Transatlantic Politics

America's tax dollars hard at work:

• The Energy Department is subsidizing two Russian nuclear institutes that are building important parts of a reactor in Iran whose construction the United States spent years trying to stop, according to a House committee.
• The institutes, both in Nizhny Novgorod, gave American officials copies of sales presentations that listed the Bushehr reactor, which Russia has agreed to fuel, as one of their projects. One institute is providing control systems, including control room equipment, and the other, hundreds of pumps and ventilation fans.
• The Energy Department is subsidizing the institutes under the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention, a program set up in 1994, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The program was intended to prevent newly impoverished scientists and their institutions from selling expertise to states or terrorist groups that want nuclear weapons.  (Doesn't Iran fall into the category of a "state or terrorist groups" that we want to prevent from obtaining nuclear weapons?!?)
• Rep. John Dingell, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said in a telephone interview, that the State Department has accused Iran of using the Bushehr reactor as a cover for obtaining nuclear technology useful in a weapons program. And, he said, “We’ve got a bunch of federal laws that impose sanctions on U.S. companies that develop Iran’s oil.”
  But under the nonproliferation program, he said, “We’ve got U.S. money providing assistance to help develop a reactor that we’re busy denouncing.” (Duh.)

Boneheads. 

Perhaps if America's federal government weren't quite so large, such "oversights" wouldn't happen (or wouldn't take years to uncover)…

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