Reply #8: Here's a golden oldie -- a thread from 2006

[starroute]

Titled "PLAME= IRAN/CONTRA REDUX - Planted WMD from Ghorbanifar & Ledeen," its main subject might be of interest today in connection with the Senate Intel Committee revelations about the machinations of those two gentlemen. (And isn't it wonderful how we at DU have *always* know the stuff that everybody else is just catching up with now.)

But it also includes some interesting side remarks on Pharaon, linking him at just one remove to the atomic proliferation activities of A.Q. Khan.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x66847

{BCCI founder} Abedi had money to spare to underwrite the protocol department: In 1981 Ghulam Ishaq Khan granted BCCI a special tax-free status allowing Abedi to avoid tens of millions of dollars in taxes and to pour his huge Pakistan profits into one of his front companies and into Pakistan's atomic bomb project. Most of the millions that flowed through the foundation went to two uses: first, to investments - patently noncharitable - in a company called Attock Cement, owned by Abedi's associate and U.S. front man Ghaith Pharaon. The second beneficiary was something called the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology. According to its brochures, the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute trains young scientists and engineers. The reality is a little more ominous . . .

The director of the institute is Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man most closely linked with Pakistan's efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Khan, a German-trained metallurgist, once worked as a classified enrichment plant in the Netherlands, where he gained access to key plans. So important is he to the Pakistani national interest that even his whereabouts are considered a national secret.(