New infrastructure in Middle East...

Just not where you'd think. For all our promises, for all our fanfare and lofty liberating rhetoric, we haven't done a damn thing for the infrastructure of either Iraq or Afghanistan.

But we've quietly (we're so humble!!) built some roads in Kuwait, running the length of the country, on into the southeastern oil fields of Iraq. But don't take my word for it, listen to the retired Air Force colonel/MIT graduate who found something odd about a meterological satellite's recent night photo of Iraq. From Florida Today:

"On May 25, while scanning the Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program images pipelined into his desktop from 450 miles in orbit, Hank Brandli skidded at a nighttime photo of Iraq. It looked familiar. But not exactly.

Brandli retrieved another DMSP image he'd archived from May 3. He compared the two. The most recent photo showed a blazing corridor of light running the length of Kuwait, south to north, all the way to the Iraqi border. The image wasn't there on May 3.

"It's going right up to Iraq's oil fields," says the retired Air Force colonel from his home in Palm Bay.

"You look for patterns. Patterns tell you things," says Brandli, who has masters degrees in meteorology, aeronautics and astronautics, and the author of "Satellite Meteorology" for the Air Force's Air Weather Service in 1976. "With night photos, you can distinguish natural gas burnoff, which looks globular, from city lights. And suddenly, over just a few weeks, we've got this straight line of lights leading all the way to those beautiful wells in southeastern Iraq.

"If you're building pipelines, you've got to have power, you've got to have light -- trucks and personnel and food and all sorts of support. If I had to bet, I'd say it looks like we're running Iraqi oil through Kuwait. It would make sense, because Kuwait's got its infrastructure intact."


It would make sense, Hank, it would make a lot of sense.

-tn

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