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... Quelque soit la véracité des faits conduisant à cette escalade, les marchés pétroliers risquent de réagir très fortement dès lundi matin, alors que le cours de pétrole a fortement chuté durant la semaine écoulée pour atteindre son niveau de juin 2005.

... ce qui pourrait tout de même bien arranger les très puissants lobbies pétroliers texans qui doivent actuellement faire grise mine devant la chute vertigineuse des cours du pétrole.

N’oublions pas tout de même qu’Israël et USA sont plus qu’alliés et qu’une telle escalade – certes uniquement verbale pour le moment – pourrait également satisfaire le Président Iranien, en augmentant le cours du pétrole, alors qu’il a du récemment demander une rallonge budgétaire, tandis que la rébellion menace à Téhéran.

( Elisabeth Studer, http://www.leblogfinance.com/ )

3 500 tonnes de CO2
600 000 litres de Jet A1 pour les avions
250 000 litres d’Avgas
500 000 litres de gazoil
140 000 litres pour les hélicos
qui n’ont jamais rien apporté à la recherche en terme de biocarburants et de moteurs hybrides.
Cet événement exalte la sur-consommation. En Afrique ... cette obscénité terrorise et humilie.

S’ils avaient la moindre capacité d’adaptation ce serait devenu une course à l’économie.

Pétition sur http://www.velorution.org/pasdak/index.php?petition=1&signe=oui.

For years, a network of fake citizens’ groups and bogus scientific bodies has been claiming that science of global warming is inconclusive. They set back action on climate change by a decade.

But who funded them? Exxon’s involvement is well known, but not the strange role of Big Tobacco ...

The website http://www.Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company’s official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have.

These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled “junk science”. The findings they welcome are labelled “sound science”.

Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them look like grassroots citizens’ organisations or academic bodies: the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example ...

( The Guardian Sept.19, 2006 The denial industry. George Monbiot, http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1875762,00.html )

The past year has redefined the landscape of exchanges around the world ...

... The euro-bourses have failed to create a pan-European market capable of competing with the LSE and, more importantly, the US markets. Two transatlantic takeovers by US exchanges are now in motion. Why does the initiative come from the US? After all, the LSE’s profits are double those of Nasdaq, Euronext’s profits are two times the NYSE’s and Deutsche Börse is three times more profitable than the NYSE. The reason is that stock exchange price/earnings ratios in the US are about 50 times, while the European p/e ratios are in the 20s. The contemplated transactions produce a substantial transfer of European earnings to US shareholders. Europe finances its own takeover.

It is extraordinary that neither the European Commission nor Ecofin, the committee of European finance ministers, have encouraged the European exchanges to get together. Is it no matter to Europe that two of its largest equity markets will be owned by US stock exchanges? Would this not affect the internal market? Does the CME-CBOT merger not threaten the European derivatives market? etc.

( Financial Times, Exchange battles mask Europe’s silence, Georges Ugeux, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/e4f90344-9a8a-11db-bbd2-0000779e2340.html )

On October 19 I debated Bob Novak at Emory University. The topic was “Civil Liberties in a Time of War.” I kicked his ass, but that’s not why I mention it. In the debate I predicted that, after the Democrats captured the Congress, Pres. Bush would provoke a Constitutional crisis by refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas.

Pres. Bush, I predicted, will effectively tell Speaker Pelosi, “You send the Capitol Police to enforce your subpoena. I’ll send the 82d Airborne to resist them. Let’s meet on the Mall and see who wins.”

Novak said I was crazy. It’s beginning to look like I was right.

The only reason George W. Bush would turn loose of White House Counsel Harriett Miers - who gazes upon our president with an adoration and veneration bordering on idolatry - is because he wants a war-time consigliere.

In a way that might make Harry F. Byrd proud, our president is about to embark on a policy of massive resistance. He will instruct his lawyers to delay, deny and refuse to comply with any effort by Congress to get to the bottom of official corruption - especially as the billions squandered or stolen in Mr. Bush’s war. He’ll try to run out the clock, then take his chances with his hand-picked right-wing judiciary. (Keep in mind the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, through which this dispute would flow, includes such Bush appointees as Brett Kavanaugh, a Ken Starr protégé whose work in the Bush White House was described by Henry Waxman as promoting “an imperial presidency.” And the Supreme Court has such presidential suck-ups as John Roberts and Sam Alito.)

Thank God the American people - and Nancy Pelosi—have given the responsibility of oversight we have constitutional heroes like Waxman and John Dingell. They are fair and tough. But even in their combined 83 years experience in Congress they have not seen a crowd that has more contempt for the Constitution than the Bush-Cheney team. I would not be surprised to learn that, in anticipation of receiving congressional subpoenas, the Bushies were having shredding parties that would make Ollie North and Fawn Hall blush.

Let’s all watch to see who Bush appoints to replace Ms. Miers. If he chooses someone like David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief counsel, we’ll know Mr. Bush intends to shred yet another Article of the Constitution. ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-begala/bushs-strategy-of-massiv_b_37946.html )

Je suis heureux de voir que je ne suis pas le seul à y penser. Merci pour votre article… “historique”.

Je pense aussi qu’il reste, comme seule issue à la crise irakienne, qu’une fuite en avant. En espérant que tout s’arrange pour le pire : les crises sont parfois salutaires.

Foreign spy activity surges to fill technology gap

By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 3, 2007

Foreign spies are stepping up efforts to obtain secret U.S. technology through methods ranging from sexual entrapment to Internet hacking, with China and other Asian countries leading the targeting of U.S. defense contractors.
  “The apparent across-the-board surge in activity from East Asia and Pacific countries will continue in the short term as gaps in technological capability become apparent in their weapons-development processes,” the latest annual report by the Defense Security Service counterintelligence office stated.
  “The globalization of defense business will increase the threat from strategic competitors who will use legitimate business activities as a venue to illegally transfer U.S. technology,” the report said, noting that the use of third countries to disguise collection will continue as a common tactic.
  The report provides details of the methods used by foreign technology spies, from simple verbal requests for information to purchases of controlled technology and—in at least one case—the use of a woman who seduced a contractor into providing his computer password.
  Other methods included offering marketing services to contractors, spying during visits to U.S. companies and the use of “cultural commonality” to obtain technology.
  The report did not identify the 106 countries that are engaged in the collection activity, but other defense officials said the most active technology spies are working for China, Russia and Iran. Other collectors of U.S. technology were identified as agents working secretly for Israel, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Egypt and United Arab Emirates, the officials said.
  The unclassified 2006 report, “Technology Collection Trends in the U.S. Defense Industry,” was approved for release in June, but only recently made available to defense contractors and government agencies. A copy was obtained by The Washington Times. It is based on counterintelligence reports from contractors and other data through early 2006.
  Space systems, lasers and missile- and radar-evading stealth technology are among the most sought-after U.S. technologies, the report said.
  Other key targets include information systems, modeling and simulation technology, optics, aeronautics, sensors, explosives, electronics and marine systems.
  The report said the largest percent of the 971 spying incidents detected during the latest reporting period came from East Asia and the Pacific with 31 percent of all incidents, while the Near East accounted for about 23 percent. About 19 percent of the incidents emanated from Eurasia and 13 percent from South Asia.
  The report provides several cases showing how foreign spies have tried to obtain technology, through simple verbal requests, covert computer hacking and clandestine intelligence activities.
  One case revealed in the report involved an East Asian company that sought to obtain classified technology related to U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a cutting-edge U.S. military technology.
  The Asian representatives showed up at a classified facility at the U.S. defense company uninvited and tried to “observe the repair” of previously purchased unclassified systems.
  The report said the “aggressive effort” to visit the company appeared to be a “veiled attempt to collect information on other high-interest UAV programs at the facility.” It was the fourth time since 2003 that the company sought UAV goods.
  Several U.S. defense contractors have reported that between October 2005 and January 2006 they found radio-frequency transmitters hidden in Canadian coins that were planted on them after they traveled through Canada, according to the report.

Pour divers observateurs, Ban Ki-moon apparaît comme l’homme des Américains.
http://www.lapresse.ch/vqhome/le_journal/JANVIER_06/gaffe_onu040107.edition=nv.html

«Et bien sûr, Ban Ki-moon ne voulait pas contrarier les Etats-Unis le jour de son entrée en fonction. Mais s’il s’aplatit devant Washington pour si peu de chose, ça promet! Je veux croire qu’il s’agit d’une maladresse.»(Un haut fonctionnaire de Genève)
Pour Victor-Yves Ghebali, professeur à l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes Internationales de Genève :” Le Sud-Coréen Ban Ki-moon est l’homme des Américains”

Aurait dit Henri III devant le cadavre du duc de Guise qu’il venait de faire assassiner.
En faisant exécuter Saddam Hussein, le nain de jardin qui occupe actuellement la Maison Blanche lui a donné une stature qu’il n’aurait probablement jamais eue autrement.
En-dehors des conséquences politiques que cet acte aura, j’y vois aussi le meilleur argument pour l’abolition de la peine de mort.
La façon dont l’acte lui-même a été perpétré  rend à la peine de mort sa vraie dimension, celle que les exécutions à l’américaine (type injection mortelle), aseptisées, lui avaient fait oublier: un acte inhumain de basse vengeance.
Cet acte a également donné à Saddam une dernière tribune qu’il n’aurait jamais eue s’il avait été simplement emprisonné. D’un point de vue purement cynique, l’exécution a été totalement contre-productive.
Enfin, elle a permis à Saddam de défier une dernière fois Bush, le lâche qui a évité le Vietnam (pas vraiment parce qu’il était pacificste)et qui s’est terré dans les Montagnes Rocheuses le 11 septembre 2001.

Autrement dit, aussi bien moralement que politiquement et que personnellement, Bush a encore fait une connerie. Il aurait mieux fait d’épargner la vie de Saddam Hussein.
Il aurait également mieux fait d’épargner celle des milliers de soldats, américains ou autres, et des dizaines de milliers de civils qui ont déjà perdu la vie dans cette folie.

L’isolation sensorielle aux Etats-Unis est déjà patente, on le sait, dans sa totale ignorance du “rest of the world”. C’est probablement en grande partie cette isolation sensorielle qui conduit à tous les délires paranoïdes qui y tiennent lieu de politique. Ce n’est donc peut-être pas par hasard si ce pays en a fait sa forme de torture privilégiée ...

L’excellent journaliste du Guardian George Monbiot publie ce texte intitulé “The darkest Corner of the Mind” sur son site http://www.monbiot.com/ (site qui vaut également la peine d’être consulté régulièrement pour les textes sans concessions que l’on peut y lire concernant la crise climatique énergétique de notre temps).

****************************************

The darkest Corner of the Mind

US interrogators have devised a new form of torture. It debases the democracy they claim to be defending.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 12th December 2006.

After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.

Last week, defence lawyers acting for Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an “enemy combatant”, released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk – taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor(1).

Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for “a piece of furniture”. The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for over three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.

The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he “does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.”(2) Jose Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.

If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then, threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him with some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism.

He is unlikely to be the only person subjected to this regime. Another “enemy combatant”, Ali al-Marri, claims to have been subject to the same total isolation and sensory deprivation, in the same naval prison in South Carolina(3). God knows what is being done to people who have disappeared into the CIA’s foreign oubliettes.

That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its “war on terror” can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay(4). This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain “stress positions”, and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.

The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep(5). The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were “commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep” while kept, like Jose Padilla and the arrivals at Guantanamo Bay, “in black hoods or spray-painted goggles”(6).

Alfred McCoy, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: “stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation”(7). The famous picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position – maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.

Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to account for torture practised by his subordinates(8). US torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to take pictures of each other.

But Padilla’s treatment also reflects another glorious American tradition: solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are currently held in isolation – a punishment only rarely used in other democracies. In some places, like the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are kept in sound-proofed cells and might scarcely see another human being for years on end(9). They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people have been kept in solitary confinement in the United States for more than 20 years.

At Pelican Bay in California, where 1200 people are held in the isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for twenty-two and a half hours a day, then released into an “exercise yard” for “recreation”. The yard consists of a concrete well about 12 feet in length with walls 20 feet high and a metal grill across the sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone(10).

The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric wing, and there’s a waiting list(11). Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from “memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions … under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy.”(12) People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far – in Texas and Washington state – both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners(13). If we were to judge the United States by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man’s mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds – physical or mental – produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man’s power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the “values of civilised nations”: terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation’s interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.

http://www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Deborah Sontag, 4th December 2006. Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation. New York Times.

2. Dr. Angela Hegarty, cited by Deborah Sontag, ibid.

3. Deborah Sontag, ibid.

4. Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project, 26th April 2006. By the Numbers. http://hrw.org/reports/2006/ct0406/index.htm

5. Carlotta Gall, 4th March 2003. U.S. Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody. New York Times,.

6. Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, 26th December 2002. U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations. Washington Post.

7. Alfred W. McCoy, 19th September 2004. The hidden history of CIA torture
Abu Ghraib is only the newest U.S. atrocity. San Francisco Chronicle.

8. Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project, ibid.

9. Eg Carol Costello, 4th May 2006. American Morning – CNN. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0605/04/ltm.01.html

10. Laura Sullivan, 26th July 2006. At Pelican Bay Prison, a Life in Solitary. National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5584254

11. ibid.

12. Peg Tyre, 9th January 1998. Trend toward solitary confinement worries experts. CNN. http://www.cnn.com/US/9801/09/solitary.confinement/

13. Laura Sullivan, 28th July 2006. Making It on the Outside, After Decades in Solitary. National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5589778

Cela y ressemble de plus en plus et montre une des faiblesses fondamentales de nos démocraties.

Les changements brutaux que le monde génère, issue du processus général et incontrôlable de complexification de nos sociétés (du fait que la complexification est une des lois fondamentale de notre Univers), créé une anxiété croissante au sein de la population qui, passé un certain seuil, bascule dans la paranoïa.

Se faisant, elle choisie alors des leaders simplistes, rassurant, étant tétanisée par sa peur. Ces leaders, à l’intelligence médiocre, ne peuvent résister à l’anxiété générale et versent eux aussi rapidement vers les mêmes travers paranoïa et dénie de la réalité.

Cette description s’applique finalement assez bien à Hitler, Staline, Mussolini qu’à GW Bush et les mêmes causes produisant les mêmes effets ...

Il ne reste plus qu’un bousher de Bagdad, sans doute le plus répugnant.
Cette politique folle devrait inciter les gouvernements occidentaux à fuir au plus vite l’OTAN, avant qu’ils ne soient entraînés dans une conflagration provoquée par la vésanie américaniste (comme vous dites).
Assez de morts, d’injustices et de fuites en avant
qui ne peuvent mener qu’à une catastrophe.

Le phénomène du mercenariat n’est certes pas nouveau. C’était, dans la plupart des pays, un délit.
Je ne peux manquer de réagir à la comparaison abusive entre les milices fascistes et celles créées par des partis communistes.
La guerre d’Espagne, d’abord : peut-on comparer les goumiers marocains enrôlés dans l’armée franquiste et les volontaires des Brigades Internationales. Je laisse le lecteur averti effectuer cete comparaison…
L’Allemagne : dans la période de montée du nazisme les S.A. et S.S. venait le plus souvent à l’appui de la police contre les “gardes rouges”.
Le Chili : le coup de Pinochet a réussi dès la mise en oeuvre de la loi sur le contrôle des armes, loi votée sous le gouvernement d’Unité Populaire. “Patria et libertad”, organisation fasciste, possédait ses propres sicaires qui agissait en coordination avec l’armée, “loyale” à l’ordre constitutionnel. La garde personnelle d’Allende ne comptait que très peu d’hommes et les organisations révolutionnaires étaient très, très faiblement armées.
Le Congo : les mercenaires et colons armés se sont coordonnés avec les troupes belges d’intervention.
Le Vietnam : outre les corps spéciaux de nombreux agents nord-américains agissaient sur contrat privé.

Il serait intéressant d’examiner la reconversion de l’armée sud-africaine post-aparthaid. En effet
de nombreux militaires se sont reconvertis dans des sociétés de “sécurité”. C’est un phénomène massif.

On peut dire que désormais le mercenariat est légalisé. Dans le cas des Etats-Unis, c’est une tradition et, à ma connaissance, les “Minutemen”, n’ont jamais fait l’objet de poursuite.

Il faut s’interroger aussi sur les réseaux “Stay Behind” qui concernent des civils agissant sur ordre d’une puissance étrangère.

Et s’interroger aussi sur les missions de la Sûreté belge à l’étranger s’agissant des “intérêts belges”, en l’occurence ceux de groupes financiers et industriels. Des agents de la sûreté se sont baladés au Kazakhstan à l’appui d’une tentative d’Electrabel/BBL de mettre la main sur l’exploitation du gaz.

La Convention de Genève prévoit expressément le statut de combattant insurgé, statut auquel ne peuvent prétendre les groupes paramilitaires agissant hors du cadre légal mais assurés de l’impunité que leur garantit le gouvernement.

Quelques mesures symboliques (promotion des véhicules mixtes essence/électricité, énergie éolienne, biocarburants issus des dérivés de produits agricoles) ne font pas oublier les spectaculaires gâchis de kilowatts/heure (provenant de centrales thermiques brûlant des millions de barils de pétrole) causé par l’obsolescence du réseau de distribution : lignes à haute ou moyenne tension peu étanches, transformateurs qui chauffent, ou encore re-routages ubuesques allongeant de milliers de kilomètres le parcours des kilowatts (et autant de déperdition à la clé) au gré des contrats de livraison négociés auprès d’opérateurs privés ou de ‘grossistes’ en perpétuelle concurrence sur l’ensemble du territoire.

Il y aurait un moyen d’économiser, en quelques mois, des millions de barils de pétrole ou des milliards de mètres cubes de gaz… Et tout ça sans se lancer dans la construction de nouvelles centrales atomiques, sans convertir massivement le parc automobile à la technologie mixte ou réduire de moitié l’usage des engrais à base de dérivés carbonés aux USA : il suffirait de moderniser certaines installations électriques obsolètes et de rationaliser le circuit de distribution du courant.

Cela apparaît tout simple en effet sur le papier, mais quasi-impossible en pratique : cela impliquerait que des entreprises privées investissent spontanément dans une rénovation du matériel ou acceptent de modifier leurs pratiques commerciales (pour celles qui font du trading de ressources énergétiques). De quoi plomber leurs comptes et mécontenter au plus haut point leurs actionnaires. Le gouvernement (républicain en l’occurrence) qui se risquerait à pénaliser les distributeurs les plus réfractaires à l’amélioration de leur outil—seul moyen de les contraindre à moderniser le réseau—s’aliènerait le soutien de généreux contributeurs à la prochaine présidentielle.

Les Etats-Unis vont donc demeurer le pays au monde qui relâche—en pure perte—autant de kilowatts dans l’atmosphère que l’Europe et l’Asie réunies, non content de consommer quotidiennement la moitié de l’essence produite sur la planète.

( La Chronique Agora Philippe Béchade 2006-01-17 Les Etats-Unis n’envisagent guère de réduire leur consommation en 2006.—NB notamment…)