October 27, 2003

WMD: The Hunt for the Truth

South Knox Bubba says I'm lying about this. But David Kay has been in Iraq, while SKB hasn't, so I think David Kay has a much better idea of the extent of Saddam's weapons programs than SKB does.

The Bush-haters will do anything to discredit the president and the War on Terror - even try to make you think that because two chemical weapons experts downplay one small portion of David Kay's interim report on the search for Saddam's WMDs, the whole report is a lie.

So here's the truth. In the Los Angeles Times story that SKB links to, two chemical weapons experts say the finding of a vial of C. botulinum Okra B is not that significant. But SKB doesn't bother to mention that another chemical weapons expert thinks it is too early to dismiss the vial's significance - and that, at any rate, Kay's report contained other information about Iraq's work in other areas of bio-weaponry:

Terence Taylor, another former U.N. biowarfare inspector who now heads the Washington office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a nonpartisan think tank, said it is too early to dismiss the discovery of the vial.

"Just because botulinum B has not been used in a weapons program elsewhere, and we never found evidence of it in the 1990s, that does not necessarily rule out" transforming it into a weapon, Taylor said. "There's not enough detail in Kay's [unclassified] statement. And there's a lot we still don't know about their weapons programs."

Bubba also doesn't link you to the full text of Kay's report. I do. Because I think that, along with my commentary, you should be able to have the full report - so you can decide. Bubba just gives you selective spin.