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

by Jeffrey St. Clair

“Jeffrey St. Clair is the Seymour Hersh of environmental journalism.”—Josh Frank From the F-22 fighter jet and B-2 bomber to the Stryker tank and Star Wars , Grand Theft Pentagon chronicles how the Pentagon shells out billions to politically wired arms contractors for weapons that don’t work for use against an enemy that no longer exists. St. Clair shows how many of the biggest arms contracts were literally inside jobs, negotiated by Pentagon generals who later went to work for the very same corporations that were awarded the contracts. The co-founder of Counterpunch and author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to The Politics of Nature , Jeffrey St. Clair lives in Portland, Oregon.

329 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2005

About the author

Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor with Alexander Cockburn of the political magazine and website CounterPunch. Raised in Indiana, he attended American University in Washington, DC, majoring in Literature and History. He is the author of 13 books, including the best-sellers Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press and Al Gore: a User's Manual. He has written for the Washington Post, San Francisco Examiner, The Nation, the Village Voice, New Left Review, Anderson Valley Advertiser and The Progressive. HIs newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes from the Dark Side of the Earth, will be published in May by AK Press. He lives in Oregon with his wife Kimberly, a librarian, and their dog Boomer.

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A SOBERING TRIP THROUGH THE 9/11 "WAR PROFITEERS"

Jeffrey St. Clair is also the author of 'Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion,' 'The Politics of Anti-Semitism,' 'The Green Fuse: Inside the Radical Environmental Movement,' etc.

He notes in this 2005 book, "As we reveal here, the Taliban offered Osama Bin Laden and his top associates to the Bush administration on several occasions after the attacks on 9/11. Bush refused. They wanted a prolonged and ever-escalating war, not a deftly-executed police action and not justice for the families of those slain and maimed by Bin Laden's kamikazes." (Pg. 8)

He argues, "To peddle the invasion [of Iraq], Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spin meisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit the script, it was either shaded, retooled or junked." (Pg. 29)

He comments, "In the fall of 1979, the Iranian revolution led to the expulsion of Halliburton from the lucrative sinecure it had enjoyed... Not to worry. Halliburton quickly moved to replace those revenues with an equally rich stream from Iran's neighbor and blood enemy, the Baathist republic of Iraq... Like many other US companies that choose to turn a blind eye to the regime's more sanguinary manifestations, Halliburton had been working in Iraq since the early 1970s, even though the Ford and Carter administrations had both refused to recognize the socialist government." (Pg. 137)

About proposals for exotic new weapons systems, he says, "with the collapse of the Soviet Union and corporate America's coddling of China, why in the world would the U.S. need to deploy such a system?... If Osama Bin Laden ever decides to strike back once again at his former friends in the US government, his payload is much more likely to be delivered via FedEx in a Louis Vitton suitcase than a rocket launched from his yurt camp in Jindu Kush." (Pg. 255)

An interesting collection of essays, this book will be of great interest to critics of the military, and progressives in general.