billp37

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

Bridges, a sociologist, is president of whitman college

----- Original Message -----
From: [e-mail]
To: [e-mail]
Cc: "John/Catherine Alsip" <[e-mail]&... "William Batie" <William.Batie@morg... "Bob Collins" <[e-mail]>, "Melvin Davidson" <melnbarbara@comcas... "brian dohe" <[e-mail]>, "Fred Fair" <fredfair@taosnet.c... "Brad M Gravelle" <brad.m.gravelle@sm... "Cargill Hall" <[e-mail]... "art morales" , "Ron Short (RBC Wealth Mgmt)" <[e-mail]&... "John Sobolewski" <nwminerals@hotmail... "Robert & Susan Wayland" <sbwayland@comcast.... "David Woodward" <dawood01@earthlink...
Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2009 4:07:38 PM GMT -08:00 Tijuana / Baja California
Subject: haaretz comment

seekingalpha.com/artic...

I look forward to hear next week about liberal arts solution to future electricity supply problems.

Fun read.

home.comcast.net/~bpayne37/whitman59/w...

:-)

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

Cryptome

cryptome.org/

posted links to

Study on a Possible Israeli Strike on Iran’s Nuclear Development
Facilities

Abdullah Toukan, Senior Associate

Anthony H. Cordesman
Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy
March 14, 2009

www.csis.org/media/csi...

with Harretz msm comments

www.haaretz.com/hasen/...

Iran, like the rest of us, needs additional electricity.

Bombing Iran may do bad things to our investments and drive up the price of gas and diesel? And maybe even start WWIII?

Here is the REAL PROBLEM.

Thu Oct 02 01:00:00 CDT 2008 A new study released this week highlights what experts have been saying for years: the U.S. faces significant risk of power brownouts and blackouts as early as next summer that may cost tens of billions of dollars and threaten lives.

The study, "Lights Out In 2009?" warns that the U.S. "faces potentially crippling electricity brownouts and blackouts beginning in the summer of 2009, which may cost tens of billions of dollars and threaten lives." ...

www.utilityproducts.co...

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

Historian R Cargill Hall

www.marshall.org/exper...

emails

-----Original Message-----
From: Cargill Hall [mailto:overflight@att...
Sent: Friday, May 15, 2009 10:49 AM
To: Collins, Bob; Alsip, John & Catherine; Payne, Bill; Greenlee, Gene; Lyons, Doug; Rosenberg, Tom
Cc: Hallion, Richard; Julie Charlip; Fair, Fred
Subject: 50th Anniversaries
Gentlemen:

Our 50th college reunion this month prompted me to reflect on others just past and impending. One of them, the launching of Sputnik I and with it the "Space Age," occurred while we were at Whitman. John Corr and I had just returned from a semester at the Escola Brasileira de Administracao Publica in Rio de Janeiro. I vividly recall standing outside the Green Lantern (affectionately known as the "Green Latrine") one evening just after the launch, watching in amazement the Soviet carrier rocket periodically twinkle in the sunset rays as it tumbled in space, end over end. Perhaps it had an affect on my choice of vocations--who knows? In 2007 Quest magazine asked me to write a 50th summary of the event; it is enclosed for your amusement.

The next noteworthy 50th: the shootdown of the CIA U-2 spy airplane on 1 May 1960, deep inside the USSR. The current shenanigans in Washington DC provoked me to consider the political parallels.

President Dwight Eisenhower authorized peacetime aerial overflights of "denied territory" on or shortly after 15 March 1954, when he approved NSC Directive 5412 "on covert operations." The directive defined them as "all activites conducted pursuant to this directive which are so planned and executed that any U.S. Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the U.S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them." It also established a committee to vet these operations, composed of representatives of the secretaries of state and defense, and the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). As events transpired, the 5412 Committee would consist of the DCI, the undersecretary of state, deputy secretary of defense, and be chaired by the president's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs-an arrangement made formal in 1955 with the issuance of NSC 5412/1 and 5412/2. To those with knowledge of the committee's existence, it became known as the 5412 Special Group, or simply, "the Special Group." The president approved or denied its recommendations.

The first overflight of the USSR followed on 21 March 1955 and they continued, using modified military airplanes, until Eisenhower terminated that program in December 1956. By then, the U-2 had come on line. Because the aerial intrusions violated international treaties to which the U.S. was a contracting party, these covert programs were closely held. Only a few in Congress and the Executive Branch were "witting" of them. Little is known of the SENSINT military overflight program because it never lost an airplane and the records were mostly destroyed. The CIA's U-2 program, however, which carried the cryptonym TALENT, ended rather more spectaculary in May 1960. Eisenhower at first offered a "plausible denial" (a weather research airplane over Turkey had strayed off course), a cover story that collapsed after the Soviets produced the pilot and charged him with espionage. The resulting international furor mightily embarrassed the administration, and it ended a Summit Conference almost before it began, with Soviet leaders demanding a personal apology from Eisenhower, one that would not be forthcoming. Shortly thereafter, the president announced publicly that the United States would not in future conduct clandestine aerial overflights of the Soviet Union, a pledge that he and his successors would keep.

Political parallels: If the U-2 incident closed a chapter on aerial overflights, it also prompted many in the media to ask why the president would "lie" to the American public in the interest of national security. And it reverberated in the presidential election in November when the Democrat challenger, John F. Kennedy, narrowly won the contest. On assuming office in January 1961, however, Kennedy did not release classified records involving these projects, and he did not authorize his Attorney General to determine whether his Republican predecessor and other administration officials responsible for the U.S.-sponsored aerial overflight policy should be officially sanctioned or possibly even prosecuted for clearly violating the terms of international conventions. Nor did leaders in a Democrat Congress clamor for Senate and House investigations of his policy, or for a "truth commission" in which former officials could be commanded to reveal just how and when that national policy had been forged. It was, after all, 1960-61-a different world, a different international threat, and, most assuredly, a different caliber of American political leaders.

We graduated together in significant times.
Carg


You don't graduate.

You are graduated by an institution.

PS Hall and I are totally different people. We have successfully avoided each other for more than 50 years. Until next week.

We are concerned that bombing of Iran nuclear electricity could possibly trigger WWIII AND may drive up the price of oil.

Both would be bad for us senior citizens.

So we continue to advocate peacefull settlement of these unforunate matters.

www.marshall.org/exper...