Elevated discourse:

From Fox News Sunday with Tony Snow (8 Jun 2003)

BRIT HUME: He wouldn't come clean, would he? He wouldn't say "Look, this is what weapons we once had, these are the stocks we had that you know we have, and this is what we did with them." What he did was say "You can go anywhere you want." That is the behavior of a man confident that the weapons he had and the systems to develop them were very well hidden, as indeed they have now proved to be. You think about this, it all starts to make sense.

WILLIAM KRISTOL: Let me just follow up on that. He let them go pretty much where they wanted which suggests that he was confident they would not find large stocks of weapons. Either they were well hidden, they had degraded over time and he hadn't bothered to reconstitute them. What he didn't allow was the interrogation of the scientists, and that does suggest - there was a good report in the Los Angeles Times this morning - that what may have been going on is that he let some of the weapons degrade - these chemical weapons don't last forever - he got rid of some of them (hopefully he didn't ship some out of the country, but we're not sure about that) - but he did have an ongoing, very dispersed, weapons of mass destruction program. Research and development in little labs, ready to go the moment when sanctions came off. And his calculation may have been that with Blix failing to find weapons, with the U.N. Security Council failing to agree on a resolution authorizing the use of force - the second resolution, with France opposing it - that Bush wouldn't go to war, and that he'd be able to stall this out, keep these dispersed research programs going, sanctions come off, and he's back with weapons ...

[crosstalk]

WILLIAM KRISTOL: ... remains strong. But I think the urgency that we had to go to war right now ...

JUAN WILLIAMS: .. that Saddam Hussein did not want to appear impotent after the defeat in '91, and therefore kept up this fraud that he had some weapons. That he had the ability ...

BRIT HUME: Oh, please.

JUAN WILLIAMS: .. to defend himself. He did not have those weapons apparently, and what hurts American credibility then is you hear the President [and] others say "Well, we found these two mobile labs." Well, these two mobile labs have been taken apart. You know they have other functions ...

BRIT HUME: They're hot dog stands, Juan, that's what they were.

JUAN WILLIAMS: But they have, they can [be] used for other fermentation processes in addition to making germ warfare chemicals.

BRIT HUME: Making cider?

JUAN WILLIAMS: You know what? The point is we haven't found any evidence, no evidence at all that those mobile labs were being used to produce ...

BRIT HUME: Oh, wrong! Oh, wrong! There is all kinds of evidence.

JUAN WILLIAMS: No. There is nothing on either one of those mobile labs.

BRIT HUME: Well, no. That's absolutely incorrect. What we have found is an array of facilities on board those mobile labs that the analysts say could not possibly have been used for anything else.

JUAN WILLIAMS: That's not true. They could have been used for variable functions, in addition to making what you said.

BRIT HUME: Making what? Making what?

JUAN WILLIAMS: They could have been used for all kinds of things.

BRIT HUME: Name one.

JUAN WILLIAMS: Pharmaceutical use. Chemical use.

BRIT HUME: So, they're making stuff like Viagra?

MARA LIASSON: Weather balloons.

BRIT HUME: Juan, that's, that really - that's the tooth fairy stuff.

posted by Quiddity at 6/09/2003 12:22:00 PM