ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

On New Year’s Eve, 3,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server were released. One of them confirms – an email dated April 2, 2011 to Clinton from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal – that: Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. *** This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French. franc (CFA). (Source Comment [This is in the original declassified email, and is not a comment added by us]: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According to the

By Kim Petersen and B. J. Sabri From The WikiLeaks Files: A December 13, 2006 cable, "Influencing the SARG [Syrian government] in the End of 2006," indicates that, as far back as 2006 - five years before "Arab Spring" protests in Syria - destabilizing the Syrian government was a central motivation of US policy. The author of the cable was William Roebuck, at the time chargé d'affaires at the US embassy in Damascus. The cable outlines strategies for destabilizing the Syrian government. In his summary of the cable, Roebuck wrote: We believe Bashar's weaknesses are in how he chooses to react to looming issues, both perceived and real, such as the conflict between economic reform steps (however limited) and entrenched, corrupt forces, the Kurdish question, and the potential threat to the regime from the increasing presence of transiting Islamist extremists. This cable summarizes our assessment of these vulnerabilities and suggests that there may be actions, stat

The Saudi monarchy is going to great lengths to increase its share of the Asian crude oil market, according to an expert. © REUTERS/ ESSAM AL-SUDANI Iraq Oil Ministry Warns of New Drop in Oil Prices Without Agreement to Cut Production Oil-rich Saudi Arabia is gearing up for all-out competition with Russia for a bigger presence in Europe and Asia oil markets amid the continued slump in crude prices, experts told Sputnik on Monday. The Saudi oil giant Aramco announced last week that it would cut oil prices for Europe, apparently in preparation for Iran’s resumption of oil exports to the region later this year. However, Arthur Berman, director of Labyrinth Oil Consulting Services in Texas, told Sputnik that Russia, the largest oil exporter to Europe, was likely the real target of Saudi Arabia’s oil policy. "The largest exporter to Europe is Russia with 1.66 mmbpd [million barrels per day], compared to Saudi Arabia with 0.89 mmbpd, so market share competition with Russia seems the

Claims that United Nations peacekeeping troops have been sexually abusing young girls in Central African Republic (CAR) continue to emerge - bringing the number of cases brought against soldiers to 26. The UN has asked three countries to investigate claims that four young girls were abused by soldiers serving in the Minusca mission. The victims have been interviewed by investigators from children's charity, Unicef. The troops are accused of rape, sexual exploitation and transactional sex with young girls living in a camp in Bangui, paying them as little as 50 cents for sex. Responding to the fresh allegations, Parfait Onanga-Anyanga, head of the UN Minusca mission has promised tough action against the alleged perpetrators. "Where there is doubt we will take the side of the victims […] The sanctions will be strong when we have established who is responsible," he said. However, this is not the first time UN peacekeepers have been accused of paying for sex with youngsters li

By Finian Cunningham The Western news media are at it again – telling barefaced lies and half-truths about starving towns in Syria being liberated from sieges. Fake images of emaciated children are also being published to shore up their fraudulent narrative. Take the image of the malnourished little girl whom the BBC and the British Independent newspaper claimed was from the Syrian town of Madaya. Turns out the girl is from south Lebanon. Her name is Marianna Mazeh. The photo published widely this week by Western media is from three years ago, yet the same media are claiming that she is one of the residents of the Syrian town of Madaya, which the Western media also say is being blockaded by the governments forces of President Bashar al-Assad. Turns out too that Marianna's family are infuriated that her forlorn image is being circulated for propaganda purposes. "I live in Tayr Filsey [south Lebanon], not Madaya, and I am fine," the little girl told Al Manar news agency.

The US government has only officially renamed certain tasks in Afghanistan trying to avoid responsibility for its actions and confuse the American people, but that doesn’t change the character of the war, says Sara Flounders of the International Action Center. Afghan troops have pushed Taliban militants out of the northern Darqad district as the security situation in the south of the country deteriorates. The Taliban is fighting government troops in Afghanistan's largest province Helmand, after militants seized vast parts of it last month. British and US elite forces were sent in to help the Afghans stop the advance. Last week a joint Afghan-US special operation saw an American soldier killed and two more wounded in Helmand province. When asked about the casualties, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook stopped short of calling the incident part of a“combat” mission. Speaking on Thursday, Cook said the Department of Defense may not always know what US troops deployed in Afghan

By Eric Margolis “Let’s begin 2016…with the thrilling explosion of our first hydrogen bomb, so that the whole world will look up to our socialist, nuclear-armed republic and the great Workers’ Party of Korea!” - Kim Jong-un North Koreans may be happy, but the rest of the world certainly is not. Predictably, the US, Japan, China, Australia and South Korea seethed with fury at the explosive North Koreans. China scowled and muttered. This hypocrisy and hysteria made world equity markets, already reeling from new Chinese financial blundering, crazy as uninformed investors ran for the lifeboats. The UN shook its tiny fist at North Korea, ignoring that the US, Britain, France, Russia and China are all in violation of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. There was not a peep about nuclear scofflaws, Israel, Pakistan and India. Nor mention that today’s outraged South Korea and Taiwan had been caught by CIA red-handed trying to make their own nuclear weapons. Is North Korea’s claim of a hydrogen w

by JACK RASMUS After 9-11, the United States focused its most aggressive foreign policy on the Middle East – from Afghanistan to North Africa. But the deal recently worked out with Iran, the current back-door negotiations over Syria between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and Russia Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and the decision to subsidize, and now export, U.S. shale oil and gas production in a direct reversal of U.S. past policy toward Saudi Arabia – together signal a relative shift of U.S. policy away from the Middle East. With a Middle East consolidation phase underway, U.S. policy has been shifting since 2013-14 to the more traditional focus that it had for decades: first, to check and contain China; second, to prevent Russia from economically integrating more deeply with Europe; and, third, to reassert more direct U.S. influence once again, as in previous decades, over the economies and governments in Latin America. Following his re-election in 2012, Obama announced what w