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Iran planning to stop using U.S. dollar to price oil, central bank governor says
The Associated Press Published: March 28, 2007
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: Iran is planning to stop using the U.S. dollar to price oil, with less than half of its oil income now paid in the U.S. currency, Iran's central bank governor said.
"That's the plan for the future, we are working on that," Governor Ebrahim Sheibany said in an interview with Zawya Dow Jones News Service late Tuesday when asked if Iran was planning to stop pricing oil in dollars. He was speaking on the sidelines of an Islamic finance forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's largest city.
In global markets, oil is priced in U.S. dollars per barrel.
"More than 50 percent of Iran's oil income is paid in other currencies. We are reducing the dollar share and asking clients to pay in other currencies," Sheibany said.
Sheibany said that almost all of Iran's European clients and some of its Asian customers have accepted making payments in non-dollar currencies.
"Even if we get dollars, we directly convert it to other currencies. Japanese don't mind paying us in yen, for example," he said.
Sheibany noted that Iran has earned more than US$45 billion (€34 billion) from oil sales during the current fiscal year, which ended March 20.
Washington is leading efforts to isolate Iran over what it claims is Tehran's bid to build atomic bombs. The United States has imposed sanctions on two big state banks and has urged international firms to avoid doing business with Iran.
Iran, the world's fourth-biggest oil exporter, insists its nuclear plans are aimed at producing electricity so it can conserve its oil and gas resources for export, and also to prepare for the day when its huge energy reserves run out.
Iran is doing fine without economic relations with Washington, and it has "perfect control" in keeping its currency stable, Sheibany said.
"We do not have any problem. We are trading with more than 70 countries, including (in) Asia and Europe," the governor said.
Iran's central bank is also shifting to holding its foreign reserves in a basket of 20 currencies and away from U.S. dollars, which now make up less than 20 percent of the reserves, Sheibany said.
Sheibany had left Malaysia on Wednesday and was not immediately available for other details.
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Many countries participate in appalling human rights violations, including Iran.
Better treatment of homosexuals has nothing to do with why the Bush Administration is trying so desperately to blow the b'jeezus out of that country, however.
-------------------- "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
quote:Originally posted by Gordon Bennett: Brought to you by the same folks that told you Saddam had WMD.
you're full of it GB... i've been here for a long time informing people of our own govt findings that Iraq had no WMD... before you ever even posted here...
this is apples and oranges and YOU don't even know the difference...
as a matter of fact? you admit you don't know anything about Iran with this commentary...
you've decided to base your decisions on the fact that you don't like Bush.. that's the same thing Bush did with Sadam...
U.K. Says Boats Were 1.7 Miles Inside Iraqi Waters (Update3)
By Mark Deen and Caroline Alexander
March 28 (Bloomberg) -- The U.K. Ministry of Defence, stepping up pressure on Iran to return 15 detained sailors and Marines, released evidence suggesting British boats were 1.7 nautical miles inside Iraq when they were seized.
Vice Admiral Charles Style said Iran's navy raided Britain's boats on the Iraqi side of the Shatt al-Arab waterway dividing the two countries on March 23. He said GPS navigation data showed the position of Britain's boats, adding that Iranian officials have given two separate accounts of the location of the vessels.
``It is hard to understand a legitimate reason for the change of coordinates,'' Style said at a briefing in London today. The boats, he said, were about their ``legal business in Iraqi waters under a United Nations'' resolution.
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise.
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Just who did the testing and where are the details of the reports.
According to everything I can locate, there has been NO evidence of any sort of gas being used by anyoine in Iraq since the 80s, as reported by both the United Nations teams and Bush's own hand picked inspecters.
During the time you were in Iraq, we heard Administration lackies declare that they had found stores of various kinds of gas and chemical weapons and claims that they had tested and found residue from nerve gas and anthrax having been used in bombs and morters during the invasion and afterward. All of those reports were later changed when it was proved they were not true. We also heard of "test" that "proved" that Saddam had nuclear weapns, but, of course, that too all turned out to be false propaganda.
Again, I can find NO reliable evidence that any WMDs were in Iraq at the time of or after the invasion.
To this date, no one has found any evidence of WMDs in Iraq since the UN sanctions required him to destroy all of them.
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There were claims by the Administration of testings and finding residue, but they all proved to be false.....in other words, they lied.
That's ok, most of us were duped before and for a long time after the invasion.
Down in the marrow of our bones, Americans don't want to believe they elected a liar and sure don't like the feeling we invaded an innocent nation.
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quote:Originally posted by bdgee: Just who did the testing and where are the details of the reports.
According to everything I can locate, there has been NO evidence of any sort of gas being used by anyoine in Iraq since the 80s, as reported by both the United Nations teams and Bush's own hand picked inspecters.
During the time you were in Iraq, we heard Administration lackies declare that they had found stores of various kinds of gas and chemical weapons and claims that they had tested and found residue from nerve gas and anthrax having been used in bombs and morters during the invasion and afterward. All of those reports were later changed when it was proved they were not true. We also heard of "test" that "proved" that Saddam had nuclear weapns, but, of course, that too all turned out to be false propaganda.
Again, I can find NO reliable evidence that any WMDs were in Iraq at the time of or after the invasion.
To this date, no one has found any evidence of WMDs in Iraq since the UN sanctions required him to destroy all of them.
jeez, you never understood dumping junk down oil wells...why would you suddenly understand this?
-------------------- Nashoba Holba Chepulechi Adventures in microcapitalism...
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I understnad quite well the notion of dumping junk down oil wells by Saddam, well enough to know that that story is a sham....about equivalen to an urban legend.
Wake up, it isn't rational and didn't happen. Just more BS by the fools that believed dubya and dickie boy.
I wonder, do you also believe there were bug eyed little green guys in Roswell?
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I am sorry to hear that, sure hope you never have any health issues from this chemical.
BAGHDAD, Iraq — A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent (search) recently exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday.
Bush administration officials told Fox News that mustard gas (search) was also recently discovered.
Two people were treated for "minor exposure" after the sarin incident but no serious injuries were reported. Soldiers transporting the shell for inspection suffered symptoms consistent with low-level chemical exposure, which is what led to the discovery, a U.S. official told Fox News.
"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt (search), the chief military spokesman in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy." The round detonated before it would be rendered inoperable, Kimmitt said, which caused a "very small dispersal of agent."
However, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the results were from a field test, which can be imperfect, and said more analysis was needed. If confirmed, it would be the first finding of a banned weapon upon which the United States based its case for war.
Click to Read the Weapons of Mass Destruction Handbook
A senior Bush administration official told Fox News that the sarin gas shell is the second chemical weapon discovered recently.
Two weeks ago, U.S. military units discovered mustard gas that was used as part of an IED. Tests conducted by the Iraqi Survey Group (search) — a U.S. organization searching for weapons of mass destruction — and others concluded the mustard gas was "stored improperly," which made the gas "ineffective."
They believe the mustard gas shell may have been one of 550 projectiles for which former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein failed to account when he made his weapons declaration shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom began last year. Iraq also failed to then account for 450 aerial bombs with mustard gas. That, combined with the shells, totaled about 80 tons of unaccounted for mustard gas.
It also appears some top Pentagon officials were surprised by the sarin news; they thought the matter was classified, administration officials told Fox News.
An official at the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) headquarters in New York said the commission is surprised to hear news of the mustard gas.
"If that's the case, why didn't they announce it earlier?" the official asked.
The UNMOVIC official said the group needs to know more from the Bush administration before it's possible to determine if this is "old or new stuff. It is known that Iraq used sarin during the Iraq-Iran war, however.
Kimmitt said the shell belonged to a class of ordnance that Saddam's government said was destroyed before the 1991 Gulf war (search). Experts believe both the sarin and mustard gas weapons date back to that time.
"It was a weapon that we believe was stocked from the ex-regime time and it had been thought to be an ordinary artillery shell set up to explode like an ordinary IED and basically from the detection of that and when it exploded, it indicated that it actually had some sarin in it," Kimmitt said.
The incident occurred "a couple of days ago," he added. The discovery reportedly occurred near Baghdad International Airport.
Washington officials say the significance of the find is that some chemical shells do still exist in Iraq, and it's thought that fighters there may be upping their attacks on U.S. forces by using such weapons.
The round was an old "binary-type" shell in which two chemicals held in separate sections are mixed after firing to produce sarin, Kimmitt said.
He said he believed that insurgents who rigged the artillery shell as a bomb didn't know it contained the nerve agent, and that the dispersal of the nerve agent from such a rigged device was very limited.
The shell had no markings. It appears the binary sarin agents didn't mix, which is why there weren't serious injuries from the initial explosion, a U.S. official told Fox News.
"Everybody knew Saddam had chemical weapons, the question was, where did they go. Unfortunately, everybody jumped on the offramp and said 'well, because we didn't find them, he didn't have them,'" said Fox News military analyst Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney.
"I doubt if it's the tip of the iceberg but it does confirm what we've known ... that he [Saddam] had weapons of mass destruction that he used on his own people," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told Fox News. "This does show that the fear we had is very real. Now whether there is much more of this we don't know, Iraq is the size of the state of California."
But there were more reasons than weapons to get rid of Saddam, he added. "We considered Saddam Hussein a threat not just because of weapons of mass destruction," Grassley said.
Iraqi Scientist: You Will Find More
Gazi George, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist under Saddam's regime, told Fox News he believes many similar weapons stockpiled by the former regime were either buried underground or transported to Syria. He noted that the airport where the device was detonated is on the way to Baghdad from the Syrian border.
George said the finding likely will be the first in a series of discoveries of such weapons.
"Saddam is the type who will not store those materials in a military warehouse. He's gonna store them either underground, or, as I said, lots of them have gone west to Syria and are being brought back with the insurgencies," George told Fox News. "It is difficult to look in areas that are not obvious to the military's eyes.
"I'm sure they're going to find more once time passes," he continued, saying one year is not enough for the survey group or the military to find the weapons.
Saddam, when he was in power, had declared that he did in fact possess mustard-gas filled artilleries but none that included sarin.
"I think what we found today, the sarin in some ways, although it's a nerve gas, it's a lucky situation sarin detonated in the way it did ... it's not as dangerous as the cocktails Saddam used to make, mixing blister" agents with other gases and substances, George said.
Officials: Discovery Is 'Significant'
U.S. officials told Fox News that the shell discovery is a "significant" event.
Artillery shells of the 155-mm size are as big as it gets when it comes to the ordnance lobbed by infantry-based artillery units. The 155 howitzer can launch high capacity shells over several miles; current models used by the United States can fire shells as far as 14 miles. One official told Fox News that a conventional 155-mm shell could hold as much as "two to five" liters of sarin, which is capable of killing thousands of people under the right conditions in highly populated areas.
The Iraqis were very capable of producing such shells in the 1980s but it's not as clear that they continued after the first Gulf War.
In 1995, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo (search) cult unleashed sarin gas in Tokyo's subways, killing 12 people and sickening thousands. In February of this year, Japanese courts convicted the cult's former leader, Shoko Asahara, and sentence him to be executed.
Developed in the mid-1930s by Nazi scientists, a single drop of sarin can cause quick, agonizing choking death. There are no known instances of the Nazis actually using the gas.
Nerve gases work by inhibiting key enzymes in the nervous system, blocking their transmission. Small exposures can be treated with antidotes, if administered quickly.
Antidotes to nerve gases similar to sarin are so effective that top poison gas researchers predict they eventually will cease to be a war threat.
Fox News' Wendell Goler, Steve Harrigan, Ian McCaleb, Liza Porteus, James Rosen and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Hilander. I do not question your observations.
A) You were fired upon by a mortar. Not an IED?
B) The oil well question was answered by thousands of hours of interrogations at Abu Graib..there was NO WMD program in Iraq.
C) The Official US Govt stance is that Sadam was a sloppy bookkeeper, and failed to keep track of some of his ordnance. That may sound crazy to most people, but the fact is Sadam kept secrets from his own people to maintain control of them. He was a BANTY rooster on a dung heap.
Hilander, is it possible that you were fired upon by people being supplied by Iran, and that's why we were never told about the mortars with sarin?
it known that prior tot eh Gulf War, Sadam had 82 mm mortars to deliver riot control agent, CS, and probably mustard, as well as 120 mm mortars for Sarin, mustard, and CS. 130 mm for Sarin and mustard; 152 mm for Sarin, GF and CS; and 155 mm for Sarin, GF and mustard.
these are WMD's but very low grade and none of these amount to a "nuclear mushroom cloud" as envisioned by Bush Cheney and Rice...
had they proposed invading Iraq for mortar shells? nobody would have listened. even Scuds were not enough to get people riled up.
it took a smallpox scare, an Anthrax ATTACK and the threat of nukes to get all the ducks inline after 9-11....
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise.
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my search for Sarin agents also turned up this interesting tidbit:May 2002
Chemical Stockpile Scrapping Work Proceeds, Amid Dissent
by Sandra I. Erwin
The United States will likely fail to meet a 2007 deadline to destroy its entire stockpile of chemical weapons. Nevertheless, Army officials remain optimistic about the future of the demilitarization program—which in recent years has been plagued by delays, cost overruns and opposition by environmental and public-safety advocacy groups.
Up until a few years ago, the focus of the U.S. chemical demilitarization program was to ensure the entire stockpile of more than 31,000 tons of bulk agents and munitions be destroyed by April 29, 2007—exactly a decade from the day the United States ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention.
But mounting criticism from local governments, lawmakers and advocacy organizations about the safety of the Army’s incinerators prompted program officials to reevaluate priorities. They decided that, even though they wanted to obliterate the stockpile as quickly as possible, they also needed to satisfy public-safety and environmental concerns about the methods of destruction.
“We are still working to meet the 2007 goal,” said James Bacon, the Army’s program manager for chemical demilitarization. “We are looking at methods to accelerate destruction, where appropriate,” he said in an interview. However, he added, “Our highest priority is the safety of the public, the workers [performing the destruction] and the environment.”
sendenDiesen Artikel per E-mail versenden / Send by E-mail US against Iran – Apocalypse now? ukDr. Alexander von Paleske - The US Government apparently continues to prepare for war against Iran. A second aircraft carrier is on its way to the Persian Gulf. Openly the options, how to destroy the Iranian alleged nuclear facilities, are being considered. Israel is pressurizing for a speedy attack.
The question, "what happens afterwards" , like in the Iraq war, is not even being considered. This may be another serious mistake.
Iran does have weapons of mass destruction for 13 years now, thanks to Israel, Germany and the UK. These countries supplied Iran from 1991 to 1993 with raw materials and "know how" for the production of nerve gases Sarin and Mustard, which were bought in China and shipped to Iran’s Bandar e Abbas.
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Army's Chemical Materials Agency Reaches Destruction Milestone
Mar 05, 2007 BY Argie Sarantinos-Perrin WASHINGTON (Army News Service, March 6, 2007) - The U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency has been safely eliminating America's stockpile of chemical weapons since 1990, and has reached a milestone with the destruction of half of its stockpile of chemical munitions. This accounts for more than 1.7 million munitions in the original stockpile.
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All of Europe was flamed, Northern Africa was proven unsafe, Russia had been pushed hard and the parts of Asia that hadn't been hit yet knew what was coming. The only places that hadn't already formed an opinion against the Axis powers were countries too weak to do anything other than pray they would be overlooked.
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