SWITZIRELAND Orange Spongers & Sinner Bottom Feeders ?

The longing of the Irish Spirit towards liberation and freedom, will eventually be realized, inevitably, sooner or later, in some lifetime or other. This Spirit is like the river Shannon, flowing back to the Atlantic Ocean. It will continue to evolve, in all Irish traditions and cultures, to a greater level of awareness, while the remainder will return to Source. This Spirit is inclusive of both quality and abundance, which is the birthright of everyone from the island of Ireland, who seeks it and asserts it.

PEACE PROCESS TO IRISH SETTLEMENT PROCESS IRELAND

Speaking with many people from across the political divide in Ireland currently, the general consensus privately, is that the Irish Peace Process, is currently dying a slow death. One of its principal architects Gerry Adams in a statement recently stated, “The political process is in trouble. I believe that the political process faces its greatest challenge since the Good Friday Agreement negotiations in 1998. The anti-Good Friday Agreement axis within unionism; the pro-unionist stance of the British secretary of state Theresa Villiers; the refusal of Downing Street to honour its own obligations, are combining to create the most serious threat to the political institutions in the North in recent years.

“The result of all this is directly undermining power-sharing and partnership government. The unionist leaderships have been encouraged in their posture by a British government that has not been fully engaged with the political process for four years.” He added, that traditional pro-British Unionist were unwilling to participate positively in any of the Agreement's institutions, stating that “Instead it has adopted a tactical approach aimed at serving the political agenda of a fundamentalist rump in their party rather than the needs of the whole community,”

Again yesterday, Adams made a veiled attack, on the current Fine Gael regime in Government in the South of Ireland, which has traditionally protected the Unionists in the North, stating, "An anti-agreement axis has now emerged. There needs to be a pro-agreement axis and the two Governments need to be very, very focused on delivering on the agreement.” 

The Irish Government has been too passive in my view and the Taoiseach(Irish Prime minister) could well emulate the example of Albert Reynolds (Another Peace Process architect who died last week)  to get involved and press ahead but particularly to keep the British Government to its obligations.”

The traditional Unionist Leader in the north Peter Robinson statement in reply, "Once more we see the self-serving attempt by Sinn Fein to distract public attention from real problems by blaming everyone, except itself, for what it asserts is a crisis that impacts on the political institutions."

Last week Hilary Clinton 's aide “Today, too many in Ireland take two decades of a ceasefire for granted. They still focus on their own sense of victimhood of the past and fail to forge a new united community that can not only solidify the peace, but even build shared prosperity. A look back at the hard-fought ceasefire may encourage some broader thinking about the responsibility of leadership to build a better shared future for the people of Ireland.”

The British Conservative Government and their Vice Royal in Ireland, since coming to power, other than enforcing a heavy censorship of international media coverage of the ongoing low intensity war In Occupied Ireland, have irresponsibly taken a hands off approach with the Peace Process and essentially have failed to understand the critical small print of the dying Good Friday agreement.

In a recent statement the leader of Republican Sinn Fein, the traditional  Irish Republican voice, leader Des Dalton stated, "We are being asked to abandon the high ideals, that inspired that revolutionary generation of a century ago and instead embrace the mythology of empire. It is evident that in the decade of centenaries, the political establishments of Leinster House, Stormont and Westminster, are determined to draw a line under Irish history. By demonising and isolating Irish Republicanism and refusing it access to public debate, they hope, that it will simply fade from the public consciousness, robbed of historical or political legitimacy. Quoting from a Ronan Fanning article in the Irish Times, he added,  “…the propagation of a bland, bloodless, bowdlerised and inaccurate hybrid of history, which if carried to extremes, is more likely to provoke political outrage than to command intellectual respect, let alone consensus.”

The Freemasonry of the Orange Order are now front and centre in Unionism, Fine Gael and British politics. Its Chaplain, Rev Mervyn Gibson, the most influential person in all-party talks on flags, parading and the past, is even more influential after the DUP and UUP scuttled the talks by the recent US Government to try move the dying process on, with its envoys Richard Haas and Meghan Sullivan sent packing by the Orange Order, exercising its trump card, the Orange veto.This is one of many critical factors, that was not dealt with by The Peace process. Another was the issue of large numbers of political prisoners still languishing in British Gaols, in both parts of Ireland. This threatens to explode again at any moment, in the same way that, the Hunger Strike of Bobby Sands and the 11 other Irish Republicans, who starved to death on Hunger Strike, changing the face of Irish politics and giving the platform to Adams voice, to be serious player he now is in Irish politics.


Now however, the Orange Order have demonstrated themselves to be the real voice of traditional Unionism, while Adams clearly does not speak for traditional Irish Republicans. What Nancy Soderberg and the British Conservative Party in London have failed to grasp, is that the Good Friday Agreement will not stick, without a proper foundation, in the context of both the Orange and Green traditions of Ireland. These traditions are deep in the psyche of the majority of Irish people's consciousness. One of the principal lessons of the last 800 years of irish History, which Ms Soderberg in the context of Ireland and many American citizens in the context of their own short history, fail to understand is "Old Europe."


In light of all of this, one does not have to be particularly bright to observe, that the Peace Process is past its sell by date, on the ground in Ireland. It clearly needs to evolve into something more comprehensive and inclusive, with respect to the matter of Orange/Green traditions and their real voices. Clearly again for a more permanent solution, the "Peace Process needs to evolve from a superficially contrived short term fix into a bedded down into comprehensive Settlement Process of solution. Everyone is going to have to think and act outside the box for a solution. This is called the Vision of States persons something the island of Ireland clearly lacks. This requires an honest broker, with enough clout and integrity, to stand up to both the internal and external bullies, that are generating the fear, that is prolonging the conflict, in which no civilized citizen from either tradition, can breathe the fresh air of liberty, equality and fraternity.


Settlement Process

The English Oxford dictionary  defines "settlement"as "An official agreement intended to resolve a dispute or conflict." Obviously in any permanent settlement, compromise is critical and nobody is going to achieve their ideals.This needs to be first accepted by everyone at the negotiating table, however painful.The alternative is a war for total victory, the consequence of which, no sane mind can countenance. Most fair minded traditional Irish republicans will acknowledge, that the Orange tradition has made considerable sacrifices, with respect to their own identity, particularly in the context of both World Wars and the recent ongoing war in Ireland, with tens of thousands losing their lives in all of this.This is a considerable factor in their tradition and identity. Any agreement that ignores this reality is doomed.


Likewise within the "green tradition" millions of Irish have died, as a result of British colonialism. This reality cannot simply be airbrushed out of Irish history by revisionism because it is deeply embedded, consciously or unconsciously, within the Irish psyche, on the same scale as the Jewish Holocaust is with Israelites. Ireland lost several million citizens in it's own holocaust, which also must be addressed within any credible settlement.There are  many other pressing, critical social issues within Ireland, such as Irish people's access to its own natural resources such as water, a Bill of Civil Rights, People before Profit, transparent genuine, direct, Democracy, with modern technology, such as the internet, with real checks and balances, that ensure ordinary people have real voting power, as a defence, against unregulated corporate monopolies, hijacking the constitutional process, with political bribery and the current endemic corruption of the present systems within all parts of Ireland.


In any objective political perspective , of the relatively small island of Ireland, with its current political realities, it is crystal clear, that a Federal solution ,similar to many other European countries, is really the only feasible solution to the current reality, with an arrangement, where Unionists in Ulster can protect their identity and traditions, within possibly a British Commonwealth arrangement, customized specifically, to facilitate their specific traditions and arrangements and possibly protect them along with their British brethren, from the creeping, fascist monopoly of Europe. This of course will be anathema to many traditional Irish republicans, with the exception of eccentrics like Martin McGuinness, but it will take compromise, fair mindedness and sacrifice, in any credible settlement, that is based on reality, as opposed to the horrific alternative. It will require people who genuinely love the people of Ireland from all traditions and a progressive ability, to think outside the box.

Of course many will argue, that the changing demographics on the ground will change all of anyway this but in a Spirit of true reconciliation, all minorities, including immigrant aspirations, must be respected in any genuine modern democracy. Traditional Irish Republicans like Ruarai O'Bradaigh, recognized this and presented drafts for a comprehensive agreement, that factored in much of this compromise, in a Spirit of Abundance, which has traditionally been a much acclaimed Irish characteristic, at least until recently. It is time for everyone to get real, put their ego's and personalities to one side and make this comprehensive, inclusive, settlement a reality, based on civilized principles of human progress.

This author formally does not belong to any political organization and offers this proposal in a spirit of unity not division. Because of fascist censorship in Ireland presently, I sincerely also ask  those readers who agree with the outlines of this proposal, to share it wherever you can. If you belong to a political party, trade union or political forum or platform, please take up this proposal and make it as inclusive as possible. If you are overseas or non Irish, we need your help desperately as some of our best and brightest have lost their lives or are overseas. We need all of both from the Irish diaspora and other nationalities help us build this peacefully without being bullied, into a comprehensive, inclusive, lasting settlement.

Please Share as much as you can if you agree, help make this happen.

mise le meas

brionOcleirigh

ISRAELI NUCLEAR ROGUE BULLY TERRORIST STATE THREATENS THE WORLD

Nuclear-Weapon States:

The nuclear-weapon states (NWS) are the five states—China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States—officially recognized as possessing nuclear weapons by the NPT. Although the treaty legitimizes these states’ nuclear arsenals, it also establishes that they are not supposed to build and maintain such weapons in perpetuity. Article VI of the treaty holds that each state-party is to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” In 2000, the five NWS committed themselves to an “unequivocal undertaking…to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.” But for now, the five continue to retain the bulk of their nuclear forces. Because of the secretive nature with which most governments treat information about their nuclear arsenals, most of the figures below are best estimates of each nuclear-weapon state’s nuclear holdings, including both strategic warheads and lower-yield devices referred to as tactical weapons. Russia and the United States also retain thousands of retired warheads planned for dismantlement, not included here.

China: About 250 total warheads. 
France: Fewer than 300 operational warheads. 
Russia: Approximately 1,512 strategic warheads deployed on 498 ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers [1]. The Federation of American Scientists estimates Russia has another 1,000 nondeployed strategic warheads and approximately 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads. Additional thousands are awaiting dismantlement.
United Kingdom: Fewer than 160 deployed strategic warheads, total stockpile of up to 225.

United States: 4,804 nuclear warheads as of September 2013 [2], including tactical, strategic, and nondeployed weapons. According to the latest official New START declaration, the United States has1,585 strategic nuclear warheads deployed on 778 ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers [1]. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that the United States' nondeployed strategic arsenal is approximately 2,800 warheads and the U.S. tactical nuclear arsenal numbers 500 warheads. Additional warheads are retired and await dismantlement.

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Non-NPT Nuclear Weapons Possessors:

Three states—India, Israel, and Pakistan—never joined the NPT and are known to possess nuclear weapons. Claiming its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes, India first tested a nuclear explosive device in 1974. That test spurred Pakistan to ramp up work on its secret nuclear weapons program. India and Pakistan both publicly demonstrated their nuclear weapon capabilities with a round of tit-for-tat nuclear tests in May 1998. Israel has not publicly conducted a nuclear test, does not admit to or deny having nuclear weapons, and states that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Nevertheless, Israel is universally believed to possess nuclear arms. The following arsenal estimates are based on the amount of fissile material—highly enriched uranium and plutonium—that each of the states is estimated to have produced. Fissile material is the key element for making nuclear weapons. India and Israel are believed to use plutonium in their weapons, while Pakistan is thought to use highly enriched uranium.

India: Between 90-110 nuclear warheads.
Israel: Between 75 to 200 nuclear warheads.
Pakistan: Between 100 to 120 nuclear warheads.

The truth about Israel's secret nuclear arsenal

Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye. But how can we expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won't come clean?

• 
• • Julian Borger
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 15 January 2014 18.18 GMT
  • Jump to comments (1087)

Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona. Photograph: Getty Images

Deep beneath desert sands, an embattled Middle Eastern state has built a covert nuclear bomb, using technology and materials provided by friendly powers or stolen by a clandestine network of agents. It is the stuff of pulp thrillers and the sort of narrative often used to characterise the worst fears about the Iranian nuclear programme. In reality, though, neither US nor British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and Iran's atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.

The exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though. It's just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat of subterfuge, Israel managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal – now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan – and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.

Despite the fact that the Israel's nuclear programme has been an open secret since a disgruntled technician, Mordechai Vanunu, blew the whistle on it in 1986, the official Israeli position is still never to confirm or deny its existence.

When the former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, broke the taboo last month, declaring Israeli possession of both nuclear and chemical weapons and describing the official non-disclosure policy as "outdated and childish" a rightwing group formally called for a police investigation for treason.

Meanwhile, western governments have played along with the policy of "opacity" by avoiding all mention of the issue. In 2009, when a veteran Washington reporter, Helen Thomas, asked Barack Obama in the first month of his presidency if he knew of any country in the Middle East withnuclear weapons, he dodged the trapdoor by saying only that he did not wish to "speculate".

UK governments have generally followed suit. Asked in the House of Lords in November about Israeli nuclear weapons, Baroness Warsianswered tangentially. "Israel has not declared a nuclear weapons programme. We have regular discussions with the government of Israel on a range of nuclear-related issues," the minister said. "The government of Israel is in no doubt as to our views. We encourage Israel to become a state party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT]."

But through the cracks in this stone wall, more and more details continue to emerge of how Israel built its nuclear weapons from smuggled parts and pilfered technology.

The tale serves as a historical counterpoint to today's drawn-out struggle over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The parallels are not exact – Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.

The list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, include today's staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.

Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. Photograph: AP

Meanwhile, Israeli agents charged with buying fissile material and state-of-the-art technology found their way into some of the most sensitive industrial establishments in the world. This daring and remarkably successful spy ring, known as Lakam, the Hebrew acronym for the innocuous-sounding Science Liaison Bureau, included such colourful figures as Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood producer behind such hits as Pretty Woman, LA Confidential and 12 Years a Slave, who finally admitted his role last month.

"Do you know what it's like to be a twentysomething-year-old kid [and] his country lets him be James Bond? Wow! The action! That was exciting," he said in an Israeli documentary.

Milchan's life story is colourful, and unlikely enough to be the subject of one of the blockbusters he bankrolls. In the documentary, Robert de Niro recalls discussing Milchan's role in the illicit purchase of nuclear-warhead triggers. "At some point I was asking something about that, being friends, but not in an accusatory way. I just wanted to know," De Niro says. "And he said: yeah I did that. Israel's my country."

Milchan was not shy about using Hollywood connections to help his shadowy second career. At one point, he admits in the documentary, he used the lure of a visit to actor Richard Dreyfuss's home to get a top US nuclear scientist, Arthur Biehl, to join the board of one of his companies.

According to Milchan's biography, by Israeli journalists Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, he was recruited in 1965 by Israel's current president, Shimon Peres, who he met in a Tel Aviv nightclub (called Mandy's, named after the hostess and owner's wife Mandy Rice-Davies, freshly notorious for her role in the Profumo sex scandal). Milchan, who then ran the family fertiliser company, never looked back, playing a central role in Israel's clandestine acquisition programme.

He was responsible for securing vital uranium-enrichment technology, photographing centrifuge blueprints that a German executive had been bribed into temporarily "mislaying" in his kitchen. The same blueprints, belonging to the European uranium enrichment consortium, Urenco, were stolen a second time by a Pakistani employee, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who used them to found his country's enrichment programme and to set up a global nuclear smuggling business, selling the design to Libya, North Korea and Iran.

For that reason, Israel's centrifuges are near-identical to Iran's, a convergence that allowed Israeli to try out a computer worm, codenamed Stuxnet, on its own centrifuges before unleashing it on Iran in 2010.

Arguably, Lakam's exploits were even more daring than Khan's. In 1968, it organised the disappearance of an entire freighter full of uranium ore in the middle of the Mediterranean. In what became known as the Plumbat affair, the Israelis used a web of front companies to buy a consignment of uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, in Antwerp. The yellowcake was concealed in drums labelled "plumbat", a lead derivative, and loaded onto a freighter leased by a phony Liberian company. The sale was camouflaged as a transaction between German and Italian companies with help from German officials, reportedly in return for an Israeli offer to help the Germans with centrifuge technology.

When the ship, the Scheersberg A, docked in Rotterdam, the entire crew was dismissed on the pretext that the vessel had been sold and an Israeli crew took their place. The ship sailed into the Mediterranean where, under Israeli naval guard, the cargo was transferred to another vessel.

US and British documents declassified last year also revealed a previously unknown Israeli purchase of about 100 tons of yellowcake from Argentina in 1963 or 1964, without the safeguards typically used in nuclear transactions to prevent the material being used in weapons.

Israel had few qualms about proliferating nuclear weapons knowhow and materials, giving South Africa's apartheid regime help in developing its own bomb in the 1970s in return for 600 tons of yellowcake.

Pictures of the secret Dimona nuclear reactor in Israel, showing where the plant has allegedly been camouflaged. Photograph: space imaging

Israel's nuclear reactor also required deuterium oxide, also known as heavy water, to moderate the fissile reaction. For that, Israel turned to Norway and Britain. In 1959, Israel managed to buy 20 tons of heavy water that Norway had sold to the UK but was surplus to requirements for the British nuclear programme. Both governments were suspicious that the material would be used to make weapons, but decided to look the other way. In documents seen by the BBC in 2005 British officials argued it would be "over-zealous" to impose safeguards. For its part, Norway carried out only one inspection visit, in 1961.

Israel's nuclear-weapons project could never have got off the ground, though, without an enormous contribution from France. The country that took the toughest line on counter-proliferation when it came to Iran helped lay the foundations of Israel's nuclear weapons programme, driven by by a sense of guilt over letting Israel down in the 1956 Suez conflict, sympathy from French-Jewish scientists, intelligence-sharing over Algeria and a drive to sell French expertise and abroad.

"There was a tendency to try to export and there was a general feeling of support for Israel," Andre Finkelstein, a former deputy commissioner at France's Atomic Energy Commissariat and deputy director general at the International Atomic Energy Agency, told Avner Cohen, an Israeli-American nuclear historian.

France's first reactor went critical as early as 1948 but the decision to build nuclear weapons seems to have been taken in 1954, after Pierre Mendès France made his first trip to Washington as president of the council of ministers of the chaotic Fourth Republic. On the way back he told an aide: "It's exactly like a meeting of gangsters. Everyone is putting his gun on the table, if you have no gun you are nobody. So we must have a nuclear programme."

Mendès France gave the order to start building bombs in December 1954. And as it built its arsenal, Paris solds material assistance to other aspiring weapons states, not just Israel.

"[T]his went on for many, many years until we did some stupid exports, including Iraq and the reprocessing plant in Pakistan, which was crazy," Finkelstein recalled in an interview that can now be read in a collection of Cohen's papers at the Wilson Centre thinktank in Washington. "We have been the most irresponsible country on nonproliferation."

In Dimona, French engineers poured in to help build Israel a nuclear reactor and a far more secret reprocessing plant capable of separating plutonium from spent reactor fuel. This was the real giveaway that Israel's nuclear programme was aimed at producing weapons.

By the end of the 50s, there were 2,500 French citizens living in Dimona, transforming it from a village to a cosmopolitan town, complete with French lycées and streets full of Renaults, and yet the whole endeavour was conducted under a thick veil of secrecy. The American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his book The Samson Option: "French workers at Dimona were forbidden to write directly to relatives and friends in France and elsewhere, but sent mail to a phony post-office box in Latin America."

The British were kept out of the loop, being told at different times that the huge construction site was a desert grasslands research institute and a manganese processing plant. The Americans, also kept in the dark by both Israel and France, flew U2 spy planes over Dimona in an attempt to find out what they were up to.

The Israelis admitted to having a reactor but insisted it was for entirely peaceful purposes. The spent fuel was sent to France for reprocessing, they claimed, even providing film footage of it being supposedly being loaded onto French freighters. Throughout the 60s it flatly denied the existence of the underground reprocessing plant in Dimona that was churning out plutonium for bombs.

Producer Arnon Milchan with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the premiere of Mr and Mrs Smith. Photograph: L Cohen

Israel refused to countenance visits by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), so in the early 1960s President Kennedy demanded they accept American inspectors. US physicists were dispatched to Dimona but were given the run-around from the start. Visits were never twice-yearly as had been agreed with Kennedy and were subject to repeated postponements. The US physicists sent to Dimona were not allowed to bring their own equipment or collect samples. The lead American inspector, Floyd Culler, an expert on plutonium extraction, noted in his reports that there were newly plastered and painted walls in one of the buildings. It turned out that before each American visit, the Israelis had built false walls around the row of lifts that descended six levels to the subterranean reprocessing plant.

As more and more evidence of Israel's weapons programme emerged, the US role progressed from unwitting dupe to reluctant accomplice. In 1968 the CIA director Richard Helms told President Johnson that Israel had indeed managed to build nuclear weapons and that its air force had conducted sorties to practise dropping them.

The timing could not have been worse. The NPT, intended to prevent too many nuclear genies from escaping from their bottles, had just been drawn up and if news broke that one of the supposedly non-nuclear-weapons states had secretly made its own bomb, it would have become a dead letter that many countries, especially Arab states, would refuse to sign.

The Johnson White House decided to say nothing, and the decision was formalised at a 1969 meeting between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, at which the US president agreed to not to pressure Israel into signing the NPT, while the Israeli prime minister agreed her country would not be the first to "introduce" nuclear weapons into the Middle East and not do anything to make their existence public.

In fact, US involvement went deeper than mere silence. At a meeting in 1976 that has only recently become public knowledge, the CIA deputy director Carl Duckett informed a dozen officials from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency suspected some of the fissile fuel in Israel's bombs was weapons-grade uranium stolen under America's nose from a processing plant in Pennsylvania.

Not only was an alarming amount of fissile material going missing at the company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec), but it had been visited by a veritable who's-who of Israeli intelligence, including Rafael Eitan, described by the firm as an Israeli defence ministry "chemist", but, in fact, a top Mossad operative who went on to head Lakam.

"It was a shock. Everyody was open-mouthed," recalls Victor Gilinsky, who was one of the American nuclear officials briefed by Duckett. "It was one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear material but the consequences appeared so awful for the people involved and for the US than nobody really wanted to find out what was going on."

The investigation was shelved and no charges were made.

A few years later, on 22 September 1979, a US satellite, Vela 6911, detected the double-flash typical of a nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa. Leonard Weiss, a mathematician and an expert on nuclear proliferation, was working as a Senate advisor at the time and after being briefed on the incident by US intelligence agencies and the country's nuclear weapons laboratories, he became convinced a nuclear test, in contravention to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, had taken place.

It was only after both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations attempted to gag him on the incident and tried to whitewash it with an unconvincing panel of enquiry, that it dawned on Weiss that it was the Israelis, rather than the South Africans, who had carried out the detonation.

"I was told it would create a very serious foreign policy issue for the US, if I said it was a test. Someone had let something off that US didn't want anyone to know about," says Weiss.

Israeli sources told Hersh the flash picked up by the Vela satellite was actually the third of a series of Indian Ocean nuclear tests that Israel conducted in cooperation with South Africa.

"It was a fuck-up," one source told him. "There was a storm and we figured it would block Vela, but there was a gap in the weather – a window – and Vela got blinded by the flash."

The US policy of silence continues to this day, even though Israel appears to be continuing to trade on the nuclear black market, albeit at much reduced volumes. In a paper on the illegal trade in nuclear material and technology published in October, the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) noted: "Under US pressure in the 1980s and early 1990s, Israel … decided to largely stop its illicit procurement for its nuclear weapons programme. Today, there is evidence that Israel may still make occasional illicit procurements – US sting operations and legal cases show this."

Avner Cohen, the author of two books on Israel's bomb, said that policy of opacity in both Israel and in Washington is kept in place now largely by inertia. "At the political level, no one wants to deal with it for fear of opening a Pandora's box. It has in many ways become a burden for the US, but people in Washington, all the way up to Obama will not touch it, because of the fear it could compromise the very basis of the Israeli-US understanding."

In the Arab world and beyond, there is growing impatience with the skewed nuclear status quo. Egypt in particular has threatened to walk out of the NPT unless there is progress towards creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The western powers promised to stage a conference on the proposal in 2012 but it was called off, largely at America's behest, to reduce the pressure on Israel to attend and declare its nuclear arsenal.

"Somehow the kabuki goes on," Weiss says. "If it is admitted Israel has nuclear weapons at least you can have an honest discussion. It seems to me it's very difficult to get a resolution of the Iran issue without being honest about that."

BRIT DIRT WAR CONTINUES DESPITE IRISH PEACE PROCESS

in the middLE OF A  bRITISH SECRET SERVICE dIRTY TRICKS op OF ID HACK, DISINFO & a DISCREDIT CAMPAIGN, i HAVE BEEN CHECKING AROUND FOR ANYTHING RELEVANT. THE FOLLOWING IS WHAT i HAVE FOUND SO FAR.

The Dirty War by Martin Dillon uncovers a real-life underground world of double and triple agents - many of whom have shared their stories with him. It exposes the covert strategies and tactics used in political conflicts, including the use of State terrorist agents and the 'enforcers' used by State terrorists to seek out collaborators in their ranks.

The Guardian, UK: The Dirty War makes Cold War duplicity a la Deighton and Le Carre seem positively endearing.'Financial Times, London: 'Dillon's exhaustive work, The Dirty War, covers the whole panoply of dirty tricks and conspiracies, black propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, conflicts between MI5 and MI6, double agents and sectarian murders. It is grippingly written with the pace of a thriller and the book scores highly because of Mr. Dillon's detachment'.

UK intelligence forced to reveal secret policy for mass surveillance of residents’ Facebook and Google use

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17-JUN-2014

Britain’s top counter-terrorism official has been forced to reveal a secret Government policy justifying the mass surveillance of every Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Google user in the UK.

This disturbing policy was made public due to a legal challenge brought by Privacy International, Liberty, Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, Pakistani organisation Bytes for All, and five other national civil liberties organisations1

The statement, from Charles Farr, the Director General of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, claims that the indiscriminate interception of UK residents’ Facebook and Google communications would be permitted under law because they are defined as ‘external communications’.

Farr’s statement, published today by the rights organisations, is the first time the Government has openly commented on how it thinks it can use the UK’s vague surveillance legal framework to indiscriminately intercept communications through its mass interception programme, TEMPORA.

The secret policy outlined by Farr defines almost all communications via Facebook and other social networking sites, as well as webmail services Hotmail and Yahoo and web searches via Google, to be ‘external communications’ because they use web-based ‘platforms’ based in the US.

The distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ communications is crucial. Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (‘RIPA’), which regulates the surveillance powers of public bodies, ‘internal’ communications may only be intercepted under a warrant which relates to a specific individual or address. These warrants should only be granted where there is some suspicion of unlawful activity. However, an individual’s ‘external communications’ may be intercepted indiscriminately, even where there are no grounds to suspect any wrongdoing.

By defining the use of ‘platforms’ such as Facebook, Twitter and Google as ‘external communications’, British residents are being deprived of the essential safeguards that would otherwise be applied to their communications - simply because they are using services that are based outside the UK.

Such an approach suggests that GCHQ believes it is entitled to indiscriminately intercept all communications in and out of the UK. The explanations given by Mr Farr suggest that:

• GCHQ is intercepting all communications - emails, text messages, and communications sent via “platforms” such as Facebook and Google – before determining whether they fall into the “internal” or “external” categories
• The Government considers almost all Facebook and other social media communications, and Google searches will always fall within the “external” category, even when such communications are between two people in the UK
• Classifying communications as “external” allows the Government to search through, read, listen to and look at each of them. The only restriction on what they do with communications that they classify as “external” is that they cannot search through such communications using keywords or terms that mention a specific British person or residence.
• Even though the Government is conducting mass surveillance - intercepting and scanning through all communications in order to work out whether they are internal or external - they consider that such interception “has less importance” than whether a person actually reads the communication, which is where the Government believes “the substantive interference with privacy arises”.
• The Government believes that, even when privacy violations happen, it is not an “active intrusion” because the analyst reading or listening to an individual’s communication will inevitably forget about it anyway.

The legal challenge is brought following revelations made by Edward Snowden about the UK’s global digital surveillance activities. Farr is the government’s star witness in the case, which will be heard by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal between 14 and 18 July 2014. Read our arguments here.

In addition to Farr's statement, we are publishing the witness statements from Dr Gus Hosein, Executive Director of Privacy International, and Eric King, Deputy Director of Privacy International. Additional evidence submitted by Privacy International, from Dr Ian Brown, Oxford Internet Institute, and Cindy Cohn, Legal Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, can be found here and here.

Eric King, Deputy Director of Privacy International said:

Intelligence agencies cannot be considered accountable to Parliament and to the public they serve when their actions are obfuscated through secret interpretations of byzantine laws. Moreover, the suggestion that violations of the right to privacy are meaningless if the violator subsequently forgets about it not only offends the fundamental, inalienable nature of human rights, but patronises the British people, who will not accept such a meagre excuse for the loss of their civil liberties.”

James Welch, Legal Director of Liberty said:

The security services consider that they’re entitled to read, listen and analyse all our communications on Facebook, Google and other US-based platforms.  If there was any remaining doubt that our snooping laws need a radical overhaul there can be no longer. The Agencies now operate in a legal and ethical vacuum; why the deafening silence from our elected representatives?”

Michael Bochenek, Senior Director of International Law and Policy at Amnesty International said:

British citizens will be alarmed to see their government justifying industrial-scale intrusion into their communications. The public should demand an end to this wholesale violation of their right to privacy.”

Shahzad Ahmad, Country Director, Bytes for All

We’ve always believed that Tempora enables unlawful profiling of people living outside UK. Now we’ve come to learn that GCHQ are also subjecting UK residents to this intrusive spying. Such an action by UK intelligence agencies is sheer violation of people's privacy, security, freedom of expression, and assembly. Such attempts by established democracies are setting extremely worrisome precedents for repressive regimes all over the world."

---

Note to Editors:
 

Law:

• Under s.8(1) Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (‘RIPA’), internal communications between British residents located within the UK, may only be monitored pursuant to a specific warrant. These specific warrants should only be granted where there is some reason to suspect the person in question of unlawful activity.
• ‘External communications’ may be monitored indiscriminately under a ‘general warrant’ pursuant to s.8(4) RIPA.

Parties:

• Privacy International is represented by Bhatt Murphy Solicitors, Dan Squires (Matrix Chambers) and Ben Jaffey (Blackstones Chambers)
• Amnesty International is represented by Kirsty Brimelow QC and Jude Bunting (Doughty Street Chambers)

Contacts:

• Privacy International - Mike Rispoli, Communications Manager, mike@privacyinternational.org; +44 (0) 7557793878
• Liberty – Contact the Press Office on 020 7378 3656 or 07973 831128
• Amnesty International – Max Tucker, Press Officer Global Campaigns, Thematic Issues and UN,max.tucker@amnesty.org; +44 (0) 7983563983
• Bhatt Murphy - Shamik Dutta 0207 729 1115

Footnotes

• 1.Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Legal Resources Centre, South Africa

RELATED PROJECT(S): 

EYES WIDE OPEN

ISSUES: 

ANTI-TERRORISM

COMMUNICATIONS SURVEILLANCE

DATA PROTECTION AND PRIVACY LAWS

COUNTRIES: 

UNITED KINGDOM

DOWNLOADS: 

 WITNESS_ST_OF_CHARLES_BLANDFORD_FARR.PDF

 ERIC_KING_WITNESS_STATEMENT.PDF

 GUS_HOSEIN_WITNESS_STATEMENT.PDF

 STATEMENT_IAN_BROWN.PDF

 OPEN_GOVT_RESPONSE.PDF

 PI_JULY_HEARING_SKELETON.PDF

'THE SPOOKS RUN THE COUNTRY' - SIR DAVID HARE

Sir David Hare

According to the British playwright Sir David Hare: 'The security services are running the country.'

In The Guardian, Hare is quoted as saying: "The reason I'm writing about the security services is that there is no democratic control of them whatsoever. 

"And now it seems the judiciary is joining in."



Hare has written three films for the BBC about an MI5 agent who is fed up with MI5's abuse of power. 

The second of these BBC plays, Turks and Caicos, to be broadcast in March 2014, is about the MI5 agent hiding on a Caribbean island.

There he meets a CIA agent who is infiltrating a group of New Jersey businessmen. 

The businessmen have built secret detention and torture camps for the US government.

But they have overcharged the US government.

Soon a body is found floating in the sea.



According to Hare: "There certainly isn't anybody in government with the guts to stand up to the security services and their effective free rein to do whatever they like. 

"That's what these films are about - our powerlessness."

Hare interviewed a large number of British spies.

He says that many of them are as worried about what's happening as he is.

"There are people inside MI5 who think what has happened in the last 10 years is absolutely disgusting", says Hare.

David Dees Illustration.

According to Hare, what is in his play is happening in real life.

He says: "The American security services have been ripped off for such huge sums of money, a lot of them for phantom projects that don't even exist. 

"They've been taken to the cleaners. 

"Apart from anything else, the war on terror has been the biggest criminal racket for the last 10 years." 


UK spy Stephen Ward. MYSTERIOUS STEPHEN.

In 2000, MI5 invited Hare to give a talk about the theatre. 

Hare says: "When I went in in 2000, they had toffee accents, accents from years ago, and Le Carré was entirely accurate about how public school, white, posh and archaic it all was. 

"It was empire - it still had the feeling of empire."

Hare's trilogy includes a UK prime minister who is a bit like Tony Blair, a man who intends to become very rich.

According to Hare: "Politics is just a function of business now."

The security services reportedly run child brothels as a way of controlling the top people. 

Hare appears to be puzzled by the fact that the public are not more enraged by the actions of their politicians.

He says: "The only argument we seem to be having in the United Kingdom is going on in Scotland...

"The Scots are saying we don't want to be organised in this monetarist, austere, anti-public kind of government." 

CIA torture and mind control of children

Perhaps some of the spooks at the Guardian and at the BBC believe that "what has happened in the last 10 years is absolutely disgusting".

Sir David Hare may be their spokesman.

There is a belief that a faction within the CIA is at war with the National Security Agency.

~~

The Starman, and Scottish Independence

US contemplates sanctions against Israel boycotters.

Ukraine president announces concessions- state sponsored terrorism at work