Daddio and Boo are in town for a visit, and we've been having some good times around DC. Highlights so far include:
At The National Zoo...
-Baby pandas are cute; grown-up pandas are like giant rugs that occasionally roll over.
-Golden lion tamarins may be little, but they don't take no shit from white-faced saki monkeys
-According to a member of the zoo staff, if they took down the fence separating 5 cheetahs from a lone zebra, "the zebra would win."
Out At Dinner...
-Boo: "This stuff tastes good, and wormy. I like this wormy stuff."
-We are sitting outside, with Boo facing the street and watching passing traffic with great interest. After about 15 minutes of sitting, Boo mournfully reports that not a single emergency vehicle has gone past. Daddio remarks, "That would be [Boo]'s restaurant review column: 'Very few emergency vehicles passed by this restaurant. I give it a rating of one fire truck. Oh, and the food was okay.'"
In The Hotel Room...
-Both Daddio and I liked the movie The Fugitive, but neither of us had seen the first 15 minutes of it until this weekend.
-Me (to Boo): "You know who Tommy Lee Jones is, right?"
Boo: "He's the guy who shoots the alien."
5 Comments:
And he has grown up so much!
My mother and I did the math and realized Boo is going to be *gasp, gape, gag* FIFTEEN this Summer. We both just about killed ourselves.
Isn't it terrifying? I hate this "growing up" fad that all the kids are into today.
ZDK,
Hey, I remember when you experimented with "growing up". That was what, 3 years ago?
*ducks*
It turns out Citizen F was right all along.
******************
Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War
Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 12, 2006; Page A01
On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.
U.S. officials asserted that Iraq had biological weapons factories in trailers, even after a Pentagon mission found them unsuited for that role.
U.S. officials asserted that Iraq had biological weapons factories in trailers, even after a Pentagon mission found them unsuited for that role. (By Pfc. Joshua Hutcheson Via Associated Press)
Graphic
From 'Biological Laboratories'
Two Iraqi trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops became a center-piece of U.S. claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But shortly after the fall of Baghdad, an internal report showed the trailers had nothing to do with banned weapons.
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A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.
The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.
None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. The contents of the final report, "Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers," remain classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work.
"There was no connection to anything biological," said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: "the biggest sand toilets in the world."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/11/AR2006041101888.html
*********************
Blind trust is a bad thing.
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