Iraq's mysterious invisible weapons

Iraq's mysterious invisible weapons
Alan Reynolds (archive)
October 9, 2003

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More recently, Notra Trulock from Accuracy in Media wrote that "Kay's team still has much work ahead before a final judgment can be made on Iraq's WMD programs." Unfortunately, asking for more and more time is beginning to sound quite desperate and unconvincing.

A second defensive strategy has been to point out that the Clinton administration also expressed anxiety about WMD in Iraq in the late '90s. The bipartisan nature of the intelligence blunder does help to absolve current administration officials from charges of deliberate deception. But it fails to absolve them from charges of being too easily duped by old misinformation. Two wrong presidents do not make one right.

A third technique has been to simply assert, as Daniel Pipes did recently, that "there was indeed massive and undisputed evidence to indicate that the Iraqi regime was building WMD." If the evidence was "undisputed," then why did stubborn people like me keep disputing it? In reality, the evidence was always flimsy, consisting largely of hearsay, technological fantasy and old paperwork. .....

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A fourth diversion has been to hint that Iraq's mysterious weapons and delivery systems were just packed up and shipped off to some other country such as Syria or Lebanon. That story is no way to make our intelligence look more intelligent. If huge stockpiles of lethal weapons and their required delivery systems (e.g., artillery shells or aircraft sprayers) could be moved from one country to another without U.S. satellites and spy planes even noticing, then the CIA would be far more incompetent than its harshest critics ever claimed.

The latest and least defensible defense of the CIA has been to flatly deny that administration spokesmen ever claimed Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons or that such weapons posed any imminent threat. A Wall Street Journal editorial thus claims, "The Imminence Test and the Stockpile Standard ... are postwar inventions, and political transparently political inventions." That is a remarkable remark, and one that relies entirely on extremely short memories.

more...

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/alanreynolds/ar20031009.shtml

"Iraq's mysterious invisible weapons"

Wouldn't ya know it..... Iraq was so good at it, they also made their WMD "Invisible". Wow, sure is good we got to 'em before they figured out how to make them visible again. <G>