Columnists
FloridaToday.com
July 15, 2003
Photo Mystery Still
Unsolved
Palm Bay's Hank Brandli generated a buzz last month when the
retired Air Force colonel suggested the United
States had run a pipeline the length
of Kuwait
to siphon off Iraqi oil to help finance the war. Unfortunately, amid Washington's
hall of mirrors, we're no closer to solving this mystery than when the story
ran in June.
Rewind: In 1976, near the end of a career of handling classified
projects, Brandli produced an analyst's bible for the Air Force Weather
Service, a book called "Satellite Meteorology." Although he left the
USAF shortly thereafter, Brandli took his passion into retirement with him by
computer-rigging his home with receiving dishes that allowed him to download
unclassified images from American and Russian weather satellites whenever they
passed over.
On May 25, Brandli was riveted by some Defense Meteorological Satellite
Program nighttime photos of Iraq
and Kuwait.
A north-south corridor of light -- not visible in a similar DMSP photo taken on
May 3 -- had apparently been carved out of the Kuwaiti desert in little more
than three weeks, all the way up to, and slightly inside of, the Iraqi border.
Brandli failed to detect that same luminescent feature in photos prior to May
3. And after reviewing images he's studied after May 25, Brandli reports,
"It's still there."
The State Department seemed to be the go-to choice for answers about this
river of light, but a spokesperson was in the dark and said to call the
Coalition of Provisional Authority, the office in charge of rebuilding Iraq.
But the CPA never called back.
The U.S.
Agency for International Development doesn't have any answers, either, and
advises you to call the Defense Department. But the Pentagon media desk doesn't
know anything about it, and urges you to call the CPA or U.S.
Central Command in Tampa.
CPA doesn't call back again. At CentCom, Lt. Col. Martin Compton is stumped.
"There are a number of possible explanations. All kinds of things
are moving into Iraq
right now, and it could be something as simple as water," he says.
"But if it's something going on in Kuwait,
I wouldn't know where to tell you to go for that. We might not even be in a
position to tell you even if we knew."
You call the U.S.
Commerce Department's Iraq
Reconstruction Task Force in Washington.
They refer you to CPA. CPA doesn't call back again.
Surely the American Petroleum Institute in Washington
would know something about new Iraqi pipelines running through Kuwait.
But after reviewing the e-mailed images, API spokesman Bill Bush says a key
colleague is skeptical that they're oil-related.
"Presumably, if you're drawing oil out of Iraq,
it would make more sense to go east toward the Gulf, where it could be
unloaded," Bush says.
But in Monterey, Calif.,
Bob Fett says "Hank got it right."
Fett and Brandli worked together in Vietnam.
Fett was the head of the Tactical Applications Department for the National
Reconnaissance Organization, the spy-satellite program whose very existence was
a state secret for 30 years. Fett, now a consultant for Naval Research Lab,
provided a map showing how the lights line up into the region of Iraq's
Rumaila oilfields.
"It's been an impressive operation," Fett says.
"(Construction giants) Halliburton, or Bechtel, or Brown & Root, were
contracted to get the oil flowing out of Iraq as quickly as possible, and
hundreds of workers have been going at it 24 hours a day, around the clock.
They needed lights to work at night." Fett adds that the project, which
runs south into the metropolitan glow around Kuwait City, doesn't have to reach
the Gulf for it to be oil-related. "Why not bring it south where the
infrastructure is already in place?"
Bechtel and Halliburton didn't respond to messages. What's important is,
Halliburton stocks are over $22 a share now. That's up from $12.62 last
October.
Billy Cox's column runs every Wednesday. He can be reached at 242-3774,
or at bcox@flatoday.net