Author: Jim Wolf
Publication: Yahoo News
Date: March 28, 2004
URL: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&u=/nm/20040328/ts_nm/nuclear_pakistan_rumsfeld_dc_2&printer=1
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
said on Sunday he had no reason to suspect President Pervez Musharraf of
Pakistan of past involvement in an international nuclear black market but
declined to rule out other possible high-level military complicity.
"I do not believe that there's any
evidence or any suggestion that President Musharraf was involved," Rumsfeld
said in an interview on the ABC program "This Week."
Abdul Qader Khan, the so-called
father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, admitted in February to having given
nuclear weapons know-how and equipment to Iran, Libya and North Korea (news
- web sites), saying he had done so without Pakistani government authorization.
"I'm not going to say that," Rumsfeld
replied when asked whether he was confident there had been no other "high-level
military" involvement in Pakistan.
"You can't prove a negative," he
added. "You can't say that I know that every person connected with the
Pakistani military over some sustained period of time had no knowledge
or participation whatsoever. That's silly. I couldn't do that."
Critics have questioned how Khan
could have carried out illicit sales going back to the late 1980s without
some level of official support.
Musharraf, in a taped ABC interview
in Islamabad on Friday, dismissed published reports about a possible deal
with President Bush (news - web sites) to go easy on him over the Khan-headed
nuclear black market.
The deal purportedly would have
been getting the Pakistani army to crack down hard on suspected al Qaeda
guerrillas loyal to Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) in tribal areas
along the Afghan border.
"There is no deal whatsoever," said
Musharraf, an Army general who seized power in an October, 1999, coup.
"This is all humbug. There is just no deal."
He reiterated that Khan acted on
his own and that neither the military nor the government was involved in
illicit nuclear deals.
Musharraf also played down the harm
done by the nuclear technology transfers to which Khan has confessed.
"People are, I think, over-assessing
the physical damage of the proliferation that he has done," he said.
"If I hand over a missile or a bomb
to any extremist, believe me, he can do nothing about it," he said. "He
cannot explode it" without knowledge of a sophisticated triggering mechanism.
