David Kay.........No WMD!

[Gimpy]

Welcome aboard. Good to have another "Volunteer" on board.

I can see some validity to your point. However, after years and years of searching by the U.N. inspectors and now nearly 10 months and $900 million of U.S. inspectors and $$$$$ I feel that David Kay and his assesment of "no WMD" since the early 1990's are clearly the facts.

Here's is another's view of the sitiation:

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Kay Testimony Impeaches Bush

By Robert Scheer,
January 26, 2004

Can we now talk impeachment?


The rueful admission by the chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction or the means to create them raises the prospect that the Bush administration is complicit in the greatest scandal in U.S. history. Yet, we hear no calls for a broad-ranging investigation of the type that led to the discovery of Monica Lewinsky's infamous blue dress.


In no previous instance of presidential malfeasance was so much at stake, in preserving both constitutional safeguards and national security. This egregious deception, which lead us to war on the basis of phony intelligence, overshadow previous scandals motivated by greed, such as Teapot Dome, or partisanship, such as Watergate. What is more, the White House continues to dig itself deeper into a hole by denying reality even as its lieutenants, one-by-one, find the courage to speak the truth.


A year after using his State of the Union Address to paint Iraq's allegedly vast arsenal of WMD as a grave threat to the U.S. and the world ? and even citing forged documents in those "16 words" about African uranium sales ? Bush spent this month's State of the Union defending the war because "had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day." Bush said officials were still "seeking all the facts" about Iraq's weapons programs, but noted that weapons searchers had already identified "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."


Vice President Dick Cheney in interviews with USA Today and the Los Angeles Times echoed this rhetorical fudging ? last year "weapons," this year "programs" ? declaring that "the jury's still out" on whether Iraq had WMD. Cheney declared, "I am a long way at this stage from concluding that somehow there was some fundamental flaw in our intelligence."


But a mere three days after the State of the Union Address, Kay quit and told the world what the Bush administration had been denying since taking office: That Saddam Hussein's regime was but a weak shadow of the semi-fearsome military force it had been at the time of the first Gulf War; that it had no significant chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs or stockpiles still in place; and that the U.N. inspections and Allied bombing runs in the 1990s had been much more effective than their critics had believed at destroying the remnants of these programs, which simply eroded into dust.


"I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction," Kay told the New York Times. "We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on. I think they gradually reduced stockpiles throughout the 1990's. Somewhere in the mid-1990's the large chemical overhang of existing stockpiles was eliminated. The Iraqis say the they believed that [the UN inspection system] was more effective [than U.S. analysts believed it was], and they didn't want to get caught."


The maddening aspect of all this is that we haven't needed ? although his is a welcome, if belated, breath of honesty ? David Kay to set the record straight. The evidence of the Bush administration's systematic abuse of the facts and its own intelligence has been out there for all who wanted to see it for nearly two years. That's why 23 former intelligence and foreign service employees of the United States government ? including several who quit in disgust ? have been willing to speak out in Robert Greenwald's shocking documentary "Uncovered." The story they tell is one of an administration that decided to go to war for reasons that smack of empire-building, and then constructed a false reality in order to sell it to the American people. Is that not an impeachable offense?


After all, the President misled Congress into approving his preemptive war on the grounds that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction threatened our very survival as a nation. If we hesitated and allowed the UN inspectors who were on the ground in Iraq to do their job, a mushroom cloud over New York ? to use Condoleezza Rice's imagery ? might well be our dark reward. Now David Kay ? who, it should be remembered, originally defended the war and dismissed the work of the UN inspectors ? has spent $900 million dollars and the time of 1400 weapons inspectors to discover what many in the CIA and elsewhere had been telling us all along. Are there to be no real repercussions for such a devastating official deceit?


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[Jake]

There are valid points all around, but you know, I have problems even considering things that start out with "Can we now talk impeachment." This takes it out of the realm of consideration in open forum to partisan politics. Being American, I see it as an American problem, and know that President Bush (no, he's not dubya, W, shrub or any other sophomoric appelation that people hang on him) believed that there were WMDs in Iraq, based upon the best intelligence that was available to him at the time, as did President Clinton (also deserving of the respect of using his name, rather than slick willie, draft dodger, etc), and the majority of politicians on the hill today. Historical usage of weapons of mass destruction, stockpiles known to be in existence at the Iraqi terminated end of UN inspections years ago, and belligerance on the part of the Iraqi government, up until the time of the invasion of Iraq all pointed in the same direction.

We haven't found them yet. We may, and we may not. But the political gameplaying of both the left and the right make slaves of each and every person who takes an article by someone who has the wherewithal to type a coherent statement based on rumor, innuendo and supposition as fact, soley to support their ulterior motivations of impeachment. Problematically, this causes statements of fact to be viewed with equal suspicion by both sides...the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.

Impeachment requires, by constitutional law, commission of "high crimes" and misdemeanors. People cite President Clinton's impeachment as equitable with an impeachment of President Bush for his statements concerning his belief that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Problem here is that it is an "apples and oranges" analogy.

President Clinton was convicted of KNOWINGLY lying to Congress and the judiciary under oath. Simply stated, perjury, which he supported in his later testimonies declaring that he had stated "untruths." Now, were President Bush to be sworn in as to the mandate of giving testimony, vs. his beliefs, and he were to say, "There ARE NOW weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," and he was challenged to provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt (this is required in a high crimes and misdemeanors case), he could be impeached if he then said he had no presentable proof and/or had manufactured proof.

But based on the statements of his predecessor, the official government stand from the Clinton years and carrying over to the Bush presidency was consistent. Iraq was assumed to have weapons of mass destruction and remained belligerant to the enforcement of UN sanctions and, in the George H.W. Bush presidency, his agreement under the terms of surrender terminating the Gulf War (another legally binding document) was binding as to his agreement to free and open UN inspections, which he immediately renegged upon. Iraq's belligerance after the Gulf war is unquestionable, as under the Clinton administration, hundreds of strikes were made against dedicated Iraqi targets. This continued into the presidency at present.

Now, there's a remedy for not liking the president in power in the US...it's called the vote. It's an option that's available every 4 years, whether he's doing a good job or a bad job. Makes no difference to the Constitution...we vote to allow him to remain in office or to go home. Seems to me that it's a good system, since it's lasted 228 years. It would serve the American people better if information was passed by those without axes to grind and without all of the hyperbole and rhetoric of impotent rage.

Let the facts stand on their own. The truth will always set us free.

Jake

[Gimpy]

"Let the facts stand on their own. The truth will always set us free."

I feel certain that some day .....they will!