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

To: PROLIFE who wrote (703710)	9/24/2005 10:46:13 AM
From: cirrus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

As I recall it, the primary reason for the war was to prevent WMD from falling into the hands of terrorists and used to attack America. If one believes these weapons exist, and if one has documents that one believes suggests as much, I can't imagine what other concerns might take priority over fully exploiting the links and information contained contained in these documents. I'm sure we all agree that the longer any WMD remain unaccounted for in the chaos of a post-war environment the greater the chance they would, if they exist, fall into the wrong hands. (On the bright side, the effectiveness of chemical and biological agents and their dispersal hardware tends to degrade with time...) In any case, America has had total access to Iraq for two and a half years. Little of substance has been found, certainly nothing that would remotely qualify as the "slam dunk" CIA Director Gene Tenet promised the President. As time passes, its less likely we will find what we sought. At some point, even the most ardent believer has to go back and wonder what went wrong. On the miles of records. Those who generate paperwork organize it. They create files and put those files in boxes and label the boxes. Especially government employees. It's really not rocket science or a decades long project to figure out what's there, especially since most of the records are of normal, routine, mundane everyday government business. The good stuff stands out. If one really wants to do search documents fast, there are absolutely incredible machines available, developed for the Google Index Project and corporate archives, that can scan tens of thousands of documents per day into computer searchable databases. One puts a stack of documents in the hopper, turn it on, and wow! There's even one that does books - actually turns the pages as it scans 1,200 pages per hour. (Go here to see one, its cool: kirtas-tech.com I'd bet the CIA or NSA has a few of these. Finally, there are quite a few fake documents out there. The Iraqi National Congress produced a ton of them to make a case against Saddam. The Nigerian documents suggesting Iraq attempted to purchase yellowcake - that incident caused such a flap when President Bush mentioned it in his State of the Union Address - were admitted by the Bush Administration to be false. As Hiram Johnson said in 1918 (the actual origin is in dispute) "The first casualty of war is truth." Sadly, that statement is even more true today than it was then. The truth has been mangled and distorted by all parties to this mess - Saddam, the Iraqi dissident groups, the UN, Democrats, Republicans... all are guilty of seeking to manipulate the truth to their advantage. Namaste. As I understand it,. there are miles of documents to go through. It is a possibility that other concerns took priority.