The Tonka Report

May 27, 2010: Clifford Krauss and John M. Broder / The New York Times – May 27, 2010

Houston — BP on Thursday night restarted its most ambitious effort yet to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to revive hopes that it might cap the well with a “top kill” technique that involved pumping heavy drilling liquids to counteract the pressure of the gushing oil.

BP officials, who along with government officials created the impression early in the day that the strategy was working, disclosed later that they had stopped pumping the night before when engineers saw that too much of the drilling fluid was escaping along with the oil. It was the latest setback in the effort to shut off the leaking oil, which federal officials said was pouring into the gulf at a far higher rate than original estimates suggested. If the new estimates are accurate, the spill would be far bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 and the worst in United States history.

Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, struggled to offer guidance on whether the latest effort was likely to succeed. “It’s quite a roller-coaster,” Mr. Suttles said. “It’s difficult to be optimistic or pessimistic. We have not stopped the flow.”

President Obama, who planned to visit the gulf on Friday, ordered a suspension of virtually all current and new offshore oil drilling activity pending a comprehensive safety review, acknowledging that oversight until now had been seriously deficient. His action halted planned exploratory wells in the Arctic due to be drilled this summer and planned lease sales off the coast of Virginia and in the Gulf of Mexico. It also halts work on 33 exploratory wells now being drilled in the gulf.

Mr. Obama said at a news conference in Washington that he was angry and frustrated about the catastrophe, and he shouldered much of the responsibility for the continuing crisis. “Those who think we were either slow on the response or lacked urgency, don’t know the facts,” Mr. Obama said. “This has been our highest priority.”

But he also blamed BP, which owns the stricken well, and the Bush administration, which he said had fostered a “cozy and sometimes corrupt” relationship between oil companies and regulators at the Minerals Management Service. The chief of that agency for the past 11 months, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, resigned on Thursday, less than a week after her boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, announced a broad restructuring of the office. “I’m hopeful that the reforms that the secretary and the administration are undertaking will resolve the flaws in the current system that I inherited,” she said in a statement.

Mr. Obama plans on Friday to inspect the efforts in Louisiana to stop the leak and clean up after it, his second trip to the region since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20. He will also visit with people affected by the spreading slick that has washed ashore over scores of miles of beaches and wetlands.

Even as Mr. Obama acknowledged that his efforts to improve regulation of offshore drilling had fallen short, he said that oil and gas from beneath the gulf, now about 30 percent of total domestic production, would be a part of the nation’s energy supply for years to come.

“It has to be part of an overall energy strategy,” Mr. Obama said. “I mean, we’re still years off and some technological breakthroughs away from being able to operate on purely a clean-energy grid. During that time, we’re going to be using oil. And to the extent that we’re using oil, it makes sense for us to develop our oil and natural gas resources here in the United States and not simply rely on imports.”

In the top kill maneuver, a 30,000-horsepower engine aboard a ship injected heavy drill liquids through two narrow flow lines into the stack of pipes and other equipment above the well to push the escaping oil and gas back down below the sea floor. As hour after hour passed after the top kill began early Wednesday afternoon, technicians along with millions of television and Internet viewers watched live video images showing that the dark oil escaping into the gulf waters was giving way to a mud-colored plume. That seemed to be an indication that the heavy liquids known as “drilling mud” were filling the chambers of the blowout preventer, replacing the escaping oil.

In the morning, federal officials expressed optimism that all was going well. “The top kill procedure is going as planned, and it is moving along as everyone had hoped,” Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the leader of the government effort, told CNN. And Robert Dudley, BP’s managing director, said on the “Today” program on NBC that the top kill “was moving the way we want it to.”

It was not until late afternoon that BP acknowledged that the operation was not succeeding and that pumping had halted at 11 p.m. Wednesday. “We have not yet stopped the flow, so the operation has not achieved its objective,” Mr. Suttles said, adding that “nothing has gone wrong or has been unanticipated.”

Engineers had feared the top kill was risky because the high-pressure mud could have punctured another gaping hole in the pipes, or dislodged debris clogging the blowout preventer and pipes and intensified the flow. The engineers also said that the problem they encountered was not entirely unexpected, and that they believed that they would ultimately succeed.

The impact of the new moratorium on offshore drilling remains uncertain. Mr. Obama ordered a halt to new leasing and drilling permits shortly after the spill, but Minerals Management Service officials continued to issue permits for modifications to existing wells and to grant waivers from environmental assessments for other wells.

Shell Oil had been hoping to begin an exploratory drilling project this summer in the Arctic Ocean, which the new restrictions would delay. Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska and a staunch supporter of drilling in the Arctic, said he was frustrated because the decision “will cause more delays and higher costs for domestic oil and gas production to meet the nation’s energy needs.”

“The Gulf of Mexico tragedy has highlighted the need for much stronger oversight and accountability of oil companies working offshore,” Mr. Begich said in a statement. “But Shell has updated its plans at the administration’s request and made significant investments to address the concerns raised by the gulf spill.” Environmental advocates, however, expressed relief. “We need to know what happened in the gulf to cause the disaster, so that a similar catastrophe doesn’t befall our Arctic waters,” said William H. Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society.

Admiral Allen on Thursday approved portions of Louisiana’s $350 million plan to use walls of sand in an effort to protect vulnerable sections of coastline. The approved portion involves a two-mile sand berm to be built off Scofield Island in Plaquemines Parish — one of six projects that the Corps of Engineers has approved out of 24 proposed by Gov. Bobby Jindal. “What Admiral Allen told us today is that if the first one is effective, then they will consider moving on to the next one,” Mr. Jindal said at an afternoon news conference in Fourchon.

Investigators also continued their efforts to understand what caused the explosion of the rig, which killed 11 workers. At a hearing in New Orleans, the highest ranking official on the Deepwater Horizon testified that he had a disagreement with BP officials on the rig before the explosion.

Jimmy Harrell, a manager who was in charge of the rig, owned by Transocean, said he had expressed concern that BP did not plan to conduct a pressure test before sealing the well closed. It was unclear from Mr. Harrell’s testimony whether the disagreement took place on the day of the explosion or the previous day.

The investigative hearings have grown increasingly combative. Three scheduled witnesses have changed their plans to testify, according to the Coast Guard. Robert Kaluza, a BP official on the rig on the day of the explosion, declined to testify on Thursday by invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. Another top ranking BP official, Donald Vidrine, and James Mansfield, Transocean’s assistant marine engineer on the Deepwater Horizon, both told the Coast Guard that they were sick.

The Tonka Report Editor’s Note: Do I really need to point out the inconsistencies, the underestimations, and the flat out misrepresentations presented in this snow job of an article after all the other evidence that has already surfaced? - SJH 

Link to original article below…

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/us/28spill.html?pagewanted=2

May 27, 2010: Paul Joseph Watson / Prison Planet.com - May 27, 2010

The shadowy design firm that was behind the infamous Hardin Montana jail is pushing to build detention camps across America, with the latest proposal centering around a fifty acre, five hundred bed facility in Italy, Texas, part of a program that many Americans fear is based around a plan to intern political dissidents in the event of a national emergency.

Private prison development firm Corplan Corrections, headed up by an individual called James Parkey, is working with underwriter Municipal Capitol Markets Group, along with prison “consultant” Richard Reyes from Innovative Government Strategies, an outfit that works with state and local government, to oversee multiple projects concentrated in different states including Arizona and Texas.

Their latest project is focused around constructing a “detention center for illegal immigrants” based in Italy, Texas. The Italy City Council heard Parkey’s proposals last week to build a “gorilla proof facility with a fence,” that would be used as a “processing center”.

The company was also behind the infamous internment facility in Hardin Montana, which attracted national media attention when responsibility for its security was handed to a mysterious paramilitary organization called American Police Force, which was fronted by career criminal and a convicted fraudster Michael Hilton, who operated under no less than 17 different aliases.

The group was also behind controversial plans to build a detention facility on Tohono O’odham Nation land near Sahuarita, Arizona. Parkey also attempted to convince the Benson City Council to build a detention camp in that part of Arizona earlier this month.

Parkey’s efforts to oversee three separate jail deals with Texas counties failed following insufficient funds being made available to run the facilities, and in 2005, “Three Texas county commissioners were convicted on bribery charges in connection to one of those Parkey-led projects,” reports TPM.

The only stumbling block that Parkey has repeatedly run into when trying to convince local authorities to accept his proposals to build the camps is the lack of prisoners to fill them. Indeed, critics have accused him of fleecing desperate small communities with promises of jobs and economic development that never come to fruition, leaving empty jails and financial black holes.

But should the federal government and Homeland Security activate its “ENDGAME” scenario in response to a declared national emergency, illegal aliens, as well as “potential terrorists” will be rounded up and imprisoned in detention camps that the Feds themselves, not just private companies, have been building over the course of the last decade.

Back in January 2006, we reported on how Homeland Security had awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root a $385 million dollar contract to construct detention and processing facilities in the event of a national emergency.

The language of the preamble to the agreement veils the program with talk of temporary migrant holding centers, as is the case with the Corplan proposals, but it is made clear that the camps will also be used “as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency.”

The stated purpose of the detention camps, to hold illegal aliens, is routinely cited, yet continuity of government plans clearly indicate that the facilities will have a dual purpose – to hold political dissidents and American citizens in the event of a declaration of martial law.

Veteran author Peter Dale Scott characterized the Halliburton contract as another step towards martial law. As Scott points out, the camps will also be used to “support the rapid development of new programs,” which more specifically relates to a longer term Homeland Security operation entitled ENDGAME, which sets its goal as the removal of not only illegal aliens but also “potential terrorists”.

As we have illustrated, in documents like the MIAC report and a plethora of others, federal authorities define American citizens who are even mildly political, own guns, or support third party candidates as potential terrorists.

“The contract calls for a response to “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs” in the event of other emergencies, such as “a natural disaster.” “New programs” is of course a term with no precise limitation. So, in the current administration, is ENDGAME’s goal of removing “potential terrorists,” writes Scott, adding that former Attorney General John Ashcroft called for the construction of internment camps for American citizens deemed to be “enemy combatants”.

Other agencies of the federal government have also been busy trying to build detention camps over the course of the last decade. In 2002, FEMA sought bids from major real estate and engineering firms to construct giant internment facilities in the case of a chemical, biological or nuclear attack or a natural disaster.

In February 2003, Okanogan County Commissioner Dave Schulz went public with his contention that his county was set to be a location for one of the camps.

Alex Jones has attended numerous military urban warfare training drills across the US where role players were used to simulate arresting American citizens and taking them to internment camps.

Whether these detention camps will be bossed by private paramilitary security forces, agents of the federal government, or a combination of the two is largely immaterial. What should concern all Americans is the fact that the camps are being constructed at all and that under new legal arguments being re-applied by President Obama, Americans can be abducted and held without trial in such facilities under the enemy combatant designation.

The Tonka Report Editor’s Note: If these prison camps were for illegal immigrants they would already be detained in them… – SJH

Link to original article below…

http://www.infowars.com/private-corporation-building-detention-camps-across-america/

May 27, 2010: Kurt Nimmo / Infowars.com – May 26, 2010

“It’s near-impossible to find anyone in Afghanistan who doesn’t believe the US are funding the Taliban: and it’s the highly educated Afghan professionals, those employed by ISAF, USAID, international media organizations – and even advising US diplomats – who seem the most convinced,” reports the Guardian today. “The US has an interest in prolonging the conflict so as to stay in Afghanistan for the long term,” said one Afghan.

It does not take a lot of research to prove the Taliban — and al-Qaeda — were fabricated by the CIA in league with Pakistani and Saudi Arabian intelligence.

In the Middle East and Europe the media has reported this fact for some time now. But in the United States the corporate media retells the official fantasy ad nauseam and millions of people by it hook, line, and sinker.

In 1998, top Rockefeller minion Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted the Taliban was created by the United States. “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” said a testy Brzezinski when pushed by Le Nouvel Observateur.

Brzezinski’s Afghan Mujahideen organized to fight the Soviets and displace their puppet Mohammad Najibullah — subsequently murdered by the Taliban — eventually splintered into the Taliban. “In 1994, a new group, the Taliban (Pashtun for ’students’), emerged on the scene. Its members came from madrassas set up by the Pakistani government along the border and funded by the U.S., Britain, and the Saudis, where they had received theological indoctrination and military training,” writes Phil Gasper, a professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur University.

The creation of the Taliban was “actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,” according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. “The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban.”

The CIA also used “humanitarian” front organizations such as the Committee for a Free Afghanistan to fund and train the Mujahideen and eventually the Taliban. The CIA also spent millions of dollars developing and printing textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings for Afghan schoolchildren.

“We should recognize that American tax dollars helped to create the very Taliban government that now wants to destroy us,” writes Rep. Ron Paul. “In the late 1970s and early 80s, the CIA was very involved in the training and funding of various fundamentalist Islamic groups in Afghanistan, some of which later became today’s brutal Taliban government. In fact, the U.S. government admits to giving the groups at least 6 billion dollars in military aid and weaponry, a staggering sum that would be even larger in today’s dollars.”

After the Taliban killed thousands and captured Kabul in 1996, the U.S. said it didn’t have a problem with their over-the-top religious fanaticism. State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw “nothing objectionable” in the Taliban’s plans to impose strict Islamic law (see Joel Mowbray, Dangerous Diplomacy: How The State Department Threatens America’s Security, p. 62). Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: “The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan.”

The CIA also used “humanitarian” front organizations such as the Committee for a Free Afghanistan to fund and train the Mujahideen and eventually the Taliban. The CIA also spent millions of dollars developing and printing textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings for Afghan schoolchildren.

“We should recognize that American tax dollars helped to create the very Taliban government that now wants to destroy us,” writes Rep. Ron Paul. “In the late 1970s and early 80s, the CIA was very involved in the training and funding of various fundamentalist Islamic groups in Afghanistan, some of which later became today’s brutal Taliban government. In fact, the U.S. government admits to giving the groups at least 6 billion dollars in military aid and weaponry, a staggering sum that would be even larger in today’s dollars.”

After the Taliban killed thousands and captured Kabul in 1996, the U.S. said it didn’t have a problem with their over-the-top religious fanaticism. State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw “nothing objectionable” in the Taliban’s plans to impose strict Islamic law (see Joel Mowbray, Dangerous Diplomacy: How The State Department Threatens America’s Security, p. 62). Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: “The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan.”

“The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil corporations], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that,” said another U.S. diplomat in 1997 (see Timothy Mitchell, McJihad: Islam In The U.S. Global Order).

“The reference to oil and pipelines explains everything,” explains Gasper. “Since the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991, U.S. oil companies and their friends in the State Department have been salivating at the prospect of gaining access to the huge oil and natural gas reserves in the former Soviet republics bordering the Caspian Sea and in Central Asia. These have been estimated as worth $4 trillion.”

The master criminal organization Enron gave the Taliban bribes as part of a “no-holds-barred bid to strike a deal for an energy pipeline in Afghanistan” in order to supply one of its power plants in India. Enron executives privately met with Taliban officials in Texas in 1997 and the fanatics were “given the red-carpet treatment.” It is said Enron secretly employed CIA agents to carry out its dealings overseas.

“Our government publicly supported the Taliban right up until September 11,” Ron Paul continues. “Already in 2001 the U.S. has provided $125 million in so-called humanitarian aid to the country, making us the world’s single largest donor to Afghanistan.”

This marriage of convenience came to an abrupt end shortly after September 11, 2001, when the United States invaded Afghanistan supposedly in response to the Taliban sheltering another CIA asset, Osama bin Laden. As it turns out, however, the U.S. planned to invade Afghanistan prior to September 11, 2001, when cave-dwelling Arabs changed the laws of physics.

Soon thereafter, in late December, 2002, an oil pipeline deal was penned in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, with installed Afghan puppet and former Unocal employee Hamid Karzai in attendance (Karzai joined the struggle against the Soviets in 1982 and became director of operations of the Afghan National Liberation Front, a CIA front).

Ahmed Wali Karzai, Hamid’s brother and a key player in the country’s opium trade, also works for the CIA. “The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House,” the New York Times reported on October 27, 2009.

As the Guardian reported, most Afghans know “America’s war strategy” is a joke and only the American people are fooled and also fleeced. For years the corporate media has told us the Taliban fund their insurgency with profits from a huge opium industry. But even Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Bilderberger Richard Holbrooke, admits this is not the case. “In the past there was a kind of feeling that the money all came from drugs in Afghanistan,” said Holbrooke last year. “That is simply not true.”

In fact, before “everything changed,” the Taliban banned opium cultivation in Afghanistan, an effort the corporate media characterized as an effort to run up prices. However, after the defeat of the Taliban, the drug trade, under the supervision of the CIA, would once again blossom. As the Guardian reported, most Afghans know “America’s war strategy” is a joke and only the American people are fooled and also fleeced.

“After five years of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan’s drug production had swelled to unprecedented proportions,” writes Alfred W. McCoy, a professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In August 2007, the U.N. reported that the country’s record opium crop covered almost 500,000 acres, an area larger than all the coca fields in Latin America. From a modest 185 tons at the start of American intervention in 2001, Afghanistan now produced 8,200 tons of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country’s GDP and 93% of global heroin supply.”

In April, Fox News ran a brazen propaganda piece on Afghanistan’s opium trade claiming the U.S. military allows peasants to grow opium out of respect for their cultural traditions. In fact, the CIA has long used profits from opium to finance its covert operations. In March 2002, a U.S. foreign intelligence official speaking on the condition of anonymity told NewsMax of the CIA’s record of involvement with the international drug trade. The official said: “The CIA did almost the identical thing during the Vietnam War, which had catastrophic consequences — the increase in the heroin trade in the USA beginning in the 1970’s is directly attributable to the CIA. The CIA has been complicit in the global drug trade for years, so I guess they just want to carry on their favorite business.”

In 2008, Russia’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, accused the Pentagon of acting as a mule for the CIA’s drug business. A Russian television report from Afghanistan said that drugs from Afghanistan were hauled by American transport aircraft to the U.S. airbases Ganci in Kyrgyzstan and Incirlik in Turkey. One of the best-informed Russian journalists on Central Asia, Arkady Dubnov, quoted anonymous Afghan sources as saying that “85 per cent of all drugs produced in southern and southeastern provinces are shipped abroad by U.S. aviation,” according to Vladimir Radyuhin.

In order to continue the CIA’s favorite business enterprise and extend the occupation indefinitely, the U.S. supports its official enemy in Afghanistan. “It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting,” Aram Roston wrote for the Nation on November 11, 2009. “US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts — hundreds of millions of dollars — consists of payments to insurgents.”

Roston “uncovered a tangled web of former military and CIA officials, relatives of the Afghanistan president and Defense Minister and various other shady characters who act as a pipeline from the U.S. Treasury to the Taliban,” write Jon Soltz and Richard Allen Smith for Vet Voice.

The occupation of Afghanistan is not about freedom and democracy for the Afghan people. It is about producing heroin and maintaining a military foothold in Asia.

On May 20, a Senate committee approved another $33.5 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “The action by the Senate Appropriations Committee is the first step toward congressional approval of the extra war spending that President Barack Obama requested in February to support his surge of 30,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan,” Reuters reported. The money comes on top of about $130 billion that Congress already approved for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars through September 30 of this year.

Not only will the money help support an effort to flood American streets with deadly heroin — and thus turn heavy profits for the money launderers on Wall Street — it will also add to the preposterous debt owed to bankers. In the end, we not only pay for the misery of drug addiction (and the war on drugs, including the prison industrial complex) but the effort to reduce America to a nation of slaves indebted for generations to come to a cabal of international bankers.

The Tonka Report Editor’s Note: Is there really any more question among the American people who the real terrorists and drug dealers are in this country? – SJH

Link to original article below…

http://www.infowars.com/afghans-u-s-created-and-funds-taliban/

May 27, 2010: Steven John Hibbs / The Tonka Report – May 27, 2010

Hello to everyone from Chicago! Circumstances have me back online much sooner than anticipated. I want to thank all of you for your kind words.

Albeit I’m online, I’m only temporarily settled as the job hunt begins tomorrow and then it’s time to look for a permanent residence so I’ll be quite busy in the weeks to come.

So far I’m digging this city every bit as much as I did Manhattan when I lived there. I’ve always enjoyed the challenges and energy of the big cities…

Steven John Hibbs