MONEY...IT'S A CRIME...

The World Tires of Dollar Hegemony

by Paul Craig Roberts

What explains the paradox of the dollar’s sharp rise in value against other currencies (except the Japanese yen) despite disproportionate US exposure to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? The answer does not lie in improved fundamentals for the US economy or better prospects for the dollar to retain its reserve currency role.

The rise in the dollar’s exchange value is due to two factors.

One factor is the traditional flight to the reserve currency that results from panic. People are simply doing what they have always done. Pam Martens predicted correctly that panic demand for US Treasury bills would boost the US dollar.

The other factor is the unwinding of the carry trade. The carry trade originated in extremely low Japanese interest rates. Investors and speculators borrowed Japanese yen at an interest rate of one-half of one percent, converted the yen to other currencies, and purchased debt instruments from other countries that pay much higher interest rates. In effect, they were getting practically free funds from Japan to lend to others paying higher interest.

The financial crisis has reversed this process. The toxic American derivatives were marketed worldwide by Wall Street. They have endangered the balance sheets and solvency of financial institutions throughout the world, including national governments, such as Iceland and Hungary. Banks and governments that invested in the troubled American financial instruments found their own debt instruments in jeopardy.

Those who used yen loans to purchase, for example, debt instruments from European banks or Icelandic bonds, faced potentially catastrophic losses. Investors and speculators sold their higher-yielding financial instruments in a scramble for dollars and yen in order to pay off their Japanese loans. This drove up the values of the yen and the US dollar, the reserve currency that can be used to repay debts, and drove down the values of other currencies.

The dollar’s rise is temporary, and its prospects are bleak. The US trade deficit will lessen due to less consumer spending during recession, but it will remain the largest in the world and one that the US cannot close by exporting more. The way the US trade deficit is financed is by foreigners acquiring more dollar assets, with which their portfolios are already heavily weighted.

The US government’s budget deficit is large and growing, adding hundreds of billions of dollars more to an already large national debt. As investors flee equities into US government bills, the market for US Treasuries will temporarily depend less on foreign governments. Nevertheless, the burden on foreigners and on world savings of having to finance American consumption, the US government’s wars and military budget, and the US financial bailout is increasingly resented.

This resentment, combined with the harm done to America’s reputation by the financial crisis, has led to numerous calls for a new financial order in which the US plays a substantially lesser role. "Overcoming the financial crisis" are code words for the rest of the world’s intent to overthrow US financial hegemony.

Brazil, Russia, India and China have formed a new group (BRIC) to coordinate their interests at the November financial summit in Washington, D.C.

On October 28, RIA Novosti reported that Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin suggested to China that the two countries use their own currencies in their bilateral trade, thus avoiding the use of the dollar. China’s prime Minister Wen Jiabao replied that strengthening bilateral relations is strategic.

Europe has also served notice that it intends to exert a new leadership role. Four members of the Group of Seven industrial nations, France, Britain, Germany and Italy, used the financial crisis to call for sweeping reforms of the world financial system. Jose Manual Barroso, president of the European Commission, said that a new world financial system is possible only "if Europe has a leadership role."

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said that the "economic egoism" of America’s "unipolar vision of the world" is a "dead-end policy."

China’s massive foreign exchange reserves and its strong position in manufacturing have given China the leadership role in Asia. The deputy prime minister of Thailand recently designated the Chinese yuan as "the rightful and anointed convertible currency of the world."

Normally, the Chinese are very circumspect in what they say, but on October 24 Reuters reported that the People’s Daily, the official government newspaper, in a front-page commentary accused the US of plundering "global wealth by exploiting the dollar’s dominance." To correct this unacceptable situation, the commentary called for Asian and European countries to "banish the US dollar from their direct trade relations, relying only on their own currencies." And this step, said the commentary, is merely a starting step in overthrowing dollar dominance.

The Chinese are expressing other thoughts that would get the attention of a less deluded and arrogant American government. Zhou Jiangong, editor of the online publication, ChinaStakes.com, recently asked: "Why should China help the US to issue debt without end in the belief that the national credit of the US can expand without limit?"

Zhou Jiangong’s solution to American excesses is for China to take over Wall Street.

China has the money to do it, and the prudent Chinese would do a better job than the crowd of thieves who have destroyed America’s financial reputation while exploiting the world in pursuit of multi- million dollar bonuses.

THIS JUST IN FROM ELECTION CENTRAL!

How Many Non-Citizen Voters? Enough to Make a Difference! October 13, 2008 by David Simcox The Impact Of Non-Citizen Voting On American Elections The approaching 2008 general elections underscore concern that the growing access of non-citizens to the ballot box could distort the outcome. Groups arguing for easier access to the polls deny there is a problem at all, seeing restrictive registration and identification rules as anti-democratic and even racist. They dismiss non-citizen voting as rare, not criminal in intent or concerted, and more harmful than beneficial to non-citizens. Yet anecdotal evidence persists and grows that non-citizens are registering and voting in significant numbers. A common and increasing indicator is the number of persons selected for jury duty from the voter rolls who beg off because they are not citizens. The 1993 "Motor-Voter" legislation accelerated the trend: it provided registration virtually by default, with affirmation of citizenship left to an honor system. The risk of detection of this fraud has waned with the increasing use of absentee and mail-in voting, which precludes personal inspection at the polls by election officials. Anecdotal evidence tells us only that illegal voting happens around the country, not how much. But there is overlooked data that define, if not the exact number of alien voters, at least the order of magnitude and extent of the practice. The explosive growth of the Latino electorate in south Florida after "Motor-Voter" resulted in a registration rate among Miami-Dade county's putatively voting-eligible population some 30 percentage points higher than the national registration rate for Hispanics, suggesting a heavy presence of ineligibles on the voter rolls. A Public Policy Institute of California survey in 2007 found 31 percent of the state's immigrant population was registered. This fraction, however, would be a population larger than the state's naturalized citizens shown by surveys to be registered. Some 300,000 to 450,000 registrations of non-citizens would be needed to bring total registrations up to 31 percent. Also in California, a poll by a Los Angeles university think tank in 2007 found that 12 percent of non-citizen respondents acknowledged being registered, implying 155,000 ineligible voters in Los Angeles County. Assuming the 12 percent registration rate applied to the nation's adult non-citizens, there would be 2.3 million ineligible aliens on U.S. voting rolls. An examination of voter registration rates in immigrant-rich congressional districts and counties in California, Texas, Florida, and New York show high numbers of registered voters disproportionate to their vote-eligible populations. In several districts and jurisdictions the number of registrants even exceeded the total number of eligible voters. Intense political mobilization and registration drives by ethnic groups in preparation for the 2008 elections-some of them aggrieved by tightened immigration policy-may well further enlarge the alien electorate. An estimated two to two and a half million ineligible voters may seem insignificant in an overall electorate that could reach 130 million in 2008. But in three presidential elections since 1960, the principal contenders have been separated by margins far less than two million. The concentration of those non-citizen votes in just a few states disproportionately increases their leverage in state and local contests and in the Electoral College. Can U.S. residents who are prohibited from voting, but vote anyway, affect the political future of the country or its political subdivisions? If you believe the word of open suffrage nonprofit organizations1 and think tanks,2 such as those whose challenge to Indiana's voter identification (ID) laws was rejected by the Supreme Court in 2008,3 the number of non-citizens who vote is negligible. Dismissing the lax voter registration process ushered in by the 1993 Motor-Voter law, those advocates argue that non-citizens have nothing to gain and a lot to lose by illegal voting, such as loss or delay of naturalization or, if illegal aliens, detection and deportation. Those claiming the number of proven cases of fraud is inconsequential often cite a Department of Justice (DOJ) five-year campaign begun in 2002 in which only 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted. These are cases in which DOJ was involved. The scoffers often ignore the sizable number of cases investigated at the state level, including those handled quietly and without criminal penalties in administrative processes. Statements of various U.S. Attorneys involved invoke a permissive legal doctrine that discourages prosecution of non-citizen voting fraud, such as absence of "concerted effort to tilt elections," little evidence of "widespread, organized fraud," "mistakes or misunderstandings by immigrants, not fraud," and no indications of "conspiracy." Apparently, citizens must tolerate the spreading access of ineligible voters to the ballot boxes as long as it is "disorganized, not concerted, lacking criminal intent, and non-conspiratorial." Some cases since 1995 in which community and ethnic nonprofit groups have been caught registering non-citizens, such as Hermandad Nacional Mexicana, DemocraciaUSA, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN), are, according to these arguments, just the result of honest mistakes or confusion among the non-citizen registrants themselves about the citizenship requirement or their own status. Some of these non-compliant groups have been beneficiaries of federal grants. But Americans favoring more, not less, ballot security remain convinced that non-citizen voters in 1996 provided the narrow winning margin in Democrat Loretta Sanchez's upset of long-time incumbent Republican Bob Dornan in California's 47th Congression-al district (Orange County). They believe that the incident was not isolated and that it presaged a growing threat to good government in general and the Republican party in particular. Few accept the official 1997 finding of a California grand jury that the 624 proven votes by ineligible aliens-out of more than 4,000 claimed by Dornan's attorneys-would not have altered the outcome. Those arguing for added safeguards against ineligible voters have provided abundant anecdotal cases of non-citizen registration and voting, but few macro-statistics showing national or regional dimensions of the practice. Much of the evidence tends to be circumstantial. For example, U.S. Census data show that 41 percent of Hispanics and 33 percent of Asians are non-citizens. Yet a national survey of reasons for not voting showed 13.8 percent of Hispanics and 13.1 percent of Asians gave "ineligibility" as their reason for not registering. How much of the gap can be attributed to the unfamiliarity of newcomers with the terms and regulations? Cases numbering in the hundreds have surfaced in which non-citizen registered voters have admitted non-citizenship to escape a summons to jury duty. But such scattered cases are little help in projecting overall numbers for the nation or its major political subdivisions. The lack of data is not surprising. It is not something busy voter registrars in high immigration states want to examine carefully. To do so risks the hostility of open suffrage and ethnic political advocates who impute racism or oppression of the poor to rigorous voting rules. The former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)-now the Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS)-has shown distaste for being drawn into investigations, alleging lack of useful data to prove non-citizenship. In another example of reliance on the honor system, the current naturalization application form used by CIS, the N-400, asks applicants if they have registered or voted in a U.S. election. CIS so far has declined to disclose the number answering "yes." Any such a number would have questionable validity, given the possible complications for the applicant who admits having voted. But indicators of significant registration of non-citizens continue to pop up. The current vast voter registration campaigns of Hispanic and Asian ethnic interests since Congress's 2006 rejection of mass amnesty may force local registrars to increase their rubber-stamping of applications, producing new legions of non-citizens to try to vote in 2008.

WAR OF THE WORLDS - PART SIX

U.S. Intel: Iran Plans Nuclear Strike on U.S.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008 9:00 AM

by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Iran has carried out missile tests for what could be a plan for a nuclear strike on the United States, the head of a national security panel has warned.

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee and in remarks to a private conference on missile defense over the weekend hosted by the Claremont Institute, Dr. William Graham warned that the U.S. intelligence community “doesn’t have a story” to explain the recent Iranian tests.

One group of tests that troubled Graham, the former White House science adviser under President Ronald Reagan, were successful efforts to launch a Scud missile from a platform in the Caspian Sea.

“They’ve got [test] ranges in Iran which are more than long enough to handle Scud launches and even Shahab-3 launches,” Dr. Graham said. “Why would they be launching from the surface of the Caspian Sea? They obviously have not explained that to us.”

Another troubling group of tests involved Shahab-3 launches where the Iranians "detonated the warhead near apogee, not over the target area where the thing would eventually land, but at altitude,” Graham said. “Why would they do that?”

Graham chairs the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, a blue-ribbon panel established by Congress in 2001.

The commission examined the Iranian tests “and without too much effort connected the dots,” even though the U.S. intelligence community previously had failed to do so, Graham said.

“The only plausible explanation we can find is that the Iranians are figuring out how to launch a missile from a ship and get it up to altitude and then detonate it,” he said. “And that’s exactly what you would do if you had a nuclear weapon on a Scud or a Shahab-3 or other missile, and you wanted to explode it over the United States.”

The commission warned in a report issued in April that the United States was at risk of a sneak nuclear attack by a rogue nation or a terrorist group designed to take out our nation’s critical infrastructure.

"If even a crude nuclear weapon were detonated anywhere between 40 kilometers to 400 kilometers above the earth, in a split-second it would generate an electro-magnetic pulse [EMP] that would cripple military and civilian communications, power, transportation, water, food, and other infrastructure," the report warned.

While not causing immediate civilian casualties, the near-term impact on U.S. society would dwarf the damage of a direct nuclear strike on a U.S. city.

“The first indication [of such an attack] would be that the power would go out, and some, but not all, the telecommunications would go out. We would not physically feel anything in our bodies,” Graham said.

As electric power, water and gas delivery systems failed, there would be “truly massive traffic jams,” Graham added, since modern automobiles and signaling systems all depend on sophisticated electronics that would be disabled by the EMP wave.

“So you would be walking. You wouldn’t be driving at that point,” Graham said. “And it wouldn’t do any good to call the maintenance or repair people because they wouldn’t be able to get there, even if you could get through to them.”

The food distribution system also would grind to a halt as cold-storage warehouses stockpiling perishables went offline. Even warehouses equipped with backup diesel generators would fail, because “we wouldn’t be able to pump the fuel into the trucks and get the trucks to the warehouses,” Graham said.

The United States “would quickly revert to an early 19th century type of country.” except that we would have 10 times as many people with ten times fewer resources, he said.

“Most of the things we depend upon would be gone, and we would literally be depending on our own assets and those we could reach by walking to them,” Graham said.

America would begin to resemble the 2002 TV series, “Jeremiah,” which depicts a world bereft of law, infrastructure, and memory.

In the TV series, an unspecified virus wipes out the entire adult population of the planet. In an EMP attack, the casualties would be caused by our almost total dependence on technology for everything from food and water, to hospital care.

Within a week or two of the attack, people would start dying, Graham says.

“People in hospitals would be dying faster than that, because they depend on power to stay alive. But then it would go to water, food, civil authority, emergency services. And we would end up with a country with many, many people not surviving the event.”

Asked just how many Americans would die if Iran were to launch the EMP attack it appears to be preparing, Graham gave a chilling reply.

“You have to go back into the 1800s to look at the size of population” that could survive in a nation deprived of mechanized agriculture, transportation, power, water, and communication.

“I’d have to say that 70 to 90 percent of the population would not be sustainable after this kind of attack,” he said.

America would be reduced to a core of around 30 million people — about the number that existed in the decades after America’s independence from Great Britain.

The modern electronic economy would shut down, and America would most likely revert to “an earlier economy based on barter,” the EMP commission’s report on Critical National Infrastructure concluded earlier this year.

In his recent congressional testimony, Graham revealed that Iranian military journals, translated by the CIA at his commission’s request, “explicitly discuss a nuclear EMP attack that would gravely harm the United States.”

Furthermore, if Iran launched its attack from a cargo ship plying the commercial sea lanes off the East coast — a scenario that appears to have been tested during the Caspian Sea tests — U.S. investigators might never determine who was behind the attack. Because of the limits of nuclear forensic technology, it could take months. And to disguise their traces, the Iranians could simply decide to sink the ship that had been used to launch it, Graham said.

Several participants in last weekend’s conference in Dearborn, Mich., hosted by the conservative Claremont Institute argued that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was thinking about an EMP attack when he opined that “a world without America is conceivable.”

In May 2007, then Undersecretary of State John Rood told Congress that the U.S. intelligence community estimates that Iran could develop an ICBM capable of hitting the continental United States by 2015.

But Iran could put a Scud missile on board a cargo ship and launch from the commercial sea lanes off America’s coasts well before then.

The only thing Iran is lacking for an effective EMP attack is a nuclear warhead, and no one knows with any certainty when that will occur. The latest U.S. intelligence estimate states that Iran could acquire the fissile material for a nuclear weapon as early as 2009, or as late as 2015, or possibly later.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld first detailed the “Scud-in-a-bucket” threat during a briefing in Huntsville, Ala., on Aug. 18, 2004.

While not explicitly naming Iran, Rumsfeld revealed that “one of the nations in the Middle East had launched a ballistic missile from a cargo vessel. They had taken a short-range, probably Scud missile, put it on a transporter-erector launcher, lowered it in, taken the vessel out into the water, peeled back the top, erected it, fired it, lowered it, and covered it up. And the ship that they used was using a radar and electronic equipment that was no different than 50, 60, 100 other ships operating in the immediate area.”

Iran’s first test of a ship-launched Scud missile occurred in spring 1998, and was mentioned several months later in veiled terms by the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, a blue-ribbon panel also known as the Rumsfeld Commission.

I was the first reporter to mention the Iran sea-launched missile test in an article appearing in the Washington Times in May 1999.

Intelligence reports on the launch were “well known to the White House but have not been disseminated to the appropriate congressional committees,” I wrote. Such a missile “could be used in a devastating stealth attack against the United States or Israel for which the United States has no known or planned defense.”

Few experts believe that Iran can be deterred from launching such an attack by the threat of massive retaliation against Iran. They point to a December 2001 statement by former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who mulled the possibility of Israeli retaliation after an Iranian nuclear strike.

“The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would destroy Israel completely, while [the same] against the Islamic only would cause damages. Such a scenario is not inconceivable,” Rafsanjani said at the time.

Rep. Trent Franks, R, Ariz., plans to introduce legislation next week that would require the Pentagon to lay the groundwork for an eventual military strike against Iran, to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and EMP capability.

“An EMP attack on America would send us back to the horse and buggy era — without the horse and buggy,” he told the Claremont Institute conference on Saturday. “If you’re a terrorist, this is your ultimate goal, your ultimate asymmetric weapon.”

Noting Iran’s recent sea-launched and mid-flight warhead detonation tests, Rep. Franks concluded, “They could do it — either directly or anonymously by putting some freighter out there on the ocean.”

The only possible deterrent against Iran is the prospect of failure, Dr. Graham and other experts agreed. And the only way the United States could credibly threaten an Iranian missile strike would be to deploy effective national missile defenses.

“It’s well known that people don’t go on a diet until they’ve had a heart attack,” said Claremont Institute president Brian T. Kennedy. “And we as a nation are having a heart attack” when it comes to the threat of an EMP attack from Iran.

“As of today, we have no defense against such an attack. We need space-based missile defenses to protect against an EMP attack,” he told Newsmax.

Rep. Franks said he remains surprised at how partisan the subject of space-based missile defenses remain. “Nuclear missiles don’t discriminate on party lines when they land,” he said.

Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl, a long-standing champion of missile defense, told the Claremont conference on Friday that Sen. Obama has opposed missile defense tooth and nail and as president would cut funding for these programs dramatically.

“Senator Obama has been quoted as saying, ‘I don’t agree with a missile defense system,’ and that we can cut $10 billion of the research out — never mind, as I say, that the entire budget is $9.6 billion, or $9.3 billion,” Kyl said.

Like Franks, Kyl believes that the only way to eventually deter Iran from launching an EMP attack on the United States is to deploy robust missile defense systems, including space-based interceptors.

The United States “needs a missile defense that is so strong, in all the different phases we need to defend against . . . that countries will decide it’s not worth coming up against us,” Kyl said.

“That’s one of the things that defeated the Soviet Union. That’s one of the ways we can deal with these rogue states . . . and also the way that we can keep countries that are not enemies today, but are potential enemies, from developing capabilities to challenge us. “

© 2008 Newsmax.

HOW THE WEST WAS LOST - PART TWELVE

Christians Accused Of Hate Crime

by Chad Groening - 6/5/2008 10:00:00 AM

One of the nation's leading Islamic critics says he is not surprised that two Christian evangelists were recently threatened with arrest for committing the "hate crime" of handing out gospel tracts in a predominately Muslim area of Birmingham, England.

Arthur Cunningham, 48, and Joseph Abraham, 65, are both American but have lived in the United Kingdom for many years. They have launched legal action against the West Midlands Police, claiming an officer infringed on their right to profess their religion.

In February, the two men say they were told by a police community support officer that they were in a Muslim area and were, therefore, not allowed to spread their Christian message. They also were told they were committing a hate crime by telling the youths to leave Islam. The ministers also say the officer told them, "You have been warned. If you come back here and get beaten up, well you have been warned."

Robert Spencer is the Director of Jihad Watch, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He believes this was a de facto imposition of Islamic law in Britain.

"Obviously English law has no restrictions on Christian evangelization or Christian proselytization of any kind. But Islamic law forbids Christians to proselytize, especially among Muslims. So this is a de facto imposition of Islamic law in Britain," Spencer contends.

Spencer says this is all part of the Islamic supremacy movement which very few westerners really understand. "Islamic supremacism is the impulse to impose Islamic law over non-Muslims. Since we're only concentrating as a society and in terms of law enforcement on terrorism, we are not resisting in any way the non-violent initiatives. And that means they'll just continue to advance," Spencer explains.

As a result, Spencer thinks it is more likely that the two evangelists will be punished and not the police officer.

HOW THE WEST WAS LOST - PART ELEVEN

Prince William County, Virginia Softens Policy On Immigration

The Washington Post

The Prince William County supervisors abolished a key part of the county’s illegal-immigration policy last night by directing police officers to question criminal suspects about their immigration status only after they have been arrested.

In October, the Board of County Supervisors directed officers to check the legal status of crime suspects, no matter how minor the offense, if they think the person might be in the country unlawfully.

“The basic policy is fundamentally the same. We just changed the way it’s implemented,” Supervisor Martin E. Nohe (R-Coles) said. “We want to give officers discretion in the field to use their judgment about when they ask and when they don’t. This allows them to make their own call.”

He said less-aggressive street enforcement limits the county’s risk of a lawsuit.

Chairman Corey A. Stewart (R-At Large) said the change will not amount to any “appreciable difference in the number of people arrested.”

“Every single person who is arrested will have their immigration status checked,” he said. “Officers will continue to have the discretion to check the status of anyone detained by them, even for minor infractions.”

The board unanimously supported changing course after slashing $3.1 million from its budget to install video cameras in police cars to enforce the county’s illegal-immigration policy. Police said they needed cameras to protect officers from accusations of racial profiling.

The board’s change in the immigration policy came before it considered the county budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1. The supervisors approved a fiscal 2009 budget of $893 million. That brings the property tax rate to 97 cents per $100 of assessed valuation, amounting to a 5 percent increase in the tax bill of the average homeowner.

The supervisors cut an additional $1.2 million in related police, foster care and protective services for the children of deported illegal immigrants last week. Other cuts included a reduction in proposed fire and rescue staffing.

WAR OF THE WORLDS - PART FIVE

CIA Chief Sees Unrest Rising With Population

The Washington Post

Swelling populations and a global tide of immigration will present new security challenges for the United States by straining resources and stoking extremism and civil unrest in distant corners of the globe, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in a speech yesterday.

The population surge could undermine the stability of some of the world’s most fragile states, especially in Africa, while in the West, governments will be forced to grapple with ever larger immigrant communities and deepening divisions over ethnicity and race, Hayden said.

Hayden, speaking at Kansas State University, described the projected 33 percent growth in global population over the next 40 years as one of three significant trends that will alter the security landscape in the current century. By 2050, the number of humans on Earth is expected to rise from 6.7 billion to more than 9 billion, he said.

“Most of that growth will occur in countries least able to sustain it, a situation that will likely fuel instability and extremism, both in those countries and beyond,” Hayden said.

With the population of countries such as Niger and Liberia projected to triple in size in 40 years, regional governments will be forced to rapidly find food, shelter and jobs for millions, or deal with restive populations that “could be easily attracted to violence, civil unrest, or extremism,” he said.

European countries, many of which already have large immigrant communities, will see particular growth in their Muslim populations while the number of non-Muslims will shrink as birthrates fall. “Social integration of immigrants will pose a significant challenge to many host nations - again boosting the potential for unrest and extremism,” Hayden said.

The CIA director also predicted a widening gulf between Europe and North America on how to deal with security threats, including terrorism. While U.S. and European officials agree on the urgency of the terrorism threat, there is a fundamental difference - a “transatlantic divide” - over the solution, he said.

While the United States sees the fight against terrorism as a global war, European nations perceive the terrorist threat as a law enforcement problem, he said.

“They tend not to view terrorism as we do, as an overwhelming international challenge. Or if they do, we often differ on what would be effective and appropriate to counter it,” Hayden said. He added that he could not predict “when or if” the two sides could forge a common approach to security.

Free Market Forces At Work?

Dual-Use Deceptions

April 12, 2008

A French company, Cryostar, pled guilty this week to a plot to smuggle cryogenic pumps from the U.S. into Iran. The pumps were manufactured by a U.S. corporation called Ebara, which pled guilty in 2004, and sent to Cryostar in France, who then changed the labeling and sold them to another French company, which sent them on to Tehran. Originally it was feared that the pumps were destined for Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but our government later learned they were going into a new offshore petrochemical station.

That story could have been much worse, but it’s frightening how many people around the world were in on this scheme and willing to run sensitive technology around our blockade of Iran. Bill Gertz suggests that some of the brass of Ebara’s parent company in Japan knew about the deception as well.

Meanwhile, in South Africa, an American citizen has been charged with running dual use electronic switches–used in nuclear detonators– into Pakistan.

Marisa Sketo was arrested in November nearly four years ago after Cape Town businessman Asher Karni was arrested on the same charge in the US.

It was alleged Sketo had worked with Karni, who pleaded guilty in the US Federal court and who was sentenced to three years in prison.

During Karni’s trial it had emerged he had imported triggered spark gaps, which have medical applications but may also be used to detonate bombs.

He said they were going to be used in a Johannesburg hospital in a machine that helped break down kidney stones but Karni passed the spark gaps on to Pakistan.

According to Sketo’s charge sheet, between June and November 2003, she had “intentionally and unlawfully imported and exported” 66 triggered spark gaps while working for a Green Point company owned by Karni.

This is an ongoing story that doesn’t get much press; the Pakistani businessman who was importing these devices is a fugitive at large. And again, it amazes me the risks these fools take to sell dangerous munitions to untrustworthy regimes.

Lenin is supposed to have said “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”. He may have gotten the “we” wrong – Communism never quite got the job done – but the rope market is going strong.