Category: America

Nabucco, an American piece for a European orchestra

19:37 24/06/2009

MOSCOW. (Alexander Knyazev, director of the regional branch of the Institute of the CIS, for RIA Novosti) – The European Union and Turkey plan to sign an intergovernmental agreement on the Nabucco natural gas pipeline project on June 25 in Ankara.

Why such a romantic name?

“Nabucco” is an opera by Giuseppe Verdi based on a biblical story about the plight of the Jews as they are assaulted and subsequently exiled from their homeland by the Babylonian King Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar). It is also an enchanting story of love and struggle for power.

The latter element of the story is probably the only thing in common between the opera and the gas pipeline project initiated by U.S. President George W. Bush and based on some European and post-Soviet countries’ non-love of Russia, as well as the global battle for elbowing Russia out of the Eurasian gas market.

Since Nabucco is mostly a political product, Turkey’s efforts to use its transit location to its best advantage are perfectly logical from the viewpoint of its national interests.

Turkey will host a major portion of the 2,050-mile pipeline, which is to bring gas supplies from Central Asia and the Middle East to Europe without using Russian resources or territory.

A consortium of six countries – Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Germany – was set up to build the pipeline to Central Europe via Turkey and the Balkans. The shareholders will finance one-third of expenditure, with the remaining part to be covered by international financial and credit organizations.

The more than 3,300-km pipeline has been estimated at 7.9 billion euros ($10.7 billion) and will have an annual throughput capacity of 31 billion cubic meters. It is to be completed by 2013.

However, technical calculations show that it cannot be commissioned sooner than in 2015; and that given the high and stable energy prices. The project is burdened with political risks and will run across a difficult geographical terrain.

Europe, in truth, is encumbered by problems with energy delivery routes.

A small Polish oil pipeline running from Odessa to Gdansk via Brody in Ukraine has long been incapacitated by Chevron’s inability to supply oil from the Tengiz deposit in Kazakhstan.

Poland, which has been trying to break its dependence on Russian energy supplies, should now heave a sigh of relief, since supplies via Belarus are likely to shrink. The same goes for Lithuania whose oil refinery, Mazeikiu Nafta, that used Russian oil, has been idling since last year.

If this is the energy freedom they wanted, then the two countries are paying an excessively high price for it. Europe’s efforts to solve its energy problems without Russia by importing energy resources from Central Asia are counterproductive – this is a fact. And the same is true of the Nabucco project.

On the contrary, Russia’s South Stream project will have the guaranteed amount of natural gas, and its capacity can be subsequently increased. A recent agreement between Russia’s Gazprom and Italy’s Eni stipulates increasing it to 63 billion cubic meters annually. Besides, Nabucco is unlikely to be competitive compared to Gazprom’s project in terms of prices.

The Russian gas export monopoly plans to pay for the South Stream construction and gas distribution and to sell gas to end users in Europe at attractive prices.

Gas for Nabucco is expected to come from Turkmenistan and possibly Iran. However, Russia has an agreement with Turkmenistan under which it buys all of its export gas, and Russia and Iran may veto the construction of any pipeline along the bottom of the Caspian Sea.

This means that Nabucco can receive gas only from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz deposit, but the probability of this is undermined by tensions between Turkey and Azerbaijan over the recent thaw in Turkish-Armenian relations.

In other words, Nabucco will have no reliable sources of natural gas in the near future.

A pipeline partnership is unimaginable without stability and reliability, something the U.S. administration cannot ensure even to its taxpayers. And so, what does the U.S. administration have to do with the Nabucco project?

Unlike the most naive part of the European establishment, the East European and other “democratic” media describe Nabucco not as a European economic or energy project, but as an American political venture.

The chaotic chanting in support of the Nabucco project reminds me of the “Va, pensiero” chorus of Hebrew slaves from Verdi’s opera – beautiful yet altogether gloomy and hopeless.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

June 25, 2009
GCHQ needs “ultra, ultra criminals”

Britons face a growing online threat from criminals, terrorists and hostile states, according to the UK’s first cyber security strategy.

Businesses, government and ordinary people are all at risk, it says.

The strategy has been published alongside an updated, wider National Security Strategy.

Its publication is a sign of the growing recognition within government of the need to bolster defences against a growing threat.

In line with a wider focus within the National Security Strategy on not just protecting the state but also citizens, the cyber-strategy encompasses protecting individuals from forms of fraud, identity theft and e-crime committed using technology as well as defending government secrets and businesses.

‘Attack capability’

Launching the strategy, security minister Lord West said: “We know that various state actors are very interested in cyber warfare. The terrorist aspect of this is the least (concern), but it is developing.”

He warned that future targets could include key businesses, the national power grid, financial markets and Whitehall departments.

He said: “We know terrorists use the internet for radicalisation and things like that at the moment, but there is a fear they will move down that path (of cyber attacks).

“As their ability to use the web and the net grows, there will be more opportunity for these attacks.”

He confirmed that the UK government has already faced cyber attacks from foreign states such as Russia and China.

But he denied that hackers had successfully broken into government systems and stolen secret information.

He also said he could not deny that the government had its own online attack capability, but he refused to say whether it had ever been used.

“It would be silly to say that we don’t have any capability to do offensive work from Cheltenham, and I don’t think I should say any more than that.”

‘Naughty boys’

Among those the government has turned to for help on cyber crime are former illegal hackers, Lord West added.

He said the government listening post GCHQ at Cheltenham had not employed any “ultra, ultra criminals” but needed the expertise of former “naughty boys” he said.

“You need youngsters who are deep into this stuff… If they have been slightly naughty boys, very often they really enjoy stopping other naughty boys,” he said.

Officials said e-crime crime is estimated to costs the UK several billion pounds a year.

Two new bodies will be established in the coming months as part of the strategy.

A dedicated Office of Cyber Security in the Cabinet Office will co-ordinate policy across government and look at legal and ethical issues as well as relations with other countries.

The second body will be a new Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) based at GCHQ.

This will bring people together from across government and from outside to get a better handle on cyber security issues and work out how to better protect the country, providing advice and information about the risks.

“CSOC’s aim will be to identify in real time what type of cyber attacks are taking place, where they come from and what can be done to stop them”, according to a Whitehall security official.

Experts say the “forensics” of detecting who is behind a cyber attack and attributing responsibility remains extremely difficult.

Officials said it would require input from those who had their own expertise in hackers. “We need youngsters,” an official said.

The range of potentially hostile cyber activity – from other states seeking to carry out espionage through criminal gangs to terrorists – is daunting.

Critical information

At one end of the spectrum, military operations – such as Russia’s conflict with Georgia last year – are now accompanied by attacks on computer systems.

The UK’s critical national infrastructure is also more reliant on technology than it was even five years ago and terrorists who have used the internet for fundraising and propaganda are also believed to have the intent – if not yet the capability- to carry out their own cyber-attacks.

Officials declined to give a figure of how many attacks on government computer networks take place each day.

In a speech in 2007, the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, explicitly mentioned Russia and China in the context of a warning that that “a number of countries continue to devote considerable time and energy trying to steal our sensitive technology on civilian and military projects, and trying to obtain political and economic intelligence at our expense. They do not only use traditional methods to collect intelligence but increasingly deploy sophisticated technical attacks, using the internet to penetrate computer networks.”

Officials said they were not aware of any “key pieces of information” that had gone missing yet but said that British companies had lost critical information.

The new Cyber Security Operations Centre will work closely with the designated parts of the critical national infrastructure and wider industry and officials say that business are keen for the government to take a lead but also share as much information as possible.

US President Barack Obama has been carrying out a similar re-organisation for defending US computer networks and British officials said the two countries were co-ordinating closely not least because of the intimate relationship between GCHQ and its US equivalent.

British officials believe that their government systems may also have fewer vulnerabilities than their US counterparts partly because they moved online later and have fewer connections between the internal government system and the rest of cyberspace to monitor.

Officials in the US and UK are also thought to be working on forms of offensive cyber-warfare capability but officials are unwilling to go into any details of what this might involve.

Some Comments:

CSOC’s aim will be to identify in real time what type of cyber attacks are taking place, where they come from and what can be done to stop them

Whitehall security official

It would be silly to say that we don’t have any capability to do offensive work from Cheltenham, and I don’t think I should say any more than that

Lord West, security minister

BBC

June 25, 2009
Israel’s New Ambassador to the U.S.

Calls Armenian Killings “Genocide”

By Harut Sassounian

Israel’s new Ambassador to the United States, Michael B. Oren, is a firm believer in the veracity of the Armenian Genocide, despite his government’s denialist position on this issue.

Prior to his ambassadorial appointment, Oren repeatedly confirmed the facts of the Armenian Genocide in his writings. In the May 10, 2007 issue of the New York Review of Books, he wrote a highly positive review of Taner Akcam’s book: “A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility.” The review was titled: “The Mass Murder They Still Deny.”

In his most recent book, “Power, Faith and Fantasy,” Oren made dozens of references to Armenia and Armenians, including lengthy heart-wrenching descriptions of the mass killings before and during the Armenian Genocide. Here are some of the most striking quotations from his book:

“The buildup of Ottoman oppression and Armenian anger erupted finally in the spring of 1894, when Turkish troops set out to crush a local rebellion, but then went on to raze entire villages and slaughter all of their inhabitants…. Some 200,000 Armenians died — 20 percent of the population — and a million homes were ransacked. ‘Armenian holocaust,’ cried a New York Times headline in September 1895, employing the word that would later become synonymous with genocide.”

Oren then went on to establish that more than a century ago, similar to today’s acrimonious political tug-of-war over the genocide recognition issue, the Armenian atrocities seriously affected U.S.-Turkish relations. He wrote: “Maintaining amicability with Turkey would prove complicated, however, because ties between the United States and the Porte [Sultan] had long been frayed. The perennial source of friction was the oppression of Armenian Christians. Though a band of modernizing Young Turks, many of them graduates of Roberts College, had achieved power in Istanbul in 1908 and promised equal rights for all of the empire’s citizens, barely a year passed before the slaughter of Armenians resumed. Some thirty thousand of them were butchered by Turkish troops in south-central Anatolia.”

In a section titled, “The most horrible crime in human history,” Oren wrote: “The first reports, from December 1914, told of anti-Christian pogroms in Bitlis, in eastern Turkey, and the hanging of hundreds of Armenians in the streets of Erzerum. Armenian men between the ages of twenty and sixty were being conscripted into forced-labor battalions, building roads, and hauling supplies for the Turkish army. The following month, after their defeat by Russian forces in the Caucasus, Turkish troops salved their humiliation by pillaging Armenian towns and executing their Armenian laborers. In the early spring, Turkish soldiers laid siege to the Armenian city of Van in eastern Anatolia and began the first of innumerable mass deportations. The slaughter then raged westward to Istanbul, where, on April 24, security forces arrested and hanged some 250 Armenian leaders and torched Armenian neighborhoods. Interior Minister Talaat Pasha informed the Armenian Patriarch that ‘there was no room for Christians in Turkey’ and advised him and his parishioners ‘to clear out of the country.’”

Oren then exposed Turkey’s attempts to falsify history by pointing out that: “Most contemporary observers agree that the massacres were scarcely connected to the war, but rather represented a systematically planned and executed program to eliminate an entire people. Indeed, foreshadowing the Nazi genocide of the Jews twenty-five years later, Turkish soldiers herded entire Armenian villages into freezing rivers, incinerated them in burning churches, or simply marched them into the deserts and abandoned them to die of thirst…. By the end of summer, an estimated 800,000 Armenians had been killed and countless others forcibly converted to Islam.”

After citing numerous eyewitness accounts of the mass killings, Oren concluded: “In all, as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed in a genocide that the Turkish government would never acknowledge, much less regret.”

While it is true that Michael Oren published this book before his assignment as Ambassador to Washington, his compelling position on the Armenian Genocide would hopefully make him refrain from following the footsteps of his predecessors who shamefully lobbied against the congressional resolution on this issue.

The appointment of a staunch supporter of the truth of the Armenian Genocide as Israel’s Ambassador to Washington comes on the heels of a serious rift between Turkey and Israel following the Gaza war earlier this year. On that occasion, there were major manifestations of anti-Semitic statements and acts throughout Turkey, including anti-Israeli remarks by Turkish Prime Minister Rejeb Erdogan. His insulting words to Israel’s President Shimon Peres in Davos, Switzerland, antagonized Israelis and Jews worldwide. Even though Israel downplayed Erdogan’s offensive words, they did a lasting damage to Israeli-Turkish relations.

The combination of an Israeli government that is less sympathetic of Turkey and the presence of Israel’s Ambassador in Washington who is a firm believer in the facts of the Armenian Genocide may facilitate the passage of the pending congressional resolution on the Armenian Genocide.

June 23, 2009
Armenia Still Hopeful About Deal With Turkey

22.06.2009

Hovannes Shoghikian

Armenia remains hopeful that it will normalize relations with Turkey soon despite renewed preconditions set by Turkish leaders, Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian said on Sunday.

He also pointedly declined to deny that the Armenian government has accepted a Turkish proposal to set up a joint commission of historians that will look into the 1915 mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. When asked by journalists to comment on statements to that effect made by U.S. and Turkish officials, Nalbandian said, “In order to develop [Turkish-Armenian] relations we intend to create a intergovernmental commission that will deal with numerous issues of interest to the two sides.”

Testifying before a U.S. congressional subcommittee last week, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon said that the formation of a historical commission is part of a Turkish-Armenian “roadmap” agreement announced in late April.

Turkish leaders have said in the past that the joint Turkish-Armenian study should specifically determine whether the Armenian massacres constituted a genocide. Former President Robert Kocharian dismissed the idea as a Turkish ploy designed to keep more countries from recognizing the genocide.

But Kocharian’s successor, Serzh Sarkisian, indicated shortly after taking office last year that he does not object to the Turkish proposal in principle. In an April interview with “The Wall Street Journal,” Sarkisian effectively acknowledged that Yerevan agreed to the establishment of a “historical sub-commission” during its fence-mending negotiations with Ankara.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other Turkish leaders have since made clear that this is not enough for completing the normalization process. They have said that Turkey will not establish diplomatic relations and reopen its border with Armenia before a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict acceptable to Azerbaijan.

Like some U.S. officials, Nalbandian seemed to suggest that the Turkish statements do not preclude the implementation of the “roadmap” deal. “If there is a desire to solve issues by diplomatic means, then that can be done through negotiations, agreements reached as a result of those negotiations and the implementation of those agreements,” he told a joint news conference with Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the visiting foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates.

“I think that we do have such an opportunity with regard to the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations,” added Nalbandian. “And Armenia will continue its efforts in that direction.”

http://www.armenialiberty.org/content/article/1760172.html

June 22, 2009
Implications of the Acquisition by Israel of a Nuclear Weapons Capability

Special National Intelligence Estimate Number 100-8-60, “Implications of the Acquisition by Israel of a Nuclear Weapons Capability,” 8 December 1960, Secret/Noforn, Excised Copy

On the basis of evidence collected during the summer and fall of 1960, the U.S. intelligence establishment drew relatively firm conclusions that Israel had an ongoing program to produce “weapons grade plutonium.” In recent years, the U.S. government has been more forthcoming in declassifying information about what it knew and when in the early years of the Israeli nuclear program. In declassifying this previously exempted document, ISCA is following that pattern.

This Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) was controversial as soon as it was published because information surfaced showing that the intelligence agencies and other U.S. government organizations had overlooked telling evidence that Israel had a nuclear weapons program underway. As Avner Cohen has shown, an intelligence post-mortem requested by President Kennedy showed that information available as early as April 1958 could have led to an accurate understanding of Israel’s purposes. Why this happened can not be easily explained, but Cohen identified a number of relevant factors, including “Israeli secrecy and deception,” underestimation of Israeli capabilities, “friends [of Israel] in high places … who might have helped to suppress the early information,” organizational bottlenecks at the CIA, and the possibility that Eisenhower wanted Israel to have the bomb. According to Cohen, “the late 1950s might have been the only time the United States could have successfully pressured Israel to give up its nuclear weapons project in exchange for American security guarantees, but the opportunity was not explored.” (Note 6)

Full Report:

June 22, 2009
U.S. Navy’s Secret Intelligence Service at the Bosphorus

Big Smoke alongside a Soviet Warship in the Bosphorus

Photo of Big Smoke, a motor yacht used by the U.S. Navy’s Task Force 157, for intelligence collection operations in the Mediterranean. Photo from Jeffrey Richelson, “Task Force 157: The U.S. Navy’s Secret Intelligence Service, 1966-77,” Intelligence and National Security 11 (1996), 118; used with permission of the author and the journal.

Central Intelligence Agency (?), “Soviet Nuclear Weapons in Egypt?”, 30 October 1973, Top Secret, Excised copy
Archival source: Nixon NSC, Henry A. Kissinger Office Files, box 132, Egypt-Ismail Vol. VII Oct. 1973

In the weeks after the October War, U.S. government officials leaked to the media information about intelligence gleanings of possible shipments of Scud missiles and nuclear weapons to Soviet bases in Egypt during the conflict. While officials were more certain about the deployment of the missiles, it was more debatable whether Moscow had actually deployed nuclear weapons to foreign territory because of the great risks involved. According to the press reports, defense officials saw a “reasonable possibility” that nuclear weapons were shipped, but members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John C. Stennis and Stuart Symington, “said the evidence did not convince them.” (Note 8)

For the first time, the U.S. government has released one of the intelligence reports that may have been the basis for the leaks. While intelligence agencies exempted this document in its entirety after the first request to the Nixon Library and also after an appeal, ISCAP agreed to release much of it, suggesting that the much of the information had been overclassified.

“Soviet Nuclear Weapons in Egypt?” draws back from definite conclusions, suggesting why some U.S. officials believed that the evidence was not good enough. Interestingly, the report indicates which Soviet cargo ship—the Mezhdurechensk—was one of the objects of suspicion, and that U.S. intelligence photographed the ship at Alexandria on 25 October.

While much of the evidence concerning the alleged deployment has been redacted from the report, probably on sources and methods grounds, a prize-winning article by Archive senior research fellow, Jeffrey Richelson, “Task Force 157: The U.S. Navy’s Secret Intelligence Service, 1966-1977,” published in Intelligence and National Security, clarifies the issue. According to Richelson’s account, Task Force 157 included a yacht equipped with a special nuclear intelligence sensor that operated in the Bosphurus and shadowed Soviet ships. The problem was that the sensor was “prone to giving positive false alarms,” and could not determine whether the “type of radiation in question” indicated the presence of nuclear weapons. This makes it all the more understandable why the authors of the 30 October report were unwilling to draw firm conclusions about the presence of nuclear weapons on the Mezhdurechensk: “The evidence should not yet be regarded as though it creates a strong presumption that the Soviets dispatched nuclear weapons to Egypt.” (Note 9)

June 22, 2009