Josh Marshall reports that the administration has a problem on its hands. Short version: Iraqi scientist Mahdi Obeidi is the guy who turned over to us the centrifuge parts that he had hidden under a rosebush in his backyard. He did this after making a deal that gave him asylum in the U.S. in return for cooperating with us, but two months later he's still being held in Kuwait.
Why? It turns out that among other things Obeidi has also told his handlers that Saddam had no chemical weapons, no biological weapons, and no nuclear program either. The CIA claims they're holding him because they don't think he's telling the whole truth, but Josh spoke to a former weapons inspector who has talked to Obeidi and suggests that the real reason is that nobody is especially interested in having him go on Larry King to tell his story, so they're holding him in Kuwait instead of giving him the asylum he thought he had bargained for.
Well, just this week the official spokesman for the Office-of-Spin-for-our-WMD-Search asked us not to be surprised if there were a surprise on the WMD front soon. This after Dubyah told us at his press conference that we were working hard to produce "evidence" of Saddam's weapon's "program" to "satisfy" the "skeptics". Got that? The weapons themselves - and the need to keep them from the hands of terrorists - have evolved in this new verbal styling into some abstract logical case we need to make to prove something to someone. The specificity of the oft mentioned threat has simply evaporated.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could deal with our own real life problems this way? He says Iraq didn't have WMDs so it's obviously up to him to tell us where they are or he can just rot there. It's a bit like Johnny Carson used to say about comedy -- you buy the premise, you buy the bit.
