Operation Ajax (1953) (officially TP-AJAX) was an Anglo–American covert operation to overthrow the elected government ([1][2][3][4]) of Iran and Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and restore the exiled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to the throne as a dictator.

Rationale for the intervention included Mossadegh’s socialist rhetoric and his nationalization, without compensation, of the oil industry which was previously operated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which later changed its name to The British Petroleum Company) under contracts disputed by the nationalists as unfair. A particular point of contention was the refusal of the Anglo-Iranian Oil company to allow an audit of the accounts to determine whether the Iranian government received the royalties it was due. Intransigence on the part of the Anglo-Iranian Oil company led the nationalist government to escalate its demands, requiring an equal share in the oil revenues. The final crisis was precipitated when the Anglo-Iranian oil company ceased operations rather than accepting the nationalists’ demands.

The newly state-owned oil companies saw a dramatic drop in productivity and, consequently, exports; this resulted in the Abadan Crisis, a situation that was further aggravated by its export markets being closed. Even so royalties to the Iranian government were significantly higher than before nationalization. Without its own distribution network it was denied access to markets by an international blockade intended to coerce Mossadegh into reprivatization. In addition, the appropriation of the companies resulted in Western allegations that Mossadegh was a Communist and suspicions that Iran was in danger of falling under the influences of the neighboring Soviet Union. But Mossadegh refused to back down under international pressure.

For the U.S., an important factor to consider was Iran’s border with the Soviet Union. A pro-American Iran under the Shah would give the U.S. a double strategic advantage in the ensuing Cold War, as a NATO alliance was already in effect with the government of Turkey, also bordering the USSR.

In planning the operation, the CIA organized a guerrilla force in case the communist Tudeh Party seized power as a result of the chaos created by Operation Ajax. According to formerly “Top Secret” documents released by the National Security Archive, Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith reported that the CIA had reached an agreement with Qashqai tribal leaders in southern Iran to establish a clandestine safe haven from which U.S.-funded guerrillas and intelligence agents could operate.

Operation Ajax was the first time the Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated a plot to overthrow a democratically-elected government. The success of this operation, and its relatively low cost, encouraged the CIA to successfully carry out a similar operation in Guatemala a year later.

Widespread dissatisfaction with the oppressive regime of the reinstalled Shah led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the occupation of the U.S. embassy. The role that the U.S. embassy had played in the 1953 coup led the revolutionary guards to suspect that it might be used to play a similar role in suppressing the revolution.

The leader of Operation Ajax was Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., a senior CIA agent, and grandson of the former President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt. While formal leadership was vested in Kim Roosevelt the project was designed and executed by Donald Wilber, a career contract CIA agent and acclaimed author of books on Iran, Afghanistan and Ceylon.

As a condition of restoring the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company the U.S. was able to dictate that the AIOC’s oil monopoly should lapse. Five major U.S. oil companies, plus Royal Dutch Shell and French Compagnie Française des Pétroles were given licences to operate in the country alongside AIOC.

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax

WOW.

FURTHERMORE:

BBC Involvement in Operation Ajax

A BBC Radio 4 documentary in 2005 claimed that it had evidence that a radio newsreader inserted the word “exactly” into a midnight timecheck one summer night in 1953, a code word to the shah of Iran that Britain supported his plans for a coup. The shah had selected the word, the documentary said, and the BBC broadcast the word at the request of the government. Officially, the BBC has never acknowledged the code word plot. The BBC spokesman declined to comment on a possible connection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Claimed_Involvement_in_Operation_Ajax

An 82-year-old Women’s Institute stalwart has been asked to remove her hat in a pub – because staff claimed it was a security risk. […]  “I mulled it over and then thought ‘How ridiculous!‘ “.

[…]
Pub licensee Tony Love said it was pub policy to always ask people to remove their hats. …”Mrs Wilbraham does not understand that the world is changing.”

…

Wrong. Mrs Wilbraham obviously understands the changes better than Mr Love. She immediately and correctly identified the changes as ‘ridiculous!’. Mr Love thinks being filmed while in a pub is a normal way for society to progress. He is blind and stupid.

…

I also wanted to point out this as a fantastic read. The Chinese have had enough of being hit by rocks tossed by their friends in the glass house. Every single page is fabulous.

Iran ‘poses major US challenge’

Iran may pose a greater challenge than any other nation to the US, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said.

<Sian Phillips>Here it comes…</Sian Phillips>

She said Iran was determined to develop nuclear weapons,

So what.

was the “central banker for terrorism” in the Middle East

Nonsense.

and was a block to democracy.

It’s a nasty job, but someone’s got to do it.

Her comments to a Congressional hearing in Washington came as Iran vowed to resist international pressure over its nuclear programme.

Iran insists it has the right to civilian nuclear technology.

There are only two ways of raising Money : Debt and Equity. Right? Wrong.
There are only two forms of tenure: Freehold and Leasehold, Right? Wrong.

Out of the primeval Capital swamp there is emerging a new animal – the “Capital Partnership” – based upon a curious hybrid of a commercial company and a partnership, known as a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP). The LLP is already beginning to make its mark in the commercial world – examples include a recent initiative by the AIM listed company Numerica and a new property portfolio investment scheme by the well known businessman Tom Hunter – but has implications for financing enterprises of all types, in particular those in the field of public investment.

During the early 1990s, professional partnerships such as Arthur Andersen became concerned that their individual partners’ acceptance of liability for their firm’s actions put them individually at risk of bankruptcy. Long before Enron, the City persuaded Jersey’s Parliament to draw up an Act creating the LLP -and the British Government, fearing an exodus of professional partnerships to Jersey, passed the Limited Liability Partnership Act in April 2001. For the first time anywhere in the world, it became possible to form a corporate body -an entity with a legal existence independent of its individual members – which had both collective limited liability and the mutual, co-operative characteristics of partnerships.

There are now over 7,000 LLPs around the country. In part, the growth is because they’re so easy to create: two designated members must complete an application downloaded from the Companies House website, and pay £95. There is no Memorandum of Incorporation, no Articles of Association and no Shareholder Agreement. In fact there isn’t even any requirement for any written agreement at all – although only the most trusting dispense with them – since simple “default” provisions based upon partnership law apply.

The LLP has two key attributes: firstly it is an “Open” Corporate body (NOT legally a partnership as one would expect from the name) in which any stakeholder, whether or not they are Investors may become Members, thereby aligning their interestswith other members. Secondly, the LLP makes it possible for those who invest Money in an enterprise or in Capital assets such as Land to be members of a “Capital Partnership” alongside the users of the Capital or Capital Asset thereby replacing the usual adversarial contracts between those who finance an enterprise or asset and those who utilise it.

In essence, all these stakeholders are brought inside the partnership, so their interests are aligned; it’s quite a change from traditional structures, which pit stakeholders in competition against each other. The LLP delivers an ideal combination of the collective and the individual; it’s flexible and easy to establish while its partnership characteristics are robust enough to make it attractive to the private sector. […]

Open Capital

“Sharia law by the back door”, they will call it, it sounds interesting to me.

[…]

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/~lcushing/Fist.html 

courtesy of Magnetbox

Now, the draft is coming back for the Iran attack; what do you think will be the hand signal of the Eloi generation?

Our taxes fund the collection of public data – yet we pay again to access it. Make the data freely available to stimulate innovation, argue Charles Arthur and Michael Cross

Thursday March 9, 2006 The Guardian
Imagine you had bought this newspaper for a friend. Imagine you asked them to tell you what’s in the TV listings – and they demanded cash before they would tell you. Outrageous? Certainly. Yet that is what a number of government agencies are doing with the data that we, as taxpayers, pay to have collected on our behalf. You have to pay to get a useful version of that data. Think of Ordnance Survey’s (OS) mapping data: useful to any business that wanted to provide a service in the UK, yet out of reach of startup companies without deep pockets.

[…]

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1726229,00.html

If you want to beat Google at their own game, you let Ordnance Survey free all of its data for British companies, and let them get on with it…but this is a subset of the principle; when you pay for something, it must belong to you, or be accounted for to you or both. HMG does none of this, and treats you like its slave. You have no rights to the fruits of your labor and no avenue of redress.

That is not right.

And of course, this goes across everything, not the least of which is the spending of your money on the war machine.

Did you know that simple text lists detailing every school in the UK are held by the government, but you cannot have access to them because private sector companies rent these lists and the government is forbidden from competing with them?

This means that even though you have payed for the government to compile and store these lists, they are not allowed to supply you with copies; you have to go to a list dealer and pay £8000 to RENT the list of all schools in the UK.

I’m not making this up.

As the originator of the “Iran Oil Bourse” I hope you can spare me some space to comment in relation to Ms. Berg’s recent articles.

The original concept five or so years ago was not of an “Iran Oil Bourse” but of a “Middle East Energy Exchange” providing a new Gulf benchmark price which would not be manipulated by investment banks and oil traders – as is the case with the North Sea “Brent” crude oil complex and has been for at least 10 years.

It makes no sense at all – and never has – for crude oil coming out of the Gulf and going to the Far East to be priced against a North Sea benchmark – but Brent has always been used since it is the “least worst” solution.

From personal experience – including very high level conversations – I think that there is no prospect whatever that Iran would unilaterally attempt to create a crude oil benchmark contract whatever currency it may be priced in. A domestic market in products, petrochemicals, and so on, is another matter.

The current global market in oil is owned, controlled, and operated by intermediaries for their own benefit and is fast deteriorating – as I warned it would five years ago – into an “ICE-bound” (ICE = Intercontinental Exchange, currently completing an audacious but brilliant strategy by applying the coup de grace to NYMEX) global monopoly extracting ever increasing profits at the expense of producers and consumers. Barclays Capital recently estimated that intermediary profits from commodity markets (of which energy is a huge component) will double to $26bn in the next three years.

Moreover, this market is now awash with hedge fund money, and despite Ms. Berg’s confidence in NYMEX and IPE/LCH, I believe that these centralized institutions face little-appreciated systemic risks as “single points of failure” in the face of the unregulated, opaque, and massive off-exchange, or “OTC,” market in energy and energy derivatives.

The difference between the LTCM near-meltdown in the financial markets and an energy market crisis this winter or next is that the Fed can’t print oil to bail out the system.

In relation to clearing, Ms. Berg is unfamiliar with the concept of a “Clearing Union” because no partnership-based “enterprise model” (i.e., legal and financial structure) enabling one has ever existed. Naturally, market users would have to back up a mutual guarantee in some way, whether through margin, collateral, or otherwise.

It’s just that there isn’t the “central counterparty” Ms. Berg is used to.

In a nutshell, I believe that the future lies in the creation of a neutral global oil trading network and “Energy Clearing Union” owned by ALL market constituencies: and this concept is beginning to get across. Certainly the Norwegians were interested in it: “Norwegian Bourse Director wants oil bourse priced in euros” – a development which followed a paper I submitted at the request of their consul-general in Edinburgh.

~ Chris Cook, formerly a Director of the International Petroleum Exchange and now a member of the Wimpole Consortium tasked with creating an energy exchange for Iran

Antiwar.com letters page with reply

It’s official: the era of resource wars is upon us. In a major London address, British Defense Secretary John Reid warned that global climate change and dwindling natural resources are combining to increase the likelihood of violent conflict over land, water and energy. Climate change, he indicated, “will make scarce resources, clean water, viable agricultural land even scarcer”—and this will “make the emergence of violent conflict more rather than less likely.”

Although not unprecedented, Reid’s prediction of an upsurge in resource conflict is significant both because of his senior rank and the vehemence of his remarks. “The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur,” he declared. “We should see this as a warning sign.”

Resource conflicts of this type are most likely to arise in the developing world, Reid indicated, but the more advanced and affluent countries are not likely to be spared the damaging and destabilizing effects of global climate change. With sea levels rising, water and energy becoming increasingly scarce and prime agricultural lands turning into deserts, internecine warfare over access to vital resources will become a global phenomenon.

Reid’s speech, delivered at the prestigious Chatham House in London (Britain’s equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations), is but the most recent expression of a growing trend in strategic circles to view environmental and resource effects—rather than political orientation and ideology—as the most potent source of armed conflict in the decades to come. With the world population rising, global consumption rates soaring, energy supplies rapidly disappearing and climate change eradicating valuable farmland, the stage is being set for persistent and worldwide struggles over vital resources. Religious and political strife will not disappear in this scenario, but rather will be channeled into contests over valuable sources of water, food and energy.

Prior to Reid’s address, the most significant expression of this outlook was a report prepared for the U.S. Department of Defense by a California-based consulting firm in October 2003. Entitled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” the report warned that global climate change is more likely to result in sudden, cataclysmic environmental events than a gradual (and therefore manageable) rise in average temperatures. Such events could include a substantial increase in global sea levels, intense storms and hurricanes and continent-wide “dust bowl” effects. This would trigger pitched battles between the survivors of these effects for access to food, water, habitable land and energy supplies.

“Violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today,” the 2003 report noted. “Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food and water rather than by conflicts over ideology, religion or national honor.”

Until now, this mode of analysis has failed to command the attention of top American and British policymakers. For the most part, they insist that ideological and religious differences—notably, the clash between values of tolerance and democracy on one hand and extremist forms of Islam on the other—remain the main drivers of international conflict. But Reid’s speech at Chatham House suggests that a major shift in strategic thinking may be under way. Environmental perils may soon dominate the world security agenda.

This shift is due in part to the growing weight of evidence pointing to a significant human role in altering the planet’s basic climate systems. Recent studies showing the rapid shrinkage of the polar ice caps, the accelerated melting of North American glaciers, the increased frequency of severe hurricanes and a number of other such effects all suggest that dramatic and potentially harmful changes to the global climate have begun to occur. More importantly, they conclude that human behavior—most importantly, the burning of fossil fuels in factories, power plants, and motor vehicles—is the most likely cause of these changes. This assessment may not have yet penetrated the White House and other bastions of head-in-the-sand thinking, but it is clearly gaining ground among scientists and thoughtful analysts around the world. […]

http://www.energybulletin.net/13605.html 

Shoppers can pay by fingerprint

Not only is the whole idea of this horrific, but the fact that the article mentions nothing of the multitude of possible downsides to this just baffles me. This isn’t journalism, this is just reprinting press releases.

This is a nice greasemonkey script to add mirrors to digg links. I found another one to remove adverts from digg but since I use adblock I didn’t even know digg had ads (although I thought the large white space under the header was a bit screwy).

http://hello.eboy.com/eboy/?cat=5 

Poet and musician Ivor Cutler, who counted John Peel and the Beatles among his fans, has died at the age of 83.

Cutler wrote surreal songs and poetry and continued to perform live until 2004. He also wrote books, did illustrations and made radio series.

He appeared regularly on Peel’s radio shows and The Beatles gave him a role in the film Magical Mystery Tour.

Cutler’s 1967 album Ludo, produced by George Martin, was re-released in 1997 by Creation, then the label of Oasis.

Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Glasgow, Cutler attributed his artistic bent to the displacement he felt when his younger brother was born.

“Without that I would not have been so screwed up as I am, and therefore not as creative,” he said.

“Without a kid brother I would have been quite dull.”

After serving with the RAF in World War II, Cutler became a teacher.

He moved to London and continued to teach, while still pursuing his artistic career, until he retired in 1980.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4781980.stm

Sad news.

There was a report on the radio this morning about a European (read EU blighted) search engine ‘Quaero’ to be set up as an alternative to Google. After googling around I found, typically for BBQ, that this was old news dressed up in mouton clothing.

Anyway, the idea of an EU-centric search engine to rival google almost made me choke on my breakfast – until recently the EU website had the single worst search tool I’ve ever seen online (It is now marginally better, and almost useful).

The reason why there is not a ‘Google equivalent’ is that whereas US taxes, financial regulations and competitive research programmes have not discriminated against startup companies almost every equivalent piece of work/employment legislation coming from the EU runs counter to small and new companies. All the blustering of Chirac (whose announcement it was that BBQ relayed) will not change this if he adheres to the typical EU top down imposing of ‘solutions’.

Last week’s story about a retired Texas school teacher who came under Homeland Security’s microscope for paying off a $6,522 credit card debt has been trumped by a similar case involving an amount of just $650.

Previously, Walter Soehnge made national headlines when he attempted to pay off debt on his MasterCard. The payment was rejected and automatically triggered an investigation by Homeland Security.

Now we have the story of Edie Booth, a community college professor in East Texas.

Trying to pay off her February credit card bill, Booth found her funds short and so asked to borrow $650 from her sister to avoid an interest overcharge of $140.

Booth made a $3,500 payment from her own account and then sent the other $650 with permission from her sister’s electronic account.

I watched the status of these two payments on line, since I am not the ‘trusting’ type, when it comes either to banks, credit card companies, OR government,” says Booth.

“The $650 was pending one day and then showed funded the next. All seemed fine. However, I continued to check the status on-line for the next 5 days.

“On the 6th day I found the extra $650 payment CANCELLED.”

Upon calling the credit card company, Booth was told that Homeland Security would not allow her to make two payments from two different sources in the same day.

Booth was then slapped with the $140 overcharge for causing the hard working boys at Homeland so much inconvenience.

This is a monumental waste of time and if there were any real terrorists out there Homeland Security is more interested in your spending habits than Al-Qaeda.

As Edie Booth points out, this is “such insanity, I mean, if you are paying your credit card, you have already obtained the explosives or whatever some time before.”

“Where is the leadership? When will we get some relief from these morons?”

The very individuals that used 9/11 to force layer upon layer of increased state surveillance and big government bureaucracy upon us are the ones in business with Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. And yet it is law-abiding citizens that get hassled for the simple desire to pay off some debt.

Homeland Security targets toy store owners, t-shirt sellers and kindergartners while hiring former East German Stasi heads to spy on Americans and recruiting tattle-tale squads under ‘Highway Watch’ – a program that encourages truckers, toll takers, road crews and bus drivers to watch their fellow citizens and report suspicious activity.

It seems painfully obvious that the people trying to take away our freedoms are not wearing turbans and shouting Allah Akbar, but that the enemy is within the gates.

[…]

http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/march2006/070306borrowedmoney.htm

And the sign above those gates reads “Arbeit Macht Frei”.

The most terrible thing about this is that the banks and credit card companies are executing these laws, with the words “we are only obeying orders”.

When will you get some relief from these morons? When you CANCEL YOUR CREDIT CARD and inform them that you are doing it because they are blithley FOLLOWING ABSURD HOMELAND SECURITY REGULATIONS and that their obedience is costing you money.

Thats when.

And I also note with dismay, that this report does not mention the name of this woman’s credit card company.

I meant to post this quote from a football manager, talking about a football pitch.

“Sometimes you see beautiful people with no brains. Sometimes you have ugly people who are intelligent, like scientists,” he said.

I’m glad I’m not stereotyped.

Excuse me while I set up another flask of bubbling green liquid.

MPs overturned previous Lords defeats on the ID Cards Bill

Government plans to make all passport applicants also have an ID card have been defeated in the Lords.Peers voted by a majority of 61 to overturn the proposal – backed by MPs last month – for a second time.

Opposition peers say the plans break the government’s promise that ID cards will initially be voluntary.

…

The UK and other countries must introduce biometric passports by October to remain part of the US visa waiver scheme, which makes travel to America easier.
[…]

On this latter point…

Remember: this is the government of my country changing my passport requirements – putting my biometric details on a database – at the request of another country.

And will that country get access to that database when some British mug wants to enter The Land Of The Free?

So obviously, if I put on my passport application that I don’t want to travel to the USA, or that I don’t mind getting a visa, I can opt out of having a biometric passport.

N’est pas?

No, me neither.

Al Quaida strikes again!

Update:

Clunk vows to continue ID battle

“I hope the Lords will recognise that this manifesto commitment, voted through by the elected chamber, should be respected,” Mr Clarke told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

[…]

OK. And the manifesto commitment is (was)…

On page 52 of its 111 pages, under the heading “Strong and Secure Borders”, the Labour 2005 manifesto said:

“We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports“.

[…] From David Davis.
As one Lord put it last night, and as this site has said recently…

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury, a Liberal Democrat, said] … describing the ID card scheme as voluntary was stretching the English language to breaking point. He went on: “It’s not often it’s left to the opposition to make sure the government honours its manifesto pledges.”

The Daytona^TM data management system is used by AT&T to solve a wide spectrum of data management problems. For example, Daytona is managing over 312 terabytes of data in a 7×24 production data warehouse whose largest table contains over 743 billion rows as of Sept 2005. Indeed, for this database, Daytona is managing over 1.924 trillion rows; it could easily manage more but we ran out of data.

Daytona’s architecture is based on translating its high-level query language Cymbal^TM (which includes SQL as a subset) completely into C and then compiling that C into object code. The system resulting from this architecture is fast, powerful, easy to use and administer, reliable and open to UNIX tools. In particular, two forms of data compression plus robust horizontal partitioning and effective SPMD parallelization enable Daytona to handle terabytes with ease. Fast, large-scale in-memory operations are supported by in-memory tables and scalar and tuple-valued multi-dimensional associative arrays.

Daytona offers all the essentials of data management including a high-level query language, data dictionary, B-tree indexing, locking, transactions, logging, and recovery. Users are pleased with Daytona’s speed, its powerful query language, its ability to easily manage large amounts of data in minimal space, its simplicity, its ease of administration, and its openness to other tools. In particular, Daytona supports SQL, Perl DBI, and JDBC.

1. Daytona In Use
2. Compared To Awk & Perl For Flat File Processing
3. Instructional Queries
4. Recently Added Features

[…]

http://www.research.att.com/projects/daytona/

Astonishing. None of this is ‘secret’ as such; they say their largest single table has 743 Billion rows. What they fail to disclose is what is in those tables. They leave it to you to ask (or not) just what the hell are you keeping in those tables?

And who prompted the NSA that this data was being kept and could be used as a ‘security’ asset? Did AT&T hint that they would be willing to sell access to this treasure trove to the NSA?

Have they made a mysqlhotcopy of this database for other agencies to sift through?
What other telecoms companies have this type of facility?