Ahmadinejad DID NOT threaten to “wipe Israel off the map”

from : http://america-hijacked.com

February 26th, 2010 | Author: Patriot

Ahmadinejad DID NOT threaten to “wipe Israel off the map.”

Apologize to the World Mr. Wallace and Return that Emmy

Posted in Zionist Threat

« What’s In a Name? by Philip Giraldi — Antiwar.com

Iran, Syria mock U.S. policy; Ahmadinejad speaks of Israel’s ‘annihilation’ »

.

Strong support behind Argentina for Falklands

from : http://www.presstv.ir

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:33:42 GMT

Argentina's neighbors have expressed support for Buenos Aires' ownership of the Falkland Islands despite Britain's plans for offshore oil drilling there.

At a meeting of Latin American and Caribbean countries, Argentina presented a statement that confirmed the backing of the present nations.

"The heads of state represented here reaffirm their support for the legitimate rights of the republic of Argentina in the sovereignty dispute with Great Britain," the statement read.

British oil exploration company, Desire Petroleum PLC, said Monday that it has started drilling for oil north of the islands, despite strong opposition from Argentina.

Earlier this week, Argentinean government formally objected to British-led drilling plans near the islands that lie around 500 kilometers off the coast of Argentina and almost 13,000 kilometers away from the UK.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez said that her government has won the backing of regional leaders over the ownership of the South Atlantic islands, which Buenos Aires calls 'Las Malvinas.'

"In the name of our government and in the name of my people I am grateful ... for the support this meeting has given to our demands," Fernandez said.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon also confirmed the support of South American states, according to Argentine diplomatic sources.

Earlier on Sunday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called on Queen Elizabeth II of Britain to leave the islands to Argentina, saying that the time of empires has long expired.

Chavez also warned that in the event of a war over the islands, Argentina would not be alone.

"The English are still threatening Argentina. Things have changed," Chavez continued. "If conflict breaks out, be sure Argentina will not be alone like it was back then."


The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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The death of a child or adult in Afghanistan is worth $1,500-$2,500

from : http://www.sott.net

Christopher Torchia
Associated Press
Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:17 EST
The fallout of war has a price in southern Afghanistan.

U.S. Army units fighting the Taliban in Helmand province have a compensation system for any death, injury or damage to crops and buildings caused by American forces to Afghan civilians and their property.

The suffering of a population caught between combatants during the Afghan war is a politically sensitive issue, and NATO troops have sought to make amends for deadly airstrikes and other instances in which civilians were killed.

In turn, they accuse insurgents of using civilians as human shields, making it harder to distinguish between enemies and innocents. Financial compensation in desperately poor Afghanistan is at least one way to alleviate distress and show good intentions, military commanders say.

The American units carry a list that gives guidance on payouts:

The death of a child or adult is worth $1,500-$2,500, loss of limb and other injuries $600-$1,500, a damaged or destroyed vehicle $500-$2,500, and damage to a farmer's fields $50-$250.

The system is also useful for gathering intelligence on insurgents, says 1st Sgt. Gene Hicks of Tacoma, Washington.

The military pays villagers in local currency for information about the location of roadside bombs as well as "where they've seen people at, where they've seen people moving, where they've seen people shooting from," Hicks said.

His Alpha Company of 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Stryker Brigade has paid out nearly $500 so far, though they also have yet to compensate landowners for compounds they have occupied and turned into patrol bases. They have not had to pay any "condolence" payments for injury or loss of life.

One Afghan landowner stands to reap a windfall because his compound has been occupied by British, Canadian and American troops.

"They've all used the same compound," Hicks said. "So he gets his money from whoever's occupying his compound at the time."

It's not an exact science, but some Afghan civilians in the area of Badula Qulp, northeast of the contested Taliban stronghold of Marjah, have been quick to exploit it. In any casualty case, the Americans are mindful that they might be asked to compensate for the death of an insurgent, rather than a civilian.

"It's really kind of hard," Hicks said. "You have to determine whether the guy was a good guy or a bad guy. It's a benefit of the doubt kind of thing."

A few days ago, a company with the 4th Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment got into a firefight with the Taliban, and a helicopter destroyed a mosque from where troops had received fire. The 15-year-old son of the local religious figure died in the air strike; the U.S. military agreed to pay compensation in a meeting with village leaders, though commanders privately speculated that the son might have been a combatant.

At that meeting, one of the elders initially objected to the idea of putting a price on someone's death, or damage to a holy religious site. By the end of the meeting, the elders seemed content with the idea of a payout.

The compensation process requires completed claim forms, and is sometimes complicated by the fact that many villagers don't know how to write and can't sign their names. In that event, soldiers take their fingerprint on the document or photograph them with the form.

During a mission in neighboring Kandahar province, Alpha Company once ran into an enterprising man who showed them where to find a roadside bomb that could have caused serious damage to one of their Stryker infantry carriers. The man wouldn't settle for a few hundred dollars; he wanted the amount of the armored vehicle that had possibly been saved from destruction - a cool $2 million or more.

He didn't get it.

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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Gadhafi: Obama fears Israel will assassinate him like it did JFK

from : http://www.haaretz.com

Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi. (AP)

Share |

Last update - 00:00 12/06/2008

By Reuters

Tags: JFK assassination

Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi said on Wednesday that U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's expressed support for Israel stems from his fear that the Mossad would assassinate him, just as it did President John F. Kennedy. "We suspect he may fear being killed by Israeli agents and meet the same fate as Kennedy when he promised to look into Israel's nuclear program," Gadhafi said. While the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons is widely assumed, Israeli officials have never admitted their existence and U.S. officials have stuck to that line in public. Advertisement Gadhafi saw a dark motive behind a recent speech by Obama in support of Israel. "Obama offered $300 billion in aid to Israel and more military support. He avoided talking about Israel's nuclear weapons," he said. Gadhafi said Obama would have an "inferiority complex" because he is black and if elected he might "behave worse than whites." "We fear that Obama will feel that, because he is black with an inferiority complex, this will make him behave worse than the whites," Gadhafi told a rally at a former U.S. military base on the outskirts of the Libyan capital Tripoli. "This will be a tragedy," Gadhafi said. "We tell him to be proud of himself as a black and feel that all Africa is behind him because if he sticks to this inferiority complex he will have a worse foreign policy than the whites had in the past." He was speaking before thousands of cheering supporters at a ceremony to celebrate the 38th anniversary of the departure of U.S. troops from Libya. Gadhafi, known for his controversial statements, took power in 1969 in a military coup in his oil- and gas-rich North African state. He was shunned for decades by the West, which accused him of supporting terrorism. His ties with Western countries have improved since Libya announced it was scrapping weapons of mass destruction programs in 2003 and agreed to pay compensation for families of victims of bombings of U.S. and French airliners. Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, would be the first African American elected U.S. president. In his campaign he has largely eschewed the rhetoric of racial struggle and drawn support among blacks and whites. Gadhafi said Obama should adopt a policy of supporting poor and weak peoples such as the Palestinians and be a friend of what he called free Arab peoples rather than U.S. "agents" in the Arab world who, he said, were hated by their own people. "We still hope he will be proud of Africa and change America and free America of its past policy, namely with the Arabs," said Gadhafi.

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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Wikileaks - We protect the world—but will you protect us?

from : http://wikileaks.org/

Wikileaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years ”
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Bombshell: Goldman Sachs Helped Greece Cover Up Its Huge Debt

from : http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com

NYT is out with a major story by Louise Story, Landon Thomas and Nelson D. Schwartz on how Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other investment banks have helped Greece hide the extent of its debt:

As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.

Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching for ways to help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early November — three months before Athens became the epicenter of global financial anxiety — a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills, according to two people who were briefed on the meeting.

The bankers, led by Goldman’s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a financing instrument that would have pushed debt from Greece’s health care system far into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards.

It had worked before. In 2001, just after Greece was admitted to Europe’s monetary union, Goldman helped the government quietly borrow billions, people familiar with the transaction said. That deal, hidden from public view because it was treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.

Athens did not pursue the latest Goldman proposal, but with Greece groaning under the weight of its debts and with its richer neighbors vowing to come to its aid, the deals over the last decade are raising questions about Wall Street’s role in the world’s latest financial drama.

As in the American subprime crisis and the implosion of the American International Group, financial derivatives played a role in the run-up of Greek debt. Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere.

In dozens of deals across the Continent, banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books. Greece, for example, traded away the rights to airport fees and lottery proceeds in years to come.

Critics say that such deals, because they are not recorded as loans, mislead investors and regulators about the depth of a country’s liabilities.

Some of the Greek deals were named after figures in Greek mythology. One of them, for instance, was called Aeolos, after the god of the winds.

Most alarming is the hint that this goes beyond Greece:

Such derivatives, which are not openly documented or disclosed, add to the uncertainty over how deep the troubles go in Greece and which other governments might have used similar off-balance sheet accounting.

Bottom line: It appears that Goldman Sachs has turned many governments throughout the world into Super-Enrons, with off-balance sheet shenanigans, financial sleight of hand and convoluted accounting. Governments generally don't need help in this kind of maneuvering, but Goldman with its collection of whiz kid derivative designers has taken the entire process to a new level. A new level so unique that it could very will collapse the financial structure of the manipulated world. Posted by Robert Wenzel at 1:17 PM



The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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Iraq Orders Former Blackwater Guards Out

from : http://www.commondreams.org

Iraq gives hundreds of former and current Blackwater employees 7 days to leave country

Published on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 by Associated Press

by Qassim Abdul-Zahra

BAGHDAD - Iraq has ordered hundreds of private security guards linked to Blackwater Worldwide to leave the country within seven days or face possible arrest on visa violations, the interior minister said Wednesday.

The order comes in the wake of a U.S. judge dismissing criminal charges against five Blackwater guards who were accused in the September 2007 shooting deaths of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad.

It applies to about 250 security contractors who worked for Blackwater in Iraq at the time of the incident, Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani told The Associated Press.

Some of the guards now work for other security firms in Iraq, while others work for a Blackwater subsidiary, al-Bolani said. He said all "concerned parties" were notified of the order three days ago and now have four days left before they must leave.

Blackwater security contractors were protecting U.S. diplomats when the guards opened fire in Nisoor Square, a crowded Baghdad intersection, on Sept. 16, 2007. Seventeen people were killed, including women and children, in a shooting that inflamed anti-American sentiment in Iraq.

"We want to turn the page," al-Bolani said. "It was a painful experience, and we would like to go forward."

Based in Moyock, N.C., Blackwater is now known as Xe Services, a name change that happened after six of the security firm's guards were charged in the Nisoor Square shootout. At the time, Blackwater was the largest of the State Department's three security contractors working in Iraq.

One of the accused guards pleaded guilty in the case, but a federal judge in Washington threw out charges against the other five in December, rapping the Justice Department for mishandling the evidence.

The legal ruling infuriated Iraqis, with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki vowing to seek punishment for the guards.

Last month, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden flew to Baghdad to appease Iraqis with a promise by the Obama administration to appeal the case and bring the guards back to trial.

The shooting further strained relations between the United States and Iraq, leading the parliament in Baghdad to seek new laws that would clear the way for foreign contractors to be prosecuted in Iraqi courts. The U.S. government rejected those demands in the Blackwater case.

In January 2009, the State Department informed Blackwater that it would not renew its contracts to provide security for U.S. diplomats in Iraq because of the Iraqi government's refusal to grant it an operating license.

But last September, the agency said it temporarily extended a contract with a Blackwater subsidiary known as Presidential Airways to provide air support for U.S. diplomats.

The Justice Department now is investigating whether Blackwater tried to bribe Iraqi officials with about $1 million to allow the company to keep working there after the Baghdad shooting, according to U.S. officials close to the probe.

Associated Press Writers Lara Jakes, Mazin Yahya and Chelsea J. Carter contributed to this report.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information.

© 2010 Associated Press

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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Peace to the world and the land of the free . Part 1

from : http://news.cnet.com

FBI wants records kept of Web sites visited

WASHINGTON--The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.

FBI Director Robert Mueller supports storing Internet users' "origin and destination information," a bureau attorney said at a federal task force meeting on Thursday.

FBI director Robert Mueller

(Credit: Anne Broache/CNET)

As far back as a 2006 speech, Mueller had called for data retention on the part of Internet providers, and emphasized the point two years later when explicitly asking Congress to enact a law making it mandatory. But it had not been clear before that the FBI was asking companies to begin to keep logs of what Web sites are visited, which few if any currently do.

The FBI is not alone in renewing its push for data retention. As CNET reported earlier this week, a survey of state computer crime investigators found them to be nearly unanimous in supporting the idea. Matt Dunn, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in the Department of Homeland Security, also expressed support for the idea during the task force meeting.

Greg Motta, the chief of the FBI's digital evidence section, said that the bureau was trying to preserve its existing ability to conduct criminal investigations. Federal regulations in place since at least 1986 require phone companies that offer toll service to "retain for a period of 18 months" records including "the name, address, and telephone number of the caller, telephone number called, date, time and length of the call."

At Thursday's meeting (PDF) of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, which was created by Congress and organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Motta stressed that the bureau was not asking that content data, such as the text of e-mail messages, be retained.

"The question at least for the bureau has been about non-content transactional data to be preserved: transmission records, non-content records...addressing, routing, signaling of the communication," Motta said. Director Mueller recognizes, he added "there's going to be a balance of what industry can bear...He recommends origin and destination information for non-content data."

Motta pointed to a 2006 resolution from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which called for the "retention of customer subscriber information, and source and destination information for a minimum specified reasonable period of time so that it will be available to the law enforcement community."

Recording what Web sites are visited, though, is likely to draw both practical and privacy objections.

"We're not set up to keep URL information anywhere in the network," said Drew Arena, Verizon's vice president and associate general counsel for law enforcement compliance.

And, Arena added, "if you were do to deep packet inspection to see all the URLs, you would arguably violate the Wiretap Act."

Another industry representative with knowledge of how Internet service providers work was unaware of any company keeping logs of what Web sites its customers visit.

If logs of Web sites visited began to be kept, they would be available only to local, state, and federal police with legal authorization such as a subpoena or search warrant.

What remains unclear are the details of what the FBI is proposing. The possibilities include requiring an Internet provider to log the Internet protocol (IP) address of a Web site visited, or the domain name such as cnet.com, a host name such as news.cnet.com, or the actual URL such as http://reviews.cnet.com/Music/2001-6450_7-0.html.

While the first three categories could be logged without doing deep packet inspection, the fourth category would require it. That could run up against opposition in Congress, which lambasted the concept in a series of hearings in 2008, causing the demise of a company, NebuAd, which pioneered it inside the United States.

The technical challenges also may be formidable. John Seiver, an attorney at Davis Wright Tremaine who represents cable providers, said one of his clients had experience with a law enforcement request that required the logging of outbound URLs.

"Eighteen million hits an hour would have to have been logged," a staggering amount of data to sort through, Seiver said. The purpose of the FBI's request was to identify visitors to two URLs, "to try to find out...who's going to them."

A Justice Department representative said the department does not have an official position on data retention.

Disclosure: The author of this story participated in the meeting of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, though after the law enforcement representatives spoke.

Declan McCullagh is a contributor to CNET News and a correspondent for CBSNews.com who has covered the intersection of politics and technology for over a decade. Declan writes a regular feature called Taking Liberties, focused on individual and economic rights; you can bookmark his CBS News Taking Liberties site, or subscribe to the RSS feed. You can e-mail Declan at declan@cbsnews.com.

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

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Flashback :WHAT YOUR CHILDREN ARE DYING FOR IN AFGHANISTAN

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wiki says :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_%282001%E2%80%93present%29#Drug_trade

In 2000, the Taliban had issued a ban on opium production, which led to reductions in Pashtun Mafia opium production by as much as 90%.^[291] Soon after the 2001 U.S. led invasion of Afghanistan, however, opium production increased markedly.^[292] By 2005, Afghanistan had regained its position as the world’s #1 opium producer and was producing 90% of the world’s opium, most of which is processed into heroin and sold in Europe and Russia.^[293] Afghan opium kills 100,000 people every year worldwide.^[294]

artikel starts :


from : what really happened (blog) ( Int.

The Taliban had all but eradicated the opium growers before the US invasion. So why is cheap Afghani heroin flooding into the United States?

In Afghan fields the poppies grow.
Between the crosses.
Row on row.

1998 Unocal Statement: Suspension of activities related to proposed natural gas pipeline across Afghanistan As a result of sharply deteriorating political conditions in the region, Unocal, which serves as the development manager for the Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline consortium, has suspended all activities involving the proposed pipeline project in Afghanistan.

From the 1998 Congressional Record. Emphasis added to text. U.S. INTERESTS IN THE CENTRAL ASIAN REPUBLICS HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON ASIA AND THE PACIFIC OF THE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ONE HUNDRED FIFTH CONGRESS SECOND SESSION FEBRUARY 12, 1998 Next we would like to hear from Mr. John J. Maresca, vice president of international relations, Unocal Corporation. You may proceed as you wish. STATEMENT OF JOHN J. MARESCA, VICE PRESIDENT OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, UNOCAL CORPORATION Mr. Maresca. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's nice to see you again. I am John Maresca, vice president for international relations of the Unocal Corporation. Unocal, as you know, is one of the world's leading energy resource and project development companies. I appreciate your invitation to speak here today. I believe these hearings are important and timely. I congratulate you for focusing on Central Asia oil and gas reserves and the role they play in shaping U.S. policy. I would like to focus today on three issues. First, the need for multiple pipeline routes for Central Asian oil and gas resources. Second, the need for U.S. support for international and regional efforts to achieve balanced and lasting political settlements to the conflicts in the region, including Afghanistan. Third, the need for structured assistance to encourage economic reforms and the development of appropriate investment climates in the region. In this regard, we specifically support repeal or removal of section 907 of the Freedom Support Act. Mr. Chairman, the Caspian region contains tremendous untapped hydrocarbon reserves. Just to give an idea of the scale, proven natural gas reserves equal more than 236 trillion cubic feet. The region's total oil reserves may well reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels. In 1995, the region was producing only 870,000 barrels per day. By 2010, western companies could increase production to about 4.5 million barrels a day, an increase of more than 500 percent in only 15 years. If this occurs, the region would represent about 5 percent of the world's total oil production. One major problem has yet to be resolved: how to get the region's vast energy resources to the markets where they are needed. Central Asia is isolated. Their natural resources are land locked, both geographically and politically. Each of the countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia faces difficult political challenges. Some have unsettled wars or latent conflicts. Others have evolving systems where the laws and even the courts are dynamic and changing. In addition, a chief technical obstacle which we in the industry face in transporting oil is the region's existing pipeline infrastructure. Because the region's pipelines were constructed during the Moscow-centered Soviet period, they tend to head north and west toward Russia. There are no connections to the south and east. But Russia is currently unlikely to absorb large new quantities of foreign oil. It's unlikely to be a significant market for new energy in the next decade. It lacks the capacity to deliver it to other markets. Two major infrastructure projects are seeking to meet the need for additional export capacity. One, under the aegis of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, plans to build a pipeline west from the northern Caspian to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. Oil would then go by tanker through the Bosporus to the Mediterranean and world markets. The other project is sponsored by the Azerbaijan International Operating Company, a consortium of 11 foreign oil companies, including four American companies, Unocal, Amoco, Exxon and Pennzoil. This consortium conceives of two possible routes, one line would angle north and cross the north Caucasus to Novorossiysk. The other route would cross Georgia to a shipping terminal on the Black Sea. This second route could be extended west and south across Turkey to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. But even if both pipelines were built, they would not have enough total capacity to transport all the oil expected to flow from the region in the future. Nor would they have the capability to move it to the right markets. Other export pipelines must be built. At Unocal, we believe that the central factor in planning these pipelines should be the location of the future energy markets that are most likely to need these new supplies. Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union are all slow growth markets where demand will grow at only a half a percent to perhaps 1.2 percent per year during the period 1995 to 2010. Asia is a different story all together. It will have a rapidly increasing energy consumption need. Prior to the recent turbulence in the Asian Pacific economies, we at Unocal anticipated that this region's demand for oil would almost double by 2010. Although the short-term increase in demand will probably not meet these expectations, we stand behind our long-term estimates. I should note that it is in everyone's interest that there be adequate supplies for Asia's increasing energy requirements. If Asia's energy needs are not satisfied, they will simply put pressure on all world markets, driving prices upwards everywhere. The key question then is how the energy resources of Central Asia can be made available to nearby Asian markets. There are two possible solutions, with several variations. One option is to go east across China, but this would mean constructing a pipeline of more than 3,000 kilometers just to reach Central China. In addition, there would have to be a 2,000-kilometer connection to reach the main population centers along the coast. The question then is what will be the cost of transporting oil through this pipeline, and what would be the netback which the producers would receive. For those who are not familiar with the terminology, the netback is the price which the producer receives for his oil or gas at the well head after all the transportation costs have been deducted. So it's the price he receives for the oil he produces at the well head. The second option is to build a pipeline south from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. One obvious route south would cross Iran, but this is foreclosed for American companies because of U.S. sanctions legislation. The only other possible route is across Afghanistan, which has of course its own unique challenges. The country has been involved in bitter warfare for almost two decades, and is still divided by civil war. From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders, and our company. Mr. Chairman, as you know, we have worked very closely with the University of Nebraska at Omaha in developing a training program for Afghanistan which will be open to both men and women, and which will operate in both parts of the country, the north and south. Unocal foresees a pipeline which would become part of a regional system that will gather oil from existing pipeline infrastructure in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia. The 1,040-mile long oil pipeline would extend south through Afghanistan to an export terminal that would be constructed on the Pakistan coast. This 42-inch diameter pipeline will have a shipping capacity of one million barrels of oil per day. The estimated cost of the project, which is similar in scope to the trans-Alaska pipeline, is about $2.5 billion. Given the plentiful natural gas supplies of Central Asia, our aim is to link gas resources with the nearest viable markets. This is basic for the commercial viability of any gas project. But these projects also face geopolitical challenges. Unocal and the Turkish company Koc Holding are interested in bringing competitive gas supplies to Turkey. The proposed Eurasia natural gas pipeline would transport gas from Turkmenistan directly across the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkey. Of course the demarcation of the Caspian remains an issue. Last October, the Central Asia Gas Pipeline Consortium, called CentGas, in which Unocal holds an interest, was formed to develop a gas pipeline which will link Turkmenistan's vast Dauletabad gas field with markets in Pakistan and possibly India. The proposed 790-mile pipeline will open up new markets for this gas, traveling from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Multan in Pakistan. The proposed extension would move gas on to New Delhi, where it would connect with an existing pipeline. As with the proposed Central Asia oil pipeline, CentGas can not begin construction until an internationally recognized Afghanistan Government is in place. The Central Asia and Caspian region is blessed with abundant oil and gas that can enhance the lives of the region's residents, and provide energy for growth in both Europe and Asia. The impact of these resources on U.S. commercial interests and U.S. foreign policy is also significant. Without peaceful settlement of the conflicts in the region, cross-border oil and gas pipelines are not likely to be built. We urge the Administration and the Congress to give strong support to the U.N.-led peace process in Afghanistan. The U.S. Government should use its influence to help find solutions to all of the region's conflicts. U.S. assistance in developing these new economies will be crucial to business success. We thus also encourage strong technical assistance programs throughout the region. Specifically, we urge repeal or removal of section 907 of the Freedom Support Act. This section unfairly restricts U.S. Government assistance to the government of Azerbaijan and limits U.S. influence in the region. Developing cost-effective export routes for Central Asian resources is a formidable task, but not an impossible one. Unocal and other American companies like it are fully prepared to undertake the job and to make Central Asia once again into the crossroads it has been in the past. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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US Policy On Taliban Influenced By Oil Deal Negotiations The two claim that the US government's main objective in Afghanistan was to consolidate the position of the Taliban regime to obtain access to the oil and gas reserves in Central Asia. They affirm that until August [2001], the US government saw the Taliban regime "as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia" from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. Until now, says the book, "the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia have been controlled by Russia. The Bush government wanted to change all that." Click image for full size But, confronted with Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, "this rationale of energy security changed into a military one", the authors claim. "At one moment during the negotiations, the US representatives told the Taliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs,'" Brisard said in an interview in Paris.

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The US government informed other nations of it's plan to invade Afghanistan months before the 9/11 attacks 9 September 2001: Bush given Afghanistan invasion plan 7 October 2001: Bush announces opening of Afghanistan attacks 13 June 2002: Hamid Karzai Elected as New Afghan Leader (Former Unocal Consultant) 27 December 2002: Afghanistan Pipeline Deal signed An agreement has been signed in the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, paving the way for construction of a gas pipeline from the Central Asian republic through Afghanistan to Pakistan. The building of the trans-Afghanistan pipeline has been under discussion for some years but plans have been held up by Afghanistan's unstable political situation.

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