Syrian link to Pakistan nuke sales investigated

[Octafish]

Your tax dollars at work, courtesy of the BFEE working through BCCI:

Syrian link to Pakistan nuke sales investigated

By Douglas Frantz
Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times
Published June 25, 2004

International investigators are examining whether Syria acquired nuclear technology and expertise through the black market network operated by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, according to a U.S. official and Western diplomats.

Intelligence reports indicate that Khan and some associates visited Syria in the late 1990s and later held clandestine meetings with Syrian nuclear officials in Iran, the diplomats said.

Khan, who helped Pakistan develop nuclear weaponry, has acknowledged selling advanced centrifuge technology and expertise to Iran, Libya and North Korea over nearly two decades. The extent of his illicit operations remains unknown, but diplomats said that if Syria did have centrifuges, the devices would undoubtedly have come from Khan's network.

Inspectors from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency are investigating whether sales were made to other countries as they try to build an accurate picture of what officials consider the most serious nuclear proliferation network in history.

CONTINUED...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0406250354jun25,1,939128.story?coll=chi-techtopheds-hed

[seemslikeadream]

1. BCCI and Pakistani Nuclear Hero

seemslikeadream
BCCI and Pakistani Nuclear Hero
Pakistan's Nuclear Hero Defended
by Jefferson Morley

"Washington and Islamabad," says the Delhi-based daily, are "holding their breath" to see if Khan "will spill the beans about Pakistan's offical complicity in the spread of nuclear weapons technology."

Pakistan proceeded to spend some $10 billion developing a nuclear arsenal, say the editors of the Times of India. The money came from Libya, Saudia Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and the depositors of the BCCI. The bank, says the editors of the Times of India, was founded by a Pakistani and operated freely in the Persian Gulf oil enclave of Dubai. It is inconceivable, they argue, that Western intelligence agencies didn't know all about this black market.

In other words, was the United States totally clueless while a Pakistani scientist supplied nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8262-2004Feb3_2.html

cosmicdot
I get the impression that the reporter's last sentence should be the first
or even the article's title: "In other words, was the United States totally clueless."
and, perhaps the rather generic "depositors of the BCCI" examined in more detail ???
Perhaps some might think it vital to get someone elected who has in the past or will in the future 'protect' those who brought BCCI's corruption to our shores. Despite Senate "investigations", I don't think the BCCI scandal was punished ... I don't recall the likes of Jackson Stephens; Harvard Management, i.e., Pug Winokur; James Bath; etc., serving time. The BCCI trial in the UK and such must have some heart's racing ... It might pay to play both sides of the fence in the presidential contest ... just in case Diebold fails to deliver or re-deliver the ideal candidate.

Or, am I off-base?

1986

George W. Bush and partners receive more than $2 million of Harken Energy stock in exchange for a failing oil well operation, which had lost $400,000 in the prior six months. After Bush joined Harken, the largest stock position and a seat on its board were acquired by Harvard Management Company. The Harken board gave Bush $600,000 worth of the company's publicly traded stock, plus a seat on the board plus a consultancy that paid him up to $120,000 a year. When Harken runs short of cash it hooks up with investment banker Jackson Stephens of Little Rock, Arkansas, who arranges a $25 million stock purchase by Union Bank of Switzerland. Sheik Abdullah Bakhsh, who joins the board as a part of the deal, is connected to the infamous BCCI.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0203/S00035.htm


IMRadioactive
Did We Ever Really Get Down To The Bottom Of BCCI?
The scandals are foggy in my mind, but the connections to things going on today are getting clearer and clearer the more I read. I hope someone can connect all the dots from then and now in a simple way...if it's possible.

There's a lot of co-incidents here that should raise major red flags...most notably BCCI's base being in Islamabad...the financial money pit for Al Queda...and a virtual black hole in the financial world. Money flows in and out of that city and the country like water...and BCCI developed the conduits that are surely still being used today.

60 Minutes came touching on the fringes recently on their expose on Haliburton's economic connections with Iran, Libya and Hussein-era Iraq, and now we're starting to learn how Pakistan's top scientist played let's make a deal for nuclear secrets between other "rogue" states and surely with our own "friends" to build his bomb and feather his nest. I'm sure where the interests of our "friends" like Haliburton or KBR run ahead of the "national security" aspect you know who wins every time.

I'd love to see more about this connection and see others get on it as well.

Thanks for the post.

seemslikeadream
I would like to read this from the Financial Times
Jan. 27, 2004
...According to bankers, some of worked with BCCI before it collapsed in 1991, Pakistani investigators have sought the help of former BCCI employees to try...
but I don't have a subscription.

9215
Quid pro Quo
In the early 80's there was also something about Poppy cutting a deal to exchange nuke technology for Pakistan purchasing US Bell helicopters.

DrBB
Whoa--simultaneous posting
See mine, below, too. I've been trying to run this down for a while now, but haven't had any luck. Do you remember any more about this?

Stuck here outa gas
Out here on the Gaza strip
From driving in too fast
Let’s ride the tiger down river euphrates


DrBB
PLEASE help me remember...
I distinctly recall reading an article related to all this in the New Yorker, well before 9/11. Pre-Bush II, also. Might have been by Sy Hersh. Might have been published in the first Clinton admin--that far back.

The occasion of the article was to bring out that, near the end of the Bush I administration, there had been an exceedingly narrowly-averted nuclear war on the Indian subcontinent. This was largely thanks to right-wing stupidity of some kind on the part of Bush I's foreign policy team. The article had a lot of evidence that we'd gone on high alert, and that India had come very close to nuking Pakistan. At that point, Pakistan did not have the Bomb, and my memory is hazy on the details of this, but what keeps bringing it to mind is this:

The article also went into some detail, IIRC, about US complicity in Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear technology. I seem to remember the article having been published before Pakistan tested its weapon, but I could be wrong about that, given the subject matter. Because the point was that the US not only looked the other way, but may have indirectly facilitated Pakistan's acquisition of necessary precursor technologies, in return for Pakistan's complicity in our operations in Afghanistan. That there was a quid pro quo: in return for allowing us to stage support for the anti-Soviet Afghan rebels through Pakistan, Pakistan required us to look the other way as they developed nuclear capability.
In other words, al Qaeda isn't the only blowback from our long and misguided involvement over there.
Anyone remember reading this, or seeing anything along these lines?

seemslikeadream
Is this it?
I haven't read it yet.
http://www.pepeace.org/current_reprints/03/The_Nuclear_Arsenal.htm


DrBB
Not the one I'm looking for, but on the right track
Hersh does mention the incident, and helps fix the chronology, but this one doesn't deal with US complicity very much. But it fills in a lot of the holes--a big help, thanks! The relevant paragraph:

India has had a tactical atomic bomb since the nineteen-seventies, and Pakistan's became operational in the late nineteen-eighties, although Pakistani leaders denied this fact for years. The Kashmiri dispute first veered close to nuclear confrontation in 1990. That spring, the American National Security Agency was monitoring what seemed to be yet another slowly escalating series of Pakistani and Indian attacks, when intercepts revealed that the Pakistani leadership had "panicked," as a senior intelligence official put it, at the prospect of a preëmptive Indian strike and had readied its small arsenal of nuclear warheads. (The previous fall, the Bush Administration had assured Congress that Pakistan did not possess such weapons—although it knew better—in order to gain continued approval for military aid to the country.)

Helps to clear up when this happened, and why I was confused about Pakistan's having nuclear weapons even though their big publically-acknowledged bomb testing hadn't occured yet.

I believe the earlier article must have been published around 91-93 sometime, as I recall it being not long after the incidents in question. New Yorker doesn't archive their stuff that far back--guess I'll have to make a trip to the library. I'm pretty sure it was a Hersh piece....

9215
here is another link
I posted "The case of the Nuclear Triggers" years ago at Smirking Chimp. It looks like author Robert Parry put some of this material on his website:
http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/kissingeriraq.htm


DrBB
Here's the title: "On the Nuclear Edge," Sy Hersh, New Yorker, 1993
So far I've found a bunch of references TO the article, but no copies of the thing itself. Anybody runs across it, please let me know.

And thanks, seemslikeadream.


9215
Some other stuff
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/international/04NUKE.html?hp >
The Pakistani leaders who denied for years that scientists at the country's secret A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories were peddling advanced nuclear technology must have been averting their eyes from a most conspicuous piece of evidence: the laboratory's own sales brochure, quietly circulated to aspiring nuclear weapons states and a network of nuclear middlemen around the world.
The cover bears an official-looking seal that says "Government of Pakistan" and a photograph of the father of the Pakistani bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan. It promotes components that were spinoffs from Pakistan's three-decade-long project to build a nuclear stockpile of enriched uranium, set in a drawing that bears a striking resemblance to a mushroom cloud.
In other nations, such sales would be strictly controlled. But Pakistan has always played by its own rules.
As investigators unravel the mysteries of the North Korean, Iranian and now the Libyan nuclear projects, Pakistan - and those it empowered with knowledge and technology they are now selling on their own - has emerged as the intellectual and trading hub of a loose network of hidden nuclear proliferators.
Brochure pictured on NYTimes;

seemslikeadream
On the day of the Indian nuclear tests, Henry Kissinger,
on his own accord, went to the CNN studios and justified the Indian tests on the ground that India was living in a tough neighourhood. He obviously knew what he was talking about.

In the light of Pakistan's state of industrial development, Islamabad will continue to need foreign black market imports for a long time to come to sustain its nuclear arsenal. There were recent reports of 800 spark gaps needed for triggers being bought in the US by a South African Jew, shipped to Dubai and then on to Pakistan.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/468709.cms

seemslikeadream
The secret empire of Dr. Khan
The incontrovertible truth is that Pakistan's nuclear programme in every aspect has been, and remains, under the firm and total control of its army at least since 1977; even its navy and air force have little role in it. Its clandestine nature relied on building a black market largely managed by trusted senior army (and ISI) officers and senior scientists in the nuclear establishment. Such people have undoubtedly been under a strong security and intelligence cover as much for their safety as to keep an eye on them. With a flourishing $2 billion-plus annual narcotics trade, and banks like the former Dubai-based Pakistani-owned "Outlaw Bank", the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International), and the Mehran Bank to manage the black market in narcotics, nuclear trade and tools for terrorism, there was obviously no dearth of unaccounted funds for the purpose. General Aslam Beg, the army chief in the late 1980's who controlled the nuclear programme, later publicly acknowledged receipt of hundreds of crores of unaccounted funds which he passed on to the ISI and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan.
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=40361


varun
Libya got its nuke blueprints from Pakistan...
..wonder who else has the blueprints...in this black market.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/politics/04NUKE.html

Warhead Blueprints Link Libya Project to Pakistan Figure
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: February 4, 2004
WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 — Twelve days ago, a 747 aircraft chartered by the United States government landed at Dulles Airport here carrying a single piece of precious cargo: a small box containing warhead designs that American officials believe were sold to Libya by the underground network linked to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the creator of the Pakistani bomb.

The warhead designs were the first hard evidence that the secret network provided its customers with far more than just the technology to turn uranium into bomb fuel. Libyan officials have told investigators that they bought the blueprints from dealers who are part of that network, apparently for more than $50 million. Those blueprints, along with the capability to make enriched uranium, could have given the Libyans all the elements they needed to make a nuclear bomb. What the Libyans purchased, in the words of an American weapons expert who has reviewed the program in detail, was both the kitchen equipment "and the recipes."....
also...
"...The last shipment of those parts to Libya was intercepted in October, which was several years after Washington began pressuring Mr. Musharraf's government to shut down the scientists at the Khan lab...."
OCTOBER??? 2 years after Pakistan became a "frontline ally" of USA in the war against terrorism?
Something is seriously wrong here...

varun
BCCI funded Pakistan's nuclear bomb
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/05foreign.htm
"...the Pakistani BCCI Foundation was created as a means of sheltering BCCI profits from taxation. In 1981, it received tax-free status while Ishaq Khan was Pakistan's minister of finance. In turn, the foundation received BCCI's profits from Pakistani operations, and then used some of those profits to finance projects the Pakistani government wanted and could not pay for itself. For example, BCCI provided $10 million in grants in the late 1980's to finance an officially "private" science and technology institute named for Pakistani President Ishaq Khan, whose director, A. Qadir Khan, has been closely associated with Pakistan's efforts to build a nuclear bomb. The institute is believed by some experts to be the headquarters for Pakistan's efforts to build an Islamic bomb. In the same period, other BCCI officials were assisting Pakistanis in purchasing nuclear technologies paid for by Pakistani-front companies through BCCI-Canada.(94).."

RainDog
And Bush knew and lied about it
a few quotes...not the article you want, though.
From Outlaw Bank by Beatty and Gwynne.
They include this statement from Sheikh Kamal Adham, former head of Saudi intelligence, bro-in-law of late King Faisal, and shareholder in BCCI and First American Bank, who was speaking to an Arabic audience when admitted, in 1992, that "Pakistan had their own atomic bomb and that Abedi/BCCI had helped them get it.

...Kamal Adham was anticipating...indictment in the U.S. over BCCI fraud.

"So why would he want to call attention to all of this? The Western press aside, the wily old spy master certainly knew the intelligence agencies of the U.S. would pick up his remarks...He may have been sending a message directly to George Bush, reminding the president that Kamal Adham knew far too much to be trifled with.

in perspective...9-91. Morganthau was going after the powerful Saudi as one of the main culprits of the BCCI scandal. Morganthau kept quiet about his intentions to indict Adham AND SHEIKH KHALID BIN MAHFOUZ (in hopes to avoid state department inverventions.)

but when Kamal found out what was happening, he hired the former executive assistant of then White House Chief of Staff John Sununu...who had just (surprise...not) quit to go "private."

This publically brought the Bush administration into the BCCI scandal for the first time.

Beatty and Gwynne learned that Bush's White House was closely monitoring the BCCI investigation, insisting that a administration official sit in on congressional and justice dept. interviews with BCCI witnesses (does this sound familiar to anyone else?? ...the investigation into whistleblowing with Dubya).

some in the FBI complained the FBI probe was spinning its wheels because it was "too political" (again, sound familiar as an excuse to investigate the Bush lies to go to war with Iraq???)...and decisions were being held up in Washington.

A justice dept official complained Washington didn't really want the Atty Gen.'s office to actually return indictments. Washington (Bush) wanted to do an overall package deal, "'where we cut off the hands of a few Pakistanis and paint it as if they were really all the big folks.'"

Beatty and Gwynne go on to note that Bush Sr, lied and claimed he didn't know Adham. (who had been director of the CIA in 1976, WHEN GEORGE BUSH HEADED THE CIA).

The American agency had been "helping to modernize Saudi intelligence during Bush's tenure (oh, no conflict of interest there, huh, Zapata Oil?)

The authors also note that Bush was known as "the Saudi vice president" throughout the middle east. State dept said it was impossible for Bush not to have known Adham because he was the main man in S.A. when you making BIZ DEALS, as well as policy.

when asked about Bush's statement, Adham did not directly deny it, though Saudi's knew Adham's newphew, Sultan bin-Bandar was ambassador to the U.S. and was a frequent guest of Bush.

...but what about the nuclear weapons issue? Reagan, "intent on continuing military aid to Pakistan during the Afghanistan (mujahadeen/Osama bin Laden as Reagan's allies) war, turned a blind eye b/c U.S. law prohibited military aid or sale to nonnuclear countries known to be developing nuclear weapons.

In 88 and 89, Bush danced on the edge of truth about Pakistan, saying it did not "possess a nuclear explosive device" to justify continuing MASSIVE support for Pakistan, b/c Pak, bush said, only had "unassembled components."

As soon as Russia pulled out of Afghanistan, Bush said unassembled components violated the rules and cut off aid.

Beatty and Gwynne, in Time Magazine, were "the first to assert that BCCI was instrumental in Pakistan achieving unofficial Nuclear Club membership.

Via BCCI, Pakistan had received sophisticated American military technology that Congress NEVER AUTHORIZED. Adham's remarks re: an atmomic bomb may have been suggesting that it wouldn't be in the Bush administration's self-interest to probe too deeply into how Pakistan, and BCCI, came to possess such military capacity.

The Sheikh knew that BCCI was "the creation of a real life Dr. No, whose empire brokered ballistic missiles, illicit pharmaceuticals, stolen military secrets, heroin, and hot money, leaving a trail of corruption across two decades and seventy countries. And of all people, Adham had reason to know that the (Bush) White House knew it too, and had known about it for years."

pp 272-77

seemslikeadream
Why no trial for the world's biggest criminal?
Pardon for scientist who sold atom bomb secrets
By Ahmed Rashid in Lahore and Robin Gedye

Pakistan is likely to pardon without trial the father of the country's atomic bomb even though he has confessed to selling nuclear technology to rogue states, a senior government official told the Telegraph yesterday.

Another promised international indignation in the event of pardon. "He is the world's biggest criminal, involved for 27 years in selling nuclear technology. If you let him off with a slap on the wrist, then what kind of message are you sending to others?" he said.

Mr. Khan has let it be known that he is prepared to blow the whistle on the army's involvement. A cabinet minister revealed that Mr. Khan's daughter, a British citizen, had traveled to London with papers that could incriminate generals and other Pakistani leaders, including the former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/04/wpak04...

varun
Pakistani nuclear sicentist offers public apology...
...and gets a slap on the wrist..
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=586&e=2&u=/nm/20040204...
Pakistani Nuclear Scientist Takes the Rap for Leaks
57 minutes ago Add World - Reuters to My Yahoo!

By Mike Collett-White
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Top Pakistani scientist and national hero Abdul Qadeer Khan made a dramatic personal apology Wednesday for leaking atomic secrets, the latest twist in a proliferation scandal stretching from Libya to North Korea (news - web sites).
In a somber address on state television, Khan, revered at home as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, absolved the government and fellow scientists of any blame in an apparent bid by all concerned to draw a line under the damaging affair.
Commentators said his confession smacked of a cover-up, possibly part of a wider agreement to spare the powerful military unwanted scrutiny in any trial and allow President Pervez Musharraf to avoid pressure from Islamists and nationalists.


seemslikeadream
Nuclear betrayal apology
But his claim to have arranged it all himself has been met with widespread skepticism.
Western diplomats said the middlemen operated in Germany, Netherlands, Malaysia and United Arab Emirates.
As a direct result of the Pakistani revelations, it was revealed yesterday a Malaysian company controlled by the son of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was being investigated for possibly supplying machine parts for Libya's nuclear weapons programs.
Malaysian special branch police began the investigation after the CIA in the US and Britain's M16 informed them in November that boxes of machine parts bearing SCOPE's name were found in five containers seized in a ship off Italy in October.

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,8592971%255E...

Pakistan pardons rogue nuke scientist
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has pardoned a scientist who confessed to leaking nuclear weapons secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea and says the country will not allow international supervision of its nuclear programme.
Musharraf also said Pakistan would not hand over any documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency, submit to an independent inquiry or allow the United Nations to supervise Pakistan's nuclear programme.

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&story... §ion=news

ElBaradei says A.Q.Khan just tip of nuclear iceberg
"Dr.Khan was not working alone," International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters, adding he had help from people in many countries.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/CHA530199.htm


seemslikeadream
all roads lead back to BCCI
don't they Octafish?

Octafish
Really seems that way, seemslikeadream.
The bank was used to funnel petrodollars and cocaine cash and arms business monies back to where it would do the most "good" as defined by the BFEE: bribe politicos around the world, arm despots, further enrich the rich, and speed the spread of the nuclear genie. My guess is they plan to hide out in underground kommandbunkers for the bosses and its Armageddon for the rest of us.
Here's the story that ran the other day in India. The thing is full of BFEE Hall of Fame names:
The secret empire of Dr Khan
Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation poses a tricky challenge

JASJIT SINGH
Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme and the man who relentlessly pursued it through clandestine means and methods for decades, has finally admitted in a written statement that he oversaw its further clandestine spread to at least three other countries. Official Pakistan, which for years insisted that its nuclear weapons programme is tightly controlled and completely secure, is now claiming that nuclear trade has been made into a private enterprise by some of its national heroes! Extensive evidence has emerged in the public domain about detailed plans for enrichment of uranium for bomb making having been transferred from Pakistan to a number of countries along with a new version of a “yellow pages” directory of networks from Malaysia to Europe and North America for supply of materials and components.

What is of critical importance is not only the world’s most adventurous multinational nuclear proliferation but the reason Khan has put forward for his activities. Pakistani officials are saying that, contrary to earlier assumptions, he did not do so for money, but that he “was motivated enough to make other Islamic countries nuclear powers also” and reduce pressure on Pakistan. This may be an effort to garner public support from Islamic parties and countries. It also harks back to Bhutto’s notion of the “Islamic Bomb” for its Um’mah. The only exception known so far is the supply of nuclear weapon making technology to North Korea for strategic reasons in exchange for long-range ballistic missiles for nuclear weapon delivery.

Islamism has been deepening in Pakistan for three decades. Its concept of “strategic depth”, especially to its west, led to intervention in Afghanistan to control Kabul through covert Mujahideen operations. Strategic depth made no sense in modern conventional military terms. But in the context of Islamic jihad, as an instrument of politics by other means in Clausewitzean terms, it incorporated deadly logic, especially when the Holy Quran was invoked under General Zia ul-Haq to justify terrorism. To this has been added the strategic depth of an “Islamic Bomb” whose wherewithal is controlled by Pakistan. One look at the map would show that Pakistan’s Islamic nuclear mushroom covers the whole of West Asia with what Mansoor Ijaz terms as the “North Korean-made missiles armed with a Chinese-made nuclear device assembled in Islamabad’s nuclear labs whose fuel came from gas centrifuges sold by Pakistan’s rogue Islamists.” Small wonder Al-Qaeda, which received extensive support from Pakistan and its most radical surrogate, the Taliban, boasted it could make a “dirty” nuclear bomb.

The incontrovertible truth is that Pakistan’s nuclear programme in every aspect has been, and remains, under the firm and total control of its army at least since 1977; even its navy and air force have little role in it. Its clandestine nature relied on building a black market largely managed by trusted senior army (and ISI) officers and senior scientists in the nuclear establishment. Such people have undoubtedly been under a strong security and intelligence cover as much for their safety as to keep an eye on them. With a flourishing $2 billion-plus annual narcotics trade, and banks like the former Dubai-based Pakistani-owned “Outlaw Bank”, the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International), and the Mehran Bank to manage the black market in narcotics, nuclear trade and tools for terrorism, there was obviously no dearth of unaccounted funds for the purpose. General Aslam Beg, the army chief in late 1980s who controlled the nuclear programme, later publicly acknowledged receipt of hundreds of crores of unaccounted funds which he passed on to the ISI and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan.

CONTINUED...

http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=40361


Octafish

BFEE Loves Nuclear Proliferation...
... as it gives them an excuse to continue as war party. That enables the ruling elites -- thugs and commies alike -- to lord it over their populatons. And it is truly Big Business -- the biggest there is.
Pakistan investigates BCCI role in sale of nuclear knowhow
Wednesday, February 04 2004 @ 06:11 PM CST
Stephen Fidler and Farhan Bokhari
The Pakistani government is examining records of the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International in its investigation into the role Pakistani scientists may have played in selling nuclear knowhow to Iran, North Korea and Libya. According to bankers, some of whom worked with BCCI before it collapsed in 1991, Pakistani investigators have sought the help of former BCCI employees to try to uncover payments made to scientists connected with Pakistan's nuclear programme. BCCI's role in financing Pakistan's own nuclear efforts has long been the subject of scrutiny. In 1992, a report into BCCI from a US Congressional sub-committee headed by Senator John Kerry, now a leading Democratic presidential contender, said "there is good reason to conclude that BCCI did finance Pakistan's nuclear programme". Though it said the issue deserved further investigation, there was little public follow-through.

This year, however, as evidence has mounted that Pakistani scientists helped the uranium enrichment programmes of Iran, North Korea and Libya, the Pakistani government has launched an investigation. A government spokesman in Islamabad said that anybody found to have passed on secrets would be punished, but denied that the government approved any transfers. At least 11 Pakistani scientists and officials - as well as the so-called father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan - have been questioned.

BCCI helped the Pakistani government under General Zia ul Haq, the military dictator killed in a 1988 plane crash, to channel payments from the US Central Intelligence Agency to fighters seeking to oust Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Soviet troops withdrew in 1989 but former BCCI officials said the relationship for organising undocumented payments for influential Pakistanis continued until the bank's collapse. One former BCCI banker who said he organised funds transfers on behalf of senior military officers in the Zia regime commented: "I'm not surprised that the Pakistanis are now looking to put together dossiers on some of their scientists receiving payments through BCCI." He said that over the past two months, Pakistani officials had travelled to the Middle East, looking for evidence of nuclear scientists receiving payments through BCCI.

Another former BCCI banker said that establishing payments to Pakistani nuclear scientists through the bank could provide evidence about the so far undocumented role of senior former Pakistani military officers in overseeing the transfer of nuclear knowhow to other countries. The investigation has prompted speculation among western intelligence officials and diplomats over the extent to which General Zia, leader of a frontline anti-communist state, in fact sanctioned the transfer of nuclear knowhow to Iran. In the past four to eight weeks, he said the Pakistani investigators have been seeking evidence of payments made to Mohammad Farooq, one of the nuclear scientists at the centre of the investigation. Pakistani officials are said to have focused on Mr Farooq as a possible contact between the Iranians and Mr Khan.

Continued to source (with loads o' links-n-stuff Pakistani nuclear)...FT archives require $...blm warned me...

http://www.pakistan-facts.com/index.php?topic=wmd-proliferation

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1080836

[Octafish]

2. BFEE Thinks Nuke Business is Good Business & Policy

Odd how Rumsferatu now DOESN'T like giving N Korea nuclear technology:

N Korea nuke risk 'growing'

From correspondents in Singapore
June 5, 2004

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned today that protracted diplomatic negotiations were giving North Korea time to develop nuclear weapons, raising the risk they would fall into terrorist hands.
"It seems to me they have demonstrated a willingness to export anything," Rumsfeld told an international gathering of security experts and government officials.

"And to the extent they have the capability they have indicated they have, reasonable people in the world would have to assume they would be willing to sell or use most of those capabilities," he said.

Rumsfeld said Washington and other parties to the talks with North Korea were trying to get Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

CONTINUED...

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,9754792%255E1702,00.html

Rummler wasn't always that way:



Rumsfeld link to sale of reactors to North Korea

By Randeep Ramesh
May 10 2003

The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, sat on the board of a company that three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts of build nuclear weapons.

Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $US200 million contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. He sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $US190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush Administration.

The sale of the nuclear technology was a high-profile contract. ABB's then chief executive, Goran Lindahl, visited North Korea in 1999.

The company opened an office in the capital Pyongyang, and the deal was signed a year later in 2000.

Despite this, Mr Rumsfeld's office said the Defence Secretary did not "recall it being brought before the board at any time". In a statement to the American magazine Newsweek, his spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, said there "was no vote on this".

A spokesman for ABB told The Guardian on Thursday that "board members were informed about the project which would deliver systems and equipment for light water reactors".

CONTINUED...

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/09/1052280441337.html?oneclick=true



Fortune's got a nice paid-archive article on the Korean Nuclear Rumsferno:

Rummy's North Korea Connection
What did Donald Rumsfeld know about ABB's deal to build nuclear reactors there? And why won't he talk about it?

By Richard Behar

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rarely keeps his opinions to himself. He tends not to compromise with his enemies. And he clearly disdains the communist regime in North Korea. So it's surprising that there is no clear public record of his views on the controversial 1994 deal in which the U.S. agreed to provide North Korea with two light-water nuclear reactors in exchange for Pyongyang ending its nuclear weapons program. What's even more surprising about Rumsfeld's silence is that he sat on the board of the company that won a $200 million contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors.

The company is Zurich-based engineering giant ABB, which signed the contract in early 2000, well before Rumsfeld gave up his board seat and joined the Bush administration. Rumsfeld, the only American director on the ABB board from 1990 to early 2001, has never acknowledged that he knew the company was competing for the nuclear contract. Nor could FORTUNE find any public reference to what he thought about the project...

CONTINUED FOR THOSE WITH THE CASH...

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,447429,00.html

[chenGOD]

23. Just so you know....

The light-water reactors are much harder to extract weapons-grade plutonium from than the (then) current graphite reactors pyongyang has.

http://www.isis-online.org/publications/dprk/final_cox.html

Also, remember the 1994 Agreed Framework came about under Clinton's watch. It was of course a ruse by the Americans, who had no interest in seeing the North Koreans get reactors of any kind (people who go on about how the North Koreans are the ones who broke that agreement should actually read the Framework and what happened with the construction of the LWRs). That being said, the Agreed Framework was a hell of alot better than anything that's likely to come about under shrubCo.

[Octafish]

13. Dr. BB: 'On the Nuclear Edge'

I think this is the article:

On the Nuclear Edge

by Seymour M. Hersh
Issue of 1993-03-29
Posted 2004-01-12

In the past few weeks, news reports have revealed troubling information about the possible export of Pakistani nuclear technology to countries such as Iran and Libya, and about the role played in the transfers by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is known as the father of the Pakistani bomb. There have long been questions about Dr. Khan, who has, whenever possible, avoided the public eye. In this piece from 1993, Seymour M. Hersh takes a prescient look at Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation, and at Dr. Khan.

On May 30, 1990, President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union arrived in Washington for his second summit meeting with President George Bush. The Cold War was over, and the publicly announced agenda reflected that fact: the two world leaders would concentrate their talks on the future of unified Germany and on renewed negotiations to reduce long-range nuclear weapons. Most Americans were increasingly upbeat about the prospects for world peace. A Times/CBS public-opinion poll of more than eleven hundred Americans taken a week before the summit showed that fewer than one in five believed nuclear war to be likely by the year 2000—far fewer than those interviewed in earlier polls.

There was a fearful irony in the poll, because in the days before Gorbachev’s visit the Bush Administration became convinced that the world was on the edge of a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India, as both nations continued their tug-of-war over control of the state of Kashmir, on India’s northern border, whose status has been in dispute since the collapse of the British Empire in India, in 1947. During months of increasing tension, India had massed two hundred thousand troops, including paramilitary forces, in Kashmir, and had deployed five brigades of its most sophisticated attack unit, the Indian Army Strike Corps, fifty miles from the Pakistani border in the south. Pakistan, against which the much larger India had fought—and won—three wars since 1947, openly deployed its main armored tank units along the Indian border and, in secret, placed its nuclear-weapons arsenal on alert. There would be no repeat of the disastrous two-week war of December, 1971, when Pakistan, outgunned and outgeneraled, was dismembered by an Indian blitzkrieg and lost what is now Bangladesh.

The American intelligence community, also operating in secret, had concluded by late May that Pakistan had put together at least six and perhaps as many as ten nuclear weapons, and a number of senior analysts were convinced that some of those warheads had been deployed on Pakistan’s American-made F-16 fighter planes. The analysts also suspected that Benazir Bhutto, the populist Prime Minister of Pakistan, had been cut out of—or had chosen to remove herself from—the nuclear planning. Her absence meant that the nation’s avowedly pro-nuclear President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and the Pakistani military, headed by Army General Mirza Aslam Beg, had their hands, unfettered, on the button. There was little doubt that India, with its far more extensive nuclear arsenal, stood ready to retaliate in kind.

CONTINUED...

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?040119fr_archive02

[Octafish]

16. The F-16s Were Secretly Fitted to Deliver NUKES!

Woe to anyone who made that business public. Barlow reported that CIA poobahs and Pentagon brass lied to Congress about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. What's worse than doing anything to make a buck, the fighter-bombers were modified in secret to equip nuclear bombs. Thank you, Dick Cheney.

Here's from Hersh's article (Thanks, Dr. BB and seemslikeadream!):

... Barlow went about his business without incident, so he thought, until July of 1989. Then he learned that the United States government was once again distorting intelligence on Pakistan’s nuclear capability. He had prepared a comprehensive analysis on Pakistan’s nuclear capability for Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney and other senior officials. The paper cited what Barlow and many others in the intelligence community understood to be persuasive data showing that the F-16 aircraft previously delivered to Pakistan had been modified to deliver nuclear weapons. Barlow’s paper was complemented by a separate Defense Intelligence Agency study, which reached the same conclusion....

[seemslikeadream]

25. No problem Octafish

Even Perry bought Della a dinner or two. How about a club sandwich?




Armitage Mark Twain quote from the 9/11 hearings

"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just stand there."

sorry Fester,

It was Will Rogers

[seemslikeadream]

3. Octafish look at this

FromTheWilderness

U.S. intelligence sources have also said that Fitzgerald's investigation has gone far beyond the mere leaking of Plame's name, itself a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, but has expanded to look into the exposure of Plame's colleagues who worked under the cover of a CIA firm called Brewster, Jennings & Associates. The "brass plate" CIA proprietary had offices in Boston and Washington, DC. Active since 1994, Brewster-Jennings was instrumental in tracking the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and had agents or correspondents in a number of countries including Iraq, North Korea, Belarus, Russia, South Africa, Iran, Israel, China, Pakistan, Congo (Kinshasa), India, Taiwan, Libya, Syria, Serbia, and Malaysia. By releasing Valerie Plame’s name, other agents' non-official covers were blown and the lives of U.S. operatives within foreign governments and businesses may have been placed in danger. Therefore, Fitzgerald's investigation has reportedly been expanded to include the issue of whether members of the staffs of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Cheney and Bush themselves, the National Security Council, and the Departments of Defense and State, may have violated more serious espionage laws.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/062504_grand_jury_summary.ht...

[Octafish]

4. They are traitors. The facts are obvious to anyone who can read...

... and reason for themselves.



Rice and Tenet "interviewed" by Fittzgerald. Wonder if THAT's why Weird Tenet quit? Now he can testify w/o fear of "executive privilege" being declared...

Bush Adviser Rice, CIA Head Interviewed in Leak Probe

Fri Jun 25, 2004 05:29 PM ET

SHANNON, Ireland (Reuters) - U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was interviewed as part of an investigation into whether an administration official leaked a covert CIA officer's identity to retaliate for her husband's criticism of the Iraq war, a U.S. official said Friday.

Rice was not under oath during the interview, which, a senior administration official said, took place "early on" in the investigation.

The official, who spoke to reporters traveling with President Bush to Ireland, would not say when the interview took place, but it appears to have been several months ago and had not been previously disclosed.

SNIP...

Outgoing CIA Director George Tenet was also interviewed in the investigation, a month or so ago, a U.S. official said, but gave no further details.

CONTINUED...

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=5519271

[seemslikeadream]

5. and Ted Olsen leaving

must be a little problem there also.

[Octafish]

6. Olsen's almost a valuable resource to the BFEE.

Then again, there's a million more where he came from.

QUESTIONS AMERICANS SHOULD ASK ABOUT TED OLSON, THE NEWLY APPOINTED U.S. SOLICITOR GENERAL

The Institute for Democracy Studies has been regularly researching the activities of the Federalist Society and Theodore Olson. Following are a list of questions to which every American should want answers. These questions arise from our briefing paper, The Federalist Society and the Challenge to a Democratic Jurisprudence. For further information, please contact Julie Gerchik at the Institute for Democracy Studies: [phone].
 
1. Ted Olson has litigated a number of controversial cases:

  a) In 1993, Olson defended a government-funded academy, the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), against charges that VMI's refusal to allow women to attend the institution amounted to impermissible sex discrimination.

  b) In 1996, Ted Olson represented Officer Stacey Koon of the Los Angeles Police Department in an appeal to the Supreme Court over the length of the sentence Koon received for his federal civil rights conviction in the 1991 beating of Rodney King.

  c) Also in 1996, Olson joined with the Center for Individual Rights (CIR) to litigate the landmark Hopwood decision that banned affirmative action programs in university admissions throughout the Fifth Circuit. CIR has received funding from the notorious Pioneer Fund, which has funded many of the foremost American race scientists of this century, such as Arthur Jensen, Roger Pearson, J. Philippe Rushton, and Linda Gottfredson.

CONTINUED...

http://www.institutefordemocracy.org/olson.html

This BFEE turd is a member of the Feudalist Society. They want to make the dick-tater a permanent shit.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

7. And then there is the Arkansas Project...

Memory Lapses From Ted Olson
<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010528&s=20010515>

[Octafish]

8. Olson and Scaife are mega-turds of the BFEE. Lots of convenient deaths.

Remember Steve Kangas? He went looking into the Scaife-VRWC angle and ended up a homicide or suicide, depending on your knowledge base:

Steve Kangas: Suicide?

In early February 1999, Steve Kangas died and his body was found in a restroom near Richard Mellon Scaife's office.  This death was not reported in mainstream media until nearly a month later.  In the meantime, Scaife proceeded to send his investigator, Rex Armistead (who did so much work in the Scaife-funded get-Clinton snipe-hunt), to investigate Kangas.  To no ones surprise, Armistead returned with very non-flattering information about Mr. Kangas...information that is contradictory to information known about Kangas.

    Kangas' death is being called a suicide.  Yet there are many inconsistencies and downright holes in the story that is being put forth by Scaife and his staff.  

    There are many questions that have to be answered about Steve Kangas' death, and it is imperative that independent investigators review the work that has been done to date and make a public accounting of the facts surrounding Kangas' death.

CONTINUED...

http://www.politicalamazon.com/kangas.html

[seemslikeadream]

9. A Timeline of CIA Atrocities

A Timeline of CIA Atrocities

By Steve Kangas

The following timeline describes just a few of the hundreds of atrocities and crimes committed by the CIA. (1)

CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: "We'll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us." The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy). It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination. These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator. The CIA trains the dictator’s security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder. The victims are said to be "communists," but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow.

This scenario has been repeated so many times that the CIA actually teaches it in a special school, the notorious "School of the Americas." (It opened in Panama but later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia.) Critics have nicknamed it the "School of the Dictators" and "School of the Assassins." Here, the CIA trains Latin American military officers how to conduct coups, including the use of interrogation, torture and murder.

The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (2) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."

The CIA justifies these actions as part of its war against communism. But most coups do not involve a communist threat. Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates, and declarations of neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, nothing has infuriated CIA Directors quite like a nation’s desire to stay out of the Cold War.

The ironic thing about all this intervention is that it frequently fails to achieve American objectives. Often the newly installed dictator grows comfortable with the security apparatus the CIA has built for him. He becomes an expert at running a police state. And because the dictator knows he cannot be overthrown, he becomes independent and defiant of Washington's will. The CIA then finds it cannot overthrow him, because the police and military are under the dictator's control, afraid to cooperate with American spies for fear of torture and execution. The only two options for the U.S at this point are impotence or war. Examples of this "boomerang effect" include the Shah of Iran, General Noriega and Saddam Hussein. The boomerang effect also explains why the CIA has proven highly successful at overthrowing democracies, but a wretched failure at overthrowing dictatorships.

The following timeline should confirm that the CIA as we know it should be abolished and replaced by a true information-gathering and analysis organization. The CIA cannot be reformed — it is institutionally and culturally corrupt.

1929

The culture we lost — Secretary of State Henry Stimson refuses to endorse a code-breaking operation, saying, "Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail."

1941

COI created — In preparation for World War II, President Roosevelt creates the Office of Coordinator of Information (COI). General William "Wild Bill" Donovan heads the new intelligence service.

1942

OSS created — Roosevelt restructures COI into something more suitable for covert action, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Donovan recruits so many of the nation’s rich and powerful that eventually people joke that "OSS" stands for "Oh, so social!" or "Oh, such snobs!"

1943

Italy — Donovan recruits the Catholic Church in Rome to be the center of Anglo-American spy operations in Fascist Italy. This would prove to be one of America’s most enduring intelligence alliances in the Cold War.

1945

OSS is abolished — The remaining American information agencies cease covert actions and return to harmless information gathering and analysis.

Operation PAPERCLIP – While other American agencies are hunting down Nazi war criminals for arrest, the U.S. intelligence community is smuggling them into America, unpunished, for their use against the Soviets. The most important of these is Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s master spy who had built up an intelligence network in the Soviet Union. With full U.S. blessing, he creates the "Gehlen Organization," a band of refugee Nazi spies who reactivate their networks in Russia. These include SS intelligence officers Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg (who massacred Jews in the Holocaust), Klaus Barbie (the "Butcher of Lyon"), Otto von Bolschwing (the Holocaust mastermind who worked with Eichmann) and SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny (a personal friend of Hitler’s). The Gehlen Organization supplies the U.S. with its only intelligence on the Soviet Union for the next ten years, serving as a bridge between the abolishment of the OSS and the creation of the CIA. However, much of the "intelligence" the former Nazis provide is bogus. Gehlen inflates Soviet military capabilities at a time when Russia is still rebuilding its devastated society, in order to inflate his own importance to the Americans (who might otherwise punish him). In 1948, Gehlen almost convinces the Americans that war is imminent, and the West should make a preemptive strike. In the 50s he produces a fictitious "missile gap." To make matters worse, the Russians have thoroughly penetrated the Gehlen Organization with double agents, undermining the very American security that Gehlen was supposed to protect.

1947

Greece — President Truman requests military aid to Greece to support right-wing forces fighting communist rebels. For the rest of the Cold War, Washington and the CIA will back notorious Greek leaders with deplorable human rights records.

CIA created — President Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947, creating the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council. The CIA is accountable to the president through the NSC — there is no democratic or congressional oversight. Its charter allows the CIA to "perform such other functions and duties… as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." This loophole opens the door to covert action and dirty tricks.

1948

Covert-action wing created — The CIA recreates a covert action wing, innocuously called the Office of Policy Coordination, led by Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner. According to its secret charter, its responsibilities include "propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."

Italy — The CIA corrupts democratic elections in Italy, where Italian communists threaten to win the elections. The CIA buys votes, broadcasts propaganda, threatens and beats up opposition leaders, and infiltrates and disrupts their organizations. It works -- the communists are defeated.

1949

Radio Free Europe — The CIA creates its first major propaganda outlet, Radio Free Europe. Over the next several decades, its broadcasts are so blatantly false that for a time it is considered illegal to publish transcripts of them in the U.S.

Late 40s

Operation MOCKINGBIRD — The CIA begins recruiting American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda. The effort is headed by Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham. Graham is publisher of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player. Eventually, the CIA’s media assets will include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service and more. By the CIA’s own admission, at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will become CIA assets.

1953

Iran – CIA overthrows the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in a military coup, after he threatened to nationalize British oil. The CIA replaces him with a dictator, the Shah of Iran, whose secret police, SAVAK, is as brutal as the Gestapo.

Operation MK-ULTRA — Inspired by North Korea’s brainwashing program, the CIA begins experiments on mind control. The most notorious part of this project involves giving LSD and other drugs to American subjects without their knowledge or against their will, causing several to commit suicide. However, the operation involves far more than this. Funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, research includes propaganda, brainwashing, public relations, advertising, hypnosis, and other forms of suggestion.

1954

Guatemala — CIA overthrows the democratically elected Jacob Arbenz in a military coup. Arbenz has threatened to nationalize the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director Allen Dulles also owns stock. Arbenz is replaced with a series of right-wing dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over 100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years.

1954-1958

North Vietnam — CIA officer Edward Lansdale spends four years trying to overthrow the communist government of North Vietnam, using all the usual dirty tricks. The CIA also attempts to legitimize a tyrannical puppet regime in South Vietnam, headed by Ngo Dinh Diem. These efforts fail to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese because the Diem government is opposed to true democracy, land reform and poverty reduction measures. The CIA’s continuing failure results in escalating American intervention, culminating in the Vietnam War.

1956

Hungary — Radio Free Europe incites Hungary to revolt by broadcasting Khruschev’s Secret Speech, in which he denounced Stalin. It also hints that American aid will help the Hungarians fight. This aid fails to materialize as Hungarians launch a doomed armed revolt, which only invites a major Soviet invasion. The conflict kills 7,000 Soviets and 30,000 Hungarians.

1957-1973

Laos — The CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections. The problem is the Pathet Lao, a leftist group with enough popular support to be a member of any coalition government. In the late 50s, the CIA even creates an "Armee Clandestine" of Asian mercenaries to attack the Pathet Lao. After the CIA’s army suffers numerous defeats, the U.S. starts bombing, dropping more bombs on Laos than all the U.S. bombs dropped in World War II. A quarter of all Laotians will eventually become refugees, many living in caves.

1959

Haiti — The U.S. military helps "Papa Doc" Duvalier become dictator of Haiti. He creates his own private police force, the "Tonton Macoutes," who terrorize the population with machetes. They will kill over 100,000 during the Duvalier family reign. The U.S. does not protest their dismal human rights record.

1961

The Bay of Pigs — The CIA sends 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade Castro’s Cuba. But "Operation Mongoose" fails, due to poor planning, security and backing. The planners had imagined that the invasion will spark a popular uprising against Castro -– which never happens. A promised American air strike also never occurs. This is the CIA’s first public setback, causing President Kennedy to fire CIA Director Allen Dulles.

Dominican Republic — The CIA assassinates Rafael Trujillo, a murderous dictator Washington has supported since 1930. Trujillo’s business interests have grown so large (about 60 percent of the economy) that they have begun competing with American business interests.

Ecuador — The CIA-backed military forces the democratically elected President Jose Velasco to resign. Vice President Carlos Arosemana replaces him; the CIA fills the now vacant vice presidency with its own man.

Congo (Zaire) — The CIA assassinates the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba. However, public support for Lumumba’s politics runs so high that the CIA cannot clearly install his opponents in power. Four years of political turmoil follow.

1963

Dominican Republic — The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Juan Bosch in a military coup. The CIA installs a repressive, right-wing junta.

Ecuador — A CIA-backed military coup overthrows President Arosemana, whose independent (not socialist) policies have become unacceptable to Washington. A military junta assumes command, cancels the 1964 elections, and begins abusing human rights.

1964

Brazil — A CIA-backed military coup overthrows the democratically elected government of Joao Goulart. The junta that replaces it will, in the next two decades, become one of the most bloodthirsty in history. General Castelo Branco will create Latin America’s first death squads, or bands of secret police who hunt down "communists" for torture, interrogation and murder. Often these "communists" are no more than Branco’s political opponents. Later it is revealed that the CIA trains the death squads.

1965

Indonesia — The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Sukarno with a military coup. The CIA has been trying to eliminate Sukarno since 1957, using everything from attempted assassination to sexual intrigue, for nothing more than his declaring neutrality in the Cold War. His successor, General Suharto, will massacre between 500,000 to 1 million civilians accused of being "communist." The CIA supplies the names of countless suspects.

Dominican Republic — A popular rebellion breaks out, promising to reinstall Juan Bosch as the country’s elected leader. The revolution is crushed when U.S. Marines land to uphold the military regime by force. The CIA directs everything behind the scenes.

Greece — With the CIA’s backing, the king removes George Papandreous as prime minister. Papandreous has failed to vigorously support U.S. interests in Greece.

Congo (Zaire) — A CIA-backed military coup installs Mobutu Sese Seko as dictator. The hated and repressive Mobutu exploits his desperately poor country for billions.

1966

The Ramparts Affair — The radical magazine Ramparts begins a series of unprecedented anti-CIA articles. Among their scoops: the CIA has paid the University of Michigan $25 million dollars to hire "professors" to train South Vietnamese students in covert police methods. MIT and other universities have received similar payments. Ramparts also reveals that the National Students’ Association is a CIA front. Students are sometimes recruited through blackmail and bribery, including draft deferments.

1967

Greece — A CIA-backed military coup overthrows the government two days before the elections. The favorite to win was George Papandreous, the liberal candidate. During the next six years, the "reign of the colonels" — backed by the CIA — will usher in the widespread use of torture and murder against political opponents. When a Greek ambassador objects to President Johnson about U.S. plans for Cypress, Johnson tells him: "Fuck your parliament and your constitution."

Operation PHEONIX — The CIA helps South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in South Vietnamese villages. According to a 1971 congressional report, this operation killed about 20,000 "Viet Cong."

1968

Operation CHAOS — The CIA has been illegally spying on American citizens since 1959, but with Operation CHAOS, President Johnson dramatically boosts the effort. CIA agents go undercover as student radicals to spy on and disrupt campus organizations protesting the Vietnam War. They are searching for Russian instigators, which they never find. CHAOS will eventually spy on 7,000 individuals and 1,000 organizations.

Bolivia — A CIA-organized military operation captures legendary guerilla Che Guevara. The CIA wants to keep him alive for interrogation, but the Bolivian government executes him to prevent worldwide calls for clemency.

1969

Uruguay — The notorious CIA torturer Dan Mitrione arrives in Uruguay, a country torn with political strife. Whereas right-wing forces previously used torture only as a last resort, Mitrione convinces them to use it as a routine, widespread practice. "The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect," is his motto. The torture techniques he teaches to the death squads rival the Nazis’. He eventually becomes so feared that revolutionaries will kidnap and murder him a year later.

1970

Cambodia — The CIA overthrows Prince Sahounek, who is highly popular among Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War. He is replaced by CIA puppet Lon Nol, who immediately throws Cambodian troops into battle. This unpopular move strengthens once minor opposition parties like the Khmer Rouge, which achieves power in 1975 and massacres millions of its own people.

1971

Bolivia — After half a decade of CIA-inspired political turmoil, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows the leftist President Juan Torres. In the next two years, dictator Hugo Banzer will have over 2,000 political opponents arrested without trial, then tortured, raped and executed.

Haiti — "Papa Doc" Duvalier dies, leaving his 19-year old son "Baby Doc" Duvalier the dictator of Haiti. His son continues his bloody reign with full knowledge of the CIA.

1972

The Case-Zablocki Act — Congress passes an act requiring congressional review of executive agreements. In theory, this should make CIA operations more accountable. In fact, it is only marginally effective.

Cambodia — Congress votes to cut off CIA funds for its secret war in Cambodia.

Wagergate Break-in — President Nixon sends in a team of burglars to wiretap Democratic offices at Watergate. The team members have extensive CIA histories, including James McCord, E. Howard Hunt and five of the Cuban burglars. They work for the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), which does dirty work like disrupting Democratic campaigns and laundering Nixon’s illegal campaign contributions. CREEP’s activities are funded and organized by another CIA front, the Mullen Company.

1973

Chile — The CIA overthrows and assassinates Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist leader. The problems begin when Allende nationalizes American-owned firms in Chile. ITT offers the CIA $1 million for a coup (reportedly refused). The CIA replaces Allende with General Augusto Pinochet, who will torture and murder thousands of his own countrymen in a crackdown on labor leaders and the political left.

CIA begins internal investigations — William Colby, the Deputy Director for Operations, orders all CIA personnel to report any and all illegal activities they know about. This information is later reported to Congress.

Watergate Scandal — The CIA’s main collaborating newspaper in America, The Washington Post, reports Nixon’s crimes long before any other newspaper takes up the subject. The two reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, make almost no mention of the CIA’s many fingerprints all over the scandal. It is later revealed that Woodward was a Naval intelligence briefer to the White House, and knows many important intelligence figures, including General Alexander Haig. His main source, "Deep Throat," is probably one of those.

CIA Director Helms Fired — President Nixon fires CIA Director Richard Helms for failing to help cover up the Watergate scandal. Helms and Nixon have always disliked each other. The new CIA director is William Colby, who is relatively more open to CIA reform.

1974

CHAOS exposed — Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh publishes a story about Operation CHAOS, the domestic surveillance and infiltration of anti-war and civil rights groups in the U.S. The story sparks national outrage.

Angleton fired — Congress holds hearings on the illegal domestic spying efforts of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence. His efforts included mail-opening campaigns and secret surveillance of war protesters. The hearings result in his dismissal from the CIA.

House clears CIA in Watergate — The House of Representatives clears the CIA of any complicity in Nixon’s Watergate break-in.

The Hughes Ryan Act — Congress passes an amendment requiring the president to report nonintelligence CIA operations to the relevant congressional committees in a timely fashion.

1975

Australia — The CIA helps topple the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Prime Minister Edward Whitlam. The CIA does this by giving an ultimatum to its Governor-General, John Kerr. Kerr, a longtime CIA collaborator, exercises his constitutional right to dissolve the Whitlam government. The Governor-General is a largely ceremonial position appointed by the Queen; the Prime Minister is democratically elected. The use of this archaic and never-used law stuns the nation.

Angola — Eager to demonstrate American military resolve after its defeat in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger launches a CIA-backed war in Angola. Contrary to Kissinger’s assertions, Angola is a country of little strategic importance and not seriously threatened by communism. The CIA backs the brutal leader of UNITAS, Jonas Savimbi. This polarizes Angolan politics and drives his opponents into the arms of Cuba and the Soviet Union for survival. Congress will cut off funds in 1976, but the CIA is able to run the war off the books until 1984, when funding is legalized again. This entirely pointless war kills over 300,000 Angolans.

"The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence" — Victor Marchetti and John Marks publish this whistle-blowing history of CIA crimes and abuses. Marchetti has spent 14 years in the CIA, eventually becoming an executive assistant to the Deputy Director of Intelligence. Marks has spent five years as an intelligence official in the State Department.

"Inside the Company" — Philip Agee publishes a diary of his life inside the CIA. Agee has worked in covert operations in Latin America during the 60s, and details the crimes in which he took part.

Congress investigates CIA wrong-doing — Public outrage compels Congress to hold hearings on CIA crimes. Senator Frank Church heads the Senate investigation ("The Church Committee"), and Representative Otis Pike heads the House investigation. (Despite a 98 percent incumbency reelection rate, both Church and Pike are defeated in the next elections.) The investigations lead to a number of reforms intended to increase the CIA’s accountability to Congress, including the creation of a standing Senate committee on intelligence. However, the reforms prove ineffective, as the Iran/Contra scandal will show. It turns out the CIA can control, deal with or sidestep Congress with ease.

The Rockefeller Commission — In an attempt to reduce the damage done by the Church Committee, President Ford creates the "Rockefeller Commission" to whitewash CIA history and propose toothless reforms. The commission’s namesake, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, is himself a major CIA figure. Five of the commission’s eight members are also members of the Council on Foreign Relations, a CIA-dominated organization.

1979

Iran — The CIA fails to predict the fall of the Shah of Iran, a longtime CIA puppet, and the rise of Muslim fundamentalists who are furious at the CIA’s backing of SAVAK, the Shah’s bloodthirsty secret police. In revenge, the Muslims take 52 Americans hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

Afghanistan — The Soviets invade Afghanistan. The CIA immediately begins supplying arms to any faction willing to fight the occupying Soviets. Such indiscriminate arming means that when the Soviets leave Afghanistan, civil war will erupt. Also, fanatical Muslim extremists now possess state-of-the-art weaponry. One of these is Sheik Abdel Rahman, who will become involved in the World Trade Center bombing in New York.

El Salvador — An idealistic group of young military officers, repulsed by the massacre of the poor, overthrows the right-wing government. However, the U.S. compels the inexperienced officers to include many of the old guard in key positions in their new government. Soon, things are back to "normal" — the military government is repressing and killing poor civilian protesters. Many of the young military and civilian reformers, finding themselves powerless, resign in disgust.

Nicaragua — Anastasios Samoza II, the CIA-backed dictator, falls. The Marxist Sandinistas take over government, and they are initially popular because of their commitment to land and anti-poverty reform. Samoza had a murderous and hated personal army called the National Guard. Remnants of the Guard will become the Contras, who fight a CIA-backed guerilla war against the Sandinista government throughout the 1980s.

1980

El Salvador — The Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, pleads with President Carter "Christian to Christian" to stop aiding the military government slaughtering his people. Carter refuses. Shortly afterwards, right-wing leader Roberto D’Aubuisson has Romero shot through the heart while saying Mass. The country soon dissolves into civil war, with the peasants in the hills fighting against the military government. The CIA and U.S. Armed Forces supply the government with overwhelming military and intelligence superiority. CIA-trained death squads roam the countryside, committing atrocities like that of El Mazote in 1982, where they massacre between 700 and 1000 men, women and children. By 1992, some 63,000 Salvadorans will be killed.

1981

Iran/Contra Begins — The CIA begins selling arms to Iran at high prices, using the profits to arm the Contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. President Reagan vows that the Sandinistas will be "pressured" until "they say ‘uncle.’" The CIA’s Freedom Fighter’s Manual disbursed to the Contras includes instruction on economic sabotage, propaganda, extortion, bribery, blackmail, interrogation, torture, murder and political assassination.

1983

Honduras — The CIA gives Honduran military officers the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual – 1983, which teaches how to torture people. Honduras’ notorious "Battalion 316" then uses these techniques, with the CIA’s full knowledge, on thousands of leftist dissidents. At least 184 are murdered.

1984

The Boland Amendment — The last of a series of Boland Amendments is passed. These amendments have reduced CIA aid to the Contras; the last one cuts it off completely. However, CIA Director William Casey is already prepared to "hand off" the operation to Colonel Oliver North, who illegally continues supplying the Contras through the CIA’s informal, secret, and self-financing network. This includes "humanitarian aid" donated by Adolph Coors and William Simon, and military aid funded by Iranian arms sales.

1986

Eugene Hasenfus — Nicaragua shoots down a C-123 transport plane carrying military supplies to the Contras. The lone survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, turns out to be a CIA employee, as are the two dead pilots. The airplane belongs to Southern Air Transport, a CIA front. The incident makes a mockery of President Reagan’s claims that the CIA is not illegally arming the Contras.

Iran/Contra Scandal — Although the details have long been known, the Iran/Contra scandal finally captures the media’s attention in 1986. Congress holds hearings, and several key figures (like Oliver North) lie under oath to protect the intelligence community. CIA Director William Casey dies of brain cancer before Congress can question him. All reforms enacted by Congress after the scandal are purely cosmetic.

Haiti — Rising popular revolt in Haiti means that "Baby Doc" Duvalier will remain "President for Life" only if he has a short one. The U.S., which hates instability in a puppet country, flies the despotic Duvalier to the South of France for a comfortable retirement. The CIA then rigs the upcoming elections in favor of another right-wing military strongman. However, violence keeps the country in political turmoil for another four years. The CIA tries to strengthen the military by creating the National Intelligence Service (SIN), which suppresses popular revolt through torture and assassination.

1989

Panama — The U.S. invades Panama to overthrow a dictator of its own making, General Manuel Noriega. Noriega has been on the CIA’s payroll since 1966, and has been transporting drugs with the CIA’s knowledge since 1972. By the late 80s, Noriega’s growing independence and intransigence have angered Washington… so out he goes.

1990

Haiti — Competing against 10 comparatively wealthy candidates, leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide captures 68 percent of the vote. After only eight months in power, however, the CIA-backed military deposes him. More military dictators brutalize the country, as thousands of Haitian refugees escape the turmoil in barely seaworthy boats. As popular opinion calls for Aristide’s return, the CIA begins a disinformation campaign painting the courageous priest as mentally unstable.

1991

The Gulf War — The U.S. liberates Kuwait from Iraq. But Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, is another creature of the CIA. With U.S. encouragement, Hussein invaded Iran in 1980. During this costly eight-year war, the CIA built up Hussein’s forces with sophisticated arms, intelligence, training and financial backing. This cemented Hussein’s power at home, allowing him to crush the many internal rebellions that erupted from time to time, sometimes with poison gas. It also gave him all the military might he needed to conduct further adventurism — in Kuwait, for example.

The Fall of the Soviet Union — The CIA fails to predict this most important event of the Cold War. This suggests that it has been so busy undermining governments that it hasn’t been doing its primary job: gathering and analyzing information. The fall of the Soviet Union also robs the CIA of its reason for existence: fighting communism. This leads some to accuse the CIA of intentionally failing to predict the downfall of the Soviet Union. Curiously, the intelligence community’s budget is not significantly reduced after the demise of communism.

1992

Economic Espionage — In the years following the end of the Cold War, the CIA is increasingly used for economic espionage. This involves stealing the technological secrets of competing foreign companies and giving them to American ones. Given the CIA’s clear preference for dirty tricks over mere information gathering, the possibility of serious criminal behavior is very great indeed.

1993

Haiti — The chaos in Haiti grows so bad that President Clinton has no choice but to remove the Haitian military dictator, Raoul Cedras, on threat of U.S. invasion. The U.S. occupiers do not arrest Haiti’s military leaders for crimes against humanity, but instead ensure their safety and rich retirements. Aristide is returned to power only after being forced to accept an agenda favorable to the country’s ruling class.

EPILOGUE

In a speech before the CIA celebrating its 50th anniversary, President Clinton said: "By necessity, the American people will never know the full story of your courage."

Clinton’s is a common defense of the CIA: namely, the American people should stop criticizing the CIA because they don’t know what it really does. This, of course, is the heart of the problem in the first place. An agency that is above criticism is also above moral behavior and reform. Its secrecy and lack of accountability allows its corruption to grow unchecked.

Furthermore, Clinton’s statement is simply untrue. The history of the agency is growing painfully clear, especially with the declassification of historical CIA documents. We may not know the details of specific operations, but we do know, quite well, the general behavior of the CIA. These facts began emerging nearly two decades ago at an ever-quickening pace. Today we have a remarkably accurate and consistent picture, repeated in country after country, and verified from countless different directions.

The CIA’s response to this growing knowledge and criticism follows a typical historical pattern. (Indeed, there are remarkable parallels to the Medieval Church’s fight against the Scientific Revolution.) The first journalists and writers to reveal the CIA’s criminal behavior were harassed and censored if they were American writers, and tortured and murdered if they were foreigners. (See Philip Agee’s On the Run for an example of early harassment.) However, over the last two decades the tide of evidence has become overwhelming, and the CIA has found that it does not have enough fingers to plug every hole in the dike. This is especially true in the age of the Internet, where information flows freely among millions of people. Since censorship is impossible, the Agency must now defend itself with apologetics. Clinton’s "Americans will never know" defense is a prime example.

Another common apologetic is that "the world is filled with unsavory characters, and we must deal with them if we are to protect American interests at all." There are two things wrong with this. First, it ignores the fact that the CIA has regularly spurned alliances with defenders of democracy, free speech and human rights, preferring the company of military dictators and tyrants. The CIA had moral options available to them, but did not take them.

Second, this argument begs several questions. The first is: "Which American interests?" The CIA has courted right-wing dictators because they allow wealthy Americans to exploit the country’s cheap labor and resources. But poor and middle-class Americans pay the price whenever they fight the wars that stem from CIA actions, from Vietnam to the Gulf War to Panama. The second begged question is: "Why should American interests come at the expense of other peoples’ human rights?"

The CIA should be abolished, its leadership dismissed and its relevant members tried for crimes against humanity. Our intelligence community should be rebuilt from the ground up, with the goal of collecting and analyzing information. As for covert action, there are two moral options. The first one is to eliminate covert action completely. But this gives jitters to people worried about the Adolf Hitlers of the world. So a second option is that we can place covert action under extensive and true democratic oversight. For example, a bipartisan Congressional Committee of 40 members could review and veto all aspects of CIA operations upon a majority or super-majority vote. Which of these two options is best may be the subject of debate, but one thing is clear: like dictatorship, like monarchy, unaccountable covert operations should die like the dinosaurs they are.

Endnotes:

1. All history concerning CIA intervention in foreign countries is summarized from William Blum’s encyclopedic work, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995). Sources for domestic CIA operations come from Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen’s The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997).

2. Coleman McCarthy, "The Consequences of Covert Tactics" Washington Post, December 13, 1987.

Copyright 1996 by Steve Kangas. Text can be quoted freely for non-commercial purposes only, with proper attribution.
<http://home.att.net/~Resurgence/CIAtimeline.html >

[Octafish]

11. "redistribute wealth" scares Scaife and all the shits-n-turds of the BFEE

Kangas knew what was going on. Scaife paid millions to protect his billions. Bush and Bush Jr are willing to spend that money to protect, empower and enrich all the establishment scum at our expense. It would be absolutely amazing to me that so many people could engage in murder on such a scale, if it wasn't for NAZI Germany.

Liberalism Resurgent:

http://mirrors.korpios.org/resurgent/tenets.htm

THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Its Causes and Cure

For liberals and conservatives alike, the Great Depression serves as a natural debating point that "justifies" or "refutes" various economic policies. Unfortunately, the Great Depression and the New Deal are complex topics that are open to many interpretations. In an effort to further this debate, I have compiled a list of hard statistics and dates that should dispel some of the more unwarranted historical revisionism.

Reading this site straight through gives a comprehensive overview of the Great Depression. Clicking on the links entitled "More" gives a more detailed explanation of points raised in the overview. I highly recommend reading the overview first, since the sub-arguments can get rather lengthy and digressive.

"The Great Depression" is far and away the most popular part of my site. It has even been favorably linked in Paul Krugman's February 5, 1997 Slate column, "The Dismal Scientist." (Krugman is expected to win a Nobel prize in economics.) I receive tons of e-mail about this site, especially from high-school students writing term papers. Consequently, I have included a short FAQ at the bottom of this page to respond to the most common questions.

Here are the main links to this site:

CONTINUED...

http://mirrors.korpios.org/resurgent/THE_GREAT_DEPRESSION.htm

[seemslikeadream]

10. A letter from John Van Matre

http://www.psnw.com/~bashford/ka-matre.html

A letter from John Van Matre

When I first heard that Steve Kangas may have died in Pittsburgh, I searched for an obituary and could find none. I wanted to know about the circumstances. I knew Steve Kangas had written an investigative essay on Richard Mellon Scaife and wondered whether there might be a connection, though I really didn't expect to find one. Finally, someone with Lexus Nexus access verified that Steve Kangas had actually died, and sent me the short obituary from the the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of Feb. 12:

"The body of a 37-year-old man found in a 39th floor bathroom of One Oxford Centre late Monday night has been identified as Steven Kangas of Las Vegas. He died of a gunshot wound to the head. The Allegheny County coroner's office ruled the death a suicide."

I plugged in One Oxford Centre and Scaife what popped up made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.


Scaife Foundations
One Oxford Centre
301 Grant Street, Suite 3900
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15219-6401


Since then, the questions surrounding the death of Steve Kangas have snowballed. There were two parallel tracks being taken. One track was seeking more information about Steve's death and wanting a further investigation. The other track was bent on smearing Steve's reputation and turning him into everything from an embezzler to a neo nazi to a down and out womanizing drunk to an assassin out to murder Richard Mellon Scaife. For instance Tucker Carlson, in an article "Stalking Scaife" characterized Steve Kangas as, "Kangas, a 37-year-old Internet pornographer from Las Vegas" and Tony Snow, in an article "Steve Kangas Left-Wing Vince Foster" characterized Steve Kangas as, "Squeeky Frohme with intellectual pretensions."

For any who are unfamiliar with Steve Kangas and wish to make up their own mind, I suggest you visit his web page and read through his essays ("The Origins of the Overclass" is the essay that mentions Scaife).

http://www.scruz.net/~kangaroo/tenets.htm

He posted his last essay to his Web site on February 3, just five days before his untimely death. In my opinion, it is not the writings of a man in throes of alcoholism, though people like Richard Scaife have suggested as much and he may well view Steve's work as pornography. See:
~kangaroo/L-PowerDistribution.html

There are more questions than answers. Richard Scaife hiring a detective to try and dig up dirt on Steve Kangas raises a red flag. He used the same detective, Rex Armistead, that was used to try and dig up dirt on President Clinton for the Arkansas Project. The Pittsburgh police should have been so thorough. I doubt the police even questioned Richard Scaife, though one report did say they were thinking about it. The systematic attempted trashing of Steve Kangas' raises questions. Discrepancies between the coroner's report, in which Steve was injured when first found, and the police report, with no mention of injuries when he was first found raises questions. The quick cremation and the erasure of Steve Kangas' hard drive raises questions.

If magically I could have three questions about the circumstances around this case answered, I suppose they would be -- (1) Is the checking of the circuit breakers in One Oxford Centre rest rooms sop, and is there a log to prove this? (2) Was the gun that killed Steve empty when found? The news articles infer this, stating 47 rounds were found in his backpack and in one pocket. This is important because if Steve Kangas were in custody of Scaife security, they may have initially taken his gun away and emptied the clip. There may even be prints on the bullets or the clip, if the gun is still in evidence. (3) One intriguing puzzle piece that doesn't fit with the theory of suicide -- the bullet found around the time that Steve Kangas was found. There was a bullet hole found in the window of a street level clothing store. The slug was found inside the store. The bullet got there somehow. The location of One Oxford Centre doesn't appear to be a part of Pittsburgh where random bullet holes would be found. I suspect this may be the first time ever that a bullet hole was found in a window of one of the shops. Maybe some time after all the stores had closed, Steve Kangas had attempted to leave, was stopped by Scaife security, shots or a shot were fired, with Steve Kangas was forced to go back up to the 39th floor. If that bullet is connected, suicide becomes implausible.

I don't know what happened to Steve Kangas on the evening of February 8. I can write several scripts from the facts, as reported in the various newspaper articles. Many of the facts of the case seem suspicious and do not fit well with the theory of suicide. When I started digging on my own, that is what I expected to find. But from the burglar alarm system, to the $300 gun, to the intensive work he'd been doing on his political web site, that does not seem to be where Steve Kangas was at.

And then there is that bullet hole in the window of the Kountz and Rider clothing store.

For Steve's sake, this case deserves to be investigated further by someone with the means and abilities far greater than I. Hopefully someone, or some agency, will investigate the death of of Steve Kangas in the manner it deserves.

Rest in peace, Steve Kangas.

John Van Matre

[seemslikeadream]

30. from GD

lancdem (1000+ posts) Tue Jun-29-04 04:15 PM
Original message
Wayne Madsen: Plame indictments will happen this week, if they happen

Edited on Tue Jun-29-04 04:15 PM by lancdem
He's the one who wrote the story on www.fromthewilderness.com saying explosive indictments would be issued by the Plame grand jury soon. In followup emails today, he told me a DOJ source confirmed the grand jury session ends tomorrow (June 30), so if there are indictments, they will happen by Friday.

A couple of other interesting details: Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, is the presiding judge, and he said that's significant because high-ranking judges don't often oversee grand juries. The last one to do so was John Sirica during Watergate.

And - he just told me he's been asked to be on standby by one radio network for the next several days if anything breaks.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1889787

[bobthedrummer]

12. The Role of Pakistan's Military Intelligence (ISI) in the September 11

Attacks by Michel Chossudovsky
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO111A.html

[Octafish]

14. Cheney Hid Pakistani Nuclear Proliferation in '89 to Make a SALE!

Cheney helped cover-up Pakistani nuclear proliferation in '89 so US could sell country fighter jets

Tuesday, March 16 2004 @ 04:04 PM Eastern Standard Time
Jason Leopold

When Pakistan's clandestine program involving its top nuclear scientist selling rogue nations, such as Iran and North Korea, blueprints for building an atomic bomb was uncovered last month, the world's leaders waited, with baited breath to see what type of punishment George W. Bush would inflict upon Pakistan's President Pervez Musharaff. Bush has, after all, spent his entire term in office talking tough about countries and dictators that conceal weapons of mass destruction and even tougher on individuals who supply rogue nations and terrorists with the means to build WMD. For all intents and purposes, Pakistan and Musharraf fit that description.

Remember, Bush accused Iraq of harboring a cache of WMD, which was the primary reason he gave for the United States launching a preemptive strike on that country a year ago, and also claimed that Iraq may have given its WMD to al-Qaeda terrorists and/or Syria, weapons that, Bush said, could be used to attack the U.S. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and top members of the administration reacted with shock when they found out that Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, spent the past 15 years selling outlaw nations nuclear technology and equipment. So it was sort of a surprise when Bush, upon finding out about Khan's proliferation of nuclear technology, let Pakistan off with a slap on the wrist. But it was all an act. In fact, it was actually a coverup designed to shield Cheney because he knew about the proliferation for more than a decade and did nothing to stop it.

Like the terrorist attacks on 9-11, the Bush administration had mountains of evidence on Pakistan's sales of nuclear technology and equipment to nations vilified by the U.S.?nations that are considered much more of a threat than Iraq?but turned a blind eye to the threat and allowed it to happen. In 1989, the year Khan first started selling nuclear secrets on the black-market; Richard Barlow, a young intelligence analyst working for the Pentagon prepared a shocking report for Cheney, who was then secretary of defense under the Bush I administration: Pakistan built an atomic bomb and was selling its nuclear equipment to countries the U.S. said was sponsoring terrorism. But Barlow's findings, as reported in a January 2002 story in Mother Jones magazine, were "politically inconvenient."

"A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the CIA's efforts to support Afghan rebels fighting a pro-Soviet government. It also would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad," Mother Jones reported. Ironically, Pakistan, critics say, was let off the hook last month so the U.S. could use its borders to hunt for al-Qaeda leader and alleged 9-11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Cheney dismissed Barlow's report because he desperately wanted to sell Pakistan the F-16 fighter planes. Several months later, a Pentagon official was told by Cheney to downplay Pakistan's nuclear capabilities when he testified on the threat before Congress. Barlow complained to his bosses at the Pentagon and was fired.

CONTINUED...

http://www.pakistan-facts.com/article.php/2004031621042158

[seemslikeadream]

15. If this planet blows to pieces this year, thank Khan Labs' and Bush

If this planet blows to pieces this year, thank Khan Labs' and Bush


You may never have heard of Khan Laboratories, but if this planet blows to pieces this year, it will be thanks to Khan Labs' creating nuclear warheads for Pakistan's military. Because investigators had been tracking the funding for this so-called "Islamic Bomb" back to Saudi Arabia, under Bush security restrictions, the inquiry was stymied. (The restrictions were lifted, the agent told me without a hint of dark humor, on September 11.)

Noam Chomsky, who read the story on page one of the Times of India, has wondered, "Why wasn't it all over US papers?

.. A top-level CIA operative who spoke with us on condition of strictest anonymity said that, after Bush took office, "There was a major policy shift" at the National Security Agency. Investigators were ordered to "back off" from any inquiries into Saudi Arabian financing of terror networks, especially if they touched on Saudi royals and their retainers. That put the Bin Ladens, a family worth a reported $12 billion and a virtual arm of the Saudi royal household, off limits for investigation.

I probed our CIA contact for specifics of investigations that were hampered by orders to back off of the Saudis. He told us that Khan Laboratories investigation had been effectively put on hold.
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=312&row=0

[Octafish]

17. War makes them rich, secure and empowered.

That's why they invented Viagra for war -- nuclear proliferation. For the BFEE, the sooner they get rid of what Ebenezer Scrooge called the "excess population," the better. Those of us "lucky" enough to survive would become their slaves. So, let's redouble our efforts to kick the Little Turd from Crawford and his handler Sneer out of the Oval Office and straight into Leavenworth.

[seemslikeadream]

18. "The Missing Link"

from your link bob

In the days following Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad's dismissal, a report published in the Times of India, which went virtually unnoticed by the Western media, revealed the links between Pakistan's Chief spy Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad and the presumed "ring leader" of the WTC attacks Mohamed Atta. In many regards, the Times of India report constitutes "the missing link" to an understanding of who was behind the terrorist attacks of September 11:

While the Pakistani Inter Services Public Relations claimed that former ISI director-general Lt-Gen Mahmoud Ahmad sought retirement after being superseded on Monday <8 October>, the day the US started bombing Afghanistan], the truth is more shocking. Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday , that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Centre. The US authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the instance of Gen. Mahmoud. Senior government sources have confirmed that India contributed significantly to establishing the link between the money transfer and the role played by the dismissed ISI chief. While they did not provide details, they said that Indian inputs, including Sheikh's mobile phone number, helped the FBI in tracing and establishing the link.

A direct link between the ISI and the WTC attack could have enormous repercussions. The US cannot but suspect whether or not there were other senior Pakistani Army commanders who were in the know of things. Evidence of a larger conspiracy could shake US confidence in Pakistan's ability to participate in the anti-terrorism coalition. 19

[seemslikeadream]

19. Behind Close Doors at the State Department

just a little more

Behind Close Doors at the State Department
The Bush Administration had sought the "cooperation" of those, who were directly supporting and abetting the terrorists. Absurd, but at the same time consistent with Washington's broader strategic and economic objectives in Central Asia.

The meeting behind closed doors at the State Department on September 13 between Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad was shrouded in secrecy. Remember President Bush was not even involved in these crucial negotiations:

"Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage handed over a list of specific steps Washington wanted Pakistan to take".13 "After a telephone conversation between Powell and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Pakistan had promised to cooperate." 14 President George W. Bush later confirmed (also on the morning of September 13th) that the Pakistan government had accepted "to cooperate and to participate as we hunt down those people who committed this unbelievable, despicable act on America''. 15

[seemslikeadream]

20. Richard L. Armitage former director of CACI guits to join Bush team

Civilian accused of killing ‘doing fine job’

MICHAEL SETTLE, Chief Political Correspondent May 06 2004

Executives from Virginia-based CACI International complained that they had still not been informed by their client, the US defence department, that their employee, working for the CIA as an interrogator, was involved in the abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad.
Jack London, CACI president, said: "The fact remains we are simply not able to confirm in any fashion any CACI employee was involved in the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison."
Ken Johnson, the company's president of US operations, added: "The employee questioned is still on the site and still performing the duties there and, by all accounts from our understanding, is doing a damn fine job."
It has been suggested the CIA contractor could escape any prosecution because US Army jurisdiction does not extend to American private contractors in Iraq.

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/15501.html

Contractors act as interrogators

Control: The Pentagon's hiring of civilians to question prisoners raises accountability issues.

Founded in 1962 as a small consulting firm, CACI now has more than $1 billion in annual revenue. It specializes in information technology but also has branched into every corner of the Defense Department to become "essentially an odd-jobs provider for the federal government," according to Tim Quillin, an analyst for the investment banking firm Stephens Inc.

More than 90 percent of CACI's business comes from its main customer - the Pentagon - and other federal agencies, according to reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.


Among the company's former directors is Richard L. Armitage, who resigned in 2001 to accept an appointment from President Bush as deputy secretary of state.


http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-te.contractors04may04,0,7348149.s ...


But these soldiers aren’t simply mavericks. Some accused claim they acted on the orders of military intelligence and the CIA, and that some of the torture sessions were under the control of mercenaries hired by the US to conduct interrogations. Two “civilian contract” organisations taking part in interrogations at Abu Ghraib are linked to the Bush administration.
California-based Titan Corporation says it is “a leading provider of solutions and services for national security”. Between 2003-04, it gave nearly $40,000 to George W Bush’s Republican Party. Titan supplied translators to the military.
CACI International Inc. describes its aim as helping “America’s intelligence community in the war on terrorism”. Richard Armitage, the current deputy US secretary of state, sat on CACI’s board.
No civilians, however, are facing charges as military law does not apply to them. Colonel Jill Morgenthaler, from CentCom, said that one civilian contractor was accused along with six soldiers of mistreating prisoners. However, it was left to the contractor to “deal with him”. One civilian interrogator told army investigators that he had “unintentionally” broken several tables during interrogations as he was trying to “fear-up” detainees.
Lawyers for some accused say their clients are scapegoats for a rogue prison system, which allowed mercenaries to give orders to serving soldiers. A military report said private contractors were at times supervising the interrogations.
Kimmitt said: “I hope the investigation is including not only the people who committed the crimes, but some of the people who might have encouraged the crimes as well because they certainly share some responsibility.”
Last night, CACI vice-president Jody Brown said: “The company supports the Army’s investigation and acknowledges that CACI personnel in Iraq volunteered to be interviewed by army officials in connection with the investigation. The company has received no indication that any CACI employee was involved in any alleged improper conduct with Iraqi prisoners. Nonetheless, CACI has initiated an independent investigation.”
However, military investigators said: “A CACI investigator’s contract was terminated because he allowed and/or instructed military police officers who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations which were neither authorised nor in accordance with regulations.”

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:LGgQIc6IKxoJ:southafrica.indymedi ...

CACI is among an elite group of Washington area companies that do classified work for the federal government. The company, formed in the 1960s, first caught the government's eye with a computer language it developed that could be used to build battlefield simulation programs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5677-2004May5_2.html

- Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State is president and partner of Armitage Assoc. LLP, was a Boeing consultant, a Raytheon consultant and an advisory board member. Armitage was also President Bush's special emissary to Jordan's King Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War. Armitage has also worked in the past for Halliburton.
http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=45246&group=webcast

From March 1992 until 1993, Armitage as ambassador, funneled U.S. dollars into the new independent states of the former Soviet Union. In January 1992, the Bush Administration's desire to cozy up to the NIS (and their oil) resulted in Armitage's appointment as Coordinator for Emergency Humanitarian Assistance.

During this time Armitage took on the other international patronage projects that normally follow war, accommodating the assuagement of the European Community, Japan and other donor countries.

Armitage owns Electronic Data Systems stock worth $250,001 to $500,000 (EDS is the 49th largest defense contractor, and lobbies the Defense Dept. over various appropriations issues), General Electric stock worth $500,001 to $1 million, Merck & Co. stock worth $100,001 to $250,000 (Merck lobbied the Defense Dept. over the Biological Weapons Convention implementation protocol), and Verizon Communications stock worth $250,001 to $500,000.

Armitage also worked as a consultant to Halliburton. Armitage is a former co-chairman of the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce. He was instrumental in the reconstruction of the emerging economies of the former Soviet republics, after the fall of the Communist empire; along with Condi Rice, who rode herd on the Bush cabal's bid for U.S. control of the Caspian oil.
http://www.ifpafletcherconference.com/army2000/bios/armitage_rt.htm
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/outside/commentary/2002/0204oil_b...

AccuPoll has teamed with Electronic Data Systems to jointly bid on voting system opportunities. EDS is a leading global information technology services company for over 40 years, and one of the leading systems integration companies in the world, with over 140,000 employees and annual revenues in excess of $21 Billion. EDS will provide deployment, training, and customer support services to state and local governments. Management believes that EDS currently has relationships with, or does business with, more than seventy percent of every federal, state and local government in the United States.

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:wH5Q2g-CjDAJ:www.accupoll.com/New...


On 9-6-2000 Nothrup Grumman Corp. acquired the government IT
market through Federal Data Corp/FDC whose customer base included NIH, NASA and FAA. FDC was folded into Northrup Grumman's Logicon, Inc. whose expertise is in command, control and communications; intelligence;weapons systems; training and simulation.

The Carlyle Group had bought FDC in 1995, The Carlyle Group assisted in this transaction too which was announced on 9-11-2000!
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/0911/news-fdc-09-11-00.asp

COINCIDENCE AND LIKELY STORIES



BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE
Buffy Sainte-Marie
© Gypsy Boy Music-SOCAN

When people ask, "What happened to the North American Indians in the 1880s?", you can pretty much point to the robber barons of the time who needed to make a fortune in oil, gold and other precious metals. Simple greed in the hands of a powerful few who manipulated the media and politicians. When people ask, "What happened to the Indian movement of the sixties and seventies?", you can pretty much point to the same motives a hundred years later, with uranium added to the list in very big print.
The shocking information in this song is not new, but strung together; the events tell a story that most non-Indian people don't know. Dedicated to Leonard Peltier, the memory of Anna Mae Aquash and Joseph Stuntz.

INTRO:
Indian legislation on the desk of a do-right Congressman
Now, he don't know much about the issue
so he picks up the phone and he asks advice from the
Senator out in Indian country
A darling of the energy companies who are
ripping off what’s left of the reservations. Huh.

1.
I learned a safety rule
I don’t know who to thank
Don't stand between the reservation and the
corporate bank
They send in federal tanks
It isn’t nice but it’s reality

chorus:
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
bury my heart at Wounded Knee. Huh.

2.
They got these energy companies that want the land
and they’ve got churches by the dozen who want to
guide our hands
and sign Mother Earth over to pollution, war and
greed
Get rich... get rich quick.

chorus...

3. We got the federal marshals
We got the covert spies
We got the liars by the fire
We got the FBIs
They lie in court and get nailed
and still Peltier goes off to jail

chorus...

4.
My girlfriend Annie Mae talked about uranium
Her head was filled with bullets and her body dumped
The FBI cut off her hands and told us she’d died of
exposure
Loo loo loo loo loo

chorus...

We had the Goldrush Wars
Aw, didn’t we learn to crawl and still our history gets
written in a liar’s scrawl
They tell ‘ya “Honey, you can still be an Indian
d-d-down at the ‘Y’
on Saturday nights”

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Deep in the Earth
Cover me with pretty lies
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. Huh!

http://www.creative-native.com/albums/coin.htm

[seemslikeadream]

21. Armitage Pledges to Deepen U.S.-Pakistan Alliance

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage pledged on Monday to deepen Washington's ties with Pakistan, dismissing talk of cracks in the relationship after meeting President Pervez Musharraf.

Last week Armitage said some in Pakistan's security community were less than enthusiastic about working with the United States, especially in tracking down Taliban and al Qaeda militants along the Afghan border.

Pakistan has also expressed deep reservations about Washington's decision to allow Israel to sell an advanced early warning radar system to India, saying it would create an arms imbalance in South Asia.

"We are very interested in having a full relationship with Pakistan, not simply one based on the global war on terror, the one that covers the entire gambit -- economic, social, political as well as of course security," Armitage said in Islamabad.

more..................

http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=35626...

[Karenina]

24. Kick for a Keeper!!!

:kick: :kick: :kick:

[seemslikeadream]

29. "Kick for a Keeper!!!" too

http://www.freewayblogger.com/

[seemslikeadream]

22. Bush's Armitage drug dealing ties letter & Nguyet Thi O'Rourke

Bush's Armitage drug dealing ties letter & Nguyet Thi O'Rourke
Secret Agent Man
http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/25/07/naureckas2507.html

Nguyet Thi O'Rourke
The article was about Armitage's relationship with a woman named Nguyet Thi
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage
DEPT. OF DEFENSE

O'Rourke, a Vietnamese immigrant convicted of running a gambling operation in Northern Virginia. Armitage had already attracted the attention of the President's Commission on Organized Crime by writing a glowing character reference for her in conjunction with her trial, on Pentagon stationery no less. What our article added was the juicy personal angle that has become a requirement for killing a nomination. It seemed that when the Arlington Police raided O'Rourke's house, they discovered some unusual photographs: They showed a nude O'Rourke holding another photo, which depicted her and Armitage wearing swimsuits.

The most obvious motive for taking such photos was to give O'Rourke some kind of leverage over Armitage; even though they didn't prove anything in themselves, they certainly implied an intimate relationship between a high-ranking government official and an organized crime figure. At the very least, they raised the question of why the official had put himself in a position where a mobster might think she could blackmail him.

more..............

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:uS1jTErAt0E:internettrash.com/use...

complaint letter to BushSr regarding alleged drug dealing ties to Armitage
http://www.dcia.com/bush.html

Ross Perot's probes of Armitage -
http://www.dcia.com/perot.html



And Richard Armitage's remark at the 9/11 Hearings

"Covert action...doing The Lord's work..."
In regards to popularizing covert action

[fujiyama]

26. Don't you just love

our allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia....

Now back to the real enemy! Iraq Iraq Saddam = 9/11

[Octafish]

27. As long as there's oil, anybody can be Cheney's pal...

...and friends of the BFEE.



In Florida Visit, Cheney Claims Ties Between Saddam, al Qaida

POSTED: 7:07 am EDT June 15, 2004

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that Saddam Hussein had "long-established ties" with al Qaida, an assertion that has been repeatedly challenged by some policy experts and lawmakers.

"He was a patron of terrorism," Cheney said of Saddam during a speech before The James Madison Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Florida. "He had long established ties with al Qaida."

Cheney offered no details backing up his claim of a link between Saddam and al Qaida.

In making the case for war in Iraq, Bush administration officials frequently cited what they said were Saddam's decade-long contacts with al-Qaida operatives. They stopped short of claiming that Iraq was directly involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, but critics say Bush officials left that impression with the American public.

CONTINUED WITH BOB GRAHAM'S THOUGHTS...

http://www.news4jax.com/news/3419393/detail.html

[struggle4progress]

28. Them Bushistas is allowin' WMDs to spread all across the world. eom