RSS
Using PayPal
WOOLSEY WATCH: Woolsey Needs to Make a Choice Between Being a War Profiteer or War Pundit
Share / Recommend - Comment - Print - Sunday, Jul 10 2005, 1:18PM
TWN has posted a great deal in the past about James Woolsey and his personal enrichment in a network of national security-oriented firms, investment funds, and other activities.
Woolsey was the first person on national television on September 11, 2001 to allege the connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda without disclosing on these shows his legal relationship representing Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress.
He is also someone who seems to see no conflict between being a pro-war pundit pretending to be on objective commentator and a war profiteer who is pocketing a lot of money from contracting related to war activities.
To add to the pile of Woolsey involvement in defense firms (to see the rest, just search under "Woolsey" on the search function on the front page of TWN), here is another snippet regarding a defense firm he is playing with and no doubt being lavishly compensated.
As reported in the San Diego Union Tribune this week:
If a rising tide lifts all boats, a surge in federal defense spending has raised a fleet of small defense contractors.At the end of May, the Navy said it had awarded an omnibus contract valued at nearly $ 40 billion to 503 government vendors, including hundreds of small businesses. The multiyear contract enables the companies to bid for a wide variety of services needed by the Navy under SeaPort Enhanced, a relatively new Web-based procurement program.
The Navy said it expects to award up to $ 5.3 billion a year under the SeaPort Enhanced program for engineering services, software development and all phases of weapons acquisition and program support. The list of eligible companies includes 60 firms based in San Diego, most of them small, privately held businesses.
"It's a hunting license, basically," said William G. Gang, chief operating officer for Information Systems Laboratories, an employee-owned defense firm based in San Diego since 1996. "You have to be on this SeaPort list to respond to the announcement."
Information Systems Laboratories, also known as ISL, serves in many ways as a paradigm among the legion of small defense contractors in ascendance throughout the San Diego region.
Like other defense companies, ISL has responded in recent years to the Pentagon's emphasis on "transformational" military technologies and tactics. The new doctrine has sought to combat terrorist and guerrilla attacks by revising the Pentagon's preference for big weapons systems to include "the small, the fast and the many."
A key to such capabilities is the electronic umbrella of digital communications and computer systems that enables regional military commanders to share information with their forces in the field as well as strategists in the Pentagon. The military calls it C4ISR, an acronym that refers to the four C's -- Command, Control, Communications and Computers -- along with Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.
As a technology company, ISL has expertise in signals processing, sensors and communications.
"They are in a pretty sweet spot right now," said Jonathan Clark, a vice president and investment banking specialist at BB&T Capital Markets/Windsor Group in Huntington Beach.
"One of the things we're seeing is that (sector) has been a tremendously robust market," Clark said, "particularly companies that are focused on intelligence, homeland security and defense."
ISL is registered as a small business, which has been helpful in winning contracts awarded under the Pentagon's Small Business Innovative Research program. About 45 percent of its 125 employees hold security clearances from the Department of Defense.
As a small business, though, ISL also has distinguished itself in other ways.
--ISL's sales growth put it on Deloitte's 2004 list of "Fast 50" high-technology companies in the San Diego area. The company recorded $ 22 million in revenue last year, a 17.6 percent gain over 2003. ISL estimates its revenue this year will exceed $ 27 million.
--R. Michael Dowe Jr., ISL's chief executive, was recently named as Ernst & Young's 2005 Entrepreneur of the Year among San Diego's software and information technology companies.
--ISL also has recruited some prominent leaders in the defense industry to serve on a five-member technical advisory committee created to help set priorities for the company's research and development.
The committee includes James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Norman Augustine, the retired chairman and chief executive of Lockheed Martin Corp.; Kent Kresa, a former chairman and chief executive of Northrop Grumman; Ret. Adm. William Owens, chief executive of Nortel and former vice chairman of the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Ret. Gen. Paul Gorman, former commander in chief of the U.S. Army's Southern Command and commanding general of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.
Woolsey should either choose to offer his expertise to the nation on biowarfare and national security issues while making a salary commensurate with those activities, as he apparently does at Booz Allen, and then forfeit his many other national security-related money-making boondoggles in which he gets rich while our nation's soldiers risk everything on the front line. Or alternatively, he should recuse himself from punditry and make all the money in the war business he would like to.
Doing both is outrageous -- and Congress should call hearings about those who have fanned the flames of the Iraq invasion, and now potentially an Iran conflict, while making windfall profits from these national security crises.
-- Steve Clemons
« Previous Article - Karl Rove and Valerie Plame» Next Article - Pamplona: White House Silence and Not So Silent Bulls
why stop now -- it's been extremely lucrative for him. just ask his pal, richard perle.
Steve, I could not agree with you more. Someday (if we don't blow the world up first) historians will look on this period as one of corruption without parallel in American history. These monsters make the Teapot Dome scandal look like an afternoon church tea social.
Nonetheless, it's sadly true that war profiteering is a time-honored tradition in this country. For a truly flaming polemic against the evils of war profiteering, nothing beats Smedley Butler's righteous rant: "War is a Racket" about WWI (and the Spanish-American War, too, IIRC). Butler's expose of this evil is in the public domain, and can be found on various sites. Googling it will bring it up easily, for those who are interested. Butler himself is an interesting character -- an anti-war polemicist who was a popular and highly honored General (received the Congressional Medal of Honor twice, among numerous other military awards).
It seems Woolsey has a cot and a mini fridge under every Fox News desk. Whenever one of the anchors gets bored, he/she wakes him up and there he is, saying "Bush is absolutely right and here's why..." It reminds me of the old Spy magazine feature "Log rolling in out time". It's economically brilliant in a Neil Cavuto sort of way.
"war profiteering is a time-honored tradition in this country."
Our country's economy is addicted to war. I don't see how this will change anytime soon.
Wow. San Diego is an intelligence hot spot. Lots of TLC (Three Letter Companies). Isn't MZM, a defense contractor under investigation due to shady dealings with Rep. Duke Cunningham, based in San Diego? Is MZM a unique case of pay-to-play?
Bill Moyer's made a comment on retiring about the incredible corporate influence in government spawning corruption we haven't seen since the start of the industrial revolution.
It's in both parties and it won't matter who's in charge. Woolsey, Feith, and Tauzin, are the most infamous examples, but it seems like every senator or representative has a family member working for a lobby group these days.
Eugene Scalia's representation of Bush before the Supreme Court in 2000 was the first event to send off alarms for me, but there have been many reports that chronicle the epidemic of incestual relationships in Washington.
With a disappearing middle class I don't see any group with enough influence to change the slippery slope we're heading down.
So hard to decide which of the two posts this is more appropriate to. Incestuous indeed.
History reminder:
Rumsfeld atop list to take over as CIA director
Washington Times
December 27, 2000
By Ralph Z. Hallow and Bill Gertz
...
In addition to past government experience, Mr. Rumsfeld also was picked for the CIA post because of his success in leading a special commission of intelligence and defense specialists in 1998 that reversed a CIA estimate on emerging international missile threats, which critics charged was politically skewed.
...
As head of a nine-member blue-ribbon panel known as the Rumsfeld Commission, he clashed with the CIA over access to sensitive intelligence and eventually gained access to some of the agency's deepest secrets.
Mr. Rumsfeld, during the panel's inquiry, personally questioned senior and junior CIA analysts and uncovered dissenting points of view that appeared to have been suppressed by senior managers.
The panel uncovered what some of its members described as "politicization" that appeared aimed at blocking development of missile defenses.
The initial November 1995 national intelligence estimate on missile threats asserted that no missile threats would emerge for 15 years. The estimate prompted Congress to appoint the Rumsfeld Commission to review the threat.
North Korea then shocked the CIA by test-launching a new long-range missile in August 1998.
The Rumsfeld panel's report concluded that missile threats to the United States were growing faster and would emerge sooner than CIA analysts had predicted.
...
Other candidates who sought the CIA post but have lost out to Mr. Rumsfeld are Rep. Porter J. Goss, Florida Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and current CIA Director George Tenet.
Mr. Goss, a former CIA officer, was opposed by some Republican conservatives who charged he was too accommodating to the CIA and did not provide tougher oversight in the past several years.
Corruption like this is bad but to be expected. The best way to out these vultures is to assemble a top ten war profiteers list that the MSM would be likely to print(they love top ten lists!).
What is more troubling is the long list of Republicans who bought Iraqi assets cheap from the CPB on Bremer's watch. These assets will only go up in value if our troops stay in Iraq long enough to stabilize the country.
War profiteering is one thing...having a financial stake in the outcome of the war is another level of corruption entirely.
Top 10 war profiteers list!! Excellent idea. from the discussions so far, seems to me we have a good start of a list. Steve began with Woolsey.
kudos steve,
Excellent analysis. This type of profiteering/advocacy needs to end. Expose it, it can't stand the light of day.
Disgusting. Particularly when the advocacy part, would seem to have invovled so many other players doing unseemly and questionably legal activities.
I don't remember hearing the liberal media whine when Prescott Bush did it.
Oh wait, I wasn't born yet then.
War profiteers and otherwise corrupt government officials are robbing YOU. Grab'em, hang'em, every one of 'em, little man.
July 14th would be a good day to start. Hope Steve is back by then with those guillotines he went over for.
Only mobs are going to root out the mobsters, and we ain't gonna apoligize for these lynchings down the road. We're gonna be proud, have a holiday, we're gonna never forget.
Now let's talk about the current extortion underway:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4671169.stm
Israel requests extra US $2.2bn
Israel is asking Washington for $2.2bn in additional aid to help fund its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and four small West Bank settlements.
Israeli officials say most of the money will be used to pay for developing the Negev and Galilee regions - where the bulk of the settlers will be moved.
One third of the sum, officials say, will go towards the relocation of Israeli military bases.
Washington has already agreed to provide the aid in principle.
But reports say that the amount is much bigger than previous estimates of about $500m.
An Israeli delegation led by the head of the Israeli prime minister's office, Ilan Cohen, is in Washington for meetings with US officials. The US team is expected to be led by Elliot Abrams, the deputy National Security Adviser.
Israel is the world's largest recipient of American aid, receiving an estimated $3bn annually.
They call it Chutzpah; they call us schmucks.
We live in a criminal society in criminal world, and if you don't have an angle, shave some points, have your hand in the till, or somehow get over or at least try to, you're a schmuck.
Mendacity is the name of the game in human life. You want to be truthful and honest, you'll be crucified.
Find yourselves an easy touch and take him/her/it to the cleaners. It's a game; it's fun; you only live once; grab for the gusto; have some juicy stories to tell the grand kids so they won't grow up to be schmucks.
At this point are we even remotely surprised by learning of this?
Steve, I absolutely salute you and the many others who are bringing this corruption to light, but I have to ask: is it even worth our breath to demand these people adhere to even the loosest framework of ethical behavior?
If the past five years have shown anything, these people (I use the term advisedly) have no more concept of ethics, decency, morality, or even minimal standards that might qualify as legal. They could no more heed a call for ethical behavior than someone like James Dobson or Jerry Falwell might a call for genuine religious tolerance.
Perhaps I've simply become to cynical for my own good. I'd like to think the important thing is the call itself is what is important, not necessarily if it is heeded or not.
Again, perhaps I've simply gotten too cynical and can't imagine anyone actually caring any longer.
Thanks again, Steve. You've actually got me thinking about what's really important here.
Steve,
Why don't you try next to bring stark attention to the nomination process of Gordon R. England to Wolfowitz's former post, deputy secretary of Defense, since his newly appointed Chief of Staff, Robert L. Earl, was an Iran-Contra criminal who stole and destroyed national security documents while working for the criminal Oliver North?
SEE LA Times:
Do we need a criminal, especially one who stole and destroyed national security documents in an effort to cover-up a high-crime, in a highly sensitive position in the Pentagon?
Shouldn't an issue be made of this, and demand that England find himself a new chief of staff if he expects to be passed through the nominating process to his Pentagon position?
Everybody should be able to see the reasonableness of not wanting a thief and destroyer of national security documents anywhere around such documents in these turbulent times.
Good luck with rounding up some guillotines. I'm sure they'll come in handy sooner rather than later. Quatorze Juillet, baby!
Aux armes, citoyens !
Formez vos bataillons !
Marchons, marchons !
Qu'un sang impur...
Abreuve nos sillons !
Attention: Fans of The Chutzpah vs. United Schmucks of America:
See "Informed Comment" for July 11, 2005 at: http://www.juancole.com/
Jerusalem and Terrorism
"The Ariel Sharon government in Israel has announced that it will build a huge wall on someone else's land through Jerusalem, cutting off 55,000 Arabs from the city (they'll have to go through nasty Israeli checkpoints every day to get into their own city!)"
"This is land theft on a massive scale. Worse, it is theft on a stage of sacred space that affects the sentiments of over a billion people. Whether Westerners like it or not, Jerusalem is considered by Muslims their third holiest city, and Israeli theft of the whole thing drives a lot of them up the wall. A partitioned Jerusalem where the Arab east is connected to the West Bank is the only route to peace. Sharon in his usual aggressive, grabby way, is trying to make that forever an impossibility."
"And, folks, this sort of thing, which the Washington Post didn't even notice, may very well get you and me killed. I think what Sharon is doing is morally and politically wrong to begin with. But I sure as hell resent the possibility that I or my family is going to get blown up because of it. ............... [READ ON]....."
WE ARE FUNDING (i.e., being extorted) OUR OWN DEMISE
Harry S Truman would be proud of you Steve. Now if we could only get a sitting Democratic senator to spearhead the war-profiteering investigation the historical analogy would be complete.
Banish Woolsey and the war profiteers!
Thank you, thank you for commenting on Woolsey and this whole issue! It is unethical to say the least. (An aside--I have trouble thinking of Woolsey without thinking of Shears' Montgomery Burns character)
I think the issue of making a profit off of war and munitions is an intriguing one. My gut reaction is that war should never be profitable--it seems any civilized capitalist society would build in disincentives to fostering war. But then a free market is an incentive for innovation in technology and other advances in efficiency.
It seems, however, that politics, power and persuasion trump ethics and even the free market. I'm not confident that innovation, efficiency, entrepreneurship, or any of these other values we like to pride ourselves on is what is driving the war machine here. Machiavellian opportunists are taking advantage of the system, which I doubt is a "free market" any longer. How many former and current senior administration officials are both pushing and profiting from this Iraqi disaster?
THERE ARE NO LITMUS TESTS IN THE ARENA OF EDITORIAL OPINION. RECUSAL IS NOT RELEVANT.
Steve,
like you, I find Woolsey a distasteful character.
That said, however, there really is no principle that insulates pundits from self-serving stakeholding in the subjects about which they write.
Lee Iacocca is free to sell cars and be a pundit on the American automobile industry if he chooses.
We can't set up screens that decide who will and who won't enter the pundit-ocracy.
Both tasteful and distasteful people will write opinion columns. George Will is free to advance the Supreme Court candidacy of his personal friend if he so chooses (and he has done so this week).
The onus is upon us, as literate members of the body politic to recognize the interest or interests that pundits are advancing along with their opinions.
James Reston, to choose a pundit with who I frequently agreed, was distincltly a self-dealer. He would not pass your litmus test for intellectual independence. Yet he was a bastion of liberal/realist opinion at the New York Times for decades.
I think, Steve, that if you reflect upon the matter you might reconsider your suggestion that
Woolsey "should recuse himself from punditry and make all the money in the war business he would like to".
Punditry is not a public office with the attendant responsibilities of public service. It is not a disinterested civic function like serving on a jury. It is, when reduced to the basics, THE SALE OF CONTROVERSIAL OPINIONS FOR MONEY.
Recusal really does not enter into it. If Tom Freedman held Lexus stock or owned Olive Trees, this would not prevent him from invoking both in his opinion-mongering on the Middle East.
You are absolutely correct to underscore the hypocrisy in the mix of Woolsey's personal interests and his public opinions, but we cannot ban from the editorial pages or the airwaves.
We can, of course, expose their hypocrisy.
This you do very well. I would suggest, Steve, that you settle for shining the light of truth into the dark corners of Woolsey's dealings and let the court of public opinion do the rest.
We can't really hold Congressional hearings about the motives of pundits.
We can, of course, hold hearings about war profiteers whose dealings skirted or abridged the law. We did so with some vigor in WWII and there would seem to be plenty of candidates from this war. Woolsey perhaps among them. The VP almost certainly among them.
But we not forget that our nation is built, inter alia, upon the freedom of hypocrites to be hypocrites.
JohnStuart
Who is Eleana Benador?
Some of the people she represents include Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Ledeen, Natan Sharansky, and James Woolsey...
The Neo-Con Stable of All-Stars
Also includes: David Gelertner, Alexander M Haig Jr, Victor David Hanson, Amir Taheri, Laurie Mylorie, Richard Pipes, and a who's-who of middle eastern expats praying that the US overthrows the governments of the country's of their birth.
Reader Comments (20) - post a comment