Your tax dollars at work, courtesy of the BFEE working through BCCI:
Syrian link to Pakistan nuke sales investigated
By Douglas Frantz
Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times
Published June 25, 2004
International investigators are examining whether Syria acquired nuclear technology and expertise through the black market network operated by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, according to a U.S. official and Western diplomats.
Intelligence reports indicate that Khan and some associates visited Syria in the late 1990s and later held clandestine meetings with Syrian nuclear officials in Iran, the diplomats said.
Khan, who helped Pakistan develop nuclear weaponry, has acknowledged selling advanced centrifuge technology and expertise to Iran, Libya and North Korea over nearly two decades. The extent of his illicit operations remains unknown, but diplomats said that if Syria did have centrifuges, the devices would undoubtedly have come from Khan's network.
Inspectors from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency are investigating whether sales were made to other countries as they try to build an accurate picture of what officials consider the most serious nuclear proliferation network in history.
CONTINUED...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0406250354jun25,1,939128.... Dr. BB: 'On the Nuclear Edge'
I think this is the article:
On the Nuclear Edge
by Seymour M. Hersh
Issue of 1993-03-29
Posted 2004-01-12
In the past few weeks, news reports have revealed troubling information about the possible export of Pakistani nuclear technology to countries such as Iran and Libya, and about the role played in the transfers by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is known as the father of the Pakistani bomb. There have long been questions about Dr. Khan, who has, whenever possible, avoided the public eye. In this piece from 1993, Seymour M. Hersh takes a prescient look at Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation, and at Dr. Khan.
On May 30, 1990, President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union arrived in Washington for his second summit meeting with President George Bush. The Cold War was over, and the publicly announced agenda reflected that fact: the two world leaders would concentrate their talks on the future of unified Germany and on renewed negotiations to reduce long-range nuclear weapons. Most Americans were increasingly upbeat about the prospects for world peace. A Times/CBS public-opinion poll of more than eleven hundred Americans taken a week before the summit showed that fewer than one in five believed nuclear war to be likely by the year 2000—far fewer than those interviewed in earlier polls.
There was a fearful irony in the poll, because in the days before Gorbachev’s visit the Bush Administration became convinced that the world was on the edge of a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India, as both nations continued their tug-of-war over control of the state of Kashmir, on India’s northern border, whose status has been in dispute since the collapse of the British Empire in India, in 1947. During months of increasing tension, India had massed two hundred thousand troops, including paramilitary forces, in Kashmir, and had deployed five brigades of its most sophisticated attack unit, the Indian Army Strike Corps, fifty miles from the Pakistani border in the south. Pakistan, against which the much larger India had fought—and won—three wars since 1947, openly deployed its main armored tank units along the Indian border and, in secret, placed its nuclear-weapons arsenal on alert. There would be no repeat of the disastrous two-week war of December, 1971, when Pakistan, outgunned and outgeneraled, was dismembered by an Indian blitzkrieg and lost what is now Bangladesh.
The American intelligence community, also operating in secret, had concluded by late May that Pakistan had put together at least six and perhaps as many as ten nuclear weapons, and a number of senior analysts were convinced that some of those warheads had been deployed on Pakistan’s American-made F-16 fighter planes. The analysts also suspected that Benazir Bhutto, the populist Prime Minister of Pakistan, had been cut out of—or had chosen to remove herself from—the nuclear planning. Her absence meant that the nation’s avowedly pro-nuclear President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and the Pakistani military, headed by Army General Mirza Aslam Beg, had their hands, unfettered, on the button. There was little doubt that India, with its far more extensive nuclear arsenal, stood ready to retaliate in kind.
CONTINUED...
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?040119fr_archive02 "The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were." — John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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Octafish (1000+ posts) Sat Jun-26-04 10:55 PM
Response to Reply #13
16. The F-16s Were Secretly Fitted to Deliver NUKES!
Woe to anyone who made that business public. Barlow reported that CIA poobahs and Pentagon brass lied to Congress about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. What's worse than doing anything to make a buck, the fighter-bombers were modified in secret to equip nuclear bombs. Thank you, Dick Cheney.
Here's from Hersh's article (Thanks, Dr. BB and seemslikeadream!):
... Barlow went about his business without incident, so he thought, until July of 1989. Then he learned that the United States government was once again distorting intelligence on Pakistan’s nuclear capability. He had prepared a comprehensive analysis on Pakistan’s nuclear capability for Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney and other senior officials. The paper cited what Barlow and many others in the intelligence community understood to be persuasive data showing that the F-16 aircraft previously delivered to Pakistan had been modified to deliver nuclear weapons. Barlow’s paper was complemented by a separate Defense Intelligence Agency study, which reached the same conclusion....
FromTheWilderness
U.S. intelligence sources have also said that Fitzgerald's investigation has gone far beyond the mere leaking of Plame's name, itself a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, but has expanded to look into the exposure of Plame's colleagues who worked under the cover of a CIA firm called Brewster, Jennings & Associates. The "brass plate" CIA proprietary had offices in Boston and Washington, DC. Active since 1994, Brewster-Jennings was instrumental in tracking the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and had agents or correspondents in a number of countries including Iraq, North Korea, Belarus, Russia, South Africa, Iran, Israel, China, Pakistan, Congo (Kinshasa), India, Taiwan, Libya, Syria, Serbia, and Malaysia. By releasing Valerie Plame’s name, other agents' non-official covers were blown and the lives of U.S. operatives within foreign governments and businesses may have been placed in danger. Therefore, Fitzgerald's investigation has reportedly been expanded to include the issue of whether members of the staffs of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Cheney and Bush themselves, the National Security Council, and the Departments of Defense and State, may have violated more serious espionage laws.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/062504_grand_jury_summary.ht...http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=646002
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