[mtbopfuyn]

Amazing how everyone is denying the existence of WMD, yet the UN (that's the United Nations - plural, with a "S") spent 12 years and untold $$$ on the very same. Remember too, this began long before Bush's or Blair's time.

[mtbopfuyn]

Blair has acknowledged that weapons of mass destruction may never be found in Iraq.

IN is the operative word here.

[cyncooper]

Ping

[Tricorn]

Yes, a major news flash indeed. Iraq had WMD? No, say it ain't so!

[xzins]

ping

[CaptRon]

Knowing he was going to take a severe whupping, Saddam Hussein decided not to prove he didn't have WMD anyway.

I fail to see the logic in this, therefore I can only conclude he was trying to protect them.

[arasina]

From John McCaslin's Townhall.com column today:

TRUSTING BYRD

When it comes to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or lack thereof, it's too bad President Bush didn't read a page from the January issue of Military magazine when he delivers his crucial State of the Union address Tuesday night.

The magazine's military-minded editors, who know more about WMDs than the rest of us, have an intriguing item surrounding what certain politicians said in the not-so-distant past about former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's possession of these deadly weapons.

Let's start with critics who continue to charge that it was Mr. Bush who said Iraq's WMD program was an "imminent threat."

"Sorry, he never said that," says Military's editors. "He wanted to get them 'before they become an imminent threat.' It was instead Senator Jay Rockefeller, West Virginia Democrat, now a Bush critic, who said, 'I do believe Iraq poses an imminent threat.'"

It gets better, at least for defenders of Mr. Bush.

President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, for instance, warned Feb. 18, 1998: "He (Saddam) will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has 10 times since 1983."

While House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, added Dec. 16, 1998: "Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons-inspection process."

Then there was Mr. Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine K. Albright, stating Nov. 10, 1999: "Hussein has . . . chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies."

Finally, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia Democrat, declared with utmost certainty Oct. 3, 2002: "We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities."

[mewzilla]

I'd still like to know why they're calling Kelly's death a suicide. Were the autopsy results ever made public?

[OldFriend]

BBC needs to be dismissed forever as unreliable, unpatriotic, Britain hating, disreputable, etc. etc.

Oh, I am so angry.

[PISANO]

It seems to me that the 'concern' in the UK about IRAQ'S WMD is as convoluted as ours is, here in the US. What difference does it make if it takes 45 minutes to deploy or 45 hours? The 911 attack took months/years to plan. If they would have had WMD on those planes whether they were stolen from IRAQ/IRAN/SYRIA/etc or bought from them, the 'time' factor to deploy would be a non-issue.

The whold idea to eliminate WMD in IRAQ (and maybe elsewhere in the future) is to preclude WMD USE against the USA/UK etc.

[piasa]

From "BIOWEAPONS:British Expert Leaves Impressive Arms Control Legacy," by Richard Stone, Science Magazine, 2003 :

(snip)

In the early 1990s, searching for evidence of an offensive bioweapons effort in Iraq, Kelly and U.S. colleague Richard Spertzel noticed something suspicious: A few years earlier, Iraq had gone on a buying spree, importing 39 tons of bacterial growth media. Officials produced documents claiming that the agar was for hospitals to diagnose infections. But when the inspectors compared Iraqi imports with those into neighboring countries Iran and Syria, figuring they should be similar, "it was clear that Iraq's imports were way too high," Kelly said in an interview with Science shortly before his death. In addition, the agar's bulk packaging did not correspond with its intended use. The inspectors accused Iraqi officials of forging the documents and importing the agar for the production of anthrax and other strains, forcing them in 1995 to acknowledge for the first time that Iraq had pursued a clandestine offensive bioweapons program.

(snip)... Kelly also was a key player in efforts in the early 1990s to ferret out the extent of the Soviet Union's offensive bioweapons efforts. After key details of the program emerged from two defectors in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and a grudging Russia signed a trilateral agreement in 1992 that called for inspections at facilities suspected of being engaged in recent bioweapons activities. The initiative unraveled in the mid-1990s due to Russia's reluctance to come clean on its past activities and refusal to permit inspections of military labs. Kelly, the only expert to have taken part in all the trilateral site visits, had warned recently that Russia has yet to demonstrate convincingly that it has abandoned its offensive bioweapons program.

[piasa]

JULY 20, 2003 : (GILLIGAN'S STORY ON UK DOSSIER'S '45 MINUTES' CONTROVERSY WAS BASED NOT ON QUOTES KELLY ACTUALLY MADE BUT WAS BASED ON WHAT GILLIGAN INFERRED) The BBC’s statement... stressed that it was still standing by the accuracy of the notes made by Mr Gilligan from the encounters with Dr Kelly. These notes were said to have been made on a Palm Pilot, an electronic diary. The clear implication is that the BBC believes the scientist was lying in his evidence to MPs. However, it is significant that Mr Gilligan has been wobbling on some key elements of his story. Was the 45-minute claim “inserted” into the dossier by Downing Street, or merely given “undue prominence” as the BBC has often claimed since?
In his own cross-examination by the Foreign Affairs Committee last week, Mr Gilligan is understood to have suggested that his claim that Mr Campbell inserted this information was based only on an “inference” from the conversation with his source. - "Statement shows BBC may have ‘sexed up’ its coverage," by Tom Baldwin, London Times, July 21, 2003

[piasa]

AUGUST 13, 2003 : (DR KELLY INVESTIGATION/ BBC MEDIA SCANDAL : WATTS ) During the inquiry ... into the suicide of Dr. Kelly, Ms. Watts blew Mr. Gilligan's tendentious report out of the water. Ms. Watts released a tape of her last conversation with Dr. Kelly, who makes clear that he is not in a position to assert that Mr. Campbell inserted anything into the intelligence report. Ms. Watts said of her conversations with Dr. Kelly, "He didn't say to me that the dossier was transformed in the last week and he certainly didn't say that the 45-minute claim was inserted either by Alastair Campbell or by anyone else in government. In fact, he denied specifically that Alastair Campbell was involved in the conversation on May 30 . . . he was very clear to me that the claim was in the original intelligence."
Ms. Watts testified ... that the BBC seemed primarily interested in corroborating Mr. Gilligan's account rather than in the merits of her own reports: "I felt under some considerable pressure to reveal my source. I also felt the purpose of that was to help corroborate the Andrew Gilligan allegations and not for any proper news purpose." And, "I was most concerned that there was an attempt to mold [her reports] so that they were corroborative which I felt was misguided and false." - "The BBC's Sexed-up Report," WSJ.com, Thursday, August 14, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT