December 24th, 2010 Via: New York Times:
A seven-year effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to hide its relationship with a Swiss family who once acted as moles inside the world's most successful atomic black market hit a turning point on Thursday when a Swiss magistrate recommended charging the men with trafficking in technology and information for making nuclear arms.
The prospect of a prosecution, and a public trial, threatens to expose some of the C.I.A.'s deepest secrets if defense lawyers try to protect their clients by revealing how they operated on the agency's behalf. It could also tarnish what the Bush administration once hailed as a resounding victory in breaking up the nuclear arms network by laying bare how much of it remained intact.
"It's like a puzzle," Andreas Müller, the Swiss magistrate, said at a news conference in Bern on Thursday. "If you put the puzzle together you get the whole picture."
The three men Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Urs and Marco helped run the atomic smuggling ring of A. Q. Khan, an architect of Pakistan's nuclear bomb program, officials in several countries have said. In return for millions of dollars, according to former Bush administration officials, the Tinners secretly worked for the C.I.A. as well, not only providing information about the Khan network's manufacturing and sales efforts, which stretched from Iran to Libya to North Korea, but also helping the agency introduce flaws into the equipment sent to some of those countries.
…
Mr. Müller, the Swiss magistrate, investigated the Tinner case for nearly two years. He said Thursday that his 174-page report recommended that the three men face charges for "supporting the development of atomic weapons" in violation of Swiss law.
They are accused of supplying Dr. Khan's operation with technology used to make centrifuges, the machines that purify uranium into fuel for bombs and reactors. Dr. Khan then sold the centrifuges to Libya, Iran and North Korea and perhaps other countries.
Posted in Covert Operations, False Flag Operations
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"
1) Swiss Men with CIA Links Face Nuclear Smuggling Trial, 2) The CIA's Destruction of Evidence
2nd January 2011
" … Allegations that the US had pressured Switzerland to bury the case against the Tinners surfaced in 2008, after the Swiss government ordered 100 pages of evidence against them to be shredded. Copies of the documents have since reappeared. … "
By Tony Paterson
The Independent | December 24, 2010
A judge yesterday called for the prosecution of three Swiss engineers suspected of smuggling nuclear weapons technology following allegations that the US pressured Switzerland to destroy incriminating evidence to conceal their work for the CIA.
Swiss federal magistrate Andreas Mueller made his recommendations at the end of a six-year investigation into the activities of engineers Urs Tinner, his brother Marco and their father Friedrich, who were arrested in 2004 on suspicion of smuggling but later released. They said they had worked for the CIA since 2003 as informers.
The three are suspected of supplying technology to a nuclear smuggling ring in Pakistan run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a nuclear scientist reputed to be the "father" of Pakistan's atomic bomb. Mr Khan, who now lives under government surveillance in Pakistan, is suspected of having aided Iran, Libya and North Korea with uranium enrichment programmes.
The Tinners are alleged to have played a bizarre dual role as nuclear weapons smugglers who at the same time worked for the CIA as informers and banked on the agency's protection. "There are many parts," Mr Mueller said yesterday. "It's like a puzzle and if you put the pieces together, you get the whole picture."
The Tinners claim to have helped supply the CIA with information about nuclear projects in Libya. They also admit to working for the Khan network and according to independent US reports they supplied the CIA with key information about its activities.
But they claim not to have known that Mr Khan's aim was to produce nuclear weapons and they deny having supplied him with the relevant technology.
Allegations that the US had pressured Switzerland to bury the case against the Tinners surfaced in 2008, after the Swiss government ordered 100 pages of evidence against them to be shredded. Copies of the documents have since reappeared.
The damage done by rogue Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan's network show that nations must put aside their individual interests to stop proliferation.
By Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz | Los Angeles Times | January 3, 2011
Seven years after the U.S. government proclaimed victory over the rogue Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, the seeds of catastrophe he sowed are still sprouting worldwide. Iran's march toward an atomic bomb? We have Khan's nuclear trafficking network to thank. North Korea's continuing development of nuclear weapons? Again, Khan's doing.
Despite putting the world's most dangerous weapons in the hands of the world's most dangerous regimes, not one participant in Khan's network is in jail today. Even the mastermind himself, too powerful for his own government to imprison, was allowed the comfort of house arrest, and now even that has ended. Instead of a strong message of deterrence, shutting down the atomic bazaar resulted in an unseemly mercy for its perpetrators and a new form of cyber proliferation.
By its nature, nuclear trafficking crosses borders. Combating this danger requires international cooperation. Yet at every turn in tracking the Khan network from Pakistan to Iran, North Korea and Libya, national interests trumped counter-proliferation objectives. Decisions by policymakers and intelligence officials in several nations created a calculus in which selling the means to wipe out a city carried less risk of severe punishment than robbing the neighborhood convenience store.
The worst scofflaw was our own Central Intelligence Agency, aided and abetted by senior officials in the George W. Bush administration. Together, they advocated obstructionism masquerading as prudence, blocking prosecutions and orchestrating the destruction of evidence detailing the full extent of the damage to our security by the Khan network.
Khan's indulgent treatment is well known. Less attention has been paid to the leniency granted his collaborators. None spent more than 4 1/2 years in prison; most served far less. The logistics chief, B.S.A. Tahir, was arrested by Malaysian authorities in late 2003, but he was never charged and walked free in June 2008. Tahir might have helped put a number of his associates behind bars, but the Malaysians refused to let him testify in Germany and South Africa. Similarly, German and South African prosecutors squabbled over evidence and witnesses, leading to light or suspended sentences for four ring members in those countries.
But the most flagrant effort to undermine prosecutions was a four-year campaign by the U.S. government to kill a Swiss investigation of the network. Interviews and previously undisclosed documents we reviewed in writing our new book provided a chilling portrait of American bullying at the highest levels to block a criminal inquiry of three Swiss citizens who were part of Khan's global enterprise: engineer Friedrich Tinner and his sons, Marco and Urs. The Americans stonewalled Swiss requests for help and then pressured them into destroying a staggering quantity of evidence.
Senior CIA and Bush administration officials argued that stopping the Tinner inquiry and destroying the evidence was necessary to protect U.S. intelligence operations and keep nuclear information away from terrorists. But our research uncovered more sinister motives.
For one, according to confidential documents, the CIA had paid the Tinners huge sums and wanted to protect their role in bringing down Khan. The CIA also wanted to stop Swiss plans, documented in a parliamentary commission report, to prosecute six of its officers who violated Swiss law by recruiting the Tinners and improperly searching their homes and offices. More important, preserving Bush's claim that shutting down Khan was a major intelligence victory meant suppressing the disclosure of the real volume of nuclear secrets the network had put on the open market much of it after the CIA penetrated the ring.
In February 2008, documents show, the Swiss succumbed to U.S. pressure and destroyed a huge cache of evidence seized from the Tinners. Among the material shredded, crushed and incinerated under CIA supervision were plans for two nuclear warheads from Pakistan's arsenal, blueprints for uranium enrichment plants and producing nuclear weapons, and decades of records detailing network transactions.
For the last 2 1/2 years, a dogged Swiss magistrate has been reassembling fragments of the evidence case, and he recently recommended charging the Tinners. But the case against the CIA agents has gone up in smoke, as has the road map to outposts in the Khan network that remain undiscovered today.
The destruction was not only wrong, it was too late. Long before the Swiss seized the cache from the Tinners, the warhead plans and other designs had been transferred to digital formats, easily sent to any computer. Copies were found in Thailand, Malaysia and South Africa; no one is sure where else they may have gone in what we regard as the world's first example of cyber proliferation. …
Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz are the authors of "The Man From Pakistan: The True Story of the World's Most Dangerous Nuclear Smuggler" and the forthcoming book "Fallout: The True Story of the CIA's Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking."
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
04-01-2011, 01:13 PM (This post was last modified: 16-01-2011, 11:48 AM by David Guyatt.)
I can't help but draw a parallel between the revelations made by Col. Fletcher Prouty in his book. JFK: the CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate President John F Kennedy. In that book, Prouty explains how the US military surplus materiel of WWII was split in two and half sent (pre-positioned?) to Korea and the other half to Indochina. The resulting Korean War and then the Vietnam war were, it was suggested, pre-planned by the USA at the end of WWII.
Now it seems that Iran and North Korea benefited from a US controlled black-market in nuclear technology.
Is it another case of arming your enemies in advance of an all out war?
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS | January 14, 2011
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) The CIA persuaded Switzerland to destroy millions of pages of evidence showing how a Pakistani scientist helped Iran, Libya and North Korea acquire sensitive nuclear technology, according to a new book.
"Fallout" by Americans Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz tells the story of the illicit nuclear procurement network created by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist who is widely considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
In 2004, Khan admitted to selling Iran, North Korea and Libya uranium enrichment technology that can be used to produce fuel for civilian reactors or atomic weapons. Khan's movements have been curtailed since his public confession.
Analysts and U.N. officials have said that Khan's illicit network, which specialized in helping countries skirt international sanctions, created the greatest nuclear proliferation crisis of the atomic age.
"Fallout" is the second book on the Khan network by Frantz and Collins, a husband-and-wife team of investigative journalists. They say the United States pressured the Swiss government to destroy evidence that could have helped U.N. investigators determine the full extent of Khan's black marketeering and say they did it to cover up CIA mistakes that had enabled Khan's network to flourish.
The CIA, the authors say, tracked Khan's activities for years thanks to a Swiss family, the Tinners, involved in the supply of nuclear technology which was a key element in Khan's network. Members of the family were recruited by the CIA.
Through the Tinners, the CIA successfully infiltrated the Khan network, but Washington failed to act quickly enough to stop it spreading "the world's most dangerous technology to the world's most dangerous regimes," Frantz told Reuters.
The CIA tried to sabotage Iran's nuclear program while monitoring Khan, but it appears the Iranians discovered the problems with equipment that had been tampered with and repaired it, the authors write.
"STUPIDITY"
A Swiss investigator who worked on the Khan case was quoted by the authors as saying that Washington had wanted the evidence collected in raids on the Tinners' home and offices, including computer files, hard drives, disks and documents, to be destroyed in order to "hide their own stupidity."
"They are responsible for the spread of this dangerous technology," the investigator said. "You cannot stop it now. The Tinners were free. They were computer freaks, living in different countries, and duplicating all those files."
Among the files confiscated from the Tinners, Collins and Frantz say, were elements of a Chinese design for a nuclear weapon that had been scanned and could therefore have been copied and disseminated around the world.
Investigators from the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also identified possible elements of designs for two other more sophisticated Pakistani nuclear weapons among the materials they were allowed to see.
In addition to the discovery of more than 300 schematics for two types of Pakistani atomic weapons in the Tinners' possession, hard drives belonging to the family were found in Thailand, Malaysia and South Africa, showing that classified information useful in making bombs had traveled the globe.
On the other hand, as I mentioned above, it might've been a case of feeding future conflicts.
I recall that during the air war phase of Gulf War 1, CIA operatives continued to negotiate with Saddam to sell him advanced anti aircraft missiles.
And during the same air war phase, the British under Margaret Thatchler, signed off on the deal and sent 40 train car loads of 120mm sabot discarding anti tank shells under the "Jordan Defence package" -- which they absolutely knew were destined for Saddam - Jordan being the agreed fig-leaf recipient.
War is profitable.
And so are enemies.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
Quote:Through the Tinners, the CIA successfully infiltrated the Khan network, but Washington failed to act quickly enough to stop it spreading "the world's most dangerous technology to the world's most dangerous regimes," Frantz told Reuters.
How do you spell LIMITED HANGOUT? :bored:
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta." The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
NukeGate: "The Biggest Political Scandal of the Past Decade: Lockheed/Sandia, Bush's State Dept., Pakistan's Nuclear Smuggling & the Hidden Parapolitics of the Plame Scandal"
By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS | January 14, 2011
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) The CIA persuaded Switzerland to destroy millions of pages of evidence showing how a Pakistani scientist helped Iran, Libya and North Korea acquire sensitive nuclear technology, according to a new book.
"Fallout" by Americans Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz tells the story of the illicit nuclear procurement network created by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist who is widely considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
In 2004, Khan admitted to selling Iran, North Korea and Libya uranium enrichment technology that can be used to produce fuel for civilian reactors or atomic weapons. Khan's movements have been curtailed since his public confession.
Analysts and U.N. officials have said that Khan's illicit network, which specialized in helping countries skirt international sanctions, created the greatest nuclear proliferation crisis of the atomic age.
"Fallout" is the second book on the Khan network by Frantz and Collins, a husband-and-wife team of investigative journalists.
They say the United States pressured the Swiss government to destroy evidence that could have helped U.N. investigators determine the full extent of Khan's black marketeering and say they did it to cover up CIA mistakes that had enabled Khan's network to flourish.
The CIA, the authors say, tracked Khan's activities for years thanks to a Swiss family, the Tinners, involved in the supply of nuclear technology which was a key element in Khan's network. Members of the family were recruited by the CIA.
Through the Tinners, the CIA successfully infiltrated the Khan network, but Washington failed to act quickly enough to stop it spreading "the world's most dangerous technology to the world's most dangerous regimes," Frantz told Reuters.
The CIA tried to sabotage Iran's nuclear program while monitoring Khan, but it appears the Iranians discovered the problems with equipment that had been tampered with and repaired it, the authors write.
"STUPIDITY"
A Swiss investigator who worked on the Khan case was quoted by the authors as saying that Washington had wanted the evidence collected in raids on the Tinners' home and offices, including computer files, hard drives, disks and documents, to be destroyed in order to "hide their own stupidity."
"They are responsible for the spread of this dangerous technology," the investigator said. "You cannot stop it now. The Tinners were free. They were computer freaks, living in different countries, and duplicating all those files."
Among the files confiscated from the Tinners, Collins and Frantz say, were elements of a Chinese design for a nuclear weapon that had been scanned and could therefore have been copied and disseminated around the world.
Investigators from the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also identified possible elements of designs for two other more sophisticated Pakistani nuclear weapons among the materials they were allowed to see.
In addition to the discovery of more than 300 schematics for two types of Pakistani atomic weapons in the Tinners' possession, hard drives belonging to the family were found in Thailand, Malaysia and South Africa, showing that classified information useful in making bombs had traveled the globe.
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Map shows countries that had at least one [most several to many] companies supplying parts for a nuclear weapon or nuclear weapons program to Iran - from Wikileak Cables. [USA and Canada are listed, as is the UK and MANY others.] Names are Norwegian spelling.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
A good summary of the Tinner/Khan/CIA case (30 pages, pdf) is here:[URL="http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/tinner_case_evaluation_21Dec2010.pdf"] http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-repo...ec2010.pdf[/URL]
The most relevant literature regarding what happened since September 11, 2001 is George Orwell's "1984".
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