The Washington Post revealed today that the Bush administration knew of a massive Pakistani nuclear reactor in the works -- capable of producing 50 warheads/year -- but didn't tell congress.
And the article contains what may well be the quote of the year (in bold type):
"What is baffling is that this information -- which was surely information that our own intelligence agencies had -- was kept from Congress," said Sokolski, now director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. "We lack imagination if we think that this is no big deal."
As Marcy Wheeler notes, the Bush administration hid disputes over Iraqi capabilities, dismissed a memo disputing the Niger claims and, not as widely known, it hid information on North Korean nuclear capability (much farther along than Iraq's) just prior to the vote to invade Iraq.
And now this. But it gets worse. In Ron Suskind's One Percent Doctrine -- which has already burned through two highlighter pens -- he delves deep into the Pakistan/U.S. relations, a dumpster dive if I've ever seen one.
The world's foremost supplier of nuclear technology to anyone with a checkbook, A.Q. Khan -- friend and adviser to Pakistan's dictator, Musharraf -- was busy, according to the CIA in 2001 (THAT'S 2001), dealing nuclear technology to Iran.
So the Bush administration knew that Iran, Libya, and North Korea were receiving weapons technology from their Pakistani allies' friend and adviser, yet they chose to invade Iraq.
A footnote: the "disarming" of Libya was a complete and total lie -- a fabrication.
Gadhafi and the Bush administration had been negotiating a mutually beneficial deal for quite some time, through Musa Kousa, Ghadafi's close adviser.
Kousa turned over intelligence on terrorists to the U.S. -- and negotiated a settlement with the Pan Am Lockerbie families -- in exchange for a high profile Libyan WMD disarmament intended to look like a success for the Bush/Cheney doctrine of Kick Arab Asses till the say Uncle.
Suskind writes, on page 271:
As for George W. Bush, he got to say, countless times, the thing he desperately wanted to say to help offset the crumbling Iraq experiment, a measurable "saving face" aria: that Gadhafi had given up his weapons because of how the U.S. invasion of Iraq had changed the landscape.
That was false, as were, in essence, almost all the public statements by all the involved parties in this so-called "double-play." It wasn't a matter of misstatement: whether it was Musharraf or Bush, everyone knew they were lying.