If you missed the 60 Minutes II segment tonight featuring Greg Thielmann's observations on the lead-up to the war in Iraq, CBS has a transcript of the segment available online along with video clips of the interviews included in the piece.
In the run-up to the war in Iraq, one moment seemed to be a turning point: the day Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations to make the case for the invasion.Among some of the more interesting points is that Thielmann and his group had come to the conclusion in 2001 that the aluminum tubes intercepted on their way to Iraq were for use in conventional rockets rather than uranium centrifuges - nearly 2 years before Powell claims that they were for uranium enrichment in his February speech to the UN.Millions of people watched as he laid out the evidence and reached a damning conclusion -- that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Correspondent Scott Pelley has an interview with Greg Thielmann, a former expert on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Thielmann, a foreign-service officer for 25 years, now says that key evidence in the speech was misrepresented and the public was deceived.
~=<*>=~
“I had a couple of initial reactions. Then I had a more mature reaction,” says Thielmann, commenting on Powell's presentation to the United Nations.“I think my conclusion now is that it's probably one of the low points in his long, distinguished service to the nation.”
Thielmann's last job at the State Department was director of the Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs, which was responsible for analyzing the Iraqi weapons threat for Secretary Powell. He and his staff had the highest security clearances, and everything – whether it came into the CIA or the Defense Department – came through his office.
Thielmann was admired at the State Department. One high-ranking official called him honorable, knowledgeable, and very experienced. Thielmann, too, had planned to retire just four months before Powell’s big moment at the U.N.
The story also notes that Adnan Sayeed Haideiri, a defector, associated with Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, who provided information to the US government about Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction, was considered such an important source that he was put into the witness protection program. David Albright, a physicist who has helped interview defectors for the UN, said that from reviewing Haideiri's claims, it was clear he had no knowledge of WMD and his information has lead to no discoveries.
Last week, ABC News.com reported on a General Accounting Office (GAO) report showing that Pentagon was selling equipment suitable for use in creating biological weapons at "bargain" prices through a surplus equipment website.
According to the report, which is due to be released today and discussed in a hearing of the House Government Reform subcommittee on national security, Congress ordered the GAO — its investigative arm — to set up a phony company to see how easy it would be to buy surplus lab equipment from the Pentagon.To make matters worse, some of the equipment was then resold to people in Egypt, Malaysia and the Philippines, places from which terrorists have been known to work.Using fake names, GAO investigators went to a Web site that sells Pentagon surplus and ordered items needed to produce bacteriological weapons, including evaporators, centrifuges, bacteriological incubators and protective clothing.
In its report, the GAO found that the "Department of Defense has not attempted to determine who is buying excess biological equipment or how these items were being used."
Oddly (or perhaps not), this story has received little coverage. I found a few foreign papers carrying it, but no major US sites other than ABC. A couple of the other stories, though, had interesting tidbits. Reuters noted potential problems with defective protective suits.
But the GAO said it was able to buy hundreds of older Battle Dress Overgarments, some from defective lots the department had been trying to get out of circulation for several years.And the Guardian commented on a particularly ironic aspect of the story:Almost 5,000 defective suits may have been issued to state and local law enforcement agencies, it said.
"Vague recall notices by the Defense Logistics Agency mean some first responders may still be relying on protective gear that won't work," Shays said.
The news is particularly embarrassing, coming only days after the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group claimed the discovery of similar equipment in Iraq was evidence that the Saddam Hussein regime had a covert weapons programme.Of course, the Defense Logistics Agency that handles the surplus goods from the Pentagon has promised to study what they need to do to help keep potential terrorists from getting their hands on such equipment and are taking steps to let people know if they've purchased potentially defective gear.
The Guardian (UK) does an overview today of what our previous weapons inspections in Iraq had told us about Iraq's weapons capability, and what we might have learned had we allowed inspections to continue. The story provides a recap of what was known as of 1998 about Iraq's weapons capabilities - that, at that time, it had the capability of possibly restarting various programs, but had not.
Neither Bush nor Blair have produced evidence that turns these unpleasant but familiar facts into a "current" threat against the US, the UK or even Iraq's immediate neighbours. The question, as the UN inspectors knew, was not whether Iraq maintained a capacity to resume production of such weapons, but whether that potential had been activated after British and US bombing ended the inspections in 1998. The resumption of UN inspections - under the US administration's credible threat of the use of force - would have answered that question.In other words, continuing the inspections would have told us what we now know - that Iraq hadn't restarted it's nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs, and didn't appear to be ready to at any point in the near future. It would also have told us that Iraq was no threat to the US or even it's neighbors, thus making the war unnecessary.
Of course, I suspect that's exactly what Bush was afraid would happen - and he didn't want to risk losing his opportunity to oust Saddam by having it shown that Saddam wasn't nearly the menace Bush made him out to be. It should have been obvious that whatever information we allegedly had that was such "convincing" proof of Saddam's perfidy was deeply questionable when we gave the UN inspectors supposedly the "best" information available to us about where Saddam was hiding his WMD and they UN inspectors found nothing.
I'd never had a problem with our decision to attack Afghanistan (though I still have grave issues with our lack of follow-thru there). That one made sense. But I never bought into the administration's rhetoric about Iraq, and when CBS published their story about how the inspectors were finding nothing and called the information we were giving them "garbage", I felt that not onlyy was Bush lying, but that he knew that he was lying.
Through it all, though, I have to admit that I've found the pro-war side's views toward the UN weapons inspectors, and the UN in general, alternately amusing and infuriating. They argue that invading Iraq was justified by the fact that Saddam violated the UN resolution, even if nothing else holds true - yet the UN itself didn't consider Iraq's breech of their resolution sufficient justification for going to war at the time that we decided they were "irrelevant" and started the war anyway. Point that out, however, and you're likely to be told that the UN's position on the violation of their resolution doesn't matter because the UN is a bunch of idiots who no longer matter in this world. If that's the case, I ask, then why does it matter whether Iraq breeched the resolution or not.
The point of all this is that, like it or not, the UN does matter, and they are relevant. Their inspectors, who are trained to handle situations like Iraq, and who are well-versed in the methods dictators use to hide their weapons caches, could have answered the question of whether Saddam was a threat or not. We just didn't let them finish their job - most likely because we knew it wouldn't give us the answer we wanted.
The Guardian's article also notes what this whole misadventure is likely to cost us - not in terms of dollars, but in those intangible terms like credibility and respect.
It's kind of hard to justify all of that, isn't it?
The cost of this adventure can be counted in many ways: there is the damage to future potential for international action against rogue states; the risk of terrorism is heightened; and the possibility of disaffected personnel from Iraq's weapons programmes throwing in their lot with some kind of jihad is higher than before. Equally dangerous is the manner in which a system of internationally sanctioned monitoring and control has been sacrificed in favour of unilateral action.
Interested in how the administration's claims about WMD stack up to the current evidence as reported by David Kay? The Beltway Bandit has just the comparison chart for you. Check it out.
Short version? They don't hold up at all. But we knew that already, right?
UPDATE 10/6/2003 - Also be sure to read the comment - ScrewDriver has posted some good info there about Kay's report.
MSNBC has provided additional information on the report that Kuwaiti security had foiled the smuggling of $60 million worth of chemical weapons and biological warheads. Turns out it's yet another false alarm.
''Kuwaiti security forces were able to seize some Iraqi artefacts smuggled to Kuwait,'' al-Sabah, who is also interior minister, was quoted as saying by al-Seyassah daily. He did not identify the other items.I was first lead to this story when my husband told me that a poster to a forum he posts to regularly had brought it up as part of a debate on the war in Iraq, citing it as evidence that the war was somehow justified. As I'd mentioned when I posted about this earlier, though, the article being referenced (which was apparently featured at the Drudge Report) had almost no details to it, aside from the assertion that a plot had been foiled and that it involved chemical and biological weapons.
Al-Sabah was responding to a question about a report the paper carried on Wednesday that Kuwaiti security forces had foiled an attempt to smuggle artefacts, chemical materials and biological warheads from Iraq to a European country via Kuwait.
Kuwaiti security sources told Reuters on Wednesday the report on the seizure of such weapons was baseless.
Asked about the report of seized biological warheads, al-Sabah also told al-Qabas newspaper: ''Up to now we have not verified this...There are some artefacts that were seized which we are examining to see if they are real or fake.''
In a story almost completely devoid of details (and so far, only running in the Hindustan Times, from what I can tell, along with an additional story in World Net Daily) the Associated Press reports that Kuwaiti's pro-government paper, al-Siyassah is claiming that Kuwaiti's security service had prevented the smuggling of chemical and biological weapons from Iraq to an "unnamed European country".
The article states that the plan was foiled, but noted that the al-Siyassah article did not say "when or how the smugglers entered Kuwait or when they were arrested," and that
Interior Minister Sheik Nawwaf Al Ahmed Al Sabah would hand over the smuggled weapons to an FBI agent at a news conference, but did not say when.It also says that the AP tried to contact the government, but they "not be immediately reached for comment."
Its interesting that a story like this would break on the same day that David Kay is reporting, essentially, that we still haven't found anything demonstrating that Saddam had any WMD. I expect we'll be hearing a lot more about this alleged smuggling operation from the right - it'll be interesting to see which, if any, of the details get filled in.
David Corn (of The Nation on his discussion with Scott McClellen during yesterdays press briefing about the House intelligence committee's letter on pre-war intelligence:
At one point at the press conference, the subject shifted to a letter recently sent to Tenet by the House intelligence committee reporting on the committee's review of the prewar intelligence on Iraq's WMDs and ties to terrorists. The committee found that this intelligence--which Bush has said was a solid basis for going to war--was predicated on fragmentary, circumstantial and out-of-date information and contained "too many uncertainties." McClellan noted, "Let's look at what we knew. We knew, just like the United Nations Security Council and intelligence agencies across the world and previous administrations, that Saddam Hussein...had large, unaccounted for stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons....We knew all these facts. Then came September 11th."Ah yes, the old "well, it doesn't matter if we lied, Saddam is gone" defense, eh? Sorry, but it's not good enough Scott.Wrong. And since I was there in the White House briefing room, I pointed out this was not the case, noting that Secretary of State Colin Powell had said in early 2001 that there were no stockpiles ("Hussein has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction"), that the Defense Intelligence Agency in September 2002 had concluded there was no "reliable information" on whether Iraq had chemical weapons stockpiles, and that the UN inspectors had not said there were WMD stockpiles. "Where are you getting your information?" I asked. Referring to the Powell statement, McClellan said, "That's not what he said....I think you're mischaracterizing Secretary Powell's comments." But it was what he said in 2001, I countered. McClellan then claimed "it was well documented by the United Nations Security Council that there were undocumented stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons." No, I said, and referred to Rolf Ekeus, the former executive chairman of the UN inspections in the 1990s. In a 2000 interview, Ekeus said, "There are no large quantities of weapons [in Iraq]. I don't think that Iraq is especially eager in the biological and chemical area to produce such weapons for storage. Iraq views those weapons as tactical assets instead of strategic assets, which would require long-term storage of those elements, which is difficult. Rather, Iraq has been aiming to keep the capability to start up production immediately should it need to."
McClellan did not counter facts with facts. Instead, he tossed out rhetoric: "America is safer, the world is better, the world is safer because Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime have been removed from power."
The rest of Corn's column is interesting as well. Corn is the journalist who first pointed out the implications of Robert Novak's original article naming Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, and discusses some of the spin and other aspects of the White House's reaction to the increased scruitny on that matter.
From Reuters 9/28/2003:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday there was new U.S. intelligence obtained before the Iraqi war about Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction programs, despite an assertion to the contrary by key congressional leaders.From the Boston Globe, 7/9/2003 (original story no longer available):"The president believes that he had very good intelligence going into the war," Rice said on the "Fox News Sunday" program.
The top aide to President Bush dismissed the finding by leaders of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee that much of the information relied upon was fragmentary or dated back to when U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998.
"There was enrichment of the intelligence from 1998 over the period leading up to the war," Rice insisted. "And nothing pointed to a reversal of Saddam Hussein's very active efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction."
"... It was very clear that this continued and it was a gathering danger."
"Yes, I think I would call it new information and it was certainly enriching the case in the same direction," she added.
He leaned forward on a podium shared with President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and said angrily: ''Imagine a world in which this tyrant had a nuclear weapon. In 1998, my predecessor raided Iraq, based upon the very same intelligence. And in 2003, after the world had demanded he disarm, we decided to disarm him.''From ABC News.com, 7/8/2003:
"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit" of weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light — through the prism of our experience on 9/11."From the US Department of State website transcript of a 2/24/01 press conference by Colin Powell regarding a trip to Egypt:
the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.[...] May I just add a p.s. that if I was a Kuwaiti and I heard leaders in Baghdad claiming that Kuwait is still a part of Iraq and it's going to be included in the flag and the seal, if I knew they were continuing to try to find weapons of mass destruction, I would have no doubt in my mind who those weapons were aimed at. They are being aimed at Arabs, not at the United States or at others. Yes, I think we should...he has to be contained until he realizes the errors of his ways.
[Emphasis added]
A New York Times report today says that according to "federal officials with knowledge of the findings" David Kay's interim report on the hunt for Iraq's alleged WMD has so far found no evidence of actual weapons.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Kay and his team had not found illicit weapons. They said they believed that Mr. Kay had found evidence of precursors and dual-use equipment that could have been used to manufacture chemical and biological weapons.Of course, it vital that we not forget that we didn't go to war over dual-use equipment that could have been used for illicit purposes or over possible weapons programs. We went to war because the government swore up and down that Saddam had actual, ready-to-use, weapons that made it an immediate threat that had to be stopped.They also said that Mr. Kay's team had interviewed at least one Iraqi security officer who said he had worked in such a chemical and biological weapons program until shortly before the American invasion in March.
This is, of course, the wasp in the pre-emptive war ointment. If intelligence is either flawed or manipulated, then the reasons for the war are non-existant, and the credibilty of those pushing for the war is lost. If we continue to turn up nothing in the search for Saddam's supposed WMDs, it's either going to take a long time, a new President or both before other countries of the world are going to be willing to follow our lead if we can't hand them concrete proof of why they should.
The article also contains yet another example of Cheney's need to get acquainted with the truth. He's apparently still claiming that the mobile trailers that were found earlier this year - which, after a hands-on investigation were determined to be for the manufacturer of hydrogen for use in artillery balloons are evidence of WMDs.
[I]n a recent television interview, Vice President Dick Cheney called the trailers "mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during the course of developing the capacity for an attack."In early June, American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence disputed claims that the trailers were used for making deadly germs. They said in interviews with The New York Times that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment.
In an article on Colin Powell's visit to Baghdad, CBS News notes the lack of progress in finding any solid evidence that Iraq had any WMD at the time the war was started and counters the Washington Times/Sunday Time of London articles that claim that David Kay's report on the WMD search may be delayed.
Powell's visit comes amid continuing doubts over the validity of the case for war, and the way intelligence was used to justify it.The article also notes that former UN weapons inspectors are saying that the "unaccounted" for weapons that apparently were part the large quantities Bush claimed in his State of the Union Address that Saddam still had may have been paperwork "glitches". I haven't been able to find the article I originally read making a similar suggestion, the gist of which was that Saddam had probably destroyed many of the weapons he did have at one point, but failed to create the proper paperwork. As a result, inspectors wouldn't be able to find those weapons, since they no longer existed, but neither could they consider them "destroyed" since they had no real proof of that. Whether this is the case or not, obviously, I can't say, but it is one of the possible explainations for our inability to find all the gallons and tons of weapons materials that Bush claimed Saddam had.The administration has reported finding no illegal weapons so far. The CIA says two trailers discovered in northern Iraq may have been biological weapons factories, but State Department analysts disagree. The White House has withdrawn the claim that Iraq sought uranium in Niger.
An interim report on the search for Iraqi weapons is due soon, but there are indications the reports findings might be inconclusive.
In July, David Kay, the survey group's leader, suggested that he had seen enough evidence to convince himself that Saddam Hussein had had a program to produce weapons of mass destruction. He expected to find "strong" evidence of missile delivery systems and "probably" evidence of biological weapons.
But last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he had met with Kay, and that the onetime weapons inspector had not informed him of any finds.
The Times of London reported this weekend that the report had been postponed because of lack of evidence. But CBS News has learned there is no delay.
The other point the article brings out is that Powell is now claiming that Saddam's gassing of the Kurds in 1988 is sufficient justification for the war in 2003.
"If you want evidence of the existence and the use of weapons of mass destruction, come here now to Halabja today and see it," Powell said after visiting the museum. "What happened over the intervening 15 years? Did (Saddam) suddenly lose the motivation? Did he suddenly decide that such weapons would not be useful? The international community did not believe so."Amazingly, Powell seems to have forgotten that between 1988 and 2003, America fought a war in Iraq (1991, under Bush the First and largely led by Powell himself), and made bombing runs during Clinton's regime. In addition, Saddam faced sanctions from the UN and periodic arms inspections. In other words, a lot happened during those 15 years.
The Washington Times, generally viewed as a paper with a strong conservative bias, is reporting that according to The Sunday Times of London, David Kay's promised update on the search for WMD in Iraq is being delayed and may never be released. Interestingly, however, I've not seen much reporting about this in any other sources. Given the Washington Times' general bias, however, I tend to consider a report from them indicating that Kay's update may not support the Bush/Blair administration's claims as more likely to be accurate than I would a similar article stating that the report would support them, but I'm still a bit trepidatious about their reliability on this, and will be keeping an eye out for additional information.
Obviously, if the report is delayed and the contents withheld, it will be bigger news in London, where there are increasing calls for Tony Blair to resign over charges he misled his nation into joining Bush's war on Iraq that it likely will be here, especially considering that any report further undercutting Blair's case could put him in a position of being forced to resign.
Back in August, Reuters reported that Kay claimed "solid progress" was being made in the WMD hunt.
"We are making solid progress. And as is with most progress it is preliminary. We are not at the final stage of understanding fully Iraq's WMD program or having found WMD weapons," said David Kay, who recently returned from Iraq where he was sent as a CIA special adviser to develop a strategy for finding weapons of mass destructionAdditionally, according to the UN News Wire: Kay and Pat Roberts, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee had sounded fairly confident that they would have a "surprise to report", and at the time, it was expected that the "surprise" would be revealed in September.[...] Kay said Iraqi scientists who were "collaborating and cooperating" and freshly unearthed documents have led the WMD hunting team to new, previously unknown sites in Iraq. Physical evidence has been collected, but he declined to describe it.
"We are taking this apart as if it were a criminal conspiracy, which in many ways it is. So you start with taking apart the various elements of the program to get you to the end which we all want to find out -- if there were weapons and, if so, what happened to those weapons," Kay said.
Conservative columnist Robert Novak recently indicated that Kay's upcoming report will aim to take the heat off the administration: "Former international weapons inspector David Kay... has privately reported successes that are planned to be revealed to the public in mid-September."The UN Wire article did note that Kay did, however, caveat the possible announcement of a surprise.
Kay cautioned, though, that no significant find will be made public unless three criteria are met: multiple Iraqis providing information about the find, multiple documents explaining it and physical evidence showing a connection to weapons of mass destruction activities.A week ago, Thomas Paine.com did an overview on David Kay and his career, and concluded that he sounded like "the perfect 'yes' man" for the administration to serve as the special advisor for the weapons hunt, and indicated that Kay has what appear to be some conflicts of interest and a possible pre-disposition to finding evidence of WMDs.
"Kay's experience and background make him the ideal person for this new role," Tenet said when he announced the appointment. "His understanding of the history of the Iraqi programs and knowledge of past Iraqi efforts to hide WMD will be of inestimable help in determining the current status of Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons."If this is an accurate analysis of Kay's potential outlook on the project, a report from him showing that there is little to support the Bush/Blair contentions could be that much more devastating. It would, at the very least, make it harder for conservatives to dismiss the report as suffering from a liberal bias or desire to make Bush look bad.Kay's no stranger to the CIA. In fact, he was fired from his position as deputy director of UNSCOM's Iraq Action Team in the early 1990s because of his contacts with the U.S. intelligence community, according to Gordon Prather, the army's chief scientist during the Reagan years.
[...] Kay is also involved with one of the nation's major defense contractors, serving as a senior vice president for the San Diego-based Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which received about two-thirds of its $6 billion revenue last year from the U.S. Treasury, according to a report by Katrin Dauenhauer and Jim Lobe in Asia Times.
Aside from homeland security projects, SAIC has already won several reconstruction contracts in Iraq, and Kay along with other former company employees are firmly planted in country. The company has headed up the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council (IRDC) since the Pentagon established the body was in February, according to the Asia Times report, and also runs the recently established Iraqi Media Network (IMN) project, charged with building a new information ministry, complete with television, radio and a newspaper. SAIC is also a subcontractor under Vinnell Corporation, which has been training the Saudi National Guard for a long time, and is now responsible for pulling together and training a new Iraqi army.
So David Kay has some personal interest in keeping up U.S. appearances in Iraq, including the image that we invaded the country for legitimate reasons. That and his die-hard loyalty to the Bush administration means he'll be spinning the upcoming report as hard and as positively as he can.
Still, all of this is at least somewhat speculatory unless the report is actually released to the public, but it'll be interesting to watch and see what other information comes out about it.
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.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.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.
Well, at least their consistent, eh?
Well, despite months of predictions that once we were able to start talking to the scientists without their minders and with Saddam out of office, they'd be able to tell us a lot about Iraq's WMDs (more recently, they've modified that claim to WMD claims, since they seem to have realized that there's most likely no actual WMDs to be found), but so far, the scientists haven't been able to tell them a thing.
The sources said four senior scientists and more than a dozen at lower levels who worked for the Iraqi government have been interviewed by U.S. officials under the direction of the CIA. Some scientists have been arrested and held for months, others have made deals in return for information and at least one has agreed to be interviewed outside Iraq.The scientists have also maintained that the disputed aluminum tubes were for use in rockets, not enriching uranium. This, despite the fact that we've been using more aggressive techniques to try and get information, such as long detention and solitary confinement, even for scientists who have voluntarily come in to speak with officials.No matter the circumstances, all of the scientists interviewed have denied that Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program or developed and hidden chemical or biological weapons since United Nations inspectors left in 1998. Several key Iraqi officials questioned the significance of evidence cited by the Bush administration to suggest that Hussein was stepping up efforts to develop new weapons of mass destruction programs.
Amir Saadi, Iraq’s 65-year-old chief liaison with United Nations weapons inspectors since last year, has been held incommunicado since his voluntary surrender in Baghdad to U.S. military police more than three months ago, according to his wife, Helma.Helma says she has received only one letter from her husband since he surrendered, and that was written when the Red Cross visited him to ensure he was being treated properly. He commented in his letter that it was "nice to have someone to talk to", leading his wife to believe he's being held in solitary confinement. She also said that he did not work with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, but instead worked on building rockets. Apparently, US officials believe he might know something about what (if anything) Saddam was working on regarding chemical weapons, and are continuing to try and get that information from him. Helma says he has no such information to give them.
The night before he gave himself up, Saadi saw himself listed on BBC satellite television as one of the men being sought by U.S. forces. In a recent interview at her home in Baghdad, Helma Saadi said that he told her, “I want to surrender. I want to cooperate. It will be just a matter of a few hours, and I’ll be back.’Just hours before his April 12 surrender, Saadi gave a television interview to a German television reporter during which he said, “There were no weapons of mass destruction, and time will bear me out.” [...]
Saadi’s surrender encouraged the wife and daughter of Gen. Hossam Amin, head of Iraq’s National Monitoring Directorate, to get him to surrender, and he, too, has not been heard from since, Helma Saadi said.
[...] His wife said she suspects her husband is being held out of sight because “he is telling the truth . . . They have realized there are no weapons of mass destruction and the quagmire they have created. They want to hold someone as a scapegoat.”
After hiring a lawyer, Helma Saadi sent a written request to L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator for Iraq. She did not receive an answer from Bremer to that letter or to one sent more recently. She did receive a response to a letter she sent asking whether her husband could be represented by a lawyer. On June 27, Col. Marc L. Warren of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps assigned to Bremer’s office, said her husband’s status “is being investigated” under the Geneva Conventions to see whether he is entitled to prisoner of war status or some other category.
Meanwhile, former government officials, scientists and professionals are still being arrested.
My question, though, is if we're going to do things like long-term detention and solitary confinement in order to try and "motivate" people to give us information on Saddam's alleged weapons programs, how are we ever going to know that the scientists are telling us the truth, especially if the absence of evidence to support any contetion that Saddam had WMD?
Of course, that question pre-supposes that they actually care about getting the truth, and right now it's hard to say if the administration does or not. They might be perfectly content to get phoney confessions to involvement in WMDs if they think it will bolster their case - and the President's flagging approval ratings.
I know that we have to put some effort into getting information from some of these people, for whom their previous lives under Saddam have made keeping secrets a matter of life and death. But using coercive techniques such as indefinate detention in solitary confinement, or, as reported the other day, kidnapping someone's wife and child to get them to come in, refusing to allow someone to turn themselves in and then breaking down the door to their home and arresting them under cover from a helicopter (and leaving his sons behind in plastic handcuffs), does nothing to ensure that the information we receive is in any way true.
I've heard this example given too many times, now, and it is just too stupid for words. Here's Casper Weinberger's version of it.
That we have not yet located huge deposits of weapons of mass destruction does not mean they do not or did not exist. After all, we have not yet found Saddam Hussein or his remains--but not even Democratic presidential candidates or the New York Times contend that he did not exist.Ok, now, think about that for a moment. There are at least two serious problems with this logic. First and foremost, we have evidence that, as of 2003, both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein existed. Secondly, hiding a person is much different (and considerably easier) than hiding enough biological or chemical weaponry to be a serious threat threat to the world.
In the last year or so, we've seen Saddam and Osama on tapes and heard their voices. We may not know where they are, precisely (or even generally, for that matter), but we have current evidence that they do, in fact, exist. If the last time anyone had seen or heard from either of these men was 1998, it's pretty likely that more than a few people would be questioning if they were even still alive for us to find. And if people were saying "well, we know they were alive in 1991, and we have some information indicating they were probably still alive in 1998, but it's maybe a bit shakey and there hadn't been any contact with either of them in the last 5 years," well, most people would probably skip the "I wonder...." stage and go straight to the "You know, they're probably dead by now" stage.
Similarly, when it comes to hiding things, it's a lot easier to hide a person than it is to hide thousands of gallons of biological or chemical agents for use in weaponry. It's also easier to hide a person than it is to hide a Scud missle or 10. Just by the quanitity of what Bush said that Iraq had, it would have had a very difficult time trying to hide all traces of it. Saddam and Osama, on the other hand, just need a room in an out of the way house, or a cave in the midst of a mountain range.
I just wish conservatives would give up on this tired old saw, it doesn't make for any kind of serious discussion, and it doesn't make any real sense.
This is something else again. Apparently, the forged documents beind the Niger uranium claim was given to US diplomats by a reporter for an Italian tabloid that is owned by Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy.
Corriere della Sera, an Italian daily, quoted Elisabetta Burba as saying her source "in the past proved to be reliable." Burba, who writes for the weekly Panorama, refused to reveal her source.At least someone recognized the implications of using forged materials."I realized that this could be a worldwide scoop, but that's exactly why I was very worried," Burba was quoted as saying. "If it turned out to be a hoax and I published it, I would have ended my career."
Corriere della Sera quoted the journalist as saying she went to Niger to try to check out the authenticity of the documents. Burba told the paper that she was suspicious because the documents spoke of such a large amount of uranium — 500 tons — and were short on details on how it would be transported and arrangements for final delivery.One thing I'd like to know is if, when turning the papers over to the US diplomats, she told them that she'd checked them out and that the paper had decided that they were too unreliable to use.On her return, she said, she told Panorama's top editor that "the story seemed fake to me."
CNN is also reporting that uranium levels in samples taken from Iran are showing that it may be possible that Iran may be enriching uranium without having provided proper notification to the UN, and that the concentrations are significant enough to indicate that it may be weapons grade uranium.
Needless to say (but I'll be saying it anyway because I'm just like that), this is another area where we can't go jumping to any conclusions. How often during the war did we hear that preliminary tests indicated that something could be biological or chemical weapons only to later learn that, oops, it wasn't.
Again, it's something important to keep an eye on and see if we can find out what's really happening, but if the report is correct, it could indicate that Iran is working on nuclear weapons.
It does bring up a question, though.... if we can tell by examining these samples that Iran may be enriching uranium, and whether or not it would be weapons-grade uranium, then why haven't we heard anything about similar samples having been taken in Iraq or what the results of those samples are?
A ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee has offered a bit of a preview of into the preliminary findings from their investigation.
On June 25, during the House debate on the intelligence authorization bill, Harman delivered an informal progress report on her committee's inquiry. Her remarks received, as far as I can tell, little media attention. But they are dramatic in that these comments are the first quasi-findings from an official outlet confirming that Bush deployed dishonest rhetoric in guiding the United States to invasion and occupation in Iraq. This is not an op-ed judgment; this is an evaluation from a member of the intelligence committee who claims to be basing her statements on the investigative work of the committee. Here's what she says:Now, obviously, unless and until she either choses to make a statement and offer additional support for her contentions or the committee makes a public report containing that support, we can't know for sure what she is basing these statements on - but she's in a position to know what she's talking about. I also think that we would have heard denials or denunciations from others on the committee if she was saying something that cannot be upheld.
- On Bush's prewar assertions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction: "When discussing Iraq's WMD, administration officials rarely included the caveats and qualifiers attached to the intelligence committee's judgments ... . For many Americans, the administration's certainty gave the impression that there was even stronger intelligence about Iraq's possession of and intention to use WMD."
- On the evidence upon which the WMD assertions were based: "The committee is now investigating whether the intelligence case on Iraq's WMD was based on circumstantial evidence rather than hard facts and whether the intelligence community made clear to the policy-makers and Congress that most of its analytic judgments were based on things like aerial photographs and Iraqi defector interviews, not hard facts."
- On the supposed Hussein-al Qaeda connection: "[T]he investigation suggests that the intelligence linking al Qaeda to Iraq, a prominent theme in the administration's statements prior to the war, [was] contrary to what was claimed by the administration."
Hopefully, there will be a public hearing in Congress on these matters and a public report that will get all of the information out in the open. I think it's important for that to happen - we need to not only know what all questions there are, but what answers the administration is prepared to offer.
A mailing list I'm a member of has been discussing the Niger uranium situation for the last few days. It's an interesting discussion because you've got people taking different sides, but we're actually talking about it, and not having one of the too-frequently-seen "flamefests" that most multi-partisan discussion seem to devolve into these days.
Anyway, this is a message I posted there earlier this evening about the new revelation that the CIA hadn't even seen the forged documents until after the State of the Union address.
I just have to wonder what the next surprise will be - and yet I'm not sure I want to know...
Reports from both Newsweek and the Associated Press are saying that, even though the CIA had looked into claims that Saddam Hussein was trying to get uranium from Niger over a year before the SOTU, they didn't actually get to look at the documents that supposedly supported that claim until after the SOTU. Here's the description of what happened from the Newsweek article (this is a much longer quote than I usually like to make, but the information is such that I think the completeness is necessary, and its complicated enough I didn't want to try and paraphrase it and wind up doing so inaccurately):
The disputed documents were first provided to Italian intelligence services in late 2001, and information about them was then passed along to allied intelligence agencies, including Britain's MI6 and the CIA.This is just bizarre - and I thought the whole mess was pretty weird to begin with. This is important, though, because the CIA's determination that the information was dubious was - we've now learned - not based on the documents being forgeries, but on whether or not the situation the documents described had any potential credibilitiy or not - and they found that it didn't. The forgeries were an entirely separate issue from the basic credibility of the story itself.
But the documents themselves didn't come into the possession of the U.S. government until nearly a year later, in October 2002, sources said, when a foreign individual - described by one source as a journalist - turned them over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. The motivations of the foreign journalist are unclear but one U.S. intelligence official says he "may have been looking for money" - either for himself or a source who provided the material to him. (The sources did not disclose the identify of the journalist.)All sources agree that the U.S. Embassy did not in fact pay for the material. What is most baffling, however, is what happened after that.
The U.S. Embassy quickly passed the documents along to the CIA station chief in Rome - as well as the State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research. But the station chief didn't send them along to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., apparently believing they were being sent instead through State Department channels.
In fact, CIA headquarters - including its nuclear-weapons analysts - never got the documents until four months later, in early February 2003 - well after CIA officials and White House aides had already had several discussions about whether the information about Iraqi attempts to buy Niger uranium was reliable enough to be mentioned by the president in his Jan. 28 State of the Union address.
Two sources said, at one point, State Department's INR division - which had long since concluded there was no reliable evidence that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program - offered the documents to the CIA.
But for reasons that are unclear, the CIA never followed up on the offer. One explanation, sources said, is that the CIA had gotten a report from the Italians about the documents, including what agency officials believed was a "verbatim text" and didn't believe it was necessary to have the primary source material themselves.
An agency official acknowledged "there were some discussions" between the State Department and the CIA about turning the material over to the agency, but no follow up took place. "It's unclear" why, the official said.
In any event, the failure has proven in retrospect to be a much bigger, if not catastrophic, bureaucratic foul-up. Throughout the fall and in the weeks prior to the State of the Union address, the CIA had tried to warn the White House that the intelligence reporting about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger was "fragmentary" and not reliable. At one point, CIA director Tenet himself personally advised deputy national-security advisor Steve Hadley to remove a reference to the uranium purchases from a speech Bush was preparing to give in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002.
But the idea that the documents themselves - which underlay the claims - was based on forged material did not become known until after Feb. 4, 2003, when the International Atomic Energy Agency asked the U.S. government to back up some of the allegations it was making about Iraq's nuclear program.
At that point, the U.S. mission to the United Nations turned the documents over Jacque Baute, an aide to IAEA executive director Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei who was responsible for monitoring Iraq-related nuclear issues.
Once IAEA forensic analysts got them, it became immediately clear that the documents were not genuine. "Within two hours they figured out they were forgeries," said one IAEA source familiar with the material.
The source explained that all the IAEA analysts really had to do was conduct a Google search. The documents purported to be letters between Niger and Iraqi officials in July 2000 and October 2000 that describe an agreement for the delivery of two lots of 500 tons of uranium over two years.
But the correspondence was on obsolete letterhead, including the wrong symbol for the presidency of Niger, and made reference to state bodies that no longer existed at the time that the letters were written. In addition, an Oct. 10, 2000, letter, allegedly signed by the foreign minister of Niger, had the signature of a man who hadn't served in that position since 1989.
So at this point, it's looking like we - somehow - found out about the allegations that Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Niger - apparently through the Brits, who learned about it from the Italians. Without seen the documents that were the source of this allegation, we started checking out. In early 2002, a 4-Star General with the United States European Command (which also handles much of Africa) named Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr. went to Niger to check out the allegations. He found there was no basis for them, and reported back - a report that made it to the Join Cheifs of Staff. A few weeks later, Cheney's office asked the CIA to check it out, so the CIA sent retired ambassador Joseph Wilson to check it out, and he, too, found no reason to believe the reports were at all credible.
In October of 2002, when Bush was getting ready to give his speech in Cincinnati, the CIA felt the information was too dubious to be used in the speech and intervened with Condoleeza Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, to get the information pulled. This was ALL before they OR the State Department had ever seen the documents themselves. In spite of the CIA insistence that the information be removed from the Cincinnati speech, the President still used it that same week when he met with Senators and Representatives in order to persuade them to vote to authorize him to go to war against Iraq. (I should also note in here that right about this same time - 12 days before the authorization vote, in fact - Bush learned that the North Koreans had announced their success in restarting their nuclear program - but the information was deliberately withheld from all but a few key Republicans until after the vote was taken, in order to prevent the North Korean situation from overshadowing Bush's desired authorization to go to war with Iraq)
Four months later, when it came time for the State of the Union address, the CIA still didn't want the info in, but agreed to the "Britian has learned" language. By that time, if I'm reading the above article correctly, the State Department (Powell's division) had a copy of the actual documents, but the CIA themselves still had not seen them. One thing this revelation does explain, though, is why it took 6 weeks for the US to turn copies of the documents over to the IAEA when they requested them in late-December/early-January (we didn't hand them over until mid-February - AFTER Powell's speech at the UN).
This really stirs the pot up quite a bit more. I find it incredible that the CIA official in Rome never passed the documents up the ladder, and that the CIA didn't seem to be doing more to get the actual documents while looking into the story. I suppose it's good that they came to the correct conclusion - that the information was bogus - even without the documents, but I suspect if they'd gotten their hands on those forgeries before the SOTU, the uranium claim would never have been made. I also have a lot of questions about why the State Department, since they apparently DID have copies of the documents, didn't pass them on to anyone else, even though they had to have known that the President was using the claim those documents purportedly supported as one of the main pieces of his case for claiming that Saddam had nuclear aims.
I still, however, find it very difficult to believe that President Bush wasn't aware of the dispute surrounding the claims, regardless of when the CIA got their hands on the documents. The very phrasing of the statement in the SOTU, in my opinion, makes it clear he had to know. Wouldn't he have wondered why he was making a claim in his speech - and not just any speech, but one that is actually a Constitutionally required report on the condition of the country and his actions on the people's behalf that must be delivered to the representatives of the American people - and sourcing it to the British and *not* to our own intelligence services? Especially if he'd previously used that information in trying to persuade Congressmen to vote for his war. To the best of my knowledge, when he spoke to the various Congressmen, he didn't caveat the information about Saddam trying to get uranium by saying it was information from the British, but now in the SOTU, that's how the line was being presented. I just can't imagine that he wouldn't have wondered why the change had been made - and given that Tenet, Rice, Powell and Cheney* pretty much had to have known by then that the information was at least questionable, I can't imagine that no one would have answered his question.
But like I said, this is just getting really, really weird.
[* Tenet was obviously aware that it was dubious as far back as October, so we know he knew. We also know that Rice's deputy, Hadley, knew because he was the person Tenet debated with about it in October. Since part of the National Security Council's job is to help vet the SOTU, Rice would have been involved in that, and I can't imagine that she wouldn't have talked to Hadley about it at all. Plus, Tenet's "mea cupla" from last week pretty strongly indicated that it was the NSC who wanted the info in the speech, and that it was from negotiating with the NSC that they ended up agreeing to the "Britian learned" phrasing. It was Cheney's initial request back in February of 2002 that had prompted the CIA to send Wilson to Niger, and he would have gotten a response. As for Powell, the State Department had the documents themselves, and Powell refused to include the information in his own speech 8 days later, even though, to date, there's been no mention of anything happening between the SOTU and the UN speech that would have caused him to form a different opinion. Since that has been an oft-asked question why he left it out when the President had used it such a short time before, I'd think if there was any such explaination it would have been proffered by now. So, logically, Powell had to have known at the time of the SOTU that the info was dubious.]
Bush had this to say today:
The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region.So, does Bush just not remember that Saddam did let the inspectors in - and that he was cooperating with them to a great extent - or was he somehow, in the words of his father, out of the loop?
Hans Blix noted in his March 7th report to the Security Council:
Inspections in Iraq resumed on 27 November 2002. In matters relating to process, notably prompt access to sites, we have faced relatively few difficulties and certainly much less than those that were faced by UNSCOM in the period 1991 to 1998. This may well be due to the strong outside pressure.I'm having one of those days where I'm just so aghast at Bush's inability to actually tell the truth. I don't know if the man just doesn't care, or if somehow he things we won't notice. Either way, it's beyond disheartening, especially since there are still so many people out there who are of the opinion that he didn't deliberately mislead us into the war, or otherwise think that he's a "honest" person.
I have no faith in this government. I haven't had for quite a while. I didn't necessarily have a lot of faith in the Clinton government, either, because he certainly wasn't all buddy-buddy with the truth, either, though it does seem that most of his lies were about personal problems and not major national policy. I don't know if I'll be able to have any faith in the next government, either, though. I know whoever becomes our next president - even if I support him or her for the position - is going to have to work hard to earn my full trust once s/he is in the job. It won't be automatic.
An interesting conversation between Wolf Blitzer and Scott Ritter regarding the Nigerien documents and the nuclear components that were buried in Mahdi Obeidi's backyard.
WOLF BLITZER:Let's focus some more on the controversy and the continuing hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Joining us now from Albany, New York, the former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter. He's also the author of a new book just about to come out entitled "Frontier Justice: WMD and the Bushwhacking of America."Bush apparently has declared that the discussion of the uranium incident is over, but I suspect he may learn that it's not up to him. There are more questions coming out all the time. With the news that the CIA blocked the inclusion of the Nigerien information from Bush's October speech, it's interesting to note that at about that same time, Bush was using that information with Congressmen and women to convince them to vote for his war.No great surprise there, Scott, what you're going to tell us. But tell us right now what you think of this uproar here in Washington over how this one line got into the president's speech? Is it just an honest mistake that happened?
SCOTT RITTER, FORMER U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: No, it's not an honest mistake. It's part of a larger effort of deception that was, you know, taken by the president, by his administration in regards to justifying this war with Iraq. It's not just the nuclear issue, although that's the one that got the majority of the senators and congressmen to change their vote back in October to support this war. It's about chemical weapons, biological weapons, the entire case that was made that Iraq has an ongoing program dedicated to manufacturing and concealing weapons of mass destruction that threaten the security.
BLITZER: But Scott, reference to the nuclear sale, if you will, of uranium from Niger to Iraq, that occurred in January after the October vote. So it wasn't specifically designed to get senators and congressmen to support the resolution.
RITTER: Will, actually, Wolf, you're wrong on that one. That piece of information, that intelligence was peddled by the CIA, in behind the door briefings, two senators and congressmen in late September, 2002, and it was that information amongst others, including the now what we know to be fraudulent claim that aluminum tubes were going to be used in a centrifuge program, that got many senators, including Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the Intelligence Services Committee or sat on the committee to change their vote. So it was just part and parcel of a larger problem.
BLITZER: Yes, but I was suggesting that the State of the Union address came after the congressional votes in the House and the Senate.
RITTER: Well, the State of the Union address is when the president made his case to the American people, and he perpetrated the fraud to the American people at that time. But this fraud was perpetrated to Congress back in September using the same information. So, you know, this is -- this is a very broad-based issue that needs to be delved into.
BLITZER: Let's get right to the issue at hand, though. Do you have any doubt that Saddam Hussein would have loved to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program?
RITTER: Well, you know, now, you're getting into speculation. What I have said is we have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting the nuclear weapons program. And I tend to believe that (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
BLITZER: Wait a minute, wait a minute. What about the equipment that was just discovered the other day buried in the backyard of a former Iraqi nuclear scientist that had been buried there since before the first war? They were supposed to give all that stuff up, as you well know, as a result of the cease-fire?
RITTER: You're right on one point. As I well know. I led the investigation into Mahdi Obeidi. I interviewed him for many hours, looking for just this material. In fact, had the United States not pulled the plug on the inspections I was trying to carry out in August 1998, we had plans to go to Obeidi's house with ground-penetrating radar, to look for this material.
But I believe you'll find that when you dig deeper into the Obeidi case, he's not telling the whole truth. Obeidi kept that material on his own volition. Qusay and the security services, you know, didn't hand it out. And the bottom line is, it's components of a nonexistent program. Nobody is trying to make the case that what Obeidi had is representative of anything that represents a viable nuclear weapons program worthy of war.
BLITZER: But that was a violation of what the U.N. -- the U.N. cease-fires had called for, hiding that equipment underground.
RITTER: First of all, it's not equipment. It's components. It doesn't constitute a viable centrifuge or centrifuge array (ph), and it's not part of a larger program. Obeidi was in violation for maintaining this. Does the fact that he maintained it represent a larger effort by the Iraqi government? We won't know until the investigation is carried out.
But what I'm telling you is based upon my investigation, which went on for many months and involved dozens of hours. Obeidi did this on his own. This wasn't something that ...
BLITZER: But Scott, you know the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. You lived there, you talked to these people. Did anything happen like that of a nature like that, Obeidi doing this on his own without getting approval or someone asking him keep this quiet? That was such a brutal regime. The guy wouldn't have had the guts to do that on his own?
RITTER: Actually, again, Wolf, you're wrong. We have several cases of Iraqi scientists who were very proud of the work they did. Remember, Obeidi was competing with Dr. Diah Jaffar Al-Jaffar (ph) over, you know, who was going to be the first to enrich uranium. He was proud of this program, and when he was ordered to turn it over, I think he maintained these components and these blueprints of his own volition, in a very similar manner that Iraqi scientists responsible for designing guidance and control equipment did the exact same thing.
BLITZER: One final question before I let you go, Scott. The two trailers, the semitrailers, the trucks they found that a lot of U.S. intelligence officials believe could only have been used to develop biological weapons, biological warfare, I don't know if you've had a chance to even examine those reports, but what do you make of that evidence?
RITTER: Again, it's not evidence of anything, Wolf. British experts who are very familiar with the Marconi hydrogen generation equipment sold to Iraq in the 1980s have reviewed these laboratories and says it is an exact replication of that. There's only one thing those labs could do, that is to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. Biological experts, who know about manufacturing biological agents say, you can not produce biological agent there.
So the president again has misled the American public and indeed the world. When, a month ago, he was in Poland and said, the fact that we had these two labs is proof that we have weapons of mass destruction. It's proof of nothing more than the president has mislead, has fabricated, we don't have a weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq to justify this war. What we have is a quagmire with Americans dying on almost a daily basis and no end in site.
BLITZER: Scott Ritter has got a new book coming out, I believe, next week "Frontier Justice: WMD and the Bushwhacking of America". We'll talk when the book comes out again. Thanks, Scott, very much.
RITTER: Thank you.
I simply don't see how it's possible that Bush and his advisors could not have known that the information was bogus if the CIA was telling them not to include it in the October speech. They really can't even try to say that the British inclusion of that information in one of their reports was what made the difference between October and January, since that particular report came out in September.
Also, keep in mind that not only did the Nigerien forgeries make it into the Bush State of the Union address, but also the claim that Iraq was trying to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes, which the White House maintained were for making centrifuges - even though experts had already explained that the tubes in question couldn't be used that way. I remember after reading about the SOTU and the inclusion of the aluminum tubes, wondering why they were bringing that up again, since I'd previously heard reports that the tubes weren't viable for WMD purposes.
I hope this story maintains its traction and that other questionable statements in the speech get put under the microscope as well.
According to an article in the NY Times, the CIA had pulled a reference to the Nigerien uranium story from Bush's October speech, but then it was included in the January State of the Union address, even though no new information had come in that would have changed anyone's opinion on the story.
There is evidence that there was concern in the C.I.A. about the credibility of the uranium information and that those doubts reached at least some White House officials months before the State of the Union address. Administration officials involved in drafting another speech Mr. Bush gave about Iraq, in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, said that at the C.I.A.'s behest, they had removed any mention of the central piece of intelligence about African uranium - a report about an effort by Iraq to obtain "yellowcake," which contains uranium ore, in Niger. No one has fully explained how, given that early October warning to the White House, a version of the same charge resurfaced in the early drafts of the State of the Union address just three months later, and stayed there, draft after draft.Makes it a bit harder to say no one in the administration knew, don't you think?
With all the controversy swirling around about the Nigerien documents (thank you Jan for finding that word for me - it makes sentence structure SO much easier!), a couple other comments haven't gotten quite the attention they might deserve. Between them, statements by President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld raise some interesting questions.
A couple days ago, while trying to defend himself from the accusations of using false information in the State of the Union address, Bush made the comment
He leaned forward on a podium shared with President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and said angrily: ''Imagine a world in which this tyrant had a nuclear weapon. In 1998, my predecessor raided Iraq, based upon the very same intelligence. And in 2003, after the world had demanded he disarm, we decided to disarm him.''[Emphasis mine]Today, Donald Rumsfeld announced that there was no new evidence involved in the decision to go to war.
The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit" of weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light — through the prism of our experience on 9/11."If there wasn't any new evidence, as Rumsfeld indicates, and if we were using the same evidence that Clinton had used in deciding to bomb Iraq in 1998, as Bush indicates, are they saying the decision to go to war against Iraq was predicated on 5-year-old or older evidence?
I've mentioned before the possiblity that whatever WMD Saddam may have had might have been destroyed in the 1998 bombings - but the admission from Rumsfeld that there was no new evidence used in making the decision to go to war makes that scenario even more likely. If that's the case, it could explain why there are no WMD to be found.
Remember, Bush said that Clinton had bombed Iraq "based upon the very same intelligence" - meaning it was intelligence gathered before the bombing occurred. Rumsfeld now confirms that they weren't using new intelligence to determine that Saddam was a threat, but older intelligence seen "in a dramatic new light".
Of course, it's been reported in several places that the neo-cons wanted this war for a very long time - even before Bush took office - but that doesn't mean using 5-year-old evidence, even if it's seen in a "new light", makes much sense.
This, of course, is still speculative at this point - but it does raise some very interesting questions. Rumsfeld has said that they used old intelligence, but they didn't say how old. It is Bush's statement that leads to the inference that it is 5 years old. And its possible that even if the WMD were destroyed in 1998, if Saddam was trying to rebuild his program, that he may have developed weapons during that 5-year period. There are a lot of things, in fact, that could have happened during those 5 years.
But that's also exactly the problem with what the combination of Bush and Rumsfeld's statement seems to be saying: A lot can happen in 5 years, and if they were relying on 5-year-old intelligence, then they'd have no way to know how much - if any of it - was accurate - and that's not the kind of intelligence you can depend on when operating on a basis of waging pre-emptive wars.
Justifying a pre-emptive war depends on specific, accurate and timely information. Seeing old intelligence in a new light doesn't qualify on any of those points, and should never be used for something this serious.
Whether one considers the result of the war to be sufficient justification for it having been waged or not, its still important that we understand exactly how and why we got into the war in the first place. Saddam being out of power is a good thing - there's no disagreement with that. But even Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged in his interview with Sam Tannenhaus from Vanity Fair (as taken from the DOD transcripts of the interview)
"[the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people] ...is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it.We went to war because the President and his people assured us that Saddam was an imminent and intolerable threat to the safety of the United States. Now we're hearing that the decision was not based on new evidence and that the "very same" evidence was used to justify Clinton's bombing, can we really say that the threat was truly imminent?
When it comes to waging war, the end cannot be used to justify the means - especially if we're waging a pre-emptive war. There's a lot more riding on this than just President Bush's image or even his presidency. We have to know what happened and why. The lives of our soldiers, the credibility of our nation, and our ability to obtain help from our allies if we are truly in need are at stake.
LiberalOasis has a good piece on the weasely way some of the questions about the Nigerien documents are being answered - and makes a rather apropos comparison in the process.
JIM LEHRER: You had no sexual relationship with this young woman?BILL CLINTON: There is not a sexual relationship. That is accurate.
Q: Do you still believe they were trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa?
GEORGE W. BUSH: Right now?
Q: No, were they? The statement you made --
BUSH: One thing is for certain. He's not trying to buy anything right now. If he's alive, he's on the run.
Here's one thing that's really for certain:
When you have to resort to being cute with verb tenses, you're in real trouble.
CNN is reporting that George Tenet has taken responsiblity for the incorrect information about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa making it into the SOTU.
In a statement released Friday evening, Tenet said that the CIA had seen and approved the speech before it was delivered, and he took responsibility for the mistake.It's importat to note, though, that as part of his statement he also said"The president had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president," he said.
The CIA director also said, "I am responsible for the approval process in my agency."
Tenet said that at the time the speech was delivered, the line was factually correct because British intelligence did indeed believe that it had evidence of such activity. But he said the CIA's own investigation of those same allegations had led the agency to decide that that the evidence was inconclusive."Concurred" with whom?"From what we know now, [CIA] officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct -- i.e., that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa," he said. "This should not have been the test for clearing a presidential address.
"This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed." [Emphasis mine]
While Tenet goes out of his way to clear Bush, Cheney and "top administration officials", his statement that the CIA "concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct" indicates that there was someone making the argument that putting the sourcing of the information on the British would clear the White House of any claims that they lied on the justification we've been hearing that the statement was "technically true". As Joshua Micah Marshall puts it:
But all of this begs the obvious and singularly important question: the charge is that CIA didn't push hard enough to keep bogus information out of the president's speech. Who was pushing on the other side? Who was pushing to keep the bogus information in? And why?So George Tenet is taking the fall, though at this point he's neither resigned nor been fired. But I don't think this is the end of the matter. It sounds like there still was someone involved in writing the speech who knew the information was false, but wanted it in the speech anyway, and finally got the CIA to "concur" by putting the onus on the British. We need to know who that person is, and why they were so insistant that the information be included.
UPDATE (10:48pm CDT): Added quote from Josh Marshall to main text
Several news outlets are now reporting that the White House is saying that the CIA approved Bush's remarks on Iraq in the State of the Union address.
Something important to keep in mind. There's not much doubt that the CIA did approve the information in the SOTU. That's not the issue. The approval, however, came after Bush had changed the line about Saddam seeking uranium from Africa to be credited to the British, rather than being offered as a flat statement. Since the British did issue a report in September that included that information, so in attributing the claim to the British, the statement became "technically true" even though they knew that the claim made in the statement was false.
This is one situation where Bush and company are trying to counter the accusation that they deliberately included false information in the SOTU with the idea that the CIA approved it. The problem for them is that this isn't an either/or situation - both can be equally true. They could have deliberately included false information even after getting it approved by the CIA by phrasing it in a way that put the blame off on the British.
I think Ari Fleischer may be feeling a bit defensive with all the questions that are getting asked about the Niger documents and the WMD issue in general. In a recent statement, he issued a tough-sounding challenge that no one could possible take him up on.
"I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."Now, I don't want to say that I don't think Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction - obviously, at one point he did. What I think is that, if he had any recently, they were nowhere near the threat that the White House made them out to be, nor do I believe that they were as plentiful as claimed. But, while I can't for the life of me figure out where the weapons disappeared to (unless it turns out that they were, in fact, destroyed in the 1998 bombings that Clinton ordered.)
Still, I find the idea that Ari wants people who don't believe the weapons existed to tell everyone where the weapons are to be very amusing.
CBS News | Bush Knew Iraq Info Was False | July 10, 2003 20:44:36Hmmmm.... let me make sure I understand this.(CBS) Senior administration officials tell CBS News the President's mistaken claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa was included in his State of the Union address -- despite objections from the CIA.
Before the speech was delivered, the portions dealing with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were checked with the CIA for accuracy, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin.
CIA officials warned members of the President's National Security Council staff the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa.
The White House officials responded that a paper issued by the British government contained the unequivocal assertion: "Iraq has ... sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." As long as the statement was attributed to British Intelligence, the White House officials argued, it would be factually accurate. The CIA officials dropped their objections and that's how it was delivered.
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," Mr. Bush said.
The statement was technically correct, since it accurately reflected the British paper. But the bottom line is the White House knowingly included in a presidential address information its own CIA had explicitly warned might not be true.
Bush - "Ok, so I know it's not really true, but since I can define it as a British claim, I'm not really lying."
Clinton - "Ok, so I know she gave me a blowjob, but since I can define "sexual relations" a penile/vaginal penetration, I'm not really lying"
Why did they call Clinton "Slick Willy" again?
Sorry - but if "technically true" isn't good enough for discussions of a blowjob, it's certainly not good enough for justifying going to war.
Well, when I wrote this the other day, I'm really glad I paid attention to that little voice in my head that said not to trust it entirely, and prompted me to include a caveat on the information. It turns out that the story from Capitol Hill Blue about a CIA advisor who claimed he'd been at 2 meetings with President Bush where Bush was advised against using the Niger documents and said that Bush had responded angrily, saying that if the CIA couldnt prove the story was true, they should hire some people who could. It turns out that the the CIA adviser is something of a con man, and that Capitol Hill Blue got "had" on the story.
After the story ran, we received a number of emails or phone calls that (1) either claimed Wilkinson was lying or (2) doubted his existence. I quickly dismissed the claims. After all, I had known this guy for 20 years and had no doubt about his credibility. Some people wanted to talk to him, so I forwarded those requests on to him via email. He didn't answer my emails, which I found odd. I should have listened to a bell that should have been going off in my ear.What's important here, though, is that only the story at Capitol Hill Blue was based on what this particular guy reported. The other stories I had mentioned in my own post were from more "regular" sources (Financial Times, MSNBC, Joshua Micah Marshall via The Hill and the Washington Post) and match information that's been widely reported in the last couple of days.Today, a White House source I know and trust said visitor logs don't have any record of anyone named Terrance J. Wilkinson ever being present at a meeting with the President. Then a CIA source I trust said the agency had no record of a contract consultant with that name. "Nobody, and I mean nobody, has ever heard of this guy," my source said.
I tried calling Terry's phone number. I got a recorded message from a wireless phone provider saying the number was no longer in service. I tried a second phone number I had for him. Same result.
Then a friend from the Hill called.
"You've been had," she said. "I know about this guy. He's been around for years, claiming to have been in Special Forces, with the CIA, with NSA. He hasn't worked for any of them and his name is not Terrance Wilkinson."
Anyway, I'd said I'd let you know when I found out anything, so I thought I'd at least get that updated.
Representative Henry Waxman has been keeping an eye and asking questions about the forged nuclear evidence for quite some time. Not only does he have a web page devoted to the topic, he also has issued a number of detailed statements and written letters to various administration officials which not only provide a solid assortment of facts, but also the sources of those facts.
Since this issue has flared up again - and because it's one I think needs to be pursued thoroughly, I've gone ahead and uploaded copies of some of the .pdf documents in case you want to read more about the situation. Representative Waxman's information is clear, well-presented and solid backed by reports, quotes and news articles.
Something I found interesting in reading through Representative Waxman's letters and responses is how there have been so very may contradictions in the excuses offered by the White House for the information having been used. Obviously, I've been aware that some of the information has been of a conflicting nature - I've commented on it more than a few times - but seeing it all laid out in one letter (especially the letter to President Bush noted above) really shows the scope of whole thing.There's a lot of information today flying around about the forged documents that were behind the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to get uranium yellowcake from Niger. Potentially the most devastating - if it's true - is a report that not only was Bush aware that the documents were not considered reliable but that he was determined to use them anyway. According to an article at Capitol Hill Blue, Terrance Wilkinson, who is described as a CIA adviser, says Bush was not only told on at least 2 occasions (which Wilkinson claims to have witnessed) prior to the State of the Union address that report of Iraq trying to purchase Uranium from Niger had been discredited, but that Bush's response was that if the CIA's current agents couldn't find any proof it was true, then they needed to hire some who could.
An intelligence consultant who was present at two White House briefings where the uranium report was discussed confirmed that the President was told the intelligence was questionable and that his national security advisers urged him not to include the claim in his State of the Union addressAdd that to the other contention that's been made recently - that while writing the speech, intelligence officials made their concerns about relying on the Niger documents known, and in response, the Bush administration decided to say that they got the information from the British - and it begins to look more and more like people in the higher levels of the Bush administration - and probably even Bush himself - knew that the Niger documents were fake, but were determined to make the accusation that Saddam was trying to get radioactive materials, even if they had no reliable evidence whatsoever to back it up. It also appears that they were willing to go to some length to try and make their accusation at least sound plausible for as long as possible in order to get the war underway."The report had already been discredited," said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA adviser present at two White House briefings. "This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings."
Bush's response was anger, Wilkinson said.
"He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," Wilkinson said. "He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country."
An interesting twist in the story comes from the Financial Times, which notes that when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) asked for information from the US about the claims that Saddam had tried to purchase uranium from Africa, the administration was very slow to respond.
The US government withheld from United Nations weapons inspectors evidence to back its claim that the Iraqi government had attempted to obtain uranium from Africa, despite repeated pledges to co-operate fully with the inspectors.No reason for the delay seems to have been provided, but if the administration was aware that the documents were forged, and if they had no other evidence to back up their claims, its not hard to imagine why they might have been less than eager to hand it over.In a letter released on Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it was forced to wait six weeks for the evidence - from December 2002 to early February 2003 - at a critical time, when it was investigating US charges that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear programme.
During that period, the US several times repeated the allegations, most notably in President George W. Bush's January State of the Union address.
On other occasions, when questions about the reliability of the Niger documents have come up, administration officials have answered that the forgery wasn't the only information they were relying on - there was additional information indicating that Saddam had also tried to obtain radioactive material from other African nations. Today's admission contradicted that information as well.
The White House on Tuesday sought to explain how a statement based on false information could have been included in the most important speech of the presidential calendar. The documents alleging a transaction between Niger and Iraq had been forged, a White House official confirmed, and said further reports of other Iraqi attempts to source uranium in Africa were "not detailed enough to be certain that such attempts were in fact made".
For the White House to finally say that "Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech" is all well and good. The question, however, is if knowing what they knew then, should they have included it? From the look of things, the answer is most likely, no.
On a forum for the CHB website, Doug Thompson, who runs CHB, was asked about the problems a Freeper had reported in trying to get information on Wilkinson. Here is the meat of Thompson's reply:
I've known Terry Wilkinson for 20+ years and his decision to go public was a painful one that I'm sure will bring recriminations. But he loves his country a lot more than any political party or politician. I've received some emails today regarding his comments and have forwarded them on to him. It's his decision as to whether or not he wishes to respond.Hopefully, there will be some kind of confirmation or refutation of this story within the next few days, but I thought the information was interesting enough to at least make note of it. I'll let you know if I find out anything further.But I don't feed anyone's desire for a witch hunt. When we ran the stories about Bill Clinton's sexual assaults on women, we identified a number of the women. I don't recall anyone at Free Republican demanding "proof" of their identity although I did have a number of liberal media types hounding me for more information.
I didn't pander to them and I won't to anyone else. I stand by the stories that run on our web site. You are free to read them or not read them, believe them or not believe them. It's a free world. We've been on the web since 1994 and we will be here 10 years from now.
You've probably seen this already, but I just have to include it. It's the quote from this week's Time in which we learn that Bush has no idea who's in charge of finding the WMDs.
I don't know about you, but I'd think this would be the kind of task you'd want to have your best person be in charge of, and reporting to you directly on a regular basis. That may not be the normal chain of command, but this is hardly a normal situation. Yet Bush had no idea who's job it was to run the search for WMD's, and, as the article notes, his aides even had to confer for a bit before they could tell him.
It's simply pathetic. There's no other word for it.
Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, "Are you in charge of finding WMD?" Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause. "Who?" Bush asked.The article goes on to note that Bush has now put George Tenet, the head of the CIA, in command of the WMD hunt. Tenet has hired former UN inspector David Kay to run the search. This could get interesting if the government tried to blame the CIA for the entire debacle by claiming they provided bad or weak intelligence. Since Tenet runs the CIA, if the CIA is made a scapegoat for the missing WMD, the next question that should be asked is why, if he - via the CIA - was unable to get the pre-war information right, would anyone want to trust him with the post-war search?
UPDATE: As Kevin Drum noted over at Calpundit, part of what's so appauling here is not that Bush didn't know the specific name of the person who was in charge of the WMD search - its that he didn't know whether the person was working as part of the civilian authority, under Bremer, or the military authority, under General Franks. As Kevin said: "Doesn't this make it pretty obvious that the WMD hunt is a bit less than a high priority for him?"
If you haven't yet read Josh Marshall's piece about the difficulty Obeidi (this Iraqi scientist who had nuclear plans and centrifuge components buried under a rosebush in his back yard) had in getting anyone to listen to him, you really should. It's astounding.
It turns out that Obeidi was trying to give up the goods almost from the moment US troops stormed into Baghdad. But our operation was so poorly run that we ended up making the guy into some sort of friggin' nuclear Diogenes, practically wandering the streets trying to find one competent person to turn himself in to.In the end, for Obeidi to be able to get anywhere in turning over this material, he had to go around to the international journalists ouside the Palestine Hotel, and approach them randomly until he was able to find someone who could contat David Albright, a UN inspector whom Obeidi had known when from when he'd been working in Iraq.
After several tries, Albright finally got someone at the CIA to listen to Obeidi, and arrangements were thought to have been made in regards to keeping him and his family safe, since he was still somewhat nervous about possible repercussions from his actions. I say they were thought to have been made because apparently they weren't made well enough. After turning the material over to the CIA, the Army showed up at his house and arrested him. Eventually he got things straightened out and he was released.
Then things got even weirder.
After Obeidi got out of Army slammer, the CIA started hedging on its promises to get him out of the country. Or at least that's what Obeidi thought.CNN checked out the story with the CIA, who asked CNN to hold off for a few days while they got Obeidi and his family out of the country."First they have promised that they will make all the attempts to safeguard me ... and then what happened they told me that they have looked and they have investigated this matter, and they have discovered that there is more that I can offer, and they are ready to take the news to the media."
At this point, Obeidi apparently started to freak and asked Albright what he should do. Abright told him to go to the media. And this, it would seem, is how CNN got pulled in -- as Obeidi's insurance policy that our folks over in Iraq didn't completely screw-up the situation or end up FedExing him and his nuclear parts to Osama bin Laden off in the wilds of Central Asia.
If you want to read the CNN story about this whole mess, it's available here.
Welcome to the latest politician to jump on the "Weapons of Mass Destruction? Oh, no, they were never that big of a deal..." bandwagon - Senator Dr. Bill Frist!
The Republican leader in the Senate said that Iraq (news - web sites)'s weapons of mass destruction was not the main justification for the US-led invasion of Iraq.For a choice selection of his comments made during the lead-up to the war, in which is proclaims strongly and frequently that Saddams WMD are such a threat that we must go after him now, check out Billmon, who has put together another of his wonderful quote compendiums from someone trying to duck as their own words come back to bite them in the bum."I'm not sure that's the major reason we went to war," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told NBC television's Today Show.
And Monster Limo notes that the same article quotes Frist's most ...unique... explaination as to why we can't find the WMD's everyone knew Saddam had.
Frist added that he was not surprised that weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq.Um, Bill? I think they usually try to keep those viruii and chemicals in some kind of container? Those might be a little easier to locate."The weapons of mass destruction that we're talking about today are new. They're little viruses, they're bacteria, they're chemicals, things you can't see, you can't touch, you can't smell. So intelligence is tough," he said.
"The administration made decisions based on the very best intelligence that we have available today," Frist insisted.
President Bush is now claiming that the reason we not yet found Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction is that they may have been looted.
In his weekly radio address Saturday, Bush defended initial administration claims about the existence of the weapons but did not promise they will be found, as he had on other occasions until recently. The president said documents and suspected weapons sites were looted and burned "in the regime's final days."If it turns out that this is he case, and if those weapons are being sold on the black market (which is a good probability - most people don't have a lot of use for WMDs themselves and know they'd fetch a good price from someone who wants them), then President Bush needs to be prepared to accept responsiblity for any deaths, injuries, sicknesses or other destruction done if and when those weapons are used.
Many conservatives will try to argue that it's Saddam's fault - that if he didn't have forbidden weapons in the first place, there would be no risk from them, and there is truth to that. Saddam, however, had neither used those weapons against the US, nor has any evidence supporting the contention that he was likely to sell them to other enemies of America been found. As such, the risk to the US from those weapons was much lower than it would be now, if, in fact, the WMD exist and have been looted. The only reason the weapons were able to be looted was because President Bush insisted on attacking Iraq in a pre-emptive war.
The irony, of course, is likely to be lost on many of the war's supporters. If President Bush is right and the weapons have been looted, his action in starting the war has just made the sale of those weapons to al Qaeda (or another of our enemies) much greater, and their use against us more likely - resulting in exactly the opposite outcome than what he intended in starting this war.
That, by itself, should be enough for reasonable people to see that under no circumstances should Bush be given a second term as President.
That may sound like a silly question, but as I noted a few days ago, there seems to be something rather strange going on in the search for Iraq's WMD.
Prior to the war, we were slow to give information to the UN inspectors on where we believed weapons might be, and when we did finally give it to them, none of the information we provided led them to find anything. [That right there should have told the Bush administration that there was either a problem with their apparent policy of only paying attention to intelligence that supported their pre-conceived notion that there were WMD to be found OR that there was something wrong with the intelligence being gathered by the CIA and friends.]
After stalling for months, the United States finally shared some of its intelligence with UNMOVIC. But, according to UNMOVIC officials, none of the intelligence it received yielded any incriminating discoveries.Since the war has ended, things haven't been much better. We failed to secure many of the sites where we suspected WMD might have been hidden, and we allowed seven nuclear facilities to be looted by not securing them in any way. The administration has said that the military teams sent in to find Iraq's WMD have run out of places to look (this, in spite of arguments from the administration that our failure to find WMD so far doesn't mean there aren't any - and that because Iraq is such a big country, it may take a long time to find where the WMD are hidden), and that Pentagon intelligence experts will be coming in.
This last bit is interesting in light of two recent revelations. The first is what had prompted me to write the other day - it turns out that there is a plant in Baghdad that created and produced all of the missiles, rockets and warheads Saddam had or was interested in. While the site has been looted, the director-general of the plant says that there are still documents on all of these systems available for us to look at. These documents would detail any kind of weapon delivery system or warhead Saddam had, and is information the United Nations inspectors very much wanted to see. Yet when a reporter asked one of our missile experts about the site and the documents, he'd never heard of it, and there are apparently no plans at all to visit the site or check out the documents.
The other revelation is that Tony Blair - who is facing serious questions about the fact that no WMD have been found yet and the nature of the intelligence that the pre-war claims were based on - has been trying desparately to get the US to offer some of the higher-level Iraqi officials we've taken into custody some kind of leniency so that they will be more willing to reveal what information they might have about Saddam's weapons program - and so far, we're refusing to make any kind of a plea-bargain with any of them.
I honestly don't know what the deal is, but the more I think about all of this, the more apparent it is that the Bush administration either does not want to find whatever WMD Saddam may have had, or, at the very least, doesn't want it to be proven that Saddam didn't have any.
Think about that.
So, what's the deal here? Anyone have any ideas?
In a story today on how the Republicans are basically dismissing questions on the missing WMD, Newt Gingrich equates questioning whether we were lied to or not to supporting Saddam Hussein.
"The literary class that dislikes Bush and dislikes American activism is thrilled, whether in Europe or in the U.S., to have this question to raise," he said. "But in the United States at least, given the mass graves, given the level of torture and brutality by the Baath Party regime, you're asking the American people to side with the apologists for replacing Saddam. Does even the most left-wing Democrat want to defend the proposition that the world would be better off with Saddam in power?"Well, of course not, but that isn't the issue here at all.
Even though I think that Iraq is better off with Saddam out of power, that doesn't mean I think that it was ok for the government to have misled us (if, in fact, that's what happened, as I suspect it is) into going to war. I could be completely gung-ho about the war, 100% behind the invasion and thing that it was the niftiest thing we've done in decades and still want to know if I was lied to about the reasons we went to war in the first place. I simply don't believe that the government should be able to get away with lying to the public in regards to our reasons for going to war.
The Republicans and other conservatives have been very successful in getting many Democrats and liberals to back off from some of these questions by trying to imply that questioning George Bush is the same as supporting Saddam Hussein. We can't let them continue to succeed with that rhetorical trick. The two can easily be mutually exclusive. It is quite possible to oppose both Saddam and Bush without it creating any crisis of conscience or moral paradox. Bush must be held accountable if he lied - EVEN IF you believe that the war as a whole was right, necessary and/or justified.
What the Republicans are really saying, in effect, is that if Bush did lie to the public, it was something he had to do as it was the only way to get people to support his war, which was, of course, the only way get rid of Saddam. Ergo, being against Bush lying means you're in favour of leaving Saddam in place.
Isn't that just a bit insulting? The Republicans don't think that we - or the rest of the world - are smart enough to recognize when a war is necessary if we're given the real reasons behind it. They think we have to be scared into submission. Why on earth should I trust a government that so clearly won't trust me?
They're also saying that the President should be able to lie - without any kind of consequences - on matters of the utmost importance, if he feels its the only way for him to get what he wants. Do we really want to set this as a prescedent? Give our leaders carte blance to lie to us "for our own good" whever they want? How will we ever know what to trust or believe again? How will the rest of the world know whether they can trust what we tell them the next time we ask for help? They could lie to us about anything, claim it was necessary if they're caught, and have an expectation that nothing will happen to them as a result.
If the public can't trust the government to provide us with even the most basic truth about what we, as a nation, are doing and why; and if the government is going to refust to trust the public with knowing what's going on in our country, the divide between the governors and the governed will grow ever wider, and our ability to function as a democracy will flounder.
Knowledge of what our government is doing and why is fundamental to being able to choose our leaders - how else do we know who to vote for? Lies, manipulation, distortion and dishonesty are not things we can afford to tolerate amonst our leaders. We need to remind them of that, and hold them accountable if they did use dishonest means of getting us into this war - regardless of whether we support the war or not. This isn't about whether Saddam should have stayed in power or not. It's about the integrity of the United States government, and the crediblity it has with the American citizens and with the rest of the world.
If you were trying to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons that were banned by the US - and knew that he would need to have missles and rockets capable of carrying and deploying the biological, chemical and/or nuclear weapons you've repeatedly sworn you know he has, wouldn't you want to get a look at all of the documentation about every aspect of his missile programs? I know I would, but apparently, the Bush administration doesn't think it's terribly important.
The al-Fatah company, located in Baghdad, is the place where all of Saddam Hussein's rockets were designed, and according to the guy who runs the place, there's a lot of documentation available - including many documents the UN Inspectors wanted to see before the war - but not only has no one from the US weapons search teams come by, yet, there aren't any plans to check the place out, either.
Among the few things left behind, though, are what U.N. inspectors long believed existed but never obtained: design plans and test results for every missile system and warhead the Iraqis developed.If Bush is now going to claim that evidence of a WMD program is the same thing as finding WMDs, I would think he'd want us to get our hands on those documents, which should verify if Saddam had any missles or warheads capable of delivering chemical, nuclear or biological weapons to a target. I'd also think he'd want us to be able to see if the documents provided any evidence of missles that would exceed the limits established by the UN following the first Gulf War, or which otherwise violate any of the restrictions placed on him.Plans for rocket engines, guidance systems and even missile warheads are strewn across the dusty office floors and swirl in the parking lot outside. Some have been blown into nearby bushes. "They're scattered everywhere," al-Chalabi said, marveling at the mess.
American missile experts who have accompanied U.S. weapons teams in Iraq expressed astonishment this week when told that the design plans and engineers behind the Iraqi Scuds and other missile projects were available.
The experts, who couldn't be identified for security reasons, said the al-Fatah company wasn't on any target list they had seen.
U.N. inspectors were always suspicious of Iraq's aims in the missile field, so much so that they visited al-Fatah — located among large homes in Baghdad's Amariyah neighborhood — four times during the 3 1/2 months they were in Iraq before the war.In a way, I find myself wondering if the Bush administration doesn't want to look at these papers, because then they might have to admit that there's nothing there that would support their claims about Saddam's capabilities. As bad as it looks right now having to admit they can't find anything and don't know where it is - being able to say that they have no idea what happened to all of the stuff they "knew" Saddam had leaves open the possiblity that the weapons have been moved elsewhere, or transferred to the leaders of another country - such as Syria or Iran. If, however, they had to acknowledge that they had evidence showing that the Saddam's capability was less than what they claimed, it would actually be worse for them. The uncertainty - and the ability it gives them to "wonder" about who might have the weapons now - lets them keep their trump card, the one thing they were able to use to justify the Iraq war, and which they may think they could use again (if anyone is willing to believe them a 2nd time).The facility also was inspected in the 1990s, and the visits paid off. Buchanan said U.N. inspectors repeatedly caught the Iraqis violating sanctions over the years when it came to rocket development.
"There were several projects which the Iraqis did ultimately disclose in the 90s, which had been aimed at producing missiles with ranges up to 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles). Iraq always said those were only paper plans, but we had our doubts," Buchanan told The Associated Press.
Whatever plans the Iraqis did have could be found today scattered inside — and outside — the al-Fatah offices.
This same thinking might also explain why they didn't secure the suspected WMD sites immediatelly after taking control of Iraq, why they allowed the various nuclear sites to be looted and why they don't seem to be showing any signs of embarassment or shame at all the questions they are now facing. It would also explain the apparent contradiction between their need to rush into war - something so necessary that we couldn't give the UN inspections more time to work - and their claims now that Iraq is a large country and they need more time to try and find the weapons. It could even help eplain why they don't want any help from the UN inspectors, IAEA or anyone else.
The idea that the Bush administration may know that there aren't any WMD to be found and are now doing whatever they can to keep anyone else from being able to prove it (in order to maintain the "uncertainty" principle and milk it to their advantage) is something I don't want to think is true. It sounds far too 'conspiracy-theory'-ish to me, and I too 'out there' - but it does seem to be at least one possible explaination as to why the Bush administration is acting the way they are. The only other explaination I can come up with is sheer incompetence - which is a pretty strong contender, really. Does anyone else have any ideas to explain all of this? I'd seriously be interested in hearing them.
Remember "Airplane", "The Naked Gun" and "Hot Shots"? Well, if you're a connisiour of fine Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker products, and are as frustrated as the rest of us about the difficulty in finding WMD in Iraq, you need to give Billmon a visit over at his Whiskey Bar.
Here's a small taste:
Cut from black. We appear to be perched on the roof of a Humvee, speeding through the streets of Baghdad. A police siren whirls and blares on the roof in front of us. The Humvee drives up on the sidewalk to avoid an Abrams tank; Iraqis dive out of the way. It ploughs through a fruit stall and a newspaper stand, turns up the steps and through the courtyard of a mosque, roars down a narrow alley, tears through a group of Iraqi women, sending black chadors flying left and right, turns into the main corridor of a hospital, drives through an operating room, smashing the patient and the doctors to pulp, exits through the back door of the hospital, takes out a few more Iraqi pedestrians, then smashes head on into a livestock market, coming to a stop in a pile of dead and dying camels.And now I'm off to get some aspirin - my sides are hurting from laughing so much!Fade soundtrack
The driver emerges from the Humvee -- Lt. Frank Drebbin, LAPD. He's in plain clothes -- his usual cheap brown suit and white shirt, with collar unbuttoned and tie loosened. Drebbin stands for a second by his Humvee, looking at the camel carnage. He is immediately surrounded by a mob of angry, shouting camel drivers. Drebbin nods and smiles. Then, realizing something is amiss, he pulls a wad of Saddam-era banknotes out of his coat pocket and begins to throw them at the crowd. As a squad of U.S. MPs comes running, rifles at ready, Drebbin saunters away. Behind him, we hear warning shots being fired.
Drebbin (voice over): It was hotter than Hollywood on Gay Pride Day, and as smelly as Shaq's armpits in double overtime. But this wasn't LA. It was Baghdad -- a sweltering slum of a city filled with brutal thugs, corrupt bureaucrats and sleazy quick-buck artists. And the Iraqis were a nasty bunch, too. Like an POW in a British prison camp, I was gonna have to stay on my guard.
Drebbin walks down the street -- oblivious to everything around him. He passes an armored personnel carrier, just as a terrorist runs up and throws a grenade in it. The APC explodes a split second after Drebbin walks by. He passes a sentry post, just as a terrorist grabs an MP from behind and slits his throat. Drebbin doesn't notice. He walks between two groups of Iraqi bandits shooting it out with pistols, and doesn't notice, even as several of the bandits fall dead at his feet.
Drebbin: (voice over) It was a Saturday, and I should've been sitting in Dodger Stadium, watching the game and enjoying a tall one -- maybe drinking a beer, too. But I was on special assignment. My mission: To find Saddam's missing weapons of mass destruction, before they found America. Another story from the files of (pause): WMD Squad!
In sharp contrast to Condoleeza Rice's statement that "We did not know at the time -- maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency -- but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery," Knight-Ridder newspapers are reporting that a senior CIA official has stated that the White House was made aware of the concerns - several months prior to the information being used in the State of the Union address.
A senior CIA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the intelligence agency informed the White House on March 9, 2002 - 10 months before Bush's nationally televised speech - that an agency source who had traveled to Niger couldn't confirm European intelligence reports that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the West African country.Despite the CIA's misgivings, Bush said in his State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa."
Three senior administration officials said Vice President Dick Cheney and some officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the president and others should include the allegation in their case against Saddam.
The claim later turned out to be based on crude forgeries that an African diplomat had sold to Italian intelligence officials.
The revelation of the CIA warning is the strongest evidence to date that pro-war administration officials manipulated, exaggerated or ignored intelligence information in their eagerness to make the case for invading Iraq.
An article in today's Observer says that, according to a British scientist who has actually examined the trailers found in Iraq, the trailers were not intended to be used to produce biological weapons, nor could they have been.
An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.[...] a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.'
Gene Healy, writing for Fox News, explains why whether or not we find WMD in Iraq, the larger issue is that it is now obvious that Saddam was never the immediate threat the administration claimed he was.
The focus on missing weapons threatens to obscure the larger point: that with or without chemical and biological weapons, Iraq was never a national security threat to the United States.It had never occured to me before that the administration's concerns about Saddam giving al Qeada WMD could be defused by looking at his history with supporting terrorist acts in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, but Healy makes an excellent point here. If Saddam was likely to supply terrorists with WMD, wouldn't he have supplied them to Palestinian terrorists by now? His support for them was well-known - something that simply cannot be said about his feelings towards Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda in general.The proposition that Saddam Hussein (search) was willing to hand over weapons of mass destruction to terrorists appears to have been based on sheer speculation, and implausible speculation at that. Despite over 20 years of supporting terror against Israel, Saddam never turned over chemical or biological weapons to Palestinian terror groups (search), reasoning, correctly, that such action would provoke massive retaliation. Still less was he likely to hand over such weapons to Al Qaeda, a group that has long opposed his "socialist infidel" rule and could not be trusted to keep the deal secret.
Moreover, Al Qaeda's behavior suggests that they never expected Saddam to give them chemical or biological weapons. Computer hard drives and paper documents seized in the March 1 capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a top-level Al Qaeda operative, reveal that the terror group had extensive plans to produce chemical and biological agents on its own.
UPDATE: Discovered I hadn't included a link to the entire article - oops! I've now added that. Sorry!
Well, after spending about 60 hours in no- or bad- connection hell, a dear friend of my ours has not only fixed our home network (we needed a router, not a hub), but has also got my computer connecting to the Internet again - and normal speed! If you can't see me jumping up and down with joy, don't worry... you can rest assured, I am.
At any rate, it's time to get back to some of the blogging. Representative Henry Waxman - who has a history of making excellent points in open letters - has written yet another, to Condoleeza Rice, asking why President Bush used forged evidence in presenting his case for war with Iraq.
He specifically addresses Rice's claims on the Sunday talk shows last weekend that the US had evidence other than the forged letter that it was relying on in making the claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to get uranium from Africa.
In addition to denying that senior officials were aware that the President was citing forged evidence, you also claimed (1) "there were also other sources that said that there were, the Iraqis were seeking yellowcake - uranium oxide - from Africa" and (2) "there were other attempts to get yellowcake from Africa."He concludes with several very specific questions regarding both the evidence and Rice's comments about the entire situation.This answer does not explain the President's statement in the State of the Union address. In his State of the Union address, the President referred specifically to the evidence from the British. He stated: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Presumably, the President would use the best available evidence in his State of the Union address to Congress and the nation. It would make no sense for him to cite forged evidence obtained from the British if, in fact, the United States had other reliable evidence that he could have cited.
Moreover, contrary to your assertion, there does not appear to be any other specific and credible evidence that Iraq sought to obtain uranium from an African country. The Administration has not provided any such evidence to me or my staff despite our repeated requests. To the contrary, the State Department wrote me that the "other source" of this claim was another Western European ally. But as the State Department acknowledged in its letter, "the second Western European government had based its assessment on the evidence already available to the U.S. that was subsequently discredited."
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also found no other evidence indicating that Iraq sought to obtain uranium from Niger. The evidence in U.S. possession that Iraq had sought to obtain uranium from Niger was transmitted to the IAEA. After reviewing all the evidence provided by the United States, the IAEA reported: "we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq." Ultimately, the IAEA concluded: "these specific allegations are unfounded."
He's done a very good job, though, with presenting the issues, and what he sees as the possible explainations for our inability to find the WMDs we were assured Iraq had.
The only quibble I have with his analysis is that he makes use of the two quotes from Paul Wolfowitz that have been shows as being taken out-of-context. By the time he gets to those, however, he's already made a good case to support his thoughts, and the Wolfowitz quotes are more of an "icing on the cake" than anything that holds up a fundamental part of his analysis. It's also important to note that he doesn't draw any firm concusions. He carefully leaves open the possiblity that we will find the WMD or the statements made by the administration will be borne out.
One section in particular, though, I found to be very interesting. It's where he discusses the ultimate ramifications if, in fact, we were misled into this war:
To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."Given the way the Bush administration stuck by many of their claims, even after they'd been shown to be inaccurate (such as using the forged documents purporting to show that Saddam Hussein tried to obtain nuclear materials from Niger even after being told by intelligence officers that they were unreliable, or repeatedly pointing to Saddams purchase of aluminium tubes as evidence of trying to restart a nuclear program even after they were told that the tubes were not suitable for that purpose), I think it might be possible for charges of that nature to be brought, and that there's a good liklihood that they'd stick. I can't say for sure since I'm no legal expert, but the longer this goes on, the better that chance gets. Admittedly, impeaching Bush would put us at risk of having Dick Cheney as President, which I simply cannot see as being a good thing, but it would sure make it harder for anyone associated with this administration to get elected in 2004, which, in my opinion, would be very good indeed.It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.
The evidence sometimes cited to support Saddam’s nuclear program was shaky, however. On the morning after Bush’s State of the Union address in January, Greg Thielmann, who had recently resigned from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)—whose duties included tracking Iraq’s WMD program—read the text in the newspaper. Bush had cited British intelligence reports that Saddam was trying to purchase “significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”Thielmann was floored. “When I saw that, it really blew me away,” Thielmann told NEWSWEEK. Thielmann knew about the source of the allegation. The CIA had come up with some documents purporting to show Saddam had attempted to buy up to 500 tons of uranium oxide from the African country of Niger. INR had concluded that the purchases were implausible—and made that point clear to Powell’s office. As Thielmann read that the president had relied on these documents to report to the nation, he thought, “Not that stupid piece of garbage. My thought was, how did that get into the speech?” It later turned out that the documents were a forgery, and a crude one at that, peddled to the Italians by an entrepreneurial African diplomat. The Niger minister of Foreign Affairs whose name was on the letterhead had been out of office for more than 10 years. The most cursory checks would have exposed the fraud.
The strongest evidence that Saddam was building a nuke was the fact that he was secretly importing aluminum tubes that could be used to help make enriched uranium. At least it seemed that way. In early September, just before Bush was scheduled to speak to the United Nations about the Iraqi threat, the story was leaked to Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of The New York Times, which put it on page one. That same Sunday (Sept. 8), Cheney and national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice went on the talk shows to confirm the story.
At the CIA, Tenet seems to have latched on to the tubes as a kind of smoking gun. He brought one of the tubes to a closed Senate hearing that same month. But from the beginning, other intelligence experts in the government had their doubts. After canvassing experts at the nation’s nuclear labs, the Department of Energy concluded that the tubes were the wrong specification to be used in a centrifuge, the equipment used to enrich uranium. The State Department’s INR concluded that the tubes were meant to be used for a multiple-rocket-launching system. (And Saddam was not secretly buying them; the purchase order was posted on the Internet.) In two reports to Powell, INR concluded there was no reliable evidence that Iraq had restarted a nuclear program at all. “These were not weaselly worded,” said Thielmann. “They were as definitive as these things go.” These dissents were duly recorded in a classified intelligence estimate. But they were largely dropped from the declassified version made available to the public. U.N. inspectors say they have found solid proof that Iraq bought the tubes to build small rockets, not nukes.]
In an Associated Press article published at CBSnews (among other places, I'm sure) on March 17th, 2003, there's a little noticed, but now potentially relevant tidbit:
Iraq also handed over videotapes of mobile biological weapons laboratories to inspectors. Iraq says the videos show the laboratories do not violate U.N. resolutions.I think it would be good at this point if whomever is currently in posession of those tapes could 1) confirm they exist, 2) confirm if they are the same mobile labs that Bush is now heralding as "proof" of a WMD program and 3) confirm if they did or did not violate UN resolutions.
If it turns out that they are the same mobile labs that we were given evidence of prior to the start of the war - and that they weren't considered violations of the UN resolutions at that point, then that would pretty much discredit Bush's more recent claims about them. Still, until more can be found out about these tapes and what's on them, it's impossible to say for sure on way or the other.
I know that we often joke in the blogosphere about how Republicans try to blame everything on Clinton, but apparently, Tom DeLay is seriously doing just that.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, said Bush had ample grounds to oust Saddam, beyond the alleged weapons program, and blamed any misinformation on "the devastation" of U.S. intelligence capabilities under former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.Of course, the story doesn't tell us if DeLay counseled the administration from trusting intelligence gathered by the "devestated" intelligence capabilities Clinton left behind.
Spinsanity, a site that I've found is great for helping with clarifying the many distortions we're faced with, both from politicians and from the media covering them, has an entry about Bush's recent declaration that "We found the weapons of mass destruction."
In remarks to Polish television released on Friday, though, President Bush stated that the U.S. has found much more than these labs. "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories," he said, according to an Associated Press article. "''They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, we found them."These mobile labs appear to be equipped in such a way that it's possible have been used to produce biological agents, but, as noted earlier, there are still many questions surrounding them and how feasible it would have been to use them for producing biological weapons. Among other issues, there was no trace of biological contamination found in either trailer, some experts question if it would have been possible for the trailers to maintain the kind of temperatures needed to grow biological agents, and there would have needed to be one, if not more, additional trailers that would have carried other equipment necessary to finish the process of making any biological agents useful as weapons.However, as the Washington Post piece states, "U.S. authorities have to date made no claim of a confirmed finding of an actual nuclear, biological or chemical weapon." The existence of the labs is an important but separate issue. In the midst of a debate about whether the U.S. government misled the public and other governments over its reasons for invading Iraq, the President is now making a patently false claim about evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
Until it can be conclusively shown that these trailers were used for the production of biological agents, for anyone - especially the President - to claim that we have actually found weapons of mass destruction or biological laboratories is reckless at best. We have found laboratories that might be useable in biological weapons manufacturing. Maybe it could be said that we have found laboratories that were likely used in biological weapons manufacturing. But to say that we flat out have found WMD or biological laboratories is misleading at best.
Atrios makes an excellent point about the administration and the search for WMDs.
The only evidence we need to know that the administration is simply in CYA mode is the fact they don't seem very concerned about the "missing" WMD. If they really believed they existed, the hunt for them wouldn't be motivated by a desire to justify the war, it would be motivated by the very legitimate desire to make sure the deadly weapons were not in the hands of evil-doers.This is something that's been nagging at me quite a bit from the time we started "finding" WMDs that always turned out to be something different.
There are many things the administration is doing that indicate they're not terribly worried about finding the WMD very quickly. These include their speculation that maybe Saddam just destroyed them all before we got to him and their shifting focus to try and say that the war was justified because we've found equipment that might indicate that they possibly had a WMD program, rather than WMDs themselves. Other signals are their refusal to allow the UN inspection teams to help with trying to locate the weapons, their lack of concern about the looting - in particular the 7 nuclear plants that have been looted - their pulling the main inspection team out of Iraq ahead of schedule (though it will be replaced with a different team), and the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam's regime, they failed to assign any troops to guard the sites they thought were most likely to have hidden WMDs.
One thing I find particularly disturbing is that prior to the start of the war, when Hans Blix and his team were still trying to do inspections in Iraq while Saddam was in power, a story came out that the inspectors were finding the intelligence given to them by the US to be "garbage". Questions have been being raised lately about whether the failure to find any WMDs is due to the government intentionally misleading the public about the existance of WMDs in order to raise support for the war, or if it'd because the information gathered by our intelligence committee was flawed, and the government simply acted in good faith on bad data. Given the comments by the UN inspectors and the difficulty they had finding anything using the information we were giving them, it sounds as though we had reason back then - prior to any attacks - to question whether the intelligence we were getting was sound or not.
Combine that with the way the administration has been acting since the "end" of the war and their nonchalance about securing potential WMD sites, et. al., and there starts to be something of an admittedly circumstantial case to substantiate the charge that they did intentionally mislead us about Saddam having WMDs and what kind of threat they posed. It's not proof, but I think its something that needs to be looked into in greater depth - and, more importantly, something that needs to be kept in mind if the administration tries to make the intelligence commitee the fall guy for this debacle.
That seems to be the current attitude of the Bush administration. If they can't show us any weapons, then maybe we'll back down if they can show that Iraq had a weapons program. Many conservatives will say that there's little difference between having weapons and having a weapons program, but the reality is that the difference is significant. Weapons can be fired and used to attack other countries. A weapons program cannot. It's the difference between an immenent danger and a potential danger down the road a bit.
Part of the reason for this shift in focus is that this past week, we managed to find two trailers that are set up as mobile chemical labs. Bush is claiming that these two trailers are proof that Iraq had a biological or chemical weapons program, and bases his claim on a CIA report on the trailers that was released last week. There are just a few problems with this.
The report also notes that, in order to produce biological weapons, each trailer would have to be accompanied by a second and possibly a third trailer, specially designed to grow, process, sterilize, and dry the bacteria. Such trailers would "have equipment such as mixing tanks, centrifuges, and spray dryers"—none of which were spotted in the trailers that were found. The problem, the CIA acknowledges, is that "we have not yet found" these post-production trailers. Question: Is it that they haven't been found—or that they don't exist?
Another question is raised by the following passage in the May 29 New York Times story about the CIA report: "And the mobile factories were poorly designed. For instance, one official noted, Iraqi biologists running the plants would have had a hard time getting raw materials into the production gear and removing multiplied colonies of deadly germs." One wonders: How hard is "a hard time"? If a worker couldn't get raw materials in or the deadly germs out, then what kind of bio-production plant was this? Was it "poorly designed" or designed for some other purpose?
Granted, these trailers do appear to be equipment that was banned by the UN resolutions, but at this point, after all the assurances that Iraq did, indeed, have significant weapons of mass destruction (specifically, enough to make 38,000 liters of botulinium toxin, 25,000 liters of anthrax and 500 tons of sarin, mustard gas and VX nerve agent) and, as a result, posed such an immenent threat to the US that we just had to go to war immediately, we deserve to be shown a great deal more than two trailers that may - or may not - have been used for bioweapons production as proof that the government wasn't lying to us just so they could get the war they so desparately wanted.
Excerpt from an editorial by Mark Bowden, author of Blackhawk Down
[...] Truth in public life has always been a slippery commodity. We expect campaigning politicians or debating journalists to pitch and spin. Facts are marshaled to support arguments and causes; convenient ones are trumpeted and inconvenient ones played down or ignored. This is the political game.But when the President of the United States addresses the nation and the world, I expect the spinning to stop. He represents not just a party or a cause, but the American people. When President Bush argued that Hussein possessed stockpiles of illicit and deadly poisons, he was presumably doing so on the basis of intelligence briefings and evidence that the public could not see. He was asking us to trust him, to trust his office, to trust that he was acting legitimately in our self-defense. That's something very different from engaging in a bold policy of attempting to remake the Middle East, or undertaking a humanitarian mission to end oppression. Neither of these two justifications would have been likely to garner widespread public support. But national defense? That's an argument the President can always win.
[...] It suggests a strain of zealotry in this White House that regards the question of war as just another political debate. It isn't. More than 100 fine Americans were killed in this conflict, dozens of British soldiers, and many thousands of Iraqis. Nobody gets killed or maimed in Capitol Hill maneuvers over spending plans, or battles over federal court appointments. War is a special case. It is the most serious step a nation can take, and it deserves the highest measure of seriousness and integrity.
When a president lies or exaggerates in making an argument for war, when he spins the facts to sell his case, he betrays his public trust, and he diminishes the credibility of his office and our country. We are at war. What we lost in this may yet end up being far more important than what we gained.
Billmon has a beautiful collection of quotes from administration and military officials, starting with
Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.andDick Cheney
August 26, 2002
Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.throughGeorge W. Bush
September 12, 2002
They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer.andDonald Rumsfeld
May 27, 2003
For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.It's interesting to watch the story evolve over time...Paul Wolfowitz
May 28, 2003
UPDATE: Also, be sure to read the comments for Billmon's post - there are a few additional choice quotes in there as well.
Also, be sure to pass this link on - this needs to get spread as widely as possible, I think, as it carries a lot of weight all on its own. Billmon has indicated that he is going to try and go back in tonight and post the sources for each statement to help makes this list an even more valuable record.
There are many in the "normal" media and the blogosphere who are claiming that it doesn't really matter if we find weapons of mass destruction or not - usually followed by an explaination that the reason it doesn't matter is that even if there aren't any WMDs, we did Iraq - and the world in general - a favour by getting rid of Saddam Hussein. While I agree that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a very good thing to have happen, I don't think it's an acceptable substitute for knowing whether our government either lied or was working from stunningly inaccurate information.
The case for the war against Iraq was made based on the government's claim that Iraq had WMD. We presented this case to the world, and, by and large, they didn't buy it. We got up in front of the world, making grand pronouncements, acting like a bully and decrying those who wouldn't stand with us, all on the strength of our claim that Iraq had WMD. If none turn up, it's going to matter. Maybe not to the US media, maybe not to the pro-war crowd, maybe not even to Bus himself. But it's going to matter to the rest of the world - to the governments we may need to call on sometime when we face a true crisis, and have to ask for their help. They're going to remember that we lied - or were completely bamboozled by bad intelligence - about WMD in Iraq, and they're going to wonder about any other claims we make whose veracity are in doubt. They're going to wonder if we're telling the truth, or making it up to try and get them to go along with us this time.
As Molly Ivins put it:
Look, if there are no WMDs in Iraq, it means either our government lied us to us in order to get us into an unnecessary war, or the government itself was disastrously misinformed by an incompetent intelligence apparatus. In either case, it's a terribly serious situation.Why do you think people were so angry at Lyndon Johnson over the Gulf of Tonkin? At Richard Nixon over the "secret war" in Cambodia? Even at Bill Clinton over the less-cosmic matter of whether he had sex with "that woman." [...]
Nonexistent WMDs also present us with a huge international credibility problem, particularly since the Bush administration now feels entitled to "punish" those countries that did not join the "coalition of willing," as we so preciously called those who caved in to our threats to cut off foreign aid.
Come on, think about this. The Bush administration apparently feels entitled to take actions punishing close old friends, including Mexico and Canada -- not to mention the Europeans -- for not siding with us in a war we may have lied about? This is not going to sit well with the rest of the world.
Contrary to President Bush's assertion on May 1st that "We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated," the team of specialists who are there to search for illegal weapons of mass destruction are preparing to leave soon without having found any evidence yet of WMDs.
It's not that they've already searched all of the suspected sites. According to Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence "U.S. forces had surveyed only 70 of the roughly 600 potential weapons facilities on the "integrated master site list" prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies before the war."
This doesn't mean that we're abandoning the search entirely, but even those groups that will still be searching for weapons are being cut back.
The hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group, which the Bush administration has said is a larger team. But the organizers are drawing down their weapons staffs for lack of work, and adding expertise for other missions.Between the failure to find any WMDs, the looting of nuclear sites, and now the decision to send the main search group home, it's looking more and more like the Bush administration is unlikely to ever show evidence of Saddam's alleged "tons" of WMDs. As I noted with the nuclear looting, this actually could serve his purposes in the long run, by allowing him to claim that, since the weapons weren't in Iraq, they must be "somewhere", which, of course, can lead to a military fishing expedition through the Middle East.Interviews and documents describing the transition from Task Force 75 to the new group show that site survey teams, the advance scouts of the arms search, will reduce from six to two their complement of experts in missile technology and biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. A little-known nuclear special operations group from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, called the Direct Support Team, has already sent home a third of its original complement, and plans to cut the remaining team by half.
"We thought we would be much more gainfully employed, or intensively employed, than we were," said Navy Cmdr. David Beckett, who directs special nuclear programs for the team.
Sadly, it's unlikely that Bush's supporters will see this as a sign of the incompetence, shoddy (or "manipulated") intelligence, or lack of veracity that the Bush administration seems to specialize in.
Last week, I posted a link to a story about a Defense Department team's discovery that one of Iraqi's nuclear sites had been looted, and there was no idea what all might be missing. Today we learn that in addition to that site, six others have also been looted and it appears that heavy equipment, radiological sources, documentation on making nuclear weapons, chemicals and other materials and may information have vanished.
It is still not clear what has been lost in the sacking of Iraq's nuclear establishment. But it is well documented that looters roamed unrestrained among stores of chemical elements and scientific files that would speed development, in the wrong hands, of a nuclear or radiological bomb. Many of the files, and some of the containers that held radioactive sources, are missing.The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had earlier pressed the US to allow them to come in and handle the inspections of nuclear facilities, since that is what they are trained for, and under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and certain UN resolutions, they are the sole legal authority responsible to conduct such investigations, but they report that they never received a reply from us about doing so.Previous reports have described damage at two of the facilities, the Tuwaitha Yellowcake Storage Facility and the adjacent Baghdad Nuclear Research Center. Now, the identity of three more damaged sites has been learned: the Ash Shaykhili Nuclear Facility, the Baghdad New Nuclear Design Center and the Tahadi Nuclear Establishment.
The identities of two other sites, also said to have been looted, could not be learned.
Recent reports have indicated that the US believes the looting of the art museums was done by "professionals" who knew what they were looking for and most likely had buyers already lined up for it. I honestly don't know if that is the truth or just some spin we're trying to put on the situation to make us look less incompetent and negligent in our handling of the aftermath of the war, but at the moment, I'm almost hoping it's spin. If its not, then it seems to me that it's also more likely than not that the looting of the nuclear sites would also have been done by professionals, who would also have buyers at the ready. That is a bit more frightening than I like to contemplate. Even if the looters are not professionals, though, if we aren't sure what has been taken or by whom, we will have no way to effectively track down the materials or know if or when any of it has been recovered.
Sadly, this may, in a way, turn out to be a boon for the Bush administration, which seems to thrive on having potential boogeymen who potentially have dangerous weaponry. As long as there can be a case made that we could be attacked at any moment by evil madmen bent on the US's distruction and armed with the ability to cause significant damage, they can continue to insist on silencing dissent to their aggressive foreign policy, justify the reduction in our civil liberties, and threaten or actually wage wars in pursuit of their apparent imperial agenda. The administration feeds on the fear of the citizenry, and seven looted nuclear sites very well may buy them enough fear to stretch the "War on Terror™" all the way through the 2004 election.
According to Nicholas Kristof, in a NYT editorial today, the Bush administration knew, well before they presented them as "evidence" of Iraq's attempts at rebuilding a nuclear weapons program that the documents indicating that Iraq tried to buy nuclear materials from Niger were forged.
I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.Unsuprisingly, that isn't the only misleading intelligence that the administration knowingly used. Kristof also reports:The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted - except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.
"It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.
Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraq's W.M.D., "they were encouraged to think it over again."Surprised? Neither am I. The level of disdain that this administration shows for the truth has been demonstrated time and again, and I have no doubt that we've not seen the last of it."In this administration, the pressure to get product `right' is coming out of O.S.D. [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]," Mr. Lang said. He added that intelligence experts had cautioned that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S. troops and that the Shiite clergy could be a problem. "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome," he said.
"The intelligence that our officials was given regarding W.M.D. was either defective or manipulated," Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted. Another senator is even more blunt and, sadly, exactly right: "Intelligence was manipulated."
The C.I.A. was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan's policies. Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom.
UPDATE: Joe Conason also comments on Kristof's column, including this well-made point:
Did Bush know that the Niger story was a fraud? The choices for the White House here aren't very attractive: Either their administration was too incompetent to detect the fake, or the president lied about the gravest issues confronted by the nation. It is hard to imagine a more serious accusation than to say that the president of the United States knowingly used fraudulent evidence to foment a preemptive war.
Seymour Hersch of the New Yorker also has an article that discusses some of the other questions about the intelligence the US relied on for justifying the war, and how it was obtained.
Tristero has a nice overview of all the articles.
Iraqi Nuclear Site Is Found Looted (washingtonpost.com)A specially trained Defense Department team, dispatched after a month of official indecision to survey a major Iraqi radioactive waste repository, today found the site heavily looted and said it was impossible to tell whether nuclear materials were missing.
From Bush's proclaimation last night:
"No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more."The regime may be no more, but as has been noted in quite a few reports lately, we've not done a great job of securing the sites where we thought Iraq might have been hiding WMDs and it's quite possible that if there were any WMDs there (and I'm still not convinced that there were), pretty much anyone who knew where they were could have gotten them and given them to whomever they want.
But who, really, expects Bush to say anything except that which he thinks will justify his position, make himself look good, or cover up the sheer imcompetence of his administration?
The Sidney Morning Herald has an interesting article on the latest "excuses" for the difficulty in finding Iraq's Weapons of Mass Distruction.
There are a couple of paragraphs that make for an interesting comparison:
When Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, suggested Iraq's WMD program could be more fragmented and degraded, he was pilloried as naive or incompetent. When his inspectors talked of a more complex search for WMD, where components or precursors could be in the form of legal, dual-use chemical or biological agents that had to be monitored, they were dismissed as flatfooted and overcautious.and
According to Dr Rice, the weapons programs are "in bits and pieces" rather than assembled weapons. "You may find assembly lines, you may find pieces hidden here and there," she said. Ingredients or precursors, many non-lethal by themselves, could be embedded in dual-use facilities.Hmmmmm.... The article notes that Rice's current description is closer to what Blix had said initially than she would care to admit, but personally, I have a very hard time telling any difference between the two.She had a new explanation too for Iraq's ability to launch these weapons that were not assembled. "Just-in-time assembly" and "just-in-time" inventory, as she put it.
With everything now in shambles, I suspect it will be much harder to prove which dual-use chemicals, plants or componants were possibly being converted into chemical and biological weapons (if, of course, there were any to start with), than it would have been to try and monitor their use and catch Iraq in the act. Not that either option would be exactly easy - mind you - "easier" is a relative term, but with everything shut down and the general chaos that is taking over Iraq, knowing what anything was being used for is going to be rather tricky.
Link via Tom Tomorrow
CalPundit has an excellent observation about the WMD false alarms, and why the Pentagon keeps releasing the "preliminary" information before the test results are confirmed:
...[T]hese reports aren't aimed at journalists or news junkies like blog readers. Rather, they are designed to build up a vague impression among casual news consumers that we've been finding WMD all over the place. Say it often enough, and everyone starts to get foggy about which reports panned out and which didn't - or even whether any of them did. Most people are simply left with the idea that we have lots of busy teams spread out all over Iraq and they keep finding stuff.Sadly, I think its working.
A couple days ago, I posted a entry titled "Will they or won't they" about the latest suspected chemical weapons "discovery" in Iraq. As has been the case each time, thus far, futher tests showed that the materials found aren't chemical weapons after all. ABC News.com has the scoop:
Chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons specialists from the Army's 5th Corps examined the unmarked barrels found near Bayji, about 130 miles north of Baghdad, and tentatively concluded that there were no chemical weapons there, the leader of the team told a New York Times reporter embedded with the team."Our tests showed no positive hits at all," Capt. Ryan Cutchin, the leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Bravo told the Times.
The suspect site also included missiles, warheads and vehicles that were suspected to be mobile laboratories for banned weapons, but Cutchin said the vehicles were "probably for decontamination or some kind of fuel filling, consistent with the rockets found at the site."
Using high-tech gear unavailable to experts from another Army squad, Mobile Exploration Team (MET) Bravo - whose preliminary tests over the weekend identified a nerve agent and a blister agent - tests came up negative.
The investigators searching for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have been frustrated by a lack of information and say they are understaffed and under-equipped.
ABC News is reporting that, once again, drums filled with suspicious chemicals have been found in Iraq. Preliminary tests indicate they may contain nerve gas and a blister agent, but there'll be nothing definitive for at least a couple of days. One thing officials are noting is that this time, there are some missiles and warheads near where the chemicals were found, along with "partially looted vehicles ... with dosage charts inside."
One thing I did notice in the article, though is that everyone is trying to be very careful to stress that these findings are preliminary and, as has happened before, may turn out to be something else when all the tests are in.
RonK at Cogent Provocateur has a long, but very much "worth it" essay on the WMD question. I'm quoting a couple of substantial excerpts, but there's a lot more to the essay and I strongly recommend reading it. He not only looks at how and why we may have been misled about the existence of WMD in Iraq, but also the repercussions of our having done that on the world stage. As with any "warning" of what might be, its possible his case may be somewhat overstated, but I think there's more than enough validity in his ideas that they're worth at least thinking about.
On whether or not we were duped:
The joke is on us, but does it matter any more? We won, didn't we?Yes, we won ... and yes, it still matters, else high officialdom wouldn't be clinging gamely to the original premise. And the PR labs wouldn't be working overtime testing damage control solutions.
From August's "what's all this frenzy about a war?", to September's "you don't introduce new products in August", through November's election victory over an opposition "soft" on Saddam, through the winter games of spinning Blix on ice, through Powell's PowerPoint prestidigitation in February, to a no-time-to-vote forced March, we plied the crowd with predictable fare. We loosened them up with liberation cocktails. We circulated tray after tray of Saddam-as-Hitler appetizers. We dutifully jotted down orders for commercial or strategic side-dishes. But the main course was always a grand sterling-covered platter of sizzling Snipe a la Bush.
No WMD, no War Powers Resolution. No WMD, no UN Res. 1441. No WMD, no Coalition of the Willing. No WMD, no Azores ultimatum. Everything hinged on Iraq's possession of WMD, and her intransigent refusal to give them up. Scratch the surface of any auxiliary casus belli, and chances are you'll find a circular argument: "Saddam is evil and dangerous. How do we know? Because he has WMDs. How can we be so sure he has WMDs? Because he's evil and dangerous."
and on some of the recent possible explainations as to why we've not yet been able to find any evidence of Iraq's WMD:
So we haven't found any WMD. There are plenty of reasonable explanations ... depending how warm the audience is. Try one of these on for size:Saddam had WMDs, which were incinerated in coalition attacks. Funny, that's what Saddam said last time ... at least in part ... and we didn't buy it then. Probably true, in part ... but too convenient, on the whole.There are a couple of late entrants in the reinvention derby. Most prominent is a report by NYT's Judith Miller, embedded with MET Alpha. In this version, an informant reveals that Saddam ordered all WMD destroyed just days before the war. So ...We found WMD, but it's so secret we can't reveal it. Not credible ... not even if there's a Carlyle Group logo on every item.
WMD are hidden so well nobody has found them yet ... the "vault thesis". Incompatible with the standard thesis, and equally devastating to US intel reputation ... but faintly plausible. The goods could be consolidated in a relatively small volume. The technicians and forklift operators -- like Pharoah's pyramid architects -- could have been buried along with the goods. Saddam had the only key, and he's not talking. There are no seed cultures. (They'd require power supplies for controlled environments, and rotation of growth media.) There's no fissile material. (Gamma survey would find it despite shielding, and it there'd be a big, dirty production site somewhere ... US hasn't even figured out how to decontaminate its own WW II extraction facilities.)
Saddam slipped the goods across the border into Syria months ago. Unlikely from a number of perspectives, but plausible. Promoted by Israeli intel, which has its own agenda. Incompatible with the main corpus of prewar "solid intelligence", and suffers from most of the "vault thesis" plot spoilers.
Saddam brought a superpower down on his head rather than surrender these WMDs? Then he destroyed the same precious WMDs rather than use them against the superpower? As in the vault thesis, he does this without leaving major production-residue signatures. And ...Only a prize-winning, best-selling subject-matter specialist could get a piece like this printed in the Podunk Herald. Miller is a journalistic rock star -- deservedly so -- but she's stuck in the desert, holding the bag, waiting for the snipe, while a goddamn real biological terror -- SARS -- bounces around the globe. In short, this report walks like a fish, quacks like a fish, and smells like a fish.US intel was comprehensively wrong on every detail ... but coincidentally correct on the central premise ... but almost all of that evidence no longer exists. And ...
The story -- pre-cleared with the military -- reaches us through a chain of biased sources: a surprise witness (who tells us everything we want to hear, complete with an al Qaeda connection), one or more military intelligence operatives, and an embedded reporter who hasn't met the informant or seen any evidence, and who laid her reputational neck on the line with the WMD hawks a long way back.
On yesterday's Nightline, Ted Koppel spotted what may be a more promising explanatory trial balloon -- "all's fair in love and war". By this thesis, we were never serious about WMD. WMD was never anything more than a necessary selling tool for war. War was necessary and salutary as an "object lesson" to lesser beings, reminding them (for their own good) that the US is big and tough. Why now? "9/11 changed everything". Why Iraq? No special reason ... Iraq presented itself as an adversary of convenience. Koppel gathered unabashed supporting testimony from B-list neocon hawks, including former CIA Director Woolsey.
As the Bush administration is now having to backpedal a bit and admit they may not be able to find any WMD, it's important for it to be clear just how certain he, and his coalition partner Tony Blair, were that those weapons were there and were an immediate danger. The Times Online (UK) has published an article reviewing some of the recent "excuses" that Geoff Hoon, the British Defense Secretary has offered as to why Saddam didn't make use of his WMD during the war and why we're having such difficulty locating evidence of any. It also contains a nice selection of quotes from various officials, made prior to the war, about just how certain they were that Iraq had these weapons.
“If we know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction — and we do — does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him?” “It (Iraq regime) possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons . . . we know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, and VX gas” -- George Bush, October 7, 2002“We are dealing with a very real threat today, that of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction” -- Geoff Hoon, March 10, 2003
“His (Saddam Hussein’s) regime has large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and he has an active programme to acquire and develop nuclear weapons” -- Donald Rumsfeld, January 20, 2003
“Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.
“In fact, they (Iraqi regime) can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people. “Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry: 550 artillery shells with mustard, 30,000 empty munitions, and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents. If we consider just one category of missing weaponry, 6,500 bombs from the Iran-Iraq war. . . Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tonnes of chemical-weapons agent. Even the low end of 100 tonnes of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan” -- Colin Powell, address to the UN Security Council, February 5, 2003
“It is right (going to war) because weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, are a real threat to the security of the world and this country” -- Tony Blair, House of Commons, January 15, 2003
“What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme.
His (Saddam Hussein’s) military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” -- Tony Blair, Foreword to Iraq “dossier”
Now that the administration has had to admit that we may not be able to find the WMD they were so sure Saddam had, they're floating yet another justifcation for the war: Showing the world how tough america is, and that democracy is the best hope for the future.
So, if WMD weren't the primary reason for the war, why did we make such a fuss about them?
"We were not lying," said one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."I don't know about anyone else, but when someone feels they need to tell me that they're not lying, it usually makes me less likely to believe that they aren't, but that's just me.
This latest attempt at justifying the war is premised on the idea that 9/11 "changed everything" and that the United States needed to make an object lesson of someone in order to show nations, particularly in the Middle East, that it's not a good idea to mess with us. We also wanted to send the message that democracy is good.
Senior officials decided that unless action was taken, the Middle East would continue to be a breeding ground for terrorists. Officials feared that young Arabs, angry about their lives and without hope, would always looking for someone to hate — and that someone would always be Israel and the United States.Of course, that message about democracy is getting a bit muddled at the moment. As was recently reported, the US has been caught off guard by how much the Shi'ite majority in Iraq wants it's own government - and how strong of a force they are to be reckoned with. The problem, of course, is that if the Shi'ites are able to establish the kind of government they want, it will be a fundamentalist theocracy - pretty much the last thing we want to see there. So now we end up in the position of telling Iraq "Sure, you can have democracy - just don't pick a form of government we don't like". It kind of defeats the purpose of it, doesn't it?Europeans thought the solution was to get a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But American officials felt a Middle East peace agreement would only be part of the solution.
The Bush administration felt that a new start was needed in the Middle East and that Iraq was the place to show that it is democracy — not terrorism — that offers hope.
One of the biggest complaints anti-war advocates had before the war was that the justification kept shifting - Saddam had WMD, Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda, Saddam might give WMD to al-Qaeda, Saddam treated his people badly, and so on - whatever they administration thought would win it the most support on any given day. Now, even though the war is over, they're still changing their justifications.
In a speech at an Abrams tank facility in Lima, OH, today, President Bush admitted that Iraq may have destroyed it's chemical weapons before the war.
"He tried to fool the United Nations, and did for 12 years, by hiding those weapons," Bush said. "And so it's going to take some time to find them. But we know he had them. And whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we're going to find out the truth."The way he says that, though, makes it sound like there would be no difference as to whether they were destroyed, moved or hid, when, in fact, there would be a huge difference - if the weapons were destroyed, then we had no reason for beginning the war.
I had commented briefly on this in a previous article, but I think its an important enough point to bring it up again. The number one reason for the invasion was to disarm Saddam of these weapons of mass destruction that we insisted that he must have. Saddam, of course, kept insisting he didn't have any, but we said he was lying.
Now, however, even President Bush is admitting that it is possible that he destroyed all of his weapons sometime prior to the war, or else he moved or hid them. Now, if he moved or hid them, and we can prove it, that would go a long way to backing Bush's rationale for the war in the first place. If, however, Saddam had destroyed them - which is what we had been demanding that he do - then there was no need to start the war. Saddam would have been complying with our requirements for avoiding an invasion.
Here's the thing, though, if Saddam had destroyed the weapons, why didn't he tell us that he destroyed them? I would think that he'd want to, so that we wouldn't invade. That would be the only logical reason for him to have destroyed them - forestalling the invasion. Otherwise, why get rid of your best weapons with an unfriendly army knocking at your door?
I suspect that Bush is using the "he destroyed them" possiblity as a way of avoiding admitting that maybe Saddam just didn't have any. For Bush, he believes it would be less embarassing for Saddam to have inexplicably destroyed his weapons right before an invasion designed to get those very weapons away from him, than to admit that they (the Bush administration) were either wrong, and Saddam didn't have them in the first place, or that they were lying about them.
Yesterday, it was reported that not only are officials in the Bush administration losing faith in the intelligence they had indicating where WMDs could be found, but that their lack of pre-planning for the need to secure potential WMD sites may well make it easier for any biological or chemical weapons Iraq may have had to fall into the hands of terrorist organizations and others. Today we learn that they weren't prepared for the Iraqi Shi'ite majority to want to run their own government after Saddam was removed from power, and may be unable to prevent them from taking over and creating a fundamentalist Islamic government, such as is found in Iran.
As the administration plotted to overthrow Hussein's government, U.S. officials said this week, it failed to fully appreciate the force of Shiite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government. Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy. Others were more focused on the overriding goal of defeating Hussein and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region.It turns out that, while many in the administration believe Chalabi to be a Shi'ite leader, he's not nearly as popular in Iraq as they had thought he would be, and the main Iraqi Shi'ite organisation, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) not only has close ties to the fundamentalist regime in Iran, but also has shown little interest in working with the US, as demonstrated by their boycott of the first meeting of US officials and Iraqi political and religious leaders, held recently, to discuss the future of Iraq."It is a complex equation, and the U.S. government is ill-equipped to figure out how this is going to shake out," a State Department official said. "I don't think anyone took a step backward and asked, 'What are we looking for?' The focus was on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."
Who, exactly, runs a war with this little planning for the aftermath? We have seen that a great number of the assumptions about what would happen after the war would be wrong. While the reaction to our presence hasn't been as poor as some of us on the anti-war side had feared, it's certainly not nearly as warm as many on the pro-war side anticipated. We weren't prepared for the looting and chaos, and, as a result, have not only made it easier for our enemies to get a hold of any WMDs (if, in fact there are any, something we still do not know), but we've let their hospitals be cleaned out of all their equipment and medicines, were unable to stop people from stealing samples of highly dangerous, if not lethal, strains of cholera, black fever, HIV, polio, and hepatitis from Iraqi's disease control center, and managed to lose countless treasures and artifacts from the museums and libraries that were ravaged. We obviously didn't have any idea of who or what we would establish as an interim government during the messy transition, or how we were going to go about helping the Iraqis form their own government to run their newly freed nation. At times it seems like the only thing we were prepared to do was protect Iraq's oil reserves.
The level of incompetence in planning and executing this war is not, in the least, mitigated by the fact that we "won" it so quickly. That we would win at least the military engagement part of the war was never in question. It would have taken even greater incompetence than I think (or at least hope) Bush is capable of to lose it. But despite the military victory, its hard to find much else that could be considered "well done".
Sadly, the result of all this incompetence is what we're going to have to live with for quite some time to come.
The Bush administration seems to be finally acknowledging that maybe the intelligence they had prior to the war may not have been nearly as good as they thought it was. The Washington Post and MSNBC are reporting that "planners and those participating in the hunt" worried that information and materials related to WMD may have been stolen during the looting and chaos that has been plaguing Iraq since Saddam's regime fell.
It seems to me that this is just more evidence that the Bush administration simply did not plan at all well (or maybe they just didn't plan at all) for what to do after the main fighting of the war had been completed and the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq began. While they managed to have a company of Marines available to secure the Ministry of Oil, there has been a great deal of condemnation for the many other things that we seem to have been able to secure. Sadly, while the loss of the national treasues of the Iraqi museums and libraries is cultural tragedy, the lack of security for the sites the administration believed were locations where WMD may have been being manufactured or stored could end up being catastrophic.
[I]f such weapons or the means of making them have indeed been removed from the centralized control of former Iraqi officials, high-ranking U.S. officials acknowledged, then the war may prove to aggravate the proliferation threat that President Bush said he fought to forestall.It is absolutely ridiculous that the Bush administration did not have better plans for securing the sites they believed were likely to hold key evidence for the WMDs they claim Iraq has. Apparently, it has only been in the last few days that they have been moving to get the sites they have not yet checked secured, though it may already be too late there, as well.“It’s a danger,” Douglas J. Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said in a telephone interview. There are signs, he said, “that some of the looting is actually strategic.” Former Baath Party and Iraqi government officials appear to be “doing at least some of the looting” of government facilities, he said, “including those that might have records or materials” relating to weapons of mass destruction.” [Emphasis mine]
The article also mentions the report from yesterday that the administration has spoken to an unnamed scientist who supposedly has led officials to samples of chemicals that might have been able to be used in creating chemical weapons, but experts caution that almost any chemical that can be used in creating chemical weapons will also have legitimate civilian uses. Even Donald Rumsfeld was hesitant to make any claims based on this reported find, saying only that he had "nothing to add" to the vague reports that have been released about it.
In other news regarding the search for WMDs, Hans Blix has accused the US of having tried to discredit the UN inspector's work in order to futher their justificaion for the war, such as leaking information that Blix had not included in oral reports given to the UN (for example, when he didn't mention the "drone" that Iraq had - and which turned out to be little more than a remote control "model" airplane made of balsa wood). He also noted once again his concern that the US and UK had taken seriously documents the International Atomic Energy Agency has "easily" determined were false, and said that the question of just who falisfied the documents was "disturbing".
Though the US has said that they do not seen any "immediate role" for a return of the UN inspectors, many on the council feel "independent UN verification that the weapons have been destroyed would help to win international support for the swift lifting of economic sanctions against Iraq."
In my opinion, if we're having such difficulty finding any evidence of the WMDs and are concerned that whatever evidence may remain could possibly be stolen or, worse, sold or given to other enemies of ours, it would be logical to begin working with the UN again on weapons inspections, and allow them to assist us in the search.
This is not a situation in which we should be worried about petty disagreement or "saving face". We should be worrying that, if, in fact, there are WMDs in Iraq - as the Bush administration has assured us there are - they need to be found and identified.
I'm sorry, but this doesn't even come close to passing the sniff test. According to the New York Times, the US has found a scientist - who cannot be identified out of fear that he may be sujected to reprisals (from whom?) - who claims that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons up until just a few days before the war, when he destroyed them.
This scientist also claims that he has kept some of the materials used to make these banned weapons, and has supposedly turned these over to the US. As for the rest of the illegal weapons, well, they're in Syria now. Wouldn't you just know it.
Oh! I almost forgot to metion that this scientist also says that, until recently, Saddam was working with al-Qaeda.
Isn't it just great how it all fits together so perfectly? Everyone expected Saddam to use his biological and chemical weapons against our troops, but he didn't. Neither the UN weapons inspectors nor our soldiers have been able to find any chemical or biological weapons. Well, says this scientist, that's because Saddam got rid of the right before you all showed up! Bush seems to be angling for an excuse to attack Syria next. Well, says this scientist, Saddam gave Syria some of those weapons, so they've got them now! Bush claimed that Saddam and al-Qaeda were working together, but hasn't been able to provide any proof. Well, says this scientist, I happen to know that they were!
But wait! There's more!
The Americans said the scientist told them that President Saddam Hussein's government had destroyed some stockpiles of deadly agents as early as the mid-1990's, transferred others to Syria, and had recently focused its efforts instead on research and development projects that are virtually impervious to detection by international inspectors, and even American forces on the ground combing through Iraq's giant weapons plants.Wasn't that just a stroke of brilliance on Saddam's part? To be able to work on developing things we wouldn't be able to find - even after he's out of power and we pretty much have free access to anywhere we want?
See, aside from this all just being too damn neat and tidy, part of what bothers me is that it just doesn't make sense. Iraq is not known to be a super high-tech country. For them to be working on developing things "impervious" to our ability to detect them seems more than a bit far-fetched. Even worse, why would Saddam want to get rid of what would have to be some of his most effective weapons right before he knows he's going to be invaded? He obviously didn't intend to go down without a fight - and yet he's supposed to have given away or destroyed his most lethal arsenal right before we show up. I honestly can't imagine that he'd be that bent on trying to prove Bush wrong - especially since he knows that if he is killed or overthrown in the war, we're going to have the kind of access necessary to find out if he the stuff anyway.
The Bush administration is going to have to do a lot better than one unnamed scientist who may be able to show them where some components that could possibly be used to make chemical weapons are located, and who has some pretty wild claims, to convince me of much of anything. They've shown on far too many occasions that they're far too willing to stretch the truth - or just make it up wholesale - for me to take anything on "faith". It's a bit of the old "boy who cried wolf" syndrome - tell enough lies, and eventually those who are paying attention won't believe much of anything you have to say.
UPDATE: Hesiod at Counterspin Central has an interesting point on this story as well. There are apparently some in the media and right-wing circles who are trying to use this guy's story as proof that Bush was justified in invading Iraq. Hesiod notes, however, that what this story says is that Saddam was destroying these weapons, which is exactly what we not only wanted him to do, but what we told him he'd have to do in order to avoid being invaded.
Reading through the many blogs I check every day, I've seen, time and time again, conservatives who say that if Saddam really had destroyed the WMD's that we know we sold him, why didn't he offer any poof or documentation of it. I've often wondered what this proof might have looked like -- is there a "international weapons destruction plant" that issues receipts for the destruction of weapons? Or was he supposed to have photographs of the destroyed weapons? What, exactly, would constitute proof?
Recently, though, another question occured to me. How, exactly, do we know he didn't provide some kind of proof, and that it was among the 8,000 pages of the 12,000 page report Iraq made to the UN, that the US removed before allowing anyone else in the world to look at it? I have to say, I have so little faith in our government that it's quite conceivable to me that they could have done precisely that, though, of course, I can't say for sure how likely it is.
A report in the Sunday Herald from Scotland (posted to CommonDreams.org) notes that Kofi Annan seemed to regret having allowed the US to edit the only original copy of the dossier, and that other nations had complained about being denied the ablity to see the full file. The US, however, claimed that it needed to remove the pages because they were "'risky' in terms of security on weapons proliferation"
It is important to note that the five permanent memebers of the Security Council - which include the US, UK, France, Russia and China - were allowed to see the entire dossier, but none have given any indication of what may or may not have been included in the information provided. France, Russia and China, however, were never in favour of this war - even though they had seen the full dossier - which means that whatever was in that report didn't convince them Iraq was a threat or in material breach of resolution 1441, and may have helped convince them that it wasn't an immediate enough threat that war was justified at that time. I have to admit that I'm not sure exactly why they would stay silent if there had been evidence that Iraq had destroyed any weapons they might have had, but we also don't know what we said we would do if they allowed any of this supposedly "risky" information to be made public. (And how "risky" can it be if we will let China see it, given that they're one of the few countries left that might have the military might to at least challenge us, and we're always so worried about them getting a hold of our military secrets?)
So, at this point, I don't know how likely it is that information on the destruction of the weapons might have been in the dossier, but it is a possiblity, and the missing pages do leave a number of unanswered questions.
From ABC News.com:
Dangerous strains of cholera, black fever, HIV, polio, and hepatitis may have been lost during the post-war looting of Iraq's key disease control facility, ABCNEWS has learned. The U.S. military is worried they may be used as weapons.
In an exclusive report on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America, Brian Ross revealed that scientists at Baghdad's central public health laboratory are worried that an unknown number of viruses have been stolen.
They say looters took refrigerators full of the deadly viruses Friday, but they're not sure what's actually missing. "They are in containers, all of these things taken together, cholera, AIDS and black fever," one unidentified Iraqi woman told Ross.
From MSNBC:
April 8 — Conclusive testing is still pending, but the latest tests indicate that barrels found in central Iraq do not contain chemical weapons agents, as first suspected, U.S. military sources said on Tuesday. Another suspicious find was also being investigated, while a third report dealing with rockets was discounted by a top general.
“I’ve seen nothing in official reports that would corroborate that,” Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal told reporters at the Pentagon. He was referring to news reports Monday that Marines had found rockets, possibly packed with sarin and a mustard agent, at a warehouse outside Baghdad.
From Reuters:
NEAR KERBALA, Iraq (Reuters) - New U.S. tests indicate that substances found at sites in central Iraq are not chemical weapons agents as first suspected, U.S. military sources said on Tuesday.
"The latest tests turned out negative," one source said.
U.S. military officers said on Monday that initial tests on substances found near the central Iraqi town of Hindiya suggested the presence of nerve agents sarin and tabun and the blister agent lewisite.
The military sources said it was not yet clear what the substances were. One officer had said on Monday that they might turn out to be simple pesticides.
I haven't yet found any additional information on the alleged Scud missles with potential chemical weapons payloads that were said to have been found and pointed at Isreal. If I come across more information on that, I'll be sure to post it. It's interesting, though, that so little has been said about it. I'm wondering if there actually was such a find, or, if as seems to happen often in wartime, stories got spread and grew a bit in the telling?
If you hear anything, please post it in comments - I'm very curious to find out more about this.
April 7 — U.S. experts are investigating three independent reports that American troops have found Iraqi chemical weapons, including some 20 rockets armed with warheads containing deadly sarin and mustard gas that were apparently ready to fire. [MSNBC]
This is a story to watch. So far, each time there's been an announcement that we've found chemical weapons, there's ended up being a catch - yesterday's find turned out to be pesticides, a find a day or two before that were conventional explosives, and the toxic agents found in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers appear to have come from a training camp in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq where Saddam has many enemies and no power.
I know many won't agree with this - as is their right - but even if this find is genuine, though, it isn't going to change my thoughts on the war much. I still believe that, had the inspectors been given adequate time and support, they would have been able to find anything the military may come up with - and that the same result could have been achieved without all of the deaths and destruction the war brings.
Earlier this evening, there were reports that troops in Iraq had found evidence of Sarin nerve gas, but, yet again, it turns out that wasn't exactly the case. Further tests showed it to be pesticides.
From MSNBC [under "Other Developments"]: Coalition forces were briefly on alert Sunday for a suspected chemical-weapon attack, after U.S. soldiers evacuated an Iraqi military compound, after tests by a mobile laboratory of a substance in an oil drum showed evidence of sarin nerve gas. More than a dozen soldiers of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division had been sent earlier for chemical weapons decontamination after they exhibited symptoms of possible exposure to nerve agents. But U.S. military officials said later that what was in the drum was actually pesticide. NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski reported that a later test confirmed that the contents were not sarin.
The BBC has another story about possible toxins being found - this time in southern Iraq. It'll be interesting to find out what the white powder actually is...
US troops say they have found thousands of boxes of unidentified white powder and some nerve agent antidote at an industrial site south-west of Baghdad.
They also said they discovered documents in Arabic, which apparently explain how to carry out chemical warfare.
A special team has been sent to investigate the discovery at Latifiya - part of a large military complex frequently visited frequently by UN weapons inspectors before the war began.
US troops have also reportedly found a second site nearby containing vials of unidentified liquid and white powder.
Update from The Command Post:
MSNBC says their embedded reporter, Michael Bloom, reports that there appears to be no evidence of chemical weapons in the cache of supplies at Latifiyah, reported in various places and posted here and here at TCP at 7:11 and 6:53 eastern. Bloom says "only traditional weapons" are evident.
Positive test for terror toxins in Iraq
EXCLUSIVE
By Preston Mendenhall
MSNBC
SARGAT, Iraq, April 4 — MSNBC.com tests reveal evidence of the deadly toxins ricin and botulinum at a laboratory in a remote mountain region of northern Iraq allegedly used as a terrorist training camp by Islamic militants with ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is conducting its own tests at the same area, but has not yet released the results, according to officials in northern Iraq.
MSNBC.COM’S TESTS were conducted over a two-day period at Sargat, an alleged terrorist training camp a mile from the Iraq-Iran border. The camp, set back in an isolated valley and surrounded by snowcapped peaks, was home to the radical Islamic militant group Ansar al-Islam, which counts among its some 700 followers scores of al-Qaida fighters.
In a Feb. 5 speech to the U.N. Security Council, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell showed a satellite photo of the Sargat camp and described Ansar al-Islam as “teaching its operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons.” U.S. officials have repeated the allegations in recent weeks.
First of all, I love the headline. "Terror Toxins"? No - no hype there.
At any rate, this story is going to be getting very wide coverage, especially among the pro-war factions, because many will take it as confirmation that Saddam Hussein has had biological and chemical weapons all along.
One thing that must be pointed out is that this camp is located in the northern part of Iraq, an area that Saddam has not had any control over for quite some time. The questions of whether Saddam had any knowledge of what was being done at the camp and if he would have had any access to the toxins are crucial. If he did, then that will help the administration in supporting their stated reasons for the war. If not, then those opposed to the war need to be vigilant in pointing that out each time the subject is raised.
According to the Sacremento Bee, evidence of toxins at the camp was discovered yesterday:
On Tuesday in the village of Sargat, three small buildings that were not damaged by the U.S. airstrikes contained about 300 small bottles of acetone and several plastic, 25-liter containers of potassium cyanide as well as C-4 explosives. A foul odor around the buildings discouraged most reporters from entering, but a German television crew videotaped the labels of the chemicals.
This is the first time since the war started that U.S. officials have said they found indications of banned weapons in Iraq. However, the area, in the north, is not under the control of Saddam Hussein's forces.
Another important question to be answered is when the toxin production began. Canoe, a Canadian news service, reported back in February that when journalists investigated the camp following Powell's UN presentation found nothing to indicate that any poisons had been or were being developed there.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell called the camp in northern Iraq a terrorist poison and explosives training centre, a deadly link in a "sinister nexus" binding Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaida terrorist network.
But journalists who visited the site depicted in Powell's satellite photo found a half-built cinderblock compound filled with heavily armed Kurdish men, video equipment and children - but no obvious sign of chemical weapons-manufacturing. "You can search as you like," said Mohammad Hassan, a spokesman for the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Islam, which controls the camp and the surrounding village.
"There are no chemical weapons here."
Of course, this discovery will also bring questions about whether there is a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda to the forefront again, since it is believed that there are links between Ansar al-Islam and al-Qaeda.
During his appearance before the UN Security Council on Wednesday, Powell displayed a satellite photo of this camp, which was identified as: "Terrorist Poison and Explosive Factory, Khurmal."
Powell said the camp is run by al-Qaida fugitives from Afghanistan under the protection of Ansar al-Islam in the autonomous Kurdish area of Iraq in a region beyond Saddam's control.
But Powell maintained a senior member of Ansar al-Islam is a Saddam agent, implying a tenuous link between Baghdad and the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
I highly recommend reading all of the Canoe article, as it points out several other questions about the camp in general. Apparently, the northern Kurdish area is controlled by two groups, the Islamic Group of Kurdistan and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. They don't seem to like each other much. As a result, much of the information about northern Iraq seems to be rather confused and filled with conflicting allegations and responses.
There have also been questions raised about whether the leader of Ansar al-Islam actually has any ties to al-Qaeda. During his presentation, Powell identified Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as the link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, largely by alleging that Zarqawi was involved with Ansar al-Islam, and that Ansar al-Islam was working with Saddam Hussein. Ansar al-Islam, however, is known to be hostile to Saddam Hussein and his regime, and the leader of Ansar al-Islam disputed that he has worked with Zarqawi.
Powell also said that Zarqawi was linked to Ansar al-Islam, a rag-tag militant group in Northern Iraq that aims to create an Islamic system in an independent Kurdish state. Jordanian officials have also connected Zarqawi to Ansar al-Islam.
Despite two interviews with the FBI, Mullah Krekar, the leader of Ansar al-Islam, remains a free man in Norway. Krekar said in an interview yesterday that his group has never had any contact with Zarqawi.
"I never met Zarqawi," Krekar said by telephone from Oslo, where he has been granted refugee status. "I just read about him in Newsweek magazine. Powell made many mistakes in his speech. He said that our group is connected to Al Qaeda, but we are not."
Obviously, if the discovery of these toxins is confirmed, this will be a very important development and one that should be watched closely. But any claims that this somehow proves that Saddam Hussein has chemical or biological weapons or otherwise justifies our attack in Iraq must be very carefully evaluated and many questions will need to be answered before such a determination can be made.
According to the Guardian, the missile that killed more than 60 people at a Baghdad marketplace last week was an American Cruise missile. Interestingly, the proof came from a Guardian reader who took information reported in the news about the missile and was able to use the Internet to research where the missile was made.
A metal fragment found at the scene by British journalist Robert Fisk carried various markings, including "MFR 96214 09". This, our reader pointed out in an email, is a manufacturer's identification number known as a "cage code".
Cage codes can be looked up on the internet (www.gidm.dlis.dla.mil), and keying in the number 96214 traces the fragment back to a plant in McKinney, Texas, owned by the Raytheon Company.
The article also provides a different viewpoint on the checkpoint killing of 7 women and children by US soldiers, noting that the soldier in charge of the checkpoint blames his troops for the deaths as they did not follow orders to first fire a warning shot.
In a rather interesting, but diplomatically-boneheaded move, the US is now planning to bring in their own weapons inspectors to find the weapons of mass distruction that the UN inspectors never located. Brian Whitaker, the author of the article, comments: "The US appears unaware that such a project will have little credibility internationally..." For some reason, that doesn't surprise me in the least.
Many of the pro-war bloggers have been making a big deal about the reports early in the week of Iraq firing Scud missles, which they had claimed they not longer had. Today, they're also adding the reports that our soldiers have found a chemical weapons plant.
Shortly after the report of a possible weapons plant was made public, the Pentagon started backing off from the story a bit, and US Central Command noted that it was premature to call it a weapons plant or to say that we had found any forbidden weapons. Apparently, we have also since learned that none of the missles fired by Iraq were Scud missles.
The United States and Britain launched their war on Iraq (news - web sites) last week to oust President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) because they said he had stockpiles of banned chemical and biological weapons.
However, Washington and London say their forces have so far not found any evidence of chemical or biological weapons and none of the missiles fired by Iraq have been Scuds, despite initial reports to the contrary.
Scud missiles, along with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, are among the arms that Iraq was barred from possessing by U.N. resolutions after the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites). [Yahoo News - updated roughly an hour before I made this post]
From FIONA:
Now here's a delectable fantasy for you.
Yes, a very nice fantasy, indeed...
Courtesy of Mark at Fried Green al-Qaedas: "...teenie weenie model airplanes of mass destruction..."
Want some context? Check it out here
Iraq may have a new kind of rocket designed for chemical or biological attacks.
NEW YORK, March 10 — U.N. inspectors have uncovered a new variety of Iraqi rocket that was apparently configured to strew bomblets filled with chemical and biological agents, The New York Times reported Monday, citing U.S. officials.
The disclosure, if verified, could help bolster the U.S. case that Iraq remains in defiance of the U.N. order to disarm itself of weapons of mass destruction.
It'll be interesting to see if this report is verified, and what impact it has on the discussions and voting at the United Nations. I do have to admit that, since the source of the report is listed as "US officials", and since this information was apparently not included Hans Blix's most recent report to the UN Security Council, I tend to be a bit suspicious about the overall veracity of the report and the timing of its release. With no current information that I've been able to find, however, either for or against its authenticity, it's impossible to guess if it's valid or not.
NOTE: I have a lot of reference articles for this post, so rather than just providing links, I'm going to go ahead and copy the relevant paragraphs here so that you don't have to go clicking all over the web just to follow up on the points I'm trying to make. All links will go to the full articles. - k
After reading a round-up of today's stories about the North Korean nuclear situation, I am even more puzzled as to why we are focusing so much on Iraq. To the best of my knowledge, Saddam Hussein has not tried to take any of our soldiers hostage, threatened to attack us with nuclear weapons, or test fired any missles recently, yet North Korea has done all of these things (and they plan to test another missle within the next few days).
WASHINGTON, March 7 — The North Korean fighter jets that intercepted an unarmed American spy plane over the Sea of Japan last weekend were trying to force the aircraft to land in North Korea and seize its crew, a senior defense official said today.
One of the four North Korean MIG's came within 50 feet of the American plane, an Air Force RC-135S Cobra Ball aircraft, and the pilot made internationally recognized hand signals to the American flight crew to follow him, presumably back to his home base, the official said. [New York Times]
North Korea would launch a ballistic missile attack on the United States if Washington made a pre-emptive strike against the communist state's nuclear facility, the man described as Pyongyang's "unofficial spokesman" claimed yesterday.
Kim Myong-chol, who has links to the Stalinist regime, told reporters in Tokyo that a US strike on the nuclear facility at Yongbyon "means nuclear war".
"If American forces carry out a pre-emptive strike on the Yongbyon facility, North Korea will immediately target, carry the war to the US mainland," he said, adding that New York, Washington and Chicago would be "aflame".
A pre-emptive strike on Yongbyon is one of the strategic options in the crisis over North Korea's nuclear arms program. The US has deployed 24 long-range bombers to the Pacific base of Guam capable of launching such a strike. [Sydney Morning Herald]
WASHINGTON/SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea has declared a maritime exclusion zone in the Sea of Japan, signaling it might be planning a missile test in the next several days and again raising regional tensions, the Defense Department said on Friday.
The Pentagon said it was aware of a three-day exclusion warning for March 8-11 in virtually the same area off its coast where Pyongyang tested an anti-ship missile on Feb. 25. [ABC News]
I also find it interesting that Bush calls the North Korean situation a "regional issue", and is insisting on working with China, Russia, South Korea and other countries in the area to find a solution. We're willing to go to war with Iraq, even if we have to do it alone, but we're not willing to hold talks with North Korea unless other countries are involved. I'm not sure how, exactly, that makes sense.
President Bush said Thursday that multilateral dialogue was the best way to deal with the communist nation's nuclear development, which he called "a regional issue." Without mentioning Bush's comments, Pyongyang's daily Minju Joson on Saturday attacked the same proposal mentioned earlier by Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"Through 'multilateral talks' the U.S. seeks to internationalize the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, evade its responsibility for spawning it and make its solution more difficult," Minju Joson said in a commentary carried by Pyongyang's official news agency, KCNA. [Fox News]
Apparently, North Korea fully believes that they will be the next Iraq.
U.S. President George W. Bush said this week that if diplomatic efforts to find a solution to the crisis fail, then the "military option is our last choice."
The North's state-run news agency KCNA said Friday his comments were "an undisguised revelation of the U.S. intention to make a pre-emptive strike at the DPRK's nuclear facilities." DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea. [Canada.com]
Given our insistance that the military option in Iraq would also be a "last resort", while acting in such a way as to make it obvious we consider it to be our "only resort", and given Bush's national security strategy making pre-emptive strikes part of our military strategy, its no wonder that North Korea would make such a claim.
Since it was announced that North Korea had violated the 1994 agreement regarding nuclear weapons, they have become more and more aggressive in trying to get Washington's attention, and we have consistantly downplayed the threat that they pose. Sadly, the message that other nations may take away from this is that if we think they have nuclear weapons, they can expect to be threatened with invasion and war (and, most likely, will get it), but if we know they have nuclear weapons, we'll pretty much leave them alone. This does not do much to deter hostile regimes from trying to achieve nuclear capabilities.
I will say this, though: I am far more concerned about the potential for an attack on the US homeland from North Korea than I am from Iraq or even Iraqi-backed terrorists.
UPDATE: Even odder than our priorities is this bit of information from the Boston Globe:
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has not suspended or revoked the authority of Westinghouse Co. to transfer documents related to nuclear technology to North Korea, despite the fact that the Asian nation has admitted that it violated terms of a nonproliferation agreement it signed with Washington in 1994, US Department of Energy documents show.
So, we're worried about North Korea becoming a real menace as a nuclear power - but we're still letting one of our major corporations give them information on nuclear technology? Even if the information is focused more on nuclear energy than nuclear weapons, it doesn't seem wise to help them increase their knowledge of nuclear technology in general.
A participant in a mailing list I belong to posted today about North Korea's "warning" (read "threat") that they could attack pre-emptively, rather than waiting for the US to finish with Iraq. She, understandably, noted that she found the idea scary.
I have to say I find that idea frightning as well, but what I find almost scarier is the way the administration has handled the entire situation with North Korea and the news of their nuclear program.
The Bush administration was initially warned (in a hand-delivered report) that North Korea was rebuilding their nuclear program in November of 2001, but that, according to an official at Lawrence Livermore Labs [one of the nations two nuclear weapons laboratories) who gave the administration that initial warning], and an "informed member of Congress", no one paid any attention to it because of the 9/11 attacks. There was also information that Pakistan was helping North Korea by giving them plans that show how to enrich uranium. The National Intelligence Estimate, a report by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, confirmed these findings in June of 2002.
In addition, there are indications that Clinton's administration may have known that North Korea was doing research towards the goal of restarting their nuclear weapons program in violation of the 1994 agreement as early as 1998 or 1999. This information was also given to the Bush administration when they took over. Why Clinton didn't do anything about it, I can't say, but part of why Bush didn't do anything when he first became President is reported to be that he was more worried about missile attacks and wanted to push the "Star Wars" missile defense project.
According to an MSNBC article:
"In June 2002, the intelligence community produced a National Intelligence Estimate that "conclusively" confirmed the North had turned from research and development to actual purchases of materials to construct a gas centrifuge facility to enrich uranium, according to a senior intelligence official. The highly classified report was first disclosed by reporter Seymour M. Hersh in the Jan. 27 issue of the New Yorker magazine.
According to congressional sources, the document was not sent to the House or Senate intelligence committees, which were only briefed months after it was finished."
On top of all that, Congress was NOT told of the National Intelligence Estimate's confirmation that North Korea had begun purchasing materials for uranium enrichment, nor were they told that during an early October trip to North Korea, the Assistant Secretary of State had confronted North Korea about their having a secret uranium facility, and that they had CONFIRMED this to him. Now, this was during the time that Bush was trying to get Congress to pass a resolution allowing him to go to war against Iraq if he felt it was necessary. The news about what North Korea was doing was not given to Congress until AFTER they had passed the Iraq resolution. In fact, IIRC, it was announced that same evening. It's fairly common for news stories that the government doesn't want to get a lot of attention are released either on Friday nights, so that they won't hit the papers until Saturday (which is generally not a heavily read edition), or when there is already a big story in play, and they think that it will kind of get "lost" in the shuffle.
Our government has known for 4 or more years that North Korea was trying to break their agreement with us on nuclear weapons, and had known since June of 2002 that they had gone beyond research and was beginning to actually attempt to begin production. They knew as of early October that they had a facility available to make the kind of Uranium that is needed to make nuclear weapons.
But rather than letting Congress know how serious the situation was, Bush kept rattling his sabre on the idea that we need to go to war against Iraq to prevent them from gaining weapons of mass destruction - and deliberately withheld the North Korean information, apparently to prevent Congress from thinking that there might be a more serious concern than Iraq.
I'm not saying that there is no reason to be concerned about Iraq - there very well may be, though I'm not entirely convinced yet. But the way the North Korean situation has been handled is disgraceful, and the level of secrecy and manipulation involved is ridiculous. If anything, it makes it more obvious that there is something other than just the possibility of Iraq gaining WMDs going on with this - and, as with so many other things - serves as just one more reason I can't trust Bush.
Annals of National Security
The Cold Test
by Seymour M. Hersh
What the Administration knew about Pakistan and the North Korean nuclear program.
Issue of 2003-01-27
Posted 2003-01-20
Last June, four months before the current crisis over North Korea became public, the Central Intelligence Agency delivered a comprehensive analysis of North Korea's nuclear ambitions to President Bush and his top advisers. The document, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, was classified as Top Secret S.C.I. (for "sensitive compartmented information"), and its distribution within the government was tightly restricted. The C.I.A. report made the case that North Korea had been violating international law—and agreements with South Korea and the United States—by secretly obtaining the means to produce weapons-grade uranium.
The document's most politically sensitive information, however, was about Pakistan. Since 1997, the C.I.A. said, Pakistan had been sharing sophisticated technology, warhead-design information, and weapons-testing data with the Pyongyang regime. Pakistan, one of the Bush Administration's important allies in the war against terrorism, was helping North Korea build the bomb.
It was bad enough when I believed that the government had known about North Korea's nuclear ambitions 12 days before letting Congress or the public know about it. Now, we find, they not only knew about it 4 months before making the information public, but that they also have known that Pakistan, our supposed great ally, has been helping them along.
Think about what that means for a moment. We are planning to go to war against Iraq because they may be trying to develop nuclear, chemical and/or biological weapons, and because they may have connections to al-Qaeda, but so far there is no substansive proof of either contention. We do, however, have evidence that Pakistan has been helping North Korea - one of the "axis of evil" nations - with developing their own nuclear weapons. Rather than threatening war against an acknowledged enemy country, and rather than pressuring Pakistan to stop helping North Korea, however, we are trying for a diplomatic solution to the North Korean crisis and we're supporting the Pakistani government and continuing to work with them on the so-called "War Against Terror".
In what world does this make any sense?
Professor admits lying about plague vials
January 16, 2003
By Betsy Blaney
Associated Press
LUBBOCK, Texas -- A university professor at the center of a scare over missing plague bacteria told the FBI he lied when he said 30 vials of the deadly bacteria had disappeared because he had accidentally destroyed them, according to court documents.
Yesterday, the public was notified that several vials of the plague bacteria were "missing". As would be expected, this was viewed with great concern, especially in this new world where anthrax can be sent through the mail and the government is taking about innoculating people against smallpox - a disease that was eradicated from normal transmission routes decades ago.
Today, however, we learn that the vials were never "missing" at all. They had been accidentially destroyed - and the professor who had claimed that they were missing knew that they had been destroyed, because he was the one who had destroyed them. For some reason, he decided that it would be better to lie and say that they were missing than to admit he had destroyed them.
Since I tend to favour integrity in my professors, I find the idea that one would lie in this kind of a situation to be somewhat disturbing. What I find even more disturbing, however, is the following statement he made about the reaction to his lie:
In the note, Butler said he knew the bacteria had been destroyed and was not a threat to public health, and he didn't realize his story would trigger "such an extensive investigation."
Now, I know that often times, academic-types seem to be a bit "out of touch" with the rest of the world. Its where the stereotype of the "absent-minded professor" comes from. But to think that annoucing 30 vials of the plague were missing at a time when concern about potential bio-terrorism attacks has reached a peak is more than just a bit "out of touch". Its like a whole freaking disconnect with the outside world.
Nick Johnson's IRC-ized version of the Iraq and North Korea situation:
<Korea> WE HAVE NUKES. WE WILL BLOW STUFF UP.
<Bush> Now now.
<Iraq> Sure, send in your inspectors. Have a blast.
<Bush> They need to agree to allow inspectors full access.
<Iraq> Ok, fine.
<Bush> Iraq needs to disarm or we will destroy stuff!
<Korea> AHEM. WE HAVE TWO NUKES THAT WE WANT TO USE TO BLOW STUFF UP!!
<Bush> Gee, settle down, Korea.
<Iraq> So like... we dismantled that stuff.
<Inspector> We couldn't find any evidence.
<Bush> No! You're lying! And the proof is that there's no evidence!
<Iraq> Uhhh...
<Korea> WE HAVE BOMBS, DAMMIT!
<Bush> Say, we'll give you some food and energy and stuff if you'll
dismantle your nuclear program again.
<Bush> Iraq: WE ARE GOING TO BLOW YOUR SHIT UP!
I can't be the only one who finds this whole situation perplexing...
Nick can regularly be found at Morons.org - a great site for satire and pointed commentary on news and current events. Joe Bob says "Check it out"...
Please join me in signing an online petition asking President Bush to let the weapons inspections work, rather than rushing to war.
Inspections in Iraq have started. Most of us breathed a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, it's become clear that the ultra-hawks in the Bush administration -- Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle -- will not take yes for an answer. While the rest of the world thinks Iraq has backed down, these men are beginning a massive public relations blitz for war.
With the possibility of a peaceful resolution to this crisis at hand, we cannot allow a few men to push the world to war. Send a message to President Bush to let the inspections work at:
http://www.moveon.org/winwithoutwar/
MoveOn.org will compile our messages and present them to the administration, including Secretary of State Powell, and to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.
The good news is that the ultra-hawks face some serious opposition. Secretary of State Colin Powell and other members of the Bush Administration are willing to give diplomacy a chance, and the State Department's interpretation of the U.N. resolution is a lot more
reasonable than the White House's interpretation.
Unless wiser heads prevail, this is what we should expect:
This could all begin before Christmas -- another wonderful gift to the world from the Bush administration.
President Bush has agreed that war should be the very last resort. Let's hold him and his Administration to those words:
http://www.moveon.org/winwithoutwar/
Please join me and sign on today. We must support policy makers who will oppose these few extremists in the Bush White House who have been looking for an excuse for war from the very beginning.
Former weapons inspector says war with Iraq inevitable
Thu Nov 14, 2:45 PM ET
PASADENA, California - Former United Nations (news - web sites) weapons inspector Scott Ritter says the U.N. resolution on disarming Iraq of weapons of mass destruction makes war inevitable.
[...] The resolution adopted unanimously last Friday says "false statements or omissions in the declarations submitted by Iraq ... and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and cooperate fully in, the implementation of this resolution shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq's obligations and will be reported to the council for assessment."
One of the inherent problems in using something like weapons inspections to ensure that a country has no weapons of mass distruction is that it requires a certain amount of trust be given, not only to the country under inspection, but to the inspectors and the process itself. Even if Saddam Hussein and the weapons inspectors both say that every weapon has been found and destroyed, it is far too easy for the Bush administration to say that they do not believe that all the weapons have been found.
This problem comes about because of the problem of proving a negative. Its one thing to prove that you do have weapons - all you have to do is show them to whomever is asking and the question is settled. Proving that you don't have weapons, however, is an entirely different matter. You can throw open every door, window, cabinet, box and piece of storage furniture you have, and someone can still say "well, maybe he buried it in his back yard" or "maybe he's got it in a hidden cubby hole that we just can't see". Unless you tear the entire house apart brick by brick and dig up every inch of the yard, the possibility will always exist that it could still be "somewhere".
The resolution passed by the United Nations stipulates that omissions or lies by Saddam in regards to what weapons he has or where they are located is not sufficient in and of itself to justify a UN invasion. He also has to show an unwillingness to comply or failure to cooperate with the resolution in some way. If, however, we claim his is lying or otherwise obstructing the efforts of the investigators, linking other behaviour to those actions in such a way as to construe them as non-compliance or non-cooperation isn't going to be much of a stretch.
The US is very much gearing up for a war. The deadline for Suddam to make his weapons declaration is December 8th, and by around that time, there will be 4 US air carriers in the area. Troops are being readied at bases around the country to ship out, and all is set for their to be a war within the next few weeks. [As a side note, I have to say I find it interesting that in other times when we've contemplated military action, we have taken care to avoid attacking during Ramadhan, which is a holy month for Muslims, yet here we stand, preparing to start a war at the beginning of the Christmas season - a time that is supposed to be holy to many Western traditions - and a time in which we are supposed to be focusing on Peace.]
Given that, no matter what the inspectors find, we still have the ability to say that we don't believe everything has been disclosed or found, and given that we've retained the right to invade Iraq by ourselves, even if the UN disagrees with our doing so, it's pretty clear that we will find an excuse to do exactly as we please - and it's also clear that what pleases George Bush is invading Iraq.
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
| E-mail: |  |
AKA: | ThorsWitch |
 | INTP |
 | B7 d++ t+ k++ s+ u- f+ i++ o+ x- e l c- |
 |
    
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
| « ? ProChoice Is Not AntiLife # » | ||||||||||
| << | domain-ated | >> | ||||||||||
| << ? domain girls # >> | ||||||||||
| <·· PWA ··> | ||||||||||
| < ? blogs by women # > | ||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
| ‹ # Circle of Shadows ? › | ||||||||||
| <-- ? In MY Opinion # --> | ||||||||||
| « # blogshares ? » | ||||||||||
| « # Scorpio ? » | ||||||||||
| < # Blogrollers ? > | ||||||||||
| < ? six degrees # > | ||||||||||
|
[ <<
?
Verbosity
#
>>
] |
||||||||||
| domain whore | ||||||||||
|
Are you a  ? Domain . Addict # |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
)O(
 |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
Rate Me on BlogHop.com!
|
Rate me at Eatonweb
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
![[ Registered ]](http://www.differentstrings.info/images/diarist.gif){kind=small}
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Recommended sites |
Please note: The Salon Blog mailing list and web rings are not managed by Salon Magazine, but are specifically for the owners/authors/editors of Salon Blogs. The Salon name is used with permission.
| < £ Salon Bloggers & > |
| Do you own/edit/write a Salon Blog? Join the Salon Bloggers Webring! |
|
|
![[Valid RSS]](http://www.differentstrings.info/images/valid-rss-dylan2.gif "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}
|
|
|
![[Blue Ribbon Campaign icon]](http://br.eff.org/br.gif)
