Feb
23
Don’t Believe Everything You Read in the Newspaper
Posted by Clif Burns at 9:20 pm on February 23, 2011
Category: ITAR
I’m just going to let this quote from Frank Gaffney in an opinion column in the Washington Times speak for itself:
“Given the well-known corruption practices by EADS, it would make common sense that it not be awarded Pentagon contracts. In fact, Congress has passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that bars companies who engage in bribery overseas from competing for United States government programs.
“The U.S. Department of Justice has appallingly interpreted the laws to cover only U.S.-based companies – therefore exempting EADS. But it gets worse. The federal government has gone even further and exempted EADS from the Buy American Act, the Berry Amendment, the International Trafficking and Arms Regulations and the Cost Accounting Standards. Complying with these expensive regulations is mandatory for any American company looking to do business with the Pentagon, but waived for a foreign competitor such as EADS.â€
Gaffney is quoting approvingly Representative Todd Tiahrt, a U.S. Congressman from Kansas. I’m sure that the Department of Justice as well as DDTC will be just as surprised as you and I are that DOJ had exempted EADS from all defense-related export controls. If I figure out how to get an exemption from the ITAR from Justice, you’ll be the first to hear about it here.
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Copyright © 2011 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
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4 Comments:
Are you sure that there was not some mix up with the
photo as I would swear that this was the late George
Carlin.
WoW!
I really dont understand how people get elected to office and they have NO clue as to government rules/regulations.
Mr. Gaffney will be happy. Boeing won the contract.
I went to grad school with Frank Gaffney at Johns Hopkins SAIS back when he still had hair. If I recall correctly, he did his undergrad at Georgetown. At the time he was working on defense issues for the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson from Washington state. He later actually was a political appointee at DoD during the Reagan Administration. He is definitely a “neocon”.
He “founded” a “think tank” in DC called Center for Security Policy, which has been supported by contributions from certain defense contractors. More recently, he has been going around warning about the “danger” of the imposition of Sharia law by the Obama Administration. Last year, he even testified as an “expert witness” in a zoning case in Murfreesboro, Tennessee (a college town near Nashville)involving a mosque, in support of the opponents to the mosque notion that Islam is not a religion but a political movement (see the archives at http://www.tennessean.com ).
Suffice it to say Frank has never let the fact that he did not go to law school or read law keep him from making broad pronouncements about what he believes the law to be.
