Here’s the new WMD threat… er, I mean, thread!
Here’s where we left off:
Chewy:
You and these Kennedys. The interest/relationship cannot be healthy. It must be stopped. I suggest going cold turkey. :moo:
Maybe Cheney or Bush ought to go and take a look. Seems even their hand-picked searchers can’t come up with the goods to support having gone to war.
[quote=“Reuters report”]Ex-U.S. Arms Hunter Kay Says No Stockpiles in Iraq
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - David Kay, who stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for weapons of mass destruction, said on Friday he does not believe there were any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.
Kay said he believes most of what is going to be found in the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has been found and that the hunt will become more difficult once America turns over governing the country to the Iraqis.
The United States went to war against Baghdad last year citing a threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. No actual banned arms have been found. [/quote]
In an interview with The Telegraph, David Kay said that he had uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria just prior to last year’s invasion of Iraq.
[quote=“David Kay”]We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons… But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam’s WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved.
Arrg-g-gh! SPUFT-T-T! Spff-f-fff! Gah! Gah! Whumpf! Waa-a-a-a . . .!
(spook! get a hold of yourself!)
[b]One . . . two . . . three . . [/b]
(Breathe, spook, breathe!)
eight . . . nine . . . ten
Oh—kay!
Whew! That was a tough one. My head almost exploded back there. I’m better now.
What we’re we talking about now? Oh, yeah, evidence. Good god, not again. I won’t even bother to ask my usual ‘Got any?’ this time as I’ve finally learned my lesson. These people are nuts:
"Deployment of US forces in the area would almost certainly involve a confrontation with Syrian troops. . .
The US administration has long considered Damascus as a prime candidate for ‘regime-change’ (along with Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and possibly even Saudi Arabia)."
http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000737.html
Just remember, a vote for George Bush in November is a vote for more regime change, more invasion, higher deficits, ever expanding religious warfare until we end up at the Super Bowl of religious warfare itself: Armageddon.
Well I was going to vote for Bush anyway but now you are saying doing so will invite more regime change, i.e. Syria. Well it is about damned time. I was looking for it to be next immediately following Iraq. Okay. I will try to be patient and wait until AFTER the election though I think Syria should be taken out the sooner the better.
fred
Saddam was a bad guy anyway, some stuff we don’t know about maybe went to Syria, it is all the fault of the CIA…all clutching at straws. Classic denials when caught in a lie.
[quote]Dr Kay said the failure to recognise this had led him to recommend an overhaul of intelligence-gathering and analytical efforts by the CIA and other agencies.
“I have had analysts apologising for the conclusions that they did,” he said.
An intelligence official said in response that it was premature to say that intelligence was completely or even largely wrong, and that “a lot of answers” were still needed. [/quote]
but that’s alright, because according to tigerman and fred, intelligence doesn’t have to be perfect. at this rate it doesn’t have to be even nominally ‘good’.
a conservative estimate from Powell in his speech to the UN:
[quote]“Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tonnes of chemical weapons agent,” he said then.
“That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. Even the low end of 100 tonnes of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory.”[/quote]
hell, let’s start a rumour right here and see if the CIA picks it up.
I’m a bit perturbed at the way many in the media are reporting David Kay’s assessment of the WMD intelligence. Many reports make it appear that Dr. Kay is critical of the Bush administration when this is not at all the case. Dr. Kay has stated that he blames the intelligence community for providing less than quality info re Iraq’s WMD.
NPR interviewed Dr. Kay and asked him whether Iraq posed an “imminent” threat with its WMD. WTF? Bush said the threat was NOT imminent!
In any event, here is how Dr. Kay replied to NPR reporter’s question:
The problem with the U.S. argument that it really is too incompetent to gather accurate weapons of mass destruction intelligence is that when there really is a threat (say, nuclear weapons) in the hands of a madman (Kim Jong Il) with the means to deliver them (Taepodong 1 missiles) are they going to get that completely wrong too?
Common sense would tell you incompetence works in both directions.
I’ve been trying to help out but so far the CIA hasn’t taken the hint.
[b]Yoo-hoo! CIA!
North Korea! Look. Over there!
Weapons of Mass Destruction! They admit they’ve got them! Proven proliferators of same. Means to deliver them! Bad attitude. Hates the U.S.[/b]
So far no signs of life over at Langley yet though. Maybe I’m not typing slowly enough.
I’m worried they really are as dumb as they claim to be and that’s not just a lame attempt at political cover. Maybe they’re waiting for another visit from Cheney to give them direction. He’s got better things to do right now though working the Damascus-or-Bust circuit.
I think the only hope is if I can figure some way to tow North Korea over to the Middle East somewhere so it will show up on the U.S. radar before it’s too late.
I think Kay felt he had to say that about Bush, being on the payroll before and such. Look carefully and you will see that there were a number of voices in the intel community expressing doubts and saying that they felt, in some cases, that they were being steered to provide interpretations to suit preconceived ideas (when the material was not being horded by the vice president).
Again I say, going to war is the absolute last resort and to be undertaken only if there is overwhelming proof (not supposition) and then with the backing of the international community (such as the voting members of the Security Council).
To say that Bush and his cronies were blameless (“Well, jez, they told me all this wrong stuff!”) is absurd. Aside from the fact that he is the president of the United States and must be responsible for actions of this weight, a competent individual would have done all possible to be abso-fucking-lutely sure that all the ducks were in a row.
As this unravels for the Republicans, I look back at my writings before the pre-emptive attack and feel that if I could source material sitting in Taiwan that led me to believe that much was being done in violation of common sense to lead the US to war, it should have been possible for the leaders of the US to do at least as much.
When is Bush and crowd going to come out and say, “We got it wrong”?
Also, this begs the question of the legitamacy of trying Saddam as a war criminal or with crimes against humanity. Attacking a soverign nation on a pretext that turns out to be spurious seems like a crime against humanity to me.
Talk about bullshit. Saddam was obligated to prove he had disarmed under the ceasefire treaty. He did not for 12 years so that is exemplary patience. We did not have to PROVE or as Rascal would say proof anything.
Second: so the CIA was PERHAPS wrong. Still not proved one way or another, BUT for such squealers, what about all the predictions on the part of the LEFT? Namely, rise of Arab Street; overthrow of moderate regimes, civil war, humanitarian crisis, lost art, no water, food, etc etc etc blah blah blah but did any of this happen? No but the Bush administration has been totally right about everything except wmds and still might be but we never hear the end of this.
And when I mean right, I mean right. We have almost all the money we envisioned namely 33 billion instead of the 35 we wanted and down to 100K troops now instead of 90K and the preemptive policy did not end diplomacy as we know it and suddenly Libya is open to getting rid of its weapons but that has nothing to do with raq AND everything to do with negotiations that have been going on for 25 years, yeah right. AND Pqkistan is opening up about its nuclear programs and Iran is at least talking about opening its up as well, but by no means give Bush credit. All this has happend in six months but negotiations with the UN for 20 plus years are finally paying off? Wake up and smell what the hell you are shoveling;
I’d say a better way to put it is ‘wake up and smell what the hell we’ve been wading through the last year.’
If you guys have been honest and straight about the facts and what your true motives were then the Soviet Union really was a worker’s paradise and Pravda really was the truth.
I wouldn’t start counting on cashing in my Likud stock options just yet if I were you. Iraq and Afghanistan are far from stabilized ( http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/front/7765782.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp). The U.S. is nowhere near any kind of exit from a stable Iraq so count on the weekly death count continuing for months or years to come. Musharraf is about as secure as a cat on a hot tin roof and there’s still some life left yet in the checks and balances of the American political system.
I like that: we’ve been right about everything but the WMD. That’s like a surgeon saying, ‘Well, everything about the operation went well except for the fact that the patient died.’
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPPrint/LAC/20040124/MCNAMARA/TPColumnists/
Lordy, lordy what has we come to dez daze? I give you guys an ‘A’ for balls, dat I do.
From the NYT:
[quote]Corrections
Published: January 27, 2004
Because of an editing error, a front-page article yesterday about David A. Kay, the C.I.A.'s former weapons inspector, misstated his view of whether the agency’s analysts had been pressured by the Bush administration to tailor their prewar intelligence reports about Iraq’s weapons programs to conform to a White House political agenda. Mr. Kay said he believed that there was no such pressure, not that there was. (His view was correctly reflected in a quotation that followed the error.)
nytimes.com/corrections.html[/quote]
Four lessons learned in hindsight:
[quote]1. [color=red]The alternatives confronting the Security Council in March 2003 were not viable.[/color] If eight months of largely unfettered investigations could not provide a smoking gun to prove the existence or nonexistence of a stockpile, certainly Hans Blix would fail as well. The alternatives some advocated … would have left us just as uncertain. Even giving Blix another year would have left us groping in the dark.
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[color=red]Intelligence failure was inevitable given the nature of the Iraqi regime[/color]. The new conventional wisdom is that Hussein wanted us to think he had a more advanced WMD program than he thought he had, and that Hussein himself thought he had a more advanced WMD program than he really had. If Hussein could be deceived in a country where he had absolute power, where he regularly punished betrayers by slipping them through human shredders or having their wives raped in front of them, then any external intelligence service was going to be deceived as well. The intelligence community accurately reported that Hussein was hiding things, that he was pursuing WMD programs, that senior members of the Iraqi military-industrial complex were convinced Iraq was pursuing WMD. Given Iraq’s record, it would have been heroic to connect those dots into the picture we now think we see, namely, that it was mostly Iraqi actors deceiving each other and everyone else.
-
[color=red]Intelligence failures beget intelligence failures[/color]. The intelligence community has a sorry record of assessing just how advanced an incipient WMD program really is. In fact, there is a striking pattern. In each of these cases, new evidence turned out to rebut the established consensus of the intelligence community: the Soviet Union in 1949, China in 1964, India in 1974, Iraq in 1991, North Korea in 1994, Iraq in 1995, India in 1998, Pakistan in 1998, North Korea in 2002, Iran in 2003 and Libya in 2003. In each of these cases, the WMD program turned out to be more advanced than the intelligence community thought. Iraq in 2003 may be the only exception…
-
[color=red]Intelligence cannot substitute for political judgment[/color]. Coercive diplomacy, the alternative to war, requires political judgment under conditions of uncertainty, a fact lost in the increasingly rancorous partisan debate. The critics who are bashing President Bush for pushing a hard line on Iraq are also bashing President Bush for not pushing a hard enough line on North Korea. Ironically, the president is doing everything in North Korea that he was accused of not doing in Iraq… The bottom line is that the hard cases – North Korea, Iran and, yes, Iraq – are hard cases precisely because the easy options have been tried and proved wanting.
I agree entirely that the emperor’s latest wardrobe collection is his finest ever – magnifique! bravo!
I have tears in my eyes just thinking about it. The man is a veritable genius!
[color=blue]President Bush said this on Tuesday at a White House press conference:[/color]
“. . . And then we went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.”
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040127-3.html
Can such a claim at this point be seriously ascribed to a lack of intelligence – or a lack of integrity? An inability to see the truth?
[quote=“spook”][color=blue]President Bush said this on Tuesday at a White House press conference:[/color]
“. . . And then we went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.”
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040127-3.html
Can such a claim at this point be seriously ascribed to a lack of intelligence – or a lack of integrity? An inability to see the truth?[/quote]
Spook, I think you are again being unfair to Mr. Bush.
Here is part of what Hans Blix stated in his report re Iraq’s compliance with UN Res. 1441:
[quote=“Hans Blix”]The substantive cooperation required relates above all to the obligation of Iraq to declare all programmes of weapons of mass destruction and either to present items and activities for elimination or else to provide evidence supporting the conclusion that nothing proscribed remains.
[color=red]Paragraph 9 of resolution 1441 (2002) states that this cooperation shall be “active”. It is not enough to open doors. Inspection is not a game of “catch as catch can”. Rather, as I noted, it is a process of verification for the purpose of creating confidence. It is not built upon the premise of trust. Rather, it is designed to lead to trust, if there is both openness to the inspectors and action to present them with items to destroy or credible evidence about the absence of any such items[/color].[/quote]
Yes, Iraq cooperated on “process” as required. But Iraq was also required by 1441 to cooperate immediately on “substance”. Hans Blix stated that Iraq had failed to cooperate on substance.
How, in light of Hans Blix’s report re 1441, is Mr. Bush either exhibiting a lack of intelligence or a lack of integrity in the statement of his that you cited above?