The Voice of the White House

Washington , D.C. , April 20, 2008 : “How did the Cold War actually start?

Stalin threatened to invade Europe ?

Russian military  threats to world peace?

No, the truth is far more prosaic and highlights the present situation as viewed, and practiced, by the corrupt Bush administration.

The Second World War had proved to be a godsend to American business which had been slowly recovering from the economic collapses of 1929 and 1938. The guaranteed entry of the United States into the global conflict after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor   mandated the creation of an enormous military machine and an immense parallel  increase in American military equipment.

Both the generals and the industrialists feasted at this table and grew fat but like all good things (for the United States at least but not for the rest of the world) the boom times ended in 1945.

With no war to supply or fight, both the military and their business counterparts faced bleak prospects of reduction in forces and shrinking business contracts with the Pentagon.

Then, in 1948, the U.S. Army hit on a plan that would turn around their loss of rank, privilege and business contracts.

In 1946, a German intelligence officer, one Reinhard Gehlen, who had been in charge of the German Army’s Russian military intelligence desk until Hitler sacked him for his inaccurate reporting, went to work for the Pentagon as a Russian expert. By 1948, under U.S. Army control, Gehlen had built up an organization which was then composed mostly of former SS and Gestapo personnel and which issued periodic reports on Russia , tailored to fit the Army’s current needs.

In that year, at the Army’s specific instructions, Gehlen prepared an entirely  fictional report that claimed, falsely, that Josef Stalin was preparing to launch a military offensive against Western Europe with 135 Russian armored divisions, then stationed in their occupation zone of Germany.

That all of these units existed solely on paper or that the Russians had torn up the German rail lines in their zone and shipped the rails themselves back to Russia (making the logistical Russian support of a massive invasion completely impossible) was well-known to both the Army and Gehlen but not  ever mentioned. This sensational report was deliberately leaked by the Pentagon to Congress and President Truman, with entirely predictable results.

A panic ensued and the Cold War had begun.

The Russians had absolutely neither the capacity, or the desire, to engage the United States in any kind of a military conflict and, on the contrary, were terrified lest Truman and the American military were prepared to  launch a full scale atomic war against them as they just recently had against Japan.

The Army expanded to meet this mythic threat, generals returned to their offices and all across America , shuttered defense plants began to reopen once again.

Now, while the vicious Bush keeps frightening the American public with non-existent terrorist threats to keep the Republican’s weakening hold on power, the Pentagon has been casting about, looking for another profitable enmity and are preparing us for another faked Gehlen report.”

Controlling the News

Pentagon's influence lurks behind TV military analysts

April 20, 2008

by David Barstow

International Herald Tribune

In the summer of 2005, the administration of President George W. Bush confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay . The detention center had just been branded "the gulag of our times" by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from UN human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration's communications experts responded swiftly.

Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as "military analysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants.

The companies include defense heavyweights but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration's war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse - an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, and Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Several analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

"It was them saying, 'We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,' " Robert Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University , said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. "This was a coherent, active policy," he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

"Night and day," Allard said, "I felt we'd been hosed."

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war.

"The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people," Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Whitman added, "a bit incredible" to think retired military officers could be "wound up" and turned into "puppets of the Defense Department."

Several analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

"I'm not here representing the administration," McCausland said.

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts' interactions with the administration.

They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon's campaign have never been disclosed. But The New York Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who could be counted on to deliver administration "themes and messages" to millions of Americans "in the form of their own opinions."

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, "the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world."

Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many - although certainly not all - faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

"Good work," Thomas McInerney, a retired air force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. "We will use it."

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks' own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: "I think our analysts - properly armed - can push back in that arena."

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John Garrett is a retired army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq . In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he "is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration."

In interviews, Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten "information you just otherwise would not get," from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq . He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. "You can't help but look for that," he said, adding, "If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. That's good for everybody."

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his Fox commentary.

"Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay," he wrote in January 2007, before Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq .

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. "You'll lose all access," McCausland said.

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 - the first of six such Guantánamo trips - which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages - how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

"The impressions that you're getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false," Donald Shepperd, a retired air force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired army general and NBC analyst, appeared on "Today." "There's been over $100 million of new construction," he reported. "The place is very professionally run."

Within days, transcripts of the analysts' appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon's dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called "information dominance." In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

Don Meyer, an aide to Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. "We didn't want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out," Meyer said.

The Pentagon's regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent Krueger, another senior aide to Clarke.

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits and suggesting names. Clarke's team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

"Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees," Krueger said.

(Through a spokesman, Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too.

At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The New York Times, the parent company of the International Herald Tribune.

In interviews, participants described a seductive environment - the uniformed escorts to Rumsfeld's private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from Rumsfeld himself.

"Oh, you have no idea," Allard said, describing the effect. "You're back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV."

"It's not like it's, 'We'll pay you $500 to get our story out,' " he added. "It's more subtle."

Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/20/america/analyst.php

World Food Crisis

Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger

April 18, 2008

by Marc Lacey

New York Times

PORT-AU-PRINCE , Haiti — Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti ’s presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country’s prime minister packing

Haiti’s hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.”

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.

In Cairo , the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa , food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia , the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

Indeed, as it roils developing nations, the spike in commodity prices — the biggest since the Nixon administration — has pitted the globe’s poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies. But experts say there are few quick fixes to a crisis tied to so many factors, from strong demand for food from emerging economies like China’s to rising oil prices to the diversion of food resources to make biofuels.

There are no scripts on how to handle the crisis, either. In Asia , governments are putting in place measures to limit hoarding of rice after some shoppers panicked at price increases and bought up everything they could.

Even in Thailand , which produces 10 million more tons of rice than it consumes and is the world’s largest rice exporter, supermarkets have placed signs limiting the amount of rice shoppers are allowed to purchase.

But there is also plenty of nervousness and confusion about how best to proceed and just how bad the impact may ultimately be, particularly as already strapped governments struggle to keep up their food subsidies.

‘Scandalous Storm’

“This is a perfect storm,” President Elías Antonio Saca of El Salvador said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Cancún , Mexico . “How long can we withstand the situation? We have to feed our people, and commodities are becoming scarce. This scandalous storm might become a hurricane that could upset not only our economies but also the stability of our countries.”

In Asia , if Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi of Malaysia steps down, which is looking increasingly likely amid postelection turmoil within his party, he may be that region’s first high- profile political casualty of fuel and food price inflation.

In Indonesia , fearing protests, the government recently revised its 2008 budget, increasing the amount it will spend on food subsidies by about $280 million.

“The biggest concern is food riots,” said H.S. Dillon, a former adviser to Indonesia ’s Ministry of Agriculture. Referring to small but widespread protests touched off by a rise in soybean prices in January, he said, “It has happened in the past and can happen again.”

Last month in Senegal , one of Africa ’s oldest and most stable democracies, police in riot gear beat and used tear gas against people protesting high food prices and later raided a television station that broadcast images of the event. Many Senegalese have expressed anger at President Abdoulaye Wade for spending lavishly on roads and five-star hotels for an Islamic summit meeting last month while many people are unable to afford rice or fish.

“Why are these riots happening?” asked Arif Husain, senior food security analyst at the World Food Program, which has issued urgent appeals for donations. “The human instinct is to survive, and people are going to do no matter what to survive. And if you’re hungry you get angry quicker.”

Leaders who ignore the rage do so at their own risk. President René Préval of Haiti appeared to taunt the populace as the chorus of complaints about la vie chère — the expensive life — grew. He said if Haitians could afford cellphones, which many do carry, they should be able to feed their families. “If there is a protest against the rising prices,” he said, “come get me at the palace and I will demonstrate with you.”

When they came, filled with rage and by the thousands, he huddled inside and his presidential guards, with United Nations peacekeeping troops, rebuffed them. Within days, opposition lawmakers had voted out Mr. Préval’s prime minister, Jacques-Édouard Alexis, forcing him to reconstitute his government. Fragile in even the best of times, Haiti ’s population and politics are now both simmering.

“Why were we surprised?” asked Patrick Élie, a Haitian political activist who followed the food riots in Africa earlier in the year and feared they might come to Haiti . “When something is coming your way all the way from Burkina Faso you should see it coming. What we had was like a can of gasoline that the government left for someone to light a match to it.”

Dwindling Menus

The rising prices are altering menus, and not for the better. In India , people are scrimping on milk for their children. Daily bowls of dal are getting thinner, as a bag of lentils is stretched across a few more meals.

Maninder Chand, an auto-rickshaw driver in New Delhi , said his family had given up eating meat altogether for the last several weeks.

Another rickshaw driver, Ravinder Kumar Gupta, said his wife had stopped seasoning their daily lentils, their chief source of protein, with the usual onion and spices because the price of cooking oil was now out of reach. These days, they eat bowls of watery, tasteless dal, seasoned only with salt.

Down Cairo ’s Hafziyah Street , peddlers selling food from behind wood carts bark out their prices. But few customers can afford their fish or chicken, which bake in the hot sun. Food prices have doubled in two months.

Ahmed Abul Gheit, 25, sat on a cheap, stained wooden chair by his own pile of rotting tomatoes. “We can’t even find food,” he said, looking over at his friend Sobhy Abdullah, 50. Then raising his hands toward the sky, as if in prayer, he said, “May God take the guy I have in mind.”

Mr. Abdullah nodded, knowing full well that the “guy” was President Hosni Mubarak.

The government’s ability to address the crisis is limited, however. It already spends more on subsidies, including gasoline and bread, than on education and health combined.

“If all the people rise, then the government will resolve this,” said Raisa Fikry, 50, whose husband receives a pension equal to about $83 a month, as she shopped for vegetables. “But everyone has to rise together. People get scared. But we will all have to rise together.”

It is the kind of talk that has prompted the government to treat its economic woes as a security threat, dispatching riot forces with a strict warning that anyone who takes to the streets will be dealt with harshly.

Niger does not need to be reminded that hungry citizens overthrow governments. The country’s first postcolonial president, Hamani Diori, was toppled amid allegations of rampant corruption in 1974 as millions starved during a drought.

More recently, in 2005, it was mass protests in Niamey , the Nigerien capital, that made the government sit up and take notice of that year’s food crisis, which was caused by a complex mix of poor rains, locust infestation and market manipulation by traders.

“As a result of that experience the government created a cabinet-level ministry to deal with the high cost of living,” said Moustapha Kadi, an activist who helped organize marches in 2005. “So when prices went up this year the government acted quickly to remove tariffs on rice, which everyone eats. That quick action has kept people from taking to the streets.”

The Poor Eat Mud

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

But the grumbling in Haiti these days is no longer confined to the stomach. It is now spray-painted on walls of the capital and shouted by demonstrators.

In recent days, Mr. Préval has patched together a response, using international aid money and price reductions by importers to cut the price of a sack of rice by about 15 percent. He has also trimmed the salaries of some top officials. But those are considered temporary measures.

Real solutions will take years. Haiti , its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself. Outside investment is the key, although that requires stability, not the sort of widespread looting and violence that the Haitian food riots have fostered.

Meanwhile, most of the poorest of the poor suffer silently, too weak for activism or too busy raising the next generation of hungry. In the sprawling slum of Haiti ’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. “Take one,” she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. “You pick. Just feed them.”

Food crisis threatens security, says UN chief

· Warning of instability and backlash for economies

· Progress on development goals could be wiped out

April 21, 2009

by Alexandra Topping

The Guardian/UK

The UN secretary general issued a gloomy warning yesterday that the deepening global food crisis, in which rapidly rising prices have triggered riots and threatened hunger in dozens of countries, could have grave implications for international security, economic growth and social progress.

Ban Ki-moon told a trade and development conference in Accra, Ghana, that the surge in prices of basic foodstuffs like cereals since last year could cancel out progress made towards meeting the UN's Millennium Development Goal of halving world poverty by 2015.

"If not handled properly, this crisis could result in a cascade of others ... and become a multidimensional problem affecting economic growth, social progress and even political security around the world," Ban told the conference.

The World Bank estimates food prices have risen by an average of 83% in the past three years, and warns that at least 100 million people could be tipped into poverty as a result. A range of factors has been blamed, including poor harvests, partly due to climate change, rising oil prices, steep growth in demand from China and India, and the dash to produce biofuels for motoring at the expense of food crops.

"One thing is certain," Ban said. "The world has consumed more than it has produced" over the last three years.

Last week Gordon Brown called for coordinated action by the US and Europe on rising food prices, after discussing the problem with Ban. In his speech yesterday, the UN chief said the ripple effect from food shortages and price hikes risked setting the UN's anti-poverty agenda back at square one. "The global food prices could mean seven lost years ... for the Millennium Development Goals," he said.

The threat of hunger and poverty in developing countries has also sharply increased, and has already resulted in food riots in parts of Asia and Africa.

Ban said several states had attempted to stave off food shortages by barring exports of rice and wheat, or introducing incentives for easier imports of foodstuffs. "This threatens to distort international trade and exacerbate shortages," he said.

The UN's special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, earlier blamed the crisis on biofuels, speculation on commodities markets, and EU export subsidies. "Hunger has not been down to fate for a long time - just as Marx thought," he told the Austrian newspaper Kurier am Sonntag. "This is silent mass murder."

Food riots have broken out in at least a dozen countries, most notably in Egypt, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Yemen and Mexico. Pakistan has reintroduced rationing, while Russia has frozen the price of milk, bread, eggs and cooking oil. Indonesia has increased public food subsidies, while India has banned the export of rice, except the high-quality basmati variety.

Earlier this month, Haiti's parliament dismissed the prime minister, and cut the price of rice, in an attempt to defuse widespread anger at food price hikes that led to days of protests and looting in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Thousands of garment workers in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, also went on strike this month over spiralling prices. The price of rice, the staple Bangladeshi food, has increased by a third since a devastating cyclone last year. Experts say 30 million of the country's 150 million people could go without daily meals.

The UN food agency has warned that it will need to make "heartbreaking" choices about which countries should receive its emergency aid, unless governments donate more money to buy increasingly expensive food.

In the 30 years to 2005, world food prices fell by around three-quarters in inflation-adjusted terms, according to the Economist food prices index. Since then they have risen by 75%, with much of the increase in the past year. Wheat prices have doubled, while maize, soya and oilseeds are at record highs.

The Energy Disaster

Barreling Along:The Big Thirst

April 20, 2008

by Jad Mouawad

New York Times

Oil prices rose above $116 a barrel last week, setting another record for the world’s most indispensable energy commodity. What was striking about this latest milestone was what didn’t happen: there was no shortage of oil, no sudden embargo, no exporter turning off its spigot.

The weak dollar, worries about terrorism and speculation on commodity markets certainly played a role. But, of course, so did demand. Producers are struggling to pump as much as they can to quench the thirst not only of the developed world, but fast-growing developing nations like China and India , the two most populous countries. To many experts, the steadily rising price underscored longer-term fears about the future of a system that has supplied cheap oil for more than a century.

“This is the market signaling there is a problem,” said Jan Stuart, global oil economist at UBS, “that there is a growing difficulty to meet demand with new supplies.”

Today’s tensions are only likely to get worse in coming years. Consider a few numbers: The planet’s population is expected to grow by 50 percent to nine billion by sometime in the middle of the century. The number of cars and trucks is projected to double in 30 years— to more than two billion — as developing nations rapidly modernize. And twice as many passenger jetliners, more than 36,000, will in all likelihood be crisscrossing the skies in 20 years.

All of that will require a lot more oil — enough that global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, a leading global energy forecaster for the United States and other developed nations. For producers it will mean somehow finding and pumping an additional 11 billion barrels of oil every year.

And that’s only 22 years away, a heartbeat for the petroleum industry, where the pace of finding and tapping new supplies is measured in decades.

The pursuit of oil will be just part of the energy challenge. The world’s total energy demand — including oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear power, as well as renewable energy sources like wind, solar and hydro power — is set to rise by 65 percent over the next two decades, according to the I.E.A.

But petroleum, the dominant fuel of the 20th century, will remain the top energy source. It accounts for more than a third of the world’s total energy needs, ahead of coal and natural gas. Refined into gasoline, kerosene or diesel fuel, oil has no viable substitute as a transportation fuel, and that is not likely to change much in the next 30 years.

The problem is that no one can say for sure where all this oil is going to come from.

That might not sound like such a bad thing for those concerned about carbon emissions and climate change. High prices might end up forcing people to conserve and encourage the development of alternatives. But the energy crunch might also result in a global scramble for resources, energy wars, and much higher energy prices.

Some oil executives are sounding the alarm bell. At a recent energy conference, John Hess, the chief executive of Hess Corporation, the international oil company, warned that an oil crisis was looming if the world didn’t deal with runaway demand and strained supplies. The chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, Jeroen van der Veer, said recently, with some understatement, that, “the energy outlook does not look rosy.”

For one thing, the world’s oil supplies are already stretched. Countries outside of the OPEC cartel — which have been the main source of new oil discoveries and production since the 1970s — have said they expect little to no growth this year in oil production.

The North Sea and Alaska are slowly running out of oil and producers there are struggling to keep production from falling. Russia ’s phenomenal oil surge is coming to an end; a top executive of Lukoil, the country’s second-largest oil group, said last week that the country’s production was unlikely to grow much. Nigeria is battling a violent militancy. And Mexico , the third-most-important supplier of crude to the United States , has been stuck in a crippling political debate over keeping out foreign investors while witnessing a dramatic drop in production that some analysts say may be irreversible.

What about OPEC? The 13 members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries account for three-quarters of the world’s proven oil reserves. But for various reasons, most of those countries are making it harder, if not impossible, for foreign oil companies to invest within their borders. With energy prices rising, OPEC producers are seeing record revenues, which have reduced the incentive to dip into their supplies by boosting production.

At the same time, major oil companies like Exxon Mobil, BP and Chevron are finding it harder to compete worldwide, as national oil companies erode their once-dominant positions. Fourteen of the world’s Top 20 oil companies are state-owned giants, like Saudi Aramco and Russia ’s Gazprom. That leaves Western oil companies in control of less than 10 percent of the world’s oil and gas reserves.

Facing higher costs, those companies are also having greater difficulty locating new oil deposits. Despite spending over $100 billion on exploration last year, the five largest international oil companies found less oil last year than they pumped out of the ground.

A small band of skeptics view today’s record prices as evidence that oil supplies have peaked — that half the globe’s oil supply has already been used up. But most experts believe that there are still enough oil reserves, both discovered and undiscovered, to last at least through the middle of the century.

The problem is that in many corners of the world, geopolitics, more than geology, has removed much of those reserves from the reach of independent oil companies.

“There are plenty of resources in the globe,” Rex Tillerson, the chairman of Exxon, recently told an investor conference. The difficulty, he said, was “just continuing to have access to all of the opportunities.”

Over the past century, the world burned through a trillion barrels of oil. Another 1.2 trillion barrels of known conventional oil reserves wait to tapped, according to BP, one of the world’s biggest oil companies. It sounds like a lot. But given the current rate of growth in demand, a trillion of those barrels will be used up in less than 30 years.

What then? Many analysts estimate another trillion barrels of yet-to-be-found oil remains, but in remote places like the Arctic Ocean where it will be expensive to extract, or in countries that might restrict access.

The big oil companies have been in a global dash to find and pump more oil. But it takes time, sometimes a decade, before the first barrels from a newly discovered oil field are pumped and sold.

What of the alternatives?

Corn ethanol, which was sold as a quick fix to the nation’s dependency on oil imports, is an imperfect substitute. It is now blamed for driving up food prices while emitting more carbon dioxide and providing a third less energy per gallon than gasoline.

It is no panacea either. Even if oil companies can meet the federal requirement to use 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, which many say will be impossible, it would only amount to 10 percent of the country’s current oil demand.

Likewise, the rush to develop heavy oil, tar sands and shale oil reserves, and investments to turn coal into liquid fuels, like diesel, will yield only small amounts of fuel. But their cost to the environment will be much higher than the exploitation of conventional oil.

Some experts are not quite so worried. They argue that the oil industry is a cyclical one in which higher prices eventually push down demand. “We’re in a bubble right now,” said Robert Mabro, a well-known oil expert at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “Prices are rising because everyone expects them to do so. We’ve seen the same thing in the real estate market.”

Still, the growth in oil consumption almost certainly will need to slow in coming years. But it seems unlikely that developing nations will cut their consumption first. China , India and the Middle East are in the midst of exceptional economic booms and need cheap energy, which is largely subsidized by their governments, to keep growing and modernizing.

Oil now accounts for just 19 percent of China ’s energy needs. But China ’s oil demand is expected to more than double by 2030 to over 16 million barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency, as more people rise from poverty, move out of villages and buy more cars.

Just as in the United States , much of the increase in China ’s oil demand has come from that country’s love affair with cars. The number of vehicles in China rose sevenfold between 1990 and 2006, to 37 million. China has now surpassed both Germany and Japan to become the second-largest car market in the world, and is set to overtake the United States by around 2015. China could have as many as 300 million vehicles by 2030.

William Chandler, an energy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, estimates that if the Chinese were using energy like Americans, global energy use would double overnight and five more Saudi Arabias would be needed just to meet oil demand. India isn’t far behind. By 2030, the two counties will import as much oil as the United States and Japan do today.

What about the United States ? The country has shown little willingness to address its energy needs in a rational way. James Schlesinger, the nation’s first energy secretary in the 1970s, once said the United States was capable of only two approaches to its energy policy: “complacency or crisis.”

The United States is the only major industrialized nation to see its oil consumption surge since the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s. This can partly be explained by the fact that the United States has some of the lowest gasoline prices in the world, the least fuel-efficient cars on the roads, the lowest energy taxes, and the longest daily commutes of any industrialized nation. The result: about a quarter of the world’s oil goes to the United States every day, and of that, more than half goes to its cars and trucks.

Rising prices and fears about the security of future supplies finally persuaded Congress last year to approve the first increase in fuel efficiency standards in 30 years, raising the average fleet-wide standards by 40 percent to 35 miles a gallon by 2020. The push, which was resisted by American carmakers for years, is underwhelming. The same goal could be reached overnight if everyone drove a Honda: the Japanese carmaker’s fleet already averages 35 miles a gallon.

“The country has been living beyond its means,” said Vaclav Smil, a prominent energy expert at the University of Manitoba . “The situation is dire. We need to do relative sacrifices. But people don’t realize how dire the situation is.”

Running Out of Planet to Exploit

April 21, 2008

by Paul Krugman

New York Times

Nine years ago The Economist ran a big story on oil, which was then selling for $10 a barrel. The magazine warned that this might not last. Instead, it suggested, oil might well fall to $5 a barrel.

In any case, The Economist asserted, the world faced “the prospect of cheap, plentiful oil for the foreseeable future.”

Last week, oil hit $117.

It’s not just oil that has defied the complacency of a few years back. Food prices have also soared, as have the prices of basic metals. And the global surge in commodity prices is reviving a question we haven’t heard much since the 1970s: Will limited supplies of natural resources pose an obstacle to future world economic growth?

How you answer this question depends largely on what you believe is driving the rise in resource prices. Broadly speaking, there are three competing views.

The first is that it’s mainly speculation — that investors, looking for high returns at a time of low interest rates, have piled into commodity futures, driving up prices. On this view, someday soon the bubble will burst and high resource prices will go the way of Pets.com.

The second view is that soaring resource prices do, in fact, have a basis in fundamentals — especially rapidly growing demand from newly meat-eating, car-driving Chinese — but that given time we’ll drill more wells, plant more acres, and increased supply will push prices right back down again.

The third view is that the era of cheap resources is over for good — that we’re running out of oil, running out of land to expand food production and generally running out of planet to exploit.

I find myself somewhere between the second and third views.

There are some very smart people — not least, George Soros — who believe that we’re in a commodities bubble (although Mr. Soros says that the bubble is still in its “growth phase”). My problem with this view, however, is this: Where are the inventories?

Normally, speculation drives up commodity prices by promoting hoarding. Yet there’s no sign of resource hoarding in the data: inventories of food and metals are at or near historic lows, while oil inventories are only normal.

The best argument for the second view, that the resource crunch is real but temporary, is the strong resemblance between what we’re seeing now and the resource crisis of the 1970s.

What Americans mostly remember about the 1970s are soaring oil prices and lines at gas stations. But there was also a severe global food crisis, which caused a lot of pain at the supermarket checkout line — I remember 1974 as the year of Hamburger Helper — and, much more important, helped cause devastating famines in poorer countries.

In retrospect, the commodity boom of 1972-75 was probably the result of rapid world economic growth that outpaced supplies, combined with the effects of bad weather and Middle Eastern conflict. Eventually, the bad luck came to an end, new land was placed under cultivation, new sources of oil were found in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea , and resources got cheap again.

But this time may be different: concerns about what happens when an ever-growing world economy pushes up against the limits of a finite planet ring truer now than they did in the 1970s.

For one thing, I don’t expect growth in China to slow sharply anytime soon. That’s a big contrast with what happened in the 1970s, when growth in Japan and Europe , the emerging economies of the time, downshifted — and thereby took a lot of pressure off the world’s resources.

Meanwhile, resources are getting harder to find. Big oil discoveries, in particular, have become few and far between, and in the last few years oil production from new sources has been barely enough to offset declining production from established sources.

And the bad weather hitting agricultural production this time is starting to look more fundamental and permanent than El Niño and La Niña, which disrupted crops 35 years ago. Australia , in particular, is now in the 10th year of a drought that looks more and more like a long-term manifestation of climate change.

Suppose that we really are running up against global limits. What does it mean?

Even if it turns out that we’re really at or near peak world oil production, that doesn’t mean that one day we’ll say, “Oh my God! We just ran out of oil!” and watch civilization collapse into “Mad Max” anarchy.

But rich countries will face steady pressure on their economies from rising resource prices, making it harder to raise their standard of living. And some poor countries will find themselves living dangerously close to the edge — or over it.

Don’t look now, but the good times may have just stopped rolling.

CIA’S Front Airlines used in the Torture Trips

Commercial Purchase Agreement Customers Defense Energy Support Center - DODAAC Database

http://www.desc.dla.mil/DCM/Files/TB%20Web%20Report.pdf

CIA holding companies in extraordinary rendition program are present, as well as some other old time favorites.

Aviation Specialties Inc.

Path Corp.

Premier Executive Transport Services Inc.

Prescott Support Company

Rapid Air Transport

Stevens Express Leasing Inc.

Tepper Aviation

Aero Contractors

Presidential Airways

EG&G Technical Services

Evergreen

Tibet

Chinese Urge Anti-West Boycott Over Tibet Stance

April 20, 2008

by Andrew Jacobs and Jimmy Wang

New York Times

BEIJING — Armed with her laptop and her indignation, Zhu Xiaomeng sits in her dorm room here, stoking a popular backlash against Western support for Tibet that has unnerved foreign investors and Western diplomats and, increasingly, the ruling Communist Party.

Over the last week, Ms. Zhu and her classmates have been channeling anger over anti-China protests during the tumultuous Olympic torch relay into a boycott campaign against French companies, blamed for their country’s support of pro-Tibetan agitators. Some have also called for a boycott against American chains like McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

On Friday and Saturday, protesters gathered in front of a half-dozen outlets of the French retailer Carrefour, including a demonstration in the central city of Wuhan that reportedly drew several thousand people, according to Agence France-Presse. On Saturday, about 50 demonstrators carrying banners held a brief rally at the French Embassy here before the police shooed them away.

For the moment, however, most of the outrage is confined to the Internet. More than 20 million people have signed online petitions saying they plan to stop shopping at the Carrefour chain, Louis Vuitton and other stores linked to France because of what they see as the country’s failure to protect the torch during its visit to Paris two weeks ago. In a survey released on Friday, China ’s state news agency, known as Xinhua, said 66 percent of those who responded said they would stay away from Carrefour during a monthlong boycott planned for May.

Public indignation has also been directed at Western news outlets, which are blamed for one-sided coverage of the torch relay and for anti-Chinese bias in their reporting on the disturbances in Tibet . In recent days, foreign news outlets here have been swamped by angry phone calls; two music videos circulating on the Internet blast CNN with expletives and lyrics like, “Don’t think that repeating something over and over again means that lies become truth.”

Like many young people, Ms. Zhu, a student at Beijing ’s prestigious Foreign Studies University , said she had been infuriated by what she described as unfair attacks on the country’s image. “ China used to be known as the sick man of Asia ,” said Ms. Zhu, 19, who has been sending out tens of thousands of pro-boycott messages through QQ, a popular online chat service. “We were separated like sand. But this worldwide show of support by Chinese all over the globe illustrates we have solidarity on this issue. After 5,000 years, we’re not so soft anymore.”

The boycott call, spread through millions of text messages and postings on the country’s most heavily trafficked Web sites, provides a window into the technology’s growing power to mobilize a country whose political passions are usually kept in check by tight government control.

Although Communist Party officials have the ability to block text messages and Internet traffic they find objectionable, the censors have until now allowed more leeway for boycott organizers. In many ways, they have been feeding the outrage by publicizing the threat by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to skip the opening ceremonies and by repeatedly calling on CNN to apologize for remarks made by Jack Cafferty, a commentator who called the Chinese government “goons and thugs.” The network has expressed regret for offending the Chinese people, but officials here have dismissed the response as insincere.

But in a sign that the government may now be worried about the intensity of popular passion, the official news agency, Xinhua, said on Friday that it was time to curb nationalist zeal. While it lauded the boycott crusade, it advised people not to complicate the government’s aim of encouraging foreign investment in China .

“Patriotic fervor should be channeled into a rational track and must be transformed into real action toward doing our work well,” the agency said.

On Saturday, it issued a stronger warning, highlighting government concern that anti-Western sentiment could affect public attitudes during the Olympics, when 1.5 million people are expected to arrive. “Every son and daughter of China has the responsibility to show to the world in real action that China welcomes friends from all countries with open arms and will deliver an outstanding Olympics,” it said in an editorial.

In the past the government has encouraged nationalistic outbursts and then quashed them when passions grew too inflamed — or when the protests had achieved the political purpose officials envisioned. In 1999, the authorities gave free rein to a brief spasm of anti-American protest after the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia; in 2005, they allowed even larger anti-Japanese demonstrations, which were fueled by anger over textbooks glossing over Japan’s wartime atrocities in China.

During marches in several Chinese cities that year, the police stood by as eggs and rocks were thrown at Japanese consulates. A few weeks later, officials pulled the plug by shutting down the organizers’ Web sites and filtering out anti-Japanese messages.

Mindful of how a public grief after the death of a party official morphed into the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square , the Chinese government recognizes that vitriolic campaigns against outsiders could easily pivot toward the Communist Party.

Fang Xingdong, who runs blogchina.com, a hub for Chinese bloggers, said that he thought the government would not stand in the way of the boycott but that it would intervene if the anti-Western campaign became too disruptive. “If the irrational mood and behaviors among netizens are getting more and more intense, it will be very dangerous,” he said, using the term for the community of bloggers and message-board users. “But I think this will not be beyond government’s control.”

If the protests on Saturday are any indication, official tolerance for unsanctioned demonstrations is wearing thin. According to witnesses and news reports, most of the Carrefour protests were quickly dispersed by the police. In Beijing , a rally that drew about 50 people to the French Embassy and a nearby French school lasted an hour before riot police forced them to leave. By 3 p.m. , dozens of uniformed officers had sealed off access to the streets surrounding the embassy.

In a country where the press is tightly controlled, the growing popularity of high-tech communication has made such protests possible. Some 229 million people have Internet access in the country, and usage in China is growing by 30 percent a year, according to BDA China, a research firm. Cellphone text messaging is ubiquitous here, with more than 98 percent of the country’s 400 million cellphone owners regularly using text messages. Another 300 million people are registered on instant messaging networks like MSN and QQ.

Ms. Zhu, for one, says that instant messaging is an effective way to reach thousands of people with a few keyboard strokes. “I don’t send e-mails to individuals,” she said. “It’s inefficient — you can reach a lot more people by e-mailing groups on QQ.”

In a demonstration of the Internet’s viral prowess, some 2.3 million MSN users have attached “I Love China ” icons to their online profiles as an expression of solidarity against “Tibetan separatists.” A Google search for “Carrefour Boycott” in Chinese yielded over 2.4 million Web pages, most of them created in the last week.

Many of the messages accuse Carrefour executives of providing financial support to pro-Tibetan advocates, a charge the company denies. Others say American fast-food chains should be boycotted as a punishment for the recent meeting by the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, with the Dalai Lama.

In the past, boycott campaigns in China have largely come to naught.

On Wednesday afternoon, as she sat in a cafe sipping a can of Coca-Cola, Ms. Zhu said she thought the boycott would be a success. “ Tibet is our country’s territory. You have no right to interfere in our interior affairs,” she said, adding, “A boycott may not be the right long-term solution, but we have to give the French people a lesson.”

Another Republican Icon

War Hero? Meet the Real John McCain: North Vietnam 's Go-To Collaborator

April 19, 2008

by Alexander Cockburn

Counterpunch

John McCain’s been getting kid-glove treatment from the press for years, ever since he wriggled free of the Keating scandal and his profitable association – another collaboration, you might say — with the nation’s top bank swindler in the 1980s. But nothing equals the astounding tact with which his claque on the press bus avoids the topic of McCain’s collaborating with his Vietnamese captors after he’d been shot down.

How McCain behaved when he was a prisoner is key. McCain is probably the most unstable man ever to have got this close to the White House. He’s one election away from it. Republican senator Thad Cochrane has openly said he trembles at the thought of an unstable McCain in the Oval Office with his finger on the nuclear trigger.

What if a private memory of years of collaboration in his prison camp gnaws at McCain, and bursts out in his paroxysms of uncontrollable fury, his rantings about “gooks” and his terrifying commitment to a hundred years of war in Iraq . What if “the hero” knows he’s a phony?

Doug Valentine has written the definitive history of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam . He knows about the POW experience. His dad, an Army man, was captured by the Japanese and sent to a POW camp in the Philippines for forced labor. Many of his mates died. Doug wrote a marvelous book about it, The Hotel Tacloban.

Now Valentine has picked up the unexploded bomb lying on McCain’s campaign trail this year. As he points out, he’s not the first. Rumors and charges have long swirled around McCain’s conduct as a prisoner. Fellow prisoners have given the lie to McCain’s claims. But Valentine has assembled the dossier. It’s devastating. We’re running it in our current CounterPunch newsletter and we strongly urge you to subscribe.

Some excerpts from Valentine’s indictment.

“War is one thing, collaborating with the enemy is another; it is a legitimate campaign issue that strikes at the heart of McCain’s character. . .or lack thereof. In occupied countries like Iraq , or France in World War II, collaboration to that extent spells an automatic death sentence.. . .The question is: What kind of collaborator was John McCain, the admitted war criminal who will hate the Vietnamese for the rest of his life?

“Put it another way: how psychologically twisted is McCain? And what actually happened to him in his POW camp that twisted him? Was it abuse, as he claims, or was it the fact that he collaborated and has to cover up? Covering-up can take a lot of energy. The truth is lurking there in his subconscious, waiting to explode. ”

“McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese captors, “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital ...

“His Vietnamese captors soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line in the American military elite. . .The Vietnamese realized, this poor stooge has propaganda value. The admiral’s boy was used to special treatment, and his captors knew that. They were working him.”

“. . .two weeks into his stay at the Vietnamese hospital, the Hanoi press began quoting him. It was not ‘name rank and serial number, or kill me’. as specified by the military code of conduct. McCain divulged specific military information: he gave the name of the aircraft carrier on which he was based, the number of U.S. pilots that had been lost, the number of aircraft in his flight formation, as well as information about the location of rescue ships.”

“…McCain was held for five and half years. The first two weeks’ behavior might have been pragmatism, but McCain soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator…..McCain cooperated with the North Vietnamese for a period of three years. His situation isn’t as innocuous as that of the French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.

“This is the lesson of McCain’s experience as a POW: a true politician, a hollow man, his only allegiance is to power. The Vietnamese, like McCain’s campaign contributors today, protected and promoted him, and, in return, he danced to their tune. . .”