Military of Portugal
The armed forces have three branches: Army, Navy, and Air Force. The military of Portugal serves primarily as a self-defense force whose mission is to protect the territorial integrity of the country and providing humanitarian assistance and security at home and abroad. Since the early 2000s, compulsory military service is no longer practised. The changes also turned the forces' focus towards professional military engagements. The age for voluntary recruitment is set at 18. In the 20th century, Portugal engaged in two major military interventions: the First Great War and the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-1974). Portugal has participated in peacekeeping missions in East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq (Nasiriyah), and Lebanon.
From the CIA fact book:
Legend:
Definition 
Field Listing 
Rank Order | Introduction | Portugal | Top of Page |
| Background: | Following its heyday as a world power during the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal lost much of its wealth and status with the destruction of Lisbon in a 1755 earthquake, occupation during the Napoleonic Wars, and the independence in 1822 of Brazil as a colony. A 1910 revolution deposed the monarchy; for most of the next six decades, repressive governments ran the country. In 1974, a left-wing military coup installed broad democratic reforms. The following year, Portugal granted independence to all of its African colonies. Portugal is a founding member of NATO and entered the EC (now the EU) in 1986. |
| Geography | Portugal | Top of Page |
| Location: | Southwestern Europe, bordering the North Atlantic Ocean, west of Spain |
| Geographic coordinates: | 39 30 N, 8 00 W |
| Map references: | Europe |
| Area: | total: 92,391 sq km land: 91,951 sq km water: 440 sq km note: includes Azores and Madeira Islands |
| Area - comparative: | slightly smaller than Indiana |
| Land boundaries: | total: 1,214 km border countries: Spain 1,214 km |
| Coastline: | 1,793 km |
| Maritime claims: | territorial sea: 12 nm contiguous zone: 24 nm exclusive economic zone: 200 nm continental shelf: 200-m depth or to the depth of exploitation |
| Climate: | maritime temperate; cool and rainy in north, warmer and drier in south |
| Terrain: | mountainous north of the Tagus River, rolling plains in south |
| Elevation extremes: | lowest point: Atlantic Ocean 0 m highest point: Ponta do Pico (Pico or Pico Alto) on Ilha do Pico in the Azores 2,351 m |
| Natural resources: | fish, forests (cork), iron ore, copper, zinc, tin, tungsten, silver, gold, uranium, marble, clay, gypsum, salt, arable land, hydropower |
| Land use: | arable land: 17.29% permanent crops: 7.84% other: 74.87% (2005) |
| Irrigated land: | 6,500 sq km (2003) |
| Total renewable water resources: | 73.6 cu km (2005) |
| Freshwater withdrawal (domestic/industrial/agricultural): | Total: 11.09 cu km/yr (10%/12%/78%) Per capita: 1,056 cu m/yr (1998) |
| Natural hazards: | Azores subject to severe earthquakes |
| Environment - current issues: | soil erosion; air pollution caused by industrial and vehicle emissions; water pollution, especially in coastal areas |
| Environment - international agreements: | party to: Air Pollution, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Marine Life Conservation, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 83, Tropical Timber 94, Wetlands, Whaling signed, but not ratified: Air Pollution-Persistent Organic Pollutants, Air Pollution-Volatile Organic Compounds, Environmental Modification |
| Geography - note: | Azores and Madeira Islands occupy strategic locations along western sea approaches to Strait of Gibraltar |
In addition to the traditional channels for reporting crimes the Government of Portugal has launched a website to report crimes online.
eGovernment - http://www.egovonline.net/
Disputes - international: | Portugal does not recognize Spanish sovereignty over the territory of Olivenza based on a difference of interpretation of the 1815 Congress of Vienna and the 1801 Treaty of Badajoz |
| Illicit drugs: | seizing record amounts of Latin American cocaine destined for Europe; a European gateway for Southwest Asian heroin; transshipment point for hashish from North Africa to Europe; consumer of Southwest Asian heroin |
What will happen to the coalititon of the willing as the dollar tanks and the arms dealing falls apart??
Bush-Cheney Cabal:Pedophilia, Arms Dealing, Murder (continued)
by OSWALD LEWINTER
But before Judge Connerrote could act, the Minister of Justice removed him from the case. As a result, there were no indictments, and the case was, for all practical purposes, closed.Why was Cools murdered, and why did senior government officials move to shut down the investigation, on the eve of indictments?
Cools was murdered within days of his return from a fact-finding trip to Geneva and Lucerne, Switzerland where he had conferred with ex Iraqui banker Abdullah Zilka and Israel's leading arms dealer Shaul
Eisenberg, who had brokered the sale some time before of a sizable interest in Gerald Bull's Space Research Corporation to South Africa's state owned arms manufacturing company, Armscor.
Bull, no stranger to the covert world of arms trafficking, had entered a lucrative joint venture to produce a new type howitzer
with Beligum's premier arms manufacturers and "charter member" of the European explosives cartel, Poudrieres Reunies de Belgique(PRB), in which British arms merchant Gerald James's Astra Company (that had
frequently employed Mark Thatcher, son of Lady Thatcher as a highly paid consultant) had purchased a controlling interest in 1989.
Cools had most imprudently announced to the Belgian press after his return from Switzerland, that he would soon release startling evidence about corruption in Belgium's growing arms industry and its ties to the Canadian billionaire Bronfman brothers, a number of
major U.S. political figures and republican fat cats with influence reaching into the inner circles of the Bush White House.
Among the names that Cools promised to present evidence on were Dick Cheney, Neil Bush, Frank Carlucci, Donald Rumsfeld and members of the
powerful Republican Barbour and Racicot clans who all own large shares in major arms manufactuerers as well as Britain's Jonathan Aitken, Thatcher's secretary of state for defense who had large holdings in a string of British arms suppliers and was a leading figure in the Tory Party hierarchy.
Cools was murdered before he could release his findings.
Cools had also investigated the the deal Bull had made with Saddam Hussein, a deal which proved fatal to him, to design and build a "super gun".
Bull's deal with Iraq had been bankrolled by Societe Generale, the banking arm of the Societe Generale de Belgique, a holding company of the Belgian royal family which owns 40% of the country's industry.
Despite Israeli protests lodged in London and Washington, D.C., every
aspect of the Bull deal with Iraq had been cleared at the highest levels of the Thatcher, Reagan and Bush administrations.
If the political and criminal intrigue In the Gerald Bull case were some of the matters that Andre Cools had intended to expose at the time of his assassination, it was not only the "Belgian connection" to the East-West arms smuggling scandals, of which he was aware.
The Belgian-Iraqi contracts had been negotiated by Count Herve de Carmoy, a French nobleman and member of the Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg, who was the international director of Britain's Midland Bank and the co-chairman of Societe Generale de Belgique, representing
the interests of a large block of French shareholders which included Valery Giscard d'Estaing as well as Jean Marie Le Pen.
Ironically, Count de Carmoy had traveled to Baghdad in 1989, to work out the final details of the Bull contract with Iraq, along with plans to build a series of chemical plants as well.
Those plants would later be described as "chemical weapons factories by the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell and obliterated by "coalition" bombing raids in the first Gulf War.
Belgium, which hosts the headquarters of NATO, enjoys a disproportionate power status within the European Union.
Brussels is a hub of arms dealing and military-industrial espionage.
Furthermore, Societe Generale de Belgique also exerts considerable control over the second major arms producer, Fabrique Nationale, which produces the Browning pistol under licence from the United States. The Belgian Banque Bruxelles Lambert was deeply implicated in one of the early United States-Israeli covert arms programs, Operation Demavand.
(Of interest is the fact that Rudy Giuliani, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York brought indictments in that case against nine defendants including three Israelis and a Brigadier General and Colonel connected to Mossad.
The case was brought to trial by Giuliani, but after one week, when defense attorneys presented the trial judge with compelling reasons to allow them to subpoena George H.W. Bush, the government dropped its case.]
One of the leading Belgian government officials of the 1980's, Jean Gol, who served as defense minister and also as interior minister,was a cousin of East Germany's Stasi Colonel, Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski.
Gol was also the head of the Belgian-Israeli Friendship Society, and was widely reputed as having direct ties to the Mossad. The
relationship between the cousins, who met regularly in Brussels, Vienna, and Stockholm, has never been publicly investigated.
Another Antwerp-based arms smuggling outfit, Casalee, which had been set up originally in Rhodesia in the 1970's to smuggle weapons to the
regime of Ian Smith, was involved in many of the covert arms deals to Iran and Iraq during the the 1980's, in particularly some of those permitted by the Balsemao regime in Portugal, to be transshipped via Israel from Setubal. John Bredenkamp, its founder and director, eventually moved his firm to Great Britain at start of the 90's.
Cools was also on the board of directors of the Bierset Airport near Liege, which was a major point of departure for many arms shipments to Iran and Iraq by Belgian, British, and U.S. interests during the period of the United Nations Arms Embargo. That airport was also under investigation for the smuggling of weapons by the CIA to the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria.
On August 17, 1996, the five-year cover-up of the Cools murder, and potentially a great deal more, came to a shocking end, when Belgian police raided a house in a small city in the French speaking sector of the nation,and rescued two young girls who had been kidnapped and imprisoned there by a pedophile ring for their pleasure.
The raid, which netted a large number of documents, computer disks with lists of names, resulted in the arrest of Marc Dutroux, a well-known criminal and low-level police informant.
The Dutroux arrest unraveled an international pedophile ring involving Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, the U.S., Great Britain, Japan and the United Nations and its agencies.
The names found on the computer disks reached into the highest levels of politics and society in the various countries and institutions, including some of the very members of the Belgian government who had originally been implicated in the assassination of Andre Cools.
By arresting Dutroux, the Belgian authorities were simultaneously able to round up many of the people responsible for the assassination of Cools.In the interim, Dutroux led police to the burial site of four young girls, all of whom had been ritually murdered by his pedophile colleagues. Within a short time, over 30 people had been arrested, including a number of high-level politicians, judges, and senior police commanders.
The prosecuting judge in the Dutroux case was Jean-Marie Connerrote, the same judge who had been dismissed from the Cools murder case before he could issue indictments.
Among those he arrested in August 1996, and charged in the Cools murder, was Alain Van der Biest, a leading member of the Belgian Socialist Party and a one-time political ally of Cools and a shareholder in PRB.
A second senior Belgian Socialist, Guy Mathot, was briefly detained, but eventually released in the Cools case.
As of this writing (2004) he is still under investigation, according to a number of detectives on the staff of Judge Connerrote. The judge also arrested two Italian Mafia leaders linked to the imprisoned
"capo di tutti capi", Salvatore "Toto" Riina and his longtime "capo-regime" Giovanni "the Pig" Brusca, who had played a prominent role in the Cools killing.
[Riina, head of the Corleone crime syndicate, had beenjailed in 1993 despite the fact that he had been a covert asset of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, who had helped the DEA, together with
Tomasso Buscetta, to make a case against his rival Gaetano Badalamenti in the famous "Pizza Connection" case.]
Soon after the arrests in Belgium, the Tunisian police arrested two Tunisians accused of being the gunmen in the Cools murder. They were extradited to Belgium, and subsequently confessed to the killing.
The Tunisian government informed Judge Connerrote that the two men were part of the GIA arms smuggling ring that had operated out of Bierset airport; a ring that included a significant number of members who had been part of the Afghani mujahideen during the 1980's and some who later joined Usama bin Laden in the new Al Qaeda.
The Dutroux pedophile ring investigation is still expaning in several companies even though Dutroux has finally gone to trial. At the time of his arrest, Dutroux was running a car-theft, drug smuggling, and
pedophile operation that was in business in the Netherlands, France, and Germany. He was closely tied to a senior Portuguese diplomat, Jorge Ritto, a former ambassador to South Africa and Permanent
Representative to UNESCO who is a close friend of the agency's Secretary General, Koiichiro Matsura.
Ritto has been implicated and jailed as a major figure in Portugal's Casa Pia pedophilia scandal. Another leading figure dredged up in the widening circle of the Dutroux pedophilia operation, Jean Michel Nihoul, managed the group's finances out of posh offices on the Avenue de Louise in the heart of the Brussels business district. He managed a string of Dutroux's properties which functioned as pedophilia clubs in various countries, including a sumptuous and secluded villa in the Caribbean at which leading U.S. political figures, governors and members of Congress could satisfy their pedophile perversions safe from media sleuths.
Nihoul had been in and out of jail since the 1970's, on a wide range of money-laundering, drug-trafficking, and prostitution charges. He was also a leading power in Belgian right-wing political circles, a close friend of U.S. General John Singlaub and Rev. Moon of the World Anti-Communist League as well as to men in the upper echelons of the Sasakawa Foundation. Nihoul was also a power in Belgium's Christian Social Party.
In the 1980's,Nihoul ran an ecology cult, called Eco Vie, through which he became friends for a time with the late Pym Fortuyn,
a Dutch politician who was murdered. The organization itself served as a front for many of Nihoul's criminal activities. Nihoul was also involved in the earlier "L'Affaire Pinon" a series of pedophile orgies managed by the wife of Dr. Pinon.
The Nihoul expose raised fears among some of the Belgian elites, that the pedophile indictments would force the reopening of an earlier case, involving the 7th January 1986 murder of a Juan Mendez of Fabrique Nationale.
Mendez was responsible for providing false "end-user certificates" for shipments of arms destinedfor for Iran,Iraq, and several African
countries on the United Nations' arms embargo list.
The Dutroux-Nihoul case also sparked a revival of interest in a parallel case unearthed in the United States, as part of the late 1980s Congressional and special prosecutors probes of the Contra Supply operations.
The American case involved CIA- Col. Oliver North initiated drugs-for money-for weapons operation, and also the Franklin Credit Bank of Omaha, Nebraska,run by Larry King, a powerful African-American Republican Party operator, whose savings and loan institution was used to launder funds for Oliver North's Contras.
When former Nebraska state senator John De Camp undertook a probe of King's activities , he uncovered a nationwide pedophile ring, servicing some of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in the Omaha business and political elites in the Republican Party circles of George Herbert Walker Bush (see 'The Franklin Cover-Up, Child Abuse, Satanism and Murder in Nebraska,' by John W. De Camp,
{Lincoln Nebraska: AWT, Inc., 1992}).
On October 14, 1996, the Supreme Court of Belgium removed Judge Connerrote from the Dutroux case. The ostensible reason given for his removal was Judge Connerrote's appearance at an event sponsored by the
parents of Dutroux's victims. The Supreme Court's action caused spontaneous demonstration in every city in Belgium, culminating with a march by 300,000 people in Brussels on October 20.
The newspaper HET VOLK editorialized, "Like a magnet, this (the firing of Connerrote) has attracted all of the hidden anger of all Belgians... anger because the rights of criminals are better protected than those of the victims."
Another major newspaper, LE SOIR, opined in an editorial that Judge Connerrote had to be removed "because he was unwilling to refrain from subpoenaing major U.S. diplomats and high government officials.
as well as key figures in the Dutch and Portuguese pedophilia cases." Both editorials linked the pedophile case with the recently solved Cools case, a case that highlighted official bungling, corrpuption and lies.
No comments:
Post a Comment