This is the day that commemorates the venality and criminality of politicians and religious leaders, made manifest.
Wake up. Six years later, wake up.
Or, better yet, lighten up, America.
Dwelling on your injuries make you sound all whiny and maudlin, and you ruin the party! Your makeup starts running with all those tears! You're ruining your botox treatment! Here's an idea from a great leader... Go SHOPPING!
Be your selfish self and get on with it.
You've had electricity and clean water for the past six years, right?
Have you been tortured or ethnically cleansed?
Are the kids insurgents, yet?
Grow up, America.
The boogey men, OBL and Dubya are two peas from the same pod. Front men for the perpetual war machine, propagandists, chosen by the real movers for their supposed religiosity and their stage presence. Both of them are rich sons of richie riches, playing with blocks and dress up costumes like they were buildings and uniforms. What do they know of anything?
But they scared you out of your wits, didn't they.
They're pretty certain of themselves, aren't they.
Their product has been tested on focus groups.
But I think they are both losing their appeal, and I think their planners are thinking of retiring their dog and pony shows to move on to bigger and brighter shiny new products...
like Iran, and then on to the Road to Damascus.
Fall is the time to roll out the new shows, Andy!
Isn't it interesting how predictably Madison Avenue their productions have become?
It's like watching the summer reruns, only they're 6 years along now. More like watching Gilligan's Island reruns.
Dubya's speeches are worse than bad. He can barely deliver them. (or more correctly, catapult them.) And OBL has lost all credibility, showing up in a funny beard and asking us to embrace Islam, indeed. He really doesn't know us, does he.
Both of them need another speech writer, another makeup man, stand-ins, props and better costumes.
Another terrorist attack, another election, and the seasons, they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down...
Lucky for their sponsors, they have Congress to pick our pockets and post date their checks...
Showing posts with label they thought they were free. Show all posts
Showing posts with label they thought they were free. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Monday, September 10, 2007
Monday, July 30, 2007
Friday, July 13, 2007
Dear Patrick Fitzgerald
You have been the biggest disappointment in this disappointing century.
A crime was committed.
Treason.
Your instruction was to investigate.
Yes, they kicked some sand in the umpire's eyes ... so you just quit?
This is not sandlot baseball.
You are a professional. DO YOUR JOB.
Is this all we deserve, after two hundred years of democracy?
What a way for a nation to die, starved for the truth, starved for justice, lied to, robbed.
(note: The video is posted properly, but there must be some screw up on the host. Anyway - it's worth watching... go to Youtube and search for Ambassador Wilson's testimony. he said a lot of the same things I've been saying but with more athori-tah.)
A crime was committed.
Treason.
Your instruction was to investigate.
Yes, they kicked some sand in the umpire's eyes ... so you just quit?
This is not sandlot baseball.
You are a professional. DO YOUR JOB.
Is this all we deserve, after two hundred years of democracy?
What a way for a nation to die, starved for the truth, starved for justice, lied to, robbed.
(note: The video is posted properly, but there must be some screw up on the host. Anyway - it's worth watching... go to Youtube and search for Ambassador Wilson's testimony. he said a lot of the same things I've been saying but with more athori-tah.)
Monday, July 09, 2007
bang the pots and pans
ECFS Received your Submission/Request at Mon Jul 9 14:54:42 EDT 2007
Eastern Time.
Your filing will be available for viewing online one (1) business day after the receipt of this confirmation. Filers are encouraged to retrieve and view their filing by going to http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/ecfs and clicking on the "Search for Filed Comments" link.
My Comment:
the final frontier for full information supression
Net Neutrality is essential to free speech, equal opportunity and economic innovation in America. Since the FCC removed this basic protection in 2005, the top executives of phone and cable companies have stated their intention to become the Internet's gatekeepers and to discriminate against Web sites that don't pay their added tolls.
This fundamental change would end the open Internet as we know it. It would damage my ability to connect with others, share information and participate in our 21st century democracy and economy. The FCC must ensure that broadband providers do not block, interfere with or discriminate against any lawful Internet traffic based on its ownership, source or destination.
Now it's your turn...
Eastern Time.
Your filing will be available for viewing online one (1) business day after the receipt of this confirmation. Filers are encouraged to retrieve and view their filing by going to http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/ecfs and clicking on the "Search for Filed Comments" link.
My Comment:
the final frontier for full information supression
Net Neutrality is essential to free speech, equal opportunity and economic innovation in America. Since the FCC removed this basic protection in 2005, the top executives of phone and cable companies have stated their intention to become the Internet's gatekeepers and to discriminate against Web sites that don't pay their added tolls.
This fundamental change would end the open Internet as we know it. It would damage my ability to connect with others, share information and participate in our 21st century democracy and economy. The FCC must ensure that broadband providers do not block, interfere with or discriminate against any lawful Internet traffic based on its ownership, source or destination.
Now it's your turn...
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Why are we in Iraq when Flint Michigan looks like a bomb dropped?
There is an alternative.
"Let's get out of Iraq and rebuild America first."
--Merle Haggard
"Let's get out of Iraq and rebuild America first."
--Merle Haggard
Thursday, June 28, 2007
the office pool...
... says the "missing family jewel" is the Kennedy assasination.
...or just maybe little Georgie W. was a Manchurian Candidate.
...or just maybe little Georgie W. was a Manchurian Candidate.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Woke up, late
Been reading a lot of good stuff on Common Dreams, Alternet, TomDispatch, Antiwar lately... this one gets me.
One Day You’re Gonna Wake Up
by David Michael Green
Published on Friday, May 4, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
One day you’re gonna wake up, America.
And, like every other one since last you can remember, it’s gonna be an ugly morning.
One day you’re gonna wake up and go to your lousy job with its lousy salary and non-existent benefits. You might even remember the good job you once had. Or that the government you once supported gave tax breaks to companies like the one that exported that good job of yours to the Third World (which is what they’re now starting to call your country). Or that that same government undermined the labor unions which fought to get you your good wages and benefits.
One day you’re gonna wake up and be furious at the monstrous tax burden you are carrying, a tab which accounts for fifty of the seventy hours you must work each week just to eke by. You might even figure out why your tax bill is so high. You might remember that the government you once supported shifted the tax burden from the rich onto people like you, and from the taxpayers of the time onto those of today. And that they borrowed money in astonishing quantities to fund their sleight-of-hand, so that you work thirty hours a week just to pay the interest on a mountain of money borrowed decades ago.
One day you’re gonna wake up in anger at the absurdly poor education your children are receiving. You’re gonna remember that it wasn’t always that way, that even after the military’s voracious appetite was temporarily sated, your country still managed to find a few bucks to at least educate a workforce. No more. And you’re gonna remember how you applauded when your educational system was twisted in to a test taking industry that is careful, above all, not to teach children how to think.
One day you’re gonna wake up literally sick and tired. You’re gonna want treatment for your maladies but you won’t be able to touch the cost. You’re gonna wonder what you were thinking when believed your country had the best healthcare system in the world, even though it was the only advanced democracy in the world that didn’t provide universal care, even though it devoted fifty percent more of its economy than those other countries to pay for a system that left fifty million people uninsured, and even though there were massive layers of unnecessary and harmful private sector bureaucracy skimming hundreds of billions of dollars of profits out of the system in the name of free enterprise.
One day you’re gonna wake up too tired to go to work anymore. You’re gonna want to retire in dignity but will be left instead to laugh bitterly at the cruelty of that joke. And you’re gonna wonder what in the world you had been thinking voting for a president who’s primary goal was to allow Wall Street to raid Social Security, destroying what had once been considered the most successful domestic program in human history.
One day you’re gonna wake up and wish that it wasn’t so bloody hot, and that there weren’t so many diseases and species eradications and violent storms lashing the planet. And maybe you’ll even remember that you once supported a government that lied about the very existence of global warming - back when it might have been curtailed - a government that scuttled the barest remedy for the problem in order to protect oil company profits.
One day you’re gonna wake up and wish you had a government that could simply and competently do the basic things it was designed for. A government that could protect you from foreign attack, that could come to your rescue after a devastating hurricane, that could properly manage a new program or other people’s security. An administration that didn’t pervert the purpose of every agency within the government to its opposite, using civil rights lawyers to fight civil rights, for example, or the EPA to protect polluters.
One day you’re gonna wake up and cry out for simple justice, blindly applied without bias. And perhaps you’ll remember when that principle died. When your country stood by and watched the politicization of its judicial system for purposes of partisanship, and said nothing. When it stood by and watched its highest law enforcement officials in the land lie about their failing memory of events and pretended to believe that was acceptable.
One day you’re gonna wake up and wish that you weren’t being drafted to go fight wars you don’t believe in. You’ll remember how soldiers were sent to their deaths for lies. You’ll remember how badly they were treated when they came home maimed and twisted. You’ll remember how real, patriotic, former soldiers were mocked and humiliated by dress-up, unpatriotic, former non-soldiers. And suddenly you’ll understand why no one would volunteer for the military anymore, and why people like you had to be drafted.
One day you’re gonna wake up and want very badly to run outside and scream in anger about a government that long ago stopped serving your interests in favor of the narrow interests of a tiny oligarchy. But instead you’ll stay inside and keep your scream tucked safely in your belly. Because you’ll know that in your country dissent has long since been outlawed, on pain of torture and death. You’ll remember concepts like due process, limitations on government search, seizure and wiretapping, habeas corpus, trial by peers, legal representation and prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment as historical artifacts no longer even taught in schools.
On day you’re gonna wake up and want so badly to change governments. You’re gonna treasure the concept of democracy like no Soviet dissident ever did. You’re gonna crave the opportunity to own your own government, to make your own societal choices, to make a change of direction never before so desperately necessary. And you’re gonna wonder why you didn’t speak up as you watched first-hand the dismantling of the democracy you had been handed by previous generations of patriots. You’re gonna wish you had been patriotic enough yourself to demand, above all else, free and fair elections, and you’re gonna shake your head in puzzlement at how you stood by watching in silence those that patently were not.
One day you’re gonna wake up and want to get the hell out of your rotting, repressive country. You’re gonna remember a time when that wasn’t true. But, oddly enough, you’ll find that other countries remember too. They’ll remember your country’s arrogance, its unilateralism, its walls, its racism, and its politicized abuse of immigrants. And they’ll remember how your government undermined and violently replaced theirs whenever corporations from your country had their profits threatened. You’re gonna want to leave, but there will be nowhere you’ll be welcome. You’re gonna find out that walls can face both directions.
One day you’re gonna wake up in a hostile world where your country no longer has any friends. There will be governments of other countries - former long-standing allies - that cannot afford to have anything to do with you, lest their publics angrily remove them from office for collaborating with a country as hated as yours. Nor will those governments trust yours anyway. They will perhaps possess intelligence that could save your life, but they will not share it. They will possess forces that could help you survive real security threats, but they will not provide them. Your country will have become an international pariah, the South Africa of the twenty-first century.
And because no one will assist you, one day you’re gonna wake up fearing for your life as your country is brutally attacked by angry militants deploying weapons of mass destruction against your cities. Long dormant connections in your brain will resurface, and you will dimly understand why. On this day - perhaps March 20, 2023 - you might be assisted in your comprehension by the message of one of the attackers, someone whose family your country callously destroyed in its mission accomplished in Iraq, and who spent the next twenty years plotting this day’s revenge. And you will wonder again why you stood by as your country attacked Iraq on a completely bogus pretext. You’ll remember applauding when this mailed fist was long ago sent. And, just as it comes hurling back in your direction at a lethal velocity, stamped “Return to Sender”, you’ll wonder what you were thinking. And you’ll realize just how much you weren’t.
One day you’re gonna wake up, America, and you’re gonna find out what was happening while you were sprawled on the couch watching endless mind-numbing loops of CSI, Desperate Housewives or Dancing with the Stars.
One day you’re gonna wake up and realize that catching all the action during week seven of the 2011 NFL season really wasn’t so critical in the greater scheme of things after all.
One day you’re gonna wake up and wished you’d invested a little more energy into monitoring and choosing the people who made monumental decisions on your behalf.
One day, with a flash of remorse greater than you thought it possible that one human vessel could contain, you’ll remember the ignored warning shots across your bow. Moments later, you’ll discover the human capacity for searing remorse is actually even greater still, as you contemplate your inattention even to the shots that were fired right through the bow. With a fury you would yesterday have thought yourself incapable of, you’ll hurriedly attempt to affix Band-Aids to the tattered splinters remaining from your country’s once sturdy hull. But you’ll learn quickly the toll of those years spent wasted in a civic coma. You’ll find that no amount of patchwork can any longer save this sinking ship from its appointment with the dustbin of history.
In shame, you’ll regret the callous arrogance with which you laughingly dismissed those who sounded the early clarion call. “We are destroying ourselves”, they tried to tell you. But even on the rare occasion when you roused yourself from your stupor long enough to learn the slightest bit about the very threats that jeopardized your life and that of your species, still you found it more reassuring to follow the blustering worst amongst us, with their patently absurd pretended confidence, and their ever constant resort to the cheapest of false solutions, and the rudest of demeanors.
One day, you’ll desperately search for hope of any sort, but none will remain. Nothing will be left to save you.
One day you’ll realize that once there were solutions, but that that day is now long past. You’ll see that human technological capacity ran its evolutionary race with wisdom, and the latter came in second. You’ll sadly realize that you stood by while your country led the once great tool-making species to its own destruction.
One day you’re gonna wake up, America, and realize how far it’s all gone. But if that day isn’t very soon, it won’t matter.
Because one day you’re gonna wake up, and it will be far, far too late.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/04/962/
One Day You’re Gonna Wake Up
by David Michael Green
Published on Friday, May 4, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
One day you’re gonna wake up, America.
And, like every other one since last you can remember, it’s gonna be an ugly morning.
One day you’re gonna wake up and go to your lousy job with its lousy salary and non-existent benefits. You might even remember the good job you once had. Or that the government you once supported gave tax breaks to companies like the one that exported that good job of yours to the Third World (which is what they’re now starting to call your country). Or that that same government undermined the labor unions which fought to get you your good wages and benefits.
One day you’re gonna wake up and be furious at the monstrous tax burden you are carrying, a tab which accounts for fifty of the seventy hours you must work each week just to eke by. You might even figure out why your tax bill is so high. You might remember that the government you once supported shifted the tax burden from the rich onto people like you, and from the taxpayers of the time onto those of today. And that they borrowed money in astonishing quantities to fund their sleight-of-hand, so that you work thirty hours a week just to pay the interest on a mountain of money borrowed decades ago.
One day you’re gonna wake up in anger at the absurdly poor education your children are receiving. You’re gonna remember that it wasn’t always that way, that even after the military’s voracious appetite was temporarily sated, your country still managed to find a few bucks to at least educate a workforce. No more. And you’re gonna remember how you applauded when your educational system was twisted in to a test taking industry that is careful, above all, not to teach children how to think.
One day you’re gonna wake up literally sick and tired. You’re gonna want treatment for your maladies but you won’t be able to touch the cost. You’re gonna wonder what you were thinking when believed your country had the best healthcare system in the world, even though it was the only advanced democracy in the world that didn’t provide universal care, even though it devoted fifty percent more of its economy than those other countries to pay for a system that left fifty million people uninsured, and even though there were massive layers of unnecessary and harmful private sector bureaucracy skimming hundreds of billions of dollars of profits out of the system in the name of free enterprise.
One day you’re gonna wake up too tired to go to work anymore. You’re gonna want to retire in dignity but will be left instead to laugh bitterly at the cruelty of that joke. And you’re gonna wonder what in the world you had been thinking voting for a president who’s primary goal was to allow Wall Street to raid Social Security, destroying what had once been considered the most successful domestic program in human history.
One day you’re gonna wake up and wish that it wasn’t so bloody hot, and that there weren’t so many diseases and species eradications and violent storms lashing the planet. And maybe you’ll even remember that you once supported a government that lied about the very existence of global warming - back when it might have been curtailed - a government that scuttled the barest remedy for the problem in order to protect oil company profits.
One day you’re gonna wake up and wish you had a government that could simply and competently do the basic things it was designed for. A government that could protect you from foreign attack, that could come to your rescue after a devastating hurricane, that could properly manage a new program or other people’s security. An administration that didn’t pervert the purpose of every agency within the government to its opposite, using civil rights lawyers to fight civil rights, for example, or the EPA to protect polluters.
One day you’re gonna wake up and cry out for simple justice, blindly applied without bias. And perhaps you’ll remember when that principle died. When your country stood by and watched the politicization of its judicial system for purposes of partisanship, and said nothing. When it stood by and watched its highest law enforcement officials in the land lie about their failing memory of events and pretended to believe that was acceptable.
One day you’re gonna wake up and wish that you weren’t being drafted to go fight wars you don’t believe in. You’ll remember how soldiers were sent to their deaths for lies. You’ll remember how badly they were treated when they came home maimed and twisted. You’ll remember how real, patriotic, former soldiers were mocked and humiliated by dress-up, unpatriotic, former non-soldiers. And suddenly you’ll understand why no one would volunteer for the military anymore, and why people like you had to be drafted.
One day you’re gonna wake up and want very badly to run outside and scream in anger about a government that long ago stopped serving your interests in favor of the narrow interests of a tiny oligarchy. But instead you’ll stay inside and keep your scream tucked safely in your belly. Because you’ll know that in your country dissent has long since been outlawed, on pain of torture and death. You’ll remember concepts like due process, limitations on government search, seizure and wiretapping, habeas corpus, trial by peers, legal representation and prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment as historical artifacts no longer even taught in schools.
On day you’re gonna wake up and want so badly to change governments. You’re gonna treasure the concept of democracy like no Soviet dissident ever did. You’re gonna crave the opportunity to own your own government, to make your own societal choices, to make a change of direction never before so desperately necessary. And you’re gonna wonder why you didn’t speak up as you watched first-hand the dismantling of the democracy you had been handed by previous generations of patriots. You’re gonna wish you had been patriotic enough yourself to demand, above all else, free and fair elections, and you’re gonna shake your head in puzzlement at how you stood by watching in silence those that patently were not.
One day you’re gonna wake up and want to get the hell out of your rotting, repressive country. You’re gonna remember a time when that wasn’t true. But, oddly enough, you’ll find that other countries remember too. They’ll remember your country’s arrogance, its unilateralism, its walls, its racism, and its politicized abuse of immigrants. And they’ll remember how your government undermined and violently replaced theirs whenever corporations from your country had their profits threatened. You’re gonna want to leave, but there will be nowhere you’ll be welcome. You’re gonna find out that walls can face both directions.
One day you’re gonna wake up in a hostile world where your country no longer has any friends. There will be governments of other countries - former long-standing allies - that cannot afford to have anything to do with you, lest their publics angrily remove them from office for collaborating with a country as hated as yours. Nor will those governments trust yours anyway. They will perhaps possess intelligence that could save your life, but they will not share it. They will possess forces that could help you survive real security threats, but they will not provide them. Your country will have become an international pariah, the South Africa of the twenty-first century.
And because no one will assist you, one day you’re gonna wake up fearing for your life as your country is brutally attacked by angry militants deploying weapons of mass destruction against your cities. Long dormant connections in your brain will resurface, and you will dimly understand why. On this day - perhaps March 20, 2023 - you might be assisted in your comprehension by the message of one of the attackers, someone whose family your country callously destroyed in its mission accomplished in Iraq, and who spent the next twenty years plotting this day’s revenge. And you will wonder again why you stood by as your country attacked Iraq on a completely bogus pretext. You’ll remember applauding when this mailed fist was long ago sent. And, just as it comes hurling back in your direction at a lethal velocity, stamped “Return to Sender”, you’ll wonder what you were thinking. And you’ll realize just how much you weren’t.
One day you’re gonna wake up, America, and you’re gonna find out what was happening while you were sprawled on the couch watching endless mind-numbing loops of CSI, Desperate Housewives or Dancing with the Stars.
One day you’re gonna wake up and realize that catching all the action during week seven of the 2011 NFL season really wasn’t so critical in the greater scheme of things after all.
One day you’re gonna wake up and wished you’d invested a little more energy into monitoring and choosing the people who made monumental decisions on your behalf.
One day, with a flash of remorse greater than you thought it possible that one human vessel could contain, you’ll remember the ignored warning shots across your bow. Moments later, you’ll discover the human capacity for searing remorse is actually even greater still, as you contemplate your inattention even to the shots that were fired right through the bow. With a fury you would yesterday have thought yourself incapable of, you’ll hurriedly attempt to affix Band-Aids to the tattered splinters remaining from your country’s once sturdy hull. But you’ll learn quickly the toll of those years spent wasted in a civic coma. You’ll find that no amount of patchwork can any longer save this sinking ship from its appointment with the dustbin of history.
In shame, you’ll regret the callous arrogance with which you laughingly dismissed those who sounded the early clarion call. “We are destroying ourselves”, they tried to tell you. But even on the rare occasion when you roused yourself from your stupor long enough to learn the slightest bit about the very threats that jeopardized your life and that of your species, still you found it more reassuring to follow the blustering worst amongst us, with their patently absurd pretended confidence, and their ever constant resort to the cheapest of false solutions, and the rudest of demeanors.
One day, you’ll desperately search for hope of any sort, but none will remain. Nothing will be left to save you.
One day you’ll realize that once there were solutions, but that that day is now long past. You’ll see that human technological capacity ran its evolutionary race with wisdom, and the latter came in second. You’ll sadly realize that you stood by while your country led the once great tool-making species to its own destruction.
One day you’re gonna wake up, America, and realize how far it’s all gone. But if that day isn’t very soon, it won’t matter.
Because one day you’re gonna wake up, and it will be far, far too late.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/04/962/
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Dear Senator Leahy
Subpena them (the Bush Crime Gang)?
Heck, why wait? Just do what THEY do, snoop.
They data mine their fellow citizens phone, email, snail mail, library records, credit card purchases... what sets them above their fellow citizens?
Time for some fairness.
Equality under law(lessness.)
They don't want to show up to answer questions: how about some extraordinary rendition?
They'd do it to us in a New York minute.
They don't want to swear their testimony?
Waterboards.
It's not torture.
What's good for the goose...
Knitting away, beneath the guillotine...
Heck, why wait? Just do what THEY do, snoop.
They data mine their fellow citizens phone, email, snail mail, library records, credit card purchases... what sets them above their fellow citizens?
Time for some fairness.
Equality under law(lessness.)
They don't want to show up to answer questions: how about some extraordinary rendition?
They'd do it to us in a New York minute.
They don't want to swear their testimony?
Waterboards.
It's not torture.
What's good for the goose...
Knitting away, beneath the guillotine...
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
no meter on the oil pumps
Refresh my memory... do you recall on the evening of "Shock and Awe" when Dubya got on television before the world to talk to the people of soon to be occupied Iraq, and all he said to them was to not disturb the oil?
And after the preemptive invasion, when the museums and government offices were being looted ("stuff happens"), the Ministry of Oil was the only building in Iraq being protected by American troops?
Remember the insider joke ... "Operation Iraqi Liberation"?
Remember the mainstream media echo chamber trumpeting the "oil for food scandal"? At least the children of Iraq were obese under Saddam. Today with the "oil for chaos" scandal that is not being mentioned in the American Idol obsessed press, Iraqi children are facing water borne parasitic disease, dissappeared medical service, and malnutrition.
Mission Accomplished.
Tell me, how much more looting do Bush's and Cheney's cronies deserve? Will they ever have enough? Fu*%ing insatiable wolves, indeed, that's what they are.
Tell me, how much more chaos would there be if American troops left right now? Will the twit Neocons EVER spill enough blood and shoot enough guns to prop up their manhood?
Sounds like PLENTY of chaos right now.
But, refresh my memory... didn't the NeoCon ideologist Michael Ledeen say that chaos was their goal?
Yes he did.
Dear Senator Levin, I heard today that your biggest financial support comes from AIPAC.
How does the Israeli lobby serve the citizens of the state of Michigan?
Is that why you are the flip side of the same coin? Heads we get crony capitalism and corporate welfare and a fascist military industrial economy, tails we get the same thing.
Why DO you rubber stamp the worst administration in history?
How Much Iraqi Crude Oil is Being Stolen? Mystery of the Missing Meters
By Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch
Posted on April 30, 2007(link)The line of ships at the Al Basra Oil Terminal (ABOT) stretches south to the horizon, patiently waiting in the searing heat of the Northern Arabian Gulf as four giant supertankers load up. Close by, two more tankers fill up at the smaller Khawr Al Amaya Oil Terminal (KAAOT). Guarding both terminals are dozens of heavily-armed U.S. Navy troops and Iraqi Marines who live on the platforms.
These two offshore terminals, a maze of pipes and precarious metal walkways, deliver some 1.6 million barrels of crude oil, at least 85 percent of Iraq's output, to buyers from all over the world. If the southern oil fields are the heart of Iraq's economy, its main arteries are three 40-plus inch pipelines that stretch some 52 miles from Iraq's wells to the ports.
Heavily armed soldiers spend their days at the oil terminals scanning the horizon looking for suicide bombers and stray fishing dhows (boats). Meanwhile, right under their noses, smugglers are suspected to be diverting an estimated billions of dollars worth of crude onto tankers because the oil metering system that is supposed monitor how much crude flows into and out of ABOT and KAAOT -- has not worked since the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Officials blame the four-year delay in repairing the relatively simple system on "security problems." Others point to the failed efforts of the two U.S. companies hired to repair the southern oil fields, fix the two terminals, and the meters: Halliburton of Houston, Texas, and Parsons of Pasadena, California.
The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) is scheduled to publish a report this spring that is expected criticize the companies' failure to complete the work.
Rumors are rife among suspicious Iraqis about the failure to measure the oil flow. "Iraq is the victim of the biggest robbery of its oil production in modern history," blazed a March 2006 headline in Azzaman, Iraq's most widely read newspaper. A May 2006 study of oil production and export figures by Platt's Oilgram News, an industry magazine, showed that up to $3 billion a year is unaccounted for.
"Iraqi oil is regularly smuggled out of the country in many different ways," an oil merchant in Amman told the Nation (U.S.) magazine last month. "Emir al-Hakim [the head of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq] is spending all his time in Basra selling oil as if it were his own. People there call him Uday al-Hakim, meaning he is behaving the same way Uday Saddam Hussein was acting. Other merchants like myself have to work through him with the big deals or smuggle small quantities on our own. The petroleum is now divided among political parties in power."
The resource curse
The smuggling and black market operations bear striking parallels to Saddam Hussein's tactics for circumventing the UN embargo. Saddam was accused of selling some $5.7 billion worth of petroleum products on the black market over the six years of the Oil-for-Food program while United Nations inspectors turned a blind eye. Today, his successors stand accused of similar abuses.
Iraq sits on 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the third largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia and Canada). From a society that once used its oil revenue to create a social welfare state that provided education, health care and social services, the country has plummeted into the ranks of the poorest countries of the world.
Economists call this the "resource curse." Those blessed with non-renewable resources often benefit the least, because a few wealthy people control the resources, or war prevents almost anyone from the benefiting.
Iraq's main revenue source - earnings from the export sales of petroleum, petroleum products and natural gas - is currently managed by the Development Fund for Iraq. DFI's May 21, 2003 document, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, assigns this money to benefit the Iraqi people. The resolution replaces the previous United Nations-run Oil-for-Food scheme that lasted from 1997 until the March 2003 invasion.
Almost four years after the DFI was created, officially logged crude sales have generated more than $80 billion. The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) managed the DFI from the immediate aftermath of Saddam's removal until June 28, 2004, when the CPA was disbanded. During those 14 months, the CPA spent $19.6 billion of Iraq's DFI funds. The three succeeding governments have been officially in charge of the DFI revenues, although the influence of the U.S. military and political advisors has remained significant throughout. In the 32 months after the CPA left, the three governments spent $47 billion more.
Halliburton & Parsons
U.S. contractors have played a key role in the repair and upgrading of Iraq's oil infrastructure and expected the industry to pay for reconstruction. In January 2004, under project Restore Iraqi Oil II (RIO II), the Bush administration contracted with Halliburton to fix southern Iraq's oil fields and with Parsons to handle the northern fields. The two companies were supposed to be supervised by yet another contractor, New Jersey-based Foster Wheeler. (The first RIO contract was the infamous, secret no-bid contract issued to Halliburton before the invasion of Iraq. Although RIO II was competitively bid, Sheryl Tappan, a former Bechtel employee wrote a book criticizing the award as unfair.)
Halliburton and Parsons have long histories in Iraq, going back more than 40 years. Brown & Root, which is now part of Halliburton , began work in Iraq in 1961, while Parsons dipped into Iraq's oil sector in the 1950s. Foster Wheeler dates its work in Iraq to the 1930s.
These companies have a lot of experience at the terminals where the black market now thrives. Indeed, Halliburton built the ABOT terminal, then known as Mina al-Bakr, in the early1970s. After it was damaged during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Halliburton repaired the terminal, before it was bombed yet again during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The Khor al-Amaya oil terminal also saw a similar cycle of destruction and rebuilding. Built with Halliburton 's help in 1973, it was heavily damaged by Iranian commandos during the Iran-Iraq war, then again during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and most recently in May 2006 by a major fire that destroyed 70 percent of its facilities. During the sanctions, Ingersoll Dresser Pump Company, a Halliburton subsidiary, had a secret contract to sell Iraq spare parts, compressors, and firefighting equipment for the refurbishment.
( Halliburton also a long history near the Turkish port of Ceyhan, from where Iraq sells oil produced at Kirkuk in northern Iraq. Halliburton runs the nearby U.S. military base at Incirlik, which was the staging ground for Operation Northern Watch that provided air protection for the Kurds during the 1990s.)
Measuring the oil
With billions of dollars to spend and extensive experience with oil infrastructure and Iraqi ports, Haliburton and Parsons seem unable to deal with the routine problem of broken meters at the Southern Iraq terminals.
The kinds of meters they were supposed to repair or replace at ABOT are commonly found at hundreds of similar sites around the world. Because they are custom-built, shipped, then assembled and calibrated on site, the process can take up to a year. But the probelm has persisted for four years.
After the 2003 invasion, the meters appear to have been turned off and there have since been no reliable estimates of how much crude has been shipped from the southern oil fields. (The northern oil fields in Kirkuk, which supply the Beiji refinery in Iraq and export crude to the Turkish port of Adana, has reliable metering but little oil to measure since insurgent attacks largely shut down the facility.)
Lieutenant Aaron Bergman, the U.S. Navy officer in charge of Mobile Security Squadron 7 at ABOT, says export authorities have "guesstimated" how much is being sold, with a back-of-the-envelope formula: Every centimeter a tanker lowers into the water equals 6,000 barrels of oil cargo.
"So you can imagine," he said earlier this month to Stars & Stripes, a newspaper serving the U.S. military, the numbers could be off, "A couple of inches could equal 180,000 barrels of fuel."
"I would say probably between 200,000 and 500,000 barrels a day is probably unaccounted for in Iraq," Mikel Morris, who worked for the Iraq Reconstruction Management Organization (IRMO) at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, told KTVT, a Texas television station.
Neither US officials nor contractors have provided good reasons why, four years into the US occupation, the meters have not been calibrated, repaired, or replaced. One excuse is that the job of calibration requires special devices to assess the current meters and security issues make importing these devises problematic. Yet that and other security-related explanations fall apart given that the oil terminals are under 24 hour high security guard, lie more than 50 miles off-shore, and are accessible only by helicopter or ship.
There are two possible explanations: that the project has been delayed by bureaucracy or that vested interests benefiting from the lack of oil metering (such as smugglers or corrupt officials) have prevented the project from moving forward.
Skyrocketing Costs
The RIO II project, which includes the meter repair work, has come under much criticism, although specific details are scarce.
For example, the Bush administration issued Halliburton the RIO II order in January 2004 and gave detailed task orders in June. But despite not starting work until November 2004, the company charged the government millions of dollars for engineers who sat idle. Halliburton 's $296 million bill included at least 55 percent overhead. (In an estimate due later this month, SIGIR may predicts even higher overhead costs.)
A Parsons joint venture (with Worley of Australia), was also issued a contract in January 2004, given detailed task orders in June, and started work in July 2004. It has also been accused of charging high overhead costs while idle, although not as much as Halliburton . SIGIR estimate pegs its overhead at 43 percent.
In addition, in a series of scathing internal reports uncovered by Congressman Henry Waxman, supervisors Foster Wheeler criticized Halliburton 's cost. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a "cure" notice on January 29, 2005, ordering Halliburton to do a better job or else. After Halliburton did improve its cost controls, the military turned over the southern oil work to Parsons in mid 2005.
When Parsons took over the contracts, two years after the invasion, it hired a Saudi Arabian sub-contractor, Alaa for Industry, to help repair or replace the meters.
The turbine meters were shipped to Kuwait for repairs but do not appear to have been fixed in a timely manner, although some have been fixed and re-installed earlier this year. Unofficial sources suggest that the Kuwaiti bureaucracy delayed the repair work: "The real reason for the hindrance to work at the ABOT is because Kuwait has a vested interest in minimizing Iraqi oil exports," an anonymous source who worked on the project said. His claim could not be verified.
In mid-September 2006, the Iraqi oil ministry abruptly announced that it would pull the plug on the oil metering project, making future monitoring even less certain.
Asim Jihad, the oil ministry spokesman, told Al Hayat: "The American company had failed in keeping its promise to finish installing these meters; also, refusing to reveal the exact cost, except for saying that it is executing it within the American grant to Iraq and the sum of that grant is unknown to us too. This relieves the ministry from its obligation to it. Besides, many international companies presented good offers to implement the project in a record time due to its importance."
The oil ministry then invited British Petroleum and Shell to plan a comprehensive national metering project that would cover not only the oil terminals, but also the productions wells and the even the refineries.
A SIGIR team traveled to ABOT in November 2006 to check on progress. Its unpublished report suggests that the work was less than half complete.
Suddenly, in December 2006, a high-level U.S. team traveled out to ABOT to inspect the meters. In a little-noticed announcement issued on a Saturday just before Christmas, John Sickman, the resident oil expert at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said the meters had been fixed and were working fine.
"The measurement using the existing turbine meters and displacement meters at the offshore terminal at ABOT is transparent and the measurement devices are more than adequate," Sickman was quoted in the press release. "Furthermore, the crude oil vessels have measurement and quality samplers."
Indeed this is how the Dutch company Saybolt measured oil export under the United Nations Oil for Food program. The problem even today, according to experts consulted for this report, is that the meters have yet to be calibrated, so the data are basically useless.
Even if the meters are working properly, smuggling could still occur. "It's easy to steal crude if you knew what you were doing," Don Deaver, a petroleum metering expert who worked for Exxon for 33 years, said. "If you meaure too low or too high, someone will lose and some will one gain. It's why you need professionals who understand how the meters work to make sure that nothing is being lost or stolen."
U.S. government officials claim that little is being stolen. SGS (a British consultancy) "is providing independent third party loading certifications onsite for the customers. This, coupled with the recent installation of ultrasonic meter provides more than redundant measurement capability," said Sickman in December.
Days after the press release, in early January 2007, Parsons began work on the meters under a $57.8 million U.S. government-funded contract supervised by Major Dale Winger of the Joint Contracting Command in Basra. Almost as soon as work started, Winger was replaced by Lieutenant Commander Brian Schorn. Reached for this article, Schorn said he was not up to speed on what work had been done, and referred questions to his "front-office" in Baghdad at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Parsons Iraq Joint Venture spokesman Don Lassus also refused to comment. The contract with the military does not permit the release of "any unclassified information," he said, without prior approval of the military.
Today no government officials have been able to establish conclusively whether oil is being smuggled or not. Even the future of the oil metering remains unclear. The latest report issued by SIGIR in January 2007 notes that repair and rehabilitation work at ABOT is scheduled to be finished by May 2007, but "it is unclear whether this project will be completed because of de-obligation requirements" that is to say that the funding could be cut.
Pratap Chatterjee is managing editor of CorpWatch and the author of 'Iraq Inc.' (Seven Stories Press, September 2004).
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/51218/
And after the preemptive invasion, when the museums and government offices were being looted ("stuff happens"), the Ministry of Oil was the only building in Iraq being protected by American troops?
Remember the insider joke ... "Operation Iraqi Liberation"?
Remember the mainstream media echo chamber trumpeting the "oil for food scandal"? At least the children of Iraq were obese under Saddam. Today with the "oil for chaos" scandal that is not being mentioned in the American Idol obsessed press, Iraqi children are facing water borne parasitic disease, dissappeared medical service, and malnutrition.
Mission Accomplished.
Tell me, how much more looting do Bush's and Cheney's cronies deserve? Will they ever have enough? Fu*%ing insatiable wolves, indeed, that's what they are.
Tell me, how much more chaos would there be if American troops left right now? Will the twit Neocons EVER spill enough blood and shoot enough guns to prop up their manhood?
Sounds like PLENTY of chaos right now.
But, refresh my memory... didn't the NeoCon ideologist Michael Ledeen say that chaos was their goal?
Yes he did.
Dear Senator Levin, I heard today that your biggest financial support comes from AIPAC.
How does the Israeli lobby serve the citizens of the state of Michigan?
Is that why you are the flip side of the same coin? Heads we get crony capitalism and corporate welfare and a fascist military industrial economy, tails we get the same thing.
Why DO you rubber stamp the worst administration in history?
How Much Iraqi Crude Oil is Being Stolen? Mystery of the Missing Meters
By Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch
Posted on April 30, 2007(link)The line of ships at the Al Basra Oil Terminal (ABOT) stretches south to the horizon, patiently waiting in the searing heat of the Northern Arabian Gulf as four giant supertankers load up. Close by, two more tankers fill up at the smaller Khawr Al Amaya Oil Terminal (KAAOT). Guarding both terminals are dozens of heavily-armed U.S. Navy troops and Iraqi Marines who live on the platforms.
These two offshore terminals, a maze of pipes and precarious metal walkways, deliver some 1.6 million barrels of crude oil, at least 85 percent of Iraq's output, to buyers from all over the world. If the southern oil fields are the heart of Iraq's economy, its main arteries are three 40-plus inch pipelines that stretch some 52 miles from Iraq's wells to the ports.
Heavily armed soldiers spend their days at the oil terminals scanning the horizon looking for suicide bombers and stray fishing dhows (boats). Meanwhile, right under their noses, smugglers are suspected to be diverting an estimated billions of dollars worth of crude onto tankers because the oil metering system that is supposed monitor how much crude flows into and out of ABOT and KAAOT -- has not worked since the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Officials blame the four-year delay in repairing the relatively simple system on "security problems." Others point to the failed efforts of the two U.S. companies hired to repair the southern oil fields, fix the two terminals, and the meters: Halliburton of Houston, Texas, and Parsons of Pasadena, California.
The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) is scheduled to publish a report this spring that is expected criticize the companies' failure to complete the work.
Rumors are rife among suspicious Iraqis about the failure to measure the oil flow. "Iraq is the victim of the biggest robbery of its oil production in modern history," blazed a March 2006 headline in Azzaman, Iraq's most widely read newspaper. A May 2006 study of oil production and export figures by Platt's Oilgram News, an industry magazine, showed that up to $3 billion a year is unaccounted for.
"Iraqi oil is regularly smuggled out of the country in many different ways," an oil merchant in Amman told the Nation (U.S.) magazine last month. "Emir al-Hakim [the head of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq] is spending all his time in Basra selling oil as if it were his own. People there call him Uday al-Hakim, meaning he is behaving the same way Uday Saddam Hussein was acting. Other merchants like myself have to work through him with the big deals or smuggle small quantities on our own. The petroleum is now divided among political parties in power."
The resource curse
The smuggling and black market operations bear striking parallels to Saddam Hussein's tactics for circumventing the UN embargo. Saddam was accused of selling some $5.7 billion worth of petroleum products on the black market over the six years of the Oil-for-Food program while United Nations inspectors turned a blind eye. Today, his successors stand accused of similar abuses.
Iraq sits on 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the third largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia and Canada). From a society that once used its oil revenue to create a social welfare state that provided education, health care and social services, the country has plummeted into the ranks of the poorest countries of the world.
Economists call this the "resource curse." Those blessed with non-renewable resources often benefit the least, because a few wealthy people control the resources, or war prevents almost anyone from the benefiting.
Iraq's main revenue source - earnings from the export sales of petroleum, petroleum products and natural gas - is currently managed by the Development Fund for Iraq. DFI's May 21, 2003 document, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, assigns this money to benefit the Iraqi people. The resolution replaces the previous United Nations-run Oil-for-Food scheme that lasted from 1997 until the March 2003 invasion.
Almost four years after the DFI was created, officially logged crude sales have generated more than $80 billion. The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) managed the DFI from the immediate aftermath of Saddam's removal until June 28, 2004, when the CPA was disbanded. During those 14 months, the CPA spent $19.6 billion of Iraq's DFI funds. The three succeeding governments have been officially in charge of the DFI revenues, although the influence of the U.S. military and political advisors has remained significant throughout. In the 32 months after the CPA left, the three governments spent $47 billion more.
Halliburton & Parsons
U.S. contractors have played a key role in the repair and upgrading of Iraq's oil infrastructure and expected the industry to pay for reconstruction. In January 2004, under project Restore Iraqi Oil II (RIO II), the Bush administration contracted with Halliburton to fix southern Iraq's oil fields and with Parsons to handle the northern fields. The two companies were supposed to be supervised by yet another contractor, New Jersey-based Foster Wheeler. (The first RIO contract was the infamous, secret no-bid contract issued to Halliburton before the invasion of Iraq. Although RIO II was competitively bid, Sheryl Tappan, a former Bechtel employee wrote a book criticizing the award as unfair.)
Halliburton and Parsons have long histories in Iraq, going back more than 40 years. Brown & Root, which is now part of Halliburton , began work in Iraq in 1961, while Parsons dipped into Iraq's oil sector in the 1950s. Foster Wheeler dates its work in Iraq to the 1930s.
These companies have a lot of experience at the terminals where the black market now thrives. Indeed, Halliburton built the ABOT terminal, then known as Mina al-Bakr, in the early1970s. After it was damaged during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Halliburton repaired the terminal, before it was bombed yet again during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The Khor al-Amaya oil terminal also saw a similar cycle of destruction and rebuilding. Built with Halliburton 's help in 1973, it was heavily damaged by Iranian commandos during the Iran-Iraq war, then again during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and most recently in May 2006 by a major fire that destroyed 70 percent of its facilities. During the sanctions, Ingersoll Dresser Pump Company, a Halliburton subsidiary, had a secret contract to sell Iraq spare parts, compressors, and firefighting equipment for the refurbishment.
( Halliburton also a long history near the Turkish port of Ceyhan, from where Iraq sells oil produced at Kirkuk in northern Iraq. Halliburton runs the nearby U.S. military base at Incirlik, which was the staging ground for Operation Northern Watch that provided air protection for the Kurds during the 1990s.)
Measuring the oil
With billions of dollars to spend and extensive experience with oil infrastructure and Iraqi ports, Haliburton and Parsons seem unable to deal with the routine problem of broken meters at the Southern Iraq terminals.
The kinds of meters they were supposed to repair or replace at ABOT are commonly found at hundreds of similar sites around the world. Because they are custom-built, shipped, then assembled and calibrated on site, the process can take up to a year. But the probelm has persisted for four years.
After the 2003 invasion, the meters appear to have been turned off and there have since been no reliable estimates of how much crude has been shipped from the southern oil fields. (The northern oil fields in Kirkuk, which supply the Beiji refinery in Iraq and export crude to the Turkish port of Adana, has reliable metering but little oil to measure since insurgent attacks largely shut down the facility.)
Lieutenant Aaron Bergman, the U.S. Navy officer in charge of Mobile Security Squadron 7 at ABOT, says export authorities have "guesstimated" how much is being sold, with a back-of-the-envelope formula: Every centimeter a tanker lowers into the water equals 6,000 barrels of oil cargo.
"So you can imagine," he said earlier this month to Stars & Stripes, a newspaper serving the U.S. military, the numbers could be off, "A couple of inches could equal 180,000 barrels of fuel."
"I would say probably between 200,000 and 500,000 barrels a day is probably unaccounted for in Iraq," Mikel Morris, who worked for the Iraq Reconstruction Management Organization (IRMO) at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, told KTVT, a Texas television station.
Neither US officials nor contractors have provided good reasons why, four years into the US occupation, the meters have not been calibrated, repaired, or replaced. One excuse is that the job of calibration requires special devices to assess the current meters and security issues make importing these devises problematic. Yet that and other security-related explanations fall apart given that the oil terminals are under 24 hour high security guard, lie more than 50 miles off-shore, and are accessible only by helicopter or ship.
There are two possible explanations: that the project has been delayed by bureaucracy or that vested interests benefiting from the lack of oil metering (such as smugglers or corrupt officials) have prevented the project from moving forward.
Skyrocketing Costs
The RIO II project, which includes the meter repair work, has come under much criticism, although specific details are scarce.
For example, the Bush administration issued Halliburton the RIO II order in January 2004 and gave detailed task orders in June. But despite not starting work until November 2004, the company charged the government millions of dollars for engineers who sat idle. Halliburton 's $296 million bill included at least 55 percent overhead. (In an estimate due later this month, SIGIR may predicts even higher overhead costs.)
A Parsons joint venture (with Worley of Australia), was also issued a contract in January 2004, given detailed task orders in June, and started work in July 2004. It has also been accused of charging high overhead costs while idle, although not as much as Halliburton . SIGIR estimate pegs its overhead at 43 percent.
In addition, in a series of scathing internal reports uncovered by Congressman Henry Waxman, supervisors Foster Wheeler criticized Halliburton 's cost. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a "cure" notice on January 29, 2005, ordering Halliburton to do a better job or else. After Halliburton did improve its cost controls, the military turned over the southern oil work to Parsons in mid 2005.
When Parsons took over the contracts, two years after the invasion, it hired a Saudi Arabian sub-contractor, Alaa for Industry, to help repair or replace the meters.
The turbine meters were shipped to Kuwait for repairs but do not appear to have been fixed in a timely manner, although some have been fixed and re-installed earlier this year. Unofficial sources suggest that the Kuwaiti bureaucracy delayed the repair work: "The real reason for the hindrance to work at the ABOT is because Kuwait has a vested interest in minimizing Iraqi oil exports," an anonymous source who worked on the project said. His claim could not be verified.
In mid-September 2006, the Iraqi oil ministry abruptly announced that it would pull the plug on the oil metering project, making future monitoring even less certain.
Asim Jihad, the oil ministry spokesman, told Al Hayat: "The American company had failed in keeping its promise to finish installing these meters; also, refusing to reveal the exact cost, except for saying that it is executing it within the American grant to Iraq and the sum of that grant is unknown to us too. This relieves the ministry from its obligation to it. Besides, many international companies presented good offers to implement the project in a record time due to its importance."
The oil ministry then invited British Petroleum and Shell to plan a comprehensive national metering project that would cover not only the oil terminals, but also the productions wells and the even the refineries.
A SIGIR team traveled to ABOT in November 2006 to check on progress. Its unpublished report suggests that the work was less than half complete.
Suddenly, in December 2006, a high-level U.S. team traveled out to ABOT to inspect the meters. In a little-noticed announcement issued on a Saturday just before Christmas, John Sickman, the resident oil expert at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said the meters had been fixed and were working fine.
"The measurement using the existing turbine meters and displacement meters at the offshore terminal at ABOT is transparent and the measurement devices are more than adequate," Sickman was quoted in the press release. "Furthermore, the crude oil vessels have measurement and quality samplers."
Indeed this is how the Dutch company Saybolt measured oil export under the United Nations Oil for Food program. The problem even today, according to experts consulted for this report, is that the meters have yet to be calibrated, so the data are basically useless.
Even if the meters are working properly, smuggling could still occur. "It's easy to steal crude if you knew what you were doing," Don Deaver, a petroleum metering expert who worked for Exxon for 33 years, said. "If you meaure too low or too high, someone will lose and some will one gain. It's why you need professionals who understand how the meters work to make sure that nothing is being lost or stolen."
U.S. government officials claim that little is being stolen. SGS (a British consultancy) "is providing independent third party loading certifications onsite for the customers. This, coupled with the recent installation of ultrasonic meter provides more than redundant measurement capability," said Sickman in December.
Days after the press release, in early January 2007, Parsons began work on the meters under a $57.8 million U.S. government-funded contract supervised by Major Dale Winger of the Joint Contracting Command in Basra. Almost as soon as work started, Winger was replaced by Lieutenant Commander Brian Schorn. Reached for this article, Schorn said he was not up to speed on what work had been done, and referred questions to his "front-office" in Baghdad at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Parsons Iraq Joint Venture spokesman Don Lassus also refused to comment. The contract with the military does not permit the release of "any unclassified information," he said, without prior approval of the military.
Today no government officials have been able to establish conclusively whether oil is being smuggled or not. Even the future of the oil metering remains unclear. The latest report issued by SIGIR in January 2007 notes that repair and rehabilitation work at ABOT is scheduled to be finished by May 2007, but "it is unclear whether this project will be completed because of de-obligation requirements" that is to say that the funding could be cut.
Pratap Chatterjee is managing editor of CorpWatch and the author of 'Iraq Inc.' (Seven Stories Press, September 2004).
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/51218/
Thursday, April 26, 2007
anything goes in war, that's why we have wars
by Anti-Flag
******************************
The war resisters league has posted their new 2008 pie chart...
http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm
******************************
Viscount Lacarte* talking about Vonnegut (link) on NewCritics.com
"I'm a blogger, not a writer..."* Not so, Viscount.
Our culture has seemingly become inured to the horrors of war. Even now as the tide is ever so slowly turning, many people still don’t know what war is. What it does to people.
Funny thing about these conservatives. They decry liberals and intellectuals for being relativists. You know. “The buck has to stop someplace. Everything can’t be ok I’m_ok_you’re_ ok ok. Ok?”
Except when it comes to war. In a war, you can just kill people because that is what war is. War is the ultimate suspension of morality. Everything is ok if it is a war. It’s like hall pass in the school of decency. It’s like a get_out_of_jail_free card in “Monopoly – The Jesus Edition.” Soldiers can break into someone’s house, kill everyone, and then go, “Oops. Wrong house.” And then move on. Let’s go have a beer and talk to the Chaplin.
Or you can bomb an entire non-military target city famous for its delicate artwork and historical architecture, and kill 100,000 people.
WWII. Maybe it could have been avoided, but since it wasn’t we did what we had to do. I don’t know if we had to bomb Dresden or not. I don’t know if we had to drop the second nuke on Japan or not. Doesn’t matter now. That shit happens in war. Which is why us asshole, pussy, un-American, un-patriotic etc. liberals believe it should be the last resort after all other alternatives have been exhausted.
Maybe life is just a collection of moments, and maybe we just have to struggle through the bad ones and enjoy the good ones.
Maybe, just maybe next time we’ll remember this time - and say “no.”
Monday, April 23, 2007
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Flesh eating zombies protecting the snowflake fetuses
a.k.a. the Republican WarParty.
In the past two weeks TUC Radio has posted two halves of a speech by Chris Hedges, on American Fascism (link), and I listened to the .mp3 yesterday. What he said about Blackwater was particularly chilling.
The Paul Krugman article, For God's Sake, posted on CommonDreams.org (link)reiterates what Hedges is saying, as does David Michael Green's article, Dark of Heartness (link).
Coincidentally, as I was reading responses to a story on Black (Extraordinary Rendition) Sites (link) posted at CommonDreams.org, this following posted comment about the criminal, fascist Bush administration caught my attention... The GOP leadership are "Deep Ecologists"!
It could explain a lot.
(While you're there, read the Scott Ritter article.)
It brought to mind a bumper sticker I saw in the parking lot of Michigan State University that I wish I'd had last fall. It read,
'Soylent Green is People
like Devos is Amway'
The 'survival of the fittest' mentality of the right wingnuttery sometimes makes me wonder why they hate Darwinianism so intensly, but then I remember... oh right, they are in the Wizard of Oz movie. The dutiful munchkins of the GOP flock hate evolution theory, so their satanic Rovian masters twist the propaganda to fit the scenario.
The flesh-eating zombie 30 percent of Americans polled who still back Bush, Cheney and the War Party resemble something out of the Night of the Living Dead.
Okay, I go on. Here's the post I mentioned...
Clark Kent April 17th, 2007 1:57 pm
In a sense they are the deepest of the “Deep Ecologists”. They look at the population explosion problem and, through their actions, imply that the best possible solution at this time is mass murder of Iraqis, New Orleans residents, poor people without health care, underprivileged people who join the U.S. armed services, people who breathe (polluted) air, eat (tainted) food or drink (polluted) water or use (toxic, but approved) chemicals.
Their means are military action, withholding of food, health care and emergency services and neglect (African AIDS being the most obvious example). In every case, the propaganda spin is to “make it look like an accident”.
Their criterion for deciding who should live and who should die is largely based on wealth– rich live, poor die, however there is also a racist component that cannot be ignored.
Obviously, such a program of mass death could not be undertaken in a real democracy, so it has been necessary for them to undermine democracy to achieve their goals.
We can fight them, of course, but until and unless we can show them that humanity is capable of limiting itself to a sustainable population, there will probably be a thriving and passionate group of people who hold their views.
This may seem overly cynical to some, but if you make your judgement based on their actions, not their words, it’s hard to find a better explanation of it all.
In the past two weeks TUC Radio has posted two halves of a speech by Chris Hedges, on American Fascism (link), and I listened to the .mp3 yesterday. What he said about Blackwater was particularly chilling.
The Paul Krugman article, For God's Sake, posted on CommonDreams.org (link)reiterates what Hedges is saying, as does David Michael Green's article, Dark of Heartness (link).
Coincidentally, as I was reading responses to a story on Black (Extraordinary Rendition) Sites (link) posted at CommonDreams.org, this following posted comment about the criminal, fascist Bush administration caught my attention... The GOP leadership are "Deep Ecologists"!
It could explain a lot.
(While you're there, read the Scott Ritter article.)
It brought to mind a bumper sticker I saw in the parking lot of Michigan State University that I wish I'd had last fall. It read,
'Soylent Green is People
like Devos is Amway'
The 'survival of the fittest' mentality of the right wingnuttery sometimes makes me wonder why they hate Darwinianism so intensly, but then I remember... oh right, they are in the Wizard of Oz movie. The dutiful munchkins of the GOP flock hate evolution theory, so their satanic Rovian masters twist the propaganda to fit the scenario.
The flesh-eating zombie 30 percent of Americans polled who still back Bush, Cheney and the War Party resemble something out of the Night of the Living Dead.
Okay, I go on. Here's the post I mentioned...
Clark Kent April 17th, 2007 1:57 pm
In a sense they are the deepest of the “Deep Ecologists”. They look at the population explosion problem and, through their actions, imply that the best possible solution at this time is mass murder of Iraqis, New Orleans residents, poor people without health care, underprivileged people who join the U.S. armed services, people who breathe (polluted) air, eat (tainted) food or drink (polluted) water or use (toxic, but approved) chemicals.
Their means are military action, withholding of food, health care and emergency services and neglect (African AIDS being the most obvious example). In every case, the propaganda spin is to “make it look like an accident”.
Their criterion for deciding who should live and who should die is largely based on wealth– rich live, poor die, however there is also a racist component that cannot be ignored.
Obviously, such a program of mass death could not be undertaken in a real democracy, so it has been necessary for them to undermine democracy to achieve their goals.
We can fight them, of course, but until and unless we can show them that humanity is capable of limiting itself to a sustainable population, there will probably be a thriving and passionate group of people who hold their views.
This may seem overly cynical to some, but if you make your judgement based on their actions, not their words, it’s hard to find a better explanation of it all.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Paranoid or Prophet?
So... why DID the FBI have a file-full of his mail?
Project Artichoke?
And it all begs the big question of our day... if they can spy on American citizens, then why can't American citizens read their e-mails, read their mail, listen to their phone calls?
A "handful" of staff in Karl Rove's office destroyed 5,000 pieces of e-mail, thereby breaking the law (don't make me look it up, it's something like the Whitehouse Communications Act)and our representatives still have to wait around for subpenas?
Hey, Senator Pat Leahy, how about dashing off a National Security letter?
It's long, but worth every minute...
Project Artichoke?
And it all begs the big question of our day... if they can spy on American citizens, then why can't American citizens read their e-mails, read their mail, listen to their phone calls?
A "handful" of staff in Karl Rove's office destroyed 5,000 pieces of e-mail, thereby breaking the law (don't make me look it up, it's something like the Whitehouse Communications Act)and our representatives still have to wait around for subpenas?
Hey, Senator Pat Leahy, how about dashing off a National Security letter?
It's long, but worth every minute...
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
kool stuff
neocon wall chart 1 and neocon wall chart 2, theocrat edition from http://oddlots.digitalspace.net/ARX/downloads/neoconned.html
For lots of info to elucidate the charts, check out the accompanying downloads.
For lots of info to elucidate the charts, check out the accompanying downloads.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Dear Journalists on NPR and AP
Sins of omission, sins of comission.
Sometimes it's what you don't tell.
So I'm hearing and reading this morning about this testimony by Kahlid Sheik Mohammed whose job it is to resurrect the images of 9-11.
He's a TALKER, isn't he?
Not in public of course.
And he might have been tortured in the past.
But that doesn't affect what he (reportedly) says today.
[cough]
And you lovingly to repeat his tales, his plans for other of our famous landmarks, certain words repeated, your (NPR) focus on child killing, images resurrected that recall the embedded horror in the back of the mind of every soccer mom as she drops her kids at the corner to catch the schoolbus.
But, just a snag in the back of my mind... why isn't it ever being said or printed:
what country does this guy come from?
Is he Yemeni? Is he Pakistani? Is he a Saudi? Is he a KUWAITI?
But but but those are our allies.
And we invaded Iraq, killing 600,000 people to fight the terrorists... where?
IRAQ!!! Someone buy the Pentagon a map!
AP, you mention the nationalities of his cohorts, but not his.
I'm just saying highly paid professionals should be better editors, or portray themselves more rightly, as editorialists.
And speaking of your editorializing, why did you chose the hypothetical targets you chose to reveal? The British newspapers have a much more complete and JUICY list.
Hey, did I say WE KILLED 600,000 recently in a country our President invaded by mistake (because it COULDn't have been by deceit)? And did you give a figure on KSM's body count?
WHO is the BIGGER TERRORIST?
Sometimes it's what you don't tell.
So I'm hearing and reading this morning about this testimony by Kahlid Sheik Mohammed whose job it is to resurrect the images of 9-11.
He's a TALKER, isn't he?
Not in public of course.
And he might have been tortured in the past.
But that doesn't affect what he (reportedly) says today.
[cough]
And you lovingly to repeat his tales, his plans for other of our famous landmarks, certain words repeated, your (NPR) focus on child killing, images resurrected that recall the embedded horror in the back of the mind of every soccer mom as she drops her kids at the corner to catch the schoolbus.
But, just a snag in the back of my mind... why isn't it ever being said or printed:
what country does this guy come from?
Is he Yemeni? Is he Pakistani? Is he a Saudi? Is he a KUWAITI?
But but but those are our allies.
And we invaded Iraq, killing 600,000 people to fight the terrorists... where?
IRAQ!!! Someone buy the Pentagon a map!
AP, you mention the nationalities of his cohorts, but not his.
I'm just saying highly paid professionals should be better editors, or portray themselves more rightly, as editorialists.
And speaking of your editorializing, why did you chose the hypothetical targets you chose to reveal? The British newspapers have a much more complete and JUICY list.
Hey, did I say WE KILLED 600,000 recently in a country our President invaded by mistake (because it COULDn't have been by deceit)? And did you give a figure on KSM's body count?
WHO is the BIGGER TERRORIST?
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