CHENEY: LIAR OR FOOL?

Around the Defense Tech din­ner table in the 1980’s, there was a com­mon theme (other than would my brother finally eat his veg­eta­bles): Was Ronald Reagan a con­niv­ing genius, a guy who will­fully ignored the facts, or just a com­plete idiot?
I find myself ask­ing the same ques­tions after read­ing this L.A. Times story about Dick Cheney today.

Vice President Dick Cheney revived two con­tro­ver­sial asser­tions about the war in Iraq on Thursday, declar­ing there was “over­whelm­ing evi­dence” that Saddam Hussein had a rela­tion­ship with Al Qaeda and that two trail­ers dis­cov­ered after the war were proof of Iraq’s bio­log­i­cal weapons pro­grams…
U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cials agree that there was con­tact between Hussein’s agents and Al Qaeda mem­bers as far back as a decade ago and that oper­a­tives with ties to Al Qaeda had at times found safe haven in Iraq. But no intel­li­gence has sur­faced to sug­gest a deeper rela­tion­ship, and other infor­ma­tion turned up recently has sug­gested that sig­nif­i­cant ties were unlikely.
Sept. 11 mas­ter­mind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is in cus­tody, has told American inter­roga­tors that Al Qaeda rejected the idea of any work­ing rela­tion­ship with Iraq, which was seen by the ter­ror­ist net­work as a cor­rupt, sec­u­lar regime. When Hussein was cap­tured last month, he was found with a doc­u­ment warn­ing his sup­port­ers to be wary of work­ing with for­eign fight­ers.
“There’s noth­ing I have seen or read that backs [Cheney] up,” said Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV (D​-​W​.Va.), vice chair­man of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who called Cheney’s remarks Thursday “per­plex­ing.“
Cheney also argued that the main thrust of the administration’s case for war the claim that Iraq was assem­bling weapons of mass destruc­tion had been val­i­dated by the dis­cov­ery of two flatbed trail­ers out­fit­ted with tanks and other equip­ment.
“We’ve found a cou­ple of semi-​​trailers at this point which we believe were in fact part of [a WMD] pro­gram,” Cheney said. “I would deem that con­clu­sive evi­dence, if you will, that he did in fact have pro­grams for weapons of mass destruc­tion.“
That view is at odds with the judg­ment of the government’s lead weapons inspec­tor, David Kay, who said in an interim report in October that “we have not yet been able to cor­rob­o­rate the exis­tence of a mobile [bio­log­i­cal weapons] pro­duc­tion effort.”

THERE’S MORE: “Given enough time, Iraq cer­tainly could have and prob­a­bly would have devel­oped CBW weaponry, and prob­a­bly would have formed closer ties with Al Qaeda. By going into Iraq we pre-​​empted those pos­si­bil­i­ties,” writes Defense Tech dad (and din­ner table talk leader) Tom Shachtman. “Cheney could have said that, and been more believ­able. We really need to get beyond the seem­ing imper­a­tive, in our cul­ture, that politi­cians must not admit to hav­ing been wrong.“
AND MORE: “How about con­niv­ing genius liar?” asks Defense Tech reader MB. “All you have to do is look at the num­bers of peo­ple the polls show still believe in the Al Qaida con­nec­tion and WMD. These claims have been com­pletely debunked, so Bush can no longer tell such bald lies to con­tinue to rein­force these ideas among the rubes, but Cheney as VP is not sub­ject to the same rules. So he keeps telling the lies, and the rubes keep falling for them, but Bush keeps his hands squeaky clean.“
AND MORE: “David Kay, who stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for weapons of mass destruc­tion, said on Friday he does not believe there were any large stock­piles of chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal weapons in Iraq,” accord­ing to Reuters.
“I don’t think they existed,” Kay tells the wire ser­vice. “What every­one was talk­ing about is stock­piles pro­duced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War and I don’t think there was a large-​​scale pro­duc­tion pro­gram in the ‘90s.”

January 23rd, 2004 | Chem-Bio | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.