russia iran & qatar – half the world’s gas

Gas exporters plan OPEC-style alliance
Russia Today, Oct 21 2008

Russia, Iran and Qatar have discussed plans to form a powerful OPEC-style group for exporting gas. The news comes after a meeting between Gazprom chairman Alexey Miller, Qatar Energy Minister Abdullah Ben Hamad Al-Attiya, and Iranian Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari, who said:

Great decisions have been taken at this meeting. The sides agreed at the Tuesday consultations on the earliest formation of this organisation and on drafting its charter. The negotiators underlined that this document is to be submitted at a coming meeting of the foreign ministers of member states of a forum of gas exporting countries.

Talks about the creation of the group will send shivers down the spines of the United States and the European Union, which rely heavily on imports. The founding fathers of any such group would be Russia, Iran, Qatar, Venezuela and Algeria. If realised, the alliance would control more than half of the world’s known gas reserves and give the countries powerful leverage.

abid ullah jan : dissecting lies (10 mins)

chicago police torturer arrested

Timeline of torture allegations against
former Chicago police commander Jon Burge
Chicago Sun-Times

1982: Murder suspect Andrew Wilson claims Burge tortured him. Wilson is convicted of killing two police officers.

1980s-90s: A pattern of torture complaints develop against Burge.

1993: Fired from Police Department on Wilson’s claims. Officers working under Burge keep their jobs.

January 2003: Former Gov. George Ryan frees four men from Illinois Death Row after they claimed they were tortured by or under Burge.

2003-2004: Freed inmates file lawsuits against Burge and other police detectives claiming torture. In the course of investigation for the lawsuits, dozens of witnesses give depositions against Burge. Among them: the use of cattle prods and electric shocks administered to suspect by a black box.

September 2004: Burge testifies in civil depositions, invoking his Fifth Amendment right. He is served with a subpoena from a grand jury investigating police torture.

2006: A $7m study concludes systematic torture occurred under Burge’s regime but concluded no charges could be filed because of statute of limitations.

December 2007: City pays out nearly $20m to settle the lawsuits brought by the four freed Death Row inmates.

October 2008: Chicago FBI agents arrest Burge at his Florida home.

psyops for the general public

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/27_01_06_psyops.pdf

the libertarian right hoax quotient

I propose that we record for posterity the discovery of a new constant quantity in the firmament of Political Science — the LIBERTARIAN RIGHT HOAX QUOTIENT, or LRHQ. This is a constant quantity of a trans-historical nature, independent of all concrete specific political issues, and represents the level to which the right wing public collectively can be induced to believe that the Rest-Of-The-World (ROTW) is practicing collective deception upon them, preparatorily to a planned stealth conquest by subversion of ‘America’.

Topics to be embraced within the LRHQ range from global warming to keynesianism, and from trilateralism to godless bolshevism, and the more irrelevant the issue to which you can attach the LRHQ, the less of it there will be left for the public to give credit any real, actually existing conspiracies.

fascist pseudo-‘balance’ from AP

(Our masters feed us endless completely random divide-and-rule nonsense, assuming the readers are so browbeaten and easily flattered that they will fall into whatever mood is indicated, without noticing that we are talking about scotching a fascist generals’ coup plot backed by NATO — RB)

86 staunch secularists are to be tried on terrorism-related charges after a year-long investigation into an alleged plot to destabilize Turkey and create the conditions for the military to carry out a coup to depose the moderate Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Unveiling a 2,455-page indictment Monday, Istanbul Chief Prosecutor Aykut Cengiz Engin told reporters that charges against the so-called “Ergenekon” gang included forming, helping or being a member of a terrorist group. Engin said the investigation was launched over a year ago with the seizure of a number of grenades, some of which from the same batch had been used in an attack on the Istanbul offices of Cumhuriyet newspaper. However, the indictment does not include charges against two retired generals, the head of the Ankara Chamber of Commerce and the Ankara bureau chief of Cumhuriyet newspaper who were all arrested last month. Engin said an extra indictment would be released once a full investigation into the new arrests was made.

The Ergenekon investigation has gripped the Turkish media in the last month with newspaper claims that the group of staunch nationalists and secularists had planned a wave of violence against state institutions in order to create the conditions necessary for the military to step in and overthrow the government. Engin on Monday said “Ergenekon,” which refers to a mythical Turkish homeland in central Asia, was the name that members of the group gave themselves. He said that the original attacks on Cumhuriyet newspaper, itself a fierce critic of the government, and a gun attack on the Court of Appeals last year were part of the operations of the group. Opposition figures have accused the government of organizing the arrests last month to take attention away from a court case aimed at banning the ruling Justice and Development Party, which is accused of attempting to undermine the secular state and trying to implement Sharia law.

– AP via Pakistan Observer

counterpunch shouldn’t print this drivel

I am a very secular person. I have always advocated a complete separation between state and religion, even in the days when that sounded like a crazy idea. But it has never entered my mind to drive on Yom Kippur. There is no law forbidding it, no law is necessary. For a traditional Jew, Yom Kippur is a day like no other. Even if one does not really believe that on this day God makes the final decision about the life or death of every human being for the next year and writes it all down in a large book, one senses that one has to respect the feelings of those who do believe. I would not drive on Yom Kippur in a Jewish neighborhood, just as I would not eat in public during Ramadan in an Arab neighborhood. It is difficult to know what the Arab driver Tawfiq Jamal was thinking of when he entered a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in his car on Yom Kippur. It is reasonable to assume that he did not do it out of malice, as a provocation, but rather out of stupidity or carelessness. The reaction was predictable. […]

[…] In the Arab community, there are probably some who dream about the good old days, before the Jews came to this country and took it by force. When Jews carry out a pogrom in Akko, whatever the immediate reason, it becomes a national event. The burning of Arab homes in a Jewish neighborhood at once arouses fear of ethnic cleansing. When the Arab young people storm into a Jewish neighborhood in order to save an endangered Arab brother, it immediately evokes memories of the 1929 massacre of the Jews in Hebron, which, at the time, was also a “mixed” town. There is reasonable hope that at some future time we shall end the national conflict and reach a peaceful solution that both peoples will accept, if only because there is no alternative. A Palestinian state will come into being side by side with Israel, and both peoples will understand that this is the best possible solution. The Akko events should give rise to second thoughts in the mind of anyone who believes in the “One-State solution” where Jews and Arabs would live in brotherhood and equality. Such a “solution” would turn the entire country into one big Akko. […] – Uri Avnery