₦airaland Forum

Portable Gas Barbecue Griller

Description:
Compact BBQ griller with foldable legs and shelves for easy transport and storage.

Perfect for grilling 'suya,' kebab, steak, fish, corn, chicken etc.

Enjoy your outdoor life, camping, travelling, parties with this portable BBQ that includes a hotplate, grill, gas hose, gas regulator and hood.

Price: 16,000 (neg)

Call 08176439653

By ERIC SCHMITT DECEMBER 31, 2014 STUTTGART, Germany

After the Islamist group Boko Haram kidnapped nearly 300 teenage girls in Nigeria in April, the United States sent surveillance drones and about 30 intelligence and security experts to help the Nigerian military try to rescue them.
Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the top general for American missions in Africa, rushed from his headquarters here to help the commanders in the crisis.

Seven months later, the drone flights have dwindled, many of the advisers have gone home and not one of the kidnapped girls has been found. Many are believed to have been married off to Boko Haram fighters, who in the past six months have seized hundreds more
civilians, including children, planted bombs in Nigerian cities and captured entire towns.


In Washington, that fleeting moment of cooperation between Nigeria and the United States in May has now devolved into finger-
pointing and stoked the distrust between the two countries’ militaries. Nigeria’s ambassador to the United States has accused the Obama administration of failing to support the fight against Boko Haram, prompting the State
Department to fire back with condemnations of the Nigerian military’s dismal human rights
record. “Tensions in the U.S.-Nigeria relationship are probably at their highest level in the past decade,” Carson, the State Department’s former top diplomat for Africa, said in an interview. “There is a high degree of frustration on both sides. But this frustration should not be allowed to spin out of control.”

Here in Stuttgart, officials at the headquarters of United States Africa Command offered their own bleak assessment of a corruption-plagued, poorly equipped Nigerian military that is “in tatters” as it confronts an enemy that now controls about 20 percent of the country.

“Ounce for ounce, Boko Haram is equal to if not better than the Nigerian military,” said one American official here, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational reports.

The violence is in the meantime spilling into neighboring countries like Cameroon, which carried out its first airstrikes against Boko Haram this week, after militants overran a
military base and attacked five villages there. Despite Boko Haram’s advances, United States
Embassy officials in Abuja said Nigeria had canceled the last stage of American training of a newly created Nigerian Army battalion.

The United States has flown several hundred surveillance drone flights over the vast, densely forested regions in the northeast where the girls were seized, but officials in Stuttgart said that with few tips to guide the missions, the flights yielded little information, while diverting drones from other missions in war zones like Iraq and Syria.

When the Pentagon did come up with what it calls “actionable intelligence” from the drone flights — for example, information that might have indicated the location of some of the girls — and turned it over to the Nigerian commanders to pursue, they did nothing with the information, Africa Command officials said.

In addition, United States security assistance to Nigeria has been sharply limited by American legal prohibitions against close dealings with foreign militaries that have engaged in human rights abuses.

Those restrictions have drawn sharp criticism from Nigerian officials. In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in
November, Nigeria’s ambassador to the United States, Adebowale Ibidapo Adefuye, said his government was dissatisfied with the “scope, nature and content” of American support in the fight against Boko Haram. He also disputed allegations of human rights violations committed by Nigerian soldiers.

“We find it difficult to understand how and why in spite of the U.S. presence in Nigeria with their
sophisticated military technology, Boko Haram should be expanding and becoming more deadly,” he said.

Mr. Adefuye accused Washington of failing to provide the lethal weapons needed to defeat Boko Haram. In June, the Pentagon gave Nigeria
some Toyota trucks, communications equipment and body armor. “There is no use giving us the type of support that enables us to deliver light jabs to the terrorists when what we need to give them is the killer punch,” the ambassador said.


Mr. Adefuye’s speech prompted a strong response from the State Department the next day. “We continue to urge Nigeria to investigate allegations of abuses perpetrated by Nigerian security forces, as well as offer Nigeria assistance in developing the doctrine and training needed to improve the military’s effectiveness,” Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, told reporters in Washington. “We wouldn’t be raising that concern if we didn’t feel and others didn’t feel that they were warranted.”

Groups like Human Rights Watch say the Nigerian military has at times burned hundreds of homes and committed other abuses as it
battled Boko Haram and its presumed supporters.

By this time, cooperation on the ground was also wearing thin. When Maj. Gen. James B. Linder, the head of American Special Operations forces in Africa, visited Nigeria in
late October, he was barred from visiting the base where American trainers were instructing the new Nigerian Army battalion created to help fight Boko Haram. General Linder was left waiting at the gate in what some American officials viewed as another dig at the Pentagon. Africa Command officials insisted it was a “coordination issue that was remedied with a meeting later in the day.

“We continue to engage with Nigeria on a broad range of training, equipping, and information-sharing projects across all of the military services,” Benjamin Benson, an Africa Command spokesman, said in an email.

Secretary of State John Kerry called Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, on Tuesday in part to discuss Boko Haram.

The strains between the two militaries are not new, and with Nigeria preparing for national
elections in February, American officials fear that earlier assessments may overtake their cautious optimism from the spring.

Testifying before House and Senate hearings, administration officials in May offered an unusually candid criticism of the Nigerian military. “We’re now looking at a military
force that’s, quite frankly, becoming afraid to even engage,” said Alice Friend, the Pentagon’s principal director for African affairs at the
time.

Sarah Sewall, the undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights, said at a separate hearing that despite Nigeria’s $5.8 billion security budget for 2014, “corruption prevents supplies as basic as bullets and transport vehicles from reaching the front lines of the struggle against Boko Haram.”


Source: mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/world/with-schoolgirls-still-missing-fragile-us-nigeria-ties-falter.html

THE ROVING EYE
Will Russia, Germany save Europe from war? By Pepe Escobar


Will Russia, Germany save Europe from war? By Pepe Escobar Are the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russia on a mad spiral leading to yet another war in Europe? Is it inevitable? Far from it.

The US-propelled vassal currently starring in the oligarch dance in Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, last week advanced the proposition that Ukrainians in the near future, after his "reforms", will be asked to vote on whether to join NATO.

Let's be serious here. Many of you will be familiar with the concept of "shatter belt" - territories and peoples that historically have been squeezed between the Germanic Eagle and the Russian Bear.

As we stand, the whole shatter belt - apart from Ukraine and Belarus - has signed up to NATO. A new Berlin wall, this time US-built - from the Baltics to the Black Sea now runs through Kiev. Were Ukraine to become a NATO member in an albeit remote future, the shatter belt buffer zone would disappear. This means NATO - essentially the US - planted right on Russia's western border.

Washington has just announced that it will be pre-positioning more military vehicles in Europe to be used in exercises or "potential military operations". This is perfectly in tune with the
relentless US Think Tankland spin that NATO and the US will be "forced" to balance their commitment to security in Eastern Europe against potential Russian "aggression".

As Ukraine, the Baltic states and Poland persist in compounded hysteria about such "aggression", the option of a post-MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) US-Russia nuclear war, terrifying as it must be, is now - casually - back on the discussion table. At least there's a countercurrent: strands of informed Americans are wondering why the US should be paying for Europe's defense when European GDP is larger than that of the US.

[b]Wanna play war, boy?[\b]
Now for the "threat" of nuclear war in Europe - bogus or otherwise. It's pointless to compare the strategic nuclear capabilities of the US and Russia based on numbers, but not on quality.

Take the compounded GDP of US, Germany, France and the UK and compare it to Russia; it's a victory by landslide. Then examine the strategic nuclear scenario, and it's a totally different story. GDP alone does not "win" anything.

Washington/Wall Street elites are now deep into nuclear war paranoia. A Council on Foreign Relations study basically "found out" what Pravda had already reported. Other pieces such as this at least hint at the obvious - glaring US strategic shortcomings.

Consider some of the basics:
•Russian ICBMs armed with MIRVs travel at about 18 Mach; that is way faster than anything in the US arsenal. And basically they are unbeatable.

•The S-400 and S-500 double trouble. Moscow has agreed to sell the S-400 surface-to-air missile system to China. The bottom line is this will make Beijing impermeable to US air power, ICBMs and cruise missiles. Russia, for its part, is already focusing on the state-of-the-art S-500 - which essentially makes the Patriot anti-missile system look like a V-2 from World War II.

•The Russian Iskander missile travels at Mach 7 - with a range of 400 kilometers, carrying a 700 kilogram warhead of several varieties, and with a circular error probability of around five meters. Translation: an ultimate lethal weapon against airfields or logistic infrastructure. The Iskander can reach targets deep inside Europe.

•And then there's the Sukhoi T-50 PAK FA. Talk about a real near-future game-changer.

NATO clowns dreaming of a war on Russia would have to come up with an ironclad system to knock out the Iskanders. They don't have any. Additionally, they would have to face the S-400s, which the Russians can deploy all over the spectrum.

Think of a hefty batch of S-400s positioned at the enclave of Kaliningrad; that would turn NATO air operations deep inside Europe into an absolutely horrendous nightmare. On top of it,
good ol' NATO fighter jets cost a fortune. Imagine the effect of hundreds of destroyed fighter jets on a European Union already
financially devastated and austerity-plagued to death.

As if this was not enough, no one knows the exact extent of NATO's strategic capabilities. Brussels is not talking. Extra- officially, these capabilities are not exactly a marvel. And Russian intelligence knows it.

Still assuming those NATO clowns would insist on playing war, Moscow has already made it very clear Russia would use their awesome arsenal of 5,000-plus tactical nuclear weapons - and whatever else it takes - to defend the nation against a NATO conventional attack. Moreover, a few thousand S-400 and S-500 systems are enough to block a US nuclear attack.

None of this hair-raising Apocalypse Now scenario is even taking into account the Russia-China alliance - the major, game-changing Eurasian story of the 2010s.

Just in case the "pivoting to Asia" gang starts harboring funny ideas about the Middle Kingdom as well, China is massively investing in bouncing lasers off satellites; satellite-hitting missiles; silent submarines that surface beside US aircraft
carriers without prior detection; and a made-in-China anti-missile missile that can hit a reentering satellite moving faster than any ICBM.

In a nutshell, Beijing knows the US surface fleet is obsolete - and undefendable. And needless to add, all of these Chinese modernizing developments are proceeding way faster than
anything in the US.

A modest proposal The spin by the Washington establishment has been relentless: Russia is expanding towards a 21st century empire.

Here, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explains in detail how this is undiluted rubbish. What has actually happened is that Moscow deftly called the Brzezinski-inspired bluff in Ukraine - with all its overtones. No wonder the Empire of Chaos is furious.

And yet there is a solution to defuse the current, hysterical rush to war logic. HereI have examined in some detail how Washington is playing Russian Roulette. Now it's time to advance a modest proposal - as it has been floated by a few concerned analysts from the US, Germany and Asia.

Essentially, it's very simple. It's up to Germany. And it's all about undoing Stalin.

Stalin, at the outset of World War II, took East Prussia from Germany and moved the eastern part of Poland into Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine was originally from Russia; it is part of Russia
and was given by Lenin to Ukraine.

So let's have East Prussia returned to Germany; the eastern part of Poland returned to Poland; and eastern Ukraine as well as Crimea - which Khrushchev gave to Ukraine - returned to Russia.

Everyone get their share. No more Stalin. No more arbitrary borders. That's what the Chinese would define as a "triple win" situation. Of course, the Empire of Chaos would fight it to death; there would be no more chaos manipulated to justify a crusade against bogus Russian "aggression".

The ball is in Germany's court. Now it's up to East Prussians to present the facts to Angela Merkel. Let's see if she's able to get the message.

These folks in charge of affairs in this goddamn country don't give a hoot about us all. They don't care about the living, neither do they bat an eyelid over the dead. The politicians(APC,PDP, et all) and the bureaucrats do not care; why you all bicker over them on NL? They don't care about you....for fvck sake!!!

Boys are hustling next to this poo! How insensitive to dirt we are in this country. The smell is horrible! How they stand the stench beats me.

A LAWMA truck drive past the mess. I guess they want be bribed before they moved this mess off the street. Effed up country!!!

Today 09 Oct 2014.
Festering Corpse still at Iyanioba -Ojo LGA, Lagos state.

slimfit1:
APC councillors can't even look for ways to get those bodies to mortuary silly people.

I tried to avoid the usual politicking on NL by posting this on the health thread.

Some one should please take this to frontage.. Maybe then some fathead holed up in office will move a foot, and send some boys to bury the dead.

It's just a mad country. Iyanioba is a cesspit of violence, dirt, thuggery,areaboys,....all manner of vices. LASTMA, Police, Union Thugs are there next to this deadmess hustling Danfo drivers for Wazo(50naira). None of them cares enough to drag the council or LAWMA to pick up the mess. It's just crazy! The worst part, the akara, buns, puffpuff sellers are not far from the mess selling to passersby. Is it that we hv lost it all in this goddamn country? Damn!!!

Why are we so freaking effed up in this goddamn country? Two festering deads lying at Ojo -at Iyanioba and opposite LASU gate.

Yesterday, I told a LASMA guy at Iyanioba to contact Ojo council and LAWMA to take care of the mess. I spoke to one police dude at oyanioba, he looked at me with disdain.

What's wrong with this country? The smell is so fvcking obnoxious.

Please get the deads off the street for the living for fvck sake!

Why are we so freaking effed up in this goddamn country? Two festering deads lying at Ojo -at Iyanioba and opposite LASU gate.

Yesterday, I told a LASMA guy at Iyanioba to contact Ojo council and LAWMA to take care of the mess. I spoke to one police dude at oyanioba, he looked at me with disdain.

What's wrong with this country? The smell is so fvcking obnoxious.

Please get the deads off the street for the living for fvck sake!

How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS
by GARIKAI CHENGU

Much like Al Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS) is made-in-the-USA, an instrument of terror designed to divide and conquer the oil-rich Middle East and to counter Iran’s growing influence in the region.

The fact that the United States has a long and torrid history of backing terrorist groups will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history.

The CIA first aligned itself with extremist Islam during the Cold War era. Back then, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side, the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side, Western nations and militant political Islam, which America considered an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, General William Odom recently remarked, “by any measure the U.S. has long used terrorism. In 1978-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the U.S. would be in violation.”

During the 1970′s the CIA used the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a barrier, both to thwart Soviet expansion and prevent the spread of Marxist ideology among the Arab masses. The United States also openly supported Sarekat Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, and supported the Jamaat-e-Islami terror group against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan. Last but certainly not least, there is Al Qaeda.

Lest we forget, the CIA gave birth to Osama Bin Laden and breastfed his organization during the 1980′s. Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told the House of Commons that Al Qaeda was unquestionably a product of Western intelligence agencies. Mr. Cook explained that Al Qaeda, which literally means an abbreviation of “the database” in Arabic, was originally the computer database of the thousands of Islamist extremists, who were trained by the CIA and funded by the Saudis, in order to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.

America’s relationship with Al Qaeda has always been a love-hate affair. Depending on whether a particular Al Qaeda terrorist group in a given region furthers American interests or not, the U.S. State Department either funds or aggressively targets that terrorist group. Even as American foreign policy makers claim to oppose Muslim extremism, they knowingly foment it as a weapon of foreign policy.

The Islamic State is its latest weapon that, much like Al Qaeda, is certainly backfiring. ISIS recently rose to international prominence after its thugs began beheading American journalists. Now the terrorist group controls an area the size of the United Kingdom.

In order to understand why the Islamic State has grown and flourished so quickly, one has to take a look at the organization’s American-backed roots. The 2003 American invasion and occupation of Iraq created the pre-conditions for radical Sunni groups, like ISIS, to take root. America, rather unwisely, destroyed Saddam Hussein’s secular state machinery and replaced it with a predominantly Shiite administration. The U.S. occupation caused vast unemployment in Sunni areas, by rejecting socialism and closing down factories in the naive hope that the magical hand of the free market would create jobs. Under the new U.S.-backed Shiite regime, working class Sunni’s lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Unlike the white Afrikaners in South Africa, who were allowed to keep their wealth after regime change, upper class Sunni’s were systematically dispossessed of their assets and lost their political influence. Rather than promoting religious integration and unity, American policy in Iraq exacerbated sectarian divisions and created a fertile breading ground for Sunni discontent, from which Al Qaeda in Iraq took root.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used to have a different name: Al Qaeda in Iraq. After 2010 the group rebranded and refocused its efforts on Syria.

There are essentially three wars being waged in Syria: one between the government and the rebels, another between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and yet another between America and Russia. It is this third, neo-Cold War battle that made U.S. foreign policy makers decide to take the risk of arming Islamist rebels in Syria, because Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, is a key Russian ally. Rather embarrassingly, many of these Syrian rebels have now turned out to be ISIS thugs, who are openly brandishing American-made M16 Assault rifles.

America’s Middle East policy revolves around oil and Israel. The invasion of Iraq has partially satisfied Washington’s thirst for oil, but ongoing air strikes in Syria and economic sanctions on Iran have everything to do with Israel. The goal is to deprive Israel’s neighboring enemies, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestine’s Hamas, of crucial Syrian and Iranian support.

ISIS is not merely an instrument of terror used by America to topple the Syrian government; it is also used to put pressure on Iran.

The last time Iran invaded another nation was in 1738. Since independence in 1776, the U.S. has been engaged in over 53 military invasions and expeditions. Despite what the Western media’s war cries would have you believe, Iran is clearly not the threat to regional security, Washington is. An Intelligence Report published in 2012, endorsed by all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, confirms that Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Truth is, any Iranian nuclear ambition, real or imagined, is as a result of American hostility towards Iran, and not the other way around.

America is using ISIS in three ways: to attack its enemies in the Middle East, to serve as a pretext for U.S. military intervention abroad, and at home to foment a manufactured domestic threat, used to justify the unprecedented expansion of invasive domestic surveillance.

By rapidly increasing both government secrecy and surveillance, Mr. Obama’s government is increasing its power to watch its citizens, while diminishing its citizens’ power to watch their government. Terrorism is an excuse to justify mass surveillance, in preparation for mass revolt.

The so-called “War on Terror” should be seen for what it really is: a pretext for maintaining a dangerously oversized U.S. military. The two most powerful groups in the U.S. foreign policy establishment are the Israel lobby, which directs U.S. Middle East policy, and the Military-Industrial-Complex, which profits from the former group’s actions. Since George W. Bush declared the “War on Terror” in October 2001, it has cost the American taxpayer approximately 6.6 trillion dollars and thousands of fallen sons and daughters; but, the wars have also raked in billions of dollars for Washington’s military elite.

In fact, more than seventy American companies and individuals have won up to $27 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last three years, according to a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity. According to the study, nearly 75 per cent of these private companies had employees or board members, who either served in, or had close ties to, the executive branch of the Republican and Democratic administrations, members of Congress, or the highest levels of the military.

In 1997, a U.S. Department of Defense report stated, “the data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement abroad and an increase in terrorist attacks against the U.S.” Truth is, the only way America can win the “War On Terror” is if it stops giving terrorists the motivation and the resources to attack America. Terrorism is the symptom; American imperialism in the Middle East is the cancer. Put simply, the War on Terror is terrorism; only, it is conducted on a much larger scale by people with jets and missiles.

Facts:
-from the CCTV angle, we can "not" be sure that helicopter flew directly over the Synagogue building

-helicopter flew over at 11.54am

-building collapsed at 12.44pm

-no aerial explosion

-building buckled under from the right-side foundation

-dust cloud rose from beneath

See sequence of events below:

My conclusion: the foundation/pillars buckled under pressure from sheer load above.

"the hegemon" sponsored al-Qaida in Pakistan against the Russians in Afghanistan, but the group went rogue, took over Afghanistan and brought ruins on the people. "they" had to bomb them in 2001 to stop them.

"the hegemon" trained ISIS jihad bunch in Jordan to overthrow the government in Syria. They went rogue... took over a stretch from Raqqa to Mosul(Iraq). Now "the hegemon" is back bombing to stop ISIS the created with the help of Saudi Arabia.

"the hegemon" with their lil' minion -the Brits trained the Islamist-jihadee bunch in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi. Now the Bel-hajj boys have gone rogue killing the hegemon's ambassador in Bengazi, thrashing the whole country called Libya. "the hegemon" is attempting to claw back control of the rogues by using a former Libyan general (a CIA man in Libya).

When will "the hegemon" ever learn lessons?
Stop creating the dogs of war that you cant control.The rest of the world is feed up with endless wars.

"They Pulled Me Back In"
By Eric Margolis

August 16, 2014 "ICH" - [s][/s]Armed humanitarianism 2.0. That’s our new western version of old-fashioned 19th century imperialism, now feminized by President Barack Obama’s lady advisors, painted
pink and accompanied by the kind of soft piano music you hear in ads for women’s products. Last week, the Obama administration latched onto the plight of Iraq’s Yazidis who were being persecuted by those awful ISIS folks – just in jolly good time to divert attention from the massacre in Gaza.

How handy. All three US networks and the
increasingly shackled BBC were ordered to drop Gaza reporting and refocus their camera teams on the suffering Yazidis and, all of a sudden, Iraq’s fleeing Christians.

This was a brilliant media ploy. The world, which was furious at the US for enabling Israel’s savaging of Gaza and killing of almost 2,000 Palestinians, switched its attention to the hitherto unknown Yazidis, and to Iraqi Christians. No one in the US had ever heard of Yazidis but that was ok. Uncle Sam to the rescue.

No mention was made that Iraq’s Christians had been safe and sound under President Saddam Hussein – even privileged – until President George Bush invaded and destroyed Iraq. We can expect the same fate for Syria’s Christians if the protection of the Assad regime is torn away by the US- engineered uprising. We will then shed crocodile tears for Syria’s Christians.

The US and Europe suddenly cheered the ostensible US-French-British `rescue mission.’ Interestingly, those old colonialists, the French and British, were so quick to get involved in oil-rich Iraq: the Brits sent in some of Her Majesty’s Killers, the renowned Special Air Service, or SAS. France and Britain are
sending arms to the Kurdish militia known as `peshmerga.’ Australia, now under a hard right government, may follow suit.

Around 1900, Imperial Britain, France and Russia all claimed the right to intervene in the Levant to supposedly protect its Christians. Such a useful excuse.

America thrilled to see the US Air Force dropped food and water to Yazidi refugees. Even this cynical writer was cheered to see US military power helping the oppressed.

But what of the 1.8 million oppressed Palestinians in Gaza, cut off by Israel and Egypt from food, water, medical supplies and power? What about the millions of refugees in Syria created by western attempts to overthrow its Assad dynasty for backing
Iran? What of millions of internal refugees from the Afghan and Iraq Wars?

Well, Washington did just announced a temporary halt in resupplying deadly US-made Hellfire air to ground missiles to Israel, which has used up its once large supply blowing apart Palestinians in Gaza. Like the fake arms-delivery suspension by the US to Egypt’s brutish regime, it will soon be lifted when
public attention has turned elsewhere.

There are 5.5 million Palestinian refugees. What are a handful of Yazidis compared to this sea of homeless? The number and plight of those Yazidi refugees were wildly exaggerated by the western powers to justify their re-intervention in Iraq. Lurid reports of ISIS cruelty may well be true, but this old cynic suspects they are being used and exaggerated to justify intervention. After all, we saw
the similar untruths about Saddam’s regime and al- Qaida’s “threat to the entire globe.”

This kind of stuff, much loved by the British, goes back to bogus stories from 1914 of German soldiers
spiking Belgian babies on their bayonets. Or,
remember the baloney about Kuwaiti babies thrown from their incubators by beastly Iraqis?

Now, the biggest dolts in the US Republican Party like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and my hometown’s own Peter King, claim the US homeland is threatened by pipsqueak ISIS while they try to provoke a real war with Russia over Ukraine. To show just how bizarre US Mideast policy has become: US warplanes are dropping aid to Iraq’s Yazidis (considered devil worshippers by many Iraqi), while they bomb Zaidi tribesmen in northern Yemen who are battling its US-installed military junta in Sa’ana. Yazidis, Zaidis, it’s all very confusing, like those pesky Slovaks and Slovenes. Meanwhile, the White House has ousted its Shia sock puppet in Baghdad, Nuri al-Maliki, in favor of a newer, even more obedient satrap. Maliki was foolish enough to actually believe he was prime minister of Iraq and refused to allow US troops to stay there indefinitely.

Big mistake, Nuri. But shed no tears for him: his vicious death squads murdered and tortured large numbers of Sunni. One of their favorite interrogation tools was an electric drill applied to the kneecap. US generals in Iraq used Shia death squads (patterned on those of El Salvador, a war I covered) to crush Sunni resistance. Now, it’s payback for the Sunnis.

Iraq’s next leader is another CIA-blessed politician who will be expected to make his nation safe for western oil companies. We see the same process in Afghanistan where CIA central casting has produced two ‘candidates’ for president.

As for de facto autonomous Kurds, they have been a western protectorate since 2003 and would be fully independent today were not for fear of a violent reaction by the irritable Turks. Israel has supplied the Kurds with arms since 1970.

Interestingly, the Kurds are now exporting oil
directly to Israel though a Turkish pipeline and
tanker while the regime in Baghdad, cut out of
payments, fumes. There’s long been talk of an
Israeli air base in Kurdistan.

“Just when I though I was out, they pulled me back in.” Michael Corleone’s plaintive line from the “Godfather” is Obama’s tune today. He’s only returning to Iraq for purely humanitarian reasons, a story that markets well to female (mainly Democratic) voters. And because the ISIS Saracens will overrun the Bible Belt soon unless Obama acts. Never mind that the US armed and trained ISIS in Jordan to overthrow Syria’s regime. Now they have gone rogue and must be stopped by a new humanitarian crusade.

So back go American troops into the hellhole of Iraq, an act that defies both military and political logic. But US elections are on the horizon and Hillary Clinton is out there blasting Obama for having left Iraq in the first place. Hillary has just fully aligned herself with Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu and asserts US troops should have stayed in Iraq…..she who is married to a notorious wartime draft dodger. Republicans are beating the same drum.

Remember the ‘tar baby’ from Uncle Remus’s slave stories of the Deep South. All who touch him get stuck. Well, that’s Iraq for you – in spades. Instead of tar, it’s sticky oil. Obama should have stayed out of Iraq. But politics forced him back in.

"They Pulled Me Back In"
By Eric Margolis

August 16, 2014 "ICH" - Armed humanitarianism 2.0. That’s our new western version of old-fashioned 19th century imperialism, now feminized by President Barack Obama’s lady advisors, painted
pink and accompanied by the kind of soft piano music you hear in ads for women’s products. Last week, the Obama administration latched onto the plight of Iraq’s Yazidis who were being persecuted by those awful ISIS folks – just in jolly good time to divert attention from the massacre in Gaza.

How handy. All three US networks and the
increasingly shackled BBC were ordered to drop Gaza reporting and refocus their camera teams on the suffering Yazidis and, all of a sudden, Iraq’s fleeing Christians.

This was a brilliant media ploy. The world, which was furious at the US for enabling Israel’s savaging of Gaza and killing of almost 2,000 Palestinians, switched its attention to the hitherto unknown Yazidis, and to Iraqi Christians. No one in the US had ever heard of Yazidis but that was ok. Uncle Sam to the rescue.

No mention was made that Iraq’s Christians had been safe and sound under President Saddam Hussein – even privileged – until President George Bush invaded and destroyed Iraq. We can expect the same fate for Syria’s Christians if the protection of the Assad regime is torn away by the US- engineered uprising. We will then shed crocodile tears for Syria’s Christians.

The US and Europe suddenly cheered the ostensible US-French-British `rescue mission.’ Interestingly, those old colonialists, the French and British, were so quick to get involved in oil-rich Iraq: the Brits sent in some of Her Majesty’s Killers, the renowned Special Air Service, or SAS. France and Britain are
sending arms to the Kurdish militia known as `peshmerga.’ Australia, now under a hard right government, may follow suit.

Around 1900, Imperial Britain, France and Russia all claimed the right to intervene in the Levant to supposedly protect its Christians. Such a useful excuse.

America thrilled to see the US Air Force dropped food and water to Yazidi refugees. Even this cynical writer was cheered to see US military power helping the oppressed.

But what of the 1.8 million oppressed Palestinians in Gaza, cut off by Israel and Egypt from food, water, medical supplies and power? What about the millions of refugees in Syria created by western attempts to overthrow its Assad dynasty for backing
Iran? What of millions of internal refugees from the Afghan and Iraq Wars?

Well, Washington did just announced a temporary halt in resupplying deadly US-made Hellfire air to ground missiles to Israel, which has used up its once large supply blowing apart Palestinians in Gaza. Like the fake arms-delivery suspension by the US to Egypt’s brutish regime, it will soon be lifted when
public attention has turned elsewhere.

There are 5.5 million Palestinian refugees. What are a handful of Yazidis compared to this sea of homeless? The number and plight of those Yazidi refugees were wildly exaggerated by the western powers to justify their re-intervention in Iraq. Lurid reports of ISIS cruelty may well be true, but this old cynic suspects they are being used and exaggerated to justify intervention. After all, we saw
the similar untruths about Saddam’s regime and al- Qaida’s “threat to the entire globe.”

This kind of stuff, much loved by the British, goes back to bogus stories from 1914 of German soldiers
spiking Belgian babies on their bayonets. Or,
remember the baloney about Kuwaiti babies thrown from their incubators by beastly Iraqis?

Now, the biggest dolts in the US Republican Party like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and my hometown’s own Peter King, claim the US homeland is threatened by pipsqueak ISIS while they try to provoke a real war with Russia over Ukraine. To show just how bizarre US Mideast policy has become: US warplanes are dropping aid to Iraq’s Yazidis (considered devil worshippers by many Iraqi), while they bomb Zaidi tribesmen in northern Yemen who are battling its US-installed military junta in Sa’ana. Yazidis, Zaidis, it’s all very confusing, like those pesky Slovaks and Slovenes. Meanwhile, the White House has ousted its Shia sock puppet in Baghdad, Nuri al-Maliki, in favor of a newer, even more obedient satrap. Maliki was foolish enough to actually believe he was prime minister of Iraq and refused to allow US troops to stay there indefinitely.

Big mistake, Nuri. But shed no tears for him: his vicious death squads murdered and tortured large numbers of Sunni. One of their favorite interrogation tools was an electric drill applied to the kneecap. US generals in Iraq used Shia death squads (patterned on those of El Salvador, a war I covered) to crush Sunni resistance. Now, it’s payback for the Sunnis.

Iraq’s next leader is another CIA-blessed politician who will be expected to make his nation safe for western oil companies. We see the same process in Afghanistan where CIA central casting has produced two ‘candidates’ for president.

As for de facto autonomous Kurds, they have been a western protectorate since 2003 and would be fully independent today were not for fear of a violent reaction by the irritable Turks. Israel has supplied the Kurds with arms since 1970.

Interestingly, the Kurds are now exporting oil
directly to Israel though a Turkish pipeline and
tanker while the regime in Baghdad, cut out of
payments, fumes. There’s long been talk of an
Israeli air base in Kurdistan.

“Just when I though I was out, they pulled me back in.” Michael Corleone’s plaintive line from the “Godfather” is Obama’s tune today. He’s only returning to Iraq for purely humanitarian reasons, a story that markets well to female (mainly Democratic) voters. And because the ISIS Saracens will overrun the Bible Belt soon unless Obama acts. Never mind that the US armed and trained ISIS in Jordan to overthrow Syria’s regime. Now they have gone rogue and must be stopped by a new humanitarian crusade.

So back go American troops into the hellhole of Iraq, an act that defies both military and political logic. But US elections are on the horizon and Hillary Clinton is out there blasting Obama for having left Iraq in the first place. Hillary has just fully aligned herself with Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu and asserts US troops should have stayed in Iraq…..she who is married to a notorious wartime draft dodger. Republicans are beating the same drum.

Remember the ‘tar baby’ from Uncle Remus’s slave stories of the Deep South. All who touch him get stuck. Well, that’s Iraq for you – in spades. Instead of tar, it’s sticky oil. Obama should have stayed out of Iraq. But politics forced him back in.

The Latest in the New Cold War
My Money’s on Putin
by MIKE WHITNEY

“History shows that the United States has
benefited politically and economically from wars in Europe. The huge outflow of capital from Europe following the First and Second World Wars, transformed the U.S. into a superpower … Today, faced with economic decline, the US is trying to precipitate another European war to achieve the same objective.” – Sergey Glazyev, Russian politician and economist “

The discovery of the world’s largest, known gas reserves in the Persian Gulf, shared by Qatar and Iran, and new assessments which found 70 percent more gas in the Levantine in 2007, are key to understanding the dynamics of the conflicts we see today. After a completion of the PARS pipeline, from Iran, through Iraq and Syria to the Eastern Mediterranean coast, the European Union would receive more than an estimated 45 percent of the gas it consumes over the next 100 – 120 years from Russian and Iranian sources. Under non-conflict circumstances, this would warrant an increased integration of the European, Russian and Iranian energy sectors and national economies.” – Christof Lehmann, Interview with Route Magazine

The United States failed operation in Syria, has led to an intensification of Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine. What the Obama administration hoped to achieve in Syria through its support of so called “moderate” Islamic militants was to topple the regime of Bashar al Assad, replace him with a US-backed puppet, and prevent the construction of the critical Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline. That plan hasn’t succeeded nor will it in the near future, which means that the plan for the prospective pipeline will eventually go forward.

Why is that a problem?

It’s a problem because–according to Dr.
Lehmann–”Together with the Russian gas… the EU would be able to cover some 50 percent of its requirements for natural gas via Iranian and Russian sources.” As the primary suppliers of critical resources to Europe, Moscow and Tehran would grow stronger both economically and politically which would significantly undermine the influence of the US and its allies in the region, particularly Qatar and Israel. This is why opponents of the pipeline developed a plan to sabotage the project by fomenting a civil war in Syria. Here’s Lehmann again:

“In 2007, Qatar sent USD 10 billion to Turkey´s Foreign Minister Davotoglu to prepare Turkey´s and Syria´s Muslim Brotherhood for the subversion of Syria. As we recently learned from former French Foreign Minister Dumas, it was also about that time, that actors in the United Kingdom began planning the subversion of Syria with the help of “rebels”’ (Christof Lehmann, Interview with Route Magazine)

In other words, the idea to arm, train and fund an army of jihadi militants, to oust al Assad and open up Syria to western interests, had its origins in an evolving energy picture that clearly tilted in the favor of US rivals in the region. (Note: We’re not sure why Lehmann leaves out Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or the other Gulf States that have also been implicated.)

Lehmann’s thesis is supported by other analysts including the Guardian’s Nafeez Ahmed who explains what was going on behind the scenes of the fake civil uprising in Syria. Here’s a clip from an article by Ahmed titled “Syria intervention plan fueled by oil interests, not chemical weapon concern”:

“In May 2007, a presidential finding revealed
that Bush had authorised CIA operations against Iran. Anti-Syria operations were also in full swing around this time as part of this covert programme, according to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. A range of US government and intelligence sources told him that the Bush administration had “cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations” intended to weaken the Shi’ite Hezbollah in Lebanon. “The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria,” wrote Hersh, “a byproduct” of which is “the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups” hostile to the United States and “sympathetic to al-Qaeda.” He noted that “the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir
Assad, of Syria”…

According to former French foreign minister
Roland Dumas, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009: “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business”, he told French television:

“I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.” … Leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials confirmed US-UK training of Syrian opposition forces since 2011 aimed at eliciting “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.”

So what was this unfolding strategy to undermine Syria and Iran all about? According to retired NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark, a memo from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense just a few weeks after 9/11 revealed plans to “attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years”, starting with Iraq and moving on to “Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” In a subsequent interview, Clark argues that this strategy is fundamentally about control of the region’s vast oil and gas resources.” (“Syria intervention plan fueled by oil interests, not chemical weapon concern“, The Guardian)

Apparently, Assad was approached by Qatar on the pipeline issue in 2009, but he refused to cooperate in order “to protect the interests of [his] Russian ally.” Had Assad fallen in line and agreed to Qatar’s offer, then the effort to remove him from office probably would have been called off. In any event, it was the developments in Syria that triggered the frenzied reaction in Ukraine. According to Lehmann:

“The war in Ukraine became predictable
(unavoidable?) when the great Muslim
Brotherhood Project in Syria failed during the
summer of 2012. …In June and July 2012 some 20,000 NATO mercenaries who had been recruited and trained in Libya and then staged in the Jordanian border town Al-Mafraq, launched two massive campaigns aimed at seizing the Syrian city of Aleppo. Both campaigns failed and the ”Libyan Brigade” was literally wiped out by the Syrian Arab Army.

It was after this decisive defeat that Saudi Arabia began a massive campaign for the recruitment of jihadi fighters via the network of the Muslim Brotherhoods evil twin sister Al-Qaeda. The International Crisis Group responded by publishing its report ”Tentative Jihad”. Washington had to make an attempt to distance itself ”politically” from the ”extremists”. Plan B, the chemical weapons plan was hedged but it became obvious that the war on Syria was not winnable anymore.” (“The Atlantic Axis and the Making of a War in Ukraine“, New eastern Outlook)

There were other factors that pushed the US
towards a conflagration with Moscow in Ukraine, but the driving force was the fact that US rivals (Russia and Iran) stood to be the dominant players in an energy war that would increasingly erode Washington’s power. Further economic integration between Europe and Russia poses a direct threat to US plans to pivot to Asia, deploy NATO to Russia’s borders, and to continue to denominate global energy supplies in US dollars.

Lehmann notes that he had a conversation with “a top-NATO admiral from a northern European country” who clarified the situation in a terse, two-sentence summary of US foreign policy. He said:

“American colleagues at the Pentagon told me,
unequivocally, that the US and UK never would allow European – Soviet relations to develop to such a degree that they would challenge the US/ UK’s political, economic or military primacy and hegemony on the European continent. Such a development will be prevented by all necessary means, if necessary by provoking a war in central
Europe”.

This is the crux of the issue. The United States is not going to allow any state or combination of states to challenge its dominance. Washington doesn’t want rivals. It wants to be the undisputed, global superpower, which is the point that Paul Wolfowitz articulated in an early draft of the US National Defense Strategy:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-
emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

So the Obama administration is going to do
whatever it thinks is necessary to stop further
EU-Russia economic integration and to preserve the petrodollar system. That system originated in 1974 when President Richard Nixon persuaded OPEC members to denominate their oil exclusively in dollars, and to recycle their surplus oil proceeds into U.S. Treasuries. The arrangement turned out to be a huge windfall for the US, which rakes in more than $1 billion per day via the process. This, in turn, allows the US to over-consume and run hefty deficits. Other nations must stockpile dollars to purchase the energy that runs their machinery, heats their homes and fuels their vehicles. Meanwhile, the US can breezily exchange paper currency, which
it can print at no-expense to itself, for valuable imported goods that cost dearly in terms of labor and materials. These dollars then go into purchasing oil or natural gas, the profits of which are then recycled back into USTs or other dollar- denominated assets such as U.S. stocks, bonds, real estate, or ETFs. This is the virtuous circle that keeps the US in the top spot.

As one critic put it: “World trade is now a game in
which the US produces dollars and the rest of the
world produces things that dollars can buy.” The petrodollar system helps to maintain the
dollar’s monopoly pricing which, in turn, sustains the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It creates excessive demand for dollars which allows the Fed to expand the nation’s credit by dramatically reducing the cost of financing. If oil and natural gas were no longer denominated in USDs, the value of the dollar would fall sharply, the bond market would collapse, and the US economy would slip into a long-term slump.

This is one of the reasons why the US invaded
Iraq shortly after Saddam had switched over to the euro; because it considers any challenge to the petrodollar looting scam as a direct threat to US national security.

Moscow is aware of Washington’s Achilles’s heel and is making every effort to exploit that
weakness by reducing its use of the dollar in its trade agreements. So far, Moscow has persuaded China and Iran to drop the dollar in their bilateral dealings, and they have found that other trading partners are eager to do the same. Recently, Russian economic ministers conducted a “de-dollarization” meeting in which a “currency switch executive order” was issued stating that “the government has the legal power to force Russian companies to trade a percentage of certain goods in rubles.”

Last week, according to RT: “The Russian and Chinese central banks have agreed a draft currency swap agreement, which will allow them to increase trade in domestic currencies and cut the dependence on the US dollar in bilateral payments. “The draft document between the Central Bank of Russia and the People’s Bank of China on national currency swaps has been agreed by the parties…..The agreement will stimulate further development of direct trade in yuan and rubles on the domestic foreign exchange markets of
Russia and China,” the Russian regulator said. Currently, over 75 percent of payments in
Russia-China trade settlements are made in US dollars, according to Rossiyskaya Gazeta
newspaper.” (“De-Dollarization Accelerates – China/Russia Complete Currency Swap
Agreement“, Zero Hedge)

The attack on the petrodollar recycling system is one of many asymmetrical strategies Moscow is presently employing to discourage US aggression, to defend its sovereignty, and to promote a multi-polar world order where the rule of law prevails. The Kremlin is also pushing for institutional changes that will help to level the playing field instead of creating an unfair advantage for the richer countries like the US. Naturally, replacing the IMF, whose exploitative loans and punitive policies, topped the list for most of the emerging market nations, particularly the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) who, in July, agreed to create a $100 billion Development Bank that will “will counter the influence of Western-based lending institutions and the dollar. The new bank will provide money for infrastructure and development projects in BRICS countries, and unlike the IMF or World Bank, each nation has equal say, regardless of GDP size.

According to RT: “The big launch of the BRICS bank is seen as a first step to break the dominance of the US dollar in global trade, as well as dollar-backed institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, both US-based institutions BRICS countries have little influence within… “This mechanism creates the foundation for an
effective protection of our national economies
from a crisis in financial markets,” Russian
President Vladimir Putin said.” (“BRICS establish $100bn bank and currency pool to cut out Western dominance“, RT)

It’s clear that Washington’s aggression in Ukraine has focused Moscow’s attention on retaliation. But rather than confront the US militarily, as Obama and Co. would prefer, Putin is taking aim at the vulnerabilities within the system. A BRICS Development Bank challenges the IMF’s dominant role as lender of last resort, a role that has enhanced the power of the wealthy countries and their industries. The new bank creates the basis for real institutional change, albeit, still within the pervasive capitalist framework. Russian politician and economist, Sergei Glazyev,
summarized Moscow’s approach to the US-
Russia conflagration in an essay titled “US is
militarizing Ukraine to invade Russia.” Here’s an excerpt:

“To stop the war, you need to terminate its
driving forces. At this stage, the war unfolds
mainly in the planes of economic, public relations and politics. All the power of US economic superiority is based on the financial pyramid of debt, and this has gone long beyond sustainability. Its major lenders are collapsing enough to deprive the US market of accumulated US dollars and Treasury bonds. Of course, the collapse of the US financial system will cause serious losses to all holders of US currency and securities. But first, these losses for Russia, Europe and China will be less than the losses caused by American geopolitics unleashing another world war. Secondly, the sooner the exit from the financial obligations of this American
pyramid, the less will be the losses. Third, the
collapse of the dollar Ponzi scheme gives an opportunity, finally, to reform the global
financial system on the basis of equity and
mutual benefit.”

Washington thinks “modern warfare” involves
covert support for proxy armies comprised of
Neo Nazis and Islamic extremists. Moscow thinks modern warfare means undermining the enemy’s ability to wage war through sustained attacks on it’s currency, its institutions, its bond market, and its ability to convince its allies that it is a responsible steward of the global economic system. I’ll put my money on Russia.

The Latest in the New Cold War
My Money’s on Putin
by MIKE WHITNEY

“History shows that the United States has
benefited politically and economically from wars in Europe. The huge outflow of capital from Europe following the First and Second World Wars, transformed the U.S. into a superpower … Today, faced with economic decline, the US is trying to precipitate another European war to achieve the same objective.” – Sergey Glazyev, Russian politician and economist “

The discovery of the world’s largest, known gas reserves in the Persian Gulf, shared by Qatar and Iran, and new assessments which found 70 percent more gas in the Levantine in 2007, are key to understanding the dynamics of the conflicts we see today. After a completion of the PARS pipeline, from Iran, through Iraq and Syria to the Eastern Mediterranean coast, the European Union would receive more than an estimated 45 percent of the gas it consumes over the next 100 – 120 years from Russian and Iranian sources. Under non-conflict circumstances, this would warrant an increased integration of the European, Russian and Iranian energy sectors and national economies.” – Christof Lehmann, Interview with Route Magazine

The United States failed operation in Syria, has led to an intensification of Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine. What the Obama administration hoped to achieve in Syria through its support of so called “moderate” Islamic militants was to topple the regime of Bashar al Assad, replace him with a US-backed puppet, and prevent the construction of the critical Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline. That plan hasn’t succeeded nor will it in the near future, which means that the plan for the prospective pipeline will eventually go forward.

Why is that a problem?

It’s a problem because–according to Dr.
Lehmann–”Together with the Russian gas… the EU would be able to cover some 50 percent of its requirements for natural gas via Iranian and Russian sources.” As the primary suppliers of critical resources to Europe, Moscow and Tehran would grow stronger both economically and politically which would significantly undermine the influence of the US and its allies in the region, particularly Qatar and Israel. This is why opponents of the pipeline developed a plan to sabotage the project by fomenting a civil war in Syria. Here’s Lehmann again:

“In 2007, Qatar sent USD 10 billion to Turkey´s Foreign Minister Davotoglu to prepare Turkey´s and Syria´s Muslim Brotherhood for the subversion of Syria. As we recently learned from former French Foreign Minister Dumas, it was also about that time, that actors in the United Kingdom began planning the subversion of Syria with the help of “rebels”’ (Christof Lehmann, Interview with Route Magazine)

In other words, the idea to arm, train and fund an army of jihadi militants, to oust al Assad and open up Syria to western interests, had its origins in an evolving energy picture that clearly tilted in the favor of US rivals in the region. (Note: We’re not sure why Lehmann leaves out Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or the other Gulf States that have also been implicated.)

Lehmann’s thesis is supported by other analysts including the Guardian’s Nafeez Ahmed who explains what was going on behind the scenes of the fake civil uprising in Syria. Here’s a clip from an article by Ahmed titled “Syria intervention plan fueled by oil interests, not chemical weapon concern”:

“In May 2007, a presidential finding revealed
that Bush had authorised CIA operations against Iran. Anti-Syria operations were also in full swing around this time as part of this covert programme, according to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. A range of US government and intelligence sources told him that the Bush administration had “cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations” intended to weaken the Shi’ite Hezbollah in Lebanon. “The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria,” wrote Hersh, “a byproduct” of which is “the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups” hostile to the United States and “sympathetic to al-Qaeda.” He noted that “the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir
Assad, of Syria”…

According to former French foreign minister
Roland Dumas, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009: “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business”, he told French television:

“I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.” … Leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials confirmed US-UK training of Syrian opposition forces since 2011 aimed at eliciting “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.”

So what was this unfolding strategy to undermine Syria and Iran all about? According to retired NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark, a memo from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense just a few weeks after 9/11 revealed plans to “attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years”, starting with Iraq and moving on to “Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” In a subsequent interview, Clark argues that this strategy is fundamentally about control of the region’s vast oil and gas resources.” (“Syria intervention plan fueled by oil interests, not chemical weapon concern“, The Guardian)

Apparently, Assad was approached by Qatar on the pipeline issue in 2009, but he refused to cooperate in order “to protect the interests of [his] Russian ally.” Had Assad fallen in line and agreed to Qatar’s offer, then the effort to remove him from office probably would have been called off. In any event, it was the developments in Syria that triggered the frenzied reaction in Ukraine. According to Lehmann:

“The war in Ukraine became predictable
(unavoidable?) when the great Muslim
Brotherhood Project in Syria failed during the
summer of 2012. …In June and July 2012 some 20,000 NATO mercenaries who had been recruited and trained in Libya and then staged in the Jordanian border town Al-Mafraq, launched two massive campaigns aimed at seizing the Syrian city of Aleppo. Both campaigns failed and the ”Libyan Brigade” was literally wiped out by the Syrian Arab Army.

It was after this decisive defeat that Saudi Arabia began a massive campaign for the recruitment of jihadi fighters via the network of the Muslim Brotherhoods evil twin sister Al-Qaeda. The International Crisis Group responded by publishing its report ”Tentative Jihad”. Washington had to make an attempt to distance itself ”politically” from the ”extremists”. Plan B, the chemical weapons plan was hedged but it became obvious that the war on Syria was not winnable anymore.” (“The Atlantic Axis and the Making of a War in Ukraine“, New eastern Outlook)

There were other factors that pushed the US
towards a conflagration with Moscow in Ukraine, but the driving force was the fact that US rivals (Russia and Iran) stood to be the dominant players in an energy war that would increasingly erode Washington’s power. Further economic integration between Europe and Russia poses a direct threat to US plans to pivot to Asia, deploy NATO to Russia’s borders, and to continue to denominate global energy supplies in US dollars.

Lehmann notes that he had a conversation with “a top-NATO admiral from a northern European country” who clarified the situation in a terse, two-sentence summary of US foreign policy. He said:

“American colleagues at the Pentagon told me,
unequivocally, that the US and UK never would allow European – Soviet relations to develop to such a degree that they would challenge the US/ UK’s political, economic or military primacy and hegemony on the European continent. Such a development will be prevented by all necessary means, if necessary by provoking a war in central
Europe”.

This is the crux of the issue. The United States is not going to allow any state or combination of states to challenge its dominance. Washington doesn’t want rivals. It wants to be the undisputed, global superpower, which is the point that Paul Wolfowitz articulated in an early draft of the US National Defense Strategy:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-
emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

So the Obama administration is going to do
whatever it thinks is necessary to stop further
EU-Russia economic integration and to preserve the petrodollar system. That system originated in 1974 when President Richard Nixon persuaded OPEC members to denominate their oil exclusively in dollars, and to recycle their surplus oil proceeds into U.S. Treasuries. The arrangement turned out to be a huge windfall for the US, which rakes in more than $1 billion per day via the process. This, in turn, allows the US to over-consume and run hefty deficits. Other nations must stockpile dollars to purchase the energy that runs their machinery, heats their homes and fuels their vehicles. Meanwhile, the US can breezily exchange paper currency, which
it can print at no-expense to itself, for valuable imported goods that cost dearly in terms of labor and materials. These dollars then go into purchasing oil or natural gas, the profits of which are then recycled back into USTs or other dollar- denominated assets such as U.S. stocks, bonds, real estate, or ETFs. This is the virtuous circle that keeps the US in the top spot.

As one critic put it: “World trade is now a game in
which the US produces dollars and the rest of the
world produces things that dollars can buy.” The petrodollar system helps to maintain the
dollar’s monopoly pricing which, in turn, sustains the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It creates excessive demand for dollars which allows the Fed to expand the nation’s credit by dramatically reducing the cost of financing. If oil and natural gas were no longer denominated in USDs, the value of the dollar would fall sharply, the bond market would collapse, and the US economy would slip into a long-term slump.

This is one of the reasons why the US invaded
Iraq shortly after Saddam had switched over to the euro; because it considers any challenge to the petrodollar looting scam as a direct threat to US national security.

Moscow is aware of Washington’s Achilles’s heel and is making every effort to exploit that
weakness by reducing its use of the dollar in its trade agreements. So far, Moscow has persuaded China and Iran to drop the dollar in their bilateral dealings, and they have found that other trading partners are eager to do the same. Recently, Russian economic ministers conducted a “de-dollarization” meeting in which a “currency switch executive order” was issued stating that “the government has the legal power to force Russian companies to trade a percentage of certain goods in rubles.”

Last week, according to RT: “The Russian and Chinese central banks have agreed a draft currency swap agreement, which will allow them to increase trade in domestic currencies and cut the dependence on the US dollar in bilateral payments. “The draft document between the Central Bank of Russia and the People’s Bank of China on national currency swaps has been agreed by the parties…..The agreement will stimulate further development of direct trade in yuan and rubles on the domestic foreign exchange markets of
Russia and China,” the Russian regulator said. Currently, over 75 percent of payments in
Russia-China trade settlements are made in US dollars, according to Rossiyskaya Gazeta
newspaper.” (“De-Dollarization Accelerates – China/Russia Complete Currency Swap
Agreement“, Zero Hedge)

The attack on the petrodollar recycling system is one of many asymmetrical strategies Moscow is presently employing to discourage US aggression, to defend its sovereignty, and to promote a multi-polar world order where the rule of law prevails. The Kremlin is also pushing for institutional changes that will help to level the playing field instead of creating an unfair advantage for the richer countries like the US. Naturally, replacing the IMF, whose exploitative loans and punitive policies, topped the list for most of the emerging market nations, particularly the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) who, in July, agreed to create a $100 billion Development Bank that will “will counter the influence of Western-based lending institutions and the dollar. The new bank will provide money for infrastructure and development projects in BRICS countries, and unlike the IMF or World Bank, each nation has equal say, regardless of GDP size.

According to RT: “The big launch of the BRICS bank is seen as a first step to break the dominance of the US dollar in global trade, as well as dollar-backed institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, both US-based institutions BRICS countries have little influence within… “This mechanism creates the foundation for an
effective protection of our national economies
from a crisis in financial markets,” Russian
President Vladimir Putin said.” (“BRICS establish $100bn bank and currency pool to cut out Western dominance“, RT)

It’s clear that Washington’s aggression in Ukraine has focused Moscow’s attention on retaliation. But rather than confront the US militarily, as Obama and Co. would prefer, Putin is taking aim at the vulnerabilities within the system. A BRICS Development Bank challenges the IMF’s dominant role as lender of last resort, a role that has enhanced the power of the wealthy countries and their industries. The new bank creates the basis for real institutional change, albeit, still within the pervasive capitalist framework. Russian politician and economist, Sergei Glazyev,
summarized Moscow’s approach to the US-
Russia conflagration in an essay titled “US is
militarizing Ukraine to invade Russia.” Here’s an excerpt:

“To stop the war, you need to terminate its
driving forces. At this stage, the war unfolds
mainly in the planes of economic, public relations and politics. All the power of US economic superiority is based on the financial pyramid of debt, and this has gone long beyond sustainability. Its major lenders are collapsing enough to deprive the US market of accumulated US dollars and Treasury bonds. Of course, the collapse of the US financial system will cause serious losses to all holders of US currency and securities. But first, these losses for Russia, Europe and China will be less than the losses caused by American geopolitics unleashing another world war. Secondly, the sooner the exit from the financial obligations of this American
pyramid, the less will be the losses. Third, the
collapse of the dollar Ponzi scheme gives an opportunity, finally, to reform the global
financial system on the basis of equity and
mutual benefit.”

Washington thinks “modern warfare” involves
covert support for proxy armies comprised of
Neo Nazis and Islamic extremists. Moscow thinks modern warfare means undermining the enemy’s ability to wage war through sustained attacks on it’s currency, its institutions, its bond market, and its ability to convince its allies that it is a responsible steward of the global economic system. I’ll put my money on Russia.

Hello Fellas, has anyone bought ticket online from Etihad with card? Is it cheaper than the agents?

torkaka: The rubbish PAAR where values are increased with out any just cause simply because of revenue drive?
The same PAAR that takes forever to come thereby mounting lots od demurrage?
If this PAAR thing was so good, customs should explain to Nigerians why they had to give waivers in their circulars for assessment notices to be generated without PAAR? They should explain to Nigerians the current cause of congestion at the ports? They should explain why it is now taking forever for containers scheduled for scanning examination are taking forever, they should explain why officers at the ports are habitually using wrong HS codes to intimidate importers!
Nigerian customs is a big joke!!

You got that trade alert from customs, too? Import assessment without PAAR till January 31st.

What really gets me riled about this country is that even bureaucrats still play politics with the rest of us. This comptroller is quoting huge sums to justify the transfer container scanning and duty assessment from Cotecna, Globascan, SGS to Nigerian customs.
Go to the ports, these custom Officers set up different squads to extort from importers: there are DC squad, Releasing Officer Squad, ICU Squad, Enforcement Squad etc. These are all from the same bloody customs. Now you have to settle them to get PAAR out on time starting from January.You have to deal all these squads. Dealing with them means settling them. Then you still have to settle police, anti-bomb squad, NDLEA and SON. You ain't done yet! You have the customs at the port gate to Settle. If it's at night, so called "Manufacturers Association" are cruising the oshodi-apapa to festac-agboju gate looking for container haulers to extort.

Lucky you if you aren't heading to Ojo-Alaba. The Nigerian Army (Ojo barracks) have setup an extortion racket with omoniles at Volks junction. You have to pay a toll of 10,000 for 20ft container, and 14,000 for 40ft container. Without this payment you can't cross to Alaba. If paying the Army touts isn't enough, you have pay the Ojo local government touts -2500/3500 for 20ft/40ft container. Ojo police have their own racket with the local government touts opposite Ojo local government gate. You'd notice a white canopy with burly men. They are police guys in mufti with the LG touts.The police charge 1000 toll for 20ft container. The "olopas" aint done yet. They still have their RRS squad at Saint Peter junction extorting 1000 for each haul.

After dealing with all these crazies, you still have the local touts at every main junction to settle. They aren't cheap! The least is 3000 for a 20footer.

The whole import thingy is a mess. Labour touts in the port are brazenly stealing your goods at the port. Custom officers are begging for samples. You have to give samples to all to avoid victimization. The roads are horrible!!!! Transporters are at your jugular! Damn Nigeria!

Why Many Charities are Corporate Scams
By Brad Yu.

#1 TIPPING 101:
So I’m the owner of Company X. My workers’ used to be paid a whopping 7.25 per/hour because of the ridiculous “minimum wage” labor laws that are seriously cutting into my profits. I only want to pay them 2.13 per/hour, which is
still way too much! If I do this I can save about $5 dollars per hour on every employee. Actually, I don’t want to pay them anything, but I know that won’t fly. They might start asking for a fair wage or even worse: dreaded “union” representation! If I have 50 full-time employees I can make an extra $500,000 extra dollars a year! How can I achieve this? The law is against me. Or is it? DING DING. TIPPING!

So people can come to my restaurant and give TIPS to my workers for “good” service. What if I make tipping account for nearly their entire wage? That way the CUSTOMER has to pay for their labor while I don’t need to pay my workers an EXTRA penny! I don’t even have to include it into the price of the food or on the bill most of the time. It’s just an additional cost the customer should be expected to pay. Now, let’s make it part of the LAW and the CULTURE and VUALA! You got yourself some home grown All-American authentic: CORPORATE CHARITY. What a brilliant CORPORATE SCAM!

Because my customers have morals and don’t want to bear witness to their poor server on the street, begging for loose change; they will act as CHARITY. To top it off, my employees will “work” even harder if their pay is “performance” based – especially if they want to beat minimum wage on slower days. So, if they want acceptable CHARITY TIPS they have to please my customers who, if continue patronizing my establishment, will fully cover the cost of my 3rd vacation home in Florida.


But just to spice up the deal even more, I will pay nearly all the other restaurant workers (hosts, Bussers, food runners, bartenders, counter personnel, etc) 2.13 per/hour and make everyone POOL their TIP money together to SHARE with each other. That way the CHARITY RECIPIENT becomes the CHARITY GIVER! My servants money can then be pooled or “SHARED” to pay my workers so I don’t have to. Sounds communal right?

It’s a sweet deal but not sweet enough. I need to force their obedience by humiliating them as well; especially women. Perhaps I will require them to dress like sluts and flirt with middle age
white men who are certainly the ones PAYING their literal survival. I will require them to BEG for their CHARITY by forcing them to wear tiny company skirts and tank tops (Tilted Kilt, Hooters), dance on the table and tell jokes (Ed Dabevics), and provide bells to ring in a CHARITY SONG like a Pavlov dog experiment (Cold Stone).

Sometimes there just needs to be something extra to trigger the good-grace giving feelings of charity givers to the NEEDY. Even something as simple as a cute little tip jar with some adorable cartoon puppy next to the words: “FEED ME” or “I’M HUNGRY” will do the trick. I know pity often works for those lazy homeless people who choose not work and live on the street. It’s bound to work for my company.

#2 Corporate Charity:

Corporations LOVE charity! WHY?!? Because they get to Bleep up our entire world and we are the lucky ones who end up paying for their EXTERNALITIES – The costs to society to clean up their messes.

So Coca-Cola opens a water bottling factory in India. The water table goes down substantially year after year and locals go thirsty and hungry (because their crops can’t grow without irrigation) as drilling deeper wells becomes increasingly unaffordable. The local community desperately seek help from anyone because their government officials got paid off from Coke and are busy cruising around in their new Rolls Royce
luxury cars. Their neighbors are too busy trying to survive themselves with Pepsi down the street so they can’t help.

In good grace, and because the corporation is such a warm wonderful philanthropic institution, they give some tiny percentage of their profits to some CHARITIES which often makes the
situation just bearable enough to prevent the local people from revolting. (Alfred Nobel’s invention DYNAMITE and is responsible for the killing of uncountable numbers of people around the world; particularly in the mining of minerals
for our iPhones. So what does he do? He forms a CHARITY “PRIZE” FOUNDATION with the word “PEACE” in it.) They also get to proudly display all their charity giving initiatives on the front pages of their websites; next to the company statistics about all their wonderful contributions they have made to society.

So what will the charity do? They will come in and PATCH UP the typically irreversible damage caused by corporate greed through FUND RAISING and VOLUNTEERING of common people. They will come and help dig deeper holes, or reroute water in from another location, or ship some in from outside the country. And who pays for it: in time, money, and energy? WE DO! Of course, without the goodwill of caring common people, what would these people do? Probably die. But does this tackle the source of the problem?

#3 Corporate Welfare
Corporations really do love CHARITY! Actually, they thrive on it. Without charity, people’s situation might be desperate and aware enough to trigger a revolution with the potential to overthrow the very system which makes them rich and powerful. Even so, they still want to pull out funding from medicare, medicaid, unemployment benefits, planned parenthood, education, low income housing subsidies, food share, or anything else directed to benefit working class people for a COPORATE CHARITY tax break.

Wal-Mart now has food donation boxes for its workers who they don’t pay a livable wage to. Ronald Mc. Donald’s House has a box for you to drop your donations for sick children whose parents probably often work at Mc. Donald’s and whose children are often fed the only food their parents can afford or have time to bring home for their kids to eat. ”Would you like fries with that $7.25 pay?” Sorry, you have to super-size your work hours if you want to bring home those factory-farm cancer sticks to your kids. Perhaps $2.13 an hour with customer charity is a more viable profit-over-people solution.

Actually, there is one kind of “CHARITY” which tends to work very consistently well in our society. The public welfare to the rich. We love to subsidize their wealth with our CHARITY GIVING tax breaks and corporate hand outs. We wouldn’t dare want to witness their corporate economy collapse as our $2.13 an hour jobs get
shipped away for even cheaper more exploited labor. We should lace up our work boots and be thankful for all these amazing jobs! We should even worship our billionaires like heroic martyrs: Steve JOBS.

We must look upstream to the source of our suffering. Our options are far broader than Pepsi vs. Coke would like us to think. The only charitable society is an equitable altruistic one where people work in solidarity, not with Ronald Mc Donald, to make a difference for each other and ourselves. So either we keep wasting our
energy trying to patch up a broken system of charity to the rich or work to create new alternatives to this greedy system of human exploitation. The choice is ours.

nattybanta: I was told by my account officer dat I can witdraw money from my naira account any where in d world using my master card. Dos dat apply to UAE too? Cos I don't wannna carry cash and den find out that I can't use money on my master card

Using Master "Debit" Card in UAE
If the card is linked to your savings or current account in Nigeria then it's an EMV card. It will only be accepted by an EMV-compliant ATM. These EMV cards are different from your prepaid cards like the UBA Africard. Prepaid cards will be accepted on all ATMs but they are less secure.

ADCB* ATMs accept and process payments on Master "debit" card. (*Abudhabi commercial bank)

Any ATM with a "red debit card" logo will accept Master "Debit" card.

UBA Master card has a daily limit of 150,000naira.. That's a little more than 3200aed. One good feature is that you get a printout of your nigerian account balance in AED.

If you use your master "debit" card on non-EMV ATMs you will get a transaction declined or invalid transaction.


Free calls on your roamed Etisalat number in UAE

Roaming is activated by default on Etisalat lines.
Recharge your Etisalat number with 5000 naira before leaving Nigeria.
With 5000 naira in your account, you can receive free calls on that number here in UAE for 30 Days and you'd still have 5000 naira balance.

Nelson Mandela: He’s Honored Now, But Was Hated Then
by Peter Beinart

If we turn the late South African leader into a nonthreatening moral icon, we’ll forget a key lesson from his life: America isn’t always a force for freedom.

Now that he’s dead, and can cause no more trouble, Nelson Mandela is being mourned across the ideological spectrum as a saint. But not long ago, in Washington’s highest circles, he was
considered an enemy of the United States. Unless we remember why, we won’t truly honor his legacy.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted against a resolution urging that
he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise,
given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus
requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.

From their perspective, Mandela’s critics were right to distrust him. They called him a “terrorist” because he had waged armed resistance to apartheid. They called him a “communist” because the Soviet Union was the ANC’s chief external benefactor and the South African Communist Party was among its closest domestic allies. More fundamentally, what Mandela’s American detractors understood is that he considered himself an opponent, not an ally, of American power. And that’s exactly what Mandela’s American admirers
must remember now.

We must remember it because in Washington today, politicians and pundits breezily describe the Cold War as a struggle between the forces of freedom, backed by the U.S., and the forces of
tyranny, backed by the USSR. In some places— Germany, Eastern Europe, eventually Korea—that was largely true. But in South Africa, the Cold War was something utterly different. In South Africa, for decades, American presidents backed apartheid in the name of anti-communism. Indeed, the language
of the Cold War proved so morally corrupting that in 1981, Reagan, without irony, called South Africa’s monstrous regime “essential to the free world.”.

In South Africa, it was the Soviet bloc—the same communist governments that were brutally repressing their own people—that helped the ANC fight apartheid. In the 1980s, they were joined by an
American and European anti-apartheid movement willing to overlook the ANC’s communist ties because they refused to see South Africa’s freedom struggle through a Cold War lens. At a time when men like Reagan and Cheney were insisting that the most important thing about Mandela was where he stood in the standoff between Washington and Moscow, millions of citizens across the West insisted that the ANC could be Soviet-backed, communist-influenced, and still lead a movement for freedom.

They were right. When it came to other countries, Mandela’s leftist ties did sometimes blind him to communism’s crimes. In 1991, for instance, he called Fidel Castro “a source of inspiration to all
freedom-loving people.” But at home, where it mattered most, the ANC was a genuine, multiracial movement for democracy. And so the Americans
who best championed South African freedom were the ones who didn’t view freedom as synonymous with the geopolitical interests of the United States.

Therein lies Mandela’s real lesson for Americans today. The Cold War is over, but mini-Cold Wars have followed. And once again, American elites, especially on the right, have a bad habit of using “freedom” as a euphemism for whatever serves American power. Thus, American politicians frequently suggest that by impoverishing the people of Iran with ever-harsher economic sanctions, and
threatening to bomb them, we are promoting their freedom, even though the people risking their life for democracy in Iran—people like dissident journalist Akbar Ganji and Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi—passionately disagree.

Mandela challenged that. Like Martin Luther King, who publicly repudiated Lyndon Johnson’s claim that Vietnam was a war for democracy, Mandela rejected George W. Bush’s idealistic rationalizations of the Iraq War. In 2003, when Bush was promising to liberate Iraq’s people, Mandela said, “All that he wants is Iraqi oil.” When Bush declared Iraq’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons a threat to the planet, Mandela had the bad manners to remind Bush that the only country to have actually used nukes was the United States. Mandela’s message to America’s leaders, born from firsthand experience, was clear: Don’t pretend
you are pure.

As with King, it is this subversive aspect of Mandela’s legacy that is most in danger of being erased as he enters America’s pantheon of sanitized moral icons. But it is precisely the aspect that Americans most badly need. American power
and human freedom are two very different things. Sometimes they intersect; sometimes they do not. Walking in Nelson Mandela’s footsteps requires being able to tell the difference.

This information is to help those visiting UAE for business -export to Nigeria, and also to help 'em avoid the cargo hawks in Deira:

Current Freight Charges to TINCAN port
Standard 20ft Container

#1 DELMAS
Transit Time :32 days
Rate: $2145
Departing Port: Jebel Ali

#2 PIL
Transit Time: 28 days
Rate: $2165
Departing port: Jebel Ali

#3 Goldstar Shipping
Transit Time: 45days
Rate: $2100
Departing port: Jebel Ali
Transit port: Port Kelang

#4. Maerskline
Transit Time : 34days
Rate: $2300
Departing port: Jebel Ali

LOCAL TRANSPORT CHARGES
Jebel Ali > Sharjah : 600AED
Jebel Ali > Ajman Jurf : 850AED

LOCAL SERVICE CHARGES
Terminal Handling Charges :970AED
Export Declaration " : 225AED
Port Storage : 30AED
BL fee. : 350AED

Use this as a guide when negotiating with freight forwarders in UAE.

The Wahhabi-Likudnik war of terror
By Pepe Escobar
The double suicide bombing targeting the Iranian embassy in Beirut - with at least 23 people killed and 170 wounded - was a de facto terror attack happening on 11/19. Numerology-wise, naturally 9/11 comes to mind; and so the case of the
Washington-declared war on terror metastasizing - largely conducted by oozy forms of Saudi "intelligence".

Yet don't expect the "West" to condemn this as terror. Look at the headlines; it's all normalized as "blasts" - as if children were playing with firecrackers.

Whether carried out by a hazy al-Qaeda-linked brigade or by Saudi spy chief Bandar bin Sultan's (aka Bandar Bush's) goons, the Beirut terror attack is essentially configured as a major, Saudi-enabled provocation. The larger Saudi agenda in Syria implies getting both Hezbollah and Iran to be pinned down inside Lebanon as well. If that happens, Israel also wins. Once again, here's another graphic illustration of the Likudnik House of Saud in action.

Nuance also applies. Bandar Bush's strategy, coordinated with jihadis, was to virtually beg for Hezbollah to fight inside Syria. When Hezbollah obliged, with only a few hundred fighters, the jihadis scurried away from the battlefield to implement plan B: blowing up innocent women and children in the streets of Lebanon.

While Hezbollah welcomes the fight, wherever it takes place, Tehran's position is more cautious. It does not want to go all out against the Saudis - at least for now, with the crucial nuclear negotiation on the table in Geneva, and (still) the possibility of a Geneva II regarding Syria. Yet the House of Saud is not welcoming Geneva II anytime soon because it has absolutely nothing to propose except regime change.

On Syria, the main pillar of Bandar Bush's strategy is to turn the previously "Free" Syrian Army into a "national army" of 30,000 or so fully weaponized hardcore fighters - mostly supplied by the "Army of
Islam", which is nothing but a cipher for the Jabhat al-Nusra. King Playstation of Jordan, also known as Abdullah, collaborates as the provider of training camps near the Syrian border. Whatever happens, one thing is certain; expect Bandar Bush's goons to be carrying out more suicide bombings on both Lebanon and Syria.

The Zionist/Wahhabi/Salafi axis The dodgy al-Qaeda-linked Abdullah Azzam
Brigades in theory exist since 2005, placing the odd bomb here and there. One sheikh Sijareddin Zreikat tweeted responsibility for the Beirut terror attack.
Curioser and curioser, the claim was "discovered" and translated into English by the Israeli disinformation website SITE.

Yet another Israeli intelligence disinformation site, DEBKAfile, claimed the terror attack was an Iran/Hezbollah false flag, based on a "Saudi warning"
reaching "Western intelligence agencies, including Israel".The rationale, according to "Saudi intelligence", was "to convince Hezbollah fighters consigned against their will to the Syrian battlefield".

This does not even qualify as pathetic. Hezbollah is basically defending the Lebanese-Syrian border, and has only a few hundred fighters inside Syria. Moreover, no string of suicide bombings will deter Hezbollah and Tehran from regaining control of what really matters in the Syrian strategic context; the Qalamoun area.

Qalamoun, ringed by mountains, is a 50-kilometer stretch bordering the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, between Damascus and al-Nabk, and right on the absolutely critical Damascus-Homs corridor of the
M5 highway. The Syrian army is on the offensive in Qalamoun. Recapturing the whole area is just a matter of time. This means controlling the northernapproach to Damascus. Hezbollah is helping in the
offensive out of Bekaa valley. This does not mean they will camp out in Syria afterwards.

Now for the false flag accusation. As far as real false flags are concerned, one just has to re-examine three recent international bombings that supposed victimized Israel. In India the bomb had
no projectiles; it barely injured an Israeli attache. In Azerbaijan the bomb was miraculously "discovered" before it went off. And in Thailand, the bomb exploded too soon, injuring only a nearby Iranian
.
Crass Israeli disinformation is unmasked when it leaps into this conclusion:
"If Tehran is capable of such atrocities merely as a diversionary tactic, then perhaps Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin ought to take a really
hard look at their negotiating partner across the table before signing a major deal Wednesday, Nov. 20, which leaves Iran's nuclear program in place."

So this neatly ties up with the current Israeli hysteria about the Geneva negotiations, which also includes the umpteenth report by a News Corporation outfit, London's Sunday Times, that Saudi Arabia will help Israel to attack Iran.

It also ties up with the proverbial US shills spinning, gloating rather, that, "strategically, this de-facto Israeli alliance with the Saudis is an extraordinary opportunity for Israel".

Even such shills have to admit that the House of Saud is "blocking formation of any government in Lebanon, for example, to obstruct Iran's ally, Hezbollah". "Blocking" of course is a euphemism to
normalize suicide bombing.

And then comes the ultimate wishful thinking disguised as "analysis"; Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu "bidding to replace the United States as military protector of the status quo". Translation; the Likudniks dreaming of becoming the new military Mob boss of petrodollar Wahhabis.

The enablers
Bandar Bush's strategy - weaponizing and providing cover to Salafis, jihadis and every patsy or mercenary in between - will go on unabated. After Bandar Bush convinced Washington to get rid of the
Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Qataris, the Saudis are the supreme warfare go-to channel. The Bandar Bush machine has ties with virtually every jihadi outfit in the Levant.

It certainly helps that Bandar has the perfect cover; the fact that he knows and has cajoled every significant player in Washington. In the US, Bandar Bush remains a dashing hero, even eliciting fawning comparisons with Gatsby. Right. And my name is actually Daisy.

Even with its own embassy attacked in Lebanon, Iran is maintaining an extremely calibrated approach. The number-one priority is the nuclear negotiations in Geneva with the partner that really
matters, the US. This explains Iran blaming the Beirut terror attack on the proverbial "Zionists", and not Saudi-enabled jihadis posing as "rebels" and
part of the whole Bandar Bush nebula.

For the moment though, enough of Orwellian newspeak. What happened in Beirut was a terror attack, cheered by Israel, and fully enabled by Saudis; a graphic display by the Likudnik-House of
Saud axis.

"They killed Gaddafi but they effed up a country"
Roving Eye

Oct 11,
In Libya, Premier Calls Kidnapping Failed ‘Coup’

Prime Minister Ali Zeidan of Libya
said on Friday that his kidnapping the day
before by militia members was no different than a “coup” and had been orchestrated by opponents in the legislature who want to force him from office. Scores of armed gunmen seized Mr. Zeidan from his hotel room in Tripoli early Thursday and released him nine hours later only under pressure from Defense Ministry officials and rival militias.

Oct 24,
Cyrenaica: a divided Libya

Federalists announced a government for
Cyrenaica today. Consisting of a prime minister, deputy prime minister and 24 other ministers, it is viewed as largely the creation of Ibrahim Jadhran, the former Petroleum Facilities Guard commander who is leading the eastern oil terminals blockade and who was elected as head
of the self-proclaimed Cyrenaica Council’s
Political Bureau on 17 August.

It was Jadhran who named Abdraba
Abdulhameed Al-Barasi to be Cyrenaica’s “prime minister” three weeks ago and who today said that the announcement of the government was two days late but that “we fulfilled our promise of a new regional government”.

Barasi said that the reason for the move was because the central authorities “have failed and have shown incompetence and corruption”. They were not to be trusted anymore, he said. Also, Cyrenaica had suffered systematic negligence.His “government”, he declared, took its legitimacy and legal status from the 1951 Kingdom of Libya constitution (which, in fact was amended in 1963, and the three-state federal makeup was replaced by a United Kingdom of Libya with 10 regions).

Nov 10,
Libya PM warns of foreign intervention

. Libya’s Prime Minister Ali Zeidan has warned his people of the possibility of foreign powers intervening unless the country's current chaos ends. "The international community cannot tolerate a state in the middle of the Mediterranean that is a source of violence, terrorism and murder," said Zeidan on Sunday in an appeal aimed at rallying his campaign against militia groups. Citing the example of Iraq, he warned against "the intervention of foreign occupation forces" in Libya. The people must take to the streets ... and support the building up of the army and police. Ali Zeidan, Libya's Prime Minister Zeidan said his country was still subject to a resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter that allows the international community to intervene to protect civilians.

Nov 11,
Libyan separatists take over oil
exports as PM warns of foreign
intervention

A separatist Libyan region has announced an establishment of an independent oil company after taking over several commercial sea ports. As Tripoli struggles to regain control, the PM has warned of
foreign intervention unless central govt rule is restored.

The prime minister of the self-proclaimed Cyrenaica government made a live announcement on nationwide television claiming that an oil firm has been set up in Tobruk next to the Hariga port where
the locals on Friday did refused to allow a
government-chartered tanker to load 600,000 barrels of oil bound for Italy.

Nov 15,
Misrata militia opens fire on protesters
At least 32 people were killed and 391 wounded, a Health Ministry official said. Libyan Defense Minister Abdullah Al-Thani cut short his visit to Jordan and is returning to his home country, LANA reported. The Misrata militia reportedly opened fire with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades at protesters as they approached its headquarters in the Gharghour district. According to a Reuters report, the militia fired an anti-aircraft cannon into the crowd, after which the protesters first fled but then returned heavily armed. The report added that the demonstrators stormed the gated building, and kept the militiamen there
until nightfall.

Nov 17
Libya's deputy spy chief kidnapped in Tripoli

Libya's deputy intelligence chief was kidnapped outside Tripoli's international airport on Sunday, a month after the prime minister was snatched by militiamen. Mustafa Noah, the head of agency's espionage unit, was bundled into a vehicle in the car park in the capital, and had no bodyguards with him at the time, two security sources said, without giving further details on the attackers or their motives.

Why Israel Murdered Arafat
by JONATHAN COOK

It seems there are still plenty of parties who would prefer that Arafat’s death continues to be
treated as a mystery rather than as an assassination. It is hard, however, to avoid drawing the logical conclusion from the finding last week by Swiss scientists that the Palestinian leader’s body contained high levels of a radioactive isotope, polonium-210. An inconclusive and much more
limited study by a Russian team published immediately after the Swiss announcement also suggests Arafat died from poisoning. 

It is time to state the obvious: Arafat was killed. And suspicion falls squarely on Israel. 

Israel alone had the means, track record, stated intention and motive. Without Israel’s fingerprints on the murder weapon, it may not be quite enough to secure a conviction in a court of law, but it should be evidence enough to convict
Israel in the court of world opinion. 

Israel had access to polonium from its nuclear reactor in Dimona, and it has a long record of carrying out political assassinations, some
ostentatious and others covert, often using hard- to-trace chemical agents. Most notoriously, Israel tried to quietly kill another Palestinian leader, Khaled Meshal of Hamas, in Jordan in 1997, injecting a poison into his ear. Meshal was saved only because the assassins were caught and Israel was forced to supply an antidote. Israeli leaders have been queuing up to deny
there was ever any malign intent from Israel’s side towards Arafat. Silvan Shalom, the energy minister, claimed last week: “We never made a decision to harm him physically.” Shalom must
be suffering from a memory lapse. 

There is plenty of evidence that Israel wanted Arafat – in the euphemism of that time –
“removed”. In January 2002, Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s military chief of staff, was caught on a microphone whispering to Israel’s prime
minister, Ariel Sharon, about Arafat: “We have to get rid of him.” 

With the Palestinian leader holed up for more than two years in his battered compound in
Ramallah, surrounded by Israeli tanks, the debate in the Israel government centred on whether he should be exiled or killed. In September 2003, when Shalom was foreign minister, the cabinet even issued a warning that
Israel would “remove this obstacle in a manner, and at a time, of its choosing.” The then-deputy
prime minister, Ehud Olmert, clarified that killing Arafat was “one of the options”. What stayed Israel’s hand – and fuelled its equivocal tone – was Washington’s adamant
opposition. In the wake of these threats, Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, warned that a
move against Arafat would trigger “rage throughout the Arab world, the Muslim world and in many other parts of the world”. By April 2004, however, Sharon declared he was no longer obligated by his earlier commitment to President George Bush not to “harm Arafat
physically”. “I am released from that pledge,” he observed. The White House too indicated a
weakening of its stance: an unnamed spokesman responded feebly that the US “opposed any such action”. Unknown is whether Israel was able to carry out
the assassination alone, or whether it needed to recruit a member or members of Arafat’s inner circle, with him inside his Ramallah compound, as accomplices to deliver the radioactive poison. So what about motive? How did Israel gain from
“removing” Arafat? To understand Israel’s thinking, one needs to return to another debate
raging at that time, among Palestinians. The Palestinian leadership was split into two
camps, centred on Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s heir apparent. The pair had starkly
divergent strategies for dealing with Israel. In Arafat’s view, Israel had reneged on commitments it made in the Oslo accords. He was
therefore loath to invest exclusively in the peace process. He wanted a twin strategy: keeping open channels for talks while maintaining the option of
armed resistance to pressure Israel. For this reason he kept a tight personal grip on the
Palestinian security forces. Abbas, on the other hand, believed that armed resistance was a gift to Israel, delegitimising the
Palestinian struggle. He wanted to focus exclusively on negotiations and state-building, hoping to exert indirect pressure on Israel by
proving to the international community that the Palestinians could be trusted with statehood. His priority was cooperating closely with the US and Israel in security matters. Israel and the US strongly preferred Abbas’s
approach, even forcing Arafat for a time to reduce his own influence by appointing Abbas to a newly created post of prime minister. Israel’s primary concern was that, however much of a prisoner they made Arafat, he would remain
a unifying figure for Palestinians. By refusing to renounce armed struggle, Arafat managed to
contain – if only just – the mounting tensions between his own Fatah movement and its chief rival, Hamas. With Arafat gone, and the conciliatory Abbas
installed in his place, those tensions erupted violently into the open – as Israel surely knew
they would. That culminated in a split that tore apart the Palestinian national movement and led
to a territorial schism between the Fatah- controlled West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza. In Israel’s oft-used terminology, Arafat was the
head of the “infrastructure of terror”. But Israel’s preference for Abbas derived not from respect
for him or from a belief that he could successfully persuade Palestinians to accept a peace deal. Sharon famously declared that Abbas was no more impressive than a “plucked chicken”. Israel’s interests in killing Arafat are evident when one considers what occurred after his
death. Not only did the Palestinian national movement collapse, but the Palestinian leadership got drawn back into a series of futile
peace talks, leaving Israel clear to concentrate on land grabs and settlement building.

Contemplating the matter of whether Israel benefited from the loss of Arafat, Palestinian
analyst Mouin Rabbani observed: “Hasn’t Abu Mazen [Abbas’] exemplary commitment to Oslo
over the years, and maintenance of security cooperation with Israel through thick and thin, already settled this question?” Abbas’ strategy may be facing its ultimate test now, as the Palestinian negotiating team once again try to coax out of Israel the barest
concessions on statehood at the risk of being blamed for the talks’ inevitable failure. The effort
already looks deeply misguided. While the negotiations have secured for the Palestinians only a handful of ageing political
prisoners, Israel has so far announced in return a
massive expansion of the settlements and the
threatened eviction of some 15,000 Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem. It is doubtless a trade-off Arafat would have rued.

Eyop: Post.email, Please can you throw more light on how you used the in-house BDC for the exchange. Are you trying to say using the black market guys is better than making use of the in-house BDC(with isssue of charging COT for bulk withdrawals) awaiting your response,Thanks

Well, I think it was in July or so. The bank's branch manager told he could get me a lower exchange rate. Then their USD exchange was 2naira lower than the black market's rate. I thought it was great. I was giving a BDC account number that belongs to bank. I wrote the cheque, filled a money transfer form. I picked up the USDollars after 2 hrs from the same branch, but before then I had received about 3 sms alerts from the bank -COT for cheque payment, FOREX charges, etc. I regretted using the bank. Though risky and higher rate, the black market is quite simple compared to banks..

igbonla: I think you should dump the UBA Africard, can't see the attraction except if you own shares there and want to keep the profit within. 1.5 Million per quarter can't go anywhere and not sure why that limit is imposed. With GTBank debit card, I can do the entire $150,000 meant for a year in one month if I can do ATM/POS transactions to cover the amount without exceeding daily limit, only that I cannot spend beyond $150,000 in the whole year.
GTB ATM charge just got reduced to N240 per transaction (I have been hounding them that the N420 they were charging is fraudulent). As a matter of fact, I must have taken out about $10,000 from ATMs in the past 2 weeks. Although GTBank says the daily limit for ATM withdrawal is N150,000, I always taken out between $800 and $1,000 at every transaction.

GTbank allow daily limit of N1,000,000 for point of sale transactions, that is roughly about $6,000 so you don't need to do 14 ATM withdrawals for transactions requiring up to $10,000. What I have done in the past was to pay the seller/retailer twice, easily allowed as long as you don't ask to walk away with the goods with the first payment. Strange enough, I never paid any currency exchange fee for POS deals (this happens only when I use a US debit card in Canada). Again, maybe GTB is just different; I am yet to try other Nigerian banks, talk of not fixing something if it's not broken.

I understand the issue with the under invoicing but that is the part I referred to on following the rules. The challenge is not for CBN to manage but for the importers to continue to put pressure on Okonjo-Iweala especially now that Sanusi decided to do some cleaning. Who is allowing and benefiting from what Cotecna and Globalscan are doing?
Truth is that importers will always undervalue their goods irrespective of what Cotecna and co are doing so they can pay almost zero import tax, almost everybody in Nigeria is working for themselves without minding the impacts of their actions on the economy and the life of Nigerians.

You will agree with me that there is need for these cleaning to happen if the country is going to move forward, there is too much impunity in the land.

Nice! Pls tell more about the GTB Debit card. I took two UBA Africards but it's difficult to make bulk deposits into these cards.
Isn't GTB's daily ATM withdrawal limit of $1000 a problem? If I have to pay $20,000 to a company, that's gonna take like 20days -daily ATM withdrawal. Well, POS payment is an option. But when haggling for lower price with manufacturers, it kinda makes it a bit difficult for them to accept when you gonna pay with a card. I know many Manufacturers like cash payments! For cash payments you get good deal compared to Letter of credit and POS payment.
Please is there any Nigerian debit card that's flexible on ATM withdrawal, with higher daily limits ?


How can one avoid these BDCs? I got really hammered dealing with the black market guys. Last month, I bought USD at 168 from these guys with enough ABEG! It really hurts to be at their mercy. Once I tried buying directly from UBA. That's so efffed up because I used the in-house BDC for the exchange. They charged COT for bulk withdrawal; and also charged bank transfer fee and FOREX fee. At the end of the day, I regretted using the bank for my FOREX needs....the abokis seem better without all the charges and fees.

Guys, any solution to this FOREX issue?