About time! I’m glad to see something happening on the long trail towards accountability. The question remains whether the Sevan indictment can be used to identify whether and where there was more widespread corruption in the Programme. Unfortunately the short answer, as Claudia has pointed out before, is ‘Yes’…

However this wouldn’t be a Pajamas thread without a token loose cannon, and luckily L Scott Davidson has volunteered. I particularly liked:

“If a lunatic felon is seen entering a school with a gun, and if that felon is shot by the police, and if the gun is not found, the police are not to be punished for their inability to find the gun.”

Very clearly the police would be punished if they shot somebody who was unarmed. The defence that they are a “lunatic felon” probably wouldn’t hold much water, especially if a gun is never found. It makes me really glad that you’re not a police officer.

“It should never have been considered to be the responsibilty of the invaders to produce the weapons, that responsibility was incumbent upon the UN and their failure to do so made the invasion necessary.”

Um, yes, it was the responsibility of the invaders to produce WMDs, since that was a critical reason for going to war. If WMDs don’t exist, the reasons for war are undermined (although not removed, since there were other reasons). If there weren’t WMDs, then the UN would hardly be able to produce them, would they? Also worth pointing out: no WMD have been found in Iraq since the fall of Saddam.