South Of Heaven

TAPI

If you were wondering why the US is still in Afghanistan eight years after Osama left and you weren't sold on the idea of bringing democracy there, maybe this is what you were looking for.

 
Please notice the red line, the proposed TAPI gas pipeline, extends from a huge natural gas reserve that sits in Turkmenistan. Who'da thunk, eh?

The significance of the signing of the inter-governmental agreement over the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas-pipeline project on Saturday in Ashgabat cannot be underestimated. It is a unique Silk Road project that holds the key to resolving many complicated issues in the region.

The project is ostensibly about the transportation of the huge Caspian energy reserves to the world market, but it is also about the stabilization of Afghanistan, fostering of Pakistan-India amity, bonding of Central Asia and South Asia and the overall consolidation of US political, military and economic influence in the strategic high plateau that overlooks Russia, Iran and China. 

TAPI is tiptoeing to center stage in the geopolitics of the region primarily due to the pressing need for Ashgabat to find new markets for its gas exports. With the global financial downturn and the fall in Europe's demand for gas, prices crashed. Russia cannot afford to pay top dollar (“European prices”) for the Turkmen gas, nor does it want the 40 bcm (billion cubic meters) of Turkmen gas it previously contracted to purchase.

Ashgabat faces an acute dilemma. Turkmenistan traditionally produces around 70 bcm of gas annually. The volume dropped to 40 bcm this year. Roughly 10 bcm goes to Russia and 12 bcm each to Iran and China. The gas revenue has dramatically fallen and the Turkmen political system is under pressure.

Several large gas fields are coming on line in Russia, which will reduce its need for Turkmen gas. The Yamal Peninsula deposit alone is estimated to hold roughly 16 trillion cubic meters of gas. Yamal can easily feed both the North Stream (55 bcm at full capacity) and South Stream (63 bcm at full capacity) pipelines and still have a surplus.

Meanwhile, Turkmenistan is sitting on the world's fourth-largest gas reserves and plans to increase its gas production to 230 bcm per year by 2030. It desperately needs to find markets and build new pipelines independent of the Soviet-era pipeline system that binds it to Russia.

The South Yolotan field, 350 kilometers to the southeast of Ashgabat, is potentially one of the world's largest natural-gas deposits, with reserves anywhere between 4 and 14 trillion cubic meters. Ashgabat awarded Chinese, United Arab Emirates and South Korean companies with contracts worth US$9.7 billion last December to develop the field. Also, Caspian offshore fields contain another estimated 6 trillion cubic meters (and 12 billion tons of oil). Three American majors - Chevron, ConocoPhillips and TXOil - are bidding for two offshore blocks (out of 32 licensed blocks).

Thus, Berdymukhamedov is being driven by a combination of factors to adopt an energy-export diversification policy. In the recent months, he evinced interest in trans-Caspian projects, but it is a problematic idea since Russia and Iran have so far insisted that such projects require the consent of all riparian countries and this requires a settlement over the status of the Caspian Sea. Besides, Turkmenistan has unresolved territorial disputes with Azerbaijan.

In November, a second Turkmen-Iranian pipeline came on stream and there is potential to increase exports up to 20 bcm. But there are limits to expanding energy ties with Iran or to using Iran as a regional gas hub while the US-Iran standoff continues.

All this compelled Berdymukhamedov to robustly push for TAPI. The projected 2,000-kilometer pipeline, at an estimated cost of $7.6 billion, traverses Afghanistan (735 kilometers) and Pakistan (800 kilometers) to reach India. Its initial capacity will be around 30 bcm but that could be increased to meet higher demand. India and Pakistan have shown interest in buying 70 bcm annually. The pipeline will be fed by the Dauletabad field, which used to supply Russia.

Berdymukhamedov did smart thinking in accelerating TAPI. This is an enterprise whose time has come. Russia cannot easily browbeat him. The US has lined up the Asian Development Bank for the project's funding. An international consortium will undertake the construction of the pipeline.

The pipeline can be easily extended to the Pakistani port of Gwadar and connected with European markets. In short, without appearing to be leaning too far toward the West, Ashgabat is loosening Russia's stranglehold on its gas and oil exports and developing leverage in its dealings with Moscow in future.

Russia can't stop it
Moscow has kept its thoughts to itself, but the geopolitics of the TAPI pipeline are rather obvious. The US is succeeding with a major Silk Road project connecting the Central Asian region with the Western market, while bypassing Russian (and Iranian) territory.

The security of the pipeline is going to be a major regional concern. The onus is on each of the transit countries to secure the pipeline. Part of the Afghan stretch will be buried underground as a safeguard against attacks and local communities will be paid to guard it. But then, Kabul will expect the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to provide security cover, which, in turn, leads to the formalization of the long-term Western military presence in Afghanistan.

Without a doubt, the project leads to an overall strengthening of US influence in South Asia. The US put heavy pressure on Pakistan and India to spurn the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) project. Delhi unabashedly buckled under the US pressure. Pakistan showed some degree of defiance and is still keeping its options open.

There have been occasional threatening noises that Pakistan will turn IPI into an IPC (Iran-Pakistan-China) pipeline. However, the US is offering TAPI as an alternative bone for Pakistan to chew so that it won't be left with much zest to press ahead with the IPC pipeline in any tearing hurry. In sum, Moscow should realize that short of playing a spoiler's role, TAPI might go through.

Pakistan has strong reasons to pitch for TAPI. It is in critical need of staving off an energy crisis. The TAPI pipeline can be operational as early as 2013-14. During 2008-2009, Pakistan's demand for natural gas began outstripping its production by a shortfall of 203 mmcfd (million cubic feet per day). Pakistan's share from TAPI is pegged at 1325 mmcfd (the same as India's).

Pakistan also hopes to get a hefty amount from India as transit fee. Then, there are the downstream economic benefits such as industrial expansion, job creation, etc. Most important, Pakistan sees that TAPI heavily involves the US and its comfort level is high whenever Washington becomes a stakeholder in fostering the normalization of its troubled relationship with India.

As Susan Elliot, the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State on South and Central Asian Affairs, put it: "The pipeline's route may serve as a stabilizing corridor, linking neighbors together in economic growth and prosperity. The road ahead is long for this project but the benefits could be tremendous and are certainly worthy of the diligence demonstrated by those four countries so far."

The TAPI pipeline is in actuality a Silk Road connecting Central Asia to the West via the Pakistani port of Gwadar. It makes Pakistan the US gateway to Central Asia. Pakistan rightly estimates that alongside this enhanced status in US regional strategy comes a US commitment to help the Pakistani economy develop and to buttress Pakistan's security needs in the long term.

Thus, the fear of bin Laden the Bad Man, the lack of women's rights in Afghanistan, the Taliban, Sharia law, all those things Americans were supposed to hate and fear, can now all be swept aside. It was about the US getting a pipeline through Kandihar.

More missing history

Here is an interesting story about Klaus Barbie, US Army intelligence, the CIA, South American fascists, cocaine, the Moonies and a few other names you may have heard.

The story of Barbie’s escape to South America with the CIC’s collaboration was addressed in the 1983 report by Allan A. Ryan Jr., head of the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations. Ryan’s 218-page report said that in 1951, the CIC helped Barbie evade French authorities and flee over a “ratline” to Bolivia.

Ryan said that a half dozen CIC officers participated in the cover-up of Barbie’s identity and excused their actions by claiming that the French arrest of Barbie could jeopardize the security of other CIC operations. To get Barbie to Bolivia, the CIC officers used a ratline run by a Croatian priest, Father Krunoslav Draganovich, Ryan wrote.

Ryan said the Central Intelligence Agency later rebuffed suggestions that Barbie be reactivated in the 1960s, but Barbie – using the name Altmann – held an official position with a state-owned shipping company that allowed him to move freely and even to travel to the United States. [For more on Ryan’s report, see Time magazine, Aug. 29, 1983]

More significantly, Barbie became a figure in Bolivian intelligence and used that perch to coordinate with other right-wing intelligence services around the continent that were engaged in Operation Condor, a program of assassinating suspected subversives and other dissidents.

In the 1970s, these intelligence agencies had teamed up to give their assassination squads regional and even global reach, including the murder of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker on the streets of Washington in 1976.

For the Cocaine Coup in 1980, Barbie recruited Argentina’s feared intelligence service along with young neo-Nazis from Europe. The World Anti-Communist League arranged support from Moon and other Asian rightists.

For years, Moon had been sinking down roots in South America, especially in Uruguay after right-wing military dictators seized power there in 1973. Moon also cultivated close ties with dictators in Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, reportedly ingratiating himself with the juntas by helping the regimes buy weapons and by channeling money to allied right-wing organizations.

“Relationships nurtured with right-wing Latin Americans in the [World Anti-Communist] League led to acceptance of the [Unification] Church’s political and propaganda operations throughout Latin America,” the Andersons wrote in Inside the League.

“As an international money laundry, … the Church tapped into the capital flight havens of Latin America. Escaping the scrutiny of American and European investigators, the Church could now funnel money into banks in Honduras, Uruguay and Brazil, where official oversight was lax or nonexistent.”

Moon expanded his network of friends when Barbie helped pull together a right-wing alliance of Bolivian military officers and drug dealers for the Cocaine Coup. WACL associates, such as Alfredo Candia, coordinated the arrival of some of the paramilitary operatives from Argentina and Europe who would help out in the violent putsch.

Barbie, then better known as Altmann, was in charge of drawing up plans for the coup and coordinating with Argentine intelligence. One of the first Argentine intelligence officers to arrive was Lt. Alfred Mario Mingolla.

"Before our departure, we received a dossier on” Barbie, Mingolla later told German investigative reporter Kai Hermann. "There it stated that he was of great use to Argentina because he played an important role in all of Latin America in the fight against communism. From the dossier, it was also clear that Altmann worked for the Americans."

As the coup took shape, Bolivian Col. Luis Arce-Gomez, the cousin of cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez, also brought onboard neo-fascist terrorists such as Italian Stefano della Chiaie who had been working with the Argentine death squads. [See Cocaine Politics by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall]

Still a committed fascist, Barbie started a secret lodge, called Thule. During meetings, he lectured to his followers underneath swastikas by candlelight.

On June 17, 1980, in nearly public planning for the coup, six of Bolivia's biggest traffickers met with the military conspirators to hammer out a financial deal for future protection of the cocaine trade. A La Paz businessman said the coming putsch should be called the "Cocaine Coup," a name that would stick. [See Cocaine Politics]

Less than three weeks later, on July 6 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, U.S. undercover drug enforcement agent Michael Levine said he met with a Bolivian trafficker named Hugo Hurtado-Candia. Over drinks, Hurtado outlined plans for the "new government" in which his niece Sonia Atala, a major cocaine supplier, will "be in a very strong position." [See Levine’s Big White Lie]

On July 17, the Cocaine Coup began, spearheaded by Barbie and his neo-fascist goon squad which was dubbed the “Fiancés of Death.”

"The masked thugs were not Bolivians; they spoke Spanish with German, French and Italian accents," Levine wrote. "Their uniforms bore neither national identification nor any markings, although many of them wore Nazi swastika armbands and insignias."

The slaughter was fierce. When the putschists stormed the national labor headquarters, they wounded labor leader Marcelo Quiroga, who had led the effort to indict former military dictator Hugo Banzer on drug and corruption charges.

Quiroga "was dragged off to police headquarters to be the object of a game played by some of the torture experts imported from Argentina's dreaded Mechanic School of the Navy," Levine wrote.

And your tax dollars and your CIA did this.

It's always nice to have the world catch up a couple of decades after you find out about this stuff, but, of course, the rest of the world hasn't caught up.

Who suicided David Kelly?

If you go here you can get a little background on David Kelly a British UN weapons inspector. Kelly is one of those guys involved in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. He called BS on the claims by Britain and the U.S. on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

He turned up suicided.

Now there are more problems with his suicide.

Fresh doubts have been raised over how Dr David Kelly died after police admitted no fingerprints were found on the packs of pills he supposedly overdosed on.

The public inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death found the weapons expert killed himself by slashing his wrist with a pruning knife and taking ‘an excess amount of co-proxamol tablets’.

Three blister packs of the painkiller, each able to hold ten pills, were retrieved from Dr Kelly’s coat pocket when his body was found in woods near his home. 

Only one tablet remained, leading his post mortem examination report to state he may have taken up to 29 pills.

Co-proxamol ingestion is listed as a cause of death on his death certificate.

But Thames Valley Police has now revealed that when it tested two of the blister packs for fingerprints there were ‘none recovered’.

The development is doubly significant because police have already said the knife which Dr Kelly is said to have used to cut his wrist did not have fingerprints on – nor did an open bottle of water found beside his body.

The lack of fingerprints on these items is particularly difficult to explain given that Dr Kelly was not wearing gloves when his body was recovered on July 18, 2003. No gloves were found at the scene.

Dr Kelly is said to have killed himself after being named as the prime source of a BBC report accusing Tony Blair’s government of lying to take Britain into war.

Uniquely, for an unexpected death such as his, no coroner’s inquest has ever been held.

The idea that Dr Kelly took pills of any description has long been contested by those who knew him.

Mai Pederson, a U.S. military official who worked with Dr Kelly in Iraq in the 1990s, has told the Mail he suffered from ‘unexplained dysphagia’ – a syndrome that can make it almost impossible to swallow pills. Friends have confirmed this.

Police have also revealed the half litre bottle of water found next to Dr Kelly’s body had 111ml of water left in it, triggering questions about the likelihood that he could have swallowed 29 pills with the aid of 389ml of water – about half a pint.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that the third co-proxamol blister pack was not subjected to a fingerprint search but was ‘reserved for DNA’ with a ‘full profile of Dr Kelly obtained’.

But this unspecified DNA evidence – which could for example be blood or sweat – does not explain the lack of prints on the first two packs.

Fingerprint expert Peter Swann, said: ‘Fingerprint testing is a complex area. It is surprising no prints were found on any of these items.

‘It is possible there were no prints but it would be advisable to have the exhibits re-examined by an independent expert.’

It is not known if any of the exhibits have been destroyed. None of the exhibits was presented as evidence to the Hutton Inquiry.

Attorney General Dominic Grieve is currently considering whether there is sufficient new evidence to apply to the High Court for an inquest into Dr Kelly’s death.

Dr Michael Powers QC, who represents a group of doctors campaigning for an inquest, said: ‘The fact no fingerprints were recovered is odd to say the least.’

The Wikileaks news in Spain

While we here in the U.S. are seeing stories about Hillary Clinton calling for the head of Wikileaks' arrest, or the story that he's wanted for a convenient rape charge, the folks in Spain are getting different Wikileaks news. That is, they are reading the leaks about how the U.S. has interfered with their system of justice. Here.

I know I'm supposed to be appalled that this came to light, but well .. I think the people of Spain -- and America --- have a right to know about it. Scott Horton in Harpers writes:

In Spain, the WikiLeaks disclosures have dominated the news for three days now. The reporting has been led by the level-headed El País, with its nationwide competitor, Público, lagging only a bit behind. Attention has focused on three separate matters, each pending in the Spanish national security court, the Audiencia Nacional: the investigation into the 2003 death of a Spanish cameraman, José Cuoso, as a result of the mistaken shelling of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel by a U.S. tank; an investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; and a probe into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for extraordinary renditions flights, including the one which took Khaled El-Masri to Baghdad and then on to Afghanistan in 2003.

These cables reveal a large-scale, closely coordinated effort by the State Department to obstruct these criminal investigations...

Diplomats routinely monitor and report on legal cases that affect national interests. These cables show that the U.S. embassy in Madrid had far exceeded this mandate, however, and was actually successfully steering the course of criminal investigations, the selection of judges, and the conduct of prosecutors. Their disclosure has created deep concern about the independence of judges in Spain and the manipulation of the entire criminal justice system by a foreign power

As well it should. One can only dream that this particular detail would concern the people of the United States as much. From David Corn at Mother Jones:

In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. An April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.

The previous month, a Spanish human rights group called the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had requested that Spain's National Court indict six former Bush officials for, as the cable describes it, "creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture." The six were former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon's former general counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel; and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel. The human rights group contended that Spain had a duty to open an investigation under the nation's "universal jurisdiction" law, which permits its legal system to prosecute overseas human rights crimes involving Spanish citizens and residents. Five Guantanamo detainees, the group maintained, fit that criteria.

Soon after the request was made, the US embassy in Madrid began tracking the matter. On April 1, embassy officials spoke with chief prosecutor Javier Zaragoza, who indicated that he was not pleased to have been handed this case, but he believed that the complaint appeared to be well-documented and he'd have to pursue it. Around that time, the acting deputy chief of the US embassy talked to the chief of staff for Spain's foreign minister and a senior official in the Spanish Ministry of Justice to convey, as the cable says, "that this was a very serious matter for the USG." The two Spaniards "expressed their concern at the case but stressed the independence of the Spanish judiciary."

Then they brought in the heat.

You know, it's one thing to not want to look in the rear view mirror. It's quite another to veer into someone else's lane and crash their car to keep them from looking into theirs.

Not that it's a shock that this happened. At the time the story was in the papers I think most of us probably assumed that there was American pressure to shut it down. But I guess I'd hoped that it was unofficial rather than a secret, coordinated Democratic and Republican cover-up. (Who says bipartisanship is dead?)

Guess who's going to jail?

 

The Exterminator!

 

"He probably has some mental health issues."

A guy tried to shoot up a schoolyard.

O'Rourke's neighbors told the San Diego Union-Tribune in a story posted on its website Saturday that he often screamed obscenities and racial epithets alone in his apartment and they frequently called police.

Vickie Rowe-Mitchell, who lives in the apartment beneath O'Rourke, said he would curse and scream the N-word for hours late at night, and said his stomping and banging was so loud her ceiling fan would shake and parts of her ceiling would fall.

"I always felt in my head he was going to do something bad," she told the newspaper. "It was just a feeling in my soul."

None of the residents of Canyon Creek Apartments knew what he did for a living.

Another neighbor, Ashley Johnson, said she had seen O'Rourke on Friday morning just a few hours before the shooting.

"I was opening my door and she was just leaving," Johnson said. "He closed his door really fast and there was this weird chemical smell. It smelled really weird in his house."

Police said a propane tank was found near Cain's car and a gas canister was found at a playground at the school after the shooting.

At about noon Friday, police said O'Rourke parked his car, jumped a fence and opened fire on the crowded playground, hitting a 6-year-old and 7-year-old in the arms before construction workers tackled him.

The girls were taken by helicopter to Rady Children's Hospital. The injuries were not life-threatening and they are expected to make a full recovery, Cain said.

Second-grader Caden Smith said he ended up in a classroom with injured girls.

"One, her arm was covered in blood and all you could see was red," Caden told the North County Times. "The other, there wasn't that much blood."

Third-grader Tommy Donahue said he was playing outside when he heard what sounded like firecrackers.

"Once the noise happened, everybody decided to scream and run for the classroom," Tommy told the newspaper as he stood next to his mother. "I felt safe in the classroom."

A local nominee for the Darwin Awards

Here.

Some might say that smoking meth with a blowtorch near a container of gunpowder is ill-advised. Some will try anyway.

John Blanchard, 65, is among them, San Mateo County sheriff's deputies say.

Deputies called to a fire Friday afternoon in a storage yard in the unincorporated community of Princeton near the Half Moon Bay Airport found Blanchard standing outside a camper that he had parked there illegally, sheriff's Lt. Ray Lunny said.

Investigators determined that the fire on the 200 block of Yale Avenue had been started by a defective propane blowtorch that Blanchard had been using to smoke methamphetamine, Lunny said.

Blanchard left the blowtorch on a dryer, causing a nearby container of gunpowder to explode, said Steve Wagstaffe, chief deputy district attorney.

Besides the blowtorch, deputies found a loaded rifle, ammunition, a container of black powder and an unopened safe containing more than 300 feet of detonation cord, Lunny said.

Sorry

At least the eight shots missed.

Authorities say a deputy trainee fired eight times at a liquor store manager after mistaking the man's finger for a gun as he pointed toward fleeing robbers.

Los Angeles County sheriff's Capt. Mike Parker told the Los Angeles Times that all the shots missed early Sunday.

Parker says the manager called 911 from the West Hollywood liquor store then ran outside as deputies arrived and started pointing. The shooting is being investigated by internal affairs and detectives.

Parker says good guys and bad guys are not always obvious when police arrive at a crime scene. As is customary, the deputy won't immediately go back on patrol.

Lee Hamilton, coverup artist

A couple of decades back I called Democratic Representative Lee Hamilton a coverup artist. He was always on key committees where he'd discourage investigations into all things national security.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius has become the latest voice of influence to sing the praises of former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who is almost universally hailed in U.S. power circles as a modern-day Wise Man, a Democratic centrist who shuns partisanship and puts love of country over politics.

But the sad truth is that Lee Hamilton has done great damage to the U.S. political process by elevating bipartisanship above a commitment to the truth. One reason why many Americans buy into baseless conspiracy theories today is that Hamilton failed to expose real conspiracies when he was in Congress.

For instance, it was surely "bipartisan" in August 1986 when Hamilton joined other members of the House Intelligence Committee, including Rep. Dick Cheney, in concluding that stories about White House aide Oliver North running money and guns to the Nicaraguan contras were false.

Hamilton, then the committee’s chairman, accepted denials from North and his boss, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, and agreed to kill a proposed congressional investigation into what was then known as “the North network.”

Since I and my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger had been writing the stories about North’s secret operation (based then on about two dozen sources), I got a call from one of Hamilton’s aides and was told that Hamilton and the panel had the choice of “believing you and your 24 sources or these honorable men. And it wasn’t a close call.”

It was, however, an erroneous call. And it was not without consequences, both in the larger scheme of things and on the personal side.

At the AP that summer, Barger had been assigned to the overnight desk as a way to transition him onto the AP regular staff (he originally had been hired into a temporary position to work with me on the North project). However, in August, Barger was informed that his time on the overnight would be extended indefinitely, a development that prompted Barger to quit.

If Hamilton had done his duty – by insisting on a real investigation to get at the truth about North's network instead of caving in to Cheney and the other Republicans – our situation at AP would have been quite different. With a congressional investigation validating our reporting, I probably could have sprung Barger from his overnight assignment and kept our team together.

Instead, Hamilton’s out-of-hand rejection of an investigation amounted to a repudiation of our work – our critics quickly noted that even the Democrats deemed our reporting not worthy of pursuit – and AP management was left with an impression that we had taken the news agency out onto a dangerous limb.

In the bigger picture, Hamilton was demonstrating what would become his M.O., putting bipartisanship and collegiality ahead of truth and accountability.

For the next few months, the AP investigation of North, which also had lifted the curtain on the Reagan administration’s tolerance of contra drug trafficking, remained in limbo.

However, on Oct. 5, 1986, one of the last planned flights by North’s little contra-supply air force was shot down over Nicaragua. One American onboard, Eugene Hasenfus, survived and began talking.

Between Hasenfus’s account and documents that were recovered from the plane, it became clear that not only were our earlier articles about the North network true but that the secret contra supply operation was bigger and more sophisticated than we had understood.

Nevertheless, President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush and other officials continued to deny a U.S. government connection to the downed plane. Apparently, the White House remained confident that it could fend off the growing evidence. After all, it had successfully co-opted Hamilton and the intelligence committee in August.

But the scandal continued to grow. In early November 1986, a Beirut newspaper disclosed Reagan’s secret arms-for-hostages deals with Iran.

Reagan and his subordinates issued another round of hearty denials, but their bluster was finally not enough. By late November, the two disclosures – the contra supplies and the Iranian arms deliveries – became linked when evidence emerged that North had crossed the two operations by diverting profits from the Iran arms sales to fund the contra war.

The Iran-Contra scandal was born. Yet, despite Hamilton’s earlier failure to detect the secret North network, the House Democratic leadership still turned to him to lead the investigation.  Hamilton was made co-chairman of the joint congressional Iran-Contra probe, with Cheney assuming the role as the administration’s chief defender.

As the Iran-Contra investigation picked up speed in early 1987, I was offered a job at Newsweek, and – given all the strife that had surrounded our investigation at AP – I decided it was the right time to leave.

My first stories at Newsweek revealed that the Iran-Contra scandal reached much higher than had been known and that the White House had begun a frantic cover-up aimed at shielding Reagan from possible impeachment.

Amid this new investigative momentum, there also was an opportunity to examine possibly the darkest part of the Iran-Contra underbelly, the Reagan administration’s concealment of contra-connected cocaine traffickers – out of fear that Americans would recoil if they knew this ugly reality about Reagan’s “freedom-fighters.”

However, it soon became clear that Hamilton envisioned his role not as a determined pursuer of the truth but as a conciliator seeking a bipartisan solution that would bring the nasty scandal to a politically acceptable conclusion without damaging the capital’s fragile political comity.

In 1987, Hamilton undertook a series of decisions that altered the course of American history, at least as it is available to the public. Over the resistance of other Democrats on the Iran-Contra panel, Hamilton struck a generous deal with Cheney and the Republicans to grant North immunity in exchange for his testimony, without requiring pre-hearing questioning.

Hamilton also didn’t push very hard against the White House insistence that the scandal was just the work of a few overzealous underlings. Though Reagan was chastised for enabling violations of law, he mostly got a pass, as did Vice President Bush despite strong evidence that Bush’s office was overseeing the entire operation.

As the committee’s final report was being written, some Democratic investigators pressed for inclusion of their discovery of a covert domestic propaganda campaign that the White House had organized to intimidate journalists – and even members of Congress – who brought to light unflattering information about the contras.

The investigators prepared a draft chapter dedicated to this remarkable discovery, but three “moderate” Republican senators – William Cohen, Warren Rudman and Paul Trible – balked at signing the majority report if it included this explosive new information.

Eager for some GOP support – since Cheney and the other Republicans were preparing a minority report denying any Iran-Contra wrongdoing – Hamilton agreed to delete the chapter although allowing a few of its findings to be sprinkled into the executive summary.

Hamilton got his three Republican signatures, but the “compromise” meant almost no American would understand how the public had been manipulated by pro-contra propaganda.

As for the contra drug trafficking scandal, the Hamilton-led investigation chose to take testimony only behind closed doors and to exclude the topic from the final report. That “compromise” served to solidify Washington’s misguided conventional wisdom that the contra-cocaine issue was a “conspiracy theory.”

In 1996, nearly a decade later, investigative reporter Gary Webb revived the contra-drug scandal with a series for the San Jose Mercury News, describing how contra cocaine helped fuel the nation’s crack epidemic. But his reporting was widely ridiculed by the major U.S. news media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, which reflected Hamilton's earlier brushing aside of the contra-cocaine problem.

It would take until 2000 for the House Intelligence Committee – long after Hamilton had left the panel – to grudgingly acknowledge that the earlier stories about Reagan’s CIA protecting contra drug traffickers were true.

Read it all. Nice to see others catching up with me.

Rape is part of war, even our wars

This is horrible.

Some women who were raped at the US's Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq were later "honor killed" by their families, says a Jordanian reporter who writes on women's issues.

"In Abu Ghraib, women were tortured by the Americans much more than the men," Lima Nabil told The Independent. "One woman said she witnessed five girls being raped. Most of the women in the prison were raped – some of them left prison pregnant. Families killed some of these women – because of the shame."

Nabil, who has reported extensively on the status of women in the Arab world and runs a home for runaway girls, made the comments to renowned foreign correspondent Robert Fisk in an article on honor killings in Jordan. Nabil did not expand on her comments in the article.

Fisk reported that a "very accurate source in Washington" in close contact with military personnel has confirmed "terrible stories of gang rape" by US forces at the now-notorious prison.

The unnamed source told Fisk that images of women being raped were behind the Obama administration's decision not to release any more pictures of abuses at Abu Ghraib. The original set of images, showing male prisoners being abused, were released in 2004, horrifying and angering the Arab world.

Military and White House officials have repeatedlydenied that the Abu Ghraib images still under wraps depict rape.

Allegations that women were raped at the facility have been made for years. In 2004, New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh alleged rape at the facility and said the US government has videotape of underage boys being sodomized.