Blog For Arizona

The Kuwaiti Secret Pipeline Test

There is something new in the desert of Kuwait. A line of light, miles long, stretches from the Iraqi border to the heart of the Kuwaiti petroleum industry. The lights were not before the Iraq war began, but appeared soon thereafter. Civilian and military sources alike claim ignorance of their existence, or even the existence of anything in the region. But are they telling the truth?



The construction was discovered by the examination of images from an unclassified weather satellite by a former Air Force meteorological officer. The discovery, and its recent publication, has set off some speculation that the construction might be a pipeline built to secretly extract oil from Iraq by the Bush Administration, its corporate cronies, or possibly the Kuwaitis themselves (entirely plausible considering that it was, in part, Saddam's accusation that the Kuwaitis were slant-drilling his oil which sparked the first Gulf War).

But the explanation may be less sensational. McGraw-Hill Construction News reported last April that the Army engineering batalions had been secretly building the Inland Petroleum Distribution System to supply Kuwaiti fuel to US Army batallions via a pipeline through the Kuwaiti desert, stopping just shy of the Iraqi boarder. The timeline is the same, the location is the same, the purpose is logical. So, is this the explanation, or is it a convenient cover?

The blogosphere, Indy-media, and middle-eastern press are weighing in for cover-story - conspiracy theories abound. They may be right, but their skeptical ruminations are certainly the wages of sin. No matter how much the White House and Pentagon protest and no matter how much proof they offer, people are still going to believe the worst of them.

Lying, stonewalling, covering up, secretive meetings, and standing the Freedom of Information Act on its head may allow you to operate behind a veil of secrecy, but it also means that no one is inclined to believe your protestations of innocence when something looks fishy, even when you are. When the cookie jar turns up empty, people automatically look to you as the culprit if you have a reputation for insisting on being alone with the jar and preventing anyone from counting the cookies.

This is one small incident, which will hardly see ink in the US media, but it underscores one of the main reasons that Bush is going to lose in 2004: nobody trusts him anymore, not even many of the officer-holders in his own party. He has broken so many promises, told so many lies, and clamped down on so much information, that many American's have just stopped believing anything he says, and will never credit him with clear motives.

This attitude is prevalent in nearly half the electorate already. The coming months will bring to light the results of the 9/11 investigation that Bush has stonewalled and footdragged, hobbled, and impeded every step of the way. This is going to focus attention on Bush's credibility problems in a way that even his lies to bring us to war could not. There were many willing to be duped and ready to be credulous in order to go to war in Iraq. But who is out there is really willing to close their eyes to the causes of 9/11, and to Bush's attempts to hide them? Very few will be able to stomach that just to support a mediocre President.

Bush is going to disappear into his credibility gap.

posted by Michael Bryan @ 1/07/2004 03:49:00 AM