Posted on 10/20/2003 1:09:09 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Recently, I sat in a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee and listened to David Kay describe his preliminary findings on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs.
When I later read his very detailed declassified summary, I expected to wake up the next morning to a flurry of media reports about how far-reaching Iraq's banned programs had progressed and how the French and Germans were going to have to eat some crow.
Instead, I woke up to a very different kind of media frenzy. I saw such headlines as "No evidence of Iraq WMD programs found," which by any objective standard is an untrue statement.
Pundits and partisan politicos savaged the Bush administration in ways that made me wonder whether they were ignorant not only of the report's contents, but also of the fact Saddam gassed 5,000 Kurdish civilians at Halabja in 1988 and fired missiles at Saudi Arabia and Israel in the first Gulf War. It was as though Saddam didn't have WMD, never had them and never sought to acquire them, which couldn't be further from the truth. This willful ignorance of facts reminded me not of professional journalists investigating a story, but of those members of the Flat Earth Society who still ignore all evidence the Earth is round.
I wonder whether we all read the same summary. What I read was that Kay and his team, working in extraordinarily difficult conditions, found hidden in a WMD scientist's home strains of biological organisms, including live botulinum, used in manufacturing bioweapons.
Kay found a prison laboratory complex that might have been used to test biowarfare agents on humans, unmanned aerial vehicle and missile technology banned by the United Nations and equipment for uranium enrichment that could have helped restart Iraq's nuclear weapons program once sanctions were lifted.
Also discovered were reams of evidence of Iraqi attempts to illicitly acquire banned technologies with WMD applications from abroad. Kay found thousands upon thousands of WMD-related documents and collected compelling testimony that scientists and officials were ordered by Saddam to conceal banned WMD work from U.N. inspectors.
He inspected dozens of suspected WMD facilities that had been clearly and deliberately sanitized by agents of the former regime, and he made numerous other relevant finds in the banned missile, chemical and biological arenas that are still being evaluated.
Why, then, did much of the media reporting make it appear that nothing of any consequence was found in Iraq? Perhaps it is because saying so makes a more sensational story than the factual reality. But saying it is so doesn't make it so.
The facts in Kay's report speak volumes about Saddam's capabilities and intent. When combined with the Halabja massacre and Saddam's use of chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980s, a very clear picture emerges of a criminal despot bent on acquiring and using weapons banned by the United Nations.
Those who are desperately seeking to find an issue on which the president might be vulnerable remind me of sharks that smell blood in the water. The scent of blood drives sharks into a feeding frenzy in which they bite and tear at everything, including inedible objects.
In the ongoing political frenzy, critics trying to sink their teeth into juicy headlines are thrashing from issue to issue, becoming less and less concerned whether their charges are true, as long as they push their message and get their sound bites on the network news. This approach only succeeds in muddying the waters and trivializing the hard, cold facts: Saddam's torture chambers, rape squads, mass grave sites, gassings of women and children, unprovoked regional wars and illegal weapons programs.
Having served on both the House and Senate intelligence committees, I know firsthand that bipartisanship is much more in the national interest than distortions and mudslinging are. I also happen to know that the American people are smarter than certain political partisans, pundits and some media outlets may believe.
Saxby Chambliss, a Republican, is Georgia's junior U.S. senator. He is a member of the Armed Services, Intelligence and Judiciary committees.
Here are some signs they're right:***
You must have been up all night.
America's military men and women and our president need all of you to show your support of them and their mission by your attendance and participation at the rally.
Please, everyone - do everything you can to be in DC on October 25th. And help spread the word!
Thank you for your support!
You know recently, every time I see the word 'rats, it reminds me of a song by Pearl Jam (I know Eddie Vedder is a stupid commie) called Rats. Some of the lyrics are perfectly telling of the democRATs behavior.
The specific line that I thought of was:
"drink the blood of their so called best friend"
(Source)
Iraq Daily: Saddam ordered training of Al-Qa'ida members
Yet another damning fact about Saddam we will not see reported in the mainstream.
BUMP!
Lies lurk at all levels of life and government***I expected to hear about the origins of lying and how it has been used throughout the ages in real life and literature. I liked the book cover's picture of Pinocchio. What I got was more than a half hour of Bush bashing.***
"It was as though Saddam didn't have WMD, never had them and never sought to acquire them, which couldn't be further from the truth."
"This willful ignorance of facts reminded me not of professional journalists investigating a story"
"I saw such headlines as "No evidence of Iraq WMD programs found," which by any objective standard is an untrue statement."
Senator Chambliss is far too civil.
The American Mainstream Press and the so-called "journalists" that serve it are part of a propaganda machine that Joseph Goebbels would have envied. Their purpose is not to discover and report truth. It is to hide and obfuscate truth and to spread "Liberal"/Leftist, anti-American, and anti-Bush propaganda everywhere and as convincingly as possible.
Sadly, the American Mainstream Press has become an Orwellian "Ministry of Truth", designed to get Big Brother into power and keep him there.
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