Now, a 'Khan-for-Iran' deal

[seemslikeadream]

WASHINGTON: Pakistan and United States have struck a "Khan-for-Iran" deal. According to well-known investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Washington has agreed to wink at Pakistan's nuclear transgressions and spare its nuclear proliferator A Q Khan in return for Islamabad's cooperation in neutralizing Iran's nuclear program.


Pakistan has readily obliged U.S and betrayed Iran, and Hersh cites U.S intelligence sources as saying an American commando task force in South Asia is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had previously helped Iran's nuclear quest. Pakistan, expectedly, has denied this.

The task force, aided by information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations, Hersh reports in New Yorker magazine, where he has written several stories over the past year that have embarrassed the Bush administration, including the first accounts of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal. He says U.S commandos or their locally recruited agents are planting remote detection devices -- known as sniffers - in Iran to detect radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear programs in the atmosphere.

"It's a deal -- trade-off," Hersh quoted a former high-level intelligence official as explaining. "'Tell us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.' It's the neoconservatives' version of short-term gain at long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation."
more
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/993242.cms

[aden_nak]

1. KHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am sorry, I could not resist.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

10. It had to be done. n/t

[lazarus]

13. even better

http://www.khaaan.com/

[AG78]

2. Yeah, that'll fly

I guess Pakistan doesn't know how we work. We'll be in a war with Pakistan in 10 or 15 years because of this deal.

"Remember when Pakistan was selling nuclear technology around the world, and then aided the man who sold those weapons? Yeah, they're very dangerous", said Stephan Cambone, Sec of Def at the Pentagon.

[Fovea]

3. Now let me get this straight.

If Pakistan agrees to lie to the US about the Iranian nuke program
so that we can go to war with Iran, the US agrees to forgive
the fact that Pakistan has supported the unthinkable: an Islamist Nuclear Weapons Program.

So when a nuke is popped in the Astrodome, we will all have to shut up, and take one for Iranian 'democracy,' right?

Let's all take the oil wars to the next level!
Is that the deal?

Really, that is exactly what I see happening. The old terror has worn off, Bush had to cheat to win, so it is time, as Emeril says, to kick up a notch... Bam!

And I suspect the deal is actually for NY or SF to take the hit.

[bluestateguy]

4. This all assumes that Mushy stays in power

what if he's overthrown by Islamic fundamentalists? Then they have a nuclear arsenal, and we end up at war with Pakistan. We don't have the troops for that, so a draft would be required. Would we have to send the conscripts to Iraq, while the more professional troops in Iraq were deployed to Pakistan? Uggh! I shudder at the thought.

[seemslikeadream]

5. Cheney Covered-Up Pakistani Nuclear Proliferation

Monday, 8 March 2004, 4:05 pm
Column: Jason Leopold

VP Cheney Helped Cover-Up Pakistani Nuclear Proliferation In '89 So US Could Sell Country Fighter Jets

By Jason Leopold

Cheney went to great lengths to cover-up Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry. In a New Yorker article published on March 29, 1993, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?040119fr_arch ... investigative reporter Seymour Hersh quoted Barlow as saying that some high-ranking members inside the CIA and the Pentagon lied to Congress about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal so as not to sacrifice the sale of the F-16 fighter planes to Islamabad, which was secretly equipped to deliver nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities and the had become so grave by the spring of 1990 that then CIA deputy director Richard Kerr said the Pakistani nuclear threat was worse than the Cuban Missile crisis in the 1

“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 l989 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.”

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0403/S00102.htm


CIA'S WHISTLE-BLOWER & SECURITY "DOUBLE-BIND"

To avoid oversight criticism for "lax security", the CIA asked the Justice Department, on 19 July, to investigate the possible disclosure of classified information in June when former Agency officials helped the media do a program on secret covert operations against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. During the same period, Congressional oversight resulted in the Agency and Pentagon being criticized for the 1993 treatment of a whistle-blower analyst, Richard M. Barlow, 42, who thought Congress should be warned that it been given misleading testimony concerning the possible Pakistani possession of nuclear weapons.

http://www.thepalmerpress.com/Art04.html


On the Nuclear Edge
by Seymour M. Hersh
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?040119fr_archive02

[blm]

6. Letting Khan go guarantees cover for Poppy Bush's role in BCCI.

How convenient for the BFEE. Does anyone believe that they ever intended to pursue Khan? HAHAHAHAH....he's ONE of them. He's been a crony of Poppy Bush's for over 30 years.

John Kerry always maintained there were unanswered BCCI questions remaining in regard to Pakistan's role.

[Career Prole]

7. Hey neo-cons, what of Khan's OTHER customer...North Korea?

While the IAEA has no direct evidence of an "enriched uranium" program, preliminary results from an IAEA investigation of the network of Abdul Khan, suggests the Pakistani scientist was a major supplier of aid and materials to North Korea, Libya, and Iran. While Libya seemed incapable of taking its program through the steps required to develop a uranium program, North Korea "needed little prompting," the diplomat says.

"You give someone the plans to assemble a complicated piece of furniture and they get home and make it halfway through. Then they have to call for help," the diplomat says. "That was Khan's role. The Libyans constantly had trouble. We know Khan gave the North Koreans enough to get a good start, and we know they and the Iranians didn't need to call as often. The Libyans finally couldn't run this stuff, but the DPRK has the people, trained in Moscow."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1221/p01s04-woap.html

I guess the fact that Khan actively assisted North Korea's program will remain in the memory hole for the neocons' convenience.

[seemslikeadream]

9. BCCI and Pakistani Nuclear Hero

Pakistan's Nuclear Hero Defended
by Jefferson Morley

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

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

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

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

[Career Prole]

11. Exactamente, SLAD...we are in the middle of

the most perilous stretch of humankind's short lifespan on the planet, IMO.

[0007]

8. If worms turn into snakes and mice into rats, then the U.S. turned

Musharraf's Pakistan into a Frankenstein.

For much of the 1980s, the Reagan administration is said to have turned a blind eye to Pakistan's pursuit of nuclear weapons in return for cooperation in the war in Afghanistan, at the end of which the world inherited both terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

[seemslikeadream]

12. The secret empire of Dr Khan

Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation poses a tricky challenge

JASJIT SINGH

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

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

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

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

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

:hi:

[suegeo]

14. Something else about this report bugged me.

Hersh reported that our people were going to pose as business men.

In the past, our "intelligence" leaders have allowed spies to pose as journalists and clergy. The people being spied on eventually figured this out, and it was death to these spies, as well as legimate reporters and legimate priests.

Their policy thereby put a stop to legitmate reporting, and to the spread of their Christian religion. (that the neo-cons want promoted in order to control the masses)

The same will eventually happen to businessmen. Some innocent businessmen will get killed, and it will put a chill on trade. I thought the neo-con asses wanted the spread of predatory capitalism.

Bad ideas. What are they thinking?

[sattahipdeep]

15. Pat Robertson satan's monkey n/t