Tuesday, June 16, 2009

US Allowed Pakistan To Go Nuclear

The United States allowed Pakistan to manufacture and acquire nuclear weapons without informing the Congress, a non-profit corruption watchdog has said, quoting a whistle blower who was fired for objecting to the policy.

Here is a very resourceful link:

Government Oversight - Richard Barlow Resource Page.

Richard Barlow at Wikipedia.

They Sold out the World for an F-16 Sale

A Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon official, who tried to object to this policy of the then US administration of keeping the Congress in dark on this issue, was fired.

"As a CIA intelligence officer and later in the Pentagon, Rich Barlow learned that top US officials were allowing Pakistan to manufacture and possess nuclear weapons," Danielle Brian, executive director, Project on Government Oversight (POGO), told a Congressional hearing last week.

Washington-based, POGO is a non-profit non-partisan watchdog that works with whistleblowers and government insiders to expose corruption, fraud, and abuse of power.

"Barlow also discovered that US officials were hiding these activities from Congress," Brian told US lawmakers in her testimony during a hearing.

"Barlow objected and suggested to his supervisors that Congress should be made aware of the situation... he was fired," said Brian in her testimony.

"Barlow is now destitute and living in a trailer," she said as she went on to give other examples of the fate of the whistleblowers in the US government.

An investigative story published by UK's The Guardian newspaper in 2007 had said: 'In the late 80s, in the course of tracking down smugglers of WMD components, Barlow uncovered reams of material that related to Pakistan.'

According to the newspaper, Barley soon discovered that senior officials in government 'were breaking US and international non-proliferation protocols to shelter Pakistan's ambitions and even sell it banned WMD technology'.

This was done because in the closing years of the cold war, Pakistan was considered to have great strategic importance, it said.

'We had to buddy-up to regimes we didn't see eye-to-eye with, but I could not believe we would actually give Pakistan the bomb,' Barlow was quoted as saying.

He next discovered that Pentagon was preparing to sell Pakistan jet fighters that could be used to drop a nuclear bomb and came to the conclusion that a small group of senior officials was physically aiding Pakistan's programme, it said.

'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 said.

'He (Barlow) prepared briefs for Dick Cheney, when Cheney was at Pentagon, for the upper echelons of the CIA and even for the Oval Office. But when he uncovered a political scandal -- a conspiracy to enable a rogue nation to get the nuclear bomb -- he found himself a marked man,' the paper said.

Sources: Rediff, POGO.org

Labels: , , ,

Monday, June 15, 2009

US drops 'India, AQ Khan' riders from Pak aid bill

Guys, India needs to fight it's own battle against Pakistan and NO ONE is going to help us in this. We have been trying to put pressure on Pakistan through the US and looks like it is not working out. We need to find our "own ways" of taking action if not Pakistanis will feel that we are incapable of defending our country.

Following Article illustrates that:

In what may be seen as a major concession to Pakistan, the US House of Representatives has dropped demands of access to the disgraced nuclear scientist Dr A.Q. Khan and preventing terrorist attacks against India as conditions from the aid bill offering Islamabad 1.5 billion dollars for the next five years.


When the Pakistan Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement Act' (PEACE) was first tabled in the Congress in April, it required Pakistan to fulfil some major requirements in order to qualify for the aid.

The act asked Pakistan to improve relations with India, and stop supporting the cross border terrorism.

It also asked Islamabad to provide 'access to Pakistani nationals' and especially to Dr. A.Q. Khan who is connected to proliferation networks.

However, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has now omitted the part that named Dr Khan, The Dawn reports.

Even though, the language of the US aid bill has been reworked, it still has certain benchmarks in place for Pakistan.

According to the restrictions included in the PEACE act, an evaluation of efforts would be undertaken by the Pakistan government to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other extremist and terrorist groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and other regions.

The act also asks for a crackdown on all terrorist camps operating inside Pakistan, including those of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).


One of the major conditions put forth in the PEACE act is to cease all support for extremist and terrorist groups, and increase oversight over curriculum in madrasas.

It also asks for the closing down of all the madrasas which are directly linked to the Taliban and other militant organizations.

The assistance could also stop if the US president fails to certify that Pakistan is cooperating with nuclear non-proliferation efforts.

Sources: ANI & Yahoo

Labels: ,