U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry (with sword), alongside Saudi energy ministerOne year has passed since the brutal murder, and macabre dismemberment, of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbal, Turkey, at the hands of a high-level Saudi regime death squad. Official U.S. and United Nations reports implicate Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in having ordered the assassination. The genocidal Saudi-led war and siege of Yemen continues, with Houthi rebel attacks igniting Saudi oil fields deep within the country, and causing recent large-scale Saudi coalition casualties at the front lines on its border. Is this a place where nuclear power plants should be built? Bennett Ramberg warned in 1985 that nuclear power plants could serve as pre-deployed weapons for an enemy, if they chose to attack them, veritable dirty bombs of immense size. In fact, Houthi forces previously fired a warning shot across the bow at a pre-operational nuclear plant in United Arab Emirates; the atomic reactor has since fired up, unfortunately. Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, while still serving as Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned that the reason Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia were pursuing nuclear power, was in order to have a pathway to nuclear weapons, if they chose to use it that way. In fact, MBS has admitted as much on a CBS "60 Minutes" interview. Despite the inherent risk that uranium enrichment and/or plutonium reprocessing can be used for nuclear weapons production, the Trump administration has continuously tried to do end runs around congressional safeguards against nuclear weapons proliferation, in order to transfer U.S. nuclear technology and know how to Saudi Arabia. MORE.