Monday, July 21, 2008

SPB News for Monday.


Obama, Hagel, and Reed have arrived in Iraq as part of a Congressional delegation. Read more.

Paulson: Banking system 'sound'
Treasury Sec. says banks in great shape despite economic 'slowdown.'

At Last, Some Truth About Iraq and Afghanistan By Eric Margolis ...[T]he same oil companies that used to exploit Iraq when it was a British colony are now returning. As former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently admitted, the Iraq war was all about oil. VP [sic] Dick Cheney stated in 2003 that the invasion of Iraq was about oil, and for the sake of Israel. Meanwhile, according to Pakistani and Indian sources, Afghanistan just signed a major deal to launch a long-planned, 1680 km long pipeline project expected to cost $8 billion... In 1998, the Afghan anti-Communist movement Taliban and a western oil consortium led by the US firm Unocal signed a major pipeline deal. Unocal lavished money and attention on Taliban, flew a senior delegation to Texas, and also hired an minor Afghan official, one Hamid Karzai. Enter Osama bin Laden. He advised the unworldly Taliban leaders to reject the US deal and got them to accept a better offer from an Argentine consortium, Bridas. Washington was furious and, according to some accounts, threatened Taliban with war. In early 2001, six or seven months before 9/11, Washington made the decision to invade Afghanistan, overthrow Taliban, and install a client regime that would build the energy pipelines.

US to Iran: You have two weeks Washington says Tehran has two weeks to decide between suspending its uranium enrichment program and facing 'further isolation'. In a Saturday statement, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said time has come for Tehran to choose between confrontation and meeting Western demands over its enrichment program.

US 'can't be trusted on torture' The British government should no longer accept US assurances that it does not use torture, a parliamentary oversight committee said today in a wide-ranging report looking at London's human rights policy. Ministers have previously taken at face value statements from their US counterparts... that Washington does not resort to such practices. But the cross-party foreign affairs committee said that stance should be abandoned given admissions from the US director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, that "water-boarding" had been used on terror suspects. Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told parliament on two occasions this year that the practice, which simulates drowning during interrogation, amounts to torture.


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