The Pentagon

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"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." ---------- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Legendary Sermon Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence[1]

The u.s. military is the world's largest polluter and emitter of greenhouse gasses.[2][3] Its annual budget makes up more than half of the united states federal government's total budget and is greater than the next ten nation-states' military expenditures combined. [4]

War Crimes

That the United States is a colonialist and imperialist country - an empire - can hardly be questioned. The conquest and near-extermination of several hundred Indigenous nations by European and U.S. settlers provided the land on which the contiguous United States was built... the enslaved labor of people of African descent fueled early U.S. economic development and the Industrial Revolution...

The U.S. Empire's imperatives of expansion and accumulation have dramatically grown in the era of modern imperialism... By 1945, the United States had become the wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world... It has launched proxy wars on four continents, routinely attacked countries, overthrown and installed governments, destroyed popular movements, assassinated foreign leaders, engaged in economic sabotage, and supported its allies' violent domestic repression and acts of war against other nations...

Today, the empire has a network of client states encompassing about 40 percent of the world's countries, about eight hundred foreign military bases, and more than 200,000 military personnel and contractors deployed in about 40 countries... Although there is now a remarkable literature on U.S. imperialism, the total number of deaths in U.S. wars, military interventions, and other hostile actions abroad is still not known. Similarly, the cumulative human costs of other forms of state and social violence... and environmental pollution in this country have not been gauged...

Altogether, I estimate that the U.S. Empire is responsible or shares responsibility for close to 300 million deaths. The almost inconceivable loss of life in these endless holocausts arguably makes this country exceptional, though in a strikingly different way than its apologists intend. As this book makes clear, this succession of catastrophes will continue as long as the imperium exists."[5]

Illegal Occupations

Turtle Island | Ka Pae Aina | Iraq | Syria

Turtle Island

“The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements… It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more… Our future security will be in their inability to injure us, the distance to which they are driven, and in their terror.”

-Orders by U.S. General George Washington, planning war crimes against the Haudenosaunee in 1779 (La Duke 2005: 154)

Industrial Complex

Corporate Agents

Henry Ford | Elon Musk | David Petraeus

Corporations

Oil Companies

British Petroleum| Halliburton | Exxon Mobil | Chevron | ConocoPhillips

Arms Dealers

Big Tech

The Mass Surveillance Disclosures of ex-Booz Allen/CIA/NSA contractor & whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed through classified NSA slides that the NSA's PRISM program "allows analysts to access data from nine major Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Apple," as reported by the Washington Post in 2013. [6]

As journalist Nafeez Ahmed reported following the disclosure of PRISM in August of 2013:

Why have Western security agencies developed such an unprecedented capacity to spy on their own domestic populations? Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis — or all three.[7]

Microsoft

The Guardian further reported in 2013 based on the Snowden disclosures that Microsoft "collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users’ communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company’s own encryption." Microsoft gave the NSA, FBI, & CIA direct access to illegally record - in mass amounts, indiscriminately - the private emails, chats, cloud storage, and Skype videos of its users. Skype itself was explicitly part of the NSA's Mass Surveillance PRISM program, even before Microsoft's purchase.[8]

With Microsoft servers playing a central and increasingly significant role in the National Security Agency's privatization and expansion of its surveillance operations, the company's importance to NSA surveillance is reflected not only in its direct participation in Project Groundbreaker but also as a key software provider for the NSA and its contractors.[9]

Microsoft sells classified versions of its operating systems to U.S. intelligence agencies and also cooperates with the NSA (National Security Agency) in such areas as encryption and computer security. Windows XP was tested by the NSA.[10]

In September 2017, the US Air Force (USAF) awarded the largest cloud contract in the government market yet with a $1 billion investment in a team composed of Microsoft as well as Dell and General Dynamics.[11]

In 2021, the US Army awarded Microsoft a 10-year contract worth ~$21.88 billion to produce a headset with augmented capabilities, or "Integrated Visual Augmentation System," based on the tech giant’s HoloLens technology.[12]

In 2022, Microsoft acquired Miburo, a cyberwar analysis company founded by Clint Watts, a former U.S. Army officer and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent.[13]

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center conducts investigations of and issues reports on suspected cybersecurity breaches of military/weapons contractors on behalf of United States, Israeli, and EU military forces.[14][15]

Media Campaigns

2003 Invasion of Iraq

At the Pentagon, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria Clarke, head of Hill & Knowlton's D.C. office, to fabricate the pretext for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.[16][17] As Rumsfeld’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Clarke implemented a psychological operations campaign involving more than 75 retired military officers who met regularly with Pentagon officials and served as unofficial conduits for broadcasting pro-war propaganda on large corporate newscasts including Fox News, CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS.[18] Together, these officers circulated and amplified falsehoods such as the claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.[19] As part of this campaign, Bush Administration officials made over five hundred false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.[20]

Petrodollar

Petrodollar | Nixon Administration | Saudi Aramco | Henry Kissinger

Jet Fuel

The US Air Force (USAF) is the single largest consumer of jet fuel in the world. The F-4 Phantom Fighter burns more than 1,600 gallons of jet fuel per hour and peaks at 14,400 gallons per hour at supersonic speeds. The B-52 Stratocruiser, with eight jet engines, guzzles 55 gallons per minute. A quarter of the world’s jet fuel feeds the USAF fleet of flying killing machines.[21][22]

Red Hills Fuel Storage Facility

Zoom In: Red Hills Fuel Storage Facility

Located in Moanalua, on the island of O'ahu, Ka Pae Aina.

The Pentagon's largest jet fuel storage tank assemblage.[23]

Sitting only 100 feet above one of Oʻahu's main aquifers, it has leaked over 46,000 gallons of jet fuel since 2014, with major spills occurring in January 2014 and March 2021.[24][25]

Residents were still feeling side effects resulting from petrol-contaminated[26][27] water a year later according to a survey conducted, with many hundreds of locals presenting with severe health issues.[28]

"Forever chemicals" such as AFFF and PFAS were also found in the drinking water, and a 2022 report found that the U.S. Navy negligence in maintaining the fuel tanks resulted in preventable leaks. [29][30][31]


Greenwashing

See The Nature Conservancy and its greenwashing of U.S. Military Bases.

Alternatives

Decommissioning the majority (>90%) of U.S. military bases around the planet | Defund The Pentagon

Positive Peace

Positive Peace: no justice, no peace - war crimes are no exception

Just Transition

Just Transition from fossil fuel military imperialism to Food Sovereignty & Deep Democracy

Sources

  1. ↑ https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
  2. ↑ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/pentagon-climate-change-neta-crawford-book/#:~:text=The%20US%20military%20is%20the,the%20emissions%20of%20most%20countries.
  3. ↑ https://earth.org/us-military-pollution/
  4. ↑ https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2023/04/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-10-countries-combined
  5. ↑ Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire; David Michael Smith; 2023; Introduction
  6. ↑ http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/agreements-with-private-companies-protect-us-access-to-cables-data-for-surveillance/2013/07/06/aa5d017a-df77-11e2-b2d4-ea6d8f477a01_story.html
  7. ↑ https://grist.org/politics/is-the-nsa-surveillance-program-really-about-spying-on-environmentalists/
  8. ↑ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data
  9. ↑ https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-reich-61b2682a/details/experience/?profileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAAAYW13cBoPRhrY4pONR6LOctwjjlRhUk8_4; From Nov 2015-Jun 2016, Eric Reich "served as a Microsoft SQL Server DBA on the GROUNDBREAKER program supporting multiple Microsoft SQL Server relational database management system-based backend deployments operated and maintained by Eagle Alliance Corporation."
  10. ↑ "Spies for Hire", Chapter 1
  11. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20210923075530/https://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2017/09/21/dell-emc-gd-microsoft-cloud-contract.aspx
  12. ↑ https://www.geekwire.com/2022/microsofts-headset-for-the-military-reportedly-results-in-physical-impairments-during-tests/
  13. ↑ https://www.geekwire.com/2022/microsoft-to-acquire-cyber-threat-analysis-startup-miburo/
  14. ↑ https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/11/politics/microsoft-iran-hackers-defense-firms/index.html
  15. ↑ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2021/10/11/iran-linked-dev-0343-targeting-defense-gis-and-maritime-sectors/
  16. ↑ https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/20/how-they-sold-the-iraq-war/
  17. ↑ http://www.spacewar.com/2003-a/030616173206.f68gs5zs.html
  18. ↑ Barstow, David. “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” The New York Times, April 20, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html
  19. ↑ Blumenthal, Sidney. “Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction,” Salon, September 6, 2007. https://www.salon.com/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/
  20. ↑ Reading-Smith Mark, et al. “Search the 935 Iraq War false statements,” The Center for Public Integrity, July 1, 2004. https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/06/24/14969/search-935-iraq-war-false-statements
  21. ↑ https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial
  22. ↑ https://truthout.org/articles/the-military-assault-on-global-climate/
  23. ↑ https://www.staradvertiser.com/2014/06/22/breaking-news/more-tiny-holes-found-in-leaking-red-hill-fuel-storage-tank/
  24. ↑ https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/local-news/navy-red-hill-fuel-timeline
  25. ↑ https://www.epa.gov/red-hill/about-red-hill-fuel-releases
  26. ↑ https://www.civilbeat.org/beat/navy-stops-red-hill-pipeline-leak-of-fuel-and-water-that-began-saturday/
  27. ↑ https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2021/12/01/live-doh-discusses-latest-investigation-into-possible-tainted-water/
  28. ↑ https://www.civilbeat.org/2022/11/hundreds-of-red-hill-families-still-sick-a-year-later-survey-finds/
  29. ↑ https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2022/12/10/epa-doh-letter-reveals-pfas-forever-chemicals-detected-groundwater-near-red-hill-last-december/
  30. ↑ https://www.epa.gov/red-hill/fire-suppressant-afff-spill
  31. ↑ https://www.civilbeat.org/2022/11/a-new-leak-at-red-hill-dumps-hundreds-of-gallons-of-firefighting-foam/
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