Thursday, February 26, 2004

'Father of the bomb... ' - the deal

pv vivekanand

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the disgraced Pakistani nuclear
scientist who has confessed to having sold nuclear
secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, has been
placed under strict house arrest after failing to
hand over documents and taped statements that
implicate senior Pakistani military officials,
including President Pervez Musharaf, in his nuclear
proliferation activities.
The "evidence" that all Pakistani military leader,
including Mushraf himself, since 1977 knew that
Qadeen Khan had been selling his nuclear know-how in
the black market, is said to be with his daughter
Dina, who smuggled it out of Pakistan.
Obviously, Qadeer Khan, 68, used it as a leverage to
ensure that he would be given to government "pardon"
for his activities -- which netted him tens of
millions of dollars, but now that he has secured a
blanket pardon in return for the evidence, he is said
to be refusing to hand over the documents and taped
conversations and statements.
Reports indicate that Dina, under instructions from
her father, is holding onto the evidence to ward off
any legal action against him. Although he had been
given a pardon, the likelihood remains strong that
legal action could be taken against him.
Qadeer Khan remained under house arrest and tight
restrictions were imposed on his movements over the
weekend in a bid to apply pressure on him for the
evidence.
Musharaf, according to sources in the Gulf and North
America, had wanted to prosecute Qadeer Khan under
pressure from the US, but his plans went wrong when it
emerged that the nuclear scientist had taken out
"insurance" against that eventuality by stashing
evidence that implicates the president and some of his
senior military brass.
Therefore, the pardon was part of a deal that involved
Qadeer Khan pledging that he would hand over the
evidence in return.
According to the sources, the evidence implicates
every military chief of Pakistan since the late 70s in
his nuclear peddling.
The trail since then winds from Pakistan through the
Gulf to Europe and the Far East and to Qadeer Khan's
fat bank accounts, and holdings and investments,
mainly outside Pakistan.
The story so far.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist, worked in the
Netherlands for a Dutch company called Physics Dynamic
Research Laboratory (FDO), which did research for
consortium called URENCO, set up by the British, Dutch
and German governments to provide equipment to enrich
uranium. It was based in the town of Almelo in
Holland.
In his compacity as a metallurgist working for FDO,
Qadeer Khan stole URENCO blueprints for centrifuges
-- metal tubes which spin uranium hexafluoride gas in
order to separate out the uranium 235 which is needed
to make a nuclear reaction and from there to a level
needed for a nuclear bomb.
He was given access to the highly confidential
blueprints because he enjoyed high security clearance
since he was married to a South African-born Dutch
woman and had announced he planned to settle down
permanently in the Netherlands. He was also fluent in
English, German and Dutch.
However, Qadeer Khan left the Netherlands in 1976 when
he was placed under investigatin by Dutch
intelligence.
He established the AQ Khan Research Laboratories near
Islamabad and began to build the bomb. Material for
the project came from European companies.
He also wrote to Frits Veerman, a technical
photographer and fromer colleague at FDO, to secure
some finer details.
Veerman has disclosed how he knew Qadeer Khan had
stolen the Urenco bluepints and also the letter in a
Dutch-language book called Atoomspionage.
It is not yet clearly known when he started his
clandestine dealings with Libya and Iran and North
Korea.
The Iranian government,under threat of sweeping UN
sanctions, disclosed to the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) last year that it was one of the
clandestine clients. Tehran said it had received help
from an external source, and the trail led to a third
party and to Qadeer Khan although the scientist and
the Iranian government are not known to have had any
direct dealing.
The Iranians provided the IAEA with a centrifuge and
the IAEA found that it was contaminated with enriched
uranium. The question immediately came up from where
did Iran got uranium. The Iranians were faced with the
question whether it had processed the fuel itself and
they explained that they got it by accident.
IAEA investigations indicated that Qadeer Khan had
surplus equipment and had also developed new
centrifuges, allowing him to seel old ones. It is
believed it was one of those old ones that ended up
with the Iranians.
Tehran told the IAEA it got the parts through a third
party but, IAED technical analysis found clear signs
that Qadeer Khan was involved in the designs.
The Libyan connection with Qadeer Khan was made by the
Libyan government iself to the US and UK after
undertaking to give up all projects of weapons of mass
destruction.
The reclusive North Korea is not forthcoming with any
revelations. But the South Korean government has said
it had come across evidence that Qadeer Khan was
passing on nuclear technology as well as equipment to
the North.
The US had been pressing Pakistan to take action
against Qadeer Khan for several months but it was the
Libyan connection in January that pulled the plug.
US President George W Bush himself gave the details of
the affair last week. He identified the key figure in
the clandestinen network as BSA Tahir, a Sri Lankan
businessman who was running a computer company in
Dubai . Bush called Tahir, the Pakistani
scientist's"deputy and chief financial officer and
money launderer."
Tahir, using another Dubai-based firm, a British
company in which he was a partner, placed an order
for centrifuge parts with a Malaysian company under
the guise that the parts were for the oil and gas
industry. Tahir's British partner has disowned any
knowledge of the clandestine operation or nything
about the centrifuge order.
The parts were delivered to Dubai and loaded onto a
German ship the BBC China and were sent to Libya in
the late summer of 2003. However, by then the Libyans
had entered too deep into negotiations with the US and
UK on giving up their projects for weapons of mass
destruction. It is believed that the Libyans, as a
sign of their good faith in the negotiations to give
up the projects, gave the tip-off that led to the
seizure of the vessels en route to Libya.
German and Italian authorities intercepted the vessel
and fund that consignment described as "used machinery
parts" listed as the cargo were found to be the
centrifuges manufactured in Malaysia.
The Libyans also showed the Americans and British a
design for a nuclear warhead, which intelligence
agencies believe originated with Qadeer Khan. Tripoli
said it had paid $50 million to Qadeer Khan for the
information he passed on about uranium centrifuges and
Chinese-inspired nuclear warhead designs as well as
equipment.
Successive Pakistani governments/military leaders had
given Qadeer Khan a free hand and this allowed him to
disguise his actions throughout if only because of his
"top-secret work" in the service of the country.
According to Shyam Bhatia, author of "Nuclear Rivals
In the Middle East" (1988), Qadeer Khan claims he was
linked to Mohammed Shahabuddin Ghauri, the 13th
century ruler of Delhi.
Perhaps it is one of the reasons that Pakistan named
its ballistic missiles bought from North Korea as
Ghauri.
Qadeer Khan used to live in astonishing luxury
throughout the last three decades, says Bhatia.
The Pakistani air force had given him the
round-the-clock use of a C-130 transport aircraft to
take him anywhere he wanted to in the world. Bhatia
argues that Qadeer Khan used this plane to fly in
parts of uranium centrifuges and other components to
Pakistan in the intial days before turning the
aircraft as his personal plane.
He even flew antique furniture from Pakistan to
Timbuktu to furnish the Hendrina Khan Hotel, which is
named after his South African-born wife.
When their plans to put Qadeer Khan and several of his
associates on trial went awry with the finding that
his daughter was holding evidence against them,
Pakistani officials, including the intelligence chief,
negotiated with him to apologise unconditionally and
surrender the evidence in exchange for a pardon.
Otherwise, experts argue, they would have put him on
trial.
Relatives of six other scientists who worked with
Qadeer Khan — who also held incommunicado at secret
locations — have accused the government of covering up
the affair.
In any event, the revelations have been startling, and
it remains to be seen whether Qadeer Khan would make a
fresh deal with the government for the evidence his
daughter holds.
However, his life might not be worth much once he
concludes that deal.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

No such thing as Pak bomb

THERE is no such as a Pakistani-made nuclear weapon.
Indeed, Pakistan has atomic weapons, but the only
Pakistani component in them is enriched uranium. The
design for the warhead was supplied by China and the
missile delivery system was provided by North Korea.
The disgraced Abdul Qadeer Khan, often described as
the "father of the Pakistani bomb," is not an expert
in nuclear technology, but a metallurgist turned rogue
nuclear trader who sold Chinese technology dating back
to the 60s and linked equipment designed from stolen
blueprints to Iran and Libya.
Khan, 51, is not a nuclear physicist; nor could he
successfully develop a long-range missile system
without outside help. His contribution was at best his
knowledge of metallurgy.
This is not a new theory. It has been heard for
several years. However, it has proved to be true in
the wake of the crisis triggered by revelations that
Khan clandestinely sold nuclear technology and
equipment to the Libyans and Iranians.
The following facts have been established so far from
various sources, named and unnamed.
— Khan, a metallurgy graduate from Europe, stole
blueprints for gas centrifuges from a Dutch company in
the mid-70s and took them to Pakistan.
— He was put in charge of the country's nuclear
programme by the then prime minister Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto and given a free hand and mandate to develop a
nuclear weapon. Successive government, both military
and civilian, continued to give him absolute authority
and confidentiality to accomplish the goal of
acquiring nuclear weapons.
— Khan, with help from the government and military,
secured a 1962 Chinese design for a nuclear warhead.
He also secured Chinese support for building a nuclear
reactor capable of producing 50 megawatts of power
that went operational in the late 80s.
— Simultaneously, he also secured missile componets
from North Korea and assembled them in Pakistan (the
most noted among the missiles is the one called
Ghauri).
— With help from Pakistani nuclear scientists assigned
to him, Khan built up a reserve of enough enriched
uranium — about 350 kilogrammes — from the
Chinese-built reactor to assemble to 15 to 17 nuclear
weapons by 1998. Some accounts have put the amount of
enriched uranium at 600 kilogrammes, enough to build
30 nuclear weapons.
— In May 1998, he carried out six nuclear tests, and
gave the impression to the outside world that Pakistan
not only has nuclear warheads but also the long-range
system to deliver them. One device is said to be
embedded underground ready for test.
— Since then, Khan regularly hosted seminars and
workshops on "vibrations in rapidly rotating
machinery" — which implied centrifuge technology
essential for producing weapons-gade uranium. Those
forums offered him the chance to draw interest from
Iran and Libya with whom he negotiated deals for
selling them gas centrifuges and other equipment which
he had obtained from China and North Korea.
— Khan was caught last year when the International
Atomic Energy Agency focused on Iran's nuclear
programme and Libya volunteered in secret to give up
its programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Centrifuges in Iran's possession were traced to Khan,
and Libya offered information to the US and UK that
its nuclear knowhow and centrifuges came from Khan
through middlemen based in the Gulf and Malaysia.
Since then, Khan has made a public confession that he
had made the deals with Iran and Libya. Conveniently,
the Pakistani government has pardoned but continues to
keep him under detention since he has refused to
surrender "evidence" that the Pakistani government and
military knew about his dubious deals. The evidence is
said to be with his daughter outside Pakistan, and
Khan, fearing for his life after he was caught, is
holding on to the evidence in return for a pledge that
he would not be killed and allowed to leave Pakistan
for a safe haven outside the country.

Friday, February 13, 2004

9/11 probe - Deception again

PV Vivekanand

BY NAMING a hand-picked group of peopled mostly deemed as Republican loyalists to conduct an investigations into "intelligence" failure in Iraq, the Bush administration is seen as trying to conceal the real fact of the affair -- intelligence data was tailored to suit and facilitate the administration's determination to launch war against Iraq.
The argument among American commentators today is that the so-called neoconservatives — read as pro-Israeli hardliners — in Washington were determined to wage on Iraq from the day George Bush entered the White House in 2001.
Such an argument was rife in the Middle East but it has gathered so much strength in Washington today that the administration is accused of creating the right atmosphere and conditions to launch military action against Iraq and went about it ruthlessly, picking and choosing information that suited its purposes and discarding anything that could raise questions about its intentions.
The "independent" investigation has been ordered with the predetermined objective that it would come up with a tailor-made finding exenorating Bush and the hardline neoconservatives around him of the political crime of deliberately waging an unprovoked war based on false and misleading claims that they themselves had created in the first place, argues Barry Grey, writing on the World Socialist Web Site.
That is one of the many salvos against Washington.
"Claims Iraq had nuclear weapons, death rays, vans of death, drones of death, mobile germ labs, poison gas factories, hidden weapons depots, long-ranged missiles, links to Al Qaeda — all were false," says The only thing real: Iraq's oil," says by Eric Margolis, a syndicated foreign affairs columnist and broadcaster, and author of War at the Top of the World - The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Tibet.
The New York Times recently carried an article recalling that US Secretary of State Collin Powell appeared at the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 that the evidence added up to "facts" and "not assertions" that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and that it was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program and building a fleet of advanced missiles.
"Powell's testimony, delivered at a moment of high suspense as American forces gathered in the Gulf region, was widely seen as the most powerful and persuasive presentation of the Bush administration's case that Iraq was bristling with horrific weapons. His reputation for caution and care gave it added credibility," said the New York Times.
"A year later, some of the statements made by Powell have been confirmed, but many of his gravest findings have been upended by David A. Kay, who until Jan. 23 was Washington's chief weapons inspector...," notes the paper.
The emerging consensus among American commentators is that
Bush and his people, having failed to tconvince the world that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to Al Qaeda and thus to the Sept.11 attacks, came up with charges that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a security threat to the US and the rest of the world.
Now, having invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam but failing to come up with any proof that he had any weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration is engaged in an effort to exonerate itself by blaming intelligence failure for the pre-war claims.
Bush this week shifted his rationale for the war saying Saddam had the capability to build weapons of mass destruction and he needed to be removed. Saddam having the capability was enough reason for war, he argued.
As a footnote, Bush also asserted that he had done a big favour for the people of Iraq by removing Saddam. Of course, Bush stayed away from recalling that prior to the war he himself had rattled off a list of specific quantities of chemical weapons like nerve gas and biological weapons and cited them as offering a legitimate reason for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam.
The very structure of the investigating panel indicates that the outcome of the inquiry would clear the administration saying that US intelligence agencies "misread" information and reached the conclusion that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and advised senior administration officals accordingly. These officials in turn conveyed the information to people closest to Bush like Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice and Powell, who in turn advised Bush, and the president acted accordingly; and that solves the problem, according to the thinking of those who are orchestrating the exercise now.
Washington describes the investigators as independent. But there is little of any independence about the group.
Retired federal judge Laurence Silberman, who co-chairs the investigating panel, is known as a long-time Republic supporters and has a record of having cleared senior Republican administration officials of any wrongdoing in past cases, points out Grey in an article on World Socialist Web Site under the title "Bush’s Iraq commission and the 'intelligence failure' fraud."
Grey specifically efers to the infamous Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan adminstration years. (The scandal stemmed from a revelation that Reagan had authorised a secret operation to finance and arm, in violation of US law, the contra death squads that killed tens of thousands of people in Nicaragua. Silberman played a key role in sabotaging the investigation by Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh).
Grey argues:
"Bush brought into his administration precisely those extreme militarists such as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz who had for the better part of a decade been campaigning for a new war to “finish the job” left undone by the Gulf war of 1991—overthrowing the Baathist regime, occupying Iraq, and seizing control of its oil resources. Both he and Cheney had the closest ties to American oil and energy conglomerates that stood to benefit most immediately and directly from this imperialist enterprise.
"The evidence is, by now, voluminous that Bush and his top advisers came to power with the determination to invade Iraq. What they lacked was a pretext. The terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001, provided them with precisely the casus belli they had been seeking, and they eagerly seized on it, even though they knew Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the hijack-bombings and had no links to Al Qaeda.
"Far from being misled, Bush and his co-conspirators proceeded to concoct a case for waging an unprovoked war, relying on the complicity of the Democratic Party and the media. A central preoccupation of the administration became the fabrication of intelligence."

Suspect timing

The timing of the expected submission of the inquiry panel's report — until after the November elections — is also suspect. No doubt, the timing is set to serve the purpose of concealing the real facts and pre-empt any political fallout from the report, argues Bush opponents.
Most telling is the mandated task of the panel — determining why there was an "intelligence failure" that led to conflicting claims and statements by Bush and his closest aides like Vice-President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell and others on Iraq's alleged stocks of weapons of mass destruction.
The whole premise of this assertion sidesteps any investigations into determining whether these false claims were issued with the sole objective of justifying the war and those who made the claims knew that they were based on doctored intelligence reports.
The investigation should have been entrusted with a non-partisan group and ordered to focus on the behind-the-scene conduct of Bush and others around him as they plotted the war against Iraq. Such an inquiry, if conducted in transparency and objectivity, would have revealed the truth of the political conspiracy and disinformation campaign that the administration waged in order to build the case against Saddam.
That anyone in the administration who opposed that approach was booted out was evident in the dismissal of Paul O’Neill as treasury secretary last year. O'Neill has revealed that the Bush administration started discussing means to set the ground for invading and occupying Iraq as soon as Bush assumed office in January 2001. He stated that the overthrow of Saddam was a priority topic at the first National Security Council meeting of the Bush administration and that he had access to documents that clearly indicated that the administration was planning the invasion and occupation of Iraq and exploitation of its oil reserves in the first days after assuming office.
Rumseld himself is said to have advocated seizing the Sept.11 attacks as the pretext for war against Iraq and preparing for invasion and occupation of that country in less than 24 hours after the aerial assaults in New York and Washington. The war on Afghanistan was only the fore-runner of the action against Iraq.
When one speaks about "intelligence failure," the agency that would be faulted should be the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the case of Iraq, the CIA had done its job, but its findings were twisted and used selectively and often out-of-context to serve the purpose of those who were determined to wage war on Iraq.
A honest and objective investigation would reveal that
Rumsfeld and his associates at the Defence Department had set up their own intelligence operation, called the Office of Special Plans.
This operation skirted all intelligence agencies of the US, including the CIA, and created, twisted and filtered information in a manner that a case for war against Iraq was built on dubious grounds.
Apart from discrediting and twisting CIA findings that there was no evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, the Office of Special Plans adopted the view that the CIA was undermining the OSP findings.
Laurie Mylroie, who is close to Cheney and other hardliners in Washington, has accused the CIA and the State Department of "systematically" discrediting "critical intelligence about Saddam’s regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction.”
According to Washington insiders, these bent upon discrediting the State Department and the CIA included Cheney, Rumsfeld, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Wolfowitz' deputy Douglas Feith and Pentagon adviser Richard Perle.
Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst, has provided an insight to the workings of the Office of Special Plans. He says that the Bush ddministration gave "greatest credence to accounts that presented the most lurid picture of Iraqi activities. In many cases intelligence analysts were distrustful of those sources, or knew unequivocally that they were wrong. But when they said so, they were not heeded...."
The administration aslo drew heavily on newspaper articles that conformed to the views of administration officials, he says.
"To a great extent OSP personnel ‘cherry-picked’ the intelligence they passed on, selecting reports that supported the Administration’s pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest," says Pollack.
A particular example, he says, was the way the OSP accepted every "report" given by the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress (INC) headed by Ahmed Chalabi on Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction and rejected reports given by trained intelligence officers because the INC was saying what the OSP "wanted to hear."
In turn, the OSP passed "raw, unverified intelligence straight to the cabinet level as gospel," says Pollack.
Such formal submission of reports was made an integral part of the OSP activities since the senior administration officials who made public statements based wanted to back up themselves.
The Washington Post wrote in June 1003 that Cheney and one of his top aides had tried to pressure the CIA "into producing more categorical and blood-curdling assessments of Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capacities" and “sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here.”
The Post went on to say that Iraq analyst at the CIA were under pressure to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that going into Iraq was urgent.
Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker magazine in October 2003: “The administration eventually got its way, a former CIA official said. ‘The analysts at the CIA were beaten down defending their assertions. And, they blame George Tenet for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.’”
No doubt these reports will be reviewed as routine by the new investigators, but it is unlikely that the officials will be questioned whether they were aware that the documents were based on doctored intelligence and they were filing it away for a situation where they were asked what their sources were.
The Bush administration is hoping that ordering an "independent" investigation will put to rest questions about the duplicity of its approach to war and the issue would not cast clouds on Bush's re-election chances.
But it might not be the case. In the days, weeks and months ahead, there would be more revelations and political horse-trading in Washington — plus a potential failure of Washington's political efforts in Iraq — that could raise more serious and focused questions about why the war itself. And those questions would refuse to be shelved, given the added ammunition Bush's Democrat rivals have found in their arsenal.
Bill van Auken, leader of the Socialist Equality Party of the US, summarised what many Americans feel today.
He says that the Iraq embroglio was "not a matter of miscalculations or exaggerations by intelligence agents."
"The administration repeatedly claimed that it had irrefutable evidence that Iraq had several hundred tonnes of chemical and biological weapons and was on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons," Van Auken points out. "Top officials insisted that they even knew the precise whereabouts of these weapons. Now, with the first anniversary of the war approaching, they are forced to admit that not a single vial of such material is to be found in all of Iraq.
"If no weapons were there, clearly there existed no verified evidence that they were there, something that United Nations inspectors attested to before the war began. The inescapable conclusion is that the government manufactured a pretext for dragging the American people into war. As a result, tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. At least 525 US soldiers have lost their lives and thousands more have been wounded.
"This would be the starting point for any genuinely independent investigation. The questions before such a panel would include: Who was responsible for lying to the American people and to the world in order to carry out an illegal war? Whose interests—hidden behind the false claims about WMD—were served by this war? How was the administration allowed to get away with it?"