Donderdag 30 maar 2006 publiceerde ik op mijn weblog het volgende bericht:
Dirty Bomb
In December, undercover teams from the Government Accountability Office, Congress's audit arm, carried small amounts of cesium-137 -- a radioactive material used for cancer therapy, industrial gauges and well logging -- in the trunks of rental cars through border checkpoints in Texas and Washington state. The material triggered radiation alarms, but the smugglers used false documents to persuade U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspectors to let them through with it. "These are documents my 20-year-old son could easily develop with a simple Internet search," said Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who chaired the hearing into covert nuclear threats before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee yesterday. "It is a problem when it is tougher to buy cold medicine than it is to acquire enough material to construct a dirty bomb." Jayson P. Ahern, an assistant commissioner for field operations for Customs and Border Protection, said U.S. customs officers were unable to confirm the validity of counterfeit Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses presented by testers, but a system will be in place within 30 days to do so. "All our systems worked, and officers appeared to follow our protocols," Ahern said. "But the bottom line is the material was allowed in with questionable documents."'
Nu de VS alles op alles zet om 'breaking up Russia,' de officiële buitenlandpolitiek was geworden onder Obama/Biden, zoals de geopolitieke deskundige Henry Kissinger al in 2015 verwoordde kan niet worden uitgesloten dat de VS Zelenski's militairen van een 'crude nuclear bomb' zal voorzien, als aanleiding voor de NAVO om Rusland in drie delen op te breken.
De corrupte praktijken van het Amerikaans militair-industrieel complex begon in feite al tegen het einde van de negentiende eeuw. In 1894 verklaarde de voorzitter van de commissie van het Huis van Afgevaardigden, die onderzoek had gedaan naar de misdadige praktijken bij het Carnegie-staalconcern, dat de werknemers ‘seem to have been somewhat animated by the desire to cheat the Government inspectors in every manner possible.’ In haar rapport concludeerde de commissie dat ‘the frauds,’ die werden aangetroffen, ‘are worthy to be called crimes,’ die ‘the dearest interests of the nation’ bedreigden. In zijn boek Unwarranted Influence. Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex (2011) beschrijft de Amerikaanse journalist/schrijver James Ledbetter, ‘editor in charge of reuters.com,’ het ontstaan en de ontwikkeling van dit machtige ‘complex,’ waarvoor president Eisenhower al in 1961 waarschuwde. Ledbetter over de militaire corruptie die al in de negentiende eeuw begon:
While arms manufacturers formed patriotic leagues and ‘preparedness campaigns’ with the goal of convincing America to enter the war, a handful of congressmen launched a far-reaching attack on munitions makers and suppliers of war materiel… When the League of Nations was established in 1919>its Article 8 of the statutes cited the ‘evil effects of private traffic in munitions,’ which was also the focus of a League conference in 1925. The merchants of death theory reached a kind of peak in the mid-1930s. The year 1934 saw the publication of three muckraking books: ‘Iron, Blood and Profits’ by George Seldes; ‘Merchants of Death’ by H. C. Engelbrecht; and a new edition of ‘War for Profits,’ by Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt, translated from German. The books were notably similar; they were polemical histories of the arms industry going back as far as the Roman Empire. The principal indictments were that:
Armament manufacturers operate outside the law, international treaties, or any system of accountability;
They whip up war panics in order to secure a market and higher profit for their products;
They directly cause some wars to happen, and prolong the duration of other wars;
They justify their existence through appeals to patriotism, when in fact they undermine national security by selling materiel to their home countries enemies;
They engage in bribery, bid-fixing, and other manipulative business practices that distort the free market…
‘Merchants of Death’ became a bestseller and was translated into French, Dutch, and Spanish.
The timing of the books coincided with the most sustained and critical American legislative interrogation of the arms industry, which became known as the ‘munitions inquiry,’ led by Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota. In April 1934, the Senate passed a resolution — without a dissenting vote — asserting that ‘the influence of the commercial motive is an inevitable factor in considerations involving the maintenance of the national defense,’ and indeed that it is ‘one of the inevitable factors often believed to stimulate and sustain wars.’ When Nye began his hearings… in September 1934, he was poised like few before or since to fundamentally alter the way in which America arms itself. He had, at least officially, the support of President Roosevelt to conduct a far-reaching inquiry, and he began to take seriously the notion that the U.S. government ought to have absolute control over the production of war materiel, a position supported by a majority of Americans according to opinion polls of the time. ‘There is a certainty that the profits of preparation for war and the profits of war itself constitute the most serious challenge to the peace of the world… The removal of the element of profit from war would materially remove the danger of more war,’ Nye said in November 1934…
Yet despite holding numerous hearings and eliciting many embarrassing details about the arms trade, the Nye committee never accomplished much more than issuing reports filled with salacious charges but few viable alternatives. Nye charged that powerful interests were conducting ‘a large effort to slow up the investigation,’ which was probably true; committee hearings about arms shipments abroad caused much diplomatic flurry. But there were other problems. Nye and Roosevelt had never gotten along well, and Nye felt that a separate committee appointed by the president to examine the profits of war was designed to undermine his own. Noting that the president's committee was loaded with military personnel, Nye bitterly compared it to appointing John Dillinger to write the anti-crime laws.
Nadat senator Nye en senator Bennett Champ van Missouri ‘put into evidence documents indicating that Woodrow Wilson and his secretary of state,’ die aantoonden dat deze Amerikaanse president en zijn regering voorjaar 1917 hadden gelogen dat zij niets hadden geweten van ‘secret treaties tying Great Britain to various plans to carve up Europe upon an armistice to end World War I,’ betekende dit ‘the end of Nye’s ability to conduct an effective inquiry, and the merchants of death thesis — at least in Washington’s power centers — went into hibernation for decades.’ Destijds al was de macht van het Amerikaanse militair-industrieel complex zo groot dat democratische controle onmogelijk was geworden.
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