The investigation itself is traceable back to two significant but extremely problematic reports made public in January 2017. One was the “Steele dossier” by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. This is principally of interest for its largely unsupported allegations that in some sense or another Trump was in cahoots with Russia. Steele’s company, Orbis, was commissioned to write the report by Fusion GPS which in turn was contracted by attorneys working for the Democratic National Campaign. Passage of earlier drafts of the Steele report through sources close to British intelligence, and accounts by Trump adviser George Papadopoulos concerning conversations he had concerning possible Russian possession of Clinton emails with a character who may as likely have been a British as a Russian spy, were instrumental in stimulating FBI interest in and spying on the Trump campaign.
There are indirect links between Steele, another former MI6 agent, Pablo Miller (who also worked for Orbis) and Sergei Skripal, a Russian agent who had been recruited as informer to MI6 by Miller and who was the target of an attempted assassination in 2018. This event has occasioned controversial, not to say highly implausible and mischievous British government claims and accusations against Russia.
The most significant matter raised by a second report, issued by the Intelligence Community Assessment and representing the conclusions of a small team picked from the Director of Intelligence office, CIA, FBI and NSA, was its claim that Russian intelligence was responsible for the hacking of the computer systems of the DNC and its chairman John Podesta in summer 2016 and that the hacked documents had been passed to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. No evidence for this was supplied.
Although the hacking allegations have become largely uncontested articles of faith in the RussiaGate discourse they are significantly reliant on the problematic findings of a small private company hired by the DNC. There is also robust evidence that the documents may have been leaked rather than hacked and by U.S.-based sources. The fact that the documents revealed that the DNC, a supposedly neutral agent in the primary campaign, had in fact been biased in favor of the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and that Clinton’s private statements to industry were not in keeping with her public positions, has long been obscured in media memory in favor a preferred narrative of Russian villainy.
Who Benefits?
Why then does the Russiagate discourse have so much traction? Who benefits?
Russiagate serves the interest of a (No. 1) corrupted Democratic Party, whose biased and arguably incompetent campaign management lost it the 2016 election, in alliance (No. 2) with powerful factions of the U.S. industrial-military-surveillance establishment that for the past 19 years, through NATO and other malleable international agencies, has sought to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, dismember Russia and the Russian Federation (undoubtedly for the benefit of Western capital) and, more latterly, further contain China in a perpetual and titanic struggle for the heart of EurAsia.
In so far as Trump had indicated (for whatever reasons) in the course of his campaign that he disagreed with at least some aspects of this long-term strategy, he came to be viewed as unreliable by the U.S. security state.
While serving the immediate purpose of containing Trump, U.S. accusations of Russian meddling in U.S. elections were farcical in the context of a well-chronicled history of U.S. “meddling” in the elections and politics of nations for over 100 years. This meddling across all hemispheres has included the staging of coups, invasions and occupations on false pretext in addition to numerous instances of “color revolution” strategies involving the financing of opposition parties and provoking uprisings, frequently coupled with economic warfare (sanctions).
A further beneficiary (No.3) is the sum of all those interests that favor a narrowing of public expression to a framework supportive of neoliberal imperialism. Paradoxically exploiting the moral panic associated with both Trump’s plaintive wailing about “fake news” whenever mainstream media coverage is critical of him, and social media embarrassment over exposure of their big-data sales to powerful corporate customers, these interests have called for more regulation of, as well as self-censorship by, social media.
Social media responses increasingly involve more restrictive algorithms and what are often partisan “fact-checkers” (illustrated by Facebook financial support for and dependence on the pro-NATO “think tank,” the Atlantic Council). The net impact has been devastating for many information organizations in the arena of social media whose only “sin” is analysis and opinion that runs counter to elite neoliberal propaganda.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for today:
Monday, July 29, 2019. Big oil and gas continues to clean up big in
Iraq, a young girl's death becomes reason for non-stop whining from
Iraqi medical staff (whining about their own hard times), and much more.
In the US the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination continues. 25 people are running for the nomination, 20 of them qualified for this week's debates which will take place on July 30th and July 31st. Six of the 20 are women. One of the six was on CBS' FACE THE NATION yesterday:
MARGARET BRENNAN: You are running on a platform with some proposals that involve some massive restructuring of the U.S. government--
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: I sure am.
MARGARET BRENNAN: --one of the things you're floating is this idea of creating a Department of Children--
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Children and Youth, yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: --how is this different than what the Education Department does and what is it that you're actually proposing?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Well, the Education Department gets about sixty-eight billion dollars in the budget and then within HHS, there is also the agency of children and working-- excuse me, children and families that gets about forty-eight billion dollars. Now, education is extremely important, but we have children who are traumatized before they even reach-- before they even reach preschool. We have a relatively high infant mortality rate. We have problems that go beyond the things that are already covered. We have problems with the fact that children have PTSD. Millions of American children have PTSD that is considered as severe as that of returning veteran from Afghanistan and Iraq. We have millions of American children who go to school every day--elementary school students who are asking their teachers if maybe they have some food for them. We have American children who go to classrooms where there aren't even the adequate school supplies with which to teach a child to read and if the child cannot learn to read by the age of eight, the high school graduation a-- possibility-- probability is drastically decreased and the chances of high-- of incarceration are drastically increased. So, we need a holistic perspective. We need more than just educational funding. We need wraparound services. We need trauma-informed education. We need to deal with the nutrition of our children, the high poverty rates, the violence in our schools, the-- the trauma-informed education. There are so many issues for the whole child that need to be addressed, as a--
MARGARET BRENNAN: How--
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: --I'm sorry.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So, when it comes though to even public education--
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: --not even the level of social services you're talking about--a lot of this is controlled at the state level. So how do you get Republican-governed states, in particular, to agree to fund everything you're laying out here and to actually implement?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Well, let's talk about that. The truth of the matter is we are the only advanced industrialized nation that bases our educational funding on property taxes. So what this means is that a child in a-- in a financially advantaged neighborhood stands a chance-- a good chance of getting a very high-quality public school education here. But if a child does not grow up, not live in a-- in a financially advantage neighborhood, then the opportunities are far less for a higher quality education. To me--
MARGARET BRENNAN: So how would you fund it?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: There should be a federal mandate. Two things are going on here. Some states have the money to do better and they choose not to. Some states simply do not have the money. To me, this should be a federal mandate every-- when I'm President-- if I'm President, the idea is that every school in America should be a palace of learning and culture and the arts. This is the way to create a peaceful society and a prosperous society years from now and that's what we should be doing.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator Kamala Harris says she wants to pay teachers more-- thirteen-thousand-five-hundred-dollar raise over four years. Is that the dollar amount you're looking for?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: I'm not looking at a specific dollar amount, but I certainly agree with the senator that we need to pay teachers a lot more. But you know what that's the-- that's one out of so many things that need to be changed. That's just one-- one thing. We have to talk about-- about what even happens in these children's lives before they even get to school. I also want to feel that the high-stakes standardized testings are not-- are not helpful at this point. But we have to deal with so much more than-- as important as it is that we pay our teachers more, which is extremely important, we have to look at the whole issue of how American-- America basically neglects millions of chronically traumatized children every single day.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You mentioned health. You have clarified in recent days that your position is not one of an anti-vaxxer.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Well--
MARGARET BRENNAN: You do--
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: --there are people who say--
MARGARET BRENNAN: --support vaccines?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Well, what's happening in the world today is that anybody who has any kind of conversation that is not toeing the line with big pharma is called an anti-vaxxer. I am pro-vaccine. I am pro-medicine. And I also find the fact that--
MARGARET BRENNAN: And you don't object to antidepressants either? You've clarified that.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: No. If people want to use antidepressants-- and I do not like the predatory practices of big pharma and I don't know why people-- when we are seeing what's going on now with the opioid crisis--
MARGARET BRENNAN: Mm-Hm.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: --where attorney generals all over this country are now indicting these big pharmaceutical executives for what we now know to have been their role in the opioid crisis. I find it so odd that people are just assuming that in every other area they're just the paragons of pure intent and concern for the common good.
MARGARET BRENNAN: As Commander-in-Chief, what do you think America's role in the world should be?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Moral leadership. Our grandparents would be rolling over in their graves to see something like, for instance, for the sake of a three-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar arms deal over the next ten years. We are giving aerial support to a genocidal war that Saudi Arabia is waging against Yemen. Tens of thousands of people have been starved, including children. Now I'm not saying that America was ever perfect, but there was a time on this planet when other nations, and Americans ourselves, saw that when it came to international policy we at least tried to stand for democracy and humanitarian.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So you would cut funding for Saudi Arabia and the alliance?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: It's not just about cutting funding to military. I want the military to have whatever it needs for legitimate security purposes. My critique is of political decisions that have more to do with short-term profit maximization for defense contractors. We need to wage peace.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Mm-Hm.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Even Donald Rumsfeld who was the secretary of defense under-- under George Bush said we must also wage peace--
MARGARET BRENNAN: Mm-Hm.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: --which is why I want a U.S. Department of Peace. We need to far-- far beef up--
MARGARET BRENNAN: Okay.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: --and-- and support far more our peace-building agencies within the State Department.
Along with Marianne Williamson, US House Rep Tulsi Gabbard, Senators Kamala Harris, Amy Kobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren are seeking the party's presidential nomination.
The greedy continue to eye Iraq and, no doubt, some are rejoicing over a new development. HYDROCARBON TECHNOLOGY reports:
Big money to be made, that's what motivated the war and what keeps it going. THE NATIONAL reports:
Sharjah's Dana Gas said payments for its operations from a joint venture in Iraq's Kurdistan region rose 74 per cent in the first half of the year.
The energy producer was paid $80 million (Dh293m) in dividends from Pearl Petroleum, in which it has a 35 per cent stake, Dana Gas said on Monday. Pearl Petroleum, which is majority owned by Dana Gas and its parent Crescent Petroleum, made the payments from the sales of condensate, LPG and gas in the Kurdish region of Iraq.
Big money to be made and it was mapped out ahead of the war. William L. Watts (MARKET WATCH) reported in July of 2003:
A map and other documents highlighting Iraqi oil production and companies doing business in the country were part of a broad evaluation of global energy producing regions by Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, the Commerce Department said Friday.
The task-force related papers were unveiled earlier in the day by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group. The documents were turned over as part of the ongoing response to a lawsuit by Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club, a liberal environmental group, who are seeking access to details of the task force's deliberations in 2001 to craft Bush administration policies on energy.
Judicial Watch received the papers from the Commerce Department last week, said Tom Fitton, the organization's president. The batch of papers included a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines and terminals, as well as a chart detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects. Another document was titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." Commerce also released similar maps and papers regarding oil projects in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.
Commerce and other agencies that participated in the task force have turned over tens of thousands of pages of documents in response to the lawsuit. Cheney and the White House have refused to turn over any papers so far. At issue is the role that energy industry executives and trade groups played in formulating the task force's energy policy recommendations unveiled in spring of 2001.
In 2010, PROJECT CENSORED noted:
Documents turned over in the summer of 2003 by the Commerce Department as a result of the Sierra Club’s and Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The documents, dated March 2001, also feature maps of Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supporting charts with details of the major oil and gas development projects in each country that provide information on the project’s costs, capacity, oil company and status or completion date.
Documented plans of occupation and exploitation predating September 11 confirm heightened suspicion that U.S. policy is driven by the dictates of the energy industry. According to Judicial Watch President, Tom Fitton, “These documents show the importance of the Energy Task Force and why its operations should be open to the public.”
When first assuming office in early 2001, President Bush’s top foreign policy priority was not to prevent terrorism or to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction-or any of the other goals he espoused later that year following 9-11. Rather, it was to increase the flow of petroleum from suppliers abroad to U.S. markets. In the months before he became president, the United States had experienced severe oil and natural gas shortages in many parts of the country, along with periodic electrical power blackouts in California. In addition, oil imports rose to more than 50% of total consumption for the first time in history, provoking great anxiety about the security of the country’s long-term energy supply. Bush asserted that addressing the nation’s “energy crisis” was his most important task as president.
The energy turmoil of 2000-01 prompted Bush to establish a task force charged with developing a long-range plan to meet U.S. energy requirements. With the advice of his close friend and largest campaign contributor, Enron CEO, Ken Lay, Bush picked Vice President Dick Cheney, former Halliburton CEO, to head this group. In 2001 the Task Force formulated the National Energy Policy (NEP), or Cheney Report, bypassing possibilities for energy independence and reduced oil consumption with a declaration of ambitions to establish new sources of oil.
The Bush Administration’s struggle to keep secret the workings of Cheney’s Energy Task Force has been ongoing since early in the President’s tenure. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, requested information in spring of 2001 about which industry executives and lobbyists the Task Force was meeting with in developing the Bush Administration’s energy plan. When Cheney refused disclosure, Congress was pressed to sue for the right to examine Task Force records, but lost. Later, amid political pressure building over improprieties regarding Enron’s colossal collapse, Cheney’s office released limited information revealing six Task Force meetings with Enron executives.
With multiple lawsuits currently pending, the Bush Administration asserts that its right to secrecy is a matter of executive privilege in regard to White House records. But because the White House staffed the Task Force with employees from the Department of Energy and elsewhere, it cannot pretend that its documents are White House records. A 2001 case, in which the Justice Department has four times appealed federal court rulings that the Vice President release task force records, has been brought before the Supreme Court. The case Richard B Cheney v. U.S. District Court for the District of Colombia, No. 03-475, to be heard by Cheney’s friend and duck hunting partner, Justice Scalia, is now pending. Cases based on the Federal Advisory Committee Act and Freedom of Information Act which require the Task Force a balanced membership, open meetings, and public records, are attempting to beat the Bush Administration in its battle to keep its internal workings secret.
In 2013, Antonia Juhasz wrote the following for CNN:
Earlier this year, Pearl Petroleum signed a 20-year gas sales agreement with the Kurdistan Regional Government to facilitate the production and sale of an additional 250 mmscfd of gas. Pearl Petroleum’s expansion plan will see the current 400 mmscfd increase in output to 650 mmscfd in 2022 and then to 900 mmscfd by 2023.
With the price of oil ranging between US$60 to US$70 per bbl, each of these two new gas production trains will generate between US$175 to US$200mn to the company’s share of revenue and project’s cash flows per annum.
Big oil, big money.
In the US the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination continues. 25 people are running for the nomination, 20 of them qualified for this week's debates which will take place on July 30th and July 31st. Six of the 20 are women. One of the six was on CBS' FACE THE NATION yesterday:
MARGARET BRENNAN: You are running on a platform with some proposals that involve some massive restructuring of the U.S. government--
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: I sure am.
MARGARET BRENNAN: --one of the things you're floating is this idea of creating a Department of Children--
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Children and Youth, yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: --how is this different than what the Education Department does and what is it that you're actually proposing?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Well, the Education Department gets about sixty-eight billion dollars in the budget and then within HHS, there is also the agency of children and working-- excuse me, children and families that gets about forty-eight billion dollars. Now, education is extremely important, but we have children who are traumatized before they even reach-- before they even reach preschool. We have a relatively high infant mortality rate. We have problems that go beyond the things that are already covered. We have problems with the fact that children have PTSD. Millions of American children have PTSD that is considered as severe as that of returning veteran from Afghanistan and Iraq. We have millions of American children who go to school every day--elementary school students who are asking their teachers if maybe they have some food for them. We have American children who go to classrooms where there aren't even the adequate school supplies with which to teach a child to read and if the child cannot learn to read by the age of eight, the high school graduation a-- possibility-- probability is drastically decreased and the chances of high-- of incarceration are drastically increased. So, we need a holistic perspective. We need more than just educational funding. We need wraparound services. We need trauma-informed education. We need to deal with the nutrition of our children, the high poverty rates, the violence in our schools, the-- the trauma-informed education. There are so many issues for the whole child that need to be addressed, as a--
MARGARET BRENNAN: How--
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: --I'm sorry.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So, when it comes though to even public education--
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: --not even the level of social services you're talking about--a lot of this is controlled at the state level. So how do you get Republican-governed states, in particular, to agree to fund everything you're laying out here and to actually implement?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Well, let's talk about that. The truth of the matter is we are the only advanced industrialized nation that bases our educational funding on property taxes. So what this means is that a child in a-- in a financially advantaged neighborhood stands a chance-- a good chance of getting a very high-quality public school education here. But if a child does not grow up, not live in a-- in a financially advantage neighborhood, then the opportunities are far less for a higher quality education. To me--
MARGARET BRENNAN: So how would you fund it?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: There should be a federal mandate. Two things are going on here. Some states have the money to do better and they choose not to. Some states simply do not have the money. To me, this should be a federal mandate every-- when I'm President-- if I'm President, the idea is that every school in America should be a palace of learning and culture and the arts. This is the way to create a peaceful society and a prosperous society years from now and that's what we should be doing.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator Kamala Harris says she wants to pay teachers more-- thirteen-thousand-five-hundred-dollar raise over four years. Is that the dollar amount you're looking for?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: I'm not looking at a specific dollar amount, but I certainly agree with the senator that we need to pay teachers a lot more. But you know what that's the-- that's one out of so many things that need to be changed. That's just one-- one thing. We have to talk about-- about what even happens in these children's lives before they even get to school. I also want to feel that the high-stakes standardized testings are not-- are not helpful at this point. But we have to deal with so much more than-- as important as it is that we pay our teachers more, which is extremely important, we have to look at the whole issue of how American-- America basically neglects millions of chronically traumatized children every single day.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You mentioned health. You have clarified in recent days that your position is not one of an anti-vaxxer.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Well--
MARGARET BRENNAN: You do--
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: --there are people who say--
MARGARET BRENNAN: --support vaccines?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Well, what's happening in the world today is that anybody who has any kind of conversation that is not toeing the line with big pharma is called an anti-vaxxer. I am pro-vaccine. I am pro-medicine. And I also find the fact that--
MARGARET BRENNAN: And you don't object to antidepressants either? You've clarified that.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: No. If people want to use antidepressants-- and I do not like the predatory practices of big pharma and I don't know why people-- when we are seeing what's going on now with the opioid crisis--
MARGARET BRENNAN: Mm-Hm.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: --where attorney generals all over this country are now indicting these big pharmaceutical executives for what we now know to have been their role in the opioid crisis. I find it so odd that people are just assuming that in every other area they're just the paragons of pure intent and concern for the common good.
MARGARET BRENNAN: As Commander-in-Chief, what do you think America's role in the world should be?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Moral leadership. Our grandparents would be rolling over in their graves to see something like, for instance, for the sake of a three-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar arms deal over the next ten years. We are giving aerial support to a genocidal war that Saudi Arabia is waging against Yemen. Tens of thousands of people have been starved, including children. Now I'm not saying that America was ever perfect, but there was a time on this planet when other nations, and Americans ourselves, saw that when it came to international policy we at least tried to stand for democracy and humanitarian.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So you would cut funding for Saudi Arabia and the alliance?
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: It's not just about cutting funding to military. I want the military to have whatever it needs for legitimate security purposes. My critique is of political decisions that have more to do with short-term profit maximization for defense contractors. We need to wage peace.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Mm-Hm.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Even Donald Rumsfeld who was the secretary of defense under-- under George Bush said we must also wage peace--
MARGARET BRENNAN: Mm-Hm.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: --which is why I want a U.S. Department of Peace. We need to far-- far beef up--
MARGARET BRENNAN: Okay.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: --and-- and support far more our peace-building agencies within the State Department.
Along with Marianne Williamson, US House Rep Tulsi Gabbard, Senators Kamala Harris, Amy Kobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren are seeking the party's presidential nomination.
The greedy continue to eye Iraq and, no doubt, some are rejoicing over a new development. HYDROCARBON TECHNOLOGY reports:
Big money to be made, that's what motivated the war and what keeps it going. THE NATIONAL reports:
Sharjah's Dana Gas said payments for its operations from a joint venture in Iraq's Kurdistan region rose 74 per cent in the first half of the year.
The energy producer was paid $80 million (Dh293m) in dividends from Pearl Petroleum, in which it has a 35 per cent stake, Dana Gas said on Monday. Pearl Petroleum, which is majority owned by Dana Gas and its parent Crescent Petroleum, made the payments from the sales of condensate, LPG and gas in the Kurdish region of Iraq.
Big money to be made and it was mapped out ahead of the war. William L. Watts (MARKET WATCH) reported in July of 2003:
A map and other documents highlighting Iraqi oil production and companies doing business in the country were part of a broad evaluation of global energy producing regions by Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, the Commerce Department said Friday.
The task-force related papers were unveiled earlier in the day by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group. The documents were turned over as part of the ongoing response to a lawsuit by Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club, a liberal environmental group, who are seeking access to details of the task force's deliberations in 2001 to craft Bush administration policies on energy.
Judicial Watch received the papers from the Commerce Department last week, said Tom Fitton, the organization's president. The batch of papers included a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines and terminals, as well as a chart detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects. Another document was titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." Commerce also released similar maps and papers regarding oil projects in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.
Commerce and other agencies that participated in the task force have turned over tens of thousands of pages of documents in response to the lawsuit. Cheney and the White House have refused to turn over any papers so far. At issue is the role that energy industry executives and trade groups played in formulating the task force's energy policy recommendations unveiled in spring of 2001.
In 2010, PROJECT CENSORED noted:
Documents turned over in the summer of 2003 by the Commerce Department as a result of the Sierra Club’s and Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The documents, dated March 2001, also feature maps of Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supporting charts with details of the major oil and gas development projects in each country that provide information on the project’s costs, capacity, oil company and status or completion date.
Documented plans of occupation and exploitation predating September 11 confirm heightened suspicion that U.S. policy is driven by the dictates of the energy industry. According to Judicial Watch President, Tom Fitton, “These documents show the importance of the Energy Task Force and why its operations should be open to the public.”
When first assuming office in early 2001, President Bush’s top foreign policy priority was not to prevent terrorism or to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction-or any of the other goals he espoused later that year following 9-11. Rather, it was to increase the flow of petroleum from suppliers abroad to U.S. markets. In the months before he became president, the United States had experienced severe oil and natural gas shortages in many parts of the country, along with periodic electrical power blackouts in California. In addition, oil imports rose to more than 50% of total consumption for the first time in history, provoking great anxiety about the security of the country’s long-term energy supply. Bush asserted that addressing the nation’s “energy crisis” was his most important task as president.
The energy turmoil of 2000-01 prompted Bush to establish a task force charged with developing a long-range plan to meet U.S. energy requirements. With the advice of his close friend and largest campaign contributor, Enron CEO, Ken Lay, Bush picked Vice President Dick Cheney, former Halliburton CEO, to head this group. In 2001 the Task Force formulated the National Energy Policy (NEP), or Cheney Report, bypassing possibilities for energy independence and reduced oil consumption with a declaration of ambitions to establish new sources of oil.
The Bush Administration’s struggle to keep secret the workings of Cheney’s Energy Task Force has been ongoing since early in the President’s tenure. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, requested information in spring of 2001 about which industry executives and lobbyists the Task Force was meeting with in developing the Bush Administration’s energy plan. When Cheney refused disclosure, Congress was pressed to sue for the right to examine Task Force records, but lost. Later, amid political pressure building over improprieties regarding Enron’s colossal collapse, Cheney’s office released limited information revealing six Task Force meetings with Enron executives.
With multiple lawsuits currently pending, the Bush Administration asserts that its right to secrecy is a matter of executive privilege in regard to White House records. But because the White House staffed the Task Force with employees from the Department of Energy and elsewhere, it cannot pretend that its documents are White House records. A 2001 case, in which the Justice Department has four times appealed federal court rulings that the Vice President release task force records, has been brought before the Supreme Court. The case Richard B Cheney v. U.S. District Court for the District of Colombia, No. 03-475, to be heard by Cheney’s friend and duck hunting partner, Justice Scalia, is now pending. Cases based on the Federal Advisory Committee Act and Freedom of Information Act which require the Task Force a balanced membership, open meetings, and public records, are attempting to beat the Bush Administration in its battle to keep its internal workings secret.
In 2013, Antonia Juhasz wrote the following for CNN:
Before the 2003 invasion,
Iraq's domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to
Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized
and utterly dominated by foreign firms.
From ExxonMobil and Chevron to BP and Shell, the West's largest oil companies have set up shop in Iraq. So have a slew of American oil service companies, including Halliburton, the Texas-based firm Dick Cheney ran before becoming George W. Bush's running mate in 2000.
The war is the one and only reason for this long sought and newly acquired access.
Oil was not the only goal of the Iraq
War, but it was certainly the central one, as top U.S. military and
political figures have attested to in the years following the invasion.
"Of
course it's about oil; we can't really deny that," said Gen. John
Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in
Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed,
writing in his memoir, "I am saddened that it is politically
inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely
about oil." Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: "People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are."
For
the first time in about 30 years, Western oil companies are exploring
for and producing oil in Iraq from some of the world's largest oil
fields and reaping enormous profit. And while the U.S. has also maintained
a fairly consistent level of Iraq oil imports since the invasion, the
benefits are not finding their way through Iraq's economy or society.
These outcomes were by design, the result of a decade of U.S. government and oil company pressure. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then CEO of Chevron, said, "Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas-reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to." Today it does.
In 2000, Big Oil, including Exxon,
Chevron, BP and Shell, spent more money to get fellow oilmen Bush and
Cheney into office than they had spent on any previous election. Just
over a week into Bush's first term, their efforts paid off when the
National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Cheney, was formed,
bringing the administration and the oil companies together to plot our
collective energy future. In March, the task force reviewed lists and maps outlining Iraq's entire oil productive capacity.
Planning for a military invasion was soon under way. Bush's first Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, said in 2004, "Already by February (2001), the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why (to invade Iraq), but the how and how quickly."
In its final report in May 2001
(PDF), the task force argued that Middle Eastern countries should be
urged "to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment."
This is precisely what has been achieved in Iraq.
Here's how they did it.
The State Department Future of Iraq Project's Oil and Energy Working Group met from February 2002 to April 2003 and agreed that Iraq "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war."
The list of the group's members was not
made public, but Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum -- who was appointed Iraq's oil
minister by the U.S. occupation government in September 2003 -- was part
of the group, according to Greg Muttitt, a journalist and author of "Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq." Bahr al-Uloum promptly set about trying to implement the group's objectives.
At the same time, representatives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Halliburton, among others, met with Cheney's staff
in January 2003 to discuss plans for Iraq's postwar industry. For the
next decade, former and current executives of western oil companies
acted first as administrators of Iraq's oil ministry and then as
"advisers" to the Iraqi government.
Before
the invasion, there were just two things standing in the way of Western
oil companies operating in Iraq: Saddam Hussein and the nation's legal
system. The invasion dealt handily with Hussein. To address the latter
problem, some both inside and outside of the Bush administration argued
that it should simply change Iraq's oil laws through the U.S.-led
coalition government of Iraq, which ran the country from April 2003 to
June 2004. Instead the White House waited, choosing to pressure the
newly elected Iraqi government to pass new oil legislation itself.
This Iraq Hydrocarbons Law, partially
drafted by the Western oil industry, would lock the nation into private
foreign investment under the most corporate-friendly terms. The Bush
administration pushed the Iraqi government both publicly and privately
to pass the law. And in January 2007, as the ''surge" of 20,000
additional American troops was being finalized, the president set specific benchmarks
for the Iraqi government, including the passage of new oil legislation
to "promote investment, national unity, and reconciliation."
But
due to enormous public opposition and a recalcitrant parliament, the
central Iraqi government has failed to pass the Hydrocarbons Law. Usama
al-Nujeyfi, a member of the parliamentary energy committee, even quit in protest over the law, saying it would cede too much control to global companies and "ruin the country's future."
In
2008, with the likelihood of the law's passage and the prospect of
continued foreign military occupation dimming as elections loomed in the
U.S. and Iraq, the oil companies settled on a different track.
Bypassing parliament, the firms started signing contracts that provide
all of the access and most of the favorable treatment the Hydrocarbons
Law would provide -- and the Bush administration helped draft the model contracts.
This morning, OIL REVIEW MIDDLE EAST notes:
Earlier this year, Pearl Petroleum signed a 20-year gas sales agreement with the Kurdistan Regional Government to facilitate the production and sale of an additional 250 mmscfd of gas. Pearl Petroleum’s expansion plan will see the current 400 mmscfd increase in output to 650 mmscfd in 2022 and then to 900 mmscfd by 2023.
With the price of oil ranging between US$60 to US$70 per bbl, each of these two new gas production trains will generate between US$175 to US$200mn to the company’s share of revenue and project’s cash flows per annum.
Big oil, big money.
Christian Parenti writing in 2004: "Iraq reconstruction is a racket. The vast majority of the money allocated for tasks such as rebuilding schools, hospitals and utilities has disappeared into the accounts of Bush administration-connected firms like Halliburton and Bechtel". pic.twitter.com/QHxgIkiOxP
From a 2018 interview Mohsen Abdelmoumen conducted with Christian Parenti:
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: In your remarkable book The Freedom: Shadows And hallucinations in Occupied Iraq,
you are talking about the investigations you have done on the ground in
Iraq. Do not you think that the intervention of the United States marks
a historic turning point not only in the Middle East but also in the
USA with the unpunished crimes of the Bush administration?
Dr. Christian Parenti: Thank you for the kind words about The Freedom.
While the US role in Iraq has been a humanitarian catastrophe for Iraq
and the entire region, and has badly damaged US standing in global
public opinion, there is nonetheless a sick imperial logic by which some
of the invasion’s outcomes advance a US imperial agenda. Call it rule
by chaos, state failure as imperial strategy. Russia, China and Iran all
feel threatened by the chaos. Members of the far-right Israeli security
establishment appreciate the fact that the collapse of Arab states
means those states are now incapable of attacking Israel. And let us
recall that coalitions of Arab states attacked Israel three times in the
twentieth century.
Viewed from the perspective of the global oil industry, the Middle East crisis is a boon. As Timothy Mitchel shows in his excellent book Carbon Democracy,
the central economic problem for the global oil industry has always
been the threat of oversupply and collapsing prices, and thus reduced
profits. The destruction of Iraq, and now Libya, has helped keep oil
off the market, and that has increased prices and profits at a time of
global oversupply, due in part to the US fracking revolution.
But
from any larger humane perspective the US engineered collapse of Iraq
has been a disaster. Even from a more rational yet still US imperialist
perspective the invasion was bad. The Iraq crisis -- while it indirectly
threatens China, which buys lots of energy from the region -- has not
hindered China’s rise. The Iraq invasion has not re-launched or renewed
US global leadership. Instead it has undermined US credibility. US
hegemony is slowly but surely in relative decline and the production of
failed and semi-failed states in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and
now Yemen are violent symptoms of its decline.
Implicit
in your question is the specter of state failure and its connection to
US foreign policy. In thinking about this, it is important to understand
how the end of the Cold War has shaped the wider crisis of the region.
During
the Cold War, political and economic vacuums – spaces of state failure –
were destabilizing because there was always the threat of communist and
left nationalist state building projects filling those voids. Thus
American empire was certainly very violent during the Cold War, but it
also involved a commitment to “development” and “stability.” The US
attacked left movements and states, but it also cultivated successful
client states. The threat of “actually existing socialism” in the form
of the USSR and its allies meant the US was committed to actual
capitalist development. One has to recall that at the end of the WWII
the USSR looked pretty good if you were a poor person in Latin America
or Africa. The Soviets beat the Nazis, went to space, had subways,
universities, factories, scientists, globally renowned arts. The threat
of this example compelled the US to invest in making capitalism work, at
least a little bit, for the masses of the Global South. All over the
world the US embraced rather statist forms of capitalist development.
Often its client states in the Global South, though fundamentally
repressive, right-wing projects, nonetheless engaged in limited land
reform, for example Marcos in the Philippines, Diem in South Vietnam,
Duarte in El Salvador. Many US allies imposed capital controls that
hindered the free movement of speculative “hot money”; there were
numerous international agreements that sought to ensure price stability
in primary commodity markets, for example the International Coffee
Agreement of 1962. These mild intrusions upon the logic of the market
were designed to limit the misery of the global peasantry and thus keep
them from rebelling. Orthodox laissez-faire economics was not yet
hegemonic. Allied states in Europe and East Asia were given aid and
preferential trade agreements that helped their economies achieve rapid
industrialization – think, South Korea. The whole point was to make
global capitalism, with the US as the lead state and economy, look like a
better choice than socialism.
This
strategy is illustrated in the way the US treated Germany after World
War II. The Roosevelt Administration actually contemplated the forced
deindustrialization of occupied West Germany. A weak industrial sector
would mean a weak military. But it would also mean a poor and
disgruntled Germany that might look to the east with more interest than
would a prosperous industrial Germany.
However,
beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the developmentalist logic
of the US Empire eroded due to the rise of neoliberalism, which was
itself partly a reaction to the over accumulation and profit crisis of
the 1970s. American deindustrialization and the right-wing assault on
the welfare state accelerated during the 1980s. As American capitalism
deindustrialized and became increasing financialized, so too did its
foreign policy shift. Austerity became the name of the game, at home and
abroad. Developmentalist states everywhere were attacked in the name of
free trade and this radically decreased stability and social cohesion.
Then the collapse of the USSR in 1991 removed the threat of an
alternative example of development.
So,
by the 1990s US foreign policy was less concerned with creating stable
client states, and it is in 1991 with the collapse of Somalia that the
first modern failed state emerges. With socialism defeated and Keynesian
developmentalism banished from the universities and replaced by a
fanatical Hayekian fixation with the market, there was no reason to
prevent this sort of state collapse. In fact, failed states meshed well
with the Clinton era logic of “humanitarian intervention.” In the minds
of many Americans, the horrible spectacle of anarchy far away seemed to
prove that the world was dangerous place that very much needed the US
military to play global cop. Good bye post-Cold War “peace dividend.”
Hello to the so-called “forever war.”
And the IMF continues to 'suggest' to Iraq.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani spoke very clearly that Iraq should
avoid getting mixed up with and indebted to the IMF and the World Bank
but the US-installed prime minister refused to listen. Now it's
probably too late.In other news, MIDDLE EAST MONITOR ONLINE reports:
An armed Iraqi militia has threatened King
of Bahrain Hamad Bin Issa Al-Khalifa in the wake of the execution of
opposition Shia activists Ahmed Malali and Ali Al-Arab, Al-Khaleej Online reported yesterday.
Secretary-General
of the Master of Martyrs Brigades in Iraq, Abu Alaa Al-Walai, said in a
statement that “the hands of the Mujahideen reached those who were
stronger and more steadfast than the Bahrain regime.”
Al-Walai
said in the statement, which was posted on the group’s official
website: “We know which hands steer you and who encourages you: it is
the force of pride and arrogance.”
Former prime minister of Iraq, Hayder al-Abadi, made the militias part of the government. Recent declarations appear to indicate the militia sees itself as the voice of the government. Saturday, ALMASDAR NEWS reported:
An official from Hashd Al-Sha’abi reportedly stated this weekend that the U.S. Armed Forces inside Iraq must withdraw or else face future repercussions.
The Hashd Al-Sha’abi official, Mu’in Al-Kazhimi, was quoted by Baghdad Today as saying that Iraq has reached stability and does not need the U.S. Armed Forces inside the country.
“The attempt to expand and stay in Iraq by the U.S. is unacceptable, coupling with the fact that they are making Iraq a danger to their neighbors,” the official said.
Saturday, we noted, "In other news, on Wednesday, a young girl Rafif Hayder died while receiving care at a hospital in Diwaniya. The response on social media was to call out those responsible for her care. In response to being called out on social media? ALSUMARIA reports Diwaniya doctors held a general strike today. ALSUMARIA also reports that the police say no threats were made against the Diwaniya doctors to their knowledge but, if any are made, threats should be reported to the police. At present, it appears social media wants some accountability for the young girl's death and the doctors are sensitive to any criticism."
This morning, a pharmacist with the hospital Tweets:
Replying to and
Medical staff in Iraq left alone against angry, aggressive and emotionally motivated people.
When the Moh decided that a child death was the physician responsibility, without mentioning MOH responsibility of life saving device shortage
need support
#Save_the_Iraqi_Doctors
#Save_the_Iraqi_Doctors#Save the Iraqi Doctors?
From what? Questions and criticisms?
It's trending slightly and you look at the Tweets and see inflamatory b.s. like this.
Someone hit that woman? No, they just thought it was a good way to piggy back on other issues and get some attention. The way women are used is disgusting.
Save the Iraqi doctors!!! From what? Hard work? I think the below would be called whining.
For only 20$
I had a call of 24 hrs
On the same day I checked blood pressure for 88 person &bring9 pints of blood
And they said that it’s rotation & it’s good for learning
Learning what?how to check bp or how to hold blood?
Actually it’s how to be a slave
#save_the_iraqi_doctors
Imagine you’re a doctor in Iraq that means;working 6 days a week,12hr a day with a pay of 20$ a day with no facilities no equipment necessary to save life threatening conditions and above it all the people,government,and your ministry is against you #save_the_iraqi_doctors
Doctors have suffered in Iraq. They were part of the brain drain, women doctors have been repeatedly targeted.
But this 'save the Iraqi doctors' is largely nonsense.
The doctor's position is that they could have saved the little girl if they'd had the proper equipment. So make that your focus.
Stop thinking no one can criticize doctors or that a critique on social media is a threat of physical violence.
And the Tweets above and elsewhere by medical staff at that hospital? Here's a new hashtag to ponder #Stop humiliating yourself by making everything -- even the death of a young girl -- all about your and your feelings.