This is a very interesting read, highlighting the great changes taking place in Nepal and in large parts of india, that is becoming the biggest freedom movement, much bigger than Kashmiri movement (which has already shaken the whole brahman raj) and the Khalistan movement (which is looking for a spark to spread all over again), and the various other independent movements...
Monday, August 16, 2010
**JP** Israel's Nuclear Weapons
Israel has not confirmed that it has nuclear weapons and officially maintains that it will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Yet the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons is a "public secret" by now due to the declassification of large numbers of formerly highly classified US government documents which show that the United States by 1975 was convinced that Israel had nuclear weapons. History Israel began actively investigating the nuclear option from its earliest days. In 1949, HEMED GIMMEL a special unit of the IDF's Science Corps, began a two-year geological survey of the Negev desert with an eye toward the discovery of uranium reserves. Although no significant sources of uranium were found, recoverable amounts were located in phosphate deposits. The program took another step forward with the creation of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) in 1952. Its chairman, Ernst David Bergmann, had long advocated an Israeli bomb as the best way to ensure "that we shall never again be led as lambs to the slaughter." Bergmann was also head of the Ministry of Defense's Research and Infrastructure Division (known by its Hebrew acronym, EMET), which had taken over the HEMED research centers (HEMED GIMMEL among them, now renamed Machon 4) as part of a reorganization. Under Bergmann, the line between the IAEC and EMET blurred to the point that Machon 4 functioned essentially as the chief laboratory for the IAEC. By 1953, Machon 4 had not only perfected a process for extracting the uranium found in the Negev, but had also developed a new method of producing heavy water, providing Israel with an indigenous capability to produce some of the most important nuclear materials. For reactor design and construction, Israel sought the assistance of France. Nuclear cooperation between the two nations dates back as far as early 1950's, when construction began on France's 40MWt heavy water reactor and a chemical reprocessing plant at Marcoule. France was a natural partner for Israel and both governments saw an independent nuclear option as a means by which they could maintain a degree of autonomy in the bipolar environment of the cold war. In the fall of 1956, France agreed to provide Israel with an 18 MWt research reactor. However, the onset of the Suez Crisis a few weeks later changed the situation dramatically. Following Egypt's closure of the Suez Canal in July, France and Britain had agreed with Israel that the latter should provoke a war with Egypt to provide the European nations with the pretext to send in their troops as peacekeepers to occupy and reopen the canal zone. In the wake of the Suez Crisis, the Soviet Union made a thinly veiled threat against the three nations. This episode not only enhanced the Israeli view that an independent nuclear capability was needed to prevent reliance on potentially unreliable allies, but also led to a sense of debt among French leaders that they had failed to fulfill commitments made to a partner. French premier Guy Mollet is even quoted as saying privately that France "owed" the bomb to Israel. On 3 October 1957, France and Israel signed a revised agreement calling for France to build a 24 MWt reactor (although the cooling systems and waste facilities were designed to handle three times that power) and, in protocols that were not committed to paper, a chemical reprocessing plant. This complex was constructed in secret, and outside the IAEA inspection regime, by French and Israeli technicians at Dimona, in the Negev desert under the leadership of Col. Manes Pratt of the IDF Ordinance Corps. Both the scale of the project and the secrecy involved made the construction of Dimona a massive undertaking. A new intelligence agency, the Office of Science Liasons,(LEKEM) was created to provide security and intelligence for the project. At the height construction, some 1,500 Israelis some French workers were employed building Dimona. To maintain secrecy, French customs officials were told that the largest of the reactor components, such as the reactor tank, were part of a desalinization plant bound for Latin America. In addition, after buying heavy water from Norway on the condition that it not be transferred to a third country, the French Air Force secretly flew as much as four tons of the substance to Israel. Trouble arose in May 1960, when France began to pressure Israel to make the project public and to submit to international inspections of the site, threatening to withhold the reactor fuel unless they did. President de Gaulle was concerned that the inevitable scandal following any revelations about French assistance with the project, especially the chemical reprocessing plant, would have negative repercussions for France's international position, already on shaky ground because of its war in Algeria. At a subsequent meeting with Ben-Gurion, de Gaulle offered to sell Israel fighter aircraft in exchange for stopping work on the reprocessing plant, and came away from the meeting convinced that the matter was closed. It was not. Over the next few months, Israel worked out a compromise. France would supply the uranium and components already placed on order and would not insist on international inspections. In return, Israel would assure France that they had no intention of making atomic weapons, would not reprocess any plutonium, and would reveal the existence of the reactor, which would be completed without French assistance. In reality, not much changed - French contractors finished work on the reactor and reprocessing plant, uranium fuel was delivered and the reactor went critical in 1964.
The United States first became aware of Dimona's existence after U-2 overflights in 1958 captured the facility's construction, but it was not identified as a nuclear site until two years later. The complex was variously explained as a textile plant, an agricultural station, and a metallurgical research facility, until David Ben-Gurion stated in December 1960 that Dimona complex was a nuclear research center built for "peaceful purposes." There followed two decades in which the United States, through a combination of benign neglect, erroneous analysis, and successful Israeli deception, failed to discern first the details of Israel's nuclear program. As early as 8 December 1960, the CIA issued a report outlining Dimona's implications for nuclear proliferation, and the CIA station in Tel Aviv had determined by the mid-1960s that the Israeli nuclear weapons program was an established and irreversible fact. United States inspectors visited Dimona seven times during the 1960s, but they were unable to obtain an accurate picture of the activities carried out there, largely due to tight Israeli control over the timing and agenda of the visits. The Israelis went so far as to install false control room panels and to brick over elevators and hallways that accessed certain areas of the facility. The inspectors were able to report that there was no clear scientific research or civilian nuclear power program justifying such a large reactor - circumstantial evidence of the Israeli bomb program - but found no evidence of "weapons related activities" such as the existence of a plutonium reprocessing plant. Although the United States government did not encourage or approve of the Israeli nuclear program, it also did nothing to stop it. Walworth Barbour, US ambassador to Israel from 1961-73, the bomb program's crucial years, primarily saw his job as being to insulate the President from facts which might compel him to act on the nuclear issue, alledgedly saying at one point that "The President did not send me there to give him problems. He does not want to be told any bad news." After the 1967 war, Barbour even put a stop to military attachés' intelligence collection efforts around Dimona. Even when Barbour did authorize forwarding information, as he did in 1966 when embassy staff learned that Israel was beginning to put nuclear warheads in missiles, the message seemed to disappear into the bureaucracy and was never acted upon. Nuclear Weapons Production In early 1968, the CIA issued a report concluding that Israel had successfully started production of nuclear weapons. This estimate, however, was based on an informal conversation between Carl Duckett, head of the CIA's Office of Science and Technology, and Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. Teller said that, based on conversations with friends in the Israeli scientific and defense establishment, he had concluded that Israel was capable of building the bomb, and that the CIA should not wait for an Israeli test to make a final assessment because that test would never be carried out. CIA estimates of the Israeli arsenal's size did not improve with time. In 1974, Duckett estimated that Israel had between ten and twenty nuclear weapons. The upper bound was derived from CIA speculation regarding the number of possible Israeli targets, and not from any specific intelligence. Because this target list was presumed to be relatively static, this remained the official American estimate until the early 1980s. Israel could potentially have produced a few dozen nuclear warheads in the period 1970-1980, and is thought to have produced sufficient fissile material to build 100 to 200 warheads by the mid-1990s. In 1986 descriptions and photographs of Israeli nuclear warheads were published in the London Sunday Times of a purported underground bomb factory at the Dimona nuclear reactor. The photographs were taken by Mordechai Vanunu, a dismissed Israeli nuclear technician. His information led some experts to conclude that Israel had a stockpile of 100 to 200 nuclear devices at that time. By the late 1990s the U.S. Intelligence Community estimated that Israel possessed between 75-130 weapons, based on production estimates. The stockpile would certainly include warheads for mobile Jericho-1 and Jericho-2 missiles, as well as bombs for Israeli aircraft, and may include other tactical nuclear weapons of various types. Some published estimates even claimed that Israel might have as many as 400 nuclear weapons by the late 1990s. We believe these numbers are exaggerated, and that Israel's nuclear weapons inventory may include less than 100 nuclear weapons. Stockpiled plutonium could be used to build additional weapons if so decided.
The Dimona nuclear reactor is the source of plutonium for Israeli nuclear weapons. The number of nuclear weapons that could have been produced by Israel has generally been estimated on the basis of assumptions about the power level of this reactor, combined with estimates for the number of delivery vehicles (aircraft, missiles) assigned a nuclear mission. Information made public in 1986 by Mordechai Vanunu indicated that at that time, weapons grade plutonium was being produced at a rate of about 40 kilograms annually. If this figure corresponded with the steady-state capacity of the entire Dimona facility, analysts suggested that the reactor might have a power level of at least 150 megawatts, about twice the power level at which is was believed to be operating around 1970. To accommodate this higher power level, analysts had suggested that Israel had constructed an enlarged cooling system. An alternative interpretation of the information supplied by Vanunu was that the reactor's power level had remained at about 75 megawatts, and that the production rate of plutonium in the early 1980s reflected a backlog of previously generated material. The constraints on the size of Israel's stockpile include several potential variables, several of which are generic to any nuclear weapons program. The Dimona reactor may have operated an average of between 200 and 300 days annually, and produced approximately 0.9 to 1.0 grams of plutonium for each thermal megawatt day. Israel may have use between 4 and 5 kilograms of plutonium per weapon [5 kilograms is a conservative estimate, and Vanunu reported that Israeli weapons used 4 kg]. The key variable that is specific to Israel is the power level of the reactor, which is reported to be at least 75 MWt and possibly as high as 200 MWt. New high-resolution satellite imagery provides important insight this matter. The imagery of the Dimona nuclear reactor was acquired by the Public Eye Project of the Federation of American Scientists from Space Imaging Corporation's IKONOS satellite. The cooling towers associated with the Dimona reactor are clearly visible and identifiable in satellite imagery. Comparison of recently acquired commercial IKONOS imagery with declassified American CORONA reconnaissance satellite imagery indicates that no new cooling towers were constructed in the years between 1971 and 2000. This strongly suggests that the reactor's power level has not been increased significantly during this period. This would suggest an annual production rate of plutonium of about 20 kilograms. Based on plausible upper and lower bounds of the operating practices at the reactor, Israel could have thus produced enough plutonium for at least 100 nuclear weapons, but probably not significantly more than 200 weapons. Some type of non-nuclear test, perhaps a zero yield or implosion test, occurred on 2 November 1966 [possibly at Al-Naqab in the Negev]. There is no evidence that Israel has ever carried out a nuclear test, although many observers speculated that a suspected nuclear explosion in the southern Indian Ocean in 1979 was a joint South African-Israeli test. Sources and Resources
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**JP** disgust with the leadership!!!!
The disgust for the present leadership of the country has gone to such extent that now people are devising new methods to show their feelings ....here is one that someone sent me
**JP** ZAKAAT ( RAMAZAN MAI DENAY KA BEHTREEN MOQA )
GOLDEN OPORTNITY
==
ALLAH SUBHAN W TA'ALA NA HAM PAR APNI RAHMATON AUR BARKAT WALAY RAMAZAN KAY SAATH SAATH AIK AAZMA'AISH BHI UTAAR DI HAI, KEH KON APNAY MUSALMAN LOGON KI TAKLEEF KO APNI TAKLEEF MEHSOOS KARTA HAI.. AUR ROZAY KAY KAY SAHIH MAQSAD KO PATA HAI...
AAJ 2 CARORE SE ZIADAH MUSALMAN JIN KAY PAS NA KHAANAY KO KUCH HAI, NA PEENAY KO SAAF PANI HAI, NA SIR PAR KOI CHATT HAI AUR NA PAHANANY KO KAPRAY HAIN AUR BE-YAAR O MADADGAR BETION KAY SAATH PARAY HAIN, ISS WAQT AAP KAY ZAKAAT, KHAIRAAT, SADQAAT AUR FITANA KAY SAHIH HAQ DAAR SIRF AUR SIRF YEH LOG HAIN.
ALLAH SUBHAN W TALA NAY APNI REHMANTON AUR BARKATON WALAY RAMAZAN KAY SAATH SAATH AAP KO YEH NEKI KARNAY KA MOQA BHI ISI MAHEENAY MA ATA KAR DIYA HAI JIS MAI AGAR AAP AIK RUPEE DETAY HAIN TO 70 GUNA YA ISS SE BHI ZIDAH KA SAWAB MILAY GA..
DON'T IGNORE/DELETE ..... READ & KEEP FORWARDING ..... YOU WILL BE HOARDING COUNTLESS FOR HEREAFTER
WHERE FOLK WILL BE WANDERING AROUND EVEN FOR A SINGLE DEED..... PRESS FORWARD....!
would you hire this guy?
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| Julian Assange To Write For Swedish Tabloid |
| from the getting-a-job-for-the-insurance dept. |
| posted by timothy on Sunday August 15, @19:33 (Communications) |
|https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/08/15/2317212/Julian-Assange-To-Write-For-Swedish-Tabloi|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Julian Assange To Write For Swedish Tabloid |
| from the getting-a-job-for-the-insurance dept. |
| posted by timothy on Sunday August 15, @19:33 (Communications) |
|https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/08/15/2317212/Julian-Assange-To-Write-For-Swedish-Tabloi|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has
[0]signed on as a columnist for Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. Why such a
move? Maybe there's something more to be found in Swedish law when you
are employed by a newspaper." Here's [1]an account in English, including
a translation of the interview that forms part of the linked Aftenbladet
article.
Discuss this story at:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/08/15/2317212
Links:
0.http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article7616188.ab
1.http://mathaba.net/news/?x=624311
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**JP** suddenly the politicians are popping up to fool the nation again!
After 2 1/2 weeks of disaster in the country, when all politicians disappeared..now suddenly...politicians of 2 parties are popping up, as if the "hidden hands" have given them new instructions to recover from the wrath of the nation that have been thrown onto these ugly faces, to fool the nation once again....
PPP-PML(N) reconciliation on flood-relief efforts shocks many in Pakistan
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Claudia Rosett has an excellent column up about the travels of the Imam from the Ground Zero Mosque
Apparently his travels are being funded by our State Dept but nobody bothers to keep track of where he is, where he will appear, what his trip is in aid of and what has been accomplished. There are also questions about his appearances with the Iranian equivalent of Baghdad Bob as well.
- The Rosett Report - http://pajamasmedia.com/claudiarosett -
Click here to print.
Seriously, Where Is Imam Feisal … and What’s with His Web Site?
Posted By Claudia Rosett On August 14, 2010 @ 1:34 pm In Uncategorized | 79 Comments
If you look past the rhetoric, the realities — or should I say the morphing unrealities? — of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s Ground Zero mosque and Islamic center project grow ever more curious. Polls show that a majority of Americans, including New Yorkers, do not question the legal right of Rauf and his partners to go ahead with their plans. But a majority of Americans do find the choice of location an affront, a potentially in-your-face, abrasive, triumphalist statement, rather than an exercise in harmony and “bridge-building.” Amid the controversy, President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg — while grandstanding about the need for government to steer clear of religious matters — have now both effectively endorsed the project. Obama, at a White House Ramadan dinner Friday night, went beyond enthusing about religious freedom, to zero in [1], quite specifically, on the right “to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan.”
That sure sounds like the project of developer Sharif El-Gamal, and the Cordoba Initiative’s Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan (whose last name on their nonprofit Cordoba Initiative’s federal tax returns of recent years is spelled not “Khan,” which she is now using, but “Kahn.”)
Meanwhile, where in the world right now IS the imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, who — as he prepares to raise $100 million for his Cordoba mosque and Islamic center — is now gathering these upmarket endorsements from Gracie Mansion and the White House? Do Bloomberg or Obama have any idea? Have they bothered to inquire?
Because as I write this, on Saturday afternoon, all but the most generic details of Rauf’s location and travels are still a mystery, and have been for weeks. From Rauf, who left the U.S. weeks ago, and whom I last located very briefly by surprising him in late July with a phone call to his office in Malaysia (he got right back off the phone to resume an “important meeting”), there has been no direct word whatsoever.
After something of an internal kerfuffle, Hillary Clinton’s State Department finally confirmed on Monday that Rauf will be spending Ramadan on a taxpayer-funded outreach tour of the Middle East, with stops hosted by the U.S. embassies in Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (all these countries are bastions of Middle Eastern oil wealth). But as I write, I can find no listing of his schedule on the State [2] Department site (as of Aug. 11, a spokesman was saying no further details are yet available), or on the sites on any of these embassies — not in Qatar [3], not in the UAE [3], nor in Bahrain [4]. When I phoned all these embassies, plus the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia, last Monday (their time), asking for information about his visits, the only embassy where any U.S. official was even willing to speak on the record about Rauf’s travels was the Mission in Bahrain, where a spokesperson said he is expected on Aug. 19, but either could not or would not provide any further detail.
So where right now is Rauf? Still in Malaysia? Sipping tea with who-knows-whom in the Middle East? Jetting between Southeast Asia and the Gulf at U.S. taxpayer expense?
And while he’s on these travels, what’s going on with the web site of his Cordoba Initiative? Last week, after someone in his Malaysia office referred all questions back to his office in New York, the phone number and address of his office in Malaysia quietly vanished from the Cordoba web site. Roughly around the same time, as Anne Bayefsky noticed and explained in a Pajamas Media post this week, Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative web site also erased a photo [5]showing Rauf meeting in Malaysia a while back with an Iranian official, Mohammad Javad Larijani — who, as Bayefsky explained, “was the Iranian official who defended Iran’s abysmal human rights record before the UN Human Rights Council in February and June of this year.”
Friday evening, after Obama gave his de facto endorsement to Rauf’s Cordoba/Park 51 Ground Zero mosque and Islamic center project, I took another look at the morphing Cordoba Initiative web site [6], and discovered it now has a note on the main page saying “Website is currently under construction.” (Grab your screenshots now — parts of this site are already sliding down the Memory Hole).
What’s going on? Why the vanishings of the Malaysian address, the Rauf-Larijani Iranian connection photo, and the elusive Imam Feisal himself? Have either Obama or Bloomberg made even the smallest effort to inquire about what use will be made, or by whom, of these de facto endorsements they are handing out?
[Update: Politico reports that Obama is now saying he did not endorse [7]the Cordoba project near Ground Zero. Hmmm... Obama's comments sounded to me like a pretty specific endorsement ... or are there other folks the rest of us have not yet heard about, who are currently buying private property near the Twin Towers site to build yet more mosques and Islamic centers?]
Article printed from The Rosett Report: http://pajamasmedia.com/claudiarosett
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/claudiarosett/seriously-where-is-imam-feisal-and-whats-with-his-web-site/
URLs in this post:
[1] zero in : http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/08/13/remarks-president-iftar-dinner
[2] State: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2010/08/145896.htm
[3] Qatar: http://abudhabi.usembassy.gov/
[4] Bahrain: http://bahrain.usembassy.gov/
[5] erased a photo : http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/an-iranian-connection-to-the-cordoba-house-ground-zero-mosque/
[6] Cordoba Initiative web site: http://www.cordobainitiative.org/
[7] did not endorse : http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41069.html
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