The way we do business: genocidal African leader is a CIA/DIA asset

Bryan Bender, Boston Globe:

When Charles G. Taylor tied bed sheets together to escape from a second-floor window at the Plymouth House of Correction on Sept. 15, 1985, he was more than a fugitive trying to avoid extradition. He was a sought-after source for American intelligence.

After a quarter-century of silence, the US government has confirmed what has long been rumored: Taylor, who would become president of Liberia and the first African leader tried for war crimes, worked with US spy agencies during his rise as one of the world’s most notorious dictators.
…
Former intelligence officials, who agreed to discuss the covert ties only on the condition of anonymity, and specialists including Farah believe Taylor probably was considered useful for gathering intelligence about the activities of Moammar Khadafy.

Bryan Bender, Boston Globe:

Breaking two and a half decades of silence, former Liberian president and accused war criminal Charles G. Taylor said today that his infamous prison break from the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in 1985 was aided by the US government…
…

In the second day of his testimony in his war crimes trial that could settle the long-standing mystery, Taylor said that on the night of Sept. 15, 1985, his maximum-security prison cell was unlocked by a guard and he was escorted to the minimum-security part of the facility.

According to news reports from The Hague, he said he then escaped by tying sheets together and climbing out a window and over a prison fence where he said a car with two men he assumed were agents of the US government drove him to New York, where his wife was waiting with money to get him out of the country.

Robtel Neajai Pailey, AllAfrica:

The bombshell news that he was indeed a CIA informant in the early years of his rise to notoriety calls into question America’s complicity in Taylor’s destruction of Liberia.

America’s facilitation of Taylor’s escape from a maximum security prison in Boston in 1985 – while he was facing extradition to Liberia for allegedly stealing US$1 million from the General Services Agency, which he headed during President Samuel Kanyon Doe’s regime – was always rumored but never corroborated. …
…
The Taylor-CIA connection has re-inscribed for Liberians an age-old dilemma, what to do with our so-called historical relationship with the United States, which has been fraught with betrayal after betrayal. Liberians who have been commenting on various notice boards are justifiably angry, upset and disappointed, but not surprised.
…
It’s no wonder that the U.S. didn’t intervene in the Liberian civil war, though Liberians begged and pleaded for its “father/mother” to stop us from killing each other. One U.S. diplomat at the time even said that “Liberia is of no strategic interest to the United States.” …

This should send a strong signal to Liberians and Liberia once and for all that America cannot be trusted. From Noriega, to Osama, to Saddam, to Samuel Doe, authoritarian leaders who end up in the U.S.’s good graces are never there for long.

Taylor presided over genocide and looting that garnered him hundreds of millions or billions of dollars while costing the lives of 250,000 human beings, including many child soldiers.

1985 would be Reagan. But the “intelligence community” that facilitated Taylor’s release is eternal and non-partisan. The same unelected government which released a man who had robbed the American people of a million dollars so that he could prey on descendants of Americans who chose to return to the country of their ethnic origin very likely participated in the kidnapping of the lawfully elected president of Honduras–indeed, probably presided over a host of criminal actions performed in the name of national security, but ending in innocent blood, public dishonor and the world’s distrust of us.

Apparently it’s just the way we do business.

China Property Bubble Pops, Dooming Keystone XL Pipeline. Here’s How.

Lost in all the hubbub over whether Obama is siding with the oil barons or the environmentalists on the plan to pipe Athabascan tar sands muck down to Houston is the economic fact that the window of profitability for the stuff is rapidly shrinking.

As most informed persons know, the muck’s eventual destination was never American gas tanks, but foreign — especially Chinese — ones. However, the stuff is too expensive to extract for it to be profitably shipped overseas in anything less than supertanker loads, and Canada’s western coast has no ports capable of docking supertankers. Even if it did, the First Nations peoples won’t let anyone hack through their lands and forests to get a pipeline — which is the only way the stuff can be profitably transported on land — to the British Columbia ports. That’s why crossing the border to get to Houston, with its supertanker-capable ports, is key.

But for this whole scheme to stay profitable, oil prices have to stay above $90 a barrel. As this oil price tracker shows, the price per barrel crashed well below that point when the US real estate and banking bubble’s popping took the US (and world) economy down with it in September of 2008, and prices stayed well below $90 a barrel until March of 2011. Only after oil prices consistently topped $90 a barrel did the TransCanada folks start talking heavily to the US mass media about Keystone XL.

Now we have word that the Chinese real estate bubble is popping:

The mainland property market is in meltdown and the damage is spreading, not only to consumers but across the mainland’s economy and, perhaps, internationally as well.

Since last year, Beijing has sought to burst what it saw as a dangerous bubble, which was pushing home prices beyond the reach of the middle class. It did so by initiating a series of tough measures to restrict bank lending and a crackdown on speculation.

As a result, sales have slumped by as much as 70 per cent, triggering a mainland-wide price war among major developers desperate to raise cash amid a credit crunch. Many are not expected to survive the shakeout.

This is having ripple effects throughout the Chinese economy. Steel suppliers in and out of China are adversely affected, since new construction accounts for 29% of China’s steel output and 15% of the world’s total steel output. Concrete, copper, and other construction-connected businesses in and out of China are also affected.

Municipalities and other local governments, which typically depend on land sales for a good chunk of their revenue, have sustained a hard blow just as they were struggling out of the long recession. Angry home and property owners suddenly find themselves “underwater”, or with negative equity, just as many if not most US homeowners have over the past five years.

The effects of the bubble’s popping will be to markedly slow the Chinese economy, if not stop it outright. That means that there will be less demand for oil, just as there was less demand during 2009 in the depths of the recession. That means that world oil prices will soon be dropping again.

And that means there won’t be any way to sell the tar sands muck to anyone and make a profit on it.

South Carolina GOP Primary Turnouts, 2008 and 2012

While the 2012 Republican caucus and primary turnouts in Iowa and New Hampshire (121,503 and 248,485, respectively) weren’t substantially different from 2008 (119,188 and 234,851 respectively), particularly considering the population growth in both states over the past four years, South Carolina’s 2012 turnout — 600,421 with 99.5% of precincts reporting — is markedly higher, nearly 155,000 more than in 2008.

My take is that this was the result of the TheoCons (UPDATE: What I for a long time have been calling “the religio-racist right”) pulling out all the stops to keep Romney from sailing unimpeded to the nomination.

Next up: Florida, which could, if Newt wins it, lead to the mother of all brokered conventions.

(Crossposted to MyFDL.)