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Reasons to Oppose Star Wars, #3: Star Wars Is a Gravy Train For Corrupt Military Corporations That Is Costing American Taxpayers Billions of Dollars
Corporations have been using high government officials and massive campaign contributions to influence decisions on missile defense. In return, they reap billions of dollars in contracts.
- 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.
