By Ilan Berman, American Foreign Policy Council
Statement before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs
Ilan Berman, Vice President for Policy, American Foreign Policy Council
November 14, 2007
Chairman Tierney, Congressman Shays, distinguished members of the Subcommittee:
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to address the current crisis with Iran, and the potential of military action against the Iranian regime.
Today, the United States and its allies are fast approaching a fateful choice. After years of intensive work, the Islamic Republic's nuclear program is mature-and approaching operational capability. According to recent European estimates, as well as the assertions of regime officials themselves, Iran is now operating some 3,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges, placing it just one year away from producing enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon.[1] Soon, therefore, Washington will need to choose, as French President Nicolas Sarkozy has put it, between "Iran with the bomb or the bombing of Iran."[2]
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Let us be clear. There are no easy answers to the current conflict with Iran, only hard choices. A compelling case can be made that, at least for the moment, Iran's nuclear ambitions can be curbed, contained and even derailed through non-military measures such as a robust, coordinated economic warfare strategy.[9] The time for such "non-kinetic" approaches, however, is rapidly running out. As Iran draws closer to the nuclear threshold, the use of force-unpalatable as it is-will loom ever larger on the horizon. This is only logical. For, as Senator John McCain succinctly explained last year, "there's only one thing worse than the United States exercising the military option; that is a nuclear-armed Iran."[10]
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The Mystery of Minot: Loose nukes and a cluster of dead airmen raise troubling questions
by Dave Lindorff
Wed, 11/21/2007—The unauthorized Aug. 29 cross-country flight of a B-52H Stratofortress armed with six nuclear-tipped AGM-29 Advanced Cruise missiles, which saw these 150-kiloton warheads go missing for 36 hours, has all the elements of two Hollywood movies.
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The American Conservative has discovered that to date, more than a month after the incident, Pentagon investigators have completely ignored a peculiar cluster of six deaths, during the weeks immediately preceding and following the flight, of personnel at the two Air Force bases involved in the incident and Air Force Commando Operations headquarters.
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"The reported problems with procedures and record keeping follows an incident in August when a B-52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and flown to a Louisiana airbase. [beside an international seaport]
The mission from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota was to ferry cruise missiles that had been slated for decommissioning but the warheads were supposed to have been removed beforehand." [as well as the fuel, so clearly these were deliberately live.]
[SNAFUBAR. SAC doesn't do decommissioning, the AF has a Cargo Command for that.]
The Air Force disciplined some 70 airmen. [and apparently terminated six of them.]
police and medical examiners in the Frueh and Blue cases say no federal investigators, whether from DOD or FBI, have called them. Worse still, because the B-52 incident got so little media attention—no coverage in most local news—none of those investigating the accidents and suicides even knew about it or about the other deaths.
“It would have been interesting to know all that when I was examining Mr. Blue’s body,” says coroner Mike Stoker, “but no one told me about any of it or asked me about him.”
“If we had known that several people had died under questionable circumstances, it might have affected how we’d look at a body,” says Don Phillips, the sheriff’s deputy who investigated the Frueh death. “But nobody from the federal government has ever contacted us about this.”
“Certainly, in a case like this, the suicides should be a red flag,” says Hans Kristensen, a nuclear-affairs expert with the Federation of American Scientists. It’s wild speculation to think that there might be some connection between the deaths and the incident, but it certainly should be investigated.”
if it had been thoroughly debunked one would assume all coroners would have been contacted by the feds, they weren't.
Frueh, 33, a married father of two who had just received approval for promotion from captain to major, reportedly flew from Florida to Portland, Oregon, for a friend’s wedding. He never showed up. Instead, he called on Aug. 29, the day the missiles were loaded, from an interstate pull-off just outside Portland to say he was going for a hike in a park nearby. (It is not clear why he was at a highway rest stop as he had no car.) A day later, back in Portland, he rented a car at the airport, again calling his family. After he failed to appear at the wedding, his family filed a missing person’s report with the Portland police. The Sheriff’s Department in remote Skamania County, Washington, found Frueh’s rental car ten days later on the side of a road nearly 120 miles from the airport in a remote area of Badger Peak. Search dogs found his body in the woods. His death was ruled a suicide, though neither the sheriff’s investigator nor the medical examiner would give details. What makes this alleged suicide odd, however, is that the sheriff reports that Frueh had with him a knapsack containing a GPS locator and a videocam—odd equipment for someone intent on ending his life.
one would assume all coroners would have been contacted by the feds, they weren't.
actually, i don't know this. The article was first published in the Oct. 22, 2007 issue of American Conservative magazine. They could have been contacted since then. [but I doubt it].
Give thanks, and remember, God Bless America!*
*You know, America, as in the elite, not you or I....
Fuck anyone else.
Note: The above Inspired by Janet Reno's 'Song of America'.
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