Palast for Conyers: The Other Downing Street 'Memos'

[evermind]

Greg Palast submitted the following as he is unable to attend the Conyers hearing:

Palast for Conyers: The Other Downing Street 'Memos'

By: Greg Palast
Thur June 16, 2005 7:27 AM ET

--snip--

March 2001 - Vice-President Dick Cheney meets with oil company executives and reviews oil field maps of Iraq. Cheney refuses to release the names of those attending or their purpose. Harper's has since learned their plan and purpose -- see below.

--snip--

May 2003 - General Jay Garner, appointed by Bush as viceroy over Iraq, is fired by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The general revealed in an interview for BBC that he resisted White House plans to sell off Iraq's oil and national assets.

--snip--

The general also disclosed that these invade-and-grab plans were developed long before the US asserted that Saddam still held WDM:

"All I can tell you is the plans were pretty elaborate; they didn't start them in 2002, they were started in 2001."

Please see the remainder of the article for the full story - I can only barely indicate the content in 4 quoted paras.

[goclark]

1. excellent and kick

[Jensen]

2. Thank God for the Conyers, Greg Palast and YOU,

All of you that day in day out push, search and post all these stories
that someday soon will lead us into a Democracy we once had!

I love that new disorder "NADD" News Attention Deficit Disorder- Our Corporate Media is definetly suffering from this and it's desperatly in needs of a cure!:kick:

[Nothing Without Hope]

3. Excellent, recommended. Also see how the Bush lawyers lied to UK's AG:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3847225
Thread title: "This May 1 EXPOSÉ ABOUT THE U.K. ATT'Y GENERAL complements the DSM:"

This exposes how the lying and bullying works and also specifically implicates top Bush admin officials in it. Don't miss it - it's an important piece.

[Nothing Without Hope]

4. Greg Palast needs donations to keep his work going - lawsuits

have been brought to stop his investigations. Find out more here:

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=424&row=1

[Supersedeas]

5. elaborate plans for chickenhawk oil execs..not so elaborate for our troops

[EVDebs]

6. William Rodriguez's RICO suit vs Bush...ongoing ?

If lawsuits threaten Palast, this one must continue vs. Bush & co.

[yurbud]

7. LETTER TO LA TIMES on Palast OIL theft docs

Editors:

Thank you for your belated front page coverage of the Downing Street Minutes, even if proof that our president lied us into war didn't merit higher placement than the rehiring of a basketball coach, or the three front page headlines and photo the day before on the verdict in a celebrity trial. I'm sure the families of soldiers serving in Iraq were laying awake at night worrying if the Lakers would rehire Phil Jackson or if Michael Jackson would be acquitted of his child molestation charges.

You have a chance to redeem yourself and for once, before we have to scour the world for serious news, tell the American people what they need to know to judge whether they are well served by their elected officials.

Please cover or better yet verify this story by Greg Palast on the oil motive for the war in Iraq.

Palast uncovered the state department document on privatizing and stealing Iraq's oil, talked to the author of the plan, the general sent to Iraq who didn't want to implement it, and oil executives who had other ideas.

He even has images of some of the critical documents on his website,
http://www.gregpalast.com/opeconthemarch.html

You could see why people might shoot at their liberators if they were trying to steal a trillion dollars worth of oil.

Now Palast of the BBC presents a timeline of the plans to steal Iraq's oil in an open letter to John Conyers.

This is brief, but ask yourself if this story makes more sense than committing more than 100,000 troops and spending hundreds of billions of dollars because a Third World country MIGHT have ties to terrorist, or MIGHT have weapons, which if they used them on us would give us an excuse to burn their whole country off the map (Saddam is evil, not stupid), or perhaps most incredible of all, that a bunch of oil executives and arms merchants suddenly got religion on human rights and wanted to spend those hundreds of billions to spread democracy, with no thought of material gain.

The reality is Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserves and sits straddling the two largest oil producing regions of the world, the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea basin. As the world's oil supplies decline, these will be the last places to be sucked dry, and therefore all the more valuable financially and politically.

This is no conspiracy theory, but basic geopolitics. Could you please tell the American people this instead of regurgitating the lies and fairy tales of the Bush administration? Democracy depends on the press acting as a watchdog and you have mostly failed in that function, or buried the most important stories in the back pages.

Hillbilly Hitler art:



Blog:

[dchill]

8. Excellent article!

But I believe that the invasion plans were not started in 2001, but in 1999 at the latest, when PNAC reps visited Bush in Texas. If he had not agreed to "take Saddam out", Bush would not have been the 2000 (R) candidate.

Also, if Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) had been about "spreading democracy" - or finding WMD, for that matter - the US would logically have sought UN backing - making the whole enterprise safer, cheaper, and more likely to succeed. But of course it was always about greed - greed for oil, greed for reCONstruction contracts, greed for power.

I don't even think it's debatable - but I do think it's impeachable, and prosecutable.

[Roland99]

9. Wow.

[ailsagirl]

10. Randi is reading this now... OMG, I'm sick to my stomach

God, this is so disgusting I can't believe it.