Don’t Bomb Iran

http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold03082004.html

The Veep and Pakistan
Cheney Helped Cover-Up Nuclear Proliferation in 1989, So Pentagon
Could Sell Pakistan Fighter Jets

By JASON LEOPOLD

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
even tougher 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 been supporting 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,
,
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 in the 1960s.

“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 fact… 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 198! 5, when it passed
the Solarz Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act (the amendment
was proposed by former Representative Stephen J. Solarz, Democrat
of New York), providing for the cutoff of all military and economic aid
to purportedly non-nuclear nations that illegally export or attempt to
export nuclear-related materials from the United States.”

“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 . 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.

Jason Leopold may be reached at: jasonleopold@hotmail.com