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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (196166)	8/8/2006 3:14:54 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Faces of the Fallen: projects.washingtonpost.com searchable by home state and several other criteria... ___________________________________________________________ I hope Dubya can sleep well at night...Deciding to launch a reckless, elective, and pre-emptive war in Iraq may be THE WORST strategic mistake a U.S. president has ever made...Bush was never successful in the business world and he clearly has been a total disaster as a president...Think about how many innocent soldiers and citizens have been killed or permanently injured because Bush FAILED to view war as a last resort...He bought the radical NeoCON theories without even asking the tough questions...Maybe Bush, Cheney and their families should be forced to spend their remaining years on the front lines over in Iraq -- they helped unleash a bloody civil war and let them go deal with it...these dudes have NEVER served on the front lines and THEY CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH about what is really happening.

To: geode00 who wrote (196166)	8/8/2006 3:27:58 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The Brilliantly Profitable Timing of the Alaska Oil Pipeline Shutdown by Greg Palast Published on Tuesday, August 8, 2006 by the Guardian/UK Is the Alaska Pipeline corroded? You bet it is. Has been for more than a decade. Did British Petroleum shut the pipe yesterday to turn a quick buck on its negligence, to profit off the disaster it created? Just ask the "smart pig." Years ago, I had the unhappy job of leading an investigation of British Petroleum's management of the Alaska pipeline system. I was working for the Chugach villages, the Alaskan Natives who own the shoreline slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker grounding. Even then, courageous government inspectors and pipeline workers were screaming about corrosion all through the pipeline. I say "courageous" because BP, which owns 46% of the pipe and is supposed to manage the system, had a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems. In one case, BP's CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of a whistleblower, Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe's tanker facility. BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him. When caught, a US federal judge said BP's acts were "reminiscent of Nazi Germany." This was not an isolated case. Captain James Woodle, once in charge of the pipe's Valdez terminus, was blackmailed into resigning the post when he complained of disastrous conditions there. The weapon used on Woodle was a file of faked evidence of marital infidelity. Nice guys, eh? Now let's talk timing. BP's suddenly discovered corrosion necessitating an emergency shut-down of the line is the same corrosion Dan Lawn has been screaming about for 15 years. Lawn is a steel-eyed government inspector who has kept his job only because his union's lawyers have kept BP from having his head. Indeed, it's pretty darn hard for BP to claim it is surprised to find corrosion this week when Lawn issued a damning report on corrosion right after a leak and spill were discovered on March 2 of this year. Why shut the pipe now? The timing of a sudden inspection and fix of a decade-long problem has a suspicious smell. A precipitous shutdown in mid-summer, in the middle of Middle East war(s), is guaranteed to raise prices and reap monster profits for BP. The price of crude jumped $2.22 a barrel on the shutdown news to over $76. How lucky for BP which sells four million barrels of oil a day. Had BP completed its inspection and repairs a couple years back -- say, after Dan Lawn's tenth warning -- the oil market would have hardly noticed. But $2 a barrel is just the beginning of BP's shut-down bonus. The Alaskan oil was destined for the California market which now faces a supply crisis at the very height of the summer travel season. The big winner is ARCO petroleum, the largest retailer in the Golden State. ARCO is a 100%-owned subsidiary of … British Petroleum. BP could have fixed the pipeline problem this past winter, after their latest corrosion-caused oil spill. But then ARCO would have lost the summertime supply-squeeze windfall. Enron Corporation was infamous for deliberately timing repairs to maximize profit. Would BP also manipulate the market in such a crude manner? Some US prosecutors think they did so in the US propane market. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) just six weeks ago charged the company with approving an Enron-style scheme to crank up the price of propane sold in poor rural communities in the US. One former BP exec has pleaded guilty. Lord Browne, the imperious CEO of BP, has apologized for that scam, for the Alaska spill, for this week's shutdown and for the deaths in 2005 of 15 workers at the company's mortally sloppy refinery operation at Texas City, Texas. I don't want readers to think BP isn't civic-minded. The company's US CEO, Bob Malone, was Co-Chairman of the Bush re-election campaign in Alaska. Mr. Bush, in turn, was so impressed with BP's care of Alaska's environment that he pushed again to open the state's arctic wildlife refuge (ANWR) to drilling by the BP consortium. Indeed, you can go to Alaska today and see for yourself the evidence of BP's care of the wilderness. You can smell it: the crude oil still on the beaches from the Exxon Valdez spill. Exxon took all the blame for the spill because they were dumb enough to have the company's name on the ship. But it was BP's pipeline managers who filed reports that oil spill containment equipment was sitting right at the site of the grounding near Bligh Island. However, the reports were bogus, the equipment wasn't there and so the beaches were poisoned. At the time, our investigators uncovered four-volume's worth of faked safety reports and concluded that BP was at least as culpable as Exxon for the 1,200 miles of oil-destroyed coastline. Nevertheless, m'Lord Browne preens himself with his corporation's environmental record. We know BP cares about nature because they have lots of photos of solar panels in their annual reports -- and they've painted every one of their gas stations green. The green paint-job is supposed to represent the oil giant's love of Mother Nature. But the good Lord, Mr. Browne, knows it stands for the color of the Yankee dollar. BP claims the profitable timing of its Alaska pipe shutdown can be explained because they've only now run a "smart pig" through the pipes to locate the corrosion. The "pig" is an electronic drone that BP should have been using continuously, though they had not done so for 14 years. The fact that, in the middle of an oil crisis, they've run it through now, forcing the shutdown, reminds me, when I consider Lord Browne's closeness to George Bush, that the company's pig is indeed, very, very smart.

To: geode00 who wrote (196166)	8/8/2006 7:01:07 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Selling the Illusion of Victory huffingtonpost.com By Deepak Chopra* 08.07.2006 America leads the world in advertising techniques, and now we'll need every ounce of Madison Avenue's skill to sell a difficult product. That product is victory. From the beginning we were told that victory was the only acceptable outcome in Iraq, and now selling that message has become twice as difficult in Lebanon. Insurgents and terrorists aren't giving up. The Islamic world celebrates their existence. At this moment the most popular figure among Muslims everywhere is Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the defiant Hezbollah leader who stands as tall as Osama bin Laden and has proved just as indestructible. The reality of victory isn't even the point anymore. President Bush, in his surprise visit to Baghdad six weeks ago, announced a new plan to secure people's safety in Baghdad. He showed his total support for the al-Maliki government, which pledged to end the terror of Shi'ite militias on the street. A program of amnesty and national unification made headlines. None of it has happened. But instead of saying so, which would be realistic, the image has to shift. The sales job needs tweaking. It's sad when image can't match reality. But isn't that the point in all wars? The home front must be sold the inevitability of victory and the impossibility of defeat. War-makers are frighteningly willing to sacrifice civilian lives while fiercely defending their own posturing. Thus Israel, with our backing, proclaimed that its Lebanon campaign could only end in the total destruction and disarming of Hezbollah. From the beginning some voices said this goal was impossible, and so it is proving. The image of victory was duly modified to lesser goals as things began to go contrary to plan. Israel next wanted a 15-mile safe zone in southern Lebanon, then a one-mile zone, then an international peacekeeping force. The reality is that there's nothing left to sell but the illusion that they will win. Wars are places where illusions go to die. A great many died after the fall of Saigon in the Vietnam fiasco, but after thirty years a new crop sprouted again. Installing democracy by force in Iraq is an illusion; deep sectarian hatred is the reality. A government of national unity is an illusion; the U.S. putting a Shi'ite sectarian president in power is the reality. Iraqi security forces are an illusion; armed thugs dressed in police uniforms to make it easier to kidnap and slaughter innocent people is a reality. These days I think I'm like most people, exhausted from criticizing the Bush war policy. All I really want now is an honest admission, first to all Americans and then to the world, that we've stirred up far more than we can handle. Let's stop fighting over WMDs and distorted evidence and yellow cake uranium. A real crisis faces the world on an order of magnitude no one ever anticipated. Every demon has flown out of Pandora's box, and trying to market the illusion that we're winning feels like a page from George Orwell. The citizens in "1984" were trapped in a world where war never ended, yet they woke up every morning to the cheerful news of impending victory that was just around the corner. Click: intentblog.com *Deepak Chopra came to the U.S. in 1970 from his native India to practice medicine, a career that evolved into the field of mind-body medicine. His breakthrough book, "Quantum Healing," brought him public recognition in 1989. Since then he has written more than 42 books and travels worldwide as a spiritual speaker who fuses Western science with Eastern wisdom. He lives in La Jolla with his wife, Rita, and has two grown children and two grandchildren. Dr. Chopra heads the Chopra Center in Carlsbad, California, which specializes in many alternative treatment modalities including Ayurveda.