Important Customer: The Pentagon

Presentation of Product Line

The "Coordination gegen Bayer-Gefahren" (CBG - Coordination against the dangers posed by Bayer - Duesseldorf/North Rhine-Westphalia) reported that German companies, including the Bayer Company (Leverkusen/ North Rhine-Westphalia), are paying large sums to cover travel expenses for personnel of the Pentagon and the US armed forces. The report is based on information provided by the US organization Public Integrity, which analyzes official documents in Washington. Between 1998 and 2007, according to this information, 22,000 trips, at an estimated value of $26 million, by personnel of the US defense department and US armed forces were sponsored by non-US government sources. Foreign governments, the German included, allocated $2,6 million for trips - usually to meetings and conferences. Among the financiers of these trips, one also finds think tanks, such as the Bertelsmann Foundation and the Clausewitz-Society, scientific and research institutions, such as various universities and the Max-Planck-Society as well as private companies. For the presentation of its product line, the sportswear company, Adidas, for example, sponsored several of its Pentagon customers' trips.[1]

Prosthetics specialist

Driven by financial interests, the medical industry is the largest sponsor of these trips. Public Integrity reports that companies of this branch paid for approx. 8.700 of the 22.000 externally sponsored trips. The total value is estimated at more than $10 million.[2] The CBG calls the 46.000 Euros paid alone by Bayer for travel of Pentagon personnel between 1998 and 2007, "a subtle form of marketing". CBG reports that the Pentagon's drug budget has clearly increased in the past few years, to reach almost an annual $7 billion - about two percent of the overall US drug consumption. The continuation of these wars could raise the US armed forces' drug budget to "about $15 billion annually," estimates the CBG.[3] Among the Pentagon's German financiers listed by Public Integrity, alongside Bayer, there is also a German Prosthetics specialist.[4]

Poison Gas Tradition

Bayer's business deals with the Pentagon already have tradition. Their cooperation aroused public attention in the spring of 2004, when reports were published on a heated controversy between Washington and this German company over the drug Lipobay. Bayer had taken the Cholesterol lowering drug off the market already in 2001 - because of alleged side effects, many of which were lethal. The interruption of a Lipobay supply contract, led to a dispute between Bayer and the Pentagon in 2004. But cooperation has not been limited to drugs. CBG reports that "the poison gas, VX, used still today by the US army, is based on a patent of this company in Leverkusen." Referring to the close affinity between pesticides - a Bayer specialty [5] - and chemical weapons, CBG calls this a "terrible tradition". CBG recalls that Bayer researchers played "an important role" in the development of chemical warfare agents already long before VX. "During WWI, Fritz Haber, in cooperation with Bayer's general director, Carl Duisberg, developed mustard gas testing it for the first time at the front, In 1938, Gerhard Schrader synthesized Sarin," reports CBG in a discussion with german-foreign-policy.com: "Schrader directed Bayer's herbicide department until 1964."[6]

Agent Orange

Boehringer Ingelheim is another German Company on the Public Integrity's list of Pentagon lobbyists. Already in the past, this company has been furnishing poison to the US armed forces. In the 1960s, Boehringer supplied 720 tons of Trichlorophenol for the production of the herbicide "Agent Orange" to a US Dow Chemical subsidiary. At the time, the US armed forces was using "Agent Orange" on a large scale against Vietnam, as a defoliant of Vietnamese forests - with devastating effects also on human beings. The effects of this chemical warfare are being felt by hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese still today.[7]

Million Dollar Deals

German travel sponsors also include the Siemens Company that is striving to establish good relations to medical technicians of the US military apparatus - not without success. In February 2007 for example, Siemens Medical Solutions USA landed a large contract to supply the US armed forces with $30 worth of equipment. In April 2009, Siemens Medical Solutions USA was awarded a US Defense Department contract, this time worth even $267 million for radiology systems to be used by the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.[8] These Siemens', Bayer's and other German firms' million dollar deals are thriving on the wars currently being waged by Washington in Iraq and Afghanistan - and on the steadily growing number of US soldiers falling victim to these wars.

[1], [2] Pentagon Travel. How Outside Interests Sponsor Thousands of Military Trips; www.publicintegrity.org
[3] BAYER zahlt Reisekosten für Mitarbeiter des US-Verteidigungsministeriums; Pressemitteilung der Coordination gegen BAYER-Gefahren, 24.08.2009
[4] Otto Bock Health Care (Duderstadt/Niedersachsen) lud Public Integrity zufolge den Chief Prosthetist vom Walter Reed Army Medical Center/North Atlantic Regional Medical Command zu einem "Otto Bock Prosthetics Course".
[5] see also Deadly Poison and Mit Abstand Marktführer
[6] Jan Pehrke: Chemie-Waffen: tödliche Tradition bei Bayer; SWB 04/2003, www.cbgnetwork.org
[7] see also A Murderous Business
[8] Siemens unit in $267 mln Pentagon contract; Reuters 31.03.2009