Dutch man sabotaged Iranian nuclear program without Dutch government's knowledge
nltimes.nl
nltimes.nl
Definitely killed by either Dutch/Americans/Saudis or Iranians.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/transplantation/transplantation...
> After Major Motorcycle Rallies, More Organs Available for Donation
> — Study estimated 21% more organ donors, 26% more transplant recipients per day during rallies
The operation happened in 2007. 1.5 to 2 years later, Van Sabben returned to Iran. Then he suddenly left and two weeks later died on 16/01/2009.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/aivd-speelde-cr...
https://nos.nl/artikel/2504114-nederlander-saboteerde-atoomc...
The Dutch tech site tweakers.net is discussing it here https://tweakers.net/nieuws/217216/volkskrant-identiteit-van...
A local news outlet states that he was an 'avid motorcycle rider' meaning he was an expert at riding motorcycles. Such a rider has low chances of getting into an accident than average.
Or the accident was a mere coincidence.
https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/engineer-who-helped-buil...
It doesn't translate to secret committee really. Secret = geheim in Dutch.
The term stiekem has a definite negative connotation. A more accurate translation would be the "sneaky committee"
I can kinda imagine they would leave significant multilateral geopolitical developments out of that by the way. There were many members in those days, including from small opposition parties. Maintaining secrecy would be difficult, especially since the Dutch parliament has a very bad track history (almost every year the "troonrede" - similar to the state of the union in the US) is leaked by someone beforehand.
These days they only seem to have 5 members from the biggest parties.
Pretty bad when intelligence services customarily operate above the law and don't even tell the government they're supposedly beholden to.
The Netherlands specifically had cabinets (i.e., governments) fall due to the responsible ministers not knowing what their agencies were doing, with snap elections as result.
In fact, in the last decade or so this happened quite often. Accountability in The Netherlands isn’t just based on knowing something and still doing the wrong things, its often also based on “should’ve known something as the person responsible for the agency in question” and not being in the know. In terms of accountability, in both cases the person in question is considered to have fucked up.
So the plausible deniability angle, is not really a benefit. Provided it comes out during that person’s tenure, although in rare instances even current office holders have been held responsible for the lack of knowledge of their prior office holders, based on the idea that the current office holder should’ve been aware such a thing happened and should’ve informed parliament post haste upon learning about it.
There's not knowing and "not knowing". Plausible deniability and all.
The whole point is to do the dirty work it isn't supposed to be happen.
They describe the process on how things can be approved and what needs to be done for that. But this thing sounds like it was more an MIVD (military) thing and I can imagine there isn't nearly as much legal due process on that side.
Would reccommend it for Dutch language speakers.
Genuinely asking because I’m curious, and not trying to flamebait.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hailing-hamas-iranian-presiden...
Can’t believe people try to place Israel and Iran on the same pane when the latter is run by extremist psychopaths that fund mass destruction across the Middle East.
In this last conflict so far there’s been 1.4K Israelis killed while 23k Palestinians killed. It’s disproportionally high on the Palestinian side. The majority are civilians. I couldn’t care less why this is so: military bureaucracy? Racism? Dehumanization of the opponents? But the numbers clearly paint Israel as the country “run by terrorists who openly call for genocides and have shown they’re willing to go any mile to achieve their extremist delusions”.
Why is Iran any different?
No, they aren't. Hamas invaded first and triggered the conflict.
Anyone who tries to equivocate Israel, the sole prosperous democracy in the Middle East, with Iran, a theocracy whose biggest export is mass destruction, is heavily misinformed at best and at worst a whataboutery propagandist.
Anyone who ignores disproportionate, egregious civilian murders to explain their perspective that Israel is good makes a better case for a misinformed whatabouting propagandist.
That said, I genuinely don’t want this to be an Israel vs. Palestine conversation and more a conversation about why shouldn’t even “evil” theocracies have a right to defended themselves?
How does this argument keep coming back? It’s obvious that line of reasoning leads to just might-makes-right, if we’re all so morally equivalent.
It seems like the main thing Iran has done against the US is through proxies, which reflects modern US strategy.
Having said that, it doesn't condone the actions of the Iranian regime as well.
US also helped current regime when it first gained power.
Looking up the quote, Regan was talking about the USSR? If so I think it may be stronger than that sentiment, but I'm not 100% sure owing (in addition to the previous point about games of telephone) to not having lived through the worst of the Cold War — and the small bit I did live through before the USSR collapsed was entirely in the UK and my experience as a child contained more fear of the IRA than the USSR as the IRA were in the news while the USSR were, (like the Klingons that were a thin analogy for them), only in films and on TV.
No, you won't.
Now. If you are either an Islamist group opposing Israel specifically, and/or a specifically Shi’a Islamist group opposing Israel or any Sunni-dominated Arab government, then, yes, your odds of getting Iranian support arr pretty good.
This isn’t like, a game, where we want all sides to have an equal chance of winning?
If a robber comes to your house armed with a knife, and you have a sword with good reach, you don’t toss the robber a sword out of some sense of sportsmanship.
Still in principle I think we should strive for nobody to have nuclear weapons, but given that that is far away the next best thing is to not let any new actor add nuclear weapons to their arsenal.
I agree with your general point though.
(I guess that’s another reason to not want more countries to get nukes: they might seem reasonable now, but they could be batshit insane by the time you start drawing your pension.)
Iran can at least be pressured now with retaliations. Once it becomes a nuclear power, even the US will be forced to trade carefully.
Now some hope that nuclear armed states become "responsible" as a result of feeling safe, and don't sponsor terrorism. But that clearly didn't work with Pakistan (major backer of the talibans, and by extension of Al Quaeda) and North Korea (aggresses South Korea regularly and issues random threats to attract attention).
And nuclear deterrence only works when the parties do no want to die. When their religion tells them it's great to die for Jihad, I don't think their is any deterrence, it's a completely different dynamic.
And with ethnic tensions all over the middle east, and Iran's stated objective to destroy Israel, no one in the middle east is really keen to be threatened by Iran's nukes.
Current day Iran, as ironic as it is, is a direct product of this. Yemeni Civil war, with the Saudis and UAE propping up the PLC, both proxies of the US, Iran-Saudi proxy conflict with the US backing the Saudis, Israel-Palestine conflict, the former is heavily sponsored by the US, etc, etc and that’s just that region and current day.
There’s the whole Arab Cold War that originated a lot of the current day issues because the US didn’t want the USSR gaining influence because of scary socialist (yet secular) leaders gaining popularity in a lot of countries.
The same motivation lead to, what is euphemistically called “interventions”, by the US in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Again, ironically, a good chunk of what is currently deemed “evil” is a direct product of these interventions like Iran, because it often either backfires or comes back to bite the US in the ass.
> Now some hope that nuclear armed states become "responsible" as a result of feeling safe, and don't sponsor terrorism. But that clearly didn't work with Pakistan (major backer of the talibans, and by extension of Al Quaeda) and North Korea (aggresses South Korea regularly and issues random threats to attract attention).
Funny you mention Pakistan and the Taliban, the latter very much a product of the US with the aid of Pakistan. Pakistan has been an important strategic ally to the US on and off, but the Islamization of Pakistan is again a direct result of US interventions, not in the least the US’ role in the 1977 coup.
North-Korea is a bit of an outlier and doesn’t fit the theme that well because of some complex pre-Cold war Japanese fascist influences and while there’s a kernel of truth in the anti-US propaganda they tell their citizens, based on the war crimes committed by the US that killed 20% of their population, it’s an entirely different beast for another time.
> And nuclear deterrence only works when the parties do no want to die. When their religion tells them it's great to die for Jihad, I don't think their is any deterrence, it's a completely different dynamic.
I think you make two main mistakes in this part of your comment and it comes across a little bigoted. The first mistake is that you have this notion about a religion, a caricature if you will, and you’re applying it to this situation as if the religion you speak of is one big monolith, which it isn’t. The other one is best described as underestimating the will to live of the people in power, regardless of whatever propaganda they might disseminate.
To put it directly: I don’t think the current leadership of Iran is any more eager to die then you or I.
Personally I’m in favor of total nuclear disarmament of all parties involved. But until such a time, I don’t think it’s morally better for one side to have nukes over another side. All sides think they’re the paragon of virtue and have reasons to dislike the other.
All sides involved are also sovereign nations and as such none of them have an inherent right to inhibit the others when it comes to arming themselves imho. Especially when taking into account that none of the main players on the stage have clean hands.
I understand that countries that already have their weapon do not want the smaller countries to get it, and a lot of people from big countries are OK if small countries get genocided if it prevent ww3 or if it keeps the bills down.
No, they won't.
> and that's not going to be the end of it!
It literally would be, if by “it” you mean “the Islamic Republic of Iran”, because Israel has its own nuclear arsenal.
The very sad and pragmatic truth might be that mutually assured destruction might have been able to prevent this.
Its especially bad since thats the way the Soviet Union got its nukes.
Please take this in the nicest way: If thats what you took away from my post you might want to evaluate how much narratives have affected your reasoning skills.
I think Trudeau put it rather well https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/israel-s-gaza-campaign-puts-...
> Israel's close friends are worried its military campaign in the Gaza Strip is putting at risk the country's long-term safety, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in an interview that aired on Thursday.
Then the US used its political power to prevent any of that from happening. Only then did Iran slowly start to develop their own infrastructure.
Together with Israel the US started a huge political campaign trying to convince everybody that Iran was building nuclear weapons, despite there not being any evidence for that. It was pretty much the universal assessment of the CIA and friends that Iran didn't have a nuclear weapons program. In fact the only evidence ever found that there might be something came from Israel, that evidence was incredibly flimsy and many security services didn't accept it as real.
That Israel btw, who not only has been claiming Iran was 'just about to have nuclear weapons since the 90s'. Literally for 30 years, Iran has been 'just about about to have' nuclear weapons. And that the same Israel who IS NOT SIGNED TO NPT and has illegal nuclear weapons. They very likely have stolen nuclear secrets from the US and other countries.
Israel also is conducting a 'the US should invaded Iran' marketing campaign for 30 years. They only went along with Bush idiotic Iraq war because Bush wanted to go after Syria and Hezbollah after that (and eventually Iran). Remember when the US government also was spouting propaganda about WMD back then?
But by all means, lets freak out about Iran when there is a literal rough nuclear state in the region. Iran now is under the most advanced nuclear monitoring system in the history of humanity, and still people are freaking out about it. Talk about propaganda being effective.
But yes, we don't want anybody to have nuclear weapons, but and nuclear weapons could have been prevented by some basic diplomacy. Instead the US made the population of Iran suffer an incredibly amount, and caused billion in damages (not to mention infection lots of computers around the world). And Israel was busy assimilating any Iranian nuclear scientist they could find.
They probably add the costs of test equipment which I presume they had to procure and even destroy several times to make sure the virus worked.
Replace it with “operation” and it’s not at all a crazy number to suggest that an incredibly complicated multi year multi national intelligence operation to disrupt a covert nuclear weapons program inside of an actively hostile nation who have a serious counterintelligence and counter espionage apparatus ended up costing that amount.
You end up coming to the conclusion rather quickly that it’s actually great value for money.
While not at all about this particular operation but if you want to hear someone who actively ran another incredibly successful nuclear non proliferation operation inside of CIA I’d recommend checking out this interview with perhaps the “spookiest” CIA person I’ve ever seen https://www.youtube.com/live/AFnfTDbcPOA?