War & Disaster Profiteering

Drone Inc.: Marketing the Illusion of Precision Killing, reveals the contractors and technology behind the targeted killing machinery of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, demonstrating how critical errors and assumptions in this remotely controlled war has resulted in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians. Read More

Nine recommendations for action by President Obama to reverse his deadly legacy of drone warfare, surveillance and entrapment, including revealing flawed government contracts with companies like AT&T & Yahoo. Read More

A group of investigative journalists have revealed that General Atomics helped fund the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a major think tank in Washington DC, when it recommended that the Obama administration loosen export rules to allow the company sell more remotely piloted military aircraft. Read More

Activists have condemned Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia for lending $850 million to Mozambique in 2013 that was used mostly to buy military equipment, despite telling the public that the money would be used to buy fishing boats. Read More

Thales, the French aerospace company, is hoping to develop a weaponized version of the Watchkeeper drone to sell to Poland. This is despite a series of software glitches and accidents that resulted in many of the first 54 Watchkeepers that were delivered to the UK to be sitting idle. Read More

U.S. Air Force officials has begun to hire private companies to fly drone aircraft operating over Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The unprecedented move is in response to demands from the Obama administration to dramatically expand the drone war just as the Pentagon faces a critical shortage of military pilots. Read More

Hundreds of private sector intelligence analysts are being paid to review surveillance footage from U.S. military drones in Central Asia and the Middle East, according to a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Read More

Qosmos - a French technology company - is being investigated for acting as an "assisted witness" in alleged torture in Syria. The specialized crimes unit of the Paris Tribunal has agreed to study the use of Qosmos surveillance software by Bashar Al-Assad's regime, following complaints filed by two human rights NGOs. Read More

Firestone, a U.S. tire company, paid out millions of dollars to Charles Taylor, a Liberian warlord in the 1990s, despite knowing about his brutal human rights record, according to documents uncovered by ProPublica, an investigative journalism website. Taylor is now serving a 50 year prison sentence for war crimes. Read More

A federal jury has found three former Blackwater contractors guilty of manslaughter and a fourth guilty of murder for killing 17 Iraqis in Baghdad's Nissour Square on September 16, 2007. The men were private security guards hired to provide security to U.S. government employees at the time. Read More