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Iraq Had No WMD Stockpiles
An article from Moscow Times newspaper (http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/01/30/120.html)
Friday, Jan. 30, 2004.
Ground Zero
By Chris Floyd
A man in Lawrence, Kansas walks into a day-care center. He has a gun in his pocket but nobody sees it. He goes up to the second floor, where the preschool kids are having their afternoon snack of cookies and juice.
He pulls out the gun and shoots a little boy in the head, leaving his face a mass of bone-flecked goo. Then he fires into the chest of the girl in the next chair; she dies still clutching the stuffed rabbit she brings with her every day. Another boy is hit while running for the door. The man is using special bullets, tipped with depleted uranium; the shot explodes the boy's shoulder in a spray of red mist and sends his gangly body hurtling down the concrete stairwell.
A day-care worker grabs the man, tries to wrestle him down. He turns, jams the gun barrel against her womb and fires. She dies, eviscerated, clinging to his shoulders. The other children have run away screaming, except for one little girl who's fallen in the slick of blood. She tries to scramble to her feet, slips again, can't find her footing, claws at the floor in a wild panic. The man fires into her back, obliterating her spine, the heavy bullet drilling through the polished wood below.
The room is filled with smoke and the sharp tang of freshly gutted meat. The man takes a desultory look around, shrugs his shoulders, then sits down on the snack table. When the police come and ask him why he did it, he answers forthrightly, without a shred of guilt or unease, as if it were the most natural thing in the world:
"Somebody said the guy who runs this place might attack me someday. I had questions that needed to be answered: Did he have a gun or a knife -- or nothing? We must be prepared to face our responsibilities and be willing to use force if necessary."
The cops roll their eyes -- another nutball. "So," says an officer, humoring him, "did he have any weapons?"
The killer shakes his head. "Nah, don't look like it. But he could have had some. What's the difference? -- Say, you fellas aren't going to lock me up, are you? It was an honest mistake. I just got bad advice, that's all."
This fable is the precise moral equivalent of the Bush Regime's murderous misadventure in Iraq. Last week, the Regime's own duly-appointed, CIA-paid weapons hunter, David Kay, finally coughed up a dinosaur-sized bone and admitted, openly, publicly, what the sane world has long known: that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the war -- and in fact hadn't had any since George Bush Senior stopped supplying Saddam Hussein with the money and material to make them many years ago.
The existence of Iraqi WMD and the dire threat it posed to America and the world was the publicly stated cause for the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The utter falsity of this claim has now been established beyond rational dispute. Likewise, it is impossible for a rational person to believe that, in the absence of any real weapons, a substantial body of credible "evidence" for this phantom stockpile could have been amassed by the Anglo-American intelligence services. You can't have real evidence of something that isn't there.
Thus we come to this unavoidable conclusion: The Bush Regime launched a war of aggression on the basis of evidence that had to be, by its very nature, insubstantial, insufficient, false. That's the only kind of evidence they could have had. What does this mean? It means they have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of children -- blown them to pieces, shot them, crushed them, terrorized them, rendered them into hunks of rotting meat -- in an act of moral insanity no different than that of a nutball in Lawrence, Kansas, shooting up a day-care center to "protect" himself from imaginary threats.
And they've reacted to the consequences of their crime with the same kind of moral nullity. Colin Powell -- the "moderate" Bushist, we're told -- simply shrugged his shoulders at Kay's revelations. "We had questions that needed to be answered," he said, while flying to Moscow to tell the Russians they must resolve all their problems peacefully, within the strict rule of law. "What was it [Saddam had]?" mused Powell. "One hundred tons, 500 tons or zero tons" of WMD? "Was it so many liters of anthrax, 10 times that amount, or nothing?"
Nothing, as it turns out. All those children -- each one of them an individual human being, each one a unique and irreplaceable vessel of consciousness, a single coalescence of the blind, churning forces of nature into a star-point of awareness, brief but incandescent, worthy beyond measure, and every bit as valuable as any mother's tow-headed darling in Lawrence, Kansas or Crawford, Texas -- killed, eliminated, snuffed out ... for nothing. For zero.
Yet Powell dismissed these pointless killings, echoing George W. Bush's Solomonic declaration on the question of existing weapons versus hypothetical ones as a basis of war: "What's the difference?" Powell said the decision to kill the children was "based on the best intelligence we had at the time" -- intelligence that, as we've seen, could not possibly have been substantial or convincing. But who cares? We heard rumors. "We had questions." We killed children. We found nothing. We're not guilty. It was bad advice, an honest mistake.
That's all they have left as a public defense: the ravings of a man who killed for no reason, who sits in the ghoulish mire he's created and calls himself good.
Quite dramatic. The analogy is not what i would call accurate, but i agree on the general idea of the article.
Interesting, I hope that the analogy story aint true though.
I suggest reading the entire report.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/10/02/kay.report/
Actually, I'm copy/pasting someone else's post who took out the juicy bits.
| quote: |
| "..... We are still very much in the collection and analysis mode, still seeking the information and evidence that will allow us to confidently draw comprehensive conclusions to the actual objectives, scope, and dimensions of Iraq's WMD activities at the time of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Iraq's WMD programs spanned more than two decades, involved thousands of people, billions of dollars, and were elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The very scale of this program when coupled with the conditions in Iraq that have prevailed since the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom dictate the speed at which we can move to a comprehensive understanding of Iraq's WMD activities. We need to recall that in the 1991-2003 period the intelligence community and the UN/IAEA inspectors had to draw conclusions as to the status of Iraq's WMD program in the face of incomplete, and often false, data supplied by Iraq or data collected either by UN/IAEA inspectors operating within the severe constraints that Iraqi security and deception actions imposed or by national intelligence collection systems with their own inherent limitations. The result was that our understanding of the status of Iraq's WMD program was always bounded by large uncertainties and had to be heavily caveated." |
| quote: |
| We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone. |
| quote: |
| 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: 1. 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; 2. Deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documentation related to weapons programs began pre-conflict and ran trans-to-post conflict; 3. 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; 4. Some WMD personnel crossed borders in the pre/trans conflict period and may have taken evidence and even weapons-related materials with them; 5. 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; 6. 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. |
| quote: |
| 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. In addition to the discovery of extensive concealment efforts, we have been faced with a systematic sanitization of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories, and companies suspected of WMD work. The pattern of these efforts to erase evidence -- hard drives destroyed, specific files burned, equipment cleaned of all traces of use -- are ones of deliberate, rather than random, acts. |
| quote: |
| Although we are resisting drawing conclusions in this first interim report, a number of things have become clearer already as a result of our investigation, among them: 1. Saddam, at least as judged by those scientists and other insiders who worked in his military-industrial programs, had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Even those senior officials we have interviewed who claim no direct knowledge of any on-going prohibited activities readily acknowledge that Saddam intended to resume these programs whenever the external restrictions were removed. Several of these officials acknowledge receiving inquiries since 2000 from Saddam or his sons about how long it would take to either restart CW production or make available chemical weapons. 2. In the delivery systems area there were already well advanced, but undeclared, on-going activities that, if OIF had not intervened, would have resulted in the production of missiles with ranges at least up to 1000 km, well in excess of the UN permitted range of 150 km. These missile activities were supported by a serious clandestine procurement program about which we have much still to learn. 3. In the chemical and biological weapons area we have confidence that there were at a minimum clandestine on-going research and development activities that were embedded in the Iraqi Intelligence Service. While we have much yet to learn about the exact work programs and capabilities of these activities, it is already apparent that these undeclared activities would have at a minimum facilitated chemical and biological weapons activities and provided a technically trained cadre. |
So EvilTree you still believe that there are/were WMD's?
After the Blix report, iraqi scientists and Kay himself? I'm sorry, you're a bit naive...
Lawrence, Kansas?
Sweet!
My hometown's famous! What a story!
| quote: |
| Originally posted by borron So EvilTree you still believe that there are/were WMD's? After the Blix report, iraqi scientists and Kay himself? I'm sorry, you're a bit naive... |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by EvilTree Did you bother to read what I posted? Kay is saying it is inconclusive whether Iraq has WMD or not. My personal opinion is that I don't know. Saddam has every reason to keep WMDs hidden, but does that mean he has them hidden somewhere? Maybe. I'm just saying I don't like how Kay is being misquoted. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by LiquidX Kay clearly said that its very UNLIKELY that tere are any WMD, and that they were ALL wrong. |
i should quote myself from beginning 2003...
The Iraqi WMD's are in Syria.
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Flotser The Iraqi WMD's are in Syria. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by DR86 |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Flotser what's wrong? |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Flotser The Iraqi WMD's are in Syria. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Cyrus King The Israeli WMD are in Israel. |
time teach them a lesson!!
| quote: |
| Originally posted by DR86 do you honestly believe that all the WMD's are in Syria? |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Cyrus King The Israeli WMD are in Israel. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by borron Israel is a WMD |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by DigiNut He sort of said that, but he also said that people had every good reason to believe that Iraq DID have WMDs, in spite of their actual physical existence or lack thereof. There's an important distinction between Bush acting on incomplete evidence/exercising poor judgment/"jumping the gun", and him actually fabricating evidence and spreading lies in order to gain power and kill innocent people. Everybody misquotes Kay (and other reports) by simplying parroting that Iraq was unlikely to have WMDs - but by ignoring the fact that pre-existing evidence suggested a very good chance of them having WMDs (to such an extent that even the Iraqi generals believed it), and that this was an impossible hypothesis to thoroughly test as long as Iraq refused thorough inspection, people are twisting the facts to give Bush a sinister, tyrannical image. Realistically, it is more likely that he just went with the "better to be safe than sorry" attitude. It may well be true that Bush is some sort of tyrannical dictator, but even if that's the case, *this* is not the evidence which proves it. |
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| Originally posted by LiquidX That pre-existing evidence goes back to the 1990's. The US used that same information for a war done in 2003.. The US intelligence did not rely on updated information, they just went with those 1990's info, how credible does that makes them?!?! where they pressure to over exaggerate?!?!.. Now, That intelligence commission investigation the 9/11 and the war, asked for an extente, why?!?! because the Administration does not want to release the "supposed" information that they have, essential for the Intelligence committy to keep going with their investigation, doesnt that sound fishy? |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by DigiNut If people had evidence in 1990 that I had several kilos of cocaine under my bed, and no one checked there for 10 years, and after 10 years I wouldn't let anybody come into my room to check under my bed, and if all my friends were still saying that I had a stash of coke, wouldn't it be logical to assume that I did in fact have some coke? Maybe I sniffed it all, or sold it all, or just burned it all in the past 10 years... or, maybe, I got rid of most of it but kept just a few grams and that's why I didn't want to let anyone in my room. Or maybe there's no coke but there are phone numbers of the people I sold it to. The point is, there was pre-existing evidence that Iraq had WMDs, and there was very little evidence to support that they'd gotten rid of them. That doesn't actually mean that they DIDN'T get rid of them - it just means that the U.S. was acting on whatever intelligence they had, however correct or incorrect, which pointed to there being at least a potential of them still having the WMDs. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Flotser Of course i dont know shit. but Yes i do believe what i've said. It just makes me feel weired everytime people see Syria as another peacful arab country. Asad is a dictator, and a stupid one. also Assad's political party is a brother-party of Saddam's party (i forgot its name). and there is an: "U.S. intelligence consensus: Iraqi WMD shipped to Syria". call me stupid but i still trust U.S. intelligence. and a google link here... http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...iraqi+wmd+syria |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by DigiNut If people had evidence in 1990 that I had several kilos of cocaine under my bed, and no one checked there for 10 years, and after 10 years I wouldn't let anybody come into my room to check under my bed, and if all my friends were still saying that I had a stash of coke, wouldn't it be logical to assume that I did in fact have some coke? Maybe I sniffed it all, or sold it all, or just burned it all in the past 10 years... or, maybe, I got rid of most of it but kept just a few grams and that's why I didn't want to let anyone in my room. Or maybe there's no coke but there are phone numbers of the people I sold it to. The point is, there was pre-existing evidence that Iraq had WMDs, and there was very little evidence to support that they'd gotten rid of them. That doesn't actually mean that they DIDN'T get rid of them - it just means that the U.S. was acting on whatever intelligence they had, however correct or incorrect, which pointed to there being at least a potential of them still having the WMDs. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by DigiNut If people had evidence in 1990 that I had several kilos of cocaine under my bed, and no one checked there for 10 years, and after 10 years I wouldn't let anybody come into my room to check under my bed, and if all my friends were still saying that I had a stash of coke, wouldn't it be logical to assume that I did in fact have some coke? Maybe I sniffed it all, or sold it all, or just burned it all in the past 10 years... or, maybe, I got rid of most of it but kept just a few grams and that's why I didn't want to let anyone in my room. Or maybe there's no coke but there are phone numbers of the people I sold it to. The point is, there was pre-existing evidence that Iraq had WMDs, and there was very little evidence to support that they'd gotten rid of them. That doesn't actually mean that they DIDN'T get rid of them - it just means that the U.S. was acting on whatever intelligence they had, however correct or incorrect, which pointed to there being at least a potential of them still having the WMDs. |
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