Finally, something on the WMD front. No, not actual WMD. But some actual information on something I’ve been wondering a lot about. Just what are we offering the regime leaders and top scientists in exchange for spilling the beans about the regime’s weapons programs?
I definitely thought the Iraqis still had some chemical and biological weapons capacity. The one thing that has made me seriously question whether they did has been the number of regime leaders and scientists in custody. Administration leaders talk a lot about the size of Iraq and how long it would take to search a country of that size. But this has always struck me as a bogus argument. When cops do a murder investigation they don’t make a grid line of their entire municipal jurisdiction, mark it off with string, and search every foot of the city. They do an investigation to find the body and the perp. They talk to people and they follow leads.
However large Iraq may be, the fact is that we have lots of folks in custody who should know plenty about the WMD program. And apparently not one of them has squealed. My governing assumption has always been that there’s a get-out-of-jail-free card, a harem, a Riviera Chateau and a lifetime supply of jelly beans (and that’s just for day one) for whomever sings first. Frankly, I still think that assumption is almost certainly accurate. But this new article from the Times of London says it’s not true. Or at least officials from Tony Blair’s government seem to be telling the Times it’s not true.
According to the article, the Brits are practically begging the Americans to start cutting some deals. But we’re standing firm. Here’s the key graf from the piece …
âWe have been trying for ages to persuade the Americans but they have come up with all kinds of legal arguments,â one government official said. US authorities have been happy to offer plea bargains to some of Americaâs most notorious criminals, but apparently draw the line at members of a regime that they have denounced as evil.
Now, one pretty straightforward explanation for this is simply that the folks in the Blair government are getting desperate. The Brits are in full scandal mode over the failure to find WMD (a British government report recently made a finding that those trailers were not mobile weapons labs after all …) both at the public, press and governmental levels. So perhaps the Blairites are just grasping for straws and want to offer still more, hoping someone will crack. Or, more cynically, they want to float a plausible explanation for the failure to find the goods.
In any case, it makes you wonder.
