Here we go again…

 Iran a Nuclear Threat, Bush Insists
    By Robin Wright
    The Washington Post    Friday 21 March 2008Experts say president is wrong and is escalating tensions.    President Bush said Thursday that Iran has declared that it wants to be a nuclear power with a weapon to “destroy people,” including others in the Middle East, contradicting the judgments of a recent U.S. intelligence estimate.    The president spoke in an interview intended to reach out to the Iranian public on the Persian new year and to express “moral support” for struggling freedom movements, particularly among youth and women. It was designed to stress U.S. support for Iran’s quest for nuclear energy and the prospects that Washington and Tehran can “reconcile their differences” if Iran cooperates with the international community to ensure that the effort is not converted into a weapons program.    But most striking was Bush’s accusation that Iran has openly declared its nuclear weapons intentions, even though a National Intelligence Estimate concluded in December that Iran had stopped its weapons program in 2003, a major reversal in the long-standing U.S. assessment.    ”They’ve declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people – some in the Middle East. And that’s unacceptable to the United States, and it’s unacceptable to the world,” Bush told U.S.-funded Radio Farda, which broadcasts into Iran in Farsi.    Experts on Iran and nuclear proliferation said the president’s statement was wrong. “That’s as uninformed as [Sen. John] McCain’s statement that Iran is training al-Qaeda. Iran has never said it wanted a nuclear weapon for any reason. It’s just not true. It’s a little troubling that the president and the leading Republican candidate are both so wrong about Iran,” said Joseph Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation.    Others said it is unclear whether the president believes what he said or was deliberately distorting Iran’s position.    ”The Iranian government is on the record across the board as saying it does not want a nuclear weapon. There’s plenty of room for skepticism about these assertions. But it’s troubling for the administration to indicate that Iran is explicitly embracing the program as a means of destroying another country,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist at the State Department until last year and now at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center.    National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said Bush was referring to previous Iranian statements about wiping Israel off the map. “The president shorthanded his answer with regard to Iran’s previously secret nuclear weapons program and their current enrichment and ballistic missile testing,” Johndroe said.    In two interviews beamed into Iran, Bush expressed deep respect for Iranian history and culture. In a second interview with the Voice of America’s Persian News Network, Bush said: “Please don’t be discouraged by the slogans that say America doesn’t like you, because we do, and we respect you.”    But analysts warned that Bush’s statement on Iran’s nuclear intentions could escalate tensions when U.S. strategy for the first time in three decades is to persuade Iran to join international talks in exchange for suspending its uranium enrichment, a process used for peaceful nuclear energy that can be converted for use in a weapons program. “The bellicose rhetoric from one side only produces the same from the other,” Maloney said.    Signaling further pressure on Tehran, the administration also issued a warning on Thursday to U.S. financial institutions about the dangers of doing business with Iranian banks because of inadequate checks on money laundering and the growing risks to the international financial system posed by Iran’s financial sector. “The government of Iran disguises its involvement in proliferation and terrorism activities through an array of deceptive practices,” the Treasury Department said.    The advisory lists 59 major banks or their branches in cities such as Athens, Hong Kong, London and Moscow. It includes Iran’s Central Bank and covers many banks not facing sanctions from the United Nations or the United States.    The Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said that Iran’s Central Bank and commercial banks started asking that their names be removed from global transactions to make it more difficult for intermediary financial institutions to determine their true identity or origin.    The United States recently imposed new restrictions on dealings with Bahrain-based Future Bank, which is controlled by Iran’s Bank Melli.    ”Over the past eight days, the U.S. government has undertaken a number of steps to put Tehran on notice that the international community will not allow the Iranian government to misuse the international financial system or global transportation network to further its aspirations to obtain nuclear weapons capability, improve its missile systems, or support international terrorism,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement.    ———    Staff writers Michael Abramowitz and William Branigin contributed to this report. 

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    Go to Original     Bush Erroneously Says Iran Announced Desire for Nuclear Weapons
    By Jonathan S. Landay
    McClatchy Newspapers    Thursday 20 March 2008    Washington – President Bush contended that Iran has “declared they want a nuclear weapon to destroy people” and that the Islamic Republic could be hiding a secret program.    Iran, however, has never publicly proclaimed a desire for nuclear weapons and has repeatedly insisted that the uranium enrichment program it’s operating in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions is for civilian power plants, not warheads.    Bush made his assertion Wednesday in an interview marking the Iranian New Year with Radio Farda, a U.S. government-run radio service that broadcasts into Iran in the Farsi language. The White House released the transcript on Thursday.    The president reiterated his view that Iran has a right to civilian nuclear power. But, he said, the low-enriched uranium fuel for its reactors should be supplied by Russia, a proposal that Tehran has repeatedly rejected.    ”The problem is the (Iranian) government cannot be trusted to enrich uranium because one, they’ve hidden programs in the past and they may be hiding one now. Who knows?” said Bush.    ”Secondly, they’ve declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people, some in the Middle East. And that is unacceptable to the United States and it’s unacceptable to the world.”    Iran has repeatedly denied seeking nuclear warheads, and its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a religious edict in 2005 forbidding the production, stockpiling and use of such weapons.    Asked about the president’s comment, Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesman, said Bush had “shorthanded” Iran’s desire “to wipe Israel off the map,” its refusal to heed U.N. Security Council demands to suspend its enrichment work and Iran’s continued development of ballistic missiles.    Asked if Iran could exploit Bush’s inaccurate comment for political purposes, Johndroe replied: “I’m not concerned about that. If they want to spin it a certain way, they can do it any way they want. They have still called for Israel to be wiped off the map and are in violation of three U.N. Security Council resolutions.”    Speaking in October 2005 at a “World Without Zionism” conference, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted by state-run Iranian media as saying that “Israel must be wiped off the map.”    Some experts, however, disputed the translation, saying that Ahmadinejad’s comment couldn’t be interpreted as a threat to use force against Israel.    Meanwhile, the State Department announced targeted new restrictions on a bank in Bahrain, which is controlled by the Iran-based Bank Melli, and additional scrutiny of any vessel calling at a U.S. port that has recently visited Iran. It said Iran hadn’t maintained “effective anti-terrorism measures” at its ports.    ”The international community will not allow the Iranian government to misuse the international financial system or global transportation network to further its aspirations to obtain nuclear weapons capability, improve its missile systems or support international terrorism,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.    The Treasury Department also warned U.S. banks that Iran is using “an array of deceptive practices” to circumvent international financial sanctions.    The department said that it is “particularly concerned that the central bank of Iran may be facilitating transactions for sanctioned Iranian banks.”    In the Radio Farda interview, Bush said, “There’s a chance that the U.S. and Iran could reconcile their differences,” but only if Iran verifiably suspends its uranium enrichment program.    ”The Iranian people have got to understand that the United States is going to be firm in our desire to prevent the nation from developing a nuclear weapon, but reasonable in our desire to see to it that you have a civilian nuclear program . . . without enabling the government to enrich.”    Enrichment produces both low-enriched uranium, which is used to fuel nuclear power plants, and highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, depending on the duration of the process.    Iran kept its program hidden for 18 years until its disclosure by an Iranian opposition group in 2002.    A December 2007 U.S. intelligence report said Iran halted work on nuclear weapons four years earlier, but could restart it.    Tehran has refused to comply with three U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding that it suspend the program while the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency completes an investigation and institutes strict safeguards to ensure the project isn’t being used for weapons.  ——- 

Annan Warns Against Conflict With Iran
    The Associated Press    Thursday 20 March 2008    New York – Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned Thursday that military action against Iran would be “a real disaster” and said the Middle East could explode if the international community doesn’t handle the many conflicts in the region very carefully.    He also said there was “quite a bit of hypocrisy on all sides” in trying to resolve the five-year conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region – especially in encouraging the African Union to take on peacekeeping when it didn’t have the resources.    At a wide-ranging round-table with journalists, Annan said he didn’t have enough information to comment on the justification for the U.N. Security Council’s demand that Iran suspend uranium enrichment until it allays suspicions its nuclear program is trying to produce weapons. Tehran insists the program is peaceful, aimed only at using nuclear power to generate electricity.    Annan said he had told Iranian leaders that “if indeed you have nothing to hide and you are not making a bomb and your intentions are pacific, open your doors, let the inspectors come, let them go anywhere – find a way of reassuring the world, not just the U.S.”    Asked how the international community should deal with Iran, he said dialogue was the only way.    ”We cannot, I’m sure, take on another military action in Iran, and I hope no one is contemplating it. It would be a real disaster,” he said.    Calling the broader Middle East “a very dangerous region,” Annan said that “many conflicts have converged and are feeding off each other, and the international community has to handle that situation very carefully because any miscalculation can lead to very serious explosions.”    He said Lebanon’s political crisis and inability to elect a president was “very worrying,” adding that it was a bit like the infighting among the Palestinians, which pits the Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas against the Islamic militants of Hamas.    Annan also cited the dangers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Sunni-Shiite divide in Iraq and other Mideast countries, and unrest in Afghanistan and Pakistan.    On Darfur, he criticized wealthy nations with well-equipped militaries for refusing to provide essential helicopters for the joint U.N.-African Union force that took over peacekeeping there early this year.    He urged U.N. member states to heed the warning of peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno that the world body’s peacekeeping operations are overstretched with more than 100,000 troops in the field.    ”I don’t think the U.N. is in a position today to go and take over in Afghanistan,” he said. “I don’t think the U.N. will get the resources to go and play a major and active role in Somalia. We are already struggling to get the resources for Darfur, where some have declared it a genocide.”    Annan was in New York to receive the first MacArthur Award for International Justice from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. As U.N. secretary-general, he promoted the concept of an international “responsibility to protect” that was adopted by world leaders at a 2005 summit.    He said his recent successful mediation after Kenya’s post-election violence “was a hopeful example” of putting this responsibility into practice.  

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    Go to Original    Annan Says UN Is “Overstretched” by Global Conflicts
    By Warren Hoge
    The New York Times    Friday 21 March 2008    United Nations – Kofi Annan, the former secretary general, said Thursday that the United Nations was “overstretched” in conflict areas and should resist taking on new responsibilities as long as major powers proved unwilling to supply needed support.    ”I don’t think the U.N. is in a position today to go in and take over in Afghanistan; I don’t think the U.N. will get the resources to play a major and active role in Somalia,” he said. “We are already struggling to get the resources in Darfur, where some have declared it a genocide.”    The United Nations, he said, must make clear what it can and cannot do. “To create the impression of action when nothing is happening is, I think, more damaging,” he said, in a conversation with journalists who cover the United Nations.    On the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, he said he backed Security Council resolutions putting pressure on its government to stop enrichment of uranium, but he warned that taking military steps to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons would be “a real disaster.” He said, “We cannot, I am sure, take another military action, in Iran, and I hope no one is contemplating it.”    It was Mr. Annan’s first conversation with United Nations journalists since completing his second five-year term in office on Dec. 31, 2006. He divides his time between Geneva and his native Ghana and was in New York to receive an international justice award from the MacArthur Foundation at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel on Thursday evening.    He said the United Nations’ current difficulties in trying to get 26,000 peacekeeping troops into Darfur, the troubled Sudan region, to replace an underequipped 7,000-member African Union force illustrated the quandary that the organization faced. “We have these conflicts where no one really wants to get involved, powerful countries with means will not touch it with a barge pole, they will support weak, ineffectual initiatives by others, sometimes by a subregional or regional organization, to create the impression of action,” he said.    ”I can understand why some countries will not put troops on the ground in Darfur for reasons I think we can accept,” he said. “But I cannot understand why they cannot spare a couple of helicopters.” The United Nations says the force needs 24 helicopters to patrol the vast Darfur area, but thus far no country has responded to repeated requests for them from the current secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.    Mr. Annan was asked about Mr. Ban’s preference for one-on-one negotiations with foreign leaders in private and free of public comment in contrast to his own practice of making broad statements on international responsibilities. “I did it my way, and I think he should do it his way,” Mr. Annan said. “But I believe there is a bully pulpit that a secretary general should use.”    He was also asked about the perception of some member states that Mr. Ban was overly influenced by the United States. Mr. Annan came to office a favorite of Washington but fell out of favor with the Bush administration after the Security Council refused in 2003 to endorse the invasion of Iraq. He later said the war violated international law.    ”Almost every secretary general at one point or the other is perceived as close to the Americans and at another point fighting the Americans with their daggers drawn,” Mr. Annan said. “It comes with the territory.”  ——- 

W.R. Pitt Comments on Mass Government Corruption

 Why?
    By William Rivers Pitt
    t r u t h o u t | Columnist    Wednesday 19 March 2008Politics is the art of controlling your environment. - Hunter S. Thompson

(Photo: William Rivers Pitt / Truthout)

    Five years in Iraq.    That’s 1,825 days since “Shock and Awe” lit up the skies above Baghdad, all of which was captured live and in living color by unblinking CNN cameras with unobstructed views of the carnage.    3,991 United States soldiers have died in Iraq since then. That’s a little more than two United States soldiers killed per day. Every day. For five years.    More than 40,000 United States soldiers have been wounded in Iraq since then. That’s more than twenty-one United States soldiers wounded per day. Every day. For five years.    The last Congressional Budget Office report on the monetary cost for Iraq dates back to October of last year, and tabulates that cost at $421 billion. The CBO cannot be censured should that number prove lower than what has actually been spent, as it is understood that all the other millions pilfered by profiteers and passed on in bribes were not duly recorded in the books, and thus cannot be accounted for.    The CBO’s number must be considered inaccurately low on spec, thanks in part to a nifty little cash-and-carry hootenanny from three years ago in July of 2005. A report from the UK Guardian tells the tale: “The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8 billion that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it has gone. A further $3.4 billion appropriated by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance ‘security’.”    But wait, there’s more: “Pilfering was rife,” continues the Guardian report. “Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank. Between $11 million and $26 million worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the Coalition Provisional Authority was unaccounted for. The payroll was padded with hundreds of ghost employees. Millions of dollars were paid to contractors for phantom work. Some $3,379,505 was billed, for example, for ‘personnel not in the field performing work’ and ‘other improper charges’ on just one oil pipeline repair contract.”    This one example, just one among the multitudes, makes the existence of significant gaps in the accuracy of the information supporting the CBO’s conclusions a safe assumption. As for the money not present on the official balance sheets, well … to paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, that cash went to the same place your lap goes when you stand up. Even the guys who stole it probably don’t know what happened to it all, not completely, not for certain. If the Federal Reserve had stuffed those bills into the belly of a ballistic missile and launched the thing into deep space, they’d know exactly as much about where it is as they now know about what happened to the cash literally dumped into Iraq. It’s somewhere, and nowhere, and all the way gone.    $421 billion spent over 1,825 days in Iraq comes to $230,684,931 plus change per day. Every day. For five years.    And that number is low.    Fast-forward the tape ten years to 2017, via the calculations recently published in a new book by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes, and the cost of attacking Iraq will be somewhere in the vicinity of $3 trillion. This is based on the assumption that United States soldiers will still be dying in Iraq ten years hence. Six to four and pick ‘em on that one. Sucker bet.    George W. Bush’s banner-bolstered “Mission Accomplished” photo-op happened four years and ten months ago. This event is noteworthy for myriad reasons, Bush’s gruesome and unspeakably inaccurate grandstanding being foremost among them. Also, as an aside, Bush’s use of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as a backdrop for his 1,825-days-wrong-and-counting festival of balderdash set a new world record for Largest Prop Ever Used For Political Gain, by any world leader, ever.    That event was followed the very next day by a comment from General Tommy Franks, leader of the US attack and invasion of Iraq. A reporter apparently had the unrivaled gall to query Franks on the matter of Iraqi civilian casualties. “We,” replied Franks, “don’t do body counts.”    The man was not lying; in the five years since the United States invaded Iraq, not one attempt has been made by any United States government agency or office to accurately count the civilian dead and wounded. A number of non-official efforts have been made to find some kind of answer for that cheeky reporter’s question. In October of 2004, a team of experts sponsored by Human Rights Watch put forth their best attempt to provide a number.    ”One of the first attempts to independently estimate the loss of civilian life from the Iraq war has concluded that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the US invasion,” reported The Washington Post. “The analysis, an extrapolation based on a relatively small number of documented deaths, indicated that many of the excess deaths have occurred due to aerial attacks by coalition forces, with women and children being frequent victims.”    That was four years ago, and might not be accurate. Two years later, the British medical journal the Lancet put the number of Iraqi civilian deaths at 655,000. A hue and cry was raised about the methodology of that study, so we really don’t know how many have died. Is it a million dead Iraqi civilians, is it two million, or only a half-million? Two hundred thousand, or one hundred thousand? Fifty thousand, or ten thousand? Nobody knows, because we don’t do body counts.    One thing is sure. Iraqi civilians have been dying. Every day. For five years.    Why?    Mainly, because the motivations behind the invasion and occupation of Iraq came down to power, payback and greed, which makes this entire calamity just another ghastly page within the oldest book in humanity’s bloody history.    Vice President Dick Cheney is, by far and away, the most powerful man in the present administration. He is still bitter from watching the slow annihilation of Richard Nixon, his first boss in Washington, at the hands of a Democrat-dominated US Congress fueled by broad and vocal support from an outraged public. Nixon was Cheney’s archetype, the Unitary Executive version 1.0, who tried to raze the separation of powers doctrine to the ground by brazenly declaring the Presidency to be beyond any legal limitations, beyond any meddling intruders sniffing for secrets in the name of oversight, and thus vested with the same absolute authority once claimed by the Stuart kings of old.    Yet that Nixonian leviathan collapsed and came to grief before the Legislature, the Judiciary, and the rule of constitutional law. Cheney was a man thwarted, and so he would brood on that defeat for many long years, and would bide his time. Few people, not even his closest Republican colleagues, were aware of the stone-fisted authoritarian lurking behind that bland conservative facade.    One passage from a Washington Post analysis of Cheney’s long career in government and business stands out: “Cheney’s muscular views on presidential power, then and now, offer one answer to the question raised often by former colleagues in recent years: What happened to the careful, mainstream conservative they once thought they understood?”    What happened? Opportunity happened, at long last, George W. Bush and 9/11 and a manufactured state of permanent war happened. Over these last five years, virtually every invocation of the ever-expanding powers laid claim by Executive privilege, every ignored Congressional subpoena, every assertion of confidentiality or national security to block even meager attempts to scrutinize White House activities, every summary termination of a US attorney who refused administration orders to cripple offending Democrats with baseless abuses of prosecutorial discretion, every refusal to obey black-letter laws requiring the release of administration documents even to the harmless librarians at the National Archives, every signing statement that eviscerates another duly-passed bill from Congress, every attempt to stack the Justice Department and the federal court system with devoted yes-men whose only qualification is their total loyalty to and complete Judicial protection of the administration, with neither heed nor concern paid to whatever laws or freedoms or principles are rubbished by the process, every one of these lethal attacks upon America’s constitutional infrastructure have been committed under the ill-defined and therefore limitless legal prerogatives afforded to American presidents “during a time of war.”    Why?    Because war in Iraq presented Dick Cheney with the means to fulfill his decades-old ambition: to invest the Executive branch with unprecedented and unlimited power, to settle a few festering scores with that nettlesome Legislature, and to cash in on the spoils of supremacy by rerouting every available dollar out of the Treasury and into tax-sheltered coffers of like-minded comrades in the oil and warfare industries, comrades who eagerly joined in the plunder and have happily fattened their fortunes with money that now might as well be in the same place as your lap once you stand up. Somewhere, nowhere, and all the way gone.    Author and former presidential adviser Sidney Blumenthal, writing in November of 2005, noted where Dick Cheney’s plans had led him, and the nation, to that point. “The making of the Iraq war, torture policy and an industry-friendly energy plan,” he observed, “has required secrecy, deception and subordination of government as it previously existed. But these, too, are means to an end. Even projecting a ‘war on terror’ as total war, trying to envelop the whole American society within its fog, is a device to invest absolute power in the executive. Dick Cheney sees in George W. Bush his last chance. Nixon self-destructed, Ford was fatally compromised by his moderation, Reagan was not what was hoped for, the elder Bush ended up a disappointment. In every case, the Republican presidents had been checked or gone soft. Finally, President Bush provided the instrument, September 11 the opportunity. This time the failures of the past provided the guideposts for getting it right. The administration’s heedlessness was simply the wisdom of Cheney’s experience.”    It is certainly possible that those Bush administration officials who advocated legalizing the torture of prisoners, and who celebrated Bush’s recent veto of legislation to prohibit same, are simply a bunch of clandestine bondage freaks with a taste for the whip and the waterboard. It doesn’t matter. The one and only reason this White House chose to legitimize the infliction of ruthless agony with the stamp of presidential approval is because somebody somewhere forbade them from doing it.    They may all genuinely despise the very idea of torture, but not as much as they despise being told “No” under any circumstances. “No” is the red flag to Cheney’s bull. “No” is unacceptable to the Unitary Executive. “No” will not stand, period, and whatever the matter at hand may be is almost completely irrelevant to the argument as they see it. Forcing “No” into becoming “Yes,” or forcing the defeated retreat of whatever adversary dared to defy them with a “No,” is the complete sum and substance of Bush administration ideology.    Why?    Outrageous as it may seem, that is the answer.    This is a wretched anniversary. Let us not do it again next year.   

Boeing Tanker Contract Loss and Attempts to Appeal

Boeing can’t win tanker appeal on technicalities

By ERIC ROSENBERG
P-I WASHINGTON BUREAUWASHINGTON — The Boeing Co.’s push to overturn a lucrative Air Force contract for aerial tankers awarded to an EADS consortium faces a high hurdle at the Government Accountability Office, the investigative branch of Congress, which is weighing Boeing’s appeal.The agency, which has until mid-June to rule on Boeing’s complaint, doesn’t overturn federal contracts for minor infractions by the government agency that awarded the contract in the first place.Rather, the GAO looks for more fundamental mistakes. In the tanker case, that is likely to take the form of whether the Air Force gave European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. the contract on the basis of the original requirements it set forth in 2007, when it first solicited bids from aircraft manufacturers to build a new fleet of tankers.When the GAO has upheld previous contractor protests, “it wasn’t about i’s that weren’t dotted and t’s not crossed,” said Joshua Schwartz, a law professor and co-director of the Government Procurement Law Program at George Washington University.The GAO acts only when there are major problems, he said. This places a substantial burden of proof on the losing bidder. On the tanker contract, “the Air Force would have to have screwed up, not on just a technicality but in some way that really had some potential to affect the outcome,” Schwartz said in an interview.Alan Chvotkin, a federal acquisition expert with a trade association that represents government contractors, put it this way: A federal agency “simply being wrong about something is not enough for GAO to recommend taking corrective action.”Instead, said Chvotkin, senior vice president at the Arlington, Va.-based Professional Services Council, the GAO “evaluates the agency’s contract decision against the criteria the agency said it would evaluate” in picking the winning bid. The GAO checks “to ensure that the agency followed its own priorities.”Boeing has acknowledged the difficulty it faces in getting the GAO to overturn the contract with the EADS team.“We know it’s an uphill battle, no doubt,” Mark McGraw, a Boeing vice president, said this week. “It would be very rare for the GAO or anybody to actually overturn a decision.”GAO statistics underscore the difficulty losing contractors face. The agency says 16 percent of protesters won in 2002, 17 percent in 2003, 21 percent in 2004, 23 percent in 2005 and 29 percent in 2006. Last year, the number of upheld protests dipped to 27 percent.Although most losing bidders don’t win their appeal, “that’s not because GAO is covering the posteriors of the executive branch agency, which did a procurement,” said Schwartz. “The GAO is quite independent, quite competent and an honest broker.”One of the protests upheld by GAO shows just how fundamental the alleged infraction must be.In 2006, the Air Force selected Boeing for another top-priority Air Force program, the $15 billion contract to build the Combat Search and Rescue-X helicopter. The losing bidders — Sikorsky and Lockheed Martin — protested the Boeing award and charged that the Air Force failed to apply uniform selection standards to all bidders.The GAO agreed.In its contract solicitation, the Air Force had told potential contractors to submit bids that included projected long-term maintenance costs. But the GAO said the Air Force then erred by failing to take into account the projected lower maintenance costs proposed by Sikorsky and Lockheed Martin helicopters.The Air Force, the GAO found, “departed from its stated evaluation approach.” The GAO has directed the Air Force to re-evaluate the bids; another helicopter contract isn’t likely to be awarded until later this year.The Air Force last month rejected the Boeing bid to build the new midair refueling tankers and instead chose a team of Airbus parent EADS and Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman. The initial program is valued at around $35 billion but could grow to $100 billion if the Air Force places additional orders.Boeing’s entry, the KC-767, was based on a version of its 767 commercial airliner, while the EADS and Northrop Grumman tanker was based on the larger Airbus A330 commercial airliner.In its protest, Boeing accuses the Air Force of switching airplane size requirements in the middle of the bidding contest. Initially, the service sought bids for a medium-sized tanker but later selected a much larger aircraft, Boeing maintains.“Boeing carefully tailored its proposal to match the Air Force’s stated requirement and provide the plane the Air Force said it wanted — an agile, efficient, yet highly capable medium-sized tanker,” the company said in a summary of its protest, adding that this was the reason it offered a modified 767 for the tanker role.“Had Boeing known the Air Force was going to give size and capacity such dispositive weight in the evaluation, it would have proposed its larger 777,” the summary said.Boeing maintains that the Air Force “repeatedly made fundamental but often unstated changes to the bid requirements and evaluation process” in an effort to keep the Airbus consortium in the competition.The Airbus team maintains that it won fair and square with a superior aircraft and denies Boeing’s charge that the Air Force stacked the deck in its favor.“I’m a little bit shocked at the assertion,” said Paul Meyer, Northrop Grumman manager of the tanker program.The GAO rarely recommends that a federal agency redirect a contract award to another company. Typically, if the GAO upholds a protest by a losing bidder, it directs that the agency correct the mistake, reopen the bidding process and re-evaluate the competing bids.The GAO, which has some 30 lawyers working on contractor protests, typically assigns one lawyer for each case. In order to reach a decision, the lawyer reviews reams of contract documentation supplied by the federal agency and often conducts hearings.Technically, the GAO’s recommendations on protests are advisory only to the federal agency. But it is rare for the agency to disregard the recommendations.

Jury Trouble in trial of former Boeing employee

 Boeing Whistelblower, Gerald Eastman and his railroad experience at the hands of Boeing and their coopted King County Officials This is a travesty.  Someone should investigate Boeing’s campaign contributions to these officials.  -GFS

P-I business reporter Andrea James has this update on the trial of a former Boeing employee accused of stealing and leaking documents to the press:

Jury selection for the trial of former Boeing employee Gerald Eastman was delayed on Wednesday because of a glitch in this morning’s juror pool: two other judges had requested 100 and 61 jurors each, leaving only three people to possibly be selected for Eastman’s trial.Eastman is accused of stealing documents from Boeing and leaking them to The Seattle Times. He faces 16 counts of criminal computer trespass. Here’s our most recent story.It will take a pool of at least 54 jurors to pick 12 plus two alternates for Eastman’s trial, according to the bailiff in the judge’s office.Eastman asked for a continuance on Monday, to allow more time to prepare for his defense, but it was denied.

Why Northrop beat Boeing for tanker

Last updated March 20, 2008 11:54 p.m. PT

Air Force says fewer planes would be needed for missions

By TONY CAPACCIO
BLOOMBERG NEWSNorthrop Grumman Corp.’s aerial tanker beat rival Boeing’s plane for a $35 billion military contract in part because fewer of the aircraft would be required to meet wartime missions and it might be ready sooner, according to Air Force documents.The Air Force would require 22 fewer Northrop tankers to meet classified homeland defense and combat scenarios covering the Pacific and Southwest Asia required in the competition, according to a document that outlined the service’s selection criteria.Boeing lost the 179-plane contract Feb. 29 to Northrop and its partner, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., and protested the decision March 11. The Air Force briefing document made available to Bloomberg News indicates that although the contest was close, the Air Force decided the Northrop entry was better in some key areas such as turnaround time on refueling missions.The Air Force also determined Los Angeles-based Northrop’s plane was likely to need less development time to meet the goal of an April 2013 introduction, the document said.Both companies offered “fair and reasonable prices” and “a reasonable business arrangement,” the briefing document said. Northrop was deemed “more advantageous in mission capability” and “in key system requirements” and “program management,” the document said.The loss of the contest and appeals would end the hold Chicago-based Boeing has had on the Air Force tanker business since 1956. Boeing’s entry in the latest contest was based on its 767 commercial plane, whereas Northrop’s was based on the larger A330 made by EADS unit Airbus, based in Toulouse, France.Boeing spokesman Bill Barksdale said the company was given the document with selected Northrop material redacted. Northrop spokesman Dan McClain confirmed his company also received the document with Boeing data deleted and declined further comment. Lt. Col. Jennifer Cassidy, an Air Force spokeswoman, also declined to comment on the documents.The documents said Boeing’s candidate had better communications capability and bested Northrop in some aerial refueling capabilities. The Boeing aircraft also was judged to have better survivability characteristics.Even so, “Northrop Grumman provides better aerial refueling efficiency,” said the slides prepared by the Air Force Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. The Air Force concluded there was more risk that Boeing’s development phase would take longer and be more expensive than Northrop’s, the slides said. That included the likelihood of a “relatively lengthy software development phase.”“Little difference exists between” Northrop’s “cost and price and the government’s probable cost and price” for the development phase, the Air Force said. In contrast, the difference between Boeing and the government’s probable costs “are not reasonably explained” for some categories.The Air Force slides, in assessing the competitor’s past performance, said there was “little confidence” in Boeing’s program management, whereas Northrop was rated “satisfactory.”Barksdale, in his e-mailed statement, said that problems Boeing had with some international tanker programs and a Navy multimission aircraft were “overly emphasized” and that the Air Force didn’t properly consider “lessons learned” by the company in resolving those issues.Among the “major discriminators” that swayed the Air Force was the Northrop model’s larger size. Boeing, in its protest to the Government Accountability Office, said that if the company had been told “the Air Force wanted a large-scale tanker, it could have offered” the bigger 777 aircraft as a base. The GAO has 100 days from the March 11 filing to decide whether the contest was fair.

Murray considers pushing procurement law changes

They don’t call her the Senator from Boeing for nothing… 

3-18-08

By KATHY MULADY
P-I REPORTERAwarding a $35 billion Air Force refueling tanker contract to the parent of Airbus carries risks that will ripple far beyond the economic effect of sending tax dollars and jobs overseas; it also compromises national security, and gives away U.S. technology and capability, a gathering of aerospace suppliers told Sen. Patty Murray on Tuesday.Murray, D-Wash., said she would consider pursuing legislation aimed at changing procurement laws to keep production of military equipment within the U.S., and she asked for help in making her case to Congress. Her colleagues, she said, see the issue mainly in economic terms.“If the laws need changing, how do we do that, and how do we sell it in a global market?” she asked.The Air Force stunned the aerospace industry last month by announcing that a team of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. and Northrop Grumman would get the contract to build the refueling tankers. The Boeing Co. has filed a protest of the decision.On Wednesday, Murray is meeting with labor leaders and workers at a rally near Boeing’s Everett plant, where the tankers would have been built, to protest the contract.“We need to have a serious conversation as a nation about what we lose,” Murray said Tuesday. “Not many are thinking deeply about the military security we are giving away.”Suppliers questioned plans to finish the planes in Alabama, “in a facility that doesn’t exist, by workers who don’t exist, with engineers who aren’t there.”They also questioned the effect of the heavier planes on runways and whether they would fit in hangars, how the planes will be maintained, where parts for repairs will come from, and how long it will take to get them.“Are they going to be waiting for parts from France?” asked Steve Smolinske, president of Rainier Rubber.And they wondered if foreign manufacturers would be required to operate under the same rules as the American suppliers.“Is the military going to do background checks on the workers?” asked Rosemary Brester, president of Hobart Machined Products.Another supplier said that at his company, national security rules are strict.“Some people in our organization can’t talk to other people, or be in certain parts of the building,” said Tom Welsh, with Valley Machine Shop in Renton. Suppliers questioned how the EADS-Northrop contract fits in with the Buy American Act that requires the government and its contractors to purchase American-made goods when available.Murray said a possible answer might be in legislation for the aerospace industry that is similar to the Jones Act for the maritime industry. The Jones Act of 1920, named after Washington Sen. Wesley Jones, limits the amount of repair and construction on U.S.-flagged ships that can be done overseas and regulates maritime commerce.P-I reporter Kathy Mulady can be reached at 206-448-8029 or kathymulady@seattlepi.com.