OPEC accused of 'economic terrorism'

Larry Klayman

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is a "price-fixing scheme" intent on damaging the free world with its "economic terrorism," charges the founder  and former head of Judicial Watch in a lawsuit.

Larry Klayman, who now runs an organization called Freedom Watch, has filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, asking for a jury trial to determine OPEC's actions are "an unreasonable restraint of trade or commerce" in violation of U.S. antitrust laws.

Citing crude oil prices in the range of $140 a barrel, Klayman's Freedom Watch, a non-profit watchdog that aims to promote and protects freedom in the U.S., reports it has purchased fuel "from the Defendant and its agents and co-conspirators."

The lawsuit was brought to target "the illegal actions" of OPEC, "which, as a form of economic terrorism, are designed to severely harm the economies of the United States and Western Europe."

Klayman, 56, made a name for himself as founder of Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog group that filed at least 18 suits against the Clinton administration in the 1990s alleging cover-ups.

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Klayman today told WND the lawsuit, filed last week, is exactly what it is: a demand for U.S. law to be applied to OPEC the same way it has been applied to other foreign cartels in court rulings dating back to the 1930s.

"The primary purpose [is] to enjoin price fixing," he said. "The federal court does have the authority to do that."

Secondly, Klayman said, it would show the federal government it should be pro-active in dealing with the economic hurt that such financial maneuvers create in the U.S.

"If American citizens can take action, why shouldn't the U.S. government?" he said.

The third aim of the lawsuit is to apply international pressure on oil producers and to seek out and reveal any secret deals they have been made.

Just over the weekend, Saudi Arabia called for a meeting of oil producing and consuming countries June 22 to talk about the soaring energy prices. The New York Times reported that a production increase is scheduled to be announced soon.

"I think [oil-producing nations] are busy, maybe already have done so, cutting deals under the table with the Bush administration and members of Congress to get what they want, to move faster on a Palestinian state, to get [the U.S.] out of Iraq," Klayman told WND.

"The big issue is what are we trading that we don't know about for higher oil production," he told WND.

The lawsuit says OPEC's actions are supportive of, "in the case of Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, communism throughout Latin America, and in the case of the Arab members of OPEC such as Saudi Arabia, radical [Wahhabi] and derivative strains of radical Islam in its centuries-old struggle for domination over Jews and Christians and Judeo-Christian interests and nation states, such as Israel, in the Middle East and throughout the world."

The lawsuit accuses OPEC and its members of "direct or indirect financial and other support for terrorist groups."

"Some of the members of OPEC are, not coincidentally, on the U.S. State Department's watch list of terrorist nations," Klayman said, which are "bent on destroying American and other Western interests."

The lawsuit cites the Sherman Act, which is being violated by the "agreed-upon limits and restrictions on the production of oil and other petroleum products by OPEC's 13 member nations," Klayman's lawsuit said.

The members are Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.

"The current effect of this unlawful scheme has been to raise prices of oil and petroleum to in excess of $140 per barrel, bringing the economy of the United States and the entire Western world to its economic knees," the lawsuit said.

"In the absence of this agreement, OPEC members and co-conspirators would be producing more oil and the price of gasoline and other petroleum products would be less," the lawsuit says. "The acts … are not the unilateral, independent acts of sovereign nations taken and effectuated entirely within the confines of their own territorial boundaries. As a multinational cartel, OPEC depends upon the concerted and agreed upon acts of all of its members … to achieve the conspiracy's price fixing scheme."

 

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