US diplomats have on several occasions intervened to convince foreign governments to buy aircraft from Boeing rather than its European rival Airbus, newly released diplomatic cables show. The cables, obtained by the New York Times from the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks, document several incidents in which diplomats were involved in haggling over the -billion-dollar deals seen as key to US economic growth.
One cable describes Saudi King Abdullah responding favorably to a personal request from then-US president George W. Bush in 2006 that he buy as many as 43 Boeing jets for Saudi Arabian Airlines and another 13 for the royal fleet.
However, the king “wanted to have all the technology that his friend, President Bush, had on Air Force One,” the cable said.
Once the king’s own plane was outfitted with the world’s most advanced telecommunications and defense equipment, “‘God willing,’ he will make a decision that will ‘please you very much,’” the cable said.
In November last year, state-owned Saudi Arabian Airlines said it had signed a contract for 12 new Boeing 777-300ER jets worth about US$3.3 billion.
The US Department of State confirmed to the Times that it had authorized an “upgrade” to the king’s plane, but declined to provide further details on security grounds.
In another incident, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina -demanded landing rights for its national carrier at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport as a condition for a Boeing deal.
“If there is no New York route, what is the point of buying Boeing,” she was quoted as saying in a November 2009 cable.
The deal went through, but so far Biman Bangladesh Airlines has not been given the landing rights, the Times said.
The Times said such practices have continued despite decades-old agreements between US and European leaders to keep politics out of airline deals.
However, US state department officials interviewed by the newspaper defended their involvement, saying such high-value exports were crucial to US President Barack Obama’s efforts to pull the country out of its economic slump.
“That is the reality of the 21st century; governments are playing a greater role in supporting their companies and we need to do the same thing,” Robert Hormats, US Under Secretary of State for economic affairs, told the Times.
Airbus may receive similar aid: Other US cables cited by the Times describe the Bush administration and French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government scrambling to win a jet deal from oil-rich Bahrain in 2007.
In the end, US diplomats convinced Bahrain to buy from Boeing after linking the signing of the deal to an upcoming visit by Bush in January 2008, the first-ever by a sitting US president, the Times said.
Washington has been infuriated by WikiLeaks and launched its own criminal investigation into the disclosure of the documents.
WikiLeaks has argued that its release of documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the inner workings of US diplomacy exposes US military abuses on the battlefield and “contradictions between the US’ public persona and what it says behind closed doors.”
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS