The Empire 103

'War Profits Trump the Rule of Law.

I. The Wings of the Dove.

Slush funds, oil sheiks, prostitutes, Swiss banks, kickbacks, blackmail, bagmen, arms deals, war plans, climbdowns, big lies and Dick Cheney - it's a scandal that has it all, corruption and cowardice at the highest levels, a festering canker at the very heart of world politics, where the War on Terror meets the slaughter in Iraq. Yet chances are you've never heard about it - even though it happened just a few days ago. The fog of war profiteering, it seems, is just as thick as the fog of war.
But here's how the deal went down. On December 14, the UK attorney general, Lord Goldsmith (Pete Goldsmith as was, before his longtime crony Tony Blair raised him to the peerage), peremptorily shut down a two-year investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into a massive corruption case involving Britain's biggest military contractor and members of the Saudi royal family. SFO bulldogs had just forced their way into the holy of holies of the great global back room - Swiss bank accounts - when Pete pulled the plug. Continuing with the investigation, said His Lordship, "would not be in the national interest."
It certainly wasn't in the interest of BAE Systems, the British arms merchant that has become one of the top 10 US military firms as well, through its voracious acquisitions during the profitable War on Terror - including some juicy hook-ups with the Carlyle Group, the former corporate crib of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and still current home of the family fixer, James Baker. BAE director Phillip Carroll is also quite at home in the White House inner circle: a former chairman of Shell Oil, he was tapped by George II to be the first "Senior Adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Oil" in those heady "Mission Accomplished" days of 2003. BAE has allegedly managed to "disappear" approximately $2 billion in shavings from one of the largest and longest-running arms deals in history - the UK-Saudi warplane program known as "al-Yamanah" (Arabic for "The Dove"). Al-Yamanah has been flying for 18 years now, with periodic augmentations, pumping almost $80 billion into BAE's coffers, with negotiations for $12 billion in additional planes now nearing completion. SFO investigators had followed the missing money from the deal into a network of Swiss bank accounts and the usual Enronian web of offshore front companies.
Nor was continuing the investigation in the interest of the Saudi royals, whose princely principals in the arms deal were embarrassed by allegations that a BAE-administered slush fund had supplied the fiercely ascetic fundamentalists with wine, women and song - not to mention lush apartments, ritzy holidays, cold hard cash, Jags, Ferraris and at least one gold-plated Rolls-Royce, as The Times reported. One scam - uncovered by the Guardian in a batch of accidentally released government documents - involved inflating the price of the warplanes by 32 percent. The rakeoff was then presumably siphoned into BAE's secret accounts, with some of it kicking back to the Saudi royals and their retainers.
The Saudis were said to be incensed by the continuing revelations spinning out of the investigation, which had begun in 2004 after the Guardian first got wind of the alleged slush fund. Last month, with talks on the new $12 billion extension in the final stages, the Saudis lowered the boom, threatening to ashcan al-Yamanah and buy their warplanes from - gasp! - the French instead. For a week or two, the Blair government played chicken with the Saudis, hoping the threat was just a hardball bluff for better terms (or maybe bigger slush).'

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/122206A.shtml