I'm sorry, I stopped paying attention as soon as he mentioned that the guy was selling a book. I mean come on, grains of salt don't even begin to cover this.

That's actually why I phrased it as a question and put the 'if' in there. That said, I do know who this guy is (from earlier things that happened), and he has some serious credibility.

That does not mean that he is necessarily correct, but what's interesting about his allegations is that they can actually be checked. The US and the new Iraqi government have access to lots of records of the old regime, and this kind of operation would leave records. Were any aircraft so modified? There would have been records of the modifications. There would also have been tower records of the flights. These things are kept and can be checked.

My guess is, given the publicity these allegations will get, they will be checked by someone.

Silly man! Just because the documents are forgeries does not mean that they aren't the truth. Siomilarly, just because there really were WMD doesn't mean that Bush wasn't lying or that the whole Iraq war was anything but a fraud perpetrated by the Neo-con right.

After all, everyone with any knowledge at all knew that Saddam had WMDs and the capacity to make more of them, that he had a nuke program and was anxious to restart it. Yet none of the leftwing Dhimocrats can trouble themselves to explain what happened to the all those materiels they themselves acknowledged only 5 short years ago that Saddam possessed. So invested are they in the notion the Bush lied to get us into war, that the truth of the matter is irrelevant. And until there emerges a "responsible wing" to the Democratic Party, one that can publicly acknowledge the distinction between reality and partisan longing, that same Democratic party will itself continue to be irrelevant.

I don't think that the Democrats will suddenly turn responsible as a group. I see far greater odds that the responsible Democrats (people like Lieberman or Clinton, for instance) and socially liberal and somewhat statist Republicans (McCain or Jeffords, for instance) will break with their parties and form a new party, based on socially liberal and somewhat statist domestic/economic policies combined with an aggressive foreign policy. Rather quickly, the rump of the Democrats would become irrelevant, as the Whigs did in the run up to the Civil War.

The key to whether this happens or not will be the 2006 and 2008 elections. If the activists of the far Left, who look to be in control for 2006, lose badly, but still maintain control for 2008, and lose badly again, and still maintain control after that, the Democrats will likely split. But if at any time in there the centrist Democrats can regain control of the party from the activists, and isolate the activists away from policy and structural concerns, then the Democrats will likely not split, and will likely become more responsible as well.