Douglas Hanson writes an article expressing how very premature and wrong it is to come to any conclusions regarding Iraq's possession of WMD based on the evidence of his own eyes from the inside of the operation to hunt down the facts of Saddam's WMD operations.
The bottom line, the searches have not been done properly, there was insufficient coordination between elements of the hunting groups, and the case is still not closed. with only 10 of Iraq's 130 known major weapons storage facilities having been searched and extensive evidence of records destruction generally acknowledged, an objective description of the events anonymized to prevent bias would read something like this:
A massive criminal conspiracy was alleged in an organization. After being investigated and convicted for wrongdoing the organization agreed to special monitoring and to regularly open its records and premises for examination as a condition for continuing operations. Those promises were erratically kept over the next decade.Finally, prosecutors raided all the enterprise's facilities and found massive record destruction, very close mouthed employees, and evidence of witness intimidation. On the matters of the warrant, after approximately 15% of the facilities were searched, conclusive evidence on some but not all of the warrant's charges was found. The major charges have had little or no substantiation to this point, the searches continue.
Given these facts, would anybody care in the slightest that not all charges had been proven? Would anybody claim that the biggest charges, had been disproven? Would anybody demand that the investigation end right now as it is obvious that nothing will be found on the most serious charges?
Once you take the politics and the emotion out of it and merely look at it as an anonymous crime story, we could be talking about the Teamsters here. And in that more dispassionate framing, the Bush critics look awfully irresponsible.