By Damien McElroy aboard USS Eisenhower Last Updated: 12:30am GMT 25/02/2007
# Cheney steps up the rhetoric against Iran # Israel seeks all clear for Iran air strike # Con Coughlin: Ready for war # Vicki Woods: Iraq inquiry could stop Iran war # In pictures: On board the USS Eisenhower # Audio: Damien McElroy on the deck of the US flagship
It is four and a half acres of American power in the middle of the Arabian Sea but the influence of USS Dwight D Eisenhower stretches for hundreds of miles. American armada prepares to take on Iran
Crew on board the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower are on alert in the Arabian Sea
The aircraft carrier, backed by its sister vessel, a handful of destroyers and a shoal of support ships, has placed a maritime ring of steel around an increasingly unstable region.
While the Eisenhower is ostensibly assisting US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is the looming threat of Iran that increasingly occupies its attention.
Recent tensions between America and Iran over Teheran's attempts to develop a nuclear weapon have raised the prospect of its third regional war in a decade.
The addition of a second aircraft carrier to its strike groups has fuelled the belief that America is gearing up for a fight with Iran. Not since the Iraq war in 2003 has America amassed so much fire power around the Gulf.
As flagship of the Fifth Fleet, the Eisenhower welcomed the arrival of a second Nimitz class nuclear powered aircraft carrier, the USS John C. Stennis, and its accompanying destroyers on Tuesday.
Captain Dan Cloyd, the Eisenhower's commanding officer, compared the situation with the international tension of the Cold War.
"There was a time when we had two aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean," he told The Daily Telegraph. "The world changes and we adapt."
The quiet-spoken Capt Cloyd embraced the suggestion that the dual deployment is at the forefront of efforts to stop Iran getting a nuclear bomb, pointing out that his maritime assets have been tasked to quash any challenge to global security.
"Our presence here is an affirmation of our resolve in this area to engage with the nations of the region either where we share common goals or where we face challenges."
Every hour and fifteen minutes a handful of jets scream north across the ocean. The range of missions an aircraft carrier as big as the Eisenhower - it has more than 5,000 people onboard - can carry out is virtually limitless.
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The Eisenhower is not only the flagship of the carrier group that protects The Gulf through which one-fifth of the world's oil is shipped. It has also helped overthrow a hard-line Islamic regime in Somalia during a stint off the Horn of Africa.
Its fighter jets now offer close support to Nato and US forces in Afghanistan.
Lieutenant Commander Matt Pothier returned yesterday from Afghanistan having delivered air support to British soldiers. He said: "Right now I have more opportunities than I've ever had to use weapons where we know there aren't any friendly people. In combat that's very rewarding."
In the carrier's Combat Direction Centre, Warrant Officer Michael Myers can spot anything untoward in a 256 mile radius from his radar screen. He can identify objects as small as wooden boats on the open sea and small aircraft in a swathe of countries from the Arabian peninsula to the northern shore of the Sea of Arabia.
Should Lieutenant Commander Craig Stapleton, the tactical operations officer, give the order, WO Myers can put up Hawkeye, an EP2 surveillance plane with massive radar capable of establishing American air traffic control across half a continent. "Those planes alone extend our radar horizon to a huge circle of the sky. I could see for 1,000 miles if I wanted to."
As it patrols the shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz, the Eisenhower ensures the safe passage of oil tankers. It also prevents the trading routes being used to transport materials that would help rogue nations build a nuclear weapon.
Capt Cloyd said: "Our maritime security mission is about denying the use of the seas to any potential spread of weapons of mass destruction."
Iran's belligerent posture has increased the challenges facing the Eisenhower since it deployed to the Middle East last October. Vice Admiral Patrick Walsh, the commander of the Fifth Fleet, issued a stark warning that Iran risks triggering an "accidental war" during aggressive military maneuvres.
During the Great Prophet 2 missile test in November, the Islamic Republic fired a Shabab missile into the six mile corridor of shipping lanes in the Straits of Hormuz. In such a constricted corridor, the results could have been disastrous.
With Teheran's real strategic intentions unclear, the US takes the threats it has made very seriously.
"They threaten to use oil as a weapon. They threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz," Adml Walsh said.
"And so it is the combination of the rhetoric, the tone, and the aggressive exercises in very constrained waters that gives us concern."
US commanders ascribe the increase in instability to increasingly aggressive actions by Teheran. For that reason the deployment of the carriers in the region is designed to intensify the pressure on Iran to step back from the brink.
"In the past year and a half it [Iran] has become much more strident, more vocal and in your face," said Walsh. "What concerns me is miscalculation."
Capt Cloyd said his personnel, 70 per cent of whom have never participated in a long term mission before, are aware that the workload could grow more intense before the deployment is over.
"We're aware of the environment and the need to respond to the environment so that we can protect regional security and stability.
We're aware of what other countries could do.
"We're busy but we would move to a higher tempo if need be."
The head of US forces in Iraq, Lt Gen David Petraeus, has told the BBC that fighting the insurgency is a "long term endeavour" which could take decades...
Are We Being Prepped for Another “Terror” Attack? - July 11, 2007
Filed under:
The 911 attack has left a multitude of questions unanswered.
Why did Building 7 collapse even though no airplane hit it?
Why were fighter aircraft not allowed to intercept the off-course jets as they should have?
Why did a MOSSAD film crew know about the attack in advance?
Given the fact that the George W. Bush regime is completely lacking in anything that remotely resembles a conscience, the possibility has always existed that the 666and neocon friends may secretly stage an even bigger “terror” attack in order to seize more power, destroy more Constitutional liberties, and postpone the 2008 elections so that they don’t need to leave office in 2009 and face possible public trial and punishment for their crimes against America, not to mention a growing list of war crimes which the World Court in Belgium would like to prosecute.
We may be getting a glimpse of the future right now. Yahoo News reports “U.S. counterterror officials are warning of an increased risk of an attack this summer, given al-Qaida’s apparent interest in summertime strikes and increased al-Qaida training in the Afghan-Pakistani border region.
On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune that he had a ‘gut feeling’ about a new period of increased risk…
Other U.S. counterterrorism officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, shared Chertoff’s concern and said that al-Qaida and like-minded groups have been able to plot and train more freely in the tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border in recent months.
Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are believed to be hiding in the rugged region.”
And they’ve reportedly been there for six years now since 9/11.
Apparently the mightiest army in the world can’t seem to find them assuming they ever existed at all and were not a CIA bogeyman from the start.
The Yahoo article continues “Chertoff’s department has not made any move to increase the nation’s color-coded terror alert system.
Now, airlines are under orange — or high — alert, which is the second most serious level on a five-point scale. The rest of the country remains a step below at yellow, or elevated.”
So, let me get this straight: Chertoff has a “gut feeling” that the US is about to be attacked by a foreign enemy, but he has done nothing whatsoever to prepare for it?
No fence along the Mexican border.
No banning of Arab students.
No deportations of suspicious Muslims.
Never mind the dual-loyalist Zionist thing, Chertoff seems to be an IDIOT!!
What in God’s name is he doing in that job?
Like that Mike Brown character whose only job prior to taking over FEMA was being an Arabian horse show judge, and not a competent one at that.
My personal guess is there won’t be an attack this summer, at least not a “major” attack.
There may be a few alleged “car bombs” of mysterious origin, like that incident in Britain a couple of weeks ago, which they are blaming on Muslim medical doctors.
A few small incidents may occur just to rattle Congress’ cage and chase a few wavering Republicans back into the neocon fold.
The main event will most likely come a little over a year from now, between August and October–some kind of gas attack on the New York subways or something even worse, terrible enough and close enough to November to give Bush and the neocons an excuse to invoke his multitude of new emergency powers, cancel the elections or postpone them indefinitely, and then find some excuse - to stay in power permanently.
OTTAWA — A significant quantity of gold, silver and other precious metals is unaccounted for at the Royal Canadian Mint.
External auditors are investigating a discrepancy between the mint's 2008 financial accounting of its precious metals holdings and the physical stockpile at the plant on Sussex Drive in Ottawa.
The mystery raises possibilities from sloppy bookkeeping to a gold heist.
Officials with the commercial Crown corporation are saying little and refuse to confirm the amount and value of the unaccounted for gold, silver and palladium.
"An unprecedented demand in gold in 2008 has led to an unreconciled difference between the mint's financial statements and the physical count of precious metals. There's a difference there that we're looking into," Christine Aquino, mint spokeswoman, said in a prepared statement Tuesday in response to questions from the Ottawa Citizen.
"We're taking this very seriously. We're conducting a thorough review and we're expected to have that completed within the month. (It) includes the analysis of precious metal by-products and financial data. We've allocated all necessary resources to this review."
She stressed police have not been called into what mint officials consider an internal matter. She would not say whether the gold and other metals in question were part of the refinery and bullion operation or one of the mint's three other business lines: producing Canadian circulating coins, designing and producing coinage for foreign countries, and numismatics.
"We're looking at many different angles right now," she said.
The mint's Ottawa headquarters houses one of the world's leading gold and silver refineries, turning out almost 2.8 million Troy ounces of refined gold in 2007.
Another 369,000 ounces of refined silver were produced as a byproduct of refining the gold from a number of sources, including gold ore, scrap recyclers, financial institutions and industry. (A Troy ounce is the traditional unit of weight for precious metals and equals 1.097 ounces.)
The volume of precious metals refined in 2007 climbed by eight per cent over 2006, to 5.4 million ounces. Bullion and refinery revenues increased to $286 million. Total mint revenue in 2007 was a record $632 million. Annual figures for 2008 have yet to be released.
Further, production of the mint's Gold Maple Leaf coins last year surged by 325 per cent over 2007, fuelling the "unprecedented demand" for gold, said Aquino.
Stealing gold or other metals from the refinery would be a considerable feat.
"The rigour of our production standards is equalled by the stringency of our security protocols, which are implemented at every level of refinery operations," according to the mint's website. "The refinery is a restricted environment controlled by security personnel supported by state-of-the art surveillance technology."
It's not known when or what triggered the audit review or what external auditor is conducting the review.
The corporation's year fiscal 2008 runs Jan. 1 to Dec. 31 and its normal external auditor is the auditor general of Canada, who is required to audit the mint's year-end consolidated financial statements.
Security is paramount to the mint's success, including its reputation with foreign governments.
In 2001, during a court hearing for a mint employee convicted of smuggling counterfeit coins from the mint's Winnipeg plant, a statement from management said the theft could have "significant economic impact" for the Crown corporation because security breaches threatened future contracts.
The largest reported theft at the mint was in 1996, when a machinist at the Sussex Drive plant pocketed 85 ounces or eight bars of almost-pure gold called "anodes," the final step in the refining process before 24-karat ingots are made in an acid bath. He sold it for $8,000 to another man, who sold it to a company for $22,000. It was resold once more for $40,000.
A charge of theft against the man was later dropped for unexplained reasons and the mint was spared the humiliation of a trial that would have explained how the man snuck the precious metal past metal detectors, surveillance cameras and electronic sensors.
Prior to that, there were only two reported incidents of gold theft in the mint's 101-year history.
In 1988, a 23-year veteran janitor at the plant stole at least $30,000 in gold. The man worked in an area of the mint where objects that come into contact with liquid gold, such as tools, are crushed and recycled so the gold can be recovered. Police found he had more than $150,000 in unexplained income between 1985 and 1988.
PENTAGON REPORTS 2.3 TRILLION DOLLARS MISSING ON 9/10/01 -
bolshevikz banksterz circuz -
Missing Gold - A King's Ransom in Precious Metals - Seems to Have Disappeared -
This image is found on the PBS.org website companion for the television documentary America Rebuilds under the section Uncovering Property.
The page, entitled A Treasure in Silver and Gold, describes the vault as two levels of 3,000 square feet each.
See the source for the full-sized image. The page credits images to Leslie E. Robertson and Associates.
The basement of 4 World Trade Center housed vaults used to store gold and silver bullion.
Published articles about precious metals recovered from the World Trade Center ruins in the aftermath of the attack mention less than $300 million worth of gold.
All such reports appear to refer to a removal operation conducted in late October of 2001. On Nov. 1, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced that "more than $230 million" worth of gold and silver bars that had been stored in a bomb-proof vault had been recovered.
A New York Times article contained: Two Brinks trucks were at ground zero on Wednesday to start hauling away the $200 million in gold and silver that the Bank of Nova Scotia had stored in a vault under the trade center ... A team of 30 firefighters and police officers are helping to move the metals, a task that can be measured practically down to the flake but that has been rounded off at 379,036 ounces of gold and 29,942,619 ounces of silver .. 1
Reports describing the contents of the vaults before the attack suggest that nearly $1 billion in precious metals was stored in the vaults.
A figure of $650 million in a National Real Estate Investor article published after the attack is apparently based on pre-attack reports.
Unknown to most people at the time, $650 million in gold and silver was being kept in a special vault four floors beneath Four World Trade Center. 2
An article in the TimesOnline gives the following rundown of precious metals that were being stored in the WTC vault belonging to Comex. 3
* Comex metals trading - 3,800 gold bars weighing 12 tonnes and worth more than $100 million
* Comex clients - 800,000 ounces of gold with a value of about $220 million
* Comex clients - 102 million ounces of silver, worth $430 million
* Bank of Nova Scotia - $200 million of gold
The TimesOnline article is not clear as to whether the $200 million in gold reported by the Bank of Nova Scotia was part of the $220 million in gold held by Comex for clients.
If so, the total is $750 million; otherwise $950 million.
There appear to be no reports of precious metals discovered between November of 2001 and the completion of excavation several months later.
Assuming that the above reports described the value of precious metals in the vaulst before the attack, and that the $230 million mentioned by Giuliani represented the approxmiate value of metals recovered, it would seem that at least the better part of a billion dollars worth of precious metals went missing. (It is not plausible, of course, that whatever destroyed the towers vaporized gold and silver, which are dense, inert metals that are extremely unlikely to participate in chemical reactions with other materials.)
An article in The Sierra Times suggests that gold was recovered from two trucks in a tunnel under 5 World Trade Center, giving rise to suspicions that the trucks were being used to remove the gold from the vaults before the South Tower fell. 4
However, this report may have been based on an erroneous reading of other reports that describe the removal of crushed vehicles from a tunnel under 5 WTC in order to gain access to the vaults under 4 WTC to remove their contents. 5
Why is there this huge discrepancy between the value of gold and silver reported recovered, and the value reported to have been stored in the vaults?
There are a number of possible explanations, from outright theft using the attack as cover, to insurance fraud.
Until there is a genuine investigation that probes all the relevant facts and circumstances surrounding the attack, we can only speculate.
References
1. Below Ground Zero, Silver and Gold, New York Times, 11/1/2001 2. Thanksgiving at Ground Zero, National Real Estate Investor, [cached] 3. Crushed towers give up cache of gold ingots, TimesOnline, 11/1/02 [cached] 4. Cache of Gold Found at WTC Two truckloads retrieved through a tunnel in rubble2, [cached] 5. , Reuters and New York Daily News, [cached]
it was a lot of *US GOLD* stored below the World Trade Centre -
what happened to the "GOLD"???
Who was in charge of Security of the World Trade Centre???
The short selling started - about $6 trillion - was taken from the IT Hi-Tech industries - by short selling - after all the genius CEO's were murdered in - the 9/11 - World Trade Centre -
GOLD | TECHNOLOGY | DJIA
38099902 = GOLD | XCI = Technology Index | 26099400 = Dow Jones Industrial Average
A construction worker on the site of Ground Zero in New York Human remains were found beneath a manhole at the site New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said construction work will continue at Ground Zero, despite recent finds of human remains at the site -
He said the discoveries - which included 18 fragments found on Sunday, would not halt work at the 9/11 attack site -
Families of more than 1,100 of those who died have never received any remains of their loved ones -
Don't talk about what you have done - or what you are going to do - Liberty is to the collective body - what health is to every individual body - Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man - without liberty - no happiness can be enjoyed - by society -
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