Group items tagged

In May, Gilo resigned in protest after the government pushed forward a proposal that would leave the US conglomerate and its Israeli partner as the sole operators of both offshore gas rigs.

While the revised draft being pushed by the government would reduce Noble’s holdings in the Tamar reservoir from 36 percent to 24% within six years and remove its veto rights in the partnership, the Texas-based company would still have the privilege of marketing gas from both reservoirs. In April Netanyahu together with Energy and Water Minister Silvan Shalom authorized the sale of natural gas from Israel’s Tamar gas field to private clients in Jordan. Under the terms of the $500 million deal, the Tamar natural gas reservoir partnership was to sell 1.87 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Jordanian companies Arab Potash and its affiliate Jordan Bromine over the next 15 years. In 2013, Israel decided to export 40% of the country’s offshore gas finds, in an effort to transform Israel from an energy importer to a major world player in the gas market.

• Snowden was allowed to leave despite the US having filed a request for Hong Kong to arrest him. Hong Kong’s government said the documents sent by Washington did not fully meet legal requirements, the statement added, so Snowden was allowed to leave. It has since been reported that the US revoked Snowden’s passport on Saturday. It is not clear how he was allowed to leave Hong Kong if this happened. • Snowden is reportedly booked on a flight on Monday from Moscow to Havana, after which he is believed to be heading for another Latin American destination, reported variously as Venezuela or Ecuador. • The Ecuadorean ambassador to Russia is at the airport but said he had not met Snowden and was not entirely sure where he is.  • WikiLeaks has claimed in tweets it "assisted Mr Snowden's political asylum in a democratic country" and that its "legal advisers" are with him, including Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks staffer.

• There has been an angry reaction in the US to news of Snowden’s departure. Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, called Snowden “an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent". • Snowden's departure came on the same day the South China Morning Post carried detailed reports of claims from him about US actions against China, including allegations of the hacking of phone text messages. China has said it is “gravely concerned” about the revelations. The country’s Xinhua news agency called the US “the biggest villain in our age" when it comes to hacking.

Which is actually more homophobic: questioning the Clinton Foundation’s lucrative relationship to those intensely anti-gay regimes, or cheering and defending that relationship? All the evidence points to the latter. But whatever else is true, it is a blatant insult to everyone’s intelligence to claim that the motive of these regimes in transferring millions to the Clinton Foundation is a selfless desire to help them in their noble work. Another primary project of the Clinton Foundation is the elimination of wealth inequality, which “leads to significant economic disparities, both within and among countries, and prevents underserved populations from realizing their potential.” Who could possibly maintain that the reason the Qatari and Emirates regimes donated millions to the Clinton Foundation was their desire to eliminate such economic oppression?

It doesn’t exactly take a jaded disposition to doubt that these donations from some of the world’s most repressive regimes are motivated by a desire to aid the Clinton Foundation’s charitable work. To the contrary, it just requires basic rationality. That’s particularly true given that these regimes “have donated vastly more money to the Clinton Foundation than they have to most other large private charities involved in the kinds of global work championed by the Clinton family.” For some mystifying reason, they seem particularly motivated to transfer millions to the Clinton Foundation but not the other charities around the world doing similar work. Why might that be? What could ever explain it? Some Clinton partisans, unwilling to claim that Gulf tyrants have charity in their hearts when they make these donations to the Clinton Foundation, have settled on a different tactic: grudgingly acknowledging that the motive of these donations is to obtain access and favors, but insisting that no quid pro quo can be proven. In other words, these regimes were tricked: They thought they would get all sorts of favors through these millions in donations, but Hillary Clinton was simply too honest and upstanding of a public servant to fulfill their expectations. The reality is that there is ample evidence uncovered by journalists suggesting that regimes donating money to the Clinton Foundation received special access to and even highly favorable treatment from the Clinton State Department. But it’s also true that nobody can dispositively prove the quid pro quo. Put another way, one cannot prove what was going on inside Hillary Clinton’s head at the time that she gave access to or otherwise acted in the interests of these donor regimes: Was she doing it as a favor in return for those donations, or simply because she has a proven affinity for Gulf State and Arab dictators, or because she was merely continuing decades of U.S. policy of propping up pro-U.S. tyrants in the region?

While this “no quid pro quo proof” may be true as far as it goes, it’s extremely ironic that Democrats have embraced it as a defense of Hillary Clinton. After all, this has long been the primary argument of Republicans who oppose campaign finance reform, and indeed, it was the primary argument of the Citizens United majority, once depicted by Democrats as the root of all evil. But now, Democrats have to line up behind a politician who, along with her husband, specializes in uniting political power with vast private wealth, in constantly exploiting the latter to gain the former, and vice versa. So Democrats are forced to jettison all the good-government principles they previously claimed to believe and instead are now advocating the crux of the right-wing case against campaign finance reform: that large donations from vested factions are not inherently corrupting of politics or politicians. Indeed, as I documented in April, Clinton-defending Democrats have now become the most vocal champions of the primary argument used by the Citizens United majority. “We now conclude,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the Citizens United majority, “that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” That is now exactly the argument Clinton loyalists are spouting to defend the millions in donations from tyrannical regimes (as well as Wall Street banks and hedge funds): Oh, there’s no proof there’s any corruption going on with all of this money. The elusive nature of quid pro quo proof — now the primary Democratic defense of Clinton — has also long been the principal argument wielded by the most effective enemy of campaign finance reform, GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell. This is how USA Today, in 1999, described the arguments of McConnell and his GOP allies when objecting to accusations from campaign finance reform advocates that large financial donations are corrupting:

So if you want to defend the millions of dollars that went from tyrannical regimes to the Clinton Foundation as some sort of wily, pragmatic means of doing good work, go right ahead. But stop insulting everyone’s intelligence by pretending that these donations were motivated by noble ends. Beyond that, don’t dare exploit LGBT rights, AIDS, and other causes to smear those who question the propriety of receiving millions of dollars from the world’s most repressive, misogynistic, gay-hating regimes. Most important, accept that your argument in defense of all these tawdry relationships — that big-money donations do not necessarily corrupt the political process or the politicians who are their beneficiaries — has been and continues to be the primary argument used to sabotage campaign finance reform. Given who their candidate is, Democrats really have no choice but to insist that these sorts of financial relationships are entirely proper (needless to say, Goldman Sachs has also donated millions to the Clinton Foundation, but Democrats proved long ago they don’t mind any of that when they even insisted that it was perfectly fine that Goldman Sachs enriched both Clintons personally with numerous huge speaking fees — though Democrats have no trouble understanding why Trump’s large debts to Chinese banks and Goldman Sachs pose obvious problems). But — just as is true of their resurrecting a Cold War template and its smear tactics against their critics — the benefits derived from this tactic should not obscure how toxic it is and how enduring its consequences will likely be.

The predictable fury across Capitol Hill, with plenty of "hostile nations" rhetoric coupled with the inevitable demonizing of Russian President Vladimir Putin, not to mention NSA spy chief General Keith Alexander, among the usual platitudes about "defending this nation from a terrorist attack", depicting Snowden as an " individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent" - this all reads like lazily written lines in a cheap spy thriller. For the Empire, getting a bloody eye is not taken lightly. Washington is left with wishful thinking that Moscow might detain Snowden. Rubbish. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had even advanced that Russia would consider granting political asylum if Snowden asked for it. And what about this priceless quote from Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman? "I know nothing." Xinhua, for its part, predictably had a field day with it; "Washington should come clean about its record first. The United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age."

Among all the excitement provoked by this thriller, one should not lose focus; the most crucial aspect of the story is Obama and spy supremo Keith Alexander swearing that the Orwellian privatized intelligence-corporate-industrial complex is essential to prevent terrorism. It is not. This is a monumental lie - and Obama is complicit. Former ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame Wilson - outed by Dick Cheney's gang - certainly don't lose their focus in this timely piece. Now to Quito. Danger still looms. But once he's there, it's game, set, match - as I said in this interview. And then HBO should start casting the movie, fast. With Ryan Gosling in the lead. Snowden, of course, should write the screenplay.

Whilst Israel claims them as her very own treasure trove, only a fraction of the sea’s wealth lies in Israel’s bailiwick as maps (iv, v, see below) clearly show. Much is still unexplored, but currently Palestine’s Gaza and the West Bank between them show the greatest discoveries, with anything found in Lebanon and Syria’s territorial waters sure to involve claims from both countries.

In a pre-emptive move, on Christmas Day, Syria announced a deal with Russia to explore 2,190 kilometres (850 Sq. miles) for oil and gas off its Mediterranean coast, to be: “… financed by Russia, and should oil and gas be discovered in commercial quantities, Moscow will recover the exploration costs.” Syrian Oil Minister, Ali Abbas said during the signing ceremony that the contract covers “25 years, over several phases.”

The agreement is reported to have resulted from “months of long negotiations” between the two countries. Russia, as one of the Syrian government’s main backers, looks set to also become a major player in the Levant Basin’s energy wealth. (vi) Lebanon disputes Israel’s map of the Israeli-Lebanese maritime border, filing their own map and claims with the UN in 2010. Israel claims Lebanon is in the process of granting oil and gas exploration licenses in what Israel claims as its “exclusive economic zone.” That the US in the guise of Vice President Joe Biden, as honest broker, acting peace negotiator in the maritime border dispute would be laughable, were it not potential for Israel to attack their neighbour again. In a visit to Israel in March 2010, Biden announced: “There is absolutely no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel’s security- none at all”, also announcing on arrival in Israel:”It’s good to be home.” Given US decades of  “peace brokering” between Israel and Palestine, this is already a road of pitfalls, one sidedness and duplicity, well traveled. There is trouble ahead.

But something else happened to all the intelligence agencies during the war - MI6 as well as MI5. As they grew massively in size they became riddled with factions and infighting. And because all this happened behind a wall of secrecy, there was little to stop things becoming vicious and poisonous.The journalist Phillip Knightley has written a really good history of spies - called The Second Oldest Profession. In it he quotes an agent describing what happened during the war years:"The whole organisation was riddled with nepotism - dim, dreary people of utter unmemorability; sub-men who were doubled up with other sub-men to create an illusion of strength and only doubled the weakness; others made memorable only by poisonous, corrupt malevolence or crass, mulish stupidity; the whole run by a chain of command remarkable for its feebleness. The entire service was decrepit and incompetent."

The case that really shocked Mrs Thatcher was the traitor Geoffrey Prime. In the 1970s he had worked at the top secret listening centre GCHQ and had been selling all it's secrets to the Russians.

And yet again it wasn't MI5 who uncovered his treachery - it was the local police in Cheltenham.In 1982 a policeman came to his house enquiring about his car - a rather distinct two-tone brown and white Mk IV Cortina - a which had been seen in the vicinity of an assault on a young girl.Prime told the policeman that he had been at home all day. But that evening he and his wife Rhona went for a drive to the top of Cleeve Hill. As they sat in the twilight Prime told Rhona that he was the man the police were looking for. And not only that, he was also a Russian spy.

Prime was a paedophile - and had used spying techniques to monitor the activities of thousands of young girls around Cheltenham. He had created a vast set of index cards which showed when the girls were most likely to be alone at home. He then went round to their houses in his two tone Cortina and sexually assaulted them.Despite this Prime had been positively vetted six times. Even the Russians got worried about his paedophile activities and seemed to want to dump him. In 1980 Prime had gone to Vienna to meet the KGB. Instead of meeting him secretly as they normally did, the Russians took him openly to the best restaurants where they knew Western intelligence agents would recognise them as KGB agents.But even then noone noticed them - or Prime.Prime's wife Rhona wrestled with her conscience - and in the end went to the police and told them everything about Prime. He was sent to jail for 35 years for spying and 3 years for the assaults on young girls - which says a lot about the priorities of the British establishment at that time.

The cases of Bettaney and Prime revealed not only just how incompetent MI5 was - but also how sad and seedy the secret world of spies really was.

“We’ve tried to get discovery into whether our client has been surveilled and have been shut down on that,” said Elizabeth Pipkin, a lawyer with McManis Faulkner, the firm representing Ms. Ibrahim pro bono. “They won’t answer that question for us.” The government says that revealing this type of information would jeopardize national security. In April, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. asserted to the court “a formal claim of the state secrets privilege” in the case. In another case, Latif v. Holder, 13 American citizens who have been denied boarding on flights are seeking removal of their names from any watch list, as well as the reasons they have been banned and an opportunity to rebut any derogatory information.

Meanwhile, in Europe,almost everyone was proud of the role which they were playing in the world. All that they read in newspapers and in books or heard from the pulpits of their churches supported the idea that they were serving the non-Europeans by bringing them the benefits of civilization and Christianity. Kipling wrote: “Take up the White Man's burden, Send forth the best ye breed, Go bind your sons to exile, To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild, Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.” On the whole, the mood of Europe during this orgy of external cruelty and exploitation, was self-congratulatory. Can we not see a parallel with the self-congratulatory mood of the American people and their allies, who export violence to the whole world, but who think of themselves as “exceptional”?