Harry Hope wrote:

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16291

WMD: Goodbye to all that

Has the US given up on finding weapons of mass destruction, and does
it matter that they weren't found?

By Bill Berkowitz

01.16.04

In early January, the Bush Administration withdrew the Joint Captured
Material Exploitation Group -- a 400-member team searching Iraq for
military equipment -- from the country, leaving about 1,000 people
still involved in the hunt.

David Kay, the head of the team searching for weapons of mass
destruction stockpiles, also appears ready to call it quits.

Hans Blix, the former United Nations chief weapons inspector, believes
the Bush Administration may "have given up on [finding] the weapons."

In a television interview, President Bush wondered what the difference
was between weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass
destruction "programs."

Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair still claims the WMD exist, but by
early January he allowed that he wasn't sure they would ever be found.

And allegations are circulating in British intelligence circles that
Saddam Hussein may have been fooled into believing he actually had
weapons of mass destruction when he didn't.

An early-January story in the Washington Post and a recent report from
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace confirms what all but
administration true believers have suspected to be true for some time:

Iraq had no functioning weapons of mass destruction programs that
could immediately threaten the United States.

In a long piece dated January 7, the Washington Post's Barton Gellman
wrote:

"Investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed
in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden
arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones."

The Carnegie report, entitled "WMD in IRAQ: Evidence and
Implications," concludes that Bush Administration "officials
misrepresented [the] threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missiles
programs over and above intelligence findings."

One of the report's authors, Joseph Cirincione, senior associate and
non-proliferation project director at Carnegie -- a Washington,
DC-based think tank that opposed the war -- stated:

"We think it's highly unlikely that there will be any significant
finds from now on."

The findings in the report were the result of more than six months of
work, and were based on hundreds of documents and dozens of interviews
with specialists, former weapons inspectors and current and former US
officials.

These days, if the Bush Administration has its way, the phrase
"weapons of mass destruction" would disappear into the ether the way
the term "Chads" did after it received more than its 15 minutes during
the counting of the ballots in Florida in 2000.

And while "chads" evoked an almost-playful mockery of all things that
could go wrong politically, the more sinister-sounding "weapons of
mass destruction" (WMD) -- which became President Bush's mantra while
arguing for his invasion of Iraq -- was aimed at signifying a serious
threat to America.

(In 2002, "weapons of mass destruction" was cited by
yourDictionary.com as the second top phrase of the year; WMD still
resonated in 2003, but it dropped to fourth in the Web site's
rankings.)

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As of today, the U.S. troop death toll is 50.

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501

Harry