Argentina has captured a three-man Iranian-Hizballah cell and is hunting for the rest of the network, according to exclusive DEBKAfile sources. Its counter-terror police were a step ahead of attacks plotted against several of the 10 Chabad centers in the country, part of a worldwide joint terrorist offensive against Israeli and Jewish targets. Two strikes were thwarted earlier this month in Thailand and Azerbaijan. The three-man cell was captured in the Argentine resort town of San Carlos de Bariloche, 1,680 km from Buenos Aires. Argentina’s T4 anti-terrorist Federal Special Operations Group waylaid the three terrorists on tips from US and Israeli intelligence. In their possession were incriminating documents and maps. Chabad centers and Jewish institutions in the country were then shut down and given extra security guards, as was the Israeli embassy in the capital. DEBKAfile’s sources reveal that one of the things the investigation seeks to discover this time is whether the captured Iranian-Hizballah cell was given a safe house, guidance and aid from family members of WW2 Nazi criminals who won sanctuary in Argentina. At the time of the Israeli embassy bombing twenty years ago the Iranian and Hizballah terrorists were suspected of working hand in glove with local pro-Nazi elements. Argentina, Germany and Israel never confirmed this. However, San Carlos de Bariloche is known as a post-1945 Nazi haven. Two books by British writers published in 2011 even claimed that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had managed to escape from Berlin and reach safety in this region. This rumor was always denied.

The terror alert Buenos Aires declared this week was also communicated to Chile, Peru, Uruguay and Mexico, in case additional Iranian-Hizballah teams were heading for Israeli and Jewish targets there too. The plot Argentina foiled after Thailand and Azerbaijan indicates that Iranian intelligence and Hizballah’s special security arm are in the midst of a worldwide terror offensive against Israel and Jews. Habad centers were picked out because their doors are always open to travelers and easily identifiable and accessible. They are often packed with large numbers of Jewish and Israeli visitors. The attackers are therefore assured of a big splash in the international media if they pull off an attack. In Nov 2008, Lashkar e-Taiba, the Pakistani arm of al Qaeda, seized Habad House in Mumbai and murdered eight Israelis and American Jews before blowing the building up. The rabbi’s small child was the only survivor, rescued from the captured building by his Indian nanny. In Bangkok, a member of the Iranian-Hizballah terrorist team, on his way with at least two confederates to blow up the Habad center after holding its occupants hostage and killing them, was captured two weeks ago, thwarting the attack. Then, on Jan 19, Azerbaijani authorities nabbed a second Iranian intelligence-Hizballah cell in Baku in time to save the local Habad community center in the city. Joint Iranian-Hizballah terrorist tentacles have already reached into three continents for an all-out drive to reach their prey, so far without success, owing to the cooperation among counter-terror agencies on sustained high alert.

before 1990	after 1995

Holocaust denial trumps freedom of expression
Natan Lerner, Haaretz, Jan 27 2012

In a recent opinion piece, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, Dr Efraim Zuroff, called upon the Israeli government and Jewish defense organizations to combat the dangers involved in the “ongoing assault on the accepted Holocaust narrative” taking place in some countries. He is right. But more vexing than the trends seen among some groups eager to gain political advantage by distorting the prevailing Holocaust narrative, are the stands adopted in respected human rights quarters claiming that restrictions on expression of opinions that deny historical facts are incompatible with principles of international human rights. Such tendencies cannot be dismissed as mere anti-Semitism or biased historical revisionism. They involve serious legal issues and it is essential for Jewish organizations sensitive to these issues to deal seriously with them.

In particular, I have in mind a “general comment” adopted last summer by the Human Rights Committee, the UN agency in charge of implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This document states that “Laws that penalize the expression of opinions about historical facts – ‘memory laws’ – are incompatible with the obligations that the Covenant imposes – in relation to the respect for freedom of opinion and expression.” Though the statement does not refer by name to the denial of the Holocaust, it seems quite obvious, in view of earlier discussions in the committee and other similar developments, that it is aimed at laws that exist in a large number of European states (and in Israel as well) prohibiting just that. As a participant in a recent UN expert seminar on the prohibition of incitement to national, racial or religious hatred, I felt the need to caution against opinions of experts voiced there in favor of decriminalizing views likely to incite against religious or ethnic groups.

These are not isolated cases. In 2007, Spain’s constitutional court made a controversial distinction between “justification” and “denial” of the Holocaust, declaring the punishment of plain denial unconstitutional. In 2009, in an important book on the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, Christian Tomuschat, a prominent German scholar of international law, while concurring that attempts to approve or to justify the Holocaust “deserve being repressed and prosecuted,” makes a distinction between “qualified denial,” which reveals a hostile attitude toward Jews, and “simple denial,” which he argued should not be made a criminal offense. The same author considers inconclusive the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, which has stated repeatedly that negation of clearly established historical facts such as the Holocaust does not constitute protected speech.

A short newspaper article does not allow for analysis of the legal complexities of the matter from the perspectives of either criminal or human rights law. At this stage, as we are reminded today, as we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the international community as a whole has a clear-cut stand on the subject: the UNGA resolved in 2005 that Holocaust denial should be prohibited. This does not mean that such complexities and the views of those voicing doubts about the legality of Holocaust denial laws should be ignored by Jewish institutions and scholars. There has always been a need to strike a balance between respect for freedom of expression and protection of populations endangered by the abuse of that freedom.

Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights proclaims the right of freedom of expression. But the exercise of such rights may be restricted out of concern for the rights or reputation of “others” and for the protection of public order. Article 20 of the same Covenant provides that any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law. The principal international and regional human rights instruments contain similar provisions, and legislation in several countries prohibiting the denial of the Holocaust, as well as the decisions of international bodies urging the outlawing of such denial, also deal with this issue. It may in some cases be difficult to establish precisely when denial is innocent enough not to imply advocacy of or incitement to hatred or hostility or bias or prejudice toward the victims or their group. But it is not impossible.

Some of the criticism being raised against criminalization of denial tends to make a distinction between denying the Holocaust of the Jewish people, a clearly established historical fact, in the words of the European Court of Human Rights, and other mass killings in the past characterized as genocide. Such a distinction implies the assumption that Holocaust denial is likely to incite to violence, discrimination or hatred against the group that was the victim of the crime, or its members, irrespective of the existence of a clearly detected specific intent. To date, no good-faith denials of the Holocaust have been identified. Decriminalizing such denials would obviously be bad policy from a public interest viewpoint. Freedom of expression should not be invoked to protect incitement, even if the intention to engage in such incitement may sometimes be difficult to prove beyond a reasonable reading of political realities and the consequences of denial.

The EU oil embargo recently slapped on Iran and the threats voiced by the US and other Western countries to come up with further sanctions against the country led watchers to conclude that an armed conflict between Iran and the West finally became imminent. The first potential scenario in the context is that the current standoff would eventually escalate into a war. The US forces in the Gulf area currently number 40,000, plus 90,000 are deployed in Afghanistan, just east of Iran, and several thousands of support troops are deployed in various Asian countries. That adds up to a considerable military potential which may still fall short of what it takes to keep a lid on everything if armed hostilities break out. For example, Colin H Kahl argues in a recent paper in Foreign Affairs that, even though “there is no doubt that Washington will win in the narrow operational sense,” the US would have to take a vast array of pertinent problems into account. At the moment, maintaining the status quo is not in the US interest, holds Stratfor’s George Friedman:

If al Assad survives and if the situation in Iraq proceeds as it has been proceeding, then Iran is creating a reality that will define the region. The US does not have a broad and effective coalition, and certainly not one that would rally in the event of war. It has only Israel.

If the conflict with Iran takes the shape of a protracted bombing campaign and comes as a prologue to the occupation of the country, the US will need to strengthen its positions in adjacent regions, meaning that Washington will be trying to draw the Caucasian republics (Georgia, Azerbaijan) and those of Central Asia into the orbit of its policy and thus tightening the “Anaconda loop” around Russia. An alternative scenario also deserves attention. The EU sanctions would surely hurt many of the European economies, notably, Greece, Italy, and Spain, by a ricochet. In fact, Spanish diplomacy chief José Manuel García-Margallo Y Marfil bluntly described the sanctions decision as a sacrifice. As for Iran, the oil blockade can cause its annual budget to contract by $15b to $20b, which generally should not be critical but, as the country’s parliamentary elections and the 2013 presidential poll are drawing closer and the West actively props up its domestic opposition, outbreaks of unrest in Iran would quite possibly ensue.

Tehran has already made it clear it would make a serious effort to find buyers for its oil export elsewhere. China and India, Iran’s respective number one and number three clients, brushed off the idea of the US-led sanctions momentarily. Japan pledged support for Washington over the matter but did not post any specific plans to reduce the volumes of oil it imports from Iran. Japan, by the way, was badly hit in 1973 when Wall Street provoked an oil crisis and the US guarantees turned hollow. Consequently, Tokyo can be expected to approach Washington’s sanction suggestions with utmost caution and to ask the US for unequivocal guarantees that the White House will be unable to provide. Right now the US is courting South Korea with the aim of having it cut off the import of oil from Iran.

The opposition mounted to the plans underlying the military scenario by China, Russia, and India seems to hold the promise of an alliance of countries seeking to tame the US hegemony and raging unilateralism. Stratfor’s Friedman has a point: time is not on the US’s side, considering that the BRICs countries have some opportunities to influence the situation in the potential conflict zone by launching joint anti-terrorism and anti-piracy maneuvers in the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf etc. Inducing the regime change in Iran, which is Washington’s end goal, still takes a pretext. The US has long been eying various factions in Iran in the hope to capitalize on the country’s existing domestic rivalries parallel to the employment of tested color revolution techniques such as the support for the Green Movement or the establishment of a virtual embassy for Iran.

Richard Sanders, a vocal critic of US foreign policy, opined that, at least since the invasion of Mexico in the late nineteenth century, the US permanently relied on the mechanism of war pretext incidents to compile justifications for its military interventions. Pat Buchanan cited in his opinion piece titled “Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?” the fairly common view that the US financial circles knowingly provoked the Pearl Harbor attack to drag the US into a war with the remote goal of ensuring the dollar empire’s global primacy. The lesson to be learned from the history of the Vietnam War, namely the Gulf of Tonkin incident in which the Maddox entered Vietnam’s territorial waters and opened fire on the boats of its navy, is that the initial conflict was similarly ignited by the US intelligence community, the result being that the US Congress authorized LBJ to militarily engage Vietnam. By the way, no retribution followed in June 1967 when the Israelis attacked USS Liberty, killing 34 and wounding 172. The morally charged concepts of humanitarian interventions and war on terror had just as well been invoked to legitimize downright aggressions against Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Speaking of the current developments around the Persian Gulf, Washington’s choice of pretexts for an aggression comprises at least three options, namely:

1. Iran’s nuclear dossier;
2. an engineered escalation in the Strait of Hormuz;
3. allegations that Iran supports international terrorism.

The US objective behind the pressure on Iran over its nuclear program, to make everybody in the world accept Washington’s rules of the game, has never been deeply hidden. The abundant alarmist talk is intended to deflect attention from the simple truth that building a nuclear arsenal with the help of civilian nuclear technologies is absolutely impossible, but Matthew H Kroenig of the CFR recently went so far as to warn that Iran would some day pass its nuclear technologies to Venezuela. The motivation must be to somehow bundle all critics of the US foreign policy.

The Strait of Hormuz, which is the maritime chokepoint of the Persian Gulf, is regarded as the epicenter of the coming new war. It serves as the avenue for oil supplies from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, the Saudi Arabia, and the UAE and is therefore being closely monitored by all likely parties to the conflict. According to the US Dept of Energy, the 2011 oil transit via the Strait of Hormuz totaled 17 bb, or roughly 20% of the world’s total. Oil prices are projected to increase by 50% if anything disquieting happens in the Strait of Hormuz. Passing through the Strait of Hormuz takes navigation across the territorial waters of Iran and Oman. Iran grants as a courtesy the right to sail across its waters based on the UN Treaty on Maritime Goods Transportation. It must be understood in connection with Washington’s recurrent statements concerning the Strait of Hormuz that in this regard the US and Iran have the same legal status as countries which penned but did not ratify the treaty, and thus the US has no moral right to references to the international law. Iran’s administration stressed recently after consultations with the national legislation that Tehran would possibly subject to a revision the regulations under which foreign vessels are admitted to the Iranian territorial waters. Navies are also supposed to observe certain international laws, in particular, those defining the minimal distance to be maintained to vessels of other countries. It constantly pops up in the US media that Iranian boats come riskily close to US vessels but, as watchers note, provocateurs like the CIA-sponsored separatists from Iran’s Baluchistan could in some cases be pulling off the tricks in disguise.

Chances are that a part of the oil embargo plan is to make the West encounter oil supply problems and start constructing pipelines across Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Qatar, and Iraq as alternative routes reaching the shores of the Arabian, Red, and Mediterranean Seas. A few of these projects, the Hashan–Fujairah pipeline, for instance, are as of today in the process of being implemented. If that is the idea, the explanation behind Washington’s tendency to convince its allies to create a “safer” pipeline infrastructure is straightforward. Geopolitics being an inescapable reality, it does have to be taken into account, though, that the region’s countries remain locked in a variety of conflicts and, due to geographic reasons, Tehran would be a key player even if the pipelines are launched. Since the new US military strategy implies focusing on two regions, the Greater Middle East and South East Asia, the issue of the Strait of Hormuz appears coupled to that of the Strait of Malacca which offers the shortest route for the oil supply from the Indian Ocean to China, Japan, South Korea, and the rest of South East Asia. The arrangement implicitly factors into the Asian countries’ decision-making related to Iran.

The precedent of “the war on terror”, a campaign during which the US occupied under dubious pretexts Iraq and Afghanistan at the costs of thousands of lives, must also be kept in mind. Ages ago, the White House sanctioned subversive activities against various parts of the the Iranian administration, including the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi writes that the US and Israeli agents have been active in Iran for quite some time and are responsible for the epidemic of the Stuxnet virus and the series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear physicists. The groups within Iran which aligned themselves with the country’s foes are the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, the Baluchistan-based separatist Jundallah whose leader Abdolmajid Rigi was arrested in Feb 2010 by the Iranian security forces and admitted to cooperating with the CIA, and the Kurdish Free Life of Kurdistan. In essence, a war against Iran, up to date a secret war, is underway. The problem the parties involved are trying to resolve is to find a way of prevailing without entering the “hot” phase of the conflict.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and its largest oil producer, is from all evidence being systematically thrown into chaos and a state of civil war. The recent surprise decision by the government of Goodluck Jonathan to abruptly lift subsidies on imported gasoline and other fuel has a far more sinister background than mere corruption, and the IMF is playing a key role. China appears to be the likely loser, along with Nigeria’s population. The recent strikes protesting the government’s abrupt elimination of gasoline and other fuel subsidies, which brought Nigeria briefly to a standstill, came as a surprise to most in the country. Months earlier Jonathan had promised the major trade union organizations that he would conduct a gradual four-stage lifting of the subsidy to ease the economic burden. Instead, without warning, he announced an immediate full removal of subsidies effective Jan 1 2012. It was “shock therapy” to put it mildly. Nigeria today is one of the world’s most important producers of light, sweet crude oil, the same high quality crude oil that Libya and the British North Sea produce. The country is showing every indication of spiraling downward into deep disorder. Nigeria is the fifth largest supplier of oil to the US and twelfth largest oil producer in the world, on a par with Kuwait and just behind Venezuela, with production exceeding 2 mb/d.

Despite its oil riches, Nigeria remains one of Africa’s poorest countries. The known oilfields are concentrated around the vast Niger Delta roughly between Port Harcourt and extending in the direction of the capital Lagos, with large new finds being developed all along the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea. Nigeria’s oil is exploited and largely exported by the Anglo-American giants—Shell, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco. Italy’s Agip also has a presence and most recently, to no one’s surprise, the Chinese state oil companies began seeking major exploration and oil infrastructure agreements with the Lagos government. Ironically, despite the fact that Nigeria has abundant oil to earn dollar export revenue to build its domestic infrastructure, government policy has deliberately let its domestic oil refining capacity fall into ruin. The consequence has been that most of the gasoline and other refined petroleum products used to drive transportation and industry, has to be imported, despite the country’s abundant oil. In order to shield the population from the high import costs of gasoline and other refined fuels, the central government has subsidized prices. Until Jan 1 2012, that is. That was the day when, without advance warning Jonathan announced immediate removal of all fuel subsidies. Prices for gasoline shot up almost threefold in hours from 65 naira (35 US cents) a liter to 150 naira (93 cents). The impact rippled across the economy to everything including prices of grains and vegetables. In justifying the move, Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi insisted:

The monies will be used in provision of social amenities and infrastructural development that will benefit Nigerians more and save the country from economic rift.

Jonathan says he is phasing out the subsidy as a part of a move to “clean up the Nigerian government.” If so how he plans to proceed is anything but apparent. The huge unexpected price hike for domestic fuel triggered nationwide protests that threatened to bring the economy to a halt by mid-January. The president deftly took the wind out of protester sails by announcing a partial rollback in prices, still leaving prices effectively double that of December. The trade union federation immediately called off the protests. Then, revealingly, Goodluck Jonathan’s government ordered the military to take to the streets to “keep order” and de facto prevent new protests. All that took place during one of the bloodiest waves of bombings and murder rampages by the terrorist Boko Haram sect creating a climate of extreme chaos.

What has been buried from international accounts of the unrest is the explicit role the IMF played in the situation. With suspicious timing IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde was in Nigeria days before Jonathan’s abrupt subsidy decision. By all accounts, the IMF and the Nigerian government have been careful this time not to be blatant about openly announcing demands to ends subsidies as they were in Tunisia before food protests became the trigger for that country’s Twitter putsch in 2011. During her visit to Nigeria Lagarde said:

President Jonathan’s ‘Transformation Agenda’ is an agenda for Nigeria, driven by Nigerians. The IMF is here to support you and be a better partner for you.

Few Nigerians were convinced. On Dec 29 Reuters wrote:

The IMF has urged countries across West and Central Africa to cut fuel subsidies, which they say are not effective in directly aiding the poor, but do promote corruption and smuggling. The past months have seen governments in Nigeria, Guinea, Cameroon and Chad moving to cut state subsidies on fuel.

Further confirming the role US and IMF pressure on the Nigerian government played, adviser to UN Sec-Gen Ban Ki-Moon Jeffrey Sachs, during a meeting with Jonathan in Nigeria in early January days after the subsidy decision, declared Jonathan’s decision to withdraw petroleum subsidy “a bold and correct policy.” Sachs, a former Harvard economics professor, became notorious during the early 1990’s for prescribing IMF “shock therapy” for Poland, Russia, Ukraine and other former communist states which opened invaluable state assets for de facto plundering by dollar-rich western multinationals.

Making the sudden decision to end the domestic fuel subsidy even more suspicious is the manner in which Washington and the IMF are putting pressure on only select countries to end subsidies. Nigeria, whose oil today sells for the equivalent of $1 a liter or roughly $3.78 a US gallon, is far from cheap. Brunei, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia all offer their petrol very cheap to their people. The Saudis sell their oil at 17 cents, Kuwait at 22 cents.10 In the US gasoline averages 89 cents a liter. That means the IMF and Washington have forced one of the poorest economies in Africa to impose a huge tax on its citizens on the implausible argument it will help eliminate corruption in the state petroleum sector. The IMF knows well that the elimination of subsidies will do nothing about corruption in high places. Were the IMF and World Bank genuinely concerned with the health of the domestic Nigerian economy, they would have provided support for rebuilding and expanding a domestic oil refinery industry that has been let to rot so that the country need no longer import refined fuels using precious state budget resources to do so. The easiest way to do that would be to expedite a two-year-old deal between China and the Nigerian government to invest some $28b in massive expansion of the oil refinery sector to eliminate need for importing foreign gasoline and other refined products. Quite the opposite: the criminal cabal inside NNPC and the Government making huge profits on the old subsidy system are suddenly making double and potentially triple more to maintain the old corrupt import system, and, of course, to sabotage Chinese refinery construction that could put an end to their gravy train.

Rather than benefit ordinary Nigerians as the IMF proclaims to want, the elimination of the subsidies has further pauperized the 90% living on less than $2 a day, according to Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Nigerian Central Bank governor. An estimated 40 million Nigerians are unemployed in the country of 148 million. Because transport costs are a significant factor in delivery of food to the cities, food price inflation has soared along with costs of public transportation for the majority of poorer Nigerians. According to the Nigerian Leadership Sunday:

Prices of commodities which shot up as a fallout of the fuel pump price increase have refused to come down.

Everything from street vegetable sellers to carwashes to roadside photographers are feeling the shock of the rise in fuel prices. Unemployment is rising as small businesses fold. The argument of the IMF and the Jonathan Administration is that by freeing fuel prices, funds would be available to more social services and rebuild Nigeria’s “infrastructure.” Both the IMF and the Government know it would have been far more economically viable to replace the current corrupt system of importing refined gasoline and fuels with investing in rebuilding Nigeria’s domestic refining capacity. Son Gyoh of the Nigerian Awareness for Development organization stated:

Would it not be more expedient to pressure government to service the refineries to full production capacity given the implications on overhead and competitiveness for local industries? Why have successive governments left the refineries in a state of disrepair while spending huge sums on subsidy? Is there any chance that the savings from subsidy withdrawal will go directly into rehabilitating the refineries? Does deregulation imply NNPC will no longer operate a monopoly in importation of refined petroleum product or is this lobby a self-serving lifeline to continue its monopoly? In any case, there is good reason to doubt subsidy removal will solve the fuel scarcity problem as the cabal will only regroup to change tactics, a fact Nigerians are only too aware of.

After Nigeria partly nationalized its oil sector in the late 1970’s they also took control of Shell Oil’s Port Harcourt I refinery. In 1989 Port Harcourt II refinery was built. Both refineries fell into serious disrepair after 1994 when the Abacha military dictatorship cut the “take” of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) from domestic sale of refined oil products such as gasoline from 84% to 22%. That caused a cash crisis for NNPC and a halt to refinery maintenance. Today only one of four refineries operates at all. What developed since was a system of NNPC importing foreign gasoline and other refined products for Nigeria’s domestic needs, naturally at a far more expensive cost. The price subsidies were to relieve that higher import cost, hardly a sensible solution but a very lucrative one for those corrupt elements in the state and private sector making a killing, literally, off the import process.

The IMF is well aware of the real cause of Nigeria’s fuel industry problems. A Nigerian legislative committee examining the sources of the industry’s problems recently released a report documenting that at least $4b/yr is taken from taxpayers in fuel industry corruption with the state Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) at the center. According to the commission:

Every day, fuel importers drop off 59 million liters of fuel. The country consumes 35 million liters daily. That leaves 24 million liters of oil available for smugglers to export, paid for by government fuel subsidies. This costs the Nigerian people roughly $4b/yr, according to Reuters.

The Nigerian government has said that the $7.5b/yr spent on fuel subsidies could be used to provide desperately needed infrastructure. But they omit any mention of the rampant siphoning off of $4b/yr of oil by black market smugglers, reportedly with connivance of high NNPC government officials, to sell to neighboring countries at a hefty profit. The refined imported fuel is reportedly smuggled into neighboring countries like Cameroon, Chad and Niger where petrol prices are far higher, according to Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, Deputy Governor of Kano State.

One major geopolitical factor that is generally ignored in recent discussion of Nigerian oil politics is the growing role of China in the country. In May 2010, only days after Jonathan was sworn in, China signed an impressive $28.5b deal with his government to build three new refineries, something that in no way fit into the plans of either the IMF or of Washington or of the Anglo-American oil majors. China State Construction Engineering Corporation Limited (CSCEC) signed the deal to build three oil refineries with Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), in the biggest deal China has made with Africa. Shehu Ladan, head of NNPC, said at the signing ceremony that the added refineries would reduce the $10b/yr spent on imported refined products. As of Jan 2012, the three Chinese refnery projects were still in the planning stage, reportedly blocked by the powerful vested interests gaining from the existing corrupt import system.

A report in China Daily last November quoted Nigeria’s Olusegun Olutoyin Aganga, the minister of trade and investment that Nigeria was seeking added Chinese investors for its energy, mining and agribusiness industries. Last September on a visit to Beijing, Nigerian central bank governor Lamido Sanusi announced his country planned to invest 5% to 10% of its foreign exchange reserves in yuan, noting that he sees the yuan becoming reserve currency. In 2010 China’s loans and exports to Nigeria exceeded $7b, while Nigeria exported $1b of crude oil, Sanusi stated. Until now Nigeria has held some 79% of her foreign currency reserves in dollars, the rest in Euro or Sterling, all of which look dicey given their financial and debt problems. The move of a major oil producer away from dollars, added to similar moves recently by India, Japan, Russia, Iran and others, augurs bad news for the continued role of the dollar as dominant world reserve currency. Clearly some in Washington would not be happy with that.

The Chinese are also bidding to get a direct stake in Nigeria’s rich oil reserves, until now an Anglo-American domain. In Jul 2010, China’s CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation) won four prospective oil blocks, two in the Niger Delta and two in the frontier Chad Basin, with plans to become core investor in the Kaduna refinery, and construction of a double track Lagos-Kano railway. As well China’s oil company, CNOOC Ltd has a major offshore production area in Nigeria. The IMF and Washington pressure to lift subsidies on imported fuels is at this point in question as is the future of China in Nigeria’s energy industry. Clear is that lifting subsidies in no way will benefit Nigerians. More alarming in this context is the orchestration of a major new wave of terror killings and bombings by the mysterious and suspiciously well-armed Boko Haram. This we will look at next in the context of Nigeria’s recent transformation into a major narcotics hub.

The string of uprisings in the Arab world boils down to Saudi Arabia and Qatar using money and influence to hijack public dissent and bring Sunni Islamists to power, says John Bradley, a British author and expert on the Middle East. ­He argues that the turbulence that saw several governments overthrown in 2011 came from sectarian divide among Muslims, which the West played on, to support its own allies. He told RT:

What we’re seeing is a Sunni-Shi’ite divide reemerge in the Middle East with Washington clearly backing the Sunni powerhouse Saudi Arabia, a close US ally. And Saudi Arabia in turn along with Qatar has taken control of the revolutions elsewhere. For example it’s funding the Ennahda, the main Islamist party in Tunisia. The Muslim Brotherhood and more extremist Salafi groups in Egypt on the record were saying they received substantial funds from Saudi Arabia. The Yemeni government has openly criticized Qatar for interfering in its internal affairs and funding radical Islamists. And of course in Syria the main civilian opposition is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the so-called Free Syrian Army is dominated by not only radical jihadists from within Syria, but also by jihadists from throughout the region.

Democratization: Indigenous Beats Imported
Ivan Eland, AntiWar.com, Jan 25 2012

The indigenous democratic revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt seem to be progressing. Tunisia recently had successful elections, and Egypt seated its new parliament and will hold a presidential election in June. In Tunisia, Islamists won the recent election but have paired with more liberal parties to form a coalition government. Although the Egyptian parliament is dominated by Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that has a plurality in the legislative body, has gone “mainstream” and is cooperating with the military council’s timetable for transition to civilian rule. Although bumps on the road may arise and both of these countries may not have completely Western-style liberal democracies, their prospects for being long-term democracies look much brighter than in the three countries in which outside force was used to remove oppressive regimes.

Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino mogul bankrolling Newt Gingrich’s super PAC isn’t trying to “buy” a presidency, his top political consultant tells NBC News. He’s just following in the footsteps of another powerful business tycoon, Joseph Kennedy. Sig Rogich, a veteran Republican operative who serves as Adelson’s government affairs consultant, said in an interview about the massive donations that the casino mogul has made to Gingrich’s super PAC:

I don’t think it’s buying a presidency any more than it was when Joe Kennedy helped his son. Sheldon Adelson plays to win, and he puts his money where his mouth is.

In the last three weeks, Adelson and his Israeli-born wife Miriam have pumped $10m into the Winning Our Future Super PAC. Those donations provided a critical cash infusion that helped revive Gingrich’s candidacy, bankrolling attack ads against Mitt Romney in South Carolina and now Florida. They’ve also made the Adelsons the largest known donors so far in a presidential race awash with money under new rules allowing unlimited donations to so-called super PACs. But the contributions have also raised new questions about Adelson’s outside role in influencing the campaign. Those questions could intensify as a result of potentially provocative comments he has made about Israel uncovered by NBC News. Adelson owns the Israeli free sheet Israel HaYom, which backs Netanyahu, and adamantly opposes any peace settlement with the Palestinians. But while Adelson and Gingrich have bonded on the issue of a hawkish Mideast policy, especially over the threat of a nuclear Iran, some of the casino mogul’s comments could prove embarrassing. Adelson said at the event:

I am not Israeli. The uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform. It was a US uniform, although my wife was in the IDF and one of my daughters was in the IDF. Our two little boys, one of whom will be bar mitzvahed tomorrow, hopefully he’ll come back, his hobby is shooting, and he’ll come back and be a sniper for the IDF. All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli born, Israel is in my heart.

Asked about those comments, Rogich cited major donations that Adelson has made to medical research and other philanthropic causes that were far bigger than his political contributions. He said:

No one could possibly ever think that he is anything but a loyal USAian. He’s shown that time and time again. I think that the fact that he is a Zionist and believes deeply in the preservation of Israel is so commendable.

“The Obama administration is denying reality. The refusal to confront evil could cause a second Holocaust.”

When Gingrich was questioned about the money from Adelson this week, he immediately cited the casino mogul’s backing of Israel as a major reason he had received his support. Gingrich said in an interview while on the campaign trail in Florida:

Sheldon Adelson is very deeply concerned about the survival of Israel and believes that the Iranians represent a mortal threat to Israel and the US. And he is deeply motivated by the question of having a commander-in-chief strong enough and willing to make sure the Iranians do not get nuclear weapons.

Asked if he had promised the casino mogul anything in exchange for the money to the super PAC, Gingrich replied:

I promised him that I would seek to defend the US and the US allies.

Saudi Arabia will recognize the Syrian National Council (SNC) as the “official representative” of the Syrian people amid a joint Western-Gulf Arab push to have President Bashar Assad removed, a senior member of the opposition group said on Friday. SNC executive council member Ahmad Ramadan told Kuwait’s Al-Rai newspaper:

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told an SNC delegation he met in Cairo last week the kingdom will recognize the Council as the official representative of the Syrian people.

Ramadan did not specify when Saudi will make the call, or whether it will be backed by its Gulf Arab allies in the GCC. It was also reported in the UK Times on Friday that Saudi Arabia and Qatar will begin funding the SNC as well as armed groups fighting the regime. Gulf Arab states have taken a leading role in trying to oust the Syrian president, having this week announced the withdrawal of their members from the Arab League monitoring team in Syria. Qatari PM Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani is to officially present a Western-backed plan to UNSC ambassadors in New York that will request Assad hand over power to his deputy, while a unity government is formed to oversee a full transition. The improving ties between the GCC and SNC have aroused concerns in some quarters of the Syrian opposition that fear Gulf states will turn Syria into a battleground against Iran. The GCC oppose the democratic aspirations of the Arab Spring protests engulfing the region, and sent troops into neighboring Bahrain last year to crush a similar uprising there. It is also unclear how representative the Istanbul-based SNC is of the protesters within Syria, and the level of contact between the internal revolution and external opposition groups.

Meanwhile, Russia has preempted the West and the GCC by already declaring its proposed UNSCR as “unacceptable.” A senior Russian diplomat rejected the plan because it does not take Moscow’s position into account, Itar-Tass reported on Friday. Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov’s remarks were the latest sign that Russia will push hard for changes in the Western-Gulf draft resolution. The UN draft, which was expected to be distributed to the UNSC later on Friday, contains “no fundamental consideration for our position” and is missing “key aspects that are fundamental to us,” Itar-Tass quoted Gatilov as saying. Russia has previously said it will veto any UNSC resolution that seeks to impose sanctions on Syria or justify military action. Russia and China vetoed a European-drafted resolution in October, while the West remains adamant in its push to have Assad removed from power.

China finally came out with a statement strongly critical of the EU sanctions against Iran’s oil exports. The FO spokesman in Beijing said the moves to put pressure on Iran and impose sanctions are not “constructive approaches”. The statement essentially takes the same line that Russia took, namely, nothing should detract from the expected talks between Iran and the “5+1″. Obviously, China will continue to import oil from Iran. Trade also will continue. Last year’s statistics show an increase of 55% in bilateral trade as compared to 2010. China’s oil imports from Iran in 2011 rose by 30%. There will be strong impetus for both sides to sustain the momentum in the economic ties. Meanwhile, has Europe bitten more than it could chew? The IMF is warning of increase of oil price to $140 due to the EU’s Iran sanctions. No wonder Tehran is reacting calmly to the EU’s histrionics. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton got some sound advice from the influential Iranian politician Alaeddin Broujerdi, chairman of the Iranian Majlis’ national security and foreign policy commission, who said she should stop playing “political games” and get serious. The matter can indeed get quite serious next week, even if Ashton refuses to get serious. The Majlis in Tehran is apparently mooting a proposal to put an embargo on oil exports to Europe. Now, the EU sanctions are supposed to come into effect only in July, so that the member countries can make alternate arrangements for their oil needs. Funnily, the Iranians are posing the question:

Why wait till July?

If Iran imposes oil sanctions against the EU, what will Obama do? Will he threaten to go to war with Iran unless Iran continues to export oil to Europe? The decent thing will be for Obama to make an offer to the European countries that the US will make up for the Iranian oil. Perhaps, he could also have a word with his predecessor Jimmy Carter on how to deal with the Iranians in an election year in the US. Meanwhile, Tehran is mending fences with the GCC states. Two deputy foreign ministers have been despatched to Kuwait and Abu Dhabi for consultations. Don’t be surprised if the Saudi-Iranian rhetoric also peters off. Clearly, the GCC states have a great deal to lose if tensions spiral up. They will pay attention to the latest warning by the Supreme Leader’s advisor and veteran Iranian statesman Ali Akbar Velayati to the effect that Iran and the GCC states are travelling on the same boat and they will ultimately swim or sink together.

USAian Islam on march in Middle East
M K Bhadrakumar, Indian Punchline, Jan 27 2012

Qatari PM Sheikh Hamad bin Jasem Al Thani is personally leading the charge of the light brigade at Turtle Bay later today, with the Arab League transferring the flag to the US and its western allies to wage the diplomatic campaign for getting a UNSC mandate for outside intervention in Syria. A battle royal is about to commence at the UNSC later in the evening, which would have all the trappings of a cold war. Ironically, just before the curtain lifts in the UNSC, some fascinating news has begun trickling in from the Libyan deserts. Libya is splitting. The pro-Muammar Gaddafi Warfallah tribe, the dominant tribe in Bali Walid and the most populous in Libya, drove out a pro-government militia trained, equipped and financed by Qatar and its western mentors this week. The tribe has formed a tribal-based government and Tripoli has “recognised” it. This is apart from the trouble brewing in eastern Benghazi and elsewhere, as dissatisfaction erupts over the puppet government in Tripoli installed by Qatar and the US-led western powers.

But Sheikh Hamad has no time left for Libya anymore as he did his two bits there already, and he has been told to move on by his western mentors, now that the action turns to Syria. The show is over in Libya as long as western control has been established over the country’s great oil fields. Hamad has been told that the rest of the Libyan deserts could go to the dogs. So, Hamad is done with Libya. He removes his blood-stained overcoat and puts on a sparkling white apparel as he emplanes for New York on Saturday. Isn’t it tragic that Hamad and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in tow have arrogated to themselves the role of the flag carriers of democracy in the Muslim Middle East? The tragedy of the Muslims of the Middle East is actually their own petty autocrats who are shivering with fear within their petticoats about their own political survival if an avalanche of genuine reform overwhelms their lands. So, Hamad and Abdullah will do all that they can, no matter what it takes, to perpetuate western political, military, economic and cultural dominance of the region.

The diplomatic battle that is commencing in New York later today is of historic importance. Russia and China are coming under immense pressure as they are standing bang in the way of an overt western military intervention in Syria. If push comes to shove, will they use their veto to deny a UNSC mandate for western intervention? That’s the big question. We may know the answer in a few days. Quintessentially, the covert western-Turkish-Arab intervention in Syria so far needs to be legitimised and carried to its logical conclusion. Why should Muslims blame USAia for all their woes? They have only themselves to blame for allowing the likes of Hamad and Abdullah to represent their voice. What is the US’s game plan? Russia Today featured a brilliant analysis of the ABC of the so-called “Arab Spring”, explained succinctly by the British author and Arabist, John Bradley. In sum, the upheaval in the Muslim Middle East and the Shi’ite Sunni divide that has been triggered artificially is lending itself to creating the political environment for the planting of the germane seeds of “USAian Islam” in the Middle East. The grand design is to perpetuate western hegemony over the Muslim Middle East for yet another century under new local political dispensations. Autocrats like Hamad and Abdullah hope to survive in the bargain as the west’s sidekicks. Whether their fervent hopes of survival prove realistic or not, time will tell. My hunch is that as dregs on a plate, they will also be washed away once the west finesses the forces of USAian Islam in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

This is not about a Muslim or Arab renaissance in the Muslim Middle East. This is not about democracy in Muslim societies. This upheaval known as the Arab Spring is not even indigenous. It’s a Caesarian operation conducted with clinical perfection by the west on the Muslim lands. The result will be that the Koran that the Muslims of the Middle East may end up reading through the coming decades will be printed in the west, financed by Hamad and Abdullah. The Muslim world indeed deserves far better than this disgusting spectacle. A variant of the tragedy is appearing in the eastern edges of the Greater Middle East also, in Afghanistan. Qatar has been brought in by Washington for a repeat performance in the Hindu Kush. Taliban will be the rulers in Kabul except that they will be rehashed as Islamists, after jettisoning their archaic form of traditional Islam and once they begin to practise “USAian Islam”. Ambassador Ryan Crocker is right. This is not about breaking up Afghanistan, it is about “Islmaizing” Afghanistan.

In fact, Afghanistan’s unity becomes terribly important for the US geostrategy. Afghanistan should remain in its present form as a single geopolitical entity on the Central Asian chessboard with the ideological underpinnings of an islamic democracy or else the great game runs into cul-de-sac. Because, once the transformation of the Taliban is complete under the Qatari and USAian supervision,  Taliban will be the avant-garde of change in the Central Asian steppes to the north and the other outlying Muslim regions of Pakistan, and of the Kashmir regions of India where “USAian Islam” is straining to find expression. And if that happens, something like half of China’s vast territorial spaces inhabited by non-Han peoples, many of them Muslims, and Russia’s “soft underbelly” become ripe for change. And Pakistan and India say goodbye to their nascent hopes for retaining their strategic autonomy as independent states. Alas, Hamad and Abudllah have their counterparts among the Pakistani and Indian elites as well.

Paradoxically, therefore, what the US and its allies expect Russia and China (and India and Pakistan) to do in the UNSC is to remain passive onlookers of an enterprise that ultimately can turn out to be their own nemesis: implanting Islamism under US control as the life force in their body-polities. The grand design of the US is to get deeply embedded in the Greater Middle East in anticipation of a century through which Asia threatens to interrupt the west’s 500-year old exclusive global dominance. The west won’t give up its hegemony without a struggle. Controlling the Middle East is the key to the US global strategy. Without a weakening of Russia and China and India and Pakistan by exploiting their mutual contradictions, and smashing up the defiant Iranian regime which espouses justice and resistance, this march of history under Asian leadership can’t be arrested. Moscow is dead right, Syria is not a matter for Russia alone when the UNSC sits down today to debate a resolution paving the way for western intervention for the overthrow of the regime in Damascus. This matter is also for China, and for BRICS and Pakistan.

If the sorry parade of European poodles, or what Chris Floyd delightfully dubbed Europuppies, had any understanding of Persian culture, they would have known that blowback for their declaration of economic war in the form of an Iranian oil embargo would be nothing short of heavy metal. Better yet; death metal. The Majlis will discuss this Sunday, in an open section, whether to cancel right away all oil exports to any European country that approved the embargo, according to Emad Hosseini, the rapporteur of the Majlis Energy Committee. And that comes with the requisite apocalyptic warning, relayed via the Fars news agency, courtesy of member of Parliament Nasser Soudani:

Europe will burn in the fire of Iran’s oil wells.

Soudani expresses the views of the whole Tehran establishment when he says:

The structure of their refineries is compatible with Iran’s oil. The embargo will cause an increase in oil prices, and the Europeans will be compelled to buy oil at higher prices. They will be compelled to buy Iran’s oil indirectly, through intermediaries.

According to the EU sanctions package, all existing contracts will be respected only until Jul 1, and no new contracts are allowed. Now imagine if this pre-emptive Iranian legislation is voted within the next few days. Crisis-hit Club Med countries such as Spain and especially Italy and Greece will be dealt a deathblow, having no time to find a possible alternative to Iran’s light, high-quality crude. Saudi Arabia, whatever the oily spin in Western corporate media, does not have the spare capacity; and on top of it, the absolute priority for the House of Saud is high oil prices, so it can bribe its own population into forgetting about noxious Arab Spring ideas, as well as repressing them. So yes, already broken European economies would be forced to keep buying Iranian oil, but now from the winners of choice: middlemen vultures.

Not surprisingly, the losers lost in these Cold War tactics anachronistically applied to a global open market are the Europeans themselves. Greece, already facing the abyss, has been buying heavily discounted oil from Iran. The strong possibility remains of the oil embargo precipitating a Greek government bond default, and even a catastrophic cascade effect in the eurozone: Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and beyond. The world needs a digital Herodotus to decode how these European poodles who claim to represent “civilization” were able, in a single stroke, to inflict simultaneous pain on Greece, the cradle of Western civilization itself, and Persia, one of the most sophisticated civilizations in history. In an astonishing historical replay of tragedy as farce, it’s as if Greeks and Persians were bonded together at the Thermopylae facing the onslaught of NATO armies. Now compare it with the action all across Eurasia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said:

Unilateral sanctions don’t help matters.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, exercising immense tact, nevertheless was unmistakable:

To blindly pressure and impose sanctions on Iran are not constructive approaches.

Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said:

We have very good relations with Iran, and we are putting much effort into renewing Iran’s talks with the 5+1 mediators’ group. Turkey will continue looking for a peaceful solution to the issue.

BRICS member India also dismissed sanctions, alongside Russia and China. India will keep buying Iranian oil and paying in rupees or gold. South Korea and Japan will inevitably extract exemptions from the Barack Obama administration. All across Eurasia trade is fast moving away from the US dollar. The Asian Dollar Exclusion Zone, crucially, also means that Asia is slowly disengaging itself from Western banks. The movement may be led by China, but it’s irreversibly transnational. Once again, follow the money. BRICS members China and Brazil started bypassing the US dollar on trade in 2007. BRICS members Russia and China did the same in 2010. Japan and China, the top two Asian giants, did the same only last month. Only last week, Saudi Arabia and China rolled out a project for a giant oil refinery in the Red Sea. And India more or less secretly is deciding to pay for Iranian oil in gold, even bypassing the current middleman, a Turkish bank. Asia wants a new international system and it’s working for it. Inevitable long-term consequences: the US dollar, and crucially the petrodollar, slowly drifting into irrelevance. “Too Big to Fail” may turn out to be not a categorical imperative, but an epitaph.

Steven Spielberg is near to etching in stone with Warner Bros on that biopic portraying the Jewish leader as the warrior to beat all warriors. With a working title of Gods And Kings, what’s envisioned is “a movie like a Braveheart-ish version of the Moses story,” an insider tells us. “Him coming down the river, being adopted, leaving his home, forming an army, and getting the Ten Commandments.” And despite the awesome screen possibilities of the parting of the Red Sea, the movie isn’t being contemplated in 3D. Back in 1956, Paramount released The Ten Commandments in VistaVision to give moviegoers a more spectacular experience of scenes like that. But this film is as far from a remake of the Cecil B DeMille-directed epic as you can get, even though they cover similar ground. Instead Warner Bros wants Spielberg to direct it with the gritty reality of Saving Private Ryan, which is considered a masterpiece redefining battle movies. ”There have been glossy versions of the Moses story but this would be a real warrior story,” an insider tells us. The studio has wanted Spielberg on the project since last September when he first read the script. (See previous, Warner Bros Goes To The Mountaintop For Moses Epic.) Getting Spielberg seemed a long shot because his deals are always complex and his dance card is always full. Talks intensified, and now insiders tell us the dialogue should consummate by the end of the month. Warner Bros wants to start production sometime in Mar-Apr 2013.

Producer Matti Lesham came to the studio with a treatment that was bought for development. The film is being produced by Dan Lin and Lesham. The two writers are Stuart Hazeldine (the upcoming epic Paradise Lost for Legendary/Warner Bros and inspired by the John Milton poem) and Michael Green (co-writer of Warner Bros’ Green Lantern and the upcoming ABC midseason series The River for Spielberg). It’s the first time they’ve scripted together. Spielberg just finished directing Lincoln and is already working on Robopocalypse: both are DreamWorks pics co-financed by Twentieth Century Fox. Spielberg wants a big film next and this is it: Ten Commandments was one of the most profitable films of its era, grossing $65m in 1956, which in today’s dollars is equivalent to close to $1b. Spielberg helmed another seminal Jewish movie, Schindler’s List which won seven Oscars at the 66th Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. He was just overlooked for a Best Director nomination on Tuesday for War Horse even though it received a Best Picture nod. Meanwhile this marks the second high-profile film Warner Bros is developing on a seminal Jewish hero. Mel Gibson and Joe Eszterhas are collaborating on their pitch to tell the story of Jewish warrior Judah Maccabee, who teamed with his father and four brothers to lead the Jewish revolt against the Greek-Syrian armies that had conquered Judea in the 2nd century B.C. (sic – RB). Gibson has the first option to direct, and he will produce the film through his Icon Productions banner.