HUMOUR
THOSE ELUSIVE W M D
David Kay is one of the world’s foremost experts on nuclear weapons. He is an
intense and outspoken Texan with a PhD in political science who had been the chief
United Nations weapons inspector inside Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War (‘Desert
Storm’) and had led the successful effort to uncover Saddam Hussein’s nuclear
programme, which was then just six months away from building a bomb. It had been
one of the major intelligence shocks of the 1990’s.
In June 2003, two months after the successful invasion of Iraq, mainly by US and
British forces, Kay was again sent to Iraq to search for the much-vaunted weapons
of mass destruction harboured by Saddam; weapons which British Prime Minister
Tony Blair said could be deployed in just 45 minutes if needed. After months of
searching each of the 946 sites identified by CIA analysts working under director
George Tenet, nothing significant was found. Some of the sites revealed stockpiles
of automatic weapons and some buried drums of gasoline, but not much else.
Kay testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on 28 January 2004,
and stated firmly, “We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself in this.
There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It is important to acknowledge
this failure,” he said, adding that an outside investigation was needed. Author Bob
Woodward takes up the tale: The next day Kay was invited to lunch with President George W Bush at the White House. The meeting was with Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and White House chief of staff Andy Card in a small dining room off the Oval Office. Notable by their absence were Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and CIA director George Tenet. How did you reach your conclusions? Bush wanted to know. And how did US intelligence services miss all this? “We missed it because the Iraqis behaved as if they had such weapons,” Kay said. “And we weren’t smart enough to understand that the hardest thing in intelligence is when behaviour remains consistent but underlying reasons change.” Saddam didn’t have WMD but wanted to appear that he did. His purpose was deception. Kay said he thought Saddam had decided to get rid of his WMD on the theory that they were too easy to find. “Take the 600,000 special aluminium tubes ordered by Iraq”, he said. “The high cost, the secrecy, the tighter specifications, and some intelligence that Saddam himself had been following the purchase of the tubes had led to the conclusion that they were for a nuclear programme.” But Kay and the inspectors had interviewed engineers, gone through the files and found the contracts. The tubes were for conventional artillery, a rework of an Italian rocket system. He
explained that the propellant wasn’t powerful enough, but the contract to buy the propellant couldn’t be changed because the man who owned the propellant factory was a close friend of Uday Hussein, one of Saddam’s powerful and murderous sons.
They then tried to make the tubes thinner (which required tighter specifications) so that the propellant would work. Everyone involved agreed that this was a good thing because tighter specifications made the tubes more expensive. Those involved made their money on commissions so the more expensive the items, the better. The contracts were cost-plus, like the contracts for many US weapons systems, so no one took a hit except the Iraqi government. All kinds of purchases were made through clandestine channels and black markets, Kay told them, rather than through the UN export control mechanism. Intelligence analysts then assumed that these items were for prohibited weapons programmes. “The flaw in that is that the Iraqis attempted to procure almost everything clandestinely,” said Kay. “They could do this because the ruling family had a rake-off. The black market was essentially run by Uday Hussein and his friends.” Even bigger and more basic, however, was that the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia had not understood the utter corruption within the system and the deterioration of Iraq’s society, Kay said. Things had
become so bad that the regime itself was not capable of the purposeful development of WMD programmes. Kay’s group would ask the Iraqis during investigations, “How could you do this? Why did you lie?” And the response always was “Everyone was lying! Everyone was out for their own gain.” The corruption had become so acidic and pervasive that eventually it just leached away the government’s ability to function. Bush wanted to know why Kay thought Saddam hadn’t just come clean on WMD long ago. Why had he riskedhis whole life, his government, instead of just throwing the doors open to the weapons inspectors? Kay said he thought Saddam never believed that the USA would actually invade his country. But more importantly, more than he feared the US, he feared the Shiites and Kurds who lived in Iraq. He also knew that they in turn feared him because they thought that he had weapons of mass destruction. “You know”, Kay said, “Totalitarian regimes generally end up fearing their own people more than they fear external threats. It’s just the history of totalitarian regimes; and we missed that.” (‘State of Denial’, Bush at War, Part III, by Bob Woodward; Simon andSchuster UK Ltd, 2006) „ÑSPORTS QUOTE “If it hadn’t been for the intervention of the net, that backhand service return would have been successful.” (V J Armitage, BBC) „ÑSCHOOL DAY HOWLERS: THE JEWS AND THE GENITALS (Yes, these are genuine!) All teachers at our school are certified. Question: What was Hitler’s first name? Answer: Heil We had a longer holiday than usual this year because the school was closed for altercations. The headmaster caned me only on rear occasions. Our school is ventilated by hot currants. A fairy tale is something that never happened a very long time ago. In Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’, Oswald dies of congenial syphilis. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, but he mostly lived at Windsor with his merry wives. This is quite usual with actors. Homer wrote ‘The Oddity’. Actually Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of the same name. John Milton wrote ‘Paradise Lost’. Then his wife died and he wrote ‘Paradise Regained’. An epitaph is a short sarcastic poem. Poetry is when every line starts with
a capital latter and does not reach the right side of the page. Polonius was a mythical sausage. Letters in sloping type are in hysterics. Emphasis in reading is putting more distress in one place than another. An abstract noun is one that cannot be heard, seen, touched or smelled. A consonant is a large piece of land surrounded by water. Britain has a temporary climate. In some rocks under the sea you can find the footprints of fishes. The Andes are a race of people living in North America. The principal exports of Sweden are hired girls. The Dutch people use water power to drive their windmills. King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery. The wife of a duke is a dukky. Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships with her face. Alexander the Great conquered Persia, Egypt and Japan. Sadly he died with no hair. Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offence. In 1431, Joan of Arc was burned to a steak. Another Greek myth was Jason and the Golden Fleas. Joan of Arc was Noah’s sister. Medieval people were violent. Murder during this period was nothing. Everybody killed somebody. Victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. The King wore a scarlet robe trimmed with vermin. In the middle of the 18th-century, all the morons moved away to Utah. Louis XVI was gelatined to death.
Hitler’s instrumentality of terror was the Gespacho. When Julius Caesar was assassinated, he is reported to have said, “Me too, Brutus!” King John ground the people down with heavy taxis. President Carter faced the Iran Hostess Crisis. The USSR and the USA became global in power, but Europe remained incontinent. If anyone should faint, put her head between the knees of the nearest medical man.Methane, a greenhouse gas, comes from burning trees and cows. A phlegmatic person is one who has chronic bronchitis. A circle is a figure with no corners and only one side. Al Chemy was a man who discovered chemistry. An advantage of an organism having both sexual and asexual reproduction in its lifecycle: twice as much reproducing. If you cross YX and XX chromosomes, you get XX (female), YY (male) and XY (undecided). Crude oil is a vicious substance. Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know that they are there. To germinate is to become a naturalized German. The Earth makes a resolution every 24 hours. Pine is an example of a carnivorous tree. Clouds just keep circling the Earth around and around and around. There is not much else to do. If teeth are not cleaned, plague is the result. Parallel lines never meet unless you bend one or both of them. The Jews were a proud people, but always had problems with unsympathetic Genitals. The seventh commandment is ‘Thou shall not admit adultery’. King Solomon had 300 wives and 700 cucumbers. The Papal bull was a mad bull kept by the Pope in the Inquisition to trample on Protestants. The Philistines are islands in the Pacific Ocean. The end of the world will make a turning point in everyone’s life. The natives of Macedonia did not believe in Paul, so he got stoned. The city of Pompeii was destroyed by an overflow of saliva from the Vatican. An armadillo is an ornamental shrub. Marsupials are poached animals. The adder is a poisonous snack. An octogenarian is an animal which has eight young at birth. One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second. The largest mammals are to be found in the sea because there is nowhere else to put them. As he walked through his room he heard the sound of heavy breeding. In the Middle Ages people lived in mud huts with rough mating on the floor. The 19th-century was when people stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. Madame Pompadour gained in power while being placed under the king. Merchants appeared and roamed from town to town exposing themselves and organising big fairies in the countryside. The Mona Lisa was the most beautiful woman ever to be laid on canvas. A census taker is a man who
goes from house to house increasing the population. Gonads are a tribe of wandering deser people. Adolescence is the stage between puberty and adultery. (‘Must Try Harder! The Very Worst Howlers by Schoolchildren’ by Norman McGreevy. Constable Press) „ÑTHE MAGICIAN AND THE PARROT A talented magician worked on a cruise ship. Because the audience was different each week, the magician was able to perform the same tricks over and over again. This was fine except that the captain’s very intelligent parrot saw every show and soon began to understand how the magician did every trick… Once he understood, the parrot started shouting loud disrupting comments in the middle of the show. Comments like: “Look! It’s not the same hat! “Look! He’s hiding the flowers under the table! Hey! Why are all the cards he has there the Ace of Spades?” The magician was furious, but he couldn’t really do anything. It was, after all, the captain’s much-loved bird. Then one night the ship sank in a furious sea storm. Guess what? The magician found himself on a lifeboat in the middle of the sea with, as fate would have it, the parrot. As they floated along they stared at each other with mutual loathing, but did not utter a word to each other. This went on for a day and then two more days. Finally, on the fourth day, the parrot could not hold back. He said, “Okay, I give up. Where’s the damn ship?” „ÑAN AUSSIE LOVE STORY An elderly man lay dying in his bed. While suffering the agonies of impending death, he suddenly smelt the aroma of his favourite Anzac biscuits wafting up the stairs from the kitchen below. He gathered his remaining strength, and lifted himself from the deathbed. Then, leaning on a wall, he slowly made his way out of the bedroom, and with even greater effort, gripping the rails with both hands, he crawled downstairs. With laboured breath, he leaned against the doorframe, gazing into the kitchen. Were it not for his death’s agony, he would have thought himself already in heaven, for there, spread out upon waxed paper on the kitchen table were
literally hundreds of his favourite Anzac biscuits. Was this heaven? Or was it one final act of love from his devoted Aussie wife of sixty years, seeing to it that he left this world a happy man, chewing on one of his favourite biscuits? Mustering one great final effort, he threw himself towards the table, landing on his knees in a rumpled posture. One aged and withered hand trembled towards a biscuit on the edge of the table, when it was suddenly smacked hard by his wife wielding a plastic spatula. “Get off!” she said, “Those are for the funeral!” davidcox@loxinfo.co.th
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