Ex-U.S. Arms Hunter Kay Says No Stockpiles in Iraq

1) Er...and how would Kay know about how the intel was gathered? Especially how would he know more so than the intel people who complained about it at the time? And in that he was among the strongest proponents of our invasion before the war from the decision making aspect rather than the intel gathering aspect, who would you expect him to blame?

And, no, this is not my conclusion. Several people...several high ranking people complained about selective intel gathering before the war...repeat and underline for effect: BEFORE THE WAR...In other words, before we knew they were right. SO in that many more are saying it now, and everything they said is confirmed with each non-find, and the otherwise unexplained formulation of a new, WH based intel dept., what are you suggesting? That it's just a conicidence? That those who complained pre-war about selective intel just happened to have been lucky in their guesswork?


2) Yes, there are very, very viable ways to know that intel is bad before the fact. Like, say, we know it's based on forged documents. Or we know that it's already been disproven. Etc. Etc. And we knew this stuff and used it anyway. Come on, you can't re-write history. I'm not even getting into the WH's new Find WMD/9-11 Connections WIth Iraq Intel Dept.s more than questionable reliance on Iraqi sources with obvious interests in the invasion over neutral intel gathered by professionals. You can't hide form this, giddy. It's all on record. We used intel we KNEW was bad. What's more, we used lots of other intel that was questionable, or murky if you will, and presented it as certain. To turn around now and say : Gee, intel is shaky business' is revisionist.

3) There was a certainty that Saddam had gassed Kurds over a decade ago, previous to all the factors which had made that impossible now, not to mention the fact that we supported him at the time. Your point?

There was a certainty that Saddam had invaded Kuwait, yes. And we fought a war over that. You might remember it. Since then Saddam had attacked exactly no one. There was a certainty that all kinds of nations aggressivley removed political oppnents. That's what happens in history. We have done it ourselves several times. Your point?

See, giddy, see if you can follow what's happened in this dicsussionm because it's symptomatic of the war discussion in general.


You make a point about how our policy makers are not to blame about the WMD scam, but the intel. I respond with two factual reasons why that isn;t true, but also add the caveat that the rest of the world said that our intel on WMD's/9-11 was really weak, and that intel is a weak premise for a war, and have been proven correct. You respond by saying that we knew Saddam was a bad guy. Now while I agree that Saddam is a bad guy, that wasn't why we went to war, he was also a bad guy ( worse, actually, in terms of practice) when we supported him and vetoed any UN sanctions against him, and we knew it. There are also all kinds of other bad guys in the world. South Africa was bad...no one suggested invasion. There are bad guys all over Africa.

But we said to the world that this particular bad guy had to be removed because of his 9-11 connections and WMDs. The world said 'prove it'. We said we had all the proof we needed, and presented case ofter case of bad intel which was quickly disproven by a puzzled intel community. What's more, we knew a lot of it was bad, and knew that more was very questionable, but didn;t present it that way. And the world said, 'uh, no.' and we reacted by calling them traitors, cowards, and jealous.

And when at the end of the day everything everyone else was saying was proven right, and everything we had been saying was proven wrong, people who support the war come back to what we knew 20 years ago when we helped Saddam retain power, and when we assisted him in his war with Iran, and what we knew when we ended the last war, and what we knew long before 9-11: Saddam is a bad guy. Still ture, still not why we went to war, or enough reason to go to war. Still doesn;t take the administration's responsibility for lying to us, and being wrong time after time away from the administration and put in on the intelligence community's head. In that they were ignoring intel from the CIA, and the scientific community, and instead going with the questionable at best intel given to them by the brand new WH intel department they had established with the express purpose of finding intel to support the war....


Put it this way ( Major run-on sentence warning): If I want to buy a new car because I don't like it, and have always thought it was ugly, which it is, and my wife says we can't afford to replace it unless we really need to, and I take it to several garages to have it checked, and they all say that it's fine, and then I take it to my nephew Greg, who isn't a mechanic, but who will get the old car if I buy a new one, and he says, Sure, it's falling apart. Besides, look at how ugly it is...and then I go back to my wife and say that the garages were worried about the car, but couldn;t say for certain when it would go, and that I had ahad another expert look at it who said it was falling apart, and we go and buy a new one, and then my wife finds out that there was nothing wrong with the old car, and that the mechanics had said so, and that Greg, who got the new car, wasn;t qualified to say anything....can I then turn to her and say it 's all good, because A) Mechanics is an iffy processs, B) the car was ugly, and C) If there is any fault it's not mine because I got bad advice?!?!?


That's what you're doing here.

 

Originally posted by MacBeth
1) Er...and how would Kay know about how the intel was gathered? Especially how would he know more so than the intel people who complained about it at the time? And in that he was among the strongest proponents of our invasion before the war from the decision making aspect rather than the intel gathering aspect, who would you expect him to blame?

And, no, this is not my conclusion. Several people...several high ranking people complained about selective intel gathering before the war...repeat and underline for effect: BEFORE THE WAR...In other words, before we knew they were right. SO in that many more are saying it now, and everything they said is confirmed with each non-find, and the otherwise unexplained formulation of a new, WH based intel dept., what are you suggesting? That it's just a conicidence? That those who complained pre-war about selective intel just happened to have been lucky in their guesswork?

<b>A. Aren't Kay's comments driven by our lack of finding WMD's of any significant stock?

B. I don't expect uniformity of opinion to come out of a community of intel and defense this large. Why do you?

That's what we saw from Saddam. Didn't he win an election with 100% of the vote. Too bad those 400,000 dead Iraqis couldn't vote. I'm really surprised that their surviving friends and family voted for Saddam, aren't you?
</b>

2) Yes, there are very, very viable ways to know that intel is bad before the fact. Like, say, we know it's based on forged documents. Or we know that it's already been disproven. Etc. Etc. And we knew this stuff and used it anyway. Come on, you can't re-write history. I'm not even getting into the WH's new Find WMD/9-11 Connections WIth Iraq Intel Dept.s more than questionable reliance on Iraqi sources with obvious interests in the invasion over neutral intel gathered by professionals. You can't hide form this, giddy. It's all on record. We used intel we KNEW was bad. What's more, we used lots of other intel that was questionable, or murky if you will, and presented it as certain. To turn around now and say : Gee, intel is shaky business' is revisionist.

<b>Didn't the evidence of forged documents come out long after the war had begun? Now that is revisionist. Have you examined all of the intel? I imagine it is contradictory in many ways. I daresay that the intel from every sector included both positive and negative factors. What they paid particular attention to was that intel that justified the decapitation of a tyrant who could/would be or was friendly toward terrorists who have begun to target the US. Sometimes you just have to choose.</b>

3) There was a certainty that Saddam had gassed Kurds over a decade ago, previous to all the factors which had made that impossible now, not to mention the fact that we supported him at the time. Your point?

<b>How was that made impossible. Weren't there missing stocks. Oh that's right, there was breakage or bookkeeping errors. So President Bush is now making up for the sins of past US Administrations and you still want to hang him out to dry. I just don't get it. Damned when we did; damned when we didn't.</b>

There was a certainty that Saddam had invaded Kuwait, yes. And we fought a war over that. You might remember it. Since then Saddam had attacked exactly no one. There was a certainty that all kinds of nations aggressivley removed political oppnents. That's what happens in history. We have done it ourselves several times. Your point?

<b>War? Kuwait? Yes, I vaguely remember that. Saddam had attacked no one but neither had he complied with the demands per his surrender. It dragged on for 12 years right into a most dangerous time for the US. Time to clean up the messes.</b>

See, giddy, see if you can follow what's happened in this dicsussionm because it's symptomatic of the war discussion in general.


You make a point about how our policy makers are not to blame about the WMD scam, but the intel. I respond with two factual reasons why that isn;t true <b>(which I've rebutted successfully I'd say)</b>, but also add the caveat that the rest of the world <b>(we do have a significant coalition; the world goes on without the French, the Germans, and the Canadians)</b> said that our intel on WMD's/9-11 was really weak, and that intel is a weak premise for a war, and have been proven correct <b>(only up to this point)</b>. You respond by saying that we knew Saddam was a bad guy. Now while I agree that Saddam is a bad guy, that wasn't why we went to war, he was also a bad guy ( worse, actually, in terms of practice) when we supported him and vetoed any UN sanctions against him, and we knew it <b>(aren't you proud of a country that can recognize past mistakes and redress them?)</b>. There are also all kinds of other bad guys in the world. South Africa was bad...no one suggested invasion. There are bad guys all over Africa. <b>(Middle East geography spells the difference)</b>

But we said to the world that this particular bad guy had to be removed because of his 9-11 connections and WMDs. The world said 'prove it'. We said we had all the proof we needed, and presented case ofter case of bad intel which was quickly disproven by a puzzled intel community. What's more, we knew a lot of it was bad, and knew that more was very questionable, but didn;t present it that way. And the world said, 'uh, no.' and we reacted by calling them traitors, cowards, and jealous. <b>(who is "we?" I don't remember any of that language coming from the Administration. Rush Limbaugh, yes but officials, no.</b>

And when at the end of the day everything everyone else was saying was proven right <b>(only about WMDs... up to this point)</b>, and everything we had been saying was proven wrong, people who support the war come back to what we knew 20 years ago when we helped Saddam retain power, and when we assisted him in his war with Iran <b>(a nation led by an Ayatollah who called the US the devil and whose supporters had taken over our embassy for more than a year)</b>, and what we knew when we ended the last war, and what we knew long before 9-11: Saddam is a bad guy. Still ture, still not why we went to war, or enough reason to go to war. Still doesn;t take the administration's responsibility for lying to us, and being wrong time after time away from the administration and put in on the intelligence community's head. In that they were ignoring intel from the CIA, and the scientific community, and instead going with the questionable at best intel given to them by the brand new WH intel department they had established with the express purpose of finding intel to support the war....


Put it this way ( Major run-on sentence warning): If I want to buy a new car because I don't like it, and have always thought it was ugly, which it is, and my wife says we can't afford to replace it unless we really need to, and I take it to several garages to have it checked, and they all say that it's fine, and then I take it to my nephew Greg, who isn't a mechanic, but who will get the old car if I buy a new one, and he says, Sure, it's falling apart. Besides, look at how ugly it is...and then I go back to my wife and say that the garages were worried about the car, but couldn;t say for certain when it would go, and that I had ahad another expert look at it who said it was falling apart, and we go and buy a new one, and then my wife finds out that there was nothing wrong with the old car, and that the mechanics had said so, and that Greg, who got the new car, wasn;t qualified to say anything....can I then turn to her and say it 's all good, because A) Mechanics is an iffy processs, B) the car was ugly, and C) If there is any fault it's not mine because I got bad advice?!?!?


That's what you're doing here.

<b>Think about the results down the road for Iraqis and the Middle East with a stable democratic Iraq-- if that can happen.</b>

 

"In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Dr Kay, who last week resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said that he had uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before last year's war to overthrow Saddam."

 

What do theories have to do with the facts about this? We went on for reasons which were wrong, which we knew were wrong, and now we're trying to revise history do aviod that fact. And those who don;t want to admit that the US was wrong, or that a Republican was wrong are swallowing it. Amazing.

 

So, Syria is the next stop, eh?

Four More Years = Four More Wars.

 

<b>MacBeth</b>:

How would you weigh the evidence in percentages for and against WMDs? 20/80... 40/60... 10/90.... 2/98?

My point about the unanimous re-re-re-re-election of Saddam was to mock your demand for uniformity of opinion... it's not necessarily a good thing. Case in point: Saddam Hussein.

Can you provide me with the link that indicates that we were aware of document forgery with regard to WMDs before the ground troops entered Iraq?

Why is the opinion on intel that supports your position recognized as "concensus" by you while another body of opinion that fails to support your position "a lie?"

In the SOTU 2001, President Bush pointed up that Saddam's danger was on a thread as thin as a vial of some bio-chem WMD smuggled into the US. It's not all about nuclear WMDs.

Saddam's treaty was with the UN not with the US. We gave him 12 years to live up to it. We gave the UN 3 months or more to get on board with enforcement. Saddam broke a treaty with the UN; the US broke away from the UN. Isn't that our right? Wouldn't going in with the UN actually be breaking the treaty?

Populations elect representatives who make the decisions. They population is fickle based on the information that they receive and/or are provided. Naturally, as death tolls mount it is difficult to maintain the initial resolve.

When did I ever say it was right for us to encourage Saddam? I only said that the argument could be made that we were now righting wrongs that were foisted upon the Iraqi people 20+ years ago. You would criticize us then and you criticize us now.

 

Syria, Iran, North Korea...who's the fourth?

 

Knowing who the source is, my best educated guess would be France!

 

Marchons! Marchons!

 

Yep, dem bastiges definitely have WMDs there!

Wines of Mass Drunkenness!!!

 

The fact that they did neither *AND* stonewalled any attempt at investigation of what went wrong pre 9/11 is pretty telling. Are they just impotent or complacent?

Bada bing, bada boom.

 

I'll stick with defensive ... and understand why. It's vicious out there.

 

http://slate.msn.com/id/2094415/
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Iraq's weapons and facilities, he says, had been destroyed in three phases: by allied bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War; by U.N. inspectors in the half-decade after that war; and by President Clinton's 1998 bombing campaign. (Clinton's airstrikes, by now widely forgotten, were even at the time widely dismissed as a political diversion; they took place during the weekend when the House of Representatives voted for impeachment. But according to Kay, they destroyed Iraq's remaining infrastructure for building chemical weapons.) Kay adds that Saddam tried to resuscitate some of these programs, but—due to sanctions, fear of inspections, and lack of resources—he was not able to do so.

Kay made these same points in his report last October, but it was easy to overlook them—in fact, the reader was meant to. Kay didn't exactly lie in the report; the points were there if you looked carefully; but he did his best to camouflage them.
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It looks like David Kay owes the Intel community an apology for saying they owe Bush an apology. Several people have mentioned that Bush was warned that there was no WMD evidence in Iraq or Terrorist connections with Al Qaeda, but here is a list that proves that Bush was indeed warned prior to the invasion of Iraq. If you go to the link, they also link many of their sources where their information came from.


http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=24889
Neglecting Intelligence, Ignoring Warnings

A chronology of how the Bush Administration repeatedly and deliberately refused to listen to intelligence agencies that said its case for war was weak

January 28, 2004
Updated January 29, 2004
Download: DOC, PDF, RTF

Former weapons inspector David Kay now says Iraq probably did not have WMD before the war, a major blow to the Bush Administration which used the WMD argument as the rationale for war. Unfortunately, Kay and the Administration are now attempting to shift the blame for misleading America onto the intelligence community. But a review of the facts shows the intelligence community repeatedly warned the Bush Administration about the weakness of its case, but was circumvented, overruled, and ignored. The following is year-by-year timeline of those warnings.

2001: WH Admits Iraq Contained; Creates Agency to Circumvent Intel Agencies

In 2001 and before, intelligence agencies noted that Saddam Hussein was effectively contained after the Gulf War. In fact, former weapons inspector David Kay now admits that the previous policy of containment – including the 1998 bombing of Iraq – destroyed any remaining infrastructure of potential WMD programs.

OCTOBER 8, 1997 – IAEA SAYS IRAQ FREE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS: "As reported in detail in the progress report dated 8 October 1997…and based on all credible information available to date, the IAEA's verification activities in Iraq, have resulted in the evolution of a technically coherent picture of Iraq's clandestine nuclear programme. These verification activities have revealed no indications that Iraq had achieved its programme objective of producing nuclear weapons or that Iraq had produced more than a few grams of weapon-usable nuclear material or had clandestinely acquired such material. Furthermore, there are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for t he production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance." [Source: IAEA Report, 10/8/98]

FEBRUARY 23 & 24, 2001 – COLIN POWELL SAYS IRAQ IS CONTAINED: "I think we ought to declare [the containment policy] a success. We have kept him contained, kept him in his box." He added Saddam "is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors" and that "he threatens not the United States." [Source: State Department, 2/23/01 and 2/24/01]

SEPTEMBER 16, 2001 – CHENEY ACKNOWLEDGES IRAQ IS CONTAINED: Vice President Dick Cheney said that "Saddam Hussein is bottled up" – a confirmation of the intelligence he had received. [Source: Meet the Press, 9/16/2001]

SEPTEMBER 2001 – WHITE HOUSE CREATES OFFICE TO CIRCUMVENT INTEL AGENCIES: The Pentagon creates the Office of Special Plans "in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true-that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States…The rising influence of the Office of Special Plans was accompanied by a decline in the influence of the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. bringing about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community." The office, hand-picked by the Administration, specifically "cherry-picked intelligence that supported its pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest" while officials deliberately "bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence." [Sources: New Yorker, 5/12/03; Atlantic Monthly, 1/04; New Yorker, 10/20/03]

2002: Intel Agencies Repeatedly Warn White House of Its Weak WMD Case

Throughout 2002, the CIA, DIA, Department of Energy and United Nations all warned the Bush Administration that its selective use of intelligence was painting a weak WMD case. Those warnings were repeatedly ignored.

JANUARY, 2002 – TENET DOES NOT MENTION IRAQ IN NUCLEAR THREAT REPORT: "In CIA Director George Tenet's January 2002 review of global weapons-technology proliferation, he did not even mention a nuclear threat from Iraq, though he did warn of one from North Korea." [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03]

FEBRUARY 6, 2002 – CIA SAYS IRAQ HAS NO WMD, AND HAS NOT PROVIDED AL QAEDA WMD: "The Central Intelligence Agency has no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist operations against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is also convinced that President Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda or related terrorist groups, according to several American intelligence officials." [Source: NY Times, 2/6/02]

APRIL 15, 2002 – WOLFOWITZ ANGERED AT CIA FOR NOT UNDERMINING U.N. REPORT: After receiving a CIA report that concluded that Hans Blix had conducted inspections of Iraq's declared nuclear power plants "fully within the parameters he could operate" when Blix was head of the international agency responsible for these inspections prior to the Gulf War, a report indicated that "Wolfowitz ‘hit the ceiling’ because the CIA failed to provide sufficient ammunition to undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons inspection program." [Source: W. Post, 4/15/02]

SUMMER, 2002 – CIA WARNINGS TO WHITE HOUSE EXPOSED: "In the late summer of 2002, Sen. Graham had requested from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when, midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that highlighted the Bush administration's claims and consigned skepticism to footnotes." [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03]

SEPTEMBER, 2002 – DIA TELLS WHITE HOUSE NO EVIDENCE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS: "An unclassified excerpt of a 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency study on Iraq's chemical warfare program in which it stated that there is ‘no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has - or will - establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.’" The report also said, "A substantial amount of Iraq's chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) actions." [Source: Carnegie Endowment for Peace, 6/13/03; DIA report, 2002]

SEPTEMBER 20, 2002 – DEPT. OF ENERGY TELLS WHITE HOUSE OF NUKE DOUBTS: "Doubts about the quality of some of the evidence that the United States is using to make its case that Iraq is trying to build a nuclear bomb emerged Thursday. While National Security Adviser Condi Rice stated on 9/8 that imported aluminum tubes ‘are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs’ a growing number of experts say that the administration has not presented convincing evidence that the tubes were intended for use in uranium enrichment rather than for artillery rocket tubes or other uses. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright said he found significant disagreement among scientists within the Department of Energy and other agencies about the certainty of the evidence." [Source: UPI, 9/20/02]

OCTOBER 2002 – CIA DIRECTLY WARNS WHITE HOUSE: "The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa." [Source: Washington Post, 7/23/03]

OCTOBER 2002 — STATE DEPT. WARNS WHITE HOUSE ON NUKE CHARGES: The State Department’s Intelligence and Research Department dissented from the conclusion in the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD capabilities that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. "The activities we have detected do not ... add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquiring nuclear weapons." INR accepted the judgment by Energy Department technical experts that aluminum tubes Iraq was seeking to acquire, which was the central basis for the conclusion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, were ill-suited to build centrifuges for enriching uranium. [Source, Declassified Iraq NIE released 7/2003]

OCTOBER 2002 – AIR FORCE WARNS WHITE HOUSE: "The government organization most knowledgeable about the United States' UAV program -- the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center -- had sharply disputed the notion that Iraq's UAVs were being designed as attack weapons" – a WMD claim President Bush used in his October 7 speech on Iraqi WMD, just three days before the congressional vote authorizing the president to use force. [Source: Washington Post, 9/26/03]

2003: WH Pressures Intel Agencies to Conform; Ignores More Warnings

Instead of listening to the repeated warnings from the intelligence community, intelligence officials say the White House instead pressured them to conform their reports to fit a pre-determined policy. Meanwhile, more evidence from international institutions poured in that the White House’s claims were not well-grounded.

LATE 2002-EARLY 2003 – CHENEY PRESSURES CIA TO CHANGE INTELLIGENCE: "Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated trips to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the war for unusual, face-to-face sessions with intelligence analysts poring over Iraqi data. The pressure on the intelligence community to document the administration's claims that the Iraqi regime had ties to al-Qaida and was pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity was ‘unremitting,’ said former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro, echoing several other intelligence veterans interviewed." Additionally, CIA officials "charged that the hard-liners in the Defense Department and vice president's office had 'pressured' agency analysts to paint a dire picture of Saddam's capabilities and intentions." [Sources: Dallas Morning News, 7/28/03; Newsweek, 7/28/03]

JANUARY, 2003 – STATE DEPT. INTEL BUREAU REITERATE WARNING TO POWELL: "The Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the State Department's in-house analysis unit, and nuclear experts at the Department of Energy are understood to have explicitly warned Secretary of State Colin Powell during the preparation of his speech that the evidence was questionable. The Bureau reiterated to Mr. Powell during the preparation of his February speech that its analysts were not persuaded that the aluminum tubes the Administration was citing could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium." [Source: Financial Times, 7/30/03]

FEBRUARY 14, 2003 – UN WARNS WHITE HOUSE THAT NO WMD HAVE BEEN FOUND: "In their third progress report since U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 was passed in November, inspectors told the council they had not found any weapons of mass destruction." Weapons inspector Hans Blix told the U.N. Security Council they had been unable to find any WMD in Iraq and that more time was needed for inspections. [Source: CNN, 2/14/03]

FEBRUARY 15, 2003 – IAEA WARNS WHITE HOUSE NO NUCLEAR EVIDENCE: The head of the IAEA told the U.N. in February that "We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq." The IAEA examined "2,000 pages of documents seized Jan. 16 from an Iraqi scientist's home -- evidence, the Americans said, that the Iraqi regime was hiding government documents in private homes. The documents, including some marked classified, appear to be the scientist's personal files." However, "the documents, which contained information about the use of laser technology to enrich uranium, refer to activities and sites known to the IAEA and do not change the agency's conclusions about Iraq's laser enrichment program." [Source: Wash. Post, 2/15/03]

FEBURARY 24, 2003 – CIA WARNS WHITE HOUSE ‘NO DIRECT EVIDENCE’ OF WMD: "A CIA report on proliferation released this week says the intelligence community has no ‘direct evidence’ that Iraq has succeeded in reconstituting its biological, chemical, nuclear or long-range missile programs in the two years since U.N. weapons inspectors left and U.S. planes bombed Iraqi facilities. ‘We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its Weapons of Mass Destruction programs,’ said the agency in its semi-annual report on proliferation activities." [NBC News, 2/24/03]

MARCH 7, 2003 – IAEA REITERATES TO WHITE HOUSE NO EVIDENCE OF NUKES: IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei said nuclear experts have found "no indication" that Iraq has tried to import high-strength aluminum tubes or specialized ring magnets for centrifuge enrichment of uranium. For months, American officials had "cited Iraq's importation of these tubes as evidence that Mr. Hussein's scientists have been seeking to develop a nuclear capability." ElBaradei also noted said "the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that documents which formed the basis for the [President Bush’s assertion] of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic." When questioned about this on Meet the Press, Vice President Dick Cheney simply said "Mr. ElBaradei is, frankly, wrong." [Source: NY Times, 3/7/03: Meet the Press, 3/16/03]

MAY 30, 2003 – INTEL PROFESSIONALS ADMIT THEY WERE PRESSURED: "A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq . A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terrorist groups. This team, self-mockingly called the Cabal, 'cherry-picked the intelligence stream' in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a official at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The DIA was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he said. Greg Thielmann, an intelligence official in the State Department, said it appeared to him that intelligence had been shaped 'from the top down.'" [Reuters, 5/30/03 ]

JUNE 6, 2003 – INTELLIGENCE HISTORIAN SAYS INTEL WAS HYPED: "The CIA bowed to Bush administration pressure to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs ahead of the U.S.-led war in Iraq , a leading national security historian concluded in a detailed study of the spy agency's public pronouncements." [Reuters, 6/6/03]

 

Will Jr go against daddy and fire Tennent?

Bush's Risky Options
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — The intensifying debate over prewar American intelligence about Iraq presents President Bush with difficult and risky alternatives as he balances election year politics with calls to overhaul the intelligence apparatus and to restore the nation's credibility around the world.

He could order the start of an inquiry about the performance of intelligence agencies, as Democrats and the former chief weapons inspector, David A. Kay, have insisted, but his aides fear that that could prove politically damaging and would almost certainly reopen old wounds with the C.I.A.

He could keep arguing that military action was justified no matter how immediate a threat Saddam Hussein posed, and put off an examination and possible overhaul of America's intelligence operations for another year. But his political team worries that doing so could keep the issue alive through a long campaign.

Or the president and those on his national security team who once described how Mr. Hussein could use his stockpiles of weapons to strike at any time could conclude that something went badly wrong during their long march to war.

But the White House does not make a habit of admitting error. And even if Mr. Bush vowed to fix what many say is a broken system, his national security aides note, the fix would not be easy.

"They've made a pretty huge mess of it," said one senior Republican who has been talking to Mr. Bush's top advisers about what steps to take next. "They wove this giant story, based on intelligence assessments that in hindsight — and this is hindsight, remember — were wrong.

"It's exposed a huge problem in our intelligence gathering. But who wants to take that on in an election year? Or while you are fighting terrorists?"

White House officials will not talk at length about why they are so deeply hesitant to start an investigation. But they are facing a situation where Democrats are looking for evidence to blame Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and some Republicans are looking for evidence to blame George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence.

One White House official said Thursday that there was clearly a risk that an inquiry could spin out of control, exactly what many administration officials fear has happened to the inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks.

Yet some officials are beginning to argue, in background conversations, that such an investigation is inevitable now that Dr. Kay has declared to the Senate that "we were almost all wrong."

The politics of doing what Dr. Kay says needs to be done — conduct an inquiry and overhaul the intelligence community before a similar mistake is made over Iran, North Korea or other potential threats — has grown enormously complex.

Mr. Bush has publicly defended the "unbelievably hardworking, dedicated people" of the American intelligence agencies in part, some administration officials say, because he because he wants to avoid another bitter public dispute with Mr. Tenet and the intelligence apparatus.

Feelings are still raw over last summer's open arguments between the White House and Mr. Tenet over who was to blame for Mr. Bush's faulty claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was trying obtain uranium in Africa.

They were worsened by the accusations that a White House official blew the cover of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. officer who operated under cover and is the wife of Mr. Bush's greatest critic on the Africa claim, Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Repairing that damage has taken months, and a grand jury has recently begun to hear evidence about the leak. Many intelligence officials continue to argue that real problem was not the ambiguous intelligence about Iraq's weapons capacity, but how Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney chose to use it.

On Thursday, appearing on NBC, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, insisted that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney were not ducking the issue.

"No one will want to know more than the president of the comparison between what we found when we got there and what we thought was there going in," Ms. Rice said. She sounded in no hurry, saying it was important to let the Iraq Survey Group complete its work, work that Dr. Kay believes is 85 percent done.

Many Republicans have a different instinct: to follow Dr. Kay's lead and put the blame on the agency's assessments rather than the White House. In their view, that is the best way to insulate Mr. Bush from the charge that he cherry-picked the most damaging information.

<b>Conveniently, some of them have long been suspicious of Mr. Tenet, who was put in his post by President Bill Clinton, and see this as an opportunity to speed along a retirement that the central intelligence chief has been talking about for a year. But Mr. Tenet has many defenders, including the president's father.</b>

It was a measure of Mr. Bush's problem, and Mr. Tenet's, that Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said this week that his committee's draft report of what went wrong, to be issued soon, would be very specific, and very critical.

"This is, indeed, a very egregious problem," he said. "If your intelligence is wrong you're in a world of trouble."

Mr. Bush's political advisers are highly aware that Dr. Kay's report has given Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination something they have long sought: a way to revive the issue of whether Mr. Bush was careless and trigger-happy, willing to twist intelligence findings to fit his own agenda, even at the cost of American credibility abroad.

What that leaves for now is a slow retreat by White House officials — a day-by-day, fact-by-fact backing away from assertions they made with such confidence nine months ago. Mr. Bush no longer declares, as he once did, that he is certain that sooner or later unconventional weapons will be found in Iraq. "He still thinks it," one of his aides said, "but I'm not sure you will hear him say it" until the Iraq Survey Group's investigation is complete.

Mr. Powell, last weekend, started backing away as well, saying more assertively than ever before that there might be no weapons stockpiles in Iraq and that if none are found, an effort had to begin to find out what went wrong. Nonetheless, he and Ms. Rice argue that Mr. Hussein brought his troubles on himself by refusing to account for stockpiles that the United Nations said existed in the mid-1990's.

Only Mr. Cheney, the man who made the most extensive claims about Iraq's readiness to strike out, has failed to back down publicly. Last Friday he was on the air again, talking about Mr. Hussein's mobile biological weapons units, which now appear, Dr. Kay says, to have had no such purpose.

"We'll have to get Cheney the new memo," one White House official said after Mr. Cheney's comments. "As soon as we write it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/30/politics/30ASSE.html

 

Yes, I can't spell Tenet.

 

Is it the CIA's fault that Bush didn't listen when they told him that there wasn't a risk?

 

Admit WMD mistake, survey chief tells Bush

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday March 3, 2004
The Guardian

David Kay, the man who led the CIA's postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has called on the Bush administration to "come clean with the American people" and admit it was wrong about the existence of the weapons.

In an interview with the Guardian, Mr Kay said the administration's reluctance to make that admission was delaying essential reforms of US intelligence agencies, and further undermining its credibility at home and abroad.

He welcomed the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate prewar intelligence on Iraq, and said the wide-ranging US investigation was much more likely to get to the truth than the Butler inquiry in Britain. That, he noted, had "so many limitations it's going to be almost impossible" to come to meaningful conclusions.

Mr Kay, 63, a former nuclear weapons inspector, provoked uproar at the end of January when he told the Senate that "we were almost all wrong" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

He also resigned from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which he was appointed by the CIA to lead in the hunt for weapons stockpiles, saying its resources had been diverted in the fight against Iraqi insurgents.

"I was more worried that we were still sending teams out to search for things that we were increasingly convinced were not there," Mr Kay said.

His call for a frank admission is an embarrassment for the White House at the start of an election year. The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has dismissed Mr Kay's assertion that there were no WMD at the start of the Iraq war as a "theory" that was "possible, but not likely".

In his state of the union speech in January, George Bush did not refer to his prewar claims that Iraq was an "immediate threat" but instead said the ISG had found "weapons of mass destruction-related programme activities".

Mr Kay, who was formerly a UN weapons inspector, called for the president to go further. "It's about confronting and coming clean with the American people. He should say we were mistaken and I am determined to find out why," he said.

A White House official said it was too early to draw conclusions: "The ISG is still working, and the commission on this has not even started."

However, Mr Kay said that continued evasion would create public cynicism about the administration's motives, which he believes reflected a genuine fear of WMD falling into the hands of terrorists. He also said that if the administration did not confront the Iraq intelligence fiasco head-on it would undermine its credibility with its allies in future crises "for a generation".

Mr Kay said that he had become convinced there were no WMD to be found several months ago, before presenting an interim report to Congress last October saying no stockpiles had been found, but he said the CIA and the Blair government were nervous about the impact of his conclusions.

"I think the greatest concern about the report was in London rather than in Washington. It was a different political issue in London than it was here," he said, referring to the storm around the death of his former UN colleague David Kelly.

Mr Kay said he had been expecting Dr Kelly's arrival in Iraq to help the search for biological weapons programmes, and had spoken to him shortly before his death. "He never had any doubts about Iraq's programmes," Mr Kay said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1160842,00.html

 

Kay better zip it or he'll be muerte.

 

pssst....check the riverbed....