Nuke Heads on the Block

posted by The Sailor @ 5:26 PM Permalink

Stop me if you've heard this one; Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld conspire to trash the reputation of a CIA specialist in WMDs, while breaking American and international law. Sound familiar? But I'm not talking about Valerie Plame, she was just the latest episode ... that we know about.

I'm referring to Rich Barlow, a former covert CIA operative, analyst, WMD specialist, and Pentagon WMD specialist who has been trying to clear his name for almost 20 years.

In the late 80s, in the course of tracking down smugglers of WMD components, Barlow uncovered reams of material that related to Pakistan. It was known the Islamic Republic had been covertly striving to acquire nuclear weapons since India's explosion of a device in 1974 and the prospect terrified the west - especially given the instability of a nation that had had three military coups in less than 30 years . [...]
He 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.
[...]
Next he discovered that the Pentagon was preparing to sell Pakistan jet fighters that could be used to drop a nuclear bomb.
[...]
the nuclear weapons programmes of Iran, Libya and North Korea - which British and American intelligence now acknowledge were all secretly enabled by Pakistan - would never have got off the ground. "None of this need have happened," Robert Gallucci, special adviser on WMD to both Clinton and George W Bush, told us.
[...]
As the first Gulf war came to an end with no regime change in Iraq, a group of neoconservatives led by Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Donald Rumsfeld were already lobbying to finish what that campaign had started and dislodge Saddam. Even as the CIA amassed evidence showing that Pakistan, a state that sponsored Islamist terrorism and made its money by selling proscribed WMD technology, was the number one threat, they earmarked Iraq as the chief target.

There's so much more I encourage you to read the whole thing.


Cross posted at SteveAudio

Labels: Bush, Iraq, War On Terror