{"id":60197,"date":"2021-11-01T06:37:59","date_gmt":"2021-11-01T11:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60197"},"modified":"2021-11-01T06:41:43","modified_gmt":"2021-11-01T11:41:43","slug":"stealing-a-nation-secret-sas-mission-to-capture-mideast-oil-artery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60197","title":{"rendered":"Stealing a Nation: Secret SAS Mission to Capture Mideast Oil Artery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Stealing a Nation: Secret SAS Mission to Capture Mideast Oil Artery<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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British files seen by\u00a0Declassified-UK<\/em>\u00a0reveal details of torture from 1970, when special forces invaded and annexed the Persian Gulf\u2019s most important oil route, Phil Miller reports.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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A dhow in the waters off Oman\u2019s Musandam Peninsula, 2007. (hoteldephil, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

F<\/strong>ifty years ago, U.S. troops began building a military base on the Chagos Islands, a British territory in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Its inhabitants, who numbered several thousand, were forcibly removed to make way for a naval station.<\/p>\n

They received almost nothing in compensation for the loss of their homeland, but Britain did well out of the deal. The Pentagon gave the Royal Navy a discount<\/a>\u00a0on its first nuclear-armed submarine fleet.<\/p>\n

This bargain helped Whitehall keep up the pretense of being a great power, bolstering the U.K.\u2019s permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council even as the British empire crumbled.<\/p>\n

But nuclear weapons would not be enough to stay ahead in this new world order. While evicting the Chagossians, U.K. officials busily conducted another colonial carve-up \u2014 this time to ensure continued control of global oil supply routes.<\/p>\n

Known as Operation Intradon, it saw a proudly autonomous Arab tribe have their land handed over to a pro-Western dictator, detainees tortured by British troops and a U.K. special forces soldier dying in a night-time parachute jump.<\/p>\n

\"\"Yet the episode has been largely forgotten outside of Musandam \u2014 a mountainous peninsula overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow sea lane between Iran and Arabia through which a third of the world\u2019s oil supplies are shipped each day.<\/p>\n

Despite living at a crossroads of the global economy as important as the Suez or Panama canals, Musandam\u2019s main tribe, the Shihuh, long resented outside interference and effectively regarded themselves as independent.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stealing a Nation: Secret SAS Mission to Capture Mideast Oil Artery British files seen by\u00a0Declassified-UK\u00a0reveal details of torture from 1970, when special forces invaded and annexed the Persian Gulf\u2019s most important oil route, Phil Miller reports. A dhow in the waters off Oman\u2019s Musandam Peninsula, 2007. (hoteldephil, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Fifty years ago, U.S. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[93,32060,522,588,1129,32059,862],"class_list":["post-60197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-geopolitics","tag-britain","tag-declassified-u-k","tag-middle-east","tag-oil","tag-persian-gulf","tag-phil-miller","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60197"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60200,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60197\/revisions\/60200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}