robertpaulsen (1000+ posts) Mon Jul-19-04 07:22 PM
Response to Reply #216
234. WHOA!!! Could this be circumstantial evidence of a Khan/Plame link?!
When I first read this article, I decided to post it here because of the dirt it has on a Musharraf/Khan/Bin Laden connection.
A. Q. KHAN & OSAMA BIN LADEN
snip
These accounts of three of the travels of Dr.A.Q.Khan establish conclusively the following facts:
He had kept the Pakistani Foreign Office informed of his travels. The Foreign Office had instructed the Pakistani diplomatic missions in the countries visited by him to accord the due honours of protocol to him.
In all the countries, he was received by officers of the Pakistani diplomatic missions and entertained by the heads of missions.
In Sudan, he was accorded the honours of protocol generally given to a member of the Cabinet and called on the President of the country.
He was accompanied by senior serving scientists of Pakistan's nuclear establishment, who were among those responsible for Pakistan's military nuclear development. They could not have gone abroad and remained absent for days without the knowledge and clearance of the Government.
At least one Lt.Gen. belonging to the Pakistan Army's Medical Corps, who had headed it, and two Brigadiers had accompanied him. They could not have gone and remained away from the country without the knowledge and clearance of the Military Headquarters.
The uranium enriched at KRL, Kahuta, used to come from Africa, mainly Niger. This partly explains the frequent travels of A.Q.Khan to Africa. From the accounts given by the Pakistani author, two intriguing questions arise:
Why did Khan consider it necessary to visit the site of a factory in Sudan, which became the target of US Cruise missile attacks after the explosions outside the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam by Al Qaeda in August 1998? The Americans had alleged at that time that this factory belonged to Osama bin Laden and was producing chemicals for weaponisation purposes. Denying this, the Sudanese authorities had claimed that it was producing anti-malaria drugs.
Why was he visiting frequently Timbuktu, which has apparently no importance from the nuclear point of view? Pakistani officials have alleged that he had illegally constructed a hotel there ( Hotel La Colombe?) in the name of his wife. If he was going there to supervise the construction of the hotel, he should have been accompanied by experts in building construction and the hotel industry. No such person accompanied him. He was always accompanied by scientists and Army officers associated with KRL and Tahir Mian, who was helping him in the procurement of centrifuges.
It is reliably learnt from well-placed observers that it also came out during the recent interrogation of the associates of Khan in Pakistan's nuclear establishment that after Osama bin Laden shifted from Khartoum to Afghanistan in 1996, Dr.Khan was also looking after bin Laden's extensive investments in the mining industry in many African countries and that the money invested in the Timbuktu hotel had come from these investments of bin Laden. The Pakistani authorities have reportedly suppressed this information and not shared it with the US.
http://www.kashmirherald.com/featuredarticle/khanandbinladen.htmlSooooo....
Khan, with the assistance of the Pakistani government and military, looked after bin Laden investments in Africa. Pretty bad on its own merits. But then this sentence caught my eye.
The uranium enriched at KRL, Kahuta, used to come from Africa, mainly Niger. This partly explains the frequent travels of A.Q.Khan to Africa.
What a coincidence. The enriched uranium that Khan had access to came mainly from NIGER!
Now, when Cheney sent Wilson to Niger, wasn't he aware of Plame's WMD "sting operation" in the Middle East?!
No wonder Musharraf had this reaction:
"In one of his statements, he has even blamed the US intelligence agencies for not uncovering this network earlier than October last year and asserted that if they had done so, he would have acted against it even earlier."
I know this is not direct proof of a smoking gun, but I think this information could be an extremely important piece of the puzzle. If the WMD trafficking that Plame's "sting operation" covered is linked to Khan, who got his enriched uranium mainly from Niger, and we can verify Cheney had access to this intelligence, then we are getting even closer to H20 Man and Prouty's big question: why?