Arms Trade
Film ... ARMS FOR THE POOR (1998)

ARMS FOR THE POOR (1998) ... Maryknoll World Productions ... some key text from the film

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

ARMS FOR THE POOR (1998) Maryknoll World Productions 28.5 minutes

Produced, directed, and edited by John Ankele and Anne Macksoud ... Narrated by Richard Kiley

Study Questions

• 1. Which countries does the US choose to support militarily?

• 2. How does the US give support? (What kinds of military support does the US provide?)

• 3. What weapons has the US supplied to other countries?

• 4. Should some weapons be banned? How should they be banned? from production? from sale?

• 5. What efforts are being made to challenge or stop arms sales?

Dwight D. Eisenhower (“Farewell to the American People,” January 17, 1960): “…we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Since the end of the Cold War, US arms sales have doubled.

The US sells more weaponry than all of the other 52 arms-exporting countries combined.

Why are 80% of arms sales to nondemocratic countries?

[Statements by various commentators, who will be heard from later.]

The US supplied arms for three decades to Indonesia under Suharto, one of the most brutal regimes in the world.

In 1975, Suharto asked Ford & Kissinger what the US would do if Indonesia invaded East Timor, “a small island between Indonesia and Australia.” That is technically not correct. East Timor is a former Portuguese territory on the island of Timor. West Timor was (and is) a part of Indonesia. Indonesia wanted the entire island. Ford & Kissinger said the US wouldn’t do anything, although they knew that it would be a violation of a UN resolution and also of a treaty between the US and Indonesia forbidding the use of US weapons for any aggressive purposes. ... 48 hours after Ford & Kissinger left Jakarta, Indonesia attacked E. Timor.

Charles Scheiner (East Timor Action Network): The worst killing took place in the first five years of the occupation. About a third of E. Timor’s population was killed (200,000).

Santa Cruz Cemetery, Dili, E. Timor, 1991: Allan Nairn reports that the soldiers attacked people peacefully attending a funeral.

Nairn speaks at a demonstration at the Indonesian Embassy in Washington, DC. They killed about 270 people that day. Then they tried to kill the witnesses. They went to hospitals and injected the wounded with sulfuric acid.

Nairn [and Amy Goodman] were at the cemetery when the soldiers attacked. Goodman is not mentioned. Nairn does not say that his skull was fractured. Nor does he say how he protected Goodman. The soldiers pointed their guns at us. Their officers must have decided there might be a price to pay if they executed Americans, because the US had supplied them with their weapons.

Constancio Pinto, a refugee from E. Timor: I was tortured every day, with blood running down my face and out of my nose, eyes, and ears. Still photos of people being tortured.

Scheiner: If there ever are war crimes trials for Indonesians, I think Ford and Kissinger should be put on trial, too—along with Jimmy Carter … and Bill Clinton.

Cops arrest the protesters at the Indonesian Embassy.

Pictures of what weapons do to human bodies.

In Vietnam, 64,000 US soldiers were killed or maimed by landmines. 90% of those landmines were American-made.

In Cambodia, one out of every 236 people is an amputee. That’s a surprisingly low figure since there are more landmines than people in Cambodia.

Dr. Chung-Hyun Kyung (Prof. of Theology, Union Theological Seminary, NYC): If you inflict so much suffering on people in other countries, eventually it will come back to your own family. What is the spiritual ground of the USA? You talk about democracy and freedom….

There are more than 100 million landmines in the world. They cause 500 deaths and injuries per week. They maim or kill 26,000 people a year, most of them innocent, mostly children.

Ken Rutherford (Landmine Survivors Network) talks about being in a vehicle that ran over a landmine in Somalia. He noticed a dismembered foot on the floorboard and wondered whether it was his own. He shows his prosthetic legs. He notes that $400,000 had been spent on him so far.

Caleb Rossiter (Director, Demilitarization for Democracy): When you provide weapons, you lose control of them. The largest recipients of US weapons in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s: Angola, Zaire, Liberia, Sudan. (He adds Somalia a moment later.) He does not say that in the case of Angola, the US provided those arms to anti-democracy mercenaries (under Jonas Savimbi and Holden Rivera) in order to overthrow a legitimate government. They all turned into battlegrounds and ceased to be functioning countries. The people of the U.S. are paying an enormous price today because the U.S. armed dictators in the 1980s.

Charles M Sennott (reporter, Boston Globe) The US limited sales of sophisticated weapons to Latin America under Carter. Now Clinton has lifted than ban. Even Reagan and Bush had not done so.

Lora Lumpe (Federation of American Scientists Arms Sales Monitoring Project): The US wants to sell fighter jets to Chile. Argentina has begged the US not to do so. It would start an arms race. The Gulf War served as a tremendous marketing tool for the US arms industry. The narrator does not point out that the “smart” bombs and missiles did not work nearly as well as advertised. Now there are air shows all around the world, paid for by US taxpayers.

Sennott: The US isn’t looking at arms as part of geopolitical strategy, but something to be pawning off to make profits while they can get them. Why are we putting all of this money into these weapons so that corporations can make a huge amount of money while they lay off working people? It isn’t about anything high-minded and lofty. It’s not about foreign policy principles. It’s not about geopolitical strategy. It’s simply about profit. It’s simply about greed, and the hard sell, and a hustle to the developing world.

Caleb Rossiter: The irony is that these industries are making profits that belong to the US taxpayer. The weapons were developed for the US military, which paid for them. All these sales are pure gravy, off the top. Because we have exported the F-15 and F-16, we now need the F-22 for the Pentagon.

Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, Commander, NATO Strike Fleet (ret.); Director, Center for Defense Information: The name of the game is air dominance, not air superiority. As long as we continue to sell our best aircraft, we’ve got to go out and invent something even better. Eventually, we’re going to have to fight them.

Lora Lumpe: The arms industry never cites profits as the reason why it wants to export weapons. Rather, it cites the number of jobs that are going to be lost if an arms sale is not made. The reality is quite different because the arms corporations are increasingly exporting the production lines overseas.

Sennott: It benefits the top executives of these corporations. He tracked six leading arms manufacturers over four years. During that time, these companies laid off 178,000 workers, but the CEOs’ pay tripled.

Seymour Melman (professor emeritus, Columbia U, author of The Permanent War Economy): “We can have as many jobs as we have now, and a lot more, [by] restoring the decaying infrastructure of the US.” The military-industrial complex preempts the wealth to such a degree … that the … American people are wanting decent housing [and] decent schools.

Lora Lumpe: “We’re shutting down libraries, methadone clinics, homeless shelters, and being told we don’t have resources for any of those.” We spend $6-7 billion a year of public mooney to promote weapons sales.

Rossiter: The defense budget is the single largest item in the discretionary budget. It’s eating up social programs.

Shanahan: We spend some $265 billion a year to maintain a military establishment that doesn’t have an enemy out there that is worth talking about. The figure is now over $400 billion officially, but much higher than that in reality. And it is about to go up.

The US is #1 in the world in military might. It is also #1 among the 18 industrial nations in its poverty rate. One in five US children lives in poverty. 10 million US children do not have health care [insurance]. 15 children a day die from gunshot wounds.

Rev. Dr. James A Forbes (Sr. Minister, Riverside Church, NYC): Many people believe that those who don’t succeed didn’t try hard enough or have some flaw in their character or – tough luck – maybe they’re just not quite able to make it. He cites Paul Tillich: Our having is related to other people not having.

Bishop Thomas Gumbleton (Detroit): People don’t want to hear that [their] lifestyle is really the cause of people in other parts of the world starving to death – that [they] have more than [they] have a right to. So when the poor demand some of these things from us, they are demanding what belongs to them. We are part of the one-fifth of the world’s people that have 83% of the world’s resources. The bottom fifth have 1.4%.

Forbes: Patterns of third world debt and exploitation and military intervention reveal that we exalt ourselves to levels of almost idolatrous significance.

Lumpe: I don’t want blood on my hands because of the support my government gives to repressive governments around the world.

Shanahan: We could stop selling weapons that kill people to people that don’t need them. And if we did that, others would follow suit. A code of conduct for arms sales has been proposed to forbid arms sales to countries that don’t respect human rights and to countries that are not democratic. We couldn’t get that passed.

Cynthia McKinney: It didn’t help that the Clinton administration came out against the code, or that the arms lobby contributed $14 million to people who have to vote on the code. The one thing that does help is the rightness of the cause.

Dr. Oscar Arias (ex-President of Costa Rica, Nobel Peace Prize laureate) is leading a call for an international code of conduct. “When one asserts that a country wants arms, to whom exactly are we referring? Is it [the poor] who are pressuring their leaders to buy tanks and missiles? The poor of the world are crying out for schools and doctors, not guns and generals.”

Jose Ramos-Horta (East Timor, Nobel Peace Prize laureate): In 1977, when I was in the US, I received news of a sister and three brothers who were killed by US weapons. At least 20 million people have died since World War II in conventional conflicts in wars in developing countries, killed by “weapons supplied by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.”

Elie Wiesel (Nobel Peace Prize laureate): Countries that sell arms indiscriminately must realize that arms sales “may bring them businesses, contracts, checks – but not honor.” “Usually, adults fight, and children die. Usually, adults hate one another, and children pay the price for that hatred.”

Dalai Lama: We must find a way to overcome [hatred and anger] without using violence.

Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money, alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.”

Postscript

Since this film was made…

• Then Code of Conduct passed, but in a watered down version which only suggests, rather than requires, that the administration follow its guidelines.

• The defense budget has increased from $265 billion (1998) to $400 billion (FY 2004).

  This does not include the cost of the war on terrorism or the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

• Lockheed Martin persuaded Congress to lift the ban on F-16 fighters for Chile.

• G.W. Bush appointed Lockheed Martin’s chief lobbyist, Otto Reich, to be assistant secretary of state in charge of Latin American Affairs.

  Reich is notorious in Latin America for his defense of torture and death squads during his time in Central America as a minor diplomat.

• Gordon England, ex-VP of General Dynamics, was appointed Secretary of the Navy.

• James Roche, ex-VP of Northrop Grumman, was appointed Secretary of the Air Force.

• 29 other weapons industry executives, consultants, and major shareholders, have been appointed to major policymaking positions in the Bush administration.