Feature story - May 17, 2003
Four major weapons contractors, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and TRW, are the primary contractors for national missile defense, and these four also have unparalleled influence in Washington D.C.
- Vice-President Dick Cheney is a former board member of
TRW.
- The Vice President's wife, Lynne Cheney, was until recently a
board member of Lockheed-Martin.
- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a recipient of the
"Keeper of the Flame" award, presented by the defense
industry-financed Center for Security Policy (CSP). They also
helped push for the creation of the "Rumsfeld Commission," which
reinterpreted data to produce a 1998 report that predicted a much
more imminent missile threat than any other group had ever
foreseen.
During the 1999-2000 election cycle alone, the four Star Wars
contractors contributed $2,485,744 from their PACs, and another
$2,378,113 in soft money - almost five million dollars in just two
years. These same contractors also retain hundreds of lobbyists in
Washington D.C. to push their interests.
And the effort is paying off - in the past two years the four
have earned $2.2 billion in contracts with much more massive
payoffs ahead. Despite the failure of the Star Wars program thus
far, Boeing has just had its contract renewed through 2007, which,
if fully realized, will have a value of $13 billion.
With such huge sums of money comes corruption, and the major
Star Wars contractors have already been implicated. Dr. Nira
Schwartz, a senior researcher at TRW working on the command,
control and communication systems, was fired when she refused to
falsify findings on the system's inability to distinguish between a
decoy and a missile. Dr. Theodore Postol, a former Pentagon advisor
and physics professor at MIT, performed the only independent
scientific analysis of the test data in relation to the case. He
concluded that there was "criminal fraud" in the program. His
letter to the White House containing these allegations was
classified, and never answered.
When describing the actions of the
companies that she blew the whistle on, Dr. Schwartz asserted in a
March 7, 2000 interview with the New York Times that missile
defense "is not a defense of the United States. It's a conspiracy
to allow them to milk the government. They are creating jobs for
themselves for life." And the hundreds of billions of dollars that
will be needed to do this will come courtesy of the American
taxpayer.