Ray McGovern: Well, two things on that. First, the proof is in the pudding. Read what we've written. Well before the war started, we were saying that there certainly weren't enough weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to warrant a war, that there weren't any weapons there that were even a threat to other countries in the region. Second, believe it or not, 85 percent of the material one needs to analyze these crucial problems is available publicly. This has always been the case. With the incredible amount of information available on the Internet, I can by ten o'clock in the morning, be morally certain that I have 80 to 90 percent of the information that's available on a given subject.
I spent 27 years analyzing top officials and their pronouncements, and the media that they control, or the media that was existing in their countries at the time. So media analysis, which is a sub-discipline of political science, is something that one picks up very quickly. The more so when one works on areas like the old Soviet Union or China. So, it's a piece of cake to sit down and look at what Condoleeza[sic] Rice said, and what Colin Powell said.
This is a case in point. On February 24, 2001, Colin Powell said, "Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. Containment has worked. The sanctions have worked. It poses neither a strategic threat, nor a threat to countries within its own region." Rice said pretty much the same thing in July of 2001. What happened?
What happened, indeed?
I've been using Powell and Rice's own words to illustrate that both A and B cannot be true. When David Kay said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that "Nearly everybody got it wrong" in reference to Iraq's WMD programs, one has to ask just who Mr. Kay asked?
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