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The UIF (Howard’s Uranium Industry Framework), plan, which Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane was expected to receive next month, complements a private enterprise bid by the Nuclear Fuel Leasing Group, a four-member group pushing to develop an enriched uranium export business based on Olympic Dam’s reserves in South Australia, reported The Australian Financial Review, (16/6/2006), p. 32 .

Business case by early next year: It outlined a timetable to detail a:

• business case by early next year;

• a stewardship plan with agreed responsibilities by December 2007; and

• endorsement by government and industry by May 2008.

Australia a one-stop nuclear shop: The NFLG plan was outlined to Prime Minister John Howard in Washington last month as he was briefed on US President George Bush’s plan for a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. Mr Bush’s partnership concept would allow Australia and Canada to become one-stop nuclear shops leasing enriched uranium to encourage greenhouse-friendly power generation.

The nuclear lobby: With Mr Bush pressing on the global stage, the Federally appointed UIF group was to urge the Howard government to develop the necessary domestic policies to ensure that all "materials, goods and services that make up the uranium value chain are produced, managed and disposed of in a socially and environmentally friendly way".

Who’s who: John White, executive director of Global Renewables and one of the four members of NFLG, which developed the business plan behind the Bush scheme, was also chairman of Mr Macfarlane’s UIF group.

Opportunities and impediments: The UIF, appointed in August 2005, will report on opportunities and impediments for development of Australia’s uranium reserves, which are about 39 per cent of the world’s total. Comprising representatives of state and territory governments, miners such as BHP and ERA,(Rio Tinto) as well the Northern Lands Council, the UIF was separate from Howard’s nuclear taskforce under Ziggy Switkowski that will study the economics of nuclear power.

Federal committee plans business case: UIF outlines a program to develop a business case. Urging governments, current uranium mine operators and other stakeholders to support and develop a stewardship plan, the UIF outlines a program to develop a business case, undertake analysis of all steps from mining to disposal, document hazards and risk management controls and develop new stewardship actions to take uranium through the entire nuclear fuel cycle.
L/F/l/l

The Australian Financial Review, 16/6/2006, p. 32

Source: Erisk Net  

Israel has dismissed accusations it was behind the car bombing last month that killed Mahmoud Majzoub, known as Abu Hamze, and his brother Nidal, both members of the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad, in the southern Lebanese city of Sidon.

Several Palestinian militants and Hezbollah officials have been killed in Lebanon in recent years in attacks their organizations have blamed on Israel.

Two days after the last assassination, rockets fired from southern Lebanon into northern Israel wounded an Israel Defense Forces soldier, prompting the Israel to launch its heaviest air raid against Syrian-backed Palestinian militants and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon since it withdraw from the area in 2000.

Rafeh admitted to the murder of Hezbollah official Ali Hasan Deeb in 1999 in the southern town of Arba, the killing of another Hezbollah official in Beirut in 2003 and the killing of Palestinian militant Jihad Jibreel in 2002, the army said.

Jibreel, killed in a bombing aimed at his car in Beirut, was the son of Ahmed Jibril, head of the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

The army said Rafeh had also confessed to planting other bombs that were either found and defused before they were detonated or missed their targets.

Syrian and Iranian-backed Hezbollah as well as Jibril welcomed the arrests in interviews with Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV.

Pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud said they proved that "Israel had not ceased its attempts to sabotage Lebanon."

Television footage released by the Lebanese Army showed equipment it said was used in the latest attack and discovered either at Rafeh’s house in the Lebanese town of Hasbaya, on the border with Israel, or in a chalet that he used.

The find included what the army said was an Israeli camera that can be used to take detailed photographs of streets while concealed within a bag, forged driving licences and identity documents it said Rafeh had received from Israel.

The footage also showed an air conditioning unit and a large speaker converted into secret cabinets that the army said were used to transport explosives used in the Sidon bombing.

Other finds included a television cabinet and a table fitted with secret drawers to conceal coded messaging devices.

The army said the attackers had used a car door, packed with explosives before being smuggled from Israel, in the bombing that killed the two Islamic Jihad officials in Sidon.

The army is hunting a Palestinian man also believed to be part of the network, and those arrested will be taken to court, security sources said.

It began with a character known as "Mr. 5%"– Calouste Gulbenkian — who, in 1925, slicked King Faisal, neophyte ruler of the country recently created by Churchill, into giving Gulbenkian’s "Iraq Petroleum Company" (IPC) exclusive rights to all of Iraq’s oil. Gulbenkian flipped 95% of his concession to a combine of western oil giants: Anglo-Persian, Royal Dutch Shell, CFP of France, and the Standard Oil trust companies (now ExxonMobil and its "sisters.") The remaining slice Calouste kept for himself — hence, "Mr. 5%."

The oil majors had a better use for Iraq’s oil than drilling it — not drilling it. The oil bigs had bought Iraq’s concession to seal it up and keep it off the market. To please his buyers’ wishes, Mr. 5% spread out a big map of the Middle East on the floor of a hotel room in Belgium and drew a thick red line around the gulf oil fields, centered on Iraq. All the oil company executives, gathered in the hotel room, signed their name on the red line — vowing not to drill, except as a group, within the red-lined zone. No one, therefore, had an incentive to cheat and take red-lined oil. All of Iraq’s oil, sequestered by all, was locked in, and all signers would enjoy a lift in worldwide prices. Anglo-Persian Company, now British Petroleum (BP), would pump almost all its oil, reasonably, from Persia (Iran). Later, the Standard Oil combine, renamed the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), would limit almost all its drilling to Saudi Arabia. Anglo-Persian (BP) had begun pulling oil from Kirkuk, Iraq, in 1927 and, in accordance with the Red-Line Agreement, shared its Kirkuk and Basra fields with its IPC group — and drilled no more.

The following was written three decades ago:

Although its original concession of March 14, 1925, cove- red all of Iraq, the Iraq Petroleum Co., under the owner- ship of BP (23.75%), Shell (23.75%), CFP [of France] (23.75%), Exxon (11.85%), Mobil (11.85%), and [Calouste] Gulbenkian (5.0%), limited its production to fields constituting only one-half of 1 percent of the country’s total area. During the Great Depression, the world was awash with oil and greater output from Iraq would simply have driven the price down to even lower levels.

Plus ça change…

When the British Foreign Office fretted that locking up oil would stoke local nationalist anger, BP-IPC agreed privately to pretend to drill lots of wells, but make them absurdly shallow and place them where, wrote a company manager, "there was no danger of striking oil." This systematic suppression of Iraq’s production, begun in 1927, has never ceased. In the early 1960s, Iraq’s frustration with the British-led oil consortium’s failure to pump pushed the nation to cancel the BP-Shell-Exxon concession and seize the oil fields. Britain was ready to strangle Baghdad, but a cooler, wiser man in the White House, John F. Kennedy, told the Brits to back off. President Kennedy refused to call Iraq’s seizure an "expropriation" akin to Castro’s seizure of U.S.-owned banana plantations. Kennedy’s view was that Anglo-American companies had it coming to them because they had refused to honor their legal commitment to drill.

But the freedom Kennedy offered the Iraqis to drill their own oil to the maximum was swiftly taken away from them by their Arab brethren.

The OPEC cartel, controlled by Saudi Arabia, capped Iraq’s production at a sum equal to Iran’s, though the Iranian reserves are far smaller than Iraq’s. The excuse for this quota equality between Iraq and Iran was to prevent war between them. It didn’t. To keep Iraq’s Ba’athists from complaining about the limits, Saudi Arabia simply bought off the leaders by funding Saddam’s war against Iran and giving the dictator $7 billion for his "Islamic bomb" program.

In 1974, a U.S. politician broke the omerta over the suppression of Iraq’s oil production. It was during the Arab oil embargo that Senator Edmund Muskie revealed a secret intelligence report of "fantastic" reserves of oil in Iraq undeveloped because U.S. oil companies refused to add pipeline capacity. Muskie, who’d just lost a bid for the Presidency, was dubbed a "loser" and ignored. The Iranian bombing of the Basra fields (1980-88) put a new kink in Iraq’s oil production. Iraq’s frustration under production limits explodes periodically.

In August 1990, Kuwait’s craven siphoning of borderland oil fields jointly owned with Iraq gave Saddam the excuse to take Kuwait’s share. Here was Saddam’s opportunity to increase Iraq’s OPEC quota by taking Kuwait’s (most assuredly not approved by the U.S.). Saddam’s plan backfired. The Basra oil fields not crippled by Iran were demolished in 1991 by American B-52s. Saddam’s petro-military overreach into Kuwait gave the West the authority for a more direct oil suppression method called the "Sanctions" program, later changed to "Oil for Food." Now we get to the real reason for the U.N. embargo on Iraqi oil exports. According to the official U.S. position:

Sanctions were critical to preventing Iraq from acquiring equipment that could be used to reconstitute banned weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

How odd. If cutting Saddam’s allowance was the purpose, then sanctions, limiting oil exports, was a very suspect method indeed. The nature of the oil market (a cartel) is such that the elimination of two million barrels a day increased Saddam’s revenue. One might conclude that sanctions were less about WMD and more about EPS (earnings per share) of oil sellers.

In other words, there is nothing new under the desert sun. Today’s fight over how much of Iraq’s oil to produce (or suppress) simply extends into this century the last century’s pump-or-control battles. In sum, Big Oil, whether in European or Arab-OPEC dress, has done its damned best to keep Iraq’s oil buried deep in the ground to keep prices high in the air. Iraq has 74 known fields and only 15 in production; 526 known "structures" (oil-speak for "pools of oil"), only 125 drilled.

And they won’t be drilled, not unless Iraq says, "Mother, may I?" to Saudi Arabia, or, as the James Baker/Council on Foreign Relations paper says, "Saudi Arabia may punish Iraq." And believe me, Iraq wouldn’t want that. The decision to expand production has, for now, been kept out of Iraqi’s hands by the latest method of suppressing Iraq’s oil flow — the 2003 invasion and resistance to invasion. And it has been darn effective. Iraq’s output in 2003, 2004 and 2005 was less than produced under the restrictive Oil-for-Food Program. Whether by design or happenstance, this decline in output has resulted in tripling the profits of the five U.S. oil majors to $89 billion for a single year, 2005, compared to pre-invasion 2002. That suggests an interesting arithmetic equation. Big Oil’s profits are up $89 billion a year in the same period the oil industry boosted contributions to Mr. Bush’s reelection campaign to roughly $40 million.

That would make our president "Mr. 0.05%."

A History of Oil in Iraq

Suppressing It, Not Pumping It

• 1925-28 "Mr. 5%" sells his monopoly on Iraq’s oil to British Petroleum and Exxon, who sign a "Red-Line Agreement" vowing not to compete by drilling independently in Iraq.
• 1948 Red-Line Agreement ended, replaced by oil combines’ "dog in the manger" strategy — taking control of fields, then capping production–drilling shallow holes where "there was no danger of striking oil."
• 1961 OPEC, founded the year before, places quotas on Iraq’s exports equal to Iran’s, locking in suppression policy.
• 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. Iran destroys Basra fields. Iraq cannot meet OPEC quota. 1991 Desert Storm. Anglo-American bombings cut production.
• 1991-2003 United Nations Oil embargo (zero legal exports) followed by Oil-for-Food Program limiting Iraqi sales to 2 million barrels a day.
• 2003-? "Insurgents" sabotage Iraq’s pipelines and infrastructure.
• 2004 Options for Iraqi OilThe secret plan adopted by U.S. State Department overturns Pentagon proposal to massively in crease oil production. State Department plan, adopted by government of occupied Iraq, limits state oil company to OPEC quotas.

This article is excerpted from Greg Palast’s new book, " Armed Madhouse" (Dutton Adult, 2006).

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/37371/

Marc Garlasco, who worked in war zones including Iraq and Kosovo during his seven-year stint in the US Department of Defence, called for an independent investigation into the killings after concluding that shell fragments and shrapnel from the site, the size and distribution of the craters on the beach, and the type of injuries sustained by the victims made Israeli shelling easily the likeliest cause.

His assessment came as at least another seven civilians, including two children, as well as two Islamic Jihad militants, were killed in a double Israeli missile strike on a VW van in the densely populated Zeitoun district of Gaza City yesterday. The two children were hit at a nearby house by flying shrapnel and the civilian dead included three medical workers from a nearby children’s hospital who rushed to help after hearing the first explosion.

Israel said the militants had been on their way to launch Katyusha rockets which have a much longer range than the Qassam rockets normally fired from Gaza into Israel. One of the two dead Islamic Jihad militants was Hamoud Wadiya, described as the top rocket launcher in the faction. Mr Peretz said before the strike that Israel was resuming operations "to protect the citizens of Israel" after a pause caused by what he had acknowledged had been "the international storm" over the civilian deaths at the Beit Lahia beach last Friday.

The debate over the beach explosion is unlikely to die down however. Mr Garlasco who is now the senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, said yesterday: "Of course I can’t be completely conclusive but all the evidence points to its being a 155mm Israeli shell which killed the Palestinians on the beach."

Mr Garlasco said that most of the serious injuries of the victims in the Gaza hospitals that he had visited were to the torsos and heads, which were inconsistent with a land mine or of a bomb embedded in the sand. "If this had been a landmine I would have expected to see serious leg injuries," he said. Mr Garlasco said that while he could not rule out the theoretical possibility that Palestinian militants had rigged up an unexploded 155mm shell to make an explosive device of their own, that too would have normally produced many more severe leg injuries.

Mr Garlasco produced a four to five-inch, mainly blackened shell fragment which he collected about 100 yards from the scene of the explosion and in which the figures 55 and the letters "mm" are clearly discernible. While acknowledging that this was not itself definite proof that the shell had killed the Palestinians he said some fragments and shrapnel which the Palestinian police explosives department say they took from the scene where the victims were killed were definitely from a 155mm shell.

Mr Garlasco who accompanied a small group of journalists to the Beit Lahia beach, pointed to three separate craters, each covered in a whitish powder, which he said were fresh, one of which was at the spot where witnesses agree the fatal blast occurred, and the two others separated it from it by about 120 and 250 yards. Mr Garlasco added: "It would be a really ridiculous coincidence if there is active shelling and then suddenly an IED [improvised explosive device] goes off."

The military have admitted firing earlier in the area but now say that the explosion occurred between 4.47 and 5.10pm, when it says firing had stopped. An ambulance driver from the nearby al-Awda hospital, Khaled Abu Sada, said that he first took a call about the emergency at 4.50pm.

The military did not explicitly repeat claims in earlier leaks that Hamas had planted the device or say whether it was a dud shell. It says that shrapnel taken from the bodies of victims being treated in Israeli hospitals was not from a 150mm shell. But Mr Garlasco said that copper-lined shrapnel taken from two injured girls who had been in a car at the time of the blast and from the car itself were consistent with such a shell fired by a M109 howitzer.

Mr Garlasco ruled out the possibility that the shells were naval, as originally thought, on the grounds that they were too large to be fired from Israeli navy coastal vessels.