Word: wmd
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...intelligence on Iraq, and would likely report back some time next year. Rather than face mounting pressure to explain the discrepancy between Iraq's actual capability and the "grave and gathering danger" warned of by President Bush and his aides, the White House has acted preemptively to quarantine the WMD issue for the election season. Instead of asking the electorate to wait for the weapons inspectors to complete their work, the electorate will now be asked to await the outcome of the commission...
...strategy is not without risk. Appointing a commission is a tacit admission that the original case for war did not pan out. But the administration has moved since last summer to emphasizing reasons other than WMD to justify the invasion: Saddam was an evil dictator who threatened his neighbors and brutalized his people; the world, and Iraq in particular, is a better place without him. Opinion polls suggest that many Americans are ready to forgive the administration its exaggeration of the WMD threat if the Iraq invasion produces a happy ending at a limited cost in American lives and treasure...
...Hutton was certainly on solid ground in castigating BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan (who has also resigned) for making "very grave" and "unfounded" charges when he accused the government, in an unscripted, unedited broadcast he made from home, of "probably knowing" that a central claim in its dossier on Iraqi WMD - that some were deployable in 45 minutes - was false and inserted over the objections of the intelligence community, allegedly at the behest of Blair's powerful communications director, Alastair Campbell. The testimony to Hutton showed that top spies put it in, and believed it at the time. Hutton also condemned...
...comments, of course, are a refreshing departure for a man, who as Slate's Fred Kaplan notes, had mastered the art of building castles out of thin air, artfully choosing his words to allow administration sound-bite authors to imply that WMD evidence was imminent. Kay did, of course, do his former employers the service of trying to pin the blame for going to war under false pretenses onto the CIA. That seems to be the White House fallback position, too, although Press Secretary Scott McClellan gamely suggests that Kay's conclusion may be "premature" - in other words...
...Some advocates of going to war to stop a WMD threat on U.S. soil have admitted their error: Former National Security Council official Ken Pollack, for instance, whose book "The Gathering Storm" made the case for many a liberal hawk that invasion was the only way to stop Saddam becoming a nuclear threat, provides an excruciatingly detailed explanation of how and why U.S. intelligence erred, but more importantly, concludes with a warning that Vice President Cheney might heed: "Fairly or not, no foreigner trusts U.S. intelligence to get it right anymore, or trusts the Bush Administration to tell the truth...