June 9, 2003
Weapons of mass idleness.
The Left Coaster points out that Bush's WMD Inspectors Have Nothing To Do. In an Associated Press story he learned that
the folks looking for WMDs based on the sites provided by that same intel community have come up dry. So dry, in fact, that they have nothing to do. ... [T]he current group of inspectors are filling their free time by being reassigned to other duties or going on training.
From the AP story:
After nearly three months of fruitless searches, weapons hunters say they are now waiting for a large team of Pentagon intelligence experts to take over the effort, relying more on leads from interviews and documents.
"It doesn't appear there are any more targets at this time," said Lt. Col. Keith Harrington, whose team has been cut by more than 30 percent. "We're hanging around with no missions in the foreseeable future."
Over the past week, his and several other teams have been taken off assignment completely. Rather than visit suspected weapons sites, they are brushing up on target practice and catching up on letters home.
Of course, Bush has no choice but to stick to his story, claiming now that Hussein had a "weapons program." (Well, duh! So do Iran and North Korea, not to mention every other nation on Earth!) Unfortunately for Bush, a "weapons program" is not the same as those "thousands of tons" of various chemical and biological weapons that Bush, et al, used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
According to Condoleeza Rice, "We've interviewed a fraction of the people who were involved. We've gone to a fraction of the sites. We've gone through a fraction of thousands and thousands and thousands of documents about this program." There are at least two problems with this statement, though. One is that if there were anything like the huge amount of weaponry claimed in March, wouldn't we have found it, or at least found some reference to it? So far, we have neither. The other problem is that
Intelligence agents and weapons hunters have been speaking with scientists and experts for the past month, but those interviews have not led the teams to any illegal weapons and none of the tips provided by Iraqis have panned out.
One would think that at this point, three months into the search, something would have panned out. Something would have been found.
The reason we haven't found anything, though, is very simple. As I've been saying since before the invasion, there were no "weapons of mass destruction." At best our leadership deluded themselves into believing they existed; at worst they knowingly lied to us. If the former, they are utterly incompetent and unfit to be our leaders. If the latter, not only are they unfit to be our leaders, they have committed criminal acts and should be tried accordingly.
And finally, to my very great relief, people seem to be waking up to the reality.
Bush lied.
Innocents died.
It appears that the inimitable Billmon has also covered this story.
Posted by Frank at June 9, 2003 8:12 PM