DEBKAfile - Iran Gains African Foothold up to Chad through Pacts with Sudan
Iran Gains African Foothold up to Chad through Pacts with Sudan
From DEBKA-Net-Weekly 341 Exclusive
May 31, 2008



New Sudanes defense minister
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Iran jumped in with gusto to meet Sudan president Omar al-Bashir’s application for a military package including arms and training of his army. The application was received after the horrendous Darfur tragedy and Khartoum’s backing for Chad rebels finally convinced Sudan’s traditional arms suppliers, Russia, China and Libya, to back away from arming Sudan’s 120,000-strong army.
Beijing came last, sensitized to its international image by the approaching Olympic Games in August. Libya has a major beef with Khartoum for backing the rebels fighting to overthrow Chad president Idriss Debby.



The pacts were signed on March 8 by Iran’s defense minister Gen. Mostafa Mohammad Majjar and his Sudanese counterpart, Gen. Abdul Rahim Mohammad Hussein, a fighter pilot appointed defense minister last month.

For years Tehran has been building up its military ties with Khartoum with an eye on its geopolitical assets: a long coast on the Red Sea, a main sea lanes to the Persian Gulf, a Muslim nation located opposite Saudi Arabia and next door to Egypt; Sudan’s command of oil resources and the White Nile, a major water source for an entire African region. This strategic jewel finally dropped into Iran’s fundamentalist lap.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Iranian sources disclosed its substance on March 14, 2008:
1. The Sudanese Army will gradually re-adjust from Russian and Chinese weaponry to Iranian-made items.
2. A 50 percent discount on Iran arms sold to Sudan.
3. Iran will build Sudan a military industry for the manufacture of Iranian weapons.
4. The two governments will establish a joint military commission to translate mutual defense collaboration into practical form. Each undertakes to come to the other’s aid in the event of foreign aggression.
5. The two air forces, navies and armored corps will exchange delegations.
6. Iran will help Sudan plan and construct security systems for strategic locations, such as oil fields, ports and the Nile River dams.
The $1.8 billion White Nile River Merowe Dam hydropower project, which includes a 174-kilometer long reservoir, is funded by China and Arab countries. Chinese, Sudanese, German and French companies participate in this project and in the Kajbar Dam downstream of the Merowe Dam.


The Sudanese are afraid that Egypt, which claims the Merowe project is diverting its water supply, may attack and destroy the project.


On March 10, the UN center in Geneva published a report compiled by a group of experts monitoring human rights in Sudan, which had this to say about these dams:


“We regret that the government did not allow access to Kajbar, Amir, Merowe and Makabrab in the northern state. The visit was planned to meet with local authorities and affected communities in the Nile valley area where two hydropower dams are being constructed. It was canceled by Sudan’s state security committee the day before it was scheduled to travel to the area. The reasons provided by the government did not justify their decision to prevent access.


‘”After being prevented from traveling to the area, the international experts met with representatives from the affected communities in Khartoum. They urged the government to ensure the safety and adequate housing of persons displaced from the area.


They also requested access for UN human rights officers to conduct an independent assessment mission to the area.”
According to the information reaching DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources, the Merowe Dam is displacing more than 50,000 people living in the fertile Nile Valley and casting them out to arid desert locations. The government is violently suppressing the protests of the Nubian people who would be displaced by the Kajbar Dam.
7. Iran has assumed responsibility for sending instructors to train Sudanese army units deployed in Darfur. To disguise the aid rendered to the forces perpetrating atrocities in Darfur, the Iranians have set up a number of welfare facilities in the province.
The have also built a military hospital to serve the Sudanese army.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military and intelligence sources disclose that in 2006, Sudan secretly permitted Iran to deploy intelligence agents along its border with Chad. These agents were entrusted with three missions.
Their missions were Oneb: To subjugate the Chad tribes working the uranium deposits of eastern Chad preparatory to their seizure; Two: To establish links with Chadian elements willing to challenge Libyan influence; Three: To strike west via Chad and hook up with the terrorist organizations battling Western influence - primarily American and Israeli – on the African continent.
By no coincidence, an American-Israeli plot was suddenly “uncovered” in Khartoum - at the very moment last month when the Sudanese defense minister was away in Tehran signing military pacts.


Sudan’s security agencies were said to have carried out a snap search of a private plane belonging to an unnamed American company operating in Sudan as it arrived with oil field equipment. What they claimed to have found was an “Israeli Mossad electric surveillance device” which was to have been planted at local military facilities.
Khartoum’s tie-in between a US oil company operating in Sudan and Israeli intelligence warned Washington that Omar al-Bashir was in the process of lining up behind Tehran’s anti-American campaign.


Our sources add that Sudan’s vice president Salva Kiir Mayardit, head of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), who has good relations with the Americans, has chosen to stay silent at this point and not demur against the new military pacts signed with Iran.






SAUDI-RUSSIAN MILITARY COOPERATION - Eurasia Daily Monitor
SAUDI-RUSSIAN MILITARY COOPERATION
By John C. K. Daly
Friday, July 18, 2008

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"And those who resisted were dragged out from their homes. This necklace was fashioned out of their teeth and bones."

Scientist to Congress: U.S. risks 'catastrophe' in nuke EMP attack



WorldNetDaily Exclusive
Congress warned: U.S. risks 'catastrophe' in EMP attack
Expert: Growing threat posed by Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, terrorists
Posted: July 10, 2008
6:22 pm Eastern
WorldNetDaily

WASHINGTON – A top scientist today warned the House Armed Services Committee America remains vulnerable to a "catastrophe" from a nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack that could be launched with plausible deniability by hostile rogue nations or terrorists.
William R. Graham, chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack and the former national science adviser to President Reagan, testified before the committee while presenting a sobering new report on "one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences."
It is the first report from the commission since 2004 and identifies vulnerabilities in the nation's critical infrastructures, "which are essential to both our civilian and military capabilities."
Not taking the steps necessary to reduce the threat in the next three to five years "can both invite and reward attack," Graham told the committee.
The scariest and most threatening kind of EMP attack is initiated by the detonation of a nuclear weapon at high altitude in the range of 25 to 250 miles above the Earth's surface. The immediate effects of EMP are disruption of, and damage to, electronic systems and electrical infrastructure. Such a detonation over the middle of the continental U.S. "has the capability to produce significant damage to critical infrastructures that support the fabric of U.S. society and the ability of the United States and Western nations to project influence and military power," said Graham.
"Several potential adversaries have the capability to attack the United States with a high-altitude nuclear weapon-generated electromagnetic pulse, and others appear to be pursuing efforts to obtain that capability," said Graham. "A determined adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high level of sophistication. For example, an adversary would not have to have long-range ballistic missiles to conduct an EMP attack against the United States. Such an attack could be launched from a freighter off the U.S. coast using a short- or medium-range missile to loft a nuclear warhead to high altitude. Terrorists sponsored by a rogue state could attempt to execute such an attack without revealing the identity of the perpetrators. Iran, the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism, has practiced launching a mobile ballistic missile from a vessel in the Caspian Sea. Iran has also tested high-altitude explosions of the Shahab-III, a test mode consistent with EMP attack, and described the tests as successful. Iranian military writings explicitly discuss a nuclear EMP attack that would gravely harm the United States. While the commission does not know the intention of Iran in conducting these activities, we are disturbed by the capability that emerges when we connect the dots."

William R. Graham
Graham reminded the committee even smaller nuclear weapons can create massive EMP effects over wide geographic areas. He also pointed out that United Nations investigators recently found that "the design for an advanced nuclear weapon, miniaturized to fit on ballistic missiles currently in the inventory of Iran, North Korea and other potentially hostile states, was in the possession of Swiss criminals affiliated with the A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network."
Theoretically, an EMP attack is devastating because of the unprecedented cascading failures of major infrastructures that could result. Because of America's heavy reliance on electricity and electronics, the impact would be far worse than on a country less advanced technologically. Graham and the commission see the potential for failure in the financial system, the system of distribution for food and water, medical care and trade and production.
"The recovery of any one of the key national infrastructures is dependent upon the recovery of others," he said. "The longer the outage, the more problematic and uncertain the recovery will be. It is possible for the functional outages to become mutually reinforcing until at some point the degradation of infrastructure could have irreversible effects on the country's ability to support its population."
Graham took the EMP debate out of the realm of science fiction by reminding the committee that as recently as May 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Russian leaders threatened a U.S. congressional delegation with the specter of such an attack that would paralyze the U.S.
He also quoted James J. Shinn, assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security, who two weeks ago told the same House committee that China's arms buildup includes exotic experiments with electromagnetic weapons that can devastate electronics with bursts of energy similar to those produced by a nuclear blast.
"The consequence of EMP is that you destroy the communications network," Shinn said. "And we are, as you know, and as the Chinese know, heavily dependent on sophisticated communications, satellite communications, in the conduct of our forces. And so, whether it's from an EMP or it's some kind of a coordinated [anti-satellite] effort, we could be in a very bad place if the Chinese enhanced their capability in this area."
Graham says terrorists who get their hands on one or a few unsophisticated nuclear weapons might well calculate they could get the most bang for their buck from attempting an EMP attack.
Recovery from a widespread EMP attack could take months or years, Graham warned. The fact that key components of the U.S. electrical grid are not even manufactured in America and must be ordered a year in advance from foreign suppliers suggests just how complicated and time-consuming recovery might be. The high state of automation within America's utilities further complicates recovery. There just might not be sufficient trained manpower available to get the job done in a timely way.
"The commission's view is that the federal government does not today have sufficient human and physical assets for reliably assessing and managing EMP threats," said Graham. "The commission reviewed current national capabilities to understand and to manage the effects of EMP and concluded that the U.S. is rapidly losing the technical competence and facilities that it needs in the government, the national laboratories and the industrial community."
Graham said it's not too late for Congress to take the bull by the horns and take the steps necessary to prepare for the threat – and thereby reduce it.
"A serious national commitment to address the threat of an EMP attack can lead to a national posture that would significantly reduce the payoff for such an attack and allow the United States to recover from EMP, and from other threats, man-made and natural, to the critical infrastructures," said Graham.
Graham's predecessor as chairman of the commission had equally tough words on the impact of the EMP threat.
"Their effects on systems and infrastructures dependent on electricity and electronics could be sufficiently ruinous as to qualify as catastrophic to the nation," Lowell Wood, acting chairman of the commission, told members of Congress in 2005.
The commission's previous report went so far as to suggest, in its opening sentence, that an EMP attack "might result in the defeat of our military forces."

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"And those who resisted were dragged out from their homes. This necklace was fashioned out of their teeth and bones."

NUCLEAR TERRORIST THREAT IN AMERICA
Newsmax.com - Bin Laden Planning Hiroshima-Type Destruction?


Bin Laden Planning Hiroshima-Type Destruction?







Does Osama bin Laden possess nuclear weapons? Has he smuggled these weapons into the United States? Does he have a plan to detonate these weapons in multiple American cities if Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities? Dr. Hugh Cort, president of the American Foundation for Counter-Terrorism Policy and Research, believes the answer to all of these questions is yes.
Cort has assembled a body of evidence which he claims supports the view that bin Laden has a plan for an “American Hiroshima” which will be implemented in the near future. He has sent this material to various U.S. officials, including Robert S. Mueller III, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Cort believes that the government is not doing enough to prevent an attack.
Much of his evidence centers around one Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who has conducted the only interview of bin Laden after 9/11. Bin Laden told Mir that he had acquired 20 suitcase nuclear bombs from the former Soviet Union. Mir told Cort that bin Laden’s men have smuggled these bombs into the United States.
His men supposedly are waiting for bin Laden to give them the signal, then seven to ten American cities will be struck. If true it is little wonder that Iran’s leader confidently predicts that the United States will be bombed back to the Stone Age.
Bin Laden supposedly has fulfilled Islamic law by warning the United States that an attack is coming and offering a truce — convert to Islam and you will not be attacked. Refusal to convert to Islam means that an attack against America is justified. Three weeks prior to 9/11 bin Laden warned that the United States would be attacked in an unprecedented way for its support of Israel.
Already bin Laden has called for all Muslims in the United States to leave. Instead of a mass exodus of Muslims from this country, new mosques are opening every few weeks. Muslim schools also are being established, which suggests that families plan to stay here for the foreseeable future. But Yossef Bodansky, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism from 1988 to 1998, has testified that bin Laden has obtained nuclear weapons.
He told Congress that “Osama has recruited former Soviet Special Forces (SPETSNAZ) soldiers to teach al-Qaida how to maintain and operate the bombs.”
Mir, by the way, has suggested that most of the nuclear weapons have been smuggled across the border from Mexico. Opponents of illegal immigration long have argued that they want the border monitored and closed for national security purposes.
Proponents of illegal immigration have maintained that opposition to it is “racist.” Clearly, opponents of illegal immigration have the better case; although if Mir is correct, the door may have been open too long.
Ronald Kessler, chief Washington correspondent for Newsmax.com, interviewed Mueller, who said that he is very concerned about bin Laden having nuclear weapons in the United States, so concerned that the FBI has surrounded mosques in 10 American cities with nuclear radiation detectors. Cort quotes Steve Coll, president of New America Foundation, as stating that these detectors cannot sense enriched uranium when it is shielded in lead. If Islamists have such bombs, no doubt they are wrapped in lead.
Cort says that Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff does not have a plan in the event that these bombs are detonated. In such a scenario real deaths will come from radiation. If people know how to avoid radiation prior to an attack, there may be many survivors.
If people can devise a radiation-proof shelter in their own homes to survive a detonation, two days later radiation is one, one-hundredth the strength of the initial blast. If people can spend three days in the shelter and then only make brief trips outside once a day, they can defeat radiation. But what credible source has warned people of the potential threat and how they can meet it?
Is all of this just alarmist talk? Has Cort missed something important which would nullify his answers? I have no idea.
It seems more than reasonable that we proceed as if it is true. If it proves to be a false alarm, what have we lost? But if Cort’s research has merit and we are prepared to handle such a situation, we could minimize its terrible impact.
When I asked some U.S. officials why no one in the government is warning people, I was told “we don’t want to unduly alarm people.” Nonsense.
I have great faith that the American people will do the right thing if properly informed. We did in the mid-1950s when told that the Soviet Union could start a nuclear war. We can do so again, but someone with credibility must tell Americans the truth.
Paul M. Weyrich is chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.
© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.






Food Scarcity 'Creating New World Order' | OneWorld.net (U.S.)
Food Scarcity 'Creating New World Order'

June 5, 2008
Antoaneta Bezlova


Inter Press Service
Eating rice in the Philippines © sinosplice (flickr)
BEIJING, Jun 4 (IPS) - Unprecedented food scarcity is beginning to dictate the rules of a new political order where individual countries are scrambling to secure their own food supplies with little concern for the rest of the world, says the founder of the Earth Policy Institute.
Recent manifestations of national food insecurity like export restrictions imposed by some grain-producing countries are the troublesome portents of an "entirely new chapter in the book of food security," Lester Brown told foreign correspondents in Beijing on Tuesday.
"We are in the midst of the most severe food crisis in the world's history," Brown said. "This is not your mother's food shortage...but a chronically tight food situation, a serious and long-term problem.''
Politicians have been meeting in Rome to find global solutions to soaring food prices and civil unrest caused by food shortages, but in reality many countries are already acting unilaterally to secure supplies for the future.
From Africa to Asia, countries are scrambling to buy or lease land overseas to grow crops and feed their people. China, which has to feed the world's largest population, has taken the lead by contracting land in Tanzania, Laos, Kazakhstan, Brazil, and others.
Lester Brown India has set its eyes on Uruguay and Paraguay, while South Korea is looking for farming deals in Sudan and Siberia. Libya and Egypt for their part have been negotiating deals to lease land in Ukraine.
The worry here, according to Brown, is that "the more influential countries would be able to secure food supplies, leaving a number of low-income, less influential countries with no food to import."
"This could create a lot of desperate countries," he says. The United Nations says soaring prices of basic foods such as rice and other cereals could affect around 100 million of the world's poorest people. In Asia, rice prices have almost tripled this year alone, leading many governments to fear the consequences if the poor cannot afford to buy their staple food.
To protect their domestic consumers, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and China have all taken steps to restrict exports. This year has seen China's first grain trade deficit in decades. It has scrapped export rebates for wheat, rice, paddy, maize and soybeans, and it will start imposing export duties of 5 to 25 percent.
World Worries as China Begins to Import Grain
As the current food crisis unfolded, China's role as the world's largest grain producer and consumer has come in for increasing scrutiny. Politicians around the globe are looking at China, which has to feed 1.3 billion people, with apprehension, worrying that any change in the country's long-held policy of self-sufficiency could have a tremendous effect on the global grain markets.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has said China's main priority is to feed its own population and that this would be the country's "biggest contribution to the world." Beijing contends it has large grain reserves to weather the current food crisis. However, the size of the country's state and private reserves is uncertain.
Chinese rice farmer © kevsunblush (flickr) "It is mostly rice," says Zhao Jinhou, a grain analyst with Shenyin Securities. Chinese planners subsidize grain production and this has led to discrepancies between international and domestic prices of rice. While global prices of rice have soared, China's domestic prices have remained stable. "There has been no incentive to sell the rice stocks," Zhao says.
In 2007, China produced more than 501.5 million tons of grain, almost level with the nation's annual consumption of 510 million tons, according to official statistics. Chinese officials have vowed to keep the nation's grain output stable and above 500 million tons to cope with rising global grain prices. But analysts say even a stable grain output in China could do little to slow down global price surges as the country is already a net grain importer.
Last year, China imported 31 million tons of grain, or 22 million tons more than what it exported. The bulk of the total imports were soybeans.
"[The Chinese] have sacrificed their self-sufficiency in soybeans in order to preserve land and water for other crops," says Brown, predicting it is only a matter of time before Beijing moves to the world markets for grain as it has done with soybeans.
"China only needs to import 10 percent of its grain consumption to influence markets greatly," he reckons.
The devastation caused by the grade-8 Sichuan earthquake on May 12 has also heightened speculations that Beijing may take further steps to restrict its exports to rein in inflation and ensure domestic supplies.
"More restrictions on grain exports would hurt China's ability to assume its leading role of a big country in the current crisis," cautions Mei Xinyu, researcher with the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, under the ministry of commerce. "The side effects of further tightening of exports would be significant and there will be more harm than benefit."
The impact of Asia's export curbs has already provoked riots in Africa and Haiti, places that depend on cheap food imports. The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts that high prices and export restrictions will cut the volume of rice traded internationally by 9 percent in 2008, which will drive prices even higher.
At the ongoing food summit in Rome, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pressed nations around the world to ease a wide range of export bans and import tariffs to help millions of poor cope with the highest food prices in 30 years.

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"And those who resisted were dragged out from their homes. This necklace was fashioned out of their teeth and bones."

Fuck off the us of a is the greatest country in the world!

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I am very good at photo editing and thats why I joined RIU. I though I could make friends here if everyone though I was a grower. Every pic I have every posted was for you, I made thos photos with things I had around the house, edited to have marijuana in each photo.

The US was the greatest country in the world, but now we're going downhill so fast there is actually a whistling sound........

better late than never.

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i'm the guy i've always wanted to be

That EMP pulse will erase everything on magnetic data storage devices (hard drives)...

This info is ooold.

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"And those who resisted were dragged out from their homes. This necklace was fashioned out of their teeth and bones."

NO not EMP ACK!! my Hard drive!!! That's were I keep my Video Games ARRRG!!

Really I would bet if a bomb goes off it would serve as a real nice distraction from whats happening with the economy and the destruction of the dollar. This is the end of US hegemonic control of the world now we can make peace or destroy the planet, Our Choice.

The end of US hedgemony, arrrggggg, that's a hard pill to swallow. Geeze, think of all that military money we could inject into the domestic economy, a chicken in every pot. I think the elites actually get off on their contention they are better than everyone else, I think it's time to pass out the shovels and potato peelers, let them get a feel for the rest of us.

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.