Free Republic

If Mary O. McCarthy should ever be so desperate as to need a character witness, or to require one so badly that she must stoop to my level, I declare in advance that I shall step forward pro bono. I am quite willing to accept that whatever she did or did not do or say about the surreptitious incarceration of al-Qaida suspects overseas (and let's not prejudge this), she did it from the most exalted motives.

IAEA acts to clean up Iraq atom site, 1,000 at risk Mon Apr 24, 2006 7:15 PM BST Printer Friendly | Email Article | RSS VIENNA (Reuters) - The International Atomic Energy Agency has begun a drive to clean up the former Tuwaitha nuclear site in Iraq where radioactive residue poses a health risk to 1,000 nearby inhabitants, the nuclear watchdog said on Monday. Residents of Ishtar village near Tuwaitha, 20 km (12 miles) south of Baghdad, are exposed to contaminated rubble left by aerial bombing and looting during and after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein,...

CIA officer Mary McCarthy was fired for leaking a possibly trumped-up story about a secret network of CIA-run prisons in Europe. Ms. McCarthy’s pattern of political donations, her Clinton administration White House service, and her extensive network of ties to other important Clintonista figures has set off a blogstorm of data mining and speculation. One aspect of her background so far comparatively unexamined is her West African uranium connection. She served in a key government position concerned with West African nations producing yellowcake uranium at the same time that Joseph Wilson was working in the area. The two may be...

BAGHDAD, 25 April (IRIN) - The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced on Monday that some 1,000 people living near the former Tuwaitha nuclear site faced serious health risks from lingering radiation. Tuwaitha, situated some 20 km south of the capital, Baghdad, "is one of a number of sites in the country identified as needing decommissioning or remediation, where radioactive material was used or waste buried," according to an IAEA statement. Residents of the nearby Ishtar village, for example, are exposed to levels of radiation higher than normal, the agency noted, which – in the case of prolonged exposure...

by Mark Finkelstein April 7, 2006 That didn't take long! Back in the MSM's Watergate heyday, it took a while for a steady drumbeat of revelations, stories and allegations to gather sufficient momentum. The pace has apparently quickened in the modern liberal-media world. On this morning's Today show, Matt Lauer, speaking of the allegation that President Bush authorized the disclosure of information by Scooter Libby, asked Chris Matthews: "scale of 1 to 10, [where] 10 is a deal-ender, where does this fall?" Matthews didn't hesitate: "heading to 10." Even Lauer seemed taken aback: "Really, that big?" For good measure, Matthews...

An Italian man from the margins of the global spy game has emerged as a central figure in the FBI's probe into the faked documents behind the Niger 'yellowcake' scandal. Was Rocco Martino trying to aid the case for the Iraq war?

The CIA leak prosecutor refuses to turn over evidence to Lewis Libby. Watchers of the CIA leak investigation are buzzing over a series of letters between prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and lawyers for former Cheney chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby. In the letters, contained in motions filed recently by Libby's defense team and released by the court, Fitzgerald steadfastly refused to reveal whether he has any evidence that Bush administration officials violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the Espionage Act, or any other law by revealing the identity of CIA employee Valerie Wilson. Libby is charged with perjury and obstruction...

ehran, Iran, Jan. 09 – Iran is resuming suspended nuclear activities at its massive uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, the government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said on Monday. Talking to reporters at a press conference in Tehran, Elham said, “As has been announced, nuclear research will begin today, and there is no legal obstacles barring this research”. “The suspension of our nuclear activities was voluntary and we have notified the IAEA of our intention to start it”, Elham added. The IAEA, the European Union and the United States had called on Iran to refrain from resuming suspended activities at Natanz, which...

Iran, in what has been regarded as a major step, has announced development of technology to separate uranium from its ore. The Iranian Atomic Energy Organization has achieved indigenous capability to separate uranium from its ore, officials said. They said the technology, known as a mixer-settler, would enable the extraction of uranium from the mined ore to produce concentrated uranium oxide, or yellowcake. "The mixer-settler can be used effectively in the fuel cycle for producing zirconium and uranium," an Iranian engineer told state television on Jan. 1. "It minimizes the use of solvent and has a recycling mechanism." In 2003,...

Special Report New Attempt to Distract Niger Uranium Export Issue Away From Libyan Rôle Analysis. By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS. New attempts are being made by officials from Niger to obfuscate the political picture with regard to the supply of Niger-originating uranium to Iraq. However, there is now a growing possibility that the reality that Niger supplied uranium to Libya, and that Libya hosted the Iraqi strategic weapons programs from about 1998 onwards, will be openly acknowledged by US and UK governments in the near future. The exclusive reporting on this matter by GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs — reporting...

Saddam's Shadow Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 Copyright 1997 Indigo Publications Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 SECTION: MINING; DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO; N. 207 LENGTH: 787 words HEADLINE: Saddam's Shadow BODY: It's not only diamonds and base metals that interest big mining companies and the latter are not alone in being interested in Katanga. In the delegation that the United States sent to Kinshasa on June 2 under its ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, the state department's African affairs department was represented by Marc Baas, director for Central Africa. (Susan Rice, director for African...

Did the CIA Build a “Bridge to Nowhere” ? We’ve heard the mantra: “Bush lied-people died !” – so many times and in so many ways, a high percentage of the American people have actually come to believe it. One of the key issues was whether Iraq was seeking uranium to resume its nuclear weapons program. ( A previous attempt , which had progressed rather far, had been interrupted by an Israeli bombing raid on Saddam’s nuclear facilities,and by Gulf War 1.) It is my considered belief a small ,politically partisan “cabal” in the CIA furnished misleading intelligence to the...

In violation of CIA regulations that bar contact with reporters without permission, Joseph Wilson's agency-employed wife Valerie Plame apparently accompanied him to a breakfast meeting with New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof in which they discussed the ambassador's controversial mission to Niger one month before Plame allegedly was "outed" by Robert Novak.In a WND column, investigative reporter Jack Cashill points to a "stunning admission" by Wilson in a January 2004 Vanity Fair magazine story that apparently has been overlooked.

Nigergate: All Ambassador Wilson’s lies Ambassador Wilson has a lot of strange friends: people that know and reveal top secret information to the foreign media, collaborators of foreign secret services and, last but not least, a number of disgruntled ex Cia officers. Once again Chiocci and Sechi at Il Giornale hit the nail on the head, this time round it’s Ambassador Wilson’s turn to be put under the spotlight. The following article, published Sunday, examines the Ambassador’s interesting ties to the French secret services and the anti-Bush cabal of ex Cia officers that go by the name of ‘VIPS’. Note...

Iran: Larijani Confirms Arrival of Yellow Cake Consignment at Esfahan UCF Mehr News Agency WWW-Text Friday, November 18, 2005 Tehran Mehr News Agency WWW-Text in Persian at 1106 GMT on 18 November carries a 1,500-word report on a news conference by Ali Larijani, Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, following the signing of a security agreement with Iraq in Tehran on 17 November. After reporting Larijani's remarks as outlined in referent item, the news agency notes: "Questioned about a report concerning the arrival of a consignment of yellow cake at Esfahan's UCF installation for processing, he (Larijani) said: This...

South Africa offers yellowcake, enrichment tech to Iran's nuclear program South Africa has offered to be a supplier of nuclear material and technology to Iran. Iranian officials said Pretoria has offered to transfer material and technology to help Teheran's nuclear program. They said the South African offer would be restricted to activities permitted by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency. "We are in the process of negotiating on the modalities of this participation," said Javad Vaidi, an official from Iran's Supreme National Security Council. On Nov. 5, Iran approved a resolution that would enable...

NEW YORK After months of complaints from what he calls “bloggers on the right,” among others, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has posted at his paid TimesSelect page a clarification on his now-famous, but somewhat flawed, column that played a central role in the still-enveloping Plame/CIA leak case. Kristof said the reasons for correcting the record now were that the Libby indictment had revived interest in the May, 6, 2003 column -- and he has been pressing for Vice President Cheney to “tell all” about the case so “here's my effort to do the same.” It came just hours...

GIS Special Topical StudiesIraq War 2003: Background, Lessons and Follow-On Return to main GIS index page  Return to Iraq War index page September 8, 2004 Reports of French Involvement in Niger-Iraq Uranium Case Not ReliableAnalysis. By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS. Reports in The Sunday Telegraph of London on September 6, 2004, cited Italian sources as having alleged that French Government officials were behind the creation of a dossier of largely forged documents which had highlighted the purchase of uranium by Iran from Niger. The documents were subsequently shown to have included forged material, thus discrediting the US policy...

FROM: JULY 18, 2005 Hold on to your hat. The plot is about to thicken. Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss’s long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte. Judging by Director Goss’s remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA “experts” in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame’s outfit –...

The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France. The man, identified by an Italian news agency as Rocco Martino, was the subject of a Telegraph article earlier this month in which he was referred to by his intelligence codename, "Giacomo". His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning "Giacomo" to procure and circulate documents -...