All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our next guest is William Hartung.
He's the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and author of Prophets of War, Lockheed Martin, and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, brand new, out.
And he has this piece at TomDispatch.com with Tom Englehart.
It's on AntiWar.com, at least, the title is Lockheed Martin's Shadow Government.
And then, well, that's, you know how it is, Tom Englehart's introductions title.
And then William Hartung's article is called Is Lockheed Martin Shadowing You?
How a Giant Weapons Maker Became the New Big Brother.
Welcome to the show, William.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us on the show today.
So Lockheed, they make fighter planes and bombs and I don't know what, Navy ships?
Oh, yeah.
And they design nuclear weapons.
They make submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
They're pretty much involved in every aspect of weapons production and research that you could think of.
Well, I can't wait to read this book if it's anything like this article, which serves as a real, a very compelling, I should say, I guess, introduction to the world of Lockheed and the business that they do with the U.S. government.
I got to mention that I interviewed Richard Cummings, who wrote the great article Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels for Playboy.com a few years back now.
And he talked about how they had this big flop.
I forgot what the plane was called, but it was supposed to compete with the DC-10 in the commercial market or something in the 1970s.
And they sold very few of them to American Airlines or Delta or something and then it kind of went nowhere.
And they had a big board meeting and they decided that the market is no place to do business.
So they would rather just work with the Pentagon and the U.S. government completely from then on.
And that's just the way it's been since the dawn of the Reagan era, basically, is that Lockheed's business is the U.S. government and the public treasury.
That's right.
They're kind of intertwined with the government and they're kind of the best example of corporate welfare.
And as Cummings showed in that article, the neocons, we can think of them as recipients of money from the military-industrial complex in the vague sense and whatever, but he goes and shows how not so much Francis Fukuyama and the theoretical neocons, but the actual Bush administration, Cheney Group, neocons, the Gestapo office, as Colin Powell called them, those guys were all directly tied to Lockheed or at worst were like one step removed, like Stephen Hadley was the lawyer for Lockheed instead of working directly for them.
But it was all like that, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz and I think Wilmser and Bolton and all of them.
Yeah, well, I get into that in the book.
And one of the links was Bruce Jackson, the vice president of Lockheed Martin, was part of the Project for the New American Century.
So that's where he started the Lockheed Martin coalition with Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, all the architects of the Iraq war.
And then at the same time, Lockheed Martin was funding the think tanks that were lobbying for the war.
And then Jackson went on to head the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which the Bush administration encouraged in the run up to the war to help market it to the American public.
And really the shock and awe campaign, it was sort of like the Transformers movie.
It was really just like a promotional video for Lockheed products in effect, right?
Well, they made the F-117 stealth fighter, which was used in the opening days of the war.
And they made a big deal about that, how it opened the way for the other bombers, and we couldn't have done it without it.
In fact, it's not the most capable plane in the world.
It was even one that was shot down in Kosovo by a relatively primitive anti-aircraft missile.
So if you're going up against a country that's almost defenseless, then it looks great.
But if you actually had to fight somebody with a piece of weapon, it might look differently.
Okay, so now let's talk a little bit more specifically about this article.
That was sort of kind of going back over my background information, what I understand about him so far.
But now what you describe is that after everything changed on 9-11 and the USA became the homeland and all this, that Lockheed has been at the center of the security, homeland, international warfare, everything complex.
They run the thing.
Well, for example, they recruited interrogators for Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
They trained the transportation security agents who pat you down at the airport.
They're making biometric technology for the FBI as well as a huge fingerprint database.
They've even worked with the Pentagon on something called the counterintelligence field activity to help spy on any war activists.
So they're right in there.
Hey, we were just talking about that with Colleen Rowley, the former FBI lawyer, a minute ago.
Well, there you go.
Serendipity.
So that was Lockheed doing that, huh?
They had a contract to help the Pentagon do that.
Well, and the thing is, too, I wonder, because this I know goes for the background about, well, let's, Bruce Jackson, let's get behind NATO expansion, let's get behind regime change in Iraq, because this is a way to sell planes.
But it seems like more and more when they outsource so much of the implementing of the policy to a company like this, especially the Pentagon, but I guess the rest of the government, too, homeland security and whatever, that really the policy implementers are the ones making the policy decisions.
And I really wonder who's zooming who at the end of the day up there in D.C.
Well, it's true.
I mean, if the companies, some of these agencies like the CIA, there are more private contractors working than there are government employees.
So in addition to the problems with the CIA itself, which are many, they've got this other layer of corporate contracting, which is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
They claim corporate confidentiality to cover up anything that they do.
Companies are involved in everything from recruiting and running agents to writing the president's daily intelligence brief.
They're also involved in writing the counterinsurgency manuals, which then turn around and use weapons from companies like Lockheed Martin.
So even the president's daily briefing is prepared by Lockheed?
Well, by other contractors like Lockheed, not Lockheed Martin.
Oh, I see.
Unfortunately, they can't cover them up.
But still, you would think at least that would be some CIA bureaucrat in a cubicle, no?
Well, sometimes they sit next to each other, the private contractor and the government employee.
Sometimes they work together.
Sometimes the employee is the contractor.
Pretty much has free reign to do it themselves.
And so, you know, one thing that's definitely happened kind of before our eyes since everything changed is the creation of even more.
We already had this course, but far more are these joint task forces where the different police agencies on the state and local and federal level all get combined, doing the same missions together all the time and that kind of thing.
And I wonder about all the information sharing and the networks integrating these different police agencies.
Because, you know, there was a time where there were 18,000 different county sheriff's departments, and it was really like that around here.
But it seems less and less, and I just wonder, you know, isn't it just a safe bet that Lockheed are at the forefront of integrating all these police into one big national security police force here?
Well, one of the things they do is they run the fingerprint database for the FBI.
So that's shared with all law enforcement across the country.
And they're also developing new ways to recognize you from your high risk, from your facial profile, new ways to capture your DNA.
So on that front, they're very much twined in this kind of attempt to put all the law enforcement and intelligence agencies on the same page.
My favorite part of what you just said was new ways of capturing DNA.
What could you be referring to there?
Well, you know, I've been trying to dig into that.
Something that Lockheed Martin brags about on its own website.
Huh.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with William Hartung from the New America Foundation.
It's Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Anti-War Radio.
Talking with William Hartung at the New America Foundation.
He's got this piece at TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt's site.
Lockheed Martin's shadow government.
And this isn't so much about the wars overseas as about the DNA collecting, but never telling you how, big brother state here in America.
So I guess that's where we left off was they say, yeah, we have novel new ways of collecting people's DNA, but they wouldn't answer your questions about what they mean.
Right.
They don't really want anybody to know the details, even though they want to brag about it.
Wow, that's pretty incredible.
Who would have thought that your genetic code belonged to you, you know?
But then again, like that spot playing during the break there, whoever thought that people had a property right, that government or their agents, private or not, were bound to respect, huh?
Yeah, we're in interesting times.
I think the government has more power over every aspect of our lives than it did even 10 or 15 years ago.
Yeah.
Well, and it seems like, you know, the last chance we had was the old law.
But now we've given up the old law, restraining the implementation of just what these people can do with us.
And I mean, you know, you write in your article here about Lockheed and the National Security Agency.
And, you know, I don't know everything about that, but I've read some James Bamford.
And it seems to me like that power more and more is being unleashed upon the American people without limit.
And that could get really bad.
I mean, the Soviet Union, there was no check on what the NKVD could do to you other than, you know, their natural limits.
And their natural limits compared to today, I mean, you know, they were basically cavemen.
But if the American federal government really wanted to implement a total police stay here, there's really nothing standing in their way.
Well, I don't know, you know, how far it's going to go.
I do know, for example, the NSA has in the past spied on phone calls, spied on, you know, Internet use.
And the program at the Pentagon that was used to spy on airport testers.
Tim Shorrock wrote a good book called Spies for Hire.
It said that there's some concern that the same program may now be run by the NSA that used to be run by the Pentagon.
You're talking about the total information awareness or what now?
The counterintelligence field activity, which was kind of a complement to the total information awareness program.
Oh, right, TALEN, right?
That's what they changed it to.
Yes, that's right.
Well, and that's part of having total secrecy is total lack of accountability for just like did happen for sure with TIA as they closed down and moved it to the NSA and called it basketball.
And nobody knew anything about it for years, you know.
Well, hey, it could be against basketball, you know.
Right.
Yeah.
Everybody likes basketball.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Well, so I'm sorry because I kind of feel like I'm out of good questions.
But if you wrote a whole book about Lockheed, then I'm certain that you must have a bunch of really great stuff to tell me that then I can ask you in better detail about after I read the thing, if I can get my hands on one.
Well, I think, you know, one interesting thing is they've also got their own foreign policy.
You know, for example, they're involved in developing the justice system in Liberia, building refugee camps in Sudan and recruiting election monitors for the Ukraine and Bosnia.
They even had an employee who helped write the Afghan constitution.
So not only are they involved in the weapons part of government, but now they're making money from diplomacy, peacekeeping, pretty much every aspect of foreign policy.
Hmm.
Well, you know, one thing about being at the New America Foundation is at least part of the time you're in D.C., right?
Well, I go back and forth.
I work out of the New York office, which is unusual for us.
But I kind of avoid getting into the day to day working in the D.C. because sometimes it can just confuse matters.
I mean, everybody gets focused in on some tiny piece of one tiny bill instead of stepping back and looking at the big picture.
Yeah.
Well, because, yeah, that's the thing.
I mean, I know people most of the time, especially if you call themselves public servants, want to think that they're good people.
And I just wonder, is there no reflection whatsoever on what they're doing?
Basically turning over the entire empire to this one company whose interests it's in the most in to stay at war until the dollar is worth nothing, you know, until the whole thing falls down.
I mean, these guys get to decide we'll do nothing but buy F-22 and F-35 fighters all day until, you know, China buys us all up.
Well, I think the problem is partly it's money in politics, partly it's job issue that they have jobs in a lot of the districts of the members.
I think partly it's the mindset that says, you know, more is better in terms of the military.
So I think, you know, a lot of members, unfortunately, their larger ideology really supports the broadest possible projection of U.S. power around the world, even if it undercuts democracy, even if it actually hurts the countries that are supposed to be helped by that power projection.
Can you tell us which members of the House and Senate are closest to Lockheed, or is it such a toss up because they all are?
Well, there's a couple of key ones.
Buck McKeon of California is the incoming chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and Lockheed Martin is his biggest contributor, and they also have their top secret research facility called the Skunk Works in his district.
Northrop Grumman builds Predators there also, or builds unmanned aerial vehicles.
And then Daniel Inouye, who calls himself the biggest guy for earmarks in the Senate, also gets the majority of his campaign money from Lockheed Martin.
So, you know, basically anybody in a position to give them money on armed services, on appropriations, if they've got a Lockheed Martin plan in their state, that's where they focus their money, as well as giving money to the Democratic and Republican National Committees.
Well, you know what I wonder about, too, and this is kind of the unknown unknown over here, like Rumsfeld would say.
What about all the Congressional staffers, and all the people on the National Security Council whose names we never hear, and the people that run the Policy Department, you know, on the Doug Fyfe level, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of getting away with murder, and who knows what?
Well, a lot of them go in and out of the industry.
So they'll work as a staffer for a while, and then they'll go work for a Lockheed Martin, or a Northrop Grumman, or an Aerospace Industries Association, or a lobbying firm that works for these companies.
So sometimes that affects their judgment when they're making decisions about what to do on things that involve money for these companies, between the government and the companies, because in the back of their minds they're thinking, you know, where am I going to cash in later?
What am I going to do for my career that's going to give me the most possible economic benefit?
So I think that's one of the damaging things about revolving the door.
It doesn't always involve people at the top, but often the people in the middle as well.
Well, you know, when I was a kid there was a phrase that you would hear sometimes, which I guess I thought meant something, but maybe it was just because I was a kid, but people would say, well, this or that is a conflict of interest, so you can't.
But people don't even really think in terms of conflict of interest in Washington, D.C. at all anymore.
It's all just one big interest, cashing in and killing people.
Well, there's groups trying to do something about that, like the Project on Government Oversight is one of them.
They want to make the revolving door go much more slowly, have people at least report to us who they used to work for, basically whose tab they're working on.
But overall, I think it hasn't become a big enough issue to really have anything major change.
But I think that's one goal that reform groups definitely have in mind.
Well, and specifically on Lockheed, are they very close, direct ties with the political parties themselves?
Well, you know, partly through the money that they give to the campaign committee, so the Congressional Campaign Committee for each party, the Republican and Democratic National Committees.
And then, you know, key operatives often get money from them, like Haley Barber, who used to run the Republican National Committee, now is thinking of running for president.
And then people at the highest levels, you know, Bill Daley, the new chief of staff to President Obama, came straight off the board of the Boeing Corporation.
So they've interpenetrated the parties and the government to an amazing extent.
Wow, it really is something to behold.
Well, now on the – we don't really quite have a neoconservative separate government in this administration, but we do have the Center for a New American Security and the COIN group.
Are they a bunch of Lockheed alumni?
Well, the people at the Center for a New American Security basically brag about getting contractor money.
You know, they list all the contractors, like Lockheed Martin, fund them right on their website.
And one of their co-founders, Kirk Campbell, when he was being grilled about going into an administration job, basically said, we're not the only ones.
I mean, Lockheed Martin and his company fund every think tank in Washington.
Wow.
You know, I read in the Wall Street Journal that the Rockefellers had financed CNAS.
And as Lou Rockwell said, it's a heck of a note to have to root for the Rockefellers.
But I actually thought maybe there'd be a little bit of temperance on all this exuberance up there.
But apparently that was in vain.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry that we're out of time, but I thank you very much for your time.
Everybody, that's William Hartung from the New America Foundation.
Look them up at tomdispatch.com, antiwar.com/Engelhardt.
