Judgment Day for the Merchants of Death

Intervening in this surging, greed-driven, incredibly lethal mess, the Tribunal rapporteurs and an international panel of 10 jurors offer 13 recommendations for action.

On January 15, 2025, five days before the inauguration of a U.S. president who threatens to rain down hell on the Palestinian people, and more war to the world, the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal released its final report on how Lockheed Martin, Boeing, RTX/Raytheon, and drone-maker General Atomics have delivered hell to millions across the globe since 9/11.

The Tribunal’s 35 evidentiary episodes explain how these four defendant corporations have been essential enablers of the U.S. colonial campaign of murder, extortion, and thievery since 9/11, epitomized in the horrific crescendo of violence that is already being rained down on the Palestinian people. This grossly illegal war campaign, unequalled in U.S. history in its geographic scope and length, is largely dependent on the products of the tribunal’s four defendant corporations.

The tribunal episodes explain how the U.S. campaign since 9/11 flows directly from the post-World War II decisions by U.S. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. businessmen, and their Congressional allies to try to pick up the reins of colonial control around the world that were being dropped by war-ruined European nations.

The U.S. leaders were, of course, acting from their racist cultural and business roots, extending back deep into slavery and the genocide against the first inhabitants of the continent, atrocities on which the U.S. was founded. They set us on the bloody path on which we find ourselves today.

For these industrialists and their political enablers, siding with liberation movements anywhere in the world meant less profits for U.S. corporations. Thus, colonial liberation must be officially described as a “communist” threat to be dealt with through direct and proxy killing, repression, torture, and terrorization.

A permanent military industry was needed to enable this Mafia-style scheme of international exploitation. Tribunal video episodes describe ways in which the U.S. public has been manipulated to support this military industrial system, to their great economic, spiritual, and intellectual disadvantage as the U.S. economy and the wealth of its oligarchs, like Elon Musk, has become more and more dependent on war and intimidation.

After World War I, even the Senate and Congress condemned gross war profiteering. Challenges to weapon manufacturers profiteering continued during World War II, though greatly diminished by war propaganda. Congressional support for weapons makers surged in the post-World War II years, so much so that “defense” stocks have become sacred elements of college and university endowment funds, pension funds, and private portfolios.

The immensity of this dependency on war stocks breached the surface of public awareness in the spring of 2024 as students in support of Palestinian life and liberation demanded that their schools disclose and divest their stock in weapons makers.

Wealth-driven weapons makers who must be protected by the so-called educators and are revered in the business world are the successors to those weapons makers in early 20th-century war-grieving America, who were often depicted as overconsumptive, sleezy, money-grubbing vultures, feeding on the corpses and misery of the war dead and afflicted.

Now, we have reached a point in which James Taiclet, the president, chair, and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation, the largest weapons maker in the world, whose F-35s, F-16s, and Hellfire missiles have been slaughtering Palestinians wholesale, can be a valued member of the board of directors of Mass General Brigham, the largest hospital system in Massachusetts, serving 2.6 million patients a year.

Intervening in this surging, greed-driven, incredibly lethal mess, the Tribunal rapporteurs and an international panel of 10 jurors offer 13 recommendations for action by the public and by government officials to pull the profit out from under war and to provide reparations for the vast harm visited on millions of people by the Merchants of Death and the U.S. government since 9/11.

More specifically, we tribunal coordinators want to work with prosecutors around the world to bring the CEOs of the defendant corporations to justice for having enabled, since the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

We want to work with students and other movements to end private and public investment in weapons production.

We must note that in our investigation, we repeatedly called on the defendant corporations to respond, in one instance getting arrested in the process. The four defendant corporations ignored us. We repeatedly asked members of Congress to answer our questions about their involvement with weapons makers. They ignored us.

The work of the Tribunal was made possible by the volunteers and the extremely low-paid work of more than 40 people—students, filmmakers, artists, journalists, and just people who joined us at various times over nearly three years to complete our video evidentiary episodes and report.

They and we represent millions of people who mean to stop the depravity of invasion, occupation, killing, and repression, everywhere, so that we can properly get about the work of human survival and the restoration of our planet.

In this, we hope that the Tribunal recommendations will be among the guide stars that will help us chart our course, shining above the hurricane of greed and viciousness now ravaging the U.S and the world.

We hope that we are effective representatives of those calling for justice and repair from the hideous war work of the Merchants of Death and the United States government since 9/11, of those calling to the world from their graves, from their hospital beds, from their poverty and dislocation, and their relentless battles against racism in their places of refuge.

The 35 evidentiary video episodes appear on the Rumble platform and can be easily accessed at MerchantsofDeath.org, as can our Tribunal Study Guide and our podcast – Merchants of Death Radio.