Mixed US messages to Iran
Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 18 Jun 2008
Summary: The NPT regime and its implementation arm – the IAEA - have robust instruments in place for providing such confidence in the form of intrusive inspections and verifications, and this means that the “Iran Six” diplomacy must be firmly anchored in a legal framework of reference, that is, the NPT regime. The irony of seeking Iran’s compliance with international norms while turning a blind eye to those very rules constitutes the package’s main flaw. source: Asia Times Onlineread more

Ex-UK Army Chief Confirms Peak Oil Motive for War
UKWatch.net - 18 Jun 2008
Brigadier-General James Ellery CBE, the Foreign Office?s Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad since 2003, confirmed the critical role of Iraqi oil reserves in potentially alleviating a ?world shortage? of conventional oil. The Iraq War has helped to head off what Brigadier Ellery described as ?the tide of Easternisation? ? a shift in global political and economic power toward China and India, to whom goes ?two thirds of the Middle East?s oil.? After the 2004 transfer of authority to an interim Iraqi civilian administration, Brigadier Ellery set up and ran the 700-strong security framework operation in support of the US-funded Reconstruction of Iraq. His remarks were made as part of a presentation at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), University of London, sponsored by the Iraqi Youth Foundation, on 22nd April. World Oil Shortage ?The reason that oil reached $117 a barrel last week?, he said, ?was less to do with security of supply? than World shortage.? He went on to emphasise the strategic significance of Iraqi petroleum fields in relation to the danger of production peaks being breached in major oil reserves around the world. ?Russia?s production has peaked at 10 million barrels per day; Africa has proved slow to yield affordable extra supplies ? from Sudan and Angola for example. Thus the only near-term potential increase will be from Iraq,? he said. Whether Iraq began ?favouring East or West? could therefore be ?de-stabilizing? not only ?within the region but to nations far beyond which have an interest.? Last month geological surveys and seismic data compiled by several international oil companies exploring Iraqi oil reserves showed that Iraq has the world?s largest proven oil reserves, with as much as 350 billion barrels, significantly exceeding Saudi Arabia?s 264 billion barrels, according to a report in the London Times. Former Bush administration energy adviser Matthew Simmons, author of the book Twilight in the Desert, says that Saudi oil production has probably already peaked, with production rates declining consecutively each year. This month the UK Treasury Department warned of the danger of an oil supply crunch by 2015, due to rocketing demand from China and India. The Threat of Easternisation Brigadier Ellery?s career in the British Army has involved stints in the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, Germany and Northern Ireland. ?Iraq holds the key to stability in the region,? he said, ?unless that is you believe the tide of ?Easternisation? is such that the USA and the West are in such decline, relative to the emerging China and India, that it is the East ? not the West ? which is more likely to guarantee stability. Incidentally, I do not.? Iraq?s pivotal importance in the Middle East, he explained, is because of its ?relatively large, consuming population? at 24 million, its being home to ?the second largest reserve of oil ? under exploited?, and finally its geostrategic location ?on the routes between Asia, Europe, Arabia and North Africa – hence the Silk Road.? Oil production peaks when a given petroleum reserve is depleted by half, after which oil is geophysically increasingly difficult to extract, causing production to plateau, and then steadily decline. US oil production peaked by 1970, while British production in the North Sea peaked by 2000, converting both countries from exporters into net importers of oil and gas. Oil industry experts and petroleum geologists increasingly believe that world oil production is precariously close to peaking. According to an October 2007 report by the German-based Energy Watch Group, run by an international network of European politicians and scientists, world oil production peaked in 2006. According to BP?s annual statistical review of world energy supply and demand for 2008, released on 11th June, world oil production fell last year for the first time since 2002, by 130,000 barrels per day last year to 81.53 million. Yet world consumption continued to rise by 1.1 per cent to 85.22 million barrels per day, outweighing production by nearly 5 per cent. Iraqi Reconstruction Corruption Whitewash Brigadier-General James Ellery is currently Director of Operations at AEGIS Defence Services Ltd., a private British security firm and US defence contractor since June 2004. In April this year, the same month as Ellery?s SOAS lecture, AEGIS won the renewal of its US defence department (DoD) contract for two more years, which at $475 million is the single largest security contract brokered by the DoD. The contract is to provide security services for reconstruction projects in Iraq conducted by mostly American companies. A US government audit by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, released exactly two years before Brigadier Ellery?s SOAS presentation, concluded that AEGIS could not prove it had properly trained or vetted several armed Iraqi employees. For a random sample of 20 armed guards, no training documentation was found for 14 of them. For 125 other employees, AEGIS reportedly failed to document background checks. The auditors concluded that ?there is no assurance that Aegis is providing the best possible safety and security for government and reconstruction contractor personnel and facilities.? During his April presentation at SOAS, AEGIS director Ellery declared, ?Iraq promises a degree of prosperity in the region as it embarks on massive Iraqi-funded reconstruction, a part of which will raise Iraqi?s oil production from 2.5 million bpd today to 3 million by next year and maybe ultimately 6 million barrels per day.? He added, ?With a budget of $187 billion over 4 years, Iraq is poised to have a considerable impact on the economies of countries whose technologies can fill the skills gap left by the latter years of Saddam Hussein?s regime.? During the UN sanctions regime imposed primarily by the US and Britain, Iraq was banned from importing thousands of household goods, including food, medicines, clothes and books, from 1991 to 2003, purportedly to prevent Saddam from developing weapons of mass destruction. It is now widely recognized that the sanctions led to massive socio-economic deprivation, the break-down of civilian infrastructure, large-scale unemployment, and de-industrialisation, resulting in the deaths of up to 1.8 million Iraqis, half of whom were children. The humanitarian crisis led United Nations officials such as Dennis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General, and Hans von Sponeck, former Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, to resign in protest. Today, those profiting most from reconstruction projects in Iraq are not Iraqis, but private contractors based primarily in the United States and Britain, according to a new report out last month by Stuart Bowen Jr, incumbent Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The Bowen Report found that at least 855 contracts valued at billions of dollars were cancelled before completion. Another 112 agreements were cancelled because of poor performance, while still more projects recorded as completed never happened. In one case, a $50 million children?s hospital in Basra is listed as completed although the contract was stopped when only 35 percent of the work was finished. During Brigadier Ellery?s tenure at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, under Paul Bremer?s leadership $8.8 billion of reconstruction funds were unaccounted for, and a further $3.4 billion was re-directed for ?security? purposes. A UN body to audit the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), by which the CPA Programme Review Board managed Iraqi oil revenues until June 2004, found ?gross irregularities by CPA officials in their management of the DFI,? and condemned the United States for ?lack of transparency? and providing the opportunity for ?fraudulent acts.? Under American- and British-administered Iraqi reconstruction programmes, Iraqi agriculture has been devastated. In 2004, the Coalition Provision Authority imposed a hundred economic orders designed to open Iraq?s economy to foreign investment, including Order 12 for tax- and tariff-free imports of foreign products. The Order allowed the giant American agribusiness conglomerate Cargill to flood Iraq with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cheap wheat, undercutting local food prices, and wiping out the livelihoods of Iraqi farmers. As an executive director of AEGIS, one of the most prominent US defence contractors in Iraq, Brigadier Ellery is a personal beneficiary of the privatisation of the Iraqi economy. In the conclusions of his April address, he said, ?Iraq has resources aplenty: not just oil, of which there is a prodigious quantity?, but especially ?the capacity to rebuild a balanced economy including agriculture – for which Iraq was a legend.? Labels: corruption, energy crisis, iraq war, peak oil, reconstruction, supply crunch

Private Lives in Public Spaces
UKWatch.net - 18 Jun 2008
Women are whispering. A friend recently expressed concern that her boyfriend had visited a lapdancing club as part of a work social. She didn’t want to be perceived as prudish or uptight and she didn’t want her boyfriend to be the odd one out at work for abstaining when his colleagues headed into the club. Her hushed ambivalence is a common response to the lapdancing clubs springing up all across the country recently as a result of a legal loophole. Lapdancing clubs have proliferated since they were allowed to be licensed in the same way as cafes and restaurants. Previously, they had to be licensed as sex encounter establishments along with sex cinemas, sex shops and peep shows. The 2003 Licensing Act states that a successful premises licence applicant does not require any other licence. Lapdancing clubs have capitalised on this clause and obtained premises licences only. These cannot be revoked unless a complainant proves that one of the four licensing objectives of “public order”, “public safety”, “protecting children from harm” or “creating a public nuisance” has been breached. The legal redress is clear. The Licensing Act need not exempt sex encounter establishments from requiring their own licence type. This utilises existing legislation, allows that legislation to perform the function it was intended to, and does not require any new legislation. Furthermore, it allows local authorities to consider their gender equality duty when making such decisions. Today, Roberta Blackman-Woods MP is proposing a ten-minute rule bill on this subject in parliament. She makes it clear that local authorities in London already have these separate licensing powers and that they could be extended countrywide. Yet the question of lapdancing clubs goes beyond the legislative argument and into the far murkier debate that surrounds this new social phenomenon. There is the personal and the political, inextricably linked. Barrister Philip Kolvin is advising both The Fawcett Society and Object on their campaigns to license lapdancing clubs as sex encounter establishments. Kolvin’s own reason for representing the Fawcett Society was personal. He is alarmed by the presence of lapdancing clubs around Gray’s Inn, where he works. His colleagues shamelessly go to the clubs after work, and he reports that there are limousines containing naked women having sex on the floor being provided as part of the transport service. Kolvin warns us that any cultural arguments are hazardous. We don’t want to go back to censorship. We don’t want to be accused of prudery. If we say there is a line, then the next question could be, what forms of sexual imagery do women approve of? At a Compass conference, the feminist scholar Angela McRobbie said she wants to see women having this discussion and dealing with the difficult questions. If women decide that they are fine about lapdancing clubs and see them as modern and empowering, she will accept that. But she doesn’t believe women are really involved in this debate. Instead she observes a strange silence on the issue. She also advocates the need to consider the responses of black and Asian women to lapdancing clubs. Are lapdancing clubs harmless? If the no-contact rules are adhered to, then presumably the lapdancing clubs leave lots of sexually frustrated men wandering the streets at night. Otherwise, we can assume that rules have been contravened and that lapdancing clubs are just another route into the sex industry at large. If neither of these harmful effects prevail, then perhaps these clubs are not needed, and men attend them with some newfound sense of social obligation in an increasingly commodified society where every pleasure must be paid for. I am of the view that the sexual empowerment argument for women is a myth. Women are reduced to sex objects for male gratification. They are emancipated only in the context of wage-earning capacity and participation in consumer culture. Increasingly, we find our power as citizens misleadingly equated with our power to consume or not to consume, to earn or not to earn. So I say let local communities be allowed to decide whether or not lapdancing clubs are approved in their area. Do you want one on your doorstep? At the Compass meeting, a lady in the audience voiced the liberal argument that lapdancers are choosing to work and benefiting from it. A former lapdancer countered her by saying, “This argument really annoys me. It’s all very well you saying that, but would you choose this job for your daughter, or your sister, or your wife, or even yourself?” Lets bring this back into the public domain and have a conversation about it in the public space. Let communities have a say in licensing these establishments, and let women have a say in their own representation. And let’s quit the double standards.

LA School Teacher Fired for Being Too “Afrocentric”; Arizona Bill Proposes to Prohibit Teachings Critical of Western Civilization
Democracy Now - 18 Jun 2008
We look at two cases of free speech in the classroom: Karen Salazar speaks out about her dismissal from the Los Angeles School District; historian Rodolfo Acuna discusses the Arizona bill that would ban schools from using some books, including Acuna’s Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. [includes rush transcript]

New Monument Honors Slain Journalists
Democracy Now - 18 Jun 2008
A new monument in London pays tribute to the hundreds of journalists killed in the course of their jobs. An estimated two war journalists have died every week over the past 10 years. The latest victim is Iraqi journalist Moheiaddin Abdul Hamid. He was killed Tuesday in a drive-by shooting soon after he left his home in Mosul.

Ralph Nader on Barack Obama: “It is Quite Clear He is a Corporate Candidate from A to Z”
Democracy Now - 18 Jun 2008
Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader discusses his independent run for the White House, the media blackout of third party candidates, and his stance on the Iraq war, the military-industrial complex, the global food crisis, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and more. [includes rush transcript – partial]

Headlines for June 18, 2008
Democracy Now - 18 Jun 2008
Senate Hearing Exposes Bush Administration’s Role in Torture Policy, Army Ousted Official for Questioning KBR Contract, KBR Accused of Overcharging Navy After Hurricane Katrina, Israel & Hamas Agree to Ceasefire, 63 Die in Baghdad Truck Bombing, Report: US Contractors to Lose Immunity in Iraq, Haditha Charges Dismissed Against Another Marine, EPA Warns of Contaminated Floodwater in Iowa, Bush Urges Lifting of Offshore Oil Drilling Ban, Racist Anti-Obama Pins Sold at Texas GOP Convention, Texas Execution of Charles Hood Postponed, Fidel Castro Seen on TV with Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez, Correction, Denver Police Stock up on Pepper Spray Guns Ahead of DNC

Israeli forces extrajudicially execute six in Gaza
Electronic Intifada - 18 Jun 2008
rr r r r rr r rr r rr r rr rr rrr rThe Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) escalated their aggression against the Gaza Strip by launching several attacks yesterday, 17 June 2008, which killed six Palestinians in separate attacks in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah. According to data collected and compiled by Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, the number of Palestinians killed by IOF since the start of 2008 has reached 357. Since 1 June 2008 25 Palestinians have been killed by IOF.

Jazz musician Branford Marsalis urged to cancel Israel concert
Electronic Intifada - 18 Jun 2008
rr r r r rr r rr r rr r rr rr rrr rThe following is an open letter to jazz musician Branford Marsalis, sent by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine: “We are writing to ask you to reconsider your decision to play in Israel. We are wondering how a musician with your sensitivity will be able to stand on a stage and play reflective, subtle jazz while less than an hour’s drive away, a million-and-a-half people in Gaza—two-thirds of them refugees—endure yet another night of hunger, darkness and fear because of the iron-clad siege the Israeli government has enforced against them for years.”

The urgency of 1948
Electronic Intifada - 18 Jun 2008
rr r r rr r rr r rr r rr r rr rrr rOne of the most repeated quotes among Palestinian refugees is: “The old will die and the young will forget,” words reputedly spoken by Israel’s founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion. However, the young have not forgotten. Everywhere I have traveled in the Arab world Palestinian children tell me the names of their original villages that they still hope to see someday. Even the youngest of children will say things like, “If I don’t return to my village, then my children or their children will.” Hanna Mermelstein writes.

Crossing the Line interviews professor Nasser Aruri about AIPAC conference
Electronic Intifada - 18 Jun 2008
rr r r rr r rr r rr r rr r rr rrr rThis week on Crossing The Line: Lawmakers made their annual pilgrimage to the the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference to show their unyielding support of Israel. US presidential candidates McCain and Obama claim to both want a change, but how will this apply to foreign policy, and more specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Noted author and professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Naseer Aruri, speaks with host Naji Ali about the importance of AIPAC in the US presidential elections.

Coal On Hold – Derbyshire Coal Mine Site Occupied
Indymedia UK - 18 Jun 2008
Today climate campaigners from ?Leave it in the Ground? have occupied the UK Coal?s Lodge House site in Derbyshire by barricading themselves in a disused farm building and taken to the trees on the site of the open cast mine.Under the cover of darkness activists have secured themselves in the Prospect Farm building, on the site which is about to be devastated by huge machines. Food and supplies have also been taken in for a long term occupation and barricades? have been set up preventing police form bringing in specialist equipment down Bell Lane, Smalley Derbyshire into the heart of the site. Similarly, people are locked on by their necks behind the doors preventing force being used to gain entry. The protesters are claiming squatter?s rights.At Lodge House today, Andy Green said ?We are here because the single greatest threat to the climate comes from burning coal. Coal fired generation is historically responsible for most of the CO2 in the air today ? about half of all carbon dioxide emissions globally. Coal form open cast mines is dirtier than that from deep mines, so it is even worse!”Newswire: Lodge House open cast mine site ocupied | Climate change protestors occupy Derbyshire open cast site | Noise Demo at UK Coal Head Office ProtestRecent Features: Leave it in the Ground: Drax Coal Train Halted | Campaigners Trespass on Proposed Coal Mine SiteLinks: Leave It In The Ground | Campaign Blog | Earth First UK | Phulbari Resistance, Bangladesh | No Opencast! article in Do or Die | UK Coal | Greenpeace on Coal | Notts Indymedia Ecology topic page