The Burden of Proof – Cheney

by Patrick Lang (bio below)

“Although our coalition has not found WMD stockpiles in Iraq, I repeat that we never had the burden of proof. Saddam Hussein did. We operated on the best available intelligence gathered over a period of years and within a totalitarian society ruled by fear and secret police,” Cheney said. (Reuters)

Breathtaking in its boldness!

Let’s see! WE asserted on the basis of bogus and distorted information that Iraq was in non-compliance with a variety of UN resolutions calling on Iraq to disarm. A few trenchant points:

• The UN had withdrawn its inspectors from the country in ’98 at our instigation because we were going to bomb extensively in an attempt to trigger a revolt. Fair enough, but the point is that the IRAQIS did not run the inspectors out of the country.
  

  
  

• “We” believed before our invasion that Iraq still had programs and stockpiles. After the invasion we were and are unable to find any, anywhere, in the whole country. We could not find them because they did not exist. THEY DID NOT EXIST!!! If they existed, where the hell are they?
  

  
  

• The UN was busily engaged in inspecting all over the country in ’02 and ’03. They found nothing and said they were not being significantly obstructed. They wanted a few more months to finish and make sure. We would not give it to them and so after the invasion we used thousands of people and spent vast amounts of money to prove that the UN was right in their judgments.
  

  
  

• The Iraqis were asked during the UN inspection process to produce an inventory of whatever they had in the way of WMD materiel. They produced a long list which was proven correct by our later direct search of the country. Nevertheless, we insisted at the time that the list was incomplete and deliberately deceptive because some quantities of parts and raw materials that our intelligence had once believed them to have were “unaccounted for” by the UN’s inspection teams in the ’90s and were still “unaccounted for” in this inventory. This PROVED that they were hiding a secret capability in WMD. In fact, it did not prove a damned thing. This was a 3RD WORLD COUNTRY, people!. Nothing works right in 3rd World Countries and the fact that they couldn’t do a perfect paper drill on all that stuff just meant that they were inefficient. The UN was in the process of proving that when we abandoned the process claiming they were deceiving us.

Now the Vice President says that the “burden of proof” lays with the Iraqi government. In other words, it was their responsibility to prove to us that they did not have gas, biological or nuclear weapons or programs to produce them. They were unable to do that, because these capabilities and programs DID NOT EXIST.

So, citizens beware! It may become your responsibility to prove that you are not guilty of treason, sedition, being a malcontent, or whatever.

Can you prove that you are not?

Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (interview), CNN and Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room (interview), PBS’s Newshour, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” (interview), and more .

Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
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Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)


“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2