Traders say Venezuela shipping fuel to Syria
Reuters, Feb 16 2012
Venezuela is emerging as a rare supplier of diesel to Syria, potentially undermining Western sanctions. A cargo of diesel was expected to arrive at Syria’s Mediterranean port of Banias this week, according to two traders and shipping data. Venezuelan state oil firm PDVSA shipped the cargo aboard the Negra Hipolita vessel, according to AIS tracking data on the Reuters Freight Fundamentals Database and to trade sources. The vessel can carry 47,000 tonnes, which if fully loaded would be worth around $50m. It was not clear how much diesel the ship was carrying. Syria’s oil minister spoke about a possibility of Venezuelan imports in January, and traders said the Negra Hipolita diesel shipment to Syria was the second delivery in the past three months. The Venezuelan tanker was last seen off the coast of Cyprus with a destination of Banias and the estimated arrival date of Wednesday, AIS ship tracking on Reuters showed. The satellite tracking has been switched off since Wednesday. The shipment comes at a critical time for Syria, which has faced worsening energy shortages this winter after Western sanctions all but halted imports, which are needed to meet half the country’s diesel demand. The government says that attacks on power stations and refinery pipelines are reducing supply.
The PDVSA shipments appeared to be carried out under a 2010 agreement between the governments of the two nations in which Venezuela provides diesel in exchange for food and commodities such as olive oil. While there is no blanket embargo on supplying fuel to Syria, its state-owned oil firm Sytrol, responsible for organizing fuel imports and exports, was placed on a US blacklist last summer, and the EU followed suit in December. It was not clear whether the recent reported fuel transactions were done via Sytrol. The EU has stopped short of banning deliveries, but oil traders said most deliveries have stopped anyway as traditional suppliers are increasingly reluctant to do business with Syria. Normally an exporter of crude oil even in peacetime, Syria has relied on imports for more than half of its annual consumption of 5m tonnes diesel because of a shortage of domestic refining capacity. International sanctions have stopped Syrian oil exports since September last year. Risk group Business Monitor International wrote in a recent report:
Given the risk that (refining) capacity could be cut due to sabotage, fuel shortages are likely to force the government to rely on costly imports supplied by a shrinking pool of political allies.
Due to the sanctions, the Negra Hipolita will not be able to dock at ports in the US or EU, one of the sources said. In the past the vessel has been primarily used to transport crude between production facilities and refineries within Venezuela. The US previously imposed sanctions on PDVSA over sales of gasoline blending components to Iran in violation of a US ban.
it is totally beyond my understanding that considering the wealth the Iranians have and their investment in nuclear{weapons?} etc and the military that they are not wise enough to set up a distillation plant for all their oil.
i believe it is an example of their obsession with everything but the practical.
I think it’s more likely to be an example of long-standing embargos on transfer of certain sorts of technology. But it isn’t too late, in my opinion; it may be possible to de-fang all this animosity at the last moment and return to a peaceful pattern of cooperative development. I certainly hope so, since the obvious alternative is another world war.
“I think it’s more likely to be an example of long-standing embargos on transfer of certain sorts of technology”
it seems rather obvious that if they could finagle all this nuclear stuff obtaining the tech and equipment for distillation would be child’s play.
Oh, I don’t know. The US let Pakistan develop a nuclear bomb. They knew all about A Q Khan for over a decade.
i’m also given to believe that much of iran’s nuclear technology was originally sold to them by french and american companies, back when eurasia was aligned with eastasia
There’s a couple of factors here: first, nuclear technology is not as physically enormous nor as expensive as refining technology (consider the volumes involved); and second, the policy of western oil companies has always been to control as much of the downstream (i.e. transport, refining, distribution and end sale) as possible, because this provides leverage over the supplier. So in the days of the Shah, Iran like other suppliers was firmly discouraged from acquiring its own refineries, but the idea of providing civilian nuclear technology was acceptable. Venezuela has had the same experience as an oil supplier. This is what they have on common. It’s nothing to do with Israel at all, except insofar as Israel interposes itself and transforms what would otherwise be an issue of imperial oil economics into an issue of ‘anti-Semitism’.
Subsidized fuel policies by successive Iranian administrations are largely responsible for the failure of Iran to refine enough of its own crude to supply its domestic market, a market which now has to service double the 1979 population. Removing or reducing subsidies is never a popular initiative. Recent attempts by governments to remove subsidies on fuel etc. have caused unrest just about everywhere it has been implemented. Apart from stifling badly needed capital investment, subsidized fuel leaks across borders at an alarming rate.
And Iran is taking steps to remedy the situation, according to this Bloomberg report, “… Iran aims to double its crude- processing capacity to 3.5 million barrels a day, … The government plans to upgrade and boost capacity at seven oil refineries, Alireza Zeighami said yesterday, according to Shana. The country can currently process 1.7 million barrels a day. Plants to be improved include those at Abadan, Shazand, Lavan, Tehran, Tabriz, Isfahan and Bandar Abbas … and the … new Persian Gulf Star Oil refinery will be completed by the end of … 2015
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-09/iran-refining-capacity-to-reach-3-5-million-barrels-shana-says.html
Another factor that has probably had some bearing on the production lag is the recent change in ownership or control of the business.
… The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has asserted its control over the oil and gas sector. It has reduced the power of the “oil mafia,” dominated by allies of former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and replaced it with companies associated with the Revolutionary Guards. …
http://iranprimer.usip.org/resource/oil-and-gas-industry
It’s no use talking to walter, he’s shabbat shomer. But that’s excellent research, moonkins. I went looking for exactly that kind of thing last night but I guess I didn’t hit on the right search terms. Mind you, that USIP source says:
This obscures what I said above about the long-term policies of oil imperialism, which have always discouraged this. What they refer to as Rafsanjani’s “oil mafia” would just be the normal neocolonial plutocracy, which is happy to get rich on western terms, without caring too much about the welfare of the Iranian people. I would hypothesise that conflict between between the Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani tendencies, so to speak, is the basic dynamic under much of what’s happening. They are competing for Khamenei’s favour, and conversely, Khamenei is trying to play them off against each other. Rafsanjani wants to rejoin the so-called “international” (i.e. US-controlled) world market, Ahmadinejad is more into autarchy. And again, none of this has much to do with Israel, though it has everything to do with the “international” financial system, which may or may not be thought of as Jewish-dominated.
Well he will probably have a look tomorrow.
One of the other interesting pieces of information I came across while looking around was the size of Iran’s gas reserve, they have the best part of one thousand trillion cubic feet of gas. That’s quite a lot in anyone’s market.
Second only to Russia, I believe.
) to have Iran at least temporarily restrained from developing some of this resource.
At the moment the gas business is a race to secure markets and hence develop the rash of new fields which have been discovered recently, not to mention the expansion of older discoveries. It’s getting very crowded and it probably suits some of the competition (no names, no packdrill
http://www.ogj.com/articles/print/volume-108/issue-6/general-interest/comment–sanctions.html
Totally OT: It’s evidently now an accepted historical fact that European politics between about 1780 and 1800 were completely tangled up by the influence of competing Masonic organisations on the various rulers. Christopher McIntosh’s Ph D thesis was all about this and is now available as a paperback from State University of New York Press, under the title “The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason”. He says for instance:
Later we find one disillusioned ex-Rosicrucian writing to another:
I haven’t yet figured out why the Illuminati favoured annexing Bavaria to Austria. Austria had already invaded Bavaria once but were repulsed by a combined Prussian and Saxon army. Austria almost invaded Bavaria again after the events described above, but were deterred by the Fürstenbund. So it does not appear the the Illuminati had the last laugh.
There’s not much information about that particular episode, and it seems to have been suppressed at the time. Epstein doesn’t discuss it if I recall. I’m pretty sure I’ve only read about in one other place – Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, “Illuminaten” entry, in Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism:
“The betrayal of the secret society by its own membership was related to the so-called Bavarian-Belgian barter project. Important protagonists of the Order had conspiratorially encouraged the plan of Emperor Joseph II, to win Bavaria for Austria and to compensate the Elector Karl Theodor with territories of the Habsburg Netherlands. The Munich “patriotic party” opposed to the plan withdrew from the Order in December 1783; from the middle of 1784 they began with targeted attacks and publications to accuse the entire order of dangerous dealings against the fatherland. The result was the electoral Illuminaten mandate of 1785 and the start of persecutory measures, especially the dismissal of Illuminaten office-holders.”
Ha. Thanks for that, Terry. It’s bewildering. It sounds to me as if the Rosicrucians and the Illuminati had penetrated each other. Perhaps there was a fifth column of Rosicrucian infiltrators within the Illuminati that wanted to bring about an alliance of Austria and Prussia against France. The Rosicrucians were basically Protestant activists. They might have developed a strategy of stages: first to knock down the Bourbons, then the Habsburgs. Or perhaps the Illuminati themselves, or some of them, had developed a strategy of stages. Given such a strategy, all kinds of things become possible. Of course, all these groups perpetually accused each other of being secret Jesuits, but I don’t think any of them actually were.
I’m looking forward to reading The Genesis of German Conservatism. That’s a mammoth tome, but McIntosh is very reliant on it and doesn’t have a single criticism.
I’ve got the Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, because someone quite inexplicably managed to put into circulation a free pdf of it. I call that inexplicable because it costs hundreds of pounds, and you would think Brill & Co would make some effort to police the copyright. Talking of pdf’s, did you receive the pdf of Katz’s Jews and Freemasonry in one piece?
I have put a “Want” on Scholem’s Du Frankisme au Jacobinisme at AbeBooks, but I think you were just extraordinarily lucky. Scholem also wrote an article about the Asiatic Brethren in german, for the Leo Baeck Institute Journal. But I can’t read german at all, whereas fortunately I can read french. Do you have Junius Frey: Jude, Aristokrat und Revolutionär by Susanne Wölfle-Fischer (Peter Lang, 1997)? I’m just curious, since evidently you can read german.
Moonkoon is the only other person here who really enjoys this sort of thing. All the other Niqnaq readers and commenters must be sighing with resignation, or possibly tutting with annoyance, at the way I shoved this into a thread supposedly about the Iranian oil industry. Still, it’s my blog and I shall derail it if I want to.
Well, not quite. I understand quite a few words, but for the most part I had to scan the German text and use machine translators. I relied heavily on my knowledge of French and, shortcomings notwithstanding, seemed to get by all right. The quotes from the Original Writings came from the French translation by R.I.S.S.
Epstein’s book is worth it. Evidently the Germans thought so too as It was translated into their language, which is funny because there’s quite a bit translating from German into English in the book.
Got the book, thanks (was hoping for endnotes being included though
The scanner I was using doesn’t work anymore on my new laptop. I tried to get it to work with drivers to no avail. I was going to scan the Junius Frey book. I may take a trip to the library; I’d like to have a digital copy as well.
It would be terrific if you could scan Scholem’s book. By the way, did you have to OCR Susanne Wölfle-Fischer’s book before you could cut the text and paste it into an auto-translator? Walter and I have arrived at the conclusion that this is the only way to do it. McIntosh by the way has a spectacular description of the Asiatic Brethren temple set-up, from a rare multi-volume work about the order called Der Signatstern:
There is an elaborate throne in front of a sanctum flanked by golden pillars, in which is displayed the name יהוה in a triangle surrounded by flames. There is a Golden Calf (covered initially with a black cloth). There are seventeen golden pillars (i.e. one too many), and various vessels for complicated incenses. As long as the money was forthcoming, even the aristocrats could expect to be impressed.
I’ve read somewhere that the Asiatic Brethren also used the Swastika as a symbol. Did you find anything about that in the book? I seem to remember this “Der Signatstern” as being cited as the source.
I don’t think I have cited Susanne Wölfle-Fischer’s book before but, yes, OCR is a requirement. Acrobat professional does a well enough job for multiple languages as long as the scan is large enough. After that I would usually plug the text into a pc program called Promt simultaneously with free online translators. For German words (even arcane ones), I’ve found this place pretty good: http://www.dict.cc/
There’s no mention of swastikas in McIntosh, I would certainly have noticed it, but the swastika appeared in the Golden Dawn’s (very eclectic) kabbalah. It was associated with the “reshut ha-gilgulim”, i.e. “beginning of whirling motions”, a stage in the kabbalistic cosmogeny. It was not, of course, regarded as a specifically Aryan symbol, any more than the hexagram was regarded as a specifically Jewish one (Scholem confirms this in a little essay about the hexagram, called “The Star of David: History of a Symbol,” which is in “The Messianic Idea in Judaism”). An interesting reference to the swastika can be found in “Two Nations in Your Womb” by Israel Jacob Yuval. A manuscript version of Sefer Amarkal cites a homily by Rabbi Eliezer Rokeach, from the tenth century or so c.e., about the Passover ritual, which concludes:
Terry, reading chapter 7 (“The Seedtime of the Political Secret Societies”) in J M Roberts’s book (“The Mythology of the Secret Societies”), increases the feeling I already had that the Bavarian Illuminati were something analogous to Al Qaeda: that they were being used by Joseph II of Austria in an attempt to infiltrate the Bavarian government and make it ripe for takeover, but that after 1789, Joseph became panicked by them and appointed a horde of neocon-type officials to get rid of them, just like the USA did vis-à-vis Al Qaeda after 9/11. It seems they really did have a “strategy of stages” and were beginning to destabilise Austria itself, and also, even more dangerously, Hungary.
From the perspective of the Illuminati, they thought they were using Joseph II. Vienna, after all (especially the Imperial Court), had more members than any other city in Europe save for Munich. However, at the same time, the Rosicrucians were also well-represented. Joseph probably had to choose sides. Being an “enlightened” ruler, it was an easy choice.
I would like to read a bit about his court. It must have been something like Washington DC in miniature. Al Qaeda probably thought, and maybe still think, that they were/are using the CIA. We have similarly ambiguous relationships here between MI6 and quite a large number of ‘Islamist’ groups. MI5 is very much the junior service to MI6 and chases the members of such groups when they start recruiting in the UK, then backs off when warned to leave them alone. But MI5 has its own pet ‘subversives’ domestically, which is the same thing on a less dramatic scale.
There is a double-edged relationship between secret services and supposed terrorist groups abroad, and between security services and subversive groups at home. I have a theory I call “push-pull”: the secret services overtly persecute (“push”), and at the same time, covertly employ (“pull”) these groups. It has all become much easier since the press became so obedient. These services can get away with the most absurd things, that obviously make no sense, and the press says nothing at all.
For example, our equivalent of a 9/11 ‘truth movement’ is run by the woman from MI5 who seduced David Shayler, the renegade MI6 man, travelled with him for several years thus meeting all his contacts and audiences, and finally, in my opinion, gave him some schizophrenogenic drug. And recently some MI6 cryptographer got murdered, obviously by a foreign agent, and MI6 floated stories that he was killed by a sex partner. It’s all obvious, but people don’t see it because the media don’t tell them to see it.
Makes perfect sense. And in the meantime you have double, even triple agents playing who knows what game (Ignace Martinovics comes to mind; Junius Frey as well).
I think Frey (or Baron von Schönfeld as he was then called), and Hirschfeld, the original convenient hebrew-speaker who helped Ecker set up the Asiatic Brethren, would correspond to today’s Mossad. I love the bit where Hirschfeld gets into a libel action and goes bankrupt, and Schönfeld appears with bags of gold to bail him out. After which, the two of them go off to Strasbourg to meet Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, the so-called “unknown philosopher” and founder of the martinists, another masonic infiltration network. That’s pure Mossad.
… it was an English freemason who is said to have stated that freemasonry dated from before the Creation.
– J M Roberts
