MI6 hounding whistleblower

Western security agencies are gunning for a customs officer who dared to complain that he was blocked from exposing the dangerous nuclear smuggling of the notorious Dr A.Q. Khan.
   Atif Amin is the honourable Pakistani-origin customs officer who was previously in charge of Operation Akin that investigated links between Khan and those Western companies that helped to build up Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile culminating in the 1998 tests.
   When he reported his findings to London, he was taken off the case and abruptly told to return home, reportedly at the joint request of both the CIA and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6.
   The reason for the decision to now go after Amin is the British authorities’ belief that he briefed US investigative reporters David Armstrong and Joe Trento about how, despite all his efforts in 2000, Khan was allowed to continue selling his nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran, North Korea and any other government that was prepared to pay for them.
   Amin is quoted by Armstrong and Trento as saying of the British security services, ‘They knew exactly what was going on all the time. If they’d wanted to, they could have blown the whistle on this long ago.’
   The frustrated customs officer could now face legal action under Britain’s Official Secrets Act because of suspicions that he secretly collaborated in the writing of America and the Islamic Bomb and even leaked key reports to the two authors.
   In early December police searched Amin’s home and car, prompting book author Armstrong to comment that the customs officer and his investigations were the subject and not the source of his work.
  ‘The most obvious answer to why they’re going after him is that this is potentially embarrassing to US and British intelligence sources,’     Armstrong commented in a statement to the media. ‘If Amin can be discredited, it would distract the public from the fact that the US and Britain prevented the most dangerous nuclear smuggling operation in history from being shut down when the opportunity existed.’
   Western intelligence experts agree they waited until 2003 to move against Khan, claiming that time was needed to collect all the evidence against him and all his clients.
   Armstrong argues that the delay was harmful, asking, ‘What did they achieve? 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?’
   In response to such criticisms the CIA has been selectively briefing the media about how Amin’s activities endangered a major intelligence operation to penetrate Khan’s network and use it to feed faulty bomb designs to such key customers as Iran.
   Such assertions beg the question of whether by the time the CIA acted Khan had already managed to pass on to Tehran copies of tested Chinese warhead designs, similar to the ones given to Libya. And if the CIA did subsequently give Khan faulty designs, were Iran’s own experts able to overcome the flaws by the time they stopped work on their weapon programme in 2003?
   According to the Armstrong/Trento book the flaws were indeed detected in advance by a Russian go-between or double agent employed by the CIA, who tipped off Tehran.
   In other words, Iran is conceivably now so far advanced in its weapon research that all it needs is the by-product of enriched uranium feed that Khan also helped Tehran to develop with technology that he originally stole from a plant in Holland where he was employed in the mid 1970s.
  ‘The great irony is that Amin and others like him who tried to halt proliferation face recrimination and have their lives ruined’, Armstrong commented. ‘On the other hand the nuclear pedlars themselves are seldom called to account.’


Remembering Emperor Bahadur Shah as a freedom fighter

The International Committee for Commemorating the First Indian War of Independence in 1857 has called on the authorities in Delhi to renew their efforts to bring back the remains of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, who is buried in Myanmar (Burma).
  ‘I strongly appeal to you to take up this issue on every level and do everything possible in the interest of India, its people and its history’, says the appeal signed by Committee President Dr Vidya Sagar Anand.
   Anand notes how after the outbreak of fighting in 1857, Bahadur Shah was deposed by British colonial forces ‘captured and exiled’ and ‘transported’ in great indignity in a bullock cart all the way to Rangoon in Burma where he lived in terrible incarceration for five years. He died in 1862.
  ‘He was undoubtedly the first and foremost symbol of the Indian nationalist struggle, which after 90 years culminated in an independent India in 1947.’
   Observing that the Indian cabinet passed a unanimous resolution in 1957 in favour of re-interring Bahadur Shah in Indian soil, Anand comments, ‘Bahadur Shah Zafar was and still is one of our noblest heroes, a man who inspired Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, the founder and creator of the Indian National Army, which agreed totally with the incontrovertible Bahadur Shah Zafar doctrine that you don’t beg for freedom but you seize it by any means necessary, including violence.’

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