The Dish

A reader synthesizes a little, and I tend to agree with her:

I find the Arnold debate very interesting. In response to today’s letter of the day, I have to say that my reaction to the flap is more like yours than like that letter-writer, and I’m a woman, so I have to disagree with the letter-writer’s implication that if you only checked with a few women you would find out how wrong you are.
I do agree that unwelcome sexual advances, especially if they include touching, are not to be discounted or dismissed. It is a serious thing. Unfortunately, it is not rare. That’s one of the things that was so mind-bending about the Anita Hill testimony – to hear Orrin Hatch ranting and raving as if it were really unusual for women to be subjected to humiliating conversation was just maddening given the reality that women are sexually attacked all day long in this country. Unfortunate as it may be, that is the context here: our culture is still very full of actions and values that are demeaning and damaging to women. It seems to me that we have to summarize it something like this: Arnold is as much of a pig as is average in our society. It would be nice if he were less of a pig, but it’s also nice that isn’t more of one. I agree with your assessment that Clinton was much worse, and look at how little it seems to have gotten in his way. Arnold seems to have a lot more integrity than most politicians and most movie stars. Maybe that’s a sad commentary, but if we’re looking for the truth I think we need to acknowledge that these things are relative.

Go Cubs. Go Arnold.

This is from his speech this morning:

“Mr. David Kay reported to the nation. I want to thank him for his good work. He is a thoughtful man. He and his team have worked under very difficult circumstances. They have done a lot of work in three months, and he reported on an interim basis. The report states that Saddam Hussein’s regime had a clandestine network of biological laboratories, a live strain of deadly agent botulinum, sophisticated concealment efforts, and advanced design work on prohibited longer range missiles. The report summarized the regime’s efforts in this way, and I quote from the report: ‘Iraq’s WMD programs spanned more than two decades, involved thousands of people, billions of dollars, and was elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.’
That is what the report said. Specifically, Dr. Kay’s team discovered what the report calls, and I quote, ‘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.’ In addition to these extensive concealment efforts, Dr. Kay found systematic destruction of evidence of these illegal activities. This interim progress report is not final. Extensive work remains to be done on his biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs. But these findings already make clear that Saddam Hussein actively deceived the international community, that Saddam Hussein was in clear violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, and that Saddam Hussein was a danger to the world.”

The president needs to make a ferocious speech soon expanding on these facts and take the truth to his opponents’ deception. This is vital. He has nothing to apologize for and huge amount to be proud of. So go get ’em, Mr President. What’s holding you back?

“I continue to be mystified by your dismissive attitude toward the revelations concerning Arnold’s behavior. You have charged that the reports are politically motivated and that Gray Davis is guilty of worse. Assume you’re correct: so what? That hardly makes the reports untrue. And indeed, Arnold has not disupted their accuracy.
Now, consider the substance of the revelations. If it had been revealed that, for example, he had a mistress, or had occasionally slept with a co-star, we might well take the attitude that while the behavior showed him to be something of a cad, this was essentially a matter to be resolved between Arnold and Maria. But what he has done, on repeated occasions (do you really think that the women who spoke to the LA Times or Premiere magazine are his only victims?), qualifies as sexual assault. This is certainly *not* a purely private matter. You might ask women you know how they would feel about a man coming up to them and sticking his hands down their dresses to fondle their breasts. I find your cavalier attitude toward such behavior dismaying, to say the least. Furthermore, the attitude displayed by Arnold in these incidents (and I would urge you to read the Premiere article which I’ve pasted to the end of this email if you haven’t already) — that because of his power he could get away with treating those around him however he wished, no matter how outrageous his conduct — is positively Clintonian. And this is someone you think we should give even *more* power to?
Next, consider Arnold’s supposed “apology.” It is, at best, totally insincere. Has he ever made an effort prior to yesterday to make amends to his victims? No. Do you really think he would have ever apologized were he not running for governor? Furthermore, consider what he said: that he had engaged in behavior that he considered “playful,” but that he now realized “some found offensive.” Again, I think you will find if you sample women you know that very few of them will find it “playful” if a man approaches them and starts fondling their breasts. And it is simply assinine for Arnold to claim that he didn’t realize this: This is behavior that took place when he was an adult (some of it as recently as 2 or 3 years ago), not when he was in sixth grade. And, again, his behavior was not merely “offensive.” It’s not as though he told an off-color joke that some found in poor taste. Grabbing women in the way that he did is assaultive behavior.
It is certainly unfortunate that Californians have such poor choices on October 7. But that does not relieve us of our obligation to speak the truth. And the truth about Arnold is abundantly clear: he is a scumbag.” – more reader feedback on the Letters Page.

If you think that David Kay’s report on Iraqi WMDs can be adequately summarized by idiotic headlines such as: “No Illicit Arms Found in Iraq,” then you need to read this report. If you believe the following “news analysis” by David Sanger in today’s New York Times summarizes the findings of David Kay, then you need to read this report. Sanger’s piece is, in fact, political propaganda disguised as analysis, presumably designed to obscure and distort the evidence that you can read with your own eyes. His opening paragraph culminates in a simple untruth:

The preliminary report delivered on Thursday by the chief arms inspector in Iraq forces the Bush administration to come face to face with this reality: that Saddam Hussein’s armory appears to have been stuffed with precursors, potential weapons and bluffs, but that nothing found so far backs up administration claims that Mr. Hussein posed an imminent threat to the world.

That is not what the administration claimed. (The Times has even had to run a correction recently correcting their attempt, retroactively, to distort and misrepresent the administration’s position.) The administration claimed that Saddam had used WMDs in the past, had hidden materials from the United Nations, was hiding a continued program for weapons of mass destruction, and that we should act before the threat was imminent. The argument was that it was impossible to restrain Saddam Hussein unless he were removed from power and disarmed. The war was legally based on the premise that Saddam had clearly violated U.N. resolutions, was in open breach of such resolutions and was continuing to conceal his programs with the intent of restarting them in earnest once sanctions were lifted. Having read the report carefully, I’d say that the administration is vindicated in every single respect of that argument. This war wasn’t just moral; it wasn’t just prudent; it was justified on the very terms the administration laid out. And we don’t know the half of it yet.

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.