From The Wilderness Publications

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An SAS soldier has refused to fight in Iraq and has left the Army over the "illegal" tactics of United States troops and the policies of coalition forces.

After three months in Baghdad, Ben Griffin told his commander that he was no longer prepared to fight alongside American forces.

He said he had witnessed "dozens of illegal acts" by US troops, claiming they viewed all Iraqis as "untermenschen" - the Nazi term for races regarded as sub-human.

The decision marks the first time an SAS soldier has refused to go into combat and quit the Army on moral grounds.

It immediately brought to an end Mr Griffin's exemplary, eight-year career in which he also served with the Parachute Regiment, taking part in operations in Northern Ireland, Macedonia and Afghanistan.

But it will also embarrass the Government and have a potentially profound impact on cases of other soldiers who have refused to fight.

On Wednesday, the pre-trial hearing will begin into the court martial of Flt Lt Malcolm Kendall-Smith, a Royal Air Force doctor who has refused to return to Iraq for a third tour of duty on the grounds that the war is illegal. Mr Griffin's allegations came as the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells, visiting Basra yesterday, admitted that Iraq was now "a mess".

Mr Griffin, 28, who spent two years with the SAS, said the American military's "gung-ho and trigger happy mentality" and tactics had completely undermined any chance of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi population. He added that many innocent civilians were arrested in night-time raids and interrogated by American soldiers, imprisoned in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, or handed over to the Iraqi authorities and "most probably" tortured.

Mr Griffin eventually told SAS commanders at Hereford that he could not take part in a war which he regarded as "illegal".

He added that he now believed that the Prime Minister and the Government had repeatedly "lied" over the war's conduct.

"I did not join the British Army to conduct American foreign policy," he said. He expected to be labelled a coward and to face a court martial and imprisonment after making what "the most difficult decision of my life" last March.

Instead, he was discharged with a testimonial describing him as a "balanced, honest, loyal and determined individual who possesses the strength of character to have the courage of his convictions".

Last night Patrick Mercer, the shadow minister for homeland security, said: "Trooper Griffin is a highly experienced soldier. This makes his decision particularly disturbing and his views and opinions must be listened to by the Government."

Norway's oil production slipped to a preliminary 2.46 million barrels per day on average in February from 2.49 million in January, and the tally is a marked drop from previous years.

Production in February 2005 was 2.657 million bpd, and in February 2004 it was 2.988 million, according to figures from the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD)

Even if gas production during the same period has shown a steady rise, the decrease in oil production of 500,000 bpd over two years is dramatic.

Oil companies predict that the current situation is likely to last through the year.

[Yeah, sure. The economy is doing just fine. They take the cost of energy and food out of the consumer price index to hide inflation that is at least three times higher than the government acknowledges. This month the Federal Reserve will make it a secret as to how much money they are printing. Corporate media points to a manipulated Dow Jones average as somehow proof that everything is fine when FTW and many other credible organizations have documented how the markets are manipulated for profit. Home foreclosures are soaring as the housing bubble begins an inevitable implosion. 800,000 jobs have been lost this winter. The US government has just raided federal pension funds to avoid the national debt ceiling and now this. Disappearing pensions are not the exception. They have become the rule. When will yours disappear and what are you doing to prepare for it? – MCR]

During pilot pay cut dispute hearing bankrupt airline says pension plan may be scrapped.

Bankrupt Delta Air Lines Inc. said Monday that it was in a "race against time" to restructure and that it was probable the company would terminate its pilots' pension plan to save money.

"It looks more likely than not," a lawyer for the airline, Jack Gallagher, said about pension prospects at an arbitration hearing on the fate of the pilots contract.

United Airlines and US Airways terminated their pension plans in bankruptcy. Northwest Airlines could also do the same in its restructuring. Pilots are the only major union at Delta, which sought bankruptcy protection last September, the same time as Northwest.

Some Wall Street analysts expect Delta and Northwest to dump some or all of their traditional pensions to lower costs and attract financing because bankruptcy law allows it and rivals have done it.

Although there is no disclosed timetable for dropping the pilots' plan, it is clear that the airline believes it cannot be saved even if Congress approves pension reform legislation that includes special help for struggling airlines.

Last week, House-Senate negotiators began work to hammer out a compromise pension bill by early April, but the fate of a provision to allow airlines to stretch pension contributions over a much longer period of time than currently allowed has not been finalized.

Delta also manages a nonunion plan, which officials said could be saved if the pension bill with industry help is approved.

An official of the pilots union, the Air Line Pilots Association, acknowledged the company had previously said privately that the underfunded pilots' plan was likely to go.

The company has halted payments, in most cases, to the pilots' plan and said it has spent $2.6 billion since 2001 in lump sum payments to pilots who took early retirement. Delta faces up to $1 billion in pension costs if pilots are allowed to take lump sum payouts this year, the company said.

The hearing was the result of an unusual agreement between the company and the pilots to have a three-member arbitration panel in Washington -- not the bankruptcy court in New York -- determine whether the carrier is in enough financial distress to void the union's contract.

The 6,000 pilots have threatened to strike if their collective bargaining agreement is thrown out. The deal was one of the richest in the industry when it was struck in early 2001.

Delta says it needs more than $300 million in annual cost savings from the pilots, but negotiations have not produced a giveback agreement. Gallagher said the two sides are about $190 million apart on savings needed annually over a four-year period.

The pilots' savings are part of $3 billion in cost cuts and revenue increases Delta says it must reach to survive.

"Delta's long-term viability is very uncertain," Gallagher said. "It only has a short time to restructure."

Gerald Grinstein, Delta's chief executive, said in an interview at the hearing the airline is meeting its savings targets in every area but pilot costs, and needs a long-term savings plan in place very soon.

The arbitration panel will hear testimony over the next two weeks and is expected to make a decision by mid April.

US climate scientists have recorded a significant rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, pushing it to a new record level.

BBC News has learned the latest data shows CO2 levels now stand at 381 parts per million (ppm) - 100ppm above the pre-industrial average.

The research indicates that 2005 saw one of the largest increases on record - a rise of 2.6ppm.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) has been analysing samples of air taken from all over the world, including America's Rocky Mountains.

The chief carbon dioxide analyst for Noaa says the latest data confirms a worrying trend that recent years have, on average, recorded double the rate of increase from just 30 years ago.

"We don't see any sign of a decrease; in fact, we're seeing the opposite, the rate of increase is accelerating," Dr Pieter Tans told the BBC.

The precise level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is of global concern because climate scientists fear certain thresholds may be "tipping points" that trigger sudden changes.

The UK government's chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, said the new data highlighted the importance of taking urgent action to limit carbon emissions.

[First there is a front page story in the Guardian that reads like some of our worst nightmares about Peak Oil and collapse coming true. It is followed later (according to great friend named Jules who found the stories) by another story denying that there is no threat to gas supplies but reaffirming all the dire events in the previous story. Only the headline really changed and some updates were added. The bottom line is that Britain is energy starved and there are no immediate solutions. The size and rapidity of rate hikes to British consumers is mind boggling and these may have only just begun in earnest. None of this would be happening if the North Sea fields were not in near-catastrophic decline or if other sources of natural gas were not maxed out by demand. In other words this is Peak Oil and Gas and this is what collapse will look like when it begins.

Although I have seen no hard evidence yet, the mysterious lack of transparency and the explanation for why pipelines to Britain are only partially full is because energy traders are arbitraging between markets, playing the float to maximize profits before selling. We have already seen this trend emerging here in the States in The End of the Grid.

In my lectures over the past several years I have posted stories showing how as many as 50,000 people freeze to death each winter in Britain for lack of heat. Many British seniors and pensioners actually have coin-operated heaters so they must choose on a daily basis whether to eat or stay warm. They are called euphemistically “excess deaths”. It’s quite likely that Britain will stop publishing those statistics after this winter like the Fed will soon stop publishing our M-3 money supply data here this month. – MCR]

The National Grid, responsible for running Britain's gas and electricity pipes and wires, yesterday issued an unprecedented warning that the country was in danger of not having enough gas to meet demand.

It issued its first-ever "gas balancing alert" to the market, telling traders that gas demand might have to be reduced, initially for businesses. The move sent wholesale prices spiralling up fourfold.

The British gas supply market has been caught out by unexpectedly cold weather and a technical problem: the country's only significant gas storage facility on the Rough offshore field in the North Sea is out of action due to a fire. Centrica, which operates Rough and runs the British Gas residential supply firm, said it could not be sure when it would get the emergency supply facility back into action.

Wholesale gas prices have risen to their highest level in four months, increasing the likelihood of further hikes in domestic gas bills which have already increased by a quarter in recent weeks.

The gas crisis will restart the political debate in the European Union about the continental energy market. Despite a pending shortage of gas in Britain which could lead to some manufacturing companies having their supplies cut off, there has been little help from France, Germany or the Netherlands where supplies are still plentiful.

The price of wholesale gas in Britain hit 250p a therm yesterday, three times more than in the Netherlands. Despite this, London gas traders said they were struggling to source new supplies. The newly-enlarged Interconnector pipeline from continental Europes was running only half-full, they said.

National Grid confirmed it had posted a gas balancing alert but insisted that this did not mean the country was about to run out of gas. "It is just a signal to the market that there is an increased possibility that there might need to be a reduction in gas demand," said a spokesman. He added that some large industrial users might have to forego supplies.

Centrica, parent group of British Gas, claimed that more severe weather than had been anticipated by meteorologists had taken energy traders and suppliers by surprise. But a spokesman for the company said no further residential price rises were planned at this time."We pushed through substantial increases so we are not intending to introduce another one," the spokesman said.

British Gas, which has 53% of the residential gas market, hit consumers with a 22% rise from March 1. This followed a 14% increase in September last year and a 12% hike 12 months earlier. The company has been offering domestic users the chance to fix the price of their gas supplies for up to four years while many industrial gas users have switched to alternative fuels. PowerGen, another major gas supplier which is owned by the German utility E.ON, has just raised its gas prices for domestic customers by 24.4%.

Electricity prices have been increased 18.4% by PowerGen while most other suppliers have increased their energy prices but by smaller amounts.

The inability of traders to obtain new gas in Europe will infuriate British politicians and give further ammunition to the European commission which last week called for faster deregulation of continental markets. A lack of transparency means it has been hard to discover exactly where the bottlenecks are and why suppliers on the continent are not switching gas to Britain. Yesterday the spot price of gas in the Netherlands had reached 70p per therm. But the Interconnector pipeline to Britain was handling only 8m cubic metres, when it could handle 16m.

The government today rejected accusations that Britain stood on a "knife-edge" in terms of energy supplies.

Responding to criticism of its energy policy, the government insisted that the country was not experiencing an emergency despite a jump in wholesale gas prices in recent days.

Alan Johnson, the trade and industry secretary, told MPs in an emergency Commons debate that Britain was in the midst of a "gas balancing alert", but that there was no threat to domestic and industry supply. Mr Johnson blamed unseasonably cold weather and fire damage to Britain's main gas storage facility for soaring gas prices.

Even as the government played down fears of a shortage of energy, experts warned that a quadrupling of wholesale gas in the space of 24 hours threatened to feed through to higher consumer prices.

UK consumers have already been hit by a raft of increases in gas and electricity bills this year. Npower raised prices for the second time in three months last week, while British Gas recently announced rises of 22% and Powergen more than 24%.

But with wholesale gas prices this week hitting 255p a therm (a unit of heat), consumers face yet higher bills.

uSwitch, the independent switching and comparison service, said wholesale gas prices could possibly stabilise without the need for any further price increases.

"However, should wholesale prices remain at these levels for some time, then the threat of further price rises being passed on to consumers could become a very real one," said Tim Wolfenden, a senior product manager at uSwitch.

Energywatch, the consumer watchdog, went further by saying that higher bills were inevitable.

A spokeswoman said: "It is inevitable that the higher prices being paid by suppliers now will reach the consumers at a later date."

The price of natural gas was as high as 220p a therm today after soaring from 61p to 255p yesterday as the cold weather continued to put pressure on domestic demand.

The National Grid, which has the job of balancing supply and demand, yesterday issued an unprecedented alert over tight supplies but said it would not be repeating the warning today as demand eased below a key level.

The jump in wholesale gas prices has sparked strong attacks on the government's energy policy.

"The government appears to be blaming France and Germany for the UK's gas shortage," said Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish National party. "This argument doesn't hold up to examination. The real culprit is the incompetence and short-sightedness of successive governments to secure supply and additional storage."

The British Gas owner, Centrica, blamed the UK shortage on a lack of supplies from Europe, with the price of wholesale gas as low as 115p a therm in the Netherlands yesterday.

The company added that the key interconnector pipeline, which brings gas from Europe to the UK via Belgium and Norfolk, was not running at full capacity.

A Centrica spokesman said: "The fact that the interconnector is not flowing at maximum rates with prices at these levels is continued evidence of a malfunctioning European market."

The European Commission and the UK regulator, Ofgem, recently said the lack of a proper energy market in continental Europe had been a key factor behind the shortfall in gas supplies entering Britain.

But Britain's situation has not been helped by a shortage in storage capacity. The UK has only about eight days' worth of gas in storage, much less than other European countries - France and Germany have over two months' storage.

The country's biggest storage site, the Rough facility off eastern England, is expected to be out of operation until May after a platform fire last month. Rough contains 80% of Britain's storage capacity.

Dictatorship is the danger

A Reagan-appointed supreme court justice voices her fears over attacks on US democracy

Linking the words "America" and "dictatorship" is a daily staple of leftwing blogs, which thrive on the idea that Bush administration policies since 9/11 are taking the country ever closer to totalitarian rule. Liberal fears that democracy is endangered by Republicans in Congress are so widespread, so endemic to the jittery political climate in the US, that they hardly bear repeating. It'll surprise no one to learn that another voice was added to the chorus last Thursday, warning that recent attacks on the American judiciary were putting the democratic fabric in jeopardy and were the first steps down the treacherous path to dictatorship.

What is surprising - more than that, electrifying - is that the voice belonged to Sandra Day O'Connor, who retired a few weeks ago from the supreme court. O'Connor is a Republican and a Reagan nominee. Regarded as the "swing vote" on the court, she swung the presidential election to George Bush in 2000.

Equally surprising is that O'Connor's speech to an audience of lawyers at Georgetown University was attended by just one reporter, the diligent legal correspondent for National Public Radio, Nina Totenberg. No transcript or recording of the speech has been made available, so we have only Totenberg's notes to go on. But - assuming they are accurate - the notes are political dynamite.

O'Connor's voice was "dripping with sarcasm", according to Totenberg, as she "took aim at former House GOP [Republican] leader Tom DeLay. She didn't name him, but she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of the conservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year when DeLay took out after the courts for rulings on abortions, prayer and the Terri Schiavo case.

"It gets worse, she said, noting that death threats against judges are increasing. It doesn't help, she said, when a high-profile senator suggests there may be a connection between violence against judges and decisions that the senator disagrees with."

Then she spoke the D-word. "I, said O'Connor, am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning. Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O'Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

Delivered by someone who was, until recently, one of the nine guardians of the US constitution, these are spine-chilling opinions, and you might have thought they'd have been all over the papers the next day. Not so. I happened to catch Totenberg's NPR report last Friday, and have been following up references to it. A cable TV talkshow and a handful of blogs have mentioned Totenberg's piece: otherwise there's been a disquieting silence, as if the former justice had laid an unsavoury egg and had best be politely ignored.

Why did O'Connor choose such a closed forum to air her thoughts? Why was Totenberg the only reporter present? The possibility that America is sliding toward dictatorship or an unprecedented form of corporate oligarchy ought to be a matter of world concern. And if O'Connor believes what she is reported to have said, surely she owes it to the world to make public the prepared text of her remarks, which so far have the dubious character of the scores of unverifiable leaks that have passed for news in the compulsively secretive world of the Bush administration. It's unsurprising that, say, Colin Powell chooses to leak rather than speak out, but when a supreme court justice prefers to whisper her fears to a coterie audience, it's hard to avoid the inference that the whisper itself speaks volumes about the imperilled democracy it purports to describe.

Death threats to judges figured importantly in O'Connor's speech, with good reason. Last year, an Illinois federal judge found her husband and mother murdered, and a Georgia state judge was shot dead in his courtroom. Within days, Senator John Cornyn of Texas mused: "I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence." DeLay, speaking of the judges who had ruled that Schiavo be allowed to die, said: "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behaviour."

These are peculiar times, and when Republican politicians appear to endorse the killing of judges who make rulings of which they disapprove, it's maybe understandable that a distinguished judge like Sandra Day O'Connor, expressing views calculated to enrage Republican politicians, might sensibly look to a small podium with a weak sound system for fear of being heard too clearly by the likes of Cornyn and DeLay.

[This is one of the most cogent and brilliant essays I have seen in my lifetime. It sums up FTW's entire editorial position, philosophy, and course. It doesn’t matter at all that we weren’t mentioned. It’s clear that Mr. Lehnecke has read Crossing the Rubicon and followed FTW.

What matters is the fact that he gets it – clearly. Many of us get it clearly. How many more out there – who are not a part of the old paradigm – also get it? What are we doing in our isolated groups that could help other groups progress faster? As Catherine Austin Fitts says, “No one is as smart as all of us.” The trouble is that we can’t seem to find each other fast enough. Isn’t it? – MCR]

Elite control to subvert democracy is quite explicit when one sees the great rift between public policy and public opinion. A Pew Research Center poll showed that Americans believed the U.S. should mind its own business internationally. Three of four American troops serving in Iraq agreed, saying they should withdraw and end the war in Iraq, according to a Zogby-Le Moyne College poll surveyed by face-to-face interviews with soldiers. Unfortunately, public opinion does not guide domestic or foreign policy and we won't be leaving Iraq anytime soon. The vice president said that the "War on Terror" is a "war which will not end in our lifetimes."

The Program on International Policy Attitudes polled Americans' attitudes toward the last federal budget. Where spending is going up (military, Iraq, Afghanistan), Americans wanted it to go down. Areas where the budget was decreasing -- social spending, education, renewable energy, support for the United Nations -- people wanted it to go up. The 2007 federal budget is more of the same. A huge majority wanted to reverse the tax cuts for the wealthy. "Democracy" is a term we hear ad nauseum by the president's speechwriters and apparatchiks, but the word does not approximate our reality. The fantasies propagated about our government and economy start in our schools, which according to the Trilateral Commission are responsible for the "indoctrination of the young."

The unthinking public continues to be deluded by massive state-corporate propaganda campaigns on all fronts. The deception justifying the illegal invasion of Iraq will surely go down in history as one of the greatest achievements of American propaganda. The anti-Iran propaganda is working, as more than half of Americans think Iran is a threat to their existence. The driving motive of the invasion is to retain American global hegemony by controlling the last remaining significant energy reserves left on the planet. What this means is U.S. planners will attempt to rule the world and destroy the social contract here at home to pay for future imperial wars.

Petroleum geologists are not popular and their warnings of Peak Oil are underreported by the "liberal media." A 2004 meeting of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas in Berlin included representatives from BP, ExxonMobil and the International Energy Agency. A U.K. observer at the ASPO stated "for the record, Ghawar's (the world's largest oil reservoir, located in Saudi Arabia) ultimate recoverable reserves in 1975 were estimated at 60 billion barrels -- by ExxonMobil, Texaco, and Chevron. It had produced 55 billion barrels up to the end of 2003 and is still producing at 1.8 billion per annum. That shows you how close it might be to the end. When Ghawar dies, the world is officially in decline."

Matthew Simmons, CEO of Simmons and Co. International, the world's largest private energy investment bank, believes the Saudis are "out of capacity." Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham concludes, "America faces a major energy supply crisis over the next two decades. The failure to meet this challenge will threaten our nation's economic prosperity, compromise our national security and literally alter the way we lead our lives."

Richard Heinberg's book, "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies," presents what will be the most significant event in human history -- the imminent decline of cheap oil -- and what we can do about it.

The current administration was inaugurated by stealing two elections, placed war criminals in key government positions, was complicit in facilitating 9/11 attacks, lied to the American people for the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation, contravened international law, used and still uses "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has subverted the Constitution. We live in a criminal state. The planet is facing an ecological crisis that will be irreversible if we continue with our system of waste, fraud, pollution and voracious resource depletion. Humanity was in "a race between education and catastrophe," according to H.G. Wells. Implementing a "power-down" strategy involves reducing "resource usage in wealthy countries, developing alternative energy sources, distributing resources more equitably, and reducing the human population humanely but systematically over time. It could save us, but will require tremendous effort and economic sacrifice." The inevitable confrontation with Mother Nature -- to rid itself of the human parasite and preside over the collapse of our unsustainable economic system -- is imminent. The question is whether a democratic global economy will evolve sooner or later. If later, we will sink to a level of barbarism never seen before. If sooner, we can work forging communities based on solidarity, mutual aid, tolerance and sustainability that will improve the quality of life and mitigate the damage done to the planet's fragile ecosystem that we are so dependent on.