Frank Gaffney, a former Timothy Leary disciple now suffering flashbacks as the director of the Security Policy Institute, has an article in the Washington Times’ magazine in which he lays out the case that Saddam was a brutal despot fiercely intent on one day reconstituting his banned weapons programs and that what the Iraq Survey Group desperately needs is more time, money and manpower to prove it.
He also recites the canard that the ISG was given botulinum toxin—it was botulinum bacteria, and a strain no one has been able to weaponize—by an Iraqi scientist, and notes that the ISG has secured and searched only 10 of 130 (that we know about) ammunition dumps in the country.
It’s more than a bit disorienting to read an article like Gaffney’s—not to mention this entry in the BushBlog—which posits that the threat was so serious that we had no choice but to abort the UN inspections and invade, while at the same time people such as Andy Sullivan are still disputing that the administration ever portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat. Also contributing to the crossfire are the conservatives such as Cato’s Alan Reynolds who thought the war was stupid to begin with and still think so.
No wonder Bush likes his news heavily filtered.
[...] a week or two more than 7 years, because I forgot about it. I published the first of 1,923 posts (quite a few written by others who were gracious enough to help me out) on October 22 of [...]