Where’s the evidence?
Sir: Melanie Phillips makes virtually no credible claim in her article on the ‘missing’ WMDs (‘I found Saddam’s WMD bunkers’, 21 April). Most of the ‘explanations’ offered are so illogical and irrational as to be laughable. The idea that a cabal of Iraqis, Russians and Syrians could dismantle and transport the massive WMD infrastructure she describes — evading notice by not only satellite and air reconnaissance but also hundreds of thousands of US and British troops and numerous search teams crisscrossing Iraq — is the stuff of a bad Tom Clancy knockoff. Then, after a page and a half of undocumented allegations, lost records, evidence she admits is circumstantial, and wholly improbable speculation, she lets drop the weasel words: ‘Of course, we don’t know whether any of this is true.’ That doesn’t stop her, however, from treating it as true, or from raising the spectre of ‘the Islamic bomb’, although she presents not a shred of hard, corroborated evidence for a single claim made by her source. I wish I could say that such journalism surprised me. Unfortunately, it seems to have become the standard for the modern news media.
John Haley Dallas, Texas, USA
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