Seymour Hersh reveals the back story to the painfully unconvincing charade between the Bush administration, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, and nuclear proliferator and Pakistani national hero AQ Khan last month. "It was a make-believe performance in a make-believe capital," Hersh writes of Khan's TV confession and his instant pardon from Musharraf.

As I have written many times before here, read Bernard-Henri Levi's flawed but brilliant and utterly horrifying book on who killed Daniel Pearl, to really grasp the magnitude of the threat posed by the nexus of Pakistani intelligence groups, radical Islamist groups of which Al Qaeda is only one of many, and Pakistan's nuclear scientists.

As CIA non proliferation consultant Bob Gallucci tells Hersh, "Bad as it is with Iran, North Korea, and Libya having nuclear-weapons material, the worst part is that they could transfer it to a non-state group. That’s the biggest concern, and the scariest thing about all this—that Pakistan could work with the worst terrorist groups on earth to build nuclear weapons."

Henri-Levi's book is utterly persuasive that this is not some remote possibility but a frighteningly realistic scenario.

Posted by Laura at March 3, 2004 09:34 AM