Featured Research
Click the links on the map to view a company profile. Browse a longer list of war contractors here. Read about W.I.B.'s methodology here.18.Jan.2012
New U.S. Nuke Facility Shows One Way Military Costs Get Hidden
The Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C. today released a report asking the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration to kill a $6 billion nuclear weapons project in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
You can read POGO’s report online here. A couple of years ago, while living in New Mexico, I wrote a primer on this project for the Santa Fe Reporter, which remains online here.
It seems odd, doesn’t it? How did a $6 billion nuclear weapons program—a program, as POGO notes, that seems at odds with Obama’s stated nukes policy—slip by without mention during the recent debate over military spending? Aren’t nuclear weapons, after all, the constant preoccupation of all foreign and national security thought—not just within the U.S., but around the world?
In the shallowest sense, the omission is understandable, considering how amazing it is that there was such a debate at all, given the militaristic drift of the past decade.
But ultimately I believe there’s one overarching reason why you’ve probably heard little to nothing about this project: Language. Specifically, the language of obfuscation.
The nuke lab in question will be run by the Department of Energy, not the Department of Defense. This is a longstanding bureaucratic fact of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, but nonetheless similar to the shell game whereby the costs of American private security contractors in Iraq shifted to the Department of State prior the withdrawal of military ground forces.
It’s also not called a nuke lab. Instead, it’s euphemistically described as a “chemistry and metallurgy” facility—still awake?—and a “replacement” one at that. So it’s not even really new, you see!
I could be wrong, of course. It could be that Americans really do care about the development of nuclear weapons—just not their own.
03.Jan.2012
A Parallel Quagmire: The Trans-Afghanistan Gas Pipeline
The perpetually postponed U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan tracks a little too closely with timelines for another fubar project, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline.
TAPI, as the pipeline is known, ought to be called TBD. It’s been a Big Oil dream since the mid-1990s, and a decade’s-long American military presence in the region has brought it no closer to reality. The Afghan news outfit Killid Media reported yesterday that “Little has happened on the TAPI natural gas project involving four countries a year after [an] agreement was signed by the governments.”
Planners are promising the project could be in operation by 2016. … Work which was delayed by security concerns will start from early 2012 and finish in two years…
Are the pipeline planners scheduling based on the projected 2014 timeline for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, or vice-versa? Does it matter? Either way, there are signs that the U.S. government is doubling down on the project as Pakistani leaders have indicated they might prefer a competing pipeline proposed to connect Pakistan and a U.S. adversary, Iran.
Read more ›
13.Dec.2011
Another eBay Arms Trader Busted
I just posted on this over at Willamette Week. Geoffrey B. Roose, a self-described three-tour U.S. Army veteran from Oregon, was arrested last week following a sting by Homeland Security agents who stumbled across his eBay store, where he was selling restricted (and apparently stolen) Trijicon military rifle scopes.
Roose’s eBay username: “mr.f.u.up.”
Investigators got a hold of Roose’s emails. In one, he reacted defensively to a prospective customer on eBay who pointed out that he appeared to be dealing in stolen government property.
“You know what man,” Roose began,
I spent three tours overseas and it isn’t my responsibility to police the world. … Take a load off and try worrying about your life, not stupid federal ITAR rules or stolen property. There is more government property wasted in a dumpster overseas then [sic] you will ever see on ebay. Sorry to be rude, but it’s the god honest truth. … Check feedback before you accuse someone of potentially having stolen property. Deal with it, it happens. It’s your tax dollars.
