Posted on 08/07/2006 3:43:15 PM PDT by DAVEY CROCKETT
Thank you will bookmark the links and check them.
Please, post what is important........LOL I am already behind.
I read this on another site and it's very thought provoking. You may want to pass it on as well:
Do you marvel at the blind eye turned to evil by many “intellectuals” today? Does the creeping anti-Semitism that condemns Israel for defending itself against Hezbollah rocket attacks stun you? Are you baffled by the moral equivalency given to Israel and the blatant terrorist fanatics of Hezbollah?
Recently, I suggested in conversation that the world is recreating the precarious conditions of the 1930’s that led to the deaths of millions in the Second World War. Victor Davis Hanson, in National Review Online, has explored that very premise in a lengthy and illuminating article.
Some excerpts:
When I used to read about the 1930s — the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, the appeasement in France and Britain, the murderous duplicity of the Soviet Union, and the racist Japanese murdering in China — I never could quite figure out why, during those bleak years, Western Europeans and those in the United States did not speak out and condemn the growing madness, if only to defend the millennia-long promise of Western liberalism.
Our present generation, too, is on the brink of moral insanity. That has never been more evident than in the last four weeks, as the West has proven utterly unable to distinguish between an attacked democracy that seeks to strike back at terrorist combatants, and terrorist aggressors who seek to kill civilians.
These past few days, the inability of millions of Westerners here and in Europe, to condemn fascist terrorists who start wars, spread racial hatred, and despise Western democracies is the real story, not the “quarter-ton” Israeli bombs that inadvertently hit civilians in Lebanon who live among rocket launchers that send missiles into Israeli cities and suburbs.
The growing turbulence of the 1930’s went largely unchallenged by those in power in Europe who instead sought to appease, smooth over, and get along with evil instead of condemning or combating it. As a result, roughly fifty million people died in the vast war that followed, and millions more would suffer for decades under the scourge of Communism that rose from the destruction.
The evil history of man is poised to repeat itself. Who will stand to prevent it?
LOL............
Your imbedded links, will stay hidden for a long time, if you wait for me to teach you, LOL, I always pray they will come thru, and one out of a 100 will.
I have been known to get the links and put them at the end of the article.
Thank you for this, the young man, is a brainwashed child.
Reads as tho he has verified many things that we knew.
In the digging in the old OBL posts last night, I saw a headline that reminded me that the Gov was all upset about getting and taking the radiation pills, in case of a nuclear attack.
Since then, I find all kinds of proof that the al-qaeda have or planned to have nuclear and bioweapons.
Bekka Valley, is where all of Saddam's WMD was to have gone and here is proof that the worst of the terrorists have control of it. (your article confirms what is in the valley)
Mike Savage had an interesting opinion, he said, that the Jewish Center in Seattle has been covered up, as if the Gov and the news sites admitted that terror had happened in Seattle and in other states, then they would have to admit that there was a threat of a dirty bomb or larger.
Thanks, Davey!
Getting back to you from the last thread
It works for me to copy and paste, LOL...probably since I don't know any better)
Bin Laden's man " Mohamed the American" in Silicon Valley
Bin Laden's man in Silicon Valley
"Mohamed the American' orchestrated terrorist acts while living a quiet suburban
life in Santa Clara
Lance Williams, Erin McCormick, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writers
Friday, September 21, 2001
He was the California connection to Osama bin Laden's fearsome terrorist
organization -- an architect of horrific acts of violence against his adopted
country, even as he lived a quiet suburban lifestyle in Silicon Valley.
For much of a decade he commuted from the West Coast to the terrorist camps of
Afghanistan and Sudan, where he trained bin Laden's men in guerrilla military
tactics, surveillance and explosives.
The unsuspecting Americans who met him in his duplex in Santa Clara knew him as
Ali A. Mohamed, a cordial, under-employed Egyptian immigrant with an Army
background, a U.S.-born wife and frequent business abroad.
But to his fellow terrorists, he was Abu Mohamed ali Amriki -- "Mohamed the
American" -- a hard-driving military taskmaster who trained bin Laden's own
personal security cadre and was a top aide and confidant of the shadowy
terrorist kingpin himself.
Until his 1998 arrest for plotting the terror bombing of two U.S. embassies in
East Africa, Mohamed "was the California connection, period," for bin Laden,
said lawyer Sam A. Schmidt, who defended another accused terrorist in the
embassy bombing trial this year.
Now in prison and presumed to be a government informant, Mohamed could be a key
connection for U.S. investigators probing bin Laden's links to the suicide
hijackers who flew jetliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon last week,
some experts say.
In remarks to a judge last year when he pleaded guilty to terrorism charges,
Mohamed admitted a long list of such crimes: training guerrillas who attacked
U.S. soldiers in Somalia in 1993; arranging a summit conference of anti-U.S.
terrorist organizations in Sudan in 1994; plotting the suicide bombings of
American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 200 people and
injured thousands.
Other suspected activities during his California days include raising money for
the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, implicated in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat, and smuggling sleeper agents for bin Laden into the
United States from Canada.
For the U.S. government, Mohamed is important today because he has extraordinary
insights into the inner workings of bin Laden's al Qaeda organization, says
Yonah Alexander, director of the Potomac Institute's Center for Terrorism
Studies in Washington, D.C., who has researched Mohamed's life. He may even have
had personal contacts with some of the hijackers responsible for last week's
attacks.
"In his previous life, perhaps he trained some of these people," Alexander said.
"Clearly (the government) has interrogated him, and we assume they are doing it
now, because he is a very important source."
Mohamed's story also is important because it shows how easily even a top- level
terrorist can operate unmolested and undetected from the very heart of the
United States.
Terrorist groups have "woven themselves into the fabric of America," said Harvey
Kushner, an international security expert and professor at Long Island
University. "That is why this is going to be a long, protracted war (against
terrorism). The enemy is not outside, it's within us."
TRIAL RECORDS REVEAL
MOHAMED'S SECRET LIFE
The details of Mohamed's two lives were obtained from court records generated
during two major terrorism trials, from defense lawyers and security experts who
have investigated his background and from people who knew him in California.
By these accounts, Mohamed, 49, is a well-educated Egyptian national, fluent in
English, who graduated from both the University of Alexandria and a Cairo
military academy. In about 1971, he joined the Egyptian army, rising to the rank
of major.
As he told a federal judge in New York last year, his links to Middle Eastern
terrorist groups go back 20 years: In 1981, he joined the Egyptian Islamic
Jihad, a group of radical Muslim fundamentalists opposed to the Egyptian
government's ties to the United States and Israel that included members of the
Egyptian military.
That same year Mohamed first visited the United States, graduating from a
special program for foreign officers at the U.S. Army Special Forces school at
Fort Bragg, N.C., according to a report by Steven Emerson, an author and
terrorism expert.
Mohamed left the Egyptian army about three years after Sadat's death, then
worked for a time as security adviser for EgyptAir, the national airline, said
attorney David Ruhnke, who researched Mohamed's history for the embassy bombing
trial.
Shortly after that, the terrorist operative returned to the United States and
established himself in the Bay Area after romancing an American divorcee whom he
met on a transatlantic flight in 1985.
Mohamed was traveling from Egypt to New York, he said, while the divorcee, a
medical technician from Santa Clara, was returning to the West Coast after a
vacation in Greece, according to two longtime acquaintances who asked not to be
named because of safety concerns.
Within a few days of arriving in the United States, Mohamed phoned the divorcee
and then turned up in the Bay Area, according to the acquaintances. After a
six-week courtship, they were married in Reno.
Mohamed's wife seemed genuinely devoted to her husband, but the acquaintances
suspected that, for him, it may have been "a marriage of convenience," as one
put it -- a way to obtain a "green card" and an American home.
Mohammed moved into his new wife's Santa Clara duplex. People who met him there
said he was cordial, well-spoken and physically fit; he described himself as a
former Egyptian army officer who hoped to do intelligence work for the United
States.
But that didn't pan out, and after a year of unemployment, he enlisted in the
U.S. Army.
While his wife remained in California, Mohamed became a sergeant and was again
stationed at Fort Bragg's Special Warfare Center, where he trained officers in
Middle Eastern culture and geography. He also became a U.S. citizen, his
associates said.
But even while an American soldier, court records show, Mohamed worked on behalf
of militant Islamic groups.
In the late 1980s, he turned up in a Brooklyn, N.Y., refugee center for people
displaced by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, according to evidence in the
1995 trial of El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian terrorist convicted of plotting to
bomb the U.N. headquarters in New York.
In Brooklyn, Mohamed gave combat training to Muslim recruits bound for
Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invasion, said defense lawyer Roger Stavis.
Nosair was among the guerrilla fighters Mohamed trained, he said.
Although the United States was then providing training and money to the
anti-Soviet rebels, the government said Mohamed's activities were unauthorized.
SPENDING MORE TIME
AWAY FROM HOME
Mohamed was discharged from the army in 1989. He returned to Santa Clara, where
he served for a time in the Army Reserve and tried but failed to get a job as an
FBI interpreter, according to lawyers familiar with his background.
He worked as a security guard at the old Sylvania plant in Mountain View,
acquaintances said, and ran a computer consulting firm out of his home.
Mohamed often complained that he couldn't find a good job and, after a time,
according to his acquaintances, he began spending months abroad, saying he had
found work in Egypt. For long periods he was out of touch.
His wife "would say he's in the desert, and he can't call me," one acquaintance
recalled.
For some of his overseas jobs, Mohamed seemed not to be paid in money. Instead,
"he'd bring back 24-karat gold bracelets," the acquaintance recalled.
And at one point in the early 1990s, Mohamed's wife told one of the
acquaintances that her husband was in Afghanistan, training people for a man
named bin Laden. At the time the name was virtually unknown in this country, and
it seemed to mean nothing to the wife.
"Maybe I am dumb, but I did not know who this guy was, bin Laden," this person
said. "I just didn't know."
GETTING TOGETHER
WITH BIN LADEN
Mohamed's 1980s work with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad eventually drew him to bid
Laden, the multimillionaire son of a Saudi construction magnate.
Bin Laden, who had helped finance and train the Islamic guerrillas who finally
expelled the Soviet invaders from Afghanistan in 1989, became increasingly
anti-American after the United States defeated Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf
War, and he began advocating a holy war to drive America from the Middle East.
He founded al Qaeda ("the base"), the terrorist organization implicated in a
long list of deadly anti-American attacks.
"I was involved in the Islamic Jihad organization, and the Islamic Jihad
organization had a very close link to al Qaeda, the organization for bin Laden,
" Mohamed told the New York judge. "And the objective of all this, just to
attack any Western target in the Middle East, to force the government of the
Western countries just to pull out from the Middle East."
L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a onetime bin Laden guerrilla who turned U.S. government
witness in the embassy bombing trial, said he had met Mohamed -- he called him
"Amriki" -- in 1991 at a camp near Peshawar, Pakistan.
Mohamed, he said, was a high-ranking member of al Qaeda, a "very, very strict
and not gentle" taskmaster who trained cadre members in how to reconnoiter
targets for terror bombings.
Mohamed told the judge that in 1992 he had been in Afghanistan, providing
"military and basic explosives training" to bin Laden's terrorists. The
curriculum also included intelligence trade craft: "I taught my trainees how to
create cell structures that could be used for operations," he said.
There were other tasks as well. In 1991, Mohamed said, he helped relocate bin
Laden from Afghanistan to the African nation of Sudan, where the
multimillionaire set up another network of paramilitary camps.
In about 1992, Mohamed said, he helped set up an al Qaeda cell in Nairobi,
Kenya, along with a car business to earn money and a refugee-assistance charity
that provided fake IDs for the terrorist gang.
In 1993, Mohamed said, bin Laden told him to scout prospective bombing targets
in Nairobi, as bin Laden wanted a strike to retaliate for that year's U.S.
intervention in Somalia.
Mohamed said he had scouted the French Embassy, the U.S. AID office and the U.S.
Embassy. He took photos and maps to Khartoum for a meeting with the terrorist
boss.
"Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a
truck could go as a suicide bomber," Mohamed told the court.
The Santa Clara resident also said he had arranged security for a conference in
which bin Laden's al Qaeda met with Imad Mughniyeh, security chief for
Hezbollah, the Iran-sponsored organization reputedly responsible for attacks
that included the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon that killed
241.
"Hezbollah provided explosives training for al Qaeda and (Egyptian Islamic)
Jihad," he said. "Iran supplied Egyptian Jihad with weapons."
In 1994, while he was at the al Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Mohamed came under FBI
suspicion in connection with a probe of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, a blind
Islamic cleric arrested and ultimately convicted for masterminding the 1993
bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six and injured 1,000.
At the FBI's request, Mohamed said, he flew to the United States to be
interrogated. Mohamed lied to the FBI, claiming no links to terror, admitting
only that he had trained Islamic guerrillas to fight the Russians in
Afghanistan.
After that, Mohamed said, al Qaeda told him not to return to Nairobi. From his
home in Santa Clara, he began tracking the Rahman case for bin Laden, relaying
what he could learn about the progress of the FBI probe. He also made telephone
calls from his home in California to bin Laden associates in Nairobi,
according to court testimony.
While back in California, Mohamed said, he did other tasks for bin Laden. Twice,
he said, he aided the terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a co-founder of the Egyptian
Islamic Jihad, by then an aide to bin Laden and later a suspect in the embassy
bombings, when he visited America to raise money.
Alexander, the Potomac Institute's terrorism expert, said intelligence sources
believed Mohamed also had helped smuggle bin Laden agents into the United States
via Canada.
Around 1997, Mohamed's acquaintances said, he and his wife moved to Sacramento,
where he worked for a video distribution company.
On Aug. 7, 1998, terrorist bombs exploded at U.S. embassies in Nairobi and in
Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania. Mohamed was again an FBI suspect. Court records show
that 10 agents searched his Sacramento apartment, downloading the entire
contents of Mohamed's two computers and photographing documents in English and
Arabic found inside.
Among the documents were terrorist training manuals, describing surveillance and
assassination techniques, and instructions on how to plant explosives to blow up
buildings.
When he pleaded guilty, Mohamed said that after the embassy bombings, he had
planned to leave the United States and return to Afghanistan to meet with bin
Laden. Before he could get away, he was subpoenaed to testify before a U.S.
grand jury in New York.
"I testified, told some lies and was arrested," he said.
ADMITS PLAN TO KILL
SOLDIERS, DIPLOMATS
Mohamed was indicted along with bin Laden and 22 other alleged terrorists. Only
six were brought to trial. In October 2000, Mohamed, who was facing the death
penalty if convicted, pleaded guilty to five conspiracy charges, including
plotting to kill U.S. soldiers in Somalia and Saudi Arabia, plotting to murder
U.S. ambassadors and other embassy officials and plotting to kill "United States
civilians anywhere in the world," as another prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald,
summarized the charges.
But he has never been sentenced, and defense lawyers and security experts
believe he had begun giving evidence about bin Laden to the government in hopes
of winning his release from prison.
Acquaintances said Mohamed's wife, who declined to talk to The Chronicle, had
expressed surprise after his arrest, but she remained loyal, corresponding with
him and visiting him in prison.
The acquaintances said they were shocked and troubled at how easily the
terrorist they knew as Ali Mohamed had duped them.
"It boggles the mind that anyone who lived this close here could possibly have
anything to do with something this horrible," said one. "It makes you wonder
about anyone else we were so taken in by."
Said the other: "I wonder sometimes, when he saw how we lived, if he wasn't
sorry. Or can they just live two lives?"
If one listens to talk radio in the west, you will hear pure hate of America and all jews.
Even on the best of the conserative shows, the hate caller will get on the air and spew the hate.
At my age, WW2 is still clearly a part of my memory and as I see what is happening today, there is little difference.
If you can listen to radio on the computer or live in the west, you will hear it pure and uncut for hours, from 1 am, at:
kgo.com
It is 810 on the AM dial, the Ray Talifero program, you could still get last nights program, until he comes on again.
No, my nerves do not want me listening to it, but i have in the past.
I do listen to Dr. Bill Wattenberg and John Rothman from that station, Dr. Bill calls it like he sees it. John is a democrat, but does have a good grasp on history and knows Israel.
I do hope you will continue to read this thread, and continue posting.
Thanks for posting it, a lot of the info, was new to me, or I had forgotten it.
It does show how much was going on before 9-11.
I never know when my copy and paste, will go to a blob, that is why I cannot post the Promed emails, unless I use the <P.
I ran bin Ladin in that google group, there are about 800 posts, and I gave out before I checked them.
My googles are finding far more than I can post........LOL, but like Donna's Pink Bunny, I keep trying.
Commies under the bed ping...
Granny, thanks for the ping! This thread format is so nice. I was on a ping list (WOT) but there were just way too many pings, so I had to to get out of it. Combining them all into one thread like this is so much nicer. Thanks Davey Crockett!
Media bias----no, no, no. Who would ever believe that.
Yes, history does repeat itself.
I have read that there were protests in New York City, that the protestors were in nazi uniforms, this was 10,000 anti war people, about 1938 to 1940 era.
One of these days I will have to google it.
The left actually thinks that the jihad side of this war is in the right and we are in the wrong.
If you are so inclined, listen to the last John Rothman show, Friday was very good, I did not stick with him for all of Saturday night. (at kgo.com)
I will be posting incidents that are possible terror acts, as I can and did you read the Spanish fires above, it reads about like the California fires that burned about 3 years ago.
Many of the California fires were set, I followed the Calif. Hiway Patrol site, as they chased a white van, with 2 men, who stopped every 3 or 4 miles at an overpass and set another fire.
Nuclear, yes, it is in the future.
We care too much and they care not at all for the women and children who will be damaged by it, after all it is the holy jihad.
Thank you for your kind words, do join in as you can.
There is so much going on, that I can promise you, there will always be something new to read.
Our present generation, too, is on the brink of moral insanity
Allways (smiles)
They will lie and lie some more.
The news reporters are looking bad, now that the false photos at Reuters has been exposed.
I always think of the Free Republic threads at the start of the Iraq war.
I was reading one night, and a half dozen Freepers were monitoring the different TV news and all posting the news as it happened. { I do not have a TV}.
One Freeper, asked if that was a missile launcher, getting ready to fire at the American tanks?
Before they could decide, what new weapon they were seeing in the hotel, firing at our troops, it was shot out of service.
It turned out to be a reporter, who was filming the attack on the Americans, fool was standing between the terrorists who were firing, the weapon was his camera lens......and he died.
But what we heard was:
"The Americans killed an American reporter, by firing into the hotel"..
Freepers are good at painting good word pictures and I sometimes forget that I was not watching it, as I read that thread.
I am still surprised, to hear a reporter interviewed and have the interview sound like he is repeating the 1963 communist manifesto, as his opinion.
Interesting post that you found, thanks.
[Appears the Zawahiri message was correct, in his call for the Egypt group to join in the jehad...granny]
Feds Hunt For 11 Egyptians Missing In U.S.
Links for articles below, from here:
http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news/?fr=yalerts-keyword&c=&p=%22Iran%22&ei=utf-8
Monday, August 7, 2006 6:32 PM PDT
Jail for man who tried to export sensors to Iran
Reuters via Yahoo! News Mon, 07 Aug 2006 2:41 PM PDT
An American-Iranian man was sentenced to a year in prison on Monday for trying to export sensors to Iran that are normally used to detect liquid or gas pressure but could also be used to detonate explosives.
Hizbollah fighter tells Israel he trained in Iran
Reuters via Yahoo! News Mon, 07 Aug 2006 11:35 AM PDT
A Hizbollah fighter captured by Israel has told interrogators he received training in Iran and arrived there on a flight from Syria, a tape of the interrogation released by the Israeli army showed on Monday.
Bush raps Syria, Iran
AFP via Yahoo! News Mon, 07 Aug 2006 10:19 AM PDT
US President George W. Bush accused Syria and Iran of fomenting "chaos" in the Middle East, and said both knew exactly what they must do to escape US diplomatic crosshairs.
Iran says US or Israeli attack will face "raging sea"
Reuters via Yahoo! News Mon, 07 Aug 2006 8:06 AM PDT
Any U.S. or Israeli attack against Iran will be returned by a force 100 times stronger, the head of the Revolutionary Guards said on Monday, as pressure mounts on Tehran's atomic work and its support for Hizbollah.
Syria and Iran must rein in Hizbollah: Bush
Reuters via Yahoo! News Mon, 07 Aug 2006 7:34 AM PDT
President George W. Bush on Monday blamed Hizbollah for provoking the crisis in Lebanon and called on Syria and Iran to rein in the organization.
Iran still plans reply to atomic incentives deal
Reuters via Yahoo! News Mon, 07 Aug 2006 4:52 AM PDT
Iran still plans to reply by August 22 to a big power offer of incentives to stop making nuclear fuel, an official said on Monday, but more senior politicians have already rejected the terms of the package.
Iran Says It Will Ignore U.N. Deadline on Uranium Program
New York Times Sun, 06 Aug 2006 10:47 PM PDT
The country’s chief national security official maintained that Iran would not halt enrichment as a precondition to negotiations.
SoCal man sentenced for attempting to ship sensors to Iran
Los Angeles Daily News Mon, 07 Aug 2006 5:51 PM PDT
LOS ANGELES - A computer technician was sentenced Monday to a year in prison for trying to ship to Iran more than 100 pressure sensors that could be used as components in explosive devices.
AFGHANISTAN, IRAN AND TAJIKISTAN PROBE CLOSER ECONOMIC TIES
EurasiaNet.org Mon, 07 Aug 2006 1:22 PM PDT
Iran is attempting to cultivate closer ties with Afghanistan and Tajikistan as part of a diplomatic effort to alleviate international pressure over Tehran’s nuclear program.
Iran insists it will not freeze nuclear work by Hiedeh Farmani Tehran, Aug 6, 2006
Space War Mon, 07 Aug 2006 6:53 AM PDT
Iran insisted Sunday it will not freeze uranium enrichment, in defiance of a UN resolution and warned it could even expand its nuclear programme which the West fears is a cover for efforts to build the bomb.
See more news stories that match my keyword
Oil Mafia and Passdaran’s Billion-Dollar Contracts/Hamid Ahadi
7/3/2006 roozonline.com
Hamid Ahadi
03 Jul 2006
Following the signing of an agreement for $7 billion between Iran’s Oil Ministry and the Khatam al-Anbiya Reconstruction Organization belonging to the elite Passdaran Revolutionary Guards Corps, informed sources have expressed their concerns that the events that had in the past followed the Passdaran’s intrusion into business activities at the expense of murders, imprisonment of investors, suspension of investments, and the flee of managers would be repeated again, and there would be no body to contain the destructive consequences of the trend.
The disclosure of the events that led to this large contract, and the purchase of shares of the Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran’s largest private oil companies with controversial management, were the reasons for the negative publicity of Iran’s hardline media against the company and the hostility of the Passdaran to the management of this oil enterprise. Fars news agency, which is under the influence of Iran’s hardliners, quoted ‘an informed source’ and revealed that the value of Oriental Oil Kish was about $90 million, and that ‘talks for a final price were underway.”
Oil Kish was created about four years ago through a number of private investors and the express permission from senior officials of the Islamic regime. The mission of the company was to develop oil and gas resources over fields that Iran shares with some of its regional neighbors. Soon, the company won on-shore and off-shore contracts for its mission. This included Paydar fields shared with Iraq, Foroozan offshore fields shared with Saudi Arabia, and Salman and Hengam fields shared with Qatar. But perhaps the biggest victory for the company came when it acquired permission to work with the American giant Halliburton.
Even at that time some had informed the company that they would not be able to cooperate with it without the participation of individuals connected to the military. Oil Kish rejected those warnings. And that is when the ‘revelations’ about the company began to appear in the pro-government media such as Keyhan newspaper and Baztab news website which has strong links to the economic branches of the Passdaran. The first attacks were for the cooperation that the company was pursuing with Halliburton, which forced Oil Kish to cancel. But the pressures continued leading to the arrest of Sirus Nassseri, the vice-chairman of the Board of Directors of the oil company, who was also a member of Iran’s negotiating team with the international community over the nuclear issue. This forced the company to suspend its activities altogether.
At the same time, Oil Kish began to have a formidable rival every time it bid for a contract from no other than Passdaran Corps’ Khatam al-Anbiya Reconstruction Organization. But the Khatam company mostly lost the competition due its lack of expertise.
When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president last year and announced his policy of fighting the oil mafia, the ground-work for arresting the mangers of Oil Kish gained momentum. In one of their first acts, supporters of president Ahmadinejad tried to install a Passdaran commander as the minister of oil, which was rejected by the Majlis (Iran’s Parliament). Vaziri Hannaneh, the then minister of oil displayed his decision not to participate in the fake scandals under the name of ‘oil mafia’ and thus did not remove the valuable managers and personnel of the oil industry. This is when the battle went underwater, but continued even more fiercely, but eventually reached a compromise.
Apparently, with that agreement, the managers of Oriental Oil Kish company, including Nasseri, were acquitted while the Passdaran Revolutionary Guards Corps were the given the oil contracts, while it would purchase all the shares of Oriental, including its contracts. This happened last week when Rahim Safavi, the supreme commander of the Passdaran signed the multi billion dollar contract with Khatam al-Anbiya.
It is reported that Passdaran’s commercial organization which is now the largest business and economic trust in the country, especially in the oil sector, had as its goal to achieve this status even from the days of the presidency of Mohammad Khatami in the late 90s. In those days, however, few thought it would succeed in its goal. But as events have turned out, the recent $7 billion contract was signed without the normal bidding process and outside any controls.
A veteran oil industry specialist said of the recent contract that Khatam al-Anbiya is not going to implement anything and only acts as a primarily contractor who will subcontract the actual work to others, mostly foreign experts, thus reaping large profits as a middle-man. What is worrisome, he said is that this new arrangement may again produce the same kind of criminal activities that took place when the military institution got involved in business deals in the past.
This is why two Majlis deputies have already asked cabinet ministers to appear before the legislature and respond to the questions about contracting the oil deal to the Passdaran and what is the role of the private sector in the arrangement.
http://www.cyrusnews.com/news/en/?mi=3&ni=449
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