And another one bites the dust

Remember this picture?

Ah, yes. The drone of death. When Bush needed terrifying weapons to scare people into supporting the war, they brought up the idea of Iraq's drone planes, which they indicated might just be able to fly all the way to the US and release chemical or biological horrors on American soil. Mention of the planes was even included in Colin Powell's presentation to the UN.

I remember, though, when the pictures of the planes first came out a short while later, that it was pretty clear there was no way they could fly those planes very far, and the planes would be capable of carrying much in the way of a payload. Of course, I'm no expert, so my opinion probably doesn't count for much, but the people in the Air Force are experts - and their opinion certainly should carry some weight.

But this is the Bush administration we're dealing with, and if an opinion doesn't support their goals, it gets ignored. It's real no surprise, then, to learn that even though the Air Force's opinion that these drones posed no threat the US was included in the National Intelligence Estimate, the Bush administraiton preferred their own version - one based on the CIA's finding that Iraq had renewed their attempts at developing sophisticated drones. (Note, however, that the drone pictured above his hardly 'sophisticated', and that the Air Force's opinion was based on their expertise in aeronautics and as the controllers of America's own drone program.)

Huddled over a fleet of abandoned Iraqi drones, U.S. weapons experts in Baghdad came to one conclusion: Despite the Bush administration's public assertions, these unmanned aerial vehicles weren't designed to dispense biological or chemical weapons.

The evidence gathered this summer matched the dissenting views of Air Force intelligence analysts who argued in a national intelligence assessment of Iraq before the war that the remotely piloted planes were unarmed reconnaissance drones.

[...] "We didn't see there was a very large chance they (UAVs) would be used to attack the continental United States," Bob Boyd, director of the Air Force Intelligence Analysis Agency, said in an AP interview. "We didn't see them as a big threat to the homeland."

Boyd also said there was little evidence to associate Iraq's UAVs with the country's suspected biological weapons program. Facilities weren't in the same location and the programs didn't use the same people.

Instead, the Air Force believed Iraq's UAV programs were for reconnaissance, as are most American UAVs. Intelligence on the drones suggested they were not large enough to carry much more than a camera and a video recorder, Boyd said.

Postwar evidence uncovered in July in Iraq supports those assessments, according to two U.S. government scientists assigned to the weapons hunt.

It's interesting to note that the Bush administration tended to prefer any opinion that might support their desire for war over that of experts in the field in question on several issues regarding Iraq's weapons capabilities. The Department of Energy's in the field of nuclear weapons said that the tubes being purchased by Iraq were not suitable for use in gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, but the Bush administration continues to insist otherwise. The experts in the State Department who know about international trading said that we should not rely on claims that Saddam was trying to obtain uranium from Africa, but the Bush administration made that a central point in the State of the Union address. And Defense Intelligence Agency engineering experts said that the trailers found in Iraq were not suitable to have been used as "bio-weapons" lab, but Bush, on a trip to Poland, not only claimed they were used as bio weapons labs, but that they were proof that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

Well, at least their consistent, eh?

Posted by thorswitch at August 25, 2003 01:21 AM | TrackBack