[Torone]

Originally posted by Colin@Jul 20 2003, 09:14 AM
The whole world has been talking about Saddam's WMD's for over a decade. The UN had been dealing with it, Clinton dealt with it, Bush dealt with it. We all know what the evidence was ahead of time. There were no secrets. We all drew our own conclusions from that.

The UN had an extremely difficult time dealing with Saddam in that time. The history is all very public.

If Saddam had no WMD's and has had no WMD's all along, then every bit of evidence and speculation and reason regarding it by any person, analyst, the UN, or any particular country will turn out to have been wrong.
This includes some of the world's top experts in satellite photo analysis, ground intelligence, and analysts such as Kenneth Pollack who has made some remarkablly dead-on predictions of Saddam's behavior in the past.

Does that suddenly mean the satellite photos were faked, the CIA faked intelligence, Bush lied, Tenet lied, Powell lied, Blair lied, former weapons inspectors lied and analysts such as Kenneth Pollack lied.

Isn't it more reasonable that these people saw what they were expecting to find rather than that there was a conspiracy between all these people to deceive the world into something which would eventually be found out anyway? This is quite normal even in the hard sciences. It is even more so in a field relying on very imperfect information gathering techniques, speculation, extrapolation, and assumption.

Isn't it also just as possible that the questions being raised now are deliberately false and misleading; ranging from deliberate misquotes to outright lies? I mean, no one is paying attention to the facts (for instance, the huge numbers of documents, the centrifuge in the scientist's rose garden, the 3 Iraqi ships circling out in the middle of nowhere maintaing radio silence, or the traces of chemical agents in the river and on and on). Don't forget, it will be election day a year from November...