Psyche, Science, and Society

Greg Palast on the origins of North Korea’s bomb

How George Bush Gave Krazy Kim the Bomb

You didn’t know that? Of course not, you read the NY Times

by Greg Palast

[Tuesday, October 10th 2006] How did a berserker like North Korea’s Kim John Il get the bomb in the first place? Answer: He bought it from the Dr. Strangelove of Pakistan in 2001 - while all our President’s men ordered our intelligence agents to keep their eyes shut tight.

On November 9, 2001, BBC Television Centre in London received a call from a phone booth just outside Washington. The call to our Newsnight team was part of a complex prearranged dance coordinated with the National Security News Service, a conduit for unhappy spooks at the CIA and FBI to unburden themselves of disturbing information and documents. The top-level U.S. intelligence agent on the line had much to be unhappy and disturbed about: a “back-off” directive.

This call to BBC came two months after the attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Towers. His fellow agents, he said, were now released to hunt bad guys. That was good news. The bad news was that, before September 11, in those weeks just after George W. Bush took office, CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) personnel were told to “back off” certain targets of investigations begun by Bill Clinton. He said there were particular investigations that were effectively killed.

Which particular investigations? The agent was willing to risk his job to get this story out, but we had to press repeatedly for specifics on the directive to “back off.” The order, he said reluctantly, spiked at least one fateful operation. As he talked, I wrote in my notebook, “Killed off Conn. Labs investigation.” Connecticut Laboratories? I was clueless until my producer Meirion Jones, a weapons expert, gave me that “you idiot” look and said, “Khan Labs! Pakistan. The bomb.” Dr. A. Q. Khan is known as the “Father” of Pakistan’s atomic bomb.

He’s not, however, the ideal parent. To raise the cash for Pakistan’s program (and to pocket a tidy sum for himself), Khan sold off copies of his baby, his bomb, to Libya and North Korea-blueprints, material and all the fixings to blow this planet to Kingdom Come.
From another source inside the lab itself, we learned that Dr. Khan was persuading Pakistan to test his bomb-on India.

Why would Team Bush pull back our agents from nabbing North Korea’s bomb connection? The answer in two words: Saudi Arabia.

The agent on the line said, “There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis.” Khan is Pakistani, not Saudi, but, nevertheless, the investigation led back to Saudi Arabia. There was no way that the Dr. Strangelove of Pakistan could have found the billions to cook up his nukes within the budget of his poor nation.

We eventually discovered that agents knew the Saudis, who had secretly funded Saddam’s nuclear weapons ambitions in the eighties, apparently moved their bomb-for-Islam money from Iraq to Dr. Khan’s lab in Pakistan after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990.

But, said the insider, our agents had to let a hot trail grow cold because he and others “were told to back off the Saudis.” If you can’t follow the money, you can’t investigate. The weapons hunt was spiked.

BBC got the call about Dr. Khan’s bomb in November 2001 and reported it that night on the tube and in the London Guardian. Over two years later, on February 11, 2004, President Bush, at an emergency press briefing, expressed his shock-shock!-at having learned that Dr. A. Q. Khan of Pakistan was running a flea market in fissionable material.

Our report on Dr. Khan’s nuclear bazaar was confirmed in 2004, not by U.S. intelligence, but by one of Khan’s customers, Muammar Gaddafi, the mischievous tyrant of Libya. It was Gaddafi’s last little bit of fun with Mr. Bush and Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair. The U.S. and Britain had agreed to end their trade embargo on Libya in return
for Gaddafi’s shutting down his bomb program and, not incidentally, Gaddafi’s giving an exclusive oil drilling agreement to British Petroleum.

So with Libya giving up Dr. Khan’s bomb, it appeared we had a happy ending for the safety of the planet. Unfortunately, while our President was holding hands with Saudi King Abdullah at the Crawford Ranch and kissing Pakistan’s dictator Pervez Musharraf on both cheeks, Khan had given the secret of the bomb, hardware included, to Kim of North Korea, a despot in a leisure suit a little less stable than Charles Manson.

The U.S. government missed discovering Dr. Khan’s radioactive fire sale because our agents were hard at work ignoring the Saudi money trail. If the agencies had not been told to “back off” the Saudis and Dr. Khan, would the U.S. have uncovered the nuclear shipments in time to stop them? We can’t possibly know, but, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, it’s amazing what you don’t see when you’re told not to look.

Now, in 2006, comes what the spook-world calls, “blow-back,” the ugly consequences of playing hide-and-don’t-seek with the Saudis five years ago. Kim has finally decided to unwrap his gift from Pakistan - and our President is, once again, in that toxic mood we all know so well: both befuddled and belligerent.

Well, I suppose George can do what he usually does in a crisis: offer Kim a big fat tax cut.

http://www.gregpalast.com

Greg Palast, winner of the George Orwell Courage-In-Journalism Prize, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and “ARMED MADHOUSE: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal ‘08, No Child’s Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.”

Add comment October 10th, 2006

Is Iraq really as bad as it sounds?

In a word, “yes!” NBC reporter Jane Arraf, in her blog piece today [Calling Bob in Baghdad] tells us that its worse, unimaginably worse:

I’m more puzzled by comments that the violence isn’t any worse than any American city. Really? In which American city do 60 bullet-riddled bodies turn up on a given day? In which city do the headless bodies of ordinary citizens turn up every single day? In which city would it not be news if neighborhood school children were blown up? In which neighborhood would you look the other way if gunmen came into restaurants and shot dead the customers?

Day-to-day life here for Iraqis is so far removed from the comfortable existence we live in the United States that it is almost literally unimaginable.

It’s almost impossible to describe what it feels like being stalled in traffic, your heart pounding, wondering if the vehicle in front of you is one of the three or four car bombs that will go off that day. Or seeing your husband show up at the door covered in blood after he was kidnapped and beaten.

I don’t know a single family here that hasn’t had a relative, neighbor or friend die violently. In places where there’s been all-out fighting going on, I’ve interviewed parents who buried their dead child in the yard because it was too dangerous to go to the morgue.

Imagine the worst day you’ve ever had in your life, add a regular dose of terror and you’ll begin to get an idea of what it’s like every day for a lot of people here.

Given this reality, its horrifying how little attention is given in the US to the hell hole the US has created for the Iraqis. Not only is it unimaginable, it’s unimaginably worse than life under Saddam, at least in the last decade of his reign. And that’s truly an amazing accomplishment, one that all of us will be reminded of for decades to come.

1 comment October 10th, 2006

The ovulation - dress connection

I’m always suspicious of claims of direct biological influences on behavior. So many times, such claims have collapsed as they fail to be replicated. But, I remember, we are biological creatures, animals, even if cultured ones. And the scientist in me says I shouldn’t ignore evidence, even if, or especially if, it conflicts with my prior beliefs.

Thus, a story today caught my attention. UCLA researchers claim that ovulating women [or at least the female college students studied] dress to appear more attractive than when they are not ovulating. Strange, but, perhaps, not surprising. Most other female animals signal ovulation. Why should we assume we are different?

Here is the complete article:

Cycle Changes Women’s Looks, Attitudes

It’s an age-old question: What makes a woman dress to impress?

A new report says the answer might be in the ovaries.

According to a study done by UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, women put more time and effort into their appearance when they’re ovulating.

Clothes and makeup aren’t the only things that change at that time of the month: Women’s strength, appetite and attitudes toward men and each other change as well.

The study’s lead author, UCLA professor Martie Haselton, explained how she and her researchers had come to the conclusion that ovulation affects a woman’s appearance.

“What we did was photograph the women on a high fertility day and a low fertility day, and we showed those photographs to a separate set of judges, and we asked them, ‘In which photo is the woman trying to be more attractive?’” she said.

The judges picked a woman’s high fertility photograph 60 percent of the time — a rate much higher than random chance.

“For the women who were actually ovulating on the day of their period, it was more than 80 percent for those photos,” Haselton said.

People have long thought that women hid all signs of ovulation, even from themselves and their mates. Haselton’s study shows that many signs do exist, though they’re subtle.

From Appetite to Attitudes

“Women experience a decrease in appetite near ovulation, even though there’s an increased caloric need. And that’s not just compared to when they are PMSing,” Haselton said.

There’s also evidence that women are stronger when they’re most fertile.

“There’s one study that showed that women’s hand strength increased during ovulation,” Haselton said.
Women may even be more tempted to cheat when they’re ovulating than at other times of the month. Their preferences for types of men can also change.

“They look more for facial masculinity and male scents — the body scents that may be associated with greater testosterone,” Haselton said. “They tend to go for the softer side, kind and caring, having sweet faces.”

Women’s interactions with each other can change too.

“There is preliminary evidence that women rate other women as less attractive during ovulation. One possibility is that they feel better about themselves. Maybe they feel better so they dress better,” Haselton said.

As with all behavioral research, don’t take this too seriously until it’s replicated. Before that happens, its just an intriguing finding. But intriguing it is.

Add comment October 10th, 2006

Colbert on chalk and awe

Steven Colbert agrees that the solution to school violence is to arm the teachers. However, he takes the logic even further:

Add comment October 10th, 2006