Tuesday, October 30, 2007

american perfidy: The man who knew too much

oct 30th, 2007

not that i am the least bit anti-american, but india has to be *very* careful in understanding how the americans view india.

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Sudarshan

This is hot explosive stuff. Please spread this far and wide. This guys life will be in danger, hope he realizes it. While I have long suspected it, its all quite clear now that Pakistan was a western creation with the specific purpose of keeping a possibly errant India in check.

So basically the americans helped build the Paki nuclear bomb. No wonder the Pakis have them by their balls. If Pakis are threatened, all american clandestine secrets will be available for free download and this terrifies the Neo-cons.

And the same Neo-cons (and other american congressmen) now push for this "pathbreaking" N-deal and utterly naive Indians in thrall of the americans, bat for this utterly crappy deal.

BP < bp16@ukonline.co.uk> wrote: The man who knew too much
http://www.guardian.co.uk:80/pakistan/Story/0,,2188777,00.html

He was the CIA's expert on Pakistan's nuclear secrets, but Rich Barlow was
thrown out and disgraced when he blew the whistle on a US cover-up. Now he's
to have his day in court. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark report

Saturday October 13, 2007
The Guardian


Rich Barlow idles outside his silver trailer on a remote campsite in
Montana - itinerant and unemployed, with only his hunting dogs and a
borrowed computer for company. He dips into a pouch of American Spirit
tobacco to roll another cigarette. It is hard to imagine that he was once a
covert operative at the CIA, the recognised, much lauded expert in the trade
in Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).
He prepared briefs for Dick Cheney, when Cheney was at the 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.



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 . Straddling deep ethnic, religious and
political fault-lines, it was also a country regularly rocked by
inter-communal violence. "Pakistan was the kind of place where technology
could slip out of control," Barlow says.
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. 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. Barlow says, "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.

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