Pakistan Nuclear Proliferation - 02 October 2004

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arun
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Pakistan Nuclear Proliferation - 02 October 2004

Post by arun »

Brazil may have tapped into Pakistani nuclear smuggling network - US expert

VIENNA (AFP) Oct 01, 2004
Brazil may have acquired key nuclear technology it is trying to keep UN atomic inspectors from seeing from a nuclear smuggling network that also supplied Iran, Libya and North Korea, a US non-proliferation expert said Friday.
"Look at the performance (data) of these centrifuges (in Brazil). They look very similar to the P2," sold by disgraced Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's network, Henry Sokolski, a former Pentagon official who now runs the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center think tank in Washington, told AFP by telephone.

But International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said "there is no indication so far that any other country shopped from the Khan network" beyond Iran, Libya and North Korea.

The Vienna-based IAEA is investigating Iran on US charges that Tehran is secretly developing nuclear weapons.

It is also trying to trace the operations of the Khan network, which has been exposed after Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, was arrested earlier this year.

Centrifuges are used to enrich uranium, a process that makes what can be fuel for civilian reactors but also the explosive core of atomic bombs.

Brazil has since February blocked IAEA inspectors from coming to inspect its uranium enrichment facilities.

Sokolski said the Brazilians "do not want anyone to see the shapes of the casings and rotors" of their centrifuges.

IAEA inspectors are due to arrive in Brazil on October 15 to try to resolve the dispute.

The Brazilian science and technology ministry has stressed that IAEA inspectors "will only have access to parts indispensable to the application of guarantees, without revealing the cores of the centrifuges."

"After a five-month suspension, negotiations on the inspection of the plant have resumed," Science and Technology spokeswoman Vera Canfran told AFP.

Brazil, which has one of the world's largest uranium reserves, denied IAEA inspectors access in February and March to a uranium-enriching facility in Resende, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, saying it wanted to protect industry trade secrets.

IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei has said Brazil, which is widely believed to have a peaceful nuclear program, should not be an exception to IAEA norms.

IAEA spokeswoman Fleming said talk about Brazil as a possible Khan client "does not seem to fit what the IAEA knows about Brazil's nuclear program nor does it correspond to our talks with them so far."

Sokolski said "people say Brazil worked on its latest technology in the late 1990's," a reference to the period when the Khan network was especially active.

He said Brazil might have turned to the Khan network in order to make financial and technological shortcuts in developing centrifuges.

But experts close to the IAEA told AFP they did not think Brazil had tapped into the Khan network.

"They may have gotten some help from abroad with sensitive technology but Brazil has apparently developed centrifuges with some unique features," one expert, who asked not to be named, said, reinforcing the theory that Brazil is trying to hide its enrichment facilities in order to avoid industrial espionage.
Link.
arun
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Post by arun »

Brazil under nuclear microscope -- again

Brazil's nuclear program was once again subject to international scrutiny Thursday following U.N. speculation that a Pakistani scientist who supplied sensitive nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran, also divulged the information to the South American nation.

A former U.S. Defense Department official told leading Brazilian newspaper Estado de Sao Paulo that the reason the United Nations was interested in inspection a new nuclear facility in Resende, Rio de Janeiro, was speculation that the technology at the plant was supplied by former Pakistani nuclear program head Abdul Qadeer Khan, who provided nuclear technology to several rogue nations over the years.

Last week Brazil and the United Nation's nuclear agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, clashed over the terms of inspections at the Resende plant set for October.

Under international law, the plant cannot begin to process uranium until it passes IAEA inspection. Brazil has the world's fourth largest reserves of the raw material used in nuclear power plants and weaponry.
Brazilian officials at the Minister of Science and Technology said they would allow IAEA inspectors in certain parts of the plant but not others to protect Brazilian innovations in uranium processing for fuel.

Henry Sokolski, head of the Washington-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, told Estado that IAEA officials harbor concerns that "the source of the technology of (Brazilian) centrifuges" was Kahn.
Some Brazilian scientists are outraged by the allegations that Brazil obtained the technology for its Resende plant from Pakistan.
"It is absurd to speculate that Brazil had bought old concepts adopted by Pakistan when it has something superior at its disposal," said physicist Fernando Barros to Estado.

Despite Brazil's ardent denials, Washington is urging Brazil to cooperate with the IAEA.

An official from the U.S. State Department told United Press International last week that the Bush administration "urged Brazil and IAEA to work together" to come to an agreement on inspections.

This, of course, isn't the first time that Brazil's been the subject of international speculation regarding its nuclear program.

In April, Brazil was accused of refusing to allow U.N. nuclear inspectors to examine the Rio facility in February and March of this year.
The plant is legal under international treaties, but is still subject to U.N. inspections. IAEA inspectors were prevented from seeing certain portions of the plant.

Brazilian officials said the inspections were unnecessary and intrusive since Brazil formally abstained from nuclear weapon development in the 1990s during the administration of then President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

Despite their objections, Brazil officials say they will allow IAEA inspectors to view some parts of the plant, although not others, citing concerns about protecting Brazilian technological secrets.

Earlier this year Brazilian Defense Minister Jose Viegas defended the nation's right to secrecy, saying "at no time did this attitude signify an impediment to the inspections."

Brazil's penchant for protecting its technology does have some worried that it could be harboring secret nuclear ambitions, namely the production of nuclear weapons.

Cardoso's successor, current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, made remarks during his 2002 presidential race that continued to resound with Washington, the United Nations and the IAEA.

During his run up to the presidency in 2002, Lula said the 1970 treat was unfair. "If someone asks me to disarm and keep a slingshot while he comes at me with a cannon, what good does that do?" he asked in a campaign speech. These remarks quickly became infamous among diplomatic circles in Washington. The Brazilian president later clarified his position, saying that he had no intention of restarting Brazil's weapons program.

Concerns arose anew in October 2003 when then Science and Technology Minister Roberto Amaral said Brazil would join the select group of nations capable of refining uranium via ultra-centrifugation, part of the weapons-grade production process.

Amaral was reprimanded by Lula for the comments and later replaced by Eduardo Campos. Despite the comments, it's not the creation of nuclear weapons that appears to concern inspectors, rather the potential for Brazil to sell refined material to other nations.

There is also Brazil's recent history of selling uranium that still concerns Washington and international inspectors. From 1979-1990 Brazil sold several tons of uranium to Iraq while the nation was under the rule of former dictator Saddam Hussein. According to Brazilians experts, additional uranium was sent to Iraq in off-the-books deals in exchange for oil during the same period.

Lula has announced that Brazil intends to expand its enrichment capacities to sell low-grade uranium to other nations. The 1970 treaty permits this, though it would surely raises red flags at the IAEA and in Washington.
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Post by Prateek »

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.as ... 2004_pg7_5

Brazil denies acquiring N-tech from Pakistan

RIO DE JANEIRO: The Brazilian government has denied allegations that it obtained its centrifugal plans for uranium enrichment from a clandestine nuclear network headed by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

The Brazilian navy, which began the nuclear programme in the 1980s, denied “any type of link with Pakistan regarding the development of Brazilian centrifuges”, in a statement on Friday.

Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology said it objected “to news accounts linking decades of scientific development to international scandals based on anonymous sources without the support of any institution or country”.

Henry Sokolski, a former Pentagon official who now runs the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington, said the Brazilian centrifuges looked similar to a type sold by Khan’s network to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

On Thursday, the daily Estado de Sao Paulo reported that Sokolski said that International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials suspected that the network was the source of Brazil’s centrifuge technology.

The enriched uranium from the centrifuges can be used as fuel for civilian reactors but also as explosive cores for atomic bombs.

Brazil, which is widely believed to have a peaceful nuclear programme, has since February blocked IAEA inspectors from inspecting its uranium enrichment facilities to “protect industry secrets”.IAEA inspectors are due to arrive in Brazil on October 15 to resolve the dispute. afp
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Post by SaiK »

using aq khan network, uncle is making a case for bunker buster nukes.. else, his bunker buster r&d need will be squashed.. already kerry is against it. they are scrambling hard and putting pieces and coming up with newer puzzles to make BB-nukes.
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Post by enqyoobOLD »

NEWS FLASH!

By Sokoloski's logic, the US Manhattan program also managed to make nukes using the famous AQ "Xerox" Khan technology onlee!


These Nonprollotollahs are idiots
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Post by Arun_S »

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040930154829.knbwbwh5.html

Pakistan refuses to let UN nuclear watchdog interview Pakistani scientist

VIENNA (AFP) Sep 30, 2004
Pakistan has refused to let the UN atomic watchdog interview disgraced nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, ringleader of a smuggling network, agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei told the BBC Thursday.
"We have not been allowed by Pakistan to talk to the man," ElBaradei, who is director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said in a BBC World Service interview aired Thursday and monitored by AFP.

It was the first time the IAEA has admitted that Pakistan is refusing to let it see Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb and ringleader of a trafficking network that supplied Iran, Libya and North Korea with sensitive nuclear technology.

The IAEA has been asking Pakistan regularly to help it investigate the international black market run by Khan, who confessed last February to passing on nuclear secrets.

Pakistan's cooperation with the probe is crucial in resolving how Iran, and other states like North Korea, have supplied themselves with nuclear parts and technology that can be used to make atomic weapons.

Asked why Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf reportedly said that nobody had asked to question Khan, ElBaradei said: "I can tell my Pakistani friends that I will be happy to send a team tomorrow to talk to him if we can, absolutely."

ElBaradei said Khan's network had "more than 30 companies and 30 countries all over the globe involved in this fantastic sophisticated illicit trafficking."

But ElBaradei said "as far as I know Mr. Khan has not talked to any non-Pakistani until now."

Pakistan's Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud said in Tehran in August that his country was cooperating with the IAEA probe into Iran's suspect nuclear programme but ruled out allowing international inspectors into Pakistan.

He pointed out that Pakistan was not a signatory of the NPT (nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), which mandates the IAEA to monitor compliance with international atomic safeguards.

IAEA inspectors have found traces of highly-enriched uranium inside Iran, leading to suspicions that Iran has been trying to produce nuclear bombs and not just atomic energy as it insists.

But Tehran maintains the traces found their way into the country on equipment bought from Khan's black market network.

The IAEA wants to take so-called "environmental samples" from Pakistan to compare them with those found in Iran -- crucial in verifying Tehran's claims.

Pakistan has supplied results from sampling it has conducted itself, but has not allowed IAEA inspectors into the country to do their own sampling, ElBaradei said in a report earlier this month.

ElBaradei said the IAEA needed results from its own testing to be able to draw definitive conclusions.

ElBaradei told the BBC that he did not think Iran was an "imminent threat" to make nuclear weapons and that "verification and diplomacy" remain "the only way to resolve" questions about Tehran's atomic ambitions.

He said Iran was "as far away as any country that has the know-how to enrich uranium . . . maybe one year, maybe two years."

Enrichment makes uranium fuel for civilian nuclear reactors but can also produce the explosive material for atomic bombs
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Post by arun »

Pakistan feared as source of nuclear terror :

A new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) on nuclear terrorism said, “The fear regarding Pakistan is that some members of the armed forces might covertly give a weapon to terrorists or that, if President Musharraf were overthrown, an Islamic fundamentalist government or a state of chaos in Pakistan might enable terrorists to obtain a weapon.”
Anyone who finds the CRS report cited is requested to post the URL.
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Post by Rye »

Last edited by Rye on 07 Oct 2004 20:39, edited 1 time in total.
arun
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Post by arun »

Rye,

Thanks for the link.
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Post by JTull »

India, the US and nuclear proliferation


Deeply perturbed over the development, India has asked the United States to withdraw sanctions it has imposed against two Indian nuclear scientists accused by Washington of transferring technology for weapons of mass destruction and missile secrets to Iran.

New Delhi is particularly worried about the timing. This has happened soon after President George W Bush's Democratic challenger Senator John F Kerry and then he himself named nuclear proliferation as "the single most serious threat to the national security of the United States". The fear is that this may turn out to be a precursor to a wider sanctions regime on the unsubstantiated excuse of Indian nuclear proliferation based on US intelligence reports - some of which have proved to be laughably outlandish in Iraq.

It is possible, high-level Indian officials feel, that this is merely a case of some officials in the US administration trying to score points by showing their alacrity in fighting nuclear proliferation at this late stage in their four-year term, even though this has clearly not been their priority in recent years, as is illustrated by the long rope given to Pakistani nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program and the apparent mastermind of a global nuclear smuggling network. Khan has not even been interviewed by any non-Pakistani investigator, much less been interrogated by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as should have happened immediately after his activities came to light.

To rub salt into Indian wounds, as it were, US companies have turned out in force - Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, United Defense and several smaller companies - to exhibit their wares at the same venue in Pakistan where for years Khan's company, Khan Research Laboratories, used to hand out glossy brochures advertising specialized equipment for making a nuclear bomb - IDEAS 2004 in Karachi. In what appeared to one observer, analyst Joshua Kucera, to be an oblique reference to the most notorious past IDEAS exhibitor - Khan - Pakistan's missiles, including the nuclear-capable Shaheen II, are displayed outside, behind a sign reading "Technological Demonstration - not for sale". Interestingly, in a display of Orwellian black humor, the slogan for this year's version of Pakistan's biggest arms show is "Arms for Peace".

The US imposed weapons sanctions against Pakistan in the 1990s after it found out about that country's secret nuclear-bomb program. But then came September 11, 2001, and the war in Afghanistan, where Pakistani support was required to fight their proteges, the Taliban. Pakistan once again became America's new best friend, a frontline sate in the "war on terror", and the sanctions were lifted.

Although Pakistan is still a state spawning Islamic fundamentalists and obscurantists from its madrassas (religious seminaries), Washington has opened up its pocketbooks again. Over the next five years, Pakistan will get at least US$1.5 billion in defense aid from the US as part of a $3 billion aid package. An announcement made at IDEAS 2004 suggests where some of that money is going to be spent: Pakistani officials revealed that the US is ready to reverse its longtime opposition to selling new F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad. The chief of the Pakistani air force told a journalist that Washington wants to provide the F-16s, in part, to help Pakistan fight Islamist extremists in the tribal areas in the northwestern part of the country, though anyone in strategic business should know that if ever these aircraft were used in combat they would be used against India.

To clarify matters on its part, Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna told reporters that the two Indian scientists had sold neither materials, equipment nor technology. "No transfer of sensitive technology has taken place," he said. "Our track record in this is well known. The US government has been asked to review the issue and withdraw the sanctions."

Last week, US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told a press briefing in Washington that two Indian scientists were among "14 entities" against which the US has imposed sanctions. He did not specify which entities were individuals or firms. But he said there were seven from China, two from India and one each in Belarus, North Korea, Russia, Spain and Ukraine. "The penalties apply to the entities themselves and not to countries or governments," Boucher said. The penalties prohibit those named under the sanctions from visiting the US or doing business with any US-based companies.

Explaining the innocence of the Indian scientists, Sarna said one of them has never been to Iran and the other one had not visited the country since mid-2003. "It has been conveyed that we don't share the US views," he added.

India is worried over the impact this controversy may have on the efforts India is making for the transfer of sensitive technology from the United States. India and the US have deepened technology cooperation over the past few months. Last month, Washington announced it had agreed to lift export controls on equipment for nuclear facilities in India after New Delhi assured the US it would address that country's non-proliferation concerns. The deal was the first phase under the "Next Steps in Strategic Partnership With India" (NSSP) agreed in January between Bush and former Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The State Department did not detail the specific offenses by the two scientists, but officials said it involved alleged assistance to Iran's nuclear program during the first half of 2003. Analyst Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Washington-based Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center, was quoted by news agencies as having speculated that the sanctions may relate to India's breakthrough development of an economic way to produce tritium, a radioactive isotope used in nuclear bombs. The US and other Western countries accuse Iran of using a civilian nuclear energy program as a cover to develop atomic weapons, a charge Tehran vehemently denies.

It is a measure of the close defense ties developing between the two countries that US forces are seeking to benefit from the vast experience the Indian military has had in fighting wars in high-altitude mountains, glaciers and deserts, and even in urban warfare, in quelling local disturbances as India has been fighting insurgencies in its northeast for more than half a century.

Only this week, beginning Monday, the Indian navy for the first time displayed its capability with the long-range maritime and submarine hunter aircraft P3C Orions in what are euphemistically called joint exercises with the US Navy off the Goa coast. In the sixth of the Indo-US series of "Malabar Exercises", the frontline Indian anti-submarine warfare ships matched their skills with the US Pacific Fleet's Los Angeles class nuclear submarine as well as a Ticonderoga missile cruiser and an Oliver Hazard Perry class guided-missile frigate. New Delhi and Washington are negotiating for the Indian navy acquiring 10 P3C Orions on a government-to-government sale to augment its depleted maritime capabilities.

On its part, the Indian navy is in the process of attaining higher skills in intercepting unknown vessels, carrying out search and seizure on the high seas to tackle terrorism-related activities as well as protecting the country from external aggression. Intercepting vessels on the high seas, called Visual Boarding Search and Seize (VBSS), is being carried out extensively by the US Navy, and India is right now engaged in learning more about the technicalities of the operation, said C S Patham, commanding officer of INS Mysore. The ship is docked at Mormugao Port in Goa to take part in the India-US joint naval exercises - Malabar 2004.

Only last month, the US administration lifted decades-old US export restrictions on equipment for New Delhi's commercial space program and nuclear power facilities. "It's an odd time to be lifting those restrictions" when the administration is concerned enough about India's cooperation with Iran to impose new sanctions, said Sokolski. The new sanctions are consistent with Under Secretary of State John Bolton's determination, officials claimed, to enforce non-proliferation laws, even if it upsets countries where the US is pursuing better ties. Bolton oversees non-proliferation policy.

US officials also claimed that the Indian scientists' so-called proliferation activities were discussed with the government in New Delhi in advance and sanctions imposed only after New Delhi failed to take action. The administration waived sanctions on Indian companies "four or five times in the last couple of years", but if the government did not take concrete action to redress the situation sanctions could not be waived, one official said.

Another official stressed that the two scientists, not the Indian government, were sanctioned, and New Delhi "needs to do some punishing of people like this itself and prevent these things from happening". Sokolski sees India competing for influence in Iran against nuclear rival Pakistan, whose top scientist Khan ran a black market that sold atomic technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea before being stopped by Islamabad at US prodding.

Pakistani intelligence had earlier accused India of helping Iran when the latter admitted last year that it had received foreign help, and media reports had named Pakistan as one of countries whose nuclear technology Iran was believed to be using. Editors of the Pakistani newspaper the Daily Times of Lahore, who have for long been passionately advocating normalization of ties with India, had surprisingly concluded, even from their own analysis, that India was involved (see Iran nukes and the South Asian puzzle , August 30, 2003).

India had not bothered then to respond vigorously to the Pakistani allegations, probably believing that the charge was too outlandish to be given credence. The Indian record on nuclear non-proliferation has been excellent. It has had very close relations with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, both leaders perpetually on the lookout for nuclear technology in the 1970s and 1980s and in a position to pay very well in cash and kind (oil), but despite its weak economy, always in need of foreign exchange, particularly to import oil, India never gave a thought to the many blandishments offered.

One of the reasons the US and other nuclear powers are wary of India on the nuclear front, however, is that it was not party to any aspect of the international non-proliferation regime until 1997, when it signed the Chemical Weapons Convention. Among the significant treaties it has not signed are the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Thus India has a very limited safeguards agreement with the IAEA, which does not cover any of its nuclear research facilities. That is why after its tests in 1998 the US was hard put to find any multilateral mechanism through which to sanction India.

India's biggest regret, in the present controversy, however, is the awkward timing of the accusation, which virtually seeks to put Indian scientists at par with Pakistan's rogue scientists. India is going all out to ensure that the NSSP initiative is invested with some real substance and at least the US Department of Commerce has claimed that things are going very well in bilateral relations. When an Indian journalist wrote an editorial last week claiming that the NSSP was devoid of any real substance, Matthew S Borman, deputy assistant secretary for export administration, US Department of Commerce, wrote a lengthy rejoinder to counter the claim.

On its part, India is determined to persuade the US that its project of spreading democracy requires that it develop special ties with democratic countries and shuns dictatorships such as Pakistan, even if it needs to use them for a while in some project. The US, in according "major non-NATO ally" status to Pakistan recently, has drawn criticism in India.

The recent and the first meeting between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Bush had also appeared to have gone well. The new United Progressive Alliance government is in any case keen to demonstrate that it has been able to maintain the forward momentum created by the previous government in developing close strategic ties with the US, despite the sanctions imposed after the 1998 Pokhran II nuclear tests.

Indian worries were best expressed in an editorial in the Indian Express (October 4):
As happened in the Iraq case, it is possible that interested parties have got together to slap the charge on retired individuals trying to make it generically somewhat similar to the proliferation undertaken by Dr A Q Khan. These sanctions have the potential of slowing down, if not actually derailing, the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership between the two countries. It is not enough for the Indian government to ask the US to review its assessment since no such transfer has taken place. The issue goes well beyond sanctions on two retired individuals who are unlikely to be affected beyond their prospects for travel to the US. This case is far more likely to be used by the non-proliferation hardliners in the US as an example of poor Indian commitment to non-proliferation, strategic literature is going to be recycling half-truths to paint India as a new source of proliferation. What is needed is greater transparency on the issues involved. If, however, there is any substance at all in US claim, then we owe it ourselves to find ways to ensuring such cases do not recur.
New Delhi is hoping that the present controversy will soon blow away and the countries will be able to get down to business as usual in the shortest possible time. But there is also apprehension that the inexplicable and totally unfounded accusation may be a precursor to reimposition or further tightening of the sanctions regime promulgated after the nuclear tests of 1998. These sanctions had been removed primarily because they had to be removed in the case of Pakistan, which became a close US ally after September 11 and the US could not be seen to be treating the two newly-proclaimed nuclear weapon states differently. In any case, the US has persisted with treating India and Pakistan at par with each other, a hyphen that India has long resented, but to no avail.
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Post by Rangudu »

http://www.suntimes.com/output/othervie ... ef111.html
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, OCTOBER 11, 2004

Pakistan nukes present challenge, but Bush, Kerry not responding

October 11, 2004

BY CHRISTOPHER PREBLE AND SUBODH ATAL


As the presidential election moves into its final weeks, neither candidate has mentioned a vital threat to national security: the vulnerabilities of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Iraq's supposed nuclear program proved to be non-existent, but Pakistan's nuclear weapons and technology are very real. If the United States is serious about keeping the world's most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world's most dangerous terrorists, it must demand a full accounting of Pakistan's nuclear proliferation activities.


Soon after Sept. 11, amid reports that Pakistani nuclear scientists had links to Osama bin Laden, President Pervez Musharraf declared that he had complete control over the country's arsenal. However, it is now known that Pakistan's nuclear technology was being exported to North Korea as late as spring 2002, and to Libya in the fall of 2003. Thus, either Musharraf was not in control of Pakistan's nuclear program or he was using it in ways that contradict U.S. policy toward at least two dangerous countries.

Musharraf blamed Pakistan's leading nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, for the technology exports, claiming Khan was leading a rogue operation for personal gain. That explanation strains credulity, given Musharraf's tight control over the Pakistani military.

That fact -- coupled with the recognition that al-Qaida has sympathizers in Pakistan's military, intelligence, nuclear and political establishments -- should have prompted the Bush administration to demand that Pakistan unravel the full details of its proliferation network.

Instead, the Bush administration supported Musharraf's assertion last February that the proliferation network was Pakistan's ''internal matter.'' Absent U.S. pressure, Musharraf has refused to cooperate with International Atomic Energy Agency investigations into the network. The two presidential candidates have been strangely silent on this matter.

The White House may be giving Musharraf a pass, since his regime has recently taken significant steps in eliminating some of the al-Qaida cells in Pakistan. However, al-Qaida-affiliated groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed continue to operate in Pakistan. So does the much larger Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has some terrorist ties, and which may still have relations with al-Qaida. According to al-Qaida expert Peter Bergen, such groups may be responsible for hiding al-Qaida fugitives, including bin Laden himself. There have also been persistent reports that elements of Pakistan's military and intelligence services are facilitating the Taliban's quest to regain some of its power in Afghanistan. Significantly, former Pakistani intelligence chiefs such as Hamid Gul and Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed have worked against U.S. interests and have helped shape the Pakistani regime's policy directions.

Some have advised against pressuring Musharraf too much, out of concern that he might be overthrown by a new government far more hostile to U.S. interests. That is a legitimate concern. But Musharraf, under pressure from the Bush administration, has cooperated in the war on terrorism by aiding in the overthrow of the Taliban and by attacking al-Qaida cells inside Pakistan. If he can survive those steps, which are unpopular with the Pakistanis, there is little reason to believe that an international effort to understand the details of Khan's nuclear network would lead to Musharraf's downfall.

While we should be mindful of potential scenarios for Pakistan, including what might happen if Musharraf loses his grip on power, the threat of the proliferation of Pakistani nuclear technology already has materialized. We cannot know the extent of that threat without a full accounting of the Khan network's operations. It is irresponsible to defer to Musharraf and a Pakistani establishment that has, at best, suspect loyalties on a matter of the utmost importance to American national security.

A more responsible U.S. policy would honestly acknowledge the Pakistan problem and lead a multinational drive to pressure Pakistan to provide a complete, verifiable accounting of its nuclear proliferation activities. Though Western powers have had differences of opinion regarding the threats posed by various actors, no one should proceed under the illusion that al-Qaida affiliates in possession of nuclear weapons do not pose a clear and present danger.

U.S. acquiescence in Musharraf's coverup was crucial to forestalling such an international effort. Both President Bush and Sen. John Kerry should be asked about Pakistan during the final debate. It is vital that the American people appreciate the gravity of the situation and have a clear understanding of the candidates' plans to tackle the problem.


Christopher Preble is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Subodh Atal is an independent foreign policy analyst.
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Post by arun »

Swiss man arrested in widening Libya nuclear probe

KARLSRUHE, Germany, Oct 11 (AFP) - A Swiss man was arrested in Germany on suspicion of involvement in an international smuggling ring to supply nuclear equipment and know-how to Libya, the federal prosecutor's office announced on Monday.

The 39-year-old, identified only as Urs T., is accused of helping Libya to build nuclear centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium in order to produce atomic weapons.

The German authorities said Urs T. was arrested in the western region of Hesse on Thursday.

Investigators believe he advised a Malaysia-based company and oversaw the production of more than 2,000 pre-assembled centrifuge components.

According to federal lawyers, the parts were shipped first to Dubai then put into at least five containers under false identification papers and loaded on to the German freight ship BBC China for shipping to Libya.

However the containers were unloaded in October last year in the southern Italian port of Taranto after the ship was banned by the German government from unloading its cargo in a port outside the European Union. The containers containing the suspect components were then seized.

Urs T.'s arrest is linked to the detention in South Africa last month of a Swiss engineer, Daniel Geiges, 65, and a 66-year-old German, Gerhard Wisser. They were charged with contravening nuclear energy laws and breaking a law banning the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Both men remain in custody.

German authorities are investigating whether the men broke national secrecy laws.

South African police are currently investigating a nuclear smuggling network thought to have ties to Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who admitted in February to helping Libya and other nations develop weapons programmes.

Libya announced late last year that it was abandoning attempts to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons after months of secret negotiations with London and Washington.
Added later : No need for the Germans to be coy. This looks like Urs Tinner whose name has been floating around for quite a while. His father Freidrich Tinner is a "good friend" of Xerox Khan from the 1980's.
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Post by Arun_S »

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclear- ... t-04j.html

Khan's Nuclear Network, A Criminal Gang

Khan, who enabled Pakistan to conduct nuclear tests in May 1998, days after similar tests by rival India, confessed in February to running a private network of nuclear proliferators and to supplying nuclear technology to some of America's declared enemies. Photo credit: AFP
Washington (UPI) Oct 13, 2004
The Pakistani government was not involved with the network of nuclear proliferators who supplied nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, :evil: :evil: :evil: but did allow this criminal gang to function, says a recent report released by a Washington-based nuclear watchdog.
In the report, Uncovering the Nuclear Black Market, the Institute for Science and International Security observes: The Pakistani government was not directing this network. It (the network) was essentially a criminal operation.

But the report also says the fact that a group of individuals was able to run such a network for so long without being noticed by the international community was more disturbing and dangerous than if it had been a secret government-controlled effort.

The report, however, warns that investigators have not yet been able to determine the exact involvement of Pakistani government officials in the network and the extent of their awareness of the activities of A.Q. Khan and his associates.

Khan, who enabled Pakistan to conduct nuclear tests in May 1998, days after similar tests by rival India, confessed in February to running a private network of nuclear proliferators and to supplying nuclear technology to some of America's declared enemies.

Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf has since sacked Khan, stripped him of all national honors and has put him under house arrest.

But his decision not to send Khan to jail has been widely criticized, although a senior U.S. official - Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca - said last week Washington understood that Khan's popularity as the father of his nation's nuclear program prevented Musharraf from doing so.

She also said that the U.S. government was satisfied with the action Musharraf had taken.

The report on the Khan network says that although the group involved in selling nuclear technology is commonly called the Khan network, it's relatively non-hierarchical.

The key technology holders and several of its leaders were in Pakistan, including Khan. But many other leaders were spread throughout the world and located in Europe, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, South Africa, and Malaysia. The network also depended on a variety of unwitting manufacturing companies and suppliers on many continents, the report says.

The network succeeded in operating in secret for several years before the United States, Britain, and the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed it through a series of actions.

During the IAEA's inspections in Iran during 2003, strong evidence emerged that Pakistani scientists and intermediaries were important clandestine suppliers of centrifuge designs and components to Iran's secret gas centrifuge program, the report says.

According to the report, U.S. intelligence agencies penetrated at least one part of the Khan network in early last year, which led to the dramatic seizure in October 2003 of several containers of parts bound for Libya's secret centrifuge program on the ship BBC China.

After Libya renounced nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in December 2003, U.S., British, and IAEA investigations learned many details about the activities of the network.

These actions resulted in intensive pressure on Pakistan to conduct a thorough investigation. Once started, the Pakistani investigation led relatively quickly to Khan's confession that he supplied gas centrifuge items to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

The report claims that the network intended to provide Libya a turnkey gas centrifuge facility. This included 10,000 centrifuges, piping to connect them together, detailed project designs for the centrifuge plant, electrical and electronic equipment, uranium feed and withdrawal equipment.

It also intended to supply the initial 20 tons of uranium hexafluoride, equipment to allow Libya to make more uranium hexafluoride, centrifuge designs, manufacturing equipment and technology to make more centrifuges indigenously. The network also promised to provide on-going technical assistance to help Libya overcome any obstacles in assembling and operating the centrifuges in the plant.

The documents Libya has provided to U.S. investigators after agreeing to abandon its nuclear program appear to contain information Pakistan received from China in the early 1980's, including hand-written notes from lectures given in China, the report says.

The design shown in these documents is that of a Chinese warhead that was tested on a missile, has a mass of about 500 kilograms, and measures less than a meter in diameter.

Although this design would not have fit on Libyan SCUD missiles, it could have been airdropped or intended for a more advanced missile Libya may have sought. The design would have fit on Iranian and North Korean missiles.

As part of Libya's abandonment of its nuclear weapons program, it voluntarily gave the United States, Britain, and the IAEA centrifuge design documents, centrifuge components, and nuclear weapons documents. Libya sent the gas centrifuge items and nuclear weapons documents to the United States for safekeeping.

The report claims those associated with the network sought to capitalize on the elaborate, underground procurement network they had created to supply the Pakistani gas centrifuge program beginning in the 1970s.

It had many manifestations over the years and involved many people from a variety of countries. Some international suppliers and middlemen had long working relationships with Khan and remained committed to the network for two or more decades, the report claims.

There was also a familial aspect to the network. Europeans who were involved in the 1970s or 1980s had sons that became involved with them in the 1990s, the report said.

The report says that while investigators now have considerable information about gas centrifuge assistance to Iran and Libya, far less information is available about the gas centrifuge assistance to North Korea.

This deficiency has resulted from North Korea's denial that it has a gas centrifuge program, the lack of IAEA inspections in North Korea, and Pakistan's reluctance to provide information about its nuclear dealings with North Korea.

The report says that IAEA investigators are now trying to determine whether Iran or North Korea also received nuclear weapon information. The report claims that in late 1990, Khan offered centrifuge help and nuclear weapons design information to Iraq, which requested a sample of the offer but the 1991 Persian Gulf War ended that effort.

Investigators interrogating Khan also probed the possibility of the network's involvement with Syria, but Khan denied selling anything to Syria, the report said.
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Xerox Khan's Criminal Gang

Post by Leonard »


Xerox Khan's Criminal Gang is a Complete BS story :lol: :lol:


Strobe Talbott & Foggies & Culinary Chefs have Been AWARE since 1994 or earlier that Xerox and Gola Gang in Slum-land have been PEDDLING nuke stuff for YEARS ...



They simply needed the Proliferation STICK to beat the PAKIS with after 9-11 and Keep the Dumb Jihadis in TSPA in Line
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Post by Arun_S »

'Pak may leak nukes to terrorists'

IANS[ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2004 09:44:53 PM ]

WASHINGTON: Pakistan and Russia are two nations that could be potential sources of leaking nuclear weapons technology or fissile materials to terrorists, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) on nuclear terrorism.


"The fear regarding Pakistan is that some members of the armed forces might covertly give a weapon to terrorists or that, if President Musharraf were overthrown, an Islamic fundamentalist government or a state of chaos in Pakistan might enable terrorists to obtain a weapon," the report said.

"Terrorists or rogue states might acquire a nuclear weapon in several ways. The nations of greatest concern as potential sources of weapons or fissile materials are widely thought to be Russia and Pakistan," it added.

Pakistan, a close ally of the US in the war against terrorism, has often been described by South Asia experts as a "potential source" of radicalism, proliferation, terrorism and even nuclear war.

The report said that although it would be difficult for the terrorists to launch a nuclear attack on any American city, such an attack is plausible and would have catastrophic consequences - in one scenario killing over a half a million people and causing damage of over $1 trillion.

Russia, the report noted, has many tactical nuclear weapons as well as much highly enriched uranium (HEU) and weapons grade plutonium, which do not have adequate safeguards.

Many experts believe that technically-savvy terrorists could fabricate a nuclear bomb from HEU. Terrorists could also obtain HEU from the more than 130 research reactors worldwide, most of which remain unprotected.

"If terrorists acquired a nuclear weapon, they could use many means in an attempt to bring it into the United States. This nation has many thousands of miles of land and sea borders, as well as several hundred ports of entry.”

“Terrorists might smuggle a weapon across lightly guarded stretches of borders, ship it in using a cargo container, place it in a hold of a crude oil tanker, or bring it in using a truck, a boat, or a small airplane," says the report.

The US would have to take up a "layered defence" to try to block terrorists at various stages in their attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon and smuggle it into the US.

These layers include threat reduction programmes in the former USSR and Pakistan, long-term engagement with the unsecured nuclear nations, efforts to secure HEU worldwide, control of former Soviet and other borders, the Container Security Initiative and Proliferation Security Initiative and US border security.
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Post by Leonard »

Pakistan nukes present challenge, but Bush, Kerry not responding

October 11, 2004

BY CHRISTOPHER PREBLE AND SUBODH ATAL




As the presidential election moves into its final weeks, neither candidate has mentioned a vital threat to national security: the vulnerabilities of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Iraq's supposed nuclear program proved to be non-existent, but Pakistan's nuclear weapons and technology are very real. If the United States is serious about keeping the world's most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world's most dangerous terrorists, it must demand a full accounting of Pakistan's nuclear proliferation activities.

Soon after Sept. 11, amid reports that Pakistani nuclear scientists had links to Osama bin Laden, President Pervez Musharraf declared that he had complete control over the country's arsenal. However, it is now known that Pakistan's nuclear technology was being exported to North Korea as late as spring 2002, and to Libya in the fall of 2003. Thus, either Musharraf was not in control of Pakistan's nuclear program or he was using it in ways that contradict U.S. policy toward at least two dangerous countries.

Musharraf blamed Pakistan's leading nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, for the technology exports, claiming Khan was leading a rogue operation for personal gain. That explanation strains credulity, given Musharraf's tight control over the Pakistani military.

That fact -- coupled with the recognition that al-Qaida has sympathizers in Pakistan's military, intelligence, nuclear and political establishments -- should have prompted the Bush administration to demand that Pakistan unravel the full details of its proliferation network.

Instead, the Bush administration supported Musharraf's assertion last February that the proliferation network was Pakistan's ''internal matter.'' Absent U.S. pressure, Musharraf has refused to cooperate with International Atomic Energy Agency investigations into the network. The two presidential candidates have been strangely silent on this matter.

The White House may be giving Musharraf a pass, since his regime has recently taken significant steps in eliminating some of the al-Qaida cells in Pakistan. However, al-Qaida-affiliated groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed continue to operate in Pakistan. So does the much larger Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has some terrorist ties, and which may still have relations with al-Qaida. According to al-Qaida expert Peter Bergen, such groups may be responsible for hiding al-Qaida fugitives, including bin Laden himself. There have also been persistent reports that elements of Pakistan's military and intelligence services are facilitating the Taliban's quest to regain some of its power in Afghanistan. Significantly, former Pakistani intelligence chiefs such as Hamid Gul and Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed have worked against U.S. interests and have helped shape the Pakistani regime's policy directions.

Some have advised against pressuring Musharraf too much, out of concern that he might be overthrown by a new government far more hostile to U.S. interests. That is a legitimate concern. But Musharraf, under pressure from the Bush administration, has cooperated in the war on terrorism by aiding in the overthrow of the Taliban and by attacking al-Qaida cells inside Pakistan. If he can survive those steps, which are unpopular with the Pakistanis, there is little reason to believe that an international effort to understand the details of Khan's nuclear network would lead to Musharraf's downfall.

While we should be mindful of potential scenarios for Pakistan, including what might happen if Musharraf loses his grip on power, the threat of the proliferation of Pakistani nuclear technology already has materialized. We cannot know the extent of that threat without a full accounting of the Khan network's operations. It is irresponsible to defer to Musharraf and a Pakistani establishment that has, at best, suspect loyalties on a matter of the utmost importance to American national security.

A more responsible U.S. policy would honestly acknowledge the Pakistan problem and lead a multinational drive to pressure Pakistan to provide a complete, verifiable accounting of its nuclear proliferation activities. Though Western powers have had differences of opinion regarding the threats posed by various actors, no one should proceed under the illusion that al-Qaida affiliates in possession of nuclear weapons do not pose a clear and present danger.

U.S. acquiescence in Musharraf's coverup was crucial to forestalling such an international effort. Both President Bush and Sen. John Kerry should be asked about Pakistan during the final debate. It is vital that the American people appreciate the gravity of the situation and have a clear understanding of the candidates' plans to tackle the problem.

Christopher Preble is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Subodh Atal is an independent foreign policy analyst.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/othervie ... ef111.html
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Post by Manu »

Swiss Arrested for Alleged Aid to Libya

By TONY CZUCZKA
The Associated Press

BERLIN (AP) - A Swiss engineer suspected of helping Libya obtain nuclear weapons technology has been arrested in Germany, prosecutors said.

The engineer is believed to have been part of the international clandestine network of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, which helped Libya's nuclear program, German federal prosecutors said Monday.

Authorities allege that Urs Tinner, 39, oversaw machine work in Malaysia on gas centrifuge parts that were intercepted by Western intelligence in October 2003 on a ship bound for Libya, and that he trained Libyans in their use.

Treason charges were being prepared against the suspect, who was arrested Thursday, German federal prosecutors said.

Swiss and German officials did not release the suspect's name, but an investigative source confirmed to The Associated Press that the man arrested last week was Tinner.

Tinner is accused of supervising the production of more than 2,000 centrifuge parts at a Malaysian company between 2001 and 2003 at the request of Buhary Seyed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan who prosecutors said was a middleman between the network and Libya.

The parts were shipped to Dubai and loaded onto a German-registered freighter with false customs papers, headed for Libya, prosecutors said.

Intelligence officials learned of the shipment and had the freighter diverted in the Mediterranean to Taranto, Italy, where its cargo was seized.

Gas centrifuges are needed to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons.

A Malaysian police report in February had named Tinner as having overseen machine work on centrifuge parts at Malaysian-based Scomi Precision Engineering, also known as SCOPE.

Swiss authorities have been investigating whether he broke Swiss law by knowingly contributing to the production of nuclear weapons by making precision parts in Malaysia destined for Libya.

Tinner's family in Switzerland said he worked for SCOPE as a technical consultant for three years, but said he was unaware of the destination of the machinery parts he made.

His case is also pending with Swiss prosecutors, said Othmar Wyss, an official in the capital of Bern who is involved in the investigation.

In August, German authorities arrested Gerhard Wisser, a suspect in an alleged effort by the network to supply pipes to Libya for use in uranium enrichment. He was released on bail but re-arrested in South Africa in September.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, said in January that Pakistani scientists were involved in selling technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Islamabad detained several scientists, including Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb. A national hero for giving Pakistan the bomb, he admitted to the charges but was pardoned by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi renounced his banned weapons programs in December in a dramatic turnaround meant to help rebuild relations with the West. On Monday, the European Union ended 12 years of sanctions against Libya and eased an arms embargo. In April, the United States lifted most of its commercial sanctions after Gadhafi abandoned his weapons programs.

Associated Press writer Balz Bruppacher in Bern contributed to this report.

10/12/04 08:44 EDT
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Post by Manu »

Govt not involved with Khan network: report

By Anwar Iqbal

WASHINGTON, Oct 12: A prestigious American nuclear watchdog has concluded that the government of Pakistan was not involved with the network of nuclear proliferators who supplied nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

In a recent report - "Uncovering the Nuclear Black Market" - the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security observes: "The Pakistani government was not directing this network. It was essentially a criminal operation."

But the report also says the fact that a group of individuals were able to run such a network for so long without being noticed by the international community was "more disturbing and dangerous" than if it had been a secret government-controlled effort.

The report, however, warns that investigators have not yet been able to determine the exact involvement of Pakistani government officials in the network and the extent of their awareness of the activities of Dr A. Q. Khan and his associates.

The report says that although the group involved in selling nuclear technology is commonly called the Khan network, it's relatively non-hierarchical.

The key technology holders and several of its leaders were in Pakistan, including Dr Khan. But many other leaders were spread throughout the world and located in Europe, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, South Africa, and Malaysia.

The network also depended on a variety of unwitting manufacturing companies and suppliers on many continents, the report says. The network succeeded in operating in secret for several years before the United States, Britain, and the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed it through a series of actions.

During the IAEA's inspections in Iran during 2003, strong evidence emerged that Pakistani scientists and intermediaries were important clandestine suppliers of centrifuge designs and components to Iran's secret gas centrifuge programme, the report says.

According to the report, US intelligence agencies penetrated at least one part of the Khan network in early last year, which led to the dramatic seizure in October 2003 of several containers of parts bound for Libya's secret centrifuge programme on the ship BBC China.

After Libya renounced nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in December 2003, US, British, and IAEA investigations learned many details about the activities of the network.

These actions resulted in intensive pressure on Pakistan to conduct a thorough investigation. Once started, the Pakistani investigation led relatively quickly to Dr Khan's confession that he supplied gas centrifuge items to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

The report claims that the network intended to provide Libya a turnkey gas centrifuge facility. This included 10,000 centrifuges, piping to connect them together, detailed project designs for the centrifuge plant, electrical and electronic equipment, uranium feed and withdrawal equipment.

It also intended to supply the initial 20 tons of uranium hexafluoride, equipment to allow Libya to make more uranium hexafluoride, centrifuge designs, manufacturing equipment and technology to make more centrifuges indigenously.

It also promised to provide on-going technical assistance to help Libya overcome any obstacles in assembling and operating the centrifuges in the plant. The documents Libya has provided to US investigators after agreeing to abandon its nuclear programme appear to contain information Pakistan received from China in the early 1980's, including hand-written notes from lectures given in China, the report says.

The design shown in these documents is that of a Chinese warhead that was tested on a missile, has a mass of about 500 kilograms, and measures less than a meter in diameter.

As part of Libya's abandonment of its nuclear weapons programme, it voluntarily gave the United States, Britain, and the IAEA centrifuge design documents, centrifuge components, and nuclear weapons documents. Libya sent the gas centrifuge items and nuclear weapons documents to the United States for safekeeping.

The report claims those associated with the network sought to capitalize on the elaborate, underground procurement network they had created to supply the Pakistani gas centrifuge programme beginning in the 1970s.

It had many manifestations over the years and involved many people from a variety of countries. Some international suppliers and middlemen had long working relationships with Dr Khan and remained committed to the network for two or more decades, the report claims.

"There was also a familial aspect to the network. Europeans who were involved in the 1970s or 1980s had sons that became involved with them in the 1990s," the report said.

The report says that while investigators now have considerable information about gas centrifuge assistance to Iran and Libya, far less information is available about the gas centrifuge assistance to North Korea.

This deficiency has resulted from North Korea's denial that it has a gas centrifuge programme, the lack of IAEA inspections in North Korea, and Pakistan's reluctance to provide information about its nuclear dealings with North Korea.

The report says that IAEA investigators are now trying to determine whether Iran or North Korea also received nuclear weapon information. The report claims that in late 1990, Dr Khan offered centrifuge help and nuclear weapons design information to Iraq, which requested a sample of the offer but the 1991 Persian Gulf War ended that effort.

Investigators interrogating Dr Khan also probed the possibility of the network's involvement with Syria but Dr Khan denied selling anything to Syria, the report said.

http://www.dawn.com/2004/10/13/top7.htm
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Post by Rangudu »

http://www.turkishpress.com/turkishpres ... p?ID=30947
Japanese official says North Korea holds nuclear weapons: report

AFP: 10/17/2004

TOKYO, Oct 17 (AFP) - North Korea has already completed the development of plutonium-based nuclear weapons with the help of Pakistan, a senior Japanese official said in comments published Sunday.

The remarks by Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda represent the first time a Japanese official has confirmed North Korea's claim to have manufactured nuclear weapons, the Sankei Shimbun said.

"North Korea is near finalising development of nuclear weapons," Hosoda told a ruling party meeting in the western town of Shimane on Saturday, the Sankei said.

Pyongyang has not finished developing uranium-based nuclear weapons, but has completed the development of a plutonium bomb similar to the one dropped by the United States on Nagasaki at the end of World War II, Hosoda said.

"It is urgent to make (North Korea) abandon them," Hosoda said, without giving any evidence to back up his claims.

Hosoda said North Korea and Pakistan had cooperated in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. "It is disgraceful," he said.

Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan publicly confessed in February to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Pakistan has refused to allow he International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's atomic watchdog, to interview Khan to discuss the international nuclear black market he used to run.

A North Korean foreign ministry spokemsan said last month the Stalinist state would never dismantle its nuclear weapons unless the United States drops its "hostile policy" towards the country.

Six-nation talks aimed at convincing North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons programs have failed to make concrete progress so far.
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Post by Rangudu »

http://www.latimes.com/news/yahoo/la-fg ... 8723.story

Long report in today's LA Times about Iran's nuke program. As usual our neighbor gets a prominent mention.
The most pressing concern is identifying the origins of small amounts of weapons-grade uranium and low-enriched uranium found at four locations during the last 18 months.

Iran says the material came from contaminated centrifuge components bought on the black market. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani scientist who helped develop his country's nuclear weapons, has confessed to selling components to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

In its September report, the IAEA said it was plausible that some of the enriched uranium came from Pakistani parts. But some concentrations were larger than simple contamination could explain, and not all of it was necessarily from Pakistan, the agency said.

Despite the high priority, inspectors have made no progress in answering the question because Pakistan refuses to cooperate fully, several diplomats familiar with the inquiry said.

Pakistan provided some data and said pointedly that not all of the enriched uranium came from its program, but diplomats said the Pakistanis had not allowed inspectors inside their nuclear plants to take samples.

The IAEA wants its own samples so independent laboratories can determine conclusively whether the material found in Iran matches enriched uranium produced by Pakistan.

ElBaradei said in late September that Pakistan had refused to let the agency question Khan. U.S. authorities also have been unable to interview the scientist. A Western diplomat complained that the Bush administration was not pressuring Pakistan to allow the IAEA to take samples or interview Khan.

The failure to trace the contamination leaves open the possibility that Iran produced weapons-grade uranium at a secret plant or bought it from an unknown supplier, diplomats said.

"Most of the traces are from Pakistan, but if some of it is not, then it is a serious issue that raises the possibility that Iran produced it," one of the European diplomats said.
MuNNA living up to reputation...
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Post by ramana »

R, Could the AQK supermarket be a sting operation seeing that it is the axis of evil that is being nailed?- Libya, Iran and NK. Iraq ia already taken care of.
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Post by Rangudu »

Ramana,

Possibly.

Xerox Khan network was and is a peripheral part of TSP's nuke procurement and disbursement system.

There is a network no doubt, for getting things from Europe, US etc. to TSP through Dubai, African nations etc. but Xerox Khan wasn't the kingpin. It's likely an ISI, PA owned thing.

It could be that the Americans and the Brits collected enough data to bust the latter but used it as leverage to use the former to set up Iran, Libya and DPRK.
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Post by svinayak »

ramana wrote:R, Could the AQK supermarket be a sting operation seeing that it is the axis of evil that is being nailed?- Libya, Iran and NK. Iraq ia already taken care of.
One pakistani BRF member who registered earlier this year in BRF said that the AQ Khan network was a means to keep other rogue countries under observation. By offering the tech the client country would open up its organization to develop personel relationship for tracking the country's program.

Now TSP would not have thought about this plan by itself hence the only conclusion is that it is the plan of the master
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Xerox Khans N/W

Post by Leonard »

Xerox's Khans N/W is a TOOL to beat the PAKIS with for AL-Keedas Co-operation.


We KNOW that "PAKIS especially the ARMANI- suited jack-booted THUGS" will NOT eat GRASS .... :lol: :lol:

PAKIS were simply DOING ROI (return of Investment) ....

Libya, Iraq, Iran, SA were main Contributors in the "Prevention to Eat GRASS/ISLAMIC NUKE " Campaign ....


Strobe Talbott knows that RAW knows since 1986 PAKIS were trading STUFF ...!!!


Since the "PAKI HEU Crackers Failed, in 1998" & Chinese PU Crackers passed, the Khan Crap was NO-LONGER needed, plus a "Safety and Maintenance" Nightmare. Hence the ROI ... :P


We all the KNOW the famous MI-5/MI-6 PAKI Embassy Xeroxing/Bugging Episode ... :lol:

That was just to GET the PAKIs with their KHAKI briefs TWISTED around their ankles.

Embassy Bugging

a. NAILED their European Partners.

b. Provided them with HARD PHYSICAL EVIDENCE .... notice all the
subsequent EUROs that have been nailed ...

c. Got the PAKIS by their b***lls

Notice ----> After PAKI Proliferation Story, More AL Keedas have been
CAUGHT ??? :D :D
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Time-LIne for PAKI NUKE Proliferation & AL- KEEDA BIG-WI

Post by Leonard »

http://www.paifamily.com/opinion/archives/000477.html

Cheney covered up Pakistani proliferation
Here's a report by Jason Leopold that alleges Dick Cheney covered up Pakistan's nuclear proliferation so that the US could sell it fighter planes.

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 coverup designed to shield Cheney because he knew about the proliferation for more than a decade and did nothing to stop it.

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 secretary of defense under the Bush I administration: Pakistan built an atomic bomb and was selling its nuclear equipment to countries the U.S. said was sponsoring terrorism.

But Barlow's findings, as reported in a January 2002 story in Mother Jones magazine, were "politically inconvenient."

"A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the CIA's efforts to support Afghan rebels fighting a pro-Soviet government. It also would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad," Mother Jones reported.

Ironically, Pakistan, critics say, was let off the hook last month so the U.S. could use its borders to hunt for al-Qaeda leader and alleged 9-11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Cheney dismissed Barlow's report because he desperately wanted to sell Pakistan the F-16 fighter planes. Several months later, a Pentagon official was told by Cheney to downplay Pakistan's nuclear capabilities when he testified on the threat before Congress. Barlow complained to his bosses at the Pentagon and was fired.

It seems that today Cheney is advising Bush II to deal with Pakistan's nuclear proliferation much in the same way he did more than a decade ago. Give the country a pass, lie to the public about the seriousness of the matter and tell Pakistan you'll turn the other cheek if the country agrees to allow U.S. troops to use its borders to hunt for bin Laden before the November election [Online Journal, via Pakistan Facts]

It is almost certain that the US turned a blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear shenanigans right from Ronald Reagan's time - but Cold War realpolitik caused the US to follow a blinkered foreign policy. Sy Hersh covered this in the New Yorker in 1993. But thi is the first time Cheney is being personally associated with the Pakistan cover-ups.



Ramzi-bin Shibh ------------Handed Over September 2002

Scroll down onto Time-Line ...

http://billstclair.com/911timeline/main ... ammed.html


KSM Handed OVER ::


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-p ... 817825.stm

Officially ----> March, 2003

Remember----> stories that KSM had ALREADY been in CUSTODY --> 4-6 Months ..

See story snapshot ---> I don't have a sub-scription to TIMES in UK ...

http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Do ... arrest.htm
"The Qadoos family point to the photo of Khalid [Sheikh Mohammed] released by Pakistani authorities, purportedly showing him under arrest in the house [in Rawalpindi 1 March 2003], looking fat and dazed in a baggy vest as he stands against a wall of peeling paint. A thorough search of the house shows there is no such wall."
Was Khalid arrested where the FBI said he was?
Sunday Times (London), 9 March 2003

"U.S. officials and insurance companies representing victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks are locked in an unusual legal standoff, stemming from the government's refusal to admit it has the alleged mastermind of the attacks in custody. The insurance companies want the U.S. Justice Department to serve summonses and complaints on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other militants named as defendants in a lawsuit in federal court in New York City. But U.S. authorities said they have never officially acknowledged holding the men.... A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office declined Friday to discuss the case."
U.S. government blocks lawsuits by Sept. 11 victims
http://billstclair.com/911timeline/main ... pture.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international ... 84,00.html
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The original Report by Jason Leopold

Post by Leonard »

Special Report

Cheney helped cover-up Pakistani nuclear proliferation in '89 so US could sell country fighter jets

By Jason Leopold
Online Journal Assistant Editor


March 10, 2004—When 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 bated breath to see what type of punishment George W. Bush would inflict 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 WMD. For all intents and purposes, Pakistan and Musharraf fit that description.

Remember, Bush accused Iraq of harboring a cache of WMD, which was the primary reason he gave for the United States launching a preemptive strike on that country a year ago, and also claimed that Iraq may have given its WMD 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 coverup 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 secretary of defense under the Bush I administration: Pakistan built an atomic bomb and was selling its nuclear equipment to countries the U.S. said was sponsoring terrorism.

But Barlow's findings, as reported in a January 2002 story in Mother Jones magazine, were "politically inconvenient."

"A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the CIA's efforts to support Afghan rebels fighting a pro-Soviet government. It also would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad," Mother Jones reported.

Ironically, Pakistan, critics say, was let off the hook last month so the U.S. could use its borders to hunt for al-Qaeda leader and alleged 9-11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Cheney dismissed Barlow's report because he desperately wanted to sell Pakistan the F-16 fighter planes. Several months later, a Pentagon official was told by Cheney to downplay Pakistan's nuclear capabilities when he testified on the threat before Congress. Barlow complained to his bosses at the Pentagon and was fired.

"Three years later, in 1992, a high-ranking Pakistani official admitted that the country had developed the ability to assemble a nuclear weapon by 1987," Mother Jones reported. "In 1998, Islamabad detonated its first bomb."

During the time that Barlow prepared his report on Pakistan, Bryan Siebert an Energy Department analyst, was looking into Saddam Hussein's nuclear program in Iraq. Siebert concluded that "Iraq has a major effort under way to produce nuclear weapons," and said that the National Security Council should investigate his findings. But the Bush administration—which had been supporting Iraq as a counterweight to the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran—ignored the report, the magazine reported.

"This was not a failure of intelligence," Barlow told Mother Jones. "The intelligence was in the system."

Cheney went to great lengths to cover-up Pakistan's nuclear weaponry. In a New Yorker article published on March 29, 1993, 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 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.

"It was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have ever faced since I've been in the U.S. government," Kerr said in an interview with Hersh. "It may be as close as we've come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis."

Presently, Kerr is leading the CIA's review of prewar intelligence into the Iraqi threat cited by Bush.

Still, in 1989 Cheney and others in the Pentagon and the CIA continued to hide the reality of Pakistan's nuclear threat from members of Congress. Hersh explained in his lengthy New Yorker article that reasons behind the cover-up "revolves around the fact . . . that the Reagan Administration had dramatically aided Pakistan in its pursuit of the bomb."

"President Reagan and his national-security aides saw the generals who ran Pakistan as loyal allies in the American proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan: driving the Russians out of Afghanistan was considered far more important than nagging Pakistan about its building of bombs. The Reagan Administration did more than forgo nagging, however; it looked the other way throughout the mid-nineteen-eighties as Pakistan assembled its nuclear arsenal with the aid of many millions of dollars' worth of restricted, high-tech materials bought inside the United States. Such purchases have always been illegal, but Congress made breaking the law more costly in 1985, when it passed the Solarz Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act (the amendment was proposed by former Representative Stephen J. Solarz, Democrat of New York), providing for the cutoff of all military and economic aid to purportedly non-nuclear nations that illegally export or attempt to export nuclear-related materials from the United States."

"The government's ability to keep the Pakistani nuclear-arms purchases in America secret is the more remarkable because (since 1989) the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Department (under Cheney) have been struggling with an internal account of illegal Pakistani procurement activities, given by a former C.I.A. intelligence officer named Richard M. Barlow," Hersh reported. "Barlow . . . was dismayed to learn, at first hand, that State Department and agency officials were engaged in what he concluded was a pattern of lying to and misleading Congress about Pakistan's nuclear-purchasing activities."

Hersh interviewed scores of intelligence and administration officials for his March 1993 New Yorker story and many of those individuals confirmed Barlow's claims that Pakistani nuclear purchases were deliberately withheld from Congress by Cheney and other officials, for fear of provoking a cutoff in military and economic aid that would adversely affect the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan.

It seems that today Cheney is advising Bush II to deal with Pakistan's nuclear proliferation much in the same way he did more than a decade ago. Give the country a pass, lie to the public about the seriousness of the matter and tell Pakistan you'll turn the other cheek if the country agrees to allow U.S. troops to use its borders to hunt for bin Laden before the November election.

Copyright © 2004 Jason Leopold

Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. He has written more than 2,000 news stories on the issue and was the first journalist to report that energy companies were engaged in manipulative practices in California's newly deregulated electricity market. Mr. Leopold is also a regular contributor to CNBC and National Public Radio and has been the keynote speaker at more than two-dozen energy industry conferences around the country.

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Re ... opold.html
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Original Story from Mother Jones

Post by Leonard »

Original Story from Mother Jones

This is the DANDA, that started the PAKI AL-KEEDA De-Briefing

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature ... intel.html

Political Intelligence
What happens when U.S. spies get the goods-- and the government won't listen?

By Ken Silverstein & David Isenberg

January/February 2002 Issue


In 1989, an intelligence analyst working for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney issued a startling report. After reviewing classified information from field agents, he had determined that Pakistan, despite official denials, had built a nuclear bomb. "I was not out there alone," the analyst, Richard Barlow, recalls. "This was the same conclusion that had been reached by many people in the intelligence community."

But Barlow's conclusion was politically inconvenient. A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the CIA's efforts to support Afghan rebels fighting a pro-Soviet government. It also would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad.

Barlow's report was dismissed as alarmist. A few months later, a Pentagon official downplayed Pakistan's nuclear capabilities in testimony to Congress. When Barlow protested to his superiors, he was fired.

Three years later, in 1992, a high-ranking Pakistani official admitted that the country had developed the ability to assemble a nuclear weapon by 1987. In 1998, Islamabad detonated its first bomb. "This was not a failure of intelligence," says Barlow. "The intelligence was in the system."

Barlow's case points to an issue that has largely been overlooked in the post-September 11 debate about how to "fix" the nation's spy networks: Sometimes, the problem with intelligence is not a lack of information, but a failure to use it.

In the early days of the Vietnam War, a CIA analyst named Sam Adams discovered that the United States was seriously underestimating the strength of the Vietcong. The agency squelched his findings and he left in frustration. During the Reagan years, Melvin Goodman, then a top Soviet analyst at the agency, reported that the "Evil Empire" was undergoing a severe economic and military decline. Goodman was pressured to revise his findings--because, he says, then-CIA director William Casey wanted to portray a Soviet Union "that was 10 feet tall" in order to justify bigger military budgets. (Reagan's Secretary of State, George Shultz, put it more delicately in his memoirs: Reports from Casey's CIA, he wrote, were "distorted by strong views about policy.")

At about the same time Barlow issued his warnings about Pakistan, an Energy Department analyst named Bryan Siebert was investigating Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. His report concluded that "Iraq has a major effort under way to produce nuclear weapons," and recommended that the National Security Council look into the matter. But the Bush administration--which had been supporting Iraq as a counterweight to the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran--ignored the report. It was only in 1990, after Saddam invaded Kuwait, that clear-eyed intelligence reporting on Iraq came into fashion.

More recently, the Clinton administration went to great lengths to protect Boris Yeltsin, who was viewed as a critical partner in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. One former intelligence analyst says that Al Gore and his national security adviser, Leon Fuerth, would "bury their heads in the sand" if presented with any derogatory report about Yeltsin. "Taking unpopular positions means that you get bad reviews and don't get promoted," he says. "Some analysts simply stop pursuing information because they know that it can get them into trouble."

A different type of political filtering takes place when the CIA relies on "liaison relationships" with foreign intelligence agencies, whose reports are often colored by the biases of the local elite. One notorious example came in Iran in the 1970s, when despite decades of cooperation with the secret police, the U.S. government failed to grasp the extent of public opposition to the Shah. Less than four months before Khomeini's revolution toppled the Iranian monarchy in early 1979, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that the Shah was "expected to remain actively in power over the next 10 years."

In Pakistan, the CIA has worked closely with the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) ever since the two institutions teamed up in the 1980s to fund and direct the Afghan guerrillas. After the Taliban took power in 1996, the CIA relied on the Pakistanis for help in monitoring the regime. But the agency reportedly got little support or information from its ally in Islamabad--probably because isi was also one of the Taliban's primary backers. "We have consistently misled ourselves because we don't have our own sources of information," warns Burton Hersh, author of The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA. "If we had had people working the bazaars in Saudi Arabia or Egypt, we would have seen that there is a lot of unhappiness and that even upper-middle-class people were thinking about joining up with bin Laden."

Reforms of U.S. intelligence--whether they involve bigger budgets, better recruiting, or more effective spying--won't make much of a difference, Hersh and others warn, as long as officials are unwilling to hear the bad news. What do you think?
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PAKI Embassy Bugging ...

Post by Leonard »

When DID the PAKI Embassy Start being BUGGED

http://www.dawn.com/2003/11/07/top3.htm

Islamabad concerned over HC bugging


By Qudssia Akhlaque

ISLAMABAD, Nov 6: The British high commissioner Mark Lyall Grant was summoned to the foreign office and conveyed Islamabad's serious concern over the reported bugging of the Pakistan high commission's communication links in London by MI5 last year, sources told Dawn on Thursday.

No specific details of the meeting between the foreign ministry officials and the British high commissioner on Tuesday were made available despite several contacts with sources. However, these sources confirmed that discussions revolved around reports of bugging and Pakistan's right to obtain Britain's official position on the matter.

Pakistan's high commission in London and the foreign ministry here "have been in touch" with the British foreign office and the British high commission on this matter, a source said.

The reports of bugging by the premier British intelligence outfit appeared in the latest edition of The Sunday Times. It was reported that British spy agency infiltrated the embassy, stole codes and schemed to plant listening devices besides stealing documents.

Interestingly, the report appeared in the paper when Pakistan's foreign minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri was in London for official consultations with what are regarded here as the "trusted" close allies. Although officials are avoiding any public pronouncements on this controversial issue, privately they concede that they were "absolutely shocked" at this disclosure.

Apparently Pakistan's high commissioner in London Maleeha Lodhi immediately reported the matter to the foreign ministry here. When Dawn contacted foreign office spokesman Masood Khan for comments, he said: "We have seen the report. We are conducting an internal evaluation as to the veracity of the contents and once we have passed through this phase we will take steps."

The spokesman was not willing to say anything beyond this. "We are supposed to be close allies, so naturally we were shocked to learn about it," remarked a senior official. However, he hastened to add: "We should not jump to any hasty conclusions." There are many unanswered questions as to whether it was a failed attempt or an attempt that succeeded, officials said.

PRIVATE FIRM: According to reports published by London-based Sunday Times, the MI5 carried out the operation in complicity with a private construction firm which was given the contract last year to renovate the high commission buildings.

During the work, the MI5 operators installed bugging devices and also removed key classified files from the mission. "We are trying to determine the authenticity of these reports and have sought British government's comment," an official said.

"If what has been stated is proved, the government of Pakistan may take legal action against the firm in court of law," he said. British embassy spokesman Tim Handley would not deny or confirm that the high commissioner was called to the foreign office in connection with the report. He added the high commissioner often visits the ministry of foreign affairs "routinely" for business.
So the Embassy BUGGING started some-time in 2002 ....

[Note Article was Published ---> 2003/11/07/ ] .... :P

First Time

AL KEEDAs started Coming Out of TERMITE state was September'2002

KSM ---> 2002/2003 ...


Rest is History ....

:twisted:
Leonard
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A Fairly More Accurate KSM Arrest DATE ????

Post by Leonard »

And NOW from the PAKI LAND ....KSM Arrest DATE .....

Officially Announced === March, 1st, 2003


From KHALED Ahmed's SECOND OPINION ....

Quoted by Khabrain (August 17, 2004) then interior minister Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat stated that in the past four weeks around 51 Pakistani and 12 foreign terrorists had been arrested in Pakistan. He revealed that on October 4, 2002 after one Malooka Khatoon alias Elis was arrested she confessed to having contacts with the Al Qaeda agent Saleh Muhammad. The lady owned Navidul Islam Trust while her husband was a retired DSP. He added that both these were active members of Jamaat-e-Islami and the Trust was headed by a Jamaat-e-Islami member, Shazia Siddiq. On December 18, the Khwaja Brothers were arrested and it was discovered that they were harbouring a number of Arab women. The Khwaja Brothers were members of Jamaat-e-Islami. On January 4, 2003, an Australian member of Al Qaeda named Terry was arrested from the house of former national hockey player, Shahid Ali Khan in Karachi whose wife was a member of Jamaat-e-Islami in the city. On January 28, 2003 Khalid Shaikh Muhammad of Al Qaeda was arrested from the house of a Jamaat-e-Islami member in Rawalpindi.

The interior minister is gone and no one in Pakistan has paid heed to what he said about the Jamaat harbouring Al Qaeda, but he has damaged the Jamaat a great deal in the West. The upshot of it all may be that the clergy in general and that of the Jamaat in particular may find it difficult to go to Europe. Some of the possible difficulties are reflected in the news items listed above. Why can’t our clerics be careful in what they say?

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.as ... 2004_pg3_5
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Post by jrjrao »

Big big article today in washingtonpost.com :

Unprecedented Peril Forces Tough Calls
President Faces a Multi-Front Battle Against Threats Known, Unknown

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dy ... ge=printer
In the tumultuous first year after Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush confronted a deluge of classified threat reports about the spread of nuclear weapons technology to unfriendly hands.
...
(with) ... two senior figures from Pakistan's nuclear establishment, who met with Osama bin Laden a month before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, were failing polygraph tests about the purpose of their trip.

At the same time, further from public view, Bush worked to penetrate and close the first private marketplace of the atomic age: Abdul Qadeer Khan's Pakistan-based distribution network. Bush's partnership with British Prime Minister Tony Blair followed a trail of underground transactions to Libya and persuaded that country to abandon an ongoing nuclear weapons program, a signal success. After resisting British advice to intervene sooner, however, Bush discovered that the decision to "wait and watch" allowed the nuclear black market to fill significant purchase orders from North Korea. The investigation has since been stymied in Pakistan.

This examination of the record by The Washington Post explores the priorities Bush set, the beliefs he formed, the choices he made and the ones he left unmade when faced with deadlock among his advisers. It draws on interviews with U.S. participants in leading events and their counterparts from U.N. agencies and governments in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Some of those interviewed shared portions of their notes and confidential records.

Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton was the only Bush administration official who agreed to speak on the record for this article. The administration made available two other political appointees for interviews on the condition that they not be identified. Officials who spoke without permission, many of them senior career analysts and policymakers, said their standing with the White House would be at risk if they were quoted by name.

A National Intelligence Estimate on nontraditional threats, completed long after Bush had committed himself to war in Iraq, reprised earlier judgments. Black-market sales from "the former Soviet Union, Pakistan -- those were the highest risks," said Richard A. Falkenrath, a former White House official who co-wrote Bush's classified May 2002 strategy "Combating Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction."

Bush took a different view. :roll: :roll: In the State of the Union address of Jan. 29, 2002, the president declared he would keep "the world's most destructive weapons" from al Qaeda and its allies by keeping those weapons from evil governments. Much later -- after applying that doctrine in Iraq -- he told a campaign audience in Pennsylvania, "We had to take a hard look at every place where terrorists might get those weapons and one regime stood out: the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein."

"It was our job to identify the threat as we saw it," said Greg Thielmann, who was director of strategic proliferation and military affairs at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research until 2003. The White House, he said, "has a right to disagree."

On March 27, 2001, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf threw a banquet for Abdul Qadeer Khan.

A German-trained metallurgist, Khan had led Pakistan's nuclear weapons program from its infancy. Musharraf's celebration marked Khan's unexpected retirement.

By then, Musharraf had good reason to know Khan was leading a secret life. The U.S. government, very carefully, had told him so.

A combined British-American intelligence inquiry into Khan, among the most closely held secrets of the Bush administration's first year, was progressively surpassing its worst fears. What London and Washington had struck upon -- beginning in Clinton's final year -- was a danger not seen before: a global private marketplace in the makings of a nuclear bomb.

By the time Bush arrived in office, according to a recent British government report, the CIA and Britain's Secret Intelligence Service knew that "Khan was at the center of an international proliferation network" supplying uranium equipment "to at least one customer in the Middle East, thought to be Libya." Khan not only dealt in designs but also had begun mass production of components.

The U.S. government had a dilemma. The picture was alarming, incomplete and dependent on sensitive intelligence sources. And the man at the center of suspicion had a stature in Pakistan that easily exceeded Musharraf's.

The Bush administration sent envoys to Islamabad with deliberately opaque words of warning. Something was amiss at Khan Research Laboratories, they said, and its secrets were being marketed abroad. One official said Assistant Secretary of State Robert Einhorn told the three-star general overseeing Pakistan's strategic nuclear force: "Either you are not on top of this or you are complicit. Either one is disturbing."

U.S. officials did not mention Khan by name. They feared a confrontation that could break Musharraf's grip on power and, in the worst-case scenario, Thielmann said, bring about a "fundamentalist government in Pakistan that had nuclear weapons."

According to a senior Pakistani adviser, Khan's retirement banquet was Musharraf's attempt to satisfy Washington. "In order not to raise suspicions" at home, the official said, Musharraf retired another top official the same night.

The Bush administration, one U.S. policymaker said, welcomed Musharraf's decision to close the spigot on his nuclear technology. "At least," the policymaker said, "that's what we hoped it was."

It did not turn out that way. Khan changed titles but kept access to his labs. His global sales flourished.

By the second half of 2001, "the British government was certainly getting nervous that A.Q. Khan was continuing to supply stuff that might not be detected before we intervened to close it down," said a high-ranking British official with access to contemporary intelligence reports.

Most alarming was this: The CIA and British intelligence saw that Khan had more than one customer, but they could identify only Libya.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush demanded a change in Pakistan's relationship with the Taliban and al Qaeda. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage was preparing a list of "non-negotiable" demands for Pakistan's military intelligence chief, Mahmud Ahmed. The administration briefly debated: Should Khan be on the list?


Feroz Hassan Khan, who was then a director in the army's strategic plans division, said in an interview that "there would have been a positive response" if Armitage had used that moment to demand action against the nuclear black market. But Bush's national security team believed the United States could push Musharraf no harder.

Six weeks later, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet brought Bush news that a participant in the meeting described as sending the president "through the roof": Two Pakistani nuclear scientists, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudhary Abdul Majid, had met with bin Laden in Afghanistan that summer. Tenet did not know whether they had a connection to Abdul Qadeer Khan -- much later, officials said, it grew clear they did not -- but he rushed to Islamabad to demand U.S. access to their questioning.

Still, Tenet held his silence on Khan. Conversations with U.S. officials were so elliptical at the time, a high-ranking Pakistani official said, that "we wondered if maybe the real American motive here was to just learn more about our [nuclear] capabilities." He added, "We weren't going to give them any kind of information on that."

March 2002 brought the first intelligence assessments that Khan had moved his base outside Pakistan, that he controlled the business through associates in Dubai and had "established his own production facilities, in Malaysia," according to a British government accounting. The same British report, by the Butler Committee, said the Joint Intelligence Committee reported new concerns in July 2002 that Khan might be selling the means "to build nuclear warheads."

Blair's government argued with increasing vigor, officials of both countries said, that it was time to confront Pakistan about Khan and stop the operation of his network.

"We disagreed," said a senior U.S. policymaker, who would not permit quotation by name on the dispute between allies. Moving immediately, he said, would have closed opportunities for covert surveillance.


Khan continued moving freely abroad, evading nominal restrictions. On a trip to Beijing, one senior Pakistani diplomat said, Chinese authorities "took me aside, said they knew it would be embarrassing, but A.Q. Khan was in China and bribing people, and they wanted him out." The diplomat said Pakistan confiscated a false passport, but Khan kept traveling.

"They made no attempt to get a handle on his activities abroad," said John Wolf, who was Bush's assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation until June.

Bolton said Bush's advisers "were continually engaged in a trade-off" between stopping the sales of nuclear technology and learning enough about them "so that when we did move we brought down what we could."

"It was a 51-49 call every day we were going through this," he said.
:roll:
...
...
The president's advisers were at a stalemate on what to do about Iran. One senior participant in the interagency debate, whose shorthand description matched that of many others, said the Defense Department and Vice President Cheney's office "tended toward a 'regime change' view of Iran," while State said "regime change is nice if you can get it at an acceptable price, but you can't."

That argument had begun nine months earlier, when deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley asked the CIA to assess, among other things, the stability of the Iranian government. The agency's report said Iran was evolving toward democracy and that U.S. attempts to undermine the mullahs would cement them in power. Participants in the debate said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz dismissed the report as "one man's opinion."
...
...
Bush administration hard-liners, who oppose any such incentives for Iran or North Korea, deny that negotiation (with Libya) was involved.

"It's 'engagement' like we engaged the Japanese on the deck of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945," said one influential advocate of that view, who declined to be quoted by name. "The only engagement with Libya was the terms of its surrender."

Iran was Khan's first customer, North Korea his second and Libya his undoing. What troubles U.S. and British officials today is the evidence of a fourth customer yet unknown.


One key clue is a ship that never arrived. Not long before Libya's disarmament, scientists in Tripoli placed an order for additional centrifuge parts. Because Khan's network operated through intermediaries, the Libyans do not know who was going to make the components, or where. Investigators in Washington, London and Vienna said they have been unable to learn.

A more disturbing unknown is the source of Libya's small cache of highly enriched uranium.

Most troubling are orders, invoices and manifests found in Khan's overseas records describing shipments that cannot be accounted for by known customers. U.S. and IAEA investigators have several suspects for a "fourth customer" -- officials named Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in approximate order of interest -- but no substantial evidence has surfaced.

The Khan network, in many ways, "is al Qaeda all over again," said one U.S. investigator.[size] Bush said in a Sept. 30 debate with Kerry that "the A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice." The investigator asked, "Does it matter if we get the leadership? Are the cells, manufacturers and middlemen independent? Do we really know who they are? Hard to believe this is the only one out there."

Since his televised confession on Feb. 4 -- and immediate pardon -- Khan has been held in conditions that Pakistani officials liken to "house arrest." Pakistani intelligence agents accept written questions from U.S. or U.N. investigators. They send replies at their discretion. Information obtained elsewhere, Wolf said, makes clear that Khan "is being less than fully candid."

"Khan knows too much about Pakistan's program" for Musharraf to permit unrestricted questioning, said Feroz Khan, a former nuclear adviser to the Pakistani president. "Also, he is a man of tremendous organizing ability and you never know, his services may be required again some day."

The night of Abdul Qadeer Khan's confession, Musharraf summoned editors from all over Pakistan to Islamabad. Speaking in Urdu for a domestic audience, he complained bitterly that "Muslim brothers" in Libya "didn't even ask us before giving us away," according to a translation of the transcript made for The Post.
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Post by ramana »

There is a goldmine of info in the above article.

- Mushy knew by March 21, 2001 that AQK was under watch.
- Bashiruddin and co started mtg OBL in summer of that year and then we had 9/11.
- Looks like AQK was proliferating like mad as if he was running out of time.
- Somewhere in the TSP threads I recall readng that Bashiruddin was Mand's boss someone right under Munir Khan who set up the PAEC and that AQK was under Munir Khan till he got independent charge of ERL later named KRL.
- The fact that AQK was working in a frenzy shows that TSP officials were in on the scheme to spread the goods in the ummah.

NK transfers were payback for the missile and not anything to do with ummahdom.

I think AQK was giving a package deal - the centrifuge technology, the supplier list to get the conventional side going and the bomb design that was tested in Chagai. The reason is implosion design has to be tested once to verify it works. This is the crux of the matter.

I would like members to think about the issues from AQK point fo view. We are getting the US narrative but not his. But that can be inferred from the US narrative and the other TSP actions.

Also which is the fourth country?

The Libya cache could be a verification sample from TSP to make sure that the stuff is enriched to that level.
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Post by daulat »

Ramana

i maintain that mushy and xerox-bhai were running a double scam. they were selling the ummah-bomb concept to win ummah-brownie points, but also selling dubious kit to make money on the side. where required, they sold bomb designs (libya) to impress. they concluded that the customers would never really get to the point where they could actually make something worthwhile, so it wouldn't really matter. (i.e. wrath of unkil)

i conclude from this that china has more active controls on the bombs, i.e. paks can't give em away - and perhaps cannot use them without permission (some sort of PAL) - afterall, would the otherwise rational beijing-wallas really truly give an unstable psychotic regime a truly devastating capability? sure if it can be used to threaten India - but not truly go over the edge - unless they had to... i.e. if a hot war with India were about to happen, they'd pass the codes on, otherwise, threaten enough till unkil intervenes, --> instability, everyone happy.

what's to say that unkil hadn't put pals in place? or indeed hasn't done so now? if they can fit PISCES at every port of entry, they can fit PALs on warheads.

so from the mushy/xeroxbhai point - repeat the words of outkast - "might as well have fun, cos the day is done and your goose is cooked!"
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Post by Abhijit »

The aricle seems to imply (subtly) that the Khan circus was a solo show and paki army was unaware of it. There is no indictment of any 'official' channel of paki govt.
Is this a 'show' article to reinforce the notion that khan acted alone?
Secondly. the people in the know in US know that Pakistan is the most likely source of any JDAM attack anywhere, when and if it occurs. I can't imagine Mushy or his successor getting to use an alibi if there is a JDAM attack on continental US.
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Post by NRao »

The night of Abdul Qadeer Khan's confession, Musharraf summoned editors from all over Pakistan to Islamabad. Speaking in Urdu for a domestic audience, he complained bitterly that "Muslim brothers" in Libya "didn't even ask us before giving us away," according to a translation of the transcript made for The Post.
Would love to get my hands on all of Mushs such talks.
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Post by Rye »

Maybe Russian "loose nukes" are mentioned so often by Kerry and Bush, is to deflect attention away from the Xerox/paki loose nukes. Pointing the finger towards Russia seems like plan B if the US state dept. cannot blame a JDAM attack on pakistan for whatever reason.
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Post by Abhijit »

Rye, let me think aloud a scenario. If there is a JDAM attack on US, do you think US will attack Russia even if the nuke was of Russian origin? Russia has even more alibi and it has been granted by unkil himself. Russian Govt is not going to be involved in this. And even US can't attack Russia out of the blue, Russia is not Eyerack. But the US aam junta will bay for blood the next day - who is US going to hit ? KSA? Iran?
To me it seems it's got to be the source of all the evil - pakiland.
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Post by pran »

Abhijit_ST wrote:The aricle seems to imply (subtly) that the Khan circus was a solo show and paki army was unaware of it. There is no indictment of any 'official' channel of paki govt.
Is this a 'show' article to reinforce the notion that khan acted alone?
Secondly. the people in the know in US know that Pakistan is the most likely source of any JDAM attack anywhere, when and if it occurs. I can't imagine Mushy or his successor getting to use an alibi if there is a JDAM attack on continental US.
Pakis have been set up nicely by China to take blame if any JDAM goes anywhere. In their mad rush to become a Islamic nuclear state and empowering umaah with their proliferation they have traded their unidimensional raison d'etre to a multidimensional one. This has invited many suspecting eyes looking for trouble in their neighborhood.
The observation is that the Chinese have complete control over their delivery and activation mechanisms. No wonder the displeasure shown over ballistically cruise missiles and exchange of no-dong from kim who wanted the enrichment technology.
Now what stops Pakis from showing that they are nuke nude to the world audience and come clean and lay it thick on China ?
So when China eventually decide to dump Pakis,it is a sure sign of JDAM going off somewhere.
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Post by Rye »

If there is a JDAM attack on US, do you think US will attack Russia even if the nuke was of Russian origin? Russia has even more alibi and it has been granted by unkil himself.
exactly. So fingers can be pointed at "loose russian nukes" instead of pakistan. I am not making any statements on US's actions with respect to russia after that. The fact that "loose russian nukes" gives an alibi to the Russian govt. means that there will be no need to talk of taking on russia because "it was not their fault".

Russian Govt is not going to be involved in this. And even US can't attack Russia out of the blue, Russia is not Eyerack. But the US aam junta will bay for blood the next day - who is US going to hit ? KSA? Iran?
Right, and at that time, when testosterone levels in the US populace is high, some scapegoat will be determined, if Pakistan and KSA are still required for other agendas -- just like Iraq was invaded for 9/11 and the pakis got a "get out of jail free" card.


We will know an answer to that once we see the direction of fingerpointing in the US. The US SD has an agenda in mind for KSA and Pakistan and the islamist jihadis in general that seems to be beyond the so-called war on terror.


If one were a ruthless superpower afraid of future competitors, one would try to keep these psychopaths around to weaken future competitors.
To me it seems it's got to be the source of all the evil - pakiland.
Sure, but public finger pointing need not be in the same direction as the real culprit for reasons of expediency, and Iraq is a case in point.
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Post by ramana »

From UPI,
Commentary: Tough nuclear neighborhood

By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE

WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 (UPI) -- From the days of Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great who ruled the Persian Empire some 500 years before Christ through the Shah en Shah (king of kings) who lost his throne to revolutionary clerics in 1979, the talons of military supremacy ruled strategic thinking. The shah, not the ayatollahs, decided Iran would be a nuclear power.

Before the cancer-stricken emperor was forced into exile, he had launched a plan to build 20 nuclear reactors, including two in Bushehr, which became a Russian project. The shah's regime also ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970 - and promptly began R&D efforts on fissile materials for nuclear weapons.


Today, as the ayatollahs survey the neighborhood, Iran is surrounded by nuclear powers - Russia to the north, Israel to the West, Pakistan and India to the east. That's four of the world's eight nuclear powers. No amount of economic sticks and carrots will deflect the Iranian theocracy from a course originally set by the late shah. The ayatollahs will lie and cheat, but they won't roll over and play dead like Libya's Col. Muammar Gadhafi, who surrendered is embryonic nuclear weapons program.

Russia made clear in 2002 it will finish construction of the $840 million nuclear reactor in Bushehr and has contracted to build five more Iranian reactors over the next 10 years for $10 billion. Jobless former Soviet nuclear engineers are known to have landed lucrative contracts in Iran. Could this know-how and expertise have rubbed off on Iranian counterparts in the form of weapons technology?

With 140,000 U.S. soldiers next door in Iraq, and U.S. carrier task forces south and west in the Arabian Sea and the Mediterranean, and the Israeli Air Force rehearsing preemptive strikes against Iran's underground nuclear facilities, the incentives, as the ayatollahs see them, are to speed things up. Tehran is also buying time by agreeing to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency. A new IAEA report on Iran won't be ready till mid-February 2005.

"We have a lot of work to do before we can conclude that Iran's program is exclusively for peaceful purposes," as the clerics claim, said IAEA Director-General Mohamed el-Baradei. Meanwhile, uranium enrichment and a parallel plutonium effort continue in 11 different underground facilities. These are designed to reduce the risk of detection or attack.

Pakistani denials notwithstanding, nuclear black marketeer Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan (AQK), the father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and arguably his country's most popular figure, built his fortune by assisting North Korea and Iran - two of the evildoers on President Bush's axis of evil -- in their nuclear quest. AQK supplied the centrifuges now used to process uranium into fuel for reactors or fissile material for bombs.

Iran received AQK's centrifuge designs as early as 1987. That was when Gen. Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan's late dictator, greenlighted secret nuclear cooperation with Iran. Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence knew Iran was willing to cough up several billion dollars -- much of it in free oil - for Dr. Strangelove Khan's nuclear secrets. AQK and some of his nuclear scientists made several trips to Iran in the late 1990s.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has assured the Bush administration he knew nothing of Dr. Khan's extracurricular activities. If that were true, Musharraf was conceding by the same token he didn't know what the ISI was up to. Dr. Khan and ISI were - and still are - connatural.

Some ranking European diplomats based in Tehran have told their home governments Iran will pursue its nuclear ambitions as long as Israel remains the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Israel, for its part, long ago concluded its very survival depends on its nuclear monopoly in the region. Hence, its decision to destroy Iraq's nuclear reactor before it went critical in 1981.

With 10 percent of the world's oil reserves and oil at $50 plus per barrel, Iran may not be too impressed by the threat of U.S. and European sanctions under counter-proliferation strategies. But these may persuade Iran to opt out of NPT and, like North Korea, go nuclear before the United States can figure out how to neutralize its efforts.

North Korea's latest act of nuclear defiance came over the weekend with a warning it would double its nuclear deterrent force if the United States persists in challenging its nuclear-weapons program.

Iraq has drained what little credibility the U.S. has left in the Middle East. For the U.S. to demand an end to Iran's nuclear programs while developing a new class of bunker-busting tactical nukes and to acquiesce in Israel's nuclear arsenal by pretending it doesn't exist, doesn't build back trust.

Unencumbered by image problems in the Middle East, Israel may take it upon itself to find a military solution to Iran's budding nuclear threat. That may well be the message the Bush administration intended when it was leaked that the United States had supplied Israel with 500 deep-penetration precision-guided bombs. They are effective through concrete walls and ceilings to a depth of 100 meters.

There is little doubt Israel -- using fighter-bombers, air-to-air refueling over Iraq, and submarine-launched cruise missiles from the Gulf -- can retard Iran's nuclear plans several years. But there is also little doubt such an Israeli strike would inflame the region. Some Arab intelligence sources believe Iran would retaliate by "activating" a new Iran-Iraq front. That, in turn, would spell quagmire for U.S. forces in Iraq.
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Post by Vivek_A »

Remember the conspiracy theory about Iran luring the US into attacking Iraq by feeding them false information through Chalabi?

Doesn't sound implausible now...The 140K US forces are now essentially hostages in that region.
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