Just this week, the Bush administration is considering making a little futuristic news. The President might soon approve "a major step forward in the building of the country's first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades," the Reliable Replacement Warhead. If only names were reality...
Critics are already claiming that the new "hybrid" design of the weapon, now planned to come on-line in 2012, will raise safety and other questions (and may someday lead to the resumption of underground nuclear testing). In other words, peering into our nuclear future, it's possible to imagine that -- to the tune of an estimated $100 billion -- the crucial word is likely to be "proliferation."
In fact, the future, as the military sees it, is simply filled to the brim with multibillion dollar American weapons systems of a sort that were once relegated to sci-fi novels for spacey boys. Now, they are the property of spacey generals, strategists, military planners, and corporate CEOs. Just a week ago, the Bush administration presented a supplemental military budget of nearly $100 billion to Congress to cover our ongoing disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as to replace equipment lost or worn out in both. But evidently Air Force officials, in a "feeding frenzy," just couldn't resist slipping in a futuristic ringer -- the funding, according to Jonathan Karp of the Wall Street Journal, for two of Lockheed Martin's F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, a high-tech plane still in development.
By the way, as Richard Cummings points out in a stunning recent piece on Lockheed in Playboy, Dick Cheney's son-in-law, Philip J. Perry, is a registered Lockheed lobbyist and his wife Lynne was on Lockheed's board until he became Vice President. On settling into Washington, George Bush appointed Lockheed's President and CEO Robert J. Stevens to his Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry. "Albert Smith, Lockheed's executive vice president for integrated systems and solutions, was appointed to the Defense Science Board. Bush had appointed former Lockheed chief operating officer Peter B. Teets as undersecretary of the Air Force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office," and that was just the beginning as the military-industrial revolving door spun wildly and the corporation made money hand over fist.
This month Tomdispatch is focusing special attention on the Pentagon, militarization, and the imperial path. Sunday, Nick Turse laid out Pentagon plans to fight crucial future battles in Baghdad 2025 and the mega-slums of other global cities. Today, Frida Berrigan of the Arms Trade Resource Center and a regular writer for this website, considers a range of weapons systems slated to come our way somewhere between tomorrow and 2040. If that's not ownership of the future, what is? Next week, stay tuned for a Michael Klare series on the militarization of energy policy. Tom
Raptors, Robots, and Rods from God
The Nightmare Weaponry of Our Future
By Frida Berrigan
We are not winning the war on terrorism (and would not be even if we knew what victory looked like) or the war in Iraq. Our track record in Afghanistan, as well as in the allied "war" on drugs, is hardly better. Yet the Pentagon is hard at work, spending your money, planning and preparing for future conflicts of every imaginable sort. From wars in space to sci-fi battlescapes without soldiers, scenarios are being scripted and weaponry prepared, largely out of public view, which ensures not future victories, but limitless spending that Americans can ill-afford now or twenty years from now.
Even though today the Armed Forces can't recruit enough soldiers or adequately equip those already in uniform, the Pentagon is committing itself to massive corporate contracts for new high-tech weapons systems slated to come on-line years, even decades, from now, guaranteed only to enrich their makers.
Future Combat Systems
The typical soldier in Iraq carries about half his or her body weight in gear and suffers the resulting back pain. Body armor, weapon(s), ammunition, water, first aid kit -- it adds up in the 120 degree heat of Basra or Baghdad.
Ask soldiers in Iraq what they need most and answers may include: well-armored Humvees (many soldiers are jerry-rigging their own homemade Humvee armor); more body armor (an unofficial 2004 Army study found that one in four casualties in Iraq was the result of inadequate protective gear), or even silly string (Marcelle Shriver found out that her son was squirting the goo into a room as he and his squad searched buildings to detect trip wires around bombs).
The same Army that can't provide such basics of modern war is now promising the Future Combat Systems network (FCS), a "family of systems" that will enable soldiers to "perceive, comprehend, shape, and dominate the future battlefield at unprecedented levels." The FCS network will consist of a "family" of 18 manned and unmanned ground vehicles, air vehicles, sensors, and munitions, including:
* eight new, super-armored, super-strong ground vehicles to replace current tanks, infantry carriers, and self-propelled howitzers;
* four different planes and drones that soldiers can fly by remote control;
* several "unmanned" ground vehicles.
Put together these are supposed to plunge soldiers into a video-game-like version of warfighting. The FCS will theoretically allow them to act as though they are in the midst of enemy territory -- taking out "high value" targets, blowing up "insurgent safe houses," monitoring the movements of "un-friendlies"-- all the while remaining at a safe distance from the bloody action.
To grasp the futuristic ambitions (and staggering future costs) of FCS, consider this: The Government Accounting Office (GAO) notes that "an estimated 34 million lines of software code will need to be generated" for the project, "double that of the Joint Strike Fighter, which had been the largest defense undertaking in terms of software to be developed."
In charge of this ambitious sci-fi style fantasy version of war are Boeing and SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation). They are the "Lead Systems Integrators" of this extraordinarily complex undertaking, but they are working with as many as 535 more companies across 40 states. They promise future forces the ability to break "free of the tyranny of terrain" and "an agile, networked force capable of maneuver in the third dimension" in the words last March of retired Major General Robert H. Scales in a Boeing PowerPoint presentation entitled "FCS: Its Origin and Op Concept."
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld once famously asserted, ''You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have." Pentagon planners seem to have taken the opposite tack. They prefer the military they, or their blue-sky dreamers, wish to have for the kinds of wars they dream about fighting. And it won't be cheap. A March 2005 GAO report found that the total program cost of Future Combat Systems alone "is expected to be at least $107.9 billion." In 2005, the Pentagon had already allocated $2.8 billion in research and development funds to FCS and, in fiscal year 2006, that was expected to increase to $3.4 billion. (Keep in mind, that all such complex, high-tech, weapons-oriented systems almost invariably go far over initial cost estimates by the time they come on line.)
"The Maserati of the Skies"
In 2006, the F-22 Raptor began rolling off the assembly line. The Air Force plans to buy 183 of these high-tech, radar-evading stealth planes, each at a price tag of $130 million, being manufactured in a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. But it turns out that the $130 million per plane cost is just one-third of the total price, once development costs are factored in. The whole program is slated to cost the Pentagon 65 billion big ones. In July 2006, the Government Accountability Office asserted. "The F-22 acquisition history is a case study in increased cost and schedule inefficiencies."
Even if it were a bargain, however, it is a classic case of future-planning run amok. The plane was originally conceived to counter Soviet fighter planes, which haven't menaced the U.S. for more than 15 years. The plane itself is technologically awe-inspiring, reportedly having a twice-the-speed-of-sound cruising speed of Mach 2. (The Pentagon jealously guards its maximum speed as top secret.)
In 2007, the only reason the military might need such a plane is to outfight its predecessor, the F-16, which Lockheed Martin has sold to numerous countries that benefited from the corporation's vociferous lobbying for new markets and our government's lax enforcement of arms-export controls.
In this classic case of boomeranging weaponry, Lockheed Martin has triumphed three times: First, General Dynamics sold F-16 fighters to the Air Force beginning in 1976; second, Lockheed (which bought General Dynamics) sold the planes to Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and other nations from the 1980s to the present moment; and third, Lockheed Martin (having merged with Martin Marietta in 1995 and adjusted its name accordingly) now gets to produce an even higher tech plane for a U.S. Air Force that fears it might be outclassed by foreign military hardware that once was our own. The Bethesda-based company ended 2001 with a stock price of $46.67 a share -- and began 2007 at a celebratory $92.07.
The Next Generation Fighter
Of course, the lesson drawn from this is to produce yet more futuristic planes. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, built by a team led (yet again!) by Lockheed Martin, made its initial flight on December 15, 2006. The total program could surpass $275 billion, making it the most expensive weapons program in U.S. history. Prime contractor Lockheed Martin is sharing the work and profits with partners Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems (not to speak of scads of subcontractors).
The Air Force already hails the F-35s "transformational sensor capability" and "low-observable characteristics" that will
"enable persistent combat air support over the future battlefield. Furthermore, [the] F-35 will help enable the negation of advanced enemy air defenses because it will possess the ability to perform unrestricted operations within heavily defended airspace."
Somewhere in there it is implied that this plane launches missiles that kill people, but it is very deeply embedded. Nowhere does it say that its opponent in the skies could be the F-22 Raptor, once it is sold to all those nations who find their F-16s woefully out of date.
What's Next Next Next Next?
Even with such spiraling, mind-boggling investments in advanced weapons systems, the aerospace industry is never satisfied. The quest for new justifications for ever "better" versions of already advanced weapons systems is the holy grail of the business. These justifications pile up in industry magazines like Aerospace America, the organ of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
In a typical article in that magazine, the industry makes much of a comment then-Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley made to Congress in March 2004. In charge of the U.S. air campaign over Iraq, he observed that most of the sorties originated from neighboring countries that were allies in Operation Enduring Freedom. But what if, he wondered, you wanted to go to war and there were no local allies willing to offer basing facilities. On the classic Boy Scout theory, be prepared, he promptly warned in written testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, "In the future, we will require deep-strike capabilities to penetrate and engage high-value targets during the first minutes of hostilities anywhere in the battlespace."
And he was only making a public point of already popular Air Force doctrine. The 176-page Air Force Transformation Flight Plan was issued in all its glittering verbosity in November 2003, bristling with a dismal, hyper-militarized view of the future. In it, Air Force planners envisioned a world with the United States even more embattled and unpopular than it was at that moment, and where we lacked all powers of persuasion to entice other nations to join future "coalitions of the willing."
The solution: new bombers that could fulfill those "deep-strike requirements" which, sadly, cannot be carried out by tomorrow's F-22 and F-35 fighter planes. (They "may not have enough range to attack critical ground targets far inside enemy territory, repeatedly, and under all circumstances.")
Not surprisingly, Lockheed Martin tried to knock two birds out of the sky with one stone, responding to criticism that the F-22 was irrelevant and too expensive, while rushing to meet the Air Force's perceived need for a new long-range bomber by suggesting yet another plane: the F/B (for fighter-bomber)-22. As they described it, in a vision of a kind of high artistry of death, this wonder of modern air war would even be capable of changing color to match the sky.
A January 2005 article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution gave Lockheed Martin visionaries a chance to share their chameleon of a "high-speed, high-altitude bomber" which could also change shape, becoming "slimmer and more aerodynamic as its fuel tanks drain on long-distance flights. It would be invisible to radar, carry precision bombs and missiles, and fly fast enough to outrun most fighters." Sounds cool, right? This might be one instance where the weapons designers and imagineers took a few steps too far into fantasy land. There has not been any progress on the idea since 2005, but don't be surprised if the chameleon fighter-bomber changes color and shape and soars again in the race for future weapons funding.
Even without the magical fighter-bomber, over the next eight years or so the Air Force imagines fielding systems like the Common Aero Vehicle-- "a rapidly responsive, highly maneuverable, hypersonic glide vehicle that would be rocket-launched into space" according to the Air Force documents. The CAV would be equipped with sensors and bristle with weapons it could launch from space against fixed and moving targets on land, and that could be delivered anywhere on earth within two hours.
As John Pike, a weapons expert and director of GlobalSecurity.org, told the Washington Post in March 2005, CAV programs will allow the U.S. "to crush someone anywhere in world on 30 minutes' notice with no need for a nearby air base."
Looking beyond 2015, the Air Force sees systems like the B-X Bomber; space-based Hypervelocity Rod Bundles (nicknamed "rods from God"), a mystical sounding system that promises "to strike ground targets anywhere in the world"; the Guardian Urban Combat Weapon, an "air-launched lurk and loiter reconnaissance, rotary winged, unmanned, combat air vehicle designed for urban warfare"; and the High Powered Microwave Airborne Electronic Attack, an "anti-electronics high powered microwave weapon against ‘soft' electronic-containing targets" that would be operated "from an airborne platform at military significant ranges."
The Air Force and the Army are not alone in imagining fabulously wild wars of the future and the multi-billion dollar weapons systems they can build to fight them. The Navy has its own gold-plated crystal ball. Their new KDD(X) program could end up totaling $100 billion for some 70 warships including destroyers, cruisers, and a seagoing high-tech killer called LCS (Littoral Combat Ship).
Generously, the Pentagon decided to give the project to two different ship building companies -- Northrop-Grumman Ship Systems (Ingalls, Mississippi) and General Dynamics (Bath Iron Works, Maine). According to the Pentagon's "Program Acquisition Cost by Weapons System," the DD(X) will include "full-spectrum signature reduction, active and passive self-defense systems and cutting-edge survivability features." At $3.3 billion for two ships in 2007, it better.
Building one ship in each location with each contractor raised the cost by $300 million per ship, according to GlobalSecurity.Org, but to members of Congress representing each district that is a small price to pay for maintaining "flexibility." In this business, one becomes accustomed to flexibility's magical spending properties. In its 2006 report, the White House's Office of Budget and Management commented that the Littoral Combat Ship and other systems mentioned above have a "high potential to meet current and future threats." Congress, where so much of the game is bringing the bacon (i.e. shipbuilding contracts) back to the Baths of the nation, wholeheartedly concurred. That was just about the sum total of the debate about these multi-billion-dollar ship systems, multi-million-dollar boons for a few companies, and the dark specter of the future threats these ships will theoretically protect us against.
Missile Defense: The Great Misnomer in the Sky
While many of the systems described so far are, at least, futures that, in some heated imagination, exist, the misnamed Ballistic Missile Defense System is moving full steam ahead despite being irrelevant, unworkable, and obscenely expensive in our less-than-futuristic present moment. The BMD program got another boost recently when incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave it his full support, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee: "I know we've spent a lot of money on developing missile defense, but I have believed since the Reagan administration that if we can develop that kind of capability, it would be a mistake for us not to."
The mistake is wasting one more dime on decades-worth of failure and bombast that have cost an estimated $200 billion so far without producing a single workable system to shoot down an enemy missile or even the sitting-duck targets that have taken the place of such missiles in half-baked tests of the woeful project.
Missile defense funding is set to soak up another $9.4 billion in fiscal 2007 -- part of the Pentagon's ongoing corporate welfare system -- and the Defense Department's Future Years Defense Program report proposes that funding averaging $10 billion annually be continued for research and development of the system through… (this is not a misprint) 2024. (The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that annual missile-defense costs will, in fact, increase to $15 billion by 2016.)
Nuclear Projections
And it is not just in the Pentagon where such blue-sky spending for an overarmed world is underway. Hidden in the innocuous sounding Department of Energy is the National Nuclear Security Administration, which has big plans laid through 2030. Their Complex 2030 vision, released in April 2006, sees a "responsive nuclear infrastructure" that can continuously dismantle and rebuild nuclear weapons, reducing their numbers and increasing their potency, while ensuring that, at any moment an American leader might want to destroy the planet many times over, nuclear production rates can be rapidly increased. The Department of Energy estimates that Complex 2030 will require a mere capital investment of $150 billion, but the Government Accountability Office suggests that, as with so many initial estimates for future weapons systems, that number was far too low. Even if the program cost only a dollar, it is but another typically dangerous and provocative step by the military-industrial complex that threatens, in this case, to encourage yet more global nuclear proliferation. Complex 2030 would, in fact, plunge us back into a Cold War atmosphere, but with far more nuclear-armed adversaries. It even promises a return to the underground testing of nuclear weapons and could require upping the production of new plutonium pits (the fissile heart of nuclear weapons).
What Do We Dream?
As engineers and physicists at Lockheed Martin and the Air Force dream up new weapons -- shaping bombers out of polymer and pixels -- politicians and Pentagoneers imagine the threats those super-bombers of the future will blast to bits.
Only the money -- billions and billions of dollars -- is real…
But as those billions are sucked away, what happens to our dreams of clear skies, cures for pandemics, solutions to global warming and energy depletion? To make more human dreams our future reality, we have to stop feeding the military's nightmare monsters.
Frida Berrigan (berrigaf@newschool.edu) is a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center. Her primary research areas with the project include nuclear-weapons policy, war profiteering and corporate crimes, weapons sales to areas of conflict, and military-training programs. She is the author of a number of Institute reports, including Weapons at War 2005: Promoting Freedom or Fueling Conflict.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
God, Help Us!
Well, duh..this all seems so damned obvious to most of us and has for many of us, for a very long time.
...Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed
upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere....
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst....
Are full of passionate intensity...And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Y. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"
In the Vietnam-War era, which was the crucible of activism for my generation, we had a devil of a time trying to get the Democratic Party to recognize the necessity for withdrawing our troops from that ill-advised, unwinnable war. With regard to Bush's misadventure in Iraq, it turns out not all that much has changed. The midterm election and many polls since have clearly demonstrated that Americans recognize that Bush's Iraq policy is and has been a thoroughgoing disaster -- from taking us into war based on lies and deceptions to the way the Occupation has been totally mismanaged. Our troops are now caught in the middle of a brutal sectarian civil war. But the Democrats appear to be divided about how to proceed: give Bush one last chance to "win," whatever that may mean, or start pulling out our troops while we still can with at least a shred of dignity.
Given this situation, the time for politeness, for speaking around the truth, is gone. Civility yes, holding one's tongue, no. Not while more and more young Americans are dying in Iraq, 3000 to date, with an estimated 25,000 maimed; not while up to 3000 innocent Iraqi civilians are being slaughtered every month; not while billions of dollars each month (half-a-trillion! total so far) are being siphoned from the U.S. treasury, and vital social programs, to pay for this moral monstrosity of a war. And definitely not while CheneyBush are determined to send tens of thousands more U.S. troops into Iraq's civil-war hellhole.The "surge" scenario is one written to satisfy the Administration's political goals, not one expected to change much on the ground in Iraq, which is why so many military leaders are opposed to it. Clearly, the "surge" is a public-relations, fig-leaf operation to cover Bush's embarrassing exposure of mendacity and fecklessness.
"REPUBS ARE NERVOUS ABOUT BUSH'S "SURGE"
If we all spoke something like the truths discussed below, our words would not change the minds of the Bush Bunker crowd; they've set their course, and intend to stay that course. But such truths surely are catching the attention of Republican powers-that-be and office-holders, who saw what happened to their ilk in the midterm elections over the Iraq issue. They would like to keep their jobs and influence in 2008 and perhaps have a shot at getting back in power. It will be those Republicans who are best able to get the message through to the Bush Administration on the necessity for drastic changes in policy -- only a small chance of that happening -- or, even more far out, to get Cheney and Bush to resign. Definitely not going to happen. If it comes to it, they seem willing to take the country and Constitution down with them.With no major foreign or domestic victories to his credit, Bush's legacy is Iraq, and he doesn't want to leave office with yet another "loser" sign slapped on his back. Ergo: the "surge," one last attempt to stabilize the stalemate in Iraq. Best-case scenario for the Bushistas: something, anything, that can be called a "victory." Alternative best-case scenario for Bush: The "surge" takes two years to fully unfold, and the inevitable U.S. defeat in Iraq happens on the next President's watch.For the Bush Administration, those two alternatives would be a win-win, and to get there our brave young men and women in uniform will just have to "sacrifice" -- in many cases, their lives -- for the Bush cause.So here are five truths that need to be aired, and their implications:
1. THE USUAL: IGNORING REALITY
CheneyBush and their cohorts have decided to ignore the voters with regard to Iraq, ignore the military, ignore the troops, ignore the allies, ignore the experts, ignore reality on the ground in that country, and are moving America full-speed over the cliff of catastrophe. As Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden suggested the other day, the Bush Administration is willing to sacrifice thousands of more young American troops as long as it delays the inevitable U.S. retreat from Iraq until after the 2008 election. And, to sweeten the pot, Bush -- per usual, years late and smarts-short -- is advocating a jobs program for young Iraqi men. Might have worked in 2003, ain't gonna work in 2007. The Bush-botched situation is way beyond that now, deep into outright sectarian warfare.
2. THWARTING THE CHENEY-BUSH POLICY:
Since CheneyBush and their court lackeys are determined to try to stalemate the war in Iraq for another two years, and have the power to do so -- fully aware that Iraq is a lost cause (see Biden link above ) --there are only three ways to stop them.A. Cut off funding for the escalation. Speaker Pelosi and Rep. John Murtha are flirting with this idea of putting restrictions on the use of appropriations for the Iraq War. This in order to make sure that funds are spent for the drawing down of U.S. troop levels, rather than for the introduction of more soldiers. And, to avoid the charge of "not supporting our troops," the Democrats will continue to fund the soldiers currently in Iraq.Congress could pass a bill requiring that the Administration consult with the appropriate committees before major shifts of policy occur in Iraq. Bush might veto, or ignore, such a resolution, of course, but at least he'd be on the record as impeding the effort to close down a war that the American public, in the election and in poll after poll, has decided is not worth continuing.B. Impeach Bush and Cheney for their high crimes and misdemeanors, which would include their lying and deceiving Congress and the American people into supporting the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq and the escalation of the war in 2007.Impeachment may or may not have traction at first, but it will grow as the congressional committees, chaired now by Dems, hold hearings on Bush policy and corruptions; besides, if the Administration is forced to deal full-time with impeachment, they will have less time and energy to focus on getting involved in mischief elsewhere. C. Refuse to participate in this politically-motivated escalation of the Iraq War. Rather than waiting to be fired for indicating that the "temporary" surge (which rightwingers correctly define as at least 18 months and probably longer) is a reckless, doomed idea, let there be mass resignations at the Pentagon, with the generals and colonels publicly denouncing the escalation madness.To stanch the flow of increasing opposition, Bush and Cheney have cleared the Administration's decks of anybody but pro-escalation loyalists; Generals Abizaid and Casey, both of whom have questioned the wisdom of escalation, are gone, and perhaps the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who reportedly are leery of implementing a politically-motivated "surge," may be on the chopping block next. Public support for the "surge" is at about 11%; not even Bush's base is buying in. Republican politicians already are out there with their opposition, and it's not just conservatives Chuck Hagel and Gordon Smith and Norm Coleman anymore. Hard-Rightists Ollie North and Heather Wilson, for example, also have come out against Bush's "surge" scam. As that snowball of public opposition rolls down the political slope, more Republican leaders will have "cover" to denounce CheneyBush's war policies. More troops in-country or those ordered to Iraq likely would refuse to participate in a war the generals themselves -- as well as many of their civilian bosses in the Administration -- have abandoned as unwinnable. The refusal of Lieutenant Ehren Watada to return to Iraq is just the tip of the iceberg of resistance inside the officer corps, and among the rank-and-file troops as well: Hundreds of on-duty soldiers have signed a petition calling for "redress," urging the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq.
3. IRAN IN THE CROSSHAIRS:
It's clear that the neo-con goal of changing the geopolitical face of the Middle East, by threat or use of force, remains in place as the operating principle of the Bush Administration. Iran and maybe Syria are still in the crosshairs. If the bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities does not happen in the next few months, either by the U.S. and/or ally Israel, it is being planned for before Bush leaves office. This may explain why an admiral is taking over the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, supplanting Abizaid at Central Command: the navy will be tactically important in any move on Iran.
4. CHENEY-BUSH POLICY ENDANGERS AMERICA:
Not only is CheneyBush policy endangering our national interests abroad -- U.S. actions are the best recruiting tools for expanding extremist jihadi ranks -- but America's military is stretched way too thin for the country's good. The Reserves and National Guard are being overused in Iraq to the point of angry frustration and exhaustion, and Army/Marine recruiters are told to get new bodies into the training pipeline however they can: huge bonuses, lowering the moral and educational and psychological requirements, going abroad for foreign soldiers for hire -- even, I kid you not, asking those already slain in battle in Iraq to sign up for a new hitch! (Yes, of course, the last named was a bureaucratic screw-up, but symbolically it seems quite in keeping with the Bush Administration's overall tendency to FUBAR whatever they touch.)
5. OUR FREEDOMS ARE ENDANGERED SPECIES:
Our freedoms, supposedly what we're fighting to protect, have been snatched from us, mostly in secret, by the Bush Administration. The concept of habeas corpus -- of justifying to a court why someone has been arrested -- is dead. The right to a jury trial: dead. The prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment (i.e., torture): dead. Attorney-client confidentiality: dead. Guaranteed access to a lawyer: dead. Right of privacy in one's home: dead. Letter and email privacy: dead. And so on. All these police-state actions are in violation of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Articles of the Bill of Rights. Under a cockamamie theory that a president can ignore or violate laws whenever he claims he's acting as "commander-in-chief" during "wartime," Bush has: authorized secret "disappearances" and tortures of suspected "terrorists," including American citizens; has established a network of secret CIA prisons around the world; has authorized "extraordinary renditions" of suspects to countries that specialize in especially brutal torture. Police agents can enter your home, tap your phones, peek into your computer and emails (and now snail-mail) -- and are not required to present a court warrant or even tell you that you are being subjected to an investigation. The Constitution is in shreds.
The Republican Party for most of its modern life (especially after Waco) has been vehemently opposed to the federal government amassing too much police power in its hands. But this White House crew these days is after as much power as it can get its hands on -- and is aided in this by their GOP lackeys in Congress and in the corporate-owned mass-media -- and has created huge bureaucracies to snoop and spy on its own citizens.
SO WHAT'S TO BE DONE?
Ordinary Americans have to see politics less as a once-every-election activity and more as an ongoing, daily campaign to save our country. That means actively opposing the worst of CheneyBush policies, of course, but it also means constantly letting Democratic leaders and our members of Congress know how we feel about their vacillations and timidity; we must hold their feet to the fire and demand that they truly act differently than the Republicans -- not just with regard to Iraq but to a whole host of domestic and foreign issues, where all too often they have caved in the past and let Karl Rove and his minions roll all over them.No more. The issues for which we're fighting are far too important for us to slip back into our lethargic, let-someone-else-do-it mode. Keeping democracy alive and well ultimately is up to us, each of us. In the Vietnam-War era, five different presidents were told by their national-security experts that there was no chance for the U.S. to win a stalemated war with guerrillas in that country, but those presidents persisted in the disastrous folly anyway. More than 54,000 U.S. troops and an estimated two million Vietnamese died in the slaughter before the Americans conceded that they had made a terrible error. Unless the Democrats, and the rest of us, step up now to stop Bush's nonsensical escalation of the Iraq War, a similar catastrophe awaits. The Democrats have to be warned in no uncertain terms about their responsibilities with regard to rescuing our troops in Iraq. Either act as an authentic Opposition Party should, or risk being abandoned in 2008 by the activist base that returned them to power. Perhaps the prospect of the incumbent Democrats reverting to non-relevancy, with the Republicans back in the majority with their boots once again on the Dems' necks, may finally concentrate their minds on what American voters sent them to Washington to do.
Copyright 2007 by Bernard Weiner
Do You Know What They Are Hiding?
Saddam's Well-Timed Execution
By Robert Parry
January 10, 2007
Saddam Hussein’s rushed execution looks even more suspicious now that the trial of his co-defendants has resumed with prosecutors playing an incriminating tape recording of the dead Iraqi dictator discussing chemical weapons – but now without any possibility of him fingering U.S. officials and others who may have helped him get the poisons.
President George W. Bush and his supporters are sure to cite the tape recording as further evidence of Hussein’s guilt and thus vindication of Bush’s decision to press ahead with Hussein’s controversial hanging on Dec. 30.
But the troubling reality – virtually ignored in the major U.S. news media – is that Bush also silenced a particularly dangerous witness who could have implicated prominent U.S. officials from both his father’s and his own administrations.
The hasty execution prevented the Iraqi judges from turning to Hussein after the tape was played on Jan. 8 to question him about its authenticity and its context. Another obvious follow-up would have been how had Hussein obtained the dangerous chemicals that he allegedly deployed to kill tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds.
In that sense, Hussein’s silence was golden for the international arms dealers who supplied his regime and for government officials who facilitated the shipments.
Former President George H.W. Bush, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and current Defense Secretary Robert Gates were among those who could breathe a little easier after the hangman’s noose had choked the life out of Hussein.
The elder George Bush, as Vice President, allegedly oversaw a covert U.S. operation to assist Hussein’s war machine during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War; Rumsfeld, as special U.S. envoy to the Middle East, had private chats with the Iraqi dictator about his war needs; and Gates, as a senior CIA official, reportedly rebuffed Israeli protests about U.S. tolerance for third-country military shipments to Iraq, including precursor chemicals.
Hussein was a unique witness to these events. Perhaps no other Iraqi possessed so much direct knowledge of these high-level discussions and what resulted from them.
Thus, with Hussein’s execution, the witness with the fullest overview of Iraq’s chemical weapons program is gone, a breach of judicial process that would never have been allowed if Hussein had been turned over to an international court.
Rush to the Gallows
When Hussein was rushed to the gallows, George W. Bush’s administration also knew that the tape recording would soon be presented as evidence. Indeed, U.S. investigators had culled it from the volumes of records seized from Hussein’s archives after U.S. forces captured Baghdad in 2003.
On Jan. 9, New York Times reporter John F. Burns described Hussein’s voice on the tape – as a moment of self-revealing clarity – coldly discussing the effectiveness of chemical weapons on an unprotected civilian population.
“In the history of prosecutions against some of the last century’s grimmest men, there can rarely have been a moment that so starkly caught a despot’s unpitying nature,” Burns wrote, while noting that Hussein’s “high-backed, black vinyl seat at the front of the dock was left ominously empty.”
At another point in the article, Burns added that Hussein’s alleged Iraqi accomplices “glanced furtively toward TV cameras” during the court proceedings. But Burns makes no mention of how Hussein’s hanging was a lost opportunity to identify people outside Iraq who aided and abetted the alleged genocide against the Kurds. [NYT, Jan. 9, 2007]
The rest of the U.S. news media pretty much missed the same part of the story after Hussein was hanged for his role in executing 148 men and boys from the town of Dujail in 1982, following a foiled assassination attempt on Hussein and his entourage.
While the U.S. media has devoted considerable time to the unruly scene at Hussein’s hanging, little has been said or written about how the world witnessed on Dec. 30 what amounted to the snuffing of a witness who could have implicated key figures around George W. Bush, possibly including the President’s father.
The ghoulish theater of the execution – taunts from Shiite guards and Hussein’s haughty response – obscured the other significance of the moment, that important chapters of history were dying with Hussein on the gallows.
As I noted in an article after the execution, Hussein now won’t be around to give troublesome testimony about how he obtained the chemical and biological agents that his scientists used to produce the unconventional weapons that were turned against Iranian forces and Iraqi civilians. He can’t give his perspective on who got the money and who smoothed the deals.
Hussein also can’t disclose what Rumsfeld told him during their famous hand-shake meeting in 1983, or whether he got an alleged message from Vice President Bush in the mid-1980s about how to deploy his air force against Iran, or if his regime knew that deputy CIA director Gates was running interference for Iraq’s military supply line in the 1980s.
Nor can Hussein give his account of the mixed messages delivered by George H.W. Bush’s ambassador April Glaspie before Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Was there an American “green light” or did Hussein just hear what he wanted to hear?
All that history and more could have been salvaged if Hussein had been turned over to an international tribunal at The Hague as was done with other tyrants, such as Yugoslavia’s late dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
Instead George W. Bush insisted that Hussein be kept under tight American guard and be tried in Iraq despite the obvious fact that the Iraqi dictator would receive nothing close to a fair trial before being put to death.
[For more details on what Hussein might have revealed, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com’s “Missing U.S.-Iraq History” or “The Secret World of Robert Gates.”]
What Can Be Done
Still, even with Hussein’s execution, there are actions that the American people can take to recover pieces of that lost history.
The U.S. government is now sitting on a treasure trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. From those captured records, U.S. analysts discovered the tape recording of Hussein that was played on Jan. 8.
The Bush administration also has exploited the documents to discredit the United Nations over the “oil for food” scandal of the 1990s, ironically when Hussein wasn’t building weapons of mass destruction. But the Bush administration has withheld the records from the 1980s when Hussein was producing chemical and biological weapons.
In 2004, for instance, the CIA released the so-called Duelfer report, which acknowledged that the administration’s pre-invasion assertions about Hussein hiding WMD stockpiles were “almost all wrong.”
But a curious feature of the WMD report was that it included a long section about Hussein’s abuse of the U.N.’s “oil for food” program in the 1990s, although the report acknowledged that the diverted funds had not gone to build illegal weapons.
Regarding the 1980s, however, the report did the opposite, acknowledging the existence of a robust WMD program but offering no documentary perspective on how that operation was organized and who was responsible for the delivery of crucial equipment and precursor chemicals.
In other words, the CIA’s WMD report didn’t identify the non-Iraqis who made Iraq’s WMD arsenal possible in the 1980s.
One source who has seen the evidence told me that it contains information about the role of Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen, who has been identified as a key link between the CIA and Iraq for the procurement of dangerous weapons in the 1980s. But that evidence remains locked away from the public.
With the Democrats now in charge of Congress, they theoretically could force out more of the story, assuming they don’t follow their usual course of putting “bipartisanship” ahead of oversight and truth.
The American people also could demand that the surviving members of Hussein’s regime be fully debriefed about their historical knowledge before their voices also fall silent either from natural causes or additional executions.
If the goal is to get the witnesses to speak freely, the interrogations should be carried out at a neutral setting like The Hague.
But George W. Bush has made sure that the singular figure who could have put that era of Iraqi history in its fullest perspective never got to present his side of the story about Iraq’s chemical weapons, either how they were obtained or how they were used.
Less than 10 days before that story might have been presented to the world, Bush ordered Saddam Hussein turned over to his Shiite enemies and silenced for good.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
By Robert Parry
January 10, 2007
Saddam Hussein’s rushed execution looks even more suspicious now that the trial of his co-defendants has resumed with prosecutors playing an incriminating tape recording of the dead Iraqi dictator discussing chemical weapons – but now without any possibility of him fingering U.S. officials and others who may have helped him get the poisons.
President George W. Bush and his supporters are sure to cite the tape recording as further evidence of Hussein’s guilt and thus vindication of Bush’s decision to press ahead with Hussein’s controversial hanging on Dec. 30.
But the troubling reality – virtually ignored in the major U.S. news media – is that Bush also silenced a particularly dangerous witness who could have implicated prominent U.S. officials from both his father’s and his own administrations.
The hasty execution prevented the Iraqi judges from turning to Hussein after the tape was played on Jan. 8 to question him about its authenticity and its context. Another obvious follow-up would have been how had Hussein obtained the dangerous chemicals that he allegedly deployed to kill tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds.
In that sense, Hussein’s silence was golden for the international arms dealers who supplied his regime and for government officials who facilitated the shipments.
Former President George H.W. Bush, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and current Defense Secretary Robert Gates were among those who could breathe a little easier after the hangman’s noose had choked the life out of Hussein.
The elder George Bush, as Vice President, allegedly oversaw a covert U.S. operation to assist Hussein’s war machine during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War; Rumsfeld, as special U.S. envoy to the Middle East, had private chats with the Iraqi dictator about his war needs; and Gates, as a senior CIA official, reportedly rebuffed Israeli protests about U.S. tolerance for third-country military shipments to Iraq, including precursor chemicals.
Hussein was a unique witness to these events. Perhaps no other Iraqi possessed so much direct knowledge of these high-level discussions and what resulted from them.
Thus, with Hussein’s execution, the witness with the fullest overview of Iraq’s chemical weapons program is gone, a breach of judicial process that would never have been allowed if Hussein had been turned over to an international court.
Rush to the Gallows
When Hussein was rushed to the gallows, George W. Bush’s administration also knew that the tape recording would soon be presented as evidence. Indeed, U.S. investigators had culled it from the volumes of records seized from Hussein’s archives after U.S. forces captured Baghdad in 2003.
On Jan. 9, New York Times reporter John F. Burns described Hussein’s voice on the tape – as a moment of self-revealing clarity – coldly discussing the effectiveness of chemical weapons on an unprotected civilian population.
“In the history of prosecutions against some of the last century’s grimmest men, there can rarely have been a moment that so starkly caught a despot’s unpitying nature,” Burns wrote, while noting that Hussein’s “high-backed, black vinyl seat at the front of the dock was left ominously empty.”
At another point in the article, Burns added that Hussein’s alleged Iraqi accomplices “glanced furtively toward TV cameras” during the court proceedings. But Burns makes no mention of how Hussein’s hanging was a lost opportunity to identify people outside Iraq who aided and abetted the alleged genocide against the Kurds. [NYT, Jan. 9, 2007]
The rest of the U.S. news media pretty much missed the same part of the story after Hussein was hanged for his role in executing 148 men and boys from the town of Dujail in 1982, following a foiled assassination attempt on Hussein and his entourage.
While the U.S. media has devoted considerable time to the unruly scene at Hussein’s hanging, little has been said or written about how the world witnessed on Dec. 30 what amounted to the snuffing of a witness who could have implicated key figures around George W. Bush, possibly including the President’s father.
The ghoulish theater of the execution – taunts from Shiite guards and Hussein’s haughty response – obscured the other significance of the moment, that important chapters of history were dying with Hussein on the gallows.
As I noted in an article after the execution, Hussein now won’t be around to give troublesome testimony about how he obtained the chemical and biological agents that his scientists used to produce the unconventional weapons that were turned against Iranian forces and Iraqi civilians. He can’t give his perspective on who got the money and who smoothed the deals.
Hussein also can’t disclose what Rumsfeld told him during their famous hand-shake meeting in 1983, or whether he got an alleged message from Vice President Bush in the mid-1980s about how to deploy his air force against Iran, or if his regime knew that deputy CIA director Gates was running interference for Iraq’s military supply line in the 1980s.
Nor can Hussein give his account of the mixed messages delivered by George H.W. Bush’s ambassador April Glaspie before Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Was there an American “green light” or did Hussein just hear what he wanted to hear?
All that history and more could have been salvaged if Hussein had been turned over to an international tribunal at The Hague as was done with other tyrants, such as Yugoslavia’s late dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
Instead George W. Bush insisted that Hussein be kept under tight American guard and be tried in Iraq despite the obvious fact that the Iraqi dictator would receive nothing close to a fair trial before being put to death.
[For more details on what Hussein might have revealed, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com’s “Missing U.S.-Iraq History” or “The Secret World of Robert Gates.”]
What Can Be Done
Still, even with Hussein’s execution, there are actions that the American people can take to recover pieces of that lost history.
The U.S. government is now sitting on a treasure trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. From those captured records, U.S. analysts discovered the tape recording of Hussein that was played on Jan. 8.
The Bush administration also has exploited the documents to discredit the United Nations over the “oil for food” scandal of the 1990s, ironically when Hussein wasn’t building weapons of mass destruction. But the Bush administration has withheld the records from the 1980s when Hussein was producing chemical and biological weapons.
In 2004, for instance, the CIA released the so-called Duelfer report, which acknowledged that the administration’s pre-invasion assertions about Hussein hiding WMD stockpiles were “almost all wrong.”
But a curious feature of the WMD report was that it included a long section about Hussein’s abuse of the U.N.’s “oil for food” program in the 1990s, although the report acknowledged that the diverted funds had not gone to build illegal weapons.
Regarding the 1980s, however, the report did the opposite, acknowledging the existence of a robust WMD program but offering no documentary perspective on how that operation was organized and who was responsible for the delivery of crucial equipment and precursor chemicals.
In other words, the CIA’s WMD report didn’t identify the non-Iraqis who made Iraq’s WMD arsenal possible in the 1980s.
One source who has seen the evidence told me that it contains information about the role of Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen, who has been identified as a key link between the CIA and Iraq for the procurement of dangerous weapons in the 1980s. But that evidence remains locked away from the public.
With the Democrats now in charge of Congress, they theoretically could force out more of the story, assuming they don’t follow their usual course of putting “bipartisanship” ahead of oversight and truth.
The American people also could demand that the surviving members of Hussein’s regime be fully debriefed about their historical knowledge before their voices also fall silent either from natural causes or additional executions.
If the goal is to get the witnesses to speak freely, the interrogations should be carried out at a neutral setting like The Hague.
But George W. Bush has made sure that the singular figure who could have put that era of Iraqi history in its fullest perspective never got to present his side of the story about Iraq’s chemical weapons, either how they were obtained or how they were used.
Less than 10 days before that story might have been presented to the world, Bush ordered Saddam Hussein turned over to his Shiite enemies and silenced for good.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
...and the plot thickens, as it apppears to go way back.
Bush Senior Early CIA Ties Revealed
By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen The Real News Project
New York - Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.
Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'
But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a "cleared and witting commercial asset" of the agency.
According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo describes Devine as an "oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush." The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.
"Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil," the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.
It was while Devine was in his new CIA capacity as a commercial cover officer that he accompanied Bush to Vietnam the day after Christmas in 1967, remaining in the country with the newly elected congressman from Texas until January 11, 1968. Whatever information the duo was seeking, they left just in the nick of time. Only three weeks after the two men departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies launched the Tet offensive with seventy thousand troops pre-positioned in more than 100 cities and towns.
While the elder Bush was in Vietnam with Devine, George W. Bush was making contact with representatives of the Texas Air National Guard, using his father's connections to join up with an elite, Houston-based Guard unit - thus avoiding overseas combat service in a war that the Bushes strongly supported.
The new revelation about George H.W. Bush's CIA friend and fellow Zapata Offshore board member will surely fuel further speculation that Bush himself had his own associations with the agency.
Indeed, Zapata's annual reports portray a bewildering range of global activities, in the Mideast, Asia and the Caribbean (including off Cuba) that seem outsized for the company's modest bottom line. In his autobiography, Bush declares that "I'd come to the CIA with some general knowledge of how it operated' and that his 'overseas contacts as a businessman' justified President Nixon's appointing him as UN ambassador, a decision that at the time was highly controversial.
Previously disclosed FBI files include a memo from bureau director J. Edgar Hoover, noting that his organization had given a briefing to two men in the intelligence community on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The memo refers to one as "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" and the other as "Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency."
When Nation magazine contributor Joseph McBride first uncovered this document in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush, then vice president and seeking the presidency, insisted through a spokesman that he was not the man mentioned in the memo: "I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late '63. I don't have any idea of what he's talking about." The spokesman added, "Must be another George Bush."
When McBride approached the CIA at that time, it initially invoked a policy of neither confirming nor denying anyone's involvement with the agency. But it soon took the unusual step of asserting that the correct individual was a George William Bush, a one-time Virginia staffer whom the agency claimed it could no longer locate. But that George Bush, discovered in his office in the Social Security Administration by McBride, noted that he was a low-ranked coast and landing-beach analyst and that he most certainly never received such an FBI briefing.
It was perhaps to help lay to rest the larger matter of the elder Bush's past associations that the former president went out of his way during his recent eulogy for President Ford to sing the praises of the Warren Commission Report as the final authority on those days.
After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And a conspiracy theorist can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Gerry Ford put his name on it and Gerry Ford's word was always good.
In fact, Ford's role on the Warren Commission is seen by many experts as a decisive factor in his rise to the top. As a Commission member, Ford altered its report in a significant way. As the Associated Press reported in 1997, "Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed - ever so slightly - the Warren Commission's key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy's body when he was killed in Dallas. The effect of Ford's change was to strengthen the commission's conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally - a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman."
This modification played a seminal role in ending talk of a larger conspiracy to kill the president. Knowledge of Ford's alteration has encouraged theorists to scrutinize the constellation of other figures who might have had a motivation to cover up the affair.
Meanwhile, there is much more to learn about George H. W. Bush's friend, Thomas Devine. The newly surfaced memos explain that Devine, from 1963 on, had authority from the agency to operate under commercial cover as part of an agency project code-named WUBRINY.
Devine at that time was employed with the Wall Street boutique Train, Cabot and Associates, described in the memos as an "investment banking firm which houses and manages the [CIA] proprietary corporation WUSALINE." These nautical names - 'Saline' and 'Briny' - or, for the Bay of Pigs invasion 'Wave' - are CIA cryptonyms for the programs and companies involved.
George H.W. Bush's own ties are amplified in the 1975 CIA memo, dated November 29, which makes it clear that he had knowledge of CIA operations prior to being named the new director of the CIA in the fall of that year.
The 1975 memo notes that, through his relationship with Devine, "Mr George Bush [the CIA director-designate] has prior knowledge of the now terminated project WUBRINY/LPDICTUM which was involved in proprietary commercial operations in Europe."
The Bush documents, part of a batch of 300,000 records the CIA provided to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, were publicly released in 1998 as the result of a lawsuit, donated to a foundation, scanned into a database - and only just noticed by an independent researcher.
Click the following to view original supporting documents: [1] [2] [3]
--------
Russ Baker, founder of the Real News Project, and Jonathan Z. Larsen, Real News editorial board member, are at work on a book about George W. Bush and the Bush clan, due out later this year. They may be reached at: russ@realnews.org.
By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen The Real News Project
New York - Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.
Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'
But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a "cleared and witting commercial asset" of the agency.
According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo describes Devine as an "oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush." The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.
"Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil," the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.
It was while Devine was in his new CIA capacity as a commercial cover officer that he accompanied Bush to Vietnam the day after Christmas in 1967, remaining in the country with the newly elected congressman from Texas until January 11, 1968. Whatever information the duo was seeking, they left just in the nick of time. Only three weeks after the two men departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies launched the Tet offensive with seventy thousand troops pre-positioned in more than 100 cities and towns.
While the elder Bush was in Vietnam with Devine, George W. Bush was making contact with representatives of the Texas Air National Guard, using his father's connections to join up with an elite, Houston-based Guard unit - thus avoiding overseas combat service in a war that the Bushes strongly supported.
The new revelation about George H.W. Bush's CIA friend and fellow Zapata Offshore board member will surely fuel further speculation that Bush himself had his own associations with the agency.
Indeed, Zapata's annual reports portray a bewildering range of global activities, in the Mideast, Asia and the Caribbean (including off Cuba) that seem outsized for the company's modest bottom line. In his autobiography, Bush declares that "I'd come to the CIA with some general knowledge of how it operated' and that his 'overseas contacts as a businessman' justified President Nixon's appointing him as UN ambassador, a decision that at the time was highly controversial.
Previously disclosed FBI files include a memo from bureau director J. Edgar Hoover, noting that his organization had given a briefing to two men in the intelligence community on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The memo refers to one as "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" and the other as "Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency."
When Nation magazine contributor Joseph McBride first uncovered this document in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush, then vice president and seeking the presidency, insisted through a spokesman that he was not the man mentioned in the memo: "I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late '63. I don't have any idea of what he's talking about." The spokesman added, "Must be another George Bush."
When McBride approached the CIA at that time, it initially invoked a policy of neither confirming nor denying anyone's involvement with the agency. But it soon took the unusual step of asserting that the correct individual was a George William Bush, a one-time Virginia staffer whom the agency claimed it could no longer locate. But that George Bush, discovered in his office in the Social Security Administration by McBride, noted that he was a low-ranked coast and landing-beach analyst and that he most certainly never received such an FBI briefing.
It was perhaps to help lay to rest the larger matter of the elder Bush's past associations that the former president went out of his way during his recent eulogy for President Ford to sing the praises of the Warren Commission Report as the final authority on those days.
After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And a conspiracy theorist can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Gerry Ford put his name on it and Gerry Ford's word was always good.
In fact, Ford's role on the Warren Commission is seen by many experts as a decisive factor in his rise to the top. As a Commission member, Ford altered its report in a significant way. As the Associated Press reported in 1997, "Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed - ever so slightly - the Warren Commission's key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy's body when he was killed in Dallas. The effect of Ford's change was to strengthen the commission's conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally - a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman."
This modification played a seminal role in ending talk of a larger conspiracy to kill the president. Knowledge of Ford's alteration has encouraged theorists to scrutinize the constellation of other figures who might have had a motivation to cover up the affair.
Meanwhile, there is much more to learn about George H. W. Bush's friend, Thomas Devine. The newly surfaced memos explain that Devine, from 1963 on, had authority from the agency to operate under commercial cover as part of an agency project code-named WUBRINY.
Devine at that time was employed with the Wall Street boutique Train, Cabot and Associates, described in the memos as an "investment banking firm which houses and manages the [CIA] proprietary corporation WUSALINE." These nautical names - 'Saline' and 'Briny' - or, for the Bay of Pigs invasion 'Wave' - are CIA cryptonyms for the programs and companies involved.
George H.W. Bush's own ties are amplified in the 1975 CIA memo, dated November 29, which makes it clear that he had knowledge of CIA operations prior to being named the new director of the CIA in the fall of that year.
The 1975 memo notes that, through his relationship with Devine, "Mr George Bush [the CIA director-designate] has prior knowledge of the now terminated project WUBRINY/LPDICTUM which was involved in proprietary commercial operations in Europe."
The Bush documents, part of a batch of 300,000 records the CIA provided to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, were publicly released in 1998 as the result of a lawsuit, donated to a foundation, scanned into a database - and only just noticed by an independent researcher.
Click the following to view original supporting documents: [1] [2] [3]
--------
Russ Baker, founder of the Real News Project, and Jonathan Z. Larsen, Real News editorial board member, are at work on a book about George W. Bush and the Bush clan, due out later this year. They may be reached at: russ@realnews.org.
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Bush's Rush To Living Hell
Bush and Cheney have both gone insane. Seroiusly, it is time to get them the hell out of there.
They do not heed elections unless they win them.
Citizens of America, see you in Washinton, D.C.
By Robert Parry
January 8, 2007
George W. Bush has purged senior military and intelligence officials who were obstacles to a wider war in the Middle East, broadening his options for both escalating the conflict inside Iraq and expanding the fighting to Iran and Syria with Israel’s help.
On Jan. 4, Bush ousted the top two commanders in the Middle East, Generals John Abizaid and George Casey, who had opposed a military escalation in Iraq, and removed Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, who had stood by intelligence estimates downplaying the near-term threat from Iran’s nuclear program.
Most Washington observers have treated Bush’s shake-up as either routine or part of his desire for a new team to handle his planned “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq. But intelligence sources say the personnel changes also fit with a scenario for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and seeking violent regime change in Syria.
Bush appointed Admiral William Fallon as the new chief of Central Command for the Middle East despite the fact that Fallon, a former Navy fighter pilot and currently head of the Pacific Command, will oversee two ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The choice of Fallon makes more sense if Bush foresees a bigger role for two aircraft carrier groups now poised off Iran’s coastline, such as support for possible Israeli air strikes against Iran’s nuclear targets or as a deterrent against any overt Iranian retaliation.
Though not considered a Middle East expert, Fallon has moved in neoconservative circles, for instance, attending a 2001 awards ceremony at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a think tank dedicated to explaining “the link between American defense policy and the security of Israel.”
Bush’s personnel changes also come as Israel is reported stepping up preparations for air strikes, possibly including tactical nuclear bombs, to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, such as the reactor at Natanz, south of Tehran, where enriched uranium is produced.
The Sunday Times of London reported on Jan. 7 that two Israeli air squadrons are training for the mission and “if things go according to plan, a pilot will first launch a conventional laser-guided bomb to blow a shaft down through the layers of hardened concrete [at Natanz]. Other pilots will then be ready to drop low-yield one kiloton nuclear weapons into the hole.”
The Sunday Times wrote that Israel also would hit two other facilities – at Isfahan and Arak – with conventional bombs. But the possible use of a nuclear bomb at Natanz would represent the first nuclear attack since the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II six decades ago.
While some observers believe Israel may be leaking details of its plans as a way to frighten Iran into accepting international controls on its nuclear program, other sources indicate that Israel and the Bush administration are seriously preparing for this wider Middle Eastern war.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has called the possibility of an Iranian nuclear bomb an “existential threat” to Israel.
After the Sunday Times article appeared, an Israeli government spokesman denied that Israel has drawn up secret plans to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. For its part, Iran claims it only wants a nuclear program for producing energy.
Negroponte’s Heresy
Whatever Iran’s intent, Negroponte has said U.S. intelligence does not believe Iran could produce a nuclear weapon until next decade.
Negroponte’s assessment in April 2006 infuriated neoconservative hardliners who wanted a worst-case scenario on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, much as they pressed for an alarmist view on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in 2003.
Unlike former CIA Director George Tenet, who bent to Bush’s political needs on Iraq, Negroponte stood behind the position of intelligence analysts who cited Iran’s limited progress in refining uranium.
“Our assessment is that the prospects of an Iranian weapon are still a number of years off, and probably into the next decade,” Negroponte said in an interview with NBC News. Expressing a similarly tempered view in a speech at the National Press Club, Negroponte said, “I think it’s important that this issue be kept in perspective.”
Some neocons complained that Negroponte was betraying the President.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr., a leading figure in the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, called for Negroponte’s firing because of the Iran assessment and his “abysmal personnel decisions” in hiring senior intelligence analysts who were skeptics about Bush’s Iraqi WMD claims.
In an article for Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times, Gaffney attacked Negroponte for giving top analytical jobs to Thomas Fingar, who had served as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, and Kenneth Brill, who was U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which debunked some of the U.S. and British claims about Iraq seeking uranium ore from Africa.
Fingar’s Office of Intelligence and Research had led the dissent against the Iraq WMD case, especially over what turned out to be Bush’s false claims that Iraq was developing a nuclear bomb.
“Given this background, is it any wonder that Messrs. Negroponte, Fingar and Brill … gave us the spectacle of absurdly declaring the Iranian regime to be years away from having nuclear weapons?” wrote Gaffney, who was a senior Pentagon official during the Reagan administration.
Gaffney also accused Negroponte of giving promotions to “government officials in sensitive positions who actively subvert the President’s policies,” an apparent reference to Fingar and Brill. The neocons have long resented U.S. intelligence assessments that conflict with their policy prescriptions. [See Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
In his personnel shakeup, Bush shifted Negroponte from his Cabinet-level position as DNI to a sub-Cabinet post as deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. To replace Negroponte, Bush nominated Navy retired Vice Admiral John McConnell, who is viewed by intelligence professionals as a low-profile technocrat, not a strong independent figure.
A Freer Hand
Negroponte’s departure should give Bush a freer hand if he decides to support attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Bush’s neocon advisers fear that if Bush doesn’t act decisively in his remaining two years in office, his successor may lack the political will to launch a preemptive strike against Iran.
Bush reportedly has been weighing his military options for bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities since early 2006. But he has encountered resistance from the top U.S. military brass, much as he has with his plans to escalate U.S. troop levels in Iraq.
As investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker, a number of senior U.S. military officers were troubled by administration war planners who believed “bunker-busting” tactical nuclear weapons, known as B61-11s, were the only way to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities buried deep underground.
A former senior intelligence official told Hersh that the White House refused to remove the nuclear option from the plans despite objections from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Whenever anybody tries to get it out, they’re shouted down,” the ex-official said. [New Yorker, April 17, 2006]
By late April 2006, however, the Joint Chiefs finally got the White House to agree that using nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, less than 200 miles south of Tehran, was politically unacceptable, Hersh reported.
“Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning,” one former senior intelligence official said. [New Yorker, July 10, 2006]
But one way to get around the opposition of the Joint Chiefs would be to delegate the bombing operation to the Israelis. Given Israel’s powerful lobbying operation in Washington and its strong ties to leading Democrats, an Israeli-led attack might be more politically palatable with the Congress.
Attacks on Iran and Syria also would fit with Bush’s desire to counter the growing Shiite influence across the Middle East, which was given an unintended boost by Bush’s ouster of the Sunni-dominated government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The original neocon plan for the Iraq invasion was to use Iraq as a base to force regime change in Syria and Iran, thus dealing strong blows to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
This regional transformation supposedly would have protected Israel’s northern border and strengthened Israel’s hand in dictating final peace terms to the Palestinians. But the U.S. invasion of Iraq backfired, descending into a sectarian civil war with Iraq’s pro-Iranian Shiite majority gaining the upper hand.
In effect, by ousting Saddam Hussein, Bush had eliminated the principal buffer who had been holding the line against the radical Shiites in Iran since 1979. By tipping the strategic balance to the Shiites, Bush also unnerved the Sunni monarchy of Saudi Arabia.
A Nightmare
By 2006, the dream of a U.S.-orchestrated transformation of the Middle East had turned into a nightmare of rising Shiite radicalism. To address this unanticipated development, Bush began pondering how best to throttle Shiite expansionism.
In summer 2006, Washington Post foreign policy analyst Robin Wright wrote that U.S. officials told her that “for the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East.” [Washington Post, July 16, 2006]
Bush’s advisers also blamed the governments of Syria and Iran for supporting anti-U.S. fighters in Iraq.
Yet lacking the military and political capacity to expand the conflict beyond Iraq, the Bush administration turned to Israel and its new Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. By summer 2006, Israeli sources were describing Bush’s interest in finding a pretext to take Syria and Iran down a notch.
That opening came when border tensions with Hamas in Gaza and with Hezbollah in Lebanon led to the capture of three Israeli soldiers and a rapid Israeli escalation of the conflict into an air-and-ground campaign against Lebanon.
Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the Israeli-Lebanese conflict as an opening to expand the fighting into Syria and achieve the long-sought “regime change” in Damascus, Israeli sources said.
One Israeli source told me that Bush’s interest in spreading the war to Syria was considered “nuts” by some senior Israeli officials, although Prime Minister Olmert generally shared Bush’s hard-line strategy against Islamic militants. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush Wants Wider War.”]
In an article on July 30, 2006. the Jerusalem Post also hinted at Bush’s suggestion of a wider war into Syria. “Defense officials told the Post … that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria,” the newspaper reported.
In August 2006, the Inter-Press Service added more details, reporting that the message was passed to Israel by Bush’s deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams, who had been a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.
“In a meeting with a very senior Israeli official, Abrams indicated that Washington would have no objection if Israel chose to extend the war beyond to its other northern neighbor, leaving the interlocutor in no doubt that the intended target was Syria,” a source told the Inter-Press Service.
In December 2006, Meyray Wurmser, a leading U.S. neoconservative whose spouse is a Middle East adviser to Vice President Cheney, confirmed that neocons inside and outside the Bush administration had hoped Israel would attack Syria as a means of undermining the insurgents in Iraq.
“If Syria had been defeated, the rebellion in Iraq would have ended,” Wurmser said in an interview with Yitzhak Benhorin of the Ynet Web site. “A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hezbollah. … If Israel had hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow for Iran that it would have weakened it and (changed) the strategic map in the Middle East.”
But the Israeli summer offensives in Gaza and Lebanon fell short of Olmert’s objectives, instead generating international condemnation of Tel Aviv for the large numbers of civilian casualties from Israel’s bombing raids.
Wounded Leaders
Now, as two politically wounded leaders, Bush and Olmert share an interest in trying to salvage some success out of their military setbacks. So, they are looking at possible moves that are much more dramatic than minor adjustments to the status quo.
Democrats and some Republicans are questioning why Bush wants to send 20,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq and offer Iraqis some jobs programs, when similar tactics have been tried unsuccessfully in the past.
Indeed, one source familiar with high-level thinking in Washington and Tel Aviv said an unstated reason for Bush’s troop “surge” is to bolster the defenses of Baghdad’s Green Zone if a possible Israeli attack on Iran prompts an uprising among Iraqi Shiites.
The two U.S. aircraft carrier strike forces off Iran’s coast could provide further deterrence against Iranian retaliation. But the conflict would almost certainly spread anyway.
Likely Hezbollah missile strikes against Israel would offer another pretext for Israel to invade Syria and finally oust Hezbollah’s allies in Damascus, as the U.S. neocons had hope would happen in summer 2006, the source said.
In the neoconservative vision, this wider war would offer perhaps a last chance at achieving the regional transformation that has been at the heart of Bush’s strategy of “democratizing” the Middle East through violence if necessary.
However, few Middle East experts believe that Bush really would want the results of truly democratic elections in the region because Islamic militants would almost surely win resoundingly amid the anti-Americanism that has grown even more intense since the hanging of Saddam Hussein in late December.
An Israeli assault on Iran could put the region’s remaining pro-American dictators in jeopardy, too. In Pakistan, for instance, Islamic militants with ties to al-Qaeda have been gaining strength and might try to overthrow Gen. Pervez Musharraf, conceivably giving Islamic terrorists control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
For some U.S. foreign policy experts, this potential for disaster from a U.S.-backed Israeli air strike on Iran is so terrifying that they ultimately don’t believe Bush and Olmert would dare implement such the plan.
But Bush’s actions in the past two months – reaffirming his determination to achieve “victory” in Iraq – suggest that he wants nothing of the “graceful exit” that might come from a de-escalation of the war.
Losing Faith
Bush has dug in his heels even as some senior administration officials have lost faith in his strategy.
On Nov. 6, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent Bush a memo suggesting a “major adjustment” in Iraq War policy that would include “an accelerated drawdown of U.S. bases” from 55 to five by July 2007 with remaining U.S. forces only committed to Iraqi areas that request them.
“Unless they [the local Iraqi governments] cooperate fully, U.S. forces would leave their province,” Rumsfeld wrote.
Proposing an option similar to a plan enunciated by Democratic Rep. John Murtha, Rumsfeld suggested that the commanders “withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions – cities, patrolling, etc. – and move U.S. forces to a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) status, operating from within Iraq and Kuwait, to be available when Iraqi security forces need assistance.”
And in what could be read as an implicit criticism of Bush’s lofty rhetoric about transforming Iraq and the Middle East, Rumsfeld said the administration should “recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) – go minimalist.” [NYT, Dec. 3, 2006]
On Nov. 8, two days after the memo and one day after American voters elected Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Bush fired Rumsfeld. The firing was widely interpreted as a sign that Bush was ready to moderate his position on Iraq, but the evidence now suggests that Bush got rid of Rumsfeld for going wobbly on the war.
On Dec. 6, when longtime Bush family counselor James Baker issued a report by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group urging a drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq, Bush wasted little time in slapping it down.
Instead, Bush talked about waging a long war against Islamic “radicals and extremists,” an escalation from his original post-9/11 goal of defeating “terrorists with global reach.”
At his news conference on Dec. 20, Bush cast this wider struggle against Islamists as a test of American manhood and perseverance by demonstrating to the enemy that “they can’t run us out of the Middle East, that they can’t intimidate America.”
Bush suggested, too, that painful decisions lay ahead in the New Year.
“I’m not going to make predictions about what 2007 will look like in Iraq, except that it’s going to require difficult choices and additional sacrifices, because the enemy is merciless and violent,” Bush said.
Rather than scale back his neoconservative dream of transforming the Middle East, Bush argued for an expanded U.S. military to wage this long war.
“We must make sure that our military has the capability to stay in the fight for a long period of time,” Bush said. “I’m not predicting any particular theater, but I am predicting that it’s going to take a while for the ideology of liberty to finally triumph over the ideology of hate. …
“We’re in the beginning of a conflict between competing ideologies – a conflict that will determine whether or not your children can live in a peace. A failure in the Middle East, for example, or failure in Iraq, or isolationism, will condemn a generation of young Americans to permanent threat from overseas.”
Escalation
Since then, Bush has floated the idea of a troop “surge” and replaced commanders who disagreed with him. Bush also removed U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, a Sunni Muslim generally considered a voice for moderation in U.S. policy who privately objected to Bush’s decision to press ahead with the hanging of Saddam Hussein.
There are even indications of tension between Bush and Cheney, who like his old friend Rumsfeld, appears to have grown disillusioned with the war.
In a little-noticed comment on Jan. 4, Sen. Joseph Biden, the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Cheney and Rumsfeld “are really smart guys who made a very, very, very, very bad bet, and it blew up in their faces. Now, what do they do with it? I think they have concluded they can’t fix it, so how do you keep it stitched together without it completely unraveling?” [Washington Post, Jan. 5, 2007]
But Bush does not appear to share that goal of limiting the damage. Instead, he is looking for ways to “double-down” his gamble in Iraq by joining with Olmert – and possibly outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair – in expanding the conflict.
Since the Nov. 7 congressional elections, the three leaders have conducted a round-robin of meetings that on the surface seem to have little purpose. Olmert met privately with Bush on Nov. 13; Blair visited the White House on Dec. 7; and Blair conferred with Olmert in Israel on Dec. 18.
Sources say the three leaders are frantically seeking options for turning around their political fortunes as they face harsh judgments from history for their bloody and risky adventures in the Middle East.
But there is also a clock ticking. Blair, who now stands to go down in the annals of British history as “Bush’s poodle,” is nearing the end of his tenure, having agreed under pressure from his Labour Party to step down in spring 2007.
So, if the Bush-Blair-Olmert triumvirate has any hope of accomplishing the neoconservative remaking of the Middle East, time is running out. Something dramatic must happen soon.
That something looks like it may include a rush to Armageddon.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Future of Iraq: The spoils of war
How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches
By Danny Fortson, Andrew Murray-Watson and Tim Webb
Published: 07 January 2007
Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.
The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. "So where is the oil going to come from?... The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies," he said.
Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq's oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through "production-sharing agreements" (or PSAs) which are highly unusual in the Middle East, where the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's two largest producers, is state controlled.
Opponents say Iraq, where oil accounts for 95 per cent of the economy, is being forced to surrender an unacceptable degree of sovereignty.
Proposing the parliamentary motion for war in 2003, Tony Blair denied the "false claim" that "we want to seize" Iraq's oil revenues. He said the money should be put into a trust fund, run by the UN, for the Iraqis, but the idea came to nothing. The same year Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, said: "It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil."
Supporters say the provision allowing oil companies to take up to 75 per cent of the profits will last until they have recouped initial drilling costs. After that, they would collect about 20 per cent of all profits, according to industry sources in Iraq. But that is twice the industry average for such deals.
Greg Muttitt, a researcher for Platform, a human rights and environmental group which monitors the oil industry, said Iraq was being asked to pay an enormous price over the next 30 years for its present instability. "They would lose out massively," he said, "because they don't have the capacity at the moment to strike a good deal."
Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, Barham Salih, who chairs the country's oil committee, is expected to unveil the legislation as early as today. "It is a redrawing of the whole Iraqi oil industry [to] a modern standard," said Khaled Salih, spokesman for the Kurdish Regional Government, a party to the negotiations. The Iraqi government hopes to have the law on the books by March.
Several major oil companies are said to have sent teams into the country in recent months to lobby for deals ahead of the law, though the big names are considered unlikely to invest until the violence in Iraq abates.
James Paul, executive director at the Global Policy Forum, the international government watchdog, said: "It is not an exaggeration to say that the overwhelming majority of the population would be opposed to this. To do it anyway, with minimal discussion within the [Iraqi] parliament is really just pouring more oil on the fire."
Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman and a former chief economist at Shell, said it was crucial that any deal would guarantee funds for rebuilding Iraq. "It is absolutely vital that the revenue from the oil industry goes into Iraqi development and is seen to do so," he said. "Although it does make sense to collaborate with foreign investors, it is very important the terms are seen to be fair."
By Danny Fortson, Andrew Murray-Watson and Tim Webb
Published: 07 January 2007
Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.
The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. "So where is the oil going to come from?... The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies," he said.
Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq's oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through "production-sharing agreements" (or PSAs) which are highly unusual in the Middle East, where the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's two largest producers, is state controlled.
Opponents say Iraq, where oil accounts for 95 per cent of the economy, is being forced to surrender an unacceptable degree of sovereignty.
Proposing the parliamentary motion for war in 2003, Tony Blair denied the "false claim" that "we want to seize" Iraq's oil revenues. He said the money should be put into a trust fund, run by the UN, for the Iraqis, but the idea came to nothing. The same year Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, said: "It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil."
Supporters say the provision allowing oil companies to take up to 75 per cent of the profits will last until they have recouped initial drilling costs. After that, they would collect about 20 per cent of all profits, according to industry sources in Iraq. But that is twice the industry average for such deals.
Greg Muttitt, a researcher for Platform, a human rights and environmental group which monitors the oil industry, said Iraq was being asked to pay an enormous price over the next 30 years for its present instability. "They would lose out massively," he said, "because they don't have the capacity at the moment to strike a good deal."
Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, Barham Salih, who chairs the country's oil committee, is expected to unveil the legislation as early as today. "It is a redrawing of the whole Iraqi oil industry [to] a modern standard," said Khaled Salih, spokesman for the Kurdish Regional Government, a party to the negotiations. The Iraqi government hopes to have the law on the books by March.
Several major oil companies are said to have sent teams into the country in recent months to lobby for deals ahead of the law, though the big names are considered unlikely to invest until the violence in Iraq abates.
James Paul, executive director at the Global Policy Forum, the international government watchdog, said: "It is not an exaggeration to say that the overwhelming majority of the population would be opposed to this. To do it anyway, with minimal discussion within the [Iraqi] parliament is really just pouring more oil on the fire."
Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman and a former chief economist at Shell, said it was crucial that any deal would guarantee funds for rebuilding Iraq. "It is absolutely vital that the revenue from the oil industry goes into Iraqi development and is seen to do so," he said. "Although it does make sense to collaborate with foreign investors, it is very important the terms are seen to be fair."
Monday, January 8, 2007
New York Times Editorial Nukes the Bushites.
The Imperial Presidency 2.0
Observing President Bush in action lately, we have to wonder if he actually watched the election returns in November, or if he was just rerunning the 2002 vote on his TiVo.
That year, the White House used the fear of terrorism to scare American voters into cementing the Republican domination of Congress. Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney then embarked on an expansion of presidential power chilling both in its sweep and in the damage it did to the constitutional system of checks and balances.
In 2006, the voters sent Mr. Bush a powerful message that it was time to rein in his imperial ambitions. But we have yet to see any sign that Mr. Bush understands that — or even realizes that the Democrats are now in control of the Congress. Indeed, he seems to have interpreted his party’s drubbing as a mandate to keep pursuing his fantasy of victory in Iraq and to press ahead undaunted with his assault on civil liberties and the judicial system. Just before the Christmas break, the Justice Department served notice to Senator Patrick Leahy — the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee — that it intended to keep stonewalling Congressional inquiries into Mr. Bush’s inhumane and unconstitutional treatment of prisoners taken in anti-terrorist campaigns. It refused to hand over two documents, including one in which Mr. Bush authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to establish secret prisons beyond the reach of American law or international treaties. The other set forth the interrogation methods authorized in these prisons — which we now know ranged from abuse to outright torture.
Also last month, Mr. Bush issued another of his infamous “presidential signing statements,” which he has used scores of times to make clear he does not intend to respect the requirements of a particular law — in this case a little-noticed Postal Service bill. The statement suggested that Mr. Bush does not believe the government must obtain a court order before opening Americans’ first-class mail. It said the administration had the right to “conduct searches in exigent circumstances,” which include not only protecting lives, but also unspecified “foreign intelligence collection.”
The law is clear on this. A warrant is required to open Americans’ mail under a statute that was passed to stop just this sort of abuse using just this sort of pretext. But then again, the law is also clear on the need to obtain a warrant before intercepting Americans’ telephone calls and e-mail. Mr. Bush began openly defying that law after Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court order on calls and e-mail between the United States and other countries.
•
News accounts have also reminded us of the shameful state of American military prisons, where supposed terrorist suspects are kept without respect for civil or human rights, and on the basis of evidence so deeply tainted by abuse, hearsay or secrecy that it is essentially worthless.
Deborah Sontag wrote in The Times last week about the sorry excuse for a criminal case that the administration whipped up against Jose Padilla, who was once — but no longer is — accused of plotting to explode a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States. Mr. Padilla was held for two years without charges or access to a lawyer. Then, to avoid having the Supreme Court review Mr. Bush’s power grab, the administration dropped those accusations and charged Mr. Padilla in a criminal court on hazy counts of lending financial support to terrorists.
But just as the government abandoned the “dirty bomb” case against Mr. Padilla, it quietly charged an Ethiopian-born man, Binyam Mohamed, with conspiring with Mr. Padilla to commit that very crime. Unlike Mr. Padilla, Mr. Mohamed is not a United States citizen, so the administration threw him into Guantánamo. Now 28, he is still being held there as an “illegal enemy combatant” under the anti-constitutional military tribunals act that was rushed through the Republican-controlled Congress just before last November’s elections.
Mr. Mohamed was a target of another favorite Bush administration practice: “extraordinary rendition,” in which foreign citizens are snatched off the streets of their hometowns and secretly shipped to countries where they can be abused and tortured on behalf of the American government. Mr. Mohamed — whose name appears nowhere in either of the cases against Mr. Padilla — has said he was tortured in Morocco until he signed a confession that he conspired with Mr. Padilla. The Bush administration clearly has no intention of answering that claim, and plans to keep Mr. Mohamed in extralegal detention indefinitely.
•
The Democratic majority in Congress has a moral responsibility to address all these issues: fixing the profound flaws in the military tribunals act, restoring the rule of law over Mr. Bush’s rogue intelligence operations and restoring the balance of powers between Congress and the executive branch. So far, key Democrats, including Mr. Leahy and Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, chairman of a new subcommittee on human rights, have said these issues are high priorities for them.
We would lend such efforts our enthusiastic backing and hope Mr. Leahy, Mr. Durbin and other Democratic leaders are not swayed by the absurd notion circulating in Washington that the Democrats should now “look ahead” rather than use their new majority to right the dangerous wrongs of the last six years of Mr. Bush’s one-party rule.
This is a false choice. Dealing with these issues is not about the past. The administration’s assault on some of the nation’s founding principles continues unabated. If the Democrats were to shirk their responsibility to stop it, that would make them no better than the Republicans who formed and enabled these policies in the first place.
Observing President Bush in action lately, we have to wonder if he actually watched the election returns in November, or if he was just rerunning the 2002 vote on his TiVo.
That year, the White House used the fear of terrorism to scare American voters into cementing the Republican domination of Congress. Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney then embarked on an expansion of presidential power chilling both in its sweep and in the damage it did to the constitutional system of checks and balances.
In 2006, the voters sent Mr. Bush a powerful message that it was time to rein in his imperial ambitions. But we have yet to see any sign that Mr. Bush understands that — or even realizes that the Democrats are now in control of the Congress. Indeed, he seems to have interpreted his party’s drubbing as a mandate to keep pursuing his fantasy of victory in Iraq and to press ahead undaunted with his assault on civil liberties and the judicial system. Just before the Christmas break, the Justice Department served notice to Senator Patrick Leahy — the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee — that it intended to keep stonewalling Congressional inquiries into Mr. Bush’s inhumane and unconstitutional treatment of prisoners taken in anti-terrorist campaigns. It refused to hand over two documents, including one in which Mr. Bush authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to establish secret prisons beyond the reach of American law or international treaties. The other set forth the interrogation methods authorized in these prisons — which we now know ranged from abuse to outright torture.
Also last month, Mr. Bush issued another of his infamous “presidential signing statements,” which he has used scores of times to make clear he does not intend to respect the requirements of a particular law — in this case a little-noticed Postal Service bill. The statement suggested that Mr. Bush does not believe the government must obtain a court order before opening Americans’ first-class mail. It said the administration had the right to “conduct searches in exigent circumstances,” which include not only protecting lives, but also unspecified “foreign intelligence collection.”
The law is clear on this. A warrant is required to open Americans’ mail under a statute that was passed to stop just this sort of abuse using just this sort of pretext. But then again, the law is also clear on the need to obtain a warrant before intercepting Americans’ telephone calls and e-mail. Mr. Bush began openly defying that law after Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court order on calls and e-mail between the United States and other countries.
•
News accounts have also reminded us of the shameful state of American military prisons, where supposed terrorist suspects are kept without respect for civil or human rights, and on the basis of evidence so deeply tainted by abuse, hearsay or secrecy that it is essentially worthless.
Deborah Sontag wrote in The Times last week about the sorry excuse for a criminal case that the administration whipped up against Jose Padilla, who was once — but no longer is — accused of plotting to explode a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States. Mr. Padilla was held for two years without charges or access to a lawyer. Then, to avoid having the Supreme Court review Mr. Bush’s power grab, the administration dropped those accusations and charged Mr. Padilla in a criminal court on hazy counts of lending financial support to terrorists.
But just as the government abandoned the “dirty bomb” case against Mr. Padilla, it quietly charged an Ethiopian-born man, Binyam Mohamed, with conspiring with Mr. Padilla to commit that very crime. Unlike Mr. Padilla, Mr. Mohamed is not a United States citizen, so the administration threw him into Guantánamo. Now 28, he is still being held there as an “illegal enemy combatant” under the anti-constitutional military tribunals act that was rushed through the Republican-controlled Congress just before last November’s elections.
Mr. Mohamed was a target of another favorite Bush administration practice: “extraordinary rendition,” in which foreign citizens are snatched off the streets of their hometowns and secretly shipped to countries where they can be abused and tortured on behalf of the American government. Mr. Mohamed — whose name appears nowhere in either of the cases against Mr. Padilla — has said he was tortured in Morocco until he signed a confession that he conspired with Mr. Padilla. The Bush administration clearly has no intention of answering that claim, and plans to keep Mr. Mohamed in extralegal detention indefinitely.
•
The Democratic majority in Congress has a moral responsibility to address all these issues: fixing the profound flaws in the military tribunals act, restoring the rule of law over Mr. Bush’s rogue intelligence operations and restoring the balance of powers between Congress and the executive branch. So far, key Democrats, including Mr. Leahy and Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, chairman of a new subcommittee on human rights, have said these issues are high priorities for them.
We would lend such efforts our enthusiastic backing and hope Mr. Leahy, Mr. Durbin and other Democratic leaders are not swayed by the absurd notion circulating in Washington that the Democrats should now “look ahead” rather than use their new majority to right the dangerous wrongs of the last six years of Mr. Bush’s one-party rule.
This is a false choice. Dealing with these issues is not about the past. The administration’s assault on some of the nation’s founding principles continues unabated. If the Democrats were to shirk their responsibility to stop it, that would make them no better than the Republicans who formed and enabled these policies in the first place.
Sunday, January 7, 2007
God Damn It....
.....the killing , the maiminmg, the deception, the betrayal, the thieving, the acts against humanity, the contempt for the rule of at home!!!!!!!!
This is my country. I have served it in uniform and out. I have, I thought, always served it to its betterment; in an effort to protect liberty and self-rule for Americans, as well as the rest of the world.
I have also ventured beyond our national borders, experiencing and being charmed by so many cultures and nationalities.
In my life, I have visited, enjoyed and honored many other people in our global village. What I found, then, is that they were not so different from ordinary Americans, in any of the ways that really matter
Why the hell would they be?
They are our cousins, after all.
Many of us came from the same stock:
Italian, German, English, Irish, Dutch, Scot, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Latin American, Canadian, Spanish, Scicilian, Russian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Egyptian, Indian, Arab, from the Arab Peninsula, Persians(Iranians),Iraqis, Swedes, Danes, Finns, Norwegians...God, the list is endless....Turks, Greeks, Africans and people from the island nations in the south. Please forgive me, if I do not name every nationality. The only reason that the U.S. is anything good is because of the diversity, not in spite of it.
I understand that there are those who think that our problems are largely due to unassimilated immigrants, be they legal or illegal. Some people are of the opinion that there IS such a thing as an American culture. Oh, Puleeze!
Other than our sea shores, mountains, deserts, high deserts, plains, meadows, forests, streams and mighty, raging rivers; our beautiful country, we do not have what any one would call a cultural oneness, here. We are diverse.
The only thing we all share is our Constitution and without it we cease to be the United States of America, the nation.
Even within the sub-scultures, we are diverse.
We are a nation of diversity, who does not see, let alone understand, our own real strength, which lies in our diversity. I am not a huge fan of big cities. I like more quiet and less distractions than city life offers. That is not to say that I do not love to visit. I have a number of favorites.
The one big city, in which I ever lived, was multi-cultural. It was wonderful or so I thought at the time. There were street fairs. We could eat foods of other cultures, dance the dances of other cultures. We could talk and laugh together; smile at each other. Everyone had fun and learned and people made a little money.
After 9/11/01, I had a rare gift and opportunity to try to find out what I desired deeply to know, for real; why do they hate us? I could not find my answers here.
I just didn't buy the official line; they hate us for our life-styles and our freedoms? They hate our SUVs? So what? So do I. An aquaintence of mine called huge SUVs, "UAVs": Urban Assault Vehicles. God, it was hystericaly the truth. I hated SUVs, but I owned a small one. For the purposes of backing out of parking places, into a narrow atreet, without getting killed. (All cars should be the same size. SMALL! Cars sould be more uniform, not people.)
I went to Egypt and stayed for a month with an Egyptian, Muslim family. Briefly, what I found out is that most Arabs, Muslims did not hate us. They were fed up with some of our government's policies that effected their lives. They knew more about some of our leaders than I did. They were, to me, more hospitable and caring than many Americans would ever think to be. They did not hate us for our freedoms or our life-styles. They liked a lot of our music and our entertainment. They liked the idea of a real Democracy, but were no longer all that convinced that we had one.
Most of my friends and family, I am sure, thought, seriously, of locking me up for my own good, when I went back again, while the bombs were falling on Iraq, to help out with a family illness. In my mind and heart, I had to go, as surely as I would have to go to to the aid of anyone of my friends and family here. I have never regretted one minute of the time I spent with those people. Rather, I cherish the memories and always will.
Americans did some really strange, bizarre things in response to 9/11. Plastic- Surgeons were over-run with patients, who wanted to look good for whatever lay ahead, aprarently.
People started buying Motorhomes by the droves. I watched in amazement and, I admit, with some clinical/research curiosity.
The president told us to shop, fly, burn as much fuel as we possibly could and be vigilant. His mouth piece told us to watch what we said. His AG called everyone who breathed a word of dissent, a treasous piece of camel poop on Osama's sandals.
I kept expecting Rod Sterling to show up, any minute, but he didn't. This was not the Twilight Zone, it was Bushworld; A NeoCon, TheoCon, Corporate Hell Realm.
It remanins so today, but as with any malignancy, unchecked, it has grown more invasive and dangerous to the life of our nation, not to mention to other people all over the world.
A cancer is not growing on the presidency any more. Now it is the presidency and it is growing on the nation.
This is my country. I have served it in uniform and out. I have, I thought, always served it to its betterment; in an effort to protect liberty and self-rule for Americans, as well as the rest of the world.
I have also ventured beyond our national borders, experiencing and being charmed by so many cultures and nationalities.
In my life, I have visited, enjoyed and honored many other people in our global village. What I found, then, is that they were not so different from ordinary Americans, in any of the ways that really matter
Why the hell would they be?
They are our cousins, after all.
Many of us came from the same stock:
Italian, German, English, Irish, Dutch, Scot, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Latin American, Canadian, Spanish, Scicilian, Russian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Egyptian, Indian, Arab, from the Arab Peninsula, Persians(Iranians),Iraqis, Swedes, Danes, Finns, Norwegians...God, the list is endless....Turks, Greeks, Africans and people from the island nations in the south. Please forgive me, if I do not name every nationality. The only reason that the U.S. is anything good is because of the diversity, not in spite of it.
I understand that there are those who think that our problems are largely due to unassimilated immigrants, be they legal or illegal. Some people are of the opinion that there IS such a thing as an American culture. Oh, Puleeze!
Other than our sea shores, mountains, deserts, high deserts, plains, meadows, forests, streams and mighty, raging rivers; our beautiful country, we do not have what any one would call a cultural oneness, here. We are diverse.
The only thing we all share is our Constitution and without it we cease to be the United States of America, the nation.
Even within the sub-scultures, we are diverse.
We are a nation of diversity, who does not see, let alone understand, our own real strength, which lies in our diversity. I am not a huge fan of big cities. I like more quiet and less distractions than city life offers. That is not to say that I do not love to visit. I have a number of favorites.
The one big city, in which I ever lived, was multi-cultural. It was wonderful or so I thought at the time. There were street fairs. We could eat foods of other cultures, dance the dances of other cultures. We could talk and laugh together; smile at each other. Everyone had fun and learned and people made a little money.
After 9/11/01, I had a rare gift and opportunity to try to find out what I desired deeply to know, for real; why do they hate us? I could not find my answers here.
I just didn't buy the official line; they hate us for our life-styles and our freedoms? They hate our SUVs? So what? So do I. An aquaintence of mine called huge SUVs, "UAVs": Urban Assault Vehicles. God, it was hystericaly the truth. I hated SUVs, but I owned a small one. For the purposes of backing out of parking places, into a narrow atreet, without getting killed. (All cars should be the same size. SMALL! Cars sould be more uniform, not people.)
I went to Egypt and stayed for a month with an Egyptian, Muslim family. Briefly, what I found out is that most Arabs, Muslims did not hate us. They were fed up with some of our government's policies that effected their lives. They knew more about some of our leaders than I did. They were, to me, more hospitable and caring than many Americans would ever think to be. They did not hate us for our freedoms or our life-styles. They liked a lot of our music and our entertainment. They liked the idea of a real Democracy, but were no longer all that convinced that we had one.
Most of my friends and family, I am sure, thought, seriously, of locking me up for my own good, when I went back again, while the bombs were falling on Iraq, to help out with a family illness. In my mind and heart, I had to go, as surely as I would have to go to to the aid of anyone of my friends and family here. I have never regretted one minute of the time I spent with those people. Rather, I cherish the memories and always will.
Americans did some really strange, bizarre things in response to 9/11. Plastic- Surgeons were over-run with patients, who wanted to look good for whatever lay ahead, aprarently.
People started buying Motorhomes by the droves. I watched in amazement and, I admit, with some clinical/research curiosity.
The president told us to shop, fly, burn as much fuel as we possibly could and be vigilant. His mouth piece told us to watch what we said. His AG called everyone who breathed a word of dissent, a treasous piece of camel poop on Osama's sandals.
I kept expecting Rod Sterling to show up, any minute, but he didn't. This was not the Twilight Zone, it was Bushworld; A NeoCon, TheoCon, Corporate Hell Realm.
It remanins so today, but as with any malignancy, unchecked, it has grown more invasive and dangerous to the life of our nation, not to mention to other people all over the world.
A cancer is not growing on the presidency any more. Now it is the presidency and it is growing on the nation.
The Corporatocracy and Its Hitmen
One of the great dilemmas facing those of us who seek to reveal new and hidden truths is that entrenched language often inhibits the discourse. So it's interesting to hear John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, talking about the “corporatocracy.”
We economic hit men, during the last 30 or 40 years, have really created the world's first truly global empire, and we've done this primarily through economics, and the military only coming in as a last resort. Therefore, it's been done pretty much secretly. Most of the people in the United States have no idea that we've created this empire and, in fact, throughout the world it's been done very quietly...
[W]e use many techniques, but probably the most common is that we'll go to a country that has resources that our corporations covet, like oil, and we'll arrange a huge loan to that country from an organization like the World Bank or one of its sisters, but almost all of the money goes to the U.S. corporations, not to the country itself, corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, General Motors, General Electric, these types of organizations, and they build huge infrastructure projects in that country: power plants, highways, ports, industrial parks, things that serve the very rich and seldom even reach the poor. In fact, the poor suffer, because the loans have to be repaid, and they're huge loans, and the repayment of them means that the poor won't get education, health, and other social services, and the country is left holding a huge debt, by intention. We go back, we economic hit men, to this country and say, “Look, you owe us a lot of money. You can't repay your debts, so give us a pound of flesh. Sell our oil companies your oil real cheap or vote with us at the next U.N. vote or send troops in support of ours to some place in the world such as Iraq.” And in that way, we've managed to build a world empire with very few people actually knowing that we've done this...
Nobody wants to be able to connect the dots. So the N.S.A., the C.I.A., these types of organizations often recruit economic hit men and the jackals, the assassins, the 007 types, but they will recruit us, maybe train us, and then turn us over to a private corporation, so that you really can't make the connection, so that if I were caught at what I was doing in one of these countries, it would not reflect on our government; it would only reflect on the corporation that I worked for...
The other thing we do, Amy, and what's going on right now in Latin America is that as soon as one of these anti-American presidents is elected, such as Evo Morales, who you mentioned, in Bolivia, one of us goes in and says, “Hey, congratulations, Mr. President. Now that you're president, I just want to tell you that I can make you very, very rich, you and your family. We have several hundred million dollars in this pocket if you play the game our way. If you decide not to, over in this pocket, I've got a gun with a bullet with your name on it, in case you decide to keep your campaign promises and throw us out.”
Edwards graphically describes the 1970's assassinations of President Torrijos of Panama (he wanted Panamanians to have control of the Panama Canal) and Jaime Roldos of Ecuador (he wanted Ecuadoreans to control their own oil). Both men died in plane "accidents".
That's an easy thing to do, and incidentally, we also tried to do that to Saddam Hussein. When he didn't come around, the economic hit men tried to bring him around. We tried to assassinate him. But that was an interesting point, because he had pretty loyal security forces, and in addition he had a lot of look-alike doubles, and what you don't want to be is a bodyguard to a look-alike double and you think it's the president and you accept a lot of money to assassinate him and you assassinate the look-alike, because if you do that, afterwards your life and your family's isn't worth very much, so we were unable to get through to Saddam Hussein, and that’s why we sent the military in...
We wanted to get Saddam Hussein to really tie in to our system, and he refused to do that. He accepted our fighter jets and our tanks and our chemical plants that he used to produce chemical weapons that we knew were being used against the Kurds and the Iranians. He accepted all that, but he wouldn’t quite tie into our system in such a big way that he would bring in the huge development organizations to rebuild his country, as the Saudis did, in a Western image. And that's what we were trying to convince him to do and also to guarantee that he would always trade oil for U.S. dollars, instead of Euros, and that he would keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us. He would not go along with those things. If he had, he would still be president, Amy.
Edwards then gives a brief resumé of his big trade deal with the Saudies, as described in his book:
OPEC decided that they were going to clamp down on us, shut off our oil supplies. They didn't like our policies towards Israel, and so in the early ‘70s, the supply of oil was cut way back in this country. We had long lines of cars at the gas stations, and we were afraid we were going to go to another depression like the one that started in 1929, so the Treasury Department came to me and some other economic hit men and said, “Look, this is unacceptable.” And I give all the details of this in the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, but the short version is, they said, “Make sure that this doesn't happen again,” and we knew that the key to stopping this sort of thing was Saudi Arabia, because it controlled more oil than anyone else and the Royal House of Saud was corruptible.
So again, the short version is we put together a deal whereby the House of Saud agreed to send almost all of the money it made from selling oil all over the world back to the U.S., invest it in U.S. government securities, the interest from those securities was used by the Treasury Department to hire U.S. companies to rebuild Saudi Arabia, power plants, desalinization plants, in fact, entire cities from the desert, and in the process, to westernize Saudi Arabia, to make it more like us. And the other part of the deal was the House of Saud agreed to keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us, and we agreed to keep the House of Saud in power, and that deal still holds.
Mind you, the Saudis are now looking to China and India as new partners, as their deal with the USA becomes increasingly untenable.
Edwards says a lot of other "high people in governments and other economic hit men and jackals" now want to tell their stories too.
And I think once Americans understand what we're doing in the world and how much hatred this is generating, we will demand change. And I think history has proven that when we demand change in any area, eventually -- it takes a little time -- but we do get it.
Here's a provocative message from one of those "jackals":
“You know, this isn’t limited to other countries. This happens in your country, too. Don't you think that the assassination of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and John Lennon and others like that, and the many senators that have died in airplane crashes and other things, has sent a strong message to your politicians?”
We economic hit men, during the last 30 or 40 years, have really created the world's first truly global empire, and we've done this primarily through economics, and the military only coming in as a last resort. Therefore, it's been done pretty much secretly. Most of the people in the United States have no idea that we've created this empire and, in fact, throughout the world it's been done very quietly...
[W]e use many techniques, but probably the most common is that we'll go to a country that has resources that our corporations covet, like oil, and we'll arrange a huge loan to that country from an organization like the World Bank or one of its sisters, but almost all of the money goes to the U.S. corporations, not to the country itself, corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, General Motors, General Electric, these types of organizations, and they build huge infrastructure projects in that country: power plants, highways, ports, industrial parks, things that serve the very rich and seldom even reach the poor. In fact, the poor suffer, because the loans have to be repaid, and they're huge loans, and the repayment of them means that the poor won't get education, health, and other social services, and the country is left holding a huge debt, by intention. We go back, we economic hit men, to this country and say, “Look, you owe us a lot of money. You can't repay your debts, so give us a pound of flesh. Sell our oil companies your oil real cheap or vote with us at the next U.N. vote or send troops in support of ours to some place in the world such as Iraq.” And in that way, we've managed to build a world empire with very few people actually knowing that we've done this...
Nobody wants to be able to connect the dots. So the N.S.A., the C.I.A., these types of organizations often recruit economic hit men and the jackals, the assassins, the 007 types, but they will recruit us, maybe train us, and then turn us over to a private corporation, so that you really can't make the connection, so that if I were caught at what I was doing in one of these countries, it would not reflect on our government; it would only reflect on the corporation that I worked for...
The other thing we do, Amy, and what's going on right now in Latin America is that as soon as one of these anti-American presidents is elected, such as Evo Morales, who you mentioned, in Bolivia, one of us goes in and says, “Hey, congratulations, Mr. President. Now that you're president, I just want to tell you that I can make you very, very rich, you and your family. We have several hundred million dollars in this pocket if you play the game our way. If you decide not to, over in this pocket, I've got a gun with a bullet with your name on it, in case you decide to keep your campaign promises and throw us out.”
Edwards graphically describes the 1970's assassinations of President Torrijos of Panama (he wanted Panamanians to have control of the Panama Canal) and Jaime Roldos of Ecuador (he wanted Ecuadoreans to control their own oil). Both men died in plane "accidents".
That's an easy thing to do, and incidentally, we also tried to do that to Saddam Hussein. When he didn't come around, the economic hit men tried to bring him around. We tried to assassinate him. But that was an interesting point, because he had pretty loyal security forces, and in addition he had a lot of look-alike doubles, and what you don't want to be is a bodyguard to a look-alike double and you think it's the president and you accept a lot of money to assassinate him and you assassinate the look-alike, because if you do that, afterwards your life and your family's isn't worth very much, so we were unable to get through to Saddam Hussein, and that’s why we sent the military in...
We wanted to get Saddam Hussein to really tie in to our system, and he refused to do that. He accepted our fighter jets and our tanks and our chemical plants that he used to produce chemical weapons that we knew were being used against the Kurds and the Iranians. He accepted all that, but he wouldn’t quite tie into our system in such a big way that he would bring in the huge development organizations to rebuild his country, as the Saudis did, in a Western image. And that's what we were trying to convince him to do and also to guarantee that he would always trade oil for U.S. dollars, instead of Euros, and that he would keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us. He would not go along with those things. If he had, he would still be president, Amy.
Edwards then gives a brief resumé of his big trade deal with the Saudies, as described in his book:
OPEC decided that they were going to clamp down on us, shut off our oil supplies. They didn't like our policies towards Israel, and so in the early ‘70s, the supply of oil was cut way back in this country. We had long lines of cars at the gas stations, and we were afraid we were going to go to another depression like the one that started in 1929, so the Treasury Department came to me and some other economic hit men and said, “Look, this is unacceptable.” And I give all the details of this in the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, but the short version is, they said, “Make sure that this doesn't happen again,” and we knew that the key to stopping this sort of thing was Saudi Arabia, because it controlled more oil than anyone else and the Royal House of Saud was corruptible.
So again, the short version is we put together a deal whereby the House of Saud agreed to send almost all of the money it made from selling oil all over the world back to the U.S., invest it in U.S. government securities, the interest from those securities was used by the Treasury Department to hire U.S. companies to rebuild Saudi Arabia, power plants, desalinization plants, in fact, entire cities from the desert, and in the process, to westernize Saudi Arabia, to make it more like us. And the other part of the deal was the House of Saud agreed to keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us, and we agreed to keep the House of Saud in power, and that deal still holds.
Mind you, the Saudis are now looking to China and India as new partners, as their deal with the USA becomes increasingly untenable.
Edwards says a lot of other "high people in governments and other economic hit men and jackals" now want to tell their stories too.
And I think once Americans understand what we're doing in the world and how much hatred this is generating, we will demand change. And I think history has proven that when we demand change in any area, eventually -- it takes a little time -- but we do get it.
Here's a provocative message from one of those "jackals":
“You know, this isn’t limited to other countries. This happens in your country, too. Don't you think that the assassination of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and John Lennon and others like that, and the many senators that have died in airplane crashes and other things, has sent a strong message to your politicians?”
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