U.S. checking possibility of pumping oil from northern Iraq to Haifa, via Jordan

Amiram Cohen
Haaretz
Wednesday Aug 1, 2007

The United States has asked Israel to check the possibility of pumping oil from Iraq to the oil refineries in Haifa. The request came in a telegram last week from a senior Pentagon official to a top Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem.

The Prime Minister's Office, which views the pipeline to Haifa as a "bonus" the U.S. could give to Israel in return for its unequivocal support for the American-led campaign in Iraq, had asked the Americans for the official telegram.

The new pipeline would take oil from the Kirkuk area, where some 40 percent of Iraqi oil is produced, and transport it via Mosul, and then across Jordan to Israel. The U.S. telegram included a request for a cost estimate for repairing the Mosul-Haifa pipeline that was in use prior to 1948. During the War of Independence, the Iraqis stopped the flow of oil to Haifa and the pipeline fell into disrepair over the years.

The National Infrastructure Ministry has recently conducted research indicating that construction of a 42-inch diameter pipeline between Kirkuk and Haifa would cost about $400,000 per kilometer. The old Mosul-Haifa pipeline was only 8 inches in diameter.

National Infrastructure Minister Yosef Paritzky said yesterday that the port of Haifa is an attractive destination for Iraqi oil and that he plans to discuss this matter with the U.S. secretary of energy during his planned visit to Washington next month. Paritzky added that the plan depends on Jordan's consent and that Jordan would receive a transit fee for allowing the oil to piped through its territory. The minister noted, however, that "due to pan-Arab concerns, it will be hard for the Jordanians to agree to the flow of Iraqi oil via Jordan and Israel."

Sources in Jerusalem confirmed yesterday that the Americans are looking into the possibility of laying a new pipeline via Jordan and Israel. (There is also a pipeline running via Syria that has not been used in some three decades.)

Iraqi oil is now being transported via Turkey to a small Mediterranean port near the Syrian border. The transit fee collected by Turkey is an important source of revenue for the country. This line has been damaged by sabotage twice in recent weeks and is presently out of service.

In response to rumors about the possible Kirkuk-Mosul-Haifa pipeline, Turkey has warned Israel that it would regard this development as a serious blow to Turkish-Israeli relations.

Sources in Jerusalem suggest that the American hints about the alternative pipeline are part of an attempt to apply pressure on Turkey.

Iraq is one of the world's largest oil producers, with the potential of reaching about 2.5 million barrels a day. Oil exports were halted after the Gulf War in 1991 and then were allowed again on a limited basis (1.5 million barrels per day) to finance the import of food and medicines. Iraq is currently exporting several hundred thousand barrels of oil per day.

During his visit to Washington in about two weeks, Paritzky also plans to discuss the possibility of U.S. and international assistance for joint Israeli-Palestinian projects in the areas of energy and infrastructure, natural gas, desalination and electricity.

A Push to Rewrite Wiretap Law

Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post
Wednesday Aug 1, 2007

The Bush administration is pressing Congress this week for the authority to intercept, without a court order, any international phone call or e-mail between a surveillance target outside the United States and any person in the United States.

The proposal, submitted by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell to congressional leaders on Friday, would amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for the first time since 2006 so that a court order would no longer be needed before wiretapping anyone "reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States."

It would also give the attorney general sole authority to order the interception of communications for up to one year as long as he certifies that the surveillance is directed at a person outside the United States.

The administration and its Republican allies on Capitol Hill have mounted a full-court press to get the Democratic-controlled Congress to pass the measure before lawmakers leave town this week for the August recess, trying to portray reluctant Democrats as weak on terrorism.

Democratic lawmakers favor a narrower approach that would allow the government to wiretap foreign terrorists talking to other foreign terrorists overseas without a warrant if the communication is routed through the United States. They are also willing to give the administration some latitude to intercept foreign-to-domestic communications as long as there is oversight by the FISA court.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) suggested yesterday that a compromise could be reached this week. "The only question," he told reporters, "is how much involvement the attorney general will have" in approving the wiretapping "as compared to the FISA court itself."

The measure faces a number of procedural roadblocks due to the crowded congressional calendar. But the administration, in an effort to speed the process, separated its immediate demands from a more sweeping proposal to rewrite FISA that became tangled in a debate between Congress and the executive branch over access to related Justice Department legal documents.

Civil liberties and privacy groups have denounced the administration's proposal, which they say would effectively allow the National Security Agency to revive a warrantless surveillance program conducted in secret from 2001 until late 2005. They say it would also give the government authority to force carriers to turn over any international communications into and out of the United States without a court order.

In January, the administration announced that the surveillance program was under the supervision of a special FISA court that Congress set up to independently review and judge wiretap requests when it passed FISA in 1978. But critics said that if the proposal succeeds, the court's supervision will no longer be required for many wiretaps.

"It's the president's surveillance program on steroids," said Jim Dempsey, policy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Dempsey said that under the new law the government would no longer have to allege that one party to the call was a member of al-Qaeda or another terrorist group. An unstated facet of the program is that anyone the foreigner is calling inside the United States, as long as that person is not the primary target, would also be wiretapped.

"They're hiding the ball here," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU's Washington legislative office. "What the administration is really going after is the Americans. Even if the primary target is overseas, they want to be able to wiretap Americans without a warrant."

The measure is intended as an "interim proposal" to close short-term "critical gaps in our intelligence capability," McConnell said in a letter to congressional leaders. It would make clear that court orders are not necessary to "effectively collect foreign intelligence about foreign targets overseas."

Bush, in his Saturday radio address, said that rewriting FISA is necessary because the "the terrorist network that struck America on September the 11th wants to strike our country again." GOP leaders have accused Democrats of blocking changes, suggesting that if another attack happens, Democrats will be to blame.

"With heightened risk of terror attack, why are Democrats holding up critical FISA changes?" read a news release issued yesterday by House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). "It's time for Democrats to stop ignoring, downplaying and sidestepping our FISA problem and start working with Republicans to keep America safe."

Democratic leaders have been working with administration officials on altering FISA, aides said. "I am committed to giving our intelligence community the tools they need to fight terrorism and am working very hard with the most senior members of the administration to do that as soon as possible," Reid said.

Democrats have said for more than a year that they are willing to make targeted changes, such as making explicit that wiretapping a call between two suspects overseas, where the call that happens to pass through the United States, needs no court order.

But Reid said, "We hope our Republican counterparts will work together with us to fix the problem, rather than try again to gain partisan political advantage at the expense of our national security."

The proposal would also allow the NSA to "sit on the wire" and have access to the entire stream of communications without the phone company sorting, said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies.

"It's a 'trust us' system," she said. "Give us access and trust us."

Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report.

Cheney appears to say that Bush will be remembered fondly on his deathbed

Michael Roston
Raw Story
Wednesday Aug 1, 2007

President George W. Bush will be remembered fondly on his deathbed.

Vice President Dick Cheney appeared to deliver that message on CNN's Larry King Live Tuesday night. When asked if he should take the President's poor poll numbers more seriously, Cheney pointed to the administration of Gerald Ford, in which he also served. Ford, who replaced Richard Nixon after his resignation from the Watergate scandal, was remembered well after his death.

"[J]ust last year, when he passed away and we had memorial services and so forth for him, he was held in very high regard; across the country his praises were sung for some of the really tough decisions he made that were very unpopular at the time," Cheney insisted.

The Vice President's paralleling of Bush's 6 1/2 years with Ford's abbreviated succession into a disgraced presidency stood out in the pre-recorded interview, in which a largely defiant Cheney stood by his decisions and acknowledged little error or wrongdoing.

Note: An earlier preview clip with commentary by Larry King can be viewed at this link.

Vice President challenges 'too powerful' criticisms
Cheney attempted to insist that as Vice Presidents have gone, he was more modest because he was not 'angling' for future elected office.

"I made the decision when I signed on with the President that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda, that I was not going to be like most Vice Presidents," he told King. "And that was angling, trying to figure out how I was going to be elected President when his term was over with."

But one verbal slip appeared to show that the Vice President saw himself 'making decisions' for the president.

"Brent doesn't walk in my shoes these days. He's not in the job I'm in," Cheney said, deflecting a criticism by Brent Scowcroft, a George H.W. Bush administration official who is a long time friend of the Vice President. "He's not responsible for making the decisions the President has had to make and those of us who support him and advise him."

As one example, Cheney did not rule out directing then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to visit Attorney General John Ashcroft in the hospital. Gonzales asked Ashcroft to overrule his deputy, who had refused to certify the legality of a counterterrorism spying program.

"I don't recall that I was the one who sent them to the hospital," Cheney said.

However, he acknowledged that "[C]ertainly I was involved because I was a big advocate of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and had been responsible and working with General Hayden and George Tenet to get it to the President for approval."

At the same time, Cheney attempted to put to bed the notion that he was not bound by controls on the executive branch because his office was in the legislative branch. However, he also seemed to hold out that the President could give him any authority he needed.

"In the executive branch, you do only what the President asks you to do -- he gives you assignments -- but whatever authority you have is delegated by the President himself," Cheney told King. "The Constitution, on the other hand, provides for your role as the President of Senate."

Cheney acknowledges underestimating Iraqi insurgents
On Iraq, the Vice President admitted he was 'incorrect' when he said that the insurgency was in its 'last throes' in mid-2005.

"I thought there were a series of these milestones that would in fact undermine the insurgency and make it less than it was at that point," he told King. "I think the insurgency turned out to be more robust."

But he insisted that success was not far off, pointing to an op-ed in the 'not exactly...friendly' New York Times from Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution. Cheney noted the two were strong critics of the war effort, and saw success coming.

"They're just back from visiting over there," he said. "They both have been strong critics of the war, both worked in the prior administration; but now saying...that we could be successful."

Cheney also called Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, "a great soldier," and said his September report would point the way toward progress. But he tried to deemphasize the General's role, too.

"I don't want to put the whole burden on him," Cheney said, pointing to the "literally hundreds of thousands of people, especially the young men and women serving, who deserve credit for the effort that's currently underway."

Earlier in the interview, Cheney also invoked the spirits of earlier Presidents, particularly George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, to say that America should fight on in Iraq.

"[I]f you looked simply at public opinion, for example, a lot of the key decisions in our history would never have been pursued or followed through on," he said. "Washington never would have carried through for seven years of the Revolution. Abraham Lincoln would never have stayed with it in order to win the Civil War. We would have been two separate nations by then.

'Glad' Bush commuted Scooter Libby's sentence
Larry King brought up the subject of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the Vice President's former chief of staff. After being convicted for perjury and other charges in the probe of the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, President Bush commuted Libby's sentence.

Cheney supported the decision.

"I am glad that the President saw fit to commute Scooter's sentence," he said. "I thought that was a good outcome, and I supported the President's decision."

Cheney demurred when asked if Libby should have been pardoned. Instead, he focused on Libby's 'burden' from his guilty sentence.

"[H]e still has a very difficult road," he said. "[H]e needs to find work. He's got legal bills. He carries the burden of having been convicted."

'No crime' in US Attorneys controversy
The Vice President strongly defended embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who he said had the President's full confidence.

"[T]he President is the one who has to evaluate the individuals who serve for them," he said. "He has confidence in Al, and that's good enough for me."

Cheney instead dismissed the investigation of the firing of the 8 US Attorneys as a 'witch hunt.'

"What's the allegation of the wrongdoing here? Frankly, there isn't anything," he asked, and answered. "With respect to the U.S. attorneys, there's been, I think, a bit of a witch hunt on Capitol Hill, as they keep rolling over rocks hoping they can find something."

The Vice President went on to reason that the assertion of executive privilege against Congressional subpoenas of key White House advisers needed to be done to protect future presidents.

"[I]t's important for us to pass on these offices we occupy to our successors in as good a shape as we found them," the Vice President argued. "And that means protecting and preserving the integrity of those processes."

Knocks Hillary Clinton; 'probably' done in 2009
Toward the end of the interview, King lured Cheney into 2008's political waters.

First, he praised a letter written by Pentagon official Eric Edelman to Senator Hillary Clinton, accusing her of 'aiding the enemy' by seeking contingency plans for withdrawal from Iraq.

"I agreed with the letter Eric Edelman wrote. I thought it was a good letter," he said.

He described himself as "totally neutral in the upcoming presidential contest," only endorsing the Republican Party generally.

"I will support the Republican nominee," he said. "And the fact that others have signed on with Fred [Thompson] or John McCain or Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, they're all good men, I hope one of them is the next President."

And ultimately, Cheney said he 'probably' was done with public service for good.

"Probably not. I can't think of one," Cheney said when King asked if he would serve in any other Republican administration.

He added, "I've had a great tour, Larry....the time comes when you need to recognize it's over, and for me that will be January of '09."

#
The full transcript of Cheney's interview with King has been published on the White House website.

The following video clips are from CNN's Larry King Live, broadcast on July 31.

Cheney: I Was Wrong About 'Last Throes' in Iraq

Reuters
Wednesday Aug 1, 2007

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney acknowledged on Tuesday he was wrong in 2005 when he insisted the insurgency in Iraq was in its "last throes."

It was Cheney's most direct public admission of how badly the administration had underestimated the strength of America's enemies in the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.

But Cheney, an architect of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, otherwise gave no ground in an interview on CNN's "Larry King Live" as he defended President George W. Bush's Iraq policy.

He said the Bush administration would still send troops into Iraq if it could do it all over again, even knowing what it knows now, including that more than 3,000 U.S. military personnel would be killed.

"I firmly believe," Cheney said, "that the decisions we've made with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan have been absolutely the sound ones in terms of the overall strategy."

But Cheney made clear he no longer held to a May 2005 assessment, widely mocked by political satirists and Democratic politicians, in which he said, "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Since then, unrelenting attacks have brought Iraq to the brink of civil war.

Cheney's words were among many oft-cited quotes marking the U.S. pursuit of the war, which has damaged U.S. credibility around the world. They include Bush's taunting insurgents after the invasion by declaring "Bring 'em on!" and the banner stating "Mission Accomplished" behind Bush as he spoke aboard an aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003.

Cheney, known for his secretive ways and rarely one to admit mistakes publicly, said:

"My estimate at the time - and it was wrong, it turned out to be incorrect - was the fact that we were in the midst of holding three elections in Iraq, elected an interim government, then ratifying a constitution, then electing a permanent government, that they had had significant success, we'd rounded up Saddam Hussein.

"I thought there were a series of these milestones that would in fact undermine the insurgency and make it less than it was at that point. That clearly didn't happen. I think the insurgency turned out to be more robust."

Cheney said it had also been made before al Qaeda in Iraq had stepped up attacks, including the 2006 bombing of a Shi'ite mosque that sparked a wave of sectarian killings.

The Bush administration is facing growing pressure from a Democratic-led Congress and a war-weary American public for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, something Bush firmly rejects.

In a further blow to Bush's strategy, Iraq's parliament went into summer recess for a month on Monday after political leaders failed to agree on a series of laws that Washington sees as crucial to stabilizing the country.

"It's better than taking two months off, which was their original plan," Cheney said. "I made it clear, for example, when I was there in May that we didn't appreciate the notion that they were going to take a big part of the summer off and they did cut that in half."

He insisted that since the U.S. Congress takes the month of August off, "I don't think we can say that they (Iraqi lawmakers) shouldn't go home at all."

More On The 9/11 Camp David "Crash"

Prisonplanet.com
Wednesday Aug 1, 2007

Related: Camp David "Crash" More Evidence Of 9/11 Media Scripting?

Poster jbrid1138 on the Prisonplanet comments boards writes...

I live within 10 miles of Camp David. On the day of 9/11 we were watching the attacks at the WTC unfold on TV like most people across the world. We have relatives in New Jersey who got word (their tv) that an airplane was on its way to Camp David and expressed concern for your well being, knowing where we live in relation to the same. It was the first we had heard of it.

Long story short, we kept in touch with those relatives and soon learned that the airplane had gone down // I didn't hear anything out the door so I assumed SOUND might be taking a bit longer than usual that day to reach us. It never came -- Because the airplane down was later reported to be many miles away from the Camp David location. There was talk (tv again) that the path was taking the airplane 'towards' Camp David on its way to Washington, DC // which is located @ 100 miles away. I questioned at the time how they picked Camp David out of the air but just assumed because of what it represents -- seemed a stupid target in a way (to me) because it sits in the woods, with little population WHILE on the other hand there are quite a few military bases near (along) that same imaginary path that the airplane never completed. Example (and this is not all of them, certainly no national guard or reserve locations listed but they do exist also along the way -- )

Letter Kenney Army Depot, PA
Fort Ritchie, MD
Fort Detrict, MD
Fort George G. Meade, MD
Fort Myer, VA

Much more going on at any one of those locations, far more target for your buck so to speak, than a location out in the woods, or so it seemed to me at the time. But I figured the terrorist were just too damn dumb to realize that fact. That's what I figured back then.

Now I know that 9/11 was an inside job and the folks pulling the strings knew exactly what they were doing.

New Video Puts Spotlight Back On Putin's False Flag Terror

Beslan siege evidence adds to weight of FSB's criminal history of inside job carnage

Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet Wednesday, August 1, 2007

A new video that appears to confirm Russian security forces were responsible for the first explosions during the Beslan hostage crisis is the final nail in the coffin, confirming that the raid was deliberately botched and then covered up in order to hand Vladimir Putin a propaganda coup in the war against Chechnya.

A video that remained secret for nearly three years after the horrific Beslan hostage crisis has cast new doubt on official conclusions about what led to the deaths of 334 people, more than half of them children, during one of Russia's worst terrorist attacks, reports the Associated Press.

The footage is far from definitive, but appears to lend credence to the theory that security forces bear at least some of the blame for the high death toll.

The footage depicts explosions taking place outside of the school buildings and contradicts the official explanation that militants were responsible for the initial blasts, while validating survivor's accounts of what took place.

The video was filmed by an onlooker and forms part of the dearth of available footage of the incident, since the FSB refuses to turn its footage over to investigators and has sought to close the book on the case at every turn.

As our investigation at the time highlighted, many aspects of the Beslan siege provide stunning contradictions to the official story and clearly indicate that Russian forces had a hand in staging if not at least provocateuring the massacre.

- The Parliamentary Committee investigation uncovered the fact that high-ranking Russian military officers were involved in the plot and acted as accomplices to the terrorists. These individuals were ranked "higher than a major and a colonel," according to the Committee.

- A former policeman was also exposed as being involved in the plot. Other police involvement was later confirmed.

- The Parliamentary Commission also found evidence that a "foreign intelligence agency" was involved in coordinating the massacre.

- Journalists who reported on the Beslan siege and uncovered evidence of inside involvement were later drugged and detained by Russian authorities as the cover-up swung into high gear.

- During the siege, Russian authorities refused to reveal what the terrorists' demands were, blocking all phone communications and claiming a tape containing the terrorists' demands was blank.

- The alleged Chechen terrorists did not even speak Chechen and received orders from abroad, according to reports.

The Beslan massacre occurred amidst a wave of terror attacks in Russia and shortly after the crashes of two Tupolev passenger airliners, which were blamed on Chechen terrorists by authorities. However, citing the fact that the aircraft debris was scattered over large areas, the independent Russian media accused Vladimir Putin of ordering the planes shot down in a crude false flag ploy to secure an election victory for the pro-Kremlin Chechen President Alu Alkhanov two days later.

Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov denied any involvement in the plane crashes or the school siege, citing "a third force that brought Russian President Vladimir Putin to power" as being responsible for the carnage.

The notorious Russian FSB has a documented history of staging false flag events in order to accomplish political agendas.

Vladimir Putin came to power as a result of an FSB orchestrated reign of terror in the autumn of 1999 which involved blowing up apartment blocks all over Russia and blaming the attacks on Chechen separatists, thus playing on Russian fears of the fierce Muslim Chechens both to start a new war in Chechnya and to win Putin the presidential elections.

FSB agents were caught planting Hexogen explosives underneath an apartment block in Ryazan. Records indicate that the first call the "terrorists" made after planting the bomb was to FSB headquarters and the culprits were allowed to flee the country by authorities.

The FSB admitted planting the sacks of explosives, but later claimed they contained sugar and were used as part of a drill to test security procedures. Authorities had first stated that a terrorist attack had been averted and that the sacks did contain Hexogen, until FSB involvement was discovered at which point the story was changed.

Alexei Kartofelnikov, the first eyewitness to see the explosives and alert the police, went on the record to state that the substance was clearly not sugar, describing the material as looking more like rice and yellow in color - a clear match for the description of Hexogen.

The FSB had planted real explosives and were caught in the act of staging a false flag terror attack, forcing them to concoct an elaborate cover story while blocking any real investigation and silencing whistleblowers.

This instance and many more are documented in the excellent documentary film The Assassination of Russia, which you can watch in full below courtesy of Google Video.

White House says spying broader than known: report

Reuters
Wednesday Aug 1, 2007

Related: FBI Wants Its Own Stasi

The Bush administration's top intelligence official has acknowledged that a controversial domestic surveillance program was only one part of a much broader spying effort, The Washington Post reported in its Wednesday edition.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell wrote in a letter that other aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic spying program remain classified, the Post said.

"That is the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed publicly because it is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has been officially acknowledged," McConnell wrote, according to the Post.

Bush acknowledged the existence of a program that monitored domestic phone calls and e-mails without court oversight in December 2005. The administration has not confirmed other secret spying efforts reported by news outlets, such as one that searched millions of telephone records.

Bush signed an executive order that authorized "a number of ... intelligence activities" following the hijacking attacks of September 11, 2001, McConnell wrote.

The warrantless wiretapping program was put under court supervision in January but the administration now wants Congress to allow it to do many of the same activities without a court order.

The letter was sent on Tuesday to Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The letter was written to defend Attorney General Alberto

Gonzales, who has been under attack over his testimony to Congress about the warrantless spying program, the Post said.