Bush and the bomb

Bush and the bomb

Saturday March 4, 2006
The Guardian

Last-ditch nuclear talks between Iran and the European Union's big three did not go well yesterday, breaking up shortly after they began in Vienna. That was not surprising since there had been an impasse in negotiations for weeks now. But it was more than just an unfortunate coincidence that the session was held a day after George Bush, visiting New Delhi, struck a landmark deal allowing India to develop peaceful nuclear energy while staying outside the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), the world's most important legal barrier to the spread of nuclear weapons. This smacks of double standards that will make it hard to hold the line on this issue and gives some substance to the charge, voiced by an angry President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that opposition to Iran's nuclear ambitions - which he claims are peaceful - is politically motivated. Next week this potentially disastrous confrontation is likely to move to the UN security council.

India of course, is not Iran, and the US is not alone in wooing the world's largest democracy or in piling on the rhetoric about shared values. Outside the capital, Mr Bush spent most time in Hyderabad, the country's Silicon Valley, symbol of its increasingly close integration into the global economy and home to high-earning outsourced call centres and software exporters. Nor is India in the same league as neighbouring Pakistan. This US ally in the "war on terror" - which the president is visiting today following an ominous suicide bombing attack on the US consulate in Karachi - has also acquired nuclear weapons without ever signing the NPT. But Pakistan has a far worse record on proliferation and is suspected of selling known-how to Iran. The US is now treating India like its uniquely special ally Israel, also outside the NPT, which maintains a policy of deliberate ambiguity about its nuclear capacity and is believed to have 200 warheads.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1723276,00.html

The Veep and Pakistan

Cheney Helped Cover-Up Nuclear Proliferation in 1989, So Pentagon Could Sell Pakistan Fighter Jets

By JASON LEOPOLD

When news of Pakistan's clandestine program involving its top nuclear scientist selling rogue nations, such as Iran and North Korea, blueprints for building an atomic bomb was uncovered last month, the world's leaders waited, with baited breath, to see what type of punishment President Bush would bestow upon Pakistan's President Pervez Musharaff.

Bush has, after all, spent his entire term in office talking tough about countries and dictators that conceal weapons of mass destruction and even tougher on individuals who supply rogue nations and terrorists with the means to build WMDs. For all intents and purposes, Pakistan and Musharraf fit that description.

Remember, Bush accused Iraq of harboring a cache of WMDs, which was the primary reason the United States launched a preemptive strike there a year ago, and also claimed that Iraq may have given its WMDs to al-Qaeda terrorists and/or Syria, weapons that, Bush said, could be used to attack the U.S.

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.

SNIP...

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.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold03082004.html