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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (16478)	5/10/2005 10:01:02 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361382

Saudi Arabia's Doomsday Plan By Rick Shenkman Mr. Shenkman is the editor of HNN. Saudi Arabia, bracing for the possibility of an attack either by an outside power or restive Shiite residents, implemented an intricate doomsday plan in the 1980s giving officials the power to blow up their own oil wells, according to a new book by journalist Gerald Posner. In the event of an attack, says Posner, the Saudis would trigger a series of "dirty bomb" explosions designed to destroy use of the kingdom's oil supplies for decades. Posner's account, related in his new book, Secrets of the Kingdom (Random House), which is due out on May 17, is based on both Israeli and American intelligence. The doomsday scenario, dubbed by the National Security Agency, Petroleum Scorched Earth (PSE), would give the Saudis the ability to fend off attacks by threatening to blow up the prized oil facilities and oil supplies which the attackers presumably would want to get their hands on. In the event an attack was carried out, the Saudis would be able to guarantee that little of value fell into the hands of their enemies. (During World War II Adolf Hitler adopted a similar strategy to prevent German infrastructure from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army.) The Saudis reportedly were worried about attacks from both Iran, Iraq and the United States as well as internal attacks staged by the oppressed Shiite minority. American intelligence first picked up hints of this plan in 1986 using sophisticated eavesdropping technology, says Posner. His footnotes indicate that he reviewed a secret file by Israel and confirmed what he learned by discussions with American intelligence officials. Posner traces the origins of the plan to events in the early 1970s when OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) began to limit the sale of oil to countries that helped Israel during the Yom Kippur War. In 1973 the British were told by American Defense Secretary James Schlesinger that the United States might use force to maintain open access to the key oil fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. Two years later, in 1975, the Sunday Times of London published an account of a classified American plan, "Dhahran Option Four," which provided for an American invasion to seize the oil wells of Saudi Arabia. In an interview with the media in 1975, Henry Kissinger publicly acknowledged that the United States might use force to free up oil supplies in the Middle East to save the West from strangulation. Posner provides significant details about the Saudi doomsday plan. He says that it includes the use of Semtex, the durable plastic explosive made in the former Czechoslovakia, in combination with Radiation Dispersal Devices (RDD). The explosives have reportedly been placed at key critical junctures in the kingdom's oil infrastructure and concealed from the employees of Western corporations working in the oil fields. The risk of radiation would be small, but enough to deter rebuilding of the oil infrastructure. In any event, the radiation would contaminate supplies for years. "All 8 of the Kingdom's refineries are part of the destruction grid," says Posner, who warns that the collapse of the kingdom's oil network would lead to worldwide instability and the most severe recession since the Great Depression. Posner's last book was Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. It was also based on secret documents concerning Saudi Arabia. Disclosure: Mr. Posner is a member of the HNN board of directors. hnn.us

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (16478)	5/10/2005 10:19:32 PM
From: SiouxPal	Respond to of 361382

Her blog is my favorite. The bible of bloggers IMO. Very clever she is.

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (16478)	5/11/2005 6:08:04 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 361382

Bolton is Bush's Frankenstein monster _______________________________ By WALTER WILLIAMS GUEST COLUMNIST The Seattle Post-Intelligencer Wednesday, May 11, 2005 seattlepi.nwsource.com Too little attention has been paid to the most important aspect of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the nomination of Undersecretary of State John Bolton to be the ambassador to the United Nations. The hearings are a red flag. The testimony pinpoints the basic flaws of the Republican-controlled administration and Congress that have brought ineffective governance. First, the effort to promote Bolton -- in spite of his incompetence and his egregious misuse of information to push his unsubstantiated claims -- reveals the political dogmatism that has made the Bush administration policies so ineffective. Second, winning at any cost has morphed into the overriding Bush administration objective as party polarization has turned Washington, D.C., politics into a no man's land where the nation's needs are the main casualty. Nowhere are these two points made more clearly than in the case of Bolton, who turns out to be President Bush's Frankenstein's monster, a figurative stitching together of the administration's worst traits. Yet, his inept performance neither got him canned from his undersecretary of state job nor stood in the way of his nomination to the even more important position of U.N. ambassador. Numerous witnesses told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Bolton was ill tempered, vindictive and abusive. He went ballistic when his judgments were challenged by subordinates, repeatedly misused information and pushed highly inflated claims about weapons of mass destruction, and disregarded any views that did not fit with his rigid ideology. New York Times reporter Douglas Jehl, based on comments from former intelligence officials, wrote that Bolton in 2002 and 2003 "sought to deliver warnings about Syrian efforts to acquire unconventional weapons that the Central Intelligence Agency and other experts rejected as exaggerated." Jehl also quoted Bolton's widely rejected claim that Cuba, Libya and Syria were " 'rogue states intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction.' " John Wolf, an assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation under Bolton, told staff members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "I believe it would be fair to say that some of the officers within my bureau complained that they felt undue pressure to conform to the views of the undersecretary versus the views that they could support." In Bolton's own testimony on another complaint about his abusing subordinates, he admitted that he wanted two analysts reassigned but said: "I didn't seek to have these people fired." That misses the key point. It is unnecessary to actually fire professional analysts to silence them. The top decision-makers need only to stick to their unrealistic claims so as to make clear that any challenges to their ideological predilections will incur their displeasure, thereby threatening the analysts' careers. Although they did not engage in Bolton's ill-tempered, vindictive histrionics, like him, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice created an environment where any internal criticism was strongly discouraged. The results, however, were the same: The top decision-makers' inaccurate data and unrealistic assumptions yielded misguided policies and inept implementation. Bolton is not a caricature of the Bush administration. Indeed, he is Cheney's protégé. Like others high in the Bush government, his unswerving, outspoken commitment to the president's agenda trumps any managerial deficiencies. The administration argued that Bolton, who during his career showed disdain for the United Nations, is the best person to remake the organization to fit the Bush administration image. For the Bush true believers, all that matters is to adhere strictly to the agenda. The competence factor is irrelevance. That is nonsense. No matter how closely Bolton's views reflect those of the administration, his lack of the needed skills seems almost certain to doom him to fail to do the job right. Incompetence blights implementation. Why, then, did the administration not nominate a more competent person with a similar view of the United Nations? The reason is that this ideology-driven administration fails to recognize Bolton's serious flaws or the debilitating consequences for policymaking flowing from them because his grave deficiencies mirror their own. Whatever the Senate finally does, the intensity of the confirmation battle makes frighteningly clear how much political polarization has made Republican senators fear the wrath of the hard-line ideologues that now own the party. These confirmation hearings are not "just politics." The serious battle over a person of such obvious unsuitability for the critical U.N. post signals the Republicans' incompetence to govern the nation. Even more specifically, the Bolton hearings cry out that total commitment to an ideology -- be it that of the Bush administration or the religious fundamentalists -- is sufficient to protect the incompetents already in the administration and future nominees lacking the skills required to do the job right. ____________________________ Walter Williams is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington's Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs and the author of "Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy."