WASHINGTON, Aug 11: US Vice President Dick Cheney knew about the so-called A. Q. Khan network of nuclear proliferators for more than a decade but did not act to stop it, says Jason Leopold, the author of a new book, News Junkie . In an article first published on a liberal American website, Common Dreams News Center, and later reproduced by other sites, Mr Leopold argues that Mr Cheney knew that the network had been selling nuclear technology to ‘outlaw nations’ for almost 15 years.

Mr Leopold, who writes regularly for major international newspapers like the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times , says that the International Atomic Energy Association launched an investigation two years ago in an attempt to uncover how Iran obtained components and parts for P-2 centrifuges.

According to this article, Iran secured most of its supply on the black market, from the network run by Dr Khan and uncovered last year. The Bush administration had mountains of evidence on ‘Pakistan’s sales’ of nuclear technology and equipment to nations vilified by the United States but turned a blind eye to the threat and allowed it to happen.

In 1989, the year Dr Khan first started selling nuclear secrets on the black-market, Richard Barlow, a young intelligence analyst working for the Pentagon, prepared a shocking report for Mr Cheney, who was then working as Secretary of Defense under the first Bush administration. But Mr Barlow’s findings were ‘politically inconvenient’.

“A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the CIA’s efforts to support Afghan rebels fighting a pro-Soviet government. It also would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad,” says a quote from the Mother Jones magazine.

“Pakistan was let off the hook (again) so the United States could use its borders to hunt for Al Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden,” says Mr Leopold.

He says that Mr Cheney dismissed Mr Barlow’s report because he wanted to sell Pakistan the F-16 fighter planes. Several months later, Mr Cheney told a Pentagon official to downplay Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities when he testified on the threat before Congress. “Mr Barlow complained to his bosses at the Pentagon and was fired.”

Mr Leopold claims that Vice President Cheney went to great lengths to cover up Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry. In a New Yorker article published on March 29, 1993, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh quoted Mr Barlow as saying that some high-ranking members inside the CIA and the Pentagon lied to Congress about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in an effort to ensure the sale of the F-16 fighter planes to Islamabad, which were secretly equipped to deliver nuclear weapons.

Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities had become so grave by the spring of 1990 that then CIA deputy director Richard Kerr said the Pakistani nuclear threat was worse than the Cuban Missile crisis in the 1960s.

Still, in l989, Mr Cheney and others in the Pentagon and the CIA continued to hide the reality of Pakistan’s nuclear threat from members of Congress, says Mr Leopold.