Sibel Edmonds Case: Nukes for sale (Pt 2)

"Nuclear or non nuclear. For example, computer hardware, maybe software."

"The Department of State is easily the most corrupted of the major government agencies."

"The State Department's Near East Bureau was not told of the planned operation, for fear that the officers there would tip off the Pakistanis, as they had done in the past...

"We still have cases on Pakistan and we still don't tell State about it," a senior Customs Service official told me recently, in anger. "The State Department constituted a security problem for us."

"Intelligence officials on both sides of the Atlantic have said they waited until 2003 to strike against the Khan network in order to gather evidence on all its activities and all its customers.

"But what did they achieve?" Armstrong asked. "Where are all the people connected to the Khan network? There were at least 50 people in this thing, and there are only a handful of people under house arrest. Did they need three extra years to do that?""

Over the past year Swiss officials have requested at least four times that the Bush administration share documents and evidence related to Khan's nuclear black market. But the United States has never responded.

Swiss officials maintain it needs U.S. assistance in order to convict three Swiss men accused of helping AQ Khan set up a secret Malaysian factory to make components for gas centrifuges.

Last week U.S. weapons expert David Albright testified before Congress and said, "I find this lack of cooperation frankly embarrassing to the United States and to those of us who believe that the United States should take the lead in bringing members of the Khan network to justice for arming our enemies with nuclear weapons."

Albright has floated one theory as to why the Bush administration won't help the Swiss investigators. He says the three Swiss men accused of being part of AQ Khan's underground network may have been working for the CIA and being paid by the U.S. government.

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