Andrew Feinstein talking:
The global arms trade is a $1.74 trillion-a-year business. Thats $250 for every person on the planet. And the profit motive behind the global arms trade is absolutely crucial. This is a business that is about big, big money. The trade contributes around 40 percent of all corruption in all global trade. So its impact on countries, on governments, on ordinary individuals in terms of the economic opportunity costs are absolutely massive.
Now, you will find that many spokespeople for the trade would try to distinguish between the legal or formal trade, on the one hand, and the illegal or illicit trade, on the other. I argue in the book that this distinction is a fallacy, that the boundaries are in fact extremely fuzzy and that the licit and the illicit are very closely intertwined, in addition to which the industry is largely protected because of its very close links to governments, to intelligence agencies, obviously to the military, and to lawmakers. So it is very seldomeven with the inadequate regulations that exist globally around the trade in weapons, it is very, very seldom that people who break those regulations are actually brought to book. To give you an example, weve recorded 502 violations of U.N. arms embargoes since they were introduced. Two of those have resulted in any legal action whatsoever. One resulted in a conviction.
Now, the situation that pertains at a global or international level has very many similarities with the domestic situation, particularly in the U.S., because letslets bear in mind while discussing this that the U.S. buys and sells almost as much weaponry as the rest of the world combined. So what happens in the U.S. is going to have enormous impact on the rest of the world. And what happens domestically, in terms of the ownership of weaponry within the U.S., really does, as I say, reflect the global trade in arms, in that we see its a $3.5 billion-a-year industry. And here were talking about smaller weaponryabout handguns, about assault rifles, semi-automatic weapons, the sorts that are used in the tragedy at Sandy Hook and all of the others that weve seen over the years throughout the U.S.
But the NRA, the gun sellers, the gun users seem to be afforded an extraordinary level of protection by government, by law enforcement authorities, just as happens on the global level. And part of this is because of the revolving door of people between, for instance, the NRA and government. Recent figures suggest that 15 of 28 lobbyists in the NRA came from important positions within government dealing with some of these same issues, so that the sorts of decisions being made by government are being informed disproportionately by those who want guns to be unregulated, by those who are making massive profits out the suffering of the victims of gun crime.
Lets use two examples. Prince Bandar would be the perfect example. Prince Bandar, while ambassador to the U.S., was used by the Saudi government to negotiate a wide range of arms deals around the world, which included the biggest arms deal in history, a deal called the al-Yamamah deal between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia worth 43 billion British pounds. Around six billion pounds of bribes were paid on that deal alone. Over one billion pounds of those bribes flowed through Prince Bandars accounts that were held in Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., as it then was. Bandar describes a 15-minute conversation with then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in which he says he told the prime minister that the Saudis had certain special needs, the prime minister said she fully understood that, and that was the end of the negotiation, the easiest negotiation hes ever had for an arms deal. Prince Bandar has effectively acted as bag man on all sorts of international arms transactions going back to the Iran-Contra imbroglio of the Reagan administration, up until fairly recent times. Bandar today, is head of state intelligence, state security in the Saudi government, which is not only a position of massive influence on the levels of human rights abuses and repression that is conducted by the Saudi state, but is also crucial to the military role that the Saudi state plays, particularly in the Middle East and particularly on behalf of the United States of America, which is why the Obama administration is in the middle of negotiations for a new arms deal with Saudi Arabia totaling $60 billion.
Now, let me give you one other example very quickly. And thats the example of Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer sometimes called the “Merchant of Death.” Bout now sitsquite correctly, in my opinionin a jail in the United States. What was barely mentioned in his trial for his gun trafficking around the world, in most of the worlds worst conflicts, is that for three years, between 2003 and 2005, while there was an Interpol warrant out for Bouts arrest, Bouts companies and Bouts planes were flying weaponry, equipment and supplies into Baghdad airport on behalf of the United States Department of Defense and U.S. defense contractors. Now, this is why I say the legal and illegal trade in weapons are inextricably intertwined. And Bout is just perhaps the best-known example of literally hundreds, if not thousands, of arms dealers around the world who play these duplicitous roles and who work on behalf of not only some of the worlds worst warlords, but also the worlds most powerful governments.
The reality of what Bout says is that what he was doing was breaking laws where they exist. He broke countless U.N. arms embargoes. The situation in the U.S. is that many arms dealers, either Americans or working for the American government, American defense contractors, similarly break many arms laws around the world. A particular reading of the U.S. governments own arms exports policies would suggest that because of the human rights violations that are recorded annually in Saudi Arabia, the United States itself shouldnt be selling weaponry to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But as I mentioned, were in the process of a $60 billion arms deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
In terms of U.S. arms dealers, the regulations are, in my opinion, minimal. Many of those regulations themselves are violated by people transacting in weaponry across the U.S. and across the world. Who are those who face justice, like Viktor Bout? Who are those who dont? Bout, as Ive mentioned, was protected by U.S. authorities and U.S. intelligence agencies for a significant period of his career selling arms into Liberia, into Angola, into the Democratic Republic of Congo, etc., etc. Similarly, many dealers in the United States itself who transgress laws, minimal as they are, very seldom face the legal consequences of their actions, which is one of the reason why the domestic situation in the U.S. mirrors the global situation in the rest of the world.
And the only way to address this, the only way to keep our children safe in schools like Sandy Hook and around the country and around the world, is if in the biggest buyer and seller of weaponry, the United States itself, there is meaningful, strongly enforced regulation that ensures that people who do have access to extremely dangerous weaponryand the vast majority of it is extremely dangeroushave extensive background checks, are monitored on an ongoing basis. And I would suggest that the weaponry itself and the ammunition should be tracked at all times.
NRA chief, Wayne LaPierre actually doesnt understand the international arms trade treaty. The treaty that will be negotiated again at the United Nations early this year, as Amy mentioned, that unfortunately wasnt passed in July because of the opposition of the United States, is intended to regulate international transfers of weapons. It would not impinge on the domestic situation in the United States of America, and nobody who Im aware of who is involved in the negotiations is suggesting that it should. I must say that from my own perspective as an analyst of the global trade in arms, I think it would actually be a positive development if there were requirements for norms and standards domestically as well as internationally. But that is not going to be developed by a body like the United Nations. So Mr. LaPierre, in the first instance, does not understand the intention of the global arms trade treaty. And his organization has been responsible for distributing a whole range of myths about the treaty. His belief is that any regulation of weaponry and arms on a global level, on a domestic level, is wrong. And thats where his opposition is coming from.
But let me make another point that I think is absolutely crucial about this and to understand where the NRA is coming from and, unfortunately, where the global trade in arms comes from, as well. And that is the linkages between politics and the gun lobby, and particularly, in terms of those linkages, money. One of the reasons that I focus on the global trade in arms in my work is because I saw, both in the context of South Africa, but also at a global level, the way in which money has come to pollute our politics. And the relationship between defense contractors on an international level and political parties and individual politicians are deep and profound. At a domestic level, the relationships between the NRA and specific elected representatives, not only in terms of money contributed, but also in terms of support given, are, again, profound. And unless we are able to break these linkages between money and politics that so pollute the way we are governed around the world, we will not be able to deal with some of the most intractable problems that face us as human beingsproblems of the weaponization of the world, problems of climate change.
I have not seen anywhere else in the world a gun lobby that has the same level of influence on its own government as the NRA does in the United States. My own assessment of what happened in July with the arms trade treaty is that the NRA, through the words of Mr. LaPierre and others, made clear to the Obama administration that it would make the presidents re-election a lot more difficult if he supported an international arms trade treaty. And I think its in that way that the NRA had such direct influence on the U.S. decision to effectively scupper negotiations for what in my opinion wouldnt have been a strong-enough arms trade treaty, but would have been far better than any form of regulation that we have at the moment. So, yes, I think this is something of a unique situation, where a gun lobby has the extent of influence that it has in the United States of America.
And, of course, partly that is due to the Second Amendment, but what I find so astonishing about the domestic debate in the U.S. is that the Second Amendment is seen in isolation from the rest of the Constitution. It is seen in isolation of the right to life. The way in which Mr. LaPierre speaks about notions of freedom, I believe, are incredibly narrowly focused, to the point of being extremely jaundiced. What of the freedom of those 27 victims of the latest mass shooting tragedy in the United States of America? Because of the freedom of the killers mother to hold in her house the absurd number of highly dangerous weapons that she did, not just the freedom but the right to life of those 20 children and seven adults was taken away from them. So the Second Amendment must surely be understood within the context of the overall U.S. Constitution. But the political debate in the countryagain, speaking as an observer, as someone who observes it from the outsidethe tone of the debate is, again, unique. This desire, this right to bear arms, with so little thought given to the consequence of the hundreds of millions of Americans who are negatively affected by that right is something that strikes the rest of the world as extraordinary.
the total number of dollars spent in the global arms trade is now $1.7 trillion, which is over a 50 percent increase in just a decade.
We have seenduring this period of fiscal and economic crisis around the world, we have seen weapons transfers increase by 24 percent. So when we talk about a global arms trade, I would see this as a starting point, as a starting point in which the world takes the decision that the current status quo in the way that we produce, buy and sell guns, across borders and within borders, although the treaty is not dealing with the domestic internal situations, but to place a line in the sand to say that we have to change the way in which we produce and trade in weaponry, that we have to regulate this as severely, if not more so, than all the other threats to our health, to our well-being and to our ability to live. That is what is at stake in the international arms trade treaty, on which negotiations will restart in the very near future.
We are seeing the weaponization of the way we live in so many ways. Policing is just one of the most obvious and current examples in that. And I would suggest that the pervasive development of drone technology around the world, that we are seeing being used for all sorts of purposes, is really the thin edge of the wedge when it comes to these issues. We are going to see greater and greater weaponization of drones that we see used in Pakistan and Afghanistan and other places. We are going to see the appearances of those sorts of drones in our own domestic policing and surveillance activities in the United States and in Europe. And there is a huge element to them besides the obvious element of human rights, freedom, to the right to privacy, the right to free expression.
The other important dimension of them that runs throughout the weapons business is the issue of blowback, the reality that so often these very same weapons that we produce for purposes that we think are good come back to haunt us. And the United States domestically, in the case of Sandy Hook and many others, is only the most recent and most tragic example of that.
– source democracynow.org
Andrew Feinstein, author of The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. He is working on a film version of the book. He is also a former ANC member of Parliament in South Africa.