Lawmakers Press for U.S. Access to Khan

A group of U.S. lawmakers yesterday called for a renewed effort by Washington to gain access to former Pakistani nuclear proliferator Abdul Qadeer Khan to learn more of his former smuggling activities, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, June 20).

Khan has confessed, then recanted, to leading a network that supplied uranium enrichment technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, and a recent report suggested that the smuggling ring might have also delivered the design for a compact, advanced nuclear warhead (see GSN, June 18).

Pakistani officials have prevented outside investigators from speaking with Khan, maintaining that the United States has received all information provided by Khan to Pakistani interrogators.

In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, four leading members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee call a nuclear-armed Iran “one of the gravest national security threats facing the United States and our friends and allies.

“Now, more than ever, we must be allowed to gain direct access to A.Q. Khan to conduct a full investigation and find out what designs were smuggled and to whom.  The United States no longer has the luxury of relying on secondhand information from Pakistani authorities on Khan's activities where our fundamental national security is concerned,” the letter states.

The Bush administration has not asked Pakistan’s new civilian government if it could interrogate Khan, recently installed Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani told AP last week.  However, Haqqani added that Islamabad could still not grant the United States access to Khan due to the scientist’s thorough knowledge of Pakistan’s nuclear activities.

The letter was submitted to Rice by committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-Calif.); ranking Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.); Representative Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), head of the committee’s panel on the Middle East and South Asia; and Representative Mike Pence (Ind.), the top Republican on the subcommittee (Associated Press/International Herald Tribune, June 26).

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