"I am extremely concerned about the consequences of this intervention on the Iraqi people. I am particularly concerned that weapons of mass destruction could be used again by the Iraqi regime against the people if there should be any opposition or uprising.

"The Iraqi people could pay the price of this war, as they have paid the price of sanctions and all the previous wars."

Uh-oh -- another loathsome sixties-throwback apologist for evildoers? Nope. The speaker is Hussain al-Shahristani, a onetime nuclear scientist who refused to work on Saddam’s weapons program and spent eleven years in prison being tortured by the Iraqi regime. Al-Shahristani was chosen by the British government to present its recent report on the horrors of Saddam’s Iraq, but, according to yesterday’s Chicago Sun-Times, he used the occasion to make two obvious points: (1) yes, Saddam is one vicious S.O.B., but (2) war is not a tidy clinical process of replacing pure evil with pure good -- especially when the self-proclaimed good guys have a history of enabling the evildoers:

"When I was in jail, I was held with British-made handcuffs. In the cells next door, I could hear the screams of people who were having holes drilled into their bones. Those drills were made in Britain."

It would be nice if some TV booker would arrange a face-to-face between al-Shahristani and Ron Rosenbaum, or Andrew Sullivan, or David Horowitz. It would be doubly nice if the interviewer had the cojones to ask Ron or Andy or Davey whether he could look al-Shahristani in the eye and call him a "fifth columnist."