Bunker Dick ventures out to reap more lies last week in the press....and now the TRUTH from someone that has BEEN IN IRAQ LOOKING FOR THE IMAGINED WMD'S
Mr. Cheney, Meet Mr. Kay
January 27, 2004
Vice President Dick Cheney continued to insist last week
that Iraq had been trying to make weapons of mass
destruction, apparently oblivious to the findings of the
administration's own chief weapons inspector that Iraq had
possessed only rudimentary capabilities and unrealized
intentions. The vice president's myopia suggests a
breathtaking unwillingness to accept a reality that
conflicts with the administration's preconceived notions.
This kind of rigid thinking helped propel us into an
invasion without broad international support and, if Mr.
Cheney is as influential as many say, could propel us into
further misadventures down the road.
Mr. Cheney has long been the administration's most alarmist
proponent of the view that Saddam Hussein had chemical and
biological weapons ready for use at any time and an active
nuclear program. He gave little ground in an interview on
National Public Radio on Thursday. He described two flatbed
trailers found in Iraq months ago as mobile biological
weapons labs and claimed they were "conclusive evidence" of
Iraqi programs to make weapons of mass destruction. The
very next day, David Kay, who had just stepped down as the
top weapons inspector, told Reuters that he now thought the
much-feared stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons
had not existed on the eve of the war. They were eliminated
in the mid-1990's by United Nations inspectors and by
Iraq's own decisions, he said, and no significant efforts
to make new ones followed.
As for those trailers cited by Mr. Cheney, the consensus
view, Mr. Kay told The Times, is that they were intended to
produce hydrogen or perhaps rocket fuel, not biological
weapons. Mr. Kay had earlier called the trailer assertions
an embarrassing fiasco. So, too, with Iraq's nuclear
weapons program. Mr. Cheney once famously declared that it
had been reconstituted, but Mr. Kay called it rudimentary -
hardly capable of producing a bomb in a year or two, as the
administration had implied.
Although administration officials cling to the hope of
finding some evidence of terror weapons in a cubbyhole
somewhere in Iraq, surely it is time to focus on how the
intelligence could have been so wrong and perhaps avoid
making the same mistakes with the next secretive dictator
to come along. Mr. Kay largely exonerates President Bush
and blames the global intelligence community. He believes
the C.I.A. became so reliant on the much-maligned United
Nations weapons inspectors that their withdrawal left it
without spies of its own.
Mr. Kay also believes that intelligence analysts failed to
realize that Mr. Hussein became increasingly isolated and
fantasy-driven in the late 1990's, a condition that enabled
scientists to hoodwink him into approving fanciful weapons
plans that turned into corrupt moneymaking schemes. That
seems hard to believe in a land where people supposedly
lived in terror of a brutal dictator. But if it is true
that Mr. Hussein wrote novels while the American-led force
geared up for war, then perhaps both sides of this conflict
were divorced from reality.
nytimes.com |
