The Laptop – Moon of Alabama

February 8, 2006

The Laptop

In the coming run up to the war of aggression on Iran, expect to hear more, a lot more, about The Laptop. It is the overwhelming proof that Iran has nuclear weapons, ehh – might have nuclear weapons, hmm – could have nuclear weapons – or not.

As Time reported:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice helped firm up support for the IAEA vote by having aides brief foreign officials on a trove of documents that, according to U.S. diplomatic sources, expose a clandestine Iranian military nuclear-research operation. The documents, found in 2004 on a laptop computer, which U.S. intelligence believes came from an Iranian engineer, contain data on tests for high explosives, a design for a missile re-entry vehicle and a diagram of a green-salt production line.

As revealed today by the Washington Post, there are even more plans to be found on The Laptop:

Iranian engineers have completed sophisticated drawings of a deep subterranean shaft, according to officials who have examined classified documents in the hands of U.S. intelligence for more than 20 months.

Complete with remote-controlled sensors to measure pressure and heat, the plans for the 400-meter tunnel appear designed for an underground atomic test that might one day announce Tehran’s arrival as a nuclear power, the officials said.

These just must be dangerous test preparations. Or maybe not:

But U.S. and U.N. experts who have studied them said the undated drawings do not clearly fit into a larger picture. Nowhere, for example, does the word "nuclear" appear on them. The authorship is unknown, and there is no evidence of an associated program to acquire, assemble and construct the components of such a site.

Further down, WaPo explains a bit of the content and origin of The Laptop:

As with the test-shaft drawings, those for the conversion facility were on the laptop allegedly stolen from an Iranian whom German intelligence tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit as an informant. It was whisked out of the country by another Iranian who offered it up to foreign intelligence officials in Turkey as evidence of a nuclear weapons program. Nowhere on any of the laptop documents, however, does the word "nuclear" appear.

Tom Clancy would be proud to have thought up that plot.

Over thousands of pages of drawings of a country’s alleged most secret weapon plans from diverse fields like nuclear chemistry, high explosives, rocket design and mining. All of these stored on just one computer drive which just happens mystically to show up in Turkey.

Apropos Turkey, Eric S. Edelman, a neocon, has last year replaced Douglas Feith at the Pentagon. Between 2003 and 2005 Edelman was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey.

By coincidence, that stint includes the timeframe The Laptop somehow is said to have appeared there. Do I smell another another Niger uranium scam? When did Michael Ledeen visit Ankara?

So like me, you may now be a bit skeptical of all these information on The Laptop.

But do not worry, there is also a real witness being rolled out now.

Also from today’s WaPo:

Beyond the computer files, an imprisoned Pakistani arms dealer recently offered uncorroborated statements that Iran received several advanced centrifuges, equipment that would vastly improve its nuclear knowledge.

See, I told you so. There is evidence that Iran is working on the bomb.

In a brightly lighted office at police headquarters in the Malaysian capital, Bukhary Syed Tahir sat down recently for his second round of talks with CIA officers since his arrest 20 months ago on the streets of Kuala Lumpur.

Tahir is held in a high-security prison, without charges, for his alleged role as a manufacturer, salesman and partner in Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan’s nuclear network, which supplied materials to Libya, Iran and North Korea. After more than a year of denials about shipments to Iran in the 1990s, Tahir has changed his story and now claims to have recalled a previously forgotten sale, according to U.S. sources.

But after nearly two years in a Malaysian high-security prison, without charges and due process, why didn´t Tahir did admit the very real transfer of wormhole engines and light sabers to Iran.

This "witness" might be just another curveball.

The Laptop story is not over yet.

Officials announced they will now start an investigation into the type of operation system used on The Laptop.

While some experts would regard a Microsoft Windows or Apple OSx as a serious sign of illegal proliferation, one senior administration official suggested finded a Linux operating system would be of more concern because of its open source.

Posted by b on February 8, 2006 at 12:29 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Scott Ritter is telling us Bush is definitely going to bomb Iran, after bypassing the stalled UN Security Council.
This laptop will be a key card in the house of cards used to justify the air campaign. As if Bush really cares about justification.
Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld want war across the Middle East, so they have a free hand with the oil-bearing nations over there. Just as “National Security” is the all purpose excuse for the domestic cromes of the Bush regime, “keeping the oil flowing” will become the excuse for any and all nuking, bombing, and occupying of oil fields that become “absolutely necessary.”
Karl Rove wants wider war in the Middle East so Bush gets back into the high polling numbers before November. Once the shooting starts, pre-emptive pardons all around will also become absolutely necessary.
Here we go. Elections have consequences.

Posted by: Antifa | Feb 8 2006 14:25 utc | 1

Nowhere, for example, does the word “nuclear” appear on them
The thing you gotta love about the neo-cons: They are so contemptuous of their audience that they leave the evidence of their lying in plain sight.

Posted by: Gaianne | Feb 9 2006 6:30 utc | 2

You can fool all of the sheeple again and again; that is, until they are lamb chops. Baaaaaah….

Posted by: Malooga | Feb 9 2006 7:06 utc | 3

God my memory is getting as bad as the sheeples’. Wasn’t the laptop lie discredited last year when it first dropped outta neo-con ass-space, along with the ‘new’ improved’ constitution, and Arnie’s Harley Davidson?
It lay on the rug like the reeking turd it was when NYT picked it up and ran. It was immediately tarred with the Niger brush, because this was right when Judith Miller’s skill at never letting the facts get in the way of a good story first became public knowledge.
It was rather a damp squib so the Neo-Cons made like they gave it the old Heave Ho.
This must be what Dubya was on about SOTUS. They’re conserving resources by recycling their lies.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 9 2006 9:11 utc | 4

Here are the known facts about Iran’s nuclear program:
1- Iran has a legitimate economic case for nuclear power, which the US (including some of the members of the current Bush administration) encouraged. (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3983-2005Mar26.html and http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GH24Ak02.html)
2- Iran’s enrichment program was not clandestine, and was widely reported in the nuclear industry literature & on Iranian radio. Iran’s deals with countries like CHina to make the necessary plants had been reported to the IAEA, and the IAEA had even visited Iran’s uranium mines in 1992. (See Le Monde Diplomatique: “Iran Needs Nuclear Energy, Not Weapons” November 2005 – http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:Wv7d_FdiMH0J:mondediplo.com/2005/11/02iran)
3- While there were undeclared facilities in Iran, the IAEA reported in Nov 2003 that “to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities referred to above were related to a nuclear weapons program.” Several other countries were caught cheating much worse with nuclear experiments than Iran (S. Korea, Bulgaria, Egypt . . .) but they just got a slap on th e wrist & no demands were made of them to totally give up their rights to a civilian nuclear industry.
4- In Nov 2004, the IAEA reported that “all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities.”
5- In Jan 2006, the IAEA reported that “Iran has continued to facilitate access under its Safeguards Agreement as requested by the Agency . . . including by providing in a timely manner the requisite declarations and access to locations.”
6- Repeated offers of compromise by Iran that would have addressed the risk of proliferation of nukes were simply dismissed without any consideration. Most recently, Iran’s Jan 2006 offer to continue the suspension of enrichment for another 2 years of additional negotiations were summarily dismissed, and not even reported in the US press though it was reported in the Iranian press (see
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB07Ak01.html )
Oh yeah, there’s also a “magic laptop” which has literally fallen out of the blue sky, and conveniently provides all the evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran that no one else has found after 3 years of inspections.
So, there we have it. Draw your own conclusions. Ask yourself, are nuclear weapons really the issue here or just a pretext?

Posted by: hass | Feb 15 2006 5:56 utc | 5

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