Another day, another lie revealed

So it develops, reports the Washington Post, that not only did David Kay come up embarrassingly empty on so-called "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, he also shot holes in another part of the prewar propaganda, the claim that Saddam Hussein could at any time pass chemical/biological weapons onto terrorists.

"No evidence of any Iraqi effort to transfer weapons of mass destruction or weapons to terrorists," wrote Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, describing a briefing Kay gave him within the last two weeks. "Only possibility was Saddam's Fedayeen [his son's irregular terrorist force] and talk only."

Let's sum up: Saddam Hussein had, to our best present knowledge after months of investigation and search, no prohibited chemical weapons, no prohibited biological weapons, no prohibited nuclear weapons, no functioning facilities to make any of them, and no intention to pass them on to terrorists even if he had them which he didn't. Was any of what we were told true?

What's really frightening about this is that administration figures continue to endorse the attack on Iraq not only despite all that has come out but almost because of it. For example, as the Post reports,

Last Thursday, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith defended the administration's prewar position at the Council on Foreign Relations. "The idea that we didn't have specific proof that he was planning to give a biological agent to a terrorist group," he said, "doesn't really lead you to anything, because you wouldn't expect to have that information even if it were true. And our intelligence is just not at the point where if Saddam had that intention that we would necessarily know it."

In other words, the invasion was justified not by what we knew but by what we didn't know. (And never mind that we said we did.) This is "preemption" in its crudest, cruelest (but most honest) form, one that allows us to attack any nation, anywhere, anytime, not even because we think it's a threat but because we don't know it's not. Ignorance becomes proof.

Hey, y'know, I think Canada has been looking at us kinda funny lately....