One brave soldiers march across Utah

Journey across Utah: Iraq vet's 'stunt' turns to solace

Marshall Thompson: Protest walk from state's northern border to southern brings out hundreds of admirers in even 'reddest' area

It was a stunt, he said. Just a way to get people to pay attention to a war many seemed content to brush aside.

Army journalist Marshall Thompson, recently returned from the Iraq war, publicized his trek across Utah as a means to encourage those in the nation's "reddest" state to talk about ways to bring his fellow service members home.But for the 28-year-old veteran from Logan, it was a journey more personal than he'd ever admitted.

Even to himself.

He had always been a dove, albeit one in Army fatigues.So as his nation lurched toward war in Iraq, Marshall Thompson was wary.The Logan soldier had joined the Army Reserves, enlisting as a journalist, upon returning from a church mission in Europe during which he felt immense appreciation for his country. A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Thompson had been raised to believe in the justness of military service.

He understood his church's scriptures to permit war - as a last resort. The son of a politician, Thompson believed his nation's leaders shared his values.But as the Iraq invasion approached, Thompson concluded he had been wrong. As an invasion-sized legion of U.S. troops moved into Kuwait, he joined protesters in Logan to demonstrate against the attack. In doing so, he found it was not just political leaders who wanted to go to war.

"We were met by so many counter-protesters," Thompson said. "And they were so angry. The police had to come and stand between us, to protect us."As the Army called him into active service, Thompson couldn't even convince his own father - then Logan's mayor - that war was a wrong course.

Leaving his new wife - pregnant with their first child - was tough enough. Doing so without his father's understanding was dispiriting."It broke my heart when we didn't see eye to eye," Thompson said.

Coming home: Stationed on a large, often-attacked base in northern Iraq, the Army propagandist traveled all over Iraq on orders to seek uplifting stories about fellow troops. Yet Thompson's experiences only further confirmed his fears.

Among U.S. troops he found low morale, brutal tactics and a dehumanizing distance from the people whose country they occupied. Among Iraqis he found anger, fear and distrust of the American occupation.

His superiors allowed him to write about none of those things."We wrote in code," Thompson said. "Like, when we would write, 'This soldier has overcome many obstacles', it meant he pretty much complained about his job during the entire interview."
He returned home on July 24 - Pioneer Day in Utah. The blasts of exploding fireworks left him anxious and jumpy.

In Utah, where polls indicate support for the Iraq war runs higher than in any other state, Thompson found many who wanted to hear the kind of news he had been assigned to find in Iraq."I felt so alienated," he said. "What people wanted to hear was not what I was able to tell them."

Before returning home, Thompson and his wife, Kristen, discussed how they could help make the case for a withdrawal of U.S. troops. A few weeks after his return, they decided: From Idaho to Arizona, he would walk across the "reddest" state in the nation. He could do it in a month - roughly a day of walking for every 100 service members killed in the war.

The stunt, as Thompson called it on his Web site - www.soldierspeace.com - had its intended effect: Media attention drove thousands to his site before he had taken a single step.The journey began early on the morning of Oct. 2. Approaching Logan that afternoon, Thompson braced himself for a spiteful response, akin to what he had tasted during the prewar protest.

Instead, more than 150 people gathered to walk by his side. Among the ranks was Thompson's father - who in the months since his son's return had come to the conclusion that the war in Iraq needed to end.Over the next month, Doug Thompson would spend many days walking with his boy."It was as if I was finally home," Marshall Thompson said.

Support and sorrow: Thompson logged 25 miles in his first day. Brutally sore the following morning, he found encouragement in the companionship of a Vietnam vet from Oregon, who had learned of the protest on the radio.Doug Firstbrook hadn't planned on making the entire trek. But he saw something in Thompson that was painfully familiar.

"We had similar jobs," said Firstbrook, a former Army journalist. "We both saw, firsthand, how information was manipulated and suppressed by the military. We both had a part in it."The gray-bearded carpenter decided to stay by Thompson's side, logging an average of 20 miles each day through wind and rain and snow.

In Salt Lake City - a blue dot on a very red map - about 100 people turned out to walk. But the real surprise came as he marched into Provo, past Ephraim, and through Richfield. In every town he had written off as "too red" for his message, Thompson found flocks who agreed.But as he moved farther south, the initial euphoria of his successes faded away. Greater distances separated smaller towns. And even with Firstbrook and sporadic others at his side, the miles were quiet and lonely.

Then, two weeks in, Kristen called with some frightening news: Their infant daughter, Eliza, had a lump on her neck. Doctors feared cancer, maybe leukemia.Sitting alone in a hotel in Panguich, Thompson was awash in doubt.

"I thought: Is it worth it? I mean, it was just a stunt," he said. "We were having a family crisis and here I was in the middle of Nowhere, Utah - walking for peace."But Kristen turned down her husband's offer to return home.

"We'll be OK," she told him. "We made it through a year with you in Iraq. We'll get through this."For Kristen, the walk had become more than a stunt. With each passing mile, she could see her husband was changing. And she wanted him to continue.

Dealing with the dreams: Marshall Thompson wasn't unrecognizable to his wife when he returned home from Iraq - but he was different.By his own admission, he angered easier and had less patience - symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He slept fitfully. And, on at least one occasion, Kristen had to wake her husband from a dream so real and terrifying that he was sobbing in his sleep.

But as he walked, connecting with fellow veterans, his father, and others "who love and accept me just for the fact that I came home alive," Thompson felt his symptoms melting away."Every symptom of PTSD, and especially the anger, just disappeared completely," he said. "For the first time since coming home I felt very in control and very normal."

And with that came the ability to deal with things once hidden.

There is a lot of time to think in 500 miles. And as he walked, Thompson's thoughts turned often to a night he spent on a dark highway near Balad, Iraq.His truck, separated from its convoy, was waiting on the side of the road when a civilian vehicle pulled up and flashed its lights. The driver waited a moment, then flashed again.

On a night which began with small arms fire and included several close calls with roadside bombs, the commander of Thompson's truck was nervous the civilian driver might be signaling an attack. He ordered Thompson to point his rifle at the driver of the car."He said, 'If he flashes his lights again, kill him.' "

For three hours, Thompson trained his sights on the driver's head. Seated on the gravel side of Utah's Highway 89, a day's walk south of Hatch, last week, Thompson cried at the memory."It's so horrible, because you have this guy - can you imagine how terrified he must have been?"Implied in the truck commander's order was a moral decision difficult for Thompson to accept: That the life of the car's driver - most likely a civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time - was worth less than his own.

And yet Thompson knew how he would have reacted had the lights flashed again. He had been given three hours to think it over and he was certain."I would have killed him," he sobbed. "Just a man. An innocent person. How can you possibly square that with what you believe?"

A soldier's peace: Doctors plan to perform a biopsy on the lump on Eliza Thompson's neck later this week. Because she's shown no other signs of sickness, they are hopeful it is not cancerous, but the little girl's father still worries.He wants to be near his daughter. He misses his wife. He pines for his bed. His feet are tired and, even as he moves farther south, the days are growing darker, colder. And so the soldier is eager for his walk to end as planned on Wednesday, even if the journey has helped him in ways he couldn't have comprehended.

When he began, on the Idaho border, Thompson called his trek a stunt. But now, as he approaches Arizona, he's more apt to call it penance."I think that maybe I've known that from the beginning," he said. "But I didn't want to say it. When you say something like that, I think, it's hard for people to understand."And yet understanding, he has come to realize, is not so hard to find.

Even for a dove in Army fatigues. Even in Utah.

http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_4573237

If you click on the link above, you'll get to see Sgt. Thompson's website. It's a good place to spend some time.

Here is his website:

http://www.asoldierspeace.com/

Here is his journal of the trip :

http://www.asoldierspeace.com/journal.htm


Keep marching, soldier.....


Four days to go, twenty four days done already.


"No matter what you think about the war, never disrespect the warrior."

The Sermon Of The Key, And Of The Chains.

If you are ever going through some tough times, here's a little thought from me that might help to make that journey a little easier.

One day, in that darkness of the darkest night of the soul, he had put his hand out in front of him, fist clenched, and palm up.

When he slowly opened up his fist, he noticed something there that he'd never ever seen before, something that had been there all that time, but unnoticed and hidden to his view.

Now it was revealed to him, a tiny golden key that fit perfectly into every lock, on every chain, that had ever held him. He realized that he'd actually placed them all on himself (quite willingly, if the truth be told) , and that he had always had that key.

Once freed of those chains, he was forever also free of making the same mistake ever again. It had taken a long time, but one sometimes has to pay a heavy price to learn a valuable lesson.

And thus endeth the sermon of the Key and of the Chains, on a rainy and cold Sunday Montreal evening....

Waterboarding - a video demonstration

I thought it might be a good idea to show the world what waterboarding really looks like.

Current TV has done a couple of video clips demonstrating the types of techniques used today by American interrogators.



The uncut version :



America, this is what is being done in your name.

After WW2 this was considered a war crime by American prosecutors - and now it's official US government policy.

Huxley's Ultimate Revolution

Aldous Huxley gave a speech on March 20, 1962 at Berkeley Language Center. There are both audio recordings of that speech, as well as transcripts. It was called "The Ultimate Revolution", and went into some of the same areas we see in the novel 1984. In fact, Huxley even mentions that work by Orwell during his talk.

Here is an excerpt from that speech :

In the past we can say that all revolutions have essentially
aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. I mean there's been the political revolution, the economic revolution, in the time of the reformation, the religious revolution. All these aimed, not directly at the human being, but at his surroundings. So that by modifying the surroundings you did achieve, did one remove the effect of the human being.

Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate
revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his
fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a violent nature.

The Techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have
employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty,
sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.

But, as, I think it was (sounds like Mettenicht) said many years ago, you can do
everything with {garbled} except sit on them. If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, it's exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them.

It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has interested me many years and about which I wrote thirty years ago, a fable, Brave New World, which is an account of society making use of all the devices available and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create, to say, mass produced models of human beings arranged in some sort of scientific caste system. Since then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them thirty years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true.

A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already. And there seems
to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, a method of control by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of servitude, Well this process is, as I say, has gone on for over the years, and I have become more and more interested in what is happening.

And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World with another
parable which was put forth more recently in George Orwell's book, Nineteen Eighty-
Four. Orwell wrote his book between, I think between 45 and 48 at the time when the
Stalinist terror regime was still in Full swing and just after the collapse of the Hitlerian terror regime. And his book which I admire greatly, it's a book of very great talent and extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to say, a projection into the future of the immediate past, of what for him was the immediate past, and the immediate present, it was a projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.

Whereas my own book which was written in 1932 when there was only a mild
dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence, was not overshadowed by the idea of terrorism, and I was therefore free in a way in which Orwell was not free, to think about these other methods of control, these non-violent methods and my, I'm inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer to the brave new world pattern than to the 1984 pattern, they will a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the BNW pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other.

That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they're living. The state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society. Much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps. So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture was tinged of course by the immediate past and present in which Orwell was living, but the past and present of those years does not reflect, I feel, the likely trend of what is going to happen, needless to say we shall never get rid of terrorism, it will always find its way to the surface.

But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more
concerned with the technically perfect, perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in BNW. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate revolution is not really very far away, that we, already a number of techniques for bringing about this kind of control are here, and it remains to be seen when and where and by whom they will first be applied in any large scale.

And first let me talk about the, a little bit about the, improvement in the techniques of terrorism. I think there have been improvements. Pavlov after all made some extremely profound observations both on animals and on human beings. And he found among other things that conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state either of psychological or physical stress sank in so to say, very deeply into the mind-body of the creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid of. That they seemed to be embedded more deeply than other forms of conditioning.

And this of course, this fact was discovered empirically in the past. People did make use of many of these techniques, but the difference between the old empirical intuitive methods and our own methods is the difference between the, a sort of, hit and miss craftsman's point of view and the genuinely scientific point of view. I think there is a real difference between ourselves and say the inquisitors of the 16th century. We know much more precisely what we are doing, than they knew and we can extend because of our theoretical knowledge, we can extend what we are doing over a wider area with a greater assurance of being producing something that really works.

In this context I would like to mention the extremely interesting chapters in Dr. William (sounds like Seargent's) Battle for the Mind where he points out how intuitively some of the great religious teachers/leaders of the past hit on the Pavlovian method, he speaks specifically of Wesley's method of producing conversions which were essentially based on the technique of heightening psychological stress to the limit by talking about hellfire and so making people extremely vulnerable to suggestion and then suddenly releasing this stress by offering hopes of heaven and this is a very interesting chapter of showing how completely on purely intuitive and empirical grounds a skilled natural psychologist, as Wesley was, could discover these Pavlovian methods.

Well, as I say, we now know the reason why these techniques worked and there's no
doubt at all that we can if we wanted to, carry them much further than was possible in the past. And of course in the history of, recent history of brainwashing, both as applied to prisoners of war and to the lower personnel within the communist party in China, we see that the pavlovian methods have been applied systematically and with evidently with extraordinary efficacy. I think there can be no doubt that by the application of these methods a very large army of totally devoted people has been created. The conditioning has been driven in, so to say, by a kind of psychological iontophoresis into the very depths of the people's being, and has got so deep that it's very difficult to ever be rooted out, and these methods, I think, are a real refinement on the older methods of terror because they combine methods of terror with methods of acceptance that the person who is subjected to a form of terroristic stress but for the purpose of inducing a kind of voluntary quotes acceptance of the state the psychological state in which he has been driven and the state of affairs in which he finds himself.

http://www.libertythink.com/Huxleytranscript.txt


I see TV as a large part of the problem. It's very nature makes it's audience passive. In a way, it allows for an almost perfect opportunity to lull people into belief. It's not unlike an electronic pulpit, where one sits there and listens - and never speaks back to the "voice of authority."

That can be CNN or FOX , but the essential dynamic is the same.

Don't forget that when the first movies were shown, people reacted in a rather fascinating way. We've all seen those early black and white films, that were quite primitive.

I remember reading a story where people ran out of a theatre in fear , in those first days of movies, when they saw a train coming on the screen.

Now, for us, that seems impossible to have happened. A grainy black and white film, a theatre, and yet....terror ? That's how much we've changed as a visual society.

Occasionally today, when we are involved with certain video games or modern day films, we can be exposed to an almost "real" sensation of fear, in much the same way.

We sit there on our sofas and chairs, and we absorb messages that are delivered to us, and they are repeated and reinforced in waves upon us. It's very much like a hypnosis of sorts, where people sit in dark rooms, relaxed, and are "programmed" by what they hear.

A film that really should be reviewed is "Network", which was to me a visionary movie. It speaks of some of the things I am trying to argue here.

Now if you take people and constantly show them horrific visual images, and endlessly fabricate apocolyptic visions of the future, and you keep doing that over and over again - you have projected this fear almost into their DNA structure.

If at the same time you offer a vision of strength, visual icons of power, and direct ties to God - one cant start to increase the control over the population. It is a Pavlovian process of creating a deep programing by using a psychological base of stress to assist you.

The more fear you create (and that can be on many levels, including economic ones) , the more mistrust you generate amongst your believers about everyone else in the world - the more power you have over them.

In a very real sense, modern media can be manipulated almost in the same manner that a cult leader's pulpit can be.

The War For Oil And Profit

In case you are still one of those people that thinks that democracy or security were the root causes of the Iraq war - here's some more "oil on the fire". This is a two part story, well researched , that will end any doubt of the real reasons behind this war - and it's deceptions.

Joshua Holland has done some great work, and he should be commended for telling the story that the mainstream American media is too afraid to address.

I strongly suggest people read these two articles, and understand the implications of the factual evidence presented.

Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted October 16, 2006.

Even as Iraq verges on splintering into a sectarian civil war, four big oil companies are on the verge of locking up its massive, profitable reserves, known to everyone in the petroleum industry as "the prize."

Iraq is sitting on a mother lode of some of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on earth, and the rules that will determine who will control it and on what terms are about to be set.

The Iraqi government faces a December deadline, imposed by the world's wealthiest countries, to complete its final oil law. Industry analysts expect that the result will be a radical departure from the laws governing the country's oil-rich neighbors, giving foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than with other major oil producers and locking in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades, regardless of what kind of policies future elected governments might want to pursue.

Iraq's energy reserves are an incredibly rich prize. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, "Iraq contains 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the second largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia), along with roughly 220 billion barrels of probable and possible resources. Iraq's true potential may be far greater than this, however, as the country is relatively unexplored due to years of war and sanctions." For perspective, the Saudis have 260 billion barrels of proven reserves.

Iraqi oil is close to the surface and easy to extract, making it all the more profitable. James Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, points out that oil companies "can produce a barrel of Iraqi oil for less than $1.50 and possibly as little as $1, including all exploration, oilfield development and production costs." Contrast that with other areas where oil is considered cheap to produce at $5 per barrel or the North Sea, where production costs are $12-16 per barrel.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43045/

That's part one, and here is part two :

The Bush administration has co-opted the compassionate language of debt relief to ensure that Big Oil gets its way in Iraq.

With 140,000 U.S. troops on the ground, the largest U.S. embassy in the world sequestered in Baghdad's fortified "Green Zone" and an economy designed by a consulting firm in McLean, Va., post-invasion Iraq was well on its way to becoming a bonanza for foreign investors.

But Big Oil had its sights set on a specific arrangement -- the lucrative production sharing agreements that lock in multinationals' control for long terms and are virtually unheard of in countries as rich in easily accessible oil as Iraq.

The occupation authorities would have to steer an ostensibly sovereign government to the outcome they desired, and they'd have to overcome any resistance that they encountered from the fiercely independent and understandably wary Iraqis along the way. Finally, they'd have to make sure that the Anglo-American firms were well-positioned to win the lion's share of the choicest contracts.

And that's where the most common -- almost ubiquitous -- tool of neocolonialism, debt, came into play. In this case, massive, crushing debt run up by a dictator who treated himself and his cronies to palaces and other luxuries, spent lavishly on weapons for Iraq's war with Iran -- fought in part on behalf of the United States -- and owed Kuwait billions of dollars in reparations for the 1990 invasion.

To put Iraq's foreign debt in perspective, if the country's economy were the size of the United States', then its obligations in 2004, proportionally, would have equaled around $55 trillion, according to IMF figures (and that doesn't include reparations from the first Gulf War).

Clearly, that amount of debt was unsustainable, and the Bush administration launched a full-court press to get creditor nations to forgive at least part of the new government's debt burden. Former Secretary of State James Baker, long the Bush family's "fixer," was dispatched on a tour of the world's capitals to cut deals on behalf of the Iraqis.

The administration raised eyebrows in the NGO community when it adopted the language of debt-relief activists to frame their pitch. Bush, and Baker, called it "odious" debt, debt that financed the whims of a brutal dictator and used against the interests of the Iraqi population. Under international law, "odious" debt, in theory at least, doesn't need to be forgiven; it's written off as a dictator's illicit gains. As one might expect, wealthy creditor nations have long resisted the concept.

Debt-relief activists Basav Sen and Hope Chu wrote that the move "seemed inexplicable at first." But it soon became clear that Iraq's debt-relief program was, in fact, a way of locking in Iraq's economic transformation.

The largest chunk of debt, $120 billion, was owed to the Paris Club, a group of 19 industrialized nations. Baker negotiated a deal whereby the Paris Club would forgive 80 percent of Iraq's debt, but the catch -- and it was a big one -- was that Iraq had to agree to an economic "reform" package administered by the International Monetary Fund, an institution dominated by the wealthiest countries and infamous across the developing world for its painful and unpopular Structural Adjustment Protocols.

The debt would be written off in stages; 30 percent would be cancelled outright, another 30 percent when an elected Iraqi government accepted an IMF structural reform agreement and a final 20 percent after the IMF had monitored its implementation for three years. This gave the IMF the role of watchdog over the country's new economy, despite the fact that its share of the country's debt burden was less than 1 percent of the total.

Among a number of provisions in the IMF agreement, along with privatizing state-run companies (which resulted in the layoffs of an estimated 145,000 Iraqis), slashing government pensions and phasing out the subsidies on food and fuel that many Iraqis depended on, was a commitment to develop Iraq's oil in partnership with the private sector. Then-Finance Minister Adel Abdul Mehdi said, none too happily, that the deal would be "very promising to the American investors and to American enterprise, certainly to oil companies." The Iraqi National Assembly released a statement saying, "the Paris Club has no right to make decisions and impose IMF conditions on Iraq," and called it "a new crime committed by the creditors who financed Saddam's oppression." And Zaid Al-Ali, an international lawyer who works with the NGO Jubilee Iraq, said it was "a perfect illustration of how the industrialized world has used debt as a tool to force developing nations to surrender sovereignty over their economies."

The icing on the cake is that the deal James Baker negotiated with the Paris Club refers to Iraq as an "exceptional situation"; no precedent was set that would allow other highly indebted countries saddled with odious debt from their own past dictators to claim similar relief.

The deadline the Iraqi government must meet for the completion of its final oil law in December is a "benchmark" in the IMF agreement.

In an investigation for the Nation, Naomi Klein discovered that Baker had pursued his mission with an eye-popping conflict of interest. Klein discovered that a consortium that included the Carlyle Group, of which Baker is believed to have a $180 million stake, had contracted with Kuwait to make sure that the money it was owed by Iraq would be excluded from any debt-relief package. When Baker met with the Kuwaiti emir to beg forgiveness for Iraq's odious debt, he had a direct interest in making sure he didn't get it.

Another major creditor was Saudi Arabia. The Carlyle Group has extensive business dealings with the kingdom and Baker's law firm, Baker Botts, was representing the monarchy in a suit brought by the families of the victims of 9/11.

The most recent IMF report (PDF) shows how successfully he failed: "While most Paris Club official creditors have now signed bilateral agreements, progress has been slow in resolving non-Paris Club official claims, especially those of Gulf countries," it says. It's likely that Iraq, a country occupied for three years, devastated by 12 years of sanctions and with a per capita GDP of $3,400, will end up paying reparations to Kuwait, a country with a per capita GDP of over $19,000, for the five months Saddam occupied his neighbor in late 1990 and early 1991.

Iraq will still face a mountain of debt even if it meets all of the "benchmarks" required of it -- the IMF expects the country's debt service to equal five percent of its economic output in 2011 and warns that even a minor price shock in the oil market "would require significant borrowing from the international markets to close the financing gaps."

"Sovereign" debt is transferable between governments; if a new strongman arises or Iraq becomes a loose federation, the debt will remain on the books and defaulting on it, while a possibility, has serious long-term consequences.

All of this is about bringing different forms of pressure onto Iraq's nascent government, not controlling it, and it's an important distinction. Before and since the "handover" to Iraq's government, the Green Zone has been overrun with "advisers" from Big Oil. Aram Roston wrote, "It's clear that there is not just the one Iraqi Oil Ministry, but a parallel 'shadow' ministry run by American advisers." In business, that's known as "positioning."

Phillip Carroll, a former chief executive with Royal Dutch/Shell and a 15-member "board of advisors" were appointed to oversee Iraq's oil industry during the transition period. According to the Guardian, the group "would represent Iraq at meetings of OPEC." Carroll had been working with the Pentagon for months before the invasion -- even while the administration was still insisting that it sought a peaceful resolution to the Iraq crisis -- "developing contingency plans for Iraq's oil sector in the event of war." According to the Houston Chronicle, "He assumed his work was completed, he said, until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called him shortly after the U.S.-led invasion began and offered him the oil adviser's job." Carroll, in addition to running Shell Oil in the United States, was a former CEO of the Fluor Corp., a well-connected oil services firm with extensive projects in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and at least $1.6 billion in contracts for Iraq's reconstruction. He was joined by Gary Vogler, a former executive with ExxonMobile, in Iraq's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

After spending six months in the post, Carroll was replaced by Robert E. McKee III, a former ConocoPhillips executive. According to the Houston Chronicle, "His selection as the Bush administration's energy czar in Iraq" drew fire from congressional Democrats "because of his ties to the prime contractor in the Iraqi oil fields, Houston-based Halliburton Co. He's the chairman of a venture partitioned by the … firm."

The administration selected Chevron Vice President Norm Szydlowski to serve as a liaison between the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Now the CEO of the appropriately named Colonial Pipeline Co., he continues to work with the Iraq Energy Roundtable, a project of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, which recently sponsored a meeting to "bring together oil and gas sector leaders in the U.S. with key decision makers from the Iraq Ministry of Oil."

Terry Adams and Bob Morgan of BP, and Mike Stinson of ConocoPhillips would also serve as advisors during the transition.

After the CPA handed over the reigns to Iraq's interim government, the embassy's "shadow" oil ministry continued to work closely with the Iraqis to shape future oil policy. Platform's Greg Muttit wrote that "senior oil advisers -- now based within the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office (IRMO) in the U.S. Embassy ... included executives from ChevronTexaco and Unocal." After the handover, a senior U.S. official said: "We're still here. We'll be paying a lot of attention, and we'll have a lot of influence. We're going to have the world's largest diplomatic mission with a significant amount of political weight."

The majors have also engaged in good, old-fashioned lobbying. In 2004, Shell advertised for an Iraqi lobbyist with good contacts among Iraq's emerging elites. The firm sought "a person of Iraqi extraction with strong family connections and an insight into the network of families of significance within Iraq." According to Platform, just weeks after the invasion, in a meeting with oil company execs and Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer in London, former British Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind promised to personally lobby****Cheney for contracts on behalf of several firms, including Shell.

Meanwhile, major oil firms were positioning themselves so that they'd have the best contacts in the new government. According to the Associated Press, "The world's three biggest integrated oil companies" -- BP, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch/Shell -- "struck cooperation or training deals with Iraq" in 2005. "It's a way to maintain contact and get the oil officials to know about them," former Iraqi Oil Minister Issam Chalabi told the AP. And it seems to have worked; in May, Iraq's current oil minister, Husayn al-Shahristani, said that one of his top priorities would be to finalize an oil law and sign contracts with "the largest companies."

Washington has its hands all over the drafting of that law. Early on, in 2003, USAID commissioned BearingPoint, Inc. -- the new name for the scandal-plagued Arthur Anderson Consulting -- to submit recommendations for the development of Iraq's oil sector. BearingPoint was the firm that designed the country's economic transformation under a previous USAID contract, so it was no surprise that its report reinforced the preference for PSAs that "everybody [kept] kept coming back to" during meetings of the State Department's "Future of Iraq Project."


http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43077/

It's quite a revealing look into the root causes of this war, the REAL reasons, and the picture it draws is quite clear. As early as March 2001, the first meetings of the NSC decided that the war in Iraq was on - and that the oil fields were being divided up.

Those documents have been released under the Freedom of Information Act - and are irrefutable.

Couple this with the close industry ties with this administration ( who were also drawing up plans for energy with the Cheney Task Force group at the same time) , who gave the energy industry almost a carte blanche ability to set American national policy ( and to even write some regulations ), as well as them doing exactly the same to enslave the Iraqis under regulations that reduce their soverignty - it's pretty clear that " freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose " if you were an Iraqi national.

What we see here is a clear and undeniable economic colonialism in place, which most benefits a small group of people , and the corporations they run.

Those oil field PSA's are a theft of the natural resources of Iraq, and rob Iraqis of control of their own future and their own wealth.

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution

- Bruce Cockburn

-- Call It Democracy --
November 1985. Toronto, Canada.

http://cockburnproject.net/songs&music/atcid.html

Tommy Emmanuel - The best guitarist you've never even heard of.....

Well, I'm a huge fan of acoustic guitar. One of the most underrated practioners of that lost art today is Tommy Emmanuel.

Let me try and convince you of that, with a few clips.

Ever seen an solo acoustic guitarist do a "drum solo " ? Turn it up....



Rock and roll on an acoustic ?



Who needs a Stat and a Marshall stack anyway ?

Beatles anyone ?



How about a little mini concert of some guitar pickin' for a Sunday morning ?



Want a lesson from him ?



Or on the other hand , you may just want to go and smash your acoustic guitar into little pieces....

If that last lesson doesn't do that for you, this one might :



Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.............

And in concert.....live....Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....



Angelina - a really nice guitar piece :



Since We Met : ( one of my favorites)



( I just love the middle eight on that one.... )

Just to finally discourage everyone totally....if you aren't by now....




If you click the link at the top of this post, you'll be directed to Tommy Emmanuel's website.

So , I hope you enjoyed learning about Tommy Emmanuel's work here, and hat's off to Australia's master of the guitar. We are not worthy....

I'm off to smash mine ..... ( just kidding)....( I think).....