Timing is Everything
by Wayne Madsen
The Plame leak damaged a major CIA investigation linking senior Bush administration officials to WMD proliferation.
U.S. intelligence insiders have pointed out that the White House is using "Rovegate" and "Who in the White House said what to whom?" as a smoke screen to divert attention away from the actual counter-proliferation work Mrs. Wilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates team were engaged in. The arrival of Timothy Flanigan as Patrick J. Fitzgerald's boss is likely related to the mountains of evidence Fitzgerald has now collected to indict senior White House officials, particularly, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for criminal conspiracy in exposing a sensitive U.S. intelligence operation that was targeting some of their closest political and business associates.
Libby, it will be recalled, was the attorney for fugitive global smuggler and multi-bilionaire Marc Rich, someone who has close ties to the Sharon government and Israeli intelligence. It is no coincidence that FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds uncovered nuclear material and narcotics trafficking involving Turkish intermediaries with ties to Israel at the same time Brewster Jennings and the CIA's Counter Proliferation Division was hot on the trail of nuclear proliferators tied to the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon and the A.Q. Khan network of Pakistan.
An arrest in early 2004 points to the links between Israeli agents and Islamist groups bent on producing weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. According to intelligence sources, this was a network that was a major focus of Edmonds' and Valerie Plame Wilson's work. In January 2004, FBI and U.S. Customs agents arrested
Asher Karni, a Hungarian-born Orthodox Jew, Israeli citizen, and resident of Cape Town, South Africa, at Denver International Airport for illegally exporting 200 electrically triggered spark gaps - devices that send synchronized electrical pulses and are used in nuclear weapons - to Pakistan via a New Jersey export company named
Giza Technologies of Secaucus (owned by Zeki Bilmen - whom the FBI has identified as a Turkish Jew who was already under surveillance by the CIA team). The cargo manifest listed the equipment as electronics gear [lithotripters used to break up kidney stones] for the
Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, South Africa.
However, the initial shipment of 66 triggers did not go to the hospital but to Karni's Top-Cape Technology of Cape Town, South Africa. Top Cape, in turn, sent the triggers to AJKMC Lithography Aid Society in Islamabad, Pakistan through Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Top-Cape "officially" traded in military and aviation electronics equipment. It was during the summer of 2003, when Valerie Plame and her team -- at a critical stage of their investigation of the A. Q. Khan network -- were outed by White House officials Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and at least one other individual (possibly Elliot Abrams), that Karni received an e-mail from his long time Pakistani associate Humayun Khan (no relation to A.Q. Khan) asking for 200 triggers to be sent to his Islamabad-based company, Pakland PME.
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Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist, nationally distributed columnist, and author who has covered DC politics, national security, and intelligence issues since 1994. He has written for The Village Voice, The Progressive, Counterpunch, and more. Madsen is also a former U.S. Naval officer who was assigned to the National Security Agency during the Reagan administration. In other words, Morphizm is not betting against him.
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