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Is the US trying to destroy ISIS?

April 24, 2016

Someone asked me to find war lies during the past few years. Perhaps they had in mind the humanitarian pretenses around attacking Libya in 2011 and Iraq in 2014, or the false claims about chemical weapons in 2013, or the lies about an airplane in Ukraine or the endlessly reported Russian invasions of Ukraine. Maybe they were thinking of the “ISIS Is In Brooklyn” headlines or the routine false claims about the identities of drone victims or the supposedly imminent victory in Afghanistan or in one of the other wars. The lies seem far too numerous for me to fit into an essay, though I’ve tried many times, and they are layered over a bedrock of more general lies about what works, what is legal, and what is moral. Just a Prince Tribute selection of lies could include Qadaffi’s viagra for the troops and CNN’s sex-toys flag as evidence of ISIS in Europe. It’s hard to scrape the surface of all U.S. war lies in something less than a book, which is why I wrote a book.

So, I replied that I would look for war lies just in 2016. But that was way too big as well, of course. I once tried to find all the lies in one speech by Obama and ended up just writing about the top 45. So, I’ve taken a glance at two of the most recent speeches on the White House website, one by Obama and one by Susan Rice. I think they provide ample evidence of how we’re being lied to.

In an April 13th speech to the CIA, President Barack Obama declared, “One of my main messages today is that destroying ISIL continues to be my top priority.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

OPEC Update

April 21, 2016

OPEC Update

All charts are updated through March 2016

The latest OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report is out out. The charts are “Crude Only”production and do not reflect condensate production.

Also the charts, except for Libya, are not zero based. I chose to amplify the change rather than the total. OPEC is now 13 nations with the the addition of Indonesia.

All Data is in thousand barrels per day.

OPEC 13

OPEC production was up 15,000 barrels per day in March. But there has really been very little change since June of 2015.

Secondary Sources

OPEC uses secondary sources such as Platts and other agencies to report their production numbers. These numbers are pretty accurate and usually have only slight revisions month to month. The big gainer in March was Iran while the biggest loser was the UAE. Notice that the UAE says their production recovered in March, from their big drop in February. But OPEC’s “Secondary Sources” says they did not, they fell another 100,000 barrels per day.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Duping Progressives into Wars

April 14, 2016

Duping Progressives into Wars

The online advocacy group, Avaaz, has pulled progressives into support of U.S. “humanitarian” wars in Libya and Syria by promoting sweet-sounding ideas like “no-fly zones,” as John Hanrahan explains.

In a recent two-part series in The New York Times laid out in detail the pivotal role that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played in President Obama’s decision to join in France and Britain’s 2011 military campaign against long-time Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The Times articles make the case that Clinton bears a heavy part of the responsibility for the tragic, increasingly chaotic aftermath of that campaign in which Gaddafi was ousted and killed.

As The Times summaries of the articles put it, Gaddafi’s fall “seemed to vindicate Hillary Clinton. Then militias refused to disarm, neighbors fanned a civil war, and the Islamic State found refuge,” leaving Libya “a failed state and a terrorist haven.”

Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shortly before he was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011.

While neocons, right-wingers and humanitarian interventionists back in 2011 were seeking regime change in Libya, there was one non-governmental organization that was alone among progressive groups in mobilizing public opinion around the world in support of military action in Libya in the form of “a no-fly zone.”

And this wasn’t just any organization, but the fast-growing, on-line advocacy giant Avaaz.org, which in 2011 had seven million members and today boasts 43.1-million members in 194 countries. As such, the New York City-based Avaaz is, as we noted in a previous article, the largest and most influential Internet-based, international advocacy organization on the planet.

Through its members’ petitions and a full-page ad last June in The New York Times, Avaaz has for the last few years been pushing for “a no-fly zone” in Syria, as have assorted neocons and war-hawks in Congress and think-tanks who favor military operations to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Exposing the Libyan Agenda: A Closer Look at Hillary’s Emails

March 14, 2016

Exposing the Libyan Agenda: A Closer Look at Hillary’s Emails

Critics have long questioned why violent intervention was necessary in Libya. Hillary Clinton’s recently published emails confirm that it was less about protecting the people from a dictator than about money, banking, and preventing African economic sovereignty.

The brief visit of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya in October 2011 was referred to by the media as a “victory lap.” “We came, we saw, he died!” she crowed in a CBS video interview on hearing of the capture and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi.

But the victory lap, write Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the New York Times, was premature. Libya was relegated to the back burner by the State Department, “as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.”

US-NATO intervention was allegedly undertaken on humanitarian grounds, after reports of mass atrocities; but human rights organizations questioned the claims after finding a lack of evidence. Today, however, verifiable atrocities are occurring. As Dan Kovalik wrote in the Huffington Post, “the human rights situation in Libya is a disaster, as ‘thousands of detainees [including children] languish in prisons without proper judicial review,’ and ‘kidnappings and targeted killings are rampant’.”

Before 2011, Libya had achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had arisen under Qaddafi from one of the poorest of countries to the richest in Africa. Education and medical treatment were free; having a home was considered a human right; and Libyans participated in an original system of local democracy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

U.S. Unable To Halt ISIS March Towards Libyan Oil

February 25, 2016

U.S. Unable To Halt ISIS March Towards Libyan Oil

The Islamic State (ISIS) is taking on recruits faster than anyone can keep up with, and it’s heading towards Libya’s oil crescent, eyeing billions of barrels that a country at war with itself cannot protect—even with U.S. air strikes.

In mid-December, the United Nations brokered a power-sharing agreement between Libya’s rival factions, but there is no chance of implementing this. That means there is no chance that the Libyan government can fight back the advance of ISIS. Things are about to get messy, and U.S. air strikes will put only a small dent in a big problem.

According to U.S. intelligence figures, there are an estimated 6,000 ISIS fighters now in Libya, headquartered in the town of Sirte, as Oilprice.com has reported in the past. From here, they control hundreds of miles of coastline. There is nothing in Sirte they want; this is simply a strategic base.

ISIS fighters have also been tracked down to Benghazi, but here they have not solidified control yet. Still, Benghazi is an important recruitment venue. More specifically, this is where it can combine forces with it radical brethren in the form of Ansar al-Sharia and other radical factions. Benghazi is where ISIS gets bigger. And its pace of recruitment is faster than anything we’ve ever seen before. It absorbs new radical factions wherever it goes. The more successful its attacks and territory grabs, the more successful its recruiting becomes. In Libya, the former prowess of Ansar al-Sharia has quickly waned. ISIS is more brutal, and more decisive. It’s either join or be killed.

ISIS’ ability to launch attacks is not limited to Sirte, which is just the staging ground, or even to Benghazi. It can attack pretty much anywhere using hit-and-runs and suicide bombings.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Western warmongers have all the answers, and they’re all wrong

January 31, 2016

Western warmongers have all the answers, and they’re all wrong

The wars in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan failed not because of noble errors, but because short-sighted Western interests trumped the needs of the people. And this is why the creeping return to war will fail again

Despite an almost total lack of public debate, Western military escalation in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is on the rise.

Renewed military interventionism has been largely justified as a response to the meteoric rise of Islamic State networks, spreading across parts of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.

Missing from government pronouncements, though, is any acknowledgement that the proliferation of Islamist terrorism is a direct consequence of the knee-jerk response of military escalation.

Discarded to the memory hole is the fact that before each of the major interventions in these three countries, our political leaders promised they would bring security, freedom and prosperity.

Instead, they have done precisely the opposite.

White man’s burden for Afghan freedom

In October 2001, as US special forces were roaming Afghanistan in the search for Osama bin Laden, Max Boot – a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations – wrote a gushing article in the Weekly Standard titled, The Case for American Empire.

“Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets,” he said.

“Occupation would be a temporary expedient to allow the people to get back on their feet until a responsible, humane, preferably democratic, government takes over… Is this an ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also without a doubt.”

Fifteen years into the war in Afghanistan, it is patently clear that this imperial dream is nothing more than a self-soothing fantasy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Defeat is Victory

January 19, 2016

Defeat is Victory

John Holcroft

On the wall of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth from his novel 1984 there were three slogans:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

It occurred to me that these apply just a little bit too well to the way the Washington, DC establishment operates.

War certainly is peace: just look at how peaceful Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine have become thanks to their peacemaking efforts. The only departures from absolute peacefulness which might be taking place there have to do with the fact that there are some people still alive there. This should resolve itself on its own, especially in the Ukraine, where the people now face the prospect of surviving a cold winter without heat or electricity.

Freedom is indeed slavery: to enjoy their “freedom,” Americans spend most of their lives working off debt, be it a mortgage, medical debt incurred due to an illness, or student loans. Alternatively, they can also enjoy it by rotting in jail. They also work longer hours with less time off and worse benefits than in any other developed country, and their wages haven’t increased in two generations.

And what keeps it all happening is the fact that ignorance is indeed strength; if it wasn’t for the Americans’ overwhelming, willful ignorance of both their own affairs and the world at large, they would have rebelled by now, and the whole house of cards would have come tumbling down.

But there is a fourth slogan they need to add to the wall of Washington’s Ministry of Truth. It is this:

DEFEAT IS VICTORY

The preposterous nature of the first three slogans can be finessed away in various ways.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Clinton Email Hints that Oil and Gold Were Behind Regime Change In Libya

January 10, 2016

Clinton Email Hints that Oil and Gold Were Behind Regime Change In Libya

On New Year’s Eve, 3,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server were released.

One of them confirms – an email dated April 2, 2011 to Clinton from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal – that:

Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver.

***

This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French. franc (CFA).

(Source Comment [This is in the original declassified email, and is not a comment added by us]: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:

A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,

Increase French influence in North Africa,

Improve his internal political situation in France,

Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,

Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa)

This may confirm what some of us have been saying for years.

The Odds Are Never In Your Favour

December 28, 2015

The Odds Are Never In Your Favour

The irony of the phrase “may the odds be ever in your favor” is not lost on the readers of the Hunger Games trilogy of novels or the film adaption. Despite the grimness of the story, over 65 million copies of the books have been sold. The total box office take so far has exceeded $1.4 billion for the four movies. The dystopian series tackles real issues like severe poverty, starvation, torture, oppression, betrayal and the brutality of war. It doesn’t fit into the standard film making success recipe of feel good fluff, politically correct storylines and happy endings. Each film in the series gets progressively darker, with the final episode permeating doom and gloom. The books and the movies capture the deepening crisis mood engulfing the world today. And they realistically portray the world as a place where there are no good guys in positions of power. The ruling class, in all cases, is driven by a voracious appetite for supremacy, wealth, and control.

An Ambiguous, Confusing, Dangerous World

The world is a morally ambiguous place where those in power and those seeking power utilize the influence of media propaganda and PR campaigns built around “heroes” and “icons” to psychologically control the masses, while enriching themselves and their crony capitalist sponsors. Endless war against the latest “bad guys” further enriches the arms dealers and their political lackeys who joyfully use faux patriotism and nationalistic fervor to insist upon more boots on the ground, drones in the air, bombs dropped, and missiles launched.

War is good for business and keeps the masses distracted, while the Wall Street financiers harvest the wealth of the citizens.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Imperial Arrogance: Tony Blair, Qaddafi and Torture

December 22, 2015

Imperial Arrogance: Tony Blair, Qaddafi and Torture

Jack-Straw-and-Tony-Blair-001

Tony Blair and Jack Straw.

That former British prime minister Tony Blair is a poster boy for corruption, mendacity, opportunism, and ruthless ambition is by now a received truth. The man who took Britain into the war in Iraq on the coattails of the Bush administration in 2003, did so imbued with a messianic desire to become a major international figure, basking in the embrace of a political establishment in Washington whose support and endorsement he valued more than that of the people in the UK who elected him and whose interests he was supposed to represent.

As he and others involved in engineering the facts to make the case of crashing into Iraq on the back of cruise missiles currently await the findings of the Chilcot Inquiry into the war, legal proceeding are underway in the UK Supreme Court to sue both Blair’s former foreign secretary Jack Straw and British intelligence agencies over their role in the rendition to Libya from London of anti-Gaddafi Libyan dissidents, where they were subsequently tortured.

Prime among those Libyan dissidents who are involved in the legal action is Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who went on to assume a key role as a military commander and official in the post Gaddafi Islamist regime based in Tripoli. Belhaj alleges that both he and his wife were rendered to Libya from the UK in 2004 and tortured in the presence of British MI6 operatives.

In the process the extent of the cooperation that existed between Blair and Gaddafi over the course of a relationship which officially began after Blair visited the Libyan leader, soon after he publicly renounced and ended Libya’s WMD program at the end of 2003 in the wake of the destruction of Iraq, has come to light.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Historic New Harpers Article Exposes Who Controls America

December 18, 2015

Historic New Harpers Article Exposes Who Controls America

There can be little doubt now: America’s decades-long catastrophic failures to make significant progress in eliminating even a single one of the numerous jihadist groups around the world is due to the American government’s secret under-the-table crucial ongoing assistance to those groups, and this American-government support has intentionally encouraged recent terrorist events especially in Syria, Libya, and other countries that had been allied with Russia — but which might be flipped ‘our’ way, by those jihadists. In such countries (America’s ‘enemies’), the U.S. government calls the jihadist groups ‘moderates’ and ‘pro-democracy.’ But in Christian, Jewish, and Shiite-Muslim dominant countries, they’re instead called “terrorists,” which is what they actually are. George Orwell called such linguistic tricks for fooling any nation’s mass of suckers, “Newspeak,” but America’s version is more sophisticated than his fictional one was. And so is America’s version of Orwell’s “Big Brother” more sophisticated than his — and now we know what it actually is, because of this:

The great investigative journalist Andrew Cockburn, in the January 2016 issue of Harpers Magazine, has come forth with what may be the best public-affairs article I’ve ever seen (it’s at that link), because he has interviewed key individuals in the U.S. government’s CIA and other intelligence agencies, some of whom he even identifies by name (i.e., they’re retired), and all of whom provide different details of the very same stunning huge story, a story that I have been reporting only in bits and pieces over the past year, but for which Cockburn offers an astounding amount of fuller and entirely new documentation — it blows everything else away.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Murder And Mayhem In The Middle East

December 1, 2015

TonelloPhotography/Shutterstock

Murder And Mayhem In The Middle East

Why it matters to those living in the West

To understand what’s happening in Syria right now, you have to understand the tactics and motivations of the US and NATO — parties sharing interwoven aims and goals in the Middle East/North African (MENA) region.

While the populations of Europe and the US are fed raw propaganda about the regional aims involved, the reality is far different.

Where the propaganda claims that various bad dictators have to be taken out, or that democracy is the goal, neither have anything at all to do with what’s actually happening or has happened in the region.

For starters, we all know that if oil fields were not at stake then the West would care much much less about MENA affairs.

But a lot of outside interests do care. And their aims certainly and largely include controlling the region’s critical energy resources. There’s a lot of concern over whether Russia or China will instead come to dominate these last, best oil reserves on the planet.

Further, we can dispense with the idea that the US and NATO have any interest at all in human rights in this story. If they did, then they’d at least have to admit that their strategies and tactics have unleashed immeasurable suffering, as well as created the conditions for lots more. But it would be silly to try and argue about or understand regional motivations through the lenses of human rights or civilian freedoms — as neither applies here.

Divide And Conquer

Instead, the policies in the MENA region are rooted in fracturing the region so that it will be easier to control.

That’s a very old tactic; first utilized to a great extent by Britain starting back in the 1700s.

Divide and conquer. There’s a reason that’s a well-worn catch phrase: it’s hundreds of years old.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

IEA: US$ 40 oil means 3 mp/d less oil by 2020

November 16, 2015

IEA: US$ 40 oil means 3 mp/d less oil by 2020

You want $40 oil? Yes, please. But according to the World Energy Outlook 2015 of the International Energy Agency, recently released in London, that would mean 3 mb/d less US tight (shale) oil by 2020. That’s about 4% of global crude production.

Fly less and drive less.

Fig 1: Slide from the WEO 2015 presentation

http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/media/weowebsite/2015/151110_WEO2015_presentation.pdf

Let’s put that into a graph for the $50 scenario:

Fig 2: US monthly crude production

The graph shows a 4 mb/d increase in US crude oil production, mainly tight oil from Texas (Eagle Ford, Permian), North Dakota (Bakken) and Niobrara (Colorado, Wyoming) between 2011 and 2015. The other States plus the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska remained on an undulating production plateau. The red production line descends by 2.5 mb/d over 5 years to 2020, with an oil price of $50 a barrel (dashed black line)

The EIA data for the above graph are from here:

US crude oil
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS2&f=M

WTI oil price
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=rwtc&f=m

The latest drilling productivity report from here
http://www.eia.gov/petroleum/drilling/
shows some details about peaking tight oil production

Bakken

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The United States government has become “the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization,” warns former Reagan official

October 11, 2015

The United States government has become “the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization,” warns former Reagan official

A former top member of the Ronald Reagan administration has issued a dire warning about the current state of American government: it’s evil and will become even more evil in the years ahead as the world itself becomes more dangerous.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, who served just over a year as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, said on the Shadow of Truth radio program that Washington, D.C., is a major den of inequity.

“The United States [military policy] has destroyed seven countries,” he says. “The populations there are subject to ongoing continual violence either from the U.S. or these Jihadists or from the Islamic State. In Libya there’s various factions, no government – just warlords fighting and nobody’s safe anywhere so the populations are getting out. You can’t live in that type of situation.”

Early in the interview, the hosts ask Roberts about a recent column he penned in which he states that all current Republican presidential contenders are essentially in favor of war. The hosts then ask him about the potential of nuclear war with either Russia or China, “because we seem to be moving in that direction.”

“I think what it will take is the European countries to realize that they’ve been enabling American aggression in the 21st century, and aggression that is now brought them millions of refugees particularly from Syria and Iraq, and they can’t cope with these refugees,” said Roberts in reference to the fighting between ISIS, Syrian rebels, and Iraqi and Syrian government forces that has caused a wave of migration out of the war zones into Europe.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/051471_NATO_terrorists_nuclear_war.html#ixzz3oGPhR7Ee

The Middle East Meltdown and Global Risk

October 4, 2015

The Middle East Meltdown and Global Risk

Among today’s geopolitical risks, none is greater than the long arc of instability stretching from the Maghreb to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. With the Arab Spring an increasingly distant memory, the instability along this arc is deepening. Indeed, of the three initial Arab Spring countries, Libya has become a failed state, Egypt has returned to authoritarian rule, and Tunisia is being economically and politically destabilized by terrorist attacks.

The violence and instability of North Africa is now spreading into Sub-Saharan Africa, with the Sahel – one of the world’s poorest and most environmentally damaged regions – now gripped by jihadism, which is also seeping into the Horn of Africa to its east. And, as in Libya, civil wars are raging in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, all of which increasingly look like failed states.

The region’s turmoil (which the United States and its allies, in their pursuit of regime change in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere, helped to fuel) is also undermining previously secure states. The influx of refugees from Syria and Iraq is destabilizing Jordan, Lebanon, and now even Turkey, which is becoming increasingly authoritarian under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Meanwhile, with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians unresolved, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon represent a chronic threat of violent clashes with Israel.

In this fluid regional environment, a great proxy struggle for regional dominance between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran is playing out violently in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and Lebanon. And while the recent nuclear deal with Iran may reduce the proliferation risk, the lifting of economic sanctions on Iran will provide its leaders with more financial resources to support their Shia proxies. Further east, Afghanistan (where the resurgent Taliban could return to power) and Pakistan (where domestic Islamists pose a continued security threat) risk becoming semi-failed states.

Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/middle-east-meltdown-global-risk-by-nouriel-roubini-2015-10#uwWCfTGqdixqPq41.99

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