The Vice Gang

When news of Pakistan's clandestine program involving its top nuclear scientist selling rogue nations, suchas Iran and North Korea, blueprints for building an atomic bomb was uncovered recently, the world's leaderswaited, with baited breath, to see what type of punishment President Bush would bestow upon Pakistan'sPresident Pervez Musharaff.

Bush has, after all, spent his entire term in office talking tough about countries and dictators thatconceal weapons of mass destruction and even tougher on individuals who supply rogue nations and terroristswith the means to build WMDs. For all intents and purposes, Pakistan and Musharraf fit that description.

Remember, Bush accused Iraq of harboring a cache of WMDs, which was the primary reason the United Stateslaunched a preemptive strike there a year ago, and also claimed that Iraq may have given its WMDs to al-Qaedaterrorists and/or Syria, weapons that, Bush said, could be used to attack the U.S.

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and top members of the administration reacted with shock when they foundout that Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist, spent the past 15 years selling outlaw nationsnuclear technology and equipment. So it was sort of a surprise when Bush, upon finding out about Khan'sproliferation of nuclear technology, let Pakistan off with a slap on the wrist. But it was all an act. Infact, it was actually a cover-up designed to shield Cheney because he knew about the proliferation for morethan a decade and did nothing to stop it.

Like the terrorist attacks on 9-11, the Bush administration had mountains of evidence on Pakistan's salesof nuclear technology and equipment to nations vilified by the U.S._nations that are considered much more of athreat than Iraq, but turned a blind eye to the threat and allowed it to happen.

In 1989, the year Khan first started selling nuclear secrets on the black-market, Richard Barlow, a youngintelligence analyst working for the Pentagon prepared a shocking report for Cheney, who was then working asSecretary of Defense under the first President Bush administration: Pakistan built an atomic bomb and wasselling its nuclear equipment to countries the U.S. said was sponsoring terrorism.

But Barlow's findings, as reported in a January 2002 story in the magazine Mother Jones, were"politically inconvenient."

"A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandatedcutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the CIA's efforts to support Afghan rebels fighting a pro-Sovietgovernment. It also would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad," MotherJones reported.

Ironically, Pakistan, critics say, was let off the hook last month so the U.S. could use its borders tohunt for al-Qaeda leader and 9-11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Cheney dismissed Barlow's report because he desperately wanted to sell Pakistan the F-16 fighter planes.Several months later, a Pentagon official was told by Cheney to downplay Pakistan's nuclear capabilities whenhe testified on the threat before Congress. Barlow complained to his bosses at the Pentagon and was fired.

"Three years later, in 1992, a high-ranking Pakistani official admitted that the country had developedthe ability to assemble a nuclear weapon by 1987," Mother Jones reported. "In 1998, Islamabaddetonated its first bomb."

During the time that Barlow prepared his report on Pakistan, Bryan Siebert an Energy Department analyst,was looking into Saddam Hussein's nuclear program in Iraq. Siebert concluded that "Iraq has a majoreffort under way to produce nuclear weapons," and said that the National Security Council shouldinvestigate his findings. But the Bush administration--which had been supporting Iraq as a counterweight tothe Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran--ignored the report, the magazine reported.

"This was not a failure of intelligence," Barlow told Mother Jones. "The intelligencewas in the system."

Cheney went to great lengths to cover-up Pakistan's nuclear weaponry. In a NewYorker article published on March 29, 1993, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh quoted Barlow assaying that some high-ranking members inside the CIA and the Pentagon lied to Congress about Pakistan'snuclear arsenal so as not to sacrifice the sale of the F-16 fighter planes to Islamabad, which was secretlyequipped to deliver nuclear weapons. Pakistan's nuclear capabilities and the had become so grave by the springof 1990 that then CIA deputy director Richard Kerr said the Pakistani nuclear threat was worse than! the CubanMissile crisis in the 1960s.

"It was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have ever faced since I've been in the U.S.government," Kerr said in an interview with Hersh. "It may be as close as we've come to a nuclearexchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis."

Presently, Kerr is leading the CIA's review of prewar intelligence into the Iraqi threat cited by Bush.

Still, in l989 Cheney and others in the Pentagon and the CIA continued to hide the reality of Pakistan'snuclear threat from members of Congress. Hersh explained in his lengthy New Yorker article that reasonsbehind the cover-up "revolves around the fact... that the Reagan Administration had dramatically aidedPakistan in its pursuit of the bomb."

"President Reagan and his national-security aides saw the generals who ran Pakistan as loyal allies inthe American proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan: driving the Russians out of Afghanistan wasconsidered far more important than nagging Pakistan about its building of bombs. The Reagan Administration didmore than forgo nagging, however; it looked the other way throughout the mid-nineteen-eighties as Pakistanassembled its nuclear arsenal with the aid of many millions of dollars' worth of restricted, high-techmaterials bought inside the United States. Such purchases have always been illegal, but Congress made breakingthe law more costly in 1985, when it passed the Solarz Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act (the amendmentwas proposed by former Representative Stephen J. Solarz, Democrat of New York), providing for the cutoff ofall military and economic aid to purportedly non-nuclear nations that illegally export or attempt to exportnuclear-related materials from the United States."

"The government's ability to keep the Pakistani nuclear-arms purchases in America secret is the moreremarkable because (since 1989) the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the DefenseDepartment (under Cheney) have been struggling with an internal account of illegal Pakistani procurementactivities, given by a former [C.I.A] intelligence officer named Richard M. Barlow," Hersh reported."Barlow... was dismayed to learn, at first hand, that State Department and agency officials were engagedin what he concluded was a pattern of lying to and misleading Congress about Pakistan's nuclear-purchasingactivities."

Hersh interviewed scores of intelligence and administration officials for his March 1993 New Yorkerstory and many of those individuals confirmed Barlow's claims that Pakistani nuclear purchases wasdeliberately withheld from Congress by Cheney and other officials, for fear of provoking a cutoff in militaryand economic aid that would adversely affect the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan.

It seems that today, Cheney is advising President Bush to deal with Pakistan's nuclear proliferation muchin the same way he did more than a decade ago. Give the country a pass, lie to the public about theseriousness of the matter and tell Pakistan you'll turn the other cheek if the country agrees to allow U.S.troops to use its borders to hunt for Bin Laden before the November election.