Filth

There is such a miasma of filth hovering over the news the past couple of days that it makes me sick. Really. Nauseated. Most of the news originates in Washington DC. That’s where the stink starts and it’s spreading so thickly that I can hardly breathe. When do people finally say “Enough” and scream to boot their skanky asses out of Washington?

1. According to Anderson Cooper’s TV program (about halfway down the page) yesterday, dozens of families have returned to their homes in the 9th ward (New Orleans) and found the decomposing bodies of relatives in their homes. That’s the area where searches for the dead were called off. Why? Who the hell knows. One hundred and four bodies have been found this way. Can you imagine walking back in to your house and finding a rotting body of someone you loved? After the authorities claimed that there were no more dead bodies to be found? Was it that poor people or poor black people weren’t worth the trouble? It’s a sick turn of events.

2. After vigorously denying that the US military used white phosphorous weapons in Fallujah, the Pentagon has now admitted that they indeed did use white phosphorous munitions against insurgents, but adamantly claim they did not target civilians. White phosphorous is a gas that has a chemical reaction with human flesh and continues to burn until the phosphorous is spent. It will burn all the way to the bone. It melts flesh. This is a hideous weapon. And since the military would not allow males over the age of 15 to leave Fallujah (because they might be insurgents), it’s a sure bet that there were a lot of innocent civilians trapped in Fallujah who were hideously burned alive. Civilians were targeted the moment authorities refused to allow people to leave the city. Some families refused to be separated and stayed together. There were women and children who were burned alive. They weren’t ‘officially’ targeted, but they were targeted nonetheless. The Pentagon claims the use of these weapons was legal. But moral? Decent? Humane? Well, those are words that have little weight or importance. Saddam gassed the Kurds. The US used chemical weapons in Fallujah. The things the Pentagon likes to call weapons of mass destruction. There’s a clue. Weapons of mass destruction don’t discriminate. They just kill anything in their path. If that includes melting the victims to death....eh. It’s legal.

3. Officials at the second largest oilfield in the world, the Burgan oil field in Kuwait, have announced that Burgan is exhausted and past peak. (Heads up from The Oil Drum)There is no way that more oil will be extracted from the wells than is currently being extracted. What it means is that progressively less and less oil will be extracted from the wells. That’s the second largest oil field in the world, next to the Saudi Ghawar oil field. Those in the oil industry state pretty plainly that there will never be another oil field discovered the size of Ghawar or Burgan. Those days are over. Worse, Burgan’s peaking gives a lot more credibility to Matthew Simmons’ claims that the Saudi Ghawar field is close to peaking or already peaking. When the oil isn’t there, what do we do then? Is there a Plan B? Plan C?

There was a hearing on Capitol Hill this week, with all the major execs of the major oil companies. The inevitable question came out: Were you involved with, present at VP Cheney’s Energy Task Force? Absolutely not, they all said. Then, the pesky Washington Post came out with an article that says otherwise, based on a White House document they got their hands on. It says that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc were all present and accounted for. So what was Cheney’s energy task force about? You know, the task force for which Congressional requests for documents have been stonewalled?

Well, according to Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, peak oil and securing Middle East oil was at the top of the list. Yes, I can see why the Veep wouldn’t want that to get out.

“We had a discussion in (the State Department’s Office of) Policy Planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields of the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly,” Wilkerson said. “That’s how serious we thought about it.”

The article goes on to say:

On Feb. 3, 2001 – only two weeks after Bush took office – an NSC document instructed NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney’s Energy Task Force because it was “melding” two previously unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states” and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”

Before this disclosure, which appeared in The New Yorker three years later, it was believed that Cheney’s secretive task force was focusing on ways to reduce environmental regulations and fend off the Kyoto protocol on global warming.

But the NSC document suggested that the Bush administration from its first days recognized the linkage between ousting unreliable leaders like Saddam Hussein and securing oil reserves for future U.S. consumption. In other words, the Cheney task force appears to have had a military component to “capture” oil fields in “rogue states.” [For more on the NSC document, see The New Yorker, Feb. 16, 2004.]

Wilkerson sums up:

“We consume 60 percent of the world’s resources,” he said. “We have an economy and we have a society that is built on the consumption of those resources. We better get fast at work changing the foundation – and I don’t see us fast at work on that, by the way, another failure of this administration, in my mind – or we better be ready to take those assets (in the Middle East).

A bunch of oil men running this administration who can only think in terms of oil. There is no Plan B other than waging war to secure the dwindling oil supplies for US consumption? Iraq, of course, was part of that plan. (WMD were merely digestible propaganda.) Is there a longer term plan? Haven’t heard of one, have you? I’ll bet the documents from Cheney’s Energy Task Force would shock the American people right out of their skins. Washington is a stinking cesspool.