Greg Palast has a new book:”Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf? China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal “08, No Child’s Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.” Today on DemocracyNow!, Amy Goodman presented part one of her recent interview with Palast. After seeing it, I will be glued to my tv tomorrow, and am going to buy the book the second it comes out in June. (via Powells.com, of course)

Exerpts from that interview follow:

AMY GOODMAN: Is the war in Iraq a war for oil?

GREG PALAST: Is the war in Iraq for oil? Yes, it’s about the oil, but not for the oil. In my investigations for Armed Madhouse, I ended up with a story far more fascinating and difficult than I imagined. We didn’t go in to grab the oil. Just the opposite. We went in to control the oil and make sure we didn’t get it. It goes back to 1920, when the oil companies sat in a room in Brussels in a hotel room, drew a red line around Iraq and said, “There’ll be no oil coming out of that nation.” They have to suppress oil coming out of Iraq. Otherwise, the price of oil will collapse, and OPEC and Saudi Arabia will collapse.

And so, what I found, what I discovered that they’re very unhappy about is a 323-page plan, which was written by big oil, which is the secret but official plan of the United States for Iraq’s oil, written by the big oil companies out of the James Baker Institute in coordination with a secret committee of the Council on Foreign Relations. I know it sounds very conspiratorial, but this is exactly how they do it. It’s quite wild. And it’s all about a plan to control Iraq’s oil and make sure that Iraq has a system, which, quote, “enhances its relationship with OPEC.” In other words, the whole idea is to maintain the power of OPEC, which means maintain the power of Saudi Arabia.

Saddam was jerking the oil market up and down, so he had to go. It’s that simple. The neocons’ plan was to destroy OPEC and Saudi Arabia along with it, but the Saudi loving Bush clan would have none of that.
Palast reports how Hugo Chavez is offering the US $50/barrel oil. The catch? The money stays in Venezuela and is not pumped back into the US economy by buying US treasuries. That would also wreak havoc with world oil prices, and OPEC. No wonder Bush hates Chavez. You gotta love a guy who pokes a stick in Bush’s eye every chance he gets. How do you think average Americans would react to THAT juicy tidbit? Arab oil isn’t the only game in town.

In other words, when George Bush rides around King Abdullah in his little golf cart on the Crawford ranch, he’s not trying to get Abdullah’s oil. Abdullah can’t drink the stuff. He’s got to sell it to us and Japan. But Abdullah takes the money back from the — when you fill up your SUV, you give your money to Saudi Arabia, the big oil companies, Saudi Arabia. But then he returns it the form of petrodollars, and that is what is funding George Bush’s mad spending spree.

So yes, the Iraq war was about the oil, but sure in hell not the way I thought.

You may remember that Palast, who writes for the Observer in London, is the one who blasted open the 2000 election scandal in Florida when Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris cut tens of thousands of black voters off of Florida rolls and handed the election to Dubya. His take on the massive NSA database is diabolical and probably on target. For the coming 2008 election, lists of names to be challanged are already being circulated.They won’t need Diebold by then:

Now, it’s accepted 2000 pretty much was fixed. Well, there’s a chapter, “Kerry won.” 2004 was fixed. And the way it was done is that 3.6 million votes were cast and never counted in the United States. That’s very important to know. This isn’t Greg Palast conspiracy nut stuff.

AMY GOODMAN: Say the number again.

GREG PALAST: 3.6 million ballots cast, never counted. And that’s because they call these spoiled votes or rejected provisional ballots, 1.9 million so-called provisional ballots, and then, most of those don’t get counted. And so, whose votes don’t get counted? If it was random, it wouldn’t matter. In other words, if these were votes where the machine doesn’t record it properly, hanging chads, extra marks on a paper ballot, you had the wrong address on your absentee ballot, etc.
[snip]

And `08, so what’s happening is there is no fix of the system. In other words, just like black folk get bad schools and bad hospitals, they get the bad voting machines, which are going to kill those votes. But they’re not satisfied with just letting the ballots be thrown away. They’re going to move it along. And one of the things I discovered is the Republican Party has something called “caging lists,” which came to our — you know, just like you had Friday, the way the Yes Men capture material by using false websites, so through a false website we were able to capture Republican Party internal missives, through georgebush.org.

And so, what happened was is that they sent us a bunch of lists of literally tens of thousands of names of voters and addresses. We were wondering what the heck this was. It turns out these were almost all African American voters, who they were prepared to challenge in 2004, and they did, to say that these people shouldn’t vote, because their addresses are suspect. And you’ll see in the book that in the lists of thousands of black voters that they were challenging over their address were thousands of black soldiers who were sent to Iraq; go to Baghdad, and the Republican Party challenges your vote.

And that’s the beginning, and because there’s been really no action taken, they’re accelerating the system now. And the next thing that they’re going after is the Hispanic vote. So when we saw two million votes cast/not counted in 2000, nearly four million votes cast/not counted in 2004, you’re going see that number massively increase in challenges to voters in 2008. And that’s what’s going back to this database story with the National Security Agency.

With Latinos in the US organizing a massive voting registration in response to Bush’s militarization of the Mexican border, I bet the NSA is quite busy making their lists, checking them twice. This interview was fascinating and I for one can’t wait for the book in June.