George Bush, the same Republican President who
ignored the Clarke plan, let
Kim get nukes, let
Bin Laden and Omar get away, exposes
US troops to death and lethal wounds in the Middle East and
demolished US stature in the world, we
learn today committed the gravest blunder of all: publishing a "how to build a nuclear weapon" manual in Arabic on the web for all aspiring terrorists to download and disseminate.
Fact is 9/11 didn't change anything. Republican George Bush's recent blunder is only the latest example of feckless Republican Presidents handing out nukes and chemical and biological weapons to rogue states and anyone else who wants them like Halloween candy.
Five Decades of Republican Torture describes one half of the Republican nightmare. Republican rogue WMD below the fold...
WE KNOW Reagan sent
US arms to Iranian revolutionaries, used that money to fund
Central American axe-murderers and terrorists, embraced
apartheid South Africa and got hundreds of
US Marines killed in Lebanon.
WE KNOW Republican Presidents Reagan and George Bush also provided chemical and biological weapons to Iraq, nuclear weapons to Pakistan, and chemical, biological and nuclear weapons to South Africa. And that this pattern persisted every time a Republican sat in the Oval office. Reagan played an especially damaging role, providing South Africa with the materials to manufacture chemical and biological weapons that have been linked to attacks by racist rightwing groups in the US.
Reagan sends WMD to Iraq:
Donald Rumsfeld, the head of the multinational pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle & Co. at the time, was dispatched to the Middle East as a presidential envoy. His December 1983 tour of regional capitals included Baghdad, where he was to establish "direct contact between an envoy of President Reagan and President Saddam Hussein."...
The Reagan administration allowed the Iraqis to buy a wide variety of "dual use" equipment and materials from American suppliers... chemical-analysis equipment for the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC)... numerous shipments of "bacteria/fungi/protozoa"...used to make biological weapons...
AND THAT"A US Senate inquiry in 1995... revealed that during the Iran-Iraq War Reagan the United States had sent Iraq samples of all the strains of germs used by Iraq to make biological weapons".
WE KNOW, that from 1980 to 1990, Reagan and Bush supply WMD to Pakistan :
Reagan certified Pakistan's compliance in 1986 despite the fact that, according to the November 4, 1986, Washington Post, US intelligence reports and non-proliferation experts had concluded that Pakistan was between two weeks and ``two screwdriver turns from having a fully assembled bomb'`.
In 1987, Congress approved another $480 million in aid for Pakistan and extended the Symington amendment exemption for another two and half years.
Despite overwhelming evidence, including public boasts by Pakistani politicians and scientists, that Pakistan had a nuclear bomb, Reagan and his successor, President George Bush senior, certified Pakistan to be free of nukes every year until 1990
WE KNOW that in 1981 South Africa's racist regime and Ronald Reagan strike up a deal to supply Pretoria with dual use technologies that allowed South Africa to build seven nuclear weapons. Bad as that is, it gets far, far worse. South Africa was working on chemical and biological weapons that would only attack people of color. And the individuals involved in the project have been conclusively linked to rightwing racist groups in the US.
The Poison Keeper by William Finnegin in the New Yorker decribes how US companies may have supplied South Africa with the componants used by the South African regime to wage a campaign of chemical and biological warfare experiments in South Africa.
WE KNOW that many Africans believe the worst about America's role in South African plans to use the program to wipe out blacks throughout the region. This article cites the New Yorker and asks did this man "kill blacks big-time?":
His real name is Dr Wouter Basson, but South Africans call him "Dr Death". He is 50, and a decorated army brigadier. In civilian life, he is an eminent cardiologist. To some supporters of the old apartheid order, he is even a hero. As the head of the apartheid regime's clandestine chemical and biological warfare programme codenamed "Project Coast", he is alleged to have "killed the blacks big time".
Dr Daan Goosen, the first managing director of Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, the South African Defence Force (SADF's) front company in the north of Pretoria where Project Coast was based, is on record to have said: "There are many people who think Basson was a war hero -- because he killed the blacks big time".
The New Yorker's excellent piece published on 15 January on Basson's trial covered 18-pages. It is a veritable collector's item. In it, William Finnegan, reported the evidence led in court thus far: "There [have been] revelations of research into a race-specific bacterial weapon; a project to find ways to sterilise South Africa's black population; a discussion of deliberate spreading of cholera through the water supply; large-scale production of dangerous drugs; the fatal poisoning of anti-apartheid leaders, captured guerrillas, and suspected security risks; even a plot to slip thallium - a toxic heavy metal that can permanently impair brain function - into Nelson Mandela's medication before his release from prison in 1990." ...
WE KNOW the New Yorker piece is unequivocal about the risks this story poses to US government and commercial interests:
"Basson had already put the fear into American intelligence during the TRC appearance, where he handed over 14 pages of notes from a visit to the US in 1981. American Air Force officers had been eager to develop joint "medical projects' with South Africa, he wrote... "Other countries have also shown signs of panic. The Swiss government launched a formal investigation of General Peter Regli, the former head of Swiss intelligence, who allegedly dealt with (and was double-dealt by) Basson in a quest to obtain South African nuclear secrets."
Some multinational chemical and pharmaceutical companies have also spent sleepless nights, wondering what lay in store for them. For they were all involved in Basson's world.
WE KNOW that Big Pharma executives in the 80's have been linked to the spread of chemical and biological weapons: shared secrets. Hmm. And in the final horrifying segment of this twisted tale, Project Coast finally comes home to roost with racist right-wing terrorists in the US, according to the New York Times.
On the morning of Feb. 28, 2000, a man in a black hood ran up to Patrick Riley in front of his office, shot him flush in the face and fled.
The bullet missed his brain, and Mr. Riley, a biotechnology entrepreneur, survived. But two days later, his business partner, a doctor named Larry C. Ford, killed himself with a shotgun after learning he was suspected of being the mastermind behind the shooting.
That is where the story probably would have ended -- a lurid but ultimately local piece of intrigue played out in the sun-splashed Orange County sprawl -- had it not been for the phone calls that within hours began coming in to the police. Dr. Ford, the callers said, had left something behind: a cache of weapons and anthrax.
The local elementary school was closed. Forty-two families were evacuated from their homes in Dr. Ford's affluent neighborhood...
Buried next to his swimming pool they found canisters containing machine guns and C-4 plastic explosives. In refrigerators at his home and office, next to the salad dressing and employee lunches, were 266 bottles and vials of pathogens -- among them salmonella, cholera, botulism and typhoid. The deadly poison ricin was stored, with a blowgun and darts...
...After his death, Detective Ray said, the authorities learned that ... ...Dr. Ford had been a consultant to Project Coast, which has been accused of creating weapons for use against enemies of apartheid. They also discovered that he had held extreme racist views and had once told a girlfriend that to understand him, she should read ''The Turner Diaries,'' the anti-Semitic and white supremacist novel, popular among far-right groups, that was prosecutors say inspired the Oklahoma City bombing....
CLEARLY WE NEED TO REMIND folks that Republican Presidents have been spreading WMD around the world for fucking decades; and these deadly weapons are now in the hands of American right-wing terrorists.
George Bush is simply selling out the security of his country by putting chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists the way his father and Reagan did before him.
Rogue Republican Presidents are serial WMD proliferators who have proven repeatedly that they're all dangerously irresponsible and should never be entrusted with the nation's security. Remember to mention the facts the next time one of these clowns starts mouthing off about "betraying national security" and "keeping America safe".