I suggest you read exactly what David Kay said very carefully. What Kay says does not contradict what a senior high ranking Iraqi airforce general claimed. To sum it up, read What David Kay really said, by Charles Krauthammer.

And to throw in another old piece of the puzzle, almost ignored by the major press agencies, have a peak here and follow the links.

And if you think that anti-Syrian dissidents could never provide you with serious reliable intel, go back and read the David Kay transcript, where he reminds all of us who told the world about Iran's nuclear program - and it wasn't the CIA or MI5.

But go ahead. Dismiss a book because it's published by a "small christian publishing firm." How blinkered can you get?! :nope:

It seems I need to make a small retraction. I said that David Kay does not contradict what Vice General Sada has been claiming.

My mistake.

David Kay is much in agreement with Sada.

You left out the part I mentioned about it being written by a former Iraqi henchman and his claims not having any independent verification. The usual standard of evidence for a claim to be taken seriously is independent corroboration and there is none here, so why shouldn't I dismiss it?

This is what Kay says in that article:

"We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he said. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved"

How does this corroborate anything when Kay can't state exactly what supposedly went to Syria? He says we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials, and this guy Sada is presumably one of those officials... so Sada says... and Kay says basically that people like Sadda are saying... and this is proof? So if I say Bigfoot exists and someone confirms I said that, then by this standard of "proof" Bigfoot must exist. Boggling.

Your logic is indeed boggling.

First you say you'd rather believe in Kay than in some former Iraqi vice general. Then you say that Kay's informational is surely unreliable because certainly this guy Sada is in your exact words "presumably one of those officials".

Make up your mind.

BTW, If Sada is "presumably one of those officials", how many more were there? Did Kay's interviews with them indicate that Sada was not the only one to state that Syria was involved? Or may this simply be a case of 10 bigfoots dancing around David Kay, of whom you stated:

"I guess it comes down to which is more credible: David Kay and his team who've scoured Iraq and interogated members of the regime."

Actually, you're not boggling. You're juggling. Advice: keep your eye on the ball. Lord knows the west's intel agencies didn't.

Its pretty straight forward actually, at least to me: Kay says only that based on interrogations, some components went to Syria. However he doesn't indicate exactly what, and he states clearly that this is only based on interrogations. He never says definitively that anything went to Syria, nor does he claim anything has corroborated these interrogations. Therefore I can accept exactly what he's saying at face value, and this doesn't contradict my unwillingness to believe whatever was told to him in these interrogations as nowhere does he say that info has been verified. In fact, he says this is something that still needs to be resolved. Which is exactly my own position: that nothing has yet been proven as far as these claims that Iraqi WMD were shipped to Syria.

What you have now stated is pretty much my opinion.

These are things that need to be resolved.

Nothing has been proven yet.

As I said in the very first sentence of this thread:

"There have been a number of recent relevant stories and documentation regarding the existance or not of Iraq's WMDs."

yes... the media is repleat with em... just as the media is full of stories of Bigfoot sightings, UFO sightings... Close Encounters...

only an irrational mentality would use these as a basis for any arguement...

and miss philips is a journalist... not an authority on any military weaponry, iraq, or the geopolitical nature of the hussien regime...

again, only an irrational mentality would use anything as a sound basis for any arguement on this topic...

your ability to operate in a contimuum that ignores fact is absoulutely amazing...


--Mike

I'm sorry but I do not subscribe to the National Enquirer. Send me your old copies.
An emotionally irrational statement in itself.
So then we can discount all journalistic sources around the world for news, with that logic.

Oh well, maybe it really is time to subscribe to National Enquirer.
David Kay is irrational. General Sada is irrational. The translators of documents found so far in the FMSO archives are irrational. Paul Gaubatz, interviewed in the 1st article I linked to at the start of the thread, is irrational.

Mike, here, is rational.

End of argument.
:rotfl:

just as i thought Avon...

in the light of irrefutable facts, you have nothing to say... and it took you all of 8 lines to say it in.

--Mike

There are no facts in your previous post.

:-j Surprise! :-j

:zzz:

one big, obvious fact... one that seems to illude your obscurred vision...

no WMDs have been confiscated by the US military or any other allied forces as todays date

none... zero... ziltch... nada...


--Mike

:zzz:

Wake me up when they find some actual weapons.

Speculation-speculation. And the fact remains that, no matter how you want to slice it, Iraq was not invaded because of WMD concerns or immediate security threats, but for political reasons.

Shock and awe! - a war for political reasons! What else is new? :hmm:

Let's ignore the missiles that were indeed found.

If Saddam had planned to move all banned weapons systems out of the country and had maybe over a decade to do so, do you think that he could have succeeded, in your opinion?

Which are?

There's a lot of ways of putting it. Washington seems to like the title "regime change".

I think it's fairly obvious that the US is pursuing a certain agenda towards the Middle East; and tossing aside whatever ideological slants I might have - there's really nothing unusual or neccesarily wrong with that.

My view of this whole thing has really been as more or less an excuse rather than a real reason. Frankly, in realpolitik terms, the long-term benefits of a more "US-friendly" arab world almost certainly outweigh the risks of a chemical attack in the United States. Not that anyone in Washington (who wants to keep their post) would be willing to admit that. :hmm:

And why was that?
The fact that there is an agenda does not mean that the war was started to implement that agenda but rather that the agenda was considered possible once the US went to war.

In any case, I think the agenda is terribly flawed.

I guess the question I should ask is "was Saddam's Iraq a real threat to US security?"

Personally, I never really saw it that way. Probably not more than Saudi Arabia (a fertile breeding ground for extremists a-la Bin Laden), and certainly less than Iraq as it is now.

As far as the WMDs though, to me the US administration's backpedalling on their original claims has been a good indicator.

Again, it's not that it'd shock me if Saddam had WMDs (he had them in the 80's); I'd just like to see an actual WMD (not a delivery system or raw-and-needing-a-lot-of-processing materials) before coming to a conclusion.

you can talk and talk and talk to her... and present her with the all the facts as they stand today... but you'd be wasting your time...

she obviously isn't interested in facts at all...

http://waltonfeed.com/pic/ostrich.gif

--Mike

I like your new sig, Mike. :up: