1115.org

This is all we need in the Middle East:

Saudi Arabia is working secretly on a nuclear program, with help from Pakistani experts, the German magazine Cicero reported in its latest edition, citing Western security sources.

It says that during the Haj pilgrimages to Mecca in 2003 through 2005, Pakistani scientists posed as pilgrims to come to Saudi Arabia.

Between October 2004 and January 2005, some of them slipped off from pilgrimages, sometimes for up to three weeks, the report quoted German security expert Udo Ulfkotte as saying.
[…]
Cicero, which will appear on newstands tomorrow, also quoted a US military analyst, John Pike, as saying that Saudi bar codes can be found on half of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons ‘because it is Saudi Arabia which ultimately co-financed the Pakistani atomic nuclear program.’

The magazine also said satellite images indicate that Saudi Arabia has set up a program in Al-Sulaiyil, south of Riyadh, a secret underground city and dozens of underground silos for missiles.

According to some Western security services, long-range Ghauri-type missiles of Pakistani-origin are housed inside the silos.

If this turns out to be true, it will confirm everyone’s worst fears about the Bush administration’s decision to ignore the international nuclear black market that Pakistan was running through disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan.

We blandly accepted it when Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf declared that the elaborate clandestine network established by A.Q. Khan was an act of private enterprise, and had nothing to do with the Pakistan government. We willingly suspended disbelief when Pervez Musharraf pardoned A.Q. Khan, a national hero in Pakistan, for his role in the black marketing of nuclear technology, and allowed him to keep all the money he made in the process. We managed to be busy doing something else more important when Pervez Musharraf refused to let A.Q. Khan be interrogated by the IAEA.

The Bush administration made a determination at the time that getting tough with Pakistan about these clandestine nuclear proliferation activities would lead them to withdraw the support they were extending in the war on terror. And their support in the war on terror was deemed to be more important than anything else.

If the report in Cicero is true, Pakistan’s support to the Saudi nuclear program happened well after A.Q. Khan was sacked (in January 2004). It happened well after Pakistan claimed to have dismantled A.Q. Khan’s clandestine network. There are no individuals who can now be made the scapegoats for this. If Pakistani scientists have been involved in mentoring a Saudi nuclear program as described, then this has to have been a Pakistani government enterprise.

The Bush administration will, no doubt, be equal to the task of professing to be extremely surprised by this turn of events.