Saudi Arabia and American Nuclear Technology - Another Tale of Unintended Consequences

This press release recently appeared on the website for the Committee on Oversight and Reform:

Here is the letter from the Committee that was sent to the White House regarding the matter:

It turns out that a number of anonymous whistleblowers came forward to warn the Committee about the apparent rush by some members of the White House staff to transfer highly sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia which may have been in violation of the Atomic Energy Act.

Here is the cover page of the Interim Staff Report for the Committee:

In the Executive Summary, we find these paragraphs:

"Within the United States, strong private commercial interests have been pressing aggressively for the transfer of highly sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia—a potential risk to U.S. national security absent adequate safeguards. These commercial entities stand to reap billions of dollars through contracts associated with constructing and operating nuclear facilities in Saudi Arabia—and apparently have been in close and repeated contact with President Trump and his Administration to the present day."

It is important to keep in mind that under Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act you will find this:

"No cooperation with any nation, group of nations or regional defense organization pursuant to section 53, 54a., 57, 64, 82, 91, 103, 104, or 144 shall be undertaken until–

a. the proposed agreement for cooperation has been submitted to the President, which proposed agreement shall include the terms, conditions, duration, nature, and scope of the cooperation; and shall include the following requirements:

(1) a guaranty by the cooperating party that safeguards as set forth in the agreement for cooperation will be maintained with respect to all nuclear materials and equipment transferred pursuant thereto, and with respect to all special nuclear material used in or produced through the use of such nuclear materials and equipment, so long as the material or equipment remains under the jurisdiction or control of the cooperating party, irrespective of the duration of other provisions in the agreement or whether the agreement is terminated or suspended for any reason;

(2) in the case of non-nuclear-weapon states, a requirement, as a condition of continued United States nuclear supply under the agreement for cooperation, that IAEA safeguards be maintained with respect to all nuclear materials in all peaceful nuclear activities within the territory of such state, under its jurisdiction, or carried out under its control anywhere;

(3) except in the case of those agreements for cooperation arranged pursuant to subsection 91c., a guaranty by the cooperating party that no nuclear materials and equipment or sensitive nuclear technology to be transferred pursuant to such agreement, and no special nuclear material produced through the use of any nuclear materials and equipment or sensitive nuclear technology transferred pursuant to such agreement, will be used for any nuclear explosive device, or for research on or development of any nuclear explosive device, or for any other military purpose." (my bolds)

Under Section 123, the United States government may not transfer nuclear technology to a foreign country without the approval of Congress.

As background and to help put this story into perspective, we have to look at a company called IP3 International (International Peace, Power and Prosperity) which is mentioned in the Committee's report.   Here is the company's mission statement:

IP3's goal is to revitalize America's flagging nuclear industry by exporting its expertise around the world.

Here are three screen captures showing the heavy involvement of former United States military personnel in the leadership of the company:

Can we say "Deep State"?  Mike Rogers is a former Congressman from Michigan's Eighth District and was an officer in the U.S. Army and FBI special agent.  John Tanner is a former Congressman from Tennessee's Eighth District and served in the Tennessee Army National Guard where he achieved the rank of Colonel.  According to the Committee report, over the period from June 2016 to December 2016, General Michael Flynn, Donald Trump's former National Security Advisor was also serving as an "advisor" to one of IP3's subsidiaries, IronBridge Group Inc.  Frances Fragos Townsend whose name you will see later in this posting served as an Assistant to President George W. Bush for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and chaired the Homeland Security Council from May 2004 to January 2008. She served as Deputy National Security Advisor for Combatting Terrorism from 2003 until 2004. Prior to serving the President, she was the first Assistant Commandant for Intelligence for the U.S. Coast Guard.

In documents released with the Committee report, we find two very interesting emails.  The first one was emailed from Frances Fragos Townsend at IP3 to staff at the National Security Council on March 28th, 2017 and appears to be an overview of the Middle East Marshall Plan that is proposed by IP3, keeping in mind that the original Marshall Plan was a U.S. program that provided aid to Europe following the devastation wrought in Europe during Second World War:

You will note two interesting points:

1.) America's Middle East allies have a sense of abandonment by the U.S.  Russia has been moving aggressively to fill the void through military aggression, security dependence and energy cooperation.

2.) The JCPOA (nuclear agreement with Iran) has set into motion a new arms race where Sunni nations (Iran is Shia) will seek equivalency with Iranian nuclear capability.  Left unchecked, the potential for a "Mutually Assured Destruction" scenario could develop in the next ten years.

One of the key goals of the plan is to "Make America Great Again in Nuclear Energy" (an appeal to Donald Trump) and reestablish U.S. commercial nuclear supplier base.  The authors claim that the Middle East Nuclear Marshall Plan will create 500,000 highly skilled jobs for workers in the Middle East and will create 200,000 jobs and $350 billion jobs in revenue in the United States.  It will also reposition the United States as the preeminent partner in the Middle East, countering the expansionist plans of Russia and China in the region.

Here is the second emailed document which was emailed from Bud McFarlane at IP3 to Micheal Flynn on January 28, 2017 that has been reformatted as a memorandum for Donald Trump:

In case you were wondering, the American companies involved in this project include Excelon Corporation, Toshiba Energy, Bechtel Corporation, Centrus, GE Power and Siemens USA according to this emailed document to Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from Frances Fragos Townsend at IP3: 

Let's close with this final quote from the Committee report:

"However, experts worry that transferring sensitive U.S. nuclear technology could allow Saudi Arabia to produce nuclear weapons that contribute to the proliferation of nuclear arms throughout an already unstable Middle East. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman conceded this point in 2018, proclaiming: “Without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.” (my bold)

Even though IP3 is touting the project as a "prosperity project" for the Middle East as a whole and as a part of Donald Trump's plan to Make America Great Again and given that Washington's global agenda is almost always accompanied by a wide range of unintended consequences, we can pretty much be assured that the transfer of America's nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia will result in the creation of yet another nuclear power, Saudi Arabia.  This will further upset the delicate balance that has kept the Middle East from ending up in a widespread regional war since the 1973 conflict in Israel.

The Amazon That You Don't Know

Updated May 2020

When most of us think about Amazon, the first thing that pops to mind is that goofy orange smiley icon that pops up on their merchandise retailing website and the fact that it started life as an online retailer of books.  What we don't think about is Amazon, the cloud computing behemoth and its links to the U.S. intelligence network.  Thanks to a recent document dump  called = by WikiLeaks, we now have a glimpse into the underbelly of Jeff Bezos' world that gets almost no attention from anyone.

Let's start with this:

Amazon Web Services or AWS states the following about itself:

What it doesn't talk about is the massive size of its operation since many of its data centres are not publicly tied to Amazon, rather, they operate under subsidiaries that are not easily identifiable with Amazon, the online retail behemoth.  The documents leaked by WikiLeaks is dated from late 2015 and lists the addresses and some operational details about more than one hundred data centres located in 15 cities in nine nations.  Here is a map that was created by WikiLeaks showing the overall locations of these data centres:

Data centres are located in the following countries, regions and cities:

1.) United States - Northern Virginia, Seattle, California Bay Area, Northeastern Oregon

2.) Europe - Dublin, Luxembourg, Frankfurt

3.) China - Beijing, Ningxia

4.) Japan - Tokyo, Osaka

5.) Singapore

6.) Australia - Sydney

7.) Brazil - Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo

Here is a sampling of the 20 page document which lists the locations and additional details including telephone numbers (which are not to be released to anyone outside of Amazon), addresses and shipping information and which comes with this warning:

"This information is not public and is classed as Highly Confidential!"

So much for that!

As you can see on this page, Amazon's presence at 7060 and 7080 Wellington Road, Manassas, Virginia is known as "Vandalay Industries" (remember that from Seinfeld?):

While all of this may seem relatively mundane, one has to keep in mind that Amazon/Bezos has a connection to the U.S. government intelligence network.  In 2013, Amazon signed a $600 million, ten year contract with the Central Intelligence Agency to develop a computing cloud service that would service all seventeen agencies that comprise the American intelligence community.  In November 2017, Amazon Web Services made the following announcement:

The AWS Secret Region has the ability to work with and store government/intelligence data that is classified up to the Secret level.  According to Amazon, AWS Secret Region is "readily available to the U.S. Intelligence Community through the intelligence community's Commercial Cloud Services contract with AWS".  AWS touts itself as the first and only commercial cloud provider to offer regions to serve government data classified as Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret and Top Secret.  

Let's close with this graphic from Synergy Research Group which shows the dominant position of Amazon in the Cloud provision business:

Amazon currently has a grip on 34 percent of the cloud market, bigger than the next four competitors (IBM, Google, Microsoft and Alibaba) combined.  This along with its past U.S. government involvement gives it the influence to gain an even larger share of the federal government's deepest and darkest secrets.

So, the next time you see this:

...think about Manadalay Industries (aka Amazon), located at 7060 and 7080 Wellington Road, Manassas, VA, 20109:

The Deep State and Its Link to the Obama Administration

Some months back, I posted an article on the Deep State, the military-industrial-intelligence complex that wields the real power in Washington.  According to Mike Lofgren, this unseen entity consists of the following players:

1.) A hybrid of federal security and law enforcement agencies which includes the following:

a.) The Central Intelligence Agency

b.) The Department of Homeland Security

c.) The Justice Department

d.) The Department of State

e.) The Department of Defense

2.) the non-financial private sector (i.e. private sector contractors that offer services to the government including companies like Booz Allen among others).

3.) the financial sector (i.e. Wall Street).

3.) the information technology sector (i.e. Silicon Valley).

It is key to note that none of these players are elected, however, they are firmly entrenched in Washington and control the levers of power.

Coincidentally, one of the Wikileaks emails leaked from John Podesta's computer provides us with a bit of a glimpse at one of the players in the Deep State.  While most of us think of Google as the search engine of choice and the purveyor of the Android operating system, Google is firmly entrenched in Washington.  Here is the email that I am referring to, dated September 9, 2008, authored by Chris Lu, the current Deputy Secretary of Labor:

Keep in mind that the subject of this email, data rooms, are virtual "data rooms" that were created to help the Obama-Biden team to transition to the Oval Office/White House, well before the election was even held.  These data rooms were of two types:

1.) working group rooms which held information that would assist with specific subjects that would be of interest to a transmission team (i.e. national security) that were accessible to only board members and working group chairpersons.

2.) a general room that was accessible to all of the principals on the list including James Rubin, (Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs under Bill Clinton) Susan Rice (current National Security Advisor), Valerie Jarrett (current Senior Advisor to the President), William Daley (former White House Chief of Staff to the current President), Peter Rouse (interim White House Chief of Staff to the current President) and, of course, John Podesta among many others.

What is key here is to note the final line in the email:

"The one thing you should know is that contrary to the log-in instructions, we're not giving out "transition2008.com" email addresses. We think that would compromise our ability to keep this whole enterprise under wraps."

Secrecy, apparently, was key.

The Obama-Biden transition team was co-chaired by John Podesta who was Bill Clinton's last White House Chief of Staff.  On November 5, 2008, then President-elect Obama announced his complete official transition team which included, among others, a woman by the name of Sonal Shah.  If you read the attached email carefully, you'll notice that she is referred to as "Sonal" and functioned as part of the "gang at Google" who helped set up the secure virtual data rooms.  It's that Google connection that I find most interesting, considering that they are not officially part of Washington.  According to her LinkedIn page, Ms. Shah was employed by Google from March 2007 to March 2009 as their Head of Global Development Initiatives as described in her own words:

"Led Google.org's Global Development efforts. Built a team to design, develop and implement two global initiatives. One focused on leveraging information and technology to provide citizens access to information about public services and improve outcomes. The goal was to empower communities to hold their government accountable.  

The second initiative focused on investing in small and medium sized enterprises for impact in low income communities. This led to the creation of a $20 million dollar fund with the Omidyar Network and the Soros Economic Development Fund. The fund focused on impact investments in growing viable business and creating jobs and other impact at the bottom of the pyramid."

She also states the following about her time on the Obama-Biden Transition Team from November 2008 to January 2009 as follows:

"Co-lead for President Obama's transition group on Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform. Led the efforts to set up innovation initiatives across the government."

It's also quite interesting to look at the rest of Ms. Shah's career.  From August 2006 to September 2008, she was employed as an Advisory Board Member at the Clinton Global Initiative and from August 2004 to March 2007, she was employed as a Vice President at Goldman Sachs.  During the Clinton Administration and the early part of the Bush II Administration, she was employed as a Director at the Department of the Treasury.  After her time at Google and after Barack Obama took office, she was employed by the Obama Administration as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Director in the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation from March 2009 to August 2011.   Not bad for a woman with a master's degree in Economics.

If you wish, you can see Ms. Shah's entire CV here.

When one starts to follow the thread that connects the Obama Administration to the information technology players in the Deep State, it is an amazing journey that shows us where the power in Washington really lies and how the same cast of unelected characters come up time and time again.

America's Unseen Government

Updated November 9, 2016

With the defeat of Hillary Clinton, this posting seems quite timely given that she appeared to be the candidate of choice.  This tells us that, while the Deep State is firmly entrenched, it doesn't always get its own way.  At times, it appears that the people have the ultimate power.  That said, the next four years will be most interesting given that the unseen government is still entrenched and that they and their agenda will not disappear anytime soon.  

Two years ago, Mike Lofgren wrote an essay that appeared on Bill Moyers' Moyers and Company website.  In his essay (which is now a book that you can find here) entitled "Anatomy of the Deep State", Mr. Lofgren examines the government that we can't see; the government that we, as voters, can't control and the government that we didn't learn about in school.  For those of you that are unfamiliar with Mr. Lofgren, prior to his retirement in 2011, he was a three decade-long Congressional employee, specializing in national security and holding a top secret security clearance as well as being a senior analyst on the House and Senate Budget committees.

All that most Americans see of their government is the partisan gridlock that exists in Washington; no matter what the Republicans do, the Democrats protest.  No matter what the Democrats or the current President does, the Republicans protest.  The mainstream media focuses on this dysfunction, repeatedly highlighting the fact that the Republicans will do everything in their power to control the current President until they regain control of the Oval Office, possibly in 2016.  Despite the fact that President Obama appears to be hamstrung, he still holds great power including:

1.) the ability to conduct massive surveillance on American citizens without judicial warrant.  This includes the building of a $1.7 billion facility in Utah that will allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte's worth of data, equivalent to 500 quintillion pages of text.

2.) detain prisoners without charge on an indefinite basis.

3.) kill certain American citizens without due process.

4.) launch a basically unfettered drone program against "terrorists" (and anyone else who happens to fall within the range of the drone's munitions).

5.) wage war (or what passes for war today) in Syria, Iraq and Libya.

Let's now take a look at the "other Washington", the one that we don't explicitly see.  Here is a quote from the essay:

"Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude."

Mr. Lofgren goes on to define the Deep State as a hybrid of federal security and law enforcement agencies along with the private sector including federal contractors, Wall Street and the technology sector.  Let's look at these in order:

1.) The hybrid of federal security and law enforcement agencies includes the following:

a.) The Central Intelligence Agency

b.) The Department of Homeland Security

c.) The Justice Department

d.) The Department of State

e.) The Department of Defense

As well, the Department of the Treasury is involved since it controls the money flows among the agencies as well as tying in to Wall Street where the real money lies.  The mysterious and closed-to-public scrutiny Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is also included.  What is not included is Congress which, for the most part, is either blissfully unaware of the Deep State by choice or by command from within the Deep State.

2.) The connection to private sector contractors:

Mr. Lofgren also goes on to note that the Deep State is not exclusively composed of government agencies.  He notes that the private sector is heavily involved in the Deep State.  As you can see in this graphic from the February 2014 Suitability and Security Processes Review Report to the President, a report that was commissioned by the President after the September 2013 Navy Yard shooting, a very significant number of government contract employees have both confidential/secret and top secret clearances:

According to a 2014 study by the Washington Post, close to 30 percent of the workforce in America's intelligence agencies are contractors.  One company with very close ties to Washington and its intelligence community is Booz Allen, the former employer of Edward Snowden.  Here is a screen capture from their website highlighting the company's ability to provide "situational awareness" to the Armed Forces so that they can "bring their brave warfighters home safely":

Here's a quote from the Booz Allen website:

"At Booz Allen Hamilton, we help the federal government and corporations accomplish their most important work—work that protects our nation and drives our economy and society forward. Booz Allen’s Fiscal 2014 Annual Report, “Reaching Forward: Inventing the Future,” highlights examples of this work, which includes rapid prototyping of equipment to protect soldiers on the battlefield, the design of next-generation wireless military communications, the development of a system to expedite delivery of vaccines to children, and the innovative use of threat intelligence to reduce the risk of cyber attacks against major banks—and much more."

Here is another quote from their 2014 Annual Report showing how important government funding is to the company's finances:

"Substantially all of the Company’s revenue is derived from services and solutions provided to the U.S. government and its agencies, primarily by the Company’s consulting staff and, to a lesser extent, subcontractors. The Company generates its revenue from the following types of contractual arrangements: cost-reimbursable-plus-fee contracts, time-and-materials contracts, and xed-price contracts." (my bold)

Coincidentally (or not), the current Director of National Intelligence and former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, James Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen.

3.)  The connection to Wall Street:

As I noted above, Mr. Lofgren goes on to illuminate the close link between two nodes of the Deep State; Washington and Wall Street.  Here is a graphic from Open Secrets showing how much the securities andinvestment industry spends on lobbying Washington by year:

Here is a graphic showing how much this sector has donated to the current election cycle:

Here is a graphic showing how much this sector has contributed over each election cycle since 1990:

Since 2012, the securities and investment industry has been the largest single source of political contributions, hitting a whopping $307.1 million in the 2016 cycle.  Further connecting the two nodes, we have the appointment of retired General David Petraeus as the Chairman of KKR's Global Institute.  KKR (or Kohlberg Kravis Roberts), is a global investment firm that manages $98.7 billion in assets for the wealthiest of Americans.   We must also remember that General Petraeus also served as the Director of the CIA.

4.) The connection to Silicon Valley: 

This connection became apparent after the revelations of Edward Snowden.  As we now know, Silicon Valley has been tracking the spending habits, geographic locations and other activities of its customer base for years.  While the recent headline Apple iPhone/San Bernardino case has led us to believe that Silicon Valley and the tech sector are not co-operating with the Deep State, in fact, an analysis by Electronic Frontier Foundation would suggest otherwise in some cases:

I would like to add another category of "insiders" that Mr. Lofgren doesn't include; America's mainstream media.  As has become apparent during this election, most of the purveyors of "news" have done their best to sway American voters toward Ms. Clinton and away from Mr. Trump.  This became increasingly obvious in the final days of the race when the media all but ignored the steady release of insider information coming from the desk of John Podesta.  

As we can see from this essay by Michael Lofgren, the invisible Deep State is firmly entrenched in the United States.  While the publicly visible federal government in Washington is nominally in charge and seemingly always in a state of disunity, there is a deeper, more frightening unelected group that pulls the strings of government and controls the current state of the nation.  While American voters are distracted by what I term "bubblegum for the brain" (i.e. lotteries, reality television and infotainment), a relatively small group of unelected Americans and oligarchs act as the puppeteers for those that actually get our vote.

Let's close this posting with a final quote from Mr. Lofgren's essay:

"We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires, the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in the future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly propagandistic success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed for the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya; the smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging further misadventure, seemed merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria. Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves in like manner." 

In case you wish to see an interview with Mike Lofgren, here is a recent exchange with Ron Paul:



Sadly, if Mr. Lofgren is right, you can vote for whoever you wish, it likely makes very little difference.