Lis­ten:
One seg­ment

Begin­ning with an exam­i­na­tion of a pri­vate secu­ri­ty firm that con­tracts with major multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions, this broad­cast focus­es on recent (as of March of 1999) devel­op­ments in the area of defense.

Defense Sys­tems Lim­it­ed (the secu­ri­ty firm) is run by for­mer British, Sovi­et and U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty vet­er­ans and spe­cial­izes in oper­a­tions on behalf of “extrac­tion firms” — com­pa­nies that extract min­er­al wealth from the envi­ron­ment. Their lead­ing clients include major oil com­pa­nies, such as British Petro­le­um and min­ing firms, such as the De Beers dia­mond oper­a­tion.

Fol­low­ing DSL’s train­ing of secu­ri­ty forces in Colom­bia, charges were aired that the police that had been the recip­i­ents of the com­pa­ny’s exper­tise had engaged in human rights abus­es. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, some mil­i­tary experts envi­sion the type of rela­tion­ship DSL has with its clients as por­tend­ing the wave of the future with regard to mil­i­tary mat­ters. As was the case until the mid­dle of the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, major war mak­ing enti­ties are seen as being cor­po­rate, trib­al or oth­er “non-nation­al” enti­ties.

In addi­tion to the dis­cus­sion of DSL, the pro­gram sets forth infor­ma­tion about the “Urban War­rior” Marine war games that were staged in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area in March of 1999. One of a num­ber of such exer­cis­es that have been con­duct­ed in recent years in Amer­i­can urban cen­ters, the exer­cis­es were of an osten­si­bly human­i­tar­i­an nature.

An exam­i­na­tion of doc­u­men­ta­tion pre­sent­ed by the Marine Corps rais­es sub­stan­tive ques­tions about the accu­ra­cy of these claims. Although the oper­a­tion was stat­ed to be in prepa­ra­tion for oper­a­tion in Third World cities, few of those have the phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the envi­ron­ments select­ed for the exer­cis­es in the U.S. In addi­tion, the “Urban War­rior” doc­u­ments explic­it­ly state that a major prob­lem of the future will be the phys­i­cal prox­im­i­ty of large num­bers of urban poor to mem­bers of the “elite”. The doc­u­ments imply that it will be the mil­i­tary’s job to safe­guard those elites in the event of con­flict. (Record­ed on 3/21/99.)