Meanwhile

Gearing up for Armageddon....

Pakistan successfully test-fired Tuesday an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads as parts of its efforts to boost its defenses, a military statement said.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan conducts regular missile tests, despite a revived peace process with nuclear rival India. The last time Pakistan test-fired a nuclear-capable missile was on June 4.

"Pakistan this morning carried out another successful test of the indigenously produced intermediate range ballistic missile Hatf V (Ghauri)," the statement said.

Reuters article

On the question of the continuing fallout of nuclear proliferation, [a spokesman] said that Pakistan was a responsible nuclear weapons state, but would not under any circumstances allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to its scientists. Simultaneously, he also said that no request had come from Washington to question Pakistan's defamed top nuclear scientist A Q Khan.

"Pakistan would not allow any country, including the US, to question Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan," the spokesman said, adding "that the 'Nuclear Black Marketing Network' in the country had been wiped out."

123Bharath.com article

You remember A.Q. Khan - he's the Pak hero who was selling Pakistan's nuclear information on the black market for about ten years to "rogue states", including North Korea and Iran - the one Butthead said in the debates had been brought to justice. That justice consisted of dismissing him from his state position with a presidential pardon, because to actually punish him as a terrorist-aiding evil doer, which he is by Butthead's definition, and a clear threat to international security, would not be in Butthead's personal best interest, partly because Pakistan is expected to capture bin Laden and his bad guys on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and dole them out when Butthead needs another "capture", and partly because to do so would have been risking the wrath of the Pakistani people and the ouster of our Pakistani puppet Musharraf.* He can't even be questioned.

Musharraf also admitted that he could not be sure that Pakistani investigators had unearthed all the customers and transactions of the network stretching back probably over a decade or more. David Albright, a former IAEA weapons inspector, says Pakistan may not push Khan too hard because that could expose the illicit networks that the country still uses to buy nuclear technology.

...At the time of Khan's confession, ElBaradei raised alarms, saying Khan was "the tip of an iceberg" in an illicit nuclear supply network with connections in many countries. "We need to know who supplied what, when, to whom," ElBaradei said.

... The world may never know exactly who bought from Khan's network. And that is intolerable.

Chicago Tribune article

The IAEA has been asking Pakistan regularly to help it investigate the international black market allegedly run by Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Pakistan's cooperation with the probe is crucial in resolving how Iran, and other states like North Korea, have supplied themselves with nuclear parts and technology that can be used to make atomic weapons.

...Mr ElBaradei said Dr Khan's network had "more than 30 companies and 30 countries all over the globe involved in this fantastic sophisticated illicit trafficking".

...Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri said in Tehran in August that his country was cooperating with the IAEA probe into Iran's suspect nuclear programme but ruled out allowing international inspectors into Pakistan.

Dawn article

Even Saddam allowed inspectors.

September 30: The hunt for Osama bin Laden was Topic 1 last week when Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf met with President Bush at the White House. The two leaders discussed other things, including Musharraf's efforts to retain his post as chief of the army. But apparently one thing that failed to rank high on the agenda was the threat of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons.

To be specific, Bush reportedly didn't even try to persuade Musharraf to allow U.S. or International Atomic Energy Agency officials a crack at interviewing Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former head of Pakistan's nuclear program and one of the world's most brazen nuclear profiteers.

Chicago Tribune article

Discussion goes something like this: "Okay, Pervie, I need bin Laden before November 2. I'll let you know when to announce it. You don't have him? Who else you got? Maybe. But if I lose ground in the polls, that's not gonna cut it. I'll need bin Laden." An actual threat of terrorists acquiring nukes? Ho-hum.

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*Whew. That was a long one. Must have some German in me......."Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth." --Mark Twain.