Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon Fuels Up

[TomDispatch in the News: 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

The Pentagon and the Hunt for Black Gold

The Oil Deal Nobody 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.

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