Free Republic

Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do. Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s...

Iran makes no secret of the fact that it manufactures weapons for export, including mortar bombs of the general type found in Iraq. Customers from around the world can log on to the Web site of the government-owned Defense Industries Organization and view a wide array of Iranian-made munitions. If they decide to order, they apparently can pay by credit card, as a VISA logo suggests. The site - which promises "best quality and fast service" - is an example of the vigor with which Iran has moved into a global arms market long dominated by the United States and...

NEW YORK: Pakistan currently has between 25 and 50 nuclear weapons, mostly relatively simple uranium arms with "modest" yields around the size of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a journal claimed on Thursday. The Nature magazine's claim followed media reports that satellite photos of Pakistan's Khushab nuclear site have shown what appears to be a partially completed heavy-water reactor capable of a 20-fold increase from its current nuclear capabilities.

The Nation, a left-leaning magazine, published an article about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's influence over NASA and its budget. The article largely rehashes the issues most regular readers of this blog are familiar with: DeLay's addition of JSC into his Congressional district, his last-minute move to top off NASA’s FY05 budget request, and the recent reorganization of the House Appropriation Committee's subcommittee structure. Like many such articles, it includes an arguably questionable comment from John Pike: "With NASA changing its spending priorities to support President Bush's vision for space exploration that will return humans to the moon and take...

WASHINGTON - U.S. commandos are hunting for secret nuclear and chemical weapons sites and other targets in Iran, and have a plan to turn the hard-line Islamic country into the next front in the war on terrorism. "It's not if we're going to do anything against Iran. They're doing it," an ex-intelligence official tells this week's issue of The New Yorker. Since at least last summer, the U.S. teams have penetrated eastern Iran, reportedly with Pakistan's help, the magazine said. "Iraq is just one campaign," the official told investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. "The Bush administration is looking at this as...

....Treasure trove Military analysts had mixed reactions to the significance of the missing explosives. John Pike, a defense analyst for GlobalSecurity. org, said the explosives, the disappearance of which was first reported in yesterday's New York Times, would prove to be an "unprecedented treasure trove" of bomb-making material. "I think the evil-doers will put it to good use," he said. "You'd have to be concerned. We'll be hearing about it again." The missing cache, reported to be about 380 tons of the explosives HMX and RDX, not only offers a large quantity of material but more importantly has useful "fabrication...

Heard of Watergate? Get ready for Lowellgate. On Sept. 18, 1972, the evening before the primary election during his second attempt for Congress, Kerry's brother Cameron and one Thomas Vallely, both part of his current campaign team, were arrested by Lowell police at 1:40 a.m. and charged with breaking and entering with the intent to commit larceny. The two were apprehended in the basement of a building whose door had been forced open, police said. It housed the headquarters of candidate DiFruscia. The Watergate scandal was making headlines at this time, and it was called the Lowell Watergate. "They wanted...

Heard of Watergate? Get ready for Lowellgate. On Sept. 18, 1972, the evening before the primary election during his second attempt for Congress, Kerry's brother Cameron and one Thomas Vallely, both part of his current campaign team, were arrested by Lowell police at 1:40 a.m. and charged with breaking and entering with the intent to commit larceny. The two were apprehended in the basement of a building whose door had been forced open, police said. It housed the headquarters of candidate DiFruscia. The Watergate scandal was making headlines at this time, and it was called the Lowell Watergate. "They wanted...

By John Pike© 2004 Insight/News World Communications Inc. Hormesis, the scientific theory that humans actually need small amounts of poison in their diets, could be the most important environmental event of the 21st century if proved valid. Billions of dollars could be saved in environmental cleanup costs, say researchers, while at the same time improving the health of all organisms, including humans. But at first examination, hormesis appears kooky. The knee-jerk reaction is to reject this phenomenon as pseudoscience or propaganda by polluters, and a few uninformed observers have done just that. But hormesis is a possible, if not highly probable, iconoclastic...

Thursday July 17, 2003 The Guardian As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war. It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses. This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising...