The Hunt for Black Gold
Commentary: The oil deal nobody, especially the Pentagon, wants to talk about.
July 16, 2008
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[Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:]
For those of you might be interested, Pepe Escobar of the RealNews.com visited TomDispatch central headquarters recently for a two-part interview with Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse. The first part, with Tom Engelhardt, was just posted. Thought you might like to check it out by clicking here. In addition, Khodi Akhavi of Inter Press Service just did a fine review of this site's new book, The World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, which can be read by clicking here.]
It's summer and gassing up your car is like emptying your wallet directly into that fuel pump. So you think you have it bad? You think you're feeling the pain? Well, stop your whining! Other oil "addicts" have it so much worse! Have you no pity? Take an obvious example—the Pentagon. Once upon a time, powering your way to a little oil war was essentially a freebie. Lately, though, all you have to do is roll that Humvee off base, send that jet down the nearest runway, or launch that Hellfire missile-armed Predator drone over Afghanistan—let's not even consider moving a whole carrier task force into the Arabian Sea—and, let's face it, you're talking an arm and a leg.
Why, the cost of refined fuel for troop use is officially about to leap from $127.68 a barrel to $170.94. That's a 34% rise in the last six months, sucker! Feeling a little less sorry for yourself now? According to Time, "Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Brian Maka said Friday that the price hike is needed to cover an anticipated $1.2 billion rise in fuel costs in the next three months." Add that to the nearly $12 billion a month being spent for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and, come on, it puts your own problems at the pump in perspective, doesn't it? Even if it is your very own tax dollars the Pentagon's spending to fuel its wars. So, peace may be hell, but war? It's murder!
Last week, Nick Turse offered some tips to mainstream reporters who finally—only five years late—made it to the Bush administration's role in Iraq's oil story. Now, in part two of his series on what the mainstream media misses when it comes to our oil wars and the energy story, he turns to Washington and that gas guzzler par excellence, the Pentagon. The ties that the Complex—the term Turse gives the old military-industrial complex in his superb book on how our everyday lives have been militarized—has developed with an allied petro-industrial complex are so taken for granted that mainstream reporters seldom think they add up to a story. It's like being on the science beat and filing stories about how we breathe. As a war-making society, though, our breathing's been a little labored lately and Turse suggests that perhaps it's time to take another look at everyday energy activities in the Pentagon. Tom Engelhardt
The Hunt for Black Gold
The oil deal nobody, especially the Pentagon, wants to talk about.
by Nick Turse
For years, "oil" and "Iraq" couldn't make it into the same sentence in mainstream coverage of the invasion and occupation of that country. Recently, that's begun to change, but "oil" and "the Pentagon" still seldom make the news together.
Last year, for instance, according to Department of Defense (DoD) documents, the Pentagon paid more than $70 million to Hunt Refining, an oil company whose corporate affiliate, Hunt Oil, undermined U.S. policy in Iraq. Not that anyone would know it. While the hunt for oil in Iraq is now being increasingly well covered in the mainstream, the Pentagon's hunt for oil remains a subject missing in action. Despite the staggering levels at which the Pentagon guzzles fuel, it's a chronic blind spot in media energy coverage.
Let's consider the Hunt Oil story in a little more detail, since it offers a striking example of the larger problem. On July 3, 2008, according to the New York Times, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform found that Hunt Oil had pursued "an oil deal with the regional Kurdistan government that ran counter to American policy and undercut Iraq's central government." Despite its officially stated policy of warning companies like Hunt Oil "that they incur risks in signing contracts until Iraq passes an oil law," the State Department in some cases actually encouraged a deal between the "Texas oil company with close ties to President Bush" and Kurdistan that "undercut" Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government in Baghdad.
Asked if the White House was aware of Hunt Oil's negotiations with Kurdistan's largely autonomous regional government, President Bush's press secretary Dana Perino replied, "I don't know of anybody who was aware of it."
It turns out that wasn't exactly the truth of the matter. The Times noted that the company's chief executive, "Ray L. Hunt, a close political ally of President Bush, briefed [the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, of which he was a member] on his contacts with Kurdish officials before the deal was signed." In fact, in a July 2nd letter, Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "Documents obtained by the Committee indicate that contrary to the denials of Administration officials, advisors to the President and officials in the State and Commerce Departments knew about Hunt Oil's interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed."
For the Times, however, the hunt for the story ended with Hunt Oil. No attention was paid to its corporate twin, Hunt Refining, with its own major financial ties to the Pentagon, the President, and the U.S. occupation forces in Iraq. This despite the fact that the company proudly promotes itself as "a significant supplier of jet fuel to the U.S. Department of Defense" in the Southeastern United States.
And why not be proud? Ever since the President's Global War on Terror revved up and Iraq was invaded, Hunt Refining has quietly reaped major rewards. While the company was a defense contractor back in the 1990s, according to DoD documents, Hunt did not receive any funds from the Pentagon in 2000 or 2001. From 2002-2004, however, the company began garnering contracts and collected an average of just over $15.5 million a year. And only then did the good times begin to roll. In the last three years, records show that Hunt has taken in increasingly larger sums of taxpayer dollars from the Pentagon—$39.6 million in 2005, $52.2 million in 2006, and, in 2007, a whopping $70 million. (Hunt Refining did not return telephone or email messages seeking comment for this article.)
Hunt's largest 2007 Pentagon contract was for the delivery of both aviation turbine fuel and JP-8 jet fuel—the latter a product used by the Army and Air Force that is very similar to commercial jet fuel. That deal was awarded just months before Hunt Refining and its affiliate Hunt Southland Refining agreed, according to Department of Justice documents, "to pay a $400,000 civil penalty and spend more than $48.5 million for new and upgraded pollution controls at three refineries" as part of a settlement to resolve "alleged violations of the Clean Air Act."
Personally, I think we should bring tar and feathering back to the town square.