October 03, 2003

Kay Report

All the headlines I saw today said, in effect, "We've Found No WMD's", based on David Kay's report to a House committee.

Andrew Sullivan has a few selected highlights from Kay's report that reveal it wasn't exactly "nothing" that we have found so far. He concludes:

"What we now see may not impress those who are looking for any way to discredit this administration and this war. But it shows to my mind the real danger that Saddam posed - and would still pose today, if one president and one prime minister hadn't had the fortitude to face him down. We live in a dangerous but still safer world because of it. Now is the time for the administration to stop the internal quibbling, the silence and passivity, and go back on the offensive. Show the dangers that the opposition was happy for us to tolerate; show the threat - real and potential - that this war averted; defend the record with pride and vigor; and fund the reconstruction in ways that will make it work now not just for our sake but for the sake of those once killed in large numbers by the weapons some are so eager not to find."

Junk Yard Blog has a pretty good post on the subject as well.

And as James Taranto notes in BOTW, there's a lot of evidence that a substantial housecleaning took place shortly before we arrived:

"In addition to the discovery of extensive concealment efforts," Kay continues, "we have been faced with a systematic sanitization of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories, and companies suspected of WMD work. The pattern of these efforts to erase evidence--hard drives destroyed, specific files burned, equipment cleaned of all traces of use--are ones of deliberate, rather than random, acts."

And from NRO, Andrew Apostolu sums up Saddam's WMD strategy.


Posted by dan at October 3, 2003 01:27 PM
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