ThinkFast: July 1, 2008

Senior Pentagon officials are concerned about the “increasing likelihood” that Israel could carry out an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities “before the end of the year, an action that would have enormous security and economic repercussions for the United States and the rest of the world.”

The Iraqi government announced Monday that “it was opening six key oil production fields to more than 30 foreign companies, while delaying an announcement on a series of no-bid consulting contracts with a handful of Western oil companies.” Critics in the Arab world and abroad cite the oil deals as reason to believe “the United States-led invasion was at least partly about access to Iraq’s oil.”

This past month was “the worst June for the S&P 500 and the Dow industrials since the Great Depression, amid rocketing oil prices and ongoing financial market woes. … The S&P 500 lost 8.6% in June, the worst monthly performance since September 2002 when it lost 11%, and the worst June performance since 1930, when it slumped 16.5%.”

A former CIA agent contends that CIA officials “ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb.” The agent, who sued the agency in 2004 after being fired, filed a motion on Friday requesting that the government “declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.”

On the trail today: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) will be in Indianapolis to speak at the National Sheriffs’ Association’s 68th Annual Conference. This afternoon, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) plans to go to Zanesville in eastern Ohio to visit a church program that provides food, clothing and emergency assistance to needy families.

Reaching out to evangelical voters, Obama is “announcing plans that would expand President Bush’s program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups” and support their ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Militants “killed more U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan in June than in Iraq for the second straight month,” underscoring the Taliban’s “growing strength.” A Pentagon report last week “forecast the Taliban would maintain or increase its pace of attacks, which are already up 40 percent this year from 2007 where U.S. troops operate along the Pakistan border.”

The Circuit Court of Appeals for D.C. criticized the administration for claiming its arguments about a Gitmo detainee should be accepted because they were repeated in three secret documents. The court compared that to the “absurd declaration” of a Lewis Carroll poem: “What I tell you three times is true.” “This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” it said.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday dismissed a lawsuit brought by a Syrian citizen who was detained at Kennedy airport and then sent to Syria and tortured under extraordinary rendition. The court claimed that “because he was never technically inside the United States, his claims could not be heard in federal court.”

And finally: Yesterday was the last day of freedom for former Alaska state congressman Vic Kohring, who was found guilty of accepting bribes. Kohring had been preparing for his 3 1/2-year prison sentence by googling the Southern California facility. Kohring said he plans to write an autobiography — called “Absolutely Innocent” — and read a lot. “It’s almost like going away on a vacation. A…Government sponsored vacation,” he said.