Pen-Elayne on the Web

Prioritizing

Quoth yesterday's Washington Post,

an extraordinary series of revelations has confirmed that Pakistan has been guilty of some of the worst crimes of nuclear weapons proliferation ever committed. For some 15 years it has been supplying atomic bomb technology to rogue states and sponsors of terrorism -- and it did so even after President Bush declared that governments that conducted such transfers could be subject to preemptive attack by the United States. Under pressure from the United Nations, Pakistani officials have acknowledged that nuclear designs and materials were given to Iran, Libya and North Korea, either directly or through an underground network involving middlemen in Germany and a secret factory in Malaysia. Officials claim the traffic was conducted solely by the country's chief weapons scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and several associates. Hoping to avoid prosecution, Mr. Khan duly confessed on Pakistani television yesterday and absolved his government. But the scientist previously gave investigators a more plausible account: that President Pervez Musharraf and other senior military leaders approved the deals.

Which seems pretty likely, as Musharraf subsequently pardoned Khan, with tacit acceptance and downplaying by the US. Says State Department "career minister" Richard Boucher, "I don't think it's a matter for the United States to sit in judgment on... What penalties, sanctions, controls or steps are used to prevent it from happening again, those are up for individual governments to decide. It's up to the Pakistani government to make sure that this sort of thing doesn't happen again." Interesting that Boucher didn't show the same restraint when sitting in judgement on Iraq.

But the heck with that, let's look at another humongous picture of Janet Jackson's boobie! Because now it can be revealed (as if it hadn't been already)! "There's no way it would have ripped that way. We're known for putting together solid, long-lasting pieces... They took off the studs that kept the cup in place and replaced them with snaps so the top could just come off." Those fiends! (This has been another shameless attempt to increase my tit hit count on a slow Friday...)