The little seen world of global weapons trade ... is about to be exposed.

The Takeaway: Shining a Light on the Global Arms Trade

Forty percent of the world's corruption is estimated to begin with arms trade. A new film aims to expose just how entrenched it is in our current political environment.

The Takeaway, hosted by John Hockenberry, provides a breadth and depth of world, national, and regional news coverage that is unprecedented in public media.

Listen to this Podcast from wnyc.org

The Takeaway: Shining a Light on the Global Arms Trade

If there's one thing we learned from this week's revelation of the Panama Papers, it's just how internationally interconnected illicit shadow money is. A corrupt Brazilians politicians goes to a law firm in Panama, and then builds a couple of skyscrapers in Miami, for example.

And much of that web, an estimated 40 percent of it, originates with global arms deals, which is the subject of a timely new film premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival: "Shadow World."

Andrew Feinstein wrote the book the film is based on. He stumbled into the world of the arms industry when he was a politician in South Africa, a member of the ANC Party under Nelson Mandela, and then began an investigation into a 10 billion dollar arms deal made by his party. He found that $300 million were bribes, much of which went to government officials. [...]

"Just about everywhere -- takes guns 'as money'."

"Now we have a situation in the world today, where the Trade in Bananas is more heavily regulated, than the Trade in Weapons. Now the reality is that Weapons are a hell of a lot more dangerous than Bananas."

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2016 Tribeca Film Festival

Feature Documentary: Shadow World -- Directed by Johan Grimonprez

Film Information
Section: Spotlight
Year: 2016
Length: 94 minutes
Language: Arabic, English, Spanish
Country: USA, Denmark, Belgium
Premiere: World

Haliburton may be the shining example of an out of control arms industry, where the profit is billions of dollars and the loss is human lives. In Shadow World, based upon the 2011 book by Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, there are other weapons manufacturers, world leaders, arms dealers, military leaders, and behind-the-scenes movers that come under director Johan Grimonprez's (Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y) scrutiny in an eye-popping assemblage of news and archival footage. Accompanying the images are comments from Feinstein, a slippery arms dealer, former New York Times writer Chris Hedges, and New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and other once-willing participants in the business who decided to speak out. Grimonprez spares no one to expose a shadow world of corruption, slush funds, drones, illicit bed partners, and a whole lot of lies and greed from the early 80s up to the present. The aim is to perpetuate war in order to generate more cash, no matter what the expense.

-- Brian Gordon

The Shadow World -- Author Andrew Feinstein

Penguin Books UK -- Oct 10, 2011

Link to video

Pulling back the curtain on the secretive world of the global arms trade, Andrew Feinstein reveals the corruption and the cover-ups behind weapons deals ranging from the largest in history - between the British and Saudi governments - to BAE's controversial transactions in South Africa, Tanzania and eastern Europe, and the revolving-door relationships that characterise the US Congressional-Military-Industrial Complex. He exposes in forensic detail both the formal government-to-government trade in arms and the shadow world of illicit weapons dealing - and lays bare the shocking and inextricable links between the two.

The Shadow World places us in the midst of the arms trade's dramatic wheeling and dealing, ranging from corporate boardrooms to seedy out-of-the-way hotels via far-flung offshore havens, and reveals the profound danger this network represents to all of us.

"Show me who profits from War -- and I'll show you how to the stop the War."

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For a clip from the Film, featuring Representative Cynthia McKinney challenging Donald Rumsfeld on the Trillions of Dollars in unaccounted for and missing Iraq War funds, click here. Or for the Trailer here: http://shadowworldfilm.com/

"It is the disease of 'permanent war' that destroys the Middle East -- not Islamic Fundamentalism."

"Once you start a War, you open up a sort of Pandora's Box. You don't control it -- it controls you."

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Screenings of Shadow World in selected theaters listed here.