30 Oct - Night Surfing

Rekindling 15 years of Israel-Jordan peace

GAZA ISN'T ABOUT ISRAELI SECURITY

GAZA IS ABOUT A WORLD GONE MAD

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman may have tipped his Masada hand when he reportedly told Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan that Israel may use nuclear weapons against Gaza.

Will ASEAN protect 'a peoples agenda' ?

The ASEAN summit moves to Vietnam next year and till then there would be sufficient time for both governments and the civil society groups to do some soul searching on whether ASEAN is of any use to the development and prosperity of the people, especially the poor or does it merely exist as another tool for increasing diplomacy minus any real commitment to democracy and respect for people's basic and fundamental rights.

Palestinian farmers struggle with water crisis

Jewish settlements boast well-irrigated farms, orchards and vineyards, in sharp contrast to the dusty Palestinian villages and the surrounding rocky desert dotted with dirt-poor Bedouin encampments.

Amnesty International says in a report issued on Tuesday that discriminatory Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian territories are the root cause of the striking disparity in access to water between Palestinians and Israelis.

"Israel allows the Palestinians access to only a fraction of the shared water resources, which lie mostly in the occupied West Bank, while the unlawful Israeli settlements there receive virtually unlimited supplies," says Amnesty researcher Donatela Robera.

Palestinians are not allowed to drill new wells or rehabilitate old ones without permits from the Israeli authorities, which are often impossible to obtain. Many rural communities rely on water tankers.

Tony Blair's bid for EU presidency sinks

Ex-PM's chances of winning role slide as Sarkozy and Merkel fail to back him

Protests greet plan to resume forced returns to Zimbabwe

Refugee welfare groups reacted angrily today to statements by Home Office ministers that Zimbabwe is now safe enough to resume the forcible return of thousands of failed asylum seekers.

The announcement by the immigration minister, Phil Woolas, came as the UN's monitor on torture was forcibly expelled from Harare and Amnesty International warned that the country was "on the brink of sliding back into violence".

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Publius Squared: The Regulatory State, Congress, and Democracy

exchange of e-mails on the interplay between regulation, legislation, and democratic accountability, and what the FCC’s recent actions on net neutrality say about it

Sex without nipples

What doctors rarely tell women with breast cancer: Just because you have the same equipment doesn't mean it works

Internet addresses set for change

The internet regulator has approved plans to allow non-Latin-script web addresses

Syria’s Economic Woes – Ehsani Comments

Why Turkey Went to Iran and What it Did There

Turkey has signed an agreement with Russia, China and Iran to use each others currencies in their trade and not dollars. This is a big deal. China has just signed a deal with Russia to buy gas worth more than the total Russian export to Europe. This is to be in local currencies rather than dollars. Russia will not have to stockpile do many dollars. From the Turkish perspective, expanding the local currency deals is important because Ankara will not have to accumulate dollars or Euros as well. All of Turkey’s energy comes from Russia and Iran....

For the Nabucco gas pipeline Turkey’s changing foreign policy is also important. Turkish friendship with Armenia and the Kurds is opening up new prospects for energy transport. It ensures that transit through Turkey will be inexpensive and secure. By fixing its Kurdish problem, regularizing relations with Armenia, and having good relations with Iran, the proposed gas pipeline bringing Azerbaijan gas through Turkey to Europe will be seen as secure and reliable.

In the following excellent articles, copied below, Gülnur Aybet explains why Turkey needs Iranian gas to make its Nabucco gas line work. The Iran visit is not about identity or religion, he argues, but about Turkey becoming the hub of a successful gas transport network – a network, by the way, that Syria is counting on to boost its importance and the importance of its allies in the region.

Pakistan's growing anti-US anger

Recently, while Pakistan's government may have been saying the things that the White House wants to hear, the country's media and public have often been openly hostile towards the United States.

Mr Mir has accused the US of surreptitiously increasing the number of marines in Pakistan and allowing private security agencies like Blackwater to operate here.

He says he has no problem with accusations that Capital Talk is anti-American.

"The whole of Pakistan is anti-American," he says.

"The talk shows are just a mirror of Pakistani society. It would be very easy for me to be the darling of Washington, but then I will become the villain for my viewers and the common people in Pakistan."

Culture (Not Just Genes) Drives Evolution Bridging a rarely-crossed border between natural and social sciences, the study looks at the interplay across 29 countries of two sets of data, one genetic and the other cultural. The researchers found that most people in countries widely described as collectivist have a specific mutation within a gene regulating the transport of serotonin, a neurochemical known to profoundly affect mood. In China and other east Asian nations, for example, up to 80 percent of the population carry this so-called "short" allele, or variant, of a stretch of DNA known as 5-HTTLPR. Earlier research has shown the S allele to be strongly linked with a range of negative emotions, including anxiety and depression. Critically, it is also associated with the impulse to stay out of harm's way. By contrast, in countries of European origin that prize self-expression and the pursuit of individual over group goals, the long or "L" allele dominates, with only 40 percent of people carrying the "S" variant. UFO sends St Petersburg residents scrambling for cameras, Video

Role of Government - As Executed

National security blanket thrown over documents, second witness at Afghan torture inquiry

( Have a commission : and not allow it to examine the evidence. 'National Security' must mean PYA from charges related to moral turpitude and violations of international accords to which Canada is signatory. Turf their vile asses!  Great election issue, I should think ! )

Environmental Graffiti

The Legend Behind the People Who Moved the Monoliths of Stonehenge

Death of Arthur and Mordred
From The Boy’s King Arthur, N.C. Wyeth 1922.
Digital Scan / Book Illustration - DavepapeBot / Wikimedia

The ’sarsen stones’ for the great stone circle at Stonehenge came from southern Wales. Their transport to Salisbury Plain brought the encapsulated sacred power of an unknown Welsh hero to southern Britain thereby to ensure the mythic potency of Stonehenge. Join us on an archeological dig back to the time of the legendary King Arthur, where we’ll meet a band of Bronze Age bowmen and rather extraordinary kind of construction project manager.

King Arthur and Salisbury Plain –

Why were the Bluestones intended for Stonehenge moved from southern Wales to Salisbury Plain? This is fascinating and important question because there are large sarsen-like stones much nearer to the Stonehenge site. There must have been something very special about these bluestones and their original location. There is an important stone circle in the Presili Mountains of Southern Wales known as Carn Menyn that is a landmark from land and sea, and was a sacred place in antiquity. At some point in the time, it became known as Bedd Arthur, and was added to the list of possible burial places for the legendary King Arthur. The extraordinary effort to move bluestones that weighed several tons each would need exceptional impetus and extraordinary motivation in order for the astronomer-priests to effectively organize, propose and convince powerful regional tribal kings to order up the essential manpower for however long it is needed.

Wales / Preseli Mts – Beddarthur
Photo - claonaite / flikr

One possibility that provides a powerful mythic rationale is that an extreme, sacred energy of an ancient Neolithic hero was located at Carn Menyn, and was literally embodied in the stones and their architectural alignment. For reasons still unknown it became an imperative to move that sacred power from southern Wales to Salisbury Plain c.2300 BC. If this legend is believed and accepted, if the astronomer-priests had the requisite charisma and oratory skill, then the project can be activated. What was to be moved was not large heavy boulders but supremely condensed magic and powerful sacred energy.

Merlin Builds Stonehenge / Roman de Brut, c.1150-55
Written in Norman by the poet Wace, Roman de Brut is a ‘history’ of new British territories of the Anglo-Normans. It includes a life of King Arthur and goes back to the mythical Brutus of Troy.
Digital Image / illuminated manuscript - Dsmdgold / Wikipedia

Much later in history, the Welsh bards either chose or were ordered by their kings to mythologize King Arthur because a defeated Cymri (Wales) people needed that to be done in the 8th through 11th centuries AD. These most skilled poets may have chosen to cloak their newly transformed King Arthur with the timeless legend of a Neolithic pre-Cymri hero of ancient Wales whose sacred energy had moved to Salisbury Plain long ago with the great Presili bluestones. Such an extraordinary endeavor requires an exceptional project director and site manager. What better choice than Merlin as Geoffrey of Monmouth relates in 1136 in his Historia Regium Britanniae. No matter that critical historical dates do not match and are badly out of joint; we are in the realm of magic. Thus did King Arthur leave the historical identity of a Cymri king and warrior who fought fiercely against invading Germanic Saxons, and enter the timeless universe of the mythical.

The Boscombe Bowmen –

Boscombe Bowmen / mass grave
Photo - Wessex Archeology Ltd

Incredibly, recent excavations by Wessex Archeology Ltd have found burials of some of the men who may have worked on this grandest building phase of Stonehenge, possibly as site managers who directed work crews. Lady Luck certainly tilted the odds; it is hard to imagine otherwise. An archeologist cannot decide to go out one day and find the guys who built megalithic Stonehenge. They could set out, but what beside snickering laughter would follow them down the road?

In May 2003, a dig for a new water pipe accidentally uncovered a Bronze Age burial at Boscombe Down, and Wessex Archeology Ltd was quickly brought in. Boscombe Down is only 6 km from Stonehenge and as we await C-14 laboratory results, age for this site as deduced from artifacts is c.2300 BC. In the grave were three adult males, a teenage male, three children and a total of five skulls. Beaker pots held food and drink, provisions for the afterlife as the deceased journeyed through the Underworld. A boar’s tusk and bone toggle were rare trade goods from Central Europe. The presence of beautifully made flint arrowheads earned this (group? family?) the name of the Boscombe Bowmen. Perhaps the adult men were archers after all. Two of the men had died before reaching the age of 30; the oldest male was at most 40 years old.

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E.U. Plan to Curb C02 Would Favor Solar Power

BRUSSELS — The European Commission is expected to introduce a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that directs the largest slices of €50 billion available for research and development to solar power and capturing and burying emissions from coal plants.

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Marcelo del Pozo/Reuters

A solar park in Sanlucar La Mayor, near Seville, Spain.

A blog about energy, the environment and the bottom line.

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October 7, 2009, 11:00 AM

Pakistanis View U.S. Aid Warily

By SALMAN MASOOD

Christoph Bangert for The New York TimesAli Rizvi, left, and Umair Anjum outside a McDonald’s in Islamabad. The men say the Kerry-Lugar aid bill will undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As the Obama administration weighs a shift in its military strategy in Afghanistan, it is also stepping up its efforts to increase aid to neighboring Pakistan. The Senate on Sept. 24 approved legislation to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for the next five years. However, conditions laid out in the bill, authored by Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, have unleashed street protests and a flood of criticism from Pakistanis who say the bill compromises their country’s sovereignty.

President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan has agreed to the stipulations in the Kerry-Lugar bill, but he is coming under sharp criticism from opposition parties and many Pakistanis who view America as a cavalier and condescending ally. Pakistan’s Parliament is discussing the Kerry-Lugar aid bill Wednesday, and it is expected to be a fiery debate.

I spoke with several Pakistanis who shared their concerns about the bill and America’s relationship with Pakistan.

Enver Baig, 63, a former senator, said he felt that America needed to change how it has treated Pakistan and its democratic governments. “We always loved the Americans, but they deserted us soon after the first Afghan war,” he said. “Since then, the trust is gone. It is time to rebuild that trust, but with the introduction of Kerry-Lugar bill, distance between America and Pakistan is increasing because of some severe conditions in the aid package.”

Christoph Bangert for The New York TimesEnver Baig says the “trust is gone” between Pakistan and America.

Mr. Baig said. “There is an impression that America wants to micro-manage everything in Pakistan,” he added.

Mr. Baig said he thought the Pakistani government had poorly negotiated draft of the aid bill and instead of asking for aid, which he thought was “peanuts,” the government should have asked that previous loans from the United States be “written off.”

“There is a lot of pressure on the government to get this bill reviewed,” he said. “There are serious reservations with the country’s armed forces as well because the aid package puts curbs and conditions on them in various ways and means. I am sure the armed forces will approach the government and convey their reservations.”

He suggested three things that the United States could do to win over the Pakistani people: It could improve the aid package, increase market access to Pakistani products and have more interaction with the country’s public, politicians and opinion makers.

Umair Anjum, 21, and Ali Rizvi, 22, who said they were studying to be accountants, sat outside a McDonald’s, enjoying a cigarette and the early October breeze. Their views reflected how many urban, educated, English-speaking young Pakistanis view the relationship between their country and America.

“Pakistanis hate America, to some extent because you don’t bomb an ally,” Mr. Rizvi said. “People here do not like the drone attacks. They are important in the war against terror, all right, but America should respect our sovereignty.”

Mr. Anjum said he felt Pakistan was routinely betrayed by the United States. The Kerry-Lugar bill, he said, “is bound to undermine our sovereignty in every possible way. The Americans are trying to dictate us in every walk of life. America is working against our interests. It is promoting India, which has a huge presence in Afghanistan. Our armed forces and people should act like Iran and stand up to American pressure.”

The young men also said that employees from private security firms such as Blackwater were operating with impunity inside Pakistan.

“There are thousands of Blackwater operatives in the country now if you go by the media reports,” Mr. Anjum said. “They have been given a license to kill. They are not accountable to anyone here. Would India allow Blackwater on its territory? Not at all.”

Mr. Rizvi said simply, “They are spies.”

Mehmud ur-Rehman, who owns Peer Book Centre in Aabpara, a bustling market, said that American aid was not reaching many Pakistani people. “Had it been so, people would not be fighting for sugar and flour in long queues across the country,” Mr. Rehman, 49, said. He is currently on bail, having spent a few weeks in prison on charges of selling Islamic books that had been banned by the former government.

Mr. Rehman said the economic crisis had hit him hard. “I have been selling books for 30 years,” he said. “But now the earnings have dropped by half. I don’t have money to timely pay the wholesale trader from whom I get stationery.”

Christoph Bangert for The New York TimesMehmud ur-Rehman, who owns the Peer Book Centre, also views U.S. aid with suspicion.

He said a friend of his, Abid Rehman,died in the terrorist attack on World Food Program office in Islamabad. But he refused to accept that Taliban militants were behind the attack. It was a conspiracy, he said. Even the public claim of responsibility by a Taliban spokesman did not convince him.

Like most Pakistanis, he also voiced suspicion over the United States’ interests in Pakistan, saying that America wanted to denuclearize Pakistan.

During the conversation with Mr. Rehman, an old bearded man, leaning on a walking stick, entered the store. Everyone stood up in deference.

Fazl-e-Haq, 87, dressed in a blue striped shirt and gray trousers, was a former inspector general of the Pakistan Police. Since 1980, he has been writing a column in Jang, the country’s most widely read Urdu daily.

“There will be a revolution in Pakistan by the third quarter 2010,” Mr. Haq said in a somber voice.

“In a country where people are dying of hunger, where women are being kidnapped and raped, where justice or flour is not available to the poor, revolution does not come by knocking at the door first,” he added. “And this will not be a peaceful revolution. It will be a bloody revolution. We have lost our honor. We have sold ourselves.”

Everyone gathered in the store nodded.

And what about America, I asked after having a little dose from this harbinger of doom.

“America is breathing its last,” Mr. Haq replied in a trembling but sure-sounding voice. “Afghanistan will be the graveyard of American imperialism.”

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  Comments of the Moment

  
  
  
  

  “ The debate over strategy and tactics in the AFPAK war as reported in the press is too simplistic. It is not "strikes" vs. boots on the ground, The real debate is the appropriate mix of technology, people, and politics that is fluid, reponsive to the situation, and forward looking. Our country deserves a more sophisticated and thoughtful dialogue on this campaign, not clouded by "good guys" and "bad guys" labels on the participants in the debate.”
  

  — mike beehler
  Surgical Strikes Shape Afghanistan Debate
  
  
  

53 DEGREES

OCTOBER 5, 2009 • 11:20 AM 0

imaginal · imaginary · imagination

Chiara Bottici, in a recent edition of the journal Philosophy and Social Criticism (abstract), gets to the heart of the problem with current political discourse in Europe and elsewhere: a lack of imagination. By imagination, she is not talking about that required to bring us to some world where Ricky Gervais becomes god or even that necessary to read a Maurice Sendak. Rather she is talking about the imagination as sketched by Hannah Arendt after Immanuel Kant. This is the imagination of what is possible, of what is not currently within our view:

Imagination is central … because it makes present to our mind what is not in front of us. If we say of somebody that they are good, we probably have in the back of our mind examples such as St Francis or Jesus of Nazareth or some other archetypical example of goodness.

Because of its ability to represent what is not immediately in our view:

imagination is the faculty that enables us to put ourselves in the others’ shoes.

In other words, Bottici is asking if, through the hypertrophy of the authenticity of the image in Western mass media and the reduction of all governance to “mere administration”, we are missing a central part of the political process. She draws further on Castoriadis‘ point that one becomes a proper individual:

that is, a social individual, only through a forced process of socialization to the imaginary significations of a society.

Photo owned by gaab22 (cc)

That is we start with our own language and a discovery of the world as we find it. In flights away from what it is we find, we imagine what might be possible. How does this relate to politics? Well, after the weekend when the Irish people voted in favour of changing our own Constitution to adopt the Treaty of Lisbon and where the political imaginary of Ireland is left so bereft as to be mostly absent, we need a little bit more imagination and a little less technocracy. Perhaps this is the space, as Bottici asks herself, where the role of religion in the public sphere can exist: as an imagining of what might be possible. In a particularly striking passage (hence its full quotation) of the article, Bottici asks:

Caught in the double vice-like grip of spectacle, on the one hand, and reduction to governance, mere technique, on the other, politics is increasingly unable to provide resources of meaning. Hence the request for a greater role of religion in the public sphere: the latter, with its vocation to the
elimination of contingency through its system of beliefs, is an endless reservoir of meaning, potentially able to cover over any appearance of chaos. This generates a crisis of the secular model according to which politics and religion must be separated: this model works only if politics and religion can rely on resources of meaning that are comparable at least. If politics drains away, it is unavoidable that we look for meaning elsewhere. [My emphasis]

“If politics drains away, it is unavoidable that we look for meaning elsewhere.” That sentence alone has a real power as we try to collectively understand what is ‘to be done’ in the coming months and years to get ‘us’ out of this financial crisis we find ourselves in. I’m hardly inducing a theocratic state by suggesting we become more imaginative about what is possible in the coming time when crucial decisions about resources will be made. Imagine if that most 19th century of phrases were to be used more widely in public discourses about Ireland’s future, social solidarity? Imagine for a moment if we stopped the arcane shouting at each other about a public sector that is supposedly draining the life out of the economy or that welfare “needs to be” cut by 5% or 10%. Think about a politics that doesn’t depend on everyone running to the lifeboats which are being put over the edge of a sinking ship.

Imagine instead if we asked ourselves some questions about what it is we want to achieve, about what is a decent, fair and just society and then started trying to bring that about?

Sunlight Foundations Realtime Investigations - Tracking Private Influences on Public Policy

Follow the (Airport) Money

By Jim Morris on 10/07/09 @ 5:43 pm | 0 Comments

Over the past five years, the Federal Aviation Administration has handed out nearly $18 billion in grants for almost 19,000 airport projects. In theory, these projects — funded through the FAA’s Airport Improvement Program — are supposed to enhance safety or protect the environment. In fact, according to a Subsidyscopeanalysis of FAA data (neatly assembled into a searchable database by Sunlight’s Kaitlin Lee), a fair amount of money has gone toward the building of parking lots and other questionable things.

Digging into Recovery.gov Data

By Anupama Narayanswamy on 10/05/09 @ 10:14 pm | 0 Comments

We’re playing with the new stimulus data released last week on the Recovery.govWeb site – analyzing the data, trying to find out which states are receiving the most money and what kinds of projects are receiving the most money. Data on contracts can be downloaded from FPDS site and the grants and loans from the USAspendingWeb site.

Although there is an easy way of downloading contracts data from FPDS, those wanting either grants or loans data will have to rely on the USASpending site, which allows downloads of slices of the data, from each agency or state. Unless users know how to work with the XML version, running aggregate functions on the data to get to the bigger picture such as the total spent by all the agencies in a specific state would be challenging and time consuming.

Also, the grants, loans and contracts cannot be put together to see, for example, which state is getting the most dollars through the Recovery Act. Most of the loans and the grants that are disbursed are given by federal agencies to states–for example, say the Dept. of Transportation gives a grant to Virginia for $10 million to build highways. Most often (but not always), the states award that grant money through contracts, which show up in the contract data in Recovery.gov. Combining grant and contract data would lead to counting some of the money twice, giving a state give highly inflated numbers.

So far, other than playing around with the maps and search by zip code feature, I find the text view in the “See where the money is going” page to be the most useful. With this you can drill down and get more information about a single contract or grant including details about the project, each transaction and other contracts or grants the recipient has received.

Shining a Bright New Light on an Old Game

By Larry Makinson on 10/01/09 @ 1:04 pm | 0 Comments

Jaws dropped around the Sunlight offices a couple of weeks ago, when we discovered – after a month’s worth of painstaking research – the extent to which lobbyist donations were echoing, and in some cases greatly supplementing, the campaign contributions of their clients.

We suspected there would be plenty of lobbyists giving money in concert with the organizations they represent, but we had no idea that we’d find cases where one, two or three dozen lobbyists gave to the same member as their clients.

Yet discoveries like that are just the sort of things that tend to pop to the surface when you take a fresh look at an old phenomenon, which is what Sunlight did with this collaborative investigative project with the Center for Responsive Politics.........

There had to be a better way to account for their real impact, and finally we came up with one. By combining the contribution databases with the lobbyist databases–records that simply didn’t exist 20 years ago–we could finally begin to investigate the connections between the lobbyists and their clients to see if they were giving in concert.

Revealing the “Hidden Budget”

By Jim Morris on 09/30/09 @ 5:36 pm | 0 Comments

Our colleagues at The Pew Charitable Trusts, with whom we collaborate onSubsidyscope, have produced a nine-page overview of federal subsidies — the “hidden budget” — that’s worth a read.

The paper is packed with interesting data and useful context. For instance:

*In 2007, the federal government subsidized about $874 billion of the nation’s health care.

*The first known U.S. subsidy — which gave fishermen five cents for every barrel of pickled fish they exported — dates to 1789.

*From 1974 to 2004, the amount of revenue lost to the government due to tax breaks tripled, from $240 billion to $730 billion.

*The biggest tax break — “Exclusion of employer contributions for medical insurance premiums and medical care” — is projected to cost the government $155 billion in fiscal year 2010, which starts tomorrow. The second-biggest — the mortgage-interest deduction — is expected to lop off another $108 billion in revenue.

Keep coming back to Subsidyscope as we unearth stories on little-noticed federal programs and extricate datasets buried in the bowels of federal agencies (in some cases pried loose only with the aid of the Freedom of Information Act). As the Pew people put it in their paper, “We are taking something that is hard to find and making it easy to get. We are turning over rocks and shining a light on what is underneath.”

Corruption charges prompt Congo to lobby Congress

By Anupama Narayanswamy on 09/18/09 @ 7:08 pm | 2 Comments

In the past few years a handful of private equity or hedge funds have garnered a reputation as “vulture funds,” a term coined to describe companies that profit from the debt of extremely poor countries. The hedge funds buy defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar, then sue them later for the full amount owed in U.S. and European courts.

Both in 2008 and earlier this year, members of Congress introduced bills to protect these debtor nations from lawsuits. The legislation was introduced after heavy lobbying campaigns by countries like the Republic of the Congo, which has spent millions of dollars hiring D.C.-based heavyweight lobbying firms.

The hedge firms–like Kensington International Ltd. which fought a long drawn case with the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville)–claim that corrupt practices by rulers, and not the poverty of the countries, are the reason they are not able to repay their debts.

Kensington International, based in the Cayman Islands, is a subsidiary of Elliott Associates, a New York company. In the 1990s, Kensington bought up several debt packages worth $100 million from Congo, which led to a decade-long round of negotiations and legal battles spanning a few continents before the lawsuit was settled in 2007. But before that happened, Kensington International’s sleuthing uncovered a series of hidden bank accounts, some belonging to the President’s son, straw men and companies in tax-haven countries run by the head of the Congo’s state-owned oil and gas company SNPC.

While the court case was still underway, the Office of President Denis Sassou–Nguesso of the Republic of the Congo hired lobbyists, according to filings under the Foreign Agents Registration Act maintained by the Department of Justice. In 2006, the filings show, SNPC paid Trout Casheries LLC, its U.S. lobbyists, the sum of $700,000 on behalf of the Republic of the Congo. The filing was the first time that the lobbying issues specifically related to debt management were listed; Trout Casheries also disclosed that they represented the President of the Republic of Congo, Sassou-Nguesso, “to respond to allegations of misconduct directed by creditors.”

According to the 2008 filings, the country spent $590,000 on lobbying alone and a total of $3.2 million to retain lawyers and for “non-FARA related” activities, including public relations campaigns and consultancy fees. They employed four lobbying firms, the Livingston Group, Trout Casheries LLC,Chlopak Leonard Schechter and Associates and the Loeffler Group, that waged an intensive heavy lobbying campaign. Lobbyists from the firms met with members of Congress, their staff and executive branch officials about 1500 times–mostly to discuss vulture funds, according to data from Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker.

People with close connections to President Sassou–Nguesso, including his son, Denis Christel Saasou-Nguesso and close aide Denis Gokana who was then the head of SNPC, feature prominently in the legal dispute between the vultures and the Republic of the Congo. In addition to SNPC, Gokana headed two other companies, Sphynx Bermuda and Africa Oil and Gas.

Kensington’s sleuthing uncovered that the SNPC, through its trading arm Cotrade, was selling Congolese oil to intermediaries; instead of direct trade, the off-shore companies headed by Gokana siphoned off millions of barrels of oil before delivering the rest to commercial markets in Europe and elsewhere.

Kensington argued that the diverted funds should be used to repay the country’s creditors rather than enrich individuals close to the president. They sued various parties in U.S. federal court, including banking giants BNP Paribas for aiding Congo in diverting the oil revenues, using the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, which was changed under the Patriot Act to give U.S.courts jurisdiction over international money laundering operations.

A separate investigation of Congo’s oil industry by Global Witness, a U.K.-based non-profit, uncovered documents that furthered the investigation. They published credit card receipts in 2007 showing that Denis Cristel’s personal shopping for designer wear in Dubai and Paris were paid for by accounts from another off-shore company, Long Beach. They also discovered that Long Beach had received payments from companies set up by Gokana.

The report found that Sphynx and Africa Oil were both controlled by Gokana, and found that his role as a special counsel to the President while he controlled private companies was a conflict of interest, one that was prohibited under the statutes that created the state oil company, SNPC.

Although there is very little mention of these allegations of corruption in the U.S. media, European outlets have covered the story. At the end of a two-year court battle, Congo reached an out of court settlement with Kensington International an undisclosed amount.

Despite the revelations unearthed in Kensington International’s suit, some in Congress continue to argue that impoverished nations are being short changed. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who serves on the who is on the Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy, has reintroduced the Stop Vulture Funds Act. She or her staffers met with lobbyists for the Republic of the Congo about “vulture” funds at least 40 times in the one year period. A similar bill was sponsored in the Senate by Robert Casey, D-Pa., in 2008. Casey was never contacted by Congo’s lobbyists.

To counter the lobbying efforts by the Congo, Elliott Associates hired Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld to represent them in Washington, spending $570,000 in 2008 alone.

Waters’ bill would prohibit U.S. citizens from trying to profit from defaulted sovereign debt, and bar U.S. courts from acting on cases filed by sovereign debt “profiteers.”

Waters’ office has not returned phone calls or e-mails commenting on the issue.

DAWG'S BLOG

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 07, 2009

Afghanistan torture and the price of integrity

"I encourage you to … start your career planning as soon as possible."

That's Tory Defence Minister Peter MacKay, showing Peter Tinsley the door. Tinsley is presently the head of the Military Police Complaints Commission, which is attempting to get hearings underway about Canadian Forces complicity in torture in Afghanistan.

The Harper government has been throwing up a series of obstacles to prevent subpoenaed witnesses from testifying at the inquiry. Iblogged about this a few days ago, but new revelations indicate that federal officials have actually threatened and intimidated witnesses, and forced them to withhold vital documents from the inquiry.

When independent inquiries start getting too close to wrongdoing by top military brass, mysterious things can and do happen. The current Tory cover-up revives uncomfortable memories of the abrupt cancellation of the Somalia inquiry by the Liberal prime minister at the time, Jean Chrétien. That inquiry was looking into the torture-murder of a Somalian boy and other gross abuses of civilians by Canadian Forces personnel. The entire fetid story of the Liberal cover-up may be found here.

Not necessarily by coincidence, there have beendirect links between the Somalian and Afghanistan situations, although it should be emphasized that in the latter case the issue is complicity--the actual torture was carried out by our Afghan allies, not by the Canadian Forces.

The inability to get to the bottom of things--or the top--when military malfeasance is at issue is an instance of the "culture of impunity." We normally like to associate the phrase with other countries, but even in democratic Canada, there are people and institutions that operate outside the law, and those operations are off-limits to public scrutiny or the pains and penalties normally applied when warranted by law.

It took a man of some considerable strength of character--Peter Tinsley--to press ahead with an inquiry against all the odds. And he is paying the price for his integrity. On December 11, his term as Commissioner will come to an end. It will not be renewed. Watch for his replacement by a complaisant government puppet, and a speedy and unsatisfactory end to the MPCC's foredoomed investigation.

UPDATE: Yet more Canadian complicity in torture--of one of our own citizens. The Harper government's attempt to minimize the role played by Canadian officials in the Abdullah Almalki case has rightly been labelled "absurd" by Amnesty International. More piano-playing to come?

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But the plan also signals the need for a reordering of the bloc’s industrial priorities by requiring governments to spend significantly greater sums of money on clean energy even as the world emerges from a deep financial crisis.