How The Bush Stole Summer Vacation
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. - George Orwell
How the Bush Stole Summer Vacation
"There's no denying that this is an oil administration, you can't talk about the career of any George Bush -- father or son -- without talking about oil." - Peter Eisner
He Said It, So It Must Be True!!!"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." Washington DC, 5 August, 2004
The United States of Oil
No administration has ever been more in bed with the energy industry -- but does that mean Big Oil is calling Bush's shots?
By Damien Cave
Nov. 19, 2001
The Bush administration's ties to oil and gas are as deep as an offshore well. President George W. Bush's family has been running oil companies since 1950. Vice President Dick Cheney spent the late '90s as CEO of Halliburton, the world's largest oil services company. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice sat on the board of Chevron, which graced a tanker with her name. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans was the CEO of Tom Brown Inc. -- a natural gas company with fields in Texas, Colorado and Wyoming -- for more than a decade.
The links don't end with personnel. The bin Laden family and other members of Saudi Arabia's oil-wealthy elite have contributed mightily to several Bush family ventures, even as the American energy industry helped put Bush in office. Of the top 10 lifetime contributors to George W.'s war chests, six either come from the oil business or have ties to it, according the Center for Public Integrity.
"There's no denying that this is an oil administration," says Peter Eisner, managing director of the nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog group that conducted the study of Bush's campaign finances. "You can't talk about the career of any George Bush -- father or son -- without talking about oil."
But talking is one thing; determining exactly how the ties to the oil industry affect domestic and foreign policy is another. How much influence does the oil industry have? Is the U.S. bombing Afghanistan in part because -- as antiwar critics have claimed -- the industry wants to clear a path for oil and gas pipelines? Will the Bush administration steadfastly avoid confrontation with Saudi Arabia -- home of 15 of the 19 suspected hijackers -- because it doesn't want to upset ExxonMobil and the other oil companies with a deep Saudi stake? Or, even more intriguingly, could the close ties between Bush and the Saudis lead to increased U.S. pressure on Israel to create a peace settlement?
Or is this too simplistic? Since at least World War II, the oil industry has often been forced by the U.S. government to serve foreign policy objectives, rather than the other way around. Presidents have generally accepted oil's economic significance, its role as the grease that makes capitalism go. But even the most conservative administrations have regularly emphasized geopolitical objectives -- Soviet containment, for example -- at the expense of oil industry interests. Aspects of Bush's energy plan suggest that even this administration will not break the give-and-take pattern.
The problem, however, is that this pattern, the so-called "cheap oil strategy" looks more and more like a failure. Foreign oil dependence has risen over the past decade while now -- with anti-American sentiment growing in the Arab world -- foreign oil supplies are looking increasingly insecure. More than ever, some kind of national policy pushing both conservation and the development of renewable energy resources seems eminently prudent, if not necessary.
And that's where the current makeup of the Bush administration becomes crucial -- not because Bush-Cheney and company plan to invade Iraq to make it safe for ExxonMobil, (although that's not totally beyond the bounds of possibility) but because these are the last men and women in the world to expect radical change from on questions related to energy. Their friends, finances, and world views are all oil-drenched.
George W.'s ties to oil don't prove that the industry decides our every foreign policy move. But they do just about guarantee, for all practical purposes, that nothing significant will change in American energy policy. With Bush-Cheney in power, oil addiction is here to stay.
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/11/19/bush_oil/index.html
Next page | Oil: It's a Bush family affair
The fusion of oil and politics is a Bush family tradition. For generations, the Bushes and their friends have been shuttling back and forth between energy industry boardrooms and Washington's hallowed halls.
Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, initiated the pattern. Shortly before winning a Connecticut Senate seat in 1952 he helped his son George raise $350,000 to start what would become Zapata Petroleum.
Sen. Bush also regularly looked out for the oil industry and his son's interests while in Washington. His biggest single favor, according to Herbert Parmet's book "George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee," came a year into his first Senate term, when he opposed legislation that would have federalized offshore resources -- including oil -- to raise money for education. In the name of states' rights and free enterprise, the bill's defeat helped both the oil companies and gave Zapata just what it needed to expand. In fact, soon after the legislation failed, Zapata moved into offshore drilling -- eventually one of Zapata's most lucrative ventures
George Bush made millions during the '50s and '60s Texas oil boom, and he also made many friends, most notably James Baker, who became Bush's company lawyer in 1963 after Zapata merged with Penn to become Pennzoil.
Bush later brought his friends to Washington, first as a representative in the House, then as head of the Republican National Committee and finally as vice president and president. He didn't stock his administration as full of oilmen and women as his son has, but like Prescott Bush, he didn't mind doing the industry's bidding either. His most public act for oil came in 1981. While serving as Ronald Reagan's vice president, he departed from the White House's official stance and visited Saudi Arabia to plead for an end to sliding prices. Bush argued that he was simply trying to protect American security interests by protecting domestic producers, who have higher costs than their Persian Gulf counterparts. But higher prices had another benefit: by protecting domestic oil jobs, they helped shore up support in Texas for what would eventually become his successful 1988 presidential campaign.
Higher prices also directly helped Bush's son, George W. Bush. George W.'s oil career started in 1978 -- 12 years after his father first entered Congress -- when several of his father's friends invested in his firm, Arbusto ("Bush" in Spanish). Unlike his father, George W. spent much of his oil career in the red. As Joe Conason pointed out in Harper's last year before the election, the company's original investors and others bailed out his firm at least three times. But after a final act of corporate CPR -- a merger with Harken Energy in 1986 -- Bush's connections to power really paid off. Two years after the merger, Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a former director of Saudi Arabia's income tax department, purchased an 11 percent stake in Harken through his company Traco International. That same year, Harken won a contract for oil-drilling in Bahrain.
"Harken had no international experience at the time," says Eisner at the Center for Public Integrity, which published a detailed account of Bush's rise to power titled "The Buying of the President: 2000." "It was their first out of country contract."
Press reports at the time questioned Bahrain's motivations. Even the normally reserved Wall Street Journal reported in 1991 that the contract "raises the question of ... an effort to cozy up to a presidential son."
The Bush family countered that the contract was well deserved. Regardless, the deal in the Persian Gulf gave Bush a direct tie to the Saudi elite and set Bush on a suddenly successful path.
"It's not just the matter of a single contract," Eisner says. "It also has to do with converting Harken into a player that was then converted into a stake in the Texas Rangers and a run for governor. It's not incidental. The Bahrain deal is central to Bush's life."
Some experts suggest that it's not necessarily a bad thing to have a presidential family so steeped in oil knowledge, given the importance of oil to both national security and the domestic economy. But Bush has shown a pervasive willingness to let oil interests define energy and environmental policy. After accepting millions from the industry during his run for governor, he signed into law tax breaks for state energy producers, and in 1997, he gave them a hand in writing their own rules. Upon hearing that Texas' state environmental agency planned to end an exemption that allowed power plants built before 1971 to avoid complying with state pollution laws, Bush tapped two people to come up with an alternative plan: Vic Beghini, an executive with Marathon Oil Inc. and Ansel Condray, an executive with Mobil.
The plan they came up with initiated a voluntary pollution reduction program that didn't punish companies for noncompliance and thus essentially failed. A study by the Environmental Defense Fund published six months after Bush announced the program revealed that only three of the 26 companies had actually cut their emissions. Two years later, under increasing public pressure, Bush signed a bill forcing power plants to cut their emissions in half by 2003 -- but the essential exemption, as the industry wanted, still stands.
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/11/19/bush_oil/index1.html
Next page | The Condoleezza Rice-Chevron-Central Asia connection
The politicos surrounding Bush also have enjoyed warm government/oil-industry connections. While Bush used his elected position to help friends in his former industry, Cheney employed past government connections to improve his own bottom line.
Iraq provides the most dramatic example. Cheney, intentionally or inadvertently, went against his own edicts in order to pad his company's profits. He told Sam Donaldson in August 2000 that, as the head of Halliburton, "I had a firm policy that I wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal." And yet, as the Financial Times eventually proved, Cheney oversaw $23.8 million in sales to Iraq in 1998 and 1999. Cheney, who collected a $36 million salary before becoming vice president, essentially profited from the destruction of Iraq that he oversaw as secretary of defense during the Gulf War. And while the oil-rig and equipment sales were legal -- a 1998 U.N. resolution gave Iraq the right to rebuild its oil industry -- Cheney's firm sold through European subsidiaries "to avoid straining relations with Washington and jeopardizing their ties with President Saddam Hussein's government," according to a November 2000 Financial Times report.
Cheney also helped Halliburton obtain a windfall of U.S. government loans. He secured $1.5 billion in taxpayer-backed financing for Halliburton -- a massive increase over the $100 million loan it received during the five-year period before Cheney took over. And while Cheney has claimed that Halliburton's rise to power had nothing to do with his political stature, State Department documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times suggest that U.S. officials assisted Halliburton both in Asia and Africa. Even the domestic defense-contracting arm of Halliburton -- Brown & Root -- saw its fortune change drastically once Cheney took over. The company booked $1.2 billion in contracts between 1990 and 1995; with Cheney at the helm, contract awards spiked to $2.3 billion between 1995 and 2000.
Other Bush administration officials have also profited from past government experience and influence. Bush's father and his then Secretary of State James Baker -- the lawyer who fought for Bush during the Florida election fiasco -- work for the Carlyle Group, an investment firm that until recently collected investments from the bin Laden family and other members of the Saudi elite. Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz sat on the board of Chevron before the arrival of Condoleezza Rice.
Rice joined the Chevron board in 1991, after serving for a year on Bush Sr.'s National Security Council. There, she earned a $35,000 annual retainer, $1,500 for every meeting she attended and stock options worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to SEC documents. She was reportedly hired for expertise in the former Soviet states, and long before U.S. planes started dropping bombs in nearby Afghanistan, she spent much of her time at Chevron working on prospective deals in the Caspian region. Chevron (with Mobil) already produces 70 percent of the oil coming out of the Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan, according to Ahmed Rashid's book, "Taliban," and the company has been working hard to secure a pipeline that would allow more oil to be produced. In 1993, with Rice on the board, the company pulled together a pipeline project to carry oil to a Russian port on the Black Sea. Russian opposition eventually postponed the plan indefinitely but Chevron still holds a 45 percent stake in the project -- and given the present state of improved Russian-American relations, many suspect that project will eventually get off the ground.
The slowly improving relations between the U.S. and Iran could also help Chevron. When negotiations over pipelines from Tengiz broke down a few years ago, Chevron turned its focus toward the Islamic theocracy, asking the Clinton State Department for a "swapping" license. Approval would have allowed oil from Tengiz to be shipped across the Caspian to Iran while, in exchange, Chevron would be able to sell an equal amount of Iranian oil that would be shipped from the Persian Gulf. The proposal was never approved, but given Rice's ties, many have suspected that Chevron will soon play a larger role in American foreign policy, whether in Iran or the Caspian.
Critics of the Bush administration point out that a stabilized Caspian region could benefit Rice's friends at Chevron, and if she returns to the board, Rice herself. They also argue that maintaining dependence on Saudi oil could benefit Cheney's old firm and Bush's father, and ultimately, the president himself when an inheritance comes his way.
But there is no clear evidence, right now, of oil company desires affecting current U.S. foreign policy. If anything, the terrorist attacks have reduced the energy industry's influence. Before Sept. 11 Saudi Arabia was reportedly pushing the U.S. to pressure Israel into Palestine peace concessions and, according to a Newsweek story, Bush was beginning to comply. But after Sept. 11, the chance that the U.S. would accede to Saudi requests evaporated, given the numerous Saudi connections to the attacks.
In that sense, the trajectory of oil influence over foreign policy has continued upon its historical path. A review of the evidence suggests that over time, the oil industry has progressively lost power. But that still doesn't mean that the current administration is likely to do anything radical to alter U.S. dependence on foreign oil -- barring the unlikely event of Bush pulling a Nixon-visit-to-China shock, and using his oil ties to force a real commitment to renewable energy and conservation.
Tuesday: George Bush may not be a puppet, but he's no groundbreaker either.
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/11/19/bush_oil/index2.html
FEDS GONE WILD PART I
The Department of Interior Oil and Gas Royalty Scandal and Its Wyoming Roots
By Laton McCartney and Rone Tempest, WyoFile, Guest Writer, 9-03-09
[snip] Minerals Management Service is, to the few people outside the energy industry who’ve ever heard of it, an obscure Interior Department agency. Yet it has an enormously important mission: leasing out onshore and offshore sites for exploitation by oil and gas companies, and collecting tens of billions of dollars in royalties from those companies. In fiscal 2008, those revenues came to a whopping $23.4 billion. Royalty payments are this country’s second largest source of income (the largest, of course, being taxes). And not incidentally, Wyoming, which gets 49 percent i of the federal royalties collected in the state, ii is the largest recipient of these revenues. In fiscal 2008, the Cowboy State received $1.27 billion dollars in federal oil, gas and coal royalties, almost twice as much as any other state.
The Lakewood branch of Minerals Management operated differently from its parent in Washington, D.C. Following the Bush administration’s oft-expressed desire to run government like a business, the Lakewood office functioned like a quasi-business, collecting royalty payments not in cash, but in “kind,” that is, in actual oil and gas. The Lakewood office then sold this oil or gas on the open market, competing with private sector traders.
Lakewood’s operations were unique in another way. The office had become a rogue enterprise, a feds-gone-wild hotbed of sex, payola, cocaine and corruption. iii Which was why Salazar’s visit was no ordinary meet-and-greet. Eight days after taking office, Salazar and his colleagues had come to Colorado to lay down the law.
“We are no longer doing business as usual,” the Stetson-wearing secretary told reporters. “There’s a new sheriff in town.”
“The President has made it clear that the type of ethical transgressions, blatant conflicts of interest, wastes and abuses that we have seen over the past eight years will no longer be tolerated,” Salazar warned Lakewood employees. He vowed to re-open a two-year-old investigation into alleged corruption and mismanagement that critics—and former Interior Department employees—claim had cost Americans billions of dollars in lost revenue.
When you read Inspector General Devaney’s 2008 report on the office, the word “tawdry” leaps to mind, astonishment not so much that Minerals Management personnel were corrupt, but how cheap they were. Devaney’s report doggedly details hundreds of industry gifts to federal Royalty-in-Kind employees: golf games, tacky little sight-seeing tours, luggage, golf bags, silver-plated trays, dip bowls, boozy Christmas parties, visits to bars, ski lift tickets, snowboarding lessons, hotel rooms, country music concerts, tailgating parties, paintball outings, drunken dinners etc., etc. Sure, it all adds up to tens of thousands of dollars, but come on!
The contempt in which the oilmen held the government officials shines up off the pages: references to Minerals Management marketers as the “MMS chicks;” e-mails damp with sexual innuendo, such as the Shell Pipeline Company official inviting the marketing specialist “girls” to “meet at my place at 6 a.m. for bubble baths and final prep. Just kidding…”
Yet the report also has its moments of pathos, as when Minerals Management marketing specialist Stacy Leyshon tells Devaney that, yes, she did sleep with a Shell Oil guy, but she didn’t have an improper “personal relationship” with him because a “one-night stand” isn’t personal. iv And what about the hurtful revelation to Minerals Management marketing specialist Crystal Edler? She thought she was dating a man from Hess Corporation, but Devaney found that the guy was putting her down on his expense account when they went out—he was working.
And then there was Greg Smith, the Lakewood office boss of the Royalty-in-Kind program. Devaney’s report observes, almost as an aside, that Smith used illegal drugs and had sex with his subordinates “in consort with industry,” which brings to mind a fairly unlovely picture. The statement that government was in bed with the oil and gas industry was not, in this case, metaphorical. [snip] - Continue reading:
FEDS GONE WILD PART II
How the ‘Royalty in Kind’ Scandal Went From Wyoming to the National Stage
The second of a two-part investigative series from WyoFile detailing the Wyoming roots of a national Department of Interior scandal.
By Laton McCartney and Rone Tempest, WyoFile, Guest Writer, 9-03-09
[snip] “The Department of the Interior is institutionally unwilling to aggressively collect the money owed to the American people by the oil industry,” stated Maloney’s report, titled A Wink and A Nod:
How the Oil Industry and the Department of Interior are Cheating the American Public and California Schoolchildren.
The report said that “for decades” Interior had given “loyal and devoted service to the petroleum industry” and had a record “replete with mismanagement, duplicity, evasions, and outright lies.”
[snip] Bush’s transition to power was conducted by his vice-president, Dick Cheney. Cheney had left his $25-million-a-year job as CEO of Halliburton, the oil-field services and construction giant co-headquartered in Dubai and Houston, to run for office in 2000. Cheney was an active executive. In an unheard-of xiii move, he “seized the initiative” to staff much of Bush’s Cabinet during the hiatus provided by the Florida recount. Cheney, not Bush, announced the appointment of several key transition team officialsxiv.
He selected David J. Gribbin III, a faithful friend from their days together in high school in Casper and at the University of Wyoming, to be the transitional liaison with Congress. To follow his mentor back into politics, xv Gribbin left his job as chief lobbyist for Halliburton. With Gribbin in place, Cheney took charge of negotiations with lawmakers about the legislative agenda.
Cheney chose Thomas Sansonetti, the Cheyenne lawyer xvi and GOP activist, to head the inner-circle team choosing top personnel for the Interior Department.
Sansonetti, who has never held elected office, xvii is a well-known quantity in the Wyoming party and preceded Diemer True as the state’s Republican organizational powerbroker: he was Republican National Committeeman, 1996-2001 (True took over in 2002) and chairman of the state Republican Party from 1983-87 (True was chair 1992-96). When Craig Thomas won the 1989 special election to replace Cheney, who had left his seat to become George H.W. Bush’s defense secretary, Sansonetti became Thomas’ aide. A member of the Federalist Society xviii, Sansonetti was also a lobbyist for the coal industry.
Although the energy industry was represented at all important levels within the incoming administration, industry lobbyists continued their own efforts. According to Newsweek, oil and gas lobbyists met at the American Petroleum Institute offices nine days before the Inauguration to draw up a “wish list” for a Bush energy plan. The list was sent over to the Bush Energy Department transition team. The expansion of the royalty-in-kind program was near the top of the list.
Membership on the Energy Department team was a political plum, and the incoming administration rewarded generous supporters with seats at the table. Men who had given the Bush campaign more than $100,000, like Tom Kuhn, head of the Edison Electric Institute, or more than $200,000, like Enron’s Kenneth Lay, became Energy transition team players. Some transitional heavyweights were not among the largest contributors, but were important in themselves, as high-level industry lobbyists. Diemer True, at this time chairman of the Independent Petroleum Producers Association, was a team member in Energy, although he and his family had given only $125,000 to state and national Republican parties and candidates in recent election cycles.
The Bush transition team, prevented from occupying the customary federal transition team quarters by the long dispute over who had won the election, had raised its own transition office money and rented a 20,000-square-foot office in a southern Virginia suburb. There it began the work of accepting résumés for 6,125 federal jobs within the new Republican administration’s gift.
To head the critical Department of the Interior, Sansonetti’s team chose Denver oil-and-gas lawyer Gale Norton, a protégée of Reagan’s first Interior Secretary, James G. Watt. Sansonetti had worked with Norton in Watt’s Interior in the ’80s. Like Watt, Norton was a Mountain States Legal Foundation attorney, and like Sansonetti, she was a member of the Federalist Society. Norton was confirmed almost immediately after Bush’s inauguration.
But her department was not fully staffed for months.xix The expansion of the royalty-in-kind program, near the top of the energy industry’s wish list, was going to have to take place in Interior’s Minerals Management Service, which lacked a new leader for some time. Thomas R. Kitso, who had replaced Cynthia Quarterman in February 1999 and stayed on after January 2001, resigned that November. Deputy secretary of Interior J. Steven Grilesxx announced that Lucy Querques Denettxxi of the Minerals Revenue Management division would be Acting Director until “further notice.” [snip] - continue reading:
The above link provides an interesting series of charts showing how Americans are NOT better off... and I, like a lot of other people, am not happy about the high cost of gas at the pump or the cost of propane, which has trippled its price (in our area and necessary) since 9/11.
I, like others, was caught up in the tragedy of 9/11 and, like the World, stood behind George Bush when he went after his family friend's son [fact, look it up], Osama.
What 'pains me' is, I did this without anybody presenting evidence 'Osama did it' and accepted what I was told by my leaders without question; besides, who WMD would NUK LER ever POISON GAS believe RAPE we TOTRURE could WMD be KILLERS led WMD astray TRIGGER by NUCLEAR CLOUD those WMD elected MISSLES by/for ANTHRAX trust WMD ?
I was brought up to believe "innocent until proven guilty" ...but hey, according to the newspapers recently, evidence gets planted and modified by the ones, one would trust sometimes, so....I'm still scratching my head over that.
What turned me into a skeptic, despite I would rather not believe my government was complicit, was a growing consensus 9/11 may have been an inside job.
One of the most troubling aspects is, why George W. Bush and his Republican administration resisted an official investigation of 9/11 for 18 months while Democrats stood by and did very little or nothing to challenge this horrendous action.
If 9/11 was an inside job, 'we need to get the fox out of the chicken house' immediately, before any more damage is done, and this involves the 'I Word' (impeachment). ...He did sort of mention 'another attack' during his April 28, 2005 Press Conference.
January 26, 1998
The Project for the New American Century, January 26, 1998, Letter to President Clinton
Despite obvious attack Iraq text, the more interesting aspect of this letter is who signed it and where they are now.
Elliott Abrams, Richard L.Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Robert B. Zoellick.
To read complete text, [click here].
June 23, 1998
Richard B. Cheney - Defending Liberty in a Global Economy - To read complete text [click here].
August 10, 2000
Shortly after Desert Storm, the Associated Press reported Cheney's desire to broaden the United States' military role in the region to hedge future threats to gulf oil resources. Cheney is CEO of Dallas-based Halliburton Co., the biggest oil-services company in the world. Because of the instability in the Persian Gulf, Cheney and his fellow oilmen have zeroed in on the world's other major source of oil--the Caspian Sea. Its rich oil and gas resources are estimated at $4 trillion by U.S. News and World Report. [ article - August 10, 2000 Cheney's Black Gold: Oil Interests May Drive US Foreign Policy]
May 15, 2001
Halliburton & KMNF [Azerbaijan] Ink 12 Year Contract
"Halliburton International Inc. and KASPMORNEFTELOT (KMNF), the marine division of the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR), have entered into a 12-year contract for a marine base and associated services to support Halliburton Sub sea offshore construction activity in the Caspian region. Halliburton Sub sea is a business unit of Halliburton Company’s Energy Services Group. "The base, with a 6,000-square metre lay down area, is located at KMNF’s Southern Basin adjacent to Caspian Shipyard. It will be primarily utilized to support Halliburton Sub sea’s catamaran crane vessel Qurban Abbasov (previously known as the Titan 4) during the restoration and upgrade of the vessel and during the forthcoming offshore construction, pipe lay and sub sea activities. The site will also be developed to provide warehouse, office and training facilities that will include advanced diver and life support technician training, utilizing the company’s 16-man modular saturation system. "The Qurban Abbasov is operated by Halliburton Sub sea in an alliance agreement with SOCAR for a period of 12 years. It will provide an advanced, stable, dynamically positioned construction platform for saturation and remote vehicle diving; flexible and bundle pipeline installation with trenching; emergency pipeline repair, subsurface well intervention with wire line; and coiled tubing. It also will be used in flotel configuration for hook-up and commissioning work. "'The acquisition of the marine base is a further indication of our commitment to the Caspian region and to the success of the partnership arrangements with SOCAR,' says Edgar Ortiz, President and Chief Executive Officer, Halliburton’s Energy Services Group." --Aylward, Marine Publishers and Halliburton Press Release, May 15, 2001.
[Ed. NOTE: The original documents are currently missing and here were their link addresses: http://www.aylward.co.uk/story1.htm - and - http://www.halliburton.com/ESG/ESGNWS/ESGNWS_051501.asp . Another interesting point is this contract runs out in 2013 and perhaps why Iran is of interest.]
August. 6, 2001
PDB Memo where Rice tells Bush,
"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."USING PLANES!
This information surfaced, ONLY, when Rice was forced to reveal the name of the document during the investigation of 9/11 and, just so everybody knows, the majority of her testimony was NOT under oath [click to read].
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001September 27, 2001
FBI Press Release shows majority of 9/11 Hijackers = Saudi Nationals [click to read]
October 4, 2001
Ted Rall Cartoon
Ted Rall cartoon October 4, 2001 This cartoon was done less than a month after 9/11 and shows a rectangle divided into four smaller rectangles. At the top it says: I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW THE PAIN IS GONE
The upper section (of each smaller rectangle) has a black background, with white print, and below them there is a cartoon.
1st small rectangle shows a cartoon of an oil man with a wrench working on an offshore oil rig.
The top caption says: AMERICANS CAN'T TAKE THIS LYING DOWN. AFTER ALL, WE'RE A SUPERPOWER!
Below, in the cartoon, it says: CASPIAN SEA, KAZAKHSTAN WORLDS LARGET OIL RESERVES.
2nd rectangle, next to the one above, shows a cartoon of two oil executives talking in a room with UNOCAL Petroleum on the wall.
The top caption says: 7,000 PEOPLE HAVE BEEN MURDERED. THEIR DEATHS MUST BE AVENGED!
Below, in the cartoon, it says: PIPELINES ARE EXPENSIVE. THE SHORTEST POSSIBLE ROUTE FROM KAZAKHSTAN TO THE SEA IS ESSENTIAL TO PROFITABILITY.
3rd rectangle, bottom left, shows a cartoon map with a pipeline running from the Caspian Sea to the Port of Karachi, across several countries the U.S. is currently fighting in.
The top caption says: TERRORISM MUST BE ERADICATED. LET'S START AT THE SOURCE!
Below, in the cartoon, it shows the: SHORTEST POSSIBLE PIPELINE ROUTE
4th rectangle, next to the one above, shows a cartoon of a gas station with a gas price sign.
The top caption says: THE TALIBAN OPPRESS WOMEN. THEY SHOULD BE OVERTHROWN!
In the above cartoon, the gas price sign says: UNLEADED 1.89 9/10 PLUS TAX
November 19, 2001
There's no denying that this is an oil administration, you can't talk about the career of any George Bush -- father or son -- without talking about oil." [November 19, 2001] - [Dark heart of the American dream]
September 4, 2002
Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11
(CBS) CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks. To read complete text, [click here].
Anonymous Cartoon
We SHELL not EXXONerate Saddam Hussein for his actions. We will MOBIL'ize to meet this threat to vital interests in the Persian GULF until an AMMICOble solution is reached. Our best strategy is BPrepared. Failing that, we ARCOming to kick your ass. == Blood for Oil?
March 20, 2003
U.S. launches cruise missiles at Saddam
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. and coalition forces launched missiles and bombs at targets in Iraq as Thursday morning dawned in Baghdad, including a "decapitation attack" aimed at Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and other top members of the country's leadership. To read complete text, [click here].
April 28, 2005Quoted text from Press Conference
Look, Kim Jong Il is a dangerous person. He's a man who starves his people. He's got huge concentration camps. And, as David accurately noted, there is concern about his capacity to deliver a nuclear weapon. We don't know if he can or not, but I think it's best, when you're dealing with a tyrant like Kim Jong Il, to assume he can. - George W. Bush
One of the reasons why I thought it was important to have a missile defense system is for precisely the reason that you brought up: Perhaps Kim Jong Il has got the capacity to launch a weapon; wouldn't it be nice to be able to shoot it down? - George W. Bush
This is a six-party talk: five of us on the side of convincing Kim Jong Il to get rid of his nuclear weapons and, obviously, Kim Jong Il believes he ought to have some. - George W. Bush
THESE QUOTES ARE SCAREY because they seem ALL TO FAMALIAR remembering George W. Bush was wrong about Iraq in his "AXIS OF EVIL" speech [click to read].
April 30, 2005
BILLIONS OF UNITED STATES TAX DOLLARS MISSING FROM IRAQ [click to read]
HALLIBURTONIRAQPROFITS[click to read]
OIL COMPANIES SHOW RECORD PROFITS [click to read]
Fraud Traced to the White
House
How California’s energy
scam
was inextricably linked to a war for oil scheme
by Katherine Yurica
http://www.yuricareport.com/PoliticalAnalysis/FraudinWhiteHouse.htm
WHY IRAQ INVADED KUWAIT
On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded and captured Kuwait. Although this invasion and the accompanying human rights violations are inexcusable, it is helpful in understanding the Gulf War to know why Iraq invaded.
When Britain drew the national borders in the Persian Gulf in 1922, they deliberately deprived Iraq of a seaport in the Gulf in the hope that Iraq could never threaten British dominance in the Gulf. Iraq has never recognized the British borders.
In 1975, the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq, with $16 million in U.S.-provided arms and supplies, forced Iraq to capitulate the Shaat al Arab waterway, Iraq's only access to its upriver port of Basra, to Iran. In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran in hopes of regaining control of the estuary, thus starting the eight-year war.
More recently, Iraq accused Kuwait of waging "economic war" with Iraq. Kuwait has nearly depleted the huge Rumailah oil field, 90% of which lies in Iraq, and 10% of which lies in a disputed border region which Kuwait invaded during the Iraq-Iran war.
Furthermore, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia gave Iraq massive financial assistance in the war against Iran, since they had much to lose if Iraq failed to block the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. After the war, Kuwait's assistance became "loans," for which they demanded repayment.
Meanwhile, Kuwait (under U.S. pressure) continued oil production far beyond the limits established by OPEC, thus lowering the price of oil. For Iraq, which relies on oil for 95% of its income, this made it very difficult to rebuild a near-bankrupt country with huge debts after years of war. It is interesting to note that many Kuwaitis have investments in the U.S. - the Emir of Kuwait alone is rumored to have invested perhaps a quarter of a trillion dollars, far greater than his oil assets - and these investments tend to profit most when the price of oil is low.
Iraq has also accused Kuwait of using its enormous foreign reserves to manipulate and weaken Iraqi currency. Iraq invaded Kuwait in response to these deliberate attempts by Kuwait to undermine the Iraqi economy. Frighteningly, these acts by Kuwait were planned by the U.S., as demonstrated by a Kuwaiti memo describing a meeting between Brigadier Ahmad Al Fahd, head of Kuwaiti security, and CIA director William Webster in November of 1989: "We agreed with the American side that it was important to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq in order to put pressure on that country's government to delineate our common border. The Central Intelligence Agency gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure, saying that broad cooperation should be initiated between us...."
HOW THE U.S. ENCOURAGED THE INVASION
In April, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, John Kelly, testified before Congress that the U.S. had no commitment to defend Kuwait. On July 25, with Iraqi troops massed on the Kuwait border, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, met with Hussein. To the embarassment of the U.S., Iraq provided minutes of the meeting to the Washington Post, which have not been disputed by the State Department.
The Ambassador told Hussein that Secretary of State James Baker had instructed her to emphasize that the U.S. has "no opinion" on Iraqi-Kuwait border disputes. She then asked him, in light of Iraqi troop movements, what his intentions were with respect to Kuwait. Hussein replied that Kuwait's actions amounted to "an economic war" and "military action against us." He said he hoped for a peaceful solution, but if not, he said, "it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death." The Ambassador's response to this clear warning was, "I have a directive from the President personally that I should work to expand and deepen relations with Iraq." She also apologized for the condemnation of Hussein's regime as a dictatorship by a journalist of the U.S. Information Agency. Glaspie later made another remark: "What we don't have an opinion on are inter-Arab disputes such as your border dispute with Kuwait...and James Baker has directed our official spokesman to reiterate this stand."
On the same day, John Kelly killed a Voice of America broadcast that would have warned Iraq that the U.S. was "strongly committed" to the defense of its friends in the Gulf. During the following week, until the invasion, the Bush administration forbade any warning to Hussein against invading, or any warning to foreigners in Iraq. According to Senator David Boren, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA predicted the invasion four days in advance. Two days before the invasion, John Kelly again testified before Congress that the U.S. had no commitment to defend Kuwait. The U.S. made no attempt to put together international resistance to an invasion.
Ambassador Glaspie later remarked to the New York Times, "I didn't think - and nobody else did - that the Iraqis were going to take ALL of Kuwait."
IS THE U.S. IN THE GULF TO DEFEND FREEDOM?
When George Bush condemns Hussein for "naked aggression," he must think that the world has no memory of U.S. history. Just a few weeks before the start of the war, while the attention of the press was averted, the U.S. took over sovereignty of Palau, a tiny country in the Pacific. After many failed efforts by the U.S. to make Palau remove the anti-nuclear clause from its constitution, they simply moved in. U.S. timing and hypocrisy were both perfect.
When Iraq attacked Iran in 1980, our response was to support Hussein with arms. The U.N. remained strangely silent about Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran.
The U.S. has a bad habit of supporting cruel dictators when it is congruent with U.S. economic interests. The U.S. occasionally helps an oppressive dictatorship overcome a popular democratic movement (Nicaragua and Chile are good recent examples,) because dictatorships are easier to control. A U.S. supported dictator will receive aid while he cooperates, and will be replaced when he gets out of hand. Witness Noriega in Panama, or Marcos in the Philippines. Saddam Hussein is just another chapter in a novel.
In 1974, the island of Cyprus was invaded by Turkey with the help of U.S. tax dollars. The atrocities committed by Turkish soldiers resemble those committed by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, and 2000 people were killed. Forty percent of the island is still under Turkish domination. Although the U.N. condemned the invasion, no action was taken. Israel invaded Lebanon, killed 20,000 people, and still occupies southern Lebanon. The U.N. condemned the invasion in numerous resolutions, but no action was taken. In spite of overwhelming international support for the U.N. resolutions against Israel's occupation of the Palestinian and Arab territories, no action has been taken. Every U.N. response to Indonesia's rape of East Timor was blocked by the U.S., although 200,000 people were slaughtered. The U.S. still gives Indonesia aid. The list goes on and on. U.S. justice is very selective.
History shows us that ethics have no weight in U.S. foreign policy, except as a line to convince U.S. citizens that a war is just. The real motives of U.S. foreign policy are always economic. To quote Dr. Joanna Santa Barbara, "This is how superpowers and regional powers operate, not in sporadic spasms of moral aberration, but all the time."
Historically, an almost infallible method of finding out which of two almost equally vile groups is the worst is to look for which one the U.S. government is supporting. If this is not the case in the Gulf (and this is not clear,) then it is purely by chance. Certainly, the governments of both Iraq and Kuwait are famous for their human rights abuses in their own countries. Kuwait is a monarchy in which women are not accorded reasonable human rights, slavery still exists, and 70% of the residents are foreign labor who are poorly treated and are not given the opportunity to become citizens.
Of course, even if the Kuwaiti government were more oppressive than the Iraqi government, this would not justify Iraq's invasion and human rights abuses. It is the residents of Kuwait who suffer most, and they are not usually to blame for their government's behavior. (In any argument, it is important to separate a country's people from its government - witness George Bush' blindness when he refers to the carpetbombing of tens of thousands of relatively innocent Iraqi conscripts as "kicking Saddam's ass.")
Bush' claims that he is defending freedom (by reinstating a monarchy) is not taken seriously by any of the peoples of the Gulf. For instance, Noha Ismail of the Arab Women's Council said in In Pittsburgh, "We know that America is not there out of love for the Kuwaitis and Saudis. In fact, America's contempt for the Arab world is very evident. We're not stupid; we may be Third World, but we're not stupid."
IS THE U.S. IN THE GULF TO DEFEND CHEAP OIL?
No. The financial cost of the war is far, far greater than the cost of expensive oil.
In fact, expensive oil is not entirely bad. High oil prices often accrue to U.S. firms. Furthermore, the U.S. produces half the oil it consumes, and the collapse of oil prices left the U.S. oil states - Louisiana, Arizona, Alaska, and Texas - in financial trouble. Both President Bush and Secretary of State Baker are oil men. They like high oil prices.
Also, other industrialized economies like Europe and Japan are more dependent on foreign oil than the U.S., so high oil prices actually help the U.S. against its major competitors.
Bush is probably quite happy that most objectors to the war think the issue is cheap oil, because his real motives remain obscure.
IS THE U.S. IN THE GULF TO PREVENT ANOTHER HITLER?
Iraq is a country which just failed to win a long, depleting war with Iran. It is not comparable to WWII Germany. Iraq has 17 million people, not 70 million. Iraq is economically broke and in debt, not economically strong as Germany was Iraq only has power because the U.S. financed it over the past ten years.
In any case, if the U.S. is serious about opposing Hitlerite territorialism, it should start with itself.
WHY IS THE U.S. IN THE GULF?
In part, the war is about control of oil. Not necessarily cheap oil, mind you. However, one of the few areas of worldwide economic control still maintained by the U.S. is oil. Having the price of oil controlled by the governments of countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait is as good as having it controlled from Wall Street.
The President's son, George Bush Jr., is director and major stockholder of Harken Energy Corporation of Dallas, which holds huge drilling rights in the Persian Gulf country of Bahrain, a small island nation just miles from where U.S. troops are stationed in Saudi Arabia.
Nevertheless, this isn't the full explanation. After all, the U.S. already controlled Arab oil prices; why did they encourage Iraq to invade Kuwait?
Simply put, George Bush wanted a war from the beginning. His attitude and behavior bear this out. He has refused to negotiate; he moved in a huge number of troops very quickly; he did not give economic sanctions a chance; and he expressed great concern that others might try to "defuse the crisis." The U.S. went to a great deal of trouble to twist the U.N.'s arm enough to put forth a vaguely worded resolution which might conceivably authorize force in the Gulf. The objectives are further militarization of the U.S. economy, and prevention of the conversion of the economy to peaceful, human-oriented purposes.
Currently, 26% of the national budget is for defense; but if all defense related expenses are added, experts estimate the sum is between one-half and two-thirds of the budget. This is a huge amount of money, and the military and defense-related industries are intent on keeping it. Thus, the military went out of its way to cause this war. The idea is to use enormous military expenditures to ease U.S. economic slumps, while reducing civilian and social programs as much as possible. This helps draw in huge amounts of money from other nations, also.
In 1990, the global arms trade was $50 billion. About $30 billion of this was provided by the U.S. and Soviet Union. More recently - less than six weeks after the invasion - the Pentagon proposed the largest sale of arms ever: $21 billion of arms to Saudi Arabia. This deal is affectionately known as the "Defense Industry Relief Act of 1990."
If one needs a sign that the U.S. is losing its superpower status, consider that the U.S., which traditionally has paid other countries to fight its wars, has changed roles and is now begging for payment. On January 25, Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) convened a press conference to publicly pressure U.S. allies to increase their donations, saying that the American people would judge them severely if they did not. At the time of this writing, Kuwait has donated $7 billion to the war effort, and pledged an additional $13.5 billion; Saudi Arabia has donated $1.6 billion plus $1.2 billion a month in fuel and lubricants; Japan has donated $2.2 billion and pledged an additional $9 billion; Germany has donated $3.5 billion and pledged an additional $5.5 billion. Many other countries have given smaller amounts.
Most of this money goes into the U.S. economy, and goes into the defense industry.
Operation Desert Shield cost an estimated $30 billion, and Desert Storm is costing about half a billion per day. This money is in addition to the annual defense budget. The administration is against a war tax, so whatever isn't paid for by other countries will likely be added to the deficit.
Readers who think it ludicrously cynical that the U.S. would invite a war solely for this purpose need only look as far as the Vietnam War, where the Johnson administration invented an attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on an American destroyer as a justification to start a war. That war, like the Gulf War, was characterized by a total unwillingness on the part of the U.S. to enter any negotiations, except the issuing of ultimatums.
The Korean War, where U.S. soldiers died defending one of the world's most barbaric police states against "naked aggression," gives us even more compelling evidence. National Security Council document NSC-68, which was adopted in 1950 and accidentally released to the public in 1975, proposed to bolster the declining U.S. post-WWII economy by military expansion. Unable to convince Congress to make massive military allocations, President Truman commanded U.S. and South Korean forces to invade and capture North Korea. (The U.N. resolution under which U.S. forces were fighting called only for "repelling" aggression from the North.) As expected, China entered the war to defend North Korea. Truman declared a state of national emergency and claimed (falsely) that the danger was created by the Soviet Union. Congress more than tripled the defense budget, and the resulting war economy has continued to this day (justified by the spectre of "International Communism.")
The problem with driving the U.S. economy this way is that it only benefits those who profit directly. Militarization of the economy means an end to many social programs, and a huge expansion of the third world that already exists right here in the U.S. Of the industrialized nations, the U.S. has one of the worst rates of homelessness, poverty, illiteracy, and infant mortality. These problems are the natural results of a war economy, and are much less prominent in countries like Japan and Germany, which have been demilitarized since WWII, and enjoy stronger economies than the U.S. as a result.
Of course, the president has other motives, like recovering from the bad press created by the Savings and Loan scandals before the next election. War may be just the ticket. After a three-day meeting of the Republican National Committee, Clarke Reed of Mississippi said, "Politically, it's gangbusters. The President has more support than I've ever seen." In addition, the war will likely enable the U.S. to establish a permanent military presence in the Gulf.
WHERE DID IRAQ GET ALL THAT MILITARY POWER?
From us, of course. The allies, most prominently the U.S., have given Iraq huge amounts of aid and arms. Right now, our boys are being killed by the arms we manufactured with our factories and bought for Iraq with our tax dollars.
The U.S. gave extensive aid and arms to Iraq throughout the Iraq-Iran war, and was providing agricultural credits right up to the day of the invasion of Kuwait. Henry Gonzalez, chairman of the House Banking Committee, charged that one Atlanta-based bank along extended $3 billion in credit to Iraq. "There is no question but those $3 billion are actually financing the invasion of Kuwait," he added. Iraq has also received or purchased weapons and equipment from Germany, the U.K., France, Italy, the Soviet Union, and many others.
CAN HUSSEIN BE NEGOTIATED WITH?
Yes, but Bush can't. Iraq, and other Arab nations, have repeatedly attempted to initiate negotiations since the invasion. These offers have been repeatedly dismissed without discussion by Bush, and were rarely reported by the U.S. press. All evidence seems to suggest that Bush has been stubbornly intent on war from the beginning. After the release of the hostages in Iraq, Bush chillingly remarked that Hussein's concession removed one more obstacle from the U.S. course of action.
Iraq wants their share of the Rumailah oil fields, and two islands giving it a port on the Gulf. Says George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley, "President Bush has spoken of this as 'rewarding aggression,' using the Third-World-Countries-As-Children metaphor, where the great powers are grown-ups who have the obligation to reward or punish children so as to make them behave properly. Instead of seeing Iraq as a sovereign nation that has taken military action for economic purposes, the President treats Iraq as if it were a child gone bad."
James Baker has stated that negotiations will take place only after Iraq physically withdraws from Kuwait. This is not negotiation; this is an ultimatum. This "formula for humiliation" of Hussein is another sign of Bush' desire for war. In fact, before Bush attacked, Barbara Ehrenreich stated that she had found out that the Pentagon's "nightmare scenario" was that Saddam would back down and that war would be averted.
As recently as Jan. 28, the U.S. and U.K. flatly opposed, for the third time, requests by groups of Gulf countries to have peace discussed in the U.N. Security Council.
WHAT SHOULD WE HAVE DONE?
The consensus among the Gulf countries is that the invasion is an Arab dispute which would have been solved by the Arab countries without any need for U.S. involvement. Contrary to the administration line, economic sanctions would likely have worked. In fact, Bush was deathly afraid that they would. If sanctions had worked, they would have delegitimized militarism. This is why it is the Pentagon's "nightmare scenario." Every member of the U.S. military elite has a budget to defend, and has to justify his own existence. (This is why foreign policy decisions should never be made by members of the military.)
We should take a lesson from history, namely Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, to which the newly formed League of Nations responded pathetically. Mussolini later confessed that, had the League made good on its threats to impose economic sanctions, he would have been forced to withdraw.
Some will argue that, even if the U.S. is liberating Kuwait for the wrong reasons, it is still the right thing to do. My response is that, if the U.S. were to liberate every unfair conquest, it would go broke long before it succeeded, even if it restricted itself to those territories more deserving of liberation that Kuwait.
One cannot simply look at Iraq and Kuwait; one must look at the entire world. The U.S. image as global policeman is impractical because there are too many criminal states and too little money to attack them all. Other methods, such as sanctions, are just as effective, far cheaper, and kill far fewer people.
Of course, the other thing we should have done is to demilitarize the economy and create a peace dividend. U.S. tax dollars should be spent on U.S. citizens, not on other nations' wars. This is the real point which peace activists should be making. If the U.S. defense budget were used purely for defense, not offense, and if it were reduced to 10% of what it is now (still far more than the U.S. actually needs to defend itself,) and if we slowly switched from a military to a commercial economy, the amount of money available for social purposes would effectively double. University education could be free, medical and day care would be available to everyone, housing and jobs would be plentiful, poverty and the accompanying violence would diminish, and we could again compete economically with Japan and Europe. Unfortunately, the military doesn't want to lose their affluence, and the military is calling all the shots.
THE MEDIA
"Naturally the common people don't want war...but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along.... All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." - Hermann Goering, 1936
Pentagon censorship of reporting from the Gulf has kept the war bloodless and antiseptic. Reporters can only travel in pools, accompanied at all times by a military escort, and all battlefield dispatches and photographs must pass a security review. This allows the Pentagon to break important information first, or to censor information entirely. It also allows them to control the mood of the articles.
Jane Kirtley of the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press told of an instance where "a military censor wanted to change the word 'giddy' to 'proud' in a story describing some pilots. That has nothing to do with national security. That's spin control." Similarly, a rule against televising soldiers in pain or disfigurement has nothing to do with security. This rule is to prevent the press from undermining popular support for the war.
Nevertheless, in a country where 90% of newspapers are Republican-owned, it is not surprising that press self-censorship is as strong as military censorship. NBC is owned by General Electric (a major defense contractor,) CBS is partly owned by Westinghouse (a major defense contractor,) and ABC is owned by Capital Cities, which has interlocking directorships with Texaco, ITT, and United Technologies. Fred Gustafson of In Pittsburgh asks us why "so much of the visual coverage of the Gulf war looks like a series of advertisements for military hardware." It is.
It is only natural that these companies do not want their broadcasts to show too much coverage of war objectors. As a result, few U.S. citizens are aware of how large the anti-war movement is. The news consists of lots of quotes from government officials, and very little opinion from those opposed. Television debates show conservatives arguing with ultra-conservatives. If some of the facts in this article come as a surprise to you, it's because the mainstream media chose not to tell you.
DEAD PEOPLE
German General Manfred Opel claimed around January 23 that there were already 300,000 dead in Iraq. This information is dubious and unconfirmable, but U.S. carpetbombing of Iraqi troops has probably brought the death count into the tens of thousands. The true numbers are unpredictable, because the Pentagon will not release estimates. However, a British officer stated that the bombs dropped on Iraq in the first three weeks of war exceeded the total tonnage dropped by the allies during World War II.
The tendency to think of Iraq as a single entity - as when the President says "We have to get Saddam out of Kuwait" - ignores the reality that thousands of troops, most of whom are conscripts, and likely a greater number of citizens, will die. The fact that they are forced to take orders from a government which we currently consider to be the enemy does not make their lives any less valuable than the lives of U.S. troops.
The apparent success of the air war is illusory. Since Iraq never had a significant air force or centralized communication system, the U.S. has accomplished little. We can learn a lesson from the Korean war, which began similarly, with a complete U.S. air victory. Yet when the ground war began, and the U.S. had complete domination of the air, the military was consistently surprised by how little effect their bombing had in biasing the ground war.
The U.S. ground troops will not have a sure victory. The Iraqi troops' strength is in their ground forces, artillery, and engineering, which were accumulated and honed through the long war with Iran. They may lose, but they will likely kill tens or hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. furthermore, ex-CIA agent Philip Agee claims that "The Korean crisis was deliberately prolonged in order to establish military expenditures as the motor of the U.S. economy...we will probably see this with the Gulf." U.S. expectations of a short war sound like those which accompanied the outset of the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
Of course, things will be far worse if other countries join Iraq. Saddam Hussein has popular support of the people of Jordan, Pakistan, and various other Arab countries, though he is not supported by their respective governments. If war spreads through the mideast, millions may die.
THE ENVIRONMENT
As of this writing, there have been three separate oil slicks in the Gulf. The first was caused by damage to oil facilities in the border town of Khafji, and is responsible for the TV pictures of dying cormorants washing up on Saudi beaches. It also threatens a major Saudi desalinization plant. U.S. and Saudi authorities have confirmed that U.S. shelling caused this damage. The other two, and much larger, slicks were the deliberate work of Saddam Hussein. (Oddly enough, reports showing pictures of the dead birds only mention the Iraqi-caused slicks.)
The second spill is the largest in history, covering 350 square miles of the Gulf. The environmental consequences of the spills will be terrible. The exchange of water with the Indian Ocean, necessary to disperse the oil, is very slow. The oil will not disperse for years, and mud flats will be irreparably destroyed. Much of the Gulf's marine life will disappear.
After the famous Exxon Valdez spill, which was small by comparison, Exxon hired over 11,000 workers to clean up the Alaskan shoreline, and even then the damage was extensive. No such mobilization is considered feasible in the Gulf.
Nonetheless, this could soon seem relatively unimportant. Dr. Abdullah Toukan, Secretary-General of the High Council of Science and Technology in Jordan demonstrated computer models of a "nuclear winter" scenario if Iraq were to set fire to up to 700 oil wells in Kuwait while retreating. According to Environmental Engineer Dr. John Cox, "There are not more than four or five teams of firefighters in the world capable of putting out oil wells." The fires could rage for years.
As a result of one burning well, "Black Rain" has already fallen on Iran. Dr. Toukan claims that the hydrocarbon cloud is deadlier than any of Hussein's biological or chemical weapons. According to Dr. Matthew Meselson, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Modelling at Harvard, "If there was a temperature inversion and there was a big release, and if there was a slow wind driving that over a population center, then you would kill everything from insects on up that doesn't have a gas mask."
If enough wells were fired, Dr. Toukan claims that the resulting cloud will cover an area the size of the United States and circle the earth for months. Highly toxic acid rain could ruin crops and contaminate water worldwide. Dr. Carl Sagan, Dr. Paul Cruizen, Joe Farman, and Dr. Bernard Lown endorse Dr. Toukan's warning.
FINAL THOUGHTS
In January, a group of 14 international jurists decided that a U.N. Security Resolution authorizing force against Iraq was invalid because China, a permanent member, had abstained from voting. The U.S. has also ignored the U.N.'s Military Staff Committee Article 46, which states that "plans for the application of armed force shall be made with the assistance of the Military Staff Committee." Furthermore, the U.S. has been accused of violating the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Even when the war is won, the U.S. will have lost credibility as an international peacekeeper, and gained the long-term hatred of the Arab world.
Jonathan Shewchuk -"The Student Union" newspaper - Carnegie Mellon University
This article appeared in the February 14, 1991 issue of Carnegie Mellon University's alternative student paper, "The Student Union." This article summarizes a lot of important information from a large number of sources, and a useful education for those who haven't been able to follow the details of American foreign policy in the Gulf. Please feel free to reprint this article in student papers, leaflets, electronic media, or otherwise. I think that it is important to get this information out to as much of the public as possible, and I greatly appreciate all efforts to circulate it.
Bush's
War of Terror, 9/11. Part 7.
August 30, 2005 02:18 AM EST
By Deanna Spingola
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/article.html?id=7875
[elided]
One very skilled good guy was FBI agent extraordinaire John P. O'Neill, formerly the Director of Counterterrorism in the New York office. He was an absolute expert on our archenemy/terrorist, Osama bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian. John O'Neill was obsessive in his bin Laden investigations. He spent long hours and demanded a great deal from himself. He was flamboyant, energetic and an effective, brilliant investigator. He felt that it was possible to destroy the Al Qaeda network but that the work had to begin in Saudi Arabia - where else if that is where Osama was from. However, in January 2001, incoming president, George W. Bush, immediately stopped all attempts by John O'Neill in his investigation of Saudi and bin Laden connections.
There are very good reasons why Bush hindered the investigations. George W. Bush had a long term business relationship with Salem bin Laden, the older half brother of Osama and the head of one of the world's biggest construction companies. His company, which he took over after the death of his father in 1972, helped to build the U.S. airfields during the first gulf war. Salem bin Laden was an investor in George W. Bush's oil company - Arbusto Energy Company in Texas. Another one of Bush's financial backers was James Bath, a Houston aircraft broker who also had ties to Salem bin Laden. In fact, it was on behalf of Salem bin Laden that James Bath purchased the Houston Gulf Airport.
Salem, a very experienced pilot, died in an unfortunate "freak" plane crash near San Antonio on 29 May 1988. Arbusto later became Bush Exploration when George H. W. Bush became vice president. The company was close to financial collapse in September 1984 when it merged with Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation owned by William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds. They immediately made George W. Bush president of the company and gave him over 13% of the stock. Spectrum merged with Harken Energy in 1986 and in 1990 received a huge contract with the government of Bahrain to drill for off-shore oil which tiny Harken had never before done. This was possibly at the request of President George H. W. Bush (1989-1993) through the Saudi government with whom President Bush was closely allied. The unsuccessful project was soon abandoned.
Prior to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, George W. Bush sold his 212,140 shares of Harken stock on 20 June 1990. They sold at $4 a share for a total of $848,560 which was $318,430 more than they were worth. George is just really lucky that people were looking the other way when this insider trading occurred. Heck, Martha Stewart wasn't even accused of insider trading but was guilty of lying about it. I suppose this suggests that there are laws for the politically connected and then there are laws for successful business women which may be the same as the laws for the really regular folks. A book entitled: Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President was written by James Howard Hatfield and gives more details about this. Unfortunately this author will not be able to supply any more details than what is in the book as he was found dead on 18 July 2001 at the age of 43 in a motel room from an apparent prescription drug overdose, an open and shut case - no police need investigate!
[elided]
HIGH
GAS PRICES FORCE CHANGES
[The above original article is no longer available at:
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/24-04222005-479340.html
and here is what it said:
High Gas Prices Force Changes
By WILL LESTER
Published: Friday, April 22, 2005
WASHINGTON -- Half the people in the country say record-high gas prices are starting to cause them problems. Who's to blame? Americans point a finger at the oil companies, foreign nations that control the oil supply, and politicians.
More than half say they're cutting back on driving, and many plan to stay closer to home on their summer vacations.
An Associated Press-AOL poll found 51 percent of those surveyed say that if gas prices remain high for the next six months it will cause a financial hardship for them. Thirty percent of those polled classified the hit as "serious," according to the survey conducted by Ipsos-Public Affairs for the AP and AOL News.
"You have to decide -- gas, groceries, medicine," said Marcia Cain of Indianapolis, who is semi-retired. "I'm on limited income. I don't go out as much -- eating out, going to listen to jazz. It uses gas you don't want to use."
Cain paid $2.15 per gallon this week after paying $2.35 per gallon the week before. "It aggravates me, but there's not much I can do about it," she said.
High global oil prices have pushed the cost of regular gasoline for U.S. motorists to about $2.21 per gallon, with prices ranging from an average of $2.64 in California to about $2 in Oklahoma, according to the auto group AAA. Prices are expected to remain above $2 nationally through the summer.
Americans spread the blame around, with 29 percent blaming the oil companies, 24 percent blaming foreign governments that dominate oil reserves and 23 percent saying politicians. Eight percent blame the high prices on "environmentalists who want to limit oil exploration," while 6 percent blame "people who drive gas-guzzling vehicles."
Anxiety about gasoline prices comes as President Bush is pressing Congress to approve energy legislation that includes tax breaks and subsidies, mostly for energy companies, and would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil development. The House passed its version of the bill Thursday.
The president gets low marks from the public for his handling of the nation's energy problems, with 62 percent saying they disapprove. When he first took office, people were more inclined to say he would handle energy problems effectively.
Many people, 41 percent, say gas prices are making them seriously consider purchasing a more fuel-efficient vehicle.
Sales of big trucks and SUVS are off at General Motors. And purchases of Ford's largest SUVs -- the Excursion, Expedition and Explorer -- all fell by more than 24 percent in the first three months of the year.
Automakers that produce hybrid cars that run on a combination of electricity and gas are reporting strong interest from consumers.
Seth Miller, who lives in Sumter, S.C., and serves in the Air Force, spent almost $80 at $2.10 a gallon the last time he filled up his Chevy Silverado truck. He has considered getting something that would be less of a gas guzzler.
"If it were feasible for me to buy another (more fuel-efficient) vehicle and keep my truck, I would," Miller said.
The survey found gas prices have prompted 58 percent to reduce their driving, 57 percent have cut back on other expenses and 41 percent have changed vacation plans to stay closer to home.
"We're going to end up with a couple of short trips," said Tom Brewer, a father of three from Cable, Ohio. "We will stay within two or three hours from home.
Dermot Gately, a New York University economics professor, said it takes time for consumers to feel the full impact of gas prices.
"The next time they buy a vehicle -- in two or three years -they may be more careful to get a more fuel-efficient one," he said. "It's a relatively slow adjustment."
The Associated Press-AOL poll was based on telephone interviews with 1,000 adults from all states except Alaska and Hawaii. The interviews were conducted April 18-20 by Ipsos-Public Affairs. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Tax cuts were devoured
by rising fuel prices
and funneled to BIG OIL;
leaving one to ask,
Who Is Making A Fortune on Oil & Gas ?
http://www.davidicke.net/newsroom/america/usa/092001p.html
THEY RETURNED
THEY Took Your Jobs
THEY Took Your Homes
THEY Took Your Money
THEY Started Illegal Wars
THEY Destroyed the Economy
THEY Murdered Women & Children
THEY Put Martha Stewart & Tommy Chong In Jail
and... THEY
Held the Teachers Accountable!
This EVIL
good ol' boy network
Brought Disgrace to the United States
with Republican/Democrat
Senate/Congress/Supreme Court Approval,
AND WALK FREE TODAY.
Nobody Listens the First Time Around
None of the Above
Should Be On Voter Ballots
http://www.nobodyforpresident.org/
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Here is what the article said:
The Bush Family 'Oiligarchy'
Part Four: At the Candidate's Ear
By Sam Parry, August 20, 2000
Many of George W. Bush’s senior foreign policy advisers also have close ties to the oil industry.
Condoleeza Rice, George W.’s chief foreign policy aide and leading candidate to serve as his national security adviser, has been a director of Chevron Corp. since 1991. Rice is currently in charge of public policy for Chevron’s board of directors, which has used her expertise in Russian issues to help Chevron navigate its way to investments in the Caspian Sea oil fields.
In 1993, Rice was granted a rare honor when Chevron named an oil tanker after her.
Lawrence Eagleburger, a seasoned Bush counselor who held top State Department posts under George W.’s father, is a director of Halliburton Corp., the world’s largest oil field services company.
When looking for a running mate, George W. also turned to Halliburton. He asked Dick Cheney, Halliburton’s chairman and chief executive, first to vet other candidates and later to take the job. With Cheney at Halliburton’s helm for the past five years, the Dallas-based company grew into a global juggernaut, now with two-thirds of its business overseas. It has business in nearly 130 countries, counts about 700 wholly and partly owned subsidiaries, employs more than 100,000 workers worldwide, and boasts a 1999 income of $15 billion. [AP, July 26, 2000]
Halliburton's global network of investments includes projects in politically volatile areas, some with savage human rights records. Other countries, where Halliburton has subsidiaries, have come under criticism for bank secrecy.
The nations where Halliburton does business include oil-producers such as Nigeria, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Iran, Libya, Angola and Russia. The company’s roster of subsidiaries also lists companies in offshore banking havens, such as the Cayman Islands, Barbados, Panama, Cyprus and Vanuatu. [Halliburton’s annual report, March 2000]
While the political Cheney might have worried about the nature of U.S. business ties to some of these countries, Cheney the oilman apparently sees nothing wrong with lucrative investments in these places, even though Iran and Libya remain on the State Department’s list of terrorist states.
As politician-Cheney promotes the need for a missile defense system in the U.S. for fear that “rogue” states might develop missiles powerful enough to threaten American cities, oilman-Cheney has negotiated Halliburton investments in some of those very countries and has criticized the use of economic sanctions as a tool of U.S. foreign policy.
During Cheney’s tenure, Halliburton built up operations in Nigeria despite the country’s pattern of human rights violations. Halliburton’s subsidiaries signed contracts with Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron, two companies that have been at loggerheads with Nigerian indigenous groups in the Niger Delta.
In April 2000, Brown & Root Energy Services, a business unit of Halliburton, was selected by Shell Petroleum Development Co. of Nigeria to work on the development of an offshore oil and gas facility, the first of its kind for Shell. The deal, valued at $300 million, has been questioned by those who have worked to hold Shell accountable for its pollution and notorious human rights record in Ogoniland in the Niger Delta.
Shell has been involved in oil exploration and export in Nigeria for more than 40 years, much of it in the fertile lands belonging to the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta. During this period, Shell’s activities led to repeated environmental calamities, caused by oil spills, noxious gas flares, cleared forests, despoiled farmland and pipeline blowouts.
Shell’s operations and the money they generated for the military government of Sani Abacha earned Shell free rein in its operations. Gen. Abacha’s government used force to crush popular protests against the oil industry throughout the Niger Delta.
Just five years ago, in November 1995, the year Cheney joined Halliburton, renowned writer and environmental advocate Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his colleagues were hanged by the Abacha government for their efforts to prevent Shell from continuing to poison the environment of the Niger Delta.
It is estimated that more than 2,000 people have been murdered for their involvement in protests against Shell’s activities in the Delta. Most of those murdered were Ogoni who had rallied behind Saro-Wiwa in the early 1990s.
In 1999, Gen. Abacha died under mysterious circumstances that have yet to be fully clarified. An interim government gave way to a popularly elected administration headed by former Nigerian Gen. Obasanjo. The transition to democracy in Nigeria has led to renewed hope that tensions in the Niger Delta will ease. Still, inequality and poverty are rampant.
In recent weeks, desperate Nigerians caused deadly explosions when they tapped pipelines to siphon oil for sale in the open market. These explosions, while they can’t be blamed directly on the oil companies, are caused by the crushing poverty faced by many Nigerians, especially in the Niger Delta. Halliburton and its business allies have turned a blind eye to this inequality created in part by the exploitation of the area's oil.
In July 1997, an incident occurred in the Niger Delta that should have set off alarms in Halliburton executive suites. A youth by the name of Gidikumo Sule was killed by the Mobile Police, notorious for their brutal tactics. Sule was among dozens protesting Chevron in a dispute involving a Chevron contractor. That contractor was Halliburton.
The versions of the story vary, but what is known is that a group of youths trying to send a message to Chevron stopped a barge owned by Halliburton, blocking access to a Chevron facility. The youths were apparently protesting the fact that Chevron had failed to hire any local workers for a project.
Mobile Police units were sent in to break up the protests and in the ensuing confrontation, the police fired at the youths killing Sule. [See The Price of Oil, Human Rights Watch,
http://www.hrw.org/hrw/reports/1999/nigeria/Nigew991-08.htm .]
After the incident, Halliburton, which owned the barge at the center of the controversy, increased its business dealings in the area.
Maybe This Will Help You Understand What Republicans Did, with Democrat Support:
BBC (Before Bush Jr./Cheney) - 1999 - Oil = $17 per barrel
ABC (After Bush Jr./Cheney) - Sept. 2011 - Oil = $115 per barrel
dahbud's HOME PAGE
Time for a Corporate Death Penalty
by Bruce A. Dixon
There are more than 40 federal offenses for which the death penalty can be applied to human beings, most of them connected to homicide of one kind or another. But countless homicides committed by the artificial persons we call corporations go unpunished every day. Apparently “personal responsibility” applies only to humans who are not operating behind the legal shield of corporate personhood. - Continue Reading
