From today's Wall Street Journal:
...the most important news in the segment comes when Mr. Piro describes his conversations with Saddam about weapons of mass destruction. The FBI interrogator says that, while Saddam said he no longer had active WMD programs in 2003, the dictator admitted that he intended to resume those programs as soon as he possibly could.
Here's the relevant segment, which appears well down in the interview:
Mr. Piro: "The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there."
Mr. Pelley: "And that was his intention?"
Mr. Piro: "Yes."
Mr. Pelley: "What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?"
Mr. Piro: "He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program."
Mr. Pelley: "Chemical, biological, even nuclear."
Mr. Piro: "Yes."
Iraq's active WMD program had been destroyed, mostly by U.N. weapons inspectors, sometime in the 1990s, but Saddam told Mr. Piro that he maintained a pretense of having those weapons mainly to keep Iran at bay. This isn't exactly news. The key point is Saddam's admission that an Iraqi WMD program remained a threat so long as Saddam remained in power.
Opponents of the war argue that none of this matters because Saddam and his ambitions were being "contained" by U.N. sanctions. Hardly. As the Los Angeles Times reported in December 2000, "sanctions are crumbling among U.S. allies, who have begun challenging them with dozens of unauthorized flights into [Iraq]."
Bowing to this reality, the Bush Administration came to office the following month promising to ease the sanctions regime, even as it spent billions patrolling the so-called "No-Fly Zones." And as we learned after the invasion, Saddam was well on his way to breaking free of the sanctions by bribing everyone from a British member of parliament to a former French cabinet minister, all through a U.N. convenience known as Oil for Food.
In another telling moment in the "60 Minutes" interview, Mr. Piro relates that when he asked Saddam about his use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians, the dictator acknowledged that he had given the orders personally and explained himself in a word: "Necessary." The same still goes for getting rid of Saddam.
2 comments:
There you go again (in a Ronald “the new God” Reagan voice). Enough with trying to justify a contrived case for an unjustified war that has cost hundreds of billions of tax dollars and thousands of lives and limbs. Reminder: The original premise was that Saddam Hussein HAD WMDs and was a threat to us. Admit you were wrong about that. Admit that the whole thing was a bad idea. Admit that we, the middle east, and the world is not a better place than it was 6 years ago. Stop changing the premise to "he had intentions of developing WMDs". If that was the original premise it would have been a non-starter. And stop with the term WMD - its meant to make people think that Hussein had weapons that could have resulted in the mushroom clouds and damage that the bombs we dropped on humans in Nagasaki and Hiroshima did. He had and wasnt close to having any such thing. Want a better thought experiment? Think about who is/was responsible for more mass destruction, suffering and death? Saddam Hussein or George W Bush? Why don't you show some guts and tackle a real controversial question that no one has the guts to ask instead of taking another shot at villifying 60 minutes and CBS with a bait and switch tactic that only your ignorant readers would fall for. Thanks for doing more fair and balanced news and commentary.
Hey Karl and Mike, you can't let someone get away with posting the truth like that. Don't just stand there; do something. Attack that guy or girl - say something about them being liberal or not supporting the troops.
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