What the definition of "is" is

In a long ago distant past, a certain POTUS was questioned about having sexual relations with a young white house intern. He dodged the question, answering along the lines of, "it depends upon what your definition of is is."


The opposition party and its media propaganda wings (TV, print, radio) all went ballistic, citing the rule of law, and bringing up the necessity of impeachment hearings.


There are certain lawyerly ways of using words but not answering direct questions directly. Those who are practiced these ways, have well learned that never having to say you're sorry means never answering "yes" or "no". Somehow, they keep getting away with this. When the question is whether or not waterboarding constitutes torture, and those being questioned profess not to be able to answer yes or no, does it seem unfair to subject them to waterboarding until such time as they CAN answer the question yes or no?


John Yoo, the author of the Bush administration "torture memos" is one of these dissemblers. Robert Parry of Consortium News reports this exchange between Rep. John Coyners (D-MI) and Yoo during the June 26, 2008 hearing before the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution.


Conyers referred to a news report of a non-responsive non-answer Yoo gave when asked if the President could legally order the torture of the child of a terrorist suspect in order to get the suspect to talk. This scenario has played out on the Fox TV series 24. Parry writes the following:

The Judiciary Committee chairman asked: “Is there anything, Professor Yoo, the President cannot order to be done to a suspect if he believes it’s necessary for national defense?”

When Yoo dissembled, Conyers posed the question more pointedly: “Could the President order a suspect buried alive?”

Yoo continued to fence with the congressman, avoiding a direct answer.

“I don’t think I ever gave advice that the President could bury somebody alive,” Yoo said, adding he believed that “no American President would ever have to order that or feel it necessary to order that.”

Pointedly, however, Yoo avoided a direct response to the question of whether he believed the President had the authority to do it.

Democracy's easiest question

More from Senator Dodd's must read prepared remarks from the floor of the Senate, delivered 24 June, 2008:

When he came to the Senate before his confirmation, Michael Mukasey was asked a simple question, bluntly and plainly: “Is waterboarding constitutional?”

He replied: “If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional.”

One would hope for a little more insight from someone so famously well-versed in national security law. But Mr. Mukasey pressed on with the obstinacy of a witness pleading the fifth: “If it’s torture….If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional.”

And that is the best this noted jurist, this legal scholar, this longtime judge, a supposed expert on national security law had to offer on the defining moral issue of this presidency. Claims of ignorance. Word games.

Now-Attorney General Mukasey was asked the easiest question we have in a democracy: Can the president openly break the law? Can he—as we know he’s done already—order warrantless wiretapping, ignore the will of Congress, and then hide behind nebulous powers he claims to find in the Constitution?

His response: The president has “the authority to defend the country.”

And in one swoop, the Attorney General conceded to the president nearly unlimited power, just as long as he finds a lawyer willing to stuff his actions into the boundless rubric of “defending the country.” Unlimited power to defend the country, to protect us as one man sees fit, even if that means listening to our phone calls without a warrant, even if that means holding some of us indefinitely.

That is, Mr. President, contempt for the rule of law.

And so, this is very much about torture – about “enhanced interrogation methods” and waterboarding.

The administration defends waterboarding

More of Senator Dodd's prepared remarks from 24 June, 2008:

We have this Administration actually defending waterboarding, a technique invented by the Spanish Inquisition, perfected by the Khmer Rouge, and in between, banned—originally banned for excessive cruelty—by the Gestapo!

Still, some say, “waterboarding’s not torture.”

Oh really?

Listen to the words of Malcolm Nance, a 26-year expert in intelligence and counter-terrorism, a combat veteran, and former Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School. While training American soldiers to resist interrogation, he writes,

I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people….Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word….

It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result…and the obstinacy of the subject.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation…usually the person goes into hysterics on the board….When done right it is controlled death.

Controlled death, Mr. President.

And that is not torture?

Not according to President Bush’s White House. They have said waterboarding is legal, and that, if it chooses, America will waterboard again.

Holding the rule of law in contempt

From Senator Dodd's prepared remarks of 24 June, 2008 on the floor of the U.S. Senate:

I don’t think you can hold the rule of law in any greater contempt than sanctioning torture, Mr. President.

Because of decisions made at the highest levels of our government, America is making itself known to the world for torture, with stories like this one:

A prisoner at Guantanamo—to take one example out of hundreds— was deprived of sleep over fifty five days, a month and three weeks. Some nights, he was doused with water or blasted with air conditioning. And after week after week of this delirious, shivering wakefulness, on the verge of death from hypothermia, doctors strapped him to a chair—doctors, healers who took the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”—pumped him full of three bags of medical saline, brought him back from death—and sent him back to his interrogators.

To the generation coming of age around the world in this decade, that is America. Not Normandy, not the Marshall Plan, not Nuremberg. But Guantanamo.

Think about it.

We have legal analysts so vaguely defining torture, so willfully blurring the lines during interrogations that we have CIA counterterrorism lawyers saying things like, “if the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

Constituencies with no political voice

Mike Davis, writing at Tom Dispatch, makes this this salient observation:

[G]lobal warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the "two constituencies with little or no political voice."

Quisling Cowards

A telecommunication companies-backed spy bill to protect the Bush administration from any and all criminal investigations into possible invasion of privacy violations of the U.S. Constitution passed a Senate test vote on Wednesday.

The issue has been framed by the mainstream media, the white house, republicans, and lily-livered democrats who have ceded ever more of their congressional consitutional authority to the executive branch for the lasts eight years, as one of national security, extant FISA laws empowered the executive branch to spy on U.S. citizens for reasons of "national security" even filing for permission from the FISA courts.


But with the capitulation of House and Senate democrats, the issue of investigating just who the white house spied on, the when, and the why is made moot.


Presumptive Democratic Presidential Nominee Barak Obama, in an alarmingly familiar pattern of flip-flopping on promises to his constituent voting base, rebuked his recent opposition saying that "national security" trumps telecom immunity. Apparently this constitutional scholar does not see a potential problem.


Voting against the bill in the Senate were 14 Democrats and one independent:

Biden (D-DE)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brown (D-OH)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Dodd (D-CT)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feingold (D-WI)
Harkin (D-IA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Leahy (D-VT)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Sanders (I-VT)
Schumer (D-NY)
Wyden (D-OR)


The words of Republican Senator Kit Bond are quite telling:

"We can tell those companies that answered their government's call for help in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks that a grateful nation stands behind them and that they will be given the civil liability protection they rightly deserve."

The teleco's would NOT need civil liability protection unless they KNOWINGLY broke the law. As this version of the law is written, it is enough for the teleco's to produce an "oly-oly-ox-in-free" statement to a judge saying that:


a) the President ordered us to spy
b) the President told us it was legal for us to spy
c) we were only following orders (no matter what our in-house attorneys may have suggested)


Ultimate passage of this law is will further solidify the Cheney administration affirmation of the "unitary executive theory" that the President IS the law (at least in times of war).


Given that the Global War on Terror has been pronounced to be a "long war" with no end in sight, the continuing war on drugs, one ramification of the "teleco immunity law" is that the President has lawful powers to disobey, break, and overturn "the law."


The following Senators were listed as "not voting"

Byrd (D - WV)
Clinton (D - NY)
Kennedy (D- MA)
Obama (D - IL)
McCain (R - AZ)

"Friendly Fire" death in Iraq was Murder

Greg Mitch of Editor and Publisher, has authored the book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits --and the President -- Failed on Iraq, which includes several chapters on non-combat deaths in Iraq. He recently followed up on this tragic story, originally said by the army to involve two non-combat deaths, but which was later revealed to be a murder-suicide in which the victim had reported harrassment to superior officers.

[L]ast August I briefly described yet another case [of "non-combat" deaths in Iraq], involving a 20-year-old Texas woman named Kamisha Block, who apparently was much loved in her Vidor hometown. It was said to be death by “friendly fire,” which officially is fairly rare in Iraq, so I kept an eye on it for days, in case of an update.

...

Forget friendly fire. It turns out that Spc. Block was actually murdered, and the killer, another soldier, Staff Sgt. Brandon Norris, then turned the gun on himself.


And more: Her parents were misled at the start, and only after the mother noticed a suspicious head wound at the funeral (it turns out she was shot five times) and asked why, were they informed a few days later about the murder angle.

...

The [Beaumount] Enterprise in an editorial today charges: "There is no excuse for the U.S. Army's shabby treatment of Kamisha Block's parents and others who cared for her. Her commanders knew right away that she had been killed by a fellow soldier in Iraq, who had been harassing her. It was a standard murder-suicide. Incredibly, the Army first told her parents that it was an accidental death due to friendly fire."

...



Even after the family was informed about the murder – the two soldiers had some sort of “relationship” in the past -- no other details were released, and it took six months, and the help of a local congressman, for the family to finally get the 1200-page military report. It revealed that their daughter had been abused by the killer several times shortly before she died, and the Army seemingly did not do enough to protect her. The Blocks say that a military official told them that the chain of command should have taken the abuse more seriously and done more.


Now they are asking why it took so long for the truth to emerge, and why no one has been punished for the failure to save their daughter.

More on Russert

Pierre Tristam in an editorial published by the Daytona Beach News-Journal provides some more enlightening insights into Tim Russert's style of "journalism."

Respect for the man aside, there’s a matter of respecting journalism when assessing Russert’s place in the trade. That respect has been lacking in the almost universally fawning tributes to Russert and the craft he represented. Journalists and politicians from the president on down have formed yet another procession of praise and prostrations worthy of, say, Diana or Elvis. But Tim Russert?

That’s what journalism as we know it today is, primarily: an adjunct to the cult of celebrity, a shareholder in the business of image management to protect, foremost, the business of America. When the powerful pay tribute to Russert (”he was an institution in both news and politics for more than two decades,” were President Bush’s autopilot words) they’re paying tribute to themselves — to the establishment Russert represented, defended and, unfortunately for us, encrusted.

...


... Since the Age of Reagan, the perception of tough journalism has paralleled the perception of integrity in politics when, all along, politics and journalism have been complicit in legitimizing spin — interpretation ahead of fact. In more honest days, we’d call that propaganda. But that’s one of those “shrill” words not to be used in polite company, and Russert’s court was nothing if not a weekly oath to the appropriate.

The late Michael Kelly, a reporter and editor whose death in Iraq in 2003 was to my mind a greater blow to journalism than Russert’s, described this in a piece for The New York Times Magazine in 1993 (two years into Russert’s stint at “Meet”): “On the Sunday talk shows, the celebrity host and the celebrity reporter and the celebrity political strategist sit side by side, and the distinctions between them are not apparent to the naked eye. In effect, they are one, members of the faith, the stars of a culture they themselves have created. Indeed, they have acknowledged their oneness. They have given themselves a name, the Insiders, and a language. The language reveals, as all languages do, a great deal about how its speakers see themselves and the world. It is self-referential, self-important, self-mocking and very nearly (if subconsciously) self-loathing. It is deeply cynical. It portrays a society where to be knowing is to admit the fraud of one’s functions in the act of performing them.” At least, they have the loathing right.

[I've gotten the impression that McCain's overt cynicism of the political process endears him to reporters and has helped establish him, in their eyes, to be the "straight-talking maverick']
...

The truth is that on any night of the week Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” does more in a two-minute segment to show in politicians’ own words how venal, dishonest, contradictory and just plain dense they can be than Russert did in his Sunday services. Russert’s master was always the political structure he grilled, but never fundamentally questioned. You always knew whose side he was on: power, not truth — and, by power, I don’t mean his own, of which he had plenty, but the powerful men and occasional women he invited to his Versailles.

I mourn his death. But I wish I could mourn the death of the journalism he represented. To the detriment of journalism and malinformed citizens, that parody lives on.

Many wrongfully held at Guatanamo

The Supreme Court's recent 5-4 ruling upholding habeas corpus means merely that the court is one conservative judge away from outlawing habeas corpus. One need not, apparently at this time, worry then, unless one is deemed by the POTUS to be an enemy combatant.


What kind of judges would a President McCain appoint to the Supreme Court? A President Obama?


Tom Lassetter writes about an eight month investigation by McClatchy news on how the U.S. came to wrongfully imprison dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren't "the worst of the worst." From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn't belong there.

Late in 2003, Knight-Ridder reported a trio of retired military officers Rear Adm. Don Guter, Rear Adm. John Hutson and Brig. Gen. David Brahms had filed a Supreme Court amicus brief on behalf of 16 detainees who had been held for almost two years at Gitmo. They were motivated by their "worry that lengthy incarcerations at Guantanamo without hearings will undermine the rule of law and endanger U.S. forces."

For two years, the Bush administration has described the detainees as "the worst of the worst" and "killers." The three former officers are skeptical, noting that 88 have been released so far from the prison camp.

"We're trying to separate the goat-herders from the real terrorists, and that's not easy, but I'm not convinced they're all guilty," said Hutson, now the dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H.

Continuing with more from the Lassetter piece:

Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the "War Council" devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected "enemy combatants" indefinitely with few legal rights.

devised a legal framework = came up with some word mumbo jumbo word to self-justify

The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.

Disregard or Rewrite American Law, etc = BREAK American law, international treaties and the UCMJ.

The "trick" to breaking international law was two-fold: (1) Hold the "terrorists" at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and (2) Define the "terrorists" as "enemy combatants", a new classification of foe.

In October 2003, Reuters reported Red Cross criticism of the U.S. for the detentions at Guantanamo.

The International Red Cross say it is unacceptable that the United States continues to detain more than 600 people at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba without charges or prospect of a timely trial.

...

The Red Cross, which has an international mandate to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and visit people detained in conflicts, has repeatedly expressed its concerns about aspects of the detention camp at Guantanamo, which was deliberately chosen because of its legal ambiguity.

Picking up on the McClatchy investigation once more:

The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.

They needed shielding from prosecution because they were COMMITTING war crimes and recognized full well that THEY, the War council members, their bosses and Bush were all complicit in war crimes

The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S. custody indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and Pakistani police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged importance of the men they handed over. Foot soldiers brought in hundreds of dollars, but commanders were worth thousands. Because of the bounties — advertised in fliers that U.S. planes dropped all over Afghanistan in late 2001 — there was financial incentive for locals to lie about the detainees' backgrounds. Only 33 percent of the former detainees — 22 out of 66 — whom McClatchy interviewed were detained initially by U.S. forces. Of those 22, 17 were Afghans who'd been captured around mid-2002 or later as part of the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, a fight that had more to do with counter-insurgency than terrorism.

The hand of the free market at work here - advertise what your looking for, offer and pay an attractive price, and people will tell you they've got just what you want. A win-win situation - informants and officials looking to settle old grudges get paid to accuse innocents of being terrorist, and we got "terrorists." Well, not a good situation for innocent men (and children) falsely accused.

American soldiers and interrogators were susceptible to false reports passed along by informants and officials looking to settle old grudges in Afghanistan, a nation that had experienced more than two decades of occupation and civil war before U.S. troops arrived. This meant that Americans were likely to arrest Afghans who had no significant connections to militant groups. For example, of those 17 Afghans whom the U.S. captured in mid-2002 or later, at least 12 of them were innocent of the allegations against them, according to interviews with Afghan intelligence and security officials.

This should surprise no one. It is really, nothing new. From the Knight-Ridder story of late 2003:

For two years, the Bush administration has described the detainees as "the worst of the worst" and "killers." The three former officers are skeptical, noting that 88 have been released so far from the prison camp.

"We're trying to separate the goat-herders from the real terrorists, and that's not easy, but I'm not convinced they're all guilty," said [former JAG, Rear Admiral] Hutson, now the dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H.

A lie by any other name

This AP article uses some artful phrasing, the kind "polite" Washington insiders use to gently rebuff politicians (not named Clinton or Gore), in discussing Scott McClellan's testimony before Congress.

On Friday, McClellan returned repeatedly to his theme that Bush, Cheney and others in the administration had done great damage to themselves — and by extension to aides like McClellan — by being less than truthful on a range of official matters.

Somehow, BEING LESS THAN TRUTHFUL just does not carry the same force as LYING.


Because LYING about ten bl*w j*bs is an impeachable offense. But BEING LESS THAN TRUTHFUL, even if it gets 4,200 member of the U.S. armed forces killed, not to mention results in the deaths of 1,000,000 and the displacement of 4,000,000 Iraqis, would apparently not amount to an impeachable offense, because, it's different from LYING.

Favored by Cheney's Handlers

Dr. Chris R. Martin, PhD on his Mediacrit blog provides some important insights into the professional work of Tim Russert:


The part "we all" know -- the trade mark self-referenced "blue-collar origins":

Russert ... was one of the elite Washington beltway gang. As the son of a Buffalo, New York sanitation worker (Russert celebrated his dad “Big Russ” in a book) he was roundly praised for his “blue-collar sensibility.” But it was the mythology of his blue-collar origins that belied the fact that he was truly a Washington insider.

Martin mentions Russert's popularity amongst politicians of both parties, but also cites some quotes from a very telling WaPo article:

Politicians of both parties liked [Tim Russert], because for all of his storied tough questioning, he was a guy who played by the polite rules of Washington, where the worst a liar can do is “misspeak.” Tellingly, Cathie Martin, Dick Cheney’s spokesperson, testified in the 2007 perjury trial of Scooter Libby that when the administration was criticized for overstating the case for war against Iraq, their strategy was to put Cheney on Russert’s show, where they thought they could control the message. “I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used,” she said. “It’s our best format.”

Martin wryly observes:

Being favored by Dick Cheney’s handlers doesn’t sound like a case for the journalism hall of fame, though.

Also very telling are these excerpts from Russert's interview by Bill Moyers for the PBS production "The Selling of the War."

BILL MOYERS: Critics point to September eight, 2002 and to your show in particular, as the classic case of how the press and the government became inseparable. Someone in the Administration plants a dramatic story in the NEW YORK TIMES And then the Vice President comes on your show and points to the NEW YORK TIMES. It's a circular, self-confirming leak.

TIM RUSSERT: I don't know how Judith Miller and Michael Gordon reported that story, who their sources were. It was a front-page story of the NEW YORK TIMES. When Secretary Rice and Vice President Cheney and others came up that Sunday morning on all the Sunday shows, they did exactly that.

My concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.

BILL MOYERS: BOB SIMON DIDN'T WAIT FOR THE PHONE TO RING.

The irony here - Moyers has given Russert a chance to defend his (lack of) effort. And then comes up with a "gotcha" moment, they kind of thing Russert was noted for.

TIM RUSSERT: Look, I'm a blue-collar guy from Buffalo. I know who my sources are. I work 'em very hard. It's the mid-level people that tell you the truth.

Note the repetition of the blue-collar myth.

BILL MOYERS: They're the ones who know the story?

TIM RUSSERT: Well, they're working on the problem. And they understand the detail much better than a lotta the so-called policy makers and political officials.

BILL MOYERS: But they don't get on the Sunday talk shows.

TIM RUSSERT: No. I mean, they don't want to be, trust me. I mean, they can lose their jobs, and they know it. But they can provide information which can help in me challenging or trying to draw out sometimes their bosses and other public officials.

BILL MOYERS: What do you make of the fact that of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news, from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department?

TIM RUSSERT: It's important that you have an opposition party. That's our system of government.

This is Russert saying the it is the job of the opposition party - the Democrats, obviously, in this case - to provide an opposing point of view. But there WERE Democrats with an opposing point of view - Senator Ted Kennedy, Former Vice President Al Gore, Governor Howard Dean, for examples.

Opposing point of view? What about the TRUTH!!

BILL MOYERS: So, it's not news unless there's somebody…

TIM RUSSERT: No, no, no. I didn't say that. But it's important to have an opposition party, your opposing views.

I'll belabor the point: It's important to have the TRUTH.

Fervent Faith Blinds

Chip Ward has a great article Radioactive Deja Vu in the West up at the Tom Dispatch web site. It concludes with this warning, a plea:

Our fervent faith in economic growth makes us blind to natural processes, ecological relationships, the long scales of time, and ultimate consequences.

We believe that, because we live above and beyond nature, we can act without context or caution. Our industrial missionaries drive thumper trucks, drill holes, send samples to the labs, and convert investors. Like the conquistadors of old, who searched for gold, they stake their claims on the land for its imagined riches. They declare ownership, no longer for church and king, but for corporation and investors. Ecosystems, communities, and future generations are sacrificed, and still salvation recedes.

Chalmers Johnson reviews Wolin

At Truthdig, Chalmers Johnson reivews Sheldon Wolin's latest book “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.” Johnson highly recommends Wolin's book, calling it "fully accessible."

Below are excerpts of Johnson's review which illuminate Wolin's "managed democracy" concept and summarize the relationships between imperialism, democracy and militarism.

The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization. Managed democracy aims at the “selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry” under cover of improving “efficiency” and cost-cutting.

...

One other subordinate task of managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or private conditions of human life so that they fail to focus on the widespread corruption and betrayal of the public trust.

...

Another elite tactic of managed democracy is to bore the electorate to such an extent that it gradually fails to pay any attention to politics.

...

Imperialism and democracy are, in Wolin’s terms, literally incompatible, and the ever greater resources devoted to imperialism mean that democracy will inevitably wither and die.

...

... Over the years, American political analysis has carefully tried to separate the military from imperialism, even though militarism is imperialism’s inescapable accompaniment. The military creates the empire in the first place and is indispensable to its defense, policing and expansion.

Political Science

I've linked to Jeff Huber's invaluable web site in the past (recently too) and will do so again, because he explains things SO well:

A first semester political science major at the most obscure community college in America can figure out that the less of its own oil an emerging nation burns, the more it can sell to finance its infrastructure and economic growth. Before said poli-sci major starts her sophomore year, she can piece together the strategic wisdom that says if you're the first Middle East oil nation to establish a functioning nuclear energy industry, you'll become a regional superpower.




And by the time she's picked up a full scholarship to finish her baccalaureate studies at Stanford, she'll realize that the Iran crisis has always been about nuclear energy, not nuclear weapons, because if Iran and its senior partners China and Russia can control when and how the world transitions from fossil fuel to the power of the sun, Dick and Dubya's big oil buddies will have to suck hind spigot on the global energy cash cow.

And what to my wondering eyes should appear, but THIS NYT headline & article:

Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production. ...

For an industry being frozen out of new ventures in the world’s dominant oil-producing countries, from Russia to Venezuela, Iraq offers a rare and prized opportunity.

While enriched by $140 per barrel oil, the oil majors are also struggling to replace their reserves as ever more of the world’s oil patch becomes off limits. Governments in countries like Bolivia and Venezuela are nationalizing their oil industries or seeking a larger share of the record profits for their national budgets.

...

Any Western oil official who comes to Iraq would require heavy security, exposing the companies to all the same logistical nightmares that have hampered previous attempts, often undertaken at huge cost, to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

[So, looks like we'll need U.S. armed forces in Iraq for a LONG time now - MG]

...

Yet at today’s oil prices [apx $135 pb] , there is no shortage of companies coveting a contract in Iraq. It is not only one of the few countries where oil reserves are up for grabs, but also one of the few that is viewed within the industry as having considerable potential to rapidly increase production.

...

The first oil contracts for the majors in Iraq are exceptional for the oil industry.

They include a provision that could allow the companies to reap large profits at today’s prices: the ministry and companies are negotiating payment in oil rather than cash.

[Because oil is worth a lot more than dollars]

...

... In an interview with Newsweek last fall, the former chief executive of Exxon, Lee Raymond, praised Iraq’s potential as an oil-producing country and added that Exxon was in a position to know. “There is an enormous amount of oil in Iraq,” Mr. Raymond said. “We were part of the consortium, the four companies that were there when Saddam Hussein threw us out, and we basically had the whole country.”


[This article leads me to speculate, that PERHAPS the American Invasion of Iraq was, after all, at least a little bit, about -- OIL]

One out of every sixteen

In an article about the home of Baltimore's mayor Sheila Dixon being raided, the following paragraph leapt off the page:

Seen by some as a divisive figure during her time on the City Council, Dixon has won over skeptics with her shrewd management of an often-troubled city of about 624,000, including an estimated 40,000 heroin addicts.

If that 40,000 estimate is correct, more than one out of every sixteen citizens of Baltimore is a heroin addict. This is alarming, sad, and frightening beyond words.