US says Iraq arms plan relied on deceit
After more than four months of searching hundreds of sites in Iraq, the team of US military officers and intelligence agents headed by former UN arms inspector David Kay has not produced hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction. US officials have not ruled out that stocks of weapons will still be found or were secreted out of the country before the war.But the investigators' conclusions, which have emerged from interviews with senior Bush administration officials and multiple intelligence sources with access to the team's findings, make the White House's best case so far that Hussein hid an outlawed weapons program. A primary justification for toppling the regime was the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The sources say Kay -- who has in the past hinted in general terms at Iraq's deception in hiding a weapons program -- will build a strong, but largely circumstantial case that Hussein dispersed his weapons programs. The case will be based on interviews with captured Iraqi leaders, documents from government files, discoveries including a pre-1991 nuclear centrifuge for enriching uranium found buried in a scientist's backyard garden, and components of possible weapons systems found in various areas of the country.
The short form:
"We found some old centrifuge parts buried under a rose bush."
Josh Marshall has more on this.
This was Kay's big "surprise"????
People are just about ready to start laughing at these clowns, and I'll bet this doesn't help. They should just stop talking about WMDs. Even the Fonz only jumped one shark.
Jumping the Shark is the best description of this fiasco I've seen.
I think the plan was that by now Iraq would be fully under the control of the occupiers, the people would be cheering in the streets and handing flowers to the troops, and the oil would be flowing nicely. The occupation would have been so successful that the whole Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction nonsense could be cast aside discreetly without any fuss.
Reality, of course, is totally different, and the lies that the invasion was based on continue to fester like an open wound. There are enough angry people now that the tales about pesticides and rose bushes will not go unnoticed. I'm really looking forward to seeing David Kay present his "evidence".
It amazes me that the failure to find wmd in Iraq has not been a major story thus far. The Kay report will officially mark the end of the snipe hunt. The stated reasons for launching an unprovoked, pre-emptive attack on another sovereign country have proved to be completely bogus.
Its time for the warmongers and this administration to be publicly ridiculed, and it will be up to the "liberal media" and prominent Democrats to do it. This issue is too important to be swept under the rug.
The argument about "some old centrifuge parts buried under a rose bush" is not in favour, but actually against the neocons' case for war, as somebody pointed out a while ago.
The fact is that these parts sat under the bush for some 12 years, including the years when Iraq was inspector-free after the inspectors' exit in the late 1990s. The scientists never got the call to dig the parts out and restart the program, even then. It never came. So I would say this is weakens rather than strengthen the case for justification for war on the basis that it was made then.
And if this is the best Kay could argue to make his position, then his report is just politics, zero substance.