More "strange feelings" about Airbus...
A big fish in the sky?
380 = 11

Between Dubai and NY only

How about this one being part of grand transportation scheme to cart hundreds of
people off to places far away never to return - they don't have to travel such
distances to achieve it but who knows?
Or maybe it's to transport world's elite while we remain grounded and starving.

EADS is Airbus parent company
European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co - NV
On Bd of Directors sit people ( whole list with explicit details ) with associations
like Hollinger, Halliburton, etc.
At this stage in NWO agenda I doubt super air flights are being designed to promote
mass vacation & travel since we're all supposed to be penniless and destitute anyway -
huddled in tent cities eating GMO foods and
getting sick and dying.


FLIGHT SCHEDULE
A380 flights will be operational from 8th August 2008 on Emirates flight EK 201 from Dubai to New York JFK International Airport (Sunday/Wednesday/Friday) and on Emirates flight EK 202 from New York JFK International Airport to Dubai (Sunday/Wednesday/Friday), with inaugural flights between New York JFK International Airport and Dubai on 1st and 3rd August 2008

EADS N.V. - EADS North America completes its board of directors

EADS North America completes its board of directors

• Influential EADS North America Board represents continued commitment to meeting U.S. customer requirements

Washington, D.C., September 17, 2003

EADS North America, the U.S. holding company for EADS – the second largest aerospace company in the world – Wednesday announced that its Board of Directors has reached its full complement. The Board is complete with the addition of Rear Admiral Gerald F. Woolever, USCG (Ret.), who was elected this week.

The Board consists of 13 individuals knowledgeable about EADS and the U.S. market, and is led by Chairman of the Board Ralph Crosby and Vice Chairman Manfred von Nordheim. Seven of the Board members also serve full-time roles for EADS or EADS business units, while six hold posts outside of EADS.

The Board of Directors is structured to correspond to all of the sectors in which EADS is active, including defense, homeland security, telecommunications, services, and space. The Board's expertise is broad-based, and matches market requirements with capability and background.

Philippe Camus and Rainer Hertrich, the CEOs of EADS stated: "EADS is committed to providing the most advanced, high-quality products and systems for the U.S. market, and also for assembling the most prominent and respected teams in the industry. We are proud to have such a distinguished group on the EADS North America Board, and view the Board's creation as another step in our long-term commitment to the U.S. market and becoming a valued U.S. corporate citizen."

"When we consolidated EADS's U.S. activities under the EADS North America holding company earlier this year, we made a commitment to assemble an experienced and knowledgeable group of individuals to represent and continually build momentum for EADS in North America," said EADS North America Chairman and CEO Ralph Crosby. "Through a thorough process, we now have delivered on that promise. I am pleased to welcome this group of influential and experienced professionals to the EADS North America Board."

Crosby continued, "EADS North America's strategy is to be a key player in the U.S. aerospace and defense industry over the long term, and this board is an important building block in our strategy. It provides EADS North America with a concentrated, collective experience, including executive know-how, government experience and knowledge of the Defense Department, transatlantic business and political expertise, and an intense strategic knowledge base."

At the last Board of Directors' meeting in May 2003, EADS North America elected General James P. McCarthy, USAF (Ret.) and Admiral T. Joseph Lopez, USN (Ret.) to the Board. Rear Admiral Gerald Woolever, USCG (Ret.), was elected at today's meeting, officially completing the Board.

The completed EADS Board of Directors is comprised of:

• Ralph D. Crosby, Jr. serves as Chairman and CEO of EADS North America and a member of the EADS Executive Committee. Crosby assumed leadership of EADS' North American activities and took his seat on the Executive Committee of EADS on 1 September 2002. Previously, Crosby was President of the Integrated Systems Sector of Northrop Grumman Corporation, a position he held since establishing the Sector in 1998. Prior to his industry career, Crosby served as an officer in the U.S. Army with duty in Germany, Vietnam and the United States. Crosby earned a Bachelor of Science at the United States Military Academy, a Master's Degree in Public Administration from Harvard University, and a Master's Degree in International Affairs from the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
• Manfred von Nordheim serves as Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of EADS North America and Senior Advisor to Ralph D. Crosby, Jr., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of EADS North America. He previously served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of EADS, Inc., the U.S. corporate offices of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS). Before the creation of EADS, von Nordheim was President of DaimlerChrysler Aerospace of North America, Inc. Von Nordheim holds a graduate degree from the Freie Universität Berlin, a Master of Arts in political science from Kent State University, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
• Fabrice Brégier was appointed President and CEO of Eurocopter in April 2003. He joins Eurocopter after having led since January 1998 MBDA, the premier European missile and missile systems manufacturer. Bregier joined the Ladardere Group's Matra defense in 1993, working on the GIE Apache program, as well as the GIE Eurodrone project. Prior to this, he served as a technical advisor to the French Minister of Foreign Trade and worked extensively with the French Department of Industry.
• Ambassador Richard Burt serves as Chairman of Diligence LLC, a commercial information and security services firm based in Washington, DC, London and Miami. He also is an International Director of the Washington-based government affairs firm, Barbour, Griffith and Rogers and serves as an advisor to the Carlyle Group, a private equity investment firm. In addition, Mr. Burt serves as Chairman of the Board of Weirton Steel, the largest tin-plate manufacturer in the U.S., and on the Board of Hollinger International. He is a Director of the Brinson Advisors family of funds and of the Deutsche Bank-Alex Brown fund family. Prior to the formation of Diligence LLC, Mr. Burt was a partner with McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting firm. Mr. Burt served as the U.S. Chief Negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) with the Former Soviet Union, U.S. Ambassador to Germany (1985-1989), Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs (1983-1985) and Director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs (1981-1983). Mr. Burt received his Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University and a Master's in International Relations from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
• Dr. Thomas Enders is Executive Vice President, Member of the Executive Committee, and Head of the Defense and Security Systems Division of EADS. Prior to the formation of EADS in July 2000, Dr. Enders served as Senior Vice President for Corporate Development and Technology at DaimlerChrysler Aerospace AG (DASA), one of the three EADS founding companies. Dr. Enders served in the German military with the 1st Airborne Division, reaching the rank of Major in the Reserves. From 1978-83, he studied economics, politics and history at the University of Bonn and at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While pursuing academic studies, he also worked as an assistant in the German Bundestag and as a research associate at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in St. Augustin. In 1987, he was awarded his doctorate in politics.
• Jean-Louis Gergorin is member of the EADS Executive Committee and head of EADS Strategic Coordination. Prior to this position, Gergorin was Group Managing Director and Deputy to the CEO of Lagardère SCA. He joined the Lagardère group in 1984 as Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy for Matra. From 1993 to 1998, Gergorin was Executive Director of Matra Hachette, Deputy to the Chairman for Strategic Coordination and a member of the executive and strategic committee of the Lagardère Group. Today, Gergorin is advisor to the French Foreign Policy planning staff and lectures at l'Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Institute for Political Science) in Paris. He is a member of the executive committee of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Gergorin studied in Paris at the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA). He has been a research fellow at the Rand Corporation and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He also carried out studies in senior management at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and is an alumnus of the executive program of the Stanford Business School. Jean-louis Gergorin is a "Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur" and an Aviation Week Aerospace Laureate (1989.)
• Robert Liberatore is Senior Vice President of External Affairs and Public Policy for DaimlerChrysler Corporation. Prior to the merger of DaimlerBenz and Chrysler, he was Vice President of Washington Affairs for the Chrysler Corporation. Liberatore reports to DaimlerChrysler Chairman Jürgen E. Schremp, and in his current position, co-chairs the corporation's public policy committee and is responsible for directing the company's federal and international government relations, with a focus on the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Mr. Liberatore holds a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.
• Admiral T. Joseph Lopez (USN, Retired) is Senior Vice President and Global Director of U.S. and Foreign Government Operations for Kellogg Brown & Root, a division of the Halliburton Company. Admiral Lopez's naval career included tours as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Naval Forces Europe/Commander –in-Chief Allied Forces, Southern Europe from 1996-1998, and all U.S. and Allied Bosnia Peacekeeping forces in 1996. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (Cum Laude) in International Relations and a Master of Science in Management and an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Humanities from West Virginia Institute of Technology.
• Allan McArtor is Chairman of Airbus North America Holdings, Inc., parent company of Airbus North America Sales, Inc. and Airbus North America Customer Services, Inc. Named Chairman in June 2001, Mr. McArtor oversees the activities of Airbus in the U.S. and Canada in several key areas, including governmental affairs. Prior to joining Airbus, Mr. McArtor was founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Legend Airlines, a regional airline based at Dallas Love Field, Texas. From 1979 – 1994, Mr. McArtor served on the senior management team of Federal Express Corporation – except for two years (1987-1989) when President Ronald Reagan appointed him to serve as the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. Mr. McArtor is a 1964 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy with a Bachelors Degree in Engineering. In addition, he holds a Masters Degree in Engineering from Arizona State University.
• General James P. McCarthy (USAF, Retired) is the ARDI Professor of National Security at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Additionally, he is the Director of the Institute for Information Technology Applications (IITA) at the Academy. General McCarthy has a distinguished 35–year military career, which includes combat, administrative and management assignments in the United States and abroad. He was Deputy Commander in Chief of the U.S. European Command; Deputy Chief of Staff for Programs and Resources at U.S. Air Force headquarters; and commander of the 8th Air Force. General McCarthy chairs Operation Enduring Freedom Lessons Learned and previously chaired Task Forces on Lessons Learned for Kosovo (1999) and Bosnia (1995-96). He also chaired the study on the transformation of the military for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He is currently a member of the Defense Science Board and formerly served on the Defense Policy Board and on the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.
• Hans-Peter Ring is a member of the EADS Board of Directors, EADS Executive Committee and serves as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the company. Prior to this position, Ring was Senior Vice President of Controlling for the EADS Group. Ring began his career at MBB, an EADS predecessor, in 1977 and was named Manager of Budgeting, Accounting and Public Audits before assuming his role of Head of Controlling for Missiles and Defense in 1987. Three years later, he assumed the role of Head of Controlling in the Aircraft and Defense Systems Divisions of Deutsche Aerospace AG (DASA). From 1992-1995, Ring was CFO and Member of the Board at Dornier Lufthart GmbH, the regional aircraft business with DASA.
• Dr. William Schneider, Jr, is President of International Planning Services, Inc., a Washington-based international trade and finance advisory firm, and is an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute. He was formerly Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology (1982-1986). He served as Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget (1981-82) prior to being nominated as Under Secretary by the president. In addition, Dr. Schneider serves as an advisor to the U.S. government in several capacities.
• Rear Admiral Gerald Woolever (U.S. Coast Guard-Retired) is Senior Vice President of Field Operations for Innovative Logistics Techniques, Inc. (INNOLOG). He has more than 35 years experience in operations and program management with industry, and with the U.S. Coast Guard, including major acquisitions oversight, logistics systems development, human resources, and government relations. Prior to joining INNOLOG, Admiral Woolever served as the Program Manager of Boeing's Integrated Deepwater Systems. Admiral Woolever earned a Master of Business Administration from the University of South Florida, and Master of Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester, and graduated first in his class with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.

About EADS North America

EADS North America is the holding company for the North American activities of EADS, one of the world's largest aerospace and defense companies. As a leader in all sectors of defense and homeland security, EADS North America and its parent company, EADS, contribute more than $6 billion to the U.S. economy annually, and support 120,000 American jobs. With operating units and investments in 10 states and the District of Columbia, EADS North America offers a broad array of advanced solutions to its customers in the commercial, homeland security, aerospace and defense agencies.

EADS North America subsidiaries are: America Eurocopter Corporation, Grand Prairie, Tx.; Astrium North America, Houston, Tx.; Barfield, Inc., Miami, Fl.; EADS Aeroframe Services, Lake Charles, La.; EADS CASA Aircraft USA, Chantilly, Va.; EADS Socata Aircraft, Pembroke Pines, Fl.; EADS Supply & Services, Rockville, Md.; EADS TELECOM North America, Addison, Tx.; Fairchild Controls Corporation, Frederick, Maryland.

Oh! The mob is hip to CHENEY! Comments on the WaPo

Bush Officials Condoned Regional Iraqi Oil Deal

Contract Contradicted State Dept.'s Public Stance

Ray Hunt of Hunt Oil was a member of Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. (Natalie Caudill - Dallas Morning News) Enlarge Photo COMMENT washingtonpost.com readers have posted 415 comments about this item. View All Comments »

By Steven Mufson

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 3, 2008; Page D01

Bush administration officials told Hunt Oil last summer that they did not object to its efforts to reach an oil deal with the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq, even while the State Department was publicly expressing concern that such contracts could undermine a national Iraqi petroleum law, according to documents obtained by a House committee.

This Story

• Bush Officials Condoned Regional Iraqi Oil Deal
• More to the Story: Hunt Oil Deal Documents Raise More Questions

Last fall, after the deal was announced, the State Department said that it had tried to dissuade Hunt Oil from signing the contract with Kurdish regional authorities but that the company had proceeded "regardless of our advice." Although Hunt Oil's chief executive has been a major fundraiser for President Bush, the president said he knew nothing about the deal.

Yesterday, however, Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released documents and e-mails showing that for nearly four months, State and Commerce department officials knew about Hunt Oil's negotiations and had told company officials that there were no objections. In one note, a Commerce Department official even wished them "a fruitful visit to Kurdistan" and invited them to contact him "in case you need any support."

That guidance contradicted the administration's public posture. The Bush administration made an Iraqi national petroleum law, which has still not been adopted, a top priority last year in the hope it would more tightly bind the country's regions together and open the way for international oil companies to invest in much larger oil fields south of Iraq's Kurdish region. The State Department said, and continues to assert, that it opposes any contract with a regional Iraqi authority in the absence of a national petroleum law.

The Hunt Oil deal was seen by Kurdish officials as a key victory because the company's chief executive, Ray L. Hunt, was not only a major backer of Bush but also a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. After the deal was completed, a dozen other foreign firms signed oil contracts with Kurdish authorities.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey said yesterday that "we continue to stand by our previous statements that the U.S. government made its objections to this arrangement known both to the company as well as to the KRG [Kurdistan Regional Government]."

But in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Waxman said documents his committee had obtained "tell a different story about the role of Administration officials."

The documents show that as early as June 12, 2007, Hunt Oil officials met with members of the State Department's Regional Reconstruction Team for the Kurdistan region in Erbil and on June 15 specifically asked whether there was a policy about companies entering contracts with Kurdish authorities. According to notes taken by Hunt Oil officials, they were told that the "U.S. has no policy, for nor against."

The documents also include an e-mail from Hunt Oil's general manager for the region stating, "There was no communication to me or in my presence made by any of the 9 state department officials with whom I met . . . that Hunt should not pursue our course of action leading to a contract. In fact, there was ample opportunity to do so, but it did not happen."

The State Department officials in Erbil sent summaries of Hunt Oil activities to the embassy in Baghdad and to Laird Treiber, the economic coordinator in the State Department's office of Iraq affairs in Washington.

Separately, Ray Hunt on July 12 and again on Aug. 30 wrote letters to Stefanie R. Osburn, the executive director of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, describing his contacts with Kurdish officials.

On Sept. 5, three days before the Hunt Oil contract was signed, the State Department's regional coordinator and deputy team leader in Erbil informed Treiber in Washington that the deal was imminent. The note recounts a conversation with Hunt Oil's regional manager, David McDonald. "Asked about concerns over potential conflicts between the recently passed KRG hydrocarbon law and an [sic] national law, he said the 'significant opportunity' outweighs the legal ambiguity," the note said.

Treiber replied, "Thanks for the heads up; getting an American company to sign a deal with the KRG will make big news back here. Please keep us posted."

It did make big news, and Bush himself was asked about it. On Sept. 20, he said, "Our embassy also expressed concern about it. I knew nothing about the deal." He continued, "I need to know exactly how it happened. To the extent that it does undermine the ability for the government to come up with a oil revenue-sharing plan that unifies the country, obviously I'm -- if it undermines that, I'm concerned."

Later, at a State Department briefing, Casey said, "We certainly are discouraging individuals and companies, as well as the government of Kurdistan, the regional government of the Kurdish region, to engage in these kinds of contracts." Referring specifically to Hunt Oil, he added that the "company decided to sign a contract regardless of our advice, but that is their decision."

Some of my favorite comments !!

1. Maybe he's just implimenting the Benjamin Franklin doctrine: Oily to bed, and oily ro rise..,

2. W=Wide Cut Gas
M=Motor Fuels
D=Diesel

B=BP-AMOCO
U=United Refining Company
S=Saudi Arabian Oil Company
H=Hunt Oil

C=ConocoPhillips
H=Halliburton
E=ExxonMobil
N=Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation
E=ENSCO International
Y=Yukos Oil Company

It is that simple.

3. speedyo wrote: "Is Ray Hunt the same Hunt who tried to corner the Silver market in the 1970's during Carter's administration?"
-----------------------------------------------------
Same crooked family, but I think Ray is the son of porky Bunker and/or his brother, Not-Bunkie. But it was in the Reagan Administration that they got their True Justice as Republicans - A government-guaranteed bailout!

Yes,folks, when one of Reagan's buddies got caught trying to screw the entire world by cornering silver, then lost his a$ doing it, YOU paid to bail him out, Mister Sucker Taxpayer. Just like YOU paid the $850,000,000,000 that was stolen by Neil Bush, Jebby Bush, Charles Keating, and their cronies in the Savings and Loan swindles.

But don't worry, it'll be a new Morning in America any time now.

4. What is so disgustng is that these guys are so rich they could solve world hunger and poverty in 10 minutes. But they had to go and start a war and let thousands of people die so they can get bigger yachts.

Congress - do your job and IMPEACH this administration NOW.

5. To be a true patriot today you have to follow. You have to believe every word your leaders say. You have to set aside the evidence before your eyes and deny the facts you hear and believe with all your heart that your leaders know better than you do what is good for you, what is right, what is just, and what is real. If your leaders tell you that the law is wrong, you have to get rid of the law. If your leaders tell you to live with fear, then you have to surrender to fear. Being an American now means being a follower. It means being obedient.

This is liberty: the liberty to have no liberty.

This is freedom: the freedom to give up freedom.

This is patriotism: the strength to be weak and compliant.

Thinking for yourself is subversive. Questioning your leaders is unpatriotic. The truest patriots today are the ones with their hands over their eyes and their ears stopped up. It is better to be fooled for the good of the nation than to question and dissent.

You angry leftist socialists aren’t Americans anymore. We are building a new reality while your old angry one gets left behind. In the new America, people will understand their place. The press will support the leaders and the people will be happy.

Gott mit uns.

6. OOOOH, . . a real Patriot! Are you writing form Iraq, where you are "defending our freedom'?

Well, starsandstripes, the decent Americans are tired of you scaredy-cats giving away MY Constitutional rights just because your fools in office couldn't protect us on 9/11 despite repeated warnings. This is the land for which I enlisted and fought, Mr. Patriot, and I'm not going to be bullied around by anyone.

Do you like what you have done to America? How do you like our economy? How about the nice little job the Republicans have done on our Armed Forces? Yessirree, that's the way to "support" our troops, . . just send them to kill sons and daughters of folk in other countries.

Like the Justice Department? I was on a federal criminal grand jury when Gonzales perverted that department, watching as the slow rot corrupted its mission and its abilities to perform.

How about our international reputation? How do you like being voted "The Biggest Threat to Woprld Peace" repeatedly in international polls? Do you think everyone on Earth is wrong but you and Dubya and Cheney?

No, you are not going to question my patriotism, and you are not going to intimidate me. We've had enough of the phony macho put out by Republican wannabe soldiers/militia/gun nuts. It's time for the grownups to take over.

7. Now Im really getting scared.....
WaPo hasn't put Obama in today....
WHY?......
It' all about OIL...

McCain is trying to move away from Bush...
Obama is moving closer to Bush......
WHY?.......

Since we all count on the media (all the media), to get our information, it's hard to tell what the truth really is......

But it IS easy to tell which candidate the media prefers......
What will they do when they HAVE to tell us what the heck Obama is up to??????

From where I sit, his magnificant* team keeps him away from orating about the issues he's been running on, sort of.....

Looks like HE chooses subjects that gets free airtime, and he doesn't talk about the REAL issues like he used to do.....

Since he keeps changing and his followers don't seem to mind, it appears that they would follow him to hell and back.....

So it MUST be the MAN rather than the issues that seem to matter......
If he keeps up the 'change', sooner or later, the people will realize that he's just another politition , but one who gets to choose what issues he will talk about......

Count on HIM for late breaking news very soon....

He would never let a long week-end pass by without something controvercial that will keep him the TOP news story for days.....
And don't think he'll be the one to do it, it will likely be a 'source' from his campaign.....as, that way, his hands will stay clean and allow him to make another sermon.....

I've always been a democrat since the 1960 election and we really do need a democrat in the WH, but it's getting harder every day to keep him an ORIGINAL...

He's lost the 'freshness' that we hungered for....

Delegates are allowed to change their minds......
If he keeps moving too close to the middle.....it just may hurt him in the general election......
Right now, I feel he is a 'shoe in'....without even talking about foreign OIL.......
OIL is like a 4 letter word.....and we NEED it, we WANT it, we HAVE it, but won't help ourselves drill for it....

Have a very nice July 4th week-end and keep safe.....
God bless our troops and God bless America........

8. Finally, Mission Accomplished!!!!

9. WHAT?! The Bush administration lied about Iraq and Oil, killing thousands and bankrupting the economy?

WAIT!...look over here--Obama got a sub-prime loan for his house! OMG!!! What a sleazeball!

10. Douglas J. Feith has a piece in the Wall Street Journal op-ed today called:

Why We Went to War in Iraq

God! What does that say when six years into a war they are STILL trying to explain why?

11. And the beat goes on.
I'm not even going to bother reading the comments here because I just don't want to be even further disgusted by the twenty-five percenter's talk of "Nothing to see hear, liberal media, but Clinton got a ...."
It boggles the mind that there are still Americans who presumably can read, who think the invasion of Iraq was about "our freedoms". (This had the highest rankings of all )

12. Exactly why did Ms. Pelosi take impeachment off the table so qjuickly? If you can do it for a president's personal life, surely it can be done for violation of national interest, massive fraud, corruption of the Justice Department and so forth.

Obama can't do it alone -- the Democratic Party must rebuild itself and reconsider its leadership.

13. as an ex-president I wonder what kind of "speaking fees" he will get from the oil industry... Bet it will start at $1 million for him to show up and speak for 5 minutes with that dumb smirk of his.

14. Unfortunately, they will probably get away with everything because while many of the American people know they were duped, but they also know they were willing accomplices.

They were frightened after 9/11, their government exploited that fear to frighten them more, and lie to them so they could push forward their pre-9/11 agenda.

Hitting SOMEONE with American military might made people feel powerful again, and if it was the wrong country, they didn’t really want to know about it!

The Media loved it because it brought in viewers. Remember, the mood was almost festive, lacking only the foam finger, and chants of "USA! USA!"

Now the people know the truth, and they are ashamed, and just want to look away.

To indict the Whitehouse would mean indicting the congress, the media, AND ourselves:
Better to just see what Brittany’s doing, instead.

15. Texas+Oil+Admin=Record Gas Prices+Unbriddled profiteering by the chosen few + Gullible, suffering, foolish populace = 2+2 = 4.

Mathematical Expectancy.

16. I can't even find words anymore to describe how I feel about this morally bankrupt administration so I won't even try.

What I will say is that all of us should be watching to see if the media, print & TV, actually followup on this story. Will we see the president asked repeatedly about this until we get a truthful answer or will the media ignore this and let this adminstration lie about the original lie they told the public? Will we have media covering up for them yet again?

Every time this administration has been caught lying, whether about torture, illegal wiretapping, starting a war, etc., etc., etc., they spin another lie about why they are not guilty and the media let them get away with it every single time.

Everyone in the media has known for a long time that it wasn't just a few bad apples that tortured our prisoners yet when Maj. Gen. Taguba came out and accused the administration of war crimes, something that should have been on the front page of every newspaper and on every TV channel, there was a collective yawn in the media. We must demand that the media coverup stops right here, right now.

NO MORE LIES! NO MORE COVERING UP LIES! NO MORE PASSING RETROACTIVE LAWS THAT LEGALIZE ILLEGAL BEHAVIOR COMMITTED BY THIS ADMINSTRATION AND THEIR PARTNERS IN CRIME. NO MORE APATHY! NO MORE STUPID STORIES ABOUT WHAT GENERAL CLARK SAID WHEN THE MEDIA SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT WHAT GENERAL TAGUBA SAID!

17. Unreal.

The Bush Jr Administration took us into a totally unnecessary "war" and disastrous, self-defeating occupation all for the sake of rewarding powerful campaign contributors, of which this one was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Geez, what are the odds Ray Hunt also sat in on those still-classified energy task force meetings with Cheney before the Iraq invasion?

Just when you think our vile, warmongering chickenhawk of a President & Vice President can't possibly sink any lower than they already are.....

18.
IMPEACH THE SON OF A B*TCH BUSH.

HOW MANY THOUSAND VIOLATIONS OF ABUSE OF POWER DOES HE NEED TO COMMIT???

MAYBE NANCY FANCY PANTIES PELOSI WHO HAS FOR />> 2 YEARS << style="font-weight: bold;">19. What is amazing is that this comes as a shock to the usually uninformed americans.
Here in Europe everyone following the situation in Kurdistan have known about this link.

As usual no american media has bothered to get the Kurdish point of view,either official or unofficional.
Imperial hubris.

Facts:
Kurdistan is more secure than any big city in the US.
30 000 Kurdish Peshmerga is controling the borders.
Unlike the US,Kurdistan is booming.
Hospitals,schools and other infrastructure is constructed and tempo is increasing.
Several international airports are running and the kurdish diaspora are vacationing at home and investing in their areas.
All income from oil exports from kurdistan goes to Baghdad for redistribution,and all new exports must be approved from Baghdad.
Kurdistan will get about 18 % of the oil export income as negotiated,whether it is exported from Kirkuk to Ceyhan or from Basra to tankers.
Iraq will export oil for 100 Billion USD this year,too much for Iraq to spend safely because of lacking security in areas outside of Kurdistan.

Meanwhile in the US:
1) The country is going broke.
2) The military is out of control.
3) Standards of living are falling.
4) Criminal facists are ruling the land.

Buy gold.

WAR CRIMES DOSSIER: Corps who are abusing on US/Canadian and other Citizens: Part 1

 Company Profiles 

 Boeing 

 Blackwater USA 

 Lockheed Martin 

 Northrop Grumman 

 General Dynamics 

 Raytheon 

 United Technologies 

 Halliburton 

General Electric 

Science Applications International Corporation 

 CSC/ DynCorp

Chemicals
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Construction
Building (or rebuilding) things is a lucrative business to be in, especially in an era when lots of things are being blown up. Construction is a mega-industry with players raking in money for huge projects, from Bechtel's Big Dig to Kellogg Brown & Root's military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are the small, mob-connected firms building at ground zero in New York, and even the bin Laden family, who largely built modern Saudia Arabia and Dubai. The companies who build dams, roads, schools, hospitals and military installations are a major economic and political force.

Energy
Those who own, extract, process, and sell the fossil fuels on which modern culture is (often regrettably) based make up perhaps the single most powerful industry in the world. While energy policy in the United States is made behind closed doors with oil barons, wars are fought in the Middle East over oil & gas, and geopolitics in South America is revolutionized on the power of vast oil reserves.


Food and Agriculture
The industrial food chain is complex - and highly profitable for those who control it. In India, ancient traditional grains have been patented by multinationals, while drought- and pest-resistant strains of food crops are engineered in laboratories and planted in massive monocultures worldwide. Harsh pesticides and herbicides have become the rule instead of the exception. GMO soybeans are crowding out the Amazon rainforests; meanwhile, massively subsidized, nutritionally-challenged corn finds its way into almost every aspect of the American diet, especially fast food. The corporations (Monsanto, Cargill, ADM, McDonald's, etc) behind what we eat exert power in their best interest, rather than in ours. What's good for their bottom line is not necessarily good for our waistlines, our coastlines, our treelines ...


Financial Services, Insurance and Banking 
Banks, investment firms, insurance companies are integral to the operation of every industry we cover. They are the nervous and circulatory systems of the corporate world. In a world where everything - even a human life - can be assigned a monetary value; where limitless money and great risk intersect, lies opportunity for greed, corruption, and fraud. 


Manufacturing
Perhaps the most outsourced industry in the world, manufacturing covers everything from textiles to automobiles to construction to electronics and everything in between. Since international trade is largely centered on the exchange of manufactured goods, issues of globalization swirl around these corporations. Here you'll find coverage of labor and sweatshops, the environment, trade agreements, and the overarching impacts of "offshoring" the manufacture of the goods the developed world consumes.


Media & Entertainment
A very few corporations control most of the messages we receive each day, from billboards to newspapers, to radio, film and television. CorpWatch covers not only the effect of media consolidation, but also the wizards behind the curtains in advertising, public relations, and the mainstream news media.


Natural Resources
It is a mark of modern civilization that we now buy and sell what nature provides for free. Trees, water, minerals, open land - these are profit opportunities for those who can turn them into timber, dams, bottled water, diamond rings, or condominium complexes. For issues directly relating to oil, gas, and coal, see also Energy.


Pharmaceuticals
The cost of prescription drugs has never been higher, and pharmaceutical companies have never spent more persuading consumers that they need drugs they've never heard of for illnesses they didn't know they had. Drug companies are also spending millions defending patents and persuading the FDA to approve new drugs ever faster. Meanwhile, developing countries go without desperately needed drugs because pharmaceutical companies fear that lowering prices for the neediest is a slippery slope. Big Pharma says high prices fund research and innovation.


Retail & Mega-Stores
Big-box stores like Wal-Mart, Asda and Home Depot have squeezed out small businesses all around the world, driving down wages and quality of life where they do business, all in the name of low prices. They are the largest, slowest-moving easy targets, smaller (and yet still massive) retail chains like Starbucks, Forever 21, Abercrombie & Fitch, the Gap and others have also drawn fire for sweatshop abuses, labor violations, and other questionable corporate behavior.


Technology & Telecommunications
Technology has seeped into nearly every aspect of modern life, from the food we eat to the ways we communicate. Consequently, telecommunications and technology corporations have gained huge power over the past two decades. Cable companies bicker with telephone monopolies over the internet; customer support for ubiquitous laptop computers is offshored from Silicon Valley to Bangalore; obsolete electronics pile up in developing world landfills, exposing children to toxic metals; and multinationals tinker with the technology of nature to make a tomato that doesn't spoil on a grocery shelf. Ubiquity, especially when it melds into the background of daily life, is perhaps the most powerful tool of corporate power.


Tobacco
The executives of Big Tobacco have stopped insisting that tobacco is not addictive, but have not stopped making a killing from the deadly addictive quality of their product. The steady demand, particularly in the developing world where regulation doesn't reach, breeds a booming business in smuggling, as well as aggressive marketing schemes targeting the poor, minorities, and children. International treaties and successful lawsuits have helped to slow the malignant spread of tobacco in the United States and other developed nations, but the industry remains one of the largest and most influential in national and international politics. 


Tourism & Real Estate
Tourism fuels some of the biggest development worldwide. Cruise ship operators are under fire for dumping waste in the oceans and exhaust into the skies; ski resorts an golf courses scar the land and pollute waterways. Tourism is a multibillion-dollar industry that frequently puts luxury ahead of the environment, respect for indigenous cultures, and sensitivity to land use issues. Real estate, some of it fueled by tourism, but also by the expansion of business, runs up against many of the other issues we cover - water use, land use, and the use of political influence to muscle into desirable locations, often with tax-breaks as a bonus. With real-estate the latest boom (or perhaps more appropriately "bubble") industry, issues associated with development - such as suburban sprawl - have become more immediate. 


 Transportation
Planes, trains, and automobiles ... almost every industry we cover requires a means of getting its goods from point A to point B. It could be your wintertime Granny Smith apple, shipped from Chile; or your iPod, made of parts flown in from China and assembled in California until it is trucked to your city, or flown back to your country. The gasoline in your car (which perhaps came from Detroit, Japan, Korea, or Germany) may be from Venezuela or Iraq. Almost everything you buy is better traveled than you could ever hope to be. And that translates into major profit for the corporations that own the means of transport.


War & Disaster Profiteering
CorpWatch looks at the intertwined relationship between private industry, the US Armed Forces and federal policy makers. We look at the domestic and foreign impacts of this dangerous complex.

Domestic Spying, Inc.Industries

by Tim Shorrock , Special to CorpWatch 
November 27th, 2007

A new intelligence institution to be inaugurated soon by the Bush administration will allow government spying agencies to conduct broad surveillance and reconnaissance inside the United States for the first time. Under a proposal being reviewed by Congress, a National Applications Office (NAO) will be established to coordinate how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and domestic law enforcement and rescue agencies use imagery and communications intelligence picked up by U.S. spy satellites. If the plan goes forward, the NAO will create the legal mechanism for an unprecedented degree of domestic intelligence gathering that would make the U.S. one of the world's most closely monitored nations. Until now, domestic use of electronic intelligence from spy satellites was limited to scientific agencies with no responsibility for national security or law enforcement. 

The intelligence-sharing system to be managed by the NAO will rely heavily on private contractors including Boeing, BAE Systems, L-3 Communications and Science Applications International Corporation ( SAIC ). These companies already provide technology and personnel to U.S. agencies involved in foreign intelligence, and the NAO greatly expands their markets. Indeed, at an intelligence conference in San Antonio, Texas, last month, the titans of the industry were actively lobbying intelligence officials to buy products specifically designed for domestic surveillance.

More on this link .. 

Top 100 military contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq

America's Empire of Bases: Chalmers Johnson; January 15, 2004

Published on Thursday, January 15, 2004 by TomDispatch.com

America's Empire of Bases

by Chalmers Johnson

As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order. Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage -- Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another. Our installations abroad bring profits to civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or, like the now well-publicized Kellogg, Brown & Root company, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston, undertake contract services to build and maintain our far-flung outposts. One task of such contractors is to keep uniformed members of the imperium housed in comfortable quarters, well fed, amused, and supplied with enjoyable, affordable vacation facilities. Whole sectors of the American economy have come to rely on the military for sales. On the eve of our second war on Iraq, for example, while the Defense Department was ordering up an extra ration of cruise missiles and depleted-uranium armor-piercing tank shells, it also acquired 273,000 bottles of Native Tan sunblock, almost triple its 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its subcontractor, Sun Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida. At Least Seven Hundred Foreign Bases It's not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. Official records on these subjects are misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least $113.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases -- surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic product of most countries -- and an estimated $591,519.8 million to replace all of them. The military high command deploys to our overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners. The Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and that it leases 4,844 more. These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003 Base Status Report fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo -- even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained ever since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. The Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, although the U.S. military has established colossal base structures throughout the so-called arc of instability in the two-and-a-half years since 9/11. For Okinawa, the southernmost island of Japan, which has been an American military colony for the past 58 years, the report deceptively lists only one Marine base, Camp Butler, when in fact Okinawa "hosts" ten Marine Corps bases, including Marine Corps Air Station Futenma occupying 1,186 acres in the center of that modest-sized island's second largest city. (Manhattan's Central Park, by contrast, is only 843 acres.) The Pentagon similarly fails to note all of the $5-billion-worth of military and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air Force bases. If there were an honest count, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases in other people's countries, but no one -- possibly not even the Pentagon -- knows the exact number for sure, although it has been distinctly on the rise in recent years. For their occupants, these are not unpleasant places to live and work. Military service today, which is voluntary, bears almost no relation to the duties of a soldier during World War II or the Korean or Vietnamese wars. Most chores like laundry, KP ("kitchen police"), mail call, and cleaning latrines have been subcontracted to private military companies like Kellogg, Brown & Root, DynCorp, and the Vinnell Corporation. Fully one-third of the funds recently appropriated for the war in Iraq (about $30 billion), for instance, are going into private American hands for exactly such services. Where possible everything is done to make daily existence seem like a Hollywood version of life at home. According to the Washington Post, in Fallujah, just west of Baghdad, waiters in white shirts, black pants, and black bow ties serve dinner to the officers of the 82nd Airborne Division in their heavily guarded compound, and the first Burger King has already gone up inside the enormous military base we've established at Baghdad International Airport. Some of these bases are so gigantic they require as many as nine internal bus routes for soldiers and civilian contractors to get around inside the earthen berms and concertina wire. That's the case at Camp Anaconda, headquarters of the 3rd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, whose job is to police some 1,500 square miles of Iraq north of Baghdad, from Samarra to Taji. Anaconda occupies 25 square kilometers and will ultimately house as many as 20,000 troops. Despite extensive security precautions, the base has frequently come under mortar attack, notably on the Fourth of July, 2003, just as Arnold Schwarzenegger was chatting up our wounded at the local field hospital. The military prefers bases that resemble small fundamentalist towns in the Bible Belt rather than the big population centers of the United States. For example, even though more than 100,000 women live on our overseas bases -- including women in the services, spouses, and relatives of military personnel -- obtaining an abortion at a local military hospital is prohibited. Since there are some 14,000 sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults each year in the military, women who become pregnant overseas and want an abortion have no choice but to try the local economy, which cannot be either easy or pleasant in Baghdad or other parts of our empire these days. Our armed missionaries live in a closed-off, self-contained world serviced by its own airline -- the Air Mobility Command, with its fleet of long-range C-17 Globemasters, C-5 Galaxies, C-141 Starlifters, KC-135 Stratotankers, KC-10 Extenders, and C-9 Nightingales that link our far-flung outposts from Greenland to Australia. For generals and admirals, the military provides seventy-one Learjets, thirteen Gulfstream IIIs, and seventeen Cessna Citation luxury jets to fly them to such spots as the armed forces' ski and vacation center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or to any of the 234 military golf courses the Pentagon operates worldwide. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld flies around in his own personal Boeing 757, called a C-32A in the Air Force. Our "Footprint" on the World Of all the insensitive, if graphic, metaphors we've allowed into our vocabulary, none quite equals "footprint" to describe the military impact of our empire. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers and senior members of the Senate's Military Construction Subcommittee such as Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) are apparently incapable of completing a sentence without using it. Establishing a more impressive footprint has now become part of the new justification for a major enlargement of our empire -- and an announced repositioning of our bases and forces abroad -- in the wake of our conquest of Iraq. The man in charge of this project is Andy Hoehn, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. He and his colleagues are supposed to draw up plans to implement President Bush's preventive war strategy against "rogue states," "bad guys," and "evil-doers." They have identified something they call the "arc of instability," which is said to run from the Andean region of South America (read: Colombia) through North Africa and then sweeps across the Middle East to the Philippines and Indonesia. This is, of course, more or less identical with what used to be called the Third World -- and perhaps no less crucially it covers the world's key oil reserves. Hoehn contends, "When you overlay our footprint onto that, we don't look particularly well-positioned to deal with the problems we're now going to confront." Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America's version of the colony is the military base. By following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever larger imperial stance and the militarism that grows with it. Militarism and imperialism are Siamese twins joined at the hip. Each thrives off the other. Already highly advanced in our country, they are both on the verge of a quantum leap that will almost surely stretch our military beyond its capabilities, bringing about fiscal insolvency and very possibly doing mortal damage to our republican institutions. The only way this is discussed in our press is via reportage on highly arcane plans for changes in basing policy and the positioning of troops abroad -- and these plans, as reported in the media, cannot be taken at face value. Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, commanding our 1,800 troops occupying the old French Foreign Legion base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti at the entrance to the Red Sea, claims that in order to put "preventive war" into action, we require a "global presence," by which he means gaining hegemony over any place that is not already under our thumb. According to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, the idea is to create "a global cavalry" that can ride in from "frontier stockades" and shoot up the "bad guys" as soon as we get some intelligence on them. "Lily Pads" in Australia, Romania, Mali, Algeria . . . In order to put our forces close to every hot spot or danger area in this newly discovered arc of instability, the Pentagon has been proposing -- this is usually called "repositioning" -- many new bases, including at least four and perhaps as many as six permanent ones in Iraq. A number of these are already under construction -- at Baghdad International Airport, Tallil air base near Nasariyah, in the western desert near the Syrian border, and at Bashur air field in the Kurdish region of the north. (This does not count the previously mentioned Anaconda, which is currently being called an "operating base," though it may very well become permanent over time.) In addition, we plan to keep under our control the whole northern quarter of Kuwait -- 1,600 square miles out of Kuwait's 6,900 square miles -- that we now use to resupply our Iraq legions and as a place for Green Zone bureaucrats to relax. Other countries mentioned as sites for what Colin Powell calls our new "family of bases" include: In the impoverished areas of the "new" Europe -- Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria; in Asia -- Pakistan (where we already have four bases), India, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and even, unbelievably, Vietnam; in North Africa -- Morocco, Tunisia, and especially Algeria (scene of the slaughter of some 100,00 civilians since 1992, when, to quash an election, the military took over, backed by our country and France); and in West Africa -- Senegal, Ghana, Mali, and Sierra Leone (even though it has been torn by civil war since 1991). The models for all these new installations, according to Pentagon sources, are the string of bases we have built around the Persian Gulf in the last two decades in such anti-democratic autocracies as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Most of these new bases will be what the military, in a switch of metaphors, calls "lily pads" to which our troops could jump like so many well-armed frogs from the homeland, our remaining NATO bases, or bases in the docile satellites of Japan and Britain. To offset the expense involved in such expansion, the Pentagon leaks plans to close many of the huge Cold War military reservations in Germany, South Korea, and perhaps Okinawa as part of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's "rationalization" of our armed forces. In the wake of the Iraq victory, the U.S. has already withdrawn virtually all of its forces from Saudi Arabia and Turkey, partially as a way of punishing them for not supporting the war strongly enough. It wants to do the same thing to South Korea, perhaps the most anti-American democracy on Earth today, which would free up the 2nd Infantry Division on the demilitarized zone with North Korea for probable deployment to Iraq, where our forces are significantly overstretched. In Europe, these plans include giving up several bases in Germany, also in part because of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's domestically popular defiance of Bush over Iraq. But the degree to which we are capable of doing so may prove limited indeed. At the simplest level, the Pentagon's planners do not really seem to grasp just how many buildings the 71,702 soldiers and airmen in Germany alone occupy and how expensive it would be to reposition most of them and build even slightly comparable bases, together with the necessary infrastructure, in former Communist countries like Romania, one of Europe's poorest countries. Lt. Col. Amy Ehmann in Hanau, Germany, has said to the press "There's no place to put these people" in Romania, Bulgaria, or Djibouti, and she predicts that 80% of them will in the end stay in Germany. It's also certain that generals of the high command have no intention of living in backwaters like Constanta, Romania, and will keep the U.S. military headquarters in Stuttgart while holding on to Ramstein Air Force Base, Spangdahlem Air Force Base, and the Grafenwöhr Training Area. One reason why the Pentagon is considering moving out of rich democracies like Germany and South Korea and looks covetously at military dictatorships and poverty-stricken dependencies is to take advantage of what the Pentagon calls their "more permissive environmental regulations." The Pentagon always imposes on countries in which it deploys our forces so-called Status of Forces Agreements, which usually exempt the United States from cleaning up or paying for the environmental damage it causes. This is a standing grievance in Okinawa, where the American environmental record has been nothing short of abominable. Part of this attitude is simply the desire of the Pentagon to put itself beyond any of the restraints that govern civilian life, an attitude increasingly at play in the "homeland" as well. For example, the 2004 defense authorization bill of $401.3 billion that President Bush signed into law in November 2003 exempts the military from abiding by the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. While there is every reason to believe that the impulse to create ever more lily pads in the Third World remains unchecked, there are several reasons to doubt that some of the more grandiose plans, for either expansion or downsizing, will ever be put into effect or, if they are, that they will do anything other than make the problem of terrorism worse than it is. For one thing, Russia is opposed to the expansion of U.S. military power on its borders and is already moving to checkmate American basing sorties into places like Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. The first post-Soviet-era Russian airbase in Kyrgyzstan has just been completed forty miles from the U.S. base at Bishkek, and in December 2003, the dictator of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, declared that he would not permit a permanent deployment of U.S. forces in his country even though we already have a base there. When it comes to downsizing, on the other hand, domestic politics may come into play. By law the Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closing Commission must submit its fifth and final list of domestic bases to be shut down to the White House by September 8, 2005. As an efficiency measure, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has said he'd like to be rid of at least one-third of domestic Army bases and one-quarter of domestic Air Force bases, which is sure to produce a political firestorm on Capitol Hill. In order to protect their respective states' bases, the two mother hens of the Senate's Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Dianne Feinstein, are demanding that the Pentagon close overseas bases first and bring the troops now stationed there home to domestic bases, which could then remain open. Hutchison and Feinstein included in the Military Appropriations Act of 2004 money for an independent commission to investigate and report on overseas bases that are no longer needed. The Bush administration opposed this provision of the Act but it passed anyway and the president signed it into law on November 22, 2003. The Pentagon is probably adept enough to hamstring the commission, but a domestic base-closing furor clearly looms on the horizon. By far the greatest defect in the "global cavalry" strategy, however, is that it accentuates Washington's impulse to apply irrelevant military remedies to terrorism. As the prominent British military historian, Correlli Barnett, has observed, the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq only increased the threat of al-Qaeda. From 1993 through the 9/11 assaults of 2001, there were five major al-Qaeda attacks worldwide; in the two years since then there have been seventeen such bombings, including the Istanbul suicide assaults on the British consulate and an HSBC Bank. Military operations against terrorists are not the solution. As Barnett puts it, "Rather than kicking down front doors and barging into ancient and complex societies with simple nostrums of 'freedom and democracy,' we need tactics of cunning and subtlety, based on a profound understanding of the people and cultures we are dealing with -- an understanding up till now entirely lacking in the top-level policy-makers in Washington, especially in the Pentagon." In his notorious "long, hard slog" memo on Iraq of October 16, 2003, Defense secretary Rumsfeld wrote, "Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror." Correlli-Barnett's "metrics" indicate otherwise. But the "war on terrorism" is at best only a small part of the reason for all our military strategizing. The real reason for constructing this new ring of American bases along the equator is to expand our empire and reinforce our military domination of the world. Chalmers Johnson's latest book is ' The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic' (Metropolitan). His previous book, 'Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire,' has just been updated with a new introduction. Copyright C2004 Chalmers Johnson Camp Bondsteel See Paul Stuart, Camp Bondsteel and America’s plans to control Caspian oil, WSWS.org, April 2002, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/apr2002/oil-a29.shtml)

The Little Administration That Couldn't

Rebuilding the American Economy, Bush-style
By Tom Engelhardt

No one was prepared for the storm when it hit. The levees meant to protect us had long since been breached and key officials had already left town. The well-to-do were assured of rescue, but for everyone else trapped inside the Superdome in a fast-flooding region, there was no evacuation plan in sight. The Bush administration, of course, claimed that it was in control and the President was already assuring his key officials that they were doing a heck of a job.

No, I'm not talking about post-Katrina New Orleans. That was so then. I'm talking about the housing and credit crunches, as well as the Bear Stearns bailout, that have given the term "bear market" new meaning.

Now, don't get me wrong -- when it comes to the arcane science of economics, like most Americans, I'd benefit from an "Economics for Dummies" course. What I do know something about, though, is history, a subject that hasn't been on the Bush administration's course curriculum since the President turned out not to be Winston Churchill and conquered Iraq refused to morph into occupied Germany ‘n Japan 1945.

History may not repeat itself, but the administration's repetitive acts these past seven years make an assessment of our economic situation possible, even if you are an economics dummy.

Just consider the record: Administration officials proved incapable of rebuilding two countries that their military occupied and damaged. In Afghanistan and Iraq, while talking up the President's "freedom agenda," they were the equivalent of a natural disaster, a whirlwind of destruction.

In the case of Iraq, in disbanding its military, its government, and even its economy, they were literal nation-wreckers. On taking Baghdad, their first act of omission was to let the capital be looted. ("Stuff happens," commented Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the time.) Soon after, the administration's new viceroy in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, promptly plunged the country into the equivalent of the Great Depression -- without a Bear Stearns bailout in sight.

In the case of Afghanistan, only a staggering boom in opiate growing -- the country now supplies an estimated 93% of the global market in illegal opiates, bringing about four billion dollars into the country -- has slightly offset the disaster of "liberation." By just about any other measure, Afghanistan is a wreck.

In the case of New Orleans, the Bush administration not only couldn't rebuild an American city that nature (and the Army Corps of Engineers) damaged, but turned a natural disaster into a man-made catastrophe that has yet to end.

Despite a reputation for being the most disciplined, tough, and focused administration in memory, Bush's men and women couldn't even secure their fondest inside-the-Beltway dream: constructing a generation-long Pax Republicana in Washington. In fact, it looks suspiciously as if Republicans in the House and Senate, fleeing Congress as if it were New Orleans -- it's politely called "retirement," not cutting and running -- could even be swept into minority status for a generation.

And now, with a mere ten "lame duck" months to go, comes the American economy…

You don't faintly need to understand economics to grasp the immediate danger. The people overseeing the handling of this crisis have done little these last years but hand money over to the rich, while running American power into the dirt.

Let me review our history lesson for a moment: No to nation-rebuilding, no to city-rebuilding, no to Congressional majority-building…

Who dares imagine that the people who brought you Iraq, the war, could begin the rebuilding of an economy, or even successfully caulk the cracks in the levees of a system that, in its complexity, puts Iraq's feeble economy to shame?

In some ways, an administration -- whatever its periodic changes of personnel -- can be compared to an individual. At a certain age, its urges become predictable, its habits set, its limits largely known. While change may be possible, you wouldn't want to bet your house on it.

So what exactly has the Bush administration proven itself good at? The twin skills of destruction and looting would stand at the top of any list. Perhaps that's because it chose to put its "eggs" in only two baskets -- those of the U.S. military and crony corporations.

Awed by the shock-and-awe force of forces that fell into their hands, administration officials moved to transfer as many powers of civil governance as possible to the Pentagon. From diplomacy to disaster relief, nation-building to intelligence gathering, an organization built only to destroy was designated as the go-to outfit for activities normally associated with those who have building in mind.

At the same time, the government was being staffed, top-to-bottom, with ill-prepared political pals, while a small set of crony corporations, of which Halliburton is certainly the best known, was given the nod in every rebuilding situation. It really didn't matter where you looked, they were the ones camped out, making money, on the landscape of destruction. With their no-bid, cost-plus contracts, these companies ran up the hours and then tended to jump ship when the going got bad. The same corporations that had essentially looted Iraq -- it was labeled "reconstruction" -- were the first ones called in when New Orleans went down. (Of the initial six contracts the Bush administration offered for the reconstruction of the city, five went to companies previously involved in Iraq's reconstruction program.)

Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration has proved serially incapable of building anything, even -- in the long run -- their own machine. And, from the Enron moment to the Bear Stearns one, whenever it looked like the Titanic might have hit an iceberg, it was a lock that those passengers assigned to the limited places in the lifeboats wouldn't be from steerage (or be weighed down with subprime mortgages).

So rebuilding. No. Saving people who aren't already friends. No. Doing a heck of a job in a crisis. No. Now, our latest and greatest crisis is upon us, the sort that, in a matter of weeks, has sent media commentators and pundits from reluctant discussions of whether we might be heading into a recession straight to references to the "d" word, "1929," and the Great Depression. And they're not alone. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll indicates that a startling 59% of Americans already believe we're heading for a long-term depression, not a recession (and 79% are worried about the possibility). Leave the definitional details to the experts. Most Americans have undoubtedly assessed the Bush administration's proven incapacity in perilous times and drawn the logical conclusions.

Ten months is a long, long time when only their hands are near the pilot's wheel of the ship of state and water's already seeping through the hull. It's an eon for an administration capable of sinking New Orleans in a matter of days, and Iraq in little more than months. Or, thought of another way, it's plenty of time if your expertise happens to lie in deconstruction. After all, barring a miracle, you're talking about the little administration that couldn't, no matter how hard Ben Bernanke may try.

So, even if you, like me, know next to nothing about economics, you already know enough to be afraid, very afraid.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

Iraq and Oil - the media begins to take up the issue

A Crude Case for War?

By Steven Mufson

Sunday, March 16, 2008; Page B01

It's hard to miss the point of the "Blood for Oil" Web site. It features one poster of an American flag with "Blood for oil?" in white block letters where the stars should be and two dripping red handprints across the stripes. Another shows a photo of President Bush with a thin black line on his upper lip. "Got oil?" the headline asks wryly.

This Story

• A Crude Case for War?
• Monday, March 17 at noon ET: Outlook: All About Oil?

Five years after the United States invaded Iraq, plenty of people believe that the war was waged chiefly to secure U.S. petroleum supplies and to make Iraq safe -- and lucrative -- for the U.S. oil industry.

We may not know the real motivations behind the Iraq war for years, but it remains difficult to distill oil from all the possibilities. That's because our society and economy have been nursed on cheap oil, and the idea that oil security is a right as well as a necessity has become part of our foreign policy DNA, handed down from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter to George H.W. Bush. And the war and its untidy aftermath have, in fact, swelled the coffers of the world's biggest oil companies.

But it hasn't happened in the way anyone might have imagined.

Instead of making Iraq an open economy fueled by a thriving oil sector, the war has failed to boost the flow of oil from Iraq's giant well-mapped reservoirs, which oil experts say could rival Saudi Arabia's and produce 6 million barrels a day, if not more. Thanks to insurgents' sabotage of pipelines and pumping stations, and foreign companies' fears about safety and contract risks in Iraq, the country is still struggling in vain to raise oil output to its prewar levels of about 2.5 million barrels a day.

As it turns out, that has kept oil off the international market at just the moment when the world desperately needs a cushion of supplies to keep prices down. Demand from China is booming, and political strife has limited oil production in Nigeria and Venezuela.

In the absence of Iraqi supplies, prices have soared three-and-a-half-fold since the U.S. invasion on March 20, 2003. (Last week, they shattered all previous records, even after adjusting for inflation.) The profits of the five biggest Western oil companies have jumped from $40 billion to $121 billion over the same period. While the United States has rid itself of Saddam Hussein and whatever threat he might have posed, oil revenues have filled the treasuries of petro-autocrats in Iran, Venezuela and Russia, emboldening those regimes and complicating U.S. diplomacy in new ways.

American consumers are paying for this turmoil at the pump. If the overthrow of Hussein was supposed to be a silver bullet for the American consumer, it turned out to be one that ricocheted and tore a hole through his wallet.

"If we went to war for oil, we did it as clumsily as anyone could do. And we spent more on the war than we could ever conceivably have gotten out of Iraq's oil fields even if we had particular control over them," says Anthony Cordesman, an expert on U.S. strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who rejects the idea that the war was designed on behalf of oil companies.

But that doesn't mean that oil had nothing to do with the invasion. Says Cordesman: "To say that we would have taken the same steps against a dictator in Africa or Burma as we took in Iraq is to ignore the strategic realities that drove American behavior."

There is no single conspiracy theory about why the Bush administration allegedly waged this "war for oil." Here are two.

Version one: Bush, former Texas oilman, and Vice President Cheney, former chief executive of the contracting and oil-services firm Halliburton, wanted to help their friends in the oil world. They sought to install a pro-Western government that would invite the major oil companies back into Iraq. "Exxon was in the kitchen with Dick Cheney when the Iraq war was being cooked up," says the Web site of a group called Consumers for Peace.

Version two: As laid out in an April 2003 article in Le Monde Diplomatique, "The war against Saddam is about guaranteeing American hegemony rather than about increasing the profits of Exxon." Yahya Sadowski, an associate professor at the American University of Beirut, argues that "the neo-conservative cabal" had a "grand plan" to ramp up Iraqi production, "flood the world market with Iraqi oil" and drive the price down to $15 a barrel. That would stimulate the U.S. economy, "finally destroy" OPEC, wreck the economies of "rogue states" such as Iran and Venezuela, and "create more opportunities for 'regime change.' "

There are historical roots for all this suspicion. After World War I, the Western powers carved up oil-producing interests in the Middle East. In Iraq, the French were given about a quarter of the national consortium, and the U.S. government pressured its allies to turn over an equal share to a handful of American companies.

Even now, the fate of Iraq's concessions is laden with politics. Russia's Lukoil hopes to regain access to a giant field. China is seeking new fields. The big U.S. firms are angling to return to fields they ran before sanctions barred them during the 1990s. Smaller U.S., Turkish, European and Korean firms are gambling on new exploration deals with the autonomous Kurdish regional authority despite threats from Baghdad.

"One can imagine Iraq's oil fields as a pimple waiting to be pricked," says Antonia Juhasz, author of "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time." She notes that the Bush administration put former oil executives on the reconstruction team, hired the Virginia consulting firm BearingPoint to write a framework for Iraq's oil industry, picked the Iraqis who took key oil ministry posts and has pressured Iraq to adopt a petroleum law favorable to international companies.

The petroleum law has become a rallying point for critics who say that the war was about oil. It would allow long-term production-sharing agreements, which Juhasz says are only used in 12 percent of the world "and only where the country needs to entice the companies to come." Defenders of the law, including exiled Iraqi oil experts, say that it provides for different types of contracts; how generous they are will depend on how well they are negotiated, but the law sets minimum conditions.

Greg Muttitt, another widely quoted war critic, who works for Platform London, a group of British environmentalists, human rights campaigners, artists and activists, says that an occupied country can't negotiate freely. What ended up in the proposed petroleum law, he says, was "pretty close" to what was in papers drafted by the State Department before the invasion. "Perhaps not surprising," he adds, given lobbying by U.S. officials and the role of former oil company executives in the reconstruction hierarchy.

That's the theory. The problem is: The petroleum law has not been adopted.

* * *

The idea that the Bush administration was in the tank for the oil industry glosses over a story of conflicting views before the U.S. invasion and the bungled execution of plans afterwards. There were two rival interagency policy groups before the war, one led by the Pentagon and one by the State Department. Some key differences were never resolved. Some Pentagon planners wanted Iraq to maximize oil output, while State worried that a flood of Iraqi oil could threaten Saudi interests and market share.

The notion of an oil war also conjures up an image of a swashbuckling, string-pulling oil industry that no longer reflects a business that in many ways has become cautious and fearful of political turmoil. Western oil interests did encourage the overthrow of Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh in the early 1950s and the war in Suez in 1956. But generally oil companies are content to forge alliances of convenience with leaders as diverse as Saudi kings, Angolan communists and Indonesia's late, long-time autocrat Suharto as long as they're predictable. On those leaders' politics, human rights record, ethnicity or religion, oil giants are agnostic.

"Companies don't like and won't make investments where there's uncertainty, and war is the biggest uncertainty of all," said Rob McKee, the former number two executive at ConocoPhillips and a former top U.S. official overseeing Iraq's oil sector. "On the other hand, companies were hoping that Iraq would open up, and as long as Saddam was there, Iraq couldn't. . . . From that point of view, maybe they were happy that there would be a change."

Still, the big firms had trepidations. In a conversation with a consultant shortly before the invasion, the chief executive of one of the five major oil companies described what he would say if asked to invest billions of dollars in Iraq after the war: Tell me about the contract system, arbitration, physical security and social cohesion, then I'll decide.

Five years later, he still hasn't decided, and physical security is so tenuous that the oil giants are still declining Iraqi invitations to send their employees to inspect existing fields.

This wasn't what Bush administration planners had expected.

Leading administration officials expected a postwar Iraq to reclaim its former position among oil exporters. "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon," then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress just after the invasion, predicting that oil would generate $50 billion to $100 billion in revenues within two to three years. Ironically, Iraq might approach that figure this year because of high prices, not higher production.

Prewar planning settled who would oversee Iraq's oil sector. The Pentagon picked Phil Carroll, a well-respected former top executive at Royal Dutch Shell, who was succeeded by McKee. War critics point to such industry ties as evidence of nefarious influence, but former administration members say the choices were made on the basis of expertise. "If you wanted to get someone to help run an oil industry, who would you choose?" asked one person involved in selecting Carroll. "A broker on an exchange? An environmental expert? Or the head of an oil company?"

* * *

The controversial details were all part of the larger strategic picture. "When we first decided on the war, I don't remember oil playing an important part," says Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser under the elder Bush and a critic of the current president's decision to invade.

But that's because concern about oil supplies is part of the architecture of U.S. foreign policy. Scowcroft notes that oil can't be disregarded because Iraq and its neighbors sit on two-thirds of the world's oil reserves. But oil needn't be mentioned either because it's self-evident. War critics might call that the perfect conspiracy.

In a sense, though, all Americans are part of that conspiracy. We have built a society that is profligate with its energy and relies on petroleum that happens to be pooled under some unstable or unfriendly regimes. We have frittered away energy resources with little regard for the strategic consequences. And now it's hard and expensive to change our ways.

Zaab Sethna, a business consultant and former official of the Iraqi National Congress, says that he attended many Pentagon and State Department meetings and never heard postwar oil policy discussed.

But, he says, "Let's not kid ourselves. Iraq is sitting on a very large portion of oil itself and is in a key region of the world. And that makes it important for U.S. security interests. . . . The Iraqi opposition . . . realized that Rwanda wouldn't be getting the attention of the superpower."

Until Rwanda discovers oil.

mufsons@washpost.com

Steven Mufson covers energy for The Post.

Investigate Big Dick

By Stephen Pizzo, News for Real. Posted May 3, 2006.

Did Cheney and oil company execs lick their chops over Iraqi oil less than two years before we invaded Iraq? Shouldn't someone find out?

If the US Senate really wants to earn our respect, I have a suggestion for them: Hold bipartisan hearings into Dick Cheney's 2001 Energy Task Force.

If not now, when?

Low-wage working Americans can't afford to drive to their jobs? Already some folks have been forced to pawn personal items just to fill their tank for another week. How bad does it have to get before you guys up there start asking the questions you should have asked years ago -- and this time, demanding real answers.

So, Bill Frist, Harry Reid, pull together a bipartisan panel made up of your toughest, most skeptical prosecutional-minded members, hire a couple of junkyard dog lawyers to act as GOP and Dem counsels, and let the long overdue hearings begin.

Subpoena everyone who had anything to do with those meetings, including secretaries who transcribed the original minutes. Oh, and when you call oil industry execs back, put them under oath this time. Because they lied last time when they said they had no idea...

(Washington Post, May 2005) A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress ...The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.

I mean really guys -- if not now, when?

Almost everyone else except Congress has tried to get this information out of the administration. The non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) filed suit in April 2002 seeking access to the records of Cheney's energy task force. But one of those "liberal activist federal judges" dismissed the suit. The Sierra Club carried its fight for those records all the way to the US Supreme Court, which in 2004 voted 7-2 to uphold "a paramount necessity of protecting the executive branch from vexatious litigation."

But just to make sure no one got lucky in court, the administration built a wide moat around all things it feels are none of our damn business; including whatever deals Cheney made in 2001 with energy company CEOs.

"WASHINGTON - As the Bush administration has dramatically accelerated the classification of information as 'top secret' or 'confidential,' one office is refusing to report on its annual activity in classifying documents: the office of Vice President Dick Cheney ... A standing executive order, strengthened by President Bush in 2003, requires all agencies and 'any other entity within the executive branch' to provide an annual accounting of their classification of documents. More than 80 agencies have collectively reported to the National Archives that they made 15.6 million decisions in 2004 to classify information, nearly double the number in 2001, but Cheney continues to insist he is exempt. (Full Story)

It's not as though we don't have good reason to suspect skullduggery was afoot at those meeting -- skullduggery that has now been allowed to manifest itself in the form of war, economic hardship for average Americans and record profits for the Big Energy folk who attended the meetings. Over the past four years we have learned little about what happened at those meetings, but what little we have learned startles even those of us who thought we had seen it all:

"Documents turned over in the summer of 2003 by the Commerce Department as a result of the Sierra Club's and Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.' The documents, dated March 2001, also feature maps of Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supporting charts with details of the major oil and gas development projects in each country that provide information on the project's costs, capacity, oil company and status or completion date." (Full Text)

So, did Cheney and oil company executives lick their chops over Iraqi oil less than two years before we attacked over non-existent WMD? When the administration brushed off questions about Cheney's meetings by telling us they concerned "securing America's energy future," was this the plan they cooked up? To overthrow Saddam, set up a puppet government and pump, pump, pump? If so, that plan has gone terribly wrong.

So, shouldn't Congress find out? If not now, when?

Well, let me correct myself. Not everything went wrong for everyone; just 2,800 American kids who died and tens of thousands of Iraqis who died. Now American motorists are getting the shaft. But look who came out smelling like a rose. By disrupting oil supplies from Iraq, the world's third largest producer, and destabilizing the entire oil producing region, and now by threatening Iran, oil companies with oil assets in the Gulf, Alaska and other regions, have seen the price of their oil skyrocket. Clearly a seat at those energy task force meetings was a seat worth having -- worth billions.

"Last week, Exxon Mobil (the majority owner of Imperial Oil (AKA 'Esso') announced its first-quarter profits had risen 14 per cent to $8.4 billion over the same period last year. That followed similar announcements by Conoco/Phillips and Chevron, the next two largest U.S. integrated oil companies. Chevron's profits jumped 50 per cent to $4 billion while Conoco/Phillips saw its profits climb 13 per cent to $3.3 billion."

A citizen would think that such obscene profits, at the very time real wages of working Americans are falling, the cost of heating and cooling their homes rises every month and transportation costs soar, would provide Congress with some backbone.

Senators, this is where the proverbial rubber hits the road. Investigate. Not just Big Oil, but Big Dick as well. Inquiring minds want to know. We are waiting and we are watching. If not now, when?

Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including "Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans," which was nominated for a Pulitzer.