The Facts Machine

"And I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide"

Monday, January 19, 2004

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern talks about some of the wee problems the Bushies face in drafting the SOTU speech, one of which is the order that was given by Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, to destroy all of Iraq's WMD in 1991.
Documentary corroboration that Kamel's order was carried out surfaced this month in a handwritten letter obtained by Barton Gelman of The Washington Post. The letter was written by Hossam Amin, director of the Iraqi office overseeing U.N. inspectors, five days after Kamel's defection. It confirms that Iraq had in fact destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons during the summer of 1991, before U.N. inspectors even knew of their existence.

Does this mean that Kamel's testimony had been known in Washington and London more than seven years before Bush's address last January, and that during that entire period no evidence had come to light poking holes in the information he provided? Yes.

Well, maybe they didn't tell the president. If that is true, ''they'' should be fired.

There is, I suppose, a chance that Bush's advisors missed the information from Kamel's debriefing -- or forgot it. But Newsweek on Feb. 24, 2003, reported Kamel's assertion that the weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed. That was more than three weeks before our troops were sent into Iraq, ostensibly to ''disarm'' Iraq of those same weapons.

Both Bush and Vice President Cheney have accorded Kamel fulsome praise as defector par excellence, emphasizing his revelations about the Iraqi biological and chemical weapons but not mentioning that Kamel also said that those same weapons were destroyed at his order in 1991. This brings the practice of ''cherry-picking'' intelligence information to new heights -- or lows.
For more SOTU fun, here's SK Bubba's drinking game substitute, the Donate to Habitat for Humanity game.

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