The Militarization of Our Police
*Note: This is not a general blanket statement about police. We know there are many more decent, hard-working police officers than not and we respect you and what you do.
Day: October 21, 2007
“Rendition” Film All Too Real for CIA Kidnapping Victims (link; interview)
Global Research, October 21, 2007
ACLU
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US intelligence does not show Syrian nuclear weapons program, officials say by Larisa Alexandrovna
by Larisa Alexandrovna
Global Research, October 21, 2007
Raw Story October 18, 2007
Cheney hand seen behind leaks of ‘misleading’ stories
Allegations that a Syrian envoy admitted during a United Nations meeting Oct. 17 that an Israeli air strike hit a nuclear facility in September are inaccurate and have raised the ire of some in the US intelligence community, who see the Vice President’s hand as allegedly being behind the disinformation.
A United Nations press release discussing the General Assembly’s Disarmament Committee meeting mistranslated comments ascribed to an unnamed Syrian diplomat as saying that Israel had on various occasions “taken action against nuclear facilities, including the 6 July attack in Syria.”
The UN has since gone through the tape recordings of the meeting and found that there was no mention of the word “nuclear” at all. According to the UN, the error was one of translation, involving several interpreters translating the same meeting.
Recent news articles, however, continue to make allegations and suggest that a nuclear weapons facility was hit — something that the Syrian government has denied, the Israeli government has not officially confirmed and US intelligence does not show.
According to current and former intelligence sources, the US intelligence community has seen no evidence of a nuclear facility being hit.
US intelligence “found no radiation signatures after the bombing, so there was no uranium or plutonium present,” said one official, wishing to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the subject.
“We don’t have any independent intelligence that it was a nuclear facility — only the assertions by the Israelis and some ambiguous satellite photography from them that shows a building, which the Syrians admitted was a military facility.”
Their statements come as officials claim Syria has begun to ‘disassemble’ the site. An article today quotes former Administration hawk and onetime Bush United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, who links Syria’s alleged action with Iran.
Israel has not spoken publicly about the air raid, other than to confirm that it happened. The confirmation came nearly a month after the Sept. 6 bombing, and provided only that “Israeli officials said the strike took place deep inside Syria.”
“‘Radiation signatures’ are just the particular type of radiation that some activity would give off,” Dr. Ivan Oelrich, a nuclear weapons expert at the Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told RAW STORY. “For example, a nuclear bomb would produce a lot of radioactivity and a nuclear reactor explosion would produce a lot of radioactivity but if you measure it carefully so you can tell, not just that it is radioactive, but exactly what particular isotopes are contributing, then it is easy to tell the difference.
“If a reactor explodes or is blown up then I can, with careful measurements of the particular types of radiation, tell what the fuel was for the reactor and how long the reactor had been running when it was hit,” Oelrich added. “It gets complicated because you have to take into account how different species are transported in the air, how fast they decay, etc. but it can be done.”
An earlier report by Raw Story cited Vincent Cannistraro, Director of Intelligence Programs for the National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan and Chief of Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center under President George H. W. Bush, as saying that what the Israelis hit was “absolutely not a nuclear weapons facility.”
The Central Intelligence Agency, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
Administration said to leak stories to press
One US intelligence source familiar with the events expressed concern about recent news reports describing Syria as having a functioning nuclear weapons program and cautioned against attributing those reports to the US intelligence community.
“The allegations that North Korea was helping to build a nuclear reactor have not been substantiated by US intelligence,” said this intelligence official, adding, “ but that hasn’t stopped Dick Cheney and his minions at the NSC, Elliot Abrams and Steve Hadley, from leaking the information [to the press], which appears to be misleading in the extreme.”
Requests for comment to the National Security Council went unanswered.
Elliot Abrams, who currently serves as the Deputy National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy, was convicted during the Iran-Contra scandal for withholding information from Congress. He was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush along with other Iran-Contra players, some of whom have reappeared in the current Bush administration.
Iran Contra was a criminal scandal in which the Reagan-Bush White House sold weapons to Iran – an avowed enemy of the United States – then funneled the money to extremist anti-Communist group of guerrilla fighters called the Contras, who were fighting the democratically elected government of Nicaragua.
A failed coup in 2002 against Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, is also attributed to the approval of Abrams, according to an investigation by the UK Guardian.
Prior to the Iraq war, now-National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley was an integral part of misleading intelligence dissemination and approved clandestine meetings between Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and members of a secretive cabal inside the Department of Defense’s controversial Office of Special Plans.
During a 2006 interview with neoconservative scholar Michael Ledeen, Raw Story was able to obtain the first on the record confirmation of the trips having been approved by the National Security Council, including the then National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice:
“Obviously Hadley did not unilaterally do anything. The Pentagon paid for the expenses of the two DOD officials, and the American ambassador in Rome was fully briefed both before and after the meetings,” Ledeen said.
What concerns intelligence officials is what appears to be manipulation of the press and strategic leaks to the public of false information, undercutting professional intelligence analysis, similar to what occurred before the Iraq war in an apparent effort to bolster support for engaging Iran.
Larisa Alexandrovna is managing editor of investigative news for Raw Story and regularly reports on intelligence and national security stories. Contact her at larisa@rawstory.com.
see
U.S. Assisted Israel In Syrian Attack
Why did Israel attack Syria? by Jonathan Cook
The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author’s copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com
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© Copyright , Raw Story , 2007
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Imperial Playground: Marching East of Iraq, by Andrew Gavin Marshall
by Andrew Gavin Marshall
featured writer
Dandelion Salad
Global Research, October 21, 2007
This article is Part III of The Imperial Playground: History of Iran in Recent History
The preparations and build-up for a war with Iran are speeding up, and the main force pushing for an attack upon Iran is Israel, as they claim that Iran wants to use a nuclear weapon against them.
Ryan Harvey plays at IMF world Bank Protest (music video)
Bill Moyers Journal: Jeremy Scahill on Blackwater (video; Iraq)
Bill Moyers Journal
PBS
October 19, 2007
On September 16, 2007, Blackwater contractors, during a complex confrontation in downtown Baghdad, shot and killed Iraqis in the crowded Nisour Square.
The FBI and State Department are currently investigating the incident, yet it further sheds light upon a growing private sector security force in Iraq and elsewhere, that many fear has not been held accountable to the same degree as have US military officials.
Jeremy Scahill has been covering Blackwater for THE NATION and other publications for more than three years. He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, and is the author of BLACKWATER: THE RISE OF THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL MERCENARY ARMY, published by Nation Books. He is also an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for DEMOCRACY NOW!.
According to THE NEW YORK TIMES, there are between 160,000 and 180,000 private contractors in Iraq, including about 30,000 armed security forces. Blackwater employees represent about 1000 of these armed contractors. There were only about 9,200 total private contractors during the Persian Gulf War.
Few Americans had even heard of Blackwater before March 31, 2004, when four of its contractors were ambushed and brutally killed in Falluja, and days later, a US siege of the region began. It was “what would be one of the most brutal and sustained US operations of the occupation,” explains Scahill, who believes the US Military response to the killings sets a dangerous precedent.
Before the September 16, 2007 confrontation, Blackwater employees had been implicated in similar incidents involving questionable force, including in December 2006, when a drunk Blackwater contractor allegedly shot and killed a bodyguard for Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi. The contractor was subsequently fired by Blackwater, yet was sent back in the region with another private firm. “[State Department] officials said that Blackwater’s incident rate was at least twice that recorded by employees of DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, the two other United States-based security firms that have been contracted by the State Department to provide security for diplomats and other senior civilians in Iraq,” writes THE NEW YORK TIMES.
Still, as Blackwater’s founder Eric Prince reminded Congress a few weeks ago, “Blackwater personnel are subject to regular attacks by terrorists and other nefarious forces within Iraq.” As the WALL STREET JOURNAL reports, “The company has said it has done 16,000 missions for the State Department since June 2005, using its weapons just 1% of the time.” And recently two Blackwater helicopters helped evacuate the Polish Ambassador to Iraq after his convoy was attacked.
But questions about accountability still abound: when mistakes are made, to which rule of law should contractors answer, military or US criminal law? Officials in the State and Defense Departments are currently debating this very question.
Blackwater’s State Department contract expires next May, and according to the AP, officials in the Department intend to “ease out” Blackwater since many share “a mutual feeling that the Sept. 16 shooting deaths mean the company cannot continue in its current role.” Yet according to the WALL STREET JOURNAL, even if Blackwater was forced to leave Iraq, they would simply be replaced by another private security firm, since the State Department does not have the personnel available to step in:
“‘There’s just no way our system could handle trying to get hundreds of new people trained and sent to Iraq,’ said a State Department official. ‘That would be a multiyear process.'”
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Michael Chertoff Visits Topoff 4 Exercise by Alex Ansary (video)
Alex Ansary
41 min 23 sec – 19-Oct-07
alexansary.com
Topoff 4 took place at multiple locations in the Portland Metro area, as well as Phoenix, AR and Guam. In this clip, Mr. Chertoff visits David Douglas High School where 1100 teenagers volunteered to take part in this anti-terrorism exercise. The basketball court has been turned into a Rapid Screening Point (RSP) which is a temporary facility for high production screening of individuals with non-acute symptoms who are potentially ill or exposed to a harmful substance.
Later, a press conference with Michael Chertoff, Mayor Tom Potter and the Governor takes place. Alex Ansary was fortunate enough to get his question in first (at 23:23) which pertained to the strange nature of nearly a dozen major war games happening around the world and asked Chertoff when the American people would be told about the situation with China and Russia. (note: Mic was only on Chertoff, sorry). This question is quickly dismissed, but is later followed by an excellent question from Ginny Ross from the OTA (oregontruthalliance.org) about the driils that took place on 911. Steve Keller, another concerned reporter, asked the panel about the possible use of private military contractors in the exercise or in future law enforcement locally. In general, Chertoff pushed the message of a never ending terror threat in nearly all of his responses to the press.
And Behind Door Number Three, World War? by Glitzqueen (aka The Other Katherine Harris)
glitzqueen
Featured writer
Dandelion Salad
Glitzqueen’s blog
Oct. 21, 2007
Ah, what a toxic array of possibilities is spread now before Americans…
Will it be mere extension of economic ruin for all but tycoons, under Hillary or Barak or Mitt or Rudy?
Or will Shrub and Darth refuse to budge and deepen our impoverishment under openly fascistic martial law?
Or might the brewing Turkish/Kurdish skirmish ignite our next world war?
I wrote the preceding notes a week ago, expecting to raise eyebrows with further musings on how easily a Turkish advance into Kurdistan could escalate into an ultimate horror, given various energy pipeline schemes involving Turkey as a hub. But while I was working out the intricacies of allegiances, Shrub stole my thunder. His ruminations on World War III are less complicated. He’s set to invite global conflict on the sole pretext of denying Iran further nuclear know-how. Not a bomb, nor facilities equal to producing one, but simply a growing body of knowledge. New message: No more tinkering or you’re toast.
After Shrub’s calculated, pretend-casual words, the notion of World War III isn’t jaw-dropping, but there’s still some new-news in the essay I’d intended. Most outside the transnational oil and gas club would be surprised by the shape and scale of “Pipelineistan” — a term coined by Pepe Escobar in his book Globalistan: How the Globalized World Is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, Ann Arbor, MI, Dec. 2006). His volume, a far more thorough presentation of rivalries within the energy arena than I’d ever seen before, is hard slogging. While reading it, I’ve also been studying more recent antics of key players. Putin keeps popping up in the catbird seat, playing Europe and Asia against one another on behalf of Gazprom (now barely controlled by the state at 51 percent and on track to become the world’s largest corporate entity before long), and American companies keep losing out on deals at every turn.
I’ll elaborate on this lore soon, in a review of the book. For the moment, though, let’s review the prospect of World War III. Should it break out right away, we’ll probably lose. Face it, we’ve never been weaker — our treasury depleted; our debt stratospheric; our export trade based on arming other countries; our military so enfeebled it needs mercenaries; our populace dumbed-down and deluded; and respect for our nation around the globe as eroded as our civil liberties. Some Superpower we are, after three decades of policies that picked our pockets to enrich corporations with no fealty to anything but profits and tax-dodging.
So what the freak can Shrub and His Thugs be thinking? Yeah, they could bomb Iran in a heartbeat, as they’re itching to do, and embroider the tale with any lies they like. And they could instantly impose a draft, along with martial law. Whipping up a media frenzy would be harder this time, but doable, especially since they have all those concentration camps ready for dissenters. Enthusiasts could be rewarded with decent pay and benefits in defense industry jobs, as a full-bore War Economy takes off — those employees’ gains balanced against use of prisoners as slave labor, so profits wouldn’t suffer; they’d soar. The government and its corporate owners might even throw in extra enticements for willing workers, maybe letting them keep their homes and forgiving some of their debt. Meanwhile, many of the same companies, ostensibly American, could cash in on the “enemy” side, too, as quite a few U.S. firms did by operating in Hitler’s Germany.
But what if governments elsewhere kicked foreigners out and nationalized their holdings? That isn’t unthinkable. And what if there’s too much loathing here for all critics to be controlled by Shrub’s hired killers? Millions might well refuse to work for his war machine and band together in the streets, not allowing themselves to be grabbed at home off the world’s radar.
It seems too vast a chance for them to take, doesn’t it? And yet reality has never stood in their way before. Neo-cons boast that they “make their own reality,” remember.
So what do they stand to gain from waging a war they can’t win? Is helping their buddies make billions enough to justify the waste and the horror?
Well, in Iraq it has been. There’s no downside for those who created and sustain that debacle. Win or lose, the war-makers, their abettors and the investors get paid. All costs are borne by suffering Iraqis, our troops and American taxpayers.
Picture World War III as the same sort of corporate invention, but bigger: a clash of Titans, not governments but corporations wanting more and at last willing, in red ink terms, to risk some bleeding. That their proxies who do the actual fighting risk lives, limbs, health, freedom, even countries they love will be sheer sound and fury, signifying nothing to those in the boardrooms, who care only for the balance sheets and their personal hoards. No doubt Shrub craves the chance to drop bombs across Pipelineistan, where our corporations have built much less infrastructure than others. In a day or two, he could set the competitors back by a decade — and, with what he’d see as luck, the war might even spread to South America, so he could pound the latest pipeline there.
But what would this action do for us? Our foes have nukes, but why should they bother? Once we stop getting any oil, life as we know it would cease. There’d be no imports at all and government policies have made us made dependent upon them. Is the point that we’re deliberately to be made desperate, so there’ll be no more sass about rights and minimum wages?
Seems that way, doesn’t it? So any World War III that we’re pushed into fighting capriciously at this time would be a war we’d fight against ourselves.
see
Bush invokes threat of “World War III” by Patrick Martin
WWIII Coming Soon to Your Planet! by Jesus of Zion
The Disconnect by Michael (Bush & WWIII)
Suicide Is Not Painless by Frank Rich
by Frank Rich
Submitted by davidswanson on Sun, 2007-10-21
After Downing Street
New York Times
It was one of those stories lost in the newspaper’s inside pages. Last week a man you’ve never heard of — Charles D. Riechers, 47, the second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the United States Air Force — killed himself by running his car’s engine in his suburban Virginia garage.
The U.S. government routinely conducts experiments on weather modification by Chris Handy (07.30.07)
by Chris Handy
Global Research, October 21, 2007
Daily Texan, University of Texas via U Wire – 2007-07-30
The U.S. government routinely conducts experiments on weather modification, and has been doing so for at least half a century. Previously classified under such names as “Project Cirrus” (1947) and “Project Popeye” (1966), weather modification is no longer a secret practice. In fact, a bill (S517) was sponsored in 2005 by Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a Republican, “to establish the Weather Modification Operations and Research Board, and for other purposes.” This bill did not become law. Yet, there is reason to believe that various government institutions are carrying out numerous legal and illegal weather experiments without informing the public.
This isn’t just a suspicion of the United States. The Chinese government announced in April the creation of the first-ever artificial snowfall over the city of Nagqu in Tibet. The event was only one in a series of Chinese weather modification experiments that have been going on for years. China, in fact, now conducts more cloud seeding projects than any other nation.
Cloud seeding through the use of silver iodide was discovered as a viable way to make rain clouds in 1946. In 1947, the U.S. military attempted to use this method to seed a hurricane, which later hit the Georgia coast near Savannah. In the mid-1960s, similar techniques were used in hopes of muddying the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam. The idea was to slow enemy troop movements through the introduction of inclement weather, and conversely to prevent foul weather over allies.
But cloud seeding with silver iodide is an archaic technique compared with newer advances in nanotechnology and other methods for weather monitoring and control. Microelectric Mechanical Sensors (MEMS) and the newer Global Environmental MEMS Sensors (GEMS), are extremely tiny machines used to monitor weather patterns.
No larger than dust particles, the sensors are designed to be sent up inside hurricanes and other weather systems in large numbers, reporting back data as they literally become a part of those systems. This data can later be used to improve weather forecasting and potentially control the weather through a better understanding of the complex mathematics involved in such systems. One goal is to “steer” these systems, sending them to specific targets and increasing or decreasing their size.
Another extremely controversial participant in the weather modification game is the infamous HAARP antenna grid in Gakona, Alaska. HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, is an enormous array of antennas inspired by the free energy experiments of 19th-century electrical playboy Nikola Tesla. Commencing sometime around 1990, HAARP was only recently declassified, and much of the current research there is said to take place in secret.
HAARP fires massive amounts of energy into the ionosphere, heating and distorting a section up to 30 miles in diameter. There are various strange and frightening claims made about the project. It may be capable of shifting the position of the jetstream, which could impact global weather in ways that we still do not understand well. Other claims about HAARP, such as that it is part of a massive government mind-control operation or that it forms the main component of a giant death ray, are difficult to verify. But these theories are not as implausible as one might think.
Even in the face of mountains of evidence, many people still believe that weather modification of any kind is only a fantasy. People must be aware that these technologies have been around for a long time, are indeed being used and have great potential for dangerous and unethical uses. Our planet’s weather is part of a single interconnected system and any change to it, whether natural or not, affects every other element of that system. The organizations most interested in modifying this system appear to be applying their theories in incredibly irresponsible ways.
© Copyright Chris Handy, Daily Texan, University of Texas via U Wire, 2007 The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7139
It’s the Oil By Jim Holt
By Jim Holt
ICH
10/20/07 “London Review Of Books”
Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.
Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.
How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.
The Defense Department was initially coy about these bases. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said: ‘I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.’ But this summer the Bush administration began to talk openly about stationing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades, to come. Several visitors to the White House have told the New York Times that the president himself has become fond of referring to the ‘Korea model’. When the House of Representatives voted to bar funding for ‘permanent bases’ in Iraq, the new term of choice became ‘enduring bases’, as if three or four decades wasn’t effectively an eternity.
But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently brands itself as ‘al-Qaida’ is exterminated. The civil war may gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will be the result. But this partition can never become de jure. (An independent Kurdistan in the north might upset Turkey, an independent Shia region in the east might become a satellite of Iran, and an independent Sunni region in the west might harbour al-Qaida.) Presiding over this Balkanised Iraq will be a weak federal government in Baghdad, propped up and overseen by the Pentagon-scale US embassy that has just been constructed – a green zone within the Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.
This is the ‘mess’ that Bush-Cheney is going to hand on to the next administration. What if that administration is a Democratic one? Will it dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely? That seems unlikely, considering the many beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term.
Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.
Then there is the case of Iran, which is more complicated. In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraq’s ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iran’s nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. But the Iranian regime is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by financing internal security services and buying off elites with oil money, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of oil were suddenly to drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price just north of $80), the repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady income. And that is an outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the Iraqi oil spigot for as long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuela’s oil-cocky Hugo Chávez into the bargain).
And think of the United States vis-à-vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollars’ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. China’s own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, China’s increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on China’s growth is its access to energy – which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washington’s sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised.
Many people are still perplexed by exactly what moved Bush-Cheney to invade and occupy Iraq. In the 27 September issue of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers, one of the most astute watchers of the intelligence world, admitted to a degree of bafflement. ‘What’s particularly odd,’ he wrote, ‘is that there seems to be no sophisticated, professional, insiders’ version of the thinking that drove events.’ Alan Greenspan, in his just published memoir, is clearer on the matter. ‘I am saddened,’ he writes, ‘that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’
Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of its oil resources actually hammered out by Cheney’s 2001 energy task force? One can’t know for sure, since the deliberations of that task force, made up largely of oil and energy company executives, have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of ‘executive privilege’. One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.
Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.
Jim Holt writes for the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker.
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Peace Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by David Swanson + Impeach Cheney 1st (MP3)
By David Swanson
After Downing Street
Oct. 20, 2007
If you haven’t already, you really should read Chris Hedges’ book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” The portrait of war and wartime propaganda and emotion is brilliant and deadly accurate. But the headline is misleading. War does not give us lasting solid self-assured meaning. War gives us a temporary high that is rooted in desperate self-deception. Hedges’ book carries on the cover a photo of people with candles and U.S. flags, holding hands, eyes closed, mouths open. These people are smoking crack, they’re taking a two-week cruise of the Caribbean, they’re on stage at American Idol, they’re kneeling in church, they’re tapping shoes in airport men’s rooms. These people are escaping from their lives, not building lives that mean something to them. Continue reading
Bombings greet Bhutto By Eric Margolis
By Eric Margolis
Toronto Sun
Sun, October 21, 2007
Deadly attack mars historic return from exile
On Thursday morning, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto arrived in Karachi, as she told me she would two weeks ago in London.
Huge crowds in the Bhutto family’s traditional power base received her with rapture and adulation.
Her enemies greeted her with two horrific bombs that killed more than 130 and wounded hundreds more, underlining the growing violence now consuming Pakistan.
While Washington and even the First Lady Laura Bush have been blasting Burma’s military junta for brutal repression, Pakistan’s U.S.-backed military junta, which receives $1 billion monthly in covert U.S. payments, is waging war against its own restive people, thousands of whom have been killed by the armed forces.
Shooting and beating rebellious Buddhist monks is evil; shooting and beating rebellious Muslim religious leaders is “anti-terrorism.”
I wished Benazir bon voyage just before she left Dubai for her historic return home, and cautioned her that my extensive reader mail from Pakistan was running very much against her because of the deal she had made with military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf to allow her return.
The widespread view among Pakistanis is that Benazir’s return and impending political power-sharing with Musharraf was engineered by Washington to add a veneer of legitimacy of democracy to his discredited military regime.
Unless Bhutto can quickly and decisively distance herself from Musharraf and his Bush administration sponsors, and show she is really in charge as prime minister, she and her cause may be gravely tarnished.
As reported in my recent columns, the U.S. has filled all senior positions in Pakistan’s powerful military and intelligence service, ISI, with pro-American generals approved by the Pentagon and CIA. Even if Musharraf is ousted or blown up, the U.S. believes it can retain firm control over Pakistan and use its armed forces to wage war there and in Afghanistan against nationalist and Islamist forces battling western influence.
The military rules Pakistan. Musharraf and his American patrons run Pakistan’s military.
So what is left for future prime minister Bhutto? If Pakistanis conclude she is being cynically used, her political career could founder. If she can somehow push Musharraf and his generals back to their barracks, she will emerge triumphant.
Confusion
Given the dizzying current political confusion between Musharraf, Bhutto, the Supreme Court, and exiled former PM Nawaz Sharif, it’s impossible to predict what will happen next.
But one thing is certain: recent polls show a majority of Pakistanis believe America under President George W. Bush has launched a war against Islam, and that Musharraf is America’s agent.
These disturbing beliefs could easily lead to increasing violence, even full-scale civil war.
Even if Musharraf and Bhutto eventually agree on some form of power-sharing, they will find themselves riding a tiger.
America’s 2001 invasion and subsequent occupation of Afghanistan, and Washington’s ongoing efforts to control Pakistan’s government, have ignited a spreading regional insurrection against western influence.
If the simmering civil war in nuclear-armed Pakistan blows into a wider conflict, the result will be an exceptionally dangerous world crisis in which nuclear-armed India could quickly become involved.
Iran factor
The growing threat of a U.S. attack on Iran will only deepen and spread the danger. An explosion in Pakistan would also isolate U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s most important national institution, the armed forces, has failed its duty to the nation.
Instead of allowing itself to be rented like the sepoys in the mercenary armies of Britain’s 19th century Imperial Indian Raj, Pakistan’s military should be assuring its commanders serve the interest of the nation, rather than foreign powers.
It’s true $1 billion a month rents a lot of co-operation. But Pakistan’s once proud soldiers have sold their honour cheap.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.
see
Benazir Bhutto’s speech after assassination attempt (videos)
Bhutto bombing kicks off war on US plan by Syed Saleem Shahzad
Police and Protesters Clash at World Bank, IMF (video)
in Washington DC, October 21, 2007
March against the World Bank in Washington DC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l2eI6yQn3Q
NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL, IMF PROTEST WASHINGTON DC
Dandelion Salad 