Pentagon Whistle-Blower Tangled with Neo-Cons and Lost

This weekend the Washington Post ran a story about Richard Barlow, a Pentagon whistle-blower in the late 1980s who tracked Pakistan and A.Q. Khan's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The U.S. government wanted to sell F-16s to Pakistan to help the mujaheddin fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. But Congress had prevented the sale of any equipment that could deliver nuclear weapons. Barlow pointed out that selling the jets to Pakistan would violate non-proliferation laws and complained that the Pentagon was misleading Congress on the issue.

From the Post:

"Barlow wrote an analysis for then-Secretary Dick Cheney that concluded the planned F-16 sale violated this law. Drawing on detailed, classified studies, Barlow wrote about Pakistan's ability, intentions and activities to deliver nuclear bombs using F-16s it had acquired before the law was passed.

Barlow discovered later that someone rewrote his analysis so that it endorsed the sale of the F-16s. Arthur Hughes, the deputy assistant secretary of defense, testified to Congress that using the F-16s to deliver nuclear weapons 'far exceeded the state of art in Pakistan' -- something Barlow knew to be untrue."

Twisting the truth to support policy in the Middle East? Never! When Barlow complained, he was instantly fired and stripped of his security clearance. His intelligence career was ruined. He now lives in a trailer in Montana and, even though Congress' investigative arm backed up his position, is still fighting for a government pension that he feels is due. And what happened to Dick Cheney and Barlow's other higher-ups -- Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley, among others? We don't think they're worrying about pensions.

Full story here.