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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: laura_bush who wrote (6074)	1/24/2004 1:59:39 AM
From: Coz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

I certainly have to agree. If a we are entitled to see anything that is on a computer funded by tax money, then we should be able to have a look at all data from all computers in congress and the white house. Probably should be able to look at everything on the pentagon computers since they came from public funds too. I mean, if it is imperative that we make sure than no one is plotting any political strategy on tax payers' computers, that makes sense. Come to think of it, why stop at computers. I don't think that the president should use air force one to travel to cities where there will be political events. He should take a taxi or something. That goes double for Cheney. We should probably get Rumsfeld to start flying commercial airlines again too, since we are all safer now than before the war, but that's a whole different matter. --Cozzz

To: laura_bush who wrote (6074)	1/24/2004 9:00:18 AM
From: Ron	Respond to of 20773

Iraq Illicit Arms Gone Before War, Departing Inspector States By RICHARD W. STEVENSON WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 — David Kay, who led the American effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, said Friday after stepping down from his post that he has concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the start of the war last year. In an interview with Reuters, Dr. Kay said he now thought that Iraq had illicit weapons at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but that the subsequent combination of United Nations inspections and Iraq's own decisions "got rid of them." Asked directly if he was saying that Iraq did not have any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the country, Dr. Kay replied, according to a transcript of the taped interview made public by Reuters, "That is correct." Dr. Kay did not respond to telephone calls and e-mail messages from The New York Times. Dr. Kay's statements undermined one of the primary justifications set out by President Bush for the war with Iraq. Mr. Bush and other top administration officials repeatedly cited Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons as a threat to the United States, and the lack of evidence so far that Saddam Hussein actually had large caches of weapons has fueled criticism that Mr. Bush exaggerated the peril from Iraq. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said the administration stood by its previous assessments that Mr. Hussein had both weapons programs and stores of banned weapons. "Yes, we believe he had them, and yes we believe they will be found," Mr. McClellan said. "We believe the truth will come out." With Dr. Kay's departure, the administration on Friday handed over the weapons search to Charles A. Duelfer, a former United Nations weapons inspector who has expressed skepticism that the United States and its allies would find any banned chemicals or biological agents. Dr. Kay's comments and the appointment of Mr. Duelfer, made by George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, appeared to be a turning point in the administration's defense of its assertions that Mr. Hussein had amassed large stores of illicit weapons that he could use or turn over to terrorists for use against the United States or other nations. The assessment Dr. Kay provided to Reuters on Friday was far more conclusive about Iraq's weapons programs than the report he delivered to the White House and Congress in October. At that time, he said he and his team "have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone." But he also reported in October that his team had uncovered evidence of "dozens of W.M.D.-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002." Although the White House stood by its statements last year that Mr. Hussein possessed stores of banned weapons, a position reiterated on Thursday by Vice President Dick Cheney, other administration officials said anonymously on Friday that the prospects that the search would turn up substantial caches of chemical or biological weapons were much diminished. Dr. Kay told Reuters that one of the reasons he left was that the team he headed, the Iraq Survey Group, had been diverted to some degree for use in battling the insurgency in Iraq. That diversion, he said, left him short of the resources needed to complete the job by the end of June, when the United States plans to return sovereignty to the Iraqis. He and his team were "not going to find much after June," he said. "I think we have found probably 85 percent of what we're going to find." Democrats said Dr. Kay's statements raised serious questions about the administration's case for war and the quality of American intelligence. "It is increasingly clear that there has been a massive intelligence failure," Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. "The potential threat posed by Iraq's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and Iraq's nuclear weapons program was central to the case for war. In light of Dr. Kay's statement, the president owes the American public and the world an explanation." ----------- nytimes.com

To: laura_bush who wrote (6074)	1/24/2004 5:28:32 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

There are afew things that legitimately need to be kept secret -- military plans, movements of troops, security plans for facilities and emergencies, plans for police raids on drug houses, that sort of thing. But with only very limited exceptions, an open government and an open political process would be far better for the country. Just think -- if there had been no political secrets, Watergate would have been unnecessary and Nixon would have served out his second term. And how might that have changed history?