The Complicity of Congress in a Criminal War

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/06/353/

The Complicity of Congress in a Criminal War
by Richard W. Behan

The US Congress has gone beyond compliance with George Bush’s illegal war, and is now technically an accomplice-it is assisting with full knowledge in the perpetration of a crime. Congress has attained this status through two grave errors, one of omission and one of commission.

The Error of Commission

The Iraq Accountability Act passed the House as H.R. 1591 and slightly differently as S. 965 in the Senate. The versions await reconciliation in conference committee. Both bills set deadlines for troop withdrawal, both appropriate the money the President requested for prosecuting his war, and both require the Iraqi Parliament to pass its “hydrocarbon law,” to enable the sharing of oil revenues among the Iraqi people.

Revenue sharing surfaced publicly when President Bush announced his troop surge initiative on January 10. It was one in a series of mandatory “benchmarks” he established for the Iraqi government to meet. “To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy,” Mr. Bush said, “Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.” On the surface that is a benign, compassionate thing to do for a war-torn people.

As usual, it seems, Mr. Bush was consciously deceiving us. He failed to tell us the whole truth. The Iraqi hydrocarbon law also privatizes 81% of Iraq’s currently nationalized petroleum resources, opening them to “investment” by Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, and two British oil companies, BP/Amoco and Royal Dutch/Shell. (For further details, see Joshua Holland, “Bush’s Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq’s Oil.”) These companies expect to sign the rarely used and notoriously profitable contracts called “production sharing agreements” which guarantee them extraordinarily high profit margins: they might capture more than half of the oil revenues for the first 15-30 years of the contracts’ lifespan, and deny Iraq any income at all until their infrastructure “investments” have been recovered.

So the Iraqi people will share among themselves all the revenue from 1/5th of their country’s oil reserves. But they will get only a fraction from the remaining 4/5ths, where the American and British oil companies expect to generate immense profits. (Read more in Crude Designs, Greg Muttitt, ed., a report by the UK’s Platform Group.)

This outcome has been on the Bush Administration’s agenda since it took office in 2001, and it is the reason we went to war. (For substantiation, see http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/47489/?comments=view&cID=516389&pID=516158 . See also The State of War, by James Risen, Bob Woodward’s State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, and The Greatest Story Ever Sold, by Frank Rich. )

more...

[MaggieSwanson]

1. "Was Congress ignorant....

of the consequences of the deceitful “benchmark?” No. Representative Dennis Kucinich offered an amendment to eliminate it from H.R. 1591. In a letter to his Democratic colleagues, Mr. Kucinich said, “By…requiring the enactment of this law by the Iraqi government, Democrats will be instrumental in privatizing Iraqi oil.”

And so they were. With Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, the benchmark survived-essentially a prescription for theft."


Great article, babylonsister. Bookmarked, K&R.

[The Magistrate]

2. The Claim Of Criminal Culpabilty, Ma'am, Would Be Laughed Out Of Any Court

This is not even good propaganda, let alone sound law.

[TwilightGardener]

3. Congress knows what's going on. I just wish one of them would

be honest and stand up and tell the American and Iraqi people the truth about why we're over there, but the public will have to figure that out on its own. As for anything criminal--no, just morally wrong.