Barak Cancels Trip to France after Threat of Lawsuit over Flotilla Raid

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak canceled a trip to an arms trading fair in France after French passengers of the Freedom Flotilla attacked two weeks ago said they plan to file a lawsuit against the state of Israel for war crimes.

Ehud Barak (photo from paltelegraph.com)

The French humanitarian aid activists said they will file the lawsuit against Israel in the International Court of Justice in the Hague for the actions of Israeli forces which boarded and attacked ships in international waters on a humanitarian aid mission, killing nine. They demanded that French police have Barak arrested at the airport upon his arrival in the country.

A spokesperson for the French activists, Lillian Glock, told reporters, "I speak on behalf of a group of international lawyers who will go to the International Court of Justice on the Israeli attack on the aid ships what constitutes without doubt a war crime and justifies our move in the International Court of Justice."

Glock added, “Israel needs to stop this bloody escalation and the only solution is international law. We want to stop Israel and punish the leaders who participated in this process. Our move is aimed at specific persons, mainly leaders, as well as those who carried out the orders, because it is not possible to hide behind a chain of command. The peace activists who were transporting essential goods to Gaza are protected under UN Security Council Resolution 1860 condemning the blockade, and therefore these activists did not violate the law”.

Originally Barak had refused calls to cancel his trip to France, during which he was scheduled to open a new 'Israeli booth' at the Eurosatory arms fair in Paris, which opens this week. The arms fair itself has come under fire by peace activists in Europe as the showcase event of the 'Merchants of Death', as they term international weapons dealers. Several years ago, peace activists bought a tank and attempted to drive it into the fair to disrupt the event, and security has been increased significantly since then. A Fox News report on the arms fair two years ago claimed that the Israeli booth boasted the most scantily-clad women carrying weaponry that Israeli arms companies and the Israeli government hoped to sell in the international market.

In his last trip to Paris, Ehud Barak was criticized by the Israeli state comptroller for his extravagant expenses at the Paris Air Show in 2009. According to expense reports of the trip, Barak booked one of the most expensive hotels in Paris, and one-third of the rooms booked were not used. The State Comptroller's report found that $254,000 was spent on empty rooms and other entirely superfluous expenses.

British Petroleum's "Smart Pig"

The Brilliantly Profitable Timing of the Alaska Oil Pipeline Shutdown

Is the Alaska Pipeline corroded? You bet it is. Has been for more than a decade. Did British Petroleum shut the pipe yesterday to turn a quick buck on its negligence, to profit off the disaster it created? Just ask the "smart pig."

Years ago, I had the unhappy job of leading an investigation of British Petroleum's management of the Alaska pipeline system. I was working for the Chugach villages, the Alaskan Natives who own the shoreline slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker grounding.

Even then, courageous government inspectors and pipeline workers were screaming about corrosion all through the pipeline. I say "courageous" because BP, which owns 46% of the pipe and is supposed to manage the system, had a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems.

In one case, BP's CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of a whistleblower, Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe's tanker facility. BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him. When caught, a US federal judge said BP's acts were "reminiscent of Nazi Germany."

This was not an isolated case. Captain James Woodle, once in charge of the pipe's Valdez terminus, was blackmailed into resigning the post when he complained of disastrous conditions there. The weapon used on Woodle was a file of faked evidence of marital infidelity. Nice guys, eh?

Now let's talk timing. BP's suddenly discovered corrosion necessitating an emergency shut-down of the line is the same corrosion Dan Lawn has been screaming about for 15 years. Lawn is a steel-eyed government inspector who has kept his job only because his union's lawyers have kept BP from having his head.

Indeed, it's pretty darn hard for BP to claim it is surprised to find corrosion this week when Lawn issued a damning report on corrosion right after a leak and spill were discovered on March 2 of this year.

Why shut the pipe now? The timing of a sudden inspection and fix of a decade-long problem has a suspicious smell. A precipitous shutdown in mid-summer, in the middle of Middle East war(s), is guaranteed to raise prices and reap monster profits for BP. The price of crude jumped $2.22 a barrel on the shutdown news to over $76. How lucky for BP which sells four million barrels of oil a day. Had BP completed its inspection and repairs a couple years back -- say, after Dan Lawn's tenth warning -- the oil market would have hardly noticed.

But $2 a barrel is just the beginning of BP's shut-down bonus. The Alaskan oil was destined for the California market which now faces a supply crisis at the very height of the summer travel season. The big winner is ARCO petroleum, the largest retailer in the Golden State. ARCO is a 100%-owned subsidiary of ... British Petroleum.

BP could have fixed the pipeline problem this past winter, after their latest corrosion-caused oil spill. But then ARCO would have lost the summertime supply-squeeze windfall.

Enron Corporation was infamous for deliberately timing repairs to maximize profit. Would BP also manipulate the market in such a crude manner? Some US prosecutors think they did so in the US propane market. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) just six weeks ago charged the company with approving an Enron-style scheme to crank up the price of propane sold in poor rural communities in the US. One former BP exec has pleaded guilty.

Lord Browne, the imperious CEO of BP, has apologized for that scam, for the Alaska spill, for this week's shutdown and for the deaths in 2005 of 15 workers at the company's mortally sloppy refinery operation at Texas City, Texas.

I don't want readers to think BP isn't civic-minded. The company's US CEO, Bob Malone, was Co-Chairman of the Bush re-election campaign in Alaska. Mr. Bush, in turn, was so impressed with BP's care of Alaska's environment that he pushed again to open the state's arctic wildlife refuge (ANWR) to drilling by the BP consortium.

Indeed, you can go to Alaska today and see for yourself the evidence of BP's care of the wilderness. You can smell it: the crude oil still on the beaches from the Exxon Valdez spill.

Exxon took all the blame for the spill because they were dumb enough to have the company's name on the ship. But it was BP's pipeline managers who filed reports that oil spill containment equipment was sitting right at the site of the grounding near Bligh Island. However, the reports were bogus, the equipment wasn't there and so the beaches were poisoned. At the time, our investigators uncovered four-volume's worth of faked safety reports and concluded that BP was at least as culpable as Exxon for the 1,200 miles of oil-destroyed coastline.

Nevertheless, m'Lord Browne preens himself with his corporation's environmental record. We know BP cares about nature because they have lots of photos of solar panels in their annual reports -- and they've painted every one of their gas stations green.

The green paint-job is supposed to represent the oil giant's love of Mother Nature. But the good Lord, Mr. Browne, knows it stands for the color of the Yankee dollar.

BP claims the profitable timing of its Alaska pipe shutdown can be explained because they've only now run a "smart pig" through the pipes to locate the corrosion. The "pig" is an electronic drone that BP should have been using continuously, though they had not done so for 14 years. The fact that, in the middle of an oil crisis, they've run it through now, forcing the shutdown, reminds me, when I consider Lord Browne's closeness to George Bush, that the company's pig is indeed, very, very smart.

LOS ALAMOS Plutonium could be missing from lab

600-plus pounds unaccounted for, activist group says

Enough plutonium to make dozens of nuclear bombs hasn't been accounted for at the UC-run Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and may be missing, an activist group says in a new report.

There is no evidence that the weapons-grade plutonium has been stolen or diverted for illegal purposes, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research said. However, the amount of unaccounted-for plutonium -- more than 600 pounds, and possibly several times that -- is so great that it raises "a vast security issue," the group said in a report to be made public today.

The institute, which is based in Takoma Park, Md., says it compared data from five publicly available reports and documents issued by the U.S. Energy Department and Los Alamos from 1996 to 2004 and found inconsistencies in them. It says the records aren't clear on what the lab did with the plutonium, a byproduct of nuclear bomb research at Los Alamos.

A spokesman for UC, which manages the national laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore for the Energy Department, did not address the report's specifics but said the New Mexico lab tracks nuclear material "to a minute quantity."

The report says there are several possible explanations for what happened to the plutonium. They include:

-- It was discarded in unsafe amounts in landfills at the Los Alamos lab. It is legal to discard weapons-grade plutonium in landfills, one of which is 40 feet deep, as long as the substance is sufficiently diluted. However, if a landfill holds too much plutonium, the material can eventually contaminate the environment -- for example by leeching into groundwater or being absorbed by the roots of plants -- study co-author Arjun Makhijani said in an interview.

-- It was shipped to an Energy Department burial site in a New Mexico salt mine, without accurate records of such shipments being kept.

-- It was stolen or otherwise shipped off site for unknown reasons.

"If it has left the site, then it obviously has the most grievous security implications," Makhijani said. "I cannot say that it has left the site, but the government has the responsibility to ensure that it has not.

"And the University (of California) obviously has a responsibility in this. It should be a grave embarrassment for the university to be sitting on numbers like this and discrepancies like this, and not have resolved them."

UC spokesman Chris Harrington said Los Alamos "does an annual inventory of special nuclear materials which is overseen by (the Energy Department). These inventories have been occurring for 20-plus years. Special nuclear materials are carefully tracked to a minute quantity."

The report concludes that at least 661 pounds of plutonium generated at the lab over the last half-century is not accounted for. The atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 contained about 13 pounds of plutonium.

"The security implications . . . are extremely serious, since less than 2 percent of the lowest unaccounted-for plutonium is enough to make one nuclear bomb," the report said.

The problem of plutonium accounting began worrying lab critics in the mid-1990s, when Energy Department officials released lab records as part of the Clinton administration's openness initiative.

Critics found they had trouble determining exactly what the lab was doing with the plutonium waste that is generated during the manufacture of spherical plutonium "pits," the fissile triggers of nuclear bombs.

Makhijani said he and colleagues from two other activist groups hoped the problem would be resolved in August 2004, when they sent a letter of complaint to then-Los Alamos Director G. Peter Nanos. Nanos was trying to reform lab operations after highly publicized scandals over UC management of Los Alamos.

Nanos and lab officials did not respond, though, and nine months later Nanos left for a different job. Makhijani said he and associates had decided to make their report public to dramatize federal officials' failure to resolve the puzzle of the missing plutonium.

Makhijani received his engineering doctorate at UC Berkeley with specialization in plasma physics and nuclear fusion. The institute is funded by sources including the Ford Foundation and San Francisco's Ploughshares Fund.

UC has joined Bechtel National and other industrial partners in a bid to retain its contract to run Los Alamos, in a competition against a consortium consisting of Lockheed-Martin, the University of Texas, several New Mexico universities and various industrial partners.

Makhijani says he isn't taking sides in the competition but that he would prefer the weapons labs be run by industrial contractors rather than universities. The reason, he said, is that university connections to the weapons labs tend to lead to restraints on free inquiry and speech within the universities.

If an Agent Knocks

Click this link ..... http://www.scribd.com/doc/8578721/What-to-Do-if-the-FBI-Comes-to-Your-Door

Press TV-On The Edge With Max Keiser-06-04-2010(Part3)

Click this link ..... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWnJa9XFwLo

You Really Want Government Drilling for Oil?

You've got to hand it to the people who really dislike free markets. They see them everywhere (under every bed?) and especially wherever any serious problem arises. That no free market exists within a thousand miles makes no difference whatsoever.

Take the oil spill in the Gulf. Market opponents are having a field day. They say this finally demonstrates the need for government to run things. Private firms can't be trusted.

But it looks more like government can't be trusted. The central government is, in law and in fact, the owner of the part in the Gulf where BP drilled for oil. (I didn't say it was the legitimate owner.) The owner leased its property to a private company, BP, with a bad safety record (though a good one for sucking up to the environmentalist establishment and bureaucrats) and issued permits for the drilling operation. It then failed to keep a sharp eye on what BP and subcontractors Transocean and Halliburton were doing to its property. That might have something to do with the fact that government regulators don't have the sort of relationship to "their" property that real private owners do, and they can always be counted on to get friendly with those they regulate. The Minerals Management Service in the Interior Department has a special conflict of interest: It makes money off the drilling it permits and regulates. Thus it could benefit from decisions that are bad for the public.

So what failed here, the market or the State? The call isn't even close. The free market was nowhere near the scene. It has an airtight alibi. It didn't exist.

Now with some effort you might get a die-hard anti-market person to concede this. So we move to the next step. What should replace the current hybrid (government-corporate) system? I see only two choices: full government management or full market management. Full government management wouldn't appear terribly promising, considering that the current problems are traceable back to government management already. How would things change substantially if, instead of contracting out the drilling to a nominally private company, the government instead hired the personnel itself and paid them directly from the U.S. Treasury? Who cares if the rig says "BP, " "Transocean," or "U.S. Government" on it? The same fallible people would be in the same position to make the same fateful mistakes. Not much would have changed.

Incentives Matter

That's because what matters is incentives, not whether a worker is on the government payroll. Why assume that civil service employees know more or care more than people paid by corporations?

But, it will be said, the government workers will have a mandate to protect the environment and the public. Okay, let's go with that. Let's say the decision-makers are environmental hawks who really don't like oil drilling anywhere. They'll be tough: no drilling unless it's 100 percent safe. Leaving aside the obvious problem with this standard, that policy would have costs. The risk of oil spills may drop to zero, but we might have to forgo certain important benefits in the process. Poor people, say, might have their prospects dimmed by more expensive energy.

Is the tradeoff worth it? How do we go about answering that question? Government is no help here. It can certainly impose a plan, but constructing a plan beneficial to the public would be like playing darts in the dark. What bureaucrats think is good for us may not actually be good for us, no matter how much they care. Mises and Hayek covered this in their writings on state socialism and economic calculation.

Things are sure looking bleak. Government assurances are worthless whether it contracts out for drilling or does it itself. That leaves only the free market. Can it be trusted?

First off, let's remember that we live in the real world. There are no iron-clad guarantees. The best we can hope for is relative security. Option A can't be perfect. All we can ask is that it is better than Options B, C, and D. But how do we decide? When people conclude that government management is the best alternative, knowingly or not they have rigged the game. They are comparing the messy real world in which free markets would operate to an impossible government-managed smooth-running utopia, where regulators have complete knowledge and total dedication to the public interest. This is the Nirvana Fallacy, and the problem with it is that utopia isn't on the table.

What is on the table are two options: an arrangement where incentives align economic activity with the public interest and one where they don't. Now which setup seems more promising? One where personnel risk no capital, face no prospects of bankruptcy, and procure their revenue by force (taxation) after flattering members of special-interest-serving congressmen? Or one where: capital had to be raised from wary investors in a competitive environment, insurance would be priced according to risk, products would have to be sold to buyers who are free to say no, and full and strict liability would haunt every decision, with bankruptcy always looming and no government bailout are even implied?

When you come down to it, the choice is really rather easy.

Copyright © 2010 Foundation for Economic Education

Obama As Moral Dupe – Will Erdogan Blink?

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

A recent article by Patrick Cockburn, one of the ablest reporters covering the Middle East, provides an excellent character portrait of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. It is certainly consistent with what little I have been able to learn about this fascinating politician. Regardless of what you may think of Erdogan, and he has many detractors (I am not one), he is certainly establishing himself as an influential world leader who must be reckoned with in an emerging multi-polar world.

Cockburn’s report is must reading, because Erdogan has maneuvered himself onto the moral high ground in a very serious crisis he did not create. Consider please the following:

By standing tall against Israel’s murderous commando attack on the unarmed ship in international waters that was carrying aid to the besieged inhabitants of Gaza, and by promising to be on another ship trying to break the blockade, Erdogan has set an example that contrasts sharply with the latest generation of pusillanimous leaders in the United States. They have refused to condemn Israel’s attack, even though a US citizen was among those murdered — thus continuing the pattern of unprincipled moral weakness that began when President Johnson refused to act decisively after the Israelis deliberately attacked the USS Liberty in international waters in June 1967, murdering over 30 American sailors.

Not surprisingly, Erdogan has become the newest bête noire of the neocons. They have embarked on a concerted effort in their media outlets to smear him as well as to trash our relations with Turkey, starting with screeds in the Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard. Their hypocrisy is stunning. Many of these same neocons assiduously cultivated the so-called strategic Israeli-Turkish alliance in the 1990s and, in fact, lobbied Congress on the behalf of Turkey. AIPAC is lobbying Congress for a resolution of support for Israel’s attack, or failing that, is pressuring congressmen to not criticize Israel. AIPAC and the neocons are also stoking up the Armenian lobby to criticize the modern Turkish Republic for the genocidal crimes which occurred during the waning days of a decrepit Ottoman Empire. This is logically equivalent to criticizing German Chancellor Angela Merkel for Adolf Hitler’s crimes. Some congressmen have already made strong public statements of support for Israel, and by extension a condemnation for Turkey, while the majority — like the good Germans of the 1930s — have done likewise by remaining silent. Israel just hoisted Obama on his petard (again) by requesting increased arms aid from the United States which, of course, will be rubber stamped by a compliant Congress. Meanwhile, according to the Jerusalem Post, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, just threatened to sink any Turkish warships carrying Erdogan, if it was escorting another flotilla of aid ships trying to break the blockade of Gaza. The threat is serious, because it was made on Israeli Army Radio, an outlet for policy pronouncements intended to lather up the Israeli citizens for battle.

To add final insult to this march of folly, Sheera Fenkle just reported that the blockade of Gaza is not about stopping arms shipments to Hamas, because in her words, ‘McClatchy obtained an Israeli government document that describes the blockade not as a security measure but as “economic warfare” against the Islamist group Hamas, which rules the Palestinian territory.’ Put another way, Israel’s own documents suggest that the Israeli government understands the blockade is about an illegal collective punishment of the Gazan people for having the temerity to elect Hamas to govern Gaza in a free election. Ironically, it was the short-sighted Israelis who promoted Hamas in its early years during the late 1980s as a tactical means to divide and weaken Palestinian allegiances to the PLO.

So Turkey and Israel are maneuvering themselves and the United States into a trap between the moral high ground and the moral low ground for very different reasons. In the eyes of most of the world, Turkey is playing a constructive grand strategic card, while Israel is playing a destructive strategic card. One holds out hope for peace and justice while the other continues its warlike business as usual. But there is more. An Israeli attack on Turkey would be also an attack on the NATO Alliance. Under the terms of the NATO Treaty, such an attack should trigger what is known as an Article 5 response — an attack on a NATO ally is an attack on all. This is what the US used to justify a NATO response to 9-11 in Afghanistan, even though the Afghan case was far less clear than the Turkish-Israeli imbroglio, because the Taliban was at most an accomplice to the 9-11 crime and may not have known about it in advance. If Israel carries through on its threat to attack a NATO warship, it would be a clear act of war. If the US (and the rest of NATO) does not respond, you can kiss NATO and Turkey goodbye, and the US would lose moral standing in the world to a greater degree than that engineered by George Bush and his fellow neocon travelers — which is no small achievement. Nobody could ever trust the United States to live up to its formal treaty obligations. Our relations with Russia and China would be weakened dangerously, and Iran’s position in the Middle East would be strengthened. The fall of dominoes would go on in all sorts of directions.

To borrow the unforgettable words of British Foreign Minister Edward Grey in the fateful summer of 1914, “the lights are going out all over” the Middle East, in NATO headquarters, and in the White House (assuming they were turned on). If Erdogan presses forward with his public promise to be on another Gaza aid ship or an escorting Turkish warship and if Israel acts on its threat to sink the ship carrying him, then like the chain of events of August 1914, the march to war could very well take on a life of its own.

We know what Israel will do if, as is likely, the US stands passively on the sidelines again, so the questions of the hour seem to be: Will Erdogan blink? Will the US force him to blink?

Study Cockburn’s report and judge for yourself if blinking is a part of Erdogan’s character, particularly, when he has maneuvered himself onto the moral high ground, and it is obvious to all but a few that the low grounders, like PM Netanyau, are playing the hapless Mr. Obama for a moral dupe — again.