The Al Qaeda Bomb

lukery pulls some threads together.

...For some reason, the criminals involved in the nuclear black market are still (mostly) walking free - in Pakistan, the US and elsewhere - while those who threatened to expose them - Richard Barlow, Sibel Edmonds, Valerie Plame, and the latest addition, Atif Amin - have been harassed, threatened and gagged.

According to Joe Trento:
The CIA even started using some of the Khan network’s front companies for its own purposes...

When AQ Khan first acquired the centrifuge blueprints in Holland in 1976, the CIA asked the Dutch government not to arrest him. They've been watching him, and the rest of the network, ever since. They watched him build the 'Islamic Bomb' in Pakistan, and they watched the proliferation - to Iran, to North Korea, to Libya, and to maybe a dozen other countries and terrorist groups like al Qaida.

At various times in the last 30 years, (elements of) the US and British governments:
a) actively assisted in the proliferation
b) tipped off the perpetrators to various stings
c) stopped investigations into the network
d) destroyed people who threatened the network: Richard Barlow, Sibel Edmonds, Valerie Plame, and the latest addition, Atif Amin.

In fact, the CIA apparently knew more about the Pakistan program than even Benazir Bhutto when she was Prime Minister.

According to Seymour Hersh's fantastic 1993 article in the New Yorker:

"The question of what Ms. Bhutto knew, or didn’t know, about the bomb would be resolved when she paid a scheduled state visit to Washington in June (1990); at that time she was provided with a detailed briefing by William H. Webster, the C.I.A. director. To dramatize the extent of American knowledge, Webster arranged for Ms. Bhutto to be shown a mockup of a Pakistani nuclear bomb.

...

Mark A. Siegel, a former Carter Administration official and close Bhutto associate, who served as Pakistan’s American lobbyist in 1989 and 1990, described her feelings of disbelief upon being briefed by Webster. "The briefing was more detailed" than any information that she, as Prime Minister, had been provided, Siegel said. "It also showed that the military was doing it behind her back." "

You might read the rest of the article, but be warned, a lot of the links have already been inactivated.