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Letter: Mystery of Khan's letter

Indian media is agog with the revelations made by Simon Henderson (based on A Q Khan's letters to his Dutch-born wife Henny), which appeared in the Sept

(The Jakarta Post)
Sat, October 10, 2009

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Letter: Mystery of Khan's letter

I

ndian media is agog with the revelations made by Simon Henderson (based on A Q Khan's letters to his Dutch-born wife Henny), which appeared in the Sept. 20, edition of The Sunday Times. (http://tinyurl.com/mm3ll6). However, the coverage of this event by major media is very low key!

It is unbelievable that the Dutch Intelligence Service (AIVD), which reportedly opened Khan's letter in possession of his niece, read its contents and still didn't pass it on to US Intelligence Services!

They must have! If so, did the US Government deliberately keep it under the wraps until now?

One also wonders why a letter dated December 2003, outlining Pakistan's active participation in the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology with China, Iran, North Korea and Libya, which AIVD confiscated in 2004 and Henderson acquired in December 2007, is being published in 2009, when Benazir Bhutto and Gen. Imtiaz (her then Defense Advisor) are both not around to confirm or deny the accusations that they approved proliferation of nuclear weapons technology.

It has almost been nine months since Benazir's assassination. So why now? Would Henderson's revelations in the Sept. 20 issue of The Sunday Times be an attempt to call (what Americans define as) the bluff of Iranian government that they are not building nuclear weapons?

Will the revelations of Simon Henderson embarrass Iran about its real intentions?

Nobody except the top US political and military leaders with high security clearances would know whether the allegations contained in the book Nuclear Deception by Levy and Scott-Clarke - claiming it was the US, a signatory of the original non-proliferation treaty of 1968, that gave the nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan in the Reagan era - are correct or false, but the story of whistleblower Rich Barlow is widely known to many who have read on this subject.

As written in this book, Pakistan cold-tested their A-bomb in 1983 and hot-tested it in 1984 using Chinese designs. Reagan gave/sold sixty F-16 aircraft that were duly modified to carry nuclear warheads to Pakistan though they lied to their Congress about it.

One must admire the cheek of then Congressman Dick Cheney who told the meeting of AEI in May 2009, "This was the world in which al-qaeda was seeking nuclear technology and Khan was selling nuclear technology on the black market."

So, wasn't it the US that first indulged in nuclear proliferation by giving nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan which, in turn, commercialized it and sold it to any nation - US ally or otherwise - that needed it and could pay in cash or kind?

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