ISLAMABAD: "The mother of all pardons" that President General Pervez Musharraf granted to the architect of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, is not unique, and America’s own history has quite a number of examples.

The US media is calling names to Dr Khan and attacking Musharraf and the Pakistan government, ignoring what the successive American administrations had been doing, in America’s supreme national interest, to leading personalities, who were found guilty of highly serious criminal charges.

Take the highly interesting and engaging example of J Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," the wisp-thin scientist, who had steered the super-secret "Manhattan Project" to success in the blinding flash of the world’s first nuclear blast.

In 1953, at the height of the Cold War anxiety, the US federal government branded Oppenheimer a security risk and told him to get lost. On November 7, 1953, William Borden, the executive director of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, wrote a letter to the FBI in which he said Oppenheimer was a hardened Communist and that more probably than not he has been functioning as an espionage agent.

Oppenheimer’s "Q" clearance, the pass that gave him access to top-secret information, was swiftly suspended. His home was wiretapped and placed under surveillance. Oppenheimer fought back to the atomic energy commission or AEC, which filed a formal list of charges against him. No. 1 on the list was his known association with Communists, something the government had conveniently overlooked back in 1941.

No. 2 was the fact that the scientist had showed "insufficient enthusiasm" for the hydrogen bomb project. No. 3 was the most serious. It alleged that Oppenheimer had lied, either by accusing his friend Heakon Chevalier of being a spy or then denying it. In AEC hearing in Washington, where Oppenheimer tried to get his clearance, he came under withering cross-examination.

Was the story about Chevalier a lie? "Yes" Oppenheimer said. Why did you tell it? "Because I was an idiot." Dozens of leading physicists around the American nation, including Albert Einstein, rallied to the defense of the "Father of the Atomic Bomb." But Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, sandbagged his old friend, Oppenheimer, and testified before the AEC that Oppenheimer seemed "confused and complicated."

On June 29, 1954, the AEC formally took away Oppenheimer’s security clearance. The scientist’s deviousness, his opposition to hydrogen bombs and his ties to Communists were all cited. He never got the clearance back. In 1967, Oppenheimer died of throat cancer. He was 62.

From Princeton, where he lived and served as director of the Institute for Advanced Study, to Washington, where he advised presidents and generals, Oppenheimer had become the expert on the atomic weaponry he created. The "J" in Oppenheimer’s name stood for nothing, none of the many enigmas about the shy, delicate child born to German Jewish immigrant parents in New York City. Possessing an inexhaustible energy for reading, he plowed his way through Harvard and five post-graduate colleges, dazzling profession with the broad range of his intellect.

By his 25th birthday, Oppenheimer was a professor of physics at Caltech and a leading authority on quantum theory. He could speak six languages including ancient Sanskrit and ruminate on spiritual themes in any one of them. In deep thought, he would chain-smoke and jangle his spindly arms.

His wife, Kitty, had been a Communist member in the thirties when other dreamy eyed activists looked to Soviet Russia as an earthly paradise and her previous husband was killed fighting fascists in Spain. Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank, was a Communist too.

Oppenheimer joined a variety of communist front groups in California, but he came to detest Communist dogma as rigid and anti-individual. When America was plunged into World War II in 1941, the military establishment overlooked his leftist affiliates and recruited him for its crash programme to developed an atomic bomb.

As director of the atomic lab at Los Alamos - a site he personally selected for its isolation and soothing desert vistas - Oppenheimer threw himself into his work. He recruited America’s top physicists and helped them crack the tremendous problems involved in splitting atoms. Under the strain, his weight - previously 130 pounds on a 6-foot frame - fell to 115 pounds. It was super sensitive work and the US Army required every man to undergo rigorous background checks.

In 1943, Oppenheimer reported to the army intelligence that Soviet agents were spying to root out information on the A-bomb. They had approached a friend of his, he said, a languages professor named Heakon Chevalier. Then Chevalier had come to him with inquiries about getting data on microfilm.

Army intelligence never went after Chevalier. Oppenheimer soon recanted his whole tale as a "cock-and-bull" story, but never explained why he offered it. It was forgotten in the rush to build the A-bomb, but would later come to stain Oppenheimer’s reputation.

On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated. Oppenheimer, trembling nervously in an underground bunker, felt the tremble of the mightiest weapon ever devised by man, a blast with the power of 20,000 tons of TNT. Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves looked over the world’s first atomic blast site. The experience of using science as a fiery instrument of death haunted Oppenheimer. "The physicists have known sin," he said," and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."

The success of the A-bomb made Oppenheimer a national hero. From a wide choice of government and academic jobs, he took an offer from Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study, an oasis of pure contemplation where scholars like Albert Einstein worked. The turning point came in September 1949, when the Soviets exploded their first A-bomb. No longer did the Untied States enjoy a monopoly on the atomic secret.

And the fact that the Soviets used spies to pry away precious data from Los Alamos compounded America’s panic about its security. President Harry S Truman ordered the Los Alamos lab to embark on a new programme to build a hydrogen bomb, a nuke whose explosive yield would be measured in millions, not thousands of tons.

Oppenheimer objected, on moral and practical grounds. The bomb, under the direction of Oppenheimer’s old friend Edward Teller, was built anyway. The second American case relates to nuclear scientist Dr Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese naturalized citizen, who was accused of mishandling nuclear weapons data and theft of nuclear secrets.

The case against Dr Lee collapsed in September 2000 when the government dropped all but one of the 59 felony charges against him. He pleaded guilty to a single count of mishandling nuclear secrets and the case became an embarrassment for the FBI, which, conducted the criminal inquiry that led to the criminal charges against him. Critics had accused investigators of singling out Dr Lee because of his Chinese ancestry.

The third case pertains to senior Bush’s 24 December 1992 exercise of constitutional power to pardon former Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger and others for their conduct related to Iran-Contra affair. In his proclamation, senior Bush wrote: "He [Weinberger] saved his best for last. As secretary of defence throughout most of the Reagan Presidency, Caspar Weinberger was one of the principal architects of the downfall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. He directed the military renaissance in this country that led to the breakup of the communist bloc and a new birth of freedom and democracy. Upon his resignation in 1987, Caspar Weinberger was awarded the highest civilian medal our nation can bestow on one of its citizens. The Presidential Medal of Freedom."

". . . I am pardoning him not just out of compassion or to spare a 75-year old patriot the torment of lengthy and costly legal proceedings, but to make it possible for him to receive the honor he deserves for his extraordinary service to our country."

Then comes another presidential pardon granted by President Gerald R Ford to Richard Nixon. ". . . I, Gerald R Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974," the presidential proclamation said.