UPDATE: Videos here. Some of the sound is a little unclear, so hopefully there will be transcripts soon.
You may recall Colin Powell saying this during his U.N. speech:
Iraq’s record on chemical weapons is replete with lies. It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons.
The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein’s late son-in-law.
This was true. However, there’s one little thing Powell left out: when Hussein Kamel defected in 1995, he also said ALL IRAQ’S UNDECLARED WMD HAD BEEN SECRETLY DESTROYED IN 1991. In other words, Iraq had been lying about what it had done in the past, not what it possessed in the present.
Of course, to know this you had to have access to supersecret sources of information. For instance, CNN:
SADLER: Can you state here and now — does Iraq still to this day hold weapons of mass destruction?
KAMEL: No. Iraq does not possess any weapons of mass destruction. I am being completely honest about this.
Or the U.N. notes from the debriefing of Kamel:
All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons – biological, chemical, missiles, nuclear were destroyed.
This morning Sam Husseini caught Colin Powell as he was leaving an appearance on Face the Nation and asked him whether he was aware of this when he spoke at the U.N. Powell said he wasn’t; in other words, he declared that he didn’t know the most basic information about what he was saying, and apparently doesn’t feel any responsibility for knowing it.
Check back later today for the video and transcript.