Jack Cashill tries to convince us that everything we were told about Iraq in the build-up to war was true, and that the calims of a failure to find WMDs, etc. are lies and deliberate ignorance by the media.
First, he mentions how Richard Butler claimed that Saddam was developing WMD capacity after Butler was booted out of Iraq in 1998. Of course, not mentioned is that Clinton was using the inspections to conduct espionage with the intent of bringing Saddam's government down. Seeing as we are constantly misled about that, it is rather disingenuous to assume that his statement must be trusted.
Secondly, he talks about Spencer Abraham in 2004 claiming that 1.77 tons of uranium had been moved out of Iraq by the U.S. The problem here is that no one denies that Saddam had uranium. The point is, it had been declared to the IAEA, it had been sealed and was not in a weaponized form, and if we had wanted him to get rid of it, we should have demanded that the declared uranium be removed; rather than invading Iraq on the pre-text of developed or developing weapons that we said he was hiding.
Thirdly, he mentions how the media ignored Douglas Feith's book describing the role that WMDs played in us going to war. Of course, that Douglas Feith may not exactly be an honest, unbiased broker is nowhere considered. That eneral Tommy Franks has, er - a colorful way of describing him (warning: language) is not mentioned either. Rather, we are told by Jack Cashill simply that Feith "knew what was going on" (and of course, we presume him to be truthful).
Fourthly, he mentions Iraqi General Georges Sada's claims that the WMDs were ferried to Syria - ignoring, of course, the question of why Saddam would keep those WMDs if he was not going to use them. That this guy might just be trying to get on the good side of the U.S. government by telling it what it wants to hear is not considered.
Fifthly, he mentions that Don Bordenkircher had a lot of prisoners boast of transporting warheads to Syria.
Some of the inmates, Bordenkircher said, "wanted to trade their information for a release from prison and were amenable to showing the locations."
Gosh, what motive could these people have for lying? And of course, if we used enhanced interrogation techniques on them, obviously they would tell us the truth; I mean that is what these techniques are good for, not for getting people to tell us what we want to hear.
Sixthly, he claims that we know where the WMDs are but the U.S. government won't look there. This sounds very much like Michael Ledeen's similar claims, and ultimately relies on believing that the U.S. government is run by people who desperately want to cover up the evidence that would vindicate them.
According to Cashill, the reason why the administration has avoided revelaing that there are WMDs is to keep the bad guys uninformed, apparently so that they won't get to the MD before we have secured Iraq enough to secure it all.
"Sometimes," [George Tenet] writes, "it is even useful to have positive accomplishments misperceived as failures, to throw foreign governments and rogue organizations off the scent."
Yes, this must be it. The Bush administration is so famously competent that is obviously capable of such a misdirection.
The administration's openness about the recent removal of a 550 metric ton yellowcake cache suggests a change in strategy in a newly secure Iraq.
Except that, as references here and here, "the uranium a) was not weapons grade and b) was well known to the UN and IAEA and was being stored legally by Saddam's government. It was legally in Iraq according to international law."
Cashill pretends to deal with this:
To be sure, the major media and the liberal bloggers have done their best to downplay the potency of the material and the political significance of its removal. After all, they tell us, everyone knew the yellowcake was there all along.
Here is an article from 2003 proving that we Hussein was known to possess uranium all along.
From the article: Experts say Tuwaitha, which was sealed off by U.N. inspectors in 1991, holds 500 metric tons of uranium and other radioactive materials that could pose health risks or even a terrorist threat if it gets into the wrong hands.
But Cashill, instead of spending 5 minutes on Google, instead he says:
But the question has to be asked: If everyone knew it was there, why were the Democrats so eager to pull American troops and cede the yellowcake to whoever controlled the ground?
Uh - if it is that dangerous, we should have removed it all much much earlier. Besides, it isn't exactly weapons grade.
The fact that a Canadian uranium producer was willing to pay tens of millions of dollars for the yellowcake suggests its potential for future harm in the hands of al-Qaida or other terrorists.
Yes, all they will need is to set up large, industrial scale nuclear infrastructure. This is why we also need to worry about whether or not Iraq has aluminum or iron reserves; if Al Qaeda gets their hands on those, they might be able to build battleships and aircraft carriers to use against us.
In short, Jack Cashill is caught in at least one obvious lie, so one should be careful about trusting all of his other points, which are largely based on nothing more than Cashill's imputation of trustyworthiness on a bunch of fairly sketchy sources.
That is all.
No comments:
Post a Comment