Posada and the two "acquittals"

An update on my previous post about Posada. The Venezuela Information Office (funded by the Venezuelan government) is reporting in its June 23 Venezuela Weekly News & Action email that the two supposed acquittals of Posada are misleading. An excerpt:

On August 25, 1977, Posada and three other men were charged with treason and referred to a military tribunal. The military court quickly absolved them.

* Later, however, the Military Court of Appeals ruled that as a civilian crime, the military court had never had jurisdiction. The acquittal was nullified and the record of the case was void. From a legal standpoint, the military trial never happened.

* The men were then charged with aggravated homicide and treason before a civilian court, yet Posada escaped from his prison cell the day before a verdict was to be announced. Under Venezuelan law, a judicial proceeding cannot move forward without the presence of the accused, and so a verdict has never been reached in his case. Posada remained a fugitive until he was detained in Miami last month.

Durbin cowed for criticism of U.S. torture practices

Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin has been the subject of a faux-scandal recently for reportedly likening U.S. treatment of prisoners to Nazi behavior.

Here's what he said that sparked the controversy:

"If I read this [an FBI report] to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you could certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pot Pol or others - that had no concern for human beings."

Senate Majority leader Bill Frist demanded an apology from Durbin while White House spokesman Scott McClellan called the comments "reprehensible." Durbin responded by caving in, saying that "Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line. To them, I extend my heartfelt apologies."

Notice of course that the comments are perfectly defensible and were made in the midst of a real scandal over blatant documented U.S. torture. The fallout from Durbin's comment says a lot about the power of aggressive Republicans working in tandem with Fox News and the rest of the media to divert national attention to something else - no matter how absurd - from even the most serious of scandals.

The impending global energy crisis

Michael Klare is warning in a new article (Reaching The Saudi Peak, June 27, 2005) that the world is likely going to face a serious energy crisis in the foreseeable future. Dire predictions of a decline in oil production seem to be common but this piece caught my attention. Klare's forecast is based on a new book by Matthew Simmons, "chairman and CEO of one of the nation's leading oil-industry investment banks", called Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy that details why the assurances of long-term, high output oil production coming from Saudi officials are wrong.

Klare concludes that:
Eventually, in the not-too-distant future, Saudi production will begin a sharp decline from which there is no escape. And when that happens, the world will face an energy crisis of unprecedented scale... Oil will still be available on international markets, but not in the abundance to which we have become accustomed and not at a price that many of us will be able to afford. Transportation, and everything it effects, —which is to say, virtually the entire world economy, —will be much, much more costly. The cost of food will also rise, as modern agriculture relies to an extraordinary extent on petroleum products for tilling, harvesting, pest protection, processing and delivery. Many other products made with petroleum paints, plastics, lubricants, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and so forth —will also prove far more costly. Under these circumstances, a global economic contraction with all the individual pain and hardship that would surely produce —appears nearly inevitable... If we act now to limit our consumption of oil and develop non-petroleum energy alternatives, we can face the "twilight" of the Petroleum Age with some degree of hope; if we fail to do so, we are in for a very grim time indeed.

I presume that the upper echelons of the U.S. government have not been relying upon the word of the governmentrnemnt and are well aware of the impending crisis. As oil becomes more scarce and thus more valuable it will only become more important for U.S. planners to control the countries that possess it.