[R-G] Turse: The Hunt for Black Gold

[Anthony Fenton]

The Hunt for Black Gold
The oil deal nobody, especially the Pentagon, wants to talk about
Nick Turse
July 16, 2008
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/tomdispatch/2008/07/the-hunt-for-black-gold.html

Introduction by Tom Engelhardt

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 Engelhardt

The Hunt for Black Gold
The oil deal nobody, especially the Pentagon, 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.

Let's consider the Hunt Oil story in a little more detail, since it  
offers a striking example of the larger problem. On July 3, 2008,  
according to the New York Times, the House Committee on Oversight and  
Government Reform found that Hunt Oil had pursued "an oil deal with  
the regional Kurdistan government that ran counter to American policy  
and undercut Iraq's central government." Despite its officially stated  
policy of warning companies like Hunt Oil "that they incur risks in  
signing contracts until Iraq passes an oil law," the State Department  
in some cases actually encouraged a deal between the "Texas oil  
company with close ties to President Bush" and Kurdistan that  
"undercut" Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government in Baghdad.

Asked if the White House was aware of Hunt Oil's negotiations with  
Kurdistan's largely autonomous regional government, President Bush's  
press secretary Dana Perino replied, "I don't know of anybody who was  
aware of it."

It turns out that wasn't exactly the truth of the matter. The Times  
noted that the company's chief executive, "Ray L. Hunt, a close  
political ally of President Bush, briefed [the President's Foreign  
Intelligence Advisory Board, of which he was a member] on his contacts  
with Kurdish officials before the deal was signed." In fact, in a July  
2nd letter, Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman told Secretary of State  
Condoleezza Rice: "Documents obtained by the Committee indicate that  
contrary to the denials of Administration officials, advisors to the  
President and officials in the State and Commerce Departments knew  
about Hunt Oil's interest in the Kurdish region months before the  
contract was executed."

For the Times, however, the hunt for the story ended with Hunt Oil. No  
attention was paid to its corporate twin, Hunt Refining, with its own  
major financial ties to the Pentagon, the President, and the U.S.  
occupation forces in Iraq. This despite the fact that the company  
proudly promotes itself as "a significant supplier of jet fuel to the  
U.S. Department of Defense" in the Southeastern United States.

And why not be proud? Ever since the President's Global War on Terror  
revved up and Iraq was invaded, Hunt Refining has quietly reaped major  
rewards. While the company was a defense contractor back in the 1990s,  
according to DoD documents, Hunt did not receive any funds from the  
Pentagon in 2000 or 2001. From 2002-2004, however, the company began  
garnering contracts and collected an average of just over $15.5  
million a year. And only then did the good times begin to roll. In the  
last three years, records show that Hunt has taken in increasingly  
larger sums of taxpayer dollars from the Pentagon—$39.6 million in  
2005, $52.2 million in 2006, and, in 2007, a whopping $70 million.  
(Hunt Refining did not return telephone or email messages seeking  
comment for this article.)

Hunt's largest 2007 Pentagon contract was for the delivery of both  
aviation turbine fuel and JP-8 jet fuel—the latter a product used by  
the Army and Air Force that is very similar to commercial jet fuel.  
That deal was awarded just months before Hunt Refining and its  
affiliate Hunt Southland Refining agreed, according to Department of  
Justice documents, "to pay a $400,000 civil penalty and spend more  
than $48.5 million for new and upgraded pollution controls at three  
refineries" as part of a settlement to resolve "alleged violations of  
the Clean Air Act."

In addition to its Pentagon connections, Hunt Refining, too, has tight  
ties to President Bush. Ray Hunt's son Hunter Hunt, the senior vice  
president of Hunt Oil Company, is, according to his corporate  
biography, "also involved in special projects that occur at Hunt  
Refining Company." The younger Hunt, however, took a leave of absence  
from the family businesses, from 1999-2001, to work for the Bush  
presidential campaign "as the primary Policy Advisor responsible for  
energy issues" and chief architect of Bush's national energy policy.

While Hunt Oil is finally making headlines and garnering press  
attention for its Bush administration connections and dealings in  
occupied Iraq, just as it should, Hunt Refining's complex ties to the  
force in charge of occupying that country aren't considered news at  
all. Despite the obvious financial relationship and network of curious  
ties that extend from the White House and the Pentagon to Texas,  
Alabama, and Iraq, this part of the story is just considered business  
as usual.

Flush with regularly increasing taxpayer dollars from the DoD, Hunt  
Refining is now embarking on an ambitious expansion program to  
increase its output. Currently, Hunt's Tuscaloosa, Alabama refinery  
processes 52,000 barrels of crude oil per day, according to a recent  
article in the trade magazine South Central Construction. The company  
aims, however, to increase its production to 65,000 barrels per day,  
resulting in "an approximate doubling of gasoline and diesel fuel  
production." According to a report in the April issue of Hydrocarbon  
Processing, the first of Hunt's new processing units will "come online  
in late 2009. The revamp is scheduled for completion in 2010." All of  
this is, of course, occurring as the Pentagon needs increasing  
quantities of fuel to carry on its wars.

In 2008, Hunt Refining has already received a $65.4 million aviation- 
fuel deal from the Pentagon that has a "performance completion"  
deadline of April 30, 2009. If recent contracts are any guide, this is  
an indication that it stands to take in record amounts from the U.S.  
military before year's end.

The DoD is, as national security expert Noah Shachtman notes, "the  
world's largest energy consumer." With no end in sight for its current  
wars and occupations, which have driven its fuel consumption sky-high,  
and ever increasing oil prices (undoubtedly, in turn, affected at  
least modestly by the Pentagon's ravenous need for fuel), ever more  
taxpayer dollars are going to be funneled to the many oil companies on  
its—and so America's—payroll.

This is how the government now works and it should be a story—and Hunt  
Refining should be part of it. But don't count on that. It's taken the  
mainstream media five years to make it to the oil story in Iraq. How  
many more before it notices that everyday oil operations in Washington  
are worth a look?

With its increasing contracts from the DoD, its soon to be ramped up  
capacity, and the toe-hold its corporate partner possesses in Pentagon- 
occupied Iraq, Hunt Refining is likely to be a player in Washington  
and a major beneficiary of DoD dollars long after George W. Bush has  
gone back to Texas. But until the mainstream media begins to tease out  
the close-knit relationships among Hunt, other energy corporations,  
and the Pentagon that enable our military to function on a daily  
basis, key aspects not just of major scandals but of how our world  
works will remain hidden, even if in plain sight.

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of  
Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San  
Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, the Nation, and regularly for  
Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades  
Our Everyday Lives, an exploration of the new military-corporate  
complex in America, was recently published by Metropolitan Books. His  
website is Nick Turse.com.