WMD: How it went wrong
Since David Kay's bombshell last week, intelligence experts are revealing the truth behind Saddam's threat to the West.

A year ago it seemed so clear. Saddam Hussein's regime, said the politicians and the spies, posed a clear and present danger. It was described most comprehensively on 5 February, 2003, by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in a presentation to the Security Council that laid out the threat in 29 sub-headings. Twelve months have passed, and now the same intelligence officials who produced the stories that scared the world to war are admitting that they got it very badly wrong. And not only do they admit that the intelligence was seriously flawed, they admit, too, that they have known there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq since the first week of May, a month after Baghdad fell, a secret that has finally lurched into the open In a series of interviews, senior former US intelligence officers, members of the weapons community and former senior US policy advisers have told The Observer that it was well known in intelligence and senior administration circles by the first week of May that it was extremely unlikely that any weapons would be found.

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Kay Questions U.S. Pre-Emptive Strike Doctrine

The former top U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq, David Kay, said on Sunday flaws in U.S. intelligence in prewar Iraq brought into question President Bush's policy of pre-emptive strike against countries deemed a threat to the United States. Bush based his decision to invade Iraq on what he called a "grave and gathering danger" posed by Iraq's biological and chemical weapons and warranted assertion of his post-Sept. 11, 2001, doctrine of pre-emptive military action to guard U.S. security in the face of new terror threats. "If you cannot rely on good, accurate intelligence that is credible to the American people and to others abroad, you certainly can't have a policy of preemption," Kay said on Fox News Sunday.

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  thanks to The Agonist

We Had Good Intel—The U.N.'s
The inspectors were 'HUMINT.' They were far more accurate, it turned out, than billions of dollars of satellites

"We were all wrong," says weapons inspector David Kay. Actually, no. There was one group whose prewar estimates of Iraqi nuclear, chemical and biological capabilities have turned out to be devastatingly close to reality—the U.N. inspectors. Consider what Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N. nuclear agency, told the Security Council on March 7, 2003, after his team had done 247 inspections at 147 sites: "no evidence of resumed nuclear activities ... nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any related sites." He went on to say that evidence suggested Iraq had not imported uranium since 1990 and no longer had a centrifuge program. He concluded that Iraq's nuclear capabilities had been effectively dismantled by 1997 and its dual-use industrial plants had decayed. All these claims appear to be dead-on, based on Kay's findings.

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  thanks to The Agonist

Pop Quiz

Who said this: Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion ... and you allow him to make war at pleasure ... If today he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the Canadians from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, “I see no probability of the Canadians invading us”; but he will say to you, “Be silent: I see it, if you don’t." A.) Howard Dean B.) Noam Chomsky C.) Gore Vidal D.) Michael Moore E.) None of the above

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Baghdad Is Bush's Blue Dress

Now, can we talk of impeachment? The rueful admission by former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction or the means to create them at the time of the U.S. invasion confirms the fact that the Bush administration is complicit in arguably the greatest scandal in U.S. history. It's only because the Republicans control both houses of Congress that we hear no calls for a broad-ranging investigation of the type that led to the discovery of Monica Lewinsky's infamous blue dress.

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