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Bush, Straw, Seize Broken Reed:Kay's Misleading Report; CIA/MI6 Syrian Plot; Dershowitz Flaps Broken Wings
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Bush seized upon the report of David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group, to assert that Kay's interim conclusions showed that Saddam had been in hot pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, as demonstrated in particular by the "deadly vial".

Kay made a cautious bid to help Bush and Blair out, but it's a case of trying to bake bricks without straw. The best dissection of the Kay report came in The Independent from Dr Glen Rangwala of Cambridge (UK).

Kay stated flatly that his team had found

*no evidence of orders or plans to continue an active nuclear program after 1991. The aluminum tubes were not for the purposes of uranium enrichment.

*At the seven sites stigmatized in the September 2002 dossier of Blair's government, there was no evidence of suspicious activities or residues.

*There was no sign of imported uranium.

There were no C/B "battlefield munitions" ready to be launched in 45 minutes.

There was no trace of "the chemical weapons, biological weapons, viruses, bacilli and10,000 liters of anthrax" invoked by UK foreign secretary Jack Straw.

Kay alleged that an Iraqi biologist had "a collection of reference strains" at his home, including "a vial of live C botulinum Okra B from which a biological agent can be produced." Straw leaped on this, claiming that this agent is 15,000 times stronger than the nerve agent VX. Wrong, says Rangwala. The vial held not the super deadly type A but the less lethal type B and there was no evidence found by Kay's group of any preparations for the extensive process required for weaponization. Botulinum type B can be used as an antidote for common botulinum poisoning. The UK does so and calls them "seed banks". ...