Iran seizes British Navy Personnel in Iraqi Waters

Do you have one solitary, single particle of evidence that the invasion of Iraq, or our present occupation, is motivated by a desire for oil?

Brandon9000 wrote:

Do you have one solitary, single particle of evidence that the invasion of Iraq, or our present occupation, is motivated by a desire for oil?

yes. And you too can see the light if you open your eyes.

Thursday, 17 March 2005, 15:41 GMT


Secret US plans for Iraq's oil


By Greg Palast
Reporting for Newsnight


The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed.

Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.

In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists".

You know we are addicted to oil and its running out

At last you understand

Well dont sit around, do what has to be done to secure whats remaining

Its vital sir

Iran has released a third letter purportedly written by Faye Turney in which she says she has been "sacrificed due to the intervening policies of the Bush and Blair governments."

The third Faye Turney letter (full text)

ok I'm not playing games Brandy

fact is America imports nearly 60% of its oil
fact is the easy oil is nearly gone
fact is by 2035 America will import 85-90% of its daily oil
fact is demand from China and India rises while supply peaks and declines
fact is America is hooked on oil
fact is most of the remaining oil will come from 1 Saudi Arabia 2 Iran 3 Iraq 4 Kuwait 5 UAE. The rest of the world has already peaked

are you telling me you invaded (with british support) to liberate the Iraqi people? Dont make me laugh

and Afghanistan? To enable women to wear short skirts? they thought there was plentiful good quality oil around the littoral states of the caspian.

Fact

George W Bush wrote:

You know we are addicted to oil and its running out

Dick Cheney wrote:

At last you understand

George W Bush wrote:

Well dont sit around, do what has to be done to secure whats remaining

Dick Cheney wrote:

Its vital sir

from Oval office transcript exclusively leaked to me

Ya Brandon, guess we had better start dropping nukes on Iran. After all those people are crazy and they may start dropping nukes on NYC and Israel.

Now, both the UK as well as Iran favour diplomacy ...

The botched US raid that led to the hostage crisis

Exclusive Report: How a bid to kidnap Iranian security officials sparked a diplomatic crisis

By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 03 April 2007
A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

Better understanding of the seriousness of the US action in Arbil - and the angry Iranian response to it - should have led Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence to realise that Iran was likely to retaliate against American or British forces such as highly vulnerable Navy search parties in the Gulf. The two senior Iranian officers the US sought to capture were Mohammed Jafari, the powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, according to Kurdish officials.

The two men were in Kurdistan on an official visit during which they met the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, and later saw Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), at his mountain headquarters overlooking Arbil.

"They were after Jafari," Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Massoud Barzani, told The Independent. He confirmed that the Iranian office had been established in Arbil for a long time and was often visited by Kurds obtaining documents to visit Iran. "The Americans thought he [Jafari] was there," said Mr Hussein.

Mr Jafari was accompanied by a second, high-ranking Iranian official. "His name was General Minojahar Frouzanda, the head of intelligence of the Pasdaran [Iranian Revolutionary Guard]," said Sadi Ahmed Pire, now head of the Diwan (office) of President Talabani in Baghdad. Mr Pire previously lived in Arbil, where he headed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Mr Talabani's political party.

The attempt by the US to seize the two high-ranking Iranian security officers openly meeting with Iraqi leaders is somewhat as if Iran had tried to kidnap the heads of the CIA and MI6 while they were on an official visit to a country neighbouring Iran, such as Pakistan or Afghanistan. There is no doubt that Iran believes that Mr Jafari and Mr Frouzanda were targeted by the Americans. Mr Jafari confirmed to the official Iranian news agency, IRNA, that he was in Arbil at the time of the raid.

In a little-noticed remark, Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian Foreign Minister, told IRNA: "The objective of the Americans was to arrest Iranian security officials who had gone to Iraq to develop co-operation in the area of bilateral security."

US officials in Washington subsequently claimed that the five Iranian officials they did seize, who have not been seen since, were "suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraq and coalition forces". This explanation never made much sense. No member of the US-led coalition has been killed in Arbil and there were no Sunni-Arab insurgents or Shia militiamen there.

The raid on Arbil took place within hours of President George Bush making an address to the nation on 10 January in which he claimed: "Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops." He identified Iran and Syria as America's main enemies in Iraq though the four-year-old guerrilla war against US-led forces is being conducted by the strongly anti-Iranian Sunni-Arab community. Mr Jafari himself later complained about US allegations. "So far has there been a single Iranian among suicide bombers in the war-battered country?" he asked. "Almost all who involved in the suicide attacks are from Arab countries."

It seemed strange at the time that the US would so openly flout the authority of the Iraqi President and the head of the KRG simply to raid an Iranian liaison office that was being upgraded to a consulate, though this had not yet happened on 11 January. US officials, who must have been privy to the White House's new anti-Iranian stance, may have thought that bruised Kurdish pride was a small price to pay if the US could grab such senior Iranian officials.

For more than a year the US and its allies have been trying to put pressure on Iran. Security sources in Iraqi Kurdistan have long said that the US is backing Iranian Kurdish guerrillas in Iran. The US is also reportedly backing Sunni Arab dissidents in Khuzestan in southern Iran who are opposed to the government in Tehran. On 4 February soldiers from the Iraqi army 36th Commando battalion in Baghdad, considered to be under American control, seized Jalal Sharafi, an Iranian diplomat.

The raid in Arbil was a far more serious and aggressive act. It was not carried out by proxies but by US forces directly. The abortive Arbil raid provoked a dangerous escalation in the confrontation between the US and Iran which ultimately led to the capture of the 15 British sailors and Marines - apparently considered a more vulnerable coalition target than their American comrades.

The targeted generals

* MOHAMMED JAFARI

Powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, responsible for internal security. He has accused the United States of seeking to "hold Iran responsible for insecurity in Iraq... and [US] failure in the country."

* GENERAL MINOJAHAR FROUZANDA

Chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the military unit which maintains its own intelligence service separate from the state, as well as a parallel army, navy and air force.

Tehran, 29 Jan. (AKI) - Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the Pasdaran, have threatened to abduct US troops if Washington does not release five Iranian officials kidnapped in the northern Iraqi town of Erbil in a raid on Tehran's consulate earlier this year. In an article published by the Pasdaran's mouthpiece, Sobhe Sadegh, the director of the centre for strategic studies of the Iranian presidency, Reza Zakeri, also says Iran will retaliate against any further abduction of Iranian nationals.

Five Iranian officials were detained in the Kurdish-controlled city on charges of being connected to a faction of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Pasdaran, that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq.

"The United States has put together a list including the names of 35 high officials of the Pasdaran and Iran's atomic agency to kidnap and question them on the military and nuclear potential of the Islamic Republic but if they will try to kidnap even one person our reaction will be harsh and immediate," Zakeri wrote in the article.

The article follows a report in the Washington Post last week saying that the Bush administration has authorized US troops to kill or capture Iranian operatives in Iraq.

The question now is who is receiving better treatment, the British sailors or the five minor Iranian officials. Given the Bush administrations history on prisoner handling I would bet the British sailors are receiving far more humane treatment.

What is it some fool said on A2K; oh ya, the horrible treatment that poor helpless British woman is going through, making her wear a head scarf in total violation of the G.C.

Quote:

Tehran, 29 Jan. (AKI) - Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the Pasdaran, have threatened to abduct US troops if Washington does not release five Iranian officials kidnapped in the northern Iraqi town of Erbil in a raid on Tehran's consulate earlier this year. In an article published by the Pasdaran's mouthpiece, Sobhe Sadegh, the director of the centre for strategic studies of the Iranian presidency, Reza Zakeri, also says Iran will retaliate against any further abduction of Iranian nationals.

Five Iranian officials were detained in the Kurdish-controlled city on charges of being connected to a faction of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Pasdaran, that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq.

"The United States has put together a list including the names of 35 high officials of the Pasdaran and Iran's atomic agency to kidnap and question them on the military and nuclear potential of the Islamic Republic but if they will try to kidnap even one person our reaction will be harsh and immediate," Zakeri wrote in the article.

The article follows a report in the Washington Post last week saying that the Bush administration has authorized US troops to kill or capture Iranian operatives in Iraq.

http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level_English.php?cat=Politics&loid=8.0.381232740&par=

If the Bush administration is of the mentality that these people should be captured or killed than I suspect their treatment is far more harsh than what the British sailors are going through.

What I find interesting about this article is the officials whom they wanted to kidnap had a meeting with the President of Iraq and the President of the KRG. If these Iranians are helping the Shiite insurgents then why not arrest Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani? Lets not forget the Kurds are suppose to be our strongest allies in Iraq. So if our strongest allies are meeting with our enemies does that make them our friends?

I, personally, don't think we have any friends in Iraq. We are an alien invader, a disease, hated and despised, being used by different factions for their own purposes.

The idea that the 15 British sailors are being treated well is belied by the fact that they all confessed instantaneously and publicly, something which must surely be against their ordinary natures.

As for the Iraqis, I'm sure they all wish that Saddam Hussein and his sons were back raping and pillaging, and torturing (often to death) anyone who expressed dissent.

The idea that the 15 British sailors are being treated well is belied by the fact that they all confessed instantaneously and publicly, something which must surely be against their ordinary natures.

Interrogation

The captured sailors would not have had special "conduct after capture" training and will have to rely on common sense, military sources say. They would have been advised to say little about their families to avoid greater pressure. But formal training is usually reserved for special forces and pilots, who endure mock interrogations.

Military sources suggested the captives were unlikely to have any sensitive state secrets. "In the main, they should just use their common sense," said one official. Whether training for capture is reviewed as a result of this incident will depend on their eventual debriefing.

As for the Iraqis, I'm sure they all wish that Saddam Hussein and his sons were back raping and pillaging, and torturing (often to death) anyone who expressed dissent.

POLITICS-US/IRAQ:
Fate of Five Detained Iranians Unknown
Khody Akhavi

WASHINGTON, Mar 29 (IPS) - As the Western media turns its attention to the fate of 15 Britons detained for allegedly trespassing into Iranian waters over the weekend, the status of five Iranian officials captured in a U.S. military raid on a liaison office in northern Iraq on Jan. 11 remains a mystery.

Even though high-level Iraqi officials have publicly called for their release, for all practical purposes, the Iranians have disappeared into the U.S.-sanctioned "coalition detention" system that has been criticised as arbitrary and even illegal by many experts on international law.

Hours before President George W. Bush declared that they would "seek out and destroy the [Iranian] networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq," U.S. forces raided what has been described as a diplomatic liaison office in the northern city of Arbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and detained six Iranians, infuriating Kurdish officials in the process.

The troops took office files and computers, ostensibly to find evidence regarding the alleged role of Iranian agents in anti-coalition attacks and sectarian violence in Iraq. One diplomat was released, but the other five men remain in U.S. custody and have not been formally charged with a crime.

"They have disappeared. I don't know if they've gone into the enemy combatant system," said Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University who served in the White House under former President Jimmy Carter. "Nobody on the outside knows."

A spokesman for the Multinational Forces Iraq (MFI), Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, told IPS this week from his office in Baghdad, "They are still in 'coalition detention' in accordance with the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546, 1637 and 1723." He provided no further information regarding their status or treatment.

The resolutions endorse the transitional government of Iraq and extend the mandate of the U.S.-led coalition force into 2007.

The continued detention of the Iranians has escalated tensions between the U.S. and Iran and may even have set the stage for the seizure by Iranian forces of 15 British sailors and marines who allegedly crossed into Iranian waters over the weekend.

"The Iranian group in Iraq was arrested by American forces, and we have been asking continuously for their release," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh this week, "but this is something different from the British sailors."

A State Department official with knowledge of the situation said the Iranians were informed of the status of the diplomats after their detention through the Swiss government, which represents U.S. interests in Iran in the absence of any U.S. diplomatic presence. He referred all additional questions to MFI in Baghdad.

Washington severed diplomatic ties with Iran in 1979, after Iranian students sympathetic to the Islamic Revolution took 52 staffers hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

During this month's regional meeting in Baghdad in which U.S. officials also participated, the Iranian delegation requested the release of the five men, according to a State Department spokeswoman. In response, the Iraqi government asked the U.S.-led coalition to investigate the circumstances involving their detention, she told IPS, adding that "the investigation is not complete, and we don't comment publicly with respect to ongoing investigations."

The U.N. Security Council resolution that officially marked the end of the U.S. occupation and transferred sovereignty to the Iraqi government retains the U.S. military's right to implement "security detentions". However, any such detentions should be subject to Iraqi law, according to Scott Horton, who teaches international law at Columbia University School of Law.

"The Iranians who are being held as 'security detainees' are not being charged with anything, and so are being held unlawfully," he told IPS.

Under Iraqi law, detainees identified as insurgents who are "actively engaged in hostilities" -- those implicated in attacks on coalition forces and innocent Iraqi civilians -- are supposed to be charged in civilian courts. They may be held up to 14 days before being brought before a magistrate and either charged with a crime or released. In order to hold detainees longer without charging them, detention authorities must provide justification for doing so, according to Horton.

That such requirements appear to be systematically ignored by U.S. forces not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and the broader "war on terror", has fueled criticism of Washington's detention policies and practices by human rights groups and legal experts around the world.

"The U.S. hasn't articulated the legal grounds under which it detains 'combatants'," said John Sifton, a researcher with Human Rights Watch. "They regularly conflate criminal terrorism, innocent civilians, and real combatants on the ground, and throw them all into the same pot."

"The vagueness of the war on terror has supplied the soil under which all this has flourished," said Sifton.

U.S. detention camps in Iraq currently hold more than 15,000 prisoners, most of whom, like the Iranians, have been held without charge or access to tribunals for months, even years, in some cases, according to a recent New York Times investigative report.

"It's an exercise of raw power by the U.S. that's not backed by any legal justification," said Horton. "Legally, it doesn't pass the 'ha ha' test."

The U.N. secretary-general's office has not commented on the detained Iranians or Iran's detention of the 15 British sailors, describing both incidents as "disputes between individual states".

"We've left it to the respective countries to work it out among themselves," said Farhan Haq, a U.N. spokesman. "Ultimately it's up to Security Council members themselves to determine how its resolutions get implemented."

The legal fate of the captured Iranians turns in part on the issue of whether the two-storey building in Arbil that was the target of the Jan. 11 raid was, as Iran claims, an official consulate, in which case its premises and staff are entitled to diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention, or rather a liaison office, as U.S. officials contend, which would not be entitled to the same protections.

Both Iran and the Kurdish regional government have agreed that consular activities -- such as the issuance of visas -- had been carried out by office staff since 1992.

But the U.S. State Department insists that it was not an accredited consulate and that the five detainees are members of the Quds force, an elite unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) described by spokesman Sean McCormack as specialising in "training terrorists and those sorts of activities".

According to a knowledgeable source at the Iraqi Embassy here, the five were not accredited diplomats, although they had submitted documents for accreditation before the raid was carried out. Their applications were being processed at the time, said the source, who asked not to be identified. The source also said that the Kurdish regional government had treated them as if they were indeed accredited.

The raid on the Arbil liaison office was the third in a series of episodes that targeted Iranian officials operating in Iraq. On Dec. 20, U.S. forces stopped a car carrying two Iranian diplomats and their guards. The next morning, soldiers raided the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the largest political party in Iraq, and detained two Iranians who turned out to have been members of the Revolutionary Guard.

After a tense nine-day political standoff, the Iranians were released from U.S. custody and were ordered by the Iraqi government to leave the country.

As part of extensive review of its diplomatic relations with Iran, the Iraqi foreign ministry plans to turn all liaison offices in Iraq into consulates, giving them official diplomatic status, according to the New York Times.

There are 36 Iranian diplomats currently based at Iran's embassy in Baghdad, as well as 11 at its consulate in Karbala and nine more at another consulate in the southern city of Basra. (END/2007)