http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=574&e=8&u=/nm/20040108/wl_nm/iraq_usa_weapons_dc WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bush administration officials "systematically" misrepresented the danger of Iraq (news - web sites)'s weapons of mass destruction programs, which were not an immediate threat to the United States and the Middle East, a report from a U.S. think tank said on Wednesday. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in its study, "WMD IN IRAQ: Evidence and Implications," that there was "no convincing evidence" Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program and that U.N. weapons inspectors had discovered that nerve agents in Iraq's chemical weapons program had lost most of their lethal capability as early as 1991. There was greater uncertainty about Iraq's biological weapons, but that threat was related to what could be developed in the future rather than what Iraq already had, the study by the liberal-leaning think tank said. The missile program appeared to have been in active development in 2002 and Iraq was expanding its capability to build missiles with ranges that exceeded U.N. limits, it said. The United States justified going to war against Iraq last year citing a threat from Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction. Since the U.S. occupation of Iraq, American forces hunting for weapons of mass destruction have not found any stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons or any solid evidence Iraq had resurrected its nuclear weapons program. It was unlikely Iraq could have destroyed, hidden, or moved out of the country hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of SCUD missiles, and facilities producing chemical and biological weapons without the United States detecting some sign of that activity, the report said. "Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs," the report said. They lumped nuclear, chemical and biological weapons together as a single threat, despite the "very different" danger they posed, which distorted the cost/benefit analysis of the war, the study said. Administration officials also insisted without evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, the report said. "There was no evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD to al Qaeda and much evidence to counter it," the report said. There was also no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, it said. 'UNDULY INFLUENCED' Prior to 2002, intelligence agencies appeared to have overestimated the chemical and biological weapons in Iraq but had a generally accurate reading of the nuclear and missile programs, the study said. But from 2002 until the war in Iraq, there appeared to have been an environment of intense political pressure in which an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's banned weapons was hurriedly put together and included a high number of dissents in what was supposed to be a consensus document of the various intelligence agencies, the study said. The Pentagon (news - web sites) created a separate intelligence office during that time. Those factors suggested "the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views," the study said. Stuart Cohen, vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which produced the National Intelligence Estimate, told ABC's "Nightline" on Tuesday, "Assertions, particularly that we had shaded our judgments to support an administration policy, were just nonsense."
And this is precisely the reason why I now refer to the "commander in chief" as "President Bait -n- Switch". What Bush and his cronies did was the same thing used car salesmen do on a daily basis in this country. Only trouble is, when used car salesmen pull a bait -n- switch, people don't die in the process!
I wonder if Bush was so easily convinced because his father as CIA chief and, later, as President and his brother as a businessman were among those who OK'd the sale of chemical weapons to Iraq in the past. Of course there are other reasons. Bush wants to define himself on war, sure. But read into what he's doing domestically while stirring up war elsewhere. Not that no one knows about it; but what he's doing to the environment, education (ever notice how he always sits and smiles with black kids for his photo ops? give it up, King George, the brother vote ain't gonna tip toward you), the deficit, everything...! But all the war noise drowns out his anti-compassionate crusade here at home.
It's funny that people take an article as golden truth when they don't even consider the source. What makes you think this leftist source even knows what they are talking about ... simple fact is they don't!
Yeah, look at all these communist leftists on the Carnegie Endowments board of trustees: James C. Gaither Chairman Manging Director, Sutter Hill Ventures; Special Counsel, Cooley Godward Gregory B. Craig Vice Chairman Partner, Williams & Connolly Bill Bradley, Managing Director, Allen & Company Robert Carswell, Of Counsel, Shearman & Sterling Jerome A. Cohen, Of Counsel, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison Richard A. Debs, Advisory Director, Morgan Stanley Susan Eisenhower, President, The Eisenhower World Affairs Institute Donald V. Fites, Chairman of the Board, Retired, Caterpillar, Inc. Leslie H. Gelb, President Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations William W. George, Former Chairman, Medtronic, Inc. Richard Giordano, Chairman, BG Group plc Jamie Gorelick, Partner, Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering Stephen D. Harlan, Partner, Harlan Enterprises LLC Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus and Bing Professor of Environmental Science Emeritus, Stanford University, Institute for International Studies Robert Legvold, Professor of Political Science, The Harriman Institute, Columbia University Stephen R. Lewis, Jr., President Emeritus, Carleton College Jessica T. Mathews, President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Zanny Minton Beddoes, Economics Correspondent, The Economist Olara A. Otunnu, Special Representative of the Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict, United Nations William J. Perry, Professor, Stanford University, Institute for International Studies W. Taylor Reveley III, Dean, William & Mary School of Law Strobe Talbott, President, Brookings Institution God, former DoD and State Dep't officials and various investment bankers, venture capitalists, and partners at various powerhouse Wall street and Capitol hill law firms! What a bunch of unrepentant Marxists!...
Who said anyone took it as the Gospel? What people are looking at is that this is one of many sources that have independently reached the same conclusion.
Colin Powell's rebuttal - ok, I admit there's no evidence, take my word for it. How about - show me the money. Hard to take the word from the guy who was in charge of the initial My Lai investigation and couldn't find anything and was proclaiming Niger yellow cake... http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040108/ap_on_re_mi_ea/us_iraq_6 Powell Refutes Think-Tank Report on Iraq 57 minutes ago By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) acknowledged Thursday that he had seen no "smoking gun, concrete evidence" of ties between Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and the al-Qaida terror network, but insisted that Iraq (news - web sites) had had dangerous weapons and needed to be disarmed by force. At a State Department news conference, Powell disagreed with a private think tank report that maintained Iraq had not been an imminent threat to the United States. And the secretary defended the case he had made last February before the United Nations (news - web sites) for a U.S.-led war to force Saddam from power. "My presentation ... made it clear that we had seen some links and connections to terrorist organizations over time," Powell said. "I have not seen smoking gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I think the possibility of such connections did exist and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did." Three experts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in a report Thursday that the Bush administration systematically misrepresented a weapons threat from Iraq, and U.S. strategy should be revised to eliminate the policy of unilateral preventive war. "It is unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of Scud missiles and facilities engaged in the ongoing production of chemical and biological weapons that officials claimed were present without the United States detecting some sign of this activity," said the report by Jessica T. Mathews, Joseph Cirincione and George Perkovich. Powell noted that Saddam obviously had, and used, destructive weapons in the late 1980s, then refused for a decade to assure the world he'd gotten rid of them. "In terms of intention, he always had it," Powell said. Of Carnegie's finding that Iraq posed no imminent threat, Powell said: "They did not say it wasn't there." Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled and there was no convincing evidence it was being revived, the report said. And the U.S.-led war on Iraq in 1991 combined with U.N. sanctions and inspections effectively destroyed Iraq's ability to produce chemical weapons on a large scale, it said. The real threat was posed by what Iraq might have been able to do in the future, such as starting production of biological weapons quickly in the event of war, Carnegie said. Also, Iraq apparently was expanding its capability to build missiles beyond the range permitted by the U.N. Security Council, the report said. "The missile program appears to have been the one program in active development in 2002," it said. Years of U.N. inspections to determine whether Saddam was harboring weapons of mass destruction were working well, and the United States should set up jointly with the United Nations a permanent system to guard against the spread of dangerous technology, the report said. It recommended that consideration be given to making the job of CIA (news - web sites) director a career post instead of a political appointment. Mathews is president, Cirincione is director of the proliferation project, and Perkovich is vice president for studies at Carnegie, an independent research group. Citing the CIA and other U.S. intelligence offices, the Bush administration contended that Iraq had caches of weapons of mass destruction and plans to produce more. The Carnegie report said the U.S. intelligence process failed on Iraq and that Bush administration officials dropped qualifications and expressions of uncertainty presented by U.S. intelligence analysts. In the weeks before the war, the administration also intensified its allegations of links between Saddam and the al-Qaida terror network headed by Osama bin Laden (news - web sites). Since May, when Bush declared an end to major combat, 357 U.S. service personnel have died in attacks on them and in accidents
U.S. Withdraws a Team of Weapons Hunters From Iraq By DOUGLAS JEHL, NYTimes WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials. The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March. A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. But that team is "still waiting for something to dispose of," said a survey group member. Some of the government officials said the most important evidence from the weapons hunt might be contained in a vast collection of seized Iraqi documents being stored in a secret military warehouse in Qatar. Only a small fraction have been translated. A report published Wednesday in The Washington Post cited a previously undisclosed document that suggested that Iraq might have destroyed its biological weapons as early as 1991. The report said investigators had otherwise found no evidence to support American beliefs that Iraq had maintained illicit weapons dating from the Persian Gulf war of 1991 or that it had advanced programs to build new ones. The report also documented a pattern of deceit that was found in every field of special weaponry. It said that according to Iraqi designers and foreign investigators, program managers exaggerated the results they could achieve, or even promised results they knew they could not accomplish — all in an effort to appease Saddam Hussein. In some cases, though, they simply did it to advance their careers, the report said, or preserve jobs or even conduct intrigues against their rivals. Senior intelligence officials acknowledged in recent days that the weapons hunters still had not found weapons or active programs, but in interviews, they said the search must continue to ensure that no hidden Iraqi weapons surfaced in a future attack. "We worry about what may have happened to those weapons," Stuart Cohen, the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said in an interview broadcast late Tuesday on the ABC News program "Nightline." "Theories abound as to what may have happened." The search for Iraqi weapons remains "the primary focus" of the survey group, a senior Defense Department official said. But he acknowledged that most of the dozens of new linguists and intelligence analysts to join the team had recently been given assignments related to combating the Iraqi insurgency rather than to the weapons search. David Kay, the head of the survey group, made it known last month that he might leave his post. Government officials said Wednesday that he had not reached a decision but that both he and his top deputy, Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency, were in Washington, in part to discuss what direction the hunt should take. "I am sure that if they had found important evidence, we would know about it," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has said the administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat. Bill Harlow, the top spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, said Wednesday that "the team needs to compete its work, and no one should jump to any conclusions before it has an opportunity to examine all of the circumstances." American intelligence officials who described the seized documents said they hoped the documents might eventually help to unravel the mystery of whether Iraqi weapons remained hidden or whether they were destroyed long before what the Bush administration initially portrayed as a mission "to disarm Iraq." In the television interview, Mr. Cohen, who as vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council led the team that formally concluded in October 2002 that Iraq possessed both chemical and biological weapons, insisted that "it is too soon to close the books on this case." A report to be released Thursday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has concluded that it was unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons and related production facilities that American officials claimed were present "without the United States detecting some sign of this activity." Through their spokesmen, Dr. Kay and General Dayton have declined repeated requests for interviews. The cache of Iraqi documents cover subjects extending far beyond illicit weapons, according to senior military officials, and are so voluminous that, if stacked, they would rise 10 miles high, according to estimates by senior government officials. The warehouse in Qatar has become the center of work by the Defense Intelligence Agency to translate and analyze the documents, the officials said. The 400-member team withdrawn from Iraq, known as the Joint Captured Matériel Exploitation Group, was primarily composed of technical experts and was headed by an Australian brigadier, Defense Department officials said. Its work included searching weapons depots and other sites for missile launchers that might have been used with illicit weapons, the officials said, and it was withdrawn "because its work was essentially done." "They picked up everything that was worth picking up," one official said. The weapons disposal team still in place, known as Task Force D/E, for disablement and elimination, has been used to collect suspicious material, although none has proved to be part of any illicit weapons program. In an interim report in October, Dr. Kay acknowledged that his team had failed to find illicit weapons or active weapons programs in Iraq, but said they had discovered evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to develop such weapons and might have retained the capacity to do so. Dr. Kay has not said when he intended to issue his next report, and that remains a subject of debate within the administration, government officials said. American intelligence officials, including Mr. Cohen, have vigorously defended their estimates of Iraq's weapons program, saying the evidence was strong, credible and backed up by a number of sources. But staff members of the Senate and House intelligence agencies are preparing reports suggesting that the administration and intelligence agencies had seriously overestimated the nature of the threat posed by illicit Iraqi weapons. Ms. Harman said in a telephone interview that she expected that Dr. Kay, appointed last June 11 as a special adviser to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was probably stepping down, a development that she said would be "very disappointing." "I have to believe that if they were about to pounce on a large stockpile of chemical or biological weapons, he would be there for the announcement," Ms. Harman said.
