Remind me: WHY did Musharraf pardon A. Q. Khan?

What was our "good friend and ally" thinking when he pardoned the man who sold, or attempted to sell, nuclear secrets and materials to N. Korea, Iran & Libya? And why was Bush okay with it? I don't remember the story they told at the time - do you?

______________________


Pakistani's Black Market May Sell Nuclear Secrets
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: March 21, 2005

Nuclear investigators from the United States and other nations now believe that the black market network run by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan was selling not only technology for enriching nuclear fuel and blueprints for nuclear weapons, but also some of the darkest of the bomb makers' arts: the hard-to-master engineering secrets needed to fabricate nuclear warheads.

Their suspicions were initially raised by the discovery of step-by-step instructions, some of which appear to have come from China and Pakistan, among the documents recovered last year from Libya. More recently, investigators have found that the Khan network had offered similar materials to Iran.

* * * *

The inability of intelligence officials to track down the whereabouts of the bomb-making instructions underscores the fact that more than a year since Mr. Khan's arrest and pardon by Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, there are still many mysteries about what exactly the Khan network was selling, and to whom.

* * * *

Intelligence officials in the United States and European diplomats said documents from Libya and Iran showed the Khan network had offered for sale instructions on such tricky manufacturing steps as purifying uranium, casting it into a nuclear core and making the explosives that compress the core and set off a chain reaction. Unlike bomb designs themselves, these manufacturing secrets can take years or even decades for a country to learn on its own.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/international/asia/21nukes.html?pagewanted=all

______________________

and a trial would expose the details to the world

exactly what Khan was doing as Khan and Pakistan were a big part of the BCCI network as uncovered by Kerry's investigation.

You may never have heard of Khan Laboratories, but if this planet blows to pieces this year, it will be thanks to Khan Labs' creating nuclear warheads for Pakistan's military. Because investigators had been tracking the funding for this so-called "Islamic Bomb" back to Saudi Arabia, under Bush security restrictions, the inquiry was stymied. (The restrictions were lifted, the agent told me without a hint of dark humor, on September 11.)

Noam Chomsky, who read the story on page one of the Times of India, has wondered, "Why wasn't it all over US papers?

.. A top-level CIA operative who spoke with us on condition of strictest anonymity said that, after Bush took office, "There was a major policy shift" at the National Security Agency. Investigators were ordered to "back off" from any inquiries into Saudi Arabian financing of terror networks, especially if they touched on Saudi royals and their retainers. That put the Bin Ladens, a family worth a reported $12 billion and a virtual arm of the Saudi royal household, off limits for investigation.

I probed our CIA contact for specifics of investigations that were hampered by orders to back off of the Saudis. He told us that Khan Laboratories investigation had been effectively put on hold.


http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=312&row=0

And I guess they can have it both ways because no one is paying attention? I'm curious who these completely unnamed sources are in the NYT story. It seems to be strategically placed to foreshadow the U.S. invasion of Iran, don't you think?

by Seymour M. Hersh
Issue of 1993-03-29
Posted 2004-01-12

...

The American intelligence community, also operating in secret, had concluded by late May that Pakistan had put together at least six and perhaps as many as ten nuclear weapons, and a number of senior analysts were convinced that some of those warheads had been deployed on Pakistan’s American-made F-16 fighter planes. The analysts also suspected that Benazir Bhutto, the populist Prime Minister of Pakistan, had been cut out of—or had chosen to remove herself from—the nuclear planning. Her absence meant that the nation’s avowedly pro-nuclear President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and the Pakistani military, headed by Army General Mirza Aslam Beg, had their hands, unfettered, on the button. There was little doubt that India, with its far more extensive nuclear arsenal, stood ready to retaliate in kind.

Since the last week of May was summit week, President Bush and his top aides were preoccupied with Gorbachev and crucial questions about his status inside the Soviet Union. A full understanding of what could happen in South Asia during those days was thus most vivid to the men and women running American intelligence, who knew that Pakistan had long been America’s ally in the clandestine war against the Soviet Union. As early as 1950, the Pakistani government had effectively ceded remote areas of its northern provinces to the Central Intelligence Agency and to the National Security Agency—the larger and still more secretive group that, from its headquarters, at Fort Meade, in Maryland, is responsible for communications intelligence. It was from northern Pakistan that the N.S.A. eavesdropped on the Soviet nuclear facilities in Kazakhstan; it was Pakistan that provided secret bases for America’s U-2 spy flights; and it was Pakistan that served as a key jumping-off point for intelligence gathering and anti-Soviet activities by the C.I.A.

Pakistan was rewarded for its support with large amounts of American military and economic aid. The American intelligence community, to protect its investment and its continuing operations, spent many millions of dollars to recruit agents and to install technical equipment to learn as much as possible about the inner workings of its ally. Those agents and that equipment enabled America to ascertain, in the early spring of 1990, that Pakistan had gone nuclear, and that its leadership was fully prepared to use the weapons, if necessary, in a war against India.


http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:UrsROHMwumcJ:www.newyorker.com/archive/content/%3F040119fr_archive02+%22On+the+Nuclear+Edge,%22+Hersh&hl=en

Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation poses a tricky challenge

JASJIT SINGH

Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme and the man who relentlessly pursued it through clandestine means and methods for decades, has finally admitted in a written statement that he oversaw its further clandestine spread to at least three other countries. Official Pakistan, which for years insisted that its nuclear weapons programme is tightly controlled and completely secure, is now claiming that nuclear trade has been made into a private enterprise by some of its national heroes! Extensive evidence has emerged in the public domain about detailed plans for enrichment of uranium for bomb making having been transferred from Pakistan to a number of countries along with a new version of a “yellow pages” directory of networks from Malaysia to Europe and North America for supply of materials and components.

What is of critical importance is not only the world’s most adventurous multinational nuclear proliferation but the reason Khan has put forward for his activities. Pakistani officials are saying that, contrary to earlier assumptions, he did not do so for money, but that he “was motivated enough to make other Islamic countries nuclear powers also” and reduce pressure on Pakistan. This may be an effort to garner public support from Islamic parties and countries. It also harks back to Bhutto’s notion of the “Islamic Bomb” for its Um’mah. The only exception known so far is the supply of nuclear weapon making technology to North Korea for strategic reasons in exchange for long-range ballistic missiles for nuclear weapon delivery.

Islamism has been deepening in Pakistan for three decades. Its concept of “strategic depth”, especially to its west, led to intervention in Afghanistan to control Kabul through covert Mujahideen operations. Strategic depth made no sense in modern conventional military terms. But in the context of Islamic jihad, as an instrument of politics by other means in Clausewitzean terms, it incorporated deadly logic, especially when the Holy Quran was invoked under General Zia ul-Haq to justify terrorism. To this has been added the strategic depth of an “Islamic Bomb” whose wherewithal is controlled by Pakistan. One look at the map would show that Pakistan’s Islamic nuclear mushroom covers the whole of West Asia with what Mansoor Ijaz terms as the “North Korean-made missiles armed with a Chinese-made nuclear device assembled in Islamabad’s nuclear labs whose fuel came from gas centrifuges sold by Pakistan’s rogue Islamists.” Small wonder Al-Qaeda, which received extensive support from Pakistan and its most radical surrogate, the Taliban, boasted it could make a “dirty” nuclear bomb.

The incontrovertible truth is that Pakistan’s nuclear programme in every aspect has been, and remains, under the firm and total control of its army at least since 1977; even its navy and air force have little role in it. Its clandestine nature relied on building a black market largely managed by trusted senior army (and ISI) officers and senior scientists in the nuclear establishment. Such people have undoubtedly been under a strong security and intelligence cover as much for their safety as to keep an eye on them. With a flourishing $2 billion-plus annual narcotics trade, and banks like the former Dubai-based Pakistani-owned “Outlaw Bank”, the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International), and the Mehran Bank to manage the black market in narcotics, nuclear trade and tools for terrorism, there was obviously no dearth of unaccounted funds for the purpose. General Aslam Beg, the army chief in late 1980s who controlled the nuclear programme, later publicly acknowledged receipt of hundreds of crores of unaccounted funds which he passed on to the ISI and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan.

more
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=40361

Pakistan's Nuclear Hero Defended
by Jefferson Morley

"Washington and Islamabad," says the Delhi-based daily, are "holding their breath" to see if Khan "will spill the beans about Pakistan's offical complicity in the spread of nuclear weapons technology."

Pakistan proceeded to spend some $10 billion developing a nuclear arsenal, say the editors of the Times of India. The money came from Libya, Saudia Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and the depositors of the BCCI. The bank, says the editors of the Times of India, was founded by a Pakistani and operated freely in the Persian Gulf oil enclave of Dubai. It is inconceivable, they argue, that Western intelligence agencies didn't know all about this black market.

In other words, was the United States totally clueless while a Pakistani scientist supplied nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8262-2004Feb3_2.html

I feel sick.

Go figure. :shrug:

Wednesday, February 04 2004 @ 06:11 PM CST

Stephen Fidler and Farhan Bokhari

The Pakistani government is examining records of the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International in its investigation into the role Pakistani scientists may have played in selling nuclear knowhow to Iran, North Korea and Libya. According to bankers, some of whom worked with BCCI before it collapsed in 1991, Pakistani investigators have sought the help of former BCCI employees to try to uncover payments made to scientists connected with Pakistan's nuclear programme. BCCI's role in financing Pakistan's own nuclear efforts has long been the subject of scrutiny. In 1992, a report into BCCI from a US Congressional sub-committee headed by Senator John Kerry, now a leading Democratic presidential contender, said "there is good reason to conclude that BCCI did finance Pakistan's nuclear programme". Though it said the issue deserved further investigation, there was little public follow-through.

This year, however, as evidence has mounted that Pakistani scientists helped the uranium enrichment programmes of Iran, North Korea and Libya, the Pakistani government has launched an investigation. A government spokesman in Islamabad said that anybody found to have passed on secrets would be punished, but denied that the government approved any transfers. At least 11 Pakistani scientists and officials - as well as the so-called father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan - have been questioned.

BCCI helped the Pakistani government under General Zia ul Haq, the military dictator killed in a 1988 plane crash, to channel payments from the US Central Intelligence Agency to fighters seeking to oust Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Soviet troops withdrew in 1989 but former BCCI officials said the relationship for organising undocumented payments for influential Pakistanis continued until the bank's collapse. One former BCCI banker who said he organised funds transfers on behalf of senior military officers in the Zia regime commented: "I'm not surprised that the Pakistanis are now looking to put together dossiers on some of their scientists receiving payments through BCCI." He said that over the past two months, Pakistani officials had travelled to the Middle East, looking for evidence of nuclear scientists receiving payments through BCCI.

Another former BCCI banker said that establishing payments to Pakistani nuclear scientists through the bank could provide evidence about the so far undocumented role of senior former Pakistani military officers in overseeing the transfer of nuclear knowhow to other countries. The investigation has prompted speculation among western intelligence officials and diplomats over the extent to which General Zia, leader of a frontline anti-communist state, in fact sanctioned the transfer of nuclear knowhow to Iran. In the past four to eight weeks, he said the Pakistani investigators have been seeking evidence of payments made to Mohammad Farooq, one of the nuclear scientists at the centre of the investigation. Pakistani officials are said to have focused on Mr Farooq as a possible contact between the Iranians and Mr Khan.


http://www.pakistan-facts.com/index.php?topic=wmd-proliferation

:nuke:

When Bush was asked to name the PM of Pakistan and had no idea. Now Musharraf is his best freakin' friend!!!!

Meanwhile, if asked about the Saudi Royal family, he could have probably named a hundred of the b@st@rds off the top of his pathetic head.

Even given the nature of the scum involved with nuclear proliferation, it's hard to imagine selling the whole planet for personal profit. I guess it's hard for me because I lack the apocalyptic vision that keeps religious zealots going.

A. Q. Khan is not the 'father' of the Pakistani a-bomb. That distinction belongs to none other than our very own Dick Cheney. Because it was through our fearless leaders efforts during the Bush 1 administration that allowed the arming of Pakistan with nukes.

How was this feat accomplished? Why through Mr. Cheney's efforts, that tricky rascal. Ya see, the idea was, if many in those 3rd world toilets had nukes, well they would save us the effort of killing them as they would kill each other.

Motive for Plame outing, because she was gonna sting Halliburton for selling nuke information to those very enemies of freedom we are now about to engage in war.

This is from

The BCCI Affair
A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations
United States Senate
by
Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown
December 1992
102d Congress 2d Session Senate Print 102-140

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/24appendic.htm



So, what else is new?

Seems to me the reporter may be too young to remember this is what BCCI was all about.

I see a grinning Soledad O'brian asking "what's BCCI?"

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. :silly:

On the surface, it looks like the BFEE just wants to make money. In reality, they want to perpetuate war.*

March 06, 2004

Cheney Helped Cover-Up Pakistani Nuclear Proliferation So US Could Sell Fighter

By: Jason Leopold
Independent Media TV

EXCERPT...

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and top members of the administration reacted with shock when they found out that Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, spent the past 15 years selling outlaw nations nuclear technology and equipment. So it was sort of a surprise when Bush, upon finding out about Khan’s proliferation of nuclear technology, let Pakistan off with a slap on the wrist. But it was all an act. In fact, it was actually a cover-up designed to shield Cheney because he knew about the proliferation for more than a decade and did nothing to stop it.

Like the terrorist attacks on 9-11, the Bush administration had mountains of evidence on Pakistan’s sales of nuclear technology and equipment to nations vilified by the U.S.—nations that are considered much more of a threat than Iraq—but turned a blind eye to the threat and allowed it to happen.

In 1989, the year Khan first started selling nuclear secrets on the black-market; Richard Barlow, a young intelligence analyst working for the Pentagon prepared a shocking report for Cheney, who was then working as Secretary of Defense under the first President Bush administration: Pakistan built an atomic bomb and was selling its nuclear equipment to countries the U.S. said was sponsoring terrorism.

SNIP...

Cheney went to great lengths to cover-up Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry. In a New Yorker article published on March 29, 1993, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/? 040119fr_archive02, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh quoted Barlow as saying that some high-ranking members inside the CIA and the Pentagon lied to Congress about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal so as not to sacrifice the sale of the F-16 fighter planes to Islamabad, which was secretly equipped to deliver nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities and the had become so grave by the spring of 1990 that then CIA deputy director Richard Kerr said the Pakistani nuclear threat was worse than the Cuban Missile crisis in the 1960s.

CONTINUED...

http://www.independent-media.tv/itemprint.cfm?fmedia_id=6090&fcategory_desc=Under%20Reported

* Think "Plame" and you'll see how they WILLFULLY reduced our nation's ability to defend itself from nuclear proliferation. Dr. Khan? He's the CIA's boy...bankrolled by BCCI...which was funded by petrodollars...which helped finance Smirko's drywells in Midland...which greased the wheels for the mullahs...It's maddening.

BTW: Great thread, Stephanie.

If I was in charge of the Justice Department...



Mr. Sneer, your agonizer, please.

PS: Happy Birthday, William Shatner!

It always comes down to Dick.

who are covering this story.

It amazes me how people have completely forgotten about BCCI and how it connects every aspect of the war on terror and almost all the global characters involved.