Curb on protest ‘is draconian’. The Times 23rd April 2005
Credit Guarantee Loan Scheme: where if you’re selling guns abroad, if the person you’re selling to defaults on payment, you will be paid from a pool of money made up of taxpayer’s money … Saddam Hussein defaulted on £652 million’ worth of stuff. Mark Thomas Comedy Project s1e2
We went to an arms fair called Defendory; now this is in Athens in Greece and it’s one of the biggest arms fairs in the world … The list of delegates attending is incredible … All your top torturers are there! … Let’s get a stall out there … We formed a PR company ... We’ll sell PR to the arms companies and all the regimes … Banner: Are You Ready When Amnesty International Come Knocking On Your Door. Mark Thomas Comedy Product s3e1
And got these people in from various torturing regimes … The arms fair actually loved us; loved us being there this PR firm. I got a Christmas card, a Christmas card from the arms fair. Mark Thomas Comedy Product s3e2
A six-week media training course for the Indonesian armed forces. ibid.
Arms’ trade: If I didn’t do it somebody else would; it’s very good for jobs (the taxpayer picks up the bill); we’re only doing what the government allows us to do. ibid.
ECGD and what they do is they provide underwriting, financial underwriting, from the taxpayer’s money to support firms who are exporting overseas. If the country they export to default they get the money within thirty days of default coughed up by the taxpayer … An insurance scheme for arms dealers … 52% of their business was arms sales. Mark Thomas Comedy Product s4e9
We show how school children brokered weapons around the world. Mark Thomas, Dispatches: After School Arms Club
September 2005 The London Arms Fair: This is the gathering of the arms industry. ibid.
Sting stick: a real weapon of torture … ‘I can’t see how anyone would design it’. ibid. schoolgirl
Stone-thrower: £5,000 … The Israeli dealer decided to pass it off as agricultural equipment. ibid.
The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. James Madison
Arms Firm’s £60 million slush fund: Police launch inquiry into allegations of gifts and payments to Saudis. The Guardian front page
When Frank Carlucci came on board he was coming straight from the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense. Reagan’s term had just finished. And Carlucci retired. He came on board and really took them in a completely new direction. Into defense ... A year, two years later the Gulf War hit. And everybody knows war time is boom time for the defense industry. Dan Briody
As a part of that $48.1 billion increase in the $400 billion Defense request that came from the President, there inside there was money for the Crusader missile. Cynthia McKinney
Prominently featured in my dissent is mention of the Carlyle Group and its relationship to the Defender missile. Cynthia McKinney
A bigger bang for a buck. Charles E Wilson’s defence policy March 1954
‘According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,’ Rumsfeld admitted. CBS Evening News, ‘The War on Waste – Defense Department Cannot Account For 25% of Funds - $2.3 Trillion’
By force of arms. [Vi et armis] Cicero
Fury itself supplies arms. Virgil
I sing of arms and the man. Virgil, Aenaid
Well it’s a question we look at very carefully. But I promise you we put under the most searching analysis the use to which equipment that we sell be put. And we are quite confident the Indonesians will put our Hawks for jet training, for advanced jet training, which is why they were needed in the first place. Sir Alan Thomas, head of Defence sales Ferranti Defense Systems
The planes will be used not only to train pilots but also for ground attacks. General Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie
Last night a confidential source disclosed to me that British arms are being sold to Italian Red Terrorist groups. Yes, Minister s3e6: The Whisky Priest, Jim to Sir Humphrey, with Bernard
The sale of arms abroad is one of those areas of government that we do not examine too closely. ibid. Sir Humphrey to Jim, with Bernard
Either you’re in the arms business or not. ibid. Chief Whip to Jim
By 1999 there were more than 1,500 registered ‘private security firms’, employing more than 800,000 people. Of these, almost 200,000 had licences to carry guns. The Russian Interior Ministry has estimated that there were at least half as many again that remained unregistered. Misha Glenny, McMafia
We are able to keep arms from him [Saddam Hussein]. His military forces have not been re-built. Condoleezza Rice, July 2001
We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. Condoleezza Rice 8th September 2002
Britain is continuing to export in excess of half a billion pounds’ worth of arms to Indonesia. Great Britain: putting the arms into Armageddon. Spitting Image s10e2
Nearly every industry in the world has a trade show … Here in Jordan for the last 14 years in huge tents in the middle of the desert they have a massive trade show for war. It’s called the Special Operations Forces Exhibition or SOFEX for short, and it’s hosted by Jordan’s King Abdullah, one of America’s only allies in the Middle East. The Business of War: SOFEX, Vice TV 2015
There’s pretty much every general in the world here. ibid.
The arms industry is estimated at anywhere between $350 million to $500 billion a year, one of the largest industries in the world. ibid.
It’s like a million Doctor Evils. ibid.
A one-stop shot for Special Operations-type training. ibid.
Viktor Bout: A story about a Russian intelligence agent who became … the biggest, the most dangerous, arms trader in the history of mankind. Daniel Estulin, lecture Alternative View 4 conference, ‘The Shadow Masters: Real Global Terrorists’
Victor Bout is thought to have supplied weapons for wars all over the world … His AK47s ended up almost everywhere … But the deal that ended it all was with the FARC rebels in Colombia. ibid.
On March 6th 2008 Vicktor Bout, a former Soviet military intelligence officer and billionaire protected by the Russian state, touched down in Bangkok. He was there to shake hands on a substantial arms deal, yet Viktor Bout’s arrival in Thailand marked the closing stages of Operation Relentless. This is the story of one of the most audacious sting operations ever conducted in the War on Terror. How a team of undercover operatives pitted their wits against a notorious criminal known as the Merchant of Death. Damian Lewis: Spy Wars s1e7: Merchant of Death, History 2019
Look around America: squads of armed and angry people taking to the streets in the woodlands and public squares howling into the night. These are the soldiers of the America Militia Movement, locked and loaded. But what’s their beef? And who’s the instigator egging them on. Is it protest or it is something more sinister? America on Fire, Charlie LeDuff reporting, History 2019
According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, there are more than 600 anti-government patriot groups in the United States. ibid.
On one part of the fence if the three-percenters, marching to protect the First Amendment backed by the second; on the other side is a mix of ANTIFA, known as anti-fascists, and American Muslims and left-wing activists. ibid.
The fire burned for hours. The largest oil refinery in Saudi Arabia had been hit multiple times. The attack was claimed by Shia-backed Houthi rebels from the neighbouring country of Yemen. It appeared to be the latest escalation in the deadly Saudi-Yemeni war that had been raging since 2015. But all was not as it seemed. Secret Wars Uncovered s1e2: Yemen: Britain & the Saudis, History 2020
Fighting in Yemen has cost the lives of thousands and triggered a humanitarian crisis. ibid.
The Unified Republic of Yemen was declared on 22 May 1990. ibid.
Early in 2015 the Houthis seized the presidential palace and dissolved parliament. ibid.
‘The Saudis have been bombing Yemen indiscriminately’ … Impossible without its [Saudis’] oldest allies in the West: the United States and the United Kingdom. ibid. David Wearing, Royal Holloway University