Bush War Lies #24

I'm not sure we can tie Bush into the possible suicide death of Dr. David Kelly, the "source" that charges that Tony Blair and his advisors "sexed up" their dossier on Iraq to more closely match Bush's made-up intelligence, very easily. But the story is nonetheless fascinating because of the wholly different reaction of the public in the UK and the US over being blatantly lied to about the reasons for invading Iraq.

The great British public are up in arms about it, demanding heads on a platter (particularly Blair's, whose approval ratings at the moment are roughly on par with Gov. Grey Davis) and culminating in a very public inquiry that has already painted a damning picture of the way Blair's team handled things. Mark my words: the BBC is going to come out of this smelling like a rose, and Blair is on his way out (though that could take upwards of three years -- dislodging bad politicians takes quite a while in the UK).

But the link between Bush and Kelly is there -- Bush relied heavily on "sexed-up" UK intelligence to rationalise his lying in the State of the Union message. And Kelly threatened to blow the lid off that by telling journalists that the famous "45 minutes to launch" idea (of long-range canon shells, not nuclear weapons as claimed) may have been true in 1991, but hasn't been true since.

What I found particularly interesting was a small detail in an article from the Moscow Times (you know things are bad when you trust a Russian newspaper over American ones, by the way) reporting on the inquiry into Kelly's "suicide":

Professor Sergei Rybakov, who served as a UN weapons expert and [Dr. David] Kelly's immediate subordinate in Iraq in 1996 and 1998, said ... UN inspectors scrutinized all Iraqi facilities that could have been used for producing biological weapons and searched for any traces of such a program, but found nothing.

Now that's very interesting. Did you know that "all Iraqi facilities that could have been used for producing bioweapons had been searched" and they found nothing? I didn't know that. The American media hasn't bothered to tell me (or anyone) that the search for bio/chem weapons in Iraq is officially over, with the result being nada.

I wonder what else the so-called "liberal media" in the US isn't telling us?