Looting?
Moe Freedman
Chris Hitchens says the NY Times has to get its story straight, were there WMD in Iraq? and can you really call a systematic attempt that includes heavy machinery "looting"?
My first question is this: How can it be that, on every page of every other edition for months now, the New York Times has been stating categorically that Iraq harbored no weapons of mass destruction? And there can hardly be a comedy-club third-rater or MoveOn.org activist in the entire country who hasn't stated with sarcastic certainty that the whole WMD fuss was a way of lying the American people into war. So now what? Maybe we should have taken Saddam's propaganda seriously, when his newspaper proudly described Iraq's physicists as "our nuclear mujahideen."Ah, "orginized looting," well that clears it up, doesn't it?My second question is: What's all this about "looting"? The word is used throughout the long report, but here's what it's used to describe. "In four weeks from mid-April to mid-May of 2003 … teams with flatbed trucks and other heavy equipment moved systematically from site to site. … 'The first wave came for the machines,' Dr Araji said. 'The second wave, cables and cranes.' " Perhaps hedging the bet, the Times authors at this point refer to "organized looting."
Thanks, I've fixed it
Does the public have such short memories they actually think they can get away with this?
And just maybe Debka file got it right when they said that truck loads of WMD and the equipment used to manufacture them was hauled off to Syria and Lebanon.
I've long suspected that Saddam's people lied to him and some of what he thought he had didn't exist, while some others were hidden and lost in the desert sands (we uncovered an entire fighter jet buried like that, and that was entirely on accident since a tailfin was sticking out of the sand), and yes, some got moved out of the country, possibly to Syria, Lebanon... and/or Russia.
I'd like to know this answer. If we can get the "liar liar liar liar!" dinks to just shut up, perhaps we can actually have some hope of finding the truth.