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Turkish Police and Protesters Clash in Istanbul's Taksim Square - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-protests-istanbul-turkey.html war & peace Turkey Arab Spring
shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • ISTANBUL — Taksim Square was engulfed in chaos on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning as riot police using tear gas and water cannons forced thousands of protesters from the square, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey struggled to contain a political crisis that has threatened the nation’s economy and paralyzed the government.
  • For nearly two weeks, the prime minister has remained largely defiant, demanding that protesters leave the square, placing armed police officers on standby to sweep the area and insisting that the demonstrations were nothing like the Arab Spring protests that ousted entrenched leaders. But as homemade firebombs and tear gas wafted in the city center it seemed that Mr. Erdogan and his supporters had miscalculated the opposition’s tenacity and conviction.
  • On Monday, he offered to talk on Wednesday — but then sent the police back to clear out the protesters. By Wednesday morning, the operation had succeeded, but anger over Mr. Erdogan’s handling of the protests had not abated. The Associated Press reported from Ankara that thousands of black-robed lawyers left courthouses around the country on Wednesday to protest the behavior of the police. And a group of protesters that had been invited to meet with Mr. Erdogan did not include representatives of Taksim Solidarity, an umbrella organization, which said in a statement reported by the Zaman newspaper that while “police violence” continued around Gezi Park, such meetings would produce nothing. The outcome of that meeting, which began late in the afternoon, was not immediately clear.
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  • Three people have been killed and at least 4,947 injured in the violence.
  • When the day began it appeared that the government had a cautious strategy aimed at reining in the protests by clearing the square, but leaving the demonstrators in the park. A Twitter message from the provincial governor, Huseyin Avni Mutlu, said, “This morning you are in the safe hands of your police brothers.” But there was so much distrust in the park that demonstrators began girding for an attack. Some scribbled their blood types on their arms in ink, in case they needed emergency care. Doctors in a makeshift medical tent were ready to tend to those suffering the effects of tear gas.
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US plan to arm Syrian rebels receives cool reactions | The Times of Israel - 0 views

www.timesofisrael.com/rebels-receives-cool-reactions war & peace syria WMD
shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Syrian rebels firing locally made shells made from gas cylinders against the Syrian forces, in Idlib province, northern Syria, Tuesday, May 21, 2013 (photo credit: (AP Photo/Edlib News Network ENN, File)
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Jun 13
     
    Don't miss this Associated Press photo ofr Syrian "rebels" firing an artillery piece with a large gas container protruding from the barrel. Then contrast that with White House claims that they have no reason to suspect that rebels are using chemical weapons. 
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Startup turns carbon dioxide into fuels - 0 views

phys.org/...rtup-carbon-dioxide-fuels.html syngas synfuels energy Clean-Energy carbon dioxide
shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The research has received funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFSOR), the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy (DOE). The collaboration between Liquid Light and the University was supported by the DOE Small Business Innovation Research program and the AFOSR Small Business Technology Transfer program. Princeton's agreement with Liquid Light allowed the company to continue to collaborate with Bocarsly and his research team. Before long, new discoveries were emerging. "They started noticing interesting chemistry that we wouldn't have predicted," said Bocarsly.
  • The Princeton scientists did some additional studies, and made a surprising discovery: They could turn CO2, which contains only one carbon, into a compound with a carbon-carbon bond, which vastly increases the possibilities for creating commercial applications. This was radical because although the reaction is certainly possible, it is highly unlikely to happen because so many other competing reactions are occurring. "Everyone who electrochemically reduces CO2 today makes compounds with only one carbon," said Bocarsly. "Nobody makes things with carbon-carbon bonds." He paused. "But we can." "That was a very 'wow' moment," recalled Cole, "because we thought that our process could only make methanol. But now we were finding that we could make a variety of products, and that is what makes this technology commercially interesting." She said Liquid Light scientists can now make more than 20 different products from CO2.
  • One of the chemicals Liquid Light can make is isopropanol, commonly known as rubbing alcohol and an important industrial chemical. Another is butanol, which could be commercially important as a fuel. Liquid Light's technology offers the potential to make these chemicals at lower cost than today's methods, which involve starting with fossil fuels such as petroleum and natural gas.
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  • Why does pyridinium work so well as a catalyst for the reaction? Based on its structure, the ring-shaped molecule is an unlikely catalyst for this reaction because it shuttles just one electron at a time. But to convert CO2 to methanol requires six electrons, and to make higher-carbon molecules takes even more electrons. Bocarsly and his team — in collaboration with Steven Bernasek, professor of chemistry — are doing studies to understand the steps in the chemical reaction, and they are making rapid progress. "There are clearly some intermediate products formed during the reaction that do not sit around for a long time and are not there in very high concentrations," said Bocarsly.
  • The Princeton team also is studying the factors that determine which products can be made from CO2. The researchers have found that very subtle changes in the electrode surface can lead to production of different chemicals. For example, CO2 plus a pyridinium catalyst and a platinum electrode make methanol. However, the same catalyst and a different electrode give a different product. The team published its findings on how the reaction is affected by catalyst concentration, temperature and pressure in the journal ChemSusChem last year.
  • Citing government statistics that the United States generates about 5.5 billion metric tons of CO2 per year, Teamey said it will not be hard to obtain the starting materials for this new industry. However, the CO2 needs to be relatively pure, a requirement that rules out gasoline tailpipes and coal-fired power plants. Instead, said Teamey, the CO2 could come from manufacturing facilities, such as fertilizer manufacturers and cement plants, which according to Teamey emit some 100 million tons of high-purity CO2 each year.
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Feb 14
     
    "Today, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a hot topic. Scientists around the globe are searching for ways to store, dispose of, or prevent the formation of the greenhouse gas, which is a major driver of global climate change. Liquid Light hopes to take this concept one step further and harness waste CO2 as a source of carbon to make industrial chemicals and fuels. The technology behind the process is simple: Take CO2 and mix it in a water-filled chamber with an electrode and a catalyst. The ensuing chemical reaction converts CO2 into a new molecule, methanol, which can be used as a fuel, an industrial solvent or a starting material for the manufacture of other chemicals. Liquid Light's founders include Bocarsly and his former graduate student Emily Cole, who earned her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2009. Cole helped revive efforts in Bocarsly's lab to study the conversion of CO2 into usable fuels, which led to the launch of Liquid Light and an ongoing collaboration that Bocarsly said has been extremely positive for his research team at the University. "We've made some discoveries that wouldn't have been made in a university setting, and this has really accelerated the research," Bocarsly said. "It is a very productive relationship." Back in the 1990s, a former Ph.D. student of Bocarsly's named Chao Lin conducted some of the earliest experiments on turning CO2 into methanol. He used palladium metal as the electrode and pyridinium, an inexpensive ring-shaped molecule, as the catalyst. By plugging the electrode into an electrical outlet, he could drive an electrochemical reaction that converted CO2 into methanol. As Bocarsly recalled, Lin was quite excited about his success. However, said Bocarsly, "We published that finding in 1994 and there was approximately zero interest in it." The work languished until 2005 when Cole, then a new graduate student, told Bocarsly she wanted to work on a clean-energy project. She took up the challenge of reproducing Lin's results, but this time
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Seymour M. Hersh · The Red Line and the Rat Line · LRB 6 April 2014 - 0 views

www.lrb.co.uk/...the-red-line-and-the-rat-line Syria Gun-running Benghazi-coverup Seymour-Hersh
shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.[*]​＊ Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14
     
    Sy Hersh walks us through his investigation into the reasons behind Obama's last-minute decision to postpone missile (and as it turns out, B52) strikes on Syria. His trail leads through the Benghazi incident and the CIA's running of weapons from Libya to jihadists in Syria (the "rat line") through Turkey engineering a false flag gas attack in Syria to draw Obama into attacking Syria for crossing his "red line" against Syrian use of chemical weapons. Note that Hersh's account of the "red line" events largely fits with the earlier accounts by Yossef Bodansky.  http://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/Middle-East/Syrian-Chemical-Attack-More-Evidence-Only-Leads-to-More-Questions.html http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/09/09/new-granular-evidence-points-to-saudi-involvement-in-syrias-chemical-weapons-terror-attack/ http://www.globalresearch.ca/did-the-white-house-help-plan-the-syrian-chemical-attack Note however that Hersh's account omits Bodansky's evidence that the U.S. State Department and CIA were part of the planning for the false flag attack.
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  • Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14
     
    Note also the previous account by Wayne Madsen of events leading Obama to postpone his atack on Syria. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2013/09/04/american-generals-stand-between-war-and-peace.html "Obama is faced with another grim reality. Some within the Pentagon ranks are so displeased with Obama's policies on Syria, they have let certain members of Congress of both parties know that «smoking gun» proof exists that Obama and CIA director John O. Brennan personally authorized the transfer of arms and personnel from Al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al Sharia Islamist rebels in Libya to Syria's Jabhat al Nusra rebels, who are also linked to Al Qaeda, in what amounts to an illegal «Iran-contra»-like scandal. The proof is said to be highly «[un]impeachable»." This is another "red line" / "rat line" tie, suggesting that the reason the Benghazi investigation has not produced an even larger scandal is that it would expose the War Party's efforts to supply captured Libyan arms to jihadists in Syria.  On the Iran/Contra parallel, note that bills to approve supply of weapons to Syrian "rebels" were then stalled in Congress, evidencing Congressional intent that it rather than the President would authorize arming the "rebel" forces. The fact that CIA and the State Dept. were already covertly doing so completes the Iran/Contra scandal analogy.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14
     
    See also Hersh's article in December 2013, establishing that the White House had "cooked" the alleged evidence offered in support of Obama's claim that Syria had been responsible for the attack. It also establishes Obama's prior knowledge that the "rebel" forces had sarin weapons. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Apr 14
     
    "The Red Line and the Rat Line: Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels excerpt/intro: In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the 'red line' he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.​＊ Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad's offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous. Obama's change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn't match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army's chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn't hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria's infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack."
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Turkey Cooks the Books in Syria | The American Conservative - 0 views

www.theamericanconservative.com/...urkey-cooks-the-books-in-syria war & peace Syria Turkey U.S.-foreign-policy false-flag
shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • If you had been a reader of The American Conservative magazine back in December 2011, you might have learned from an article written by me that “Unmarked NATO warplanes are arriving at Turkish military bases close to Iskenderum on the Syrian border, delivering weapons [to the Free Syrian Army] derived from Colonel Muammar gaddafi’s arsenals…” Well, it seems that the rest of the media is beginning to catch up with the old news, supplemented with significant details by Sy Hersh in the latest issue of the London Review of Books in an article entitled “The Red Line and the Rat Line.” The reality is that numerous former intelligence officials, like myself, have long known most of the story surrounding the on-again off-again intervention by the United States and others in Syria, but what was needed was a Sy Hersh, with his unmatched range of contacts deep in both the Pentagon as well as at CIA and State Department, to stitch it all together with corroboration from multiple sources. In a sense it was a secret that wasn’t really very well hidden but which the mainstream media wouldn’t touch with a barge pole because it revealed that the Obama Administration, just like the Bushies who preceded it, has been actively though clandestinely conspiring to overthrow yet another government in the Middle East. One might well conclude that the White House is like the Bourbon Kings of France in that it never forgets anything but never learns anything either.
  • The few media outlets that are willing to pick up the Syria story even now are gingerly treating it as something new, jumping in based on their own editorial biases, sometimes emphasizing the CIA and MI6 role in cooperating with the Turks to undermine Bashar al-Assad. But Hersh’s tale is only surprising if one had not been reading between the lines over the past three years, where the clandestine role of the British and American governments was evident and frequently reported on over the internet and, most particularly, in the local media in the Middle East. Far from being either rogue or deliberately deceptive, operations by the U.S. and UK intelligence services, the so-called “ratlines” feeding weapons into Syria, were fully vetted and approved by both the White House and Number 10 Downing Street. The more recent exposure of the Benghazi CIA base’s possible involvement in obtaining Libyan arms as part of the process of equipping the Syrian insurgents almost blew the lid off of the arrangement but somehow the media attention was diverted by a partisan attack on the Obama Administration over who said what and when to explain the security breakdown and the real story sank out of sight.
  • So this is what happened, roughly speaking: the United States had been seeking the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria since at least 2003, joining with Saudi Arabia, which had been funding efforts to destabilize his regime even earlier. Why? Because from the Saudi viewpoint Syria was an ally of Iran and was also a heretical state led by a secular government dominated by Alawite Muslims, viewed as being uncomfortably close to Shi’ites in their apostasy. From the U.S. viewpoint, the ties to Iran and reports of Syrian interference in Lebanon were a sufficient casus belli coupled with a geostrategic assessment shared with the Saudis that Syria served as the essential land bridge connecting Hezbollah in Lebanon to Iran. The subsequent Congressional Syria Accountability Acts of 2004 and 2010, like similar legislation directed against Iran, have resulted in little accountability and have instead stifled diplomacy. They punished Syria with sanctions for supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon and for its links to Tehran, making any possible improvement in relations problematical. The 2010 Act even calls for steps to bring about regime change in Damascus. The United States also engaged in a program eerily reminiscent of its recent moves to destabilize the government in Ukraine, i.e., sending in ambassadors and charges who deliberately provoked the Syrian government by meeting with opposition leaders and openly making demands for greater democracy. The last U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford spoke openly in support of the protesters while serving in Damascus in 2010. On one occasion he was pelted with tomatoes and was eventually removed over safety concerns.
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  • Lost in translation is the fact that Washington’s growing support for radical insurgency in Syria would also inevitably destabilize all its neighbors, most notably including Iraq, which has indeed been the case, making a shambles of U.S. claims that it was seeking to introduce stable democracies into the region. Some also saw irony in the fact that a few years before Washington decided al-Assad was an enemy it had been sending victims of the CIA’s rendition program to Syria, suggesting that at least some short-term and long-term strategies were on a collision course from the start, if indeed the advocates of the two policies were actually communicating with each other at all. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, whose country shared a long border with Syria and who had legitimate security concerns relating to Kurdish separatists operating out of the border region, became the proxy in the secret war for Washington and its principal European allies, the British and French. When the U.S.-Saudi supported insurgency began to heat up and turn violent, Turkey became the key front line state in pushing for aggressive action against Damascus. Erdogan miscalculated, thinking that al-Assad was on his last legs, needing only a push to force him out, and Ankara saw itself as ultimately benefiting from a weak Syria with a Turkish-controlled buffer zone along the border to keep the Kurds in check.
  • Hersh reports how President Barack Obama had to back down from attacking Syria when the Anglo-American intelligence community informed him flatly and unambiguously that Damascus was not responsible for the poison gas attack that took place in Damascus on August 21, 2013 that was being exploited as a casus belli. The information supporting that assertion was known to many like myself who move around the fringes of the intelligence community, but the real revelation from Hersh is the depth of Turkish involvement in the incident in order to have the atrocity be exploitable as a pretext for American armed intervention, which, at that point, Erdogan strongly desired. As the use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians was one of the red lines that Obama had foolishly promoted regarding Syria Erdogan was eager to deliver just that to force the U.S.’s hand. Relying on unidentified senior U.S. intelligence sources, Hersh demonstrates how Turkey’s own preferred militant group Jabhat al-Nusra, which is generally regarded as an al-Qaeda affiliate, apparently used Turkish-provided chemicals and instructions to stage the attack.
  • Is it all true? Unless one has access to the same raw information as Sy Hersh it is difficult to say with any certainty, but I believe I know who some of the sources are and they both have good access to intelligence and are reliable. Plus, the whole narrative has an undeniable plausibility, particularly if one also considers other evidence of Erdogan’s willingness to take large risks coupled with a more general Turkish underhandedness relating to Syria. On March 23rd, one week before local elections in Turkey that Erdogan feared would go badly for him, a Turkish air force F-16 shot down a Syrian Mig-23, claiming that it had strayed half a mile into Turkish airspace. The pilot who bailed out, claimed that he was attacking insurgent targets at least four miles inside the border when he was shot down, an assertion borne out by physical evidence as the plane’s remains landed inside Syria. Was Erdogan demonstrating how tough he could be just before elections? Possibly.
  • Critics of Hersh claim that the Turks would be incapable of carrying out such a grand subterfuge, but I would argue that putting together some technicians, chemicals, and a couple of trucks to carry the load are well within the capability of MIT, an organization that I have worked with and whose abilities I respect. And one must regard with dismay the “tangled webs we weave,” with due credit to Bobby Burns, for what has subsequently evolved in Syria. Allies like Turkey that are willing to cook the books to bring about military action are exploiting the uncertainty of a White House that continues to search for foreign policy successes while simultaneously being unable to define any genuine American interests. Syria is far from an innocent in the ensuing mayhem, but it has become the fall guy for a whole series of failed policies. Turkey meanwhile has exploited the confusion to clamp down on dissent and to institutionalize Erdogan’s authoritarian inclinations. Ten years of American-licensed meddling combined with obliviousness to possible consequences has led to in excess of 100,000 dead Syrians and the introduction of large terrorist infrastructures into the Arab heartland, yet another foreign policy disaster in the making with no clear way out.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Apr 14
     
    Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi adds valuable context to revelations of Turkey's involvement in the false flag Sarin gas attack in Syria and in Turkey's follow-up plan to stage a false flag attack on a Turkish tomb in Syria as a pretext for Turkish invasion of Syria. 
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Global carbon dioxide levels break 400ppm milestone | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-levels-break-400ppm-milestone environment climate change
shared by Paul Merrell on 08 May 15 - No Cached
  • Record carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere were reported worldwide in March, in what scientists said marked a significant milestone for global warming. Figures released by the US science agency Noaa on Wednesday show that for the first time since records began, the parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere were over 400 globally for a month. The measure is the key indicator of the amount of planet-warming gases man is putting into the atmosphere at record rates, and the current concentrations are unprecedented in millions of years. The new global record follows the breaking of the 400ppm CO2 threshold in some local areas in 2012 and 2013, and comes nearly three decades after what is considered the ‘safe’ level of 350ppm was passed.
  • “Reaching 400ppm as a global average is a significant milestone,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist on Noaa’s greenhouse gas network. “This marks the fact that humans burning fossil fuels have caused global carbon dioxide concentrations to rise more than 120ppm since pre-industrial times,” added Tans. “Half of that rise has occurred since 1980.”
  • Paul Merrell on 08 May 15
     
    Combustion as an energy source has to end.
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Saudis offer Russia secret oil deal if it drops Syria - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...il-deal-if-it-drops-Syria.html war & peace syria U.S. foreign policy Saudis Russia secret negotiations
shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia has secretly offered Russia a sweeping deal to control the global oil market and safeguard Russia’s gas contracts, if the Kremlin backs away from the Assad regime in Syria.
  • The revelations come amid high tension in the Middle East, with US, British, and French warship poised for missile strikes in Syria. Iran has threatened to retaliate. The strategic jitters pushed Brent crude prices to a five-month high of $112 a barrel. “We are only one incident away from a serious oil spike. The market is a lot tighter than people think,” said Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review. Leaked transcripts of a closed-door meeting between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan shed an extraordinary light on the hard-nosed Realpolitik of the two sides. Prince Bandar, head of Saudi intelligence, allegedly confronted the Kremlin with a mix of inducements and threats in a bid to break the deadlock over Syria. “Let us examine how to put together a unified Russian-Saudi strategy on the subject of oil. The aim is to agree on the price of oil and production quantities that keep the price stable in global oil markets,” he said at the four-hour meeting with Mr Putin. They met at Mr Putin’s dacha outside Moscow three weeks ago.
  • “We understand Russia’s great interest in the oil and gas in the Mediterranean from Israel to Cyprus. And we understand the importance of the Russian gas pipeline to Europe. We are not interested in competing with that. We can cooperate in this area,” he said, purporting to speak with the full backing of the US.
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  • The talks appear to offer an alliance between the OPEC cartel and Russia, which together produce over 40m barrels a day of oil, 45pc of global output. Such a move would alter the strategic landscape. The details of the talks were first leaked to the Russian press. A more detailed version has since appeared in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, which has Hezbollah links and is hostile to the Saudis. As-Safir said Prince Bandar pledged to safeguard Russia’s naval base in Syria if the Assad regime is toppled, but he also hinted at Chechen terrorist attacks on Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi if there is no accord. “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us,” he allegedly said. Prince Bandar went on to say that Chechens operating in Syria were a pressure tool that could be switched on an off. “These groups do not scare us. We use them in the face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role in Syria’s political future.”
  • The Putin-Bandar meeting was stormy, replete with warnings of a “dramatic turn” in Syria. Mr Putin was unmoved by the Saudi offer, though western pressure has escalated since then. “Our stance on Assad will never change. We believe that the Syrian regime is the best speaker on behalf of the Syrian people, and not those liver eaters,” he said, referring to footage showing a Jihadist rebel eating the heart and liver of a Syrian soldier. Prince Bandar in turn warned that there can be “no escape from the military option” if Russia declines the olive branch. Events are unfolding exactly as he foretold.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Aug 13
     
    Note particularly that the Saudi intelligence chief allegedly negotiated on the U.S. behalf as well. This tends to support my conclusion in a comment yesterday that U.S. military strikes on Syria could not happen without agreement by the Russians not to react militarily. 
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North Dakota Allows Cops To Arm Their Drones With Tasers And Tear Gas | ThinkProgress - 0 views

thinkprogress.org/...north-dakota-taser-drones war & peace police-militarization drones weaponization
shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • There’s a new sheriff on the high plains. Or rather, just above them. North Dakota’s police agencies can fly drones armed with Tasers, tear gas, bean-bag cannons, and other “less-lethal” weapons, thanks to fierce lobbying from the law enforcement industry on a bill that was initially meant to restrict police use of the flying robots rather than outfit them with weapons. While other local police departments have flirted with weaponizing their drones, North Dakota is the first state to explicitly allow the armaments. When State Rep. Rick Becker introduced H.B. 1328, the law both banned weaponized drones and established a procedure for law enforcement to seek a warrant before using drones in searches. Only the warrant requirement survived. After stiff lobbying and a multi-stage public relations effort by law enforcement and drone proponents, first reported by The Daily Beast, the version of the bill that ultimately passed authorized police to arm their unmanned aerial vehicles with sound cannons, pepper spray, and other weapons not designed to kill. The weaponization of law enforcement drones could facilitate police abuse of force. Military drone pilots can develop a “Playstation mentality” toward their deadly work, according to United Nations official. The physical remove of a drone pilot desensitizes him, the thinking goes, and makes it easier to be rash about deploying his armaments. Pilots themselves contest this desensitization claim, however, and there’s reason to think military drone operators experience post-traumatic stress disorder despite sitting far from the battlefield.
  • Police drones won’t have Hellfire missiles, of course. But the weapons North Dakota’s law enforcement drones are authorized to use under state law are still capable of causing serious injury and death. 39 people have been killed by police Tasers in 2015 thusfar, according to The Guardian. Rubber bullets can kill, and most non-lethal weapons can inflict grievous and lasting harm. Law enforcement operations are already monitoring civil rights activists affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, using a combination of undercover officers, social media snooping, and cell phone monitoring technology called Stingray. An FBI-provided aerial surveillance plane was also on hand during the unrest in Baltimore following the killing of Freddie Gray by police. Should drones equipped with remote-controlled Tasers and tear gas come into wider use, it seems likely they’d be incorporated into crowd control and demonstration monitoring efforts. In such uses, officers far from the scene of unrest could make bloodless decisions about how to deploy drone weaponry, potentially escalating tense situations.
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US's Saudi Oil Deal from Win-Win to Mega-Loose | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...eal-from-win-win-to-mega-loose must-read banksters big oil Saudis Russia shale-oil U.S.-foreign-policy
shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Who would’ve thought it would come to this? Certainly not the Obama Administration, and their brilliant geo-political think-tank neo-conservative strategists. John Kerry’s brilliant “win-win” proposal of last September during his September 11 Jeddah meeting with ailing Saudi King Abdullah was simple: Do a rerun of the highly successful State Department-Saudi deal in 1986 when Washington persuaded the Saudis to flood the world market at a time of over-supply in order to collapse oil prices worldwide, a kind of “oil shock in reverse.” In 1986 was successful in helping to break the back of a faltering Soviet Union highly dependent on dollar oil export revenues for maintaining its grip on power. So, though it was not made public, Kerry and Abdullah agreed on September 11, 2014 that the Saudis would use their oil muscle to bring Putin’s Russia to their knees today.
  • It seemed brilliant at the time no doubt. On the following day, 12 September 2014, the US Treasury’s aptly-named Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, headed by Treasury Under-Secretary David S. Cohen, announced new sanctions against Russia’s energy giants gazprom, gazprom Neft, Lukoil, Surgutneftgas and Rosneft. It forbid US oil companies to participate with the Russian companies in joint ventures for oil or gas offshore or in the Arctic. Then, just as the ruble was rapidly falling and Russian major corporations were scrambling for dollars for their year-end settlements, a collapse of world oil prices would end Putin’s reign. That was clearly the thinking of the hollowed-out souls who pass for statesmen in Washington today. Victoria Nuland was jubilant, praising the precision new financial warfare weapon at David Cohen’s Treasury financial terrorism unit. In July, 2014 West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark price for US domestic oil pricing, traded at $101 a barrel. The shale oil bonanza was booming, making the US into a major oil player for the first time since the 1970’s. When WTI hit $46 at the beginning of January this year, suddenly things looked different. Washington realized they had shot themselves in the foot.
  • They realized that the over-indebted US shale oil industry was about to collapse under the falling oil price. Behind the scenes Washington and Wall Street colluded to artificially stabilize what then was an impending chain-reaction bankruptcy collapse in the US shale oil industry. As a result oil prices began a slow rise, hitting $53 in February. The Wall Street and Washington propaganda mills began talking about the end of falling oil prices. By May prices had crept up to $62 and almost everyone was convinced oil recovery was in process. How wrong they were.
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  • Since that September 11 Kerry-Abdullah meeting (curious date to pick, given the climate of suspicion that the Bush family is covering up involvement of the Saudis in or around the events of September 11, 2001), the Saudis have a new ageing King, Absolute Monarch and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman, replacing the since deceased old ageing King, Abdullah. However, the Oil Minister remains unchanged—79-year-old Ali al-Naimi. It was al-Naimi who reportedly saw the golden opportunity in the Kerry proposal to use the chance to at the same time kill off the growing market challenge from the rising output of the unconventional USA shale oil industry. Al-Naimi has said repeatedly that he is determined to eliminate the US shale oil “disturbance” to Saudi domination of world oil markets. Not only are the Saudis unhappy with the US shale oil intrusion on their oily Kingdom. They are more than upset with the recent deal the Obama Administration made with Iran that will likely lead in several months to lifting Iran economic sanctions. In fact the Saudis are beside themselves with rage against Washington, so much so that they have openly admitted an alliance with arch foe, Israel, to combat what they see as the Iran growing dominance in the region—in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq.
  • This has all added up to an iron Saudi determination, aided by close Gulf Arab allies, to further crash oil prices until the expected wave of shale oil company bankruptcies—that was halted in January by Washington and Wall Street manipulations—finishes off the US shale oil competition. That day may come soon, but with unintended consequences for the entire global financial system at a time such consequences can ill be afforded. According to a recent report by Wall Street bank, Morgan Stanley, a major player in crude oil markets, OPEC oil producers have been aggressively increasing oil supply on the already glutted world market with no hint of a letup. In its report Morgan Stanley noted with visible alarm, “OPEC has added 1.5 million barrels/day to global supply in the last four months alone…the oil market is currently 800,000 barrels/day oversupplied. This suggests that the current oversupply in the oil market is fully due to OPEC’s production increase since February alone.” The Wall Street bank report adds the disconcerting note, “We anticipated that OPEC would not cut, but we didn’t foresee such a sharp increase.” In short, Washington has completely lost its strategic leverage over Saudi Arabia, a Kingdom that had been considered a Washington vassal ever since FDR’s deal to bring US oil majors in on an exclusive basis in 1945.
  • That breakdown in US-Saudi communication adds a new dimension to the recent June 18 high-level visit to St. Petersburg by Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister and son of King Salman, to meet President Vladimir Putin. The meeting was carefully prepared by both sides as the two discussed up to $10 billion of trade deals including Russian construction of peaceful nuclear power reactors in the Kingdom and supplying of advanced Russian military equipment and Saudi investment in Russia in agriculture, medicine, logistics, retail and real estate. Saudi Arabia today is the world’s largest oil producer and Russia a close second. A Saudi-Russian alliance on whatever level was hardly in the strategy book of the Washington State Department planners.…Oh shit! Now that OPEC oil glut the Saudis have created has cracked the shaky US effort to push oil prices back up. The price fall is being further fueled by fears that the Iran deal will add even more to the glut, and that the world’s second largest oil importer, China, may cut back imports or at least not increase them as their economy slows down. The oil market time bomb detonated in the last week of June. The US price of WTI oil went from $60 a barrel then, a level at which at least many shale oil producers can stay afloat a bit longer, to $49 on July 29, a drop of more than 18% in four weeks, tendency down. Morgan Stanley sounded loud alarm bells, stating that if the trend of recent weeks continues, “this downturn would be more severe than that in 1986. As there was no sharp downturn in the 15 years before that, the current downturn could be the worst of the last 45+ years. If this were to be the case, there would be nothing in our experience that would be a guide to the next phases of this cycle…In fact, there may be nothing in analyzable history.”
  • October is the next key point for bank decisions to roll-over US shale company loans or to keep extending credit on the (until now) hope that prices will slowly recover. If as strongly hinted, the Federal Reserve hikes US interest rates in September for the first time in the eight years since the global financial crisis erupted in the US real estate market in 2007, the highly-indebted US shale oil producers face disaster of a new scale. Until the past few weeks the volume of US shale oil production has remained at the maximum as shale producers desperately try to maximize cash flow, ironically, laying the seeds of the oil glut globally that will be their demise. The reason US shale oil companies have been able to continue in business since last November and not declare bankruptcy is the ongoing Federal Reserve zero interest rate policy that leads banks and other investors to look for higher interest rates in the so-called “High Yield” bond market. Back in the 1980’s when they were first created by Michael Millken and his fraudsters at Drexel Burnham Lambert, Wall Street appropriately called them “junk bonds” because when times got bad, like now for Shale companies, they turned into junk. A recent UBS bank report states, “the overall High-Yield market has doubled in size; sectors that witnessed more buoyant issuance in recent years, like energy and metals mining, have seen debt outstanding triple or quadruple.”
  • Assuming that the most recent downturn in WTI oil prices continues week after week into October, there well could be a panic run to sell billions of dollars of those High-Yield, high-risk junk bonds. As one investment analyst notes, “when the retail crowd finally does head for the exits en masse, fund managers will be forced to come face to face with illiquid secondary corporate credit markets where a lack of market depth…has the potential to spark a fire sale.” The problem is that this time, unlike in 2008, the Federal Reserve has no room to act. Interest rates are already near zero and the Fed has bought trillions of dollars of bank bad debt to prevent a chain-reaction US bank panic. One option that is not being discussed at all in Washington would be for Congress to repeal the disastrous 1913 Federal Reserve Act that gave control of our nation’s money to a gang of private bankers, and to create a public National Bank, owned completely by the United States Government, that could issue credit and sell Federal debt without the intermediaries of corrupt Wall Street bankers as the Constitution intended. At the same time they could completely nationalize the six or seven “Too Big To Fail” banks behind the entire financial mess that is destroying the foundations of the United States and by extension of the role of the dollar as world reserve currency, of most of the world.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 15
     
    I give a lot of credibility to this article's author when it comes to matters involving the oil market. Remember when reading that the only thing propping up the U.S. dollar is the Saudi (later extended to all OPEC nations) insistence that they be paid for their oil and natural gas in U.S. dollars, which creates artificial demand for the dollar globally. If the Gulf Coast States begin accepting payment in rubles or yuan, it is curtains for the U.S. dollar in global markets.  
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Crude price drop triggers major layoffs in US oil industry - RT USA - 0 views

www.rt.com/...217959-us-oil-industry-prices war & peace economic warfare U.S.-foreign-policy blowback oil-buttle
shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Thousands of recently highly paid workers have been laid off after the oil price plummeted 50 percent in 2014. At least four American oil-producing states are already facing budget problems due to decreasing oil revenues. The price plunge has affected petroleum production in all oil-extracting countries, including the US.
  • For Texas, which has a far larger and more diversified economy than Louisiana, the oil price downturn is no good either. In just October and November Texas lost 2,300 oil and gas jobs, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week. Through the last half a year the state has been losing $83 million in potential revenue every day, the Greater Houston Partnership recently reported. They blamed this on crashing price of its West Texas Intermediate crude oil, which has depreciated to $54.73 per barrel this week, from more than $100 six months ago.
  • This doesn’t apply to the state of Alaska. According to the NYT, approximately 90 percent of state’s budget is formed from oil revenues. Alaska’s government is considering a 50 percent capital-spending cut for bridges and roads in the face of the oil price drop, with Moody’s, the credit rating service, lowering Alaska’s credit outlook from stable to negative. The state of Louisiana’s 2015-16 budget is going to be $1.4 billion short, with 162 state government positions already eliminated and more to be discontinued starting from January. Contracts and projects are being either reduced or frozen in state agencies. According to the state’s chief economist Greg Albrecht, for every $1 fall in price of an annual average barrel of oil, Louisiana loses $12 million.
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  • Now according to Tom Runiewicz, a US industry economist at IHS Global Insight, if oil stays around $56 a barrel till the middle of the next year, companies providing services to oil and gas industry could lose 40,000 jobs by the end of 2015, while oil and gas equipment manufacturers could slash up to 6,000 jobs.
  • The situation in other oil-extracting states could be even worse. In a study published last year, the Council on Foreign Relations warned the largest job losses caused by sharp decline in oil prices are going to take place in North Dakota, Oklahoma and Wyoming, where the number of drilling rigs is decreasing.
  • Currently cheap fuel is still believed to be providing an overall boost to the US economy, as consumers can spend less on gasoline and more on shopping and services. But for the American energy sector the future looks less bright. It’s effecting places like Alaska, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, the New York Times reports. US oil experts recall the 1980s oil price downturn, accompanied by economic disasters around the globe and arguably becoming one of the causes of the fall of the Soviet Union. Some experts are positive and say America’s oil-producing states won’t suffer too much because they “diversified their economies.”
  • These workers can earn more than $1,700 a week, much higher than the average $848 a week payment for other workers, the WSJ reported. When experienced workers lose their highly paid jobs, they stop paying their bills. There are also fears of a house-price slump. Fitch Ratings has already warned that with the price of oil continuing to plummet, home prices in Texas “may be unsustainable.”
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 14
     
    The oil bubble is beginning to burst. Blowback. 
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Asia Times Online :: Russia, China mock divide and rule - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...WOR-02-231214.html war & peace economic-warfare China Russia U.S.-foreign-policy
shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • At the symposium, held in a divinely frescoed former 15th century Dominican refectory now part of the Italian parliament's library, Sergey Glazyev, on the phone from Moscow, gave a stark reading of Cold War 2.0. There's no real "government" in Kiev; the US ambassador is in charge. An anti-Russia doctrine has been hatched in Washington to foment war in Europe - and European politicians are its collaborators. Washington wants a war in Europe because it is losing the competition with China. Glazyev addressed the sanctions dementia: Russia is trying simultaneously to reorganize the politics of the International Monetary Fund, fight capital flight and minimize the effect of banks closing credit lines for many businessmen. Yet the end result of sanctions, he says, is that Europe will be the ultimate losers economically; bureaucracy in Europe has lost economic focus as American geopoliticians have taken over.
  • What he did emphasize was this was outright financial war, helped by a fifth column in the Russian establishment. The only equal component in this asymmetrical war was nuclear forces. And yet Russia would not surrender. Leontyev characterized Europe not as a historical subject but as an object: "The European project is an American project." And "democracy" had become fiction. The run on the rouble came and went like a devastating economic hurricane. Yet you don't threat a checkmate against a skilled chess player unless your firepower is stronger than Jupiter's lightning bolt. Moscow survived. gazprom heeded the request of President Vladimir Putin and will sell its US dollar reserves on the domestic market. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier went on the record against the EU further "turning the screw" as in more counterproductive sanctions against Moscow. And at his annual press conference, Putin emphasized how Russia would weather the storm.
  • Essentially, the Empire of Chaos is bluffing, using Europe as pawns. The Empire of Chaos is as lousy at chess as it is at history. What it excels in is in upping the ante to force Russia to back down. Russia won't back down.
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  • Russia could outmaneuver Western financial markets by cutting them off from its wealth of oil and natural gas. The markets would inevitably collapse - uncontrolled chaos for the Empire of Chaos (or "controlled chaos", in Putin's own words). Imagine the crumbling of the quadrillion-plus of derivatives. It would take years for the "West" to replace Russian oil and natural gas, but the EU's economy would be instantly devastated. Just this lightning-bolt Western attack on the rouble - and oil prices - using the crushing power of Wall Street firms had already shaken European banks exposed to Russia to the core; their credit default swaps soared. Imagine those banks collapsing in a Lehman Brothers-style house of cards if Russia decided to default - thus unleashing a chain reaction. Think about a non-nuclear MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) - in fact warless. Still, Russia is self-sufficient in all kinds of energy, mineral wealth and agriculture. Europe isn't. This could become the lethal result of war by sanctions.
  • Russia could always deploy an economic "nuclear" option, declaring a moratorium on its foreign debt. Then, if Western banks seized Russian assets, Moscow could seize every Western investment in Russia. In any event, the Pentagon and NATO's aim of a shooting war in the European theater would not happen; unless Washington was foolish enough to start it.
  • To top it off, in 2014 President Xi Jinping has deployed unprecedented diplomatic/geostrategic frenzy - ultimately tied to the long-term project of slowly but surely keeping on erasing US supremacy in Asia and rearranging the global chessboard. What Xi said in Shanghai in May encapsulates the project; "It's time for Asians to manage the affairs of Asia." At the APEC meeting in November, he doubled down, promoting an "Asia-Pacific dream". Meanwhile, frenzy is the norm. Apart from the two monster, US$725 billion gas deals - Power of Siberia and Altai pipeline - and a recent New Silk Road-related offensive in Eastern Europe, [4] virtually no one in the West remembers that in September Chinese Prime Minister Li Keiqiang signed no fewer than 38 trade deals with the Russians, including a swap deal and a fiscal deal, which imply total economic interplay.
  • A case can be made that the geopolitical shift towards Russia-China integration is arguably the greatest strategic maneuver of the last 100 years. Xi's ultimate master plan is unambiguous: a Russia-China-Germany trade/commerce alliance. German business/industry wants it badly, although German politicians still haven't got the message. Xi - and Putin - are building a new economic reality on the Eurasian ground, crammed with crucial political, economic and strategic ramifications. Of course, this will be an extremely rocky road. It has not leaked to Western corporate media yet, but independent-minded academics in Europe (yes, they do exist, almost like a secret society) are increasingly alarmed there is no alternative model to the chaotic, entropic hardcore neoliberalism/casino capitalism racket promoted by the Masters of the Universe.
  • And yet, as much as Lao Tzu, already an octogenarian, gave the young Confucius an intellectual slap on the face, the "West" could do with a wake-up call. Divide et impera? It's not working. And it's bound to fail miserably. As it stands, what we do know is that 2015 will be a hair-raising year in myriad aspects. Because from Europe to Asia, from the ruins of the Roman empire to the re-emerging Middle Kingdom, we all still remain under the sign of a fearful, dangerous, rampantly irrational Empire of Chaos.
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Collapse of Ukraine Government: Prime Minister Yatsenyuk Resigns amidst Pressures Exert... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5393168 war & peace Ukraine government-collapse
shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk announced his resignation in the Rada (Parliament) and that of the entire Cabinet on Thursday, July 24.  This decision was taken following the withdrawal of two parties from the coalition government and the non-adoption of two important pieces of legislation, which had been demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) “I announce my resignation after the collapse of the coalition and the blocking of government initiatives … “In connection with the breakup of the parliamentary coalition, as well as non-adoption of a number of important bills, I announce my resignation,” The resignation of the Prime Minister signifies the collapse of the government and the resignation of the entire cabinet. “But the cabinet members will continue fulfilling their duties until a new coalition is formed in the Rada.”
  • On July 24th, the Rada failed to support the government’s bill pertaining to the 2014 budget sequestration, which had been demanded by the IMF on behalf of Kiev’s external creditors. The disbursement by the IMF of the “Second Tranche” of a 17 billion dollar policy based loan was conditional upon the prior adoption of this legislation.
  • The national economy is in crisis, the political structures of the country are in total disarray, all of which is occurring in the immediate wake of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 crash in Eastern Ukraine. The two parties which left the coalition are The Neo-Nazi Svoboda party and the Centre Right Ukraine Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR) Party led by former champion boxer Vitali Klitschko.
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  • The entire country is in an impasse. No money will be forthcoming from the IMF until this legislation is adopted. In the meantime, Ukraine remains on the blacklist of its external creditors. Moreover, a controversial draft law on reforming the country’s gas transportation system was rejected (Itar-Tass, July 24, 2014). Both bills were tied into the government’s negotiations with both the EU and the IMF.
  • President Poroshenko (left) has intimated that the resignation of the cabinet has paved the way for a process of meaningful political restructuring:  “Society wants a full reset of state authorities,” said Mr Poroshenko. What is implied by Poroshenko’s statement is that the parliamentary process is slated to become defunct inasmuch as Rada is obligated to adopt the legislation demanded by the IMF and the European Union. And if the Rada does not adopt the legislation, the composition of the Parliament will be changed through a process of outright political manipulation. The 2014 budget project demanded by the IMF includes massive cuts in social spending coupled with increased allocations to the Armed Forces. Its adoption will contribute (virtually overnight) to a further process of the impoverishment of the Ukraine population.
  • Yatsenyuk intimated in his resignation speech that the State was bankrupt and that failure to abide by IMF demands would create social chaos: “The fact is that today you failed to vote for the laws, and I have nothing (with which) to pay wages of policemen, doctors, teachers; nothing to buy a rifle with, nothing to fuel an armored personnel carrier with. Today you failed to take a decision to fill the gas storages to allow us to live through the winter, to at last free ourselves from dependence on Russian gas,” (Rada, July 24, 2014)
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Jul 14
     
    The American coup-imposed government of Ukraine goes bankrupt and collapses. 
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U.S. Seen as Biggest Oil Producer After Overtaking Saudi Arabia - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...er-after-overtaking-saudi.html oil fracking U.S.-production Big-Energy
shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The U.S. will remain the world’s biggest oil producer this year after overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia as extraction of energy from shale rock spurs the nation’s economic recovery, Bank of America Corp. said. U.S. production of crude oil, along with liquids separated from natural gas, surpassed all other countries this year with daily output exceeding 11 million barrels in the first quarter, the bank said in a report today. The country became the world’s largest natural gas producer in 2010. The International Energy Agency said in June that the U.S. was the biggest producer of oil and natural gas liquids. “The U.S. increase in supply is a very meaningful chunk of oil,” Francisco Blanch, the bank’s head of commodities research, said by phone from New York. “The shale boom is playing a key role in the U.S. recovery. If the U.S. didn’t have this energy supply, prices at the pump would be completely unaffordable.”
  • Oil extraction is soaring at shale formations in Texas and North Dakota as companies split rocks using high-pressure liquid, a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The surge in supply combined with restrictions on exporting crude is curbing the price of West Texas Intermediate, America’s oil benchmark. The U.S., the world’s largest oil consumer, still imported an average of 7.5 million barrels a day of crude in April, according to the Department of Energy’s statistical arm.
  • “The shale production story is bigger than Iraqi production, but it hasn’t made the impact on prices you would expect,” said Blanch. “Typically such a large energy supply growth should bring prices lower, but in fact we’re not seeing that because the whole geopolitical situation outside the U.S. is dreadful.”
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Pushing Ukraine to the Brink » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...pushing-ukraine-to-the-brink war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Ukraine Afghanistan Iraq pipelinestan must-read
shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • What does a pipeline in Afghanistan have to do with the crisis in Ukraine? Everything. It reveals the commercial interests that drive US policy. Just as the War in Afghanistan was largely fought to facilitate the transfer of natural gas from Turkmenistan to the Arabian Sea, so too, Washington engineered the bloody coup in Kiev to cut off energy supplies from Russia to Europe to facilitate the US pivot to Asia. This is why policymakers in Washington are reasonably satisfied with the outcome of the war in Afghanistan despite the fact that none of the stated goals were achieved. Afghanistan is not a functioning democracy with a strong central government, drug trafficking has not been eradicated, women haven’t been liberated, and the infrastructure and school systems are worse than they were before the war. By every objective standard the war was a failure. But, of course, the stated goals were just public relations blather anyway. They don’t mean anything. What matters is gas, namely the vast untapped reserves in Turkmenistan that could be extracted by privately-owned US corporations who would use their authority to control the growth of US competitors or would-be rivals like China. That’s what the war was all about. The gas is going to be transported via a pipeline from Turkmenistan, across Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to the Arabian sea, eschewing Russian and Iranian territory. The completion of the so called TAPI pipeline will undermine the development of an Iranian pipeline, thus sabotaging the efforts of a US adversary.
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Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova to obtain non-NATO ally status, increase in transfer of mi... - 0 views

stratrisks.com/20345 war & peace Ukraine Russia Georgia Moldova Aserbaijan Bosnia Herzegovina Kosovo Macedonia Montenegro Serbia Crimea NATO
shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The U.S. Congress passed in two readings a Russian aggression prevention bill that provides major non-NATO ally status for Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova (during the period in which each of such countries meets specified criteria) for purposes of the transfer or possible transfer of defense articles or defense services. The bill was submitted to the competent commission for being prepared for the final reading, APA reports, quoting the official website of the U.S. Congress. The bill directs President Barack Obama to increase U.S. Armed Forces interactions with the armed forces of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia; and U.S and NATO security assistance to such states. Armenia is not included in the list. The bill also amends the Natural Gas Act to apply the expedited application and approval process for natural Gas exports to World Trade OrGanization members, and urges the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Trade and Development Agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the World Bank Group, and the European Bank for Reconstruction to promote assistance to Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova in order to exploit natural Gas and oil reserves and to develop alternative energy sources.
  • The document prohibits any federal department or agency from taking any action that recognizes Russian Federation sovereignty over Crimea or otherwise endorses the Russian Federation’s illegal annexation of Crimea, and directs the Secretary of State to strengthen democratic institutions, the independent media, and political and civil society organizations in countries of the former Soviet Union; and increase educational and cultural exchanges with countries of the former Soviet Union.
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Hungary Eager to Participate in Turk Stream - Russia Insider - 0 views

russia-insider.com/...2881 economic-warfare Russia Gazprom TurkStream EU pipelinestan
shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Hungary was perhaps the most enthusiastic of the potential host states for South Stream, and is now looking for alternative options to secure gas deliveries
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 15
     
    Southeastern EU nations are lining up for the new Russian Gazprom natural Gas line through Turkey to the Greek border. Competing plans for intra-EU pipelines. 
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Turkish MP faces treason charges after telling RT ISIS used Turkey for transiting sarin... - 0 views

www.rt.com/...084-erdem-rt-interview-treason war & peace Turkey sarin-precursors MP treason litigation
shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • A treason investigation has been launched against a Turkish MP who alleged in an exclusive interview with RT that Islamic State jihadists delivered deadly sarin gas to Syria through Turkey. Ankara’s Chief Prosecutor's Office opened the case against Istanbul MP Eren Erdem of Republican People's Party (CHP) after his interview about sarin was aired on RT on Monday. "Chemical weapon materials were brought to Turkey and put together in ISIS camps in Syria, which was known as the Iraqi Al-Qaeda at that time." 
  • Erdem noted that the chemicals used for the production of weapons did not originate from Turkey. “All basic materials are purchased from Europe. Western institutions should question themselves about these relations. Western sources know very well who carried out the sarin gas attack in Syria,” Erdem told RT.
  • As Turkish media reported Wednesday, the prosecutor’s office is planning to send a summary of proceedings to the Ministry of Justice on Thursday. Following that, the summary may be forwarded to the Turkish parliament, which could vote to strip Erdem of his parliamentary immunity.Once Turkish mass-media reported the criminal investigation had been opened against Erdem, the hashtags #ErenErdemYalnızDeğildir - #ErenErdemYouAreNotAlone began to circulate in Turkish social networks.On Tuesday, MP Erdem issued a written statement in his defense, saying he had become the target of a smear campaign because of his statements made in parliament.He claimed he had received death threats over social media following the publication of his interview with RT, revealing the Turkish paramilitary organization Ottoman Hearths had published his home address on Twitter to enable an attack on his house.“I am being targeted with death threats because I am patriotically opposed to something that tramples on my country's prestige,” said the MP.As for his accusations about Turkish businessmen being involved in supplying Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) with the poisonous gas sarin and other reactants needed for chemical warfare, Erdem maintained this statement was made based on the results of a Turkish court investigation in 2013.Erdem revealed that five Turkish citizens had been arrested by the Adana Chief Prosecutor's Office as a result of an investigation coded 2013/139. A Syrian national was prosecuted in Turkey for procuring chemical agents for Islamist groups in Syria. At the same time, Erdem noted all the persons arrested within the framework of the 2013/139 investigation were released a week later.
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Israel Grants Oil Rights in Syria to Murdoch and Rothschild - Craig Murray - 0 views

www.craigmurray.org.uk/...yria-to-murdoch-and-rothschild war & peace Israel Golan-Heights oil Genie-Energy
shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • srael has granted oil exploration rights inside Syria, in the occupied Golan Heights, to Genie Energy. Major shareholders of Genie Energy – which also has interests in shale gas in the United States and shale oil in Israel – include Rupert Murdoch and Lord Jacob Rothschild. This from a 2010 Genie Energy press release: Claude Pupkin, CEO of Genie Oil and gas, commented, “Genie’s success will ultimately depend, in part, on access to the expertise of the oil and gas industry and to the financial markets. Jacob Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch are extremely well regarded by and connected to leaders in these sectors. Their guidance and participation will prove invaluable.” “I am grateful to Howard Jonas and IDT for the opportunity to invest in this important initiative,” Lord Rothschild said. “Rupert Murdoch’s extraordinary achievements speak for themselves and we are very pleased he has agreed to be our partner. Genie Energy is making good technological progress to tap the world’s substantial oil shale deposits which could transform the future prospects of Israel, the Middle East and our allies around the world.” For Israel to seek to exploit mineral reserves in the occupied Golan Heights is plainly illegal in international law. Japan was succesfully sued by Singapore before the International Court of Justice for exploitation of Singapore’s oil resources during the second world war. The argument has been made in international law that an occupying power is entitled to opeate oil wells which were previously functioning and operated by the sovereign power, in whose position the occupying power now stands. But there is absolutely no disagreement in the authorities and case law that the drilling of new wells – let alone fracking – by an occupying power is illegal.
  • Israel tried to make the same move twenty years ago but was forced to back down after a strong reaction from the Syrian government, which gained diplomatic support from the United States. Israel is now seeking to take advantage of the weakened Syrian state; this move perhaps casts a new light on recent Israeli bombings in Syria. In a rational world, the involvement of Rothschild and Murdoch in this international criminal activity would show them not to be fit and proper persons to hold major commercial interests elsewhere, and action would be taken. Naturally, nothing of the kind will happen.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Mar 16
     
    From Wikipedia: "Genie Energy's Strategic advisory board is composed of: Dick Cheney (former vice president of the United States), Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, Rupert Murdoch (media mogul and chairman of News Corp), James Woolsey (former CIA director), Larry Summers (former head of the US Treasury), and Bill Richardson, an ex-ambassador to the United Nations and energy secretary."
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Syria Delivers Evidence to UN Showing Peparations for False Flag Chemical Attack in Idlib - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...248462 war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Syria false-flag Idlib-gas-attack
shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • During a speech delivered on Tuesday to the United Nations Security Council, Syria’s Permanent UN Representative Bashir al-Jaafari claimed to have provided information to the council that was evidence that armed opposition groups, including Al Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front, were gearing up to use chemical weapons against civilians in the Syrian province of Idlib in an effort to frame the Syrian government for the attack. Jaafari’s warning comes as Syria and its allies are preparing for a major military offensive that would target the rebel-held Idlib province, which even mainstream Western outlets admit is dominated by terrorist groups and their affiliates. Speaking to the council, Jaafari stated:
  • I put in your hands documented information on the preparations taken by Jabhat al-Nusra [al-Nusra Front] terrorist organization and the affiliated groups to use the chemical weapons against civilians in Idlib province to accuse the Syrian Arab Army and to justify any aggression that might be launched on Syria.” He added that eight canisters of chlorine had been transported to Halouz village in Idlib. The evidence Jaafari provided to the Security Council regarding an imminent “false flag” attack has not been made public. Jaafari’s mention of chlorine gas being transported into Idlib follows similar warnings from Russia’s Defense Ministry, which warned in a statement on Tuesday that “a large supply of poisonous [chemical] agents has been brought to the city of Saraqib on two trucks from the village of Afs” and that the deadly cargo has been “accompanied by eight members of the White Helmets organization” and received by two high-ranking Ahrar al-Sham commanders. Ahrar al-Sham has long been a battlefield ally of al-Nusra Front and The New York Times wrote in 2015 that its membership included associates of Osama bin Laden. In addition, the White Helmets group, which receives millions in funding from Western governments, has repeatedly been linked to falsifying evidence of both bombings and chemical weapon attacks in order to facilitate Western military intervention in the Syrian conflict. The Russian military added that a part of the load was later put into “unmarked plastic barrels and transported to another militant base in southern Idlib in order to stage the use of chemical weapons.” It is currently unclear if the area of southern Idlib cited in this statement coincided with Jaafari’s statements that chlorine gas canisters had been delivered to Halouz village in Idlib with this intent.
  • Warnings from Syria’s UN representative and the Russian military follow hawkish statements recently made by members of the Trump administration, particularly National Security Advisor John Bolton, who stated last Wednesday that the U.S. would respond “very strongly” if the Syrian government is accused of chemical weapons use in Idlib. Bolton, speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, also boasted of the U.S.’ past responses to alleged Syrian government involvement in chemical weapons attacks on Syrian civilians this April and in April of last year.
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Santos finds gas resource in Corvus field offshore Western Australia - 0 views

www.offshore-technology.com/...santos-corvus #Santos_FInds_Gas #COrvus_Field #Offshore_Western_Australia #Australian_Energy_Company
shared by jacob logan on 17 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • jacob logan on 17 Apr 19
     
    Australian energy company Santos has discovered a new gas resource in the Corvus field offshore Western Australia by drilling the Corvus-2 well.
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