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 V: Blood Money and Broken Oaths —Naming the War Lords – Profiles of Power, Profit, and Permanent War
by Marivel Guzman | Akashma News
There are men who sell wars. And there are men who build the weapons. Often, they are the same.”
— Akashma News, 2025
Patriots. Strategists. Innovators.
That’s how they are introduced on television. But behind every press release and campaign ad is a ledger. And that ledger shows profit made from pain, shares lifted by war, and a cast of powerful individuals who walk between Washington, Wall Street, and war zones—unchallenged, unelected, and unaccountable.
I. The Men Who Sold the Wars
Dick Cheney
CEO of Halliburton before becoming VP.
His company gained $39.5 billion in Iraq War contracts.
Personally retained stock options while architecting war policy.
Donald Rumsfeld
Sat on the board of Gilead Sciences during the planning of biosecurity policy.
Championed a war doctrine that transformed defense into private enterprise.
Zalmay Khalilzad
U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Later became a consultant for oil and defense interests in the very regions he helped “liberate.”
II. The Generals and Officials Who Became Investors – or Were Always Connected
Gen. James Mattis
Joined General Dynamics board shortly after retiring.
Benefited from a firm that supplies key components to both U.S. and NATO operations.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal
Advisor to Palantir, the CIA-funded predictive warfare and surveillance firm.
Former top commander in Afghanistan.
Gen. Michael Hayden
After leading both the NSA and CIA, became a private intelligence consultant.
Affiliated with Booz Allen Hamilton, same firm Edward Snowden worked for before exposing global surveillance.
Lt. Gen. William Hartman
Currently head of U.S. Cyber Command and NSA (acting).
Central figure in the next-gen war theater: data and cyber control.
Condoleezza Rice
National Security Advisor (2001–2005) and Secretary of State (2005–2009).
Former board member of Chevron, which honored her by naming an oil tanker “Condoleezza Rice” in the late 1990s.
Advocated aggressively for regime change in Iraq, despite evidence contradicting the WMD narrative.
Her influence over Afghanistan policy is deeply tied to pipeline geopolitics—not democracy.
As reported in Akashma News (2012), Rice’s connections to energy giants and Hamid Karzai—Afghanistan’s U.S.-installed president and former Unocal pipeline advisor—reveal that “freedom” in Afghanistan may have always been code for oil transit routes and corporate access to Central Asian reserves.
III. Trojan Chips and Phantom Circuits: The Hidden Frontline of Betrayal
“We build our weapons in the name of security—while outsourcing their soul.”
Every F-35. Every smart missile. Every drone or comms satellite in the U.S. arsenal carries inside it parts from foreign nations.
And some of those nations don’t share American values—only American contracts.
Microchips from Taiwan and Israel.
Rare-earth magnets from China.
Optical components from Germany.
Coding subcontractors in India, the UAE, and beyond.
These components are:
Untraceable once installed.
Unverifiable by visual inspection.
Vulnerable to backdoors, malware, timed failure, or embedded surveillance.
In short: weapons may now come pre-compromised.
Israel’s Case: A Known Precedent
In the 1990s, Israeli-manufactured pagers were discovered to be covert surveillance devices, transmitting user location and message metadata without consent. These pagers were sold across Latin America, Europe, and Asia—including to government officials and journalists.
Today’s equivalent?
Cellebrite, Pegasus, NSO Group—all accused of spying on allies and dissidents.
Yet these firms maintain privileged access to U.S. markets and intelligence networks.
What About China?
In 2018, a Bloomberg investigation alleged that Chinese microchips were covertly installed on server motherboards used by Apple, Amazon, and Pentagon contractors.
Even if unconfirmed, the possibility is the threat.
And if Raytheon, Lockheed, or General Dynamics can’t verify every circuit, the entire system is compromised.
IV. The Tech Titans and the Spy Market
Peter Thiel (Palantir)
Created software that maps populations, predicts insurgency, and profiles suspects.
Palantir is funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm.
Jeff Bezos (Amazon)
Bid on the $10B JEDI cloud war contract, and won major DOD deals via AWS.
Amazon’s infrastructure now supports U.S. intelligence, ICE, and military data.
Eric Schmidt (Google/Alphabet)
Served on the Defense Innovation Board.
Helped bridge Silicon Valley with the Pentagon.
Bill Gates (Microsoft)
Indirectly involved in Iraq reconstruction and humanitarian tech expansion.
Microsoft still maintains defense partnerships and cloud servicing for secure military communications.
Lord of War (2005) – Fiction Based on Too Many Facts
In Lord of War, Nicolas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, a smooth-talking arms dealer who thrives in the chaos left behind by collapsing governments and constant conflict. Based loosely on real-life figures like Viktor Bout, the film peels back the curtain on the global weapons trade—legal and illegal—and shows how war is less about ideology, and more about inventory management.
Yuri sells to dictators, rebels, and “freedom fighters”—often in the same country, often with weapons traced back to U.S. or Russian stockpiles. He helps stage rebel uprisings, fuels civil wars, and arms child soldiers, all while living comfortably under the protection of great powers who need people like him to do the dirty work off the books.
The film’s final punchline comes in the credits:
“There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation—one for every 12 people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11?”
That’s not a line from the movie. It’s the film’s closing warning—and one of the most honest summations of the modern arms economy ever put on screen.
The real difference between Yuri Orlov and the Pentagon’s preferred contractors?
Orlov was honest about being a merchant of death.
V. Conclusion: These Are the Lords of War
They don’t fight on battlefields. They don’t wear medals. But they profit on every bullet, bomb, and biometric scan.
They rotate from command posts to boardrooms, from political office to private consultancy.
And while veterans die waiting for care, while families mourn from Kabul to Kansas, these war lords cash checks, win contracts, and rewrite policy in their image.
They are the hidden government.
And they’ve sold the republic for stock options and subcontracting fees.
“The difference between Yuri Orlov and real war lords? Orlov was fictional—and slightly more honest.”
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