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On Memorial Day.. What does it mean to support the troops?
Well over 1 million soldiers have served in Afghanistan and Iraq since September 11, 2001, according to the Pentagon. A full third of those million have served more than once. In addition to the 1,600-plus soldiers who have been killed in Iraq, more than 12,000 troops have been wounded and needed to seek medical treatment. Soldiers who have suffered psychologically are more difficult to count - and often more difficult to treat. A 2004 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine pointed out that 17 percent of Iraq veterans were exhibiting signs of major depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But according to that study, less than 40 percent of those soldiers sought treatment for PTSD, due to the stigma associated with its diagnosis. According to Steve Robinson at the National Gulf War Resource Center, the military needs to be doing much more to educate about and treat PTSD.
Once soldiers arrive home, they face new difficulties. According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, although veterans compose only 9 percent of the U.S. population, they represent 23 percent of our nation's homeless. More than 500,000 veterans experience homelessness each year.
The White House isn't getting kinder to vets, either. In January of 2003, just prior to the March invasion of Iraq, President Bush suspended the health-care benefits of 200,000 veterans. The Bush administration's proposed 2006 budget would charge a new $250 enrollment fee to 2.2 million veterans, and would double vets' prescription drug co-pay, which could limit access to those drugs for veterans living in poverty. The budget also proposes to cut $351 million from veterans' nursing homes, and $4 million from medical and prosthetic research.
Source: The Evangelical Fundamental bigot's website: Sojourners
In Herold's view, each of the world's seven largest publicly traded oil companies will begin seeing production declines within the next 48 months or so.
May 13, 2005 --The analysts at John S. Herold Inc.-- a research-only firm that issues valuations on several hundred publicly traded energy companies -- are making predictions even bolder than their call on Enron. [This article appeared on the Herold web site as “Peer Group New Source Production Portfolios: 2005 New Source Production Portfolios,” but is available only to Herold’s paid subscribers. --J.R.] They have begun estimating when each of the world's biggest energy companies will peak in its ability to produce oil and gas. Herold's work shows that the best minds in the energy industry are accepting the reality that the globe is reaching (or has already reached) the limit of its own ability to produce ever increasing amounts of oil.
Many analysts have estimated when the earth will reach its peak oil production. Others have done estimates on when individual countries will hit their peaks. Herold is the first Wall Street firm to predict when specific energy companies will hit their peaks.
* Oil prices -- which are already at record levels -- will continue rising as demand outstrips supply. In a few years, gasoline prices of $2 per gallon could seem like a bargain.
* State-owned oil companies like Mexico's Pemex, Venezuela's PDVSA (Petroléos de Venezuela) and Saudi Arabia's Saudi Aramco may be unable to increase their production enough to meet burgeoning global demand.
Another energy industry veteran, John Olson, co-manager of Houston Energy Partners, an energy hedge fund, agrees. Olson believes that Herold's predictions about peak production are "very significant. It is perhaps the first cannon ball over the bow of a big tanker."
Last month, the president of China's Sinopec Economics and Development Research Institute, said that between January and September of 2004, motor fuel use in his country soared by 20 percent. Yu also predicted that China's oil consumption will double over the next 15 years to more than 10 million barrels of oil per day. Meanwhile, the Energy Information Administration expects India's oil consumption to increase by nearly 30 percent over the next five years.
..virtually everyone else in the oil industry -- agrees that the era of cheap energy is over and that America must begin adapting to the new geopolitical realities that come with that fact.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/15/herold/index_np.html (subscribers only)or http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/031505G.shtml
Source via: http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/2818/2/
The lies that led to war
Comment: and WHY NO OUTRAGE?
A leaked British memo, and other documents, make it clear that Bush intended all along to invade Iraq -- and lied about it to the American people. The full gravity of his offense has not yet sunk in.By Juan ColeWhy has there not been more outrage in the United States at these revelations? Many Americans may have chosen to overlook the lies and deceptions the Bush administration used to justify the war because they still believe the Iraq war might have made them at least somewhat safer. When they realize that this hope, too, is unfounded, and that in fact the war has greatly increased the threat of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, their wrath may be visited on the president and the political party that has brought America the biggest foreign-policy disaster since Vietnam.
...Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described to Ron Susskind in "The Price of Loyalty" the first Bush national security meeting of principals on Jan. 30, 2001. He writes that after Bush announced he would simply disengage from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and "unleash Sharon," he made it clear that Iraq would be a priority.
...We know about this episode from the public account of Sir Christopher Meyer, then the U.K. ambassador in Washington. Meyer reported that in the two weeks after Sept. 11, the Bush national security team argued back and forth over whether to attack Iraq or Afghanistan. It appears from his account that Bush was leaning toward the Iraq option.
...When British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington on Sept. 20, 2001, he was alarmed. If Blair had consulted MI6 about the relative merits of the Afghanistan and Iraq options, we can only imagine what well-informed British intelligence officers in Pakistan were cabling London about the dangers of leaving bin Laden and al-Qaida in place while plunging into a potential quagmire in Iraq. Fears that London was a major al-Qaida target would have underlined the risks to the United Kingdom of an "Iraq first" policy in Washington.
The memo reported a July 2002 meeting of key British Cabinet and other officials, held when Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the British intelligence service, MI6, returned from a trip to Washington. It revealed that the decision to go to war had already been made by that point: "Military action was now seen as inevitable,"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8891.htmhttp://snipurl.com/f1fr
Following FAIR's call for more mainstream coverage of the "smoking gun memo"--the secret British document containing new evidence that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify its plan to invade Iraq--a steady trickle of news reports have appeared. But that coverage has been downplayed in general and is still completely absent from the nightly news.http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2520
The Right to demonstrate and freedom of speech
On the waters of Elliott Bay last year something very analogous to this horror story happened to Glen Milner. Glen is faced with a $10,100 fine from the Coast Guard, which apparently cannot be appealed to any court. His only recourse is appealing to a biased Coast Guard official.
The motive of the Coast Guard is clear. They want to deny Glen and others their right to demonstrate against the fleet during Seafair. Though Glen has been doing this with others for a number of years, last year the Coast Guard decided to get tough.
Glen has written to Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Jay Inslee, the ACLU and others. The ACLU doesn't think there is much they can do about this, though they are, of course, sympathetic. Staff people from the politicians' offices are trying to do what they can.
Source: Tom Krebsbach of Lake Forest Park SNOW
US interrogators beat to death man they believed innocent
An investigatory report by the New York Times on the deaths of two prisoners held by the U.S. military at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in December 2002.
A copy of a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army's criminal investigation into the case, which was obtained by the New York Times. The Times obtained the copy of the file from a person involved in the investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military's response to the deaths.
see this website to read the report: http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/2816/2/
Overseas Basing Commission removes report from web siteMay 19, 2005 --
[Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News reported Thursday that the Overseas Basing Commission had removed a report to Congress after the Department of Defense complained that it disclosed classified information without authorization.
Comment: an empire of bases
-- The commission chair, however, told the *Washington Post* that "The commission is confident that everything in our report was obtained from unclassified sources or settings." -- Aftergood provides a link to a copy of the report on the Federation of American Scientists web site. -- Bases have a cardinal importance in the American way of hegemony.
-- Chalmers Johnson has argued that the base is the essential institution in the practice of empire as developed by the United States: "With the end of the Cold War the huge Eurasian territory between the Balkans and Pakistan, formerly off-limits as the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, opened up for expansion. America quickly deployed military forces into this critical region and prepared to fight wars with regimes that stood in the way.
During this period of little more than a decade, a vast complex of interests, commitments, and projects was woven together until a new political culture paralleling civil society came into existence. This complex, which I am calling an empire, . . consists of permanent naval bases, military airfields, army garrisons, espionage listening posts, and strategic enclaves on every continent of the globe . . . creating not an empire of colonies but an empire of bases"
(*The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic* [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 22-23). --Mark]
Source: via Mark Jensen, a Professor at PLU
http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/2815/http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/index.html
Buy Your Gas at Citgo: Join the BUY-cott!
Of the top oil producing countries in the world, only one is a democracy with a president who was elected on a platform of using his nation's oil revenue to benefit the poor. The country is Venezuela.
Citgo is a U.S. refining and marketing firm that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company. Money you pay to Citgo goes primarily to Venezuela
By buying your gasoline at Citgo, you are contributing to the billions of dollars that Venezuela's democratic government is using to provide health care, literacy and education, and subsidized food for the majority of Venezuelans.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-25.htm
US Defends Disarmament Stance
20 May 2005 -- United Nations - The United States defended itself Friday against charges that it is moving too slowly toward nuclear disarmament, saying it must balance such steps against "our obligations to maintain our own security."
At a month long conference reviewing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, states without nuclear weapons dismissed the Americans' recitation of a long history of warhead and missile reductions, and asked instead what Washington has done lately.
...citing the steps endorsed by the 2000 conference, which also included negotiating a verifiable treaty ending production of nuclear bomb material worldwide, and reducing arms in an "irreversible" way. The Bush administration opposes verification of a bomb-material cutoff, and critics note that the Moscow Treaty is reversible, since warheads need not be destroyed, just stored away.
"Unfortunately, today we see that no progress has been made in the area of those practical steps," said Algeria's Hamza Khelif.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/052105A.shtml
Your local police department may be working with the FBI's JointTerrorist Task Force program. Under this program, local policeare taken away from their regular criminal law enforcement activitiesand used to undertake a wide range of other activities, includingmonitoring of religious activities and infiltration of peace groups,such as American Friends Service Committee and Amnesty International.
Documents obtained by the ACLU prove that the FBI and Joint TerrorismTask Forces (JTTFs) are gathering information about peace groups, andare intimidating anti-war activists through aggressive questioning. Inone example, the Colorado Spring Police Department suppliedinformation on 80 participants of a peaceful demonstration, along withlicense plate numbers of 30 of them, to the Denver IntelligenceBureau. This kind of surveillance is chilling to free speech-protectedactivities. For example, in the days leading up to the 2004 DemocraticNational Convention, officials identifying themselves as JTTF agentsmade "visits" to the homes of several activists as well as theirfriends and family members.
http://aclu.convio.net/site/MessageViewer?em_id=1861.0&dlv_id=6581
2005 Renewable Energy Fair, June 4th
FREE To Attend! 10 AM - 4 PM. Expanded greatly from last year, Shoreline Solar Project's 2nd Annual Renewable Energy Fair is Saturday, June 4th at Meridian Park School, 17077 Meridian Avenue North, Shoreline, WA 98133. This year's fair includes dozens of exhibitors, Responsible fuel vehicles including biodiesel, electric, and hybrids, Solar Electric Power, Solar Hot Water, Green building design & materials, energy efficiency and Energy Star Appliances, workshops and presentations and a newly created KIDS ZONE with lots of fun hands-on learning activities. Special Presentation by the Pacific Science Center!
http://www.shorelinesolar.org/gpage2.html
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewsViewsnolose
Well over 1 million soldiers have served in Afghanistan and Iraq since September 11, 2001, according to the Pentagon. A full third of those million have served more than once. In addition to the 1,600-plus soldiers who have been killed in Iraq, more than 12,000 troops have been wounded and needed to seek medical treatment. Soldiers who have suffered psychologically are more difficult to count - and often more difficult to treat. A 2004 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine pointed out that 17 percent of Iraq veterans were exhibiting signs of major depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But according to that study, less than 40 percent of those soldiers sought treatment for PTSD, due to the stigma associated with its diagnosis. According to Steve Robinson at the National Gulf War Resource Center, the military needs to be doing much more to educate about and treat PTSD.
Once soldiers arrive home, they face new difficulties. According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, although veterans compose only 9 percent of the U.S. population, they represent 23 percent of our nation's homeless. More than 500,000 veterans experience homelessness each year.
The White House isn't getting kinder to vets, either. In January of 2003, just prior to the March invasion of Iraq, President Bush suspended the health-care benefits of 200,000 veterans. The Bush administration's proposed 2006 budget would charge a new $250 enrollment fee to 2.2 million veterans, and would double vets' prescription drug co-pay, which could limit access to those drugs for veterans living in poverty. The budget also proposes to cut $351 million from veterans' nursing homes, and $4 million from medical and prosthetic research.
Source: The Evangelical Fundamental bigot's website: Sojourners
In Herold's view, each of the world's seven largest publicly traded oil companies will begin seeing production declines within the next 48 months or so.
May 13, 2005 --The analysts at John S. Herold Inc.-- a research-only firm that issues valuations on several hundred publicly traded energy companies -- are making predictions even bolder than their call on Enron. [This article appeared on the Herold web site as “Peer Group New Source Production Portfolios: 2005 New Source Production Portfolios,” but is available only to Herold’s paid subscribers. --J.R.] They have begun estimating when each of the world's biggest energy companies will peak in its ability to produce oil and gas. Herold's work shows that the best minds in the energy industry are accepting the reality that the globe is reaching (or has already reached) the limit of its own ability to produce ever increasing amounts of oil.
Many analysts have estimated when the earth will reach its peak oil production. Others have done estimates on when individual countries will hit their peaks. Herold is the first Wall Street firm to predict when specific energy companies will hit their peaks.
* Oil prices -- which are already at record levels -- will continue rising as demand outstrips supply. In a few years, gasoline prices of $2 per gallon could seem like a bargain.
* State-owned oil companies like Mexico's Pemex, Venezuela's PDVSA (Petroléos de Venezuela) and Saudi Arabia's Saudi Aramco may be unable to increase their production enough to meet burgeoning global demand.
Another energy industry veteran, John Olson, co-manager of Houston Energy Partners, an energy hedge fund, agrees. Olson believes that Herold's predictions about peak production are "very significant. It is perhaps the first cannon ball over the bow of a big tanker."
Last month, the president of China's Sinopec Economics and Development Research Institute, said that between January and September of 2004, motor fuel use in his country soared by 20 percent. Yu also predicted that China's oil consumption will double over the next 15 years to more than 10 million barrels of oil per day. Meanwhile, the Energy Information Administration expects India's oil consumption to increase by nearly 30 percent over the next five years.
..virtually everyone else in the oil industry -- agrees that the era of cheap energy is over and that America must begin adapting to the new geopolitical realities that come with that fact.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/15/herold/index_np.html (subscribers only)or http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/031505G.shtml
Source via: http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/2818/2/
The lies that led to war
Comment: and WHY NO OUTRAGE?
A leaked British memo, and other documents, make it clear that Bush intended all along to invade Iraq -- and lied about it to the American people. The full gravity of his offense has not yet sunk in.By Juan ColeWhy has there not been more outrage in the United States at these revelations? Many Americans may have chosen to overlook the lies and deceptions the Bush administration used to justify the war because they still believe the Iraq war might have made them at least somewhat safer. When they realize that this hope, too, is unfounded, and that in fact the war has greatly increased the threat of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, their wrath may be visited on the president and the political party that has brought America the biggest foreign-policy disaster since Vietnam.
...Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described to Ron Susskind in "The Price of Loyalty" the first Bush national security meeting of principals on Jan. 30, 2001. He writes that after Bush announced he would simply disengage from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and "unleash Sharon," he made it clear that Iraq would be a priority.
...We know about this episode from the public account of Sir Christopher Meyer, then the U.K. ambassador in Washington. Meyer reported that in the two weeks after Sept. 11, the Bush national security team argued back and forth over whether to attack Iraq or Afghanistan. It appears from his account that Bush was leaning toward the Iraq option.
...When British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington on Sept. 20, 2001, he was alarmed. If Blair had consulted MI6 about the relative merits of the Afghanistan and Iraq options, we can only imagine what well-informed British intelligence officers in Pakistan were cabling London about the dangers of leaving bin Laden and al-Qaida in place while plunging into a potential quagmire in Iraq. Fears that London was a major al-Qaida target would have underlined the risks to the United Kingdom of an "Iraq first" policy in Washington.
The memo reported a July 2002 meeting of key British Cabinet and other officials, held when Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the British intelligence service, MI6, returned from a trip to Washington. It revealed that the decision to go to war had already been made by that point: "Military action was now seen as inevitable,"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8891.htmhttp://snipurl.com/f1fr
Following FAIR's call for more mainstream coverage of the "smoking gun memo"--the secret British document containing new evidence that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify its plan to invade Iraq--a steady trickle of news reports have appeared. But that coverage has been downplayed in general and is still completely absent from the nightly news.http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2520
The Right to demonstrate and freedom of speech
On the waters of Elliott Bay last year something very analogous to this horror story happened to Glen Milner. Glen is faced with a $10,100 fine from the Coast Guard, which apparently cannot be appealed to any court. His only recourse is appealing to a biased Coast Guard official.
The motive of the Coast Guard is clear. They want to deny Glen and others their right to demonstrate against the fleet during Seafair. Though Glen has been doing this with others for a number of years, last year the Coast Guard decided to get tough.
Glen has written to Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Jay Inslee, the ACLU and others. The ACLU doesn't think there is much they can do about this, though they are, of course, sympathetic. Staff people from the politicians' offices are trying to do what they can.
Source: Tom Krebsbach of Lake Forest Park SNOW
US interrogators beat to death man they believed innocent
An investigatory report by the New York Times on the deaths of two prisoners held by the U.S. military at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in December 2002.
A copy of a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army's criminal investigation into the case, which was obtained by the New York Times. The Times obtained the copy of the file from a person involved in the investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military's response to the deaths.
see this website to read the report: http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/2816/2/
Overseas Basing Commission removes report from web siteMay 19, 2005 --
[Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News reported Thursday that the Overseas Basing Commission had removed a report to Congress after the Department of Defense complained that it disclosed classified information without authorization.
Comment: an empire of bases
-- The commission chair, however, told the *Washington Post* that "The commission is confident that everything in our report was obtained from unclassified sources or settings." -- Aftergood provides a link to a copy of the report on the Federation of American Scientists web site. -- Bases have a cardinal importance in the American way of hegemony.
-- Chalmers Johnson has argued that the base is the essential institution in the practice of empire as developed by the United States: "With the end of the Cold War the huge Eurasian territory between the Balkans and Pakistan, formerly off-limits as the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, opened up for expansion. America quickly deployed military forces into this critical region and prepared to fight wars with regimes that stood in the way.
During this period of little more than a decade, a vast complex of interests, commitments, and projects was woven together until a new political culture paralleling civil society came into existence. This complex, which I am calling an empire, . . consists of permanent naval bases, military airfields, army garrisons, espionage listening posts, and strategic enclaves on every continent of the globe . . . creating not an empire of colonies but an empire of bases"
(*The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic* [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 22-23). --Mark]
Source: via Mark Jensen, a Professor at PLU
http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/2815/http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/index.html
Buy Your Gas at Citgo: Join the BUY-cott!
Of the top oil producing countries in the world, only one is a democracy with a president who was elected on a platform of using his nation's oil revenue to benefit the poor. The country is Venezuela.
Citgo is a U.S. refining and marketing firm that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company. Money you pay to Citgo goes primarily to Venezuela
By buying your gasoline at Citgo, you are contributing to the billions of dollars that Venezuela's democratic government is using to provide health care, literacy and education, and subsidized food for the majority of Venezuelans.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-25.htm
US Defends Disarmament Stance
20 May 2005 -- United Nations - The United States defended itself Friday against charges that it is moving too slowly toward nuclear disarmament, saying it must balance such steps against "our obligations to maintain our own security."
At a month long conference reviewing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, states without nuclear weapons dismissed the Americans' recitation of a long history of warhead and missile reductions, and asked instead what Washington has done lately.
...citing the steps endorsed by the 2000 conference, which also included negotiating a verifiable treaty ending production of nuclear bomb material worldwide, and reducing arms in an "irreversible" way. The Bush administration opposes verification of a bomb-material cutoff, and critics note that the Moscow Treaty is reversible, since warheads need not be destroyed, just stored away.
"Unfortunately, today we see that no progress has been made in the area of those practical steps," said Algeria's Hamza Khelif.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/052105A.shtml
Your local police department may be working with the FBI's JointTerrorist Task Force program. Under this program, local policeare taken away from their regular criminal law enforcement activitiesand used to undertake a wide range of other activities, includingmonitoring of religious activities and infiltration of peace groups,such as American Friends Service Committee and Amnesty International.
Documents obtained by the ACLU prove that the FBI and Joint TerrorismTask Forces (JTTFs) are gathering information about peace groups, andare intimidating anti-war activists through aggressive questioning. Inone example, the Colorado Spring Police Department suppliedinformation on 80 participants of a peaceful demonstration, along withlicense plate numbers of 30 of them, to the Denver IntelligenceBureau. This kind of surveillance is chilling to free speech-protectedactivities. For example, in the days leading up to the 2004 DemocraticNational Convention, officials identifying themselves as JTTF agentsmade "visits" to the homes of several activists as well as theirfriends and family members.
http://aclu.convio.net/site/MessageViewer?em_id=1861.0&dlv_id=6581
2005 Renewable Energy Fair, June 4th
FREE To Attend! 10 AM - 4 PM. Expanded greatly from last year, Shoreline Solar Project's 2nd Annual Renewable Energy Fair is Saturday, June 4th at Meridian Park School, 17077 Meridian Avenue North, Shoreline, WA 98133. This year's fair includes dozens of exhibitors, Responsible fuel vehicles including biodiesel, electric, and hybrids, Solar Electric Power, Solar Hot Water, Green building design & materials, energy efficiency and Energy Star Appliances, workshops and presentations and a newly created KIDS ZONE with lots of fun hands-on learning activities. Special Presentation by the Pacific Science Center!
http://www.shorelinesolar.org/gpage2.html
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewsViewsnolose
posted by T. Scott Brineman at 8:10 AM
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