Thursday, January 17, 2013
Algerian LNG Important to Europe
European energy experts are keeping a watchful eye on the unfolding crisis in Algeria, where a loss of LNG supplies could increase the Continent's reliance on Russian gas.
Algeria is the EU’s third most important gas supplier behind Russia and Norway.
The In Amenas facility in eastern Algeria that was taken over by Islamist terrorists is operated by the UK’s BP. It owns close to 50% of the plant with Norway’s Statoil and Algeria’s Sonatrach. The plant's output accounts for 12% of Algerian gas production and 18% of the country’s gas exports.
Israel Election Briefing
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Islamists Threaten Jordan
Why Mali Matters
Brazil Outpacing Mexico: World Bank
Brazil's growth will beat Mexico for the first time in three years. Domestic demand is key. Read more.
Japan Grounds all Boeing 787s
Dreamliner Becoming Nightmare
An emergency landing, and Japan acted … to save lives. Read more.
Is the Boeing 787 today's Constellation?
Is the Boeing 787 today's Constellation?
US Supplying Egypt With More F-16s, Tanks
Advanced American Arms for Islamist Regime
The Obama administration is going ahead with an ominous arms deal, ignoring bipartisan criticism. Read more.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Japan Abandons Austerity
Secret Cable Says Syria Used Chemical Weapon
Agent 15 Allegedly Dropped on Rebels in Homs
A powerful, Cold War-era hallucinogen allegedly used on Syrian rebels. Read more.
France Determined to Beat Al Qaeda in Mali
France is escalating its intervention in Mail against Al Qaeda, doing what needs to be done. Read more.
Mali Conflict Briefing
What you need to know about Mali….
National Journal staff reporter Matt Vasilogambros: "Northern Mali could become a failed state and a hotbed for militants, similar to what Afghanistan was when the Taliban took power during the 1990s."
Read more.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Switzerland Freezes $700 Million Mubarak Assets
Hundreds of millions of dollars in mainly ill-gotten gains frozen in neutral Switzerland. Should the money be released--to Egypt's clerical fascist regime? Read more.
The answer to the above question, of course, is: No! The betrayal and abandonment of the Mubarak regime, an American ally that preserved peace with Israel, will be remembered as one of the greatest foreign policy blunders, recalling the catastrophic Carter administration's craven treachery in Iran.
Iran Nearing Nuclear Bomb Building Capacity
Nazi-Like Regime Close to Point of No Return: Report
Monitoring and exposing Iran's atomic ayatollahs and foreign spies. Read more.
Israel Home to 3rd Largest Group of NYSE-Listed Companies
Jerusalem, Here I Am, I Love You: Alpha Blondy
Sunday, January 13, 2013
The Iranian Regime's American Hostage Habit
Levinson Kidnapping Latest in Long Line of Cases
By Clare M. Lopez
Startling photos of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared in March 2007 while on a trip to Iran's Kish Island in the Persian Gulf, are the latest evidence in a litany of American hostages, taken, held and sometimes murdered by the Iranian mullahs and their terror proxies over a period of more than three decades.
Broadcast on the Fox News Greta Van Susteren program on January 8, 2013, the two-year-old Levinson photos show a haggard man with wildly unkempt graying hair and beard in chains and wearing an orange jumpsuit.
His wife, Christine, who was Van Susteren's guest, described her conviction that her husband is still alive even though U.S. officials have said little publicly in the nearly six years since Levinson was kidnapped.
A 22-year FBI veteran, Levinson worked as a private investigator after his 1998 retirement from government service. Although in the region on an assignment for Global Witness, a London-based group that investigates corporate and government corruption, Levinson decided to fly to Kish Island after spending several days on assignment looking into a cigarette smuggling case in Dubai.
Fateful Meeting with a Fugitive American Assassin
On Kish Island, he reportedly was scheduled to meet with Dawud Salahuddin (born David Belfield), an African-American convert to Islam and wanted fugitive for the July 1980 contract murder of Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former press attaché at the Iranian Embassy in Washington, who became an outspoken critic of the Khomeini regime in the months following the overthrow of the Shah. [Editor's Note: In September 2007, Foreign Confidential reported on the Levinson-Belfield meeting. Click here to read the article.]
One day after meeting with Salahuddin, Levinson disappeared and, before these latest photos, had been seen only in a 2010 videotape and some earlier photographs that were made public in December 2011. In the tape, a gaunt Levinson asked for U.S. government help in meeting the (unspecified) demands of his captors, whose identity is not mentioned.
The FBI has offered a $1 million reward for information leading to Levinson's safe recovery and return and the Department of State also is involved in working with the Iranian government to secure his release. In a 2011 statement, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said American officials had received indications that Mr. Levinson "is being held somewhere in southwest Asia."
According to FOX News now, that statement was a red herring, improbably intended as a "goodwill gesture to Iran," by suggesting that Al-Qaeda or other terrorists were holding Levinson. In her January 8, 2013 interview with Van Susteren, Christine Levinson said she believes that her husband is being held in Iran.
Iranian Intelligence Ministry Main Suspect
U.S. officials, cited by FOX, judge that the Iranian intelligence service, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), likely is behind both Levinson's kidnapping and the email transmission of his photos and video to the family.
The FBI, which insists that Levinson was not working for the U.S. government at the time of his kidnapping, claims it does not know who is holding Levinson or what their demands might be. The Iranian regime, of course, denies knowing anything about Levinson.
The December 2006 seizure and imprisonment of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Middle East Program, demonstrated another variation on the Iranian regime's predilection for kidnapping American citizens. This time, it targeted an Iranian-American academic whose U.S. citizenship was no protection.
Imprisoned for 105 days after her passport was stolen in Tehran, Esfandiari had been a regular visitor to Iran, where her elderly mother lived. In her case, the regime seemed to want to register its pique at U.S. programs it viewed as supportive of regime change in Iran—although the Wilson Center would seem an odd target for such a charge. In any case, Esfandiari was released unharmed in August 2007 after her mother put up her Tehran apartment to pay the "bail" (ransom).
Hostages are Bargaining Chips
The Roxana Saberi case showed the Iranian regime continuing its pattern of seizing Americans and sometimes using them as bargaining chips to obtain the release of its own operatives being held in detention. Saberi is a U.S. citizen who was working as a journalist in Iran when she was arrested in January 2009. Although Saberi holds dual U.S.-Iranian citizenship, Iran refuses to recognize dual citizenship and insists on treating such individuals solely as Iranian subjects.
She initially was charged with working without press credentials but three months later, an Iranian judge brought far more serious charges of espionage on behalf of the U.S. against her. After a brief "trial," Saberi was sentenced to an eight-year prison term.
There was something that Iran badly wanted, though, and that was the release of five IRGC Qods Force commanders, who'd been caught coordinating terrorist attacks in Iraq that killed hundreds of Americans.
The so-called "Irbil Five" (detained by American forces in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil in 2007), were senior Qods Force commanders, acting on orders from the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They were responsible for providing Iranian-manufactured EFPs (Explosively Formed Projectiles) to terror militias in Iraq to maim and kill Americans.
Quds Force Commanders
Further, these five Qods Force commanders not only coordinated the supply of Iranian EFPs but also acted as terror liaison and military advisors to local Iraqi terrorists as well as Al-Qaeda units.
Roxana Saberi became the bargaining chip for the release of these terrorists. In May 2009, the Iranian press reported that Vali Nasr, a senior advisor of Iranian heritage in the Obama administration, was in Iran. Saberi's case was sent up on appeal to an Iranian appeals court, a hearing was held on May 10, 2009, and voila! – her charges were reduced to possession of classified information, and her sentence was reduced to two years, suspended.
Saberi was released the next day and flew home to the U.S. Two months later, in July 2009, President Obama freed the Irbil Five, swapping Iranian terror masters responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of American deaths and injuries, for one innocent American citizen hostage.
The quid pro quo for the 2012 release of Hizballah terror operative, Ali Musa Daqduq, is less clear. In 2007, Daqduq masterminded an ambush of U.S. troops in the southern Iraqi town of Karbala that resulted in the torture and execution of five Americans.
After being captured by U.S. forces, Daqduq confessed to his role in the attack and provided detailed testimony about Iranian and Hizballah support and training to Iraqi terror militias. With the Obama administration's decision to withdraw all American combat troops from Iraq in 2011, Daqduq had to be either transferred to Guantanamo Bay to face military justice or turned over to the Iraqis, who were expected to set him free.
Unwilling to send anyone to GITMO and perhaps fearful of the Iranian/Hizballah reaction if it did, the administration predictably chose the second option and, in November 2012, the Iraqis released Daqduq.
Behind-the-Scenese Arrangement?
It is difficult to know whether his release was part of another behind-the-scenes arrangement between the U.S. and the Iranian regime, but the question lingers because of prior exchanges like that of the "Irbil Five" for Roxana Saberi.
One possible connection that has never been fully explained is the case of the three young American hikers, who were snatched near the Iraqi border with Iran by Iranian border guards in July 2009. Shane M. Bauer, Joshua F. Fattal, and Sarah E. Shourd (who was Mr. Bauer's fiancé) were charged with espionage and imprisoned in Tehran's notorious Evin prison.
Like Saberi, they were put on trial, found guilty and sentenced to eight-year prison terms. Shourd was released first, in September 2010, on $500,000 bail, and Bauer and Fattal were finally released a year later, in September 2011, likewise on $500,000 bail each.
Although Iranian regime comments, echoed by members of what the Iranian media call their "Iran Lobby in America," attempted to portray the entire incident as part of an internal Iranian power struggle between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Khomenei, the hikers' protracted detention and the ultimate payment of ransom money by the U.S. conforms rather to classic Islamic doctrine regarding captured infidels. And although it is impossible to know for sure, the timing of the Daqduq release certainly puts it in the suspect category as a possible prisoner exchange.
The litany of Iranian-instigated hostage crises involving Americans continues. Tehran engages in such behavior for a number of reasons: To use such prisoners as bargaining chips in future prisoner swaps, to demonstrate its implacable hostility and ability to publicly extract concessions from the U.S, and to keep Iranian dissidents, exiles, and those holding dual citizenship on notice that they cannot be safe from the mullahs' reach anywhere in the world. The behavior is not likely to stop until it is made clear to Tehran that it no longer will be tolerated.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Nigerian Criminals Expanding and Diversifying
Fraudsters Go Overseas to 'Chop Your Dollars'
Nigerian fraudsters, swindlers and confidence tricksters are expanding and diversifying, spreading out from their African haven--where they have collaborated successfully for decades with corrupt government officials and bankers.
The Nigerian criminals are developing new twists on the multibillion-dollar 419 scam; and they are operating from Europe and Asia, including Japan, where the National Police Agency's Security Bureau is reviewing the files of a number of suspicious foreign nationals.
Fraudulent commodities and currency trading schemes are among the new Nigerian specialties. Some victims are individuals who believe they are investing to share in a supposedly specially licensed broker's staggering commission payments; in actuality, the contracts and related documents shown to the sucker are bogus.
When cornered or confronted , many Nigerian crooks become aggressive, threatening their victims or accusers with "untimely death," demanding money.
Over the years, a number of 419 victims have been lured to Nigeria and other African countries, only to be kidnapped and held for ransom and, in some cases, killed.
The dirty secret of all this is that Nigerian scammers are praised at home. A 419-celebrating music video by one scammer--he was arrested in Amsterdam in connection with a phony lottery--was a big hit in Lagos. The song lyrics were racist to boot, bragging about "chopping dollars" from despised white people. For many poor, angry, young Nigerians, international fraud is an attractive career option.
Posts
