Archive
Blood Money and Broken Oaths
By Marivel Guzman | Akashma News
About the Series
This nine-part investigative series traces how U.S. wars—from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Congress to Silicon Valley—have become less about defense and more about dividends. It exposes the revolving door between military command and corporate control, the use of terror to justify mass surveillance, and the hidden ledger of war profiteers.
Table of Contents
- Part I: The War Machine’s Finest Minds – And Why They Failed Us
- Part II: Blood Money and Broken Oaths – How America’s Wars Were Lost to Greed
- Part III: The Empire’s Ledger – Mapping the Timeline of Treason
- Part IV: Collateral Empire – The Civilian Toll and the Future of Resistance
- Part V: Naming the War Lords – Profiles of Power, Profit, and Permanent War
- Part VI: Collateral Profits – How War Built Empires, Crushed Nations, and Reshaped the Global Order
- Part VII: Resistance Rising – The Return of the Unbought Voice
- Part VIII: The Patriot Act’s Children – Surveillance, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Dissent
- Part IX: The Archive of Resistance – Building the People’s Historical Memory
Coming Soon: The eBook Edition
Complete manuscript with footnotes, timelines, visual archives, and appendices. Arabic and Spanish translations will follow the English release.
Part I: Blood Money and Broken Oaths — The War Machine’s Finest Minds – And Why They Failed Us
by Marivel Guznan |Akashma News
They walk among us, decorated in ribbons and stars. They hold degrees in strategy, military science, and global security. Men and women like Lt. Gen. William J. Hartman and Col. Laurie Buckhout—steeped in cyber warfare, intelligence command, and battlefield coordination. Their résumés read like a war college syllabus. Their service, decades long. Their minds, forged in the crucible of conflict.
On paper, these leaders are extraordinary. Seasoned generals. Cyber tacticians. National security architects. Yet despite all this, the United States has not won a war since Operation Desert Storm. And even that “victory” unraveled into decades of instability, emboldening warlords and birthing monsters like ISIS.
So we ask, with no malice—only urgency:
If the best-trained brass can’t win, what are they really fighting for?
Let’s break it down.
1. “Winning” Isn’t What It Used to Be
War has changed. Victory no longer ends with treaties or surrender. The modern battlefield is everywhere and nowhere—insurgents without flags, drones without borders, ideologies without nations.
Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. The “enemy” shifts with each administration. So even the most skilled general fights a ghost with rules that vanish mid-battle.
And when the goal is ill-defined, or forever postponed, no one wins—except those selling the bullets.
2. Political Sabotage of Military Strategy
The brass may strategize—but execution belongs to Washington.
And in Washington, strategy is eclipsed by optics, reelection cycles, and lobbying dollars.
From the disastrous pullout of Iraq that gave rise to ISIS, to the haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan that betrayed both U.S. soldiers and Afghan civilians—our wars have been sabotaged from within.
Generals follow orders. But what if the orders are designed to enrich friends, not to defend the nation?
3. Wars That Were Never Meant to Be Won
This is the hardest truth.
Afghanistan: 20 years, trillions spent, no intention to build a nation—just to rent one.
Iraq: Invaded on a lie. Left broken, bleeding, and looted.
Syria and Libya: Proxy wars ignited, populations destroyed, stability traded for oil corridors and arms sales.
As General Wesley Clark warned: “There was a plan to take out seven countries in five years.” If chaos was the goal, then mission accomplished. War wasn’t lost. It was repackaged as policy.
4. Bureaucracy, Corruption, and the Military-Industrial Complex
Even the most principled officers—like Hartman or Buckhout—can’t outmaneuver the system Eisenhower warned us about.
A swamp of overlapping agencies. Procurement games. “Consulting” gigs. Retired brass going from battlefield to boardroom. Raytheon. Lockheed. Palantir.
The medals might shine, but the system is rusted.
5. Cyberwarfare: A War Without Glory
Our modern heroes now fight in digital silence. No headlines. No parades. Just servers breached, satellites hijacked, grids disabled.
Hartman and Buckhout may be winning battles in cyber arenas we’ll never see—but without transparency, without accountability, the public can’t know what’s won, or what’s lost.
6. Strategy Without Soul
Even the most refined tactics collapse without just cause.
Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. These weren’t wars of liberation. They were occupations disguised as peacekeeping.
Soldiers fought with honor—but the cause was hollow. And occupiers don’t win hearts. They ignite resistance.
So what’s the verdict?
The failure doesn’t lie in skill. It lies in the absence of truth, purpose, and restraint.
Our generals serve two masters—country and contract. And more often than not, they retire into the arms of the contractor who profits from the wars they once directed.
No PhD in war theory can redeem a battle fought for shareholders.
We opened with respect. We acknowledge the service, the dedication, the brilliance.
But now it’s time to flip the page.
Because behind every uniform is a shadow. Behind every “hero” is a name on a contract. And behind every failed war is a ledger soaked in blood.
Welcome to Part II Blood Money and Broken Oaths — How America’s Wars Were Lost to Greed.
Part II: Blood Money and Broken Oaths – How America’s Wars Were Lost to Greed
by Marivel Guzman | Akashma News
They said it was about freedom. They said it was about justice. They said it was about protecting American lives.
But the body count rose, the lies piled up, and the contracts multiplied.
Behind every failed operation, every smokescreen of national interest, and every “freedom mission” abroad—there was a ledger. And the names in those ledgers weren’t soldiers or widows. They were stockholders, politicians, former generals, and billionaires.
This is not anti-war rhetoric. This is forensic journalism. We follow the money. We follow the lies. And we follow the names.
I. The Bush Dynasty: Family Business Meets Foreign Invasion
George H.W. Bush – former CIA Director, oilman, war president. His company, Zapata Offshore, had connections to offshore drilling, Latin America operations, and covert interests.
George W. Bush – sat atop the nation in 2001, as oil executives and military contractors circled the wreckage of 9/11 like vultures. He handed the no-bid reconstruction contracts to Halliburton, formerly run by his vice president, Dick Cheney.
And then came the war built on a lie—Weapons of Mass Destruction—a falsehood pushed by political operatives and amplified by a willing press. The Bush-Cheney doctrine turned Iraq into a playground for profiteers.
II. Dick Cheney: Halliburton’s Shadow Commander
Vice President Cheney made millions from Halliburton stock options even after supposedly “severing ties.” In 2003 alone, Halliburton secured $7 billion in contracts from the U.S. government.
His fingerprints are everywhere:
KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary) billed billions for “reconstruction.”
Allegations of fraud, overcharging, and unsafe conditions for troops.
Private subcontractors like Blackwater (now Academi) acted as mercenary extensions of U.S. foreign policy—with legal immunity.
III. Congress for Sale: The Blood-Soaked Wallets on Capitol Hill
Congress didn’t just approve the wars—they invested in them.
Senator Dianne Feinstein: Her husband, Richard Blum, had stakes in military contractors that gained from Iraq contracts.
Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH): Longtime advocate of defense expansion, recipient of funds from Raytheon and Lockheed.
Dan Crenshaw (R-TX): Public military hero, private supporter of increased private security contracting. Multiple donations from defense PACs.
And let’s not forget Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE)—our cyber subcommittee chair. With decades of military service and political clout, he embodies the revolving door. No direct link to NSO Group or Palantir yet, but his pro-surveillance stances and cyber warfare lobbying track suggest he’s under corporate gravity.
Use OpenSecrets.org and Project on Government Oversight to track the steady stream of blood money funneled through campaign donations and insider contracts.
IV. When Generals Turn Into Guns-for-Hire
Gen. James Mattis: Board member of General Dynamics after his military career.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal: Became advisor to Palantir Technologies, a CIA-seeded surveillance company.
Gen. Michael Hayden: Ex-NSA director turned private consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton—the same firm Edward Snowden worked for when he exposed global surveillance.
They fought wars. Then they sold the playbook.
V. The Tech Profiteers: From Silicon Valley to Baghdad
Bill Gates: Not just the vaccine mogul—Microsoft technology undergirded U.S. digital surveillance and logistics systems in war zones. While Microsoft didn’t profit from boots-on-the-ground war, its infrastructure contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan were extensive.
Peter Thiel: Founder of Palantir, funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. Palantir’s predictive policing software was deployed in Iraq and on U.S. streets.
Jeff Bezos: Amazon’s AWS cloud bid for the JEDI war cloud contract—worth $10 billion—showed that today’s wars aren’t about tanks. They’re about data.
VI. The Looting of Iraq: $6.6 Billion Gone in Cash
Between 2003–2007, the U.S. “lost” $6.6 billion in cash meant for Iraq’s reconstruction. That money was flown in on pallets—literally—in C-130s, and vanished.
Where did it go? Corrupt Iraqi officials? American contractors? Halliburton vaults?
No accountability. No charges. No return.
VII. From Patriot Act to Panopticon
With the ink still wet from the Twin Towers’ collapse, Congress passed the Patriot Act, giving birth to:
NSA mass surveillance.
Fusion centers spying on Americans.
Corporate surveillance networks with no oversight.
Big Tech, security firms, and retired brass cashed in. And the American people were told: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”
Meanwhile, the architects of fear had everything to gain.
VIII. Conclusion: The Road to Treason Is Paved with Contracts
America didn’t lose its wars because of incompetence. It lost them because winning was never the goal.
The Pentagon became a piggy bank. Congress a stock exchange. And the generals? Many became consultants, CEOs, and lobbyists.
They served money, not country. And money, as we know, doesn’t need a passport to move through the doors of corruption.
So we name them. We trace the dollars. And we demand that history stop calling them patriots when they were, in truth, profiteers.
In Part III, we’ll break down timelines, show document trails, and map the full revolving door from war zones to corporate boardrooms.
Welcome to Part III: Blood Money and Btoken Oaths: The Empire’s Ledger – Mapping the Timeline of Treason
Part III: Blood Money and Broken Oaths: The Empire’s Ledger – Mapping the Timeline of Treason
by Marivel Guzman | Akashma News
“History is not only written by the victors. It’s bankrolled by them.”
— Akashma News, 2025
Follow the wars. Follow the resignations. Follow the contracts. Follow the betrayal.
I. 1991–1997: From Desert Storm to Corporate Warm-Up
1992–1995: Cheney becomes CEO of Halliburton.
Over $3.8 billion in Pentagon contracts under his leadership.
1994: Bill Clinton signs Presidential Decision Directive 25, quietly expanding U.S. peacekeeping and private contractor roles abroad.
1995: Carlyle Group recruits ex-officials like George H.W. Bush and James Baker.
II. 2000–2003: The Setup Before the Storm
2000: Bush-Cheney campaign begins with heavy oil and defense lobbying support.
Sept 2000: PNAC publishes Rebuilding America’s Defenses—calls for a “Pearl Harbor-like event” to reshape U.S. global policy.
2001 (pre-9/11):
CIA briefs Bush on potential Al-Qaeda threat.
NSA surveillance pilot programs begin domestically.
Sept 11, 2001: The attacks become the pivot point.
Congress passes AUMF.
PATRIOT Act signed Oct 26, 2001—ushering in surveillance capitalism.
III. 2003–2008: The Iraq Gold Rush
2003: U.S. invades Iraq on false WMD intelligence.
KBR receives $7 billion in no-bid contracts.
Halliburton stock surges.
2004: Blackwater awarded $21 million for diplomatic security in Iraq.
2005:
Don Bacon rises in cyber command roles.
Palantir Technologies begins DOD contracts under CIA’s In-Q-Tel.
2006–2007:
Iraq Reconstruction money disappears—$6.6 billion unaccounted for.
Gen. Petraeus surges troops; war contractors surge profits.
2007: Microsoft and Google sign early-stage DOD support contracts for infrastructure and field operations.
IV. 2009–2016: The Silent Profiteering Years
2009:
Barack Obama inherits Iraq/Afghanistan quagmire.
Expansion of drone warfare and NSA surveillance under Hayden.
2010:
Palantir wins major U.S. Army contracts.
General Dynamics, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton among top 5 war profiting firms.
2011:
U.S. “withdraws” from Iraq.
Defense contractors begin pivoting to cyber operations and homeland surveillance.
2013: Edward Snowden leaks NSA surveillance programs.
2014–2015:
ISIS rises—Palantir and Amazon AWS used in military targeting systems.
Senate quietly approves expanded surveillance with corporate partners.
V. 2017–2020: Enter the Tech Lords
Trump years:
Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir and Trump ally, embedded himself into U.S. intelligence architecture.
Palantir wins ICE contracts for predictive policing, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle fought over the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract—a digital backbone for U.S. war and surveillance.
Tech billionaires weren’t building apps. They were constructing a battlefield without borders.
2018:
JEDI Cloud Contract bid begins—Microsoft vs. Amazon vs. Oracle.
2020:
COVID emergency legislation used to redirect funds into “cyber defense and biosecurity” infrastructure.
VI. 2021–2024: The New Hybrid War Economy; Afghanistan’s Ghosts and Ukraine’s Windfall
2021: Afghanistan withdrawal—$7B in military equipment left behind.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 left $7 billion in abandoned U.S. equipment. And a whole new contract market: homeland security, border tech, biometric screening.
The Ukraine war triggered a second boom:
Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin—all reported historic profits.
Cyber contractors were deployed to NATO allies.
Former generals rotated into new roles: consultants, board members, defense liaisons.
Laurie Buckhout was appointed Deputy Secretary for Cyber Policy in 2025. Lt. Gen. William Hartman assumed acting control of Cyber Command and the NSA.
Meanwhile, Rep. Don Bacon—decorated officer, now House cyber subcommittee chair—oversaw funding pipelines that matched lobbying spreadsheets.
2025: The Year the Veil Slipped
This year, everything came full circle.
The CBS leak exposed that cyber operations against Russia were paused—allegedly for political optics, not strategy.
Gen. Hartman denied wrongdoing.
Bacon confirmed it.
Hegseth, the Trump-aligned Secretary of Defense, was revealed to have used Signal to issue battlefield instructions—from his phone.
The cyber war had begun. But the real battle was being waged in boardrooms and committee hearings, where revolving doors never stopped spinning.
Cyber Command & NSA controversies over “paused” operations.
Pete Hegseth–Trump-appointed Secretary of Defense under fire.
Don Bacon leads cyber oversight—but questions emerge on defense lobbying.
New revelations link PAC donations to cyber security procurement priorities.
Conclusion: A Ledger Written in Blood
From Desert Storm to drone storms, from Baghdad to Big Data, America’s war story is no longer about victory.
It’s about returns.
Generals became lobbyists. Presidents became investors. Congress became shareholders.
And the people—the soldiers, the taxpayers, the wounded, the dead—they were left with flags and folded letters.
This is not a tragedy. It is a crime. And the evidence is in the timeline.
Part IV: Blood Money and Broken Oaths: Collateral Empire – The Civilian Toll and the Future of Resistance
The Prosecution of an American President
Posted on September 16, 2012 by Akashma Online News
Bush it is responsible for the murder of millions innocent around the world.
They said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They didn’t. They said Saddam was an imminent threat to our national security. He wasn’t. They convinced us Iraq was involved in 9/11. It wasn’t. And yet America, still reeling from the September 11th attacks, launched a full scale invasion of Iraq. The destruction was unimaginable: over 4,400 American soldiers, dead. Over a hundred thousand innocent Iraqis, dead. Millions displaced. A nation destroyed. Cost to U.S. taxpayers…almost a trillion dollars.
When we didn’t find anything they simply said the intelligence was bad. But what if the intelligence wasn’t bad? What if the entire Iraq war was based on a calculated lie?
It would make every American soldier’s death a murder.
We owe to our world to bring the criminals to justice. We owe to the victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, US. We owe to our world to stop the mad machine. We owe to the victims of 911. This movie was done with almost no money, it needs all the support of the people to collect the funds to be world wide distributed. People need to know that the aim of this Film/ Documentary/Petition, is not about profits, but about Justice and Truth.
Independent Film The Prosecution of An American President Support, Share and Donate. The Prosecution of An American President the first of its kind Movie. Has been in the making for more than 5 years, finally ready to be distributed. It is a movie/documentary exposing George Bush jr lies to lead to the invasion of Iraq and subsequent murder of more than 1,000,000 Iraqi innocent civilians. Help to make this movie the movement that stop the mad machine, the movement to will lead to the prosecution and conviction of the First American President
This electrifying film documents the efforts of Vincent Bugliosi, one of our nation’s foremost prosecutors, as he meticulously presents his case that former president George W. Bush is guilty of murder for deliberately taking our nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses. Based on Bugliosi’s New York Times bestseller, the movie discloses shocking hidden details of how Bush and his people systematically lied to Congress AND the country.
Ignored and blacked out by the mainstream press, Mr. Bugliosi has fought an uphill battle to bring his message to the American people. To the survivors who struggle with the unthinkable possibility that their government led them astray. To the families of veterans who have taken their own lives in record numbers. To the outraged citizens who have organized and protested, but who haven’t yet found a way to bring a strong case.
Vincent Bugliosi – born August 18, 1934 – is an American attorney and author, best known for prosecuting Charles Manson and other defendants accused of the Tate–LaBianca murders, and for defending Stephanie Stearns in the Sea Wind murders of 1974. His most recent books are Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (2007), The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder (2008), and Divinity of Doubt: The God Question (2011).
It was only to be expected that Vincent Bugliosi, the man who prosecuted Charles Manson, would turn his attention to George W. Bush. And, doing so, he asks: Why do so many people think impeachment is the proper response to Bush’s crimes and corruption?
Perhaps the most amazing thing to me about the belief of many that George Bush lied to the American public in starting his war with Iraq is that the liberal columnists who have accused him of doing this merely make this point, and then go on to the next paragraph in their columns. Only very infrequently does a columnist add that because of it Bush should be impeached. If the charges are true, of course Bush should have been impeached, convicted, and removed from office. That’s almost too self-evident to state. But he deserves much more than impeachment. I mean, in America, we apparently impeach presidents for having consensual sex outside of marriage and trying to cover it up. If we impeach presidents for that, then if the president takes the country to war on a lie where thousands of American soldiers die horrible, violent deaths and over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, even babies are killed, the punishment obviously has to be much, much more severe. That’s just common sense. If Bush were impeached, convicted in the Senate, and removed from office, he’d still be a free man, still be able to wake up in the morning with his cup of coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice and read the morning paper, still travel widely and lead a life of privilege, still belong to his country club and get standing ovations whenever he chose to speak to the Republican faithful. This, for being responsible for over 100,000 horrible deaths?* For anyone interested in true justice, impeachment alone would be a joke for what Bush did. Democratic Under Ground
As to what Bugliosi would do, take note that the title of his upcoming book is The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. Anybody out there ready to make this dream a reality?
Vincent Bugliosi walk you to the process to prosecute George Bush. The first American President that was prosecuted and convicted by various courts around the world. Now justice needs to be served and George Bush and his Allies need to be brought to prosecuted.
This film Documentary and Petition expose George Bush lies that lead to the invasion of Iraq. 911 Crime considered the crime of the century by its covert prints that pointed somewhere else except to be the perpetrators of the crime.
author Vincent Bugliosi has written the most important and thought-provoking book of his prolific career. In a meticulously researched and clearly presented legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial for murder after he leaves his presidency, Bugliosi delivers a searing indictment of the President and his administration.
With what he believes is overwhelming evidence that President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses–a war that has caused great loss of life, cost this nation close to $1 trillion, and alienated most of our allies in the Western world–Bugliosi argues that it is George W. Bush who must be held accountable for what Bugliosi considers to be monumental crimes.
In this groundbreaking book, Bugliosi, in his inimitable style, presents a powerful case against the man in the oval office.
If you were never satisfied with the official story, well you are in between the millions and hopefully few billions soon to be. Being part of the group of minded people that does not believe the dopey story that Bush told us about 911. The story was incredible since the first day that we watched in national television THREE building disintegrate to DUST after being hit by TWO planes. It is a matter of simple first grade Maths, 1 + 1 is not equal to 3, isn’t it?
The Fallujah Project is about raising awareness on the use of depleted uranium in warfare. Iraq was used as experimental grounds of US nuclear illegal arms. Bush needs to respond to the use of depleted uranium in Iraq.
Read some of the information being collected in the last 10 years by Jeff Prager, download DUST and take the doubt once and for all about the events that took place on September 11, 2001.
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