3D Chess: How Pakistan Got Its Nukes & Saudi Arabia Could Get Them & Cheney Benefits From Tragedy

McCamy Taylor

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Fri Dec-28-07 04:05 PM
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3D Chess: How Pakistan Got Its Nukes & Saudi Arabia Could Get Them & Cheney Benefits From Tragedy

Edited on Fri Dec-28-07 04:21 PM by McCamy Taylor

I want to apologize in advance. There is no way to present this in a way that isn't messy. So, I am just going to dive right in.

I know that there have been an astounding number of blockbuster news stories lately, but try to think back before Two Torture Tapes and Iran NIE to a story that almost got buried by the mainstream media. Here it is in the good old Guardian , former CIA agent and counter proliferation expert Rich Barlow telling a sickening tale of how the NeoCons enabled Pakistan to go nuclear.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,,2188777,00.html

(Barlow) soon discovered, however, that senior officials in government were taking quite the opposite view: they were breaking US and international non-proliferation protocols to shelter Pakistan's ambitions and even sell it banned WMD technology. In the closing years of the cold war, Pakistan was considered to have great strategic importance. It provided Washington with a springboard into neighbouring Afghanistan - a route for passing US weapons and cash to the mujahideen, who were battling to oust the Soviet army that had invaded in 1979.

According to the author, when Reagan took office in 1981, détente and counter proliferation were tossed out the window. Instead, the US began a massive arms build up, under the guidance of the NeoCons. So did the rest of the world, including Pakistan. Barlow, who had been laid off from his CIA post in 1981, was rehired in 1984 when it became apparent that Pakistan had tested a Chinese nuke.

Barlow came to the conclusion that a small group of senior officials was physically aiding the Pakistan programme. "They were issuing scores of approvals for the Pakistan embassy in Washington to export hi-tech equipment that was critical for their nuclear bomb programme and that the US Commerce Department had refused to license," he says.

The CIA set up a sting operation, but two people working for the White House tipped off the Pakistani government. A crisis ensued, Barlow lost his job, only to rehired in 1989—and then fired again by Cheney and Wolfowitz after he objected that the selling of F-16 fighters to Pakistan would enable that country to proceed with the development of its nuclear program.

Adrian Levy, one of the authors of the Guardian story has written a book about these events called Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons

Next thing you know, literally pretty much overnight, Barlow’s security clearances evaporate; a vicious whispering campaign begins in the Pentagon, accusing Barlow of being potentially a spy, adulterer, a drunkard, and his wife Cindy who is also in the CIA is very much set against him. This may sound remarkably like another case, the Plame-Wilson case. And it’s the same cast of characters essentially, on the periphery. With Barlow case it involves once again Louis Scooter Libby, Stephen Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eric Adelman, still in the Pentagon negotiating with Pakistan. All of these people revolving around the Barlow case, helping to spread the smear.

This story intersects with the Bhutto family in a couple of ways. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began Pakistan’s nuclear weapon’s program and is rumored to have been assassinated by kangaroo court, because he defied Kissinger’s injunction against attempting to acquire nukes.

http://www.pppuk.org/zab.htm

The daughter, Benazir Bhutto was prime minister of Pakistan during Barlow’s last stint at the CIA, when Cheney and Wolfowitz had him fired for attempting to interfere with the sale of the F-16 fighters. As prime minister, she would have had access to information about her country’s nuclear weapon’s program and about assistance from people within the United States government. As the daughter of a man rumored to have been killed because of his nuclear ambition, it is likely that she would have had a special interest in acquiring as much knowledge and documentation as possible to use as leverage against would be imperial meddlers. While Pakistan’s military and intelligence community might have tried to have kept her in the dark about their illicit dealings with high ranking US government officials, she would have been aware of at least some of the deals which Barlow is now describing in his whistle blower lawsuit. And, as a twice elected prime minister, she would be a credible witness against proven liars like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, if she ever decided to talk about how Pakistan got its nukes.

Bhutto also knew a lot about the Taliban. Though in recents days, she had talked tough about Al Qaeda, when she was prime minister of Pakistan, her country's intelligence was an ally of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/playing-roulette-in-pakis_b_74666.html

That support for the Taliban is traced in the declassified documents back to 1995, when Bhutto was Pakistan's prime minister. One cable on Dec. 22, 1995, states that "Pakistan has followed a policy of supporting the Taliban" in its effort to seize power.

Now, think back to what really happened to Benazir Bhutto. She was living in exile, physically safe, powerless to hurt Musharraf, but a threat to the NeoCons thanks to her knowledge of how her country acquired its nuclear arms program. In July 2007, the Rich Barlow story was heating up. The Washington Post had this article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/06/AR2007070602127.html

Barlow wrote an analysis for then-Secretary Dick Cheney that concluded the planned F-16 sale violated this law. Drawing on detailed, classified studies, Barlow wrote about Pakistan's ability, intentions and activities to deliver nuclear bombs using F-16s it had acquired before the law was passed.

Barlow discovered later that someone rewrote his analysis so that it endorsed the sale of the F-16s. Arthur Hughes, the deputy assistant secretary of defense, testified to Congress that using the F-16s to deliver nuclear weapons "far exceeded the state of art in Pakistan" -- something Barlow knew to be untrue.

In the summer of 1989, Barlow told Brubaker, Rostow and Michael MacMurray, the Pakistan desk officer in charge of military sales to Pakistan who prepared Hughes's testimony, that Congress had been misled.

Within days, Barlow was fired.

Coincidentally or not, shortly afterwards, the Bush administration decided to encourage Bhutto to return to Pakistan. Within two months, the BBC was reporting that Bhutto was returning to Pakistan after years of exile.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6994976.stm

No doubt, she was promised that Musharraf would keep her safe. She was probably told that with all the billions he had been paid by the US, he was no more than a US puppet. And so he should be. Which makes you wonder, if his security forces were failing to keep Mrs. Bhutto protected, why didn’t the Bush administration slap his wrist? Could it be that the Bush administration---or some one within the administration—did not want to see her protected?

We speculate that Al Qaeda murdered Benazir Bhutto but that the one who really benefits is Musharraf. However, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz can sleep easier at night, too. Indeed, who is in the best situation of all, right now? Not Musharraf. Everyone in the entire world is pointing their finger at him, blaming him for deliberately lax security if not for hiring the assassin. All Musharraf has to show for it is billions of US dollars—and a country that could tip over into civil war, and India next door with its own nukes, “Target: Pakistan” written on every one of them.

On the other hand, Cheney and Wolfowitz have managed to get through 24 hours without anyone even mentioning how they helped Pakistan get its nuclear weapons that now pose such a danger to the region since the country is politically destabilized and the Barlow whistle blower suit which is now minus one key witness, who would never have been called to testify, but whose very presence would have nagged like a phantom limb, making the two men subject to blackmail. For, how could they claim to be concerned about the possibility of a nuclear Iran, if they were known to have made a nuclear Pakistan in a short sighted attempt to annoy the Soviet Union back at the end of the Cold War? They would look like traitors. Worse, they would be revealed to be the foreign policy fools that they are. And I suspect that Wolfowitz can tolerate anything except being shown to be stupid.

Luckily for the self styled NeoCon Uber-genius, there are papers like the New York Times, which recently had a piece called “Wolfowitz May Return as Arms Control Adviser”

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/wolfowitz-may-return-as-arms-control-advisor/

“When it comes to arms control experience, Mr. Wolfowitz is hard to beat.”

This line was written tongue in cheek, I suspect (or, at least, hope). If you scroll down, you will find that the author, Mike Nizza can find no internet source that approves of the appointment. Maybe this is because people writing on the internet know about Wolfowitz’s “arms control experience” in nuking up Pakistan. That is pretty hard to beat.

Now, for the important question. How many days will pass, before Cheney and Wolfowitz begin to assert that Iran killed Bhutto? I know they will try. These guys are NeoCons. They only know how to do one thing at a time, and they do it whole heartedly, with lies, guns and suitcases full of (US taxpayer) money. And sometimes, Al Qaeda helps.

Of course, Al Qaeda mostly helps Saudi Arabia. In the Huffington Post piece linked above, the author of the piece, Robert Scheer reminds us that someone else, Nawaz Sharif stands to gain from Bhutto's death (even though he wrote his article for the Huffington Post back in November).

It was a very good week for Saudi Arabia. The royal family's favored Pakistani "president-in-exile," Nawaz Sharif, returned in a triumphant homecoming, throwing down a major challenge to the rule of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who's still favored, for the moment, by the United States.

If Al Qaeda really did kill Bhutto, perhaps they were thinking of the fact that their funding comes from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Royal family would probably love to get its hands on Pakistan's nuclear weapons. And this would be an easy, underhanded way for the NeoCons to arm their favorite Middle East ally (along with Israel which already has nukes) without actually having to go around the CIA's back. All they would have to do is encourage the US to suddenly cut off the billions in aid which have been flowing to Pakistan--say, on the pretext that we have suddenly noticed that Pakistan is harboring Osama and then Pakistan's new, Saudi controlled prime minister could sell nuclear technology and weapons to Saudi Arabia for some much needed cash, the way they sold their nuclear secrets in the mid 1990's. This is all good for the Bush family and its retainers, too, since they are employed by the Carlyle Group, so what benefits their Saudi Masters makes them a hell of lot richer, as well---

Which is why I say that this is like 3D Chess. There are so many ways that Cheney and Co. benefit from the tragedy of Bhutto's assassination. The only thing I can tell you for certain is that the goals of the Neo Con's are never advanced when a Muslim country moves towards democratic rule , because this gives the lie to the narrative spread by people like Richard Perle that Islam is, in itself, a form a terrorism which must be wiped from the face of the earth. Even if Pakistan has no nationalized oil that needs to be liberated from the control of brown people (the first commandment of the NeoCons), no self respecting follower of that philosophy would ever allow a Muslim country to descend into peace and tranquility.