Monkeyfister

Mars is a cold desert planet with no liquid water on its surface. But in the Martian arctic, water ice lurks just below ground level. Discoveries made by the Mars Odyssey Orbiter in 2002 show large amounts of subsurface water ice in the northern arctic plain. The Phoenix lander targets this circumpolar region using a robotic arm to dig through the protective top soil layer to the water ice below and ultimately, to bring both soil and water ice to the lander platform for sophisticated scientific analysis.

The complement of the Phoenix spacecraft and its scientific instruments are ideally suited to uncover clues to the geologic history and biological potential of the Martian arctic. Phoenix will be the first mission to return data from either polar region providing an important contribution to the overall Mars science strategy "Follow the Water" and will be instrumental in achieving the four science goals of NASA's long-term Mars Exploration Program.

--Determine whether Life ever arose on Mars

--Characterize the Climate of Mars

--Characterize the Geology of Mars

--Prepare for Human Exploration

The Phoenix Mission has two bold objectives to support these goals, which are to (1) study the history of water in the Martian arctic and (2) search for evidence of a habitable zone and assess the biological potential of the ice-soil boundary.

Labels: Mars, NASA, Solar System. Planets, Space

With prices now falling, the global rice crisis seems to be subsiding. That’s thanks in part to a policy announcement by a Japanese bureaucrat. On May 19, Japan’s Deputy Agriculture Minister, Toshiro Shirasu, said that Tokyo would release some of its massive stockpile of rice to the Philippines, selling 50,000 tons “as soon as possible” and releasing another 200,000 tons as food aid. The first shipment could reach the Philippines by late summer. Shirasu also left open the possibility of using more of its reserves to help other countries in need.

To understand Japan’s role in deflating the rice market, it helps to visit the warehouses rimming Tokyo Bay. It’s here in temperature-controlled buildings that Japan keeps millions of 30-kilogram vinyl bags of rice that it imports every year. Tokyo doesn’t need rice from the outside world: The country’s heavily subsidized farmers produce more than enough to feed the country’s 127 million people. Yet every year since 1995, Tokyo has bought hundreds of thousands of metric tons of rice from the U.S., Thailand, Vietnam, China, and Australia.

A Rice Imbalance

Why does Japan buy rice it doesn’t need or want? In order to follow World Trade Organization rules, which date to 1995 and are aimed at opening the country’s rice market. The U.S. fought for years to end Japanese rice protectionism, and getting Tokyo to agree to import rice from the U.S. and elsewhere was long a goal of American trade policy. But while the Japanese have been buying rice from farms in China and California for more than a decade, almost no imports ever end up on dinner plates in Japan. Instead the imported rice is sent as food aid to North Korea, added to beer and rice cakes, or mixed with other grains to feed pigs and chickens. Or it just sits in storage for years. As of last October, Japan’s warehouses were bulging with 2.6 million tons of surplus rice, including 1.5 million tons of imported rice, 900,000 tons of it American medium-grain rice.

It’s one of the cruel ironies of global trade that poor countries have been paying through the nose for rice while Japan has been sitting on reserves (BusinessWeek, 5/1/08). The imbalance is a cause for concern because half the world’s population depends on rice as a staple food. Following Shirasu’s announcement that Japan is putting its reserves to good use, U.S. trade officials have sent word to Tokyo that they back the move. The two sides will meet in Washington on May 23 to discuss the details.

That’s good news for poor nations like Bangladesh and the Philippines that either import rice or get handouts. The Japanese gesture has helped to rein in rice prices. On the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), rice futures have fallen almost 20% since reaching an all-time high of $25.07 per 100 lb. on April 24. But they are still nearly three times their levels from a year ago.
…
To tap its import reserves, Tokyo had to get Washington’s imprimatur. That might not have happened if not for Tom Slayton, a former U.S. agriculture official, and Peter Timmer, a visiting Stanford University professor, who drew attention to Japan’s reserves in a report on the Center for Global Development’s (CGD) Web site in early May. Releasing the rice, they wrote, “would bring prices down immediately, averting hunger, malnutrition and increased mortality among poor people in Asia.”

Even so, giving Japan the green light wasn’t an easy decision for Washington. High rice prices had brought American farmers an unexpected windfall. What’s more, the U.S. had a more pressing matter to attend to, the $300 billion farm bill working its way through Congress. But the CGD paper circulated in Washington. Two Congressional committees and a Washington Post editorial referred to the paper, and U.S. trade officials were soon reaching out to the Japanese.

Labels: Failure, Global Economy, Global Famine, Globalism

The following essay shows how a photograph aided and abetted a terrible miscarriage of justice. I invite readers to offer their own interpretation of the considerable amount of material contained in the footnotes.

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”
– Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“How can you say she’s a good person?” I am sitting in an editing-room in Cambridge, Mass. arguing with one of my editors. I reply, “Well, exactly what is it that she did that is bad?” We are arguing about Sabrina Harman, one of the notorious “seven bad apples” convicted of abuse in the notorious Abu Ghraib scandal. My editor becomes increasingly irritable. (I have that effect on people.) He looks at me as you would a child. “What did she do that is bad? Are you joking?” And then he brings up the trump card, the photograph with the smile. “How do you get past that? The smile? Just look at it. Come on.

The question kept coming up. How do you explain the smile? What does it mean? Not only is she smiling, she is smiling with her thumbs-up – over a dead body. The photograph suggests that she may have killed the guy, and she looks proud of it. She looks happy.

I should back up a moment.

This is one of the central images in a rogue’s gallery of snapshots, a photograph taken at Abu Ghraib prison in the fall of 2003. It is a photograph taken by Chuck Graner of Sabrina Harman – posed and looking into the lens of the camera.

In my filmed interview for my documentary “Standard Operating Procedure” Sabrina explains her thumbs-up and her smile:[1]

SABRINA HARMAN: I kind of picked up the thumbs-up from the kids in Al Hilla, and so whenever I would get into a photo, I never know what to do with my hands… So any kind of photo, I probably have a thumbs-up because it’s just — I just picked it up from the kids. It’s just something that automatically happens. Like when you get into a photo, you want to smile. It’s just, I guess, something I did.

*******

And indeed I have 20 or so photos of Harman – from Abu Ghraib and from al Hilla, where she had been stationed before Abu Ghraib – in which she is smiling with her thumb up.[2] I felt that showing 10 or 20 thumbs-up photographs didn’t really explain that one photograph. It’s fine to say that all ducks quack, but why is this duck quacking in that one instance? I needed to know: Why is she smiling with her thumb up in that photograph? Somehow her explanation, “It’s just something I did,” wasn’t satisfactory. It bothered me.

Here is another excerpt with another quote about the thumb:

ERROL MORRIS: Why did you take these pictures – Graner of you and you of Graner?

SABRINA HARMAN: It was just to say, “Hey, look, it’s a dead guy. We’re with a dead guy.” It wasn’t anything — I guess we weren’t really thinking, “Hey, this guy has family,” or anything like that, or “Hey, this guy was just murdered.” It was just, “Hey, it’s a dead guy, it’d be cool to get a photo next to a dead person.” I mean that was it. That was the extent of that one… I know it looks bad. I mean, even when I look at [the photographs], I go, “Oh Jesus, that does look pretty bad.” [But] if a soldier sees somebody dead, normally they’ll take photos of it. I don’t know why, maybe it’s a curiosity thing or if they see something odd, they’ll take a photo of it. Just to say “Hey, look where I’ve been, look what I’ve seen.”

ERROL MORRIS: Maybe you can’t believe it yourself?

SABRINA HARMAN: I can’t believe they murdered the guy.

Wait just one second. Murdered?

And who are they?

What does the photograph really show? What are we looking at? A smile? A murder? And if it is a murder, who is the killer?

I would like to answer these questions.

*******

The story behind the photograph starts on Oct. 27, 2003, a little over a week before it was taken. On that day, two Iraqi employees of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were killed in a bomb explosion outside the organization’s office in Baghdad.[3] Very early in the morning on Nov. 4, 2003, a group of Navy Seals (an acronym for Sea-Air-Land units) apprehended Manadel al-Jamadi, who was suspected of having provided explosives for the Oct. 27 bombing.

He wasn’t taken to Abu Ghraib immediately. First, he was brought to Camp Pozzi, an interrogation center adjacent to the Baghdad International Airport. Camp Pozzi was operated by the Seals but was also used by the C.I.A. Several hours later he was moved to Abu Ghraib – for some prisoners, an intermediate stop before rendition to Jordan.[4]

He was placed first in a holding cell on Tier 4B, interrogated, and then taken to the shower room on Tier 1B, adjacent to Tier 1A, the soon-to-be notorious hard site, where many of the prisoner-abuse photographs were taken. Certain details about what happened early that morning are well known from various investigations and reports. Here are two of them: (1) al-Jamadi walked into the shower room under his own power, and (2) one hour later al-Jamadi was dead.

What happened to him?

Labels: Abu Ghraib, Documentary, War Crimes

Labels: Collapse, Debt Economy, US Economy

Bush was expected to press the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for an early meet to raise oil production. (OPEC is scheduled to next meet in September to decide on its oil output policy.) Stephen Hadley, the US national security advisor, was on record that Bush would tell Saudi King Abdullah that the oil-exporting countries should regard it to be in their self-interest to "take into account the economic health of their customers who pay these prices". In the event, when they met on Friday, Bush found that the Saudi king was not to be persuaded.

Meanwhile, Nozari was back on stage. He told Fars news agency, "I believe there is no need for an [emergency] OPEC meeting. Why should there be this meeting when oil prices go up? The OPEC members are currently utilizing their full capacity and are supplying the market ... With oil at US$126, it is not wise for those with oil not to supply it." Nozari then added, "I believe it is not that oil is becoming more expensive, but the dollar is becoming cheaper."

It would have been unthinkable five or six years ago that a visiting US president would receive such an open rebuff in the Middle East. Last weekend's exchanges revealed the extent of decline in the US's dominance of the Middle East through the present Bush administration. No doubt, oil lies at the very center of the decline of the American dominion. The cascading rise in oil prices has led to a massive transfer of resources to the energy exporting countries. Iran is one principal beneficiary.

The huge accumulation of wealth enables Iran to exert influence regionally and ensure there is practically nothing the US can do to stop its rise as a regional power. Goldman Sachs in a report on Friday predicted oil would further jump to a level of $140 by July. "The near-term outlook for oil prices continues to be bullish," Goldman said. Investors are flocking to the oil market as a hedge against the fall in the value of the dollar. The Wall Street Journal has reported that at the moment the Iranians hold about 25 million barrels - about twice the quantum of the US's daily imports - of heavy crude in offshore tankers in the Persian Gulf.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underscored these realities of the new regional order when he called on the big powers recently to "put concrete proposals on the table guaranteeing the security of Iran and ensuring Iran a worthy, equal place in talks on resolving all problems in the Near and Middle East."

Lavrov is not alone in doing some fast-forward thinking. US specialists also realize the need for new thinking regarding the shaping of a nuclear Iran. Essentially, it boils down to reflecting the limits of American power. A leading US expert on Iran, Ray Takeyh a senior fellow at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, took the bull by the horns when he suggested recently that the time had come for the US to "concede to Iranian indigenous enrichment capability of considerable size" and to concentrate instead on ways and means to make certain that "untoward activities" do not take place within the perimeters of its nuclear infrastructure.

Takeyh wrote last week while Bush was in Iran's neighborhood, "Iran has an elaborate nuclear apparatus and is enriching uranium. It is impossible to turn the clock back. Instead of reviving an incentive package rejected long ago by Iran or issuing calls for military retribution that worry no one in the country's hierarchy, the United States and its European allies would be wise to negotiate an arrangement that would meet at least some of their demands."

True, oil and nuclear proliferation make a serious mix. But they form only one facet of the breakdown of the Bush administration's Iran strategy. The breakdown is comprehensive. During his tour, Bush kept trying to secure support for his containment policy toward Iran. However, the regional countries remain circumspect. Iraq's Arab neighbors refuse to get involved in the quagmire in that country despite their constant wailing that Iranian influence in Iraq has reached an intolerable level. They won't allow themselves being lined up with any further efforts by the Bush administration to confront Iran. While criticizing Iran in private to their American interlocutors and urging US counter-measures, they hedge their bets, factoring that the next US president might well engage Iran in unconditional talks.

The developments in Lebanon have further exposed that the Bush administration has no effective plan for coping. If the Washington-based newsletter Counterpunch is to be believed, a pre-planned Israeli intervention (with US acquiescence) in Lebanon during the recent fighting had to be called off at the last minute on the basis of intelligence that Hezbollah would massively retaliate. In the view of the US intelligence community, Tel Aviv would have been subject to "approximately 600 Hezbollah rockets in the first 24 hours in retaliation".

Counterpunch says the Bush administration developed cold feet after it "initially green-lighted" plans regarding Israeli military intervention on the side of the US-backed militias. "The Hezbollah rout of the militias in West Beirut plus the fear of retaliation on Tel Aviv, forced cancellation of the supportive [Israeli] attack."

Unsurprisingly, there is much anger and bitterness among Lebanese warlords that they were let down by the Bush administration. Prime Minister Fuad al-Siniora wanted to resign and the Saudis had to dissuade him from doing so. The result is plain to see. The political balance has shifted in favor of the Hezbollah and the pro-West militias have been humiliated. Most important, an improbable alliance formed between the Hezbollah and the Lebanese army (which the Bush administration assisted to the tune of $400 million in the past two-year period).

The regional implications are equally significant. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are backing Arab League mediation efforts, distancing themselves from the US denunciations of Iran and Syria. The two Arab heavyweights would be uneasy about the lengthening shadows of Iranian influence on Lebanon, but they realize at the same time that Iran is a regional power with which they need to come to terms.

To quote well-known British author and Middle East scholar Patrick Seale, "The Arab Gulf States in particular trade briskly with Iran and are home to a large Iranian population. They do not want to isolate Iran or undermine its economy, as the United States and Israel would like them to do. It seems clear that greater understanding and confidence between Saudi Arabia and Egypt on the one hand and Iran and Syria on the other - free from US and Israeli interference - would do much to ease Lebanon's path to peace and security."

In sum, the Bush administration has no Plan B on Lebanon, either. The Arab League mediation coolly ignored Washington's keenness to open a Lebanon file in the United Nations Security Council and to pillory Syria and Iran. All that the US officials could do was to keep mumbling skepticism concerning the prospects of the intra-Lebanese talks in Doha under the Arab League.

However, the US's failure in rolling back Syrian and Iranian influence in Lebanon pales in comparison with the withering away of the US-sponsored Arab-Israeli "peace process". The latter hung like an albatross's cross on Bush's Middle East tour. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' credibility has greatly suffered; Fatah has been eliminated from Gaza; Hamas is significantly gaining ground in the West Bank after its consolidation in Gaza. Thus, there were no takers when Bush told the Arab audience in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Friday, "All nations in the region must stand together in confronting Hamas, which is attempting to undermine efforts at peace with continued acts of terror and violence."

The Arabs knew that at any rate, there is an air of unreality in Bush's anti-Hamas rhetoric. Hamas had announced only a couple of days ago that it would send a delegation to Egypt on Monday for a new round of talks with mediators. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported on Sunday that several former Israeli military and security officials - including ex-Mossad head Ephraim Halevi, former army chief Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and the former commander of Israeli troops in Gaza, Shmuel Zakai - wrote to the government a month ago supporting indirect talks with Hamas and expressing opposition to any large-scale military assault on Gaza.

They wrote, "Recognizing that ending the Hamas regime in Gaza is not a realistic goal and reinstating Fatah in the Gaza Strip by means of Israeli bayonets is not desirable ... non-public negotiations should take place with Hamas through Egypt or anyone else acceptable to both sides."

Time and again during Bush's Middle East tour, what emerges is this palpable sense that the US has been all but marginalized from a new Middle East that is taking shape. All of Bush's rhetoric couldn't hide the fact that even by adding 300 million Americans to 7 million Israelis, he failed to disprove the erosion in Israel's regional supremacy.

In a brilliant article recently, former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer underlined that the center of gravity of the regional power and politics in the wake of the Iraq war has shifted to the Persian Gulf. To quote Fischer, "Indeed, it is now virtually impossible to implement any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without Iran and its local allies - Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine."

The point is, the historic failure of the Iraq war is yet to be fully grasped. On a regional plane, as the Iraq war interminably rolls on, the situation is fraught with the immense consequence of the unraveling of the entire system of states that was created in the Anglo-French settlement after the fall of Ottoman Empire in 1918. The Iraq war has triggered Shi'ite empowerment and unleashed historical forces that lay chained for centuries. Its geopolitical significance is yet to sink in as winds of change sweep across the entire region.

Labels: Bush Foreign Policy, Failure, Long-Term Effects

In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.

The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration's various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn't allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush's men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.

Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program's authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey's words, "to take advantage of a very sick man," sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft's sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and "literally ran" up the hospital stairs to beat them there.

Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their heavy-handed ploy. "I'm not the attorney general," Ashcroft told Bush's men. "There"—he pointed weakly to Comey—"is the attorney general." Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey's presence in the room. The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House—"without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality," he testified.

What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can't help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey's testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him "to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases." The larger mystery remained intact, however. "It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate," the article conceded.

Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed "every 45 days" as part of planning to assess threats to "the continuity of our government."

Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise that the president's passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.

While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government's data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a "national emergency." Executive orders issued over the past three decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report, even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be a trigger.

Let's imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blast—say, a suitcase nuke—in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a "parallel government" that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state.

Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency's incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem far-fetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of "militants" and "American negroes," who were to be held at "assembly centers or relocation camps." In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish "temporary detention and processing capabilities" for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs." Just what those "new programs" might be is not specified.

n the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.

It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance state—as seems to be the case with Main Core—even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.

Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools.

"The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help," he says. "Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets." An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time."

Labels: American Fascism, American Fascists, Illegal Spying, Shadow Government

Barral was born in Madrid. His father died fighting for the communist cause in Spain's civil war. At age 11 Barral fled with his mother to Morocco and joined a refugee ship bound for Argentina. There he met the young Guevara, who was part of a group of school friends. "He was totally apolitical in those days," said Barral. "We used to get together at weekends. He was just one of the group."

The political one was Barral, who soon began to get in trouble with the police for his left-wing activities. He ended up in jail and was lucky to get out alive at a time when the Argentine military was "disappearing" young leftists. He was shipped off to a new asylum, this time in Hungary.

Exiled twice by age 22, Barral decided it was time to settle down. He graduated in medicine, got married and started a family. Meanwhile, his old friend Guevara had gone to fight in Cuba alongside a fiery student leader, Fidel Castro.

A couple of years after Castro's rebel army swept to power, an official Cuban delegation was visiting Budapest. Word of Guevara's old school friend got back to him in Cuba. Before Barral knew it, he was off to join the revolution.

In Cuba he was asked if he would help create a psychiatric unit at the Ministry of Interior. Barral stresses it was for only ministry employees, and he had no part in treating political prisoners.

"I was Spanish, and I wasn't entirely trusted. So I wasn't asked to do that kind of work," he said.

In the late 1960s he was banished to the east of the country after a dispute with his boss. Hearing about an essay writing contest sponsored by the Cuban Cultural Council, he decided one evening to give it a shot. The theme: Attitudes of the Revolutionary Intellectual. First prize was a 40-day trip to Hanoi, North Vietnam, at the time under heavy U.S. aerial bombardment.

Barral wasn't the slightest bit deterred by the risks, and was thrilled when he learned he had won. "For a young communist like me, Vietnam was it. It was the model of bravery and resistance," he said.

In late 1969 he left for Hanoi, by way of Moscow and Peking. He decided he would focus his time on examining North Vietnam's political and social organization to see how it had managed to resist such a powerful enemy.

After one visit to a bomb site, Barral found himself asking how American pilots could inflict such carnage on civilians.

"When I saw the morale of the Vietnamese under bombardment, I wanted to see how the other side felt."

Barral was surprised when his North Vietnamese handlers offered to arrange for him to interview a captured pilot. Two days later he was taken to the office of the Committee for Foreign Cultural Relations in Hanoi.

The future Republican presidential nominee walked in unchained, Barral said, wearing an overall and a towel around his neck. The two men sat down over coffee and oranges with a translator. McCain "seemed very sure of himself and happy to talk," said Barral, who identified himself only as a Spanish psychiatrist, not mentioning that he worked for the Cuban state security services.

McCain described how surprised he had been when he was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967 and landed in the middle of a lake in the city. He was injured when he ejected, breaking several limbs, and was dumped into a cell with no medical treatment for several days. He also described his career in the military, mentioned that his father was an admiral and head of U.S. forces in the Pacific, and said his wife was a model.

He was in better condition by the time Barral saw him, but he didn't earn much sympathy from the Spaniard. Barral described him in the article as "an insensitive individual without human depth," who showed no remorse for his bombing of civilians. "I believe that he has bombed densely populated places for sport," he added.

McCain recalled the interview years later in his memoirs, Faith of My Fathers, describing Barral as "a Cuban propagandist masquerading as a psychiatrist and moonlighting as a journalist."

McCain and other POWs have alleged that several Cuban agents were involved in the torture of American prisoners, but none has ever been positively identified. The allegation was vehemently denied by Fidel Castro in a recent newspaper column that called it "completely unethical."

Cuba was a firm ally of North Vietnam and maintained an embassy in Hanoi. But though Cuban troops and military advisers famously participated in conflicts in Africa, none was ever sent to fight in the Vietnam War.

Barral says he was not sent there by the Cuban government with any propaganda purpose in mind. "It was my own initiative, and it was never my plan to interview a prisoner," he said.

Although he didn't give away any secrets, McCain recognizes that he violated the military's Code of Conduct in agreeing to be interviewed. The code advises American prisoners of war to give only name, rank, service number and date of birth. Under interrogation captured military personnel should "evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability."

When McCain refused to meet a peace delegation a month later, he says he was punished, forced to sit on a stool for three days and nights.

Barral retired in 1989 after rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Since then his faith in communism has been sorely tested.

Labels: 2008 Election, POWs, Propaganda, St. John McCain, Viet Nam

The evidence is mounting that the US might just encounter the first real crisis of the oil depletion age before the year is out. The crisis at first will be one of spiraling prices for diesel [see chart] and heating oil that will cause considerable economic havoc, and then there may be actual shortages right here in the United States. Within the last three weeks the wholesale price of heating oil has moved up by nearly 70 cents a gallon and no end is in sight. Many observers are noting that what they call “a tight market for distillates” –- the industry’s term for diesel and heating oil – is the main factor driving up the price of crude and consequently gasoline.

Diesel Prices

The reasons for this surge in distillate prices are easy to understand. Conventional oil production, from which distillates are made, has been flat for the last three years while demand from Asia and the Middle East has been increasing rapidly. The trend into higher-mileage diesel-powered cars in Europe and other places, which has been underway for many years, is having a major impact on the demand for diesel. In some European countries, diesels now account for over 70 percent of new car registrations.

Moreover, a worldwide mismatch is developing between the demand for distillates and for gasoline. A recent OPEC report claims that in the last seven years, the demand for distillates grew by 5.2 million b/d while the demand for gasoline increased by 2 million b/d. OPEC notes that during the same period, refiners added 1.2 million b/d of fluid catalytic cracking and coking capacity used to produce gasoline while adding only 700,000 b/d of hydrocracking capacity used to make more distillates.

This change in demand and refining capabilities is leaving European and Asian refiners with a surplus of gasoline and a shortage of diesel. The overseas refiners are happy to sell their surplus gasoline to America which still wants it in prodigious quantities. This, believe it or not, helps keep gasoline prices lower than the price of crude suggests it should be as unusually large amounts of gasoline and blending components keep arriving at our shores.

This past winter America was awash in gasoline which in turn discouraged refiners from making more as they were not making much money for their efforts and presumably were running out of storage space. US refinery utilization dropped to abnormally low levels. Now this was fine for gasoline consumers, who continued to drive around burning cheap--in comparison to the price of crude and diesel--imported gasoline. It did nothing, however, for those who find diesel and heating oil increasingly unaffordable.

Prices for distillates went up and up and inventories went down and down as we were no longer making enough to satisfy demand even at outrageous prices, and our imports of distillates dropped as everybody in the world wanted more diesel. Imports which were running 300-400,000 b/d early last year have been 200,000 b/d or less in recent weeks. Most of our distillate imports currently are coming from Canada as nobody else seems willing or able to sell us this increasingly scarce and valuable commodity.

At the same time as our imports have been falling, our exports of finished distillates jumped from 275,000 b/d last fall to over 400,000 b/d this spring, according to the most recently available data. Much of our diesel exports, by the way, are going to Chile which is suffering from a drought-caused electric power shortage and has to have power to keep the copper mines going. The wave of electricity shortages and rolling blackouts around the world is not helping the situation as the demand for diesel to power emergency generators is growing rapidly and seems destined to become a significant source of new demand.

The arithmetic is simple; US refineries have been producing about 4.2 million b/d of diesel in recent weeks. (It did jump to 4.4 the week before last as refiners cashed in on the high prices). However, the net of our imports and exports is taking away about 0.2 million b/d. Since we use about 4.2 million b/d in the US at this time of year, our stockpiles have been shrinking and prices rising.

Next fall, when it comes time to start filling all those heating oil tanks, demand will increase to 4.4-4.5 million b/d. During the next four or five months, we will have to build our stockpiles by 15 to 20 million barrels to get ready for the next winter. There was a small increase in stocks last week, but there is a long way to go before fall and the recent earthquake in China suggests Beijing will be increasing its demand for diesel markedly over the next few months. While this may or may not directly affect the US, it will surely drive up prices still further.

By last week, the average cost of gasoline in the US had increased by 68 cents a gallon over a year ago, while the average gallon of diesel had increased by $1.71. Unless the situation stabilizes during the next few weeks, there will clearly be trouble before the year is out. High prices so far have not resulted in a significant drop in demand for distillates and the EIA is reporting that in the last month consumption is up by nearly one percent over last year.

There is little on the horizon to suggest a major reversal of this situation. Worldwide demand for distillates is likely to continue increasing over the rest of the year. Very high prices may tamp demand in the US and other OECD countries a bit. So far the EIA is reporting that demand for gasoline is only down by 0.2 percent over last year, despite reports from other sources that the demand is dropping much more.

Most observers agree that we have another five or six months before serious problems develop for we can always divert next winter’s heating oil supplies into our trucks, tractors, and heavy equipment. This may require a waiver or two of air pollution regulations, but that does not seem to be a problem these days.

In his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” of 1798, the English parson Thomas Malthus insisted that human populations would always be “checked” (a polite word for mass starvation) by the failure of food supplies to keep pace with population growth. For a long time, it looked as if what Malthus called the “dark tints” of his argument were unduly, even absurdly, pessimistic. As Paul Roberts writes in “The End of Food” (Houghton Mifflin; $26), “Until late in the twentieth century, the modern food system was celebrated as a monument to humanity’s greatest triumph. We were producing more food—more grain, more meat, more fruits and vegetables—than ever before, more cheaply than ever before, and with a degree of variety, safety, quality and convenience that preceding generations would have found bewildering.” The world seemed to have been liberated from a Malthusian “long night of hunger and drudgery.”

Now the “dark tints” have returned. The World Bank recently announced that thirty-three countries are confronting food crises, as the prices of various staples have soared. From January to April of this year, the cost of rice on the international market went up a hundred and forty-one per cent. Pakistan has reintroduced ration cards. In Egypt, the Army has started baking bread for the general population. The Haitian Prime Minister was ousted after hunger riots. The current crisis could push another hundred million people deeper into poverty. Is the world’s population about to be “checked” by its failure to produce enough food?

Paul Roberts is the second author in the past couple of years to publish a book entitled “The End of Food”—the first, by Thomas F. Pawlick, appeared in 2006. Pawlick, an investigative journalist from Ontario, was concerned with such predicaments as the end of the tasty tomato and its replacement by “red tennis balls” lacking in both flavor and nutrients. (The modern tomato, he reported, contains far less calcium and Vitamin A than its 1963 counterpart.) These worries seem rather tame compared with Roberts’s; his book grapples with the possible termination of food itself, and its replacement by—what? Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” contains a vision of a future in which just about the only food left is canned, from happier times; when the cans run out, the humans eat one another. Roberts lacks McCarthy’s Biblical cadences, but his narrative is intended to be no less terrifying.

Roberts’s work is part of a second wave of food-politics books, which has taken the genre to a new level of apocalyptic foreboding. The first wave was led by Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” (2001), and focussed on the perils of junk food. “Fast Food Nation” painted an alarming picture—one learned about the additives in a strawberry milkshake, the traces of excrement in hamburger meat—but it also left some readers with a feeling of mild complacency, as they closed the book and turned to a wholesome supper of spinach and ricotta tortellini. There is no such reassurance to be had from the new wave, in which Roberts’s book is joined by “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System,” by Raj Patel (Melville House; $19.95); “Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood,” by Taras Grescoe (Bloomsbury; $24.99); and “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” by Michael Pollan, the poet of the group (Penguin Press; $21.95).

All of these authors agree that the entire system of Western food production is in need of radical change, right down to the spinach. Roberts opens with a description of E.-coli-infected spinach from California, which killed three people in 2006 and sickened two hundred others. The E. coli was traced to the guts of a wild boar that may have tracked the bug in from a nearby cattle ranch. Industrial farming means that even those on a vegan diet may reap the nastier effects of intensive meat production. It is no longer enough for individuals to switch to “healthier” choices in the supermarket. Schlosser asked his readers to consider the chain of consequences they set in motion every time they sit down to eat in a fast-food outlet. Roberts wants us to consider the “chain of transactions and reactions” represented by each of our food purchases—“by each ripe melon or freshly baked bagel, by each box of cereal or tray of boneless skinless chicken breasts.” This time, we are all implicated.

Like Malthus, Roberts sees humanity increasingly struggling to meet its food needs. He predicts that in the next forty years, as agriculture is threatened by climate change, “demand for food will rise precipitously,” outstripping supply. The reasons for this, however, are not strictly Malthusian. For Malthus, famine was inevitable because the math of human existence did not add up: the means of subsistence grew only arithmetically (1, 2, 3), whereas population grew geometrically (2, 4, 8). By this analysis, food production could never catch up with fertility. Malthus was wrong, on both counts. In his treatise, Malthus couldn’t envisage any innovations for increasing yield beyond “dressing” the soil with cattle manure. In the decades after he wrote, farmers in England took advantage of new machinery, powerful fertilizers, and higher-yield seeds, and supply rose faster than demand. As the availability of food increased, and people became more prosperous, fertility fell.

Malthus could not have imagined that demand might increase catastrophically even where populations were static or falling. The problem is not just the number of mouths to feed; it’s the quantity of food that each mouth consumes when there are no natural constraints. As the world becomes richer, people eat too much, and too much of the wrong things—above all, meat. Since it takes on average four pounds of grain to make a single pound of meat, Roberts writes, “meatier diets also geometrically increase overall food demands” even in those parts of Europe and North America where fertility rates are low. Malthus knew that some people were more “frugal” than others, but he hugely underestimated the capacity of ordinary human beings to keep eating. Even now, there is no over-all food shortage when measured by global subsistence needs. Despite the current food crisis, last year’s worldwide grain harvest was colossal, five per cent above the previous year’s. We are not yet living on Cormac McCarthy’s scorched earth. Yet demand is increasing ever faster. As of 2006, there were eight hundred million people on the planet who were hungry, but they were outnumbered by the billion who were overweight. Our current food predicament resembles a Malthusian scenario—misery and famine—but one largely created by overproduction rather than underproduction. Our ability to produce vastly too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand, and generated a wildly dysfunctional market.

Michael Pollan writes that the food business once lamented what it called the problem of the “fixed stomach”—it appeared that demand for food, unlike other products, was inelastic, the amount fixed by the dimensions of the stomach itself, the variety constrained by tradition and habit. In the past few decades, however, American and European stomachs have become as elastic as balloons, and, with the newly prosperous Chinese and Indians switching to Western diets, much of the rest of the world is following suit. “Today, Mexicans drink more Coca-Cola than milk,” Patel reports. Roberts tells us that in India “obesity is now growing faster than either the government or traditional culture can respond,” and the demand for gastric bypasses is soaring.

Driven by our bottomless stomachs, Roberts argues, the modern economy has reduced food to a “commodity” like any other, which must be generated in ever greater units at an ever lower cost, year by year, like sneakers or DVDs. But food isn’t like sneakers or DVDs. If we max out our credit cards buying Nikes, we can simply push them to the back of a closet. By contrast, our insatiable demand for food must be worn on our bodies, often in the form of diabetes as well as obesity. Overeating makes us miserable, and ill, but medical advances mean that it takes a long time to kill us, so we keep on eating. Roberts, whose impulse to connect everything up is both his strength and his weakness, concludes, grandly, that “food is fundamentally not an economic phenomenon.” On the contrary, food has always been an economic phenomenon, but in its current form it is one struggling to meet our uncurbed appetites. What we are witnessing is not the end of food but a market on the brink of failure. Those bearing the brunt are, as in Malthus’s day, the people at the bottom.

Cheap food, in these books, is the enemy. Roberts complains that “the attributes of food that our economic system tends to value and to encourage”—like cheapness—“aren’t necessarily the attributes that work best for the people eating the food, or the culture in which that food is consumed, or the environment in which it is produced.” Cheap food distresses Raj Patel, too. Patel, a former U.N. consultant and a current anti-globalization activist, is an excitable fan of peasant coöperatives and Slow Food. He lacks Roberts’s cool scope but shares his ambition to connect all the dots. Patel would like us to take lessons in “culinary sensuousness” from his “dear friend” Marco Flavio Marinucci, a San Francisco-based artist and, apparently, a master of the art of “gastronomical foreplay.” Patel regrets that most of us are nothing like dear Mr. Marinucci. We are all too busy being screwed over by the giant corporations to take the time to appreciate “the deeper and subtler pleasures of food.” For Patel, it is a short step from Western consumers “engorged and intoxicated” with cheap processed food to Mexican and Indian farmers committing suicide because they can’t make a living. The “food industry’s pabulum” makes us all cogs in an evil machine.

Labels: Gardening, Global Economy, Global Resources, Lawns To Gardens, Oil, Oil Distillates, Oil Producers, Peak Oil

Labels: Camping, My Life As It Is

"Far from normal."

Those were the words that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke used to describe the financial markets (and by extension the economy) these heady spring days when everybody else with a rostrum, it seems, has pronounced the so-called liquidity crisis contained. There's a great wish for American finance to return to business-as-usual -- raking in fantastic fees for innovating new modes of tradable paper, and engineering mergers and buy-outs that generate huge fees plus $100 million kiss-offs for corporate CEOs in the noble struggle to dismantle America's productive capacity -- but apparently events are still out of hand.
The Federal Reserve itself has been instrumental in promoting abnormality by doing everything possible to prevent the work-out of bad debts in the system. Since money is loaned into existence, and loans are debts, the work-out of bad debt suggests the discovery that a lot of money has disappeared -- which is exactly the case. The Fed has postponed the work-out by sucking up truckloads of impaired, untradable securities in exchange for loans to giant banks who don't have enough cash on hand to pay their janitors.
Personally, my theory has been that the specter of peak oil pretty clearly implies the inability of industrial economies to continue producing real wealth in the customary way. In the face of this, either consciously or at a more mystical level, the worker bees in banking recognize that, in order to maintain their villas in the Hamptons, money has to be loaned into existence some other way (than in the service of industrial productivity).
We've tried just about everything else. There was the so-called service economy, an attempt to replace manufacturing with hamburger sales. Then there was the information economy, in which work would be replaced with knowing about stuff. Then there was the tech thing, which was about bringing internet companies that existed only on the back of cocktail napkins to the initial public offering stage of capitalization -- which allowed a few-hundred-or-so thirty-year-old smoothies to retire to vineyards in the Napa Valley, while hundreds of thousands of retirees lost half the value of their investment portfolios. Then there was the housing boom, which was all about the creation of more suburban sprawl under the theory that houses (or "homes" in the jargon of the realtors) represent an obvious sort of wealth, and therefore that using houses as collateral would allow humongous sums of money to be loaned into existence -- along with massive fees for structuring the loans into bundles of bond-like thingies.
This has all failed now because the racket went too far. Every possible candidate for a snookering got snookered. Too much collateral for which there were no takers went into the ground. The insane run-up in house values made a downward price movement inevitable, and as soon as the turnaround happened, it fell into the remorseless algebra of a deflationary death spiral. More importantly, however, this society ran out of tricks for loaning money into existence and instead began to experience the pain of money thought-to-be-in-existence being defaulted into a vapor -- and worse, these defaults led to logarithmic chains of money destruction in its places of origin, the investment banks that had created the racket.
The important part of this is that the money is gone. What makes matters truly eerie is that the "bubble" in suburban houses has occurred at exactly the moment in history when the chief enabling resource for suburban life -- oil -- has entered its scarcity stage.
The logical conclusion of all this is not what the American public wants to hear: we have become a much poorer society and are now faced with the unavoidable task of making major changes in how we live. All the three-card-monte moves at the highest level of finance lately amount to an effort to avoid the unavoidable, acknowledging our losses. Certainly the political fallout of all this will be awesome. But it's not about politics, really. It's about the entire society's inability to form a workable new consensus of reality.

Labels: James Kunstler, US Economy