Vatican Official Tied To BP, Goldman Sachs And Media Censorship In The Oil Fiasco.. Goldman Sachs Knew BP Oil Rig Would be Hit?

News unfolding from the oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico has linked media censorship to investment bankers at Goldman Sachs (GS) stewarding the Vatican’s wealth, and increasing evidence that the explosion was intended.

A near total news blackout from independent sources, and arrests of anyone caught photographing and filming the devastation, show the Halliburton-British Petrolium (BP) oil crisis is being criminally controlled, implicating some of Wall Street’s heaviest hitters.

According to a report issued by frightened, yet faithful, documentary filmmaker, James Fox, interviewed from the Gulf’s Grand Isles by Mel Fabregas on the Internet’s Veritas Radio Show, “There is a complete media blackout” on news coverage broadcast from the region.

“They are arresting people with cameras and anyone off camera that is caught talking to a reporter,” Fox testified.

Another reporter told Fox,”You call this a free country? Right here, in the United States of America, there’s no freedom of press. There’s no freedom of speech. They’re closing down the airspace above the oil spill, so reporter’s can’t fly over to determine how bad these oil plumes really are.”

Suspicious pieces of this deadly puzzle feature Halliburton, the world’s second largest oil field services company, headquartered in Houston and Dubai, whose negligence is blamed for the timely and profitable explosion.

Three weeks before the “natural gas leak,” the George Bush/Dick Cheney 9-11-linked Halliburton company negotiated the purchase of the world’s largest oil-spill cleanup firm (Boots & Coots) at the exact time keen observers on Wall Street–financial intelligence agents at Goldman Sachs (GS; often called “Government Sachs”)–unloaded 44% of their stock in BP.

These facts parallel the shorting of airline stocks by those in the know prior to the World Trade Center (WTC) 9-11 attacks that new scientific evidence proves were followed by building demolitions, given the red thermite incendiary powder found everywhere around ground zero.

The WTC lessor, Larry Silverstein, partnered with Lloyd Blankfein of GS in the little known Partnership for New York City (PFNYC), took out a General Electric insurance policy just six weeks before the attacks. PFNYC “partners,” in charge of assessing financial damages to NYC, and reconstruction plans for the WTC, obviously “veered” insurance payoffs and additional private equity investments to Las Vegas for the construction of the 9-11 memorial–speciously called the “Veer Towers” in the “New World Center.” (Watch PHARMAWHORES, the movie; 1-888-508-4787.)

Blankfein, the PFNYC Co-Chairman and GS CEO, was barraged with indictments and rising media infamy regarding Goverment Sachs’s conflicting interests effectively demolishing the US economy through the “shorting” of the housing industry–scrutiny suspended by Halliburton’s oil rig synchronously exploding most profitably for GS and its CEO.

GS is covertly invested in the Bush-Cheney-linked Halliburton Company according to veteran observers. GS and Halliburton both had massive financial incentives to cause the profitable explosions–the three 9-11 WTC building demolitions, and the most recent “accident” in the Gulf.

The media’s gross neglect of the full extent of the crisis obviously supports GS’s damage control and incriminating connections. These include Blankfein’s PFNYC Co-Chairman, Rupert Murdoch, and their pernicious influence over the major networks and the PFNYC–the world’s leading petrochemical-pharmaceutical-biotechnology consortium profiting from death, disease, and environmental destruction. This unholy alliance best explains the media’s aversion to responsible reporting in the Gulf and elsewhere.

Besides Blankfein and Government Sachs backing stock in both BP and Halliburton, another red oil-drenched herring is Peter D. Sutherland–the outgoing Chairman of BP is also the current Non-Executive Chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

The scariest part of this whole story is that Mr. Sutherland, the man standing with one foot in GS, and the other on the burning Halliburton-BP oil rig, is the Consultor of the Extraordinary Section of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See. In other words, Sutherland is the chief financial adviser to the Pope.

In 2010, Mr. Sutherland finished a 13-year stint as Chairman of BP, Europe’s largest oil company. A former Attorney General of Ireland, he is President of the Federal Trust for Education and Research, a British think tank whose efforts might better be called corporatist indoctrination than trustworthy “education.” He is Chairman of The Ireland Fund of Great Britain, and a member of the advisory council of Business for New Europe–a pro-New-World-Order European think-tank based in Britain.

From 1993-95, Sutherland was the Director-General of the World Trade Organization.

In January 2006, the current Non-executive Chairman of Goldman Sachs International, was appointed by United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, as his Special Representative for Migration.

Now, ironically, Sutherland’s mission impossible is to migrate marine flora and fauna, fisherman, and coastal residents out of harms way in this spreading international emergency.

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Goldman Sachs Knew BP Oil Rig Would be Hit?
NO JOKE: GOLDMAN SACHS SHORTED GULF OF MEXICO

from:Pure Energy Systems News

http://www.pesn.com/2010/05/9501645/No_joke–Goldman_Sachs_shorted_TransOcean/

It turns out that Goldman Sachs really did place shorts on TransOcean stock days before the explosions rocked the rig in the Gulf of Mexico sending stocks plunging while GS profits soared — benefitting once again from a huge disaster, having done the same with airline stocks prior to 911 then again with the housing bubble.

Goldman Sachs sold $250 million of BP stock before spill – Firm’s stock sale nearly twice as large as any other institution; Represented 44 percent of total BP investment (RawStory; June 2, 2010)

by Sterling D. Allan
Pure Energy Systems News

On Apr. 30, the Huffington Post published a story stating:

In what is looming as another public relations predicament for Goldman Sachs, the banking giant admitted today that it made “a substantial financial bet against the Gulf of Mexico” one day before the sinking of an oil rig in that body of water.

The new revelations came to light after government investigators turned up new emails from Goldman employee Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre in which he bragged to a girlfriend that the firm was taking a “big short” position on the Gulf.

“One oil rig goes down and we’re going to be rolling in dough,” Mr. Tourre wrote in one email. “Suck it, fishies and birdies!” ………………

see:

NB Someone just has hacked this link. The website is:
http://www.pesn.com
———————————————–
THE GREAT AMERICAN BUBBLE

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression – and they’re about to do it again.

By MATT TAIBBI (said to have worked on Wall Street for 26 years)

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush’s last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup – which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson.

There’s John Thain, the rear end in a top hat chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain’s sorry company.
And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There’s Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board.

The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman – not to mention …
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain – an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere – high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts.

All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth – pure profit for rich individuals.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage.

Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s – and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet. …

IF AMERICA IS NOW CIRCLING THE DRAIN, GOLDMAN SACHS HAS FOUND A WAY TO BE THAT DRAIN.

BUBBLE #1 – THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Goldman wasn’t always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids – just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to small-time vendors in downtown Manhattan.

You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman’s first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there’s really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman’s disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s.

This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an “investment trust.” Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player.
Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game.

Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investment-trust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hog-wild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund – which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation.

In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah – which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.
The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line ….
read more at:
http://www.rollingstone.com/

Goldman Sachs, BP, Enron, Iran Hype and the End of the 'Oil Printing' Scam

It appears that BP and Goldman Sachs have been literally ‘printing oil’ for a decade using Enron-style commodity futures contracts, says Chris Cook, former compliance and market supervision director of the International Petroleum Exchange.

Their profit has come at the expense of other players in the oil trade: from market brokers to businesses and gas consumers. But the game is up, with only the hype over a potential war with Iran holding up a market primed to implode from falling demand.

How has this manipulation been achieved?

By means of prepay transactions: a form of financing, structured as a commodity trade, which can be made to look as if it is cash flow from operations. Investors prepay for physical oil. The producer lends oil to the investor, and the investor lends dollars to the producer. The temporary ownership rights created and sold to investors via intermediaries such as Goldman Sachs essentially enable a producer to act as a private oil bank ‘printing oil’.

How does printing oil affect the market?

In early 2009, risk averse money poured into the oil producers, allowing them demand higher prices from refiners, and thus driving forward contracts higher in a ‘super-contango’.

Traders began to buy oil, and to sell it forward, since the contango difference in price enabled them to pay to insure and finance the oil; to lease tank storage, and even to charter the fleets of tankers which sat as floating storage off the UK coast through spring and summer 2009.

Passive investors, for their part, lose money in such a contango market, because the oil lease contracts are rolled over from month to month at a loss to them, since they would (say) sell June delivery oil contracts which they are in no position to perform, and have to buy July delivery oil contracts at a higher price.

It is this continuing loss to long term fund investors which funds the ‘contango trade’ of the arbitrageur traders who charter the tankers.

And what does this imply for the direction of oil prices?

There have been two outflows of passive investment from the market, firstly in September 2011 when sentiment turned in favour of T-Bills as safe haven. The second was in December 2011, following the MF Global problem.

In each case we have seen the physical market go into backwardation, and in my view the record deliveries by the Saudis may be explained by an urgent desire to sell inventory returned to their ownership at high prices before the collapse they know is on the way.

But the exit of passive investors from the market has yet to have the effect it did in late 2008 when the price collapsed to $35/barrel from the high of $147/barrel. The reason is that the current noise and rhetoric re Iran has firstly attracted refiners, who have purchased oil forward, and possibly even prepaid, because they fear prices will rise.

This forced up the physical price of oil in the current ‘spike’ which will further kill off demand, while speculators have poured into the market to buy futures contracts, which producers have been only too happy to sell, in order to lock in high prices and insure against a collapse.

It is only a matter of time before this spike ends as the market turns, and at this point there is literally nothing holding the market up.

Recession reality: oil demand is collapsing:

Falling demand for products in the US and EU has seen massive closures of refineries, to the extent that some 2m barrels per day of US East Coast refining capacity has closed. In a nutshell, demand in the West is dropping like a stone. In my view much of demand in the East (if not wishful thinking and hand waving by analysts) is financial, being the building of strategic reserves and refinery stocks as a physical hedge.

It will be seen that the effect of Prepay on the oil market has been to create a parallel financial market in ‘paper oil’ which means that most participants are completely misled as to the true state of the market.

If my analysis of the oil market is correct, many if not all prepay transactions have been terminated in recent months as passive investors have pulled out and the market has become free again of Dark Inventory. However the oil price has been kept inflated by a massive wave of speculative buying attracted by rhetoric and noise about Iran.

If he’s right, it’s likely the ‘Big Boys’ have used time bought by the Iran smokescreen to position themselves on the other side of the oil trade in anticipation of another oil price down spike. (Perhaps that was the whole idea of the media’s Iran hysteria 😉

Their timing may be tied to Greek debt insurance and a market realization that the global economy is floundering. Oil prices fell today after Iran agreed to let international nuclear inspectors into its facilities.

If oil crashes to $75 a barrel, the lower energy costs would give a shot in the arm to consumers and save the bacon of a banking system hooked on growth –however modest– to keep kicking the financial can down the road.

All this would also enable QE’x’ with lower inflation.

Who says markets are engineered?

 

Goldman Sachs sold $250 million of BP stock before spill

 

Firm’s stock sale nearly twice as large as any other institution; Represented 44 percent of total BP investment

The brokerage firm that’s faced the most scrutiny from regulators in the past year over the shorting of mortgage related securities seems to have had good timing when it came to something else: the stock of British oil giant BP.

According to regulatory filings, RawStory.com has found that Goldman Sachs sold 4,680,822 shares of BP in the first quarter of 2010. Goldman’s sales were the largest of any firm during that time. Goldman would have pocketed slightly more than $266 million if their holdings were sold at the average price of BP’s stock during the quarter.

If Goldman had sold these shares today, their investment would have lost 36 percent its value, or $96 million. The share sales represented 44 percent of Goldman’s holdings — meaning that Goldman’s remaining holdings have still lost tens of millions in value.

The sale and its size itself isn’t unusual for a large asset management firm. Wall Street brokerages routinely buy and sell huge blocks of shares for themselves and their clients. In light of a recent SEC lawsuit arguing that Goldman kept information about a product they sold from their clients, however, the stock sale may raise fresh concern among Goldman’s critics. Goldman is also a frequent target of liberals and journalists, including Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi, who famously dubbed the firm a “vampire squid.”

Two calls placed to Goldman Sachs’ media office in New York Wednesday morning after US markets opened were not immediately returned, though Raw Story decided to publish the story quickly after the calls since the stock sale had been already noted online.

Others also sold stock

Other asset management firms also sold huge blocks of BP stock in the first quarter — but their sales were a fraction of Goldman’s. Wachovia, which is owned by Wells Fargo, sold 2,667,419 shares; UBS, the Swiss bank, sold 2,125,566 shares.

Wachovia and UBS also sold much larger percentages of their BP stock, at 98 percently and 97 percent respectively.

Wachova parent Wells Fargo, however, bought 2.3 million shares in the quarter, largely discounting Wachovia’s sales.

Those reported buying BP’s stock included Wellington Management, a large asset firm, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

BP is struggling to cap a massive oil leak at one of its drill sites in the Gulf of Mexico. The firm’s myriad safety violations over the years have come to light in lieu of the Gulf disaster.

BP traded on average at $56.86 in the first quarter, according to GuruFocus, a site that monitors the major trading moves of prominent investors. A list of major institutions’ sales of BP stock are available at the market research website Morningstar.

It’s certainly unknown as to why the firms sold their holdings. In its analysis of the company in mid-March, Morningstar, the market research site, gave the company an average rating of three out of a possible five stars.

“BP’s valuation carries more uncertainty than ExxonMobil’s or Shell’s because the firm is less integrated, with more of its earnings coming from the [exploration and production] business than from potentially offsetting refining operations,” the site’s analyst wrote. “Like its peers, a sustained drop in oil and gas prices can hurt upstream earnings. Lower crude-oil feedstock costs could help refining margins, but refined product pricing lags could quickly swing refining profits to losses. BP’s global business faces potential disruptions caused by political risks, particularly with its heavy exposure to Russia. Disruptions caused by environmental and operational constraints could further limit earnings potential.”

The transnational oil company, like other energy giants, was hit with lower oil and gas prices in the past year after the price of oil surged in 2008.

“BP’s fourth quarter marked another quarter of year-over-year production gains, with a 3% increase thanks to new field startups,” Morningstar’s analyst wrote in another note, after BP turned in better than expected fourth quarter results in February. “BP reported fourth-quarter replacement cost profit of $3.4 billion, up 33% from year-ago earnings of $2.6 billion, as upstream earnings growth was more than enough to offset downstream weakness. For the full year, BP’s earnings of $14 billion were 45% below year-ago earnings of $26 billion, in part because of lower oil prices earlier in the year. We’re encouraged by BP’s sequential earnings gains as new projects and cost-cutting efforts drive upstream results.”

The SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Goldman Sachs and one of its vice presidents in April, asserting that the firm had committed fraud by misrepresenting a mortgage-investment product inherently designed to fail. The company helped a hedge fund trader create a mortgage investment that gained value as mortgage borrowers defaulted en masse.

In response, Goldman said the SEC’s charges were “completely unfounded in law and fact” and averred that it would “vigorously contest them and defend the firm and its reputation.”

The firm has also faced criticism over giant bonuses paid to staff amidst the US financial crisis. Goldman reduced the sizes of its staff bonuses this year to $16.9 billion, and said it would pay its chief executive $9 million, far less than the previous year.

Goldman also announced it would create a $500 million program to help small businesses. Critics noted that the figure represented just 3% of the bonus pool.

Source: Raw Story (http://s.tt/1d8nY)

 

 

Turkey, Libya ink deal after Iran oil woes: WW3 or just oil biz

Turkey to cut purchases of Iran oil by 10 percent: energy minister

Turkey will reduce the amount of oil it buys from Iran by around 10 percent, Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said Friday, a week after Washington warned Iran’s customers they could be subject to U.S. sanctions unless they significantly cut purchases.

Turkey will partly replace the oil with 1 million tons it expects to buy from Libya, Yildiz told reporters. The country is also in talks with Saudi Arabia on spot oil purchases and longer term contacts, Yildiz added.

“We plan to increase the number and the route of countries we buy oil from,” Yildiz said.

Turkey imports around 200,000 barrels per day of oil from Iran, representing 30 percent of its total imports and more than 7 percent of Iran’s oil exports.

Having been omitted from a list of countries granted exemptions by Washington, Turkey remained hopeful of obtaining a waiver to avoid U.S. financial sanctions.

The United States exempted Japan and 10 EU nations from sanctions because they have significantly cut purchases of Iranian crude oil, but left Iran’s top customers China and India exposed to the possibility of such steps.

Turkey’s sole refiner Tupras, a unit of Koc Holding, said in a statement to the Istanbul stock exchange that it would cut its purchases of Iranian crude by 20 percent.

Tupras is the main Turkish customer, currently buying some 30 percent of its crude oil from the Islamic Republic, and it has a 9 million ton annual purchase contract.

Koc Energy Group chairman Erol Memioglu told reporters last month that the existing Tupras oil contract with Iran would end in August.

He said that he expected more clarity on the details of the sanctions in May, before Washington’s measures on oil-related transactions take effect on June 28.

Both the United States and the European Union have imposed unilateral sanctions against Iran’s financial and energy sectors over its nuclear program, whereas Turkey has said it is only compelled to observe the softer U.N. sanctions.

Trade between Turkey and Iran has risen sharply over the past decade, leading to Turkey being regarded as a possible weak link in the international sanctions against Iran.

Turkey has struck a new contract to buy oil from Libya, and has held talks with Saudi Arabia about possible supplies over the past few months.

Iran says its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes, and denies that it is building weapons. A meeting between Iranian nuclear negotiators and representatives of six major powers is expected on April 13, with Istanbul a possible venue for the talks.

Libya’s Economy Minister Ahmed al-Koshli said yesterday that his country wants to benefit from the technology Turkey possesses, speaking in the “Energy, Economy and Sustainable Development” session of the Eurasian Economic Summit.

“The know-how and experience Turkey has is very important for us. We want Turkey to share its experiences with Libya,” he said, adding that his country is working on integrating with the global economy. Al-Koshli also said Libya’s bourse is now open. “Free Libya wants to learn about environmentally friendly technologies, especially solar and wind energy, so that we will have the opportunity to export clean energy to Europe and other countries.”

Meanwhile, Mohammad Reza Farzin, Iran’s deputy minister of economy and finance, said Iran’s government has decided to initiate reforms in the areas of energy prices and economic development.

Unfair distribution

Iran is the 17th largest economy in the world, with its $930 billion GDP, according to data from the International Monetary Fund, Farzin said. The country has the second largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world.

Keeping energy prices artificially low leads to unfair income distribution, energy smuggling and higher energy consumption, Farzin said, adding that if the current rate of increase in energy consumption in Iran continues for the next 20 years, the country will consume all the oil it produces.

Turkey has struck a 1 million ton oil supply deal with Libya after reducing imports of Iranian crude under pressure from the United States and the international community, the Turkish energy minister said yesterday.

Turkey’s oil refiner Tüpraş agreed to the deal with Libya and has also started negotiations with Saudi Arabia for a long-term contract, Yıldız said.

The move comes after the United States said earlier that it would exempt seven emerging economies, including Turkey, from tough new sanctions after they cut oil supplies from Iran. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added India, Malaysia, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Taiwan to the list of those exempt from the sanctions.

However, Reuters quoted a U.S. diplomat as saying that Turkey’s position did not stem from an exemption but was an exception. Tüpraş may pay 180 days more to the Iranian central bank over Turkey’s Halkbank, the diplomat said. The U.S. was observing whether Turkey would renew an oil contract with the Islamic republic by the end of August, the agency also quoted him as saying.

Source

BP,Lockerbie,Libya,Iran and Syria: here is part of the deal

Senators demand criminal probe of BP’s Lockerbie connection

US senators are demanding that BP face a criminal investigation into its role in freeing convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi last year. New York Democrat Charles Schumer joined with victims’ relatives to call for a probe into BP’s “blood money” in the Lockerbie case. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also called on Scottish and British authorities to review the circumstances that led Scotland to release al-Megrahi in 2009.

State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters that Clinton issued the letter in response to the one from the senators. The issue has sparked outrage a series of letters among the senators, Clinton, Britain’s Ambassador to the US Nigel Sheinwald and Foreign Secretary William Hague. Crowley said Hague sent Clinton a letter in recent days. “[H]e has found no basis to that suggestion that BP in any way influenced the Megrahi decision. Whatever lobbying that they [i.e., BP] did was within the context of the prisoner transfer agreement,” he said.

BP acknowledges that it pressed the British government to sign a prisoner transfer agreement with Libya—just as the energy giant had a $900 million oil exploration agreement with Tripoli. Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, son of Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi also admitted that Libya pressed Britain for Megrahi’s return during trade talks. In televised comments comments last year he told Megrahi that “in all the trade, oil and gas deals which I have supervised, you were there on the table.”

The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold a public hearing next week on the circumstances surrounding Megrahi’s release. Lawmakers said the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster shows that BP puts “profits ahead of people.” (Daily Mail, CNS News, July 20; VOA, July 19)

The Lockerbie case remains an obstacle to normalization of US ties with Libya. But in the renewed coverage of the case, nobody seems to recall the Orwellian revisionism that has characterized this case. Paul Foot asserted in The Guardian on March 31, 2004:

[T]he Lockerbie bombing was carried out not by Libyans at all but by terrorists based in Syria and hired by Iran to avenge the shooting down in the summer of 1988 of an Iranian civil airliner by a US warship. This was the line followed by both British and US police and intelligence investigators after Lockerbie. Through favoured newspapers like the Sunday Times, the investigators named the suspects—some of whom had been found with home-made bombs similar to the one used at Lockerbie.

This line of inquiry persisted until April 1989, when a phone call from President Bush senior to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned her not to proceed with it. A year later, British and US armed forces prepared for an attack on Saddam Hussein’s occupying forces in Kuwait. Their coalition desperately needed troops from an Arab country. These were supplied by Syria, which promptly dropped out of the frame of Lockerbie suspects. Libya, not Syria or Iran, mysteriously became the suspect country, and in 1991 the US drew up an indictment against two Libyan suspects. The indictment was based on the “evidence” of a Libyan “defector”, handsomely paid by the CIA.

In a Jan. 31, 2001 retrospective on the Lockerbie affair, the BBC recalls Poppy Bush’s words at the moment the official rewriting of history took place: Syria had a “bum rap.”

Source

This essay will explain why two countries, Libya and Syria – and two leaders, Muammar al-Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad – that have been very similar regarding divisiveness in their regional and international relations, have elicited two very different reactions from the international community over the past year. I will begin by comparing the international relations of the two states over the past few decades, in an attempt to both identify respective alliances each might have, and to highlight the equally deleterious effects that some policies have had in the region. I will then offer four reasons that intervention was deemed appropriate in Libya: a weak security apparatus, comparatively weak alliances, excitable and inconsistent foreign policies, and unique circumstances for intervention. This is in stark comparison to Syria’s situation where intervention is still unforthcoming: a loyal security apparatus, very strong alliances with Russia and Iran, strategic importance in the peace-process with Israel, and their influence over Hezbollah. I will finally offer a complementary explanation that asserts that the recent popularity of Islamist political parties, emanating from democratic elections in Tunisia and Egypt, is being viewed cautiously by Israel, the region’s superpower and beacon of democracy. A similar outcome in Syria could prove detrimental to their security. The question I will be attempting to answer is why for two countries so similar, one seems to have had the towel thrown in, and the other has been left to go a few more rounds.

On September 1, 1969, following a military coup, Muammar al-Gaddafi seized power in Libya. For the next 42 years he would be the de facto leader of the State until the UN-authorised intervention in 2011. Describing Gaddafi’s time in power, Luis Martinez tells us that he:

“…very much wanted to achieve the role of a major international actor, but the inconsistencies in his foreign policies, his frequent antagonism toward neighbouring countries, his support for radical, fringe groups, and his inability to rally Arab or African support for his more extreme positions have consistently undercut his efforts at leadership beyond Libya’s borders” (Martinez, 2011: 566-567).

The first thirty years of Gaddafi’s rule were consistent with this analysis. The Libyan leader defined his foreign policy through “hostility towards the West and Israel, his promotion of Arab unity schemes, and the exertion of Libyan influence over its neighbours” (Martinez, 2011: 567). He was a supporter of terrorism and financed and armed groups as far and wide as the IRA in Northern Ireland (Davis, 1990: 10), and rebel factions throughout Africa – in Chad, Sudan, Tunisia and Mauritania (Martinez, 2011:567). In an effort to cement Libya’s place at the top of Arab politics, Gaddafi took a hard line approach to the issue of Israel. Here, again, Gaddafi financed militants and aided the Palestinians via “funds, bases, and training” (Martinez, 2011: 567). Setting it apart from other Arab states, Libya opposed the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords in 1993 (Martinez, 2011: 567). However, in the late 1990s, Gaddafi’s stance softened. He eased relations with Israel and the Palestinian Authority, reduced tensions with the United States and began again to hold some sway in the international arena. Surprisingly, just days after the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. in 2001, Gaddafi “declared that the United States had the right to take reprisals against terrorist attacks” (Martinez, 2011: 569) and on foot of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Muhamad Chalgam (effectively, the Libyan foreign minister) “publicly announced that the Libyan government would disclose and end all of its unconventional weapons programs” (Martinez, 2011: 569). Such back-tracking in foreign policy came at the same time that Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, was handed over for trial. In 2009, he was released back to Libya as the British government acknowledged that their commercial interests via British Petroleum played a role in the decision to release Megrahi.[1] Since 1988, Gaddafi and Libya had been placed under constraints from United Nations and US sanctions. At the same time, the Soviet Union, Libya’s “wary patron and supplier of arms”, collapsed; this left Libya further isolated from the global community and “increased the danger to Libya of maintaining a radical foreign policy” (Martinez, 2011: 567). Libya’s relations with its Arab neighbours fractured at this point as the Arab League acted in indifference to the sanctions imposed again Libya by the international community. As a result, Arab nationalism in Libya dimmed somewhat. Gaddafi’s relationships with his neighbours has deteriorated in recent years, with some Arab States accusing him of pandering to the US with his decision to abandon Libya’s weapons programs (Martinez, 2011: 571). Just two years after the Libya-UK deal to release Megrahi, with Gaddafi seemingly neutered on the international stage he faced civil uprising from rebel forces domestically, Libya found itself the focus of a UN intervention. Unlike Rwanda and Srebrenica before it, Benghazi was spared much notoriety, as Gaddafi’s forces were stopped before their march on the rebel-held city. Since then, rebels have killed Gaddafi and Libya has been freed from his enigmatic 42-year reign.

Throughout Gaddafi’s time of rule in Libya, there was a parallel father-son leadership in Syria. Hafiz al-Assad reigned from 1970 until 2000, when Bashar as-Assad took over. Hafiz inherited a Syria grieving over the loss of territory in the Golan Heights to Israel and set about turning Syria “from a victim into an actor in regional politics” (Hinnebusch, 2011: 691). He made it his mission to reclaim those Golan Heights militarily. In the process, he made alliances with the Soviet Union (which would transcend communism) and Egypt (which would collapse following the 1973 failure to recapture the Golan Heights). Hafiz focused his efforts in the late 1970s on Lebanon; intervening there, he “used the civil war to insert Syria as Lebanon’s arbiter” (Hinnebusch, 2011: 692) and made up for losing Egypt as an ally. Hafiz realized that:

“…whoever controlled Lebanon was in a strong position to control the PLO; hence the Palestinian card: Syria’s bargaining leverage in the Arab-Israeli conflict would be greatly enhanced if it could veto any settlement of the Palestinian problem that left Syria out and overcome rejectionist Palestinian resistance to an acceptable settlement” (Hinnebusch, 2011: 692).

In 1979 yet another opportunity for alliance presented itself to Syria, when Iran revolted and transformed into a “fiercely anti-Zionist state” (Hinnebusch, 2011: 692). 1990-1991 saw Syria enter peace negotiations with Israel and attach itself to the Western-led coalition in the Gulf war. This resulted in “US and Israeli tolerance of Assad’s further military intervention in Lebanon to consolidate a Pax Syriana” (Hinnebusch, 2011: 693). Unlike Gaddafi’s wavering foreign policy, this ploy by Hafiz had set in motion a relationship that solidified Syrian security for years. Hafiz needed the US to “accept Syria as the key to peace and stability in the Middle East”, and the Gulf war was such an opportunity to “trade membership in the anti-Iraq US coalition…for US promises to broker an acceptable Arab-Israeli settlement after the war” (Hinnebusch, 2011: 694). Hafiz’s ability to create such an alliance while keeping relations with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas is telling.

When Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000 he inherited a regional power structure where Turkey and Israel were aligned. In order to counteract this, Bashar employed non-conventional defense strategies: “reliance on Hezbollah’s capacity to engage forces in asymmetric warfare and investment in missiles with chemical warheads in hardened sites that targeted Israel” (Hinnebusch, 2011: 695). Following the meeting of Bashar and US President Bill Clinton in 2000, peace talks between Syria and Israel broke down and Syria aligned itself fully with Iran. The foreign policy of Bashar al-Asad mirrors, once again, those of Muammar al-Gaddafi, by promoting terror. Following the breakdown of the peace-talks, Syria supported the Palestinian intifada and “allowed Hamas and Islamic Jihad to maintain offices in Syria, even though these groups were involved in suicide bombings in Israel”, and also Hezbollah’s operations in Lebanon, including massive assistance in the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel conflict (Hinnebusch, 2011: 695). US-Syrian relations diminished at this time with the rise of both Bashar and the neoconservatives in the US. The US saw Syria as a threat to the region, as Syria was aligning itself with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in early 2001. However, Bashar has outlasted both United States President George W. Bush and the ‘neocons.’ Another area of concern for the West was Syria’s close ties with Hezbollah in Lebanon, where Syria has vital security interests, with “each supporting the other against common enemies” and where Hezbollah’s “proven ability to confront Israel was a pivotal part of the Israeli-Syrian power balance” (Hinnebusch, 2011: 698). As relations between Syria and Turkey thawed and Syria made closer alliances with Iran, by 2009:

“…Syria had managed to position itself between two networks: on the one hand, it was still part of the Iran-led “resistance axis” and had developed diverse economic connections in Asia and renewed security and economic relations with Russia; on the other hand, it revived the option to lean toward a West-centric camp that included Saudi Arabia and the ‘moderate’ Arabs and was manifest in Turkish-sponsored peace talks with Israel; closer relations with Western Europe, symbolized by the detente with France; and a cautious improvement in relations with the United States under the new administration of Barack Obama” (Hinnebusch, 2011: 700).

2011-2012 has seen huge social uprising in Syria, however, against the Bashar al-Assad regime. The violence returned by Assad against his civilian opponents has been “if anything, even worse than Gaddafi’s” (Evans, 2011: 41). Yet intervention has not been forthcoming, in contrast with Libya, where after 250 deaths and Gaddafi’s vow to go “‘house-to house’…the next day NATO began bombing” (O’Connell, 2011: 15).

Having seen the similarities in both the Libyan and Syrian regimes’ abrasive foreign policies over the years, it begs the question why one state has been treated differently by the international community than the other. I argue that those very same foreign policies play a vital role in how the international community perceives the state of the nations. Firstly, while Gaddafi’s main influence in supporting terror has been financial and vocal, his standing army and security apparatus were weak enough to allow the world to see a crumbling state when rebel forces began their uprising. Had a stronger security apparatus been in place, the perception of stability would have been enhanced. In Libya, “internal fracturing and conflict are partly attributable to the relationship between the regime and the army and security forces,” specifically “within the army – a weak institution – and within the parliamentary and security organizations” (Dalacoura, 2012: 70). Secondly, as illustrated above, due to Gaddafi’s tumultuous international relations, he garnered himself very few political allies. The stage was, therefore, set for the international community to oust Gaddafi fairly easily if the opportunity occurred. It is curious, however, that the international community distanced itself from Gaddafi at a time when he was in the twilight of his aggressor years, so to speak. I have, above, shown how his foreign policies towards his regional neighbours and the West became significantly more amicable in the 2000s:

“Not long ago, Libya’s leader [Gaddafi] signed friendship treaties and trade deals with major Western leaders and was praised for his active cooperation with European partners in the fight against terrorism and illegal migration” (Colombo & Tocci, 2012: 78).

Why then the abandonment of their ‘ally’? For the same historical reasons, the international community could not trust Gaddafi. His track record of whimsical and often contradictory foreign policies outlined above show that his support could not be counted on and, while playing nice with the West in more recent years, it would have been interesting to see what direction his foreign policies took towards his neighbours’ in the midst of the Arab Spring had he not had his own domestic issues. This is especially interesting as his neighbours already chastised him for pandering to the United States in 2001. As such, the stage was irrevocably set for an international community disillusioned after four decades of dealing with an unpredictable, terrorism-promoting aggravator to remove him from power. Finally, the opportunity presented to the international community was unique: “The Libyan military had a very limited capability, the terrain was extremely favourable to an aerial campaign and the international community was united in its resolve” (Shanahan, 2012). This is in contrast with Syria where:

“The Syrian opposition controls no territory, can not confidently claim the support of a majority of the Syrian population, and until recently has refused to call for international intervention. Syria’s terrain, alliances and location make for a radically different strategic environment than Libya’s, and everyone recognizes that a No-Fly Zone in the Syrian case would immediately mean a larger-scale military intervention which nobody wants. The difficulties posed by Syria’s bloodbath are real, then, and the policy choices excruciating” (Lynch, 2011).

In examining Syria, and the reasons for non-intervention thus far, I will frame my explanation around the same structure as that of Libya: perception emanating from security apparatus, alliances, and international relations. One of the most staggering differences between Libya and Syria is that because of Syria’s hard line against Israel over the years and proud national identity, Bashar al-Assad has received mass popularity until late. What is more is that Assad’s regime has been proven to adapt. Heydemann & Leenders describe Syria as a state of recombinant authoritarianism, in which the regime has the ability to “modify their practices as circumstances change, to accommodate seemingly contradictory policies, to balance competing demands, and sustain diverse ruling conditions” (Heydemann & Leenders, 2011: 4). While it would be foolish to suggest that Assad’s legitimacy is not now being called into question, due to the strength and direction of Syria’s foreign policy down the years the cracks may not have appeared as significant to the international community as they did in Libya:

“…the Syrian regime had a residue of popular legitimacy not enjoyed by fellow autocrats in the region, which derived from its foreign policy and, in particular, its ‘resistance’ to Israel and the West.” (Colombo & Tocci, 2012: 77)

This, coupled with the assistance of Iranian security forces in quelling the protests, has proven to be a much more stable security apparatus than the one Gaddafi held.[2] Dalacoura writes that it is the continuing ties held between “the Alawite regime and the army and security forces in Syria – and the security forces’ exercise of elaborate mechanisms of control over state institutions and society” that explain Assad’s ability to hold on to power (Dalacoura, 2012: 70). Iran, however, is not the only strategic alliance held by Syria. Heydemann writes that “leading authoritarian states such as Russia and China…have far greater capacity to constrain and limit the effects of Western support for democracy” than before (Heydemann, 2012: 26). This is true, as it is these two states that are casting the veto on intervening in Syria. One shared reason is their intimate tie to the country, formed by Hafiz al-Assad and strengthened by Bashar. This level of global alliance is in contrast to anything Muammar al-Gaddafi could have imagined. Russia, in particular, cannot stand to lose Syria as an ally. Having already lost billions in arms deals, similar events in Libya would prove detrimental, alongside the fact that Syria offers the Russians their only naval base on the Mediterranean. An intervention in Syria would result in effective Russian expulsion from the region, a catastrophic blow to economy, security, politics and pride (Shanahan, 2011).

Syria’s role in the Arab-Israeli peace-process is extremely important. This role is most certainly a factor in the international community’s decision not to intervene militarily in Syria. The mutual necessity with the United States created by Syria has, so far, not buckled entirely. Syria has always seen the US as a “necessary broker that alone could bring Israel into a peace settlement,” while Syria has placed itself in a position so that the US views an “Israeli-Syrian peace as pivotal to completing the ‘circle of peace’ around Israel and empowering moderate forces in the region” (Hinnebusch, 2011: 696). The sway held with Hezbollah in this regard, and Syria’s ability to use them to extraordinary effect as agents in a proxy war against, Israel is also an issue. Dalacoura writes that an overthrow of the Assad regime would be hugely detrimental to both Hezbollah and Iran (Dalacoura, 2012: 76-77). All of these factors are a direct result of the steps taken in Syrian foreign policy since the beginning of the Hafiz al-Assad regime in the 1970s. They offer a stark contrast to Gaddafi’s history of international relations.

In offering an alternative argument to the previous one, there are those who believe that the potential for Islamist parties to come to the fore in the aftermath of the Arab Spring is rising. It follows that this is why the West is perhaps easing away from military intervention in Syria until these countries see how Tunisia and Egypt begin to act in the region under new, potentially Islamist, rule (Springborg, 2012: 43). Heydemann & Leenders remark that, as such, Western support for political reform in the region “has been marked by timidity, a disinclination to alienate pro-Western regimes, and reluctance to tackle core issues concerning the distribution of political power” (Heydemann & Leenders, 2011: 2-3). Israel, for one, has been toiling with the various Assad regimes for decades. For Israel the enemy it knows is almost surely better than the enemy it does not, were a Salafist party to come to power in a new Syria. Both arguments are most likely true and complementary. While the regional and international relations of both Libya and Syria have played a leading role in the international community’s decision to intervene in the former and wait-it-out in the latter, the influence from Israel and others regarding rising radical Islam in the region is undoubtedly a factor in the decision not to intervene in Syria.

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Iran Accountable for BP Oil Spill 2010?

British Petroleum has been inundated with diatribes by our government and media for a lack of responsible reaction during the three months while millions of barrels of oil gushed out of MC252 well site into the Gulf of Mexico. Since the biggest environmental catastrophe in the U.S. history enfolded, causing billions of dollars in damage to the fishing and tourism industries and wildlife habitat, the corporation executives have been trying to seek a way out of this ignominy.

In order to pay for the damages it caused to U.S. businesses and to itself, BP will likely resort to its historic strategy of how it became an oil giant in the first place. And the U.S. will once again help the corporation as we did in 1953 when a covert CIA plot overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and instated an authoritarian regime in order to acquire that country’s oil.

The coup proved to be a successful covert experiment for the U.S. when The National Iranian Oil Company was transformed into British Petroleum in 1954. Iran’s illustrious experiment was also catalytic in helping the U.S. make similar coups a norm in various Middle Eastern and Latin American countries including Iraq, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Panama to overthrow leaders noncompliant toward imperialistic demands.

In 1979, Iran’s Islamic Revolution ousted BP from the country and attained back its resources; but for the past few years U.S. officials have again been looking toward Iran, which still has the world’s third largest oil reserves. Our politicians have been pressing Iran to stymie its nuclear enrichment program which they claim is a threat to Israel’s security – perhaps in the same way the imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq were a threat to the U.S. in 2003. In June, our powerful nation successfully pressured the United Nations to impose economic sanctions on the recalcitrant Iran but such diplomatic stunts are designed to be expired the moment corporate greed demands again.

President Obama’s diplomatic stance has been under immense pressure from corporate lobbyists who want to send our troops to invade Iran in order to get their grip on the country’s petroleum and natural gas. The U.S. has a solid history of sacrificing its human and financial resources for corporate executives; therefore, BP executives will contentedly demand that we sacrifice our tax dollars and troops to help them steal Iran’s oil once again.

According to many analysts invasion of Iran is imminent, and the BP fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico might serve as a key factor to expedite that invasion. But hopefully the American public is slightly smarter today than we were in 2003 and will not be misled by the greedy corporate executives.

As we stand facing harsh consequences of the two wars we started in Iraq and Afghanistan, BP and its likes might have to turn to another soldier this time in holding Iran accountable to pay for the catastrophe the corporation caused. The country that serves as BP’s next partner in crime will be guilty of bloodshed and environmental disasters as they arise in the future. The only way to end the cycle of violence and man-made environmental catastrophes is by adamantly opposing the greedy oil executives and putting tangible emphasis on sustainable alternative energy.

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History of BP Includes Role in 1953 Iran Coup After Nationalization

Interesting interview linking BP, the CIA, and the rise of modern terrorism in the Middle East. 60 years ago BP was called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

Excerpted from an interview with Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror.

STEPHEN KINZER: Well, I’ll tell you an interesting story to start off. I was recently on a panel in the National Cathedral in Washington, and one of the other panelists—we were talking about Iran—was Bruce Laingen, who had been the chief American diplomat in Iran and was the most prominent figure among the hostages that were held there for 444 days. And I knew that Laingen had become an advocate of reconciliation with Iran, which I consider quite remarkable, considering the ordeal that he suffered, so I wanted to talk to him. I hadn’t met him before. And we exchanged some emails after that.

He told me an amazing story. He said, “I had been sitting in my solitary cell as a hostage for about a year, when one day the cell door opens, and there is standing one of the hostage takers, one of my jailers. And all of my rage and my fury built up over one year sitting in that cell just burst out, and I started screaming at him, and I was telling him, ‘You have no right to do this! This is cruel, this is inhumane! These people have done nothing! This is a violation of every law of god and man! You cannot take innocent people hostage!’” He said, “I went on like this for several minutes. When I was finally out of breath, the hostage taker paused for a moment, and then he leaned into my cell and said, in very good English, ‘You have no right to complain, because you took our whole country hostage in 1953.’”

That story really reinforced to me the connection and the fact that those hostage takers took those hostages not out of nihilistic rage, but for a very specific reason that seemed to make very good sense to them. In 1953, the Iranian people had chased the Shah out, but CIA agents working inside the American embassy in Tehran organized a coup and brought him back. So flash forward to 1979, people of Iran have chased the Shah out again. He has been admitted into the United States.

What happened was that in the first half of the twentieth century, Americans had a super good image in Iran. The only Americans there were doctors and school teachers and people who really were selflessly devoting themselves to Iranians. Meanwhile, the British and the Russians and the French and other colonial powers were ripping Iran apart and stealing and looting everything of value there. So they, people in Iran, had a very high, exalted opinion of the United States, perfect country, the ideal country. And the words of Franklin Roosevelt in all his radio speeches during the Second World War also had a big impact on Iranians. And, of course, there was a big World War II conference in Tehran that just focused Iranians on the ideals of freedom that the Allied powers said they were fighting for.

So in the period after World War II, Iranian nationalism came to focus on one great cause. At the beginning of the twentieth century, as a result of a corrupt deal with the old dying monarchy, one British company, owned mainly by the British government, had taken control of the entire Iranian oil industry. This one company had the exclusive rights to extract, refine, ship and sell Iranian oil, and they paid Iran a very tiny amount. But essentially the entire Iranian oil resource was owned by a company based in England and owned mainly by the British government. That was Anglo-Iranian Petroleum, later to become British Petroleum and BP.

Anyway, what happened was that Prime Minister Mosaddeq, who really was an extraordinary figure in his time, although he’s been somewhat forgotten by history, came to power in 1951 on a wave of nationalism aimed at this one great obsession: we’ve got to take back control of our oil and use the profits for the development of one of the most wretchedly impoverished nations on earth at that time. So the Iranian parliament voted unanimously for a bill to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company, and Mosaddeq signed it, and he devoted himself during his term of office to carrying out that plan, to nationalize what was then Britain’s largest and most profitable holding anywhere in the world.

Bear in mind that the oil that fueled England all during the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s all came from Iran. The standard of living that people in England enjoyed all during that period was due exclusively to Iranian oil. Britain has no oil. Britain has no colonies that have oil. Every factory in England, every car, every truck, every taxi was running on oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which was projecting British power all over the world was fueled 100 percent by oil from Iran.

Suddenly, Iran arrives and says, “Oh, we’re taking back the oil now.” So this naturally set off a huge crisis. And that’s the crisis that made Mosaddeq really a big world figure around the early 1950s. At the end of 1951, Time magazine chose him as Man of the Year, and they chose him over Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower. And they made the right choice, because at that moment Mosaddeq really was the most important person in the world.

Actually, it was at this time that Aramco, the Arab American Oil Company, came into Saudi Arabian, and their deal was a fifty-fifty split, so 50 percent for the country that has the oil and 50 percent for the company that comes in and builds the refinery. That had the air of fairness that ordinary people could understand, but the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company would not give in one inch. And that just made the Iranians more and more radical.

The British tried all sorts of things to bring Mosaddeq down. They imposed a crushing economic embargo on Iran. They required all their oil technicians to leave. Many of them wanted to stay in Iran and work for the nationalized company. The British wouldn’t allow this. So, since they had been very careful not to train anyone how to run the oil refinery, any Iranians, that was the end of the possibility of oil refining. Just in case the Iranians could figure out how to extract any oil, the British imposed a naval embargo around the port, where oil is exported from in Iran. The British took Mosaddeq to the United Nations, they sued him in the World Court, and lost both times. The British were arguing that the Iranian oil industry was their private property and that Mosaddeq had stolen it from them. That was their complaint, but they failed to get any redress in international fora.

So then the British decided they would have to overthrow Mosaddeq, and they started a plot to do that. But Mosaddeq figured out what was happening, and he did the only thing he could have done to protect himself: he closed the British embassy. He sent home all the British diplomats. And among those diplomats were, of course, all the spies and the secret agents that were arranging the coup. So then, the only thing that Prime Minister Churchill could think of to do was to ask Harry Truman, the American president, to do this job for us: Can you please overthrow Mosaddeq, because we don’t have anyone in Iran now that can do it? And Truman said no. Truman believed that the CIA could be a covert action and intelligence-gathering agency, but he never wanted it to get involved in overthrowing governments. So that was the end of the line for Britain, until there was regime change in the United States.

We had the election of 1952. Dwight Eisenhower took office. John Foster Dulles became his secretary of state. And Dulles had spent his whole adult life working as a lawyer for giant international corporations. And the idea that a country should be able to get away with nationalizing such a big company, such a big corporate resource, was, as Dulles very well understood, a great threat to the system that he had been representing all his life, the system of multinational enterprise. And he realized that it was in the interest of the United States, as he saw them, to make sure that no such example could be set. So the new administration, the Eisenhower administration, reversed the policy of the Truman administration. They agreed to send a CIA agent, Kermit Roosevelt, to Iran in the summer of 1953. And that’s the story that I tell in my book.

It just took Kermit Roosevelt three weeks in August of 1953—Bag of money and a few other very interesting resources. He was a real-life James Bond. This guy was a real intrepid secret agent, and the story is just amazing how he did this. But it’s really an object lesson in how easy it is for a rich and powerful country to throw a poor and weak country into chaos. So at the end of August 1953, Mosaddeq was overthrown. At the moment, that seemed like a great success. So we got rid of a guy that we didn’t like, and we replaced him with someone else, the Shah, who would do anything we wanted. It seemed like the perfect ending. He was under house arrest for the rest of his life in his village in Iran. So that coup seemed like a success at first. But now, when you look back on it, it serves as a fascinating object lesson in unintended consequences.

Just very briefly, we placed the Shah back on his peacock throne. The Shah ruled with increasing repression for twenty-five years. His repression set off the explosion of the late 1970s, what we call the Islamic Revolution. That revolution brought to power a clique of fanatically anti-American mullahs. That revolution also inspired radicals in other countries, like next-door Afghanistan, where the Taliban came to power and gave shelter to al-Qaeda with results we all know. That instability in Iran that followed that revolution also led Iran’s great enemy next door, Saddam Hussein, to invade Iran. That not only set off an eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, but it also brought the United States into its death embrace with Saddam. We were the military allies of Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War, and we were supplying Saddam with military intelligence, with Bell helicopters that he used to spray gas on Iranian positions. President Reagan sent a special envoy twice to Baghdad to negotiate with Saddam and ask him how we could help him. And, of course, that envoy was Donald Rumsfeld. So that instability set off by that revolution also led the United States into the spiral in Iraq that brought us to the point where we are now.

That revolution in Iran also spooked the Soviets. They were terrified that there would be copycat fundamentalist revolutions all along their southern flank. And to prevent that, they invaded Afghanistan. That brought the United States into its position in Afghanistan, where we brought Osama bin Laden there, we trained all these tens of thousands of jihadis in how to kill infidels, which they later became the Taliban. We later became the infidels they wanted to kill. So why is this all so important for today?

They call it in the CIA “walking back the cat.” You can walk back the cat endlessly on this one. And the reason the story is so relevant is that it tells us the main thing you need to know in assessing the current idea of an attack on Iran, which is the worst consequences are ones you can’t even imagine. Not even the wisest analysts, the most prescient specialists, in 1953 could ever have imagined all these consequences. Ah, the Shah’s going to fall; there’s going to be mullahs in power; the Soviets are going to invade Afghanistan; all these other things will happen. It shows you that when you violently interfere in the affairs of another country, you’re like setting off a wheel at the top of a hill. You let it go; you have no idea how it’s going to bounce.
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Iran has oil reserves to last for the next 88 years and is the second long-lasting oil source in the world , according to the latest annual BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

Iran has oil reserves to last for the next 88 years and is the second long-lasting oil source in the world , according to the latest annual BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

BP announced in the report that in regard of Reserves-to-production (R/P) ratio, UAE will be the prominent source of oil for the world in the coming decades.

BP defines Reserves-to-production (R/P) ratio as such: If the reserves remaining at the end of any year are divided by the production in that year, the result is the length of time that those remaining reserves would last if production were to continue at that rate.

Based on this index, UAE will have oil reserves to last for the next 94 year. According to the report, Iran placed in the second rank. By regarding these preconditions that Iran’s oil reserves, production not change extremely, Iran can produce oil until 88 next years. Libya will have the potentiality of producing oil in next 77 years and placed in the third rank.

BP said that although Saudi Arabia is now the largest oil producer and has the largest oil reserves in the world, but based on the R/P ratio the country follows UAE, Iran and Libya. Saudi Arabia’s oil will finish 16 years beforehand of Iran’s oil, BP added. Saudi Arabia R/P ratio is about 72 years.

BP Statistical Review of World Energy showed that U.S. will have the potentiality of oil production only in next 11 years. Also the R/P ratio for Russia is calculated some 20 years.

BP’s Oily Political Connections: from the Bush to Obama Era

Judging from the oily history of the last ten years, reining in BP could prove politically daunting. A company with incredible economic might, BP has enjoyed privileged access to the inner rungs of Washington power. Only by ridding the political system of insider money can we hope to avert future oil disasters like the devastating spill which hit the Gulf of Mexico last week.

The perversion of U.S. democracy to serve oil interests like BP went into high gear under former Vice President Dick Cheney. Dallas-based Halliburton, where Cheney worked prior to the 2000 election, made equipment and chemicals used in oil drilling, and sold to producers including BP.

Later during the 2000 election, BP exerted significant influence over politics through its campaign contributions. That is not too surprising when you consider that in the late 1990s BP had acquired Amoco and Atlantic Richfield, two companies which had been players on the U.S. electoral scene and which had made political contributions. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, BP ranked fourth amongst oil and gas company contributors in the 2000 elections, with donations totaling $1.1 million. Two thirds of that amount went to the GOP.

Cheney was grateful and never forgot the favor: in early 2001 the Vice President set up an Energy Task Force seeking to design a national energy policy. In a slap in the face to democracy, the Task Force was never open to official public comment and kept all its deliberations secret from the public. At the time, the White House claimed that turning over its records from the Task Force would impede its ability to get candid advice.

For years, Bush and Cheney successfully stonewalled attempts to shed light on the inner workings of the Energy Task Force. Indeed, the administration won a Supreme Court ruling stipulating that the White House would not have to reveal the records of industry executives who had met with administration officials. Finally, however, after four long years the Washington Post obtained a list showing that oil company officials, including BP, had met with Cheney aides at the White House.

The revelations caused a public furor on Capitol Hill and made BP look derelict at best and deceitful at work. During testimony at a November, 2005 hearing of the Senate’s Energy and Commerce Committee, BP CEO Ross Pillari told members that he didn’t know if company representatives had met with Task Force officials.

With BP now in the hot seat as a result of the Washington Post’s bombshell, New Jersey Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg asked the Justice Department to investigate whether CEO’s had misled Congress. Meanwhile, the Senate’s Energy Committee Chairman, Republican Pete Domenici of New Mexico, and Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, asked executives to clarify their responses.

Now feeling the heat, Pillari backtracked somewhat, remarking that he had “looked into the matter and can advise you that BP representatives did meet with staff members of the National Energy Policy Development Group (Task Force) and provided them with comments on a range of energy policy matters” including natural gas, liquefied natural gas, transportation fuels and renewable energy. Then, in a rhetorical flourish worthy of a truly slick oil man, Pillari added that his response at the November hearing “was and is a truthful answer as I was not personally involved in energy policy issues at the time.”

BP’s discussions with the White House had real life consequences. When the Bush/Cheney White House finally came out with its National Energy Policy, environmentalists were appalled. Specifics of the plan included expanded oil exploration in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, an expansion of oil refinery sites and oil pipelines, and additional subsidies for the fossil fuel industry funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Needless to say, there was no representation on the Task Force of renewable energy or energy efficiency experts. Brazenly, Bush defended the Energy Task Force as simply business as usual. “We listened to energy companies, which seems to make sense,” he said. “If you’re developing an energy plan, one place to start is to listen to people who know something about the business.”

The culture of permissiveness in the White House fostered an incestuous relationship between Cheney officials and BP. Take, for example, the case of native Alaskan Andrew Lundquist, a man who worked for both his state’s senators on Capitol Hill. The Executive Director no less of Cheney’s Energy Task Force, Lundquist later oversaw efforts to spearhead energy policy at the White House.

Then however Lundquist left government and opened a consulting business. Nine months later, he became a lobbyist for companies that served to benefit from the very same energy policy that he had helped to craft. Lundquist’s clients, which paid him more than $300,000 in 2003, included BP.

Hoping to capitalize on public dissatisfaction with Cheney’s energy policy, Obama ran TV ads during campaign ’08 claiming that Republican rival John McCain was “in the pocket” of Big Oil. At the time, Obama commanded some moral authority on the issue of oil development. As a Senator, he had urged the EPA to mount a “comprehensive” review of proposed air and construction permits for a BP refinery in Indiana. In a letter, Obama expressed concern that the Indiana Department of Environmental Management had “set an aggressive timeline to issue a final permit” for the refinery located about 20 miles southeast of Chicago.

As campaign ’08 heated up, Obama made much political hay over the fact that the McCain camp benefited from a flood of contributions from oil executives after the Arizona Senator reversed his position on offshore drilling. Yet, peer beneath the rhetoric and Obama does not emerge as any less oily. Indeed, just prior to the election the Center for Responsive Politics reported that BP had donated more money to Obama than McCain.

Then, when gas prices rose above $4 a gallon and calls for “drill, baby, drill,” increased, Obama vacillated. Conservation and renewable energy would be emphasized in an Obama White House, the candidate declared, but he would also support some expansion of offshore oil drilling.

To be sure, once ensconced in office Obama crafted an energy policy which sought to move away from the Bush era’s emphasis on fossil fuels. To his credit, early on in his presidency Obama overturned a draft plan to allow drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. At one point, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar even remarked that the Bush administration “had torpedoed” offshore renewable energy in favor of oil and natural gas.

There were ominous signs along the way, however. Obama tapped Steven Koonin, a former Chief Scientist for BP, to be Undersecretary of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. Then, on April 1st, a mere few weeks prior to the Gulf oil spill, Obama said he would open millions of acres off the Southeastern and Alaskan coastlines to offshore oil exploration. The announcement ended a decades-long moratorium on drilling off the East Coast. Included were 167 million acres from the northern tip of Delaware to central Florida, millions more in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and about 130 million acres north of Alaska. “Thousands of environmental activists who supported Barack Obama for president are waking up this morning to what must seem like a very big and not very funny April Fools’ joke,” remarked the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

During the Bush years, BP enjoyed an enormous degree of economic and political power in Washington. Though it appeared at first as if Obama might change this fundamental equation, the young president failed to act sufficiently. Now, in the wake of the Gulf disaster, we shall see whether Obama has the political courage to finally take on BP and the oil companies while significantly ramping up alternative energy.

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BP oil spill 2010: Was BP's Kurt Mix a Criminal or a Hero?

The FBI has arrested a former BP drilling and completions project engineer, Kurt Mix. This happened on the eve of the hearing to obtain preliminary approval of the civil settlement between BP and the Plaintiff’s Steering Committee for damages due to the Deepwater Horizon accident. (According to the FBI, Mix resigned from BP in January 2012.)

The complaint asserts that he “deleted his entire string of over 200 texts with SUPERVISOR” on his iPhone, after having already met with a government VENDOR “who retrieved some of MIX’S relevant hardcopy documents.” The legal issue at hand is whether “BP plc and/or individuals employed by BP violated any federal criminal laws by intentionally understating the amount of oil that was flowing from the Macondo well following the Macondo April 20, 2010 explosions.” There are references to the Securities and Exchange Commission, so in effect the government is investigating whether there was illegal stock-manipulation by BP based on the publicly reported flow rate. Since Mr. Mix’s texts were addressed to a “SUPERVISOR” and a “CONTRACTOR,” all his communications were non-public. Clearly, he did not mislead the public in any way. So the FBI is trying to squeeze him to get others by charging him with obstruction of justice.

The New York Times reported:

Joan McPhee, Mr. Mix’s lawyer, said the contents of the deleted messages were also available in e-mail and other messages provided to the government. “These misguided charges over failure to retain text messages constitute startling government overreaching,” she said.

According to the government, on May 26, when BP was trying but failing to plug the well, Mr. Mix sent a text that said, “Too much flow rate – over 15,000,” an apparent reference to a rate of greater than 15,000 barrels a day. Two days later, the complaint noted, “BP continued publicly to state that top kill was broadly proceeding according to plan.”

On May 29, the top kill procedure was stopped, the complaint noted, and “BP’s stock price dropped approximately 15 percent on the next trading day.”

A technician involved in BP’s efforts to plug the well said on Tuesday that there were various opinions on the flow rate among the experts at the time.

The technician, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the internal workings of the response effort, said that Mr. Mix had personally resisted accepting the high estimates of some contractors, insisting that much less oil was flowing out.

The matter will be sorted out in court, but it raises the question: “If Mr. Mix was a part of BP conspiracy to underestimate the flow of oil, who in the government will be charged with a conspiracy to overestimate the flow of oil?”

The time interval in question, beginning on May 26, 2010, is a critical juncture in the timeline of the response to the spill, which was under direct federal control under the National Contingency Plan. This was the time when BP first tried to use a subsea intervention to kill the well from the top — specifically, the “top kill” operation. Up until this time, all subsea efforts had been directed at collection of the spilling oil, not a direct intervention to kill the well. The government was avidly pursuing its own alternative kill plan through the use of two relief wells designed to perform a “bottom kill.”

May 26, 2010 was when the battle lines were drawn and the joint BP/Coast Guard press conferences ended. BP wanted to perform a “top kill” via subsea intervention, and the government wanted to perform a “bottom kill” via the relief well. History tells us who had it right: BP. They succeeded in killing the Macondo well through a two-stage process: installing a capping stack to perform a “well integrity test” and then a “static kill.” The well was dead beneath a mile of cement by August 4, 2010, weeks before the projected finish date of the relief well. Given his intimate knowledge of the flow rates during the top kill, it is safe to assume that Mr. Mix was a key player in the well integrity test and static kill. If so, he deserves a lot of the credit for successfully carrying out the presidential edict to “plug the damn hole.” So why is he being played as a criminal? Is his real “crime” showing up the president?

Let us look at the serious misinformation that has been fed to the American public. On the same day the well was killed, August 4, 2010, the government released a report, titled “Deepwater Horizon MC 252 Gulf Incident Oil budget,” which put the total cumulative amount of oil discharged at 4,928,100 barrels. Given that the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico was permanently halted by closing the capping stack on Day 87 at 2:23:47 PM (CDT), July 15, 2010, simple long division gives us an average daily flow according to the government of 4,928,100 / 87 = 56,645 bpd. On the other hand, take a look at the government report prepared by the Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG) under Marcia McNutt, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), on June 10, 2010:

… On May 27, the Plume Modeling Team, which analyzed video obtained from BP, provided an initial lower bound estimate of 12,000 to 25,000 barrels of oil per day, but at that point were continuing their work to provide an upper bound estimate…Based on additional video that BP was directed to provide, members of the Plume Modeling Team have now calculated updated lower and upper bound range estimates for a period of time before the Riser Insertion Tube Tool was inserted and before the riser was cut. Most of the experts have concluded that, given the limited data available and the small amount of time to process that data, the best estimate for the average flow rate for the leakage prior to the insertion of the RITT is between 25,000 to 30,000 barrels per day, but could be as low as 20,000 barrels per day or as high as 40,000 barrels per day.

… Based on observations on May 17th, and given the amount of oil observed and the adjusted calculations for the amount of oil that has been burned, skimmed, dispersed, or evaporated the initial estimate from the Mass Balance Team that was announced on May 27 was in the range of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil per day. The team continued to refine its estimate and has concluded that the best estimate for the average flow rate was in the range of 12,600 to 21,500 barrels of oil per day.

Even the highest end of the highest estimates does not approach 56,645 bpd. The government is more wrong even now than Mr. Mix may have been in the early stages of the accident working in real time. So which government entity has been misleading the public — Marcia McNutt’s Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG) or Marcia McNutt’s USGS? And why haven’t we seen her text messages? Or Steven Chu’s? What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander!

Oh, that’s right…the Justice Department has been stonewalling BP regarding its flow rate documents and has reluctantly turned over only 100 out of an estimated 10,000 of them under the duress of a court order.

Perhaps we ought to sic FBI Special Agent Barbara O’Donnell, who arrested Mix, on Attorney General Eric Holder, et al.! And while she’s at it, she ought to investigate where the cement fragments that landed on the deck of the service boat Damon Bankston have been hidden by her colleagues in the Justice Department. There has been much discussion that the cause of the blowout was due to faulty cement in the shoe track, which would have been pushed ahead of the oil and gas up to the rig, out on its deck, and overboard onto the deck of the Bankston before the first explosion. Who has been hiding this critical physical evidence for over two years and thereby been obstructing justice, Agent Connelly? Where is that smoking gun, Agent Connelly — in the possession of the Mexican drug gangs after having been lost track of by the Justice Department?

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More than two years after the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the federal government’s criminal investigation has produced its first charges. They will not be the last.

The arrest of a former BP engineer for deleting text messages he was supposed to preserve may seem like small potatoes for the mighty U.S. Department of Justice. What the obstruction charges really mean, however, is that prosecutors are focusing on whether BP tried to cover up the size of the spill in an attempt to trim billions of dollars from its ultimate criminal environmental-law fine.

As Bloomberg News reports here, U.S. prosecutors in New Orleans said Tuesday that Kurt Mix, who worked on internal BP efforts to estimate the amount of oil leaking from the well, deleted electronic messages between him and a supervisor. Mix, 50, was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice.

“Mix deleted numerous electronic records relating to the Deepwater Horizon disaster response, including records concerning the amount of oil potentially flowing from the well, after being repeatedly informed of his obligation to maintain such records,” FBI Special Agent Barbara O’Donnell said in a sworn statement filed in the case.

The blowout on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed 11 workers and caused the worst offshore spill in U.S. history, Bloomberg News adds. The Justice Department has been investigating the incident and the spill-rate estimates, O’Donnell said in her affidavit.

BP declined to comment on the case against Mix and said it would continue to cooperate with the U.S. investigation. “BP had clear policies requiring preservation of evidence in this case and has undertaken substantial and ongoing efforts to preserve evidence,” the London-based company said in a statement.

So what’s going on here? Why would the Justice Department go after such a low-level guy on charges that sound so peripheral?

The short answer is that this is how the federal government handles white-collar criminal investigations. Prosecutors lean on small players in hopes that they will plead guilty in exchange for a more lenient sentence and point a finger at people further up the corporate ladder.

In this case, the Justice Department appears to be sending a more specific signal—namely, that it is focusing on the extent of the spill and what precisely BP knew about it. (The New Orleans Times-Picayune’s dispatch on the charges has some good detail.)

BP has already paid about $8 billion in civil claims, and it agreed recently to settle with plaintiffs for another $7.8 billion. Then there are criminal fines for violations of the Clean Water Act. Penalties can range up to $1,100 per barrel for an accidental spill and up to $4,300 per barrel if the spiller is deemed to have been grossly negligent. BP and the government are debating privately just how many millions of barrels spewed into the Gulf of Mexico (somewhere between 4 million and 5 million) and whether the company deserves the gross negligence label.

Mix may have some relevant information on those questions. More important, he may know who else has relevant information on those questions. That’s at least part of the reason why he drew the short straw and the very first criminal charges. Much more is on the way.

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Surprise! Obama Was Top Recipient of BP Donations in 2008

No wonder it took him nearly two weeks before getting on the ball with the Gulf oil spill. He’s the top recipient of British Petroleum donations in the last election cycle. Now watch him demonize them every chance he gets. If he wants to lead by example, he should return their money.

During the 2008 election cycle, individuals and political action committees associated with BP — a Center for Responsive Politics’ “heavy hitter” — contributed half a million dollars to federal candidates. About 40 percent of these donations went to Democrats. The top recipient of BP-related donations during the 2008 cycle was President Barack Obama himself, who collected $71,000.

BP regularly lobbies on Capitol Hill, as well. In 2009, the company spent a massive $16 million to influence legislation. During the first quarter of 2010, it spent $3.53 million on federal lobbying efforts, ranking it second (behind ConocoPhillips) among all oil and gas industry interests.

Its registered lobbyists include a number of former federal government and high-ranking political campaign officials, including longtime political operative Tony Podesta, former congressional chief of staff Bob Brooks, former congressional legislative director David Pore and vice presidential aide Michael S. Berman, the Center’s research shows.

Tony Podesta, of course, is the brother of former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, who also helped launch the far-left smear merchant outfit Media Matters.

Of course the $71,000 Obama received from BP is chump change compared to what he got from Goldman Sachs, so don’t expect him to be returning any of it. Nor should you expect any of his media lapdogs to mention his BP connection.

You suppose if something this disastrous happened under Bush’s watch the media would be reticent to mention the company’s donations to the “oil man” Bush? Fuhgeddaboutit. It would be a 24/7 talking point until your ears bled.

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Sarah Palin Blames Obama-BP Connection for Slow Oil-Spill Response; BP to Attempt to Plug Well With Mud

Since we’re all pointing fingers and naming names with regard to whose fault the BP spill really was, why wouldn’t Sarah Palin jump in the ring?

On Fox News Sunday, the former Republican candidate for VP said, “I don’t know why the question isn’t asked by the mainstream media and by others if there’s any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration.”

“If there’s any connection there to President Obama taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico — now, if this was President Bush or if this were a Republican in office who hadn’t received as much support even as President Obama has from BP and other oil companies, you know the mainstream media would be all over his case,” she continued.

Later, she tweeted that Obama had been the top recipient of BP money in the past 20 years.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs responded on CBS’s Face the Nation,

“I’m almost sure that the oil companies don’t consider the Obama administration a huge ally,” he said. “My suggestion to Sarah Palin would be to get slightly more informed as to what’s going on in and around oil drilling in this country. We proposed a windfall profits tax when they jacked their oil prices up to charge more for gasoline.”

While the largest single donation by BP — $77,051 — did go to Obama, the oil and gas industry overall contributed $2.4 million to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

However, even if Obama had been the greatest recipient of BP money in all of history, it remains to be seen how a slow reaction to cleaning up the Gulf would help anyone, especially the company he is supposedly “in bed” with.

As for actually trying to stop the leak, which has expelled some 6 million gallons at this point, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa P. Jackson traveled to Louisiana on Sunday to monitor the response, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano are to visit areas affected by the spill today.

Oil is now at least 12 miles into Louisiana’s marshes and has reached 65 miles of shore. BP is planning to try the “top kill” technique, in which engineers shoot mud into the well to plug the leak (which has never been attempted 5,000 feet under water), as early as Tuesday.

Remember when the BP CEO was calling the leak “relatively tiny” back in mid-May?

All this while, as The New York Times points out, offshore drilling continues seemingly unabated. President Obama had announced a moratorium on granting drilling permits and environmental waivers on May 14, but since then at least seven new drilling permits and five environmental waivers have been granted.

Asked about the permits and waivers, officials at the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Service, which regulates drilling, pointed to public statements by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, reiterating that the agency had no intention of stopping all new oil and gas production in the gulf.

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