behind closed doors with Cheney’s energy task force in 2001, when the administration was pounding out its energy policies, according to a White House document obtained by the Washington Post. The Government Accountability Office also found that Chevron was just one of several companies that "gave detailed energy policy recommendations" to the task force.

It’s almost impossible to tease out all the interconnections between Big Oil, the White House, the Pentagon, and the Iraqi Ministry of Oil, since they are tied together in a web of contracts and mutually supporting relationships built up over many years. However, just in case the Times wants to set its staff loose on the recent past, there is no mistaking the many ties that exist. (A small tip for Times researchers: Skip the Times archives. They will be of little help.)

Should further evidence be necessary, when it comes to those U.S. advisors at work in Iraq, mainstream reporters need look no further than the solicitations sent out by the Iraqi Ministry of Oil itself. Consider, for instance, a recent "tender" for a contractor to drill "two deep exploration wells" in the South Rumaila and Luhais oil fields in the Basra District of southern Iraq. Not only does the solicitation (the deadline for which is July 27, 2008) contain special instructions for "Companies outside Iraq," but it asks potential contractors to send their bids to the Ministry of Oil not in Arabic, but "in the English language."

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, the Nation, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published by Metropolitan Books. His website, Nick Turse.com has been newly revamped and expanded.

Copyright 2008 Nick Turse

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.

With the basic Pentagon budget now clocking in at roughly $541 billion per year — before "supplemental" war funding for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the President’s Global War on Terror, as well as national security spending by other agencies, are factored in — even Lockheed’s hefty $28 billion take is a small percentage of the massive total. Obviously, significant sums of money are headed to other companies. However, most of them, including some of the largest, are all but unknown even to Pentagon-watchers and antiwar critics with a good grasp of the military industrial 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:

1. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings Inc.

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $3,360,739,032

This is billionaire investor Ronald Perelman’s massive holding company. It has "interests in a diversified portfolio of public and private companies" that includes the cosmetics maker Revlon and Panavision (the folks who make the cameras that bring you TV shows like 24 and CSI). MacAndrews & Forbes might, at first blush, seem an unlikely defense contractor, but one of those privately owned companies it holds is AM General — the folks who make the military Humvee. Today, says the company, nearly 200,000 Humvees have been "built and delivered to the U.S. Armed Forces and more than 50 friendly overseas nations." Humvees, however, are only part of the story.

AM General has also assisted Carnegie Mellon University researchers in developing robots for the Pentagon blue-skies outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s "Grand Challenge," an autonomous robot-vehicle competition. Last year, AM General and General Dynamics Land Systems, a subsidiary of mega-weapons maker General Dynamics, formed a joint venture "to compete for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program." AM General has even gone to war — dispatching its "field service representatives" and "maintenance technical representatives" to Iraq where they were embedded with U.S. troops.

As such, it’s hardly surprising that, earlier this year, the company received one of the Defense Logistics Agency’s Outstanding Readiness Support Awards. Nor should anyone be surprised to discover that a top MacAndrews & Forbes corporate honcho, Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Administrative Officer Barry F. Schwartz, contributed a total of at least $10,000 to Straight Talk America, the political action committee of presidential candidate John McCain, who famously said it would be "fine" with him if U.S. troops occupied Iraq for "maybe a hundred years" (if not "a thousand" or "a million").

Perhaps hedging their bets just a bit, MacAndrews & Forbes is diversifying into an emerging complex-within-the-Complex: homeland security. Recently, AM General sold the Department of Homeland Security’s Border Patrol "more than 100 HUMMER K-series trucks for use in border security operations."

2. DRS Technologies, Inc.

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,791,321,140

Incorporated during the Vietnam War, DRS Technologies has long been "a leading supplier of integrated products, services and support to military forces, intelligence agencies and prime contractors worldwide"; that is, they have been in the business of fielding products that enhance some of the DoD’s deadliest weaponry, including "DDG-51 Aegis destroyers, M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, M2A3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters, AH-64 Apache helicopters, F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and F-16 Fighting Falcon jet fighters, F-15 Eagle tactical fighters… [and] Ohio, Los Angeles and Virginia class submarines." They even have "contracts that support future military platforms, such as the DDG-1000 destroyer, CVN-78 next-generation aircraft carrier, Littoral Combat Ship and Future Combat System."

In addition to 2007’s haul of Pentagon dollars, DRS Technologies has continued to clean up in 2008 for a range of projects, including: a $16.2 million Army contract for refrigeration units; $51 million in new orders from the Army for thermal weapon sights (part of a five-year, $2.3-billion deal inked in 2007); a $10.1 million contract to build more than 140 M989A1 Heavy Expanded Mobility Ammunition Trailers (to transport "numerous and extremely heavy Multiple Launch Rocket System pods, palletized or non-palletized conventional ammunition and fuel bladders"); and a $23 million deal "to provide engineering support, field service support and general depot repairs for the Mast Mounted Sights (MMS) on OH-58 Kiowa Warrior attack helicopters," among many other contracts.

Fitch Ratings, an international credit rating agency, recently made a smart, if perhaps understated, point — one that actually fits all of these billion-dollar babies. DRS, it wrote, "has benefited from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan…"

3. Harris Corporation

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,501,163,834

Harris is "an international communications and information technology company serving government, defense and commercial markets in more than 150 countries." It has an annual revenue of more than $4 billion and an impressive roster of former military personnel and other military-corporate complex insiders on its payroll. Not only does Harris assist and do business with a number of the Pentagon’s largest contractors (like Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems), it is also an active participant in occupations abroad. On its website, the company boasts that "Harris technology has been used for a variety of commercial and defense applications, including the War in Iraq where the [Harris software] system provided detailed, 3-D representations of Baghdad and other key Iraqi cities."

Last year, Harris signed multiple deals with the military, including contracts to create a high-speed digital data link that transmits tactical video, radar, acoustic, and other sensor data from Navy MH-60R helicopters to their host ships. It also supplies the Navy with advanced computers that provide the "highly sophisticated moving maps and critical mission information via cockpit displays" used by flight crews.

In the first six months of this year, Harris has continued its hard work for the Complex. In January, the company was "selected by the U.S. Air Force for the Network and Space Operations and Maintenance (NSOM) program" for "a base contract and six options that bring the potential overall value to $410 million over six-and-a-half-years" to provide "operations and maintenance support to the 50th Space Wing’s Air Force Satellite Control Network at locations around the world."

In May, the company was "awarded a three-year, $20 million contract by [top 10 Pentagon contractor] L3 Communications to provide products and services for a next-generation Tactical Video Capture System (TVCS)" — a system that integrates real time video streams to enhance tactical training exercises — "that will support training at various U.S. Marine Corps locations across the U.S. and abroad." That same month, Harris was also "awarded a potential five-year, $85 million Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract from the U.S. Navy for multiband satellite communications terminals that will provide advanced communications for aircraft carriers and other large deck ships."

In addition, Harris is now hard at work in the Homeland. Not only did the company pick up more than $3 million from the Department of Homeland Security last year, but national security expert Tim Shorrock, in a 2007 CorpWatch article, "Domestic Spying, Inc.," specifically noted that Harris and fellow intelligence industry contractors "stand to profit from th[e] unprecedented expansion of America’s domestic intelligence system."

4. Navistar Defense

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,166,805,361

Still listed in Pentagon documents under its old name, International Military and Government, LLC, Navistar is the military subsidiary of Navistar International Corporation — "a holding company whose individual units provide integrated and best-in-class transportation solutions." While the company has served the U.S. military since World War I, it’s known, if at all, by the public for making some of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles designed to thwart Iraqi roadside bombs. As of April 2008, the U.S. military had "ordered 5,214 total production MaxxPro MRAP vehicles" from Navistar and, that same month, the company was awarded "a contract valued at more than $261 million… for engineering upgrades to the armor used on International MaxxPro MRAP vehicles."

But Navistar makes more than MRAPs. Just last month, the company signed a "multi-year contract valued at nearly $1.3 billion" with the U.S. Army "to provide Medium Tactical Vehicles and spare parts to the Afghanistan National Police, Afghan National Army, and the Iraqi Ministry of Defense." This followed a 2005 multi-year Army contract, worth $430 million, "for more than 2,900 vehicles and spare parts."

Quite obviously, the company is significantly, profitably, and proudly involved in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Tom Feifar, the Global Defense and Export general manager for Navistar Parts, put it late last year, "It’s an honor to be a part of the effort to support our troops."

5. Evergreen International Airlines

Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,105,610,723

A privately held global aviation services company, it has subsidiaries in related industries such as helicopter aviation (Evergreen Helicopters, Inc.), as well as a few unrelated efforts like producing "agricultural, nursery and wine products" (Evergreen Agricultural Enterprises, Inc.). Evergreen has been on the Pentagon’s payroll for a long time. Back in 2004, Ed Connolly, the executive vice president of Evergreen International Airlines, stated, "Evergreen has flown continuously for the [U.S. Air Force] Air Mobility Command since 1975 and is proud to continue its long standing history of supporting the U.S. Armed Forces global missions with quality and reliable services."

Not surprisingly, Evergreen has been intimately involved in the occupation of Iraq. In fact, in 2004, the company received "approximately 200 awards for its support of international airlift services during the Iraq war" from the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command. An Air Force general even handed out these medals and certificates of achievement to Evergreen’s employees.

In Amnesty International’s 2006 report, "Below the Radar: Secret Flights to Torture and ‘Disappearance,’" the human rights organization noted that Evergreen was one of only a handful of private companies with current permits to land at U.S. military bases worldwide. That same year, the company even airlifted FOX News personality Bill O’Reilly and his TV show crew to Kuwait and Iraq to meet and greet troops, sign books and pictures, and hand out trinkets. And just last year the company was part of a consortium, including such high profile commercial carriers as American, Delta, and United Airlines that the Pentagon awarded a "$1,031,154,403 firm fixed-price contract for international airlift services… [that] is expected to be completed September 2008."

Under the Radar

All told, these five stealth corporations from the military-corporate complex received more than $8.9 billion in taxpayer dollars in 2007. To put this into perspective, that sum is almost $2 billion more than the Bush administration’s proposed 2009 budget for the Environmental Protection Agency. Put another way, it’s about nine times what one-sixth of the world’s population spent on food last year.

Tens of thousands of defense contractors — from well-known "civilian" corporations (like Coca-Cola, Kraft, and Dell) to tiny companies — have fattened up on the Pentagon and its wars. Most of the time, large or small, they fly under the radar and are seldom identified as defense contractors at all. So it’s hardly surprising that firms like Harris and Evergreen, without name recognition outside their own worlds, can take in billions in taxpayer dollars without notice or comment in our increasingly militarized civilian economy.

When the history of the Iraq War is finally written, chances are that these five billion-dollar babies, and most of the other defense contractors involved in making the U.S. occupation possible, will be left out. Until we begin coming to grips with the role of such corporations in creating the material basis for an imperial foreign policy, we’ll never be able to grasp fully how the Pentagon works and why we so regularly make war in, and carry out occupations of, distant lands.

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, the Nation, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published by Metropolitan Books. His website, Nick Turse.com has been newly revamped and expanded. 

Copyright 2008 Nick Turse

"Liberal Hollywood" is a favorite whipping-boy of right-wingers who suppose the town and its signature industry are ever-at-work undermining the U.S. military. In reality, the military has been deeply involved with the film industry since the Silent Era. Today, however, the ad hoc arrangements of the past have been replaced by a full-scale one-stop shop, occupying a floor of a Los Angeles office building. There, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and the Department of Defense itself have established entertainment liaison offices to help ensure that Hollywood makes movies the military way.

What they have to trade, especially when it comes to blockbuster films, is access to high-tech, tax-payer funded, otherwise unavailable gear. What they get in return is usually the right to alter or shape scripts to suit their needs. If you want to see the fruits of this relationship in action, all you need to do is head down to your local multiplex. Chances are that Iron Man — the latest military-entertainment masterpiece — is playing on a couple of screens.

For the past three weeks, Iron Man –a film produced by its comic-book parent Marvel and distributed by Paramount Pictures — has cleaned up at the box office, taking in a staggering $222.5 million in the U.S. and $428.5 million worldwide. The movie, which opened with "the tenth biggest weekend box office performance of all time" and the second biggest for a non-sequel, has the added distinction of being the "best-reviewed movie of 2008 so far." For instance, in the New York Times, movie reviewer A.O. Scott called Iron Man "an unusually good superhero picture," while Roger Ebert wrote: "The world needs another comic book movie like it needs another Bush administration… [but] if we must have one more… ‘Iron Man’ is a swell one to have." There has even been nascent Oscar buzz.

Robert Downey Jr. has been nearly universally praised for a winning performance as playboy-billionaire-merchant-of-death-genius-inventor Tony Stark, head of Stark Industries, a fictional version of Lockheed or Boeing. In the film, Stark travels to Afghanistan to showcase a new weapon of massive destruction to American military commanders occupying that country. On a Humvee journey through the Afghan backlands, his military convoy is caught up in a deadly ambush by al-Qaeda stand-ins, who capture him and promptly subject him to what Vice President Dick Cheney once dubbed "a dunk in the water," but used to be known as "the Water Torture." The object is to force him to build his Jericho weapons system, one of his "masterpieces of death," in their Tora Bora-like mountain cave complex.

As practically everyone in the world already knows, Stark instead builds a prototype metal super-suit and busts out of his cave of confinement, slaughtering his terrorist captors as he goes. Back in the U.S., a born-again Stark announces that his company needs to get out of the weapons game, claiming he has "more to offer the world than making things blow up." Yet, what he proceeds to build is, of course, a souped-up model of the suit he designed in the Afghan cave. Back inside it, as Iron Man, he then uses it to "blow up" bad guys in Afghanistan, taking on the role of a kind of (super-)human-rights vigilante. He even tangles with U.S. forces in the skies over that occupied land, but when the Air Force’s sleek, ultra high-tech, F-22A Raptors try to shoot him down, he refrains from using his awesome powers of invention to blow them away. This isn’t the only free pass doled out to the U.S. military in the film.

Just as America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to bring various Vietnam analogies to mind, Iron Man has its own Vietnam pedigree. Before Tony Stark landed in Afghanistan in 2008, he first lumbered forth in Vietnam in the 1960s. That was, of course, when he was still just the clunky hero of the comic book series on which the film is based. Marvel’s metal man then battled that era’s American enemies of choice: not al-Qaedan-style terrorists, but communists in Southeast Asia.

Versions of the stereotypical evil Asians of Iron Man’s comic book world would appear almost unaltered on the big screen in 1978 in another movie punctuated by gunfire and explosions that also garnered great reviews. The Deer Hunter, an epic of loss and horror in Vietnam, eventually took home four Academy Awards, including Best Picture honors. Then, and since, however, the movie has been excoriated by antiwar critics for the way it turned history on its head in its use of reversed iconic images that seemingly placed all guilt for death and destruction in Vietnam on America’s enemies.

Most famously, it appropriated a then-unforgettable Pulitzer prize-winning photo of Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam’s national police chief, executing an unarmed, bound prisoner during the Tet Offensive with a point blank pistol shot to the head. In the film, however, it was the evil enemy which made American prisoners do the same to themselves as they were forced to play Russian Roulette for the amusement of their sadistic Vietnamese captors (something that had no basis in reality).

The film Iron Man is replete with such reversals, starting with the obvious fact that, in Afghanistan, it is Americans who have imprisoned captured members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban (as well as untold innocents) in exceedingly grim conditions, not vice-versa. It is they who, like Tony Stark, have been subjected to the Bush administration’s signature "harsh interrogation technique." While a few reviewers have offhandedly alluded to the eeriness of this screen choice, Iron Man has suffered no serious criticism for taking the imprisonment practices, and most infamous torture, of the Bush years and superimposing it onto America’s favorite evil-doers. Nor have critics generally thought to point out that, while, in the film, the nefarious Obadiah Stane, Stark’s right hand man, is a double-dealing arms dealer who is selling high-tech weapons systems to the terrorists in Afghanistan (and trying to kill Stark as well), two decades ago the U.S. government played just that role. For years, it sent advanced weapons systems — including Stinger missiles, one of the most high-tech weapons of that moment — to jihadis in Afghanistan so they could make war on one infidel superpower (the Soviet Union), before setting their sights on another (the United States). And while this took place way back in the 1980s, it shouldn’t be too hard for film critics to recall – since it was lionized in last year’s celebrated Tom Hanks film Charlie Wilson’s War.

In the cinematic Marvel Universe, however, the U.S. military, which runs the notorious prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan where so many have been imprisoned, abused, and, in some cases, have even died, receives a veritable get out of jail free card. And you don’t need to look very closely to understand why — or why the sleek U.S. aircraft in the film get a similar free pass from Iron Man, even when they attack him, or why terrorists and arms dealers take the fall for what the U.S. has done in the real world.

If they didn’t, you can be sure that Iron Man wouldn’t be involved in a blue-skies ballet with F-22A Raptors in the movie’s signature scene and that the filmmakers would never have been able to shoot at Edwards Air Force base — a prospect which could have all but grounded Iron Man, since, as director Jon Favreau put it, Edwards was "the best back lot you could ever have." Favreau, in fact, minced no words in his ardent praise for the way working with the Air Force gave him access to the "best stuff" and how filming on the base brought "a certain prestige to the film." Perhaps in exchange for the U.S. Air Force’s collaboration, there was an additional small return favor: Iron Man’s confidant, sidekick, and military liaison, Lt. Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes — another hero of the film — is now an Air Force man, not the Marine he was in the comic.

With the box office numbers still pouring in and the announcement of sequels to come, the arrangement has obviously worked out well for Favreau, Marvel, Paramount — and the U.S. Air Force. Before the movie was released, Master Sergeant Larry Belen, the superintendent of technical support for the Air Force Test Pilot School and one of many airmen who auditioned for a spot in the movie, outlined his motivation to aid the film: "I want people to walk away from this movie with a really good impression of the Air Force, like they got about the Navy seeing Top Gun."

Air Force captain Christian Hodge, the Defense Department’s project officer for Iron Man, may have put it best, however, when he predicted that, once the film appeared, the "Air Force is going to come off looking like rock stars." Maybe the Air Force hasn’t hit the Top Gun-style jackpot with Iron Man, but there can be no question that, in an American world in which war-fighting doesn’t exactly have the glitz of yesteryear, Iron Man is certainly a military triumph. As Chuck Vinch noted in a review published in the Air Force Times, "The script… will surely have the flyboy brass back at the Pentagon trading high fives — especially the scene in which Iron Man dogfights in the high clouds with two F-22 Raptors."

Coming on the heels of last year’s military-aided mega-spectacular Transformers, the Pentagon is managing to keep a steady stream of pro-military blockbusters in front of young eyes during two dismally unsuccessful foreign occupations that grind on without end. In his Iron Man review, Roger Ebert called the pre-transformation Tony Stark, "the embodiment of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against in 1961 — a financial superhero for whom war is good business, and whose business interests guarantee there will always be a market for war."

Here’s the irony that Ebert missed: What the film Iron Man actually catches is the spirit of the successor "complex," which has leapt not only into the cinematic world of superheroes, but also into the civilian sphere of our world in a huge way. Today, almost everywhere you look, whether at the latest blockbuster on the big screen or what’s on much smaller screens in your own home — likely made by a defense contractor like Sony, Samsung, Panasonic or Toshiba — you’ll find the Pentagon or its corporate partners. In fact, from the companies that make your computer to those that produce your favorite soft drink, many of the products in your home are made by Defense Department contractors — and, if you look carefully, you don’t even need the glowing eyes of an advanced "cybernetic helmet," like Iron Man’s, to see them.

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, the Nation, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published in the American Empire Project series by Metropolitan Books.

Copyright 2008 Nick Turse

Rick is a midlevel manager in a financial services company in New York City. Each day he commutes from Weehawken, New Jersey, a suburb only a stone’s throw from the Big Apple, where he lives with his wife, Donna, and his teenage son, Steven. A late baby boomer, Rick just missed the Vietnam era’s antiwar protests, but he’s been against the war in Iraq from the beginning. He thinks the Pentagon is out of control and considers the military-industrial complex a danger to the country. If you asked him, it’s a subject on which he would rate himself as knowledgeable. He puts effort into educating himself on such matters. He reads liberal websites, subscribes to progressive-minded magazines, and is a devotee of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In fact, he has no idea just how deep the Pentagon rabbit hole goes or how far down it his family already is.

Rick believes that, despite its long reach, the military-industrial complex is a discrete entity far removed from his everyday life. Now, if this were 1961, when outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the country about the "unwarranted influence" of the "military-industrial complex" and the "large arms industry" already firmly entrenched in the United States, Rick might be right. After all, he doesn’t work for one of the Pentagon’s corporate partners, like arms maker Lockheed Martin. He isn’t in the Army Reserve. He’s never attended a performance of the Marine Corps band (not to mention the Army’s, Navy’s, or Air Force’s music groups). But today’s geared-up, high-tech Complex is nothing like the olive-drab outfit of Eisenhower’s day: It reaches deeper into American lives and the American psyche than Eisenhower could ever have imagined. The truth is that, at every turn, in countless, not-so-visible ways Rick’s life is wrapped up with the military.

So wake up with Rick and sample a single spring morning as the alarm on his Sony (Department of Defense contractor) clock interrupts his final dream of the night. Donna is already up and dressed in fitness apparel by Danskin (a Pentagon supplier that received more than $780,000 in DoD dollars in 2004 and another $456,000 in 2005) and Hanes Her Way (made by defense contractor and cake seller Sara Lee Corporation, which took in more than $68 million from the DoD in 2006). Committed to a healthy lifestyle, she’s wearing sneakers from (DoD contractor) New Balance and briskly jogging on a treadmill made by (DoD contractor) True Fitness Technology.

Rick drags himself to the bathroom (fixtures by Pentagon contractor Kohler, purchased at defense contractor Home Depot). There, he squeezes the Charmin, brushes with Crest toothpaste, washes his face with Noxzema; then, hopping into the shower, he lathers up with Zest and chooses Donna’s Herbal Essences over Head & Shoulders — "What the hell," he mutters, "I deserve an organic experience." (The manufacturer of each of these products, Procter & Gamble, is among the top 100 defense contractors and raked in a cool $362,461,808 from the Pentagon in 2006.)

In go his (DoD supplier) Bausch and Lomb contact lenses and down goes a Zantac (from DoD contractor GlaxoSmithKline) for his ulcer. Heading back to the bedroom, he finds Donna finished with her workout and making the bed — with the TV news on — and lends her a hand. (Their headboard was purchased from Thomasville Furniture, the mattress from Sears, the pillows were made by Harris Pillow Supply, all Pentagon contractors.) They exchange grim glances as, on their Samsung set (another DoD contractor) the Today Show chronicles the latest in chaos in Iraq. "Thank god we never supported this war," Rick says, thinking of the antiwar rally Donna and he attended even before the invasion was launched. NBC, which produces the Today Show, is owned by General Electric, the 14th-largest defense contractor in the United States, to the tune of $2.3 billion from the DoD in 2006, and has worked on such weapons systems as the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters and F/A-18 Hornet multimission fighter/attack aircraft, both in use in Iraq.

A Who’s Who of Your Life

Of course, the Pentagon has long poured U.S. tax dollars into private coffers to arm and outfit the military and enable it to function. At the time of Eisenhower’s farewell address, New York Times reporter Jack Raymond noted that the Pentagon was spending "$23,000,000,000 a year for services and procurement of guns, missiles, airplanes, electronic devices, vehicles, tanks, ammunition, clothing and other military goods." Today, that would equal around $200 billion. In 2007, the Department of Defense’s stated budget was $439 billion. Counting the costs of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number jumps to over $600 billion. Factoring in all the many related activities carried out by other agencies, actual U.S. national security spending is nearly $1 trillion per year.

Back in Eisenhower’s day, arms dealers and mega-corporations, such as Lockheed and General Motors, held sway over the corporate side of the military-industrial complex. Companies like these still play an extremely powerful role today, but they are dwarfed by the sheer number of contractors that stretch from coast to coast and across the globe. Looking at the situation in 1970, almost 10 years after Eisenhower’s farewell speech, Sidney Lens, a journalist and expert on U.S. militarism, noted that there were 22,000 prime contractors doing business with the U.S. Department of Defense. Today, the number of prime contractors tops 47,000 with subcontractors reaching well over the 100,000 mark, making for one massive conglomerate touching nearly every sector of society, from top computer manufacturer Dell (the 50th-largest DoD contractor in 2006) to oil giant ExxonMobil (the 30th) to package-shipping titan FedEx (the 26th).

In fact, the Pentagon payroll is a veritable who’s who of the top companies in the world: IBM; Time-Warner; Ford and General Motors; Microsoft; NBC and its parent company, General Electric; Hilton and Marriott; Columbia TriStar Films and its parent company, Sony; Pfizer; Sara Lee; Procter & Gamble; M&M Mars and Hershey; Nestlé; ESPN and its parent company, Walt Disney; Bank of America; and Johnson & Johnson among many other big-name firms. But the difference between now and then isn’t only in scale. As this list suggests, Pentagon spending is reaching into previously neglected areas of American life: entertainment, popular consumer brands, sports. This penetration translates into a remarkable variety of forms of interaction with the public.

Rick and Donna’s home is full of the fruits of this incursion. As they putter around in their kitchen, getting ready for the day ahead, they move from the wall cabinets (purchased at DoD contractor Lowe’s Home Center) to the refrigerator (from defense contractor Maytag), choosing their breakfast from a cavalcade of products made by Pentagon contractors. These companies that, quite literally, feed the Pentagon’s war machine, are the same firms that fill the shelves of America’s kitchens.

Today, just about every supermarket staple — from Ballpark Franks (Sara Lee) and Eggo waffles (Kelloggs) to Jell-O (Kraft) and Coffee Mate (Nestle) — has ties to the Pentagon. The same holds for many household appliances. In Rick and Donna’s dining room, a small Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner buzzes around the floor. Rick thought it would be cute to have the little mechanical device trolling around the house making their hectic lives just a tad easier. Little did he know that Roomba’s manufacturer, iRobot, takes in U.S. tax dollars ($51 million of them from the DoD in 2006, more than a quarter of the company’s revenue) and turns them into PackBots, tactical robots used by U.S. troops occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and Warrior X700s — 250-pound semiautonomous robots armed with heavy weapons such as machine guns, that are now deployed in Iraq.

In addition to selling millions of Roombas to civilian consumers, the company uses government tax dollars to make money on the civilian side of its business. According to the company’s December 2006 annual report (which listed as its "Research Support Agencies" the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA], the U.S. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command, and the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center), government funding "allows iRobot to accelerate the development of multiple technologies." Yet iRobot retains "ownership of patents and know-how and [is] generally free to develop other commercial products, including consumer and industrial products, utilizing the technologies developed during these projects." It’s a very sweet deal. And iRobot is hardly alone.

Entering the Digital World with Guns Blazing

Sitting on the dining room table is Rick’s HP (Hewlett-Packard) notebook computer. HP is another company that has grown its civilian know-how with generous military contracts, like the multiyear, multimillion-dollar deal it signed in 2005 with DARPA to "develop technologies to improve the performance of mission-critical computer networks used during combat and other vital operations." A spokesman for the company noted, "Our work for DARPA is aimed at significantly improving the performance of the Internet…. If we can successfully create new approaches to the way Internet traffic is detected and routed, we may start seeing the Internet used as the de facto communications and information network in areas where it previously would’ve been thought too risky." Success would certainly translate into more lucrative civilian work, as well.

Meanwhile, Rick and Donna’s son, Steven, is still upstairs, having a hard time tearing himself away from his computer game. His room is a veritable showcase of the new entertainment/sports/high tech/pop culture dimension of the twenty-first-century Complex: there are NASCAR posters (in 2005, more than $38 million in taxpayer money was spent on U.S. armed forces’ racecars); National Football League (NFL) jerseys and baseball caps (the NFL has partnered with the Pentagon to create military profiles aired during TV broadcasts of regular and postseason games, while individual NFL teams have hosted "military appreciation" events); X-Men comic books (the Pentagon teamed up with Marvel Comics to produce limited-edition, "military-exclusive" comic books, with pro-Pentagon themes, that are now sought after by civilian collectors); and a wastebasket filled with empty Mountain Dew bottles (the Air Force was one of the sponsors of the Dew Action Sports Tour, a traveling show featuring skateboarding, BMX, and freestyle motocross contests).

During Ike’s time, when civilian firms like Ford and AT&T were the big military suppliers, the payroll showed an utter lack of cool companies. Now, the Pentagon is reaching into virgin territory in new ways with new partners. Today, hip firms like Apple, Google, and Starbucks are also on DoD contractors’ lists. And while Ike’s complex was typified by brass bands and patriotic parades, today’s variant is a flashy digitized world of video games, extreme sports, and everything cool that appeals to potential young recruits.

Steven finally shuts down Tropico: Paradise Island — a nation-building simulation video game where the player, as "El Presidente," attempts to lure tourists to his/her fun-in-the-sun resort. Neither father nor son is remotely aware that the software maker, Breakaway Games, does taxpayer-funded work for such military clients as DARPA, the Joint Forces Command, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the United States Air Force — as well as having developed 24 Blue, a simulator used to improve aircraft carrier-based operations. They are blissfully unaware of even the existence of Breakaway’s Pentagon-funded video game that could conceivably lead to more effective bombing of targets abroad.

Steven grabs his iPod MP3 player (from DoD contractor Apple Computer) and heads downstairs to leave with his father. On his way to the door, Rick goes to his bookshelf and scans a selection of progressive texts whose publishers just happen to be DoD contractors, including a reissue of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin), Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America by Lou Dubose and Molly Ivins (Random House), and Jon Stewart’s America (The Book) (Warner Books), before choosing the Hugo Chavez-approved Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky (ahem, Metropolitan Books from Macmillan publishers). As the last one out, Donna sets the ADT alarm system. (ADT took in more than $16 million from the Pentagon in 2006, while its parent company, Tyco International, cleaned up to the tune of over $187 million.)

The Pentagon on Wheels

Rick and Steven hop into the Saturn parked in the driveway. Rick is proud of his car choice — after all, Saturn has such a people-friendly (even anti–Detroit establishment) vibe. Admittedly, he is aware that General Motors owns not only the Saturn but the Hummer brand — the civilian version of the U.S. military’s Humvee — but he believes that, in this world, you can’t be squeaky-clean perfect. But Hummer isn’t the half of it.

How could Rick have known that, in 1999, GM formally entered the Army’s COMBATT (COMmercially BAsed Tactical Truck) vehicle development program? Or that GM actually had its own military division, General Motors Defense, when his Saturn was made? Nor could Rick have known that GM Defense formed a joint venture with defense giant General Dynamics to create the GM-GDLS Defense Group (which was awarded in excess of $1.5 billion in DoD contract dollars in 2005). Or that GM took in $87 million from the Pentagon in 2006. Or that, in 2007, GM entered into a 50-year lease agreement to build a $100 million test track on the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Grounds. Or that the maker of his Saturn’s tires, Goodyear, was America’s 69th-largest defense contractor in 2004, with DoD contracts worth nearly $357 million.

Rick might be an aging baby boomer, but he still tries to look cool (to Steven’s embarrassment). As he pulls the Saturn out of the driveway, he dons a pair of Oakley sunglasses. Oakley supplies goggles and boots to U.S. troops. And while the military purchased goggles from firms such as the American Optical Company during the 1940s, it’s unlikely that anyone ever called that company’s designs "badass," as Powder, a skiing magazine that runs Army recruitment ads on its website, called one of Oakley’s products.

Driving along, Rick glances over at his son. "Are those the Wolverine boots we just got you?"

"Yeah, Dad," answers Steven, looking down at his now-ratty footwear.

Rick’s already thinking about the next pair he’ll need to buy his son, not about the five-year, multimillion-dollar contract the company signed in 2003 to supply the Army with an upgraded infantry combat boot, or the other deals, worth tens of millions of dollars, that Wolverine signed with the Pentagon in 2004, 2006, and 2007.

As they drive to his school, Steven perks up. "That’s it, Dad!" he says, pointing at a Ford Escape that just pulled into the high school parking lot. "Whaddaya say, Dad? Next year, when I get my license?"

Rick remembers hearing on the radio that Ford makes an Escape hybrid-electric vehicle. "You know what, son? I think maybe we just might look into it." He experiences a little burst of satisfaction. Not only can he feel like a good dad, but as a bonus he can even help the environment. (Ford Motor Company and its subsidiaries have, of course, garnered rafts of defense contracts and aided the Army and Navy in various projects.)

Overjoyed, Steven shoots his father a big smile as he opens the car door, "Alright! Well, I’ll see you tonight, Dad."

"Do you have your cell phone?" Rick asks. Steven whips a Motorola from his pocket. (Motorola made almost $308 million from the Department of Defense in 2004, while the phone’s service provider, Verizon, took home more than $128 million in DoD contracts, and $50 million more from the Department of Homeland Security, in 2006.)

The Real Matrix

With Steven at school, Rick heads for work. He gives the local Exxon station (ExxonMobil took in more than $1.17 billion in DoD dollars in 2006) a pass and instead pulls into Shell, which likes to portray itself as a kinder, greener oil giant. As he signs the receipt of his Bank of America credit card (a firm which issues special credit cards to Pentagon employees to streamline the process of buying supplies for the DoD), Rick has no way of knowing that Shell’s parent company, N.V. Koninklijke Nederlansche, was the 31st-largest defense contractor in 2006, reaping more than $1.15 billion dollars in DoD contracts.

Entering the Holland Tunnel on his way to Manhattan, Rick realizes that, with Steven driving next year, he can start taking mass transit to work. The PATH train into the city — recently restored under the watchful eye of Bechtel, the 15th-largest defense contractor of 2004 and the recipient of more than $1.7 billion in DoD contracts that year — will, he believes, lessen his "footprint" on the planet.

Keep in mind, Rick is now only a couple of hours into his long day. In fact, no part of the hours to come will be lacking in products produced by Pentagon contractors — from the framed photographs of Donna and Steven on his desk (taken by an Olympus camera and printed on Kodak paper) to the beer he drinks with lunch (Budweiser) to most of the products around his office, including: 3M Post-It notes, Microsoft Windows software, Lexmark printers, Canon photocopiers, AT&T telephones, Maxwell House Coffee, Kidde fire extinguishers, Xerox fax machines, IBM servers, paper from International Paper, Duracell batteries, an LG Electronics refrigerator, and paper towels by Marcal Paper Mills.

Rick is, of course, a fiction, but the rest of us aren’t — and neither is the existence of the real Matrix.

In the 1999 sci-fi movie classic of the same name, the Matrix is an artificial reality (resembling the Western world at the dawn of the twenty-first century) created by sentient machines. Humans, who are grown as energy sources and wired in to the Matrix using cybernetic implants, are kept in a coma-like state — ignorant of the very existence of the artificial reality that they "live" in. In explaining the situation to Neo, the movie’s protagonist, Morpheus, a leader of a group of unplugged free humans who wage a guerrilla struggle against the machines, reveals:

"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."

At one point in his farewell speech, Eisenhower presaged this point, suggesting, "The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — [of the conjunction of the military establishment and the large arms industry] is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government." But only Hollywood has yet managed to capture the essence of today’s omnipresent, all-encompassing, cleverly hidden system of systems that invades all our lives; this new military-industrial-technological-entertainment-academic-scientific- media-intelligence-homeland security-surveillance-national security-corporate complex that has truly taken hold of America.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, Adbusters, the Nation, and regularly for Tomdispatch. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, has just been published in Metropolitan Books’ American Empire Project series. His website is NickTurse.com. To view a short video interview with Turse, click here.

From the Book The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives by Nick Turse. Copyright © 2008 by Nick Turse. Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Biological weapons delivered by cyborg insects. It sounds like a nightmare scenario straight out of the wilder realms of science fiction, but it could be a reality, if a current Pentagon project comes to fruition.

Right now, researchers are already growing insects with electronics inside them. They’re creating cyborg moths and flying beetles that can be remotely controlled. One day, the U.S. military may field squadrons of winged insect/machine hybrids with on-board audio, video or chemical sensors. These cyborg insects could conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions on distant battlefields, in far-off caves, or maybe even in cities closer to home, and transmit detailed data back to their handlers at U.S. military bases.

Today, many people fear U.S. government surveillance of email and cell phone communications. With this program, the Pentagon aims to exponentially increase the paranoia. Imagine a world in which any insect fluttering past your window may be a remote-controlled spy, packed with surveillance equipment. Even more frightening is the prospect that such creatures could be weaponized, and the possibility, according to one scientist intimately familiar with the project, that these cyborg insects might be armed with "bio weapons."

For the past 50 years, work by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — the Pentagon’s blue skies research outfit — has led to some of the most lethal weaponry in the U.S. arsenal: from Hellfire-missile-equipped Predator drones and stealth fighters and bombers to Tomahawk cruise missiles and Javelin portable "fire and forget" guided missiles. For the last several years, DARPA has funneled significant sums of money into a very different kind of guided missile project, its Hybrid Insect MEMS (HI-MEMS) program. This project is, according to DARPA, "aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems [MEMS] inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis." Put simply, the creation of cyborg insects: part bug, part bot.

Bugs, Bots, Borgs and Bio-Weapons

This past August, at DARPA’s annual symposium — DARPATech — HI-MEMS program manager Amit Lal, an associate professor on leave from Cornell University, explained that his project aims to transform "insects into unmanned air-vehicles." He described the research this way: "[T]he HI-MEMS program seeks to grow MEMS and electronics inside the insect pupae. The new tissue forms around the insertions, making the bio-electronic interface long-lasting and reliable." In other words, micro-electronics are inserted at the pupal stage of metamorphosis so that they can be integrated into the insects’ bodies as they develop, creating living robots that can be remotely controlled after the insect emerges from its cocoon.

According to the latest reports, work on this project is progressing at a rapid pace. In a recent phone interview, DARPA spokesperson Jan Walker said, "We’re focused on determining what the best kinds of MEMS systems are; what the best MEMS system would be for embedding; what the best time is for embedding."

This month, Rob Coppinger, writing for the aerospace trade publication Flight International, reported on new advances announced at the "1st US-Asian Assessment and Demonstration of Micro-Aerial and Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology" — a Pentagon-sponsored conference. "In the latest work," he noted, "a Manduca moth had its thorax truncated to reduce its mass and had a MEMS component added where abdominal segments would have been, during the larval stage." But, as he pointed out, Robert Michelson, a principal research engineer, emeritus at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, laid out "on behalf of DARPA" some of the obstacles that remain. Among them were short insect life-spans and the current inability to create these cyborgs outside specialized labs.

DARPA’s professed long-term goal for the HI-MEMS program is the creation of "insect cyborgs" capable of carrying "one or more sensors, such as a microphone or a gas sensor, to relay back information gathered from the target destination" — in other words, the creation of military micro-surveillance systems.

In a recent email interview, Michelson — who has previously worked on numerous military projects, including DARPA’s "effort to develop an ‘Entomopter’ (mechanical insect-like multimode aerial robot)" — described the types of sensor packages envisioned, but only in a minimalist fashion, as a "[w]ide array of active and passive devices." However in "Insect Cyborgs: A New Frontier in Flight Control Systems," a 2007 article in the academic journal Proceedings of SPIE, Cornell researchers noted that cyborg insects could be used as "autonomous surveillance and reconnaissance vehicles" with on-board "[s]ensory systems such as video and chemical."

Surveillance applications, however, may only be the beginning. Last year, Jonathan Richards, reporting for The Times, raised the specter of the weaponization of cyborg insects in the not-too-distant future. As he pointed out, Rodney Brooks, the director of the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicated that the Pentagon is striving toward a major expansion in the use of non-traditional air power — like unmanned aerial vehicles and cyborg insects — in the years ahead. "There’s no doubt their things will become weaponized," he explained, "so the question [is]: should they [be] given targeting authority?" Brooks went on to assert, according to The Times, that it might be time to consider rewriting international law to take the future weaponization of such "devices" into account.

But how would one weaponize a cyborg insect? On this subject, Robert Michelson was blunt: "Bio weapons."

Cyborg Ethics

Michelson wouldn’t elaborate further, but any program using bio-weapons would immediately raise major legal and ethical questions. The 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention outlawed the manufacture and possession of bio-weapons, of "[m]icrobial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin… that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes" and of "[w]eapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict." In fact, not only did President George W. Bush claim that Iraq’s supposed production and possession of biological weapons was a justification for an invasion of that nation, but he had previously stated, "All civilized nations reject as intolerable the use of disease and biological weapons as instruments of war and terror."

Reached for comment, however, DARPA’s Jan Walker insisted that her agency’s focus was only on "fundamental research" when it came to cyborg insects. Although the focus of her agency is, in fact, distinctly on the future — the technology of tomorrow — she refused to look down the road when it came to weaponizing insect cyborgs or arming them with bio-weapons. "I can’t speculate on the future," was all she would say.

Michelson is perfectly willing to look into future, especially on matters of cyborg insect surveillance, but on the horizon for him are technical issues when it comes to the military use of bug bots. "Surveillance goes on anyway by other means," he explained, "so a new method is not the issue. If there are ethical or legal issues, they are ones of ‘surveillance,’ not of the ‘surveillance platform.’"

Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights and civil liberties group, sees that same future in a different light. Cyborg insects, he says, are an order of magnitude away from today’s more standard surveillance technologies like closed circuit television. "CCTV is mostly deployed in public and in privately owned public spaces. An insect could easily fly into your garden or sit outside your bedroom window," he explained. "To make matters worse, you’d have no idea these devices were there. A CCTV camera is usually an easily recognizable device. Robotic surveillance insects might be harder to spot. And having to spot them wouldn’t necessarily be good for our mental health."

Does Michelson see any ethical or legal dilemmas resulting from the future use of weaponized cyborg insects? "No, not unless they could breed new cyborg insects, which is not possible," he explained. "Genetic engineering will be the ethical and legal battleground, not cybernetics."

Battle Beetles and Hawkish Hawkmoths

Weaponized or not, moths are hardly the only cyborg insects that may fly, creep, or crawl into the military’s future arsenal. Scientists from Arizona State University and elsewhere, working under a grant from the Office of Naval Research and DARPA, "are rearing beetle species at various oxygen levels to attempt to produce beetles with greater-than-normal size and payload capacity." Earlier this year, some of the same scientists published an article on their DARPA-funded research titled "A Cyborg Beetle: Insect Flight Control Through an Implantable, Tetherless Microsystem." They explained that, by implanting "multiple inserted neural and muscular stimulators, a visual stimulator, a polyimide assembly and a microcontroller" in a 2 centimeter long, 1-2 gram green June beetle, they were "capable of modulating [the insect’s] flight starts, stops, throttle/lift, and turning." They could, that is, drive an actual beetle. However, unlike the June bug you might find on a porch screen or in a garden, these sported on-board electronics powered by cochlear implant batteries.

DARPA-funded HI-MEMS research has also been undertaken at other institutions across the country and around the world. For example, in 2006, researchers at Cornell, in conjunction with scientists at Pennsylvania State University and the Universidad de Valparaiso, Chile, received an $8.4 million DARPA grant for work on "Insect Cyborg Sentinels." According to a recent article in New Scientist, a team led by one of the primary investigators on that grant, David Stern, screened a series of video clips at a recent conference in Tucson, Arizona demonstrating their ability to control tethered tobacco hawkmoths through "flexible plastic probes" implanted during the pupal stage. Simply stated, the researchers were able to remotely control the moths-on-a-leash, manipulating the cyborg creatures’ wing speed and direction.

Robo-Bugs

Cyborg insects are only the latest additions to the U.S. military’s menagerie. As defense tech-expert Noah Shachtman of Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog has reported, DARPA projects have equipped rats with electronic equipment and remotely controlled sharks, while the military has utilized all sorts of animals, from bomb-detecting honeybees and "chickens used as early-warning sensors for chemical attacks" to guard dogs and dolphins trained to hunt mines. Additionally, he notes, the DoD’s emphasis on the natural world has led to robots that resemble dogs, monkeys that control robotic limbs with their minds, and numerous other projects inspired by nature.

But whatever other creatures they favor, insects never seem far from the Pentagon’s dreams of the future. In fact, Shachtman reported earlier this year that "Air Force scientists are looking for robotic bombs that look — and act — like swarms of bugs and birds." He went on to quote Colonel Kirk Kloeppel, head of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s munitions directorate, who announced the Lab’s interest in "bio-inspired munitions," in "small, autonomous" machines that would "provide close-in [surveillance] information, in addition to killing intended targets."

This month, researcher Robert Wood wrote in IEEE Spectrum about what he believes was "the first flight of an insect-size robot." After almost a decade of research, Wood and his colleagues at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory are now creating small insect-like robots that will eventually be outfitted "with onboard sensors, flight controls, and batteries… to nimbly flit around obstacles and into places beyond human reach." Like cyborg insect researchers, Wood is DARPA-funded. Last year, in fact, the agency selected him as one of 24 "rising stars" for a "young faculty awards" grant.

Asked about the relative advantages of cyborg insects compared to mechanical bugs, Robert Michelson noted that "robotic insects obey without innate or external influences" and "they can be mass produced rapidly." He cautioned, however, that they are extremely limited power-wise. Insect cyborgs, on the other hand, "can harvest energy and continue missions of longer duration." However, they "may be diverted from their task by stronger influences"; must be grown to maturity and so may not be available when needed; and, of course, are mortal and run the risk of dying before they can be employed as needed.

The Future is Now

There is plenty of technical information about the HI-MEMS program available in the scientific literature. And if you make inquiries, DARPA will even direct you to some of the relevant citations. But while it’s relatively easy to learn about the optimal spots to insert a neural stimulator in a green June beetle ("behind the eye, in the flight control area of the insect brain") or an electronic implant in a tobacco hawkmoth ("the main flight powering muscles… in the dorsal-thorax"), it’s much harder to discover the likely future implications of this sci-fi sounding research.

The "final demonstration goal" — the immediate aim — of DARPA’s HI-MEMS program "is the delivery of an insect within five meters of a specific target located a hundred meters away, using electronic remote control, and/or global positioning system (GPS)." Right now, DARPA doesn’t know when that might happen. "We basically operate phase to phase," says Walker. "So, it kind of depends on how they do in the current phase and we’ll make decisions on future phases."

DARPA refuses to examine anything but research-oriented issues. As a result, its Pentagon-funded scientists churn out inventions with potentially dangerous, if not deadly, implications without ever fully considering — let alone seeking public or expert comment on — the future ramifications of new technologies under production.

"The people who build this equipment are always going to say that they’re just building tools, that there are legitimate uses for them, and that it isn’t their fault if the tools are abused," says the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Eckersley. "Unfortunately, we’ve seen that governments are more than willing to play fast-and-loose with the legal bounds on surveillance. Unless and until that changes, we’d urge researchers to find other projects to work on."

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, has just been published in Metropolitan Books’ American Empire Project series. His website is NickTurse.com

Copyright 2008 Nick Turse

Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com interviews Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How The Military Invades Our Everyday Lives.

In the late 1990s, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon — a game in which the goal was to connect the actor Kevin Bacon to any other actor, living or dead, through films or television shows in no more than six steps — became something of a phenomenon. Spread via the Internet (before becoming a board game and a book), Six Degrees has taken its place in America’s pop culture pantheon among favorite late-night drunken pursuits.

Here is a new variant of the game: The goal is to connect Kevin Bacon to the Pentagon. A commonsense approach would be to consider Bacon’s military roles — the ROTC cadet in his first feature film, the 1978 comedy classic Animal House, for example, or the Marine Corps prosecutor, Captain Jack Ross, in the 1992 film A Few Good Men. But the game isn’t as easy as it looks. Animal House was hardly a pro-military project and the Department of Defense actually denied A Few Good Men access to its facilities. The script, the Pentagon claimed, reinforced "the conclusion that not only is criminal harassment a commonplace and accepted practice within the Marine Corps, but that it requires a sister military service to uncover the wrongdoings…" A spokesman for the film understood why: "It is certainly not a recruiting film," he commented.

So does that mean game over? Perish the thought. In reality, there are no degrees of separation between Bacon and the Pentagon because the actor began his career in a "recruiting film" — a real one. As Bacon recalled: "After the [Vietnam] war was over in [19]75, I was already thinking about becoming an actor and I got sent out on this Army recruiting film. It was a soft-sell kind of thing. I was a guy getting out of high school who didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, so I took the gig. It was my very first paying acting job."

As it happens, however, the military puts Bacon to shame when it comes to connections in Tinseltown. The Pentagon might, in fact, be thought of as the ultimate Hollywood insider — a direct result of the ever-expanding military-corporate complex or "The Complex" as I call it in my new book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives.

So let’s play a new version of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, with the military standing in for Bacon. The object is to follow a few of the thousands of linkages and connections between Hollywood and the military that have made the Department of Defense a genuine legend of the silver screen, from the Silent Era to the ramped-up military-movie complex of today, ending with — who else? — Kevin Bacon. Just sit back with a big bucket of popcorn and enjoy the show…

Thirty Seconds Over Hollywood

Let’s go back to 1915, when, in response to a request for assistance, U.S. Secretary of War John Weeks ordered the army to provide every reasonable courtesy to D. W. Griffith’s pro–Ku Klux Klan epic Birth of a Nation. The Army came through with more than 1,000 cavalry troops and a military band. The film featured George Beranger, who would go on to star with Humphrey Bogart and Glen Cavender in San Quentin (1937) — in which a former Army officer is hired to impose military discipline on the infamous prison. Cavender had also appeared alongside actor/director Syd Chaplin, Charlie’s brother, in A Submarine Pirate (1915), for which the Navy provided a submarine, a gunboat, and the use of the San Diego Navy Yard. (The film was even approved to be shown in Navy recruiting stations.)

Syd Chaplin later starred in the non-military A Little Bit of Fluff (1928) with Edmund Breon, who appeared in the 1930 World War I aviation epic The Dawn Patrol. That film was written by John Monk Saunders, who penned another World War I drama, Wings (1927), featuring Gary Cooper. Wings received major support from the War Department (back in the days before it was called the Defense Department) and won the first Academy Award for Best Picture.

Gary Cooper provides the link to Sergeant York, a 1941 film directed by World War I Army Air Corps veteran (and The Dawn Patrol director) Howard Hawks that was denounced by many as war-mongering propaganda. Hawks went on to direct actor Ray Montgomery in Air Force (1943), a Warner Brothers’ film about a bomber crew serving in the Pacific, which received assistance from the Army Air Corps. In fact, the War Department even fast-tracked a review of the script because the film was deemed "a special Air Corps recruiting job."

That same year, Montgomery also played a bit part, alongside Humphrey Bogart, in Warner Brothers’ Action in the North Atlantic (assistance from the Navy). Bogart additionally starred with Lloyd Bridges in Columbia Pictures’ 1943 Sahara, a World War II epic made with the full cooperation of the U.S. Army. Bridges would go on to appear with both Van Johnson and Spencer Tracy in the non-military Plymouth Adventures (1952). But long before that, both Johnson and Tracy took off in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a film celebrating the 1942 "Doolittle Raid" — a U.S. terror-bombing effort that decimated civilian sites including factories, schools and even a hospital in Japan — made, of course, with the assistance of the War Department.

Van Johnson fought his way through another MGM production, Battleground (1949), which not only featured tanks and trucks loaned by the Army, but, as extras, twenty members of the 101st Airborne Division. Battleground co-starred John Hodiak, who, that same year, played alongside Jimmy Stewart in the World War II adventure film Malaya. Stewart actually enlisted in the Air Force in World War II, then served in the Air Force Reserve, and retired as a brigadier general. While in the Reserves, he flew high in Strategic Air Command (1955), a film conceived at the urging of Curtis LeMay, the actual commander of the Air Force’s actual Strategic Air Command (SAC). Even with Cold War–era demands on its equipment, SAC provided Paramount with B-36 bombers, B-47 jet bombers and a full colonel as a technical adviser.

But that was just one of SAC’s (and LeMay’s) connections to Hollywood. The 1963 film A Gathering of Eagles, for example, received SAC’s wholehearted support. Written by Battleground screenwriter Robert Pirosh and featuring matinee idol Rock Hudson, it was praised for its realism by none other than LeMay.

Rock Hudson later starred with John Wayne in The Undefeated (1969), but not before "the Duke" made his military-entertainment masterpiece The Green Berets (1968), which enjoyed the full backing of the Vietnam-embattled Department of Defense. With loads of military input, The Green Berets proved to be, said Variety, a "whammo" and "boffo" box-office success. Critics, however, almost universally panned it. One New York Times film reviewer went so far as to call it "so unspeakable, so stupid, so rotten and false in every detail… vile and insane."

Wayne’s Green Berets costar, George Takei (better known as Mr. Sulu on TV’s Star Trek), was no stranger to the military-entertainment complex, having appeared in the 1960 Marines Corps-assisted Hell to Eternity and the 1963 film version of John F. Kennedy’s PT 109. (For which the Navy provided a destroyer, six other ships, and a few sailors.) Takei, who would be "beamed up" in the Navy-supported 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, also once starred with Grant Williams, an actor who later showed up in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), a then-unbelievably big-budget (at least $25 million) Twentieth Century Fox film. For that movie, the Department of Defense provided research assistance, stock footage, a technical adviser, an old airplane hangar (which the film blew up), and the use of Navy ships at Pearl Harbor. Demonstrating a new willingness to go above and beyond for Hollywood, the Navy even loaded thirty "Japanese" airplanes onto the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown for the attack.

In Rehab Mode, the Military Goes Civilian

Military-Tinseltown cooperation obviously goes back a long way. But in the 1970s, a new, amped-up relationship was launched, largely in response to a growing negative impression of the U.S. military brought on by the Vietnam War — and by the daunting prospect of having to field an all-volunteer military. The Pentagon was hungry for help in rehabilitating its image — even lending support to "civilian" flicks — and the film industry was happy to oblige.

Take Twentieth Century Fox’s 1974 collaboration with the Navy on the non-military The Towering Inferno (1974). The Navy lent helicopters, and the studio said thanks in the form of an acknowledgment in the credits. The film featured longtime military-entertainment stalwart William Holden, who had already appeared in I Wanted Wings (an army-aided 1941 propaganda flick) and The Bridges at Toko-Ri (made with Navy assistance in 1955). He had also co-starred in 1948’s Man From Colorado with Glenn Ford, who acted alongside Charlton Heston in Midway (1976), a production that was allowed to use the USS Lexington aircraft carrier for two weeks of filming. Heston, in turn, went on to star in Gray Lady Down — a 1978 submarine thriller that benefited from the use of a real submarine, ships, and sailors, all courtesy of the Navy.

Gray Lady Down featured actor Stacey Keach, who starred in 1980’s TV movie-adaptation of Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War. The Marine Corps provided an adviser (who tempered some of the more disturbing portions of Caputo’s memoir), the use of military facilities, and 30 marines. Brian Dennehy, who also starred in A Rumor of War, would act alongside Scott Glenn in the 1985 western Silverado. But before he became a cowboy, Glenn played the part of Navy test pilot and NASA spaceman Alan B. Shepard in The Right Stuff (1983). That film was partially shot at Edwards Air Force Base and used various types of aircraft and equipment as well as Air Force personnel as extras.

Ed Harris, who blasted into orbit as astronaut John Glenn in The Right Stuff moved from the space capsule to the NASA control room in the 1995 blockbuster drama Apollo 13 (Air Force extras and equipment loaned by Vandenberg Air Force Base). Beside him in the co-pilot seat was none other than… Kevin Bacon. Apollo 13 also featured Bill Paxton, who, a year earlier, had been in the Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbuster, True Lies, which benefited from Marine Corps assistance. Paxton had also acted in 1990’s Navy Seals (helped by the Navy) and, in 2000, would dive below the surface in the Navy-supported submarine action-drama U-571.

True Lies was but another link in the military-entertainment matrix. The film’s co-star, Tom Arnold, shared billing in Exit Wounds (2001) with Steven Seagal (whose 1992 film Under Siege and 1996 film Executive Decision received, respectively, Navy and Army cooperation) and Bruce McGill, who would appear with Morgan Freeman in 2002’s The Sum of All Fears. Shot on location at Whiteman Air Force Base and Offutt Air Force Base, The Sum of All Fears featured numerous USAF aircraft and enjoyed the input of multiple Air Force technical advisers.

Freeman’s costar in The Sum of All Fears, Ben Affleck, had a lead role in the 2001 historical drama Pearl Harbor. Produced with the backing of the Navy, the film had its premiere on the deck of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Affleck was joined in Pearl Harbor by Cuba Gooding Jr. (who also starred in 2000’s Navy-aided Men of Honor), Tom Sizemore (from 1991’s Navy-aided Flight of the Intruder) and Josh Hartnett. That same year, Hartnett and Sizemore appeared in Ridley Scott’s blockbuster Black Hawk Down, made with the full cooperation of the Army. The Pentagon sent the film eight helicopters and 100 soldiers, including members of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

Pearl Harbor co-star Tom Everett appeared in Air Force One (1997), starring Harrison Ford, which used USAF aircraft, Air Force personnel as extras, and was filmed at both the Rickenbacker and Channel Islands Air National Guard bases. Its director, Wolfgang Petersen, also directed the George Clooney/Mark Wahlberg Air Force-aided weather drama The Perfect Storm (partially filmed at the Channel Islands base as well).

Wahlberg had a bit part in the 1994 Danny DeVito comedy Renaissance Man (made with Army involvement). In fact, the Oscar-winning, military-themed Forrest Gump received only limited help from the Army, in part because Renaissance Man and another 1994 comedy, In the Army Now, starring Pauly Shore and David Alan Grier, sucked up so much military attention that year. Grier went on to appear in the non-military The Woodsman (2004) with Benjamin Bratt, who had previously been cast in the 1994 Army-aided thriller Clear and Present Danger and would star in the ABC TV series E-Ring, a self-proclaimed "pulsating drama set inside the nation’s ultimate fortress: the Pentagon." Its producer and co-creator Ken Robinson had worked in the actual Pentagon over "a couple decades." At Bratt’s side in the non-military The Woodsman was not only Grier but — you guessed it — Kevin Bacon.

The Pentagon, the Sequel

In fact, one could take many (if not all) of Bacon’s non-military roles and quickly find connections that lead directly to the Pentagon. For instance, have a look at Bacon’s distinctly unmilitary Wild Things (1998) and you’ll find movie veteran Robert Wagner, who was featured not only in such Navy-supported fare as The Frogmen (1951) and Midway (1976), but also in the Marine Corps–aided Halls of Montezuma (1950), Stars and Stripes Forever (1952), and In Love and War (1958); the Army-assisted Between Heaven and Hell (1956); the Air Force-supported The Hunters (1958); and finally The Longest Day (1962), an epic about World War II’s D-Day landings made with the cooperation of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.

When it comes to military-entertainment connections, the point is: Bacon isn’t special. Almost any current actor — from Academy Award-winner Gwyneth Paltrow (in 2008’s upcoming Air Force-aided Iron Man) to young actress Dakota Fanning (at the side of top-gunner Tom Cruise in the Army-aided, Steven Spielberg-directed 2005 remake of War of the Worlds) — could be linked to the military. The reasons are simple. As David Robb, the author of Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, observed:

"Hollywood and the Pentagon have… a collaboration that works well for both sides. Hollywood producers get what they want — access to billions of dollars worth of military hardware and equipment — tanks, jet fighters, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers — and the military gets what it wants — films that portray the military in a positive light; films that help the services in their recruiting efforts."

But recruiting is just part of the equation, and the phrase "a positive light" is even a little soft. At the movies, the military gets sold — at least in those legions of Pentagon-aided films — as heroic, admirable, and morally correct. Often, it can literally do no wrong. This, of course, is no accident. Something must be exchanged for the millions of dollars in otherwise unavailable high-tech weapons systems and equipment, not to speak of personnel and military advisors, necessary to make the sort of "realistic," eye-catching war, action, and sci-fi movies that Hollywood (and assumedly its audiences) demand.

Speaking about the big-budget, live-action blockbuster Transformers (2007), Ian Bryce, one of its producers, characterized the relationship this way, "Without the superb military support we’ve gotten… it would be an entirely different-looking film… Once you get Pentagon approval, you’ve created a win-win situation. We want to cooperate with the Pentagon to show them off in the most positive light, and the Pentagon likewise wants to give us the resources to be able to do that."

On the military side, Air Force master sergeant Larry Belen spoke of similar motivations for aiding the production of Iron Man: "I want people to walk away from this movie with a really good impression of the Air Force, like they got about the Navy seeing Top Gun." But Air Force captain Christian Hodge, the Defense Department’s project officer for Iron Man, may have said it best when he unabashedly predicted, "The Air Force is going to come off looking like rock stars."

On the Silver Screen, you can be sure of three things: the Complex is forever; the Pentagon has no equal (sorry Kevin!), and there will, most definitely, be a sequel…

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, The Nation, the Village Voice and regularly for Tomdispatch. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, has just been published in Metropolitan Books’s American Empire Project series.

Copyright 2008 Nick Turse

One day in August, I walked into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Nearly three years before I had been locked up, about two blocks away, in "the Tombs" — the infamous jail then named the Bernard B. Kerik Complex for the now-disgraced New York City Police Commissioner. You see, I am one of the demonstrators who was illegally arrested by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) during the protests against the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC). My crime had been — in an effort to call attention to the human toll of America’s wars — to ride the subway, dressed in black with the pallor of death about me (thanks to cornstarch and cold cream), and an expression to match, sporting a placard around my neck that read: WAR DEAD.

I was with a small group and our plan was to travel from Union Square to Harlem, change trains, and ride all the way back down to Astor Place. But when my small group exited the train at the 125th Street station in Harlem, we were arrested by a swarm of police, marched to a waiting paddy wagon and driven to a filthy detention center. There, we were locked away for hours in a series of razor-wire-topped pens, before being bussed to the Tombs.

Now, I was back to resolve the matter of my illegal arrest. As I walked through the metal detector of the Federal building, a security official searched my bag. He didn’t like what he found. "You could be shot for carrying that in here," he told me. "You could be shot."

For the moment, however, the identification of that dangerous object I attempted to slip into the federal facility will have to wait. Let me instead back up to July 2004, when, with the RNC fast-approaching, I authored an article on the militarization of Manhattan — "the transformation of the island into a ‘homeland-security state’" — and followed it up that September with a street-level recap of the convention protests, including news of the deployment of an experimental sound weapon, the Long Range Acoustic Device, by the NYPD, and the department’s use of an on-loan Fuji blimp as a "spy-in-the-sky." Back then, I suggested that the RNC gave New York’s "finest," a perfect opportunity to "refine, perfect, and implement new tactics (someday, perhaps, to be known as the ‘New York model’) for use penning in or squelching dissent. It offered them the chance to write up a playbook on how citizens’ legal rights and civil liberties may be abridged, constrained, and violated at their discretion."

Little did I know how much worse it could get.

No Escape

Since then, the city’s security forces have eagerly embraced an Escape From New York-aesthetic — an urge to turn Manhattan into a walled-in fortress island under high-tech government surveillance, guarded by heavily armed security forces, with helicopters perpetually overhead. Beginning in Harlem in 2006, near the site of two new luxury condos, the NYPD set up a moveable "two-story booth tower, called Sky Watch," that gave an "officer sitting inside a better vantage point from which to monitor the area." The Panopticon-like structure — originally used by hunters to shoot quarry from overhead and now also utilized by the Department of Homeland Security along the Mexican border — was outfitted with black-tinted windows, a spotlight, sensors, and four to five cameras. Now, five Sky Watch towers are in service, rotating in and out of various neighborhoods.

With their 20-25 neighborhood-scanning cameras, the towers are only a tiny fraction of the Big Apple surveillance story. Back in 1998, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) found that there were "2,397 cameras used by a wide variety of private businesses and government agencies throughout Manhattan" — and that was just one borough. About a year after the RNC, the group reported that a survey of just a quarter of that borough yielded a count of more than 4,000 surveillance cameras of every kind. At about the same time, military-corporate giant Lockheed Martin was awarded a $212 million contract to build a "counter-terrorist surveillance and security system for New York’s subways and commuter railroads as well as bridges and tunnels" that would increase the camera total by more than 1,000. A year later, as seems to regularly be the case with contracts involving the military-corporate complex, that contract had already ballooned to $280 million, although the system was not to be operational until at least 2008.

In 2006, according to a Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) spokesman, the MTA already had a "3,000-camera-strong surveillance system," while the NYPD was operating "an additional 3,000 cameras" around the city. That same year, Bill Brown, a member of the Surveillance Camera Players — a group that leads surveillance-camera tours and maps their use around the city, estimated, according to a Newsweek article, that the total number of surveillance cameras in New York exceeded 15,000 — "a figure city officials say they have no way to verify because they lack a system of registry." Recently, Brown told me that 15,000 was an estimate for the number of cameras in Manhattan, alone. For the city as a whole, he suspects the count has now reached about 40,000.

This July, NYPD officials announced plans to up the ante. By the end of 2007, according to the New York Times, they pledged to install "more than 100 cameras" to monitor "cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States." This "Ring of Steel" scheme, which has already received $10 million in funding from the Department of Homeland Security (in addition to $15 million in city funds), aims to exponentially decrease privacy because, if "fully financed, it will include…. 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers" to monitor all those electronic eyes.

Spies in the Sky

At the time of the RNC, the NYPD was already mounted on police horses, bicycles, and scooters, as well as an untold number of marked and unmarked cars, vans, trucks, and armored vehicles, not to mention various types of water-craft. In 2007, the two-wheeled Segway joined its list of land vehicles.

Overhead, the NYPD aviation unit, utilizing seven helicopters, proudly claims to be "in operation 24/7, 365," according to Deputy Inspector Joseph Gallucci, its commanding officer. Not only are all the choppers outfitted with "state of the art cameras and heat-sensing devices," as well as "the latest mapping, tracking and surveillance technology," but one is a "$10 million ‘stealth bird,’ which has no police markings — [so] that those on the ground have no idea they are being watched."

Asked about concerns over intrusive spying by members of the aviation unit — characterized by Gallucci as "a bunch of big boys who like big expensive toys" — Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly scoffed. "We’re not able to, even if we wanted, to look into private spaces," he told the New York Times. "We’re looking at public areas." However, in 2005, it was revealed that, on the eve of the RNC protests, members of the aviation unit took a break and used their night-vision cameras to record "an intimate moment" shared by a "couple on the terrace of a Second Avenue penthouse."

Despite this incident, which only came to light because the same tape included images that had to be turned over to a defendant in an unrelated trial, Kelly has called for more aerial surveillance. The commissioner apparently also got used to having the Fuji blimp at his disposal, though he noted that "it’s not easy to send blimps into the airspace over New York." He then "challenged the aerospace industry to find a solution" that would, no doubt, bring the city closer to life under total surveillance.

Police Misconduct: The RNC

As a result of its long history of brutality, corruption, spying, silencing dissent, and engaging in illegal activities, the NYPD is a particularly secretive organization. As such, the full story of the department’s misconduct during the Republican National Convention has yet to be told; but, even in an era of heightened security and defensiveness, what has emerged hasn’t been pretty.

By April 2005, New York Times journalist Jim Dwyer was already reporting that, "of the 1,670 [RNC arrest] cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial. Many were dropped without any finding of wrongdoing, but also without any serious inquiry into the circumstances of the arrests, with the Manhattan district attorney’s office agreeing that the cases should be ‘adjourned in contemplation of dismissal.’" In one case that went to trial, it was found that video footage of an arrest had been doctored to bolster the NYPD’s claims. (All charges were dropped against that defendant. In 400 other RNC cases, by the spring of 2005, video recordings had either demonstrated that defendants had not committed crimes or that charges could not be proved against them.)

Since shifting to "zero-tolerance" law enforcement policies under Mayor (now Republican presidential candidate) Rudolph Giuliani, the city has been employing a system of policing where arrests are used to punish people who have been convicted of no crime whatsoever, including, as at the RNC or the city’s monthly Critical Mass bike rides, those who engage in any form of protest. Prior to the Giuliani era, about half of all those "arrested for low-level offenses would get a desk-appearance ticket ordering them to go to court." Now the proportion is 10%. (NYPD documents show that the decision to arrest protesters, not issue summonses, was part of the planning process prior to the RNC.)

Speaking at the 2007 meeting of the American Sociological Association, Michael P. Jacobson, Giuliani’s probation and correction commissioner, outlined how the city’s policy of punishing the presumed innocent works:

"Essentially, everyone who’s arrested in New York City, in the parlance of city criminal justice lingo, goes through ‘the system’…. if you’ve never gone through the system, even 24 hours — that’s a shocking period of punishment. It’s debasing, it’s difficult. You’re probably in a fairly gross police lockup. You probably have no toilet paper. You’re given a baloney sandwich, and the baloney is green."

In 2005, the Times’ Dwyer revealed that at public gatherings since the time of the RNC, police officers had not only "conducted covert surveillance… of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident," but had acted as agent provocateurs. At the RNC, there were multiple incidents in which undercover agents influenced events or riled up crowds. In one case, a "sham arrest" of "a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders."

In 2006, the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), reported "that hundreds of Convention protesters may have been unnecessarily and unlawfully arrested because NYPD officials failed to give adequate orders to disperse and failed to afford protesters a reasonable opportunity to disperse."

Police Commissioner Kelly had no hesitation about rejecting the organization’s report. Still, these were strong words, considering the weakness of the source. The overall impotence of the CCRB suggests a great deal about the NYPD’s culture of unaccountability. According to an ACLU report, the board "investigates fewer than half of all complaints that it reviews, and it produces a finding on the merits in only three of ten complaints disposed of in any given year." This inaction is no small thing, given the surge of complaints against NYPD officers in recent years. In 2001, before Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly came to power, the CCRB received 4,251 complaints. By 2006, the number of complaints had jumped by 80% to 7,669. Even more telling are the type of allegations found to be on the rise (and largely ignored). According to the ACLU, from 2005 to 2006, complaints over the use of excessive force jumped 26.8% — "nearly double the increase in complaints filed."

It was in this context that the planning for the RNC demonstrations took place. In 2006, in five internal police reports made public as part of a lawsuit, "New York City police commanders candidly discuss[ed] how they had successfully used ‘proactive arrests,’ covert surveillance and psychological tactics at political demonstrations in 2002, and recommend[ed] that those approaches be employed at future gatherings." A draft report from the department’s Disorder Control Unit had a not-so-startling recommendation, given what did happen at the RNC: "Utilize undercover officers to distribute misinformation within the crowds."

According to Dwyer, for at least a year prior to those demonstrations, "teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe" to conduct covert surveillance of activists. "In hundreds of reports, stamped ‘N.Y.P.D. Secret,’ [the NYPD’s] Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, [including] street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies." Three elected city councilmen — Charles Barron, Bill Perkins and Larry B. Seabrook — were even cited in the reports for endorsing a protest event held on January 15, 2004 in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

In August, the New York Times editorial page decried the city’s continuing attempts to keep documents outlining the police department’s spying and other covert activities secret:

"The city of New York is waging a losing and ill-conceived battle for overzealous secrecy surrounding nearly 2,000 arrests during the 2004 Republican National Convention.… Police Commissioner Ray Kelly seemed to cast an awfully wide and indiscriminate net in seeking out potential troublemakers. For more than a year before the convention, members of a police spy unit headed by a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency infiltrated a wide range of groups… many of the targets … posed no danger or credible threat."

The Times concluded that — coupled with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to disrupt and criminalize protest during the convention week — "police action helped to all but eliminate dissent from New York City during the Republican delegates’ visit. If that was the goal, then mission accomplished. And civil rights denied."

Police Commissioner Kelly had a radically different take on his department’s conduct. Earlier this year, he claimed that "the Republican National Convention was perhaps the finest hour in the history of the New York City Department."

Police Misconduct: 2007

"Finest" might seem a funny term for the NYPD’s actions, but these days everyone’s a relativist. In the years since the RNC protests, the NYPD has been mired in scandal after scandal — from killing unarmed black men and "violations of civil rights" at the National Puerto Rican Day Parade to issuing "sweeping generalizations" that lead to "labeling almost every American Muslim as a potential terrorist." And, believe it or not, the racial and political scandals were but a modest part of the mix. Add to them, killings, sexual assaults, kidnapping, armed robbery, burglary, corruption, theft, drug-related offenses, conspiracy — and that’s just a start when it comes to crimes members of the force have been charged with. It’s a rap sheet fit for Public Enemy #1, and we’re only talking about the story of the NYPD in the not-yet-completed year of 2007.

For example, earlier this year a 13-year NYPD veteran was "arrested on charges of hindering prosecution, tampering with evidence, obstructing governmental administration and unlawful possession of marijuana," in connection with the shooting of another officer. In an unrelated case, two other NYPD officers were arrested and "charged with attempted kidnapping, armed robbery, armed burglary and other offenses."

In a third case, the New York Post reported that a "veteran NYPD captain has been stripped of his badge and gun as part of a federal corruption probe that already has led to the indictment of an Internal Affairs sergeant who allegedly tipped other cops that they were being investigated." And that isn’t the only NYPD cover-up allegation to surface of late. With cops interfering in investigations of fellow cops and offering advice on how to deflect such probes, it’s a wonder any type of wrongdoing surfaces. Yet, the level of misconduct in the department appears to be sweeping enough to be irrepressible.

For instance, sex crime scandals have embroiled numerous officers — including one "accused of sexually molesting his young stepdaughter," who pled guilty to "a misdemeanor charge of child endangerment," and another "at a Queens hospital charged with possessing and sharing child pornography." In a third case, a member of the NYPD’s School Safety Division was "charged with the attempted rape and sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl." In a fourth case, a "police officer pleaded guilty…. to a grotesque romance with an infatuated 13-year-old girl." Meanwhile, an NYPD officer, who molested women while on duty and in uniform, was convicted of sexual abuse and official misconduct.

Cop-on-cop sexual misconduct of an extreme nature has also surfaced…. but why go on? You get the idea. And, if you don’t, there are lurid cases galore to check out, like the investigation into "whether [an] NYPD officer who fatally shot his teen lover before killing himself murdered the boyfriend of a past lover," or the officer who was "charged with intentional murder in the shooting death of his 22-year-old girlfriend." And don’t even get me started on the officer "facing charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics and conspiracy to commit robberies of drugs and drug proceeds from narcotics traffickers."

All of this, and much more, has emerged in spite of the classic blue-wall-of-silence. It makes you wonder: In the surveillance state to come, are we going to be herded and observed by New York’s finest lawbreakers?

It’s important to note that all of these cases have begun despite a striking NYPD culture of non-accountability. Back in August, the New York Times noted that the "Police Department has increasingly failed to prosecute New York City police officers on charges of misconduct when those cases have been substantiated by the independent board that investigates allegations of police abuse, officials of the board say." Between March 1, 2007 and June 30, 2007 alone, the NYPD "declined to seek internal departmental trials against 31 officers, most of whom were facing charges of stopping people in the street without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, according to the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board." An ACLU report, "Mission Failure: Civilian Review of Policing in New York City, 1994-2006," released this month, delved into the issue in even greater detail. The organization found that, between 2000 and 2005, "the NYPD disposed of substantiated complaints against 2,462 police officers: 725 received no discipline. When discipline was imposed, it was little more than a slap on the wrist."

Much has come to light recently about the way the U.S. military has been lowering its recruitment standards in order to meet the demands of ongoing, increasingly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including an increase in "moral waivers" allowing more recruits with criminal records to enter the services. Well, it turns out that, on such policies, the NYPD has been a pioneering institution.

In 2002, the BBC reported that "New York’s powerful police union…. accused the police department of allowing ‘sub-standard’ recruits onto the force." Then, just months after the RNC protests, the New York Daily News exposed the department’s practice of "hiring applicants with arrest records and shoving others through without full background checks" including those who had been "charged with laundering drug money, assault, grand larceny and weapons possession." According to Sgt. Anthony Petroglia, who, until he retired in 2002, had worked for almost a decade in the department’s applicant-processing division, the NYPD was "hiring people to be cops who have no respect for the law." Another retiree from the same division was blunter: "It’s all judgment calls — bad ones…. but the bosses say, ‘Send ’em through. We’ll catch the problem ones later.’"

The future looks bright, if you are an advocate of sending the force even further down this path. The new choice to mold the department of tomorrow, according to the Village Voice, the "NYPD’s new deputy commissioner of training, Wilbur ‘Bill’ Chapman, should have no trouble teaching ‘New York’s Finest’ about the pitfalls of sexual harassment, cronyism, and punitive transfers [because h]e’s been accused of all that during his checkered career."

In the eerie afterglow of 9/11, haunted by the specter of terrorism, in an atmosphere where repressive zero-tolerance policies already rule, given the unparalleled power of Commissioner Kelly — called "the most powerful police commissioner in the city’s history" by NYPD expert Leonard Levitt — and with a police department largely unaccountable to anyone (as the only city agency without any effective outside oversight), the Escape from New York model may indeed represent Manhattan’s future.

Nick Turse v. The City of New York

So what, you might still be wondering, was it that led the security official at the federal courthouse to raise the specter of my imminent demise? A weapon? An unidentified powder? No, a digital audio recorder. "Some people here don’t want to be recorded," he explained in response to my quizzical look.

So I checked the recording device and, accompanied by my lawyer, the indomitable Mary D. Dorman, made my way to Courtroom 18D, a stately room in the upper reaches of the building that houses the oldest district court in the nation. There, I met our legal nemesis, a city attorney whose official title is "assistant corporation counsel." After what might pass for a cordial greeting, he asked relatively politely whether I was going to accept the city’s monetary offer of $8,500 — which I had rejected the previous week– to settle my lawsuit for false arrest. As soon as I indicated I wouldn’t (as I had from the moment the city started the bidding at $2,500), any hint of cordiality fled the room. Almost immediately, he was referring to me as a "criminal" — declassified NYPD documents actually refer to me as a "perp." Soon, he launched into a bout of remarkable bluster, threatening lengthy depositions to waste my time and monetary penalties associated with court costs that would swallow my savings.

Then, we were all directed to a small jury room off the main courtroom, where the city’s attorney hauled out a threatening prop to bolster his act — an imposingly gigantic file folder stuffed with reams of "Nick Turse" documents, including copies of some of my disreputable Tomdispatch articles as well as printouts of suspicious webpages from the American Empire Project — the obviously criminal series that will be publishing my upcoming book, The Complex.

There, the litany of vague threats to tie me down with depositions, tax me with fees, and maybe, somehow, send me to jail for a "crime" that had been dismissed years earlier continued until a federal magistrate judge entered the room. To him, the assistant corporation counsel and I told our versions of my arrest story — which turned out to vary little.

The basic details were the same. As the city attorney shifted in his seat, I told the judge how, along with compatriots I’d met only minutes before, I donned my "WAR DEAD" sign and descended into the subway surrounded by a phalanx of cops — plainclothes, regular uniformed, Big Brother-types from the Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU), and white-shirted brass, as well as a Washington Post photographer and legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild — and boarded our train. I explained that we sat there looking as dead as possible for about 111 blocks and then, as the Washington Post reported, were arrested when we came back to life and "tried to change trains." I asked, admittedly somewhat rhetorically why, if I was such a "criminal," none of the officers present at my arrest had actually showed up in court to testify against me when my case was dismissed out of hand back in 2004? And why hadn’t the prosecutor wanted to produce the video footage the NYPD had taken of the entire action and my arrest? And why had the city been trying to buy me off all these years since?

Faced with the fact that his intimidation tactics hadn’t worked, the city attorney now quit his bad-cop tactics and I rose again out of the ditch of "common criminality" into citizenship and then to the high status of being addressed as "Dr. Turse" (in a bow to my PhD). Offers and counteroffers followed, leading finally to a monetary settlement with a catch — I also wanted an apology. If that guard hadn’t directed me — under threat of being shot — to check my digital audio recorder at the door, I might have had a sound file of it to listen to for years to come. Instead, I had to be content with the knowledge that an appointed representative of the City of New York not only had to ditch the Escape from New York model — at least for a day — pony up some money for violating my civil rights, and, before a federal magistrate judge, also issue me an apology, on behalf of the city, for wrongs committed by the otherwise largely unaccountable NYPD.

The Future of the NYPD and the Homeland-Security State-let

I’m under no illusions that this minor monetary settlement and apology were of real significance in a city where civil rights are routinely abridged, the police are a largely unaccountable armed force, and a culture of total surveillance is increasingly the norm. But my lawsuit, when combined with those of my fellow arrestees, could perhaps have some small effect. After all, less than a year after the convention, 569 people had already "filed notices that they intended to sue the City, seeking damages totaling $859,014,421," according to an NYCLU report. While the city will end up paying out considerably less, the grand total will not be insignificant. In fact, Jim Dwyer recently reported that the first 35 of 605 RNC cases had been settled for a total of $694,000.

If New Yorkers began to agitate for accountability — demanding, for instance, that such settlements be paid out of the NYPD’s budget — it could make a difference. Then, every time New Yorkers’ hard-earned tax-dollars were handed over to fellow citizens who were harassed, mistreated, injured, or abused by the city’s police force that would mean less money available for the "big expensive toys" that the "big boys" of the NYPD’s aviation unit use to record the private moments of unsuspecting citizens or the ubiquitous surveillance gear used not to capture the rest of the city on candid camera. It wouldn’t put an end to the NYPD’s long-running criminality or the burgeoning homeland security state-let that it’s building, but it would, at least, introduce a tiny measure of accountability.

Such an effort might even begin a dialogue about the NYPD, its dark history, its current mandate under the Global War on Terror, and its role in New York City. For instance, people might begin to examine the very nature of the department. They might conclude that questions must be raised when institutions — be they rogue regimes, deleterious industries, unaccountable corporations, or fundamentally-tainted government institutions — consistently, over many decades, evidence a persistent disregard for the law, a lack of accountability, and a deep resistance to reform. Those directly affected by the NYPD, a nearly 38,000-person force — larger than many armies — that has consistently flouted the law and has proven remarkably resistant to curtailing its own misconduct for well over a century, might even begin to wonder if it can be trusted to administer the homeland security state-let its top officials are fast implementing and, if not, what can be done about it.

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, is due out in the American Empire Project series by Metropolitan Books in 2008. His new website NickTurse.com (up only in rudimentary form) will fully launch in the coming months.

Copyright 2007 Nick Turse

Originally posted at TomDispatch.com.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on a proposal, championed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq in exchange for bipartisan Congressional support for the long-term (read: more or less permanent) garrisoning of that country. The troops are to be tucked away on "large bases far from Iraq’s major cities." This plan sounded suspiciously similar to one revealed by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt in the New York Times on April 19, 2003, just as U.S. troops were preparing to enter Baghdad. Headlined "Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq," it laid out a U.S. plan for:

a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to…. perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the Bashur air field in the Kurdish north.

Shortly thereafter, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, denied any such plans: "I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting…" – and, while the bases were being built, the story largely disappeared from the mainstream media.

Even with the multi-square mile, multi-billion dollar, state-of-the-art Balad Air Base and Camp Victory thrown in, however, the bases in Gates’ new plan will be but a drop in the bucket for an organization that may well be the world’s largest landlord. For many years, the U.S. military has been gobbling up large swaths of the planet and huge amounts of just about everything on (or in) it. So, with the latest Pentagon Iraq plans in mind, take a quick spin with me around this Pentagon planet of ours.

Garrisoning the Globe

In 2003, Forbes magazine revealed that media mogul Ted Turner was America’s top land baron — with a total of 1.8 million acres across the U.S. The nation’s ten largest landowners, Forbes reported, "own 10.6 million acres, or one out of every 217 acres in the country." Impressive as this total was, the Pentagon puts Turner and the entire pack of mega-landlords to shame with over 29 million acres in U.S. landholdings. Abroad, the Pentagon’s "footprint" is also that of a giant. For example, the Department of Defense controls 20% of the Japanese island of Okinawa and, according to Stars and Stripes, "owns about 25 percent of Guam." Mere land ownership, however, is just the tip of the iceberg.

In his 2004 book, The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson opened the world’s eyes to the size of the Pentagon’s global footprint, noting that the Department of Defense (DoD) was deploying nearly 255,000 military personnel at 725 bases in 38 countries. Since then, the total number of overseas bases has increased to at least 766 and, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, may actually be as high as 850. Still, even these numbers don’t begin to capture the global sprawl of the organization that unabashedly refers to itself as "one of the world’s largest ‘landlords.’"

The DoD’s "real property portfolio," according to 2006 figures, consists of a total of 3,731 sites. Over 20% of these sites are located on more than 711,000 acres outside of the U.S. and its territories. Yet even these numbers turn out to be a drastic undercount. For example, while a 2005 Pentagon report listed U.S. military sites from Antigua and Hong Kong to Kenya and Peru, some countries with significant numbers of U.S. bases go entirely unmentioned — Afghanistan and Iraq, for example.

In Iraq, alone, in mid-2005, U.S. forces were deployed at some 106 bases, from the massive Camp Victory, headquarters of the U.S. high command, to small 500-troop outposts in the country’s hinterlands. None of them made the Pentagon’s list. Nor was there any mention of bases in Jordan on that list –or in the 2001-2005 reports either. Yet that nation, as military analyst William Arkin has pointed out, allowed the garrisoning of 5,000 U.S. troops at various bases around the country during the build-up to the war in Iraq. In addition, some 76 nations have given the U.S. military access to airports and airfields — in addition to who knows where else that the Pentagon forgot to acknowledge or considers inappropriate for inclusion in its list.

Even without Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the more than 20 other nations that, Arkin noted in early 2004, were "secretly or quietly providing bases and facilities," the available statistics do offer a window into a bloated organization bent on setting up franchises across the globe. According to 2005 documents, the Pentagon acknowledges 39 nations with at least one U.S. base, stations personnel in over 140 countries around the world, and boasts a physical plant of at least 571,900 facilities, though some Pentagon figures show 587,000 "buildings and structures." Of these, 466,599 are located in the United States or its territories. In fact, the Department of Defense owns or leases more than 75% of all federal buildings in the U.S.

According to 2006 figures, the Army controls the lion’s share of DoD land (52%), with the Air Force coming in second (33%), the Marine Corps (8%) and the Navy (7 %) bringing up the rear. The Army is also tops in total number of sites (1,742) and total number of installations (1,659). But when it comes to "large installations," those whose value tops $1,584 billion, the Army is trumped by the Air Force, which boasts 43 mega-bases compared to the Army’s 39. The Navy and Marines possess only 29 and 10, respectively. What the Navy lacks in big bases of its own, however, it more than makes up for in borrowed foreign naval bases and ports — some 251 across the globe.

Diversification

Land and large installations, however, are not all that the Defense Department owns. Until relatively recently, the U.S. Navy operated its own dairy, complete with a herd of Holsteins. Even though it did get rid of those cows in 1998, it kept the 865-acre farm tract in Gambrills, Maryland, and now leases it to Horizon Organic Dairy.

While it doesn’t have a dairy, the Army still operates stables — such as the John C. McKinney Memorial Stables where many of the 44 horses from its ceremonial Caisson Platoon live. It also has a big farm (the Large Animal Research Facility). In fact, the Pentagon owns hundreds of thousands of animals — from rats to dogs to monkeys. In addition to an unknown number of animals used for unexplained "other purposes," in 2001 alone, the DoD utilized 330,149 creatures for various types of experimentation.

Then, there’s the equipment the DoD owns, loads of it. For instance, it is the unlikely owner of "over 2,050 railcars, know[n] as the Defense Freight Rail Interchange Fleet." The DoD also reportedly ships 100,000 sea containers each year and spends $800 million annually on domestic cargo, primarily truck and rail shipments. And when it comes to trucks, the Army, alone, has a fleet of 12,700 Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Trucks (huge, eight-wheeled vehicles used to supply ammunition, petroleum, oils, and lubricants to other combat vehicles and weapons systems in the field) and 120,000 Humvees. All told, according to a 2006 Pentagon report, the DoD had a total of at least "280 ships, 14,000 aircraft, 900 strategic missiles, and 330,000 ground combat and tactical vehicles."

The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the DoD’s largest combat support agency (with operations in 48 of the 50 states and 28 foreign countries) boasts: "If America’s forces eat it, wear it, maintain equipment with it, or burn it as fuel…. DLA probably provides it." In fact, the DLA claims that it "manages" some 5.2 million items and maintains an inventory, in its Defense Distribution Depots (which stretch from Italy and Japan to Korea and Kuwait), valued at $94.1 billion.

The DLA runs the Defense National Stockpile Center (DNSC) which stores 42 "strategic and critical materials" — from zinc, lead, cobalt, chromium, and mercury (more than 9.7 million pounds of it in 2005) to precious metals such as platinum, palladium, and even industrial diamonds — at 20 locations across the U.S. With a stockpile valued at over $1.5 billion and $5.7 billion in sales of excess commodities since 1993, the DNSC claims that there is "no private sector company in the world that sells this wide range of commodities and materials."

All told, the Department of Defense owns up to having "[o]ver $1 trillion in assets [and] $1.6 trillion in liabilities." This is, no doubt, a gross underestimate given the DoD’s historic penchant for flawed book-keeping and the fact that, according to a study by its own inspector general, it cannot even account for at least $1 trillion dollars in money spent — or perhaps, according to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as much as $2.3 trillion. Cooking the books and stashing cash is fitting enough for an American organization, in the age of Enron, that thinks of itself not just as a government agency but, in its own words, as "America’s oldest company, largest company, busiest company and most successful company." In fact, on its website, the DoD makes the point that it easily bests Wal-Mart, Exxon-Mobil, and General Motors in terms of budget and staff.

It’s Got the Whole World in Its Hands

In addition to assembling a dizzying array of assets, from tungsten to tubas — in 2005 alone, it spent more than $6 million on sheet music, musical instruments, and accessories — the Pentagon owns a great deal of housing: 300,000 units worldwide. By its own admission, it is also a slumlord par excellence — with an inventory of "180,000 inadequate family housing units." According to the Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Installations & Environment):

Approximately 33 percent of all [military] families live on-base, in housing that is often dilapidated, too small, lacking in modern facilities — almost 49 percent (or 83,000 units) are substandard.

Meanwhile, the Department of Defense’s own home, the Pentagon, bests the Sultan of Brunei’s Istana Nurul Iman palace, the largest private residence in the world — 3,705,793 to 2,152,782 square feet of occupiable space. The DoD likes to boast that the Pentagon is "virtually a city in itself" — with 30 miles of access highways, 200 acres of lawn space. It includes a five-acre center courtyard, 17.5 miles of corridors, 16 parking lots (with an estimated 8,770 parking spaces), seven snack bars, two cafeterias, one dining room, a post office, "credit union, travel agency, dental offices, ticket offices, blood donor center, housing referral office, and 30 other retail shops and services," a chapel, a heliport, and numerous libraries. Moreover, says the DoD, the Pentagon consumed a huge portion of its natural environment, its concrete reportedly contains "680,000 tons of sand and gravel from the nearby Potomac River."

In value, the Pentagon’s other properties are almost as impressive. The combined worth of the world’s two most expensive homes, the $138 million 103-room "Updown Court" in Windlesham, Surrey in the United Kingdom and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s $135 million Aspen ski lodge don’t even come close to the price tag on Ascension Auxiliary Airfield, located on a small island off the coast of St. Helena (the place of Napoleon Bonaparte’s exile and death). It has an estimated replacement value of over $337 million. Other high-priced facilities include Camp Ederle in Italy at $544 million; Incirlik Air Base in Turkey at almost $1.2 billion; and Thule Air Base in Greenland at $2.8 billion; while the U.S. Naval Air Station in Keflavik, Iceland is appraised at $3.4 billion and the various military facilities in Guam are valued at more than $11 billion.

Still, to begin to grasp the Pentagon’s global immensity, it helps to look, again, at its land holdings — all 120,191 square kilometers which are almost exactly the size of North Korea (120,538 square kilometers). These holdings are larger than any of the following nations: Liberia, Bulgaria, Guatemala, South Korea, Hungary, Portugal, Jordan, Kuwait, Israel, Denmark, Georgia, or Austria. The 7,518 square kilometers of 20 micro-states — the Vatican, Monaco, Nauru, Tuvalu, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Maldives, Malta, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Seychelles, Andorra, Bahrain, Saint Lucia, Singapore, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati and Tonga — combined pales in comparison to the 9,307 square kilometers of just one military base, White Sands Missile Range.

Downsizing?

While it has been setting up hundreds of bases across the globe to support ongoing wars, the Pentagon has also been restructuring its forces in an effort to reduce troop levels at old Cold War mega-bases and close down less strategically useful sites. Does this mean less Pentagon control in the world?

Don’t bet on it. In fact, the U.S. military is exploring long-term options to dominate the planet as never before. Previously, the DoD has only maintained a moving presence on the high seas. This may change. The Pentagon is now considering — and planning for — future "sea-basing." No longer just a ship, a fleet, or "prepositioned material" stationed on the world’s oceans, sea-bases will be "a hybrid system-of-systems consisting of concepts of operations, ships, forces, offensive and defensive weapons, aircraft, communications and logistics." The notion of such bases is increasingly popular within the military due to the fact that they "will help to assure access to areas where U.S. military forces may be denied access to support [land] facilities." After all, as a report by the Defense Science Board pointed out, "[S]eabases are sovereign [and] not subject to alliance vagaries." Imagine a future where the people of countries at odds with U.S. policies suddenly find America’s "massive seaborne platforms" floating just outside their territorial waters.

With a real-estate portfolio that includes the earth and the sea, the sky would, quite literally, be the limit for the DoD. According to Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired’s "Danger Room" blog, the "U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight Plan" of 2004 outlined what "analysts call the most detailed picture since the end of the Cold War of the Pentagon’s efforts to turn outer space into a battlefield…. the report makes U.S. dominance of the heavens a top Pentagon priority in the new century." As the U.S. military’s outer-space policy statement puts it, "Freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power."

When you’re focused on effectively controlling a planet, the idea of occupying Iraq, a country about the size of the state of California, for the next decade or five, must seem like a small thing. In practice, however, the global landlord on the Potomac has found property values in Iraq steep indeed. As all now know, it has been fought to a standstill there by modest-sized bands of guerillas lacking air power, sea power, or high-tech spy satellites in outer space. The Pentagon may be landlord to massive swaths of the globe, but from Vietnam to Laos, Beruit to Somalia, U.S. forces have also found themselves evicted by neighborhood residents from properties they were prepared to consider their own. The question remains: Will Iraq be added to the list of permanently occupied territories and take on the look of long-garrisoned South Korea as Secretary of Defense Gates and President Bush have urged — or will it be added to a growing list of places that have effectively resisted paying the rent on Planet Pentagon?

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, is due out in the American Empire Project Series by Metropolitan Books in 2008.

Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
www.TomDispatch.com