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A Blind Eye to the Islamic Bomb
Excerpted and edited from a documentary shown on Australian television. It manages to touch on most of the key points of the whole sordid story behind the Islamic Bomb, from BCCI, to the Pak Generals racking of billions of dollars in aid for nuclear research and their personal back accounts. The report doesn’t mention that most of the money for the Islamic bomb came from the sale of Heroin. There is a reason the General governing Peshawar was known as the ’Noreiga of Pakistan’, or why General Aslam Beg is a dollar billionare.

JOSEPH TRENTO: Does that mean it’s clear now that some of the same accounts that were used to fund the Muj also funded the nuclear weapons program in Pakistan? Now, we made a deal with the devil. The devil was Pakistan - they wanted to develop the weapons, we wanted to beat the Soviets. In order to do that we made a trade-off. "Look the other way, otherwise it’s not going to happen."

The evidence for a US policy of looking the other way is there from the very beginning. In late 1979, Jimmy Carter’s administration was still reeling from the hostage crisis in Iran. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the whole region was in turmoil. The day after the Soviets invaded, Carter’s National Security Advisor - Zbigniew Brzezinski - penned this memorandum to the president. Under the heading, "What is to be done?" Brzezinski said it was essential to get Pakistan’s support for the Mujaheddin.
BRZEZINSKI DOCUMENT QUOTE: "This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our non-proliferation policy. "

It appears the new policy was accepted. Billions of dollars flowed into the Afghan resistance and there was no real effort to close down Pakistan’s nuclear program. The ISI - Pakistan’s intelligence agency - was the favoured conduit and literally hundreds of suitcases stuffed with cash were given to them by both the CIA and Saudi intelligence. CIA sources suspect that up to half the funding for the Afghan resistance ended up being diverted to help make Pakistan’s nuclear bomb. But with so much cash flying about, the money trails were impossible to trace.

But outside of the ISI money trail, there was another method of financing Pakistan’s nuclear program. The BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, was the first global bank for the Islamic world. Founded by a Pakistani and funded by Arab Gulf states, it was used by criminals, governments and intelligence agencies to fund activities they wanted to hide. But the bank’s illegal activities began attracting attention, and when BCCI collapsed in 1991, its books were thrown open. Jonathan Winer was part of a US congressional inquiry, led by Senator John Kerry, which began probing BCCI’s criminal activities in the early ’90s. It became clear that the BCCI trail led directly to Pakistan’s nuclear program.
JONATHAN WINER: What we knew at the time was that BCCI officials believed that BCCI had been used for Pakistan’s nuclear program to handle the funds. We knew that BCCI officials believed that the bank had been used by British intelligence, by US intelligence. We documented its use by certain terrorists.

It was here, through the BCCI’s former London headquarters, that much of the external financing for Pakistan’s nuclear program was channelled. Although we can’t reveal his identity, Dateline has spoken to a former executive manager of the bank who’s confirmed the links between BCCI and Pakistan’s nuclear quest. According to the source, who would not appear on camera, two years before the bank’s collapse, key executives querying a $400 million loss on a cotton project in Egypt were told that the loss didn’t exist and were informed that one of the bank’s Arab owners had directly contributed the $400 million to Pakistan’s nuclear development. What is disturbing about BCCI is that the links between the Saudi and Pakistan governments and terrorist networks were never investigated and Jonathan Winer believes they continued well into the ’90s.
JONATHAN WINER: What’s interesting is what happened to the BCCI people afterwards and did any of them continue to engage in the kind of activities they engaged in for BCCI after the bank collapsed? Some of the underlying cast of characters in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, continue to turn up after the bank goes under.
I personally believe that the same people behind BCCI are now the ones behind Al Qaeda and the entire Islamist movement. A bunch of Saudi Princes, Dubai Sheikhs, Pak Generals and Muslim Brothers turned businessmen. One level up from the Learned Elders of Islam perhaps. And I bet most of them truly don’t give a damn about Islam either.

Almost a decade after BCCI collapsed, some of the family names linked to it turn up in the now well-established Khan nuclear network. Despite the evidence of extensive Saudi involvement in BCCI, former spymaster Prince Turki al-Faisal denies the links. Prince Turki’s denials may be disingenuous. His uncle, Kamal Adham, was a BCCI shareholder and John Kerry’s Senate investigation uncovered loans worth millions from a BCCI controlled company directly to Prince Turki.
Posted by: Paul Moloney 2004-06-24
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=36269