Big shocker: no WMDs in Iraq

Hold on to your seats:

The U.S-led team hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has not found any stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons, but will keep searching the country, CIA adviser David Kay said on Thursday.

Kay, heading the search for chemical and biological weapons as well as evidence of any effort to develop nuclear weapons, presented a classified interim report to U.S. lawmakers behind closed doors [...]

But multiple sources have told the team that "Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled CW (chemical warfare) program after 1991," Kay said. And information found so far suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop and produce and fill new chemical warfare weapons was "reduced -- if not entirely destroyed."

Kay concluded that "whatever we find will probably differ from pre-war intelligence. Empirical reality on the ground is, and has always been, different from intelligence judgments that must be made under serious constraints of time, distance and information."

"Serious constraints of time"? The only time limit was self-imposed by a petulant Bush eager to get his war on. And those "intelligence judgments" were not made by professionals -- the CIA or DIA, but by political hacks out of the Pentagon.

There's no excuse for the lies and deceptions employed by the administration to justify their war.

What's worse, despite the international prestige, money, and lives that have been wasted in this endeavour, Bush refuses to admit defeat.

The Bush administration is seeking more than $600 million from Congress to continue the hunt for conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein's government had an illegal weapons program, officials said Wednesday.

The money, part of the White House's request for $87 billion in supplemental spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, comes on top of at least $300 million that has already been spent on the weapons search, the officials said.

In other words, $1 billion spent for this folly -- this figment of the Neocon's imagination, this snipe hunt under the hot Iraqi sun.

Posted October 02, 2003 03:29 PM | Comments (207)