Category Archives: Middle East

Iran’s Nuke Program Clone in Oak Ridge

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We know with near precision the current phase of all Iran’s nuclear program progress stands. How you ask? We have better scientists than Iran does and have been advancing these technologies for far longer. In fact, the United States has a clone operation located in Oak Ridge. This makes the P5+1 negotiations with John Kerry in the lead all the more…well stupid and frankly…reckless.

Primer:

ORNL plays an important role in national and global security by virtue of its expertise in advanced materials, nuclear science, supercomputing and other scientific specialties. Discovery and innovation in these areas are essential for protecting US citizens and advancing national and global security priorities. ORNL supports these missions by using its signature strengths to meet complex national security challenges in a number of areas.

Nuclear Nonproliferation – The laboratory’s expertise and experience covers the spectrum of nuclear nonproliferation work, from basic R&D to “boots-on-the-ground” implementation. This work ranges from uranium fuel cycle research to detection technologies and nuclear forensics. ORNL’s non-proliferation activities include developing, coordinating and helping to implement policies designed to reduce threats from a variety of sources, including nuclear weapons and “dirty bombs.”

National Defense – ORNL works with the US Department of Defense to respond to global challenges by developing and delivering advanced technologies in areas such as special materials; information management, synthesis and analysis; advanced sensor technology; energy efficiency technologies; early warning systems for chemical and biological threats; and unmanned air, ground and sea systems.

Then there is Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago where scientists have been at the forefront of nuclear reactor technology since the lab’s founding in 1946 as the home of the world’s first reactors. Groundbreaking research performed at the lab over the following decades led to the creation of the current generation of American nuclear reactors.

Checks and Balances for negotiations:

In Atomic Labs Across U.S., a Race to Stop Iran

WASHINGTON — When diplomats at the Iran talks in Switzerland pummeled Department of Energy scientists with difficult technical questions — like how to keep Iran’s nuclear plants open but ensure that the country was still a year away from building a bomb — the scientists at times turned to a secret replica of Iran’s nuclear facilities built deep in the forests of Tennessee.

There inside a gleaming plant at the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation were giant centrifuges — some surrendered more than a decade ago by Libya, others built since — that helped the scientists come up with what they told President Obama were the “best reasonable” estimates of Iran’s real-life ability to race for a weapon under different scenarios.

“We know a lot more about Iranian centrifuges than we would otherwise,” said a senior nuclear specialist familiar with the forested site and its covert operations.

The classified replica is but one part of an extensive crash program within the nation’s nine atomic laboratories — Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Livermore among them — to block Iran’s nuclear progress. As the next round of talks begins on Wednesday in Vienna, the secretive effort remains a technological obsession for thousands of lab employees living the Manhattan Project in reverse. Instead of building a bomb, as their predecessors did in a race to end World War II, they are trying to stop one.

Ernest J. Moniz, the nuclear scientist and secretary of energy, who oversees the atomic labs, said in an interview that as the Obama administration sought technical solutions at the talks, diplomats would have been stumbling in the dark “if we didn’t have this capability nurtured over many decades.” Although Mr. Moniz would not discuss the secret plant at Oak Ridge, parts of which date to the American and Israeli program to launch cyberattacks on Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant, he said more generally that the atomic labs give the United States “the capacity to carry through” in one of the most complex arms-control efforts in history.

It has also changed the labs. In the bomb-making days, the scientists largely kept to their well-guarded posts. But anyone traveling to the Iran talks over the past year and a half in Vienna and Lausanne, Switzerland, saw the Energy Department experts working hard as the negotiations proceeded, and heading out to dinner after long days of talks.

It was over one of those dinners in Vienna last summer that several of the experts began wondering how they might find a face-saving way for Iran to convert its deep-underground enrichment plant at Fordo, a covert site exposed by the United States five years ago, into a research center. That would enable Iran to say the site was still open, and the United States could declare it was no longer a threat.

“The question was what kind of experiment you can do deep underground,” recalled a participant in the dinner. By the time coffee came around, the kernel of an idea had developed, and it subsequently became a central part of the understanding with Iran that Secretary of State John Kerry and Mr. Moniz announced this month. Under the preliminary accord, Fordo would become a research center, but not for any element that could potentially be used in nuclear weapons.

Sometimes, during negotiations in Switzerland, a member of the scientific team would dump a bowl of chocolates on the table and rearrange them to show the Iranians how a proposed site rearrangement might work. “It was a visual way,” an official said, “to get past the language barrier.”

But much of the work was done back at the labs, where specialists who had become accustomed to more 9-to-5 days found themselves on call seven days a week, around the clock, answering questions from negotiators and, at times, backing up the answers with calculations and computer modeling.

A senior official of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Kevin Veal, who has been along for every negotiating session, would send questions back to the laboratories, hoping to separate good ideas from bad. “It’s what our people love to do,” said Thom Mason, the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “It can be very rewarding.”

Given the stakes in the sensitive negotiations, the labs would check and recheck one another, making sure the answers held up. The natural rivalries among the labs sometimes worked to the negotiators’ advantage: Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the mountains of New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb, was happy to find flaws in calculations done elsewhere, and vice versa.

“A lot of what we did was behind the scenes,” said Charles F. McMillan, the Los Alamos director.

A prime target of the effort was redesigning Iran’s still-under-construction nuclear reactor at Arak, a sprawling complex ringed by antiaircraft guns. The question was how to prevent the reactor from producing weapons-grade plutonium, a main fuel of atom bombs. Iran insisted the reactor was being built to produce medical isotopes for disease therapy.

Last year, when the Iranians proposed a way to redesign Arak, the job of assessing the plans fell to Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, one of the world’s most experienced developers of nuclear reactors.

The lab refined the Iranian idea, making sure Arak’s new fuel core would produce no pure bomb-grade plutonium. Eventually, the Iranians signed on. It is one of the few elements of the provisional nuclear deal between Iran, the United States and five other world powers that looks like a permanent fix because in order to produce weapons fuel, the whole reactor would have to undergo an obvious overhaul.

In lauding the deal announced early this month, Mr. Moniz put the redesign of Arak at the top of the achievements list, saying it “shuts down the plutonium pathway.”

At other times, scientists were on tight deadlines to come up with solutions.

Late last year, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was traveling by train to visit his children when a call came in that his team had to immediately reassess Natanz, Iran’s main enrichment plant. There in a vast underground bunker mazes of centrifuges spin around the clock to purify uranium, another bomb fuel.

The question was whether a proposed design of Natanz that allowed more than 6,000 centrifuges to spin would still accomplish the administration’s goal of keeping Iran at least a year away from acquiring enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. The answer was yes.

William H. Goldstein, the director of the Livermore lab, said the required turnaround for answers “was hours in some cases.”

Fordo, the most troubling of Iran’s many nuclear sites, was another major challenge. The enrichment complex there is buried so far under a mountain that Israel fears it could not wipe out the site and its nearly 3,000 centrifuges with airstrikes. The United States has only one bunker-busting weapon that might accomplish the job.

Over the dinner last summer in Vienna, the scientists and American negotiators discussed how to turn the mountain fortress into a peaceful research center.

The answer lay in the deep-underground nature of the site, which made it excellent for an observatory to track invisible rays from cosmic explosions, opening a new window onto the universe. (The rocky strata of the site would filter out extraneous signals.) Another idea was to use the installed centrifuges for purifying rare forms of elements used in medicine rather than for uranium.

In early March, Oak Ridge in Tennessee got a call from the negotiators. They needed to learn more about the idea of purifying elements, to make sure that it was possible and that the equipment left in the mountain could not be easily turned to producing nuclear fuel.

An Oak Ridge team went into action, working Friday night into Saturday. That afternoon, Mr. Mason, the Oak Ridge director, was able to send a report to Washington, which was then delivered to Mr. Moniz.

“The answer was ‘yes,’ ” Mr. Mason said. “It was feasible.”

In the interview, Mr. Moniz said he spoke to his lab directors last week and asked them to think hard about other uses for the Fordo complex, an issue that will be on the table when negotiators resume their talks this week.

The world of science, Mr. Moniz said, has lots of peaceful projects that would help move the mountainous fortress off the pathway to atomic bombs.

“We’re going to be thinking,” he said, “about other directions.” The question is whether, in the last weeks of the negotiations, the Iranians will go along.

Did Susan Rice Leak Classified Info on Purpose?

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There was a profound moment when the Prime Minister of Israel gave a presentation at the United Nations on Iran’s readiness of their break-out period on their nuclear weapon using a cartoon as a prop. The Obama administration later used it as satire against Netanyahu.

Capture

Seems, a year or so later, the White House is agreeing….pigs fly…..

Did Susan Rice Disclose Classified Info on Iran?

Bloomberg’s Eli Lake reports Tuesday that the Obama administration kept secret until the beginning of April Iran’s two to three month breakout time for a nuclear weapon, saying “the administration only declassified this estimate at the beginning of the month, just in time for the White House to make the case for its Iran deal to Congress and the public.”

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, speaking to reporters on Monday, said that the administration has held this assessment for “quite some time.” Lake says that Brian Hale, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, confirmed Monday “that the two-to-three-month estimate for fissile material was declassified on April 1.”

However, at least one member of the administration publicly spoke about the two-to-three-month breakout time frame prior to April. On March 2, 2015, National Security Advisor Susan Rice addressed the annual AIPAC meeting and said the following [emphasis added]:

This is my third point—a good deal is one that would verifiably cut off every pathway for Iran to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon.  Every single one.

Any deal must prevent Iran from developing weapons-grade plutonium at Arak, or anywhere else.

Any deal must prevent Iran from enriching uranium at its nuclear facility at Fordow—a site we uncovered buried deep underground and revealed to the world in 2009.

Any deal must increase the time it takes Iran to reach breakout capacity—the time it would take to produce a single bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium.  Today, experts suggest Iran’s breakout window is just two to three months.  We seek to extend that to at least one year.

Rice’s disclosure suggests that either DNI spokesman Brian Hale is incorrect in his assertion that the assessment was declassified on April 1, or Rice revealed classified information.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Rice’s March disclosure.

From HotAir:

Only a few short weeks later, that framework nuclear deal appears increasingly dubious. Iran has demanded that it sunset after only five rather than ten years. The Islamic Republic also wants to operate twice the number of centrifuges agreed to in Switzerland. The administration insists that it will provide sanctions relief to Iran in stages, but Tehran contends that it will have total relief right up front. According to The Wall Street Journal, the mullahs learned on Friday that they will receive billions in unfrozen funds once a deal is signed even as American and Iranian warships engage in a tense standoff off the coast of Yemen.

Few believe that the complex international sanctions regime in place today, a web of commitments that took years to assemble, could “snap back” in the event that Iran failed to live up to its end of the deal. “[O]nly a credulous sixth-grader could imagine that in the event that there is some evidence of Iranian cheating (and the evidence inevitably will be murky, incomplete, and subject to debate) that countries such as France and Germany, which are eager to do business with Tehran, much less countries such as China and Russia, which are not only cozy with Tehran but hostile to Western interests in general, will agree to reimpose sanctions,” Commentary Magazine’s Max Boot observed.

While Netanyahu might not have accurately assessed Iran’s nuclear capabilities in 2012, he was apparently correct when he insisted earlier this month that “Iran’s breakout time from start of deal will be near zero.” Today, Americans are learning that the administration knew Netanyahu was telling the truth about Iranian breakout times even as it was mocking him before an audience of the president’s sycophantic and naïve Twitter fans. As The Daily Beat’s Eli Lake wrote on Tuesday, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and a spokesman with the Director of National Intelligence’s office both confirmed that Iran could have the materials necessary to construct a fissionable device before the autumn.

“Here is the puzzling thing,” Lake wrote, “When Obama began his second term in 2013, he sang a different tune.”

He emphasized that Iran was more than a year away from a nuclear bomb, without mentioning that his intelligence community believed it was only two to three months away from making enough fuel for one, long considered the most challenging task in building a weapon. Today Obama emphasizes that Iran is only two to three months away from acquiring enough fuel for a bomb, creating a sense of urgency for his Iran agreement.

Back in 2013, when Congress was weighing new sanctions on Iran and Obama was pushing for more diplomacy, his interest was in tamping down that sense of urgency. On the eve of a visit to Israel, Obama told Israel’s Channel Two, “Right now, we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon, but obviously we don’t want to cut it too close.”

On Oct. 5 of that year, Obama contrasted the U.S. view of an Iranian breakout with that of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the time said Iran was only six months away from nuclear capability. Obama told the Associated Press, “Our assessment continues to be a year or more away. And in fact, actually, our estimate is probably more conservative than the estimates of Israeli intelligence services.”

So, why mislead as this White House has misled when it invites an embarrassing rebuke like this? Because the lie is heard by all the right audiences, whereas the correction will languish in the obscure corners of the country where honesty remains a virtue.

Despite its mounting failures, the administration maintains its legitimacy by providing the smug and complacent reasons that justify their self-approbation. For many, the facts are fungible. So long as they believe in their hearts the president is brighter and more capable than his political opponents, no amount of demonstrable mendacity from the White House could shatter that belief. Even amid increasing evidence that this article of faith might not be true, the faithful will accept anything – even hastily constructed Twitter memes – so long as it affirms their creed.

“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant,” Ronald Reagan said in a pivotal 1964 speech, “it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” And this White House hopes to keep it that way.

 

The Clinton’s and False Philanthropy

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The Latest Available Clinton Foundation Filings Appear Deceptive

by: Charles Ortel

My interest in the Clinton Foundation financial disclosures was originally sparked by an article written in the New York Times entitled “Unease at Clinton Foundation over Finances and Ambitions.”

Considering this article with the benefit of hindsight after having poured through reams of public filings and comments made by the Clinton Foundation as well as related parties, one wonders how seriously management, directors, and other employees take their manifold legal duties, particularly when it comes to making truthful and complete disclosures.

Since August 2013, few investigative reporters have dug deeply enough below the surface of Clinton Foundation filings, seeking and finding answers to questions concerning the stated financial performance of significant constituent entities as well as the consolidated whole.

I have completed a summary review of these filings, and have attached a report which answers a few key questions. Specifically:

  1. What do Clinton Foundation disclosures tell informed readers about the stewardship of billions of dollars in “charitable contributions” sent to Little Rock, to New York City, to Boston, to London, and to Stockholm from numerous donors with modest means, from wealthy and powerful donors, and from a host of governments and government-connected benefactors?
  2. Did management exercise vigilance to ensure that the Clinton Foundation actually carried out its original and its amended tax-exempt purposes?
  3. Did directors take reasonable care, as fiduciaries, under applicable state, federal, and foreign laws to operate this charity serving, at all times, a public interest?
  4. Are all business arrangements with material “related” parties fully and adequately disclosed in annual, publicly available filings that comparable charities regularly complete on time?

Or, do the Clintons, and others who operate the Clinton Foundation, function as Robin Hood in reverse? Do they dupe small, modest income donors to enrich themselves and cronies?

Headline Conclusions of the First Foundation Report

The truth is that it is difficult to perform penetrating analysis of publicly available financial information pertaining to the Clinton Foundation because, so far, it is not technically complete in numerous material respects.

The numbers that the Clinton Foundation supplies to the public in its legally mandated filings do not add up, are frequently incorrect, and appear to be materially misleading. In numerous cases, the Clinton Foundation appears to have followed inconsistent policies adding in appropriate portions of the various activities it pursued around the world to create “consolidated” financial statements.

As the attached report notes, In several instances portions were added only for some of the years in which the entities remained in operation, artificially enhancing purported financial results. In other cases, important elements of activity were improperly characterized and combined.

Meanwhile the Foundation solicits donations even though its informational filings are not in compliance with applicable law. Regulators at Federal, State, Local, and international levels are not doing what they should do to protect the public.

Why?

And how long must we wait before regulators at home and abroad remedy rampant and persistent deficiencies in the Clinton Foundation’s operating and disclosure practices.

The attached print report details ten specific concerns about the most recent Clinton Foundation filings. I invite your considered reaction.

Read the full interim report here.

Clinton Foundation(s) Collusion

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From their website:

Creating Partnerships of Purpose We convene businesses, governments, NGOs, and individuals to improve global health and wellness, increase opportunity for women and girls, reduce childhood obesity

New Book, ‘Clinton Cash,’ Questions Foreign Donations to Foundation

The book does not hit shelves until May 5, but already the Republican Rand Paul has called its findings “big news” that will “shock people” and make voters “question” the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” by Peter Schweizer — a 186-page investigation of donations made to the Clinton Foundation by foreign entities — is proving the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy.

The book, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, asserts that foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return.

“We will see a pattern of financial transactions involving the Clintons that occurred contemporaneous with favorable U.S. policy decisions benefiting those providing the funds,” Mr. Schweizer writes.

His examples include a free-trade agreement in Colombia that benefited a major foundation donor’s natural resource investments in the South American nation, development projects in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake in 2010, and more than $1 million in payments to Mr. Clinton by a Canadian bank and major shareholder in the Keystone XL oil pipeline around the time the project was being debated in the State Department.

In the long lead up to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign announcement, aides proved adept in swatting down critical books as conservative propaganda, including Edward Klein’s “Blood Feud,” about tensions between the Clintons and the Obamas, and Daniel Halper’s “Clinton Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine.”

But “Clinton Cash” is potentially more unsettling, both because of its focused reporting and because major news organizations including The Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have exclusive agreements with the author  to pursue the story lines found in the book.

Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which includes Mr. Paul and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, have been briefed on the book’s findings, and its contents have already made their way into several of the Republican presidential candidates’ campaigns.

Conservative “super PACs” plan to seize on “Clinton Cash,” and a pro-Democrat super PAC has already assembled a dossier on Mr. Schweizer, a speechwriting consultant to former President George W. Bush and a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution who has contributed to the conservative website Breitbart.com, to make the case that he has a bias against Mrs. Clinton.

And the newly assembled Clinton campaign team is planning a full-court press to diminish the book as yet another conservative hit job.

A campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, called the book part of the Republicans’ coordinated attack strategy on Mrs. Clinton “twisting previously known facts into absurd conspiracy theories,” and he said “it will not be the first work of partisan-fueled fiction about the Clintons’ record, and we know it will not be the last.”

The timing is problematic for Mrs. Clinton as she begins a campaign to position herself as a “champion for everyday Americans.”

From 2001 to 2012, the Clintons’ income was at least $136.5 million, Mr. Schweizer writes, using a figure previously reported in The Post. “During Hillary’s years of public service, the Clintons have conducted or facilitated hundreds of large transactions” with foreign governments and individuals, he writes. “Some of these transactions have put millions in their own pockets.”

The Clinton Foundation has come under scrutiny for accepting foreign donations while Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state. Last week, the foundation revised its policy to allow donations from countries like Germany, Canada, the Netherlands and Britain but prohibit giving by other nations in the Middle East.

Mr. Schweizer’s book will be released the same day former President Bill Clinton and the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea, will host the Clinton Global Initiative gathering with donors in Morocco, the culmination of a foundation trip to several African nations. (A chapter in the book is titled “Warlord Economics: The Clintons Do Africa.”)

There is a robust market for books critical of the Clintons. The thinly sourced “Blood Feud,” by Mr. Klein, at one point overtook Mrs. Clinton’s memoir “Hard Choices” on the best-seller list.

But whether Mr. Schweizer’s book can deliver the same sales is not clear. He writes mainly in the voice of a neutral journalist and meticulously documents his sources, including tax records and government documents, while leaving little doubt about his view of the Clintons.

His reporting largely focuses on payments made to Mr. Clinton for speeches, which increased while his wife served as secretary of state, writing that “of the 13 Clinton speeches that fetched $500,000 or more, only two occurred during the years his wife was not secretary of state.”

In 2011, Mr. Clinton made $13.3 million in speaking fees for 54 speeches, the majority of which were made overseas, the author writes.

*** Now the questions that need to be asked include what policies did the State Department, the NSC and the White House take covertly with regard to diplomacy and those affects on strategies.

Resettlement of Somalis in America, Threat Matrix

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Refugee resettlement into the United States where the U.S. State Department in coordination with the United Nations has brought terror recruiting to our homeland. Arrests occur weekly of those that either have traveled to Iraq and or Syria, trained and have returned or are part of a peer to peer process to attack soft targets in America. Each mayor, each governor must demand a stop to this program. Is it happening in a town in which you live? Likely yes. 190 towns across America are targeted locations for resettlement.

In case you have any questions on the matter of ‘Refugee Resettlement’ click here to listen to the facts.

Just this past February in Minneapolis:

Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin and U.S. Attorney Andrew M. Luger for the District of Minnesota announced today the indictment of Hamza Naj Ahmed, 19, for conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).  Ahmed is also charged with attempting to provide material support to ISIL and for making a false statement in a terrorism investigation.  Ahmed was previously charged by criminal complaint for lying to FBI agents.  The defendant was detained on Feb. 5, 2015, after making an initial appearance before Magistrate Judge Steven Rau in U.S. District Court in St. Paul, Minnesota.

“Hamza Ahmed is at least the fourth person from the Twin Cities charged as a result of an ongoing investigation into individuals who have traveled or are attempting to travel to Syria in order to join a foreign terrorist organization,” said U.S. Attorney Luger. “Since 2007, dozens of people from the Twin Cities have traveled or attempted to travel overseas in support of terror. While my office will continue to prosecute those who attempt to provide material support to ISIL or any other terrorist organization, we remain committed to working with dedicated community members to bring this cycle to an end.”

The photos above were taken in Minneapolis.

 

FBI Arrests 6 People In 2 States In Terrorism Investigation

The FBI made a string of arrests Sunday, taking a total of six people into custody in Minneapolis and San Diego in a terrorism joint task force operation. The arrests follow an inquiry into young people from the Twin Cities area who have joined terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Shabab.

Details about the case are still emerging. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Minnesota office has confirmed the arrests to several media outlets, saying that public safety was not under an immediate threat. So far, it seems that all of those arrested are young men whose families are originally from Somalia.

A news briefing about the arrests is scheduled for Monday morning; we’ll update this post with news.

From Minnesota Public Radio:

“A Somali woman who said she was the mother of two men who were arrested told MPR News that the FBI arrived at her house around noon. One of her sons was arrested at her house; the other was arrested in San Diego.

“She said more than a dozen FBI and police officers searched her house and confiscated a tablet computer owned by the son arrested in San Diego.”

That woman met with other parents whose sons were arrested Sunday; they’re part of a large Somali community in Minneapolis. ***

“We have a terror recruiting problem in Minnesota,” US Attorney for Minnesota Andrew Luger said during the press conference.

“As described in the criminal complaint, these men worked over the course of the last 10 months to join ISIL,” said Luger. “Even when their co-conspirators were caught and charged, they continued to seek new and creative ways to leave Minnesota to fight for a terror group. ”

According to the FBI, authorities on Sunday arrested Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman, Adnan Farah, Hanad Mustafe Musse and Guled Ali Omar in Minneapolis, and Abdirahman Yasin Daud and Mohamed Abdihamid Farah were arrested in California after driving from Minneapolis to San Diego. All the accused are between the ages of 19 and 21.