Word: kayes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...preemptive spin from Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice this week has been that Kay's group needs a lot more time to find WMD evidence. U.S. and British officials are also insisting that the belief that Saddam's regime maintained stocks of weapons of mass destruction had been conventional wisdom at the UN before the war - a point contested by former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, who insists that what the UN inspection team maintained was not the existence of prohibited weapons per se, but rather that Iraq had failed to provide satisfactory answers to questions over...
...past six months, the Bush administration and Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair have urged skeptics to be patient. The weapons will be found, they've said repeatedly. It's a big country, and Saddam had a decade to perfect his concealment techniques. Wait for David Kay and his 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group to complete their work. But with Kay due to submit a preliminary report to Congress in the next two weeks, either the Bush administration is playing an excellent game of rope-a-dope by deliberately dampening expectations ahead of a major surprise, or else...
...British officials told various media sources this week that Kay's group has found no unconventional weapons or laboratories to build them, despite their freedom of access throughout Iraq and cooperation from officials of Saddam's regime. Instead, it will show documentary and other evidence suggesting that Saddam's regime harbored the intent to eventually reconstitute its biological and chemical weapons production programs, and had refined the know-how and some of the dual-use infrastructure that would allow it to do so once freed of international scrutiny. Even then, a CIA spokesman says, the report won't reach firm...
...case for going to war without delay was always couched in terms of Iraq being "a grave and gathering danger," and so far, reports suggest, Kay's group has not, thus far, come up with the goods to support that case. Which means that his preliminary report comes at a bad time for the White House and 10 Downing Street. Just this week, polls find President Bush's domestic approval ratings at an all-time low of 49 percent, while his administration faces increasing difficulty in convincing his electorate and legislature to underwrite his commitments of American life and treasure...
...based on the vagaries of a Stalinist bureaucracy in which accounting was routinely exaggerated to please superiors. The question of why Saddam continued to play cat-and-mouse games with the inspectors even if he had destroyed his weapons may relate to his intent to reconstitute his programs. Kay's group will likely show evidence that Saddam's regime worked to keep as much as possible of the infrastructure of a chemical and biological weapons program in place, so that such programs could be rebuilt later. This would square with the oft-cited testimony of key defector Hussein Kamel...