Cornell Furtuna

On the supply side, Russia is the largest producer of nickel and its production is largely a by-product of platinum production. Because of the diversity of its deposits, Russia can switch between high-nickel and high-copper platinum ore in a way that lets them maintain a high price for nickel without reducing their production and sale of the more valuable platinum group metals.

Preparation time to develop a deep ocean mine could be a decade, beginning with prospecting, then site exploration, and finally capital investment, so if a mineral developer wanted to enter into production by 2020 they would need to begin their prospecting operations within two years.

In 1980 the US passed legislation to recognize claims by domestic miners, and by the middle of the 1980s there was an agreement among all states who had companies involved in the seabed mining consortia to recognize each others claims. However, after the 1994 modifications to the LOS Convention and the subsequent ratification of the convention by all other developed countries, every foreign partner and every foreign owner involved in or with the US firms pulled out. Two of the consortia dissolved, with one of the minesites later being registered with the International Seabed Authority. Kennecott gave up its site, which was picked up by Lockheed, and Lockheed left that site along with their original one in the hands of their lawyers. Unfortunately, the republican controlled congress zeroed out the budget of the office responsible for renewing claims while, at the same time, Lockheed’s licenses have lapsed.

Meanwhile, there are eight deep seabed exploration licenses recognized by the International Seabed Authority (including a site formerly held by one of the consortia and now registered by a german group). They all maintain exploration programs and provide progress reports to the Authority. The Authority conducts workshop on deep seabed minerals (not just nodules but sulfides and cobalt crusts) and at the request of its members it is developing exploration regulations so that applications for sites of those minerals can be made and recognized (an action the US has not even considered).

Due to the failure of the United States to take even token action to maintain the deep seabed mining legislation of 1980 or even to seek and process renewal applications from Lockheed, the deep seabed mining system of the LOS Convention has become the only system capable of recognizing exclusive claims to deep seabed mine sites and title to the recovered minerals. Just as an individual can’t get a mortgage on a house without demonstrating clear title, an investor ready to put over $1 billion to a deep seabed mine will only do so under a regime that can recognize exclusive access to a deposit and internationally recognized tile to the recovered minerals. The US regime, even if refunded by congress, can’t meet that test.

US firms were the organizers of the deep seabed mining consortia of the 1970s and 1980s, but they never planned to conduct those operations alone. Foreign firms, on the other hand, now have the capability to conduct mining operations without the US and, with the outlook for prices for seabed minerals to continue rising for three decades or more, I expect to see exploration programs ramp up to begin development of plans for commercial development in a couple years.

However, unless the US joins the LOS Convention, American firms, once the pioneers in this industry, will be left on the shore because the LOS regime for the seabed is not only the near-universally accepted written law governing the deep seabed, it has become, by default on the part of the US, customary international law for those minerals as well.

We in the “South Eastern States” have surely suffered the most from the presidency of Bush. We are facing a very serious dilemma; we have a new strain of government corruption that is immune to the antibodies of the justice system as defined by the constitution which incudes: (a) Election fraud, (b) political favors for illegal campaign contributions (large oil companies, Tobacco Companies, Gambling Casinos, etc.), ( c) corrupt Bush appointed U.S Attorneys that spend millions of dollars profiling high ranking Democrats so that their offices can be freed up for a Bush operative and (d) Bush appointed U.S. Judges that removes the threat of a political comeback by giving maximum sentences with appeal denials and highly restricted/screened prison correspondence.

My contacts with natives of other conquered lands (america, maori, fiji, tonga, samoa, etc.)
leads me to the inescapable conclusion that the
whiteman has done nothing but harm to the conquered peoples, their enviroment and their lands. Everywhere one looks it is the whiteman
who extracts the resources of the lands for their
own uses while denying the natives use of those same resources.

Again: we hawaiians are not americans and have never wanted to be. It was the whitemen who, with the threat of violence, forced us to pledge alligence to him. Any and all such pledges, than,
are null and void because they were done so under duress. Here’s evidence that the hawaiians
were not complicit in the unlawful annexation of
hawaii by the republican mafiosa.

President Cleveland’s address to Congress on Dec. 18, 1893 stated that: “The provisional government has not assumed a republican or other constitutional form, but has remained a mere executive council or oligarchy, set up without the assent of the people. It has not sought to find a permanent basis of popular support and has given no evidence of an intention to do so. Indeed, the representatives of that government assert that the people of Hawaii are unfit for popular government and frankly avow that they can be best ruled by arbitrary or despotic power.”

Shoot! Whiteman, Shoot! Kill! Kill! Kill!
(women and children first!)

I once worked on a documentary for an anniversary of the African Development Bank and although never was in Darfur, I was close enough to the Sudan border in Ethiopian and Kenya and have a spot in my heart for the magnificent people of this region. I just knocked out this article when I remembered, (I’m well into my 70s) of U.S. backing the rebels was never being factored in.
By the way, I wonder and ask you as someone more conversant on the Sudan than I, whether or not the U.S. is still actively supporting the rebellion{s}, either materially or diplomatically, either openly or secretly. sentimentally, morally and/or spiritually.?
Appreciativly in advance should you have time to read my article below and comment, Jay Janson

While there is great sorrow and indignation over the suffering and loss of life in the Sudan, early U.S. involvement in the war goes unmentioned. Instead, the U.S. leads an effort to condemn China for buying Sudan’s oil. For years the U.S. had paid for war in hopes to arrange for some eventual control of the oil discovered in Darfur, (all well once well reported in the New York Times). The human crises receives modest financial aid from a U.S. government, silently protected from any embarrassment of acknowledging a prime complicity in fomenting war in Darfur.

HistoryNewNetwork, George Mason University republished the folloing from hand_ringin

“Early CIA Involvement in Darfur Has Gone Unreported”

republished as well by Global Research, Operation Sudan of SaveDafur, UK IndyMedia, Ethiopian News, FreeThoughtManifesto, Islamic Forum, Countercurrents, Nicholas D. Kristof, Schema-Root news, jcturner23’s reviews, NewsTrust,News Search Tracker, alfatomega, Newsvine, Digg, Netscape, Boreal Access, Newswire, Tailrank, Congo Music News, Zaire, mideastyouth.com, Darfur News from Google, ibrattleboro.com and sundry other sites from the original in OpEdNews, January 23, 2007

There has been a glaring omission in the U.S. media presentation of the Darfur tragedy. The compassion demonstrated, mostly in words, until recently, has not been accompanied by a recognition of U.S. complicity, or at least involvement, in the war which has led to the enormous suffering and loss of life that has been taking place in Darfur for many years.

In 1978 oil was discovered in Southern Sudan. Rebellious war began five years later and was led by John Garang, who had taken military training at infamous Fort Benning, Georgia. “The US government decided, in 1996, to send nearly $20 million of military equipment through the ‘front-line’ states of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda to help the Sudanese opposition overthrow the Khartoum regime.” [Federation of American Scientists fas.org]

Between 1983 and the peace agreement signed in January 2005, Sudan’s civil war took nearly two million lives and left millions more displaced. Garang became a First Vice President of Sudan as part of the peace agreement in 2005. From 1983, “war and famine-related effects resulted in more than 4 million people displaced and, according to rebel estimates, more than 2 million deaths over a period of two decades.”
[CIA Fact Book -entry Sudan]

The BBC obituary of John Garang, who died in a plane crash shortly afterward, describes him as having “varied from Marxism to drawing support from Christian fundamentalists in the US.” “There was always confusion on central issues such as whether the Sudan People’s Liberation Army was fighting for independence for southern Sudan or merely more autonomy. Friends and foes alike found the SPLA’s human rights record in southern Sudan and Mr Garang’s style of governance disturbing.” Gill Lusk - deputy editor of Africa Confidential and a Sudan specialist who interviewed the ex-guerrilla leader several times over the years was quoted by BBC, “John Garang did not tolerate dissent and anyone who disagreed with him was either imprisoned or killed.”

CIA use of tough guys like Garang in Sudan, Savimbi in Angola, Mobutu in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), had been reported, even in mass media, though certainly not featured or criticized, but presently, this is of course buried away from public awareness and meant to be forgotten, as commercial media focuses on presenting the U.S. wars of today in a heroic light. It has traditionally been the chore of progressive, alternate and independent journalism to see that their deathly deeds supported by U.S. citizens tax dollars are not forgotten, ultimately not accepted and past Congresses and Presidents held responsible, even in retrospect, when not in real time.

Oil and business interests remain paramount and although Sudan is on the U.S. Government’s state sponsors of terrorism list, the United States alternately praises its cooperation in tracking suspect individuals or scolds about the Janjaweed in Darfur. National Public Radio on May 2, 2005 had Los Angeles Times writer Ken Silverstein talk about his article “highlighting strong ties between the U.S. and Sudanese intelligence services, despite the Bush administration’s criticism of human-rights violation in the Sudan.” Title was “Sudan, CIA Forge Close Ties, Despite Rights Abuses.” Nicholas Kristof, of The New York Times, won a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for “his having alerted this nation and the world to these massive crimes against humanity. He made six dangerous trips to Darfur to report names and faces of victims of the genocide for which President Bush had long before indicted the government of Sudan to the world’s indifference.” [Reuters] But last November saw the opening of a new U.S. consulate in Juba the capital of the Southern region. (Maybe consider this an example of “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!” especially where oil is involved.)

The point is there is human suffering at mammoth level proportions. Humanitarian activists are trying to pry open the purse strings of an administration and congress willing to spend billions upon billions to get people killed and keep them in their place, namely, at our feet. Reminding Congress of what needs to be atoned for because of past policies of supporting war and human destruction could eventually make present policies of war intolerable. Americans are presently not exactly conscious stricken about dead and maimed Iraqis and Afghans, for commercial media always keeps of most of the human particulars of war crimes modestly out of sight, dramatizing much lesser losses and suffering of American military personal abroad.

Darfur made the headlines again because a governor of presidential timber was building up his foreign policy credentials. Meanwhile we are going to continue to see newsreels of our mass media depressing us with scenes of starving children, basically as testimony of how evil another Islamic nation’s government is, so we can feel good - and want to purchase the products needing the advertising - which pays for the entertainment/news programs - which keep viewers in the dark about THEIR contribution to the suffering brought upon those people all the way over there in Africa.

Just try to put 4 and 2 million of anything into perspective. We are talking about an equivalent to the sets of eyes of half the population of Manhattan. Imagine one of us, whether a precious child ,a handsome man, a beautiful women, - to the tune of, (dirge of), one times four million, half of us dead. Sorry! It has no impact right? We realize that, remembering the words of Joseph Stalin (of all people), “One man’s death is a tragedy, a thousand, is a statistic.” There is absolutely no way we can whip up enough anguish to match a total of four million displaced and two million dead Sudanese, unless we could be of a mind and heart with Martin Luther King dealing with three million dead Vietnamese, also as in this case, over on the other side of the world, far from our living rooms - “So it is that those of us who are yet determined that “America will be” are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.” (MLK, 1967, “Beyond Vietnam”)

This writer remembers reading newspapers articles about the U.S. backing the Southern Sudan rebellion way back then. If we had supported a side that wound up winning, we would be bragging about our having supported ‘freedom fighters’. But we just threw a lot of money and outdated weapons at a John Garang in the Sudan, as we did with Jonas Savimbi in Angola, to the ultimate destruction of millions of people, and they LOST! Like we did in Vietnam, and half-way lost in Korea, and now are mid-way losing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jesus! Calculating the chances of an investment in human life and money coming to a fruition of sorts - that is certainly the job of any intelligence gathering agency! What we have had is an Agency using its gathered intelligence to do unintelligent things because, as our Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote more than a hundred and twenty-five years ago, “Things are in the saddle and ride herd over men” (trampling others under foot, we might add)

The European Union is under pressure from inside to assure that a United Nations force of 20,000 men will be sent to Darfur as required by Security Council resolution 1706, and to threaten sanctions in order to halt a war the U.S. was originally interested to see begun.

The U.N. Security Council will receive a list from the International Criminal Court of those Sudanese officials who could be charged with war crimes. The list is expected include some members of rebel organizations among Sudanese government officials and Janjaweed militias. There assuredly will be no names on the list of non-Sudanese officials of nations which were known to have involved themselves in this Sudanese civil war contrary to accepted provisions and obligations of U.N. membership. But we can know that the responsibility for war, slaughter, rape and theft in Sudan extends beyond the leaders of those murderously wielding guns and swords.

It will be good if outside influence will now be focused on peace, but citizens best be vigilant of their nation’s foreign policy intentions. The world has heard many protestations that oil is not a reason for war, but blood and oil has been known to mix.

That now the U.S. use its economic power humanely, to promote peace in the Sudan and give generously to help war victims.
Published on 5 Jul 2004 by Zaman Daily. Archived on 5 Jul 2004.
Oil Underlies Darfur Tragedy
by Cumali Onal

The fighting in Sudan’s Darfur region, which is being reported in the world press as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and a ‘humanitarian crisis’, reportedly stems from attempts to gain control over the oil resources in the region, claim Arab sources.

These Arab sources find it interesting that such skirmishes occurred when a peace agreement that would have brought an end to 21 years of north-south conflict was about to be signed. The sources point out that oil fields have recently been discovered in Darfur.

A good friend of mine is still trying to figure out why so short and what did he say. Looks like two speeches in two days is too much for Thompson.

Rudy gave two speeches today and knocked the one in Orlando out of the park and did very well on the other one considering the audience. Unlike Mitt, Rudy doesn’t have to bus in supporters to be there and shout for him.