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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (477073)	10/16/2003 10:37:10 PM
From: PROLIFE	Respond to of 769667

Hey, that is great. NO better companies to go to than Halliburton and Bectel. I know you wish clinto's and Kerry's China/Vietnam connections were getting the bids, but so solly, you will have to be satisfied with a few trips around the planet for clintos campaign cash..

To: American Spirit who wrote (477073)	10/16/2003 11:01:09 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

'Stubborn Facts' in Iraq Report Ignored by Bush Bashers By Frank Gaffney To hear a number of leading Democrats tell it, the report issued recently by David Kay, the chairman of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), was proof positive that President George W. Bush effectively had committed a war crime: He launched a war of aggression on the pretext that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and now, thanks to Kay, we know that wasn't true. There is only one problem with this highly partisan attack and the parallel media reporting that has taken a similarly Pollyannaish line about the Kay report: No responsible reader could take any comfort from its findings, let alone construe them as an indictment of the Bush administration and its decision to liberate Iraq. While the president's critics may not wish to be bothered by the facts, they are, as the saying goes, "stubborn things." And those laid out by Kay and his colleagues paint a picture of Saddam as a despot relentlessly engaged in the pursuit of the most devastating weapons known to man. The ISG's inability to date to locate the weapons the United Nations previously determined were in Saddam's hands should be a matter of grave concern - and redoubled effort. Its report certainly is not cause for, as some have suggested, shutting down the ISG and reallocating its resources elsewhere. Consider, for example, the following facts that belie the conclusion Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction: The Kay team thus far has been able to examine only 10 of the 130 known ammo depots in Iraq, some of which are as large as 50 square miles. It would be folly to say on the basis of a less-than-10-percent sample whether weapons of mass destruction are to be found in the remainder. These depots are filled with immense quantities of ordnance. Since the regime made no appreciable effort to distinguish which contained high explosives and which were loaded with chemical or biological agents, establishing exactly what is in such facilities is a time-consuming and dangerous task. In addition to the known depots, there are untold numbers of covert weapons caches around the country. These caches have been the source of much of the ordnance used in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to attack U.S. and coalition forces. Whether any of these contain weapons of mass destruction remains unknown at this juncture. But if they do, IEDs could, in the future, be vastly more devastating - especially to unprotected Iraqis in proximity to the attack. The task is complicated further by the relatively small size of the objects of the search. Kay has noted that all of Saddam's as yet unaccounted for weapons of mass destruction could be stored in a space the size of a two-car garage. According to former Clinton CIA director R. James Woolsey, Saddam's entire suspected inventory of the biological agent anthrax would fill roughly half of a standard semi's tractor trailer. The really bad news in the Kay report is revelations about the role being played in activities related to weapons of mass destruction by Saddam's dreaded Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) or Mukhabarat. According to Kay, the Mukhabarat had more than two dozen secret laboratories - and others still are being found - that "at a minimum kept alive Iraq's capability to produce both biological and chemical weapons." In addition to discovering work aimed at weaponizing various deadly diseases, the ISG received from an Iraqi scientist "reference strains" for one of the most lethal substances known to man: botulinum toxin. In short order, with the right equipment and growth material - items Saddam was able to acquire and retain since they inherently were "dual use" and also could be used for commercial purposes - such strains could translate into large quantities of biological agents. Lest we forget, it was this sort of capability that Bush cited as grounds for war. He warned of the possibility that weapons of mass destruction could be made available to terrorists. It would not take large quantities to inflict immense damage. And it likely would be the IIS, rather than the Iraqi regular army or even the Republican Guard, that would be responsible for providing such support to the regime's terrorist proxies. In a little-noted aspect of his recent Meet the Press interview, Vice President Richard Cheney for the first time offered official confirmation that Iraqi agents appeared to have played such a catalytic role in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. It is one thing to ignore the facts available and their ominous implications. It is, however, another thing altogether to pretend that Kay has shown that there is no danger from Saddam's weapons of mass destruction when the facts are otherwise, and bothersome indeed. Frank Gaffney is president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington. insightmag.com