Germany complicit in NATO crimes with arms export: Analyst

Press TV has interviewed Scott Rickard, a former American intelligence linguist in Orlando, about a report saying Germany in 2015 almost doubled its arms exports to the highest level in nearly 20 years, in contradiction with an earlier pledge to restrict the amount of weapons sales.

A rough transcription of the interview appears below.

Press TV: Well obviously selling weapons big business and becoming bigger by the day. Now with Germany exporting billions of euros worth of arms to entities like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, how does the United States, how does the UK, how does Germany and other countries get away with selling these types of weapons to these types of regimes?   

Rickard: Well that is a great question. When you look at the size of the military industrial complex in Germany alone, it provides most of the weapons outside the US to NATO and then another half of their weapons actually are supplied to Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Algeria, Egypt and what you see here is a true indication of the cooperation of Germany in NATO’s crimes in the Middle East and Germany is number three on the export of weapons around the world, whereby Russia is number two and the United States is number one and if you look at the massive amounts of weapons that are being bought by these countries, it is tremendous amounts that they cannot even use.

I mean the population of Qatar is only just about 2 million where in fact 90 percent of that population are foreign workers. So you have a very small, like 200 to 300 thousand native people from Qatar that are actually buying these massive amounts of weapons and these massive amounts of weapons are absolutely unnecessary for the security of any country. What they are being used for is they are being used for arms deals outside of the country and instead of the Americans selling directly to terrorists like Daesh, they are using proxy nations like Saudi Arabia and like Qatar to proxy wars. That is what happened in Libya, that is what is happening in Syria, and it is absolutely criminal and how do they get away with it? Well it is because the Americans alongside their NATO allies control the high seas and the banks across the planet. So that is how they are getting away with it.

Press TV: Well being that it is also big business, making a lot of money by these countries that I named, what is going to be the answer in order to try to stop this obviously by creating chaos and then at the same time then selling these weapons it is obviously in their interest to make sure that the world is not stable, so what is the answer? What is the answer to basically bringing this vicious circle to an end?

Rickard: Well the only answer I can come up with is for countries like Iran and Russia and other countries that have had to deal with the onslaught of the West, just sheer devastation not only in the Middle East but in other regions around the world, is to help educate unfortunately the American people. The American people are incredibly misled, their news media is incredibly misleading and their educational system is incredibly misleading.

So when in fact they hear these stories about these arms deal and the security, they think that it is necessary, they have been fooled to think that it is necessary. So I think that going to the colleges and getting people educated at younger age could help it in the future but in the short-term unfortunately there are just so many brainwashed individuals in the United States and there are so many people basically making so much money off of the military industrial complex in the surrounding businesses like the intelligence community and this anti-terrorism community, the cyber warfare community, everything has been pretty much propped up by the fear, doubt and uncertainty of the chaos that is ensued by this massive military industrial complex. That is what is driving the economy in the mindset unfortunately of the Americans and of so I would say of many of the Western civilizations.

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