Global Warming and Widespread Blackouts Are Just as Deadly as Terrorism

By Jason Leopold

© 2005 Jason Leopold

Two years ago this month, a Blackout plunged 50 million people in Northeastern U.S. and the Canadian province of Ontario into total darkness for more than a day, wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy. Now, it’s the devastation in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi wrought by Hurricane Katrina that has killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.

The common thread in both disasters is that energy and environmental experts sounded early alarms about the potential for catastrophes like this unless the White House immediately took the necessary steps to upgrade the country’s aging power grid to stave off widespread power failures, and in the case of climate change, backed the Kyoto protocol, which aims to curb the air pollution blamed for severe climate changes that is no doubt the reason Katrina turned from a relatively small hurricane to a destructive monstrosity due to high sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the National Weather Service.

While support for the Kyoto treaty wouldn't have fended off an act of God like Hurricane Katrina it would have been a step in the right direction for the White House politically in that the Bush administration is criticized for neglecting the environment. By signing it, supporting it or what have you the White House would be able to fend off its critics who claim the administration has done nothing to safeguard the environment for future generations.

Global Warming isn’t some harebrained scheme cooked up in a laboratory by mad scientists. It’s an issue that is as real as terrorism. And it’s just as deadly.

Power shortages and daily blackouts have become a daily occurrence around the country over the past few years as the antiquated power grid is continuously stretched beyond its means—mainly a result of electricity deregulation, whereby power is sent hundreds of miles across the grid to consumers by out-of-state power companies as opposed to power being sent to consumers by local utilities, which is what the grid was designed for.

Still, the Bush administration, and Democratic and Republican lawmakers, has refused to treat the issues with the same type of urgency given to the so-called war on terror, which makes the president’s sympathetic response to Katrina’s victims and those who are trapped inside elevators during blackouts insincere.

Keep in mind the White House refuses to change its stance on the issues because it would be economically unfriendly to President Bush’s financial supporters—the oil and gas industry who just got $15 billion in tax breaks under the new energy bill that guarantees these corporate behemoths will end up emitting more toxic emissions and greenhouse gases into the air from their power plants and refineries, further eroding the environment and, as a result, ensuring that Global Warming, and unusual weather related disasters like Hurricane Katrina, are here to stay.

On the electricity front, all may appear to be back to normal since the worst blackout in the nation’s history struck an unsuspecting public two years ago. But there’s a crisis in the making there too and it’s only a matter of time before another catastrophic power failure hits.

Just last week, more than 500,000 Southern California residents fell victim to rolling blackouts after a transmission line linking California to Oregon tripped, creating a shortage of more than 2,600 megawatts. One megawatt can light about 750 homes.

Two years ago, President Bush promised that the nation’s aging power grid would quickly be updated to stave off the potential for future blackouts and to handle growing demand, but so far nothing substantial has been done and the likelihood for a Hurricane Katrina-like disaster remains all too real. Demand for electricity is expected to increase by 45 percent by 2025. The Bush administration has not developed a plan to handle, at the very least, the annual increase in demand.

Spotting the potential for a disaster similar to the August 2002 blackout, Pat Wood, the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and a close friend of Bush, distanced himself from the do nothing attitude of his friends in the White House.

“The reliability of the transmission grid is too important to let another year go by without legislation providing for nationwide mandatory reliability rules,” Wood said at a June 8 Energy and Resources Subcommittee hearing on the reliability of the nation’s electricity system.

Currently, power companies maintain grid reliability by following voluntary guidelines designed by the power industry, just like the voluntary emissions limits the fossil-fuel industry says it upholds. A measure that would have imposed mandatory grid reliability rules and mandatory limits on fossil fuel and greenhouse gas emissions was defeated by the Senate earlier this year at the urging of President Bush, who said the voluntary rules were working.

Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.

What's Eating Cindy Sheehan?

By Jason Leopold

Cindy Sheehan has been subjected to an unwarranted backlash by right-wing pundits because of her antiwar protests and some explosive statements she made about President Bush. Perhaps Sheehan, while mourning the death of her son, Casey, a U.S. soldier who died in the Iraq war, lashed out at the president, and decided to take her antiwar message to Crawford, Texas, after doing some fact checking on her emotional state. If so, these are likely some of the circumstances that drove her:

While searching the 600 or so sites identified by United States intelligence and Iraqi officials as places where the country's biological weapons may have been hidden, which was President Bush’s rationale for starting the war, to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, not a single speck of anthrax or other WMD has been uncovered since the war started more than two years ago.

Two skeletal trailers that may have been used to develop anthrax or botulism, scrubbed from top to bottom when it was found, leaving no biological weapons traces behind, according to the Department of Defense, is the only evidence the U.S. has found so far to justify its preemptive strike against Iraq.

The media who covered the war on the ground asked U.S. military officials in Iraq why WMD haven't been found. Their responses were short and to the point.

"I honestly don't know" the answer, said Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for U.S. intelligence, during a briefing May 30, 2003.

Prior to the war, nearly every major media outlet warned, based on reports from the Pentagon, that Iraq's cache of chemical and biological weapons could be used on U.S. and British troops sent into Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein's regime.

To back up these claims, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Saddam's history of using WMD on his own people and in the war the country fought against Iran was evidence of the viciousness of the dictatorship. So are we to believe that Saddam suddenly got a dose of humanity, opting instead to let his regime be torn apart rather than go out in a blaze of glory? Or could it be that Iraq either destroyed its WMD or never had anything substantial to begin with?

Looking back at the events that led up to the war, it's likely the latter. The Bush administration never presented the proof to the United Nations that its intelligence suggesting Iraq was developing chemical and biological weapons was superior to that of the U.N. weapons inspectors who actually combed through the country looking for stockpiles of anthrax, botulism or VX. Now the military, which has taken over inspections, are finding exactly what U.N. weapons inspectors found – nothing. Even Al Capone's safe had a couple of empty bottles of liquor in it when Geraldo Rivera opened it up twenty years ago.

In October 2002, President Bush gave a speech in Cincinnati and spoke about the imminent threat Iraq posed to the U.S. because of the country's alleged ties with al-Qaeda and its endless supply of chemical and biological weapons:

"Surveillance photos reveal that the (Iraqi) regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons," Bush said. "Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles – far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations – in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work. We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States. And, of course, sophisticated delivery systems aren't required for a chemical or biological attack; all that might be required are a small container and one terrorist or Iraqi intelligence operative to deliver it."

None of this intelligence information has ever panned out. Most notably, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vice President Dick Cheney erred when he said in 2002 that Iraq was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon.

Furthermore, the president's claims that thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program were also incorrect.

Bush said in a September 2002 speech that attempts by Iraq to acquire the tubes point to a clandestine program to make enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. But experts contradicted Bush, saying that the evidence is ambiguous.

The report, from the Institute for Science and International Security, a copy of which was acquired by the Washington Post, "also contends that the Bush administration is trying to quiet dissent among its own analysts over how to interpret the evidence."

David Albright, a physicist who investigated Iraq's nuclear weapons program following the 1991 Persian Gulf War as a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency's inspection team, the Post reported, authored the report.

The Institute, headquartered in Washington, is an independent group that studies nuclear and other security issues."

"By themselves, these attempted procurements are not evidence that Iraq is in possession of, or close to possessing, nuclear weapons," the report said, according to the Post story. "They do not provide evidence that Iraq has an operating centrifuge plant or when such a plant could be operational."

The lack of evidence and public blunders by other high-ranking officials in the Bush administration are endless.

Secretary of State Colin Powell made it clear in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on February 3, 2003, a day before his infamous meeting at the U.N. where he presented "evidence" of an Iraqi weapons program, which turned out to be the empty trailers the U.S. military found shortly after the start of the war, that there was no "smoking gun":

"While there will be no 'smoking gun,' we will provide evidence concerning the weapons programs that Iraq is working so hard to hide," Powell said in his op-ed. "We will, in sum, offer a straightforward, sober and compelling demonstration that Saddam is concealing the evidence of his weapons of mass destruction, while preserving the weapons themselves."

However, Powell did no such thing. Instead, Powell held up a small vial of anthrax at the U.N. meeting to illustrate how deadly just a small vial can be and then used that to couch his claims that Iraq's alleged stockpile of anthrax would be much deadlier.

The same day, February 3, 2003 White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer dodged a dozen or so questions about the intelligence information from sources in Iraq and from the CIA that showed, without any doubt, that Iraq possessed WMD.

"I think the reason that we know Saddam Hussein possesses chemical and biological weapons is from a wide variety of means. That's how we know," Fleischer said.

In virtually every press briefing (archived on the White House's web site), and every speech by President Bush between January 2003 and the days leading up to the war in March, hundreds of questions were directed at Bush during stakeouts and at Fleischer at his press briefings about what intelligence information the U.S. had that could be declassified to support its allegations that Iraq was either developing WMD or was hiding them. However, not a single shred of proof was offered up by the White House to back up its claims.

Moreover, when the White House finally seized on something tangible prior to the war, such as the existence of long-range missiles, Iraq started destroying the weapons in the presence of U.N. inspectors. But at that point war with Iraq was inevitable.

In an interview with "Meet the Press" on February 9, 2003, Tim Russert, the program's host, asked Powell about one of the alleged WMD sites Powell spoke about at a U.N. meeting the week before. Russert asked Powell if the U.S. knew where certain weapons in Iraq were being stored why not just send the U.N. inspectors in or destroy the facility rather than go to war.

Powell's response is poignant:

"Well, the inspectors eventually did go there, and by the time they got there, they were no longer active chemical bunkers."

Still trying to figure out what’s eating Cindy Sheehan?

(Reporter’s note: I wrote a portion of this article in 2003, shortly after the start of the war. I have changed some elements of it in hopes of explaining why some people, such as Cindy Sheehan, demand an end to the war).

Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.

Lying With a Straight Face

By Jason Leopold

© 2005 Jason Leopold

Every year, right around the anniversary of 9/11 the Bush administration spins the public about the reasons 1,864 American soldiers have died fighting for a lie in Iraq. And every year, it’s just as crucial that the media tell the public the truth about the reasons the war was started.

So here goes.

The disinformation campaign the White House launched last weekend should leave no doubt that the war in Iraq was hatched well before 9/11 and is part of a broader strategy to remake the entire Middle East into a so-called Pax Americana, a blueprint drafted by hardcore neoconservatives years ago that called for overthrowing Middle East dictators and installing U.S. approved governments in the region.

It’s entirely likely that the administration will attempt to sell Congress and the public another war in the near future, the next likely target being Iran. How else should we interpret the following statement Bush made in Utah Monday, during a speech he made to Veterans of Foreign Wars?

“The third part of our strategy in the war on terror is to spread the hope of freedom across the broader Middle East,” Bush said.

As public support for the Iraq war erodes, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have taken their propaganda campaign on the road, once again linking the war in Iraq to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in hopes that the administration can dramatically change perception of the military conflict in Iraq, even though a half-dozen federal investigations have concluded that Iraq played no role in 9/11.

In the book “The Price of Loyalty,” Bush’s former Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill said that the Iraq war was planned just days after the president was sworn into office.

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill said, adding that going after Saddam Hussein was a priority 10 days after the Bush’s inauguration and eight months before Sept. 11.

“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty, wrote in his book. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”

As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.

O’Neill was fired from his post for disagreeing with Bush’s economic policies. In typical White House fashion, senior administration officials have labeled O’Neill a “disgruntled employee”, whose remarks are “laughable” and have no basis in reality.

Moreover, claims by O’Neill that the U.S. and Britain were operating from murky intelligence during the buildup to war came six days after Bush’s inauguration. It was then that British intelligence communicated to the CIA, the Pentagon and National Security Adviser Rice’s office that an Iraqi defector told British intelligence officials that Saddam Hussein had two fully operational nuclear bombs, according to two senior Bush advisers.

The London Telegraph reported the defector’s claims on Jan. 28, 2001.

“According to the defector, who cannot be named for security reasons, bombs are being built in Hemrin in north-eastern Iraq, near the Iranian border,” according to the Telegraph report. The defector said: "There are at least two nuclear bombs which are ready for use. Before the UN inspectors came, there were 47 factories involved in the project. Now there are 64."

That information turned out to be grossly inaccurate but it was cited by Vice President Dick Cheney during a speech in 2002 as a means to build the case for war.

However, O’Neill’s allegations that Bush planned an Iraq invasion prior to 9-11 are backed up by dozens of on-the-record statements and speeches made by the president’s senior advisers, including Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, during Bush’s first four months in office.

In dozens of transcripts posted on the Defense Department’s web site between January and May 2001, months before 9-11, Rumsfeld said the United States needed to be prepared for surprises, such as launching preemptive wars against countries like Iraq.

“If you think about it, Dick Cheney's (Secretary of Defense) confirmation hearing in 1989 -- not one United States senator mentioned a word about Iraq,” Rumsfeld said in a May 25, 2001 interview with PBS’ NewsHour. “The word "Iraq" was never mentioned in his entire confirmation hearing. One year later we're at war with Iraq. Now, what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that you'd best be flexible; you'd best expect the unexpected.”

In fact, Rumsfeld discusses the above scenario in a half-dozen other interviews in May 2001 and appears to suggest, by specifically mentioning Iraq, that history would eventually repeat itself.

Responding to a reporter’s question on January 26, 2001 about the Bush administration’s policy toward Saddam Hussein’s regime days after his Senate confirmation hearing, Rumsfeld said “I think that the policy of the country is that it is not helpful to have Saddam Hussein's regime in office.”

In his inaugural address on January 20, 2001 President Bush also alluded to the possibility of war, although he did not mention Iraq by name.

“We will confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors,” Bush said. “The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake … We will defend our allies and our interests.”

Further evidence suggests that when the Bush administration took office it was worried that the U.S. was losing international support for the sanctions it placed on Iraq ten years earlier leaving the door open to the possibility that Saddam Hussein would be let out of his proverbial box. President Bush sent Powell on a trip to the Middle East in late February 2001 to study the situation in Iraq to decide whether the administration should keep the sanctions in place or whether it should start to lay the groundwork for a preemptive strike.

But Powell returned to the U.S. and championed the sanctions saying, Iraq posed absolutely no threat to the U.S., during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 8, 2001, much to the dismay of Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom believed in using military force to oust Saddam Hussein.

“When we took over on the 20th of January, I discovered that we had an Iraq policy that was in disarray, and the sanctions part of that policy was not just in disarray; it was falling apart,” Powell said during his Senate testimony.

“We were losing support for the sanctions regime that had served so well over the last ten years, with all of the ups and downs and with all of the difficulties that are associated that regime, it was falling apart. It had been successful. Saddam Hussein has not been able to rebuild his army, notwithstanding claims that he has. He has fewer tanks in his inventory today than he had 10 years ago. Even though we know he is working on weapons of mass destruction, we know he has things squirreled away, at the same time we have not seen that capacity emerge to present a full-fledged threat to us.”

Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in early 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.

A Trip Down the Memory Hole: May 2003: Despite Thin Intelligence Reports US Plans to Overthrow Iranian Regime

By Jason Leopold

© May 29, 2003 Jason Leopold

Here we go again. While postwar Iraq continues to crumble, the Bush administration is now setting its sights on a new target—Iran—in its so-called effort to reshape most of the Middle East and bring democracy to countries ruled by vicious dictators. But the Bush administration is again relying on flimsy evidence and thin intelligence information in claiming that the Iran poses an immediate threat to the United States.

The U.S. still hasn’t uncovered any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was the prime reason for launching an attack against the country. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said in an interview reported by CNN Tuesday that it’s possible the WMD in Iraq may have been destroyed prior to the war. So right now, the Bush administration doesn’t have much credibility here or with countries that rightfully opposed the war in Iraq.

Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary, said during his daily press briefing Tuesday that Iran hasn’t taken the appropriate steps to round up al Qaeda terrorists allegedly hiding out within its borders. Moreover, Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons puts the U.S. in grave danger. Therefore, regime change is in order.

“The future of Iran will be determined by the Iranian people, and I think the Iranian people have a great yearning for government that is representative of their concerns,” Fleischer said.

Fleischer also said Iran's claim that its nuclear program is designed to produce fuel for civilian nuclear reactors is a "cover story."

“Our strong position is that Iran is preparing instead to produce fissile materials for nuclear weapons,” Fleischer said. “That is what we see.”

An Iranian opposition group says the Iranian government is building two secret nuclear sites that might already be partially operational, producing enriched uranium that could be used in nuclear weapons.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, claims the Iranian government has "planned it" so that it can "be able to get the bomb by 2005."

The NCRI provided detailed information about the previously undisclosed sites -- Lashkar-Abad and Ramandeh, about 25 miles west of Tehran, but offered no direct evidence.

Iranian officials have denied harboring al-Qaeda operatives and said the country would vigorously defend itself against any U.S. threat, which in the eyes of the Bush administration, could set the stage for another war and further increase anti-American sentiment and put the U.S. in more danger of terrorist attacks, according to several Democratic lawmakers.

However, the real cover story is the one the Bush administration is spinning in order to win public support for what was already planned for Iran months ago, well before “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Before the United States military decimated Iraq, the neocons at the highly influential think tanks the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century were already advising Bush administration officials, like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on how to overthrow the ruling parties in Iran, Libya and Syria after the war in Iraq was over.

Many of AEI and PNAC’s former members are now working in Bush’s administration. PNAC’s influence on Bush’s foreign and defense policies are so powerful that many of its recommendations on how to transform the military have already been adopted by the Pentagon.

But unlike Iraq, using military force in these other countries to replace the rulers wasn’t being considered as a way to oust the regimes, according to former Bush administration officials. Whether or not that becomes the course of action now is debatable, but even if military force isn’t used for regime change in Iran or other Middle Eastern countries the reasons for engaging in political warfare in that region is just as troubling as the reasons the U.S. launched a military attack on Iraq: intelligence information that suggests these countries pose an immediate threat to the U.S. is thin and possibly non-existent.

Still, the Bush administration has its agenda and it seems that Iran is indeed its next target. Instead of military action, the Bush administration will encourage a “popular uprising” in its effort to overthrow Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and lend financial support to Iranians to get the job done.

To get Iranians to rise up against its government, U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, has drafted an amendment to the Senate Foreign Authorization bill titled The Iran Democracy Act that calls for using the new Radio Farda to host programming from Iranian Americans who communicate with their families inside Iran about the desire for an internationally monitored referendum vote on what form of government Iran should have.

The amendment would also provide grants for private radio and TV stations in the U.S. that broadcast pro-democracy news and information into Iran. The amendment also provides funds to translate books, videos and other materials into Persian - specifically, information on building and organizing non-violent social movements.

Moreover, Brownback introduced legislation that would establish an Iran Democracy Foundation to provide grants to the Iranian-American community and for the radio and TV Stations in the U.S. that broadcast directly into Iran.

This is the type of political warfare the Bush administration believes will force Iran’s government from power. But the Bush administration will have a hard time convincing Iranians that it can follow through on its promise. For one, anarchy is running amok in postwar Iraq and many critics have accused the Bush administration of abandoning its goal of democratizing the country. Furthermore, Iranians remember how the first President Bush encouraged the Kurds to rise up against Saddam Hussein during the 1990s only to be abandoned by that administration and ultimately slaughtered by Hussein.

But that doesn’t stop the think tanks from believing that it can’t be done.

“For Iran, the approach might be compared to the approach the United States and other democratic states took to Poland in the 1980s,” said David Frum, President Bush’s former speechwriter, who is credited with coining the phrase “axis of evil,” in an April 5 presentation at AEI. “In Poland, as in Iran, an economically incompetent authoritarian regime ruled over an increasingly angry population. In Poland, as in Iran, a mass opposition movement rose up against the regime: Solidarity in Poland, the student democratic movement in Iran. Back in the 1980s, the United States and its allies never confronted the Polish communists directly. Instead, they imposed stringent economic sanctions on the regime--and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for its covert newspapers and radio stations and to support the families of jailed or exiled activists…as the regimes economy disintegrated, the Polish communists were compelled first to open negotiations with Solidarity, next to permit Solidarity to compete in semi-free elections, and finally to step aside for a Solidarity government. Fourteen years later, Poland is a democratic state and a staunch NATO ally.”

Richard Perle, who sits on the Defense Policy Board, a group that advises Rumsfeld, is more blunt in the reasons for going after Iran and he is not shy about suggesting that military force be used if necessary.

“The idea that our victory over Saddam will drive other dictators to develop chemical and biological weapons misses the key point: They are already doing so. That's why we may someday need to preempt rather than wait until we are attacked,” Perle said in a letter to AEI members earlier this month.

Michael Ledeen, another influential AEI scholar, claims that the U.S. ought to “bag” Iran’s regime because of its anti-American views.

‘The Iranian people have shown themselves to be the most pro-American population in the Muslim world, but the Iranian regime is arguably the most anti-American on Earth. Let's support the people, and help them bag the regime.”

Cheney + Pakistan = Iran: VP Helped Cover-Up Pakistani Nuclear Proliferation So US Could Sell Country Fighter Jets

By Jason Leopold
© 2005 Jason Leopold

When news last year of Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear program showed how the country's top nuclear scientist was secretly selling atomic bomb blueprints to Iran and North Korea, the so-called “Axis of Evil" (along with Iraq), world leaders waited to see how President Bush would punish Pakistan's President Pervez Musharaff.

Bush has, after all, spent his entire time in office talking tough about countries and dictators that conceal weapons of mass destruction, and even tougher about individuals who supply rogue nations and terrorists with the means to build WMDs. For all intents and purposes, Pakistan and Musharraf fit that description.

Bush, Vice President Cheney and top members of the administration reacted with shock when they found out that Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, spent the past 15 years selling outlaw nations nuclear technology and equipment. So it was sort of a surprise when Bush, upon finding out about Khan’s proliferation of nuclear technology, let Pakistan off with a slap on the wrist.

But it was all an act. In fact, it was actually a cover-up designed to shield Cheney because he knew about the proliferation for more than a decade and did nothing to stop it.

The International Atomic Energy Association launched an investigation two years ago in an attempt to uncover how Iran obtained components and parts for P-2 centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium into fuel for civilian power reactors.

Iran secured most of its supply on the black market, from the network run by Khan. The network was uncovered last year, leading to Khan's arrest in Pakistan. An ex-Dutch prime minister, Ruud Lubbers, said the CIA had asked the Netherlands in 1975 not to prosecute Khan because US intelligence wanted to find out more about Khan's contacts while he was working as an engineer at the top secret Dutch uranium enrichment plant at Almelo, the BBC reported.

IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei said in June that he was looking for "additional documentation regarding offers of equipment made to Iran, as well as for information on associated technical discussions between Iran and intermediaries in the procurement network."

The Bush administration had mountains of evidence on Pakistan’s sales of nuclear technology and equipment to nations vilified by the United States -- nations that are considered much more of a threat than Iraq -- but turned a blind eye to the threat and allowed it to happen.

In 1989, the year Khan first started selling nuclear secrets on the black-market, Richard Barlow, a young intelligence analyst working for the Pentagon, prepared a shocking report for Cheney, who was then working as Secretary of Defense under the first Bush administration: Pakistan had built an atomic bomb and was selling its nuclear equipment to countries the United States said was sponsoring terrorism.

But Barlow’s findings, as reported in a January 2002 story in the magazine Mother Jones, were “politically inconvenient.”

“A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the CIA's efforts to support Afghan rebels fighting a pro-Soviet government. It also would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad ,” Mother Jones reported.

Ironically, Pakistan, critics say, was let off the hook so the United States could use its borders to hunt for al-Qaeda leader and 9-11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Cheney dismissed Barlow’s report because he wanted to sell Pakistan the F-16 fighter planes. Several months later, Cheney told a Pentagon official to downplay Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities when he testified on the threat before Congress. Barlow complained to his bosses at the Pentagon and was fired.

“Three years later, in 1992, a high-ranking Pakistani official admitted that the country had developed the ability to assemble a nuclear weapon by 1987,” Mother Jones reported. “In 1998, Islamabad detonated its first bomb.”

During the time that Barlow prepared his report on Pakistan, Bryan Siebert, an Energy Department analyst, was looking into Saddam Hussein's nuclear program in Iraq. Siebert concluded that, "Iraq has a major effort under way to produce nuclear weapons," and said the National Security Council should investigate his findings. But the first Bush administration -- which had been supporting Iraq as a counterweight to the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran -- ignored the report, the magazine reported.

"This was not a failure of intelligence," Barlow told Mother Jones. "The intelligence was in the system."

Cheney went to great lengths to cover-up Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry. In a New Yorker article published March 29, 1993, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh quoted Barlow as saying that some high-ranking members inside the CIA and the Pentagon lied to Congress about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in an effort to ensure the sale of the F-16 fighter planes to Islamabad, which was secretly equipped to deliver nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities and the had become so grave by the spring of 1990 that then CIA deputy director Richard Kerr said the Pakistani nuclear threat was worse than the Cuban Missile crisis in the 1960s.

“It was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have ever faced since I’ve been in the U.S. government,” Kerr said in an interview with Hersh. “It may be as close as we’ve come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis.”

Kerr was leading the CIA’s review of prewar intelligence into the Iraqi threat cited by the second Bush administration.

Still, in l989, Cheney and others in the Pentagon and the CIA continued to hide the reality of Pakistan’s nuclear threat from members of Congress. Hersh explained in his lengthy New Yorker article that reasons behind the cover-up “revolves around the fact … that the Reagan Administration had dramatically aided Pakistan in its pursuit of the bomb.”

“President Reagan and his national-security aides saw the generals who ran Pakistan as loyal allies in the American proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Driving the Russians out of Afghanistan was considered far more important than nagging Pakistan about its building of bombs. The Reagan Administration did more than forgo nagging, however; it looked the other way throughout the mid-nineteen-eighties as Pakistan assembled its nuclear arsenal with the aid of many millions of dollars’ worth of restricted, high-tech materials bought inside the United States. Such purchases have always been illegal, but Congress made breaking the law more costly in 1985, when it passed the Solarz Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act (the amendment was proposed by former Representative Stephen J. Solarz, Democrat of New York), providing for the cutoff of all military and economic aid to purportedly non-nuclear nations that illegally export or attempt to export nuclear-related materials from the United States.”

“The government’s ability to keep the Pakistani nuclear-arms purchases in America secret is the more remarkable because (since 1989) the State Department, the C IA, and the Defense Department (under Cheney) have been struggling with an internal account of illegal Pakistani procurement activities, given by a former CIA intelligence officer named Richard M. Barlow,” Hersh reported. “Barlow … was dismayed to learn, at first hand, that State Department and agency officials were engaged in what he concluded was a pattern of lying to and misleading Congress about Pakistan ’s nuclear-purchasing activities.”

The description by Hersh of what took place in mid-1990 is eerily reminiscent of what is taking place today in terms of the current Bush administration’s foreign policy objectives.

Hersh interviewed scores of intelligence and administration officials for his March 1993 New Yorker story and many of those individuals confirmed Barlow’s claims that Pakistani nuclear purchases were deliberately withheld from Congress by Cheney and other officials to avoid a cutoff in military and economic aid that would adversely affect the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan.

Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.

Halliburton Sold Iranian Oil Company Key Nuclear Reactor Components, Sources Say

By Jason Leopold

© 2005 Jason Leopold

Scandal-plagued Halliburton -- the oil services company once headed by Vice President Cheney -- sold an Iranian oil development company key components for a nuclear reactor, say Halliburton sources with intimate knowledge into both companies’ business dealings.

Halliburton was secretly working at the time with one of Iran’s top nuclear program officials on natural gas related projects and sold the components in April to the official's oil development company, the sources said.

Just last week, a National Security Council report said Iran was a decade away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. That time frame could arguably have been significantly longer if Halliburton, whose miltary unit just reported a 284 percent increase in its second quarter profits due to its Iraq reconstruction contracts, was not actively providing the Iranian government with the means to build a nuclear weapon.

With Iran's new hardline government now firmly in place, Iranian officials have rounded up relatives and close business associates of Iran's former President and defeated mullah presidential candidate Hashemi Rafsanjani, alleging the men were involved in widespread corruption of Iran's oil industry, specifically tied to the country's business dealings with Halliburton.

On July 27, one of Iran's many state countrolled news agencies, FARS, an 'information' arm of the Islamic judiciary, announced the arrest of several of the executives of the Oriental Oil Kish Company, which is owned by Rafsanjani's children and other relatives.

"They were brought up on charges of economic corruption," according to a report posted on the Iran Press News website. “Following the necessary investigations by the judiciary's bailiffs, with warrants from the public prosecutor's office (mainly mullahs who only dole out Islamic jurisprudence), the case of economic corruption and malfeasance, certain of the authorities of Oriental Kish Oil Company have been arrested and under questioning. The head of the board of directors was also among those detained.”

Now comes word that Halliburton, which has a long history of flouting U.S. law by conducting business with countries the Bush administration said has ties to terrorism, was working with Cyrus Nasseri, vice chairman of the board of directors of Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran’s largest private oil companies, on oil and natural gas development projects in Tehran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran’s nuclear development team and has been negotiating Iran's nuclear development issues with the European Union and at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“Nasseri, a senior Iranian diplomat negotiating with Europe over Iran's controversial nuclear program is at the heart of deals with U.S. energy companies to develop the country's oil industry,” the Financial Times reported.

“A reliable source stated that, given the parameters, the close-knit cooperation and association of one of the key members of the regime's nuclear negotiation team with Halliburton can be an alarm bell which will necessarily instigate the dynamics of the members of the regimes' negotiating committee,” according to the Iran Press News story.

Oriental Oil Kish is registerd in the United Kingdom and Dubai.

Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in late July for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran’s nuclear secrets and accepting as much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton, Iranian government officials said. During the first round of interrogations in the judiciary, a huge network of oil mafia has been exposed, according to the IPS report.

It’s unclear whether Halliburton was privy to information regarding Iran’s nuclear activites. Halliburton sources said the company sold centrifuges and detonators to be used specifically for a nuclear reactor and oil and natural gas drilling parts for well projects to Oriental Oil Kish.

A company spokesperson did not return numerous calls for comment. A White House spokesperson also did not return calls for comment.

In 1991, Halliburton sold Libya, another country that sponsors terrorism, nuclear detonator devices. The company paid more than $3 million in fines for violating a U.S. trade embargo that President Reagan imposed in 1986 because of Libya's ties to terrorist activities.

Oriental Oil Kish dealings with Halliburton became public knowledge in January when the company announced that it had subcontracted parts of the South Pars natural gas drilling project to Halliburton Products and Services, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Halliburton that is registered in the Cayman Islands.

Following the announcement, Halliburton said the South Pars gas field project in Tehran would be its last project in Iran. The BBC reported that Halliburton, which took in $30-$40 million from its Iranian operations in 2003, "was winding down its work due to a poor business environment."

Halliburton, under mounting pressure from lawmakers in Washington, D.C., pulled out of its deal with Nasseri's company in May, but has done extensive work on other areas of the Iranian gas project and was still acting in an advisory capacity to Nasseri's company, two people who have knowledge of Halliburton's work in Iran said.

In an attempt to curtail other U.S. companies from engaging in business dealings with rogue nations, the Senate approved legislation July 26 that would penalize companies that continue to skirt U.S. law by setting up offshore subsidiaries as a way to legally conduct business in Libya, Iran and Syria, and avoid U.S. sanctions under International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is part of the Senate Defense Authorization bill.

“It prevents U.S. corporations from creating a shell company somewhere else in order to do business with rogue, terror-sponsoring nations such as Syria and Iran,” Collins said in a statement.

"The bottom line is that if a U.S. company is evading sanctions to do business with one of these countries, they are helping to prop up countries that support terrorism -- most often aimed against America," she said.

The law currently doesn’t prohibit foreign subsidiaries from conducting business with rogue nations provided that the subsidiaries are truly independent of the parent company.

But Halliburton’s Cayman Island subsidiary never did fit that description.

Halliburton first started doing business in Iran as early as 1995, while Vice President Cheney was chief executive of the company and in possible violation of U.S. sanctions.

According to a February 2001 report in the Wall Street Journal, “Halliburton Products & Services Ltd. works behind an unmarked door on the ninth floor of a new north Tehran tower block. A brochure declares that the company was registered in 1975 in the Cayman Islands, is based in the Persian Gulf sheikdom of Dubai and is non-American. But, like the sign over the receptionist's head, the brochure bears the company's name and red emblem, and offers services from Halliburton units around the world.”

Moreover, mail sent to the company’s offices in Tehran and the Cayman Islands is forwarded to the company’s Houston headquarters.

Not surprisingly, in a letter drafted by trade groups representing corporate executives vehemently objected to the amendment saying it would lead to further hatred and perhaps incite terrorist attacks on the United States and “greatly strain relations with the United States’ primary trading partners.”

“Extraterritorial measures irritate relations with the very nations the United States must secure cooperation from to promote multilateral strategies to fight terrorism and to address other areas of mutual concern,” said a letter signed by the Coalition for Employment through Exports, Emergency Coalition for American Trade, National Foreign Trade Council, USA Engage, U.S. Council on International Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“Foreign governments view U.S. efforts to dictate their foreign and commercial policy as violations of sovereignty, often leading them to adopt retaliatory measures more at odds with U.S. goals.”

Still, Collins’ amendment has some holes. As Washington Times columnist Frank Gaffney pointed out in a July 25 story, “the Collins amendment would seek to penalize individuals or entities who evade IEEPA sanctions -- if they are "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States."

“This is merely a restatement of existing regulations," Gaffney said.

"The problem with this formulation is that, in the process of purportedly closing one loophole, it would appear to create new ones. As Sen. Collins told the Senate: "Some truly independent foreign subsidiaries are incorporated under the laws of the country in which they do business and are subject to that country's laws, to that legal jurisdiction. There is a great deal of difference between a corporation set up in a day, without any real employees or assets, and one that has been in existence for many years and that gets purchased, in part, by a U.S. firm."

"It is a safe bet that every foreign subsidiary of a U.S. company doing business with terrorist states will claim it is one of the ones Sen. Collins would allow to continue enriching our enemies, not one prohibited from doing so,” Gaffney said.

Going a step further, Dow Jones Newswires reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sent letters in June to energy corporations demanding that the companies disclose in their security filings any business dealings with terrorist supporting nations.

“The letters have been sent by the SEC's Office of Global Security Risk, a special division that monitors companies with operations in Iran and other countries under U.S. sanctions, which were created by the U.S. Congress in 2004,” Dow Jones reported.

The move comes as investors have become increasingly concerned that they may be unwillingly supporting terrorist activity. In the case of Halliburton, the New York City Comptroller's office threatened in March 2003 to pull its $23 million investment in the company if Halliburton continued to conduct business with Iran.

The SEC letters are aimed at forcing corporations to disclose their profits from business dealings rogue nations. Oil companies, such as Devon Energy Corp., ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp., that currently conduct business with countries that sponsor terrorism, have not disclosed the profits received from terrorist countries in their most recent quarterly reports because the companies don’t consider the earnings “material.”

Devon Energy was until recently conducting business in Syria. The company just sold its stake in an oil field there. ConocoPhillips has a service contract with the Syrian Petroleum Co. that expires on Dec. 31.

Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.