More Revelations on WMD

The NY Times has been in hot water with some liberals who demand to know why they sat on the NSA story for over a year before finally going with it this past month. Some think the Times only finally decided to publish the story because one of their reporters has a book coming out that threatened to steal the thunder. The book does discuss that program, but apparently Times reporter James Risen also has quite a bit to say about the CIA and WMDs:

A new book on the government's secret anti-terrorism operations describes how the CIA recruited an Iraqi-American anesthesiologist in 2002 to obtain information from her brother, who was a figure in Saddam Hussein's nuclear program.

Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the CIA's behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the nuclear program because — he said — it had been dead for a decade.

A CIA operative later told Dr. Alhaddad's husband that the agency believed her brother was lying. In all, the book says, some 30 family members of Iraqis made trips to their native country to contact Iraqi weapons scientists, and all of them reported that the programs had been abandoned.

I suppose it's possible that all of them were lying, because Saddam had secretly discovered the CIA's efforts and told the scientists to lie...but that would be ridiculous. And we know what happened next:

In October 2002, a month after the doctor's trip to Baghdad, the U.S intelligence community issued a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program.

You have to wonder, why did they even bother? They knew what they wanted, so why go looking for anything that might contradict that? I'm pretty sure that had Saddam himself walked into the CIA with a briefcase stuffed full of papers demonstrating the futility of the Iraqi nuclear program, the Bush administration would still have claimed an Iraqi bomb was "imminent." They feared a little nerve gas or anthrax might not be enough to do the trick, so the Iraqi nuclear bomb bit was floated repeatedly prior to the invasion...and by some die-hards since.) Of course Bush apologists will jump out of the woodwork to attempt to refute Risen's claims, or more entertainingly, explain why the nuclear bomb claim wasn't really used as justification for war in the first place. As with every other instance they've rushed to defend the administration, they'll be-like this claim here-full of nothing more then hot air.