War & Disaster Profiteering

In the largest U.S. anti-war protest in recent memory, at least 75,000 demonstrators encircled the White House on Saturday to demand a diplomatic solution to escalating tensions with Iraq. Read More

Many veterans' advocates believe a certain anthrax vaccine to be a major cause of Gulf War sickness. The company manufacturing it has launched a massive lobbying campaign to persuade the Bush administration to stockpile the controversial drug so it can be administered to civilians. Read More

Identity protection is the name given to novel techniques to keep crops properly segregated, and to compile detailed information on them for the benefit of a variety of agribusiness corporations, grain traders, retailers and restaurants. Read More

The International Criminal Court is not likely to prosecute environmental crimes due to military actions, a new report prepared for the U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute concludes. It examines the possibilities of environmental damage during military action becoming a criminal liability for military personnel and/or their contractors before the newly formed International Criminal Court (ICC). Read More

What began with Vice President Dick Cheney's refusal 15 months ago to make his energy task force documents public expanded quickly to include policy making at virtually every level of government. And, after September 11, the blanket of secrecy - which had until then only covered the brass breasts of the DOJ's Lady Justice statue - darkened some of America's most valued constitutional protections. Read More

ricewaterhouseCoopers is providing government relations services to Uzbekistan, the Central Asian country that is a prime ally in President Bush's ''War on Terror.'' Read More

The Halliburton Company, the Dallas oil services company bedeviled lately by an array of accounting and business issues, is benefiting very directly from the United States efforts to combat terrorism.From building cells for detainees at Guantnamo Bay in Cuba to feeding American troops in Uzbekistan, the Pentagon is increasingly relying on a unit of Halliburton called KBR, sometimes referred to as Kellogg Brown & Root. Read More

The companies making new homeland security devices, such as bomb detectors and biological weapon alarms, want the government to pick up the tab if their products fail and they are sued. Read More

Northrop Grumman Corp. agreed to pay $7.8 billion in stock for TRW Inc. yesterday in a deal that would complete its transformation from a struggling defense contractor to the second-largest force in the industry. Read More

Not everybody is convinced that Turkmenistan will be the source of a future pipeline in Central Asia. Joseph Naemi, another Iranian born businessmen who splits his time between Sydney, Australia, and Tashkent, Uzbekistan, is working on the possibility that Afghanistan's other major northern neighbor may be a better business bet Read More