Why doesn’t President Bush ask the Canadians or Mexicans?

Every once in a while a headline shows up where the U.S. President is asking the Saudis to increase oil production.
See this article
If the Saudis king says no, the press acts as if though the Arabs are controlling the United States. The United States imports just as much from Canada and Mexico (See See U.S. Energy Information Administration website, yet why doesn’t the President ask these countries to increase oil production? If he does, how come the mainstream media doesn’t report on it.

The Saudis invest trillions of dollars in the United States, but Canada and Mexico do not. Saudi Arabia buys billions of dollars worth of weapons from the United States, even though they do not have the qualified personnel to operate the weaponry. Saudi Arabia is just a storage place for weapons the United States uses in its military interventions in the Middle East and surrounding regions.

Thanks for Nothing Halliburton

This video shows how Halliburton overcharges for everything, but the soldiers are living under poor conditions. If this is how they are treating Americans, image how they are treating the Iraqis. Is there any wonder why there are Iraqis still fighting the Americans?

This is from the film Iraq for Sale

Crocodile tears for Darfur flood the civilized world

More celebrities are joining the crocodile tears for Darfur band wagon. See http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/celebrity-women-speak-with-one-voice-on-darfur/2007/09/16/1189881341251.html

Organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Save Darfur Coalition are silent on the role of the United States and other democracies in fueling the violence in Sudan.

See http://allthingspass.com/journalism.php?jid=165
And http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Oil_in_Africa/oil_in_africa.html

For some strange reason these activists are not too concerned about the Congo were a larger number of killings and rapes have occurred. Can it be because the United States, Israel and Europe benefit from the diamonds, other natural resources, and sale of weapons, that the death of millions of black Africans in the Congo is not so tragic?
See http://worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/congo.htm

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9832

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/JulAug2007/snow.html

Alan Greenspan: the Iraq war is largely about oil

The US and Britain have always maintained that the war to oust Saddam Hussein was about weapons of mass destruction – not oil.

US President George Bush said Saddam was a threat to world security because he could sell the weapons on to terrorists.

But Mr Greenspan, a Republican who was boss of the US Federal Reserve for 18 years, said that was not the whole truth, according to a copy of the book seen by Associated Press.

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he is reported to have written.

from http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1284299,00.html

Iraq Union Leaders Speak Out Against Occupation

By Ben Terrall
June 19th, 2007
Faleh Abood Umara, General Secretary of the Southern Oil Company Union (affiliated with the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions) worked for the Southern Oil Company in Basra for 28 years. Umara was detained by Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1998 for union activities. In the post-Saddam years he has worked on his union’s negotiating team with both the Oil Ministry and British occupation authorities, defending the rights of oil company workers.

His colleague Hashmeya Mushin Hussein, President of the Electrical Utility Workers Union, is the first woman to head a national union in Iraq. The Electrical Utility Workers are affiliated with the General Federation of Iraqi Workers (GFIW).

USLAW (U.S. Labor Against the War ) National Coordinator Michael Eisenscher introduced the speakers, pointing to the roots of Iraq labor unions in the country’s struggle against British imperialism, and the brave efforts of trade unionists under Saddam Hussein. Eisenscher noted that the June 2005 tour of Iraqi labor leaders USLAW coordinated (all three of the labor federations represented on that tour called for an end to the occupation in order to restore peace and end terrorism in Iraq) took place a month before a national meeting of the AFL-CIO, thereby helping achieve passage of a resolution by that U.S. labor body saying troops in Iraq “deserve a commitment from our country’s leaders to bring them home rapidly.” Eisenscher described this as the first time in its 50 year history that the federation took a position in opposition to a U.S. war while it was being waged, contrasting with unfortunate past history that earned it the label “AFL-CIA.” (The federation long served as an echo chamber for Washington’s cold war anti-communism, and helped facilitate brutal repression in Latin America and elsewhere.
.
.
.
Since the U.S. high command has announced that it will arm “Sunni insurgents,” allegedly to fight al-Quaida, after years of equipping Shia militias, it doesn’t take much effort to see how Washington might be contributing to fragmentation in Iraq. And as Iraq specialists Antonia Juhasz and Raed Jarrar wrote about the oil law on CounterPunch: “Many Iraqi oil experts are already referring to the draft law as the “Split Iraq Fund,” arguing that it facilitates plans for splitting Iraq into three ethnic/religious regions. The experts believe the law undermines the central government and shifts important decision-making and responsibilities to the regional entities. This shift could serve as the foundation for establishing three new independent states, which is the goal of a number of separatists leaders.”
Meanwhile, the Iraq oil law’s granting dominance to multinational oil giants behind the Bush Administration continues to be largely overlooked by the U.S. media and politicians in Washington. Instead, the mostly unquestioned spin from Washington is that the U.S. is working to heal divisions: UPI energy correspondent Ben Lando, who has written extensively about the oil workers’s strike, this week described Lt. Gen Martin as “the latest U.S. government official to push a common but false claim that the controversial draft oil law will lead to a just division of the proceeds from oil sales and pave the way for reconciliation in the war-torn nation.”
In fact, under the Iraq oil law still being negotiated, foreign oil giants stand to be the primary beneficiaries of those proceeds.
As Antonia Juhasz wrote, “The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire Iraqi workers or share new technologies. They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country. The vast majority of Iraq’s oil would then be left underground for at least two years rather than being used for the country’s economic development.
Complete article is at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/06/iraq-union-leaders-speak-out-against-occupation/
Additional information at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/06/1359232

Website of U.S. Labor Against the War is at http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/

Those who blow whistle on contractor fraud in Iraq face penalties

Corruption has long plagued Iraq reconstruction. Hundreds of projects may never be finished, including repairs to the country’s oil pipelines and electricity system. Congress gave more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq, and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared, according to a government reconstruction audit.

Despite this staggering mess, there are no noble outcomes for those who have blown the whistle, according to a review of such cases by The Associated Press.

”If you do it, you will be destroyed,” said William Weaver, professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

”Reconstruction is so rife with corruption. Sometimes people ask me, ‘Should I do this?’ And my answer is no. If they’re married, they’ll lose their family. They will lose their jobs. They will lose everything,” Weaver said.

They have been fired or demoted, shunned by colleagues, and denied government support in whistleblower lawsuits filed against contracting firms.

”The only way we can find out what is going on is for someone to come forward and let us know,” said Beth Daley of the Project on Government Oversight, an independent, nonprofit group that investigates corruption. ”But when they do, the weight of the government comes down on them. The message is, ‘Don’t blow the whistle or we’ll make your life hell.’

”It’s heartbreaking,” Daley said. ”There is an even greater need for whistleblowers now. But they are made into public martyrs. It’s a disgrace. Their lives get ruined.”

Bunnatine ”Bunny” Greenhouse knows this only too well. As the highest-ranking civilian contracting officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she testified before a congressional committee in 2005 that she found widespread fraud in multibillion-dollar rebuilding contracts awarded to former Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

Soon after, Greenhouse was demoted. She now sits in a tiny cubicle in a different department with very little to do and no decision-making authority, at the end of an otherwise exemplary 20-year career.

People she has known for years no longer speak to her.

complete article here http://www.newspress.com/Top/Article/article.jsp?Section=NATIONAL&ID=565074540867487317  It’s written by DEBORAH HASTINGS, AP National Writer, August 24, 2007

Judith Miller and the Bloodbath in Iraq (Repeat)

Here is a reminder of Judith Miller’s contribution to journalism by Jospeh A. Palermo

On April 21, 2003, Judith Miller, now working as an embedded reporter with the U.S. military’s MET Alpha, wrote the story, “Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert.” In this piece of propaganda, Miller claims without evidence or proof that the Iraqis destroyed or shipped to Syria their vast stockpiles of WMDs. Miller’s anonymous source was a guy claiming to be an “Iraqi scientist,” and she tells her readers that she “was permitted to see him from a distance at the sites where he said that material from the arms program was buried. Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried.”

This “Iraqi scientist,” who turned out to be bogus, allowed Miller to appear on PBS’s Newshour with Jim Lehrer and have the following exchange:…

complete article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/judith-miller-and-the-blo_b_57023.html

United States oil imports and Saudi Arabia investments

According to http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html

in March 2007,
the top 5 countries that the U.S. imported crude oil from are
Canada 1,780,000 barrels per day
Mexico 1,621,000 barrels per day
Nigeria 1,290,000 barrels per day
Saudi Arabia 1,216,000 barrels per day
Venezuela 1,036,000 barrels per day

And the top 5 countries that the U.S. imported Petroleum from are
Canada 2,305,000 barrels per day
Mexico 1,749,000 barrels per day
Nigeria 1,346,000 barrels per day
Venezuela 1,285,000 barrels per day
Saudi Arabia 1,244,000 barrels per day

According to http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2089.htm

“Canada and the U.S. have one of the world’s largest investment relationships. The U.S. is Canada’s largest foreign investor. Statistics Canada reports that at the end of 2005, the stock of U.S. foreign direct investment in Canada was $228 billion, or about 65% of total foreign direct investment in
Canada. U.S. investment is primarily in Canada’s mining and smelting industries, petroleum, chemicals, the manufacture of machinery and transportation equipment, and finance. ”

On the same government website it says about
Saudia Arabia at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3584.htm

During and after the Gulf War, the Government of Saudi Arabia provided water, food, shelter, and fuel for coalition forces in the region. There also were monetary payments to some coalition partners. Saudi Arabia’s combined costs
in payments, foregone revenues, and donated supplies were $55 billion. More than $15 billion went toward reimbursing the United States alone.

It does not give figures about how much Saudi Arabia invests in the United States and vice versa.

Here (http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20060115-103622-3038r.htm ) is an article that says “…government sources estimate Saudi holdings in the United States at $400 billion to $800 billion.”
This particular article is warning us of the influence Saudi contributions to media outlets and Universities will have. The reality is whatever influence they have is negligible in these areas.

Another way the U.S. gets back its money from purchasing oil is by selling the Saudis sophisticated expensive weaponry. ( http://www.fas.org/asmp/profiles/saudi_arabia.htm ) The Saudis don’t have the qualified personnel to use the weaponry, which is why they and Kuwait had to look to the United States for help when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.