Originally published at TomDispatch.com

It couldn’t be worse, could it?  In the Gulf, BP now claims to be retrieving 15,000 barrels of oil a day from the busted pipe 5,000 feet down.  That’s three times the total amount of oil it claimed, bare weeks ago, was coming out of that pipe.  A government panel of experts now suggests that the real figure could be up to 60,000 barrels or 2.5 million gallons a day, the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every four days -- and some independent experts think the figure could actually be closer to 100,000 barrels a day. 

In the meantime, we just learned from the Los Angeles Times that -- go figure -- the “primary responsibility for safety and other inspections” on the oil rig that blew in the Gulf “rested not with the U.S. government but with the Republic of the Marshall Islands,” and that those impoverished islands had outsourced their responsibilities to private companies.  Go BP!  We also learned that the relief wells sure to staunch the flow of oil by “early August” could take far longer, fail, or even make matters significantly worse; that BP cut every corner in the book to save money when drilling its well; and, oh, that evidently even the heavens are angry at the oil giant, since on Tuesday a lightning strike put its sole drill/retrieval ship in the Gulf out of action for hours, leaving all that oil pouring into the water unimpeded.  However bad the bad news is, each new dawn it only seems to get worse, as does the “collateral damage,” whether to pelicans or the Gulf's beaches and wetlands.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, that war equivalent of BP’s Gulf disaster, things are similarly trending downward at a startling pace as the news from there grows ever grimmer.  The model American offensive in the southern town of Marja, declared a "success" in early May, has faltered badly and has been labeled by Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal a “bleeding ulcer”; the “government in a box” that he claimed the U.S. would merrily roll out after U.S. and Afghan troops decisively shoved the Taliban aside, is still in absentia, and the Taliban remain all too present; Afghan President Hamid Karzai now openly indicates that he thinks the Americans can’t win in his country and he’s planning accordingly; the much ballyhooed American “offensive” in Afghanistan’s second largest city, Kandahar, has once again been delayed; corruption increases; American and NATO death tolls grow worse by the month as support for the war in the U.S. sinks; the “collateral damage” only increases; and this week, in a piece in the New York Times, we were told things are so bad that a serious drawdown of forces in 2011 is considered unlikely.  Go figure (again)!

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In recent weeks, former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen has been on a public relations campaign defending the efficacy of waterboarding, going so far as to say that the torture technique sanctioned by the Bush administration is not only safe, but is in line with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

On Tuesday, in an interview with "Fox News," John Yoo, the former Justice Department attorney who was the principal author of legal memoranda that cleared the way for CIA interrogators to waterboard "war on terror" detainees and subject them to other brutal torture techniques, asserted that waterboarding was harmless.

Please click this link to listen to an interview with Jeffrey Kaye on the Peter B. Collins show.

In his defense of the practice, Yoo cited the thousands of US servicemen who have undergone SERE training and said, "we don't think it amounts to torture because we would not be doing it to our own soldiers otherwise."

However, a previously unreleased internal Department of Defense (DoD) memo, summarizing a review of the Navy SERE program in late February - early March 2007, reveals  that there was fierce criticism within the DoD of the Navy SERE school in North Island, San Diego, for being the only SERE facility to still use waterboarding in its training program.

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Originally published at Voices for Creative Nonviolence

President Obama’s 2009 supplemental spending request to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is currently before Congress. The House Appropriations Committee will “mark up” (finalize its version) of a war funding bill at a committee hearing on May 7th. The full House will likely vote on the bill the following week. The objective is to have the bill finalized and to Obama for signature by Memorial Day.

President Obama is seeking an additional $75.8 billion in war funds for this fiscal year. It is possible that Congress will add to this amount before final passage. If Congress enacts Obama’s request, total war spending will come to $144.6 billion for Fiscal Year 2009 (which ends on September 30, with Fiscal Year 2010 beginning on October 1). This compares to the $186 billion war spending in 2008. Obama’s proposed war budget for 2010 is $130 billion.

At first glance, it is easy to conclude that the proposed 22 percent reduction in war spending from 2008 to 2009 represents a significant shift in war strategy and is indicative of a drawing down of the twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sadly, such a conclusion would be wrong.

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