If you live in Houston, the person next to you may be a Qatari either in country for medical care or working for a petroleum company either owned or partially owned by Qatar like Golden Pass Products.
If you live in Chicago, you may have dinner at the Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel, owned by the Qatar Investment Authority. If you live in Washington DC, you may work or live at City Center, a fully owned Qatar real estate development.
If you walk through airports in Houston, Washington DC, New York or Chicago, you will see arrival and departure gates for Qatar Airlines. If your children are in university and want to learn Arabic, they are doing so with foreign language departments paid for in full by Qatar. In other classes, your son or daughter may be sitting next to a Qatari student or your child may have never been accepted to the school of their choice as that place was handed over to a foreign student instead getting in-State tuition. It should be noted that Sheik al Mayassa al Thani was educated both at Duke University and Columbia. He runs the Qatari Foundation that has it’s headquarters at City Center in Washington DC.
If you happen to work at a cargo port or two or more that imports natural gas, you may be employed by Qatar. One reason for terminating the Export Import Bank is due in part that the U.S. invests $2 billion in loan guarantees in a country that has an established wealth within the top world ranking, yet the bank supports operations for natural gas in Qatar that supplies Japan, India and the UK, such that the United Kingdom has enjoyed a $33 billion investment by Qatar that Great Britain received 85% of their natgas from Qatar.
Now, the United States has had a relationship with Qatar since the 1990’s and since that time, the al Thani monarchy has toggled their foreign policy relationships for many years, meaning they are manipulating for the sake of moving into a higher regional power.
This toggle/manipulation agenda is described as removing Bashir al Assad from power but yet Qatar works diligently with Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban and Barack Obama has and is deferring all negotiations with those terror groups to the al Thani monarchy.
With a population of just 2.0 million, it should be noted that each resident is way above the norm for wealth and the style of living is so luxurious that up to 20% of those that live in Qatar are foreign nationals.
Qatar maintains a Shura council for day to day domestic policy and law enforcement. Political parties in Qatar are forbidden completely and their own Constitution is thin on substance, checks and balances and protections except for the monarchy ruling family and party.
When it comes to the United States and the ‘defensive’ component, sure America has CENTCOM part two there but another key military asset is al Udeid base that is designed to support efforts in Afghanistan, and this base has been expanded from the original footprint by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Secretary Chuck Hagel just recently extended a joint military cooperation agreement with Qatar for another ten years. At this location, the United States trains the Qatari military paid for by U.S. grants.
France is the largest exporter of arms to Qatar and Qatar maintains a large inventory of ‘stinger’ missiles which are sold, traded and smuggled through a black market. There are real questions that need to be answered as to why Qatar has received and bought huge numbers of various and high tech-based military assets for a military that is quite small in scale and without knowing the real outside threat to their sovereignty and safety.
While that U.S. State Department has maintained a very wide, deep and comprehensive list of terror groups, it is well known by the State Department that Qatar has key people that support these terror groups and coordinate donations from outside sources. Due in part to negotiations of the Iranian nuclear program, the Taliban, Gitmo and al Qaeda, Secretary Hillary Clinton and now John Kerry only mention these matters in passing to Qatar just to get it on the record, but otherwise nothing outside a feeble attempt to pinpoint these illicit activities has created any traction as our NSC and State needs Qatar for nefarious objectives as has been noted least of which is the Taliban 5.
The illicit activities include the facts that the Taliban 5 live in ClubMed conditions, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was provided safe haven in Qatar, Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas lives fully protected in Doha and Yusuf al Qaradawi, a very old man, lives in Qatar running the Syrian and Egyptian Islamic jihad. Only recently did Qatar dispel a few Muslim Brotherhood leaders to Syria but they are well protected and other Muslim Brotherhood leadership remains in Qatar with funding continuing as it began during the Arab Spring from the elitists in Qatar. At the core of support for the Muslim Brotherhood objectives in Qatar is Emir Tamin bin Hamad. These objectives include construction projects in Gaza including electrical power plants.
Then in closing there is yet another satellite headquarters for Qatari investments that is located in Switzerland named the al Karana Foundation. This effort is led by Abdelrahman bin Umayer al Nuaymi and is well known to the global banking system(s) while no one dares to either challenge or exam the connections, transactions or causes that mostly will translate to funding going to terror groups that includes al Nusra and the Ennahda Party in Tunisia.
So you see ladies and gentlemen, dollars and terrorism is in fact a global enterprise that occurs even in alleged neutral countries, or are they in fact neutral?
First article on Qatar: https://founderscode.com/?p=738