Search Results for: iran

July 18, 2018 By Fausta

Good news of the day: Texas to pass Iraq and Iran as world’s No. 3 oil powerhouse

Via Kermit’s FB feed,
Texas to pass Iraq and Iran as world’s No. 3 oil powerhouse

The combined output of the Permian and Eagle Ford is expected to rise from just 2.5 million barrels per day in 2014 to 5.6 million barrels per day in 2019, according to HSBC. That means Texas will account for more than half of America’s total oil production.

By comparison, Iraq’s daily production is seen at about 4.8 million barrels, while Iran is projected to pump 3 million. Oil supplies from Iran are likely to plunge due to tough sanctions from the United States.

And we’re not energy dependent on dictatorships.

That’s something to celebrate.

January 2, 2018 By Fausta

How will the Iranian protests affect Latin America?

There are 21 reported deaths from the protests that started last Thursday in Iran. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei blamed Iran’s “enemies”

Other Iranian officials had blamed “foreign agents” and an online “proxy war” waged by the US, the UK and Saudi Arabia for the violence.

Khamenei’s remarks followed more deadly violence on Monday, in which nine people were killed, including seven protesters, a member of a pro-government militia and a policeman. Twelve others were killed over the weekend as the protests intensified.

For years Iran has targeted Latin America for recruitment,

Iranian intelligence and military efforts to recruit young men in Peru, train them in Iran, and return them to Peru. A Hezbollah movement has now been established in the country.
. . .
a former Iranian official with knowledge of the country’s terror network who claimed that “more than 40,000 of the regime’s security, intelligence and propaganda forces” have been successfully placed in the region. According to another source cited in the article, the Quds Force has established command and control centers in two Latin American countries.

Last November, Iran promised to send warships to the Gulf of Mexico

Iran will likely use the warships’ visit to South America to advance its relationship with Venezuela, a US adversary, the outlet reported.

Seven years ago I was posting on Iran-Venezuela ties. Hezbollah and Iran have continued their expansion in our hemisphere (emphasis added)

Overall, Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean offer Iran and Hezbollah fertile territory to build relations, bolster economic development and spread their ideology. Their efforts are made easier by governments such as Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, whose hostility to U.S. interests manifest as non-cooperation on U.S. counterterror and defense partnerships. The Iranian regime also associates with the Bolivarian Alliance of the Countries of Our America (ALBA), a group created by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, which resists the United States through political and economic means.

What is perhaps the most worrisome tactic of Iran and Hezbollah is the use of seemingly innocuous acts of diplomacy to obscure drug smuggling and money laundering. According to the U.S. government, Iran has relied on Latin America to evade sanctions by signing economic and security agreements in order to create a network of diplomatic and economic relationships.

According to Infobae, Lebanon-based Hezbollah generates at least $10million/year from drugs and weapons trafficking, but Hezbollah’s total take may be much larger at the Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay Tri-Border Area (TBA).

Venezuela – going back to the Aeroterror flights days – continues to be on top of Iran’s list, granting Iranian military firms large tracts of isolated land to develop missile technology.

Venezuela’s Vice President, Tareck El Aissami, has allegedly issued passports to members of Hamas and Hezbollah.

This means members of the two organizations, as well as drug lords from narco-terror groups such as FARC, not only coordinate and work together, but also are awarded state sponsorship from the highest levels of government

While this took place, the Obama administration allegedly covered up for Hezbollah in Latin America; They killed a probe of the terror group to get the Iran deal. According to Josh Meyer’s extensive report,

As a result, some Hezbollah operatives were not pursued via arrests, indictments, or Treasury designations that would have blocked their access to U.S. financial markets, according to Bauer, a career Treasury official, who served briefly in its Office of Terrorist Financing as a senior policy adviser for Iran before leaving in late 2015. And other “Hezbollah facilitators”arrested in France, Colombia, Lithuania have not been extradited — or indicted — in the U.S., she wrote.

Whether Iran and Hezbollah use the region to circumvent sanctions, traffic drugs, launder money or plan future attacks, there is a real and growing threat.

Will the protests in Iran have any effect on this? Only if there’s regime change.

But Iranian expansion in the Americas continues to be one of the ignored stories of the decade.
.

December 22, 2017 By Fausta

This morning in blogging: Bigger than Iran-Contra

Indeed, with billions of drug trade money funding terrorists, and tens of thousands of lives ruined, The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook makes Iran-Contra look like pikers.

Read my post, This morning in blogging: Bigger than Iran-Contra.

AND,

August 29, 2017 By Fausta

Argentina: Did Iran poison Nisman?

The WSJ editorial board asks,
Nisman and the Iranians: Did the Islamic Republic poison an Argentine prosecutor? (emphasis added)

Monday that a new toxicology analysis on the body of the late Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman has discovered the drug ketamine, an anesthetic mostly used on animals. It is highly unlikely Nisman would have voluntarily ingested such a drug. He had been investigating Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center when he was found dead in his apartment with a gunshot wound to the head in January 2015.

“There is a mountain of evidence in the case that indicates that it is a homicide; this would be one more,” said Mr. Sáenz, who worked to get the case moved to federal court last year so he could take over the probe.

In 2006 Nisman indicted seven Iranians and one Lebanese-born member of Hezbollah for the bombing, which killed 85. At the time of his death Nisman was a day away from testifying before the Argentine Congress about his more recent findings. He alleged that then-President Cristina Kirchner and her foreign minister Héctor Timerman had made a deal with Tehran to bury the matter in return for Iranian oil and Iranian purchases of Argentine grain.

Read the whole article.

I’ve been posting on this story for years: read the files here.

July 17, 2017 By Fausta

Venezuela: Cuba and Iran in the picture

Yesterday’s referendum results will remain symbolic, by design:

“In reality, it is the Venezuelan regime that has already brought foreign intervention into Venezuela by calling on Cuba, Iran, and Russia to circumvent its sovereignty and provide lethal aid to its violent suppression and intimidation of the Venezuelan people.”

Cuba:
How Cuba Runs Venezuela. Havana’s security apparatus is deeply embedded in the armed forces.

To keep its hold on Venezuela, Cuba has embedded a Soviet-style security apparatus. In a July 13 column, titled “Cubazuela” for the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba website, Roberto Álvarez Quiñones reported that in Venezuela today there are almost 50 high-ranking Cuban military officers, 4,500 Cuban soldiers in nine battalions, and “34,000 doctors and health professionals with orders to defend the tyranny with arms.” Cuba’s interior ministry provides Mr. Maduro’s personal security. “Thousands of other Cubans hold key positions of the State, Government, military and repressive Venezuelan forces, in particular intelligence and counterintelligence services.”

Every Venezuelan armed-forces commander has at least one Cuban minder, if not more, a source close to the military told me. Soldiers complain that if they so much as mention regime shortcomings over a beer at a bar, their superiors know about it the next day. On July 6 Reuters reported that since the beginning of April “nearly 30 members of the military have been detained for deserting or abandoning their post and almost 40 for rebellion, treason, or insubordination.”

The idea of using civilian thugs to beat up Venezuelan protesters comes from Havana, as Cuban-born author Carlos Alberto Montanerexplained in a recent El Nuevo Herald column, “Venezuela at the Edge of the Abyss.”

Iran:
Venezuela is Syria in the New World
Podcast:

Read more (emphasis added)
[Read more…]

January 24, 2017 By Fausta

“Venezuela looks like a failed economy. In fact, it’s Iran’s frontier in the Americas”

While the media was only broadcasting stories about the women’s march, the grownups were paying attention to serious matters. John Batchelor’s January 21, 2016 (emphasis added):
Venezuela Falls to Iran & What is to be done?

Facing a parliamentary vote to oust him and a call for new elections, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 4 replaced Vice President Aristóbulo Istúriz with regime loyalist Tareck El Aissami, the governor of Aragua State. El Aissami’s appointment comes at a critical time for the embattled Bolivarian regime. Venezuela’s economy is spiraling into chaos under the crushing weight of triple-digit inflation, basic commodities shortages, widespread corruption and violent crime. Maduro is relying on El Aissami to tighten the regime’s grip on power. As it turns out, that is in no small part thanks to his Iran and Hezbollah connections. Brig. Gen. Mohammad-Reza Naqdi, the new cultural adviser to the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) chief commander and a former chief of the IRGC’s Basij militia, recently announced that a Latin American team visited Iran to learn how to form a Basij-like mobilization force, praising “Iran’s perseverance and success.” – See more at:
• Meet Venezuela’s new VP, fan of Iran and Hezbollah
• Should Boeing and Airbus sell planes to Iran Air?

Listen to the full podcast:

Batchelor concludes with, “Venezuela looks like a failed economy. In fact, it’s Iran’s frontier in the Americas”.

You can’t say you haven’t been told.

September 7, 2016 By Fausta

Some of that Iranian money coming soon to our hemisphere

I posted this morning on how the Most Transparent Administration™ conducts itself in the era of Smart Diplomacy™: Launder $400 million in exchange for five hostages, refuse to call it a ransom, and then launder $1.3 billion more. Make sure it’s all in cash, à la Breaking Bad, load it in pallets, and fly it in, so you bypass the international banking system and Constitutional prohibitions.

*That’s only $80million – one hostage’s worth*

Must I remind you, Obama took to the airwaves last month and bare-faced lied to all, smirking,

“We announced these payments in January. Many months ago. Th-that wasn’t a secret; we announced them.”

Iran is using that money already. Last month Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif toured Latin America with an entourage of 120 “politico-economic” delegates, stopping in Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia and Venezuela.

Algemeiner interviewed Ilan Berman, vice president of the Washington, DC-based conservative think tank the American Foreign Policy Council (emphasis added),

A vast majority of the hundreds of trade and economic deals Iran has signed with Latin American countries “haven’t amounted to anything, because the Iranians didn’t have any money,” Berman said. “But now, for the first time, Iran has the ability to put its money where its mouth is. Its economy is stabilizing, and it can now capitalize on all those promises it made to solidify its position in the region — and make those trade deals real.”

Iran, Berman stated, is taking a long-term approach to its relationship with Latin America.

Berman discussed how Hugo Chávez saw Iran as an anti-American strategic partner with like-minded countries like Bolivia and Ecuador, which matched Iran’s plans.

“I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Latin America,” he said. “And what you discover if you spend time down there is that it is like the third inning of a baseball game. Iran has all sorts of strategic interests in the region. Ten years ago, it was worried about Western sanctions; it wanted trade partners that would help it blunt the effect of sanctions. Now the Iranians are out of the box, and they’re looking for where they can increase their legitimacy and where they can increase their cooperation.”

in contrast,

Berman said, “The Obama administration doesn’t have a Latin America strategy at all. All it cares about is resetting relations with Cuba. So it has scoped down what it is interested about in Latin America. There is really no appetite in the White House to start talking about what the Iranians are doing there.”
. . .
“The Obama administration talks a lot about how the deal is tactical — that it is not intended to address Iran’s terrorism or human-rights violations, just strictly to deal with its nuclear program. But the benefits that are conferred to Iran as a result are strategic and transformative. The sanctions regime is a thing of the past; the era of macro sanctions is over. Iran is getting infused with multiple, billion-dollar trade and military deals, and its global ambitions are expanding. The nuclear deal is a gateway drug for Iran to do all sorts of things. Yes, it slows down Iran’s nuclear program, but at the expense of empowering everything else.”

What the “everything else” may turn out to be, we’ll soon find out.

August 25, 2016 By Fausta

Iran’s LatAm tour

The $99,999,999.99 x 13 is in, and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is touring Latin America, with an entourage of 120 “politico-economic” delegates.

First, Cuba and Nicaragua.

Now Ecuador,

While in Quito, Zarif is scheduled to attend a joint economic commission with his Ecuadorian counterpart Guillaume Long to be held later today. Separate meetings with President Rafael Correa, Speaker of Parliament and Foreign Minister are also on Zarif’s agenda on this one-day official visit. The two sides are also slated to sign a memorandum of understanding for economic cooperation.

Chile, Bolivia and Venezuela are next on the schedule.

Perhaps this explains what they are doing with all the money Obama gave them for his worthless nuclear deal

Smart diplomacy.