Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Hindrocket pleased with his own ignorance
According to the Associated Press, the mystery of Iraq's missing anthrax may have been solved. Prior to the Iraq war, it was widely believed that the regime retained some or all of this material ... I haven't had time to go back and check the ISG report, and from the AP account it isn't clear whether Saddam didn't know that the anthrax had been destroyed, or just didn't know that it had been dumped near one of his palaces. But it sounds like the former.
So, according to Hinney, the "mystery" is not how the U.S. could have claimed Iraq had anthrax when they didn't, but whether Hussein was aware his anthrax had been destroyed. In May 2003, there was not yet such a mystery in the Hinney rear-brain - Iraq certainly had lots of WMD,
Whether ... the weapons were destroyed at the outset of the war, or were moved to Syria, as Debka File says, or are still in Iraq and simply haven't been found yet, is unclear ... In short, there's a headline but there isn't any story. Which is typical of all of the "Where are the WMD?" stories. What, exactly, do these people think? Are they seriously trying to argue that Saddam didn't have any chemical or biological weapons? If that were true, Saddam would have pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes of all time, for no apparent purpose.
The most pressing mystery to me is whether Hinney read Blix's reports before the war and dismissed them, or simply didn't read them. That it had been confirmed that Iraq had secretly destroyed some anthrax in 1991 was no secret or mystery. From Hans Blix's March 7, 2003 update to the UNSC,
There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared, and that at least some of this was retained after the declared destruction date. It might still exist. Either it should be found and be destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision or else convincing evidence should be produced to show that it was, indeed, destroyed in 1991.
In fact, just how much Iraq had produced compared to how much it had destroyed was the core of the issue. Hans Blix to the UNSC March 7, 2003,
Iraq proposed an investigation using advanced technology to quantify the amount of unilaterally destroyed anthrax dumped at a site. However, even if the use of advanced technology could quantify the amount of anthrax, said to be dumped at the site, the results would still be open to interpretation. Defining the quantity of anthrax destroyed must, of course, be followed by efforts to establish what quantity was actually produced.
// posted by Erik @ 3/29/2005 09:48:00 AM
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