klynn and I posted interrelated content about this more than a year ago.

I rather wonder whether Obama realizes his apparent public position with Russia may or may not be looking, um, flawed…or exposed…

Some of it came from Russia; fuel certainly has, and recently.

Iran has plenty of natural gas to trade for currency; they have a legitimate need for nuclear electricity generation if we think of natural gas as their primary “cash crop.”

But the instability of gas business development has been due to a global tug of war, including China. Americans don’t really think of natural gas as a proxy for oil; it’s become a near-equivalent, and countries with demand the size of China are going to put a lot of pressure on the already volatile gas market.

China has also supplied both uranium and nuclear technology to Iran, too, and they certainly expected something for it.

I think the other bit which scared the global energy warmongers was Gore’s first book published in 1992 while he was a seated senator; he called for a global Marshall plan to save our environment, including an exit from oil dependency.

Oh, and in some piece on the AIPAC case, Laura Rozen noted that the two AIPAC lobbyists (Rosen and Weissman**) got info from DoD’s Larry Franklin (who worked in Dougie Feith’s OSP Shop of Horrors), and then IIRC they went to Elliott Abrams who was at that time on the NSC (!).

So that’d be an interesting little Loop-de-Looperootie, eh?
** Weissman, according to her reporting and also New Yorker, was an ‘Iran expert’, whatever that means. If he was an ‘Iran expert’ like Condi was a ‘Russian expert’, he knew stats and a lot of ‘book learnin’, but hadn’t ever read Iranian literature or grasped the culture. But again, pure speculation on my part as to what his ‘expertise’ did — or didn’t — signify. He probably was an ‘expert’ on all things military, but whether he knew diddly shit about their history or culture is not reported.

At least some of those interests, in different combos, wanted to control oil and gas, surely? (Meaning, Mid-East oil and gas.) Bush I had gone to war for it, and then Bill Clinton probably stumbled along and interruped their Grand Plans.

PNAC was written in 1998; that was surely not the first salvo, but it suggests that were making plans — or pissed about their ‘plans delayed’ by Clinton and Gore — at least by 1998.

It sure looks to me as if this was in the works at least from the early 1990s when Cheney was Sec of Defense.

It also may help explain their almost blind hatred and irrational views of Al Gore and Bill (and Hillary) Clinton. Whoever Cheney’s minions and fellow travelers are, they’ll never, ever forgive Gore for trying to get us off oil. And they’ll never forgive Big Dog for being a bright, articulate person who understands the Constitution.

There’s no way they could have pulled something this big off a shelf in Jan 2001. It had to go back far earlier.

And “who at GITMO is or was actually a ‘combatant’ to start with?” Heck, they don’t/didn’t care about that any more than they cared about international law when they started this mess. They were only interested in bending any and everything to their will so they could have their way.

I’ll keep plugging away at understanding this. Rather proud of myself that you think I got off to a passable start.

Again, many many thanks.

So the courts have been trying very hard to sort it out and we’ve been having even very “conservative” judges astounded at what DOJ is saying “counts” under the broad MCA definitions (for example, in one case DOJ argued, I think to Judge Leon, that the fact that someone was tortured by al-Qaeda and then held in prison by the Taliban after the false confession tortured out by al-Qaeda made them associated with al-Qaeda so as to be able to be held indefinitely in US torture).

See, in large part what Congress did was try to avoid the combatant issue period and make a case for classifying as “unlawful enemy combatants” people who might have sold a burger to bin laden at a Kabul McDonald’s drive through. The courts are buying into that, but they are trying to go as close to that as they can and, given the wide range of persons and situations before them, are spitting out opinions to try to set definitions and while it’s not necessarily contradictory – it’s not cohesive and more than that, the approach isn’t really bridging the civilian/military/madeupbcwe’dscrewedupcivilian&military chasms.

Obama and others keep trying to set out these “categories” of people at GITMO as the ones they can make out civiilan cases against, the ones they can have military tribunals for, the ones they tortured too much to use information, etc. etc. etc.

Those arent the right start point categories.

The start point categories should be — who at GITMO is or was actually a “combatant” to start with?

With under 10% battlefield captures and a huge number of sales, local vendettas, etc. involved, along with the obsession over kids sent to pick up tomatos and the like — the big start point is a 90% or so non-combatant detention group.

Start there, and you end up somewhere vastly different than Obama is going

“However, unlike the terms “combatant”, “prisoner of war”, and “civilian”, the term “unlawful combatant” is not mentioned in either the Hague or the Geneva Conventions. So while the former terms are well understood and clear under international law, the term “unlawful combatant” is not.[3][8]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_combatant

So, the ICRC defined the term in 2005, Bush issued that Nov 2001 Executive Order and the US Congress picked that up and put it in the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Nonetheless, Geneva Conventions and other international law is still silent about it?

Many thnx.

I think that if there were a plot carried through where there was a car bomb, or a sniper, poisening etc. of Osama Bin Laden and/or other prominent, known, identified and identifiable al-Qaeda operations officers, then in the context of the authorizations given by Congress and the quasi war status and laws of war, arguabley such a targeted killing of a leader of the opposing “force” in something that is being denominated as war would be arguably “legal.”

I would certainly respect arguments to the contrary. I basically don’t believe you can paint what is going on as a war – which is why our military, who are certainly under the pressures and dangers of a war, have such a hard time achieving a “mission accomplished” footing.

Once someone has been “reduced to possession” even under the laws of war and even if they are the commander of the opposing forces, you can’t just kill them without it being murder. And if your car bomb/sniper/etc. ends up assassinating bystanders, civilians, etc. then even even the arguable legal footing of war based targeted killing of an opposing commander fails.

All imo, fwiw.

http://rawstory.com/08/news/20…..n-program/