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

To: calgal who wrote (534232)	2/2/2004 1:44:03 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Blair and Bush squeak through William F. Buckley (archive) URL:http://www.townhall.com/columnists/wfbuckley/wfb20040202.shtml February 2, 2004 \| Print \| Send Britons and Americans wept copiously in mid-week. It appeared almost as if there had been collusion to save the reputations of Tony Blair and George Bush. Pressure has been building for months, to the effect that the British and American governments knew all along, during the heavy debates in the fall of 2002 and winter of 2003, that Saddam Hussein had no inventory of weapons that might conceivably be held to be of mass destruction. Everyone was waiting for confirmation by two august sources. The first is Lord Hutton, one of those British solons whose word is accepted as Mosaic in authority and integrity. What he said, after investigating British intelligence from the six-month period before the fighting began, is that there was no solid evidence that weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq. But he said that such evidence as there was might easily justify the suspicion that such weapons had existed. He rebuked sharply the proposition, advanced by the BBC, that intelligence estimates had been "sexed up" for the purpose of advancing the war-bound agenda of Tony Blair. That was a bombshell. Criticizing the BBC at so fundamental a level is on the order of looking into the Bureau of Weights and Measures to find out whether a pound was being misweighed. The chairman of the board of governors of the BBC promptly resigned, leaving only a Tory former foreign secretary to complain that intelligence estimates should have been so mistaken. Yes, they were mistaken, Lord Hutton's 740-page report agreed, but the same data yielded the same suspicions in France and Germany and, of course, the United States. In Washington we had the testimony of the eloquent David Kay. He had been in charge of searching out the evanescing weapons and one day, a few weeks ago, after months of scrutiny, he came to a conclusion, namely that such weapons did not exist. But like Lord Hutton, he declined to insinuate any deception by administration officials. Kay also noted that the same evidence had convinced French and German officials that the dangerous weapons were there. WMD, he said, is what it looked like, and that is what President Bush acted on. And then, answering a question from Sen. John McCain, Kay reached the identical conclusion of his counterpart in Great Britain. Whatever we think of the honesty of our intelligence sources, they simply are not reliable enough. Either Saddam Hussein was spectacularly resourceful in setting up brummagem deposits of chemical and biological look-alikes, or the perceptions of our whole assembly of satellites and Peeping Toms and spies on the ground can be fatefully mistaken. If there is a scandal, it is that our vision, in important matters, is defective. The intelligence services, in 1962, initially discounted reports that the Soviets had nuclear missiles on the ground in Cuba, but that is indeed what they proved to be, and photographs were taken and shown to President Kennedy. Our ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, then showed them to the Security Council, causing embarrassment to the Soviet members, to the extent that Soviet officials were capable of embarrassment. The question will naturally arise: If we had had proof positive that the weapons did not exist on Iraqi soil, would we have held back the war? Certainly Mr. Bush would have had fewer supporters in Congress for his Tonkin Gulf-style resolution, leaving it for him uniquely to decide whether to go on to war. The Democratic presidential candidates are resting their claims on this one point: that the president himself deceived the American people. Whether the war that proceeded was indefensible asks a different question, not one that can be authoritatively answered pending the distillation of the scene in Iraq. If what comes out of the bloody present is a reformed society freed of a sadistic tyrant, bent on a future in which there is, so to speak, separation of church and state, and if such developments inspire a whole region in the direction of civic stability, you will not find presidential aspirants in the year 2008 declaiming about the misleading evidence on which we acted in 2003. William F. Buckley, Jr. is editor-at-large of National Review, a Townhall.com member group. ©2003 Universal Press Syndicate

To: calgal who wrote (534232)	2/2/2004 1:44:21 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Kay’s Say and the CIA John Leo (archive) URL:http://www.townhall.com/columnists/johnleo/jl20040202.shtml February 2, 2004 \| Print \| Send David Kay’s exit interview was odd. In resigning as chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, he made news. “I don’t think they existed,” he said of the WMD supposedly stockpiled by Saddam Hussein. But this announcement came not in a Washington press conference but in a phone interview with a London-based news outlet (Reuters). Then he declined to answer phone calls and E-mails from the New York Times and talked to the London Telegraph instead. Reuters said Kay “fired a parting shot at the Bush administration.” This wasn’t true and may have reflected the journalistic expectation (or hope) that Kay would slam the door on the way out. Reuters eliminated the “parting shot” from its copy a couple of hours later. The right-leaning Telegraph, possibly with an opposite expectation, ran its story under a sensational headline: ‘Saddam’s WMD hidden in Syria, says Iraq survey chief’. Kay was quoted as saying that interviews with former Iraqi officials established that “a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam’s WMD program.” The story was tamer than the headline. Kay’s account grew tamer still when he got around to talking to U.S. media and the Senate: Whatever had been shipped to Syria (satellites and on-the-ground reports established “a constant stream of trucks, cars, rail traffic”) could not have amounted to much, since no significant, telltale evidence of production of weapons of mass destruction has been found anywhere in Iraq. The first reports on Kay’s comments, based solely on the brief and thin Reuters dispatch, stuck to the simple failure to find WMD. But once Kay started adding qualifiers and nuances, the story seemed less damaging to the Bush administration and less helpful to the “Bush lied” constituency. The stark no-weapons reporting (Iraq illicit arms gone before war, inspector insists, said the first New York Times article) faded from certainty to the finding that the weapons “probably” were gone when the United States invaded. Kay is personally convinced that Iraq had no WMD, but he acknowledged a dwindling chance that such forbidden weapons might still be found. Kay told National Public Radio that Saddam “had a large number of WMD program-related activities,” repeating the awkward phrase used in Kay’s interim report last October and repeated in President Bush’s State of the Union address. “So there was a WMD program. It was going ahead. It was rudimentary in many areas.” Later, he said that Iraq began retooling its nuclear weapons program in 2000 and 2001 but never got as far toward making a bomb as Iran and Libya. The Iraqis were working to develop biological weapons using the poison ricin “right up until” the invasion in March. Officers in the Republican Guard, he said, told interrogators that they believed other guard units had biological or chemical weapons. This might be interpreted as a small olive branch offered to the intelligence community -- maybe the CIA was picking up reports of beliefs, rather than hard facts, about the existence of WMD. “Clearly, the intelligence that we went to war on was inaccurate, wrong,” Kay said, but he did not think intelligence reports had been deliberately distorted and said he had found no evidence that analysts had been pressured to shade their assessments in order to justify a war. His only political finger-pointing was toward the Carter administration (for its policy of relying so heavily on technological surveillance and downgrading the need for spies) and in the general direction of unnamed political or military leaders who allowed post-invasion looting to go on in Iraq, thus allowing the destruction of official papers about weapons. Kay’s smooth and convincing testimony at his Senate hearing helps to discredit the theory that neoconservatives in the Bush administration conspired to manipulate intelligence reports. In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Duke professor of political science Peter Feaver writes: “How could even the all-powerful neocons have manipulated the intelligence estimates of the Clinton administration, French intelligence, British intelligence, German intelligence, and all the other ‘coconspirators’ who concurred on the fundamentals of the Bush assessment?” Belief that Saddam had WMD was so universal that one blogger, Calpundit.com, launched a contest of sorts seeking the names of any serious analysts who publicly doubted the actual existence of WMD in Iraq before September of 2002, when the U.N. inspections resumed. The blogger and his readers identified two people who qualified: Russian President Vladimir Putin and former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter. The point here is unmissable. The huge consensus about WMD in Iraq was wrong, and the arrow is pointing toward the intelligence services. ©2003 Universal Press Syndicate