Afghanistan Mineral Riches: Beware the Hype

News that "United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself" should be taken with several doses of salt.

James Risen of the in Afghanistan" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html?hp">NYT broke the story, which has the security blogosphere buzzing. It gushes,

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.

“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,” said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines.

But, as Foreign Policy managing editor Afghanistan has $1 trillion in untapped mineral resources?" href="http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/06/14/say_what_afghanistan_has_1_trillion_in_untapped_mineral_resources">Blake Hounshell points out, the discovery in question dates to 2007, has been widely documented on US government websites for years, and the $1 trillion figure seems to have been conjured from thin air. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder points to evidence that the Soviets had documented this trove way back in 1985!

Katie Drummond of Wired's Danger Room adds, "it might be prudent to be wary of any data coming out of Afghanistan’s own Mines Ministry," citing a Wall Street Journal report noting it “has long been considered one of the country’s most corrupt government departments."

That this story has gotten front page placement in the country's top newspaper has Mother Jones' Rich" href="http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/06/afghanistan-strikes-it-rich">Kevin Drum, OTB's Propaganda ?" href="http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-afghanistan-minerals-story-news-or-propaganda/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OTB+%28Outside+The+Beltway+%7C+OTB%29&utm_content=Google+Reader">Doug Mataconis, and others questioning the timing. Ambinder, noting the on-the-record quotes from the highest levels of the U.S. military, goes so far as to characterize this as "a massive information operation."

Aside from the fact that the news isn't actually new and that there's good reason to believe that the potential benefits are being wildly exaggerated for political reasons, we should also be skeptical of the idea that Afghanistan is going to suddenly leap forward several centuries into modernity by virtue of a natural resource find.

First, as Matt Yglesias of the Center for American Progress notes, it's quite likely that the actual extraction will be performed by non-Afghan companies who bid on the mineral rights at a fraction of their actual value.

Second, given the corruption that is endemic in the Afghan governance culture, it's quite likely that most of the money will be skimmed off the top rather than benefiting the Afghan people.

Third, there's real reason to worry about a developing country relying on resource extraction to build their economy. CNAS senior fellow' Depressed " href="http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2010/06/why-1-trillion-untapped-mineral-deposits-has-me-depressed.html">Andrew Exum points to Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion and sees dark days ahead for the NATO coalition effort:

Collier describes the characteristics that "trap" countries in cycles of civil conflict: low income, slow growth, and dependence on primary commodity exports. I don't need to tell you Afghanistan has the first and third characteristics in spades, and you may have noticed that Afghanistan has already been in a pretty miserable cycle of civil conflict since the PDPA coup in 1978. Does this resource find make civil war more or less likely? The statistics, I'm afraid, suggest the former.

The presence of civil war is not reason alone to give up on Afghanistan and bring the boys home. I have previously argued that yes, Afghanistan is in a civil war, and that we should take sides in that civil war to advance U.S. and allied interests. That's basically what we are doing today. But counterinsurgency strategies rest on the assumption that you can eventually weaken anti-government forces and reduce levels of violence to the point where a political process can take place in more peaceful circumstances. We now have one trillion fresh reasons why this assumption might not be valid for Afghanistan.

The Washington Independent's Comes to Afghanistan" href="http://washingtonindependent.com/86857/the-resource-curse-comes-to-afghanistan">Spencer Ackerman, noting that "Afghanistan’s economy is based around opium and foreign aid," agrees:

[I]n emerging and underdeveloped states, weak legal systems and official corruption create incentives for powerful people to exploit those resources, rather than allow mineral wealth to fuel national renewal. Think Congo or Sierra Leone. It’s easy to tick off the ways in which what political scientists call the “Resource Curse” applies to Afghanistan: a tenuous legal structure; warlordism; war; foreign interventionism; corruption throughout the political system; an uneasy and unstable relationship between provincial and national authorities; and an uneasy and unstable relationship in provinces and districts with instruments of local governance as well as national governance.

Let's hope that retired Green Beret and DoD senior executive Times" href="http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2010/06/us-identifies-vast-riches-of-minerals-in-afghanistan-ny-times.html">Pat Lang is right that "the lives of ordinary Afghans will be profoundly changed perhaps for the better." After decades of war and centuries of poverty, it would be wonderful. But a lot needs to go right for the rosier side of the perhaps to come true. And there's not much in Afghan history that would lead me to bet on it.

The IPCC consensus on climate change was phoney, says IPCC insider

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia – the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.

Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.

61% Underfunded Illinois Teachers Pension Fund Goes For Broke, Becomes Next AIG-In-Waiting By Selling Billions In CDS

“If you were to have faxed me this balance sheet and asked me to guess who it belonged to, I would have guessed, Citadel, Magnetar or even a proprietary trading desk at a bank.” So begins a story by Alexandra Harris of the Medill Journalism school at Northwestern, which, however, does not focus on some exotic product-specialized hedge fund, or some discount window (taxpayer capital) backed prop desk (hedge fund) at a TBTF bank, but instead at the 61% underfunded, $33.7 billion Illinois Teachers Retirement System (TRS), which just happened to lose $4.4 billion in 2009 (a year when, courtesy of America's conversion from capitalism to socialism, the market rose 60%), and 5% in2008. Yet underperformance can be explained. What can not, is that the TRS has now become a shadow AIG. As Harris notes "TRS is largely on the risky side of the contracts, selling and writing OTC derivatives, including credit default swaps, insurance-like contracts that guarantee payment in the event of a default, that were blamed in part for the 2008 collapse of Lehman Bros. and bailout of insurance giant American International Group Inc., or AIG." Demonstrating just how far the fund is willing to go in the "for broke" category, knowing full well that if it repeats AIG's implosion, the government will likely bail it out, is the disclosure that a stunning 81.5% of the fund's investments are considered risky - this means it is the fourth-riskiest investment portfolio for a pension fund in the U.S! All it will take is another Flash Crash-like event, or a liquidity crunch, and the 355,000 "full-time, part-time and substitute public school teachers and administrators working outside the city of Chicago" will likely end up with a big, fat donut in their retirement portfolios courtesy of some deranged lunatic, portfolio manager, situated externally at a bank like Goldman Sachs, who in taking a page straight out of Obama's bailout nation, has decided there is no such thing as risk. And to those naive enough to think the TRS is the only such fund which has now gone all-in on "no risk and infinite return", wait until such stories start emerging about every single massively underfunded pension and fully insolvent fund in the US.

From Harris' report:

Frank Partnoy, a law and finance professor at the University of San Diego who worked on Wall Street as a derivatives structurer in the mid-1990s, said TRS’s portfolio is an indication that investing is not about what is smart but what will generate the highest returns.

“It’s an epic illustration of how we’ve really gotten lost in financial complexities,” he said, after studying the Illinois Auditor General's 2009 audit of TRS and the fund's March 31 derivatives positions.

TRS said it uses over-the-counter, or privately negotiated, derivatives to maximize the performance of its portfolio and only allows money managers to invest in derivatives if they “have the appropriate expertise and knowledge and employ sophisticated risk management systems,” said David Urbanek, public information officer, in an e-mail.

The fact that TRS trustees and investment advisors approved the use of OTC derivatives isn’t, in itself, alarming. The financial instruments are not explicitly prohibited in the Illinois pension code, and many derivatives contracts provide protection against losses on other investments.

In the balance sheet provided to Medill News Service, TRS’s OTC derivatives portfolio showed that in addition to writing CDSs, the pension fund was selling swaptions and shorting international-based interest rate swaps. For each contract written or sold, TRS received a premium.

And as always happens when one collects pennies before a rollercoaster, the spectacular blow up always eventually catches up with you:

Unfortunately for TRS, its OTC positions soured in late April when Greece’s debt woes worsened, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Spain’s debt to AA and the euro dropped to its lowest levels since the currency’s inception. The International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank orchestrated a $1 trillion bailout to ensure that Greece and the other PIIGS—Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain—would not default on their debts.

“As the European debt crisis worsens, TRS’ positions are going to bleed money,” the trader said.

Where it gets even scarier, is that TRS may be fraudulently misrepresenting its massively underwater portfolio:

But the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System said if it unwound the OTC trades held in its pension fund today, the positions would have a market value of $5 million and a notional value of $1.1 billion. Notional value is the total value of a leveraged financial instrument’s assets.

It isn’t clear how TRS is valuing its OTC derivatives and market experts, among them Rosenthal, who estimated a loss of $515 million as of March 31, were skeptical the OTC positions could have been showing a net positive notional value.

TRS projects it will have logged a $158 million gain from its derivatives portfolio by the June 30 end of fiscal 2010— with $5 million derived from its swaptions, CDS and interest rate swaps positions—and just a fraction of its projected $627 million total return.

A significant portion of TRS’s OTC derivatives are linked to interest rate swaps and those are tied to either the London Interbank Offering Rate or Euro Interbank Offering Rate. Interest rate swaps stipulate for every basis point tick upward in the LIBOR or EURIBOR, the fund is forced to pay out an interest rate that is two basis points higher. This is why the notional value of TRS’s U.S. dollar- and international-based interest rate swaps were in the red by $361.4 million at the end of March.

TRS’ portfolio also includes a large number of swaptions—or the right at a future time to enter into a swap position—which showed a loss of $14 million as of March 31. In addition, the fund sold approximately $154 million worth of CDSs guaranteeing the debt of dozens of companies, countries and states, among them American International Group Inc., GMAC, Panama, Mexico and California. (See graphic).

A large part of TRS’s international-based interest rate swaps positions are linked to the Brazilian Interbank Deposit Rate and Euribor in a bet that inflation would stay low in Europe but rise in emerging markets.

Rosenthal, who said TRS appears to be betting that long-term Treasury yields will greatly increase, is incredulous that the fund even has this view. “Their job is not to play the [Treasury] yield curve,” Rosenthal said. “It’s not their job to have that view.”

Swaptions, Euribor exposure, curve trades? What the hell happened to buy and hold. Does TRS really expect to survive this, when there are sharks like Goldman who know every single trade the TRS has on, and one day, sooner rather than later, will destroy it, but not before margin calling it to death in the process.

The logical question of who the hell is supervising this slow motion train crash surprisingly has no answer:

Section 1-109.1. of the Illinois Pension Code states it is the duty of the board of trustees of a retirement system or pension fund to appoint fiduciaries to manage its assets—including the power to acquire and dispose of any assets—as well as assign others as fiduciaries to oversee activities other than asset management.

TRS said it makes day-to-day operational decisions concerning strategic asset allocation, portfolio structure and manager selection, but cedes all of its investment decisions, within TRS parameters, to professional money managers, a list some 60 names long that includes Goldman Sachs Asset Management, JPMorgan Investment Management, Northern Trust Co. and State Street Global Advisors.

When asked which managers were responsible for the pension fund’s derivatives portfolio, Urbanek, the Illinois TRS spokesman, said OTC derivatives positions are scattered across each asset class because they are “complementary positions” within each portfolio.

According to its investment policy, TRS encourages diversification of assets and “prudent” risk taking because these strategies align with its long-term investing goals. “Increasing risk is rewarded with compensating returns over time.”

“They’re not maintaining effective internal controls,” Partnoy said. “Is it prudent risk-taking to write CDSs on Brazil?”

At the end of the day, it appears the fund is doing nothing illegal by essentially offloading front-office duties to Goldman, which of course is happily trading in advance of the fund, to whose books it likely has full exposure, to benefit its own prop trading desk, and reward its own shareholders first and foremost: 63 out of 63 profitable trading days anyone?

The bottom line, experts say, is that there is no language in the Illinois pension code that prohibits pension funds and retirement systems from buying or selling OTC derivatives as an investment method. In the event of catastrophic losses, lawsuits would be filed against the fiduciaries, but ultimately taxpayers would be left holding the bag.

And here we see where the next layer of catastrophic systemic collapse will come from: the multi-trillion pension system, which is now invested in the riskiest imaginable products, and whose existence is contingent on a market and economy, both priced to perfection. The Fed is surely aware of this, and will do everything in its power to prevent a catastrophic collapse. Yet the Fed always loses the battle at the end of the day. And if Americans were angry the last time they had to bail out bankers, just wait until it becomes obvious that these very banks blew up the pensions of tens of millions of Americans only so that the very same banks could enjoy at least one more year of record bonuses. It is not obvious where the next crash will happen. And it is certain that nothing will be done, as facing the problem would mean recognizing the massive losses already facing the pension system. And that would be the dominoes that forces yet another round of inevitable mark-to-market, and bank implosions. The timebomb is now ticking and there are merely seconds left before it goes off. We have been warned, and will do nothing to stop it.

Moody's Latest To Downgrade Greek Debt To Junk

Moody's Investors Service slashed Greece's credit rating to junk status on Monday in a new blow to the debt-ridden country that is under intense international scrutiny after narrowly avoiding default last month.

A Moody's statement said it was cutting Greece's government bond ratings by four notches to Ba1 from A3, with a stable outlook for the next 12-18 months. It was the second of the three major agencies to accord Greek bonds junk status. Standard & Poor's did the same in late April.

The downgrades reflect concern that the country could fail to meet its obligations to cut its deficit and pay down its debt - which the Greek government says is out of the question.

Finance Ministry officials in Athens had no immediate reaction to the rating cut, which came as a delegation from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union started an interim review of the country's efforts to pull itself out of a major debt crisis.

After amassing a vast public debt and overspending that sent its budget deficit spiraling to 13.6 percent of gross domestic product in 2009, Greece was saved from defaulting on its loans in May by the first installment of a joint EU and IMF euro110 billion bailout. It is to receive the second in September, pending implementation of a major austerity program that has sparked strong union reaction and a series of damaging strikes.

"The Ba1 rating reflects our analysis of the balance of the strengths and risks associated with the Eurozone/IMF support package," said Moody's lead analyst for Greece Sarah Carlson.

"The package effectively eliminates any near-term risk of a liquidity-driven default and encourages the implementation of a credible, feasible, and incentive-compatible set of structural reforms, which have a high likelihood of stabilizing debt service requirements at manageable levels."

"Nevertheless, the macroeconomic and implementation risks associated with the program are substantial and more consistent with a Ba1 rating."

Despite the downgrade, the gap, technically known as a spread, between Greek 10-year bond yields and their benchmark German equivalents dipped only slightly late Monday. The difference was at 5.91 percent, down from 6.12 percent earlier in the day.

That means that Greece would have to pay a rate of around 9 percent were it to raise cash through bond issues. However, bolstered by the rescue loans, Athens says it has no plans to try selling its bonds to the markets soon — except for short-term treasury bill issues in July.

In return for the bailout, Prime Minister George Papandreou's center-left government announced painful austerity measures, slashing pensions and salaries while increasing indirect taxes, seeking to gradually bring the deficit down to 2.6 percent in 2014. The continued flow of EU and IMF funds is conditional on Greece meeting its targets, which will remain under constant scrutiny.

Athens says it has exceeded deficit-cutting targets in the first five months of 2010, as a lower-than-expected increase in revenues was offset by higher spending cuts.

The finance ministry says the January-May deficit stood at euro8.97 billion ($10.77 billion), compared to euro14.65 billion in the first five months of 2009. The drop translates into a 38.8 percent reduction, more than the planned 35.1 percent cut.

Papandreou said late last week that Greece was back on track to "a normal financial and fiscal situation, having left the major dangers behind."

Monday's Moody's statement said the austerity package was "very ambitious."

"There is considerable uncertainty surrounding the timing and impact of these measures on the country's economic growth, particularly in a less supportive global economic environment," Carlson said.

The EU/IMF delegation, which will stay in Athens for the week, was holding meetings at the finance ministry and was expected to also meet with officials at the labor ministry in coming days to review reforms to the social security system.

Russia deploys hundreds of extra soldiers to Kyrgyz military base

Moscow/Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan - Russia has deployed hundreds more soldiers to protect its military base in Kyrgyzstan, in the wake of fresh unrest that had left almost 100 people dead in the Central Asian country as of Sunday.

Three Ilyushin Il-96 military planes with a battalion of Russian paratroopers on board have landed at the base in Kant, the Interfax news agency reported. A Russian battalion typically ranges from 350 to 800 soldiers, depending on the situation.

The planes also reportedly carried ammunition.

The troops have been tasked with protecting the base in northern Kyrgyzstan, in case the bloody clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbek nationals in the south spread.

Russia had previously sent some 150 extra soldiers to Kyrgyzstan after violent protests in early April brought down the government of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev.

Kyrgyz President Rosa Otunbayeva has requested Russian military intervention to quell the new wave of rioting and looting, but Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday rejected her plea.

US wants South Korean boat’s sinking as they tell it but Russia and China don’t agree

Christopher King questions the US-South Korean accusation that North Korea sank the South Korean corvette the Cheonan in March this year. He says the lack of evidence linking Pyongyang to the sinking, coupled with the history of US deceptions in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, makes it more likely that the Cheonan was sank by the US or South Koreans, accidentally or deliberately.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has “...warned Chinese officials that China could put itself in a ‘dangerous position’ if it refuses to accept North Korea’s role in the sinking of the Cheonan, an apparent reference to the South Korean joint civilian-military investigatory report”, according to the 2point6billion.com website. This Hong Kong news forum’s name should remind us that Europe is following America into conflicts everywhere with our economies and currencies collapsing while Asia is getting on with rapid development. Can there possibly be a connection?

There is no use Americans getting angry with China for having its exports surge as the Financial Times reports. Many of us can think of much better ways to spend money than on wars and have been saying for a long time that America should be restructuring its economy rather than killing people half a world away in order to steal their oil. Why blame China for America’s own blunders? As I’ve said previously, America would like an excuse for mid-level conflict with China in order to bring in trade sanctions and recover American jobs. A reason to default on their interest payments would be nice too. They’re also pressing for a revaluation of the renminbi. The Chinese won’t be impressed by Hillary ’s threats, so there’s the possibility of a good manufactured conflict here.

”Truth has now become politics and evidence doesn’t matter”

The Chinese and Russians don’t agree with America that North Korea sank the South Korean corvette Cheonan on 26 March 2010, and why should they just because Hillary Clinton expects them to? They’ve seen the evidence. All there is against North Korea is a piece of metal with a single character on it that is said to be usually (not always, but usually) used in North Korea. Even some South Korean experts don’t agree with this. No-one appears to have said is even part of a torpedo. It’s not enough to convince an American jury, criminal or civil, so how can it go to the United Nations? Why are the UK and Europe going along with this? Truth has now become politics and evidence doesn’t matter.

The international character of the investigation was much touted by the Americans, but it turns out that experts from other countries were merely window-dressing observers while Americans and South Koreans did the investigating. Since our countries are expected to back America in the United Nations, the investigation report should be made public before we become entangled in yet another American conflict even further away from Europe than the Afghanistan-Pakistan mess. Show us the evidence!

The Cheonan sinking might indeed have been the North Koreans taking revenge for a maritime clash with South Korea in November 2009, but it is unlikely. The North Koreans like minor provocations that display their bargaining items and this does not fit the pattern. It might also have been a mine or the Sokcho, the Cheonan’s sister ship, wildly firing off a torpedo as well as its guns.

Suspcious US behaviour

As I’ve said previously, I like the United States as culprits. As suspicious behaviour, why is it that the US only announced on 5 July, after two months, that it and South Korea had an anti-submarine exercise in progress allegedly 75 miles away at the same time as the sinking? Possibly much closer. We knew anyway. Bloggers were writing about it and it was independently reported. I mentioned it on this website on 2 July. There’s grave suspicion in South Korea about the American story. The government says that it will track down spreaders of internet rumours and conspiracy theories contrary to government conclusions. What’s this? Isn’t South Korea supported by the US because it’s a democracy where, by definition, the proletariat are allowed to disagree with their government? Indeed, there is an expectation that we, the unwashed, will scrutinize our exalted leaders’ actions. Such over-sensitivity and control usually means that we’re not being told the truth.

The excited gunfire by the Cheonan’s sister ship, the Sokcho, against an (alleged) flock of birds and America’s bellicose response to the sinking, without evidence, reminds me of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that President Johnson used to start a full-scale war on Vietnam. We know how that went. Nearly 60,000 American dead wasn’t it, with at least two million Vietnamese killed and the population still suffering genetic damage from agent orange that the US sprayed over nearly the whole country.

Echoes of Tonkin

The papers about the Tonkin incident were only declassified and pried out of the government by persistent investigative journalists. The synopsis on the George Washington University website by Robert J. Hanrock in the formerly classified journal Cryptographic Quarterly makes fascinating and relevant reading.

If you don’t know the story, the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy were on a mission of deliberate provocation within the territorial waters of North Vietnam. Simultaneously, on land the CIA and American “trainers” were organizing raids by South Vietnamese commandos on the North’s facilities. Maddox had engaged North Vietnamese torpedo boats two days previously when on a similar mission. On the night of 4 August 1964 at 21.34 hours both Maddox and Turner Joy detected surface and air threats. They began high speed evasive manoeuvres and a few minutes later Turner Joy began firing its main five-inch guns wildly. It fired over 300 rounds on up to 13 targets, fired star shells, dodged two dozen torpedoes, dropped four or five depth charges. Targets were appearing and disappearing. US aircraft called in could find no attackers. No trace of debris was found in the morning. The Maddox’s captain did not believe that there had been any attackers and this was found to be the case. The ships’ own high-speed wakes, erroneous sonar interpretation and radar reflections from waves were responsible for false targets and torpedoes.

Delighted by first reports of an attack, President Johnson was not pleased when doubts that any attack had occurred reached him. He was cheered however, when the National Security Service presented him with reports based on radio intercepts that had been selected to support the attack story by omitting 90 per cent of the material, particularly items indicating that there had been no attack. Johnson used this material to get the House of Representatives to give him a free hand on military action in South East Asia, resulting in the American wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. America killed millions. Does it sound familiar?

Johnson knew that there had been no attack on the Maddox and Turner Joy. He is quoted as saying, “Hell, those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish,” and thought himself very clever. The government had resisted releasing the Tonkin documents for years because they were so similar to the intelligence methods used in support of the Iraq war.

The Cheonan explosion time at 21.22 hours, is within 12 minutes of the time the 1964 Tonkin incident commenced (21.34 hours). The same symptoms of wild gunfire against an unidentified target are seen. American craft were near the Cheonan and presumably helicopters with torpedo-carrying and depth charge capability. It is possible that the Cheonan was not where it was supposed to be or expectations of where it should have been were wrong. In other words, it could have been mistaken for a North Korean vessel. The coincidence of times is noteworthy. Early evening when sight of one’s surroundings has just been lost could be a disturbing and disorientating time, especially near a hostile coast as both these incidents were.

I know nothing of naval warfare, so call me presumptuous, but firing on an unidentified target that has not shown hostility is surely an amazing thing to do. America has an appalling record in Iraq and Afghanistan for attacking targets without confirmation of their identity. BBC reporter John Simpson’s convoy was attacked on camera by an American aircraft, killing a cameraman and 17 other persons with 45 injured. Wedding parties are particularly favoured for air attack, when they are reported as Taliban or Al-Qaeda training camps. General Stanley McChrystal’s big idea in Afghanistan at present is special forces night attacks on houses, often the wrong ones, with everyone killed, men, women and children. Of course, there’s the Wikileaks’ “Collateral Murder” video showing American attitudes, that you have probably seen.

The Sokcho might not have been the only craft firing at the time of the Cheonan explosion. If an American submarine or helicopter torpedoed or depth charged the Cheonan, whether by accident or intentionally, they are clearly not going to admit to it.

Because of their record of genuine conspiracies and murderous ones at that, only the most naïve persons now believe the American and British governments. That is why we have conspiracy theories. It is a simple fact that there is no evidence whatsoever in the public domain linking North Korea to the sinking. Having examined the best that the Americans have, the Russians and Chinese don’t think so either. Yet Hillary Clinton wants the world to trust and believe her when she says that North Korea was responsible. The evidence is really that the Cheonan sinking is another in a long line of American deceptions.

---

Christopher King is a retired consultant and lecturer in management and marketing. He lives in London, UK.

BP Death Clouds Already Onshore! Benzene-3400ppb & Hyrdrogen Sulfide-1200ppb TOXIC AIR ALERT

Click this link ..... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGxGVGiD3yk