Who was there?

[LeahMira]

Did anyone else from Delaware come to hear David Kay last night (4/28) at UD?

I thought he did a pretty good job... want to talk about it?

[kiahzero]

1. Unfortunately, I had to miss it.

Had stuff to get done for class... =(

What was the general theme of the presentation?

[LeahMira]

2. Sorry, but studies are important now also...

Generally, he was saying the same kinds of things Joe Biden was saying right after 9/11... if you were on campus then you'll remember that Joe said that the US depends a lot on intelligence from other (not our own) sources, and that while we have a lot of spy satellites and such, they can't show us what's inside the buildings and trucks. For that we need trained men and women who can infiltrate and risk their lives to spy and send back good information.

Kay noted that our info on WMDs came from basically one individual who defected from Iraq. This defector talked to a number of people through a liaison, and that's why so many nations believed there were WMDS... all of them were hearing the same story from the same individual but didn't realize it.

Kay is an interesting speaker, full of factual information, and surprisingly he has a nice dry wit that keeps things interesting. The UD news reported about his presentation, and it's a pretty good synopsis.

http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2004/Kay042904.html

[kiahzero]

3. What's interesting about that defector

If it's the one that I'm thinking of, is that he also said that the weapons were destroyed.

http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kamel.html
On February 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the Iraq crisis. In a revelation that "raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist," the magazine's issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995 told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims.

Until now, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who was killed shortly after returning to Iraq in 1996, was best known for his role in exposing Iraq's deceptions about how far its pre-Gulf War biological weapons programs had advanced. But Newsweek's John Barry-- who has covered Iraqi weapons inspections for more than a decade-- obtained the transcript of Kamel's 1995 debriefing by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. inspections team known as UNSCOM.

Inspectors were told "that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them," Barry wrote. All that remained ere "hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches" and production molds. The weapons were destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors, in the hopes of someday resuming production after inspections had finished. The CIA and MI6 were told the same story, Barry reported, and "a military aide who defected with Kamel... backed Kamel's assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks."

But these statements were "hushed up by the U.N. inspectors" in order to "bluff Saddam into disclosing still more."

On a completely different topic: were you at Politically Incorrect tonight? I swear, the one guy (Jack, I think) must have been a freeper.

[LeahMira]

4. Missed it...

... but I'm staff (a secretary), not a student, so I generally don't go to student-oriented events. I hope to get to tomorrow's (5/12) talk about Korea though. Also, planning to see Janis Ian next week. She sang to my generation. :-)

[LeahMira]

5. Speakers online

All of the speakers for the Global Agenda series are taped at: http://www.udel.edu/global/agenda/2004/speakers/

You can pick up the David Kay presentation as well as the others, which were all pretty darn good.