Left Flank

I share ACW's dismay, that "the Swiss shredded the evidence" of Urs Tinner's involvement with A.Q. Khan.

Investigative journalist Douglas Frantz claims that Urs Tinner and his family, who are at the center of a Swiss government decision to shred documents implicating all three men in A.Q. Khan's nuclear Wal-Mart, is a CIA stooge. Listen to Frantz discuss the case on WRS.

Michael von der Galien pleads, referring to documents including blueprints and manuals for manufacturing nuclear devices circulated by A.Q. Khan:

For some reason, some governments seem to underestimate the danger terrorists and their buddies pose to the West, and to the world as a whole. Still. 7 years after 9/11. Is there anyone who doubts that terrorists will use weapons of mass destruction if they can get their hands on them?

Something has to be done about the black market; this threat has to be removed.

Urs Tinner and his son, according to Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in The Nuclear Jihadist, did not operate unnoticed. The central issue is not, that A.Q. Khan and Tinner operated as they did. It's that the CIA refused to share the information it had since the 1970s about Khan with both American administrations, and American and foreign and international law enforcement and regulatory agencies. When the CIA did divulge the information, its excuse was, that law enforcement activities would impede intelligence-gathering. And, after being told, successive American administrations, both Democratic and Republican, subordinated the non-proliferation issue to short-term strategic issues, like the Soviet-Afghan War and relations with Pakistan's ISI.

In the meantime successive Pakistani regimes considered the acquisition of a uranium-based nuclear device, that A.Q. Khan promised, a matter of life or death with India. The CIA could have stopped Khan dead in his tracks in the late 70s when he was copying documents from a Dutch firm. So, I ask, even if former PM Benazir Bhutto slipped documents to Pyongyang, who is really responsible in the chain of causation from Khan to any terrorist group or rogue state with a bomb?

Three letters...starts with a C...