Kay’s report and mass graves in Iraq testify Bush was right

By Mary Mostert

It appears to be the conclusion of many self-proclaimed “experts” in the media and among Democrats that since the recent Interim Report issued by Dr. David Kay did not come up with a large stash of stockpiled weapons on mass destruction in Iraq that they did not exist and, therefore, President Bush should not have invaded Iraq. Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, said he was distressed by Kay’s request for more time.

"We are ... talking about intent, and talking about facilities, but we have nothing we can point to. Did we misread it? Did they mislead us? Or did we simply get it wrong?" he asked.

Of course, in order to know whether or not the Americans “misread” Saddam Hussein’s devious behavior, or fell for a deliberate effort by Saddam Hussein to make the world THINK he was hiding weapons of mass destruction, we need to know what he HAD and where it went which takes us back to the UN Resolutions Hussein ignored.

Why do so many people conclude Saddam Hussein DIDN’T have WMD when in fact Hussein admitted spending billions of dollars trying to build them? Nearly every account of the issue that I have read quotes only 8 words of a 47 word sentence. Blasted all over the headlines of newspaper across the world was Dr. Kay saying, “We have not yet found stocks of weapons,…” That is what Jay Rockefeller and talk show hosts and commentators are responding to. However, those 8 words are in a sentence in Kay’s report which reads, “We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone.”

In other words, Kay was saying, if they DID exist before the war, we need to be concerned about where they are NOW. He went on to report:

“We are actively engaged in searching for such weapons based on information being supplied to us by Iraqis.

“Why are we having such difficulty in finding weapons or in reaching a confident conclusion that they do not exist or that they once existed but have been removed? Our search efforts are being hindered by six principal factors:

1. “From birth all of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) activities were highly compartmentalized within a regime that ruled and kept its secrets through fear and terror and with deception and denial built into each program.
   
   
2. “Deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documentation related to weapons programs began pre-conflict and ran trans- to post-conflict.
   
   
3. “Post-Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) looting destroyed or dispersed important and easily collectable material and forensic evidence concerning Iraq's WMD program. As the report covers in detail, significant elements of this looting were carried out in a systematic and deliberate manner, with the clear aim of concealing pre-OIF activities of Saddam's regime.
   
   
4. “Some WMD personnel crossed borders in the pre/trans-conflict period and may have taken evidence and even weapons-related materials with them.
   
   
5. “Any actual WMD weapons or material is likely to be small in relation to the total conventional armaments footprint and difficult to near impossible to identify with normal search procedures. It is important to keep in mind that even the bulkiest materials we are searching for, in the quantities we would expect to find, can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two-car garage.
   
   
6. “The environment in Iraq remains far from permissive for our activities, with many Iraqis that we talk to reporting threats and overt acts of intimidation and our own personnel being the subject of threats and attacks. In September alone we have had three attacks on Iraq Survey Group facilities or teams: The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) base in Irbil was bombed and four staff injured, two very seriously; a two-person team had their vehicle blocked by gunmen and only escaped by firing back through their own windshield; and on Wednesday, 24 September, the Iraq Survey Group Headquarters in Baghdad again was subject to mortar attack.”
   
   

So, what HAVE they found so far? Was it really not worth reporting, whatever it was? Kay reported, but almost no media source mentioned:

“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.” Some of those activities included:

— A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to U.N. monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW (chemical biological weapons) research.

— A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW (bioweapons) agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N.

— Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

— New research on Biological Weapons-applicable agents, brucella and Congo Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the U.N.

— Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation.

— A line of unmanned aerial vehicles not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared unmanned aerial vehicles out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.

— Continuing 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 U.N.

— Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 km — well beyond the 150-km range limit imposed by the U.N. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.

— Clandestine 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.

It’s really not all that complicated. Kay’s report, along with the continuing reports of thousands of bodies found in mass graves in Iraq should be sufficient to convince the world that we are all a lot better off without Saddam Hussein.

© Mary Mostert