Tag: Lockheed Martin

“Omnipresent surveillance:” Dystopian society in our global era, Part 3

Posted on by kathiemm
Statement for the record by James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence [of the United States], to the Senate Armed Services Committee. In the public domain.

by Anthony J. Marsella, PhD

What Government Agencies and Organizations are Involved?


According to Wikipedia,

“The United States Intelligence Community (IC)  is a federation of 17 separate United States government intelligence agencies, that work separately and together to conduct intelligence activities to support the foreign policy and national security of the United States. Member organizations of the IC include intelligence agencies, military intelligence, and civilian intelligence and analysis offices within federal executive departments. The IC is overseen by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) making up the seventeen-member Intelligence Community, which itself is headed by the Director of  National Intelligence (DNI), who reports to the President of the United States.[1][2]”

There are, as documented in this Wikipedia excerpt, an extensive number of “intelligence” gathering and utilization organizations, involving thousands of employees and an unknown, but obviously considerable, amount of money.  All of this in the name of domestic and national security.  There are numerous issues regarding duplication, competition, communication, hierarchies, strengths and weaknesses, and costs among these known groups. There is reason to believe there are also unknown groups that function independently.

There is irony and paradox here! The approved protectors and guardians impose constraints and abuses on citizens in the name of national security; however, in doing so, they impose control and domination.

This is a bewildering anomaly, and one from which there may never be an escape, given the secrecy and depth of penetration of governance and private surveillance groups. Can we really expect military intelligence to give up its roles and its methods, and its ties to weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and others in the war industry? Of course not!

There are powerful connections among Silicon Valley corporations, military weapons manufacturers, and the Defense Department.  They support one another in a “silent” conspiracy of financial relations and ties. Numerous retired military officials and officers go to work for Silicon Valley and weapon industry corporations as consultants and executives. The fix is on!  Will this system harvest what it sows? The fabled Military-Industrial-Congressional-Academic Complex lives . . . at least for now; too many on the take, too few guided by an essential conscience!

Foundations of the National Security State

The USA’s national “security state” and its impositions are possible for a number of reasons:

  • Technological developments (e.g., big data) permit mass surveillance, monitoring, and archiving of information on all citizens;
  • Suppression and condemnation of protests, including harassment, persecution, and prosecution of those speaking out against the national security state;
  • Collaboration and cooperation of a biased and compromised media, which is, arguably, the most important societal check and balance against the abuses, violations, and identification of government and private criminal actions;
  • Location and control of power within a small group of individuals (oligarchy) who by stain of temperament, disposition, position, and financial interests seek to increase, sustain, and protect USA state terrorism policies, actions, and organizational structures;
  • Development of a vast complex of “escape” clauses within our executive, judicial, and congressional systems permitting individuals to lie, distort, misrepresent, and speak with impunity without fear of prosecution. In brief, a privileged and oligarchic “group” is “free” to engage in illegal actions without accountability, transparency, or risk;
  • Lust for power, wealth, position and the domination and control accompanying these impulses. Selfish motives from troubled minds.
  • Use of Congressional acts and secret agreements to justify and protect abuses, including The Patriot Act, The Department of Homeland Security and Fusion Center authorizations, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF).

Marc Slavo (2019) points out the nefarious cooperatives among countries with mass surveillance systems. He writes:

“Many countries have surveillance systems, but the countries in the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes and 14 Eyes alliances work together to share data on a massive scale, according to a report by Cloud Wards.  Innocent people are spied on every day. The Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and 14 Eyes groups are big players in the global surveillance game. Each country involved can carry out surveillance in particular regions and share it with others in the alliance.

The Five Eyes are the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Five Eyes alliance, also known as FVEY, was founded on Aug. 14, 1941, and can be traced back to the WWII period. During the second world war, the exchange of intelligence information between the UK and the U.S. was important, and the partnership continued afterward.

The Nine Eyes alliance consists of the Five Eyes countries, plus Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway. Though there’s evidence that the Nine Eyes and 14 Eyes exist, little is known about what they can and can’t do.

The 14 Eyes alliance is made up of the Nine Eyes countries, plus Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. It’s an extension of the Five Eyes and Nine Eyes alliances, but its actual name is SIGINT.

A recent CIA sponsored Bill, the “Intelligence Authorization Act” (SB: 3153; HB 3194) garnering Congressional support would criminalize whistle blowers and reporters. Imagine, citizens are to be criminalized and punished for engaging in citizen expected responsibilities of complaint.”

Daniel Schuman (July 25, 2019), policy director of DEMAND PROGRESS, writes:

“House Intelligence Committee Chair expansion of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act beyond all reason will effectively muzzle reporting on torture, mass surveillance, and other crimes against the American people — all at the request of the CIA.”

Dagny Taggart (a pseudonym for a seasoned reporter fearful of retaliation), based on Pew Survey, results, writes (2019): “Americans Don’t Trust the Govt, the Media, or Each Other: Fading  Trust is “Sign of Cultural Sickness and National Decline.”

Is this any wonder? Years of corruption, cronyism, and crime by government, private corporations, military, and other societal institutions make “trust” a foolish and unwarranted action.  This is nothing new!

[Note from Kathie MM:The conclusion of this series will be published on EP Friday August 16, with some recommendations for addressing the problems described here. Don’t miss it!]

Give peace a chance: Don’t believe the war profiteers

Posted on by kathiemm
Vereshchagin’s painting The Apotheosis of War (1871) came to be admired as one of the earliest artistic expressions of pacifism – Public Domain

by Roy Eidelson

Last month I had the opportunity to share some thoughts at a Divest Philly from the War Machine event, hosted by Wooden Shoe Books and sponsored by World Beyond War, Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and other anti-war groups. Below are my remarks, slightly edited for clarity. My thanks to everyone involved. 

In late May, Vice President Mike Pence was the commencement speaker at West Point. In part, he told the graduating cadets this: “It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen…And when that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns and do your duty, and you will fight, and you will win. The American people expect nothing less.”

What Pence didn’t mention that day is why he could be so sure that this will come to pass. Or who the primary beneficiaries will be, if or when it does. Because the winners won’t be the American people, who see their taxes go to missiles instead of healthcare and education. Nor will they be the soldiers themselves—some of whom will return in flag-draped caskets while many more sustain life-altering physical and psychological injuries. The winners also won’t be the citizens of other countries who experience death and displacement on a horrific scale from our awesome military might. And our planet’s now-fragile climate won’t come out on top either, since the Pentagon is the single largest oil consumer in the world.

No, the spoils will go to our massive and multifaceted war machine. The war machine is comprised of companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, among others, that make billions of dollars each year from war, war preparations, and arms sales. In fact, the U.S. government pays Lockheed alone more each year than it provides in funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor Department, and the Interior Department combined. The war machine also includes the CEOs of these defense contractors, who personally take in tens of millions of dollars annually, and the many politicians in Washington who help secure their jobs by collectively accepting millions of dollars in contributions from the defense industry—roughly evenly split between both major parties. And let’s not forget the retired politicians and retired military officers, who travel the pot-of-gold pipeline to become highly paid board members and spokespersons for these same companies.

Vice-President Pence also didn’t mention to the cadets that the U.S. military budget today exceeds that of the next seven largest countries combined—an enthusiastic display of Congressional bipartisanship at its very worst. Nor did he note that we’re the largest international seller of major weapons in the world, with ongoing efforts to promote even bigger markets for U.S. arms companies in countries run by ruthless, repressive autocrats. That’s how it came to pass last August, for example, that Saudi Arabia used an expensive Lockheed laser-guided bomb to blow up a bus in Yemen, killing 40 young boys who were on a school trip.

Given these realities, I’d like to offer my perspective—as a psychologist—on a question that has never really been more timely: How is it that the war profiteers, card-carrying members of the so-called 1%, continue to thrive despite all the harm and misery they cause for so many? We know that the 1%—the self-interested very rich and powerful—set the priorities of many of our elected officials. We also know that they exert considerable influence over the mainstream media regarding which narratives are promoted and which are obscured. But in my own work, what’s most important—and what too often goes unrecognized—are the propaganda strategies they use to prevent us from realizing what’s gone wrong, who’s to blame, and how we can make things better. And nowhere is this more apparent or more consequential than when it comes to the one-percenters who run our war machine. In my next three posts, I describe these strategies.

Stoking Fear: We Must Remember How the Iraq War Was Sold, Part 2.

Posted on by kathiemm

by Roy Eidelson

The high-level machinations that produced the Iraq War are far from unique. (Photo: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)

After the invasion of Iraq, when WMD stockpiles couldn’t be found, the Bush administration simply shifted gears a bit. It continued to feed the public’s fears by linking the war in Iraq to the larger “global war on terror.” Speaking at the National Lawyers Convention of the Federalist Society in Washington, D.C., in 2006, Cheney offered this: “On the morning of September 11th, we saw that the terrorists need to get only one break, need to be right only once, to carry out an attack. We have to be right every time to stop them. So to adopt a purely defensive posture, to simply brace for attacks and react to them, is to play against lengthening odds, and to leave the nation permanently vulnerable.”

When debate over the correct course in Iraq intensified even more the following year, the president yet again resorted to “It’s a Dangerous World” appeals. Bush warned of looming catastrophe with public statements like this: “If we do not defeat the terrorists and extremists in Iraq, they won’t leave us alone—they will follow us to the United States of America. That’s what makes this battle in the war on terror so incredibly important.” The fearmongering didn’t stop when Bush left office. In a 2010 Veterans Day speech in St. Louis, General John Kelly—most recently Donald Trump’s chief of staff—insisted: “Our enemy is savage, offers absolutely no quarter, and has a single focus, and that is either kill every one of us here at home or enslave us with a sick form of extremism that serves no God or purpose that decent men and women could ever grasp.”

Today it’s clear that Iraq did not have an active WMD program. Yet many Americans—including more than half of Fox News viewers—continue to erroneously believe that such a program was found. So too, in a 2011 poll almost half of Americans believed that Iraq either gave substantial support to al-Qaeda or was involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Neither claim is true. The persistence of these false beliefs demonstrates the staying power of manipulative psychological appeals designed to exploit our fears.

But despite the devastation wrought, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that the Iraq War created its share of winners too. Consider the executives and largest shareholders in companies like Halliburton’s former subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root; General Dynamics; Lockheed Martin; and ExxonMobil, to name just a few. These corporations garnered huge war profits through no-bid defense contracts, oil sales, environmental cleanup, infrastructure repair, prison services, and private security. Indeed, speaking to defense contractors at an August 2015 private event, the former president’s brother Jeb Bush—who failed to gain the 2016 Republican presidential nomination—explained, “Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.”

Sadly, the high-level machinations that produced the Iraq War are far from unique. History shows that fearmongering has long been a standard tactic used to rally public support and acquiescence for military interventions that are both unwarranted and unwise. It has happened many times before, it has happened since, and it will happen yet again—perhaps soon—unless we collectively learn to recognize, resist, and counter these false appeals from self-serving peddlers of war.

Roy Eidelson is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and was a member of the American Psychological Association for over 25 years, prior to his resignation. He is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 25 Mar 2019.

The road to militarization: Paved in video games?

Posted on by kathiemm

With no universal conscription, how does the military-industrial complex entice young people into the military?

Young men playing at video arcade.
Photo by KoS, used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

It certainly helps to keep a substantial portion of the population poor and to limit job opportunities for people of color. But to increase the enthusiasm of adolescents for a career involving weapons, violence, and death, what could be a better avenue than video games?

Don’t assume for one minute that the arms manufacturers and the video game industry are not in bed with each other.

For decades, Lockheed Martin weapons have appeared in extremely violent video games—e.g., Homefront and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter–in which Americans kill, kill, and kill various enemies threatening the country’s liberty.

Such games are case studies in moral disengagement:

Lockheed Martin reciprocated, deliberately developing for one of their complex aircraft a training module that resembled a video game and “leveraged” video game technology for “tracking and interpreting real-time events during military operation(s).” Indeed, they bought their own video game maker, 3Dsolve, to develop training materials.

There is considerable evidence—although not undisputed—that exposure to violent video games can teach and increase violent behavior, violent thoughts, and violent emotions [links open in pdf].

The bad news is that this connection may serve the military well, convincing children that war is a game, that “wasting” others is fun, and that massive death and destruction are justifiable.

The good news is that prosocial video games appear to promote prosocial behavior [link opens in pdf].

What are your thoughts about how to promote prosocial videos in a culture of violence?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology