No, Maurice, I have often heard UNMOVIC and UNSCOM inspectors refer to the list and items on it. I don't have it offhand, but I'll have a look, it's definitely a public document.
Nobody is in doubt that Saddam had all this stuff, after all, he used it on the Kurds and Shi'a. Nobody doubts that obstructed and blocked and deceived the UN inspectors, especially after Hussein Kamel defected and spilled the beans in such a well-documented fashion. It doesn't take theories of stupidity or pressure to believe that intelligence services all over the world were unlikely to believe that Saddam threw the UN inspectors out in 1998 so that he could secretly destroy all his WMDs while making the world think he still had them. That's hardly rational - Saddam could have got hundreds of billions of dollars for oil if the sanctions had been lifted, and his refusal to abide by UN armitice terms kept the sanctions from being lifter.
Now, maybe Saddam was irrational. On the other hand, if he can still manage to hide himself in Iraq, who knows what else remains hidden? Or are you now going to insist that Saddam himself never existed? -g-
As for Scott Ritter, it has been established to my satisfaction that he was simply on Sadam's payroll, so who cares what he says or how often he changes his story? |
