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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tonto who wrote (4695)	3/1/2004 6:38:05 PM
From: American Spirit	Respond to of 81568

Possible illegal oil flows into Kuwait right after invasion: Meteorologist's work featured in national weather magazine By Billy Cox FLORIDA TODAY On May 25, while scanning the Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program images pipelined into his desktop from 450 miles in orbit, Hank Brandli skidded at a nighttime photo of Iraq. It looked familiar. But not exactly. Brandli retrieved another DMSP image he'd archived from May 3. He compared the two. The most recent photo showed a blazing corridor of light running the length of Kuwait, south to north, all the way to the Iraqi border. The image wasn't there on May 3. "It's going right up to Iraq's oil fields," says the retired Air Force colonel from his home in Palm Bay. "Maybe I'm full of s---. Maybe all they're doing is building a highway to put in McDonald's and sell hamburgers. But why go that way? I think we're in bed with Kuwait. I think we're pumping oil out of Iraq to pay for this war." That's an audacious observation. Especially considering those labyrinthine lines of exasperated motorists waiting to gas up at the fuel pumps in Baghdad. Not to mention the fact that Iraq's infrastructure officially won't be capable of exporting oil for another week or so. But as the May-June issue of Weatherwise magazine makes clear, Brandli isn't a conspiracy zealot squinting for guppies in the fig trees. An article titled "Weathering History" profiles the Vietnam veteran as a pioneer in satellite meteorology who was unable to discuss much of his defense work until 1995. That's the year President Clinton declassified vaults of Cold War satellite images. Now 63, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumnus isn't allowing multiple sclerosis to derail his passion for eye-in-the-sky technology. Three times a day, he checks his the latest unclassified downloads from American and Russian weather satellites filtering into his home-wired receivers. He found last month's DMSP nocturnal shots over Baghdad especially compelling. "You look for patterns. Patterns tell you things," says Brandli, who has masters degrees in meteorology, aeronautics and astronautics, and the author of "Satellite Meteorology" for the Air Force's Air Weather Service in 1976. "With night photos, you can distinguish natural gas burnoff, which looks globular, from city lights. And suddenly, over just a few weeks, we've got this straight line of lights leading all the way to those beautiful wells in southeastern Iraq. "If you're building pipelines, you've got to have power, you've got to have light -- trucks and personnel and food and all sorts of support. If I had to bet, I'd say it looks like we're running Iraqi oil through Kuwait. It would make sense, because Kuwait's got its infrastructure intact." At the State Department in Washington, D.C., David Staples on the Future of Iraqi Projects desk says he doesn't know if Iraq's oil is flowing into Kuwait. He referred the query to the Defense Department. A DoD spokesman suggested contacting the Office of Coalition of Provisional Authority (OCPA) in Baghdad. OCPA was not immediately available for comment. In Indialantic, retired Air Force Col. Hyko Gayikian isn't sure what to make of Brandli's speculation. He wonders if maybe Kuwait's lights were pre-existing features that were temporarily shut down during the war. (Brandli says no, that he checked other photos prior to the March war campaign and could find no such lights.) Either way, Gayikian has nothing but praise for Brandli's abilities. He was Brandli's commander at the Southeast Asia Tactical Forecast Center's intelligence compound in South Vietnam beginning in 1966. "Hank is one of the most knowledgeable people in satellite meteorology I've ever known," Gayikian says. "He's a real pro, and he's stuck with it. He'll always call to tell me about unusual satellite pictures he's just gotten his hands on."