Needlenose

Chief weapons inspector David Kay released his long awaited report (Awaited by whom? Like there were going to be any surprises!) on Iraq’s imaginary WMD program; King George the Witless immediately seized upon it and stated that he was “even more convinced with the Kay report that we did the right thing.”

What did Kay have to say? Well for one thing, Iraq’s WMD program spanned more than two decades! Gee, now that’s impressive. Hey wait a moment, my own personal WMD program has lasted at least that long! I just haven’t accomplished much! And apparently, neither had Hussein! Apparently, Kay determined that Iraq’s WMD program “involved thousands of people, billions of dollars and was elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Occupation Freedom.” Wow, talk about a poor return-on-investment! Hey David, have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor? Maybe the program wasn’t super-secret…maybe…wait for it here…maybe it didn’t even exist!.

Well Kay isn’t as stupid as his master, and apparently he has recently entertained that very notion, although as only one of the explanations for how that multi-billion dollar lethal cornucopia could have vanished without a trace! As was expected, Kay came forward with no new evidence. He did put forward a bit of circumstantial evidence, noting that two key scientists who had collaborated with his team were unceremoniously wacked by the Iraqi underground, and reasoned that perhaps the other scientists were still ‘too scared’ to come forward with real evidence. Hmm, that strikes me as additional evidence that Dubya and his commanders are again failing in their Geneva-Convention duty of protecting Iraqi civilians – Geez, George, can’t you even run a witness protection program? Can we say ‘war-crime?’

But if after searching for half-a-year Kay had managed to turn up some real, but unrelated evidence that maybe Hussein was trying to start up a WMD program…so what? None of Dubya’s so-called pre-war ‘intelligence’ turned out to be correct! In U.S. criminal law, if you search a vehicle with a warrant issued on probable cause looking for evidence of one crime, but find evidence of another, it’s okay to bust the perp for the other crime. If, however, it turns out that the original warrant was issued under false pretenses, can you imagine how fast the case would be thrown out of court? David Kay – either tell the truth, or STFU and resign.

A
King George the Witless delegated ‘the Israel problem’ to Colin ‘Spineless’ Powell when it became apparent that Sharon was going to give the Roadmap, and the U.S., the finger.

After whinging and dithering and doing nothing for half-a-year after gaining responsibility for something from his stupid boss, Colin finally took a stand on the building of a particularly flagrant piece of the Sharon’s Roadmap-defying Great Wall of Greater Israel – that is, he took a stand ‘sort-of.’

You see, Sharon wanted to build a particularly gerrymandered piece of wall to protect a settlement located deep within occupied territory – one that would cut through the middle of a Palestinian University, among other things. When Powell whined a bit (and threatened to reduce Israel’s annual $8 billion dollar handout by the amount of the cost of the fence), Sharon graciously decided to leave a few gaps in the wall, so the locals along the path wouldn’t be 100% cut off from their former neighbors, friends and families.

And like the proverbial 90-lb. weakling comic-book advertisement fame, Powell is just standing there and taking it as the bully kicks sand in his face and walks off with the girl. Says Mr. Powell:

“The gaps in and of themselves do not satisfy me,” Powell said in an interview Friday. “The question is what becomes of the gaps in due course. We have not yet come to a conclusion about what to do and what our action should be, [but the officials] examined the fence, where it’s going and how it’s going, the settlements and what our obligations are under the law under these matters.”

Yeah, I bet ‘The Butcher of Sabra” started quaking in his boots when he heard that!

Remember those claims by Bushites about how Iraq’s oil would help cover the costs of recovering from a war? They were wrong, of course, but it turns out that they weren’t just mistakenly wishful thinking — just as with Iraq’s supposed unconventional weapons and the imagined ease of establishing a pro-American government, they were brazen, conscious lies about what the government knew to be true.

In a story for tomorrow’s New York Times, Jeff Gerth* explains:

The Bush administration’s optimistic statements earlier this year that Iraq’s oil wealth, not American taxpayers, would cover most of the cost of rebuilding Iraq were at odds with a bleaker assessment of a government task force secretly established last fall to study Iraq’s oil industry, according to public records and government officials.

The task force, which was based at the Pentagon as part of the planning for the war, produced a book-length report that described the Iraqi oil industry as so badly damaged by a decade of trade embargoes that its production capacity had fallen by more than 25 percent, panel members have said.

Despite those findings, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress during the war that “we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”

Moreover, Vice President Dick Cheney said in April, on the day Baghdad fell, that Iraq’s oil production could hit 3 million barrels a day by the end of the year, even though the task force had determined that Iraq was generating less than 2.4 million barrels a day before the war.

Now, as the Bush administration requests $20.3 billion from Congress for reconstruction next year, the chief reasons cited for the high price tag are sabotage of oil equipment — and the poor state of oil infrastructure already documented by the task force.

* — Yes, that Jeff Gerth, if you remember his journalistic atrocities during the Whitewater era and with regard to Wen Ho Lee. But if you look at this story closely, you’ll see his facts are much more solid, and there’s a near-total absence of anonymous sources. For whatever reason, he appears to have fallen back on real reporting.