How many of you know that on June 5th, 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that he was appointing a task force to oversee the nation's nuclear arsenal, and the nuclear procurement process?
Didn't know that? Well, it's true. Don't feel bad though. The MSM only reported high level resignations at the air force, and gave sketchy details about some of the lax accountability with regard to nuclear weapons.
But there is far more to the story. And, if you heard Gates' press conference on C-span, and happen to know a little background, you would understand that something a lot bigger than a shake-up of air force leadership is happening.
Let's begin with the video:
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/...
I'll let you google around to see for yourself what the MSM reported about this press conference. There are several facts that Gates gives in this press conference that aren't even mentioned in any of the MSM reporting about it, but one really stood out, for me.
Gates announced that the task force he has set up to oversee the nuclear arsenal and the nuclear procurement process will be led by James Schlesinger.
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Who is James Schlesinger?
Here is an exampleof some of his more recent work with the Council on Foreign Relations.
Interesting, but this is the part of his careerI found most salient to his current role in oversight of the nuclear arsenal and nuclear procurement process:
During President Nixon's last days in the White House during the Watergate crisis, when the President's mental stability was doubted by some, Schlesinger is thought to have instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to check with him before carrying out any of Nixon's orders regarding nuclear weapons. He also drew up contingency plans for an emergency deployment of the 82nd Airborne to Washington D.C. in the event of Nixon refusing to step down in the event of impeachment and usurping of the marines.[1]
Schlesinger is a brilliant and multi-talented public servant who has had quite a colorful history, and he has held a number of official positions dealing with nuclear weapons.
Worthy of note: he was fired from his position as Secretary of Defense by President Ford and his successor was Donald Rumsfeld.
[Schlesinger] explicitly disavowed any intention to acquire a destabilizing [nuclear] first-strike capability against the USSR.
Emphasis mine. From Wikipedia, the above quote is an important point regarding Schlesinger's views about nuclear war in the context of his policy analysis. I recommend reading the whole bio. And yes, it is significant that Schlesinger opposed "first strike" and that he was fired by Ford and replaced by Rumsfeld.
President Carter appointed Schlesinger as the first Secretary of Energy, and his esteem of Schlesinger's nuclear policy certainly influenced Carter's modernization of the nuclear triad, a major accomplishment of Carter's Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown.. Brown, of course, succeeded Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense in 1977.
Though this may seem far afield of the subject of this diary, it is not, as I shall explain later.
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On June 20th, fifteen days after Gates' press conference, a related story was written by Rob Kall of the Huffington Post.
Kall's article gave extensive reporting following up on an article published in the Financial Times, the previous day, on June 19th 2008. Kall's story gives further exposition to a remarkable revelation uncovered by Admiral Donald's investigation of nuclear security. This is the same investigation Gates refers to in the above video. The remarkable revelation? 1,000 missing pieces of nuclear weapons.
I hadn't read Kall's article or the Financial Times article when I first heard the story on NPR. I heard only a headline blurb with no follow-up. When I heard it, my first thoughts were not about dangerous incompetence. My first thoughts were that a major espionage case was breaking.
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On July 9th, The Australian Jewish News reported that a list of Iranian officials involved in developing nuclear weapons were being blacklisted by the US government.
I apologize for not providing a better source for this story. I almost certainly first heard the story on NPR, which did not provide details.
Here is another source. Note that at the bottom of the story, the attribution is Deutche Presse. I include this source, because, unlike the other source, the story identifies officials connected with Iran's nuclear fuel program. It's significant because it indicates that whoever is the first hand source (Stuart Levey?), that first hand source is reporting that not only potential black marketeers are being targeted, but that officials connected with Iran's enrichment program are being lumped in with them. Perhaps this is a bogus effort to confuse the issue with Iran's enrichment program.
This story, following the other two stories I reference above, strongly indicates that IF the missing nuclear weapons parts have been traced to the black market, that officials inside the US government may have exposed the IRANIANS on the receiving end. Never before has there been exposed such explicit information about the actual individuals involved.
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On July 25th, 2008, Fox Business News reported that:
Laurie Magid, Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, today announced the unsealing of an indictment charging Ali Amirnazmi, 64, of Berwyn, Pa., with numerous crimes relating to his participation in illegal business transactions with Iran between, in or about 1996 and in or about July 2008 and lying to federal officials about those transactions.
The source is Fox Business News. I found this story while I was looking for other sources for the above story about Iranian officials. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. [I provided the link.]
According to Jason Leopold, Dick Cheney was doing business with Iran in 1996 when he was the CEO of Halliburton. Leopold doesn't give any other sources besides sources inside Halliburton that he claims to have. If that were the only indication that the vice president is involved in the nuclear black market, one might dismiss it. But, it's NOT the only indication.
Before I get into the other indications, I'll dwell on this story a bit more. I tried to find other sources for it, so I zeroed in on Laurie Magid, the USA who unsealed Amirnazi's indictment.
Laurie Magid took over as USA in Eastern PA on July 15th. Ten days later, she unseals this indictment of an alleged Iranian agent operating in Alexandria VA since 1996. That's curious, no? And the guy she succeeds gives one of the boilerplate reasons for stepping down six months before his term expires? Curiouser and curiouser.
OK, Philadelphia Inquirer also has the story. So does Washington Times. I tried to find out more about this guy Amirnazmi and the company, Trantech. Trantech claims to be owned by Titi McNeil, a Vietnamese immigrant.
We provide outstanding expertise, technical solutions and mission-critical support to a Federal Government client-base that includes numerous DoD and Civilian agencies, as well as state and local governments and commercial clients. TranTech is rated SEI CMM Level 2 and has a facility clearance. For more information on TranTech, see our Company History.
Interesting. Might be worthwhile to find out more about the company. Mr Lancione cites his background working with the AIR FORCE in his bio. Mr Bowser has ties to the air force's logistics operations.
Oh, wait! Amirnazmi's company is Trantech Consultants Probably just a coincidence that Titi McNeill's company has ties to the air force. Here's Amirnazmi's company, which has a lot of corporate clients in the oil industry:
http://www.chemplan.com/...
In fact, there's Cheney's Energy Task Force in Trantech's client list.
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Are these stories related?
Well, consider the next twist. Read this story in the Guardian about Richard Barlow. Barlow was a guy who was in a position to know, and he contends that Cheney, Wolfowitz, Hadley and a few others were involved in shielding the AQ Khan network all the way back in the 1980s and early 1990s. Mother Jones checked Barlow's story, too., too.
There IS a nuclear black market. We've seen stories about involvement by members of our own government, including the allegations made by Sibel Edmonds::
The Turks and Israelis had planted "moles" in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. "The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States," she said.
They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.
The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.
Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachés in the Turkish embassy.
Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.
The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.
Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.
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OK, I'm tired of dancing. If you're really hungry for more background, you can google around for more info from Sibel Edmonds press releases, or buy Valerie Plame's book.
My narrative hypothesis:
US Air Force officers, acting on Cheney's orders, arranged to "disappear" parts of nuclear weapons. Those parts of nuclear weapons, through Pakistani, North Korean, or Turkish middlemen, were sold to Iranian military officials, who bought them on the black market without official sanction. Maybe some of the trades were direct, with "businessmen" like Amirnazmi arranging transfers. Why? Well, two words: CASSIS BELLI. And of course, everyone gets a little taste on the espionage and black market trading.
In case you think the North Korean angle is unlikely:
According to an April 14 announcement, the Clinton administration has imposed sanctions on four firms in Iran and one in North Korea for "missile technology proliferation activities." The targeted firms are Changgwang Sinyong Corporation in North Korea; and the Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics, Aerospace Industries Organization, Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group, and Sanam Industrial Group, all in Iran.
The same players have been involved in this stuff for a very long time, and they keep getting away with it. They play their games, break the law, pocket profits, walk around the raindrops, and go back and do it again. And each time they get away with it, they endanger our national security, play the defense industry protection racket, and up the ante.
For example, Take Rumsfeld and Cheney. Look back at their careers. Look at how they have moved through the same circles for years. You can see how they hooked up with the nuclear industry and the defense establishment, if you read their bios. You can see who they did business with, and who sponsored their rise to power.
The Iraq War wasn't the first time Rumsfeld and Cheney were involved in an effort to hype a threat and profit from a protection racket. Read about Team B. These guys are racketeers and they have a lot of experience. Rumsfeld and Cheney had help gaming the Soviet threat from GHW Bush. Later, GHW Bush is one of the war profiteers of the Carlyle Group while Rummy and Cheney work the protection racket con from the inside during the Iraq War.
But, I have a feeling that their luck is about to change. If one end of the nuclear black market is the Iranians who have just been named, and one of their local operatives has been nabbed after being protected for years, and the air force officers who are on the other end are currently being sweated, and we have all kinds of publicly available info on the Pakistani and Turkish parts in the black market, then my guess is that we are just a North Korean or two away from the whole dirty business being brought down.
OK, so what's the importance of Schlesinger's nuclear war doctrine?
Just this: RUMMY CHANGED the US nuclear doctrine in 2005 to allow pre-emptive nuclear war against non-nuclear nations suspected of developing nuclear weapons, and a few months after that, Cheney tasked STRATCOM with coming up with a plan for pre-emptive nuclear war with Iran. We have been on and off timelines to implement that plan ever since.
That's one of the reasons that I read a great deal into Schlesinger's appointment.
I've been collecting dots to connect since the announcement. I've shared some of it here. This is turning into a book, though, and obviously, there's a lot of material I've given already as food for thought.
Am I the only person who noticed these four bits of info:
- On June 24th, 2008, Bush suddenly announced he was taking North Korea off the enemies list.
- Just days before they nabbed Amirnazmi, Condi Rice rushed over to Singapore to have a sit-down with the North Koreans.
- The diplomatic breakthrough with Iran, in which the US announced that a diplomatic presence will be established in Iran, wasn't something Bush, Rice or Cheney cared to take credit for accomplishing. And it happened right in the middle of the Iran War plan falling apart before our eyes.
- Fmr Iraqi Generals spill the beans to the press about secret Israeli Air Force exercises inside Iraq? Denied by the Iraqi government, and denied by Israel too, but who thinks this is an invention, given Cheney's track record for working outside official channels?
There has been a lot of analysis comparing the Bush Administration to a fascist regime, and rightly so, in my opinion. Here's a feature of fascist regimes that occurs every now and then: THE PALACE REVOLT