Columnists

            FloridaToday.com

December 30, 2003

Here’s My Best, Worst of the Year

By Billy Cox   bcox@flatoday.net
A FLORIDA TODAY special column  ( www.FloridaToday.com )


We leave 2003 with quiet reflection on the visionary discussions we've hosted here during the past year. Things like the Chilean blob, those prescription-drug busts at the We Really Care Clinic, human tongue transplants, the Women of Wal-Mart, how Florida Memorial Gardens short-changed the late Melbourne Beach Sen. Howard Futch by burying someone other than his wife in the family's prepaid plot, and online war-wagering a good four months before the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency proposed selling war futures on Wall Street.

And as we anticipate another year of quality, we --

"Which column did you like the best?"

 

Oh, stop it! How immodest -- you're embarrassing me! Well, OK. The one I liked most concerned those nocturnal lights in Kuwait. This is the 100-ton blue whale in the living room that nobody wants to talk about. Think about it: 150,000 American troops massed in Kuwait before the invasion of Iraq, and nobody knows anything about the electric ant train that began glowing in the desert darkness last May, shortly after Saddam Hussein's statues began tumbling in Baghdad.

 

This story landed on our desk courtesy of Palm Bay's Hank Brandli, a retired Air Force colonel and satellite meteorologist who performed intelligence analysis for the military. Brandli compared an unclassified May 3 Defense Mapping Satellite Program photo -- which shows nothing -- to a May 25 image in which a sudden corridor of lights appears to bisect the tiny Gulf state and run north to the border with Iraq.

 

Brandli argued the corridor of light was part of a back-door pipeline line to drain black gold -- Texas teeeea -- from Iraq's southern oil fields to help finance the war. And, in fact, last summer, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Bechtel National Inc., and Kellogg Brown & Root staged a rare joint press conference to explain how they were coordinating their war/reconstruction efforts, and how Operation RIO (Restore Iraqi Oil) was designed to get Iraq's production back to prewar levels, and how KBR began deploying its resources in Kuwait in October 2002.

 

But when Florida Today attempted to get explanations of the DMSP images -- from Bechtel, Halliburton, the U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Central Command, the Pentagon's media desk, the Coalition of Provisional Authority, and the American Petroleum Institute -- those who bothered to comment said they knew nothing.

 

Not even Popular Mechanics, with all of its insider connections, could crack the nut. The magazine reported in its December issue that the lights "stretching the length of an inaccessible area of Kuwait has stumped both military and petroleum industry experts." England-based American investigative journalist Greg Palast, author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," put his boys on the trail and came back with goose eggs, too.

So maybe it's St. Elmo's Fire. Maybe it's an electrostatic phenomenon related to Earth energy released through a fresh new fault line. Maybe it's magma oozing from --

 

"What was your least favorite column?"

 

Easy.  Feral cats.  Americans are getting ripped off on a scale so large it can't be categorized, corporate abuses are being concealed by the Department of Homeland Security under "critical infrastructure information" exemptions, millions of American jobs are being farmed out overseas, thousands of soldiers have been killed or wounded after being dispatched to find weapons of mass destruction that don't exist, and nothing elicits reader outrage like feral cats.

 

Last summer I daydreamed in print about BB-shooting not only the feral cats that destroyed a colony of finches next to my house, but butt-shooting the dingbats who were feeding them. In unprecedented numbers, acerbic e-mails clogged the pipes and the phone lines turned to glass from the heat. At that point, I knew I'd finally identified an issue Brevardians were passionate about.

Billy Cox's column runs every Wednesday. He can be reached at 242-3774, or at bcox@flatoday.net.