By Conn Hallinan - January 22, 2012
Every year Dispatches From The Edge gives
awards to news stories and newsmakers that fall under the category of “Are you
serious?” Here are the awards for the year 2011.
The Golden Lemon
Award to Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest arms company, whose F-22
Raptor fighter has some “performance” problems: the pilots can’t breathe.
The U.S. Air Force was forced to “stand down” its fleet of
160+ F-22s—at $150 million apiece, the single most expensive fighter in
the world—when pilots began experiencing “hypoxia-like symptoms” from a
lack of oxygen. But the company got right on it, according to Lockheed
Martin vice president Jeff Babione, who said he was “proud to be a part” of the
team that got the radar-evading aircraft back into the air—for five
weeks. When pilots continued to have problems, the F-22 fleet was grounded again.
According to the Air Force, no one can figure out why oxygen
is not getting to the pilots, but that pilots “would undergo physiological
tests.” To see if the pilots can go without air?
Runner-up in this category is Lockheed Martins’ F-35, at
$385 billion the most expensive weapon system in U.S. history. The cost of an
individual F-35 has jumped from $69 million to $113 million a plane, and while this is cheaper than the
F-22, the U.S. plans to eventually purchase more than 16 times the number of
F-35s than F-22s. It seems the F-35 fighter has “cracks” and “hot spots” that,
according to the director of the program, Vice Adm. David
Venlet, are “hard to get at.”
Dispatches suggests that the Air Force issue ice packs and super glue to pilots.
The P.T. Barnum Award to Dennis Montgomery, a computer programmer who scammed the U.S. government for more than $20 million. Montgomery claimed he had
software that could spot terrorist conspiracies hidden in broadcasts by the
Qatar-based Arabic news network, Al-Jazeera.
He said his program could also detect hostile submarines and identify
terrorists in Predator drone videos.
The Bush administration took his claims so seriously that in
December 2003 it turned back flights from Britain, France and Mexico because
the software had “discovered” the planes flight information embedded in an Al Jazeera’s crawl bar. The White House,
fearing the planes would be used to attack targets in the U.S., actually talked
about shooting the planes down.
The CIA eventually concluded the software was a fabrication,
but rather than rebuking those in charge during the hoax—Donald Kerr and
George Tenet—both men got promotions. The spy agency also didn’t bother
to tell anyone in the military, so in 2009 the U.S. Air Force bought the bogus
software for $3 million.
C. Northcote
Parkinson Award to the U.S. Defense Department for upholding the British
sociologist’s dictum that “work expands so as to fill the time available for
its completion.” Parkinson—a social scientist with a wicked sense of
humor—was hired after World War II to examine the future of the Royal
Navy. He concluded that, given the military’s deep love of fancy gold lace, as
well as its addiction to bureaucracy, eventually there would be more admirals
than ships. Needless to say, that is exactly what happened.
But it is not just the Brits who yearn for the golden
epaulets. According to the Project On
Government Oversight (POGO), the U.S. military is adding brass
to its ranks at a record pace. While the enlisted ranks have grown by 2 percent
from 2001 to 2011, three and four star generals and flag rank admirals have
increased 24 percent, one and two star generals and admirals by 12 percent, and
lower ranking officers by 9.5 percent.
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made an attempt to
cut the ranks of the top brass, but as soon as Leon Panetta took over the post,
he reversed the cuts and added six more generals. In fact, at the same time as
the Pentagon was cutting the enlisted ranks by 10,000 in anticipation of an end
to the Iraq War, it added 2,500 officers.
According to POGO, “Today’s military is the most top-heavy
force in U.S. history.” Between 2012 and 2021, POGO estimates that the six new
generals Panetta appointed will cost taxpayers $14 million.
However, there may be a silver lining here. Generals and
admirals don’t fight, that’s the job of enlisted men. At this rate the U.S.
will run out of privates and the business of war will be left to generals and
admirals. If that comes to pass, Dispatches predicts an outbreak of pacifism.
The Confused
Priorities Award is a three-way tie between British Prime Minister David
Cameron, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and former Irish Taoiseach
(prime minister) Bertie Ahern.
In the midst of a savage austerity program, with massive
cutbacks in social spending, Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal government will spend
up to $40 billion on a new generation of missile-firing
submarines. While British Defense Secretary Liam Fox said the
submarine was necessary to maintain the country’s nuclear deterrence, critics
say the program is really a boondoggle for BAE Systems, the United
Kingdom-based arms company that will make the new weapon system.
Canada’s Harper got into the winner’s circle by spending over $100 million on summit meetings
and pork barrel projects for Conservative cabinet member Tony Clement. The
summit expenditures included $13,711 for “glow sticks,” $62 million for
accommodations, and $4.3 million for a temporary fence to keep Canadians away
from the lake where the Group of 8 meeting took place. Half of the summit money
was used to build an office building in Fraser’s district, as well as develop airports
and communities that the cabinet member could take credit for. In the meantime,
Harper slashed spending for health care and education, and cut $200 million
from environmental protection and monitoring.
Ahern, Taoiseach of the Irish Dail from 1997 to 2008,
oversaw the bank speculation and real estate bubble that destroyed Ireland’s
economy in 2008. Ahern claimed that no one told him that the financial
situation was so dire, although an investigation by independent analyst Rob
Wright found that the Fianna Fail government had repeatedly been warned that a
crash was coming. Asked what his greatest regret was, Ahern replied that it was
his failure to build a stadium to match those in Arab states. “I think
unfortunately when I see little countries like Qatar and Kuwait…talking about
their 10 stadiums and we never succeeded in getting one national stadium.
That’s an achievement I tried hard to do but I didn’t get.”
The White Elephant
Award to the Greek Army for considering taking 400 free M1A1 Abrams tanks from
the U.S. “This is a free offer,”
said Greek army spokesman Yiannis Sifakis.
Well, sort of free.
The Abrams, the U.S.’s main battle tank, is a 67.6-ton
behemoth that burns 10 gallons of gas just to start, and gets 1.6 gallons to
the mile. The tanks will also cost $11 million to transport to Greece.
In the meantime, the Greek Socialist government has laid off
tens of thousands of workers, cut wages, slashed health care, increased sales
taxes, and advanced the retirement age. Massive demonstration and general
strikes have convulsed major cities, and the country is on the verge of
bankruptcy.
Maybe the army is thinking that if German banks try to
repossess the country, those 400 Abrams tanks might come in handy (if Greece
can afford to gas to run them)?
The Dr. Frankenstein
Award to former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright for her
sponsorship of Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, a man accused of murdering
Serb prisoners during the 1999 Yugoslav War and selling their body parts.
Reporting on the scandal in CounterPunch,
reporter Diana Johnstone, author of “Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and
Western Delusions,” cites a report by Swiss Senator Dick Marty implicating
former Kosovo Liberation Army commander Thaci of running “safe houses” during
the war where Serb prisoners were tortured and killed.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a human
rights organization with 47 member states, sponsored the Marty investigation.
“An undetermined but apparently small number of prisoners
were transferred in vans and trucks to an operating site near Tirana
international airport [Albania], from which fresh organs could be flown rapidly
to recipients” the Marty Report says. “Captives were killed, usually by a
gunshot to the head, before being operated on to remove one of more of their
organs.” Kidneys seem to have been the major harvest.
Thaci has also been linked to the heroin trade and
prostitution.
Albert and her aide, the late Richard Holbrooke, pushed
Thaci into the leadership of Kosovo during the Rambouillet negotiations leading
up to the war. According to Johnson, far more prominent leaders of the Kosovo
delegation to those talks were pushed aside, and Thaci—known in law
enforcement circles as “The Snake—became the face of Albanians secession
movement.
Asked about the Marty Report, U.S. State Department
spokesman Phillip Crowley said the Americans would continue to work with Thaci
because “any individual anywhere on the earth is innocent until proven
otherwise.” Of course, it also helps that Thaci approved the construction of a
massive U.S. base in Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel, giving the U.S. its first military
foothold in the Balkans.
The Surreal Award to the U.S. Justice Department for finally agreeing that lawyers defending
prisoners at Guantanamo can view classified files that were prominently displayed on the WikiLeaks website. The Department ruled
that lawyers may access the documents, but cannot “download, save, print, or
disseminate” the material, a ruling that attorney David Remes said was “still
surreal.”
The Grinch Award to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for complaining that Colombia’s minimum
wage was too high, and driving up the cost of labor. The minimum
wage is $1.80 an hour and, for full time workers, brings in around $300 a
month.
The Historical
Re-write Award to Jean-Francois Cope, general secretary of French President
Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative Union for Popular Movement and the man behind
the “Burka Ban.” Cope organized a recent conference on secularization that, according to French Prime Minister Francois Fillon, led
to “a stigmatization of Muslims.”
Cope defended the conference as “controversial but
necessary,” adding that “the values of France are like the Three Musketeers:
liberty, equality, fraternity.” Except that the Alexander Dumas novel was
set in 1625, and the Musketeers were fighting for Louis XIII and the Catholic
Church. “Liberty, equality, fraternity” was the slogan of the 1789 French
Revolution, and was not highly thought of in the Feudal court of Bourbons.
The creative Language
Award to the Obama administration for its denial that the American bombing
of Libya constituted a war. It was, according to the White House, a
“time-limited, scope-limited military action.”