Paul Jay on RT – US knew Afghan bonanza in ‘07

Real News reports an interview with Paul Jay.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Well, of course, I’m called upon to speculate here, but I think that there’s enough information to have [what] I guess one could call an informed speculation. There’s no—I don’t have evidence that I would talk to anyone who is sitting in the deliberations with President Obama. But the evidence is crystal clear that the United States Geological Survey in 2007 made it clear that there were known deposits of a long list of minerals, from copper and iron ore right through to what may be one of the world’s largest deposits of lithium—they’re calling it the Saudi Arabia of lithium. This—if we know as a fact this was known in 2007 and it wasn’t some little sideline secret or—it was actually announced publicly at a trade fair in Washington, DC, in 2007. The New York Times article tries to suggest that the Afghan government just found out about it recently, except back in the press release issued in 2007 by the US Geological Survey they actually quote the Afghan ambassador, who talks about the quality of and richness of the ore being equal to any in the region—and we know this is a region filled with mineral resources. So we know that the US administration knew about these deposits. It’s hard to fathom or believe that President Obama didn’t know that. So now we get into informed speculation, and I don’t think it’s a great leap to say when President Obama was making his decision, if this had been public, people would have said, is this another grab for oil as the war in Iraq was? So I think one can at least speculate that it would have been in US interests not to talk about this. But I also think there’s another point that needs to be made here, if you don’t mind me rambling on here, which is the United States wasn’t the only country that knew about this. Certainly Russia had to know about the results of this [inaudible]

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