What are you expecting from me on Thanksgiving

[hansel]

There’s one point that’s continually bothered me, that I haven’t seen addressed. I’d particularly like it if Scylla, the one showing the most reflective attitude here, did so:

Presumably, we’re in a better position now to find WMDs than we ever were. We have physical control of the country, and there’s no dictator trying to play cat and mouse, among other things.

Yet, we’ve found nothing so far, and the inspectors often mention how difficult it will be to search even under these conditions. After all, it’s a large country, and they’re only a limited, if large, body of inspectors, and the things they’re looking for could be as small as a bundle of papers.

Given that, how is it at all possible that the Bush administration could know with enough certainty before the invasion that there were WMDs in Iraq? Even under optimal conditions, it’s very difficult; what possible certainty could the Bush administration have had from iffy intelligence reports, no matter how much the Office of Special Plans spun the data?

When I think about this, the scale of the gamble the Bush administration took boggles me.

Re: the centrifuge in the garden. The reason I give it very little credence as a piece of a program to develop WMDs is that it was buried in a garden from the time of the first Gulf War. Crucial piece that it is, the fact that it’s lain undisturbed for more than a decade is evidence against Iraq having an active WMD program.

[El_Cid_Viscoso]

[Overheard at Denny’s]Hey y’all, I know Saddam had some bad ass weapons, but why ain’t none of the militia used 'em?[OaD]

[elf6c]

*Originally posted by SimonX *
**Kay did ask for 9 more months. July 2004. **

Yeah, and a whopping $600 million dollars.

More on the trailer issue- guess who was the last person to give up on those (just like he was the last person to give up on Iraqi 9-11 ties and had to be publically corrected by the President)- that right Dick Cheney. More:

In a paper issued May 28, the CIA called the trailers “the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.” But intelligence analysts from the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency have said they believe the trailers were probably used to fill hydrogen weather balloons.

Kay said an investigation of the trailers has “yielded a number of explanations including hydrogen, missile propellant and BW production but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers.”

Military scientists who analyzed the pair of trailers during the summer doubted they were designed to function as mobile laboratories, according to the three military officers involved in the weapons hunt.

“There were some people who really believed they were for making hydrogen for weather balloons. Almost no one was certain they were biological weapons,” said one senior-ranking military commander involved in the search. “The trailers are great examples of dual-use but that’s about it,” the commander said.

Dual-use items, which could have either military or civilian applications, long troubled U.N. weapons inspectors who tagged most such equipment and kept it under monitoring while they were in Iraq. Defense officials in Baghdad and Washington have said much of what weapons inspectors have found so far is equipment and facilities with dual-use capabilities. There is no indication that any of those materials or places are new or were unknown to U.N. inspectors.

One of the U.S. scientists involved in the hunt, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said some conducting the search believe the Iraqis could have tried to produce biological warfare agents inside the trailers but not very well.

Also, it would have been hard, if not impossible, to hide the evidence. No traces of anthrax or any other warfare agent have been found during more than a half-dozen tests on the trailers.

Last month, Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) repeated the claim that the two trailers were “mobile biological facilities” that could have been used to make several biological agents, including smallpox.

Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

I don’t know Scylla, Kay does seem to take every inference in favor of this could, might, maybe, sort of, may have intended approach. I would say he was unbiased in general, however in comparison to someone like Cheney, Rumsfled some of the others that may have dragged Bush down the garden path on Iraq- he does seem to be.

Also- still have not scene any follow up on that “story” you posted. You may want to stick to primary sources like CNN or even Fox News Channel for links regarding possible news.

Other details:

After searching for nearly six months, U.S. forces and CIA experts have found no chemical or biological weapons in Iraq and have determined that Iraq’s nuclear program was in only “the very most rudimentary” state, the Bush administration’s chief investigator formally told Congress Thursday.

Before the war, the administration said Iraq had a well-developed nuclear program that presented a threat to the United States.

Now, “It clearly does not look like a massive, resurgent program, based on what we discovered,” former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay, who heads the government’s search, said Thursday after briefing House and Senate intelligence committees in a closed session on his interim report.

Compared to what Bush claimed:

On Oct. 7, 2002, President Bush said that “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. . . . Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

No illegal weapons found in Iraq, U.S. investigator says / Search draws...

[pesch]

Perhaps we need to take a look at the latest report from David Kaye, who delivered this interim report on the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) before a congressional panel on Oct. 2.

The report is surprisingly readable, and I would recommend you take a look at it. But here are a few paragraph about it.

First, the report goes into problems the inspectors have faced:

Why are we having such difficulty in finding weapons or in reaching a confident conclusion that they do not exist or that they once existed but have been removed? Our search efforts are being hindered by six principal factors:

From birth all of Iraq’s WMD activities were highly compartmentalized within a regime that ruled and kept its secrets through fear and terror and with deception and denial built into each program;

Deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documentation related to weapons programs began pre-conflict and ran trans-to-post conflict;

Post-OIF looting destroyed or dispersed important and easily collectable material and forensic evidence concerning Iraq’s WMD program. As the report covers in detail, significant elements of this looting were carried out in a systematic and deliberate manner, with the clear aim of concealing pre-OIF activities of Saddam’s regime;

Some WMD personnel crossed borders in the pre/trans conflict period and may have taken evidence and even weapons-related materials with them;

Any actual WMD weapons or material is likely to be small in relation to the total conventional armaments footprint and difficult to near impossible to identify with normal search procedures. It is important to keep in mind that even the bulkiest materials we are searching for, in the quantities we would expect to find, can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two car garage;

The environment in Iraq remains far from permissive for our activities, with many Iraqis that we talk to reporting threats and overt acts of intimidation and our own personnel being the subject of threats and attacks. In September alone we have had three attacks on ISG facilities or teams: The ISG base in Irbil was bombed and four staff injured, two very seriously; a two person team had their vehicle blocked by gunmen and only escaped by firing back through their own windshield; and on Wednesday, 24 September, the ISG Headquarters in Baghdad again was subject to mortar attack.

Nevertheless, they have found evidence of several ongoing WMD program.

We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later:

• A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.

• A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.

• Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist’s home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

• New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.

• Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists’ homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).

• A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.

• Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.

• Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km - well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.

• Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong – 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.

There is also extensive evidence that the Iraqis destroyed evidence of the program as the U.S. forces advanced on Baghdad:

On 10 July 2003 an ISG team exploited the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) Headquarters in Baghdad. The basement of the main building contained an archive of documents situated on well-organized rows of metal shelving. The basement suffered no fire damage despite the total destruction of the upper floors from coalition air strikes. Upon arrival the exploitation team encountered small piles of ash where individual documents or binders of documents were intentionally destroyed. Computer hard drives had been deliberately destroyed. Computers would have had financial value to a random looter; their destruction, rather than removal for resale or reuse, indicates a targeted effort to prevent Coalition forces from gaining access to their contents.

Here’s one conclusion about the existence of biological programs:

With regard to biological warfare activities, which has been one of our two initial areas of focus, ISG teams are uncovering significant information - including research and development of BW-applicable organisms, the involvement of Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) in possible BW activities, and deliberate concealment activities. All of this suggests Iraq after 1996 further compartmentalized its program and focused on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents.

As for the chemical weapons program, there’s a ton of evidence that has to be sifted through:

Let me turn now to chemical weapons (CW). In searching for retained stocks of chemical munitions, ISG has had to contend with the almost unbelievable scale of Iraq’s conventional weapons armory, which dwarfs by orders of magnitude the physical size of any conceivable stock of chemical weapons. For example, there are approximately 130 known Iraqi Ammunition Storage Points (ASP), many of which exceed 50 square miles in size and hold an estimated 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordinance. Of these 130 ASPs, approximately 120 still remain unexamined. As Iraqi practice was not to mark much of their chemical ordinance and to store it at the same ASPs that held conventional rounds, the size of the required search effort is enormous.

And by all accounts, Saddam wanted to continue developing chemical weapons, such as mustard gas:

While searching for retained weapons, ISG teams have developed multiple sources that indicate that Iraq explored the possibility of CW production in recent years, possibly as late as 2003. When Saddam had asked a senior military official in either 2001 or 2002 how long it would take to produce new chemical agent and weapons, he told ISG that after he consulted with CW experts in OMI he responded it would take six months for mustard. Another senior Iraqi chemical weapons expert in responding to a request in mid-2002 from Uday Husayn for CW for the Fedayeen Saddam estimated that it would take two months to produce mustard and two years for Sarin.

As for nuclear weapons, the first Gulf War and subsequent sanctions may have severely crippled Iraq’s program, but Saddam still wanted nukes:

With regard to Iraq’s nuclear program, the testimony we have obtained from Iraqi scientists and senior government officials should clear up any doubts about whether Saddam still wanted to obtain nuclear weapons. They have told ISG that Saddam Husayn remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons. These officials assert that Saddam would have resumed nuclear weapons development at some future point. Some indicated a resumption after Iraq was free of sanctions. At least one senior Iraqi official believed that by 2000 Saddam had run out of patience with waiting for sanctions to end and wanted to restart the nuclear program.

That’s just the tip of the iceburg. The report is in English and easy to read. It’s on the Web and available to everyone.

Now, take a look at how the New York Times delivered the news:

No Illicit Arms Found in Iraq, U.S. Inspector Tells Congress

WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 — The government’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq told Congress on Thursday that his team had failed to find illegal weapons after three months of scouring the country, but he said the group had discovered some evidence of Saddam Hussein’s intent to develop such weapons and even signs that Baghdad had retained some capacity to do so.

(Not surprisingly, senators who were expecting Bush to produce barrels of the stuff were not happy)

“I’m not pleased by what I heard today,” said Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He said Americans were hoping there would be a breakthrough by now, but, he said, “There has not been a breakthrough.”

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the ranking minority member on the intelligence committee, said that Dr. Kay’s report raised fresh doubts about the Bush administration’s policy of pre-emptive war.

One wonders, after reading the report, if they’re fools, morons, or politicians who understand that, once this report is filtered through the media, that they know exactly how it will appear:

Let’s summarize: Despite 12 years of sanctions, Saddam Hussein kept together his programs to build nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. He kept the plans and whatever materials he could. He organized resistence to numerous United Nations resolutions – hear that multlaterialists HE DEFIED UNITED NATIONS RESOLUTIONS – to dismantle these programs.

His intentions are clear: hide as much as possible, deny everything, and when the heat was off, when the sanctions were lifted, start rebuilding.

Can you deny that he intended to rebuild his stocks of biological weapons? Do you believe that, if the sanctions were suddenly lifted, he was going to say, "We’re free. Burn the documents, Ali! We don’t need these programs? Who needs mustard gas? Who needs Sarin?

And if you truly believe that nations should act in accordance with United Nations resolutions, and a country subscribing to those resolutions defies the U.N., what do you think should happen next? Should the U.N. enforce those resolutions? Or should there be another 12 years of sanctions?

The evidence is there that these programs existed in Iraq. Don’t let your hatred of Bush blind you to them.

[RedFury]

And if you truly believe that nations should act in accordance with United Nations resolutions, and a country subscribing to those resolutions defies the U.N., what do you think should happen next?

Invade Israel.

[elf6c]

Wow I came to post the first instance on the official Spin Control- but I see someone beat me too it. But even Bush didn’t try to strech the results like you did- bravo! I see you love the bold font- in your honor I will use some to help refute your wishful thinking.

We have not found at this point actual weapons," Kay said after briefing lawmakers behind closed doors. “It does not mean we’ve concluded there are no actual weapons.”

In a statement to several congressional committees Thursday, he only made one strong finding — that Saddam was actively developing missiles that exceeded range limits imposed by the United Nations.

“In addition to intent, we have found a large body of continuing activities and equipment that were not declared to the U.N. inspectors when they returned in November of last year,” Kay said.

**Taken together, Kay’s findings do not validate most of Bush’s prewar assertions that Saddam had widespread chemical and biological weapons and programs to make more, and was developing a nuclear weapon. **Kay did not address U.S. assertions about Saddam’s ties to terrorist groups, particularly al-Qaida.

Critics have contended that the U.S. intelligence community made serious errors in its analysis of the threat posed by Iraq or the administration exaggerated what intelligence information it did have to persuade a skeptical world to support an invasion.

“Did we misread it, or did they mislead us, or did they simply get it wrong? Whatever the answer is, it’s not a good answer,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“I’m not pleased by what I heard today,” said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the committee’s chairman, “but we should be willing to adopt a wait-and-see attitude — and that’s the only alternative we really have.”

Kay did say, however, that there was evidence that Iraq “focused on maintaining small, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of (biological weapons) agents.”

To that end, he described “a clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment … suitable for continuing (chemical and biological weapon) research.” Whether the equipment was actually utilized for that purpose, Kay’s report does not say.

Wow, only one strong finding- they wanted to extend the range of their missles. No weapons, no real programs, on possible intend, and a few dual use products and one vial of botulism bacteria. Gee you could get that with a few dented cans. Are they WMD’s too? In any event pesch, thanks for the laugh. Nothing but excuses, major qualifers, little piles of ashes, weather balloon equipment, and destoyed computer equipment. That’s not what Bush, Cheney and Powell promised us now is it?

Love the blame the media attempt- classic! See they keep reports things that make Bush look bad- it’s a conspiracy!!

:rolleyes:

[elf6c]

And the black helicopters forced me to post those typos too.

Well anyway, here is the official Bush line. Unsurprisingly, he is taking the glass is half-full approach. Still, you have to think that maybe Cheney and his pro-invasion chickenhawk buddies might not be getting a Christmas card from the Bush’s this year.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) on Friday defended his decision to attack Iraq (news - web sites), brushing off doubts from Americans and citing what he said was preliminary evidence from the top CIA (news - web sites) weapons hunter that Baghdad had been developing unconventional weapons.

“I can’t think of any people who think that the world would be a safe place with Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) in power,” Bush said.

Democrats cried foul, saying the report on the search for weapons of mass destruction showed there had been no immediate threat to the United States from Iraq and the war appeared to have been fought under false pretenses.

Bush awoke to headlines that the U.S. team led by CIA adviser David Kay had reported that it had found no biological or chemical weapons in Iraq and that a CBS-New York Times poll showed a drop in American confidence on the president’s skill in handling crises.

Specifically, the poll found growing doubts about whether the Iraq war was worth the costs. Only 41 percent said it was, while 53 percent said it was not, although about half said it was worth removing Saddam from power.

Down to 41 percent. Glug, glug, glug.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=1&u=/nm/20031003/ts_nm/iraq_bush_dc_5

[quixotic78]

pesch, the major problem I have with your post is that everything is being viewed based on the hypothesis that Saddam had an active WMD program. I mean, look at your post. Okay, people burning notebooks and ruining hard drives is certainly indicative of some suspicious activity. But it is certainly NOT indicative of some suspicious activity involving WMDs unless you’re already working under that hypothesis.

Try it this way. Suppose the cops start banging on my door, because they got an anonymous tip that I’ve got a pound of cocaine in my basement. I’m on the toilet when they start banging, so it takes me a minute to get to them. I let them in, they serve their warrant and lo and behold, I don’t have any cocaine in my basement. But they’re pretty convinced that I do indeed have the coke. So they conclude that the two minutes it took me to get the door was the time I took to flush my drugs. Hell, they might have even heard a flush! Case closed. I get arrested.

That’s ridiculous! Burning notebooks is certainly fishy, but who’s to say that they weren’t burning records of plans to invade Saudi Arabia? Nude photos of Saddam? Detailed records of Uday and Qusay’s shenanigans? A list of moms that Saddam would like to fuck? You don’t know, and asserting that a pile of ash is evidence of a WMD program is asinine to the highest degree.

[wring]

y’all are missing the important detail/bolding of that post. it was all “blah blah blah wmd programs” and “blah blah blah Saddam wanted” PLease compare and contrast to Bush’s speeches wherein he spoke of WMD in existence, tons and tons of chemicals/biological etc etc etc. a wmd “program” can be a notebook w/schematics in it, a buried trailer, a scientist w/a degree in biological engineering.

it simply was not what was asserted to have been in existence.

I am also struck by the remark from the REpublican senator who suggested that we take a ‘wait and see’ approach. Seems to me that I heard those same words several months ago from t’other side and they were ignored.

[Weird_With_Words]

*Originally posted by pesch *
(Not surprisingly, senators who were expecting Bush to produce barrels of the stuff were not happy)

I think that’s also what the majority of Americans were expecting to find right after the war. Oh yeah, and ties to 9/11.

HE DEFIED UNITED NATIONS RESOLUTIONS

And we had to defy the U.N. to enforce the U.N.? Nice doublethink.

We knew this. We knew this from the beginning. What we didn’t know was that he didn’t have any WMD to attack with at the time of the invasion. Don’t you remember Bush saying that they’d be able to attack us with a nuke/bio-chem/nuclear anthrax bomb in just 48 hours? Or the smoking-gun-mushroom-cloud line? Or just the sheer amount of fucking urgency this administration lent to the invasion? The invasion of Iraq was sold to us, (well, not so much to us as to you. We, i.e. liberals, were saying the evidence was full of shit from the very beginning) and it was sold to us as the only logical response to an imminent attack.**

Can you deny that he intended to rebuild his stocks of biological weapons?

**Nope. Can you deny that this invasion was a drastic and expensive response to an as-of-yet immaterial threat?

**Do you believe that, if the sanctions were suddenly lifted, he was going to say, "We’re free. Burn the documents, Ali! We don’t need these programs? Who needs mustard gas? Who needs Sarin?

**Nope. Do you believe that makes a difference?

And if you truly believe that nations should act in accordance with United Nations resolutions, and a country subscribing to those resolutions defies the U.N., what do you think should happen next?

The U.N. should decide whether or not it’s serious enough to invade. If not, more sanctions. (Or, what RedFury said.)

Should the U.N. enforce those resolutions? Or should there be another 12 years of sanctions?

I think the method of resolution enforcement would best be left to those who made the resolutions in the first place, and, for that matter, those who have something resembling legitimacy

The evidence is there that these programs existed in Iraq.

Scaling back our expectations, are we?

**Don’t let your hatred of Bush blind you to them. **

Few of us hate him. Hell, I don’t even dislike him. I just think it’s tragically unfortunate that he happens to be our un-elected president. And I wish I could live my life without wondering how much different things would have been if a whole shitload of mistakes hadn’t been made in Florida. Sigh.

I guess in the end I’m just astonished by the sheer amount of double-think coming out of the republican party in connection to this. Let’s get a few thing completely… fucking… straight… right… now:

The best defense is not an offense, unless you have dyslexia. The best defense is a defense.

You never have to hurt the ones you love, you always have a choice.

Oh yeah, and a pre-emptive strike cannot be justified by what might have happened. It’s quite possible that people have been saved by a pre-emptive strike, but I would exptect the people involved to be intellectually mature enough to confront just how morally dubious such an action is.

[Scylla]

I’ve read the report carefully a couple of times (or at least the transcript of Kaye’s testimony.)

It contains a bit more positive information than I was expecting.

The bad news for Bush is that his imminence argument is conclusively false.

There is however more good news for Bush in the transcript than I had been expecting, particularly concerning bioweapons and missiles. I think the argument is very strong that Bush’s assertion that Saddamm had not given up his WMD ambitions and accepted disarmament is borne out in this report.

I want to thinkg about it some more and go over it more carefully and I want to look at it and discuss it objectively as possible and without an agenda, and would be interested in discussing it with people who make a sincere effort to do the same.

What I want to do is build rational conclusions, not make debating points.

[Squink]

*Originally posted by Scylla *
What I want to do is build rational conclusions, not make debating points.

You know, I was all in favor of that “rational” approach 9 months to a year ago. But that was before the administration pig-fuckers started playing up every conceivable scrap of anything as a goddamned “imminent threat” to America and Americans. The war is supposedly won. They’ve got SQUAT, and still these morons try to play up toothpicks like they’re nuclear weapons:

WEAPONS of mass destruction (WMD) have been found in Iraq in the form of a vial of botulinum bacteria discovered by US arms inspectors, the US State Department said today.
“Botulinum kills people, it kills people in large quantities,” spokesman Richard Boucher said. “Botulinum is a weapon of mass destruction, yes.”

“Anything that destroys on a massive scale is a weapon of mass destruction,” he said.

Fuck em. Any serious debate at this point serves only to rationalize or obfuscate the administration’s campaign to hoodwink millions of decent citizens into supporting a war for which there was no rationally adequate justification.

What they hell would Saddam do with botulinum anyway, mail every american a free sample of septic vichysoise ? For God’s sake, the bug is a microaerophile !

[elucidator]

I hereby nominate myself as someone without an agenda, with simply oodles and gobs of rational arguments. But I fear that I lack friend Scylla’s patience, a willlingness to wait until Gabriel’s trumpet solo before we leap to any conclusions. I simply cannot match the patience of a man who can watch glacier races.

But lets just take an instance. Veep Cheney’s much repeated remark to the effect that he had definite proof that Saddam had “reconstituted his nuclear weapons program”. Not maybe, not perhaps, not hints needful of confirmation. Stated as fact.

A “fact” that’s wholly unsubstantiated by Mr. Kay’s research. What are we to make of this? Did Mr. Cheney refuse to share his solid evidence with Mr. Kay? Some unfortunate miscommunication? Rather a pity, don’t you think? If only Mr. Cheney had shared his irrefutable proof with Mr. Kay! Think how much simpler it might have been!

Perhaps someone should ask Mr. Cheney? Does anyone know where he is, so we can ask? That would be nice. Move things along.

And while he’s about it, why doesn’t he stop by Colin Powell’s office, pick up those piles of evidence that Colin used to present his solidly substantiated case to the UN Security Council. Apparently, Mr. Kay is wandering about the Godforsaken Desert with a dowsing rod. That seems hardly fair, since we have such solid proof at hand, proof of “huge stockpiles” of Bad Mojo. Or, at least, we did have. Did something happen to all that powerful proof? Was it misplaced? Did Bill Clinton steal it?

But friend Scylla has one thing clearly right: the “imminence” was false. I would have used the word “fraudulent”, since I suspect some intent. Oh, dear. Does that mean I have an “agenda”? Have I made a “debating point”? Darn. Outside of Scylla, that paragon of clear minded and unbiased analysis, where, oh where, can we find someone without an “agenda”? What with december being banned, and all.

[elucidator]

Now, now, **Squink[/b, you were explicitly told: no agenda! And it is unkind of you to call the botulinum bug a pinhead. Spores have feelings, too, you know!

[Mr.Svinlesha]

Scylla:

What I want to do is build rational conclusions, not make debating points.

I’m with you. Since we also come from such widely divergent points of the political spectrum, anything we can agree on ought to serve as a good factual basis for both sides, and maybe help us get past the partisan bickering and down towards something resembling the “truth.” However, I haven’t had the chance to read the report fully yet.

Having said that, I just want to bring up one discrepancy that has fairly leapt out at me from what’s been posted thus far. First, consider this passage taken from Powell’s presentation to the UN on February 5, 2003:

** We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities.

Let me say a word about satellite images before I show a couple. The photos that I am about to show you are sometimes hard for the average person to interpret, hard for me. The painstaking work of photo analysis takes experts with years and years of experience, pouring for hours and hours over light tables. But as I show you these images, I will try to capture and explain what they mean, what they indicate to our imagery specialists.

Let’s look at one. This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji (ph). This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapon shells.

Here, you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines. The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers.

How do I know that? How can I say that? Let me give you a closer look. Look at the image on the left. On the left is a close- up of one of the four chemical bunkers. The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions. The arrow at the top that says security points to a facility that is the signature item for this kind of bunker. Inside that facility are special guards and special equipment to monitor any leakage that might come out of the bunker.

The truck you also see is a signature item. It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong.

This is characteristic of those four bunkers. The special security facility and the decontamination vehicle will be in the area, if not at any one of them or one of the other, it is moving around those four, and it moves as it needed to move, as people are working in the different bunkers.

Now look at the picture on the right. You are now looking at two of those sanitized bunkers. The signature vehicles are gone, the tents are gone, it’s been cleaned up, and it was done on the 22nd of December, as the U.N. inspection team is arriving, and you can see the inspection vehicles arriving in the lower portion of the picture on the right.

The bunkers are clean when the inspectors get there. They found nothing.**

Please note the underlined sentences. Here Powell seems to be arguing that chemical munitions can be identified at an ASP by virtue of special signature items. These signature items served as the basis for his assertion that the particular images he presented were, in fact, evidence of the presence chemical weapons at the bunkers.

Now, compare this to the following quote pesch posted, above, from Kay’s report:

** Let me turn now to chemical weapons (CW). In searching for retained stocks of chemical munitions, ISG has had to contend with the almost unbelievable scale of Iraq’s conventional weapons armory, which dwarfs by orders of magnitude the physical size of any conceivable stock of chemical weapons. For example, there are approximately 130 known Iraqi Ammunition Storage Points (ASP), many of which exceed 50 square miles in size and hold an estimated 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordinance. Of these 130 ASPs, approximately 120 still remain unexamined. As Iraqi practice was not to mark much of their chemical ordinance and to store it at the same ASPs that held conventional rounds, the size of the required search effort is enormous.**

Now it appears Kay is arguing, afterwards, that there is in essence no way to differentiate between chemical and non-chemical munitions at an ASP short of going through each site, on the ground, and physically inventorying all the weapons to see if some might contain chemicals.

I submit that these claims contradict each other. This contradiction implies that either Powell was lying in his presentation to the UN (because, in fact, as Kay asserts, one must inspect every munitions site on the ground in order to locate chemical weapons), or that Kay is lying in his report (because chemical munitions require special handling, procedures, and equipment, which can be unmistakably recognized even in satellite photos). I can’t see how you can have it both ways.

Note also the discrepancy in the site count: Powell identifies 65 potential dumps, whereas in Kay’s report the number of cites has jumped to 130. Granted, there might very well be a reasonable explanation for the difference; on the other hand, it might be possible that Kay is expanding the number of potential cites in an effort to obfuscate the embarrassing truth: that they have, in fact, failed to turn up any illicit weapons thus far.

In addition, I’d like to second hansel’s request, and ask you directly (or any other supporter of the war) why it is necessary to gather these scraps of evidence after the invasion, when the administration assured us that it had “bulletproof” evidence of Iraq’s possession of these “WMDs” prior to the invasion. Where is all that solid evidence? Why has the administration been reduced to cobbling together conjectures of “programs,” now, afterwards?

Finally, with regard to the OP: I would hope that you would change your tune, and admit that you were wrong, from the heart. I’d like to see you take a critical stance to the war, consistently, after your admission that the administration had mislead you regarding the gravity of the thread Iraq posed to the US. And most importantly, I would like it to affect your voting behavior in the next presidential election.

[elucidator]

Well, we have to move Scylla along gently, Mr. S. Baby steps. He has already come to grips with the fact that the immediacy of the “threat” was entirely fraudulent. Must’nt push it too far, too fast, the threat of breakdown is very real when treating victims of Cognitive Dissonance.

A vision of the future…

Friend Scylla dandles Grandchild #8 on his knee…

“What did you do in those days, Grampa?”

“Why, I stood shoulder to shoulder with my comrades Minty, Diogenes, elucidator…”

“Wow, Grampa! You knew elucidator?”

“Indeed I did, child. In fact, it was my cogent and concise arguments that led him to see the error of his ways and support my movement to have GeeDubya impeached and exiled to Akron. Which led, of course, to the election of President Clinton and the Golden Age…”

“I know! I know! That’s President Chelsea’s mom, isn’t it!”

If asked, of course, I will confirm the story as told. Grandfathers have a flexibility with truth denied to politicians.

[wring]

I’m still trying to envision how the satelite photos managed to pick up the presence of the single vial in a frig. amazing.

[ElvisL1ves]

You guys are all way behind. The spin as far back as June was that Saddam himself was a Weapon of Mass Destruction. There, libbies, we know he existed. Nyah nyah.

Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, coalition ground commander and head of the 3rd U.S. Army, said letting the Iraqi people know for certain that Saddam is dead is an important part of reducing the Iraqi people’s “fear factor.”
…
“Following up on all the leads will take some time. I know that we got the No. 1 weapon of mass destruction in Iraq. That was Saddam Hussein.”

Never mind that he still isn’t actually, technically, in the strictest sense of the word, dead, or even gone from Iraq, but details are for the small-minded.

[elucidator]

Well, as Ms. Rice points out, “The President is not a fact-checker.”

Bit of an understatement.

[Squink]

More of a “fact-chucker” actually.