2008-12-20 Lockheed Martin changed its website to say that it does not manufacture cluster munitions
CONTENTS
(1) LOCKHEED MARTIN DOESN’T MANUFACTURE CLUSTER BOMBS?
(2) NO, OF COURSE LOCKHEED DOESN’T MANUFACTURE CLUSTER BOMBS
(3) LOCKHEED MARTIN HAS REFORMED ITS WAYS, NEW YORK TIMES
(4) HOW GOVERNMENT BECOMES PROSECUTOR ON BEHALF OF LOCKHEED MARTIN
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(1) LOCKHEED MARTIN DOESN’T MANUFACTURE CLUSTER BOMBS?
Gail writes:
The Lockheed Martin site says that LM doesn’t manufacture cluster bombs. Is this new? Please advise.
(Link no longer valid http://www.lockheedmartin.com/products/ATACMSBlockI/)
Sure enough, if you scroll to bottom of the above web page, you’ll find:
“Lockheed Martin does not manufacture submunitions, “cluster bombs” or any other explosive warheads used in its missile, rocket or guidance systems. Lockheed Martin does provide systems – such as ATACMS Block IA – that accurately deliver a variety of payloads which greatly reduce collateral damage due to their precision. Ordnance is furnished by the military services that use Lockheed Martin’s delivery and guidance systems.”
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(2) NO, OF COURSE LOCKHEED DOESN’T MANUFACTURE CLUSTER BOMBS
RESPONSE to Gail:
Is this new?” Yes, it is. They manufacture(d) the dispensers (WCMD’s) and the cluster munitions (CBU’s) to go with the dispensers. More explanation below.
They have removed the information on cluster munitions that used to be on their website. The Source was: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/mfc/index.html but I can’t find “WCMD’s”, or CBU’s” there now.
The pages that did have WCMD/CBU information now all come up as error pages, one after the other. The message is one that indicates the pages did exist at one time. Also, if you look around through their press releases, etc. you will find reference to personnel who had positions in the WCMD or CBU units. Lockheed Martin would have made the statement that they don’t manufacture cluster munitions and taken the info off their website because of the very recent International Treaty (December 2008) to Ban Cluster Bombs. It’s not a problem (for my trial) because the information exists in other places. e.g. http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app5/wcmd.html (Note: I copied this page at http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=2358 just in case the link stops working. But not all of the information will display properly.)
There are millions of cluster bombs stock-piled, so maybe Lockheed Martin shut down the manufacturing recently, after the UN Treaty? (The U.S. didn’t sign onto the treaty. Lockheed Martin pretty well runs their foreign policy – – item #3 below.)
You have to be a lawyer to get the right answer. The statement is “Lockheed Martin does not manufacture submunitions…” . One might ask, “Does Lockheed Martin SELL cluster bombs?” And never mind all that. Isn’t it wonderful that Lockheed Martin no longer manufactures cluster munitions! Would I could believe them. See #3.
For WCMD’s, CBU’s, and BLU’s :
(1) The Dispenser is called a WCMD (Wind Corrected Munitions Dispenser). It has a navigation system built into it. “After release, the WCMD guidance corrects for launch errors and winds aloft, and computes the optimum flight path and submunition release point. . has a stand-off range of about 10 miles.”
(2) The cluster munitions (Lockheed Martin products) that go in the Munitions Dispenser are:
– CBU’s (Combined Effects Munition) , “a multi-purpose cluster bomb, consisting of 202 1.5 kg BLU-97/B CEBs (Combined Effects Bomblets)”.
They sell a number of CBU’s with various “payloads”. The information from the Lockheed Martin site is still on this website: http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app5/wcmd.html (Jan 2, 2011 the information is still there.)
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(3) LOCKHEED MARTIN HAS REFORMED ITS WAYS, NEW YORK TIMES
(Canadians should note that Lockheed Martin is one of the partners represented in the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) negotiations among Stephen Harper, George Bush, the president of Mexico and big corporate “leaders”. Think SPP; remember the police tactics at the Montebello summit.)
Also this from http://www.nupge.ca/news_2007/n22au07b.htm :
“Lockheed Martin executive Ron Covais, also present at the (SPP) forum, told Maclean’s magazine, in reference to the SPP talks, “We’ve decided not to recommend any things that would require legislative changes, because we won’t get anywhere.” The main avenue for changes would be through executive agencies, bureaucrats and regulations, he said, adding: “The guidance from the ministers was “‘Tell us what we need to do and we’ll make it happen.'”
(Like, put the census into Lockheed’s hands? Remember the article circulated to you “News report Nov 01, U.S. wants more information on Canadians”. The report said that the Americans will introduce a visa system for Canadians to enter the U.S. if they aren’t given access to information on routine (all) Canadian citizens. And, happy, happy, “”Canadian officials have said (Canada) will meet the new standard, “plus or minus a little,” by 2011. But there’ll be tremendous pressure (from the U.S.) to get there faster.”)
Back to the quoted article http://www.nupge.ca/news_2007/n22au07b.htm:
“The SPP is a disturbing mixture of government officials, big business, and the defence departments and defence industries. The initiative may be a secret to most Canadians, but not to the select few, and what an interesting crew they are!
Consider who attended the secret Banff meeting. From Canada:
Stockwell Day, Federal Minister of Public Safety
General Rick Hillier, Chief of the Defence Staff
Gordon O’Connor, then Minister of Defence
Perrin Beatty, President, Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters
Thomas d’Aquino, Canadian Council of Chief Executives
Roger Gibbins, Canada West Foundation
Richard L. George, Suncor Energy Inc.
Peter Harder, Deputy Minister, Foreign Affairs
Fred Green, Canadian Pacific Railway
James Kinnear, Pengrowth Corporation
Sharon Murphy, Chevron Canada
From the United States:
Donald Rumsfeld, Former U.S. Defense Secretary
Rick Covais, President, Lockheed Martin
Admiral Tim Keating, U.S. Navy, Northern Command
James Schlesinger, former Secretary of Energy and Defense
Dan Fisk, Senior Director, National Security
Maj. Gen. Mark Volcheff, Director, Plans, Policy and Strategy, NORAD
Clay Sell, Deputy Secretary of Energy
From Mexico:
Geronimo Gutierrez, Deputy Foreign Minister
Vinicio Suro, Pemex, Mexican National Oil Co.
Eduardo Medina-Mora, Secretary of Public Security”)
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— And now, to the New York Times article,
LOCKHEED MARTIN HAS REFORMED ITS WAYS:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/business/yourmoney/28lock.html
The New York Times November 28, 2004
Lockheed and the Future of Warfare
In-Depth Coverage
By Tim Weiner
EXCERPT:
” Lockheed says it has transformed its corporate culture. In the 1970’s, it was discovered that the company had paid millions of dollars to foreign officials around the world in order to sell its planes. In one case, Kakuei Tanaka, who had been the prime minister of Japan, was convicted of accepting bribes.
”Without Lockheed, there never would have been a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” said Jerome Levinson, who was the staff director of the Senate subcommittee that uncovered the bribery. The antibribery provisions of that law, passed in 1977, owed their existence to the Lockheed investigation, he said. The last bribery case involving Lockheed came a decade ago, when a Lockheed executive and the corporation admitted paying $1.2 million in bribes to an Egyptian official to seal the sales of three Lockheed C-130 cargo planes.
Mr. Trice, Lockheed’s senior vice president for business development, says the company cleaned up its act at home and overseas since the last of the series of major mergers and acquisitions that gave the corporation its present shape in March 1995. ”You simply have to look people in the eye and say ‘we don’t do business that way,”’ he said.
There really is no need to do business that way any more — not in a world where so much of Lockheed’s wealth flows directly from the Treasury, where competition for foreign markets is both controlled and subsidized by the White House and Congress, and where Lockheed’s influence runs so deep. Men who have worked, lobbied and lawyered for Lockheed hold the posts of secretary of the Navy, secretary of transportation, director of the national nuclear weapons complex and director of the national spy satellite agency. The list also includes Stephen J. Hadley, who has been named the next national security adviser to the president, succeeding Condoleezza Rice.
Former Lockheed executives serve on the Defense Policy Board, the Defense Science Board and the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which help make military and intelligence policy and pick weapons for future battles.
Lockheed’s board includes E.C. Aldridge Jr., who, as the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, gave the go-ahead to build the F-22.
None of those posts and positions violate the Pentagon’s rules about the ”revolving door” between industry and government. Lockheed has stayed clear of the kind of conflict-of-interest cases that have afflicted its competitor, Boeing, and the Air Force in recent months.
”We need to be politically aware and astute,” Mr. Stevens said. ”We work with the Congress. We work with the executive branch.” In these dialogues, he said, Lockheed’s end of the conversation is ”saying we think this is feasible, we think this is possible, we think we might have invented a new approach.”
Lockheed makes about $1 million a year in campaign contributions through political action committees, singling out members of the Congressional committees controlling the Pentagon’s budget, and spends many millions more on lobbying. Political stalwarts who have lobbied for Lockheed at one point or another include Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi and a former Republican national chairman; Otto Reich, who persuaded Congress to sell F-16’s to Chile before becoming President Bush’s main Latin America policy aide in 2002; and Norman Y. Mineta, the transportation secretary and former member of Congress.
Its connections give Lockheed a ”tremendous opportunity to influence contracts flowing to the company,” said Ms. Brian of the Project on Government Oversight. ”More subtly valuable is the ability of the company to benefit from their eyes and ears inside the government, to know what’s on the horizon, what are the best bets for the government’s future technology needs.”
SO who serves as the overseer for the biggest military contractors and their costly weapons? Usually, the customer itself: the Pentagon.
”These programs are huge,” said Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer for the last three years, who recently joined Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm. ”There is a historical tendency to underestimate their test schedules, their technological hurdles, the likely weight of an airplane and, as a result, to underestimate costs. ”Because you have so few contractors, you don’t get the level of attention that the average citizen would think would be devoted to a program costing billions of dollars,” he said. ”With this massive agglomeration into a very small number of companies, you get far less visibility as to whether the subcontractors are effectively managed. Problems accumulate.”
”Twenty years ago, the complaint was, it takes so long to build things,”he said. Weapons designed in the depths of the cold war were built long after the Berlin Wall crumbled. That led some people, including George W. Bush while running for president in 1999, to suggest that the Pentagon skip a generation of weapons set to roll off the assembly line in this decade and concentrate instead on lighter, faster, smarter systems for the future.
That didn’t happen. It still takes two decades to build a major weapons system, and the costs are still staggering.
”The complaints haven’t changed 20 years later,” Mr. Zakheim said. The difference between then and now is the concentration of expertise, experience and power in a few hands, he said, ”and I don’t think the effect has necessarily been a good one.”
Mr. Stevens rejected that criticism. ”I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard ‘not progressive, not sophisticated, ponderous, slow”’ as terms used to describe Lockheed, he said. ”I see none of that.”
What he sees is a far grander vision. Lockheed, he said, is promising to transform the very nature of war. During the cold war, when Lockheed and its component parts built an empire of nuclear weapons, Mr. Stevens said, the watchword was: ”Be more fearful. ‘Deterrence,’ isn’t that Latin? ‘Deterrere.’ Induce fear. Terrorize.”
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(4) HOW GOVERNMENT BECOMES PROSECUTOR ON BEHALF OF LOCKHEED MARTIN (Death Merchant)
It’s not too hard to see the problem the Government has created by contracting-out to Lockheed Martin Corporation.
– The Government has a large NON-COMPLIANCE problem because of out-sourcing to Lockheed Martin. This posting has centred on Lockheed’s manufacture of weapons that contravene International Humanitarian Law (even before the UN Treaty to Ban Cluster Munitions).
I haven’t mentioned a word about the other very contentious aspect: privacy, sovereignty over and security of Canadian information, especially in the light of the American Patriot Act.
Now look what happens when the Government decides to enforce compliance.
There is no doubt in my mind but that I did the right thing in saying, “No” to the contracting-out. Most people in the world would understand that what Lockheed Martin does is immoral; that participation with Lockheed is participation in criminal activity. And, Government assurances to the contrary, we are opening ourselves up to providing the American military direct access to the most comprehensive data base the Government of Canada has on its citizens. Fascist states maintain comprehensive files on citizens and use fear tactics.
To enforce compliance with Canadian law, after the Government has contracted-out to Lockheed Martin:
– it must use the threat, and then maybe the actuality of the prison system, to coerce a citizen who has done the right thing, into compliance.
– the prosecutors (the whole judicial and penal system) end up defending the corporate interest, not the public interest.
– I am not suggesting that the prosecutors WILL use the argument supplied by Lockheed Martin on its website, “Lockheed Martin does not manufacture submunitions, “cluster bombs” or any other explosive warheads … “. But IF they did, they would also be using the lies of the corporate interest against the citizen. You can see how slippery is the slope. Statistics Canada doesn’t want to lose this court case.