Month: October 2008
Black Market Nukes! Part four: The Tinner Circle
Previously in this series, Friedrich Tinner and his sons Urs and Marco, a family of engineers, were mentioned as part of the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network. The Tinners had a factory in Malaysia producing centrifuge parts . When A.Q. Khan's international activities were exposed in 2003, so were the Tinners, who were based in Switzerland. They were taken into custody there, and expected to (eventually) stand trial. But the Swiss President made a rather shocking announcement on 23 May 2008... President Pascal Couchepin announced that the 30,000 documents of evidence in the Tinner case had been shredded. Blueprints for a nuclear bomb This came as a shock to the Swiss prosecutors. Any kind of successful prosecution of the Tinners was now in jeopardy, to say the least . Couchepin stated that the files were shredded because 'There were detailed construction plans for nuclear weapons, for gas ultracentrifuges to enrich...
Black Market Nukes! Part three: Couldn’t You Keep That To Yourself?
Let me sli - ide down along the side of this picture here and get into position to welcome you our readers back once again to Blather's very convoluted yet very informative 5-part series Black Market Nukes! To kick off this, the third part, which in one respect involves Valerie Plame (pictured), I should remind you of the main point of part one of this series. I wrote of how an ex-FBI employee, Sibel Edmonds, revealed that she worked on a project in which she listened to wiretaps and translated them. She listened to phone traffic between the Turkish embassy and the Turkish lobby group the American Turkish Council (ATC), involving dealings in the nuclear black market. But this FBI investigation she was working on was shut down, and her contract was terminated. It seems the FBI team went too deep, got too close to an uncomfortable truth... Essentially, foreign...
Black Market Nukes! Part two: The Path of Khan
In part one, ex-FBI employee Sibel Edmonds listened to wiretaps of Turkish agents in the USA, who were stealing American nuclear secrets and selling them on the black market. The FBI investigation was surprisingly shut down, and US Attorney General John Ashcroft slapped a State Secret Priveleges gag order on Edmonds to prevent her from speaking out about it when she blew the whistle. But she's recently defied that gag order. She claims that one of the buyers of these stolen nuclear secrets was Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's intelligence agency , who were working with Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man responsible for Pakistan's nuclear bomb. Part two of this series follows the trail of A.Q. Khan and his nuclear black market network. The Path of Khan In 1972, A.Q. (let's call him A.Q.) received his PhD in metallurgy and got a job in the Netherlands working for the...
Haunted Dublin book – Chilling accounts of the supernatural
Haunted Dublin: Chilling accounts of the supernatural in the city By Dave Walsh Introduction by Barry Kavanagh Only €14.99 + €3.50 P&P! Paperback: 93 pages, including 40 photographs by Dave Walsh Nonsuch Ireland/History Press Published October 2008 Haunted Dublin, by author and journalist Dave Walsh, gathers together in one succinct volume, well-known legends with rare and chilling accounts of the supernatural in the city. With poltergeists and apparitions, lore, myth and the downright scary, this fascinating work will delight and unsettle those brave enough to explore this hidden world. > iframe {position: absolute;top: 0;left: 0;} _psEmbed("https://www.davewalshphoto.com"); View the Haunted Dublin photograph collection » Dublin is the perfect haunted city, with its narrow cobbled streets concealing layers of interwoven history and folklore, left behind by generations of Viking, Norman and Irish inhabitants. Walking through the streets on a dark October evening, as Halloween or Samhain grows closer and the moon slips...
Black Market Nukes! Part one: Found in Translation
Who's that riding around with a nuclear bomb in his motorcycle sidecar? This is the first in a projected 5-part series of articles for Blather.net on the subject of black market nukes. As you may or may not know, there is an international network of people selling blueprints and material for nuclear weapons on the black market. If you follow the news keenly, you may stumble across a report from time to time, but it seems this issue is not as much in the media spotlight as it should be. I'm going to try to draw various strands of the story together for you. I'll be writing about A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani bomb and 'the merchant of menace'; Khan's associates the Tinner family in Switzerland; 'certain Turkish entities', as George W. Bush called them; the CIA front-company connected to the outed agent Valerie Plame; and first and...