Oh, well, I’ll try to dredge up last night’s flaming inspiration:

The west allowed the sanctions to degenerate into a game of hide and seek. It was Saddaam against the inspectors and, if he won one, wasn’t he clever. The UN requirement, originally anyway, was that the entire thing be easy, with everything the inspectors wanted supplied them with no quibbles.
Saddaam’s actions were of somebody who had something to hide. Or who wanted to hint that he had something to hide. Sure fooled us.

Question: If I get the security code wrong, and this is a pretty tough one, the comment I wrote goes away.
Is that supposed to happen?
Why can’t I just try the next code?

You try the backbutton switch when it says security code is wrong?

If you are talking about a comment you wrote that disappeared without an error message, than that’s her spam filter working to block a word.

To me, however, the strongest evidence that Sadaam had them was his own behavior. His cat-and-mouse games in the 1990′s were not the bahavior of one who had disarmed.

We made a judgement call, but there were only two ways to know for sure that Sadaam did not have WMD’s–either Sadaam’s full cooperation (like Ukraine and South Africa, or Libya after we invaded Iraq), or invasion. Had we not invaded, we would still not know.

Sadaam used WMD’s before and broke the agreement of the cease fire by interfering with inspections. That alone was cause enough to revoke the cease fire.

Which also means, Jake, your BDS wet dream notwithstanding, you’ll see neither impeachment nor war crimes trials. We’ll have another election in 2008 (but shh! you never know when the theocrat Pretzeldent BusHitler might institute martial law!), another mediocrity in the WH and screeches from one or another side of the partisan aisle.

I will say, though, watching this blubbering fool Tenet reminds me that JFK had three good ideas in his life:

1. Put a man on the moon.
2. Sleep with Marilyn Monroe.
3. Break the CIA and scatter it to the wind.

Pity he didn’t do no. 3 first. And why GWB gave a medal to this lumbering nitwitted jackanape escapes me. Tenet should have been out the door on 9/12 and started the morning of 9/13 asking “you want fries with that?”

That will often be the case, and the key is to analyze the data correctly, without pre-judging it.

Spend a little time with a href= http://intelligence.senate.gov/phaseiiaccuracy.pdf >this document, (“Postwar Findings about Iraq’s WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How they Compare with Prewar Assessments”) and read all the instances of “evidence was overstated” or “based not on intelligence but layers of analysis from a single source,” “even more alarmist” “less nuanced,” etc.

To have been wrong about the former means we’re in the mess we’re in today. To have been wrong about the latter would have been far, far, worse.

Besides, if Sadaam had WMD’s, I have a feeling that the debate today would be the same, only the left wouldn’t be saying “Bush lied” as much (although some on the far left would have alleged that we planted any weapons we found).

I can hear it now: We did our job and got Sadaam’s WMD’s, but now our troops are caught in a civil war and we need to get out and what we’re doing now has nothing to do with the war on terror, etc., etc., etc.,

Re McCarthy’s assertion about Niger and Yellocake, the most definitive assessment I can come up with states this:

“Conclusion 3: Postwar findings do not support the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) assessment that Iraq was “vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake” from Africa. Postwar findings support the assessment in the NIE of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) that claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are “highly dubious.”

The ISG found no evidence that indicated Iraq sought uranium from Africa. The ISG did recover evidence that Iraq explicitly turned down an offer to purchase uranium from the Democratic Republic of the Congo…”

from Postwar Findings on Iraq’s WMD Programs…etc Sept 8 2006

Content of these bunkers is probably now in Syria, smuggled here with help of Russian spetznaz.

Yes, Tenet continues to assert (as do most intelligence analysts) that his (and their) belief was that Saddam possessed WMD. My complaint about the “interview” was that Pelley continued to assert that everybody knew prior to the invasion of Iraq that no WMD existed…which is patently false—and ridiculously poor “journalism”.

But it’s par for the course for “journalists” today to carry their own biases and preconceptions into an “interview”.

Just so everybody’s clear—I think Tenet is an incompetent idiot…but so is Scott Pelley.