Free Republic

The Great American Oil & Gas Boom & the Future of Iran No country, No Nation, has ever added oil production capacity – yes ever – like the United States has in the past few years. America has gone from producing 5 Million barrels of oil per day in 2011 to over 7.5 Million barrels this past year; and will soon surpass 10 Million barrels of oil production domestically. It’s an incredible oil boom that will have a profound impact on the lives of ordinary Americans. By the time Obama leaves office, he will have presided over a country that...

• Huge deal to sell Typhoon fighters to UAE in doubt • Implications for other Gulf arms deals after Iran nuclear talks If there were any remaining doubts that arms sales take precedence over human rights or concerns about exacerbating regional tensions, the British government has been unashamedly quashing them. UK prime minister David Cameron and his defence secretary Philip Hammond have been busy trying to persuade the rulers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to buy British Typhoon jets, following the example of Saudi Arabia and Oman. The Saudis, the UK's largest arms customer, have bought 72 Typhoons,...

America’s “schizophrenic” approach to the Middle East could result in many key Arab states deciding to align themselves more closely with Russia, the rulers of Bahrain warned on Sunday. In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Sheikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, the Crown Prince of Bahrain, warned that Barack Obama's administration would lose influence in the region if it persisted with what a “transient and reactive” foreign policy. There has been a sharp rise in tensions between Washington and several major Arab states in the wake of last month’s controversial interim agreement with Iran over its nuclear programme. Citing President...

Why is Iran working on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles? There is no possible peaceful purpose for ballistic missiles. Iran may claim that their nuclear program is peaceful, but they cannot possibly make that claim when it comes to ballistic missiles. The only reason to have ballistic missiles is to target enemies with high explosives and WMD. Iran’s Shehab-3 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles have sufficient range to hit Israel, Saudi Arabia and US bases in Afghanistan, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait and Turkey. Why are the Iranians working with the North Koreans on multi-stage Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs)? Who might the Iranians be...

Failure to reach a deal between Iran and world powers over Tehran’s nuclear program could lead to a war in the Middle East, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said Wednesday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is doing everything he can to make the Iranian nuclear negotiations [in Geneva] with the P5+1 countries fail,” Nasrallah accused Wednesday. In a rare public appearance in south Beirut on the eve of the Ashoura holiday, commemorated by Shiite Muslims as a day of mourning for the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, the terror chief said the Israeli prime minister was “furious [at the prospect of an...

DOHA - Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief has said the kingdom will make a "major shift" in relations with the United States in protest at its perceived inaction over the Syria war and its overtures to Iran, a source close to Saudi policy said on Tuesday. Prince Bandar bin Sultan told European diplomats that Washington had failed to act effectively on the Syria crisis and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was growing closer to Tehran, and had failed to back Saudi support for Bahrain when it crushed an anti-government revolt in 2011, the source said.

Israel, alarmed at the prospect of a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, is reported to be discussing the possibility of an anti-Iran alliance with longtime Arab adversaries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a project that could have immense ramifications in the Middle East. If talks are under way, they're in large part the result of many secret meetings between Israeli and Arab intelligence chiefs and other senior officials that have been held over several years, often in the Jordanian capital Amman. Senior Israelis have held meetings with prominent figures from a number of Persian Gulf and other Arab states in...

WASHINGTON — The United States was said to have planned to destabilize at least two Arab countries over the last two years. A former leading U.S. military commander asserted that the administration of President Barack Obama worked to destabilize the regimes of Bahrain and Egypt. Ret.] Gen. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the administration’s drive against Bahrain, wracked by a Shi’ite revolt, was led by the intelligence community.

Bahrain security forces routinely detain children without cause and subject them to ill-treatment that may rise to the level of torture, Human Rights Watch said today, based on reports from victims, family members, and legal rights activists. On September 12, 2013, the European Parliament issued a further resolution on the deteriorating rights situation in Bahrain, urging it among other things "to respect the rights of juveniles, to refrain from detaining them in adult facilities and to treat juveniles in accordance with the Convention on the Rights of a Child, to which Bahrain is a party." ... Information recently obtained from...

Bahrain authorities banned the circulation of books that are about Hezbollah, written by people who are affiliated with the Shiite group or who support it, the Bahrain news agency reported Friday. Authorities have reportedly shut down a publishing house affiliated with Hezbollah. …

Qatar's new Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani is set to announce a cabinet reshuffle, a day after taking over from his father Sheikh Hamad, officials say. ... Sheikh Hamad seized power from his father Sheikh Khalifa in a bloodless coup in 1995, with the support of the armed forces and cabinet, and also neighbouring states. ... In 2003, he named Sheikh Tamim - his second son by his second wife Sheikha Moza bint Nasser - as his heir apparent. ... In foreign policy, the emirate is expected to maintain its alliance with the West while at the same...

U.S. embassies in a slew of Muslim countries will close on Sunday due to a credible and serious security threat. The embassies will close in response to "a specific threat against a U.S. embassy or consulate," according to a senior U.S. official, who called it a "concerted effort" to target an embassy or consulate in a Muslim country. "We just don't know which one," the official told ABC News. "There could be other targets, not just embassies," another U.S. official said. The threat is considered to be throughout the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Some of the biggest...

Washington D.C., May 30, 2013 / 04:05 am (CNA).- As he oversees the missionary territory of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, apostolic vicar Camillo Ballin outlined Catholics' need for religious toleration as well as a physical home for ministry. A native of Italy, Bishop Ballin set out to study Arabic and Islam in order “to discover another world” after his ordination as a priest of the Comboni Missionaries. In a May 29 interview with CNA, he noted that his travels have taken him to Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, and eventually to his 2005 appointment as apostolic vicar of Kuwait....

Excavations at an archaeological site in Bahrain are shedding light on one of the oldest trading civilisations. The site in Bahrain, thought to be the location of the enigmatic Dilmun civilisation Dilmun, one of most important ancient civilisations of the region and said to date to the third millennium BC, was a hub on a major trading route between Mesopotamia - the world's oldest civilisation - and the Indus Valley in South Asia. It is also believed that Dilmun had commercial ties with ancient sites at Elam in Iran, Alba in Syria and Haittan in Turkey. "For 4,000 years this...

MANAMA, Bahrain (AP) — The U.S. Navy is putting underwater drones through wartime-style drills as part of international mine-clearing exercises in the Persian Gulf following similar maneuvers by Iran. The U.S.-led exercises, which began last week, include operations by the unmanned SeaFox devices, which are equipped with sonar and an explosive charge designed to shoot and destroy mines. It is part of the Navy's plans to increasingly deploy automated surveillance and protection systems, including aerial drones. Navy commanders insist the exercises, comprising more than 41 nations, are not intended solely against possible Iranian threats. But Iran has previously warned it...

Mithal Al-Alusi, whose two sons were killed in a Baghdad ambush soon after he visited Israel, tells The Times of Israel he feels betrayed by the superpower which allowed him to return to his homeland Mithal Al-Alusi is angry. He is angry with Iran for supporting global terrorism. He is angry with Syrian President Bashar Assad for oppressing and killing his own people. He is angry with his own prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq, for colluding with the two. But most of all, he is angry with US President Barack Obama for allowing this all to happen. “Obama has...

On April 7, 2013, the Bahraini government approved a proposal by parliament to compile a list of terrorist organizations and to enter Hizbullah onto it, and ordered the interior and foreign ministries to take steps to implement this resolution. This is an unprecedented move in the Arab world, which comes after the exposure of terrorist cells and attacks in Bahrain that are attributed to this Lebanese Shi'ite organization, and following Shi'ite protests in the kingdom that began in February 2011, which the Bahraini government claimed had been guided and funded by Iran and Hizbullah. The Bahraini authorities' fear of involvement...

MIAMI (Reuters) - Guantanamo war crimes prosecutions of five prisoners charged with plotting the September 11 hijacked planes attacks will be delayed by two months because of lost files caused by Pentagon computer problems, U.S. military officials said on Wednesday. A weeklong pretrial hearing had been set to begin on Monday in the death penalty case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and four alleged co-conspirators. The judge overseeing the case postponed the hearing until June 17 at the request of defense lawyers who said three to four weeks' worth of their confidential work files had...

Well, well, well, so Obama has embarked on his third war in little more than two years. You've got to admit that "flexibility" is his middle name. Or at least one of his middle names: Barack Barry Hussein "Flexibility" Soetoro Obama, Jr. Those are the names we know so far, but The Donald thinks there might be more. Whodda thunk? Here we are barely into the first week of what started out as a "No-Fly Zone" and it is now turning out to be Air Al Qaida. Ten years ago, AQ had a mere four civilian airplanes to crash into...

A Bahraini princess who works as a police officer is on trial for torturing two doctors while they were in detention, prosecutors said today. Shaikha Noora Bint Ebrahim Al Khalifa allegedly carried out the abuse during political unrest in the Gulf Arab kingdom in 2011. A senior official at Bahrain’s Public Prosecutor’s office said the royal is also facing a separate trial for physically assaulting Aayat Al Qormozi, a young female opposition activist. … According to Al Sammak’s lawyer, the alleged torture took place in March and April 2011, a period when the kingdom was convulsed by unrest following the...