Posted on 10/11/2003 8:24:34 AM PDT by Isara
Iraq: David Kay's search for weapons of mass destruction turned up nothing, and that's the end of the story. Well, at least that's what most of America has been led to believe. But that's not an accurate picture.
The mainstream media, so obviously eager to discredit the Bush administration, took Kay's report and his congressional testimony and simply ignored the parts which are the bulk of both that didn't suit their agenda.
"Congress Told Weapons Hunt Fruitless," the Oakland Tribune headline read. "So far he has come up dry: no weapons, no mobile labs, no nuclear weapons or even advanced programs," NBC anchor Tom Brokaw announced.
The Washington Post said the "Search In Iraq Finds No Banned Weapons," while The New York Times wrote an editorial about the "The Failure To Find Iraqi Weapons."
A more honest assessment of the report and Kay's testimony could not possibly produce such unequivocal conclusions. Both are filled with far more information than we could list here that vindicates the decision for war.
Kay, who leads the Iraq Survey Group that's searching for banned weapons, told Congress that Saddam Hussein "had not given up on his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction" and that Iraqi scientists and senior government officials have told his group that Saddam "remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons."
"These officials assert that Saddam would have resumed nuclear weapons development at some future point," Kay said, probably after the lifting of sanctions.
Kay pointed out that "at least one senior Iraqi official" indicated that Saddam had grown tired of waiting and wanted to restart the program even with sanctions still in place.
Critics will argue that intentions aren't the same as possession. But according to Kay's report, his team "discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002."
Included, as Kay outlined in an Oct. 6 interview with Fox News' Tony Snow that apparently few journalists watched, are more than two dozen chemical and biological weapons laboratories "that were hidden in the Iraq intelligence service" and reference strains of botulinum toxin.
Kay also said the Iraqis were working on Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever and told Snow that his team was looking for a "much larger" cache of weapons that contains anthrax and other agents, the work on which "continued right up to 2003."
Perhaps most significantly, Kay told Congress and Snow's audience that Iraq was actively improving its missile program in violation of the U.N. a program that would have continued to move ahead had not the coalition moved into Iraq and toppled Saddam.
The media's spin-and-omission effort puzzles Kay. He said on that same Fox show that he was "sort of amazed" that "powerful information about both (Iraq's) intent and (its) actual activities that were not known and were hidden from U.N. inspectors seems not to have made it to the press. This is information that, had it been available last year, would have been headline news."
Would have been, should have been. With the major media determined to dump on the Bush White House, it's not surprising.
I hope the public will see through before it's too late.
5.56mm
The same issue has what looks like a puff piece on the Hildabeast which I couldn't bring myself to read...perhaps another indication she plans to run in 2004.
We have a winner.
We would have to find a fully operational hydrogen bomb for the media to stop claiming that there were no WMD, and then the media would claim that we planted it.
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