Baltimore Riots- What do they tell us about this city?

Opinion/Editorial By Bill Collier- The people of Baltimore own what happened there. No, it wasn’t a small group of people: the rioters were in the thousands and the community itself did not stand up to stop them. The so-called “leaders” asked cops to back off, claiming they could calm things down. In one scene, I saw live on Fox News, a city councilman intoned this promise while, behind him, people were looting a liquor store. And nobody stopped them. Clergy were seen praying in the street: the mob went around them and kept acting, well, like an unruly mob. I also saw “clergy” buy into the hate-filled rhetoric and justify the “anger” of the mob, while “regretting” the violence.
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Is Iran arming itself with American-Made Uranium?

3 min read

Is Iran arming itself with American-Made Uranium?

W R Collier Jr April 23, 2015

The Shocking Source of Iranian Uranium

By Mr Bill Collier- According to a New York Times item posted in November of 2014, the Russians have agreed to greatly expand their role in providing Uranium and technical support to the Iranian nuclear program. In essence, Russia is selling Uranium to Iran.

The world’s largest producer of uranium is Kazakhstan, which produces 46,2 million pounds of uranium to the US’s 4.3 million pounds per year. A total of 139.5 million pounds of uranium are produced annually. According to one estimate, a 50 kilogram bomb (around 110 pounds) would require as much as 2,000 kilograms of uranium (around 4,400 pounds). That uranium is utilized by many buyers, including a once-US-owned and now Russian-owned company called Uranium One, the world’s leading producer of nuclear materials which controls as much as 50% of US uranium production.

According to Wikipedia– Uranium One is a uranium mining company owned by the Russian government with headquarters in Toronto and operations in Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, South Africa and the United States. It is a Canadian corporation. Rosatom, a Russian State-owned enterprise, through its subsidiary ARMZ Uranium Holding, purchased the balance of a 100% stake in the firm January 2013.

By purchasing the firm, which controls up to 50% of US uranium production, the Russian government not only obtained US uranium, which is then sold on the market to a number of customers, potentially including Iran, but also the expertise of personnel in America and Canada which can be used company-wide to increase mining efficiency and production.

According to the same Wikipedia entry cited above- ARMZ took complete control of Uranium One in January 2013 in a transaction which was reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. In December 2013, an internal reorganization of Rosatom extinguished the interest of ARMZ making Uranium One a direct subsidiary of Rosatom.

This committee includes the US Secretary of State. Hilary Clinton, the current democratic front-runner in the 2016 Presidential Election, wasn’t the Secretary of State at the time.

It is the Russian parent company, ARMZ, that will be tasked with supplying uranium to the Iranians, although the amount being purchased has not been disclosed. What is certain is that Iran has enough uranium to produce dozens of nuclear bombs.

In a related scandal, Hillary Clinton has been accused of taking payments from foreign governments in exchange for currying favor from the State Department. In this instance, Clinton is accused of taking money from the same Russian-owned company that now controls up to 50% of the Uranium being produced in America. The company donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation from 2009 to 2013. The donations were not revealed publicly. You can read more about that scandal in this NYTimes article.

Whether or not the accusations against Clinton are true, the mere fact that the US State Department allowed this deal to go through, a deal which ultimately gives the Russian government control over up to 50% of American uranium production, has caused no small amount of alarm.

The issue is not just about the uranium being mined, which could potentially become part of an Iranian nuclear weapon, but the acquisition of technical means and know-how that would make the Russian government owned company more efficient at mining operations and at uranium processing in general.

The shocking truth here is that Iran gets its uranium from a Russian-government-owned company that now controls up to 50% of US uranium production. It is at least possible, either at present or in the very near future, that SOME of the higher quality US uranium now resides in Iranian centrifuges.

The potential exists for American uranium to be used in Iranian nuclear bombs aimed at American allies or, possibly, distributed to agents to attack America itself (with dirty bombs or portable nuclear bombs). Whether or not this has already come or will come to fruition, the mere fact that such an exchange could occur should give Americans pause. That the US State Department, partly under Clinton (where the process of this approval began) and partly under Kerry (who gave the final approval for the deal), would approve such a deal with these potential outcomes has many even in the intelligence community scratching their heads.

The degree to which Clinton will be tied to this remains to be seen.

Mr Bill Collier is the editor and publisher of News Scope, a digital news intelligence journal that can be found at News-Scope.com
Flashback- the reset button

The Optics Of The Obama-Castro Meetings

3 min read

The Optics Of The Obama-Castro Meetings

W R Collier Jr April 12, 2015

Bill Collier- The meeting with Cuba’s dictator will no doubt leave a bad taste in the mouth of President Obama’s critics and many Cubans, for whom the Castros are synonymous with Hitler or Stalin. The image of the President proudly smiling with glee and talking about how nations should only use pursuasion and nothing more in their dealings with one another is in stark contrast to the scowls and bitter bromides his domestic political opponents feel they endure. It was well beyond “persuasion”, his critics lament, for the IRS (allegedly) to turned loose on the President’s political opponents.

Of course the President’s supporters seem happy with the move, indeed the left in this country idolize the likes of Che Guevara, an Argentinian communist who played a key role in Cuba’s revolution. For them, opening trade, diplomacy, and travel to Cuba seems a bit like a dream come true. Michael Moore, a leftist documentary film maker, even came to Cuba to extol the virtues of its health care system.

The President has been seen with many foreign leaders who seem unsavory, including the Chinese communist leaders who notoriously order to aborting of all children beyond a couple’s first child unless that couple can pay steep penalties for “permission” to have other children. But so too have other Presidents been seen with such characters, and the President pointed out that having dialogue and diplomacy does not constitute agreement as such. For him, merely having diplomacy and dialogue is an improvement that might just mitigate future conflict. This is exactly what is being done with Iran, and normalization of relations is the end goal.

But Cuba is 90 miles off the coast of Florida, so the fact we have a communisty tyranny so close and that, with economic trade, it could afford (again) to export its revolution by force (as it once did) is deeply troubling. That the current American President proclaims policies that to his critics sound too much like the rhetoric coming from Cuba on “economic justice” only makes the optics of a Castro-Obama relationship seem all the more objectionable. A communist dictatorship across the ocean is one thing, but many Americans feel, instinictively, a particular revulsion for a communist dictatorship 90 miles from Florida!

Make no mistake, the Castro regime is a massive human right violator. Even during the Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Panama, anti-Castro protestors were brutally beaten by Cuban security who were on scene while the Panammian police stood by and did nothing.

For a President who is accused of being in bed with communism and who is accused of over-stepping his bounds of authority, the optics of being more friendly and congenial to Raul Castro than he has been toward his domestic opponents, the optics were particularly unfavorable: at least in the eyes of his domestic political critics. But President Obama believes an opening with Cuba might soften the regime and do for Cuba what Nixon felt US relations with Communist China would do: export the values of freedom. Some would argue that Nixon’s China policy has failed and that, instead of exporting freedom, America imported shades of socialism.

Despite his smiles and clear satisfaction in meeting with a man many see as an enemy of American values, despite the fact a majority of Americans appear to approve of this opening of relations with the communist dictatorship, one should not expect such efforts at open and cordial dialogue and a commitment to not go beyond persuasion with the President’s domestic political opponents.