When
news of Pakistan's clandestine program involving
its top nuclear scientist selling rogue nations,
such as Iran and North Korea, blueprints for
building an atomic bomb was uncovered last month,
the world's leaders waited, with baited breath,
to see what type of punishment President Bush
would bestow upon Pakistan's President Pervez
Musharaff.
Bush
has, after all, spent his entire term in office
talking tough about countries and dictators
that conceal weapons of mass destruction and
eventougher on individuals who supply rogue
nations and terrorists with the means to build
WMDs. For all intents and purposes, Pakistan
and Musharraf fit that description.
Remember,
Bush accused Iraq of harboring a cache of WMDs,
which was the primary reason the United States
launched a preemptive strike there a year ago,
and also claimed that Iraq may have given its
WMDs to al-Qaeda terrorists and/or Syria, weapons
that, Bush said, could be used to attack the
U.S.
Bush,
Vice President Dick Cheney and top members of
the administration reacted with shock when they
found out that Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's
top nuclear scientist, spent the past 15 years
selling outlaw nations nuclear technology and
equipment. So it was sort of a surprise when
Bush, upon finding out about Khan's proliferation
of nuclear technology, let Pakistan off with
a slap on the wrist. But it was all an act.
In fact, it was actually a cover-up designed
to shield Cheney because he knew about the proliferation
for more than a decade and did nothing to stop
it.
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 working as Secretary of Defense
under the first President Bush administration:
Pakistan built an atomic bomb and was selling
its nuclear equipment to countries the U.S.
said was sponsoring terrorism.
But
Barlow's findings, as reported in a January
2002 story in the magazine Mother Jones, 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 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 beensupporting
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, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?040119fr_archive02,
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.
"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 factŠ 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.
"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 was
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 President
Bush 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.
(c)
2004 Jason Leopold
-
Jason Leopold is an investigative journalist
based in California, he has recently finished
a book on the California energy crisis. He can
be contacted at jasonleopold@hotmail.com. This
story is available for republication, please
contact the author by email.
