A quiet burial of a scandal that will haunt Washington (Khan)

.. On May 2, Pakistan announced the closure in the scandal-related case, as it freed from jail the last of the 11 nuclear scientists imprisoned more than two years ago for suspected roles in the covert transfers. The 12th figure, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the ring's alleged mastermind, was granted immunity from prosecution and has been made to stay at home under tight security since his February 2004 televised confession on illicit nuclear dealings.

Contrast the international crisis being contrived over Iran -- a country that would take at least 10 years to acquire nuclear-weapons capability after freeing itself from International Atomic Energy Agency inspections -- with the lack of any response to Pakistan's defiant statement that "as far we are concerned this chapter is closed."

And notice the dramatic irony that at the very time Tehran is under pressure to come clean on its imports of Pakistani nuclear designs and items, the exporting country has announced closure of the probe. A full international investigation could yield answers to several key unresolved Iran-related issues cited by the IAEA in its report released April 28.

It was the Pakistani proliferation ring that gave the Iranian nuclear program its start ..

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20060513bc.html

Man it sux getting old. I really need to get some sleep.
I may get the chance to get back to NY over the summer, if I do I'd like to get together and have a drink (or more!). I'm still bummed that I couldn't make it when the Malloy family was there for the Raven get together.

Let me know when you are coming to town. The NY Forum is also a good place to post and see how many of us can get together.

I know about getting old too. Midnight is usually past my bedtime too.;)

....No one to date has been charged, let alone put on trial, in Pakistan for involvement in a clandestine proliferation ring whose international-security ramifications thus far exceed Iran's enrichment of a minute amount of uranium. None of the actors in the scandal has been allowed by Pakistan to be questioned by the IAEA or any other outside investigators, although Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has acknowledged transfers of bomb know-how, including complete uranium-enrichment centrifuges, to Iran, North Korea and Libya from 1987 to 2003.

In fact, the principal actors are not A.Q. Khan and his fellow scientists but the Pakistan military and intelligence. To ensure that the role of the principal actors is not exposed, the entire blame was pinned on a group of 12 "greedy" scientists led by Khan, and then these very men have been religiously kept away from international investigators.

What's more, the military -- which has always controlled the nuclear program -- claimed that it wasn't aware that nuclear secrets were being sold until Libya and Iran began spilling the beans. As part of Pakistan's nukes-for-missiles swap with North Korea, a Pakistani C-130 military transport aircraft, for example, was photographed loading missile parts in Pyongyang in 2002. Yet Musharraf claimed he was in the dark.

No country has concocted a more ridiculous tale than Pakistan as an excuse for roguish conduct. The uncovering of the proliferation ring should have persuaded Islamabad's Western allies to distance themselves from the military and invest in the only real guarantee for Pakistan's future as a stable, moderate state -- its civil society. Instead, the Bush administration went along with Islamabad's charade because it sees the Pakistan military as central to U.S. strategic interests in that country. It even lent a helping hand to the Musharraf regime to dress up the pretense as reality.

Such is America's ability to shape international perceptions that the world has been made to believe that A.Q. Khan, on his own, set up and ran a nuclear Wal-Mart. And that Khan's network of "private entrepreneurs" had only less than a dozen Pakistani scientists, including his right-hand man, Mohammad Farooq, who has just been freed from incarceration.

.A good way to get around Tehran's reluctance to share full information is for Washington and its friends to facilitate IAEA investigations into the Pakistani ring. Several key outstanding issues on Iran could be readily settled if the IAEA were permitted to do the obvious -- probe the front part of the supply line in the country where it originated. Yet the U.S.-backed Musharraf regime on May 2 again rejected that idea, declaring, "There is no question of direct access."

Even the task of containing the risks of further Pakistani leakage in the future cannot be met without verifiably unplugging the various links in the elaborate Pakistani nuclear-supply chain. A charade that hushes up the role of the military -- in the interest of Musharraf and the U.S. -- is hardly the answer to those risks.

This is a job for Halliburton.

-Hoot

.

and Dick Cheney

If this planet blows to pieces this year, thank Khan Labs' and Bush
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1104251


Dick Cheney exposed Valerie Plame to cover up his association with A.Q. Khan's Nuclear Walmart. Read about it here: http://s93118771.onlinehome.us/DU/AMERICANJUDAS.pdf

and puts the lie to the reasons for the next neocon war.

to the whole Iran story and rooted in BCCI - not surprisingly.