Anjali Kamat talking:
Egypt already has a surplus of these large military systems. What was announced last week by the administration was a temporary delay in the delivery of large weapons systems, which include F-16s, M1A1 tanks, Apache helicopters, Harpoon missile systems. Egypt’s military already has a surplus of this. It has the fourth-largest amount of F-16s in the world. And when we spoke to Egyptian generals, retired Egyptian generals in Egypt, as well as defense analysts here in the U.S., what became clear is that they don’t need these—you know, these kind of large weapons systems for what—for anything they’re confronting right now. It’s also interesting that the U.S. military has been trying to push for Egypt to kind of switch from these large military systems to lighter systems designed for counterterrorism, for border surveillance, for use in the Sinai. And all of that support will continue as before.
What will also continue is the funds for military training. You know, every year, Egyptian officers and generals come to the U.S. to be trained in American war colleges. One of those generals was today Egypt’s strongman; General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 2006. This exchange program will continue. And from what, you know, major generals in the American military and the Egyptian military told us, this is a key part of the relationship. It creates lasting friendships between the two militaries. International Military Education and Training.
there was a military coup in Egypt on July 3rd. Under U.S. law, the U.S. is required to suspend military aid to a country if there’s a determination that there’s been a military coup there. The U.S. has declined to make this determination so far. What we found—and this is on the Department of Defense website—is that after July 3rd, in the three months after the coup before this latest announcement, the Pentagon continued to award defense contracts to large defense corporations for equipment headed to Egypt. So this was to Raytheon, BAE Systems and to General Electric. And this continued through July, August and September.
When we asked the Pentagon to comment on this, they directed us to the State Department. When we asked the State Department to comment on this, they had no idea about this. So we commissioned further research on arms shipments to Egypt from the United States, from a group that tracks arms shipments in Chicago called Transarms.
And what we found is that in the three months after the coup there were nearly 2,000 tons of military equipment that continued to flow to Egypt. This is despite the administration’s pronouncements that business would not be continuing as usual and that there was a review underway. That might have led some people to assume that maybe there’d be a hold on some of this equipment. And we found that, you know, 2,000 tons continued to flow on eight ships that left from Baltimore, New York, Norfolk, Virginia, and they arrived in Alexandria and Damietta as late as late September. And this continued despite the pronouncements of concern and despite, you know, on August 14th—it’s been described by Human Rights Watch as one of the worst incidents of mass killings in Egypt. Hundreds of protesters were killed. The day after that, President Obama spoke and said that, you know, business cannot continue as usual. But these ships and shipments of arms continue to flow.
I think a lot of people don’t realize, is that, you know, since Egypt signed the peace accords with Israel, Camp David, 1979, there’s been a steady flow of U.S. military aid to Egypt. Since 1987, that’s averaged to about $1.3 billion a year in military aid. All of this aid stays in the United States. It never actually makes it to Egypt. What happens is that Egypt can draw on this money, or has been able to traditionally draw on this money, to purchase American-made equipment.
It’s deposited in a bank in New York, that’s right. So, at this point, what we know is that half of that aid has already been disbursed. So there’s about $584 million left. I spoke to the State Department last week after their announcement to ask what was going to happen to the rest of this money. And they said they still hadn’t made a determination. They made it clear that Egypt wouldn’t have access to it immediately, but it might—it would still be used primarily to pay up the defense contractors. So, even though there’s been a delay in the delivery of these large weapons systems—I mean, some of them are weapons systems that were ordered back in 2009, so these are orders that were made years before, and some of them have been paid off already.
what we heard in Egypt, is that there are still unopened boxes of tanks. They have so many tanks that there’s no real use for them right now. So it’s great corporate welfare for U.S. weapons manufacturers. That’s precisely what a lot of analysts told us, is that this is really a jobs program for the defense industry here in the United States.
— source democracynow.org
Anjali Kamat, correspondent for Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines. She recently produced an episode called Egypt and the USA: After the Coup.