Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Gordon England and Eric Edelman
The Financial Times reports that the current secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, will replace Wolfowitz as Rumsfeld's deputy. The Turkish press sticks by its story that former ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman will receive an appointment, but now says he's going to replace Feith rather than Wolfowitz -- the Turkish Press along with other international sources is now reporting the Edelman story as fact rather than speculation.
I posted earlier about Edelman, who turns out to be a hardline neoconservative and a Cheney associate very much like a Feith or a Libby without the name recognition, but who is England? The short answer is that Gordon England is a corporate stooge.
Rumsfeld kicked off his tenure as Defense Secretary by packing the Pentagon with corporate insiders, shills for various war-profiteering firms, and as William Harung wrote in the LA Times,
The management of the military and, indeed, the use of warfare in American foreign policy has always been heavily influenced by lobbyists for defense contractors and other private interests; Rumsfeld's innovation was simply to cut out the middle man.
We can see Rumsfeld's vision at work in Gordon England's enthusiastic boosterism for the V-22 Osprey, the half-plane half-helicopter money pit that is so unsafe it's killed 23 people without leaving "test phase" and is such a boondoggle that the libertarians at CATO called it "an albatross around the Pentagon's and taxpayers' necks"
I posted earlier about Edelman, who turns out to be a hardline neoconservative and a Cheney associate very much like a Feith or a Libby without the name recognition, but who is England? The short answer is that Gordon England is a corporate stooge.
Rumsfeld kicked off his tenure as Defense Secretary by packing the Pentagon with corporate insiders, shills for various war-profiteering firms, and as William Harung wrote in the LA Times,
Nowhere was Rumsfeld's vision of a corporate-dominated department more evident than in his initial choices to run three military services: Secretary of the Air Force James Roche, a former vice president at Northrop Grumman; Secretary of the Navy Gordon England, a former executive at General Dynamics; and former Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White, who came from Enron.
The management of the military and, indeed, the use of warfare in American foreign policy has always been heavily influenced by lobbyists for defense contractors and other private interests; Rumsfeld's innovation was simply to cut out the middle man.
We can see Rumsfeld's vision at work in Gordon England's enthusiastic boosterism for the V-22 Osprey, the half-plane half-helicopter money pit that is so unsafe it's killed 23 people without leaving "test phase" and is such a boondoggle that the libertarians at CATO called it "an albatross around the Pentagon's and taxpayers' necks"
