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TERRY TELLS US SO
The Sunday Age’s Terry Lane directs his forensic research abilities towards the matter of Iraq’s military capacity:
There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There weren’t before the invasion and there aren’t now. Just as those opposed to the war have argued all along. After the thorough going-over that the country got from Scott Ritter, Richard Butler and Hans Blix, it was obvious. The anti-warriors are now entitled to say, we told you so.
No weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? I wouldn’t be so sure. Anyway, let’s take a look at what Lane’s experts were saying before the war. Here’s Scott Ritter in 1999:
I have grown convinced that there has been a total breakdown in the willingness of the international community to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein is well on the road to getting his sanctions lifted and keeping his weapons in the bargain.
From the same year, Richard Butler:
Following Iraq’s expulsion from Kuwait, it became clear that the Saddam Hussein government had created a range and quality of weapons of mass destruction that was truly alarming. Iraq had also acquired a very considerable long-range missile force to deliver those weapons. There was also concern about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, which through the International Atomic Energy Agency, we now know was advanced ... It was envisaged that UNSCOM’s job in the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction would take a relatively short time, possibly as little as a year. It has taken eight years, and the job is still not completely finished.
The reason for this distressing lag is that Iraq never kept its side of the bargain by: not making honest disclosure statements of its prohibited weapons and weapons capability ...
And Hans Blix in 2002:
One must realize and remember that the Iraqis have had plenty of time to hide whatever they wanted to hide since 1998. They were quite capable at that before, and they would be even better at it now. We read stories to the effect that they have been putting things on mobile—on trucks and moving it around in the country - there could be underground installations - and we would need to have an idea where we could find that and look for it.
So much for the obviousness of Iraq’s lack of WMD. Lane continues:
We are told that it is not good enough to simply say that “George Bush is a dangerous, religious-driven idiot who represents all that is rotten about America”. But what if it is true?
When it comes to Lane’s idiocy, there’s no doubt.
I’m surprised he didn’t add Andrew Wilke to that list. That’s the anti-war clown who reckons the government tarted up reports to support WMD claims, when he himself said pre-war that we shouldn’t invade Iraq because Sadaam would use his WMDs on coalition troops.
Dimwits like Lane always seem to find the quotes that support their argument, but miraculously miss the ones from the same sources that disprove them. Why, it’s almost like they’re blinkered!
“The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at the storage depot, 170 kilometers southwest of Baghdad, was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved here in the past few years at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions.”—Hans Blix 1/27/03
You’re a liar, Terrry Lane, pure and simple.
Now repeat after me: There WERE WMD in Iraq before the invasion, and no matter how many times I, and other leftist scumbags, lie about it, that will always remain true.
Now go get yourself caught in an intra-party purge like a good lil’ commie ought.
Posted by Dave Surls on 2006 09 17 at 12:07 AM • permalink“Now the CIA tells us that Saddam Hussein had no links with Osama bin Laden nor al-Quaeda and was not responsible for the terror strikes against America in 2001.’
That’s swell, Terry. Luckily, this was not a reason given for American military operations in Iraq.
Now, do be a good lil’ terrorist supporter, and go play on the freeway, before you accidently reproduce, and do irreparable harm to the gene pool.
Posted by Dave Surls on 2006 09 17 at 12:13 AM • permalinkThis fuckwit should know that even Billy Clinton was urged to do something about Hussein but never got round to it because another chick was blowing him.
So alas, it fell to George W. Bush. Good on him for doing so. Absolutely every intelligence agency in the world knew and believed that Saddam had WMDs. This was no lie. Hussein also made the world believe that he had more weapons than he had anyway, and if he didn’t have them, he could have just been honest about it, but he didn’t.
So it was Saddam’s own fault that he got shafted. Good. The world is better for it - one less maniac in power. Lane should stop pretending to be a journalist.
Posted by The Best Infidel on 2006 09 17 at 12:21 AM • permalinkAt least when Nelson claimed not to see the enemy it was because he recognized the need to stay and fight.
“WMDs? I see no WMDs!”
Posted by MikeTheLibrarian on 2006 09 17 at 12:22 AM • permalinkNow that Lane has AGAIN committed the unforgiveable sin of not checking his facts, I suggest we all keep today’s article as a kind of reminder of ol’ Tezza.
Obviously, The Age will now recognise that the man is a serial transgressor in the Don’t Check Your Facts Department and will now reluctantly have to let him go before the paper’s credibility is totally shredded.
So long Terry - it’s been a long time coming.
It’s now official. Terry Macbeth Lane has been accepted into the club as one of Saddam’s Useful Idiots.
Give him his badge and teach him the secret handshake so he’ll shut up ferchrissake.Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2006 09 17 at 12:39 AM • permalink“George Bush is an ignorant, cruel, closed minded, avaricious, sneaky, irresponsible, thieving, brain-damaged frat boy with a drinking problem and a taste for bloodshed, whose numerous crimes have been abetted by the moral corruption of his party cohort and whose contempt for American military lives alone warrants his impeachment..”
Now these are not Terry’s words, neither does he necessarily agree with them (he’s getting as bad as Alan Ramsey), but the words of an unnamed American “patriot” which he just read in his latest edition of Harpers.
Lazy and cowardly journalism I say.SwinishCapitalist, if you shine an ultraviolet light on Lane’s forehead, the words OFFICIAL USEFUL IDIOT will appear. They were tattooed there years ago, but I am unsure if he did it himself, or the KGB gave it to him as a good conduct award.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 09 17 at 01:49 AM • permalinkI think that, with Mr. Lane’s talent, that he is being wasted there in Australia. He ought to be wasted some place where he will be truly appreciated. Maybe in the middle of the Anbar province. I’m sure he’ll be perfectly safe and we could use his fine, objective reporter’s voice to tell us the sad tale about the poor torturing, murdering bastards.
Or perhaps his bravery is better suited to the upcoming Afghani winter instead. We could use some news about the Taliban, who also had nothing to do with 9/11.
Bonmot,
The Age… will now reluctantly have to let him go before the paper’s credibility is totally shredded.
I think it’s too late for that.
Posted by daddy dave on 2006 09 17 at 03:45 AM • permalinkTRJS - that’s entirely believable.
What a difference a couple of decades can make. Twenty years ago Lane’s program on 3LO was a part of my daily routine. I wonder what I’d think now if I could hear those interviews again.Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2006 09 17 at 04:19 AM • permalinkI had a nephew who was in General Frank’s Centcom at Qatar before and during the invasion - one 5 Aussie military on secondment.
Saddam’s WMD were moved prior to the invasion his Ba’athist colleagues in Syria.
Given Ritter and Butler’s published statements above, one is left no choice to but to assume all social democrats, whether US liberals or Oz socialists are simply lying.
Except they insist they aren’t since its a different narrative being narrated by them, and as valid as any other.
Interestingly I have yet to come a across an intelligent socialist. Why not?
No intelligent person would consider socialism as a panacea for society’s ills in the first place.
Terry Lane’s triple fact checking for today’s column apparently confirms :
“Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program using uranium from Niger, as George Bush claimed. His claim was based on a fake letter. We told you so.”
My quick googling turned up this from a hostile source:
On January 28, 2003, Bush, in his State of the Union address, said: ‘The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’ Bush didn’t stop there—later, there was talk of ‘mushroom clouds’ unless Saddam was taken out.
My take is that Bush never claimed Iraq “had a weapons program using uranium from Niger.” Maybe someone could demand from Lane that he source this claim.
Anyone out there got the facts?On the soapbox is a wanker with a sinecure,
Belittling bloggers laugh at him behind his back.
And the wanker never has a clue,
Unlike me and you, very strange.
Terry Lane is in my ears and in my eyes.
There beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit, and mean while back ..
Down at the Age there is a fellow selling fauxtographs
Of every Fatima he’s made into a show.
And the AP people that come and go
Stop and say hello.“One consequence of the politics of the last five years will be to ensure that such warnings will on no account be taken seriously. ‘A sovereign state attacking America through proxies? Don’t be ridiculous. Those are stories that neoconservatives tell. If there were secret links between terrorist enabling states and terrorists we would have found out. Now whether such accusations were ever true in the past is immaterial. They won’t be considered true in the future. Not because there is some physical or factual bar to its existence but because of a political prohibition of its utterance.”
Belmont Club
Would you buy a slightly used sense of security from Lefty Enterprises?This is ridiculous. There was universal consensus that he had these things. The peaceniks gave as one of the reasons for NOT going to war against Saddam that it would provoke use of WMD.
With France’s help, once the heat was off and the oil-for-food bribes had undermined sanctions it was - or would have been - back to business. Saddam wanted to give the Kurds and Shiites the impression he had them; he certainly wanted to give the Iranians the impression he had them. At the same time (would he have even known himself?) he was telling the West his pockets were empty.
He had his bluff called. But there is a bigger point here and it’s a point that one would have expected of not just from Hitchens but many of his other fellow travellers:
‘I think that what bothers me more though is the attitude of many supposed liberals and radicals who act as if they have to be spoon fed. In other words, if no government in the West had said anything about Saddam Hussain, they wouldn’t have had anything to say for themselves. They wouldn’t have had any quarrel with the existence of this regime; they wouldn’t have had a case against him. They just wait to see if a case is presented then see if they can find fault with it. It seems to me that that’s completely wrong. If you are a proper intenationalist you should have your own indictment of Saddam Hussain as many groups did and as many individuals did, including myself.’ (LNL 9/8/04)
Hitchens is really a leftist and there’s plenty I don’t like about his views but here is a glimpse of a more admirable left.
We should be debating with them now about how best to stem the rise of fascism in the post 9/11 world, both secular and religious, but the discussion is almost exclusively conducted on the right while the left sinks ever deeper into passivity and denial.
The world may have miscalculated on the WMD but it was never wrong about the real problem in Iraq and nor were Bush and Blair or Clinton for that matter. To say that present difficulties in Iraq do not justify that butcher’s removal is the most obscene revisionism.
Gotta confess: in the spring of 2003, I never expected that we would still be fighting a multi-sided insurrection there, and pointing to the tiny type in Intelligence Committee reports to justify our deposal of Saddam. I thought we’d be shepherding a young democracy—two young democracies, counting Afghanistan—putting the squeeze on Iran, and conducting a hazmat program to clean up all the nasty WMDs and component Saddam had squirreled away in the desert.
I’m still in favor of us having gone in, though. After 9/11, we were completely within our right to one-up the entire terror-enabling world in response.
Posted by The Sanity Inspector on 2006 09 17 at 08:37 AM • permalinkWhy is Terry MacBeth Lane still writing columns? Hasn’t he shamed himself enough?
I have a copy of a letter to Clinton (the NewAmericanCentury.org) from Jan. 26, 1998. Many notable persons, including Richard Armitage, Francis Fukayama, and Donald Rumsfeld, are the signatories. It’s about Saddam and the uncertainty regarding Iraq’s WMDs. No, not “they don’t exist!!!!!!” No, it’s regarding the safety of our troops in the area, the safety of our allies, like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and the safety of the (evil!!!) world’s oil supplies, should Saddamn use his chemical and biological weapons. These important people end the letter by asking Clinton to remove Saddam and his regime from power, as the “US has the authority under existing UN resolutions” and insisting on unanimity from the Security Council would continue to cripple American policy.
In January of 1998. AHEM.
What do you expect from The Age- pack of shit folded into the residue of dead trees. And wtf hasn’t the bloody Greens done a protest over the waste of precious paper that the Fairfax Press murders everyday?
Posted by Wylie Wilde on 2006 09 17 at 02:05 PM • permalink“Anyone out there got the facts?”
Yeah, the fact is is that it never really mattered whether the Iraqis were talking to Niger about obtaining uranium, because the IAEA had left hundreds of tons of it laying around Iraq, instead of taking it away from the Baathists, like they were supposed to do.
The Baathists had all the uranium they needed to restart their nuclear weapons programs, thanks to the worthless United Nations.
And, that’s a fact, Jack.
Posted by Dave Surls on 2006 09 17 at 02:13 PM • permalink“The world may have miscalculated on the WMD…”
True enough. And the important bit, the part the “caring and sharing” Left cannot bring itself to admit or even recognize, is that we erred on the side of the of civilization. If we had stayed in Afghan (and we are still there), the Left would be braying that we were bogged down trying to find terrorism’s titular head (whom they would rightly say has gone to ground and is now ineffective), while “real” dangers were lurking.
You want to know the real difference between “them” (moonbats as personified by McBeth Lane) and “us”: even if the “War on Terror” was being pursued by a President of the Democrat party, “we” would still be on the side of the President.
Posted by Vanguard of the Commentariat on 2006 09 17 at 02:57 PM • permalinkTerry Lane on research: “Facts? I doan need no steenkin’ facts!!!”
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 09 17 at 04:34 PM • permalink“The world may have miscalculated on the WMD…”
It was a bunch of crap from day one. What kind of idiots would allow the Baathists to retain the kind of weapons they did use when they invaded Kuwait (artillery, tanks, jet aircraft, etc.), but demand that they surrender weapons they didn’t use (chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons) as part of a ceasefire agreement meant to resolve Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait?
There is, of course, only one organization that could be that inane, and that’s the utterly useless United Nations.
Those clowns could fuck up a wet dream.
Posted by Dave Surls on 2006 09 17 at 06:25 PM • permalinkThis Ritter??
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30595This Butler
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/08/22/1061529335325.htmlThis blix, who knew nothing????
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1068887/postsThe blix link is a good summing up of oil for food and worth a look on its own. For Blix to have known nothing when it would have been funding what he was “looking” for is a bit odd.
Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2006 09 17 at 10:45 PM • permalink
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“There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There weren’t before the invasion and there aren’t now.”
Same old leftist lies.
Different day.