Node Of Evil - Fair And Balanced Reporting

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

 
As the bombs fall on Iraq in an attempt to get Saddam Hussein (who may or may not have survived to deliver a taped address to Iraqi citizens this morning), we're still interested in whether or not there are chemical/biological/nuclear weapons (herein called CBNs) in Iraq. The Financial Times is reporting that the U.S. military has a list of 300 sites that it'd like to check for these weapons. According to the story, however, this list of sites is based on a rather wide criteria -- it was assembled based on which areas looked like they might house CBNs from satellite photographs. The report cites an example of one building that's on the list because it looks like it might be big enough to house Scud missiles, even though its access roads aren't wide enough to offload or load Scuds. We're interested to see how many of these "sites" were on the U.N. inspector's lists and how many actually end up containing weapons. The U.S. is in a tough spot, however; if these sites have weapons and the U.S. knew about it but didn't tell the inspectors, then it stands accused of witholding information the inspectors could have used to do their jobs. However, since U.S. intelligence released to inspectors so far has been uniformly bad then that list may point out these weaknesses in U.S. intelligence gathering. Perhaps all the good human intel sources were being used to track down Hussein. Not that this isn't a worthy goal -- if he goes and his sons go, then we're a good way towards the end of the conflict. Nevertheless, the lack of a good-faith effort on the part of the United States to support the inspectors would add to the embarrasment of losing the diplomatic battle.

Andrew 11:15 PM : |

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