The EDO factory on Home Farm Road in Brighton has been part of ITT Corporation (www.itt.com), since December 2007.
Before ITT took over the factory was known as EDO MBM, a trading unit of the EDO Corporation, another US company which acquired EDO MBM in 2003 and was bought by ITT in 2007. Prior to that the factory was owned by the Emblem Group, a British company.
ITT stands for International Telegraph and Telecom. The company was established in 1920 and diversified to weapons production in the 1930s when it acquired the German Focke-Wulf company who were a manufacturer of aircraft for the Nazi Luftwaffe. It is now the 19th largest defence manufacturer in the world.
EDO’s military products include bomb racks, release clips and arming mechanisms for warplanes. They have contracts with the UK Ministry of ‘Defence’ and US arms giant Raytheon relating to the release mechanisms of the Paveway bomb system.
EDO MBM’s supply of weapons systems for the illegal aggression and subesquent war crimes committed in Iraq makes their directors war criminals. International law is very clear on this point, in the 1947 trial of Bruno Tesch, a German industrialist, the court acted:
on the principle that any civilian who is an accessory to a violation of the laws and customs of war is himself also liable as a war criminal.
Tesch was convicted even though he did not supply products for specifically criminal purpose, because he carried on supplying them when he became aware they were being used to commit atrocities. Release mechanisms may not be as ‘glamourous’ as warheads, but they are just as crucial to the committing of the atrocities in Iraq. Dave Jones, EDO MBM’s Managing Director has said under oath that he is “fully aware” of what his products are used for.
We have read out testimonies from the survivors of the Fallujah massacre over a megaphone outside EDO. We have read out the names of the dead in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. We have shown pictures of those killed or wounded by the bombing campaign. We have directed their attention to the report in the Lancet which estimates over a million people have been killed during the US/UK occupation of Iraq and the UN’s Goldstone report which catalogue’s war crimes in Gaza. Yet EDO continues its complicity…