Deep Blade Journal

“There really should be a yellow sign around the Langley Headquarters of CIA, ‘Politicians may go no further’” –Ray McGovern, PBS News Hour, 8/10/2004

The Goss nomination to the CIA speaks volumes. First, no one with any objectivity is going to be allowed to run Bush’s CIA. Only a highly political and loyal Republican operative can be trusted to keep the secrets of this administration’s incredible duplicity, malfeasance, and embarrassing connections to unsavory elements. Furthermore, the Goss nomination is nakedly political with respect to the November election.

Terence Hunt’s analysis in an AP release today has it right, “More broadly the nomination reinforced Bush’s efforts to keep the nation focused on the war on terrorism, his strongest suit in his battle for re-election.”

The News Hour on Tuesday was as close to terrific as it ever gets. Former DCI Stansfield Turner (Carter Administration) and former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern, a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity laid out a case against Goss. Here’s how Ray McGovern wrapped it up:

At the end of [the joint Congressional committee that was the first to investigate 9/11], their final report left out all the information having to do with what the president of the United States was told prior to 9/11. The White House forbade that from being in the final report. Eleanor Hill, the executive director of that committee remonstrated loudly.Porter Goss gave in to the White House, and so that report was ipso facto, incomplete, because it contained lots of stuff, but nothing on what the president was told before 9/11. That’s proof positive to me that you’ve got a partisan person here who will do the bidding of the White House. And that’s precisely why he’s been nominated and nominated now because the controversy will now be centered on the failure of intelligence, Iraq, 9/11, failure of intelligence and no attention being given to the failure of the president.

I’ll go further. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the 911 report winks that tracing the financing of the plot was of little “practical significance”. But who on September 11, 2001 was taking a leisurely breakfast, just as the planes hit, with a Pakistani intelligence figure implicated in just such financing? Why, Porter Goss himself! Now I’m sure Representative Goss was not privy to the plot, but this goes to show that there is deep mystery about 911 that will stay buried with the political operative Porter Goss as DCI.

A BBC story today quotes the most recent monthly oil market report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), which said that “demand for oil was running at 82.2 million barrels a day, 750,000 more than previously thought”.

“The upwards revision means that daily demand has grown by a record 2.5 million barrels a day this year”, according to the report.

Light sweet crude prices have touched $45 in the last 48 hours.

The IEA also says “world demand would rise by a further 1.8 million barrels next year to 84 million barrels a day….OPEC’s production capacity would rise by 400,000 barrels a day this year, and by a further 700,000 barrels a day in 2005.”

Hmmm. That adds up 700,000 bpd short. Plus, why would demand growth fall be 30% next year unless they expect a rapid fall-off in economic growth? This is not explained.

Other very interesting stories are linked on the same page as this BBC story, for example Environment drives Hummer vs Hybrid row (an American 10mpg Hummer owner defends his big engine delusions).

There is also a very interesting q&a thing (click on the link for “Ask an oil expert”) with Dr. Adnan Shihab-Eldin, OPEC’s director of research, Dr Leo Drollas of the Centre for Global Energy Studies in London, and Rick Sellers, head of the Renewable Energy Unit at IEA.

Needn’t worry about supplies, is the consensus, “reserve growth” and unconventional oil has us covered until 2080. When questioners pressed on this matter, Shihab-Eldin, says just that “production capacity will increase”, and Drollas says simply, “we’ve been there before,” referring to the 1970s, when $100 per barrel oil was predicted, but we saw sub-$20 oil in the 1990s.

This last point is quite true, but then the world was still in the midst of major discoveries of new giant fields, the likes of which have not been found since, despite vigorous effort.

M. King Hubbert wrote in 1971 that world oil would peak in 2000. Could Hubbert’s analysis have been accurate in the 1970s? Why not? The fact that prices dipped during some intervening periods does not disprove it. I’ll be agnostic. Show me the oil. We’ll see if the world is producing 115–125 mbd within 20 years, as these analysts suggest will happen.