Likely there were never WMDS

[Zorin Industries 0]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3426703.stm

 

 

I don't know whta effect this will have on Bush, but it could very well finish off Blair

[Guest Salacious Crumb]

I don't think it will hurt Bush terribly b/c we got Saddam and the attacks are dying off a bit. WMD wasn't going to hang him if the other two got resolved.

[Zorin Industries 0]

Yeah, the problem for Blair was that he hinged the British case for war on WMD'S and he hasen't been ableto shake that off as well as Bush has. Plus the Hutton report comes out this week, and if it criticsizes Blair much, he may have no choice but to quit

[Spicy McHaggis 0]

Powell's only comments:

 

"The answer to that question is, we don't know yet."

 

"We had questions that needed to be answered.

 

"What was it? One hundred tonnes, 500 tonnes or zero tonnes? Was it so many litres of anthrax, 10 times that amount or nothing?"

 

 

Where exactly does he say there never were WMD's?

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

The "Likely there weren't ever any WMDs" comment was made by David Kay, lead weapons inspector.

[Downhome 0]

How much have the deaths of US soldiers went down? It still seems like every day, or every other day we hear of a few of them getting killed one way or another.

 

Do any of you have any actual numbers since the capture of Saddam Hussein?

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

Biased site, but it still gives a casualty count and analyses on when the deaths happened, etc.

 

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

[Downhome 0]

Biased site, but it still gives a casualty count and analyses on when the deaths happened, etc.

 

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

Thank you.

 

Do you know of any concrete numbers of soldiers who have commited suicide while over there?

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

http://lists.ilps-news.com/pipermail/no2us...ary/000076.html

 

Says 21 in that article, which has an AP byline.

[Guest MikeSC]

The "Likely there weren't ever any WMDs" comment was made by David Kay, lead weapons inspector.

Which COMPLETELY contradicts every report he's given and every moment of testimony he's given to Congress to date.

-=Mike

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

Yeah.

 

But he said it as he was quitting, so... take from that what you will.

[Guest MikeSC]

Yeah.

 

But he said it as he was quitting, so... take from that what you will.

Either he was lying then --- or he is lying now.

 

EITHER way, he's lied.

-=Mike

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

Yeah, but we already knew that, didn't we?

[Justice 0]

So... wait... lemme get this straight:

 

If there were no WMDs in there in the first place... why didn't the UN Inspections for 7 years after ever show any evidence of this? I mean, I don't have much respect for the UN as is, but if they had been mistakenly accusing Iraq for 12 years of having these things...

 

You know, if that's true, I just lost ALL respect for the UN as a governmental body. I mean, seriously, look at the options we have right now:

 

WMDs: UN defies US invasion, despite Iraq breaking a massive UN resolution after ejection in 1998 and with the current weapons inspections turning up practically nothing.

 

No WMDs: For 12 years the UN accuses and punishes Iraq with sactions for not having these things, and through this reinforcement of something that wasn't true they provided the basis for an invasion.

 

I'm still fine and cool with the whole war, but if that's the case with WMDs, I find the UN to be more at fault than the US. Hell, the fact that when war looks to be on the horizon, suddenly the UN believes that Iraq has no weapons is real suspicious. It's almost as though they had weapons inspectors over there just so they could look like they were actually doing something without actually having to take Saddam out of power.

[Guest Cerebus]

The "Likely there weren't ever any WMDs" comment was made by David Kay, lead weapons inspector.

Which COMPLETELY contradicts every report he's given and every moment of testimony he's given to Congress to date.

-=Mike

Or the UN....I know lefties are having a field day with this but it makes me nervous. Frankly, I don't give a fuck about Bush, Blair, or whether or not they lied. For too many, that seems to take precedent over WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO THOSE WEAPONS??? Look at UNMOVIC's last report to the SC. There is a laundry list of unaccounted for weapons (either weapons never found and dismantled or weapons of which they never recived evidence of destruction). For example, once the Iraqis claimed they had dumped several liters of anthrax and provided soil samples as evidence. Unfortunately, it was impossible to determine how much anthrax was dumped so they naturally asked for documented evidence. The Iraqis claimed they had destroyed all documents relating to the anthrax's destruction leading UNSCOM to a rather confused conclousion; were the Iraqis lying or if they were telling the truth why destroy all the evidence proving it? I'm more interested in what happened to all those unaccounted for weapons. Are they hidden soemwhere in the western desert? Smuggled out to Syria or Jordan? Were they destroyed or allowed to break down but they simply never told anyone? Too many questions unanswered for me, and many of them more important than the (admittedly) important question of that intelligence.

[PLAGIARISM! 0]

I think both Blair and Bush are lucky there isn't an opposing candidate worth a shit on either side of the atlantic. Blair's got a lot more going against him right now though.

[Justice 0]

CNN.com

 

Kay: No evidence Iraq stockpiled WMDs

Former chief U.S. inspector faults intelligence agencies

 

(CNN) -- Two days after resigning as the Bush administration's top weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay said Sunday that his group found no evidence Iraq had stockpiled unconventional weapons before the U.S.-led invasion in March.

 

He said U.S. intelligence services owe President Bush an explanation for having concluded that Iraq had.

 

"My summary view, based on what I've seen, is we're very unlikely to find large stockpiles of weapons," he said on National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition." "I don't think they exist."

 

It was the consensus among the intelligence agencies that Iraq had such weapons that led Bush to conclude that it posed an imminent threat that justified the U.S.-led invasion, Kay said.

 

"I actually think the intelligence community owes the president rather than the president owing the American people," he said.

 

"We have to remember that this view of Iraq was held during the Clinton administration and didn't change in the Bush administration," Kay said.

 

"It is not a political 'gotcha' issue. It is a serious issue of 'How you can come to a conclusion that is not matched in the future?'"

 

Other countries' intelligence agencies shared the U.S. conclusion that Iraq had stockpiled such weapons, though most disagreed with the United States about how best to respond.

 

Powell: Violations justified war

Asked if Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States at the time of the invasion, Kay said, "Based on the intelligence that existed, I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat."

 

Although his team concluded that Iraq did not possess large amounts of weapons of mass destruction ready for use, that does not necessarily mean it posed no imminent threat, he said. "That is a political judgment, not a technical judgment."

 

Secretary of State Colin Powell defended the administration's moves Sunday. "Military action was justified by Iraq's violation of 12 years of U.N. resolutions," he said in an interview with First Channel Russia during a visit to Moscow.

 

"Iraq had the intent to have weapons of mass destruction and they had previously used weapons of mass destruction. They had programs to develop such weapons," Powell said.

 

"And what we were trying to find out was what inventory they actually had, and we are still examining that question."

 

Saddam Hussein was given the opportunity to divulge what his country was doing but chose not to do so, which resulted in the U.S.-led campaign to oust him, Powell said.

 

"And the world is better off, the Iraqi people are better off, because Saddam Hussein is gone," Powell said. "And we will continue to make sure we find all elements of his weapons of mass destruction programs and whatever weapons there might be."

 

Powell made the Bush administration's case that Saddam's regime possessed such weapons in a presentation to the U.N. Security Council last year.

 

Other failures

The discovery that Iran and Libya had nuclear programs also appears to have caught intelligence agencies by surprise, Kay said.

 

The Iranian program was uncovered not by intelligence agencies but by Iranian defectors, he said.

 

Libya's program contained a number of international clues, such as a connection to Pakistan and plants in Malaysia. "It was, in many ways, the biggest surprise of all, and it was missed," Kay said.

 

Last June, when he was appointed to lead the U.S. effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Kay expressed confidence they would be found.

 

Despite his group's failure to unearth such weapons, those predictions have not embarrassed him, he said.

 

"They're coming back to haunt me in the sense of why could we all be so wrong? ... It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information."

 

Kay said he would not submit a final report on his work in Iraq, since the task of searching for weapons will continue, led by Charles Duelfer, a longtime weapons inspector who replaces Kay as the new CIA special adviser. (Full Story)

 

Despite not finding any WMD, Kay said his team found that the Iraqi senior leadership "had an intention to continue to pursue their WMD activities. That they, in fact, had a large number of WMD-related activities."

 

Kay predicted investigators would find that Iraqi scientists were "working on developing weapons or weapons concepts that they had not moved into actual production."

 

Kay alleges Syria connection

Kay also raised the possibility -- one he first discussed in a weekend interview with "The Sunday Telegraph" of London -- that clues about banned weapons programs might reside across Iraq's western border.

 

"There is ample evidence of movement to Syria before the war -- satellite photographs, reports on the ground of a constant stream of trucks, cars, rail traffic across the border. We simply don't know what was moved," Kay said.

 

 

But, he said, "the Syrian government there has shown absolutely no interest in helping us resolve this issue."

 

Kay acknowledged that the truth might never be revealed. Widespread looting in Baghdad after the invasion destroyed many government records. "There's always going to be unresolved ambiguity here."

 

Kay said he resigned after his resources were diverted to other work from the exclusive goal of searching for unconventional weapons.

 

"It's very hard to run organizations with multiple missions, particularly if one half is controlled by the Defense Department and one half is controlled by the CIA. ... I thought that was the wrong thing to do."

 

Kay said he would like to write a book dealing with the issue of proliferation and intelligence.

 

"I'm not doing a Paul O'Neill," he said, referring to the former Bush treasury secretary who was the primary source for "The Price of Loyalty," a recent book that said the Bush administration was planning to invade Iraq almost from the time Bush took office.

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

He just doesn't want to wake up with a severed horse head lying next to him.

[Justice 0]

He just doesn't want to wake up with a severed horse head lying next to him.

Hey, has Bush ever been accused of murder for any of his former staff members? The joke doesn't work unless it's Clinton, dude.

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

Karl Rove, not Bush!

 

And there's a first time for everything.

 

Oh, and STFU you murdering prick. You thought I'd forget.

Edited January 26, 2004 by Tyler McClelland