The Big Fix: Bushists Seek to Legalize the Nuke Black Market

Antifascist Calling...

A new piece by Joshua Frank over at Dissident Voice reveals that the Bush administration, in the wake of Sibel Edmonds' blockbuster revelations January 6 to The Sunday Times, is seeking to legalize the secretive nuclear trade with Turkey, a key player in Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan's nuclear black market proliferation network.

In the process, leading neocons and other allies of the regime would be exonerated for their role in selling nuclear secrets for profit to any and all commers.

In one fell-swoop, according to Frank,

In likely reaction to the UK Times' report, the Bush Administration quietly announced on January 22 that the president would like Congress to approve the sale of nuclear secrets to Turkey. As with most stories of this magnitude, the U.S. media has put on blinders, opting to not report either Edmonds' story or Bush’s recent announcement.

Citing a White House press release alleging that the criminal activities of U.S. neocons and their Likudnik doppelgängers at the State Department and the American Turkish Council (paging Marc Grossman!) had been signed off by the Clinton administration back in 2000, the White House now hopes to retroactively absolve current and former officials of wrongdoing.

According to Bushist dissemblers,

The Agreement was signed on July 26, 2000, and President Clinton approved and authorized execution and made the determinations required by section 123 b. of the Act (Presidential Determination 2000 26, 65 FR 44403 (July 18, 2000)). However, immediately after signature, U.S. agencies received information that called into question the conclusions that had been drawn in the required NPAS and the original classified annex, specifically, information implicating Turkish private entities in certain activities directly relating to nuclear proliferation. Consequently, the Agreement was not submitted to the Congress and the executive branch undertook a review of the NPAS evaluation.

My Administration has completed the NPAS review as well as an evaluation of actions taken by the Turkish government to address the proliferation activities of certain Turkish entities (once officials of the U.S. Government brought them to the Turkish government's attention). The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Energy, and the members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are confident that the pertinent issues have been sufficiently resolved and that there is a sufficient basis (as set forth in the classified annexes, which will be transmitted separately by the Secretary of State) to proceed with congressional review of the Agreement and, if legislation is not enacted to disapprove it, to bring the Agreement into force.

While the nuke smuggling ring was undoubtedly a bipartisan affair (Grossman was, after all, U.S. ambassador to Turkey under Clinton, as was the decades-long cover-up of the Khan/ISI network), the Bush regime is deeply spooked by Sibel Edmonds and appears to be running for cover through a deft maneuver.

Frank pointedly asks:

What "private entities" the press release refers to is not clear, but it could well include the American Turkish Council, the "entity" revealed in the Times' article. The Bushites seem to be covering their own exposed backsides, for the timing of Bush's call to sell nuke secrets to Turkey is certainly suspicious, if not overtly conspicuous. ... Edmonds says "several arms of the government were shielding what was going on" which included an entire national security apparatus associated with the neoconservaties who have profited by representing Turkish interests in Washington.

Frank rhetorically inquires:

Is the Bush Administration seeking to exonerate these "officials" with its plea to allow Turkey to obtain U.S. nuclear secrets?

The answer is obvious: why of course they are!

In this writer's opinion, the nature of the Bush gang's bid for retroactive immunity for the nuke cabal demolishes the dodgy theory advanced by some, notably the campy antisemite xymphora, that the (highly-profitable) scam may have been a "counter-proliferation operation" stumbled upon by Sibel Edmonds. I'm not thinking so. A careful analysis, of the historical data (something that always sems to elude tin-foil hat fascists) suggests otherwise.

Like their Turkish counterparts, Israeli spooks were key players in the CIA/ISI/Saudi intervention in Afghanistan during the 1970s-1980s and provided arms and "expertise" to far-right Afghan Islamists, including those who later morphed into the Afghan-Arab database known as al Qaeda. As with their Turkish mates who launched the "contra-guerrilla" arm of NATO's Gladio operation against leftist Turks and Kurds, the Israeli intelligence "community" is also deeply embedded in the global drug trade.

According to the late Israeli scholar Israel Shahak,

...massive involvement of Israeli Intelligence in drug trafficking must be well known to (and is probably approved by) its American opposite numbers. Ample precedents for that exist. ... It can therefore be tentatively presumed that in its encouragement of drug traffic and traffickers, as in much else, Israel acts as a proxy executor of the American will. This would at least partly explain why this policy works. -- Israel Shahak, Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies [London: Pluto Press, 1997] p. 121.

Precisely as Sibel Edmonds has described regarding the drug trafficking angle of the nuclear proliferation network.

A "big fix" indeed!