Is Anyone Awake
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Iraq | Saddam Hussein | War | WMD's — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
So, it has been a few days since this story has come out and I have waited to see whether there would be any further commentary on it. There hasn't been, which is quite the pity since it would seem that the media is no longer interested in widely reporting and discussing interesting stories.
What? You don't find the following interesting?
Read on . . .
The Lebanese-born Mr. Piro, one of only a handful of agents at the bureau who speaks Arabic, was able to wheedle information from Saddam over a matter of months through a combination of flattery and ego-deflation that worked wonders with the former despot. But as Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute first noticed, the most important news in the segment comes when Mr. Piro describes his conversations with Saddam about weapons of mass destruction. The FBI interrogator says that, while Saddam said he no longer had active WMD programs in 2003, the dictator admitted that he intended to resume those programs as soon as he possibly could.
Here's the relevant segment, which appears well down in the interview:
Mr. Piro: "The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there."
Mr. Pelley: "And that was his intention?"
Mr. Piro: "Yes."
Mr. Pelley: "What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?"
Mr. Piro: "He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program."
Mr. Pelley: "Chemical, biological, even nuclear."
Mr. Piro: "Yes."
Iraq's active WMD program had been destroyed, mostly by U.N. weapons inspectors, sometime in the 1990s, but Saddam told Mr. Piro that he maintained a pretense of having those weapons mainly to keep Iran at bay. This isn't exactly news. The key point is Saddam's admission that an Iraqi WMD program remained a threat so long as Saddam remained in power.
Opponents of the war argue that none of this matters because Saddam and his ambitions were being "contained" by U.N. sanctions. Hardly. As the Los Angeles Times reported in December 2000, "sanctions are crumbling among U.S. allies, who have begun challenging them with dozens of unauthorized flights into [Iraq]."
Seems interesting to me. Why isn't it being discussed more?
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Is Anyone Awake 5 Comments (0 topical, 5 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
because it won't get any traction. If a candidate brings up WMD, as Huckabee did it gets scoffed at and ignored.
It is the one thing he did that I liked. He got zero out of it and quickly dropped it.
It won't get any traction. Everyone already "knows" what happened. After the fact revelations only have impact when they reveal something contrary to Republicans or consevatives. When it is in support of, it's just old news.
absentee
Wait until Labor Day.
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On other blogs that I frequent.
W and Cheney haven't pointed out a lot of things they could have countering the liberal take on Iraq. I've ceased asking why they don't.
http://hillbillypolitics.com
But then again why would the MSM on their own volition accentuate something that would undercut their agenda in destroying W and Cheney. The real question is why aren't W & Cheney drawing attention to this and why do the key Republican candidates appear to ignore this nugget.