Gareth Porter's The 'laptop of mass destruction' at Asia Times Online (Mar 4, 2008) reviews the provenance of the supporting evidence for the US's charges against Iran on their nuclear activities. Turns out the 1,000 pages of technical documents may or may not have been sourced by an Iranian resistance group, may or may not have been actually sourced by Israel's Mossad, and the CIA is steering way clear of performing "forensic tests that would reveal when different versions of different documents were created".
John Otis (Venezuela shuts border as accusations fly, Houston Chronicle, Mar 4, 2008) notes:
...In Bogota, the government continued to analyze documents recovered from laptop computers belonging to Raul Reyes, the slain guerrilla leader who served as a spokesman for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Rebels said Tuesday they would replace him with Milton de Jesus Toncel, alias "Joaquin Gomez," the Associated Press reported.
Citing one of the documents that purportedly shows that Venezuela sent $300 million to the rebels, known by their Spanish acronym FARC, Uribe said his government would denounce Chavez before the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands for sponsoring and financing what he called genocides by the guerrillas....
Tyler Bridge and Jenny Carolina Gonzalez report for the Miami Herald on McClatchy Newspapers (Colombia: Rebel documents talk of uranium offer, Mar 4, 2008):
A mysterious "Belisario'' offered to sell Colombian rebels uranium that could be used for a dirty bomb. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez feuded with Cuba. Chavez offered to move hostages held by the rebels to Venezuela — and hold them there.
That's just some of the content in 15 documents released Tuesday by Colombian police, who said they'd been found in the captured laptop of the rebel's No. 2 commander, Raul Reyes, who was killed Saturday when Colombian forces attacked his camp inside Ecuador.
Overall, the documents describe the Venezuelan and Ecuadorean governments as far more deeply enmeshed with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, than previously had been realized.
There was no independent verification of the documents, but Colombia has said it would allow experts from the Organization of American States to examine the computers involved.
The most stunning information in the documents involves uranium, which can be used by terrorists for so-called "dirty bombs'' in which conventional explosives disperse radioactive materials that people then inhale.
"Another of the themes is the one on uranium,'' says a Feb. 16 note from someone identified only as Edgar Tovar to Raul — most likely Reyes.
"There's a man who supplies me with material for the explosive we prepare, and his name is Belisario and he lives in Bogota," the note says. "He sent me the samples and the specifications and they are proposing to sell each kilo for two and a half million dollars, and that they supply and we look for someone to sell to, and that the deal should be with a government that can buy a huge amount. They have 50 kilos ready and can sell much more.''
Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos said in a statement Tuesday that the letter proves the FARC was "negotiating to get radioactive material, the principal base for making dirty weapons of destruction and terrorism.''
"This shows that these terrorist groups ... constitute a grave threat not just to our country but to the entire Andean region and Latin America,'' he added.
Some experts were skeptical, however.
"In a lot of cases involving uranium deals, somebody's usually getting snookered,'' said James Lewis, a former State Department expert on arms smuggling now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The $2.5 million per kilo price "sounds about right,'' he said, but "the quantity sounds really suspicious'' because accumulating 50 kilos would be very difficult under the very watchful eye of U.S. and other intelligence agencies....
So, we have the Dodgy Dossier and forged documents from a disgraced ex-policeman turned spy-for-hire providing the grist for the mill of the war machine lies in the US and the UK against Iraq, and now we see that same kind of grist and mill being used in South America against Venezuela and Ecuador, and the US running it against Iran.
Did we just enter the Twilight Zone?
March 6 Update: Pablo Bachelet reports for the McClatchy Newspapers (March 5, State Dept.: U.S. will examine captured rebel hard drives) that Thomas Shannon, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, told a House committee that "Colombia has promised soon to share the hard drives from the captured computers with the United States".
What will be interesting is to see what kinds of forensic analysis will be done on them and their contents, and the silence in the media over the lack of such analyses being done on the "Iranian" laptop.
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