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Week 30 - July 29th - 2002 |
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David Seaton's Energy Links® Commentary Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) is another curiosity of the Bush administration, which to use the words of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" is getting "curiouser and curiouser". The administration plans to recruit a million volunteers by next month to serve as government informants in 10 test cities. If the plan works, the goal is to enroll 4 percent of Americans, or about 11 million domestic spies across the nation. The focus would be on truck drivers, cable installers, utility employees and others whose jobs regularly take them to a variety of places. (Bush wanted letter carriers to participate, but the Postal Service has declined.) TIPS is a plan to create an immense network of people who have regular access to peoples' houses with the object of spying on Americans in their homes. A plan to put in place a network of informants and then constructing a huge database of information about private citizens all without search warrants or any other legal guarantees. If there ever was clear proof that the Bush administration was not "conservative", that is to say a defender of custom and tradition this is it. The words "Radical" and "extremist" come to mind, but not "conservative". For someone who values America's oldest, most revered traditions the right to privacy is sacred. The central document of the United States of America and the heart of its traditions is the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution (Search and Seizure) states: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Nothing in TIPS has any connection to America's republican traditions or those of English common law from which they evolve and seems more like an adaptation of some program from Czarist Russia's OKRANA or some third world secret police organization. The idea of anonymous informants denouncing people they have a grudge against is nightmarish - this kind of army of informants is the hallmark of a dictatorship. In Spain bullfighters say "El miedo quita el tipo" - fear changes people. This means that if a person is talkative fear will render him taciturn, the normally phlegmatic will fidget etc. In this case a group of Arabs knock down a pair of buildings and kill three thousand people. Because of this, out the window goes a tradition harking back in English common law as far as the Semayne's Case of 1603, which originated the famous phrase "An Englishman's house is his castle", which in turn is the origin of the American Fourth Amendment. No less an icon of American history and traditions than Benjamin Franklin once said that those who are ready to give up liberty for safety deserve neither. David Seaton David Seaton's Energy Links®
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California
Takes on Air Pollution . . . (Davis - Washington Post) |
| Truce
likely to open Sudan to investment (Hoovers) An end to civil war in Sudan will encourage Western oil companies to resume operations in the largely unexplored African country and ease pressure on Canada's Talisman Energy Inc. to leave, observers said. "I think people are sitting up and paying attention right now. It will be a while before there is any real action," said Ian Lundin, chairman of Sweden's Lundin Petroleum, which suspended activity in Sudan in January due to fighting. "We have made it clear that we need a cessation of hostilities for us to go back in there. That has to be established and we have to be able to show that it is permanent," he said from his Geneva office. Austria's OMV, which has said it is not willing to return if human rights were being violated, said it would welcome a peace deal but would wait for the results of its own assessment of the situation before deciding whether to resume operations. "We have spoken with a number of experts, including a number of [non-government organizations], and are about to put their findings on paper and make it available," board member Helmut Langanger said in Austria. The Sudanese government and rebel groups in control of the country's south reached an agreement a week ago that could end a two-decade civil war. The tentative deal comes just as Talisman was expected to sell its Sudanese interests after being heavily criticized for operating in a war zone. There is speculation a decision will be made by the Calgary-based company's board during a regular meeting Monday. The board will also review the company's second quarter results, due on Tuesday. "Unless they have gone a long way toward signing an agreement there, I think this maybe relieves the pressure of having to sell it and enhances the value of the property," said Gord Currie, analyst at Canaccord Capital Corp. Click here to read more Contents |
| Russia
Offers to Help Develop Iran's Oil and Gas Industry (Tehran Times) Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has approved the draft of a long-term program for the development of cooperation between Russia and Iran through to 2012, which includes the participation of Russian companies in Iranian oil and gas projects. The prime minister signed the relevant decree on 24 July, the government information department reports. The program is aimed at developing trade, economic, industrial, scientific and technological cooperation between the two countries. There is also a plan to increase oil extraction in a project to be implemented by the Slavneft Oil Company and the National Iranian Drilling Company. As part of its cooperation with Iran, Russia is also expected to help design, finance and construct a number of pipelines in Iran, as well as a gas pipeline between Iran and India. Other plans include an examination of the Nurabad-Hasani oil pipeline, as well as the development of a project to carry Russian oil to Iran. The two countries also plan to build jointly an underground gas storage facility, as well as to arrange gas storage facilities near the cities of Tehran and Tabriz, Interfax reported. The program includes cooperation in oil refining. Iran and Russia plan to improve technological processes at heavy oil refineries in Iran, build refining modules with a capacity of 25,000 barrels a day and create facilities for the primary refining of oil containing large amounts of water and salt at oil wells. Click here to read more Contents |
| New
Sykes-Picot (The Star - Amman) (...) The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 divided the Levant into areas under British and French rule (Palestine was mandated to Britain later under the San Remo agreement of 1922) and facilitated the creation of a federation of "independent Arab states" under both countries' protection. We can easily trace the Middle East, as we know it today, to those historic events. The outcome of this disgraceful intervention by the supreme powers of the day in the fate of this region and its people is self-evident. Today history is about to repeat itself. The United States is busy redrawing the map of this region to serve its interest and that of its Israeli ally. The focus of Washington's efforts in the coming phase will be to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and implant a subservient government in its place. No one really knows the extent of America's ambitions in Iraq. They could include partitioning Iraq into a number of entities, making sure that this country will never pose a threat to Israel. As we have seen in Afghanistan, Washington will be the kingpin in imposing a system of government that is subordinate to its American paymaster. But the embedded danger in conquering Iraq is not limited to dividing that country. It will launch a new era of direct US rule of the Arab world. Replacing Saddam Hussein is no no longer the core issue. Turning Iraq into an American base will limit any threat to Israel by the Islamic republic in Iran, prepare for a new approach to Saudi Arabia and put the small Gulf states under US protection and control for decades. Click here to read more Contents |
| Sharon's
Stealth Plan (Washington Post) (...)Following the same tactics he has employed for a quarter-century, Sharon has been asserting in public that he accepts Bush's diplomacy -- and meanwhile is quietly overseeing a plan of settlement construction designed to make any two-state solution impossible. Since Sharon took office less than 18 months ago, 44 new settlement sites, including more than 300 units, have been established in the West Bank -- including nine in the past three months. In contrast, the previous Israeli government under Ehud Barak thickened existing Israeli settlements in West Bank border areas, but did not allow new outposts. Despite a budget crisis caused by the continuing bloodshed, Sharon's government is pouring new money into the program: The new budget calls for $64 million in subsidies this year to induce Israelis to move to settlements, plus $19 million in funding for settlement development. That doesn't count the nine roads Israel is building for use by settlements, at a cost of $50 million, or the border fences being constructed around greater Jerusalem -- fences that are advertised as security measures but will have the practical effect of roping off new tracts of land for settlement expansions. On June 20 -- four days before Bush's peace initiative speech -- tenders were announced for the construction of 957 new units in the settlements.(...)But there should be no mystery about the old general's intentions. For 25 years -- since he first unveiled his vision for Jewish settlement of the occupied territories while serving in the cabinet of Prime Minister Menachem Begin -- Sharon has been nothing if not consistent. Whenever he has been in office, he has relentlessly pursued a strategic plan for settlement that aims at permanent Israeli control of about 60 percent of the West Bank -- and the blockage of any contiguous space of Palestinian self-government. His annexation map includes north-south bands along Israel's current border with the West Bank and the West Bank's border with Jordan; east-west corridors that connect the Israeli settlement bands and turn Palestinian-populated areas into isolated islands; and a wide swath around Jerusalem, meant to ensure that only Israel can ever exercise sovereignty over all parts of the city. Sharon also has a consistent strategy for handling American and other international inquiries about his program: straight-faced denial. His spokesmen now insist, as they did during his previous tours in office, that there is no settlement expansion going on, only "natural growth" of existing settlements. But by Sharon's definition, many existing settlements officially extend miles beyond their border fences, so that new construction on a bare hilltop can be deemed a "new neighborhood" of a town barely visible -- or not -- on the horizon; and the term "already-existing settlements" is meant to include those officially authorized years ago, but never constructed; and so on. Click here to read more Contents |
| Islam
rejecting globalization - and Jews and Israel (Ha'aretz) Three weeks after the Twin Towers attack on September 11, the prestigious Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram published an article in which the writer hoped that "with the collapse of the city of globalization, it's possible to dare to predict that the whole theory of globalization will be buried with it." Dr. Esther Webman, from Tel Aviv University's Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism says: "Globalization is viewed in the Arab world as an economic threat, and as the continuation of the Western colonialist enterprise of exploiting the Arab world. But more than anything else, it is viewed as a social-cultural threat, of imposing Western culture on the Muslim world, and the undermining of the family values of Muslim society." Just as radical Islamic thinkers identify globalization with the United States, so too Israel and Jews generally are thought to pose the danger of regional domination. Israel is seen as the lever by which the loathed Western values are disseminated in the Middle East. Hezbollah's spiritual leader, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, has warned in the past that "the world Jewish movement has labored to expropriate from Israel its present positions of strength. Jews want to control the Muslim world's economic potential and resources, and they want to weaken it spiritually with respect to the Jerusalem question, and geographically, as regards the question of Palestine." As Sheikh Fadlallah sees it, the struggle against Israel is a wide cultural battle, and is not limited to the political or military contest for pieces of turf in Palestine. Ibrahim Ghosheh, formerly the spokesman for the Hamas movement, claimed in the early 1990s that if compromise were to be forged between Israel and the Arabs, "Israel would rule in the region just as Japan dominates south-east Asia, and all the Arabs will turn into the Jews' workers." Click here to read more Contents |
David Seaton's Energy Links®
Thought provoking, action oriented articles from the English language Internet
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