The Empire 289

'The Nuclear Bombshell That Never Went Off
By Jeff Stein

Congressional Quarterly

Say you're a member of Congress, and a Pentagon expert tells you that top officials are secretly letting Taiwan go nuclear, to contain China's emerging threat.
Do you: (1) start an investigation, with an eye toward hearings to grill officials on the facts, or (2) drop it and stand aside as officials run your whistleblower out of town?
In the real-life case of Pakistan and nuclear weapons, the answer from Congress has been (2). Twenty years ago, the House Foreign Affairs Committee learned that officials in the Reagan and Bush administrations were looking the other way while Pakistan acquired U.S. technology for its clandestine nuclear weapons program. Later, the United States allowed Pakistan to tweak its U.S.-supplied F-16s to carry nuclear bombs over India.
Why? Because Washington was dependent on Pakistan for arming and supplying the Islamic warriors battling the Soviet Red Army next door in Afghanistan.
Congress had passed legislation in 1985, aimed at Pakistan, that required the administration to cut off all military and economic aid to any country that was clandestinely pursuing nuclear weapons.
When the last beleaguered Soviet unit withdrew from Afghanistan on Feb. 15, 1989, CIA officials in Langley, Va., clinked champagne glasses. But the glasses were hardly dry when into the vacuum came the Taliban, followed by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Talk about unintended consequences.
But that wasn't all. Eventually it emerged that Pakistan's mad scientist, A.Q. Khan was running "a nuclear Wal-Mart," as Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, D-N.Y., put it at a hearing of a House International Relations subcommittee last May, "that sold nuclear equipment and related technologies to North Korea and Iran, two-thirds of the axis of evil, and also tried to sell it to the other third," Iraq. Khan also sold nuclear equipment to Libya and Syria.
Worse, perhaps, al Qaeda is actively seeking nuclear weapons, in the opinion of U.S. intelligence agencies and most private experts.
All this could have been avoided, says Richard M. Barlow, the former CIA and Defense Department expert whose warnings on the acquiescence of Reagan and Bush administration officials in Pakistan's nuclear program were quashed by the Pentagon and avoided by Congress.
For his candor, and despite the backing of some top intelligence officials, Barlow was stripped of his Top Secret/Codeword clearances and hounded out of the Pentagon.'

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102807E.shtml