On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 Reed Tryte wrote:
> How likely is this to be accurate?
The Newsweek reporter John Barry claims to have a verified copy of Kemal's statement. And he clearly has Rolk Ekeus's confirmation, a central actor who claims to have been in on the fabrication of evidence from the beginning.
If he's got documents and a witness like that, this is a claim that cries out for follow-up to check it out.
> I thought the inspectors had actually found some stuff from 1991-1998.
If you mean during this tour of duty, I'm pretty sure not. All they've turned up afaik are the famous dozen empty warheads and the missile that goes 15 miles farther than it's supposed. But no stocks of chemical or biological weapons or precursors.
If true, this story means:
1) The US's central piece of evidence that (a) Saddam has lots of weapons left and (b) inspections can't work -- cited only two days ago by Kenneth Pollack in a NYT Op-Ed -- is completely fabricated. That completely changes the balance of cooperation and credibility. If truth and reason matter at all, of course. And secondly,
2) iiuc, it bears on Blix's current search. The conventional wisdom, as recounted once again by Kenneth Pollack last week, is that inspectors were pretty sure that the bulk of the weapons stocks were destroyed by 1995 until Kamel defected and told them the opposite. And that's why Blix is looking for evidence that stocks that existed in 1995 were destroyed since -- solely on the basis of Kamel's testimony. But if Kamel said exactly the opposite, there is no basis for that search.
This seems to imply that Blix has been kept in the dark and doesn't know it, which would be interesting, to put it mildly. It also means the list of Iraq's Things to Do would have gotten enormously shorter.
If reason and truth have anything to do with this, of course.
Michael