Any reasonable person might assume that the Duelfer report would be hard to spin. Not only did Iraq not have weapons of mass destruction at the time of our invasion, but Saddam Hussein hasn’t had anything in the way nuclear, biological, or chemical programs for many years. There were, to borrow a phrase, “program activities” in Iraq, but they were destroyed after the first Iraq war in 1991.
Saddam, in other words, was getting less dangerous, not more so. He wasn’t a “gathering threat”; he was a weakening one.
And yet, there was Jim Wilkinson, Bush’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications, saying recently that “there is no doubt [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction capability.”
David Kay, the man Bush hand picked to search for WMD in Iraq, is sick of the administration’s spin and it’s hard to blame him. From this morning’s episode of NBC’s Today:
“Denial is not just a river in Egypt. No, that’s not what the report says. The report is scary enough without misrepresenting what it says.”
So, Bush campaign, is Kay just another “disgruntled former employee”?