Saddam WMD follow up

Response received

Professor McAdams replies that I ``do not seem to seriously challenge the notion that virtually everybody fully believed that Saddam had WMDs,'' and that I ``talk around'' his points.

Okay, I see how I could be more direct.

What I do examine in the previous post is what ``fully believed'' means. When did Saddam have weapons? How did he get them? What shape were they in in 2002-3? Sure, we can find a point in history where everybody thinks Saddam had some weapons. I have a whitepaper posted here that traces Saddam's bioweapons to a UK cow. But the litany of items I cite reveal a great deal of fraud that officials communicated to the public.

I want to show that tracing these frauds is not a product of someone who is ``just completely heedless of any standards of telling the truth or making a plausible argument.''

And I did point out that the Germans certainly did not buy the story told them by Curveball. So there is a counterexample to ``everybody fully believed.'' Again, I certainly could be more direct.

And what about Kamel? The secret UN debriefings that Rangwala and Newsweek's John Barry revealed clearly show something less than ``full belief'' that the weapons were extant. Beyond that, by reading through Rangwala's site, as I recommend, you find a whole lot of just the opposite of ``full belief.''

Furthermore, though I did not reach back to the Clinton years in any detail in my piece, I do challenge Khidir Hamza, ``Saddam's Bombmaker.'' A lot of people were fooled by that guy, including the very knowledgeable and thorough David Albright, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. So it's not surprising that a lot of stories like "Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported", cited by Kagan, were around in 1998.