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January 12, 2005
Lock 'Em Up and Throw Away the Key
The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.
In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.
Not much news there other than the fact that they've quietly given up looking for those WMDs. (Sean Hannity still hasn't given up. "We know he had them, and we know he used them," he said today in response to this news.) However, the most interesting part of this story may be the following:
The work on documents is not connected to weapons of mass destruction, officials said, and a small group of Iraqi scientists still in U.S. military custody are not being held in connection with weapons investigations, either.
Three people involved with the ISG said the weapons teams made several pleas to the Pentagon to release the scientists, who have been interviewed extensively. . . .
None of the scientists has been involved in weapons programs since the 1991 Gulf War, the ISG determined more than a year ago, and all have cooperated with investigators despite nearly two years of jail time without charges. U.S. officials previously said they were being held because their denials of ongoing weapons programs were presumed to be lies; now, they say the scientists are being held in connection with the possible war crimes trials of Iraqis.
In other words, we're gonna keep these scientists locked up just as long as we darn well please, and there ain't nothin' you or they can do about it. In other countries such policies are known as "fascist" or "communist." In America (and its colonies like Iraq) they're called "liberation."
Posted by Mike Tennant at January 12, 2005 08:35 PM
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