From Holden:
In today’s gaggle Little Scottie went so far as to claim that David Kay doesn’t know anything about Iraqi munitions or US efforts to locate them. We also got a peak at Scottie’s big asterisk again today.
Q The former chief weapons inspector, David Kay, said that, to him, it looked like that white powder was HMX. Are you disagreeing with his assessment?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think there’s others that have said they’re not sure what’s in those boxes. It’s not clear, it’s not clear what’s in those boxes. And there are others that question what’s in those boxes. But, regardless, it also —
Q I’m sorry, who questioned that?
MR. McCLELLAN: I’ve seen some of the media reporting, and I’ll go back and look at the media reporting and pull that for you.* And the military, I mean, they haven’t said that it’s clear what was in those boxes, other than it’s some type of explosives. But it leads to the possibility, if our troops were there and found those munitions, it’s certainly a possibility that those munitions were part of what was destroyed, because we know that they destroyed a large volume of munitions that they found in Iraq at the — these munitions were spread throughout the country.
Q Did they keep records of —
MR. McCLELLAN: Now you’re drawing conclusions without knowing all the facts, and I don’t think you can do that.
Q I’m saying David Kay reached the conclusion.
MR. McCLELLAN: That’s what I’m saying. You cannot draw the conclusions without knowing all the facts, and the facts are still unclear.
Q Wouldn’t we stipulate that David Kay is not just some casual observer, but somebody who actually knows intimately about operations on the ground, particularly during the time —
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, Ambassador Bremer is someone who knew about operations on the ground as well, because he was —
Q Was he conducting weapons inspections?
MR. McCLELLAN: — he was there, and he was very well aware of what was going on there. Our military was very well aware of that, and they have not come out — the military has not been able to confirm what, exactly, this video shows.
*CNN reported, “‘That’s either HMX or RDX,’ Kay said, referring to the types of explosives. ‘I don’t know of anything else in al Qaqaa that was in that form.'” · “But Michael Lysobey, a former U.N. weapons inspector, said it was unclear from the videotape whether the barrels contained the high-grade explosives.”