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Ex-CIA officer James Lawler exposes the complex reality behind the US response to Pakistan’s nuclear program led by Abdul Qadeer Khan. Did Washington deliberately overlook Pakistan's nuclear ambitions—often dubbed the 'Islamic Bomb'—while closely monitoring Iran?

#AQKhan #IslamicBomb #CIARevelations #PakistanNuclear #JamesLawler #NuclearProliferation #USPakistanTies #IranNuclear #World

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Transcript
00:00I'm going to ask you to wear some speculation hat over here, please. It's a very fundamental
00:05question. Now, why would the United States be okay with Pakistan getting the Islamic bomb,
00:11but not an Iran getting an Islamic bomb, and specifically when A.Q. Khan has publicly said
00:16that he wanted to give this to Iran in the first place? Okay, I'm speculating here. I've got my
00:22speculation hat on, but you may recall that Pakistan was at least assisting us in Afghanistan
00:28at the time, and so I think there was at least some turning a blind eye to Pakistan's acquisition
00:37of its own nuclear capability, and we thought that was a price we had to pay, I guess. I think it was
00:43probably a stupid move, but the United States has had a number of stupid moves, and maybe that was
00:54one of them, so, you know. I'm going to build on that a little bit. I'm going to build on that.
00:59Well, I mean, you know, things like overthrowing Mossadegh in 53, that worked for about 20 years,
01:08and then, boy, boomeranged on us. The attempt at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 in Cuba, you know, I seldom
01:18have we ever supported an indigenous movement that turned out well for the people or for the United
01:23States. It's one of those things, you know, you may get some short-term gratification from it, but
01:31if people want to overthrow their government, they need to do it themselves. We can't really,
01:35we shouldn't really be in there. More than that, this is the love story of successive
01:40White Houses with Pakistani military dictators, which, listen, we share a border with them, so it
01:46really baffles us. And this is where, just coming back to my point, post 9-11, there was a real
01:52fear, and there's been reporting in the New York Times as well, that these nuclear weapons that
01:57Pakistan possessed could fall into the hands of terrorists that were, it seemed as if they were
02:02overrunning the country, because Parvez Musharraf was running the show at the time. He was deeply unpopular
02:09at the time, and the Americans essentially were propping him up. So did, when you, I know that
02:16this was towards the end, I guess, of your career, but did you ever pick up the sense that, you know,
02:21the Americans had a contingency plan in case those nuclear weapons fell in the wrong hands?
02:26I'm pretty convinced they did. One of my best friends, Rolf Mouat-Larsen, was head of the CIA's
02:33Counter Terrorist Center's Weapons of Mass Destruction Department, and he, Director George
02:41Tenet, CIA Director George Tenet knew that Rolf and I were close friends, best friends, and so he said,
02:47I want to make sure that you both are, have complete transparency into each other's operations to make
02:54sure that Dr. Khan or other folks in Pakistan are not supplying these to Osama bin Laden.
03:02And so we did that, and we found no evidence that that was going on, but we were, we were concerned
03:08about it, sure. I mean, that was the nightmare scenario. What if Al-Qaeda or some Al-Qaeda supporters
03:15gets a nuclear weapon? You know, but it turned out, now, Khan may have done some extremely stupid
03:21or irrational things, but that wasn't one of them.
03:31And so, we're going out here, how would we jadi out?
03:44So that we arrived at the later, KKRI, that multiple scenes around the street?
03:49We are in one mirror, now, well, and we have the intention to do it.
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