Where’s Osama? Who Cares?

‘War On Terror’ Makes Rich Arms Industry Execs Even Richer

Defence Contractors Profits Soar Off 9/11 And The ‘War On Terror’

No wonder President Bush doesn’t give a bucket of crap about finding Osama Bin Laden. Why would he want to? Find Osama, bring him to justice, and the momentum of the ‘War On Terror’ just becomes all that harder to maintain. As long as Osama’s ‘out there’, the ‘War On Terror’ can roll on, endlessly. But Osama will have to improve the quality of his videos, however. People are getting suspicious and are asking serious questions about whether or not someone is faking this stuff.

Here’s Bush showing how much he cares about capturing Osama – History’s Greatest Terrorist Mastermind, the Cold-Blooded Killer Of Thousands Of Americans, and the FBI’s Most Wanted Man In The World :

“I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.”

“I don’t know where he is. I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.”

“Deep in my heart I know the man’s on the run, if he’s alive at all…I just don’t spend much time on it, really, to be honest with you.”

If he’s alive at all? Shhhh! Don’t let that idea take hold in the minds of mainstream Americans. Not to worry. One thing is guaranteed, whenever Bush needs it the most, Osama always comes through with a new video or tape recording.

In a piece titled, appropriately enough, ‘Cashing In On Terror’, Robert Scheer explains just how good Osama Bin Laden, and the ‘War On Terror’, has been for the American war industry :

What a boondoggle 9/11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George Bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.

Lockheed Martin, the nation’s top weapons manufacturer, reaped a 22 percent increase in profits, while rivals for the defense buck, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, increased profits by 62 percent and 22 percent, respectively. Boeing’s profits jumped 61 percent, spiked this quarter by its commercial division, but Boeing’s military division, like the others, has been doing very well indeed since the terrorist attacks. As Newsweek International put in August: “Since 9/11 and the U.S.-led wars that followed, shares in American defense companies have outperformed both the Nasdaq and Standard & Poor’s stock indices by some 40 percent. Prior to the recent cascade of stock prices worldwide, Boeing’s share prices had tripled over the past five years while Raytheon’s had doubled.”

Bush the younger…exploited the trauma of 9/11 as an occasion to depose the defanged dictator of Iraq and thus provide a “shock and awe” showcase for the arms industry, which continues to benefit obscenely from the failed occupation. The second Iraq war, irrationally conflated with the 9/11 attack that had nothing to do with Hussein, provided the perfect threat package to justify the most outrageous military boondoggle in the nation’s history.

Thanks to bin Laden and Bush’s exploitation of “war on terror” hysteria, the taxpayers have been hoodwinked into paying for a sophisticated military arsenal to fight a Soviet enemy that no longer exists. The Institute for Policy Studies calculated last year that the top 34 CEOs of the defense industry have earned a combined billion dollars since 9/11; they should give bin Laden his cut.

The only stocks that soared spectacularly on the morning of 9/11, before the plug was pulled on Wall Street, were those of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and so on. If you were a Wall Street player and you had the slightest inkling that 9/11 was coming, you could have become a very, very rich person indeed. If you were that cold-blooded. But of course, many were.

The NeoCons who put their names to policy documents under the Project For The New American Century – including Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and a checklist of NeoCon media ‘War On Terror’ promoters – predicted that only a ‘New Pearl Habour’ would see Americans ready to spend the sort of money they currently hand over to defence contractors. They made this prediction only a few years before the 9/11 attack. Soon after, massive increases in defence spending became a profit-heavy reality.

And here’s a blatant warning from five decades ago, of how and why the arms industry megacorps want, need and push for more wars, all the time. The man speaking is then retiring US President Ike Eisenhower. The speech was seen and heard by tens of millions of Americans, and hit the headlines of virtually every American newspaper the day after. Then his warning all but disappeared from the pages of American history. His warning is as prescient now as it was back then. Perhaps even more so today :