NEW DELHI: Does US President George W. Bush enjoy a special relationship with aviation giant Lockheed Martin? A cursory glance at US newspaper reports since he came to power indicates that the manufacturer of F-16s based in Texas, which also happens to be the home state of President Bush, has a cosy relationship with the White House, one which can be that can be traced back to the early 1990s when George Bush Senior bailed the company out of financial difficulties by clearing a major 150-aircraft deal with Taiwan.
Lockheed Martin, which was in financial trouble again and was faced with the prospect of laying off at least 5,000 employees, has been given a fresh lease of life through the “strategic ties” that the US is pursuing with great vigour with both India and Pakistan. After 15 long years Pakistan is now cleared by Washington to get the blocked supply of F-16s, with the option to upgrade these to the C and D type of aircraft, as well as purchase as many as it wants to. The figure being currently quoted by Islamabad is around 70 F-16s. The offer is equally open-ended for India, which is in the market for the purchase of 126 fighter jets, with Lockheed Martin willing to upgrade the aircraft to ensure that it meets Indian specifications.
President Bush himself has decided now to fly in new helicopters to be put together by Lockheed Martin based on designs developed by Augusta-Westland. The $1.6 billion contract will not go to Sikorsky, whose helicopters are currently being used in the presidential fleet, but has been bagged by Lockheed Martin instead with the full backing of Italy and Britain, both partners in the invasion of Iraq. The US media has been full of stories about the close relations between the Texas-based defence contractor and President Bush since he first came to power in 2001.
The US-based Arms Trade Resource Centre noted in an article that President Bush “has strong ties to Lockheed Martin from his service as governor of Texas, where he tried to give the firm a contract to run the Texas welfare system before he had to relent in the fact of public protests and an unfavourable regulatory ruling by the Clinton administration.” Vice-President Dick Cheney’s wife, according to the same article, was on Lockheed Martin’s board, “a service for which she received $120,000 in compensation.” She was on the board of directors from 1994 till 2001.
The Texas Observer, in an interview with representatives Rania Masri and Jordan Green of the Institute for Southern Studies, asked them why Lockheed Martin always managed to “make out so well” in the defence sector. Their answer: “We should bear in mind that Lockheed Martin has two former executives in Bush’s cabinet (first term) — secretary of transportation Norman Mineta and secretary of veterans affairs Anthony Principi — and that one of their board members, Douglas H. McCorkindale, is president of Gannett Media, whose flagship paper is USA Today, a newspaper that shapes our political discourse and the way we consider foreign policy questions.”
Interestingly, the two members of the institute also spoke of a close relationship between Texas and Israel, pointing out that nearly 300 Texan companies were doing business in Israel.
The connections between President Bush and Lockheed Martin through personnel appeared to have been a recurring point of interest in the US. CorpWatch, in an article, pointed out that the largest defence contract in US military history of about $250 billion, was awarded in October 2003 to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. This, the article states, was at the instance of Air Force secretary James G. Roche, who worked for 17 years with Northrup Grumman. Other names in the same article are of the Navy secretary at the time, Gordon England, who “served as president of Lockheed’s Fort Worth division,” and again of Mr Mineta, who apparently also “ditched his term as a congressional representative to join the Lockheed team in 1995.” The article also mentions undersecretary for the Air Force Albert E. Smith, who was a “Lockheed vice-president who oversaw the company’s space programme.”
Incidentally, both Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman have been credited in several US media reports as having contributed generously to the Republican presidential campaign. Estimates of this kind of spending have appeared at different levels in the US, with women’s groups, organizations like the Centre for Responsive Politics and the Centre for Public Integrity all expressing concern over the reported millions spent by these companies in “building prototypes and wooing politicians.”—By arrangement with AsianAge/Delhi.
