Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: [OT] the poetry of donald rumsfeld

[Pierce T . Wetter III]

> > > Remember "The buck stops here"?  Now we have, "it's the CIA's fault"
> > > instead.
> >
> >   Actually, my interpretation is that even Saddam thought he had WMD.
> >
> >   What David Kay found was that the scientists had been taking  
> > Saddam's
> > money, but only pretending to work.
> >
> >   So really, its Saddam's fault...
>
> All Kay did was confirm reports from previous inspectors.

 Not entirely true. Here's an interesting article.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2094415/

With a quote:

"In the Times interview, Kay does add one dimension to his tale—and it  
is the newest, most intriguing aspect of them all. In the late 1990s,  
it seems, Saddam took personal control of Iraq's WMD program. As a  
result, Iraqi scientists started going to him directly with proposals  
of fanciful weapons systems, for which Saddam paid them heaps of money.  
As Kay puts it, the WMD program turned into a "vortex of corruption."  
Saddam was deluded with fantasies; the scientists pocketed the money  
and filed phony progress reports on fake weapons systems.

Kay says the CIA's biggest failure lay in missing this internal  
deception. Though the Times piece doesn't say so, it's quite likely  
that the CIA itself was deceived, intercepting some of these phony  
reports and treating them as credulously as Saddam did. In any case, in  
the Times interview, Kay calls for an overhaul in the way the agency  
processes intelligence."

 Here's the times interview, which unfortunately, you'd have to pay for:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html? 
res=F50817F63C5C0C758EDDA80894DC404482

 but here's the senate briefing about the issue by him:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/01/28/kay.transcript/

 Of historical interest, here's what David Kay said in 2002:

http://www.house.gov/hasc/openingstatementsandpressreleases/ 
107thcongress/02-09-10kay.html

 vs. what he said in 2003:

http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2003/ 
david_kay_10022003.html


>  Namely, Iraq
> had not had a viable WMD program for several years preceding March
> 2002.  Since inspectors were in the country during March 2002 until the
> US told them to leave, you can't argue that Iraq was in material breach
> of the relevant UN resolutions.

 Uh, actually, having read Blix's report, which detailed a list of  
questions that SH had to answer, I can.

 Its on the UN site somewhere.

 Here's a quote from Kay on the issue:

"We have discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents,  
physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were  
prohibited under the initial U.N. Resolution 687 and that should have  
been reported under 1441, with Iraqi testimony that not only did they  
not tell the U.N. about this, they were instructed not to do it and  
they hid material."

 Pierce