The Hunt for Oil

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Does it surprise you that the first company to sign an oil deal with Iraqi Kurds is Hunt Oil, a company with very close ties to Bush and our country’s intelligence infrastructure?

Texas’ Hunt Oil Co. and Kurdistan’s regional government saidSaturday they’ve signed a production-sharing contract for petroleumexploration in northern Iraq, the first such deal since the Kurdspassed their own oil and gas law in August.A Hunt subsidiary,Hunt Oil Co. of the Kurdistan Region, will begin geological survey andseismic work by the end of 2007 and hopes to drill an exploration wellin 2008, the parties said in a news release.

Nope. It doesn’t surprise me, either. But I am interested in what it portends for long-term plans in Iraq.

First, some background. The Hunt family that owns Hunt Oil (it’s privately held, so we don’t get to scrutinize financial statements) is one of the big money Texas donors behind the Bush family political empire. Ray Hunt, the current chair of the company, is also on the board of Halliburton and the King Ranch, meaning he probably knows to duck when he goes quail hunting with Dick Cheney. Hunt is also on the board of trustees for Shrub’s new presidential library, which has Read more →

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They Won’t Put Their Lies in Writing

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Well, I guess that’ll make it harder to prosecute General Petraeus for lying to Congress.

In the latest twist to the ongoing saga over the Petraeus White House report, a senior military official tells the Washington Times today that there will actually be no report at all:

A senior military officer said there will be nowritten presentation to the president on security and stability inIraq. “There is no report. It is an assessment provided by them bytestimony,” the officer said.

The only hard copy will be Gen. Petraeus’ opening statement toCongress, scheduled for Monday, along with any charts he will use inexplaining the results of the troop surge in Baghdad over the pastseveral months.

[snip]

While Petraeus’ statement to Congress will be made available,the public will not know what information he is providing to PresidentBush. The lack of transparency over Petraeus’ “report” will onlyintensify the high level of skepticism surrounding his statistics.

UPDATE: In a recent hearing, Sen. Norm Coleman(R-MN) said he recently met with Gen. Petraeus and was shown “thedata.” Coleman said the data is “very clear about a reduction inviolence. General Petraeus has those charts,” Coleman explained. Apparently, those charts will not be for public consumption.

You see, I’m sure if we had those Read more →

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Our Latest Rent-a-Thuggish-Sheikh in Iraq

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Bush_and_risha_2I have little wisdom to add to this Abu Aardvark post, but I wanted to make sure people saw it:

It’s kind of lost in the shuffle of the coming battle over thevarious Iraq reports, but I find myself morbidly fascinated by thephotos and reports which have circulated in the Iraqi press aboutBush’s meeting in Anbar with the controversial head of the AnbarSalvation Council Sattar Abu Risha.   The pictures themselves speakvolumes:  look at Bush’s shit-eating grin and Abu Risha’s detachedcontempt, and figure out which is the supplicant in this scenario. 

An hour with Bush was really quite a coup for Sattar Abu Risha.   The head of the Anbar Salvation Council has a rather unsavory reputation as one of the shadiest figures inthe Sunni community, and as recently as June was reportedly on his way out.  As a report in Time described him,

Sheikh Sattar, whose tribe is notorious for highway banditry, is alsobuilding a personal militia, loyal not to the Iraqi government but onlyto him. Other tribes — even those who want no truck with terrorists —complain they are being forced to kowtow to him. Those who refuse riskbeing branded as friends of al-Qaeda and tossed in jail, or worse. Read more →

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Or Maybe O’Hanlon Is the New Judy Miller

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Because for the life of me, I can’t understand how taking an "overly rigorous approach to the numbers" makes one "sloppy."

Yet according to Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policystudies at the Brookings Institution who has closely followedstatistics on Iraq for years, the average number of daily attacks onIraqi civilians and US/allied forces has declined from 160 in August2006 to 120 in August 2007.

The GAO’s data may not reflect the downwardtrend experienced last month, says Mr. O’Hanlon. During his recent tourthrough Iraq, he adds, every local briefing he received from the USmilitary said that attacks in that particular sector were down.

In addition, for the GAO to decline to judge whether attacks are sectarian or not is to take an overly rigorous approach to the numbers, says the Brookings expert.      

"I just think they were flat-out sloppy," he says of GAO.

Doesn’t taking a rigorous approach with numbers make you meticulous, as opposed to sloppy? (HT TP)

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General Petraeus Is the New Judy Miller

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General Petraeus, lying to Congress is a crime.

Let’s just repeat that fact over and over. Because that’s what Petraeus is planning on doing on Monday, as Karen DeYoung (in an article buried on page A16) explains clearly. Go read the whole article, closely, for a description of the many methods of the Administration’s hocus pocus. But I’d like to focus on one particular tactic.

Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bushadministration’s claim that its war strategy is working. Incongressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 percent decrease in sectarian attacks.

[snip]

When Petraeus told an Australian newspaper last week that sectarianattacks had decreased 75 percent "since last year," the statistic wasquickly e-mailed to U.S. journalists in a White House fact sheet. Asked for detail, MNF-I said that "last year" referred to December 2006, when attacks spiked to more than 1,600.

By March, however — before U.S. troop strength was increased underBush’s strategy — the number had dropped to 600, only slightly lessthan in the same month last year. That is about where it has remainedin 2007, with what MNF-I said was a slight increase in April and May"but Read more →

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No Senators Knew

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There are a number of details that make Sidney Blumenthal’s latest appear to be a happy coincidence of timing. Just after Bush biographer Robert Draper reports that Bush still claims to have believed–in April 2006–that Iraq had WMD, Blumenthal comes out with an article tying up a lot of loose ends on Saddam Hussein’s Foreign Minister, Naji al-Sabri, proving Bush was briefed that Saddam did not have WMD.

On Sept. 18, 2002,CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office ontop-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons ofmass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bushdismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreignminister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out tobe accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

But I think the timing may not be so coincidental. First, on Monday, General Petraeus will get up to make his version of Colin Powell’s UN speech. Petraeus will present information that is, even now, known to be false. Blumenthal’s article reminds of that Powell speech prominently.

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The Decider on Iran

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Aside from the boorishness of discussing more war with bread crumbs all over your chin, Bush’s pathetic simplification of our relationship with Iran–in a monologue he calls "strategic thinking"–is pretty alarming, even coming from Bush.

"The job of the president," he continued, through an ample wad of breadand sausage, "is to think strategically so that you can accomplish bigobjectives. As opposed to playing mini-ball. You can’t play mini-ballwith the influence we have and expect there to be peace. You’ve gottathink, think BIG. The Iranian issue," he said as bread crumbs tumbledout of his mouth and onto his chin, "is the strategic threat right nowfacing a generation of Americans, because Iran is promoting an extremeform of religion that is competing with another extreme form ofreligion. Iran’s a destabilizing force. And instability in that part ofthe world has deeply adverse consequences, like energy falling in thehands of extremist people that would use it to blackmail the West. Andto couple all of that with a nuclear weapon, then you’ve got adangerous situation. … That’s what I mean by strategic thought.

Okay. The Iranian issue is the strategic threat facing this generation of Americans. As opposed to, say, China? Because, while I don’t advocate bombing the Read more →

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GAO Report: The Status of the Dispute

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Okay, here’s the Karen DeYoung report I was so impatient for yesterday. She lays out mostly the changes that I found here, ThinkProgress found here, and NSN found here.

A bleak portrait of the political and security situation in Iraq released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office sparked sharp protests from the top U.S. military command in Baghdad, whose officials described it as flawed and "factually incorrect."

The controversy followed last-minute changes made in the final draft of the report after the Defense Departmentmaintained that its conclusions were too harsh and insisted that someof the information it contained — such as the extent of a fall in thenumber of Iraqi army units capable of operating without U.S. assistance– should not appear in the final, unclassified version.

The GAO rejected several changes proposed by the Pentagonand concluded that Iraq had failed to meet all but two of nine securitygoals Congress had set as part of a list of 18 benchmarks of progress.But grades for two of the seven unmet security benchmarks — theelimination of havens for militia forces and the deployment of threeIraqi army brigades to assist the U.S. security plan in Baghdad — wererecast to reflect partial progress. Two other benchmarks, one politicaland one economic, were also described as "partially met." [my emphasis]

If I’m reading the bolded paragraph correctly, it says the military succeeded in burying the details about how few Iraqi army units can operate on their own; it was evident that the GAO had changed this benchmark from failing to mostly failing partial success, but I guess the actual numbers are even more damning than the Gentleman’s C grade on it is.

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Still Holding My Breath for DeYoung and Ricks

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[Update: Here’s DeYoung’s take.]

So I’ve been holding my breath to see what Karen DeYoung and Tom Ricks had to say about today’s GAO report. After all, they were leaked the draft report last week, and they anticipated that BushCo might "soften" the report. Since there are clear signs the Administration did just that, I have been eagerly waiting for them to give us a catalog of the changes the Administration forced the GAO to make.

But I’m still holding my breath.

After posting soley the AP report for hours after the other mainstream outlets had posted their own stories, the WaPo is up with it’s own account finally. Only it’s not by DeYoung or Ricks.

Instead, we get an amazingly vanilla account of Comptroller General David Walker’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, without even a treatment of Walker’s suggestion that Petraeus is cooking the books.

For the moment, I’ll just assume I’m being impatient, that DeYoung or Ricks will have a full reporting comparing the two reports–and pointing out the clear spin–tomorrow. But I do hope they write this story before the Bush counter-campaign begins.

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The GAO Report Busts the Administration in Its Lies

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I’m anxiously waiting the WaPo’s analysis of today’s GAO report. You’ll recall the WaPo reported last week that someone had liberated a copy of the GAO to prevent BushCO from "softening" its conclusions. But the numbers suggest that some of the conclusions were softened: whereas on Thursday, the WaPo reported Iraq had met three and partially met two of the benchmarks, the GAO has since added two more partially met objectives–on not providing a safe haven for outlaws, and on preparing three Iraqi brigades in Baghdad. In other words, over the weekend, Bush squeezed two more gentleman’s C’s out of the GAO.

More interesting still is the chart on page 12, which shows why Bush tried so hard to get GAO to give it some more passing grades. That chart shows shows how much more generous BushCo was in its July 2007 assessment. How else to explain that in July, BushCo found that Iraq had made satisfactory progress on eight benchmarks, whereas today’s softened GAO report finds that Iraq has made satisfactory progress on only three. And BushCo gave Iraq more positive grades than GAO did on two other benchmarks.

The GAO has quantified just how much lying Bush has already been Read more →

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