Year: 2003

If you don’t have time, here are my highlights. First off:

We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN.

Translation: Saddam was lying to the U.N. as late as 2002. He was required by the U.N. to fully cooperate. He didn’t. The war was justified on those grounds alone. Case closed. Some of the physical evidence still remains, despite what was clearly a deliberate, coordinated and thorough attempt to destroy evidence before during and after the war. Among the discoveries:

*tA clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.

*tA prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.

*tReference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist’s home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

*tNew research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.

*tDocuments and equipment, hidden in scientists’ homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).

*tA line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of- 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.

*tContinuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.

*tPlans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km – well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.

*tClandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles –probably the No Dong — 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.

Would you be happy, after 9/11, if the president had allowed such capabilities to remain at large, and be reinvigorated, with French and Russian help, after sanctions were removed? I wouldn’t. But Howard Dean and Dominique de Villepin would have happily looked the other way rather than do anything real to enforce the very resolutions they claimed to support.

One of the crazy premises of the “Where Are They?” crowd is that we would walk into that huge country and find large piles of Acme bombs with anthrax in them. That’s not what a WMD program is about; and never was. Saddam was careful. He had to hide from the U.N. and he had to find ways, over more than a decade, to maintain a WMD program as best he could, ready to reactivate whenever the climate altered in his favor. Everything points to such a strategy and to such weapons being maintained. The bio-warfare stuff is particularly worrying:

With regard to biological warfare activities, which has been one of our two initial areas of focus, ISG teams are uncovering significant information – including research and development of BW-applicable organisms, the involvement of Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) in possible BW activities, and deliberate concealment activities. All of this suggests Iraq after 1996 further compartmentalized its program and focused on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents.

Mustard gas in a matter of months. And concealment all the time:

A very large body of information has been developed through debriefings, site visits, and exploitation of captured Iraqi documents that confirms that Iraq concealed equipment and materials from UN inspectors when they returned in 2002. One noteworthy example is a collection of reference strains that ought to have been declared to the UN. Among them was a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B. from which a biological agent can be produced. This discovery – hidden in the home of a BW scientist – illustrates the point I made earlier about the difficulty of locating small stocks of material that can be used to covertly surge production of deadly weapons. The scientist who concealed the vials containing this agent- has identified a large cache of agents that he was asked, but refused, to conceal. ISG is actively searching for this second cache.

When you read this kind of information, you can see why the president has ordered more money to go to this effort. We need every cent. We have to show to the world – and to the appeasers at home – the extent of the threat that this monstrous regime potentially represented.

As for actual munitions, absorb this fact:

There are approximately 130 known Iraqi Ammunition Storage Points (ASP), many of which exceed 50 square miles in size and hold an estimated 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordinance. Of these 130 ASPs, approximately 120 still remain unexamined. As Iraqi practice was not to mark much of their chemical ordinance and to store it at the same ASPs that held conventional rounds, the size of the required search effort is enormous.

Here are Kay’s conclusions:

1. Saddam, at least as judged by those scientists and other insiders who worked in his military-industrial programs, had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Even those senior officials we have interviewed who claim no direct knowledge of any on-going prohibited activities readily acknowledge that Saddam intended to resume these programs whenever the external restrictions were removed. Several of these officials acknowledge receiving inquiries since 2000 from Saddam or his sons about how long it would take to either restart CW production or make available chemical weapons.
2.tIn the delivery systems area there were already well advanced, but undeclared, on-going activities that, if OIF had not intervened, would have resulted in the production of missiles with ranges at least up to 1000 km, well in excess of the UN permitted range of 150 km. These missile activities were supported by a serious clandestine procurement program about which we have much still to learn.
3.tIn the chemical and biological weapons area we have confidence that there were at a minimum clandestine on-going research and development activities that were embedded in the Iraqi Intelligence Service. While we have much yet to learn about the exact work programs and capabilities of these activities, it is already apparent that these undeclared activities would have at a minimum facilitated chemical and biological weapons activities and provided a technically trained cadre.

Could we have contained this indefinitely? If we’d wanted to continue to starve an entire country, make a mockery of U.N. resolutions, give new life to one of the most vicious dictatorships on the planet, and leave open the risk of this shadow but viable WMD program coming into the hands of any terrorist faction Saddam wanted to entertain. Were there risks of action? You bet. But most of the enormous risks did not come about: no use of such weapons, no massive destruction of oil wells, no fracturing of the country, no terrorist revenge or resurgence.

FOR THE FUTURE: But Kay makes a more important point at the end. He notes that our ability to examine this entire edifice in a liberated Iraq, to see where our intelligence failed and where it succeeded, is a hugely helpful task in the broader war on terror. Over to Kay:

[W]whatever we find will probably differ from pre-war intelligence. Empirical reality on the ground is, and has always been, different from intelligence judgments that must be made under serious constraints of time, distance and information. It is, however, only by understanding precisely what those difference are that the quality of future intelligence and investment decisions concerning future intelligence systems can be improved. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is such a continuing threat to global society that learning those lessons has a high imperative.

Of course it does. I’ve waited a long time for this report, and kept my peace until it came out and we had some empirical data to measure. But what we now see may not impress those who are looking for any way to discredit this administration and this war. But it shows to my mind the real danger that Saddam posed – and would still pose today, if one president and one prime minister hadn’t had the fortitude to face him down. We live in a dangerous but still safer world because of it. Now is the time for the administration to stop the internal quibbling, the silence and passivity, and go back on the offensive. Show the dangers that the opposition was happy for us to tolerate; show the threat – real and potential – that this war averted; and defend the record with pride and vigor; and fund the reconstruction in ways that will make it work now not just for our sake but for the sake of those once killed in large numbers by the weapons some are so eager not to find.

Money quote from an old New Times L.A. article, now floating around the web:

Perhaps you are among the millions never told of Lieutenant Governor Davis’s widely known – but long unreported – penchant for physically attacking members of his own staff. His violent tantrums have occurred throughout his career, from his days as Chief of Staff for Jerry Brown to his long stint as State Controller to his current job. Davis’s hurling of phones and ashtrays at quaking government employees and his numerous incidents of personally shoving and shaking horrified workers – usually while screaming the f-word “with more venom than Nixon” as one former staffer recently reminded me – bespeak a man who cannot be trust with power. Since his attacks on subservients are not exactly “domestic violence,” they suggest to me the need for new lexicon that is sufficiently Dilbertesque. I would therefore like to suggest “office batterer” for consideration as you observe Davis in his race for governor.

Go read the rest. It makes Arnold look restrained in comparison. It was published six years ago. Funny how the L.A. Times didn’t wait till five days before the election to run with it.

Weighs in on the racial aspects of the Rush ESPN story. Cool sports blog, I think. And brand new.

Apparently, he discussed the drug once on his show a couple of years’ back. According to this news thread, “The talk was mostly about the abusers of the drug, and that it was a shame that the abuse affected people who really need it.” The date given for the show is July 30, 2001. Someone should find the transcript.

Taranto unearths some details that cast doubt on whether the leaking of Plame’s name was, strictly speaking, illegal. It doesn’t make it any ethically or morally better, in my book. But it’s still interesting.

Some interesting observations from old Hollywood hand, Roger Simon.

I’m not commenting on the prescription drug stuff because no charges have been filed against Limbaugh and we don’t know what the truth is yet. And I haven’t commented on his ESPN firing because, well, when you know as little about football is I do, it’s hard to judge whether Limbaugh’s comments were valid or not. But a couple of things are worth saying: this isn’t censorship. The government is not involved. Rush had freedom of speech a week ago and he still has today. His whining on this point was silly and worthy of Susan Sontag. Similarly, I don’t have much sympathy for ESPN. They hired Rush Limbaugh, after all, not Jim Lehrer. Didn’t they expect something like this? He’s designed for controversy. And he has to quit the minute he causes some? Denial all round, if you ask me …

Schwarzenegger’s response today to the smear campaign orchestrated by the liberal Los Angeles Times struck exactly the right note. In general, I believe the women in these cases. Almost always, the men have behaved badly. For the record, I believed Anita Hill (though I would still have supported Clarence Thomas for Supreme Court Justice); and I believed almost all the women who came forward to accuse Bill Clinton of sexual abuse and harassment. But there is a distinction here between illegal sexual harrassment and legal sexual grossness. There is a distinction between a named accuser and an anonymous one. There is a distinction between a public lawsuit and a private incident. And there is a distinction between public and private life, a distinction which we have now effectively abolished to the detriment of our entire civil compact. One of the best aspects of the Schwarzenegger candidacy is therefore that he might actually get to be governor of California, having used drugs, taken steroids, had group sex, said all sorts of outrageous things, and lived a lively and not-always admirable private life. Maybe he’ll prove that the smears can’t work any more. And because privacy is essentially over in this country for any public figures, Arnold’s path may be the only one we now have. So I’d say: vote against the Los Angeles Times. That means: vote for Arnold.