When armed rebels from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta attacked an enormous oil facility 75 miles off the swampy West African coast on June 19, traveling hours by speedboat under cover of darkness and kidnapping an oil worker, their brazen assault underlined the perhaps underappreciated dependence of the United States — and the world — on oil from Nigeria.

Three days afterward, Nigerian officials said at a hastily arranged global energy summit in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, that recent attacks had cut Nigeria’s oil production to its lowest level in nearly two decades, giving oil markets the jitters and helping to send prices higher…

“We always focus on the Persian Gulf but this is one of the key oil security issues in the world today,” said Daniel Yergin, one of the nation’s best-known energy experts and chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm. “It’s tied up with Nigerian politics, regional and national battles for power, and criminality.” When Mr. Yergin spoke to lawmakers at a hearing in Congress last week, he was asked what would most help stabilize world markets. “Helping bring peace to the Niger Delta would be a major contribution,” he responded.

According to J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, the government led by Nigeria’s new president, Umaru Yar’Adua, must break with decades of neglect and pay attention to the troubles of the southern delta region by promoting development but also cracking down on the rebels and “demonstrating that these guys cannot operate with impunity.”

He’s not very optimistic, however. “When you look at the delta, the overwhelming picture is that the situation has very little promise of being fixed,” he said.

So, given production limitations and strong/concentrated demand, even small disruptions by guerrilla groups on light sweet crude production is likely to have a direct influence on global oil pricing (in contrast, disruptions aimed at heavy crude production should have little impact on global pricing). Further, there are already active groups in many of the most critical production areas.

Fortunately, from the demonstrated behavior of these groups it doesn't appear that guerrilla/terrorist groups have fully grasped their potential market power with small attacks (despite aspirational pronouncements from al Qaeda and large scale attacks in 2005/2006). Once they do, as bad as disruption is today, it could get MUCH worse.

Why? A direct connection to scalable profits...

As we saw with e-mail spam/phishing, even the faintest whiff of profits can turn a loose collection of individuals/groups into a torrential crime-fueled marketplace generated billions and attracting tens of thousands of participants. Are we about to see the same occur with oil?

Disruption isn't limited to Nigeria. A remote control bomb by the FARC on Occidental Petroleum's pipeline in Colombia just knocked out 100,000 barrels a day. It's also interesting to note how irrelevant the US military/national security system has become in regards to global energy security. The entire paradigm of warfare has changed but the $1 Trillion behemoth has barely budged.

A WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 19 nations finds that in 14 of them most people favor an unequivocal rule against torture, even in the case of terrorists who have information that could save innocent lives. Four nations lean toward favoring an exception in the case of terrorists.

However, large majorities in all 19 nations favor a general prohibition against torture. In all nations polled, the number saying that the government should generally be able to use torture is less than one in five.

On average across all nations polled, 57 percent opt for unequivocal rules against torture. Thirty-five percent favor an exception when innocent lives are at risk. Just 9 percent favor the government being able to use torture in general.

The four publics that favor an exception for terrorists when innocent lives are at risk include majorities in India (59%), Nigeria (54%), and Turkey (51%), and a plurality in Thailand (44%).

Support for the unequivocal position was highest in Spain (82%), Great Britain (82%) and France (82%), followed by Mexico (73%), China (66%), the Palestinian territories (66%), Poland (62%), Indonesia (61%), and the Ukraine (59%). In five countries either modest majorities or pluralities support a ban on all torture: Azerbaijan (54%), Egypt (54%), the United States (53%), Russia (49%), and Iran (43%). South Koreans are divided.

[snip]

The survey presented respondents with an argument in favor of allowing the torture of potential terrorists who threaten civilians: "Terrorists pose such an extreme threat that governments should now be allowed to use some degree of torture if it may gain information that would save innocent lives." In fourteen nations, a majority or plurality rejected this argument in favor of the unequivocal view: "Clear rules against torture should be maintained because any use of torture is immoral and will weaken international human rights standards against torture."

Only India had even a modest plurality favoring an exception for terrorists in 2006. In the current survey three countries (India, Nigeria, and Turkey) have a majority supporting such exceptions, Thailand has a plurality and South Korea is divided.

Four countries included in both surveys show dramatic increases in support for allowing the torture of terrorists: India (from 32% to 59%), Nigeria (39% to 54%), Turkey (24% to 51%), and South Korea (31% to 51%). Substantial increases also occurred in Egypt (25% to 46%) and the United States (36% to 44%).

At the same time there have been equally dramatic increases among those favoring a complete ban on torture. Support has grown substantially in Mexico (rising from 50% to 73%), Spain (65% to 82%), China (49% to 66%), Indonesia (51% to 61%), Britain (72% to 82%), and Russia (43% to 49%).

On average, support for an exception has gone up six points while support for an unequivocal rule has gone up two points. Thus the net increase in favor of an exception is just four points.

Despite this illegal conduct, not everyone can sue OPEC and succeed. In 2002, a federal court dismissed a class-action lawsuit brought against OPEC by a gas station owner. An appeals court agreed, noting that “under the current state of our federal laws the individual member states of OPEC are afforded immunity from suit brought for damage caused by their commercial activities when they act through OPEC.”

The “current state of our federal laws” refers to the “act of state doctrine,” which was first enunciated by the Supreme Court in 1897 with the following words: “Every sovereign state is bound to respect the independence of every other sovereign state, and the courts of one country will not sit in judgment on the acts of the government of another, done within its own territory.”...

Fortunately, there is another way to sue OPEC. Even if actions by individual citizens fail, a seldom-used provision of Article III of the Constitution grants original jurisdiction to the Supreme Court over lawsuits brought by states against “foreign states” and, as expanded by the United States Code, over “aliens.”

The attorneys general of the various states should sue OPEC as an alien or, pleading alternatively, as a foreign state.

The states should contend that Article III of the Constitution outweighs the act of state doctrine. Respect for the sovereignty of a foreign government for acts “done within its own territory” does not, even if very liberally construed, protect decisions reached by a cartel based in Austria that directs 13 nations to sell their product at inflated prices to customers outside their boundaries.

As Thomas Walde, a professor at the University of Dundee, [has explained], OPEC is not a "cartel" in the legal sense of the word because it is a collection of governments, not private companies. A plausible defense could be that OPEC actions constitute a "joint resource conservation effort" and not market manipulation per se.

The Supreme Court yesterday upheld the constitutionality of the law allowing for the detention of "unlawful combatants," which Israel uses to hold Hezbollah fighters.

Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch and Justices Edmond Levy and Ayala Procaccia rejected an appeal by two Gazan Palestinians who were detained after their involvement in terror activity on behalf of Hezbollah was proved.

The Unlawful Combatants Law authorizes the state to detain foreign nationals who belong to terror organizations or have participated directly or indirectly in hostile actions against the State of Israel.

Its goal is to prevent their continued activities.

Beinisch wrote in the verdict that although the law involves substantial harm and the suppression of personal freedom through administrative detention, the harm is proportional.

She noted that it was passed in a "harsh security reality" that justifies the violation of to personal freedom.

"The law's harm to the constitutional right to personal freedom, although substantial, is no greater than necessary," Beinisch wrote.

"Therefore, we have concluded that the law meets the criteria of the limitations ruling and there is no constitutional grounds to intervene in it."

Yet how powerful can this judicial review be? Not only does the Illegal Combatants law create a new category not recognized in international law, it reverses the burden of proof. Once an order is signed by the Chief of Staff, the burden of proof is on the defendant: he has to prove to the court that he is not an enemy combatant. Moreover, he is expected do this when the charge against him is based solely on classified evidence, which he is barred from examining and is therefore unable to challenge. One of the defendants told the court he was arrested in his house, for no reason, and added that if he were exposed to the evidence against him he would be able to respond. But that, of course, did not happen. After the defense lawyers argued their case, they and their clients had to exit the courtroom, leaving the security services’ representatives to reveal their secret evidence to the judge.

Let’s start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned on this administration is not the failure to make Iraq work, as devastating as that has been. It will be one with much broader balance-of-power implications — the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy…

The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world — the U.S. economy — to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states — from Russia to Venezuela to Iran — that are reshaping global politics in their own image.

Mr. Zakaria’s central thesis is that while the U.S. still has many unique assets, “the rise of the rest” — the Chinas, the Indias, the Brazils and even smaller nonstate actors — is creating a world where many other countries are slowly moving up to America’s level of economic clout and self-assertion, in every realm…

For too long, argues Zakaria, America has taken its many natural assets — its research universities, free markets and diversity of human talent — and assumed that they will always compensate for our low savings rate or absence of a health care system or any strategic plan to improve our competitiveness.

“That was fine in a world when a lot of other countries were not performing,” argues Zakaria, but now the best of the rest are running fast, working hard, saving well and thinking long term. “They have adopted our lessons and are playing our game,” he said. If we don’t fix our political system and start thinking strategically about how to improve our competitiveness, he added, “the U.S. risks having its unique and advantageous position in the world erode as other countries rise.”

a small group of players — “the superclass” — a new global elite, who are much better suited to operating on the global stage and influencing global outcomes than the vast majority of national political leaders.

Some of this new elite “are from business and finance,” says Rothkopf. “Some are members of a kind of shadow elite — criminals and terrorists. Some are masters of new or traditional media; some are religious leaders, and a few are top officials of those governments that do have the ability to project their influence globally.”