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Bush
Administration’s Lies
About
Iraq’s WMD Unraveling
Dissident
Voice News Service Compilation
Updated: June 3, 2003
"I'm not reading
this. This is bullshit."
-- Colin Powell (The Bush
junta's good cop routine, commenting on the quality of the
"intelligence" reports on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before
his theater performance at the UN in February.)
____________________________________________________________
Contents:
1) US News and
World Report Truth and consequences: New questions
about U.S.
intelligence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass terror
2) The Guardian
Powell's doubts over CIA intelligence on Iraq prompted
him to set
up secret review: Specialists removed questionable evidence
about
weapons from draft of secretary of state's speech to UN
3) The Guardian
Straw, Powell had serious doubts over their Iraqi weapons
claims: Secret transcript revealed
4) The Guardian
Ministers 'distorted' UN weapons report
5) The Guardian
Claire Short: Blair lied to cabinet and made secret
6) Washington Post
Bush Remarks Confirm Shift in Justifying War
Standard
of Proof For Weapons Drops
7) The Independent
How Blair used discredited WMD 'evidence'
8) Newsweek Where are Iraq’s WMDs? Inside the administration’s
9) Newsweek Former UK Foreign Sec.: ‘Why Rumsfeld Is Wrong’
10) The Sunday
Herald No weapons in Iraq? We'll find them in Iran
11) New York Times Save
Our Spooks
12) The Guardian
Cabinet's secret war briefings: Revelation intensifies
calls for inquiry
13) Financial Times
Blix report fuels doubts on weapons of mass destruction
________________________________________________________
1) Truth and consequences: New questions
about U.S. intelligence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass terror
By Bruce B. Auster, Mark Mazzetti and
Edward T. Pound
US News and World Report
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030609/usnews/9intell.htm
On the evening of February 1, two dozen
American officials gathered in a spacious conference room at the Central
Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. The time had come to make the public case
for war against Iraq. For six hours that Saturday, the men and women of the
Bush administration argued about what Secretary of State Colin Powell
should--and should not--say at the United Nations Security Council four days
later. Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein's misdeeds, they
found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell
tossed several pages in the air. "I'm not reading this," he declared.
"This is bulls- - -."
Just how good was America's intelligence
on Iraq? Seven weeks after the end of the war, no hard evidence has been turned
up on the ground to support the charge that Iraq posed an imminent threat to
U.S. national security--no chemical weapons in the field, no Scud missiles in
the western desert, no biological agents. At least not yet. As a result,
questions are being raised about whether the Bush administration overstated the
case against Saddam Hussein. History shows that the Iraqi regime used weapons
of mass terror against Iraqi Kurds and during the war against Iran in the
1980s. But it now appears that American intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs
was sometimes sketchy, occasionally politicized, and frequently the subject of
passionate disputes inside the government. Today, the CIA is conducting a
review of its prewar intelligence, at the request of the House Intelligence
Committee, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has conceded that Iraq may
have destroyed its chemical weapons months before the war.
The dossier. The question remains: What
did the Bush administration know-- or think it knew--on the eve of war? In the
six days before Powell went to the U.N., an intense, closed-door battle raged
over the U.S. intelligence dossier that had been compiled on Baghdad's weapons
of mass destruction and its links to terrorists. Holed up at the CIA night and
day, a team of officials vetted volumes of intelligence purporting to show that
Iraq posed a grave threat. Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, and Condoleezza
Rice, the national security adviser, were among those who participated in some
sessions. What follows is an account of the struggle to find common ground on a
bill of particulars against Saddam. Interviews with more than a dozen officials
reveal that many pieces of intelligence--including information the
administration had already cited publicly--did not stand up to scrutiny and had
to be dropped from the text of Powell's U.N. speech.
Vice President Cheney's office played a
major role in the secret debates and pressed for the toughest critique of
Saddam's regime, administration officials say. The first draft of Powell's
speech was written by Cheney's staff and the National Security Council. Days
before the team first gathered at the CIA, a group of officials assembled in
the White House Situation Room to hear Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, lay out an indictment of the Iraqi regime--"a
Chinese menu" of charges, one participant recalls, that Powell might use
in his U.N. speech. Not everyone in the administration was impressed, however.
"It was over the top and ran the gamut from al Qaeda to human rights to
weapons of mass destruction," says a senior official. "They were
unsubstantiated assertions, in my view."
Powell, apparently, agreed. So one week
before he was to address the U.N. Security Council, he created a team, which
set up shop at the CIA, and directed it to provide him with an intelligence
report based on more solid information. "Powell was acutely aware of the
need to be completely accurate," says the senior official, "and that
our national reputation was on the line."
The team, at first, tried to follow a
45-page White House script, taken from Libby's earlier presentation. But there
were too many problems--some assertions, for instance, were not supported by
solid or adequate sourcing, several officials say. Indeed, some of the damning
information simply could not be proved.
One example, included in the script,
focused on intelligence indicating that an Iraqi official had approved the
acquisition of sensitive software from an Australian company. The concern was
that the software would allow the regime to understand the topography of the
United States. That knowledge, coupled with unmanned aerial vehicles, might one
day enable Iraq to attack America with biological or chemical weapons. That was
the allegation. Tenet had briefed Cheney and others. Cheney, says a senior
official, embraced the intelligence.
The White House instructed Powell to
include the charge in his presentation. When the Powell team at the CIA
examined the matter, however, it became clear that the information was not
ironclad. CIA analysts, it turns out, couldn't determine after further review
whether the software had, in fact, been delivered to Iraq or whether the Iraqis
intended to use it for nefarious purposes. One senior official, briefed on the
allegation, says the software wasn't sophisticated enough to pose a threat to
the United States. Powell omitted the allegation from his U.N. speech.
It had taken just one day for the team
assembled at the CIA to trip over the fault line dividing the Bush
administration. For months, the vice president's office and the Pentagon had
been more aggressive than either State or the CIA when it came to making the
case against Iraq.
Veteran intelligence officers were
dismayed. "The policy decisions weren't matching the reports we were
reading every day," says an intelligence official. In September 2002, U.S.
News has learned, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a classified
assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons. It concluded: "There is no reliable
information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons . . .
." At about the same time, Rumsfeld told Congress that Saddam's
"regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons,
including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas." Rumsfeld's critics say
that the secretary tended to assert things as fact even when intelligence was
murky. "What we have here is advocacy, not intelligence work," says
Patrick Lang, a former top DIA and CIA analyst on Iraq. "I don't think
[administration officials] were lying; I just think they did a poor job. It's
not the intelligence community. It's these guys in the Office of the Secretary
of Defense who were playing the intelligence community."
Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's top policy
adviser, defended the intelligence analysis used in making the case for war and
says it was inevitable that the "least developed" intelligence would
be dropped from Powell's speech. "With intelligence, you get a snippet of
information here, a glimpse of something there," he said. "It is
inherently sketchy in most cases."
In a written statement provided to U.S.
News, the CIA's Tenet says: "Our role is to call it like we see it--to
tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and what we
base it on. . . . The integrity of our process was maintained throughout, and
any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong."
In those first days of February, the
disputed material was put under the microscope. The marathon meetings, which
included five rehearsals of the Powell presentation, lasted six days. According
to a senior official, Powell would read an item. Then he would ask CIA officers
there--including Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin--for the source of the
information. "The secretary of state insisted that every piece of evidence
be solid. Some others felt you could put circumstantial evidence in, and what
matters is the totality of it," says one participant. "So you had
material that ended up on the cutting-room floor."
And plenty was cut. Sometimes it was
because information wasn't credible, sometimes because Powell didn't want his
speech to get too long, sometimes because Tenet insisted on protecting sources
and methods. At the last minute, for instance, the officials agreed to drop an
electronic intercept of Iraqis describing the torture of a donkey. On the tape,
the men laughed as they described what happened when a drop of a lethal
substance touched the animal's skin.
Thin gruel. The back and forth between
the team at the CIA and the White House intensified. The script from the White
House was whittled down, then discarded. Finally, according to several
participants, the National Security Council offered up three more papers: one
on Iraq's ties to terrorism, one on weapons of mass destruction, one on
human-rights violations. The document on terrorism was 38 pages, double spaced.
By the time the team at the CIA was done with it, half a dozen pages remained.
Powell was so unimpressed with the information on al Qaeda that he decided to
bury it at the end of his speech, according to officials. Even so, NSC
officials kept pushing for Powell to include the charge that 9/11 hijacker
Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. He refused.
By Monday night, February 3, the
presentation was taking final shape. Powell wanted no doubts that the CIA stood
behind the intelligence, so, according to one official, he told Tenet:
"George, you're coming with me." On Tuesday, some members of the team
decamped to New York, where Powell took a room at the Waldorf-Astoria.
Participants ran two full dress rehearsals complete with place cards indicating
where other members of the Security Council would be sitting. The next morning,
Powell delivered his speech, as scheduled. Tenet was sitting right behind him.
Today, the mystery is what happened to
Iraq's terror weapons. "Everyone believed they would find it," says a
senior official. "I have never seen intelligence agencies in this
government and other governments so united on one subject."
Mirages. Were they right? Powell and
Tenet were convinced that chemical agents had been deployed to field units.
None have been found. War planners used the intelligence when targeting
suspected weapons of mass destruction sites. Yet bomb-damage assessments found
that none of the targets contained chemical or biological weapons. "What
we don't know at this point," says an Air Force war planner, "is what
was bad intelligence, what was bad timing, what was bad luck."
As for the al Qaeda tie, defense
officials told U.S. News last week they had learned of a potentially
significant link between Saddam's regime and Osama bin Laden's organization. A
captured senior member of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, has told
interrogators about meetings between Iraqi intelligence officials and top
members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group that merged with al Qaeda in the
1990s. The prisoner also described $300,000 in Iraqi transfers to the
organization to pay for attacks in Egypt. The transfers were said to have been
authorized by Saddam Hussein. "It's a single-source report," says one
defense official. "But is this the first time anyone has told us something
like this? Yeah."
Senior administration of-ficials say they
remain convinced that weapons of mass destruction will turn up. The CIA and the
Pentagon reported last week that two trucks seized in Iraq were apparently used
as mobile biological weapons labs, though no biological agents were found. A
senior counterterrorism official says the administration also believes that
biological and chemical weapons have been hidden in vast underground complexes.
"You can find it out in the open, but if you put this stuff underground or
underwater," he says, "there is no signature and it doesn't show
up." He added that the Pentagon is using small robots, outfitted with sensors
and night-vision equipment, to get into and explore "heavily
booby-trapped" underground complexes, some larger than football fields.
"People are getting discouraged that they haven't found it," he says.
"They are looking for a master source, a person who can say where the stuff
is located."
Some 300 sites have been inspected so
far; there are an additional 600 to go, and the list is growing, as captured
Iraqis provide new leads. But what if those leads turn up nothing? "It
would be," says a senior administration official, "a colossal
intelligence failure."
2) Powell's doubts over CIA intelligence
on Iraq prompted him
to set up secret review: Specialists
removed questionable evidence
about weapons from draft of secretary of
state's speech to UN
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and
Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian [UK]; June 2, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,968581,00.html
Fresh evidence emerged last night that
Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was so disturbed about questionable
American intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that he assembled a
secret team to review the information he was given before he made a crucial
speech to the UN security council on February 5.
Mr Powell conducted a full-dress
rehearsal of the speech on the eve of the session at his suite in the Waldorf
Astoria, his New York base when he is on UN business, according to the
authoritative US News and World Report.
Much of the initial information for Mr
Powell's speech to the UN was provided by the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz,
the US deputy defence secretary, set up a special unit, the Office of Special
Plans, to counter the uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.
Mr Powell's team removed dozens of pages
of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a
draft of his speech, US News and World Report says today. At one point, he
became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he
declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the
magazine.
Presented with a script for his speech,
Mr Powell suspected that Washington hawks were "cherry picking", the
US magazine Newsweek also reports today. Greg Theilmann, a recently retired
state department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi
threat, says that inside the Bush administration "there is a lot of sorrow
and anger at the way intelligence was misused".
The Bush administration, under increased scrutiny
for failing to find Saddam Hussein's arsenals eight weeks after occupying
Baghdad, yesterday confronted the damaging new allegations on the misuse of
intelligence to bolster the case for war.
The gaps in the case against Saddam have
become a matter for public debate only within the last few days. They have also
become an issue of credibility for the CIA and the Bush administration as it
begins to assemble a case against Iran and its nuclear programme.
Yesterday, a senior Bush administration
official told reporters travelling with the president to the Evian summit that
Washington was not alone in its pursuit of Saddam's arsenal.
"We have to remember that there's a
long history of accusation of the weapons of mass destruction programmes in
Iraq. A lot of what is unresolved about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
programme comes from the United Nations, from Unscom, from Unmovic [teams of
weapons inspectors] and, of course, from US and other intelligence," the
official said.
The official also said that US forces in
Iraq had not yet had the time to process the hundreds of documents captured
since Saddam's fall, or track down the people with information on his weapons
programmes.
On Friday, the CIA director, George
Tenet, was forced to issue a statement denying the agency doctored intelligence
reports.
"Our role is to call it like we see
it, to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and
what we base it on. That's the code we live by," the statement said.
During a series of meetings at CIA
headquarters last February, initiated by Mr Powell, the secretary of state was
reported to have reviewed the intelligence reports on Saddam, his arsenal of
chemical and nuclear weapons, and his possible links with al-Qaida. The
ostensible purpose of the exercise, carried out over four days, was to decide
which should be included in his address.
However, a common theme of the meetings
was the failure of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to produce a
convincing case against Saddam. Despite the increasingly belligerent statements
from the administration's hawks, the CIA had disturbingly little proof.
Even more damaging, many of the
assertions bandied about were based on reports that were speculative or
impossible to corroborate - but seized on because they suited the agenda of the
hawks in the administration. Ambiguities and nuance were left aside.
One claim from the original dossier that
could not be proved involved the supply of sensitive software from Australia
that would have allowed Baghdad to gather sensitive information about the
topography of the US. However, the CIA could not establish for Mr Powell
whether the software had been delivered to Iraq.
Although the issue of flawed CIA
intelligence has caused concern about the agency's ability to gather evidence
on potential threats to the US, it did not appear to have shaken the widespread
belief that the war on Iraq was a just war.
"The day that I saw those nine and
10-year-old boys released from a prison, the day I saw the mass graves
uncovered, it was ample testimony of the brutality and repressiveness of this
regime," the Republican senator John McCain told ABC television yesterday.
"It was the day that I believe our liberation of Iraq was fully
vindicated."
The president's changing tune
'The Iraqi regime was required to destroy
its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons, and
to stop all support for terrorist groups. The Iraqi regime has violated all of
those obligations'
October 7 2002
'Year after year, Saddam Hussein has gone
to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep
weapons of mass destruction'
January 28 2003
'The regime of Saddam Hussein spent years
hiding and disguising his weapons... it's going to take 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'
April 24 2003
'One thing we know is that he had a
weapons programme. We also know he spent years trying to hide the weapons
programme. And over time the truth will come out'
May 6 2003
'We found the weapons of mass
destruction. We found biological laboratories... And we'll find more. But for
those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned
weapons, they're wrong. We found them.'
May 29 2003
3) Straw, Powell had serious doubts over
their Iraqi weapons claims
Secret transcript revealed
Dan Plesch and Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian; May 31, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,967548,00.html
Jack Straw and his US counterpart, Colin
Powell, privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on
Iraq's banned weapons programme at the very time they were publicly trumpeting
it to get UN support for a war on Iraq, the Guardian has learned.
Their deep concerns about the
intelligence - and about claims being made by their political bosses, Tony
Blair and George Bush - emerged at a private meeting between the two men
shortly before a crucial UN security council session on February 5.
The meeting took place at the Waldorf
hotel in New York, where they discussed the growing diplomatic crisis. The
exchange about the validity of their respective governments' intelligence
reports on Iraq lasted less than 10 minutes, according to a diplomatic source
who has read a transcript of the conversation.
The foreign secretary reportedly
expressed concern that claims being made by Mr Blair and President Bush could
not be proved. The problem, explained Mr Straw, was the lack of corroborative
evidence to back up the claims.
Much of the intelligence were assumptions
and assessments not supported by hard facts or other sources.
Mr Powell shared the concern about
intelligence assessments, especially those being presented by the Pentagon's
office of special plans set up by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz.
Mr Powell said he had all but "moved
in" with US intelligence to prepare his briefings for the UN security
council, according to the transcripts.
But he told Mr Straw he had come away
from the meetings "apprehensive" about what he called, at best, circumstantial
evidence highly tilted in favour of assessments drawn from them, rather than
any actual raw intelligence.
Mr Powell told the foreign secretary he
hoped the facts, when they came out, would not "explode in their
faces".
What are called the "Waldorf
transcripts" are being circulated in Nato diplomatic circles. It is not
being revealed how the transcripts came to be made; however, they appear to
have been leaked by diplomats who supported the war against Iraq even when the
evidence about Saddam Hussein's programme of weapons of mass destruction was
fuzzy, and who now believe they were lied to.
People circulating the transcripts call
themselves "allied sources supportive of US war aims in Iraq at the
time".
The transcripts will fuel the controversy
in Britain and the US over claims that London and Washington distorted and
exaggerated the intelligence assessments about Saddam's nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons programme.
An unnamed intelligence official told the
BBC on Thursday that a key claim in the dossier on Iraq's weapons released by
the British government last September - that Iraq could launch a chemical or
biological attack within 45 minutes of an order - was inserted on the
instructions of officials in 10 Downing Street.
Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister,
admitted the claim was made by "a single source; it wasn't
corroborated".
Speaking yesterday in Warsaw, the Polish
capital, Mr Blair said the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in the
dossier was "evidence the truth of which I have absolutely no doubt about
at all".
He said he had consulted the heads of the
security and intelligence services before emphatically denying that Downing
Street had leaned on them to strengthen their assessment of the WMD threat in
Iraq. He insisted he had "absolutely no doubt" that proof of banned
weapons would eventually be found in Iraq. Whitehall sources make it clear they
do not share the prime minister's optimism.
The Waldorf transcripts are all the more
damaging given Mr Powell's dramatic 75-minute speech to the UN security council
on February 5, when he presented declassified satellite images, and
communications intercepts of what were purported to be conversations between
Iraqi commanders, and held up a vial that, he said, could contain anthrax.
Evidence, he said, had come from
"people who have risked their lives to let the world know what Saddam is
really up to".
Some of the intelligence used by Mr
Powell was provided by Britain.
The US secretary of state, who was
praised by Mr Straw as having made a "most powerful and authoritative
case", also drew links between al-Qaida and Iraq - a connection dismissed
by British intelligence agencies. His speech did not persuade France, Germany
and Russia, who stuck to their previous insistence that the UN weapons
inspectors in Iraq should be given more time to do their job.
The Waldorf meeting took place a few days
after Downing Street presented Mr Powell with a separate dossier on Iraq's
banned weapons which he used to try to strengthen the impact of his UN speech.
A few days later, Downing Street admitted
that much of its dossier was lifted from academic sources and included a
plagiarised section written by an American PhD student.
Mr Wolfowitz set up the Pentagon's office
of special plans to counter what he and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, considered
inadequate - and unwelcome - intelligence from the CIA.
He angered critics of the war this week
in a Vanity Fair magazine interview in which he cited "bureaucratic
reasons" for the White House focusing on Iraq's alleged arsenal as the
reason for the war. In reality, a "huge" reason for the conflict was
to enable the US to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia, he said.
Earlier in the week, Mr Rumsfeld
suggested that Saddam might have destroyed such weapons before the war.
4) Ministers 'distorted' UN weapons
report
Nicholas Watt, Richard Norton-Taylor and
Michael White in Basra
The Guardian; May 30, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,966797,00.html
Tony Blair's Iraq crisis deepened last
night as ministers were accused of distorting the findings of the chief UN
weapons inspector to support Britain's claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons
programme.
Amid growing anger among senior
intelligence officials about Downing Street's use of their work for political
ends, Hans Blix's office rejected claims by ministers that he had provided
unequivocal evidence of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programme.
As the prime minister became the first
western leader to visit Iraq since the end of the war, Dr Blix's spokesman said
the chief weapons inspector had "never asserted" that Iraq definitely
had weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the conflict.
Ewen Buchanan, who said Dr Blix had
merely said there was a "strong presumption" that banned items such
as an thrax still existed, was speaking after the armed forces minister, Adam
Ingram, declared that the UN had provided "damning" evidence of
illegal Iraqi weapons.
Mr Buchanan's remarks will undermine the
credibility of Downing Street, which faced severe pressure yesterday over
claims that it doctored a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to
strengthen the case for war. An unnamed intelligence official told the BBC that
the key claim in last September's dossier - that Iraq could launch a chemical
or biological attack within 45 minutes of an order - had been inserted on the
instructions of officials at No 10.
Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's
director of communications, who played a key role in drawing up the dossier,
said yesterday in Basra that the BBC was "saying we forced the
intelligence agencies to put things in the dossier that were untrue. That is
wholly untrue; there is nothing in there that was not the work of the
intelligence agencies".
As the prime minister insisted once again
that banned weapons would be found, Downing Street faced renewed pressure last
night when the hawkish deputy US defence secretary appeared to belittle the
importance of such weapons.
Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair magazine
that the decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main reason
for invading Iraq was taken for "bureaucratic" reasons, indicating
that Washington did not take the threat seriously.
Amid the furore, British intelligence
sources expressed fury at Downing Street's behaviour. They were deeply
reluctant to allow Downing Street to use their intelligence assessments because
they feared it would be manipulated for political ends.
Widespread unease in the intelligence
community about Downing Street's use of their information in the September
dossier was compounded by a second report in February containing sections
plagiarised by Mr Campbell's staff. John Scarlett, chairman of Whitehall's
joint intelligence committee, was reported to be furious at what a senior
Whitehall source described yesterday as a "serious error".
Caveats about intelligence supplied by
MI6 and GCHQ, the government's eavesdropping centre, were swept aside by Mr
Blair, egged on by Mr Campbell, well-placed sources said.
A Whitehall source told the Guardian
yesterday: "It may take several months to decide what the Iraqis were
doing." He added that something had to be found, if only for political
reasons, to support Mr Blair.
Downing Street will also struggle to
shrug off the remarks by Dr Blix's office. Ministers, who privately rubbished
the chief weapons inspector when he resisted the rush to war, have recently
hailed a 173-page report he produced in March to prove that Iraq had a banned
weapons programme.
Dr Blix's spokesman, who did not directly
criticise any ministers, said the report indicated that there was a "strong
presumption" Iraq did not destroy illegal substances such as anthrax. But
Mr Buchanan added: "We know they had anthrax. We never asserted that these
days they had them."
However, Mr Buchanan made clear that Dr
Blix's report raised serious questions about Iraq: "There are hundreds, if
not thousands, of unanswered questions."
5) Short: Blair lied to cabinet and made
secret war pact with US
Tory threat to break ranks on Iraq
Nicholas Watt and Michael White in Evian
The Guardian; June 2, 2003
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,968599,00.html
Tony Blair is facing mounting pressure
from across the House of Commons to hold an independent inquiry into the Iraq
war after Clare Short levelled the incendiary allegation at the prime minister
that he had lied to the cabinet.
As an increasingly exasperated prime
minister once again swept aside calls for a public inquiry into the failure to
uncover banned Iraqi weapons, the former international development secretary
accused Mr Blair of bypassing the cabinet to agree a "secret" pact
with George Bush to go to war.
To compound the prime minister's
difficulties - as MPs prepare to return to Westminster tomorrow after the
Whitsun recess - Robin Cook demanded an independent inquiry into the
"monumental blunder" by the government.
His criticisms were echoed last night by
the Tories who said they were giving "very serious consideration" to
calls for an inquiry.
Michael Howard, the shadow chancellor,
indicated to the BBC last night that the Tories were considering abandoning
their bipartisan approach to Iraq because of fears that Downing Street might
have "doctored" last year's dossier on Iraq's banned weapons to strengthen
the case for war.
The interventions by such senior figures
from across the house gave heart to Labour MPs who are planning to ambush the
prime minister on Wednesday at his weekly Commons appearance and during a
subsequent statement on the G8 summit.
They are demanding an emergency Commons
statement after an unnamed intelligence source told the BBC last week that
Downing Street had "sexed up" a dossier on Iraq's banned weapons.
Tam Dalyell, the father of the house who
has a question to the prime minister on Wednesday's Commons order paper, is
expected to step up the pressure by asking about Ms Short's accusation that he
was deceitful to the cabinet on three occasions.
In her BBC interview yesterday, she
accused Mr Blair of:
* Agreeing in "secret" with Mr
Bush at Camp David last September to go to war - and then telling the cabinet
that he would try to act as a constraint on the US.
* Misleading the cabinet over Iraq's
weapons capability - by "spinning" the claim that Iraq could launch a
chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes. "Where the spin came was
the suggestion that it was all weaponised, ready to go, immediately dangerous,
likely to get into the hands of al-Qaida, and therefore things were very very
urgent."
* Falsely telling the cabinet and the
world that Jacques Chirac, the French president, would veto a second UN
security council resolution authorising war. The transcript of Mr Chirac's
interview, which she subsequently read, showed the prime minister's claim to be
wrong.
Ms Short, who was widely criticised after
she failed to carry out a threat to resign on the eve of war, accused the prime
minister of riding roughshod over the conventions of cabinet. "It was all
done in Tony Blair's study ... The normal Whitehall systems to make big
decisions like this broke down and were very personalised in No 10."
Warning that civil servants and troops
were ready to disobey an order to go to war, Ms Short said that the prime
minister swung round the Whitehall machinery at the last moment when the
attorney general declared that military action would be legal. But she added:
"I think, given the attorney's advice, it was legal. But I think the route
we got there didn't honour the legality questions."
Some of her criticisms were echoed by the
former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who demanded an independent inquiry into
the failure to uncover any weapons of mass destruction, despite the dire
warnings from Downing Street.
"It is beginning to look as if the
government's committed a monumental blunder," he told The World This
Weekend on Radio 4.
"The government should admit it was
wrong and they need to set up then a thorough independent inquiry into how they
got it wrong so that it never happens again and we never again send British
troops into action on the basis of a mistake."
As a growing number of Labour MPs joined
the clamour for an emergency statement and a full investigation by the
parliamentary intelligence committee, an angry prime minister hit back at his
critics.
Speaking en route to Evian, Mr Blair
predicted that the next US-UK intelligence dossier on Saddam Hussein's arsenal
would make sceptical voters "very well satisfied" that he was right.
Expressing frustration about what he sees
as his critics' attempt to refight the war by other means, Mr Blair insisted
for the third time in as many days that intelligence reports had not been
doctored under political pressure and would be vindicated.
Appealing for voters to be patient, he
declared: "I have said throughout that when this is put together, the
evidence of the scientists and witnesses, the investigations from the sites,
people will be very well satisfied."
The new dossier on which Downing Street
pins its hopes will be produced by US intelligence and weapons inspection teams
which are now fanning out over Iraq while colleagues work on humanitarian aid
and reconstruction.
6) Bush Remarks Confirm Shift in
Justifying War
Standard of Proof For Weapons Drops
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post; June 1, 2003; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63017-2003May31?language=printer
In asserting last week that "we
found the weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, President Bush presented a
far less expansive estimate of Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and
nuclear capabilities than the one his administration had used for months in
justifying the war.
Since last August, Bush and his top
lieutenants said it was an absolute certainty that Iraq remained in possession
of significant quantities of banned weapons, particularly chemical and
biological munitions. But Bush's remarks Thursday, in an interview on Polish
television, made clear the administration had lowered its standards of proof.
The president asserted that the discovery in Iraq of two trailers, with
laboratory equipment but no pathogens aboard, was tantamount to a discovery of
weapons.
"We found the weapons of mass
destruction," Bush asserted in the Thursday interview, released Friday.
"We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up
in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to
build biological weapons. 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, they're wrong. We found them."
Bush's assertion, one of many recent
administration statements shifting focus from Iraq's weapons to Iraq's weapons
programs, indicated the president would consider its accusations justified by
the discovery of equipment that potentially could be used to produce weapons.
But the original charges against Iraq, presented to the United Nations and the
American public, were explicitly about the weapons themselves.
On Aug. 26, 2002, Vice President Cheney
told the VFW National Convention: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that
Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." On Sept. 12, 2002,
Bush told the U.N. General Assembly: "United Nations inspections also
revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other
chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities
capable of producing chemical weapons."
In Bush's State of the Union address on
Jan. 28, he cited evidence that Hussein had enough materials to produce more
than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard
and VX nerve agents. "He has given no evidence that he has destroyed
them," Bush said.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in
the same speech to the U.N. on Feb. 5 in which he discussed evidence of the
mobile weapons labs Bush referred to last week, argued: "We know that
Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, he's
determined to make more." A month later, on March 7, Powell told the
United Nations that Hussein has "clearly not" made a decision to "disarm
Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction."
Finally, in delivering his March 17
ultimatum to Hussein to go into exile, Bush told the nation: "Intelligence
gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime
continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever
devised."
Bush's political opponents ridiculed the
suggestion Bush made last week that the discovery of two trailers validated the
earlier accusations. "Just because they found two mobile labs, to say
that's evidence of weapons of mass destruction is absurd," said Kristian
Denny, spokeswoman for Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), a presidential candidate.
As the war started in Iraq, the
administration continued to say with confidence that weapons would be found. On
March 21, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said "there's no
question" biological and chemical weapons would be found and asserted that
"this was the reason that the president felt so strongly that we needed to
take military action."
But when heavy combat in Iraq ended
without the discovery of banned arms, administration officials began to
emphasize the search for evidence of weapons programs rather than the weapons
themselves. In Lima, Ohio, on April 24, Bush raised the possibility that the
weapons might not exist any longer. "We know he had them," the
president said. "And whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them,
we're going to find out the truth."
In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine
on May 9, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, appeared to minimize
the importance of the weapons. "The truth is that for reasons that have a
lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue
that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core
reason," he said, according to a Pentagon transcript in which he stressed
other justifications for the war.
7) Revealed: How Blair used discredited
WMD 'evidence'
UK intelligence chiefs warned claim that
Iraq could activate banned weapons in 45 minutes came from unreliable defector
By Raymond Whitaker, Paul Lashmar and
Andy McSmith
The Independent [UK]; June 1, 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=411301
Tony Blair's sensational pre-war claim
that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "could be activated within 45
minutes" was based on information from a single Iraqi defector of dubious
reliability, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
British intelligence sources said the
defector, recruited by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, told his story
to American officials. It was passed on to London as part of regular
information-sharing with Washington, but British intelligence chiefs considered
the "45 minutes" claim to be unreliable and uncorroborated by any
other evidence. How it came to be included as the most dramatic element in the
Government's "intelligence dossier" last September, making the case
for war, is now the subject of a furious row in Whitehall and abroad.
The armed forces minister, Adam Ingram,
admitted last week that the information had come from a single source. But
Downing Street denied a report that the claim made its way into the dossier
only after politicians rejected a more cautious draft prepared by the
intelligence services and demanded that it be "sexed up".
Coming in the same week that the United
States Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said Iraq might have destroyed its
banned weapons before the war, the row has called into question the entire
Anglo-American case on WMD. The failure to find such weapons has led to demands
in the US and Britain for inquiries into whether the public was misled.
On Wednesday, the parliamentary
Intelligence and Security Committee will meet behind closed doors to examine
the Government's WMD claims, but it is not expected to have full access to the
intelligence seen by ministers.
Irritated by the latest row about Iraq's
missing weapons, which has overshadowed his six-day foreign tour, the Prime
Minister has promised to bring out another dossier. Mr Blair said that he had
seen some of the information obtained from Iraqi scientists now under
interrogation, which proved that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of dangerous
weapons.
In an interview in St Petersburg with Sky
News, being broadcast today, he said: "What we are going to do is assemble
that evidence and present it properly to people. We are not going to give a
running commentary on it. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of potential
WMD sites that are still being investigated. We have only just begun."
The Prime Minister's official spokesman
vehemently denied yesterday that there was or had been any conflict between the
Government and the intelligence services over Iraq, and claimed that leaks were
probably coming from minor officials who did not have great inside knowledge.
President George Bush went further on
Polish television, saying two trailers found laden with equipment in northern
Iraq were proof of the existence of WMD. US intelligence agencies claim they
were biological weapons production facilities. Mr Bush said: "Those who
say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons -
they're wrong. We found them."
The Prime Minister insisted that the
information in the British dossier "is intelligence that comes through our
Joint Intelligence Committee". He said: "It's not invented by
politicians and it's not invented by our security service. Everything was
cleared by the Joint Intelligence Committee, and was their judgement - not my
judgement, or another politician's judgement."
But one intelligence source said:
"The '45-minute' remark was part of the American intelligence input into
the dossier. It was being treated cautiously by the British, but it was
alighted on by the politicos and blown out of proportion." Intelligence
circles remain confident that evidence of WMD will soon be found.
Controversy reigns over the work of a
special unit within the Pentagon, created by Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul
Wolfowitz, which enthusiastically promoted the Iraqi National Congress's WMD
claims over the scepticism of others, notably in the CIA. Yesterday The
Guardian said the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, met his American counterpart,
Colin Powell, in February to discuss their concerns about the quality of
information on Iraq's banned weapons, and the claims being made by their
respective political masters. The Government said the meeting never took place.
8) Where are Iraq’s WMDs?
The message was plain: Saddam’s weapons
of mass destruction made war unavoidable. So where are they? Inside the
administration’s civil war over intel
By Evan Thomas, Richard Wolffe and
Michael Isikoff
NEWSWEEK ; June 9, 2003 Issue
http://www.msnbc.com/news/919753.asp#BODY
George Tenet, the director of Central
Intelligence, was frustrated. For four days and nights last winter, some of the
most astute intelligence analysts in the U.S. government sat around Tenet’s
conference-room table in his wood-paneled office in Langley, Va., trying to
prove that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to America. The spooks were
not having an easy time of it.
ON FEB. 5, Secretary of State Colin
Powell was scheduled to go to the United Nations and make the case that Saddam
possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. But the evidence was
thin—sketchy and speculative, or uncorroborated, or just not credible. Finally,
according to a government official who was there, Tenet leaned back in his
chair and said, “Everyone thinks we’re Tom Cruise. We’re not. We can’t look
into every bedroom and listen to every conversation. Hell, we can’t even listen
to the new cell phones some of the terrorists are using.”
Tenet was being truthful. Spying can help
win wars (think of the Allies’ cracking the Axis codes in World War II), but
intelligence is more often an incomplete puzzle (think of Pearl Harbor). Honest
spies appreciate their own limitations. Their political masters, however, often
prefer the Hollywood version. They want certainty and omniscience, not hedges
and ambiguity. Bush administration officials wanted to be able to say, for
certain, that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of chem-bio weapons; that he
could make a nuclear bomb inside a year; that he was conspiring with Al Qaeda
to attack America.
And that is, by and large, what they did
say. On close examination, some of the statements about Saddam and his WMD made
by President George W. Bush and his top lieutenants in the months leading up to
the Iraq war included qualifiers or nuances. But the effect—and the intent—was
to convince most Americans that Saddam presented a clear and present danger and
had to be removed by going to war.
SOUNDING DEFENSIVE
No wonder, then, that many people are
perplexed (or vexed) that U.S. forces in Iraq have been unable to find any WMD.
Administration officials insist that eventually they will be able to prove that
Saddam was working on a dangerous weapons program. They say that two trailers
found in northern Iraq are in fact mobile bioweapon labs, capable of brewing up
enough anthrax in a weekend to snuff out a city. But some of Bush’s top men are
beginning to sound a little defensive or unsure, and congressional critics are
starting to circle. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz caused a flap by
telling Vanity Fair magazine that removing Saddam’s WMD was a “bureaucratic”
justification for going to war (Wolfowitz says that he was quoted out of
context). A recently retired State Department intelligence analyst directly
involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, Greg Thielmann, flatly told NEWSWEEK
that inside the government, “there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way
intelligence was misused. You get a strong impression that the administration
didn’t think the public would be enthusiastic about the idea of war if you
attached all those qualifiers.”
The prospect of a serious inquiry hung
uneasily over a small dinner party of top intelligence officials, including
Tenet, in Washington last week. The guests “were stressed and grumpy,” reports
a former CIA official who was present. “There was a lot of rolling of eyes and
groans” about a coming wave of investigations. Tenet tried to reassure his
dinner partners that the second-guessing was premature. “We’ll be fine,” he
said. In an unusual move, the DCI two days later put out a public statement
defending the CIA’s “integrity and objectivity.” The job of the CIA director
is, as the former agency official puts it, “to speak truth to power.” The CIA
is supposed to be an independent agency that doesn’t blow in the political
wind.
It is doubtful that congressional
investigators or reporters will turn up evidence that anyone at the CIA or any
other intelligence agency flat-out lied or invented evidence. More likely,
interviews with some of the main players suggest, the facts will show that the
agency was unable to tell the Bush administration what it wanted to hear. Tenet
might have tried harder to keep the Bushies from leaping to unwarranted
conclusions. In fact, in one case, he aggressively pushed evidence about an
Iraqi nuclear program that was strongly challenged by nuclear-weapons experts
elsewhere in the government. But the agency’s failure was more elemental: the
CIA was unable to penetrate Saddam’s closed world and learn, with any real
precision, his real capabilities and intentions.
That is truly disturbing news for the war
on terror. If America has entered a new age of pre-emption—when it must strike
first because it cannot afford to find out later if terrorists possess nuclear
or biological weapons—exact intelligence is critical. How will the United
States take out a mad despot or a nuclear bomb hidden in a cave if the CIA
can’t say for sure where they are? And how will Bush be able to maintain
support at home and abroad? The story of how U.S. intelligence tracked Iraq’s
WMD capability, pieced together by NEWSWEEK from interviews with top
administration and intelligence officials, is not encouraging.
WAS HE JUST BLUFFING?
The case that Saddam possessed WMD was
based, in large part, on assumptions, not hard evidence. If Saddam did not
possess a forbidden arsenal, the reasoning went, why, then, would he put his
country through the agony of becoming an international pariah and ultimately
risk his regime? Was he just bluffing in some fundamentally stupid way? Earlier
U.N. weapons inspectors projected that Saddam kept stores of anthrax and VX,
but they had no proof. In recent years, the CIA detected some signs of Saddam’s
moving money around, building additions to suspected WMD sites, and buying
chemicals and equipment abroad that could be used to make chem-bio weapons. But
the spooks lacked any reliable spies, or HUMINT (human intelligence), inside
Iraq.
Then came the defectors. Former Iraqi
officials fleeing the regime told of underground bunkers and labs hiding vast
stores of chemical and biological weapons and nuclear materials. The CIA, at
first, was skeptical. Defectors in search of safe haven sometimes stretch or
invent the facts. The true believers in the Bush administration, on the other
hand, embraced the defectors and credited their stories. Many of the defectors
were sent to the Americans by Ahmed Chalabi, the politically ambitious and
controversial Iraqi exile. Chalabi’s chief patron is Richard Perle, the former
Reagan Defense Department official and charter member of the so-called neocons,
the hard-liners who occupy many top jobs in the Bush national-security
establishment.
The CIA was especially wary of Chalabi,
whom they regarded as a con man (Chalabi has been convicted of bank fraud in
Jordan; he denies the charges). But rather than accept the CIA’s doubts, top
officials in the Bush Defense Department set up their own team of intelligence
analysts, a small but powerful shop now called the Office of Special Plans—and,
half-jokingly, by its members, “the Cabal.”
The Cabal was eager to find a link
between Saddam and Al Qaeda, especially proof that Saddam played a role in the
9-11 attacks. The hard-liners at Defense seized on a report that Muhammad Atta,
the chief hijacker, met in Prague in early April 2001 with an Iraqi
intelligence official. Only one problem with that story, the FBI pointed out.
Atta was traveling at the time between Florida and Virginia Beach, Va. (The
bureau had his rental car and hotel receipts.)
SEARCHING FOR NUKES
No matter. The Iraq hawks at Defense and
in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney continued to push the idea that
Saddam had both stockpiles of WMD and links to terrorists who could deliver
those weapons to American cities. Speeches and statements by Cheney, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush himself repeated these claims throughout the
fall of 2002 and the winter of 2003. One persistent theme: that Saddam was
intent on building a nuke. On Oct. 7, for instance, Bush predicted in a speech
in Cincinnati that Saddam could have “a nuclear weapon in less than a year.”
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.
NOT-SO-SECRET WEAPONS
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.
The real test of the government’s case
against Saddam came in the testimony by Secretary of State Powell delivered to
the United Nations on Feb. 5. Powell, the administration’s in-house moderate,
was very wary of being set up for a fall by the administration hawks. Presented
with a “script” by the White House national-security staff, Powell suspected
that the hawks had been “cherry-picking,” looking for any intel that supported
their position and ignoring anything to the contrary.
Powell ordered his aides to check out
every fact. And to make sure he would not be left hanging if the intel case
against Saddam somehow proved to be full of holes, he gently but firmly
informed Tenet that the DCI should come up to New York—and take his place
behind the secretary of State at the U.N. General Assembly. (“I don’t think
George looked too comfortable sitting there,” said a former top official,
chuckling, in 41’s administration.)
For four days and nights, Powell and
Tenet, top aides and top analysts and, from time to time, Rice, pored over the
evidence—and discarded much of it. Out went suggestions linking Saddam to 9-11.
The bogus Niger documents were dumped. Powell did keep a hedged endorsement of
the aluminum tubes and contended that Saddam “harbored” Al Qaeda operatives.
His most compelling offering to the United Nations was tape recordings (picked
up by spy satellites) of Iraqi officials who appeared intent on hiding
something from the U.N. arms inspectors. Just what they were hiding was never
quite clear.
The almost round-the-clock vetting
process in Tenet’s conference room at the CIA was tense and difficult,
according to several participants. The debate over whether to include the
purported links between Al Qaeda and Saddam went on right up to the eve of
Powell’s speech.
CENTCOM VERSUS CIA
Powell’s presentation did not persuade
the U.N. Security Council, but it did help convince many Americans that Saddam
was a real threat. As the military began to gear up for an invasion, top
planners at Central Command tried to get a fix from the CIA on WMD sites they
could take out with bombs and missiles. After much badgering, says an informed
military source, the CIA allowed the CENTCOM planners to see what the agency
had on WMD sites. “It was crap,” said a CENTCOM planner. The sites were “mostly
old friends,” buildings bombed by the military back in the 1991 gulf war,
another source said. The CIA had satellite photos of the buildings. “What was
inside the structures was another matter,” says the source. “We asked, ‘Well, what
agents are in these buildings? Because we need to know.’ And the answer was,
‘We don’t know’,” the CENTCOM planner recalled.
When the military visited these sites
after the war, they found nothing but rubble. No traces of WMD. Nor did Special
Forces find any of the 20 or so Scud missiles, possibly tipped with chem-bio
warheads, that were said by the CIA to be lurking somewhere in the Western
Desert. The search is not over. While CENTCOM is pulling out its initial teams
of WMD hunters, the Pentagon has created a whole new program to search sites,
looking for the elusive WMD. It is disheartening that the military was unable
to secure Saddam’s large nuclear-material storage site at Al Tuwaitha before
the looters got there. Materials for a “dirty bomb” could have found their way
by now into the hands of terrorists.
And so the searching—and guessing—goes
on. So do the bureaucratic wars: last week one of the founders in the Cabal had
his security clearance pulled—by enemies in the intelligence community, his associates
suspected. The CIA has done a reasonably good job of tracking down Al Qaeda
chieftains, capturing about half of them so far. Despite some reports of low
morale (mostly from retired analysts), the agency is well funded and well aware
of its central role in the war on terror. The spooks for the most part know the
imprecise nature of their business. It would be healthier if politicians and
policymakers did, too. A little realism would be a good thing, especially in an
age of sneak attacks by both sides, when the margin for error is just about
zero.
9) ‘Why Rumsfeld Is Wrong’
Former British foreign secretary Robin
Cook discusses his resignation over the Iraq war—and why it’s unlikely that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction
By William Underhill
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE; May 30, 2003
http://www.msnbc.com/news/920238.asp
May 30 —
On the eve of the Iraq war, Robin Cook shook British politics by
quitting the government in protest of the planned invasion. In his powerful
resignation speech, the foreign secretary urged respect for multilateral
agreements and insisted that the dangers posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein
had been overstated. Cook, who served in Tony Blair’s cabinet as leader of
Parliament’s House of Commons, claimed in particular that Iraq possessed no
weapons of mass destruction “in the commonly understood sense.” His supporters
now say that the Coalition’s failure to find such weapons has vindicated his
stand. Cook, who is still has his seat in Parliament, spoke this week to
NEWSWEEK’s William Underhill in London.
NEWSWEEK: COALITION FORCES only
overthrew Saddam Hussein a few weeks ago. There must be a chance that weapons
of mass destruction will still be uncovered?
Robin Cook: These are things that are not
easy to conceal. For a nuclear bomb you need a nuclear reactor. For a missile
you need a large factory. You won’t find them round in someone’s back garden.
And all these synthetic claims about Iraq being a big country are irrelevant.
If Saddam had the capacity to hit us with weapons of mass destruction, we would
have found it. I did say it was quite probable that he had laboratory stocks of
biological toxins and chemical shells that might be used on the battlefield,
but it’s an awful long time after the end of the war [and] we haven’t found any
of them, either. One other point is frequently overlooked. Chemical and
biological weapons have a limited shelf life. All the materials that Saddam had
in 1991 (at the end of the gulf war) would have degraded to the point of being
useless long before 2003, whether or not he had destroyed them.
Isn’t it possible that Saddam Hussein
ordered their destruction, as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has
suggested?
No. I don’t think it’s even remotely
possible. I just cannot follow the Rumsfeld logic; that watching CNN and seeing
the American build-up Saddam said to his generals, “It’s obvious that the U.S.
is going to invade; we had better destroy our biggest weapons, so that when I
am toppled there might be some very difficult questions for Donald Rumsfeld to
answer.”
So was the public deliberately misled
over the weapons’ existence?
These are charged terms. I think it’s
much wiser to keep the spotlight on the issues, and leave questions for the
government to answer rather than end up [with] personalized headlines that I
would then have to defend. The focus should be on how the government can square
what it said at the time of the build-up to [war with] Iraq with what they have
discovered—or failed to discover—in the aftermath. It is a real issue, which
they are not entitled to brush under the carpet. We were sold the menace of the
weapons of mass destruction as the reason for the war. And the [British]
attorney general based his legal justification for war on the necessity to
disarm Saddam Hussein. If those weapons didn’t exist then the justification
falls away.
Are you saying that the Blair government
itself never believed in the existence of these weapons of mass destruction?
I never saw any [cabinet] briefing or
other evidence that suggested that there was an urgent or compelling threat
from Saddam Hussein. I am not going to comment on the motivation or sincerity
of others, but I am rather puzzled that people who went to the same briefings
as me and saw the same material could come to such radically different
conclusions. To be fair to the United States administration, it never made any
bones about the reasons why it went to war. It wanted to carry out a change of
regime in Iraq. And many of the proponents of were lobbying for it long before
September 11.
And that’s also why the British
government went to war?
No, but they were madly keen to prove
that they were reliable allies of President Bush—and there were those around
President Bush who were determined to have a war.
There are those in Washington who now
appear to see the weapons issue as irrelevant.
It was their decision to put this at the
heart of their case. It cannot be a side issue after the war when they made it
a central issue before the war.
Recent weeks have produced still more
evidence to demonstrate the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s rule. Has that
altered your position in any way?
I was never in any doubt about the brutality
of the Saddam Hussein’s regime, but neither government [the United States or
Britain] ever based its case for invasion on brutality—because that’s simply no
basis in international law for going to war just to change a regime. If we do
decide that we are going to go to war to remove brutal regimes then we have a
very busy time in front of us. We are not proposing to intervene to relieve the
people of Zimbabwe of the repressive rule of President [Robert] Mugabe. We are
not proposing to intervene in Burma where the military junta has run the
country for longer than Saddam Hussein. We have allowed more people to be
killed in the Congo civil war than were ever killed inside Iraq. If you are
going to decide that brutality is a reason for military intervention, it must
be a decision that is [made] multilaterally by an international forum. You
cannot have individual nations such as the U.K. or the U.S. deciding for
themselves which ones they are going to pick on next. One important reason is
that if you accept that principle that countries can invade countries where you
disapprove of the regime, the next time it may not be the U.S. or the U.K. that
acts on that principle.
How much damage has this affair done to
Prime Minister Tony Blair?
There is an issue of credibility not just
for the prime minister, but for the government more generally. It is going to
have to bite the bullet and admit there are no weapons of mass destruction that
could have posed a credible threat to Britain and probably were none at the time.
The longer they continue to pretend that one day they are going to turn the
corner and find a nuclear reactor the more improbable it becomes.
10) No weapons in Iraq? We'll find them
in Iran
Iraq: They told us Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction, but they've found none. Were they lying?
By Neil Mackay
The Sunday Herald [Scotland]; June 1,
2003
http://www.sundayherald.com/34271
THE spooks are on the offensive. In their
eyes, it still remains to be seen whether Tony Blair lied to the British public
by claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), but as the Prime
Minister's own intelligence officers now say, Parliament was misled and
subjected to spin, exaggeration and bare-faced flim-flammery.
It is now seven weeks since the war in
Iraq ground to a confused, stuttering halt and still not one WMD has been
found. A couple of possible mobile bio-weapons labs have been located, but a
close examination showed they hadn't seen so much as a speck of anthrax or
nerve gas. Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made clear before the
invasion that the UK was entering the war to disarm Saddam. We were
specifically told this was not a battle about regime change, but a battle to
'eradicate the threat of weapons of mass destruction'.
Ironically, it was the ultra-hawkish US
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who let the cat out of the bag when he said
on Wednesday: 'It is possible Iraqi leaders decided they would destroy (WMDs)
prior to the conflict.' If that was true then Saddam had fulfilled the criteria
of UN resolution 1441 and there was absolutely no legal right for the US and UK
to go to war. Rumsfeld's claim that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons makes
a mockery of the way the US treated the UN's chief weapons inspector Dr Hans
Blix. The US effectively told him he wasn't up to the job and the Iraqis had
fooled him .
To add to Blair's woes, Paul Wolfowitz,
US deputy defence secretary and the man credited with being the architect of
the Iraqi war, told American magazine Vanity Fair last week that the Bush
administration only focused on alleged WMDs because it was a politically
convenient means of justifying the removal of Saddam. 'For bureaucratic reasons
we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction,' the leading
neo-conservative hawk said, 'because it was the one reason everyone could agree
on'.
Then to cap it all, a secret transcript
of a discussion between US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw came to light on Friday showing that, even while they were
telling the world that Saddam was armed and dangerous, the pair were worried
that the claims about Iraq's WMD programme couldn't be proved. Powell
reportedly told Straw he hoped that when the facts came out they wouldn't
'explode in their faces'.
So how on earth did the British people
come to believe Saddam was sitting in one of his palaces with an itchy trigger
finger poised above a button marked 'WMD'? And if there were no WMDs, then why
did we fight the war? The answer lies with Rumsfeld.
With September 11 as his ideological
backdrop, Rumsfeld decided in autumn 2001 to establish a new intelligence
agency, independent of the CIA and the Pentagon, called the Office of Special
Plans (OSP). He put his deputy, Wolfowitz, in charge. The pair were
dissatisfied with the failure of the CIA among others to provide firm proof of
both Saddam's alleged WMD arsenal and links to al-Qaeda.
Regime change in Iraq had been a
long-term goal of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Even before Bush took over the
presidency in September 2000 the pair were planning 'regime change' in Iraq. As
founders of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), one of the USA's
most extreme neo-con think-tanks, the pair were behind what has been described
as the 'blueprint' for US global domination -- a document called Rebuilding
America's Defences.
Other founders of the PNAC include:
Vice-President Dick Cheney; Bush's younger brother Jeb; and Lewis Libby,
Cheney's chief of staff. The Rebuilding America's Defences document stated:
'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf
regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the
immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in
the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'
The PNAC document supports a 'blueprint
for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great-power
rival and shaping the international security order in line with American
principles and interests'.
It also calls for America to 'fight and
decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars' and describes US
armed forces as 'the calvary on the new American frontier'. The UN is sidelined
as well, with the PNAC saying that peace-keeping missions demand
'American political leadership rather
than that of the United Nations'.
That was the policy blueprint, but to
deliver it Rumsfeld turned to the Office of Special Plans. Put simply, the OSP
was told to come up with the evidence of WMD to give credence to US military
intervention.
But what do conventional intelligence
experts make of the OSP? Colonel Patrick Lang is a former chief of human
intelligence for the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the 1990s.
He was also the DIA's chief of Middle East intelligence and was regularly in
Iraq. He said of the OSP : 'This office had a great deal of influence in a
number of places in Washington in a way that seemed to me to be excessive and
rather ill-advised.
'The regular organisations of the
intelligence community have very rigorous rules for how you evaluate
information and resources, and tend to take a conservative view of analytic
positions because they're going to dictate government decisions.
'That wasn't satisfactory in Secretary
Rumsfeld's Pentagon so he set up a separate office to review this data, and the
people in this office, although they're described as intelligence people, are
by and large congressional staffers. They seemed to me not to have deceived
intentionally but to have seen in the data what they believe is true. I think
it's a very risky thing to do.'
Most of the OSP intelligence was based on
debriefings with Iraqi exiles -- a tactic, says Lang, which is highly
questionable as the exiles have clear, personal agendas that might taint their
claims. But even if the US was using selective intelligence to justify war
against Iraq, does that mean that Tony Blair was also being briefed with OSP
intelligence ? According to Melvin Goodman, veteran CIA analyst and current
professor of national security at the National War College in Washington, the
answer is an unequivocal 'yes'. Goodman says that there is 'no question' that
Blair was 'brought along at the highest level' by Bush and Rumsfeld, adding
that the Prime Minister was 'vulnerable because of his own evangelical bent'
over bringing democracy to the Middle East.
That US view has been corroborated by
British intelligence sources who have confirmed to the Sunday Herald that the
UK government was being influenced by the selective intelligence emanating from
the OSP. Senior UK intelligence sources representing a range of views from
across all the spying services said: 'There was absolute scepticism among
British intelligence over the invasion of Iraq. The intelligence we were
working on was basically of a technical nature coming from satellite
surveillance and eavesdropping. The only real Humint (human intelligence from
agents) that we had was from Iraqi exiles and we were sceptical of their
motives.'
It was this 'tainted' information which
was used to compile the crucial dossier on Iraq which Blair presented to MPs
last September. The most sensational part of the dossier claimed that Iraq
could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes -- a claim based
on one single Iraqi defector. A British intelligence source said: 'The
information had been lying around for ages. The problem was we didn't really
trust the defectors as they were working in their own self-interest and really
doing their master's bidding -- by that I mean us, the UK. They also had one
eye to the future and their role in any new Iraqi government.'
The British intelligence source said the
best Humint on Saddam was held by the French who had agents in Iraq.
'French intelligence was telling us that
there was effectively no real evidence of a WMD programme. That's why France
wanted a longer extension on the weapons inspections. The French, the Germans
and the Russians all knew there were no weapons there -- and so did Blair and
Bush as that's what the French told them directly. Blair ignored what the
French told us and instead listened to the Americans.'
Another source -- an official involved in
preparing the Iraqi dossier for Blair -- told the BBC: 'Most people in
intelligence weren't happy with [the dossier] as it didn't reflect the
considered view they were putting forward.' Other sources said they accepted
there was a 'small WMD programme' in Iraq, but not one that would either
threaten the West or even Saddam's neighbours. Another said they were 'very
unhappy' with the dossier, others said they were 'pissed off' and one described
the claim that WMDs could be ready in 45 minutes as 'complete and utter
bollocks'.
The Sunday Herald was told: 'The spooks
were being asked to write this stuff. The dossier had been lying around for
about six months. When it came time for publication Downing Street said it
wasn't exciting or convincing enough. The message was that it didn't cut the
mustard in terms of PR as there wasn't much more in it than a discerning
newspaper reader would know.
'The intelligence services were asked if
there was anything else that could be added into it. Intelligence told Downing
Street that the 45-minute claim hadn't been added in as it only came from one
source who was thought to be wrong.
'The intelligence services were asked to
go back and do a rewrite even though Downing Street was told the 45 minute
claim was unconvincing.'
Another intelligence source was quoted as
telling the BBC that they had been asked to rewrite the dossier as well to make
it 'sexier'. The intelligence source said the dossier had been 'transformed' a
week before publication. Blair has rejected each and every one of these claims
as 'completely absurd'.
In a further curious twist, an
intelligence source claimed the real 'over-arching strategic reason' for the
war was the road map to peace, designed to settle the running sore of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The source said: 'I believe that Britain and
America see the road map as fundamental. They were being told by Ariel Sharon's
government that Israel would not play ball until Saddam was out of the picture.
That was the condition. So he had to go.'
Meanwhile, the blame game is now well and
truly under way and someone is going to end up carrying the can. Jane Harman,
the senior Democrat on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, said: 'This
could conceivably be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time ... It was the
moral justification for war. I think the world is owed an accounting.'
CIA director George Tenet has just over a
month to get his act together before the House and Senate Intelligence
committees start hearings into the nature of intelligence and the Iraq war.
Like Downing Street, the Pentagon strongly denies it manipulated information.
Here in the UK, more than 70 MPs have
signed an early day motion calling on the government to justify its case for
war by publishing the intelligence on which it was based. Labour rebels are
threatening to report Blair to the Speaker of the Commons for the cardinal sin
of misleading Parliament. This would force Blair to answer emergency questions
in the Commons.
The government, however, has hit back by
starting to spin against its own intelligence agencies -- a potentially deadly
tactic. One senior minister was quoted as saying anonymously: 'If we don't find
weapons of mass destruction, it will be Britain's biggest ever intelligence
failure. We would have to look at the whole set up of how we gather
intelligence in the future. It would have serious consequences.'
Peter Kilfoyle, the former defence
minister who is organising the backbench protests, said: 'The only cogent
reason that was offered for the war was weapons of mass destruction, which the
government said could be utilised within 45 minutes. It seems to me that, at
the very least, evidence was used selectively from intelligence reports to fit
the case.' He added that failure to prove the case for war was built on solid
ground would 'shatter trust' in the government. 'Tony Blair, Jack Straw and
Geoff Hoon are all barristers,' Kilfoyle said. 'They know very well a case
based on this sort of information would be laughed out of court.'
Five steps to the world according to Bush
1. PNAC
The ultra-hawkish neo-conservative
think-tank, the Project for the New American Century, was set up in 1997 by the
likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush (George W's brother) and Paul
Wolfowitz. Its over-arching aim is the establishment of a 'global Pax
Americana' -- a re-ordered world squarely under the control of the USA. To
achieve this grand strategic goal, the PNAC says these steps must be achieved:
Saddam deposed
Afghanistan invaded
Arafat isolated
Syria cowed
UN sidelined
Iran punished
As the world has seen, nearly all of
these aims have been achieved.
2. The Office of Special Plans
This new intelligence agency was set up
in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks by US defence secretary Donald
Rumsfeld.
Frustrated by the failure of conventional
spying organisations such as the CIA to come up with proof that Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction and was linked to Osama bin Laden, the OSP
cherry-picked intelligence from mountains of raw data to build the intelligence
picture its political masters required.
3. Bush and Blair
With Bush fully briefed by Rumsfeld using
intelligence from the OSP, the US was convinced it had a case to prosecute a
war against Iraq. But could America take its allies with it? Blair was briefed
at length by Bush and other leading members of the US administration using OSP
information. The British intelligence services were not coming up with the same
sort of information that the OSP were collating. Nevertheless, Blair threw his
lot in with Bush, banking on the OSP intelligence.
4. Troops and conflict
With Afghanistan under US control after
the first major battle in the seemingly endless war on terror, Bush and Blair
were able to topple Saddam using the OSP intelligence to take the public with
them. With Iraq occupied, the hawks have turned their attentions to Iran, with
claims that the 'Mullahcracy', in the words of the neo-conservatives, had a
weapons of mass destruction programme and was tied to al-Qaeda. Sound familiar?
5. Pax Americana
This is the ultimate aim of the
neo-conservatives now running the United States. America stands as the world's
policeman, the US has no powerful rivals and global capitalism flourishes: the
PNAC's project is complete.
11) Save Our Spooks
By Nicholas F. Kristof
The New York Times, May 30, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/30/opinion/30KRIS.html
On Day 71 of the Hunt for Iraqi W.M.D.,
yesterday, once again nothing turned up.
Maybe we'll do better on Day 72. But we
might have better luck searching for something just as alarming: the growing
evidence that the administration grossly manipulated intelligence about those
weapons of mass destruction in the runup to the Iraq war.
A column earlier this month on this issue
drew a torrent of covert communications from indignant spooks who say that
administration officials leaned on them to exaggerate the Iraqi threat and
deceive the public.
"The American people were
manipulated," bluntly declares one person from the Defense Intelligence
Agency who says he was privy to all the intelligence there on Iraq. These
people are coming forward because they are fiercely proud of the deepest ethic
in the intelligence world — that such work should be nonpolitical — and are
disgusted at efforts to turn them into propagandists.
"The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear
weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent
security threat to the U.S.," notes Greg Thielmann, who retired in
September after 25 years in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau
of Intelligence and Research. "And the administration was grossly
distorting the intelligence on both things."
The outrage among the intelligence
professionals is so widespread that they have formed a group, Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, that wrote to President Bush this month
to protest what it called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental
proportions."
"While there have been occasions in
the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political
purposes," the letter said, "never before has such warping been used
in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to
authorize launching a war."
Ray McGovern, a retired C.I.A. analyst
who briefed President Bush's father in the White House in the 1980's, said that
people in the agency were now "totally demoralized." He says, and
others back him up, that the Pentagon took dubious accounts from émigrés close
to Ahmad Chalabi and gave these tales credibility they did not deserve.
Intelligence analysts often speak of
"humint" for human intelligence (spies) and "sigint" for
signals intelligence (wiretaps). They refer contemptuously to recent work as
"rumint," or rumor intelligence.
"I've never heard this level of
alarm before," said Larry Johnson, who used to work in the C.I.A. and
State Department. "It is a misuse and abuse of intelligence. The president
was being misled. He was ill served by the folks who are supposed to protect
him on this. Whether this was witting or unwitting, I don't know, but I'll give
him the benefit of the doubt."
Some say that top Pentagon officials cast
about for the most sensational nuggets about Iraq and used them to bludgeon
Colin Powell and seduce President Bush. The director of central intelligence,
George Tenet, has been generally liked and respected within the agency ranks,
but in the last year, particularly in the intelligence directorate, people say
that he has kowtowed to Donald Rumsfeld and compromised the integrity of his
own organization.
"We never felt that there was any
leadership in the C.I.A. to qualify or put into context the information
available," one veteran said. "Rather there was a tendency to feed
the most alarming tidbits to the president. Often it's the most ill-considered
information that goes to the president.
"So instead of giving the president
the most considered, carefully examined information available, basically you
give him the garbage. And then in a few days when it's clear that maybe it
wasn't right, well then, you feed him some more hot garbage."
The C.I.A. is now examining its own
record, and that's welcome. But the atmosphere within the intelligence
community is so poisonous, and the stakes are so high — for the credibility of
America's word and the soundness of information on which we base American
foreign policy — that an outside examination is essential.
Congress must provide greater oversight,
and President Bush should invite Brent Scowcroft, the head of the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a man trusted by all sides, to lead an
inquiry and, in a public report, suggest steps to restore integrity to
America's intelligence agencies.
12) Cabinet's secret war briefings
Revelation intensifies calls for inquiry
by Patrick Wintour and Michael White in
Evian
The Guardian; June 3, 2003
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,969310,00.html
The security services carried out a
series of secret meetings with members of the cabinet shortly before the
outbreak of war against Iraq in order to convince wavering ministers of the
severity of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
The confidential briefings, conducted in
February, came at a time of mounting public hostility towards the war and were
said to have played a crucial role in persuading ministers of the need for
military action.
Cabinet members were taken in groups of
five or six over a period of four days, and were given personal briefings by
senior figures in the foreign intelligence service, the SIS.
The revelation that the security services
were directly used to brief cabinet ministers indicates the extent of Tony
Blair's fears of opposition to his Iraq policy even at the heart of his
government. It is thought some cabinet members requested the personal briefings
as they wrestled with their consciences.
One minister dismissed the suggestion
that the intelligence services "lobbied" in favour of war on behalf
of Downing Street, but added: "For busy cabinet members, it is flattering
and impressive to get oral briefings direct from SIS."
The briefings provided additional
intelligence following the publication of the Iraq dossier on weapons of mass
destruction in September.
The previously undisclosed level of
intelligence service briefing of the cabinet will intensify the calls for a
public inquiry into their assessment that Saddam possessed WMD. The absence of
any compelling evidence of WMD is creating a crisis of trust around Mr Blair's
grounds for the war.
Pressure mounted yesterday when the
former foreign secretary Robin Cook called for a public inquiry along the lines
of the Scott inquiry into breaches of arms-to-Iraq guidelines in the mid-90s.
"The scale of the issues requires the inquiry should have full access to
papers, rights of interview and wherever possible should meet in public,"
he said. He said it should be conducted by a legal figure from outside the
political arena.
"We were told by the prime minister
that the whole purpose of this war was disarmament. That looks rather difficult
to sustain when we have not yet found a single weapon of mass destruction to
disarm. There is a problem in that what they said before the war has turned out
to be wrong. I am not suggesting any bad faith or any deception. They ought to
be at least as interested as we are in why they were wrong."
He pointed out that the attorney
general's legal justification for war was based on the existence of WMD in
Iraq. "If he did not have those weapons, then that legal base
disappears," he said.
He said that in the more open political
culture of the US, two separate congressional inquiries were already under way
into the role of the intelligence services in Iraq. The US Democrats are making
similar allegations that the Bush administration hyped the certainty of such
weapons.
Mr Blair faces the prospect of further
trouble tomorrow when the committee responsible for overseeing the intelligence
services, chaired by former cabinet minister Ann Taylor, is due to meet to
discuss whether it can stage an inquiry into the grave allegations that
security service evidence was hyped by politicians and Downing Street's
communications unit.
The committee meets in private and
reports to the prime minister. It is due to publish its annual report shortly,
but needs Downing Street's co-operation to conduct a specific inquiry into
Iraqi intelligence, especially if it is to gain access to top secret briefing
material.
In Evian for the G8 summit, Mr Blair
angrily denied claims that he had tricked the public into going to war, saying
he stood 100% by the evidence he presented to the public on WMD. He again
rejected calls for a public inquiry.
He said: "Frankly, the idea that we
doctored intelligence reports in order to invent some notion about a 45-minute
capability for delivering weapons of mass destruction is completely and totally
false." Every single piece of evidence had been properly endorsed by the
intelligence committee, he said.
He also, unusually, rebuffed former
cabinet minister Clare Short by name, deriding her claim that he had secretly
made a pact with President Bush in September to go to war whilst pretending to
the cabinet he was seeking to rein in the US president. He said the assertion
was "completely and totally untrue".
Mr Blair again said he was confident WMD
would be found.
13) Blix report fuels doubts on weapons
of mass destruction
By James Politi in Washington, James
Blitz in Evian and Mark Turner The Financial Times [London]; June 2, 2003
US and British leaders were on Monday
scrambling to explain why they had so far failed to find evidence of Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction as United Nations weapons inspectors reported that
Baghdad was handing over fresh information just hours before the US-led air
strikes that began the war.
At the G8 summit in Evian, Tony Blair,
the UK prime minister, was forced to deflect suggestions by a former cabinet
minister that he had decided last September to go to war with Iraq, whether or
not United Nations support was forthcoming.
"The idea . . . that I made some
secret agreement with George Bush last September that we would invade Iraq in
any event at a particular time is completely and totally untrue," he said.
Colin Powell, US secretary of state, said
"it wasn't a figment of anyone's imagination" that Iraq possessed
WMD. "There was no doubt in my mind as I went through the intelligence
that the evidence was overwhelming," Mr Powell said in Rome, before
heading to the Middle East.
But both the US Congress and the UK
parliament appear determined to hold their leaders to account on the issue.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is
likely to hold a public hearing this month to examine the administration's use
of intelligence. And leading members of Mr Blair's Labour party are calling on
the prime minister to explain himself to parliament.
The new report by Hans Blix, chief UN
weapons inspector, revealed that Baghdad supplied information on its illicit
weapons programmes up to the eve of military hostilities. But, even at the end,
Iraq failed to alleviate fundamental suspicions that it had something to hide.
Unmovic, the UN inspection commission,
has continued to analyse data in spite of its sidelining from the weapons hunt.
In its latest quarterly report, it said Iraq proffered information on unmanned
aircraft and its claimed destruction of anthrax as late as 19 March, hours
before the first air strikes.
But while "inspections, declarations
and documents submitted by Iraq contributed to a better understanding of past
weapons programmes, the long list of proscribed items unaccounted for was (not)
shortened", the report says.
The report says new data on the Al Hakam
dump site, where Iraq claimed to have disposed of anthrax, indicated traces of
biological material "consistent with Iraqi declarations". But the
analysis did not "provide a quantification of the anthrax dumped in 1991
with the necessary degree of certainty" and "does not resolve the
question regarding the total quantity of anthrax produced and destroyed by
Iraq".
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