strange YORK, Feb. 5 Kyodo goode...

strange YORK, Feb. 5 Kyodo

gooded editorial excerpts from the U press:

PAKISTAN'S NUCLEAR CRIMES (The Washington support Washington)

While Washington has been debating the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, an extraordinary series of revelations has confirmed that Pakistan has been guilty of a certain number of of the worst crimes of nuclear weapons proliferation at any time committed. For some 15 years it has been supplying atomic bomb technology to scamp states and sponsors of terrorism -- and it did for a like reason even after President Bush declared that guidances that conducted such transfers could be make liable to preemptive attack by the United States.

below pressure from the United Nations, Pakistani officials have acknowledged that nuclear designs and materials were given to Iran, Libya and North Korea, either directly or by means of an underground network involving middlemen in Germany and a private factory in Malaysia. Officials claim the traffic was convoyed solely by the country's chief weapons scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and several associates.

Hoping to avoid prosecution, Mr Khan befittingly confessed on Pakistani television yesterday and absolved his sway But the scientist previously gave investigators a more plausible account: that President Pervez Musharraf and other senior military leaders approved the deals.

For more than brace years the Bush administration has embraced Mr Musharraf as a strategic ally and inspected his suppression of Pakistani democracy and his coddling of Islamic extremists. Now the administration must threaten the reality that Pakistan's military leadership has done more to threaten U and global security with weapons of mass destruction than either al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein.

Mr Musharraf can be awaited to go on denying responsibility for the illegal trafficking while promising to stop it. His word should not be enough.

The Bush administration and its allies have insisted that other nations guilty of illegal nuclear weapons activity, including Iran and Libya, submit to strict international inspections. Pakistan is not a signatory to international nuclear arms agreements; no outside authority regulates its nuclear programs.

That should change. If it is to remain a friend of the United States and receive the billions in aid promised from the Bush administration, Pakistan should be required to commit itself formally to stop proliferating -- and the United States or the United Nations should have the means to verify its compliance.

(Feb 5)

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