There is something fishy about this WMD stuff. When the Iraq war was in its formative phase, there were indications that Collin Powell was not on board with the rest of Bush's inner circle. Then Powell was shown something that made a believer out of him. Tony Blair was also shown something that made him such a strong believer that he bucked British public opinion and his own party to back this war. The same thing happened with John Howard of Australia. Also the Prime Minister of Spain backed this thing even though he had clear opposition from his own electorate. There is evidence that some sort of damning intelligence exists that can overcome scepticism to the point of politicians risking their careers. If this information was based upon an Iraqi source then it would have made sense to keep the source secret up until the fall of Baghdad. However Baghdad has fallen but the source still remains a secret. Something does not add up!

I see two possible explanations:

1) There was a massive foul up by American/British intelligence to the point that the responsible parties can not admit to it.

2) The critical piece of intelligence did not come from an Iraqi source but from a third party that is still sensitive.

I have a problem with explanation 1). If Collin Powell found out that he had been deceived by an incompetent intelligence tip, he probably would have come clean by now. If the Australian or British inner political circles had realized that they had been deceived by the incompetence of the CIA or MI-5 then by now their frustration would have been revealed to the Guardian or the New York Times. However that information has not been leaked. This makes me believe the responsible parties still believe the information is true.

We have seen several news reports were people say they witnessed isolated examples of WMDs and then the story was immediately retracted. One story mentioned a captured Iraqi soldier whose job it was to mix chemical weapons and load the material into warheads. Supposably he was captured along with a load of war heads with Cyrillic writing on them. There have been other isolated stories with similar levels of detail but all of them were later retracted. A couple days ago, Judith Miller revealed some information but also stated that she was bound by censorship restrictions imposed by the Pentagon. Another strange story involved the Russian ambassador to Iraq. While the fighting was still going on, he left Baghdad with a convoy of Russian diplomats and travelled to the Syrian border. While in route, this convoy was attacked by American aircraft even though they had notified the Americans in advance. Oddly enough, after reaching Syria, the Russian ambassador returned to Baghdad. Also, oddly enough, the Russians did not make a huge stink about their people being attacked by American aircraft.

Something is going on and it is so sensitive that responsible people are not talking about it.

Gary