Helicopters, Cover-ups and War Crimes
"Obama Confronts a Choice on Copters" read this week's New York Times . The President soon "will have to decide whether to proceed with some of the priciest aircraft in the world -- a new fleet of 28 Marine One helicopters that will each cost more than the last Air Force One....The choice confronting Mr. Obama encapsulates the tension between two imperatives of his nascent presidency, the need to meet the continuing threats of an age of terrorism and the demand for austerity in a period of economic hardship."
This is a gross misrepresentation of the choice Obama faces. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn) and others have alleged that the contract for 28 Marine One helicopters was awarded to the Italian firm Finmeccanica as a thank you for Italy's participation in the Iraq War. The evidence, however, indicates that the contract was more specifically a payoff to the Italian government for supplying the forged documents showing Saddam had obtained weapons grade uranium from Niger. President Bush famously used this fraudulent "yellowcake" intelligence to justify launching the war.
When reviewing the helicopter contract, President Obama can either be actively complicit by continuing with Finmeccanica; he can duck and cover by simply switching to the proper supplier, Sikorsky; or he can use the mandated review of this purchase decision to root out those in military, the aerospace industry and Congress who were willing to compromise the security of all subsequent American presidents so that Bush could cover up his core war crime.
Officials up and down the chain who awarded the contract knew that they were doing something extraordinarily wrong. The rigged bidding process bypassed, for example, Marine One pilots who repeatedly sought to give input. They had many safety concerns. At the time of the bid, the helicopter chosen was not certified to fly in the U.S. It was an old model made of heavy materials; this flew in the face of why the President supposedly needed a new fleet: i.e., so many extra security devices had been added to Marine One after 9/11, it was struggling to lift off. In its losing bid, the Connecticut-based Sikorsky, which had manufactured virtually all presidential helicopters since Eisenhower first ordered one, proposed a new model made of much lighter, composite materials.
But the Marine One pilots' prime objection, which was raised repeatedly by many other officials in private, was national security. Finmeccanica was doing business with Iran, China and Libya. Why outsource so sensitive a project? At the time of the bid, the security clearance necessary to manufacture and maintain Marine One required U.S. citizenship and prohibited Marine One team members from being married to citizens of another country.
After the bid was awarded, John Pike, head of GlobalSecurity.org, told us: "Analyzing the defense industry for nearly 30 years, I try to stay calm and nonpartisan. But the Finmeccanica deal raised every hair on my neck. Apparently no one else sees the irony in a foreign military contractor building Marine One and Ayatollah One."
Many others did see the irony but were intimidated or paid off. For example, right after Finmeccanica won the contract, Kim Weldon, the daughter of then-Congressman Curt Weldon (R - Pa), landed a full-time job with the company. Previously she'd been a social worker. Finmeccanica also paid consulting money to Weldon's real estate agent, who subsequently pled guilty for attempting to destroy bribery evidence sought by the FBI. Weldon's chief of staff, his wife and other Weldon aides were given free trips to Italy. The chief of staff subsequently pled guilty for failing to disclose income funneled to his wife. Like many other Congressmen, however, Weldon looks as if he will escape unscathed.
At Finmeccanica promotional events, Weldon was accompanied by Giovanni Castellaneta, the Italian ambassador to United States and simultaneously a Finmeccanica vice president. Today Castellaneta sits on Finmeccanica's Board of Directors on behalf of the Italian Government. Ambassador Castellaneta is the key figure in Italy's exchange of forged intelligence for U.S. defense dollars.
According to Italy's La Repubblica, Nicola Pollari, the head of the Italian spy agency SISMI, had failed to dispel the CIA's misgivings about the authenticity of the yellowcake papers. Giovanni Castellaneta then arranged for Pollari to bypass the CIA and meet directly with then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, Rice's chief deputy at the time. The meeting took place on Sept. 9, 2002, in the White House, and was confirmed by White House officials.
"It is completely out of protocol for the head of a foreign intelligence service to circumvent the C.I.A.," former C.I.A. officer Philip Giraldi told Vanity Fair's Craig Ungar. "It is uniquely unusual. In spite of lots of people having seen these documents, and having said they were not right, they went around them."
"To me there is no benign interpretation of this," Melvin Goodman, a former C.I.A. and State Department analyst said to Ungar. "At the highest level it was known the documents were forgeries. Stephen Hadley knew it. Condi Rice knew it. Everyone at the highest level knew."
Nonetheless, after the White House meeting that Castellaneta arranged for Pollari, the story of the yellowcake shipments to Saddam was treated as hard proof despite multiple attempts by America's top spies to discredit it.
Especially when no WMDs were found, President Bush needed to find a way he could control to repay the Italians for their help. Bush pressed for a new fleet of Marine Ones. He demanded the contract be awarded through an expedited bidding process because of heightened security concerns. A senior Finmeccanica executive told us that long before the Navy announced the award in January 2005, he and other company executives were told that the fix was in.
Finmeccanica hid the payoff by cutting U.S. companies Bell Helicopter and Lockheed Martin into the deal. Although Lockheed doesn't make helicopters, it acted as the ostensible lead partner.
"Lockheed pimped itself out," says Lt. Col. Gene T. Boyer, a retired Army pilot who flew three presidents in Marine One for 10 years. Boyer thinks the mushrooming of the Marine One fleet is a disgrace. "Many of the Marine Ones are used just to ferry around Washington VIPs who brag afterwards that they've flown in the same chopper used by the president."
Boyer believes that the Pentagon officials and members of Congress who pushed this contract through should be investigated not just because of the massive cost overruns, but "because they didn't cover the country's back."
The ballooning of Finmeccanica's contract from $6.1 billion to $11.2 billion ($400 million per chopper) was predictable given Bush's push to bypass procedures and sign a deal with Finmeccanica. The massive cost overruns now compel the Secretary of Defense to re-certify to Congress that this acquisition program is essential to national security. It isn't. President Obama needs to appoint an independent, public commission to examine who drove the Marine One procurement process, which many officials say (off the record) was the most secretive, rigged award they've ever seen. Put all officials involved on the record, and under oath. Rarely does one bloated contract connect both to military fraud and to the corruption of our intelligence agencies. Fiscal austerity and our future safety demand a full accounting.
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Guys, we all know that Eric Holder has about 5 years' worth of investigations to do for each year the Bush administration was allowed to run amuck. We need to give him time.
Our job is to make enough fuss about the specific examples of especially egregious malfeasance ... that they rise to the top of his list of "investigative priorities
I think it's a REALLY GOOD SIGN that Obama put the very guy that blew the whistle on past fraud - in charge of monitoring the bailout. He's serious about operating ethically.
Let's do as Reagan suggested - trust and verify - with one addition - lots of "Sunlight" and noise.
Obama is "the one President at a time" now to use his own words. He can right all the wrongs of prior Presidents. Let's just "hope for change" that he does not "screw up" more while trying to fix those alleged and perceived wrongs.
If any war crimes were mentioned in the article, since yellowcake uranium was only one among many justifications for taking the war against Islamic jihadists to Iraq after doing so in Afghanistan first I missed them. I also don’t get how cover-ups can be since they are revealed as allegations in the article. So maybe a better title would be Helicopters rather than Helicopters, Cover-ups and War Crimes to suit objectivity and fair reporting in news journalism or commentary.
This should be headline worthy instead of just a sidebar story. I want to see more daylight between Obama's policies and Bush's not just different rherotic and style but true 180 degree difference.
Several years before his nomination, when the majority of citizens and many of their state and national representatives were calling for the impeachment of the criminals, Bush/Cheney, Obama said no, it would interfere with "the peoples business". Similarly, today, Obama wants to just "look forward", apparently beyond the bodies, treason, and endless material and cultural carnage. Obama certainly represents something better than the theiving, corporate fascist Republicans. Yet like the almost all the rest of the Democrats, always too slow, too little and too late, unless you've sold some marijuana plants or gotten addicted to cocaine or passed a bad check.
Although completely wrong/evil, I 'get' the payback deal between Bushco and Finmeccanica/Italy. That's 'just' Machivellian politics. What I don't get is how ex-Congressman Curt Weldon (R - Pa) can survive unscathed. How can he not be charged for what seem to me to be obvious crimes?
The 'hope' we hold out for Obama is that he can stop the rot. Corruption and influence peddling needs to be rooted out at all levels.
Yeah I always wondered why that whole mess just seemed to go away. If you've ever heard him speaking you'd know he's way way out there. I imagine any follow ups on these many issues of bushco will come out of the recently redirected Justice Department, and as we know from the last 8 yrs is supposed to be independant of political influence from the Administration. I think Holders gonna go to the mats with the old guard, and no one gonna stop him once he digs in.
When will this madness stop!!!
Put Pressure on Leahy and Obama and dont let up.
Protest whereever Cheney/Bus
BTW, Bush is being sued by Dan Rather for being fired from CBS for his National Guard story. Bush never was always AWOL for the National Guard. His fellow pilots thought Bush was a pig and spoiled brat.
Oh c'mon the Niger Yellowcake forgeries have been extensively covered by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker and other writers, albeit not MSM http://en.
Neo-con MIchael Ledeen is the prime suspect, and his ties with Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraq National Congress. The Plame/Ambassador Wilson affair arose out of this. No wonder Scooter Libby wasn't pardoned.
You don't think acting as a conduit rates a little reward?
I think it's a fine helicopter and better than anything Sikorsky has. Perhaps if American Industry devoted itself to making better cars and less bombs the economy would recover a little bit faster.
so the bush administration bribed the italians to produce false evidence so george could go after saddam .. what a suprize>>>
Can anyone tell me why this was not picked up by the major media outlets?
Is it not verified?
Why isn't anything of useful importance to the citizens picked up by the media? It is intentional. Their agenda seems to be very different from most citizens these days.
Good article indeed.
I wonder if we'll ever get see this news in Italy. (my money is on NO).
BTW: the chopper is really fine, I dare say superior to its sikorsky counterpart, but $400 million a piece is outrageous!
So strange, why did they have to forge things like that when they know exactly what we sold them during the Bush-Reagan years!!!
Those Italian banks were also helping funnel money and the US guaranteed agricultural loans to Iraq too!! Things thing just run in the family. Is it the Bush family or the CIA family though???
They are so good at disinformation, especially about themselves, they probably want us to believe they weren't even involved and tried to talk everyone out of all this nonsense and Mr Slamdunk was the only one at fault.
I was going to say something, but the irony detector went off.
Excellent journalism. And the MSM was making fun of Pres. Obama for picking Ben Stein to ask a question at his press conference? Like the Huffington Post is a joke to the MSM? We need real investigative reporters on the Washington beat, not a paparazzi press corp. like the MSM offers us. Give Democracy Now! a call. They will be glad to get this story out to the people. Who needs MSM but the corporations who support them? We the people need transparency in the news. I'm tired of getting my news from them by reading between the lines. Keep up the good work. We sure need more reporters on the beat telling us the truth.
Umm . . . I don't think the HuffPo reporter at the press conference was Ben Stein, who is not a reporter -- he's a conservative economist/pundit and alleged humorist.
You may be referring to Sam Stein, perhaps.
Can't wait for someone, anyone, in the MSM to realize that this Marine One travesty is a bona fide, honest to goodness scandal.
Great story. I hope it gets digged.
In the interest of national security the whole cabal should be sent to Gitmo!
I agree wholeheartedly. I think if we started investigating all the various strings that were pulled, each being somehow intertwined, we'll find that lots of Bush and Gang's accomplices are still working in our goverment or being paid by our government.
It was a conspiracy on so many levels. These people need to be rooted out, publicly identified and shamed, and convicted.
We will NEVER see this story in the real press unless you forge a document that ties the deal together. The MSM falls for nothing less than fabricated evidence, falsified intelligence, and totally bogus WMDs.
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