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Saudi Arabia supports ‘surge’ – considers sending troops to Iraq

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Saudi Arabia believes the Iraqi government is not up to the challenge and has told the United States that it is prepared to move its own forces into Iraq should the violence there degenerate into chaos, a senior U.S. official told NBC News on Tuesday…

The Saudi government has signaled in the past that it would oppose an early withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, fearing it would leave minority Sunni Muslims at the mercy of Shiite Muslim militias.

via MSNBC

Related:

Is Iran driving the New Saudi Diplomacy? (CSMonitor)

Libby trial resumes: will “display the secret strategizing of an administration that cherry-picked information to justify war in Iraq”

U.S. v. Libby boils down to two drastically different versions of the same events in the spring and summer of 2003. The government alleges that Libby was involved in a concerted White House effort to discredit Plame’s husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had publicly accused the Bush administration of twisting information he provided on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. Wilson led a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger a year earlier and found no grounds for claims that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium there.

Eight days after Wilson went public with his claims, Plame’s identity as a CIA officer appeared in Novak’s column.

The defense says that neither Libby nor the White House sought to retaliate against Wilson and that Libby misspoke to investigators looking into the disclosure because he was overwhelmed by a crush of national security and other matters. He has said he had no motive to lie about the details or timing of conversations he had with reporters.

Article via WashingtonPost

US comptroller says taxes would have to double to pay for Bush budget in 2040

“The picture I will lay out for you today is not a pretty one and it’s getting worse with the passage of time,” said David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, in a Thursday morning hearing of the Senate’s Budget Committee. “Continuing on our current fiscal path would gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living, and ultimately even our domestic tranquility and our national security,” he warned.

The head of the GAO also warned that if no action is taken now to control government spending, severe tax hikes could be necessary. He stated that, “balancing the budget in 2040 could require actions as large as cutting total federal spending by 60 percent or raising federal taxes to 2 times today’s level.”

Article via RawStory

Iraq Punditry: Getting Rich by being Wrong vs. Right but Poor

“Surely those who warned us not to invade Iraq have been recognized and rewarded, and those who pushed for this disaster face tattered credibility and waning career prospects. Could it be any other way in America?

So we selected the four pundits who were in our judgment the most influentially and disturbingly misguided in their pro-war arguments and the four who were most prescient and forceful in their opposition.  Then we did a career check … and found that something is rotten in the fourth estate.”

A long overdue look at the pre-war statements of:

Tom Friedman
Peter Beinart
Fareed Zakaria
Jeffrey Goldberg
Robert Scheer
William S. Lind
Jonathan Schell
Scott Ritter

Article via RadarOnline.com

US Deploying F-117A Stealth Fighters to South Korea – concerns over another North Korean nuke test?

SEOUL (Reuters) – The United States is deploying a squadron of stealth fighters to South Korea, a U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday, amid speculation that North Korea may be ready to test a second nuclear device. 


The U.S. television network ABC cited U.S. officials last week as saying North Korea was preparing for another test. However, both U.S. and South Korean officials have publicly said that there was no evidence a test was imminent. 

via Reuters

Bush ‘surge’ crafted by aide who wanted to nuke North Korea in 1995

The Democrats expressed alarm over an academic article he wrote in 1995 that called for dispatching more troops to South Korea, redeploying American tactical nuclear weapons to the country, and bombing North Korea if Pyongyang refused to abandon its nuclear program. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, described Mr. Crouch’s North Korea proposals as “reckless.”

via RawStory

Iran threatens to stop oil flow via Hormuz strait

A senior Iranian officer warned that if the West continues to threaten Iran’s economy over its nuclear program, Teheran will discontinue the flow of oil via the Strait of Hormuz, Israel Radio reported Monday.

According to the officer, 40% of the world’s oil is transferred through the strait, and the world is dependent on Iran for a source of energy and a stable economy.  

via The Jerusalem Post

The spoils of war: How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches

The Cover story from Sunday’s Independent (UK):

Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. “So where is the oil going to come from?… The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said

Read the rest of the article

Belarus Blocks Transit of Russian Oil

The latest in the energy dispute between Russia and its former Soviet republics:

“The suspension of oil deliveries comes just days after Belarus and Russia reached a last-ditch agreement on gas prices that avoided a New Year’s cutoff of natural gas for Belarusian consumers that threatened a repeat of last year’s energy dispute between Moscow and Kiev.

Belarus grudgingly accepted a doubling of the price it pays for imports of Russian natural gas, on which it depends for industry and home heating.

But the two countries are now locked in a dispute over oil duties, with Russia determined to stop Belarus from re-exporting petroleum products made from processing Russian oil bought cheaply.”

via AP News

See the earlier politricks.mnp posts (and this) for background info on the conflict.

UPDATE (1/9/07): RUSSIA SHUTS OFF OIL PIPELINE TO PARTS OF EASTERN EUROPE

UPDATE 2 (1/10/07): BELARUS DITCHES TRANSIT TAX PLACED ON RUSSIAN OIL 

Israel denies planning attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities

Israel vehemently denied Sunday a report by a British newspaper which claimed that it plans to attack Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities using nuclear weapons.  According to the report quoting Israeli military sources, two Israel Air Force squadrons are training to blow up an enrichment plant at Natanz, around 220 kilometres south-east of Tehran, using “bunker buster” nuclear bombs. Two other sites would also be hit with conventional weapons.

via RawStory/dpa German Press Agency

U.S. Bars Lab From Testing Electronic Voting Machines

A laboratory that has tested most of the nation’s electronic voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests.

Experts on voting systems say the Ciber problems underscore longstanding worries about lax inspections in the secretive world of voting-machine testing. The action by the federal Election Assistance Commission seems certain to fan growing concerns about the reliability and security of the devices.

via the NYTimes

Report blasts ExxonMobil for misleading public on climate change, funding psuedo-science

The Union of Concerned Scientists released a report today arguing that oil giant ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.

“ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer,” said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Director of Strategy & Policy. “A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 years.”

The report said that a task force that Exxon Mobil helped create on global climate science in 1998 included someone who had led a nonprofit organization called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, “which had been covertly created by the tobacco company Philip Morris in 1993 to manufacture uncertainty about the health hazards posed by secondhand smoke.”

This report comes on the heels of an unprecedented step by the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, which in September 2006 wrote the oil giant to demand that the company withdraw its support for dozens of groups that have “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence”. The scientists also strongly criticised the company’s public statements on global warming, which they described as “inaccurate and misleading.” (see article)

Exxon Mobil raked in $10.5 billion in net earnings in the third quarter of 2006– a near record in American corporate profits that was second only to the $10.7 billion it recorded for the fourth quarter of 2005.

See the Union of Concerned Scientists Press Release
Read the whole report:
Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil uses Big Tobacco Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science” (pdf)

Foreign Spying on US Defense Technology Seen Rising

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Foreign countries, especially nations in the Asia-Pacific region, have intensified their efforts to steal sensitive U.S. defense technology, according to a Pentagon report circulated on Wednesday…

In one case, a female spy seduced an American translator to learn his computer password. His unclassified network was later found to be infected by viruses planted by a foreign intelligence service.

The total number of suspicious foreign contacts climbed to 971 during fiscal year 2005, the report said. The number of countries trying to obtain U.S. technology also rose, to 106 from 90 a year earlier.
Article (Reuters) via Yahoo!News

Saddam Executed for ‘lesser’ crimes to avoid implicating the US?

What could possibly have been the benefit of hanging Saddam before the lengthy history of his heinous crimes (i.e. the wholesale gassing of Kurds) could have been officially and legally documented? His execution for the murder of 148 Shiites was bound to stoke the flames of sectarian violence in the country, as the hanging appeared to be nothing more than legalized revenge at the hands of the Shiites now in power for past crimes against their brothers. Why then would the “autonomous” government of Iraq rush Saddam off to his death? Was this perhaps due to the fact that the US (and others) could have been implicated during courtroom proceedings for the other, more serious, crimes he was charged with?

Well evidently others have had the same thoughts. Famed columnist for the British paper the Independent, Robert Fisk, not surprisingly, pondered similar questions:
But would the Americans and British dare touch a trial in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why the CIA – in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war crimes against Halabja – told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time our favourite ally rather than our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988.

Story via The Independent

Experiments that claim to ‘cure’ homosexual rams spark anger

SCIENTISTS are conducting experiments to change the sexuality of “gay” sheep in a programme that critics fear could pave the way for breeding out homosexuality in humans.

The technique being developed by American researchers adjusts the hormonal balance in the brains of homosexual rams so that they are more inclined to mate with ewes.

It raises the prospect that pregnant women could one day be offered a treatment to reduce or eliminate the chance that their offspring will be homosexual. Experts say that, in theory, the “straightening” procedure on humans could be as simple as a hormone supplement for mothers-to-be, worn on the skin like an anti-smoking nicotine patch.

via The Times (Uk)