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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Win Smith who wrote (132990)	5/14/2004 11:21:58 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Blix is mistaken. Such claims were generally not proven one way or the other, but subject to controversy. The yellow cake story seems to be disproved, but that is the nature of intelligence, sometimes it is wrong. Not being privy to the underlying intelligence (even Blix was not provided with the whole story, due to fear of leaks in his team), I do not think that either he nor I are in a position to evaluate the quality of the overall intelligence. The absence of stockpiles is inconclusive. After all, they had them in the first Gulf War, and didn't use them on us, for fear of retaliation. Kay noted testimony of shipments to Syria, and that there were convoys on relevant dates, but that the contents of the trucks could not be verified. For all we know, the bulk of the intelligence was correct.

To: Win Smith who wrote (132990)	5/14/2004 11:31:26 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

By the way, the situation in respect of war is not that of a court room. In any event, the burden was on Saddam to prove compliance, as it had to be, just as one must document deductions during an audit. The problem is that the whole exercise of inspections was futile. We had, for example, signal intelligence showing Iraqi officers discussing moving things around to deceive the inspectors, and we had evidence of security breaches within the inspection team. It was just as likely that the greater cooperation Blix got at the very end was due to having ensured that the relevant stockpiles were deep underground.