There were a number of remarkable aspects last week to former president Jimmy Carter's trip to Cuba.

Carter -- who by all accounts has done a far better job of being an ex-president than he did of being a president -- added the journey to Havana to two decades' worth of post-White House mediation, quiet diplomacy, and humanitarian work, a legacy that is simply unimaginable for our other, far more venal living ex-Prez's. (Honestly, can you imagine Bill Clinton, or any member of a Bush family, doing something simply because it would help people in need?)

But while the precedent-setting nature of his trip, and the domestic political furor that it kicked up in Florida, dominated media coverage last week, Carter also did something far more significant than his photo-ops with Castro or chats (in fluent Spanish) with ordinary Cubans: he called horse hooey on the Bush Administration's public warnings over Cuban bioterrorism, and he proved it.

Specifically, when John Bolton, Bush's undersecretary of state for water-carrying -- er, arms control -- delivered a well-publicized speech to the right-wing Heritage Foundation just before Carter's trip, he asserted that "the United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological-warfare, research-and-development effort." Bolton also charged that Cuba was selling the technology to Iran and other rogue states.

In Havana on Monday, Carter shot back: "In preparation for this unprecedented visit, I requested, and we all received, intense briefings from the State Department, the intelligence agencies of my country, and high officials in the White House...for them to share with us any concerns that my government had about possible terrorist activities that were supported by Cuba.

"There were absolutely no such allegations made or questions raised. I asked them specifically on more than one occasion, `Is there any evidence that Cuba has been involved in sharing any information to any other country on Earth that could be used for terrorist purposes?' And the answer from our experts on intelligence was, `No.'"

When Carter came out contradicting the White House, Colin Powell, whose State Department officials were among those that briefed Carter, backpedalled and contradicted Bolton -- a little. ""We didn't say that (Cuba) actually had some weapons...but it has the capacity to conduct such research."

Well, duh. In the hands of a good polemicist, any well-stocked high school chemistry lab -- let alone any country with technology produced since the industrial revolution began -- has "the capacity to conduct such research." That wasn't what Bolton said. The predictable right-wing spin (typified on outlets like the "We Distort, Then Deride" Fox talking head shows) has been to sneer that a gullible Carter has been taken in by the wily and treacherous Fidel. But the contradiction here isn't between Fidel and anyone. There are only three possible explanations for the discrepancy between Carter and Bolton, none involving Castro: either Carter is lying about what he was told in his briefings; the White House was lying in what it told Carter; or the White House was lying in what it told the American public.

Given the desperate sales job the Dubyaites have been trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to spin concerning the menace of Iraqi bioterror, the Cuba dustup is instructive. Last week, bried soon after by the teapot tempest over August terrorism warnings (another thing the Bushies lied about, in its repeated claims that they had never gotten such warnings), the White House announced that well, after all, it doesn't matter whether the UN inspects Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, or what they might find; we're going to invade anyway.

For anyone who's watched the genocidal strangulation of Iraq's people over the past decade, this comes as no surprise; the whole sordid era has been one episode after another of the U.S. changing its demands to ensure they were unmeetable, and then changing them again if they were in danger of being met.

Saddam has continually charged that the whole disarmament and weapons of mass destruction issues are a charade, a thin American rationalization for aggressive policies it intended to pursue regardless of what Iraq did. And once again -- as with Saddam's claims, eventually revealed as accurate, that the U.S. was stocking U.N. inspection teams with American spies--Washington has managed to make a brutal, bloodstained dictator look like the reasonable and rational party.

The comparison is useful because U.S. policy on Cuba hasn't been rational for a couple of generations. First, the rationale for the irrational was the Cold War; now, the White House would like the excuse for a Cuban embargo in its fifth decade to be the threat of terrorism. (Shades of Thirteen Days!) In reality, the Cuban embargo, and all sorts of other emblems of official U.S. hostility to Castro -- Radio Marti, the travel ban, covert intelligence operations, and so forth -- are a byproduct of the politics of a state with a lot of electoral votes. That state, Florida, also happens to have been very good to the Bush family, and so the small but noisy part of the Cuban exile community that still harbors unfathomable hatred for Castro continues to wield a sort of immense veto power over any common sense that might seep into U.S. policy toward the island country.

No other country in the world has such hostility toward Cuba; Canadians, for example, travel there frequently as a vacation spot, and trade flows freely.

Castro is no saint; but the lack of political freedom that most US pundits point to as the legitimation of U.S. hostility isn't all that different from what a lot of Americans wanted after September 11. Then (and, for many, now), many of us were willing to sacrifice big portions of the Bill of Rights to increase our sense of security. In Cuba, the tradeoff for lack of political freedoms has been a different form of security -- health care and public education systems available to all, and unrivaled in Latin America. It's not an enviable tradeoff, but it's one the people of many poor countries might choose, left to their own devices.

Moreover, it's impossible to separate Cuba's poverty, and lack of political freedoms, from the impact of years of U.S. hostility, including the embargo, one actual invasion (at least), and innumerable assassination attempts. (Far more dire threats than we faced on September 11.) It's a pattern familiar throughout Latin America: any time a leader, whether communist, "avowed socialist," left-leaning, or simply populist, embraces policies that try to focus primarily on the well-being of his country's impoverished masses, that country knows it will gain an implacable foe in the United States.

Oftentimes, given the choice -- as in Nicaraguan elections that unseated the Sandanistas -- people decide they simply can't afford that price. But it's a familiar price, one even exacted on freely elected governments, from Guatemala in 1954 to Grenada in 1983 to Caracas in 2002.

And the reason it's familiar is that such hostility is what the United States responds with, every time, regardless of who's in power in Washington, and regardless of what the official excuse for American policy is. What Jimmy Carter revealed this week in Havana wasn't the strengths and failures of Castro's revolution; it was that the Bush Administration, like its predecessors (including Carter), are willing to flat-out lie to the American people to justify the unjustifiable policies it is intent on pursuing.

As the sack-Saddam campaign revs up -- and when, sooner or later, Fidel dies -- remember this week's lesson. What the experts say in private may be exactly the opposite of what the White House tells us in public. Or, to quote the old bromide, you can tell when they're lying: their lips move.