Tuesday, February 17, 2004


Not Everyone Was Wrong
...One event came on Jan. 29, when David Kay, the retiring chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, dropped his own weapon of mass destruction. "It turns out," Kay told Congress, "we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment. And that is most disturbing." It is, indeed, disturbing. But a review of stories over the past year or so suggests that not everybody was wrong before the war.

We now know, for example, that the Defense Intelligence Agency reported in September 2002 that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has -- or will -- establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities." We know that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research reported that it "considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment" that Iraq was pursuing "an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons," and that Energy Department experts did not agree that controversial aluminum tubes were part of a nuclear program. We now know that the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center disputed the notion that Iraq's unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, were being designed as attack weapons. ...