Partial Transcript

Well, I bit the damn bullet and purchased a Nightline transcript, as per a post below regarding David Kay and what I thought I heard. I'll post the relevant section, and let you decide--in retrospect, perhaps I'd been drinking was a little distracted, but take a look (emphasis mine) :

[1]23:41:54 TED KOPPEL (ABC NEWS)
Among the Iraqi scientists that you've now had a chance to talk to, among the Iraqi leaders like Tariq Aziz that you've had a chance to talk to, have you learned anything that surprised you?
[1]23:42:06 DAVID KAY (FORMER CHIEF US WEAPONS INSPECTOR)
I learned a lot. Tariq Aziz, for example, goes in great lengths describing the Iraq post-'98. A Saddam that was more isolated, was more caught up into a fantasy world, a novelist, a playwrighter. Not concerned with affairs of state, but yet awarding money to scientists, for example, directly without any sort of external review. It was literally the heart of darkness, a society coming apart. And I think we missed, by and large, what had happened after 1998.
[1]23:42:39 TED KOPPEL (ABC NEWS)
Missed in what sense? Missed that something had -I mean, how would we have known that Saddam was that disengaged or, for that matter, that remove from reality?
[1]23:42:49 DAVID KAY (FORMER CHIEF US WEAPONS INSPECTOR)
Well, better human intelligence and we might have known. There's a history of missing this. We missed how far the Soviet Union had descended into economic incapacity and decayed military might before its collapse. And the stories of the great surprise of what the Soviet Union, this giant of a superpower, looked like when we really saw it from the inside. So, I think we missed that. We missed a society coming apart.
[1]23:43:14 TED KOPPEL (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Doesn't that -sort of mitigate against a preemptive foreign policy, the kind of foreign policy that the Bush Administration is talking about right now? If we can't rely on our intelligence in places like the former Soviet Union, in places like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, on what basis do we preemptively go to war?
[1]23:43:33 DAVID KAY (FORMER CHIEF US WEAPONS INSPECTOR)
I think you cannot have a preemptive foreign or military policy unless you have pristine, perfect intelligence. The lessons are right now.
[1]23:43:41 TED KOPPEL (ABC NEWS)
There's no such thing.
[1]23:43:42 DAVID KAY (FORMER CHIEF US WEAPONS INSPECTOR)
We don't have it and it may not be physically possible, intellectually possible.
[1]23:43:46 TED KOPPEL (ABC NEWS)
What conclusion do you reach as to preemptive strikes?
[1]23:43:50 DAVID KAY (FORMER CHIEF US WEAPONS INSPECTOR)
I reach a conclusion that as a democracy, you be very careful about it and require extraordinarily high levels of evidence. Though, I must say, in the case of Iraq, you can't spend any time there but doubt that Iraq is better off without Saddam. The hundreds of thousands of people that simply disappeared under his rule, ripped apart society there. And also I quite frankly think we were on the verge of Iraq becoming more dangerous as it decayed into this storehouse of huge amounts of military equipment, including WMD capability and technology, just at the time that other groups and countries were seeking that.
[1]23:44:29 TED KOPPEL (ABC NEWS)
(OC) It raises a couple of interesting questions, David Kay, as to what some of those scientists may yet choose to do and as to what may yet happen in Iraq, whether it is indeed a safer place. We have to take a short break. We'll be back with David Kay in just a moment.

Huh? Kay appears to be saying that Iraq was falling apart, therefore the invasion was justified. Quite a ways from Bush telling the world that Hussein could spring a "mushroom cloud" on us as a calling card.

I'll admit that the post below was--well, you decide--was it any more of an exaggeration than "25,000 liters of anthrax?"