U.S. Nuke Secrets for Sale? And What Was the Deal With that B-52 Stratofortress Again?
Brian Doherty | January 9, 2008, 4:15pm
Interesting (and quite alarming, if true) piece from the London Sunday Times that has gotten very little U.S. play, about accusations by a former FBI translator. The basic deal:
[Sibel Edmonds] approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.
Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.
Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.
...............
She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.
“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.
Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology.
Dave Lindorff at CounterPunch does a spinoff of the Sunday Times piece and ties it into one of those "oh yeah, what was that all about?" moment that provide so much fun fodder for conspiracy theorizing:
If Edmonds' story is correct, and Al-Qaeda, with the aid of Turkish government agents and Pakistani intelligence, with the help of US government officials, has been attempting to obtain nuclear materials and nuclear information from the U.S., it casts an even darker shadow over the mysterious and still unexplained incident last August 30, when a B-52 Stratofortress, based at the Minot strategic air base in Minot, ND, against all rules and regulations of 40 years' standing, loaded and flew off with six unrecorded and unaccounted for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
That incident only came to public attention because three as yet unidentified Air Force whistleblowers contacted a reporter at the Military Times newspaper, which ran a series of stories about it, some of which were picked up by other US news organizations.
An Air Force investigation into that incident, ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, claimed improbably that the whole thing had been an "accident," but many veterans of the US Air Force and Navy with experience in handling nuclear weapons say that such an explanation is impossible, and argue that there had to have been a chain or orders from above the level of the base commander for such a flight to have occurred.
Incredibly, almost five months after that bizarre incident (which included several as yet unexplained deaths of B-52 pilots and base personnel occurring in the weeks shortly before and after the flight), in which six 150-kiloton warheads went missing for 36 hours, there has been no Congressional investigation and no FBI investigation into what happened.
Accidents can happen.
Brian Courts | January 9, 2008, 7:05pm | #
It didn't take much for me to find an article by the same author
Great, then I'll bet it would have taken the author even less time to find it and link to it. As to it's substance, it seems pretty much as I would have thought - not much there to build a conspiracy case on. A couple of points from the article:
Another Minot B-52 pilot, 20-year-old Adam Barrs
I'm pretty sure there are
no 20-year-old B-52 pilots in the U.S. Air Force. I thught perhaps the age was simply a typo, but no, it turns out that Barrs was in fact 20, but
not a pilot, "merely" an airman at the base. That's a rather important detail to get wrong as it
drastically reduces the "value" of the death for conspiracy purposes.
Further, the circumstances of the death are the he was a passenger in a car that went of the road and hit a tree. The driver was taken to the hospital in critical condition and has been charged with negligent homicide. I'll bet there's a reason for that charge (alcohol) which would make this anything but mysterious. Besides, was the driver supposed to hit the tree in just the right way to kill this airman, with no connection to the flight of missiles nor even to B-52's, while leaving himself unharmed?
Of course this is precisely the kind of thing I was referring to when I said that closer examination tends to reveal the "mysterious" deaths were not so mysterious nor even all that connected to the incident. I'm two for two on that one which just makes it seem even more clear that this is a non-story. Another point to make is that when someone "stretches" details like that to try to make the incident in question a better fit a broader theory, that alone is further evidence that we should not take them seriously and can probably bypass the rest of the details they appeal to in support of their claims. Nonetheless I looked over the others and there's more.
Two more Air Force personnel, Senior Airman Clint Huff, 29, of Barksdale AFB, and his wife Linda died on Sept. 15 in nearby Shreveport, Louisiana, when Huff reportedly attempted to pass a van in a no-passing zone on his motorcycle, and the van made a left-hand turn, striking them.
What?? The "connection" is simply that they were Air Force personnel in
nearby Shreveport!?! This doesn't even pass the laugh test, come on. That method of death is in not at all suspicious and the connection is virtually non-existent! Hmmmm do we see a pattern here?
Please note that since it is the same author making the case, I can safely assume that any more damning a connection than he offers would certainly have been included, so if that's the best he can do to support this theory, there simply isn't much there. But yet there's more.
Then there are two reported suicides, which both occurred within days of the flight. One involved Todd Blue, a 20-year-old airman who was in a unit that guarded weapons at Minot. He reportedly shot himself in the head on Sept. 11 while on a visit to his family in Wytheville, Virginia. Local police investigators termed his death a suicide.
Oh, conspiracy theorists love suicides because it's so easy to imply (thanks to Hollywood?) that is just a cover for a more nefarious demise. However, suicides among people his age are unfortnuately not uncommon, and among the leading causes of death. Without
much more evidence (something that would make the claim of a suicide seem implausible, or something that made it a statistical abberation, for example) this just doesn't hold up as anything. Coupled with the non-stories above, these "mysterious" deaths are starting to look like a pretty weak foundation to build a major conspiracy on.
The second suicide, on Aug. 30, was John Frueh, a special forces weather commando at the Air Force’s Special Operations command headquartered at Hurlburt AFB in Florida.
Huh??? Again, where's the connection??? He isn't even in "nearby Shreveport" but I guess Florida is close enough for conspiracy theorists.
The rest of the details are equally unconvincing. He supposed to go to Portland for a wedding, fails to show up, ends up dead in the woods of Washington State. Not getting any closer, that's for sure. But hey, he did have a bag with a GPS and a video camera which, according to the author, seems strange for a suicide. Perhaps it is, but, one, don't all suicides have people pointing out how the decedant did things up until the last minute that are inconsistent with someone killing himself? And, much more importantly, even if it is strange, so what? The author has made
no connection whatsoever with the flight of missiles! In fact the lack of connection is so obvious and glaring I cannot imagine how anyone wishing to be taken seriously could include it in the list. That he is grasping this desperately, as I said, is further evidence that there really is nothing there.
So I'd say I was pretty much spot-on in my guess that these "mysterious deaths" connected to the flight (as they always seem to do) would turn out to be neither mysterious nor connected. A few minutes reading and the whole thing falls apart. This is also highlights both why I said someone shouldn't be throwing in sinister sounding vague parentheticals about such an important part of the (non)story, and why one might feel the need to remain vague in later stories as the bark of the vague implication is much worse than the bite of the details.
