January 24, 2004

Chief US Arms Hunter In Iraq: WMDs Never Existed. David Kay, Bush's hand-picked man to find Iraq's vast stockpiles of WMD, has stated clearly that they do not, and at the time of the invasion, did not exist:

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

Q. What about the nuclear program?

A. ... 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. ... I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s.

Atrios hits the nail (or one of them) on the head. ... I don't think Dick Cheney is in denial, I think he is flat-out bullshitting. But what does he care? The media refuses to ask questions even a first-week journalism student would see are automatic -- as the bodies of American soldiers pile up. If only there was some fibbing about oral sex involved ...

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