(submitted in response to
Maureen Dowd's
Dear Editors,
In yesterday's NYTimes, Maureen Dowd wrote in "National
House of Waffles":
"More and more, with
Bush administration pronouncements about the
I'm beginning to think
instead that it depends on the meaning of "had."
Sec. Rumsfeld
on "Meet the Press"
said:
"...if you’ll
think back, the weapons of mass destruction was always chemical, biological and
nuclear, and in no instance did anyone on the administration that I know of
suggest that they had a nuclear weapon."
On this program as well as
ABC's "This Week," he continually distinguished between nuclear
"weapons" and nuclear "program."
Dr. Rice also said on "Fox News Sunday:"
"I believe, if you look
back, Tony (Snow), we have never said that we thought that he had nuclear
weapons."
Call me a cynic, but in the
face of all of this insistence that the State of the Union uranium claim, even
though it should have been removed, was factually accurate ("The British
said X.."), the following statement bothers me:
"I believe that Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."
Dr. Rice said this on Fox as well
as Sec. Rumsfeld on ABC and during various press
conferences on Sunday.
We know all that Saddam
"had" weapons prior to 1991 and this statement would therefore be
"accurate." The important
question will be if the administration admits to beleiveing
that Saddam Hussein "had" WMD in April 2003.
Milton Alan Turner