the north korea connection

FC,

Thanks very much for posting this. It seems everyone but Ken knows that Iraq had WMD but by denying it they get something else to bash the President for. I guess it's a difficult concept to understand that when a regime gets notice of several weeks that they're about to be invaded they will get rid of the evidence. Easy to understand when we're dealing with a doper on the street, harder to understand apparently when dealing with animals who happen to be heads of state.

 

Even Bush has now admitted that the WMD he said Saddam had didn't exist anymore at the time we invaded.

He lied to us. The American people now realize that he lied. And we're going to be paying for it, for a long time.

Bush is much more popular now, than he will be in a few years.

 

And when did Bush admit this? Source?

 

'President George Bush now admits that stockpiles have not been found in Iraq but claimed as recently as Thursday that "Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons, and he could have passed that capability on to the enemy".'

- Source

 

Gosh, folks, how many times does the point need to be made, that sure they admit they haven't found them? That is not the same thing as saying he never had them, or that he didn't have them moved elsewhere as FC's post indicates and as anecdotal reports indicate from troops who have come across empty storage sites. Maybe it was just tear gas or smoke grenades that Saddam used on the Iranians and Kurds.

Naaaaaahh.

 

The use of those weapons was in the 1980s, ftr, not in 2003.

 

Frustrating, isn't it, ftr. They're willing to give our enemies the benefit of the doubt, but not their own country. They'll believe slander that Cheney got drunk and shot a "skunk" (oops, I meant lawyer!), with no proof, but ignore plenty of evidence that Saddam was playing games with the UN inspectors. And we're living in a police state where the government (Bush, I guess), conrols everything and fabricates all the evidence he needs to get us into wars we don't need or want. Why we're not being locked up for dissent, I don't know.

 

"Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there." - President George W. Bush - Source

 

http://www.intelligencesummit.org/news/TomMcInerney/TM022106.php

 

Yeah, right. The Bush administration is failing to take advantage of an alleged slam dunk to prove that it was correct about Iraq WMDs.

 

Actually, I believe that GWB is trying to protect Putin, in order to "win" his support for sanctions against Iran. Russian, French, and German fingerprints are all over the place. GW feels that it is more important to consolidate foreign opinion against Tehran than to pursue the WMD issue. I think that is a big mistake.
The Pentagon sits on the documents of the Saddam Hussein regime
by Stephen F. Hayes
12/19/2005, Volume 011, Issue 14
'FOR THE SECOND TIME IN recent weeks the Department of Defense has denied a request from The Weekly Standard to release unclassified documents recovered in postwar Iraq. These documents apparently reveal, in some detail, activities of Saddam Hussein's regime in the years before the war. This second denial could also be the final one: According to two Pentagon sources, the program designed to review, translate, and analyze data from the old Iraqi regime may be shuttered at the end of December, not just placing the documents beyond the reach of journalists, but also making them inaccessible to policymakers.

As a consequence, the ongoing debate over the Iraq war and its origins is taking place without crucial information about the former Iraqi regime and its relationships with presumed U.S. allies and known U.S. enemies. Despite the determined shredding and burning efforts of regime officials in the dying days of Saddam Hussein's government, much of this information still exists--in handwritten documents, in videotapes and audiotapes, in photographs and satellite images, on computer hard drives. All told, the U.S. government has in its possession more than 2 million "exploitable" items from the former Iraqi regime (the intelligence community's term of art for information it thinks might be useful). According to sources with knowledge of the project, now two and a half years old, only 50,000 documents have been translated and fully exploited. '

 

My country is the New Jerusalem. We don't need any WMD. As for the countries of this world they all lie in wickedness.

 

You have not heard me piling on to Cheney about the details of the shooting. It is not a big issue with me. I have only stated that I would like to see him resign and Condi Rice become vice president but that is because I like Condi Rice not as a knock against Cheney.

 

EL,

Frustrating, isn't it, ftr. They're willing to give our enemies the benefit of the doubt, but not their own country. They'll believe slander that Cheney got drunk and shot a "skunk" (oops, I meant lawyer!), with no proof, but ignore plenty of evidence that Saddam was playing games with the UN inspectors. And we're living in a police state where the government (Bush, I guess), conrols everything and fabricates all the evidence he needs to get us into wars we don't need or want. Why we're not being locked up for dissent, I don't know.

Bush can do no right, Iran can do (and apparently Saddam did) no wrong. What interesting is that, after a lot of prodding to get a straight answer, IIRC, Ken has already said that knowing what he knew at the time of the invasion Bush did the right thing in invading Iraq. And yes, it seems benefit of the doubt is hard to come by from Ken when the issue is trying to catch terrorist scum using cell phones.

 

I need to "print a retraction". I said that Ken had said that we did the right thing in Iraq. In fact, he did not, judging from our exchange in THIS THREAD. My apologies to Ken and all.