And there is the Illinois woman who tried to collect federal benefits by claiming she watched her two daughters drown in the rising New Orleans waters. In fact, prosecutors say, the children did not exist.

The tally of ignoble acts linked to Hurricane Katrina, pulled together by The New York Times from government audits, criminal prosecutions and Congressional investigations, could rise because the inquiries are under way. Even in Washington, a city accustomed to government bloat, the numbers are generating amazement.

"The blatant fraud, the audacity of the schemes, the scale of the waste - it is just breathtaking," said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Such an outcome was feared soon after Congress passed the initial hurricane relief package, as officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Red Cross acknowledged that their systems were overwhelmed and tried to create new ones on the fly.

"We did, in fact, put into place never-before-used and untested processes," Donna M. Dannels, acting deputy director of recovery at FEMA, told a House panel this month. "Clearly, because they were untested, they were more subject to error and fraud."

Officials in Washington say they recognized that a certain amount of fraud or improper payments is inevitable in any major disaster, as the government's mission is to rapidly distribute emergency aid. They typically send out excessive payments that represent 1 percent to 3 percent of the relief distributed, money they then ask people to give back.

What was not understood until now was just how large these numbers could become.

The estimate of up to $2 billion in fraud and waste represents nearly 11 percent of the $19 billion spent by FEMA on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as of mid-June, or about 6 percent of total money that has been obligated.

"This started off as a disaster-relief program, but it turned into a cash cow," said Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, a former federal prosecutor and now chairman of a House panel investigating storm waste and fraud.

The waste ranged from excessive loads of ice to higher-than-necessary costs on the multibillion-dollar debris removal effort. Some examples are particularly stark.

The $7.9 million spent to renovate the former Fort McClellan Army base in Anniston, Ala., included fixing up a welcome center, clinic and gymnasium, scrubbing away mold and installing a protective fence between the site and a nearby firing range. But when the doors finally opened, only about 10 people showed up each night, leading FEMA to shut down the shelter within one month.

The mobile homes, costing $34,500 each, were supposed to provide temporary housing to hurricane victims. But after Louisiana officials balked at installing them inland, FEMA had no use for them. Nearly half, or about 10,000, of the $860 million worth of units now sit at an airfield in Arkansas, where FEMA is paying $250,000 a month to store them.

The most recent audit came from the Government Accountability Office, which this month estimated that perhaps as much as 21 percent of the $6.3 billion given directly to victims might have been improperly distributed.

"There are tools that are available to get money quickly to individuals and to get disaster relief programs running quickly without seeing so much fraud and waste," said Gregory D. Kutz, managing director of the forensic audits unit at the G.A.O. "But it wasn't really something that FEMA put a high priority on. So it was easy to commit fraud without being detected."

The most disturbing cases, said David R. Dugas, the United States attorney in Louisiana, who is leading a storm antifraud task force for the Justice Department, are those involving government officials accused of orchestrating elaborate scams.

One Louisiana Department of Labor clerk, Wayne P. Lawless, has been charged with issuing about 80 fraudulent disaster unemployment benefit cards in exchange for bribes of up to $300 per application. Mr. Lawless, a state contract worker, announced to one man he helped apply for hurricane benefits that he wanted to "get something out of it," the affidavit said. His lawyer did not respond to several messages left at his office and home for comment.

"The American people are the most generous in the world in responding to a disaster," Mr. Dugas said. "We won't tolerate people in a position of public trust taking advantage of the situation."

Two other men, Mitchell Kendrix of Memphis and Paul Nelson of Lisbon, Me., have pleaded guilty in connection with a scheme in Mississippi in which Mr. Kendrix, a representative for the Army Corps of Engineers, took $100 bribes in exchange for approving phantom loads of hurricane debris from Mr. Nelson.

In New Orleans, two FEMA officials, Andrew Rose and Loyd Holliman, both of Colorado, have pleaded guilty to taking $20,000 in bribes in exchange for inflating the count on the number of meals a contractor was serving disaster workers. And a councilman in St. Tammany Parish, La., Joseph Impastato, has also been charged with trying to extort $100,000 from a debris removal contractor. Mr. Impastato's lawyer, Karl J. Koch, said he was confident his client would be cleared.

A program set up by the American Red Cross and financed by FEMA that provided free hotel rooms to Hurricane Katrina victims also resulted in extraordinary abuse and waste, investigators have found.

First, because the Red Cross did not keep track of the hundreds of thousands of recipients - they were only required to provide a ZIP code from the hurricane zone to check in - FEMA frequently sent rental assistance checks to people getting free hotel rooms, the G.A.O. found.

In turn, some hotel managers or owners, like Daniel Yeh, of Sugar Land, exploited the lack of oversight, investigators have charged, and submitted bills for empty rooms or those occupied by paying guests or employees. Mr. Yeh submitted $232,000 in false claims, his arrest affidavit said. His lawyer, Robert Bennett, said that Mr. Yeh was mentally incompetent and that the charges should be dismissed.

And Tina M. Winston of Belleville, Ill., was charged this month with claiming that her two daughters had died in the flooding in New Orleans. But prosecutors said that the children never existed and that Ms. Winston was living in Illinois at the time of the storm. The public defender representing Ms. Winston did not respond to a request for comment.

Charities also were vulnerable to profiteers. In Burbank, Calif., a couple has been charged with collecting donations outside a store by posing as Red Cross workers. In Bakersfield, Calif., 75 workers at a Red Cross call center, their friends and relatives have been charged in a scheme to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in relief.

To date, Mr. Dugas said, federal prosecutors have filed hurricane-related criminal charges against 335 individuals. That represents a record number of indictments from a single hurricane season, Justice Department officials said. Separately, Red Cross officials say they are investigating 7,100 cases of possible fraud.

Congressional investigators, meanwhile, have referred another 7,000 cases of possible fraud to prosecutors, including more than 1,000 prison inmates who collected more than $12 million in federal aid, much of it in the form of rental assistance.

Investigators also turned up one individual who had received 26 federal disaster relief payments totaling $139,000, using 13 Social Security numbers, all based on claims of damages for bogus addresses.

Thousands more people may be charged before the five-year statute of limitations on most of these crimes expires, investigators said.

There are bigger cases of government waste or fraud in United States history. The Treasury Department, for example, estimated in 2005 that Americans in a single year had improperly been granted perhaps $9 billion in unjustified claims under the Earned-Income Tax Credit. The Department of Health and Human Services in 2001 estimated that nearly $12 billion in Medicare benefit payments in the previous year had been based on improper or fraudulent complaints.

Auditors examining spending in Iraq also have documented hundreds of millions in questionable spending or abuse. But Mr. Kutz of the accountability office said that in all of his investigative work, he had never encountered the range of abuses he has seen with Hurricane Katrina.

R. David Paulison, the new FEMA director, said in an interview on Friday that much work had already been done to prevent such widespread fraud, including automated checks to confirm applicants' identities.

"We will be able to tell who you are, if you live where you said you do," Mr. Paulison said.

But Senator Collins said she had heard such promises before, including after Hurricane Frances in 2004 in which FEMA gave out millions of dollars in aid to Miami-Dade County residents, even though there was little damage.

Mr. Kutz said he too was not convinced that the agency was ready.

"I still don't think they fully understand the depth of the problem," he said.

Our soldiers have nothing to gain by going to war and everything to lose. War is a rich man's device that, if the truth were known, ignores the will of the people who have no say in it. Modern wars have no heroes but they inevitably produce atrocities and countless innocent victims. There can be no moral justification for civilized people of any nationality taking up arms against one another, unless one nation is directly assaulted by another. War is the tool of barbarians and tyrants and they are provoked by cowards hiding in safe places.

The underlying reasons for war are always cloaked in darkness and secrecy; otherwise, no sane person would fight them and we would be forced to live in relative accord. Our Plutocratic rulers, however, believe that war is more profitable than peace. Defense contractors cannot make billions by waging peace. Besides, what U.S. president would boast of being the "peace time" president? There is no bravado in peace. Armed to the teeth, the American hero, as exemplified by and glorified in Hollywood, are invariably men of extreme violence.

While those who initiate war invariably cloak their intentions in the language of patriotism, wars always have economic and ideological causes. In America the causes of war have their origins in corporate Plutocracy. Here, war is initiated at the behest of a corporation or a group of corporations doing business in a foreign country. The usual cause is that a foreign government has imposed some kind of restriction upon one these corporations. In the most virulent cases these countries will not allow their natural capital to be plundered by corporate marauders or privatized and exported. Some countries even insist upon public ownership of their raw materials which makes them the greatest menace to peace.

Nations that have not adopted capitalism as their religion traditionally refuse to allow their resources or their people to be exploited for profit. These nations nationalize their assets and rather than invading and occupying other nations, they provide free health care, unlimited education and other programs of social and spiritual uplift to their citizens. These are the dangers of socialism and communism that we were indoctrinated against since birth; the greatest scourge of evil the world has ever known. This is what they teach us in school and it is ingrained in our psyche to the grave.

Using the tax base for the public good, to create a prosperous peace time economy for all, of course, is positively un-American and anti-capitalist. It is a dangerous ideology that must not be allowed to spread, lest it result in eruptions of democracy, prolonged outbursts of peace and the equitable distribution of goods and wealth. If allowed to flourish, socialism would mean the abolition of Plutocracy and the end of socioeconomic class divisions. It would mean the emancipation of the working class from their Plutocratic rulers.

The Plutocrats know in their hearts of stone that the people lack the intelligence and wisdom to self govern. They know that we require leaders who are our moral and intellectual superiors who can teach us the value of free markets, fair trade, conquest, private ownership and insatiable greed. Thank God, we have them to look after us and to grind us into hamburger for consumption by the global elite.

In a nutshell, that is what war is about as it pertains to the American experiment. There are no noble causes to fight and die for. War is about private ownership of everything and everyone; the commodification of nature and people, subjugated to rule by a corrupt global economic elite. War is the result of humankind's oldest and worst nemesis-greed and lust for power over the lives of others.

War is comprised of roughly equal parts racism, fervent nationalism, propaganda and lies, herd mentality, religion, and the private ownership of materials and labor. War is the sum of humankind's worst attributes, bought and paid for in blood.

As terrible as war is, perhaps it exacts its greatest toll on the combatants themselves-the soldiers. Acting in the belief that they are spreading light into the darkness of the world they are, in fact, doing exactly the opposite. They are stamping out the light of understanding, rationality, and hope. The soldier thus becomes the horrible thing they are vainly trying to destroy. All of this is possible because they have blindly followed men without hearts and conscience, men devoid of souls, who have misled them into the burning depths of hell from which there is no way out.

This is the sad reality we are witnessing in Iraq and the 135 nations where our armed forces are stationed, carrying out the sociopathic agenda of global domination and empire. Those whose minds are not truly their own are susceptible to control by the psychopaths who would use them for evil, just as soldiers have traditionally been the pawns of kings and emperors through the ages.

The lies espoused by our so called leaders do not matter on the battlefield. They do not matter when the bodies come home in oversized cardboard boxes, hauled by fork lifts to airport curbs and deposited at the feet of grief-stricken families like a commodity. In a sense, that is what they are. This is war's assembly line, where the bodies are packaged and sent home like a parcel, with the flag as a corporate logo printed on a box with the stamp "Made in America"; where lives are converted into cash for the global elite, a gift from the Plutocracy.

General Smedley Butler was right when he said in 1933 that war is a racket. It still is and always will be. War is the ultimate contempt for life; the ultimate betrayal of human potential.

Charles Sullivan is a photographer, free lance writer and social activist residing somewhere in the hinterland of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net

The latest costs include the transfer of more than 1,200 2 1/2-ton trucks, nearly 1,100 Humvees and $8.8 million in other equipment from the U.S. Army to the Iraqi security forces.

Army and Marine Corps leaders are expected to testify before Congress Tuesday and outline the growing costs of the war - with estimates that it will cost between $12 billion and $13 billion a year for equipment repairs, upgrades and replacements from now on.

The Marine Corps has said in recent testimony before Congress that it would need nearly $12 billion to replace and repair all the equipment worn out or lost to combat in the past four years. So far, the Marines have received $1.6 billion toward those costs to replace and repair the equipment.

According to the Army, the $17 billion includes:

-$2.1 billion in equipment that must be replaced because of battle losses.

-About $6.5 billion for repairs.

-About $8.4 billion to rebuild or upgrade equipment.

One of the growing costs is the replacement of Humvees, which are wearing out more quickly because of the added armor they are carrying to protect soldiers from roadside bombs. The added weight is causing them to wear out faster, decreasing the life of the vehicles.

Congress has provided about $21 billion for equipment costs in emergency supplemental budget bills from 2002-06. All the war equipment expenses have been funded through those emergency bills, and not in the regular fiscal-year budgets.

Pentagon officials have estimated that such emergency bills would have to continue two years beyond the time the U.S. pulls out of Iraq in order to fully replace, repair and rebuild all of the needed equipment.

The push for additional equipment funding comes after the House last week passed a $427 billion defense spending bill for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, which includes $50 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. A separate $66 billion emergency funding bill for the two wars was approved earlier in the month.

War-related costs since 2001 are approaching half a trillion dollars.

Those who stand to reap the big gains are billionaires, millionaires, and their heirs. But every taxpayer has a stake in the outcome. An estate-tax overhaul could affect the nation's social structure and the tax burden on ordinary Americans for years to come.

"The revenue involved is not trivial," says Joel Slemrod, a University of Michigan economist. "What makes it more important, though, is this is by far the most progressive tax we have. [A large reduction] would certainly change in a substantial way who is bearing the tax burden."

The estate tax has stirred controversy ever since its 1916 launch, but as more Americans grow wealthier - and as the gap between rich and poor grows wider - this once-in-a-generation tax has moved to the political foreground.

Last week, the House - including all but two Republicans and 43 Democrats - voted for a major permanent cut in the tax. The Senate is now considering its own rollback legislation. To those who want to abolish the tax altogether, these moves represent an opportunity to bring their goal one step closer.

Other lawmakers see the new legislation as a welcome middle ground in a contentious debate that has simmered ever since President Bush took office in 2001. It would permanently boost the estate value exempt from taxation above the $1 million level. And a new law could remove what many see as morbid incentives in current law, which make deaths in 2010 financially advantageous.

Under Mr. Bush's 2001 tax cuts, the estate tax rate is being reduced, and the exemption amount raised every year until 2010, when the tax disappears altogether. But after that, current law allows the tax to return in full force: The first $1 million of estate value is exempt, with the rest facing as much as a 55 percent tax.

"Compromise in Congress is the answer," says attorney Sandy Kraemer of Colorado Springs, Colo., author of "60-Minute Estate Planner." "It's critically important that we provide a flow of inheritance from generation to generation. On the other hand, we do not want to see huge amounts of wealth pooled in families that can buy and sell elections."

At the extremes on this issue, he says, are socialism and feudalism. A total confiscation of estates would undercut America's traditional capitalistic incentives, hurting the economy. By contrast, absent any tax on wealth or estates, a financial aristocracy is likely to gain increasing clout. The tax also provides substantial revenue to the US government - though its $24 billion in 2004 revenues were dwarfed by the $990 billion brought in by the income tax. It also provides an incentive for charitable giving and for people to plan for the transfer of their estates, proponents of an estate tax add.

Between the extremes lie a wide range of options. The Republican-led Congress hopes to lower the tax significantly. The move would primarily affect the very wealthiest Americans. Just 62,718 estates filed taxes in 2004, the most recent year for which IRS records are available. The cumulative value of those estates was $193 billion.

A year ago, the House voted to permanently repeal the estate tax, but it fell three votes short in the Senate. The new House bill is designed to break the deadlock. Instead of eliminating the tax as of 2010, the House bill would boost the exemption to $5 million for an individual's estate or $10 million for couples. After 2010, the exemption would be adjusted yearly for inflation.

Above those amounts, estates up to $25 million in value would be taxed at a rate equal to the tax on capital gains (now 15 percent). Estates above $25 million would be taxed at twice the capital gains rate.

In effect, all wealthy estates would be big winners under the House bill - especially the vast majority of estates that would be completely sheltered by the new exemption of $5 million or $10 million.

Even with the House backing away from full repeal, not all Senate Republicans support rollback legislation. Sens. Lincoln Chafee (R) of Rhode Island and George Voinovich (R) of Ohio are concerned about the growth of the federal deficit and the burden of national debt on future generations. Where estate-tax foes dub it the "death tax," Senator Voinovich points to the "birth tax" facing newborn citizens as a result of soaring federal deficits.

"Every child born in this country has $28,000 of debt on his back," says Chris Paulitz, a spokesman for the Ohio lawmaker. "Until we're in the black and not the red, [Voinovich] thinks we should not be doing this type of tax cuts."

At the same time, some Senate Democrats campaigned on a promise to end the estate tax, and will support cuts like those passed in the House.

"It's very reasonable and gets to the heart of what I want to do, which is to provide some certainty to small business[es], which are engines of growth in our economy. These are the jobs that are going overseas," says Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D) of Arkansas. She is one of four Democrats - along with Sens. Max Baucus of Montana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and Bill Nelson of Florida - who voted June 8 to end a filibuster on permanent repeal of the estate tax. She says she would support the House compromise.

Aides to Senate majority leader Bill Frist say he will not bring a bill to the floor without the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster.

The House bill would cost the federal government $279 billion in lost estate-tax revenues between 2006 and 2016, according to Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation. Under current law, the tax is projected to bring in about $400 billion during that time.

In terms of estates that actually pay the tax, "this is only affecting a very small slice - very, very wealthy Americans," says Dr. Slemrod at the University of Michigan. Still, "There are certainly more and more people in the category of having a couple of million dollars to $4 [million] or $5 million of wealth."

Any drop in estate-tax revenues has some effect on virtually all Americans, he adds. "Either they're going to have to cough up more taxes or see a decline in what the government provides."

Traders are worried about disruptions to U.S. fuel supplies during peak summer demand in the northern hemisphere that could deflate the inventory cushion needed in case of supply outages from major exporters such as Nigeria and Iran.

"A spate of refinery outages should be reflected in this week's (U.S. government stock) report," said JPMorgan. "We are assuming deliveries will fall back rather sharply reflecting delivery disruptions along the Calcasieu Ship Channel."

The shipping channel, connecting the refining hub of Lake Charles, Louisiana with the Gulf of Mexico, is expected to be shut two to four more days while the clean-up of an oil spill last week continues, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Monday.

Three oil refineries and a liquefied natural gas terminal in Lake Charles remain cut off to shipping traffic, forcing the refineries to slow fuel production.

Analysts expect the channel closure to reduce crude imports, leading to an 800,000-barrel fall in U.S. crude stocks last week in government data due on Wednesday.

Gasoline supplies could also have fallen for the first time in nine weeks, with strong demand continuing at above 9 million barrels per day (bpd), analysts said in a Reuters survey

.

Government figures last week showed U.S. drivers are buying more motor fuel than last year, despite paying almost $3 a gallon at the pump, while gasoline stocks rose less than expected.

"The shock waves from last week's drop in US gasoline inventories are causing many to re-assess their views on US supply and demand," said Tobin Gorey of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

CHINA BOOM

Implied oil demand in China accelerated 13.5 percent in May from a year ago, nearing the explosive rate of 2004 as refiners boosted output and curbed exports to meet summer demand, according to Reuters calculations based on official data.

The signs of strong demand are easing worries that high oil prices are feeding inflation that could hit economic growth and dampen consumer thirst for oil.

U.S. Federal Reserve policy-makers gathering on June 28-29 are widely expected to raise interest rates and signal further increases may be needed to keep inflation in check.

Adjusted for inflation, oil is at its most expensive since 1980, the year after the Iranian revolution, and is holding near its record $75.35 hit in April after a rally that has taken prices up from $20 at the start of 2002.

The rally has come on fund buying amid fears over real and potential disruptions. OPEC's number-two producer, Iran, repeated on Sunday it stood ready to use its 2.5 million bpd of exports in self-defense if threatened by a dispute over its atomic program.

Qatar's Oil Minister, Abdullah al-Attiyah, said on Monday that despite the soaring market, OPEC was having trouble selling some of its heavier crudes. He added OPEC would likely keep production rates steady when the group next meets in September.

Production in OPEC Nigeria has been cut by a quarter after a series of militant attacks, though Iraq's oil minister sketched a positive outlook Sunday, saying its output had recovered to 2.5 million bpd -- the highest since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Another 14 billion dollars in six-month bills were auctioned at a discount rate of 5.11 percent, up from 5.06 percent last week. The rate was the highest since 5.36 percent on January 2, 2001.

Separately, the U.S. Federal Reserve said Monday that the average yield for one-year Treasury bills, a popular index for making changes in adjustable rate mortgages, rose to 5.24 percent last week from 5.13 percent the previous week.

He urged legislators to approve the deal before a newly elected Congress, with a strong anti-free-trade element, was to be sworn in on July 28.

Ollanta Humala, the presidential runner-up, commented that the free trade deal would reduce the competitive ability of local producers, when subsidized U.S. agricultural goods came on to the Peruvian market.

Toledo signed a bilateral trade agreement with Washington in April, but the deal still has to be approved by the legislatures of both nations.

Marcial Ayaipoma, the legislature's president, said Peru's full Congress was expected to begin considering the free trade agreement on Tuesday.