WMD's.

• WMD's and the Iraq War, by Deal Hudson. April 17, 2007:

  During the period leading up to the Iraq War, I was in regular conversation with the White House as part of what is called the Catholic Working Group. Karl Rove asked me to create this group after the 2000 election.

  We had many discussions with White House and Defense Department personnel about just war theory and the proposed invasion of Iraq. They were all well-versed in the basic principles.

  Our central concern . . . was not the issue of whether all other means had been exhausted -- we thought they had -- but whether there was a an immediate danger to the United States.

  That's where WMDs came in.

  On one call with the White House we were all assured by a senior administration official that he had "absolute and certain proof" of WMDs. I asked if he could share the evidence with us. He said "no" but that we should "trust" him.

  Since this was someone I had known for a number of years in other circumstances, I had no reason not to believe him. (He, perhaps, had no reason not to believe the person who told him he had "absolute and certain proof" and so on.)

  We believed him.

• ‘I found Saddam’s WMD bunkers’, by Melanie Phillips. The Spectator (UK) No. 21 April 2007:

  It’s a fair bet that you have never heard of a guy called Dave Gaubatz. It’s also a fair bet that you think the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found absolutely nothing, nada, zilch; and that therefore there never were any WMD programmes in Saddam’s Iraq to justify the war ostensibly waged to protect the world from Saddam’s use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

  Dave Gaubatz, however, says that you could not be more wrong. Saddam’s WMD did exist. He should know, because he found the sites where he is certain they were stored. And the reason you don’t know about this is that the American administration failed to act on his information, ‘lost’ his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam’s WMD to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war.