agreed... i used to live on STX and believe me, eliminating 66% of the population would be an improvement
Posted on 12/09/2010 4:26:59 AM PST by Ordinary_American
While Obama has been focusing his attention on the Republican hostage takers and bomb throwers the Iranian regime has been stockpiling Shahab 3 missiles in Venezuela that can reach the United States. Hudson New York reported, via Israel Matsav:
According to Die Welt, Venezuela has agreed to allow Iran to establish a military base manned by Iranian missile officers, soldiers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Venezuelan missile officers. In addition, Iran has given permission for the missiles to be used in case of an “emergency”. In return, the agreement states that Venezuela can use these facilities for “national needs” – radically increasing the threat to neighbors like Colombia. The German daily claims that according to the agreement, Iranian Shahab 3 (range 1300-1500 km), Scud-B (285-330 km) and Scud-C (300, 500 and 700 km) will be deployed in the proposed base. It says that Iran also pledged to help Venezuela in rocket technology expertise, including intensive training of officers
Venezuela has also become the country through which Iran intends to bypass UN sanctions. Following a new round of UN sanctions against the Islamic Republic, for example, Russia decided not to sell five battalions of S-300PMU-1 air defence systems to Iran. These weapons, along with a number of other weapons, were part of a deal, signed in 2007, worth $800 million. Now that these weapons cannot be delivered to Iran, Russia is looking for new customers; according to the Russian press agency Novosti[2], it found one: Venezuela.
Thank You for the compliment. I will be the first to tell you, I did not deserve the compliment. I do Thank You though. Tell me more in an email about you and yours. I am in prayer for you.
We were with you until you added the most unreasonable demand for the Coke!
CA....
Thank You. That is a headline I too could consider as ‘Good News’
Thanks himno hero.
From the beaches of Venezuela to the beaches of mainland Florida, the extreme minimum distance, it is 1700 kilometers. From Caracas to Miami it's 2000 km.
If it is, I’d advise against moving into Vault 112, unless you like being tortured =P
The Obama administration knew full well what was in those weekly jumbo jet cargo deliveries to Caracas, on Iran Air, originating from Teheran, with a stop in Damascus. They ferried WMD, missile parts for assembly and Iranian technicians along with Revolutionary Guards—directly threatening the security of the Western hemisphere, and contravening the Monroe Doctrine. And perhaps even North Korean technical personnel have been involved in these dealings. if so, This de-facto constitutes a clear and present danger to the United States and the Constitution. This necessarily calls for Incoming 2011 congressional International Relations Committee hearings, and possible referral to the new House Judiciary Committee for an article of impeachment...violation of Constitutional oath of office by the President.
agreed... i used to live on STX and believe me, eliminating 66% of the population would be an improvement
Sitting here trying to think of what the hell Venezuela has that anyone wants to 'take'.
The full article is well worth the read. You will see a glimpse of what happened in 2007...that set up the crisis of 2008 and the deadly lynch pin 0bama seems to be ignoring.
Never forget what Bush said, he destroyed capitalism...in order to save it. 0bama got elected and tossed the strategy out the window.
Iran and Venezuela didn’t have the “gold mine” exchange for nothing. Sometimes it is necessary to revisit old articles for recent historical perspectives.
http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/Dollar_oil_china_russia_iran_venezuela
Now let’s add Venezuela’s mercurial Hugo Chavez to the “Axis of Oil”. This makes matters much tougher for Washington.
Venezuela is the fourth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, accounting for more than 10% of American oil imports. It ships 1.3 million barrels of crude oil north every day. And Chavez has promised to cut off oil shipments to the US if Iran is attacked by the US military. He’s already reduced oil shipments to the US by 200,000 bpd from a year ago.
On July 30th 2006, on a two-day visit to Tehran, Chavez pledged that his country would “stay by Iran at any time and under any condition. We are with you and with Iran forever.
“As long as we remain united we will be able to defeat US imperialism, but if we are divided they will push us aside.”
Chavez then invited Iranian oil companies to invest in Venezuela. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, replied:
“I feel I have met a brother and trench mate after meeting Chavez. We do not have any limitation in cooperation. Iran and Venezuela are next to each other and supporters of each other. Chavez is a source of a progressive and revolutionary current in South America and his stance in restricting imperialism is tangible.”
To cap the group hug-in, Chavez noted that “Russia helped break a US-imposed blockade by agreeing to sell fighter planes and helicopters worth billions of Dollars to Venezuela.”
Venezuela seizing new assets
On May 1st, Chavez declared that Venezuela will strip the world’s biggest oil companies of operational control over the Orinoco Belt crude projects. These can convert about 600,000 barrels of heavy, tar-like crude into valuable synthetic oil every day.
Venezuela says there are around 235 billion barrels of crude reserves in the vast Orinoco Belt. If correct, that would give Chavez the planet’s largest oil supply. Venezuela currently has 80 billion barrels of proven reserves. Petroleos de Venezuela PDVSA is working with oil companies from China, India, Iran and Brazil to certify the Orinoco reserves, while Chavez seeks to reduce his reliance on the United States.
As regards the seizure, oil minister Rafael Ramirez has said that Venezuela will only consider agreements on the booked value of the projects rather than their much larger current net worth.
The implications are potentially stark for the United States, which imports 62% of its oil supply. Chavez says PDVSA is ready to become the sole energy supplier to Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Haiti, and would finance up to 50% of the total oil bill. Chavez is also giving away at least 100,000 bpd to Cuba, which the Castro brothers sell on the open market at their own profit, draining Venezuela’s finances further.
Chavez is also absorbing higher shipping costs to reach China, expanding oil exports to the Asian juggernaut by tenfold since 2004 to 160,000 bpd.
The Baltic Exchange’s Dry Freight Index – a composite of global seaborne trade routes for commodities – hit a record high on April 27th, driven by surging demand for raw materials to Asia. The cost index of merchant ships tripled to 6,230 points over the past 14 months, surpassing the all-time high of 6,208 in Dec 2004.
Venezuelan Finance Minister Nelson Merentes says Caracas used some Petro-Dollars to pay off $4.7 billion of foreign debt in 2006, lowering the national debt by 15% to $26.3 billion. Merentes aims for Venezuela’s debt to be lower than 25% of GDP by the end of 2008.
Revenue at PDVSA came to $101 billion in 2006, but the net profit was only $4.8 billion. Chavez spent an estimated $9 billion to keep gasoline prices under 20 cents a gallon, and spent billions more to cement political alliances with Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua.
Because of heavy spending on social programs – and also thanks to subsidizing oil sales to Central America – Venezuela’s currency reserves haven’t grown anywhere near as fast as Moscow’s hoard. S&P puts a “junk status” rating of BB- on Venezuela’s bonds; it has put Caracas on notice about a possible downgrade too, due to the ousting of Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhilips, Chevron Corp, Total, Statoil and British Petroleum from the Orinco Belt.
That might not scare Chavez however, who can rely on investment from Sinopec, Lukoil, and Petroleos de Brazil for development of the Orinco oil reserves. During the last several decades, control of global oil reserves has steadily passed from private companies to national oil companies like Rosneft and Petróleos de Venezuela. Roughly 77% of the world’s 1.15 trillion barrels of proven reserves now sits in the hands of national companies. Fourteen of the top-20 oil companies are state-controlled. Together, the “Axis of Oil” pumps one-fifth of global oil output.
Maintaining the US Dollar monopoly on the sale of oil is critical to the US government’s ability to print money without sending the greenback into a tailspin. However, if the “Axis of Oil” and/or the Chinese Dragon decide to shift more of their trade surpluses towards the Euro or gold, it could seriously undermine the US Dollar, increasing the cost of US imports and corralling the US economy into a “Stagflation” trap.
Such a scenario is more likely in the event of a US military strike on Iran. But the G7 group of seven leading central banks has worked together for a long time, dealing with many market crises – usually by coordinated inflation of their money supplies. That keeps their currencies in stable target zones.
A shift by the “Axis of Oil” – and especially China – away from the US Dollar could override the G-7’s manipulative antics. On May 1st, US Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke warned the US Congress against imposing tariffs on Chinese imports – just the kind of move that could spark Beijing’s flight from the Dollar.
“If trade both destroys and creates jobs, what is its overall effect on employment? The answer is, essentially, none,” Bernanke said in Butte, Montana.
The Fed’s ability to print unlimited amounts of US Dollars and inflate assets, might hang in the balance...
J.J. Green, wtop.com
WASHINGTON - Iran Air 744 is a bimonthly flight that originates in Tehran and flies directly to Caracas with periodic stops in Beirut and Damascus. The maiden flight was Feb. 2, 2007.
The mere existence of the flight was a significant concern for U.S. intelligence officials, but now a broader concern is who and what are aboard the flights.
“If you [a member of the public] tried to book yourself a seat on this flight and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a week before, a month before, six months before — you’ll never find a place to sit there,” says Offer Baruch, a former Israeli Shin Bet agent.
Baruch, now vice president of operations for International Shield, a security firm in Texas, says the plane is reserved for Iranian agents, including “Hezbollah, the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) and other intelligence personnel.”
Current and former U.S. intelligence official fear the flight is a shadowy way to move people and weapons to locations in Latin America that can be used as staging points for retaliatory attacks against the U.S. or its interests in the event Iranian nuclear sites are struck by U.S. or Israeli military forces.
“My understanding is that this flight not only goes from Caracas to Damascus to Tehran perhaps twice a month, but it also occasionally makes stops in Lebanon as well, and the passengers on that flight are not processed through normal Venezuelan immigrations or customs. They are processed separately when they come into the country,” says Peter Brookes, senior fellow for National Security Affairs at the Heritage Foundation.
The 16-hour flight typically leaves Tehran and stops at Damascus International Airport (DAM), which is Syria’s busiest. In 2009, almost 4.5 million passengers used the airport.
After a 90-minute layover, the flight continues the remaining 14 hours to Venezuela’s Caracas Maiquetía International Airport (CCS). Upon arrival, the plane is met by special Venezuelan forces and sequestered from other arrivals.
“It says that something secretive or clandestine is going on that they don’t want the international community to know about,” says Brookes, a former deputy assistant defense secretary for Asian and Pacific Affairs and CIA employee.
“The fact that there is a flight is of course of interest, but the fact that not anybody can gain access to this flight or buy a ticket for that flight is of particular curiosity and should be of concern to the United States.”
In addition to speculation about who is aboard, there are significant concerns that the Boeing 747SP airplane might be transporting uranium to Tehran on the return flight. The U.S. government has enacted strong sanctions against Iran because of its nuclear program and there are worries the flight might provide an opportunity to skirt the embargo against materials that might be used for the program.
“Clearly, Iran has been a sponsor of Hezbollah, and clearly Hezbollah profits from this relationship,” former CIA Director Michael J. Hayden says.
“It would be too much to say that Hezbollah is a puppet of the Iranian state, but one way of looking at this relationship is that the Iranian state might rely on Hezbollah as a strategic weapon — its weapon for global reach.”
Hayden, now a principle in the Chertoff Group, says the CIA has been aware of the activities for several years.
“Fundamentally, the thing that first and very solidly caught our attention at the Agency was the inauguration of direct air flight between the two capitals. Here was a conduit that people could travel from Iran into the Western Hemisphere, into Latin America in a way that would be very difficult for American intelligence services to detect and to understand.
“Right there at that very simple level, just the direct flight is something that we would be and should be concerned about.”
Brookes says the passengers “may not even need visas because they are special passengers. That obviously is of concern because there is no transparency about who the people are coming in and going out of the country. Of course there is concern that these folks may be Iranian special agents.”
Beyond concerns about Iranian intelligence flooding the west, Brookes and others worry that Iranian special advisers are schooling the Venezuelan military and may be involved in plans to move Iranian agents inside the U.S.
“It’s certainly a possibility. Would the agents that come into Venezuela be able to find their way to the United States? That’s certainly possible. You see the drug smugglers today using submersibles to move drugs to the U.S. and other parts of the Caribbean which is a real challenge. So why wouldn’t they be able to do the same with persons?”
A U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity says there are concerns about the relationships between Iran and Venezuela, but you have to keep it in perspective.
“The problems both countries face internally, and their own regional priorities closer to home, limit the amount of trouble they can cause together. But it’s something you have to watch, whether it’s the potential for government-to-government mischief or the possibility of something involving Iran’s friends like Hezbollah.
“You can ask what a self-proclaimed Bolivarian socialist has in common with a bunch of theocratic thugs in Iran. The answer is ‘not much,’ beyond a taste for repression and a shared desire to make life difficult for the United States and its allies.”
On Friday, the next flight is expected to take off. While U.S. intelligence may be able to track the flight, there appears to be little more they can legally do to determine what or who is on board.
“American intelligence services have a lot of things on their plate. The fact that I can tell you that we’re really interested in that direct flight tells you that it was on our scope — something that we are sensitive to,” Hayden says. “Are we doing enough about it? I would have to say ‘no,’ because it’s a very challenging menu that American intelligence has to deal with.”
In a statement, the State Department says, “Nations have the right to enter into cooperative relationships with other nations.”
Neither the Iranian nor the Venezuelan governments responded to request for reaction before this article was published.
You can follow WTOP’s J.J. Green on Twitter.
Brittany Zickfoose contributed to this report.
(Copyright 2010 by WTOP. All Rights Reserved.)
"D.C. NUKED! CONSTITUTION RESTORED"
Probably nothing quite THAT good though, huh?
[Now, don't everyone get me all wrong, here; I've been cleaning out the garage, and the closets, so I'm just kinda in that "out with it all" mode.]
Exactly what I was thinking!
I do not think they will be visiting you. I know you were joking to make me smile and laugh. It worked. Thank You!
“Just because she’s dumb doesn’t mean she’s not a True Believer.”
To a great extent, you are again correct. Perhaps I’m coming from the base idea of seeing anyone who falls for the leftist view of how society should be ...as basically lacking intelligence.
Of course, that is largely due to their minds being darkened by an illusion since they no longer follow the One who is the source of all Truth.
They could if launched from a oil tanker in international waters.
Think outta the box.
ping
The only part of the US they could hit would be Guantanamo Bay. :-)
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