Judicial Watch
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For Immediate Release |
| Feb 12, 2003 |
Contact: Press Office
202-646-5188
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WHY IS PAKISTAN A SAFE HAVEN FOR BIN LADEN?
Judicial Watch Investigates How Our “Ally,” Pakistani President Musharraf, Harbors Terrorists While Trading Missile & Nuke Technology with North Korea
President Bush Pledged bin Laden Would be Taken “Dead or Alive”
(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said today that it would file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the State Department, Defense Department and other government agencies as part of an investigation into the Bush-Cheney administration’s prosecution of the “War on Terror,” as well as the degree and quality of cooperation from our “ally” Pakistan.
Many military and intelligence analysts believe Osama bin Laden was among the group that U.S.-backed Afghan mercenaries allowed to successfully slip out of the al Qaeda and Taliban stronghold of Tora Bora in December 2001, to freedom in Pakistan. Michael Swetnam, a counterterrorism expert at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, has stated, "Roughly 70 percent of the Qaeda leadership apparently escaped our campaign unharmed, and there is evidence they are trying to reconstitute the organization." In mid-November 2002 and on February 11, 2003, Al –Jazeera television released audio tapes of bin Laden providing instructions to his followers. Since their escape into Pakistan, only one al Qaeda notable, Abu Zubaydah, has been captured by Pakistani security forces.
On December 31, 2002, a shootout erupted between U.S. and Pakistani troops along the Afghan border, prompting U.S. forces to call in an F-16 to drop a 500-pound bomb on the Pakistanis in order to end the firefight. One U.S. soldier was injured. The shooting raised again the question of whether some Pakistani soldiers and tribal leaders still sympathize with their Taliban neighbors, whom they long supported, until the September 11th attacks.
Pakistan has been helping North Korea with the design for gas centrifuges and the machinery it needs to make enriched uranium in exchange for missile technology and parts from Pyongyang. In July 2002, the CIA reportedly detected a Pakistani aircraft taking on a cargo of ballistic missile parts at a North Korean airfield. In a January 1999, U.N. report it was revealed that the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, offered to help Iraq develop a nuclear weapon on the eve of the first Gulf War.
“President Bush promised the American people that bin Laden would be brought to justice. The administration must pressure Pakistan to turn over bin Laden and stop proliferating weapons of mass destruction. Judicial Watch is investigating why the Bush-Cheney administration has not moved more aggressively against Pakistan as a sanctuary for bin Laden,” stated Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman.
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