AQ Khan developing as the reason for war with Iran. NYT is helping sell it

[blm]

Gee - aren't we all safer because BCCI matters were deep-sixed long ago? Nothing to see there, citizen....move on.



http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/abdul_qadeer_khan/index.html?inline=nyt-per

Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan is a Pakistani metallurgist and the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. In Pakistan, Dr. Khan is considered a national hero despite his admission in 2004 that he said he sold nuclear technology to several countries. To the United States and nuclear investigators around the world, he is a rogue scientist who has failed to reveal the true extent of the dangers posed by the shadowy network he created.

In 2003, the seizure of a shipment of equipment for uranium enrichment bound for Libya set of a chain of led Libya to publicly disclose its illegal nuclear program and cooperate with international investigators. As evidence mounted that the cargo had come from Pakistan, Dr. Khan shocked the world with a tearful confession on state-run television. He made a detailed confession in which he admitted that during the previous 15 years he had provided Iran, North Korea and Libya with the designs and technology to produce the fuel for nuclear weapons. He was pardoned because of his national stature, but under an arrangement with Mr. Musharraf he was placed under house arrest indefinitely.

But four years after his confession, international inspectors and Western officials confronted a new mystery, this time over who may have received blueprints for a sophisticated and compact nuclear weapon found on his network’s computers.
>>>>>>>

[varun]

1. This story should lead to a war with Pakistan

not Iran

[blm]

2. When you know the entire story of the last 20 plus years, it points to Iran.

.

[Octafish]

5. Points to Cheney, too.

AMERICAN JUDAS: Selling the Security of America and the World for 30 Pieces of Silver

By Robert Paulsen
Compiled From the Research by Posters on “The Plame Indictment Threads”

Thank you for putting things in focus, Robert and blm!

[blm]

15. Why so many here stick their heads in the sand and pretend none of this is happening

is just so odd to me.

[robertpaulsen]

24. Thanks for that, Octafish!

And thanks to blm for highlighting the truth. Leave it to the paper that employed Judy Miller to fail to connect the dots on the real deal!

:thumbsup::patriot:

[blm]

26. FAILED to connect the dots, or deliberately AVOIDING the truth? A few years ago, a Boston Globe

reporter told me straight up that he asked his editors why they didn't highlight Kerry's work on BCCI and instead chose to downplay it and its role in abetting global terrorism - he said he received a chilly response and one editor told him privately that BCCI was not a topic up for newsroom discussion.

Seems to me NYT and Boston Globe's powers that be are on the same page.

[leveymg]

14. It points to the CIA and Saudi intel as having sponsored AQ Khan since the mid-1970s

Does Bush really want to open up this can of worms?

Khan's nuclear program was originally part of the 1976 deal that CIA Director George H.W. Bush made with Prince Turki al-Faisal, head of Saudi external intelligence, the GID. In exchange for Saudi funding of U.S. intelligence operations banned by the Democratic Congress since the Church Commmittee hearings, the Agency looked the other way as the Saudis implemented their own covert operations around the world, including influence operations and financial frauds inside the U.S., which included BCCI and the S&L scandals.

BCCI was created as the funding vehicle for this joint intelligence operation, called the Safari Club. In addition to bank takeovers, BCCI funded Khan's program to build the Islamic atomic bomb and the develpment of a global Jihadist paramilitary, programs managed by Pakistani ISI intelligence. http://journals.democraticunderground.com/leveymg/280

The Pakistanis developed a working bomb during the Reagan-Bush era. Khan then began peddling unranium enrichment centrifuges. Customers included North Korea, Iran, and Libya. These machines were of poor quality, broke down constantly, and generally delayed the progress of those who operated them. Khan's machines also required specialized parts manufactured in third-countries, the importation which the CIA used to monitor the progress of Khan's customers. Khan also peddled A-bomb plans of dubious quality - the North Korean device tested in October 2006 didn't work. The CIA, which worked with Khan, tried to do the same in the late 1990s -- this was called Operation Merlin -- but Iran caught on. When Cheney outed Plame, he destroyed the CIA unit that was working with Khan on these Clinton-era deception operations. See, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_oet&address=358x4659

The paramilitary aspect of this also deserves mention. In the late 1970s, the CIA commenced Operation Cyclone, working with GID and ISI to train and equip Islamic fighters in Afghanistan, operations that continued in Bosnia as it eventually morphed into what we know today as al-Qaeda. Key 9/11 leaders were part of ongoing joint CIA-ISI-GID operations in the secret war against the Russians in Chechnya, which allowed these al-Qaeda operatives to freely travel in and out of the US under the sponsorship of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center. http://journals.democraticunderground.com/leveymg/337

Iran is entirely peripheral to all this.

[blm]

16. Peripheral, yes, but Khan will be their excuse for HAVING to confront Iran as predicted

by some of us here a few years ago.

[mod mom]

3. These next couple months make me extremely nervous. rec'd

[madokie]

12. I remember the Cuban missile crises like it was yesterday in so many ways

and I feel the same apprehensions now as I did leading up to then. If and when Jan 20 gets here and we're not in a war where nuclear weapons are being used we can rejoice but not until. I believe history will show that we're today living in perilous times being led by a madman

[blm]

27. How can one NOT feel the apprehension and tension, especially those of us who forewarned

our fellow Dems and DUers for the last few years that this is exactly what would happen.

[seemslikeadream]

4. restrictions were lifted, the agent told me without a hint of dark humor, on September 11

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1104251



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

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

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

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

[blm]

31. Thanks slad.... I almost missed your post.

.

[Octafish]

6. The players at BCCI corrupted the biggest names in politics.

Here AND There.

The Strange Saga of BCCI

"The Bank of Crooks and Criminals International"

Sightings from The Catbird Seat

EXCERPT...

From The Outlaw Bank: BCCI

by Jonathan Deaty & S.C. Gwynne

Kamal Adham was one of the true inside power players of the Middle East, a shrewd, jovial man who had for decades straddled the worlds of Middle Eastern business and politics.. He was the half brother of Iffat, the favorite wife of King Faisal, who ruled Saudi Arabia from 1964 until his death in 1975. . . .

Like so many other enterprising Arabs in the 1960s and 1970s, when oil revenues were booming and foreign companies were lining up to sell their products, Adham had used his connection to commercial advantage. The way most commoners in the Middle East got rich off the oil boom was through a simple system know as "agency" arrangements.

In order to sell a product or service in Saudi Arabia, you had to know someone in the royal family, which authorized all expenditures. If you did not know a princeling or a royal cousin, then you hired an "agent" who provided you access for a "commission." Though this commission often looks very much like a "bribe" ... it was nonetheless the way business was done, and few were better at it than Kamal Adham.

The list of his agency deals was long and illustrious. . . .

By the mid-1960s Adham's influence was such that he simultaneously came to represent three defense firms and was being ardently courted by a fourth. Said Northrop representative Kermit Roosevelt, "Adham already has a piece of the Lighting deal, the Mirage deal, and the Lockheed deal and is trying to complete the square by an arrangement with Northrup."

He also came to be the principal broker for weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia on behalf of Egypt.

But perhaps his richest contract was with Boeing Company, which paid him millions of dollars in commissions to help it sell passenger jetliners to the fledgling Saudi airlines. . . .

That and other similar transactions had led to a three-year investigation of Boeing's commission payments by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, whose goal in part was to figure out exactly who Boeing was using to accomplish these sleights of hand.

Curiously, in the words of a 1976 Wall Street Journal article, Boeing's efforts to suppress those names, particularly Adham's, "has been accomplished with significant help from the State Department, which entered a court fight between the SEC and Boeing to argue that disclosure of Boeing's 'highly placed' consultants abroad could harm U.S. foreign policy interests.

How could the mere disclosure of Adham's name affect U.S. foreign policy? In two ways.

First, Adham was the head of the Saudi internal security service - arguably the most important agency of the government, since it protected the royal family - and the General Intelligence Directorate of Saudi Arabia. In that role he was the principal liaison between the CIA and European intelligence agencies, and he even had an agency code name: Tumbleweed. In geopolitical terms, Adham was the five-hundred-pound gorilla of Saudi intelligence, an outfit know and feared for its merciless hunts for dissidents and brutal methods of repression. . . .

But the second and more important foreign policy concern was that Adham was the kingdom's key link to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in the years leading to the Camp David accords in 1979 - the years following the 1973 war, when the Saudi-Egypt axis acquired key strategic importance...

CONTINUED…

http://www.the-catbird-seat.net/BCCI.htm

OIL

a famous prayer by Firesign Theatre:

“Anointed with oil on troubled waters?
Oh Heavenly Grid, help us bear up thy Standard,
our Chevron flashing bright,
across the Gulf of Compromise,
standing Humble on this Rich-field
of Mobile American thinking?
Here in this Shell, we call life.”

Of course, the BCCI affair involves many of the same crooks who run the BFEE today. And they move big petrobucks around. Big nukes around. And run America into the ground. DUers and folks who aren't familiar with the story may be surprised hear the story of James R. Bath, kicked off the Texas ANG flight line along with fellow officer, George W Bush. And both were involved with BCCI through the bin Laden family.

Small world. Still, plenty big enough for many who should know better to hide their heads in the sand.

[peacetalksforall]

7. The NYT says Khan is a 'rogue scientist' in the eyes of the United States.

Why don't they just say it - he is Cheney's friend/partner.

Has the U.S. been silent in 'warring' on Pakistan or Khan?
Has Israel?

Is Khan on one of the cards in the 52 card deck?

Why does Israel and the U.S. want to 'do' Iran, not Pakistan?

Will the U.S. freeze Pakistan's money? Will they promote an embargo?

It seems we're still buddies with Pakistan (or ... this administration is).

[blm]

25. Dubai and Pakistan $$$ staked BCCI from the beginning - They worked WITH GHWBush and his cronies

on those illegal operations for decades. It is absurd to think that none of them knew what AQ Khan was doing - in fact, it is certain, from all I've seen, that AQ Khan was working as a key PART of Poppy Bush's overall agenda.

[Truth2Tell]

8. Khan has always been a scapegoat.

A must read on this topic:

"Deception" by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark of UK's Guardian Newspaper.

The shocking, three-decade story of A. Q. Khan and Pakistan’s nuclear program, and the complicity of the United States in the spread of nuclear weaponry. On December 15, 1975, A. Q. Khan—a young Pakistani scientist working in Holland—stole top-secret blueprints for a revolutionary new process to arm a nuclear bomb. His original intention, and that of his government, was purely patriotic—to provide Pakistan a counter to India’s recently unveiled nuclear device. However, as Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark chillingly relate in their masterful investigation of Khan’s career over the past thirty years, over time that limited ambition mushroomed into the world’s largest clandestine network engaged in selling nuclear secrets—a mercenary and illicit program managed by the Pakistani military and made possible, in large part, by aid money from the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Libya, and by indiscriminate assistance from China. Most unnerving, the authors reveal that the sales of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya, so much in the news today, were made with the clear knowledge of the American government, for whom Pakistan has been a crucial buffer state and ally—first against the Soviet Union, now in the “war against terror.” Every successive American presidency, from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, has turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear activity—rewriting and destroying evidence provided by its intelligence agencies, lying to Congress and the American people about Pakistan’s intentions and capability, and facilitating, through shortsightedness and intent, the spread of the very weapons we vilify the “axis of evil” powers for having and fear terrorists will obtain. Deception puts our current standoffs with Iran and North Korea in a startling new perspective, and makes clear two things: that Pakistan, far from being an ally, is a rogue nation at the epicenter of world destabilization; and that the complicity of the United States has ushered in a new nuclear winter. Based on hundreds of interviews in the United States, Pakistan, India, Israel, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Deception is a masterwork of reportage and dramatic storytelling by two of the world’s most resourceful investigative journalists. Urgently important, it should stimulate debate and command a reexamination of our national priorities.

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&q=AQ+Khan+books&cid=2805000647147057782

[blm]

28. Yep - he's been as much a part of BFEE's operations over the decades as Marc Rich and

Jackson Stephens, Dubai and Saudi royals, Bin Ladens and others involved in GHWBush's New World Order agenda.

[lovuian]

9. Bush is in England selling the war to Europe

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/bush-threatens-iran-with-military-action-848488.html

A spokesman for the Stop the War Coalition, which protested against Mr Bush's arrival at Downing Street on Sunday, said: "Bush has been travelling round Europe trying to secure support for sanctions and a possible future attack on Iran."

Mr Brown also announced that Britain is sending more troops to Afghanistan as the bodies of five soldiers killed in action last week were brought home. About 400 support staff are being withdrawn, but 630 more troops are being flown out.

Mr Brown is due to announce troop withdrawals from Basra before the summer recess of Parliament at the end of next month.

[hootinholler]

10. I'm sure teh CIA has a front company organization to track these people down!

Oh, wait...

-Hoot

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

19. Yeah,...heh heh,...

HMPF! ;(

[ProSense]

11. More

here.

[blm]

17. Thanks for keeping a sharp eye, ProSense.

Hard for me to get to my computer these days.

[Bucky]

13. Who to blame for making the world more dangerous is like one of those rotation codes we did as kids

You know how the codes work: You let A=S and B=N and so forth. Then you can write a message to your friend during class like "ARY'D HP YP YJR QPPS SGRT DVJPPA ARYD PIY" and with the right decoder, you friend know you meant "let's go to the pool after school lets out" without any of the dorks in class catching on.

Only in the Global War On Terror the code is based on countries instead of letters. If AFGHANISTAN attacks you, you know to invade IRAQ. If PAKISTAN threatens nuclear proliferation, you should invade IRAN. If you get screwed at the gas pump by EXXONMOBILE, then you invade VENEZUELA.

See, it's just a matter of figuring out how to rotate the code.

[readmoreoften]

21. Exactly. And when we invade before the election whose fault will it be?

Rotate everyone: the Democrats.

[blm]

29. In some serious ways it is the fault of a few Dems who HAD the power to

make sure the American people knew what was going on, but instead sided with protecting the secrecy and privilege of the Bushes and their powerful cronies throughout the 90s.

That led us directly to Bush2, a 9-11 event, invasion of Iraq and our soon to be war with Iran.

The deep-sixing of BCCI matters throughout the 90s for Poppy Bush was the worst decision a Democratis president ever made.

[Truth2Tell]

18. Afternoon kick. nt

[readmoreoften]

20. Look I know we want Iran but we can't overthrow a country with more people than France or England

Tehran (sprawl excluded) has only 1 million less people than New York City (sprawl excluded). This is psychotic times 10. Yes, Halliburton wants their oil and the neocons want their geostrategic location. But fuckin' no. I said so. There. WHY WON'T THEY LISTEN TO ME????

[blm]

22. Unfortunately, even many DUers insist there is nothing amiss about all this and have no problem

that so many outstanding matters of BCCI were swept under the carpet throughout the 90s to protect Bush and his BFEE cronies.

They think those who point out the unresolved matters, including AQ Khan, are just beating a dead horse. Unfortunately, that dead horse flew jets into NYC buildings and led us straight into war in Iraq and is trotting towards war with Iran.

That entire region is going to blow up.

[readmoreoften]

23. This is becoming genocide of multiple ethnic groups.

How many Americans realize that they're not even Arab and they don't speak Arabic?

[blm]

30. How many Americans have one clue about the fascists involved around the globe

with the Bushes and their New World Order?