8. september 2006

America's black gold discovery A huge oil find in the US part of the Gulf of Mexico is certainly good news for the west and bad news for oil dictators across the world. Treasure was discovered in America’s Gulf of Mexico waters today, black gold so vast and so deep and so surprising and so recoverable that overnight, America’s energy reserves have just increased as much as 50%. Chevron, Norway’s Statoil and deep-sea driller Devon Energy have just discovered as many as 15 billion barrels of previously unknown oil in a vast underwater pool five miles under the floor of the sea. No one even had a clue about this huge oil’s existence up until new high technology of deep sea drilling (cost: $1 billion a pop, and every bit as weird and high-tech as a spaceship) came to the fore. But now it’s known. And even with America’s oil appetite at 6 million barrels of crude a day, oil prices just dropped $2 to $68 a barrel due to all the anticipated coming supply. And these prices are going down further. That’s great news for everyone - little countries like Costa Rica whose citizens have to pay top dollar for fuel, as well as the average American mom in her SUV cringing at her final bill at the pump. Oil tyrants beware. Via Winds of Change. Oil prices hit a 5-month low on Friday, and is at $66.99 a barrel, on this and other developments. Crude fell as low as $66.99 a barrel <CLc1> as supply concerns eased after U.S. distillate supplies rose sharply and BP said it might be able to reopen the closed section of its Alaskan oilfield sooner than expected. Peak oil prophecies appear to have been overstated. This, of course, doesn't mean that the west's addiction to oil, and the fact that most of the world's oil supplies are in the hands of rather dubious regimes in unstable regions, is not a serious problem. 9:14:02 PM    comment []  trackback []

New Bin Laden video shows 9/11 planning Al-Jazeera has aired a video of Osama Bin Laden meeting with some of the 9/11-01 hijackers, apparently footage of the actual planning of the terrorist attacks. The video showed bin Laden sitting with his former lieutenant Mohammed Atef and Ramzi Binalshibh, another suspected planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings. Atef, also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan in 2001. Binalshibh was captured four years ago in Pakistan and is in U.S. custody, and this week President Bush announced plans to put him on military trial. Hot Air has more details including footage from al-Jazeera. Update: Andrew Cochran has some more details about the yet-unseen Bin Laden video, as well as the full details of an audio recording of Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, the successor of al-Zarqawi in Iraq. It is also worth noting Douglas Farah's article on the Jihadi 20-year-plan for taking create an Islamist Caliphate. This week’s New Yorker should be required reading for those interested in the Islamist jihadi movements. The reason is simple. It gives us, in al Qaeda’s own words, the 20-year plan of the group and its different iterations to wear away the West’s resolve: plunge the United States into wars that will over extend its military, focus on a few key concepts (use of the internet, building a single narrative of itself and the West to give a unified vision of the war, drastic decentralization of command and control structures etc.) and a specific timetable in which different phases of the plan will be completed. The scary part is that while low-level intelligence analysts have been looking at this plan (it is publicly available), there has been very little interest in and attention to these enemy plans by political decision makers. You'd not expect, in World War II, that if the total war plans of the Axis powers fell into Allied hands, it would be virtually ignored. This is yet another argument that the war on terror is not really being fought as a war, even as war rhetoric is very prominent in domestic politics. 7:33:12 AM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.10.2006; 03:09:31.