Difficile est satiram non scribere.
(It is difficult not to write satire.)
--Juvenal
US-Led Team Says No WMD Stocks Found in Iraq
Thu October 2, 2003 07:41 PM ET
By Tabassum Zakaria
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S-led team hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found no stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons, six months after the United States launched a war against Baghdad to remove such a threat, CIA adviser David Kay said on Thursday.
The United States went to war against Iraq in March, citing a threat posed by Baghdad's development of unconventional weapons. Kay was sent to Iraq this summer to coordinate efforts to find those weapons, and he presented a classified interim report to U.S. lawmakers behind closed doors on Thursday.
"We have not found at this point actual weapons. It does not mean we've concluded there are no actual weapons. It means at this point in time, and it's a huge country with a lot to do, that we have not yet found weapons," Kay told reporters.
The team conducting the WMD hunt has also not found any evidence to confirm pre-war reporting that the Iraqi military was prepared to use chemical warfare against U.S.-led forces, Kay said in a statement.
Critics have questioned whether President Bush's administration exaggerated the Iraqi WMD threat to get support for the war.
The White House denied any exaggeraqtion, and cited the things that David Kay's team did find:
--432 fingernail clippers
--87 box cutters
--a copy of Edward Teller's Autobiography
--2,188 Swiss Army Knives
--a set of nunchucks at the Baghdad Tai-Kwan-Do School and Chinese Eatery
--449 cans of spray paint
--16 "extremely sharp" sticks
--2.7 Million butane lighters
--a boxing glove (left hand), made in China and
--a copy of "Frommer's New Orleans on two hangovers a day" from 1987.
"If you put the pieces of the puzzle together," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan, "I think the picture is clear. Saddam was cleary planning to set fire to, spray graffiti on, or at the least deliver a sharp poke to an unspecified target somewhere in New Orleans."
(Remember, Kids, the part in bold is actual 100% news-flavored media product. The rest is the fakey part.)
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