Authors: CIA waited years to stop nuclear proliferation

By David

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The US government is guilty of allowing nuclear materials and intelligence to proliferate among to some of the most dangerous regimes in the world for more than 30 years, a new book alleges.

In Fallout, authors Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins charge that the CIA waited until it was too late to stop the A.Q. Kahn network from disseminating nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

 "They could literally have stopped him in his tracks [in the 1970s]," Franz told NPR's Fresh Air Tuesday.

"It would have done an enormous amount to delay Pakistan building its own nuclear weapon, to delay the arms race on the South Asian continent and to stop Iran from getting where it is on the nuclear front."

"You know, so this is something that the CIA has been, in our view, guilty of for more than 30 years now," 

 he added.

In 1974, Kahn, who was working at a centrifuge production facility in the Netherlands, approached Pakistani officials with offers to help them with their nuclear program.

The Dutch security service first notified the CIA after they discovered Kahn in 1975, but US officials asked the Dutch to let Kahn go free so they could secretly monitor him.

"In the subsequent years and decades, Khan became clearly the most dangerous proliferator in history," 

 Franz noted.

In 2004, Kahn was finally arrested and put under house arrest in Pakistan. President George W. Bush hailed the arrest as a victory for his administration. 

Fallout details the way the CIA recruited the Tinners, a family of Swiss engineers, to spy on Kahn beginning in the 1970s. The Tinners supplied Kahn with the techniques and materials to make gas centrifuges, which were later sold to Libya and Iran.

The CIA has spent the last seven years trying cover up their role in recruiting the Tinners, and putting halt to a Swiss attempt to prosecute the family.

"Senior CIA and Bush administration officials argued that stopping the Tinner inquiry and destroying the evidence was necessary to protect US intelligence operations and keep nuclear information away from terrorists. But our research uncovered more sinister motives," 

 Franz and Collins wrote in an article the Los Angeles Times.

By stopping the investigation, the CIA had hoped to protect the Bush legacy by covering up evidence showing the true volume of nuclear secrets traded by the Kahn network.

Documents uncovered by the authors show that in February 2008, 

"the Swiss succumbed to US 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."

In the end, the destruction of evidence came too late in stopping evidence from ending up in the hands of criminals. "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," the authors observed.

The CIA was also successful in stopping a Swiss prosecution of six CIA officers that may have violated Swiss law by recruiting the Tinners and breaking into their house.

Last month, a Swiss magistrate recommended charging the Tinners with trafficking in technology for making nuclear weapons. The New York Times reported that in defense of the Tinners, lawyers could expose CIA secrets and tarnish the Bush legacy.

"The lesson here is clear: Leaders must set aside national interests and work cooperatively to stay ahead of nuclear traffickers," Franz and Collins concluded. "What's needed is a new multilateral legal regime that puts trafficking in nuclear, chemical and biological weapons on a par with crimes against humanity. This won't be easy, but blind adherence to narrow national objectives increases the risk to all of us."

 

Torture Policies Undermine 9/11 Case, Jason Leopold on the 20th highjacker case

Torture Policies Undermine 9/11 Case

By Jason Leopold

May 15, 2008

The Pentagon’s decision to drop war-crimes charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged “20th hijacker” in the 9/11 attacks, again underscores the consequences of the Bush administration’s descent into torture and other abusive treatment of “war on terror” detainees.

If al-Qahtani’s case had gone forward, the U.S. government would have been forced to reveal its own violations of the Geneva Convention, anti-torture statutes and the laws of war, according to lawyers representing al-Qahtani.

“All of the [incriminating] statements Mohammad al-Qahtani made or is alleged to have made were the result of torture or made under the threat of torture and that is in my view why the government decided to dismiss his case at this point,” said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York.

CCR has been representing Mohammed al-Qahtani since 2005 and has led the legal battle for the human rights of detainees incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for the last six years.

The harsh treatment of al-Qahtani was catalogued in an 84-page log of his interrogation that was leaked in 2006. The so-called “torture log” shows that beginning in November 2002 and continuing well into January 2003, al-Qahtani was subjected to sleep deprivation, interrogated in 20-hour stretches, poked with IV’s, and left to urinate on himself.

On Dec. 11, 2002, interrogators began to apply what they called the “pride and ego down approach,” subjecting him to religious and sexual humiliation, making him bark like a dog, and calling him “a pig” as he was made to pick up piles of trash with his hands cuffed.

According to one entry for Dec. 13, 2002, the interrogators sought to “escalate the detainee’s emotions.”

“A mask was made from an MRE [meals ready to eat] box with a smiley face on it and placed on the detainee’s head for a few moments. A latex glove was inflated and labeled the ‘sissy slap’ glove. This glove was touched to the detainee’s face periodically after explaining the terminology to him.

“The mask was placed back on the detainee’s head. While wearing the mask, the team began dance instruction with the detainee. The detainee became agitated and began shouting. The mask was removed and detainee was allowed to sit. Detainee shouted and addressed lead [interrogator] as ‘the oldest Christian here’ and wanted to know why lead allowed the detainee to be treated this way.”

The log contains numerous entries describing al-Qahtani’s reaction to the interrogations, as he cried, shook, moaned, yelled, prayed, cried out for Allah, trembled uncontrollably and asserted his innocence.

Psychological Trauma

According to a report by CCR attorneys, “on one occasion described in the interrogation log, Mr. al-Qahtani was rushed to a military base hospital when his heart rate fell dangerously low during a period of extreme sleep deprivation, physical stress and psychological trauma.

“The military flew in a radiologist from the U.S. Naval Station in Puerto Rico to evaluate the computed tomography (‘CT’ or ‘CAT’) scan. After being permitted to sleep a full night, medical personnel cleared Mr. al-Qahtani for further interrogation the next day. During his transportation from the hospital, Mr. al-Qahtani was interrogated in the ambulance.”

Legal experts, who have followed the al-Qahtani case since his capture in December 2001, say a core problem for the Pentagon was that the evidence against al-Qahtani was derived substantially from admissions that he made while under harsh interrogation.

There was also circumstantial evidence related to al-Qahtani’s attempt to enter the United States before the 9/11 attacks. An immigration official turned him back and U.S. government officials claim that action forced the 9/11 hijackers to proceed with only 19 participants.

Last February, the Pentagon announced its intention to pursue the death penalty against al-Qahtani and five other men for their alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

But on May 9, the Pentagon dismissed the case against al-Qahtani without explanation – and without prejudice, meaning that the charges could be reinstated at a later date. Though the charges were dropped, he will remain detained indefinitely at Guantanamo.

Al-Qahtani is believed to be one of the first detainees subjected to harsh questioning after the Justice Department issued a legal opinion in August 2002 permitting U.S. government interrogators to sidestep the Geneva Convention and use cruel and humiliating techniques, from forced nudity to stress positions to waterboarding, to extract information.

The Geneva Convention bars abusive or demeaning treatment of captives. However, John Yoo, then a senior lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that the Geneva Convention did not apply to alleged members of al-Qaeda.

As reported previously, specific interrogation methods used against al-Qahtani were approved by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a December 2002 action memorandum.

Months of Torture

Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, an attorney with CCR and the lead attorney defending al-Qahtani, said in a sworn declaration that his client, imprisoned at Guantanamo, was subjected to months of torture based on verbal and written authorizations from Rumsfeld.

“Mr. al-Qahtani was subjected to a regime of aggressive interrogation techniques, known as the ‘First Special Interrogation Plan,’" Gutierrez said. “Those techniques were implemented under the supervision and guidance of Secretary Rumsfeld and the commander of Guantánamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller.

"These methods included, but were not limited to, 48 days of severe sleep deprivation and 20-hour interrogations, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, physical force, prolonged stress positions and prolonged sensory over-stimulation, and threats with military dogs.”

Gutierrez’s claims about the type of interrogation al-Qahtani endured have since been borne out by the release of hundreds of pages of internal Pentagon documents, which described interrogation methods at Guantanamo, as well as by the findings of two independent reports on prisoner abuse.

Rumsfeld’s action memo was criticized by Alberto Mora, the former general counsel of the Navy.

“The interrogation techniques approved by the Secretary [of Defense] should not have been authorized because some (but not all) of them, whether applied singly or in combination, could produce effects reaching the level of torture, a degree of mistreatment not otherwise proscribed by the memo because it did not articulate any bright-line standard for prohibited detainee treatment, a necessary element in any such document,” Mora wrote in a 14-page letter to the Navy’s inspector general.

Additionally, a Dec. 20, 2005, Army Inspector General Report relating to the capture and interrogation of al-Qahtani included a sworn statement by Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, who said Secretary Rumsfeld was “personally involved” in the interrogation of al-Qahtani and spoke “weekly” with Maj. Gen. Miller about the status of the interrogations between late 2002 and early 2003.

Last February, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) confirmed that it had launched a formal investigation to determine, among other issues, whether department attorneys provided the White House with poor legal advice when it said interrogators could use harsh interrogation methods against detainees.

CCR’s Warren said a trial of al-Qahtani would have forced the government to disclose how it obtained information from the defendant about alleged terrorist plans and the inner workings of al-Qaeda.

“We were pursuing the case that the government got evidence through torture,” Warren said. “The government would have to talk about how the information was obtained. That would never be able to survive in court because the torture log is clear that Mr. al-Qahtani provided information because he was being tortured.”

Warren said he wants the Pentagon to release al-Qahtani and have him sent to Saudi Arabia “where they have a system in place to maintain custody of any former Guantanamo detainee who presents a danger, as well as a strong rehabilitation program supervising those that are released.”

“It’s unlikely he would face torture or abuse on the magnitude Mr. al-Qahtani faced at Gitmo,” Warren said.

Jason Leopold has launched a new Web site, The Public Record, at www.pubrecord.org

1974 CIA NIA showed Isreal had stockpile and that there would be proliferation: NSA

National Security Archive Update, January 14, 2008

In 1974 Estimate, CIA Found that Israel Already Had a Nuclear
Stockpile and that
"Many Countries" Would Soon Have Nuclear Capabilities

http://www.nsarchive.org 

Washington DC, January 14, 2008 - In the wake of the Indian "peaceful nuclear
explosion" on May 17, 1974 and growing concern about the spread of nuclear
weapons capabilities, the U.S. intelligence community prepared a Special National
Intelligence Assessment, "Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons," published today by the National Security Archive.

The 1974 Indian test created shock waves in the U.S. government, not only because
of its broader implications, but because the intelligence community had failed to
detect that it was imminent (This failure led to an intelligence post-mortem.)
The possibility that the Indian test might lead to a nuclear arms race in South Asia
and create new pressures for nuclear proliferation elsewhere induced the U.S.
government, which under Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had treated this problem
as a lower-level issue, to begin viewing developing policies to curb proliferation
as a higher priority.

That the SNIE estimated that "many countries" would have the economic and
technological capability to produce nuclear weapons by the 1980s underlined
the seriousness of the problem, as did another statement: 
"Terrorists might attempt theft of either weapons or fissionable materials." 


Noting that there were over 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world, the report
observed that 
"absolute assurance about future security is impossible."

The CIA released the 1974 SNIE in response to a FOIA request by National Security
Archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson, author of Spying on the Bomb: American
Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea
(New York: W.W. Norton,2006). Quicker than usual, the CIA posted the SNIE on
its Web site before the National Security Archive published the document.
In response to the CIA posting, the estimate has already received some play
in the U.S. and Israeli press, as well as on www.armscontrolwonk.com. Interestingly,
twenty years ago, the CIA released an excised version of the "Summary and
Conclusions" of this document in response to a FOIA request by the Natural
Resources Defense
Council. It became the subject of a front-page story in The New York Times on
26 January 1978, under the headline, "C.I.A. Said in 1974 Israel had A-Bombs."
In response to press queries, the CIA stated that the release was a mistake
because it included some classified details.

Visit the Web site of the National Security Archive for more information about
today's posting.

http://www.nsarchive.org 

Good source for information on nuclear proliferation and the CIA!!

More, much more is on the link.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1281780&mesg_id=1281780