Dr Nuke and his network

[candypreet]

Dr Nuke and his network
INDRANI BAGCHI

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2005 02:02:50 AM ]

Briefing journalists in New Delhi last week, US ambassador to India David Mulford admitted that the US investigation into Pakistan's nuclear proliferation network had entered its "second phase". Condoleezza Rice's statements in Islamabad certainly pointed to an interesting shift in the present US policy of alternately acknowledging or ignoring Pakistan's role in creating and running one of the world's deadliest blackmarkets, what IAEA chief Mohammed El Baradei evocatively labelled the nuclear Walmart.

Inured to former secretary of state Colin Powell's public "good conduct" certificates to Pakistan — his official take on Pakistan's proliferation activities was, if they say they have shut it, I believe them — it did not take long for Rice's significantly nuanced comments to ring alarm bells in concerned quarters. So if the first phase was confined to shutting up the Khan operation, the second phase promises to be more intrusive — going after the whys and wherefores of the Pakistani nuclear system.

Because, for the first time, official attention is focusing not merely on the father of the Pakistani nuclear programme, Abdul Qadeer Khan, personally, but on a network with patrons reaching the highest and darkest corners of the Pakistani military establishment. Addressing a press conference with Pakistan foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri, she said the US was very interested in knowing "what happened" and "how and why it happened".

After decades of "off the record" knowledge, the world woke up to extensive nuclear proliferation activities by Pakistan when Libya blew the whistle in 2003
The first official message to President Musharraf to roll up the AQ Khan network was delivered by former US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage. Following selective leaks in US papers in early 2004, the Pakistan government arrested their national icon, forced him to confess on national TV, absolving the entire Pakistan establishment of any complicity. Never mind that Pakistan military aircraft was used for transfers to and from North Korea, Libya and ...
Reports say he is safe only because his daughter had, in the nick of time, spirited out a taped account by her father, using it as his life insurance with Pakistan authorities.

Pakistan had worked out a deal with the US that come what may, they would not allow the US or other international investigators to quiz Khan. Most important, they said that with the arrest of Khan, the network had been effectively rolled up. But now, the heat is building up because of the US' immediate interest in eliminating the Iranian nuclear programme. Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility was built with Khan's designs, the centrifuges suspiciously similar to what Khan filched from Dutch company Urenco years ago. As the US tries to build a case against Iran and even North Korea, Pakistan's cooperation is even more vital.

Having first denied any link, Pakistan information minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed announced in March that Khan had indeed supplied centrifuges to Iran. On March 25, almost as soon as the US announced that it would sell F-16s to Pakistan, Pakistan announced that it would hand over centrifuge samples to international investigators to assess similarities with Iran. There is certainly the smell of a link.

According to reports, US is again piling on the pressure for international interrogators to quiz Khan, and his two most important mentors, former president Ghulam Ishaq Khan and former chief of army staff General Mirza Aslam Beg. For the present, their chief sources are Khan's erstwhile business partner BSA Tahir, and South African businessman Asher Karni, who made a deal with a Pakistani businessman, Humayun Khan, to buy spark gaps and oscilloscopes — essential in any nuclear program. Humayun Khan is known as a reliable supplier of military hardware for the Pakistani army, and is also connected to jehadi groups in J&K. It was interesting, say nuclear analysts here, that Humayun Khan's company, Pakland PME, bore an intriguing similarity to a PAEC (Pakistan Atomic Energy Corporation) front company, Pakland Corporation, which, in the '80s, bought tritium purification and production facility from a German company.
It is clear that putting AQ Khan away has not affected Pakistan's dependence on the nuclear blackmarket. Pakistan needs this route to upgrade its programme or even just maintain it. Besides, Pakistan, say nuclear experts here, may be moving towards developing tactical nuclear weapons, that are small and easily carried. For this, it needs more plutonium, which, crudely put, delivers more bang for the buck. To expose its external procurement facility to the US would be disastrous.

[candypreet]

The US is sensitive to Pakistan's dilemma. But the US' larger interests have to be served. These are, rolling up the proliferation bazaar and preventing Pakistan's nuclear weapons from falling into jehadi hands, and preventing countries like Saudi Arabia from jumping on to the nuclear bandwagon. There have been US media reports of efforts to secure Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, without official endorsement and even Bush has publicly testified to their safety.

Former US ambassador Robert Blackwill recently went on record to say that the US and India should hold secret talks for the "management" of Pakistan. It is an idea that sections in both governments have flirted with. But India is a long way away from doing this and the US-Pakistan relationship is too delicately poised to handle a shock of this nature. For the future, who knows?
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1073522,curpg-1.cms

[candypreet]

its time for a bump

[Ono]

Export controls violations and illicit trafficking by Swiss companies and
individuals in the case of A. Q. Khan network:


http://www.pircenter.org/data/resources/lamy.pdf

[candypreet]

good information. thanks

[exitwound]

KHAAAAAAAAAAN!

http://www.khaaan.com/

[candypreet]

Notorious Dr. Nuke
By Jules Crittenden

At the heart of a very real Axis of Evil is a scientist who puts up a humble front, despite his years of boasting about his nation's nuclear might, despite accusations that he is behind what experts say is the most dangerous proliferation of weapons of mass destruction the world has ever seen.

``I am the kindest man in Pakistan. I feel the ants in the morning. I feed the monkeys,'' Abdul Qadeer Khan told the Los Angeles Times in 1998, when his quarter-century of work to build a bomb for Pakistan finally came to fruition with a nuclear test blast.

That was before A.Q. Khan, as he is known, fell from grace last February, when he took personal responsibility for transferring nuclear secrets to pariah states Iran, Libya and North Korea - claiming he acted without his government's knowledge. Also suspected of aiding Iraq in the early 1990s, he is now under house arrest, but weapons experts say it remains unclear exactly where he sold his deadly knowledge, or whether a nebulous network remains in place that might put advanced weapons technology in the hands of terrorists.

``This guy was peddling nuclear technology under our noses for a decade,'' said James Walsh of Harvard University's Belfer Center. ``He did more damage in a decade than any other country did in 50 years.''

After stealing nuclear secrets from his Dutch employer in the early 1970s, he founded Pakistan's nuke program in 1976 in response to archenemy India's bid to build nuclear weapons. Nationally revered as the Father of the Pakistani Bomb, observers say his public standing even in humiliation is such that President Pervez Musharraf has been unwilling to let U.S. agents question him directly.

``He was larger than life, larger than anyone,'' said Professor Adil Najam of Tufts University's Fletcher School, who added that Khan's arrogance and self-promotion also earned him enemies in Pakistan.

But Najam and others say Khan may be protected in part because of the fears that high-placed officials who tolerated his schemes might be compromised.

``The notion that this was a freelance operation is ludicrous,'' said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.Org. ``If you believe that, there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. This was an operation on the scale of the Colombian drug cartels.''

Pike and others say the threat of Russian nuclear weapons and technology proliferation by comparison largely has been contained, and that Khan has emerged as the world's leading rogue proliferator.

``He really set up a brokerage firm,'' said Walsh, who said Khan supplied the blueprints and sometimes some of the bomb-making equipment, and is also known to have had sophisticated parts shipped from firms in Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates. Even if Khan is genuinely out of business, Walsh said, ``The question is, what about the rest of the network? There is some concern the rest of this network has not been rolled up.''



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2004/041128-dr-nuke.htm

[exitwound]

this guy really puts a bee in my bonnet. i'd like to put a bullet in his, and that of everyone else who went around irresponsibly spreading massive weapons technology advancements willy-nilly.

Fuck him and the horsemen of the Apocalypse he rode in on. :mad:

[candypreet]

A.Q. Khan and Al Qaeda
The Asian Age India | B. Raman

If there is one country in the world which has been systematically violating with impunity all regulations relating to nuclear and missile proliferation and from which there is a real danger of leakage of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and related technologies to Al Qaeda and other pan-Islamic terrorist organisations belonging to Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF) for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders, that country is Pakistan.

The US double standards in this matter are evident from the alacrity with which it acted against Iraq despite the lack of any credible evidence against it, and the care with which it protects the regime in Pakistan, despite all the evidence available against it.

Before October 2003, no other leader of a nuclear power had made stronger statements than General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan about the safety and security of its nuclear and missile assets. He had made many statements since he seized power in October 1999, that Pakistan's nuclear and missile assets were under the effective control of the Army. He has made many statements since October 2003, when Pakistan's proliferation activities in Iran, Libya and North Korea were exposed, absolving himself and the Army of any responsibility in this regard and putting the blame totally on a group of about a dozen scientists headed by A.Q. Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan's atomic bomb.

This group brought in suitcases containing millions of dollars in cash; bought real estate and invested millions of dollars in business companies in Pakistan and abroad; travelled dozens of times every year all over Europe, Africa and Asia; carried sensitive drawings and designs abroad; invited foreign dignitaries from Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and North Korea to visit Pakistan's nuclear and missile establishments into which Pakistan's own elected political leaders were barred access by the Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI); received foreign scientists and engineers for training in the nuclear and missile establishments; invited North Korean scientists to witness its nuclear tests of 1998; invited North Korean and Iranian scientists to witness the Ghauri (nothing but North Korea's Nodong re-baptised) missile test of 1998; and sent to Libya, Iran and North Korea uranium hexafluoride and other sensitive material by special aircraft into which they were loaded in Pakistani airports. And, yet, we are told by Musharraf that all these were rogue operations by this small group of which the Army and the ISI had no inkling till the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) brought them to his notice. He has even had the audacity to find fault with the US for not detecting the rogue activities of his scientists.

One is told that these scientists did it for greed. Even if one accepts for argument's sake this explanation, one could understand how the scientists must have been tempted by offers of millions of dollars by the oil-rich Iran and Libya. But where is the question of greed as the motive in the case of North Korea, a bankrupt state, which did not even have a few thousand dollars in its coffers with which it could bribe the scientists?

One has lost count of the number of times Musharraf has changed his prevaricating statements. Initially, he was saying that none of the Pakistani leaders, political or military, had any knowledge of these transgressions and hence they could not be held responsible. He then changed his stand and started hinting that the controls over the scientists weakened while the elected political leadership was in power and hence such transgressions became possible.

His contention has been that after the interception by the intelligence agencies of the US and the UK of a ship in October 2003, which was found carrying to Libya a clandestine consignment of centrifuges for uranium enrichment, manufactured at the instance of A.Q. Khan by a company in Malaysia with the assistance of a Sri Lankan Muslim, he became aware of the extensive non-proliferation activities of the A.Q. Khan group and immediately acted against them. According to Musharraf, details of the clandestine travels and the proliferation network of A.Q. Khan came to notice during the subsequent investigation.

Not many experts have been convinced of the innocence of Pakistan's military in this affair. Many of us have been pointing out that this proliferation started and continued at the instance and with the blessing of Pakistan's military leadership. I have also been pointing out in many articles that while the late Zia-ul-Haq who ruled the country from 1977 to 1988, authorised the proliferation to Iran, Musharraf himself had authorised that to Libya and North Korea and was totally in the picture.

But, unfortunately, for reasons of realpolitik, the US administration has chosen to accept the denials of military responsibility by Musharraf. It not only gave him a clean chit, but even rewarded Pakistan by conferring on it Major Non-Nato Ally (MNNA) status.

However, despite the efforts of Musharraf to keep his cupboard tightly shut to prevent the discovery of any more skeletons, nuclear skeletons keep popping up. The skeletons are everywhere if only the US wants to look at them. On November 23, 2004, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) put on its website edited extracts from a report on nuclear proliferation worldwide during the second half of 2003 submitted by it to the Congress. It had another bombshell for Pakistan. The CIA report said, "Before the reporting period, the A.Q. Khan network provided Iran with designs for Pakistan's older centrifuges as well as designs for more advanced and efficient models and components."

What did the CIA mean by "designs for more advanced and efficient models and components"? Pakistani analysts maintained that it meant more advanced centrifuges. But, the New York Times, in an analytical article as quoted in the Daily Times of November 27, 2004, interpreted it otherwise. It said: "A new report from the CIA says the arms trafficking network led by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan provided Iran's nuclear programme with significant assistance, including the designs for advanced and efficient weapons components."

The Daily Times wrote: "The (New York Times) story is aimed at alleging that Pakistan gave a warhead design to Iran and wants to create exactly this impression. This is obvious from the reference to a closed-door speech to a private group by former CIA director George Tenet and references to unnamed CIA officials. According to the NYT, Tenet described Mr Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapon's programme, as being at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden because of his role in providing nuclear technology to other countries."

Most analyses are coming back to the question: Could Dr Khan and a small group of scientists close to him have done this as a rogue operation without the approval and involvement of the political and military leadership of the country? Should the outside world be satisfied with Musharraf's contention that Khan has been thoroughly interrogated and that all the information given by him has been shared with others and that no further interrogation is needed. Definitely not by outsiders, he says.

One thing stands out clearly from the recent developments — the entire truth has not come out. Only part of the story, as given out by Musharraf, has come out. Is it not necessary for the safety of the lives of billions of innocent civilians, who face the threat of a possible use of weapons of mass destruction by the jihadi terrorists, to find out the truth?

There is only one man in Pakistan who has the entire picture. Without having Khan interrogated by an independent outside panel, the truth will never be known.

In a report from Washington carried on March 3, 2005, Dawn of Karachi quoted a report of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security as saying, "In addition to money, Qadeer (A.Q. Khan) was also motivated by pan-Islamism and hostility to Western controls on nuclear technology."

Till now, the focus of the investigation by the US and the IAEA has been on Khan's role in creating and running a "nuclear Walmart" for state aspirants to military nuclear power such as Libya, Iran and North Korea? How about non-state aspirants such as Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda whose pan-Islamic ideology he shares?

I had in some other articles referred to the suspected penetration of Islamic fundamentalist and jihadi terrorist elements in Pakistan's nuclear and missile communities. I had also drawn attention to reports carried by the Pakistani media on the annual conventions of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) at Muridke near Lahore. These reports had referred to the presence of unnamed Pakistani scientists at these conventions. The LeT is a member of Bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF).

There is a greater danger of Al Qaeda and other jihadi terrorists getting hold of nuclear and radiological weapons or materials from the supporters of their pan-Islamic ideologies in Pakistan's scientific community such as A.Q. Khan than from any other quarter.

Unless A.Q. Khan is interrogated by a group of international experts not connected with Pakistan, outside Pakistani territory, the international community will never be able to establish the progress made by the terrorists in their efforts to acquire WMDs or materials.

B. Raman is a former Additional Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat, and presently, Director of Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai

[candypreet]

bumpity bump:) :) :)

[candypreet]

At the heart of a very real Axis of Evil is a scientist who puts up a humble front, despite his years of boasting about his nation's nuclear might, despite accusations that he is behind what experts say is the most dangerous proliferation of weapons of mass destruction the world has ever seen.

``I am the kindest man in Pakistan. I feel the ants in the morning. I feed the monkeys,'' Abdul Qadeer Khan told the Los Angeles Times in 1998, when his quarter-century of work to build a bomb for Pakistan finally came to fruition with a nuclear test blast.

That was before A.Q. Khan, as he is known, fell from grace last February, when he took personal responsibility for transferring nuclear secrets to pariah states Iran, Libya and North Korea - claiming he acted without his government's knowledge. Also suspected of aiding Iraq in the early 1990s, he is now under house arrest, but weapons experts say it remains unclear exactly where he sold his deadly knowledge, or whether a nebulous network remains in place that might put advanced weapons technology in the hands of terrorists.

``This guy was peddling nuclear technology under our noses for a decade,'' said James Walsh of Harvard University's Belfer Center. ``He did more damage in a decade than any other country did in 50 years.''

After stealing nuclear secrets from his Dutch employer in the early 1970s, he founded Pakistan's nuke program in 1976 in response to archenemy India's bid to build nuclear weapons. Nationally revered as the Father of the Pakistani Bomb, observers say his public standing even in humiliation is such that President Pervez Musharraf has been unwilling to let U.S. agents question him directly.

[candypreet]

Iran and N. Korea.
Now libya has yet to confirm Dr. Khan's network

[candypreet]

a bump for 2007.....

[candypreet]

The Man 'Who Nearly Blew Up the World'
Reportedly ill, A. Q. Khan's legacy continues


http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=342255&rel_no=1

[Bman]

The Times (London)

May 3, 2007, Thursday


Awkward truth of scientist's 'nuclear supermarket'

Bronwen Maddox


As the US hands over the $600 million a year it has promised Pakistan, it might ask itself this: was this really not enough to buy a single interview with A. Q. Khan?

According to the account which President Musharraf has doggedly peddled, the country's most famous nuclear scientist not only equipped his own country with its first nuclear weapons, but then -acting alone, Musharraf insists -sold to North Korea, Libya and possibly Iran the starter kits that helped them to win nuclear self-sufficiency.

This solitary villain and his "nuclear supermarket" would have been incredible even in a James Bond film. As an account of the spawning of the most serious nuclear threats the world now faces it has always been implausible. But even though Khan has done more damage to the cause of peace than Osama bin Laden, the US, since it co-opted the Pakistani Government to its War on Terror in 2001, has chosen to accept the portrayal of him as a "rogue scientist", acting largely without government help for 20 years. Its officials have not managed to get a single face-to-face interview with him.

It is a public service, then, to try to answer the unanswered questions about Khan: Was the Pakistani Government complicit? How much did the US know? And where did the money go? The International Institute of Strategic Studies has done that (in what it bravely describes as a "dossier", despite its ill-fated predecessors in that genre), although the answers are patchy.

The report usefully deflates the myth that Khan was "the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb". He was a technician who helped it to master uranium enrichment, one of the trickier barriers, and to bring in the material illicitly to do so.

But even though successive Pakistani governments gave Khan great autonomy from the start, the IISS concludes that "it is logical to assume that the intelligence apparatus did know more than Pakistan has ever let on".

The IISS is not the first to point out that Khan's trades with North Korea particularly suggest government complicity, but it puts the point bluntly. It argues that the centrifuges, blueprints and uranium hexafluoride that Khan admits supplying to North Korea "were probably transported...on chartered Pakistani Air Force flights". It is sceptical of the claim by Pakistani governments that they bought missiles from North Korea for cash, not for a barter of nuclear technology. "The broad co-operation between Pyongyang and Islamabad is significant reason to suspect state complicity" -at least knowing of the deal and "implicitly condoning" it, the report says.

But in Libya, Khan's sales of centrifuge equipment "were almost exclusively private business transactions", it argues. Mark Fitzpatrick, the report's main author, points out that Khan would have had to share most of the reputed $100 million price of the Libyan contract with members of his network (40 of whom have been named).

Fitzpatrick, formerly of the US State Department, argues that the US knew about some of Pakistan's efforts to acquire its own bomb but probably much less about Khan's sales until much later. Details of his North Korean sales surfaced in a US intelligence report only in 2000.

Nuclear Black Markets: Pakistan, A. Q. Khan and the rise of proliferation networks. www.iiss.org

[candypreet]

The nuclear black market

Still in business
May 3rd 2007
From The Economist print edition

Abdul Qadeer Khan's network in Pakistan was slick but not unique


TO BORROW a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush's former defence secretary, when it comes to the illicit trade in bomb-useable nuclear materials and know-how, it is the unknown unknowns that keep people awake at night. The revelation in 2004 that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man still feted in Pakistan as the father of its bomb, had turned his country's illicit procurement network into a private and hugely profitable supply chain, ready to sell all sorts of nuclear kit to others, was a huge blow to the global anti-proliferation effort. But exactly how far did the damage go?......................................

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9122661

[Bman]

"The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice. " - President George W. Bush, Presidential Debate, Sept. 30, 2004



Another Bush lie, exposed.

He knew this was a lie at the time, as I remember posting a thread about it. Khan hadn't been "brought to justice" and NO PERSON IN PAKISTAN HAS EVER BEEN CONVICTED OF ANY CRIME RELATED TO THE KHAN NUCLEAR BLACK MARKET DEALINGS

Bush knew that.. How do I know? Because I knew it at the time. Anyone with access to "The Google" and "The Internets" knew it as well.

Lie, lie, lie.

[Bman]

The nuclear black market

Still in business
May 3rd 2007
From The Economist print edition

Abdul Qadeer Khan's network in Pakistan was slick but not unique


TO BORROW a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush's former defence secretary, when it comes to the illicit trade in bomb-useable nuclear materials and know-how, it is the unknown unknowns that keep people awake at night. The revelation in 2004 that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man still feted in Pakistan as the father of its bomb, had turned his country's illicit procurement network into a private and hugely profitable supply chain, ready to sell all sorts of nuclear kit to others, was a huge blow to the global anti-proliferation effort. But exactly how far did the damage go?......................................

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9122661



From the article at your link


It does not help that, as Kenley Butler and Leonard Spector, two proliferation experts, point out in a recent issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, of the dozens of businessmen, agents and scientists tapped by the Khan network, only three (two Germans and a Dutchman) have so far been convicted and sent to prison. None of Mr Khan's Pakistani collaborators is in jail either.

[candypreet]

good post bman ----- as usual