The cover story for this week's
Time Magazine sheds a rather different light on the "Where are they?" question: They weren't there, but Saddam
thought they were. An excerpt from the article:
Quote:Saddam's underlings appear to have invented weapons programs and fabricated experiments to keep the funding coming. The Mukhabarat captain says the scamming went all the way to the top of the mic to its director, Huweish, who would appease Saddam with every report, never telling him the truth about failures or production levels and meanwhile siphoning money from projects. "He would tell the President he had invented a new missile for Stealth bombers but hadn't. So Saddam would say, 'Make 20 missiles.' He would make one and put the rest in his pocket," says the captain. Colonel Hussan al-Duri, who spent several years in the 1990s as an air-defense inspector, saw similar cons. "Some projects were just stealing money," he says. A scientist or officer would say he needed $10 million to build a special weapon. "They would produce great reports, but there was never anything behind them."
If Saddam may not have known the true nature of his own arsenal, it is no wonder that Western intelligence services were picking up so many clues about so many weapons systems. But it helps answer one logical argument that the Administration has been making ever since the weapons failed to appear after the war ended: why, if Saddam had nothing to hide, did he endure billions of dollars in sanctions and ultimately prompt his own destruction? Perhaps because even he was mistaken about what was really at stake in this fight.
And just to keep the Cheney debate going, simply because Dick Lautenberg claims the arrangements are illegal does not make them so, no matter how many
NON-JUDICIAL opinions or studies allege they may be. Appearances can be deceiving, to say the least, as echoed in the questions raised by
Time's current cover story as cited above. The Administration position re Cheney/Halliburton is precisely that all pertinent legal requirements have been met or exceeded. If The Opposition is able to prosecute their charge successfully, I will be most surprised. In fact, I doubt they will even be able, on the face of available "evidence", to get a court to consider their allegations. Law is law, opinions are opinions.
