Sunday, December 4, 2011
(CBS) William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, January 2011.
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.
Have you noticed that Lockheed Martin, the giant weapons corporation, is shadowing you? No? Then you haven't been paying much attention. Let me put it this way: If you have a life, Lockheed Martin is likely a part of it.
True, Lockheed Martin doesn't actually run the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well. After all, it received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history. It now does work for more than two dozen government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency. It's involved in surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service.
Oh, and Lockheed Martin has even helped train those friendly Transportation Security Administration agents who pat you down at the airport. Naturally, the company produces cluster bombs, designs nuclear weapons, and makes the F-35 Lightning (an overpriced, behind-schedule, underperforming combat aircraft that is slated to be bought by customers in more than a dozen countries) -- and when it comes to weaponry, that's just the start of a long list. In recent times, though, it's moved beyond anything usually associated with a weapons corporation and has been virtually running its own foreign policy, doing everything from hiring interrogators for U.S. overseas prisons (including at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq) to managing a private intelligence network in Pakistan and helping write the Afghan constitution...[Full Article]
Labels: Lockheed Martin
Friday, July 29, 2011
TSA to continue using radiation-firing devices despite availability of safe alternative
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, July 29, 2011
Even as the US economy teeters on the brink of default, the federal government has handed a $72 million dollar contract to defense contractor Lockheed Martin to install radiation-firing body scanners at 300 more airports across the east and central United States, despite the availability of devices that do not rely on radiation to function.
“Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) has been awarded two regional task orders totalling $72 million to help TSA integrate and deploy new passenger screening and security equipment at airports across the east and central United States,” states the press release.
The defense contractor is virtually tied at the hip with the U.S. government, receiving tens of billions of dollars in contracts every year, and has a substantial lobbying budget which is used to support Congress members and Senators who “advocate national defense and relevant business issues.”
Despite the TSA’s recent announcement that it plans to install a “privacy friendly” software update that will dispense with images that show intricate details of a person’s naked body, the devices will continue to use radiation in order to function.
This is a completely unnecessary health risk given the fact that Sony Corporation is already using scanners that don’t rely on any form of energy being fired into the body to work, instead using “passive energy” to produce an image that also shows a generic outline of a person’s body.
In addition, Australian airports have begun trialing body scanning technology that neither emits any form of radiation, nor produces a naked image of the person passing through it.
The $72 million Lockheed Martin contract only mentions software upgrades to existing Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) devices, the company will not be developing body scanners that protect travelers from health threats that have been identified by numerous prestigious scientific bodies.
Numerous highly respected universities and health bodies, including Johns Hopkins, Columbia University, the University of California, and the Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety, have all warned that the health threat posed by the scanners has not been properly studied and could lead to increased cancer rates.
Despite the TSA lying in claiming that Johns Hopkins had verified the safety of the scanners, Dr Michael Love, who runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at the Johns Hopkins school of medicine, has publicly warned that “statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays”.
A study conducted last year by Dr David Brenner, head of Columbia University’s center for radiological research, also found that the body scanners are likely to lead to an increase in a common type of skin cancer called basal cell carcinoma, which affects the head and neck.
As we reported earlier this month, leaked documents published by the Electronic Privacy Information Center revealed how TSA workers became concerned over a “cancer cluster” amongst screening agents at Boston Logan International Airport, and how the federal agency tried to cover-up the complaints.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.
Labels: body scanners, contract, Lockheed Martin
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Wired
By the end of the year, the U.S. Army will leave Iraq. But Iraq isn’t going to leave the U.S. Army.
American soldiers spent seven years patrolling the urban neighborhoods of Iraq; its troops battled insurgents there block-by-block and house-by-house. Now that the Army is getting out of Iraq, it wants to make sure its urban combat skills don’t wither away. So it today it gave Lockheed Martin a contract worth up to $287 million to build Urban Operations Training Systems — essentially, giant simulation facilities and modules to help soldiers get ready for life in the big, bad city...
[Full Article]Labels: Lockheed Martin, U.S. Army
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