11/25/2002

“Between late November [2002] and mid-March 2003, [chief UN weapons inspector Hans] Blix reports, the UN inspectors made seven hundred separate visits to five hundred sites [in Iraq]. About three dozen of those sites had been suggested by intelligence services, many by [George] Tenet’s CIA, which insisted that these were ‘the best’ in the agency’s database. Blix was shocked. ‘If this was the best, what was the rest?’ he asked himself. ‘Could there be 100-percent certainty about the existence of weapons of mass destruction but zero-percent knowledge about their location?’ By this time Blix was firmly opposed to the evident American preference for disarmament by war.” [The 25th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.]

 – Thomas Powers, The Military Error, Page 120