From The Wilderness Publications

[With crystal clarity author Jim Bamford – who showed us the now infamous (and once Top Secret) Northwoods documents – analyzes the real issues behind the current flap over domestic eavesdropping. Another Rubicon has been crossed. Total Information Awareness (under different guises) continues to operate and most Americans have not yet begun to realize how little privacy they have. – MCR]

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Deep in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.

Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima, Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country.

A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A. has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment.

According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret.

Jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency," the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations.

But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned.

"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."

He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."

At the time, the agency had the ability to listen to only what people said over the telephone or wrote in an occasional telegram; they had no access to private letters. But today, with people expressing their innermost thoughts in e-mail messages, exposing their medical and financial records to the Internet, and chatting constantly on cellphones, the agency virtually has the ability to get inside a person's mind.

The N.S.A.'s original target had been the Communist bloc. The agency wrapped the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in an electronic cocoon. Anytime an aircraft, ship or military unit moved, the N.S.A. would know. And from 22,300 miles in orbit, satellites with super-thin, football-field-sized antennas eavesdropped on Soviet communications and weapons signals.

Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering and never moved, the N.S.A. is trying to find small numbers of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to country.

During the cold war, the agency could depend on a constant flow of American-born Russian linguists from the many universities around the country with Soviet studies programs. Now the government is forced to search ethnic communities to find people who can speak Dari, Urdu or Lingala - and also pass a security clearance that frowns on people with relatives in their, or their parents', former countries.

According to an interview last year with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the N.S.A.'s director, intercepting calls during the war on terrorism has become a much more complex endeavor. On Sept. 10, 2001, for example, the N.S.A. intercepted two messages. The first warned, "The match begins tomorrow," and the second said, "Tomorrow is zero hour." But even though they came from suspected Al Qaeda locations in Afghanistan, the messages were never translated until after the attack on Sept. 11, and not distributed until Sept. 12.

What made the intercepts particularly difficult, General Hayden said, was that they were not "targeted" but intercepted randomly from Afghan pay phones.

This makes identification of the caller extremely difficult and slow. "Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands," General Hayden said.

Still, the N.S.A. doesn't have to go to the courts to use its electronic monitoring to snare Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan. For the agency to snoop domestically on American citizens suspected of having terrorist ties, it first must to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, make a showing of probable cause that the target is linked to a terrorist group, and obtain a warrant.

The court rarely turns the government down. Since it was established in 1978, the court has granted about 19,000 warrants; it has only rejected five. And even in those cases the government has the right to appeal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which in 27 years has only heard one case. And should the appeals court also reject the warrant request, the government could then appeal immediately to a closed session of the Supreme Court.

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the N.S.A. normally eavesdropped on a small number of American citizens or resident aliens, often a dozen or less, while the F.B.I., whose low-tech wiretapping was far less intrusive, requested most of the warrants from FISA.

Despite the low odds of having a request turned down, President Bush established a secret program in which the N.S.A. would bypass the FISA court and begin eavesdropping without warrant on Americans. This decision seems to have been based on a new concept of monitoring by the agency, a way, according to the administration, to effectively handle all the data and new information.

At the time, the buzzword in national security circles was data mining: digging deep into piles of information to come up with some pattern or clue to what might happen next. Rather than monitoring a dozen or so people for months at a time, as had been the practice, the decision was made to begin secretly eavesdropping on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people for just a few days or a week at a time in order to determine who posed potential threats.

Those deemed innocent would quickly be eliminated from the watch list, while those thought suspicious would be submitted to the FISA court for a warrant.

In essence, N.S.A. seemed to be on a classic fishing expedition, precisely the type of abuse the FISA court was put in place to stop.At a news conference, President Bush himself seemed to acknowledge this new tactic. "FISA is for long-term monitoring," he said. "There's a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring."

This eavesdropping is not the Bush administration's only attempt to expand the boundaries of what is legally permissible.

In 2002, it was revealed that the Pentagon had launched Total Information Awareness, a data mining program led by John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who had served as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to rebels in Nicaragua.

Total Information Awareness, known as T.I.A., was intended to search through vast data bases, promising to "increase the information coverage by an order-of-magnitude." According to a 2002 article in The New York Times, the program "would permit intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials to mount a vast dragnet through electronic transaction data ranging from credit card information to veterinary records, in the United States and internationally, to hunt for terrorists." After press reports, the Pentagon shut it down, and Mr. Poindexter eventually left the government.

But according to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush administration and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on data-mining techniques. "Our survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining," the report said, "shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts, of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational." Of these uses, the report continued, "the Department of Defense reported the largest number of efforts."

The administration says it needs this technology to effectively combat terrorism. But the effect on privacy has worried a number of politicians.

After he was briefed on President Bush's secret operation in 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a letter to Vice President Dick Cheney.

"As I reflected on the meeting today and the future we face," he wrote, "John Poindexter's T.I.A. project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance."

Senator Rockefeller sounds a lot like Senator Frank Church.
"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge," Senator Church said. "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

NEW DELHI , Dec 26 (IPS) - The Asia-Pacific region has not only emerged as one of the main engines of the world economy but it has also taken the global centre-stage in developments pertaining to nuclear weapons and efforts to acquire a capability to make them.

From Iran and Israel in West Asia, through India and Pakistan in South Asia, to North Korea and Japan in the East, the region exhibited, in 2005, unprecedented activity in the nuclear field that can only intensify in the coming years.

In each of these countries, the United States plays a major role. Its policies of selectively favouring or opposing their nuclear activities will alter the strategic balance in some of the world’s most volatile regions.

"This is a marked shift from the cold war period, where the global nuclear centre of gravity lay in the all-out confrontation between the eastern and western blocs, which was most intense in Europe," says Achin Vanaik, professor of international relations and global politics at Delhi University. He is also a member of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace and an independent nuclear expert. "Regrettably, Asia’s nuclear developments are dominated by a superpower that has set its face firmly against nuclear disarmament."

2005 witnessed two landmark nuclear developments-- an attempt by the U.S. and its allies to censure Iran and prevent it from enriching uranium, either for military or civilian purposes, and an Indo-U.S. agreement to "normalise" India’s nuclear weapons status and resume civilian nuclear commerce with it.

Talks continued in 2005 between North Korea and other nations led by the U.S., which included China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and the European Union, to dissuade Pyongyang from pursuing its nuclear weapons programme. These did not resolve the issue.

Meanwhile, Japan moved closer towards revising its post-World War II commitment not to make or acquire nuclear weapons and not to build a large scale standing army. This acquires great significance in the context of what has been called a "new cold war" between Japan and China.

In September, the U.S. brought a motion in the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) holding Iran "non-compliant" with its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and paving the way for referring it to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions. The resolution could be passed because India broke ranks with the non-aligned movement at the IAEA and voted with Washington.

Iran rejected the resolution and reiterated its right under the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Russia has since proposed a compromise, under which Iran can convert yellowcake (oxides of uranium) into hexafluoride gas to be sent to Russia for enrichment.

Under the compromise, Iran can burn the enriched uranium in a power reactor, being built with Russian help, but would send back the spent fuel to Russia. Iran will thus, forswear reprocessing to extract plutonium, which too, like highly enriched uranium, is used to make nuclear bombs.

Iran has not formally rejected the proposal, but its talks with the European Union-3 (Germany, France and Britain) have not yielded results.

Tehran’s nuclear posture and activities have drawn a hostile response from Israel and the U.S. President George W. Bush again returned to his "Axis of Evil" characterisation. The U.S. reportedly has drawn up plans for an armed attack on Iran.

A war of words meanwhile broke out between Iran and Israel. In October, Iran’s newly elected president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the world’s map."

Israeli leaders have vowed to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said on Dec. 1 that Israel would not allow Iran to do so. "Israel, and not only Israel, cannot accept a situation in which Iran would be in possession of nuclear weapons," Sharon said.

Former prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu has held out a scarcely veiled threat to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, approvingly citing Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s "Osirak" research reactor, then under construction.

On Dec. 16, Iran warned Israel that its response to an Israeli attack would be "swift, firm and destructive."

"What all this highlights is the potential for a dangerous conflict in the Middle East," says Vanaik. "The region has already become explosively volatile because of the occupation of Iraq, coming on top of the Palestinian crisis. If the U.S. and Israel persist with a hardline approach to Iran, they could create havoc. U.S. double standards -- hostility to Iran, coupled with its support to Israel’s nuclear weapons programme -- are a source of great popular discontent in the region."

Washington’s double standards are evident in South Asia too. It agreed to make a one-time exception in the international nuclear non-proliferation regime for India by accepting that India is a "responsible" nuclear weapons state, although it has not signed the NPT. The Bush administration offered to persuade the U.S. congress to amend non-proliferation laws and to plead for a similar exception for India in the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group.

India and the U.S. are developing a "strategic partnership", including extensive military cooperation. In March, Washington offered to help India become a great world power in the 21st century.

This has rankled Pakistan, which sees the Indo-U.S. "partnership" as introducing regional strategic asymmetry. Pakistan is likely to demand similar treatment for itself in respect of nuclear technology and equipment, and is drawing up plans for new nuclear power stations.

The U.S. is doing little to defuse the Indo-Pakistan nuclear rivalry. It is embarrassed by disclosures about the clandestine activities of the Abdul Qadeer Khan network which sold uranium enrichment technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. But Washington needs Pakistan as an ally in the "war against terrorism", in particular, the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It has resisted applying pressure on Pakistan to subject Khan to thorough interrogation to detail his nuclear transactions.

The hardline approach of the U.S. to Iran’s nuclear activities contrasts with its soft approach to North Korea, despite Pyongyang’s claim that it already has a nuclear weapon. It is offering inducements to North Korea, including a civilian nuclear reactor, and economic aid, although it rejects the demand that the reactor’s construction should precede the dismantling of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme.

"Washington’s non-proliferation criteria are selective, discriminatory and inconsistent," says Vanaik. "It uses non proliferation as a weapon when that suits its short-term interests. When it doesn’t, it allows nuclear weapons technologies to proliferate."

A worrisome example of this may be Japan. The country’s constitution, dictated by the U.S. during its post-war occupation, forbids the acquisition, manufacture or "bringing in" of nuclear weapons. Many conservative politicians in Japan want the statute amended.

Japan has stockpiled huge amounts of plutonium, reprocessed in western Europe, ostensibly to feed its fast breeder reactors but with the potential for quick diversion to military uses.

Should Japan acquire nuclear weapons and continue its military build up, China will react. Already, China feels threatened by Washington’s ballistic missile defence programme and by growing Indo-U.S. military collaboration. If present trends continue, Asia could witness two new arms races -- one between Japan and China, and the other between China and India.

These rivalries will not be driven entirely by regional factors but will have a strong extra-regional influence, that of the U.S. As the Asia-Pacific region transits into 2006, it seems headed for turmoil and instability.

[Boy are there some flaws in this article! The Caspian is a bust. It was boasted to have 300, then 250, then 200 billion barrels. Now there’s basically 40 billion barrels in the whole region. Forget the three times “possible” that amount. Second, it’s all heavy sour oil. North Sea (Brent Light) was much sweeter. Heavy sour is basically useless to US and Western refineries unless we’re making asphalt. ExxonMobil and ChevTex have pulled out anyway and sold of most of their interests. Statoil has pulled out. The world is using 84-85 Mbpd.

So all this represents is geography coming to rule, as we at FTW always said it would. Engdahl wants to have his cake and eat it too. That being said, the US is clearly on the decline in this region, as it is all over the world. – MCR]

On December 15, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) inaugurated an oil pipeline running from Kazakhstan to northwest China. The pipeline will undercut the geopolitical significance of the Washington-backed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC)oil pipeline which opened this past summer amid big fanfare and support from Washington.

The geopolitical chess game for the control of the energy flows of Central Asia and overall of Eurasia from the Atlantic to the China Sea is sharply evident in the latest developments.

Making the Kazakh-China oil pipeline link even more politically interesting, from the standpoint of an emerging Eurasian move towards some form of greater energy independence from Washington, is the fact that China is reportedly considering asking Russian companies to help it fill the pipeline with oil, until Kazakh supply is sufficient.

Initially, half the oil pumped through the new 200,000 barrel-a-day pipeline will come from Russia because of insufficient output from nearby Kazakh fields, Kazakhstan's Vice Energy Minister Musabek Isayev said on November 30 in Beijing. That means closer China-Kazakhstan-Russia energy cooperation - the nightmare scenario of Washington.

Simply put, the United States stands to lose major leverage over the entire strategic Eurasian region with the latest developments. The Kazakh developments also have more than a little to do with the fact that the Washington war drums are beating loudly against Iran.

The new China pipeline runs 962 kilometers (598 miles) and will take China a third of the way to Kashagan in the Caspian Sea, one of the world's largest accessible oil reserves. Kashagan is the largest new oil discovery in decades and exceeds the size of the North Sea. This is a major reason Washington has such a strong interest in supporting democratic regime change in the Central Asia region of late.

In the next 10 years, Kazakhstan plans to almost triple oil production, prompting the landlocked nation to seek new export routes because the country wants to avoid pipelines through Russia and excessive Russian dependence. China is now among Kazakhstan's major target markets.

Best public estimates are that Kazakhstan has 35 billion barrels of discovered oil reserves, twice the amount in the North Sea, and may hold about three times more, according to a Kazakh government report released on November 18 in London. German oil engineers have privately reported that recent drilling by Italy's AGIP, the current oil consortium leader for Kashagan, a huge field offshore Kazakhstan southwest of Tengiz, has confirmed enormous oil deposits there.

The government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev plans to produce 3.6 million barrels a day of oil from all fields in Kazakhstan, onshore and off, by 2015. For 2005, they expect to average about 1.3 million barrels a day, making Kazakhstan far larger than Azerbaijan, and second in oil production of the former Soviet states only to Russia.

The December 15 opening of the new Kazakh-China pipeline was a major event for Beijing. Zhang Guobao, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planning agency, attended the opening. CNPC has invested more than $2.6 billion in Kazakhstan since 1997.

Beijing takes the geopolitical prize
In October, Beijing scored a second major geopolitical coup when China completed a $4.18 billion takeover of PetroKazakhstan Inc. It was, in a sense, revenge on Washington for the blocking of the China acquisition of Unocal. US oil majors had made major efforts to lock up Kazakhstan oil after discovery of major oil offshore in the Kashagan field. They failed. ExxonMobil was charged with bribery of Kazakh officials to win a presence in the Kazakh oil business, and a senior Mobil executive was later jailed on US tax evasion in New York tied to the Kazakh bribery payments.

Nazarbayev enjoys good relations with Russia's President Vladimir Putin. He was general secretary of the Communist Party when Kazakhstan was part of the USSR, and is regarded as a sly fox in terms of dealing with Moscow, while also keeping a clear distance from Moscow.

In October, Russia's Lukoil failed in its bid to buy up the Kazakh state oil company, PetroKazakhstan, in a privatization. Nazarbayev indicated a major geopolitical shift in strategy, compared with a decade or more ago, when it appeared that Washington was to be the major foreign ally of Nazarbayev. At that time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's company, Chevron, became the lead oil contractor and operator in the Kazakh Tengiz oil field. That was just after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the US oil presence in Kazakhstan was a major US political priority supported by the Bill Clinton administration.

The Chevron Tengizchevoil consortium formed the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) in 1993 amid great fanfare. After years of haggling with the Kazakh government, Chevron finally constructed a pipeline from Tengiz on the Caspian's northeastern shore to the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. Following years of pressure, most members of the CPC group, including Chevron and Oman Oil Co, decided to not pursue future expansions of the CPC line.

Now, a decade later and with the scope of Kazakh oil deposits dwarfing any in the region, with its recent confirmed drillings in the Kashagan field, Nazarbayev has scored a political balance of power coup by turning to Beijing.

In October, Nazarbayev announced that CNPC had won the bid to buy PetroKazakhstan. What will be important to watch, now that Nazarbayev won re-election on December 4, further extending his 14-year reign, is to what extent Washington begins to play up "human rights abuses" by Nazarbayev.

A fledgling "Orange" revolution a la Ukraine has sprung up behind opposition candidate Zharmakhan Tuyakbai and his party, For a Just Kazakhstan. He came in second with 6.6% of the vote and cried fraud, but Washington's and the US media response were muted this time. Rice, in a major trip to shore up sagging US influence in Central Asia on October 10-13, held a private meeting with Tuyakbai. He is clearly being groomed for a possible future role, but clearly not yet.

Washington suffers strategic setback
A major setback for Washington's Eurasian encirclement strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia came several months ago when Uzbekistan's autocratic president Islam Karimov told Washington it could no longer use the Karshi-Khanabad military air base in southeast Uzbekistan, a major piece in Washington's Eurasian chess board play, put into place after September 11, 2001.

Since strong US protest over the government's bloody suppression of protests against a state trial of alleged Islamic fundamentalists in Andijan last May, Karimov's relations with Washington have deteriorated. Karimov's decision to move so aggressively was no doubt influenced by the successful March "Tulip" revolution which toppled Askar Akayev in neighboring Kyrgystan and set the stage for the July election of opposition and US-backed candidate Kurmanbek Bakiev.

On July 29, Karimov announced he was evicting the US entirely from the airbase with a January 2006 exit date. In October, the US Senate, as retaliation, voted not to pay $23 million in base user fees to Uzbekistan for past use. Moscow and Beijing have both moved into the vacuum. A look at the map will indicate why. Uzbekistan is strategic for control or to prevent control by foreign powers such as Washington, of Central Asia and pipeline routes linking Russia, China and Kazakhstan. In October 2004, Moscow secured a long-term military base agreement to station troops in Dushanbe, the capital of nearby Tajikistan, a move by Russia to limit the spread of Washington-backed "color revolutions" in the region.

That appeared to redraw the Eurasian geostrategic map in Moscow's favor, with the recent US loss of Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan is now effectively Russia's main ally in Central Asia.

Washington's position in Eurasia and its future relations with Kazakhstan suddenly assumed high priority. Clearly, the Bush administration decided the time was not ripe to try a full-blown "Orange" revolution in Kazakhstan this month, at least not until Washington's position in the region was stronger. That was a clear purpose of the October Rice visit.

But now with the strong geopolitical turn of Nazarbayev toward playing Beijing to offset potential Washington domination in the region, the situation has begun to change dramatically. A year ago, China attempted to buy out a 16% share in the Kashagan consortium from British Gas, which was willing to sell. That sale was blocked by US consortium member ExxonMobil, the company subsequently charged with bribery and convicted. Now China has opened an oil flow out of Kazakhstan to the East, not the West.

This has major strategic implications for the future of the Washington-backed BTC oil pipeline. That pipeline was built by the Caspian Oil Consortium headed by British Petroleum, and was backed by both Clinton and George W Bush, despite the fact that it was the most costly and least viable oil route out of the Caspian.

Former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had been the chief Washington lobbyist advocating the BTC route to circumvent Russia. Its construction was undertaken on the assumption that it would carry not only Baku oil, but also a major share of Kazakh oil from Tengiz and offshore Kashagan oil fields. Oops!

A larger China energy strategy
The December China-Kazakhstan pipeline opening is one part of a massive Chinese plan to secure as much Kazakh oil riches as possible.

The Chinese plan to connect several pieces of infrastructure - part Soviet-built, part Chinese-built - then reverse the flow of some of them and forge a new export corridor stretching from Kazakhstan's oil-rich Caspian basin, including Kashagan, through a series of western and central-Kazakh oil zones, and ultimately into China. With completion of this major project, China will for the first time have secured a source of imported energy not vulnerable to US aircraft carrier battle groups, as is the case with present oil deliveries from the Persian Gulf and Sudan.

Before opening the new pipeline, China imported only 25,000 bpd from Kazakhstan. Once the link between Kenkiyak and Kumkol is finished, connecting existing infrastructure near the Caspian with the portion inaugurated on December 15, the project will pump 1 million bpd. That would be about 15% of China's crude oil needs.

China then plans to tap into production from dozens of Kazakh sites it has acquired during the past several years. This is oil that currently goes west, or north through Russia.

Beijing still prefers the color 'red'
Beijing has also studied the Washington-backed series of regime changes across Central Asia and the "color revolutions" from Georgia to Ukraine and most recently Kyrgystan, and has evidently decided to "nip in the bud" any similar non-governmental organization efforts within China, or in areas strategic to long-term China energy security.

Kyrgystan's "Tulip" revolution last July sounded alarm bells in Beijing. Possible Chinese pipeline links to Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran and or Russia would clearly be threatened by a ring of new pro-North Atlantic Treaty Organization neighbors and states between western China and its potential oil sources. Their alarm led to warmer ties between Uzbekistan's Karimov and Beijing in recent months, as well as an invitation from Moscow-tied Belarus President Yuri Lukashenko.

The Washington journal Foreign Policy ran a short item in its October edition by an apparent Chinese dissident. The article, titled, "China's Color-Coded Crackdown", is worth quoting:

In China's halls of power, the fall of post-Soviet authoritarian regimes has raised the uncomfortable specter of a Chinese popular uprising. According to the Hong Kong-based Open magazine, a report by Chinese President Hu Jintao, titled "Fighting the People's War Without Gunsmoke", is guiding the Chinese Communist Party's "counterrevolution" offensive. The report, disseminated inside the party, outlines a series of measures aimed at nipping a potential Chinese "color revolution" in the bud.

Some Chinese apparently call it the Battle of the Two Georges - George Bush and global financier George Soros. The Foreign Policy piece continues:

Perhaps the most telling sign of China's concern has been its crackdown on non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Beijing believes that international organizations, especially advocacy NGOs, have acted as Washington's "black hands" behind the recent regime changes in Central Asia. A recent issue of a biweekly journal run by the Communist Party Propaganda Department referred to Washington's "$1 billion annual budget for global democratization" and identified NGOs such as the International Republican Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Institute of Peace and the Open Society Institute as organizations that "brainwash" local people and train political oppositions.

In late August, ahead of a visit by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Chinese police raided the office of the Empowerment and Rights Institute, a human rights group supported by the NED. A new regulation offering more freedom to NGOs was initially expected later this year. No longer. The Ministry of Civil Affairs has now stopped processing registration applications, effectively freezing many groups' operations. Instead, the only government offices taking an interest in NGOs are the national security agency [China's secret police] and public security forces.

Both have launched investigations into local NGOs. Some senior Chinese managers working for international NGOs have been called in for "private talks" with authorities, though no related arrests or detentions have been reported. Some NGO offices have had plainclothes security officers show up in an effort to clandestinely ferret out information on foreign staff and organizations. Environmental groups have been singled out for a massive government survey, most likely because they have angered powerful agencies by successfully initiating public debates on controversial issues, such as genetically modified foods and huge dam projects, and because only around 10% of green groups are currently registered with the state.

Meanwhile, Beijing has commissioned researchers from several provincial academies of social science to study the activities of NGOs in China. NGO publications such as directories experienced unexpectedly strong sales in recent months, as they no doubt became convenient study tools. Likewise, experts have been dispatched to Central Asia to study how those color revolutions first sprung roots. In a May 19 Politburo meeting, senior administrators from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where foreign research funds are usually well received, were reminded of the "acute and complicated struggle in the ideological realm in the new millennium". In other words, be careful about the political implications of your research.

According to sources in Beijing, final decisions on the government's approach to NGOs will be made in a November meeting of the State Council, China's highest executive body. As long as the clouds of color revolution are hovering over Central Asia - some, for example, expect storms in Belarus - the Chinese government will stay on high alert ... Beijing's moves against the country's NGO community remain largely unnoticed outside China. If the international community wants an open and democratic China, it should pay more attention to the survival and growth of Chinese liberal institutions. Otherwise, the country will be destined to remain the same shade of red.

Beijing-Tehran-Moscow
At the end of 2004, Beijing signed a $70 billion energy agreement with Tehran, China's largest Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries energy deal to date. China's state Sinopec agreed to buy 250 million tons of LNG over 30 years from Iran, as well as to develop the giant Yadavaran field. That agreement covered the comprehensive development by Sinopec of the giant Yadavaran gas field, construction of a related petrochemical and gas industry including pipelines.

As part of the huge Iran-China economic cooperation agreement, China's state-run military construction company, NORINCO, will expand the Tehran Metro underground.

A second phase in the Iran-China strategic energy cooperation will involve constructing a pipeline in Iran to take oil some 386 kilometers to the Caspian Sea, there to link up with the planned pipeline from China into Kazakhstan.

On signing the deal, Iran's Petroleum Minister announced that Tehran would like to see China replace Japan as Iran's largest oil importer. As well, Iran has what are estimated to be the world's second largest reserves of natural gas after Russia. Iran is a place of enormous strategic importance to China, to Japan, to Russia, to the European Union, and for all these reasons, to Washington as well.

Iran supplies about 14% of China's oil. Along with Russia, China has been involved since the late 1990s in supplying nuclear technology to Tehran. In 1997, Beijing, under Washington pressure, nominally agreed to stop nuclear-related shipments to Iran, but the flows are believed continuing as the Iran relation is strategic and critical to China's energy security.

China, a veto member of the UN Security Council, has repeatedly called for the issue of Iranian nuclear development to be dealt with by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA's chief, Nobel Peace Prize awardee, Mohamed ElBaradei, has earned the enmity of Washington war hawks for his open declarations of lack of evidence in both Iraq and now of Iranian atomic bomb capability.

Given the nature of the Bush administration's rush to war in Iraq in 2003, where China had a major stake in oil development, and the subsequent US blocking of other Chinese attempts at securing energy independence, including Unocal, it is not surprising that Beijing is taking extraordinary measures to secure its long-term oil and gas supply.

Energy is the Achilles' heel of China's economic growth. Beijing knows that only too well. So does Washington. A decision by Washington to take military action against Iran now would pull a far larger cast of actors into the fray than Iraq.

F William Engdahl is author of the book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order from Pluto Press Ltd. He can be contacted via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

[More pressure on Japan. This is a very slick move by China to place its wolf scent on the Asian continental shelf and encroach on Japanese claims. The whole world knows that the North Korean people are both starving and freezing. As a result of this announcement, depending upon where this new Sino-PRK exploration takes place, Japan is going to feel very threatened and tensions in the region, already high, are bound to escalate. – MCR]

BEIJING (AFX) - China and North Korea have signed an agreement to develop offshore oil resources jointly, Chinese state media said.

Chinese Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan signed the deal yesterday with his North Korean counterpart Ro Tu Chol, who was on a four-day visit to Beijing, the Xinhua news agency said.

Zeng said relations this year between the communist countries had progressed in economic cooperation and trade, as well as the Korean nuclear issue.

The Swedish Prime Minister, Göran Persson, has founded a non-political committee with the intent of making Sweden fossil fuel-independent by 2020.

The members of the committee include Professor Christian Azar of Chalmers University of Technology, Leif Johansson, CEO of Volvo Group, makers of trucks, buses and heavy machinery, Birgitta Johansson Hedberg, CEO of the Swedish Farmers Supply and Crop Marketing Association and Christer Segersten, chairman of the Södra member-owned forestry group as well as representatives for the energy sector and industry.

The committee will study and propose measures and mitigation over the next six months, and will present their findings and suggestions this summer.

An initial hearing in front of an assembled audience of journalists and other interested people were held 13:th of December. As a public government hearing it is available as a series of TV web casts from the Swedish government's website.

The hearing began with a speech the Prime Minister stating that we are about to experience the oil peak and so need to assess measures to mitigate its effects and to transform society to adapt to this, including looking on how transport and car use will look in the future. PM Persson underscored that Sweden is very fortunate to have vast agricultural and forestry resources, and to have excellent access to fresh water and no need for irrigation.

After the Prime Minister, ASPO chairman Kjell Aleklett gave a short lecture introducing peak oil to the assembled audience, and he was followed by the CEO of the Swedish Petroleum Association and professor Sven Kullander of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. After lunch there were lectures on climate change by professor Christian Azar and Gunn Persson of Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, and statements from committee members, including Volvo CEO Leif Johansson. Volvo has done research into future fuels for commercial vehicles and mentioned peak oil before, and is converting one of it's factories to 100% renewable energy.

The general theme of the hearing was one of Swedish style consensus and non-confrontation, and one can but assume that biofuels, both for transport and electricity generation and heating will be the focus of the committees work.

Today Sweden gets almost all of it's electricity from nuclear and hydroelectric power, and mostly relies on fossil fuels only for transport; most of the heating has been converted to electric space heating, biofuels and waste recycling, with a small percentage remains fossil fuelled. A 1980 referendum decided that nuclear power is to be phased out, although this has been severely delayed so far, with the exception of the mothballing of the Barsebäck 1 and 2 reactors.

Recently there has been trend in Sweden towards increased sales of flexifuel E85 (ethanol) vehicles and fuel, and there are projects underway increase native production of ethanol and synthetic fuels from forest industry waste.

Perhaps doing some planning of his own, the Prime Minister Göran Persson, has acquired a large forest property and manor, beautifully located on an inland lake peninsula.

A bipartisan move has begun in Congress to pass a resolution stating that "it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States, in collaboration with other international allies, should establish an energy project with the magnitude, creativity, and sense of urgency that was incorporated in the 'Man on the Moon' project to address the inevitable challenges of 'Peak Oil'."

This resolution lays out the dimensions of the challenge facing the United States and the world with the looming specter of worldwide demand for oil exceeding supply, forcing prices high enough to impose serious repercussions on the economy and our way of life. The process of getting it approved comes down to educating and informing lawmakers of the seriousness of the problem and the speed at which it is coming at us.

* The United States has only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, but produces 8 percent of the world's oil and consumes 25 percent of global oil production, of which nearly 60 percent is imported from foreign countries.

* The developing countries around the world are increasing their demand for oil consumption at rapid rates; for example, the average consumption increase, by percentage, from 2003 to 2004 for the countries of Belarus, Kuwait, China, and Singapore was 15.9 percent.

· As fossil energy resources become depleted, new, highly efficient technologies will be required in order to sustainably tap replenishable resources.

* The Shell Oil scientist M. King Hubbert accurately predicted that United States domestic production would peak in 1970, and a growing number of petroleum experts believe that the peak in the world's oil production (Peak Oil) is likely to occur in the next decade while demand continues to rise.

* North American natural gas production has also peaked and the United States is now the world's largest importer of both petroleum and natural gas.

* The population of the United States is increasing by nearly 30,000,000 persons every decade.

* The energy density in one barrel of oil is the equivalent of eight people working full time for one year.

* The United States has approximately 250 years of coal at current consumption rates, but if that consumption rate is increased by 2 percent per year, coal reserves are reduced to 75 years.

HOUSE RESOLUTION 507 calls on the nation to increase the productivity with which it uses fossil fuels and "accelerate the transition to renewable fuels and a sustainable, clean energy economy."

The resolution calls for launching a project on the scale that achieved putting a man on the Moon to address the challenges presented by Peak Oil."

The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on energy and air quality heard testimony on the resolution earlier this month, beginning with that of Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., the leading voice in Congress calling for a concerted national effort to develop alternative transportation fuels, now dominated by petroleum.

Such a transition could well require 20 years, according to another of the speakers, Robert L. Hirsch, senior energy program adviser at Science Applications International Corp. of Alexandria, Va., which recently concluded an energy transition analysis commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy.

We won't know for sure when peak oil has occurred until sometime afterward, but a number of individuals who follow the oil industry believe the peak already has passed or will be upon us in the next five to 10 years. They note that worldwide we are consuming three barrels of oil for every new barrel being found.

If they are correct, and Hirsch is correct about the length of time required to accomplish a transition to other fuels, then Americans face major life-changing difficulties in the years ahead.

Not everyone, to be sure, is convinced that the issue of oil depletion is pressing. But it's notable that President Bush recently lauded Bartlett for speaking out about peak oil.

In 1999, when he was chairman of Haliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney spoke at the London Institute of Petroleum and noted that "producing oil is obviously a self-depleting activity ... (and) by 2010 we will need (to produce) on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day."

Cheney said that when the world was producing 71 million barrels a day. Today oil production is around 84 million barrels a day, with little play in the system.

Prudence and the national interest should dictate that a major effort to accelerate the transition to fuels other than oil and natural gas should begin sooner rather than later, to avoid an economic calamity. Such a calamity will occur if oil peaks without alternative fuels of sufficient quantity and affordability in place.