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Bush's New Security Measures Make Us Less Secure
© June 6, 2002 We've done our part. We've published all of the evidence we could find that Bush was at a minimum grossly negligent in allowing the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to take place. It is up to the Congress to sort through it all now. So let's turn our attention to the new measures that the Bush administration has proposed to enhance our security. Because in many cases, if not most, they actually make us less secure. Take today's announcement by Attorney General Ashcroft for example. Ashcroft announced anti-terrorism changes that will require roughly 100,000 new visitors each year to provide fingerprints, photographs and details about their plans in the United States. At the same time, Ashcroft said he would keep secret most of the new criteria for identifying risky suspects, except that nearly all visitors from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Syria - except some diplomats - will face the new scrutiny. What that means is that someone is going to have to sort through the 35 million foreign visitors who enter each year and apply the secret standards to determine who might be deemed threatening. The problem with this plan is that the government does not have infinite resources. By any measure the policy Ashcroft has announced is a massive undertaking. The resources required to implement the Ashcroft plan will be substantial, and we already know the vast majority of people who will be screened are not, in fact, terrorists. Those who are will likely use falsified documents to hide their true identities and place of origin. So Ashcroft is going to spend a huge pile of cash sorting through a giant haystack looking for a needle that is likely disguised as hay. Since the money to pay for sorting through all of these visitors is money we can't spend doing something else, like following up on FBI and CIA memos that identified actual terrorists, Ashcroft's plan will actually make us less safe. Take ANWR as another example of a policy that would make us less secure. Ignore for the moment that ANWR will never produce enough oil to make even a small dent in our needs, even if it did, it was still is a risky scheme. As any system engineer knows, to make a system more impenetrable to failure, the key is decentralization. All of the oil produced in Alaska flows through a single pipeline that has, already, been shut down with a single rifle shot. If a pumping station on the Alaska pipeline were taken out in the winter, the whole thing would congeal into a giant tube of chapstick. The more we rely on that pipeline for our oil, the easier we make it to disrupt our energy supplies. The ANWR plan centralized the point of attack. What would work to make us more secure? Well, not surprisingly, the exact measures the Bush administration is fighting. Were we to raise fuel efficiency in our cars, trucks and SUVs by even a single mile per gallon, we would cut our oil imports by an amount greater than Iraq's total exports within a year. Were we to raise it by 5 miles per gallon, within a few years, we could stop buying oil from Saudi Arabia, thereby denying them the money to fund virulent anti-western Wahabiism in mosques scattered throughout the Muslim world. Were we to establish solar and wind power plants throughout the nation, we would massively decentralize our electricity production. Were we to mandate low energy consuming building designs, we would greatly reduce the impact of an attack on a production facility. The Bush administration has resisted all of these measures. Bush doesn't want us looking into his policies that led to the attacks of 9/11 because he fears the political fallout when America learns that the nation was made more vulnerable so that a pipeline could be built across Afghanistan. Hopefully, the Congress will look into them anyway. But beyond those failures, the current policies being pursued by the Bush administration would make future attacks more likely, and more damaging. Democrats certainly don't need a blue ribbon commission to point that out.
Cheney's Pawns © May 24, 2002 The Daily Brew Any time a democracy goes to war, there is always a tradeoff between the public's need to know what its military is doing, and the military's need to maintain operational security. In conflicts ranging from World War II to the Gulf War, wars fought primarily by professional soldiers, it is easy to see how this tradeoff tended to favor operational security. But in a very real way, the war on terror is unlike any that the United States has ever fought. For the first time, the citizens of the United States, not just its military forces, are the primary targets of our enemies.
Because American citizens are highly likely to be the victims of terrorist attacks, they are also highly likely to be the front line of defense against them. It is perhaps no coincidence that in the two most notorious recent cases where terrorists have been thwarted, Flight 93 and the "shoe bomber," it was civilians who defeated the attackers, not the military or the police. Since the Bush administration has proven itself unable to prevent these attacks, one can make a strong case that the citizens themselves have a "need to know" about the threats they face. But the cold warriors in the Bush administration just don't buy it.
While making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear that any details of the threats faced by the American people, along with the details of any failures by the Bush administration that may have led to the terrorist attacks of September 11, were simply none of the public's business. Mr. Cheney gave an example:
"Let's assume we've got information on some guy who was involved in the East Africa embassy bombings, and it's classified. We got it from sensitive sources. And now we see him crop up someplace. Maybe he shows up in the United States, and we've got reason to believe he may be planning another operation. So if you go back and you analyze the East Africa bombings and you make public the information that was collected at that time, you may tip him off that we know about him and that we know who he is and we lose our window into the next attack against the United States."
Mr. Cheney's hypothetical may be true, but it also may be true that if you make public the information, an American citizen might be able to defend himself, or his family, against an attack. Further, it is easy to envision a way to release scads of relevant information to the American public without compromising sensitive sources. After all, we aren't talking about troop movements in Afghanistan, we are talking about the movements of suspected terrorists inside our borders. Even if we "tip them off," we may well prevent an attack, and save American lives, in the process.
In the case of activities prior to the September 11 attacks, the argument that national security concerns should prevent an open investigation falls apart completely. President Bush has assured us that he had no "specific information" concerning the attacks, and the perpetrators are dead. Unless Mr. Bush is lying, there simply can be no classified information to protect.
But Mr. Cheney isn't really concerned about protecting sensitive sources. Mr. Cheney is concerned about protecting the political viability of the Bush administration. Mr. Cheney wasn't making the rounds on the Sunday talk shows to discuss operational security. Mr. Cheney was making the rounds on the Sunday talk shows to move the weekend news cycle away from the ongoing furor over the administration's failure to either warn or protect the American public from the attacks of September 11 by releasing yet another vague and non-specific threat of an imminent terrorist attack.
When he was confronted with the story he was trying to kill, Mr. Cheney made it perfectly clear that the Bush administration would fight tooth and nail to make sure the American people would never be given access to the information they would need to evaluate the Bush administration's conduct prior to those attacks.
When asked about the possibility that a commission be set up to investigate the Bush administration's failures, he insisted that the investigation into Sept. 11 should be handled by the Congressional intelligence committees, where the details would remain classified and out of the public's view, and not by an independent commission. He also said that he would advise President Bush not to turn over to Congress the August intelligence briefing that warned that terrorists were interested in hijacking airplanes. In a moment of unscripted candor, he was plain about his reasons. Mr. Cheney said "[T]he kind of feeding frenzy we've seen in the last 48 hours is exactly the thing I fear most if we don't have a responsible investigation." Indeed, Mr. Cheney, indeed.
Finally, Mr. Cheney also said "[p]art of what elections are all about is evaluating and holding accountable our leaders for their performance. And I don't think there's anything wrong with our making certain that we believe, and, as we talk with the American people, that we believe that we've done an effective job of dealing with the crisis the nation's been in since September 11, and I would hope the American people would take that into account in evaluating our performance."
In other words, Mr. Cheney was telling the nation that the Bush administration should only be evaluated for its actions after the terrorist attacks, not for its actions before the attacks. Kind of makes you curious, now doesn't it?
Would A Comprehensive Investigation Spell Defeat For Bush? © May 19, 2002 The Daily Brew Washington insiders are abuzz with speculation about when the next shoe will drop. The first, revelations that President Bush hid from the public warnings of the terrorist attacks of September 11 as early as last August, has already put the Bush Administration into full damage control mode. But no one inside the beltway believes for an instant these revelations will be the end of the story. The defense offered by Bush and his surrogates, that the information was "unspecific," and that the exact nature of the attacks "couldn't have been anticipated," has already unraveled in the face of contradictory reports and events. These events demonstrate conclusively that the exact nature of the attacks was easily anticipated, and that the FBI knew exactly where to look for likely conspirators: America's flight schools. Still, even these revelations, and the Bush administration's clumsy denials, are not the real story. The real story is the certainty that any highly publicized investigation into the intelligence gathering process will reveal the truth about the Bush Administration's counter-terrorism activities in the months preceding the September 11 terrorist attacks. It is there that the next shoe will drop, since any publicized investigation into the FBI's counter terrorism activities prior to September 11 terrorist attacks leads, inexorably, to the deceased FBI Deputy Director, John P. O'Neill. Since the Bush Administration also knows what is likely to be revealed if John O'Neill ever becomes the focus of the inquiry, the battle over the scope of the coming Congressional investigation has become the political knife fight that will determine the fate of the Bush Presidency. John P. O'Neill had been not only a Deputy Director at the FBI, he had also been Osama bin Laden's main antagonist from within US law enforcement. O'Neill had investigated the bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, a US base in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-Es-Salaam in 1998, and the USS Cole last year. In short, John P. O'Neill had been the point man for the FBI on Al Queada. It is simply impossible to examine the FBI's role in pursuing terrorism prior to 9/11 without examining the work of John O'Neill in detail. However, John O'Neill will never testify before Congress. He had quit the agency just two weeks prior to the September 11 attacks to serve as Director of Security at the World Trade Towers, where he died in the attacks. But John O'Neill's story did not die with him. French intelligence analysts Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie claim to have met O'Neill several times last summer, and reported in their book, "bin Laden: Hidden Truth" that O'Neill had complained bitterly that the US State Department - and behind it the oil lobby who make up President Bush's entourage - blocked his attempts to prove bin Laden's guilt. They quote O'Neill as stating "The main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests, and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it." They also charge that shortly after assuming office the Bush administration slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan in order to do a deal with the Taliban for an oil pipeline across Afghanistan. Any inquiry into these charges would require the Congress not only to interview O'Neill's colleagues, but also to sort through all of the correspondence and memoranda between the FBI, the White House, and the State Department. Ultimately, it may prove impossible to prove or refute the charges of the French authors. However, the charges are likely to pass the smell test of the American public. Bush has proven beyond a shadow of anyone's doubt his fealty to the oil industry. The deal for an oil pipeline across Afghanistan is now a fact, complete with shiny new bases all over central Asia for the US military to use while guarding it. The Bush family's long standing business dealings with Saudi rulers is well documented, as is the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. When combined with the fact that the Bush administration allowed bin Laden's relatives to fly out of the US in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, at a time when all commercial domestic air traffic was shut down, a pattern becomes clear. Even if the French author's accounts of John O'Neill cannot be established as fact, the mere broad dissemination of them, when combined with all of the other, easily available information, will be more than sufficient to fatally cripple the Bush presidency. While the French author's charges were briefly aired on CNN by Paula Zahn in a conversation with former UN weapons inspector Richard Butler last winter, they have been otherwise ignored by the major newspapers and network news broadcasts. As such, they have not received nearly the publicity of the more recent revelations concerning the warnings Bush received prior to the attacks. This will change radically if these charges are aired and investigated as part of a Congressional inquiry into the conduct of the FBI prior to September 11. Unfortunately for the Bush Administration, D.C. insiders are betting that even with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, the investigation will happen, and it will be both bi-partisan and comprehensive. Bush's surrogates are already trying to change those odds, terming the inquiry a "fishing expedition" in public and strong arming GOP congressional representatives in private, but so far, the public has not lost its appetite for more information. The battle for the public's perception of this inquiry will certainly become a centerpiece of the fall political season, since if the Democrats gain a majority in the House this fall, a wide ranging investigation becomes an absolute certainty. If democracy under George Bush stays true to form, look for the Supreme Court to involve itself in a number of these congressional races.
Credibility © March 9, 2002 The Daily Brew
Culling the web to bring you the constant variety of abuses of the Bush administration brings me a lot of mail. Lately, I’ve been hit with a rash of folks who want to know my “sources.” Most are nice, but some are concerned about my “credibility.” So I thought I would post a few paragraphs about my thought processes so readers could decide for themselves if I am telling the truth.
I believe in Japan, because I’ve been there. I ate the food, rode the bullet train, the whole nine yards. There is nothing like having your own senses engaged to tell you what is real. Of course, I also believe in Australia, and I’ve never been there. I’ve seen a lot of pictures, though, and I’ve met a few Australians, all of which has convinced me it’s there, and that I ought to plan a visit.
I also believe that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris hired a company from Texas to scrub the Florida voter roles, deliberately targeted Democratic voters and illegally installed Bush’s brother in the White House. I haven’t seen the contract, so this information is a bit trickier to verify than say, the existence of Japan. My understanding has come exclusively from journalists like Greg Palast, and the newspapers that have published the story on their websites.
Of course, deciding which information to trust when it is coming from corporations who are in the business of selling it to you requires some effort. On the few occasions that I have been close enough to a story to know the facts first-hand, the newspapers have universally gotten at least some portion of it wrong. I have also been close enough to a few stories to know when they outright lied. I trust my own eyes, and that experience has taught me never to take anything I read in the paper at face value. Just because some journalist says it, and some editor puts it out there, means nothing. There has to be some other reason to trust it as well.
So, for example, I trust the Greg Palast stories about the Great Florida Democratic Voter Purge of 2000 because a bunch of voters and election official-type people are quoted confirming it. I figure he couldn’t have misquoted all of those people without creating a shit-storm if the basic allegation was false. I’ve seen such storms before.
Once upon a time the media told us the lie that Al Gore claimed credit for “finding” love canal. The problem was, when he made the statement, he was in front of a bunch of high school kids. When they later saw how the media had lied about Gore, they went on a little mini-crusade to set the record straight. Of course, I only read about their campaign in the paper also, so I am forced to take the leap of faith that it would have been easier for the media to get away with misquoting Gore than to invent a story about a bunch of angry high school kids who had their naivety shattered by the New York Times. That is what I mean when I say you have to put some effort into it.
With respect to the September 11 tragedy, most of the essential facts are pretty easily established, if you put forward some of that “effort” I was talking about. Do a quick Google search for “Taliban”, “Afghanistan” and “oil pipeline”, and you will find newspapers dating back to the mid 1990s talking about efforts by various US companies trying to get one built. There is little doubt that a whole bunch of oil execs had spent a whole bunch of time and money trying to get a pipeline built across Afghanistan. You can believe it simply because the data is so cumulative. So the only question is; once the Bush junta was complete, did the Bush regime try to move the project forward? You don’t need a newspaper to answer that one.
Nobody should have to convince you that the Bush team was all over that pipeline. Some reports indicate there is more oil around the Caspian than anywhere in the world, Saudi Arabia included. Nobody is saying it is a pittance, like say ANWR. The US imports more than half its oil, and both Bush and Cheney are oil guys. Any suggestion that they weren’t scheming up a way to get that thing built, and under US control, is absurd. In fact, given the national security implications of oil, I would probably have faulted them if they hadn’t.
So how do we figure out what they might have done to drive the pipeline deal in the months leading up to the attacks? Again, you don’t have to be Einstein to figure out anything they did that might have helped Osama became political cyanide on September 12. So it is safe to say they are going to do their best to keep any of the bad parts from ever coming to light. Still, a few of them have.
Paul Begala has publicly reported that under the Clinton Administration there was a ship in the Gulf of Arabia that had a cruise missile with Osama’s name on it on hot stand by. He also said that prior to the attacks, Bush ordered it to stand down. Do I trust Begala? To be honest, I do. But you don’t have to trust him to see that he is telling the truth. Just ask yourself this, if Begala was bullshitting, don’t you think you would have heard a response? Seriously; an unapologetic, card-carrying member of Clinton’s war room makes this kind of allegation, and the entire Right Wing Media Hallelujah Chorus gives him a pass? Neither Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Bill O’Reilly attacks his patriotism? Give me a break. Begala told the truth. Bush had taken our full court press off of Osama just prior to the attacks.
The next item up is the two French guys who wrote the book, “Bin Laden: Hidden Truth.” In it, they quote John P. O'Neill, former Deputy Director of the FBI, saying he quit the agency because his hunt for Osama was being hamstrung by oil politics. He left, went to work as head of security for the World Trade Towers, and died in the attack. Obviously, his story is pretty hard to verify with a follow on interview. So lets give it the smell test.
The book has been all over Europe. The allegations were aired on US TV in two separate shows that I personally saw, one an interview of Richard Butler by Paul Zahn. If these charges were false, would you have expected the White House and the FBI to have made a statement? I tend to think they would. After all, this didn’t come from some anonymous internet chatroom, the quotes were attributed to one of their own, a deputy director at that. If they could have lined up John O’Neill’s former coworkers to call the story a crock, I tend to believe that would have happened. At a minimum, if the French writers were lying, I am sure at least one of the Right Wing Pundit Brigade would have piped up. If the story is true, on the other hand, I would expect the FBI, the White House, the GOP, and their fawning sycophants on the AM dial, to simply sit there quietly, hoping for it to blow over. And, low and behold, we haven’t heard a peep out of any of them.
A lot more has been said and written about these events. For example, there are reports that prior to 9/11 US negotiators gave the Taliban an ultimatum, “a carpet of gold, or a carpet of bombs.” There are reports that Jeb Bush also declared a state of emergency prior to the attacks. There are numerous reports that Bush had advance warning. But let’s ignore all that, and just put two and two together based only on the evidence that just prior to 9-11, Bush took the pressure off Osama.
Why? Why would Bush let up? Was it a conspiracy to incite an attack, and give Bush an excuse to get our troops on the ground for the pipeline project? When I suggest that as a possibility, I find my “credibility” called into question. OK, let’s give Bush the benefit of the doubt, and assume it just a bad miscalculation. In my mind, it is a distinction without a difference. Even if Bush wanted an attack, he couldn’t possibly have known for sure he was going to get one. On the other hand, even if he had not wanted one, it was still obvious that he was making it a whole lot more likely when they let up in the hunt for Osama. After all, this was the guy the Bush administration blamed for blowing up the US Cole. Conspiracy or no, he bears a huge portion of the responsibility for what happened. The buck stops there. Whatever his motives, Bush is responsible for letting down our guard. So it is no wonder he is hiding every government record in sight, and trying to limit the scope of the Congressional investigation into the security breakdown that preceded the attacks. If you don’t believe that one, do another google search for “Bush” “records” “investigation” and “release.”
The truth is, I don’t give a rip whether the 72% of the country who currently think Bush is doing a good job as President realizes that he cheated to get there, ruined the economy, and got us into a war. If people are too stupid to think for themselves, and too lazy to do their own homework, I can’t get too worked up about it. All I ask is that they spare me the email asking for “sources” and attacking my “credibility.”
The ongoing death and destruction in Afghanistan guarantee that Bush's war on terrorism continues to be big news overseas, but many Americans have stopped paying much attention. They should know that our armed forces are still engaged in combat.
Mop up operations continue in Afghanistan (where we occasionally kill a bunch of the wrong people) and any day now it seems like Bush might invade Iraq. Still, the war effort no longer seems to capture the interest of many of the US citizens in whose name it is being fought. Americans seem to have moved on from the spectacle. Perhaps it is simply too painful a reminder of the attacks in New York and Washington.
More cynically, perhaps the war coverage is too uninspiring to still garner our interest. That would be one predictable consequence of the US media meekly accepting military control over their movements in and around US combat forces. It would also explain why the Bushies are going to begin an official policy of planting lies in the foreign press, the only reporters they do not control.
Maybe Americans have tuned out the war simply because they are distracted by the Olympics. Salt Lake City got the games because community leaders in Utah handed out massive bribes to third world IOC members. About every 4 events seems to produce a sandal that blows up to an international incident, and in the middle of all of this, the US is taking home a record number of medals. Is it any surprise that the Olympics are getting huge numbers? What could be more attractive to a culture that has merged the concepts of competition and corruption, scandal and entertainment?
Still, it would be better if people were paying attention, because continuing the current game plan in Bush's war on terrorism is a big mistake, and one that is almost certain to bite us on the ass.
The war was never really about fighting evil. We can no more eliminate evil than we can eliminate lust. It certainly isn't being fought to counter any credible military threat to America. While twenty guys with box cutters managed to get some very lethal results, they were still only twenty guys with box cutters. The United States isn't making some high minded declaration that killing innocent civilians is unacceptable, because far more innocents have been killed in Afghanistan than in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania combined. The war also isn't about "liberating" Afghanistan, unless it was to "liberate" what little infrastructure was left in their country after twenty years of wars we armed them to fight.
The war is about revenge, and oil. They hit us, and we wanted to hit them back ten times as hard. And we did.
The Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are on the run, and no longer control a government that provides them with a base of operations. The oil pipeline the Bush administration sought from the Caspian across Afghanistan is back on track. We have achieved our objectives. While the US should certainly continue to find, and perhaps eliminate, terrorists, we should do so covertly. Continuing to pummel Afghanistan with the blunt instruments of strike fighters simply creates more enemies than it eliminates. Reporters inside of Afghanistan describe "miles of housing, schools and government buildings reduced to rubble" and "tens of thousands of desperate people ... packed into rooms without ceilings, without walls, without water or electricity or heat." We should declare victory, and leave. Or even better, we should declare victory and stay, not to provide security for Bush's oil pipeline to the Caspian, but to rebuild Afghanistan.
Bush has proposed a $120 billion increase in the military budget, $48 billion in the coming year alone. The plans call for spending $475 million for mobile howitzers, $910 million for reconnaissance helicopters, $1.3 billion for 23 stealth fighter jets or $5 billion for new navy destroyers and submarines. Notably, none of these weapons would have been of any use in preventing the September 11 attacks, so perhaps our national security would be better served if we spent that money in Afghanistan, rebuilding homes, hospitals, schools and farms, rather than with the defense contractors who are business partners with Bush's father in the Carlyle Group.
Were Bush's $120 billion increase directed to the impoverished people of Afghanistan, we could improve living conditions in the country to a level they have never seen. Housing could be provided for literally millions of displaced Afghan refugees. Health care services could be provided for millions more. Agricultural production could be increased to a level to make Afghanistan self-sufficient. We could use Bush's proposed increase in the military budget to single-handedly lift the country out of its misery, while keeping our defense spending constant.
What message would such massive humanitarian aid send to potential recruits of radical Islamic fundamentalists? How could anyone in the Arab world continue to credibly argue that the United States was at war with Muslims? More importantly, which course of action would actually make us safer from further terrorist attacks; showing the world that the war really wasn't against Islam, or further enriching the Bush family by building countless weapons, all of which are useless against terrorists who are supposedly already living amongst us?
Imagine if the United States stopped consuming oil.
Imagine if, over the next three decades, every car and building in the US was powered by electricity from a cheap, non-polluting source.
Sound too good to be true? It might be.
On the positive side, debate about the US role in global warming would cease. Air quality in the US would immediately skyrocket, and water quality, at least in some areas, would soon follow.
The economic effects are less clear. If giant corporations like ExxonMobil went the path of the buggy makers, there would be huge economic dislocations. We have a taste of what that would feel like thanks to the crooked energy traders at Enron who stole from their employees and then lied to Congress about it. But the death of Enron only eliminated thousands of jobs; the big oil companies employ millions.
And the economic consequences in America would be just the tip of the iceberg. Forty percent of all the oil extracted from the planet is consumed in the US. Even a twenty five percent drop in US demand would absolutely destroy the price, and the effect would ripple across the planet. In the short and not so short term, the economies of producer countries like Venezuela, Mexico, and Russia would be devastated. Perhaps more troubling is the effect it would have in the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia.
Twenty five percent of the oil extracted in Saudi Arabia is destined for the US and our SUVs. The Saudis make hundreds of billions from a never-ending parade of super tankers bound for our shores laden with crude. With one of the youngest populations on the planet, Saudi Arabia uses billions of those dollars to provide their children basic social services, food, and education. Unfortunately, part of that education is to teach their children, and other children around the world, to hate the United States.
While they are teaching their kids to hate us, they are also using tens of those billions to buy advanced US weapons. They are one of our best customers, employing thousands of Americans in the fabrication of fighter jets destined for Saudi Arabia. If America ever stopped buying Saudi oil, the Saudis might have to stop buying US weapons. Millions of Americans busy building fighter jets might lose their jobs. At the same time, Saudi Arabia could go bankrupt, and the millions of its children who had been taught to hate us would no longer be receiving basic social services and education. Hopefully, they won’t have learned yet how to fly our jets.
On the flip side, if the price dropped out of the floor, the Saudis would probably be able to sell more oil to China. They already buy missiles from China, so the basic weapons-for-gas two-step is already set up. They wouldn’t make near as much money as they do now, but if we could “break our dependence on foreign oil”, maybe the Saudi’s could teach their kids to hate the Chinese instead of us.
Of course, this scenario is politically impossible. The US is about as likely to significantly reduce oil consumption, thereby bankrupting Islamic terrorists, as it is to decriminalize drugs, thereby bankrupting Central and South American terrorists. At the same time, just like decriminalizing drugs, it might actually be technically possible.
In addition to well known sources of clean, cheap power (wind, solar, geothermal, etc.), technological breakthroughs could create more electricity. Much more.
In 1989, two scientists at the University of Utah reported an experiment where two metal rods were dunked in heavy water and a current was run across them. They claimed that the device produced excess heat, that is, more energy output than energy input. They theorized that this could only be possible as a result of some unexplained nuclear effect, or so-called “cold fusion.” Interestingly, the results indicated that unlike other well known nuclear processes, cold fusion seemed to produce far more energy than toxic waste by-product, a result nuclear physicists regarded as an abomination.
Pons and Fleishman were immediately ridiculed out of the profession in the same manner as many who have made revolutionary scientific discoveries throughout history. The high temperature plasma physics crowd, funded to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars, were particularly vicious. The physics establishment declared that such a result was not permitted by their models, mostly because it failed to produce a cesspool of nuclear waste, and therefore not possible. Never allowing for the possibility that they or their models might not know everything, the High Priests of Science declared Pons and Fleishman crackpots, the government and the media bought it, and that little bit of unpleasantness was quickly put behind the scientific establishment. Or so they thought.
The problem was that the plasma crowd never bothered to rigorously check Pons and Fleishman’s results, as the most critical element, the calorimetry that measured the excess heat, was decidedly outside of their area of expertise. Pons and Fleishman were driven to exile purely on theoretical, and more effectively, rhetorical grounds. This could prove embarrassing if the facts ever come out.
Right now, the physics crowd is safe. They were successful in killing Pons and Fleishman’s idea, along with any threat that the US government might actually fund further research into the matter that might come at their expense. But they couldn’t kill the whole notion entirely, because facts are stubborn things.
Over time, other scientists have run more experiments and have confirmed in several instances that with just the right conditions, it is possible to generate excess heat, sometimes a lot of it, and without producing a mountain or nuclear waste. As those results have piled up, that fact that it is possible has become essentially indisputable. Still, despite the profound potential impact of cheap, non-polluting energy, these results are largely unknown. Perhaps this is because they might expose the Emperors of Science as having no clothes.
Where the excess heat comes from nobody really knows. Whether it could be harnessed on an industrial scale may also never be known. What is known is that very little progress is likely in the near future because even discussing it is regarded as career ending heresy within the only community that really matters; the scientific establishment of the US government that doles out billions of dollars every year to do basic science in the Department of Energy’s labs and America’s colleges and universities.
Unlimited cheap clean energy could mean clean air and water the world over. It could also end desertification in the third world, pollution in the first world, and global warming throughout the whole world. But, it could also greatly upset the geopolitical applecart, where the status quo quietly sows the seeds of our own destruction. So maybe it is just as well we don’t look into such things.
I had to turn off the "O'Reilly Factor." I just couldn't take listening to O'Reilly's guest, Bernard Goldberg, sell his book "Bias" about the supposedly liberal media. So instead, I did a quick google search for the string "Enron Afghanistan Pipeline Taliban." This is what I learned in about 10 minutes of web surfing.
The Motive
For years, US oil interests have been trying to build a pipeline across Afghanistan to access the oil and gas around the Caspian Sea; efforts that have continued past the 9-11 attacks.
Source: http://www.wluml.org/english/new-archives/wtc/at-stake/unocal.htm
Enron was a key player in this game. Way back in 1996, Enron had cut a deal with the president of Uzbekistan for joint development of the nation's natural gas fields.
Source: Houston Chronicle Date: TUE 06/25/96 Section: Business Page: 4 Edition: 3 STAR (sorry, no link)
Enron had also done the feasibility study for the pipeline.
Source http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD201A.html
For a time, the Taliban appeared to be a potential partner. They had even visited Sugarland, Texas to talk things over.
Source http://news6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/west_asia/newsid_37000/37021.stm
The Crime
Unfortunately, the talks broke down, and by late last summer, the US Government was threatening to commence war against Afghanistan (an attack which would have violated every precept of international law).
Sources http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1550000/1550366.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1550000/1550366.stm
At least twice, Bush conveyed the message to the Taliban that the United States would hold the regime responsible for an al Qaeda attack. But after concluding that bin Laden's group had carried out the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, a conclusion stated without hedge in a Feb. 9 briefing for Vice President Cheney, the new administration did not choose to order armed forces into action.
Source http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8734-2002Jan19.html
Simultaneous with making, but not following through on these threats, Bush took a number of actions to make the US decidedly more vulnerable to a terrorist attack. He ordered the Naval strike force, which Clinton placed in the Indian Ocean on 24 hour alert so he could hit Osama as soon as he had solid intelligence, to stand down. Bush threatened to veto the Defense Appropriations Bill after Democrats tried to move $600 million out of Star Wars and into anti-terror defense. Bush opposed Clinton's anti-money-laundering efforts, which were designed to stop al Qaeda's money. Bush abandoned Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, or as the two star general Donald Kerrick told the Washington Post, reflecting on his service to both President Clinton and President Bush: Clinton's advisors met nearly weekly on how to stop bin Laden and al Qaeda. "I didn't detect that kind of focus" from the Bush Administration.
Source http://democrats.com/view.cfm?id=5714
I don't have to tell you what happened next.
The Cover Up
Dick Cheney is openly breaking the law by defying GAO requests to turn over his records of meetings with Enron.
Source http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20020201.html
At the same time that Cheney has refused to turn over his records, Enron and its accountants have shredded millions of pages of documents.
Source http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/30/business/30SHRE.html
The Bush's themselves may have destroyed evidence. When the Justice Department instructed the Bush administration to preserve any documents related to Enron Corporation, a senior administration official said that until now, "the White House had not been making any formal effort to preserve or catalogue information about Enron contacts."
Source http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10918-2002Feb1.html
While all of this law breaking, stalling, and destruction of evidence has gone on, Bush has asked Daschle to limit Congressional probes into Sept. 11.
Source http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/01/29/inv.terror.probe/index.html
Note that the supposedly "liberal press" has so far failed to put all of these pieces together. They are too busy giving Bernard Goldberg and Bill O'Reilly the airtime to sell a canard called "Bias."
Enron might be getting all the press, but there is another Congressional investigation revving up that promises to be far more treacherous for the Bush Administration. Over the course of the past several weeks, heads of both the House and Senate intelligence committees have been meeting to plan a bipartisan House-Senate investigation into the events of September 11. While revelations from the Enron probe could be embarrassing to the White House, revelations concerning the terrorist attack could prove to be devastating.
Thanks to the saturation coverage by the corporate media, the public is already well versed in the basic facts likely to be uncovered in the various Enron hearings. Will anyone really be surprised to learn that Enron executives had unprecedented access to White House officials as they formulated their energy plan? Will anyone be shocked if it turns out that the energy plan was heavily tilted towards the interests of corporate energy concerns, or that it favored the unregulated markets that made energy companies rich over the public power that kept the lights on in LA, while blackouts rolled across the rest of California?
The fact is, the Enron cat is already out of the bag. The public already understands that the Bush administration was letting the crooks at Enron write federal energy policy, right up until the time they ran Enron into the ground. The public also understands that when Enron's own criminal conduct eventually caught up to it, the Bush administration realized their good friends had become toxic waste, cut their ties, and let the implosion run its course. Given what is already known, the Enron hearings aren't likely to cause any damage to the Bush administration that hasn't already happened. So why are Bush and Cheney both so eager to fight the lawsuit looming with the GAO, seeking records of their contacts with Enron?
It can't be because they perceive some political benefit. They read the polls. They understand that the American public believes they are hiding something. They know that the longer they fight to keep their records secret, the more guilty they look. They understand that in the long run, the "principle" they are pushing on the Sunday talk shows; that congressional oversight is an unwarranted intrusion into their right to make public policy unfettered by any accountability to the public, isn't going to hold water. So why is the White House so willing to take the slings and arrows for Enron, when the damage from the scandal has already been done?
Perhaps they are simply laying the groundwork for fighting off a larger scandal.
The American public remains blissfully unaware the Bush administration's policies concerning Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden just prior to September 11. Few Americans understand the organizational effort to fight Osama bin Laden and his Al Queda network that was put in place under Clinton, and how changes by the incoming Bush administration impacted that effort. At the same time, a series of very serious allegations concerning changes to these policies have been widely reported in Europe. With a few exceptions, the US corporate media has so far provided very little coverage of these reports. Hearings into these events could change that coverage dramatically.
The reports indicate that, prior to September 11, the Bush administration was eager to do business with the Taliban. Specifically, the Bush administration wanted to see an oil pipeline built across Afghanistan, unlocking the vast oil and gas reserves surrounding the Caspian Sea. In their zeal to open these reserves, reports indicate that the Bush administration impeded the ongoing FBI manhunt for Osama bin Laden, who the US had been agressively targeting in the wake of the attacks on the USS Cole. The reports further indicate that just prior to the attacks, the Taliban were given an ultimatum; the US was either going to give them a "carpet of gold, or a carpet of bombs." Shortly thereafter, the talks are said to have broken down, and the events of September 11 unfolded.
If these allegations are aired in Congressional hearings on CSPAN, the Bush administration will have a much bigger scandal on its hands than Enron. If these allegations are proven to be true, the Bush energy policy was much more than crony capitalism and a massive payback to the multi-national corporations that paid for Bush's ascension to the White House. If true, these allegations would show that Bush's energy policy led directly and predictably to the most devastating terrorist attack in history, an attack that caused billions in property damage and cost thousands of innocent Americans their lives.
So when President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11, there was a lot more at stake than a corrupt company that ripped off its employees. And when Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey called for a broad and far reaching investigation, saying "We do not meet our responsibilities to the American people if we do not take an honest look at the federal government and all of its agencies and let the country know what went wrong. The best assurance that there's not another terrorist attack on the United States is not simply to hire more federal agents or spend more money. It's to take an honest look at what went wrong. Who or what failed? There's an explanation owed to the American people;" the stakes became astronomical.
In the end, the Bush administration's decision to fight the GAO ensures that the limits of Congress' power to investigate both the Enron debacle, and the events leading up to September 11, will be decided by the Supreme Court. At a minimum, this will buy the Bush administration time. It also means that the ultimate arbiters of what information, if any, the Bush administration must make public will be decided by the same five jurists who put Bush in the White House, holding that the very act of counting American ballots would have caused Bush "irreparable harm." Perhaps this Court, the Bush administration's ace in the hole, is what makes them think the fight is worth it.
Having ripped the bedsheets from the political-corporate orgy that is American politics, a hopeless optimist (or a member of the Green Party) might believe that some good could actually come from the Enron scandal. As both the Democrats and Republicans grapple to cast blame, the battle is bringing into focus the reality that, at one time or another, virtually every elected official in Washington was rubbing uglies with the most notorious white collar crooks in history.
Still, the Bush Administration's refusal to release any records revealing the depths of their dalliance with Enron is eerily reminiscent of the "hide the ball" bookkeeping that led to the fiasco in the first place. How the White House expects to use secrecy and suppression by the Executive Branch of an allegedly democratic government to dodge a scandal brought upon by a complete lack of candor and transparency within an allegedly public company is beyond me. I guess that's why Karl Rove gets paid the big bucks and I don't. Nevertheless, it sure seems that the Bush strategy of lie, deny, and obstruct will guarantee that the Republicans ultimately bear the brunt of the fiasco.
Which might be a shame.
After all, is there any doubt that at least some of the Democrats who accepted Enron's cash also aided and abetted Enron's escape from the regulatory scrutiny that might have prevented their implosion? Wouldn't it be nice if the members of both parties who were feeding at the Enron trough were ultimately called to account for allowing the seventh largest company in the country to repeatedly lie not only to the SEC, but also its investors, its employees, and the general public?
Alas, that isn't going to happen. See, there is no such thing as the tooth fairy, Santa Claus doesn't come at Christmas, and there is nothing remotely approaching a critical mass of politicians who are willing to put the public interest in front of their own political survival. Even though Enron has made it painfully obvious that a mountain of corporate cash has bought our formally representative democracy, they did buy it, and they still own it, lock, stock and barrel. The river of money that flows into Washington protects the jobs of incumbents so effectively that virtually no elected official has any incentive to change it. So whatever "crimes" are uncovered in the weeks ahead, you can bet taking money from major companies who Congress is supposed to be regulating won't be one of them.
Please don't pretend that the tepid support for McCain-Feingold style campaign finance reform somehow undermines this theory either. McCain-Feingold does change a lot of things, but what it does not change is the system whereby public officials run for public office by buying time on supposedly public airwaves, all of which is paid for by private donations.
There is hope though, if you want to call it that. Nobody believes for a second that the crimes committed by Arthur Andersen and the Enron brass were unique to Enron. Perhaps, in the not too distant future, another major company will "restate" their earnings, leading to another collapse in confidence, and another death spiral into bankruptcy. If it happens enough, it could lead to a collapse in confidence across the whole market.
Then, all of a sudden, the millions of 401K investors spanning America whose interest currently is limited to the minute to minute fluctuations in the NASDAQ and a fake war on a third world country half way around the globe (to the exclusion of real problems in their own neighborhoods), might see that they have a vested interest in paying for fair and clean elections, instead of selling off that responsibility to the highest bidder. But don't expect our democracy to confront its demons any time soon. Just like a barely functional alcoholic, Americans seem unwilling to face up to their problems until they hit rock bottom.
One great task of wartime leadership, said Eliot A. Cohen, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, "is not only to communicate resolve and determination and will, but to explain what you are doing and why you are doing it."
Hmm. Where do you think he is going with this one? Think he is impressed with Dubya's "wartime leadership"?
"I think thus far that is not quite what we have seen," he said. "We have seen a tremendous pulse of staunchness, but we have not seen the more intellectual side of war leadership, making the case for what we are doing and laying out the arguments for what we do next."
The normal way to "lay out the arguments for what we do next" is to give a speech, but so far, we haven't seen it. Which is strange, because if there is one thing Bush has shown us that he can do, it is to read a speech. In fact, about the only time Bush looks comfortable with whatever it is that he happens to be saying, is when he is reading something someone else wrote for him from a teleprompter. To hear the chattering celebrity spokespeople tell it, he comes off like Reagan, Churchill and Eisenhower, all rolled into one. The Peggy Noonan quote on this point is just too funny.
"He was magically transformed before our very eyes. Transformed into a man, a man who no longer needed the teleprompter."
Her knees grew week. She fell in love. Give me break.
The contrast between Bush talking in his own words and Bush reading the words of his staff is stunning. If there was ever a guy who gained from reading someone else's writing off a screen, it's Bush. He gains so much stature from the teleprompter, the GOP should give the guy who invented the thing the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Of course, the problem with having "teleprompter George" give a great speech is when "off the cuff George" has to answer a question with a camera pointed at him, he inevitably comes off sounding like one of the Duke boys from Hazard County. So it usually isn't Bush who makes the case for Bush's policies. It is his minions. Which brings me back to "what we do next."
The past few days have seen a non-stop parade of Republican operatives on the cable channels giving us the hard sell for a war against Iraq. You don't need a Phd. in political science to understand why this is happening. Bush has already decided what he is going to do. He is going to clean up his dad's legacy. If Don King were promoting it, it would be titled "The Son of Bush v. Saddam Hussein" But watching Bush's minions make the pitch to the American public for a war against Iraq tells me that the White House polls must not be showing support for expanding the turkey shoot in Afghanistan.
This isn't too surprising. After all, support for the war on bin Laden comes naturally; he attacked us, and hit us with a pretty solid blow. All Saddam ever did was take over a corrupt monarchy called Kuwait. And it isn't as if he didn't get punished for it. We were so worried that he would take over another corrupt monarchy, Saudi Arabia, that we mobilized the whole world to attack him.
The irony of this is that one could argue that Saudi Arabia is actually a much bigger threat to America than Iraq. After all, both Osama bin Laden and most of the rest of the guys who blew up the World Trade Towers were Saudis. The Saudi government allows millions of dollars to flow out of the country to fund fundamentalist mosques, where they teach young Muslims to hate America. Millions more are given to groups like Al Queada, to train those young Muslims in the arts of hijacking planes, building car bombs, and filling out student visa applications. No one has made the case that Saddam does any of these things. Nevertheless, the Saudi Royal family seem to have a special relationship with the Bush family, and Saddam clearly doesn't, so the White House's permanent campaign for now is directed towards building support for what seems to be a grudge match between the Bush family and Saddam.
So, if you waste your time listening to the corporate media spout White House propaganda for the next couple of weeks, plan on hearing a lot about what an evil man Saddam is, and how he gassed his own people, and how he is developing weapons of mass destruction, and how he is a threat to us, and how we better get him before he gets us. You will know that the White House ad campaign has succeeded in swinging public opinion the minute it starts raining ordinance in Baghdad, and the speechwriters write some stirring words for Bush to read to us from the teleprompter.
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