Ritter's Newsday articleI spoke with John Kerry about what I held to be the hyped-up intelligence regarding the threat posed by Iraq's WMD. "Put it in writing," Kerry told me, "and send it to me so I can review what you're saying in detail."
I did just that, penning a comprehensive article for Arms Control Today, the journal of the Arms Control Association, on the "Case for the Qualitative Disarmament of Iraq." This article, published in June 2000, provided a detailed breakdown of Iraq's WMD capability and made a comprehensive case that Iraq did not pose an imminent threat. I asked the Arms Control Association to send several copies to Sen. Kerry's office but, just to make sure, I sent him one myself.snip
Despite receiving thousands of phone calls, letters and e-mails demanding that dissenting expert opinion, including my own, be aired at the hearing, Sen. Kerry apparently did nothing=============================================================
Kerry should hang from the gibbet, right? Not exactly. First, Ritter does not declare Saddam to be WMD-free. He does declare him to NOT be an imminent threat. Further, Ritter does not give any facts on Kerry's complicity beyond his vote and "apparent" inaction in committee. In my opinion, until the facts are laid out, this does NOT makes him equivalent to BUSH in misleading the country--Ritter weasels around this point, but the implication is that Kerry is as guilty as Bush. I reject this outright because the facts as given in the article do NOT support it--assuming the worst without the facts is the kind of reasoning that helped Bush during the lead up to war.
What of the Arms Control Association article that Ritter sent to Kerry? That article, the
"Case for the Qualitative Disarmament of Iraq", details a lot of important information about Iraq and WMD leading up to 1998--every DUer should read it to avoid the widespread ignorance on this issue. There are a few important points:
...given the Iraqi record of half-truths and outright false statements, UNSCOM had difficulty accepting any declaration by Iraq that was not backed up with documents or other verifiable evidence. The fact that Iraq maintained it did not have such documents meant that UNSCOM was faced with trying to prove a negative, which in and of itself is an almost impossible task.This is the crux of it. This is why Hans Blix, and most major political leaders were not at all sanguine about declaring Saddam had no WMD. Iraq had been quite duplicitous in the past, forcing the UNSCOM to prove beyond a doubt in 1995 the Iraqi capability to produce VX gas, for example.
Ritter goes on to show the evidence that Iraq's CW capability had been destroyed to a great extent, and that the remaining unaccounted for material (including VX and mustard gas), could be ASSUMED to have been deteriorated. For the mustard gas:
The other issue is the mustard-filled artillery shells. Iraq declared to UNSCOM that it had a stockpile of 13,500 such shells on the eve of the Persian Gulf War. UNSCOM supervised the destruction of 12,747 of these shells, and Iraq declared that the remaining shells had been destroyed by aerial bombardment...And for the VX:
The remaining question over Iraq's VX program hinges on the discovery of chemical traces unique to stabilized VX on several destroyed Scud warhead fragments that were excavated by UNSCOM in early 1998. Iraq disputes this finding, admitting that while it did succeed in producing stabilized VX on a laboratory scale, it never weaponized stabilized VX. The Iraqi argument appears to be valid. Producing significant stocks of VX for use on weapons that would still be viable today would have required an advance in CW technology that Iraq did not demonstrate.This is all evidence that should have been brought up in the committee hearing (including other sections of Ritter's article) and included in the final report. This committee hearing was mostly made up of false witnesses who told fantastical stories about an Iraq WMD program light years beyond what Ritter had seen and experienced. The blackout on dissenting information extended far beyond the Senate, and the blackout withIN the Senate can hardly be blamed on Kerry alone.
If the facts show that Kerry wilfully obfuscated evidence in order to go to war, then I will be as angry as you like. But so far the facts DON'T show that, and it is only overeagerness to hang Kerry that makes DUers forget their critical thinking skills in this case. Show me the facts, and then you'll have my ear.