Tonight is President Bush’s State of the Union address. And this AP article comes across with a sort of malicious satisfaction that no WMD capabilities have been found in Iraq, leading Bush to focus more on domestic issues in his speech tonight.
This year, Bush will mention the search by David Kay, named by the CIA in June to lead the search for weapons of mass destruction. In nearly 10 months, not a single item has been found in Iraq from a long and classified intelligence list of weapons of mass destruction.
But in my mind, the article is too quick to dismiss the findings of the very same inspector to which it refers. Kay’s Oct. report of last year documented quite well Saddam’s WMD-related activities.
- We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002.
- A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.
- In addition to the discovery of extensive concealment efforts, we have been faced with a systematic sanitization of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories, and companies suspected of WMD work. The pattern of these efforts to erase evidence — hard drives destroyed, specific files burned, equipment cleaned of all traces of use — are ones of deliberate, rather than random, acts.
As for Bush’s speech, we’ll just have to see.