Bush's decision on war affirmed (Democratic criticism having little effect on public opinion)

List ping?

It's 6:30am here. I'll watch the replay. As for a transcript? Hell, they'll likely redact that also to fit their nasty agenda.

Nobody -- not the Russians, not the Germans, not the French, not even the Syrians, and certainly not the UN -- contended that Saddam didn't have WMD before we went to war to take him out. The main debate was how to and when to deal with Saddam and his violation of 17 UN resolutions.

Remember, Saddam moved one of his most valuable military assets, his air force, to Iran at the start of the 1991 Gulf War. It makes sense he would move his WMDs out of country as well. We diddled around with the UN long enough for him to do so. This is a more plausible explanation than that "WMD never existed."

Also remember that the ones who are now howling the loudest about the "lack" of WMD are precisely the same people who wouldn't have gone to war even if Saddam had paraded his WMD publically through the streets of Baghdad last March.

Hey Mike ... is it me or are these comments contradicting themselves

No Mo1 it is not you. I am so confused with the different reports on Fox News since Kaye resigned and started giving interviews, or speaking on camera. There has been different stories being reported. Since Dean and Kerry has been on the campaign trail I guess they are getting their info from the cable news reports.

"I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat," Mr. Kay said, adding that "what we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than, in fact, we thought it was even before the war."

I don't think Kay has been unclear or contradictory at all. It's the elite media that has cherry-picked his statements and run with them.

Kay has said plainly that:
1. Saddam had an active WMD program.
2. Components of that program were moved to Syria before the war.
3. A culture of corruption fooled Western Intel -- and a mad Saddam himself -- into believing WMD stockpiles were at the ready.
4. Saddam did not have massive stockpiles on the ready.
5. A nuclear program was underway as late as 2001.
6. Iraq was a haven for Islamist terrorists before and after the war.

And, Kay's conclusion about what Bush did: He was right to go to war because Saddam was actually more dangerous than we thought he was when we thought he had stockpiles of WMD.

Of course every media outlet -- except the Washington Times -- focused solely on Kay's opinion that no WMDs would be found. That is the least news-worthy aspect of his comments, and I'm glad The Washington Times pointed that out to their readers.

It's the elite media that has cherry-picked his statements and run with them.

After watching Kay's interview on the Today show this morning .. I TOTALLY agree with you

Thanks for the ping windchime.

From Fox News:

U.S. Says More Time Needed on Iraq WMD

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

WASHINGTON — The White House says it needs more time to determine whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, an issue the Bush administration once was so confident about that it was cited as a justification for waging war.

The issue was injected into the presidential campaign when retired chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay (search) said he had concluded, after nine months of searching, that deposed President Saddam Hussein did not have stockpiles of forbidden weapons. Confronted with Kay's statement, administration officials declined to repeat their once-ironclad assertions that Saddam had them.

Democrats pounced on Kay's conclusion as evidence that President Bush duped the nation about the reasons for going to war.

Campaigning in New Hampshire, Sen. John Kerry, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said Bush had misled the people. "When the president of the United States looks at you and tells you something, there should be some trust. He's broken every one of those promises," the Massachusetts senator said.

Howard Dean, another Democratic candidate, said, "The White House has not been candid with the American people about virtually anything with the Iraq war."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said, "Obviously, we want to compare the intelligence from before the war with what the Iraq Survey Group learns on the ground. But the first step is to let the Iraq Survey Group finish their work so the intelligence community can have ... as complete a picture as possible."

McClellan said the inspectors should continue their work "so that they can draw as complete a picture as possible. And then we can learn — it will help us learn the truth."

Kay, meanwhile, was called to appear Wednesday at a public hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee and agreed to attend.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle demanded an investigation, either by the Senate Intelligence Committee or an independent commission, into the "administration's role in the intelligence failures leading up to the war with Iraq."

Sen. Joe Lieberman, another Democratic candidate campaigning in New Hampshire, also urged an investigation or congressional hearings "on the intelligence that some of us saw directly, and the statements that the administration was making and the emphasis the administration was putting on weapons of mass destruction."

Vice President Dick Cheney, meeting in Rome with Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, did not answer when a reporter asked if he felt prewar intelligence was faulty. Cheney has been among the administration's most forceful advocates of war and was outspoken in describing Iraq's alleged threat.

Kerry has questioned whether Cheney tried to pressure CIA analysts who wrote reports on Iraq's weapon programs.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, traveling in Vienna, Austria, said the Iraq war was justified, even if banned weapons are never found, because it eliminated the threat that Saddam might again resort to "evil chemistry and evil biology."

Saddam's willingness to use such weapons was sufficient cause to overthrow his regime, Ashcroft said, referring to the use of chemical and biological arms against Iraqi Kurds in 1988 and during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

Even before Kay announced his conclusion, Bush had expanded his public rationale about the war as the search for weapons proved fruitless. Bush cast it as a broader war against terrorism, calling Iraq the central front, and said democracy would spread in the Middle East if it should take hold in Iraq.

Kay, in a weekend interview with National Public Radio, tried to deflect heat from Bush.

Asked whether Bush owed the nation an explanation for the discrepancies between his warnings and Kay's findings, Kay said, "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people."

washington post.com

Text of Reuters Interview with David Kay

Friday, January 23, 2004; 5:13 PM

The following are excerpts of a telephone interview conducted with David Kay, after he stepped down Friday as the chief U.S. arms hunter in Iraq:

Q: Why did you decide to step down?

A: "It was, as usually it is in these cases, a complex set of issues, it related in part to a reduction in the resource and a change in focus of ISG (Iraq Survey Group). When I had started out, I had made it a condition that ISG be exclusively focused on WMD. That's no longer so. The reduction of resources. And the reason those were important is, and at least to me they were important, is I didn't feel that we could complete the task as quickly as I thought it important to complete the task, unless we exclusively focused ISG.

Q. You're talking about that they were asking some of the analysts to do the insurgency work, right?

A. Yes.

Q: Is it true that one of the reasons you wanted to step down was because you don't believe that anything will be found, is that true?

A: "No. No, that wasn't the reason. In fact, the reason I thought it important to complete everything is that ... by the time we get to June ... we're not going to find much after June. Once the Iraqis take complete control of the government it is just almost impossible to operate in the way that we operate. In fact it was already becoming tough. We had an important ministry that would not allow its people to be interviewed unless they had someone present. It was like the old regime.

"I think we have found probably 85 percent of what we're going to find.

"The country is such and he hid so much that you can probably spend the next decade of your life in the country, and you will find things, but I think in terms of understanding that program, we're well on the way, almost at the end, so that you can say what went wrong, what they had."

Q: What happened to the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that everyone expected to be there?

A: "I don't think they existed.

"I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War and those were a combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them. I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production, and that's what we're really talking about, is large stockpiles, not the small. Large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the period after '95."

Q. After '95?

A. "We're really talking about from the mid-90s, when people thought they had resumed production."

Q. What about the nuclear program?

A. "The nuclear program was as we said in the interim report, I think that will be a final conclusion. There had been some restart of activities, but they were rudimentary.

"It really wasn't dormant because there were a few little things going on, but it had not resumed in anything meaningful."

Q: You came away from the hunt that you have done believing that they did not have any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the country?

A: "That is correct."

Q. Is that from the interviews and documentation?

A. "Well the interviews, the documentation, and the physical evidence of looking at, as hard as it was because they were dealing with looted sites, but you just could not find any physical evidence that supported a larger program."

Q: Do you think they destroyed it?

A: "No, I don't think they existed."

Q. Even though in the mid-1980s people said they used it on Halabja?

A. "They had stockpiles, they fought the Iranians with it, and they certainly did use it on the Kurds. But what everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s."

Q: What are you going to do now?

A: "I'm going back to the private sector. I know that. But I haven't done anything. I said I wouldn't do that until I left."

See my post#48, the part from the washingtonpost entitled Text of Reuters Interview with David Kay.

"We had an important ministry that would not allow its people to be interviewed unless they had someone present. It was like the old regime."

There seems to be more here than meets the eye. Wonder which group and why they still require 'minders'. I hope Kay passes the specific information about this to a more secure authority than the Senate 'Intelligence' Committee.

Bump!