National security implications of AIG bailout...

This just in from Big Don;(explaining why we taxpayers now own an insurance company)

Editor's Note #1: The Bailout of AIG, the CIA, and Covert Operations

By now you no doubt have heard about the AIG bailout. If not, just check out this thread at the LATOC Forum. There is, however, something you almost certainly haven't heard about which is that the insurance business is heavily involved in covert operations. Some of you may be thinking "Huh? Insurance companeis and covert operations?! Wow, this is some real nutballery, even for LATOC". Well if so then just consider the following excerpts from an article entitled "The Secret (Insurance) Agent Men" by Los Angeles Times staff writer Mark Fritz, originally published on September 22nd, 2000.

(Security is Number One...)

Sense and Reality on Energy

Floyd Norris in the NYTimes;

High oil prices have helped to bring down the American economy and to devastate Detroit. Politicians are talking about energy policy, although they seem to be talking past each other.

So it is now, and so it was in 1974, after the price shock that arrived after the Arab oil exporters started an embargo in retaliation for America’s support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and learned that they could sell oil for a lot more than they had thought.

From the perspective of 2008, what is most remarkable is that in 1975, the country had a president who actually wanted to confront the issue. The answers he proposed seem highly relevant now, even if the steps needed are much larger than would have been necessary if action had been taken back then.

Can you imagine hearing the following statements from either Senator John McCain or Senator Barack Obama?

“To provide the critical stability for our domestic energy production in the face of world price uncertainty, I will request legislation to authorize and require tariffs, import quotas or price floors to protect our energy prices at levels which will achieve energy independence.”

“Increasing energy supplies is not enough. We must take additional steps to cut long-term consumption.”

“Obviously, voluntary conservation continues to be essential, but tougher programs are needed, and needed now.”

Those are excerpts from President Ford’s State of the Union address in 1975.

Jimmy Carter, great as he was, was NOT the only president who attempted to grab this bull by its horns. Over, and over, and over again, the American people have been exhorted by sensible leadership to do better. Sadly, these exhortations have all fallen on deaf ears. They threaten to do so again.

Why Georgia Does Not Belong in NATO

William Pfaff in the IHT; Nowhere in what I have read of the comment on this small but important war has it been explained [ital] why [unital] neither Georgia nor Ukraine should belong to NATO. They carry with them ready-made wars that NATO neither can nor should be expected to deal with. They are both ethnically and culturally divided nations whose histories are of struggle between or among their component parts.

In Georgia it is between the linguistically distinct enclaves that in the past were Russian and wish again to be Russian, and the majority of Georgians who want to be part of the West, but are also determined to dominate their rebellious territories.

If they would peacefully renounce those territories, an ethnically and culturally united Georgia would have every right to demand NATO membership. But as things are now (or were, until the last few days), Mikheil Saakashvili wants his country inside NATO to protect him from the consequences of forcing those dissident territories to remain under Georgian domination. NATO has no business doing such a thing, and as Russia supports the rebel enclaves, NATO membership for Georgia has war with Russia built into it. As we have just seen.

In Ukraine, the problem is between a culturally and historically Orthodox and Russian-speaking Ukraine, and a westernized and Uniate Catholic Ukraine, whose ties are to Poland and Lithuania. Westernized Ukraine is trying to use NATO to help it dominate Russian Ukraine. This again has war built into it, and NATO must stay away from a conflict that is an unresolved and possibly irresolvable internal Ukrainian problem.

NATO is extremely lucky that Germany and France blocked it earlier this year from offering membership to Georgia. Had they not done so, NATO today would either have threatened Russia with war this week, or its Article Five guarantee to come to the military aid of any of its members under attack would have been discredited.

Scratch Russia Georgia War and You Find Oil and Gas Pipelines

The war between Russia and Georgia has some nationalist elements, some old grudges but mostly it rubs the wrong way Russia’s newly found power: energy imperialism.

Georgia has refused to play along like other former Soviet states and, if anything, its independent attitude has been a giant irritant for Russia ever since Vladimir Putin used oil and gas to project hegemony over the region and, by extension, into all Europe. At the same time, Georgia, a tiny, 4 million people country has been trying to ward off the giant on its north by seeking membership in NATO or the European Union. In the postCold War era, the United States and Russiadependent Europe are reduced to just pleading for calm.

A look at the map makes the issue at hand quite transparent.

Oil and gas can come from Russia into Europe by tanker through the Black Sea from its massive terminal in Novorossiysk or by pipelines through Belarus, Ukraine and even plans of under water construction in the Baltic. All of these give Russia a huge leverage, almost monopoly, over both the transit and destination countries. More than 25 European countries depend now for more than 75% of their oil and gas from Russia.

But Georgia was eager to act as a spoiler and European countries were even more eager to comply while trying to avoid incurring the wrath of the hand that feeds them. More fair and balanced coverage of talking monkey resource war at Energytribune.

A Fascinating Prepared Variation

In today's DEBKAfile;

Georgian tanks and infantry, aided by Israeli military advisers, captured the capital of breakaway South Ossetia, Tskhinvali, early Friday, Aug. 8, bringing the Georgian-Russian conflict over the province to a military climax.

Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin threatened a “military response.”

Former Soviet Georgia called up its military reserves after Russian warplanes bombed its new positions in the renegade province.

In Moscow’s first response to the fall of Tskhinvali, president Dimitry Medvedev ordered the Russian army to prepare for a national emergency after calling the UN Security Council into emergency session early Friday.

Reinforcements were rushed to the Russian “peacekeeping force” present in the region to support the separatists.

Georgian tanks entered the capital after heavy overnight heavy aerial strikes, in which dozens of people were killed.

Lado Gurgenidze, Georgia's prime minister, said on Friday that Georgia will continue its military operation in South Ossetia until a "durable peace" is reached. "As soon as a durable peace takes hold we need to move forward with dialogue and peaceful negotiations."

Is this the beginning?

"Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power."- (p. xiii)

"... But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book.” (p. xiv)

"In that context, how America 'manages' Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." (p.31)

“Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization." (p.35) Zbigniew Brzezinski - The Grand Chessboard

Some Saw Opportunity?

Yes, that's former general and Secretary of State Colin Powell holding up a vial of anthrax - part of the generalized misrepresentations alleging that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.

In the lead-up to the invasion, the U.S. and UK emphasized the argument that Saddam Hussein was developing "weapons of mass destruction" and thus presented an imminent threat to his neighbors, to the U.S., and to the world community. The US stated "on November 8, 2002, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1441. All fifteen members of the Security Council agreed to give Iraq a final opportunity to comply with its obligations and disarm or face the serious consequences of failing to disarm. The resolution strengthened the mandate of the UN Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), giving them authority to go anywhere, at any time and talk to anyone in order to verify Iraq’s disarmament." Throughout late 2001, 2002, and early 2003, the Bush Administration worked to build a case for invading Iraq, culminating in then Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 2003 address to the Security Council. Shortly after the invasion, the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies largely discredited evidence related to Iraqi weapons and, as well as links to Al Qaeda, and at this point the Bush and Blair Administrations began to shift to secondary rationales for the war, such as the Hussein government's human rights record and promoting democracy in Iraq.

Accusations of faulty evidence and alleged shifting rationales became the focal point for critics of the war, who charge that the Bush Administration purposely fabricated evidence to justify an invasion it long planned to launch.

Many opine that the U.S. was conscientious in its pursuit of the Iraqi WMD artifacts. Given that the Pentagon and foggy bottom probably still had the invoices and receipts for much of that material, their level of concern was warranted.

Who can say?

From where I sit, it's already just another one of history's mysteries and an anomalous link in the chain of elite rule and the narratives supporting the same. Always interesting to see how a face and a voice invested with such trust and gravitas as Powell's could be associated with something so rank, dank, and stank. The lesson, I suppose, is to always critically examine the facts and the statements and to scrupulously ignore the feelings that the spokesperson evokes. If it bolsters public confidence and is expedient to the narrative aims - TPTB have access to a stellar cast of characters that can be deployed against public confidence building objectives.....,

Case Closed?

A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report.

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked for the past 18 years at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md., had been told about the impending prosecution, the Los Angeles Times reported for Friday editions. The laboratory has been at the center of the FBI's investigation of the anthrax attacks, which killed five people.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. The Times, quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.

Top U.S. biological weapons researcher commits suicide as FBI closes in...,

Soul Technology?

What did you mean when you said our civilization would follow its own past?

What was here before you was very great. It uncovered the secret to which you are blind, the secret of communion with the dead. It began to be able to use intelligent energy in its technology. To use souls as tools. Look at the carvings at Dendera in Egypt. Those strange objects in the containers are not electrical filaments or religious symbols. Those are souls. The walls of the containers bear a electrical charge of a type that imprisons them. Because of the use of such technology, elemental bodies extended their perception outside of the time stream, with the result that the school of the earth ceased to work as a place of change. Who knows the truth, cannot find their weakness, and that is your aim on earth. What was worse the knowledge of this power was kept from the common, ordinary people who have little self-will to begin with, and so are the only ones really capable of making good use of such abilities. The old world was destroyed because of its own greed and secretiveness. Those least evolved rose to the top, as happens here. Your leaders as you call them, are all people with damaged senses of self-worth The damaged goods run the civilization. That's why it cannot last.

extracts From: Whitley Strieber The Key

Argentina's Economic Collapse - Part 1 of 12

What's around that signpost up ahead (and why have *we* never seen these images of recent history from a country in the western hemisphere on teevee before?)

The Meta-Group's Geostrategic Goal

The fact that the United States will use drug traffickers as geostrategic assets does not at all mean that Washington and the traffickers will necessarily have the same agendas. In theory at least, the contrary should be true. Although the United States may have used known traffickers like Zaman and Qadir to regain access to Afghanistan, its stated ultimate goal, and the one assumed by the mainstream media, was to reimpose its own kind of order. Whether the country is Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Colombia, or Kosovo, America's national interest is said to be to install and then protect pipelines. And pipelines require peace and security.

The prime geostrategic goal of the drug traffic in Afghanistan is precisely to prevent peace and security from happening. It is true that the international illicit drug industry, like the international oil industry, is polymorphous and flexible, relying on diversified sources and markets for its products in order to maintain its global dominance. But for the global drug traffic to prosper, there must always be key growing areas where there is ongoing violence, and state order does not prevail. However, in speaking above of America's stated national interest, I do not assume that a U.S. government will always represent that national interest. Something else has happened in recent decades, the growth of the drug trade to the point that it now represents a significant portion of national and international wealth. And it has to be said that the American free enterprise system, like every other dominant political system in a current nation with world pretensions, will tend above all to represent the interests of the wealthy. Thus Bush Administration policies cannot be assumed to reflect the national goals of peace and security, as outlined above.

On the contrary, its shocking underfunding of Afghanistan's recovery, like its complex and destabilizing interventions in Georgia, suggest that it, as much as the drug traffic, hopes to utilize instability – as a pretext for maintaining unstable U.S. bases in countries like Uzbekistan, whose people eventually will more and more object to them. These policies can be said to favor the interests of the drug traffic more than the interests of security and orderly development.

A test of the Bush Administration's true intentions in the War on Terror came as early as November 2001. The Americans had learned, correctly, that Osama bin Laden was holed up in the caves of Tora Bora. While storming the caves was a difficult military challenge, surrounding and isolating them was well within the capacity of U.S. military strength. However General Franks, the United States commander, entrusted the task of capturing bin Laden to two local commanders: Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman. As we have seen, Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman were not only drug lords, they were earlier part of the 1980s heroin trail to Soviet troops that had been organized "with the blessings of the CIA." Thus the U.S. could hardly plead ignorance as to these men's activities and interests, which clearly involved making sure that the writ of Kabul would never extend to their own Nangahar Province. For the drug trade to thrive in Afghanistan, it was necessary that the influence of Osama and the Taliban be preserved, not extinguished. The folly of using Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman was brought to Franks' attention at the time:

Military and intelligence officials had warned Franks and others that the two main Afghan commanders, Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman, couldn't be trusted, and they proved to be correct. They were slow to move their troops into place and didn't attack until four days after American planes began bombing – leaving time for al-Qaida leaders to escape and leaving behind a rear guard of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek fighters.[110]

The failure to use U.S. troops cannot be attributed to the motive of appeasing local sentiments:

Pir Baksh Bardiwal, the intelligence chief for the Eastern Shura, said that he would welcome a massive influx of U.S. troops. He believed that the Pentagon planners were making a grave mistake by not surrounding Tora Bora.[111]

A U.S. journalist who was there, Philip Smucker, claims that the treachery of the local commanders went beyond their slowness to surround Tora Bora. He describes hearing how one lower level commander

whom Ali had assigned to guard the Pakistani border, had acted as an outright escort for al Qaeda.... "Ilyas Khel just showed the Arabs the way out of the country into Pakistan".....That Ali had entrusted [Khel, who had once served under the military commander of Osama's friend Younis Khalis] suggested to us that the escapes were part of a much broader conspiracy to assist al Qaeda right through to the end.[112]

How high up did this conspiracy go? Certainly Ali's failure to capture Osama could have been and was predicted. But if capturing Osama was indeed the U.S. goal (as announced at the time by Colin Powell), the real question is why the task was not entrusted to U.S. troops. In the wake of 9/11, Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, has claimed to possess information linking the American 9/11, and much else, to massive drug-trafficking which has corrupted high level U.S. officials. Among other things, she has claimed that the U.S. has never gone after top-level drug traffickers, because

this would upset "certain foreign relations." But it would also expose certain of our elected officials, who have significant connections with high-level drugs- and weapons-smuggling – and thus with the criminal underground, even with the terrorists themselves.....[113]

After Ms. Edmonds reported improprieties to her FBI employers, she was fired. She has appealed her firing, but the Bush administration has invoked the unusual claim of the "state-secrets privilege" to prevent the lawsuits she has filed from being heard in court. At this point we know little more than that what concerned her involved arms-dealing, drug-trafficking, and Turkey. It is I think a matter of national priority to learn more about the American links to Far West, Ltd., the group accused of staging the Russian 9/11. It is a matter of more than purely historic interest to learn if that group's Islamist and American connections could have supplied a meeting-ground for staging the American 9/11 as well. Lobster Magazine - The Global Drug Meta-Group

USS Liberty Incident

The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a U.S. Navy technical research ship, USS Liberty, in international waters north of the northern Sinai Peninsula coast, about 25.5 nautical miles northwest of the minaret at El Arish[1](p.26), by Israeli fighter planes and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War. The attack, which killed 34 U.S. servicemen and wounded at least 173, was the second deadliest against a U.S. Naval vessel since the end of World War II, surpassed only by the Iraqi Exocet missile attack on the USS Stark on May 17, 1987, and marked the single greatest loss of life by the U.S. intelligence community.

From Weapons : The International Game of Arms, Money and Diplomacy - Russell Warren Howe. Discussion of present Israeli war plans in the Middle East may be illuminated by reference to the past. The 1967 Israeli-initiated attack on Egypt is illustrative.

Although clearly warned by France's Charles de Gaulle to not initiate hostilities, and more obliquely warned by the US' Lyndon Johnson, Israel "launched the war on June 5, using French aircraft and largely French armor. It was a Pearl Harbor-style operation, destroying the Egyptian Air Force on the ground" [Howe, Russell Warren. Weapons: The International Game of Arms, Money and Diplomacy. N.Y: Doubleday, 1980. p. 523].

R.W. Howe's account expands on quickly-negotiated limits on the conflict. Israel promised the United States that its sole objective would be Egypt. To monitor this and other stipulations, the US moved its intelligence ship the USS Liberty into "the eastern Mediterraneun, to cover Arab and Israeli traffic.... Two hundred feet below the ship, on a parallel course, was its 'shadow' - the Polaris strategic submarine Andrew Jackson...." [Ibid., p.524].

Howe continues, "The first important thing the the [USS Liberty] NSA monitors learned was that the Israelis had cracked the Egyptian and Jordanian codes. From a relay station inside the swiftly captured northern region of Sinai, Israel was interrupting and retransmitting Cairo's messages to Amman [Jordan]. In spite of world reporting of the Israeli successes, soon to be backed up by television film, Cairo appeared to be telling Amman that the tide of war had turned. Three quarters of Israel's air force, the Israelis made the 'Egyptian' messages say, had been destroyed. The three hundred aircraft on Jordan's radar were Egyptian planes raiding Israel - not, as was really the case, Israeli planes returning unscathed from raids on Egypt. Cairo's anxious appeals to Jordan for help were transformed into an invitation to join in an assured victory and recapture West Jerusalem. Jordan's consequent participation in the war enabled Tel Aviv to seize East Jerusalem and the West Bank" [Ibid, pp. 524-525].

All this was discovered by the USS Liberty and communicated back to the United States. When Israel's Ambassador to the United States Avraham Harman subsequently pleaded that Israel was "resisting aggression," the US UnderSecretary of State Eugene Rostow "snapped back that the United States knew that Tel Aviv had lured [Jordan's King] Hussein into the conflict by cooking his communications. Harman...returned to the embassy and called his country. By then, it was midnight in Tel Aviv, but within hours the Israeli ministry of defense there had ordered aircraft to seek out the U.S. communications ship" [Ibid. p. 525]. That ship was the USS Liberty.

"American intelligence analysts now believe that the Israeli intention was complete destruction - a sinking with all hands. This could then be blamed on the Egyptians or the Russians, not only destroying a wartime nuisance, but also making Americans more sympathetic to Israel's cause" [Ibid. p.525]

OPEC Leader Issues Warning About Iran and Oil Supply

In today's NYTimes; The head of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries warned on Thursday that oil prices would experience an “unlimited” increase in the event of a military conflict involving Iran because the group’s members would be unable to make up the lost production.

“We really cannot replace Iran’s production — it’s not feasible to replace it,” Abdalla Salem el-Badri, the OPEC secretary general, said in an interview.

Iran, the second-largest producing country in OPEC after Saudi Arabia, produces about four million barrels of oil a day out of the daily worldwide production of close to 87 million barrels.

The country has been locked in a long dispute with Western nations over its nuclear ambitions.

In recent weeks, the price of oil has risen higher on speculation that Israel could be preparing an attack on the country’s nuclear facilities. The saber rattling intensified this week with missile tests by Iran.

That has further unnerved oil markets because of concerns that any conflict with Iran could disrupt oil shipments from the gulf. In New York, crude oil climbed $5.60, to $141.65 a barrel.

“The prices would go unlimited,” Mr. Badri said during the interview, referring to the effect of a military conflict. “I can’t give you a number.”

Iran has insisted that its nuclear program is for purely peaceful purposes.

Mr. Badri, a former oil executive who has headed the oil industry in Libya and served as deputy prime minister of that country, called for a peaceful solution, and he hinted that an additional conflict in the Middle East besides the continuing conflict in Iraq would be severe and long-lasting.

“If something happened there, nobody would be able to solve it,” he said, referring to a war involving Iran.

Only Obama Ready to Put in Work....,

While the other wannabe, gonnabe, pranksters and wanksters pooh-poohed it at the time, only Sen. Barack Obama clearly asserted the narrative imperative to put in serious work in accordance with U.S. foreign policy stipulations regarding the global war on terror - in today's NYTimes;

Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about Osama bin Laden’s terrorism network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal areas, a problem that had been exacerbated by years of missteps in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, sharp policy disagreements, and turf battles between American counterterrorism agencies.

The new plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was intended to eliminate some of those battles. And it was meant to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington’s risk-averse attitude toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan. They also argue that catching Mr. bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive.

But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light. The plan has been held up in Washington by the very disagreements it was meant to eliminate. A senior Defense Department official said there was “mounting frustration” in the Pentagon at the continued delay.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.

While Baraka was ready to ride, and caught flak for saying as much, flatfooted, greenhorn republican presidential nominees were making unintelligible mouth noises about staying in Iraq for another 100 years....,

Occupation Plan for Iraq Faulted in Army History

The NYTimes brings you all the history you can use on the U.S. debacle in Iraq. The story of the American occupation of Iraq has been the subject of numerous books, studies and memoirs. But now the Army has waded into the highly charged debate with its own nearly 700-page account: “On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign.”

In 2005, the RAND Corporation submitted a report to the Army, called “Rebuilding Iraq,” that identified problems with virtually every government agency that played a role in planning the postwar phase. After a long delay, the report is scheduled to be made public on Monday.

But the “On Point” report carries the imprimatur of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. The study is based on 200 interviews conducted by military historians and includes long quotations from active or recently retired officers.

Pentagon blocked Cheney's attack on Iran

From the Asia Times; Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) bases by insisting that the administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former George W Bush administration official.

J Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled in an interview that senior Defense Department (DoD) officials and the Joint Chiefs used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal.

McClatchy newspapers reported last August that Cheney had proposed several weeks earlier "launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran", citing two officials involved in Iran policy.

According to Carpenter, who is now at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy, a strongly pro-Israel think-tank, Pentagon officials argued that no decision should be made about the limited airstrike on Iran without a thorough discussion of the sequence of events that would follow an Iranian retaliation for such an attack. Carpenter said the DoD officials insisted that the Bush administration had to make "a policy decision about how far the administration would go - what would happen after the Iranians would go after our folks".

The question of escalation posed by DoD officials involved not only the potential of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Iraq to attack, Carpenter said, but possible responses by Hezbollah and by Iran itself across the Middle East.

Carpenter suggested that DoD officials were shifting the debate on a limited strike from the Iraq-based rationale, which they were not contesting, to the much bigger issue of the threat of escalation to full-scale war with Iran, knowing that it would be politically easier to thwart the proposal on that basis.

The former State Department official said DoD "knew that it would be difficult to get interagency consensus on that question".

look at the two candidates' fathers

As we simplistically blather about the candidates' race and age – it's hip vs hip operation, folks – we seem to be ignoring the best guide we have to John McCain and Barack Obama's hearts.

Both men have written strange, searching books about their fathers. It is in their pages that we can find the clearest clues to their potential presidencies. At first glance, these slabs of non-fiction – Dreams From My Father by Obama, and Faith of My Fathers by McCain – are strikingly similar. They both tell the autobiographical story of an insecure young man who flails around for an identity, and finds it by chasing the ghost of his absent father to a dangerous place far beyond the United States. Yet Obama ended up writing a complex story of colonised people – while McCain wrote a simple celebration of the coloniser.

Johann Hari in last Friday's Independant: If you really want to understand what this race is about, look at the two candidates' fathers

Eisenhower Warns of the Military Industrial Complex

Cold War Oil Politics

The U.S. and the Soviet Union;

Richard Heinberg, a professor from Santa Rosa, California argues that a newly declassified CIA document shows that the U.S. used oil prices as leverage against the economy of the Soviet Union:

"The Memorandum predicts an impending peak in Soviet oil production 'not later than the early 1980s' (the actual peak occurred in 1987 at 12.6 million barrels per day, following a preliminary peak in 1983 of 12.5 Mb/d). 'During the next decade,' the unnamed authors of the document conclude, 'the USSR may well find itself not only unable to supply oil to Eastern Europe and the West on the present scale, but also having to compete for OPEC oil for its own use.' The Memorandum predicts that the oil peak will have important economic impacts: 'When oil production stops growing, and perhaps even before, profound repercussions will be felt on the domestic economy of the USSR and on its international economic relations.'"

"...Soon after assuming office in 1981, the Reagan Administration abandoned the established policy of pursuing détente with the Soviet Union and instead instituted a massive arms buildup; it also fomented proxy wars in areas of Soviet influence, while denying the Soviets desperately needed oil equipment and technology. Then, in the mid-1980s, Washington persuaded Saudi Arabia to flood the world market with cheap oil. Throughout the last decade of its existence, the USSR pumped and sold its oil at the maximum possible rate in order to earn foreign exchange income with which to keep up in the arms race and prosecute its war in Afghanistan. Yet with markets awash with cheap Saudi oil, the Soviets were earning less even as they pumped more. Two years after their oil production peaked, the economy of the USSR crumbled and its government collapsed.

As noted in April - In a radically altered world— where Russia is transformed from battered Cold War loser to arrogant broker of Eurasian energy, and the United States is forced to compete with the emerging “Chindia” juggernaut—the only route to survival on a shrinking planet, lies through international cooperation.

It's Liquidation Time...

It's approaching three months since we last sampled a little bit of the Hypertiger's wisdom. I tend to dot connect from the periphery of what's available to us in the mainstream if we'll only focus our attention diligently enough to see it.

F'zample, the makings of the Greatest Depression are all readily available for anyone to see. The pernicious gaming of the food supply and gradual conditioning of public awareness to this process is another subject we've covered extensively, and, which other dot-connectors have summarized nicely to our attention.

But at the end-of-the-day - I've only come across a single purveyor of an internally consistent grand unified theory of the end of the world as we know it (TEOTWAWKI) who goes well beyond the popular periphery and deep into historical detail and comes back up and out with simple, readily accessible explanatory summations. I believe it imperative that you go and fully assimilate Hypertiger Wisdom if want to have a comprehensive handle on the current situation - that said, I humbly yield the microphone to the Hypertiger;

A well rested horse is not an exhausted horse. And an exhausted horse is zero.

Top lives off the yield from the bottom. When the yield from the bottom to the top becomes zero...The top goes nowhere. The top needs to find a well rested horse to ride...You can add as many exhausted horses to the equation as you want...You are not going anywhere.

Rich people get all the power they have from the bottom...and when the bottom is exhausted...There is nothing they can do...They have no power other than what you all give them.

And you think when you can no longer pay the top what you owe them that they are going to print up what you owe them...hand it to you and then you hand it back to them to pay them what you owe them...

Sorry...When the bottom is exhausted...It's game over.

No magic printing press or anything else is going to work....The only thing that works is liquidation.

the top needs assets and saves assets...But once the bottom is used up...They are not assets anymore...They are liabilities and either self liquidate or are wiped off the face of the ledger...

Can't feed 6 Billion boot lickers anymore...well...liquidate them until you get to the point that you can.

The above is real economics...Not the wishful thinking fantasy economics you all are devoted to and promote.

Very, very few people realize what we've enbedded in...An absolute capitalist hierarchial food powered make work enterprise...

GDP break down...

Agriculture: 1% The producers of the power...

The consumers of the power. (food powered make work liabilities)

Industry: 20.7%
Services: 78.3%

Sorry but none of you eat Gold and Silver or copper or crude oil, etc. to sustain the continued existence of your bodies...

Total labor force out of the population of 300 Million...150 million.

farming/food production 0.5% or 7.5 million people...

In any evaluation of the actual state of an economy, the intellectual tools of historic comparison are invaluable. When those tools are used today to examine the US economy, what one finds is a massive multi-generational retrogression which has been constant since the mid-1960s. To give just one example of this, today, the US manufacturing base takes up a mere 9.9 percent of total employment.

If the gargantuan and grotesque US military-industrial complex is subtracted, as it ought to be as sheer economic waste, what would remain are those still employed in the US civil and private economy. In reality, genuinely productive employment in the US economy is much lower than 9.9 percent. This is de-industrialisation in broad daylight. Some folks not only haven't a clue about the nature of the beast, they actively promote disinformation which serves to keep other clueless folks distracted from seeking a clue on their own.

Peak Wood

This article provides a simple and highly accessible primer on the cyclical rise and fall of complex civilization. In addition, it actually references the Sumerian god of the forest and its conservation "Humbaba".

I'll never forget the first time I went into a supersized grocery store, in New Hampshire I believe, some twenty-odd years ago. It was easily the most impressive collection of food that I had ever personally witnessed. Dumbstruck, I referred to this for me unprecedented phenomenon as "the mighty Humbaba", and that term has stuck ever since. My children know exactly what I'm talking about when I refer to the now somewhat typical big box store or grocery store as "Humbaba".

Humbaba was the lord of the cedar forest - a giant with a face of coiled intestines. Gilgamesh the Sumerian hero fought and killed him and then cut down his cedar trees. The Epic of Gilgamesh is translated in full here;

The importance of oil is not that it provides energy; energy can be had from anything. The importance of oil is that is provides cheap energy. A society's complexity is not a function of the total energy throughput, but the ERoEI--Enery Returned on Energy Invested, or ROI in pure energy economics terms. Since the general problem (if not the specifics) is such a common one, allow me to explain with an example from our own history: the end of the Bronze Age, the beginning of the Iron Age, and a crisis we might today call, "Peak Wood."[...]

Every civilization eventually falls prey to diminishing returns. The problem of Peak Oil--like "Peak Wood"--is just one dimension of this much larger, intractable problem, inherent to the nature of any complex society. What separates extant civilizations from extinct ones is whether or not a less attractive alternative existed, which could become the basic strategy for a new iteration in the cycle of expansion and exploitation. But eventually, miracles run out. Eventually, the deus ex machina leaves us to sink or swim on our own merit. The crisis of Peak Oil is precisely the kind of crisis that has always collapsed civilizations, and if history is any guide, then it seems very likely that we have finally run out of luck, and the time has finally come to pay back 10,000 years of debt.

In addition to being a good and satisfying read on its own, invoking the sacred name of the great Humbaba, it links to the anthropik blog and website, jeffvail, and some other good resource sites, as well.