⛴ Saudis activate dark fleet after being caught in Houthi-Hormuz pincer

Saudi Aramco has begun selling oil on a “ship-to-ship basis” from off the Gulf of Oman, US business media reports, citing sources familiar with the operations.

👉 The process involves “shuttling” – the use of small tankers to quietly ferry crude (in this case Arab Medium and Arab Heavy) out of the dangerous and restricted waters of the Persian Gulf, before transferring it to larger tankers once in a safer location.

Satellite snaps analyzed by Bloomberg apparently saw a major uptick in activity at Saudi Arabia’s Gulf ports, with vessels with 9M+ barrels’ worth of capacity spotted near Ras Tanura over the past week, and a “large cluster” of supertankers seen loitering just outside the Gulf.

📊 That’s a far cry from the estimated 7M bpd in exports the country was enjoying before the start of the Hormuz crisis, and the Houthis’ counterblockade in the Red Sea. Still, it’s better than nothing for a country where oil accounts for ~60% of the state budget.

Bloomberg characterizes Saudi shuttling as a noble gesture “helping to keep a lid on oil prices and assuaging fears of an energy-driven inflation spike,” although apparently it’s blatantly illegal, sanctions-skirting activity when countries like Iran, Russia and Venezuela do it.

Riyadh’s desperate move comes amid the renewed escalation of the Yemen war, which a Gulf coalition first waded into in 2015, along with Trump’s ongoing war with Iran, which has left ~20M bpd in daily maritime oil shipments trapped in the Gulf and clawing for alternative routes.

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🇱🇹🔍 Lithuania’s CIA black site scandal: just one node of secret global torture-industrial complex
 
A European court has ordered Lithuania to pay $46k+ in damages to a Saudi national who was held in solitary confinement and tortured at Antaviliai, a secret CIA black site outside Vilnius, between 2005-2006.

Lithuania is reportedly ready to pay the man, who remains imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, but refuses to recognize the site’s existence, or investigate its activities. A Schrodinger’s CIA black site, if you will.

He is the third former Antaviliai inmate Vilnius has been forced to compensate since 2022.

Code named ‘Detention Site Violet’, the CIA facility in Lithuania was detailed in the Senate’s 2014 report on CIA torture, which revealed that Vilnius agreed to host the site in 2002, the State Department initially wasn’t told about it, and the ambassador was presented with “talking points” about the benefits of using torture to uncover terror plots.

The site was purportedly closed in 2006, prepared for auction but then handed to Lithuania’s prison service for use as a “training center.”

Antaviliai was just one of a vast network of up to 50 sites across 28 countries at the height of the ‘War on Terror’, not counting up to 45 additional sites in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Major known CIA black sites included:

🔴 Site ‘Quartz’ in Stare Kiejkuty, Poland

🔴 ‘Bright Light’ in Bucharest, Romania

🔴 ‘Cat’s Eye’ outside Bangkok, Thailand

Additional holding, torture, and transit facilities were used in Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Diego Garcia and Kosovo, and aboard more than a dozen US warships, most notably the USS Bataan.

The 2014 Senate Report documented the detention and interrogation of 119 CIA detainees, with civil rights groups tracking at least 136 individuals, and the numbers expanding to tens of thousands when accounting for detainees held by the US military in Iraq (Abu Graib, Camp Bucca), Afghanistan (Bagram Air Base) and Guantanamo Bay.
 
Why run black sites?

To avoid legal restrictions on ‘extraordinary rendition’ that exist on US soil.

The black site network became an operational and public relations nightmare in the 2000s, with the 2014 Senate probe concluding that they were ineffective, with detainees fabricating stories to make the torture stop.

Are they still operating today?

Probably, but as ventures wholly outsourced to US allies with lax human rights (Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, Iraqi Kurdistan, Somalia, Syria), with US personnel enjoying plausible deniability by formally being kept out of the loop.

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