[1:40 PM] Here’s the entire transcript (it's long) of David Kay’s testimony two days ago before the Senate Armed Services Committee. I haven’t read the entire thing yet. But as soon as I do, I’ll comment.

[12:29 PM] The whole David Kay affair is looking much like the whole Iraq war debate. There are multiple ways to look at it and we seem to be looking at the issue from none of the ways that are useful.

Kay is now trying to say that this was a failure of intelligence. What happened to all that talk about the White House leaning on intelligence analysts and the State Department’s assessments in the National Intelligence Estimate being ignored? Here’s an excerpt from a WaPo article last July. Does no one remember this?

President Bush and his national security adviser did not entirely read the most authoritative prewar assessment of U.S. intelligence on Iraq, including a State Department claim that an allegation Bush would later use in his State of the Union address was "highly dubious," White House officials said yesterday…

The report declared that "most" of the six intelligence agencies believed there was "compelling evidence that Saddam [Hussein] is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort for Baghdad's nuclear weapons program." But the document also included a pointed dissent by the State Department, which said the evidence did not "add up to a compelling case" that Iraq was making a comprehensive effort to get nuclear weapons…

A senior administration official who briefed reporters yesterday said neither Bush nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice read the NIE in its entirety.

Let’s remember in this debate that the intelligence community is more than just the CIA.

Kay also seems to be playing on the tendency to think that intelligence estimates come in the form of “Mr. President, we’re 150% sure that Iraq has x.” We know that it doesn’t happen this way and surely it didn’t with Iraq. Isn’t this what an administration is supposed to weigh? If they guess wrong, well the laws of probability simply say that that’s going to happen at some point. But that does not constitute an intelligence failure.

And have we forgotten these allegations of VP Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz leaning on analysts over their Iraq analyses? Apparently we have. Note to Democratic candidates…

[3:50 PM] Dick Cheney’s assertions about Iraq, which contradict even other administration officials, including Colin Powell, are worth seeing in full. This comes from the transcript of his NPR interview with Juan Williams. Note my comments in brackets

WILLIAMS: You were also among the most confident of any in the administration that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq. Has the administration officially given up on finding any weapons of mass destruction?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: No, we haven't, Juan. I believe they had programs designed to produce weapons of mass destruction [This is not disputed (see my verb tense discussion below). When in the past is what is in question. Removing any specific qualifiers allows this adminstration to continually conflate Saddam's pre- and immediately post-Gulf War I WMD programs with the yet unfound and alleged programs just prior to Gulf War II]. We still don't know the whole extent of what they did have. It's gonna take some additional, considerable period of time in order to look in all of the cubby holes and the ammo dumps and all the places in Iraq where you might expect to find something like that.

WILLIAMS: When the president says in the State of the Union that we're looking now for weapons of mass destruction-related programs, can that be interpreted as the administration backing away from the assertion that weapons of mass destruction might be in Iraq?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Well, it's a debate. You know, do you have, say, a stockpile of biological agents, say, anthrax? In some cases we believe part of this was because this was provided by the United Nations and the United Nations got it from the Iraqis, that they did have large stocks of anthrax, large stocks of VX nerve agent [Note the tense used. The administration frequently does this and intentionally does not distinguish between the distant past—i.e. first Gulf War and time since UNSCOM inspectors left in 1998—using UN figures of what they believed was unaccounted for by the Iraqis as an inventory of what Iraq must have]. Now this wasn't something we dreamed up or something that was thought about at CIA. Everybody believed it and had good reason to believe it and, of course, they'd used chemical weapons previously, so the presumption would have been that it was, in fact, there.

In terms of the question what is there now, we know for example that prior to our going in that he had spent time and effort acquiring mobile biological weapons labs, and we're quite confident he did, in fact, have such a program. We've found a couple of semi trailers at this point which we believe were, in fact, part of that program. Now it's not clear at this stage whether or not he used any of that to produce or whether he was simply getting ready for the next war. That, in my mind, is a serious danger in the hands of a man like Saddam Hussein, and I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did, in fact, have programs for weapons of mass destruction.

WILLIAMS: Would you consider what has taken place so far a failure of intelligence, and does it endanger taking some sort of preemptory action on the part of the US government if our intelligence is not sufficiently good to be relied on?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: I can't say that, Juan. I think, first of all, it's important to remember it's intelligence. You know, you're trying to collect information about a regime that is doing everything it can to hide that information, about a regime that you've been to war with before, about a regime that's an absolutely brutal dictatorship with only a handful of people likely to know the information you want to get your hands on. So it's a tough intelligence problem just to begin with, and what you have to do is rely on the intelligence community to collect and analyze the data that's available, and then you have to act on it. You know, you get bits and pieces.

But remember what we had in Saddam Hussein. We know he was running one of the bloodiest regimes in history. We know he had used chemical weapons against the Iranians and against the Kurds. We had information based on the Gulf War that we'd underestimated his program then. You put all that together and you provide that then to the president. What's he supposed to say? Gonna ignore it? Even Bill Clinton in 1998 was making statements about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction that were based upon the same basic fundamental intelligence that we had when we arrived here two years later [this again is a bogus strategy: “We’re doing just continuing Clinton era policy. Clinton never advocated an invasion of Iraq].

WILLIAMS: Now in Paul O'Neill's book, he suggests that the administration wanted to go after Saddam Hussein even before 9/11 occurred. Is that right?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Well, you've got to remember the policy that we inherited was the policy of the Clinton administration, and it called for regime change [See my previous note on this. Being desirous of regime change is not the same as invasion planning]. That's something that Bill Clinton decided on. We continued it. We agreed with it. And it said that Saddam Hussein needed to be dealt with and effectively removed from power.

WILLIAMS: Now we had a recent memo that indicated that there was a lack of connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and Saddam had warned, in fact, his supporters against working with al-Qaeda and other Arab fighters. What do you make of that memo?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: I think it's probably the kind of memo that he would put out in order to try to maintain any control over that connection. But if he had such a connection, and I believe he did, that it would be limited to very few people, handled in a very narrow track, and not widely discussed or known about within his own government. That's not the way he did business.

WILLIAMS: But you continue to believe it?

Vice Pres. CHENEY: I continue to believe. I think there's overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government. [There’s overwhelming evidence according to the Vice President of the United States. But we can’t really share that with the American people, or apparently the State Department or the CIA] We've discovered since documents indicating that a guy named Abdul Rahman Yasin, who was a part of the team that attacked the World Trade Center in '93, when he arrived back in Iraq was put on the payroll and provided a house, safe harbor and sanctuary [so there’s a direct link between the 1993 bombing and al-Qaida? The Yasin story has been known for some time. This is far, far from overwhelming evidence of a Saddam-al-Qaida link]. That's public information now. So Saddam Hussein had an established track record of providing safe harbor and sanctuary for terrorists. He did for Abu Nidal for years. Palestinian, Islamic Jihad, other organizations found safe harbor in Iraq [See my previous note. We know Saddam was a bad guy; what we’re looking for here is this "overwhelming" evidence you mentioned of a Saddam-al-Qaida link]. He provided bonus payments to the families of suicide bombers in Israel. I mean, this is a guy who was an advocate and a supporter of terrorism whenever it suited his purpose, and I'm very confident that there was an established relationship there.

[12:19 PM] Even though Iraq maintains extensive and ominous “weapons related program activities” (no comment since I couldn’t add anything to the lampooning of this ridiculous nugget from the SOTU address), perhaps we should hear more about what’s happening in North Korea, where the North Koreans have apparently swung open the door to not just “weapons related program activities” but said, “hey wanna see some weapons grade plutonium?” Read Siegfried Hecker’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations committee on his trip to the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center. In interviews Hecker seems convinced that the North Korean’s are serious about reaching a diplomatic solution. When will the administration stop clinging to these ridiculous Iraq assertions and get serious as well (click here for an NPR interview in which Vice-President Cheney makes bizarre remarks about Iraq’s WMD and al-Qaida connections that go well beyond what other people in the administration are saying).

[5:26 PM] A op-ed in the Washington Times (a poorly written one I should add) brings up the elephant in the room again regarding the U.S. and WMD in the Middle East – the Israeli double standard.

Israel possesses nuclear weapons, not for prestige or offensive purposes, but solely to deter against threats to its existence. Yet, over the long-term, Israel's arsenal of taboo weapons will prompt its adversaries to seek countervailing capabilities that could test the durability of deterrence. Strategically, Israel would be better off in a region where no one possessed any weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, Israeli leaders have acknowledged this by endorsing annually at the United Nations, for the last two decades, the idea of making the Middle East a zone free of all WMD. Israel insists, however, that peace should precede disarmament.

[…]

The United States, as chief cop on the block and Israel's main protector, also must demonstrate fairness. The Iranian and Arab polities crave fairness as they perceive it has been denied to them. Their perceptions may be debatable, and Israel's existential security cannot be traded away, but some Israeli contribution to regional disarmament is imperative.

Somewhat confusingly, the authors write in the future tense that Israel’s arsenal will prompt a countervailing response. Hasn’t his already happened in both Iraq and Iran? Isn’t that what both of these countries’ nuclear programs were about? This may be a poor editing job as both of the authors are experts in this realm. Respectively they have authored the definitive books on India’s and Israel’s nuclear weapons programs.

[3:55 PM] I've added an RSS feed to the Fields Report. This seems to be the way to go especially since my posts are erratic. The link is down on the left, above the Archive section. This is a work in progress as I am still with Blogger which currently does not support an RSS feed (although rumor has it that it will soon). I'm too lazy to migrate the site over to another provider who does, so this is stiched together "by hand." So bare with me as I work the kinks out.

[8:03 PM] The "Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War" discussion has ended over at Slate. While a great idea and worthwhile discussion, I don't think I was moved by many of the discussion other than Ken Pollack's. But as I take a closer look at the totality of the debate I will offer my thoughts.

[11:11 AM] Ken Pollack has an article in this month's Atlantic titled "Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong," in which he discusses how estimates of Saddam’s unconventional arsenal could have been so off. The article is not available electronically, but you can read an Atlantic interview with Pollack here. And here is an excerpt from the intro

At this point, Pollack argues, Saddam likely reduced his programs and destroyed his weapons, retaining only a very limited research-and-development capability while ensuring that teams of scientists were kept together, in anticipation of one day restarting the programs.

If this is indeed what happened, how did the world, and particularly the world's top intelligence agencies, miss such a crucial turn of events? The simple answer, Pollack suggests, is that we never considered the possibility.

You will of course remember that the Fields Report considered this the most likely possibility before the war. Just thought I should mention that in case we’re keeping score.

[1:28 PM] Over at Slate, Jacob Weisberg, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Fareed Zakaria will reexamine the Iraq war all this week and discuss whether in hindsight they think differently about whether the war was the right policy.

[10:12 PM] Tonight’s “Brown and Black Presidential Forum” was not surprisingly a lot more bland than the more policy focused NPR debate five days ago. One of the low points that stood out in my mind was when co-moderator Maria Celeste Arraras (who was way out of her league) thought she was scoring a point for Latino immigrants, but apparently wasn’t entirely sure about the question she was asking

ARRARAS: No one has. OK. You all seem pretty shocked. It's more common than you all think, but all right. [Arraras had in an utterly stupid moment just asked any candidates who had employed illegal immigrants to raise their hands]

OK, let's go on to the next question, because there's a lot of questions.
Governor Dean, thousands of Hispanic soldiers have risked their lives for this country and are not U.S. citizens. As president, would you automatically grant citizenship to any immigrant who serves in combat on behalf of the United States?

DEAN: You have to be a little bit careful about how you do that, because otherwise you will have a disproportionate number of people who are Hispanic joining the army simply to do that.
But the direction of your question is the right one. The answer is going to end up being yes one way or the other.

ARRARAS: Let me interrupt you one second. There's a lot of Hispanics that join the Army regardless because Puerto Ricans are naturally-born citizens and they still join. [Arraras apparently forgot that she asked about Latino immigrants and not naturally-born U.S. citizens. Details, details.]

DEAN: I understand that. One of the most unfortunate things I think that happened in the Iraq war was a young man who was Hispanic, who was an immigrant who got killed, who then got his citizenship given to him after he had arrived home in a casket. That is the wrong thing to do.

So my attitude is if you join the Army, yes, it should give you an absolute path to earned legalization or to citizenship. The answer is basically yes, but here's why I'm sort of jumping around a little bit.

DEAN: If you simply say that, then my concern is that the Army becomes the haven for people who are struggling to get by because they happen to be Hispanic, it's the only way to become a United States citizen. We don't want to force Hispanic citizens into that position.

So the answer is, if you serve America, yes, you ought to get citizenship. But we have to be very careful just exactly how we offer that so we don't have an unfair, disproportionate affect on Hispanics in this country who are not citizens.

[2:28 PM] Remember the Policy Analysis Market (PAM)? Probably not. Okay, remember the Defense Department’s idea for a market that let you speculate on the probability of terrorist attacks? Yes, that media (and Congressional) distortion. I wrote about it back in August of 2003. I received and email from Robin Hanson, one of the creators of the idea. It appears that the PAM will relaunch in March of this year. Here’s the link he sent me. Scroll toward the bottom for the link to the March relaunch.

[10:10 AM] Charles Krauthammer continues the ridiculous assault on Howard Dean for saying that we are not safer with capture of Saddam Hussein. Krauthammer writes that Dean’s assertion “amounts to an open-court confession of cluelessness on foreign policy.” Krauthammer then proceeds to demonstrate that it is he who hasn’t a clue. Here are his key arguments with my comments.

First, here’s the larger context of the cluelessness comment

The idea that we are not safer (a) because we are still losing troops and (b) because al Qaeda has not been extinguished, amounts to an open-court confession of cluelessness on foreign policy.

Krauthammer continues

The first is the equivalent of saying that we were not safer after D-Day because we were still losing troops in Europe. In war, a strategic turning point makes you safer because it hastens victory, hastens the ultimate elimination of the hostile power, hastens the return home of the troops. It does not mean there is an immediate cessation, or even a diminution, of casualties (see: Battle of the Bulge).

This of course is bogus because it relies on the faulty assumption that Saddam was a threat to the U.S. in the first place. Krauthammer’s comment here depends on a second comment Dean made on an occasion after his Pacific Council speech. Dean said “One of the attacks they don't bring up very often anymore is the Saddam Hussein thing, that it's not safer since Saddam Hussein's been captured -- because we now have 23 troops killed…” Fair enough. It would have been more accurate for him to say “Iraq is not safer for Coalition troops.” But that doesn’t change the fact that U.S. is not any safer with Saddam captured. I won’t belabor that point because I’ve gone into detail before about how Saddam couldn’t threaten the U.S. even if he wanted to (and the neglected point I again bring up is that we made Saddam the enemy not vice-versa).

The other part of the statement -- we cannot be safer because we are still threatened by terrorism -- is even more telling. It rests on the wider notion, shared not just by Dean but by many Democrats, that so long as al Qaeda is active, we are never any safer. This rests on the remarkable assumption that we have a single enemy in the world, al Qaeda, and that it and it alone defines "safety."

It is hard to believe that serious people can have so absurdly narrow a vision of American national security. The fact is that we have other enemies in the world.

This too is ridiculous. Howard Dean was not saying that the only threat to U.S. security is al-Qaida. But al-Qaida is a threat and Saddam’s capture does not diminish that threat no matter how one personally sees the threat. This has nothing to do with a narrow view of security. It has to do with threats and their removal. The threat from al-Qaida has not been removed.

Saddam Hussein was one of them, and he is gone. Libya was another, and it has just retired from the field, suing for peace and giving up its weapons of mass destruction. (Gaddafi went so far as to go on television to urge Syria, Iran and North Korea to do the same.) Iran has also gone softer, agreeing to spot inspections, something it never did before it faced 130,000 American troops about 100 miles from its border.

These gains are all a direct result of the Iraq war.

Here Krauthammer is conflating bad or rogue countries with threats to the U.S. Because we don’t like Iran doesn’t make it a threat to the U.S. The same certainly goes for Saddam. Iran’s willingness to open up for more intrusive nuclear inspections had more to do with getting its hand caught in the nuclear cookie jar, which happened before the war in Iraq. Libya is a slightly different story, but its capabilities were the least of the three. So while this may the only case directly attributable to the war in Iraq, it doesn’t change the fact that Libya was not a significant threat to the U.S. in the first place.

The idea that we are not safer because al Qaeda is not yet stopped is absurd. Of course we have terror alerts. We will continue to have them until al Qaeda is extinguished, and you do not eliminate in two years a menace that was granted eight years of unmolested growth and metastasis when Dean's party was in power.

Absurd is too strong a word. It’s hard to assess how much safer we are from al-Qaida. It’s a patient organization that could strike now or wait for the right moment long into the future. The 9/11 attacks were years in the planning. That’s neither here nor there, because again, the al-Qaida threat has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein. This is what Howard Dean meant and Krauthammer knows it.

And now, just this week, another astonishing development: a summit between India and Pakistan leading to negotiations that, the joint communique said, "will" solve all outstanding issues, including the half-century-old fight over Kashmir. Both Pakistani and Indian observers agree that intense behind-the-scenes mediation by the Bush administration was instrumental in bringing about the rapprochement.

Whether India and Pakistan go to war or not does not affect U.S. security. Is it in the U.S. national interest that the two countries don’t go to war? Of course. But national interest does not necessarily equal national security. This is the lamest point of all.

Krauthammer wants to take a big swipe at Howard Dean (as so many do). But it is his logic that is flawed, not Dean’s.

[8:34 PM] As the rationale for the war in Iraq continues to shift, the only link to weapons of mass destruction the administration can point to is Iraq’s desire to continue its programs after the first Gulf War—i.e. the past. Colin Powell, in a truly ridiculous moment, continues to push this in light of the WaPo article yesterday

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, can I try you on something a little less rosy than some of the things you cited? Iraq U.S. inspectors are pulling out. Carnegie, in a report today, says the threat was vastly exaggerated, Iraq posed no immediate danger to the U.S. They have some recommendations that the CIA Director's job be made a career job instead of a political appointee. A lot of probables, a lot of maybes were left out by senior officials in describing what intelligence had uncovered.

Looking ahead, but also looking back, would you -- would you have rephrased your speech to the UN, in light of all of this, if you had another chance?

SECRETARY POWELL: No. I knew exactly the circumstances under which I was presenting that speech to the UN on the 5th of February: the whole world would be watching, and there would be those who would applaud every word, and there would be those who were going to be skeptical of every word.
That's why I took the time (clears throat) -- excuse me -- I took the time to go out to the agency and sit down with the experts. And anything that we did not feel was solid and multi-sourced, we did not use in that speech.
What the Carnegie report, which I have not read, but I'm familiar with it from press accounts this morning, it said that there was that capability within Iraq and they were doing these kinds of things. And they believe that we, perhaps, overstated it, but they did not say it wasn't there.

The fact of the matter is, Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, and programs for weapons of mass destruction, and used weapons of mass destruction against Iran and against their own people. That's a fact.

Now, that's back in 1988 when they used it against their own people. But throughout the '90s, when they had every opportunity to come clean, make the declarations, and get right with the international community, they had the chance to respond to every one of those UN resolutions during the '90s, when they were threatened by President Clinton in 1998 with a bombing and they still didn't come clean, and then they caused the inspectors to have to be forced out of the country, there is, I think, a solid case that has been made to many governments by their intelligence agencies, and that has been the consistent view of UN inspectors and of the United States intelligence community, that this was a danger we had to worry about.

Now, in terms of intention, he always had it. And anybody who thinks that Saddam Hussein, last year, was just, you know, waiting to give all of this up, even though he was given the opportunity to do so, he didn't do it. What he was waiting to do was see if he could break the will of the international community, get rid of any potential for future inspections, and get back to his intentions, which were to have weapons of mass destruction. And he kept the infrastructure. He kept the programs intact.

Where the debate is, is why haven't we found huge stockpiles, and why haven't we found large caches of these weapons. Let's let the Iraqi Survey Group complete its work. There has been the movement out of some of the individuals from the group. I presume that their particular job is finished.
But I am confident of what I presented last year. The intelligence community is confident of the material they gave me; I was representing them. It was information they presented to the Congress. It was information they had presented publicly, and they stand behind it. And this game is still unfolding.

Truly sad. I haven’t read the Carnegie report yet. It appears to be a (good) summary of bogus administration rationale and a refutation of them. More after I take a closer look at it.

[9:20 AM] Here’s some of Aaron Brown’s interview with the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman who wrote the story yesterday about Iraq’s missing WMD programs:

BROWN: Art Gellman wrote the piece in the "Post" today the "Washington Post" that got all this attention. It is quite a piece of work by the looks of it and by the reaction it is getting. Mr. Gellman is in Washington tonight. He joins us from there and we're glad to have him.

It's 6,000 words I think. That's a lot of work and we're not going to cover it all. Let's look at some broad strokes. Do the inspectors, the American team, believe anymore that they will find a cache of weapons of mass destruction, biological or chemical?

BARTON GELLMAN, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, "WASHINGTON POST": I'd have to say those expectations are months in the past neither a cache of active weapons, the lethal agents that make them up nor even active production lines for any of those weapons now look likely to be found in the inspector's own view.

BROWN: But what they have found is what? I mean I think a lot of, as I read the piece today, a lot of the pieces is on the one hand what the Americans thought they had or said they had and what the Iraqis really wanted to have if they could.

GELLMAN: There's definitely some deception been found by Iraq about aspirations or intentions or past desires or records they may have kept.

Saddam Hussein seems to have wanted to rebuild these programs. The question is whether he took active steps to do so and whether he was even capable of building the kinds of programs that worried the United States and the British government the most.

BROWN: On the first part, whether he took active steps, the answer is, sort of?

GELLMAN: Yes.

Look, I interviewed a missile scientists who had secret drawings, computer drawings and computations for a family of missiles that could eventually have struck at Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey. But they were drawings. They existed on compact disks. There were no actual missiles.

And experts that I spent many hours with evaluating his plans said that, if he could have built it at all, it would have taken six years. So the question is not whether they wanted them or took preliminary steps, or at least not only those things. It's also whether these missiles were something that would become part of Iraq's arsenal anytime soon.

BROWN: There's a key moment in this story which really plays out over a decade, where the -- one of Saddam's son-in-laws defects and he is debriefed extensively. The importance of that moment is?

GELLMAN: Look, everyone knew who has followed this for a long time that Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, gave away a big chunk of secrets when he left Iraq. The question is whether he gave away all of them, and especially on one point. Did Iraq destroy all the biological weapons agents that it produced before 1991? Iraq said yes. The United States and others doubted it for a long time. Now, what I came across was a new document. It's a handwritten damage report inside the Iraqi government that went to Qusay Hussein, Saddam's son, saying, the son-in-law has defected. Here are all the secrets he knows that we haven't told anyone. And one of the secrets is that we destroyed all the biological weapons not when we said we did in 1990, but, in fact, the following summer in 1991.

But what it says, unambiguously, is, we destroyed all the biological weapons. And it was those same weapons that Colin Powell was referring to on February 5 when he said that Iraq still had, for instance, some thousands of liters left of anthrax.

BROWN: Does the reporting give us any clue as to why the American and presumably British intelligence was wrong?

GELLMAN: It's a really big, complicated question, and it offers only hints.

There's one intriguing element here that I came across and didn't expect to come across. And that is the extent to which Iraqi scientists and engineers and program managers seem to have been lying to their bosses and ultimately to Saddam Hussein. There was a lot of inflation of progress reports, a lot of creation of false progress reports. Generals and scientists and company managers told me that you just don't tell Saddam Hussein, no, what you want can't be done.

And so people would tell him, yes, we're doing it, yes, sir, it's happening. And so it appears that he received a lot of information that would exaggerate, in his own mind, the extent to which he had active programs. And it may be that some of that same information made its way out into Western intelligence reports.

BROWN: We appreciate your time tonight. It's a terrific piece of work. I assume it's still online, for people who don't have access to the paper, to the paper copy of the paper. They can go take a look at all of it. It's a nice piece of work. And, again, thank you.

GELLMAN: Thank you.

BROWN: Bart Gellman of "The Washington Post" tonight.

[9:06 AM] I saw the Errol Morris documentary on Robert McNamara, Fog of War, last week. It's really good. Check it out (or at least the interesting website).

[7:51 PM] It's telling that the major newspapers and weblogs for that matter don't really seem to care much about what I think was the best Democratic presidential debate yet. That wouldn't be because it was on NPR on not television would it? Nah.

[7:41 PM] I don’t even know where to start on the Washington Post article that should essentially put to rest arguments about the Bush administration’s bogus assertions for going to war in Iraq. I wonder if everyone has digested this entirely. It doesn’t seem to be a huge news story so far (Aaron Brown intervied the author Barton Gellman tonight--I'll post a link to the transcript when it's available). Howard Dean, the “anti-war candidate” should be all over this. But ultimately, as I’ve written here even before the war, it should finally cause serious discussion about the difference between a desire for a WMD program and actually having one. I opposed the war on grounds of no imminent threat to the United States. I questioned all along whether Saddam still had any robust WMD programs and assessed that a likely scenario was for him to have them completely dismantled in order to get sanctions lifted, while retaining the expertise to reconstitute them at a later date. If this isn’t proof that this was the case, I don’t know what is.

[9:58 AM] The headline says it all. “Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper: Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage.”

[11:36 AM] Be sure to check out last week’s Newsweek cover story on The Daily Show and Jon Stewart. As you may know I am a big fan of the Daily Show which so many times even through its satire and parody is more informative and probing of political and international news than the mainstream media. Although the Newsweek article is flattering of the show, like other stories I’ve seen on the Daily Show, one gets the sense that the author isn’t a regular viewer but rather screened several shows to prepare for the article. This isn’t a bad thing but if you’ve never seen the show, the article doesn’t do justice to its comic brilliance.