WMD AGAIN….YES, AGAIN….I guess the Bush administration has already pretty much admitted that their pre-war WMD evidence was about as honest as a byline from Jayson Blair, but even so this story is discouraging as hell:
Jack Straw and his US counterpart, Colin Powell, privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq’s banned weapons programme at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to get UN support for a war on Iraq, the Guardian has learned.
….The meeting took place at the Waldorf hotel in New York, where they discussed the growing diplomatic crisis. The exchange about the validity of their respective governments’ intelligence reports on Iraq lasted less than 10 minutes, according to a diplomatic source who has read a transcript of the conversation.
The foreign secretary reportedly expressed concern that claims being made by Mr Blair and President Bush could not be proved. The problem, explained Mr Straw, was the lack of corroborative evidence to back up the claims.
….Mr Powell shared the concern about intelligence assessments, especially those being presented by the Pentagon’s office of special plans set up by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz.
….But he told Mr Straw he had come away from the meetings “apprehensive” about what he called, at best, circumstantial evidence highly tilted in favour of assessments drawn from them, rather than any actual raw intelligence.
Mr Powell told the foreign secretary he hoped the facts, when they came out, would not “explode in their faces”.
I don’t know, I really don’t. At this point I’d say that these guys have about the same scruples as used car salesmen, but I’m afraid that might be unfair to used car salesmen.
What I don’t understand is why people on the right aren’t more upset about this. A lot of liberals felt deeply betrayed by Clinton when the truth about Monica Lewinsky came out ? and said so repeatedly. Most of us didn’t think it rose to the level of an impeachable offense, but we were seriously pissed off that we had supported a guy who lied so baldly about this.
Shouldn’t war supporters be feeling the same way? George Bush is your guy, and even if we do eventually find some small amount of WMD it’s getting more and more obvious that he fabricated the entire public justification for the war. Aren’t you at all angry about that?
