Not Afghanistan
Why fight a war to protect a drug trade and the tracks for a UNOCAL pipeline in Afghanistan when we should be investing in Infastructure in the US? Does someone in the Administration have a deal going on with UNOCAL through their connections to Bush 41 et at.? If so, would this be unethical not to disclose it as a conflict of interest?
Look at the BILLIONS spent in the defense industries to get more or less the same political mess in Afghanistan and ask yourself-- Should this instead be used to fund Infastructure and Green Economy conversion projects IN THE US?
What if: we had High Speed Rail lines connecting Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and Washington, DC to Atlanta, or Philadelphia, New York and Boston? What if we had High Speed rail lines that connected Chicago with Los Angeles?
What if: every closed plant put those people back to work developing bio-fuels domestically, making solar, wind turbine energies, or developed safe nuclear. What if we had rooftop parks and gardens with reconfigured green buildings irrigating organic produce consumed in the area.
What if: the money spent in making war could be spent curing us in subsidized or free health care?
What is your "what if?"
What if we didn't fight wars for oil companies misappropriating the Name of God to serve our
lack of innovation and insight and misdirection of resources?
WE HAVE LOTS OF NATURAL GAS IN PENNSYLVANIA.
And if we figure out how to capture carbon we can make even coal clean.
http://www.ringnebula.com/Oil/Timeline.htm
Friday, November 06, 2009
Thursday, November 05, 2009
So How Dark Was Cheney's 'Dark Side' Really? :Pretty Damn Dark.
Former UK ambassador says CIA sent people to be ‘raped with broken bottles’
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Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.
"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles," he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. "I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."
Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is "endemic" to the country's justice system.
Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a "totalitarian" state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.
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Suspects in Uzbekistan's gulags "were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they'd been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes."
"I was absolutely stunned -- it changed my whole world view in an instant -- to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn't do the torture ourselves," Murray said.
IT'S THE PIPELINE, STUPID
Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.
Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan's natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.
"The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan," Murray noted.
Murray said part of the motive in hyping up the threat of Islamic terrorism in Uzbekistan through forced confessions was to ensure the country remained on-side in the war on terror, so that the pipeline could be built.
"There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It's what it's about. It's about money, it's about oil, it's not about democracy."
The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is slated to be completed in 2014, with $7.6 billion in funding from the Asian Development Bank.
Murray was dismissed from his position as ambassador in 2004, following his first public allegations that the British government relied on torture in Uzbekistan for intelligence.
The following videos were posted to YouTube by the Real News Network on Oct. 26 and Nov. 4, 2009.
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