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Big
Difference 24 Hours Can Make in Cheney's Media Fantasy Parade!
A
BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by Amanda
Dear
BuzzFlash,
What a big difference 24 hours can make in the Bush-Cheney media fantasy
parade? Yesterday, Cheney said David Kay was preparing a report that
would validate assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Today, US and British officials state that Kay's report had been delayed
and may not necessarily even be published.
From "Meet the Press" Transcript with Tim Russert and Vice
President Dick Cheney, Sunday, September 14, 2003:
MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to weapons of mass destruction. I asked
you back in March what you thought was the most important rationale
for going
to war with Iraq. There’s the question, and here is your answer:
“...the combination of [Saddam’s] development and use of chemical weapons,
his
development of biological weapons, his pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
VICE PRES. CHENEY: And the tie to terror.
MR. RUSSERT: Where are they?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I think that the jury is still out in terms
of trying to get everything pulled together with respect to what we know.
But we’ve got a very good man now in charge of the operation, David Kay.
He used to run UNSCOM, a highly qualified, technically qualified and
able individual. He’s in charge of the operation now.
And I also think, Tim, that if you go back and look at what we found
to date, that we—there’s no doubt in my mind but what Saddam Hussein
had these capabilities. This wasn’t an idea cooked up overnight by a
handful of people, either in the administration or out of the CIA. The
reporting that led to the National Intelligence Estimate, upon which
I based my statements to you, that was produced a year ago now, the essence
of which has since been declassified, that was the product of hundreds
of people working over probably 20 years, back at least to the Osirak
reactor in 1981.
The conclusions in that NIE, I think, are very valid. And I think
we will find that in fact they are valid. What we’re dealing with here is
a regime that had to learn after we hit them in ’91 that anything above
ground was likely to be destroyed in an air campaign. They’d gone through
many years of inspections. They knew they had to hide and bury their
capabilities in this region inside their civilian structure. And I think
that’s what they did. And if you look—we’ll talk about the nuclear program.
The judgment in the NIE was that if Saddam could acquire fissile material,
weapons-grade material, that he would have a nuclear weapon within a
few months to a year. That was the judgment of the intelligence community
of the United States, and they had a high degree of confidence in it.
What do we know ahead? Well, we know he had worked on the program for
20 years. We know he had technicians who knew how do this stuff because
they had been working on it over that period of time. We believed, the
community believed, that he had a workable design for a bomb. And we
know he had 500 tons of uranium. It is there today at Tuwaitha, under
seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency. All those are facts that
are basically not in dispute. And since we got in there, we found—we
had a gentleman come forward, for example, with full designs for a process
centrifuge system to enrich uranium and the key parts that you’d need
to build such a system. And we know Saddam had worked on that kind of
system before. That’s physical evidence that we’ve got in hand today.
So to suggest that there is no evidence there that he had aspirations
to acquire nuclear weapon, I don’t think is valid, and I think
David Kay will find more evidence as he goes forward, interviews
people, as
we get to folks willing to come forward now as they become more
and more convinced that it’s safe to do so, that, in fact, he (Saddam)
had a robust
plan, had previously worked on it and would work on it again.
Same on biological weapons—we believe he’d developed the capacity to
go mobile with his BW production capability because, again, in reaction
to what we had done to him in ’91. We had intelligence reporting before
the war that there were at least seven of these mobile labs that he had
gone out and acquired. We’ve, since the war, found two of them. They’re
in our possession today, mobile biological facilities that can be used
to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during
the course of developing the capacity for an attack.
So on CW and chemical weapons, my guess is it’s buried inside his civilian
infrastructure. That’s not an unusual place to put it. And,
again, David Kay’s task is to look for the people that were involved
in the
program, to find documentary evidence to back it up, to find
physical evidence when he can find that. It’s a hard task, but
I have got great
confidence that he can do this. And again, the whole notion that
somehow there’s nothing to the notion that Saddam Hussein had
WMD or had developed
WMD, it just strikes me as fallacious. It’s not valid now. Nobody drove
into Baghdad and had somebody say, “Hey, there’s the building over
there where all of our WMDs stored.” But that’s not the way the system
worked.
*
* *
Report on Iraq WMD shelved as no evidence found by US-UK team
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4708.htm
September 15, 2003
After failing to get any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
the US and Britain have decided to delay indefinitely the publication
of a full report on the controversial issue, media reported today.
Efforts by the Iraq Survey Group, an Anglo-American team of 1,400 scientists,
military and intelligence experts, to scour Iraq for the past four months
to uncover evidence of chemical or biological weapons have so far ended
in failure, 'The Sunday Times' claimed in its report.
It had been expected that a progress report would be published tomorrow
but MPs on the British Parliament's security and intelligence committee
have been told that even this has been delayed and no new date set.
British defence intelligence sources have confirmed that the final report,
which is to be submitted by David Kay, the survey group's leader, to
George Tenet, head of the CIA, had been delayed and may not necessarily
even be published, the paper said.
In July, Kay suggested on US television that he had seen enough evidence
to convince himself that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had had a
programme to produce weapons of mass destruction.
He expected
to find "strong" evidence of missile delivery
systems and "probably" evidence of biological weapons.
But last week British officials said they believed Kay had been "kite-flying" and
that no hard evidence had been uncovered.
Also in the news:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/25/iraq/printable560449.shtml
In
July, David Kay, the survey group's leader, suggested that he had seen
enough evidence to convince himself that Saddam Hussein
had had
a program to produce weapons of mass destruction. He expected
to find "strong" evidence
of missile delivery systems and "probably" evidence
of biological weapons.
But last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he had met with
Kay, and that the onetime weapons inspector had not informed him of any
finds.
A
Buzzflash Reader
Amanda
A
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