More on AQ Khan selling Iran a nuclear plan at a meeting in Dubai in 1987, way back during Reagan's presidency, from the WaPo's Dafna Linzer:

Khan, who often sold his products through friends and intermediaries while he ran Pakistan's nuclear program, did not attend the meeting. He and several associates are under house arrest in Pakistan and are off-limits to U.S. and foreign interrogators.

But the IAEA learned enough about the meeting to prod Iran again about the offer, and last month Iranian official produced a copy for inspectors.

Two Western diplomats familiar with its contents described it as a five-point, phased plan in which the network offered to supply Iran with drawings for Pakistani centrifuges and then a starter kit of one or two centrifuges. Phase three included as many as 2,000 centrifuges, which could be used to enrich bomb-grade uranium. Auxiliary items for the centrifuges and enrichment process would have been delivered afterward, followed by reconversion and casting equipment for building the core of a bomb.

It is just hard to understand why the Bush administration has not insisted on questioning Khan, given the extent to which he was involving in proliferating nuclear plans to rogue states of pressing concern to the US at this moment. The LA Times' Douglas Frantz has more questioning that, as well as why the US and the UK let Khan sell nuclear know-how to Libya more than 18 months after it concluded he was running an international nuclear smuggling ring, part of a pattern of looking away at Pakistani proliferation dating back to the Reagan administration:

A former CIA agent who worked in the region said the Reagan administration had "incontrovertible" knowledge of Pakistan's progress toward the bomb and Khan's central role in procuring material, but chose not to act.

The pattern and priorities had been established. Throughout the 1980s, the Reagan and Bush administrations sent $600 million a year in military and economic assistance to Pakistan for its help on Afghanistan, according to a report last month by the Congressional Research Service.

Not until the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan did the first President Bush reimpose sanctions on Pakistan, in 1990, for developing atomic weapons.

Meantime, on a different Iran-related subject, two Iranian contacts send along this plea for international attention to the case of Iranian political prisoner Dr. Farzad Hamidi. Arrested last June in front of the UN building in Tehran, Hamidi has been on a hunger strike for the past 35 days in Rajaii shahr prison. More can be found on his case at the Human Rights Watch website.

Posted by Laura at February 27, 2005 11:32 AM