Monday, October 04, 2004
RICE ON KHAN Digby notices this recent exchange between National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Wolf Blitzer:
BLITZER: Listen to this one excerpt of what [President Bush] said briefly about Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former Pakistani nuclear scientist who helped create the Pakistani bomb...It's time for these people to go home.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES [from the debate]: The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BLITZER: To justice? The guy has been -- Khan has been freed. He's been pardoned by President Musharraf... Khan himself lives in a villa. And the IAEA would like to question him, and the Pakistani government doesn't even allow that to happen.
RICE: I think we all know that A.Q. Khan was a particular kind of figure in Pakistani lore, a national hero... if you don't think that his national humiliation is justice for what he did, I think it is. He's nationally humiliated.
