Posted on 02/11/2004 6:41:02 PM PST by Mia T
BUSH, THE CLINTONS + WMD PROLIFERATION:
The REAL "Imminent Threat"
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Pakistani officials say that since Dr. Khan's retirement, he has no longer been officially affiliated with the laboratory that bears his name. Still, one former Pakistani military official described him as a proud nationalist who saw himself as a Robin Hood-like character outwitting rich nations and aiding poor ones. Dr. Khan, he said, "was not that sort that would think it was a bad thing" to share nuclear weapons technology. "In fact, he would think it was a good thing. |
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WASHINGTON -- As the Pakistani nuclear proliferation story widens, U.S. intelligence officials say top atomic scientists from that country met with Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar in Afghanistan.
Two former senior Pakistani nuclear scientists who were based in the Afghan town of Kandahar met Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden several times before the fall of the Taliban. They were later detained and questioned on their return to Pakistan.
Last week, after it became clear that Pakistan was the center of what has become known internationally as the "nuclear bazaar," President Pervez Musharraf agreed to pardon nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan for selling the country's nuclear secrets to Libya, North Korea and Iran.
Because Pakistan is perceived to be central to the U.S. war on terror, the reaction in Washington has been low-key.
"This is a matter between Dr. Khan, who is a Pakistani citizen, and his government," said Secretary of State Colin Powell to reporters outside the United Nations. "But it is a matter also that I'll be talking to President Musharraf about."
Bush administration officials have expressed satisfaction with Musharraf's guarantees that the country's nuclear proliferation will now come to an end.
A top defector from North Korea says that country's uranium-based nuclear weapons program was launched in 1996 under a deal with Pakistan. In addition, Pakistan stationed other nuclear scientists in Iran to help that country develop its nuclear weapons program.
Pakistan says the presidential pardon to the top nuclear scientist over his admission to have proliferated nuclear technology to three foreign countries is subject to set of a "comprehensive conditions" -- but those conditions have not been revealed publicly.
The pardon even allows Khan to keep the vast wealth he accumulated by developing Pakistan's nuclear weapons and from selling the technology to other countries -- including several rogue nations. Khan is believed to have earned millions of dollars from his sale of nuclear know-how, beginning in the late 1980s. Much of the money was funneled through bank accounts in the Middle East. His assets include four houses in Islamabad worth an estimated $2.8 million, a villa on the Caspian Sea, a luxury hotel in Mali and a valuable collection of vintage cars.
Khan, 69, last week made a televised confession of his wrongdoing after government investigators confronted him. Despite being granted a pardon, he is under house arrest and forbidden to give interviews.
In addition to selling nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea, Khan also offered Saddam Hussein a design for a nuclear weapon in 1990, according to a document seized by U.N. weapons inspectors. Later he made a deal with Libya. |
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Now that a congressional committee has released its three-volume, 872-page techno-thriller on the theft of atomic secrets by Chinese spies, much of Washington is agog. But the uproar overlooks an arresting fact. For more than a half decade, the Clinton administration was shoveling atomic secrets out the door as fast as it could, literally by the ton. Millions of previously classified ideas and documents relating to nuclear arms were released to all comers, including China's bomb makers
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Back in 1993, when the terrors of the Cold War were still fresh, the administration decided that the best way to keep the nuclear arms race from heating up again was to get the world's nations to sign a test-ban treaty. The idea was that even if a country knew how to make a bomb, it couldn't perfect new ones and build up advanced forces without physically testing new designs. So development of new weapons would be frozen, ending the vicious spiral of nuclear move and countermove.
Releasing many of America's nuclear secrets was seen as an essential part of this strategy, since it would signal a new global order in which nuclear know-how was suddenly and irreparably devalued and real security would lie in the collective knowledge that nobody was able to push weaponry beyond the known boundaries.
What had been gold would become dross, and the atom would lose power and prestige. Driven by such logic, the administration made public masses of generalities about nuclear arms, even as specific weapon designs were kept secret.
Now, however, critics charge that the gamble failed -- that the explosion last year of nuclear devices by India and Pakistan and the reports that China has stolen America's top designs for nuclear arms have demonstrated that the test ban is fatally flawed. The depth and breadth of China's spying, they add, make the world's largest state seem quite hungry for a thoroughly modernized nuclear force, test-ban treaty or no.
In response to the China scandal, the Clinton administration has stopped all declassifications, beefed up security at the national weapons laboratories and adopted a conciliatory tone. Last week. as the House select committee released its report, President Clinton called protecting atom secrets "a solemn obligation."
But in private, administration officials say the openness was smart after all, its advantages even now outweighing its risks. They insist that its crowning jewel, the test ban, while admittedly shaky, still has lessened the risk of new atomic advances, making it a potent force for international good.
"We pulled off an impossible feat," said Hazel O'Leary, keeper of the nation's atom secrets as secretary of energy from 1993 to 1997. "To say all our efforts were negative is not to understand the benefits, not to see what we did in terms of building international trust."
Critics disagree vehemently. But they say the giveaway nonetheless illuminates the spy scandal and helps explain the administration's slow response when confronted with evidence of spying.
"It would be nothing short of miraculous if the openness has not seriously damaged U.S. interests," said Frank Gaffney Jr., a Pentagon official during the Reagan administration who now directs the Center for Security Policy, a research group in Washington. |
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(There would be an analogous treasonous miscalculation in the Mideast: clinton failed to shut down Muslim terrorism, then in its incipient stage and stoppable, because he reasoned that doing so would have wrecked his chances for the Nobel Peace Prize. Indeed, according to Richard Miniter, Madeleine Albright offered precisely the Nobel-Muslim factor as a primary reason for the clinton administration not treating the bombing of the USS Cole as an act of war.)
The Real Danger of a Fake President:
hillary talks: ON MILITARY TACTICS ("The Easy Part") (viewing movie requires Flash Player 6, available HERE) missus clinton's REAL virtual office update http://hillarytalks.blogspot.com http://virtualclintonlibrary.blogspot.com http://demmemogate.blogspot.com http://www.hillarytalks.us http://www.hillarytalks.org fiendsofhillary.blogspot.com fiendsofhillary.us fiendsofhillary.org fraudsofhillary.com |
Lib Author Regrets Voting (TWICE!) for clinton
MUST-READ BOOK FOR DEMOCRATS:
The Man Who Warned America
UDAY: "The end is near this time I think the Americans are serious, Bush is not like Clinton."
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My most recent piece on the clintons and nuclear proliferation:
HILLARY GOES NUCLEAR For more than a half decade, the Clinton administration was shoveling atomic secrets out the door as fast as it could, literally by the ton. Millions of previously classified ideas and documents relating to nuclear arms were released to all comers, including China's bomb makers. William J. Broad So I have real concerns, specifically about a plant in my state near where I live, Indian Point.... So we need to resolve... questions of... proliferation... before we go forward with nuclear power. hillary clinton Missus clinton's sudden concern about proliferation, therefore, is a decade too late and a dollar too cheap. 3 The clintons turned the dilemma of the nuclear age--how to exploit nuclear energy's peaceful and productive potential while preventing the spread of nuclear weapons-- on its head: They exploited nuclear proliferation for their own gain even as they prevented the realization of nuclear energy's peaceful and productive potential. Moreover, by ignoring terrorism for those eight years,4 the clintons caused the nuclear dilemma to become even more acute, complex and deadly with the concomitant rapid rise in non-state actors' involvement in the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Contrary to the clintons' quaint theories,5 rogue states routinely violated their Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons nonproliferation obligations, setting up a perfect symbiosis for non-state actors--particularly terrorists--seeking to acquire and use nuclear or other WMD. The non-state actor is the rogue state's perfect WMD delivery-system: there is no return address. "I remember exactly what happened. Bruce Lindsey said to me on the phone, 'My God, a second plane has hit the tower.' And I said, 'Bin Laden did this.' that's the first thing I said. He said, 'How can you be sure?' I said 'Because only bin Laden and the Iranians could set up the network to do this and they [the Iranians] wouldn't do it because they have a country in targets. Bin Laden did it.' I thought that my virtual obsession 2 with him was well placed and I was full of regret that I didn't get him." bill clinton
The clintons, almost singlehandedly, therefore, made proliferation of WMD today's preeminent threat to international peace and security. Some call the clintons quislings, Manchurian Candidates, bought off in Little Rock by Riady and company6 decades ago (and much too cheaply, according to their Chinese benefactors7), trading our national security for their political power. This argument is persuasive but incomplete....
PROLIFERATION IN THE AGE OF CLINTON
Spying Isn't the Only Way to Learn About Nukes
The New York Times
May 30, 1999
Nuclear is now very much in the news as a potential power source because of its lack of contribution to global warming. If you look at nuclear energy, which currently provides 20 percent of our energy with virtually no emission of greenhouse gases, we do have to take a serious look, but there remain very serious questions about nuclear power... in a world with suicidal terrorists.
Remarks at The National Press Club
May 23, 2006
illful nuclear proliferation, the product of clinton naiveté, corruption and obsession with legacy,1 was the predominant clinton policy for eight long years.2
Sunday, Sept 3, 2002
Larry King Live
THE (oops!) INADVERTENT ADMISSIONS OF BILL + HILLARY CLINTON
WITH FOOTNOTES
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