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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Monday, December 19, 2011

19 December - Blogs Im Following II

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Plumbing WikiLeaks: Water’s Role in U.S. Foreign Aid 
As thousands of government representatives, academics, industry officials, and environmental organizations gathered in Istanbul in March 2009 for the water sector’s largest convention, the head U.S. State Department official from the Istanbul consulate debated the value of the laborious meeting and how its goals squared with national policy, according to a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks.
Wikileaks water circle of blue u.s. foreign aid USAID
Photo credit WikiLeaks.org
This is the second in a new series that analyzes the water-related U.S. embassy cables published by WikiLeaks. Click here for the first article on Saudi Arabia, Iran nukes, desalination, and terrorism.
In a cable intended for Steven Pierce, a senior policy advisor at the time for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Sharon Wiener of the Istanbul consulate seemed clearly dissatisfied with the Fifth World Water Forum. The Forum had brought together 25,000 participants from 155 countries, including more than 100 ministers and several heads of state, yet Wiener dismissed the nonbinding declarations of high-level delegates and the World Water Council, the convention’s sponsoring body, as virtually valueless.
“The World Water Council,” she wrote, “has long believed that the [Forum’s] key outcomes are the numerous declarations made by heads-of-state, ministers, parliamentarians, and others. We disagree.”


Essentially, Wiener, then the U.S. Consul General in Instanbul, had advocated that water should factor into U.S. foreign policy through decisive action — rather than a series of nonbinding agreements that may never be signed. Her cable was sent to a senior policy advisor in the office of the administrator at USAID, whose budget is one of the primary vehicles for water-sector funding.
She was concerned that the nonbinding agreements typically signed at such events took up enormous amounts of time and resources, though they offered little assistance to the lives of those they were meant to help.
For instance, this time around, things had gone awry when senior government officials had convened on March 17, 2009, to finalize preparations for the ministerial meetings, at which time, an agreed-upon ministerial statement would be signed. Instead of moving forward, many delegations had pressed to re-open the draft declaration for a variety of reasons, including transboundary water issues, human security, and the human right to water — which, she noted, the U.S. was “one of only a few countries [to] vocally oppose.”
When assessing the 250,000 memos that are available online via WikiLeaks, a nonprofit organization that accepts leaked government and corporate documents, it becomes clear through the water-related notes — of which there are quite a few — that the U.S. leadership is responding to global water challenges, pushing scientific partnerships, training technocrats in international law and policy, and assisting water negotiations.
U.S. assistance can range from helping other countries with adaptation to changing environmental and political conditions to helping with the implementation of adequate sanitation and clean sources of drinking water.

opit
December 18, 2011 at 6:42 pm
IRIN Middle East | IRAQ: Seeping sewage hits Fallujah residents …
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=89829
14 Jul 2010 – Fallujah’s infrastructure was in ruins after battles between US forces and Sunni … Waste pours onto the streets and seeps into drinking water supplies. … is the main pipeline that sends all the waste to the main processing unit, …
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2009/07/water-wealth-power.html
The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S. Intentionally Destroyed Iraq’s Water Supply
http://www.progressive.org/mag/nagy0901.html

Infographic: US ends Iraq war chapter
A deeper look at Iraq's ethnic composition, military bases, private contractors, casualties and oil fields.


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