Observations on current events

Energy & Permanent War:

One piece of information that virtually never appears in the stories that cover the rising cost of oil is the supply strain created by George Bush's Permanent War.
The U.S. military uses significant amounts of diesel, fuel oil, kerosene and lubricants for its land, sea and air operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

It was, after all, F.D.R. who, in realizing how essential oil supplies were to winning the Second World War, made the Oil For Protection Deal of the 20th century with Ibn Saud (Truman actually signed the deal after F.D.R's death). And soon after, the American ally Israel was created and armed to the teeth, ensuring tension in the region would remain high for decades to come. Wanting to avoid another oil shock after 1973, the U.S. was successful in persuading the Saudis to sign massive infrastructure contracts with American engineering firms, deepening the relationship of the world's most powerful democracy and a oil-rich monarchy (a society utterly devoid of civil rights for all citizens). Arms sales to both Israel and Saudi Arabia would, naturally, follow. Carter provided the impetus for Reagan's creation of CENTCOM. It would cement the U.S. military commitment to the region, even if the costs would never show up in the price of Middle East petroleum U.S. consumers pay. This was a deliberate and unforgivable disassociation/cost externalization that would encourage U.S. consumers to ignore fuel costs for decades, due to their artificially low level. Today, most politicians fail to acknowledge how U.S. non-energy policy got us to the situation we are in.

AP: Oil prices pass $143 a barrel; US gas hits high"...Supply concerns and a fragile global economy continue to drive the price of oil to new highs, as well as continued tensions in the Middle East..."

Iran:

The New Yorker: Preparing the Battlefield
"The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran..."


War For Economic Empire:

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: It Was Oil, All Along
"Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be ... the bottom line. It is about oil..."

WMD:

Scott Ritter: The Nuclear Expert Who Never Was
"...David Albright has a history of being used by those who seek to gain media attention for their respective claims. In addition to the Hamza and Obeidi fiascos, Albright and his organization, ISIS, have served as the conduit for other agencies gaining publicity about the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program, the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor, and most recently the alleged Swiss computer containing sensitive nuclear design information. On each occasion, Albright is fed sensitive information from a third party, and then packages it in a manner that is consumable by the media. The media, engrossed with Albright’s misleading résumé ('former U.N. weapons inspector,' 'Doctor,' 'physicist' and 'nuclear expert'), give Albright a full hearing, during which time the particulars the third-party source wanted made public are broadcast or printed for all the world to see. More often than not, it turns out that the core of the story pushed by Albright is, in fact, wrong...
...It is high time the mainstream media began dealing with David Albright for what he is (a third-rate reporter and analyst), and what he isn’t (a former U.N. weapons inspector, doctor, nuclear physicist or nuclear expert). It is time for David Albright, the accidental inspector, to exit stage right. Issues pertaining to nuclear weapons and their potential proliferation are simply too serious to be handled by amateurs and dilettantes."


War For Private Profit:

Greg Palast: Driving the surge in gas prices? The Bush-McCain surge in Iraq
"...More important than even the Democrats’ declaring that oil company profits are undeserved, is their implicit understanding that the profits are the spoils of war.
And that’s another reason to tax the oil industry’s ill-gotten gain. Vietnam showed us that foreign wars don’t end when the invader can no longer fight, but when the invasion is no longer profitable."

The Corporatist State:

This ruling sets a dangerous precedent for corporate entities (not) being held to account.
It is interesting that when a jury of citizens makes a determination of what the company should pay, the sum is in the billions. When an elected/appointed government official (judge) has their say, the sum is drastically reduced.
If the $500 million sum was negotiated, it is highly suspect, because it represents what the company thought was 'reasonable,' thus not an amount they would consider truly 'punitive.'

AP: Court rejects death penalty for raping children
"...The Supreme Court on Wednesday also cut the $2.5 billion punitive damages award in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster to $500 million.
The court ruled that victims of the worst oil spill in U.S. history may collect punitive damages from Exxon Mobil Corp., but not as much as a federal appeals court determined.
Justice David Souter wrote for the court that punitive damages may not exceed what the company already paid to compensate victims for economic losses, about $500 million compensation.
Exxon asked the high court to reject the punitive damages judgment, saying it already has spent $3.4 billion in response to the accident that fouled 1,200 miles of Alaska coastline.
A jury decided Exxon should pay $5 billion in punitive damages. A federal appeals court cut that verdict in half."

Our Fleeting Civil Rights:

Follow the money, and one sees how votes are bought.
It's utterly corrupt, but 'legal,' since corporations are 'people' and money = speech.

Politico.com Dems who flipped on FISA immunity see more telecom cash
"House Democrats who flipped their votes to support retroactive immunity for telecom companies in last week’s FISA bill took thousands of dollars more from phone companies than Democrats who consistently voted against legislation with an immunity provision, according to an analysis by MAPLight.org.
In March, the House passed an amendment that rejected retroactive immunity. But last week, 94 Democrats who supported the March amendment voted to support the compromise FISA legislation, which includes a provision that could let telecom companies that cooperated with the government’s warrantless electronic surveillance off the hook.
The 94 Democrats who changed their positions received on average $8,359 in contributions from Verizon, AT&T and Sprint from Jan. 2005 to March 2008, according to the analysis by MAPLight, a nonpartisan organization that tracks the connection between campaign contributions and legislative outcomes..."

The Global Arms Trade:

NY Times: American Envoy Is Linked to Arms Deal Cover-Up
"An American ambassador helped cover up the illegal Chinese origins of ammunition that a Pentagon contractor bought to supply Afghan security forces, according to testimony gathered by Congressional investigators.A military attaché has told the investigators that the United States ambassador to Albania endorsed a plan by the Albanian defense minister to hide several boxes of Chinese ammunition from a visiting reporter. The ammunition was being repackaged to disguise its origins and shipped from Albania to Afghanistan by a Miami Beach arms-dealing company.
The ambassador, John L. Withers II, met with the defense minister, Fatmir Mediu, hours before a reporter for The New York Times was to visit the American contractor’s operations in Tirana, the Albanian capital, according to the testimony. The company, under an Army contract, bought the ammunition to supply Afghan security forces although American law prohibits trading in Chinese arms..."

War and The Fourth Estate:

The corporate media (corporate television news, in particular) and the DoD learned a lesson in Vietnam - never again shall the people in whose name a war is being fought be the recipients of the facts. They might see the utter horror that war is, and refuse to continue to pay for it, or buy the things broadcast advertisers are selling...

Brian Stelter (NY Times, from the Business, Media section) - Reporters Say Networks Block War Reports

Targeting Iran:

Ray McGovern: Bomb Iran? What’s to Stop Us?
"It’s crazy, but it’s coming soon — from the same folks who brought us Iraq.
Unlike the attack on Iraq five years ago, to deal with Iran there need be no massing of troops. And, with the propaganda buildup already well under way, there need be little, if any, forewarning before shock and awe and pox — in the form of air and missile attacks — begin.
This time it will be largely the Air Force’s show, punctuated by missile and air strikes by the Navy. Israeli-American agreement has now been reached at the highest level; the armed forces planners, plotters and pilots are working out the details..."


Health Care:

Norman Solomon: Health Care and Ghosts of War
"There’s a lot of profit in death. Under the guise of national security. And under the guise of health care.
Today, across the United States, people are dying because they don’t have access to health care. But policy solutions are available. In Congress, about 90 co-sponsors are backing H.R. 676, a bill to provide 'comprehensive health insurance coverage for all United States residents.' Call it whatever you like — 'single payer' or 'improved Medicare for all' or 'universal health care with choice of providers and no financial barriers.' What it adds up to is the policy option of treating health care as the human right that it is.
In the latest edition of 'Health Care Meltdown,' author C. Rocky White identifies himself as 'a conservative Republican who has always held an entrepreneurial ‘pull yourself up by your own bootstraps’ free-market philosophy.' A longtime physician, White describes 'the frustration I began to experience while trying to provide compassionate, quality health care in the context of a market in which the accustomed rules of business economics don’t apply.'
Dr. White immersed himself in research on health care policy and finance. Then he pored through reams of the latest data on the tradeoffs of reform options. 'No matter how I turned the cube,' he writes, 'the answer never changed. That answer was nearly impossible for me, a free-market Republican, to accept.'
Here are Dr. White’s two key conclusions in his own words:
* 'Until we remove the motive of profit from the financing of health care, we cannot and we will not resolve our current health care crisis.'
* 'Any group that proposes reform policy that maintains the use of for-profit insurance companies in a so-called free market is being driven by one single motive — to protect the golden coffers of their share of the $2 trillion cash cow!'..."

Counterinsurgency Methods:

WikiLeaks.org - How to train death squads and quash revolutions from San Salvador to Iraq
"Wikileaks has released a sensitive 219 page US military counterinsurgency manual. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as 'what we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places'. Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, history making.
The leaked manual, which has been verified with military sources, is the official US Special Forces doctrine for Foreign Internal Defense or FID.
FID operations are designed to prop up 'friendly' governments facing popular revolution or guerilla insurgency. FID interventions are often covert or quasi-covert due to the unpopular nature of the governments being supported ('In formulating a realistic policy for the use of advisors, the commander must carefully gauge the psychological climate of the HN [Host Nation] and the United States.')
The manual directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor unions & political parties. It directly advocates warrantless searches, detainment without charge and (under varying circumstances) the suspension of habeas corpus. It directly advocates employing terrorists or prosecuting individuals for terrorism who are not terrorists, running false flag operations and concealing human rights abuses from journalists. And it repeatedly advocates the use of subterfuge and 'psychological operations' (propaganda) to make these and other 'population & resource control' measures more palatable..."


On Torture:

McClatchy Newspapers: General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes
"The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing 'war crimes' and called for those responsible to be held to account..."


Questioning The Propaganda Used To Promote Permanent War:

Pakistan Daily - USA Military Officers Challenge Official Account of September 11
"Twenty-five former U.S. military officers have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and called for a new investigation. They include former commander of U.S. Army Intelligence, Major General Albert Stubblebine, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Col. Ronald D. Ray, two former staff members of the Director of the National Security Agency; Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, PhD, and Major John M. Newman, PhD, and many others. They are among the rapidly growing number of military and intelligence service veterans, scientists, engineers, and architects challenging the government’s story..."

Economics:

The Telegraph (UK) - RBS issues global stock and credit crash alert
"The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months as inflation paralyses the major central banks.
'A very nasty period is soon to be upon us - be prepared,' said Bob Janjuah, the bank's credit strategist.
A report by the bank's research team warns that the S&P 500 index of Wall Street equities is likely to fall by more than 300 points to around 1050 by September as 'all the chickens come home to roost' from the excesses of the global boom, with contagion spreading across Europe and emerging markets...
...RBS expects Wall Street to rally a little further into early July before short-lived momentum from America's fiscal boost begins to fizzle out, and the delayed effects of the oil spike inflict their damage..."


Infinite, Extra-Legal Detention:

Glenn Greenwald: John Yoo’s Ongoing Falsehoods in Service of Limitless Government Power
"...Contrary to one of the core falsehoods spouted by people like John Yoo, a huge bulk of our 'War on Terror' prisoners, including those at Guantanamo, were not 'captured fighting against the U.S.' at all. While supporters of unlimited executive power incessantly claim that the War on Terror can’t be waged based on the premise that Terrorists are like criminals, many of the detainee apprehensions are identical to how accused criminals are captured, since — unlike actual wars of the past — they involve snatching people up while engaged in completely innocent activities and in civilian settings, not on battlefields while engaged in combat.
Yoo purposely uses falsehoods here because the way so many of these detainees are captured by the U.S. is what distinguishes them from detainees in past wars captured on actual battlefields. That’s precisely what makes the risk of erroneous detentions (or more malignantly-motivated detentions, such as that of Sami al-Haj) so high. And it that’s fact — along with the fact that, by the administration’s own claims, this is a 'completely different war' that will last decades, not merely years — that makes the very idea of empowering our Government to imprison such people indefinitely, with no real process, so dangerous and tyrannical.
The other deeply misleading claim in Yoo’s Op-Ed is even more transparent. He characterizes the Court’s decision as 'grant[ing] captured al Qaeda terrorists the exact same rights as American citizens to a day in civilian court.' What minimally self-respecting law professor would be willing to make this claim with a straight face?
The whole point of the habeas corpus right is that without a meaningful hearing, we don’t know if the individuals our Government is imprisoning are really 'al Qaeda terrorists' or something else. That ought to be too basic even to require pointing out..."

Iraq:

Tom Engelhardt: The Greatest Story Never Told
'Finally, the U.S. Mega-Bases in Iraq Make the News'

Energy & Recycling:

Times Online (UK) - Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
"Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'...
...Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.
For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.
The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.
Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready..."


Univ. of Michigan: Microchip sets low-power record with extreme sleep mode
"A low-power microchip developed at the University of Michigan uses 30,000 times less power in sleep mode and 10 times less in active mode than comparable chips now on the market.
The Phoenix Processor, which sets a low-power record, is intended for use in cutting-edge sensor-based devices such as medical implants, environment monitors or surveillance equipment.
The chip consumes just 30 picowatts during sleep mode. A picowatt is one-trillionth of a watt. Theoretically, the energy stored in a watch battery would be enough to run the Phoenix for 263 years..."

Government Of, By And For The People?

Robert Scheer: Empire or Republic?
"...As Washington warned, it is extremely difficult to unmask 'pretended patriotism' when the nation is frightened by enemies real and imagined. But Washington could not have anticipated the sort of mass media society in which government propaganda becomes compelling and inconvenient truths are concealed behind the veil of national security. He certainly did not anticipate the modern militarized state, in which a permanent war footing has been the norm since the onset of the cold war.
For these reasons, Washington’s concerns needed the updating provided by our other great general turned President, Dwight David Eisenhower. Ike’s farewell address provides a perfect bookend to Washington’s, for it marks a modern President’s recognition that the fears of our first President had been realized. The Empire had come to replace the Republic. The 'military-industrial complex' that Eisenhower warned against was merely the logical extension of a stark policy of American intervention into the affairs of nations on every continent and the imperial reach of forward military bases throughout the world..."

The Military Industrial Complex:

Stephen Lendman: Exposing Pentagon and CIA Corruption
"Information for this article comes from long-time business, finance and political writer and analyst Bob Chapman who publishes the bi-weekly International Forecaster. It's power-packed with key information and a valued source for this writer. He obtained voluminous material directly from its source. People need to know it. Read on.
SueAnn Arrigo is the source. She was a high-level CIA insider. Her title was Special Operations Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). She also established the Remote Viewing Defense protocols for the Pentagon in her capacity as Remote Viewing Advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). It earned her a two-star general rank in the military. She called it a 'ploy' so the Pentagon could get more of her time and have her attend monthly Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings. Only high-level types are invited, and she was there from October 2003 to July 2004.
Part of her job involved intelligence gathering on Iraq and Afghanistan - until August 2004 when she refused to spread propaganda about a non-existant Iranian nuclear weapons program and left. She followed in the footsteps of others at CIA who resigned for reasons of conscience and became critics - most notably Ray McGovern, Ralph McGehee, and Phil Agee.
On May 16, 2008, Arrigo sent extensive government corruption and cover-up information to Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee - in 12 separate cases. This article covers four of them or about one-third of what Congress got.

The 12 are explosive and revealing but just the tip of the iceberg:
-- of government corruption and war profiteering;
-- sweetheart deals and kickbacks;
-- high-level types on the take;
-- trillions of missing dollars;
-- on September 10, 2001, Rumsfeld admitting 'According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions;'
-- imagine the current amount;
-- its corrosive effect on the nation; and people should
-- demand accountability - who profits, who pays and what are the consequences of militarism gone mad..."

Standing Up To The Media Monopoly:

Free Press: Bill Moyers addresses NCMR 2008 (video)

Free Press: Dan Rather addresses NCMR 2008(video)

The Lies That Took A Fearful Nation To War:

McClatchy Newspapers: Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?
"Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have 'been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,' a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.
A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.
The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.
Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces..."

Campaign 2008:

Glenn Greenwald: McCain, Spying and Executive Power: A Complete Reversal in 6 Months
"Last December, as his campaign was floundering, John McCain responded to a questionnaire on executive power, spying and torture that was distributed to all candidates by The Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage. McCain explicitly refused to answer whether he thought there was 'any executive power the Bush administration has claimed or exercised that . . . is unconstitutional.' But on one critical issue — whether he thinks the President possesses 'inherent power' under Article II 'to conduct surveillance for national security purposes without judicial warrants, regardless of federal statutes' — McCain gave an answer that was basically the equivalent of the ACLU/Russ-Feingold/Chris-Dodd view, and completely at odds with the Bush/Cheney/Yoo view of executive power...
...Now that McCain is desperate to shore up the support of right-wing extremists, he just gave the exact opposite answer yesterday. Over the last couple weeks, a controversy arose among right-wing executive power fanatics because a McCain representative said at a campaign event that McCain opposes telecom amnesty in the absence of probing hearings and an apology from the telecoms — a reversal of McCain’s January vote for full telecom amnesty without those conditions...
...these days, in order to please the self-proclaimed 'small government' conservative movement, a candidate must now vow to spy on Americans with no warrants or oversight of any kind; reserve the right to torture; and even break the law — ignore popular will as expressed through acts of Congress — whenever such lawbreaking is deemed beneficial. Those are now defining planks in the limited-government 'conservative' movement..."


Surveilance For Profit:

Democracy Now! - Spies for Hire: Carlyle Group to Become Owner of 'One of America's Largest Private Intelligence Armies'
"...AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, start off by talking about the significance of Carlyle buying, if it’s approved, Booz Allen’s government unit.

TIM SHORROCK: Well, as you said before, as you said earlier, Carlyle has kind of scaled down its defense investments in recent years, but this is a major plunge back into it. Booz Allen Hamilton is one of the largest intelligence contractors in America and also plays a very strategic role, I would say, in US intelligence as an adviser to agencies such as the National Security Agency. And it also advises all the key combat commands of the United States military and other key agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. And they don’t just provide technology. They provide, you know, all kinds of expertise and all kinds of management, consulting to these agencies, you know, help them decide how to spend their money down the road. And they have many, many people on staff who have played very senior roles in intelligence.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Michael McConnell and his journey from Booz Allen to National Intelligence?

TIM SHORROCK: Well, McConnell began as an intelligence officer in the US Navy. He became well known to Americans when he was the intelligence adviser to Colin Powell during the first Gulf War. And then after that, he was appointed to be director of the National Security Agency at the very tail end of the first Bush administration. He ran the National Security Agency, which of course does eavesdropping and surveillance on telephone calls and emails all over the world, including in the United States. He ran the NSA for a few years, and then he went directly to Booz Allen, where he became the director—he was a vice president of Booz Allen, he was a director of their military intelligence programs.
The important thing for readers—for listeners to know about the military intelligence is that the Pentagon controls about 85 percent of the entire intelligence budget. And so, when we’re talking about military intelligence, we’re talking about a huge swathe of intelligence. And so, in that position, he advised the NSA, he advised many of the other agencies. And so, he played a very important role in intelligence. And I would say that people like McConnell, when they’re in the private sector playing this kind of consulting role to the agencies, they might as well be called an intelligence official with a proviso that they are working for the private sector. So then, as you also mentioned, during his time at Booz Allen, they played an important advisory role in many important Bush’s administration programs, such as Admiral Poindexter’s program, which was designed to, you know, collect all kinds of information on American citizens to root out—to allegedly root out terrorism here..."

Iraq:

This is classic thug behavior: push, grab, take, keep.
How can anyone suggest this is not a move typical of an imperial power?

Patrick Cockburn for the Independent (UK) - Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control
"A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.
The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.
But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November..."

Natural Resources:

Michael Klare: The New Geopolitics of Energy
"While the day-to-day focus of US military planning remains Iraq and Afghanistan, American strategists are increasingly looking beyond these two conflicts to envision the global combat environment of the emerging period--and the world they see is one where the struggle over vital resources, rather than ideology or balance-of-power politics, dominates the martial landscape. Believing that the United States must reconfigure its doctrines and forces in order to prevail in such an environment, senior officials have taken steps to enhance strategic planning and combat capabilities. Although little of this has reached the public domain, there have been a number of key indicators...
...At a time when world supplies of oil, natural gas, uranium and key industrial minerals like copper and cobalt are beginning to shrink and the demand for them is exploding, the major industrial powers are becoming more desperate in their drive to gain control over what remains of the planet's untapped reserves [for more evidence of major shortages in fossil fuels, see Klare, 'Beyond the Age of Petroleum,' November 12, 2007, and Mark Hertsgaard, 'Running on Empty,' May 12]. These efforts typically entail intense bidding wars for supplies on international markets--hence the record high prices for all these commodities. But they also take military form, as arms transfers and the deployment of overseas missions and bases. It is to bolster America's advantage--and to counter similar moves by China and other resource competitors--that the Pentagon has placed resource competition at the center of its strategic planning..."

Iraq:

Walter Pincus: Long-Term Contracts Show Plans for Continued Iraq Occupation
"The depth of US involvement in Iraq and the difficulty the next president will face in pulling personnel out of the country are illustrated by a handful of new contract proposals made public in May...."


The Denver Convention:

CBS4 (TV) News: ACLU Sues Denver for Weapons Information
"The American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit against the city of Denver after an open records request for information about the purchasing of security equipment for the Democratic National Convention was denied. The group wants to know what weapons the city is buying for crowd control during protests..."

Unlawful Indefinite Detention:

The Guardian (UK): US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships
"The United States is operating 'floating prisons' to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.
Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.
Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.
The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped...
...Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said: 'They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.
'By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been 'through the system' since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them,'..."