The Trial of a Nation
Urstruly December 1, 2005
#113 Posted by Behram1 on December 2, 2005 7:14:40 pm
Dear Urstruly,
I read the November 2005 issue of Atlantic Monthly on A.Q. Khan, wherein the writer went at great lengths to show the shananigans of this egolamaniac.
You must read that article.
Respectfully submitted,
reply to this interact
write a new interact
add to favorites
flag objectionable content
#114 Posted by rsridhar on December 2, 2005 7:53:39 pm
re: this article
This article is a hogwash.
Just because Abdul ``Xerox`` Khan was not prosecuted (for lack of evidence) does not mean he is not guily of pilfering the technology.
An article from MSNBC:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3340760
(Pakistan’s nuclear father, master spy
A nationalist, Abdul Qadeer Khan built an atomic bomb
By Robert Windrem
NBC News
Abdul Qadeer Khan and Avul Pakir Jainulabuddin Abdul Kallam have a lot in common. It`s too bad they hate each other.
The fathers of the Pakistani and Indian atomic bomb respectively, Khan and Abdul Kalam are both now old men, both Muslims, both born in what is now India and both claim to be the products of their nation`s scientific cultures... although each spent productive time overseas. And each had a major say not only in the development of nuclear programs but long-range missile development as well.
There are differences between these national heroes of the nuclear age. Khan is a man of bombast--figuratively as well as literally, while Abdul Kalam is an ascete, known for his poetry.
Of the two, Khan is the better known, the more colorful, the more Strangelovian. Seen in the west as a scientific rogue, a spy even, he is outspoken, critical of western values and a man on a mission, and that mission is simply infusing Pakistan with superpower pride.
While always pushing that agenda, Khan claims he is not as he seems, telling a press conference in 2002 that he`s ``one of the most gentle people in Pakistan... I feed birds and ants.`` And while rumors circulate that he owns the ``Hotshots`` nightclub in Islamabad, Khan demurs, saying he makes only $400 a month.
His words have been recorded and reported on for 20 years and he has never wavered. His 2002 comments were typical: on one hand he brandished the sword: ``The armed forces are not under pressure any more; they believe they are at equal footing with the enemy.`` Then, in almost the same breath, he equated the success of Pakistan`s billion-dollar bomb with its more pressing concerns: ``Now we can concentrate on our education, and economic and social problems.``
UNAPOLOGETIC PATRIOT
Khan is a metallurgist by training, but it had taken a great deal more than a doctorate in metallurgy to provide Pakistan with the atomic bomb. It had taken a sound knowledge of atomic physics, engineering, and management. It had taken a long stint in the Netherlands where he had filched the secret formula for processing uranium until it was bomb-grade from right under the noses of his trusting Dutch hosts. It had taken a degree of patriotism that only one adjective could adequately describe: fanatical. It had taken monumental self-absorption and egotism. And it had taken money--real money.
If he resembled anyone in the US atomic bomb program, it was Edward Teller, the unapologetic patriot instead of Robert Oppenheimer, the quixotic scientist.
Born in Bhopal, India, Khan eventually found his way to Pakistan like millions of other Muslims. Precocious, he was able to breeze through science courses first in Pakistan, then in Europe, ultimately earning a doctorate from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium in 1972.
That year, he went to work for the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory, or FDO, in Amsterdam. FDO was a subsidiary of a Dutch firm, Verenigde Mchine-Fabrieken, which in turn worked closely with one of Western Europe`s most important nuclear facilities: URENCO. Because they were unwilling to rely on the United States nuclear fuel for their power reactors, Great Britain, German and the Netherlands had created URENCO in 1970 to guarantee their own supply of enriched uranium, the same fuel used in the Hiroshima bomb.
An enrichment plant was located in Almelo, Holland, and used highly classified ultracentrifuge technology to separate scarce highly fissionable U-235 from abundant U-238 by spinning the two isotopes at up to 100,000 revolutions a minute. FDO was URENCO subcontractor and consultant. Its personnel, including Khan, were technically subject to tight security controls.
Khan, a thoroughly likeable fellow who made friends wherever he went, was enthusiastically recommended to URENCO for a clearance by FDO, which noted that he had lived in the West for eleven years and was married to a Dutch national. The Dutch Security Service, BVD, then ran a background check on Khan. The investigation neglected to find out that Mrs. Khan was not Dutch at all, but rather a Dutch-speaking South African who carried a British passport. Khan quickly fit in, plying secretaries with candy and cookies, gamely went out for volleyball with his neighbors and took his wife and two daughters to the seaside or into the Ardennes on weekends.
Within a week or so of being hired, Khan was sent over to Almelo. It was the first of many trips he would make to the uranium factory. Khan was also responsible for translating technical documents, which he often took home with FDO`s blessing. As the months passed, A. Q. Khan became thoroughly familiar not only with all the design plans at Almelo but with those belonging to the companies that supplied parts for the ultracentrifuges.
SECRETS AND SPIES
Khan`s most important foray to Almelo was made in the autumn of 1974, when he spent 16 days in the plant`s most secret area. His assignment was to translate a highly classified report on a breakthrough in centrifuge technology from German to Dutch. During the 16 days, the delightful young Pakistani popped up everywhere. Asked by one colleague why he was writing in a foreign script, Khan replied that it was only a letter back to his family back home. Another noticed that he continually roamed around the factory, notebook in hand, but thought nothing of it.
No one seems to know when A Q. Khan began committing espionage for Pakistan. He certainly would have been an ideal choice as a spy. He came from a family of patriots. His father was a teacher; grandfather and great-grandfather were military officers. Most important, his joviality masked a bitter past. He had been born in Bhopal in 1935, during the British raj. But his family had been forced to flee India to Pakistan during the partition of British India. He therefore often remarked, ``Everybody kicks those who do not have a country of their own.`` And he added, ``we have to safeguard this country of the pure more than out own lives.``
A subsequent investigation by the Dutch turned up no evidence that he was sent to the Netherlands as a spy. Nor is it clear whether he approached his government or the other way around. Whatever the case, it seems that he began pulling secrets out of URENCO and transmitting them to Islamabad only after India exploded its peaceful bomb in May 1974, but the stint inside Almelo was not the finale to his career in espionage.
In January 1976, Khan and family suddenly left Holland and turned up in Pakistan. His wife wrote to her former neighbors that they were on vacation and that her husband had fallen ill. Soon afterward, Khan himself sent a letter of resignation to FDO, effective that March. It was all nice, neat, and pleasant. Smiling A. Q. Khan apparently managed to steal secrets that were the most closely guarded industrial gems in western Europe. Of equal importance to the technical materials was a list of suppliers to URENCO, the companies across Europe that made the components he needed to obtain for Pakistan.
Khan soon rose to head the nascent Pakistani program, and from its new headquarters at Kahuta, south of Islamabad, directed a new effort, obtaining critical technology and equipment to complement what he had learned in the Netherlands.
In more than 20 letters written to the network of Pakistani agents who smuggled centrifuge parts out of Canad during the late 1970`s, Khan laid out the successes of his teams. He described the travels of key operatives, the role of such companies as Siemens, Union Carbide and others in the building of Kahuta, and even the technical papers he was ordering from the US Department of Commerce with no more trouble than he would have had requesting data on wheat production techniques.
The following months and years saw more of the same. Responding to a leaked CIA charge that Pakistan would be able to explode an atomic bomb within a few years, Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq assured the world that his country had absolutely no intention of acquiring an atomic arsenal. Khan, however, was not so discreet. In November 1990, he said simply that Pakistan could by then enrich uranium and produce an atomic bomb ``if necessary``.
FROM SCIENTIST TO NATIONAL HERO
Khan by then had become a national hero: a scientist-manager on a par with Iraqi`s Jafar Jafar and Israel`s Yuval Neeman, both western-educated but still the ultimate patriots.
He was rewarded for that patriotism by being made the head of a research institute that was named after him: the A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories at Kahuta. Although he was portrayed by the western press as a superspy after his feat was made public, he himself not only avoided reference to it but denied that Pakistan had received any help, clandestine or otherwise, from other nations. ``All the research work [at Kahuta] was the result of our innovation and struggle,`` he told a group of Pakistani librarians in 1990. ``We did not receive any technical know-how from abroad, but we can`t reject the use of books, magazines and research papers in this connection.``
On one occasion--his receiving a gold medal from the Pakistani Institute of National Affairs--Khan boasted that Kahuta had put Pakistan on ``the world nuclear map``. And he added that that his long stay in Europe and ``intimate knowledge of various countries and their manufacturing firms was an asset.`` That was putting it mildly.
Beneath Khan`s apparently serene, almost self=effacing demeanor, there beat the heart of a dedicated Muslim scientist. Indeed, he often seemed conflicted by the requirements of strict secrecy about his country`s nuclear weapons program, on one hand, and an irresistible urge to brag about it -- to flout it in the face of the West--on the other.
``Western countries had never imagined that a poor and backward country like Pakistan would finish their monopoly [on uranium monopoly] in such a short time,`` he told a Rawalpindi journalist in February 1984. ``As soon as they realized that Pakistan had dashed their dreams, they pounced on Pakistan like hungry jackals and began attacking us with all kinds of accusations and falsehoods. You see yourself... how could they tolerate a Muslim country becoming their equal in this field.``
Then, in an outburst of anger that today must worry Israel even more than when it was said 20 years ago, Khan directed his bitterness not just as the west: ``All western countries, including Israel, are not only the enemies of Pakistan but in fact of Islam. Had any other Muslim country instead of Pakistan made this progress, they would have conducted the same poisonous propaganda about it. The examples of Iraq and Libya are before you.
Today, Khan is showered with rose petals, his place in history secured. A soccer team, the ``Dr Abdel Qadeer Khan Eleven`` is named for him, Pakistan is about to issue stamps commemorating the nuclear tests, each featuring his official portrait.
Not only is he in charge of the atomic bomb program, but also, the Ghauri missile that will carry the bombs. There are nagging questions about his bomb: the CIA believes that instead of six successful tests in 1998, the Pakistanis had two maybe three. The rest, they believe, were duds. But in the articles of faith that make up any nation`s nuclear theology, it doesn`t matter much. It is not a bad thing, Khan knows, if India can never be sure any missile aimed at its troops or city will detonate... and he will never tell them.
Robert Windrem is an investigative reporter at NBC)
The above article is dated but tells the interesting tale of subterfuge that Pak`s nuclear hero indulged in with gay abandon.
Sridhar
This article is a hogwash.
Just because Abdul ``Xerox`` Khan was not prosecuted (for lack of evidence) does not mean he is not guily of pilfering the technology.
An article from MSNBC:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3340760
(Pakistan’s nuclear father, master spy
A nationalist, Abdul Qadeer Khan built an atomic bomb
By Robert Windrem
NBC News
Abdul Qadeer Khan and Avul Pakir Jainulabuddin Abdul Kallam have a lot in common. It`s too bad they hate each other.
The fathers of the Pakistani and Indian atomic bomb respectively, Khan and Abdul Kalam are both now old men, both Muslims, both born in what is now India and both claim to be the products of their nation`s scientific cultures... although each spent productive time overseas. And each had a major say not only in the development of nuclear programs but long-range missile development as well.
There are differences between these national heroes of the nuclear age. Khan is a man of bombast--figuratively as well as literally, while Abdul Kalam is an ascete, known for his poetry.
Of the two, Khan is the better known, the more colorful, the more Strangelovian. Seen in the west as a scientific rogue, a spy even, he is outspoken, critical of western values and a man on a mission, and that mission is simply infusing Pakistan with superpower pride.
While always pushing that agenda, Khan claims he is not as he seems, telling a press conference in 2002 that he`s ``one of the most gentle people in Pakistan... I feed birds and ants.`` And while rumors circulate that he owns the ``Hotshots`` nightclub in Islamabad, Khan demurs, saying he makes only $400 a month.
His words have been recorded and reported on for 20 years and he has never wavered. His 2002 comments were typical: on one hand he brandished the sword: ``The armed forces are not under pressure any more; they believe they are at equal footing with the enemy.`` Then, in almost the same breath, he equated the success of Pakistan`s billion-dollar bomb with its more pressing concerns: ``Now we can concentrate on our education, and economic and social problems.``
UNAPOLOGETIC PATRIOT
Khan is a metallurgist by training, but it had taken a great deal more than a doctorate in metallurgy to provide Pakistan with the atomic bomb. It had taken a sound knowledge of atomic physics, engineering, and management. It had taken a long stint in the Netherlands where he had filched the secret formula for processing uranium until it was bomb-grade from right under the noses of his trusting Dutch hosts. It had taken a degree of patriotism that only one adjective could adequately describe: fanatical. It had taken monumental self-absorption and egotism. And it had taken money--real money.
If he resembled anyone in the US atomic bomb program, it was Edward Teller, the unapologetic patriot instead of Robert Oppenheimer, the quixotic scientist.
Born in Bhopal, India, Khan eventually found his way to Pakistan like millions of other Muslims. Precocious, he was able to breeze through science courses first in Pakistan, then in Europe, ultimately earning a doctorate from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium in 1972.
That year, he went to work for the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory, or FDO, in Amsterdam. FDO was a subsidiary of a Dutch firm, Verenigde Mchine-Fabrieken, which in turn worked closely with one of Western Europe`s most important nuclear facilities: URENCO. Because they were unwilling to rely on the United States nuclear fuel for their power reactors, Great Britain, German and the Netherlands had created URENCO in 1970 to guarantee their own supply of enriched uranium, the same fuel used in the Hiroshima bomb.
An enrichment plant was located in Almelo, Holland, and used highly classified ultracentrifuge technology to separate scarce highly fissionable U-235 from abundant U-238 by spinning the two isotopes at up to 100,000 revolutions a minute. FDO was URENCO subcontractor and consultant. Its personnel, including Khan, were technically subject to tight security controls.
Khan, a thoroughly likeable fellow who made friends wherever he went, was enthusiastically recommended to URENCO for a clearance by FDO, which noted that he had lived in the West for eleven years and was married to a Dutch national. The Dutch Security Service, BVD, then ran a background check on Khan. The investigation neglected to find out that Mrs. Khan was not Dutch at all, but rather a Dutch-speaking South African who carried a British passport. Khan quickly fit in, plying secretaries with candy and cookies, gamely went out for volleyball with his neighbors and took his wife and two daughters to the seaside or into the Ardennes on weekends.
Within a week or so of being hired, Khan was sent over to Almelo. It was the first of many trips he would make to the uranium factory. Khan was also responsible for translating technical documents, which he often took home with FDO`s blessing. As the months passed, A. Q. Khan became thoroughly familiar not only with all the design plans at Almelo but with those belonging to the companies that supplied parts for the ultracentrifuges.
SECRETS AND SPIES
Khan`s most important foray to Almelo was made in the autumn of 1974, when he spent 16 days in the plant`s most secret area. His assignment was to translate a highly classified report on a breakthrough in centrifuge technology from German to Dutch. During the 16 days, the delightful young Pakistani popped up everywhere. Asked by one colleague why he was writing in a foreign script, Khan replied that it was only a letter back to his family back home. Another noticed that he continually roamed around the factory, notebook in hand, but thought nothing of it.
No one seems to know when A Q. Khan began committing espionage for Pakistan. He certainly would have been an ideal choice as a spy. He came from a family of patriots. His father was a teacher; grandfather and great-grandfather were military officers. Most important, his joviality masked a bitter past. He had been born in Bhopal in 1935, during the British raj. But his family had been forced to flee India to Pakistan during the partition of British India. He therefore often remarked, ``Everybody kicks those who do not have a country of their own.`` And he added, ``we have to safeguard this country of the pure more than out own lives.``
A subsequent investigation by the Dutch turned up no evidence that he was sent to the Netherlands as a spy. Nor is it clear whether he approached his government or the other way around. Whatever the case, it seems that he began pulling secrets out of URENCO and transmitting them to Islamabad only after India exploded its peaceful bomb in May 1974, but the stint inside Almelo was not the finale to his career in espionage.
In January 1976, Khan and family suddenly left Holland and turned up in Pakistan. His wife wrote to her former neighbors that they were on vacation and that her husband had fallen ill. Soon afterward, Khan himself sent a letter of resignation to FDO, effective that March. It was all nice, neat, and pleasant. Smiling A. Q. Khan apparently managed to steal secrets that were the most closely guarded industrial gems in western Europe. Of equal importance to the technical materials was a list of suppliers to URENCO, the companies across Europe that made the components he needed to obtain for Pakistan.
Khan soon rose to head the nascent Pakistani program, and from its new headquarters at Kahuta, south of Islamabad, directed a new effort, obtaining critical technology and equipment to complement what he had learned in the Netherlands.
In more than 20 letters written to the network of Pakistani agents who smuggled centrifuge parts out of Canad during the late 1970`s, Khan laid out the successes of his teams. He described the travels of key operatives, the role of such companies as Siemens, Union Carbide and others in the building of Kahuta, and even the technical papers he was ordering from the US Department of Commerce with no more trouble than he would have had requesting data on wheat production techniques.
The following months and years saw more of the same. Responding to a leaked CIA charge that Pakistan would be able to explode an atomic bomb within a few years, Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq assured the world that his country had absolutely no intention of acquiring an atomic arsenal. Khan, however, was not so discreet. In November 1990, he said simply that Pakistan could by then enrich uranium and produce an atomic bomb ``if necessary``.
FROM SCIENTIST TO NATIONAL HERO
Khan by then had become a national hero: a scientist-manager on a par with Iraqi`s Jafar Jafar and Israel`s Yuval Neeman, both western-educated but still the ultimate patriots.
He was rewarded for that patriotism by being made the head of a research institute that was named after him: the A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories at Kahuta. Although he was portrayed by the western press as a superspy after his feat was made public, he himself not only avoided reference to it but denied that Pakistan had received any help, clandestine or otherwise, from other nations. ``All the research work [at Kahuta] was the result of our innovation and struggle,`` he told a group of Pakistani librarians in 1990. ``We did not receive any technical know-how from abroad, but we can`t reject the use of books, magazines and research papers in this connection.``
On one occasion--his receiving a gold medal from the Pakistani Institute of National Affairs--Khan boasted that Kahuta had put Pakistan on ``the world nuclear map``. And he added that that his long stay in Europe and ``intimate knowledge of various countries and their manufacturing firms was an asset.`` That was putting it mildly.
Beneath Khan`s apparently serene, almost self=effacing demeanor, there beat the heart of a dedicated Muslim scientist. Indeed, he often seemed conflicted by the requirements of strict secrecy about his country`s nuclear weapons program, on one hand, and an irresistible urge to brag about it -- to flout it in the face of the West--on the other.
``Western countries had never imagined that a poor and backward country like Pakistan would finish their monopoly [on uranium monopoly] in such a short time,`` he told a Rawalpindi journalist in February 1984. ``As soon as they realized that Pakistan had dashed their dreams, they pounced on Pakistan like hungry jackals and began attacking us with all kinds of accusations and falsehoods. You see yourself... how could they tolerate a Muslim country becoming their equal in this field.``
Then, in an outburst of anger that today must worry Israel even more than when it was said 20 years ago, Khan directed his bitterness not just as the west: ``All western countries, including Israel, are not only the enemies of Pakistan but in fact of Islam. Had any other Muslim country instead of Pakistan made this progress, they would have conducted the same poisonous propaganda about it. The examples of Iraq and Libya are before you.
Today, Khan is showered with rose petals, his place in history secured. A soccer team, the ``Dr Abdel Qadeer Khan Eleven`` is named for him, Pakistan is about to issue stamps commemorating the nuclear tests, each featuring his official portrait.
Not only is he in charge of the atomic bomb program, but also, the Ghauri missile that will carry the bombs. There are nagging questions about his bomb: the CIA believes that instead of six successful tests in 1998, the Pakistanis had two maybe three. The rest, they believe, were duds. But in the articles of faith that make up any nation`s nuclear theology, it doesn`t matter much. It is not a bad thing, Khan knows, if India can never be sure any missile aimed at its troops or city will detonate... and he will never tell them.
Robert Windrem is an investigative reporter at NBC)
The above article is dated but tells the interesting tale of subterfuge that Pak`s nuclear hero indulged in with gay abandon.
Sridhar
#115 Posted by rsridhar on December 2, 2005 7:55:07 pm
re:#105 by godot
Ha, ha.
What are u smoking dude?
Pak is the terrorist capital of the world and has no future.
Sridhar
Ha, ha.
What are u smoking dude?
Pak is the terrorist capital of the world and has no future.
Sridhar
#116 Posted by rsridhar on December 2, 2005 7:58:32 pm
re: Pak`s nuclear hero, a proliferator
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12081
(Pakistani Proliferation
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
Washington Times | February 6, 2004
After three years of denying anything was amiss in Pakistan`s nuclear establishment, President Pervez Musharraf has finally conceded that a national icon, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan (AQK), the father of Pakistan`s nuclear arsenal, is a criminal proliferator of nuclear secrets.
But Mr. Musharraf is still reluctant to concede that his country`s all-powerful and controversial Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency knew about it. Islamabad`s behind-the-scenes whispers say Mr. Musharraf , when he was army chief of staff, then chief executive before he became president, also was fully in the picture.
AQK, a devout Muslim with a penchant for the lifestyle of the rich and famous, is under house arrest after admitting he peddled nuclear know-how to North Korea, Iran and Libya. After Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi decided last month to dismantle his embryonic nuclear weapons program under international inspection, AQK`s assistance could no longer be denied. AQK and his nuclear scientists had given Libya the wherewithal, originally stolen from the plant where Dr. Khan worked in the Netherlands in the 1970s, to manufacture the centrifuge technology needed to refine uranium to weapons-grade quality.
Under questioning by Mr. Musharraf himself, AQK confessed to being the ``enabler`` for the secret nuclear weapons programs of both North Korea and Iran, the remaining two members of president Bush`s axis of evil trio. Iraq was the third. But Pakistan`s Dr. No also made it clear he would go public with everything he knows about the powers-that-be at a public trial.
AQK`s Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) — the heart of Pakistan`s nuclear establishment — was so secret even civilian prime ministers were not allowed to visit the installations 20 miles west of Islamabad. KRL was under the strict control and supervision of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Both the KRL and ISI are known for their anti-American culture.
In 2001, a U.S. spy-in-the-sky satellite photographed a Pakistani C-130 at Pyongyang airport in North Korea as it loaded missiles for Pakistan. These missiles were exchanged for nuclear weapons technology. ISI was in charge of the entire operation.
AQK`s motivations were ideological as well as the lure of lucre. He had a well-known loathing of the U.S. that dated back to 1989 when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and the U.S. began punishing Pakistan for its secret quest to acquire a nuclear arsenal. The Bush 41 and Clinton administrations imposed a series of diplomatic, economic, and military sanctions against Pakistan, which kept denying it was involved in anything beyond the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Until Pakistan`s 1998 nuclear tests, that is.
AQK was generously compensated for helping America`s enemies achieve nuclear weapons capabilities. He made dozens of trips to North Korea and to Dubai, where he maintained a mansion, and met with Libyan and Iranian nuclear scientists. He also conducted similar meetings in Casablanca, Morocco, and Istanbul, Turkey. Anyone who knows anything about Pakistan`s ultrasecret nuclear activities also knows these activities could not have taken place without the full knowledge — and approval — of ISI.
President Musharraf first suspected something was amiss in March 2001 when he relieved AQK as head of Pakistan`s nuclear program and appointed him as an adviser to the president on nuclear affairs. But AQK continued his nuclear proliferation activities unimpeded until last week when he was fired as an adviser to the president and placed under house arrest.
Two Pakistani nuclear scientists under AQK`s orders journeyed to Kandahar, Afghanistan, shortly before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to confer with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, and Osama bin Laden. Shortly after Operation Enduring Freedom toppled the Taliban regime, one of Mullah Omar`s messages warned of an event that would soon hit the U.S. ``so terrible that it defies description.`` Some intelligence analysts relate Omar`s statement to the visit of the two Pakistani scientists before the U.S. attack who presumably told their interlocutors how to assemble a ``dirty bomb,`` or a blend of conventional explosives with radioactive materials.
After the liberation of Kabul and Kandahar, the CIA submitted to Mr. Musharraf a list of a half-dozen nuclear scientists it wanted probed for al Qaeda links. The two who had visited Kandahar before September 11, Suleiman Asad and Muhammad Ali Muktar, suddenly were working in Burma on undisclosed research, and therefore unavailable.
Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmud, former director of Pakistan`s Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and Chief Engineer Chaudry Abdul Majeed had also befriended Taliban leaders, according to documents captured in Kabul.
Shortly before Enduring Freedom got under way Oct. 7, 2001, Mr. Musharraf dispatched to Kandahar the head of ISI, accompanied by some of Pakistan`s politico-religious leaders, to urge Omar to give up Osama bin Laden and thus avoid an American attack. The ISI chief ignored Mr. Musharraf`s orders and advised Omar not to surrender bin Laden. Mr. Musharraf fired him.
Two Pakistani generals — former army chief Gen. Aslam Beg — and former ISI chief Gen. Hamid Gul — are close to AQK and are believed to have been aware of his self-appointed mission to proliferate nuclear weapons knowledge to America`s enemies. Gen. Gul once said he looked forward to the day when a truly Islamic state could be established — a new caliphate comprised of a nuclear arsenal and the oil resources of Iran and the Gulf after the demise of the Saudi royal family.
Islamist militants also see Iraq as a potential battlefield for a larger war of civilizations that Gen. Beg told UPI in December 2001 ``is already upon us.`` The overall strategic objective of the AQK-Beg-Gul school of thinking is humiliation of the U.S., much as earlier was visited on the Soviets in Afghanistan.
While Mr. Musharraf was in the U.S. last June to reassure President Bush about his pro-American bona fides, his own chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, Gen. Mohammed Aziz Khan said, at a public meeting, ``America is the No. 1 enemy of the Muslim world and is conspiring against Muslim nations all over the world.`` These are also the sentiments that inspire Pakistan`s nuclear proliferation campaign. ``To assume that only Dr. Khan and his No. 2., Muhammad Farooq, the head of overseas procurement, were involved is patently absurd,`` said a U.S. intelligence source who has served in Pakistan.
To avoid what could be a public trial embarrassing the Pakistani high command, including Mr. Musharraf himself, and ISI, the president persuaded AQK to fall on his sword. On Wednesday, Mr. Khan made a full groveling confession on TV about his global proliferating activities ``that I did in good faith`` but now realize ``I was mistaken.``
He absolved the government and military from any culpability. But this was unlikely to end the AQK saga. Next comes the unraveling of AQK`s international nuclear black market, with operatives including Americans, Europeans, Arabs and Asians.)
Sridhar
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12081
(Pakistani Proliferation
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
Washington Times | February 6, 2004
After three years of denying anything was amiss in Pakistan`s nuclear establishment, President Pervez Musharraf has finally conceded that a national icon, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan (AQK), the father of Pakistan`s nuclear arsenal, is a criminal proliferator of nuclear secrets.
But Mr. Musharraf is still reluctant to concede that his country`s all-powerful and controversial Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency knew about it. Islamabad`s behind-the-scenes whispers say Mr. Musharraf , when he was army chief of staff, then chief executive before he became president, also was fully in the picture.
AQK, a devout Muslim with a penchant for the lifestyle of the rich and famous, is under house arrest after admitting he peddled nuclear know-how to North Korea, Iran and Libya. After Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi decided last month to dismantle his embryonic nuclear weapons program under international inspection, AQK`s assistance could no longer be denied. AQK and his nuclear scientists had given Libya the wherewithal, originally stolen from the plant where Dr. Khan worked in the Netherlands in the 1970s, to manufacture the centrifuge technology needed to refine uranium to weapons-grade quality.
Under questioning by Mr. Musharraf himself, AQK confessed to being the ``enabler`` for the secret nuclear weapons programs of both North Korea and Iran, the remaining two members of president Bush`s axis of evil trio. Iraq was the third. But Pakistan`s Dr. No also made it clear he would go public with everything he knows about the powers-that-be at a public trial.
AQK`s Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) — the heart of Pakistan`s nuclear establishment — was so secret even civilian prime ministers were not allowed to visit the installations 20 miles west of Islamabad. KRL was under the strict control and supervision of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Both the KRL and ISI are known for their anti-American culture.
In 2001, a U.S. spy-in-the-sky satellite photographed a Pakistani C-130 at Pyongyang airport in North Korea as it loaded missiles for Pakistan. These missiles were exchanged for nuclear weapons technology. ISI was in charge of the entire operation.
AQK`s motivations were ideological as well as the lure of lucre. He had a well-known loathing of the U.S. that dated back to 1989 when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and the U.S. began punishing Pakistan for its secret quest to acquire a nuclear arsenal. The Bush 41 and Clinton administrations imposed a series of diplomatic, economic, and military sanctions against Pakistan, which kept denying it was involved in anything beyond the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Until Pakistan`s 1998 nuclear tests, that is.
AQK was generously compensated for helping America`s enemies achieve nuclear weapons capabilities. He made dozens of trips to North Korea and to Dubai, where he maintained a mansion, and met with Libyan and Iranian nuclear scientists. He also conducted similar meetings in Casablanca, Morocco, and Istanbul, Turkey. Anyone who knows anything about Pakistan`s ultrasecret nuclear activities also knows these activities could not have taken place without the full knowledge — and approval — of ISI.
President Musharraf first suspected something was amiss in March 2001 when he relieved AQK as head of Pakistan`s nuclear program and appointed him as an adviser to the president on nuclear affairs. But AQK continued his nuclear proliferation activities unimpeded until last week when he was fired as an adviser to the president and placed under house arrest.
Two Pakistani nuclear scientists under AQK`s orders journeyed to Kandahar, Afghanistan, shortly before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to confer with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, and Osama bin Laden. Shortly after Operation Enduring Freedom toppled the Taliban regime, one of Mullah Omar`s messages warned of an event that would soon hit the U.S. ``so terrible that it defies description.`` Some intelligence analysts relate Omar`s statement to the visit of the two Pakistani scientists before the U.S. attack who presumably told their interlocutors how to assemble a ``dirty bomb,`` or a blend of conventional explosives with radioactive materials.
After the liberation of Kabul and Kandahar, the CIA submitted to Mr. Musharraf a list of a half-dozen nuclear scientists it wanted probed for al Qaeda links. The two who had visited Kandahar before September 11, Suleiman Asad and Muhammad Ali Muktar, suddenly were working in Burma on undisclosed research, and therefore unavailable.
Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmud, former director of Pakistan`s Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and Chief Engineer Chaudry Abdul Majeed had also befriended Taliban leaders, according to documents captured in Kabul.
Shortly before Enduring Freedom got under way Oct. 7, 2001, Mr. Musharraf dispatched to Kandahar the head of ISI, accompanied by some of Pakistan`s politico-religious leaders, to urge Omar to give up Osama bin Laden and thus avoid an American attack. The ISI chief ignored Mr. Musharraf`s orders and advised Omar not to surrender bin Laden. Mr. Musharraf fired him.
Two Pakistani generals — former army chief Gen. Aslam Beg — and former ISI chief Gen. Hamid Gul — are close to AQK and are believed to have been aware of his self-appointed mission to proliferate nuclear weapons knowledge to America`s enemies. Gen. Gul once said he looked forward to the day when a truly Islamic state could be established — a new caliphate comprised of a nuclear arsenal and the oil resources of Iran and the Gulf after the demise of the Saudi royal family.
Islamist militants also see Iraq as a potential battlefield for a larger war of civilizations that Gen. Beg told UPI in December 2001 ``is already upon us.`` The overall strategic objective of the AQK-Beg-Gul school of thinking is humiliation of the U.S., much as earlier was visited on the Soviets in Afghanistan.
While Mr. Musharraf was in the U.S. last June to reassure President Bush about his pro-American bona fides, his own chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, Gen. Mohammed Aziz Khan said, at a public meeting, ``America is the No. 1 enemy of the Muslim world and is conspiring against Muslim nations all over the world.`` These are also the sentiments that inspire Pakistan`s nuclear proliferation campaign. ``To assume that only Dr. Khan and his No. 2., Muhammad Farooq, the head of overseas procurement, were involved is patently absurd,`` said a U.S. intelligence source who has served in Pakistan.
To avoid what could be a public trial embarrassing the Pakistani high command, including Mr. Musharraf himself, and ISI, the president persuaded AQK to fall on his sword. On Wednesday, Mr. Khan made a full groveling confession on TV about his global proliferating activities ``that I did in good faith`` but now realize ``I was mistaken.``
He absolved the government and military from any culpability. But this was unlikely to end the AQK saga. Next comes the unraveling of AQK`s international nuclear black market, with operatives including Americans, Europeans, Arabs and Asians.)
Sridhar
#117 Posted by rsridhar on December 2, 2005 8:03:53 pm
re: Xerox Khan, the master spy
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/040216/16pakistan.htm
Excerpts:
1. (Khan, 67, who confessed last week to trading nuclear equipment and know-how to Iran, Libya, and North Korea, was a pioneer of sorts in a dangerous growth industry: marketing the means to make the bomb. U.S. and other officials count Khan`s outing as a major success in the fight to stop the spread of nuclear technology to rogue states and perhaps terrorists. ``The source of the goodies is dried up,`` says a senior State Department official.
But all is not well. A Pakistani probe launched under pressure from the Bush administration and the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations watchdog, revealed an eye-popping global network of suppliers and middlemen--from agents in Germany to brokers in Dubai to a factory allegedly making gas-centrifuge parts in Malaysia.)
2. (....Khan maintained several houses, foreign bank accounts, and a flamboyant lifestyle--all on a government salary of $2,000 a month. Western diplomats say Iran received both parts and designs for the centrifuges needed to enrich uranium into bomb-grade material. Libya got all that--and a blueprint for a nuclear warhead. And North Korea took centrifuge know-how in exchange for ballistic missile technology vital to developing Pakistan`s military deterrent against India.
Khan reportedly told a friend--before his confession--that three Army chiefs, including Musharraf, knew about the North Korea trade....)
sridhar
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/040216/16pakistan.htm
Excerpts:
1. (Khan, 67, who confessed last week to trading nuclear equipment and know-how to Iran, Libya, and North Korea, was a pioneer of sorts in a dangerous growth industry: marketing the means to make the bomb. U.S. and other officials count Khan`s outing as a major success in the fight to stop the spread of nuclear technology to rogue states and perhaps terrorists. ``The source of the goodies is dried up,`` says a senior State Department official.
But all is not well. A Pakistani probe launched under pressure from the Bush administration and the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations watchdog, revealed an eye-popping global network of suppliers and middlemen--from agents in Germany to brokers in Dubai to a factory allegedly making gas-centrifuge parts in Malaysia.)
2. (....Khan maintained several houses, foreign bank accounts, and a flamboyant lifestyle--all on a government salary of $2,000 a month. Western diplomats say Iran received both parts and designs for the centrifuges needed to enrich uranium into bomb-grade material. Libya got all that--and a blueprint for a nuclear warhead. And North Korea took centrifuge know-how in exchange for ballistic missile technology vital to developing Pakistan`s military deterrent against India.
Khan reportedly told a friend--before his confession--that three Army chiefs, including Musharraf, knew about the North Korea trade....)
sridhar
#118 Posted by rsridhar on December 2, 2005 8:16:41 pm
re: Pak`s nuclear odyssey
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/12/international/asia/12NUKE.html?ei=5007&en=85b47f440288c152&ex=1391922000&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1125783874-EsdlIgiaFizVNG+/O9qwfA
(A Tale of Nuclear Proliferation: How Pakistani Built His Network
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, DAVID E. SANGER and RAYMOND BONNER
Published: February 12, 2004
he break for American intelligence operatives tracking Abdul Qadeer Khan`s nuclear network came in the wet August heat in Malaysia, as five giant cargo containers full of specialized centrifuge parts were loaded into one of the nondescript vessels that ply the Straits of Malacca.
Advertisement
The C.I.A. had penetrated the factory of Scomi Precision Engineering, where one of the nuclear network`s operatives — known to the workers only as Tinner — watched over the production of the delicate machinery needed to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs.
Spy satellites tracked the shipment as it wended its way to Dubai, where it was relabeled ``used machinery`` and transferred to a German-owned ship, the BBC China. When it headed through the Suez Canal, bound for Libya, the order went out from Washington to have it seized, according to accounts from American officials.
That seizure led to the unraveling of a trading network that sent bomb-making designs and equipment to at least three countries — Iran, North Korea and Libya — and has laid bare the limits of international controls on nuclear proliferation.
Yesterday, President Bush proposed to enhance that system by restricting the production of nuclear fuel to a few nations.
The scope and audacity of the illicit network are still not fully known. Nor is it known whether the Pakistani military or government, which had supported Dr. Khan`s research, were complicit in his activities.
But what has become clear in recent days is that Dr. Khan, a Pakistani national hero who began his rise 30 years ago by importing nuclear equipment to secretly build his country`s atom bomb, gradually transformed himself into the largest and most sophisticated exporter in the nuclear black market.
``It was an astounding transformation when you think about it, something we`ve never seen before,`` said a senior American official who has reviewed the intelligence. ``First, he exploits a fragmented market and develops a quite advanced nuclear arsenal. Then he throws the switch, reverses the flow and figures out how to sell the whole kit, right down to the bomb designs, to some of the world`s worst governments.``
The story of that transformation emerges from recent interviews on three continents — from Islamabad, Pakistan`s capital, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; from the streets of Dubai, where many of the deals were cut, to Washington and Vienna, where intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency struggled to understand and defuse the threat.
Taken together, they show how Dr. Khan assembled a far-reaching organization of scientists, engineers and business executives who operated on murky boundaries between the legal and the illegal, sometimes underground but often in plain view, unencumbered by international agreements that prohibit trafficking in nuclear technology.
Dr. Khan started in the mid-1980`s, according to nuclear proliferation experts, by ordering twice the number of parts the Pakistani nuclear program needed, and then selling the excess to other countries, notably Iran.
Later, his network acquired another customer: North Korea, which was desperate for a more surreptitious way to build nuclear weapons after the United States had frozen the North`s huge plutonium-production facilities in Yongbyon.
And in the end he moved on to Libya, his ultimate undoing, selling entire kits, from centrifuges to enrich uranium, to crude weapons designs. Investigators found the weapons blueprints wrapped in bags from an Islamabad dry cleaner.
In his speech yesterday, Mr. Bush said the network even sold raw uranium to be processed into bomb fuel. He also identified Dr. Khan`s deputy — ``the network`s chief financial officer and money-launderer,`` he called him — as Bukhari Sayed Abu Tahir, a businessman in Dubai, who, investigators say, placed the order for the Libyan equipment.
One longtime trading partner of Dr. Khan`s was Peter Griffin, a British engineer who said in an interview that he had been a supplier to Pakistan for two decades, in the period when Dr. Khan was building nuclear weapons.
``Anything that could be sent to Pakistan, I sent to Pakistan,`` he said. But he said that all his sales had been approved by British trade authorities.
Mr. Griffin is also the partner in a Dubai company that investigators said placed the order for materials that wound up on the ship headed for Libya, although he denies knowing anything about that shipment.
For years hints of Dr. Khan`s operation circulated widely among intelligence officers and officials in Pakistan, the United States and elsewhere. But Pakistan`s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, confronted Dr. Khan only after the BBC China was seized on its way to Libya and evidence of the network tumbled out. Last week Dr. Khan issued a public confession and then was pardoned by General Musharraf.
The deference shown Dr. Khan at the end began decades before, when he was working secretly and successfully to make his country a nuclear power.
``Khan had a complete blank check,`` said one aide close to General Musharraf. ``He could do anything. He could go anywhere. He could buy anything at any price.``
Research Roots in Holland
Dr. Khan`s start came with India`s first atomic test in 1974, an event that so traumatized Pakistan that developing its own weapon became the country`s most pressing goal. ``We will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own,`` said Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, then the prime minister.
Dr. Khan, a bright young Pakistani metallurgist working in the Netherlands, lent his aid. From his perch at Urenco, a European consortium, he possessed blueprints of the world`s best centrifuges — the hollow metal tubes that spin very fast to enrich natural uranium into bomb fuel.
A set of thousands of centrifuges, called a cascade, concentrates the rare U-235 isotope to make a potent fuel.
``I saw top-secret technical drawings in his house,`` recalled Frits Veerman, a Dutch colleague who shared an office with Dr. Khan.
Dr. Khan stole the designs, Dutch investigators found, and he fled back to Pakistan in 1976. He used the blueprints and his knowledge to set up an enrichment project in Kahuta, near Islamabad, that reported directly to the prime minister. He drew heavily on Dutch lists of nearly 100 companies that supplied centrifuge parts and materials.
``They literally begged us to buy their equipment,`` Dr. Khan boasted in 2001 in a publication celebrating the 25th anniversary of his Pakistani laboratory. ``My long stay in Europe and intimate knowledge of various countries and their manufacturing firms was an asset.``
Business executives and merchants, including German, Dutch and French middlemen, flocked to Pakistan to offer price lists for high-technology goods and learn what Pakistan needed. The multilingual Dr. Khan led the acquisition effort. His shopping spree spanned the world.
``Africa was important because of the materials needed,`` said a senior Pakistani official involved in the investigation of Dr. Khan. ``Europe was crucial for bringing in high-tech machines and components. Dubai was the place for shipments and for payments.
``We were not the first beneficiaries of this network. But the intensity of Pakistan`s nuclear acquisition effort did enlarge the market. Everybody knew that there is a buyer out there, loaded with money and hellbent on getting this ultimate weapon.``
Even in the early days, the trade was no secret. Washington sent Germany dozens of complaints about their leaky export-control system that let ``dual use`` technology leave even though some was clearly intended for Pakistan`s nuclear program, said Mark Hibbs, a Germany-based editor of a technical journal, Nucleonics Week. But many of those warnings were ignored, he said.
Mr. Veerman said Dutch companies continued to work with Dr. Khan after it was clear he was developing centrifuges for a weapon. Dr. Khan even sent scientists to the Netherlands in the late 1970`s for centrifuge-related training.
Eventually the flow of technology reversed, two senior Pakistani military officials involved in the probe of Dr. Khan said. ``These contacts and channels were later used for sending technology out of Pakistan by certain individuals,`` a military official said, ``including Dr. A. Q. Khan.``
From Buyer to Seller
Dr. Khan had three motives, investigators say. He was eager to defy the West and pierce ``clouds of the so-called secrecy,`` as he once put it. He was equally eager to transfer technology to other Muslim nations, according to a senior Pakistani politician. ``He also said that giving technology to a Muslim country was not a crime,`` the politician said.
But another motive appears to have been money. As Dr. Khan`s nuclear successes grew, so did his wealth. He acquired homes and properties, including a tourist hotel in Africa.
A family friend said Dr. Khan spoke of the centrifuge designs he perfected as if the technology belonged to him personally, not to Pakistan. A senior politician said that in meetings with Chaudry Shujat Hussain, leader of a pro-Musharraf political party, Dr. Khan never spoke of selling the technology, only of ``sharing`` it.
He started slowly. He simply ordered more parts in the black market than he needed for Pakistan.
At first, Western intelligence agencies tracking Dr. Khan were perplexed.
``In the 1980`s, I remember being told by officials that Khan was over-ordering centrifuge parts and they couldn`t understand why,`` recalled Simon Henderson, a London-based author who has written extensively about Dr. Khan. It eventually became clear that the extras went to clients outside Pakistan.
Around 1987, Dr. Khan struck a deal with Iran, which wanted to build 50,000 centrifuges of a type known as P-1, for Pakistan-1, an entry-level model, Western investigators found. If ever completed, a plant that size would let Tehran make fuel for about 30 atom bombs each year.
As Pakistan`s own technology became more sophisticated, Dr. Khan sold old Pakistani centrifuges and parts, Western investigators found, some contaminated with highly enriched uranium.
Iran appears to have acquired such second-hand gear. ``They were not happy to discover they overpaid for old wares,`` said one American intelligence official. But for Iran, it was a start.
A Pakistani military official involved in the investigation of Dr. Khan said foreign requests for technology ``came on paper, in person, through third parties, in meetings with Khan himself.``
The scientist then used the vast logistic system available to him, which included government cargo planes, to ship the components to middlemen, who cloaked the source.
``The same network, the same routes, the same people who brought the technology in were also sending it out,`` said the military official.
In the final stages of his export career, Dr. Khan simply used his middlemen to order large shipments of parts for foreigners, even if Pakistan had no apparent role in the transaction and appeared to receive no direct benefits, American investigators said.
A Made-to-Order Customer
When Libya embarked on a two-step effort to become a nuclear-weapons nation, Dr. Khan`s network was presented with an opportunity to sell a particularly sophisticated system. The network was moving to a new level of ambition.
Libya`s initial focus was the aging P-1 design, American and European investigators said. But eventually the Libyans sought a more efficient technology, the P-2, made of maraging steel, a superhard alloy. That design has steel rotors that could spin nearly twice as fast as earlier aluminum ones, doubling the rate of enrichment.
The central figure in the Libyan P-2 effort, American officials said, was Mr. Tahir, a Sri Lankan native who had moved to Dubai as a child. Dr. Khan had attended Mr. Tahir`s wedding in 1998, Malaysian officials said.
In his speech yesterday, Mr. Bush said Mr. Tahir used a company in Dubai, SMB Computers, ``as a front for the proliferation activities of the A. Q. Khan network.`` Corporate records list him as an owner.
Another associate whose name surfaced in the Libyan deal was Mr. Griffin, the British engineer who long procured gear for Dr. Khan, according to investigators in several countries, corporate records and company officials.
Interviewed by telephone from France, Mr. Griffin, 68, declined to discuss details of his early relationship with Dr. Khan but said he had known him for decades. ``We met ages ago,`` he said.
Mr. Griffin said that all the items he sent to Pakistan were approved by the British Department of Trade and Industry and that he had done nothing illegal. He said the British authorities had seized his computer in June from his home in France. That had given rise to false ``suspicions that Gulf Technical Industries and myself were doing things for Libya,`` Mr. Griffin said. ``There`s no such truth in it.``
In June 2000, according to investigators and public records, Mr. Griffin set up a trading company in Dubai, Gulf Technical Industries. The following year, it contracted with a Malaysian manufacturing conglomerate to make sophisticated parts.
The manufacturer, Scomi Group Berhad, said it signed a contract with Gulf Technical in December 2001 to supply the components. Mr. Griffin and Mr. Tahir had met with company officials months earlier, in February 2001, to discuss the possible deal, said Rohaida Ali Badaruddin, a Scomi spokeswoman. After the contract was signed, Scomi set up Scomi Precision Engineering, hired some 40 workers, bought costly machine tools and began work, she said.
Dr. Khan provided the blueprints for the machines and parts, said a close aide to General Musharraf who is familiar with the Pakistani investigation. ``He had given most of the designs,`` the aide said. At one point Dr. Khan suggested that two of his senior aides join the Malaysian enterprise, the aide said.
Scomi Precision made its first shipment to Gulf Technical in December 2002 and the last in August 2003. Investigators said the shipments were largely P-2 centrifuge parts.
Throughout the work at Scomi Precision, the man known as Tinner, an engineer sent from Dubai by Mr. Tahir, was on site overseeing the work, a Scomi official said.
In a statement, Scomi said the shipments had consisted only of ``14 semifinished components.`` Company officials said they never knew of the intended use of the parts.
A senior Bush administration official disputed the company`s account, saying it would be highly unlikely that someone there did not know what they were producing. American and European weapons experts also said that the shipment headed for Libya contained thousands of centrifuge parts.
``Their goal was far reaching,`` a top European nuclear expert said of the Libyans. ``They had ordered this very large amount.``
Mr. Griffin acknowledged that he had been to Malaysia and that he and Mr. Tahir had met with Scomi officials. But he said the discussion had to do with exports of tank trucks, a deal he said never materialized. Mr. Griffin said that if Mr. Tahir had continued to meet with Scomi officials, or struck any deals, he had not authorized it.
But a Scomi official insisted the meeting was to discuss Scomi`s contract for finely tooled parts.
Malaysian officials said Mr. Tahir was under investigation in Malaysia, but was not under arrest. His younger brother, Sayed Ibrahim Bukhari, said in a telephone interview this week that Mr. Tahir does not hold any ownership position in SMB Computers.
Mr. Bush said the Malaysian authorities had assured Washington that the Scomi factory was no longer producing centrifuge parts.
An American expert said the Libyans planned on making at least 10,000 of the machines. Such a complex would make enough highly enriched uranium each year for about 10 nuclear weapons.
But the advanced centrifuges never reached Libya. They were seized on the BBC China.
When investigators went to Libya, they found that Dr. Khan`s network had also provided blueprints for a nuclear weapon. For investigators, it was a startling revelation of how audacious and dangerous the black market had become. And it made them recognize that they did not know who else out there was buying and selling.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said, ``We haven`t really seen the full picture.``
Reporting for this article was contributed by David Rohde and Talat Hussain from Pakistan, Craig S. Smith from the Netherlands and Tim Golden from New York.)
Sridhar
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/12/international/asia/12NUKE.html?ei=5007&en=85b47f440288c152&ex=1391922000&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1125783874-EsdlIgiaFizVNG+/O9qwfA
(A Tale of Nuclear Proliferation: How Pakistani Built His Network
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, DAVID E. SANGER and RAYMOND BONNER
Published: February 12, 2004
he break for American intelligence operatives tracking Abdul Qadeer Khan`s nuclear network came in the wet August heat in Malaysia, as five giant cargo containers full of specialized centrifuge parts were loaded into one of the nondescript vessels that ply the Straits of Malacca.
Advertisement
The C.I.A. had penetrated the factory of Scomi Precision Engineering, where one of the nuclear network`s operatives — known to the workers only as Tinner — watched over the production of the delicate machinery needed to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs.
Spy satellites tracked the shipment as it wended its way to Dubai, where it was relabeled ``used machinery`` and transferred to a German-owned ship, the BBC China. When it headed through the Suez Canal, bound for Libya, the order went out from Washington to have it seized, according to accounts from American officials.
That seizure led to the unraveling of a trading network that sent bomb-making designs and equipment to at least three countries — Iran, North Korea and Libya — and has laid bare the limits of international controls on nuclear proliferation.
Yesterday, President Bush proposed to enhance that system by restricting the production of nuclear fuel to a few nations.
The scope and audacity of the illicit network are still not fully known. Nor is it known whether the Pakistani military or government, which had supported Dr. Khan`s research, were complicit in his activities.
But what has become clear in recent days is that Dr. Khan, a Pakistani national hero who began his rise 30 years ago by importing nuclear equipment to secretly build his country`s atom bomb, gradually transformed himself into the largest and most sophisticated exporter in the nuclear black market.
``It was an astounding transformation when you think about it, something we`ve never seen before,`` said a senior American official who has reviewed the intelligence. ``First, he exploits a fragmented market and develops a quite advanced nuclear arsenal. Then he throws the switch, reverses the flow and figures out how to sell the whole kit, right down to the bomb designs, to some of the world`s worst governments.``
The story of that transformation emerges from recent interviews on three continents — from Islamabad, Pakistan`s capital, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; from the streets of Dubai, where many of the deals were cut, to Washington and Vienna, where intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency struggled to understand and defuse the threat.
Taken together, they show how Dr. Khan assembled a far-reaching organization of scientists, engineers and business executives who operated on murky boundaries between the legal and the illegal, sometimes underground but often in plain view, unencumbered by international agreements that prohibit trafficking in nuclear technology.
Dr. Khan started in the mid-1980`s, according to nuclear proliferation experts, by ordering twice the number of parts the Pakistani nuclear program needed, and then selling the excess to other countries, notably Iran.
Later, his network acquired another customer: North Korea, which was desperate for a more surreptitious way to build nuclear weapons after the United States had frozen the North`s huge plutonium-production facilities in Yongbyon.
And in the end he moved on to Libya, his ultimate undoing, selling entire kits, from centrifuges to enrich uranium, to crude weapons designs. Investigators found the weapons blueprints wrapped in bags from an Islamabad dry cleaner.
In his speech yesterday, Mr. Bush said the network even sold raw uranium to be processed into bomb fuel. He also identified Dr. Khan`s deputy — ``the network`s chief financial officer and money-launderer,`` he called him — as Bukhari Sayed Abu Tahir, a businessman in Dubai, who, investigators say, placed the order for the Libyan equipment.
One longtime trading partner of Dr. Khan`s was Peter Griffin, a British engineer who said in an interview that he had been a supplier to Pakistan for two decades, in the period when Dr. Khan was building nuclear weapons.
``Anything that could be sent to Pakistan, I sent to Pakistan,`` he said. But he said that all his sales had been approved by British trade authorities.
Mr. Griffin is also the partner in a Dubai company that investigators said placed the order for materials that wound up on the ship headed for Libya, although he denies knowing anything about that shipment.
For years hints of Dr. Khan`s operation circulated widely among intelligence officers and officials in Pakistan, the United States and elsewhere. But Pakistan`s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, confronted Dr. Khan only after the BBC China was seized on its way to Libya and evidence of the network tumbled out. Last week Dr. Khan issued a public confession and then was pardoned by General Musharraf.
The deference shown Dr. Khan at the end began decades before, when he was working secretly and successfully to make his country a nuclear power.
``Khan had a complete blank check,`` said one aide close to General Musharraf. ``He could do anything. He could go anywhere. He could buy anything at any price.``
Research Roots in Holland
Dr. Khan`s start came with India`s first atomic test in 1974, an event that so traumatized Pakistan that developing its own weapon became the country`s most pressing goal. ``We will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own,`` said Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, then the prime minister.
Dr. Khan, a bright young Pakistani metallurgist working in the Netherlands, lent his aid. From his perch at Urenco, a European consortium, he possessed blueprints of the world`s best centrifuges — the hollow metal tubes that spin very fast to enrich natural uranium into bomb fuel.
A set of thousands of centrifuges, called a cascade, concentrates the rare U-235 isotope to make a potent fuel.
``I saw top-secret technical drawings in his house,`` recalled Frits Veerman, a Dutch colleague who shared an office with Dr. Khan.
Dr. Khan stole the designs, Dutch investigators found, and he fled back to Pakistan in 1976. He used the blueprints and his knowledge to set up an enrichment project in Kahuta, near Islamabad, that reported directly to the prime minister. He drew heavily on Dutch lists of nearly 100 companies that supplied centrifuge parts and materials.
``They literally begged us to buy their equipment,`` Dr. Khan boasted in 2001 in a publication celebrating the 25th anniversary of his Pakistani laboratory. ``My long stay in Europe and intimate knowledge of various countries and their manufacturing firms was an asset.``
Business executives and merchants, including German, Dutch and French middlemen, flocked to Pakistan to offer price lists for high-technology goods and learn what Pakistan needed. The multilingual Dr. Khan led the acquisition effort. His shopping spree spanned the world.
``Africa was important because of the materials needed,`` said a senior Pakistani official involved in the investigation of Dr. Khan. ``Europe was crucial for bringing in high-tech machines and components. Dubai was the place for shipments and for payments.
``We were not the first beneficiaries of this network. But the intensity of Pakistan`s nuclear acquisition effort did enlarge the market. Everybody knew that there is a buyer out there, loaded with money and hellbent on getting this ultimate weapon.``
Even in the early days, the trade was no secret. Washington sent Germany dozens of complaints about their leaky export-control system that let ``dual use`` technology leave even though some was clearly intended for Pakistan`s nuclear program, said Mark Hibbs, a Germany-based editor of a technical journal, Nucleonics Week. But many of those warnings were ignored, he said.
Mr. Veerman said Dutch companies continued to work with Dr. Khan after it was clear he was developing centrifuges for a weapon. Dr. Khan even sent scientists to the Netherlands in the late 1970`s for centrifuge-related training.
Eventually the flow of technology reversed, two senior Pakistani military officials involved in the probe of Dr. Khan said. ``These contacts and channels were later used for sending technology out of Pakistan by certain individuals,`` a military official said, ``including Dr. A. Q. Khan.``
From Buyer to Seller
Dr. Khan had three motives, investigators say. He was eager to defy the West and pierce ``clouds of the so-called secrecy,`` as he once put it. He was equally eager to transfer technology to other Muslim nations, according to a senior Pakistani politician. ``He also said that giving technology to a Muslim country was not a crime,`` the politician said.
But another motive appears to have been money. As Dr. Khan`s nuclear successes grew, so did his wealth. He acquired homes and properties, including a tourist hotel in Africa.
A family friend said Dr. Khan spoke of the centrifuge designs he perfected as if the technology belonged to him personally, not to Pakistan. A senior politician said that in meetings with Chaudry Shujat Hussain, leader of a pro-Musharraf political party, Dr. Khan never spoke of selling the technology, only of ``sharing`` it.
He started slowly. He simply ordered more parts in the black market than he needed for Pakistan.
At first, Western intelligence agencies tracking Dr. Khan were perplexed.
``In the 1980`s, I remember being told by officials that Khan was over-ordering centrifuge parts and they couldn`t understand why,`` recalled Simon Henderson, a London-based author who has written extensively about Dr. Khan. It eventually became clear that the extras went to clients outside Pakistan.
Around 1987, Dr. Khan struck a deal with Iran, which wanted to build 50,000 centrifuges of a type known as P-1, for Pakistan-1, an entry-level model, Western investigators found. If ever completed, a plant that size would let Tehran make fuel for about 30 atom bombs each year.
As Pakistan`s own technology became more sophisticated, Dr. Khan sold old Pakistani centrifuges and parts, Western investigators found, some contaminated with highly enriched uranium.
Iran appears to have acquired such second-hand gear. ``They were not happy to discover they overpaid for old wares,`` said one American intelligence official. But for Iran, it was a start.
A Pakistani military official involved in the investigation of Dr. Khan said foreign requests for technology ``came on paper, in person, through third parties, in meetings with Khan himself.``
The scientist then used the vast logistic system available to him, which included government cargo planes, to ship the components to middlemen, who cloaked the source.
``The same network, the same routes, the same people who brought the technology in were also sending it out,`` said the military official.
In the final stages of his export career, Dr. Khan simply used his middlemen to order large shipments of parts for foreigners, even if Pakistan had no apparent role in the transaction and appeared to receive no direct benefits, American investigators said.
A Made-to-Order Customer
When Libya embarked on a two-step effort to become a nuclear-weapons nation, Dr. Khan`s network was presented with an opportunity to sell a particularly sophisticated system. The network was moving to a new level of ambition.
Libya`s initial focus was the aging P-1 design, American and European investigators said. But eventually the Libyans sought a more efficient technology, the P-2, made of maraging steel, a superhard alloy. That design has steel rotors that could spin nearly twice as fast as earlier aluminum ones, doubling the rate of enrichment.
The central figure in the Libyan P-2 effort, American officials said, was Mr. Tahir, a Sri Lankan native who had moved to Dubai as a child. Dr. Khan had attended Mr. Tahir`s wedding in 1998, Malaysian officials said.
In his speech yesterday, Mr. Bush said Mr. Tahir used a company in Dubai, SMB Computers, ``as a front for the proliferation activities of the A. Q. Khan network.`` Corporate records list him as an owner.
Another associate whose name surfaced in the Libyan deal was Mr. Griffin, the British engineer who long procured gear for Dr. Khan, according to investigators in several countries, corporate records and company officials.
Interviewed by telephone from France, Mr. Griffin, 68, declined to discuss details of his early relationship with Dr. Khan but said he had known him for decades. ``We met ages ago,`` he said.
Mr. Griffin said that all the items he sent to Pakistan were approved by the British Department of Trade and Industry and that he had done nothing illegal. He said the British authorities had seized his computer in June from his home in France. That had given rise to false ``suspicions that Gulf Technical Industries and myself were doing things for Libya,`` Mr. Griffin said. ``There`s no such truth in it.``
In June 2000, according to investigators and public records, Mr. Griffin set up a trading company in Dubai, Gulf Technical Industries. The following year, it contracted with a Malaysian manufacturing conglomerate to make sophisticated parts.
The manufacturer, Scomi Group Berhad, said it signed a contract with Gulf Technical in December 2001 to supply the components. Mr. Griffin and Mr. Tahir had met with company officials months earlier, in February 2001, to discuss the possible deal, said Rohaida Ali Badaruddin, a Scomi spokeswoman. After the contract was signed, Scomi set up Scomi Precision Engineering, hired some 40 workers, bought costly machine tools and began work, she said.
Dr. Khan provided the blueprints for the machines and parts, said a close aide to General Musharraf who is familiar with the Pakistani investigation. ``He had given most of the designs,`` the aide said. At one point Dr. Khan suggested that two of his senior aides join the Malaysian enterprise, the aide said.
Scomi Precision made its first shipment to Gulf Technical in December 2002 and the last in August 2003. Investigators said the shipments were largely P-2 centrifuge parts.
Throughout the work at Scomi Precision, the man known as Tinner, an engineer sent from Dubai by Mr. Tahir, was on site overseeing the work, a Scomi official said.
In a statement, Scomi said the shipments had consisted only of ``14 semifinished components.`` Company officials said they never knew of the intended use of the parts.
A senior Bush administration official disputed the company`s account, saying it would be highly unlikely that someone there did not know what they were producing. American and European weapons experts also said that the shipment headed for Libya contained thousands of centrifuge parts.
``Their goal was far reaching,`` a top European nuclear expert said of the Libyans. ``They had ordered this very large amount.``
Mr. Griffin acknowledged that he had been to Malaysia and that he and Mr. Tahir had met with Scomi officials. But he said the discussion had to do with exports of tank trucks, a deal he said never materialized. Mr. Griffin said that if Mr. Tahir had continued to meet with Scomi officials, or struck any deals, he had not authorized it.
But a Scomi official insisted the meeting was to discuss Scomi`s contract for finely tooled parts.
Malaysian officials said Mr. Tahir was under investigation in Malaysia, but was not under arrest. His younger brother, Sayed Ibrahim Bukhari, said in a telephone interview this week that Mr. Tahir does not hold any ownership position in SMB Computers.
Mr. Bush said the Malaysian authorities had assured Washington that the Scomi factory was no longer producing centrifuge parts.
An American expert said the Libyans planned on making at least 10,000 of the machines. Such a complex would make enough highly enriched uranium each year for about 10 nuclear weapons.
But the advanced centrifuges never reached Libya. They were seized on the BBC China.
When investigators went to Libya, they found that Dr. Khan`s network had also provided blueprints for a nuclear weapon. For investigators, it was a startling revelation of how audacious and dangerous the black market had become. And it made them recognize that they did not know who else out there was buying and selling.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said, ``We haven`t really seen the full picture.``
Reporting for this article was contributed by David Rohde and Talat Hussain from Pakistan, Craig S. Smith from the Netherlands and Tim Golden from New York.)
Sridhar
#119 Posted by rsridhar on December 2, 2005 8:23:13 pm
re: Khan`s nuclear quest
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=print&id=17421
Sridhar
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=print&id=17421
Sridhar
#120 Posted by rsridhar on December 2, 2005 8:28:45 pm
re:#49 by HP
You guys are just pathetic.
Read my posts. Read how Xerox khan was involved in a global nuclear ring.
Sridhar
You guys are just pathetic.
Read my posts. Read how Xerox khan was involved in a global nuclear ring.
Sridhar
#121 Posted by Rommel on December 3, 2005 12:35:35 am
Salam,
Since when and how come did the metallurgist A.Q.Khan become the personification of the Pakistani Nation that his trial becomes the trial of the nation itself?
The Multan Conference is a fact. If it was held under a shamiana, that does not change the fact that it happened. Please do some research before doubting events that actually took place. The Book titled ``The Islamic BOMB by Wiesmann and Krosney`` published in 1981 has a whole chapter on this conference. The conference can also be read about at nuclearweaponarchive.org.
About A.Q.Khan and centrifuge technology. A.Q.Khan was a middle level technician cum metallurgist at Almelo having just completed his studies in 1972. He did not have the experience, the access, the training or the knowhow of centrifuges that he could have stolen blueprints and reproduced them in Pakistan all by himself.
PAKISTAN DID NOT BEGIN CENTRIFUGE WORK AS PART OF THE ENRICHMENT PROJECT WITH A.Q.KHAN. THE PAEC began work on Kahuta as Project-706 in 1974 with Bashiruddin Mahmood as project director. The first pilot scale centrifuges were developed by PAEC based on ``ITALIAN CENTRIFUGE DESIGNS`` and were successfully run in 1975 at Sihala before the KRL plant was fully made operational and before AQKhan came to Pakistan. The designs that A.Q.Khan brought to Pakistan were first generation centrifuges which were so low in efficiency that it could not produce enriched uranium. PAEC was involved in all areas of enrichment and without PAEC support, KRL could never have gone beyond an advanced machine design shop.
The story of the Italian centrifuges has been published for the first time from declassifed dutch documents in the US Magazine Nucleonics Week, Sept, 2005.
The real father of Pakistan`s atomic bomb is Munir Ahmad Khan, Chairman PAEC from 1972-1991, who was appointed PAEC Chairman by Bhutto at the Multan Conference.
A.Q.Khan was used by successive governments as a decoy and a front man, and nothing more. His technical contribution is not more than 5 % of the entire effort. there are 24 steps that lead to a bomb, each critical to the program, the PAEC Under Munir Khan dealt with 23, A.Q.Khan was only `heading` KRL and depended on PAEC for trained manpower, uranium hexalforide gas which is the crucial raw material for enrichment, balancing rotors, maraging steel and much more. The Bomb was made by the PAEC directorate of technical development, and work on it began in March 1974, which is again 2 yrs before AQK came to Pakistan.
A.Q.Khan never met Bhutto when he came here. He was hired by PAEC as a mole in Urenco , as were many other unsung heroes of PAEC in other countries who came back to serve Pakistan. A.Q.Khan never headed the program, he was a tiny part of a gigantic team effort headed by the PAEC Chairman. That is why he was never made PAEC Chairman.
The PAEC under Munir Khan accomplished the following from 1972-1991.
1. Initiated work on the atomic bomb in March 1974 with the establishment of DTD, also known as the Wah Group.
2. Started R&D in all areas of enrichment in 1974, selected site for KRL in January 1975, and started first centrifuge plants in Oct-Nov 1975 based on Italian Designs.
3. Parallel to that, began work on the Uranium Hexafloride plant at D.G.Khan to supply large quantities of Feed for Kahuta in 1975.
4. Began work on the NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE in 1974 which includes all steps from uranium exploration, mining, milling, yellow cake, conversion to hexafloride or UF6, enrichment, fuel fabrication and then plutonium production and reprocessing.
5. Completed the pilot reprocessing plant called New Labs in PINSTECH in 1981 after the French backed out.
6. Started work on the heavy water Khushab Plutonium reactor in 1985 which is now commissioned and produces weapon grade plutonium and tritium for advanced compact warheads.
7. Selected the Chaghi test sites in 1976 which were complete by 1980.
8. Established the Centre for Nuclear Studies in 1975 which has so far produced over 5000 nuclear scientists and engineers and which is now a university (PIEAS) and provided the human resource and technical manpower for the entire program.
9. Laid the groundwork for the Chashma-1 nuclear power plant in Nov. 1990.
10. Established the National Development Complex for the production of solid fueled Shaheen missiles in 1990 with Samar Mubarikmand as project director.
11. Procured Maraging steel worth Rs. 50 million in 1975 for the enrichment project and centrifuge development, and high frequency inverters from the British firm Emerson Electric and developed mass spectrometers for measuring the levels of enrichment.
12. Conducted the first successfull nuclear cold test on March 11th, 1983. The PAEC between 1983 and 1990 conducted 24 cold tests of diff designs of atomic bombs, and in each test a new design was tested and improved.
13. Established over a dozen nuclear medical and agricultural centres such as NORI and NIAB.
14. Produced nuclear fuel indigenously for KANUPP after the Canadians backed out in the wake of the Indian 1974 test.
So if PAEC under Munir was doing nothing for the program, then why did the PAEC conduct the 1998 Chaghi tests? AQKhan never had any thing to do with nuclear weapons design or development or the nuclear fuel cycle. His role in enrichment is restricted to heading KRL as a thief and a proliferator, when in fact he was dependent on PAEC for the uranium hexalforide gas, and technical manpower, almost all of which came to KRL from PAEC before he came to Pakistan as KRL was a PAEC project and all other areas of enrichment.
So how the hell is he the father of the bomb? if he bought the press and his paid propaganda writers, then that does not change facts on the ground. He has been exposed and Munir Ahmad Khan vindicated, who called for nuclear maturity and total secrecy. One day the full truth will come out, and AQKhan lovers will get the shock of their lives.
Munir Ahmad Khan and his team are the real heroes of nuclear Pakistan.
Pakistan Zindabad.
Regards.
Since when and how come did the metallurgist A.Q.Khan become the personification of the Pakistani Nation that his trial becomes the trial of the nation itself?
The Multan Conference is a fact. If it was held under a shamiana, that does not change the fact that it happened. Please do some research before doubting events that actually took place. The Book titled ``The Islamic BOMB by Wiesmann and Krosney`` published in 1981 has a whole chapter on this conference. The conference can also be read about at nuclearweaponarchive.org.
About A.Q.Khan and centrifuge technology. A.Q.Khan was a middle level technician cum metallurgist at Almelo having just completed his studies in 1972. He did not have the experience, the access, the training or the knowhow of centrifuges that he could have stolen blueprints and reproduced them in Pakistan all by himself.
PAKISTAN DID NOT BEGIN CENTRIFUGE WORK AS PART OF THE ENRICHMENT PROJECT WITH A.Q.KHAN. THE PAEC began work on Kahuta as Project-706 in 1974 with Bashiruddin Mahmood as project director. The first pilot scale centrifuges were developed by PAEC based on ``ITALIAN CENTRIFUGE DESIGNS`` and were successfully run in 1975 at Sihala before the KRL plant was fully made operational and before AQKhan came to Pakistan. The designs that A.Q.Khan brought to Pakistan were first generation centrifuges which were so low in efficiency that it could not produce enriched uranium. PAEC was involved in all areas of enrichment and without PAEC support, KRL could never have gone beyond an advanced machine design shop.
The story of the Italian centrifuges has been published for the first time from declassifed dutch documents in the US Magazine Nucleonics Week, Sept, 2005.
The real father of Pakistan`s atomic bomb is Munir Ahmad Khan, Chairman PAEC from 1972-1991, who was appointed PAEC Chairman by Bhutto at the Multan Conference.
A.Q.Khan was used by successive governments as a decoy and a front man, and nothing more. His technical contribution is not more than 5 % of the entire effort. there are 24 steps that lead to a bomb, each critical to the program, the PAEC Under Munir Khan dealt with 23, A.Q.Khan was only `heading` KRL and depended on PAEC for trained manpower, uranium hexalforide gas which is the crucial raw material for enrichment, balancing rotors, maraging steel and much more. The Bomb was made by the PAEC directorate of technical development, and work on it began in March 1974, which is again 2 yrs before AQK came to Pakistan.
A.Q.Khan never met Bhutto when he came here. He was hired by PAEC as a mole in Urenco , as were many other unsung heroes of PAEC in other countries who came back to serve Pakistan. A.Q.Khan never headed the program, he was a tiny part of a gigantic team effort headed by the PAEC Chairman. That is why he was never made PAEC Chairman.
The PAEC under Munir Khan accomplished the following from 1972-1991.
1. Initiated work on the atomic bomb in March 1974 with the establishment of DTD, also known as the Wah Group.
2. Started R&D in all areas of enrichment in 1974, selected site for KRL in January 1975, and started first centrifuge plants in Oct-Nov 1975 based on Italian Designs.
3. Parallel to that, began work on the Uranium Hexafloride plant at D.G.Khan to supply large quantities of Feed for Kahuta in 1975.
4. Began work on the NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE in 1974 which includes all steps from uranium exploration, mining, milling, yellow cake, conversion to hexafloride or UF6, enrichment, fuel fabrication and then plutonium production and reprocessing.
5. Completed the pilot reprocessing plant called New Labs in PINSTECH in 1981 after the French backed out.
6. Started work on the heavy water Khushab Plutonium reactor in 1985 which is now commissioned and produces weapon grade plutonium and tritium for advanced compact warheads.
7. Selected the Chaghi test sites in 1976 which were complete by 1980.
8. Established the Centre for Nuclear Studies in 1975 which has so far produced over 5000 nuclear scientists and engineers and which is now a university (PIEAS) and provided the human resource and technical manpower for the entire program.
9. Laid the groundwork for the Chashma-1 nuclear power plant in Nov. 1990.
10. Established the National Development Complex for the production of solid fueled Shaheen missiles in 1990 with Samar Mubarikmand as project director.
11. Procured Maraging steel worth Rs. 50 million in 1975 for the enrichment project and centrifuge development, and high frequency inverters from the British firm Emerson Electric and developed mass spectrometers for measuring the levels of enrichment.
12. Conducted the first successfull nuclear cold test on March 11th, 1983. The PAEC between 1983 and 1990 conducted 24 cold tests of diff designs of atomic bombs, and in each test a new design was tested and improved.
13. Established over a dozen nuclear medical and agricultural centres such as NORI and NIAB.
14. Produced nuclear fuel indigenously for KANUPP after the Canadians backed out in the wake of the Indian 1974 test.
So if PAEC under Munir was doing nothing for the program, then why did the PAEC conduct the 1998 Chaghi tests? AQKhan never had any thing to do with nuclear weapons design or development or the nuclear fuel cycle. His role in enrichment is restricted to heading KRL as a thief and a proliferator, when in fact he was dependent on PAEC for the uranium hexalforide gas, and technical manpower, almost all of which came to KRL from PAEC before he came to Pakistan as KRL was a PAEC project and all other areas of enrichment.
So how the hell is he the father of the bomb? if he bought the press and his paid propaganda writers, then that does not change facts on the ground. He has been exposed and Munir Ahmad Khan vindicated, who called for nuclear maturity and total secrecy. One day the full truth will come out, and AQKhan lovers will get the shock of their lives.
Munir Ahmad Khan and his team are the real heroes of nuclear Pakistan.
Pakistan Zindabad.
Regards.
#122 Posted by Romair on December 3, 2005 1:28:00 am
kaalchakra #: ``Information about China as the source of a fool-proof blueprint for a nuclear weapon came from American records. It seems Americans obtained a copy of exactly the same Chinese blueprint that Pakistan had, and then confronted Pakistan with it at the highest levels.``
I am not too sure how much China has been involved. I don`t think China`s own technology is that advanced. Or at least wasn`t when Pakistan was developing nukes. The three countries with truly sophisticated nuclear weapons and launch capabilities are USA, Russia and Israel. Do read up on Israel`s capabilities if you get a chance. They are truly amazing. Albeit with a lot of help from the USA. But way ahead of Pakistan and India........
Kahuta is protected like a precious diamond. This I know of personally.......
Everything else is heresay. One would have had to have been involved in the real project, to know who did what. My acquitance is quite reliable however. He was involved in funding the front companies as a banker, covering the Middle East. I believe BCCI helped a lot also.
If you read the main article in Time Magazine, from a few years ago, with the picture of AQ Khan on the cover, you will notice a detailed mention of a young Sri Lankan Muslim in Dubai. He has been caught and was apparently AQ`s partner in business. This guy used to run a computer business, amongst other things.
I am quite sure Pakistan did not get the detailed advanced nuclear technology from China. China would never give it away like that. In addition, if Pakistan was getting it from China, then why set up all these front companies in Dubai and Europe and what not. There was a Pakistani caught in the USA, as well.
The acquisition of nukes for Pakistan is truly a fast-paced mystery novel. Pakistan got them, after there were huge restrictions on acquiring nukes. It is the only country that has been able to do so. India did most of its work, before then. And Israel had access to the USA. Pakistan had nothing. Yet it stayed one step ahead of the game. Keeping the whole world guessing.
I wouldn`t be surprised if it were European scientists that helped out. I think by 84, Pakistan had the bomb. AQ Khan was definitely involved. But he is a mettalurgist. There is no way he could have developed the bomb. That was done by a whole group of scientists, who deserve a lot of credit. The fact that they remained underground, and to this day, no one knows who they are, is an even bigger credit to them.......
AQ Khan got too much into the limelight. That is not how real heroes should behave. And he openly came on air to admit he did some dealings on his own. Which was a huge let-down for Pakistan. At the same time, Pakistan has broken no int`l law, neither has AQ Khan. He has broken Pakistani law...........
AQ Khan was a hero for the right reasons. And he is now a pardoned criminal for the right reasons also. But he has been turned into a far bigger hero than he deserves to be. He lives in sector E-7 in Islamabad. He has always had a lot of security around his house. Interestingly, almost right next to him, is another very senior nuclear scientist. We used to live in the area and knew this scientist. The most down to earth man you will ever see. Those are the true heroes............
I am not too sure how much China has been involved. I don`t think China`s own technology is that advanced. Or at least wasn`t when Pakistan was developing nukes. The three countries with truly sophisticated nuclear weapons and launch capabilities are USA, Russia and Israel. Do read up on Israel`s capabilities if you get a chance. They are truly amazing. Albeit with a lot of help from the USA. But way ahead of Pakistan and India........
Kahuta is protected like a precious diamond. This I know of personally.......
Everything else is heresay. One would have had to have been involved in the real project, to know who did what. My acquitance is quite reliable however. He was involved in funding the front companies as a banker, covering the Middle East. I believe BCCI helped a lot also.
If you read the main article in Time Magazine, from a few years ago, with the picture of AQ Khan on the cover, you will notice a detailed mention of a young Sri Lankan Muslim in Dubai. He has been caught and was apparently AQ`s partner in business. This guy used to run a computer business, amongst other things.
I am quite sure Pakistan did not get the detailed advanced nuclear technology from China. China would never give it away like that. In addition, if Pakistan was getting it from China, then why set up all these front companies in Dubai and Europe and what not. There was a Pakistani caught in the USA, as well.
The acquisition of nukes for Pakistan is truly a fast-paced mystery novel. Pakistan got them, after there were huge restrictions on acquiring nukes. It is the only country that has been able to do so. India did most of its work, before then. And Israel had access to the USA. Pakistan had nothing. Yet it stayed one step ahead of the game. Keeping the whole world guessing.
I wouldn`t be surprised if it were European scientists that helped out. I think by 84, Pakistan had the bomb. AQ Khan was definitely involved. But he is a mettalurgist. There is no way he could have developed the bomb. That was done by a whole group of scientists, who deserve a lot of credit. The fact that they remained underground, and to this day, no one knows who they are, is an even bigger credit to them.......
AQ Khan got too much into the limelight. That is not how real heroes should behave. And he openly came on air to admit he did some dealings on his own. Which was a huge let-down for Pakistan. At the same time, Pakistan has broken no int`l law, neither has AQ Khan. He has broken Pakistani law...........
AQ Khan was a hero for the right reasons. And he is now a pardoned criminal for the right reasons also. But he has been turned into a far bigger hero than he deserves to be. He lives in sector E-7 in Islamabad. He has always had a lot of security around his house. Interestingly, almost right next to him, is another very senior nuclear scientist. We used to live in the area and knew this scientist. The most down to earth man you will ever see. Those are the true heroes............
#123 Posted by aquaris on December 3, 2005 3:16:24 am
Its a general perception... that AQ Khan has taken all the blame on himself in the wider interest of Pakistan..
#124 Posted by Rommel on December 3, 2005 4:30:47 am
Salam,
PAKISTAN IN 1976 TOLD THE NETHERLANDS IT HAD ITALIAN CENTRIFUGE DESIGN
Nucleonics Week
Sept-2005
Munir Ahmad Khan, then chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), told Dutch officials in mid-1976 that Pakistan had ``no interest`` in developing gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment, according to Dutch government dossiers related to its investigation of the theft of Urenco`s centrifuge design information by Pakistan.
Khan confirmed that Pakistan had done some development work on gas centrifuges, but asserted that the effort was limited to a small number of centrifuges and a cascade design obtained from Italy.
The dossiers spell out that the Netherlands` intelligence agency, the Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst (BVD), learned in 1975 that Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist—unrelated to Munir Khan—might have misappropriated confidential or secret Urenco data and provided it to Pakistani government procurement agents working out of the Pakistan embassy in Belgium.
The files provide information about the A.Q. Khan investigation beyond what was declassified by the Netherlands government earlier this year. Declassified documents referred to actions by the Dutch administration beginning in 1978 (NuclearFuel, 1 Aug., 5).
Suspicions that A.Q. Khan was involved in a diversion of centrifuge know-how were first raised by Khan`s employer, Fysisch-Dynamisch Onderzoek (FDO), a laboratory which was a subcontractor of Ultracentrifuge Nederland (UCN). UCN was at that time the Dutch partner firm in the trilateral Urenco enrichment enterprise.
According to Dutch diplomatic sources close to the Urenco program at that time, Khan was hired by FDO in 1972 because UCN was gearing up to shift its centrifuge program from a Dutch model to a German model, based on a decision made by the Urenco partnership and approved by the Netherlands government. The sources said that not enough Dutch nationals could be found to staff up FDO in a hurry.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, UCN had developed a supercritical centrifuge using aluminum rotor tubes called Commercial Nuclear Obreptitious Rotor (CNOR). According to documents, UCN terminated the CNOR program in October 1974. UCN prepared to build the German steel centrifuge called G-2 instead, they said.
To set up G-2, UCN obtained classified engineering reports about the G-2 centrifuge from Centec, a Urenco centrifuge technology development agency in Germany, and from the firm Machinenfabrik Augsburg-Nuremberg AG (MAN), then a partner in the German centrifuge development and construction effort. Khan was assigned the task of translating these documents from German into Dutch.
In 1975, FDO personnel became suspicious of Khan, after a French firm, Metalimphy, was tasked by Pakistan`s embassy in Belgium to obtain specialized wrapping foil based on a technical report that appeared to belong to UCN. As a precaution, the French firm showed the report to UCN officials, who confirmed it was a confidential document that had been misappropriated from the company.
Since UCN had never provided any information from its centrifuge program to Pakistan`s embassy in Brussels, the company quickly focused its attention on Khan, a Pakistani national, in its attempt to locate the source of the leak. It was believed possible that Khan could have obtained the report in question and that he could have provided it to Pakistani government agents. As of October 1975, documents suggest, FDO had contacted Dutch intelligence about its concerns.
About a year later, in September 1976, FDO officials held a discussion with PAEC head Munir Khan. Dutch experts sought to confirm their suspicions that Pakistan had been tapping the UCN program for a secret centrifuge development program.
Munir Khan was appointed PAEC chairman by then-prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1972. Two years later, when India set off its first nuclear test, he presided over a meeting of Pakistani scientists and government officials in Multan to discuss how Pakistan should respond to the perceived Indian threat. In July 1976—two months before he met with Dutch experts—Munir Khan fell out with A.Q. Khan over the direction of Pakistan`s autonomous nuclear development, leaving A.Q. Khan in charge of Pakistan`s uranium enrichment effort, according to media reports in Pakistan. The PAEC under Munir Khan continued to develop plutonium production.
But Munir Khan brushed off Dutch concerns that Pakistan was trying to steal Urenco`s technology. He said Pakistan had ``no interest`` in developing gas centrifuge technology for a future uranium enrichment program.
The PAEC head, Munir Khan, did acknowledge that the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science & Technology (Pinstech) in Rawalpindi had carried out an exploratory centrifuge investigation, and had set up between 10 and 20 centrifuges in a laboratory. But according to Munir Khan, Pinstech`s centrifuge effort was based on centrifuge and cascade design information obtained from Italy—not from the Urenco program.
The record of questions about A.Q. Khan by top officials at Khan`s employer FDO beginning in 1975, registered in Dutch internal files, contrasts with statements made by ministry staffers in documents that were declassified earlier this year. The declassified files suggest a very different reaction to assertions by a U.K. lawmaker in 1978 and media accounts beginning in 1979 that Urenco security could have been compromised. The declassified files say the Dutch government considered it improbable that Khan could have seriously challenged the security of the Urenco program and that Khan had little access to secret centrifuge design information.
Beginning in 1979, staffers in the Netherlands ministries of Economic Affairs and Foreign Affairs engaged in damage control to play down allegations about Khan in public and in parliament. Records show that personnel in the Dutch embassy in Islamabad at this time discussed Pakistan`s nuclear program with Pakistani officials. The Pakistanis—mirroring Munir Khan`s claims—told Dutch diplomats that Pakistan`s centrifuge program was a low priority or at a very early stage, and that there was no military component to it.
That message may have served the purpose of bureaucrats in The Hague to put out the fire of speculation in the media and parliament about Khan`s contribution to a nuclear weapons program in Pakistan. But one cable from the Netherlands` embassy in Pakistan to headquarters in The Hague suggested that embassy staffers were highly skeptical of Pakistan`s assertions that its nuclear program was peaceful.
Western officials said last month that it would have been possible for Pakistan to have obtained centrifuge design know-how from a pilot centrifuge development program in Italy at that time, which was centered on work carried out by Italian industry and government-sponsored laboratories.
Western officials said that Italy began centrifuge research and development in 1969, and by 1973 had done some separation work using a relatively simple, so-called Zippe-type centrifuge. This type was pioneered after World War II by the German engineer Gernot Zippe, and provided the engineering and physics bases for both Italian and Urenco machines.
Italy developed and tested a second generation centrifuge on a lab scale by 1975, officials said. At about the same time, Italian scientists were doing work on a different, block-mounted centrifuge and had begun to experiment with more advanced rotor tubes made of carbon fiber. By around 1978, the Italian program had designed a small uranium enrichment plant.
Then, however, Italy dropped its centrifuge program and shifted its interest toward gaseous diffusion, in parallel with Italy`s membership in the Eurodif consortium. Officials said that the IAEA has since verified that Italy is no longer pursuing any research in the field of centrifuge uranium enrichment.
Munir Ahmad Khan died in 1999.
Regards.
PAKISTAN IN 1976 TOLD THE NETHERLANDS IT HAD ITALIAN CENTRIFUGE DESIGN
Nucleonics Week
Sept-2005
Munir Ahmad Khan, then chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), told Dutch officials in mid-1976 that Pakistan had ``no interest`` in developing gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment, according to Dutch government dossiers related to its investigation of the theft of Urenco`s centrifuge design information by Pakistan.
Khan confirmed that Pakistan had done some development work on gas centrifuges, but asserted that the effort was limited to a small number of centrifuges and a cascade design obtained from Italy.
The dossiers spell out that the Netherlands` intelligence agency, the Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst (BVD), learned in 1975 that Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist—unrelated to Munir Khan—might have misappropriated confidential or secret Urenco data and provided it to Pakistani government procurement agents working out of the Pakistan embassy in Belgium.
The files provide information about the A.Q. Khan investigation beyond what was declassified by the Netherlands government earlier this year. Declassified documents referred to actions by the Dutch administration beginning in 1978 (NuclearFuel, 1 Aug., 5).
Suspicions that A.Q. Khan was involved in a diversion of centrifuge know-how were first raised by Khan`s employer, Fysisch-Dynamisch Onderzoek (FDO), a laboratory which was a subcontractor of Ultracentrifuge Nederland (UCN). UCN was at that time the Dutch partner firm in the trilateral Urenco enrichment enterprise.
According to Dutch diplomatic sources close to the Urenco program at that time, Khan was hired by FDO in 1972 because UCN was gearing up to shift its centrifuge program from a Dutch model to a German model, based on a decision made by the Urenco partnership and approved by the Netherlands government. The sources said that not enough Dutch nationals could be found to staff up FDO in a hurry.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, UCN had developed a supercritical centrifuge using aluminum rotor tubes called Commercial Nuclear Obreptitious Rotor (CNOR). According to documents, UCN terminated the CNOR program in October 1974. UCN prepared to build the German steel centrifuge called G-2 instead, they said.
To set up G-2, UCN obtained classified engineering reports about the G-2 centrifuge from Centec, a Urenco centrifuge technology development agency in Germany, and from the firm Machinenfabrik Augsburg-Nuremberg AG (MAN), then a partner in the German centrifuge development and construction effort. Khan was assigned the task of translating these documents from German into Dutch.
In 1975, FDO personnel became suspicious of Khan, after a French firm, Metalimphy, was tasked by Pakistan`s embassy in Belgium to obtain specialized wrapping foil based on a technical report that appeared to belong to UCN. As a precaution, the French firm showed the report to UCN officials, who confirmed it was a confidential document that had been misappropriated from the company.
Since UCN had never provided any information from its centrifuge program to Pakistan`s embassy in Brussels, the company quickly focused its attention on Khan, a Pakistani national, in its attempt to locate the source of the leak. It was believed possible that Khan could have obtained the report in question and that he could have provided it to Pakistani government agents. As of October 1975, documents suggest, FDO had contacted Dutch intelligence about its concerns.
About a year later, in September 1976, FDO officials held a discussion with PAEC head Munir Khan. Dutch experts sought to confirm their suspicions that Pakistan had been tapping the UCN program for a secret centrifuge development program.
Munir Khan was appointed PAEC chairman by then-prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1972. Two years later, when India set off its first nuclear test, he presided over a meeting of Pakistani scientists and government officials in Multan to discuss how Pakistan should respond to the perceived Indian threat. In July 1976—two months before he met with Dutch experts—Munir Khan fell out with A.Q. Khan over the direction of Pakistan`s autonomous nuclear development, leaving A.Q. Khan in charge of Pakistan`s uranium enrichment effort, according to media reports in Pakistan. The PAEC under Munir Khan continued to develop plutonium production.
But Munir Khan brushed off Dutch concerns that Pakistan was trying to steal Urenco`s technology. He said Pakistan had ``no interest`` in developing gas centrifuge technology for a future uranium enrichment program.
The PAEC head, Munir Khan, did acknowledge that the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science & Technology (Pinstech) in Rawalpindi had carried out an exploratory centrifuge investigation, and had set up between 10 and 20 centrifuges in a laboratory. But according to Munir Khan, Pinstech`s centrifuge effort was based on centrifuge and cascade design information obtained from Italy—not from the Urenco program.
The record of questions about A.Q. Khan by top officials at Khan`s employer FDO beginning in 1975, registered in Dutch internal files, contrasts with statements made by ministry staffers in documents that were declassified earlier this year. The declassified files suggest a very different reaction to assertions by a U.K. lawmaker in 1978 and media accounts beginning in 1979 that Urenco security could have been compromised. The declassified files say the Dutch government considered it improbable that Khan could have seriously challenged the security of the Urenco program and that Khan had little access to secret centrifuge design information.
Beginning in 1979, staffers in the Netherlands ministries of Economic Affairs and Foreign Affairs engaged in damage control to play down allegations about Khan in public and in parliament. Records show that personnel in the Dutch embassy in Islamabad at this time discussed Pakistan`s nuclear program with Pakistani officials. The Pakistanis—mirroring Munir Khan`s claims—told Dutch diplomats that Pakistan`s centrifuge program was a low priority or at a very early stage, and that there was no military component to it.
That message may have served the purpose of bureaucrats in The Hague to put out the fire of speculation in the media and parliament about Khan`s contribution to a nuclear weapons program in Pakistan. But one cable from the Netherlands` embassy in Pakistan to headquarters in The Hague suggested that embassy staffers were highly skeptical of Pakistan`s assertions that its nuclear program was peaceful.
Western officials said last month that it would have been possible for Pakistan to have obtained centrifuge design know-how from a pilot centrifuge development program in Italy at that time, which was centered on work carried out by Italian industry and government-sponsored laboratories.
Western officials said that Italy began centrifuge research and development in 1969, and by 1973 had done some separation work using a relatively simple, so-called Zippe-type centrifuge. This type was pioneered after World War II by the German engineer Gernot Zippe, and provided the engineering and physics bases for both Italian and Urenco machines.
Italy developed and tested a second generation centrifuge on a lab scale by 1975, officials said. At about the same time, Italian scientists were doing work on a different, block-mounted centrifuge and had begun to experiment with more advanced rotor tubes made of carbon fiber. By around 1978, the Italian program had designed a small uranium enrichment plant.
Then, however, Italy dropped its centrifuge program and shifted its interest toward gaseous diffusion, in parallel with Italy`s membership in the Eurodif consortium. Officials said that the IAEA has since verified that Italy is no longer pursuing any research in the field of centrifuge uranium enrichment.
Munir Ahmad Khan died in 1999.
Regards.
#125 Posted by Godot on December 3, 2005 4:43:48 am
Re: # 115
rsridhar
``godot...What are u smoking dude?``
Not what you are, dude. Can I have some? Judging from your posts, you carry very good stuff. I`ll contact you at charsi@smokeit.com
rsridhar
``godot...What are u smoking dude?``
Not what you are, dude. Can I have some? Judging from your posts, you carry very good stuff. I`ll contact you at charsi@smokeit.com
#126 Posted by Behram1 on December 3, 2005 6:18:27 am
Re: # 125
Dear godot:
[rsridhar
I`ll contact you at charsi@smokeit.com ]
And don`t forget to get him some Bangladeshi khajoor injected sugar cane for his chikna madrasi b$tt. He needs to get his therapy.
Respectfully submitted,
Dear godot:
[rsridhar
I`ll contact you at charsi@smokeit.com ]
And don`t forget to get him some Bangladeshi khajoor injected sugar cane for his chikna madrasi b$tt. He needs to get his therapy.
Respectfully submitted,
#127 Posted by kalihawa on December 3, 2005 6:22:33 am
Morality at the level of nations has no meaning. You have Bomb now, worry about its safety. Soon it will be realized that keeping bombs is more expensive than making them.
#128 Posted by Behram1 on December 3, 2005 6:34:17 am
Re: # 122
Dear Romair:
[Kahuta is protected like a precious diamond. This I know of personally....... ] Were you contacted by the international atomic agency spies about this precious diamond?
[AQ Khan got too much into the limelight. That is not how real heroes should behave.]
Yet in an earlier post, you considered him as a hero. Double speak as usual, eh?
[ And he openly came on air to admit he did some dealings on his own. Which was a huge let-down for Pakistan. At the same time, Pakistan has broken no int`l law, neither has AQ Khan. He has broken Pakistani law........... ]
Then why the pardon? Gibberish or double speak, which one? You chose.
[AQ Khan was a hero for the right reasons.] Get your thoughts examined, for your own sanity.
[ And he is now a pardoned criminal for the right reasons also.] Get your thoughts examined, for your own sanity.
[ But he has been turned into a far bigger hero than he deserves to be.] Hero, my foot.... ``hero....hath may lay key phiro``
[ He lives in sector E-7 in Islamabad... We used to live in the area and knew this scientist. The most down to earth man you will ever see. Those are the true heroes............ ]
Then, what are you doing in the western world?
Romair, you are soooo confuuuused about this world. Your double speak is just hilarious.
Respectfully submitted,
Dear Romair:
[Kahuta is protected like a precious diamond. This I know of personally....... ] Were you contacted by the international atomic agency spies about this precious diamond?
[AQ Khan got too much into the limelight. That is not how real heroes should behave.]
Yet in an earlier post, you considered him as a hero. Double speak as usual, eh?
[ And he openly came on air to admit he did some dealings on his own. Which was a huge let-down for Pakistan. At the same time, Pakistan has broken no int`l law, neither has AQ Khan. He has broken Pakistani law........... ]
Then why the pardon? Gibberish or double speak, which one? You chose.
[AQ Khan was a hero for the right reasons.] Get your thoughts examined, for your own sanity.
[ And he is now a pardoned criminal for the right reasons also.] Get your thoughts examined, for your own sanity.
[ But he has been turned into a far bigger hero than he deserves to be.] Hero, my foot.... ``hero....hath may lay key phiro``
[ He lives in sector E-7 in Islamabad... We used to live in the area and knew this scientist. The most down to earth man you will ever see. Those are the true heroes............ ]
Then, what are you doing in the western world?
Romair, you are soooo confuuuused about this world. Your double speak is just hilarious.
Respectfully submitted,
Interact Index
Latest Interacts
- jalal_awan: Hello to everyone; I'm flattered... Terrorism Unveiled
- bjkumar: Atif2, thank you for... A Guantanamo Diary
- VRV: #12 Posted by nkg... Swat Calls For Civil
- jayp: Durani was sacked because... Terrorism Unveiled
- jayp: Re: # 31 nkg the homo... The Palestinian Puzzle
- jayp: Slowly moves are being... Swat Calls For Civil
- nkg: Re: # 26 GF... Oh you... The Palestinian Puzzle
- jayp: Now the VP elect... Swat Calls For Civil
