Wednesday, April 29, 2009

CIAer now works for Senate

As has been previously reported, one of the nation's top investigative journalists, Douglas Frantz, a former managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and investigative author on A.Q. Khan's rogue nuclear network, is lending his considerable investigative skills to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he heads up the committee's investigations team.

Committee sources say Frantz's first investigative report for the committee on an Iran-related issue should be released in the coming days. Frantz declined to discuss the report. But sources said the investigation, which involved Frantz's travel to the IAEA, the U.N.'s atomic watchdog agency in Vienna, looks at a number of financial entities in Europe and elsewhere that help Iran conduct overseas financial transactions that allegedly finance its nuclear activities. The committee has scheduled a hearing on Iran's financing of its nuclear program for next Wednesday morning.

The report's release coincides with the influential annual policy conference (.pdf) of the pro-Israel group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which opens this weekend in Washington. Sources had earlier told The Cable that AIPAC officials had met with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) shortly after he became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee to recommend that the committee's investigative energies could be usefully directed into looking into the Iran sanctions-busting issue.
Read on.

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