Category: News

Over at Truth in Media, Ben Swann presents a clear and damning report on how the US actions in Iraq and Syria led to the rise of ISIS. Featuring Antiwar.com’s Angela Keaton. (How did Swann get a one-on-one interview with Barack Obama?!)

News release from the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep)

A federal lawsuit seeks disclosure of thousands of Central Intelligence Agency files revealing why the CIA is convinced that Israel stole enough U.S. government-owned weapons-grade uranium in the 1960’s to manufacture over a dozen atomic weapons.

The 147-page complaint (PDF) filed in DC’s U.S. District Court contains exhibits about how U.S. weapons-grade uranium was illegally diverted from the now-defunct Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Apollo, Pennsylvania into the clandestine Israeli nuclear weapons development program.  The CIA for decades has blocked researcher Freedom of Information Act access to its core files on the NUMEC diversion.

The lawsuit against CIA comes at the conclusion of IRmep’s courtroom victory this month against the U.S. Department of Defense to release a report (PDF) on the Israeli H-bomb development program, laser enrichment of weapons-grade material and 1987 status of its nuclear weapons production sites.

The CIA lawsuit exhibits reveal:

1. An FBI eyewitness account of NUMEC executives stuffing irradiators with weapons-grade uranium canisters for rush shipment to Israel.
2. A leaked file of CIA Directorate of Operations Chief Carl Duckett confirming the illegal diversion to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
3. The NUMEC facility visit during its highest-loss year of Israel’s top spies, including Jonathan Pollard’s handler Rafael Eitan and Avraham Bendor.
4. LBJ and Carter administration attempts to cover-up CIA’s compelling evidence that an illegal diversion occurred.
5. CIA Tel Aviv Station Chief John Hadden’s analysis that NUMEC “was an Israeli operation from the beginning.”
6. Former Atomic Energy Commissioner Glenn T. Seaborg’s account of the Energy Department claims that traces of the specialized highly-enriched uranium provided to NUMEC were picked up in Israel.
7. A GAO report on NUMEC with CIA equity the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel compelled be publicly released in 2014.

Currently, U.S. taxpayers are expected to pay for a nearly half-billion dollar U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cleanup of the environment surrounding the undercapitalized smuggling front’s former plant sites and waste dump.

According to IRmep Director Grant F. Smith, “It is our hope that this lawsuit is a productive step in finally holding those truly responsible for the NUMEC fiasco accountable.”

IRmep is a Washington, DC-based nonprofit researching U.S. Middle East policy formulation. Select CIA and DOD lawsuit filings may be viewed at IRmep’s Center for Policy and Law Enforcement web page at: http://irmep.org/CFL.htm.

Grant F. Smith is the author of America’s Defense Line: The Justice Department’s Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government. He currently serves as director of research at the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington (IRmep), D.C. Read other articles by Grant, or visit Grant’s website.

After a week here in FMC Lexington Satellite camp, a federal prison in Kentucky, I started catching up on national and international news via back issues of USA Today available in the prison library, and an “In Brief” item, on p. 2A of the Jan. 30 weekend edition, caught my eye. It briefly described a protest in Washington, D.C., in which members of the antiwar group “Code Pink” interrupted a U.S. Senate Armed Services budget hearing chaired by Senator John McCain. The protesters approached a witness table where Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright and George Schulz were seated. One of their signs called Henry Kissinger a war criminal. “McCain,” the article continued, “blurted out, ‘Get out of here, you low-life scum.'”

At mail call, a week ago, I received Richard Clarke’s novel, The Sting of the Drone, (May 2014, St. Martin’s Press), about characters involved in developing and launching drone attacks. I’m in prison for protesting drone warfare, so a kind friend ordered it for me. The author, a former “National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism,” worked for 30 years inside the U.S. government but seems to have greater respect than some within government for concerned people outside of it. He seems also to feel some respect for people outside our borders.

He develops, I think, a fair-minded approach toward evaluating drone warfare given his acceptance that wars and assassinations are sometimes necessary. (I don’t share that premise). Several characters in the novel, including members of a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, criticize drone warfare, noting that in spite of high level, expensive reconnaissance, drone attacks still kill civilians, alienating people the U.S. ostensibly wants to turn away from terrorism.

Elsewhere in the plot, U.S. citizens face acute questions after they themselves witness remote control attacks on colleagues. Standing outside a Las Vegas home engulfed in flames, and frustrated by his inability to protect or save a colleague and his family, one main character ruefully identifies with people experiencing the same rage and grief, in faraway lands like Afghanistan and Pakistan, when they are struck by Predator drones that he operates every day. U.S. characters courageously grapple with more nuanced answers to questions such as, “Who are the terrorists?” and “Who are the murderers?” As the plot accelerates toward a potential terrorist attack against railway systems in U.S. cities, with growing suspicion that the attacks are planned for Christmas Day, Clarke builds awareness that those who launch cyber-attacks and drone attacks, no matter which side claims their loyalty, passionately believe their attacks will protect people on their own side.

Continue reading “Kathy Kelly on The Front Page Rule”

In his speech this week to his anti-extremism conclave in Washington, President Obama declared that “former extremists have the opportunity to speak out, speak the truth about terrorist groups, and oftentimes they can be powerful messengers in debunking these terrorist ideologies.”

But what about former victims of government extremism speaking out?

Maher Arar is a Canadian who was kidnapped at John F. Kennedy Airport in 2002 and renditioned to Syria, where he was tortured at the behest of the U.S. government. I mentioned his case in a 2007 American Conservative article optimistically titled, “Will Torture Bring Down Bush?”:

But the evidence of CIA “torture taxis” secretly racing around the globe carrying gagged, sedated detainees to some of the most brutal regimes in the world proved too much for Bush to deny. He revised his defense in April 2005: “We operate within the law and we send people to countries where they say they are not going to torture people.” But then why would the U.S. go to the trouble of kidnapping people—Canadian Maher Arar, who was grabbed at JFK Airport and renditioned to Syria or Australian Mamduh Habib, seized in Pakistan and flown to Egypt, for instance—and turning them over to governments the U.S. has long denounced for using torture?

I also blogged about his case in 2010, “Obama Administration: Don’t Question Sincerity of Torturers” –

The Supreme Court disgraced itself on Monday by torpedoing the appeal of Maher Arar, the Canadian who was kidnapped at John F. Kennedy International Airport and sent by the U.S. government to Syria for torturing.

The Canadian government has publicly apologized to Arar for providing false information to the U.S. government about Arar’s suspicious connections. The U.S. government has refused to admit it did anything wrong in shipping Arar to the Middle East to be tortured at U.S. behest.

Continue reading “Obama’s Latest Hokum on Violent Extremism: Arar Retorts”

Tuesday on Fox Radio News’ “The Alan Colmes Show,” Alan spoke with Antiwar.com founder Eric Garris about President Obama asking Congress for the authorization for the use of military force to take on ISIS.

Garris has urged citizens to call their representatives to oppose this use of force, and explained to Alan why the Obama administration are only trying to scare people into supporting war. They also discussed why such a move would only unify ISIS and al-Qaeda against the United States because we will be seen as a common enemy.

Listen to the interview here: