http://msnbc.com/news/919535.asp Iraq weapons questions dog allies U.S. downplays issues; Blair faces criticism May 29 — They stood shoulder-to-shoulder to convince the world that military action was the only way to disarm Saddam Hussein. Now the United States and Britain are facing growing criticism about the initial rationale for invading Iraq — the imminent threat posed by the nation’s weapons of mass destruction. NEARLY TWO MONTHS after the end of the war, British and American experts have yet to find evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction — and reports from captured regime figures suggest they have denied their existence. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was visiting southern Iraq on Thursday, told reporters en route that he was convinced that Saddam did have such weapons. “I have said throughout and I just repeat to you, I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction,” Blair said. “And rather than speculating, let’s just wait until we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists,” Blair said. But he also acknowledged the importance of the evidence, especially for his domestic audience. “It matters immensely,” he said, “because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat.” The question flared anew after U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Tuesday that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war. Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the war, said Rumsfeld’s comments vindicated his own stance. “If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven’t been there for quite a long time,” Cook said Wednesday. 45-MINUTES? Further fueling the controversy was a BBC report Thursday suggesting that British intelligence agents were unhappy with the government’s claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to use within 45 minutes. Blair’s office responded that the claim, contained in an intelligence dossier released on Sept. 24, was entirely the work of British intelligence agencies. “Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies,” Blair’s office said in a statement to the BBC. The BBC, however, said its intelligence source didn’t dispute the origin of the information, but said the agencies were skeptical of the claim that weapons of mass destruction could be ready for use within 45 minutes. “The information which I’m told was dubious did come from the agencies, but they were unhappy about it because they didn’t think it should have been in there,” said BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan. “They thought it was not corroborated sufficiently, and they actually thought it was wrong. They thought the informant concerned had got it wrong, they thought he had misunderstood what was happening.” The BBC quoted an unidentified official as saying the claim was not in early drafts of the dossier, but was added in the week before publication at the behest of Blair’s office. “It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable. Most things in the dossier were double-sourced but that was single-sourced, and we believe that the source was wrong,” the BBC quoted its source as saying. Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram confirmed in an interview that there was a single source for the 45-minute claim. He denied, however, that Blair’s office had insisted on including the claim in the dossier. “That is not the case. There was no pressure from No. 10 (Blair’s office). That allegation is not true,” Ingram told BBC radio. But Blair opponents seized on the latest evidence to blast the prime minister. “I believe the prime minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us,” said Tony Benn, a left-wing member of the Labor Party. “The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain.” SUSPICIOUS TRAILERS The issue hasn’t gained the same degree of traction in the United States, even as a series of top officials have sought to de-emphasize the importance of Saddam’s alleged arsenal. To date, the closest the allies appeared to have come to discovering signs of banned weaponry were two Iraqi truck trailers equipped with fermenters. In a report this week, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency said examination of the trailers revealed “an ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system. It added, “Both trailers we have found probably are designed to produce BW [biological weapons] agent in unconcentrated liquid slurry.” Information about the trailers, based largely on an Iraqi engineer’s description, was a key component of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons programs. There is no evidence the two trailers were ever actually used to make biological weapons, the intelligence officials said. Officials said they did not expect to find any biological agents inside the trucks, which they said the Iraqis probably had decontaminated. DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE? In recent weeks, senior American officials in Iraq have raised the possibility that chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed prior to the conflict. On Tuesday, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations that the whereabouts of Saddam’s arsenal remained a mystery. “We don’t know what happened,” he said, “It is also possible that they (the Iraqi government) decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict.” And in two separate interviews, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — a fellow hawk within the Bush administration — was quizzed about the weaponry. In an interview with Vanity Fair, he said the threat posed by Iraq’s weaponry was one of several reasons behind the decision to go to war. “For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said. Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion had been “almost unnoticed but huge” — namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaida grievance. Separately, Wolfowitz insisted in an interview with the Washington Post that the weapons would be found. “No one should expect this kind of deception effort to get penetrated overnight,” he said in comments published Thursday. Wolfowitz said the hunt would continue in Iraq. “We’re a long way” from exhausting the search, he told the paper. LAWMAKERS RESPONSE However, the fruitless search has irked some lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike. Last week, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) said that experts so far have only discovered “fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool” in Iraq. As a result, the senator — an outspoken critic of the war — said the administration’s “extensive hype of WMD” had become an embarrassment. “It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power,” he said. Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is more concerned about the quality of the information made available to the administration ahead of the war. “I have no doubts whatsoever that the administration worked on the basis of the intelligence that was given to them.” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “What I don’t know is how good that intelligence was, and it is our job to find out was it good; could they have done better.” His opposite number on the committee, Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the Select Intelligence Committee, said she believed the U.S. intelligence. She added, “I think the world is owed an accounting, but we haven’t found much at all. We’ve only found two mobile vans capable of making biological weapons. And that raises some questions.”
How about the case Bush made that democratizing the region would put a big dent in terrorism? WMD was one justification for the war, but it wasn't the only one.
I think there is a post on this about a page ago, about the administration "overplaying" the WMD to bring everyone together under a united front then selling it to the nation and the world. Thanks for another good article Woofer.
Well, we've stopped those anti-Iranian terrorists based in Iraq from trying to dislodge the government in Iran.
Who cares what the reasons are, making a democracy in Iraq and giving terrorism one less place to hide = good. DD
Even if this is 100% correct, that a classical greek democracy is built in baghdad and terrorism is irrevocably hindered, Using lies, half truths, exaggerations, knowingly using dubious intelligence etc to either make, sell, or justify policy decisions (especially big bloody ones) = bad.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2083736/ Reassessing Miller U.S. intelligence on Iraq's WMD deserves a second look. So does the reporting of the New York Times' Judith Miller. By Jack Shafer Posted Thursday, May 29, 2003, at 4:11 PM PT The lead editorial in Monday's New York Times applauds the news reported in the Times' own pages that the CIA is reassessing the prewar intelligence about Iraqi's unconventional weapons programs collected by the CIA, the National Intelligence Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other agencies. The editorial reads: The failure so far to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the prime justification for an immediate invasion, or definitive links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda has raised serious questions about the quality of American intelligence and even dark [sic] hints that the data may have been manipulated to support a pre-emptive war. [Emphasis added.] If the government must re-examine whether data may have been "manipulated" to support the war, surely the New York Times should conduct a similar postwar inventory of its primary WMD reporter, Judith Miller. In the months running up to the war, Miller painted as grave a picture of Iraq's WMD potential as any U.S. intelligence agency, a take that often directly mirrored the Bush administration's view. Now, thanks to the reporting of the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, we understand why Miller and the administration might have seen eye-to-eye on Iraq's WMD. On the same day as the Times editorial appeared, Kurtz reproduced an internal Times e-mail in which Miller described Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial Iraq leader, former exile, and Bush administration fave, as one of her main sources on WMD. "[Chalabi] has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper," Miller e-mailed Times Baghdad bureau chief John Burns. Miller added that the MET Alpha—a military outfit searching for WMD after the invasion—"is using Chalabi's intell and document network for its own WMD work." The failure of "Chalabi's intell" to uncover any WMD has embarrassed both the United States and Miller. As noted previously in this column, she oversold the successes of the post-invasion WMD search. On April 21, she reported in the Times that an Iraqi scientist had led MET Alpha to a site where Iraqis had buried chemical precursors for chemical and biological weapons. "Officials" told Miller this was "the most important discovery to date in the hunt for illegal weapons." . . . But none of Miller's wild WMD stories has panned out. From these embarrassing results, we can deduce that either 1) Miller's sources were right about WMD, and it's just a matter of time before the United States finds evidence to back them up; 2) Miller's sources were wrong about WMD, and the United States will never find the evidence; 3) Miller's sources played her to help stoke a bogus war; or 4) Miller deliberately weighted the evidence she collected to benefit the hawks. It could be that the United States inadvertently overestimated Iraq's WMD program. For example, the United States might have intercepted communications to Saddam in which his henchmen exaggerated the scale of Iraq's WMD progress to make him happy. "The country needs to know if the spy organizations were right or wrong," concludes the Times editorial, a fair and equitable stand. But by the same logic, the country needs to know if Miller and the Times too gullibly advanced the WMD findings of their sources—and if so, why.
Reads like any possible scenario could be played out from what this guy had to say, but really isn't that true of many journalists from week to week.
1441 Otherwise known as the only legal (or illegal depending on your "interpretation") justification for war against Iraq. We found plans for a missile? Woooooo... we got em now baby!
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...=1&u=/ap/20030530/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_marines Failed Iraq Arms Hunt Stumps Top Marine By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer WASHINGTON - The top commander of U.S. Marines in Iraq said Friday he is surprised that extensive searches have failed so far to discover any of the chemical weapons that American intelligence had indicated were supplied to front line Iraqi forces at the outset of the war. Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said in a video teleconference from his headquarters in southern Iraq that he was convinced before and during the war that at least some Republic Guard units had been provided with chemical weapons at forward areas. "It was a surprise to me then — it remains a surprise to me now — that we have not uncovered weapons, as you say, in some of the forward dispersal sites," he told reporters at the Pentagon "Believe me, it's not for lack of trying," he added. "We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there."
Obviously this gentleman is not a CC.net poster; or else he would know that "It is only a matter of time."
Another recent article about the wmd. I guess since the polls show most Americans still believe Iraq was responsible for 9/11 and recent polls show support for the war even if there weren't wmd or a threat from them, Wofowicz and gang are starting to come clean. Poor Heath I really think he believed in the whole thing that he was in great personal danger from some Iraqi wmd's. Note I still expect a few vials of something or other to be found eventually. After all most hospitals have something that could be labelled a possible bio weapon. Don't forget the big lie about nuclear weapons which I don't think they are even speculating about. The UN nuclear inspector who they trashed was right on about that. ********************** WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz By David Usborne 30 May 2003 The Bush administration focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction as the primary justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force because it was politically convenient, a top-level official at the Pentagon has acknowledged. The extraordinary admission comes in an interview with Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, in the July issue of the magazine Vanity Fair. Mr Wolfowitz also discloses that there was one justification that was "almost unnoticed but huge". That was the prospect of the United States being able to withdraw all of its forces from Saudi Arabia once the threat of Saddam had been removed. Since the taking of Baghdad, Washington has said that it is taking its troops out of the kingdom. "Just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to the door" towards making progress elsewhere in achieving Middle East peace, Mr Wolfowitz said. The presence of the US military in Saudi Arabia has been one of the main grievances of al-Qa'ida and other terrorist groups. "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Mr Wolfowitz tells the magazine. The comments suggest that, even for the US administration, the logic that was presented for going to war may have been an empty shell. They come to light, moreover, just two days after Mr Wolfowitz's immediate boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, conceded for the first time that the arms might never be found. The failure to find a single example of the weapons that London and Washington said were inside Iraq only makes the embarrassment more acute. Voices are increasingly being raised in the US _ and Britain _ demanding an explanation for why nothing has been found. Most striking is the fact that these latest remarks come from Mr Wolfowitz, recognised widely as the leader of the hawks' camp in Washington most responsible for urging President George Bush to use military might in Iraq. The magazine article reveals that Mr Wolfowitz was even pushing Mr Bush to attack Iraq immediately after the 11 September attacks in the US, instead of invading Afghanistan. There have long been suspicions that Mr Wolfowitz has essentially been running a shadow administration out of his Pentagon office, ensuring that the right-wing views of himself and his followers find their way into the practice of American foreign policy. He is best known as the author of the policy of first-strike pre-emption in world affairs that was adopted by Mr Bush shortly after the al-Qa'ida attacks. In asserting that weapons of mass destruction gave a rationale for attacking Iraq that was acceptable to everyone, Mr Wolfowitz was presumably referring in particular to the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell. He was the last senior member of the administration to agree to the push earlier this year to persuade the rest of the world that removing Saddam by force was the only remaining viable option. The conversion of Mr Powell was on full view in the UN Security Council in February when he made a forceful presentation of evidence that allegedly proved that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction. Critics of the administration and of the war will now want to know how convinced the Americans really were that the weapons existed in Iraq to the extent that was publicly stated. Questions are also multiplying as to the quality of the intelligence provided to the White House. Was it simply faulty _ given that nothing has been found in Iraq _ or was it influenced by the White House's fixation on the weapons issue? Or were the intelligence agencies telling the White House what it wanted to hear? This week, Sam Nunn, a former senator, urged Congress to investigate whether the argument for war in Iraq was based on distorted intelligence. He raised the possibility that Mr Bush's policy against Saddam had influenced the intelligence that indicated Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction. This week, the CIA and the other American intelligence agencies have promised to conduct internal reviews of the quality of the material they supplied the administration on what was going on in Iraq. The heat on the White House was only made fiercer by Mr Rumsfeld's admission that nothing may now be found in Iraq to back up those earlier claims, if only because the Iraqis may have got rid of any evidence before the conflict. "It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict," the Defence Secretary said. * The US military said last night that it had released a suspected Iraqi war criminal by mistake. US Central Command said it was offering a $25,000 (315,000) reward for the capture of Mohammed Jawad An-Neifus, suspected of being involved in the murder of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims whose remains were found at a mass grave in Mahawil, southern Iraq, last month. The alleged mobile weapons laboratories As scepticism grows over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, London and Washington are attempting to turn the focus of attention to Iraq's alleged possession of mobile weapons labs. A joint CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency report released this week claimed that two trucks found in northern Iraq last month were mobile labs used to develop biological weapons. The trucks were fitted with hi-tech laboratory equipment and the report said the discovery represented the "strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biowarfare programme". The design of the vehicles made them "an ingeniously simple self-contained bioprocessing system". The report said no other purpose, for example water purification, medical laboratory or vaccine production, would justify such effort and expense. But critics arenot convinced. No biological agents were found on the trucks and experts point out that, unlike the trucks described by Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, in a speech to the UN Security Council, they were open sided and would therefore have left a trace easy for weapons inspectors to detect. One former UN inspector said that the trucks would have been a very inefficient way to produce anthrax. Katherine Butler wmd
