SENATORS WERE TOLD IRAQI WEAPONS COULD HIT U.S. http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/localstoryN1216NELSON.htm
[it not only looks like the Bush crowd were bigger liars than we thought but that the Senate is a good deal dumber than we thought]
JOHN MCCARTHY FLORIDA TODAY - U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities. Nelson, D-Tallahassee, said about 75 senators got that news during a classified briefing before last October's congressional vote authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nelson voted in favor of using military force. Nelson said he couldn't reveal who in the administration gave the briefing. . .
"That's news," said John Pike, director of Global Security, a Washington, D.C.-area military and intelligence think tank. "I had not heard that that was the assessment of the intelligence community. I had not heard that the Congress had been briefed on this.". . . Pike said any UAVs Iraq might have had would have had a range of only several hundred kilometers, enough to hit targets in the Middle East but not the United States.
DEFENSE TECH - This tale of drone attack was beyond unlikely last year - and looks even more absurd now. According to every public report about Iraq's "unmanned air force," Saddam's UAV fleet consisted of, at best, a couple of ancient Czech training drones. These planes have a maximum range of 800 miles or so - not nearly enough to reach anywhere close to American shores. In fact, only the world's most-advanced UAVs, like the American Global Hawk, could make such a trip.
The only realistic way such drones could hit the U.S. - and this isn't terribly realistic - is if Saddam packed them onto boats, which would then have to sneak past the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf, slip through the Suez Canal, tiptoe through the Mediterranean, and make their way to the middle of the Atlantic. Only then could this unmanned cargo - packed with the chemical or biological arms that have so far proved so elusive - be launched from these ultra-stealthy ships. Pretty unlikely stuff.