Even though the price of oil is crashing and its incredibly cheap price is leading to problems throughout the energy industry, the battle for the Keystone Pipeline continues with Transcanada using all its influence to advance its interests through the corrupt US political system.

Last week Nebraska’s Supreme Court decided to throw out a lawsuit challenging the route of the Keystone XL pipeline. The suit was brought by landowners in Nebraska concerned about their land being seized by the government. Nebraska, along with other states, is targeted to be part of the pipeline’s route from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

Nebraska’s highest court threw out a challenge Friday to a proposed route for the Keystone XL oil pipeline, even though a majority of judges agreed the landowners who sued should have won their case.
The decision removes a major roadblock for the $8 billion cross-continental project that Republicans have vowed to make a key part of their 2015 agenda in Congress…

The proposed 1,179-mile pipeline would carry more than 800,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Canada to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast, passing through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma along the way.

Republicans in the House responded to the court decision by passing a bill to authorize the pipeline and have cited the State Department’s dubious analysis of the pipeline’s minimal environmental effects. Despite all outside recommendations the decision to authorize the pipeline will, in truth, come down to President Obama and whether he will veto a bill from the now Republican-dominated Congress.

With low oil prices and the oil from Canada ultimately going to markets for export (not the US) the economic argument is getting progressively weaker. That’s if there even is one at all with these oil prices. At the same time, the environmental damage from allowing tar sand oil to be both exploited and sold remains dire according to climate scientists.

Then again, given that a reported 72% of Republican Senators are climate change deniers it is unlikely any of the facts of oil and the environment will influence votes in the new Congress. Building the Keystone Pipeline is now an ideological goal outside of material reality.

On the thirteenth anniversary of the first prisoners brought to Guantanamo Bay, a report from the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research examines how the United States government used the facility as a “battle laboratory.” Prisoners were treated like “test subjects” as personnel, including medical officers, engaged in experiments to develop new interrogation techniques. Numerous detainees were drugged upon arrival to help interrogators break them. One prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was treated like a “lab rat” and monitored closely by medical personnel to determine if his body could continue to be tortured.

The report was first covered and published at VICE by journalist Jason Leopold. It is based on unclassified government documents and statements from government officials and military personnel and co-authored by Joseph Hickman, a former Guantanamo guard.

“Every lab must have its test subjects,” the report declares. Guantanamo was “no different” except “its rats were human beings, detainees.”

The report not only makes the case that the torture techniques developed through experiments to “exploit intelligence” were exported to other facilities, such as Bagram and Abu Ghraib, but also highlights the disturbing reality that medical personnel were involved in “human subjects research” and conduct that likely constituted crimes against humanity.

According to Colonel Britt Mallow, the commander of the Criminal Investigative Task Force, [Major General Michael] Dunlavey and later [Major General] Geoffrey Miller referred to GTMO as a ‘Battle Lab’ meaning that interrogations and other procedures there were to some degree experimental, and their lessons would benefit DOD in other places. While this was logical in terms of learning lessons, I personally objected to the implied philosophy that interrogators should experiment with untested methods, particularly those in which they were not trained.”

“Enhanced interrogation techniques,” or torture techniques, were renamed “counter-resistance techniques” to make it easier to defend their use. Beginning in January 2002, the standard protocol was to give arriving detainees 1250 milligrams of mefloquine, an anti-malarial drug, which was “five times greater than necessary for the stated prophylactic use” and put them at risk of “severe psychological effects.”

As described in the report, “Mefloquine’s side effects commonly include hallucinations, anxiety, paranoia, aggression, psychotic behavior, mood changes, depression, memory impairment, convulsions, loss of coordination (ataxia), suicidal ideation, and possibly suicide, and they can last for weeks.” The side effects can be greater in “patients with personal history or family history of mental illness.” The drugs were given before prisoners were “tested for malaria,” suggesting the “excessive dose” was deliberate. [Previously, journalist Jeffrey Kaye has done extensive reporting on the use of mefloquine on detainees.]

It is highly unlikely that mefloquine was used for malaria. Much more possible is that military personnel were aware of the side effect and wanted them to occur in prisoners so they could modify their behavior and use the drug to aid in making them compliant.

…[Office of Legal Counsel] memos drafted by John Yoo did allow for the use of mind-altering drugs, maintaining that it was not torture unless it caused “permanent” or “profound” mental harm or damage. It argued that only drugs that “penetrate to the core of an individual’s ability to perceive the world around him, substantially interfering with his cognitive abilities, or fundamentally alter his personality” would qualify as torture. This would be satisfied by “the onset of ‘brief psychotic disorder’” or “delusions or hallucinations” lasting an entire day. The memo also cited, as an example of a profound disruption, a drug or action “pushing a person to the brink of suicide, particularly where the person comes from a culture with strong taboos against suicide.” The memo, however, claims that in order to satisfy the intent standard of the criminal statute, the administration of the drug must specifically be intended to cause such prolonged harm. Under this logic, torture would not result from the use of a drug with intent to cause lesser forms of psychological harm, such as anxiety, paranoia, aggression, depression, memory impairment, or mere suicidal ideation, all known side effects of high doses of mefloquine…

On October 2, 2002 at Guantanamo, personnel at a “Counter Resistance Strategy Meeting” discussed using “controlled chaos” at the facility. “Controlled chaos included taking steps to discover how to find and manipulate phobias, such as ‘insects, snakes, [and] claustrophobia.’”

Behavioral Science Consultation Team members Major Paul Burney and Major John Leso told the group, “[W]hat’s more effective than fear based strategies are camp-wide, environmental strategies designed to disrupt cohesion and communication among detainees . . . .[The] [e]nvironment should foster dependence and compliance . . . .We need to create an environment of ‘controlled chaos.’”

Two psychologists and one psychiatrist were a part of BSCT. Their mission was to monitor detainees’ behavior during interrogations and detention. They were to develop “psychological operations.” In some cases, they “simply made up” some of the torture techniques that were used against prisoners.

There was discussion about “new experiments,” including whether to use “truth serum” to manipulate the “camp environment” and “foster dependence and compliance.”

I’m not a big one to trade in conspiracy theories, but this all begs for an explanation.

Saudi Bomb Threat to U.S. Army Post

A Saudi in the U.S. on a student visa (now where have we heard that one before?), who prompted a four-hour lockdown at a U.S. Army post in Texas when he claimed to have a bomb in his car, pleaded guilty to two federal charges. He agreed to leave the country with his only penalty being about seven weeks of time-served awaiting trial.

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery agreed not to sentence Mutasim Abdul-Aziz Alati, 24-years-old, to prison on condition he not return to the U.S. As soon as his family in Saudi Arabia buys him a one-way ticket, Alati will be escorted to the airport.

Prosecutors say Alati showed up at the main entrance to U.S. Army Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio in November and told military police he had a bomb in his vehicle. This prompted a high-speed chase through the post. He was apprehended and no bomb was found in the car.

Despite what might in other circumstances be called a terrorist bomb threat, Alati was only charged with evading authorities and illegally entering military property. Even if he had been sentenced, the likely time would have only been two years.

By way of explanation, Alati told the court he was “stressed out” by tests he was taking at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio.

The 9/11 Report and the Saudis

While these unusual events passed relatively unnoticed in Texas, other events related to Saudi citizens and possible terror acts passed relatively unnoticed in Washington DC.

Since the September 11 attacks, what Jeff Stein of Newsweek calls “dark allegations” remain about official Saudi ties to the terrorists, most of whom were Saudi citizens. Fueling the suspicions: 28 still-classified pages in the Congressional 9/11 Report. Former Florida Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat who co-chaired the joint investigation into the attacks, says the classified pages raise questions about Saudi financial support to the hijackers.

“There are a lot of rocks out there that have been purposefully tamped down, that if were they turned over, would give us a more expansive view of the Saudi role” in assisting the 9/11 hijackers, Graham said.

Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama refused to declassify the pages, citing “national security.” But critics, including members of Congress who have read the pages, say national security has nothing to do with it. U.S. officials, they charge, are trying to hide the double game that Saudi Arabia has long played with Washington, as both a close ally and a player in Islamic Sunni extremism.

Small World!

One of course cannot forget the oddity in the days right after 9/11, when the Bush administration used the FBI to facilitate the departure of 160 Saudi nationals, including relatives of bin Laden, out of the United States. Their chartered planes were among the very few non-military flights allowed in the air at the time.

The Saudi ambassador to the United States at the time of the 9/11 attacks, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, was known as “Bandar Bush” for his close ties to the Bush family in Texas. He went on to become chief of Saudi intelligence. Bandar had led Saudi efforts to coordinate the supply of weapons to Syrian rebels. He faced criticism for backing extreme Islamist groups and thus risking a repeat of the “blowback” that brought Osama bin Laden’s Saudi fighters home after the Saudi-sanctioned jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

And hey, just recently, Prince Khaled bin Bandar, the new chief of Saudi intelligence, arrived in Washington for “discussions on joint efforts to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).” The Saudi’s have been widely-held to have helped fund ISIS in the recent past.

————————–

Peter Van Buren writes about current events at blog. His book,Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, is available now from Amazon.