The launch last week of the enormous 1,767km long Baku-Tblisisi-Ceyahan (BTC) pipeline opens another chapter in the engrossing New Great Game being played in Central Asia and chalks up a significant tick in the West’s control of the region’s resources over the hungry gaze of both Russia and China.

As is often the case in this neck of the woods, the West traded in its moral scruples to secure high quality light crude — falling in cahoots with the despotic leader of Azerbaijan whence the oil comes from.

The enormous pipeline project, which took ten years and $4bn to complete, will move 1.2% of global oil production when it is operating at its full capacity — from the Caspian to the Mediterranean — and reduces the West’s reliance on the Persian Gulf for black gold. The 44m wide construction, dubbed Pipelinistan by one wag, carves its way through territory the US has moved to make its own over the past decade much to the chagrin of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Anything and anyone who stood in its way were bulldozed away in this unseen part of the world. The BTC’s major shareholders are BP (301%) and the Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR (25%), followed by Unocal (US, 8.9%), Statoil (Norway, 8.71%), Turkish Petroleum (6.53%), ENI (Italy, 5%), TotalFinaElf (France, 5%), Itochu (Japan, 3.4%), ConocoPhillips (US, 2.5%), Inpex (Japan, 2.5%) and Delta Hess (a joint venture of Saudi Delta Oil with American Amerada, 2.36%).

The US courted the despised Azeri dictator Heydar Aliyev right up until his death in December 2003 and then helped ensure a smooth succession by providing its finest election fixing expertise (honed in Florida then exported worldwide) to gift Aliyev’s son, Ilham, power. Ilham also happens to be the boss of the country’s major oil firm, SOCAR. This is a regime that according to Transparency International ranks 140th out of 146 in the global corruption index — ie perfect material for Dick Cheney to act upon. Democracy activists are routinely crushed in Azerbaijan as they are in nearby Uzbekistan, another state with a US backed dictator, Islam Karimov.

In Georgia though, the US could not be 100% sure that its oil lifeline (ooops pipeline) would be 100% secure under the former USSR foreign minister, Edward Shevardnadze, hence the US-orchestrated Rose Revolution in late 203 that saw a more telegenic, American-educated and American-aligned character, Mikhai Saakashvili, installed as leader.

As for Turkey, well that is pretty secure given that the pipeline just happens to conclude right next door to the massive American airbase at Incirlik

What’s more, there is the distinct possibility that another Central Asian demon will come onboard the US gravy train. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev has just announced that Kazakh crude will also flow through the BTC before 2010. He even proposed to add Aktau — the Kazakh Caspian oil Mecca — to a new acronym. Further pacts with further devils and all of them behind closed doors very far way from the nearest camera.

The little red email was initially overjoyed by this curious story from Germany of exploding toads. Our first instinct was it was the first manifestations of the sinister Project X-Ray, a CIA plot to use animals as bombs. We were ready to roll out our theories on the correlation between Project X-Ray and pet disappearances, or evapozoology as we’ve coined it. We even ordered an extra stash of tinfoil. Read on if you dare.

It started with an April 28th story run by the Associated Press. Since the start of April, over 1,000 toads had puffed up until their stomachs exploded, in one pond in Hamburg, and scientists were mystified. The water and the toads were both tested for any sort of agent that might cause them to explode, but no bacteria or virus was found, according to Janne Kloepper of Hamburg’s Institute for Hygiene and the Environment. The pond water is no cleaner or dirtier than any of Hamburg’s other ponds, the toads seem disease-free and even the hypothesis of a South American fungus was ruled out. And still the toads exploded.

Werner Schmolnik, head of a local environmental group, told the Hamburger Abendblatt daily: “It looks like a scene from a science-fiction movie. The bloated animals suffer for several minutes before they finally die.”

This week there was more news on the toad front — the exploding toad phenomenon is spreading — Denmark is now in the grip of an exploding toad crisis. There was also a new answer: crows. According to Berlin vet Frank Mutschmann, crows may be pecking out the toads’ livers. He bases his findings on the wounds and posits that once the crow pecks into the toad, the toad puffs itself up as its standard defence mechanism, but as it now has a hole in it and is missing a liver, the toad explodes.

He also says it’s not that unusual, but the fact that it’s happening in a city has made the phenomenon big news. Janne Kloepper remained scientific about the crow theory: “We haven’t seen that. It might be, it might not be. It’s speculation until it’s observed.”

Other theories have been put forward, including horses on a nearby track infecting the toads with a virus and that the toads are taking the selfless way out — sacrificing themselves by suicide to save others from overpopulation. We still like our theory best.

It didn’t matter what region you read about in the recently released Amnesty International Annual Review, the War on Terror™ (TWOT™) was all pervading — as a method for governments the world over to bury their flagrant human rights abuses. So it was hardly surprising then that the US came in for the harshest criticism. The US is condoning torture and abuse in the name of TWOT™, setting up a latter — day Gulag and creating a new generation of the “disappeared”, AI stated.

George Bush has been using the 11 September attacks as an excuse to ignore international law, and for creating a network of supplicant nations to “sub-contract” illegal detention and mistreatment, AI claimed.

AI said in its introduction: “The ‘war on terror’ appeared more effective in eroding international human rights principles than in countering international “terrorism”.

Meanwhile AI’s secretary general Irene Khan noted, “In 1973 AI published its first report on torture. It found that: ‘torture thrives on secrecy and impunity. Torture rears its head when the legal barriers against it are barred. Torture feeds on discrimination and fear. Torture gains ground when official condemnation of it is less than absolute.’ The pictures of detainees in US custody in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, show that what was true 30 years ago remains true today

 The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law.” She continued: “To argue that torture is warranted is to push us back to the Middle Ages.”

Over in cuckoo land White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told gullible reporters that the US was still the land of the free and the champion of human rights, such blatant falsehoods raising nary a question or a doubt in the supplicant journalists minds. “I think the allegations are ridiculous, and unsupported by the facts,” said McClellan in his own little denial world. “The United States is leading the way when it comes to protecting human rights and promoting human dignity,” he continued. Human dignity does not sit well with those images from Abu Ghraib surely! “We have liberated 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. It’s liberation, Scott, but not as we know it! “We have worked to advance freedom and democracy in the world so that people are governed under a rule of law, that there are protections in place for minority rights, that women’s rights are advanced so that women can fully participate in societies where now they cannot,” he concluded, and no one in the press briefing batted an eyelid.

Other parts of the report that details abuses from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe that the little red email found interesting included:

• “The ‘war on terror’ and the ‘war on drugs’ increasingly merged, and dominated US relations with Latin America and the Caribbean. Following the US elections in November, the Bush administration encouraged governments in the region to give a greater role to the military in public order and internal security operations. The blurring of military and police roles resulted in governments such as those in Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Paraguay deploying military forces to deal with crime and social unrest.

“The US doubled the ceiling on the number of US personnel deployed in Colombia in counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics operations. The Colombian government in turn persisted in redefining the country’s 40-year internal conflict as part of the international ‘war on terror’.

• In the Sudanese region of Darfur, the United Nations stopped short of describing the violence against civilians as genocide. AI said the UN was “held hostage” to Russian arms-trade interests and Chinese oil interests when it debated Sudan, as millions were displaced and thousands died needlessly.

The full report can be read here, and it is essential reading and something the little red email looks forward to each and every year it is released.

33 The percentage of the world’s remaining rainforests that are in Brazil
40-50 The estimated number of years that the rainforest will survive if deforestation continues at its current rate
40 The percentage of annual income Brazil spends repaying its loans
137 Plant and animal species become extinct every day as a result of rainforest depletion

We’ll all be choking soon as the world’s last great ‘lung’, the Brazilian rainforest, continues to deteriorate at alarming levels in large part thanks to just one man — Blairo Maggi, the world’s largest producer of soya beans, who also happens to be the governor of Matto Grosso, the province where tree clearing has been harshest.

Figures just out show that 2004 saw the second highest rate of forest clearing ever, with an area of more than 10,000 square miles cut down — equivalent almost toe size of Belgium with Matto Grosso accounting for half the clearing. As the normally unfunny British comedian once said of this statistic: “Why not just get rid of Belgium?”

Since 2003 when Maggi became governor of the province, the rate of deforestation in the province more than doubled.

Known in Brazil as O Rei da Soja — the King of Soy — Maggi is also labeled the King of Deforestation by environmentalists.

In an interview last year he said: “To me, a 40 per cent increase in deforestation doesn’t mean anything at all, and I don’t feel the slightest guilt over what we are doing here. We are talking about an area larger than Europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about.” Last year Maggi’s company grossed $600 million.

20 per cent of Brazil’s rainforest has already been destroyed by legal and illegal logging, and clearance for cattle ranching. But the soya boom for cattle feed, on the back of the BSE crisis in Britain, has dramatically stepped up the pace of destruction.

The Catch 22 for the government is the debt vicious circle it finds itself in. Agribusiness is the country’s number one export earner, and soya is the principal commodity. The current government under President Lula actively promotes soya export as a means to earn foreign exchange for debt payments.

Between 1995 and 2004, the area cultivated with soya increased by 77 per cent in the centre—west, with Mato Grosso becoming the single biggest producer. Now soya is rapidly advancing from all sides toward the heartland of the Amazon, fuelling massive deforestation.

The solution it strikes the little red email is simple. Cancel Brazil’s burdensome debt on condition of reducing soya production and we’ll all live happily ever after.

Since this will never happen we’d suggest you stock up on oxygen tanks — you’ll be needing them soon.

Aid to poor countries is a fickle old business. When the cameras are rolling at the scene of a major disaster such as the Asian tsunami politicians fall over themselves to pledge beaucoup cash. Once the rolling news stations have rolled elsewhere most of this aid never materializes. A report just released by ActionAid International shows that virtually all the world’s richest nations are no where near achieving the stated goal of giving 0.7% of GDP to foreign aid with you know who, the US, being the worst offender, giving only 0.02% of its income in real assistance.

ActionAid states that some two-thirds of the money donated by the world’s wealthiest countries is in actuality “phantom aid” that is not genuinely available for poverty reduction in developing countries.

Phantom Aid is aid that is diverted from poor nations for other purposes within bureaucratic aid systems. This includes aid that is, among all G7 donations:

• not targeted for poverty reduction, estimated to be worth US$4.9 billion

• double counted as debt relief, totaling US$9.4 billion

• overpriced and ineffective — Technical Assistance, estimated at US$13.8 billion

• tied to goods and services from the donor country, estimated at US$2.7 billion

• poorly coordinated and with high transaction costs, estimated at US$9 billion

• too unpredictable to be useful to the recipient — lack of data prevents an estimate

• spent on immigration-related costs in the donor country; totaling US$1.5 billion

• spent on excess administration costs; totaling US$0.4 billion.

In total, says the study, at least 61% of all donor assistance from G7 nations is phantom aid, with real aid in 2003 accounting for just US$27 billion, or only 0.1% of combined donor income. Nearly 90% of all contributions coming from the United States and France are considered phantom aid.

Says ActionAid International USA Policy Analyst, Rick Rowden, “what this comes down to is that the US government is spending the tax dollars of well meaning Americans on bloated, inefficient, and manipulative programs that do little to help the poor. This is inexcusable when you consider that a child dies every two seconds from hunger somewhere in the world.”

The report argues that the share of real aid is unlikely to increase unless a system of genuine accountability, which balances the interests of donors, recipients, and the poor, can be put in place.

The G7 countries — Britain, the US, Germany, Italy, France, Canada and Japan — spent only 0.07% of national income on real aid and would need a tenfold increase to hit the UN target of 0.7%, ActionAid said. In just under a month the G7 leaders will gather in Scotland where the British government claims it will make the doubling of aid a centerpiece of discussion.

Every day, 800 million people go to bed hungry, 30,000 children die of preventable disease, 100 million children are denied education. Three children a minute die due to unsafe water and sanitation. Approximately 30 children die a minute of hunger — these statistics will be something for the Koizumis and Blairs of this world to chew over at breakfast in the luxury resort of Gleneagles next month.

Here are some interesting stats from the ActionAid report.

• Just 11% of French aid is genuine, says Action Aid. France spends nearly $2bn on technical assistance and $0.5bn on refugee costs in France. Debt relief, an accounting exercise, is 40%

• Of US aid, 86 cents in the dollar is phantom, largely because it is tied to the purchase of American goods and services. (If there is a disaster or a war always lok out for Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary making a mint on other nations’ misfortunes.) George Bush’s Aids drugs plan excludes cheaper, generic drugs, so giving lucrative contracts to US pharmaceutical companies but treating fewer patients

• Of Japanese aid to Vietnam, 86% is spent on infrastructure projects because Vietnam is a key market for Japanese exports. These projects tend to be found in areas where Japanese firms operate

• In Cambodia, donors spent between $50m and $70m on 700 international consultants in 2002 — equivalent to the wage bill for 160,000 Cambodian civil servants

• UK DfID officials posted overseas get allowances for business class flights, which can be transferred towards holiday flights. DfID administrative costs, at 11.5%, are well above the 8% ceiling allowed by DfID in its funding agreements with NGOs.

Zimbabwe is a thoroughly under-reported country, so with our customary geographical aplomb, the little red email set our Norwegian correspondent on the trail.

Aging Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe — Africa’s answer to Hitler — is a man who should never be left under-reported. 81-year-old Mugabe has desecrated the previous prosperous nation by consistently using inhumane and economical illogical measures to stay in power.

Last year it was revealed that in true Hitler Jugend style he trains young people down to twelve-year-olds to torture, rape, and even beat their own relatives. The Jugend operates out of secret camps all over the country. The camps were created as a tool to monitor and scare his opponents into total submission. The camps and brainwashing of the nation youth clearly follow Hitler’s philosophy of indoctrination. Chenjerai Hunzvi, the head of Mugabe’s terrorist gangs in 2002 even nicknamed himself Hitler.

This fact is a warning of what might come in the future. The latest events since Mugabe was reelected in March show that to stay in power he is creating a scenario similar to the Holocaust.

The present situation in Zimbabwe is identified as “preparation” by genocidewatch.org, the stage that immediately precedes genocide. Government-sponsored rape was widely used in villages were the opposition party had a stronghold prior to the election aiming at breaking the spirit of the few who dare oppose his ruling party.

Last week Zimbabwe closed the country’s private schools and arrested many of the top staff. The move was ordered by the education minister who told a delegation of parents that the government was going to take over the schools the same way they seized the white-owned farms in 2002. Now Mugabe controls not only the media, but also all education in the country. When he confiscated the farms he gave them to his political cronies while he publicly claimed that he would give it back to the people of Zimbabwe. What few have reported is that this was done to pay Mugabe’s very large debts to Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi.

Closing down schools was not the only move Mugabe did last week to tighten the control over his bankrupt regime. A campaign to clean the cities from opponents was also launched. The police burnt down hundreds of homes and destroyed others with bulldozers and sledge hammers in squatter camps around the country, leaving thousands of people homeless in areas were he did not receive any votes.

Trudi Stevenson, an opposition legislator for northern Harare, told the Guardian that 500 to 700 houses in the Hatcliffe township in her district had been destroyed. “The place looks like a bomb site. It was a major military operation,” she said.

In addition Zimbabwean police arrested almost 10,000 street vendors and traders in the capital, Harare. The capital’s jail cells are said to be jammed with small traders trying to squeeze out a living in the collapsing economy. The blitz, which began last week, prompted so much anger that paramilitary forces armed with truncheons and teargas were deployed to prevent riots.

The social unrest clearly shows the nation is struggling. The government has revised initial estimates of those in need of food aid upwards to nearly three million, but says the figure could be higher.

This is however not affecting the president and his young wife Grace upcoming wedding anniversary where the total expenses will cost over £250,000. “It will be classy, royal-like,” one source said to state newspaper, “Mugabe will be driven from a church service in an open Rolls Royce with horses in front. That’s how they want it.” The source is continued here.

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

If you fancy your luck, on the other hand…
You could try our latest competition! Yes, that’s right: another chance to be cool for free. Head on over to here to try your luck in our latest revolutionary contest.

 

Quote of the week
American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Jameel Jaffer on the release of FBI reports documenting that inmates claim to have seen guards flush Korans down the toilet at Gitmo:
“Unfortunately, one thing we’ve learned over the last couple of years is that detainee statements about their treatment at Guantanamo and other detention centres sometimes have turned out to be more credible than US government statements.”

 

Newsweek & the Washington Post are wimps
We said as much last issue, and it proves to be right. Lest we forget, as Greg Palast pointed out, with the new editorial guidelines in place, the Watergate scandal would never have been published as a story.

 

Amnesty gets Dick bent out of shape
Dick Cheney that is. A sure sign that they must be doing something right then.
“For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don’t take them seriously,” he said in an interview that aired Monday night on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” (See our story above for what else AI said)

Well we’d best not pay any attention to this then:
One Guantanamo prisoner told a military panel that American troops beat him so badly he wets his pants now. Another detainee claimed U.S. troops stripped prisoners in Afghanistan and intimidated them with dogs so they would admit to militant activity.
Tales of alleged abuse and forced confessions are among some 1,000 pages of tribunal transcripts the US government released to The Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit — the second batch of documents the AP has received in 10 days.
Perhaps Dick will take the US government seriously, even if he does think Amnesty International is comic relief…

 

Dr Jim’s guide to the web
This week, we find out what Dr Jim does in his time off. And we’re encouragingly appalled:
Five Finger Fillet
Masturbate For Peace (remind us not to shake hands with Dr Jim)
Get Your War On (an oldie, but a goodie)
Interesting Mother… er… fellows

 

Bush extends corporate shield
Bush moves to keep the corporates in Iraq safe from legal battles — read on for shocking tales of big business plundering in the newly acquired oil colony.

 

Colonel Depp ensures the good doctor gets what he wanted
One last shoot out for everybody’s favorite NRA poster child: Dr Hunter S Thompson.

 

Princess Diana: Police Cannot Rule Out Murder
One of the last conspiracy theories of the twentieth century took a new turn this week, with police increasingly convinced of foul play.
Detectives investigating the death of Princess Diana have revealed that they cannot rule out the possibility she was murdered, reports the Daily Express.
The sensational disclosure was made as senior officers on the longawaited inquiry said they could not disprove the welter of conspiracy theories, many claiming the crash was deliberate, which continue to shroud Diana’s death.
Instead of being able to dismiss it as a terrible accident, police admit that the deeper they have probed, the more mysterious their investigation has become. Read on for more conspiracy here.
The pressures facing detectives investigating the death of Princess Diana were illustrated yesterday when a Daily Express poll showed that 94 per cent of people in Britain think she was murdered.

 

PR to the monsters dies
No, not Ari Fleischer. No not Scott McLellan. It’s Baron Edward Von Kloberg III, PR to Mobutu, Saddam et al. The Baron appears to have come down with a case of conscience, as he threw himself off a tall building.

 

Kazakh farmers endure rain of space junk
Things are tough enough for Kazakh farmers really, without having huge great big rocket bits falling on your village. Nevertheless this is what they put up with, although so far they’ve been lucky — the only casualties have been cows.

 

It’s your innermost secret…
…so why not put it on a postcard and then send it to a total stranger who’ll show it on a website? It makes perfect sense to us, but we probably need to get out a lot more.

 

Straits Times reporter nabbed for spying
Quite what sort of threat Singapore poses to China, we are unsure. However state secrets are back in force.

 

Aero America: come fly the unfriendly skies
So far they just admit to moving TWOT™ suspects around the place (single to Uzbekistan, anyone?). How long before the drug-running stories surface, we wonder?

 

Why did Feith resign?
Perhaps it was because of his involvement in the latest Israeli spy scandal of Lawrence Franklin, which is now burgeoning in size and scope. So argues this piece on antiwar.com.

 

Peak Oil gains ground, loses tinfoil hat image
More and more people are discussing the inevitable: the peak and decline in the world’s oil. Businessweek is even toying with the idea that world oil reserves may peak this year. Explain to us again how the invasion of iraq has absolutely nothing to do with Iraq having the second largest oil reserves in the world. The little red email’s more cynical side also notes how peak oil only lost its tin-foil hat patina after the invasion, which is almost suspiciously convenient timing.

 

Gmail? Hotmail? Try Wmail!
The terror hotmail account: finally all is revealed.

 

New memo adds to evidence of warmongering
The Sunday Times has done it again. It claims that a newly leaked memo shows that the US & UK tried to goad Saddam into war by increasing their bombings in 2002 to twice the rate.

 

Calling all adbusters
Here’s this week’s pick of the adbusting crop, by an unknown artist snapped by the people at Blort, transforming Microsoft’s original slogan of “Suddenly everything clicks” into a much more honest tag. Given the looming row and 5% of global income fines MS runs the risk of at the hands of the EU this week, we felt it was a timely adbust.

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

It’s war with Iran!
For a minute the little red email thought the balloon had gone up on another part of Operation Keep Mohammed Down, AKA TWOT™. Sadly it would seem to be a typo on the CBS article entitled “Hospital in Germany copes with heavy flow of wounded from Iran, Afghanistan”. It would seem to be Iraq, rather than Iran, that they meant. To be fair there is some small print down the bottom that reads: “In the interest of timeliness, this story is fed directly from the Associated Press newswire and may contain occasional typographical errors.” On the other hand, maybe the Pentagon has fed AP the wrong month’s propaganda story by mistake…

 

Strap in — the ball is back in Hugo’s Court
The US has denied Venezuela’s request for the extradition of Luis Posada Carriles. What will the charsmatic Neo-Bolivarian do now?

 

Finally a big congratulatory shout to:
The ever-wicked Mr Richardson, and the soon-to-be-Mrs-Richardson. Sorry the little red email couldn’t be there. We hope you have a revolutionary time.

 

The Little Red Email Osama bin Laden Sweepstakes Shirt Contest!
Don’t forget: if you fancy a free Canned Revolution t-shirt, you can win one by simply guessing the date of Osama’s media debut as a US prisoner. Send your expected date of bin Laden’s first television appearance as an American prisoner to osamasweepstakes@cannedrevolution.com.